Shouldn't it first be scientifically, or at least statistically proven, that glyphosate can cause cancer
No. The courts should be accessible to everyone, even janitors. Nobody should have to wait for permission from scientists before seeking justice. It is not the janitor's fault that no conclusive research has been done, so why should he be denied his day in court?
We don't know that. Glyphosate / Roundup causes tumors in test animals at high dosage. It has not been shown to correlate with cancer in humans, but not many studies have been done, and Monsanto has lobbied the EPA to "reinterpret" some of the results.
Given the ambiguous data, $289M seems excessive, and will likely be reduced on appeal, where judges will decide, and there will be no sympathetic jury.
Eating food grown in fields treated with glyphosate is unlikely to be a problem. But if you work directly with glyphosate, you should take reasonable precautions. Wear gloves, long sleeves, long pants. Carry a bottle of soapy water so you can rinse quickly if it spills on your skin.
The best solution is to transition to robotic weed control. Robots can use image recognition and targeted piezoelectric applicators to spray glyphosate directly onto the weed leaves, while spraying very little on the crop or on the ground. This can reduce herbicide use by 95%.
Dude, if your "culture" is dependent on schoolchildren being massacred and gang-bangers spraying bullets, you've got a fucked-up culture.
You are missing the point. The culture of urban gang-bangers and rural gun owners couldn't be more different. Gun control advocates are mostly opposed to the latter culture, not the first. Rural whites join the NRA, and are politically active on gun rights. Urban gang-bangers are not.
Do you seriously believe that closing the "gun show loophole" will make a non-negligible difference? Yet it gets way more attention than urban handgun shootings.
It wasn't always thus. You might want to read up on the history on the gun control movement in America. In the 1980s, there was a strong advocacy movement for restrictions on handguns (responsible for 75% of gun homicides and even more gun suicides), and HCI and the Brady Campaign made it clear that they were not after "long guns" used for hunting. Their proposals were sensible. Their influence was growing.
That came to an abrupt end on the morning of January 17th, 1989, when Patrick Purdy walked onto a school playground in Stockton, California, opened fire with an SKS semi-automatic rifle, killing five children and wounding 32 more. The advocates took advantage of the publicity and outrage to completely abandon their assurances of focusing on handguns, and called for bans on "automatic rifles" (already illegal), and "AK-47s" (also already illegal). They got their "assault weapons" ban, but alienated millions of hunters and others that had supported them. The backlash swept dozens of gun control advocates from public office in the 1994 Republican mid-term landslide. The ban expired. NRA membership ballooned. Trust was gone. Willingness to compromise was gone. Any sort of new restriction on gun ownership is unthinkable in today's political climate.
I remember reading a thread about Venezuela's crime rate going down by a factor of 1000 when they enacted a global ban on private, non police/military gun ownership.
Then something is seriously wrong with either your memory or your critical thinking skills. This never happened, and is so completely implausible that only a fool would believe it.
it's pretty well known that if you leave, for any reason, you'll never be allowed to come back.
That is a foolish policy. My company keeps in touch with alumni, and we invite them to our annual picnic. We have rehired several "boomerangs", with good results every time. They already know our culture and procedures, so they can hit the ground running, without the typical 3-6 month learning curve. We also already know their capabilities, so we can put them into a team where they fit. They come back brimming with new ideas about how to fix our products and processes, and they have learned that the grass isn't greener elsewhere, so they rarely leave a second time.
What possible justification is there for a "no rehire" policy? Do they really think it will dissuade people from quitting?
And for all that, the murder rate in the USA is about half what it was 50 years ago....
The murder rate is irrelevant. Gun control is about culture, not "saving lives".
In many ways, gun control is the mirror image of abortion. Liberals are often perplexed when conservatives dismiss their argument that we could save way more babies by sex education, access to contraceptives, better prenatal care, nutrition supplements for pregnant women, and streamlined adoptions, than by banning abortions. That is all true, but is missing the point. It is not about "saving babies" but about a culture of people behaving irresponsibly and then flushing the consequences down the toilet.
Similarly, gun violence dramatically declined over the past few decades mostly because of a big reduction in environmental lead pollution. There is much more we could do: black children still have twice the blood lead levels of white children, and prison inmates have three times the average level. Yet there is WAY more passion about closing the "gun show loophole", something that would have a negligible effect, than about not poisoning kids, which would likely save thousands of lives annually. Likewise, gun control advocates focus on school shootings and "assault weapons", not because these represent a lot of deaths (school shootings are less than 0.05% of gun deaths, and handguns kill a thousand times as many people as assault rifles), but because they represent "gun culture".
How hard would it be to design an airdroppable package that had a SatLink , a wifi hotspot and Solar? power (with battery backup)??
The only people with a clear motivation to do this are the Eritreans or Somalis, both of whom have enough of their own problems. Eritrea is on the brink of economic collapse, and the last thing they want right now is to rekindle their border war with Ethiopia (basically, two bald men fighting over a comb). Somalia is politically and militarily fragmented, so helping their kin in the Ethiopian borderlands is not a priority.
The ethnic Somalis in this region have ties to al Shabaab, which is considered a terrorist organization by most Western countries. Giving then technology that could be used in attacks could land you in prison for a very long time.
they still haven't recovered from the colonialists raping their countries and then pulling out.
This is not supported by evidence. The countries where colonialism was longest and deepest (e.g: South Africa, Ghana, Kenya) are doing the best, because of strong institutions, rule of law, and economic ties to the wider world. Countries where colonialism was shortest and weakest, and tribalism left intact, are doing the worst.
The Germans occupied Norway for longer than the Italians occupied Ethiopia. Blaming Ethiopia's problems on "colonialism" is absurd.
By any objective measure, Africans that gave up tribalism and adopted western ways, are doing relatively well. If you look at income, infant mortality, maternal mortality, violence, longevity, nutrition, literacy, health, sexual abuse, alcoholism, or any other measure of human welfare that you can think of, traditional tribal societies are at the absolute bottom.
That's why I carry a Nintendo DS, point-and-shoot, flip-phone, iPod and GPS in my pockets wherever I go!
At least those are all "things you want to have in your pocket". The problem with the Bixby smart fridge is that 99% of the features have nothing to do with refrigeration. The calendar can remind you of your appointments, but the interface is so clunky that it is useless. You can use it as a web browser, but why would you want to stand in the kitchen to do that? One feature that is actually related to the refrigerator is an internal camera that can display the contents of the fridge without opening the door... but it takes so long to traverse the menus, that it is easier to just open the door and look the old fashioned way.
In fact the interface is so badly designed that we can't even figure out how to set the temperature, so it it is still on the factory settings, which occasionally results in frozen milk if we put it on the back shelf.
If they fixed the voice recognition to Alexa levels (which are very good) and tied the voice recognition to the rest of the functionality, it might not be so bad. But overall it is a dumb concept with an even dumber implementation.
Our Alexa occasionally does OTA updates. But Bixby (apparently) never does. So I don't have any hope for improvements.
My wife bought a Bixby enabled Samsung refrigerator. It is difficult to voice activate, doesn't understand much, and is way worse than either Alexa or Google Home (she has both of those too).
It does include good speakers, so if you want your refrigerator to play nice music, you may like it.
Balloons and blimps have also stayed aloft for longer than 27 days. The claim, as written in TFA, is wrong.
Sure, you can qualify if by saying "without refueling" or "heavier than air" or "powered flight" or whatever, but TFA doesn't say that. It says "any aircraft", which is baloney.
Germany was quite peaceful in 1939, thanks to its strong military and authoritarian government.
Yet Germany lost the subsequent war.
The biggest "winner" of both world wars was the country that had done the least to prepare for them: The United States of America.
After WW2, America switched to much higher military spending, and higher levels of preparation. Results: Korea - tie, Vietnam - lost, Afghanistan - lost, Iraq - lost.
The problem with high military spending, is that it makes it easy to initiate stupid wars.
Better question: Why do we pretend that SSNs are "secret"?
They are already semi-public, and generally used as a "citizenship number". There have been so many breaches that nearly every SSN has be leaked multiple times. Why not just go all the way, and make SSNs fully public? Then people could just write it on an envelope, and the USPS would deliver the letter to your current address.
If companies want something for authentication, they would have to use something sensible instead.
Sport is clearly more important than science it would seem...
No, not more important, just more popular. But the solution is more articles about scientists, not fewer about sports. It is not a paper encyclopedia, and there is no inherent limit to the number of articles.
Assuming you get to keep the paper, it makes it possible to audit the results to a much higher degree of certainty.
Not really. It is just a receipt, not a list of who/what you voted for. You can use it to confirm that your vote was counted, but not that the vote was recorded correctly, nor that additional fake ballots were not also counted.
Opponents of electronic voting talk about "paper ballots" like they are some magical thing than ensures fair elections. That is nonsense.
It says "In the new study everyone was more likely to survive if they saw a female physician"
TFA says that, but the report it is based on does not. TFA is poorly written by someone that can't do math (e.g.: the difference between 11.9 and 12.4 is not "12%"). A journalist who can't calculate a percentage is unlikely to be able to judge statistical significance.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck monsanto, just have the bots pull the fucking weeds.
That would be much slower and require a far most sophisticated mechanism.
A piezoelectric sprayer is what your inkjet printer uses. They are cheap, reliable, and fast.
A 95% reduction that works and is affordable, is much better than a 100% solution that is never deployed.
Shouldn't it first be scientifically, or at least statistically proven, that glyphosate can cause cancer
No. The courts should be accessible to everyone, even janitors. Nobody should have to wait for permission from scientists before seeking justice. It is not the janitor's fault that no conclusive research has been done, so why should he be denied his day in court?
Is that roundup doesn't cause cancer.
We don't know that. Glyphosate / Roundup causes tumors in test animals at high dosage. It has not been shown to correlate with cancer in humans, but not many studies have been done, and Monsanto has lobbied the EPA to "reinterpret" some of the results.
Given the ambiguous data, $289M seems excessive, and will likely be reduced on appeal, where judges will decide, and there will be no sympathetic jury.
Eating food grown in fields treated with glyphosate is unlikely to be a problem. But if you work directly with glyphosate, you should take reasonable precautions. Wear gloves, long sleeves, long pants. Carry a bottle of soapy water so you can rinse quickly if it spills on your skin.
The best solution is to transition to robotic weed control. Robots can use image recognition and targeted piezoelectric applicators to spray glyphosate directly onto the weed leaves, while spraying very little on the crop or on the ground. This can reduce herbicide use by 95%.
Dude, if your "culture" is dependent on schoolchildren being massacred and gang-bangers spraying bullets, you've got a fucked-up culture.
You are missing the point. The culture of urban gang-bangers and rural gun owners couldn't be more different. Gun control advocates are mostly opposed to the latter culture, not the first. Rural whites join the NRA, and are politically active on gun rights. Urban gang-bangers are not.
Do you seriously believe that closing the "gun show loophole" will make a non-negligible difference? Yet it gets way more attention than urban handgun shootings.
It wasn't always thus. You might want to read up on the history on the gun control movement in America. In the 1980s, there was a strong advocacy movement for restrictions on handguns (responsible for 75% of gun homicides and even more gun suicides), and HCI and the Brady Campaign made it clear that they were not after "long guns" used for hunting. Their proposals were sensible. Their influence was growing.
That came to an abrupt end on the morning of January 17th, 1989, when Patrick Purdy walked onto a school playground in Stockton, California, opened fire with an SKS semi-automatic rifle, killing five children and wounding 32 more. The advocates took advantage of the publicity and outrage to completely abandon their assurances of focusing on handguns, and called for bans on "automatic rifles" (already illegal), and "AK-47s" (also already illegal). They got their "assault weapons" ban, but alienated millions of hunters and others that had supported them. The backlash swept dozens of gun control advocates from public office in the 1994 Republican mid-term landslide. The ban expired. NRA membership ballooned. Trust was gone. Willingness to compromise was gone. Any sort of new restriction on gun ownership is unthinkable in today's political climate.
I remember reading a thread about Venezuela's crime rate going down by a factor of 1000 when they enacted a global ban on private, non police/military gun ownership.
Then something is seriously wrong with either your memory or your critical thinking skills. This never happened, and is so completely implausible that only a fool would believe it.
it's pretty well known that if you leave, for any reason, you'll never be allowed to come back.
That is a foolish policy. My company keeps in touch with alumni, and we invite them to our annual picnic. We have rehired several "boomerangs", with good results every time. They already know our culture and procedures, so they can hit the ground running, without the typical 3-6 month learning curve. We also already know their capabilities, so we can put them into a team where they fit. They come back brimming with new ideas about how to fix our products and processes, and they have learned that the grass isn't greener elsewhere, so they rarely leave a second time.
What possible justification is there for a "no rehire" policy? Do they really think it will dissuade people from quitting?
Small wonder Tesla cannot get a grip on its "production hell".
OTOH, they are not held back by ossified traditional thinking.
And for all that, the murder rate in the USA is about half what it was 50 years ago....
The murder rate is irrelevant. Gun control is about culture, not "saving lives".
In many ways, gun control is the mirror image of abortion. Liberals are often perplexed when conservatives dismiss their argument that we could save way more babies by sex education, access to contraceptives, better prenatal care, nutrition supplements for pregnant women, and streamlined adoptions, than by banning abortions. That is all true, but is missing the point. It is not about "saving babies" but about a culture of people behaving irresponsibly and then flushing the consequences down the toilet.
Similarly, gun violence dramatically declined over the past few decades mostly because of a big reduction in environmental lead pollution. There is much more we could do: black children still have twice the blood lead levels of white children, and prison inmates have three times the average level. Yet there is WAY more passion about closing the "gun show loophole", something that would have a negligible effect, than about not poisoning kids, which would likely save thousands of lives annually. Likewise, gun control advocates focus on school shootings and "assault weapons", not because these represent a lot of deaths (school shootings are less than 0.05% of gun deaths, and handguns kill a thousand times as many people as assault rifles), but because they represent "gun culture".
How hard would it be to design an airdroppable package that had a SatLink , a wifi hotspot and Solar? power (with battery backup)??
The only people with a clear motivation to do this are the Eritreans or Somalis, both of whom have enough of their own problems. Eritrea is on the brink of economic collapse, and the last thing they want right now is to rekindle their border war with Ethiopia (basically, two bald men fighting over a comb). Somalia is politically and militarily fragmented, so helping their kin in the Ethiopian borderlands is not a priority.
The ethnic Somalis in this region have ties to al Shabaab, which is considered a terrorist organization by most Western countries. Giving then technology that could be used in attacks could land you in prison for a very long time.
they still haven't recovered from the colonialists raping their countries and then pulling out.
This is not supported by evidence. The countries where colonialism was longest and deepest (e.g: South Africa, Ghana, Kenya) are doing the best, because of strong institutions, rule of law, and economic ties to the wider world. Countries where colonialism was shortest and weakest, and tribalism left intact, are doing the worst.
The Germans occupied Norway for longer than the Italians occupied Ethiopia. Blaming Ethiopia's problems on "colonialism" is absurd.
By any objective measure, Africans that gave up tribalism and adopted western ways, are doing relatively well. If you look at income, infant mortality, maternal mortality, violence, longevity, nutrition, literacy, health, sexual abuse, alcoholism, or any other measure of human welfare that you can think of, traditional tribal societies are at the absolute bottom.
That's why I carry a Nintendo DS, point-and-shoot, flip-phone, iPod and GPS in my pockets wherever I go!
At least those are all "things you want to have in your pocket". The problem with the Bixby smart fridge is that 99% of the features have nothing to do with refrigeration. The calendar can remind you of your appointments, but the interface is so clunky that it is useless. You can use it as a web browser, but why would you want to stand in the kitchen to do that? One feature that is actually related to the refrigerator is an internal camera that can display the contents of the fridge without opening the door ... but it takes so long to traverse the menus, that it is easier to just open the door and look the old fashioned way.
In fact the interface is so badly designed that we can't even figure out how to set the temperature, so it it is still on the factory settings, which occasionally results in frozen milk if we put it on the back shelf.
If they fixed the voice recognition to Alexa levels (which are very good) and tied the voice recognition to the rest of the functionality, it might not be so bad. But overall it is a dumb concept with an even dumber implementation.
Our Alexa occasionally does OTA updates. But Bixby (apparently) never does. So I don't have any hope for improvements.
My wife bought a Bixby enabled Samsung refrigerator. It is difficult to voice activate, doesn't understand much, and is way worse than either Alexa or Google Home (she has both of those too).
It does include good speakers, so if you want your refrigerator to play nice music, you may like it.
The world has more qualified workers than job openings
You've obviously never tried to find a decent plumber on Craigslist.
Balloons and blimps have also stayed aloft for longer than 27 days. The claim, as written in TFA, is wrong.
Sure, you can qualify if by saying "without refueling" or "heavier than air" or "powered flight" or whatever, but TFA doesn't say that. It says "any aircraft", which is baloney.
God will not be happy.
The gods are still pissed about Prometheus giving us fire.
Every significant advance in human history has been accompanied by moral nattering by naysayers.
I wouldn't say that....the USAF and NRO has a lot of space assets.
Those are reconnaissance and surveillance assets, not weapon systems.
Germany was quite peaceful in 1939, thanks to its strong military and authoritarian government.
Yet Germany lost the subsequent war.
The biggest "winner" of both world wars was the country that had done the least to prepare for them: The United States of America.
After WW2, America switched to much higher military spending, and higher levels of preparation. Results: Korea - tie, Vietnam - lost, Afghanistan - lost, Iraq - lost.
The problem with high military spending, is that it makes it easy to initiate stupid wars.
Parts of the addresses were converted to asterisks. This is explained in the summary.
Why do they need an SSN in the first place?
Better question: Why do we pretend that SSNs are "secret"?
They are already semi-public, and generally used as a "citizenship number". There have been so many breaches that nearly every SSN has be leaked multiple times. Why not just go all the way, and make SSNs fully public? Then people could just write it on an envelope, and the USPS would deliver the letter to your current address.
If companies want something for authentication, they would have to use something sensible instead.
Sport is clearly more important than science it would seem...
No, not more important, just more popular. But the solution is more articles about scientists, not fewer about sports. It is not a paper encyclopedia, and there is no inherent limit to the number of articles.
Assuming you get to keep the paper, it makes it possible to audit the results to a much higher degree of certainty.
Not really. It is just a receipt, not a list of who/what you voted for. You can use it to confirm that your vote was counted, but not that the vote was recorded correctly, nor that additional fake ballots were not also counted.
Opponents of electronic voting talk about "paper ballots" like they are some magical thing than ensures fair elections. That is nonsense.
It is easy to have a verified vote.
It is easy to have a secret vote.
It is very, very difficult to have both.
Should've asked a farmer, not an engineer.
The farmer would have told you that scarecrows are mostly ineffective.
Agreed. Agricultural bird scarers use a 12v battery, propane gas cylinder
They also cover a very small area, and don't work well once the birds get used to them.
I have seen them used in cherry orchards near harvest time, and nowhere else.
I'm more interested in how long it'll take for the birds to learn that the drone can't actually hurt them
Step one: Condition birds to believe that the drone is harmless
Step two: Mount a shotgun on the drone.
It says "In the new study everyone was more likely to survive if they saw a female physician"
TFA says that, but the report it is based on does not. TFA is poorly written by someone that can't do math (e.g.: the difference between 11.9 and 12.4 is not "12%"). A journalist who can't calculate a percentage is unlikely to be able to judge statistical significance.