Sure, they "get it" all right. People roll over for software activation now because companies like Ubisoft have won a place for it by threatening something worse and then relenting. The damage is done though - the sea change in DRM came with activation, that's when you gave up ownership of your media, quibbles over when and how often you need to activate are a straw man that they've thrown out in the (successful) hope that people will parrot crap like, "Well, I only need to activate once. That's nothing, look at what Ubisoft used to do."
It seems possible to me that the FBI had the UDIDs but didn't know it. With warrantless searches now the norm and the unscrupulous attitude that that implies, agents don't have or expect the oversight that they used to. So it could easily be that an agent collected those, thinking it was no big thing.
That is not correct, at least not for the US strategic oil reserve: it is explicitly there in order to help stabilize the price, created in response to the spike in price in the 70s. It isn't nearly large enough to keep the country running in case of a supply disruption of any significant length.
All right, I skimmed the article and replied in haste so let me correct myself: the cost of getting the circumcision is indeed factored into the $313 cost, and more than that, that cost is averaged over the entire population. So the real cost would be nothing for most people and extremely high for those people who got HIV or some other serious venereal disease or urinary tract infection.
The actual AAP report also doesn't focus as much on the African trails as the Nature article suggests, what they're really saying is that the cost of getting the circumcision and treating the nominal complications that arise from it is small enough that we should make sure that the option is available (i.e.: not prohibited) even if the benefits are dubious. They also mention some speculative reasons why removing the foreskin may help with infection - the inner surface is thin and susceptible to micro tears, etc. I still think they should do some real trails here before they make recommendations for here, but this is certainly a more reasonable position.
I personally don't think circumcision is something that should be done to a child who can't fight back, especially since most of the problems that it supposedly helps with don't come up until you're sexually active anyway, but I do recognize that using a condom is much easier for a circumcised person than it is for someone with a foreskin.
I am also skeptical, though I'm not sure about claiming natural = good. First of all, a savings of US$313 over the life of the patient is trivial given the current US health care system. Really really trivial - I hope they factored the cost of getting the circumcision into that, because that procedure alone is likely to cost double that amount.
Second, they're citing the African trials again as evidence for this, which... Why would they do that? Those trials took place in some of the poorest parts of Africa, they say nothing about efficacy of circumcision in places were soap is abundant. If there's so much debate around this issue, why don't they just do some trials here in the US?
I think the Democrats realize that if they decide to fight it out on money, they are going to eventually lose. Obama taking the extra money was a tactical success, but a strategic failure that I think that the Democratic party will regret sooner or later.
No, it's Citizen's United and the resulting super PACs that are doing it. The money going to the actual campaigns is still limited to $5000 per contributor (Wikipedia says $2500... I'm not sure that's the whole story, but the point is that it's limited), it's the super PACs that can take an unlimited amount of money and from anonymous donors.
You are correct that this is working far far more in the Republican's favor than the Democrat's, partly because Obama publicly came out against super PACs and declared that he could win without one. He has one anyway - it was set up on his behalf, whether he wanted it or not. However, it has only raised something like $40M vs. $800M between all the super PACs for Romney.
I'm undoing mods to post this, but people need to be clear on what the problem is if we're ever going to have a hope of fixing it.
Okay, well that is also possible. If you look at the link I provided it considers a scenario of high affluence but strong environmental regulation, this would allow for a population of four billion. The question remains though: is heavily regulating people's environmental impact, or changing their values as you put it, a superior option to regulating their baby production, or teaching them that having lots of babies isn't a good thing? I don't see that it is.
Yeah, I didn't really follow the question either. Wars over resources thanks to dwindling oil or droughts or... who knows. Maybe he's suggesting that people will start dying at some point, since ten billion can't be sustained indefinitely. Or maybe a large portion of those ten billion will simply be kept very poor - we could sustain a much larger number of people at a lower level of consumption.
You're suggesting that technology can solve the problem, but the article is talking about technology which would exacerbate it. What you're betting on is that one technology will outpace the other and while that's very likely I don't see why it would go the way you think - overpopulation already has a substantial lead and it doesn't look like it's in any danger of falling behind.
You are correct that the Earth could sustain more people, up to twenty billion at a consumption level equal to the average Mexican (it's not all about food). Here's a link:
The question is: is that the road we want to take? Is a lower quality of life worthwhile for the sake of having a larger number of people? Forcing people to move to dense, efficient cities doesn't seem to me to be a superior option to forcing people to reign in their currently unrestrained baby-making.
Current estimates have the global population leveling off at ten billion, with the the Earth able to sustain a maximum of two billion at a consumption level equal to the average American. Those estimates are based on current technology, however. With a dramatic increase in lifespan we would be looking at a very significant population bump, and with us already unable to sustain the existing population... I've often wondered if the ability to extend people's lives already exists and the people who came up with it, independently perhaps, have just kept it to themselves. They are, presumably, smart people after all.
Their actions would still have been noteworthy, perhaps not illegal, but certainly noteworthy. Bear in mind that they essentially just spotted a bunch of people standing on a street corner and decided to kill them all when they saw that a few were carrying weapons. That's noteworthy. People excuse this by saying "it's war," although calling the continued occupation of Iraq a war is about as honest as the "war on terror." More than that though, even in a real war it's not as though all military action, even properly executed military action, is okay.
Consider: Scenario 1 - Germany invades France, the US eventually invades France with the goal of liberating it and shoots German soldiers from a helicopter in the process. Scenario 2 - The US invades Iraq and shoots Iraqi soldiers from a helicopter in the process.
Both wars involve soldiers doing their thing, in basically the same way, but one is okay and one isn't.
Speaking of political double-think, I think it's funny that this story about a Republican platform for Internet freedom comes right after a story titled "Why WikiLeaks Is Worth Defending From Grandstanding Politicians Who Only Occasionally Care About Freedom, Particularly on the Internet." (Okay, I may have modified the title slightly.)
Well I'm surprised about the father/mother relation. It was my understanding that birth defects increase dramatically with the age of the mother, and less so with the age of the father. Birth defect does not necessarily mean mutation, but this result still surprises me.
They also didn't freeze any funds, the IndieAGoGo project was canceled - no funds were ever transferred. I hate Paypal too, but this rant was misapplied.
Also, the reason why you use Paypal is because you don't get any donations if you require paper checks or wire transfers. Part of being a successful charity is understanding that you need to make it easy for people to contribute.
Well okay, you could certainly say that. I just don't see why you would. Most laws prohibiting killing humans center on the idea that humans are special somehow, that it's human-ness that needs to be preserved. Some people try to define this, calling it sentience, but the point is that under the law it's human life which is exclusively valuable.
While youngish children could be accurately thought of as small stupid selfish adults, babies are very different from other humans. You could make an argument that babies are not substantially different from monkeys or pigs, animals that we kill with regularity, and therefore killing babies should be considered with equal disregard. I expect some parents would protest though. Not that they'd have a compelling argument against the practice, they'd probably just yell and punch you.
Where was I going with this? I think I was trying to say that you can make a rule prohibiting anything, but our rules about killing are generally very lax. It's okay to kill almost anything that isn't human or human-like, and the further a thing gets from being human the more trivial a matter it is to kill it. It's hard to imagine anything further from human than a bunch of cells that are only nominally a distinct creature: unable to continue existing without life support. Anyway, the idea I'm getting at is that while you can make a law or an ethical determination that killing a fetus is wrong, it would represent a large departure from our collective attitude towards killing in general.
and since killing adults is wrong, killing babies must be OK.
Er, I don't see why you couldn't say, "Killing adults is wrong, and killing babies is also wrong." I don't think your conclusion follows from the argument. It's true that the argument does break down eventually - starting in, roughly, the third trimester it is not so clear that this thing is not a baby. You could debate what the proper course of action is at that point, but prior to that it's pretty straightforward.
but rather believes that at some arbitrary time the unseen individual is suddenly real (like, second, third trimester, a specific number of days into pregnancy), just a magic but arbitrary switch that has nothing to do with physical development
This isn't exactly correct. As you say, it's somewhat arbitrary and difficult to determine ethically what exactly a baby is and when it comes into existence. However, it's not very difficult at all to identify something which is not a baby. My keyboard is not a baby, no one would ever mistake it for one. Nor would anyone ever mistake a fertilized egg or an embryo for a baby. They have nothing in common with a baby beyond DNA (something that my keyboard is covered with).
So they're not saying that a baby comes into existence at this time and therefore prior to that abortion is okay, they're saying that this thing is clearly not a baby so... what's the big deal?
Ted Stevens was chair of the committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation when he made his little "series of tubes" speech, and that didn't get rid of him. He only resigned when he was convicted for corruption (he might not have been chair anymore at that point, I'm not sure), and he was only just barely removed from the senate despite his conviction.
Being competent isn't what matters as long as you can convince your base that your opponent is a socialist who wants to take their jorbs.
It's possible that's Obama has gone back on some campaign promises, probable really, but that doesn't mean that they don't have impact. Every time Obama or any other politician breaks a promise it weakens their position and so they avoid it when they can.
Telecom immunity isn't a great example, he voted against it originally and attempted to remove the amendment that added it to the FISA reform bill but failed to do so. I'm in the camp that believes they should have killed or delayed the bill altogether as a consequence, but Obama wound up voting in favor of the bill despite the bad amendment. Just like the NDAA this seems like manufactured criticism - republicans and conservative democrats managed to push a bad amendment onto a large bill, and Obama decided that a stalemate and resulting inaction would be worse than going ahead with the bill, amendment intact. Certainly I wish the telecom immunity had never gone through, but calling it a betrayal is really blowing it out of proportion.
Nonsense. Even if you take a maximally cynical position that each candidate is completely purchased and by each company and each industry to an equal extent (false), legislation written by those companies must acknowledge campaign promises to at least some degree. So net neutrality legislation written by the ISPs for Obama would be more neutral than net neutrality legislation written by the ISPs for Romney.
I will certainly acknowledge that special interests have far more influence than they should, and even more in the wake of Citizens United, but I don't understand this nihilistic approach to politics. If you really believe that election results are completely inconsequential, why are you here commenting on them?
Are you saying that they are both equally ignorant? Or that the choice between Romney and Obama would have no impact on this issue?
I'm not sure about the first point, neither one of them has demonstrated Ted Stevens-style ignorance, but the second point is definitely wrong: even if they don't know the full impact of the promises that they make, those promises still influence policy. Legislation will result from this, on one side or the other, if only to keep up appearances of making good with campaign promises.
What is happening is that America (and most Americans) don't want the U.S. government to be subordinated below some global government. We've already seen what happens when sovereignty is surrendered to a more universal government, and for the most part we don't want to see that happen again. Once was enough and even then that universal government has likely gone too far.
You're talking about the US federal government, to which the states were subordinated? Or the states, to which the counties are subordinated? Or the counties, to which the municipalities are subordinated? You really need to be a little more clear here. If this is more of that "state's rights" bullshit, let me remind you once again: the original and most powerful argument both for and against state's rights was slavery.
Also: fuck you. What is this shit?
BTW, I sure hope you aren't an American or living in America. If you are, get the hell out of here.
I'm not leaving my country just because some assholes think they should be able to torture without criticism. The UN and the International Court are an attempt to bring the world a little closer together. They've had some successes and some failures, but the most important thing is the effort. Turning our back on the UN means turning our back on the rest of the world, all for the sake of some worthless sovereignty?
Development is much further along than this drug, RISUG could be available within the next five-ten years. It's available right now if you're in India and willing to be a guinea pig. No testicle shrinkage, though the Wikipedia article say there might be other drawbacks. The article says that there's no evidence for adverse effects though... which makes me wonder why it brings that up at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, they "get it" all right. People roll over for software activation now because companies like Ubisoft have won a place for it by threatening something worse and then relenting. The damage is done though - the sea change in DRM came with activation, that's when you gave up ownership of your media, quibbles over when and how often you need to activate are a straw man that they've thrown out in the (successful) hope that people will parrot crap like, "Well, I only need to activate once. That's nothing, look at what Ubisoft used to do."
It seems possible to me that the FBI had the UDIDs but didn't know it. With warrantless searches now the norm and the unscrupulous attitude that that implies, agents don't have or expect the oversight that they used to. So it could easily be that an agent collected those, thinking it was no big thing.
You should read it all though, that was a good article. Thanks.
That is not correct, at least not for the US strategic oil reserve: it is explicitly there in order to help stabilize the price, created in response to the spike in price in the 70s. It isn't nearly large enough to keep the country running in case of a supply disruption of any significant length.
Thank you for a moment of rationality in what will doubtless be an enlightened discussion.
All right, I skimmed the article and replied in haste so let me correct myself: the cost of getting the circumcision is indeed factored into the $313 cost, and more than that, that cost is averaged over the entire population. So the real cost would be nothing for most people and extremely high for those people who got HIV or some other serious venereal disease or urinary tract infection.
The actual AAP report also doesn't focus as much on the African trails as the Nature article suggests, what they're really saying is that the cost of getting the circumcision and treating the nominal complications that arise from it is small enough that we should make sure that the option is available (i.e.: not prohibited) even if the benefits are dubious. They also mention some speculative reasons why removing the foreskin may help with infection - the inner surface is thin and susceptible to micro tears, etc. I still think they should do some real trails here before they make recommendations for here, but this is certainly a more reasonable position.
I personally don't think circumcision is something that should be done to a child who can't fight back, especially since most of the problems that it supposedly helps with don't come up until you're sexually active anyway, but I do recognize that using a condom is much easier for a circumcised person than it is for someone with a foreskin.
I am also skeptical, though I'm not sure about claiming natural = good. First of all, a savings of US$313 over the life of the patient is trivial given the current US health care system. Really really trivial - I hope they factored the cost of getting the circumcision into that, because that procedure alone is likely to cost double that amount.
Second, they're citing the African trials again as evidence for this, which... Why would they do that? Those trials took place in some of the poorest parts of Africa, they say nothing about efficacy of circumcision in places were soap is abundant. If there's so much debate around this issue, why don't they just do some trials here in the US?
I think the Democrats realize that if they decide to fight it out on money, they are going to eventually lose. Obama taking the extra money was a tactical success, but a strategic failure that I think that the Democratic party will regret sooner or later.
No, it's Citizen's United and the resulting super PACs that are doing it. The money going to the actual campaigns is still limited to $5000 per contributor (Wikipedia says $2500... I'm not sure that's the whole story, but the point is that it's limited), it's the super PACs that can take an unlimited amount of money and from anonymous donors.
You are correct that this is working far far more in the Republican's favor than the Democrat's, partly because Obama publicly came out against super PACs and declared that he could win without one. He has one anyway - it was set up on his behalf, whether he wanted it or not. However, it has only raised something like $40M vs. $800M between all the super PACs for Romney.
I'm undoing mods to post this, but people need to be clear on what the problem is if we're ever going to have a hope of fixing it.
Okay, well that is also possible. If you look at the link I provided it considers a scenario of high affluence but strong environmental regulation, this would allow for a population of four billion. The question remains though: is heavily regulating people's environmental impact, or changing their values as you put it, a superior option to regulating their baby production, or teaching them that having lots of babies isn't a good thing? I don't see that it is.
Yeah, I didn't really follow the question either. Wars over resources thanks to dwindling oil or droughts or... who knows. Maybe he's suggesting that people will start dying at some point, since ten billion can't be sustained indefinitely. Or maybe a large portion of those ten billion will simply be kept very poor - we could sustain a much larger number of people at a lower level of consumption.
You're suggesting that technology can solve the problem, but the article is talking about technology which would exacerbate it. What you're betting on is that one technology will outpace the other and while that's very likely I don't see why it would go the way you think - overpopulation already has a substantial lead and it doesn't look like it's in any danger of falling behind.
You are correct that the Earth could sustain more people, up to twenty billion at a consumption level equal to the average Mexican (it's not all about food). Here's a link:
http://www.ecofuture.org/pop/rpts/mccluney_maxpop.html
The question is: is that the road we want to take? Is a lower quality of life worthwhile for the sake of having a larger number of people? Forcing people to move to dense, efficient cities doesn't seem to me to be a superior option to forcing people to reign in their currently unrestrained baby-making.
Current estimates have the global population leveling off at ten billion, with the the Earth able to sustain a maximum of two billion at a consumption level equal to the average American. Those estimates are based on current technology, however. With a dramatic increase in lifespan we would be looking at a very significant population bump, and with us already unable to sustain the existing population... I've often wondered if the ability to extend people's lives already exists and the people who came up with it, independently perhaps, have just kept it to themselves. They are, presumably, smart people after all.
Their actions would still have been noteworthy, perhaps not illegal, but certainly noteworthy. Bear in mind that they essentially just spotted a bunch of people standing on a street corner and decided to kill them all when they saw that a few were carrying weapons. That's noteworthy. People excuse this by saying "it's war," although calling the continued occupation of Iraq a war is about as honest as the "war on terror." More than that though, even in a real war it's not as though all military action, even properly executed military action, is okay.
Consider: Scenario 1 - Germany invades France, the US eventually invades France with the goal of liberating it and shoots German soldiers from a helicopter in the process. Scenario 2 - The US invades Iraq and shoots Iraqi soldiers from a helicopter in the process.
Both wars involve soldiers doing their thing, in basically the same way, but one is okay and one isn't.
Speaking of political double-think, I think it's funny that this story about a Republican platform for Internet freedom comes right after a story titled "Why WikiLeaks Is Worth Defending From Grandstanding Politicians Who Only Occasionally Care About Freedom, Particularly on the Internet." (Okay, I may have modified the title slightly.)
Well I'm surprised about the father/mother relation. It was my understanding that birth defects increase dramatically with the age of the mother, and less so with the age of the father. Birth defect does not necessarily mean mutation, but this result still surprises me.
They also didn't freeze any funds, the IndieAGoGo project was canceled - no funds were ever transferred. I hate Paypal too, but this rant was misapplied.
Also, the reason why you use Paypal is because you don't get any donations if you require paper checks or wire transfers. Part of being a successful charity is understanding that you need to make it easy for people to contribute.
Well okay, you could certainly say that. I just don't see why you would. Most laws prohibiting killing humans center on the idea that humans are special somehow, that it's human-ness that needs to be preserved. Some people try to define this, calling it sentience, but the point is that under the law it's human life which is exclusively valuable.
While youngish children could be accurately thought of as small stupid selfish adults, babies are very different from other humans. You could make an argument that babies are not substantially different from monkeys or pigs, animals that we kill with regularity, and therefore killing babies should be considered with equal disregard. I expect some parents would protest though. Not that they'd have a compelling argument against the practice, they'd probably just yell and punch you.
Where was I going with this? I think I was trying to say that you can make a rule prohibiting anything, but our rules about killing are generally very lax. It's okay to kill almost anything that isn't human or human-like, and the further a thing gets from being human the more trivial a matter it is to kill it. It's hard to imagine anything further from human than a bunch of cells that are only nominally a distinct creature: unable to continue existing without life support. Anyway, the idea I'm getting at is that while you can make a law or an ethical determination that killing a fetus is wrong, it would represent a large departure from our collective attitude towards killing in general.
and since killing adults is wrong, killing babies must be OK.
Er, I don't see why you couldn't say, "Killing adults is wrong, and killing babies is also wrong." I don't think your conclusion follows from the argument. It's true that the argument does break down eventually - starting in, roughly, the third trimester it is not so clear that this thing is not a baby. You could debate what the proper course of action is at that point, but prior to that it's pretty straightforward.
but rather believes that at some arbitrary time the unseen individual is suddenly real (like, second, third trimester, a specific number of days into pregnancy), just a magic but arbitrary switch that has nothing to do with physical development
This isn't exactly correct. As you say, it's somewhat arbitrary and difficult to determine ethically what exactly a baby is and when it comes into existence. However, it's not very difficult at all to identify something which is not a baby. My keyboard is not a baby, no one would ever mistake it for one. Nor would anyone ever mistake a fertilized egg or an embryo for a baby. They have nothing in common with a baby beyond DNA (something that my keyboard is covered with).
So they're not saying that a baby comes into existence at this time and therefore prior to that abortion is okay, they're saying that this thing is clearly not a baby so... what's the big deal?
Ted Stevens was chair of the committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation when he made his little "series of tubes" speech, and that didn't get rid of him. He only resigned when he was convicted for corruption (he might not have been chair anymore at that point, I'm not sure), and he was only just barely removed from the senate despite his conviction.
Being competent isn't what matters as long as you can convince your base that your opponent is a socialist who wants to take their jorbs.
It's possible that's Obama has gone back on some campaign promises, probable really, but that doesn't mean that they don't have impact. Every time Obama or any other politician breaks a promise it weakens their position and so they avoid it when they can.
Telecom immunity isn't a great example, he voted against it originally and attempted to remove the amendment that added it to the FISA reform bill but failed to do so. I'm in the camp that believes they should have killed or delayed the bill altogether as a consequence, but Obama wound up voting in favor of the bill despite the bad amendment. Just like the NDAA this seems like manufactured criticism - republicans and conservative democrats managed to push a bad amendment onto a large bill, and Obama decided that a stalemate and resulting inaction would be worse than going ahead with the bill, amendment intact. Certainly I wish the telecom immunity had never gone through, but calling it a betrayal is really blowing it out of proportion.
Nonsense. Even if you take a maximally cynical position that each candidate is completely purchased and by each company and each industry to an equal extent (false), legislation written by those companies must acknowledge campaign promises to at least some degree. So net neutrality legislation written by the ISPs for Obama would be more neutral than net neutrality legislation written by the ISPs for Romney.
I will certainly acknowledge that special interests have far more influence than they should, and even more in the wake of Citizens United, but I don't understand this nihilistic approach to politics. If you really believe that election results are completely inconsequential, why are you here commenting on them?
Republican or demonrat, it makes no difference.
Are you saying that they are both equally ignorant? Or that the choice between Romney and Obama would have no impact on this issue?
I'm not sure about the first point, neither one of them has demonstrated Ted Stevens-style ignorance, but the second point is definitely wrong: even if they don't know the full impact of the promises that they make, those promises still influence policy. Legislation will result from this, on one side or the other, if only to keep up appearances of making good with campaign promises.
What is happening is that America (and most Americans) don't want the U.S. government to be subordinated below some global government. We've already seen what happens when sovereignty is surrendered to a more universal government, and for the most part we don't want to see that happen again. Once was enough and even then that universal government has likely gone too far.
You're talking about the US federal government, to which the states were subordinated? Or the states, to which the counties are subordinated? Or the counties, to which the municipalities are subordinated? You really need to be a little more clear here. If this is more of that "state's rights" bullshit, let me remind you once again: the original and most powerful argument both for and against state's rights was slavery.
Also: fuck you. What is this shit?
BTW, I sure hope you aren't an American or living in America. If you are, get the hell out of here.
I'm not leaving my country just because some assholes think they should be able to torture without criticism. The UN and the International Court are an attempt to bring the world a little closer together. They've had some successes and some failures, but the most important thing is the effort. Turning our back on the UN means turning our back on the rest of the world, all for the sake of some worthless sovereignty?
Have a look at RISUG:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_sperm_under_guidance
Development is much further along than this drug, RISUG could be available within the next five-ten years. It's available right now if you're in India and willing to be a guinea pig. No testicle shrinkage, though the Wikipedia article say there might be other drawbacks. The article says that there's no evidence for adverse effects though... which makes me wonder why it brings that up at all.