Technically, wouldn't you be drinking wine from a skraeling's skull since the skraelings were found in Vinland?
I'm a Viking. I have a longship, and skraeling slaves to man the oars. Conceivably, I went to Vinland, raped and pillaged and whatnot among the skraelings, then returned to Vikingland to quaff mead from skraeling skulls collected in Vinland.
And it's still my universe, so I'll call it Vikingland if I so choose.
Besides which, rule four is that the alcoholic beverage of choice is mead, independent of location.
To sum up:
Rule 1: I get to be a viking. Rule 2: Everyone else gets to be a skraeling. Rule 3: Vikings don't have to close HTML tags. Rule 4: Mead is the alcoholic beverage of choice regardless of location And now, for rule 5: Any theoretical objections to the logic of the rules, or the ways things work in my universe, are hereby declared anathema. Any skraeling who voices those objections will have his eyeballs plucked and mounted on that little pointy bit on the top of my battle axe, then he will be tossed in the air where I, and my household slaves, will fight to catch him upon our spears. Winner gets the privilege of raping and pillaging the corpse.
Why should workers have to supply personal information that isn't in any way relevant to the job?
FWIW, the activities of a public employee off the clock could very easily impact their job performance, the performance of the department, etc. How many times have we seen an entire department get a black eye because some stupid employee decided it was a good idea to post $[OBECTIONABLE MATERIAL] online when it could be traced back to the city?
Not that I agree with it, I'm just playing a bit of devil's advocate.
Of course Vikings care about significant digits. Typically it requires four digits on each hand to grip a two-handed battle axe effectively. So I can lose one digit from each hand, no worries, as long as it wasn't a thumb -- I'll still be drinking mead from a skraeling's skull.
But if I lose any more than that...
See, significant digits fully explained by a Viking. What is it with you people, thinking Vikings don't have or need an understanding of the finer principles of mathematics as relating to raping and pillaging?
"But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said."
Ya know they's in barney when the dustcarts dont' e'en have any rubbish to pick up!
The problem isn't the lack of rubbish, it's that the dustcarts are made of flint. That's a huge fire risk if people have any steel in their rubbish.
And they're not in Barney if they're made of Flintstone, they're in Bedrock.
(1) it doesn't invalidate your point, and (2) it doesn't need to be said
Your claim was that biological buffers are sufficient to dismiss concerns of acidification. This claim must be qualified by examination of the limits of the buffering systems, and the inputs created that could overwhelm those limits.
Your gross oversimplification of "it's buffered, we don't need to worry about it for some value of abuse $x" is insufficient, since we do not know what the limit of $x is.
Actually, per the density the real numbers, there is no "biggest" landslide, values, since, if $xThat's ridiculous. We're dealing with percentages expressed as integers only (since I'm stupid and that makes my math work more betterer). Let's just move the decimal two places to the left to make it a little more confusing.
Let y = a whole number. Let x = 0.01. There exists some maximum value of y so that y*x See? My math holds. In my universe, where I get to set the rules[1], anyway.
[1] The first rule is that I get to be a viking. The second rule is that everyone else gets to be a skraeling.
(1) Mass media has no effect on those that don't watch it.
Mostly. But that's a small minority of the population. And you need to consider that there is an indirect effect, since people interact with eachother.
(2) Special Interest Groups are people that get organized and participate.
Agreed. But I'll still say that it is possible for a very dedicated group of people focused on a single issue to have disproportionate influence, and that this does not always work in the best interests of the community.
I personally feel that special interest groups (and also single-issue voters) have a very valid place in our political system. I just think that apathy among the general population often means that these groups exert too much influence, particularly since access to politicians is limited.
I mean, I get your point, but on a site filled with pedants, most of them highly attuned to mathematics, perhaps that wasn't the best choice of words.
[1] 99% is as big a landslide as it gets. 100% would mean the land was falling, not sliding. Assuming that the percentage in a landslide victory correlates to the slope of the surface the land is sliding along.
Oh crap... I've opened the door for the pedants to tar and feather me as well, haven't I?
Hey, why not go back and re-examine your textbooks from high school chemistry? It seems you slept through the second part of that lecture.
Remember the lab where you had to determine the concentration of a buffer in solution that had pH-sensitive dyes in it?
And how you could pipette huge amounts of an acid (or base) into the solution without a notable change in pH? But then you add one more drop and *presto* your solution was now purple (or orange, etc)? And with each drop added after that, there was no buffering effect?
Buffer systems in the ocean are like that, though more complex.
Ah, so it all comes down to you being a selfish asshole, then.
I'll just chalk your response up to innate selfishness, and assume that there's no way you'd ever do anything voluntarily for the good of others. That's fine... just don't ever let yourself fall on the mercy of strangers. Or need assistance from anyone who doesn't personally benefit from offering you assistance.
You needn't bother responding; I'll let you go back to reading Ayn Rand.
The key is you have to decide which is more important, playing for 2 hours on the PS3 or spending 2 hours researching the truth.
You're right, that is the key. The problem is that to most people, the utility of participating in politics is simply far lower than other activities. This is why the media is effective, since it allows them to make snap judgments with a very small investment of time.
I wish everyone could spend the time necessary to make educated decisions in the ballot box, and to actively participate in politics. Unfortunately, that is not the case... so we're stuck with (1) mass media having a disproportionate role and (2) very vocal and dedicated special interests having sometimes undue influence.
Oh that's right, for some insane reason people always come down on the side of the government.
It's not insane at all. It's self-interest.
We all (w/ exceptions of course) pay taxes in exchange for government services.
When someone "cheats" on their taxes (whether it's evasion or avoidance), our proportionate share of the expense of government services is increased.
I'm siding with the government on this issue because it's in my own self-interest that stupid tricks can't be used for you to avoid paying your fair share of taxes. It's not insane -- it's rational. What's insane is for someone to think that people who don't cheat the system should, for some reason, support those who do cheat the system.
And from a philosophical standpoint, theoretically the government is an expression of the wishes of the people to live by an accord. Yes, we all fight over how that accord is enforced, how it operates, and what it does -- but cheating the accord for personal gain is a violation of community accord. It's an action that deserves ostracism, at the very least.
Since the seats in the House are by district there is substantially more control over who is elected due to the local level. Money can't hide the fact your an asshole in politics at that ground level where as in the senate you can pretty much BS your way into office with enough money.
And yet we're still left with only the choice of "the elephants' asshole" or "the asses' asshole". It's assholes for everyone, assholes all around. The very nature of the patronage-based parties ensures that non-assholes are filtered out early in the process.
And never mind the power of gerrymandering, which not only ensures that the party in power stays in power, but also ensures that third parties have little to no chance -- and even if they do get a candidate elected, the damage will be confined to a single district.
And as for your contention that you can't hide your asshole-itude in the House... Senators average roughly 3,000,000 persons per seat. House members "only" average just under 700,000 persons per seat. Are you seriously suggesting that a ratio of 1:700,000 is sufficient to overcome all the ways that mass media can be used to completely snow the public?
Image is everything, and it's easily manipulable when less than 0.001% of the voters in a district have ever met the candidates for more than a handshake, let alone personally know them well enough to make educated judgments of character.
Looks from this, that you want the RIAA to win the case with last minute evidence. What side is the poster of this on?
On the side of truth, justice, and the American way[1]?
The judge was merciful to the RIAA, and exercised good judgment in tossing the improper evidence, while retaining the good evidence. That was fair.
Or would you prefer that judges should capriciously choose what evidence to allow based on only which "side" they are on?
[1] The American way, excluding economic hegemony, smug condescension, conspicuous levels of consumption, big asses, cowboy hats, chain restaurants, big-assed cars that seat 4.2 times the number of passengers actually in the car, military action to support economic interests, plausible deniability by offshoring torture, pollution, and awful labor conditions, and apple pie. Not that there's anything wrong with apple pie. It just doesn't fit well with this case.
Yeah, you're a I-feel-fine hypocrite, just like the rest of us.
Where are you getting that from? Just because you're an i-feel-fine asshole who exposes others to disease doesn't mean that I am.
(1) I can estimate with reasonable certainty whether or not I've been exposed to swine flu (2) Based on the answer to (1), I can make an educated decision about whether it's possible my headache and ague could be due to swine flu.
Besides which, I can, and have, paid $300 to postpone an international trip due to communicable illness. Because I'm not a selfish asshole. Even though I was well enough to travel. And even though it caused work issues for myself and my coworkers -- because it would have caused worse issues for the people I would have traveled with, and the people I needed to meet with, had they gotten sick.
Assuming this is a) the flight out (not home) and b) my first leg of the trip. Even if this was, by miracle, my flight out, I somehow doubt in this situation you'd ditch $1000 (or more since if you can't get our, you don't get to use the return flight) to help reduce the risk of other people getting a minor illness.
(1) Minor illness? Says you. Not minor to a diabetic with circulator problems, or people with one of a host of other complicating factors. (2) Why would I be ditching $1000? I just rescheduled an international flight from July to August, it cost me $300 to reschedule the tickets for the whole family. Even flights to China only cost $300 per ticket to reschedule.
Gah. Why do I feed the trolls? I should have learned by now.
The flu is a virus, not a bacteria, and it requires a host organism to survive.
Apples to orangutans. There are bacteria that can infect humans but also exist free of a host, though these are rare and typically not a threat as a pathogen except for the immuno-compromised.
Multiply that by 120,000 years, and I think we would have seen this bacteria before if it had any staying power as a mammalian pathogen.
Why? If it infects arctic land creatures, it could possibly exist in an isolated population for some time. Or it could be extremely virulent and have killed off its host population, in which case we wouldn't have seen it.
There are several possibilities for a pathogenic organism to be able to remain undiscovered for a long time. Of course, none of those are likely. But possible? Yes.
But I'll stick to my first conclusion, which is that a bacteria adapted to survive in ice is only infinitesimally likely to also be a human pathogen.
Something that is dead has no potential of becoming alive again. Otherwise it is not truly dead, but only mostly dead. The question is, what does the bacteria have to live for?
Now take this pill and don't go swimming for a half hour. And have fun cytokine-storming the castle.
1) There was suddenly a spring flu that was both out of season and relatively mild (what we have now, and H1N1 appears to also be related to that earlier strain)
2) By the time of the Fall and the "usual" flu season, the strain from early spring had mutated dramatically making it extremely deadly (as these things go, killing 10-20% of those infected vs. the usual 0.1%). An estimated 500K-600K died in the U.S. (just to give an idea of scope).
Yes... but... people who had survived the mild first version of the 1918 flu were immune to the nasty later waves; it acted like an attenuated vaccine.
So maybe the best personal strategy (assuming no other complicating illnesses) would be to deliberately get infected with the mild version. Of course, that's assuming access to the vaccine will be limited.
The odds of a 120,000-year-old bacteria turning out to be dangerous are minuscule.
The odds of any particular bacterium being dangerous are low.
FWIW, 120,000 years is not that long ago from a biological perspective. Some pathogens can pass from pigs, rabbits, or other mammals to humans... it's not like mammals didn't exist 120 millenia years ago.
The bigger tipoff is that the bacteria survived in ice. It's not likely that a bacterium adapted to live in ice will also be able to live (and thrive) in humans.
In the long run, yes it would be necessary to completely close the borders to prevent your population from being exposed.
But we're not dealing with the long run. We're just dealing with the period of time until the vaccine is widely available (and, of course, proof of vaccination will be required for entry).
It would be a miracle if this sytem caught 1%.
Why? If your tolerance of false-positive is high, detection systems like this could be considerably more effective than 1%.
And even if it was only 10%... do the math. (0.9*x)^n is far less than (1*x)^n over successive generations (x = number of people each infected person infects, n is the number of generations). Total number of infected people is halved prior to just the sixth generation.
At any rate, we're not talking about preventing penetration ad infinitum -- just until the vaccine is widely available.
Since my wife has light hair and I have dark(and I'm a f'ing monkey) choosing light color skin would have more to do without them being super hairy and being picked on for it.
Big mistake. Come the apocalypse and ensuing nuclear winter, you're going to wish your kids were yeti, or wookies.
Wait, what about all the people in the designer baby story that said we shouldn't interfere with natural selection? Wouldn't this count as part of evolution / natural selection?
Yes. All medicine is interfering with natural selection. But the ability to get the medicine may be due to genetic factors that are being selected against, so maybe it's natural selection after all.
But, at any rate, I suspect you have an ulterior motive, plague3106 (71849). You're just trying to drum up support for not allowing people to treat an epidemic, aren't you? This is a self-interested move on your part to enable your continued existence, isn't it?
Well, I for one do NOT welcome our H1N1 Mexican Swine Flu Plague overlords, and I defy you. I am getting the vaccine when it's available, like it or not.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a Viking. I have a longship, and skraeling slaves to man the oars. Conceivably, I went to Vinland, raped and pillaged and whatnot among the skraelings, then returned to Vikingland to quaff mead from skraeling skulls collected in Vinland.
And it's still my universe, so I'll call it Vikingland if I so choose.
Besides which, rule four is that the alcoholic beverage of choice is mead, independent of location.
To sum up:
Rule 1: I get to be a viking.
Rule 2: Everyone else gets to be a skraeling.
Rule 3: Vikings don't have to close HTML tags.
Rule 4: Mead is the alcoholic beverage of choice regardless of location
And now, for rule 5: Any theoretical objections to the logic of the rules, or the ways things work in my universe, are hereby declared anathema. Any skraeling who voices those objections will have his eyeballs plucked and mounted on that little pointy bit on the top of my battle axe, then he will be tossed in the air where I, and my household slaves, will fight to catch him upon our spears. Winner gets the privilege of raping and pillaging the corpse.
FWIW, the activities of a public employee off the clock could very easily impact their job performance, the performance of the department, etc. How many times have we seen an entire department get a black eye because some stupid employee decided it was a good idea to post $[OBECTIONABLE MATERIAL] online when it could be traced back to the city?
Not that I agree with it, I'm just playing a bit of devil's advocate.
Of course Vikings care about significant digits. Typically it requires four digits on each hand to grip a two-handed battle axe effectively. So I can lose one digit from each hand, no worries, as long as it wasn't a thumb -- I'll still be drinking mead from a skraeling's skull.
But if I lose any more than that...
See, significant digits fully explained by a Viking. What is it with you people, thinking Vikings don't have or need an understanding of the finer principles of mathematics as relating to raping and pillaging?
The problem isn't the lack of rubbish, it's that the dustcarts are made of flint. That's a huge fire risk if people have any steel in their rubbish.
And they're not in Barney if they're made of Flintstone, they're in Bedrock.
Sheesh.
Just because it is obvious doesn't mean that
(1) it doesn't invalidate your point, and
(2) it doesn't need to be said
Your claim was that biological buffers are sufficient to dismiss concerns of acidification. This claim must be qualified by examination of the limits of the buffering systems, and the inputs created that could overwhelm those limits.
Your gross oversimplification of "it's buffered, we don't need to worry about it for some value of abuse $x" is insufficient, since we do not know what the limit of $x is.
Oh, so you just get to add significant digits whenever you feel like it? Sweet.
D'oh.
Apparently, the third rule is that vikings don't have to close html tags.
Mostly. But that's a small minority of the population. And you need to consider that there is an indirect effect, since people interact with eachother.
Agreed. But I'll still say that it is possible for a very dedicated group of people focused on a single issue to have disproportionate influence, and that this does not always work in the best interests of the community.
I personally feel that special interest groups (and also single-issue voters) have a very valid place in our political system. I just think that apathy among the general population often means that these groups exert too much influence, particularly since access to politicians is limited.
Well, technically, no. It could be 99% [1].
I mean, I get your point, but on a site filled with pedants, most of them highly attuned to mathematics, perhaps that wasn't the best choice of words.
[1] 99% is as big a landslide as it gets. 100% would mean the land was falling, not sliding. Assuming that the percentage in a landslide victory correlates to the slope of the surface the land is sliding along.
Oh crap... I've opened the door for the pedants to tar and feather me as well, haven't I?
*exchanges tinfoil suit for flame-retardant suit*
Hey, why not go back and re-examine your textbooks from high school chemistry? It seems you slept through the second part of that lecture.
Remember the lab where you had to determine the concentration of a buffer in solution that had pH-sensitive dyes in it?
And how you could pipette huge amounts of an acid (or base) into the solution without a notable change in pH? But then you add one more drop and *presto* your solution was now purple (or orange, etc)? And with each drop added after that, there was no buffering effect?
Buffer systems in the ocean are like that, though more complex.
Ah, so it all comes down to you being a selfish asshole, then.
I'll just chalk your response up to innate selfishness, and assume that there's no way you'd ever do anything voluntarily for the good of others. That's fine... just don't ever let yourself fall on the mercy of strangers. Or need assistance from anyone who doesn't personally benefit from offering you assistance.
You needn't bother responding; I'll let you go back to reading Ayn Rand.
You're right, that is the key. The problem is that to most people, the utility of participating in politics is simply far lower than other activities. This is why the media is effective, since it allows them to make snap judgments with a very small investment of time.
I wish everyone could spend the time necessary to make educated decisions in the ballot box, and to actively participate in politics. Unfortunately, that is not the case... so we're stuck with (1) mass media having a disproportionate role and (2) very vocal and dedicated special interests having sometimes undue influence.
It's not insane at all. It's self-interest.
We all (w/ exceptions of course) pay taxes in exchange for government services.
When someone "cheats" on their taxes (whether it's evasion or avoidance), our proportionate share of the expense of government services is increased.
I'm siding with the government on this issue because it's in my own self-interest that stupid tricks can't be used for you to avoid paying your fair share of taxes. It's not insane -- it's rational. What's insane is for someone to think that people who don't cheat the system should, for some reason, support those who do cheat the system.
And from a philosophical standpoint, theoretically the government is an expression of the wishes of the people to live by an accord. Yes, we all fight over how that accord is enforced, how it operates, and what it does -- but cheating the accord for personal gain is a violation of community accord. It's an action that deserves ostracism, at the very least.
And yet we're still left with only the choice of "the elephants' asshole" or "the asses' asshole". It's assholes for everyone, assholes all around. The very nature of the patronage-based parties ensures that non-assholes are filtered out early in the process.
And never mind the power of gerrymandering, which not only ensures that the party in power stays in power, but also ensures that third parties have little to no chance -- and even if they do get a candidate elected, the damage will be confined to a single district.
And as for your contention that you can't hide your asshole-itude in the House... Senators average roughly 3,000,000 persons per seat. House members "only" average just under 700,000 persons per seat. Are you seriously suggesting that a ratio of 1:700,000 is sufficient to overcome all the ways that mass media can be used to completely snow the public?
Image is everything, and it's easily manipulable when less than 0.001% of the voters in a district have ever met the candidates for more than a handshake, let alone personally know them well enough to make educated judgments of character.
On the side of truth, justice, and the American way[1]?
The judge was merciful to the RIAA, and exercised good judgment in tossing the improper evidence, while retaining the good evidence. That was fair.
Or would you prefer that judges should capriciously choose what evidence to allow based on only which "side" they are on?
[1] The American way, excluding economic hegemony, smug condescension, conspicuous levels of consumption, big asses, cowboy hats, chain restaurants, big-assed cars that seat 4.2 times the number of passengers actually in the car, military action to support economic interests, plausible deniability by offshoring torture, pollution, and awful labor conditions, and apple pie. Not that there's anything wrong with apple pie. It just doesn't fit well with this case.
You want to publicize how *easy* it is to bypass your scanners, in the hopes of selling more scanners?
I don't think you've thought your cunning plan all the way through.
Where are you getting that from? Just because you're an i-feel-fine asshole who exposes others to disease doesn't mean that I am.
(1) I can estimate with reasonable certainty whether or not I've been exposed to swine flu
(2) Based on the answer to (1), I can make an educated decision about whether it's possible my headache and ague could be due to swine flu.
Besides which, I can, and have, paid $300 to postpone an international trip due to communicable illness. Because I'm not a selfish asshole. Even though I was well enough to travel. And even though it caused work issues for myself and my coworkers -- because it would have caused worse issues for the people I would have traveled with, and the people I needed to meet with, had they gotten sick.
(1) Minor illness? Says you. Not minor to a diabetic with circulator problems, or people with one of a host of other complicating factors.
(2) Why would I be ditching $1000? I just rescheduled an international flight from July to August, it cost me $300 to reschedule the tickets for the whole family. Even flights to China only cost $300 per ticket to reschedule.
Gah. Why do I feed the trolls? I should have learned by now.
Apples to orangutans. There are bacteria that can infect humans but also exist free of a host, though these are rare and typically not a threat as a pathogen except for the immuno-compromised.
Why? If it infects arctic land creatures, it could possibly exist in an isolated population for some time. Or it could be extremely virulent and have killed off its host population, in which case we wouldn't have seen it.
There are several possibilities for a pathogenic organism to be able to remain undiscovered for a long time. Of course, none of those are likely. But possible? Yes.
But I'll stick to my first conclusion, which is that a bacteria adapted to survive in ice is only infinitesimally likely to also be a human pathogen.
Go ahead and mod me troll, but...
Something that is dead has no potential of becoming alive again. Otherwise it is not truly dead, but only mostly dead. The question is, what does the bacteria have to live for?
Now take this pill and don't go swimming for a half hour. And have fun cytokine-storming the castle.
Yes... but... people who had survived the mild first version of the 1918 flu were immune to the nasty later waves; it acted like an attenuated vaccine.
So maybe the best personal strategy (assuming no other complicating illnesses) would be to deliberately get infected with the mild version. Of course, that's assuming access to the vaccine will be limited.
The odds of any particular bacterium being dangerous are low.
FWIW, 120,000 years is not that long ago from a biological perspective. Some pathogens can pass from pigs, rabbits, or other mammals to humans... it's not like mammals didn't exist 120 millenia years ago.
The bigger tipoff is that the bacteria survived in ice. It's not likely that a bacterium adapted to live in ice will also be able to live (and thrive) in humans.
In the long run, yes it would be necessary to completely close the borders to prevent your population from being exposed.
But we're not dealing with the long run. We're just dealing with the period of time until the vaccine is widely available (and, of course, proof of vaccination will be required for entry).
Why? If your tolerance of false-positive is high, detection systems like this could be considerably more effective than 1%.
And even if it was only 10%... do the math. (0.9*x)^n is far less than (1*x)^n over successive generations (x = number of people each infected person infects, n is the number of generations). Total number of infected people is halved prior to just the sixth generation.
At any rate, we're not talking about preventing penetration ad infinitum -- just until the vaccine is widely available.
Big mistake. Come the apocalypse and ensuing nuclear winter, you're going to wish your kids were yeti, or wookies.
You -- out of the gene pool!
Yes. All medicine is interfering with natural selection. But the ability to get the medicine may be due to genetic factors that are being selected against, so maybe it's natural selection after all.
But, at any rate, I suspect you have an ulterior motive, plague3106 (71849). You're just trying to drum up support for not allowing people to treat an epidemic, aren't you? This is a self-interested move on your part to enable your continued existence, isn't it?
Well, I for one do NOT welcome our H1N1 Mexican Swine Flu Plague overlords, and I defy you. I am getting the vaccine when it's available, like it or not.