They're buying the damned book themselves, paying cash for it. It's not really censorship if they, instead of banning it, go through entirely legal channels to simply purchase every copy of it, is it?
Grey area?
Grey, trending towards black. If a government takes steps to prevent me from reading certain material, that's censorship. Now, in certain cases that may be justified, but the way they're going about this says it probably isn't.
If the Pentagon purchased those books for training purposes, say, or to use as reference materials... no big deal. The government buys plenty of books. In this case, they want to have a government-sanctioned book burning and that's just wrong (no, I don't care if they're actually just going to shred them or something, the principle is the same.) If there's classified materials in there, there are plenty of ways to legally have a book suppressed on national security grounds. That the military is doing it this way indicates that they probably don't have any legal grounds to have it classified or otherwise banned. Probably some high-ranking officials are going to get embarrassed over what he's written and just want to cover their collective ass. The problem is, using public funds in such an obvious attempt at a cover-up will likely make for even more red faces at the Pentagon that whatever is in the damn book.
This is probably a perfect candidate for taking a hands-off approach. All they're doing is legitimizing the book in the public's eye, and creating a huge demand for it. Come on, guys, people get all excited when Britney Spears shaves her head... all you're going to do here is help the publisher sell a lot more copies. Worse yet, once a single copy gets out, it'll be all over the Internet anyways. Wikileaks should have taught them that much.
But when the first printing sells out, the publisher is only going to print more. Clearly this is a scam to funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of this "former officer", paying a hefty fee to the publisher to launder the dough.
Wow. That is some kind of screwed up logic. Are you sure you understand what logic is?
Yes, I do, and either you didn't understand me or you have issues with your logical processes.
You are saying that people who will risk their child getting smallpox, pneumonia, a serious flu, etc... and other medical issues that are known to possibly end with the death of their child rather than face the perceived risk of a vaccination are people who think all life should be free of risk? Nothing in your argument leads to your conclusion.
What? I said, "I look at the anti-vaccination crowd as being of the same stripe as the anti-flouridation / anti-chlorination people." I think I'm pretty clearly not on the side of people who won't vaccinate their kids.
I must not be making myself very clear today. Sheesh. And I haven't even been drinking.
(with digital storage of the DNA, just in case a sample was hidden somewhere)
No, usually they just store samples of the actual pathogen. Much more useful that way: there are samples of everything from polio to leprosy to bacillus bubonicus stored away in government labs. Private sector facilities as well, since they do a lot of the research for treatments. Unless you could use that digital copy to reproduce the bacterium for testing, it's not all that useful.
And Americans began to think it was somehow their right to work less for more and consume more and for less at the same time.
Not really, and you're buying into a lot of anti-Americanism that isn't really true. We were perfectly happy to work for what we got, and we did. We worked hard and built something significant. Unfortunately, we are in the process of throwing it all away.
What actually happened was that increasing industrial efficiency over the previous century or so made us able to make more and more product for less and less effort (and less money.) That was how we took over so much of the world's manufacturing: we could make it better, faster and cheaper. China (and perhaps India, although if you go down their road you may regret it) has essentially short-circuited that process by not worrying about industrial efficiency because they have a pre-existing workforce composed of a billion disposable self-reproducing organic robots. Contrast that to the Japanese: if they manage to remain an industrial power in the face of China's onslaught it will be because their investment in efficiency paid off. Why do you think they invest so heavily in robotics?
Like I said, for us to have tried to compete with third-world economies on their terms was a mistake, and one that we actually have laws on the books to prevent. The fact that our government failed to enforce those laws was a failure on our part, true, but not the one you think. In any event, what is currently happening to us was by no means inevitable. I don't know if "entitled" is the proper word to use: I would say "complacent". We lost sight of the fact that there were others who would like to take what we built for ourselves away from us, and that there were plenty of treasonous personalities right here that were more than willing to help.
In any event, I will agree with you that we are doing it to ourselves.
There is something called Safe Harbor which seems to have stuck around between COPA and DMCA
Safe Harbor has more to do with a Web host not being liable for having copyrighted content on its servers: if it takes that content down upon request by the copyright holder, it's not liable for any consequences. I don't think that applies to ISPs, who only supply connectivity. I don't know: can anyone who is more knowledgeable here inform us?
Open any type of bank account and they want your life story - no thanks to the PATRIOT Act.
Not true because, thanks to the Big Three credit bureaus... they already have it. Well, the parts they're interested in anyway. They don't much care who you lost your virginity to, but if it has to do with your creditworthiness, they feel they have a right to know. I disagree with that premise: the credit system is not, contrary to what some people will tell you, about the consumer. It is about banks, businesses and creditors insulating themselves from risk at our expense.
You're right to privacy goes out the door once you're breaking the law.
What? That is the most ridiculous thing I've read all day. If that truly were the case, law enforcement wouldn't be bothered by such pesky things as warrants and judicial oversight. The trick is finding a balance between the need for society to successfully prosecute criminals, and individual need to keep our private lives free of (and this is crucial) unnecessary government interference. Just because you've been accused of a crime does not mean that law enforcement can start pillaging your private life at will. Well, it wasn't that way for a long time. Now, I'm not so sure.
In that case I apologize and extend my hand in friendship (no sarcasm). I understood that most of your post was of the same opinion as mine, but I guess I misunderstood the first part. Again, apologies.
Well... At least it got me +3 Insightful:)
No problemo, and I was unnecessarily brusque in my reply.
I look at the anti-vaccination crowd as being of the same stripe as the anti-flouridation / anti-chlorination people. I think they're all idiots who don't have the slightest grasp of probabilities, and feel that life should be free of all risk. Of course, that's just not the way it works.
After reading the whole thread again, which started with someone blaming government experimentation for his son's autism and ending with the post I replied to, I think they were talking about autism.
Nope, I wasn't. That's why I said "reaction" rather than "autism".
Well, then, I'm sorry but there is not one shred of (credible) evidence linking vaccines to autism.
Didn't say there was, and you took me completely out of context. Not the way to make friends. But it is true that people can have bad reactions to some vaccines: my cousin gets sick for a couple of days every time she gets a flu shot. Hardly the same thing as becoming autistic, but its still unpleasant. I was trying to point out that the (vanishingly small) risks of mass vaccination are far outweighed by the benefits. Sorry if I tweaked your pedantism gene.
Your line of thinking in the first two sentences is what caused this stupid decision: "Oh, well, there's always the chance that this poor little girl is the 1 in gazillion to have autism due to vaccines".
Yes, and if you'd grasped the rather simple point I was making (which, by the way is the same as yours), you'd have realized that I don't consider that possibility sufficient to warrant that we stop vaccinating our children. I understand what a pandemic is, I know how common they have been in the past, and I know that there are only a few things that stand in the way of their return. Vaccines are one of them.
I loath CFL lights. They don't last ANYWHERE near the reports say they will.
Yeah, me too. Oh, you can buy more expensive, longer-lived bulbs but then where's the savings?
Yet the power LED on one of my computers is still happily running (after 24 hours a day for 10 years).
Yes, can't fault them for longevity. Don't much care for the spectrum though... kinda harsh, not enough red
And LEDs don't require you to use a hazmat suit to pick up pieces if you break one (since they contain Mercury)
Yes and no. The reality is that you have to consider the entire cycle, from the materials in the product, to hazardous substances used in the manufacturing process, to final disposal. I don't know enough about the comparative risks of CFLs vs LEDs in that regard. Anyone else care to pick up the thread?
It's easy for stuff to be 50% less in a factory town where works are just meat and they work super overtime with no overtime pay. Also over seas it costs less to pay off / bribe gov into looking the other way over them breaking over time and worker rights laws.
Yet you buy those products without hesitation from that factory town -and thousands of others like it- every time you shop. But it sure is nice to be self-righteous on the Internet isn't it?
You, sir, are an idiot, and are expressing more self-righteousness than the GP. At least he is acknowledging the problem, which is a major step in the right direction. You just want to feel a degree of moral superiority which, from your comment, I don't think you deserve.
Now, you might have had a point before all those factories went overseas, before the transfer of technology and manufacturing to third-world countries was largely complete. Yes, if we'd voted with our dollars back then, back when it might have made a difference, things might have turned out differently. Hell, if we'd stuck to our guns and insisted that the Feds do what they could to protect domestic industries from predatory practices by foreign manufacturers (and I do not mean the way they "protected" our electronics industries from Japan) we might have stood a chance. Unfortunately for your high horse, the "Buy American" mantra doesn't mean squat when you don't have any way to actually buy American. So get off the soapbox... you're decades too late.
The GP is right, and unless we make efforts to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. (even if that means a degree of protectionism that many proponents of the "Global Economy" might find objectionable, as if competing with third-world industrial economies on their own terms was ever a good idea) the problem is going to get worse. Eventually, of course, America will have no significant industrial capacity of any kind, At that point, just to maintain what little we have left, we will be reduced to the likes of Nigeria and certain Middle Eastern countries who are selling off their natural resources, selling them to nations who understand what it means to create wealth. That used to be us, we used to be the nation that made everything for everyone, but now we've put legal shackles on anyone who is still trying to accomplish anything, and call it "progress". I don't think most of you understand what "service economy" really means. I know some ex-third-worlders who would be happy to explain the difference between that and "manufacturing economy." Doesn't matter... you'll understand soon enough when we can't even afford to keep the lights on anymore.
You want to get worked up about how our industrial leaders sold us out with the collusion of U.S. government officials who made backroom deals with China, I might back you up. But the American consumer no longer has much choice in the matter: it's buy Chinese or go without. So blaming the consumer at this point serves no purpose.
I bought a new Android phone, HTC Wildfire, for my girlfriend a month ago. Applications like Skype [skype.com] and Evernote still aren't available for this phone,
The lack of Skype has nothing whatsoever to do with Android fragmentation. It has to do with carrier reluctance to allow VoIP on their networks. Evernote, I dunno. Odds are it's not OS fragmentation (which may not mean what you think it means), but the fact that the app isn't compatible with a particular release of Android. For example, a lot of apps written for Android 1.6 won't work on later versions, so you have to wait until the author updates it. But that's not an example of carrier fragmentation of an operating system, that's just a matter of keeping your phone and apps up-to-date.
My children aren't vaccinated (12 and 8 respectively)
And if they become patients zero and one in the next influenza pandemic, I hope you live to see it.
Actually, I can't fatten them up - I cook nearly all their food, and they don't often leave much on the plate.
Which means... what? That you're a good cook? Look, you're talking about children, whose immune systems are still in training. They will be the first hit when one of your neighbor's unvaccinated kids infects them. Really, please investigate the situation before blindly reacting to that which I don't think you fully understand. You're on Slashdot, so I assume you have a mind that's more open than most, so do some Googling on this subject. Otherwise you're not being a good parent, nor are you being remotely socially conscious. I wouldn't want you as a neighbor, especially if I had kids.
Children, by definition, do not have fully functional immune systems. Now, that's fine when it comes to many infections that children encounter: they get sick for a while, fight it off, and from that point forward their body knows that particular pathogen. That's a good thing. However, there are many diseases, diseases known to have killed millions in the past, for which a child's (or an adult's, for that matter) system has no defense against whatsoever. Hence the development of vaccines, to help teach your body to fight that which it otherwise could not, because you would be dead first.
Drop the false pride and get them vaccinated. I know we'll all sleep better.
Umm, and why are you telling me this, considering I said the same thing with (almost) less emotion?
It would have been a reasonably informative and less offensive comment if he hadn't preceeded it with "Huh? Are you stupid?".
Still, he's right. Parents who believe the human immune system (especially that of a child, which is still being "trained") can withstand the onslaught of every single infectious disease in existence simply because they feed their kids well are dangerously complacent. Well, you know what they say about those who forget history. The problem is, when they repeat that history they're likely to take the rest of us with them. Pandemics are no joke, and any parent considering withholding vaccination for their children should thoroughly research the subject first. Frankly, if I found out that my neighbors weren't vaccinating their kids I'd have a few words with them.
The parents in the US are actually just being selfish. They rightfully understand that in order to keep a disease at bay, you really only need to have a certain percentage of the population immune. They are therefore able to reap the rewards of herd immunity (their child does not get the disease) while avoiding the small risk posed by the vaccine. If there are enough free riders, the system falls apart.
Yes, I agree, and that's an excellent way to describe the situation. When I was a kid back in the sixties, I was vaccinated for everything. My father was physicist, and understood the probabilities here more clearly than most, and still had me vaccinated because it was the right thing to do. I think America has lost something in the past few decades. Call it social consciousness, whatever... we're far more of a "me first" culture than we used to be.
And when the system falls apart, as you say, and those parents are either dying themselves from a flu pandemic, or lose their kids anyway to a real bona-fide infection, I hope they realize what they've done. Probably they won't: selfish people usually have a good reason to justify their selfishness.
a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing
blind faith can be a dangerous thing
So the answer lies in the middle somewhere. You can't match a physician's years of training, but you can make an effort to understand what's going on. At a minimum, that means finding out if the proposed treatment for your condition is appropriate (and there may be more than one, and your doctor may have good reasons for selecting a particular one.) Make sure that your doctor has the requisite experience to treat you properly: not all physicians are one hundred percent up-front about that. Don't be afraid to find another one, if you aren't comfortable with what you're hearing. Seek out a second opinion if necessary.
In the end though, once you've decided upon a course of action, you are largely taking matters on faith, but that's why we have experts. We take it on faith that the engineers, architects, regulators and other people who built our civilization do, by and large, know what they're doing. That applies to the medical profession as well: health is always something of a risk, but there's no question that making a decision that's as informed as you can make it is worth the effort.
Maybe it's those fucking unconstitutional required vaccinations the morons have been experimenting with us for years
*facepalm*
I am sorry that you've managed to breed.
Clearly he was affected badly as a child by one those vaccinations. People just don't get it: yes, sometimes people have bad reactions to specific vaccines (can't help it, in any large population somebody will have an issue.) The problem comes down to what the term public health means: these people are trying to prevent epidemics, which invariably result in far more deaths than those lost to the vaccines themselves. Anyone who doesn't think that the flu can kill ought to research that subject a little more thoroughly before condemning vaccines: the last flu pandemic killed a lot of people. We're actually overdue for another big one.
That's why I get pissed when I hear about parents who refuse vaccinations for their children: those walking disease factories then proceed to infect other people's kids.
And only in America is saying, "hey, a little bit of socialism ain't so bad" is equated with "DOWN WITH CAPITALISM FASCIST ILLUMINATI!"
Really? I've been there lots of times, and never gotten that reaction.
Thank you.
Bud, if the banks thought they could put paypal out of business and rake in those kinds of profits themselves, they'd be all over it. I've yet to meet a banker who isn't interest in increasing revenues by $3 billion per year.
The problem, I think, is that that would require banks to get together, and agree to set up a central funds clearinghouse and associated Web services, and then figure out how to share the proceeds. There are a lot of banks, so that would be difficult at best. Still, one of the big boys like Chase (ugh) or Bank of America (blecch!) could certainly afford to set something like that up on their own. I'm sure they've looked into the possibility, but it would probably just be easier to buy Paypal (like EBay did.)
And only in America is saying, "hey, a little bit of socialism ain't so bad" is equated with "DOWN WITH CAPITALISM FASCIST ILLUMINATI!" Things don't have to be so black and white. I promise you, in "socialist" Europe, capitalism is doing just fine. That's also why I put socialism in quotes in my initial p
Dude, stop getting your opinions about a nation of three hundred million people from Slashdot. You know, it's amazing how Europeans of a number of different stripes just lump ALL Americans into this general-purpose catchalll "Fucktard" category. Really, the degree of bigotry and ignorance is just remarkable. So just grow up: America is about the most fractious nation on the entire goddamn planet, and trying to reach any conclusion about us other than that "we generally agree to disagree" about most things is pointless, and makes you look silly.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding, let's not become the Fox News of the internet.
Too late.
They're buying the damned book themselves, paying cash for it. It's not really censorship if they, instead of banning it, go through entirely legal channels to simply purchase every copy of it, is it?
Grey area?
Grey, trending towards black. If a government takes steps to prevent me from reading certain material, that's censorship. Now, in certain cases that may be justified, but the way they're going about this says it probably isn't.
... no big deal. The government buys plenty of books. In this case, they want to have a government-sanctioned book burning and that's just wrong (no, I don't care if they're actually just going to shred them or something, the principle is the same.) If there's classified materials in there, there are plenty of ways to legally have a book suppressed on national security grounds. That the military is doing it this way indicates that they probably don't have any legal grounds to have it classified or otherwise banned. Probably some high-ranking officials are going to get embarrassed over what he's written and just want to cover their collective ass. The problem is, using public funds in such an obvious attempt at a cover-up will likely make for even more red faces at the Pentagon that whatever is in the damn book.
... all you're going to do here is help the publisher sell a lot more copies. Worse yet, once a single copy gets out, it'll be all over the Internet anyways. Wikileaks should have taught them that much.
If the Pentagon purchased those books for training purposes, say, or to use as reference materials
This is probably a perfect candidate for taking a hands-off approach. All they're doing is legitimizing the book in the public's eye, and creating a huge demand for it. Come on, guys, people get all excited when Britney Spears shaves her head
But when the first printing sells out, the publisher is only going to print more. Clearly this is a scam to funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of this "former officer", paying a hefty fee to the publisher to launder the dough.
I, uh ... what?
Wow. That is some kind of screwed up logic. Are you sure you understand what logic is?
Yes, I do, and either you didn't understand me or you have issues with your logical processes.
You are saying that people who will risk their child getting smallpox, pneumonia, a serious flu, etc... and other medical issues that are known to possibly end with the death of their child rather than face the perceived risk of a vaccination are people who think all life should be free of risk? Nothing in your argument leads to your conclusion.
What? I said, "I look at the anti-vaccination crowd as being of the same stripe as the anti-flouridation / anti-chlorination people." I think I'm pretty clearly not on the side of people who won't vaccinate their kids.
I must not be making myself very clear today. Sheesh. And I haven't even been drinking.
(with digital storage of the DNA, just in case a sample was hidden somewhere)
No, usually they just store samples of the actual pathogen. Much more useful that way: there are samples of everything from polio to leprosy to bacillus bubonicus stored away in government labs. Private sector facilities as well, since they do a lot of the research for treatments. Unless you could use that digital copy to reproduce the bacterium for testing, it's not all that useful.
And Americans began to think it was somehow their right to work less for more and consume more and for less at the same time.
Not really, and you're buying into a lot of anti-Americanism that isn't really true. We were perfectly happy to work for what we got, and we did. We worked hard and built something significant. Unfortunately, we are in the process of throwing it all away.
What actually happened was that increasing industrial efficiency over the previous century or so made us able to make more and more product for less and less effort (and less money.) That was how we took over so much of the world's manufacturing: we could make it better, faster and cheaper. China (and perhaps India, although if you go down their road you may regret it) has essentially short-circuited that process by not worrying about industrial efficiency because they have a pre-existing workforce composed of a billion disposable self-reproducing organic robots. Contrast that to the Japanese: if they manage to remain an industrial power in the face of China's onslaught it will be because their investment in efficiency paid off. Why do you think they invest so heavily in robotics?
Like I said, for us to have tried to compete with third-world economies on their terms was a mistake, and one that we actually have laws on the books to prevent. The fact that our government failed to enforce those laws was a failure on our part, true, but not the one you think. In any event, what is currently happening to us was by no means inevitable. I don't know if "entitled" is the proper word to use: I would say "complacent". We lost sight of the fact that there were others who would like to take what we built for ourselves away from us, and that there were plenty of treasonous personalities right here that were more than willing to help.
In any event, I will agree with you that we are doing it to ourselves.
and no penalty against me if I end up not finding anything at all.
Worse yet, no penalty against you if you do find something.
There is something called Safe Harbor which seems to have stuck around between COPA and DMCA
Safe Harbor has more to do with a Web host not being liable for having copyrighted content on its servers: if it takes that content down upon request by the copyright holder, it's not liable for any consequences. I don't think that applies to ISPs, who only supply connectivity. I don't know: can anyone who is more knowledgeable here inform us?
Open any type of bank account and they want your life story - no thanks to the PATRIOT Act.
Not true because, thanks to the Big Three credit bureaus ... they already have it. Well, the parts they're interested in anyway. They don't much care who you lost your virginity to, but if it has to do with your creditworthiness, they feel they have a right to know. I disagree with that premise: the credit system is not, contrary to what some people will tell you, about the consumer. It is about banks, businesses and creditors insulating themselves from risk at our expense.
You're right to privacy goes out the door once you're breaking the law.
What? That is the most ridiculous thing I've read all day. If that truly were the case, law enforcement wouldn't be bothered by such pesky things as warrants and judicial oversight. The trick is finding a balance between the need for society to successfully prosecute criminals, and individual need to keep our private lives free of (and this is crucial) unnecessary government interference. Just because you've been accused of a crime does not mean that law enforcement can start pillaging your private life at will. Well, it wasn't that way for a long time. Now, I'm not so sure.
In that case I apologize and extend my hand in friendship (no sarcasm). I understood that most of your post was of the same opinion as mine, but I guess I misunderstood the first part. Again, apologies. Well... At least it got me +3 Insightful :)
No problemo, and I was unnecessarily brusque in my reply.
I look at the anti-vaccination crowd as being of the same stripe as the anti-flouridation / anti-chlorination people. I think they're all idiots who don't have the slightest grasp of probabilities, and feel that life should be free of all risk. Of course, that's just not the way it works.
After reading the whole thread again, which started with someone blaming government experimentation for his son's autism and ending with the post I replied to, I think they were talking about autism.
Nope, I wasn't. That's why I said "reaction" rather than "autism".
Well, then, I'm sorry but there is not one shred of (credible) evidence linking vaccines to autism.
Didn't say there was, and you took me completely out of context. Not the way to make friends. But it is true that people can have bad reactions to some vaccines: my cousin gets sick for a couple of days every time she gets a flu shot. Hardly the same thing as becoming autistic, but its still unpleasant. I was trying to point out that the (vanishingly small) risks of mass vaccination are far outweighed by the benefits. Sorry if I tweaked your pedantism gene.
Your line of thinking in the first two sentences is what caused this stupid decision: "Oh, well, there's always the chance that this poor little girl is the 1 in gazillion to have autism due to vaccines".
Yes, and if you'd grasped the rather simple point I was making (which, by the way is the same as yours), you'd have realized that I don't consider that possibility sufficient to warrant that we stop vaccinating our children. I understand what a pandemic is, I know how common they have been in the past, and I know that there are only a few things that stand in the way of their return. Vaccines are one of them.
I loath CFL lights. They don't last ANYWHERE near the reports say they will.
Yeah, me too. Oh, you can buy more expensive, longer-lived bulbs but then where's the savings?
Yet the power LED on one of my computers is still happily running (after 24 hours a day for 10 years).
Yes, can't fault them for longevity. Don't much care for the spectrum though ... kinda harsh, not enough red
And LEDs don't require you to use a hazmat suit to pick up pieces if you break one (since they contain Mercury)
Yes and no. The reality is that you have to consider the entire cycle, from the materials in the product, to hazardous substances used in the manufacturing process, to final disposal. I don't know enough about the comparative risks of CFLs vs LEDs in that regard. Anyone else care to pick up the thread?
It's easy for stuff to be 50% less in a factory town where works are just meat and they work super overtime with no overtime pay. Also over seas it costs less to pay off / bribe gov into looking the other way over them breaking over time and worker rights laws.
Yet you buy those products without hesitation from that factory town -and thousands of others like it- every time you shop. But it sure is nice to be self-righteous on the Internet isn't it?
You, sir, are an idiot, and are expressing more self-righteousness than the GP. At least he is acknowledging the problem, which is a major step in the right direction. You just want to feel a degree of moral superiority which, from your comment, I don't think you deserve.
... you're decades too late.
... you'll understand soon enough when we can't even afford to keep the lights on anymore.
Now, you might have had a point before all those factories went overseas, before the transfer of technology and manufacturing to third-world countries was largely complete. Yes, if we'd voted with our dollars back then, back when it might have made a difference, things might have turned out differently. Hell, if we'd stuck to our guns and insisted that the Feds do what they could to protect domestic industries from predatory practices by foreign manufacturers (and I do not mean the way they "protected" our electronics industries from Japan) we might have stood a chance. Unfortunately for your high horse, the "Buy American" mantra doesn't mean squat when you don't have any way to actually buy American. So get off the soapbox
The GP is right, and unless we make efforts to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. (even if that means a degree of protectionism that many proponents of the "Global Economy" might find objectionable, as if competing with third-world industrial economies on their own terms was ever a good idea) the problem is going to get worse. Eventually, of course, America will have no significant industrial capacity of any kind, At that point, just to maintain what little we have left, we will be reduced to the likes of Nigeria and certain Middle Eastern countries who are selling off their natural resources, selling them to nations who understand what it means to create wealth. That used to be us, we used to be the nation that made everything for everyone, but now we've put legal shackles on anyone who is still trying to accomplish anything, and call it "progress". I don't think most of you understand what "service economy" really means. I know some ex-third-worlders who would be happy to explain the difference between that and "manufacturing economy." Doesn't matter
You want to get worked up about how our industrial leaders sold us out with the collusion of U.S. government officials who made backroom deals with China, I might back you up. But the American consumer no longer has much choice in the matter: it's buy Chinese or go without. So blaming the consumer at this point serves no purpose.
I bought a new Android phone, HTC Wildfire, for my girlfriend a month ago. Applications like Skype [skype.com] and Evernote still aren't available for this phone,
The lack of Skype has nothing whatsoever to do with Android fragmentation. It has to do with carrier reluctance to allow VoIP on their networks. Evernote, I dunno. Odds are it's not OS fragmentation (which may not mean what you think it means), but the fact that the app isn't compatible with a particular release of Android. For example, a lot of apps written for Android 1.6 won't work on later versions, so you have to wait until the author updates it. But that's not an example of carrier fragmentation of an operating system, that's just a matter of keeping your phone and apps up-to-date.
My children aren't vaccinated (12 and 8 respectively)
And if they become patients zero and one in the next influenza pandemic, I hope you live to see it.
Actually, I can't fatten them up - I cook nearly all their food, and they don't often leave much on the plate.
Which means ... what? That you're a good cook? Look, you're talking about children, whose immune systems are still in training. They will be the first hit when one of your neighbor's unvaccinated kids infects them. Really, please investigate the situation before blindly reacting to that which I don't think you fully understand. You're on Slashdot, so I assume you have a mind that's more open than most, so do some Googling on this subject. Otherwise you're not being a good parent, nor are you being remotely socially conscious. I wouldn't want you as a neighbor, especially if I had kids.
Children, by definition, do not have fully functional immune systems. Now, that's fine when it comes to many infections that children encounter: they get sick for a while, fight it off, and from that point forward their body knows that particular pathogen. That's a good thing. However, there are many diseases, diseases known to have killed millions in the past, for which a child's (or an adult's, for that matter) system has no defense against whatsoever. Hence the development of vaccines, to help teach your body to fight that which it otherwise could not, because you would be dead first.
Drop the false pride and get them vaccinated. I know we'll all sleep better.
Umm, and why are you telling me this, considering I said the same thing with (almost) less emotion?
It would have been a reasonably informative and less offensive comment if he hadn't preceeded it with "Huh? Are you stupid?".
Still, he's right. Parents who believe the human immune system (especially that of a child, which is still being "trained") can withstand the onslaught of every single infectious disease in existence simply because they feed their kids well are dangerously complacent. Well, you know what they say about those who forget history. The problem is, when they repeat that history they're likely to take the rest of us with them. Pandemics are no joke, and any parent considering withholding vaccination for their children should thoroughly research the subject first. Frankly, if I found out that my neighbors weren't vaccinating their kids I'd have a few words with them.
The parents in the US are actually just being selfish. They rightfully understand that in order to keep a disease at bay, you really only need to have a certain percentage of the population immune. They are therefore able to reap the rewards of herd immunity (their child does not get the disease) while avoiding the small risk posed by the vaccine. If there are enough free riders, the system falls apart.
Yes, I agree, and that's an excellent way to describe the situation. When I was a kid back in the sixties, I was vaccinated for everything. My father was physicist, and understood the probabilities here more clearly than most, and still had me vaccinated because it was the right thing to do. I think America has lost something in the past few decades. Call it social consciousness, whatever ... we're far more of a "me first" culture than we used to be.
And when the system falls apart, as you say, and those parents are either dying themselves from a flu pandemic, or lose their kids anyway to a real bona-fide infection, I hope they realize what they've done. Probably they won't: selfish people usually have a good reason to justify their selfishness.
My doctor reads slashdot. Now what.
Whoa, dude. Find another doctor, fast.
a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing
blind faith can be a dangerous thing
So the answer lies in the middle somewhere. You can't match a physician's years of training, but you can make an effort to understand what's going on. At a minimum, that means finding out if the proposed treatment for your condition is appropriate (and there may be more than one, and your doctor may have good reasons for selecting a particular one.) Make sure that your doctor has the requisite experience to treat you properly: not all physicians are one hundred percent up-front about that. Don't be afraid to find another one, if you aren't comfortable with what you're hearing. Seek out a second opinion if necessary.
In the end though, once you've decided upon a course of action, you are largely taking matters on faith, but that's why we have experts. We take it on faith that the engineers, architects, regulators and other people who built our civilization do, by and large, know what they're doing. That applies to the medical profession as well: health is always something of a risk, but there's no question that making a decision that's as informed as you can make it is worth the effort.
People don't care about relevant studies. They care about what their friend Nancy's brother's ex-wife's uncle said.
In other words, we have this wonderful thing called the World Wide Web, and most people will get their relevant medical knowledge from gossip.
Well, that explains a lot.
Maybe it's those fucking unconstitutional required vaccinations the morons have been experimenting with us for years
*facepalm*
I am sorry that you've managed to breed.
Clearly he was affected badly as a child by one those vaccinations. People just don't get it: yes, sometimes people have bad reactions to specific vaccines (can't help it, in any large population somebody will have an issue.) The problem comes down to what the term public health means: these people are trying to prevent epidemics, which invariably result in far more deaths than those lost to the vaccines themselves. Anyone who doesn't think that the flu can kill ought to research that subject a little more thoroughly before condemning vaccines: the last flu pandemic killed a lot of people. We're actually overdue for another big one.
That's why I get pissed when I hear about parents who refuse vaccinations for their children: those walking disease factories then proceed to infect other people's kids.
And only in America is saying, "hey, a little bit of socialism ain't so bad" is equated with "DOWN WITH CAPITALISM FASCIST ILLUMINATI!" Really? I've been there lots of times, and never gotten that reaction.
Thank you.
Bud, if the banks thought they could put paypal out of business and rake in those kinds of profits themselves, they'd be all over it. I've yet to meet a banker who isn't interest in increasing revenues by $3 billion per year.
The problem, I think, is that that would require banks to get together, and agree to set up a central funds clearinghouse and associated Web services, and then figure out how to share the proceeds. There are a lot of banks, so that would be difficult at best. Still, one of the big boys like Chase (ugh) or Bank of America (blecch!) could certainly afford to set something like that up on their own. I'm sure they've looked into the possibility, but it would probably just be easier to buy Paypal (like EBay did.)
And only in America is saying, "hey, a little bit of socialism ain't so bad" is equated with "DOWN WITH CAPITALISM FASCIST ILLUMINATI!" Things don't have to be so black and white. I promise you, in "socialist" Europe, capitalism is doing just fine. That's also why I put socialism in quotes in my initial p
Dude, stop getting your opinions about a nation of three hundred million people from Slashdot. You know, it's amazing how Europeans of a number of different stripes just lump ALL Americans into this general-purpose catchalll "Fucktard" category. Really, the degree of bigotry and ignorance is just remarkable. So just grow up: America is about the most fractious nation on the entire goddamn planet, and trying to reach any conclusion about us other than that "we generally agree to disagree" about most things is pointless, and makes you look silly.