Last time I looked at a GM product they were STILL, after a couple decades, building them for drivers with a short left leg and passengers with a short right leg. (The wheel well clearance for the front wheels impinged on the space for the front-seat personnel's footwells. On the driver's side they produced a footrest at the same distance as the height of the fully-retracted brake (and, in the manual shift, clutch) pedal(s), with the accelerator pedal being farther forward.)
Of course that was quite a while back - before the Federal Government took them over (and also PAID Fiat to TAKE Chrysler). These days Ford is the only old-school private-enterprise US car maker, thanks to not taking the bailout money and busting their butts to make quality vehicles.
It's not just an issue of a well person buying a gun and then developing mental health problems. The US gun lobby doesn't even want to restrict sales to those who already have mental health issues.
That depends on the mental health issue.
I don't know of anyone - even the most extreme gun-rights advocates - who has a problem with disarming a person who has been adjudicated by a court of appropriate jurisdiction to being a danger to others by reason of mental problems.
But many "mental health issues" are not associated with an increase in risk of attacks on others - and many are actually associated with a DEcrease.
For instance: Depressives are drastically LESS dangerous to the general population than the average person. Meanwhile, disarming anyone who has ever been treated for depression would disarm over half the adult women in the United States.
Psychiatrists are some of the strongest lobbyists AGAINST such laws. This is because they both make it less likely that people needing treatment for mental issues will seek it and open confidential patient records to perusal by government functionaries and law enforcement.
Another recent trend is treating anyone who is a crime victim - rape, assault, robbery, stalking, etc. - for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Whether they want such "treatment" or not. Guess who is most likely to NEED a gun for self-defense? Guess when they are likely to get off their tails and go buy one?
The audio sounded like he was somehow using a full auto.
If this were the case, then it would be pretty much the first use of full auto in the US for a crime like this in modern history.
And (unless I missed one in the last few years) the second killing committed, by its owner, with a privately-owned machine gun under the regulation of the GCA '34, in the 83 years since its passage.
It's a bit early, so news items are notoriously unreliable (even when they're really trying to get it right). Nevertheless I've already heard:
- CNN: Claim that the guns were converted semi-autos. (That's also illegal.)
- CNN: Claim by a relative that the shooter "was not a gun guy".
- New York Post (paraphrasing an article in the Daily Mail and a tweet from NBC News): Claim that the shooter was the son of a multiple felon bank robber, prison escapee, attempted cop killer, with a diagnosis of psychopathy and a history of using firearms in his crimes.
Why would video messaging need a server in the middle? That would be better for supporting group chat situations, but that's the only reason I can think of.
NAT (network address translation) and the exhaustion (and increased prices of) IP addresses. (Also its spinoff: IPMasq) It's what spiked the peer-to-peer model (for ordinary users who didn't spend the massive premium for a fixed IP address) and for years drove the bulk of the public Internet to a central servers / sea of clients model.
When working through NAT on both ends of a link, the easy way is to use a middle-man relay system at a fixed IP address.
It's possible to tunnel through NAT. But it's a pain. Even those approaches need some kind of rendezvous server for the two ends to use to get acquainted and establish their direct fat pipe.
It will be interesting to see if the rollout of IPv6 leads to fixed addresses and that results in more peer-to-peer application use by the general population
The clear relation the article was communicating is that the FCC is biased towards righty faggots who fetishize markets.... the FCC has been co-opted by right wingnuts and thinks free speech for right fags must be encouraged but brown Puerto Ricans should be made an example of.
Really?
I thought the article showed a clear bias against failing to follow the rules when filling out and filing forms, then took a flying leap into differential regulation of left-right political speech (by an regulatory body whose charter doesn't allow that). This is the only thing in the Slashdot submission that leads me to suspect WAPA may have a left-of-center editorial policy, or not carry right-wing talk hosts.
Just as you took a flying leap from enforcing paperwork requirements to allege bias over skin color.
I support censorship at the client. Everyone gets to speak, you get to filter.
No, its accussing the FCC of bias. While it took efforts to limit WAPAs AM signal to protect licensing, the FCC has let similar signals go on in the continental US.
Did the stations they "let go" fill out their renewal paperwork correctly and file it on time?
If they did, and the station in Puerto Rico didn't, the only bias shown is against people who break the rules the FCC is chartered to enforce.
= = = =
Of course, if breaking the rules is more characteristic of left-wing than right-wing executives, enforcing politics-blind rules might provoke the rule-breakers to cry "Bias!" and point out numbers, out-of-context, to support their attempt to get away with rule-breaking. We've seen a lot of that with other parts of the legal code.
My wife is currently taking a database class using Oracle and apparently Oracle-supplied sample data.
The sample dataset was employee records, including salaries. Judging by the employee names there were two male and one female programmers. The males were paid substantially more than the female.
FCC audio division's regulations have done little to stop AM and satellite radio from broadcasting right-wing streams-of-consciousness throughout the lower 48 states.
Can't tell if he's far right, and complaining about being silenced by the left, or far left, and complaining that "those pesky nazis" get to spew their hate speech.
I can tell. He's a lefty who's tweaked that the FCC won't censor his political opposition.
Since the number of stations (and alternative media outlets) climbed to the point where there was no shortage to be used to justify forcing radio stations to present all positions on controversial subjects, the "fairness doctrine" regulations were removed. This let free speech came at last to radio, which enabled the talk radio industry.
Talk radio ended up presenting primarily conservative viewpoints, mainly because progressive viewpoints tend to be presented as as 1984-style duckspeak rants attempting to enforce consensus, and this verbal abuse didn't attract enough listeners for such shows to achieve financial success.
Why is everything shrouded in a goddamn fucking mystery? WHY?!
To make it harder for ordinary citizens to identify, work around, or replace the spyware/controlware built into the core of their machines.
At least Intel and AMD admit it's there.
(Of course that's because they sell some access to it as a feature, to corporate IT departments, who use it for remote administration and monitoring of their companies' computing infrastructure and individual users.)
Actually, GP's point about the ITC being a US group was helpful: with "International" in the name, I had assumed it was multinational, possibly under the UN.
Good point. But presuming that's what he meant, IMHO his phrasing was at least as confusing as that he was trying to "fix".
The agency comes by its "International" legitimately, since it's function involves governing trade between US entities and those of other nations.
There are FAR more people employed in the sale and instillation of solar panel than there are in manufacturing. Raising the price of panels will kill those jobs.
But how many of those jobs are held by US citizens or holders of work visas and how many are "undocumented" aliens?
Not saying the latter's jobs don't matter. AM saying that, as far as jobs for the US citizen voters who elected Trump on the promise of more jobs for US citizens (and others with legal work status), job losses for that group don't count. So your argument won't convince them.
Also AM saying that raising the prices can retard other parts of the economy, so it's not that simple.
(Also saying I was planning to buy a couple pallets of solar panels now that they were down into the $0.30/W range - providing enough generation to make my retirement home grid-independent - and this might foul that up. Sigh. It will be interesting to see how it works out.)
"The International Trade Commission" is a US group, it has no international mandate.
Neither does the US presidency, judiciary, congress, or the raft of federal agencies, of which this is one. Per wikipedia:
The United States International Trade Commission (USITC, sometimes I.T.C.) is an independent, bipartisan, quasi-judicial, federal agency of the United States that provides trade expertise to both the legislative and executive branches. Furthermore, the agency determines the impact of imports on U.S. industries and directs actions against unfair trade practices, such as subsidies, dumping, patent, trademark, and copyright infringement.
Saying "it has no international mandate" may make it SOUND like it's some private group, rather than a fully functional and authorized part of the government. But it doesn't make it any less legitimate than any other part of the government.
International relations are an anarchy. Each sovereign country's governmental components don't require any "mandate" from any outside-the-country persons, groups, or governments to be as legitimate as any other governmental component.
The CEOs who got paid well to sell out the company are almost as guilty as the Chinese.
It's right in line with a career building move for denizens of the C-suite (CEO, COO, CFO, CTO,...) that is often attributed to the teachings of the Harvard Business School (though graduates of other business schools have also been seen to execute it). It works like this:
1. Join the company as the new, or turnaround, CEO (or whatever). Get a big package of stock options (a "free" leveraged investment that pays off drastically if, and only if, the stock price rises.) 2. Dump the R&D and other preparation for future products (and any personnel working on them). Perhaps also make some cuts in customer support for current products, cheapen the product, cut infrastructure maintenance, etc.. This drastically cuts expenses while not (initially) affecting revenue, boosting the "bottom line" of the financial statements. 3. Announce the big boost in profits at a few quarterly reports and the investor/financial media phone conferences. The stock price soars, as does the executives' reputation as a corporate administration wizard. 4. Select a successor (sucker), leave the company, and cash out the stock options. (PROFIT!) Of course cashing out when leaving is viewed as prudent, since the company will now be run by somebody else the way THEY feel like running it. 5. Rinse and repeat at your next company. Meanwhile, your successor is in charge, and catches the blame, when the house of cards collapses.
The scam depends on the benefits being immediate and the damages, though bigger, being delayed.
Moving production to China (or some other offshore sites), with its far lower costs but track record of expropriation of trade secrets (which takes a while to spin up into a competing product) has exactly the same structure.
Of course it's a breach of fiduciary duty for officers of a corporation to do this. But they can make it LOOK like they're being responsible by taking advantage of the drastically lower production prices to "maximize investor value".
Until enough investors catch on to this, and both the markets and stockholder meetings shift to make this a losing strategy for executives (or regulators pick up on it ditto), expect it to continue.
CS degrees in the job market aren't about the pay scale.
They're about getting past the bureaucrats in the HR departments. So they're about being hired at all.
You can make as much (or even more) if you're a substantial programming talent even without a degree. But that does you no good if you have no job and make nothing.
Back in the late '60s (Minsky's "first period") a 4-year CS degree actually HURT employability. The schools were teaching a lot of stuff that wasn't really useful on a job (for instance: How often do YOU write a new compiler for some programming task?), and someone with a degree was viewed as having more to unlearn before he could focus on learning what the employer needed.
About the turn of the millennium it was nearly impossible for someone without a degree, regardless of experience and other credentials, to get a job at a US corporation.
Not sure what the situation is these days. (After a couple years out of work I helped found a startup. B-) )
Vaccination (challenging the immune system with a substance related to the pathogen, to promote directed response, such as antibody generation) is a class of immunizations that works fine against both viruses and bacteria, and to varying degrees to other components of disease processes. Diptheriia, tetanus, and whooping cough, for example, are all bacterial diseases.
Vaccination originally meant the specific challenge of a deliberate infection with cowpox virus (ariolae vaccinae) to promote immunity to the related smallpox virus. It has since been applied to other immunizations that involve a challenge with a related substance or a component of a killed pathogen (but not the live pathogen itself - which is "innoculation"). This usage was promoted by Pasteur, in order to honor Jenner, who developed the smallpox vaccination.
Antibodies from the blood pass freely into saliva and remain active there, so an immunization against dental caries bacteria has been known to be possible for decades. But tooth decay bacteria are a problem for vaccine development.
They avoid the immune system by displaying surface proteins that are similar to those on the heart. This both reduces the immune systems willingness to attack them and leads to autoimmune attacks on the heart and circulatory system if the immune system DOES go after them. (This is why dentists may prescribe prophylactic antibiotic doses before certain procedures that are likely to result in decay bacteria being transferred to the bloodstream.)
Before molecular biology, vaccines were typically made by growing the pathogen, killing it, and producing a sterile, injectable, mixture containing its components (along with an irritant to convince the immune system there's something that needs its attention). Doing this with dental caries would lead to heart problems, so tooth decay vaccines have not been pursued until recently.
By selecting a conserved (doesn't change much because it has to be this way to work) surface component (so the bug will have trouble evolving away from susceptibility to the immunization) that does NOT look to the immune system like some part of the body, and using that as the challenge agent, it should be possible to come up with an immunization to the common tooth decay bacteria.
What happens when you give a deeply depressed, suicidal person whose main reason to NOT kill himself is that he didn't even have the drive to do this a motivational boost?
This reminds me of the sampling-error false link between antidepressants and criminal behavior, and the ethical dilemma some psychologists have when treating psychopaths.
Some psychopaths (just like some non-psychopaths) also happen to be clinically depressed. (It's apparently like being color-blind vs. being diabetic. No particular link, so there's all four binary combos.)
A depressed psychopath may be quite willing to commit atrocities but mostly doesn't because he's too downed to get up the energy to do it. (He may have committed a few already and be in prison, which might also add a bit of situational depression to the mix.)
So what do you get if you treat the depression? A fully-functional, energetic, psychopath, all set to go on the rampage he's been too downed-out to get around to.
Thus do you get sampling bias making it appear that a good antidepressant has increased criminal behavior as a side-effect. (Actually it just produces more active behavior in general - and the psychopahths do more of their usual thing.)
And thus the ethical dilemma for a shrink treating one: Does he leave the depression untreated and the patient suffering? Or does he treat the depression and produce an active, energetic psychopath who is a serious danger to everyone around him?
Psychopathy itself is essentially untreatable. About the only "treatment" that has been shown to be substantially effective (by the measure of drastically reducing recidivism) is to teach them Objectivism - a philosophy that provides convincing and accessible answers to "Why should I be good? What's in it for me?"
It doesn't say anything about risk adjustment; for example, what proportion of the people on antidepressants have other significant health issues like cancer or Alzheimer's?
More importantly, from the summary it seems to be comparing the risks for antidepressant users to the risks for the general population. A more apt comparison might be to people diagnosed with depression who DIDN'T take antidepressants.
The relevant question is: If you're depressed, will you be more likely to die if you take them or if you don't.
Bad movies get bad ratings from critics and public alike and fewer people go. Not 100% correlation, but only 7% for summer movies?
Only a 7% correlation says to me that the reviewers aren't plugging or panning movies (in a way that triggers a tomatoes up/down tick)on anything that matters to moviegoers decisions to buy a ticket.
So the research doesn't just discredit the "Rotten Tomatoes killed our film" theory. It also discredits the reviews themselves.
About three weeks back we had a report on a breakthrough that could result in rechargeable zinc-air batteries, built of cheap materials. Rechargeable zinc-air would trounce lithium-ion on energy density (for applications exposed to air, at least) because you don't have to carry the oxidizer around. Main detail to be worked out is cycle lifetime.
Now we have a breakthrough that could result in non fire-prone lithium-ion batteries - again if the (unstated) details work out. This could be a drop-in replacement, perhaps with a tweak of the charge control chip's parameters.
I wonder when, if, and which might make it to market.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I looked at a GM product they were STILL, after a couple decades, building them for drivers with a short left leg and passengers with a short right leg. (The wheel well clearance for the front wheels impinged on the space for the front-seat personnel's footwells. On the driver's side they produced a footrest at the same distance as the height of the fully-retracted brake (and, in the manual shift, clutch) pedal(s), with the accelerator pedal being farther forward.)
Of course that was quite a while back - before the Federal Government took them over (and also PAID Fiat to TAKE Chrysler). These days Ford is the only old-school private-enterprise US car maker, thanks to not taking the bailout money and busting their butts to make quality vehicles.
It's not just an issue of a well person buying a gun and then developing mental health problems. The US gun lobby doesn't even want to restrict sales to those who already have mental health issues.
That depends on the mental health issue.
I don't know of anyone - even the most extreme gun-rights advocates - who has a problem with disarming a person who has been adjudicated by a court of appropriate jurisdiction to being a danger to others by reason of mental problems.
But many "mental health issues" are not associated with an increase in risk of attacks on others - and many are actually associated with a DEcrease.
For instance: Depressives are drastically LESS dangerous to the general population than the average person. Meanwhile, disarming anyone who has ever been treated for depression would disarm over half the adult women in the United States.
Psychiatrists are some of the strongest lobbyists AGAINST such laws. This is because they both make it less likely that people needing treatment for mental issues will seek it and open confidential patient records to perusal by government functionaries and law enforcement.
Another recent trend is treating anyone who is a crime victim - rape, assault, robbery, stalking, etc. - for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Whether they want such "treatment" or not. Guess who is most likely to NEED a gun for self-defense? Guess when they are likely to get off their tails and go buy one?
The audio sounded like he was somehow using a full auto.
If this were the case, then it would be pretty much the first use of full auto in the US for a crime like this in modern history.
And (unless I missed one in the last few years) the second killing committed, by its owner, with a privately-owned machine gun under the regulation of the GCA '34, in the 83 years since its passage.
It's a bit early, so news items are notoriously unreliable (even when they're really trying to get it right). Nevertheless I've already heard:
- CNN: Claim that the guns were converted semi-autos. (That's also illegal.)
- CNN: Claim by a relative that the shooter "was not a gun guy".
- New York Post (paraphrasing an article in the Daily Mail and a tweet from NBC News): Claim that the shooter was the son of a multiple felon bank robber, prison escapee, attempted cop killer, with a diagnosis of psychopathy and a history of using firearms in his crimes.
But I don't see why the video itself would need to pass through a middleman.
It needent. (It's just easier to set up - and to recover quickly if the NAT / MASQ mapping goes down, too.)
Try Jitsi meet. Fully FOSS, no client install needed, runs in the browser. Run your own relay server if you like.
Website that doesn't work AT ALL unless you enable javascript.
(Sure you need to give them access to your browser to run the software. But just to find out about it?)
Why would video messaging need a server in the middle? That would be better for supporting group chat situations, but that's the only reason I can think of.
NAT (network address translation) and the exhaustion (and increased prices of) IP addresses. (Also its spinoff: IPMasq) It's what spiked the peer-to-peer model (for ordinary users who didn't spend the massive premium for a fixed IP address) and for years drove the bulk of the public Internet to a central servers / sea of clients model.
When working through NAT on both ends of a link, the easy way is to use a middle-man relay system at a fixed IP address.
It's possible to tunnel through NAT. But it's a pain. Even those approaches need some kind of rendezvous server for the two ends to use to get acquainted and establish their direct fat pipe.
It will be interesting to see if the rollout of IPv6 leads to fixed addresses and that results in more peer-to-peer application use by the general population
The clear relation the article was communicating is that the FCC is biased towards righty faggots who fetishize markets. ... the FCC has been co-opted by right wingnuts and thinks free speech for right fags must be encouraged but brown Puerto Ricans should be made an example of.
Really?
I thought the article showed a clear bias against failing to follow the rules when filling out and filing forms, then took a flying leap into differential regulation of left-right political speech (by an regulatory body whose charter doesn't allow that). This is the only thing in the Slashdot submission that leads me to suspect WAPA may have a left-of-center editorial policy, or not carry right-wing talk hosts.
Just as you took a flying leap from enforcing paperwork requirements to allege bias over skin color.
I support censorship at the client. Everyone gets to speak, you get to filter.
Now THAT we can agree on. B-)
No, its accussing the FCC of bias. While it took efforts to limit WAPAs AM signal to protect licensing, the FCC has let similar signals go on in the continental US.
Did the stations they "let go" fill out their renewal paperwork correctly and file it on time?
If they did, and the station in Puerto Rico didn't, the only bias shown is against people who break the rules the FCC is chartered to enforce.
= = = =
Of course, if breaking the rules is more characteristic of left-wing than right-wing executives, enforcing politics-blind rules might provoke the rule-breakers to cry "Bias!" and point out numbers, out-of-context, to support their attempt to get away with rule-breaking. We've seen a lot of that with other parts of the legal code.
My wife is currently taking a database class using Oracle and apparently Oracle-supplied sample data.
The sample dataset was employee records, including salaries. Judging by the employee names there were two male and one female programmers. The males were paid substantially more than the female.
I can tell. He's a lefty who's tweaked that the FCC won't censor his political opposition.
Since the number of stations (and alternative media outlets) climbed to the point where there was no shortage to be used to justify forcing radio stations to present all positions on controversial subjects, the "fairness doctrine" regulations were removed. This let free speech came at last to radio, which enabled the talk radio industry.
Talk radio ended up presenting primarily conservative viewpoints, mainly because progressive viewpoints tend to be presented as as 1984-style duckspeak rants attempting to enforce consensus, and this verbal abuse didn't attract enough listeners for such shows to achieve financial success.
Why is everything shrouded in a goddamn fucking mystery? WHY?!
To make it harder for ordinary citizens to identify, work around, or replace the spyware/controlware built into the core of their machines.
At least Intel and AMD admit it's there.
(Of course that's because they sell some access to it as a feature, to corporate IT departments, who use it for remote administration and monitoring of their companies' computing infrastructure and individual users.)
Hee hee.
Watched that. Now You Tube is suggesting all sorts of anti-liberal videos that its algorithms think might be of interest to me. B-)
Actually, GP's point about the ITC being a US group was helpful: with "International" in the name, I had assumed it was multinational, possibly under the UN.
Good point. But presuming that's what he meant, IMHO his phrasing was at least as confusing as that he was trying to "fix".
The agency comes by its "International" legitimately, since it's function involves governing trade between US entities and those of other nations.
There are FAR more people employed in the sale and instillation of solar panel than there are in manufacturing. Raising the price of panels will kill those jobs.
But how many of those jobs are held by US citizens or holders of work visas and how many are "undocumented" aliens?
Not saying the latter's jobs don't matter. AM saying that, as far as jobs for the US citizen voters who elected Trump on the promise of more jobs for US citizens (and others with legal work status), job losses for that group don't count. So your argument won't convince them.
Also AM saying that raising the prices can retard other parts of the economy, so it's not that simple.
(Also saying I was planning to buy a couple pallets of solar panels now that they were down into the $0.30/W range - providing enough generation to make my retirement home grid-independent - and this might foul that up. Sigh. It will be interesting to see how it works out.)
"The International Trade Commission" is a US group, it has no international mandate.
Neither does the US presidency, judiciary, congress, or the raft of federal agencies, of which this is one. Per wikipedia:
Saying "it has no international mandate" may make it SOUND like it's some private group, rather than a fully functional and authorized part of the government. But it doesn't make it any less legitimate than any other part of the government.
International relations are an anarchy. Each sovereign country's governmental components don't require any "mandate" from any outside-the-country persons, groups, or governments to be as legitimate as any other governmental component.
The CEOs who got paid well to sell out the company are almost as guilty as the Chinese.
It's right in line with a career building move for denizens of the C-suite (CEO, COO, CFO, CTO, ...) that is often attributed to the teachings of the Harvard Business School (though graduates of other business schools have also been seen to execute it). It works like this:
1. Join the company as the new, or turnaround, CEO (or whatever). Get a big package of stock options (a "free" leveraged investment that pays off drastically if, and only if, the stock price rises.)
2. Dump the R&D and other preparation for future products (and any personnel working on them). Perhaps also make some cuts in customer support for current products, cheapen the product, cut infrastructure maintenance, etc.. This drastically cuts expenses while not (initially) affecting revenue, boosting the "bottom line" of the financial statements.
3. Announce the big boost in profits at a few quarterly reports and the investor/financial media phone conferences. The stock price soars, as does the executives' reputation as a corporate administration wizard.
4. Select a successor (sucker), leave the company, and cash out the stock options. (PROFIT!) Of course cashing out when leaving is viewed as prudent, since the company will now be run by somebody else the way THEY feel like running it.
5. Rinse and repeat at your next company. Meanwhile, your successor is in charge, and catches the blame, when the house of cards collapses.
The scam depends on the benefits being immediate and the damages, though bigger, being delayed.
Moving production to China (or some other offshore sites), with its far lower costs but track record of expropriation of trade secrets (which takes a while to spin up into a competing product) has exactly the same structure.
Of course it's a breach of fiduciary duty for officers of a corporation to do this. But they can make it LOOK like they're being responsible by taking advantage of the drastically lower production prices to "maximize investor value".
Until enough investors catch on to this, and both the markets and stockholder meetings shift to make this a losing strategy for executives (or regulators pick up on it ditto), expect it to continue.
CS degrees in the job market aren't about the pay scale.
They're about getting past the bureaucrats in the HR departments. So they're about being hired at all.
You can make as much (or even more) if you're a substantial programming talent even without a degree. But that does you no good if you have no job and make nothing.
Back in the late '60s (Minsky's "first period") a 4-year CS degree actually HURT employability. The schools were teaching a lot of stuff that wasn't really useful on a job (for instance: How often do YOU write a new compiler for some programming task?), and someone with a degree was viewed as having more to unlearn before he could focus on learning what the employer needed.
About the turn of the millennium it was nearly impossible for someone without a degree, regardless of experience and other credentials, to get a job at a US corporation.
Not sure what the situation is these days. (After a couple years out of work I helped found a startup. B-) )
Vaccination (challenging the immune system with a substance related to the pathogen, to promote directed response, such as antibody generation) is a class of immunizations that works fine against both viruses and bacteria, and to varying degrees to other components of disease processes. Diptheriia, tetanus, and whooping cough, for example, are all bacterial diseases.
Vaccination originally meant the specific challenge of a deliberate infection with cowpox virus (ariolae vaccinae) to promote immunity to the related smallpox virus. It has since been applied to other immunizations that involve a challenge with a related substance or a component of a killed pathogen (but not the live pathogen itself - which is "innoculation"). This usage was promoted by Pasteur, in order to honor Jenner, who developed the smallpox vaccination.
Antibodies from the blood pass freely into saliva and remain active there, so an immunization against dental caries bacteria has been known to be possible for decades. But tooth decay bacteria are a problem for vaccine development.
They avoid the immune system by displaying surface proteins that are similar to those on the heart. This both reduces the immune systems willingness to attack them and leads to autoimmune attacks on the heart and circulatory system if the immune system DOES go after them. (This is why dentists may prescribe prophylactic antibiotic doses before certain procedures that are likely to result in decay bacteria being transferred to the bloodstream.)
Before molecular biology, vaccines were typically made by growing the pathogen, killing it, and producing a sterile, injectable, mixture containing its components (along with an irritant to convince the immune system there's something that needs its attention). Doing this with dental caries would lead to heart problems, so tooth decay vaccines have not been pursued until recently.
By selecting a conserved (doesn't change much because it has to be this way to work) surface component (so the bug will have trouble evolving away from susceptibility to the immunization) that does NOT look to the immune system like some part of the body, and using that as the challenge agent, it should be possible to come up with an immunization to the common tooth decay bacteria.
Which seems to be what is being done here.
What happens when you give a deeply depressed, suicidal person whose main reason to NOT kill himself is that he didn't even have the drive to do this a motivational boost?
This reminds me of the sampling-error false link between antidepressants and criminal behavior, and the ethical dilemma some psychologists have when treating psychopaths.
Some psychopaths (just like some non-psychopaths) also happen to be clinically depressed. (It's apparently like being color-blind vs. being diabetic. No particular link, so there's all four binary combos.)
A depressed psychopath may be quite willing to commit atrocities but mostly doesn't because he's too downed to get up the energy to do it. (He may have committed a few already and be in prison, which might also add a bit of situational depression to the mix.)
So what do you get if you treat the depression? A fully-functional, energetic, psychopath, all set to go on the rampage he's been too downed-out to get around to.
Thus do you get sampling bias making it appear that a good antidepressant has increased criminal behavior as a side-effect. (Actually it just produces more active behavior in general - and the psychopahths do more of their usual thing.)
And thus the ethical dilemma for a shrink treating one: Does he leave the depression untreated and the patient suffering? Or does he treat the depression and produce an active, energetic psychopath who is a serious danger to everyone around him?
Psychopathy itself is essentially untreatable. About the only "treatment" that has been shown to be substantially effective (by the measure of drastically reducing recidivism) is to teach them Objectivism - a philosophy that provides convincing and accessible answers to "Why should I be good? What's in it for me?"
I hear prozac is also good for making you fall out of love.
It doesn't say anything about risk adjustment; for example, what proportion of the people on antidepressants have other significant health issues like cancer or Alzheimer's?
More importantly, from the summary it seems to be comparing the risks for antidepressant users to the risks for the general population. A more apt comparison might be to people diagnosed with depression who DIDN'T take antidepressants.
The relevant question is: If you're depressed, will you be more likely to die if you take them or if you don't.
Bad movies get bad ratings from critics and public alike and fewer people go. Not 100% correlation, but only 7% for summer movies?
Only a 7% correlation says to me that the reviewers aren't plugging or panning movies (in a way that triggers a tomatoes up/down tick)on anything that matters to moviegoers decisions to buy a ticket.
So the research doesn't just discredit the "Rotten Tomatoes killed our film" theory. It also discredits the reviews themselves.
We've had very quiet hurricane seasons these past years, which makes this year's normal season seem like some type of outlier.
Hear, hear!
Just YESTERDAY we had a front page story claiming a failed El Nino is the reason for the storms.
Yet I don't see any mention of that here.
... All problems look like nails.
I git the impression that applying blockchain to attribution databases may be one of these cases.
But I would be pleased to be proven wrong.
About three weeks back we had a report on a breakthrough that could result in rechargeable zinc-air batteries, built of cheap materials.
Forgot the link.
About three weeks back we had a report on a breakthrough that could result in rechargeable zinc-air batteries, built of cheap materials. Rechargeable zinc-air would trounce lithium-ion on energy density (for applications exposed to air, at least) because you don't have to carry the oxidizer around. Main detail to be worked out is cycle lifetime.
Now we have a breakthrough that could result in non fire-prone lithium-ion batteries - again if the (unstated) details work out. This could be a drop-in replacement, perhaps with a tweak of the charge control chip's parameters.
I wonder when, if, and which might make it to market.