Absolutely; the information in the black box MIGHT still require a warrant for them to legally access it and use it against you in a court case, but this is a question of due process while collecting evidence - a 4th, not 5th, amendment issue. There's no question that collecting this data would be gathering evidence, rather than "compelling testimony."
Just like browser history doesn't "violate your 5th amendment rights" - the technology enables a historical record of operation, and it is accessible to police, given a specific set of circumstances and rules. Even if you delete your local caches, the police can still subpoena records from Google, your ISP, etc. I'll totally agree with people concerned about the implications of this technology that the police can't (!shouldn't!) be able to access it on a whim, or for a fishing expedition - but they absolutely SHOULD be able to access it with a properly granted search warrant or subpoena.
One or the other of these things must be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt by the prosecution (since it's a felony), in order for you to be found under some part of the manslaughter crime.
No, beyond a reasonable doubt. Beyond a shadow of a doubt is a MUCH higher standard of proof, which means that they must show there is NO DOUBT whatsoever that you are completely guilty of the crime - i.e., in-vehicle video & audio recording showing someone saying, "HAHA LOOK AT THE KID IN THE ROAD, I'M GONNA KILL HIM!" Combined with testimony of a passenger stating that you said the same thing, and deliberately ran down the kid in the road.
Reasonable doubt says that the case presented must be such that a "reasonable" person would conclude you are guilty of the crime. And that's a whole lot muddier when you've got a photogenic 14 year old dead with no history of any wrongdoing and tearful parents who will go, 'he's NEVER done drugs, NEVER, he was such a good kid!', and a guy who perhaps has a history of some "smearable" offense that can be introduced in court to make him look like a monster.
The black box supported his claims that he was not driving negligently - not exceeding the speed limit, braked properly, belted in, etc. etc. - in other words, that he was operating his vehicle in accordance with standard best practices and safety regulations. This has a direct bearing on the outcome of the case - it's not hard for the prosecution to argue "he was probably speeding!" or "he was probably driving in an unsafe manner!" - and with the black box data, he can say "no, no I wasn't," and support that with evidence.
Just because there is evidence that can be used against you, doesn't mean your right to not-self-incriminate is being broken.
Correct. Properly collected evidence is absolutely NOT "self incrimination."
If the police violate your privacy by searching your home and seizing a blood-soaked shirt from your closet, that evidence should be thrown out on account of illegal search and seizure - a violation of due process.
If the police get a valid warrant to search your home, and during that search, find a blood-soaked shirt in your closet, then that evidence would absolutely be admissible in court as evidence against you in a murder trial.
Proper collection of physical evidence is not compelling you to testify against yourself, and so the "self incrimination" argument is legally moot. The proper argument here is about the circumstances under which a police agency can access and collect the data, and use it against you. And there SHOULD be strict and well-defined rules govering this. But in no way is it a fifth amendment issue.
Let us take a hypothetical example. Suppose I wanted to dry my hands as fast as possible and I happened to be at the top of a tall building with on towel. Well, a good stiff breeze helps, so if pragmatism was about *now* with no regard to the future, the best option would be to jump off the building and wave my hands in the breeze.
Reductio ad absurdam - unfortunately for your point, a pragmatist would recognize the idiocy of committing suicide in order to dry his hands.
A pragmatist - in REALITY - would say, "I'll shake my hands briskly to remove as much excess moisture as I can, and then perhaps wipe them on the leg of my pants or my shirt." A pragmatist would NOT say, "I need to assemble a solar-powered hand dryer using only the materials available to me on this rooftop, then leave it behind when I go for other people to use it, and launch a worldwide campaign to install a hand dryer on every roof of every building, everywhere!"
How is it pragmatic to set myself up for future pain and suffering which high certainty? In 5 years, I certainly won't feel I made the pragmatic choice when I have to fix the mess again.
A pragmatist would either print a hard copy for future reference and safe keeping, or dump the relevant information out to a plain text file and files that away so he could access it later. It is not pragmatic to embark on a crusade to change the entire software industry to support standards that will magically protect everybody, somehow, in the future. Shit gets old and obsolete. A pragmatist deals with that fact by saying, "Well what's the longest-lived format I can think of and use?" (hard copy printout, or text-file dump.) An idealist deals with this fact by launching the Long Now project and its affiliates, to ensure that mankind in the future has access to the numerous digital resources and cultural artifacts produced today.
By your reckoning RMS as an idealist would have taken a scorched arth approach and eschewed everything proprietary.
Which he has. He will - grudgingly - use non-free software when he has to, and he will bitch about it the whole time, kicking and screaming and fighting it. His move to a 'completely free' computer that you referenced also comes at tremendous sacrifice in the number of things that he can accomplish with his computer. He has chosen his ideals over practical efficiency - in other words, he is an idealist, not a pragmatist. His many semantic quibbles with other Open Source / Free Software people (Open Source vs. Free Software... GNU/Linux vs. Linux... slagging off on Canonical for their misdeeds here... i'm sure you've heard numerous others, I know I have) is also indicative of his "scorched earth" view - if you do not agree with him, you are wrong, evil, immoral, and, if not ACTUALLY the enemy, certainly lending aid and comfort to him.
Don't misunderstand me - I respect him for walking the walk when it comes to his ideals. But trying to call him a "pragmatist" where Free Software is concerned is pretty silly by any stretch of the imagination.
An idealist is merely a pragmatist who cares about the future.
In fact, a pragmatist is one who cares very little for the future, so what you're really saying is, "an idealist is a pragmatist who is the opposite of a pragmatist."
A = B = !B is not a logically coherent construction, as A cannot be both "B" and "Not B" in reality.
A pragmatist is concerned with the actual, practicability of an idea - how well it suits or reflects our current understanding of reality. It is far less concerned with "possible future ramifications that may come to pass, given a complex series of likely or unlikely events."
A pragmatist would say, "well, this isn't the best solution out of all possible ideal solutions, but it is practical, it is workable, and we can implement it now, and iterate improvements to it over time as resources allow." An idealist would engage in the scorched earth policy of saying, "If we can't have it our way from top to bottom, then it's all evil, and we should have nothing to do with it, and reject it on principle."
I invite you to consider which response would be more likely from RMS, and then consider why you're trying to define him as something that is almost a polar opposite to the way his writings, speech, and ideals suggest.
Depends on the environment - anaerobes don't do well in oxygen-rich environments, but then, the atmosphere of Mars isn't exactly oxygen rich, and not all anaerobic bacteria are obligate anaerobes.
If the bacteria couldn't complete the job, then you'd dry out and mummify over time, leaving behind something that probably resembles Ötzi the Iceman. Of course, the body would still be subjected to the minimal weathering effects if left sitting unattended on the surface, so abrasion from dust moving around on the surface would take a toll over many years, too.
Likely you'd be some sort of mummified humanoid shape for thousands of years, with weathering taking a slow toll on the mummified remains.
I don't think anybody has claimed that they "can beat the laws of physics". That doesn't mean that they haven't developed a way that is more efficient than other methods so far. This argument is sort of like saying "can't go faster than the speed of light, so why bother building a faster jet?"
Wireless power further out than a few inches is highly wasteful and potential power output drops quite rapidly with distance.
And Apple claims that their device will charge "up to about a meter" away from the device. If that's true, then based on what you've just said, I suspect they've come up with a novel and non-obvious method for efficiently charging/delivering power over longer distances than the "few inches" you've described - which would be a completely legitimate and valid thing to grant them a patent for.
Because it actively prevents "the little guy" from having any legal protection whatsoever. Because it tells the little guy, "Don't bother to try innovating, if you want to do R&D, you better do it in the lab of a giant multinational." Because there are plenty of counterexamples where a "little guy" has invented something and been able to extract licensing fees from "the big guys" as a result of patents that the "little guy" owns. But it seems that now that Apple is suing Samsung, we have to immediately stop all patents, right now, no matter how stupid or misguided the replacement system we've designed is.
I know that it's cool to hate on the patent system here on Slashdot, but this proposal is *actively worse* than the current system. It does NOTHING to prevent "bad" patents from getting in - the big guys have the pockets and legal team to continue pushing the applications through, and they'll end up fighting each other in court anyway. All it does is tell the "little guys," "just go home, don't try to invent something new."
It is, according to this article, a different approach:
Most of today’s wireless chargers utilize inductive charging, which requires a charger and your gadget to be extremely close — usually touching — to do the job. So if your smartphone is capable of wireless charging (the Lumia 920, for example), it requires a wired charging base on which you place the phone to charge.
It goes on to say:
An Apple patent application published Thursday, “Wireless Power Utilization in a Local Computing Environment,” uses a different approach. Apple’s implementation would utilize a near-field magnetic resonance (NFMR) power supply to deliver juice to nearby devices that have an NFMR resonator circuit within.
Like you, I don't know enough about the field to properly judge, but it does sound like they're using a different approach (NFMR instead of induction) to produce the power, and that this NFMR device will create a charging "zone," which could possibly deliver enough power to charge/power a desktop's worth of accessories during normal use - keyboard, mouse, phone, etc. Is it "novel" enough to patent? The USPTO obviously thought so. Whether or not it's a "good" solution, it does seem to at least be *different* than what the current wireless charging techniques are using.
The disparity between hundreds of dollars to apply for patents and millions to invalidate patents should tell you the system is designed to fuck over the little guy they claim to help protect.
And in what way does this fix ("you want a patent? Great, the fee is $5 million, we take cash or bank check, no personal checks please!") not "fuck over the little guy"?
The "little guy" doesn't have a few million dollars laying around to spend on ramming his patent application through. Your proposed "fix" would simply enshrine the notion that unless you're a big multinational with a billion dollar bankroll, you can't innovate, so don't even bother.
While I agree that patents are probably too easily granted, your proposed solution doesn't really do much to foster innovation and open the field up to "the little guy." Every little guy without a giant bankroll will automatically be at a disadvantage.
The question if water keeps some memory is something different. As everyone who works in that area knows: yes it does.
The proposed mechanism of "water memory" is that the hydrogen bonds between molecules impose some sort of small scale order reflecting the "shape" of the remedies molecules. Please explain how something that has only been exhibited to last for fractions of a nanosecond persists for the minutes or hours or days or weeks between creation of the homeopathic remedy and its administration. You can't claim "yes it does" if you can't demonstrate that it exists on time scales required for it to be the mechanism by which your medication works.
This is certainly not what homeopathy is about.
No, this is exactly what homeopathy is about. Homeopathy =/= "herbal medicine." The principles of homeopathy fly in the face of established physical and medical sciences, and require us to actively suspend the things we know about medicine in order to believe that they work. Medicines do not get more potent by being diluted to the point where there is no "remedy" left in the solution - this is a CENTRAL, fundamental, principle of homeopathy. Water does not retain some "memory" of molecules it has been in contact with in any time frame which would make it possible for "water memory" to be the functional mechanism. And repeated studies have shown homeopathic remedies to have no better results and efficacy than the placebo effect - there is no science which supports homeopathy.
but solid, and another big deal is not even diluted at all and on top of that, a hugh deal of homeopathic "remedies" are also sold with different name as modern herbal remedies.
I'm curious why you keep trying to define homeopathic remedies as "not diluted solutions," when *everything* written by Hahnemann and other proponents of homeopathy say that the diluted solutions we've been discussing are the gold standard of homeopathic remedies. The move of homeopaths to embrace "herbal medicine" is a move by homeopaths to co-opt another alternative medicine to bolster their own lack of credibility.
Homeopathy deserves no credence as a science, because it has no basis in science, and has no support in science. It is not an observable or measurable phenomenon, and any 'successes' attributed to it are the operation of the well documented placebo effect. Herbal medicine is a different matter, and is NOT homeopathy as set out by Hahnemann - undiluted herbal extracts are herbal remedies. They are no more homeopathic than an aspirin.
Surprisingly this is exactly the same way modern vaccines work...
Yeah, stopped clocks are also right twice a day. That doesn't make them accurate.
Vaccines generally work by feeding a concentrated dose of viral particles, dead virus, or weakened virus, to provoke an immune response in the patient, which "primes" their immune system to be ready to respond to an attempted infection by that same virus in the future. They ACTUALLY put something into you that contains something other than water or alcohol - a measurable, detectable amount of a biologically active agent that has a measurable, detectable effect above the placebo effect in the patient.
Homeopathy says, "to cure fever chills and headaches, give them a remedy made from a substance that CAUSES fever, chills and aches, and dilute it to 30C for optimal potency." It is completely symptom based, and ignores the fact that literally HUNDREDS of substances will cause "fever, chills and aches" in healthy humans, and the cure for ONE illness can actually exacerbate the other. Furthermore, homeopathic doctrine specifically states that the MORE dilute a remedy is, the MORE potent it is. 30C is the "standard" dilution recommended by Hahnemann - a dilution so weak that "water memory" - some vague, indefinable, unscientific bullshit if I've ever heard it - is the only thing that homeopathic advocates can offer as a mechanism of action. A dilution so weak that it is wildly statistically improbable that a single molecule of your "remedy" still exists in the solution you've prepared.
The fourth and fifth sentences of that wikipedia article are actually more relevant:
Homeopathic remedies are prepared by repeatedly diluting a chosen substance in alcohol or distilled water, followed by forceful striking on an elastic body, called succussion. Each dilution followed by succussion is said to increase the remedy's potency.
This is how homeopathic remedies are prepared. There is no science here, there is nothing but quackery. If I injected you with sterile saline and called it a vaccine, you would get *exactly the same effect* as if I gave you a magical bit of voodoo water and called it a remedy - that is to say, NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER.
Actually if you carefully read my previous posts, you will realize: I no where stated, claimed or implied that homeopathy works.
Um. Yeah you did:
You obviously don't know how homeopathy works. Perhaps read up an article or a book about it?
Obviously you don't know how it works.
Unless by "how [it|homeopathy] works," you mean "it doesn't," then you are very strongly implying, claiming, and stating that "homeopathy works." Those are direct quotes from your own posts. Homeopathy DOES NOT WORK. It is voodoo and quackery of the first order. Any "cure" from a homeopathic remedy is created by the placebo effect, because homeopathic doctrine requires dilution of any "active agent" to the point where it is so statistically improbable for there to be a single molecule of the "remedy" in the remaining dilution that is administered to the sick person that you may as well just give them a sugar pill and tell them it's going to cure them for all the efficacy your remedy will have.
The first 3 or 4 sentences of the wikipedia article explain it perfectly.
This wikipedia article? Here's the first 3 sentences, reproduced for you to read, since you seem to have concluded they say something which would support your arguments that I don't understand homeopathy:
Homeopathy is a system of alternative medicine originated in 1796 by Samuel Hahnemann, based on his doctrine of similia similibus curentur ("like cures like"), according to which a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people will cure that disease in sick people. Scientific research has found homeopathic remedies ineffective and their postulated mechanisms of action implausible. Within the medical community homeopathy is generally considered quackery.
I'm not sure what I've said is inconsistent with that understanding of homeopathy.
And stuff like this: 30C is considered the "standard" for any homeopathic remedy - recommended by Hahnemann himself. is complete bullshit anyway, where did you get that from?
From the very same homeopathy article that you recommended I read, and I just linked above - clearly I read it more closely than you did:
Hahnemann advocated 30C dilutions for most purposes (that is, dilution by a factor of 1060). In Hahnemann's time, it was reasonable to assume the remedies could be diluted indefinitely, as the concept of the atom or molecule as the smallest possible unit of a chemical substance was just beginning to be recognized. The greatest dilution reasonably likely to contain even one molecule of the original substance is 12C.
Damn. I guess I'm better educated on this matter than you are! You keep claiming that everybody's wrong in their characterization of homeopathy, but you seem incapable of articulating how we're wrong. If you're upset that we're challenging your religion, I'm sorry for that - but don't claim your religion is a science if it's unable to stand up to even the most cursory scientific examination.
You did not correct his procedure. You repeated it... except for the "random shit";D now it is still shit, lol.
Yes, the version I corrected only really had minor wording problems - it was fundamentally correct. Guess you noticed that.
You know, at the time where flight was invented. No one knew how it works either.
You seem to be having trouble with the distinction between "something empirically works - we haven't figured out the equations describing the mechanism yet, but we're studying it via the scientific method of experimentation and observation," versus "something is asserted to work, but no evidence of efficacy has ever been observed above a baseline placebo effect."
In the first scenario, we know "flight is possible," because it's been observed in numerous natural systems, and can be generally explained (long before modern manned aviation, mind you) by Newtonian physics & Bernoulli's research. We can empirically demonstrate that it works, and devise scientific studies to discover how it works. And we largely have, as you can see by going to an airport. And we didn't develop manned flight in any appreciable way until long after Newton & Bernoulli BOTH gave us their observations - so we generally understood its principles LONG before planes were ever built.
In the second scenario, we're told "homeopathy totally works," except it's never been shown to work above a placebo level of effect, and every scientific study of the "medicine" has shown zero effectiveness in the treatments beyond that placebo effect. If all you're doing is offering people an expensive sugar pill, that is not "medicine," that is "quackery." The burden of proof is on you - numerous studies have shown zero effect beyond placebo. Can you point to any legitimate studies showing the effectiveness of homeopathic remedies that would justify the expense and ridiculous pageantry of homeopathic medicine? The most "sciencey" way to describe its function is that there's some sort of "water memory" that is actually the active ingredient, and that somehow "nanoparticles" are created in the water that alleviate the condition. Again - ridiculous notions that have no basis in fact, physics, or observable reality.
Just as a side question, if you have a C1 "solution", is that used as a medicine or only the C10 or C30 solution?
30C is considered the "standard" for any homeopathic remedy - recommended by Hahnemann himself. At that point, the original solution is so diluted that it's incredibly unlikely that any of the water molecules in your solution would have even come in *contact* with the original substance you were diluting. If you're just brewing willow tea to relieve some cramps, that's not homeopathy - that's herbal medicine, and entirely legitimate as a medical field of study - numerous medicines we have today were discovered from plants.
But if you take that herbal tea, dilute it to a 30C concentration, then what you've got is a cup full of distilled water, and odds are that you have absolutely nothing from the original tea you brewed in that dilution - in other words, you have a cup of water with no active ingredients and no therapeutic effects.
1: Put some shit dictated by your repertory or materia medica in a bottle. Set counter C to 0. 2: Dilute 100:1 with water. 3: Succuss bottle on some elastic surface to help that "water memory" to develop. 4: Increase C by 1. 5: GOTO step 2 until C is 30 (or whatever number you prefer.)
At the end of this procedure, you will still likely be unable to detect even a single molecule of "active ingredient" in the water, and you will still be left with a very expensive sugar pill. Homeopathy is grade A snake oil bullshit, friend. I'm sorry, but the ONLY benefit you get from it is the placebo effect - and you don't need expensive water to get that effect - belief is all that's required, and that comes free if you're credulous enough.
Even IF the medicines prescribed by the repertories were useful, homeopathy's dilution principles guarantees that no biologically significant amount of active ingredients will ever enter your system. Unless you have some actual science to show that this is more than a placebo effect, it's an argument you're going to lose.
I should have looked at the name I was responding to, shame on me for assuming that slashdot had more than one ignorant, self-important ass spouting inane drivel and calling it fact.
Only if you discount the English Channel, the 2-3 million soldiers (about 1-1.5 million of which were well-trained army forces), and the Royal Navy which would have absolutely devastated any German landing craft - since most of the german "landing craft" were flat bottomed barges, slow, largely unarmed, and largely unsuited for traversing the English channel - and the German's lack of air superiority, and the fact that Germany simply did not have the naval capacity to land the tens of thousands of troops and armor it would have taken to make a convincing attempt at establishing a beachhead, never mind the follow-on capacity to land the hundreds of thousands of troops and armor it would have taken to make a convincing march on London and hold even the 750 sq miles of London itself. When Churchill spoke of "fighting them on the beaches," he was actually being pretty literal - he expected (and had his generals plan for) street by street, town by town fight against any German forces, with the ~1.5million strong Home Guard and another 1-1.5m 'regular' forces opposing them every step of the way - blowing bridges, poisoning wells, mining roads, etc.
The Battle of Britain and the Blitz was intended to wear down the RAF and the British will to fight, and it never truly achieved that. Goring (directing the Luftwaffe at the time) was getting awful intelligence from his own advisors, and misjudged the size of the RAF, the production capacity of their plants, the effectiveness of his own pilots, and repeatedly thought he was close to achieving his goal of being able to steamroll the Royal Navy and Britain's industrial base unopposed by British air power - which would, he hoped, force them into surrendering.
Britain's resistance dragged out that process far longer than expected, and that made Hitler impatient. If they had kept up the pace of attacks they had launched during the Blitz, they would have been awful close to forcing that surrender, but the impatience and the cost of mounting an invasion (which they hadn't even planned fully until long after the French surrender) prompted Hitler to look east towards Russia instead, rather than being bogged down trying to conquer Britain with a limited naval capacity and no air superiority.
I'll once again act the direct question you ignored:
Also many dispute the assertion of past diseases being the same as current versions.
Then surely you can provide us with some examples of scientists disputing this?
It's a pretty simple question.
That's an odd assumption. Nobody ever studied it before him. Can you support that assumption? Because it must be true for your correction to be on topic.
It's not an assumption at all - it's fact. He isolated the bacteria in 1982. The disease itself was described in medical literature LONG before 1975, and its genes have been isolated from museum samples hundreds and thousands of years old. In other words - it existed in North America and Europe long before the any alleged disease "escape" from Plum Island.
Perhaps, since you're alleging that the pathogen was released from Plum Island, perhaps you can show that it was studied there, or show that the US government knew what the active agent was, or was studying it in any way, prior to 1975, or Burgdorfer isolating it in 1982.
Every disease has been around for a long time. The problem is we may not have the ability to look back in time.
Lucky for us this is one of the ones we DO have the ability to identify in centuries-old samples of ticks, mice, and humans. Making a general assertion that "sometimes we can't look back" is an inadequate argument to counter the fact that it's been found in multiple centuries-old samples.
I'll once again act the direct question you ignored:
Also many dispute the assertion of past diseases being the same as current versions.
Then surely you can provide us with some examples of scientists disputing this?
It's a pretty simple question.
Someone, somewhere had to study it in a lab to isolate the pathogen in 1982.
Yes, his name was Willy Burgdorfer, and that's why the microbe is named after him.
Diseases don't spontaneously jump thousands of miles
Nobody's claimed they did. It's a zoonotic infection, and it's VERY common for diseases like that to circulate in their animal reservoirs (mice & deer, in this case), until conditions line up just right for an outbreak. In this case, the tick that transmits it feeds on blood three times in its life, once for each phase. This means a tick, in order to infect someone, has to first feed on a mouse or a deer infected with the bacteria, and THEN feed on a human during a subsequent phase. Conditions have to line up properly for that to happen, and even being bitten by a tick, it generally requires a significant amount of undisturbed feeding time to transmit the disease - it's not a case where infection occurs the INSTANT a person is bitten - this is why tick checks are important, and effective, in reducing the likelihood of infection.
The genetic material from the North American strain of bacteria that causes Lyme disease has been found in museum specimens dating back to the 1800's, and according to Wikipedia, they found B. burgdorferi DNA in a 5300 year old mummified ice age hunter. There's a lot of evidence that the pathogen has been around for centuries.
Also many dispute the assertion of past diseases being the same as current versions.
Then surely you can provide us with some examples of scientists disputing this?
And even if it was, the US outbreak had to have come from somewhere.
Yes, it came from the natural animal reservoirs for the disease - mice and deer. As human developments encroach on woodlands and pastures where these animals live, more humans come in contact with the animals (and, as a result, their parasitic passengers). This is exactly how most zoonotic infections break out. A pathogen whose DNA has been found on hundreds and thousands of year old museum samples cannot have been "manufactured" exclusively at Plum Island in 1975.
Also - how could Plum Island have been "studying Lyme Disease" in 1975, when Lyme Disease was not identified as a tick-borne illness, with a bacterial cause isolated, until 1982? (Do you see how the sequence of these things is sort of important?)
And if it was transported here from abroad, then it would likely have been closer to a shipping port or international airport.
Researchers in Europe had seen numerous cases of "neurological problems after tick bites," and erythema migrans - the expanding "bullseye" lesion that is a hallmark of the disease - long before any outbreaks in 1975 in Connecticut. They didn't isolate the pathogen until 1982, but they were describing the disease and its components for decades:
Before 1976, elements of B. burgdorferi sensu lato infection were called or known as tick-borne meningopolyneuritis, Garin-Bujadoux syndrome, Bannwarth syndrome, Afzelius' disease, Montauk Knee or sheep tick fever. Since 1976 the disease is most often referred to as Lyme disease, Lyme borreliosis or simply borreliosis.
It's a vector borne disease - you can't pass it from human to human during normal contact, it requires the tick vector, and so it's quite easy to imagine that some infected mice were carried over into new england at some point (perhaps even as far back as the 1600's and 1700's colonization), and those mice found a welcoming habitat here in North America, where they began to spread, and the disease happily circulated in them as a reservoir for years, with cases of all of these syndromes cropping up over time but not being recognized as related to tick bites until the cases in Lyme, where researches connected the neurological issues with the erythema migrans they saw in their patients, and related it to the disease being described by their colleagues in Europe.
This is one case where Occam's Razor favors the conspiracy theory".
I'm more informed than you are, though you found the same site I did
Interesting you were able to find a breakdown, considering no record is kept of voice votes in the House. Care to share your source? CAN you share your source, or is it more made up shit from FantasyConspiracyLand?
Care to explain how your numbers add up at all? During the 109th Congress, at the time this bill was passed (early December 2006), there were 232 Republican Representatives, 202 Democrat Representatives, and 1 Independent, with 3 seats Vacant. Your numbers suggest that there were 189 Republicans, 238 Democrats, and 0 independents participating in the vote. Now, maybe a bunch of Republicans got lazy and stayed home and missed the vote, but where the FUCK did the Democrats come up with 36 more votes than they had representatives?
At the end of the 109th Congress, there were 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats, and 2 Independents. At the start, there were 55 Republicans, 45 Democrats, 0 independents. No matter WHEN this vote was taken, it is impossible for the 53 Democrats you suggest voted on the bill to have voted. In addition, the *official vote tally* indicates that the Senate passed it *unanimously* - which means, NOBODY voted against it. Which means, your numbers are completely wrong.
You are claiming that they all "fought against it," when they demonstrably did not. Not even a majority of them did. In fact none of them, including our current President, voted against it in the Senate. Why would they? The Postal Worker's Union *also* supported the plan. When you start trotting out bullshit partisan politics that bears no resemblance to the way things actually played out in demonstrable fact, you can expect to be corrected. I know that here at slashdot we're supposed to be post-modern and not care about "facts" and "figures," and instead we should seek to affirm one another's self esteem and provide a loving space where everybody's feelings are respected, but seriously? Fuck that in the ear - if you want to talk bullshit, expect to hear some corrections.
It was the Republicans who voted for the law, while most Democrats opposed it.
Are you joking, lying, or just completely ignorant?
The PAEA changed how the Postal Service would be allowed to handle the retirement benefits. It was passed in 2006, and was brought before Congress by Republican Tom Davis. It passed the House of Representatives by a voice vote, and passed the Senate with unanimous approval.
In the 109th Congress, Republicans held a fairly slim majority in both houses. There were 48 Democrats in the Senate (none of whom registered an objection - they gave unanimous approval); there were 202 Democrats in the House (few, if any of whom registered an objection if it passed by voice vote);
And this dastardly Republican corruption of justice and our beloved Postal Service was co-sponsored by Rep. Davis' fellow neocon Republithugs: -- Republican John McHugh of New York; -- Democrat Henry Waxman of California; -- Democrat Danny Davis of Illinois;
Clearly, it's all a Republican plot, and the poor beleaguered Democrats who fought against this tooth and nail were simply steamrolled on this issue! No friend, make no mistake about it - if the Republicans are "setting them up to fail," the Democrats are happily providing the soundtrack.
Everybody assumes because they don't get much important mail that nobody else must get important mail, either - that's why you see comments like this about "nobody needing mail service more than once a week." But surely a middle ground exists between "once a week" and "every day" that would also allow the USPS to save a little money?
Given the increasingly electronic nature of things like this, I think the USPS could probably explore: 1) Any address gets service 3 days a week; each carrier could service 2 different routes in a week, on alternating days (e.g., Mon/Wed/Fri, or Tues/Thurs/Sat):
-- If you absolutely MUST receive something on a non-delivery day, pick it up at the post office, or just... wait until tomorrow. Very few things sent by post are *that* urgent that you couldn't wait one extra day for regular service to deliver it;
-- Cut the number of carriers in half - since you only do half the existing routes on any given day, you don't need as many carriers;
-- For absolutely time-critical shipping, subcontract with a service like FedEx or UPS to handle the local delivery of specific packages on non-delivery days; 2) Offer a "pro" plan to opt out of the advertising (just like you can do with apps and online services)... I would pay a reasonable amount of money to have my mail service (and my mailbox) not cluttered up by a bunch of useless crap advertising that I never look at. I understand that the ads help subsidize the low cost of mail, so I would be willing to help offset that lost revenue, if they offered a service that would exempt my mailbox from the advertising b.s. and save a tree or ten... I suspect they could find a few other people who would be willing to pay this, as well.
As people are increasingly connected and things move increasingly to being done online/electronically, I think the migration to once a week service (or even longer intervals) is pretty inevitable. But it need not be "daily delivery today, monthly delivery tomorrow," either - it can be phased in over many years as / if demand tapers so that people and companies have a chance to adjust.
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Absolutely; the information in the black box MIGHT still require a warrant for them to legally access it and use it against you in a court case, but this is a question of due process while collecting evidence - a 4th, not 5th, amendment issue. There's no question that collecting this data would be gathering evidence, rather than "compelling testimony."
Just like browser history doesn't "violate your 5th amendment rights" - the technology enables a historical record of operation, and it is accessible to police, given a specific set of circumstances and rules. Even if you delete your local caches, the police can still subpoena records from Google, your ISP, etc. I'll totally agree with people concerned about the implications of this technology that the police can't (!shouldn't!) be able to access it on a whim, or for a fishing expedition - but they absolutely SHOULD be able to access it with a properly granted search warrant or subpoena.
No, beyond a reasonable doubt. Beyond a shadow of a doubt is a MUCH higher standard of proof, which means that they must show there is NO DOUBT whatsoever that you are completely guilty of the crime - i.e., in-vehicle video & audio recording showing someone saying, "HAHA LOOK AT THE KID IN THE ROAD, I'M GONNA KILL HIM!" Combined with testimony of a passenger stating that you said the same thing, and deliberately ran down the kid in the road.
Reasonable doubt says that the case presented must be such that a "reasonable" person would conclude you are guilty of the crime. And that's a whole lot muddier when you've got a photogenic 14 year old dead with no history of any wrongdoing and tearful parents who will go, 'he's NEVER done drugs, NEVER, he was such a good kid!', and a guy who perhaps has a history of some "smearable" offense that can be introduced in court to make him look like a monster.
The black box supported his claims that he was not driving negligently - not exceeding the speed limit, braked properly, belted in, etc. etc. - in other words, that he was operating his vehicle in accordance with standard best practices and safety regulations. This has a direct bearing on the outcome of the case - it's not hard for the prosecution to argue "he was probably speeding!" or "he was probably driving in an unsafe manner!" - and with the black box data, he can say "no, no I wasn't," and support that with evidence.
Correct. Properly collected evidence is absolutely NOT "self incrimination."
If the police violate your privacy by searching your home and seizing a blood-soaked shirt from your closet, that evidence should be thrown out on account of illegal search and seizure - a violation of due process.
If the police get a valid warrant to search your home, and during that search, find a blood-soaked shirt in your closet, then that evidence would absolutely be admissible in court as evidence against you in a murder trial.
Proper collection of physical evidence is not compelling you to testify against yourself, and so the "self incrimination" argument is legally moot. The proper argument here is about the circumstances under which a police agency can access and collect the data, and use it against you. And there SHOULD be strict and well-defined rules govering this. But in no way is it a fifth amendment issue.
Reductio ad absurdam - unfortunately for your point, a pragmatist would recognize the idiocy of committing suicide in order to dry his hands.
A pragmatist - in REALITY - would say, "I'll shake my hands briskly to remove as much excess moisture as I can, and then perhaps wipe them on the leg of my pants or my shirt." A pragmatist would NOT say, "I need to assemble a solar-powered hand dryer using only the materials available to me on this rooftop, then leave it behind when I go for other people to use it, and launch a worldwide campaign to install a hand dryer on every roof of every building, everywhere!"
A pragmatist would either print a hard copy for future reference and safe keeping, or dump the relevant information out to a plain text file and files that away so he could access it later. It is not pragmatic to embark on a crusade to change the entire software industry to support standards that will magically protect everybody, somehow, in the future. Shit gets old and obsolete. A pragmatist deals with that fact by saying, "Well what's the longest-lived format I can think of and use?" (hard copy printout, or text-file dump.) An idealist deals with this fact by launching the Long Now project and its affiliates, to ensure that mankind in the future has access to the numerous digital resources and cultural artifacts produced today.
Which he has. He will - grudgingly - use non-free software when he has to, and he will bitch about it the whole time, kicking and screaming and fighting it. His move to a 'completely free' computer that you referenced also comes at tremendous sacrifice in the number of things that he can accomplish with his computer. He has chosen his ideals over practical efficiency - in other words, he is an idealist, not a pragmatist. His many semantic quibbles with other Open Source / Free Software people (Open Source vs. Free Software... GNU/Linux vs. Linux... slagging off on Canonical for their misdeeds here... i'm sure you've heard numerous others, I know I have) is also indicative of his "scorched earth" view - if you do not agree with him, you are wrong, evil, immoral, and, if not ACTUALLY the enemy, certainly lending aid and comfort to him.
Don't misunderstand me - I respect him for walking the walk when it comes to his ideals. But trying to call him a "pragmatist" where Free Software is concerned is pretty silly by any stretch of the imagination.
In fact, a pragmatist is one who cares very little for the future, so what you're really saying is, "an idealist is a pragmatist who is the opposite of a pragmatist."
A = B = !B is not a logically coherent construction, as A cannot be both "B" and "Not B" in reality.
A pragmatist is concerned with the actual, practicability of an idea - how well it suits or reflects our current understanding of reality. It is far less concerned with "possible future ramifications that may come to pass, given a complex series of likely or unlikely events."
A pragmatist would say, "well, this isn't the best solution out of all possible ideal solutions, but it is practical, it is workable, and we can implement it now, and iterate improvements to it over time as resources allow." An idealist would engage in the scorched earth policy of saying, "If we can't have it our way from top to bottom, then it's all evil, and we should have nothing to do with it, and reject it on principle."
I invite you to consider which response would be more likely from RMS, and then consider why you're trying to define him as something that is almost a polar opposite to the way his writings, speech, and ideals suggest.
Depends on the environment - anaerobes don't do well in oxygen-rich environments, but then, the atmosphere of Mars isn't exactly oxygen rich, and not all anaerobic bacteria are obligate anaerobes.
If the bacteria couldn't complete the job, then you'd dry out and mummify over time, leaving behind something that probably resembles Ötzi the Iceman. Of course, the body would still be subjected to the minimal weathering effects if left sitting unattended on the surface, so abrasion from dust moving around on the surface would take a toll over many years, too.
Likely you'd be some sort of mummified humanoid shape for thousands of years, with weathering taking a slow toll on the mummified remains.
I don't think anybody has claimed that they "can beat the laws of physics". That doesn't mean that they haven't developed a way that is more efficient than other methods so far. This argument is sort of like saying "can't go faster than the speed of light, so why bother building a faster jet?"
And Apple claims that their device will charge "up to about a meter" away from the device. If that's true, then based on what you've just said, I suspect they've come up with a novel and non-obvious method for efficiently charging/delivering power over longer distances than the "few inches" you've described - which would be a completely legitimate and valid thing to grant them a patent for.
Because it actively prevents "the little guy" from having any legal protection whatsoever. Because it tells the little guy, "Don't bother to try innovating, if you want to do R&D, you better do it in the lab of a giant multinational." Because there are plenty of counterexamples where a "little guy" has invented something and been able to extract licensing fees from "the big guys" as a result of patents that the "little guy" owns. But it seems that now that Apple is suing Samsung, we have to immediately stop all patents, right now, no matter how stupid or misguided the replacement system we've designed is.
I know that it's cool to hate on the patent system here on Slashdot, but this proposal is *actively worse* than the current system. It does NOTHING to prevent "bad" patents from getting in - the big guys have the pockets and legal team to continue pushing the applications through, and they'll end up fighting each other in court anyway. All it does is tell the "little guys," "just go home, don't try to invent something new."
It is, according to this article, a different approach:
It goes on to say:
Like you, I don't know enough about the field to properly judge, but it does sound like they're using a different approach (NFMR instead of induction) to produce the power, and that this NFMR device will create a charging "zone," which could possibly deliver enough power to charge/power a desktop's worth of accessories during normal use - keyboard, mouse, phone, etc. Is it "novel" enough to patent? The USPTO obviously thought so. Whether or not it's a "good" solution, it does seem to at least be *different* than what the current wireless charging techniques are using.
And in what way does this fix ("you want a patent? Great, the fee is $5 million, we take cash or bank check, no personal checks please!") not "fuck over the little guy"?
The "little guy" doesn't have a few million dollars laying around to spend on ramming his patent application through. Your proposed "fix" would simply enshrine the notion that unless you're a big multinational with a billion dollar bankroll, you can't innovate, so don't even bother.
While I agree that patents are probably too easily granted, your proposed solution doesn't really do much to foster innovation and open the field up to "the little guy." Every little guy without a giant bankroll will automatically be at a disadvantage.
The proposed mechanism of "water memory" is that the hydrogen bonds between molecules impose some sort of small scale order reflecting the "shape" of the remedies molecules. Please explain how something that has only been exhibited to last for fractions of a nanosecond persists for the minutes or hours or days or weeks between creation of the homeopathic remedy and its administration. You can't claim "yes it does" if you can't demonstrate that it exists on time scales required for it to be the mechanism by which your medication works.
No, this is exactly what homeopathy is about. Homeopathy =/= "herbal medicine." The principles of homeopathy fly in the face of established physical and medical sciences, and require us to actively suspend the things we know about medicine in order to believe that they work. Medicines do not get more potent by being diluted to the point where there is no "remedy" left in the solution - this is a CENTRAL, fundamental, principle of homeopathy. Water does not retain some "memory" of molecules it has been in contact with in any time frame which would make it possible for "water memory" to be the functional mechanism. And repeated studies have shown homeopathic remedies to have no better results and efficacy than the placebo effect - there is no science which supports homeopathy.
I'm curious why you keep trying to define homeopathic remedies as "not diluted solutions," when *everything* written by Hahnemann and other proponents of homeopathy say that the diluted solutions we've been discussing are the gold standard of homeopathic remedies. The move of homeopaths to embrace "herbal medicine" is a move by homeopaths to co-opt another alternative medicine to bolster their own lack of credibility.
Homeopathy deserves no credence as a science, because it has no basis in science, and has no support in science. It is not an observable or measurable phenomenon, and any 'successes' attributed to it are the operation of the well documented placebo effect. Herbal medicine is a different matter, and is NOT homeopathy as set out by Hahnemann - undiluted herbal extracts are herbal remedies. They are no more homeopathic than an aspirin.
Yeah, stopped clocks are also right twice a day. That doesn't make them accurate.
Vaccines generally work by feeding a concentrated dose of viral particles, dead virus, or weakened virus, to provoke an immune response in the patient, which "primes" their immune system to be ready to respond to an attempted infection by that same virus in the future. They ACTUALLY put something into you that contains something other than water or alcohol - a measurable, detectable amount of a biologically active agent that has a measurable, detectable effect above the placebo effect in the patient.
Homeopathy says, "to cure fever chills and headaches, give them a remedy made from a substance that CAUSES fever, chills and aches, and dilute it to 30C for optimal potency." It is completely symptom based, and ignores the fact that literally HUNDREDS of substances will cause "fever, chills and aches" in healthy humans, and the cure for ONE illness can actually exacerbate the other. Furthermore, homeopathic doctrine specifically states that the MORE dilute a remedy is, the MORE potent it is. 30C is the "standard" dilution recommended by Hahnemann - a dilution so weak that "water memory" - some vague, indefinable, unscientific bullshit if I've ever heard it - is the only thing that homeopathic advocates can offer as a mechanism of action. A dilution so weak that it is wildly statistically improbable that a single molecule of your "remedy" still exists in the solution you've prepared.
The fourth and fifth sentences of that wikipedia article are actually more relevant:
This is how homeopathic remedies are prepared. There is no science here, there is nothing but quackery. If I injected you with sterile saline and called it a vaccine, you would get *exactly the same effect* as if I gave you a magical bit of voodoo water and called it a remedy - that is to say, NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER.
Um. Yeah you did:
Unless by "how [it|homeopathy] works," you mean "it doesn't," then you are very strongly implying, claiming, and stating that "homeopathy works." Those are direct quotes from your own posts. Homeopathy DOES NOT WORK. It is voodoo and quackery of the first order. Any "cure" from a homeopathic remedy is created by the placebo effect, because homeopathic doctrine requires dilution of any "active agent" to the point where it is so statistically improbable for there to be a single molecule of the "remedy" in the remaining dilution that is administered to the sick person that you may as well just give them a sugar pill and tell them it's going to cure them for all the efficacy your remedy will have.
This wikipedia article? Here's the first 3 sentences, reproduced for you to read, since you seem to have concluded they say something which would support your arguments that I don't understand homeopathy:
I'm not sure what I've said is inconsistent with that understanding of homeopathy.
From the very same homeopathy article that you recommended I read, and I just linked above - clearly I read it more closely than you did:
Damn. I guess I'm better educated on this matter than you are! You keep claiming that everybody's wrong in their characterization of homeopathy, but you seem incapable of articulating how we're wrong. If you're upset that we're challenging your religion, I'm sorry for that - but don't claim your religion is a science if it's unable to stand up to even the most cursory scientific examination.
Yes, the version I corrected only really had minor wording problems - it was fundamentally correct. Guess you noticed that.
You seem to be having trouble with the distinction between "something empirically works - we haven't figured out the equations describing the mechanism yet, but we're studying it via the scientific method of experimentation and observation," versus "something is asserted to work, but no evidence of efficacy has ever been observed above a baseline placebo effect."
In the first scenario, we know "flight is possible," because it's been observed in numerous natural systems, and can be generally explained (long before modern manned aviation, mind you) by Newtonian physics & Bernoulli's research. We can empirically demonstrate that it works, and devise scientific studies to discover how it works. And we largely have, as you can see by going to an airport. And we didn't develop manned flight in any appreciable way until long after Newton & Bernoulli BOTH gave us their observations - so we generally understood its principles LONG before planes were ever built.
In the second scenario, we're told "homeopathy totally works," except it's never been shown to work above a placebo level of effect, and every scientific study of the "medicine" has shown zero effectiveness in the treatments beyond that placebo effect. If all you're doing is offering people an expensive sugar pill, that is not "medicine," that is "quackery." The burden of proof is on you - numerous studies have shown zero effect beyond placebo. Can you point to any legitimate studies showing the effectiveness of homeopathic remedies that would justify the expense and ridiculous pageantry of homeopathic medicine? The most "sciencey" way to describe its function is that there's some sort of "water memory" that is actually the active ingredient, and that somehow "nanoparticles" are created in the water that alleviate the condition. Again - ridiculous notions that have no basis in fact, physics, or observable reality.
30C is considered the "standard" for any homeopathic remedy - recommended by Hahnemann himself. At that point, the original solution is so diluted that it's incredibly unlikely that any of the water molecules in your solution would have even come in *contact* with the original substance you were diluting. If you're just brewing willow tea to relieve some cramps, that's not homeopathy - that's herbal medicine, and entirely legitimate as a medical field of study - numerous medicines we have today were discovered from plants.
But if you take that herbal tea, dilute it to a 30C concentration, then what you've got is a cup full of distilled water, and odds are that you have absolutely nothing from the original tea you brewed in that dilution - in other words, you have a cup of water with no active ingredients and no therapeutic effects.
I'll take a stab at correcting his procedure:
1: Put some shit dictated by your repertory or materia medica in a bottle. Set counter C to 0.
2: Dilute 100:1 with water.
3: Succuss bottle on some elastic surface to help that "water memory" to develop.
4: Increase C by 1.
5: GOTO step 2 until C is 30 (or whatever number you prefer.)
At the end of this procedure, you will still likely be unable to detect even a single molecule of "active ingredient" in the water, and you will still be left with a very expensive sugar pill. Homeopathy is grade A snake oil bullshit, friend. I'm sorry, but the ONLY benefit you get from it is the placebo effect - and you don't need expensive water to get that effect - belief is all that's required, and that comes free if you're credulous enough.
Even IF the medicines prescribed by the repertories were useful, homeopathy's dilution principles guarantees that no biologically significant amount of active ingredients will ever enter your system. Unless you have some actual science to show that this is more than a placebo effect, it's an argument you're going to lose.
Don't flatter yourself.
I should have looked at the name I was responding to, shame on me for assuming that slashdot had more than one ignorant, self-important ass spouting inane drivel and calling it fact.
Only if you discount the English Channel, the 2-3 million soldiers (about 1-1.5 million of which were well-trained army forces), and the Royal Navy which would have absolutely devastated any German landing craft - since most of the german "landing craft" were flat bottomed barges, slow, largely unarmed, and largely unsuited for traversing the English channel - and the German's lack of air superiority, and the fact that Germany simply did not have the naval capacity to land the tens of thousands of troops and armor it would have taken to make a convincing attempt at establishing a beachhead, never mind the follow-on capacity to land the hundreds of thousands of troops and armor it would have taken to make a convincing march on London and hold even the 750 sq miles of London itself. When Churchill spoke of "fighting them on the beaches," he was actually being pretty literal - he expected (and had his generals plan for) street by street, town by town fight against any German forces, with the ~1.5million strong Home Guard and another 1-1.5m 'regular' forces opposing them every step of the way - blowing bridges, poisoning wells, mining roads, etc.
The Battle of Britain and the Blitz was intended to wear down the RAF and the British will to fight, and it never truly achieved that. Goring (directing the Luftwaffe at the time) was getting awful intelligence from his own advisors, and misjudged the size of the RAF, the production capacity of their plants, the effectiveness of his own pilots, and repeatedly thought he was close to achieving his goal of being able to steamroll the Royal Navy and Britain's industrial base unopposed by British air power - which would, he hoped, force them into surrendering.
Britain's resistance dragged out that process far longer than expected, and that made Hitler impatient. If they had kept up the pace of attacks they had launched during the Blitz, they would have been awful close to forcing that surrender, but the impatience and the cost of mounting an invasion (which they hadn't even planned fully until long after the French surrender) prompted Hitler to look east towards Russia instead, rather than being bogged down trying to conquer Britain with a limited naval capacity and no air superiority.
I'll once again act the direct question you ignored:
It's a pretty simple question.
It's not an assumption at all - it's fact. He isolated the bacteria in 1982. The disease itself was described in medical literature LONG before 1975, and its genes have been isolated from museum samples hundreds and thousands of years old. In other words - it existed in North America and Europe long before the any alleged disease "escape" from Plum Island.
Perhaps, since you're alleging that the pathogen was released from Plum Island, perhaps you can show that it was studied there, or show that the US government knew what the active agent was, or was studying it in any way, prior to 1975, or Burgdorfer isolating it in 1982.
Lucky for us this is one of the ones we DO have the ability to identify in centuries-old samples of ticks, mice, and humans. Making a general assertion that "sometimes we can't look back" is an inadequate argument to counter the fact that it's been found in multiple centuries-old samples.
I'll once again act the direct question you ignored:
It's a pretty simple question.
Yes, his name was Willy Burgdorfer, and that's why the microbe is named after him.
Nobody's claimed they did. It's a zoonotic infection, and it's VERY common for diseases like that to circulate in their animal reservoirs (mice & deer, in this case), until conditions line up just right for an outbreak. In this case, the tick that transmits it feeds on blood three times in its life, once for each phase. This means a tick, in order to infect someone, has to first feed on a mouse or a deer infected with the bacteria, and THEN feed on a human during a subsequent phase. Conditions have to line up properly for that to happen, and even being bitten by a tick, it generally requires a significant amount of undisturbed feeding time to transmit the disease - it's not a case where infection occurs the INSTANT a person is bitten - this is why tick checks are important, and effective, in reducing the likelihood of infection.
The genetic material from the North American strain of bacteria that causes Lyme disease has been found in museum specimens dating back to the 1800's, and according to Wikipedia, they found B. burgdorferi DNA in a 5300 year old mummified ice age hunter. There's a lot of evidence that the pathogen has been around for centuries.
Then surely you can provide us with some examples of scientists disputing this?
Yes, it came from the natural animal reservoirs for the disease - mice and deer. As human developments encroach on woodlands and pastures where these animals live, more humans come in contact with the animals (and, as a result, their parasitic passengers). This is exactly how most zoonotic infections break out. A pathogen whose DNA has been found on hundreds and thousands of year old museum samples cannot have been "manufactured" exclusively at Plum Island in 1975.
Also - how could Plum Island have been "studying Lyme Disease" in 1975, when Lyme Disease was not identified as a tick-borne illness, with a bacterial cause isolated, until 1982? (Do you see how the sequence of these things is sort of important?)
Researchers in Europe had seen numerous cases of "neurological problems after tick bites," and erythema migrans - the expanding "bullseye" lesion that is a hallmark of the disease - long before any outbreaks in 1975 in Connecticut. They didn't isolate the pathogen until 1982, but they were describing the disease and its components for decades:
It's a vector borne disease - you can't pass it from human to human during normal contact, it requires the tick vector, and so it's quite easy to imagine that some infected mice were carried over into new england at some point (perhaps even as far back as the 1600's and 1700's colonization), and those mice found a welcoming habitat here in North America, where they began to spread, and the disease happily circulated in them as a reservoir for years, with cases of all of these syndromes cropping up over time but not being recognized as related to tick bites until the cases in Lyme, where researches connected the neurological issues with the erythema migrans they saw in their patients, and related it to the disease being described by their colleagues in Europe.
Props for the retraction.
No blood, no foul. I'll apologize in kind for going straight to the flamethrower when a gentle correction probably would have sufficed.
Now we can get back to affirming each other's self esteem in a loving and safe environment. :)
Interesting you were able to find a breakdown, considering no record is kept of voice votes in the House. Care to share your source? CAN you share your source, or is it more made up shit from FantasyConspiracyLand?
Care to explain how your numbers add up at all? During the 109th Congress, at the time this bill was passed (early December 2006), there were 232 Republican Representatives, 202 Democrat Representatives, and 1 Independent, with 3 seats Vacant. Your numbers suggest that there were 189 Republicans, 238 Democrats, and 0 independents participating in the vote. Now, maybe a bunch of Republicans got lazy and stayed home and missed the vote, but where the FUCK did the Democrats come up with 36 more votes than they had representatives?
At the end of the 109th Congress, there were 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats, and 2 Independents. At the start, there were 55 Republicans, 45 Democrats, 0 independents. No matter WHEN this vote was taken, it is impossible for the 53 Democrats you suggest voted on the bill to have voted. In addition, the *official vote tally* indicates that the Senate passed it *unanimously* - which means, NOBODY voted against it. Which means, your numbers are completely wrong.
You are claiming that they all "fought against it," when they demonstrably did not. Not even a majority of them did. In fact none of them, including our current President, voted against it in the Senate. Why would they? The Postal Worker's Union *also* supported the plan. When you start trotting out bullshit partisan politics that bears no resemblance to the way things actually played out in demonstrable fact, you can expect to be corrected. I know that here at slashdot we're supposed to be post-modern and not care about "facts" and "figures," and instead we should seek to affirm one another's self esteem and provide a loving space where everybody's feelings are respected, but seriously? Fuck that in the ear - if you want to talk bullshit, expect to hear some corrections.
Are you joking, lying, or just completely ignorant?
The PAEA changed how the Postal Service would be allowed to handle the retirement benefits. It was passed in 2006, and was brought before Congress by Republican Tom Davis. It passed the House of Representatives by a voice vote, and passed the Senate with unanimous approval.
In the 109th Congress, Republicans held a fairly slim majority in both houses. There were 48 Democrats in the Senate (none of whom registered an objection - they gave unanimous approval); there were 202 Democrats in the House (few, if any of whom registered an objection if it passed by voice vote);
And this dastardly Republican corruption of justice and our beloved Postal Service was co-sponsored by Rep. Davis' fellow neocon Republithugs:
-- Republican John McHugh of New York;
-- Democrat Henry Waxman of California;
-- Democrat Danny Davis of Illinois;
Clearly, it's all a Republican plot, and the poor beleaguered Democrats who fought against this tooth and nail were simply steamrolled on this issue! No friend, make no mistake about it - if the Republicans are "setting them up to fail," the Democrats are happily providing the soundtrack.
Everybody assumes because they don't get much important mail that nobody else must get important mail, either - that's why you see comments like this about "nobody needing mail service more than once a week." But surely a middle ground exists between "once a week" and "every day" that would also allow the USPS to save a little money?
Given the increasingly electronic nature of things like this, I think the USPS could probably explore:
1) Any address gets service 3 days a week; each carrier could service 2 different routes in a week, on alternating days (e.g., Mon/Wed/Fri, or Tues/Thurs/Sat):
-- If you absolutely MUST receive something on a non-delivery day, pick it up at the post office, or just... wait until tomorrow. Very few things sent by post are *that* urgent that you couldn't wait one extra day for regular service to deliver it;
-- Cut the number of carriers in half - since you only do half the existing routes on any given day, you don't need as many carriers;
-- For absolutely time-critical shipping, subcontract with a service like FedEx or UPS to handle the local delivery of specific packages on non-delivery days;
2) Offer a "pro" plan to opt out of the advertising (just like you can do with apps and online services)... I would pay a reasonable amount of money to have my mail service (and my mailbox) not cluttered up by a bunch of useless crap advertising that I never look at. I understand that the ads help subsidize the low cost of mail, so I would be willing to help offset that lost revenue, if they offered a service that would exempt my mailbox from the advertising b.s. and save a tree or ten... I suspect they could find a few other people who would be willing to pay this, as well.
As people are increasingly connected and things move increasingly to being done online/electronically, I think the migration to once a week service (or even longer intervals) is pretty inevitable. But it need not be "daily delivery today, monthly delivery tomorrow," either - it can be phased in over many years as / if demand tapers so that people and companies have a chance to adjust.