And as the editors have always said to the whiners complaining about US-centric stories, slashdot is US site so deal with it or go read something else...
Maybe opened by someone, but probably not the addressee. Every random charity, lobbyist organization, petition, interest group, etc. runs constant letter writing campaigns. I have written a few over the years for a couple causes (it's usually a more-or-less form letter where they encourage you to add your own details and of course sign your own name), but I generally wonder whether it's worth my time, as I know there are 1000's of others doing the same thing. And that's usually just to state representatives.
Still, I would imagine it's at least most likely to get opened and scanned by an intern than an email, which is probably auto-replied and deleted without any human intervention. So in that sense, yeah, if you are going to take the time to try, it's definitely the better bet...
I, however, have suffered massive reactions to vaccines in the past and now refuse them. The worst was a HepC which knocked me on my arse for a month. Never finished the full course of that vaccine.
That's a great anecdote, except for the fact that there is currently no vaccine for hepatitis C.
If the same antibodies are created from a live vs. inactive virus, they will be just as effective and the mechanism of protection is the same.
And pertussis is *highly* contagious to unvaccinated people when exposed (5-10x more than the Spanish Flu of 1918), so "more susceptible" really doesn't mean much.
Yeah, I tried looking for that number (since any herd immunity quoting percentages for the 132 reported cases is useless).
Best I could find was a statement from the author in another article: "In California we have ‘personal belief exemptions’ [from mandatory vaccination] of 3 percent to 10 percent per county."
So that gives an approximate 90-97% vaccination rate, depending on location.
I don't think that whooping cough is deadly, so not vaccinating against it is not unwise.
It killed about 300,000 people worldwide last year, so I'd call that deadly. Though a persistent cough that can last 2-3 months and be so violent people commonly vomit, break ribs, and/or have seizures would be enough for me to vaccinate.
While I generally agree with your conclusion (and anti-vaccination whackos really tick me off) unfortunately the numbers you quote don't support it... those are only percentages of the 132 infected patients, where you need to be looking at the population as a whole.
It's possible (and extremely likely!) that there is a higher percentage of the population vaccinated overall than vaccinated and still contracted pertussis. In fact, if that is *not* true the vaccination was useless. Could have even been over 92%, it's just impossible to know without that data...
Well, that data was not provided in the article (it only talked about the breakdown of those infected, not the breakdown of all children), so you can't make a conclusion either way there.
But looking it up, it found an estimate that about 5% of CA children are not vaccinated for pertussis. If that estimate is correct and given the study's numbers of 20% of the patients either unvaccinated or incomplete vaccination, that's a pretty significantly higher percentage.
It could also just be that (as the article implies may be the case) the current booster recommendations wait too long and should be considered sooner. As they said, rates dropped drastically among 13 year olds, since that's the age for the booster, and was highest among 8-12 year olds.
The data is pretty definitive that the vaccine works very well, but also that it the protection clearly drops off over time. But as you say, the media and irrational anti-vaccination nutjobs love to generalize and don't usually bother with real data...
So far that project seems to be mostly a bunch of junk salvage with a few active panels, but if he ever gets it all working it will be the best goddamn amateur simulator ever made!
I tend to agree with some of the posters here... unless you are planning on becoming a commercial pilot, a 737 simulator sounds horribly boring. But I guess there is no accounting for taste, there are already a lot of people out there spending hours a day tending their fake farms on Facebook instead of going into their backyards and planting a real garden... oh well...
Sure it is, just like water going from hot steam to slightly less hot steam is still "cooling". It's all just based on concentration of H+, with "neutral" being a given concentration in pure water. "Acidification" just means that concentration is increasing.
I'd say that makes not bad, but horrible. An intriguing concept ruined by a just a plain awful UI design decision. The pure disregard for usability is mindboggling...
10% of what he gets would be $0.10 a year, since he's paid $1:)
He doesn't give a crap about salary any more, he owns almost 25% of Oracle's stock. He makes over $1B for every $1 the stock goes up. ORCL was up $0.65 today. Cha-ching, that's $700M for Larry. Kind of depressing, really...
Actually, he's partially correct. He would have to pay regular income tax on any spread of purchase price (which could be 0 for RSAs) and fair market value on the date he received them. Cap gains (or losses) would be on the difference between that FMV and the price at which he sells them (if/when he ever does).
It's a bit more complicated for ISOs (AMT instead of income) but Ellison most definitely would get NQOs because ISOs are limited to $100K FMV, which would be a joke to him (I'm sure he pays more than that for a week of upkeep on his yacht).
And when you are already the 6th richest man on the planet you don't need money coming in from other sources, anyway. Salary, stock grants, whatever, none of those are motivation to help Oracle succeed as much as his 25% share of the company...
You have no idea what you are talking about. Capital gains is obviously a form of income tax. So are dividends, gambling winnings, rental properties, etc. They are not all taxed at the same rate, but that's totally irrelevant.
Everything you put on your 1040 is a form of "income tax". That's why it's official name is "Form 1040, U.S. Individual Income Tax Return". There really isn't even any debate on it, the IRS clearly states capital gains are part of your income tax.
As the chief executive officer, chairman of the board, and largest voting shareholder he most definitely filed the lawsuit. No one at Oracle would wipe their ass unless he approved.
You are confusing 2 terms. Monoculture is not the same as monocropping. Monoculture is growing the same crop over a given area of land. Monocropping is doing that without rotating the crop year to year.
A single given plot of land can avoid both of these problems by planting several crops and rotating among your own land. In fact, big surprise, that's how subsistence farming used to work for a long time before corporate megafarming started planting the same crops (rotated or not) on vast expanses of land. Native Americans had known this was a good idea in a thousand years ago (see "three sisters").
It is - and in fact that's the *real* argument against GMOs, as well.
I'm skeptical about large-scale use of GMOs, but I'm so sick of people thinking they are going to somehow kill us all with their genetic cooties. The problem is spreading (accidentally or intentionally) these engineered genes throughout an entire species without understanding their long-term effects on said species itself. If human start dying from GMOs it's going to be from a massive famine after we have managed to kill off a couple of staple crops worldwide...
Slashdot Mirror
And as the editors have always said to the whiners complaining about US-centric stories, slashdot is US site so deal with it or go read something else...
It's just another "crazy thing" that somebody did that really just takes time and planning.
Yeah, just like the first moon landing. Ho hum.
Maybe opened by someone, but probably not the addressee. Every random charity, lobbyist organization, petition, interest group, etc. runs constant letter writing campaigns. I have written a few over the years for a couple causes (it's usually a more-or-less form letter where they encourage you to add your own details and of course sign your own name), but I generally wonder whether it's worth my time, as I know there are 1000's of others doing the same thing. And that's usually just to state representatives.
Still, I would imagine it's at least most likely to get opened and scanned by an intern than an email, which is probably auto-replied and deleted without any human intervention. So in that sense, yeah, if you are going to take the time to try, it's definitely the better bet...
Yeah, and I bet it motivated more kids to go into tech so they don't end up as pizza delivery guys. That's one dangerous damn job.
I, however, have suffered massive reactions to vaccines in the past and now refuse them. The worst was a HepC which knocked me on my arse for a month. Never finished the full course of that vaccine.
That's a great anecdote, except for the fact that there is currently no vaccine for hepatitis C.
"Create its own antibodies naturally"? Really?
If the same antibodies are created from a live vs. inactive virus, they will be just as effective and the mechanism of protection is the same.
And pertussis is *highly* contagious to unvaccinated people when exposed (5-10x more than the Spanish Flu of 1918), so "more susceptible" really doesn't mean much.
Yeah, I tried looking for that number (since any herd immunity quoting percentages for the 132 reported cases is useless).
Best I could find was a statement from the author in another article: "In California we have ‘personal belief exemptions’ [from mandatory vaccination] of 3 percent to 10 percent per county."
So that gives an approximate 90-97% vaccination rate, depending on location.
I don't think that whooping cough is deadly, so not vaccinating against it is not unwise.
It killed about 300,000 people worldwide last year, so I'd call that deadly. Though a persistent cough that can last 2-3 months and be so violent people commonly vomit, break ribs, and/or have seizures would be enough for me to vaccinate.
While I generally agree with your conclusion (and anti-vaccination whackos really tick me off) unfortunately the numbers you quote don't support it... those are only percentages of the 132 infected patients, where you need to be looking at the population as a whole.
It's possible (and extremely likely!) that there is a higher percentage of the population vaccinated overall than vaccinated and still contracted pertussis. In fact, if that is *not* true the vaccination was useless. Could have even been over 92%, it's just impossible to know without that data...
Well, that data was not provided in the article (it only talked about the breakdown of those infected, not the breakdown of all children), so you can't make a conclusion either way there.
But looking it up, it found an estimate that about 5% of CA children are not vaccinated for pertussis. If that estimate is correct and given the study's numbers of 20% of the patients either unvaccinated or incomplete vaccination, that's a pretty significantly higher percentage.
It could also just be that (as the article implies may be the case) the current booster recommendations wait too long and should be considered sooner. As they said, rates dropped drastically among 13 year olds, since that's the age for the booster, and was highest among 8-12 year olds.
The data is pretty definitive that the vaccine works very well, but also that it the protection clearly drops off over time. But as you say, the media and irrational anti-vaccination nutjobs love to generalize and don't usually bother with real data...
So far that project seems to be mostly a bunch of junk salvage with a few active panels, but if he ever gets it all working it will be the best goddamn amateur simulator ever made!
I tend to agree with some of the posters here... unless you are planning on becoming a commercial pilot, a 737 simulator sounds horribly boring. But I guess there is no accounting for taste, there are already a lot of people out there spending hours a day tending their fake farms on Facebook instead of going into their backyards and planting a real garden... oh well...
It isn't acidification until you cross neutral.
Sure it is, just like water going from hot steam to slightly less hot steam is still "cooling". It's all just based on concentration of H+, with "neutral" being a given concentration in pure water. "Acidification" just means that concentration is increasing.
I'd say that makes not bad, but horrible. An intriguing concept ruined by a just a plain awful UI design decision. The pure disregard for usability is mindboggling...
And Samsonite for making his luggage...
And by all accounts Ellison loves the courtroom theater, so if he managed to make himself look bad and hurt Oracle's case, that's his own fault...
He doesn't "get" $1 a year to live on. When you're that rich, your salary is irrelevant.
Isn't that exactly what I said? Jeez, it was only a 2 sentence comment, and no one who replied to it even read it...
Did you even read my comment? Duh.
10% of what he gets would be $0.10 a year, since he's paid $1 :)
He doesn't give a crap about salary any more, he owns almost 25% of Oracle's stock. He makes over $1B for every $1 the stock goes up. ORCL was up $0.65 today. Cha-ching, that's $700M for Larry. Kind of depressing, really...
Actually, he's partially correct. He would have to pay regular income tax on any spread of purchase price (which could be 0 for RSAs) and fair market value on the date he received them. Cap gains (or losses) would be on the difference between that FMV and the price at which he sells them (if/when he ever does).
It's a bit more complicated for ISOs (AMT instead of income) but Ellison most definitely would get NQOs because ISOs are limited to $100K FMV, which would be a joke to him (I'm sure he pays more than that for a week of upkeep on his yacht).
And when you are already the 6th richest man on the planet you don't need money coming in from other sources, anyway. Salary, stock grants, whatever, none of those are motivation to help Oracle succeed as much as his 25% share of the company...
You have no idea what you are talking about. Capital gains is obviously a form of income tax. So are dividends, gambling winnings, rental properties, etc. They are not all taxed at the same rate, but that's totally irrelevant.
Everything you put on your 1040 is a form of "income tax". That's why it's official name is "Form 1040, U.S. Individual Income Tax Return". There really isn't even any debate on it, the IRS clearly states capital gains are part of your income tax.
As the chief executive officer, chairman of the board, and largest voting shareholder he most definitely filed the lawsuit. No one at Oracle would wipe their ass unless he approved.
You are confusing 2 terms. Monoculture is not the same as monocropping. Monoculture is growing the same crop over a given area of land. Monocropping is doing that without rotating the crop year to year.
A single given plot of land can avoid both of these problems by planting several crops and rotating among your own land. In fact, big surprise, that's how subsistence farming used to work for a long time before corporate megafarming started planting the same crops (rotated or not) on vast expanses of land. Native Americans had known this was a good idea in a thousand years ago (see "three sisters").
It is - and in fact that's the *real* argument against GMOs, as well.
I'm skeptical about large-scale use of GMOs, but I'm so sick of people thinking they are going to somehow kill us all with their genetic cooties. The problem is spreading (accidentally or intentionally) these engineered genes throughout an entire species without understanding their long-term effects on said species itself. If human start dying from GMOs it's going to be from a massive famine after we have managed to kill off a couple of staple crops worldwide...