Why? A mod is not done until it is done, and when it is being created by fans for free, it tends to take a while and proceed entirely at the pace of the people creating it, which (since they aren't being paid to do it under a certain time) is "whenever they feel like working on it." All properly done video games are "nearly done" for a very long time (years, sometimes) because going from nearly done to actually done is usually the longest part. Sometimes, they never actually do get finished even if they are released.
And Duke Nukem Forever is rather a bad example, given that, you know, it actually came out. More importantly, to my knowledge the developers of Black Mesa have never announced a release date or given a completion quantity ever, so the fact that they are now means there is no prior justification for such cynicism, since your hopes have never been actually let down. They have only been let down in your mind, which expected it to be finished before now. You really shouldn't be cynical if they've never actually failed yet.
Anyone who *actually* games wants to know who the fuck cares about underpowered Intel video card drivers. Oh, it will be able to play 5 year old Valve games? WHOOPTY-FUCKING-DOO.
Again, NOT THE POINT. The point is: open source drivers are easier to work with. Creating one for a graphics card yourself? Hard. Writing drivers is always a bitch, thats why they often don't work right (even the closed source ones creating by the people who made the hardware in the first place). Thats why the ATI open source driver kind of sucks. Graphics cards have a ton of out-of-spec tweaks and gimmicks to improve performance, and always have, sometimes even tweaks intended to make a single engine run well. That makes creating your own driver a monumental task, even if you ostensibly have the specs, because those specs are never quite valid. Hell, ATI/Nvidia can't even get their drivers to work right all the time, and they made the damned cards.
All of that is a reason why the ability to work with an existing driver (assuming it is well-made) a huge bonus. Because otherwise you are working with a black box that doesn't ever work exactly as advertised and as it properly should. If you can look at the source, you can try to figure out why. Ideally, the hardware would itself be open too so you could see how far it deviates from the specs (they all do), but we don't live in an ideal world. Thats why I use a close-source driver and probably always will. But it'd be cool if I didn't have to. And that's the point of the story.
Sorry, I won't be even considering running games on my Linux boxes/laptops. I'm running Windows 8 on my gaming laptop and it handles graphics, HDMI out, dual cards, dual monitors, Steam, all games (not just Source games) just fine. Why would I ever subject myself to the mess that is graphics on Linux?
Won't get better unless someone (e.g. Valve) works on fixing it.
The fact that the open source drivers are on Linux isn't really important to the story at all, asides from the background (i.e. that is the reason Valve are working with open source drivers to max out performance in the first place). The interesting thing is how the OSS allows Valve to tweak or examine the driver code on the fly to find out how to optimize performance.
Reading the summary is great, but understanding the point is even better.
It'd have to be "discrete" anyways, even if it is integrated into the board. There isn't enough room or thermal overhead to put the necessary power on the same die as the CPU, which is what modern Intel graphics does.
Haha, thanks for linking to that article, it's quite a hoot to read.
if you read anything about the legal skirmish between Apple and Samsung, and replace “patent infringement” with “real estate title arguments,” the entire argument of the IP communists collapses into dust.
"IP communists"? Really? I think that insult is about 30 years out of date. The irony here, of course, is that copying someone else's product and outselling them doing so is perhaps the ultimate capitalist move.
The difference being that babies aren't capable (and aren't expected to be capable) of knowing better. Adults are, which makes their behavior evil even if they don't intend it to be. It's very rare (some would even argue impossible) for someone to actually intend to commit evil as such, but people can think evil actions are good (usually because of some kind of ignorance).
Not really, use your own stem cells to grow the tissue, grow a new heart/arm/etc., and transplant it. Transplant tech has advanced enormously in recent years.
I think simply growing a full heart/arm out of your own stem cells would be the more impressive accomplishment there, actually. It'd almost certainly have a greater impact. Making it a cyborg part and transplanting it are pretty easy by comparison.
Only if they're within minutes travel of the target - otherwise, it's still an hour or more. Hypersonic is fast, but it's not magical.
Hypersonic planes (such as the X-51A) can travel at 4,000+ MPH. Stationed at a remote base for the US or nearly anywhere in the country for the Russians they can hit any target within 2,000 miles (thats considerably more than the distance between Moscow and London or Tel Aviv, for reference) in 1/2 an hour. That would take 3 or more hours for a subsonic aircraft. So yes, minutes instead of hours.
And at that speed, even a long range (270 mile or so, such as the AN/TPS-75 radar the Air Force uses, and thats pretty long range. The AEGIS radar system is less than half that) radar system will only give you 4 minutes of warning, which while more than enough time to react for an automated system, would be pretty hard to react to if humans had to be involved (such as would happen in a first-strike scenario). And hitting a target from the front that is traveling at 1.7 km/s is a bit of a problem. The US spent $700+ million developing a missile system capable of shooting down SCUD missiles traveling at speeds less than that (Mach 5). They pulled it off after decades of work... but those are ballistic missiles. I.e., they don't turn after launch, which means they are a really really easy target to hit by comparison. A guided plane traveling even faster is a considerably harder target.
That sound you heard is the OP's point whooshing about a mile over your head. Bombers can't afford to do that.
...yet. Jet and plane technology has come quite a ways since the 1960s, and what was impossible then with technology of the time might well be do-able today.
There are other uses to a hypersonic aircraft than simply dodging missiles. The ability to arrive on target in minutes instead of hours, for example. Plus, even if the bomber isn't technically faster than the missile, missiles have limited fuel capacity and require a certain reaction time before they can be fired, so if you can build a bomber fast enough, by the time the missile is fired it can't reach you before it runs out of fuel. This is even more true if you are traveling at extremely high altitudes. If you have a bomber traveling at Mach 5 (1 mile per second, roughly) and a missile traveling at Mach 6 launched at the bomber when it is 20 miles away (easily possible for a high altitude bomber to hit a target that far away), it will take 100 seconds to hit, in which time the missile must travel 120 miles, which is outside the range of, say, a Patriot missile (which travels at Mach 5). And the higher the speed, the more fuel it takes for the same distance. A bomber can afford that. It's a lot harder for a disposable missile to do the same.
According to this, most stars (2/3rds in the Milky Way) are actually single. Assuming other galaxies are similar in that respect to ours (which is safe, logical, and pretty much required given the difficulty involved in observing stars in other galaxies), most are probably single everywhere.
At those distances tides would be extremely minor. The Sun does have tidal effects on the Earth, but they are quite minor. The tidal effects of a binary star would be about the same (they would vary according to the orbit more than it does on Earth, but not enough to be an issue).
The much bigger problem would be the fact that the planet would vary in distance from a star according to it's orbit, much more so than the Earth does, even if the orbit isn't eccentric, simply because the suns are orbiting each other (probably fairly rapidly) and would therefore be closer and farther from the planet in turns. Depending on the separation, mass, and orbit of the stars, it is possible there isn't even a "goldilocks" zone, because the radiation in any orbit varies from high to low extremes too much as one star gets closer and farther. Most likely, though, one star is much smaller and will have little effect, or the radiation won't vary so much from the average that it will make a difference. It's hard to say because any such arrangement is a three-body gravity problem, so the solution is very complex (although you could model it as a 2 body assuming the planet is a point-mass to calculate the stars orbits, and the stars are a single body to calculate the planet's orbit, which is in most cases quite accurate).
I realized that gaming with that kind of pressure at some point actually takes the fun away. So once a gaming session develops into a grinding I just stop and resume at some other time. And it's kind of funny now that I see some colleagues at work play some FPSs at lunch, cursing at each other, and I wonder: how can they have fun this way?
Some people actually enjoy the challenge. For them, being the best (or just better than the people you play against often) is in itself a reward, and getting the experience to get there is a challenge which is in and of itself enjoyable. I'm not a fan of grinding that doesn't improve your skill, only your character's "skill", but playing to improve your own skill is fun, and the end reward is the thrill of defeating opponents. Especially opponents who used to beat you a lot.
They have these fancy new portable PCs called "laptops" now. Small enough to fit in a bag, can you believe it? I'm surprised you haven't heard of them, considering every one of my friends has one. Not even that expensive, and no sharing a screen that reduces a 1080p screen to an effective 480p! Incredible, I know.
I'm always shocked at just how much American culture has spread world wide. And the thing is - it often works in our favor. Iranian kids playing WoW can't in any way benefit Iran that I can think of, but has multiple benefits for the U.S. Someone from the gov should be on the horn right now getting those accounts reactiviated.
No, because if they are playing WoW they aren't protesting against their government. Now they can't play WoW, they are likely wondering why, and "because their leaders want nukes" might not sit well with them. That's the idea behind sanctions.
The real problem is a social phobia about teaching little boys how they are supposed to wash and care for their penis. Instead, we just cut off the foreskin so we don't have to deal with it. Touching your "penis" is bad, after all.
Later in life it leads to abnormal masturbation, reduced sexual pleasure, and reduced pleasure of your female partner. - This study conveniently ignores these issues because they're not about children.
From TFA:
Perhaps the most powerful evidence in favour of circumcision comes from randomized controlled trials in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda. These found that, for men who have sex with women, circumcision reduced the risk of infection with HIV. (No protection was observed for men who have sex with men.) The South African and Ugandan trials also found that circumcision reduced infection rates for human papillomavirus (HPV) and herpes. The World Health Organization has already made circumcision part of its HIV-prevention strategy in sub-Saharan Africa, with a goal to circumcise 20 million men by 2015.
The AAP found that, in addition to preventing sexually transmitted infections, circumcision could reduce the rates of urinary tract infections and penile cancer, probably because the foreskin harbours infectious microbes as well as the immune cells targeted by HIV.... The task force also found no strong evidence that circumcised babies grew up with more urinary difficulties or sexual problems.
So... yeah. Reduced infection rates in children and adults, and no strong evidence of sexual problems at all. It doesn't matter if you could stop infection through education on how to properly clean the penis. Hell, HIV could be stopped dead in a few generations if people stopped having sex with multiple partners and/or used condoms. But guess what? The world doesn't work like that, and a measure that can help prevent disease with very few side effects can and should be used to help stop disease. Hence, the recommendation.
Ahem: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/04/18/1018707108. First result on Google. Short version: false positives at a.1% rate, false negatives at 7.5%, independent review caught every single one. I'd say that is reasonably accurate.
There is a ton of science in forensic science. Obviously, it is not 100% nor is it "hard" science where you can get 99.9995% confidence using a thousand or more trials for each match like you can in, say, physics. That is why you have a trial, and "beyond reasonable doubt", not beyond all doubt.
Nice strawman. One of the functions of government has always been to promote behavior beneficial for society, and prevent behavior that is detrimental to it. How else can you argue that science and evolution should be taught in the (public) classroom and not creationism (young-earth creationism, specifically)? Because the former is good for society (well educated populace), while the latter is not. That is why government offers education in the first place and requires children to be educated. Because it is necessary for a well-formed society, which is in turn required for a well-formed government.
Also, if that's your best argument for legalization of marijuana ("because otherwise it's like living in 1984!") then you can expect reasonable people to simply ignore you.
You think you are going to 'help the herd' by reducing individual liberties? So you are going to allow government to tell people what to do with themselves, how to live and allow it throw people to jail for doing things to themselves that government denies them, and this is somehow going to help society?
Yes. Society has always done this. It's necessary, much as libertarians like to think otherwise. In an ideal universe, it wouldn't, because people wouldn't choose to do stupid things that hurt themselves and others, but people always have and always will. It's a very fine balancing act between allowing people freedom to do good (constructive) things, and restricting them from doing bad (destructive) things, because a freedom that is good in one person's hands can be a destructive thing in another.
I'm actually not even taking a stance on this issue so much, I'm not really opposed to legalizing pot (though am I in favor of it either), I'm talking more in general about why you can legitimately ban it.
Alchohol is different, of course, because it doesn't tend to have lasting effects even if you drink some every day (in moderation, of course, such as my dad who has a single glass of wine) and can, depending on the kind, have some benefits (wine in particular has anti-oxidants which can improve health). But that isn't even at issue here: simply because one possibly bad thing is legal does not mean another thing should be. The fact that murderers exist and are free doesn't mean the police shouldn't track down robbers, for example (I'm not comparing pot or alcohol to either of those things, it's just an analogy). It's a terrible, fallacious, and meaningless argument that really ends up making your argument look weak. A lot of people use that type of argument on Slashdot (commonly, "why are they going after copyright infringers when rapists are on the loose?!?!?!"), but it's really bad.
And for the record (not the place to argue about it, though, so I won't), I do think the government should have the power to deny women abortions, because I think abortion is murder. So yeah, even weaker argument there IMO.
Probably both, but the study shows the former. From the abstract:
Persistent cannabis use was associated with neuropsychological decline broadly across domains of functioning, even after controlling for years of education. Informants also reported noticing more cognitive problems for persistent cannabis users. Impairment was concentrated among adolescent-onset cannabis users, with more persistent use associated with greater decline. Further, cessation of cannabis use did not fully restore neuropsychological functioning among adolescent-onset cannabis users. Findings are suggestive of a neurotoxic effect of cannabis on the adolescent brain and highlight the importance of prevention and policy efforts targeting adolescents.
They followed individuals for several decades, and frequent users showed a decline of neuropsychological functioning that non-pot-smokers did not. In other words, pot damages your brain. Note that they were specifically testing adolescent-onset users: in other words, people who used it as teenagers. Whether it would have the same effects on an adult who didn't smoke it as a teen isn't answered (although probably yes, I'm guessing the effects would be considerably reduced).
It's not about individual intelligence, it's about herd intelligence. If individuals lower their intelligence, the intelligence of the group goes down, and in a democratic society that is devastating. It's actually a problem in any society (except maybe a tyranny or dictatorship), but it's worse when individuals have the ability to influence society directly. Unless, of course, drug users would be willing to give up their vote, which I don't imagine is going to happen anytime soon (nor, indeed, would it be enough to counteract the effects completely.)
By lowering your intelligence, you aren't hurting other individuals, you are hurting your entire culture and their ability to make prudent and intelligent decisions, which in a way is worse than harming individual people, since the effects can last for generations.
Communications are going to be a major issue. Gets a lot harder to send a signal out when you have 20+ meters of solid rock overhead. And even if you go down a sink-hole with a direct line of sight upwards, you'd have to send the signal straight up. Only solution I can see would be a repeater at the surface, possibly with a physical cable going down. It's pretty challenging overall.
All that would be tremendously simplified if we just sent a manned mission. Then a person could just climb down with an actual rope. With reduced gravity, it'd be quite easy (they may even be able to simply jump down and back up again, depending on how deep the hole is.)
Obviously you'd have to use goggles or something. The problem with a full-face mask is that it will almost always interfere with vision and communications. This paint isn't intended for high-risk individuals like a bomb-squad, it's intended to help prevent major facial damage if you do get exposed. A full face mask isn't worth it on those people.
Also eye-lids tend to do a decent job protecting the eyes.
It is isnt violating religious freedom to force employers to pay for contraceptives any more than it violates religious freedoms to ban human sacrifice.
Yes, it is. One bans an action that infringes on others basic rights. The other forces an individual to do something for another which is not related to any constitutional rights.
Of course, you wouldn't want people to not be able to have as much consequence-less sex as they want, they might actually get interested in politics or something if that happened (see: Brave New World.)
It's fun to read Sci-Fi books, but FTL is not possible irrelevant of any advances we make in science. If you think it IS in fact possible, then you fundamentally do not understand what the speed of light is, why it is, or how space-time works.
The thing is: no one really knows how space-time works (and we probably never will, not completely). We have a model and theories that fits the observations well (although not, of course, perfectly). That model states FTL is impossible using conventional means (read: any way we know of right now). To assume that that model is complete or perfect is to misunderstand the nature of science. It may be, but we really don't and won't ever know for sure. The history of science is filled to the brim with obsolete models that were accurate by the best measures at the time (and, BTW, that includes now-ridiculous models like the geocentric theory), and there is very little reason to think this will turn out to be any different. In fact, we already have some reason to think it won't, although exactly how, we have no idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? A mod is not done until it is done, and when it is being created by fans for free, it tends to take a while and proceed entirely at the pace of the people creating it, which (since they aren't being paid to do it under a certain time) is "whenever they feel like working on it." All properly done video games are "nearly done" for a very long time (years, sometimes) because going from nearly done to actually done is usually the longest part. Sometimes, they never actually do get finished even if they are released.
And Duke Nukem Forever is rather a bad example, given that, you know, it actually came out. More importantly, to my knowledge the developers of Black Mesa have never announced a release date or given a completion quantity ever, so the fact that they are now means there is no prior justification for such cynicism, since your hopes have never been actually let down. They have only been let down in your mind, which expected it to be finished before now. You really shouldn't be cynical if they've never actually failed yet.
Anyone who *actually* games wants to know who the fuck cares about underpowered Intel video card drivers. Oh, it will be able to play 5 year old Valve games? WHOOPTY-FUCKING-DOO.
Again, NOT THE POINT. The point is: open source drivers are easier to work with. Creating one for a graphics card yourself? Hard. Writing drivers is always a bitch, thats why they often don't work right (even the closed source ones creating by the people who made the hardware in the first place). Thats why the ATI open source driver kind of sucks. Graphics cards have a ton of out-of-spec tweaks and gimmicks to improve performance, and always have, sometimes even tweaks intended to make a single engine run well. That makes creating your own driver a monumental task, even if you ostensibly have the specs, because those specs are never quite valid. Hell, ATI/Nvidia can't even get their drivers to work right all the time, and they made the damned cards.
All of that is a reason why the ability to work with an existing driver (assuming it is well-made) a huge bonus. Because otherwise you are working with a black box that doesn't ever work exactly as advertised and as it properly should. If you can look at the source, you can try to figure out why. Ideally, the hardware would itself be open too so you could see how far it deviates from the specs (they all do), but we don't live in an ideal world. Thats why I use a close-source driver and probably always will. But it'd be cool if I didn't have to. And that's the point of the story.
Sorry, I won't be even considering running games on my Linux boxes/laptops. I'm running Windows 8 on my gaming laptop and it handles graphics, HDMI out, dual cards, dual monitors, Steam, all games (not just Source games) just fine. Why would I ever subject myself to the mess that is graphics on Linux?
Won't get better unless someone (e.g. Valve) works on fixing it.
The fact that the open source drivers are on Linux isn't really important to the story at all, asides from the background (i.e. that is the reason Valve are working with open source drivers to max out performance in the first place). The interesting thing is how the OSS allows Valve to tweak or examine the driver code on the fly to find out how to optimize performance.
Reading the summary is great, but understanding the point is even better.
It'd have to be "discrete" anyways, even if it is integrated into the board. There isn't enough room or thermal overhead to put the necessary power on the same die as the CPU, which is what modern Intel graphics does.
Haha, thanks for linking to that article, it's quite a hoot to read.
if you read anything about the legal skirmish between Apple and Samsung, and replace “patent infringement” with “real estate title arguments,” the entire argument of the IP communists collapses into dust.
"IP communists"? Really? I think that insult is about 30 years out of date. The irony here, of course, is that copying someone else's product and outselling them doing so is perhaps the ultimate capitalist move.
The difference being that babies aren't capable (and aren't expected to be capable) of knowing better. Adults are, which makes their behavior evil even if they don't intend it to be. It's very rare (some would even argue impossible) for someone to actually intend to commit evil as such, but people can think evil actions are good (usually because of some kind of ignorance).
Not really, use your own stem cells to grow the tissue, grow a new heart/arm/etc., and transplant it. Transplant tech has advanced enormously in recent years.
I think simply growing a full heart/arm out of your own stem cells would be the more impressive accomplishment there, actually. It'd almost certainly have a greater impact. Making it a cyborg part and transplanting it are pretty easy by comparison.
Only if they're within minutes travel of the target - otherwise, it's still an hour or more. Hypersonic is fast, but it's not magical.
Hypersonic planes (such as the X-51A) can travel at 4,000+ MPH. Stationed at a remote base for the US or nearly anywhere in the country for the Russians they can hit any target within 2,000 miles (thats considerably more than the distance between Moscow and London or Tel Aviv, for reference) in 1/2 an hour. That would take 3 or more hours for a subsonic aircraft. So yes, minutes instead of hours.
And at that speed, even a long range (270 mile or so, such as the AN/TPS-75 radar the Air Force uses, and thats pretty long range. The AEGIS radar system is less than half that) radar system will only give you 4 minutes of warning, which while more than enough time to react for an automated system, would be pretty hard to react to if humans had to be involved (such as would happen in a first-strike scenario). And hitting a target from the front that is traveling at 1.7 km/s is a bit of a problem. The US spent $700+ million developing a missile system capable of shooting down SCUD missiles traveling at speeds less than that (Mach 5). They pulled it off after decades of work... but those are ballistic missiles. I.e., they don't turn after launch, which means they are a really really easy target to hit by comparison. A guided plane traveling even faster is a considerably harder target.
That sound you heard is the OP's point whooshing about a mile over your head. Bombers can't afford to do that.
...yet. Jet and plane technology has come quite a ways since the 1960s, and what was impossible then with technology of the time might well be do-able today.
There are other uses to a hypersonic aircraft than simply dodging missiles. The ability to arrive on target in minutes instead of hours, for example. Plus, even if the bomber isn't technically faster than the missile, missiles have limited fuel capacity and require a certain reaction time before they can be fired, so if you can build a bomber fast enough, by the time the missile is fired it can't reach you before it runs out of fuel. This is even more true if you are traveling at extremely high altitudes. If you have a bomber traveling at Mach 5 (1 mile per second, roughly) and a missile traveling at Mach 6 launched at the bomber when it is 20 miles away (easily possible for a high altitude bomber to hit a target that far away), it will take 100 seconds to hit, in which time the missile must travel 120 miles, which is outside the range of, say, a Patriot missile (which travels at Mach 5). And the higher the speed, the more fuel it takes for the same distance. A bomber can afford that. It's a lot harder for a disposable missile to do the same.
According to this, most stars (2/3rds in the Milky Way) are actually single. Assuming other galaxies are similar in that respect to ours (which is safe, logical, and pretty much required given the difficulty involved in observing stars in other galaxies), most are probably single everywhere.
At those distances tides would be extremely minor. The Sun does have tidal effects on the Earth, but they are quite minor. The tidal effects of a binary star would be about the same (they would vary according to the orbit more than it does on Earth, but not enough to be an issue).
The much bigger problem would be the fact that the planet would vary in distance from a star according to it's orbit, much more so than the Earth does, even if the orbit isn't eccentric, simply because the suns are orbiting each other (probably fairly rapidly) and would therefore be closer and farther from the planet in turns. Depending on the separation, mass, and orbit of the stars, it is possible there isn't even a "goldilocks" zone, because the radiation in any orbit varies from high to low extremes too much as one star gets closer and farther. Most likely, though, one star is much smaller and will have little effect, or the radiation won't vary so much from the average that it will make a difference. It's hard to say because any such arrangement is a three-body gravity problem, so the solution is very complex (although you could model it as a 2 body assuming the planet is a point-mass to calculate the stars orbits, and the stars are a single body to calculate the planet's orbit, which is in most cases quite accurate).
I realized that gaming with that kind of pressure at some point actually takes the fun away. So once a gaming session develops into a grinding I just stop and resume at some other time. And it's kind of funny now that I see some colleagues at work play some FPSs at lunch, cursing at each other, and I wonder: how can they have fun this way?
Some people actually enjoy the challenge. For them, being the best (or just better than the people you play against often) is in itself a reward, and getting the experience to get there is a challenge which is in and of itself enjoyable. I'm not a fan of grinding that doesn't improve your skill, only your character's "skill", but playing to improve your own skill is fun, and the end reward is the thrill of defeating opponents. Especially opponents who used to beat you a lot.
They have these fancy new portable PCs called "laptops" now. Small enough to fit in a bag, can you believe it? I'm surprised you haven't heard of them, considering every one of my friends has one. Not even that expensive, and no sharing a screen that reduces a 1080p screen to an effective 480p! Incredible, I know.
/sarcasm
I'm always shocked at just how much American culture has spread world wide. And the thing is - it often works in our favor. Iranian kids playing WoW can't in any way benefit Iran that I can think of, but has multiple benefits for the U.S. Someone from the gov should be on the horn right now getting those accounts reactiviated.
No, because if they are playing WoW they aren't protesting against their government. Now they can't play WoW, they are likely wondering why, and "because their leaders want nukes" might not sit well with them. That's the idea behind sanctions.
The real problem is a social phobia about teaching little boys how they are supposed to wash and care for their penis. Instead, we just cut off the foreskin so we don't have to deal with it. Touching your "penis" is bad, after all.
Later in life it leads to abnormal masturbation, reduced sexual pleasure, and reduced pleasure of your female partner. - This study conveniently ignores these issues because they're not about children.
From TFA:
Perhaps the most powerful evidence in favour of circumcision comes from randomized controlled trials in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda. These found that, for men who have sex with women, circumcision reduced the risk of infection with HIV. (No protection was observed for men who have sex with men.) The South African and Ugandan trials also found that circumcision reduced infection rates for human papillomavirus (HPV) and herpes. The World Health Organization has already made circumcision part of its HIV-prevention strategy in sub-Saharan Africa, with a goal to circumcise 20 million men by 2015.
The AAP found that, in addition to preventing sexually transmitted infections, circumcision could reduce the rates of urinary tract infections and penile cancer, probably because the foreskin harbours infectious microbes as well as the immune cells targeted by HIV.... The task force also found no strong evidence that circumcised babies grew up with more urinary difficulties or sexual problems.
So... yeah. Reduced infection rates in children and adults, and no strong evidence of sexual problems at all. It doesn't matter if you could stop infection through education on how to properly clean the penis. Hell, HIV could be stopped dead in a few generations if people stopped having sex with multiple partners and/or used condoms. But guess what? The world doesn't work like that, and a measure that can help prevent disease with very few side effects can and should be used to help stop disease. Hence, the recommendation.
Ahem: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/04/18/1018707108. First result on Google. Short version: false positives at a .1% rate, false negatives at 7.5%, independent review caught every single one. I'd say that is reasonably accurate.
There is a ton of science in forensic science. Obviously, it is not 100% nor is it "hard" science where you can get 99.9995% confidence using a thousand or more trials for each match like you can in, say, physics. That is why you have a trial, and "beyond reasonable doubt", not beyond all doubt.
Nice strawman. One of the functions of government has always been to promote behavior beneficial for society, and prevent behavior that is detrimental to it. How else can you argue that science and evolution should be taught in the (public) classroom and not creationism (young-earth creationism, specifically)? Because the former is good for society (well educated populace), while the latter is not. That is why government offers education in the first place and requires children to be educated. Because it is necessary for a well-formed society, which is in turn required for a well-formed government.
Also, if that's your best argument for legalization of marijuana ("because otherwise it's like living in 1984!") then you can expect reasonable people to simply ignore you.
You think you are going to 'help the herd' by reducing individual liberties? So you are going to allow government to tell people what to do with themselves, how to live and allow it throw people to jail for doing things to themselves that government denies them, and this is somehow going to help society?
Yes. Society has always done this. It's necessary, much as libertarians like to think otherwise. In an ideal universe, it wouldn't, because people wouldn't choose to do stupid things that hurt themselves and others, but people always have and always will. It's a very fine balancing act between allowing people freedom to do good (constructive) things, and restricting them from doing bad (destructive) things, because a freedom that is good in one person's hands can be a destructive thing in another.
I'm actually not even taking a stance on this issue so much, I'm not really opposed to legalizing pot (though am I in favor of it either), I'm talking more in general about why you can legitimately ban it.
Alchohol is different, of course, because it doesn't tend to have lasting effects even if you drink some every day (in moderation, of course, such as my dad who has a single glass of wine) and can, depending on the kind, have some benefits (wine in particular has anti-oxidants which can improve health). But that isn't even at issue here: simply because one possibly bad thing is legal does not mean another thing should be. The fact that murderers exist and are free doesn't mean the police shouldn't track down robbers, for example (I'm not comparing pot or alcohol to either of those things, it's just an analogy). It's a terrible, fallacious, and meaningless argument that really ends up making your argument look weak. A lot of people use that type of argument on Slashdot (commonly, "why are they going after copyright infringers when rapists are on the loose?!?!?!"), but it's really bad.
And for the record (not the place to argue about it, though, so I won't), I do think the government should have the power to deny women abortions, because I think abortion is murder. So yeah, even weaker argument there IMO.
Probably both, but the study shows the former. From the abstract:
Persistent cannabis use was associated with neuropsychological decline broadly across domains of functioning, even after controlling for years of education. Informants also reported noticing more cognitive problems for persistent cannabis users. Impairment was concentrated among adolescent-onset cannabis users, with more persistent use associated with greater decline. Further, cessation of cannabis use did not fully restore neuropsychological functioning among adolescent-onset cannabis users. Findings are suggestive of a neurotoxic effect of cannabis on the adolescent brain and highlight the importance of prevention and policy efforts targeting adolescents.
They followed individuals for several decades, and frequent users showed a decline of neuropsychological functioning that non-pot-smokers did not. In other words, pot damages your brain. Note that they were specifically testing adolescent-onset users: in other words, people who used it as teenagers. Whether it would have the same effects on an adult who didn't smoke it as a teen isn't answered (although probably yes, I'm guessing the effects would be considerably reduced).
It's not about individual intelligence, it's about herd intelligence. If individuals lower their intelligence, the intelligence of the group goes down, and in a democratic society that is devastating. It's actually a problem in any society (except maybe a tyranny or dictatorship), but it's worse when individuals have the ability to influence society directly. Unless, of course, drug users would be willing to give up their vote, which I don't imagine is going to happen anytime soon (nor, indeed, would it be enough to counteract the effects completely.)
By lowering your intelligence, you aren't hurting other individuals, you are hurting your entire culture and their ability to make prudent and intelligent decisions, which in a way is worse than harming individual people, since the effects can last for generations.
Communications are going to be a major issue. Gets a lot harder to send a signal out when you have 20+ meters of solid rock overhead. And even if you go down a sink-hole with a direct line of sight upwards, you'd have to send the signal straight up. Only solution I can see would be a repeater at the surface, possibly with a physical cable going down. It's pretty challenging overall.
All that would be tremendously simplified if we just sent a manned mission. Then a person could just climb down with an actual rope. With reduced gravity, it'd be quite easy (they may even be able to simply jump down and back up again, depending on how deep the hole is.)
Obviously you'd have to use goggles or something. The problem with a full-face mask is that it will almost always interfere with vision and communications. This paint isn't intended for high-risk individuals like a bomb-squad, it's intended to help prevent major facial damage if you do get exposed. A full face mask isn't worth it on those people.
Also eye-lids tend to do a decent job protecting the eyes.
It is isnt violating religious freedom to force employers to pay for contraceptives any more than it violates religious freedoms to ban human sacrifice.
Yes, it is. One bans an action that infringes on others basic rights. The other forces an individual to do something for another which is not related to any constitutional rights.
Of course, you wouldn't want people to not be able to have as much consequence-less sex as they want, they might actually get interested in politics or something if that happened (see: Brave New World .)
It's fun to read Sci-Fi books, but FTL is not possible irrelevant of any advances we make in science. If you think it IS in fact possible, then you fundamentally do not understand what the speed of light is, why it is, or how space-time works.
The thing is: no one really knows how space-time works (and we probably never will, not completely). We have a model and theories that fits the observations well (although not, of course, perfectly). That model states FTL is impossible using conventional means (read: any way we know of right now). To assume that that model is complete or perfect is to misunderstand the nature of science. It may be, but we really don't and won't ever know for sure. The history of science is filled to the brim with obsolete models that were accurate by the best measures at the time (and, BTW, that includes now-ridiculous models like the geocentric theory), and there is very little reason to think this will turn out to be any different. In fact, we already have some reason to think it won't, although exactly how, we have no idea.