You realize that's a value statement without any justification. It's not really a fact that you're stating there. I happen to agree with your opinion, that religion is not a good justification for being a health hazard, but there are plenty of people who would argue it IS an excuse not to be vaccinated.
I'd argue it's not a valid excuse because it has the potential to get others sick, you're not just making a decision for yourself. Of course, one could say that line of reasoning, using indirect, unintended consequences, is isn't good because it could be extended to deny you of any other right. Like "Your gun might be stolen and used to murder someone: therefore you should not be able to own a firearm."
My point is that it's not as black and white as you're making it, even though I think we all here agree with you.
A bit like burning a house down to fireproof it. Allowing them to get sick IS the health hazard we want to avoid. Having people who should be immune carry the diseases just to teach them a lesson is still going to affect immunocompromised people or kids who are too young to be vaccinated.
I'd say ONLY blame the media for promoting it. It will happen again if the media continues to equate "how famous is this person" with "does this person know what they are talking about?" So there's real importance to blaming the media. There is none for blaming a former playboy model for unscientific views.
Well, I suppose you get to feel smarter than one individual person. Maybe validate some opinions about attractive blonde famous celebrities if that's your thing. I guess one could consider those worthy goals. If so, please, keep it to yourself. Yes yes, you're much smarter than somone who used to have an MTV show, congrats. Now shut up and focus on what's important.
I also remember hearing that the iphone was suffering poor adoption because they had a reputation for needing to be connected to a PC regularly. Many japanese customers didn't like that, a surprising number didn't have any home PC. Low-end japanese phones (sold for a penny) in the early 2000s were capable of most of what people use smartphones for today: they got e-mail, they could surf the web, they could take pictures.
I went there for a few months, and was really annoyed at having to take a step down in terms of phone function when I came back. There were comparable phones, but not in the same price range. As we all know, apple is mainly a marketing wonder, the iphone was successful because it was leaps and bounds ahead of what most people THOUGHT a phone was capable of here, but it wasn't much ahead of what was available in japan.
You know what, that's too much sarcasm for me to fart out at once. This sounds essentially like the subprime mortgage crisis. And a lot of other banking crises. It doesn't seem totally insane to me to trust your friend Joe in a trailer over the banking industry: when he runs off with my money, at least he might go to jail rather than getting millions in rewards.
Indeed, it's states rights when it comes to lack of gun control, teaching creationism in schools, denying gay marriage, and polluting. When states try to enact gun control, raise taxes, abolish creationism, raise environmental standards, or allow gay marriage, suddenly states rights aren't important.
I'm saying they're basically the same in terms of the mechanism proposed here: people have health insurance not tied to employers so they'll start their own business. That has nothing to do with where the reforms are being enacted: it should have happened at the state level with romneycare if it's going to be true for the nation with obamacare.
Put another way: that debate is valid but shouldn't matter with the current subject.
Hi. SCIENCE. Turn in your nerd card if you don't see why this is slashdot material. We need more nerds engaged in politics, not more nerds being apathetic about it. Especially on this issue.
Bureaucracy getting in the way of research is a very real issue. Administration of research funding has increased dramatically more than actual funding for research. Not unique to research of course, that's just bureaucracy. It's getting in the way of science. From the guy's letter
On one occasion, I was invited to give a talk on research integrity and misconduct to a large group of AAAS fellows. I needed to spend $35 to convert some old cassette tapes to CDs for use in the presentation. The immediate office denied my request after a couple of days of noodling. A university did the conversion for me in twenty minutes, and refused payment when I told them it was for an educational purpose.
I would disagree with his point here: the red tape is bad at universities. In my thesis work, we ran into an issue where we had too much data and needed to buy external hard drives to backup the data. Data that would be required by the grant to be stored. However, buying hard drives was prohibited by the funding, according to our administration. Eventually, someone coughed up the money from their pocket. I'm quite certain at my university, the same issue would have come up. It's possible the university in the guy's anecdote did too, someone just handed an administrator $35 from their own wallet.
Cable news viewers aren't going to demand red tape be cut for biomedical research, they'd be more likely to demand the opposite. Ironically, they advocate the opposite for private industry on the grounds that it stifles innovation. Then they bemoan research funds being spent on fruit fly research while alzheimers hasn't been cured. Nerds need to demand the issue be solved.
I'm skeptical of any anecdotes I hear about obamacare. On top of the fact that anecdotes aren't real evidence, there have been several well-publicized obamacare horror stories that have turned out to be far-right funded lies.
The other way is also true. The "strong evidence" that obamacare is going to make many more startups doesn't seem to be much more than a theory. Here's the study they're referring to. Seems odd that they don't show self-employment increasing in Massachusetts, given that Romneycare is basically Obamacare and happened there eight years ago.
Why call it a "war on coal" though? The hysterical people convinced there's a "war on Christmas" aren't people you should be emulating if you want to sound reasonable or if you have legitimate arguments.
Oh dear god. People are really framing poor old coal as a persecuted entity we've declared war on, and people are actually swallowing it? And a google search reveals you're not joking.
I believe that people are pushing clean energy in an attempt to get rich, since that's what every industry does including coal. But I can't be more open-minded than that when you resort to such bald orwellian tactics.
I agree that the papers should be open, but I disagree that not linking to the paywalled site is a good answer. Publishers of scientific journals don't get much money by individuals paying for papers. They get their money from universities and research institutions paying the toll. The paywall for individuals is just to keep forcing the universities paying. What you said is true for paywalls on general periodicals like wall street journal or new york times (if either still does that), since people actually might buy access to those articles. Not PNAS.
Furthermore, the primary source is important obviously. Most of the time with slashdot articles, you get a link to some three paragraph blurb in science daily or Time, and the actual paper is not linked in that article. Meanwhile, there are questions here that can only be answered by details which are in the actual paper but aren't in the blurby news story. These questions could be answered by people who do have access, but without a link to the paywalled paper, such people are less likely to bother tracking it down.
That criticism doesn't go for phys.org: they have the link to the actual paper at the bottom. Good on them.
Again, publicly funded research should be open access, I'm not saying paywalls are good or justified.
If you did in fact mean Hula, then what's stopping them is the fact that ISPs don't really care what you twirl around your hips as they're unlikely to make a dollar from it.
What's stopping them from blocking netflix is that they don't want a revolution on their hands. Hulu was their attempt at vertical integration, they are undoubtedly aware that hulu is not a competitor enough though to topple netflix. Attempting to say their customers couldn't use netflix would cause them to lose a huge chunk of their customers.
As for pirate bay, they probably realize it would be down for a matter of hours at most, and that trying to block it would create more problems and waste more money than would gain them.
Gasp! I can't access it through comcast? How ever will I buy office chairs in china without 021yy.org?!?! It's SO much better than those humps over at 022yy.org.
(In case the link gets slashdotted, it's a website for office furniture in Chinese. At least according to google translate.)
To be fair, she accuses the intelligence community of doing far more than simply spying on her.
said the CIA had searched through computers belonging to staff members investigating the agency’s role in torturing detainees, and had then leveled false charges against her staff in an attempt to intimidate them.
“I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution, including the speech and debate clause,” she said. “It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function.”
The intelligence community blackmailing the people who are supposed to have oversight of the intelligence community is probably at least a little more dangerous than the intelligence community spying on it's citizens. If for no other reason that the former prevents the latter from being solved. Pruning the CIA and NSA back to appropriate levels will require congressional action, and that's likely exactly what the CIA and/or NSA is trying to stop with these actions.
Terrorists are dumb. That is the only thing saving humanity.
That's a hyperbole. There is a whole lot of humanity out there. There are 15,000 births PER HOUR. The 3000 people dead from 9/11 didn't even make a dent in the daily population increase.
Not trying to be callous here, it was a horrible attack, just that humanity will continue even if we give terrorists one ICBM and an instruction manual written at a second grade level.
The guards need to see the drone to shoot it. And if they see the drone, wouldn't they be able to stop it from being collected without shooting it? It's not like the prison yard is enemy territory, they control it. Hit an alarm, tell all the inmates to get down on the ground or whatever it is you do when anything happens there. It's not like simply flying over the prison is sufficient to deliver drugs.
Only for a moment: this needs to be pressed. Otherwise, congress will pass laws restricting the NSA from spying on congress, and maybe large corporations who donate well. Then everyone will forget about the NSA and we'll be left permanently under big brother's gaze. At least until we say something the government doesn't like, at which point they'll release or make up embarassing or illegal stuff about us, then send us to for-profit prisons to work as slaves.
Maybe a bit too cynical there, but hey, can't be too careful.
The prohibition of murder seems to be better than the alternative. We could go back and forth with arguments about what constitutes a scotsman, but my point was merely that absolute statements like "prohibition will ALWAYS fail" are unfounded.
As for the concealed carry, it's a valid hypothesis, no doubt, but proof is needed. If most violent criminals don't think about consequences such as "does this guy have a gun" then the experiment is going to fail and with a lot of dead bodies. Before concluding either way, we'd need good data. Which again, I'm not suggesting it wouldn't, I believe there is data out there that supports the idea. Just that I don't want to find it right now.
He asked a reasonable question and you respond with... being holier than thou? Condescending? Patronizing? I'm not quite sure what the specific term is, but you're being shitty and for no good reason. Jerk. And whoever modded you +1 informative is whatever you would call your specific brand of being shitty online but isn't even being original.
I'm objecting to the simplistic approach you're advocating. Prohibition of alchohol didn't fail because prohibition ALWAYS fails. Legalizing EVERYTHING sold on the black market is an absurd stance. Even legalizing all drugs is probably unjustified. Even with Portugal's example, saying it will work everywhere is not very sound.
I'd like to see a citation for concealed carry reducing crime. I'm not saying that skeptically, I just haven't seen any studies on it because I haven't looked.
My main point though is Charliemopps suggestion that it would be easy to eliminate these problems is nonsense: the voters would oppose it, it's not just political gridlock.
Okay, so you're obviously convinced that there are magic bullets out there for any issue, so I'm not going to try telling you there aren't, but what about that is supposed to be easy to remedy? I don't think political gridlock in Chicago is what keeps Chicago from eliminating the black market, legalizing... everything?... and giving out a whole lot of guns. I think that goes well into "Most sane people would object to doing that."
When are causes of violent crime not obvious? It's not like people dying from being shot in Juarez mexico is too mysterious. "Relatively easily remedied?" How? Getting rid of all the guns and knives? Making everyone rich? Installing a morality-enforcing chip on everyone? Nuking the city?
Slashdot Mirror
You realize that's a value statement without any justification. It's not really a fact that you're stating there. I happen to agree with your opinion, that religion is not a good justification for being a health hazard, but there are plenty of people who would argue it IS an excuse not to be vaccinated.
I'd argue it's not a valid excuse because it has the potential to get others sick, you're not just making a decision for yourself. Of course, one could say that line of reasoning, using indirect, unintended consequences, is isn't good because it could be extended to deny you of any other right. Like "Your gun might be stolen and used to murder someone: therefore you should not be able to own a firearm."
My point is that it's not as black and white as you're making it, even though I think we all here agree with you.
A bit like burning a house down to fireproof it. Allowing them to get sick IS the health hazard we want to avoid. Having people who should be immune carry the diseases just to teach them a lesson is still going to affect immunocompromised people or kids who are too young to be vaccinated.
I'd say ONLY blame the media for promoting it. It will happen again if the media continues to equate "how famous is this person" with "does this person know what they are talking about?" So there's real importance to blaming the media. There is none for blaming a former playboy model for unscientific views.
Well, I suppose you get to feel smarter than one individual person. Maybe validate some opinions about attractive blonde famous celebrities if that's your thing. I guess one could consider those worthy goals. If so, please, keep it to yourself. Yes yes, you're much smarter than somone who used to have an MTV show, congrats. Now shut up and focus on what's important.
I also remember hearing that the iphone was suffering poor adoption because they had a reputation for needing to be connected to a PC regularly. Many japanese customers didn't like that, a surprising number didn't have any home PC. Low-end japanese phones (sold for a penny) in the early 2000s were capable of most of what people use smartphones for today: they got e-mail, they could surf the web, they could take pictures.
I went there for a few months, and was really annoyed at having to take a step down in terms of phone function when I came back. There were comparable phones, but not in the same price range. As we all know, apple is mainly a marketing wonder, the iphone was successful because it was leaps and bounds ahead of what most people THOUGHT a phone was capable of here, but it wasn't much ahead of what was available in japan.
Ladies and gentlemen: it's official. Hipsterism has moved onto webcomics. Detonate the nukes. Perhaps the cockroach culture can do better than we did.
Yeah, those fools should have definitely given their money to the pros.
You know what, that's too much sarcasm for me to fart out at once. This sounds essentially like the subprime mortgage crisis. And a lot of other banking crises. It doesn't seem totally insane to me to trust your friend Joe in a trailer over the banking industry: when he runs off with my money, at least he might go to jail rather than getting millions in rewards.
Indeed, it's states rights when it comes to lack of gun control, teaching creationism in schools, denying gay marriage, and polluting. When states try to enact gun control, raise taxes, abolish creationism, raise environmental standards, or allow gay marriage, suddenly states rights aren't important.
I'm saying they're basically the same in terms of the mechanism proposed here: people have health insurance not tied to employers so they'll start their own business. That has nothing to do with where the reforms are being enacted: it should have happened at the state level with romneycare if it's going to be true for the nation with obamacare.
Put another way: that debate is valid but shouldn't matter with the current subject.
Bureaucracy getting in the way of research is a very real issue. Administration of research funding has increased dramatically more than actual funding for research. Not unique to research of course, that's just bureaucracy. It's getting in the way of science. From the guy's letter
On one occasion, I was invited to give a talk on research integrity and misconduct to a large group of AAAS fellows. I needed to spend $35 to convert some old cassette tapes to CDs for use in the presentation. The immediate office denied my request after a couple of days of noodling. A university did the conversion for me in twenty minutes, and refused payment when I told them it was for an educational purpose.
I would disagree with his point here: the red tape is bad at universities. In my thesis work, we ran into an issue where we had too much data and needed to buy external hard drives to backup the data. Data that would be required by the grant to be stored. However, buying hard drives was prohibited by the funding, according to our administration. Eventually, someone coughed up the money from their pocket. I'm quite certain at my university, the same issue would have come up. It's possible the university in the guy's anecdote did too, someone just handed an administrator $35 from their own wallet.
Cable news viewers aren't going to demand red tape be cut for biomedical research, they'd be more likely to demand the opposite. Ironically, they advocate the opposite for private industry on the grounds that it stifles innovation. Then they bemoan research funds being spent on fruit fly research while alzheimers hasn't been cured. Nerds need to demand the issue be solved.
I'm skeptical of any anecdotes I hear about obamacare. On top of the fact that anecdotes aren't real evidence, there have been several well-publicized obamacare horror stories that have turned out to be far-right funded lies.
The other way is also true. The "strong evidence" that obamacare is going to make many more startups doesn't seem to be much more than a theory. Here's the study they're referring to. Seems odd that they don't show self-employment increasing in Massachusetts, given that Romneycare is basically Obamacare and happened there eight years ago.
Why call it a "war on coal" though? The hysterical people convinced there's a "war on Christmas" aren't people you should be emulating if you want to sound reasonable or if you have legitimate arguments.
Oh dear god. People are really framing poor old coal as a persecuted entity we've declared war on, and people are actually swallowing it? And a google search reveals you're not joking.
I believe that people are pushing clean energy in an attempt to get rich, since that's what every industry does including coal. But I can't be more open-minded than that when you resort to such bald orwellian tactics.
I agree that the papers should be open, but I disagree that not linking to the paywalled site is a good answer. Publishers of scientific journals don't get much money by individuals paying for papers. They get their money from universities and research institutions paying the toll. The paywall for individuals is just to keep forcing the universities paying. What you said is true for paywalls on general periodicals like wall street journal or new york times (if either still does that), since people actually might buy access to those articles. Not PNAS.
Furthermore, the primary source is important obviously. Most of the time with slashdot articles, you get a link to some three paragraph blurb in science daily or Time, and the actual paper is not linked in that article. Meanwhile, there are questions here that can only be answered by details which are in the actual paper but aren't in the blurby news story. These questions could be answered by people who do have access, but without a link to the paywalled paper, such people are less likely to bother tracking it down.
That criticism doesn't go for phys.org: they have the link to the actual paper at the bottom. Good on them.
Again, publicly funded research should be open access, I'm not saying paywalls are good or justified.
Comcast is part of the unholy cabal of big content megacorps that make up Hulu. So if by "Hula" you meant hulu, that's what's stopping them. They'll block everything else on the web before they block hulu.
If you did in fact mean Hula, then what's stopping them is the fact that ISPs don't really care what you twirl around your hips as they're unlikely to make a dollar from it.
What's stopping them from blocking netflix is that they don't want a revolution on their hands. Hulu was their attempt at vertical integration, they are undoubtedly aware that hulu is not a competitor enough though to topple netflix. Attempting to say their customers couldn't use netflix would cause them to lose a huge chunk of their customers.
As for pirate bay, they probably realize it would be down for a matter of hours at most, and that trying to block it would create more problems and waste more money than would gain them.
Gasp! I can't access it through comcast? How ever will I buy office chairs in china without 021yy.org?!?! It's SO much better than those humps over at 022yy.org.
(In case the link gets slashdotted, it's a website for office furniture in Chinese. At least according to google translate.)
said the CIA had searched through computers belonging to staff members investigating the agency’s role in torturing detainees, and had then leveled false charges against her staff in an attempt to intimidate them. “I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution, including the speech and debate clause,” she said. “It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function.”
From the intercept.
The intelligence community blackmailing the people who are supposed to have oversight of the intelligence community is probably at least a little more dangerous than the intelligence community spying on it's citizens. If for no other reason that the former prevents the latter from being solved. Pruning the CIA and NSA back to appropriate levels will require congressional action, and that's likely exactly what the CIA and/or NSA is trying to stop with these actions.
Terrorists are dumb. That is the only thing saving humanity.
That's a hyperbole. There is a whole lot of humanity out there. There are 15,000 births PER HOUR. The 3000 people dead from 9/11 didn't even make a dent in the daily population increase.
Not trying to be callous here, it was a horrible attack, just that humanity will continue even if we give terrorists one ICBM and an instruction manual written at a second grade level.
The guards need to see the drone to shoot it. And if they see the drone, wouldn't they be able to stop it from being collected without shooting it? It's not like the prison yard is enemy territory, they control it. Hit an alarm, tell all the inmates to get down on the ground or whatever it is you do when anything happens there. It's not like simply flying over the prison is sufficient to deliver drugs.
Only for a moment: this needs to be pressed. Otherwise, congress will pass laws restricting the NSA from spying on congress, and maybe large corporations who donate well. Then everyone will forget about the NSA and we'll be left permanently under big brother's gaze. At least until we say something the government doesn't like, at which point they'll release or make up embarassing or illegal stuff about us, then send us to for-profit prisons to work as slaves.
Maybe a bit too cynical there, but hey, can't be too careful.
The prohibition of murder seems to be better than the alternative. We could go back and forth with arguments about what constitutes a scotsman, but my point was merely that absolute statements like "prohibition will ALWAYS fail" are unfounded.
As for the concealed carry, it's a valid hypothesis, no doubt, but proof is needed. If most violent criminals don't think about consequences such as "does this guy have a gun" then the experiment is going to fail and with a lot of dead bodies. Before concluding either way, we'd need good data. Which again, I'm not suggesting it wouldn't, I believe there is data out there that supports the idea. Just that I don't want to find it right now.
He asked a reasonable question and you respond with... being holier than thou? Condescending? Patronizing? I'm not quite sure what the specific term is, but you're being shitty and for no good reason. Jerk. And whoever modded you +1 informative is whatever you would call your specific brand of being shitty online but isn't even being original.
I'm objecting to the simplistic approach you're advocating. Prohibition of alchohol didn't fail because prohibition ALWAYS fails. Legalizing EVERYTHING sold on the black market is an absurd stance. Even legalizing all drugs is probably unjustified. Even with Portugal's example, saying it will work everywhere is not very sound.
I'd like to see a citation for concealed carry reducing crime. I'm not saying that skeptically, I just haven't seen any studies on it because I haven't looked.
My main point though is Charliemopps suggestion that it would be easy to eliminate these problems is nonsense: the voters would oppose it, it's not just political gridlock.
Okay, so you're obviously convinced that there are magic bullets out there for any issue, so I'm not going to try telling you there aren't, but what about that is supposed to be easy to remedy? I don't think political gridlock in Chicago is what keeps Chicago from eliminating the black market, legalizing... everything?... and giving out a whole lot of guns. I think that goes well into "Most sane people would object to doing that."
When are causes of violent crime not obvious? It's not like people dying from being shot in Juarez mexico is too mysterious. "Relatively easily remedied?" How? Getting rid of all the guns and knives? Making everyone rich? Installing a morality-enforcing chip on everyone? Nuking the city?
The second link I gave says the number is 18.5 per 100/k from 2012, so I'm going to need some citations for that.