We desperately need some mechanism to keep the human population in check.
And that's why we invented nuclear weapons.
Nature likes balance. Technology allows us to push nature further out of balance without all dying. If we can develop technology faster than we continue to push nature out of balance, we'll be fine, if not, we'll all die, but at least there won't be anyone left to worry about it.
In the meantime, I have some consumption to do.
Not quite.
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
What is in the vaccine is not important. The difference between a treatment and a vaccine is that the treatment attacks and kills the pathogen, or just alleviates symptoms. A vaccine acts like the pathogen, causing an immune response that attacks and kills the pathogen, or a cellular response that stops the pathogen from being destructive.
Vaccines do not have to be made from live or dead specimens of the pathogen - they can also be made of specimens of a similar pathogen (smallpox vaccine is made from cowpox, for example), or anything that mimics a critical part of the pathogen closely enough to trigger an immune/cellular response.
People tend to think the difference is that vaccines PREVENT disease and treatments treat disease only because most people get vaccines before they have a chance to be exposed to a disease. If you somehow ended up with Polio or Smallpox or whatever, they'd still give you a vaccination to get your body to take care of it (and that's what they did back when they first created the vaccines).
If not, stay where you are. An extra $20,000 spent on tuition translates to needing to make nearly an extra $40,000 in salary (taxes!) to make up for it down the road.
On top of that, you'd actually do far more to help your future employment now to take a good internship (or research position or whatever) where you work for free (and willingness to work for free is one of the things that will get you a good internship) than to have to work a crappy job that pays the money you need to afford school.
Or if you're entrepeneurially minded (and can spell better than I can), you could take that $20,000 and start your own business now while you go to school. It's a lot easier to start a business when you have a student's flexible schedule then when you work full time (believe me, I've started two, and the one I started in school was much easier). Sell the business when you graduate, or hire a manager and enjoy the extra income.
The one place where which school you are at matters is what companies recruit at your school. You'll find that companies will tend to recruit at big-name CS schools (like MIT/Carnegie/CalTech) no matter how far away they are, the big state schools in neighboring states, and smaller state schools/smaller private schools in their more immediate vicinity. The converse of this is that if you go to a small-name school, you're probably going to be looking at a job near where you are now when you graduate, but on the upside, it's also easier to get interviews with local companies (cheaper for the company, it can be done anytime instead of in one of the 15 minute appointments the recruiter has, and you can interview on-site and meet more people and see the company).
Personally, I got my job because I was the most memorable person at an intern/co-op fair at my school, which was a combination of my company being at the fair in the first place, and being able to talk for a half an hour about the brewery local to the company's location while 20 unmemorable people waited to hand the guy their resumes. In CS, you'd be surprised how much of getting a job can just be being able to hold a conversation.
I got hired full time because I performed well during my internship.
Also, FWIW, one of the most talented people I work with has a degree from a small-name CS school (it's most known for it's music-related programs). But it's a school local to the company, so the company recruits there. He also started as an intern.
People need other people they trust to filter out the crap. Many would argue that trusting someone *OTHER* than a news company to filter out crap for you would result in better news.
Blogs are new, and there are a lot of them, and quality for the majority is low. But probably, a few years down the road, some blogs will develop a reputation for being good at filtering out the crap, and those "blogs" will become the new "news organizations".
The current news organizations started as many, many, smaller news outlets that, over the years, have consolidated into a few conglomerates, who have a pretty good stranglehold on the existing means of distribution, and thus present a pretty high barrier to entry for new news outlets.
That's what the internet changes - it obliterates that barrier to entry. Yes, the vast majority of people who try to take advantage of that will produce crap, but hopefully a few will produce something better than what is currently produced by the conglomerates - or at least, something better for some audiences.
When cost of distribution goes down, variety of product distributed, and thus likelihood that a particular audience can find a product more closely suited to their needs, goes up. Cable TV is a good example of this - creating a cable channel is much cheaper than creating a broadcast channel, which is why there is such a variety of cable channels. The internet just lowers that cost of distribution even further.
I've been around the nation's roadways for a long time -- since the early 1900s in fact -- and am thus quite aware of the ruinous activities it has been subjected to by the typical driver since then. You know, things like people popping into the passing lane and treating it
like the right lane, or in the larger picture basically assuming the entire road is there to serve as some form of entertainment.
The issues with extreme traffic congestion and high insurance rates are only another sign of the degree to which the abuse of the roadways has been
risen up to.
When I started, the car dealer would inform me that my car could cause immeasurable damage to other drivers and pedestrians as a not-so subtle hint to not screw around, and driving required some basic knowledge of transmissions and
attention to the owners manual before you could even start the car. Frankly, things became unmanageable at the point the roads were made
accessible to anybody with a few thousand dollars; anybody who's been around this long knows what I'm talking about.
It's a short hop to realizing that the problems we're experiencing with aggressive drivers and drag racers are the same problem. Intimate knowledge of automobile mechanics used to be a requirement -- along with a malcontent-type disposition -- in order to wreak the sort of havoc that today requires a few hundred bucks and a trip to the local accessory shop. Every Honda is now a potential rice-rocket, and every SUV doubles as road-tank.
Many experts believe we should raise the barrier of entry by requiring drivers to undergo education, certification, and maybe
even an oath to only pass in the passing lane as part of the certification process if going onto the expressway. It used to take years to do what kids today
can do in months; additionally, a would-be driver who spends a few months picking up parrallel parking or whatever has hardly
learned the fundamentals of driving any more than someone who reads a manual about his DVD player has become a laser
engineer. I suggest that the field and the general user experience would be greatly enhanced by limiting access to automobiles (by means of pricing and with the cooperation of the rental car companies) and by separating people allowed to drive on local roads during the day from those allowed to drive at night or on the expressway.
It makes more sense than trying to go out and educate every user. Think about it; in what other field do we "educate" "users"? We
don't try to educate people with electrical outlets and let any curious individual perform as a licensed electrician. We don't "educate"
passengers and let anyone who cares be a bus driver give it a try. Why are things always so difficult when it comes to driving cars?
I've been around the nation's roadways for a long time -- since the early 1900s in fact -- and am thus quite aware of the ruinous activities it has been subjected to by the typical driver since then. You know, things like people popping into the passing lane and treating it
like the right lane, or in the larger picture basically assuming the entire road is there to serve as some form of entertainment.
The issues with extreme traffic congestion and high insurance rates are only another sign of the degree to which the abuse of the roadways has been
risen up to.
When I started, the car dealer would inform me that my car could cause immeasurable damage to other drivers and pedestrians as a not-so subtle hint to not screw around, and driving required some basic knowledge of transmissions and
attention to the owners manual before you could even start the car. Frankly, things became unmanageable at the point the roads were made
accessible to anybody with a few thousand dollars; anybody who's been around this long knows what I'm talking about.
It's a short hop to realizing that the problems we're experiencing with aggressive drivers and drag racers are the same problem. Intimate knowledge of automobile mechanics used to be a requirement -- along with a malcontent-type disposition -- in order to wreak the sort of havoc that today requires a few hundred bucks and a trip to the local accessory shop. Every Honda is now a potential rice-rocket, and every SUV doubles as road-tank.
Many experts believe we should raise the barrier of entry by requiring drivers to undergo education, certification, and maybe
even an oath to only pass in the passing lane as part of the certification process if going onto the expressway. It used to take years to do what kids today
can do in months; additionally, a would-be driver who spends a few months picking up parrallel parking or whatever has hardly
learned the fundamentals of driving any more than someone who reads a manual about his DVD player has become a laser
engineer. I suggest that the field and the general user experience would be greatly enhanced by limiting access to automobiles (by means of pricing and with the cooperation of the rental car companies) and by separating people allowed to drive on local roads during the day from those allowed to drive at night or on the expressway.
It makes more sense than trying to go out and educate every user. Think about it; in what other field do we "educate" "users"? We
don't try to educate people with electrical outlets and let any curious individual perform as a licensed electrician. We don't "educate"
passengers and let anyone who cares be a bus driver give it a try. Why are things always so difficult when it comes to driving cars?
We don't try to educate people with electrical outlets and let any curious individual perform as a licensed electrician.
I'll pick this example, but the critique applies to the whole post.
We *DO* educate people about electrical outlets - from a VERY early age, we tell people "Mess with this outlet and you'll die." And we let any curious person who wants to perform as an electrician, and the people who decide to do that without the proper training cause themselves property damage and sometimes die.
The problem is that if you put a computer on the internet and it causes havok (by getting infected with whatever), unlike mucking with electrical outlets, the user doesn't die. If you want computers to work like electrical outlets, you'd have to make people who own computers liable for any damage caused by their computer, just like someone who connects poor electrical work to the electrical network is liable if they manage to blow out the local power substation. Then users will have a financial incentive to not put computers on the network unless they are reasonably sure they're not going to cause the network problems.
Of course, that will never happen, so we'll just have to deal with idiots ruining the network, much like we have to accept bad drivers on the road.
I've misplaced several of the documents I printed. So how does this work? do I put the tracking number in the printer and it tells me where my lost documents are? Do I press a button on the printer and my documents beep so I can find them? Or do I have to do something else?
The federal government is expressly provided the ability to regulate copyright by the constitution - no interstate commerce is necessary. They can legislate whatever they would like to protect copyright.
The FCC, however, has a mandate which only extends to broadcast transmissions (currently, we'll see if that limit remains in place after 4 more years of republicans), so they can't mess with your TiVo yet.
If they use a keylogger to capture what I type into my online journal, it's not a wiretap. If they use a keylogger to capture what I type to my mother, it's boring, and sometimes profane - but probably also a wiretap.
This is a case where judges are forced to apply old rules for old tech to new tech. The original intent of the wiretap law was to prevent people from eavesdropping on conversations between two parties without appropriate judicial oversight. So is using a keylogger wiretapping? It depends.
The real answer is an updated law to reflect the updated technology. Relying on Judges to protect our rights is the sign of a lazy legislature.
Not having a robots.txt file doesn't give google permission to use his content. If Google takes a query by you, looks all over the net for images you might want, and then displays a page with other people's copywritten work for you, that sounds like pretty clear copyright infringement to me.
Now, if google said "Here is a list of places you can find these images", that's different. Fine line, but line none-the-less.
It is possible that there were more votes for Bush because there were also more electronic voting machines, but if you look a little deeper, you can see that there were more votes for Bush because the people of Florida are getting dumber.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody invented a way for computers to recognize handwriting.
Like, so 10 years ago.
We still hate Microsoft, but we like that they're suing spammers.
If two people you really don't like kill each other, you can still hate them even though they both did you a favor.
line will creep down at Internet speed.
African internet speed or European internet speed?
... as least until one of your arsonists accidentally burns down the murderer's neighbor's house.
We desperately need some mechanism to keep the human population in check.
And that's why we invented nuclear weapons.
Nature likes balance. Technology allows us to push nature further out of balance without all dying. If we can develop technology faster than we continue to push nature out of balance, we'll be fine, if not, we'll all die, but at least there won't be anyone left to worry about it.
In the meantime, I have some consumption to do.
What is in the vaccine is not important. The difference between a treatment and a vaccine is that the treatment attacks and kills the pathogen, or just alleviates symptoms. A vaccine acts like the pathogen, causing an immune response that attacks and kills the pathogen, or a cellular response that stops the pathogen from being destructive.
Vaccines do not have to be made from live or dead specimens of the pathogen - they can also be made of specimens of a similar pathogen (smallpox vaccine is made from cowpox, for example), or anything that mimics a critical part of the pathogen closely enough to trigger an immune/cellular response.
People tend to think the difference is that vaccines PREVENT disease and treatments treat disease only because most people get vaccines before they have a chance to be exposed to a disease. If you somehow ended up with Polio or Smallpox or whatever, they'd still give you a vaccination to get your body to take care of it (and that's what they did back when they first created the vaccines).
Is your dad paying for the tuition?
If not, stay where you are. An extra $20,000 spent on tuition translates to needing to make nearly an extra $40,000 in salary (taxes!) to make up for it down the road.
On top of that, you'd actually do far more to help your future employment now to take a good internship (or research position or whatever) where you work for free (and willingness to work for free is one of the things that will get you a good internship) than to have to work a crappy job that pays the money you need to afford school.
Or if you're entrepeneurially minded (and can spell better than I can), you could take that $20,000 and start your own business now while you go to school. It's a lot easier to start a business when you have a student's flexible schedule then when you work full time (believe me, I've started two, and the one I started in school was much easier). Sell the business when you graduate, or hire a manager and enjoy the extra income.
The one place where which school you are at matters is what companies recruit at your school. You'll find that companies will tend to recruit at big-name CS schools (like MIT/Carnegie/CalTech) no matter how far away they are, the big state schools in neighboring states, and smaller state schools/smaller private schools in their more immediate vicinity. The converse of this is that if you go to a small-name school, you're probably going to be looking at a job near where you are now when you graduate, but on the upside, it's also easier to get interviews with local companies (cheaper for the company, it can be done anytime instead of in one of the 15 minute appointments the recruiter has, and you can interview on-site and meet more people and see the company).
Personally, I got my job because I was the most memorable person at an intern/co-op fair at my school, which was a combination of my company being at the fair in the first place, and being able to talk for a half an hour about the brewery local to the company's location while 20 unmemorable people waited to hand the guy their resumes. In CS, you'd be surprised how much of getting a job can just be being able to hold a conversation.
I got hired full time because I performed well during my internship.
Also, FWIW, one of the most talented people I work with has a degree from a small-name CS school (it's most known for it's music-related programs). But it's a school local to the company, so the company recruits there. He also started as an intern.
People need other people they trust to filter out the crap. Many would argue that trusting someone *OTHER* than a news company to filter out crap for you would result in better news.
Blogs are new, and there are a lot of them, and quality for the majority is low. But probably, a few years down the road, some blogs will develop a reputation for being good at filtering out the crap, and those "blogs" will become the new "news organizations".
The current news organizations started as many, many, smaller news outlets that, over the years, have consolidated into a few conglomerates, who have a pretty good stranglehold on the existing means of distribution, and thus present a pretty high barrier to entry for new news outlets.
That's what the internet changes - it obliterates that barrier to entry. Yes, the vast majority of people who try to take advantage of that will produce crap, but hopefully a few will produce something better than what is currently produced by the conglomerates - or at least, something better for some audiences.
When cost of distribution goes down, variety of product distributed, and thus likelihood that a particular audience can find a product more closely suited to their needs, goes up. Cable TV is a good example of this - creating a cable channel is much cheaper than creating a broadcast channel, which is why there is such a variety of cable channels. The internet just lowers that cost of distribution even further.
The issues with extreme traffic congestion and high insurance rates are only another sign of the degree to which the abuse of the roadways has been risen up to.
When I started, the car dealer would inform me that my car could cause immeasurable damage to other drivers and pedestrians as a not-so subtle hint to not screw around, and driving required some basic knowledge of transmissions and attention to the owners manual before you could even start the car. Frankly, things became unmanageable at the point the roads were made accessible to anybody with a few thousand dollars; anybody who's been around this long knows what I'm talking about.
It's a short hop to realizing that the problems we're experiencing with aggressive drivers and drag racers are the same problem. Intimate knowledge of automobile mechanics used to be a requirement -- along with a malcontent-type disposition -- in order to wreak the sort of havoc that today requires a few hundred bucks and a trip to the local accessory shop. Every Honda is now a potential rice-rocket, and every SUV doubles as road-tank.
Many experts believe we should raise the barrier of entry by requiring drivers to undergo education, certification, and maybe even an oath to only pass in the passing lane as part of the certification process if going onto the expressway. It used to take years to do what kids today can do in months; additionally, a would-be driver who spends a few months picking up parrallel parking or whatever has hardly learned the fundamentals of driving any more than someone who reads a manual about his DVD player has become a laser engineer. I suggest that the field and the general user experience would be greatly enhanced by limiting access to automobiles (by means of pricing and with the cooperation of the rental car companies) and by separating people allowed to drive on local roads during the day from those allowed to drive at night or on the expressway.
It makes more sense than trying to go out and educate every user. Think about it; in what other field do we "educate" "users"? We don't try to educate people with electrical outlets and let any curious individual perform as a licensed electrician. We don't "educate" passengers and let anyone who cares be a bus driver give it a try. Why are things always so difficult when it comes to driving cars?
like the right lane, or in the larger picture basically assuming the entire road is there to serve as some form of entertainment.
The issues with extreme traffic congestion and high insurance rates are only another sign of the degree to which the abuse of the roadways has been
risen up to.
When I started, the car dealer would inform me that my car could cause immeasurable damage to other drivers and pedestrians as a not-so subtle hint to not screw around, and driving required some basic knowledge of transmissions and
attention to the owners manual before you could even start the car. Frankly, things became unmanageable at the point the roads were made
accessible to anybody with a few thousand dollars; anybody who's been around this long knows what I'm talking about.
It's a short hop to realizing that the problems we're experiencing with aggressive drivers and drag racers are the same problem. Intimate knowledge of automobile mechanics used to be a requirement -- along with a malcontent-type disposition -- in order to wreak the sort of havoc that today requires a few hundred bucks and a trip to the local accessory shop. Every Honda is now a potential rice-rocket, and every SUV doubles as road-tank.
Many experts believe we should raise the barrier of entry by requiring drivers to undergo education, certification, and maybe
even an oath to only pass in the passing lane as part of the certification process if going onto the expressway. It used to take years to do what kids today
can do in months; additionally, a would-be driver who spends a few months picking up parrallel parking or whatever has hardly
learned the fundamentals of driving any more than someone who reads a manual about his DVD player has become a laser
engineer. I suggest that the field and the general user experience would be greatly enhanced by limiting access to automobiles (by means of pricing and with the cooperation of the rental car companies) and by separating people allowed to drive on local roads during the day from those allowed to drive at night or on the expressway.
It makes more sense than trying to go out and educate every user. Think about it; in what other field do we "educate" "users"? We
don't try to educate people with electrical outlets and let any curious individual perform as a licensed electrician. We don't "educate"
passengers and let anyone who cares be a bus driver give it a try. Why are things always so difficult when it comes to driving cars?
We don't try to educate people with electrical outlets and let any curious individual perform as a licensed electrician.
I'll pick this example, but the critique applies to the whole post.
We *DO* educate people about electrical outlets - from a VERY early age, we tell people "Mess with this outlet and you'll die." And we let any curious person who wants to perform as an electrician, and the people who decide to do that without the proper training cause themselves property damage and sometimes die.
The problem is that if you put a computer on the internet and it causes havok (by getting infected with whatever), unlike mucking with electrical outlets, the user doesn't die. If you want computers to work like electrical outlets, you'd have to make people who own computers liable for any damage caused by their computer, just like someone who connects poor electrical work to the electrical network is liable if they manage to blow out the local power substation. Then users will have a financial incentive to not put computers on the network unless they are reasonably sure they're not going to cause the network problems.
Of course, that will never happen, so we'll just have to deal with idiots ruining the network, much like we have to accept bad drivers on the road.
There are only so many suckers, don't go telling people who are likely to be good at poker where our suckers are! You're giving away our money man!
Erm, I mean, this is a horrible idea, all of the IT people I know lose lots and lots of money playing poker online.
Like being derided for poor, delayed, buggy content.
As long as he's willing to accept the decreased quality associated with making you work overtime.
But, beating Rodney King and violating Rodney King's civil rights are separate acts.
I've misplaced several of the documents I printed. So how does this work? do I put the tracking number in the printer and it tells me where my lost documents are? Do I press a button on the printer and my documents beep so I can find them? Or do I have to do something else?
The federal government is expressly provided the ability to regulate copyright by the constitution - no interstate commerce is necessary. They can legislate whatever they would like to protect copyright.
The FCC, however, has a mandate which only extends to broadcast transmissions (currently, we'll see if that limit remains in place after 4 more years of republicans), so they can't mess with your TiVo yet.
If they use a keylogger to capture what I type into my online journal, it's not a wiretap. If they use a keylogger to capture what I type to my mother, it's boring, and sometimes profane - but probably also a wiretap.
This is a case where judges are forced to apply old rules for old tech to new tech. The original intent of the wiretap law was to prevent people from eavesdropping on conversations between two parties without appropriate judicial oversight. So is using a keylogger wiretapping? It depends.
The real answer is an updated law to reflect the updated technology. Relying on Judges to protect our rights is the sign of a lazy legislature.
Not having a robots.txt file doesn't give google permission to use his content. If Google takes a query by you, looks all over the net for images you might want, and then displays a page with other people's copywritten work for you, that sounds like pretty clear copyright infringement to me.
Now, if google said "Here is a list of places you can find these images", that's different. Fine line, but line none-the-less.
It is possible that there were more votes for Bush because there were also more electronic voting machines, but if you look a little deeper, you can see that there were more votes for Bush because the people of Florida are getting dumber.
Thanks for totally missing the joke, and then EXPLAINING it.
We'll raise fuel taxes, and everyone will starve to death because farmers won't be able to grow food anymore.
Just wait until someone writes an aimbot.
An advanced society makes accomodations for its disabled members, which is why prostitution should be legalized immediately.
Next you'll be telling us that sex isn't as much fun if you pay for it.