Seven minutes, and we've gone from "Hey, miraculous biomedical development possible" to "Fuck hippies."
I mean, have hippies even started protesting this? I realize that straw man arguments about "Africans should just go to whole foods" is sometimes all one can contribute, and sometimes mods don't want to read more than two posts down before dumping their points, but fucking hell, come on slashdot.
And it IS a fucking strawman argument. We all know (or should know) that no bit of technology is completely benign. By focusing on the most idiotic of criticisms, that might make us feel smart and also make us feel better about the technology, but we're drowning out actual concerns. Look at golden rice which did the beta carotene thing first. Yes yes, greenpeace blah blah blah, ignore that little section. There are concerns about whether it will affect the fertility of the soil. Perhaps that's not a concern with bananas, I don't know, maybe some agriculturally-leaning slashdotter could pipe in after the obligatory "fuck GMO protesting hippies."
Loss of biodiversity, and establishing an entrenched monoculture of food is a bigger concern with GMO. Bananas were decimated by disease before. It would really suck if everyone was planting this one strain of super bananas, and they became a necessary staple for vitamin A in parts of the world and we consider the problem solved and don't bother trying to improve nutrition in other ways. Then the Panama disease came and killed them all in the way it has done before, and suddenly we're left with a sudden serious shortage of vitamin A foods. If you're wondering, that causes blindness, impaired immune function, cancer, and birth defects.
See? It's entirely possible for people to have more concerns than "OMG, scary frankenfoods!" I'm not a hippie. I don't have a solution though. I mean, do they have whole foods there? Because if they did have a whole foods, that would probably be a better solution than potentially creating this. (kidding)
Bottom line, ignore the lunatic fringes in any controversey. It's fun to point and laugh at idiots, but you'll usually ignore the more reasonable people who might be on that side of the argument, those reasonable people might be right, in which case, you'd take second place in the idiot contest.
She was influential, but WHY WAS SHE INFLUENTIAL? The media. I'm saying they'll cause more problems if we let them get away with this shit as always. McCarthy on the other hand has used up most influence she has.
It would just be a waste of money given the plans we had based on the rockets. Plans which, again, are not necessary for defense of the country. Actual war would undoubtedly be vastly more expensive too. And realize that the $5 billion lost was an estimate put forward by people who have an interest in the rocket industry: it's advertising.
Lets not heap abuse on McCarthy: that's pointless. She did suffer a tragedy: her kid does have a disorder (possibly not autism, by the way). When she started her ill-advised crusade, the Wakefield papers suggesting a link between autism and vaccines hadn't been retracted yet. And according to wikipedia, she hasn't made public statements against vaccinations since 2011.
Instead, blame the media for reporting on what celebrities think and junk science. They should have known better. They are the ones who are supposed to be the professionals at telling society what's important. They are the ones who committed an ethical violation. And blaming them is the only way to stop another tragedy like this. There will always be individuals espousing stupidity and ignorance. While it's annoying, it's not until someone hands that person a microphone and gives them an audience that it really becomes an issue. That will always happen. Jenny McCarthy isn't going to do much more damage, but the media is STILL more than willing to tell everyone everything that any famous person says, without considering the fallout.
The military doesn't NEED rockets to put up new satellites right at this moment in order to defend the country.
If Russia cuts us off and then attacks us, the sattelites currently up there would work just fine. The missiles would work. The airplanes and boats would work. The guns would work. It would take, what, several years before the satellites for weather and spying shut down and would need to be replaced.
It would just be a waste of money given the plans we had based on the rockets. Plans which, again, are not necessary for defense of the country. Actual war would undoubtedly be vastly more expensive too. And realize that the $5 billion lost was an estimate put forward by people who have an interest in the rocket industry: it's advertising.
It's always good to be skeptical of anyone saying some new bit of technology is only five years away from being useful... but people saying some bit of technology will take "at least 100 years" should be outright ignored. No one can predict that far in the future when it comes to technology. The NEXT technological breakthrough in a series is nearly impossible to predict a decade in advance. Calling a STRING of breakthroughs like that is dumber than tarot cards. Think about the conservative predictions in the 80s for technology in the year 2000. Flying cars and MAYBE personal radios for everyone. Saying everyone would have pocket supercomputers would have been laughed out of the room.
I agree, writing all android phones off is nonsense. However, Samsung does do what GP said, the unlocked versions are more expensive and not subsidized. And samsung IS the dominant manufacturer in android phones. The galaxy S5 would be a GREAT phone if they didn't pointlessly lock it down.
The link I provided explains what I was talking about: the galaxy S5 from AT&T or verizon is, in fact, locked down, and Samsung isn't doing anything about it. There's a $10K bounty for a workaround, but it's almost been two months.
It may have been part of their strategy, but it seems with their "knox" development that they'd rather try to market their devices as totally secure, even if that means secure against users themselves.
Looks like you have been beaten to the punch. Anyway, I'm not sure why it would matter: they're so rare that the chances of one coming across a screen that could display the test is pretty low.
Consider that cameras and monitors don't even capture the full range in terms of dark to light that the NORMAL human eye can see. Extra color information, like resolution, is one of those things that you need to actually see and get used to before you become willing to shell out extra money for it. I have an AMOLED screen on my phone, which supposedly shows darker blacks and more brilliant colors. I like it, but I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars on my next phone for it.
Fuck any company that tries to limit what I can do with my possessions.
Until they prove that this new tablet is easily rootable, so that you can do what you want on it, no self-respecting nerd should buy this.
(And before any smartass pipes up with "customers are leasing it, not buying it" yeah yeah, you are very clever, but you and I both know that's horseshit.)
No, the reasons they're not allowed to donate are outdated reasons. It made sense when there was no test, or when the tests were less reliable. Today, we obviously have tests, every donation is tested. The false negative rate is 0.03%. So it's pretty safe to take a negative as a negative.
Gay men are also more likely to have had an HIV test than most people, and they would self-exclude themselves if positive. Given that gay men could already simply lie, it's not like a whole lot would change there.
Was that before or after HIV woke us up to the need to heavily screen each and every bag of blood that comes in? Was that before or after medical malpractice lawsuits became a way of life for a huge number of leeches (which in turn, drives up liability insurance)?
I'm actually asking, I don't know a timeline. I just know that the costs have obviously increased greatly, to a point where not paying for it might not be viable today. Even if we WERE okay with letting people who didn't have enough credits go "bankrupt" by dying. Which I doubt we ever were.
Which is why it makes no sense to me that most Americans who regularly acknowledge that fact pay no attention to what their congressmen are doing. "The government is doing a terrible job" somehow justifies apathy and ignorance about the whole thing. It's insane.
Whatever the reason for it, I think it's counterproductive to generalize it like that. Congress is dysfunctional, and most politicians can't be trusted. There must be congressmen though, so it is up to the citizens to reign them in by voting, INCLUDING IN THE PRIMARIES, in order to ensure the ones we get are the least overtly corrupt ones.
American revolution casualties per year: ~2,700
Egyptian revolution casualties per year: ~2,500.
Oh yeah. It's a total clusterfuck over there, the likes of which the world has never seen, and the difference is clearly religion. Centuries from now, to say nothing of decades, the area will be total hell. Americans after and during the revolutionary war never had legal issues of any type. (/heavy sarcasm)
Lest you say "Oh, but sectarian violence, and rape!" remember that America had outright slavery, and women couldn't vote. Ending either wasn't even much of a discussion. On top of that, America benefitted from being a giant ocean away from most meddling, while Egypt is surrounded by foreign governments trying to weigh in, largely pushing towards sectarian violence. And the worlds superpowers of China, Russia, the US, and the EU are all all up in their buisiness too.
Face it: the Egyptians are handling this a lot better than we did. It could be better in theory, sure, I don't think anyone would question that. But to suggest it's terrible and it's because of religion, which many Americans seem convinced of (not just trolls) is really stupid.
Sure, science waits for no one, and everyone besides the grant-writers work odd hours occasionally. Still, that doesn't mean that time points are chosen SPECIFICALLY to make it hard for the workers. It sounds like your work had to be done in that way prior to the cage thing. I have odd hours still. But that's only when not having those odd hours would ruin the experiment. If they had reason to think that only 12 hour time points would work, someone WOULD be coming in at midnight.
That's not supported by any evidence I can see. The 48-72 hours was more likely chosen because it would allow the postdocs, grad students, and techs to not have to come in at midnight on a weekend to kill a mouse and drain them of their blood (and then quit and join a different lab). Not because that time frame was empirically determined to be the minimum fasting time required for the effect.
Skimming the article and paper, it's pretty clear that they're establishing that this is a real effect, not determining the most efficient method to get it. I don't have any background knowledge about the molecular mechanism they're proposing, or much about nutrition and fasting (scientifically or personally) but I'd be surprised if fasting for shorter periods of times but for more periods wouldn't have some of the same effect, possibly even moreso.
Anyway, the article says they tested it in a handful of chemotherapy patients to prove the point, but most of the work was done in mice. Mice, obviously, aren't perfect metaphors for humans. It wouldn't be terribly shocking to me at least that mice fasting for three days would have the same response that humans used to at least three square meals a day would in 12 hours.
It could go the other way of course, humans with much greater masses and probably a lot more body fat might require longer fasting. I don't know.
I'd submit that those strips were never as thoughtful or funny as Calvin and Hobbes. When I was a kid, I loved Garfield, Dilbert, and Calvin and Hobbes. I bought their books and read them a lot. Why? Well, kids have poor tastes, which is why they think cut up hot dogs are awesome every day for dinner for years on end. I still find myself gorging on webcomic archives even if I don't find them that entertaining. I read through most of "Ctrl alt del"'s archive before getting sick of it, and I think of Ctrl alt del as the least funny, least insightful comic (web or not) that I've ever run across.
So I think I have authority on the subject of comic strip quality. I'm embarrassed to admit that even on slashdot. I mean, at least comic BOOKS would be semi respectable here.
Anyway, Garfield, dilbert, Ctrl alt del, calvin and hobbes, penny arcade, far side... it seems to me that they had a short period where they were still evolving, but after that, they were pretty stable. I get the sense that comics only go downhill after the artists stop caring.
I don't think Bill Watterson would have run out of fresh ideas to share with the world. I think he was being 100% honest when he said he lacked the passion to do it anymore. I think it's easier for young people to pour time, energy, and passion into things. And I don't think that Watterson could have simply phoned it in. I think Calvin and Hobbes would have been enjoyable up to now, assuming Watterson hadn't shot himself or died of exhaustion.
Think of all the great scientific revolutions and achievements. Now subtract the ones which required very little in the way of costs (IE, costs for Newton to make calculus were something along the lines of "Food to keep Newton's brain working", or mendel's pea plants, which costs were "Whatever a monk's time was worth in the mid 1800s").
How many items on your list were funded through free-market forces? Were there any? If so, I'd invite you to dig deeper. Almost every major finding in biomedical research is directly funded by the US government, to say nothing of the collaborators and background knowledge which is also supported by US grants.
I honestly can't think of a "great dream" scientifically that isn't, from conception to being sold to consumers, government funded. I'd argue that instead, we must forcefully take our government from the short-sighted hands it's fallen into.
So then... what the hell was stopping them from merging? It's not like they'd be defiling the field of competition, and it's not like Washington is erring on the side of too much competition in mobile markets.
It depends on what you mean by that. The console versions of the games, there's automatic targeting. You hit the aim button and you automatically have locked onto the nearest enemy with most of the guns. The PC versions of all the games evidently have manual aiming by default at least which is obviously much easier with a mouse.
Were it a primarily shooting game, I'd much prefer manual aiming with a mouse, but the driving half of the game, it seems like a stick would be preferable.
Heck, we (= the West) have been fighting regimes that did this in the past, saying we had to liberate the people from the oppression, etc. etc., and now we're doing it ourselves?
People stopped demanding liberty and freedom and started demanding safety. The government complied as best they could. Democracy in action!
Slashdot Mirror
Seven minutes, and we've gone from "Hey, miraculous biomedical development possible" to "Fuck hippies."
I mean, have hippies even started protesting this? I realize that straw man arguments about "Africans should just go to whole foods" is sometimes all one can contribute, and sometimes mods don't want to read more than two posts down before dumping their points, but fucking hell, come on slashdot.
And it IS a fucking strawman argument. We all know (or should know) that no bit of technology is completely benign. By focusing on the most idiotic of criticisms, that might make us feel smart and also make us feel better about the technology, but we're drowning out actual concerns. Look at golden rice which did the beta carotene thing first. Yes yes, greenpeace blah blah blah, ignore that little section. There are concerns about whether it will affect the fertility of the soil. Perhaps that's not a concern with bananas, I don't know, maybe some agriculturally-leaning slashdotter could pipe in after the obligatory "fuck GMO protesting hippies."
Loss of biodiversity, and establishing an entrenched monoculture of food is a bigger concern with GMO. Bananas were decimated by disease before. It would really suck if everyone was planting this one strain of super bananas, and they became a necessary staple for vitamin A in parts of the world and we consider the problem solved and don't bother trying to improve nutrition in other ways. Then the Panama disease came and killed them all in the way it has done before, and suddenly we're left with a sudden serious shortage of vitamin A foods. If you're wondering, that causes blindness, impaired immune function, cancer, and birth defects.
See? It's entirely possible for people to have more concerns than "OMG, scary frankenfoods!" I'm not a hippie. I don't have a solution though. I mean, do they have whole foods there? Because if they did have a whole foods, that would probably be a better solution than potentially creating this. (kidding)
Bottom line, ignore the lunatic fringes in any controversey. It's fun to point and laugh at idiots, but you'll usually ignore the more reasonable people who might be on that side of the argument, those reasonable people might be right, in which case, you'd take second place in the idiot contest.
She was influential, but WHY WAS SHE INFLUENTIAL? The media. I'm saying they'll cause more problems if we let them get away with this shit as always. McCarthy on the other hand has used up most influence she has.
Ah, I admit I didn't do much research on what she has said besides skimming the wiki page.
It would just be a waste of money given the plans we had based on the rockets. Plans which, again, are not necessary for defense of the country. Actual war would undoubtedly be vastly more expensive too. And realize that the $5 billion lost was an estimate put forward by people who have an interest in the rocket industry: it's advertising.
Lets not heap abuse on McCarthy: that's pointless. She did suffer a tragedy: her kid does have a disorder (possibly not autism, by the way). When she started her ill-advised crusade, the Wakefield papers suggesting a link between autism and vaccines hadn't been retracted yet. And according to wikipedia, she hasn't made public statements against vaccinations since 2011.
Instead, blame the media for reporting on what celebrities think and junk science. They should have known better. They are the ones who are supposed to be the professionals at telling society what's important. They are the ones who committed an ethical violation. And blaming them is the only way to stop another tragedy like this. There will always be individuals espousing stupidity and ignorance. While it's annoying, it's not until someone hands that person a microphone and gives them an audience that it really becomes an issue. That will always happen. Jenny McCarthy isn't going to do much more damage, but the media is STILL more than willing to tell everyone everything that any famous person says, without considering the fallout.
The military doesn't NEED rockets to put up new satellites right at this moment in order to defend the country.
If Russia cuts us off and then attacks us, the sattelites currently up there would work just fine. The missiles would work. The airplanes and boats would work. The guns would work. It would take, what, several years before the satellites for weather and spying shut down and would need to be replaced.
It would just be a waste of money given the plans we had based on the rockets. Plans which, again, are not necessary for defense of the country. Actual war would undoubtedly be vastly more expensive too. And realize that the $5 billion lost was an estimate put forward by people who have an interest in the rocket industry: it's advertising.
It's always good to be skeptical of anyone saying some new bit of technology is only five years away from being useful... but people saying some bit of technology will take "at least 100 years" should be outright ignored. No one can predict that far in the future when it comes to technology. The NEXT technological breakthrough in a series is nearly impossible to predict a decade in advance. Calling a STRING of breakthroughs like that is dumber than tarot cards. Think about the conservative predictions in the 80s for technology in the year 2000. Flying cars and MAYBE personal radios for everyone. Saying everyone would have pocket supercomputers would have been laughed out of the room.
I agree, writing all android phones off is nonsense. However, Samsung does do what GP said, the unlocked versions are more expensive and not subsidized. And samsung IS the dominant manufacturer in android phones. The galaxy S5 would be a GREAT phone if they didn't pointlessly lock it down.
The link I provided explains what I was talking about: the galaxy S5 from AT&T or verizon is, in fact, locked down, and Samsung isn't doing anything about it. There's a $10K bounty for a workaround, but it's almost been two months.
It may have been part of their strategy, but it seems with their "knox" development that they'd rather try to market their devices as totally secure, even if that means secure against users themselves.
Looks like you have been beaten to the punch. Anyway, I'm not sure why it would matter: they're so rare that the chances of one coming across a screen that could display the test is pretty low.
Consider that cameras and monitors don't even capture the full range in terms of dark to light that the NORMAL human eye can see. Extra color information, like resolution, is one of those things that you need to actually see and get used to before you become willing to shell out extra money for it. I have an AMOLED screen on my phone, which supposedly shows darker blacks and more brilliant colors. I like it, but I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars on my next phone for it.
Samsung has been on a real kick lately with locked bootloaders.
Fuck any company that tries to limit what I can do with my possessions.
Until they prove that this new tablet is easily rootable, so that you can do what you want on it, no self-respecting nerd should buy this.
(And before any smartass pipes up with "customers are leasing it, not buying it" yeah yeah, you are very clever, but you and I both know that's horseshit.)
No, the reasons they're not allowed to donate are outdated reasons. It made sense when there was no test, or when the tests were less reliable. Today, we obviously have tests, every donation is tested. The false negative rate is 0.03%. So it's pretty safe to take a negative as a negative.
Gay men are also more likely to have had an HIV test than most people, and they would self-exclude themselves if positive. Given that gay men could already simply lie, it's not like a whole lot would change there.
As far as empirical evidence: it appears that bans on gay men donating blood doesn't do much. The American Medical Association is convinced it's a stupid policy.
Lastly, there are drugs to treat HIV. If you die from a shortage of blood, there's no drugs yet to manage that.
Was that before or after HIV woke us up to the need to heavily screen each and every bag of blood that comes in? Was that before or after medical malpractice lawsuits became a way of life for a huge number of leeches (which in turn, drives up liability insurance)?
I'm actually asking, I don't know a timeline. I just know that the costs have obviously increased greatly, to a point where not paying for it might not be viable today. Even if we WERE okay with letting people who didn't have enough credits go "bankrupt" by dying. Which I doubt we ever were.
Which is why it makes no sense to me that most Americans who regularly acknowledge that fact pay no attention to what their congressmen are doing. "The government is doing a terrible job" somehow justifies apathy and ignorance about the whole thing. It's insane.
Whatever the reason for it, I think it's counterproductive to generalize it like that. Congress is dysfunctional, and most politicians can't be trusted. There must be congressmen though, so it is up to the citizens to reign them in by voting, INCLUDING IN THE PRIMARIES, in order to ensure the ones we get are the least overtly corrupt ones.
American revolution: 1765 to 1783. About 18 years. Up to 50,000 Americans dead or wounded.
Arab spring: (Egypt), 2011-today. About 3 years so far. Deaths: over 1,100. 6,400 or so injured
American revolution casualties per year: ~2,700
Egyptian revolution casualties per year: ~2,500.
Oh yeah. It's a total clusterfuck over there, the likes of which the world has never seen, and the difference is clearly religion. Centuries from now, to say nothing of decades, the area will be total hell. Americans after and during the revolutionary war never had legal issues of any type. (/heavy sarcasm)
Lest you say "Oh, but sectarian violence, and rape!" remember that America had outright slavery, and women couldn't vote. Ending either wasn't even much of a discussion. On top of that, America benefitted from being a giant ocean away from most meddling, while Egypt is surrounded by foreign governments trying to weigh in, largely pushing towards sectarian violence. And the worlds superpowers of China, Russia, the US, and the EU are all all up in their buisiness too.
Face it: the Egyptians are handling this a lot better than we did. It could be better in theory, sure, I don't think anyone would question that. But to suggest it's terrible and it's because of religion, which many Americans seem convinced of (not just trolls) is really stupid.
Sure, science waits for no one, and everyone besides the grant-writers work odd hours occasionally. Still, that doesn't mean that time points are chosen SPECIFICALLY to make it hard for the workers. It sounds like your work had to be done in that way prior to the cage thing. I have odd hours still. But that's only when not having those odd hours would ruin the experiment. If they had reason to think that only 12 hour time points would work, someone WOULD be coming in at midnight.
That's not supported by any evidence I can see. The 48-72 hours was more likely chosen because it would allow the postdocs, grad students, and techs to not have to come in at midnight on a weekend to kill a mouse and drain them of their blood (and then quit and join a different lab). Not because that time frame was empirically determined to be the minimum fasting time required for the effect.
Skimming the article and paper, it's pretty clear that they're establishing that this is a real effect, not determining the most efficient method to get it. I don't have any background knowledge about the molecular mechanism they're proposing, or much about nutrition and fasting (scientifically or personally) but I'd be surprised if fasting for shorter periods of times but for more periods wouldn't have some of the same effect, possibly even moreso.
Anyway, the article says they tested it in a handful of chemotherapy patients to prove the point, but most of the work was done in mice. Mice, obviously, aren't perfect metaphors for humans. It wouldn't be terribly shocking to me at least that mice fasting for three days would have the same response that humans used to at least three square meals a day would in 12 hours.
It could go the other way of course, humans with much greater masses and probably a lot more body fat might require longer fasting. I don't know.
I'd submit that those strips were never as thoughtful or funny as Calvin and Hobbes. When I was a kid, I loved Garfield, Dilbert, and Calvin and Hobbes. I bought their books and read them a lot. Why? Well, kids have poor tastes, which is why they think cut up hot dogs are awesome every day for dinner for years on end. I still find myself gorging on webcomic archives even if I don't find them that entertaining. I read through most of "Ctrl alt del"'s archive before getting sick of it, and I think of Ctrl alt del as the least funny, least insightful comic (web or not) that I've ever run across.
So I think I have authority on the subject of comic strip quality. I'm embarrassed to admit that even on slashdot. I mean, at least comic BOOKS would be semi respectable here.
Anyway, Garfield, dilbert, Ctrl alt del, calvin and hobbes, penny arcade, far side... it seems to me that they had a short period where they were still evolving, but after that, they were pretty stable. I get the sense that comics only go downhill after the artists stop caring.
I don't think Bill Watterson would have run out of fresh ideas to share with the world. I think he was being 100% honest when he said he lacked the passion to do it anymore. I think it's easier for young people to pour time, energy, and passion into things. And I don't think that Watterson could have simply phoned it in. I think Calvin and Hobbes would have been enjoyable up to now, assuming Watterson hadn't shot himself or died of exhaustion.
Think of all the great scientific revolutions and achievements. Now subtract the ones which required very little in the way of costs (IE, costs for Newton to make calculus were something along the lines of "Food to keep Newton's brain working", or mendel's pea plants, which costs were "Whatever a monk's time was worth in the mid 1800s").
How many items on your list were funded through free-market forces? Were there any? If so, I'd invite you to dig deeper. Almost every major finding in biomedical research is directly funded by the US government, to say nothing of the collaborators and background knowledge which is also supported by US grants.
With space exploration too, it's been government all along. Goddard, father of american rocketry, needed government funding in 1917. The SpaceX corporation is getting funding from NASA and obviously, without NASA, there wouldn't be a SpaceX conceptually anyway.
I honestly can't think of a "great dream" scientifically that isn't, from conception to being sold to consumers, government funded. I'd argue that instead, we must forcefully take our government from the short-sighted hands it's fallen into.
So then... what the hell was stopping them from merging? It's not like they'd be defiling the field of competition, and it's not like Washington is erring on the side of too much competition in mobile markets.
As I've heard someone say, Verizon is the hottest girl at the prom, and worse, she knows it.
I understood what you were saying up until that point, now I have no idea what you mean.
It depends on what you mean by that. The console versions of the games, there's automatic targeting. You hit the aim button and you automatically have locked onto the nearest enemy with most of the guns. The PC versions of all the games evidently have manual aiming by default at least which is obviously much easier with a mouse.
Were it a primarily shooting game, I'd much prefer manual aiming with a mouse, but the driving half of the game, it seems like a stick would be preferable.
and then freaked when his public divorce proceeding, including how he was screwing the babysitter for 8 years, was publicized.
Wow, I can't even go eight MINUTES and this guy is still going after eight YEARS? How is that not front page news everywhere?
We already did pay for it through taxes, so no, not MUCH higher.
Heck, we (= the West) have been fighting regimes that did this in the past, saying we had to liberate the people from the oppression, etc. etc., and now we're doing it ourselves?
People stopped demanding liberty and freedom and started demanding safety. The government complied as best they could. Democracy in action!