If I had mod points today, I would give them all to you, even if you are an AC. There is a qualitative difference between the idea of being seen in public and mass surveillance combined with indexing and long-term data storage. We need more than an expectation of privacy. We need a guarantee.
They can wait with the elephant bird and the terror bird until I get peckish again.
Gastornis parisiensis they can keep, I don't want them to tread on my feet.
But more seriously, instead of editing the genes so that Californian Grizzly doesn't eat people, they could do some editing so that they can be employed to pick oranges, that would be the day.
I don't know about bears picking oranges. Next, they'll discover fire and then it's just trouble after that. See this story.
We were directed by the physicians not to vaccinate. This was 20 years ago, so I think the anti-vaccine movement wasn't as strong and immunosuppression wasn 't as advanced. Someone above mentioned that non-vaccinated kids were not the risk, but that the condition that required the transplant was the risk factor. Of course, it was, but childhood disease can kill or cripple seemingly healthy kids, if you can't be vaccinated against things like measles, having almost everyone around you vaccinated is the next best thing. Lowering the accumulated risk seems like a good thing. As you say, when dealing with a chronic condition, you're always making those kinds of risk/reward judgments.
And what if I don't want to live in society? Will society let me independently exist, or will they force my participation, through such means as property taxes? And if I'm not given a choice, who's the parasite?
Born, never asked, eh? I think the choices then are be dead or live on an isolated island in the remote Pacific. With rising sea levels, the second choice may not be the better option. With the human population spread across the globe the way it is, it's getting pretty hard not to be part of some sort of society.
My son was immunosuppressed because of a kidney transplant when he was an infant so he couldn't be vaccinated. We depended on herd-immunity. It was always scary to run into someone who was anti-vaccine. I thought "It's bad enough that you're putting your own kid at risk, but you're seriously endangering mine." The anti-vaccine people aren't always uneducated, many of the ones that I encountered were college grads. I guess they slept through biology class. Many seemed to think vaccination was some sort of plot by "The Man".
It's a way to get their foot in the door. They will either make a new agency, or expand the FCC to essentially police the internet. You'll need someone to check up on ISPs to make sure they're staying neutral, and a bunch of new regulations that define exactly what neutral is. ISPs will probably need a license to operate which can be revoked in the event an ISP is found not to be neutral. From there, they can probably add new regulations to prevent sharing copyrighted materials without even passing new legislation. Since its already illegal, all they'd need to do is expand the meaning of net neutrality as necessary.
And net-neutrality advocates really need to get real about this. The Internet is moving away from preferred content, not toward it, and users would perceive blocked content as "broken links." Customers would have a shit fit, and probably sue their ISP for false advertising if that happened (not to mention the Feds could bring antitrust charges). Net neutrality legislation is an unnecessary opportunity for the government to break the Internet. Don't fall for it.
You are assuming that competition exists among ISPs. This is not the case in many parts of the US. Where I live there is one choice, excluding satellite which is a lousy solution. Without local competition, a monopoly can do whatever they want in the absence of regulation. By the time customers get together and sue an ISP for throttling or blocking sites, the damage is done. A net startup would be out of business before folks realized it was gone. Monopolies have to be regulated. Net neutrality is minimal regulation. It says keep your hands off content. If there were any real competition, it wouldn't be necessary.
This seems like one of those "what could possibly go wrong" scenarios. Genetic and epigenetic interactions are complex. Even simple genetic defects like the defect that causes sickle cell anemia can have a positive genetic benefit like conferring resistance to malaria. Maybe by eliminating something like alcoholism in a population, we eliminate some necessary positive trait. Sorting out how much of a particular complex trait like alcoholism or psychopathy is genetic, epigenetic, or environmental isn't easy. In general, when it comes to messing with our heredity, I think extreme caution is in order. I don't think we're as smart in this area as we think we are.
think if people actually went and read the CONSTITUTION they would see that copyright exists for a reason - to protect the creator, to make it profitable to create, and to enbiggen a vibrant creative economy.
Article 1 Section 8
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Doesn't say anything about making it profitable or about the economy, rather congress may make laws granting exclusive rights for a limited time to promote progress in the arts and sciences. If you want to try and profit, that's your business not congress's. Maybe our current congress has it backwards.
Something similar to that experiment is done every year. In many parts of the world people live in crowded conditions with close contact to pigs and chickens. A small number of people become infected with H5N1. A few die, most don't. If you did the experiment that you describe, you will probably end up with results similar those in the paper - people would get ill; maybe a few would die, probably from Al Qaeda medical care. If you want to be a terrorist, cheap explosives are more cost effective.
Well, for the most part...the music being produced today, just isn't worth keeping, and owning to replay over and over again in the coming years.
That's not just my "get off my lawn" mentality either...I hear it from younger people today. They go through tons of music, but it is quite often disposable, I've heard them say.
I think the problem is just the opposite. There is so much great music, from all time periods, available right now that we're in some sort of golden age of music. There's always something new and exciting to discover, so why limit yourself. I listen to everything from Gregorian chants to hip-hop and my personal opinion is that the stuff being produced right now in any genre that you can name is as good and as anything from any past period. It's just different because it's built on what came before. Of course, there are giants like Coltrane or Beethoven, but new giants will always come along and revolutionize music.
Me too. I'm an old geezer and I mostly listen to streaming rather than stuff I own. I subscribe to a couple of streaming services and usually listen to radio streams like WFMU while working. My main complaint against the commercial streaming services like Rhapsody is that tracks will disappear. You can create a playlist and tracks will occasionally become unavailable because the music company has pulled the songs from the service.
Insane? Perhaps. But even if she's not, she really needs to learn about this little writing technique called paragraphs. Perhaps, she needs also someone to clue her to that fact that using lots of phrases in caps makes you SOUND TOTALLY BATSHIT.
I can only speak to my own experience. I've worked in industry, academia, and govt. Of all my jobs, the govt. job is the one where my coworkers' and my motivations have been the least self-serving. YMMV, obviously.
That reflects my experience. I work in academia now. It has advantages over the other two in many ways, but the squabbles seem to be over more petty issues (joke: why are academic politics so vicious? Because the stakes are so low). When I worked in a government research lab, there was a high degree of camaraderie, especially among the science and tech folks. There was definitely dead wood in the bureaucracy, but there's plenty of that in corporate world. There was essentially no dead wood in the labs that I worked in. YMMV. When I was in startups, the principals seemed to be dedicated to the making the organization work, but to much of the rest of the crew, it was just a job.
Next CNN editorial: Does watching TV programs on the internet cause brain damage?
CNN makes their money from cable. Is it all that surprising that they would have an editorial bashing the competition: video games and looking at junk on the net? I wonder if they ever had an editorial asking if watching TV news makes you paranoid?
WTF? No matter what the story is about, over the past couple of weeks an AC makes one of the first posts decrying the evil done by Google. Slashdot headline: "Bad People Kick Kittens." First post: Slashdot cares about kicking kittens, but what about Google driving around taking photos of kittens? Is someone paying to trash Google on/., or does some lone guy just hate Google and lurk on/. all day just to bad mouth them?
It used to be that the magic words were "abracadbra" or "presto chango", but now the new magic words are "national security". Those words hypnotize judges into giving the government anything it wants. It seems to even work on corporations: Google, ATT etc.The NSA is the Fight Club. The first rule of the NSA is you don't talk about the NSA
It leaves me wondering exactly what kind of security system we really have. It seems to be some unholy tangle of secret government combined with corporate indifference to laws and civic responsibility. Ike warned about the military-industrial complex. Today he would probably be warning us about the national security-corporate alliance that has taken root in the US. We pay for the NSA, but we don't get to ask about what they do. Our representatives oversee them in secret, give them money in secret (we can't see the "black budget"), and don't talk about what they oversee. Is the money worth it? Who knows? You and I will never find out. Is the NSA spying on US citizens? You and I won't get a straight answer. Does the government issue death warrants for US citizens without due process? You bet, but we are not privy to those decisions until CNN announces it. Is Google assisting the NSA? My guess is yes. And I'll bet everyone else, ATT, Microsoft, etc., at the top of the food chain is also. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain for both sides. Customers and stockholders don't care and you can't prove it because the government will invoke the magic words.
I wish you hadn't posted that link. I just wasted 10 minutes looking at pictures of bad tattoos. BUT, it's still better than wasting 20 seconds every time I watch a DVD
I work in the advertising industry and it is outrageous how far people can go to abuse others. It isn't free to make all those good tv shows and in my opinion authors should get paid for them. Mostly this is based on advertising on TV. If you don't want advertising, go buy the DVD boxes which don't have them. But have some decency and let people get paid for their hard work. Dish Network is bunch of assholes.
The ad and TV industry only has itself to blame. The amount of advertising minutes in typical hour show keeps increasing. Flip around channels at random and you have a much higher chance of landing on an ad than program content. I pay Netflix and Amazon to watch shows rather than put up with constant interruption at key dramatic moments by loud and annoying ads. Dish seems to want to give their customers what the customers want. Maybe the ad and TV industries should try and treat viewers with a bit more respect and they would get a bit more respect in return.
Slashdot Mirror
If I had mod points today, I would give them all to you, even if you are an AC. There is a qualitative difference between the idea of being seen in public and mass surveillance combined with indexing and long-term data storage. We need more than an expectation of privacy. We need a guarantee.
I want my Dodo-burger and my Moa-burger too.
They can wait with the elephant bird and the terror bird until I get peckish again.
Gastornis parisiensis they can keep, I don't want them to tread on my feet.
But more seriously, instead of editing the genes so that Californian Grizzly doesn't eat people, they could do some editing so that they can be employed to pick oranges, that would be the day.
I don't know about bears picking oranges. Next, they'll discover fire and then it's just trouble after that. See this story.
We were directed by the physicians not to vaccinate. This was 20 years ago, so I think the anti-vaccine movement wasn't as strong and immunosuppression wasn 't as advanced. Someone above mentioned that non-vaccinated kids were not the risk, but that the condition that required the transplant was the risk factor. Of course, it was, but childhood disease can kill or cripple seemingly healthy kids, if you can't be vaccinated against things like measles, having almost everyone around you vaccinated is the next best thing. Lowering the accumulated risk seems like a good thing. As you say, when dealing with a chronic condition, you're always making those kinds of risk/reward judgments.
And what if I don't want to live in society? Will society let me independently exist, or will they force my participation, through such means as property taxes? And if I'm not given a choice, who's the parasite?
Born, never asked, eh? I think the choices then are be dead or live on an isolated island in the remote Pacific. With rising sea levels, the second choice may not be the better option. With the human population spread across the globe the way it is, it's getting pretty hard not to be part of some sort of society.
My son was immunosuppressed because of a kidney transplant when he was an infant so he couldn't be vaccinated. We depended on herd-immunity. It was always scary to run into someone who was anti-vaccine. I thought "It's bad enough that you're putting your own kid at risk, but you're seriously endangering mine." The anti-vaccine people aren't always uneducated, many of the ones that I encountered were college grads. I guess they slept through biology class. Many seemed to think vaccination was some sort of plot by "The Man".
It's a way to get their foot in the door. They will either make a new agency, or expand the FCC to essentially police the internet. You'll need someone to check up on ISPs to make sure they're staying neutral, and a bunch of new regulations that define exactly what neutral is. ISPs will probably need a license to operate which can be revoked in the event an ISP is found not to be neutral. From there, they can probably add new regulations to prevent sharing copyrighted materials without even passing new legislation. Since its already illegal, all they'd need to do is expand the meaning of net neutrality as necessary.
And net-neutrality advocates really need to get real about this. The Internet is moving away from preferred content, not toward it, and users would perceive blocked content as "broken links." Customers would have a shit fit, and probably sue their ISP for false advertising if that happened (not to mention the Feds could bring antitrust charges). Net neutrality legislation is an unnecessary opportunity for the government to break the Internet. Don't fall for it.
You are assuming that competition exists among ISPs. This is not the case in many parts of the US. Where I live there is one choice, excluding satellite which is a lousy solution. Without local competition, a monopoly can do whatever they want in the absence of regulation. By the time customers get together and sue an ISP for throttling or blocking sites, the damage is done. A net startup would be out of business before folks realized it was gone. Monopolies have to be regulated. Net neutrality is minimal regulation. It says keep your hands off content. If there were any real competition, it wouldn't be necessary.
Gives a whole new meaning to Soylent Green.
This seems like one of those "what could possibly go wrong" scenarios. Genetic and epigenetic interactions are complex. Even simple genetic defects like the defect that causes sickle cell anemia can have a positive genetic benefit like conferring resistance to malaria. Maybe by eliminating something like alcoholism in a population, we eliminate some necessary positive trait. Sorting out how much of a particular complex trait like alcoholism or psychopathy is genetic, epigenetic, or environmental isn't easy. In general, when it comes to messing with our heredity, I think extreme caution is in order. I don't think we're as smart in this area as we think we are.
If you'd like to see the extent of surveillance in US, watch this video released by anon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKaG9pfEFSQ
Scary to say the least. 1984 is already here.
Isn't this convenient, the video has been deleted from YouTube. That is doubleplusungood.
enbiggen seems perfectly cromulent.
think if people actually went and read the CONSTITUTION they would see that copyright exists for a reason - to protect the creator, to make it profitable to create, and to enbiggen a vibrant creative economy.
Article 1 Section 8
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Doesn't say anything about making it profitable or about the economy, rather congress may make laws granting exclusive rights for a limited time to promote progress in the arts and sciences. If you want to try and profit, that's your business not congress's. Maybe our current congress has it backwards.
Something similar to that experiment is done every year. In many parts of the world people live in crowded conditions with close contact to pigs and chickens. A small number of people become infected with H5N1. A few die, most don't. If you did the experiment that you describe, you will probably end up with results similar those in the paper - people would get ill; maybe a few would die, probably from Al Qaeda medical care. If you want to be a terrorist, cheap explosives are more cost effective.
I wish I had mod points today. You would get them all. Until this post, this has been a fact free discussion.
Well, for the most part...the music being produced today, just isn't worth keeping, and owning to replay over and over again in the coming years.
That's not just my "get off my lawn" mentality either...I hear it from younger people today. They go through tons of music, but it is quite often disposable, I've heard them say.
I think the problem is just the opposite. There is so much great music, from all time periods, available right now that we're in some sort of golden age of music. There's always something new and exciting to discover, so why limit yourself. I listen to everything from Gregorian chants to hip-hop and my personal opinion is that the stuff being produced right now in any genre that you can name is as good and as anything from any past period. It's just different because it's built on what came before. Of course, there are giants like Coltrane or Beethoven, but new giants will always come along and revolutionize music.
Me too. I'm an old geezer and I mostly listen to streaming rather than stuff I own. I subscribe to a couple of streaming services and usually listen to radio streams like WFMU while working. My main complaint against the commercial streaming services like Rhapsody is that tracks will disappear. You can create a playlist and tracks will occasionally become unavailable because the music company has pulled the songs from the service.
Insane? Perhaps. But even if she's not, she really needs to learn about this little writing technique called paragraphs. Perhaps, she needs also someone to clue her to that fact that using lots of phrases in caps makes you SOUND TOTALLY BATSHIT.
I use a chainsaw.
I can only speak to my own experience. I've worked in industry, academia, and govt. Of all my jobs, the govt. job is the one where my coworkers' and my motivations have been the least self-serving. YMMV, obviously.
That reflects my experience. I work in academia now. It has advantages over the other two in many ways, but the squabbles seem to be over more petty issues (joke: why are academic politics so vicious? Because the stakes are so low). When I worked in a government research lab, there was a high degree of camaraderie, especially among the science and tech folks. There was definitely dead wood in the bureaucracy, but there's plenty of that in corporate world. There was essentially no dead wood in the labs that I worked in. YMMV. When I was in startups, the principals seemed to be dedicated to the making the organization work, but to much of the rest of the crew, it was just a job.
Next CNN editorial: Does watching TV programs on the internet cause brain damage?
CNN makes their money from cable. Is it all that surprising that they would have an editorial bashing the competition: video games and looking at junk on the net? I wonder if they ever had an editorial asking if watching TV news makes you paranoid?
Would you prefer to have every channel priced the same as HBO?
Yes, if I only had to pay for the 3 channels that I actually watch instead of 250 that I don't watch in order to get those 3 channels.
WTF? No matter what the story is about, over the past couple of weeks an AC makes one of the first posts decrying the evil done by Google. Slashdot headline: "Bad People Kick Kittens." First post: Slashdot cares about kicking kittens, but what about Google driving around taking photos of kittens? Is someone paying to trash Google on /., or does some lone guy just hate Google and lurk on /. all day just to bad mouth them?
It used to be that the magic words were "abracadbra" or "presto chango", but now the new magic words are "national security". Those words hypnotize judges into giving the government anything it wants. It seems to even work on corporations: Google, ATT etc.The NSA is the Fight Club. The first rule of the NSA is you don't talk about the NSA
It leaves me wondering exactly what kind of security system we really have. It seems to be some unholy tangle of secret government combined with corporate indifference to laws and civic responsibility. Ike warned about the military-industrial complex. Today he would probably be warning us about the national security-corporate alliance that has taken root in the US. We pay for the NSA, but we don't get to ask about what they do. Our representatives oversee them in secret, give them money in secret (we can't see the "black budget"), and don't talk about what they oversee. Is the money worth it? Who knows? You and I will never find out. Is the NSA spying on US citizens? You and I won't get a straight answer. Does the government issue death warrants for US citizens without due process? You bet, but we are not privy to those decisions until CNN announces it. Is Google assisting the NSA? My guess is yes. And I'll bet everyone else, ATT, Microsoft, etc., at the top of the food chain is also. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain for both sides. Customers and stockholders don't care and you can't prove it because the government will invoke the magic words.
I wish you hadn't posted that link. I just wasted 10 minutes looking at pictures of bad tattoos. BUT, it's still better than wasting 20 seconds every time I watch a DVD
I work in the advertising industry and it is outrageous how far people can go to abuse others. It isn't free to make all those good tv shows and in my opinion authors should get paid for them. Mostly this is based on advertising on TV. If you don't want advertising, go buy the DVD boxes which don't have them. But have some decency and let people get paid for their hard work. Dish Network is bunch of assholes.
The ad and TV industry only has itself to blame. The amount of advertising minutes in typical hour show keeps increasing. Flip around channels at random and you have a much higher chance of landing on an ad than program content. I pay Netflix and Amazon to watch shows rather than put up with constant interruption at key dramatic moments by loud and annoying ads. Dish seems to want to give their customers what the customers want. Maybe the ad and TV industries should try and treat viewers with a bit more respect and they would get a bit more respect in return.
This country is awash in guns. What good has that done? Brains in the heads of citizens would do much more.