I've done a bit of scientific programming, but I'm not a computer-science-oriented person by any stretch. Thus, I'm a little confused by this. Under what license are things like Quicksort and Stupidsort (for another, very bad example) "released"? Why would a person feel it necessary to release an algorithm under any kind of license at all, in fact? No textbook would want to include GPL-ed code--wouldn't that make the entire book GPL by nature of the license?
Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but this seems like a fairly bad precedent to set.
First of all: this is not a cancer cure. No vaccine is a cure for anything. On a related note: naturopaths and chiropractors and the like emphasize preventative medicine (let me adjust your spine to prevent problems in the future; take this supplement to stave off cancer in the future), but then turn around and reject _vaccination,_ which is perhaps one of the most effective forms of preventative medication known to man?
...or for that reason any unnatural medicine...
Your opposition to scientific medicine is irrational. There are _many_ examples of "natural" cures that have devastating side effects--herbs are not pefectly safe just because they are natural. To name two, poke and comfrey can be quite dangerous depending on the amount taken. Radon gas is a natural (radiation) phenomenon that is known to cause lung cancer. Furthermore, any worthwhile therapeutic drug potent enough to do something useful is going to be potent enough to potentially cause side effects.
...radiation to cure cancer actually increases the probability of some other cancers, introduces problems in progenies...
Unless whole-body, fetal, or genital irradiation takes place, there should be no effect upon future generations of exposure of ancestry to radiation. Furthermore, although there is some chance that radiation damage can cause cancers later on in life, that must be weighed against the risk of _not curing the current cancer._ All use of ionizing radiation has a risk, but the benefits from dosing a patient (extension of life, relief of pain, etc.) can in many cases be shown to easily outweigh the risks. As you've just said, currently no scientific studies have found any effective cancer therapy that doesn't carry the risk of side-effects, but we _know_ the side effects of non-treatment or worthless treatment: morbidity and death.
You're right to be concerned about potential long-term effects of this kind of vaccine, especially in a case like this where recommendations are being made to vaccinate a large segment of the population. However, your good message is being lost in a deluge of paranoia and irrational distrust of medicine, and so reasonable people are going to be disinclined to listen to your valid points. I'd suggest you keep your pen dipped in ink rather than 100% natural sulfuic acid, and you'll attract more positive attention.
EA's method causes the game to get released without the polish, period. If any shows up, it comes in patches later on, most of which we will probably have to buy in the future.
Activision's method causes stress on the designers, and perhaps contributes to an "anything for 30" mentality--consoles don't have adjustable system parameters, so those who're designing for a console must sacrifice everything and anything to get the magic FPS number. This is only a problem if the game is developed _for_ consoles to be ported to PC, or developed concurrently with the PC version--because then the PC version will be hamstrung for the sake of the console version. If you're going to release to the PC crowd, do it right: these people have computing power and can generally get more if they need it--or can turn down some options if they don't want it.
That may be the new 'theory' but we all know about theory vs reality.
Uh, but wasn't this data accumulated via testing actual drives? That's... kinda how science works--by replacing anecdotal evidence with scientifically-gathered data. That's basically condemning science in favor of anecdotes--and the medical fields can tell you how well _that_ works.
Um, but doesn't the summary of the paper say that there is no infant mortality effect, and that failure rates increase with time, and thus the bathtub curve doesn't actually apply?
For a refutation of your points, please see the other replies to your post. The short of it is that you're using bad science, too few good scientific references, interpreting the FDA's movements to suit your needs, using good science in the wrong way, and are basing your hypothesis on tenative links at best, all while presenting an emotionally-charged, logically-flawed argument on a controversial subject while insulting your critics. That's not a recipe to win people over.
I'd like to see the data you refer to in the last paragraph of your post. I'm certain the reactions to, say, the polio vaccine are _far_ worse than polio itself. Don't paint "all vaccinations" with a broad brush if you have concerns with a specific vaccine--you'll get labeled as a loon and for good reason. What about flu vaccination for the elderly? Do you oppose that, too?
Also, here is a link that contains information that should do a lot to refute your hypothesized link between thimerosal-preserved vaccinations and autism. I'd like to see the Danish studies to which they refer--I'm a little disappointed they didn't provide a link.
I'm not fond of the big pharmaceutical companies, either--but please don't paint conspiracies where are are none. You're discrediting people who are interested in the legitimate concerns about Pharma (things like marketing drugs to consumers).
When a crime carries this sentence as a possiblity, the Swedish police gets greater powers to use surveillance...
So, wait. The _objective measurement_ of the severity of the crime (i.e. the level of police response required) is tied to the _possible sentence_ it can carry? While in theory this shouldn't be a problem, since the sentence should reflect the harm done by the criminal, that kind of stipulation has _ludicrous_ potential for abuse.
Actually, wouldn't Generation Fifteen be _really, really happy_ to see an Earth spacecraft zip up and radio: "Hey, guys. Yeah, Earth's still there. We're sending shuttles to pick you up--turns out we can get there inside of a week nowadays, so you and your grandchildren's grandchildren don't have to die on that damn boat."
You simply don't _tell_ the intermediate generations. Take the first however many thousands of generations and plant them in the ark, which looks as much as possible like an island isolated in the water, or a huge city with no perceptible exits to the outside. Eventually if you can keep the first few generations from spilling too many beans, you end up with a Truman Show or Dark City of sorts--except that it's flying through space.
This idea, of course, is full of problems. How do you remind everyone what they're supposed to do when they get wherever they're going? What happens if they break through the outer wall? What if the "crew" finds out they've been duped since two generations ago and decides to turn the thing around and ram it into Earth out of spite?
Wow. That's _several_ sci-fi movies/books/video games waiting to be made. Discover the destiny of your entire generation! Help the rebellion turn the Ark around and get your children back to Earth! PREVENT the rebellion from turning the Ark around--and do it without killing everyone because you can't afford to lose them!
Just because someone put words in a paper doesn't necessarily mean they're true. Even if there's no outright falsification, it's entirely possible that their statistical analyses could be off (for a silly example: they had a sample of only two rats, and one of them suffered more free radical damage than the other). There's the potential for them to have misinterpreted their results, or to have accidentally exposed the rats to a different--
Wait, wait. Wait. I just went to look in the article for where these folks had been published (i.e. what quality of peer review they had). Right at the bottom of the page, it says that Greenpeace _admits_ that the Russian studies had errors. So, they're admitting that they're using a poorly-designed study in order to try and scare the government into banning trials on GM foods? What is going on here?
The Wii is easily one of the more complex Nintendo systems to set up--if not the most complex. Not only do you have to plug something into the TV at the back, but you also have to position, align, and affix the sensor bar. God help you if you don't have a table edge to line it up with! Then there's the memory card--perhaps it was just my console, but the SD card didn't seem to want to "click" into place properly. That threw me for a serious loop--I had to check twice if I wasn't putting it in upside-down. Then there's the system menu--what other Nintendo console (the DS?) has ever had a setup menu with quite as many options as this one? Wifi _alone_ could scare away even a relatively competent console gamer who has little computing experience otherwise.
I honestly don't know what he quite meant. The SNES was dirt simple to set up and run compared to the Wii. Sure, it can be set up as braindead as any other appliance (blinking VCR, anyone?), except for the sensor bar and SD card. I'm also not criticizing the Wii interface OR saying that plugging in the sensor bar is hard to do or beyond anyone--I just don't understand how the Wii can be pointed to as something that's simpler than a machine that just needs to be plugged into the television.
I'm currently 290 meters away from popular opinion. What the heck does that mean?
I don't understand what your issue is here: it's perfectly clear what they mean. I'm sorry I can't explain in detail, but it's already 65 Roentgens past the hour and I have a bus to catch.
I have to wonder if implantable RFID could survive the intense magnetic and RF conditions inside of an MRI unit. The RF energy is sufficient to cause heating of tattoos in some cases, and RFID chips are basically tiny antennas, if I understand how they operate. Not only could these units destroy said chips, but localized heating from the RF absorption could cause some serious internal burns--especially if they're implanted deep or near to important organs.
The obvious next question is to ask how well these chips show up on standard radiographs. If medical record of these things is lost or somehow never made (i.e. company goes out of business and the patient forgets there's one in his stomach, or some records mistake happens) then I imagine x-ray imaging is basically the only way to find them just by chance. Metal usually does a pretty good job of causing artifacts on a radiograph, but these chips could be small enough to escape notice--especially if they're at the fringe of the field of view, or not in view at all.
It's not something to stay up at night about, no, but I think they're valid concerns to raise.
Isn't the WWW by definition a social network? I mean, nearly if not everything I do on the WWW involves in some way content that was created by someone else and then disseminated to the Internet for consumption.
Even NYC, which has much more reason to be afraid of terrorist attacks than Boston, didn't bat an eyelash.
What would really help to calm this situation would be if someone important from NYC--say, the mayor or police chief--were to come out and publically state that Boston overreacted. Not that it'd ever happen, but it would be nice to see.
Slashdot Mirror
By impregnating it with a conductive material, maybe?
Feynman in one of his books discussed his experience at a company that tried to plate plastics. I wish I remembered more about the anecdote.
They still have fear and a fanatical devotion to the Pope! And nice red uniforms.
I've done a bit of scientific programming, but I'm not a computer-science-oriented person by any stretch. Thus, I'm a little confused by this. Under what license are things like Quicksort and Stupidsort (for another, very bad example) "released"? Why would a person feel it necessary to release an algorithm under any kind of license at all, in fact? No textbook would want to include GPL-ed code--wouldn't that make the entire book GPL by nature of the license?
Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but this seems like a fairly bad precedent to set.
Even the experts are afraid to click on each other's links anymore.
Does anyone else think that was tremendously funny in a sixth-grade-humor sort of way? Maybe I just am up too early.
It is well known that any so-called cure...
...or for that reason any unnatural medicine...
...radiation to cure cancer actually increases the probability of some other cancers, introduces problems in progenies...
First of all: this is not a cancer cure. No vaccine is a cure for anything. On a related note: naturopaths and chiropractors and the like emphasize preventative medicine (let me adjust your spine to prevent problems in the future; take this supplement to stave off cancer in the future), but then turn around and reject _vaccination,_ which is perhaps one of the most effective forms of preventative medication known to man?
Your opposition to scientific medicine is irrational. There are _many_ examples of "natural" cures that have devastating side effects--herbs are not pefectly safe just because they are natural. To name two, poke and comfrey can be quite dangerous depending on the amount taken. Radon gas is a natural (radiation) phenomenon that is known to cause lung cancer. Furthermore, any worthwhile therapeutic drug potent enough to do something useful is going to be potent enough to potentially cause side effects.
Unless whole-body, fetal, or genital irradiation takes place, there should be no effect upon future generations of exposure of ancestry to radiation. Furthermore, although there is some chance that radiation damage can cause cancers later on in life, that must be weighed against the risk of _not curing the current cancer._ All use of ionizing radiation has a risk, but the benefits from dosing a patient (extension of life, relief of pain, etc.) can in many cases be shown to easily outweigh the risks. As you've just said, currently no scientific studies have found any effective cancer therapy that doesn't carry the risk of side-effects, but we _know_ the side effects of non-treatment or worthless treatment: morbidity and death.
You're right to be concerned about potential long-term effects of this kind of vaccine, especially in a case like this where recommendations are being made to vaccinate a large segment of the population. However, your good message is being lost in a deluge of paranoia and irrational distrust of medicine, and so reasonable people are going to be disinclined to listen to your valid points. I'd suggest you keep your pen dipped in ink rather than 100% natural sulfuic acid, and you'll attract more positive attention.
EA's method causes the game to get released without the polish, period. If any shows up, it comes in patches later on, most of which we will probably have to buy in the future.
Activision's method causes stress on the designers, and perhaps contributes to an "anything for 30" mentality--consoles don't have adjustable system parameters, so those who're designing for a console must sacrifice everything and anything to get the magic FPS number. This is only a problem if the game is developed _for_ consoles to be ported to PC, or developed concurrently with the PC version--because then the PC version will be hamstrung for the sake of the console version. If you're going to release to the PC crowd, do it right: these people have computing power and can generally get more if they need it--or can turn down some options if they don't want it.
That may be the new 'theory' but we all know about theory vs reality.
Uh, but wasn't this data accumulated via testing actual drives? That's... kinda how science works--by replacing anecdotal evidence with scientifically-gathered data. That's basically condemning science in favor of anecdotes--and the medical fields can tell you how well _that_ works.
Um, but doesn't the summary of the paper say that there is no infant mortality effect, and that failure rates increase with time, and thus the bathtub curve doesn't actually apply?
For a refutation of your points, please see the other replies to your post. The short of it is that you're using bad science, too few good scientific references, interpreting the FDA's movements to suit your needs, using good science in the wrong way, and are basing your hypothesis on tenative links at best, all while presenting an emotionally-charged, logically-flawed argument on a controversial subject while insulting your critics. That's not a recipe to win people over.
I'd like to see the data you refer to in the last paragraph of your post. I'm certain the reactions to, say, the polio vaccine are _far_ worse than polio itself. Don't paint "all vaccinations" with a broad brush if you have concerns with a specific vaccine--you'll get labeled as a loon and for good reason. What about flu vaccination for the elderly? Do you oppose that, too?
Also, here is a link that contains information that should do a lot to refute your hypothesized link between thimerosal-preserved vaccinations and autism. I'd like to see the Danish studies to which they refer--I'm a little disappointed they didn't provide a link.
I'm not fond of the big pharmaceutical companies, either--but please don't paint conspiracies where are are none. You're discrediting people who are interested in the legitimate concerns about Pharma (things like marketing drugs to consumers).
When a crime carries this sentence as a possiblity, the Swedish police gets greater powers to use surveillance...
So, wait. The _objective measurement_ of the severity of the crime (i.e. the level of police response required) is tied to the _possible sentence_ it can carry? While in theory this shouldn't be a problem, since the sentence should reflect the harm done by the criminal, that kind of stipulation has _ludicrous_ potential for abuse.
Actually, wouldn't Generation Fifteen be _really, really happy_ to see an Earth spacecraft zip up and radio: "Hey, guys. Yeah, Earth's still there. We're sending shuttles to pick you up--turns out we can get there inside of a week nowadays, so you and your grandchildren's grandchildren don't have to die on that damn boat."
You simply don't _tell_ the intermediate generations. Take the first however many thousands of generations and plant them in the ark, which looks as much as possible like an island isolated in the water, or a huge city with no perceptible exits to the outside. Eventually if you can keep the first few generations from spilling too many beans, you end up with a Truman Show or Dark City of sorts--except that it's flying through space.
This idea, of course, is full of problems. How do you remind everyone what they're supposed to do when they get wherever they're going? What happens if they break through the outer wall? What if the "crew" finds out they've been duped since two generations ago and decides to turn the thing around and ram it into Earth out of spite?
Wow. That's _several_ sci-fi movies/books/video games waiting to be made. Discover the destiny of your entire generation! Help the rebellion turn the Ark around and get your children back to Earth! PREVENT the rebellion from turning the Ark around--and do it without killing everyone because you can't afford to lose them!
Armagain: Humans Die Hard
How can you state that "all GM food is not the same" and then immediately go on to paint all GM food with one brush?
Just because someone put words in a paper doesn't necessarily mean they're true. Even if there's no outright falsification, it's entirely possible that their statistical analyses could be off (for a silly example: they had a sample of only two rats, and one of them suffered more free radical damage than the other). There's the potential for them to have misinterpreted their results, or to have accidentally exposed the rats to a different--
Wait, wait. Wait. I just went to look in the article for where these folks had been published (i.e. what quality of peer review they had). Right at the bottom of the page, it says that Greenpeace _admits_ that the Russian studies had errors. So, they're admitting that they're using a poorly-designed study in order to try and scare the government into banning trials on GM foods? What is going on here?
Then, there are probably many hundreds of members of the rodent family that can be classed as rats.
Which is probably one of the reasons why biologists use genetically identical strains of test animals.
The Wii is easily one of the more complex Nintendo systems to set up--if not the most complex. Not only do you have to plug something into the TV at the back, but you also have to position, align, and affix the sensor bar. God help you if you don't have a table edge to line it up with! Then there's the memory card--perhaps it was just my console, but the SD card didn't seem to want to "click" into place properly. That threw me for a serious loop--I had to check twice if I wasn't putting it in upside-down. Then there's the system menu--what other Nintendo console (the DS?) has ever had a setup menu with quite as many options as this one? Wifi _alone_ could scare away even a relatively competent console gamer who has little computing experience otherwise.
I honestly don't know what he quite meant. The SNES was dirt simple to set up and run compared to the Wii. Sure, it can be set up as braindead as any other appliance (blinking VCR, anyone?), except for the sensor bar and SD card. I'm also not criticizing the Wii interface OR saying that plugging in the sensor bar is hard to do or beyond anyone--I just don't understand how the Wii can be pointed to as something that's simpler than a machine that just needs to be plugged into the television.
I'm sorry, I must've missed the meme-o on this one--what the hell does butt-sex with fish-squirrels have to do with evolution?
Quiet, you. These things are already hard enough to come by. Next you'll suggest they replace the touchscreens at the DMV with DS Lites.
I'm currently 290 meters away from popular opinion. What the heck does that mean?
I don't understand what your issue is here: it's perfectly clear what they mean. I'm sorry I can't explain in detail, but it's already 65 Roentgens past the hour and I have a bus to catch.
In that case, all the ??AA would have to do is put the U.S. itself on the blacklist. Problem solved.
I have to wonder if implantable RFID could survive the intense magnetic and RF conditions inside of an MRI unit. The RF energy is sufficient to cause heating of tattoos in some cases, and RFID chips are basically tiny antennas, if I understand how they operate. Not only could these units destroy said chips, but localized heating from the RF absorption could cause some serious internal burns--especially if they're implanted deep or near to important organs.
The obvious next question is to ask how well these chips show up on standard radiographs. If medical record of these things is lost or somehow never made (i.e. company goes out of business and the patient forgets there's one in his stomach, or some records mistake happens) then I imagine x-ray imaging is basically the only way to find them just by chance. Metal usually does a pretty good job of causing artifacts on a radiograph, but these chips could be small enough to escape notice--especially if they're at the fringe of the field of view, or not in view at all.
It's not something to stay up at night about, no, but I think they're valid concerns to raise.
Isn't the WWW by definition a social network? I mean, nearly if not everything I do on the WWW involves in some way content that was created by someone else and then disseminated to the Internet for consumption.
Even NYC, which has much more reason to be afraid of terrorist attacks than Boston, didn't bat an eyelash.
What would really help to calm this situation would be if someone important from NYC--say, the mayor or police chief--were to come out and publically state that Boston overreacted. Not that it'd ever happen, but it would be nice to see.