Cable TV is nearly as passe as POTS. Even my Boomer parents have dropped their landline and went cell-only.
Cell-only has a practical problem. If your cell phone is on the first floor of your home, and you're in your bedroom on the second floor, you likely won't hear it ring.
My parents have a large house and this isn't a problem. *I* never have this problem because not only do I keep my phone with me, but also my generation rarely makes or receives phone calls. We communicate via text, email, IM, whatever. Phone calls or Skyping are scheduled affairs. I literally get no more than one unscheduled phone call a month, and unless I recognize the caller number I don't even bother answering.
Regardless, the drawbacks of having a landline far outweighed any benefit my parents might have been receiving from it, which is why they canceled it.
And what will your children use for important calls between when they get home from school and when you get home from work?
This is a nonissue. If your kid is old enough to be home alone, they are old enough to have an inexpensive cell phone. Ting costs $6/month for a line. Besides, if your kids *don't* have a cell phone then how will they call 911 in an emergency while they are traveling home from school and aren't at home yet?
Likewise, Netflix and Amazon Prime have a practical problem: no NFL.
Not an issue for me (cf. my two chosen ala carte channels). Further, given Dish's offer of ESPN via internet this is a bellwether for sports being live streamed on the internet. People are already doing this via geolocked services intended for expats by using VPN services with gateways sited in other countries. It's only a matter of time before these stupid pretenses are dropped.
Been saying this as long as/. was around, few agreed but most argued.
I think that savings will materialize, just not for the average subscriber. I would have taken exactly two channels last time I subscribed to cable (which was a decade ago)... History and Sci-Fi. Literally no other channels. I think my bill would have decreased had this been offered unbundled.
However, technology has advanced and now I would take 0 channels. I want everything I watch to be on demand, commercial free. So, that means Netflix, Amazon Prime, and possibly that HBO offering in the future.
Cable offerings are irrelevant to me. I won't go back to watching commercials or being forced to wait for something to air rather than viewing it when it's convenient for me (no, DVRs aren't equivalent). Cable company value to me is exactly equal to how reliably they provide high bandwidth/low latency internet access—well, plus customer service, but let's be realistic about that.
Cable TV is nearly as passe as POTS. Even my Boomer parents have dropped their landline and went cell-only. The writing is on the wall for cable.
i guess im still relatively new enough to not realize that this comment was cliche, so apologies for that (i guess) but i still fail to see why this is 'stuff that matters'.
No need to apologize. This kind of story would have never made it to the site pre-11 Sep 2001. When posting a story about the WTC and Pentagon attacks, CmdrTaco mentioned he would not normally include something like that on the site because it wasn't topical but decided to make an exception.
However, the thousands of comments made on that story opened their eyes to the possibility of using stories like this as clickbait for ad impressions and to inflate traffic numbers. Thus, they proceeded down the path to the dark side, and the community came up with this "stuff that matters" semantic retcon to justify posting anything at all, even though in the past stories nominally had to satisfy both constraints ("news for nerds AND stuff that matters").
Looks like Dice is working on retiring slogan altogether. A more honest version currently would be "Tech News or Whatever We Think the 'Audience' Might Flame War Over. Oh, and Your Car Insurance Hopes You'll Never Guess This One Neat Trick That Happened Next..."
Imagine someone trying to publish a paper on aneuploidy->tumorigenesis (or any other "alternative" process) with someone having your attitude as a reviewer!
I'm sure they would get a warm reception for an intriguing paper.
However, if the content of the paper made it clear that they were ignorant of even the basic, undergraduate-level concepts in the field that they were "overturning", I doubt I would take the time to try to tease out what they meant to say when they fail to properly execute their "refutation" of established knowledge. I mean, after all, it's not like I would be getting co-author credit or receiving tuition for providing their education.
Ask yourself how seriously I would be taken if I submitted a paper to a mathematics journal claiming I had a 256 step algebraic proof of Fermat's Last Theorem and I made it apparent in the opening paragraph that I didn't even have a competent undergraduate background in set theory and therefore mangled my claims by misapplying the Axiom of Choice.
I will give you credit, though for at least digging up something off PubMed. Far too many "skeptics" just want to play the move the goalposts game.
(I warn you, though, if you try to demand citation after citation that HPV can cause cancer then we're done, because all you'll get is lmgtfy.com links)
Here's your basic education meta-background, again presuming you aren't just trying to troll. Only some HPV strains cause cancer. High risk strains of HPV produce proteins that act equivalently to mutations in the genome because they bind and inactivate tumor suppressor proteins like p53 and pRB. By removing the functional product, this is equivalent to two-hits of point mutation and therefore results in an inactive gene product (bound and neutralized product is equivalent to nonexistent product).
HPV E7 is equivalent to a mutation in a protooncogene. It interacts with cyclin dependent kinase inhibitors and therefore acts to initiate replication.
Mutations were introduced into the R-ras gene at codons 38 or 87, analogous to positions 12 and 61, respectively, responsible for H-ras oncogene activation. [...] Transfectants expressing either R-ras mutant formed colonies in soft agar and were tumorigenic in vivo.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the burden of proof lies on you when you contradict the preponderance of established knowledge.
You could read about oncogenesis in HPV, the mechanism of which is well elucidated, but I doubt you will even admit that viruses can cause cancer. I'm not going to play your "guess where I will move the goalposts next" game, especially as you seem to be applying some new "appeal to ignorance as a form of authority" fallacy. No doubt eventually you would demand evidence that cells exist at all and reject any citation showing otherwise.
Put up credible evidence to corroborate your contradiction of established knowledge. Right now your speculation is about as credible as a counterclaim that Russell's teapot is the ultimate cause of all cancer.
If the narrative you subscribe to is correct, people should be able to take a normal cell, introduce the point mutations, and observe it transforming. They can't...
I still suggest you educate yourself, even though you seem to have already convinced yourself of the (dubious) veracity of your speculation. You might then understand, for example, about oncogenes, tumor suppressors, and cancer inducing viruses. Yes, scholasticism is not science, but ignorance is no virtue.
Also how do you explain the effects of non mutagens such as asbestos? The claim that two hits to a oncogene and suppressor are REQUIRED is surely too strong.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you really should familiarize yourself with basic concepts in the field before trying to speculate.
For example, two hits are required on a tumor suppressor gene but only one hit is required on a protooncogene. This will be obvious if you understand the mechanisms involved. Once you learn why that's the case, you can probably also learn from proximate educational material why persistent irritants that cannot be cleared by the body (asbestos is the classical example) can cause cancer. These are far from unexplained mysteries at this point.
Oh, you might also enjoy learning how certain viruses cause cancer even without using a lysogenic/retroviral approach (c.f. HPV) and what that is equivalent to in terms of tumor suppressors & oncogenes.
You appear to be performing the act you advise me not to do.
Haha, no, I merely misphrased. As I said before, cancer requires a mutation in a protooncogene and a two-hit to disable a tumor suppressor gene.
Perhaps only mutations that lead to stable aneuploidies are an issue.
Feel free to back up that claim. I'm sure you'll understand why less weight is given to speculation from an AC that seems to contradict both Occam's Razor as well as current understanding in the field.
That is how I meant to phrase it. Sorry for the confusion.
However 95% to 100% of tumors are reported Aneuploid.
Yes, chromosomal duplication, wholesale deletion, transposition, etc, do tend to happen in cancer due to accumulated errors in a positive feedback loop. For example, the most famous human cancer cell line for lab use is HeLa (taken from Henrietta Lacks' cervical cancer back in the 1950's) have 70-80 chromosomes rather than the normal human 46.
However, in a larger sense your point isn't well-made because we are discussing oncogenesis and you are talking about sampling cells from an, ipso facto, established cancer. You can't make claims about what triggered the cancer by sampling a cell that definitely had many generations of cancer evolution before a detectable tumor was formed.
You seem to misunderstand: cancer requires more than a single mutation. At a bare minimum cancer needs a protooncogene mutation, and then typically also requires Knudson two-hit on at least one of the tumor suppressor genes. That, together, gets cancer started.
The angiogenesis and metastasis mutations (among others) happen later due to natural selection. Cancer is just evolution.
To restate: I have never heard of a single DNA point mutation from wild type that can cause cancer. Multiple mutations of specific types are required. The odds of this happening are increased because most adult cells are on "pause" in the cell cycle, so mutations can accumulate without causing immediate triggering of apoptosis.
At the very least, we should also despise Newton if anyone who ever favored him committed a crime.
Based on the number of people who use weapons based on Newtonian physics to kill, Newton may be the biggest mass murderer of all time.
Haha, I was just going to post that, with the emphasis on how Newton masterminded the only historical deployment of nuclear weapons against civilian population centers.
Wow, so we've now gone as far as drive while drunk once, and get the death penalty? Wow...
Worse than that. These people aren't thinking clearly. In fact, I wonder if they may be excessively fatigued.
Have any of these people advocating extreme punishments for victimless DUI have ever driven while tired? Because, if so, they are likely hypocrites.
Cognitive impairment after approximately 18 hours awake is similar to that of someone with a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.05%. After about 24 hours awake, impairment is equivalent to a BAC of 0.10%, higher than the legal limit in all states.
I'm guessing most of these people calling for draconian punishment for DUI are merely neo-Prohibitionists. They haven't built a solid case for why these punishments are deserved, whereas other driving impairments that can induce driving impairments equivalent to the 0.08 BAC level such as cell phone, eating, screaming kids in the back seat, etc, are not.
Let's be consistent! First offense, driving while tired: summary execution via rectal impalement, on the side of the road, followed by gibbeting until the corpse is dismembered by wild animals! That will *definitely* work and is a proportional punishment. Those tired fucks deserve whatever we give them, because they've... and...... yeah!
Of course they don't. They're too cheap to pay for something someone has produced and believe they are entitled to take what they want. [...] They obviously believe the product has some value or they wouldn't have stolen it.
Not really. I'm actively considering pirating the Interview then immediately deleting it, unwatched. I could easily afford to pay to stream the movie, but I hate Sony only slightly less than I hate the influenza A virus.
If one doesn't believe something have value, why steal it in the first place?
On principle. I don't actually want to see this movie. "Free" is a price too high for this. I imagine I would want to take a shower after viewing it, and I have no desire to invest a fraction of my life in watching such drivel.
However, I strongly believe we should not be cowed into self-censorship by threats. Therefore, I feel a compulsion to access this movie in defiance of said threats, a goal which is in tension with my strong desire to give Sony nothing of value.
Ergo, the degenerate solution of pirating and deleting the movie unwatched. It's a logically consistent position.
I don't think we should be teaching our kids exponential running time O(n^2) algorithms.
Call me liberal, but I don't think we should be teaching our kids improper definitions for "exponential" *or* myths that O(n^2) algorithms like bubble sort are bad.
Quick: which is going to be faster to sort a list of 4 items, bubble sort or randomized partition merge sort? What's that you say? Proper algorithm selection requires more than knee-jerk application of platitudes? Exactly.
It won't work. They are war dialing all of North America.
Works just fine for me, and I perceive no reason it wouldn't work for others. Do you wish to restate your objection?
I have never given out either of my last two real phone numbers. Hell, I don't even know what my current "real" phone number is. I get zero calls on it. If I ever were to get such a call, I wouldn't answer. In fact, if I don't recognize the number I let it ring through to voicemail or use GV screening to decide whether to answer it as the caller leaves their message.
For all intents and purposes, GV is my "real" phone number. I don't get spammed... more precisely, I can only tell if I get slammed when I look inside the GV "spam" category once or twice a year. These calls get black holed.
That way any sales call in itself would be a felony if that special prefix is not displayed clearly.
Hey! We could stop crime by passing a law to make it illegal! That would definitely keep those criminals from calling.
Bonus points for going directly to making this a felony. I'm bothered by the stench of my neighbors' preparing fish head stew. Can that be a felony, too? What about if they paint their front door red? I hate that.
Rather than pointlessly inflating the number of felonies in this country, I suggest that you instead obtain a Google Voice number and start giving that out instead of your real number. With GV, you can mark callers as spammers and they will get a "number disconnected" tone if they call back. You can also block people so they go straight to voicemail while others ring through.
Ah, so according to you it's okay he committed a crime because a putative foreign agent told him it was okay to commit it? You're wrong, of course; this is a crime, and the legal system will illustrate this lesson for you quite effectively.
It appears a sting on you would work if someone told you they were working for the FBI or similar agency and wanted you to take something from your workplace for them.
No, it wouldn't, for reasons that aren't worth discussing because your analogy is fundamentally flawed. It seems you can't perceive the difference between betraying a position of trust in a classified defense position (with expectations and penalties codified in law) vs "loyalty" to a random job.
Protip: they aren't the same.
You act as if this guy were some tragic figure. He's not. He's no more than someone willing to sell access to classified material. His actions are sufficient to prove he is untrustworthy, and he deserves his comeuppance.
Your problem is that you can't perceive that this isn't about locking up someone who may someday be a bad person, this is about locking up someone who is, by definition, a bad person. Furthermore, you completely fabricate some nonexistent legal definition that it somehow isn't betrayal for someone to transfer classified information to "allies". What this guy did is a crime, and it did happen, and it does (ipso facto) indicate he is untrustworthy—your unsubstantiated claims to the contrary.
I could pretend I'm sorry you end up annoyed as a consequence of your lack of perception, but it wouldn't be true. Would you prefer I retract my previous presumption of your deceit (which I made out of courtesy to you) and instead just presume you're obtuse? I'm leaning that way at this point anyway, so perhaps it's best.
And you completely fail to understand that if all someone lacks is the opportunity to betray a trust, then that person isn't trustworthy in the first place.
This sting provided an opportunity, and this person demonstrated his true colors. Given that you apparently believe (from your repeated comments) that integrity only matters as long as you aren't tempted to betray the trust, then this demonstrates a critical failure in your trustworthiness.
"I'm totally trustworthy! I would have never sold those secrets if no one offered to buy them..." (*cough*)
BTW, it looks like you froth at the mouth a bit, metaphorically speaking, when you post three replies to a single post in under 10 minutes. Just saying...
You clearly misunderstand the concept of trustworthiness, since you advocate allowing people willing to sell classified information to have access to such. Because apparently the only thing that would hold you back from selling classified material is a lack of a specific opportunity, this is indicative that you aren't trustworthy enough for a classified position either.
Furthermore, you continue to misapprehend the lessons inherent in the Egyptian F-16 transfer. You seem to believe that because we are willing to send nigh-obsoleted military hardware to a country that implies we are more than willing for them to have access to all our defense secrets for our state of the art designs.
Either you are obtuse or you are deliberately pretending to misunderstand all of this. Because the former is such an insult, I'm going to be polite and presume you are just being deceitful.
From that, it's obvious to everyone that you don't mind having people working in sensitive positions who are willing to sell our defense secrets.
Now THAT sounds like the ridiculous copout to me.
This person clearly indicated he was sell classified defense information to someone. None of your proposed rationalizations affect that or mitigate that fact. This is sufficient to prove he should not be working in a sensitive position.
And neither should you, for that matter, because you seem to have difficulty grasping this concept.
Thanks, you satisfactorily answered the shibboleth by avoiding the question. From that, it's obvious to everyone that you don't mind having people working in sensitive positions who are willing to sell our defense secrets.
Furthermore, you are on crack if you assume that we treat all allies equally. No one does that. Being allied isn't a binary state of TRUST_COMPLETELY/ZERO_TRUST.
We don't give unfettered access to our military hardware to ANYONE. Sometimes we sell them gimped, "export versions", other times, we give them out of date systems, and if we really trust them, we might offer *some* of our current technology.
Hell, you even drew the wrong conclusion about the F16 gift. Quick: tell me who we have given F-22's (or even countries to whom we have offered to sell them). What's that you say? No one, because we won't transfer our best technology to even our closest allies? Exactly.
Egypt got F-16's, because we could trump those with even our previous generation air superiority fighter (F-15). They didn't get F-15's, and we wouldn't have sold them to them even if they had asked. No, instead we gave them hardware we can trivially destroy if they try to turn it on us or allies we care about more. For bonus points, check the short list of countries who DO have F-15's and grok why the Egyptians got F-16's.
It's still a simple case of locking up some guy whose crime was being a greedy idiot. There is no real criminal who was seeking out the plans - now that would be a person worth catching instead of setting up a fake crime.
You seem to be bending over backwards to defend this guy.
I'm about as libertarian as they come, but even I don't want people who are willing to sell our classified defense secrets working in sensitive positions. You seem to miss that point in all your ranting about how this is some sort of fabricated non-crime that should never have been investigated.
Here's your shibboleth: presuming all this damning evidence is true, are you happy or not that this person is no longer working on classified defense projects?
Well, at least you settled the Poe's Law question. "Wishful thinking"? Besides, what paper are you talking about anyway?
Actually, wait—nevermind, let's just say you got "wooshed" and should spend some time introspecting about how you evangelize your chosen position. I'm guessing if we were speaking face to face I would be trying to dodge your wild gesticulations and to avoid the spittle as you talked about this.
Slashdot Mirror
Cable TV is nearly as passe as POTS. Even my Boomer parents have dropped their landline and went cell-only.
Cell-only has a practical problem. If your cell phone is on the first floor of your home, and you're in your bedroom on the second floor, you likely won't hear it ring.
My parents have a large house and this isn't a problem. *I* never have this problem because not only do I keep my phone with me, but also my generation rarely makes or receives phone calls. We communicate via text, email, IM, whatever. Phone calls or Skyping are scheduled affairs. I literally get no more than one unscheduled phone call a month, and unless I recognize the caller number I don't even bother answering.
Regardless, the drawbacks of having a landline far outweighed any benefit my parents might have been receiving from it, which is why they canceled it.
And what will your children use for important calls between when they get home from school and when you get home from work?
This is a nonissue. If your kid is old enough to be home alone, they are old enough to have an inexpensive cell phone. Ting costs $6/month for a line. Besides, if your kids *don't* have a cell phone then how will they call 911 in an emergency while they are traveling home from school and aren't at home yet?
Likewise, Netflix and Amazon Prime have a practical problem: no NFL.
Not an issue for me (cf. my two chosen ala carte channels). Further, given Dish's offer of ESPN via internet this is a bellwether for sports being live streamed on the internet. People are already doing this via geolocked services intended for expats by using VPN services with gateways sited in other countries. It's only a matter of time before these stupid pretenses are dropped.
Been saying this as long as /. was around, few agreed but most argued.
I think that savings will materialize, just not for the average subscriber. I would have taken exactly two channels last time I subscribed to cable (which was a decade ago)... History and Sci-Fi. Literally no other channels. I think my bill would have decreased had this been offered unbundled.
However, technology has advanced and now I would take 0 channels. I want everything I watch to be on demand, commercial free. So, that means Netflix, Amazon Prime, and possibly that HBO offering in the future.
Cable offerings are irrelevant to me. I won't go back to watching commercials or being forced to wait for something to air rather than viewing it when it's convenient for me (no, DVRs aren't equivalent). Cable company value to me is exactly equal to how reliably they provide high bandwidth/low latency internet access—well, plus customer service, but let's be realistic about that.
Cable TV is nearly as passe as POTS. Even my Boomer parents have dropped their landline and went cell-only. The writing is on the wall for cable.
i guess im still relatively new enough to not realize that this comment was cliche, so apologies for that (i guess) but i still fail to see why this is 'stuff that matters'.
No need to apologize. This kind of story would have never made it to the site pre-11 Sep 2001. When posting a story about the WTC and Pentagon attacks, CmdrTaco mentioned he would not normally include something like that on the site because it wasn't topical but decided to make an exception.
However, the thousands of comments made on that story opened their eyes to the possibility of using stories like this as clickbait for ad impressions and to inflate traffic numbers. Thus, they proceeded down the path to the dark side, and the community came up with this "stuff that matters" semantic retcon to justify posting anything at all, even though in the past stories nominally had to satisfy both constraints ("news for nerds AND stuff that matters").
Looks like Dice is working on retiring slogan altogether. A more honest version currently would be "Tech News or Whatever We Think the 'Audience' Might Flame War Over. Oh, and Your Car Insurance Hopes You'll Never Guess This One Neat Trick That Happened Next..."
Imagine someone trying to publish a paper on aneuploidy->tumorigenesis (or any other "alternative" process) with someone having your attitude as a reviewer!
I'm sure they would get a warm reception for an intriguing paper.
However, if the content of the paper made it clear that they were ignorant of even the basic, undergraduate-level concepts in the field that they were "overturning", I doubt I would take the time to try to tease out what they meant to say when they fail to properly execute their "refutation" of established knowledge. I mean, after all, it's not like I would be getting co-author credit or receiving tuition for providing their education.
Ask yourself how seriously I would be taken if I submitted a paper to a mathematics journal claiming I had a 256 step algebraic proof of Fermat's Last Theorem and I made it apparent in the opening paragraph that I didn't even have a competent undergraduate background in set theory and therefore mangled my claims by misapplying the Axiom of Choice.
I will give you credit, though for at least digging up something off PubMed. Far too many "skeptics" just want to play the move the goalposts game.
Okay, one ostensible show of good faith deserves another. Here's a discussion of how certain HPV strains cause cancer: Mechanisms of Human Papillomavirus-Induced Oncogenesis
(I warn you, though, if you try to demand citation after citation that HPV can cause cancer then we're done, because all you'll get is lmgtfy.com links)
Here's your basic education meta-background, again presuming you aren't just trying to troll. Only some HPV strains cause cancer. High risk strains of HPV produce proteins that act equivalently to mutations in the genome because they bind and inactivate tumor suppressor proteins like p53 and pRB. By removing the functional product, this is equivalent to two-hits of point mutation and therefore results in an inactive gene product (bound and neutralized product is equivalent to nonexistent product).
HPV E7 is equivalent to a mutation in a protooncogene. It interacts with cyclin dependent kinase inhibitors and therefore acts to initiate replication.
Also, you might find this 1994 paper interesting as well: Oncogenic activation of human R-ras by point mutations analogous to those of prototype H-ras oncogenes
Mutations were introduced into the R-ras gene at codons 38 or 87, analogous to positions 12 and 61, respectively, responsible for H-ras oncogene activation. [...] Transfectants expressing either R-ras mutant formed colonies in soft agar and were tumorigenic in vivo.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the burden of proof lies on you when you contradict the preponderance of established knowledge.
You could read about oncogenesis in HPV, the mechanism of which is well elucidated, but I doubt you will even admit that viruses can cause cancer. I'm not going to play your "guess where I will move the goalposts next" game, especially as you seem to be applying some new "appeal to ignorance as a form of authority" fallacy. No doubt eventually you would demand evidence that cells exist at all and reject any citation showing otherwise.
Put up credible evidence to corroborate your contradiction of established knowledge. Right now your speculation is about as credible as a counterclaim that Russell's teapot is the ultimate cause of all cancer.
If the narrative you subscribe to is correct, people should be able to take a normal cell, introduce the point mutations, and observe it transforming. They can't...
[citation needed]
Reputable, peer-reviewed journal articles only, please.
I still suggest you educate yourself, even though you seem to have already convinced yourself of the (dubious) veracity of your speculation. You might then understand, for example, about oncogenes, tumor suppressors, and cancer inducing viruses. Yes, scholasticism is not science, but ignorance is no virtue.
Also how do you explain the effects of non mutagens such as asbestos? The claim that two hits to a oncogene and suppressor are REQUIRED is surely too strong.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you really should familiarize yourself with basic concepts in the field before trying to speculate.
For example, two hits are required on a tumor suppressor gene but only one hit is required on a protooncogene. This will be obvious if you understand the mechanisms involved. Once you learn why that's the case, you can probably also learn from proximate educational material why persistent irritants that cannot be cleared by the body (asbestos is the classical example) can cause cancer. These are far from unexplained mysteries at this point.
Oh, you might also enjoy learning how certain viruses cause cancer even without using a lysogenic/retroviral approach (c.f. HPV) and what that is equivalent to in terms of tumor suppressors & oncogenes.
Happy learning!
You appear to be performing the act you advise me not to do.
Haha, no, I merely misphrased. As I said before, cancer requires a mutation in a protooncogene and a two-hit to disable a tumor suppressor gene.
Perhaps only mutations that lead to stable aneuploidies are an issue.
Feel free to back up that claim. I'm sure you'll understand why less weight is given to speculation from an AC that seems to contradict both Occam's Razor as well as current understanding in the field.
That is how I meant to phrase it. Sorry for the confusion.
However 95% to 100% of tumors are reported Aneuploid.
Yes, chromosomal duplication, wholesale deletion, transposition, etc, do tend to happen in cancer due to accumulated errors in a positive feedback loop. For example, the most famous human cancer cell line for lab use is HeLa (taken from Henrietta Lacks' cervical cancer back in the 1950's) have 70-80 chromosomes rather than the normal human 46.
However, in a larger sense your point isn't well-made because we are discussing oncogenesis and you are talking about sampling cells from an, ipso facto, established cancer. You can't make claims about what triggered the cancer by sampling a cell that definitely had many generations of cancer evolution before a detectable tumor was formed.
You seem to misunderstand: cancer requires more than a single mutation. At a bare minimum cancer needs a protooncogene mutation, and then typically also requires Knudson two-hit on at least one of the tumor suppressor genes. That, together, gets cancer started.
The angiogenesis and metastasis mutations (among others) happen later due to natural selection. Cancer is just evolution.
To restate: I have never heard of a single DNA point mutation from wild type that can cause cancer. Multiple mutations of specific types are required. The odds of this happening are increased because most adult cells are on "pause" in the cell cycle, so mutations can accumulate without causing immediate triggering of apoptosis.
At the very least, we should also despise Newton if anyone who ever favored him committed a crime.
Based on the number of people who use weapons based on Newtonian physics to kill, Newton may be the biggest mass murderer of all time.
Haha, I was just going to post that, with the emphasis on how Newton masterminded the only historical deployment of nuclear weapons against civilian population centers.
Wow, so we've now gone as far as drive while drunk once, and get the death penalty? Wow...
Worse than that. These people aren't thinking clearly. In fact, I wonder if they may be excessively fatigued.
Have any of these people advocating extreme punishments for victimless DUI have ever driven while tired? Because, if so, they are likely hypocrites.
Cognitive impairment after approximately 18 hours awake is similar to that of someone with a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.05%. After about 24 hours awake, impairment is equivalent to a BAC of 0.10%, higher than the legal limit in all states.
http://www.cdc.gov/Features/ds...
I'm guessing most of these people calling for draconian punishment for DUI are merely neo-Prohibitionists. They haven't built a solid case for why these punishments are deserved, whereas other driving impairments that can induce driving impairments equivalent to the 0.08 BAC level such as cell phone, eating, screaming kids in the back seat, etc, are not.
Let's be consistent! First offense, driving while tired: summary execution via rectal impalement, on the side of the road, followed by gibbeting until the corpse is dismembered by wild animals! That will *definitely* work and is a proportional punishment. Those tired fucks deserve whatever we give them, because they've... and... ... yeah!
Pirates don't buy.
Of course they don't. They're too cheap to pay for something someone has produced and believe they are entitled to take what they want. [...] They obviously believe the product has some value or they wouldn't have stolen it.
Not really. I'm actively considering pirating the Interview then immediately deleting it, unwatched. I could easily afford to pay to stream the movie, but I hate Sony only slightly less than I hate the influenza A virus.
If one doesn't believe something have value, why steal it in the first place?
On principle. I don't actually want to see this movie. "Free" is a price too high for this. I imagine I would want to take a shower after viewing it, and I have no desire to invest a fraction of my life in watching such drivel.
However, I strongly believe we should not be cowed into self-censorship by threats. Therefore, I feel a compulsion to access this movie in defiance of said threats, a goal which is in tension with my strong desire to give Sony nothing of value.
Ergo, the degenerate solution of pirating and deleting the movie unwatched. It's a logically consistent position.
I don't think we should be teaching our kids exponential running time O(n^2) algorithms.
Call me liberal, but I don't think we should be teaching our kids improper definitions for "exponential" *or* myths that O(n^2) algorithms like bubble sort are bad.
Quick: which is going to be faster to sort a list of 4 items, bubble sort or randomized partition merge sort? What's that you say? Proper algorithm selection requires more than knee-jerk application of platitudes? Exactly.
It won't work. They are war dialing all of North America.
Works just fine for me, and I perceive no reason it wouldn't work for others. Do you wish to restate your objection?
I have never given out either of my last two real phone numbers. Hell, I don't even know what my current "real" phone number is. I get zero calls on it. If I ever were to get such a call, I wouldn't answer. In fact, if I don't recognize the number I let it ring through to voicemail or use GV screening to decide whether to answer it as the caller leaves their message.
For all intents and purposes, GV is my "real" phone number. I don't get spammed... more precisely, I can only tell if I get slammed when I look inside the GV "spam" category once or twice a year. These calls get black holed.
That way any sales call in itself would be a felony if that special prefix is not displayed clearly.
Hey! We could stop crime by passing a law to make it illegal! That would definitely keep those criminals from calling.
Bonus points for going directly to making this a felony. I'm bothered by the stench of my neighbors' preparing fish head stew. Can that be a felony, too? What about if they paint their front door red? I hate that.
Rather than pointlessly inflating the number of felonies in this country, I suggest that you instead obtain a Google Voice number and start giving that out instead of your real number. With GV, you can mark callers as spammers and they will get a "number disconnected" tone if they call back. You can also block people so they go straight to voicemail while others ring through.
What the guy did was what he was told to do.
Ah, so according to you it's okay he committed a crime because a putative foreign agent told him it was okay to commit it? You're wrong, of course; this is a crime, and the legal system will illustrate this lesson for you quite effectively.
It appears a sting on you would work if someone told you they were working for the FBI or similar agency and wanted you to take something from your workplace for them.
No, it wouldn't, for reasons that aren't worth discussing because your analogy is fundamentally flawed. It seems you can't perceive the difference between betraying a position of trust in a classified defense position (with expectations and penalties codified in law) vs "loyalty" to a random job.
Protip: they aren't the same.
You act as if this guy were some tragic figure. He's not. He's no more than someone willing to sell access to classified material. His actions are sufficient to prove he is untrustworthy, and he deserves his comeuppance.
Your problem is that you can't perceive that this isn't about locking up someone who may someday be a bad person, this is about locking up someone who is, by definition, a bad person. Furthermore, you completely fabricate some nonexistent legal definition that it somehow isn't betrayal for someone to transfer classified information to "allies". What this guy did is a crime, and it did happen, and it does (ipso facto) indicate he is untrustworthy—your unsubstantiated claims to the contrary.
I could pretend I'm sorry you end up annoyed as a consequence of your lack of perception, but it wouldn't be true. Would you prefer I retract my previous presumption of your deceit (which I made out of courtesy to you) and instead just presume you're obtuse? I'm leaning that way at this point anyway, so perhaps it's best.
And you completely fail to understand that if all someone lacks is the opportunity to betray a trust, then that person isn't trustworthy in the first place.
This sting provided an opportunity, and this person demonstrated his true colors. Given that you apparently believe (from your repeated comments) that integrity only matters as long as you aren't tempted to betray the trust, then this demonstrates a critical failure in your trustworthiness.
"I'm totally trustworthy! I would have never sold those secrets if no one offered to buy them..." (*cough*)
BTW, it looks like you froth at the mouth a bit, metaphorically speaking, when you post three replies to a single post in under 10 minutes. Just saying...
You clearly misunderstand the concept of trustworthiness, since you advocate allowing people willing to sell classified information to have access to such. Because apparently the only thing that would hold you back from selling classified material is a lack of a specific opportunity, this is indicative that you aren't trustworthy enough for a classified position either.
Furthermore, you continue to misapprehend the lessons inherent in the Egyptian F-16 transfer. You seem to believe that because we are willing to send nigh-obsoleted military hardware to a country that implies we are more than willing for them to have access to all our defense secrets for our state of the art designs.
Either you are obtuse or you are deliberately pretending to misunderstand all of this. Because the former is such an insult, I'm going to be polite and presume you are just being deceitful.
Now THAT sounds like the ridiculous copout to me.
This person clearly indicated he was sell classified defense information to someone. None of your proposed rationalizations affect that or mitigate that fact. This is sufficient to prove he should not be working in a sensitive position.
And neither should you, for that matter, because you seem to have difficulty grasping this concept.
This was always humor, which you seem to lack despite your dubious claims to the contrary.
Oh, wait! I figured out an even better way to sequester carbon—we can just wait for the petaton stick up your ass to petrify!
Thanks, you satisfactorily answered the shibboleth by avoiding the question. From that, it's obvious to everyone that you don't mind having people working in sensitive positions who are willing to sell our defense secrets.
Furthermore, you are on crack if you assume that we treat all allies equally. No one does that. Being allied isn't a binary state of TRUST_COMPLETELY/ZERO_TRUST.
We don't give unfettered access to our military hardware to ANYONE. Sometimes we sell them gimped, "export versions", other times, we give them out of date systems, and if we really trust them, we might offer *some* of our current technology.
Hell, you even drew the wrong conclusion about the F16 gift. Quick: tell me who we have given F-22's (or even countries to whom we have offered to sell them). What's that you say? No one, because we won't transfer our best technology to even our closest allies? Exactly.
Egypt got F-16's, because we could trump those with even our previous generation air superiority fighter (F-15). They didn't get F-15's, and we wouldn't have sold them to them even if they had asked. No, instead we gave them hardware we can trivially destroy if they try to turn it on us or allies we care about more. For bonus points, check the short list of countries who DO have F-15's and grok why the Egyptians got F-16's.
It's still a simple case of locking up some guy whose crime was being a greedy idiot. There is no real criminal who was seeking out the plans - now that would be a person worth catching instead of setting up a fake crime.
You seem to be bending over backwards to defend this guy.
I'm about as libertarian as they come, but even I don't want people who are willing to sell our classified defense secrets working in sensitive positions. You seem to miss that point in all your ranting about how this is some sort of fabricated non-crime that should never have been investigated.
Here's your shibboleth: presuming all this damning evidence is true, are you happy or not that this person is no longer working on classified defense projects?
Well, at least you settled the Poe's Law question. "Wishful thinking"? Besides, what paper are you talking about anyway?
Actually, wait—nevermind, let's just say you got "wooshed" and should spend some time introspecting about how you evangelize your chosen position. I'm guessing if we were speaking face to face I would be trying to dodge your wild gesticulations and to avoid the spittle as you talked about this.