"requires certain circumstances (which didn't exist until relatively recently) to thrive effectively due to its specific limitations, such as its means of transmission."
Huh? You mean people weren't banging each other without condoms before the early 80's? Because I'm pretty sure teh history of sexually transmitted diseases goes wayyyy farther back than that.
I did a study on AIDS for a philosophy of Science class, focussing on the (then) competing disease models: viral cause and lifestyle cause. The main proponent of the latter was Peter Duesberg, a well respected researcher, who put forth the arguement that HIV was simply an opportunistic infection that could catch hold of a person after the damage they had done to their bodies by IV drug use and poor lifestyle choices. The major arguement behind this was that, if AIDS was caused by an infectious agent, it is acting in a manner contrary to everything we know about how diseases work.
Well, it turns out that he was wrong, and indeed HIV is different than what we've seen before. And the therapeutic treatments bear this out - surpress the virus and people don't get AIDS.
But...
Stuff like this pops up, and one really starts to wonder if the AIDS experts really know what they're talking about. A virus hangs around for a hundred years and then BLAMMO - instant deadliness. Yeah, I guess it's possible, but it does reinforce Duesberg's original point - AIDS doesn't act the way we normally believe diseases should act.
"My favorite alternative is that we need someone to do to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton; that just like Newton's laws are near-perfect and beautiful at reasonable speeds, maybe there's something that happens at cosmically grand distances, masses, or propagation delays for Gravity that we're going to have to be awfully clever to ever hope to reliably detect."
Screw that - the reason Einstein needs to go down can be summed up in one word:
Starships. (and not the lameass rock band, either)
"Finally it is russia's oil. Europe can go buy it elsewhere, that's the nature of a free market economy."
Not exactly. The main Russian hold on Europe isn't oil, it's gas. And that comes in pipelines. If Russia turns off the compressors, it starts getting very cold in European houses. True, the EU could find other sources, but it would be a while - new pipelines take time to build.
Russia has every right to do whatever they want with their oil, and the EU has every right to go elsewhere - except the EU currently lacks the capacity to do so. In real terms, if Putin wanted a blowjob from Angela Merkel broadcast live on SkyTV, he could get it. And the EU knows it. They may not be happy about it, but the cost of doing business with Putin and giving him cover is cheaper than building more pipelines. The US made a similar choice in our dependency on Middle Eastern and Venezuelan oil, and now it appears we chose poorly - how much do you want to bet the EU ignores that lesson?
"While they wait for that, they'll fire up a deep fryer in their cubicle and make up a batch of donuts for everyone."
We were nearing move-in on one of my construction projects and I sat in on a meeting of the Transition Planning Group. The big controversy? Management was afraid everyone from the old building was going to bring over their space heaters and coffeepots, and wanted Facilities to take care of it. The head of Facilities said that he would make up the rules, but he would not enforce them - it was up to Management to do that.
This went on for about 10 minutes. At one point I said: "I can take care of the problem - publish the rules and after a week I'll walk through with a set of dykes and cut off all the plugs".
Response from the VP: "Whose going to pay for all that destroyed personal property?"
I just shut up, then. I guess in their world, rules enforce themselves.
"True, but I was just dumbing things down for the masses as religion in the USA is identified more with protestant fundamentalism than judeo-catholicism."
Sorry, you don't get a pass. You weren't "dumbing down", you were appealing to a latent anti-Catholicism that still exists in many areas of the US and many protestant churches. If you really wanted something that the fundamentalist would have related to, you would have said "Jerry Falwell" and not "The Pope".
The Catholic Church has many things to answer for; the current Creationism/ID bullshit isn't one of them, so don't pretend that it is.
"In the mind of the Pope and Goddard alike, its -ours-."
Nice try, but for one thing - the Roman Catholic Church hasn't espoused creationism for a loooong time. For that matter, it almost NEVER advocated taking the Bible literally. That was one of the roots causes of the Reformation - the Church insisted that the Bible be interpreted via priests, but with spreading literacy and the invention of the printing press, that became impossible.
So Protestants began reading the bible for themselves and discovered that, wonder of wonders, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense if taken literally. But, "in for a penny, in for a pound": now the main drivers behind a literal interpretation of the bible, and also the most strident in their demands that they are RIGHT, are the intellectual descendants of those who broke away from orthodoxy in the first place.
I sometimes wonder if Martin Luther, had he realized what would be the ultimate fate of his cause, would have snuck back up to the cathedral door and pulled the nails out.
"Ultimately Europeans are no greener than Americans - we are just being given more encouragement to be green by Adam Smith's "invisible hand"."
While I agree with your analysis of why fuel efficiency in the EU is generally higher, I'd be surprised if Adam Smith hadn't gotten out of his grave and wasn't, at this very moment, beating you to death. Using taxes to shape supply and demand is the OPPOSITE of "the invisible hand" - it is government intervention in a market. I'm not saying that is bad (although I personally believe it does more harm than good), but at least use the proper terminology.
Re:Is it ok to keep kids off the internet these da
on
Good Email For Kids?
·
· Score: 1
"one of its artists once sent her a drawing of her as a rabbit."
Have you considered the possibility that the artist was a furry and could be jacking off over that picture as you typed your response?
Just a thought.
PS: I have kids and I loathe the "think of the children" mindset. I just couldn't resist the opportunity to put that thought in your head.
If the majority of voters in the country are in this "whiny, bitter losers" category, can you honestly say that it was a legitimate election?
If you are saying that the majority of voters in the country believe that Al Gore should have won the 2000 election, then I believe you are mistaken.
If you are one of the small number of people that are CONSTANTLY bringing up the legitimacy of the Bush Presidency and commenting on how different things would be if Bush hadn't stolen the election, then I'm referring to YOU.
"there were only 9 votes that counted, and switching 1 would have done it."
Nope - the 5-4 vote was on continuing the recount. If that had gone the other way, it would have been remanded to the Florida court to figure out a consistent way to do the recount. Given the amount of time that would have taken, the election would have landed in the House of Reps, which was majority Republican at the time.
It may still have gone to Gore, but the 2000 Election Fraud Theory is starting to take on the same aspects of "Lee winning at Gettysburg" - you can game all the variables you want, but in the end it winds up being about whiny, bitter losers.
"did not have enough ballots according to Florida legal standards (where hanging chads are called null votes).
Ahh, but that would have ignored "voter intent". That was the hook that Gore tried to hang his hat on - that votes should be counted if judges determined what the voter WANTED, rather than what the voter DID. That was also the root of his downfall - when David Boies stood there in front of God and Man and said "No, votes will not be counted in the same way in different parts of Florida" it was over. We can debate about whether the second part of the decision was legitimate, but my opinion is that a different ruling would still have resulted in a Bush Presidency.
Also, it's funny (or not) how Hillary Clinton agreed not to campaign in the Florida primary, but then was ALL ABOUT "voter intent" when it turned to her advantage.
"The only way to save ourselves is to hole up at our universities and libraries. They're the only places hillbillies will never go."
Hillbillies aren't that dumb - they may never go in there, but you can set fire to them real good from the outside. Concentrating in large groups , surrounding yourselves with all that flammable paper, without an independent source of food or water - are you sure the hillbillies are the stupid ones?
It's "gyp", derived from "Gypsies". Please get your culturally insensitive references correct or the PC police will run out of work, and we don't want that, now do we? Otherwise they might get involved in more important things, like changing housing policy to provide loans to unqualified applicants.
Oh, wait...
(This offtopic flamebait brought to you by the letter Y and the number "I paid off my fucking loans why can't everybody else?!")
"How many people would like to be employed but not registered as unemployed (e.g. wife/husband still has job)?"
Actually, unemployment statistics are derived from surveys, NOT from claims at the unemployment office. Those numbers are reporte4d as "new jobless claims" or somesuch. The survey method is more accurate in one sense - there are people who meet the definition of "unemployed" that do not get unemployment benefits (fired for cause, etc.)
One of the criticisms, however, is that you only count as unemployed if you report that you are still actively looking for a job. Critics contend that this under-represents unemployment figures, since at a certain point people "give up" searching for a job or go to work at McDonalds or something. OTOH, there ARE people who drop in and out of the employment market, women of childbearing age especially. Is it really a fair picture of the job market to count as unemployed a woman who decides to take a year off to have a baby?
Slashdot Mirror
"requires certain circumstances (which didn't exist until relatively recently) to thrive effectively due to its specific limitations, such as its means of transmission."
Huh? You mean people weren't banging each other without condoms before the early 80's? Because I'm pretty sure teh history of sexually transmitted diseases goes wayyyy farther back than that.
I'm just going to assume the "Informative" mod is meta humor. It's either that or despair for the human race.
I did a study on AIDS for a philosophy of Science class, focussing on the (then) competing disease models: viral cause and lifestyle cause. The main proponent of the latter was Peter Duesberg, a well respected researcher, who put forth the arguement that HIV was simply an opportunistic infection that could catch hold of a person after the damage they had done to their bodies by IV drug use and poor lifestyle choices. The major arguement behind this was that, if AIDS was caused by an infectious agent, it is acting in a manner contrary to everything we know about how diseases work.
Well, it turns out that he was wrong, and indeed HIV is different than what we've seen before. And the therapeutic treatments bear this out - surpress the virus and people don't get AIDS.
But...
Stuff like this pops up, and one really starts to wonder if the AIDS experts really know what they're talking about. A virus hangs around for a hundred years and then BLAMMO - instant deadliness. Yeah, I guess it's possible, but it does reinforce Duesberg's original point - AIDS doesn't act the way we normally believe diseases should act.
"My favorite alternative is that we need someone to do to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton; that just like Newton's laws are near-perfect and beautiful at reasonable speeds, maybe there's something that happens at cosmically grand distances, masses, or propagation delays for Gravity that we're going to have to be awfully clever to ever hope to reliably detect."
Screw that - the reason Einstein needs to go down can be summed up in one word:
Starships.
(and not the lameass rock band, either)
"Thats it, im going to have bad dreams for weeks now."
My work here is complete.
"Finally it is russia's oil. Europe can go buy it elsewhere, that's the nature of a free market economy."
Not exactly. The main Russian hold on Europe isn't oil, it's gas. And that comes in pipelines. If Russia turns off the compressors, it starts getting very cold in European houses. True, the EU could find other sources, but it would be a while - new pipelines take time to build.
Russia has every right to do whatever they want with their oil, and the EU has every right to go elsewhere - except the EU currently lacks the capacity to do so. In real terms, if Putin wanted a blowjob from Angela Merkel broadcast live on SkyTV, he could get it. And the EU knows it. They may not be happy about it, but the cost of doing business with Putin and giving him cover is cheaper than building more pipelines. The US made a similar choice in our dependency on Middle Eastern and Venezuelan oil, and now it appears we chose poorly - how much do you want to bet the EU ignores that lesson?
"While they wait for that, they'll fire up a deep fryer in their cubicle and make up a batch of donuts for everyone."
We were nearing move-in on one of my construction projects and I sat in on a meeting of the Transition Planning Group. The big controversy? Management was afraid everyone from the old building was going to bring over their space heaters and coffeepots, and wanted Facilities to take care of it. The head of Facilities said that he would make up the rules, but he would not enforce them - it was up to Management to do that.
This went on for about 10 minutes. At one point I said: "I can take care of the problem - publish the rules and after a week I'll walk through with a set of dykes and cut off all the plugs".
Response from the VP: "Whose going to pay for all that destroyed personal property?"
I just shut up, then. I guess in their world, rules enforce themselves.
Great link! Except they don't host the software and can't even link to download locations in the forum.
Better to go here: http://www.mrbass.org/dvdshrink/
There's a quote from Henry Kissinger regarding the Iran-Iraq War that is apropos: "The only problem with this war is that only one side can lose."
"How did that ignorant propaganda flamebait get modded insightful?"
You are aware this is Slashdot, yes?
"True, but I was just dumbing things down for the masses as religion in the USA is identified more with protestant fundamentalism than judeo-catholicism."
Sorry, you don't get a pass. You weren't "dumbing down", you were appealing to a latent anti-Catholicism that still exists in many areas of the US and many protestant churches. If you really wanted something that the fundamentalist would have related to, you would have said "Jerry Falwell" and not "The Pope".
The Catholic Church has many things to answer for; the current Creationism/ID bullshit isn't one of them, so don't pretend that it is.
"In the mind of the Pope and Goddard alike, its -ours-."
Nice try, but for one thing - the Roman Catholic Church hasn't espoused creationism for a loooong time. For that matter, it almost NEVER advocated taking the Bible literally. That was one of the roots causes of the Reformation - the Church insisted that the Bible be interpreted via priests, but with spreading literacy and the invention of the printing press, that became impossible.
So Protestants began reading the bible for themselves and discovered that, wonder of wonders, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense if taken literally. But, "in for a penny, in for a pound": now the main drivers behind a literal interpretation of the bible, and also the most strident in their demands that they are RIGHT, are the intellectual descendants of those who broke away from orthodoxy in the first place.
I sometimes wonder if Martin Luther, had he realized what would be the ultimate fate of his cause, would have snuck back up to the cathedral door and pulled the nails out.
"Ultimately Europeans are no greener than Americans - we are just being given more encouragement to be green by Adam Smith's "invisible hand"."
While I agree with your analysis of why fuel efficiency in the EU is generally higher, I'd be surprised if Adam Smith hadn't gotten out of his grave and wasn't, at this very moment, beating you to death. Using taxes to shape supply and demand is the OPPOSITE of "the invisible hand" - it is government intervention in a market. I'm not saying that is bad (although I personally believe it does more harm than good), but at least use the proper terminology.
"one of its artists once sent her a drawing of her as a rabbit."
Have you considered the possibility that the artist was a furry and could be jacking off over that picture as you typed your response?
Just a thought.
PS: I have kids and I loathe the "think of the children" mindset. I just couldn't resist the opportunity to put that thought in your head.
If you are saying that the majority of voters in the country believe that Al Gore should have won the 2000 election, then I believe you are mistaken.
If you are one of the small number of people that are CONSTANTLY bringing up the legitimacy of the Bush Presidency and commenting on how different things would be if Bush hadn't stolen the election, then I'm referring to YOU.
"there were only 9 votes that counted, and switching 1 would have done it."
Nope - the 5-4 vote was on continuing the recount. If that had gone the other way, it would have been remanded to the Florida court to figure out a consistent way to do the recount. Given the amount of time that would have taken, the election would have landed in the House of Reps, which was majority Republican at the time.
It may still have gone to Gore, but the 2000 Election Fraud Theory is starting to take on the same aspects of "Lee winning at Gettysburg" - you can game all the variables you want, but in the end it winds up being about whiny, bitter losers.
"did not have enough ballots according to Florida legal standards (where hanging chads are called null votes).
Ahh, but that would have ignored "voter intent". That was the hook that Gore tried to hang his hat on - that votes should be counted if judges determined what the voter WANTED, rather than what the voter DID. That was also the root of his downfall - when David Boies stood there in front of God and Man and said "No, votes will not be counted in the same way in different parts of Florida" it was over. We can debate about whether the second part of the decision was legitimate, but my opinion is that a different ruling would still have resulted in a Bush Presidency.
Also, it's funny (or not) how Hillary Clinton agreed not to campaign in the Florida primary, but then was ALL ABOUT "voter intent" when it turned to her advantage.
Well, you can certainly spend big and get shitty performance.
"I think my sexual innuendo detector just went off inadvertently."
I think they make a pill for that now. Or a session with a hooker, only they call it "sexual surrogate therapy" and insurance pays for it.
"Some of us still remember the Great 8-Track Riots of '78. It wasn't pretty."
That's nothing compared to the 78 Riots in 33.
"The only way to save ourselves is to hole up at our universities and libraries. They're the only places hillbillies will never go."
Hillbillies aren't that dumb - they may never go in there, but you can set fire to them real good from the outside. Concentrating in large groups , surrounding yourselves with all that flammable paper, without an independent source of food or water - are you sure the hillbillies are the stupid ones?
Formula:
#zombies=#computers * X%
I mean, isn't it that obvious?
"Which, I am told, does happen occasionally for jack-asses."
Occasionally? With the amount of jackasses in the world, how could they NOT be breeding amongst themselves and multiplying?
"What a gip."
It's "gyp", derived from "Gypsies". Please get your culturally insensitive references correct or the PC police will run out of work, and we don't want that, now do we? Otherwise they might get involved in more important things, like changing housing policy to provide loans to unqualified applicants.
Oh, wait...
(This offtopic flamebait brought to you by the letter Y and the number "I paid off my fucking loans why can't everybody else?!")
"How many people would like to be employed but not registered as unemployed (e.g. wife/husband still has job)?"
Actually, unemployment statistics are derived from surveys, NOT from claims at the unemployment office. Those numbers are reporte4d as "new jobless claims" or somesuch. The survey method is more accurate in one sense - there are people who meet the definition of "unemployed" that do not get unemployment benefits (fired for cause, etc.)
One of the criticisms, however, is that you only count as unemployed if you report that you are still actively looking for a job. Critics contend that this under-represents unemployment figures, since at a certain point people "give up" searching for a job or go to work at McDonalds or something. OTOH, there ARE people who drop in and out of the employment market, women of childbearing age especially. Is it really a fair picture of the job market to count as unemployed a woman who decides to take a year off to have a baby?