I'm not fresh on the details, but I wasn't 100% convinced when I looked into it a few years ago that Wakefield had intentionally fabricated data. If I remember correctly, the heart of the problem was that the PCR machine he had used to get most of his results was unreliable. Seemed to me that it probably was intentional, but it may not have been malicious, it may have been that he really wanted to believe the results it seemed to be showing him, but had he been objective about it, he would have known it wasn't.
At any rate, no smoking gun for intentionally falsifying had been found, and he insists it's true. There's no sane scientist or doctor who thinks the studies are accurate, so I think it's more fair to leave it at that, and make sure we're not overstating it by saying he intentionally lied. Probably yes, and he had financial motive to lie.
To play devil's advocate, no, the USPS does not, but most drug dealers aren't using snail-mail to coordinate while they are using texts. And scanning every letter would cost the taxpayer much more than storing texts would. Cell phones would also cost a lot.
That's the realistic answer to why they don't. It's stupid, because of course taxpayer money should not be a concern compared to our civil liberties.
I won't even say I will. If I have something super secret to say, I'll do it face to face or find something more secure than texts.
Still not a fucking reason to give up an ounce of privacy. Crime is low. I don't see any evidence that the police can't manage to keep order without reading our SMS messages from the past two years.
Who modded this troll? Honestly, it's hard not to go into hyperbole when talking about anti-vaxers. They're killing children. Literally, albeit less directly than slitting their throats. And these people have ears on congress. It's not enough that congress protects banks above the national interest, protects industry's ability to pollute over the interests of it's citizens and the rest of the world, and erodes our rights to make people think they're doing something to stop terrorists... NOW you have these people spreading lies about an invention that does nothing but save lives?
What about that doesn't suck? If there's a better example of congress sucking than this, what is it? The patriot act's passage? At least there were two sides in that debate. With anti-vaxers, they've got nothing. Papers which were proven bad, gut feelings, and a lot of movie stars vomiting into the media. That's all there is. Compared to this, the patriot act is a shining beacon of logic from our legislature.
Oh come on, you can dismissively summarize anything like that if you want to sound like some type of elitist (AKA: a douche).
Super mario brothers? I've heard that game consists of EXTREMELY poor graphics, jumping on stuff, and occasinally breaking bricks with your head, to save a princess or something else. And it's only in 2D!
Minecraft... that's basically just legos, with exploding cacti. No thanks.
(Insert your favorite song)? It seems that consists mostly of percussion, guitars, other stringed instruments, and singing about love or something else. Anything different from all the music of the past 30 years?
Sex? What's fun about mashing genitals together? Are people really spending thousands and thousands of dollars just for a 2 second orgasm?
Uh, and also making an EMP grenade and using it is not the best way to uphold your privacy. In fact, I think that would get your picture plastered over every major newspaper. Or in a CIA/some other government agency list/secret holding cell/unmarked grave.
What are you counting as "bigger projects"? I'd say the internet being created and the genome being sequenced are big ideas, possibly bigger than Voyager. If "bigger projects" is only defined by "how far can we shoot an object out from earth" then yes, our project bigness has stagnated, but I don't think that's a good standard.
But well, like the summary and your outright uninformed comment the rest of the discussion here will be "patent troll hurr hurr".
Assuming it was NOT some form of patent trolling would be the uninformed opinion. The context of the patent may matter more than the specifics of the patent.
Is it a patent covering mobile technology? Yes? Then odds are it's going to be used not to protect innovation that the holder invested in, but rather to punish those people who actually ARE making advances in technology and daring to sell it, or is going to be used to try to stifle competition without actually offering a better product. Or, in other words, for patent trolling.
A few years ago, my iphone decided to update itunes. A new EULA was presented to me that I had to agree to in order to download any more music or apps. I started to skim it to see if I could spot anything that might explain why they were updating it. Then I saw that it was page one of sixty four on the iphone screen.
I think they've since fixed that with an "e-mail this to me" option, and I could have just not bought that Taylor Swift song right then and there (don't judge me.) Still, 64 pages? In a sane world (which the legal system is not), that massive shit of dense legalese would be clear proof that the EULA was never meant to be read or understood by the user. Just have me press a button agreeing to not sue Apple for anything. It's just as fair and makes just as much sense.
We don't dream this big anymore? Since Voyager left earth, we sequenced the human genome, along with the genomes of nearly 200 other organisms. The computer that lives in my pocket is so much better than the computers on board Voyager that I can't even figure out how to compare them. Granted, I only spent 5 minutes skimming wiki articles trying to do so, but I'll also point out that 5 minutes of research got me the name of all the units on board the voyager, and way too much information for me to handle on that. 5 minutes of research at Voyager's time would maybe result in "finding the right world book letter." And it wouldn't have that information.
Putting a big rocket and a nuclear power supply on something and sending it off into space is awe-inspiring, yes, but I'd argue we're dreaming much bigger today. The internet changed the world a lot more than the space age did.
(Note that I'm not knocking the space age, and am fully aware that it's unlikely the internet would have come about were it not for the space age.)
Dear Mr Hamadoun Toure: If it won't be curbed or controlled why not define attempts to do so as a crime against humanity [wikipedia.org] and access to the internet a human right?
For one thing, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that at least five of the security council members (Russia, China, the US, India, and Pakistan) would have strong feelings against giving up their ability to block the internet if and when they felt like it.
And I'd probably bet at least half dollars to doughnuts that the rest would too. Azerbaijan, for example. Wiki tells me their internet is pretty open for now, but the government likes to take a heavy hand against opposition, so they're a "probably."
Oh, I agree, it's a suicide mission in many countries if you stand on principle, and unlikely to change anything in reality. Just sounded like Vlm was saying McAfee was stupid for refusing the bribe. I would amend it to "stupid AND/OR noble."
I think this list is concerned with a more specific question. This measure is more useful to which countries could be silenced during a similar uprising, where there is armed opposition. China is unlikely to undergo such an uprising for the same reasons that their ISPs are willing to follow a government's orders. The government enjoys much more popular support with the Chinese than Syria does/did with it's citizens. If there were such a rebellion however, China would stay online longer probably, since presumably some of the entities would join the revolt, would ignore the government's orders, and would not be as easily forcibly shut down because of how many different ones there were. The question wasn't really about general internet censorship, there are other lists and measurements for that.
I disagree with the implication that the solution to rampant corruption is to pay up or go somewhere else. I don't know if this guy was taking a stand against a corrupt government on principle or was too stupid to take the easy way out, but if this is a result of corruption and not McAfee actually murdering someone, then I hope he succeeds, and I hope heads roll because of it. Real heads, of the corrupt officials, actually rolling.
I'm guessing though he actually was involved in something shady himself, if not outright murder, and if heads were to roll, they'd be the wrong heads...
The question started off with the word "should." Much different question than the one you're answering.
The answers to either one though are obvious. No, they should not be in a fair world. Yes, they are in this unfair one if the employer thinks the employee has a brain on his or her shoulders and if the employer likes money.
Doesn't it just mess up your mood when you crack an egg and it has some blood formed?
Former chicken embryologist here. Just FYI: that's not a chicken embryo. A blood spot on eggs is from the mother hen's reproductive tract. The eggs you buy in the store aren't fertilized anyway. Hens lay eggs whether or not they've been fertilized by a rooster. It would take time and effort to put the roosters in the hen cages. I guess if you're buying local free range chicken eggs, they might not be so concerned with efficiency and you might get some fertilized, but even then, you'd only know if you opened up the egg, injected the yolk with ink (for contrast) and looked at it under a dissecting microscope. An egg would need to be incubated by the hen for about 4 days before you would see much in the egg, and they're generally collected at least once daily to prevent eggs from going bad or getting damaged.
Still gross of course when you do get a blood spot, but it's just a fluke. The rest of the eggs in the dozen are from different chickens, and red in one of them is no indication that the rest are bad.
Sorry to appeal to emotion, but I find your attitude a little cold, a little remote, a little shitty.
Look on the bright side: with global warming and rising seas, his attitude will get warmer, less remote (as we all huddle together on Island Everest), and a tsunami may wash his shitty attitude away.
The small amount of actually useful discussion of how we can adapt to a changing climate (no matter what it's cause) will be drowned out in the accusations and counter accusations
Well, the good news is that the status of the atmosphere, and the survival of the human species, does not depend on discussions on slashdot.
The bad news is that it instead depends on discussions between politicians, lobbyists, and voters.
I'll take flexible phones. It's the transparent phone idea that I can't fathom. Looks cool... and useless. You'd have to have a background appear if you wanted to see or read anything, and you'd have to either use no case, or a glass case.
I gave the Humble Bundle brand name a lot of free advertising and word of mouth because I expected them to always be DRM-free and cross-platform....I helped them create this good will.
Are you suggesting that your celebrity endorsement of them counts as "a lot of free advertising" and "helping them create this good will?" I think you overestimate your celebrity status. You have 525 people following you on google plus. Not that you would have a right to feel betrayed even if you had 11k people following you, but... well... check your ego. They don't owe you for saying nice things about them to a handful of people.
"Pay what you want, DRM-free, cross-platform and helps charity."
That's been a tagline of all the bundles so far, IIRC. It's not just some implicit assumption on his part. You'll note how they had to contort it for the THQ bundle.
There have been four android-only bundles. That's not any more cross-platform than PC only.
As far as DRM-free, these aren't indie games. Were they indie games, I feel like this would indeed be a step backward. But this is a big chunk of a big company's catalog. Granted, they're desperate, but naming your price on 5 games all from a publisher, and the DRM is only steam? That feels like progress.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not fresh on the details, but I wasn't 100% convinced when I looked into it a few years ago that Wakefield had intentionally fabricated data. If I remember correctly, the heart of the problem was that the PCR machine he had used to get most of his results was unreliable. Seemed to me that it probably was intentional, but it may not have been malicious, it may have been that he really wanted to believe the results it seemed to be showing him, but had he been objective about it, he would have known it wasn't.
At any rate, no smoking gun for intentionally falsifying had been found, and he insists it's true. There's no sane scientist or doctor who thinks the studies are accurate, so I think it's more fair to leave it at that, and make sure we're not overstating it by saying he intentionally lied. Probably yes, and he had financial motive to lie.
To play devil's advocate, no, the USPS does not, but most drug dealers aren't using snail-mail to coordinate while they are using texts. And scanning every letter would cost the taxpayer much more than storing texts would. Cell phones would also cost a lot.
That's the realistic answer to why they don't. It's stupid, because of course taxpayer money should not be a concern compared to our civil liberties.
I won't even say I will. If I have something super secret to say, I'll do it face to face or find something more secure than texts.
Still not a fucking reason to give up an ounce of privacy. Crime is low. I don't see any evidence that the police can't manage to keep order without reading our SMS messages from the past two years.
Who modded this troll? Honestly, it's hard not to go into hyperbole when talking about anti-vaxers. They're killing children. Literally, albeit less directly than slitting their throats. And these people have ears on congress. It's not enough that congress protects banks above the national interest, protects industry's ability to pollute over the interests of it's citizens and the rest of the world, and erodes our rights to make people think they're doing something to stop terrorists... NOW you have these people spreading lies about an invention that does nothing but save lives?
What about that doesn't suck? If there's a better example of congress sucking than this, what is it? The patriot act's passage? At least there were two sides in that debate. With anti-vaxers, they've got nothing. Papers which were proven bad, gut feelings, and a lot of movie stars vomiting into the media. That's all there is. Compared to this, the patriot act is a shining beacon of logic from our legislature.
Oh come on, you can dismissively summarize anything like that if you want to sound like some type of elitist (AKA: a douche).
Super mario brothers? I've heard that game consists of EXTREMELY poor graphics, jumping on stuff, and occasinally breaking bricks with your head, to save a princess or something else. And it's only in 2D!
Minecraft... that's basically just legos, with exploding cacti. No thanks.
(Insert your favorite song)? It seems that consists mostly of percussion, guitars, other stringed instruments, and singing about love or something else. Anything different from all the music of the past 30 years?
Sex? What's fun about mashing genitals together? Are people really spending thousands and thousands of dollars just for a 2 second orgasm?
Uh, and also making an EMP grenade and using it is not the best way to uphold your privacy. In fact, I think that would get your picture plastered over every major newspaper. Or in a CIA/some other government agency list/secret holding cell/unmarked grave.
What are you counting as "bigger projects"? I'd say the internet being created and the genome being sequenced are big ideas, possibly bigger than Voyager. If "bigger projects" is only defined by "how far can we shoot an object out from earth" then yes, our project bigness has stagnated, but I don't think that's a good standard.
Yes, but "will still be working in 35 years" isn't the gold standard for what is "dreaming big." So I don't know what your point is.
But well, like the summary and your outright uninformed comment the rest of the discussion here will be "patent troll hurr hurr".
Assuming it was NOT some form of patent trolling would be the uninformed opinion. The context of the patent may matter more than the specifics of the patent.
Is it a patent covering mobile technology? Yes? Then odds are it's going to be used not to protect innovation that the holder invested in, but rather to punish those people who actually ARE making advances in technology and daring to sell it, or is going to be used to try to stifle competition without actually offering a better product. Or, in other words, for patent trolling.
A few years ago, my iphone decided to update itunes. A new EULA was presented to me that I had to agree to in order to download any more music or apps. I started to skim it to see if I could spot anything that might explain why they were updating it. Then I saw that it was page one of sixty four on the iphone screen.
I think they've since fixed that with an "e-mail this to me" option, and I could have just not bought that Taylor Swift song right then and there (don't judge me.) Still, 64 pages? In a sane world (which the legal system is not), that massive shit of dense legalese would be clear proof that the EULA was never meant to be read or understood by the user. Just have me press a button agreeing to not sue Apple for anything. It's just as fair and makes just as much sense.
We don't dream this big anymore? Since Voyager left earth, we sequenced the human genome, along with the genomes of nearly 200 other organisms. The computer that lives in my pocket is so much better than the computers on board Voyager that I can't even figure out how to compare them. Granted, I only spent 5 minutes skimming wiki articles trying to do so, but I'll also point out that 5 minutes of research got me the name of all the units on board the voyager, and way too much information for me to handle on that. 5 minutes of research at Voyager's time would maybe result in "finding the right world book letter." And it wouldn't have that information.
Putting a big rocket and a nuclear power supply on something and sending it off into space is awe-inspiring, yes, but I'd argue we're dreaming much bigger today. The internet changed the world a lot more than the space age did.
(Note that I'm not knocking the space age, and am fully aware that it's unlikely the internet would have come about were it not for the space age.)
Dear Mr Hamadoun Toure: If it won't be curbed or controlled why not define attempts to do so as a crime against humanity [wikipedia.org] and access to the internet a human right?
For one thing, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that at least five of the security council members (Russia, China, the US, India, and Pakistan) would have strong feelings against giving up their ability to block the internet if and when they felt like it.
And I'd probably bet at least half dollars to doughnuts that the rest would too. Azerbaijan, for example. Wiki tells me their internet is pretty open for now, but the government likes to take a heavy hand against opposition, so they're a "probably."
Oh, I agree, it's a suicide mission in many countries if you stand on principle, and unlikely to change anything in reality. Just sounded like Vlm was saying McAfee was stupid for refusing the bribe. I would amend it to "stupid AND/OR noble."
I think this list is concerned with a more specific question. This measure is more useful to which countries could be silenced during a similar uprising, where there is armed opposition. China is unlikely to undergo such an uprising for the same reasons that their ISPs are willing to follow a government's orders. The government enjoys much more popular support with the Chinese than Syria does/did with it's citizens. If there were such a rebellion however, China would stay online longer probably, since presumably some of the entities would join the revolt, would ignore the government's orders, and would not be as easily forcibly shut down because of how many different ones there were. The question wasn't really about general internet censorship, there are other lists and measurements for that.
I disagree with the implication that the solution to rampant corruption is to pay up or go somewhere else. I don't know if this guy was taking a stand against a corrupt government on principle or was too stupid to take the easy way out, but if this is a result of corruption and not McAfee actually murdering someone, then I hope he succeeds, and I hope heads roll because of it. Real heads, of the corrupt officials, actually rolling.
I'm guessing though he actually was involved in something shady himself, if not outright murder, and if heads were to roll, they'd be the wrong heads...
The question started off with the word "should." Much different question than the one you're answering.
The answers to either one though are obvious. No, they should not be in a fair world. Yes, they are in this unfair one if the employer thinks the employee has a brain on his or her shoulders and if the employer likes money.
Doesn't it just mess up your mood when you crack an egg and it has some blood formed?
Former chicken embryologist here. Just FYI: that's not a chicken embryo. A blood spot on eggs is from the mother hen's reproductive tract. The eggs you buy in the store aren't fertilized anyway. Hens lay eggs whether or not they've been fertilized by a rooster. It would take time and effort to put the roosters in the hen cages. I guess if you're buying local free range chicken eggs, they might not be so concerned with efficiency and you might get some fertilized, but even then, you'd only know if you opened up the egg, injected the yolk with ink (for contrast) and looked at it under a dissecting microscope. An egg would need to be incubated by the hen for about 4 days before you would see much in the egg, and they're generally collected at least once daily to prevent eggs from going bad or getting damaged.
Still gross of course when you do get a blood spot, but it's just a fluke. The rest of the eggs in the dozen are from different chickens, and red in one of them is no indication that the rest are bad.
No, but that probably has more to do with FedEx's wealth vs a lowly human citizen's wealth than anything else.
Sorry to appeal to emotion, but I find your attitude a little cold, a little remote, a little shitty.
Look on the bright side: with global warming and rising seas, his attitude will get warmer, less remote (as we all huddle together on Island Everest), and a tsunami may wash his shitty attitude away.
The small amount of actually useful discussion of how we can adapt to a changing climate (no matter what it's cause) will be drowned out in the accusations and counter accusations
Well, the good news is that the status of the atmosphere, and the survival of the human species, does not depend on discussions on slashdot.
The bad news is that it instead depends on discussions between politicians, lobbyists, and voters.
I'll take flexible phones. It's the transparent phone idea that I can't fathom. Looks cool... and useless. You'd have to have a background appear if you wanted to see or read anything, and you'd have to either use no case, or a glass case.
I gave the Humble Bundle brand name a lot of free advertising and word of mouth because I expected them to always be DRM-free and cross-platform....I helped them create this good will.
Are you suggesting that your celebrity endorsement of them counts as "a lot of free advertising" and "helping them create this good will?" I think you overestimate your celebrity status. You have 525 people following you on google plus. Not that you would have a right to feel betrayed even if you had 11k people following you, but... well... check your ego. They don't owe you for saying nice things about them to a handful of people.
"Pay what you want, DRM-free, cross-platform and helps charity." That's been a tagline of all the bundles so far, IIRC. It's not just some implicit assumption on his part. You'll note how they had to contort it for the THQ bundle.
There have been four android-only bundles. That's not any more cross-platform than PC only.
As far as DRM-free, these aren't indie games. Were they indie games, I feel like this would indeed be a step backward. But this is a big chunk of a big company's catalog. Granted, they're desperate, but naming your price on 5 games all from a publisher, and the DRM is only steam? That feels like progress.
That would be MAAD: Mutually assured AWESOME destruction.
I'd argue that this WOULD be a pretty big change to war. The crusades weren't fought with moon-nukes. Sorry, Fallout.