Not very many people would fail to understand that there exist medical reasons some people cannot receive some vaccines. I doubt those who do understand that would try to suggest such people should receive the vaccine anyway.
But I believe those who can get vaccinated should get vaccinated against any diseases of sufficient consequence (including to others) which the person has some reasonable chance of exposure to. I believe such people have an ethical obligation to do this though I do not believe they should have a legal obligation. Yet I do believe I have an obligation to berate them for their selfish ways, and attempt to convince them otherwise.
The majority of people who choose not to get vaccinated even against such huge killers as the flu, don't do so for the right reasons, or for reasons that typically really make any sense or are based on any solid assumptions. Their often willful ignorance increases the risk for other people.
Sometimes that risk is adopted by their own children when they refuse to allow them to be vaccinated. And that is a terrible tragedy. When someone's child dies from a vaccine preventable disease, I think the person who made the decision not to vaccinate their child bears personal responsibility for the child's death.
I also think they should then be brought up on manslaughter charges for this event. A successful defense is, "There is a legitimate medical reason I could not vaccinate my child." A child dying from a vaccine preventable disease is not different than a child dying because their parent sought healing through prayer instead of healing through medicine. In both cases, medicine could have saved the child, and through willful negligence on the part of the parent, the child has died.
It's been a while since I was in a science class, but are they filling petri dishes with pond water these days? Because I thought the whole point was to reduce the number of variables. Otherwise we'd just draw all our conclusions from phone surveys or whatnot and needn't bother experimenting at all.
Clinical trial methodologies are well understood by the scientific community, and population size statistical analysis, double blind methodology, control groups, and placebo controlled studies enable us to first eliminate the effects of variability that come from patients with extenuating circumstances that affect the outcome of the trial, and second, to actually test a drug or vaccine in real use. I will not defend them to you further than this, because if your intent is to attack clinical methodology, then the rest of our conversation is moot, off topic, and we can't really like know anything, man.
Let us assume for the sake of argument that the hundreds of thousands of scientists, doctors, researchers, government agents, and generally the scientific community at large collectively knows more about this than you or I. Either you accept that we can have clinical trials and draw meaningful conclusions from them (in which case why are we discussing this?) or you don't (in which case you have single handedly upset the entire scientific community with an Internet post; and call me closed minded, but I'm not willing to accept that premise).
I never said that 'a tiny amount of dead virus' did or did not do anything. I said the shot did
Earlier you said:
I understand that the shot itself is 'harmless' so I can only assume that this is due to lowered immunity while my body adapts to the foreign organism I've been injected with.
Forgive me for assuming that your statement about a lowered immune system as a result of the shot was intended to suggest that the shot makes you sick because of your viral load, I still have a hard time reading those statements and not drawing that conclusion. But maybe you misspoke or I misunderstand what you're trying to say.
There certainly are people who have adverse reactions to the flu shot. For example, the majority of flu shots come in vials with a latex stopper. If you have even a mild latex allergy (which you might not observe via skin contact), that could cause you some non-flu like symptoms as a result.
I'm not aware of an overwhelmed immune system being a side effect for anyone but immunocompromised people. However, for the sake of argument, I'll accept your premise that you are not immunocompromised, but somehow still end up with a dramatically weakened immune system as a result of the shot.
You're an exception, and your statements seem to suggest you understand this. Like I said, the shot really isn't for everyone. If what you're saying is true, it's not for you. That doesn't make it worthless for pretty much everyone else.
Let's bring this full circle then.
By presenting vaccines as a mechanism to prevent infection. They're not.
Yes, they are. Maybe not for you in this particular case (which I'm accepting for the sake of argument). But the efficacy of vaccines is very well proven, including the flu vaccine. Vaccines which aren't proven to be effective are not approved for administration. Even the seasonal flu shot is subject to annual verification, each year's shot is administered in a placebo controlled trial where they give it and a placebo to patients in a double blind study, then subject those patients to placebo controlled double blind exposure to the virus. That is to say that half of the patients get the vaccine, and half get placebo. Then half of each group get exposed to live unattenuated virus (saline suspension inhaled nasally), and half get exposed to sterile saline solution. This is repeated individually for each of the strains of virus in the
No, I said that if the tiny amount of dead virus in a flu shot overwhelms your immune system, then you have a weak immune system. If you find that to be at odds with your own personal experience, then I'd suggest you misunderstand the cause and effect relationship somewhere.
This is an outright lie. Most, if not all, doctors use the 'sounds like' diagnosis test.
I wonder what you base that on. If the doctor needs to know (as in it will affect their course of treatment), the doctor absolutely will use a flu test kit, or else they're negligent. If the patient is otherwise healthy and not at high risk from a flu infection, they won't bother, because in such a case the treatment is the same either way.
The actual fact of the matter is, there is no ethical way to conduct a flu shot trial, and it hasn't ever happened. Never once have they vaccinated half of a group of humans and then exposed them to the virus. Further never once have they sequestered a group of humans, gave half the shot, and kept them in a sterile environment to observe the results
They don't sequester patients in a sterile environment, but if you know anything at all about clinical studies, you know that this is not required to produce significant results, and in fact is a purely arbitrary and imaginary condition concocted because it would support your case. The reason we can get meaningful results without full quarantine is that we can use population size to eliminate natural variability. That's just standard statistics.
Finally WRT A+B+C+D, yes, I agree you should have gotten the shots in all four scenarios. Are you trying to claim that the fact that vaccination is less than 100% effective is a reason not to use it? A) If you got the shot, and got sick, then yes, I'm saying there's an extremely high chance you would have gotten sick anyway. Every single flu batch produced is heavily tested and verified to be inactive; the chances of acquiring the flu from the shot directly are statistically insignificant. Your point was that the flu shot knocks down your immune system and you aren't strong enough to have resisted secondary infection as a result. I countered that this makes you immunocompromised, because the standard treatment for weak immune systems is a higher dose. The rules are different if you're immunocompromised, and you should talk to a doctor if so. B) Yup. You might still have gotten sick (see C). But then you might not have, depends on what you got sick with, and if it was the flu, whether it was a strain in the vaccine (if it was in the vaccine, and it was sufficiently later for your body to have produced an immunoresponse, then you probably wouldn't have gotten sick) C) Yup. D) Yup.
We don't know in advance what strains of flu you'll be exposed to, if even any at all. A high infection rate for Flu is 15%, it's not nearly as common as people think it is, but it is definitely quite deadly for certain groups, which is why we treat it so seriously. Because we don't know for sure what strains you'll be exposed to, we can't create a perfect vaccine. But the core of your whole argument seems to be that an imperfect vaccine is not better (or possibly even worse) than no vaccine at all. That's simply not true.
Nobody is suggesting there should be such a thing as forced flu immunization (at least that I've heard). However, as members of a civilization, gestalt is a useful principle, and in general we should try to not put individual momentary discomfort over the survival of those around us. Just because we don't believe it should be forced on anyone, doesn't mean we don't believe people have an individual responsibility to consider the welfare of those around them.
If the few ML's of dead virus you receive in a flu shot is enough to have a significant negative effect on your immune system, then you qualify as immunocompromised (even other patients who are immunocompromised typically have as a worst side effect "soreness at the injection site"). If that's the case, then you're in the high risk category, and it's actually quite important for you to get vaccinated, because with that level of sensitivity, an actual infection would probably kill you. In addition, the flu shot is such a mild exposure that this year for the first time, the FDA approved high dose shots for immunocompromised patients (to give them a better immunoresponse).
Flu vaccination is correlated with flu-like symptoms because people tend to get vaccinated during cold/flu season, and often after observing people around them starting to get sick. Flu vaccine doesn't provide any protection at all against a cold, but many people mistake a cold as the flu. Actual flu can be difficult to diagnose since a severe common cold infection can bear many of the same symptoms (but is not as dangerous). Most doctors use a flu test kit for diagnosis since symptoms alone are not always sufficient. In general though, if you're not laid up for a week with a 100F+ fever, rapid onset exhaustion, and severe cough, chances are that was not the flu.
It's common for people to say, "I get sick from the flu shot," in fact that's possibly the most common reason people give for not getting it. However there are no studies that I'm aware of which provide any significant support for the notion that there is any causal link.
Huh? You get lowered immunity from a vaccination. I don't think you understand how vaccines work.
Also, you're ignoring what I have said to you directly, and what others in this thread have also mentioned: herd immunity, which benefits people around you by keeping you from becoming infectious after you've been exposed to the disease.
It's probably a semantic point, but vaccines don't create an infection in any typical sense of the word. Infections require a colonization by a parasite organism. Denatured or especially inactivated (dead) disease found in a vaccination cannot colonize you because it cannot reproduce. At least we can no more consider a vaccination to be colonization than we could consider animals in a zoo to have colonized the zoo (and heck, they can reproduce). Without colonization, it's not an infection, just an exposure.
I feel it's necessary to make the distinction, because calling a vaccination an intentional infection creates a level of FUD which does it a disservice.
In addition to saving you a week of pure misery and time off of work, and more important than that, flu vaccine for low risk patients (the only non-at-risk patients are already dead) has the benefit of providing herd immunity for high risk patients.
Flu vaccines for most people has the advantage of introducing herd immunity.
Flu vaccine, like most vaccines, trains the immune system how to deal with a disease. For immunocompromised patients, this means that when they're exposed, instead of the disease ravaging their body and possibly killing them, it can respond appropriately and they either get a lot less sick than they would have, or possibly don't get sick at all. Never mind patients who cannot get the vaccine at all due to allergies or age restrictions (infants should not receive the flu vaccine before 6 months of age, and have some of the most fragile immune systems).
Unfortunately there's a limit to how much exposure their immune system can handle. At some point their immune system becomes overwhelmed. Many patients who die or suffer permanent consequences from the Influenza virus could have avoided that fate if their immune system had suffered fewer exposures. Of course if they had had zero exposures, then they certainly would have not experienced any complications.
When they recommend a healthy individual get the flu vaccination, it's a matter of convenience for that individual (you don't miss work and aren't miserable for a week). But it's potentially a matter of life and death for other people they encounter.
So no, flu vaccine is absolutely not unnecessary, even for young healthy people. Thinking that way is wholly selfish.
You're right, the flu strains are picked by the CDC and WHO (at least in the US) months in advance of the season, based on disease patterns in other parts of the world. The strains you're ultimately exposed to might not have even existed when the vaccine's strains were chosen (influenza had a tendency to mutate). You could get a flu shot and never be exposed to any of the strains it contains, making it essentially ineffective for you. But those strains are going to be around, and those who are exposed to them but are vaccinated can halt that strain's advance. If there was a way to see the future and know which strains you were going to encounter, you're absolutely right, that'd be a great way to increase its efficacy.
But lack of 100% efficacy is not a reason to reject it. No medicine is 100% effective, whether it's preventative or responsive.
So, instead of security by obscurity, companies should focus on security by geek appeasement instead?
Although clearly rhetorical, I'm going to say that yes, when it comes to DRM, the best way to bolster your security is to make it so nobody wants to break it (as in, make it sufficiently unobtrusive, and people won't be motivated to defeat it).
Make no mistake, cryptography is about preventing an untrusted party from getting access to some information. If the untrusted party doesn't try to get access to that information, this is stronger security than anything else you can throw at it.
You'd have to have two contacts from different area codes with the same exchange and line number (xxx-123-4567) since it looks at the seven last digits. Not (as I think you seem to suggest) two contacts in the same area code, same exchange, and same starting digit (123-456-7xxx).
As other people have mentioned, this is the result of some ambiguity in terms of how a message might arrive, particularly in other countries, where the same number might have different prefix codes depending on where it was sent from.
Where I work, laptops, cell phones, and other devices are forbidden in meetings unless they're an active part of the meeting. For example, it's ok to use a laptop for presentation purposes, and it's ok to pull out a laptop to look something up that's relevant to the meeting, but when you're done, you close the lid.
You aren't even supposed to use a laptop for taking notes, because there are too many other things which can be a distraction, and not enough people are able to avoid the temptation.
This is a big cultural shift from 2-3 years ago, when laptops were omnipresent in meetings. The policy was poorly received when it was first instituted, but I think most people who've done it both ways would agree that it's a good one, and meetings are more productive as a direct result.
That was my initial reaction until I read the part about it being a distraction to other students (eg, a screensaver, someone playing a game, etc).
I don't think banning laptops is the way to approach that, there's a lot of value for students who use their laptops well. And I agree with you, college is a good opportunity for teenager-cum-adults to have the freedom to make their own decisions in an environment which helps them to measure themselves (eg, they can see their grades slipping). So for the student who wants to waste class time by doing something else, that's their decision, so long as they're not taking down others with them.
If anything needs to be done, it should take the form of TA's who approach distracting kids and ask them to at least sit in the back of the room when not fully engaged in classwork (or ask them to do things like switch to an unobtrusive screensaver if they're not actively using the laptop, etc). Students who have difficulty with being distracted can make it a point to try to sit in the front of the room so there's less opportunity for distraction in front of them.
It's possible some students don't realize they're being a distraction, so the mere act of the professor mentioning at the start of the class some basic laptop use etiquette might by itself go a long way:
Please silence your laptops and cell phones
Please disable your screensaver or set it to a blank screen
If you are going to do anything on your laptop which is not related to the classwork, please sit toward the back of the room
To be fair, rape allegations against Julian Assange have nothing whatsoever to do with WikiLeaks.
Whatever you call the allegations (many people wouldn't call it rape), and whether they are true or not, the government wants people to have this conversation, not a conversation about what was actually leaked.
It's misdirection in massive proportions. "Pay no attention to the crimes we're committing over here, the guy who told you about them did something bad himself." One thing has no effect on the seriousness of the other (in either direction), and the two things should be conversed about as though there were two different men named Julian Assange, one associated with WikiLeaks, and one who was arrested for something sex related. The overlap between the two is an interesting curiosity, and not itself newsworthy.
Even still though, sugarcane ethanol yield is 6 times greater than corn. I don't know how this translates to energy per acre, but it definitely takes us a lot more land area to produce an equivalent amount of fuel with corn than with sugarcane.
In addition, part of corn's efficiency comes from the fact that the distiller's grain byproduct of ethanol production can be used as animal feed. But that has a diminishing return, if we produced enough ethanol to meet our fuel needs, we'd produce far more distiller's grain than there is demand for it, and much of this would become waste product.
Switchgrass on the other hand produces a much more comparable energy ratio to sugarcane (1:5.4). So while corn, especially in low production quantities, is not a net energy loss, it's hard to believe it's the best option for ethanol production in the US.
Because this is a tax on being alive, the failure of paying is being sent to jail.
The democrats wanted a public option to cover this, but the Republicans refused (in one of their many, "If you move a step forward, I'll move a step," only it was backwards).
The reason why you have to have every citizen covered is that this is the only way to prevent abuses of the clauses which state that an insurance company cannot refuse to cover you for a pre-existing condition.
Otherwise you can float along in life with no significant health insurance, then if you develop a chronic or otherwise extremely expensive condition, purchase health insurance only at that time. Insurance only works when the total cost of insurance is greater than or equal to the total outlay by the insurance company. If people can game the numbers this way, the whole idea of insurance falls apart.
This leaves only three choices: 1) A public option - so that pre-existing conditions can be covered by the government when all else fails 2) Requiring everyone to have insurance - so that you can't game the system 3) Eliminate the requisite coverage of pre-existing conditions
#3 is the worst one, pre-existing conditions make people a slave to their job if they have a chronic condition; they can never change insurance coverage or they lose their coverage.
#2 is better but not great, for reasons you obviously get.
#1 is the best choice, but oh no, it sounds like "socialism," and that's practically communism, and then we might as well be Russian, and those guys were going to nuke us... commie bastards.
They not only rely on contracts to retain customers (not satisfaction), but new contracts is a major metric - if not the primary metric - for most carriers in terms of their sales reports. Most stockholders care about growth, not profitability, and new contracts looks like growth (with very little, if any, attention paid to lost accounts)
Killing him would make him a martyr, and would likely create more supporters of the WikiLeaks organization, including other people now willing to be a figurehead, but probably better capable of hiding themselves (such as the owners of botnets which possess tremendous capacity to hide their origin).
Killing Assange would not halt the flow of information. WikiLeaks is a hydra, cut off its head, and two more will grow in its place. Killing him would likely increase the flow of information, and would legitimize it in the eyes of many.
Or since a $0.99 song being shared causes $62,500 in damages, they (and the industry they represent) should be charged $62,500 * (falsely accused recipient) * (average requested settlement amount).
Sideloading is wholly possible and even quite simple on a purely vanilla device (no additional software such as a file browser required). Click a URL from an email or a web page that links to the.apk file. Tap the "Download Complete" notification, and it will prompt you to install the app (or find the file in the browser's "Downloads" function).
Isn't anybody who's particularly into the Beetles already an owner of all of the CD versions of the same music that they care to own? Doesn't iTunes convert those CD's into metadata-tagged high quality audio files for free?
I never understood why people cared so much whether The Beetles was available on iTunes. The music is easily available from other channels, and if you're willing to dedicate at least a few minutes to it, you have all the same advantages. Breadth of a music store is definitely important, and I get that this is a milestone accomplishment from a business perspective, but I don't get why ordinary citizens really care. It's not like The Beetles are still releasing new music.
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Not very many people would fail to understand that there exist medical reasons some people cannot receive some vaccines. I doubt those who do understand that would try to suggest such people should receive the vaccine anyway.
But I believe those who can get vaccinated should get vaccinated against any diseases of sufficient consequence (including to others) which the person has some reasonable chance of exposure to. I believe such people have an ethical obligation to do this though I do not believe they should have a legal obligation. Yet I do believe I have an obligation to berate them for their selfish ways, and attempt to convince them otherwise.
The majority of people who choose not to get vaccinated even against such huge killers as the flu, don't do so for the right reasons, or for reasons that typically really make any sense or are based on any solid assumptions. Their often willful ignorance increases the risk for other people.
Sometimes that risk is adopted by their own children when they refuse to allow them to be vaccinated. And that is a terrible tragedy. When someone's child dies from a vaccine preventable disease, I think the person who made the decision not to vaccinate their child bears personal responsibility for the child's death.
I also think they should then be brought up on manslaughter charges for this event. A successful defense is, "There is a legitimate medical reason I could not vaccinate my child." A child dying from a vaccine preventable disease is not different than a child dying because their parent sought healing through prayer instead of healing through medicine. In both cases, medicine could have saved the child, and through willful negligence on the part of the parent, the child has died.
It's been a while since I was in a science class, but are they filling petri dishes with pond water these days? Because I thought the whole point was to reduce the number of variables. Otherwise we'd just draw all our conclusions from phone surveys or whatnot and needn't bother experimenting at all.
Clinical trial methodologies are well understood by the scientific community, and population size statistical analysis, double blind methodology, control groups, and placebo controlled studies enable us to first eliminate the effects of variability that come from patients with extenuating circumstances that affect the outcome of the trial, and second, to actually test a drug or vaccine in real use. I will not defend them to you further than this, because if your intent is to attack clinical methodology, then the rest of our conversation is moot, off topic, and we can't really like know anything, man.
Let us assume for the sake of argument that the hundreds of thousands of scientists, doctors, researchers, government agents, and generally the scientific community at large collectively knows more about this than you or I. Either you accept that we can have clinical trials and draw meaningful conclusions from them (in which case why are we discussing this?) or you don't (in which case you have single handedly upset the entire scientific community with an Internet post; and call me closed minded, but I'm not willing to accept that premise).
I never said that 'a tiny amount of dead virus' did or did not do anything. I said the shot did
Earlier you said:
I understand that the shot itself is 'harmless' so I can only assume that this is due to lowered immunity while my body adapts to the foreign organism I've been injected with.
Forgive me for assuming that your statement about a lowered immune system as a result of the shot was intended to suggest that the shot makes you sick because of your viral load, I still have a hard time reading those statements and not drawing that conclusion. But maybe you misspoke or I misunderstand what you're trying to say.
There certainly are people who have adverse reactions to the flu shot. For example, the majority of flu shots come in vials with a latex stopper. If you have even a mild latex allergy (which you might not observe via skin contact), that could cause you some non-flu like symptoms as a result.
I'm not aware of an overwhelmed immune system being a side effect for anyone but immunocompromised people. However, for the sake of argument, I'll accept your premise that you are not immunocompromised, but somehow still end up with a dramatically weakened immune system as a result of the shot.
You're an exception, and your statements seem to suggest you understand this. Like I said, the shot really isn't for everyone. If what you're saying is true, it's not for you. That doesn't make it worthless for pretty much everyone else.
Let's bring this full circle then.
By presenting vaccines as a mechanism to prevent infection. They're not.
Yes, they are. Maybe not for you in this particular case (which I'm accepting for the sake of argument). But the efficacy of vaccines is very well proven, including the flu vaccine. Vaccines which aren't proven to be effective are not approved for administration. Even the seasonal flu shot is subject to annual verification, each year's shot is administered in a placebo controlled trial where they give it and a placebo to patients in a double blind study, then subject those patients to placebo controlled double blind exposure to the virus. That is to say that half of the patients get the vaccine, and half get placebo. Then half of each group get exposed to live unattenuated virus (saline suspension inhaled nasally), and half get exposed to sterile saline solution. This is repeated individually for each of the strains of virus in the
So you're calling me a liar
No, I said that if the tiny amount of dead virus in a flu shot overwhelms your immune system, then you have a weak immune system. If you find that to be at odds with your own personal experience, then I'd suggest you misunderstand the cause and effect relationship somewhere.
This is an outright lie. Most, if not all, doctors use the 'sounds like' diagnosis test.
I wonder what you base that on. If the doctor needs to know (as in it will affect their course of treatment), the doctor absolutely will use a flu test kit, or else they're negligent. If the patient is otherwise healthy and not at high risk from a flu infection, they won't bother, because in such a case the treatment is the same either way.
Are you just assuming this because it would support your case? No, they absolutely do placebo controlled trials. Check it out for yourself: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=flu+vaccine+placebo+controlled+trials
They don't sequester patients in a sterile environment, but if you know anything at all about clinical studies, you know that this is not required to produce significant results, and in fact is a purely arbitrary and imaginary condition concocted because it would support your case. The reason we can get meaningful results without full quarantine is that we can use population size to eliminate natural variability. That's just standard statistics.
Finally WRT A+B+C+D, yes, I agree you should have gotten the shots in all four scenarios. Are you trying to claim that the fact that vaccination is less than 100% effective is a reason not to use it?
A) If you got the shot, and got sick, then yes, I'm saying there's an extremely high chance you would have gotten sick anyway. Every single flu batch produced is heavily tested and verified to be inactive; the chances of acquiring the flu from the shot directly are statistically insignificant. Your point was that the flu shot knocks down your immune system and you aren't strong enough to have resisted secondary infection as a result. I countered that this makes you immunocompromised, because the standard treatment for weak immune systems is a higher dose. The rules are different if you're immunocompromised, and you should talk to a doctor if so.
B) Yup. You might still have gotten sick (see C). But then you might not have, depends on what you got sick with, and if it was the flu, whether it was a strain in the vaccine (if it was in the vaccine, and it was sufficiently later for your body to have produced an immunoresponse, then you probably wouldn't have gotten sick)
C) Yup.
D) Yup.
We don't know in advance what strains of flu you'll be exposed to, if even any at all. A high infection rate for Flu is 15%, it's not nearly as common as people think it is, but it is definitely quite deadly for certain groups, which is why we treat it so seriously. Because we don't know for sure what strains you'll be exposed to, we can't create a perfect vaccine. But the core of your whole argument seems to be that an imperfect vaccine is not better (or possibly even worse) than no vaccine at all. That's simply not true.
Nobody is suggesting there should be such a thing as forced flu immunization (at least that I've heard). However, as members of a civilization, gestalt is a useful principle, and in general we should try to not put individual momentary discomfort over the survival of those around us. Just because we don't believe it should be forced on anyone, doesn't mean we don't believe people have an individual responsibility to consider the welfare of those around them.
If the few ML's of dead virus you receive in a flu shot is enough to have a significant negative effect on your immune system, then you qualify as immunocompromised (even other patients who are immunocompromised typically have as a worst side effect "soreness at the injection site"). If that's the case, then you're in the high risk category, and it's actually quite important for you to get vaccinated, because with that level of sensitivity, an actual infection would probably kill you. In addition, the flu shot is such a mild exposure that this year for the first time, the FDA approved high dose shots for immunocompromised patients (to give them a better immunoresponse).
Flu vaccination is correlated with flu-like symptoms because people tend to get vaccinated during cold/flu season, and often after observing people around them starting to get sick. Flu vaccine doesn't provide any protection at all against a cold, but many people mistake a cold as the flu. Actual flu can be difficult to diagnose since a severe common cold infection can bear many of the same symptoms (but is not as dangerous). Most doctors use a flu test kit for diagnosis since symptoms alone are not always sufficient. In general though, if you're not laid up for a week with a 100F+ fever, rapid onset exhaustion, and severe cough, chances are that was not the flu.
It's common for people to say, "I get sick from the flu shot," in fact that's possibly the most common reason people give for not getting it. However there are no studies that I'm aware of which provide any significant support for the notion that there is any causal link.
Huh? You get lowered immunity from a vaccination. I don't think you understand how vaccines work.
Also, you're ignoring what I have said to you directly, and what others in this thread have also mentioned: herd immunity, which benefits people around you by keeping you from becoming infectious after you've been exposed to the disease.
It's probably a semantic point, but vaccines don't create an infection in any typical sense of the word. Infections require a colonization by a parasite organism. Denatured or especially inactivated (dead) disease found in a vaccination cannot colonize you because it cannot reproduce. At least we can no more consider a vaccination to be colonization than we could consider animals in a zoo to have colonized the zoo (and heck, they can reproduce). Without colonization, it's not an infection, just an exposure.
I feel it's necessary to make the distinction, because calling a vaccination an intentional infection creates a level of FUD which does it a disservice.
In addition to saving you a week of pure misery and time off of work, and more important than that, flu vaccine for low risk patients (the only non-at-risk patients are already dead) has the benefit of providing herd immunity for high risk patients.
Flu vaccines for most people has the advantage of introducing herd immunity.
Flu vaccine, like most vaccines, trains the immune system how to deal with a disease. For immunocompromised patients, this means that when they're exposed, instead of the disease ravaging their body and possibly killing them, it can respond appropriately and they either get a lot less sick than they would have, or possibly don't get sick at all. Never mind patients who cannot get the vaccine at all due to allergies or age restrictions (infants should not receive the flu vaccine before 6 months of age, and have some of the most fragile immune systems).
Unfortunately there's a limit to how much exposure their immune system can handle. At some point their immune system becomes overwhelmed. Many patients who die or suffer permanent consequences from the Influenza virus could have avoided that fate if their immune system had suffered fewer exposures. Of course if they had had zero exposures, then they certainly would have not experienced any complications.
When they recommend a healthy individual get the flu vaccination, it's a matter of convenience for that individual (you don't miss work and aren't miserable for a week). But it's potentially a matter of life and death for other people they encounter.
So no, flu vaccine is absolutely not unnecessary, even for young healthy people. Thinking that way is wholly selfish.
You're right, the flu strains are picked by the CDC and WHO (at least in the US) months in advance of the season, based on disease patterns in other parts of the world. The strains you're ultimately exposed to might not have even existed when the vaccine's strains were chosen (influenza had a tendency to mutate). You could get a flu shot and never be exposed to any of the strains it contains, making it essentially ineffective for you. But those strains are going to be around, and those who are exposed to them but are vaccinated can halt that strain's advance. If there was a way to see the future and know which strains you were going to encounter, you're absolutely right, that'd be a great way to increase its efficacy.
But lack of 100% efficacy is not a reason to reject it. No medicine is 100% effective, whether it's preventative or responsive.
They prey on faults in human behavior.
How is a vaccine preying on faults in human behavior?
second-generation antipsychotics don't seem to be quite the miracle cures the marketing departments suggested
How does this equate to preying on faults in human behavior?
They prey on faults in human behavior.
How is a vaccine preying on faults in human behavior?
So, instead of security by obscurity, companies should focus on security by geek appeasement instead?
Although clearly rhetorical, I'm going to say that yes, when it comes to DRM, the best way to bolster your security is to make it so nobody wants to break it (as in, make it sufficiently unobtrusive, and people won't be motivated to defeat it).
Make no mistake, cryptography is about preventing an untrusted party from getting access to some information. If the untrusted party doesn't try to get access to that information, this is stronger security than anything else you can throw at it.
Because Android is a Java platform? What should they have written it in?
You'd have to have two contacts from different area codes with the same exchange and line number (xxx-123-4567) since it looks at the seven last digits. Not (as I think you seem to suggest) two contacts in the same area code, same exchange, and same starting digit (123-456-7xxx).
As other people have mentioned, this is the result of some ambiguity in terms of how a message might arrive, particularly in other countries, where the same number might have different prefix codes depending on where it was sent from.
Where I work, laptops, cell phones, and other devices are forbidden in meetings unless they're an active part of the meeting. For example, it's ok to use a laptop for presentation purposes, and it's ok to pull out a laptop to look something up that's relevant to the meeting, but when you're done, you close the lid.
You aren't even supposed to use a laptop for taking notes, because there are too many other things which can be a distraction, and not enough people are able to avoid the temptation.
This is a big cultural shift from 2-3 years ago, when laptops were omnipresent in meetings. The policy was poorly received when it was first instituted, but I think most people who've done it both ways would agree that it's a good one, and meetings are more productive as a direct result.
That was my initial reaction until I read the part about it being a distraction to other students (eg, a screensaver, someone playing a game, etc).
I don't think banning laptops is the way to approach that, there's a lot of value for students who use their laptops well. And I agree with you, college is a good opportunity for teenager-cum-adults to have the freedom to make their own decisions in an environment which helps them to measure themselves (eg, they can see their grades slipping). So for the student who wants to waste class time by doing something else, that's their decision, so long as they're not taking down others with them.
If anything needs to be done, it should take the form of TA's who approach distracting kids and ask them to at least sit in the back of the room when not fully engaged in classwork (or ask them to do things like switch to an unobtrusive screensaver if they're not actively using the laptop, etc). Students who have difficulty with being distracted can make it a point to try to sit in the front of the room so there's less opportunity for distraction in front of them.
It's possible some students don't realize they're being a distraction, so the mere act of the professor mentioning at the start of the class some basic laptop use etiquette might by itself go a long way:
To be fair, rape allegations against Julian Assange have nothing whatsoever to do with WikiLeaks.
Whatever you call the allegations (many people wouldn't call it rape), and whether they are true or not, the government wants people to have this conversation, not a conversation about what was actually leaked.
It's misdirection in massive proportions. "Pay no attention to the crimes we're committing over here, the guy who told you about them did something bad himself." One thing has no effect on the seriousness of the other (in either direction), and the two things should be conversed about as though there were two different men named Julian Assange, one associated with WikiLeaks, and one who was arrested for something sex related. The overlap between the two is an interesting curiosity, and not itself newsworthy.
Even still though, sugarcane ethanol yield is 6 times greater than corn. I don't know how this translates to energy per acre, but it definitely takes us a lot more land area to produce an equivalent amount of fuel with corn than with sugarcane.
In addition, part of corn's efficiency comes from the fact that the distiller's grain byproduct of ethanol production can be used as animal feed. But that has a diminishing return, if we produced enough ethanol to meet our fuel needs, we'd produce far more distiller's grain than there is demand for it, and much of this would become waste product.
Switchgrass on the other hand produces a much more comparable energy ratio to sugarcane (1:5.4). So while corn, especially in low production quantities, is not a net energy loss, it's hard to believe it's the best option for ethanol production in the US.
The democrats wanted a public option to cover this, but the Republicans refused (in one of their many, "If you move a step forward, I'll move a step," only it was backwards).
The reason why you have to have every citizen covered is that this is the only way to prevent abuses of the clauses which state that an insurance company cannot refuse to cover you for a pre-existing condition.
Otherwise you can float along in life with no significant health insurance, then if you develop a chronic or otherwise extremely expensive condition, purchase health insurance only at that time. Insurance only works when the total cost of insurance is greater than or equal to the total outlay by the insurance company. If people can game the numbers this way, the whole idea of insurance falls apart.
This leaves only three choices:
1) A public option - so that pre-existing conditions can be covered by the government when all else fails
2) Requiring everyone to have insurance - so that you can't game the system
3) Eliminate the requisite coverage of pre-existing conditions
#3 is the worst one, pre-existing conditions make people a slave to their job if they have a chronic condition; they can never change insurance coverage or they lose their coverage.
#2 is better but not great, for reasons you obviously get.
#1 is the best choice, but oh no, it sounds like "socialism," and that's practically communism, and then we might as well be Russian, and those guys were going to nuke us... commie bastards.
They not only rely on contracts to retain customers (not satisfaction), but new contracts is a major metric - if not the primary metric - for most carriers in terms of their sales reports. Most stockholders care about growth, not profitability, and new contracts looks like growth (with very little, if any, attention paid to lost accounts)
Killing him would make him a martyr, and would likely create more supporters of the WikiLeaks organization, including other people now willing to be a figurehead, but probably better capable of hiding themselves (such as the owners of botnets which possess tremendous capacity to hide their origin).
Killing Assange would not halt the flow of information. WikiLeaks is a hydra, cut off its head, and two more will grow in its place. Killing him would likely increase the flow of information, and would legitimize it in the eyes of many.
I dunno, on my screen your so-called identical copy is a lighter shade of gray, so it looks like it still lost some blackness. Nice try though.
On the upshot, it looks like it gained a light gray bar! Maybe that's where all the black went?
Or since a $0.99 song being shared causes $62,500 in damages, they (and the industry they represent) should be charged $62,500 * (falsely accused recipient) * (average requested settlement amount).
Sideloading is wholly possible and even quite simple on a purely vanilla device (no additional software such as a file browser required). Click a URL from an email or a web page that links to the .apk file. Tap the "Download Complete" notification, and it will prompt you to install the app (or find the file in the browser's "Downloads" function).
...or pop your CD into your computer and use iTunes to create high quality fully-tagged audio files out of it for no additional cost.
Isn't anybody who's particularly into the Beetles already an owner of all of the CD versions of the same music that they care to own? Doesn't iTunes convert those CD's into metadata-tagged high quality audio files for free?
I never understood why people cared so much whether The Beetles was available on iTunes. The music is easily available from other channels, and if you're willing to dedicate at least a few minutes to it, you have all the same advantages. Breadth of a music store is definitely important, and I get that this is a milestone accomplishment from a business perspective, but I don't get why ordinary citizens really care. It's not like The Beetles are still releasing new music.