If you claimed to have a religious belief that you shouldn't pay for certain types of healthcare, you would be by definition, not an atheist.
As far as your odd plan to create a religion based on this belief... well go right ahead, but be prepared to act like a religion. Courts aren't stupid, and they aren't going to let you make up your sham religion for the sole purpose of evading the law. It's an old con, and the court system is wise to it.
That's simply not the same thing. The private limo industry is NOT a taxi service. Limo services aren't point to point, they're hiring a private car for the day or night. They're also FAR more expensive, and rely on reputation of the limo company.
Taxi services are normally dispatch services, with the drivers operating independently. It's VERY different from a limo service in about every way. Taxi services are now suffering because of a combination of historic greed and anti-competitive actions. By that, I mean the sale of medallions, which brought in revenue to cities (greed) and made it difficult or impossible for people to start a taxi business (anti-competitive).
If cities want to eliminate the medallion program, stop the sale of them, etc, that's totally fine with me. But creating an unregulated industry to compete with a regulated one is simply unfair, and frankly possibly even unconstitutional. You can't make the laws apply to one set of people and not another. Uber is clearly a taxi dispatch service. Why should the law not apply to them, but apply to everyone else?
You've missed the point. The system can't survive with a regulated and unregulated market. The regulated market will have higher costs, and have to charge higher fees. So the regulated market will become smaller and smaller, and likely more expensive. Do you really want the choice where the safe, knowledgeable driver is extremely expensive, and your only alternative is some guy in his shitmobile who barely knows the city?
only ones bitching are those who run taxis who now get slightly less profit.
I don't run a taxi service. I don't know anyone who runs a taxi service. I rarely take taxis. I'm bitching.
This isn't replacing the taxi industry with a technology, it's pitting a highly regulated industry (taxi cabs) with an unregulated variant. Taxicabs pay huge amounts of money to run a taxicab. If you want to loosen regulations on taxis, fine. But Ueber is an attempt to create an unlicensed, unregulated market where a licensed regulated one exists. It has about zero to do with technology.
Yes, (though it's not exactly an empty drive). It's called deniable encryption, and is intened to stand up to "rubber hose cryptanalyis". (Or court orders as the case may be).
Computers have clocks in them that can be reset to any value you desire. How do you propose to cirvumvent that? If your proposal is "NTP", then I'd say that NTP can be very, very easily faked.
Also, even if you COULD somehow prevent falsification of the date, you just need to hack the software that checks the date. How do you propose to make THAT unhackable?
1. The court agreed to hear the case. They don't agree to hear cases where the law is clear. 2. 3 justices dissented from the majority opinion. So they must have believed the spirit of the law rather than loopholes and literal interpretations gave some leeway to Aero. I didn't see any links to minority opinions, but reporting on Surpreme Court decisions is normally absolutely terrible. Hell, they didn't even report who dissented, which tells you a lot about the politics involved.
Taking MD5, it's published, and tweaking a few points (though who ever did this needs to be very competent) would have been sufficient.
No, that would have been stupid. It's unlikely someone would have reverse engineered your hacked md5 algorithm, but it's also possible you could screw it up.
The solution is VERY simple. Generate a random 256 bit string. Hash random-string+data, and use the output as the identifier. Throw away the random 256 bit string.
Some manager probably said any work for addition security wasn't worth the cost. Ooops!
No, some developer didn't know what the hell they were doing. You'd be surprised (but shouldn't be) how little most developers know about security, especially encryption.
I'd suggest the justiced read a little bit from the late computer scientist Dijkstra liked to imagine a world where math was patentable. He was president of "Math Inc" "the most exciting and most miserable business ever conceived." Where he imagined that an important mathematical proof had been patended, and was demanding all the mathematicians that relied on it to pay up!
My dear Jonathan,
After so many years of silence, you will be surprised to receive such a long letter from me. But, read on, and you will understand that this time I must address myself to a lawyer I can trust and of whom I know that he understands.
Remember our schooldays, when we argued about the relative merits of the Greek and the Roman culture? How I defended the Greeks by quoting Plato and you the Romans by quoting Cicero, and how the unsettled question did not impair the friendship and companionship between the two of us? (Happy youths, who could argue hotly about the relative superiority of classical cultures, whereas, today, the inferiority of contemporary civilization seems to be the only common meeting ground!) Our fates were decided that evening by the choice of our heroes: you chose law and I chose mathematics and our ways parted. (It is a strange thought that, if in that same discussion, I had chosen Homer and you Horatius, we might both have become professional poets and our paths might have continued to cross each other....)
Dear Jonathan, I am in a fix. I leave it to your great wisdom or to your worldly experience to decide for yourself, whether my problem is that I don’t understand them, or whether they are so short-sighted that they are unable to understand me. But the long and the short of it is that I am in a fix, I have painted myself into a corner to the extent that I need legal advice, imagine! As you know —Hugo has certainly told you something about it— I am presently responsible for Mathematics Inc., the most exciting and most miserable business ever conceived. It is really most exciting, because —beside being a most flourishing business (and that is saying a good deal, these days)— by blending the strength of Greek contemplation with that of Roman enterprise, we are changing the face of the world! Our problem is, however, that apparently the world is not quite ready for this (truly!) “Cultural Revolution” and is beginning to fight back in a most unartistic manner, just because it —and in particular: its legal procedures!— cannot cope with it. There are legal procedures for the protection of property of “things”, but there is no true protection of property of “ideas”, and of such nature are the products of Mathematics Inc. (There are, of course, patent law and copy-right, but as you read on, you, as a lawyer, will immediately see that in our cases they are insufficient.)
One of our most successful product lines is connected with what used to be known as the Riemann Hypothesis, but now should be named our Theorem. To bring you into the picture, Riemann —originally trained to become a Lutheran minister!— was one of those romantic mathematicians of the nineteenth century, who maintained his fame by dying young enough to ensure that nobody saw that he himself was also unable to prove his conjecture. Riemann completely missed the vision and imagination, needed to escape from the prejudices of the pre-industrial society and, according to the tradition of the period, he fought his problem single-minded: the amateur, needless to say, failed miserably.
To supply the missing proof was for Mathematics Inc. an obvious target, not only because we have built up the first (and only) corporation in the world, that is technically capable of constructing such a proof, but also, because commercially it is a most attractive proposition. The point is that whole flocks of mathematicians have made themselves dependent on it and have (somewhat irresponsibly) based whole branches of mathematics on Riemann’s assumptio
Most of the people with limited incomes I know don't have a car, they ride the bus. You're right though, it will disproprortionally affect people with low incomes. But it's hardly a tax on the poor, it's a tax on usage. That's fine with me, and realistically ads up to maybe $5-$7 a month. I've been "poor" before, and I could certainly afford $5 a month.
If you want to help people with low income, raise the damn federal minimum wage.
The MOST important part is documenting where your assets are, and account numbers. After you die, your assets go into probate, and aren't just simply accessible via logging into your bank. So the username and password isn't really as important as you think it is.
Seriously, talk with a lawyer who's familiar with inheiritance in your state. Obviously documenting where all your assets are is very important, but don't just assume your loved ones are going to login to your account and transfer money out of it a few weeks after you're dead. That stuff gets locked into probate as soon as the financial institutions hear you're dead (with a few exclusions of course).
Odd. I can see someone helping you price a house, and giving advice. Is that worth thousands of dollars? Not really.
Most of the "work" that real estate agents do has been replaced with internet searches. I bought a house several years ago, and found the house I bought through open houses and searches. Why do I need to hire someone to do that? Why should a seller accept losing 7% of the value of a house (a LOT of money) just to pay a middleman who has a trade industry group (MLS) that keeps a monopoly on the listings?
The real estate market is a scam for the service they provide. They're generally nice people and not exactly trying to screw you over, but like all middle-men, they aren't nearly as necessary as they used to be in an information age. Travel agents were nice people too, and they went away. Some people are still convinced they need insurance agents as well. I've never used one and never will. Why would I? I can't figure out insurance on my own? A lot of the agency jobs are being automated away. Searching for a house that meets your needs used to be "hard", now it's simple.
If you want to sell your house, you can't list it on MLS, since you need to be an agent. Though I think there's cheap listing agents now that'll list your house for you, I think you might still have to pay off the other parties agent. There's a cultural change coming as people get more and more used to self-service. I see real estate agents morphing into a far smaller, and far well less paid role.
A: Yes. Pertussis, or whooping cough, can be prevented with vaccines. Before pertussis vaccines became widely available in the 1940s, about 200,000 children got sick with it each year in the US and about 9,000 died as a result of the infection. Now we see about 10,000–40,000 cases reported each year and unfortunately about 10–20 deaths.
Pertussis vaccines are recommended for people of all ages. Infants and children should get 5 doses of DTaP for maximum protection. A dose is given at 2, 4 and 6 months, at 15 through 18 months, and again at 4 through 6 years. A booster dose of Tdap is given to preteens at 11 or 12 years of age.
Any adolescents or adults who didn't get Tdap as a preteen should get one dose. Getting Tdap is especially important for pregnant women. It’s also important that those who care for infants are up-to-date with pertussis vaccination. You can get the Tdap booster dose no matter when you got your last regular tetanus booster shot (Td). Also, you need to get Tdap even if you were vaccinated as a child or have been sick with pertussis in the past.
Learn more about preventing pertussis.
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Whooping cough can be deadly for babies. Learn how to protect them through vaccination. See this infographic. Q: Why is the focus on protecting infants from pertussis?
A: Infants are at greatest risk for getting pertussis and then having severe complications from it, including death. About half of infants younger than 1 year old who get pertussis are hospitalized, and 1 or 2 in 100 hospitalized infants die.
There are two strategies to protect infants until they're old enough to receive vaccines and build their immunity against this disease.
First, vaccinate pregnant women with Tdap during each pregnancy, preferably at 27 through 36 weeks. By getting Tdap during pregnancy, mothers build antibodies that are transferred to the newborn, likely providing protection against pertussis in early life, before the baby can start getting DTaP vaccines at 2 months old. Tdap also helps protect mothers during delivery, making them less likely to transmit pertussis to their infants.
Second, make sure everyone around the infant is immunized. This includes parents, siblings, grandparents (including those 65 years and older), other family members, babysitters, etc. They should be up-to-date with the age-appropriate vaccine (DTaP or Tdap) at least two weeks before coming into close contact with the infant. Unless pregnant, only one dose of Tdap is recommended in a lifetime.
These two strategies should reduce infection in infants, since health data have shown that, when the source of pertussis could be identified, mothers were responsible for 30-40% of infant infections and all household members were responsible for about 80% of infections.
It's also critical that healthcare professionals are up-to-date with a one-time Tdap booster dose, especially those who care for infants.
Learn more about infant complications.
Top of Page Q: Do pertussis vaccines protect for a lifetime? If I've had whooping cough, do I still need a pertussis booster?
A: Getting sick with pertussis or getting pertussis vaccines doesn't provide lifelong protection, which means you can still get pertussis and pass it onto infants.
Pertussis vaccines are effective, but not perfect. They typically offer high levels of protection within the first 2 years of getting vaccinated, but then protection decreases over time. This is known as waning immunity. Similarly, natural infection may also only protect you for a few years.
In general, DTaP vaccines are 80-90% effective. Among kids who get all 5 doses of DTaP on schedule, effectiveness is very high within the year following the 5th dose
To stop cartooning. Beatle Baily, Hagar the Horrible, Garfield and yes... I'll even go far as Dilbert (I'm sure blasphemy to geeks around here) are worn out strips that are recycling the same dumb gags and phone-it-in art over and over. I actually respect Waterson for quitting in his prime.
I assure you that people have unhappy experiences on other hallucinogens as well. Also, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that LSD was the first. It's really more like one of the last. All the ones I listed have been used by human beings for thousands of years.
As far as religion is concerned, I think you misunderstand. It's not that much "religion" as in doctrine as it is an established practice that minimizes harm, but established practices designed to minimize the bad effects of the powerful drugs.
YMMV, but don't assume your experiences are everyones.
The story you linked to says the burden of proof is on the person suing, and must prove the statement was libelous. I believe libel is already illegal. The makes the law really stupid if it's already covered by libel laws. But it's not quite having to be careful about what you say about beef.
LSD has no such traditions. Its just a chemical to get you high.
LSD is a special case because it's very new. There hasn't been enough time to develop traditions around its use. That's not true for other, very similar drugs. These drugs have long traditions of usage outside the west. That includes peyote, psychedelic mushrooms, Ayahuasca, and ibogaine, to name just a few.
Typically these drugs are taken in group settings with an experienced person or group of people to guide the experience. It's really completely contrary to our current medical system where the patient is given a drug and sent on their way. Medical practitioners have sometimes used them in a one-on-one setting, which can probably work as well, but still represents an inherent clash with the medical establishment, and is quite contrary to how the traditional cultures where these drugs were first used have used them.
I'd totally agree with you that none of these drugs should be available at the corner 7-11. These drugs aren't compatible with our consumer driven culture. They're all very powerful drugs that invoke a profound experience on the user and need to be respected. But also our medical establishment really isn't suited to their use either. So what's to be done?
Umm.. no. It's no surprise to everyone that countries spy on one another. It's a big surprise to most that the US government is spying on everyone in the world, including its citizens.
In this case the wife is played by the American people, Not Russia.
He said he didn't have the documents with him to steal, and destroyed them after he gave them to the journalists. Now.. he could be lying of course but...
Snowden is a sharp guy. He knows that having those documents with him would make him a really, really good target to just be killed by the US CIA, or be kidnapped by whatever they're calling the KGB these days. Remember the US is the country that waterboarded people, and said it wasn't torture.
Now... whether he's given some form of assistance to Russia is a different matter. We all know he's willing to act as a political puppet for Putin, throwing him some softball questions to deny the Russians aren't spying on it's citizens. "Yes Mr. Putin sir, oh greatest leader of Russia Sir! You certainly aren't spying on YOUR citizens like those dirty, dirty Americans are, right sir?"
The sad thing is- Snowden's actions will probably hurt us abroad and not do a thing to stop the fascist and creepy internal spying on U.S. citizens.
You might be right. But the thing about Snowden's actions are that it put the burden on the American people, and the government to do something. If they don't, so be it, but he's giving us the chance to. If he didn't, most Americans would still be living in silent bliss about the spying going on.
Now, as far as who hurt who, I'd say the US government is FAR more responsible for hurting it's own relationships by doing the spying in the first place.
It's sort of like cheating on your wife, then getting mad at a mutual friend when the mutual friend tells your wife. Then end of your marriage isn't really the fault of your friend, and it's not your friends problem if you don't learn anything from it and become a better person.
Russia would be tough, but Snowden only wound up in Russia after he was left with no other options. So if he kept a low profile, he'd never have wound up in Russia.
If you think the US doesn't have the power to take it's own citizens from many, many countries in the world and just make them disappear, you're living in a delusion, The US has a golden ticket that the lawyers have been ever-expanding their justification to do anything. It's called the Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Terrorists, and it's been used to justify killing and targeting people that have no connection to the Sept 11 attacks. You think they wouldn't try use it to legally justify kidnapping Snowden?
And if they couldn't do that, you think they wouldn't use a CIA operative to kidnap him, or get some other group to do it? Countries are mean motherfuckers. You're under the misapprehension that countries actions are ruled by laws. They aren't, they're ruled by politics and what they can get away with. The OP is right. If Snowden hadn't put up a big profile rather quickly, the US govt would have found him and hung him out to dry in one way or another. (And I'm certain Ed Snowden is under no illusion this would have happened, and likely was a major reason he DID come forward).
You've missed a very, very big loophole. The US government decides NOT to prosecute him. Banks commit massive fraud and destroy our economy in 2008.. and... nobody gets prosecuted. That was most certainly a political decision to prosecute or not. It happens all the time. It's really quite business as usual.
What I'd like to see is the Obama administration simply say they were wrong to spy on Americans and vacuum up masses amounts of intelligence without a warrant, then stop doing that crap and pass a law that says they can't. Then refuse to prosecute Snowden for any wrongdoing.
The law works like this ALL the time. I'm no fool and I sure as hell realize this isn't going to happen anytime soon. But wait a few years for current guys to get out of office, and someone else to get in (likely a Democrat wanting to distinguish themselves from the past, or one of those extrodinarily rare beed of non-crazy Republicans who also are wiling to stand up to their crazy party every so often). Then it might, just might happen. But not for perhaps 5-10 years.
It reminds me of an old joke. During WWII a high ranking Soviet official walks out of a meeting with Stalin, obviously upset, muttering under his breath "Mustached asshole!". The secretary overhears him, and goes in and tells Stalin he just heard the official mutter "Mustached asshole!". Stalin calls in the official and asks him "Comrade, Who were you referring to when you said "Mustached asshole"? The official without hesitation says "I was referring to Hitler of course!". Stalin thanks him and calls the secretary in, asking her "And who did YOU think he was referring to, comrade?"
I think you're sort of missing the point. Sexism is sexism. You're still dividing the world up into sexes and saying one persons sexism is better or worse or not as important than someone else's sexism. Uhh.. also a form of sexism.
Isn't not discriminating on the basis of sex simply not discriminating on the basis of sex? You're kind of saying "Well fuck you and the discrimination you face because mine (or womens) is FAR worse". That's counter-productive. If you're against discrimination, you're against it, no matter who's being discriminated against.
Slashdot Mirror
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If you claimed to have a religious belief that you shouldn't pay for certain types of healthcare, you would be by definition, not an atheist.
As far as your odd plan to create a religion based on this belief... well go right ahead, but be prepared to act like a religion. Courts aren't stupid, and they aren't going to let you make up your sham religion for the sole purpose of evading the law. It's an old con, and the court system is wise to it.
That's simply not the same thing. The private limo industry is NOT a taxi service. Limo services aren't point to point, they're hiring a private car for the day or night. They're also FAR more expensive, and rely on reputation of the limo company.
Taxi services are normally dispatch services, with the drivers operating independently. It's VERY different from a limo service in about every way.
Taxi services are now suffering because of a combination of historic greed and anti-competitive actions. By that, I mean the sale of medallions, which brought in revenue to cities (greed) and made it difficult or impossible for people to start a taxi business (anti-competitive).
If cities want to eliminate the medallion program, stop the sale of them, etc, that's totally fine with me. But creating an unregulated industry to compete with a regulated one is simply unfair, and frankly possibly even unconstitutional. You can't make the laws apply to one set of people and not another. Uber is clearly a taxi dispatch service. Why should the law not apply to them, but apply to everyone else?
You've missed the point. The system can't survive with a regulated and unregulated market. The regulated market will have higher costs, and have to charge higher fees. So the regulated market will become smaller and smaller, and likely more expensive. Do you really want the choice where the safe, knowledgeable driver is extremely expensive, and your only alternative is some guy in his shitmobile who barely knows the city?
only ones bitching are those who run taxis who now get slightly less profit.
I don't run a taxi service. I don't know anyone who runs a taxi service. I rarely take taxis. I'm bitching.
This isn't replacing the taxi industry with a technology, it's pitting a highly regulated industry (taxi cabs) with an unregulated variant. Taxicabs pay huge amounts of money to run a taxicab. If you want to loosen regulations on taxis, fine. But Ueber is an attempt to create an unlicensed, unregulated market where a licensed regulated one exists. It has about zero to do with technology.
Yes, (though it's not exactly an empty drive). It's called deniable encryption, and is intened to stand up to "rubber hose cryptanalyis". (Or court orders as the case may be).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
After the keypair expires
Computers have clocks in them that can be reset to any value you desire. How do you propose to cirvumvent that? If your proposal is "NTP", then I'd say that NTP can be very, very easily faked.
Also, even if you COULD somehow prevent falsification of the date, you just need to hack the software that checks the date. How do you propose to make THAT unhackable?
I'd agree with you, except for two things.
1. The court agreed to hear the case. They don't agree to hear cases where the law is clear.
2. 3 justices dissented from the majority opinion. So they must have believed the spirit of the law rather than loopholes and literal interpretations gave some leeway to Aero. I didn't see any links to minority opinions, but reporting on Surpreme Court decisions is normally absolutely terrible. Hell, they didn't even report who dissented, which tells you a lot about the politics involved.
No, that's not a tweak to an algorithm, it's a random input to an algorithm. The algorithm is the same, the input is different.
Taking MD5, it's published, and tweaking a few points (though who ever did this needs to be very competent) would have been sufficient.
No, that would have been stupid. It's unlikely someone would have reverse engineered your hacked md5 algorithm, but it's also possible you could screw it up.
The solution is VERY simple. Generate a random 256 bit string. Hash random-string+data, and use the output as the identifier. Throw away the random 256 bit string.
Some manager probably said any work for addition security wasn't worth the cost. Ooops!
No, some developer didn't know what the hell they were doing. You'd be surprised (but shouldn't be) how little most developers know about security, especially encryption.
I'd suggest the justiced read a little bit from the late computer scientist Dijkstra liked to imagine a world where math was patentable. He was president of "Math Inc" "the most exciting and most miserable business ever conceived." Where he imagined that an important mathematical proof had been patended, and was demanding all the mathematicians that relied on it to pay up!
My dear Jonathan,
After so many years of silence, you will be surprised to receive such a long letter from me. But, read on, and you will understand that this time I must address myself to a lawyer I can trust and of whom I know that he understands.
Remember our schooldays, when we argued about the relative merits of the Greek and the Roman culture? How I defended the Greeks by quoting Plato and you the Romans by quoting Cicero, and how the unsettled question did not impair the friendship and companionship between the two of us? (Happy youths, who could argue hotly about the relative superiority of classical cultures, whereas, today, the inferiority of contemporary civilization seems to be the only common meeting ground!) Our fates were decided that evening by the choice of our heroes: you chose law and I chose mathematics and our ways parted. (It is a strange thought that, if in that same discussion, I had chosen Homer and you Horatius, we might both have become professional poets and our paths might have continued to cross each other....)
Dear Jonathan, I am in a fix. I leave it to your great wisdom or to your worldly experience to decide for yourself, whether my problem is that I don’t understand them, or whether they are so short-sighted that they are unable to understand me. But the long and the short of it is that I am in a fix, I have painted myself into a corner to the extent that I need legal advice, imagine! As you know —Hugo has certainly told you something about it— I am presently responsible for Mathematics Inc., the most exciting and most miserable business ever conceived. It is really most exciting, because —beside being a most flourishing business (and that is saying a good deal, these days)— by blending the strength of Greek contemplation with that of Roman enterprise, we are changing the face of the world! Our problem is, however, that apparently the world is not quite ready for this (truly!) “Cultural Revolution” and is beginning to fight back in a most unartistic manner, just because it —and in particular: its legal procedures!— cannot cope with it. There are legal procedures for the protection of property of “things”, but there is no true protection of property of “ideas”, and of such nature are the products of Mathematics Inc. (There are, of course, patent law and copy-right, but as you read on, you, as a lawyer, will immediately see that in our cases they are insufficient.)
One of our most successful product lines is connected with what used to be known as the Riemann Hypothesis, but now should be named our Theorem. To bring you into the picture, Riemann —originally trained to become a Lutheran minister!— was one of those romantic mathematicians of the nineteenth century, who maintained his fame by dying young enough to ensure that nobody saw that he himself was also unable to prove his conjecture. Riemann completely missed the vision and imagination, needed to escape from the prejudices of the pre-industrial society and, according to the tradition of the period, he fought his problem single-minded: the amateur, needless to say, failed miserably.
To supply the missing proof was for Mathematics Inc. an obvious target, not only because we have built up the first (and only) corporation in the world, that is technically capable of constructing such a proof, but also, because commercially it is a most attractive proposition. The point is that whole flocks of mathematicians have made themselves dependent on it and have (somewhat irresponsibly) based whole branches of mathematics on Riemann’s assumptio
Most of the people with limited incomes I know don't have a car, they ride the bus. You're right though, it will disproprortionally affect people with low incomes. But it's hardly a tax on the poor, it's a tax on usage. That's fine with me, and realistically ads up to maybe $5-$7 a month. I've been "poor" before, and I could certainly afford $5 a month.
If you want to help people with low income, raise the damn federal minimum wage.
The MOST important part is documenting where your assets are, and account numbers. After you die, your assets go into probate, and aren't just simply accessible via logging into your bank. So the username and password isn't really as important as you think it is.
Seriously, talk with a lawyer who's familiar with inheiritance in your state. Obviously documenting where all your assets are is very important, but don't just assume your loved ones are going to login to your account and transfer money out of it a few weeks after you're dead. That stuff gets locked into probate as soon as the financial institutions hear you're dead (with a few exclusions of course).
Odd. I can see someone helping you price a house, and giving advice. Is that worth thousands of dollars? Not really.
Most of the "work" that real estate agents do has been replaced with internet searches. I bought a house several years ago, and found the house I bought through open houses and searches. Why do I need to hire someone to do that? Why should a seller accept losing 7% of the value of a house (a LOT of money) just to pay a middleman who has a trade industry group (MLS) that keeps a monopoly on the listings?
The real estate market is a scam for the service they provide. They're generally nice people and not exactly trying to screw you over, but like all middle-men, they aren't nearly as necessary as they used to be in an information age. Travel agents were nice people too, and they went away. Some people are still convinced they need insurance agents as well. I've never used one and never will. Why would I? I can't figure out insurance on my own? A lot of the agency jobs are being automated away. Searching for a house that meets your needs used to be "hard", now it's simple.
If you want to sell your house, you can't list it on MLS, since you need to be an agent. Though I think there's cheap listing agents now that'll list your house for you, I think you might still have to pay off the other parties agent. There's a cultural change coming as people get more and more used to self-service. I see real estate agents morphing into a far smaller, and far well less paid role.
The article is terrible. The CDC has a very good FAQ on the pertussis vaccine.
http://www.cdc.gov/pertussis/a...
Q: Can pertussis be prevented with vaccines?
A: Yes. Pertussis, or whooping cough, can be prevented with vaccines. Before pertussis vaccines became widely available in the 1940s, about 200,000 children got sick with it each year in the US and about 9,000 died as a result of the infection. Now we see about 10,000–40,000 cases reported each year and unfortunately about 10–20 deaths.
Pertussis vaccines are recommended for people of all ages. Infants and children should get 5 doses of DTaP for maximum protection. A dose is given at 2, 4 and 6 months, at 15 through 18 months, and again at 4 through 6 years. A booster dose of Tdap is given to preteens at 11 or 12 years of age.
Any adolescents or adults who didn't get Tdap as a preteen should get one dose. Getting Tdap is especially important for pregnant women. It’s also important that those who care for infants are up-to-date with pertussis vaccination. You can get the Tdap booster dose no matter when you got your last regular tetanus booster shot (Td). Also, you need to get Tdap even if you were vaccinated as a child or have been sick with pertussis in the past.
Learn more about preventing pertussis.
car
Whooping cough can be deadly for babies. Learn how to protect them through vaccination. See this infographic.
Q: Why is the focus on protecting infants from pertussis?
A: Infants are at greatest risk for getting pertussis and then having severe complications from it, including death. About half of infants younger than 1 year old who get pertussis are hospitalized, and 1 or 2 in 100 hospitalized infants die.
There are two strategies to protect infants until they're old enough to receive vaccines and build their immunity against this disease.
First, vaccinate pregnant women with Tdap during each pregnancy, preferably at 27 through 36 weeks. By getting Tdap during pregnancy, mothers build antibodies that are transferred to the newborn, likely providing protection against pertussis in early life, before the baby can start getting DTaP vaccines at 2 months old. Tdap also helps protect mothers during delivery, making them less likely to transmit pertussis to their infants.
Second, make sure everyone around the infant is immunized. This includes parents, siblings, grandparents (including those 65 years and older), other family members, babysitters, etc. They should be up-to-date with the age-appropriate vaccine (DTaP or Tdap) at least two weeks before coming into close contact with the infant. Unless pregnant, only one dose of Tdap is recommended in a lifetime.
These two strategies should reduce infection in infants, since health data have shown that, when the source of pertussis could be identified, mothers were responsible for 30-40% of infant infections and all household members were responsible for about 80% of infections.
It's also critical that healthcare professionals are up-to-date with a one-time Tdap booster dose, especially those who care for infants.
Learn more about infant complications.
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Q: Do pertussis vaccines protect for a lifetime? If I've had whooping cough, do I still need a pertussis booster?
A: Getting sick with pertussis or getting pertussis vaccines doesn't provide lifelong protection, which means you can still get pertussis and pass it onto infants.
Pertussis vaccines are effective, but not perfect. They typically offer high levels of protection within the first 2 years of getting vaccinated, but then protection decreases over time. This is known as waning immunity. Similarly, natural infection may also only protect you for a few years.
In general, DTaP vaccines are 80-90% effective. Among kids who get all 5 doses of DTaP on schedule, effectiveness is very high within the year following the 5th dose
To stop cartooning. Beatle Baily, Hagar the Horrible, Garfield and yes... I'll even go far as Dilbert (I'm sure blasphemy to geeks around here) are worn out strips that are recycling the same dumb gags and phone-it-in art over and over. I actually respect Waterson for quitting in his prime.
I assure you that people have unhappy experiences on other hallucinogens as well. Also, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that LSD was the first. It's really more like one of the last. All the ones I listed have been used by human beings for thousands of years.
As far as religion is concerned, I think you misunderstand. It's not that much "religion" as in doctrine as it is an established practice that minimizes harm, but established practices designed to minimize the bad effects of the powerful drugs.
YMMV, but don't assume your experiences are everyones.
The story you linked to says the burden of proof is on the person suing, and must prove the statement was libelous. I believe libel is already illegal. The makes the law really stupid if it's already covered by libel laws. But it's not quite having to be careful about what you say about beef.
LSD has no such traditions. Its just a chemical to get you high.
LSD is a special case because it's very new. There hasn't been enough time to develop traditions around its use. That's not true for other, very similar drugs. These drugs have long traditions of usage outside the west. That includes peyote, psychedelic mushrooms, Ayahuasca, and ibogaine, to name just a few.
Typically these drugs are taken in group settings with an experienced person or group of people to guide the experience. It's really completely contrary to our current medical system where the patient is given a drug and sent on their way. Medical practitioners have sometimes used them in a one-on-one setting, which can probably work as well, but still represents an inherent clash with the medical establishment, and is quite contrary to how the traditional cultures where these drugs were first used have used them.
I'd totally agree with you that none of these drugs should be available at the corner 7-11. These drugs aren't compatible with our consumer driven culture. They're all very powerful drugs that invoke a profound experience on the user and need to be respected. But also our medical establishment really isn't suited to their use either. So what's to be done?
Umm.. no. It's no surprise to everyone that countries spy on one another. It's a big surprise to most that the US government is spying on everyone in the world, including its citizens.
In this case the wife is played by the American people, Not Russia.
He said he didn't have the documents with him to steal, and destroyed them after he gave them to the journalists. Now.. he could be lying of course but...
Snowden is a sharp guy. He knows that having those documents with him would make him a really, really good target to just be killed by the US CIA, or be kidnapped by whatever they're calling the KGB these days. Remember the US is the country that waterboarded people, and said it wasn't torture.
Now... whether he's given some form of assistance to Russia is a different matter. We all know he's willing to act as a political puppet for Putin, throwing him some softball questions to deny the Russians aren't spying on it's citizens. "Yes Mr. Putin sir, oh greatest leader of Russia Sir! You certainly aren't spying on YOUR citizens like those dirty, dirty Americans are, right sir?"
The sad thing is- Snowden's actions will probably hurt us abroad and not do a thing to stop the fascist and creepy internal spying on U.S. citizens.
You might be right. But the thing about Snowden's actions are that it put the burden on the American people, and the government to do something. If they don't, so be it, but he's giving us the chance to. If he didn't, most Americans would still be living in silent bliss about the spying going on.
Now, as far as who hurt who, I'd say the US government is FAR more responsible for hurting it's own relationships by doing the spying in the first place.
It's sort of like cheating on your wife, then getting mad at a mutual friend when the mutual friend tells your wife. Then end of your marriage isn't really the fault of your friend, and it's not your friends problem if you don't learn anything from it and become a better person.
Are you kidding me?
Russia would be tough, but Snowden only wound up in Russia after he was left with no other options. So if he kept a low profile, he'd never have wound up in Russia.
If you think the US doesn't have the power to take it's own citizens from many, many countries in the world and just make them disappear, you're living in a delusion, The US has a golden ticket that the lawyers have been ever-expanding their justification to do anything. It's called the Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Terrorists, and it's been used to justify killing and targeting people that have no connection to the Sept 11 attacks. You think they wouldn't try use it to legally justify kidnapping Snowden?
And if they couldn't do that, you think they wouldn't use a CIA operative to kidnap him, or get some other group to do it? Countries are mean motherfuckers. You're under the misapprehension that countries actions are ruled by laws. They aren't, they're ruled by politics and what they can get away with. The OP is right. If Snowden hadn't put up a big profile rather quickly, the US govt would have found him and hung him out to dry in one way or another. (And I'm certain Ed Snowden is under no illusion this would have happened, and likely was a major reason he DID come forward).
You've missed a very, very big loophole. The US government decides NOT to prosecute him. Banks commit massive fraud and destroy our economy in 2008.. and... nobody gets prosecuted. That was most certainly a political decision to prosecute or not. It happens all the time. It's really quite business as usual.
What I'd like to see is the Obama administration simply say they were wrong to spy on Americans and vacuum up masses amounts of intelligence without a warrant, then stop doing that crap and pass a law that says they can't. Then refuse to prosecute Snowden for any wrongdoing.
The law works like this ALL the time. I'm no fool and I sure as hell realize this isn't going to happen anytime soon. But wait a few years for current guys to get out of office, and someone else to get in (likely a Democrat wanting to distinguish themselves from the past, or one of those extrodinarily rare beed of non-crazy Republicans who also are wiling to stand up to their crazy party every so often). Then it might, just might happen. But not for perhaps 5-10 years.
Ahh.. the one upsmanship of sexism. What fun!
It reminds me of an old joke. During WWII a high ranking Soviet official walks out of a meeting with Stalin, obviously upset, muttering under his breath "Mustached asshole!". The secretary overhears him, and goes in and tells Stalin he just heard the official mutter "Mustached asshole!". Stalin calls in the official and asks him "Comrade, Who were you referring to when you said "Mustached asshole"? The official without hesitation says "I was referring to Hitler of course!". Stalin thanks him and calls the secretary in, asking her "And who did YOU think he was referring to, comrade?"
I think you're sort of missing the point. Sexism is sexism. You're still dividing the world up into sexes and saying one persons sexism is better or worse or not as important than someone else's sexism. Uhh.. also a form of sexism.
Isn't not discriminating on the basis of sex simply not discriminating on the basis of sex? You're kind of saying "Well fuck you and the discrimination you face because mine (or womens) is FAR worse". That's counter-productive. If you're against discrimination, you're against it, no matter who's being discriminated against.