Higher faculties? You must be thinking of different people.
Anyone is capable of making an intelligent assessment of risk, if they are educated to actually understand such things. But every day the news trumpets the "Growing rate of this" and the "Increase in violence nationwide" and the "Dangers of (insert thing you do every day)." And so people are educated to fear things that are not rational.
Dirty bombs are just one more example. People afraid of flying because of terrorism. Jesus. I was living within sight of the towers on 9/11, then six months later I get a job down south, and move, and the goddamn rednecks are all still walking around, looking at the sky saying, "It could happen here." Irrational fear.
I'm worried about having a heart attack before I'm 50 due to damn job stress and bad diet. That's a real worry. The only reason I don't fly anymore is because the experience has become so fricking absurd; I left the gate by my plane in Kansas City once (it was enclosed with a giant fence with a metal detector at the little gulag entrance) to get a goddamn sandwich and take a leak, and they wouldn't let me back in until they x-rayed the goddamn sandwich I'd picked up for my wife, and wouldn't let me take her a coke at all. Far as I'm concerned, they can all go out of business. I'd rather buy a plane and fly myself.
Wired ran an article about that just today...Briefly, Terrorism is ineffective at accomplishing most goals (though it works well at getting people the hell out of your country) because, as people, we associate terrorist attacks with attacks on ourselves, not with big abstract policy goals.
Al-Qaeda blowing up a building doesn't change the US policy toward the Jewish state; all it does is provoke a counter attack, and the sense that someone out there wants to kill us for no reason.
50% regardless, 65% if anyone in the country is killed by a mobster or crazy driver in the next day or so, 85% if the aforementioned killing has any video footage, and 100% if any of the journalists who saw the demo run over a prostitute on their way home.
Oh sure, you look at it. You check to make sure it works, and isn't too hard to install. I've worked for a lot of companies; if you buy software, and it works, you just assume it's doing what it's supposed to be doing, and doesn't have a massive glaring security flaw.
The whole point of buying it, is so you don't have to develop it yourself.
Meh. Who here hasn't dealt with a vendor salesperson claiming their product is the best product ever, and that it has no side effects, whitens teeth, takes out the trash, clears up your skin, etc? Saying that Sony should have been completely aware of the software specifics of a piece of code they brought from a third party, a piece of code that they were almost certainly not even allowed to review, is disingenuous.
Remember that Sony music is completely separate from the software part of the company...There is no guarantee that anyone in music there is technically competent to weigh in on this sort of thing at the management level.
I also doubt they'll be able to recover anything, but not because I believe that the software was accurately represented to them, but instead because they probably signed away most of their rights to sue just like everyone else does when they contract to us a piece of software.
You act like the Surgeon General makes laws, or does anything other than produce position papers.
There is nothing that would ever require an administration to follow the SG's recommendation except that they don't want to look like assholes, and frankly, I don't care if the truth makes them look bad.
Fix the problem, not the blame...I don't give a damn if they blame bush or not, but this cannot be allowed to continue, or there is no point in having a surgeon general at all. I am so damn tired of people blaming crap on the past as an excuse not to fix a problem that exists here and now.
Not gotten a fair shake? Are you out of your mind? His legacy is going to be composed entirely of lies, political shenanigans, and a goddamn military quagmire. For a president who for the vast majority of his term had a legislature controlled by his own party to have accomplished practically nothing of note except fearmongering and pork, is obscene.
QED? No way. There's hardly any math in it at all.
It's an extreme example, because explaining anything that heavy on theory in terms that a non-expert can follow is almost impossible, but if anyone could do it, it's Feynman.
Oh really? Why don't you read a bit more, dumbass. I had the 4th post, where I specifically mentioned Clinton, and specifically mentioned Reagan as well, and yet it's me being oh so blind and biased.
Actually, looking back, I was the first person to mention Clinton in this thread, which would seem to suggest that you are uninformed at best. Next time try not to talk so obviously out your ass.
Let's say you're in the government, and only one member of your government was chosen because of his scientific knowledge, and you're having a meeting on science. Would you invite him to attend?
Is it not a problem because everyone abuses the system? Shouldn't that suggest to a rational person that we need to fix the fucking system? But no, you've got to immediately make it a partisan issue, because you can't ever be wrong, and nothing can ever be your fault.
Fucking crybaby conservatives. "Waaaaa, Clinton did it too, so why are you yelling at meeeeeee?" After 7 years, you pansies should be able to stand up for your own damn misdeeds.
How does that follow? If you frequently go off on some weird ass jargon-filled tangent about some obscure scientific esoterica that no normal person would ever care about, then sure, that's going to put a crimp in your social life, because it demonstrates a lack of social skills.
But if you give a layman a reasonable overview of some issue that's actually relevant to the discussion, while restraining your tendency to sneer at stupid questions, and patronize people just because they don't already know what you're talking about, then you might find that some people are actually capable of being interested.
Feynman did a lecture series on quantum electrodynamics that was specifically geared toward people who didn't know what the hell quantum electrodynamics was. If you want to see an example of someone explaining a hard to understand topic to a bunch of people who have no background in a manner that is both accurate and entertaining, I highly recommend picking it up.
Science should never bow to political pressures. Bush is guilty of this, obviously...This is hardly the first evidence.
But, especially in the area of health care, he's far from the only one who has gotten involved in a negative manner. Reagan tried to squash talk about AIDS, Clinton poo poo'd needle exchange programs, Bush Jr. jumped on everything just as part of the administrations obsession about managing information.
This stuff really needs to be separate and non-partisan...I am so freaking tired of this or that issue being batted around because of peoples inborn prejudices. A reputable expert with actual facts puts together a well thought-out, scientific report, and they get defunded, their speeches are edited and pre-reviewed. People from within the administration work to discredit their testimony. It's just ridiculous, and there is no way good science or good policy is coming out of it.
Hell, while they're at it, they should add a scientist general, and do the same damn thing. This stuff isn't about opinion. There is a right answer.
That'd be fine, or even cool. It'd deflect the inevitable storm of 500 people saying, "Wrong n00b!" and not reading down far enough to see that you admitted it already, and let the whole discussion move on to more productive things.
I don't know. I think retractions would screw with everything else. If you make a boneheaded statement (and I've done it more than once myself), it should stand. Otherwise, everyone who responds to correct your misstatement will look insane, and it'd be hard to metamod, because the comments wouldn't necessarily fit the context anymore, etc.
This is true, but the thing to remember is, while those germs are alive, it is still possible to pass them to a new host.
Sure, your body is kicking bacterial ass, but that last cough or sneeze that they manage to wring out of you could spew a few lucky winners into a coworkers face, and the cycle starts again, but with a slightly more resistant strain.
I do tend to cook ground beef a bit more, though I have to admit, I love the rare hamburger...Sometimes I buy higher end meat, just so I can eat a rare burger with low risk.
It's all about acceptable risks. There is a little risk in all of it, but if you're intelligent about it, you can still eat stuff that tastes good without too much worry.
They are way over enthusiastic...Slow pasteurization or no pasteurization for certain things is acceptable as long as it's clearly labeled...Not everything needs to be nuked to fricking death. People die from undercooked meat as well, but if I'm going to have a fillet, I'm not going to cook it brown just to save myself a tiny bit of risk. What the hell is the point?
Likewise, I'd rather be able to make an informed choice about the origins of my food...GM vegetables aren't a big concern of mine, other than the fact that I fricking hate Monsanto and their ilk over the goddamn self-terminating seed issue, and would like to be able to avoid their products. However, hormone treated animal meat/milk bothers me, and I'd really like to be able to avoid that by some method other than raising my own cows.
Yep, everyone before me is right. The only thing I want to add is that there is actually a group that decides what oil actually fits in what categories: the International Olive Oil Council. All IOOC member nations (the US isn't one) have to abide by their standards in labeling olive oils. By their standards, there can be no refined oil in either EVOO or just plain VOO.
Just one more example of the FDA's obsession with pasteurization and processing. What a country...Can't get unpasteurized cheese because it might hurt you, but they don't have to label GM foods or hormone pumped cow products.
It's because we like immoral behavior; if it only affected religious zealots, we'd add it to the water supply.
I just love how so many so-called Christians can be so happy to watch other people die. Whole buncha stone throwing fake christians in the world today.
Don't get me wrong, I don't hate all religious people. Just the holier-than-thou hypocrites who talk about god while imposing their narrow-minded world view on everyone else.
She uses it to fry things, which is a big "WTF?" if you know anything about olive oil. The whole point of extra virgin olive oil is that it's a lighter more flavorful oil, and it's usually substantially more expensive. Use it in a salad dressing or as a condiment, drink it straight out of the bottle like the Greeks do, but don't fry in it, jesus! It doesn't even have a very high smoke point, compared to refined olive oil.
It's like frying something in sesame oil, or flaxseed oil, or any other oil that you can think of that is used primarily for how it tastes, rather than as an efficient conductor of heat.
Of course, in the U.S., EVOO is defined by acidity, so you're not buying real EVOO at the stores, just regular refined oil with a low acid level.
Sure. The proof of concept in the article was them taking a phage that preyed on e coli and bulking it up to make it more effective.
I'm not worried about it infecting people, I'm worried about it colonizing our intestines, and keeping us bacteria free for the rest of our lives (which would be a bad thing). This sort of thing is a possibility, and it's not unlikely that our immune systems wouldn't really care, since the phage isn't capable of harming us directly...In all likelihood, it'd wipe out all the bacteria in your system, and that would be the end of it. Your body would get rid of it (flushing it out of your intestines when you are lacking in e coli would not be a problem =P), and you could eat some yogurt and be fine.
Still, if the stuff was persistent and able to survive in a dormant state in the environment for a significant period of time, and to pass through the stomach, it could prove to be a significant problem. Hell, it'd make for a pretty good bioweapon in that case; mostly non-lethal, but pretty damn debilitating.
View the damn parent post he's replying to, and tell me that ad hominem isn't relevant. It's fricking hilarious that an AC wouldn't be browsing at a level low enough to view other AC posts.
Sure, it's not meant to be a universal statement. But most home users have only one computer, and most home users user windows, so the majority of windows users are 1 computer, 1 user.
As opposed to linux, which is most popular in business and among geeks, where the 1 user, 1 computer rule is least likely to hold true.
Yes, I understand that it's not going to affect people; I'm not an idiot. That would be the biggest evolutionary jump ever.
My argument (which I've expressed repeatedly through the thread) is that it may affect bacteria other than the bacteria intended, bacteria that we need. Engineer something that eats e coli and you get the good stuff as well as the bad stuff, and if it picks up a decent infection vector, then we could end up with a real problem.
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Higher faculties? You must be thinking of different people.
Anyone is capable of making an intelligent assessment of risk, if they are educated to actually understand such things. But every day the news trumpets the "Growing rate of this" and the "Increase in violence nationwide" and the "Dangers of (insert thing you do every day)." And so people are educated to fear things that are not rational.
Dirty bombs are just one more example. People afraid of flying because of terrorism. Jesus. I was living within sight of the towers on 9/11, then six months later I get a job down south, and move, and the goddamn rednecks are all still walking around, looking at the sky saying, "It could happen here." Irrational fear.
I'm worried about having a heart attack before I'm 50 due to damn job stress and bad diet. That's a real worry. The only reason I don't fly anymore is because the experience has become so fricking absurd; I left the gate by my plane in Kansas City once (it was enclosed with a giant fence with a metal detector at the little gulag entrance) to get a goddamn sandwich and take a leak, and they wouldn't let me back in until they x-rayed the goddamn sandwich I'd picked up for my wife, and wouldn't let me take her a coke at all. Far as I'm concerned, they can all go out of business. I'd rather buy a plane and fly myself.
Wired ran an article about that just today...Briefly, Terrorism is ineffective at accomplishing most goals (though it works well at getting people the hell out of your country) because, as people, we associate terrorist attacks with attacks on ourselves, not with big abstract policy goals.
Al-Qaeda blowing up a building doesn't change the US policy toward the Jewish state; all it does is provoke a counter attack, and the sense that someone out there wants to kill us for no reason.
50% regardless, 65% if anyone in the country is killed by a mobster or crazy driver in the next day or so, 85% if the aforementioned killing has any video footage, and 100% if any of the journalists who saw the demo run over a prostitute on their way home.
Oh sure, you look at it. You check to make sure it works, and isn't too hard to install. I've worked for a lot of companies; if you buy software, and it works, you just assume it's doing what it's supposed to be doing, and doesn't have a massive glaring security flaw.
The whole point of buying it, is so you don't have to develop it yourself.
Meh. Who here hasn't dealt with a vendor salesperson claiming their product is the best product ever, and that it has no side effects, whitens teeth, takes out the trash, clears up your skin, etc? Saying that Sony should have been completely aware of the software specifics of a piece of code they brought from a third party, a piece of code that they were almost certainly not even allowed to review, is disingenuous.
Remember that Sony music is completely separate from the software part of the company...There is no guarantee that anyone in music there is technically competent to weigh in on this sort of thing at the management level.
I also doubt they'll be able to recover anything, but not because I believe that the software was accurately represented to them, but instead because they probably signed away most of their rights to sue just like everyone else does when they contract to us a piece of software.
You act like the Surgeon General makes laws, or does anything other than produce position papers.
There is nothing that would ever require an administration to follow the SG's recommendation except that they don't want to look like assholes, and frankly, I don't care if the truth makes them look bad.
Fix the problem, not the blame...I don't give a damn if they blame bush or not, but this cannot be allowed to continue, or there is no point in having a surgeon general at all. I am so damn tired of people blaming crap on the past as an excuse not to fix a problem that exists here and now.
Not gotten a fair shake? Are you out of your mind? His legacy is going to be composed entirely of lies, political shenanigans, and a goddamn military quagmire. For a president who for the vast majority of his term had a legislature controlled by his own party to have accomplished practically nothing of note except fearmongering and pork, is obscene.
QED? No way. There's hardly any math in it at all.
It's an extreme example, because explaining anything that heavy on theory in terms that a non-expert can follow is almost impossible, but if anyone could do it, it's Feynman.
Oh really? Why don't you read a bit more, dumbass. I had the 4th post, where I specifically mentioned Clinton, and specifically mentioned Reagan as well, and yet it's me being oh so blind and biased.
Actually, looking back, I was the first person to mention Clinton in this thread, which would seem to suggest that you are uninformed at best. Next time try not to talk so obviously out your ass.
Let's say you're in the government, and only one member of your government was chosen because of his scientific knowledge, and you're having a meeting on science. Would you invite him to attend?
WHO CARES?
Is it not a problem because everyone abuses the system? Shouldn't that suggest to a rational person that we need to fix the fucking system? But no, you've got to immediately make it a partisan issue, because you can't ever be wrong, and nothing can ever be your fault.
Fucking crybaby conservatives. "Waaaaa, Clinton did it too, so why are you yelling at meeeeeee?" After 7 years, you pansies should be able to stand up for your own damn misdeeds.
How does that follow? If you frequently go off on some weird ass jargon-filled tangent about some obscure scientific esoterica that no normal person would ever care about, then sure, that's going to put a crimp in your social life, because it demonstrates a lack of social skills.
But if you give a layman a reasonable overview of some issue that's actually relevant to the discussion, while restraining your tendency to sneer at stupid questions, and patronize people just because they don't already know what you're talking about, then you might find that some people are actually capable of being interested.
Feynman did a lecture series on quantum electrodynamics that was specifically geared toward people who didn't know what the hell quantum electrodynamics was. If you want to see an example of someone explaining a hard to understand topic to a bunch of people who have no background in a manner that is both accurate and entertaining, I highly recommend picking it up.
Science should never bow to political pressures. Bush is guilty of this, obviously...This is hardly the first evidence.
But, especially in the area of health care, he's far from the only one who has gotten involved in a negative manner. Reagan tried to squash talk about AIDS, Clinton poo poo'd needle exchange programs, Bush Jr. jumped on everything just as part of the administrations obsession about managing information.
This stuff really needs to be separate and non-partisan...I am so freaking tired of this or that issue being batted around because of peoples inborn prejudices. A reputable expert with actual facts puts together a well thought-out, scientific report, and they get defunded, their speeches are edited and pre-reviewed. People from within the administration work to discredit their testimony. It's just ridiculous, and there is no way good science or good policy is coming out of it.
Hell, while they're at it, they should add a scientist general, and do the same damn thing. This stuff isn't about opinion. There is a right answer.
That'd be fine, or even cool. It'd deflect the inevitable storm of 500 people saying, "Wrong n00b!" and not reading down far enough to see that you admitted it already, and let the whole discussion move on to more productive things.
I don't know. I think retractions would screw with everything else. If you make a boneheaded statement (and I've done it more than once myself), it should stand. Otherwise, everyone who responds to correct your misstatement will look insane, and it'd be hard to metamod, because the comments wouldn't necessarily fit the context anymore, etc.
This is true, but the thing to remember is, while those germs are alive, it is still possible to pass them to a new host.
Sure, your body is kicking bacterial ass, but that last cough or sneeze that they manage to wring out of you could spew a few lucky winners into a coworkers face, and the cycle starts again, but with a slightly more resistant strain.
I do tend to cook ground beef a bit more, though I have to admit, I love the rare hamburger...Sometimes I buy higher end meat, just so I can eat a rare burger with low risk.
It's all about acceptable risks. There is a little risk in all of it, but if you're intelligent about it, you can still eat stuff that tastes good without too much worry.
They are way over enthusiastic...Slow pasteurization or no pasteurization for certain things is acceptable as long as it's clearly labeled...Not everything needs to be nuked to fricking death. People die from undercooked meat as well, but if I'm going to have a fillet, I'm not going to cook it brown just to save myself a tiny bit of risk. What the hell is the point?
Likewise, I'd rather be able to make an informed choice about the origins of my food...GM vegetables aren't a big concern of mine, other than the fact that I fricking hate Monsanto and their ilk over the goddamn self-terminating seed issue, and would like to be able to avoid their products. However, hormone treated animal meat/milk bothers me, and I'd really like to be able to avoid that by some method other than raising my own cows.
Yep, everyone before me is right. The only thing I want to add is that there is actually a group that decides what oil actually fits in what categories: the International Olive Oil Council. All IOOC member nations (the US isn't one) have to abide by their standards in labeling olive oils. By their standards, there can be no refined oil in either EVOO or just plain VOO.
Just one more example of the FDA's obsession with pasteurization and processing. What a country...Can't get unpasteurized cheese because it might hurt you, but they don't have to label GM foods or hormone pumped cow products.
It's because we like immoral behavior; if it only affected religious zealots, we'd add it to the water supply.
I just love how so many so-called Christians can be so happy to watch other people die. Whole buncha stone throwing fake christians in the world today.
Don't get me wrong, I don't hate all religious people. Just the holier-than-thou hypocrites who talk about god while imposing their narrow-minded world view on everyone else.
She uses it to fry things, which is a big "WTF?" if you know anything about olive oil. The whole point of extra virgin olive oil is that it's a lighter more flavorful oil, and it's usually substantially more expensive. Use it in a salad dressing or as a condiment, drink it straight out of the bottle like the Greeks do, but don't fry in it, jesus! It doesn't even have a very high smoke point, compared to refined olive oil.
It's like frying something in sesame oil, or flaxseed oil, or any other oil that you can think of that is used primarily for how it tastes, rather than as an efficient conductor of heat.
Of course, in the U.S., EVOO is defined by acidity, so you're not buying real EVOO at the stores, just regular refined oil with a low acid level.
Sure. The proof of concept in the article was them taking a phage that preyed on e coli and bulking it up to make it more effective.
I'm not worried about it infecting people, I'm worried about it colonizing our intestines, and keeping us bacteria free for the rest of our lives (which would be a bad thing). This sort of thing is a possibility, and it's not unlikely that our immune systems wouldn't really care, since the phage isn't capable of harming us directly...In all likelihood, it'd wipe out all the bacteria in your system, and that would be the end of it. Your body would get rid of it (flushing it out of your intestines when you are lacking in e coli would not be a problem =P), and you could eat some yogurt and be fine.
Still, if the stuff was persistent and able to survive in a dormant state in the environment for a significant period of time, and to pass through the stomach, it could prove to be a significant problem. Hell, it'd make for a pretty good bioweapon in that case; mostly non-lethal, but pretty damn debilitating.
View the damn parent post he's replying to, and tell me that ad hominem isn't relevant. It's fricking hilarious that an AC wouldn't be browsing at a level low enough to view other AC posts.
Sure, it's not meant to be a universal statement. But most home users have only one computer, and most home users user windows, so the majority of windows users are 1 computer, 1 user.
As opposed to linux, which is most popular in business and among geeks, where the 1 user, 1 computer rule is least likely to hold true.
Yes, I understand that it's not going to affect people; I'm not an idiot. That would be the biggest evolutionary jump ever.
My argument (which I've expressed repeatedly through the thread) is that it may affect bacteria other than the bacteria intended, bacteria that we need. Engineer something that eats e coli and you get the good stuff as well as the bad stuff, and if it picks up a decent infection vector, then we could end up with a real problem.