It is? Really? I see this leading to "Don't publish stories on X person who has been kidnapped because they might kill him" to "Don't publish this unverified and unlikely dirty bomb threat to Y city because you'll cause mass panic and death."
The slippery slope seems to bottom out at the "Temporarily supressing stories when there is a clear and credible threat to human life." Which is one I'm okay with as long as you keep that big fat line of "clear and credible threat to human life." Give wikipedians and the founders of wiki a little credit, they're not going to accept things like "Don't publish that this politician lied because there is a threat to human life," or "Don't publish this about scientology because someone could die over it."
Because the Taliban specifically told the Times that they would kill him if it were reported?
I see nothing to that effect anywhere, and even the taliban is smart enough to know: you don't kidnap a REPORTER if your intent is to keep it silent. They wanted this to be a huge news story.
A cop also has to deal with a much wider range of situations than a security screener at an airport, has to have much more training, I believe is paid much more, and has less ability to hand odd situations up the pay scale. And, honestly, that's pretty surprising to me that a cop would think that up. I think it's more likely that he didn't think of that, it's just standard SOP for those types of accidents.
Most of all though, a cop having to make correct decisions is usually much more important than a security screener making stupid decisions.
I'm surprised at how many people are missing the point here. Pandora (and Hulu, for that matter) is blocked outside of the US. A number of/. readers are responding with, "Oh, if you're in the UK go here." "In France, you can listen on this site." It's not (or at least shouldn't be) about what works in this region or that one or the other. It's fundamentally about the misapplication of national boundaries to an international (and nation-neutral) system. The internet restricted by borders is silly and wrongheaded.
You're the one missing the point: some people outside of the US want to listen to music as they would on pandora. I can appreciate that national laws shouldn't be applied in this manner here, but I still would want something to replace pandora. It's not as if I can send an e-mail to pandora, the US government, the RIAA or anyone else involved in this, telling them this is absurd, and they'll say "Oh okay, here's your pandora back." And it's not like using those alternatives changes anything in reguards to internet borders. If people overseas don't listen to any music online, the obsolete industry isn't going to see the err in their ways.
How will musicians, writers, movie studios, news organizations, software companies etc even approach covering the costs of producing their work if the first person who buys it can make infinite number of copies and share them with the whole world?
Hire thugs to break that first person's thumbs. Same effect as lawyers really, but more efficient and less evil.
Even if false, what does that say about society today if this is even believable.
He got questioned about it after a random invasive search about a script. Not arrested, not strip searched, not tortured, doesn't sound like he was even delayed longer than usual (which doesn't mean the process wasn't humiliating, annoying and stupid)...
It says about society the following: we employ typical security types for airport security and pay them to do a security guard's job. Is there a society on earth, or ever, that routine things like this were handled by the best and the brightest and were concerned that they sort out odd situations themselves? I'd imagine that the guards at castle gates were always the easily confused types. And it may just be more efficent for gatekeepers to hand the odd cases up the ladder to someone who can sort things out.
What's ridiculous is that he was randomly searched once, they didn't find the script or anything else, then he got searched again. Unless he exited the gate and came back in, that doesn't make much sense to me.
Sorry for the double post, just thought of an important exception: "Coaligna residents are so dumb my father urinates in all the beers he sells at his bar and they don't even know it."
It is telling that enough of the townspeople were offended by it that they boycotted her father's business out of business. I couldn't find the full thing, but unless she gave away the town's secret recipe for the world's best apple pie, or revealed that the town enjoyed ritualistic killing and eating of vagrants, I can't fathom what would get under reasonable people's skin that much.
Conclusion: Coaligna is indeed a town full of assholes.
I always love it when someone rephrases my jokes to be more obvious and gets all the mod points for it.
That was sarcasm. I'm sarcastically responding to the poor moderation job here, the joke is that I'm saying I love it but really I hate it because mod points are all I have in this world and I'm bitter about it.
And then right there the joke was that I was making a joke and then restating it to be more obvious, because that was what I was complaining about.
It is certainly a barrier but by no means an insurmountable one especially if you build on one of the foreign languages you learnt at school.
That's very true. In a few short months, your spanish skills of "Donde esta la biblotech" could branch out into other areas. For example:
"Donde esta la azul biblotech"
That means where is the BLUE library! But what if you're interested in dancing, not reading?
"Donde esta la discotech"
Advanced stuff! If that's all your job requires, you'd be ready right now! Once you move. And if you have to know more spanish than that, like where is the red library or the blue dance club, or, you know, any real job where you have to communicate beyond what you remember from high school spanish (keeping in mind that most places the foreign language instruction in high school and college really are worthless) and could learn in a short time, then you're fucked.
by simply ignoring data from anyone who ever rented SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2, Gigli, From Justin to Kelly, Disaster Movie, any movie by Uwe Boll and any movie starring Paris Hilton
Hey, I (along with the rest of my frat, our school hockey team, and most of the town) was in a movie starring Paris Hilton, you insensitive clod!
But there is no reason why the governments should have license to grow when its supporting economy just dropped 20%. To argue otherwise is to argue that you can tax a nation into prosperity, or that you can lift yourself up by your boot straps.
Without knowing the specifics of NC's budget, I'd say you're underestimating how inefficient the process is. Think of a big huge titanic-like ship, it can't turn on a dime. The government does have a reason to introduce new taxes when the economy bottoms out, if only because they tend to overspend when the economy is bad, and much moreso when it's good. The economy dropped quickly compared to their reaction time, as it always has and always will. They didn't learn from history as they never have and never will. Existing revenue undoubtedly dropped with the economy, but the programs they've set up obviously don't.
It's not an efficient process, but I'd argue they should find ways of transitioning rather than just "Hey free downtown health clinic, the economy tanked yesterday, and so we're not going to get as much taxes, so we can't fund you. Go home. Dude with the stab wound, get out of here. Now." Or "repaving of this highway postponed indefinitely because of the economy. Continue taking the 20 mile detour to work everyday until either the economy picks up again or you lose your job, whichever comes first."
You want these programs to be let down gently if they have to go in other words, and that takes tax money the government suddenly doesn't have.
It could also be solved with foresight, careful planning, innovation, and sacrifice, but we don't live in a world where legislators or politicians have those qualities.
What if she is the first person not to have the disease we all have and that she is aging but really really slow?
That is an interesting thought. There's actually some molecular evidence that aging, on a cellular level, is a result of a specific mechanism, not just a general and inevitable accumulation of damage.
This paper is... well one I haven't actually read. But I did see a seminar by the author. He suggested that accumulation of a specific protein fragment was causing aging. It was found in one of those premature aging diseases (Hutchinson-Gilford progeria specifically) with increased abundance, but they do find it accumulates as people get older, changing some cell mechanisms. The theory was that the full length protein, which has important normal functions, was cut in a specific way with low frequency, but over time the fragments build up and interfere with different processes, the effects of which seem to mimic aging.
Of course, it's not definitive that this is how you age, and there are several other mechanisms which might be causing aging in specific ways, but the implications of the theories are interesting: it might be possible to block those pathways to stop aging.
Unfortunately for this specific girl, I don't see anything to indicate she's not aging, I think it's probably she's just not actually growing. Growing and aging do appear independant, as progeria patients appear to age more rapidly but don't grow rapidly. It is possible that whatever is keeping her from growing will also prevent her from aging, but I don't see any reason to expect that.
* For a scientific theory, there are quite a few proponents of Darwinism-as-infallible-science who have some pretty fantastical (and completely unsupported by anything) views on the origin of life. (Crystals, lightning, aliens... We might as well add ecktoplasma to the list.)
You can't judge an idea or school of thought by the fringe. Just like you can't write all religious people off as violent nuts who just want to kill anyone who disagrees with them.
* For a unified theory of where all life began, it's got some notably large holes which have been present since Darwin conceived the theory. For instance, where did flowering plants come from?
A valid question for google or someone who was actually talking about the evolution of flowering plants. I made no reference to it.
* Darwinism has its own dogma - immutable and unchallengeable, until the evidence is insurmountable in opposition (see: skeletal fossils). It's akin to the idiotic "6000 year-old Earth" people: they pick a single source, and then think "how can we make our facts fit our assumptions?"
"Darwinism" has had several major updates and is in fact not immutable. The molecular explanation of DNA and inheritance was the first major change to the theory of natural selection. A second notable one was Gould and that other guy's punctuated equalibrium. It's not dogmatic, dogma doesn't change. At the very least, "darwinism" refers to an outdated theory, so you shouldn't use that term unless you're talking about the theory of natural selection before we knew it was DNA that was causing it.
The resistance you might be referring to is that evolutionary scientists are tired of debating the same old arguments creationists have been regurgitating since Darwin published the theory initially.
Furthermore, it's a normal human tendancy to cling to an idea. Evolutionary biologists are subject to normal human fallacies unfortunately.
* Darwinism necessitates n+1 levels of fossil complexity. If the Darwin model for evolution holds, then there would be no "missing link": there would be many, many missing links while at the same time we would see clear gradation from "then" until "now".
Same as my response above, "Darwinism" is outdated.
Punctuated equilibrium faces many of the same problems. But it, like much of theology, is pretty much just an unsupportable point of belief based on an unproven but presumed fact (in this case, that Darwinian evolution occurs as speculated at all).
Citation needed. Pretty much unsupportable? You haven't actually read the books have you? The fossil record, molecular studies, and bacteriological studies all confirm it.
Evolutionary biology is treated as the "source" science for many other rearward-looking sciences, such as archeology and geology, the results of which are many obvious incongruities between what's on the ground and what's in the texts.
So take your specific concerns up with the people publishing those studies.
It is widely accepted as absolute, undisputed fact despite the above faults, and any claims to the contrary are met with zealous hostility.
We've gotten tired of answering the same arguments creationists have been bringing up for decades. They're still brought up because creationists are closed minded. There's no point in arguing it anymore: creationists aren't going to be convinced no matter what. Claims against evolution have been debated to death, bringing them up again is met with hostility because of how annoying it is.
If Noah's sons all looked alike and went to different corners of the earth, it's still possible for black populations, white populations, and east asian populations to arise.
Has this been demonstrated to be possible? Or just postulated on based on fossil records and circumstantial (yet technically unassociated) evidence?
Yes. No. Do a google search for it. (Hint, bacteriological studies might be what you're looking for.)
if you fiat it away (as theists often do),
Seems to me you're doing the exact same thing - your "god" is just the infallible truth of evolutionary biology instead of a spaghetti monster in the sky.
So you went out of your way to take an off-hand comment to bring out the old "Science is just another religion" saw?
Don't know if you've noticed, but it's never been a compelling argument. To anyone. Do you honestly think I have a burden to cite specific evidence every time I mention evolution in passing? The rest of us have already been convinced, if you're not, that's your issue.
Slashdot: celebrity death news for nerds. News that you wouldn't hear any other place. Nice job reporting there, Gizzmonic.
Guys, if you happen to have a facebook or twitter account, PLEASE let everyone know. We really need to get this news out there. There's a lot of chatter about some protests in Iran, but we really need to show them what the web is actually for: trivial celeb gossip.~
(Not to be insensitive to MJ or his family, but in all honesty, this is fake news, not real news.)
They posted pics of the whole thing online. I would have sued about that too, but then again, they were suprisingly tasteful. I mean, she did use one of them as her yearbook photo.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a VERY slippery slope
It is? Really? I see this leading to "Don't publish stories on X person who has been kidnapped because they might kill him" to "Don't publish this unverified and unlikely dirty bomb threat to Y city because you'll cause mass panic and death."
The slippery slope seems to bottom out at the "Temporarily supressing stories when there is a clear and credible threat to human life." Which is one I'm okay with as long as you keep that big fat line of "clear and credible threat to human life." Give wikipedians and the founders of wiki a little credit, they're not going to accept things like "Don't publish that this politician lied because there is a threat to human life," or "Don't publish this about scientology because someone could die over it."
Because the Taliban specifically told the Times that they would kill him if it were reported?
I see nothing to that effect anywhere, and even the taliban is smart enough to know: you don't kidnap a REPORTER if your intent is to keep it silent. They wanted this to be a huge news story.
No one was saying "This is unique to this one small town."
A cop also has to deal with a much wider range of situations than a security screener at an airport, has to have much more training, I believe is paid much more, and has less ability to hand odd situations up the pay scale. And, honestly, that's pretty surprising to me that a cop would think that up. I think it's more likely that he didn't think of that, it's just standard SOP for those types of accidents.
Most of all though, a cop having to make correct decisions is usually much more important than a security screener making stupid decisions.
I'm surprised at how many people are missing the point here. Pandora (and Hulu, for that matter) is blocked outside of the US. A number of /. readers are responding with, "Oh, if you're in the UK go here." "In France, you can listen on this site." It's not (or at least shouldn't be) about what works in this region or that one or the other. It's fundamentally about the misapplication of national boundaries to an international (and nation-neutral) system. The internet restricted by borders is silly and wrongheaded.
You're the one missing the point: some people outside of the US want to listen to music as they would on pandora. I can appreciate that national laws shouldn't be applied in this manner here, but I still would want something to replace pandora. It's not as if I can send an e-mail to pandora, the US government, the RIAA or anyone else involved in this, telling them this is absurd, and they'll say "Oh okay, here's your pandora back." And it's not like using those alternatives changes anything in reguards to internet borders. If people overseas don't listen to any music online, the obsolete industry isn't going to see the err in their ways.
How will musicians, writers, movie studios, news organizations, software companies etc even approach covering the costs of producing their work if the first person who buys it can make infinite number of copies and share them with the whole world?
Hire thugs to break that first person's thumbs. Same effect as lawyers really, but more efficient and less evil.
Even if false, what does that say about society today if this is even believable.
He got questioned about it after a random invasive search about a script. Not arrested, not strip searched, not tortured, doesn't sound like he was even delayed longer than usual (which doesn't mean the process wasn't humiliating, annoying and stupid)...
It says about society the following: we employ typical security types for airport security and pay them to do a security guard's job. Is there a society on earth, or ever, that routine things like this were handled by the best and the brightest and were concerned that they sort out odd situations themselves? I'd imagine that the guards at castle gates were always the easily confused types. And it may just be more efficent for gatekeepers to hand the odd cases up the ladder to someone who can sort things out.
What's ridiculous is that he was randomly searched once, they didn't find the script or anything else, then he got searched again. Unless he exited the gate and came back in, that doesn't make much sense to me.
Sorry for the double post, just thought of an important exception: "Coaligna residents are so dumb my father urinates in all the beers he sells at his bar and they don't even know it."
It is telling that enough of the townspeople were offended by it that they boycotted her father's business out of business. I couldn't find the full thing, but unless she gave away the town's secret recipe for the world's best apple pie, or revealed that the town enjoyed ritualistic killing and eating of vagrants, I can't fathom what would get under reasonable people's skin that much.
Conclusion: Coaligna is indeed a town full of assholes.
What's left for users outside the U.S.?
Not the US national debt for one thing. Kind of balances out.
I always love it when someone rephrases my jokes to be more obvious and gets all the mod points for it.
That was sarcasm. I'm sarcastically responding to the poor moderation job here, the joke is that I'm saying I love it but really I hate it because mod points are all I have in this world and I'm bitter about it.
And then right there the joke was that I was making a joke and then restating it to be more obvious, because that was what I was complaining about.
It is certainly a barrier but by no means an insurmountable one especially if you build on one of the foreign languages you learnt at school.
That's very true. In a few short months, your spanish skills of "Donde esta la biblotech" could branch out into other areas. For example:
"Donde esta la azul biblotech"
That means where is the BLUE library! But what if you're interested in dancing, not reading?
"Donde esta la discotech"
Advanced stuff! If that's all your job requires, you'd be ready right now! Once you move. And if you have to know more spanish than that, like where is the red library or the blue dance club, or, you know, any real job where you have to communicate beyond what you remember from high school spanish (keeping in mind that most places the foreign language instruction in high school and college really are worthless) and could learn in a short time, then you're fucked.
Kind of what I was implying...
Unfortunately, Miss Daisy will still cite it as one of the many reasons she shouldn't have to keep her damn cat inside.
Let's get off oil if for nothing else, to bankrupt every middle eastern country out there.
On the other hand, the only middle eastern countries that don't want to nuke the US to hell are those which are rich off oil.
And normal cell proliferation causes most cancers, but smoking is still a bad idea.
by simply ignoring data from anyone who ever rented SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2, Gigli, From Justin to Kelly, Disaster Movie, any movie by Uwe Boll and any movie starring Paris Hilton
Hey, I (along with the rest of my frat, our school hockey team, and most of the town) was in a movie starring Paris Hilton, you insensitive clod!
But there is no reason why the governments should have license to grow when its supporting economy just dropped 20%. To argue otherwise is to argue that you can tax a nation into prosperity, or that you can lift yourself up by your boot straps.
Without knowing the specifics of NC's budget, I'd say you're underestimating how inefficient the process is. Think of a big huge titanic-like ship, it can't turn on a dime. The government does have a reason to introduce new taxes when the economy bottoms out, if only because they tend to overspend when the economy is bad, and much moreso when it's good. The economy dropped quickly compared to their reaction time, as it always has and always will. They didn't learn from history as they never have and never will. Existing revenue undoubtedly dropped with the economy, but the programs they've set up obviously don't.
It's not an efficient process, but I'd argue they should find ways of transitioning rather than just "Hey free downtown health clinic, the economy tanked yesterday, and so we're not going to get as much taxes, so we can't fund you. Go home. Dude with the stab wound, get out of here. Now." Or "repaving of this highway postponed indefinitely because of the economy. Continue taking the 20 mile detour to work everyday until either the economy picks up again or you lose your job, whichever comes first."
You want these programs to be let down gently if they have to go in other words, and that takes tax money the government suddenly doesn't have.
It could also be solved with foresight, careful planning, innovation, and sacrifice, but we don't live in a world where legislators or politicians have those qualities.
Once some government erects a new law / regulation / tax / bureaucracy / program, it's harder to get rid of than mildew.
It's true, I have often found it takes a lot more Lysol to kill a legislator than it does to kill mildew.
What if she is the first person not to have the disease we all have and that she is aging but really really slow?
That is an interesting thought. There's actually some molecular evidence that aging, on a cellular level, is a result of a specific mechanism, not just a general and inevitable accumulation of damage.
This paper is... well one I haven't actually read. But I did see a seminar by the author. He suggested that accumulation of a specific protein fragment was causing aging. It was found in one of those premature aging diseases (Hutchinson-Gilford progeria specifically) with increased abundance, but they do find it accumulates as people get older, changing some cell mechanisms. The theory was that the full length protein, which has important normal functions, was cut in a specific way with low frequency, but over time the fragments build up and interfere with different processes, the effects of which seem to mimic aging.
Of course, it's not definitive that this is how you age, and there are several other mechanisms which might be causing aging in specific ways, but the implications of the theories are interesting: it might be possible to block those pathways to stop aging.
Unfortunately for this specific girl, I don't see anything to indicate she's not aging, I think it's probably she's just not actually growing. Growing and aging do appear independant, as progeria patients appear to age more rapidly but don't grow rapidly. It is possible that whatever is keeping her from growing will also prevent her from aging, but I don't see any reason to expect that.
* For a scientific theory, there are quite a few proponents of Darwinism-as-infallible-science who have some pretty fantastical (and completely unsupported by anything) views on the origin of life. (Crystals, lightning, aliens... We might as well add ecktoplasma to the list.)
You can't judge an idea or school of thought by the fringe. Just like you can't write all religious people off as violent nuts who just want to kill anyone who disagrees with them.
* For a unified theory of where all life began, it's got some notably large holes which have been present since Darwin conceived the theory. For instance, where did flowering plants come from?
A valid question for google or someone who was actually talking about the evolution of flowering plants. I made no reference to it.
* Darwinism has its own dogma - immutable and unchallengeable, until the evidence is insurmountable in opposition (see: skeletal fossils). It's akin to the idiotic "6000 year-old Earth" people: they pick a single source, and then think "how can we make our facts fit our assumptions?"
"Darwinism" has had several major updates and is in fact not immutable. The molecular explanation of DNA and inheritance was the first major change to the theory of natural selection. A second notable one was Gould and that other guy's punctuated equalibrium. It's not dogmatic, dogma doesn't change. At the very least, "darwinism" refers to an outdated theory, so you shouldn't use that term unless you're talking about the theory of natural selection before we knew it was DNA that was causing it.
The resistance you might be referring to is that evolutionary scientists are tired of debating the same old arguments creationists have been regurgitating since Darwin published the theory initially.
Furthermore, it's a normal human tendancy to cling to an idea. Evolutionary biologists are subject to normal human fallacies unfortunately.
* Darwinism necessitates n+1 levels of fossil complexity. If the Darwin model for evolution holds, then there would be no "missing link": there would be many, many missing links while at the same time we would see clear gradation from "then" until "now".
Same as my response above, "Darwinism" is outdated.
Punctuated equilibrium faces many of the same problems. But it, like much of theology, is pretty much just an unsupportable point of belief based on an unproven but presumed fact (in this case, that Darwinian evolution occurs as speculated at all).
Citation needed. Pretty much unsupportable? You haven't actually read the books have you? The fossil record, molecular studies, and bacteriological studies all confirm it.
Evolutionary biology is treated as the "source" science for many other rearward-looking sciences, such as archeology and geology, the results of which are many obvious incongruities between what's on the ground and what's in the texts.
So take your specific concerns up with the people publishing those studies.
It is widely accepted as absolute, undisputed fact despite the above faults, and any claims to the contrary are met with zealous hostility.
We've gotten tired of answering the same arguments creationists have been bringing up for decades. They're still brought up because creationists are closed minded. There's no point in arguing it anymore: creationists aren't going to be convinced no matter what. Claims against evolution have been debated to death, bringing them up again is met with hostility because of how annoying it is.
If Noah's sons all looked alike and went to different corners of the earth, it's still possible for black populations, white populations, and east asian populations to arise.
Has this been demonstrated to be possible? Or just postulated on based on fossil records and circumstantial (yet technically unassociated) evidence?
Yes. No. Do a google search for it. (Hint, bacteriological studies might be what you're looking for.)
if you fiat it away (as theists often do),
Seems to me you're doing the exact same thing - your "god" is just the infallible truth of evolutionary biology instead of a spaghetti monster in the sky.
So you went out of your way to take an off-hand comment to bring out the old "Science is just another religion" saw?
Don't know if you've noticed, but it's never been a compelling argument. To anyone. Do you honestly think I have a burden to cite specific evidence every time I mention evolution in passing? The rest of us have already been convinced, if you're not, that's your issue.
Slashdot: celebrity death news for nerds. News that you wouldn't hear any other place. Nice job reporting there, Gizzmonic.
Guys, if you happen to have a facebook or twitter account, PLEASE let everyone know. We really need to get this news out there. There's a lot of chatter about some protests in Iran, but we really need to show them what the web is actually for: trivial celeb gossip.~
(Not to be insensitive to MJ or his family, but in all honesty, this is fake news, not real news.)
A lot of nerds really like perscription Ibuprofen and are worried they'll be strip searched if they use it.
They posted pics of the whole thing online. I would have sued about that too, but then again, they were suprisingly tasteful. I mean, she did use one of them as her yearbook photo.