Doctor: "Ah. I see you've got that not-so-rare allergic reaction to the lack of open Wi-Fi signals. Symptoms include restlessness (over no WiFi), anger (directed at computers with no WiFi to connect to) and twitching (when thinking of all the stuff on the Internet you can't access). Take two open WiFi signals from your neighbors and call me in the morning."
No we can't protect everyone from everything, but some common sense things should be regulated. No putting toxic components into kids toys, for example. This isn't like a company selling kids "Bag O' Glass Shards" where the parent could simply look and see that the toy was dangerous. The jewelry looks perfectly harmless. It's cheap so kids can buy it with their pocket money. Then they stick it in their mouths (as kids often do) and they're harmed. The market wouldn't solve this by themselves. Left to their own devices, they'd wait until a few kids died. Then they'd deny it. Then they'd wait until some more kids died. Then they'd "look into it." When some more kids died, they might recall a small batch declaring the problem solved. When even more kids died, they might finally do a wider recall and might actually switch chemicals. (Going from Harmful Chemical A to Not Quite As Harmful But Still Not Safe Chemical B.) They might even pay some hush money to the families affected. In the end, they'd still wind up ahead in profits with nothing stopping them from repeating the pattern again.
Lemons are inedible by themselves? Try telling that to my six year old son who loves them so much he asks us to buy lemons at the grocery store for him to eat.
In fact, since the latest trend in candy making is sour candies, I keep wondering why lemons can't become the fruit of choice for young folks. Why get a pale imitation when you can eat something truly sour!
Interestingly, I just introduced my 6 year old son to Star Wars. We just watched Episode 4 and his reaction was mixed. He loved it during the "fast parts" (space battles, garbage mashers and such) but hated it during the "slow parts" (Han and Luke talking, Luke and Ben talking, pretty much anyone just standing around and talking).
Of course, he's probably too young to appreciate why the "slow parts" are needed, but it got me to thinking: What would Star Wars be like if it were recreated today? Leave Lucas out of the picture (to better cut ties from the previous version) and suppose the studio was just launching it fresh. I'd guess that someone like Michael Bay would be made the director and some big names would be brought in to play Luke, Han, etc. I'd also guess that the battle scenes would be doubled in length and the "boring stuff" cut as much as possible. In short, it'd wind up being just another loud, summer popcorn action flick that would take in millions and then be forgotten until the inevitable sequel.
"Sure, Thiomersal/Thimerosal has been ruled out as a factor. But can we really already rule out that any link exists between vaccines and autism (or no link at all, by the way)?"
This is one problem I have with the antivax groups. A little tactic called "moving the goal posts." Why are autism/vaccines linked? Thimerosal! Wait, that's been removed and autism rates haven't dropped? Then it's the MMR combined shot. Wait, studies have shown no link? Well, then it's the number of shots kids get. Wait, kids get exposed to more pathogens in a day then we expose them to via vaccines in their lifetime? Well, then it's toxins in the vaccines.... We can never prove to antivax groups 100% conclusively that autism isn't caused by vaccines because every time one of their theories is shot down, they immediately come up with another one. It's a game of "sure, my last 99 theories were wrong but this one's right so you should devote resources towards researching this link."
"Population groups that do not vaccinate for religious reasons do not develop regressive autism- regardless whether they're genetically related groups such as the Amish or groups from independent backgrounds. How do you explain that?"
"To put things into perspective, autism rates are now higher than the death count prevented by the vaccines. Just better diagnoses do not account for the thousand-percent increase in autism rates in the last decades, so it seems environmental factors cannot yet be ruled out."
The insinuation of that statement is that vaccines cause autism and thus we have to balance preventing deaths via vaccine and preventing autism via not vaccinating. The fact of the matter, though, is that studies have shown no vaccine-autism link. Meanwhile, diagnosis *has* improved dramatically. We know understand that autism is a spectrum, not just a specific illness. Some people might have Asperger's Syndrome and seem fine. Others will have full-blown can't-communicate-with-anyone Autism.
Decades ago, a person might have just been labeled "stupid/retarded/etc" and that would have been it. Now we can run tests and identify people with Autism. The CDC has identified a 57% increase in the past few years. (A far cry from 1000%.) We should definitely look into the causes of autism, but vaccines have been ruled out already. Right now it looks like mainly genetics with some possible environmental factors tossed in.
But those fossils were put there by God to test the faithful..... *collapses laughing*
Sorry, I thought I could say that with a straight face.
Sad thing is, though, that some people believe in a trickster God who would deceive you and then punish you for falling for the deception. I prefer to believe in a God whose only real requirement is that you be a "good person" and who would actually be pleased that humans are using their minds to figure out the world around them. After all, if we're not supposed to use our minds, what are they there for?
I think the bigger skew to the risk judgment is that vaccines have been too successful for their own good in some respects. Do you remember when polio paralyzed people regularly, measles killed and a cough might being fears of being Whooping? If you're around my age (34) or even a bit older, you don't. Neither do I. Of course, I've read many accounts, but haven't seen it first hand. So it would be easy to discount the threat that these diseases pose.
Some people think: "I haven't seen anyone I know of die or be maimed by polio/measles/whooping cough, so how bad can it be?" (Yes, one antivax nut in Australia even said that whooping cough has never killed anyone!) If they had actually had a cousin die from whooping cough, had a sibling scarred for life from measles and had a friend who barely survived polio but will be in a wheelchair the rest of his life, I doubt they'd be so anti-vaccine.
I was in the store one day when I saw a child huddled under a rack of clothing crying. I didn't see a parent nearby so I asked the child if he was lost. He quickly bolted out from the rack of clothing and down the aisle to where his mother was. (Quite far down. Far enough that I wouldn't have any way of knowing she was related to the child.)
Now the only reason I took this "risk" of asking the child was because my own two children and my wife were with me. So I looked more like "family man" and less like "creepy guy approaching child alone in store." If I was by myself, I'd think twice about trying to help the child* because of the risk it'd pose to me. And the fact that I'd do that saddens me. It's the reality of the situation that we automatically think of 30-something guy approaching a child with no parent around as having some sinister motive and the man can get in trouble for it. Swap the 30-something guy for a 30-something woman though and suddenly she a caring motherly type looking out for the child.
*At least, I wouldn't approach the child alone. I'd stay away, tell the the child I'd come back with some help and would get a store employee to assist me in finding the child's parents.
The problem is that effective methods of fighting terrorism (of which some are being used right now) aren't too visible to the public and aren't "sexy." Politicians want to be seen as doing something and ordering some half-secret government agency to do some secret stuff to prevent terrorists from even getting to the airport isn't visible at all. Effective? Perhaps, but not visible.
However, having TSA agents tell everyone to remove their shoes is quite visible. And new high-tech "terrorism fighting" gear given to the TSA is visible and "sexy." So the politicians go for these approach and everyone nods their heads in agreement that something has indeed been done. The fact that this "something" won't stop any terrorists (except for, perhaps, the stupidest of the terrorists) doesn't enter in the equation.
I'm no fan of those pre-DVD-movie ads either, but how much time does it take to put the DVD in your Mac, rip it to the hard drive, burn a new DVD and then play that one? Wouldn't it take less time to watch the 10 minutes of ads (or go to the other room and do something else while they run)? Especially if it is a rented DVD that you'll be sending back in a few days.
Well, I guess every parent (myself included) is in violation of child porn laws. Every parent takes bath time photos of their kids. These aren't "sexually suggestive" in any way, just kids playing in a tub. And, since they're in the bathtub, they have no clothes on. My parents took them of me, I took them of my kids and I'm sure my kids will take them of my future grandchildren.
Of course, someone with a twisted sense of what constitutes child porn could look at my photo collection, see a few tub time photos and declare "Why those kids have no clothes on! Some pervert might get his hands on these (despite the fact that they are a private photo collection) and get sexually excited over naked kids! We must charge the parents with child porn and take the kids away from them! Now! Think of the children!!!"
The sad thing is, it has happened before and will likely happen again until some sanity returns to this whole thing. By all means, go after the people making child porn. Lock them away for a good long time (especially if they abuse the children in the process). But don't think that anything involving kids without clothes is child porn.
I use that too. Program I'm not sure about? Run it in SandboxIE and delete the Sandbox when I'm done. Website that might impact my security? Run it while my browser is under SandboxIE so I'm safe from viral threats.
If a stellar mass BH went through our solar system the most likely thing it would do to the Earth is distort it's orbit and or move the Sun.
Either of which would be pretty bad. We could find the Earth too hot or too cold to live on. We could even find ourselves getting tossed out of the solar system entirely. And if it came too close, we could wind up in orbit around the black hole, most likely a decaying one where being gobbled up was just a matter of time. Luckily, the chances of a rogue stellar mass black hole coming upon us is tiny. (This exact scenario is discussed in BadAstronomer/Phil Plait's excellent book Death From The Skies which I'm in the middle of reading.)
I'm not a big sports game player, but if a company shut down a major feature of the previous year's version that I bought so they could push this year's new version on me, I'd seriously reconsider ever buying from them again. So you pay them $50 for Madden 10 and then what? You get 12 months or so of play before they shut that down to push Madden 11? I can't see this working to increase sales that much. Instead, I think it will tarnish EA's reputation which will lead to reduced sales in the long run.
I'll come out and say that I agree with you... in theory. In theory, I wish I could pay a price and then be able to see my purchased movie anywhere. Real-world problems interfere with that ideal, however.
Movie studios won't just put the movie up somewhere where I could get it for free. They'll want to make sure that I'm actually authorized to watch the movie. This means they'll rely on DRM. This, in turn, means they're likely to rely on one location for authorizations to take place. If those authorization servers go offline, you lose access to the content you've paid for and need to pay again for access to it. In addition, movie studios aren't going to want to run servers letting you download a file over and over for one small payment. They'll want recurring payments.
This is why I think that streaming is the better option. Something along the lines of Netflix. Pay a fee and get access to the library of content. As long as you pay your monthly fee, you can watch as many movies/TV shows/whatever as your plan allows. (I'd prefer unlimited, but we are talking about movie studios here.) There should be many different companies doing this providing access to the same content. This way competition will keep prices low and quality high. (Besides, I'm sure the movie studios don't want Netflix to be to them what Apple/iTunes was to the music industry.)
Of course, I already have a Netflix account and love streaming via Roku, so I'm mostly there. Now if the movie studios would just get with the times and let their content be streamed. Heck, I'd even accept a 6 month lag on DVD release versus streaming release if they're that concerned with streaming cutting into DVD profits!
And today's evolutionary advantage is tomorrow's evolutionary disadvantage. As another poster said, bigger brains need bigger skulls which increases the odds that the mother will die during childbirth. And if the entire body is bigger, you need more food to feed said bigger body. So a hypothetical super-intelligent cousin of Homo Sapiens* could have evolved and still have gone extinct. Perhaps we're the Goldilocks of Hominids. Some were too dumb, some were too smart, we're just right.... for now (cue menacing music).
*Hypothetical because 1) the skull the article references has already been discredited as belonging to an entire species/sub-species and 2) big skulls/brains doesn't always equal smarter.
No, first you need to grow the Ginko organically. Then you need to increase the potency by diluting it homeopathically. Next, you form it into an ear candle. Once you do that, the the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot will contact the aliens from Vega 7 who will beam increased memory skills and ESP into you. But if any of this is attempted by "Western medicine", it will all fail.
Book publishers face different challenges than the record industry. E-Books might be freely shared, but most people still prefer to read their books in dead-tree format. (I don't think that Kindles and the like will replace printed books anytime soon.) Printed books are hard to share out/copy the way that CDs/MP3s can be shared/copied. The challenge here is with self-publishing/on-demand publishing authors taking off. I think Mike Elgan outlined the threat book publishers face quite well in Book Publishers: You Can't Beat Amazon -- So Join 'Em.
Slashdot Mirror
You are perfectly free to say whatever you want in China. You just might not be very free after you say it.
The real reason he can't find a girlfriend? He decided to use the Drake Equation to show why he doesn't have a girlfriend!
(Counts on Slashdot readership to not RTFA and thus not know that he actually has a girlfriend now.)
Doctor: "Ah. I see you've got that not-so-rare allergic reaction to the lack of open Wi-Fi signals. Symptoms include restlessness (over no WiFi), anger (directed at computers with no WiFi to connect to) and twitching (when thinking of all the stuff on the Internet you can't access). Take two open WiFi signals from your neighbors and call me in the morning."
No we can't protect everyone from everything, but some common sense things should be regulated. No putting toxic components into kids toys, for example. This isn't like a company selling kids "Bag O' Glass Shards" where the parent could simply look and see that the toy was dangerous. The jewelry looks perfectly harmless. It's cheap so kids can buy it with their pocket money. Then they stick it in their mouths (as kids often do) and they're harmed. The market wouldn't solve this by themselves. Left to their own devices, they'd wait until a few kids died. Then they'd deny it. Then they'd wait until some more kids died. Then they'd "look into it." When some more kids died, they might recall a small batch declaring the problem solved. When even more kids died, they might finally do a wider recall and might actually switch chemicals. (Going from Harmful Chemical A to Not Quite As Harmful But Still Not Safe Chemical B.) They might even pay some hush money to the families affected. In the end, they'd still wind up ahead in profits with nothing stopping them from repeating the pattern again.
Lemons are inedible by themselves? Try telling that to my six year old son who loves them so much he asks us to buy lemons at the grocery store for him to eat.
In fact, since the latest trend in candy making is sour candies, I keep wondering why lemons can't become the fruit of choice for young folks. Why get a pale imitation when you can eat something truly sour!
Interestingly, I just introduced my 6 year old son to Star Wars. We just watched Episode 4 and his reaction was mixed. He loved it during the "fast parts" (space battles, garbage mashers and such) but hated it during the "slow parts" (Han and Luke talking, Luke and Ben talking, pretty much anyone just standing around and talking).
Of course, he's probably too young to appreciate why the "slow parts" are needed, but it got me to thinking: What would Star Wars be like if it were recreated today? Leave Lucas out of the picture (to better cut ties from the previous version) and suppose the studio was just launching it fresh. I'd guess that someone like Michael Bay would be made the director and some big names would be brought in to play Luke, Han, etc. I'd also guess that the battle scenes would be doubled in length and the "boring stuff" cut as much as possible. In short, it'd wind up being just another loud, summer popcorn action flick that would take in millions and then be forgotten until the inevitable sequel.
"Sure, Thiomersal/Thimerosal has been ruled out as a factor. But can we really already rule out that any link exists between vaccines and autism (or no link at all, by the way)?"
This is one problem I have with the antivax groups. A little tactic called "moving the goal posts." Why are autism/vaccines linked? Thimerosal! Wait, that's been removed and autism rates haven't dropped? Then it's the MMR combined shot. Wait, studies have shown no link? Well, then it's the number of shots kids get. Wait, kids get exposed to more pathogens in a day then we expose them to via vaccines in their lifetime? Well, then it's toxins in the vaccines.... We can never prove to antivax groups 100% conclusively that autism isn't caused by vaccines because every time one of their theories is shot down, they immediately come up with another one. It's a game of "sure, my last 99 theories were wrong but this one's right so you should devote resources towards researching this link."
"Population groups that do not vaccinate for religious reasons do not develop regressive autism- regardless whether they're genetically related groups such as the Amish or groups from independent backgrounds. How do you explain that?"
Easy. It's not true. The Amish actually do vaccinate and their rates of autism are lower. Also see http://antiantivax.flurf.net/#Population_X_and_Vaccines_Autism
"To put things into perspective, autism rates are now higher than the death count prevented by the vaccines. Just better diagnoses do not account for the thousand-percent increase in autism rates in the last decades, so it seems environmental factors cannot yet be ruled out."
The insinuation of that statement is that vaccines cause autism and thus we have to balance preventing deaths via vaccine and preventing autism via not vaccinating. The fact of the matter, though, is that studies have shown no vaccine-autism link. Meanwhile, diagnosis *has* improved dramatically. We know understand that autism is a spectrum, not just a specific illness. Some people might have Asperger's Syndrome and seem fine. Others will have full-blown can't-communicate-with-anyone Autism.
Decades ago, a person might have just been labeled "stupid/retarded/etc" and that would have been it. Now we can run tests and identify people with Autism. The CDC has identified a 57% increase in the past few years. (A far cry from 1000%.) We should definitely look into the causes of autism, but vaccines have been ruled out already. Right now it looks like mainly genetics with some possible environmental factors tossed in.
Well, if you used Google Maps you could get a path from Boston to London. (Or were able to at one point.) http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2007/03/directions_from_goog.html Close enough.
But those fossils were put there by God to test the faithful..... *collapses laughing*
Sorry, I thought I could say that with a straight face.
Sad thing is, though, that some people believe in a trickster God who would deceive you and then punish you for falling for the deception. I prefer to believe in a God whose only real requirement is that you be a "good person" and who would actually be pleased that humans are using their minds to figure out the world around them. After all, if we're not supposed to use our minds, what are they there for?
I think the bigger skew to the risk judgment is that vaccines have been too successful for their own good in some respects. Do you remember when polio paralyzed people regularly, measles killed and a cough might being fears of being Whooping? If you're around my age (34) or even a bit older, you don't. Neither do I. Of course, I've read many accounts, but haven't seen it first hand. So it would be easy to discount the threat that these diseases pose.
Some people think: "I haven't seen anyone I know of die or be maimed by polio/measles/whooping cough, so how bad can it be?" (Yes, one antivax nut in Australia even said that whooping cough has never killed anyone!) If they had actually had a cousin die from whooping cough, had a sibling scarred for life from measles and had a friend who barely survived polio but will be in a wheelchair the rest of his life, I doubt they'd be so anti-vaccine.
"More people die on Britain's roads each YEAR than have died as a result of terrorism in TOTAL."
I think that our course of action should be clear. Let the War on Roads begin!
I was in the store one day when I saw a child huddled under a rack of clothing crying. I didn't see a parent nearby so I asked the child if he was lost. He quickly bolted out from the rack of clothing and down the aisle to where his mother was. (Quite far down. Far enough that I wouldn't have any way of knowing she was related to the child.)
Now the only reason I took this "risk" of asking the child was because my own two children and my wife were with me. So I looked more like "family man" and less like "creepy guy approaching child alone in store." If I was by myself, I'd think twice about trying to help the child* because of the risk it'd pose to me. And the fact that I'd do that saddens me. It's the reality of the situation that we automatically think of 30-something guy approaching a child with no parent around as having some sinister motive and the man can get in trouble for it. Swap the 30-something guy for a 30-something woman though and suddenly she a caring motherly type looking out for the child.
*At least, I wouldn't approach the child alone. I'd stay away, tell the the child I'd come back with some help and would get a store employee to assist me in finding the child's parents.
The problem is that effective methods of fighting terrorism (of which some are being used right now) aren't too visible to the public and aren't "sexy." Politicians want to be seen as doing something and ordering some half-secret government agency to do some secret stuff to prevent terrorists from even getting to the airport isn't visible at all. Effective? Perhaps, but not visible.
However, having TSA agents tell everyone to remove their shoes is quite visible. And new high-tech "terrorism fighting" gear given to the TSA is visible and "sexy." So the politicians go for these approach and everyone nods their heads in agreement that something has indeed been done. The fact that this "something" won't stop any terrorists (except for, perhaps, the stupidest of the terrorists) doesn't enter in the equation.
I'm no fan of those pre-DVD-movie ads either, but how much time does it take to put the DVD in your Mac, rip it to the hard drive, burn a new DVD and then play that one? Wouldn't it take less time to watch the 10 minutes of ads (or go to the other room and do something else while they run)? Especially if it is a rented DVD that you'll be sending back in a few days.
Well, I guess every parent (myself included) is in violation of child porn laws. Every parent takes bath time photos of their kids. These aren't "sexually suggestive" in any way, just kids playing in a tub. And, since they're in the bathtub, they have no clothes on. My parents took them of me, I took them of my kids and I'm sure my kids will take them of my future grandchildren.
Of course, someone with a twisted sense of what constitutes child porn could look at my photo collection, see a few tub time photos and declare "Why those kids have no clothes on! Some pervert might get his hands on these (despite the fact that they are a private photo collection) and get sexually excited over naked kids! We must charge the parents with child porn and take the kids away from them! Now! Think of the children!!!"
The sad thing is, it has happened before and will likely happen again until some sanity returns to this whole thing. By all means, go after the people making child porn. Lock them away for a good long time (especially if they abuse the children in the process). But don't think that anything involving kids without clothes is child porn.
I use that too. Program I'm not sure about? Run it in SandboxIE and delete the Sandbox when I'm done. Website that might impact my security? Run it while my browser is under SandboxIE so I'm safe from viral threats.
Since no one has guessed it:
October 10th, 2010 is 10/10/10, or 101010 which is 42 in binary.
Bonus is that you can rearrange the 2 digit month/day/year any way you want and still get 42.
Either of which would be pretty bad. We could find the Earth too hot or too cold to live on. We could even find ourselves getting tossed out of the solar system entirely. And if it came too close, we could wind up in orbit around the black hole, most likely a decaying one where being gobbled up was just a matter of time. Luckily, the chances of a rogue stellar mass black hole coming upon us is tiny. (This exact scenario is discussed in BadAstronomer/Phil Plait's excellent book Death From The Skies which I'm in the middle of reading.)
Yes, but we'll find out that answer on October 10th of this year.
*waits to see if people figure it out or if my joke was too obscure*
I'm not a big sports game player, but if a company shut down a major feature of the previous year's version that I bought so they could push this year's new version on me, I'd seriously reconsider ever buying from them again. So you pay them $50 for Madden 10 and then what? You get 12 months or so of play before they shut that down to push Madden 11? I can't see this working to increase sales that much. Instead, I think it will tarnish EA's reputation which will lead to reduced sales in the long run.
I'll come out and say that I agree with you... in theory. In theory, I wish I could pay a price and then be able to see my purchased movie anywhere. Real-world problems interfere with that ideal, however.
Movie studios won't just put the movie up somewhere where I could get it for free. They'll want to make sure that I'm actually authorized to watch the movie. This means they'll rely on DRM. This, in turn, means they're likely to rely on one location for authorizations to take place. If those authorization servers go offline, you lose access to the content you've paid for and need to pay again for access to it. In addition, movie studios aren't going to want to run servers letting you download a file over and over for one small payment. They'll want recurring payments.
This is why I think that streaming is the better option. Something along the lines of Netflix. Pay a fee and get access to the library of content. As long as you pay your monthly fee, you can watch as many movies/TV shows/whatever as your plan allows. (I'd prefer unlimited, but we are talking about movie studios here.) There should be many different companies doing this providing access to the same content. This way competition will keep prices low and quality high. (Besides, I'm sure the movie studios don't want Netflix to be to them what Apple/iTunes was to the music industry.)
Of course, I already have a Netflix account and love streaming via Roku, so I'm mostly there. Now if the movie studios would just get with the times and let their content be streamed. Heck, I'd even accept a 6 month lag on DVD release versus streaming release if they're that concerned with streaming cutting into DVD profits!
And today's evolutionary advantage is tomorrow's evolutionary disadvantage. As another poster said, bigger brains need bigger skulls which increases the odds that the mother will die during childbirth. And if the entire body is bigger, you need more food to feed said bigger body. So a hypothetical super-intelligent cousin of Homo Sapiens* could have evolved and still have gone extinct. Perhaps we're the Goldilocks of Hominids. Some were too dumb, some were too smart, we're just right.... for now (cue menacing music).
*Hypothetical because 1) the skull the article references has already been discredited as belonging to an entire species/sub-species and 2) big skulls/brains doesn't always equal smarter.
No, first you need to grow the Ginko organically. Then you need to increase the potency by diluting it homeopathically. Next, you form it into an ear candle. Once you do that, the the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot will contact the aliens from Vega 7 who will beam increased memory skills and ESP into you. But if any of this is attempted by "Western medicine", it will all fail.
Sounds like they're not configured correctly. A small tweak and they could remove drivers who disobey the lights.
Book publishers face different challenges than the record industry. E-Books might be freely shared, but most people still prefer to read their books in dead-tree format. (I don't think that Kindles and the like will replace printed books anytime soon.) Printed books are hard to share out/copy the way that CDs/MP3s can be shared/copied. The challenge here is with self-publishing/on-demand publishing authors taking off. I think Mike Elgan outlined the threat book publishers face quite well in Book Publishers: You Can't Beat Amazon -- So Join 'Em.