The problem is that kids need to reach a certain age before they get vaccinations. An infant will be susceptible to viruses that non-vaccinated kids spread and can die before they are old enough to get the vaccine.
Exactly this. Vaccines have been TOO successful. I'm the parent of two boys (13 and 10). Both are vaccinated. However, I've educated myself about what life was like before vaccines. I'll never know first hand the horrors of not knowing if today was the day your child would get sick with Polio, Measles, Mumps, etc. For that I'm grateful. However, it means that it can be easy to wrongfully minimize the risks of the diseases ("Who gets measles today? It's just like chicken pox - you get lumps for a few days and then they go away.") and then maximize the risks of the vaccines ("Vaccines contain FORMALDEHYDE and MERCURY!!!! Those are toxic in high enough doses, therefore vaccines must be toxic.").
In the early days of the anti-vax movement, the anti-vaxxers were protected by herd immunity. Unfortunately, this helped their cause since they could point to their healthy, unvaccinated kids and get more parents to skip the "unneeded" vaccines. As more people joined the movement, though, herd immunity broke down and we got outbreaks. Hopefully, those will be enough to correct the risk analysis that parents perform and show them that the tiny risks that vaccines pose are far outweighed* by the benefits.
* The only exception is if you have a medical condition that precludes vaccination. Then, you're relying on everyone else to do the right thing and vaccinate so that herd immunity can protect you.
It's ok. The Killbots will have a preset kill limit. Then we'll just send wave after wave of our own men against them until they hit the limit and shut down.
Again, the big company with the high priced lawyers will say "We'll tie you up in court for so many years that you'll be bankrupt for the rest of your life due to legal fees. Or you could sign this, get a few thousand in a token settlement, and never speak of this again. We also refuse to change the settlement in any way and if you try changing it, we'll withdraw the offer."
When faced with that, how many people, realistically, will say "I choose to fight them"? The big company knows it can bully small people around because big companies can afford protracted legal battles more than individuals can.
On the flip side, my father lost his job a few years ago. He tried finding more work, but nobody wanted to hire someone so close to retirement age. He was forced to retire early due to lack of opportunities. Not everyone who loses their job is awash in job offers.
On the flip side, some companies want to operate with no consequences for what they do. If employees are kept from complaining, they don't need to acknowledge any problems and don't need to work to fix them. (And employees might not be able to simply quit due to lack of other jobs or might not feel that the situation is so far gone that quitting is their only option.)
I almost didn't want to reply because on slashdot it is *well known* that first amendment protections only restrain the *government*, not private enterprises. Nothing stops a private person or corporation or whatever from attempting to limit your free speech.
True, but I would think that there would be laws to prevent corporations from limiting employees' freedoms outside of the office. Suppose you wanted to volunteer to help the campaign of John Smith, but your company didn't like his platform. If they forbid any employee from helping or supporting John Smith in any way, would that be legal? What if they amended their employment contract and anyone who didn't agree to it was immediately terminated? What if the new contract said you would donate time/money to John Smith's opponent? Could a company legally tell you that you must support one political candidate over a second one? It seems like that would be a violation of the employee's fundamental right to support whichever candidate they like - even if these rights typically apply to government and not companies.
I can understand companies not wanting employees to speak "as a representative of the company," but there's got to be a line between the company's right to maintain a certain work environment and the employee's natural rights as citizens.
They don't know what it was doing at the time the tracks were made [for example, if it had been stalking prey, maybe it was treading softly, moving slowly, so perhaps it's steps were uncharacteristic.
Very good point. Imagine if - millions of years from now - a cheetah's footprints were examined by archaeologists of that era. The prints show an animal walking very slowly and carefully. They might conclude that the cheetah was a slow predator, unable to run at fast speeds. Of course, they'd be wrong. The cheetah can achieve fast speeds while hunting - even if these are short-lived bursts of speed.
Perhaps the T-Rex was similar. It didn't move fast until the prey was within sprinting distance and then it took off. What we need to do is find more T-Rex footprints and analyze those. One set of prints doesn't make a good sample size. More prints will give us a better picture of what T-Rex was really like.
I don't mind ads if they are unobtrusive. Want to put in a banner ad and a sidebar ad? Fine. I consider the minor annoyance worth it if it brings the site enough revenue to continue to function. However, if the ad floods the entire top half of the screen and/or interferes with scrolling in an effort to keep the ad on screen, then that's too much.
I'm actually considering getting an ad blocker and only setting it for ads that cause issues like these.
The top ad is annoying, but the side ad (and possibly JavaScript to keep it and the list of replies I have in the window) messes up scrolling for me. I need to right-click and have Chrome remove the content on every page load just to read Slashdot.
A couple of places I've shopped at have the chip readers make a sound when you can remove your card. Sometimes, I notice the sound before the text change.
I looked up the numbers and terrorists kill about 28,000 people a year worldwide. And most of them are likely Muslims that the terrorists don't think are in the "right" sect.
From the linked article: "More than 55% of all attacks took place in five countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nigeria), and 74% of all deaths due to terrorist attacks took place in five countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria, and Pakistan)."
Terrorism in countries like the US or Australia is actually vanishingly low. It's touted as a horrible threat by politicians to take away rights and to get themselves more power, but you're more likely to die in a car accident than from a terrorist. (There are 37,000 road accident deaths in the US per year and 1.3 million worldwide - Source.)
If people want to ban all Muslims because of the tiny risk of terrorism, why aren't we banning all motor vehicles to combat the higher risk of automobile-related deaths?
Could someone encode something in these genes that makes a person do something really annoying? And then infect random peop---
Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry, never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
The first phone call consisted of a few words transmitted a short distance. The first movie was a short series of moving images. The first movie with people talking didn't have much dialogue in it. The first computers had pitiful storage space by modern standards and took up entire rooms.
The "First" of something is always very limited. You're not going to get the DNA equivalent of a Blu-Ray Player from the first storage of a movie in DNA. However, as more people work on it and more advances are made, larger amounts of data will be stored until a "DNA Movie Player" becomes feasible.
My son was attacked back in elementary school. (He's in high school now.) They were, ironically, waiting in line for an anti-bullying program. A kid jumped forward in line right in front of my son. My son is touchy about his personal space (he's on the Autism spectrum), so he put his hands up to protect himself. The kid kicked him in the ribs hard enough to send him to the nurse and leave a mark.
The next day I met with the principal, teacher, and teacher's assistant. First, they said nobody witnessed the incident. Then, they said that the teacher's assistant actually witnessed it and my son started it. (By putting his hands up to protect himself. Mind you he never laid hands on the other kid.) Finally, the principal looked at me and said that my son "isn't the kind of kid to be bullied." (Her exact words.) At that point, I realized that the principal wanted to bury the whole thing and didn't care about addressing it. I ended the meeting as quickly as possible, called my wife, and she came to pull our son out of that school. We went to the superintendent and demanded he be placed in another school in the district that took bullying seriously. He was placed in another elementary school and wasn't bullied again.
The point of all of this is that not only is the child's response important, but the response of the adults is important too. Your daughter should have been asked what happened and, when they found out that the kid tried kissing her without her permission, he should have faced consequences. I would understand if the school had to impose some token "punishment" on your daughter as a "we don't condone violence" tactic, but he definitely shouldn't have gotten away without punishment by the school. Sadly, too many school administrators think that they can insist they don't have a bullying problem and maintain that facade by ignoring bullying or actually acting as adult bullies towards kids who report incidents.
It's nice that you could fight back, but that's not the solution for everyone. I was harassed by a group of kids all through high school. Individually, they wouldn't bother me, but when five or more of them got together, they got very brave. One on one, I might have been able to fight them, but five on one I wouldn't have stood a chance. I would have been beaten up and then made fun of more for getting beaten up.
I complained to my best friend, but to nobody else. That was a huge mistake in hindsight. Bullies WANT their victims to be alone. If I had support from adults and peers, the harassment might have stopped. Instead, I just took it. The result? I developed paranoia. I was sure that everyone who was laughing was laughing at me. I isolated myself from the world. Every day was a struggle to push through while taking every arrow flung at me. When you hear those stories of bullied kids who shoot up their school or commit suicide, I think that I could have easily gone down either path had things gotten a bit worse.
Luckily, my best friend - the one person I confided in about the situation - finally spoke with my bullies. Turns out they thought they were "just having fun" and didn't stop to think about how it was hurting me. They stopped and I got some breathing room to recover. (College also gave me some distance and perspective on the matter.)
I disagree that you need to physically fight to be a "real man." I've been in only a few physical fights and don't think I'm any less of a man. I'm also teaching my sons that violence isn't the answer. Yes, it might need to be undertaken at times, but only as a last resort, not as "prove you're a real man by beating kids up."
American law is written by politicians. Politicians get big campaign donations from big companies. Big companies want arbitration because they can use someone who will rule in their favor most of the time - as opposed to courts which are pesky in their insistence on listening to facts.
Once the big company makes the big donation to the politician, the politician proposes a bill that benefits the big company. Then other politicians (who also get big donations from the big company) vote on it and make it a law. (It's like a twisted 2017 version of Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm Just A Bill.")
Also, if AT&T gets away with requiring arbitration, other companies will follow suit. Pretty soon, the only way to pursue a company wronging you will be to enter into arbitration with an arbiter that the company chooses and pays and who rules for the company 90+% of the time.
\Continuing with your cheeseburger analogy, if the other hamburger shop decides to only offer cheeseburgers now, you will be forced to choose between two cheeseburger shops. Want a hamburger with no cheese? Maybe you should move three towns over where there's still a small, hamburger shop that gives you the choice... Wait, never mind. Cheesecast - the big cheeseburger conglomerate - just bought them out and they only offer cheeseburgers now also.
This is a great point. If Internet access were a truly competitive market, we might not be so concerned about one ISP doing this. People could vote with their wallets and defect to any of a dozen other ISPs. As it stands, though, most people have access to one or two broadband ISPs. In my case, it's Charter's Spectrum. If Spectrum abused their monopoly position, I'd be able to gripe about it, but I couldn't flee to another ISP. And if me contesting their bad behavior meant having to go to an arbitrator that THEY chose, who ruled in THEIR favor 95% of the time, and whose ruling I was FORCED to accept (with no recourse to go to court), they'd be able to abuse their monopoly with impunity. The only one who could stop them would be the federal government, but I don't see this administration being big on following in Teddy Roosevelt's Trust Buster shoes.
Have you tried lately to get a job without internet access?
Anecdotal evidence to support you: Today, I was in Jo-Ann buying some yarn for my wife. (She's into crocheting and was making yarn water balloons.) As I paid for the skein of yarn, a man walked up and asked the person at the register how he could apply for a job. They told him that all job applications are online. He needed to go to a website to fill out an application. If he didn't have Internet access, he might not be able to get a job (above a minimum wage one at McDonald's).
Internet access is highly needed for participation in today's society and not having it can negatively impact a person's chances of advancement.
Profit doesn't always breed competition. The barrier to entry might be high, meaning that only a few companies can actually participate in the market even if they get good profits. In addition, a monopoly in the market might result in high prices and the monopoly company squashing any would-be competitors before they pose a risk.
Not necessarily. If everything you are doing is simple, then you're obviously not challenging yourself. You shouldn't have a ton of highly difficult tasks to accomplish, but a good mix of simple and hard are necessary to keep your mind sharp. (Do the hard tasks to give your brain a workout and work on the simple tasks to give your brain a rest.)
Why is "success" defined as being the top in your field? Why is "reaching the top" something to be pursued? If that's what you want, and that's what you enjoy, do it. The people I've seen get to these positions work a lot. I haven't really seen people that get to "the top" that don't. As long as you actually LIKE this, then go for it.
Some still think of success in life as climbing some ladder. If you aren't going higher, then they think you're not succeeding.
My grandmother (when she was alive) would inevitably ask me if I got a promotion at work and would express disappointment when the answer was "no." What she didn't understand, though, was that me getting promoted would mean I'd be a manager, not a web developer. This would mean having to manage people (hiring, firing, making sure people do their work when they're supposed to, dealing with company politics) instead of working with code. I love working with code, but would HATE having to do the job of a manager. Why should I "climb the corporate ladder" if it means leaving a rung that I enjoy and moving into rungs that I hate?
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the people who can't be vaccinated due to valid medical conditions (allergies, immune system disorders, etc).
The problem is that kids need to reach a certain age before they get vaccinations. An infant will be susceptible to viruses that non-vaccinated kids spread and can die before they are old enough to get the vaccine.
Exactly this. Vaccines have been TOO successful. I'm the parent of two boys (13 and 10). Both are vaccinated. However, I've educated myself about what life was like before vaccines. I'll never know first hand the horrors of not knowing if today was the day your child would get sick with Polio, Measles, Mumps, etc. For that I'm grateful. However, it means that it can be easy to wrongfully minimize the risks of the diseases ("Who gets measles today? It's just like chicken pox - you get lumps for a few days and then they go away.") and then maximize the risks of the vaccines ("Vaccines contain FORMALDEHYDE and MERCURY!!!! Those are toxic in high enough doses, therefore vaccines must be toxic.").
In the early days of the anti-vax movement, the anti-vaxxers were protected by herd immunity. Unfortunately, this helped their cause since they could point to their healthy, unvaccinated kids and get more parents to skip the "unneeded" vaccines. As more people joined the movement, though, herd immunity broke down and we got outbreaks. Hopefully, those will be enough to correct the risk analysis that parents perform and show them that the tiny risks that vaccines pose are far outweighed* by the benefits.
* The only exception is if you have a medical condition that precludes vaccination. Then, you're relying on everyone else to do the right thing and vaccinate so that herd immunity can protect you.
It's ok. The Killbots will have a preset kill limit. Then we'll just send wave after wave of our own men against them until they hit the limit and shut down.
Again, the big company with the high priced lawyers will say "We'll tie you up in court for so many years that you'll be bankrupt for the rest of your life due to legal fees. Or you could sign this, get a few thousand in a token settlement, and never speak of this again. We also refuse to change the settlement in any way and if you try changing it, we'll withdraw the offer."
When faced with that, how many people, realistically, will say "I choose to fight them"? The big company knows it can bully small people around because big companies can afford protracted legal battles more than individuals can.
On the flip side, my father lost his job a few years ago. He tried finding more work, but nobody wanted to hire someone so close to retirement age. He was forced to retire early due to lack of opportunities. Not everyone who loses their job is awash in job offers.
On the flip side, some companies want to operate with no consequences for what they do. If employees are kept from complaining, they don't need to acknowledge any problems and don't need to work to fix them. (And employees might not be able to simply quit due to lack of other jobs or might not feel that the situation is so far gone that quitting is their only option.)
True, but I would think that there would be laws to prevent corporations from limiting employees' freedoms outside of the office. Suppose you wanted to volunteer to help the campaign of John Smith, but your company didn't like his platform. If they forbid any employee from helping or supporting John Smith in any way, would that be legal? What if they amended their employment contract and anyone who didn't agree to it was immediately terminated? What if the new contract said you would donate time/money to John Smith's opponent? Could a company legally tell you that you must support one political candidate over a second one? It seems like that would be a violation of the employee's fundamental right to support whichever candidate they like - even if these rights typically apply to government and not companies.
I can understand companies not wanting employees to speak "as a representative of the company," but there's got to be a line between the company's right to maintain a certain work environment and the employee's natural rights as citizens.
Very good point. Imagine if - millions of years from now - a cheetah's footprints were examined by archaeologists of that era. The prints show an animal walking very slowly and carefully. They might conclude that the cheetah was a slow predator, unable to run at fast speeds. Of course, they'd be wrong. The cheetah can achieve fast speeds while hunting - even if these are short-lived bursts of speed.
Perhaps the T-Rex was similar. It didn't move fast until the prey was within sprinting distance and then it took off. What we need to do is find more T-Rex footprints and analyze those. One set of prints doesn't make a good sample size. More prints will give us a better picture of what T-Rex was really like.
I don't mind ads if they are unobtrusive. Want to put in a banner ad and a sidebar ad? Fine. I consider the minor annoyance worth it if it brings the site enough revenue to continue to function. However, if the ad floods the entire top half of the screen and/or interferes with scrolling in an effort to keep the ad on screen, then that's too much.
I'm actually considering getting an ad blocker and only setting it for ads that cause issues like these.
The top ad is annoying, but the side ad (and possibly JavaScript to keep it and the list of replies I have in the window) messes up scrolling for me. I need to right-click and have Chrome remove the content on every page load just to read Slashdot.
A couple of places I've shopped at have the chip readers make a sound when you can remove your card. Sometimes, I notice the sound before the text change.
I looked up the numbers and terrorists kill about 28,000 people a year worldwide. And most of them are likely Muslims that the terrorists don't think are in the "right" sect.
From the linked article: "More than 55% of all attacks took place in five countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nigeria), and 74% of all deaths due to terrorist attacks took place in five countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria, and Pakistan)."
Terrorism in countries like the US or Australia is actually vanishingly low. It's touted as a horrible threat by politicians to take away rights and to get themselves more power, but you're more likely to die in a car accident than from a terrorist. (There are 37,000 road accident deaths in the US per year and 1.3 million worldwide - Source.)
If people want to ban all Muslims because of the tiny risk of terrorism, why aren't we banning all motor vehicles to combat the higher risk of automobile-related deaths?
I've heard that terrorists consume dihydrogen monoxide. We really need to ban this horrible substance once and for all!
Could someone encode something in these genes that makes a person do something really annoying? And then infect random peop---
Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry, never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
Wait, what was I saying again?
The first phone call consisted of a few words transmitted a short distance. The first movie was a short series of moving images. The first movie with people talking didn't have much dialogue in it. The first computers had pitiful storage space by modern standards and took up entire rooms.
The "First" of something is always very limited. You're not going to get the DNA equivalent of a Blu-Ray Player from the first storage of a movie in DNA. However, as more people work on it and more advances are made, larger amounts of data will be stored until a "DNA Movie Player" becomes feasible.
My son was attacked back in elementary school. (He's in high school now.) They were, ironically, waiting in line for an anti-bullying program. A kid jumped forward in line right in front of my son. My son is touchy about his personal space (he's on the Autism spectrum), so he put his hands up to protect himself. The kid kicked him in the ribs hard enough to send him to the nurse and leave a mark.
The next day I met with the principal, teacher, and teacher's assistant. First, they said nobody witnessed the incident. Then, they said that the teacher's assistant actually witnessed it and my son started it. (By putting his hands up to protect himself. Mind you he never laid hands on the other kid.) Finally, the principal looked at me and said that my son "isn't the kind of kid to be bullied." (Her exact words.) At that point, I realized that the principal wanted to bury the whole thing and didn't care about addressing it. I ended the meeting as quickly as possible, called my wife, and she came to pull our son out of that school. We went to the superintendent and demanded he be placed in another school in the district that took bullying seriously. He was placed in another elementary school and wasn't bullied again.
The point of all of this is that not only is the child's response important, but the response of the adults is important too. Your daughter should have been asked what happened and, when they found out that the kid tried kissing her without her permission, he should have faced consequences. I would understand if the school had to impose some token "punishment" on your daughter as a "we don't condone violence" tactic, but he definitely shouldn't have gotten away without punishment by the school. Sadly, too many school administrators think that they can insist they don't have a bullying problem and maintain that facade by ignoring bullying or actually acting as adult bullies towards kids who report incidents.
It's nice that you could fight back, but that's not the solution for everyone. I was harassed by a group of kids all through high school. Individually, they wouldn't bother me, but when five or more of them got together, they got very brave. One on one, I might have been able to fight them, but five on one I wouldn't have stood a chance. I would have been beaten up and then made fun of more for getting beaten up.
I complained to my best friend, but to nobody else. That was a huge mistake in hindsight. Bullies WANT their victims to be alone. If I had support from adults and peers, the harassment might have stopped. Instead, I just took it. The result? I developed paranoia. I was sure that everyone who was laughing was laughing at me. I isolated myself from the world. Every day was a struggle to push through while taking every arrow flung at me. When you hear those stories of bullied kids who shoot up their school or commit suicide, I think that I could have easily gone down either path had things gotten a bit worse.
Luckily, my best friend - the one person I confided in about the situation - finally spoke with my bullies. Turns out they thought they were "just having fun" and didn't stop to think about how it was hurting me. They stopped and I got some breathing room to recover. (College also gave me some distance and perspective on the matter.)
I disagree that you need to physically fight to be a "real man." I've been in only a few physical fights and don't think I'm any less of a man. I'm also teaching my sons that violence isn't the answer. Yes, it might need to be undertaken at times, but only as a last resort, not as "prove you're a real man by beating kids up."
American law is written by politicians. Politicians get big campaign donations from big companies. Big companies want arbitration because they can use someone who will rule in their favor most of the time - as opposed to courts which are pesky in their insistence on listening to facts.
Once the big company makes the big donation to the politician, the politician proposes a bill that benefits the big company. Then other politicians (who also get big donations from the big company) vote on it and make it a law. (It's like a twisted 2017 version of Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm Just A Bill.")
Also, if AT&T gets away with requiring arbitration, other companies will follow suit. Pretty soon, the only way to pursue a company wronging you will be to enter into arbitration with an arbiter that the company chooses and pays and who rules for the company 90+% of the time.
\Continuing with your cheeseburger analogy, if the other hamburger shop decides to only offer cheeseburgers now, you will be forced to choose between two cheeseburger shops. Want a hamburger with no cheese? Maybe you should move three towns over where there's still a small, hamburger shop that gives you the choice... Wait, never mind. Cheesecast - the big cheeseburger conglomerate - just bought them out and they only offer cheeseburgers now also.
This is a great point. If Internet access were a truly competitive market, we might not be so concerned about one ISP doing this. People could vote with their wallets and defect to any of a dozen other ISPs. As it stands, though, most people have access to one or two broadband ISPs. In my case, it's Charter's Spectrum. If Spectrum abused their monopoly position, I'd be able to gripe about it, but I couldn't flee to another ISP. And if me contesting their bad behavior meant having to go to an arbitrator that THEY chose, who ruled in THEIR favor 95% of the time, and whose ruling I was FORCED to accept (with no recourse to go to court), they'd be able to abuse their monopoly with impunity. The only one who could stop them would be the federal government, but I don't see this administration being big on following in Teddy Roosevelt's Trust Buster shoes.
Anecdotal evidence to support you: Today, I was in Jo-Ann buying some yarn for my wife. (She's into crocheting and was making yarn water balloons.) As I paid for the skein of yarn, a man walked up and asked the person at the register how he could apply for a job. They told him that all job applications are online. He needed to go to a website to fill out an application. If he didn't have Internet access, he might not be able to get a job (above a minimum wage one at McDonald's).
Internet access is highly needed for participation in today's society and not having it can negatively impact a person's chances of advancement.
Profit doesn't always breed competition. The barrier to entry might be high, meaning that only a few companies can actually participate in the market even if they get good profits. In addition, a monopoly in the market might result in high prices and the monopoly company squashing any would-be competitors before they pose a risk.
Not necessarily. If everything you are doing is simple, then you're obviously not challenging yourself. You shouldn't have a ton of highly difficult tasks to accomplish, but a good mix of simple and hard are necessary to keep your mind sharp. (Do the hard tasks to give your brain a workout and work on the simple tasks to give your brain a rest.)
Some still think of success in life as climbing some ladder. If you aren't going higher, then they think you're not succeeding.
My grandmother (when she was alive) would inevitably ask me if I got a promotion at work and would express disappointment when the answer was "no." What she didn't understand, though, was that me getting promoted would mean I'd be a manager, not a web developer. This would mean having to manage people (hiring, firing, making sure people do their work when they're supposed to, dealing with company politics) instead of working with code. I love working with code, but would HATE having to do the job of a manager. Why should I "climb the corporate ladder" if it means leaving a rung that I enjoy and moving into rungs that I hate?