We have one Anonymous member claiming that it was his attack that brought down GoDaddy. We have GoDaddy claiming that it was network issues.
Lacking any further evidence, we're in a he said-she said scenario. While I'm not advocating blindly believing GoDaddy representatives, blindly believing an Anonymous member without any evidence to back him up seems foolish also. (A tweet the Anonymous member made during some service's downtime doesn't count as evidence.)
Sadly, Akin was informed by a doctor who actually believes that idiocy. Of course, that doctor should lose his medical license for gross lack of knowledge of basic human anatomy. (Side note: If women could prevent pregnancy by expelling unwanted sperm, birth control companies would immediately go out of business.)
Of course, they've protected us against terrorists. Just like my Magic Anti-Tiger Rock keeps all the tigers away from me. Sure, some might say that there are no tigers in New York, but I know that - were I to let go of this rock for even a second - a tiger could sneak up and get me. The TSA affords the same protection!
In a way, I wish they offered a feeling of security. When I go through the TSA checkpoints, "security" isn't what I'm feeling. Perhaps it's the blessing and curse of seeing through the security theater. Kind of like being the only one in the audience to see the wire when a magician "levitates" his assistant. Everyone else is ooh-ing and ahh-ing and you're sitting there thinking "The wire is right there on her back, people!"
I'm reminded of that line about theatrics and escalation from the end of Batman Begins. I think the only thing keeping us from seeing a wave of "terrorist theatrics" is their fanatical obsession with killing people. They aren't going to go for a complex, flashy, inspires-fear-without-actually-causing-harm scheme when they could just blow up some folks instead. A terrorist is less likely to sneak some Anthrax and a TSA uniform into an airport bathroom and more likely to blow themselves up in a busy airport security check line. In fact, a few terrorists doing this in choice airports at choice times could (at least temporarily) shut down all air travel. After all, how do you security check people on the line before they get to the security checkpoint?
Ok, let's assume for a second that a natural disaster happens and you survive. Furthermore, let's assume that you decide to spread word of this via a generic tweet instead of calling friends and family. The advice was to "add #survived to your tweets. This will help when family and friends that are worried about you search on your welfare." Wouldn't friends and family be following your Twitter feed? Wouldn't they see that you tweeted "I'm all right" by going to your Twitter page? Why would they search on "#survived" and scroll through the (hopefully) long list of survivors just to find your entry? A hash tag to aggregate these "I survived" tweets isn't a bad idea, but it's not going to help friends and family see your message.
In fact, the judge had to have the jury correct their verdict since, in at least 2 cases, they decided to award Apple damages even after they said that Samsung didn't infringe in that instance.
I think one problem is that patent lawsuits are just assumed to happen. It seems, too often, the patent office just approves patents figuring that they'd get sorted out in the courts. Meanwhile, the courts just assume that patents must be valid by default if they've been approved by the patent office.
True, but we tend to give parents some leeway when it comes to raising them. We don't declare that parents who raise their kids in Religion A are dooming their kids to hell and thus the kids should be raised in Religion B. We don't take kids away from parents who let their kids watch too much TV. We don't arrest parents if they give their kid soda and ice cream.
Yes, in the mythical world where a parent not vaccinating only affected their kids, I'd still argue parents should still make the sensible choice of vaccinating their kids, but I'd be leery of getting the government involved. (As opposed to in our world where not vaccinating affects others in which case I support government mandated vaccines.)
That's the problem right there. If it's a few nutjobs who claim that vaccines are the way the government is introducing mind control nanites into people, then herd immunity will be fine.
If it's Jenny McCarthy, Donald Trump, and other big name celebrities telling everyone that vaccines cause autism through "toxins" (made generic so it's impossible to disprove), then many people stop vaccinating and herd immunity breaks down. We're seeing outbreaks now due to herd immunity collapsing, but the anti-vax community refuses to believe they could be the cause because this didn't happen when they were a small group.
No, we're recognizing that not vaccinating isn't merely an action that only affects your own family. It's an action that affects others.
I have the right to stand on a street corner and wave my arms. I don't have a right to do that if waving my arms means I'll be smacking people in the face.
Not to mention that mercury was blamed for "vaccines cause autism." They removed the mercury. Autism rates still rose. So they changed their claim of why "vaccines cause autism" to something else. Every time the link they claim is proven false, they move the goal posts somewhere else so they can claim that "vaccines cause autism" hasn't *really* been disproven and that the burden is on everyone else to disprove claim #1,263.
As O('_')O_Bush said, Herd Immunity means that, by not vaccinating, they *ARE* forcing their ways upon others. If not vaccinating just increased the risk to the unvaccinated kids without affecting anyone else in the least, I'd be 100% for optional vaccination. But if some random parent in my kid's school might make my kid sick because his vaccine didn't take or make someone else's child sick because they're too young to get the vaccine or have a valid medical reason not to (e.g. allergies), then they are forcing their way upon us to the detriment of our kids.
Unfortunately, the ones that suffer aren't only the kids of the parents who don't vaccinate. If it were only those parent's kids, I'd be in favor of vaccination being voluntary. However, when Parent A doesn't vaccinate his/her kids, they increase risk of infection for Parent B's baby (too young for vaccination), Parent C's child (can't be vaccinated due to valid medical reason such as allergies), and Parent D's child (vaccine didn't take). A person's rights to raise their kids how they want don't extend to putting other kids at risk.
In fact, that's the main reason behind the special "vaccine court" that handles claims of problems with vaccines. Vaccines make so little profit that any legal risk they pose to the company could tip the scales into them being not worth the effort. The vaccine court is a way to weed out the frivolous claims (i.e. "this vaccine turned my son autistic and my evidence is Jenny McCarthy") and take action on the valid cases. If vaccines were dumped into the main court system, lawsuits would spread like wildfire over every imagined complaint. The companies would have to defend themselves against them and vaccines just not be worth the effort, money-wise. They would be losing money (via frivolous lawsuits) and their production would be stopped. Then we'd all suffer through those diseases again.
Even if we put aside the knowledge that homeopathy doesn't do anything, there's no chance of quality control. They themselves admit that the "water memory" is not measurable by any scientific instrument. So if I gave you one vial of homeopathic solution and one vial of distilled water that I bought in the grocery store, how would you tell the difference? How can you tell that the "homeopathic cure" you bought isn't really just tap water (or plain sugar pills in the case of the tablet variety)? How can you be sure that it was prepared as the homeopathy company claims it has been?
The answer is that you can't. By claiming that their "cure" can't be measured by any instrumentation, they've admitted that they could be selling anything to the gullible folks who are buying it up. Unlike traditional medicine manufacturers where pretty much any lab can measure what's in a given drug sample. (No chance to swap aspirin with sugar pills without being found out.)
Vaccines aren't 100% effective. There are some for whom the vaccine didn't work. If we were talking about a fully vaccinated population, it wouldn't matter. Herd immunity would protect these people (along with those too young to get vaccinated and those who have valid medical reasons like allergies). However, if too many people stop vaccinating, herd immunity breaks down and these people are subjected to a disease that their immune system isn't ready for.
If you don't use a condom, the only people at risk are you and your partner. (Well, and anyone else that person sleeps with, but the immediate risk is just the two of you.)
If you don't get vaccinated, you can spread diseases to people who are too young to get vaccinated, people who's vaccinations didn't take (vaccination isn't 100% effective for everyone), people who can't get vaccinated due to allergies/illness/etc. And you don't have to have intimate contact with these people. Walk by one of them in a store and you might have passed on your virus. Sneeze on your hand, touch your desk, and you'll pass your virus on to the person who sits there next class period. This is bad enough when we're talking about something minor like a cold. However, if you're talking about whooping cough, mumps, or polio, your lack of vaccination could mean severe injury or death to someone else.
At its core, the anti-vax movement is bad risk assessment for a few reasons. First of all, the horrors of the diseases that most vaccinations prevent against haven't been seen in a few generations. People my age (30's) with kids have never lived in a world where you could get polio or mumps at any moment and wind up dead, on an iron lung, deaf, scarred for life, etc. They score the risk of these infections as low because they don't see them. (The fallacy here being that the *reason* they don't see them is because of vaccines.)
Then, they hear scare tactics from certain people (Wakefield, McCarthy, etc) who claim that vaccines contain mercury/fetal tissue/generic toxins/etc that will harm their child. One shot and suddenly your child will catch The Autism. (Picture that in a much scarier font and cue a woman screaming off camera.) This would be so horrible and so, they conclude, we must stop all vaccinations until they are proven 100% safe.
The fallacy with this last one is that 1) there has never been a proven link between vaccines and autism, 2) even if there was, the diseases vaccines prevent are far worse than autism, and 3) no medical procedure is 100% safe. In fact, nothing anyone does is 100% safe. Driving in to work? You could get in a car crash and die. Better not commute to work until they can design cars that are 100% safe. Walking down the street? You could trip, hit your head, and die. Better not walk until they design 100% safe sidewalks.
The fact is that risk that vaccines pose is minuscule (and mainly limited to allergic reactions or slight fevers) and the threat these diseases pose is huge should they make a comeback. It is only bad risk assessment that makes vaccines look like a bigger threat than the diseases.
Could this be the source of Earworms? A song overpowers your music memory and keeps replaying. You try to stop it, but your brain is trying to "turn it off" in non-music memory so you fail and you hear it over and over and over again.
In related news, Hey, I just met you and this is crazy..... (earworm pass on completed)
Slashdot Mirror
We have one Anonymous member claiming that it was his attack that brought down GoDaddy.
We have GoDaddy claiming that it was network issues.
Lacking any further evidence, we're in a he said-she said scenario. While I'm not advocating blindly believing GoDaddy representatives, blindly believing an Anonymous member without any evidence to back him up seems foolish also. (A tweet the Anonymous member made during some service's downtime doesn't count as evidence.)
Sadly, Akin was informed by a doctor who actually believes that idiocy. Of course, that doctor should lose his medical license for gross lack of knowledge of basic human anatomy. (Side note: If women could prevent pregnancy by expelling unwanted sperm, birth control companies would immediately go out of business.)
Having just watched the ending of Season 2 of Doctor Who ("Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday"), it's clear who is behind these copyright bots: Cybermen!
"Copyright violation found! Delete! Delete! Delete!"
I hear he was going to ask for a billion, but why ask for a billion when you can ask for a million? *puts pinky finger to mouth*
Of course, they've protected us against terrorists. Just like my Magic Anti-Tiger Rock keeps all the tigers away from me. Sure, some might say that there are no tigers in New York, but I know that - were I to let go of this rock for even a second - a tiger could sneak up and get me. The TSA affords the same protection!
In a way, I wish they offered a feeling of security. When I go through the TSA checkpoints, "security" isn't what I'm feeling. Perhaps it's the blessing and curse of seeing through the security theater. Kind of like being the only one in the audience to see the wire when a magician "levitates" his assistant. Everyone else is ooh-ing and ahh-ing and you're sitting there thinking "The wire is right there on her back, people!"
Just as long as it isn't pot. Plane full of passengers with the munchies and all you have are those little bags of peanuts?!!!
I'm reminded of that line about theatrics and escalation from the end of Batman Begins. I think the only thing keeping us from seeing a wave of "terrorist theatrics" is their fanatical obsession with killing people. They aren't going to go for a complex, flashy, inspires-fear-without-actually-causing-harm scheme when they could just blow up some folks instead. A terrorist is less likely to sneak some Anthrax and a TSA uniform into an airport bathroom and more likely to blow themselves up in a busy airport security check line. In fact, a few terrorists doing this in choice airports at choice times could (at least temporarily) shut down all air travel. After all, how do you security check people on the line before they get to the security checkpoint?
George Lucas is to blame. He edited the order in Voyager: Special Edition.
Given that this happened during a speech about a Doctor Who episode, the proper reference is:
EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE COPYRIGHT BOTS!!!!
Ok, let's assume for a second that a natural disaster happens and you survive. Furthermore, let's assume that you decide to spread word of this via a generic tweet instead of calling friends and family. The advice was to "add #survived to your tweets. This will help when family and friends that are worried about you search on your welfare." Wouldn't friends and family be following your Twitter feed? Wouldn't they see that you tweeted "I'm all right" by going to your Twitter page? Why would they search on "#survived" and scroll through the (hopefully) long list of survivors just to find your entry? A hash tag to aggregate these "I survived" tweets isn't a bad idea, but it's not going to help friends and family see your message.
In fact, the judge had to have the jury correct their verdict since, in at least 2 cases, they decided to award Apple damages even after they said that Samsung didn't infringe in that instance.
I think one problem is that patent lawsuits are just assumed to happen. It seems, too often, the patent office just approves patents figuring that they'd get sorted out in the courts. Meanwhile, the courts just assume that patents must be valid by default if they've been approved by the patent office.
True, but we tend to give parents some leeway when it comes to raising them. We don't declare that parents who raise their kids in Religion A are dooming their kids to hell and thus the kids should be raised in Religion B. We don't take kids away from parents who let their kids watch too much TV. We don't arrest parents if they give their kid soda and ice cream.
Yes, in the mythical world where a parent not vaccinating only affected their kids, I'd still argue parents should still make the sensible choice of vaccinating their kids, but I'd be leery of getting the government involved. (As opposed to in our world where not vaccinating affects others in which case I support government mandated vaccines.)
"If the movement is small"
That's the problem right there. If it's a few nutjobs who claim that vaccines are the way the government is introducing mind control nanites into people, then herd immunity will be fine.
If it's Jenny McCarthy, Donald Trump, and other big name celebrities telling everyone that vaccines cause autism through "toxins" (made generic so it's impossible to disprove), then many people stop vaccinating and herd immunity breaks down. We're seeing outbreaks now due to herd immunity collapsing, but the anti-vax community refuses to believe they could be the cause because this didn't happen when they were a small group.
No, we're recognizing that not vaccinating isn't merely an action that only affects your own family. It's an action that affects others.
I have the right to stand on a street corner and wave my arms. I don't have a right to do that if waving my arms means I'll be smacking people in the face.
Not to mention that mercury was blamed for "vaccines cause autism." They removed the mercury. Autism rates still rose. So they changed their claim of why "vaccines cause autism" to something else. Every time the link they claim is proven false, they move the goal posts somewhere else so they can claim that "vaccines cause autism" hasn't *really* been disproven and that the burden is on everyone else to disprove claim #1,263.
As O('_')O_Bush said, Herd Immunity means that, by not vaccinating, they *ARE* forcing their ways upon others. If not vaccinating just increased the risk to the unvaccinated kids without affecting anyone else in the least, I'd be 100% for optional vaccination. But if some random parent in my kid's school might make my kid sick because his vaccine didn't take or make someone else's child sick because they're too young to get the vaccine or have a valid medical reason not to (e.g. allergies), then they are forcing their way upon us to the detriment of our kids.
Unfortunately, the ones that suffer aren't only the kids of the parents who don't vaccinate. If it were only those parent's kids, I'd be in favor of vaccination being voluntary. However, when Parent A doesn't vaccinate his/her kids, they increase risk of infection for Parent B's baby (too young for vaccination), Parent C's child (can't be vaccinated due to valid medical reason such as allergies), and Parent D's child (vaccine didn't take). A person's rights to raise their kids how they want don't extend to putting other kids at risk.
In fact, that's the main reason behind the special "vaccine court" that handles claims of problems with vaccines. Vaccines make so little profit that any legal risk they pose to the company could tip the scales into them being not worth the effort. The vaccine court is a way to weed out the frivolous claims (i.e. "this vaccine turned my son autistic and my evidence is Jenny McCarthy") and take action on the valid cases. If vaccines were dumped into the main court system, lawsuits would spread like wildfire over every imagined complaint. The companies would have to defend themselves against them and vaccines just not be worth the effort, money-wise. They would be losing money (via frivolous lawsuits) and their production would be stopped. Then we'd all suffer through those diseases again.
Even if we put aside the knowledge that homeopathy doesn't do anything, there's no chance of quality control. They themselves admit that the "water memory" is not measurable by any scientific instrument. So if I gave you one vial of homeopathic solution and one vial of distilled water that I bought in the grocery store, how would you tell the difference? How can you tell that the "homeopathic cure" you bought isn't really just tap water (or plain sugar pills in the case of the tablet variety)? How can you be sure that it was prepared as the homeopathy company claims it has been?
The answer is that you can't. By claiming that their "cure" can't be measured by any instrumentation, they've admitted that they could be selling anything to the gullible folks who are buying it up. Unlike traditional medicine manufacturers where pretty much any lab can measure what's in a given drug sample. (No chance to swap aspirin with sugar pills without being found out.)
Vaccines aren't 100% effective. There are some for whom the vaccine didn't work. If we were talking about a fully vaccinated population, it wouldn't matter. Herd immunity would protect these people (along with those too young to get vaccinated and those who have valid medical reasons like allergies). However, if too many people stop vaccinating, herd immunity breaks down and these people are subjected to a disease that their immune system isn't ready for.
If you don't use a condom, the only people at risk are you and your partner. (Well, and anyone else that person sleeps with, but the immediate risk is just the two of you.)
If you don't get vaccinated, you can spread diseases to people who are too young to get vaccinated, people who's vaccinations didn't take (vaccination isn't 100% effective for everyone), people who can't get vaccinated due to allergies/illness/etc. And you don't have to have intimate contact with these people. Walk by one of them in a store and you might have passed on your virus. Sneeze on your hand, touch your desk, and you'll pass your virus on to the person who sits there next class period. This is bad enough when we're talking about something minor like a cold. However, if you're talking about whooping cough, mumps, or polio, your lack of vaccination could mean severe injury or death to someone else.
At its core, the anti-vax movement is bad risk assessment for a few reasons. First of all, the horrors of the diseases that most vaccinations prevent against haven't been seen in a few generations. People my age (30's) with kids have never lived in a world where you could get polio or mumps at any moment and wind up dead, on an iron lung, deaf, scarred for life, etc. They score the risk of these infections as low because they don't see them. (The fallacy here being that the *reason* they don't see them is because of vaccines.)
Then, they hear scare tactics from certain people (Wakefield, McCarthy, etc) who claim that vaccines contain mercury/fetal tissue/generic toxins/etc that will harm their child. One shot and suddenly your child will catch The Autism. (Picture that in a much scarier font and cue a woman screaming off camera.) This would be so horrible and so, they conclude, we must stop all vaccinations until they are proven 100% safe.
The fallacy with this last one is that 1) there has never been a proven link between vaccines and autism, 2) even if there was, the diseases vaccines prevent are far worse than autism, and 3) no medical procedure is 100% safe. In fact, nothing anyone does is 100% safe. Driving in to work? You could get in a car crash and die. Better not commute to work until they can design cars that are 100% safe. Walking down the street? You could trip, hit your head, and die. Better not walk until they design 100% safe sidewalks.
The fact is that risk that vaccines pose is minuscule (and mainly limited to allergic reactions or slight fevers) and the threat these diseases pose is huge should they make a comeback. It is only bad risk assessment that makes vaccines look like a bigger threat than the diseases.
Could this be the source of Earworms? A song overpowers your music memory and keeps replaying. You try to stop it, but your brain is trying to "turn it off" in non-music memory so you fail and you hear it over and over and over again.
In related news, Hey, I just met you and this is crazy..... (earworm pass on completed)