Isn't freedom what you want to do. How come you imposing your culture's point of view on another culture freedom.
See, this right here is why all the apologists sound like idiots. Yes, freedom is what you want to do. No, freedom is not what "your culture" forces you to do. If I step in and tell your neighbours that they can't murder you for wearing a dress, I'm not "imposing my cultures point of view" - I'm giving you the freedom to decide what you want to do.
How in the world can you have it so completely ass-backwards?
I was not aware of the texture of squirrel shit. Thanks.
"nutty" isn't a texture.
My point was clear, and it was about trust.
That's nice. You must have missed the part where I said "nobody is paying attention to your point because you come across as nuttier than squirrel shit".
Personal attacks and blaming the victim is easy isn't it? Actually picking apart the arguments is a little harder....
Nah, it's quite easy. From what little I actually read of your diatribe, your objection is one giant emotionally-fueled ad-hominem argument. "I don't trust X because they're Y therefore Z is wrong". It tells us nothing about the science behind the subject being discussed; it only tells us about your personal shortcomings. Personally, I don't give a shit who you trust; if you're willing to risk your life and the lives of your spawn because you're upset with the FDA, that's your problem.
The problem is that setting up a web site to do this is expensive - there are data subscriptions and a lot of coding involved.... What to do? Beats me.
Create a (federal) government run site to manage sales-tax related data, and offer an API that can easily integrate with all major services. The coding required for individual vendors would be minimal - when the user clicks the "checkout" button, create a connection to the API requesting the most recent applicable tax rates for the customers address, and apply them to the total. Even a script kiddie could slap together the required code in about 5 minutes. Larger sites could store a local cache of the entire tax database to minimize latency and unneccessary overhead, while smaller vendors would use the simpler approach. For even easier integration, paypal and similar payment-sites could compute the taxes automatically if the vendor requests it.
I'm not saying that this is neccessarily the ideal solution, but it's certainly not an insurmountable problem.
That's why I said family/tribe. We live "too long" as is; I'm assuming that there's some advantage to having your grandparents kicking around.
In more primitive societies (ie. small tribes) there certainly would be. However, in such societies your grandfather might be only 30 years older than you, and dead from a rock to the head or a tooth infection before he hits 50. And, really, most tribal societies had "elders" rather than "grandparent" - if your particular grandparent died it wouldn't matter much since the "elders" served as advisors and teachers for the entire tribe. Too many elders might have been just as bad as too few; you run into the problem of diminishing returns, where you have to invest more and more effort into feeding and caring for them, while getting less and less of a return with each new individual. So I really don't think cancer would have been a huge issue.
An advantage in modern society, though? I'm not so sure. I don't want to come across as callous, but, if anything, a dead grandfather might be more of an advantage because he left you that really cool car in which you impregnated half the cheerleading squad. I appreciate my grandparents, and love having them around, but I don't see any great survival/breeding advantage to having surviving elders in modern society.
Aside from you being an asshole, you missed my point entirely.
You need to realize that nobody is paying attention to your point because you come across as nuttier than squirrel shit. Personally, I didn't make it past the 2nd paragraph of your diatribe. I'd be quite surprised if a significant number of readers had gotten even that far.
if it were "simple", random chance should have stumbled across it over time, and THAT would spread through the population because it confers a survival advantage for your family/tribe
Not really. Cancer rarely occurs early in life. For most of human history, you would have died well before cancer had a chance to finish you off. Even now it mostly occurs late enough in life that it doesn't affect reproduction. Ergo, the evolutionary advantage would be weak-to-non-existent, meaning the mutations might have no better odds of spreading than what would be expected from pure chance.
One day this talk of the Singularity and downloading our minds into machines will be viewed the way we currently view alchemy and orgone healing boxes.
âoeFirst they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.â
Mahatma Gandhi
That only works for guys in diapers who get daily enemas from teenage girls, apparently. For us regular folks, it's more along the lines of "First they ignore you, then they shoot you".
Why would the invasion at that time take place if no one believed that particular state had anything to do with or were preparing for attacks on other states?
See, now that's a strawman argument. You don't get to change the original claim and pretend I was objecting to your modified version.
I'd hazard you have no evidence that the invasion would have occurred had the list not been believed. Am I wrong?
I'm guessing you don't have any evidence that Einstein wouldn't have come up with Relativity if he had been born retarded. Am I wrong?
Asking me to provide evidence in a what-if scenario is asinine. You can ask me to explain my reasoning, if you like, but if you're asking for evidence then either you don't understand what that word means, or you're being a dick and intentionally asking for the impossible.
We have evidence that heads of states (ours) kept trumpeting lies after they had been made aware of were lies to their citizens to eventually invade a state that had nothing to do with the initial cause of fear.
No, you don't, but it's irrelevant to what I said. I'm not sure why the "OMG DA BUSH IS EEEVIL!" crowd feel it necessary to go off on a long-winded diatribe at the slightest provocation. All I said is that he had no basis for implying that the invasion of Iraq would have been averted if the things he listed had not been believed by the general public. 90% of your comment has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. I don't give a damn what you think you have evidence of; if you disagree with the singular claim that I made, then explain your reasoning and let's discuss it. Don't pull out your laundry-list of talking points and start doing your version of the Gish Gallop.
So, in other words, you agree that yellowcake uranium was found in, and removed from, Iraq. Good to see that I'm not the only one around here who knows wtf is going on. Not sure why you had to write 4 paragraphs in order to agree with me, but thanks, anyway.
I'd rather have the data go through random computers than ones controlled by corporations.
Then you're a fool. There's really no other way to put it. If you'd rather put yourself at the mercy of millions of people who have no oversight and no incentive to not abuse you, than at the mercy of a handful of large bodies which are monitored by users, experts, and competitors, you are a naive idiot, and I am shocked that you've managed to survive past your pubescent years. It's much more likely that you're simply trolling.
Thanks for that:) I'd never heard of that story until now, and I got quite a good laugh after looking it up.
Unfortunately, pain only works on the individual. It's entirely possible for an entire society (or a subset) to carry on having delusional beliefs which cause pain and suffering for countless members, as long as that pain and suffering doesn't affect their ability to procreate and compete. Evolution doesn't necessarily weed out stupid beliefs.
"Proof" here means evidence of a certain level of safety or confidence.
That's all fine and good, as long as we're operating on your definition of "proof". But it's not you that we're trying to convince, so your definition is largely irrelevant in this discussion. What matters is what the opposition means when they say they want "proof".
It is. Or if not prove, at least demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt.
There's a big difference there. You can't prove a negative, just like you can't prove the non-existence of something. To use our favorite analogy: I can't prove that a god doesn't exist; the best I can do is look at the god you posit, and demonstrate that it's unlikely to exist. Replace "god" with "unicorn", "leperchaun", "santa", or "autism causing vaccine" as required. With vaccines, we showed that removing mercury from them did not lead to a reduction in autism rates - in fact, the rates were completely unaffected. The reasonable conclusion based on that data is that mercury in vaccines does not cause autism, but it doesn't "prove" that vaccines do not cause autism.
How many thousands have died needlessly because of the knee jerk reactions to falsified claims of Iraq's connection to the 9/11 attacks, acquisition of yellow cake uranium and the existence of other WMD (e.g. chemical weapons)?
I know you're just trolling and I probably shouldn't respond, but the answer to your "question" is "zero". I mean, even ignoring the fact that 550 tons of yellowcake were found in Iraq, you have no basis for implying that the invasion of Iraq would have been averted if the things you listed had not been believed by the general public.
The problem with this is that it's not a knee jerk response. What it is is something worse, it's bullshit science which has been deliberately prepared to generate a particular result, a result which has caused deaths.
Wakefield's paper may have been "bullshit science", but it's not science that motivates the anti-vax lunatics. The opposition to vaccines existed long before he published, and continued to exist after he was discredited. He just gave the crazies that little-bit of extra publicity which they needed in order to attract a larger portion of the population. And if people had understood a damn thing about science -or even just plain-ol' statistics - they would have continued to get their children vaccinated even if there were good reason to suspect a link between MMR vaccines and autism. So no, "bullshit science" isn't the root cause here - anti-science attitudes within the public, the lack of scientific awareness, and the poor science-reporting and over-the-top sensationalism within the media are far bigger issues.
Damn! You beat me to it. However we need to figure out what Dr. Cooper is doing back in high school...
Research on the social patterns, rituals, and mating habits of pubescent Homo-sapiens. Valuable information for when the mother-ship reaches our orbit.
Hold up... I've never heard anyone claim that it's the magnetic field which keeps hydrogen from escaping. AFAIK it's simple gravity which keeps our atmosphere in place. Given a large enough planetary body, I'm having a hard time imagining hydrogen atoms reaching escaping velocity, regardless of what kind of radiation they're being bombarded with. You got a source for that?
Slashdot Mirror
ah, come on, "free" really.
Yes, really.
Isn't freedom what you want to do. How come you imposing your culture's point of view on another culture freedom.
See, this right here is why all the apologists sound like idiots. Yes, freedom is what you want to do. No, freedom is not what "your culture" forces you to do. If I step in and tell your neighbours that they can't murder you for wearing a dress, I'm not "imposing my cultures point of view" - I'm giving you the freedom to decide what you want to do.
How in the world can you have it so completely ass-backwards?
I was not aware of the texture of squirrel shit. Thanks.
"nutty" isn't a texture.
My point was clear, and it was about trust.
That's nice. You must have missed the part where I said "nobody is paying attention to your point because you come across as nuttier than squirrel shit".
Personal attacks and blaming the victim is easy isn't it? Actually picking apart the arguments is a little harder....
Nah, it's quite easy. From what little I actually read of your diatribe, your objection is one giant emotionally-fueled ad-hominem argument. "I don't trust X because they're Y therefore Z is wrong". It tells us nothing about the science behind the subject being discussed; it only tells us about your personal shortcomings. Personally, I don't give a shit who you trust; if you're willing to risk your life and the lives of your spawn because you're upset with the FDA, that's your problem.
The problem is that setting up a web site to do this is expensive - there are data subscriptions and a lot of coding involved. ...
What to do? Beats me.
Create a (federal) government run site to manage sales-tax related data, and offer an API that can easily integrate with all major services. The coding required for individual vendors would be minimal - when the user clicks the "checkout" button, create a connection to the API requesting the most recent applicable tax rates for the customers address, and apply them to the total. Even a script kiddie could slap together the required code in about 5 minutes. Larger sites could store a local cache of the entire tax database to minimize latency and unneccessary overhead, while smaller vendors would use the simpler approach. For even easier integration, paypal and similar payment-sites could compute the taxes automatically if the vendor requests it.
I'm not saying that this is neccessarily the ideal solution, but it's certainly not an insurmountable problem.
That's why I said family/tribe. We live "too long" as is; I'm assuming that there's some advantage to having your grandparents kicking around.
In more primitive societies (ie. small tribes) there certainly would be. However, in such societies your grandfather might be only 30 years older than you, and dead from a rock to the head or a tooth infection before he hits 50. And, really, most tribal societies had "elders" rather than "grandparent" - if your particular grandparent died it wouldn't matter much since the "elders" served as advisors and teachers for the entire tribe. Too many elders might have been just as bad as too few; you run into the problem of diminishing returns, where you have to invest more and more effort into feeding and caring for them, while getting less and less of a return with each new individual. So I really don't think cancer would have been a huge issue.
An advantage in modern society, though? I'm not so sure. I don't want to come across as callous, but, if anything, a dead grandfather might be more of an advantage because he left you that really cool car in which you impregnated half the cheerleading squad. I appreciate my grandparents, and love having them around, but I don't see any great survival/breeding advantage to having surviving elders in modern society.
Aside from you being an asshole, you missed my point entirely.
You need to realize that nobody is paying attention to your point because you come across as nuttier than squirrel shit. Personally, I didn't make it past the 2nd paragraph of your diatribe. I'd be quite surprised if a significant number of readers had gotten even that far.
How about posting an article from someone who ISN'T already drinking the DCA coolaid?
if it were "simple", random chance should have stumbled across it over time, and THAT would spread through the population because it confers a survival advantage for your family/tribe
Not really. Cancer rarely occurs early in life. For most of human history, you would have died well before cancer had a chance to finish you off. Even now it mostly occurs late enough in life that it doesn't affect reproduction. Ergo, the evolutionary advantage would be weak-to-non-existent, meaning the mutations might have no better odds of spreading than what would be expected from pure chance.
Are you hoping to turn into some kind of Leonard Betts?
I'm thinking more along the lines of Lazarus Long.
One day this talk of the Singularity and downloading our minds into machines will be viewed the way we currently view alchemy and orgone healing boxes.
And people who think they can predict the future?
âoeFirst they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.â
Mahatma Gandhi
That only works for guys in diapers who get daily enemas from teenage girls, apparently. For us regular folks, it's more along the lines of "First they ignore you, then they shoot you".
If you think that more than 15% of the stuff in Marchinko's books is actually true, I've got a bridge to sell you ...
Why would the invasion at that time take place if no one believed that particular state had anything to do with or were preparing for attacks on other states?
See, now that's a strawman argument. You don't get to change the original claim and pretend I was objecting to your modified version.
I'd hazard you have no evidence that the invasion would have occurred had the list not been believed. Am I wrong?
I'm guessing you don't have any evidence that Einstein wouldn't have come up with Relativity if he had been born retarded. Am I wrong?
Asking me to provide evidence in a what-if scenario is asinine. You can ask me to explain my reasoning, if you like, but if you're asking for evidence then either you don't understand what that word means, or you're being a dick and intentionally asking for the impossible.
We have evidence that heads of states (ours) kept trumpeting lies after they had been made aware of were lies to their citizens to eventually invade a state that had nothing to do with the initial cause of fear.
No, you don't, but it's irrelevant to what I said. I'm not sure why the "OMG DA BUSH IS EEEVIL!" crowd feel it necessary to go off on a long-winded diatribe at the slightest provocation. All I said is that he had no basis for implying that the invasion of Iraq would have been averted if the things he listed had not been believed by the general public. 90% of your comment has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. I don't give a damn what you think you have evidence of; if you disagree with the singular claim that I made, then explain your reasoning and let's discuss it. Don't pull out your laundry-list of talking points and start doing your version of the Gish Gallop.
So, in other words, you agree that yellowcake uranium was found in, and removed from, Iraq. Good to see that I'm not the only one around here who knows wtf is going on. Not sure why you had to write 4 paragraphs in order to agree with me, but thanks, anyway.
I'd rather have the data go through random computers than ones controlled by corporations.
Then you're a fool. There's really no other way to put it. If you'd rather put yourself at the mercy of millions of people who have no oversight and no incentive to not abuse you, than at the mercy of a handful of large bodies which are monitored by users, experts, and competitors, you are a naive idiot, and I am shocked that you've managed to survive past your pubescent years. It's much more likely that you're simply trolling.
Thanks for that :) I'd never heard of that story until now, and I got quite a good laugh after looking it up.
Unfortunately, pain only works on the individual. It's entirely possible for an entire society (or a subset) to carry on having delusional beliefs which cause pain and suffering for countless members, as long as that pain and suffering doesn't affect their ability to procreate and compete. Evolution doesn't necessarily weed out stupid beliefs.
"Just because you haven't found it yet doesn't mean it doesn't exist!"
QED
"Proof" here means evidence of a certain level of safety or confidence.
That's all fine and good, as long as we're operating on your definition of "proof". But it's not you that we're trying to convince, so your definition is largely irrelevant in this discussion. What matters is what the opposition means when they say they want "proof".
It is. Or if not prove, at least demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt.
There's a big difference there. You can't prove a negative, just like you can't prove the non-existence of something. To use our favorite analogy: I can't prove that a god doesn't exist; the best I can do is look at the god you posit, and demonstrate that it's unlikely to exist. Replace "god" with "unicorn", "leperchaun", "santa", or "autism causing vaccine" as required. With vaccines, we showed that removing mercury from them did not lead to a reduction in autism rates - in fact, the rates were completely unaffected. The reasonable conclusion based on that data is that mercury in vaccines does not cause autism, but it doesn't "prove" that vaccines do not cause autism.
How many thousands have died needlessly because of the knee jerk reactions to falsified claims of Iraq's connection to the 9/11 attacks, acquisition of yellow cake uranium and the existence of other WMD (e.g. chemical weapons)?
I know you're just trolling and I probably shouldn't respond, but the answer to your "question" is "zero". I mean, even ignoring the fact that 550 tons of yellowcake were found in Iraq, you have no basis for implying that the invasion of Iraq would have been averted if the things you listed had not been believed by the general public.
The problem with this is that it's not a knee jerk response. What it is is something worse, it's bullshit science which has been deliberately prepared to generate a particular result, a result which has caused deaths.
Wakefield's paper may have been "bullshit science", but it's not science that motivates the anti-vax lunatics. The opposition to vaccines existed long before he published, and continued to exist after he was discredited. He just gave the crazies that little-bit of extra publicity which they needed in order to attract a larger portion of the population. And if people had understood a damn thing about science -or even just plain-ol' statistics - they would have continued to get their children vaccinated even if there were good reason to suspect a link between MMR vaccines and autism. So no, "bullshit science" isn't the root cause here - anti-science attitudes within the public, the lack of scientific awareness, and the poor science-reporting and over-the-top sensationalism within the media are far bigger issues.
I didn't know MIT was located in Vatican City ...
How do you tell the difference between an MIT mathematician and a smart MIT mathematician? One talks to the media, the other is a millionaire.
Even with a robot, you're not getting any cheerleaders.
Maybe even especially with a robot, you're not getting any cheerleaders.
I dunno ... the phrase "I am fully functional, programmed in multiple techniques; a wide variety of pleasuring." is a hell of a pickup line ....
Damn! You beat me to it. However we need to figure out what Dr. Cooper is doing back in high school...
Research on the social patterns, rituals, and mating habits of pubescent Homo-sapiens. Valuable information for when the mother-ship reaches our orbit.
Hold up ... I've never heard anyone claim that it's the magnetic field which keeps hydrogen from escaping. AFAIK it's simple gravity which keeps our atmosphere in place. Given a large enough planetary body, I'm having a hard time imagining hydrogen atoms reaching escaping velocity, regardless of what kind of radiation they're being bombarded with. You got a source for that?