I know this is a nerd culture, the title IS "News for Nerds, stuff that matters" after all. What I was getting at is that, despite this being a very science oriented site, the user base is surprisingly open to thoughtful discussion and debate about faith, morality and so on. (with the the caveat that there is a huge implied expectation that, if you are going to make a faith or morality based statement, you do so reasonably and be articulate as possible.)
As for the spam, trolls, flamebait etc etc, near as I can tell, even the most carefully curated forums are vulnerable to such things. Every forum owner has to make decisions regarding the accessibility and freedoms within their site. At one end you have pretty much wild west/borderline anarchy like 4chan. (especially my fellow lurker fags of/b) and at the other end you have forums where the admin must read and approve every single post before it appears. I've always appreciated the fact that Slashdot has always leaned more to the free end of that spectrum. I don't mind putting up with such nonsense; some of it is entertaining, which is why I habitually browse at -1.
Respectfully; I must disagree. I've been a member for many years, Slashdot has been my homepage since sometime around 2002. Over the years I have been a moderator and meta-moderator many times. At first I was dubious about the moderation system, fearing that groupthink would end up shutting out the dissenting voices. Yet, despite this being a science and technology focused site, I have seen some good conversations about religion, faith and the role(s) of faith-based morality in a modern society. I've seen similar discourse on any number of topics one would think were vulnerable to groupthink For what it may be worth, the groupthink as I remember it has always been at least a little anti-Microsoft (or any other large technology corporation) and pro-Linux. My own impression has been that the Slashdot community leans heavily towards libertarianism and that is what drives debate, rather than some knee-jerk anti-X bias.
I still see short; thoughtless comments, trolls and flamebait, mainly because I browse at -1, but they've always been more likely to appear under Anonymous Coward than any actual userID. What moderation did was to allow people to choose for themselves how much, or how little of the total thread they wished to see. Even at the unfiltered setting I prefer to browse at, I think I'm seeing far less Goatse links, pointless Natalie Portman/Hot grits comments and the like than I used to. Mind you, I do find the more recent "apping appers use aps!" and "You're all group think cows!" trolls to be at least more entertaining than the goatse and Rickroll links were. (entertaining in the sense of watching in fascination as a homeless man with mental health issues rubs dog shit all over his face to repel alien mind probes.)
You'll note that many of the marketing tactics that have had the pro-privacy folks up in arms are attempts to develop that level of tracking, collating and ad to sales conversion. There was a comment on this site recently from a person who went to Home Depot to buy more hair clog removers and came home to find that Facebook now showed him clog removal and plumbers ads.
As I've said before in related conversations, the sheer amount of data any one organization collects is bad enough. But then many of them continue on to sell or share that data in various ways. Facebook likely already knows who your wife is, VISA or MasterCard almost certainly do as well. It's quite possible for sophisticated data analysis to figure out that showing youdoes indirectly lead to sales from other members of your household.
What the article here is saying is that the direct clicks leads to the clicker buying something X% of the time isn't as valuable as it once was or perhaps as people once thought it was. That sort of straight forward metric was easy for corporate types to understand in the early days of Internet advertising and thus easy to sell to them. The marketing landscape is now having to adapt to the reality that there is significant anti-ad push-back, combined with the more subtle, and hence harder to sell, ads leading to indirect sales paradigm. As far as I can tell, and in my humble opinion, that is one of the major drivers behind every business and their dog wanting you to download and install their phone app and like them on social media. It makes drawing those ads to sales inferences FAR easier.
Bottom line, selling digital ad space is going to have to get more sophisticated and the absolute dollar value of a given impression is going to go down. I predict we are going to see even subtle and pervasive attempts at tracking consumers in response.
The problem is, ending the subsidies for the entire petroleum industry is FAR from simple or easy. Sure there is the immediate problem of having to go against the powerful Oil and Gas lobbyists which is indeed a big hurdle to try to overcome. But there are several less immediately obvious hurdles as well.
1) For such a thing to work, every major oil producing nation would have to end subsidies by the same relative amount and at the same time. To do otherwise would be to allow petroleum producers in one country to maintain a significant competitive advantage. If (for example) Canada stops subsidies and tax breaks etc on its petroleum industry but Russian doesn't, everyone will be buying the much cheaper Russian oil, leaving little market for Canada. Canada would likely still sell lots to the US of course, the logistics of shipping gives Canada a small advantage there. But since the US, by law, doesn't sell the majority of its petroleum output on the common market, instead consuming it at home and re-selling Canadian oil, the US would be also adversely affected by the Canadian policy change.
2) Ending subsidies would mean that many alternative sources (such as oil sands and shale) would simply go out of business. That reduces the worldwide output, in turn driving up the cost per barrel. Research and development of extraction from such sources would likely languish compared to the pace it now has.
3) Petroleum products are sold on international commodity markets and one of the subtle effects of most commodity markets is that they are more influenced by the perception of changes in supply and demand than the actual numbers justify. If ending subsidies on say Western Canada Intermediate means an increase in cost of X/barrel, speculation is likely to drive that still higher by some unknown own amount.)
4) This may be my cynicism talking, but it seems to me that, historically, the oil and gas industry has always been very quick to jump on opportunities to raise prices and slow to drop them. (absent competitive reasons to do so) Someone sneezes in the Middle East and everyone everywhere jacks up the price at the pump in anticipation of shortages. But when cheaper supply becomes available, consumers must wait until that cheaper supply actually reaches the pumps. Ending government subsidies would mean every company from the well-head to the pump would have an excuse to increase their profit margins slightly while the government gets all the blame.
5) This would make alternative energy sources more competitive sure, but it would take time for the various industries to scale up to meet that increased demand. As far as I know, Tesla is already selling cars as fast as they can make them and it takes time to increasing hiring, tooling and so on. Even GM would be hard pressed to start selling millions of electric cars per year without 2-5 years to revamp vast sections of their supply chain and tooling.
6) All of the above factors mean that I wouldn't be surprised if the effective price at the pump doubles. That would entail an enormous political cost. People are already angry about the cost to fill up at the pumps, to heat their homes in winter and so on. Lets not forget that the poor have far fewer options when it comes to energy consumption. In Canada and the US, two of the richest nations in the world, there are a lot of people driving second and even third hand cars because that's all they can afford. World wide, there are a lot of small farmers using single cylinder gas or kerosene powered equipment that flat do not have the choice to abandon that equipment and obtain new electric or propane powered stuff. Here in North America, I don't think any of the big players in the agri-equipment field are even looking at electric powered tractors, harvesters, balers and so on. So the price of food will also go up. And if you think doubling the price of fuel provokes a shit storm, that's nothing compared to the fallout from huge increases in the cost of groceries.
I vaguely remember looking into Magnus effect sails many years ago. I think the magazine Popular Science had an article on them that led me to do further reading on the subject.
IIRC; There were some major mechanical engineering problems to be solved before the concept could be scaled up to the size needed for commercial shipping.
1) Freakin' huge tubes, essentially only mounted at one end meant doing some serious engineering on the drive motors, bearings and so on, so as to not snap off in bad weather. On a conventional sailing vessel, you douse sails so as to not snap masts, you can't do that with a Magnus rotor.
2) as others have pointed out, the sheer height of a rotor large enough to make a practical difference imposes some pretty serious limitations on routes, since clearance under bridges becomes a deal breaker. Also, that height means that the gantry cranes typically used in port for handling shipping containers might conflict with the rotors.
3) Most existing ships can't be modified to incorporate these structures because a) limited deck space and b) The structure of the hull wouldn't be strong enough to take the loads without a lot of (expensive) modifications.
On a more financial/social level; international shipping is very demanding. Relatively low margins, yet with literally tens of millions at risk with each ship load encourages a great deal of cautious, conservative behaviour. Using the latest and most efficient engines and scaling ship size up is an obvious next step to take when planning and building new vessels. The demands, risks and savings and opportunities are very well understood. Building a Magnus ship means very different hull designs, increased risk of loss at sea, changes to infrastructure, new required skills for ships crew and so on. That is a much harder sell, particularly since a failure to meet expectations for efficiency means the ship becomes a money sink. A Magnus ship converted back to completely conventional propulsion wouldn't be as efficient as conventional designs.
The bottom line is that, while a Magnus ship could work, it would be hard to make cost effective enough to justify the risks
You mean, like now, with every social site being required to allow TLA access and people crossing the border are being required to surrender all their social media accounts(and, IIRC passwords to said sites)? Let's not forget the infamous Room 634a run by AT&T on behalf of the NSA, (and, one assumes, similar facilities at all the other backbone ISP companies) so any one site not playing footsies with the intel community gets all of its traffic harvested, stored and analysed anyway.
Then there are the persistent rumours and stories about the hardware companies being required to put back-doors in their kit. Personally, I think back dooring export kit is a legitimate intelligence operation, but the rumours are that the vulnerabilities are going into all gear they ship.
The result is that all the American companies the intelligence communities care about are about are wittingly or unwittingly, working for the government and there are many Americans who think that is a good thing
I don't know what the Chromecast does snoop, but it'd be trivial for it to snoop and report the internal network details. How many computers/devices on your network, what their MAC addresses are, what WiFi password and security level you use, whether you have a home media centre and what files you have hosted on it. It's conceivable that, using checksums or metadata, it is possible to detect which video or audio files match legally licensed digital downloads and from that, make an inference about how many were home rips and/or copyright infringing material.
From there, using the massive database that someone like Google could amass, it would be easy to then track your mobile devices if/when they appear on other networks. (your cell phone on your carriers network, your tablet/laptop on WiFi hotspots.
In my opinion; the problem with any internet capable of device hasn't been what it may or may not snoop on its own, it's been what the manufacturers and software developers can compile or infer on the back end when all the data from multiple sources has been collected. What your cell phone does, for example, is only one piece of the puzzle. For any large internet savvy company, it is straightforward, even comparatively cheap to build a surprising and even scary profile on individuals by collecting all the little scraps our devices send.
Because of that, I've often felt that reports, and consumer pushback, about privacy violating stuff often miss the real dangers. It's not enough to disable/forbid all the privacy eroding functions on this or that hardware or software, not when the same data can be so easily collected through other hardware or software. What's needed is effective laws banning the collection of such data in the first place, regardless of data source. Ideally, such laws would be backed up by a firm resolve by consumers to totally boycott any company that pushes that boundary. I don't mean refusing to use something until the company makes minor changes and promises to not err again. I mean being caught infringing is an effective death sentence for the company. Never buy or use anything from that company ever again. That will ensure that no other company will be willing to risk it. As it is now, every company acts like the camel with his nose in the tent. They ease in a bit further at every opportunity, stop only when caught and back up the minimum they think they can get away with only to resume pushing in when they think the attention is off the them. And it's not just one camel is it? We have dozens of camels all trying to nose their way in and not only are they basing their encroachment on what they are getting away with, they are closely watching and copying any encroachment they see the others getting away with.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I'll see your single article and your claim that there are no studies on how effective the flu vaccine is and raise you SEVENTY NINE THOUSAND FUCKING EXAMPLES of scholarly studies on flu vaccines found with a 12 second Google search. Read that again you muppet, seventy nine thousand studies by educated and trained researchers who have done studies and have put them out for peer review, granting other experts an opportunity to poke holes in their findings, results and conclusions if at all possible. Every type of flu vaccination, every possible combination of flu vaccine and patient, ranging from pediatric to geriatric, including workplace, school and pregnancy situations.
Your entire article, clearly so well researched and thoughtfully written is entirely based on "viewing with alarm" one line of warning text in the insert from one single example of flu vaccine.IT DOESN'T SAY THERE ARE NO STUDIES ON FLU VACCINE EFFECTIVENESS, IT SAYS THERE HAVE BEEN NO CONTROLLED STUDIES SPECIFICALLY WITH FLULAVAL And that is largely because all of the individual ingredients in the formulation HAVE been tested and been found to be safe in these kinds of applications. Then there is the fact that you can't really test vaccine for flu A until flu A hits your area and makes a whole lot of people sick and kills a few. What researchers do instead is infer results to some degree. E.G. previous vaccines A, B and C have been tried, we now know how well they worked in the real world, so based on that, we can come up with next years vaccine based on those findings.
The only part of warning insert that is actually a semi-legitimate concern is the use of thiomersal as a preservative agent. Yes, Thiomersal contains mercury, albeit in truly minuscule amounts. The scientific consensus seems to be that, since it is such a tiny amount and NOT in the form of elemental mercury, it is safe to use it in vaccinations. (certainly the amounts of mercury in a vaccine are infinitesimal compared to what was routinely used in dental amalgam for fillings.)
That said, if you want to play it safe, there ARE non-thiomersal formulations available.
First; yes the annual flu vaccine is against specific types of flu. BUT, a cocktail of, say, five vaccines against the strains researchers think are likely to be the most common OR the most serious in terms of symptoms is likely to make you immune to more than five types. Since the researchers want to make the vaccine as broad in application as possible, they try very hard to find target virus bits that are common to whole groups or families of strains. Thus, vaccine against flu A may make you 60% sure that you'll be immune to Flu A, but at the same time, that vaccine will make you more resistant, possibly even immune to flu strains Aa, Ab, Ac and so on.
Second, "flu like symptoms" is far FAR from having the flu itself. People tend to forget just how horribly having a bad flu can affect them. You can still go to work, take care of the kids and so on with "flu like symptoms", but it is quite common for the actual flu to leave you bedridden for days. Even with routine flu infections, there is a risk of death. And the nature of the flu virus is such that we can never wholly predict when the next pandemic killer flu will appear. Remember that H1N1 has been fingered as the killer behind the "Spanish Flu", a disease that, in two years killed more people world wide than the entirety of WW1. Something close to 20% of people who contracted the disease DIED. With the vaccines we have now, mortality rate is something like 0.01% We've gone to entire families dying, to a percentage smaller than a rounding error. I'd say that very VERY effectively demonstrates the effectiveness of flu vaccines don't you?
And while I'm at it, let me say that "flu like symptoms" are not contagious, but the flu certainly is. You can contract and pass along the flu for a day or so before you even have a hint that you're sick, and you can remain contagious for up to 10 days after first noticing symptoms. Being vaccinated reduces that window of contagion a great deal, making everyone else safer as well. (that is the bigger part of the herd immunity effect. The other part is that, with far fewer hosts to replicate in, the opportunities for the virus to mutate into something more virulent are drastically reduced.)
While there may not be an exact definition of "robot", there is a fair bit of autonomy implied by the proper use of the term in my opinion. These two machines are MECHA, which in my book is arguably cooler (aka geekier) than robots.
Given the long and respected place for mecha in Japanese nerd culture, I'm surprised that it's being described as a robot in the first place. But, to be fair, the makers may well call their machine a mecha, but the english media when reporting on it and its American rival would have used the more widely known term "robots"
WOOOOSH! (it was clear to me that every example of Microsoft software arglebargle_xiv listed was a discontinued application. That made his post either sarcastic, tongue in cheek or both. I'm surprised the folks with mod points today didn't catch that and mod him as "funny" instead of "insightful")
Actually, drug companies can and do "donate" their expired or no longer FDA approved drugs to registered charities all over the world. (I think oogaboogaland is just down the river from Oompa-loompa land) I remember reading articles during the Rwanda genocide to the effect that the various aid agencies, in addition to the problems of helping and healing people in a war zone, had the problem of having to sort through the tons of medical supplies the pharmaceutical companies provided. e.g. they needed antibiotics, hypodermic syringes and anaesthetics, what they often got was pallets full of birth control, cholesterol medication and so on. There often were some supplies they could use, but the rest usually got dumped in a convenient ditch.
See, the problem is; in virtually every country the pharmaceuticals have manufacturing and management operations, the drug company gets to decide what to donate and what value to claim on their donations for tax credit/deduction purposes. Shipping off expired or non-approved drugs at their (former) American retail value is a double win for them.
But, will you stay merely dead? Or can we eagerly await a new zombie movie, written, cast and directed from the undead point of view? A movie directed by a zombie from the zombies point of view? I'd watch the fuck out of that!
Besides, even if you found a big iron jockey with the collectors bug who happened to live in an apartment or condo, where would he put it?? It would almost have to go into a storage locker on the outskirts of town. So, to my mind, the best chance of finding an old mainframe that some collector held on to would be to haunt the storage locker auctions. There's always a chance that a mainframe admin finally succumbed to caffeine poisoning and forgot to add the storage locker and contents to his will and estate lists.
That said, I'd love to be a fly on the wall when some collector approached the property manager or condo board to ask for permission to add 220V three cycle and a 2" water line to his residence so he can run his mainframe, water chiller/condensor and UPS
I'd prefer to simply stay up all night, lying in wait and stroking my gun. But my government won't let me have one. Something about being a danger to myself or others.
I've ridden in commercial planes, trains and buses. two things they all had in common was 1) no nearly enough legroom, and 2) large numbers of people who I not only would not wish to see naked, but would even be willing to pay moderate sums to avoid seeing at all, let alone naked.
I am Canadian, spent most of my life within easy reach of the border. But ever since 9/1 and all the subsequent security nonsense, I have pretty much boycotted the US. I used to go over at least weekly. Some of the enhanced security at the border, as it applies Canada's aboriginal people, Canadian and British citizens, arguably violates those peoples rights under the Jay Treaty. Since the wording is "that it shall at all times be free to His Majesty's subjects..." I would further suggest that it might be construed to apply to all citizens of Her Majesty's Commonwealth Realms and Territories. (not the original intent, I grant you, but law rests on the actual wording, not intent.)
There are many android-based phones which support the MHL standard, which would allow HD resolutions, surround sound and, as a bonus, allow you to use the larger battery pack from the monitor to run or recharge your cellphone. There are loads of guides out there to coach you through installing Linux on an Android mobile device.
this would also allow your modular laptop to use the cell carriers data networks (if you bought a plan) and not just be limited to finding free wi-fi while on the go.
As Highdude702 said, even first time visitors can be presumed to know that they are going to a site dedicated to the distribution of highly illegal child pornography. Moreover, one could argue that just downloading and running Tor is itself highly suspicious and suggestive behaviour. Sure; it has valid and important uses for enabling whistle-blowers, uncensored communication by people in repressive countries and so on. But as far as I know, the majority of use-cases for Tor involve illegal drugs, guns, pornography and black hat hackers.
So the suspects arrested and the various other leads generated that did not lead to an arrest are all people who chose to run Tor, and once within the Tor darknet, chose to search out this material. From the article, I get the impression that the actual arrests where people who had actual user accounts at the site in question. Which implies they were, or expected to be, regular users. I would assume that either the people actually abusing children or at least the people choosing to upload the resulting pictures and videos would have to have a user account. Non-US police noticed the gaffe and shared it with the US authorities. They, in turn, shared the non-US leads that their investigation turned up. That is exactly the sort of inter-agency cooperation we'd expect from our police, and I'm glad they did so in this case.
I do not think this is entrapment. No one was encouraged by the police to go to the site, no one was encouraged by the police to create and/or upload the offensive content. What the police did was the digital equivalent of taking over a stolen goods fencing operation and video recording everyone who came in to fence stolen property. That is called running a sting operation and is a long accepted and legal tactic. Such operations do often record innocent people (if a fence is running a pawn shop for example), but that is highly unlikely to occur on a hidden, non-indexed darknet site. I happen to know that many of the black hat hacker forums are by invite only. I can only assume that the more careful child porn operations would do something similar, a factor which drastically reduces the already low odds of catching innocent people in the sting operation.
As a rule, people hate change, unless it was their idea in the first place or they can see how it furthers their own goals/principles/ideologies. Look how people argued and fought against lightning rods of all things, because people believed it encroached on divine prerogatives. As another example, many people in many countries fought bitterly to try and prevent the adoption of a provably superior system of weights and measures. Many folks in the US still hate the very idea of converting over to match what has now become the world standard.
As for the specific example of software; you're talking about changing a tool they use, possibly one they use every day in their job. While a suggested change may add a useful feature or greatly improve work-flow, they are afraid they will have to learn more about the tool they have come to take for granted. (There are good reasons why Linus Torvalds rants so scathingly when developers make changes that break userspace or user workflows after all)
If it was just a bug patch, those are usually invisible to the majority of users. For those affected by the bug, affects them in the more subtle sense of negative evidence. (in other words, people really notice when something breaks, but when something doesn't break like it used to, that is harder to notice and appreciate) However; from your description, you are primarily advocating adding features or explicitly changing work flows (even if in minor ways). Without more specific information, I certainly can't judge the possible merits of your suggestions. At minimum though, I think your suggestions would require:
1) Adding items to menus, possibly adding new menus altogether. That requires the users learn these new options. With enough new menu items, the devs may decide to revamp the whole look and feel just to drive home the idea that the software has changed and to prove to their bosses that they are actually adding something meaningful to the code. {I'm looking at you Microsoft Office 2007},
2) Changing or adding to the underlying mechanics of the application, which runs the risk of adding whole new sets of bugs to what is hopefully a previously stable release.
3) Convincing the software company or developers that your changes are positive enough, and in enough demand by the user base to justify devoted the time, eyeballs and above all Money to making your changes. Keep in mind that quite often, once an application has been released and the initial flood of user reports have ebbed, most dev teams get cut down, programmers reassigned to other projects and so on. A few are sometimes kept for bug chasing, something which takes proportionally much more time than new code development. The few bug chasers (the code monkey kind, get your mind out of the gutter) will push back against creeping feature-itis and managers will often just decide to add your suggestion to the list for the dev team of the next major version to consider.
$89,000/yr for deflazacort? Big Pharm clearly has the US health industry blindfolded, bent over and reamed but good doesn't it? My son has Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy and is taking deflazacort for it. It hasn't been approved for general prescription here in Canada, but getting approval for it to treat DMD is a straightforward rubber stamp through the exceptional access program. Because it isn't formally approved, we have to pay for it and then get reimbursed for it, Also because it's an EAP drug, we're paying only a little over wholesale. Currently we pay 85$ for a three month supply, or 340/yr. That includes shipping from the pharmacy associated with the research and teaching hospital my son is being treated by.
Slashdot Mirror
ahh yes, one of the classic mental train wrecks of our time....
So....how often do you have to reapply that dog shit to maintain full efficacy in repelling those alien mind rays?
As for the spam, trolls, flamebait etc etc, near as I can tell, even the most carefully curated forums are vulnerable to such things. Every forum owner has to make decisions regarding the accessibility and freedoms within their site. At one end you have pretty much wild west/borderline anarchy like 4chan. (especially my fellow lurker fags of /b) and at the other end you have forums where the admin must read and approve every single post before it appears. I've always appreciated the fact that Slashdot has always leaned more to the free end of that spectrum. I don't mind putting up with such nonsense; some of it is entertaining, which is why I habitually browse at -1.
I still see short; thoughtless comments, trolls and flamebait, mainly because I browse at -1, but they've always been more likely to appear under Anonymous Coward than any actual userID. What moderation did was to allow people to choose for themselves how much, or how little of the total thread they wished to see. Even at the unfiltered setting I prefer to browse at, I think I'm seeing far less Goatse links, pointless Natalie Portman/Hot grits comments and the like than I used to. Mind you, I do find the more recent "apping appers use aps!" and "You're all group think cows!" trolls to be at least more entertaining than the goatse and Rickroll links were. (entertaining in the sense of watching in fascination as a homeless man with mental health issues rubs dog shit all over his face to repel alien mind probes.)
As I've said before in related conversations, the sheer amount of data any one organization collects is bad enough. But then many of them continue on to sell or share that data in various ways. Facebook likely already knows who your wife is, VISA or MasterCard almost certainly do as well. It's quite possible for sophisticated data analysis to figure out that showing youdoes indirectly lead to sales from other members of your household.
What the article here is saying is that the direct clicks leads to the clicker buying something X% of the time isn't as valuable as it once was or perhaps as people once thought it was. That sort of straight forward metric was easy for corporate types to understand in the early days of Internet advertising and thus easy to sell to them. The marketing landscape is now having to adapt to the reality that there is significant anti-ad push-back, combined with the more subtle, and hence harder to sell, ads leading to indirect sales paradigm. As far as I can tell, and in my humble opinion, that is one of the major drivers behind every business and their dog wanting you to download and install their phone app and like them on social media. It makes drawing those ads to sales inferences FAR easier.
Bottom line, selling digital ad space is going to have to get more sophisticated and the absolute dollar value of a given impression is going to go down. I predict we are going to see even subtle and pervasive attempts at tracking consumers in response.
1) For such a thing to work, every major oil producing nation would have to end subsidies by the same relative amount and at the same time. To do otherwise would be to allow petroleum producers in one country to maintain a significant competitive advantage. If (for example) Canada stops subsidies and tax breaks etc on its petroleum industry but Russian doesn't, everyone will be buying the much cheaper Russian oil, leaving little market for Canada. Canada would likely still sell lots to the US of course, the logistics of shipping gives Canada a small advantage there. But since the US, by law, doesn't sell the majority of its petroleum output on the common market, instead consuming it at home and re-selling Canadian oil, the US would be also adversely affected by the Canadian policy change.
2) Ending subsidies would mean that many alternative sources (such as oil sands and shale) would simply go out of business. That reduces the worldwide output, in turn driving up the cost per barrel. Research and development of extraction from such sources would likely languish compared to the pace it now has.
3) Petroleum products are sold on international commodity markets and one of the subtle effects of most commodity markets is that they are more influenced by the perception of changes in supply and demand than the actual numbers justify. If ending subsidies on say Western Canada Intermediate means an increase in cost of X/barrel, speculation is likely to drive that still higher by some unknown own amount.)
4) This may be my cynicism talking, but it seems to me that, historically, the oil and gas industry has always been very quick to jump on opportunities to raise prices and slow to drop them. (absent competitive reasons to do so) Someone sneezes in the Middle East and everyone everywhere jacks up the price at the pump in anticipation of shortages. But when cheaper supply becomes available, consumers must wait until that cheaper supply actually reaches the pumps. Ending government subsidies would mean every company from the well-head to the pump would have an excuse to increase their profit margins slightly while the government gets all the blame.
5) This would make alternative energy sources more competitive sure, but it would take time for the various industries to scale up to meet that increased demand. As far as I know, Tesla is already selling cars as fast as they can make them and it takes time to increasing hiring, tooling and so on. Even GM would be hard pressed to start selling millions of electric cars per year without 2-5 years to revamp vast sections of their supply chain and tooling.
6) All of the above factors mean that I wouldn't be surprised if the effective price at the pump doubles. That would entail an enormous political cost. People are already angry about the cost to fill up at the pumps, to heat their homes in winter and so on. Lets not forget that the poor have far fewer options when it comes to energy consumption. In Canada and the US, two of the richest nations in the world, there are a lot of people driving second and even third hand cars because that's all they can afford. World wide, there are a lot of small farmers using single cylinder gas or kerosene powered equipment that flat do not have the choice to abandon that equipment and obtain new electric or propane powered stuff. Here in North America, I don't think any of the big players in the agri-equipment field are even looking at electric powered tractors, harvesters, balers and so on. So the price of food will also go up. And if you think doubling the price of fuel provokes a shit storm, that's nothing compared to the fallout from huge increases in the cost of groceries.
We slashdotters like being in the know, so how about sharing the reference? We could all use a good giggle...
IIRC; There were some major mechanical engineering problems to be solved before the concept could be scaled up to the size needed for commercial shipping.
1) Freakin' huge tubes, essentially only mounted at one end meant doing some serious engineering on the drive motors, bearings and so on, so as to not snap off in bad weather. On a conventional sailing vessel, you douse sails so as to not snap masts, you can't do that with a Magnus rotor.
2) as others have pointed out, the sheer height of a rotor large enough to make a practical difference imposes some pretty serious limitations on routes, since clearance under bridges becomes a deal breaker. Also, that height means that the gantry cranes typically used in port for handling shipping containers might conflict with the rotors.
3) Most existing ships can't be modified to incorporate these structures because a) limited deck space and b) The structure of the hull wouldn't be strong enough to take the loads without a lot of (expensive) modifications.
On a more financial/social level; international shipping is very demanding. Relatively low margins, yet with literally tens of millions at risk with each ship load encourages a great deal of cautious, conservative behaviour. Using the latest and most efficient engines and scaling ship size up is an obvious next step to take when planning and building new vessels. The demands, risks and savings and opportunities are very well understood. Building a Magnus ship means very different hull designs, increased risk of loss at sea, changes to infrastructure, new required skills for ships crew and so on. That is a much harder sell, particularly since a failure to meet expectations for efficiency means the ship becomes a money sink. A Magnus ship converted back to completely conventional propulsion wouldn't be as efficient as conventional designs.
The bottom line is that, while a Magnus ship could work, it would be hard to make cost effective enough to justify the risks
correction, room 641a
Then there are the persistent rumours and stories about the hardware companies being required to put back-doors in their kit. Personally, I think back dooring export kit is a legitimate intelligence operation, but the rumours are that the vulnerabilities are going into all gear they ship.
The result is that all the American companies the intelligence communities care about are about are wittingly or unwittingly, working for the government and there are many Americans who think that is a good thing
From there, using the massive database that someone like Google could amass, it would be easy to then track your mobile devices if/when they appear on other networks. (your cell phone on your carriers network, your tablet/laptop on WiFi hotspots.
In my opinion; the problem with any internet capable of device hasn't been what it may or may not snoop on its own, it's been what the manufacturers and software developers can compile or infer on the back end when all the data from multiple sources has been collected. What your cell phone does, for example, is only one piece of the puzzle. For any large internet savvy company, it is straightforward, even comparatively cheap to build a surprising and even scary profile on individuals by collecting all the little scraps our devices send.
Because of that, I've often felt that reports, and consumer pushback, about privacy violating stuff often miss the real dangers. It's not enough to disable/forbid all the privacy eroding functions on this or that hardware or software, not when the same data can be so easily collected through other hardware or software. What's needed is effective laws banning the collection of such data in the first place, regardless of data source. Ideally, such laws would be backed up by a firm resolve by consumers to totally boycott any company that pushes that boundary. I don't mean refusing to use something until the company makes minor changes and promises to not err again. I mean being caught infringing is an effective death sentence for the company. Never buy or use anything from that company ever again. That will ensure that no other company will be willing to risk it. As it is now, every company acts like the camel with his nose in the tent. They ease in a bit further at every opportunity, stop only when caught and back up the minimum they think they can get away with only to resume pushing in when they think the attention is off the them. And it's not just one camel is it? We have dozens of camels all trying to nose their way in and not only are they basing their encroachment on what they are getting away with, they are closely watching and copying any encroachment they see the others getting away with.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I'll see your single article and your claim that there are no studies on how effective the flu vaccine is and raise you SEVENTY NINE THOUSAND FUCKING EXAMPLES of scholarly studies on flu vaccines found with a 12 second Google search. Read that again you muppet, seventy nine thousand studies by educated and trained researchers who have done studies and have put them out for peer review, granting other experts an opportunity to poke holes in their findings, results and conclusions if at all possible. Every type of flu vaccination, every possible combination of flu vaccine and patient, ranging from pediatric to geriatric, including workplace, school and pregnancy situations.
Your entire article, clearly so well researched and thoughtfully written is entirely based on "viewing with alarm" one line of warning text in the insert from one single example of flu vaccine. IT DOESN'T SAY THERE ARE NO STUDIES ON FLU VACCINE EFFECTIVENESS, IT SAYS THERE HAVE BEEN NO CONTROLLED STUDIES SPECIFICALLY WITH FLULAVAL And that is largely because all of the individual ingredients in the formulation HAVE been tested and been found to be safe in these kinds of applications. Then there is the fact that you can't really test vaccine for flu A until flu A hits your area and makes a whole lot of people sick and kills a few. What researchers do instead is infer results to some degree. E.G. previous vaccines A, B and C have been tried, we now know how well they worked in the real world, so based on that, we can come up with next years vaccine based on those findings.
The only part of warning insert that is actually a semi-legitimate concern is the use of thiomersal as a preservative agent. Yes, Thiomersal contains mercury, albeit in truly minuscule amounts. The scientific consensus seems to be that, since it is such a tiny amount and NOT in the form of elemental mercury, it is safe to use it in vaccinations. (certainly the amounts of mercury in a vaccine are infinitesimal compared to what was routinely used in dental amalgam for fillings.)
That said, if you want to play it safe, there ARE non-thiomersal formulations available.
Second, "flu like symptoms" is far FAR from having the flu itself. People tend to forget just how horribly having a bad flu can affect them. You can still go to work, take care of the kids and so on with "flu like symptoms", but it is quite common for the actual flu to leave you bedridden for days. Even with routine flu infections, there is a risk of death. And the nature of the flu virus is such that we can never wholly predict when the next pandemic killer flu will appear. Remember that H1N1 has been fingered as the killer behind the "Spanish Flu", a disease that, in two years killed more people world wide than the entirety of WW1. Something close to 20% of people who contracted the disease DIED. With the vaccines we have now, mortality rate is something like 0.01% We've gone to entire families dying, to a percentage smaller than a rounding error. I'd say that very VERY effectively demonstrates the effectiveness of flu vaccines don't you?
And while I'm at it, let me say that "flu like symptoms" are not contagious, but the flu certainly is. You can contract and pass along the flu for a day or so before you even have a hint that you're sick, and you can remain contagious for up to 10 days after first noticing symptoms. Being vaccinated reduces that window of contagion a great deal, making everyone else safer as well. (that is the bigger part of the herd immunity effect. The other part is that, with far fewer hosts to replicate in, the opportunities for the virus to mutate into something more virulent are drastically reduced.)
Given the long and respected place for mecha in Japanese nerd culture, I'm surprised that it's being described as a robot in the first place. But, to be fair, the makers may well call their machine a mecha, but the english media when reporting on it and its American rival would have used the more widely known term "robots"
WOOOOSH! (it was clear to me that every example of Microsoft software arglebargle_xiv listed was a discontinued application. That made his post either sarcastic, tongue in cheek or both. I'm surprised the folks with mod points today didn't catch that and mod him as "funny" instead of "insightful")
See, the problem is; in virtually every country the pharmaceuticals have manufacturing and management operations, the drug company gets to decide what to donate and what value to claim on their donations for tax credit/deduction purposes. Shipping off expired or non-approved drugs at their (former) American retail value is a double win for them.
But, will you stay merely dead? Or can we eagerly await a new zombie movie, written, cast and directed from the undead point of view? A movie directed by a zombie from the zombies point of view? I'd watch the fuck out of that!
That said, I'd love to be a fly on the wall when some collector approached the property manager or condo board to ask for permission to add 220V three cycle and a 2" water line to his residence so he can run his mainframe, water chiller/condensor and UPS
I'd prefer to simply stay up all night, lying in wait and stroking my gun. But my government won't let me have one. Something about being a danger to myself or others.
I am Canadian, spent most of my life within easy reach of the border. But ever since 9/1 and all the subsequent security nonsense, I have pretty much boycotted the US. I used to go over at least weekly. Some of the enhanced security at the border, as it applies Canada's aboriginal people, Canadian and British citizens, arguably violates those peoples rights under the Jay Treaty. Since the wording is "that it shall at all times be free to His Majesty's subjects..." I would further suggest that it might be construed to apply to all citizens of Her Majesty's Commonwealth Realms and Territories. (not the original intent, I grant you, but law rests on the actual wording, not intent.)
this would also allow your modular laptop to use the cell carriers data networks (if you bought a plan) and not just be limited to finding free wi-fi while on the go.
So the suspects arrested and the various other leads generated that did not lead to an arrest are all people who chose to run Tor, and once within the Tor darknet, chose to search out this material. From the article, I get the impression that the actual arrests where people who had actual user accounts at the site in question. Which implies they were, or expected to be, regular users. I would assume that either the people actually abusing children or at least the people choosing to upload the resulting pictures and videos would have to have a user account. Non-US police noticed the gaffe and shared it with the US authorities. They, in turn, shared the non-US leads that their investigation turned up. That is exactly the sort of inter-agency cooperation we'd expect from our police, and I'm glad they did so in this case.
I do not think this is entrapment. No one was encouraged by the police to go to the site, no one was encouraged by the police to create and/or upload the offensive content. What the police did was the digital equivalent of taking over a stolen goods fencing operation and video recording everyone who came in to fence stolen property. That is called running a sting operation and is a long accepted and legal tactic. Such operations do often record innocent people (if a fence is running a pawn shop for example), but that is highly unlikely to occur on a hidden, non-indexed darknet site. I happen to know that many of the black hat hacker forums are by invite only. I can only assume that the more careful child porn operations would do something similar, a factor which drastically reduces the already low odds of catching innocent people in the sting operation.
As for the specific example of software; you're talking about changing a tool they use, possibly one they use every day in their job. While a suggested change may add a useful feature or greatly improve work-flow, they are afraid they will have to learn more about the tool they have come to take for granted. (There are good reasons why Linus Torvalds rants so scathingly when developers make changes that break userspace or user workflows after all)
If it was just a bug patch, those are usually invisible to the majority of users. For those affected by the bug, affects them in the more subtle sense of negative evidence. (in other words, people really notice when something breaks, but when something doesn't break like it used to, that is harder to notice and appreciate) However; from your description, you are primarily advocating adding features or explicitly changing work flows (even if in minor ways). Without more specific information, I certainly can't judge the possible merits of your suggestions. At minimum though, I think your suggestions would require :
1) Adding items to menus, possibly adding new menus altogether. That requires the users learn these new options. With enough new menu items, the devs may decide to revamp the whole look and feel just to drive home the idea that the software has changed and to prove to their bosses that they are actually adding something meaningful to the code. {I'm looking at you Microsoft Office 2007},
2) Changing or adding to the underlying mechanics of the application, which runs the risk of adding whole new sets of bugs to what is hopefully a previously stable release.
3) Convincing the software company or developers that your changes are positive enough, and in enough demand by the user base to justify devoted the time, eyeballs and above all Money to making your changes. Keep in mind that quite often, once an application has been released and the initial flood of user reports have ebbed, most dev teams get cut down, programmers reassigned to other projects and so on. A few are sometimes kept for bug chasing, something which takes proportionally much more time than new code development. The few bug chasers (the code monkey kind, get your mind out of the gutter) will push back against creeping feature-itis and managers will often just decide to add your suggestion to the list for the dev team of the next major version to consider.
$89,000/yr for deflazacort? Big Pharm clearly has the US health industry blindfolded, bent over and reamed but good doesn't it? My son has Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy and is taking deflazacort for it. It hasn't been approved for general prescription here in Canada, but getting approval for it to treat DMD is a straightforward rubber stamp through the exceptional access program. Because it isn't formally approved, we have to pay for it and then get reimbursed for it, Also because it's an EAP drug, we're paying only a little over wholesale. Currently we pay 85$ for a three month supply, or 340/yr. That includes shipping from the pharmacy associated with the research and teaching hospital my son is being treated by.