(In cattle country, USA feed stores all display tetracycline and amphicillin powder in open barrels with convenient scoops the size of garden trowels stuck in them for customers to purchase bulk antibiotics priced by the pound.)
Prompting Swave An deBwoner to exclaim:
Serious question: how is this allowed? These are prescription-only pharmaceuticals right? I can't just walk into a drugstore and pick up a bottle of either of these antibiotics without a prescription.
Is there some part of the law that controls access to these that explicitly exempts feed stores?
Large-animal veterinarians routinely write multiple-refill prescriptions for bulk-purchase antibiotics for livestock farmers and ranchers. Their local feed store keeps a copy of those prescriptions on file, so their customers can buy antibiotics in bulk without being inconvenienced by the need to hand over a new prescription form each time they visit. It's a "good ol' boy" thing.
Googling the question brings me to an article that states that pet stores routinely sell prescription antibiotics without prescription:
Pet antibiotics - and especially those for fish - are a different issue. As are pet vaccinations.
FWIW - with the exception of rabies vaccine, I administer all our dogs' vaccinations and innoculations myself, because DIY is MUCH less expensive than having a veterinarian do it...
Acting in the best interests of their patients is what doctors get paid to do. They have extensive training, knowledge, and first-hand experience to rely on.
-1 Offtopic.
Antibiotics are indicated for viral infections because they prophylactically prevent secondary infections. It's not because doctors are conspiring to eradicate mankind.
And don't put words in my mouth. I never said or implied the widespread (mal)practice of prescribing antibiotics for viral infections was a conspiracy. It's not. It is - or was, at any rate - extremely common, especially among GPs, however.
As to why the practice is/was so prevalent, the internists with whom I've discussed the issue (all of whom are bitterly critical of their fellow MDs for engaging in it) have fairly unanimously agreed that their GP cohorts basically give in to their patients' demands for antibiotics because those patients are largely ineducable on the subject - and because, for decades, there was a mistaken belief among them that prescribing useless antibiotics was merely a harmless concession to those imbecilic patients' conviction that penicillin was a universal panacea for diseases of all kinds. That's strictly anecdotal, of course, but it certainly rings true.
What the studies I cited and anecdotal evidence from MDs with whom I've discussed the problem both strongly indicate is that prophylaxis ("preventative prescription" for lay readers) is absolutely not the primary reason most doctors who engage in the practice of antibiotic prescription for viral infections do so.
Doctors are human. They cater to their patients' demands for medication that is of absolutely no value beyond placebo for those patients' actual medical issues simply to get them off their necks - and thereby preserve their positive regard. As long as MDs can persuade themselves that there's no harm in them doing so, it's simply easier to humor their patients than to say, "No," and risk alienating them...
I don't think there's so much we can do to fight antibiotic resistance. Remember this video?
https://youtu.be/plVk4NVIUh8
MDs who gave in to their patients' demands for antibiotic prescriptions to treat viral infection, such as colds and influenza - neither of which are in any way affected by antibiotics of any kind - bear a certain amount of responsibility for the rapidly-decreasing effectiveness of our antibiotic arsenal. Farmers are still more responsible, since they routinely use massive amounts of antibiotics in animal feed. (In cattle country, USA feed stores all display tetracycline and amphicillin powder in open barrels with convenient scoops the size of garden trowels stuck in them for customers to purchase bulk antibiotics priced by the pound.) That's why we're facing the end of the antibiotic era and an impending return to the soaring childhood disease and purpueral fever mortality rates that were ubiquitous throughout human history prior to the mid-20th century.
Yes, evolution was always destined to eventually obsolete antibiotics, per the video to which you linked. But we have enormously hastened that process by our careless and profligate overuse of what were once "silver bullets" that should have been jealously treasured and expended only when absolutely necessary. Now they're rapidly becoming nerf balls, instead - and we have only our own collective foolishness to blame for that.
The forthcoming introduction of the new, superbug-killing antibiotic teixobactin notwithstanding, we're waging a losing battle against microbial infections - and I find the prospect horrifying...
But who the heck still actually goes to a movie theater to watch a move?
Not me - and I'll turn 65 in less than two weeks.
We stopped going to theaters back in 2006, after making the mistake of seeing Superman Returns in "3D". (Only the action sequences were in 3D, so you had to keep putting the polarized glasses on and taking them off throughout the movie - which completely ruined the experience. And the 3D effect itself was so jittery it gave me a headache.)
Now we watch movies on a 55-inch 4K LCD screen (plenty big enough when you're sitting 7 feet away) with a WAY overpowered 7.1 audio system to give us all the window-rattling sound we can stand - and we couldn't be more satisfied with the substitution.
Pluses:
Electricity aside, it's free.
No traffic or parking hassles.
We can watch the movie in our bathrobes, with our feet up.
No smartphone junkies chattering away, or livestreaming their commentary.
No idiots yelling advice to the characters on the screen.
No patrons shuffling past us to go to/return from the concession stand or restroom.
We can pause or rewind the movie at any point to go to the restroom ourselves, or pop more corn/pour another tall, frosty one.
As legendary former Speaker of the California House Jesse Unruh [wikipedia.org] famously observed:
"If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money, and then vote against them, you've got no business being up here."
(Unruh was talking about the California legislature - but the qualification is equally applicable at the national level. Perhap moreso... )
To which mdingler responded:
We need more politicians like that in Congress and posters like you on/..
I obviously agree with your first point - and I am flattered by your second.
I sometimes upvote stuff I disagree with. Usually after hovering on the downvote for a while. Then I think "No, I want everyone to see how stupid this person is."
I often upmod stuff I disagree with (although never when it's factually incorrect). If someone posts a comment that conflicts with my philosophical or political views, but that comment is thoughtfully presented, well-argued, or - and this happens a lot - it cites sources that are credible and on-point, I'll happily award +1 Insightful or +1 Informative mod points. Ad hominems, by contrast, I downmod on a regular basis.
I do make it a policy not to award mod points (up or down) to AC's - and, even so, I sometimes break that rule, when it's clear that the AC in question is well-informed or even an expert on the subject under discussion, and is posting anonymously only to avoid implying that his comment is endorsed by his employer, or he is whistleblowing. Or she is or does - let's face it, using his/her, she/him gets way too awkward way too quickly to be a useful construction...
Revealing the identities of moderators will merely give the trolls specific targets on which to concentrate their venom, without providing the community with any benefit in compensation. The current system, which prevents moderators from posting in a thread they moderate sort of works. De-anonymizing those mods, in addition to preventing the moderator from posting under his/her actual identity, will simply further discourage those of us who get mod points from using them at all. It's just Not A Good Idea.
If you want to do something actually useful about the moderation system, try revisiting the existing categories, instead. For instance, why do we need both Troll and Flamebait? They're essentially synonyms, after all. And why isn't there a -1 Misinformed or -1 Stupid, instead? Those would actually be useful additions to the mod categories for posts that are neither Trollish nor Flamebait-y, but are, instead simply, genuinely idiotic or factually wrong, but not inflammatory or critical in nature - and they'd be a lot more on-target for those kinds of posts than -1 Overrated, n'est ce pas?
Anyway, that's my fiftieth of a dollar. Thanks for asking...
Today, CNN was lying about President Trump saying that he wanted to confiscate guns without due process. More fake news. We all know our President would never ever say such a thing!
The phony quote, if you can possibly believe it, was, "I like taking the guns early...Take the guns first. Go through due process second,” They even had some CGI version of President Trump speaking these words in a supposed meeting with members of congress.
We're not going to fall for it, no sir. We're way to smart for that. YOU DON'T GET TO SLANDER OUR PRESIDENT THAT WAY, LIBS.
Nice. I looked it up because I wasn't sure about "nous". Wiki added this tidbit: "adopted as the motto of the Royal Air Force 617 Squadron which carried out the "Dambuster" raids". Appropriate.
And, of course the 617 Squadron's motto was a cheeky (and purposeful) misquote of Louis XIV's famous dismissal of warnings about unrest among the commoners over his extravagant spending on Versailles, "Après moi, le déluge."
That aside, though, there are certainly going to be plenty of opportunities for humanity to go extinct in the near- and medium-term future. Designer plagues, for instance. (If you're old enough, you may remember when science-geek kids regularly got chemistry sets for Xmas and birthday presents that included some fairly hazardous substances, as well as the ingredients to make everything from awesome stinks to small quantities of actual explosives, poison gases, and other noxious and/or dangerous compounds. Now consider the potential consequences of making gene-splicing technology in similar kit form available to antisocial 14-year-olds.) Or runaway nanotechnology. (Blue, green, and gray goo, anyone?) The continuing proliferation of nuclear weapons eventually making its way down the responsibility food chain to members of the tinpot dictator crowd, perhaps?
The thing is, though, "using up" the planet is pretty fucking far down the list. Gobbling up all the low-hanging fruit? Absolutely - and we're just the kind of short-sighted species to depend on for that. But those resources don't, for the most part, get "used up" in the process of using them. Instead, they get transformed into trash - trash that future generations will find ways to recycle into new stuff, because the scarcity of the resources will by then justify the expense of recovering them from landfills and so forth.
Likewise, catastrophic climate change will not "kill the planet," either. It will change the planet and its ecosystem in fairly drastic ways - but life will continue, and adapt, because that's what life does. The Permian-Triassic extinction killed off 95% of all species in existence on this planet. 180 million years later, just before the Chixiculub event ended the reign of the dinosaurs, the planet was teeming with life - and it had been overrun with species proliferating to occupy every available ecological niche since about 10 megayears after the P-T extinction ran its course.
We humans are a pretty damned hardy bunch. If there's a way to survive, we'll find it. Not all of us, perhaps, but enough to allow the species to continue to exist.
Sure, it's possible that, as the icecaps melt and the oceans rise, billions of human beings will die in conflicts over possession of the remaining, sharply reduced quantity of arable land and potable water. By the same token, it's also quite possible that they will not - that, instead, we'll find solutions like urban farming and inexpensive desalinization and filtration of toxic compounds from aquifers that will allow those billions to avoid armed conflict, despite wrenching changes in geography and resource distribution. It's simply impossible to know with any degree of certainty.
As Neils Bohr famously observed: "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future..."
Godwin's Law does not apply here, in any way, shape, or form.
Prompting Ungrounded Lightning to reprove:
Acdtually it does. Because Godwins law is just that, if a thread goes on long enough, Nazis or Nazism will be mentioned.
What does not apply are a couple of the usual misinterpretations of Godwin's law (which are very handy for neo-Naziis): That any mention of Nazis is just trolling rather than an honest attempt to learn from history to avoid repeating it, or that once Nazis are mentioned the discussion is over.
Sorry, but you're incorrect. Godwin's Law is: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1."
First of all, the comments that Z00L00K incorrectly invoked Godwin's Law were on a separate issue than the main thread - which is to say they were off-topic to begin with, and should rightly be considered as a distinct thread of their own. Secondly (and most crucially), there was no comparison to Hitler involved. Instead, Teun was commenting on his perception of the central theme of Orwell's book. He wasn't comparing it to Hitler. He was stating his impression that it was a story about Nazism. That is an entirely different thing than Godwin meant.
In a thread about books on the history of WWII, if William Shirer's landmark work The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich comes up, that doesn't have anything whatsoever to do Godwin's Law, because discussion on that thread cannot avoid the mention of Hitler and Nazism. It's inherent to the topic, and Godwin's Law is therefore extraneous to the discussion. By contrast, if, in a discussion about, say, astronomy, Nazism comes up (as in, for instance, "The members of IAU who voted to make Pluto a minor planet are all just Nazis!"), it would be appropriate to invoke Godwin's law, despite the fact that Hitler, per se, is not mentioned by name.
Likewise, Godwin's Law doesn't apply either to your comment, or to mine, precisely because the subject under discussion is Godwin's Law itself. They're exempt by virtue of the fact that the mention of Hitler and/or Nazis/Nazism is central to the discussion, and it cannot proceed without them being mentioned.
Again, the core conceit of Godwin's Law is that the mention of Hitler be derogatory in intent. If you don't believe me, I invite you to ask the man himself about it...
Speaking of George Orwell's novel1984, Teun stated:
Curious, I always thought it was a parable of the resurrection of ultra right-wing Nazism...
Prompting Z00L00K to sneer:
Hello Godwin's law.
Fail. Hard, hard fail.
In a discussion about a famous literary work the setting and premise of which is the soul-crushing effect on individuals of life in a totalitarian state which exercises uncompromising control over every aspect of its citizens' lives to the degree that it dictates their employment of vocabulary specifically designed to obfuscate and reverse the meaning of established words, it is entirely appropriate for a participant to state that he or she believed that the book itself was about Nazism.
Godwin's Law does not apply here, in any way, shape, or form.
Had Teun said something like, "Ajit Pai is a Nazi," or, "CPAQ is just a bunch of Nazis," or even, "You must be a Nazi sympathizer," then Godwin's Law would, indeed, have been invoked. In the above case, which is absent of any trace of ad hominem, it absolutely does not...
In response to the assertion that "the Antarctic ice sheet is growing", Barsteward inquired:
are you talking ice coverage and/or ice thickness?
He's referring to the fact that the East Antarctic ice sheet is accumulating additional snow at and near the South Pole. What he's purposefully ignoring is that the East Antarctic sheet is losing ice at its periphery nearly as quickly as the West Antarctic sheet is - and the West sheet is absolutely hemorrhaging ice.
In fact, the additional buildup of snow on the East sheet is almost undoubtedly a result of the West sheet melting. The prevailing winds at the Pole are westerlies (they blow from the west), which carries humid air from the melting West sheet over the Pole to the East one, where it precipitates out as snow.
It's just more "whataboutist" handwaving designed to derail the larger discussion.
The thing is, it's questionable how much of the change is already committed. There are a lot of lags in various feedback cycles, and if, say, the permafrost methane is already inevitable, then that may mean that a much greater temperature rise is already inevitable. Methane may have a half life of 50 years (?? not that long??) but it's a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and when it degrades, it degrades to CO2. Nobody's quite sure how much methane is locked up in the permafrost...but it's already starting to melt, so it may well be too late to stabilize things. How much mitigation we can do is uncertain. And the sun is now hotter than it was the last time all that CO2 was in the atmosphere (see carboniferous period http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/c...), so nobody's quite certain what will happen. There are models, but anyone who believes them needs their head examined.
FWIW, methane's half-life as an atmospheric gas is about 12 years - but, to your point, its effects on atmospheric warming persist for as long as a century. C02 hangs around for up to 50,000 years, so its effects on warming are more critical in the longer term. Other gases and aerosols also contribute to global warming (and thus climate change) to various degrees, and with varying amounts of persistence. It's a complex set of interactions.
What nobody seems to be taking into account is the rapidly-mounting evidence that glaciers and icecaps are complex, unstable systems, the continued existence of which depends on relative stability in base climate conditions (aka "chaotic systems"). Every year for the past decade, glaciologists studying the Greenland icecap have observed that melting there is proceeding - and increasing - far faster than their models predict. It's an asymptotic trend that leads to what I think is the inevitable conclusion that Greenland's ice sheet (which is three miles thick in the center) is going to collapse within no more than a few hundred years.
That's way, WAY faster than even recently-revised models predict - but those models are predicated on the notion that miles-thick icecaps are essentially reservoirs of cold that will preserve their integrity for millenia. The problem is that all the current evidence is that those assumptions are unwarranted. They certainly don't account for the staggering rate of surface melt, or for the destablilzing effect of all that meltwater eroding the integrity of the ice sheet beneath the surface as it drains, via moulins, all the way to bedrock.
The instability of the icecap surface (its so-called "rottenness") has led the government of Greenland to altogether ban scientists from setting foot on it during the warm season, for safety reasons. They're now forced to deploy and recover automated weather stations and other instrument packages from helicopters hovering above the ice, in order to comply with that prohibition. In fact, it's getting harder for glaciologists and climatologists to collect reliable, long-term, automated data from Greenland in general, because their instrument packages and weather stations keep disappearing into the moulins that unpredictably open underneath them.
The current climate change situation reeks to me of the Permian/Triassic catastrophe. That event was produced by natural causes (although exactly what triggered it initially is still not definitively settled) whereas this one was unquestionably precipitated by global carbon emissions resulting from the age of industrialization, particularly in the developed world.
We, as a species, can be forgiven for not realizing the consequences of causing such enormous increases in CO2 emissions back in the 19th century and the first... let's be generous and say "eight
... Hollywood has a habit of hacking good stories to garbage to fit their perceived demographics, and the Culture novels are simply AWESOME !
I think it's important to note that Amazon is not Hollywood. It's equally important, IMnsHO, to note that this project would be a series (which is to say "a miniseries, potentially leading to a string of miniseries, each based on one of Banks' Culture novels").
I make those points, because Amazon's adaptation of PKD's The Man in the High Castle isn't garbage (it's a little slow getting started, but it's a good-faith effort to translate and expand the novel to a video series format that mostly succeeds), and the miniseries format doesn't require the kinds of compromise in storytelling that trying to cram a full novel into 2 hours or so (purely in order to satisfy theater owners' demands, so they can shuffle more people through their concession stands per day) for a feature film adaptation.
I first became convinced that the miniseries was the future of video adaptations of major novels when James Clavell's Shogun was broadcast. It's a truly great, extremely faithful adaptation of his massive book that kept me riveted from its opening scene through its finale. it benefitted from an enormous budget (for its time), a first-rate script, and superb casting and direction - and it made a believer in the form out of me.
In this decade, Game of Thrones has set a standard for fantasy/SF miniseries by which every new offering will and should be measured. For that, we should all be grateful. For instance, Netflix's adaptation of Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon - which my wife and I have been watching - has benefitted by that example, in terms of budget, casting, direction, and scriptwriting. It's good, damnit! So is Syfy's adaptation of The Expanse novels.
Finally, I'm pretty sure that Amazon is well aware of how many fans of Iain M. Banks' work there are, how protective we are of his vision, and the level of expectation they'll have to meet for this adaptation to succeed with that readymade audience. (And it would not greatly surprise me to learn that Jeff Bezos is one of us. After all, he's definitely a space geek - and almost all of us grew up on a steady diet of SF.)
I've been waiting for TV to take science fiction seriously for a very long time. Babylon 5 raised my hopes considerably - but, various iterations of Star Trek aside, it was pretty much an outlier in the realm of long-form SF storytelling in the TV universe until very recently. That someone is finally tackling The Culture - and that Banks' widow is permitting it to happen - is a long step in the right direction.
OTOH, Syfy's upcoming version of Stranger in a Strange Land has me really worried. After all, both RAH and Virginal Heinlein have been gone for a good, long while now - and it would be so freakin' easy for the wrong team to fuck that one up...
The problem is that/. forbids the display of both certain Unicode characters and their HTML-entity counterparts. So, although that's a handy tool for other purposes, it doesn't solve the Slashdot-character-display-is-purposefully-borked problem.
What can you get with Red that you can't get without it, other than a lack of ads though?
As noted in TFS, there are original movies and TV-style series that are only available to YouTube Red subscribers. (The rest of us have to pirate them.) Youtube has also recently moved a bunch of content from network TV providers behind their paywall.
There will be, because when the wall is breached we take it ALL down to demonstrate to the wall-builders that they have failed. When that first bit of the Berlin wall was breached, they didn't leave all the rest of it in place.
The challenge stops when idiots stop putting up walls.
<facepalm>
You are an idiot.
I've been around the scene for a long time - probably longer than you've been alive. R. Bubba Magillicuddy has been a personal friend of mine since he was 13 years old, and I know from many discussions with him and other crackers on the subject over the years that there's absolutely NOTHING ideological in his or his peers' motives for breaking DRM.
R. Bubba started cracking games when he was 12, because he wanted to play them, and couldn't afford to buy them himself. So he taught himself to circumvent copy protection schemes (in assembler!), which let him borrow games from his friends and make working copies for himself. By the time he was 15, he was one of the most accomplished crackers on the planet. The release groups he worked with would overnight him copies of newly-released games from all over the world, just so they could claim bragging rights to being the first to have working cracks of them.
Bubba's motives were never ideological. Neither were those of the other top-flight crackers I've interviewed. They all did it for fun, for recognition on the scene, and for bragging rights. (For instance, other crackers beat 688 Attack Submarine's copy protection, too, but none of their cracks caused the teletype display to print out "Cracked by R. Bubba Magillicuddy!" when you typed any random string into the authenticity check. Bubba could have simply skipped that check routine altogether, of course, but making the game do his bragging for him was just too tempting an exploit to pass up.)
It's not a moral crusade. It wasn't then and it's not now. It's a hobby that lets you play $100 games without paying $100 for them. And the people who merely download and play those games, rather than cracking them personally, aren't doing it as some kind of twisted moral crusade, either. They do it because they don't have to pay actual money for cracked games.
That's it, that's all. The crackers crack games for the lulz and the ego-boo. The lusers download and install them because they're kids, and they don't have the money to spend on games - because their allowances go for dope, and kicks, and gear, instead
This wasn't the government banning him from saying anything, it was google saying "yes, you can say that, but we disagree, and feel that you damaged our image so badly that you're fired"
I think you have misinterpreted Google's reason for firing Damore. It wasn't about him "damaging our image," but, rather, about his memo creating disruption in the Google work environment.
The things he said were guaranteed to start flame wars on internal Google email systems, to polarize co-workers - not just Damore's immediate co-workers, but people in entirely different departments, or even different divisions of Alphabet, to whom his screed was forwarded - and to incite hostility and resentment between employees of a company that famously strives to provide a supportive and inclusive work environment. That, in turn, hampers productivity, impairs team function, and creates a toxic environment for people who are, after all, being paid to work for Google's benefit, rather than to engage in water cooler fistfights and flip the bird at one another over their cubicle partitions.
That's why he was fired. Not because Google's management disapproved of his opinion, but because his memorandum, in fact, disrupted the Google workspace and got in the way of Google's other employees doing their goddamned jobs...
I woulda settled for a "Whoops; my bad guys. CN*, huh?" But way to own it! What got me was that there's so much rabid CNN hate here that you got enthusiastic support for condemning them for CNBC's article. Sorry if I was ruder than necessary.
I'd say you were exactly as rude as necessary - and not more.
I'm actually grateful to you for persisting until I finally realized my error. I hate being wrong. When I am, I want to be set straight as quickly as possible, so that I can start being right, instead.
So, thank you, gnick. I appreciate your help. In fact, I appreciate it so much that I've made you my/. friend.
(I'm not really sure what advantages, if any, being my "friend" on/. actually confers on those I've befriended, but I tend to consider only folks that seem as though they have their heads screwed on straight and are both smart and funny. You appear to be one of those folks. However, if you object to me adding you to that small collection, please let me know, and I'll reset you to neutral status.)
Slashdot Mirror
I stated:
Prompting Swave An deBwoner to exclaim:
Serious question: how is this allowed? These are prescription-only pharmaceuticals right? I can't just walk into a drugstore and pick up a bottle of either of these antibiotics without a prescription.
Is there some part of the law that controls access to these that explicitly exempts feed stores?
Large-animal veterinarians routinely write multiple-refill prescriptions for bulk-purchase antibiotics for livestock farmers and ranchers. Their local feed store keeps a copy of those prescriptions on file, so their customers can buy antibiotics in bulk without being inconvenienced by the need to hand over a new prescription form each time they visit. It's a "good ol' boy" thing.
Googling the question brings me to an article that states that pet stores routinely sell prescription antibiotics without prescription:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200207183470319
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/here-are-reasons-you-shouldnt-take-fish-antibiotics-180964523/
I am amazed.
Pet antibiotics - and especially those for fish - are a different issue. As are pet vaccinations.
FWIW - with the exception of rabies vaccine, I administer all our dogs' vaccinations and innoculations myself, because DIY is MUCH less expensive than having a veterinarian do it ...
dcollins117 blathered:
Acting in the best interests of their patients is what doctors get paid to do. They have extensive training, knowledge, and first-hand experience to rely on.
-1 Offtopic.
Antibiotics are indicated for viral infections because they prophylactically prevent secondary infections. It's not because doctors are conspiring to eradicate mankind.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
And don't put words in my mouth. I never said or implied the widespread (mal)practice of prescribing antibiotics for viral infections was a conspiracy. It's not. It is - or was, at any rate - extremely common, especially among GPs, however.
As to why the practice is/was so prevalent, the internists with whom I've discussed the issue (all of whom are bitterly critical of their fellow MDs for engaging in it) have fairly unanimously agreed that their GP cohorts basically give in to their patients' demands for antibiotics because those patients are largely ineducable on the subject - and because, for decades, there was a mistaken belief among them that prescribing useless antibiotics was merely a harmless concession to those imbecilic patients' conviction that penicillin was a universal panacea for diseases of all kinds. That's strictly anecdotal, of course, but it certainly rings true.
What the studies I cited and anecdotal evidence from MDs with whom I've discussed the problem both strongly indicate is that prophylaxis ("preventative prescription" for lay readers) is absolutely not the primary reason most doctors who engage in the practice of antibiotic prescription for viral infections do so.
Doctors are human. They cater to their patients' demands for medication that is of absolutely no value beyond placebo for those patients' actual medical issues simply to get them off their necks - and thereby preserve their positive regard. As long as MDs can persuade themselves that there's no harm in them doing so, it's simply easier to humor their patients than to say, "No," and risk alienating them ...
schure cautioned:
I don't think there's so much we can do to fight antibiotic resistance. Remember this video? https://youtu.be/plVk4NVIUh8
MDs who gave in to their patients' demands for antibiotic prescriptions to treat viral infection, such as colds and influenza - neither of which are in any way affected by antibiotics of any kind - bear a certain amount of responsibility for the rapidly-decreasing effectiveness of our antibiotic arsenal. Farmers are still more responsible, since they routinely use massive amounts of antibiotics in animal feed. (In cattle country, USA feed stores all display tetracycline and amphicillin powder in open barrels with convenient scoops the size of garden trowels stuck in them for customers to purchase bulk antibiotics priced by the pound.) That's why we're facing the end of the antibiotic era and an impending return to the soaring childhood disease and purpueral fever mortality rates that were ubiquitous throughout human history prior to the mid-20th century.
Yes, evolution was always destined to eventually obsolete antibiotics, per the video to which you linked. But we have enormously hastened that process by our careless and profligate overuse of what were once "silver bullets" that should have been jealously treasured and expended only when absolutely necessary. Now they're rapidly becoming nerf balls, instead - and we have only our own collective foolishness to blame for that.
The forthcoming introduction of the new, superbug-killing antibiotic teixobactin notwithstanding, we're waging a losing battle against microbial infections - and I find the prospect horrifying ...
rukiddingme inquired:
But who the heck still actually goes to a movie theater to watch a move?
Not me - and I'll turn 65 in less than two weeks.
We stopped going to theaters back in 2006, after making the mistake of seeing Superman Returns in "3D". (Only the action sequences were in 3D, so you had to keep putting the polarized glasses on and taking them off throughout the movie - which completely ruined the experience. And the 3D effect itself was so jittery it gave me a headache.)
Now we watch movies on a 55-inch 4K LCD screen (plenty big enough when you're sitting 7 feet away) with a WAY overpowered 7.1 audio system to give us all the window-rattling sound we can stand - and we couldn't be more satisfied with the substitution.
Pluses:
Minuses:
I pointed out:
As legendary former Speaker of the California House Jesse Unruh [wikipedia.org] famously observed:
"If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money, and then vote against them, you've got no business being up here."
(Unruh was talking about the California legislature - but the qualification is equally applicable at the national level. Perhap moreso ... )
To which mdingler responded:
We need more politicians like that in Congress and posters like you on /..
I obviously agree with your first point - and I am flattered by your second.
Thank you, sir ...
Dr. Evil confessed:
I sometimes upvote stuff I disagree with. Usually after hovering on the downvote for a while. Then I think "No, I want everyone to see how stupid this person is."
I often upmod stuff I disagree with (although never when it's factually incorrect). If someone posts a comment that conflicts with my philosophical or political views, but that comment is thoughtfully presented, well-argued, or - and this happens a lot - it cites sources that are credible and on-point, I'll happily award +1 Insightful or +1 Informative mod points. Ad hominems, by contrast, I downmod on a regular basis.
I do make it a policy not to award mod points (up or down) to AC's - and, even so, I sometimes break that rule, when it's clear that the AC in question is well-informed or even an expert on the subject under discussion, and is posting anonymously only to avoid implying that his comment is endorsed by his employer, or he is whistleblowing. Or she is or does - let's face it, using his/her, she/him gets way too awkward way too quickly to be a useful construction ...
whipslash inquired:
Anyone else have an opinion on this?
I do. It's a terrible idea.
Revealing the identities of moderators will merely give the trolls specific targets on which to concentrate their venom, without providing the community with any benefit in compensation. The current system, which prevents moderators from posting in a thread they moderate sort of works. De-anonymizing those mods, in addition to preventing the moderator from posting under his/her actual identity, will simply further discourage those of us who get mod points from using them at all. It's just Not A Good Idea.
If you want to do something actually useful about the moderation system, try revisiting the existing categories, instead. For instance, why do we need both Troll and Flamebait? They're essentially synonyms, after all. And why isn't there a -1 Misinformed or -1 Stupid, instead? Those would actually be useful additions to the mod categories for posts that are neither Trollish nor Flamebait-y, but are, instead simply, genuinely idiotic or factually wrong, but not inflammatory or critical in nature - and they'd be a lot more on-target for those kinds of posts than -1 Overrated, n'est ce pas?
Anyway, that's my fiftieth of a dollar. Thanks for asking ...
PopeRatzo railed:
Today, CNN was lying about President Trump saying that he wanted to confiscate guns without due process. More fake news. We all know our President would never ever say such a thing!
The phony quote, if you can possibly believe it, was, "I like taking the guns early...Take the guns first. Go through due process second,” They even had some CGI version of President Trump speaking these words in a supposed meeting with members of congress.
We're not going to fall for it, no sir. We're way to smart for that. YOU DON'T GET TO SLANDER OUR PRESIDENT THAT WAY, LIBS.
Moderate parent +1 Funny, please ...
An anonymous coward remarked:
Après nous, le déluge. C'est la vie.
Prompting sysrammer to respond:
Nice. I looked it up because I wasn't sure about "nous". Wiki added this tidbit: "adopted as the motto of the Royal Air Force 617 Squadron which carried out the "Dambuster" raids". Appropriate.
And, of course the 617 Squadron's motto was a cheeky (and purposeful) misquote of Louis XIV's famous dismissal of warnings about unrest among the commoners over his extravagant spending on Versailles, "Après moi, le déluge."
That aside, though, there are certainly going to be plenty of opportunities for humanity to go extinct in the near- and medium-term future. Designer plagues, for instance. (If you're old enough, you may remember when science-geek kids regularly got chemistry sets for Xmas and birthday presents that included some fairly hazardous substances, as well as the ingredients to make everything from awesome stinks to small quantities of actual explosives, poison gases, and other noxious and/or dangerous compounds. Now consider the potential consequences of making gene-splicing technology in similar kit form available to antisocial 14-year-olds.) Or runaway nanotechnology. (Blue, green, and gray goo, anyone?) The continuing proliferation of nuclear weapons eventually making its way down the responsibility food chain to members of the tinpot dictator crowd, perhaps?
The thing is, though, "using up" the planet is pretty fucking far down the list. Gobbling up all the low-hanging fruit? Absolutely - and we're just the kind of short-sighted species to depend on for that. But those resources don't, for the most part, get "used up" in the process of using them. Instead, they get transformed into trash - trash that future generations will find ways to recycle into new stuff, because the scarcity of the resources will by then justify the expense of recovering them from landfills and so forth.
Likewise, catastrophic climate change will not "kill the planet," either. It will change the planet and its ecosystem in fairly drastic ways - but life will continue, and adapt, because that's what life does. The Permian-Triassic extinction killed off 95% of all species in existence on this planet. 180 million years later, just before the Chixiculub event ended the reign of the dinosaurs, the planet was teeming with life - and it had been overrun with species proliferating to occupy every available ecological niche since about 10 megayears after the P-T extinction ran its course.
We humans are a pretty damned hardy bunch. If there's a way to survive, we'll find it. Not all of us, perhaps, but enough to allow the species to continue to exist.
Sure, it's possible that, as the icecaps melt and the oceans rise, billions of human beings will die in conflicts over possession of the remaining, sharply reduced quantity of arable land and potable water. By the same token, it's also quite possible that they will not - that, instead, we'll find solutions like urban farming and inexpensive desalinization and filtration of toxic compounds from aquifers that will allow those billions to avoid armed conflict, despite wrenching changes in geography and resource distribution. It's simply impossible to know with any degree of certainty.
As Neils Bohr famously observed: "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future ..."
I averred:
Godwin's Law does not apply here, in any way, shape, or form.
Prompting Ungrounded Lightning to reprove:
Acdtually it does. Because Godwins law is just that, if a thread goes on long enough, Nazis or Nazism will be mentioned.
What does not apply are a couple of the usual misinterpretations of Godwin's law (which are very handy for neo-Naziis): That any mention of Nazis is just trolling rather than an honest attempt to learn from history to avoid repeating it, or that once Nazis are mentioned the discussion is over.
Sorry, but you're incorrect. Godwin's Law is: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1."
First of all, the comments that Z00L00K incorrectly invoked Godwin's Law were on a separate issue than the main thread - which is to say they were off-topic to begin with, and should rightly be considered as a distinct thread of their own. Secondly (and most crucially), there was no comparison to Hitler involved. Instead, Teun was commenting on his perception of the central theme of Orwell's book. He wasn't comparing it to Hitler. He was stating his impression that it was a story about Nazism. That is an entirely different thing than Godwin meant.
In a thread about books on the history of WWII, if William Shirer's landmark work The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich comes up, that doesn't have anything whatsoever to do Godwin's Law, because discussion on that thread cannot avoid the mention of Hitler and Nazism. It's inherent to the topic, and Godwin's Law is therefore extraneous to the discussion. By contrast, if, in a discussion about, say, astronomy, Nazism comes up (as in, for instance, "The members of IAU who voted to make Pluto a minor planet are all just Nazis!"), it would be appropriate to invoke Godwin's law, despite the fact that Hitler, per se, is not mentioned by name.
Likewise, Godwin's Law doesn't apply either to your comment, or to mine, precisely because the subject under discussion is Godwin's Law itself. They're exempt by virtue of the fact that the mention of Hitler and/or Nazis/Nazism is central to the discussion, and it cannot proceed without them being mentioned.
Again, the core conceit of Godwin's Law is that the mention of Hitler be derogatory in intent. If you don't believe me, I invite you to ask the man himself about it ...
Speaking of George Orwell's novel1984, Teun stated:
Curious, I always thought it was a parable of the resurrection of ultra right-wing Nazism...
Prompting Z00L00K to sneer:
Hello Godwin's law.
Fail. Hard, hard fail.
In a discussion about a famous literary work the setting and premise of which is the soul-crushing effect on individuals of life in a totalitarian state which exercises uncompromising control over every aspect of its citizens' lives to the degree that it dictates their employment of vocabulary specifically designed to obfuscate and reverse the meaning of established words, it is entirely appropriate for a participant to state that he or she believed that the book itself was about Nazism.
Godwin's Law does not apply here, in any way, shape, or form.
Had Teun said something like, "Ajit Pai is a Nazi," or, "CPAQ is just a bunch of Nazis," or even, "You must be a Nazi sympathizer," then Godwin's Law would, indeed, have been invoked. In the above case, which is absent of any trace of ad hominem, it absolutely does not ...
In response to the assertion that "the Antarctic ice sheet is growing", Barsteward inquired:
are you talking ice coverage and/or ice thickness?
He's referring to the fact that the East Antarctic ice sheet is accumulating additional snow at and near the South Pole. What he's purposefully ignoring is that the East Antarctic sheet is losing ice at its periphery nearly as quickly as the West Antarctic sheet is - and the West sheet is absolutely hemorrhaging ice.
In fact, the additional buildup of snow on the East sheet is almost undoubtedly a result of the West sheet melting. The prevailing winds at the Pole are westerlies (they blow from the west), which carries humid air from the melting West sheet over the Pole to the East one, where it precipitates out as snow.
It's just more "whataboutist" handwaving designed to derail the larger discussion.
And it's from an AC. 'Nuff said ...
HiThere pointed out:
The thing is, it's questionable how much of the change is already committed. There are a lot of lags in various feedback cycles, and if, say, the permafrost methane is already inevitable, then that may mean that a much greater temperature rise is already inevitable. Methane may have a half life of 50 years (?? not that long??) but it's a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and when it degrades, it degrades to CO2. Nobody's quite sure how much methane is locked up in the permafrost...but it's already starting to melt, so it may well be too late to stabilize things. How much mitigation we can do is uncertain. And the sun is now hotter than it was the last time all that CO2 was in the atmosphere (see carboniferous period http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/c...), so nobody's quite certain what will happen. There are models, but anyone who believes them needs their head examined.
FWIW, methane's half-life as an atmospheric gas is about 12 years - but, to your point, its effects on atmospheric warming persist for as long as a century. C02 hangs around for up to 50,000 years, so its effects on warming are more critical in the longer term. Other gases and aerosols also contribute to global warming (and thus climate change) to various degrees, and with varying amounts of persistence. It's a complex set of interactions.
What nobody seems to be taking into account is the rapidly-mounting evidence that glaciers and icecaps are complex, unstable systems, the continued existence of which depends on relative stability in base climate conditions (aka "chaotic systems"). Every year for the past decade, glaciologists studying the Greenland icecap have observed that melting there is proceeding - and increasing - far faster than their models predict. It's an asymptotic trend that leads to what I think is the inevitable conclusion that Greenland's ice sheet (which is three miles thick in the center) is going to collapse within no more than a few hundred years.
That's way, WAY faster than even recently-revised models predict - but those models are predicated on the notion that miles-thick icecaps are essentially reservoirs of cold that will preserve their integrity for millenia. The problem is that all the current evidence is that those assumptions are unwarranted. They certainly don't account for the staggering rate of surface melt, or for the destablilzing effect of all that meltwater eroding the integrity of the ice sheet beneath the surface as it drains, via moulins, all the way to bedrock.
The instability of the icecap surface (its so-called "rottenness") has led the government of Greenland to altogether ban scientists from setting foot on it during the warm season, for safety reasons. They're now forced to deploy and recover automated weather stations and other instrument packages from helicopters hovering above the ice, in order to comply with that prohibition. In fact, it's getting harder for glaciologists and climatologists to collect reliable, long-term, automated data from Greenland in general, because their instrument packages and weather stations keep disappearing into the moulins that unpredictably open underneath them.
The current climate change situation reeks to me of the Permian/Triassic catastrophe. That event was produced by natural causes (although exactly what triggered it initially is still not definitively settled) whereas this one was unquestionably precipitated by global carbon emissions resulting from the age of industrialization, particularly in the developed world.
We, as a species, can be forgiven for not realizing the consequences of causing such enormous increases in CO2 emissions back in the 19th century and the first ... let's be generous and say "eight
slincolne cautioned:
... Hollywood has a habit of hacking good stories to garbage to fit their perceived demographics, and the Culture novels are simply AWESOME !
I think it's important to note that Amazon is not Hollywood. It's equally important, IMnsHO, to note that this project would be a series (which is to say "a miniseries, potentially leading to a string of miniseries, each based on one of Banks' Culture novels").
I make those points, because Amazon's adaptation of PKD's The Man in the High Castle isn't garbage (it's a little slow getting started, but it's a good-faith effort to translate and expand the novel to a video series format that mostly succeeds), and the miniseries format doesn't require the kinds of compromise in storytelling that trying to cram a full novel into 2 hours or so (purely in order to satisfy theater owners' demands, so they can shuffle more people through their concession stands per day) for a feature film adaptation.
I first became convinced that the miniseries was the future of video adaptations of major novels when James Clavell's Shogun was broadcast. It's a truly great, extremely faithful adaptation of his massive book that kept me riveted from its opening scene through its finale. it benefitted from an enormous budget (for its time), a first-rate script, and superb casting and direction - and it made a believer in the form out of me.
In this decade, Game of Thrones has set a standard for fantasy/SF miniseries by which every new offering will and should be measured. For that, we should all be grateful. For instance, Netflix's adaptation of Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon - which my wife and I have been watching - has benefitted by that example, in terms of budget, casting, direction, and scriptwriting. It's good, damnit! So is Syfy's adaptation of The Expanse novels.
Finally, I'm pretty sure that Amazon is well aware of how many fans of Iain M. Banks' work there are, how protective we are of his vision, and the level of expectation they'll have to meet for this adaptation to succeed with that readymade audience. (And it would not greatly surprise me to learn that Jeff Bezos is one of us. After all, he's definitely a space geek - and almost all of us grew up on a steady diet of SF.)
I've been waiting for TV to take science fiction seriously for a very long time. Babylon 5 raised my hopes considerably - but, various iterations of Star Trek aside, it was pretty much an outlier in the realm of long-form SF storytelling in the TV universe until very recently. That someone is finally tackling The Culture - and that Banks' widow is permitting it to happen - is a long step in the right direction.
OTOH, Syfy's upcoming version of Stranger in a Strange Land has me really worried. After all, both RAH and Virginal Heinlein have been gone for a good, long while now - and it would be so freakin' easy for the wrong team to fuck that one up ...
rmdingler snorted:
The Democrats are saying, "Look we are trying!" while accepting campaign contributions as fast as the Republicans from ISPs.
As legendary former Speaker of the California House Jesse Unruh famously observed:
If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money, and then vote against them, you've got no business being up here.
(Unruh was talking about the California legislature - but the qualification is equally applicable at the national level. Perhap moreso ... )
An Anonymous Coward blurted:
I'm proud I voted for Trump. I will vote him again I 2020.
The irony of an AC trumpeting how proud he is of his vote is so thick, rich, and creamy I could cut it with a spoon ...
Some AC offered:
Wish granted.
The problem is that /. forbids the display of both certain Unicode characters and their HTML-entity counterparts. So, although that's a handy tool for other purposes, it doesn't solve the Slashdot-character-display-is-purposefully-borked problem.
Next ... ?
nitehawk214 demanded:
But what content that anyone actually cares about is behind the paywall?
Or, more accurately, what content that isn't available from a dozen other channels?
That, sir, is an entirely different question ...
alvinrod asked the musical question:>/p>
What can you get with Red that you can't get without it, other than a lack of ads though?
As noted in TFS, there are original movies and TV-style series that are only available to YouTube Red subscribers. (The rest of us have to pirate them.) Youtube has also recently moved a bunch of content from network TV providers behind their paywall.
So, that's what ...
GameboyRMH blathered:
There will be, because when the wall is breached we take it ALL down to demonstrate to the wall-builders that they have failed. When that first bit of the Berlin wall was breached, they didn't leave all the rest of it in place.
The challenge stops when idiots stop putting up walls.
<facepalm>
You are an idiot.
I've been around the scene for a long time - probably longer than you've been alive. R. Bubba Magillicuddy has been a personal friend of mine since he was 13 years old, and I know from many discussions with him and other crackers on the subject over the years that there's absolutely NOTHING ideological in his or his peers' motives for breaking DRM.
R. Bubba started cracking games when he was 12, because he wanted to play them, and couldn't afford to buy them himself. So he taught himself to circumvent copy protection schemes (in assembler!), which let him borrow games from his friends and make working copies for himself. By the time he was 15, he was one of the most accomplished crackers on the planet. The release groups he worked with would overnight him copies of newly-released games from all over the world, just so they could claim bragging rights to being the first to have working cracks of them.
Bubba's motives were never ideological. Neither were those of the other top-flight crackers I've interviewed. They all did it for fun, for recognition on the scene, and for bragging rights. (For instance, other crackers beat 688 Attack Submarine's copy protection, too, but none of their cracks caused the teletype display to print out "Cracked by R. Bubba Magillicuddy!" when you typed any random string into the authenticity check. Bubba could have simply skipped that check routine altogether, of course, but making the game do his bragging for him was just too tempting an exploit to pass up.)
It's not a moral crusade. It wasn't then and it's not now. It's a hobby that lets you play $100 games without paying $100 for them. And the people who merely download and play those games, rather than cracking them personally, aren't doing it as some kind of twisted moral crusade, either. They do it because they don't have to pay actual money for cracked games.
That's it, that's all. The crackers crack games for the lulz and the ego-boo. The lusers download and install them because they're kids, and they don't have the money to spend on games - because their allowances go for dope, and kicks, and gear, instead
You know: priorities ...
beelsebob opined:
This wasn't the government banning him from saying anything, it was google saying "yes, you can say that, but we disagree, and feel that you damaged our image so badly that you're fired"
I think you have misinterpreted Google's reason for firing Damore. It wasn't about him "damaging our image," but, rather, about his memo creating disruption in the Google work environment.
The things he said were guaranteed to start flame wars on internal Google email systems, to polarize co-workers - not just Damore's immediate co-workers, but people in entirely different departments, or even different divisions of Alphabet, to whom his screed was forwarded - and to incite hostility and resentment between employees of a company that famously strives to provide a supportive and inclusive work environment. That, in turn, hampers productivity, impairs team function, and creates a toxic environment for people who are, after all, being paid to work for Google's benefit, rather than to engage in water cooler fistfights and flip the bird at one another over their cubicle partitions.
That's why he was fired. Not because Google's management disapproved of his opinion, but because his memorandum, in fact, disrupted the Google workspace and got in the way of Google's other employees doing their goddamned jobs ...
gnick confided:
I woulda settled for a "Whoops; my bad guys. CN*, huh?" But way to own it! What got me was that there's so much rabid CNN hate here that you got enthusiastic support for condemning them for CNBC's article. Sorry if I was ruder than necessary.
I'd say you were exactly as rude as necessary - and not more.
I'm actually grateful to you for persisting until I finally realized my error. I hate being wrong. When I am, I want to be set straight as quickly as possible, so that I can start being right, instead.
So, thank you, gnick. I appreciate your help. In fact, I appreciate it so much that I've made you my /. friend.
(I'm not really sure what advantages, if any, being my "friend" on /. actually confers on those I've befriended, but I tend to consider only folks that seem as though they have their heads screwed on straight and are both smart and funny. You appear to be one of those folks. However, if you object to me adding you to that small collection, please let me know, and I'll reset you to neutral status.)
Please keep up the good work ...
Please accept my apology.
Please accept my apology.
Please accept my apology.