Is it too much to ask that we kick the homophobia? Some people are gay; get over it.
Re:"The Republican War on Science"?
on
Science Debate 2008
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Scientific American is not a good way to take the pulse of scientists. It measures science aficionados -- those who are interested in science but not smart or dedicated enough to read journals like Nature directly. It's not written for a very sophisticated audience. I think even the Science section of the New York Times is better.
Actually there would be no inflationary effect unless the guy in the helicopter printed the bills as opposed to dropping money he had previously earned.
Completely agreed. In fact I think this is the most likely scenario. When the deal was announced, YHOO rose but MSFT fell even further -- clearly the market thinks this is a value-destroying merger.
My point was merely that "dumping" stocks onto the market at below-value does not, by itself, affect the price of the stock for more than a few seconds.
It still wouldn't matter. An undervalued stock is like money lying in the street. Your position is like saying that, while people will pick up $3000 in hundred-dollar bills if a helicopter drops them on Manhattan, they won't bother to pick up $1 billion. Even if it cost $70 to pick up a single $100 bill (analogous to fronting the money to buy an undervalued stock), they would all be gone in no time.
There's an equilibrium, though. When a large block of stock is sold, the price of the stock may drop momentarily, but then it is undervalued and hedge funds and mutual funds snap it up until it is back to where it was. This effect is born out empirically. The demand curve for a stock is extremely steep: if it drops even a dollar, everyone and his mother wants to buy, which pushes it back up to its equilibrium price.
The one exception is when insiders sell large blocks of stock -- then the market assumes there must be bad news coming, and the price does drop and remain low. But this effect is informational, and the magnitude of the drop has much less to do with how many shares are dumped onto the market than it does with what the dump says about the insider's opinions (e.g. what proportion of his stock he dumps, and how many other insiders do the same simultaneously).
In any case, the fact that there are "loose shares" dumped onto the market does not by itself affect the price.
We absolutely have a long way to go -- and I have accumulated many a flamebait moderation for lashing out at casual homophobia on Slashdot -- but we have also come a long way. There is a tremendous, gaping, categorical chasm between social ostracism and state-sanctioned arrest, torture, and execution.
That aside, I can't help but feel grateful when straight people like you defend my right not to be treated unequally just because my long-term significant other has man parts instead of lady parts. Thanks.
I am avowedly disgusted by the RIAA and hate them just as much as any card-carrying slashdotter, but I have to wonder if this is really a significant defeat. To my knowledge, courts pretty much always accept amicus briefs from any semi-credible source. It sounds like this was just a throwaway motion from the RIAA, which was (as was expected) easily defeated. It certainly isn't bad news, but it's hard for me to get excited about it either.
Well there's a big difference between Christianity and Islam, in that the numerical majority of Christians do not support the stoning of gays or the persecution of women for the crime of being raped. Most of them are very much live-and-let-live whose expressions of dissent on social issues are (1) very mild in terms of their passions, compared to most Muslims, and (2) expressed through the ballot box, not by taking the law into their own hands.
So it works fine to say that we judge Christianity by the numerical majority of Christians.
That doesn't work so well with Islam, where torturing and murdering gays is mainstream among the numerical majority of Muslims.
So if you're a Muslim and you don't think this numerical majority test works, as apparently the grandparent poster didn't, you've got to posit some sort of alternative.
I can assure you that "Muslims" who bomb people they think are repressing them and picket actors'/soldiers' deaths because of whatever sexual orientation they might be- are hardly Muslims at all.
What authority decides who is a true Muslim and who isn't? Because it is a crime to be gay in most Islamic countries, punishable by torture and/or death, and at some point you have to wonder if maybe your tolerance is the anomaly, not their barbarity.
At what point do we start judging the tree by the fruit that it bears?
You know, I am generally pretty politically correct, and I totally understand the need to let a thousand flowers bloom.
But in this case, it really seems like people are trying pretty hard to be offended. It's fine if your religion prevents YOU from creating pictures of your prophet, or eating meat, or working on Sundays, or using vowels. Best of luck with that. But it's a different thing entirely to tell ME that I am not allowed to either.
So you don't do use a bank or credit card that has an optional web interface or send any email or say anything in an instant message or skype conversation that you'd prefer to keep private?
Your advice is wildly overreaching. It's like telling MADD, "if you don't want to get killed by drunk drivers, don't leave your house."
Put bluntly, either the GWOT is justified on its own merits or it isn't. Silly comarisons to what else could be done instead with the cash is retarded.
I'm afraid you're the retarded one. By invading Iraq, we did not save Western civilization, since it was never in jeopardy. Your radical exaggeration is pure hysteria; there is no evidence that western civilization faced any threat from Saddam's Iraq whatsoever. At this point, even the Republicans are reduced to justifying it on humanitarian grounds (laughable as that is on its own terms).
And yes, it is not only non-retarded but necessaryto evaluate an investment by considering what else could be done with the cash instead. This is the economic concept of opportunity cost, which is one of the core concepts of basic microeconomics.
So either this forthcoming gyroscopic wonder will be tethered to the game console or it will run on disposable batteries which will last about fifteen minutes.
Rule #1 of the internet: If you don't want anyone to see something, don't fucking put it it on the internet!
Really.
So you don't have an online interface for your credit card? You don't do online banking? You don't manage your IRA or 401K online? You don't write any emails that you wouldn't want published? You don't use SSH to access sensitive information? You don't send any instant messages that you wouldn't want published? You don't visit any websites that you wouldn't want the world to know about?
Oh, but that stuff's all different, you say. Sure, the information is all on a server, but the server will only send it to people who have the right password! Except, the MySpace photos weren't leaked by a mole; they were leaked because the server mistakenly sent it to anyone who asked for it.
This is a big deal, and your snide reply (essentially "don't use the internet") doesn't come close to offering a workable solution.
There are no buses or trains or any other mass transit anywhere near where I live and commute from. Give me the mass transit before you start charging me for not using it (and acting holier than thou.)
Whoa, speaking of holier-than-thou... Why can't you carpool? Why can't you move closer to your job? And if, by some chance, there's a real reason why you can't do either of alternatives, and if the roads you commute on are crowded enough for this scheme even to be considered for them, then variable tolls still seem like a good thing for you. After all, all the other bastards who could carpool or move but choose instead to take up space on the highway every day might reconsider their choice and reduce congestion for you.
Not really. It just means that they have to have both scram and conventional jets on the airplane, or some kind of hybrid, or even some kind of booster craft to lift the plane up to scram altitudes. Of course I'm a layman, but I can't see this being a serious impediment if they can get the scramjets working reliably.
Except that you can reduce drag by flying higher where the atmosphere is thinner. My understanding was that scramjets didn't work much lower than near-space anyway.
The chicken pox example is a perfect demonstration of all that is wrong with your argument. Here is why a mandatory chicken pox vaccine at an early age is a great idea:
1) Chicken pox is communicable, often before symptoms appear, so it puts everyone else at risk (including those who have been vaccinated, since the vaccination is not 100% effective). 2) Chicken pox increases the risk that you will contract shingles later in life, which is a serious health risk. 3) Chicken pox can cause serious scarring. 4) Chicken pox, like other diseases, compromises your immune system until you fight it off. 5) Chicken pox is extremely unpleasant.
"I'm sure by next year, they're going to be calling for all infant girls to go ahead and get the hpv shot, because you can never be too careful about protecting your infant from STDs."
As well they should. There are no side-effects, and HPV causes most cases of cervical cancer. It's also extremely common and completely asymptomatic in most cases. It can spread despite the use of a condom, so only people who remain completely abstinent for their entire lives can be confident they won't catch it.
Now you can argue that it should be given at the start of adulthood rather than in infancy, and I guess that works as well (if there are no differences in administrability), but it seems to me that at best there's no reason why it should be one as opposed to the other and it's more of a "why not" question. (It also seems possible to me that the vaccine is more effective if given in teenage years, in which case this argument is of course moot.)
The number of recommended vaccinations has increased dramatically over the last 30 years (have you seen the list?). Do you have any actual evidence to support the belief that this is 100% safe, or is it more like a creationism thing?
Is having the vaccinations 100% safe? No. Is it safer than NOT having all the vaccinations? Yes. FDA testing is rigorous, and its mistakes are famous precisely because they are rare.
I am sorry to hear about your sister and sister-in-law. It is predictable and perhaps even understandable that you would distrust pharmaceuticals after two such coincidences. Superstition is predictable and often understandable. It is not, however, rational.
Usually we put up with superstition because it is quirky and harmless. In this case, though, it sounds to me like you may be compromising the safety of your children because of it, and I'd say that's a good candidate for the point where harmless superstition crosses the line into something more malignant.
If another study comes out and vindicates your suspicion that there is indeed a significant risk of autism from vaccination, then you will have my sincerest apology. I would offer the same to a conspiracy theorist or a creationist if their beliefs were vindicated. But to value your own suspicions, supported as they are by two isolated anecdotes, above the conclusions of many studies designed to test precisely this possible connection between vaccination and autism, none of which (to my knowledge) have found any significant evidence of a link, seems like dangerous superstition.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it too much to ask that we kick the homophobia? Some people are gay; get over it.
Scientific American is not a good way to take the pulse of scientists. It measures science aficionados -- those who are interested in science but not smart or dedicated enough to read journals like Nature directly. It's not written for a very sophisticated audience. I think even the Science section of the New York Times is better.
Actually there would be no inflationary effect unless the guy in the helicopter printed the bills as opposed to dropping money he had previously earned.
Completely agreed. In fact I think this is the most likely scenario. When the deal was announced, YHOO rose but MSFT fell even further -- clearly the market thinks this is a value-destroying merger.
My point was merely that "dumping" stocks onto the market at below-value does not, by itself, affect the price of the stock for more than a few seconds.
It still wouldn't matter. An undervalued stock is like money lying in the street. Your position is like saying that, while people will pick up $3000 in hundred-dollar bills if a helicopter drops them on Manhattan, they won't bother to pick up $1 billion. Even if it cost $70 to pick up a single $100 bill (analogous to fronting the money to buy an undervalued stock), they would all be gone in no time.
There's an equilibrium, though. When a large block of stock is sold, the price of the stock may drop momentarily, but then it is undervalued and hedge funds and mutual funds snap it up until it is back to where it was. This effect is born out empirically. The demand curve for a stock is extremely steep: if it drops even a dollar, everyone and his mother wants to buy, which pushes it back up to its equilibrium price.
The one exception is when insiders sell large blocks of stock -- then the market assumes there must be bad news coming, and the price does drop and remain low. But this effect is informational, and the magnitude of the drop has much less to do with how many shares are dumped onto the market than it does with what the dump says about the insider's opinions (e.g. what proportion of his stock he dumps, and how many other insiders do the same simultaneously).
In any case, the fact that there are "loose shares" dumped onto the market does not by itself affect the price.
We absolutely have a long way to go -- and I have accumulated many a flamebait moderation for lashing out at casual homophobia on Slashdot -- but we have also come a long way. There is a tremendous, gaping, categorical chasm between social ostracism and state-sanctioned arrest, torture, and execution.
That aside, I can't help but feel grateful when straight people like you defend my right not to be treated unequally just because my long-term significant other has man parts instead of lady parts. Thanks.
Ah, I see what you're getting at. It does seem like a very strange move on their part. What law firm do they work for?
I am avowedly disgusted by the RIAA and hate them just as much as any card-carrying slashdotter, but I have to wonder if this is really a significant defeat. To my knowledge, courts pretty much always accept amicus briefs from any semi-credible source. It sounds like this was just a throwaway motion from the RIAA, which was (as was expected) easily defeated. It certainly isn't bad news, but it's hard for me to get excited about it either.
Well there's a big difference between Christianity and Islam, in that the numerical majority of Christians do not support the stoning of gays or the persecution of women for the crime of being raped. Most of them are very much live-and-let-live whose expressions of dissent on social issues are (1) very mild in terms of their passions, compared to most Muslims, and (2) expressed through the ballot box, not by taking the law into their own hands.
So it works fine to say that we judge Christianity by the numerical majority of Christians.
That doesn't work so well with Islam, where torturing and murdering gays is mainstream among the numerical majority of Muslims.
So if you're a Muslim and you don't think this numerical majority test works, as apparently the grandparent poster didn't, you've got to posit some sort of alternative.
What authority decides who is a true Muslim and who isn't? Because it is a crime to be gay in most Islamic countries, punishable by torture and/or death, and at some point you have to wonder if maybe your tolerance is the anomaly, not their barbarity.
At what point do we start judging the tree by the fruit that it bears?
You know, I am generally pretty politically correct, and I totally understand the need to let a thousand flowers bloom.
But in this case, it really seems like people are trying pretty hard to be offended. It's fine if your religion prevents YOU from creating pictures of your prophet, or eating meat, or working on Sundays, or using vowels. Best of luck with that. But it's a different thing entirely to tell ME that I am not allowed to either.
So you don't do use a bank or credit card that has an optional web interface or send any email or say anything in an instant message or skype conversation that you'd prefer to keep private?
Your advice is wildly overreaching. It's like telling MADD, "if you don't want to get killed by drunk drivers, don't leave your house."
We're talking about Warcraft III here, not World of Warcraft. Warcraft III is not a subscription game.
I'm afraid you're the retarded one. By invading Iraq, we did not save Western civilization, since it was never in jeopardy. Your radical exaggeration is pure hysteria; there is no evidence that western civilization faced any threat from Saddam's Iraq whatsoever. At this point, even the Republicans are reduced to justifying it on humanitarian grounds (laughable as that is on its own terms).
And yes, it is not only non-retarded but necessaryto evaluate an investment by considering what else could be done with the cash instead. This is the economic concept of opportunity cost, which is one of the core concepts of basic microeconomics.
So either this forthcoming gyroscopic wonder will be tethered to the game console or it will run on disposable batteries which will last about fifteen minutes.
Sorry, I don't see it.
Really.
So you don't have an online interface for your credit card? You don't do online banking? You don't manage your IRA or 401K online? You don't write any emails that you wouldn't want published? You don't use SSH to access sensitive information? You don't send any instant messages that you wouldn't want published? You don't visit any websites that you wouldn't want the world to know about?
Oh, but that stuff's all different, you say. Sure, the information is all on a server, but the server will only send it to people who have the right password! Except, the MySpace photos weren't leaked by a mole; they were leaked because the server mistakenly sent it to anyone who asked for it.
This is a big deal, and your snide reply (essentially "don't use the internet") doesn't come close to offering a workable solution.
It would be pretty sweet if there were an option to filter for games that are available for Mac OS X.
That's because they contain heavy metals, not because they're explosive.
Not really. It just means that they have to have both scram and conventional jets on the airplane, or some kind of hybrid, or even some kind of booster craft to lift the plane up to scram altitudes. Of course I'm a layman, but I can't see this being a serious impediment if they can get the scramjets working reliably.
Except that you can reduce drag by flying higher where the atmosphere is thinner. My understanding was that scramjets didn't work much lower than near-space anyway.
This is factually inaccurate. Whether or not we like it, IQ is between 40 and 80% heritable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Heritability
The chicken pox example is a perfect demonstration of all that is wrong with your argument. Here is why a mandatory chicken pox vaccine at an early age is a great idea:
1) Chicken pox is communicable, often before symptoms appear, so it puts everyone else at risk (including those who have been vaccinated, since the vaccination is not 100% effective).
2) Chicken pox increases the risk that you will contract shingles later in life, which is a serious health risk.
3) Chicken pox can cause serious scarring.
4) Chicken pox, like other diseases, compromises your immune system until you fight it off.
5) Chicken pox is extremely unpleasant.
"I'm sure by next year, they're going to be calling for all infant girls to go ahead and get the hpv shot, because you can never be too careful about protecting your infant from STDs."
As well they should. There are no side-effects, and HPV causes most cases of cervical cancer. It's also extremely common and completely asymptomatic in most cases. It can spread despite the use of a condom, so only people who remain completely abstinent for their entire lives can be confident they won't catch it.
Now you can argue that it should be given at the start of adulthood rather than in infancy, and I guess that works as well (if there are no differences in administrability), but it seems to me that at best there's no reason why it should be one as opposed to the other and it's more of a "why not" question. (It also seems possible to me that the vaccine is more effective if given in teenage years, in which case this argument is of course moot.)
Is having the vaccinations 100% safe? No. Is it safer than NOT having all the vaccinations? Yes. FDA testing is rigorous, and its mistakes are famous precisely because they are rare.
I am sorry to hear about your sister and sister-in-law. It is predictable and perhaps even understandable that you would distrust pharmaceuticals after two such coincidences. Superstition is predictable and often understandable. It is not, however, rational.
Usually we put up with superstition because it is quirky and harmless. In this case, though, it sounds to me like you may be compromising the safety of your children because of it, and I'd say that's a good candidate for the point where harmless superstition crosses the line into something more malignant.
If another study comes out and vindicates your suspicion that there is indeed a significant risk of autism from vaccination, then you will have my sincerest apology. I would offer the same to a conspiracy theorist or a creationist if their beliefs were vindicated. But to value your own suspicions, supported as they are by two isolated anecdotes, above the conclusions of many studies designed to test precisely this possible connection between vaccination and autism, none of which (to my knowledge) have found any significant evidence of a link, seems like dangerous superstition.