>>3.) The chance of every piece of a drive by wire failing in such a way as to cause your car to accelerate uncontrollably is probably similar to your chance of being struck down by a falling meteorite. In the unusual even that it does happen, you can shift your car into neutral to stop.
My old car (an 84 Caprice Classic) went into a bout of uncontrolled acceleration when I was driving around the campus loop. Nearly killed a few people before I cut the engine power. It's a terrifying feeling having the engine racing out of control, with your feet pushing as hard on the brakes as you can... I thought the floor mat had caught on the accelerator, but apparently it was a known issue with them (called "The Flying Dutchman Syndrome" back then) but they never issued a recall for it. Problem was with the cruise deciding to engage arbitrarily, at an arbitrarily high speed.
It launched me through a stop sign right when I was braking, with pedestrians in the intersection. I could easily see how someone would panic when that happened... and yeah, the brakes absolutely did not work.
Though I will admit, for the first time since I became aware of their existence I feel something other than blinding hatred for the Tea Party, who are basically responsible for the Republicans not having enough votes. Looks like some of them really do care about civil liberties, and for that at least they should be congratulated.
They're the Libertarian wing of the Republican party... kinda. Except with more God and less drugs.
Obama, naturally, is for the intrusive spying powers that he claimed he was against when he was running for office.
Yeah, I actually get a lot of sun (I'm darker than my Asian wife) and supplement occasionally, but you've piqued my curiosity, so I'll ask for my levels to be checked the next time I get a physical.
I'm not saying that Vitamin D is bad, or anything closely resembling it - in digging through the PubMed archives on Vitamin D I came across a lot of interesting studies, all positive about it - but rather that there hasn't been a significant short term change capable of explaining the autism spikes.
Eh. Piracy notably declined the one the one time the feds shut down the biggest piracy ring. I wouldn't be surprised that if they arrested all the ringleaders the DDOS attacks, that maybe the people posting on anonymous would be less... aggressive. Because the more aggressive ones are in jail, and the other people tend to know it.
That's the trouble with listening to ReachMD - you don't get to collect references. Essentially, he said that a bit of Vitamin D supplementation is good for you, as long as you don't oversupplement, but that the claims of a deficiency epidemic are overstated. I immediately thought of you, since it appears to be an issue for you on/.
According to PubMed, Vitamin D levels have decreased slightly in men in the last 10 years, and have been unchanged in women (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19064511?dopt=Abstract). So it's perhaps unlikely to be causing the spike in autism.
As far as your toxins go, I don't believe any of them have been shown to have a strong correlation with autism. And it also doesn't explain the worldwide staggered spikes in cases being reported. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if it had something to do with chicken mcnuggets or something like that causing it, but there's no conclusive evidence so far (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17367287).
Oh, you're arguing with the wrong person if you think that I think that TCM is all nonsense. There's actually been a lot of studies on TCM remedies, and some work, some don't. I've read the bible of alt med research from the UCSF medical library, and you'd be surprised how many studies have been done on tea (something like 300+ when I read it back in 2005), and many other things have pharmacological effects that people don't realize can harm them because "it's natural". St. John's Wort, for example, has drug/drug interactions with a lot of things - don't be clever and fail to tell your doctor that you're supplementing it because you think it can't harm you.
Hell, even something innocuous like grapefruit can drastically affect other drugs you're taking, because it has chemicals metabolized by CYP3A4, which is one of the most heavily used liver enzymes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_drugs_affected_by_grapefruit)
There's absolutely no doubt that alt med has pharmacological effect. Homeopathy is another thing entirely - it's just selling water with MAGICAL POWERS.
>>Wikipidia is organized with a structure and a purpose. Anonymous is none of the above.
Every group of people has members that are more organized than others. If you chart pretty much any population, you see the same 90/10 rule apply everywhere.
Quite simply, there are going to be some people that log on and put their anon hats more often than others.
>>Maybe enough of them are to spoil the pot. A person in need cannot research every org to find out who the bad apples are. It takes only being burned once.
You must also hate all Muslims because of Islamicists, and all black people because of the New Black Panthers, and all Jews because some of them made http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103596/ and so on and so forth.
In more recent news, the author of one of the big studies which suggested massive Vitamin D deficiencies recently said that he was wrong, and that there's no worldwide Vitamin D deficiency crisis.
>>environmental exposure to toxins
Toxins is one of those great words that doesn't mean anything. Which "toxin"?
>>If you can pay $20k a year to get a degree and make $40,000 a year teaching high school biology, gosh, why would you want to do actual science??
It depends on region. In Southern California, starting teachers make something like $50k, and starting bio lab rats are in the 20s somewhere... and they're not doing anything more complex than washing beakers. Postdocs don't make a whole lot either.
Obviously, if you love biology you want to be the guy that makes it big and becomes his own PI, but it's hard to slag for years killing mice and doing dishes when a teaching position is available to you. Automatic raises, three months vacation, good salary, union + tenure making it hard to be fired, and a chance to better the future by training the next generation of scientists. Of course, if you hate kids, it's not the career choice for you, and there's a LOT of nonsense teachers have to put up with... but it is certainly not the underpaid slave mine that people make it out to be. (Mileage varies by region, of course.)
Experienced teachers in my buddy's school district (Santa Ana) make up to $94k/year. (http://www.sausd.us/1443102812295097/lib/1443102812295097/_files/2010-11_Teacher_Salary_Schedule.pdf)
>>I already "donate" $20-25,000 a year to the IRS, State treasury, and local treasury. I feel no desire to donate more.
Exactly. Since you can't choose to not pay your taxes (without repercussions), I don't feel bad at all about claiming all my legal tax deductions I can find, even while lobbying to move to a different system with less subsidies for people.
In other words, if both some taxes (like California Use Tax) and deductions are morally objectionable, it doesn't make sense to pay one and not take the other.
>>Anonymous has no "core group of fanatics" because at any one time, Anonymous is engaged in fifty different things on different scales, and that "core group of fanatics" is never the same across all of them.
That's... wrong.
Look at Wikipedia. By your argument, Wikipedia doesn't have a core group of fanatics, because at any one time, their editors are engaged in 50 different things on different scales.
But when you look at the statistics for Wikipedia edits (even anonymous ones - http://www.flickr.com/photos/inju/433360488/) you'll see the same superstar effect that you see everywhere else. The top 10% of people do 90% of the work.
If the FBI eliminate those top 10% - which is easy if they can own the site that people congregate - then they could kill either wikipedia or anonymous. Sure, you'd have some low level activity, but every group needs its dedicated organizers true believers who put in the time and effort above and beyond that of normal users.
>>Which I also doubt the brain does; this is a noisy, largely stationary background signal that isn't really able to carry any detailed meaning.
Why do you doubt the brain does it? I could imagine things like brain waves might help neurons sync their firing over longer distances. Given the complexity of the human brain, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find it making use of this mechanism in some way.
We demand that everyone's taxes go up because asshats like you complain about the "20-25k" taxes you pay a year while siphoning much more than that in benefits from services the government provides. Just to mention a few: local and national security, fire protection services, water infrastructure, public infrastructure of all kinds, etc.
A citizen donating $20-25k a year is on the giving end of the spectrum, not the receiving.
A fair chunk of our populace doesn't pay any taxes at all, other than sales tax.
>>I'm most familiar with medical ethicists, who are often employed by hospitals >>Cohen just delivered his own opinion, as if he had a direct line to God.
To be fair, maybe he *did* talk with the surgeons first. =)
>>Do I have a right to take cash-for-clunkers, when the $3000 I'm getting comes from my neighbors' wallets?
You do know you can donate money to the IRS, don't you? If you feel guilty about a particular tax deduction or credit, you can always donate an equivalent amount to the IRS.
But people never do that. Weird, isn't it?
To me, those sorts of issues have never bothered me. I don't think the mortgage interest deduction should exist, but I'll take it anyway. Our taxes are high enough that refusing to take the deductions is equivalent to suicide.
>>if the Christian church were not inept at this task, there would have never been a reason for people to turn to the government as the answer.
"People turned to the government as the answer"? We didn't have government welfare until FDR and the New Deal. Prior to this, Hoover thought that churches could and did handle charity work just fine. FDR by contrast was a Big Government sort of fellow, and saw government as the answer for everything, including welfare. So "people" didn't turn to the government, but rather the government took that aspect of society away from the charitable institutions.
>>Churches use assistance as mostly a recruiting tool or a control tool. Do you think they'd really help out a gay family in trouble?
I feel bad for you... you must live in a dark and cynical world.
Weirdly enough, churches do actually try to do what's right because it's right. I don't think even once in all the times we fed the homeless did we tell them what church we were from. And a great deal of our charitable work was done anonymously, such as canned food drives or Toys for Tots or sock drives, or whatever, that are all donated to a charity. And yeah, churches do help out gay families in trouble. Real churches aren't like the Westborough Baptists.
Sure, we'd have recruiting things (like ads in the local newspaper, or bring a friend days or whatever) but these were separate from the charitable actions of my church.
Your statement really reflects your own wretchedness - if you honestly think that good churches only use charity as a cynical recruitment tool, then I doubt you are capable of seeing much good in anything, anywhere in the world.
>>Maybe we should draft politicians instead of electing them.
Worked well enough for the Athenians when they drafted their leaders - except when they'd go to war. Of course, only the wealthy landowners were eligible, but that was seen as a benefit, as they were expected to constantly donate money to the civic good while they were in office. Evergetism and all that.
To be fair, our current system is based on the Progressive notion that we should have experts/specialists running our government and bureaucracies. Though in practice, you get boards like the California Athletic Commission which does not have a single person with fight experience making the rules for how boxing and MMA matches should proceed... so maybe randomly selecting them would be better.
>>I doubt seriously that the brain USES this type of signal processing and more likely that this is the type of thing that its redundancy systems are seeking to filter out.
Don't make that claim unless you have evidence for it - you might be surprised.
In the neural circuits of crayfish, they actually work better with a certain amount of noise in the environment. It's a phenomenon known as stochastic resonance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance) which comes up in a lot of signal processing situations. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was happening in our brains.
>>both our computers and our brains run software, with only a few basic features baked into the hardware.
No. A great deal of the mechanisms in the brain are hard wired, such as the V1 cortex, which is used for vision, or the hippocampus, or any number of other parts of the brain. Only the neocortex is general purpose, and even then it's much closer to a FPGA than a general purpose computer running software.
>>The reasonable conclusion based on that data is that mercury in vaccines does not cause autism, but it doesn't "prove" that vaccines do not cause autism.
Right. Given that autism has spiked all around the world, and it's unlikely to be solely due to just increased detection, the logical question is to ask what caused it.
It's a very interesting question, because there were sudden spikes in certain years around the world, and they were not always the same year. So there's a lot of possible causes, which the current autism megastudy is trying to narrow down to likely candidates. IIRC, vaccinations are one of the many factors they're looking at (because they are deployed worldwide), but so is fast food, plastics, and a number of other possible causes.
It's irresponsible to suggest they cause autism without proof.
That said, there's a possible bias against associating vaccinations with side effects, as I've said on here before, so possible adverse effects may be underreported... but if I had kids, I'd get them immunized to everything I could.
>>It'd barely make any difference as you need contiguous blocks and the rate at which we're using them means that even reclaiming whole/8 blocks only extends the life of IPv4 by a few months at best.
Yeah, if people were serious about reclaiming IP blocks, all you'd need to do is charge $1/year/IP. Cheap enough for users, but will bankrupt companies hoarding their overallocations.
>>Percentage is a poor comparison without knowing the actual amounts.
No, percentages really are all that matter. Why? Because ultimately all that consumers care about is the price per KWH you get out of a power source, and so the percentage of subsidy that goes into that price is the key factor.
If we move to 30% solar, then the huge massive subsidies for solar will bankrupt the federal government - so they'd have to end. And then people probably wouldn't buy any more solar.
>>You provide claims of 'massive' subsidies to green techs but no source
Slashdot Mirror
>>3.) The chance of every piece of a drive by wire failing in such a way as to cause your car to accelerate uncontrollably is probably similar to your chance of being struck down by a falling meteorite. In the unusual even that it does happen, you can shift your car into neutral to stop.
My old car (an 84 Caprice Classic) went into a bout of uncontrolled acceleration when I was driving around the campus loop. Nearly killed a few people before I cut the engine power. It's a terrifying feeling having the engine racing out of control, with your feet pushing as hard on the brakes as you can... I thought the floor mat had caught on the accelerator, but apparently it was a known issue with them (called "The Flying Dutchman Syndrome" back then) but they never issued a recall for it. Problem was with the cruise deciding to engage arbitrarily, at an arbitrarily high speed.
It launched me through a stop sign right when I was braking, with pedestrians in the intersection. I could easily see how someone would panic when that happened... and yeah, the brakes absolutely did not work.
They're the Libertarian wing of the Republican party... kinda. Except with more God and less drugs.
Obama, naturally, is for the intrusive spying powers that he claimed he was against when he was running for office.
Yeah, I actually get a lot of sun (I'm darker than my Asian wife) and supplement occasionally, but you've piqued my curiosity, so I'll ask for my levels to be checked the next time I get a physical.
I'm not saying that Vitamin D is bad, or anything closely resembling it - in digging through the PubMed archives on Vitamin D I came across a lot of interesting studies, all positive about it - but rather that there hasn't been a significant short term change capable of explaining the autism spikes.
Eh. Piracy notably declined the one the one time the feds shut down the biggest piracy ring. I wouldn't be surprised that if they arrested all the ringleaders the DDOS attacks, that maybe the people posting on anonymous would be less... aggressive. Because the more aggressive ones are in jail, and the other people tend to know it.
>>Citation?
That's the trouble with listening to ReachMD - you don't get to collect references. Essentially, he said that a bit of Vitamin D supplementation is good for you, as long as you don't oversupplement, but that the claims of a deficiency epidemic are overstated. I immediately thought of you, since it appears to be an issue for you on /.
According to PubMed, Vitamin D levels have decreased slightly in men in the last 10 years, and have been unchanged in women (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19064511?dopt=Abstract). So it's perhaps unlikely to be causing the spike in autism.
As far as your toxins go, I don't believe any of them have been shown to have a strong correlation with autism. And it also doesn't explain the worldwide staggered spikes in cases being reported. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if it had something to do with chicken mcnuggets or something like that causing it, but there's no conclusive evidence so far (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17367287).
Oh, you're arguing with the wrong person if you think that I think that TCM is all nonsense. There's actually been a lot of studies on TCM remedies, and some work, some don't. I've read the bible of alt med research from the UCSF medical library, and you'd be surprised how many studies have been done on tea (something like 300+ when I read it back in 2005), and many other things have pharmacological effects that people don't realize can harm them because "it's natural". St. John's Wort, for example, has drug/drug interactions with a lot of things - don't be clever and fail to tell your doctor that you're supplementing it because you think it can't harm you.
Hell, even something innocuous like grapefruit can drastically affect other drugs you're taking, because it has chemicals metabolized by CYP3A4, which is one of the most heavily used liver enzymes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_drugs_affected_by_grapefruit)
There's absolutely no doubt that alt med has pharmacological effect. Homeopathy is another thing entirely - it's just selling water with MAGICAL POWERS.
>>Wikipidia is organized with a structure and a purpose. Anonymous is none of the above.
Every group of people has members that are more organized than others. If you chart pretty much any population, you see the same 90/10 rule apply everywhere.
Quite simply, there are going to be some people that log on and put their anon hats more often than others.
>>Maybe enough of them are to spoil the pot. A person in need cannot research every org to find out who the bad apples are. It takes only being burned once.
You must also hate all Muslims because of Islamicists, and all black people because of the New Black Panthers, and all Jews because some of them made http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103596/ and so on and so forth.
Ignorance is no excuse for false generalizations.
>>Vitamin D defiency
In more recent news, the author of one of the big studies which suggested massive Vitamin D deficiencies recently said that he was wrong, and that there's no worldwide Vitamin D deficiency crisis.
>>environmental exposure to toxins
Toxins is one of those great words that doesn't mean anything. Which "toxin"?
>>If you can pay $20k a year to get a degree and make $40,000 a year teaching high school biology, gosh, why would you want to do actual science??
It depends on region. In Southern California, starting teachers make something like $50k, and starting bio lab rats are in the 20s somewhere... and they're not doing anything more complex than washing beakers. Postdocs don't make a whole lot either.
Obviously, if you love biology you want to be the guy that makes it big and becomes his own PI, but it's hard to slag for years killing mice and doing dishes when a teaching position is available to you. Automatic raises, three months vacation, good salary, union + tenure making it hard to be fired, and a chance to better the future by training the next generation of scientists. Of course, if you hate kids, it's not the career choice for you, and there's a LOT of nonsense teachers have to put up with... but it is certainly not the underpaid slave mine that people make it out to be. (Mileage varies by region, of course.)
Experienced teachers in my buddy's school district (Santa Ana) make up to $94k/year. (http://www.sausd.us/1443102812295097/lib/1443102812295097/_files/2010-11_Teacher_Salary_Schedule.pdf)
>>I already "donate" $20-25,000 a year to the IRS, State treasury, and local treasury. I feel no desire to donate more.
Exactly. Since you can't choose to not pay your taxes (without repercussions), I don't feel bad at all about claiming all my legal tax deductions I can find, even while lobbying to move to a different system with less subsidies for people.
In other words, if both some taxes (like California Use Tax) and deductions are morally objectionable, it doesn't make sense to pay one and not take the other.
>>How about a widening of the diagnosis ?
They've looked at that, and while it might have a minor part, it doesn't match the data.
>>Anonymous has no "core group of fanatics" because at any one time, Anonymous is engaged in fifty different things on different scales, and that "core group of fanatics" is never the same across all of them.
That's... wrong.
Look at Wikipedia. By your argument, Wikipedia doesn't have a core group of fanatics, because at any one time, their editors are engaged in 50 different things on different scales.
But when you look at the statistics for Wikipedia edits (even anonymous ones - http://www.flickr.com/photos/inju/433360488/) you'll see the same superstar effect that you see everywhere else. The top 10% of people do 90% of the work.
If the FBI eliminate those top 10% - which is easy if they can own the site that people congregate - then they could kill either wikipedia or anonymous. Sure, you'd have some low level activity, but every group needs its dedicated organizers true believers who put in the time and effort above and beyond that of normal users.
>>Which I also doubt the brain does; this is a noisy, largely stationary background signal that isn't really able to carry any detailed meaning.
Why do you doubt the brain does it? I could imagine things like brain waves might help neurons sync their firing over longer distances. Given the complexity of the human brain, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find it making use of this mechanism in some way.
A citizen donating $20-25k a year is on the giving end of the spectrum, not the receiving.
A fair chunk of our populace doesn't pay any taxes at all, other than sales tax.
>>I'm most familiar with medical ethicists, who are often employed by hospitals
>>Cohen just delivered his own opinion, as if he had a direct line to God.
To be fair, maybe he *did* talk with the surgeons first. =)
>>Do I have a right to take cash-for-clunkers, when the $3000 I'm getting comes from my neighbors' wallets?
You do know you can donate money to the IRS, don't you? If you feel guilty about a particular tax deduction or credit, you can always donate an equivalent amount to the IRS.
But people never do that. Weird, isn't it?
To me, those sorts of issues have never bothered me. I don't think the mortgage interest deduction should exist, but I'll take it anyway. Our taxes are high enough that refusing to take the deductions is equivalent to suicide.
>>if the Christian church were not inept at this task, there would have never been a reason for people to turn to the government as the answer.
"People turned to the government as the answer"? We didn't have government welfare until FDR and the New Deal. Prior to this, Hoover thought that churches could and did handle charity work just fine. FDR by contrast was a Big Government sort of fellow, and saw government as the answer for everything, including welfare. So "people" didn't turn to the government, but rather the government took that aspect of society away from the charitable institutions.
>>Churches use assistance as mostly a recruiting tool or a control tool. Do you think they'd really help out a gay family in trouble?
I feel bad for you... you must live in a dark and cynical world.
Weirdly enough, churches do actually try to do what's right because it's right. I don't think even once in all the times we fed the homeless did we tell them what church we were from. And a great deal of our charitable work was done anonymously, such as canned food drives or Toys for Tots or sock drives, or whatever, that are all donated to a charity. And yeah, churches do help out gay families in trouble. Real churches aren't like the Westborough Baptists.
Sure, we'd have recruiting things (like ads in the local newspaper, or bring a friend days or whatever) but these were separate from the charitable actions of my church.
Your statement really reflects your own wretchedness - if you honestly think that good churches only use charity as a cynical recruitment tool, then I doubt you are capable of seeing much good in anything, anywhere in the world.
>>Maybe we should draft politicians instead of electing them.
Worked well enough for the Athenians when they drafted their leaders - except when they'd go to war. Of course, only the wealthy landowners were eligible, but that was seen as a benefit, as they were expected to constantly donate money to the civic good while they were in office. Evergetism and all that.
To be fair, our current system is based on the Progressive notion that we should have experts/specialists running our government and bureaucracies. Though in practice, you get boards like the California Athletic Commission which does not have a single person with fight experience making the rules for how boxing and MMA matches should proceed... so maybe randomly selecting them would be better.
>>I doubt seriously that the brain USES this type of signal processing and more likely that this is the type of thing that its redundancy systems are seeking to filter out.
Don't make that claim unless you have evidence for it - you might be surprised.
In the neural circuits of crayfish, they actually work better with a certain amount of noise in the environment. It's a phenomenon known as stochastic resonance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance) which comes up in a lot of signal processing situations. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was happening in our brains.
>>both our computers and our brains run software, with only a few basic features baked into the hardware.
No. A great deal of the mechanisms in the brain are hard wired, such as the V1 cortex, which is used for vision, or the hippocampus, or any number of other parts of the brain. Only the neocortex is general purpose, and even then it's much closer to a FPGA than a general purpose computer running software.
>>The reasonable conclusion based on that data is that mercury in vaccines does not cause autism, but it doesn't "prove" that vaccines do not cause autism.
Right. Given that autism has spiked all around the world, and it's unlikely to be solely due to just increased detection, the logical question is to ask what caused it.
It's a very interesting question, because there were sudden spikes in certain years around the world, and they were not always the same year. So there's a lot of possible causes, which the current autism megastudy is trying to narrow down to likely candidates. IIRC, vaccinations are one of the many factors they're looking at (because they are deployed worldwide), but so is fast food, plastics, and a number of other possible causes.
It's irresponsible to suggest they cause autism without proof.
That said, there's a possible bias against associating vaccinations with side effects, as I've said on here before, so possible adverse effects may be underreported... but if I had kids, I'd get them immunized to everything I could.
>>It'd barely make any difference as you need contiguous blocks and the rate at which we're using them means that even reclaiming whole /8 blocks only extends the life of IPv4 by a few months at best.
Yeah, if people were serious about reclaiming IP blocks, all you'd need to do is charge $1/year/IP. Cheap enough for users, but will bankrupt companies hoarding their overallocations.
>>Percentage is a poor comparison without knowing the actual amounts.
No, percentages really are all that matter. Why? Because ultimately all that consumers care about is the price per KWH you get out of a power source, and so the percentage of subsidy that goes into that price is the key factor.
If we move to 30% solar, then the huge massive subsidies for solar will bankrupt the federal government - so they'd have to end. And then people probably wouldn't buy any more solar.
>>You provide claims of 'massive' subsidies to green techs but no source
I told you what the source was - the CEC.