The website did not violate their own privacy policy or terms of service:
From the Prvacy Policy:
Compliance with Legal Process We may disclose personal information if we or one of our affiliated companies is required by law to disclose personal information, or if we believe in good faith that such action is necessary to comply with a law or some legal process, to protect or defend our rights and property, to protect against misuse or unauthorized use of our web sites or to protect the personal safety or property of our users or the public.
And from their terms of service
We have the right to disclose any information that we believe necessary to comply with any law, regulation or governmental request or that information that could prevent or assist in the resolution of any criminal, illegal, or inappropriate activity.
While it may be normally debatable what the terms "misuse" "unauthorized use" and "inappropriate activity" entail, the online conduct portion of the terms of service states:
It is a condition of your use that you do not. . . Use the Site to upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available content that is harmful to minors in any way, or that is harassing, harmful, threatening, abusive, vulgar, obscene, defamatory, libelous, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable.
It could even be argued that the deleted posts constitute sexual harassment, imparting a legal or at least tortious duty to prevent the poster from repeating his actions. Probably not an argument that would hold up in court against the paper if someone was suing the paper for sexual harassment due to a reader posting on the site, but one that does bolster the stance that the paper was in the right.
The editor in question may indeed have violated standards of journalistic integrity by forwarding the information to the school administrators, but I can not see any law or contract broken by their actions.
I think GP meant that 300 years ago the average Caucasian height was about the same as that of other races... it has only been since the agricultural and industrial revolutions that our average height has increased. I believe a similar increase in height is currently occurring in China and other Asian countries as the adopt a more occidental style of diet with higher protein levels.
But the children of wealthy people are less likely to die before having children themselves... better health care, more nutritious food, safer cars, less likely to be involved in dangerous occupations... and then better able to choose a healthy mate.
Vendetta works under Linux. More of a space shooter with role playing elements than the traditional FPS which you seem to be looking for, but the guys at Guild Software have spent a good amount of time making sure it works well under a wide variety of hardware configurations.
On a basic level you are right, but that is not the whole picture. Indeed, a misguided but well intentioned "caretaker" providing food for a feral cat colony will indeed be causing greater suffering than they alleviate as the queens are able to have more and larger litters. This leads to extreme levels of competition for all other resources and the rampant spread of disease. However, there are more nuanced features of population dynamics that have to be considered.
When there is a low chance of offspring surviving to reproduction, organisms (including people) tend to have MORE offspring, rather than fewer. In fact, they will have tend to have offspring at a rate that is greater than that which is necessary to maintain population size, because otherwise in the long run you would likely become a genetic dead end. Having this increased birth rate leads to more population stress, leading to lowered rates of survival to breeding age, thus birth rate is increased via breeding earlier and more often. This leads to dramatic boom cycles, followed by bust cycles when the local environment's production capacity is temporally exceeded. These bust/boom cycles, in turn, lead to even higher birthrates per breeding female... and so on.
But, by altering the local environment to increase the chances of an individual offspring making it to adulthood, technological societies reduce the dependence on high birth rate to maintain a genetic lineage. Increased access to nutritional food, clean water, and basic health care will increase survivorship leading to a short lived population boom, but at this time the perceived value of an individual life is increased somewhat. The key here is allowing some level of self interest where a person can pursue goals which are not merely survival oriented, but for the long term betterment of themselves, and thus society.
Our ability to manipulate our environment such that a literally supernatural proportion of children survive to adulthood, and thus the care this affords us to put into each individual child, allows human beings to place an extraordinarily high value on an individual life: contrary to the opinion that many have of humans being a violent species, our rate of intraspecific killing is about 1/1000th that of the average animal. This lower rate of person on person killing of course leads to higher value of human life, so more care put into an individual child and therefore lower birth rates. As has been pointed out elsewhere, this is to the point that most Westernized societies actually have negative internal population growth (I.E. death rate minus birth rate) and population sizes are only increasing due to immigration from poorer places with higher population growth.
I wouldn't be surprised if the abstract was using "% efficiency" to mean percentage of maximum theoretical efficiency. In these units, assuming maximum Carnot efficiency is 50% (just to make the math easier) then a "90%" efficient power plant would actually be 45% efficient, while the "40%" efficiency of the internal combustion engine would be closer to 20%. This puts the numbers at least in the right order of magnitude.
I may be putting words in his mouth, but I assume GP was referring to modern rock musicians as opposed to orchestral musicians. Much higher ratio of party to practice...
No big deal, just set up your own content delivery system with Rockband's level of immersion, pay for hosting and bandwith, arrange a payment method, and find and advertise to an audience as large as Rockband provides instantly. Then you don't have to worry about those companies taking 70% off the top of sales.
I'd like to make a claim that our species is still primarily selected by our DNA. The combined knowledge and ideas that we have come across, however, is the basic unit of selective pressure upon our society. If we were to encounter another species that is capable of communicating on the level that we are, both groups could benefit greatly without any major genetic changes. There is no particular reason that our culture is limited to one organism, in fact it has been shown that other great apes and possibly other creatures can learn tricks from H. Sapiens that give them a selective advantage. Or maybe I've just been watching too many nature shows with Sir David Attenborough lately.
You think that's surreal? I have an idea for just HOW to mine those landfills.
Von-Neumann replicators let loose in the dump, making copies of themselves, powered by digestion of the organic wastes present in the landfill. End of cycle, the replicators all move to a collection site where they will self disassemble into the appropriate bins leaving materials pure enough to commercially recycle.
The idea is not likely to be readily implementable in the near future, and then there is the whole "what could possibly go wrong?" thing, but still... the idea is intriguing.
I used to concur with you that it is homosexual men pushing the "heroin chic" look, but a little more in depth look is revealing. Yes, skinny is the most noticeable aspect of the look, but there are other telling features involved with the supposed ideal body. Slight build, large eyes, androgynous features, lack of body hair... that describes a pre-pubescent child.
I guess my post came off a lot more harsh against people and families suffering from cancer than I intended. I do support early diagnosis, and taking appropriate treatment where determined medically beneficial. It's just that with the current risks, which cases treatment would be beneficial can be hard to determine, so I also support research into better diagnostics in making those decisions. I suppose I did not made it clear enough that I am personally excited by advances in treatment, such as the topic of this article and improved techniques I mentioned which would make the surgical option safer and more effective, therefore an appropriate treatment at earlier stages of the disease when it can be early to know if the cancer will be benign, or the more malignant form you had unfortunately witnessed. I would be very happy if surgery or some other treatment was made safe, effective and affordable enough that it could be used pre-emptively for those who are at a high risk rather than waiting for cancer to take hold in the first place, such as we currently do by attempting to aggressively lower cholesterol levels in those patients who have a high risk for heart attack.
The comment I made about funding the surgery was a poorly thought through reaction about talks of nationalized health care. I do support society providing funding for treatment where it is likely to provide benefit to the patient in terms of length and/or quality of life, and we have to determine the appropriate mix of public insurance, private insurance, private health savings, and even good natured human charity in helping the sick afford to get better and in helping families prepare for and cope with the disease. I also urge the medical community to find more cost efficient ways to treat patients that have no means of affording top of the line medical services.
Usually prostate cancer progresses at such a slow rate that an untreated patient will die of other unrelated causes before the prostrate cancer would kill them, or even cause significant quality of life issues. How many men would choose between impotence and a, say, 1/1000 (no idea if that is the actual chance) of dying earlier?
Add in another possible side effect of cancer surgery: death. A small but significant number of patients die during prostrate sectioning surgery. Some patients die from sepsis caused by imperfect healing of the incisions (the large intestine is a very icky place, and you don't want what is inside there to get into the rest of the body.) For very mild cases of prostrate cancer, the risk of death due to surgery approaches the risk of death due to the cancer. Adding in other surgical complications involved, often times the best course of action with mild prostrate cancer is a wait and see policy, no matter how much the thought of this scares the patient (other types of cancer are usually "get it out as quick as possible" situations.)
While surgery may indeed currently not be the best course of action in mild prostrate cancers, this will likely eventually change. The rates of surgical complications (including death) of course are going to keep going down as advances are made in surgical technique (such as cellular level laparoscopic microscopy allowing the surgeon to identify individual nerves to avoid sectioning, allowing for preservation of bladder control and sexual function.) However, these advanced procedures are indeed quite expensive and I think as a society we will eventually have to start asking whether extending a patients life is worth the financial cost.
Oddly enough, one of the easiest ways to extend life expectancy is to simply have the population hold off on having children, but then not use IVF or other medical pregnancy inducing techniques. Those whose bodies are less affected by aging will be more capable of having children at an older age, and if that aging resistance has a genetic component, it will then be expressed at a higher rate in the population.
Working out just how to increase the average age of parenthood and then denying fertility treatments without significantly impinging on people's rights is left as a trivial exercise for the reader. (The first can actually be achieved "rather trivially" in humans by increasing female education opportunities, but then those same women will be better suited to demand and afford fertility treatments at an older age.)
No merchandising opportunities? Okay, it doesn't have the traditional merchandising opportunities... but potentially lucrative. From what I've heard about the movie, this could actually translate well into a video game... granted, I don't know what Disney/Pixar's skills are in this territory, but...
Alternatively, they could use the "reasoning" of "You mean, if I downloaded up to the intarnetz I can get my stuff from school, my friend's house, or my iphone without having to figure out all those scary cables and thumbdrivamagiggers?"
If your average person can't get access to their files because their internet connection is down... they just go do something else for a while. Your typical (or at least stereotypical) slashdotter should be able to find an alternative way to get internet access if the files are that important... neighbor's unsecured wifi, tethered cell-phone, bringing your laptop to someplace that does have access, or even more, um, exotic alternatives.
Even a small accident can kill thousands of people and make a place unliveable for millions of years.
Chernobyl, by no means a small nuclear accident, has killed 56 people so far... 47 workers directly involved in the immediate cleanup from radiation poisoning and 9 children in the surrounding area from thyroid cancer due to increased iodine-131 exposure, mostly through local milk. There have indeed been many cases of thyroid cancer which have been linked to Chernobyl, but it is actually a highly treatable cancer with a very good prognosis with early detection. The rise in the most malignant cancers such as leukemia should have been seen within ten years, but there has been no statistical increase found yet. Of the pregnant women who evacuated the area around Chernobyl who elected to carry full term, there was no significant increase in birth defects or mortality found in their children.
As for making the place unlivable for millions of years? Study after study shows that after the initial death toll the wildlife took, populations have not been significantly impacted. Specimens have been taken from the area which are so radioactive that they have to be handled specially... however studies on even these animals show little to no statistical increase in DNA damage over control specimens. Often times, samples taken from areas of lower radiation exposure surprisingly showed LOWER rates of DNA damage and associated cancers than control specimens not affected by the accident... the current best supported theory of radiation hormesis is that low levels of radiation exposure trigger DNA repair mechanisms which account for this anomaly, and studies have found that proteins responsible for DNA repair are indeed transcribed at a much higher rate in mildly irradiated organisms. Basically, it has been shown that the linear non-threshold model used to predict casualties due to radiation has been shown to be invalid at exposures lower than about 100 milliSeverts.
This video from the BBC has a pretty good summary. Am I going to attempt to get irradiated? No. But the current widely held fear of low dose radiation simply is not supported by evidence, but a mathematical model which is proving to be faulty the more we look at it.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Prvacy Policy:
Compliance with Legal Process
We may disclose personal information if we or one of our affiliated companies is required by law to disclose personal information, or if we believe in good faith that such action is necessary to comply with a law or some legal process, to protect or defend our rights and property, to protect against misuse or unauthorized use of our web sites or to protect the personal safety or property of our users or the public.
And from their terms of service
We have the right to disclose any information that we believe necessary to comply with any law, regulation or governmental request or that information that could prevent or assist in the resolution of any criminal, illegal, or inappropriate activity.
While it may be normally debatable what the terms "misuse" "unauthorized use" and "inappropriate activity" entail, the online conduct portion of the terms of service states:
It is a condition of your use that you do not. . . Use the Site to upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available content that is harmful to minors in any way, or that is harassing, harmful, threatening, abusive, vulgar, obscene, defamatory, libelous, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable.
It could even be argued that the deleted posts constitute sexual harassment, imparting a legal or at least tortious duty to prevent the poster from repeating his actions. Probably not an argument that would hold up in court against the paper if someone was suing the paper for sexual harassment due to a reader posting on the site, but one that does bolster the stance that the paper was in the right.
The editor in question may indeed have violated standards of journalistic integrity by forwarding the information to the school administrators, but I can not see any law or contract broken by their actions.
I think GP meant that 300 years ago the average Caucasian height was about the same as that of other races... it has only been since the agricultural and industrial revolutions that our average height has increased. I believe a similar increase in height is currently occurring in China and other Asian countries as the adopt a more occidental style of diet with higher protein levels.
But the children of wealthy people are less likely to die before having children themselves... better health care, more nutritious food, safer cars, less likely to be involved in dangerous occupations... and then better able to choose a healthy mate.
We can, but we won't. Would you be offended if the BBC assumed that it's viewers were British?
You mean hydroxic acid?
I'll take your Obligatory Matrix Reference and follow it up with an Obligatory XKCD HREF
Vendetta works under Linux. More of a space shooter with role playing elements than the traditional FPS which you seem to be looking for, but the guys at Guild Software have spent a good amount of time making sure it works well under a wide variety of hardware configurations.
On a basic level you are right, but that is not the whole picture. Indeed, a misguided but well intentioned "caretaker" providing food for a feral cat colony will indeed be causing greater suffering than they alleviate as the queens are able to have more and larger litters. This leads to extreme levels of competition for all other resources and the rampant spread of disease. However, there are more nuanced features of population dynamics that have to be considered. When there is a low chance of offspring surviving to reproduction, organisms (including people) tend to have MORE offspring, rather than fewer. In fact, they will have tend to have offspring at a rate that is greater than that which is necessary to maintain population size, because otherwise in the long run you would likely become a genetic dead end. Having this increased birth rate leads to more population stress, leading to lowered rates of survival to breeding age, thus birth rate is increased via breeding earlier and more often. This leads to dramatic boom cycles, followed by bust cycles when the local environment's production capacity is temporally exceeded. These bust/boom cycles, in turn, lead to even higher birthrates per breeding female... and so on.
But, by altering the local environment to increase the chances of an individual offspring making it to adulthood, technological societies reduce the dependence on high birth rate to maintain a genetic lineage. Increased access to nutritional food, clean water, and basic health care will increase survivorship leading to a short lived population boom, but at this time the perceived value of an individual life is increased somewhat. The key here is allowing some level of self interest where a person can pursue goals which are not merely survival oriented, but for the long term betterment of themselves, and thus society.
Our ability to manipulate our environment such that a literally supernatural proportion of children survive to adulthood, and thus the care this affords us to put into each individual child, allows human beings to place an extraordinarily high value on an individual life: contrary to the opinion that many have of humans being a violent species, our rate of intraspecific killing is about 1/1000th that of the average animal. This lower rate of person on person killing of course leads to higher value of human life, so more care put into an individual child and therefore lower birth rates. As has been pointed out elsewhere, this is to the point that most Westernized societies actually have negative internal population growth (I.E. death rate minus birth rate) and population sizes are only increasing due to immigration from poorer places with higher population growth.
I wouldn't be surprised if the abstract was using "% efficiency" to mean percentage of maximum theoretical efficiency. In these units, assuming maximum Carnot efficiency is 50% (just to make the math easier) then a "90%" efficient power plant would actually be 45% efficient, while the "40%" efficiency of the internal combustion engine would be closer to 20%. This puts the numbers at least in the right order of magnitude.
I may be putting words in his mouth, but I assume GP was referring to modern rock musicians as opposed to orchestral musicians. Much higher ratio of party to practice...
No big deal, just set up your own content delivery system with Rockband's level of immersion, pay for hosting and bandwith, arrange a payment method, and find and advertise to an audience as large as Rockband provides instantly. Then you don't have to worry about those companies taking 70% off the top of sales.
I'd like to make a claim that our species is still primarily selected by our DNA. The combined knowledge and ideas that we have come across, however, is the basic unit of selective pressure upon our society. If we were to encounter another species that is capable of communicating on the level that we are, both groups could benefit greatly without any major genetic changes. There is no particular reason that our culture is limited to one organism, in fact it has been shown that other great apes and possibly other creatures can learn tricks from H. Sapiens that give them a selective advantage. Or maybe I've just been watching too many nature shows with Sir David Attenborough lately.
You think that's surreal? I have an idea for just HOW to mine those landfills.
Von-Neumann replicators let loose in the dump, making copies of themselves, powered by digestion of the organic wastes present in the landfill. End of cycle, the replicators all move to a collection site where they will self disassemble into the appropriate bins leaving materials pure enough to commercially recycle.
The idea is not likely to be readily implementable in the near future, and then there is the whole "what could possibly go wrong?" thing, but still... the idea is intriguing.
I used to concur with you that it is homosexual men pushing the "heroin chic" look, but a little more in depth look is revealing. Yes, skinny is the most noticeable aspect of the look, but there are other telling features involved with the supposed ideal body. Slight build, large eyes, androgynous features, lack of body hair... that describes a pre-pubescent child.
robots.allow?
They did one better... they fired the statistician that got different results than the editor wanted.
Impotence caused by a cut nerve can not be cured with hormones.
I guess my post came off a lot more harsh against people and families suffering from cancer than I intended. I do support early diagnosis, and taking appropriate treatment where determined medically beneficial. It's just that with the current risks, which cases treatment would be beneficial can be hard to determine, so I also support research into better diagnostics in making those decisions. I suppose I did not made it clear enough that I am personally excited by advances in treatment, such as the topic of this article and improved techniques I mentioned which would make the surgical option safer and more effective, therefore an appropriate treatment at earlier stages of the disease when it can be early to know if the cancer will be benign, or the more malignant form you had unfortunately witnessed. I would be very happy if surgery or some other treatment was made safe, effective and affordable enough that it could be used pre-emptively for those who are at a high risk rather than waiting for cancer to take hold in the first place, such as we currently do by attempting to aggressively lower cholesterol levels in those patients who have a high risk for heart attack.
The comment I made about funding the surgery was a poorly thought through reaction about talks of nationalized health care. I do support society providing funding for treatment where it is likely to provide benefit to the patient in terms of length and/or quality of life, and we have to determine the appropriate mix of public insurance, private insurance, private health savings, and even good natured human charity in helping the sick afford to get better and in helping families prepare for and cope with the disease. I also urge the medical community to find more cost efficient ways to treat patients that have no means of affording top of the line medical services.
Usually prostate cancer progresses at such a slow rate that an untreated patient will die of other unrelated causes before the prostrate cancer would kill them, or even cause significant quality of life issues. How many men would choose between impotence and a, say, 1/1000 (no idea if that is the actual chance) of dying earlier?
Add in another possible side effect of cancer surgery: death. A small but significant number of patients die during prostrate sectioning surgery. Some patients die from sepsis caused by imperfect healing of the incisions (the large intestine is a very icky place, and you don't want what is inside there to get into the rest of the body.) For very mild cases of prostrate cancer, the risk of death due to surgery approaches the risk of death due to the cancer. Adding in other surgical complications involved, often times the best course of action with mild prostrate cancer is a wait and see policy, no matter how much the thought of this scares the patient (other types of cancer are usually "get it out as quick as possible" situations.) While surgery may indeed currently not be the best course of action in mild prostrate cancers, this will likely eventually change. The rates of surgical complications (including death) of course are going to keep going down as advances are made in surgical technique (such as cellular level laparoscopic microscopy allowing the surgeon to identify individual nerves to avoid sectioning, allowing for preservation of bladder control and sexual function.) However, these advanced procedures are indeed quite expensive and I think as a society we will eventually have to start asking whether extending a patients life is worth the financial cost.
The U.S. government is trying to add the flu to no fly lists.
Oddly enough, one of the easiest ways to extend life expectancy is to simply have the population hold off on having children, but then not use IVF or other medical pregnancy inducing techniques. Those whose bodies are less affected by aging will be more capable of having children at an older age, and if that aging resistance has a genetic component, it will then be expressed at a higher rate in the population.
Working out just how to increase the average age of parenthood and then denying fertility treatments without significantly impinging on people's rights is left as a trivial exercise for the reader. (The first can actually be achieved "rather trivially" in humans by increasing female education opportunities, but then those same women will be better suited to demand and afford fertility treatments at an older age.)
No merchandising opportunities? Okay, it doesn't have the traditional merchandising opportunities... but potentially lucrative. From what I've heard about the movie, this could actually translate well into a video game... granted, I don't know what Disney/Pixar's skills are in this territory, but...
When was the last time you got an Anthony Hopkins figure with a cheeseburger and fries?
I'd expect an Anthony Hopkins figure to be served with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
Alternatively, they could use the "reasoning" of "You mean, if I downloaded up to the intarnetz I can get my stuff from school, my friend's house, or my iphone without having to figure out all those scary cables and thumbdrivamagiggers?"
If your average person can't get access to their files because their internet connection is down... they just go do something else for a while. Your typical (or at least stereotypical) slashdotter should be able to find an alternative way to get internet access if the files are that important... neighbor's unsecured wifi, tethered cell-phone, bringing your laptop to someplace that does have access, or even more, um, exotic alternatives.
Chernobyl, by no means a small nuclear accident, has killed 56 people so far... 47 workers directly involved in the immediate cleanup from radiation poisoning and 9 children in the surrounding area from thyroid cancer due to increased iodine-131 exposure, mostly through local milk. There have indeed been many cases of thyroid cancer which have been linked to Chernobyl, but it is actually a highly treatable cancer with a very good prognosis with early detection. The rise in the most malignant cancers such as leukemia should have been seen within ten years, but there has been no statistical increase found yet. Of the pregnant women who evacuated the area around Chernobyl who elected to carry full term, there was no significant increase in birth defects or mortality found in their children.
As for making the place unlivable for millions of years? Study after study shows that after the initial death toll the wildlife took, populations have not been significantly impacted. Specimens have been taken from the area which are so radioactive that they have to be handled specially... however studies on even these animals show little to no statistical increase in DNA damage over control specimens. Often times, samples taken from areas of lower radiation exposure surprisingly showed LOWER rates of DNA damage and associated cancers than control specimens not affected by the accident... the current best supported theory of radiation hormesis is that low levels of radiation exposure trigger DNA repair mechanisms which account for this anomaly, and studies have found that proteins responsible for DNA repair are indeed transcribed at a much higher rate in mildly irradiated organisms. Basically, it has been shown that the linear non-threshold model used to predict casualties due to radiation has been shown to be invalid at exposures lower than about 100 milliSeverts.
This video from the BBC has a pretty good summary. Am I going to attempt to get irradiated? No. But the current widely held fear of low dose radiation simply is not supported by evidence, but a mathematical model which is proving to be faulty the more we look at it.