I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at here. I'm not looking for references, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov or are the places for that. I'm querying the capacity of the eds to make informed and reasonable judgements about what constitutes news. The complete sequencing of the mouse genome, completed last week and published in Nature with extensive informatic analysis (probably interesting the/. readers) also published in that journal was rejected for example (not bitching about that, just wondering whether these people have a clue - actually, not wondering).
Yes, there are bacteria that are able to either reduce elemental sulfur to H2S (requiring the presence of H2) - the species in question is Desulfovibrio vulgaris.
There are also sulfide oxidising bacteria that depend on molecular oxigen - this is quite common in the Archaebacteria that live around hot springs. I think that some species are able to utilise sulfide in solid form, for example in pyrites.
Is this like clicking on that attachment that says "I_love_you.vbs" in Outlook? Or should the computer produce some sort of audible warning on mouse-over?
In many cases I'd say it would have to involve a mouse mod that gives a 60kV shock, rather than just a beep.
I'll spell it out (my view): if it were the case that people were created equal and had equal opportunities than they should be treated equally and given equal opportunities. Given that this is not the case, those who are in a position of weakness should be given an advantage.
So yes, it may look like I have contradicted myself - I like the idea that people would be created equal and so not need positive discrimination, but it is an unatainable utopian ideal and so a better start for the Declaration of Independence might have been "We recognise that all people, while created equal in the eyes of God, are subject to varied circumstance..." (given some help from the Founding Fathers it could even sound nice:)
Thanks for pointing that out, not being a University dropout from Minnesota who listens to Rush Linbaugh I might have missed the fine point you make. The implication of being created equal is that people are then treated equally.
I didn't miss the point - that was what I was talking about; treating a nobleman, with all their wealth, the same as a pauper leaves the pauper in a psition of weakness (this is the point of nobles obliges)
Again no - it has been shown (sorry about the passive there) that social spending saves community money and hardship - the Scand examples supports that
After the next point - I leave you alone.
This point presupposes alot. First I pay more tax than I should because I beleive in the public good (and when I withhold payment of tax it is be refusing to work, so also harming myself - as will most likely be the case in the near future due to concientious objection to the imminent war). Second, where do you draw the line a public spending - your money is used to make roads and maintain other public infrastructure - would you prefer that you contracted your own construction workers to build the road you use to get to work, the shops or your friends' houses (perhaps you could share that bit at least). Why not consider social infrastructure as well. Well educated, happy people are going to be much nicer to live near in the long run.
Obvious truths are a very dangerous thing to rely on since obvious truths may not be so abvious to others: e.g. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.... It's a nice thought, but not all people (as an illustration of what is an obvious truth that is not so obvious) are created equal, some need more help than others because of physical, social, economic or mental disabilities. Here we see the fundamental basis for your nation based on an obvious truth that presupposes something that has no evidence.
Reported crime figures and correlations between policy and effect on the other hand can be debated and questioned. This is the fundamental difference between religion and science. Far from being thin indications supporting a utopian "vision", they are well establish social principles - ever wondered why Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries have lower levels of crime and higher standards of living: they spend more on social serviced.
In a number of states of Australia we have manditory sentencing (notably in the more redneck states): they have been shown not to have a benefit in reducing crime rates - sure the people in prison cannot affect the community at large while they are in prison. However, they become criminalised and marginalised by detention and tend to reoffend when release. Perhaps you are suggesting that the entire population should be incarcerated - it would reduce the crime rate.
I am sure you are right, I don't see what you say; that things are black and white (for why else would mandatory dentention be valid).
The problem of criminality is vexed issue - do we imprison for punitive, correctional or community safety reasons? Unfortunately it tends to be the first and the third. I agree that some people should be removed from society for the good of society, those without potential for rehabilitation. However, making people suffer further for having been placed (by birth or otherwise) in unfortunate circumstances is most likely an inappropriate solution.
If you know you are right you probably aren't. Perhaps you should question you belief set some more and see how valid your claims are. I personally doubt most of my own beliefs most of the time. This is why I choose to argue on the basis of publish evidence.
At 60K per male inmate per year in California, you should be able to pay for a decent education system just be reducing your rate of incarceration: asumming that the cost of imprisonment is approximately the same across the country and that incarceration rates are still approximately 1/250 (I think they may be higher now given the Republican's approach to crime/imprisonment) then reducing the rate rate by only 1% should save ~$600M per year.
Not having three-strikes you're out might help too - it doesn't reduce crime rates, but it does cost money: check the stats!
But you are missing the point - if the US is such a wonderful place and is the moral leader of the world why do you need to have so many people in prison?
Perhaps if the US provided adequate education, social services and health care to its poor rather than incarcerating them, you guys wouldn't need to spend all that money.
When I visited the Alcatraz Museum an SF I saw some stats which showed that the US rate of imprisonment was the highest in the world (second was Apartheid South Africa). Now this suggests that either the Great American Way of Life is really very sick or the US Governemnt is going about things the wrong way. I personally believe that both of these are true.
I, like you, used to think that Americans must be the most sheltered, detached people in the world (and I am an American). However, after my travels I have realized that the rest of the world isn't really that different.
I have spent a lot of time travelling around the world to some of the poorest and least well educated parts of the world. Nowhere I have been was as insular and self involved as the US.
My impression was that on average the Americans I met were about as well educated as the average in Mexico (the difference being that the Americans I met were college educated while those in Mexico had often left school at the age of 14 or 15) - at one point in the US I was complemented on how well I spoke English (I am an Australian); this was not tongue in cheek.
The irony never ceases to amaze me that a country that was colonised by a European trying to show that world extended past the horizon, is so firmly convinced that the world stops at its borders.
Seems to me that it's the other way round. The WTC was obviously trying to trade off the good name of LoTR.
The irony never ceases to amaze me that a country that was colonised by a European trying to show that world extended past the horizon, is so firmly convinced that the world stops at its borders.
The last week reading slashdot will convince u India is majorly into Linux. *Being and Indian* lemme tell you, this isnt happening here.
The main reason is
1. Piracy is rampant here. Ms Win costs Rs.0($0)
2. Both being free, Windows is easier to use.
3. Tools(MS VStudio) is also free.
I'd go along with this. Some years ago I worked voluntarily in Nepal helping an NGO get its IT infrastructure together and useful. After a while, noticing the extreme level of piracy I asked the boss about it. His answer, "What can thay take away from us? We are one of the 25 poorest countries in the world."
Isn't it ironic that the plague tauted by religious fanatics as 'God's scourge against the sinners' is so successful because of it's propensity to evolve resistance.
AIDS was tauted as a scourge brought to Earth against sinner (originally only homosexuals but later IV drug users).
The people making this claim were religious fanatics.
The very same (demographically speaking) people are responsible for getting Evolution taught as `only a theory' (this still makes me laugh - creation doesn't get past the hypothesis/axiom stage of idea development) in some American schools.
HIV and other retroviruses are successful in large part because of their genetic instability and the subsequent selection of fit copies.
I feel that it is ironic that people who have stated that AIDS was sent to remove sinners have also said that evolution is either not possible (I have been to talks like this - unfortunately) or `only a theory' when the virus clearly is successful because of its evolutionary fluidity.
I can't see any `all Christians' (I don't see the word `christian' at all in fact), nor do I see any statements about who is right and who is wrong. I honestly don't care whether you believe that life is the result of evolution, Devine Creation, or something that was picked out of some BOFH's ear on a slow day.
I think you may have been reading between the lines, but if the boot fits, you may need some help pulling it out.
S. aureus is scarey, sure, but really only if you are already sick or immunocompromised. The really scarey bug, one that was almost under control until relatively recently is Tuberculosis.
There are a number of MDR Tuberculosis strains (many originating in the former USSR, but also in the drug ghettos of New York).
The difference between S. aureus and Tuberculosis from the point of view of community health is that to get consumption (from an epidemiological point of view), all you need is to live in high density housing in an area where Tuberculosis is present. The advent of MDR strains makes the likelihood of an infected individual being nearby higher and the possibility of treatment less (already difficult with 6 month courses of antibiotics being the norm for standard strains - the main cause of MDR appearance seems to be drug users going off courses and poor hospitals in old Soviet backwaters).
HIV does very occasionally swap genes by RNA recombination with co-infecting viruses (I would imagine this would nearly always be other HIV substrains - though I may be wrong).
The importat thing though about HIV (and other retroviruses), is that they are extremely error prone in their replication (~1 error per 1000 bases replicated, which is about 1e3 fold higher than bacteria and 1e6 fold higher than humans and other animals).
The upshot of this is that any host of a retrovirus (HIV in this case) is actually host to around 1000 different replication competent substrains. Each will have different drug sensitivities, growth rates and host ranges. That is the reason that single drug treatments are now ineffective against modern strains.
The combination of rapid mutation and recombination in HIV makes it very difficult to reliably treat AIDS sufferers with antiviral drugs.
Isn't it ironic that the plague tauted by religious fanatics as 'God's scourge against the sinners' is so successful because of it's propensity to evolve resistance.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at here. I'm not looking for references, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov or are the places for that. I'm querying the capacity of the eds to make informed and reasonable judgements about what constitutes news. The complete sequencing of the mouse genome, completed last week and published in Nature with extensive informatic analysis (probably interesting the /. readers) also published in that journal was rejected for example (not bitching about that, just wondering whether these people have a clue - actually, not wondering).
Yes, there are bacteria that are able to either reduce elemental sulfur to H2S (requiring the presence of H2) - the species in question is Desulfovibrio vulgaris.
There are also sulfide oxidising bacteria that depend on molecular oxigen - this is quite common in the Archaebacteria that live around hot springs. I think that some species are able to utilise sulfide in solid form, for example in pyrites.
This work was done a couple of years ago - the Nature article is merely reporting on a meeting.
The seem to have forgotten at least one principle: The user must NOT be an idiot.
Sure, but the guide lines need to be implementable.
Is this like clicking on that attachment that says "I_love_you.vbs" in Outlook? Or should the computer produce some sort of audible warning on mouse-over?
In many cases I'd say it would have to involve a mouse mod that gives a 60kV shock, rather than just a beep.
what a crock of shi*.
A cogent argument, supported by this report commissioned by IBM. Note how poorly Solaris rates - something many should be able to sympathise with.
I'll spell it out (my view): if it were the case that people were created equal and had equal opportunities than they should be treated equally and given equal opportunities. Given that this is not the case, those who are in a position of weakness should be given an advantage.
So yes, it may look like I have contradicted myself - I like the idea that people would be created equal and so not need positive discrimination, but it is an unatainable utopian ideal and so a better start for the Declaration of Independence might have been "We recognise that all people, while created equal in the eyes of God, are subject to varied circumstance ..." (given some help from the Founding Fathers it could even sound nice :)
Geez. It's "created equal" not "treated equal".
Thanks for pointing that out, not being a University dropout from Minnesota who listens to Rush Linbaugh I might have missed the fine point you make. The implication of being created equal is that people are then treated equally.
I didn't miss the point - that was what I was talking about; treating a nobleman, with all their wealth, the same as a pauper leaves the pauper in a psition of weakness (this is the point of nobles obliges)
Again no - it has been shown (sorry about the passive there) that social spending saves community money and hardship - the Scand examples supports that
After the next point - I leave you alone.
This point presupposes alot. First I pay more tax than I should because I beleive in the public good (and when I withhold payment of tax it is be refusing to work, so also harming myself - as will most likely be the case in the near future due to concientious objection to the imminent war). Second, where do you draw the line a public spending - your money is used to make roads and maintain other public infrastructure - would you prefer that you contracted your own construction workers to build the road you use to get to work, the shops or your friends' houses (perhaps you could share that bit at least). Why not consider social infrastructure as well. Well educated, happy people are going to be much nicer to live near in the long run.
Anyway, that's it. Thanks.
I'm confused - were you born this year?
Obvious truths are a very dangerous thing to rely on since obvious truths may not be so abvious to others: e.g. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal... . It's a nice thought, but not all people (as an illustration of what is an obvious truth that is not so obvious) are created equal, some need more help than others because of physical, social, economic or mental disabilities. Here we see the fundamental basis for your nation based on an obvious truth that presupposes something that has no evidence.
Reported crime figures and correlations between policy and effect on the other hand can be debated and questioned. This is the fundamental difference between religion and science. Far from being thin indications supporting a utopian "vision", they are well establish social principles - ever wondered why Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries have lower levels of crime and higher standards of living: they spend more on social serviced.
In a number of states of Australia we have manditory sentencing (notably in the more redneck states): they have been shown not to have a benefit in reducing crime rates - sure the people in prison cannot affect the community at large while they are in prison. However, they become criminalised and marginalised by detention and tend to reoffend when release. Perhaps you are suggesting that the entire population should be incarcerated - it would reduce the crime rate.
I am sure you are right, I don't see what you say; that things are black and white (for why else would mandatory dentention be valid).
The problem of criminality is vexed issue - do we imprison for punitive, correctional or community safety reasons? Unfortunately it tends to be the first and the third. I agree that some people should be removed from society for the good of society, those without potential for rehabilitation. However, making people suffer further for having been placed (by birth or otherwise) in unfortunate circumstances is most likely an inappropriate solution.
If you know you are right you probably aren't. Perhaps you should question you belief set some more and see how valid your claims are. I personally doubt most of my own beliefs most of the time. This is why I choose to argue on the basis of publish evidence.
Sorry, repost: non-fatal brainfailure
At 60K per male inmate per year in California, you should be able to pay for a decent education system just be reducing your rate of incarceration: asumming that the cost of imprisonment is approximately the same across the country and that incarceration rates are still approximately 1/250 (I think they may be higher now given the Republican's approach to crime/imprisonment) then reducing the rate rate by only 1% should save ~$600M per year.
Not having three-strikes you're out might help too - it doesn't reduce crime rates, but it does cost money: check the stats!
But you are missing the point - if the US is such a wonderful place and is the moral leader of the world why do you need to have so many people in prison?
Not having three-strikes you're out might help too - it doesn't reduce crime rates, but it does cost money: check the stats!
Perhaps if the US provided adequate education, social services and health care to its poor rather than incarcerating them, you guys wouldn't need to spend all that money.
When I visited the Alcatraz Museum an SF I saw some stats which showed that the US rate of imprisonment was the highest in the world (second was Apartheid South Africa). Now this suggests that either the Great American Way of Life is really very sick or the US Governemnt is going about things the wrong way. I personally believe that both of these are true.
Because Beethoven only wrote prime music?
The Guarantee of Freedom of Speech in US law may not apply, but AI is talking about The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Have a look at the AI report.
I, like you, used to think that Americans must be the most sheltered, detached people in the world (and I am an American). However, after my travels I have realized that the rest of the world isn't really that different.
I have spent a lot of time travelling around the world to some of the poorest and least well educated parts of the world. Nowhere I have been was as insular and self involved as the US.
My impression was that on average the Americans I met were about as well educated as the average in Mexico (the difference being that the Americans I met were college educated while those in Mexico had often left school at the age of 14 or 15) - at one point in the US I was complemented on how well I spoke English (I am an Australian); this was not tongue in cheek.
The irony never ceases to amaze me that a country that was colonised by a European trying to show that world extended past the horizon, is so firmly convinced that the world stops at its borders.
Seems to me that it's the other way round. The WTC was obviously trying to trade off the good name of LoTR.
The irony never ceases to amaze me that a country that was colonised by a European trying to show that world extended past the horizon, is so firmly convinced that the world stops at its borders.
What a wanker! and not even an original one. I guess he's just found out about form letters.
The last week reading slashdot will convince u India is majorly into Linux. *Being and Indian* lemme tell you, this isnt happening here.
The main reason is1. Piracy is rampant here. Ms Win costs Rs.0($0)
2. Both being free, Windows is easier to use.
3. Tools(MS VStudio) is also free.
I'd go along with this. Some years ago I worked voluntarily in Nepal helping an NGO get its IT infrastructure together and useful. After a while, noticing the extreme level of piracy I asked the boss about it. His answer, "What can thay take away from us? We are one of the 25 poorest countries in the world."
Having problems with excessive SPAM blocking your bandwidth?
Add more fibre to your diet!
signing guest books with your real e-mail address will get you spammed, using AOL will get you spammed, using hotmail....
Makes it sound a bit like cancer doesn't it?
Quoting myself:
Isn't it ironic that the plague tauted by religious fanatics as 'God's scourge against the sinners' is so successful because of it's propensity to evolve resistance.
AIDS was tauted as a scourge brought to Earth against sinner (originally only homosexuals but later IV drug users).
The people making this claim were religious fanatics.
The very same (demographically speaking) people are responsible for getting Evolution taught as `only a theory' (this still makes me laugh - creation doesn't get past the hypothesis/axiom stage of idea development) in some American schools.
HIV and other retroviruses are successful in large part because of their genetic instability and the subsequent selection of fit copies.
I feel that it is ironic that people who have stated that AIDS was sent to remove sinners have also said that evolution is either not possible (I have been to talks like this - unfortunately) or `only a theory' when the virus clearly is successful because of its evolutionary fluidity.
I can't see any `all Christians' (I don't see the word `christian' at all in fact), nor do I see any statements about who is right and who is wrong. I honestly don't care whether you believe that life is the result of evolution, Devine Creation, or something that was picked out of some BOFH's ear on a slow day.
I think you may have been reading between the lines, but if the boot fits, you may need some help pulling it out.
S. aureus is scarey, sure, but really only if you are already sick or immunocompromised. The really scarey bug, one that was almost under control until relatively recently is Tuberculosis .
There are a number of MDR Tuberculosis strains (many originating in the former USSR, but also in the drug ghettos of New York).
The difference between S. aureus and Tuberculosis from the point of view of community health is that to get consumption (from an epidemiological point of view), all you need is to live in high density housing in an area where Tuberculosis is present. The advent of MDR strains makes the likelihood of an infected individual being nearby higher and the possibility of treatment less (already difficult with 6 month courses of antibiotics being the norm for standard strains - the main cause of MDR appearance seems to be drug users going off courses and poor hospitals in old Soviet backwaters).
There's just so much to look forward to!
HIV does very occasionally swap genes by RNA recombination with co-infecting viruses (I would imagine this would nearly always be other HIV substrains - though I may be wrong).
The importat thing though about HIV (and other retroviruses), is that they are extremely error prone in their replication (~1 error per 1000 bases replicated, which is about 1e3 fold higher than bacteria and 1e6 fold higher than humans and other animals).
The upshot of this is that any host of a retrovirus (HIV in this case) is actually host to around 1000 different replication competent substrains. Each will have different drug sensitivities, growth rates and host ranges. That is the reason that single drug treatments are now ineffective against modern strains.
The combination of rapid mutation and recombination in HIV makes it very difficult to reliably treat AIDS sufferers with antiviral drugs.
Isn't it ironic that the plague tauted by religious fanatics as 'God's scourge against the sinners' is so successful because of it's propensity to evolve resistance.