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Comment: Re:I'd say Great Idea (Score 2) 192

by Thangodin (#46199421) Attached to: Cops With Google Glass: Horrible Idea, Or Good One?

Agreed. Where cops are required to wear surveillance gear, they are on their best behavior, because the video is available in court--this has already been demonstrated in the EU. And that's not up to the chief of police. Your lawyer can demand it. And Google glass feeds to the Google servers, not the police station. Ultimately, the cops don't own it, so they can't just delete or edit what they don't like, they can only modify their copy, which is not the master, which your lawyer can request. So they will be very careful to make sure that nothing incriminating appears in the feeds.

This is surveillance of the cops as well as citizens--souveillance, not just surveillance. Read Contrary Brin to find out what souveilance is. All the conspiracy theorist here need to take their tin foil hats off for a moment and try to understand what this really means.

Comment: Re:Trying to censor decenting opinions is bad scie (Score 4, Insightful) 314

The issue here is that the ideas have been picked apart long ago by the scientific community. But these journals are not meant to address the scientific community. They exist to provide industrial boilerplate as quote fodder for politicians and pundits. The real target is people who don't know any better. Even when the journal has been discredited, they will still quote it, because few people will know that it has been discredited.

A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on. That is the whole point of efforts like these.

Comment: Re:If they are SO REALLY CONCERN about religion .. (Score 1) 674

by Thangodin (#45667181) Attached to: New Documentary Chronicles Road Tripping Scientists Promoting Reason

No, the point was not that they don't like religious people. The point was that they don't like religion, and the undue influence of religious leaders.

I have noticed that there are a thousand Richard Dawkins on the internet, and all but one of them are made of straw. You have just made that a thousand and one. Slate has an article by someone who claims that Christopher Hitchens was wrong when he thought that banning religion would fix the world. Except that Hitchens never called for a ban on religion, and he certainly never thought that eliminating religion would solve all the world's problems. The number of people misrepresenting Hitchens has skyrocketed, because no one would dare do it while he was alive. And that makes me suspect that they know they are lying.

If you are going to criticize someone, could you please exert the slightest rudimentary effort to understand what they did in fact say. I'm quite certain that 99.9% of the disputes on the internet would vanish if people could just learn to listen.

And before you say that we don't understand religious people, please be informed that most of the atheists I know were devoutly religious for most of their lives before becoming atheists, and we not only understand it, we were there, which is more than I can say for most of the people slinging this nonsense. The deepest theological conversations I have ever had took place in atheist meetups, between former believers who understood theology very well--in fact, it was theology that made them atheists. And yes, this includes Muslims.

Please take the time to become likewise informed.

Comment: Re:Just to be real clear: (Score 1) 23

by Thangodin (#44980853) Attached to: Read it and effing weep

If the monopoly is not run for profit, it can. Executives of health care insurance companies take home bigger bonuses than bankers, and spend more money in lobbying than the oil industry. All of that was money that was supposed to be going to health care.

The U.S. spends 20% of it's GDP on health care, while most other first world nations spend about 12% and cover more people. Many European countries combine public single payer with public and private health care providers, and this seems to deliver the best results for the least money. And the 20% in the U.S. does not include the cost of medical bankruptcies, or the cost of lost opportunities caused by people who are afraid to strike out on their own and start their own business because their health care is tied to their job, and entrepreneurship means going without medical insurance until your business is a success. The American health care system strongly discourages entrepreneurship.

Meanwhile, companies that want to hire the best are saddled with the additional cost of expensive health care insurance. Even with the dollar at par, Canadians are cheaper to hire because the company doesn't have to carry this cost. And because private health care operates with small sample sets of people for a single company, actuarial tables don't work, because outliers are more frequent, so the companies demand more for insurance than average rates would suggest. The best way to bring costs down in insurance is to insure the largest number of people possible and spread the costs more evenly. This is precisely what public, single payer systems do. And they also do not result in a balkanized health care system, where your insurance may not cover you at the closest hospital, or even in the town that you happen to be in.

Comment: Re:Rupert Grint? (Score 1) 249

by Thangodin (#44462057) Attached to: New Doctor Who Actor To Be Revealed This Sunday

I'd be interested to see what Grint could do with the role, and I wouldn't count him out for the future. And no, he's not 12 anymore (making a movie at 12 doesn't make you 12 forever.) The most exciting suggestion was Tilda Swinton; she would be magnificent! And yeah, the Catherine Tate thing could work too; the Doctor is dead--oh, wait, remember that there was a hybrid...

Comment: Re:nature and consumers (Score 1) 358

by Thangodin (#44409539) Attached to: GMO Oranges? Altering a Fruit's DNA To Save It

GMO does not mean Monsanto, unless you have a large anti-GMO movement. The anti-GMO movement is the best friend that Monsanto ever had. Thanks to you guys, Monsanto will rule the agricultural world.

Here's how it works. A small company engineers a new crop that can be grown in third world conditions and dramatically increase the food supply. But they need to obtain clearance, which, thanks to the anti-GMO movement, they can't get. For that they need lots of money and lawyers. So they go broke, Then Monsanto comes along, buys the IP for a fraction of what it took to produce, and they do have enough money and lawyers. And because there is actually nothing wrong with GMO foods, they win, because unlike anti-GMO activists, the court has to listen to the facts, and Monsanto brings it to market--probably modified to be a terminator crop (by the way, Monsanto did not invent this, and many of the seeds that you buy for you garden will not produce offspring.)

So keep up your good work. Monsanto thanks you. Without you, they could not do what they do.

Comment: Re:nature and consumers (Score 1) 358

by Thangodin (#44409507) Attached to: GMO Oranges? Altering a Fruit's DNA To Save It

You're talking about monoculture. This is the rule with crops bred the old fashioned way, not the exception--the orange crop is a monoculture, and that's why they're having this problem. Bananas are having the same problem. We've actually gone through three types of bananas. There is a blight that is wiping out the current monoculture, and after that, there will be no large sweet bananas unless we engineer something that can resist it. This has absolutely nothing to do with genetic modification.

Comment: Re:nature and consumers (Score 1) 358

by Thangodin (#44409467) Attached to: GMO Oranges? Altering a Fruit's DNA To Save It

And don't forget that there is a natural source of radiation--the Sun. And all of this happens with that too.

Oh, but it's natural. That makes it much better than GMO. Yeah. So is cyanide, mercury, cancer, and bubonic plague.

By the way, genetic modification is the one source of mutation where we know what effect it has, because we are actually trying for it. Random mutation can produce anything, including produce that is highly toxic.

Comment: Re:What?!? (Score 1) 322

by Thangodin (#44003709) Attached to: World Population Could Reach Nearly 11 Billion By 2100

Agreed. What they are predicting is not a population increase in Africa, but a devastating population collapse. What Africa is currently undergoing is the baby boom, when a scattershot reproductive strategy (have lots of kids, no birth control, and hope some live) meets modern medicine. But Africa does not have the food, resources, or social capital to support this, unlike the first world during their baby boom. Emigration is not an option either; the first world has already begun to face the limitations of cultural assimilation, realizing that a large population from a culture with low social capital cannot reasonably be expected to assimilate to the norms of a country with high social capital without massive disruption. The habits and traditions just aren't there. Tribal warfare--gang violence--and zero sum economics (you get rich only by taking from others; a common idea in Europe until only three or four centuries ago, and probably less) are still the norm in sub-Saharan Africa. They're like us, but a few centuries back.

Comment: Re:A true and accurate and transparent lie detecto (Score 1) 456

by Thangodin (#43243511) Attached to: If I could augment my senses (w/ implant or similar) ...

All true. Too many people have this cartoon image of those they disagree with as being comic book villains, cackling with glee while plotting their next nefarious act. What this misses is the reality of motivated reasoning, by which people convince themselves of opinions of convenience--those which are flattering, consoling, or advantageous to themselves. They don't know they're lying. Even Hitler thought he was going to heaven, not in spite of what he did, but because of it.

And here's the killer question: how do you know that you're not doing the same thing? Serious philosophers and skeptics agonize over this all the time. There is actually a method to determine this, but that would take a book, not a posting.

George W. Bush was not an evil man. In most ways, he was exemplary--smart, considerate, funny, well read, disciplined. But he was a terrible president, grossly incompetent (and as much as I like Obama, he has not impressed me yet.) Bush's trust in Donald Rumsfeld, whom Gerald Ford called the worst person he had ever met in government, is a testimony to this. Rumsfeld really was a bad man, whose ambition trumped all other considerations, but in this regard he is actually quite rare.

Bad politicians are usually not bad people. They really do believe they are doing the right thing, but they came to believe this largely because they wanted to. The idea that this might be morally suspect is actually quite new; religion is a product of the same kind of reasoning, and witness how long it has been given a free pass. A new standard of ethics is being created, and it is still in its earliest stages. Don't be fooled by the cartoon version of reality.

Comment: Re:Noise canceling headphones (Score 4, Interesting) 561

by Thangodin (#43178829) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Block Noise In a Dorm?


Comment: Re:It's called the key (Score 1) 1176

by Thangodin (#42903985) Attached to: Driver Trapped In Speeding Car At 125 Mph

It sounds like most of the controls are wired controllers--that is, if the controller electronics or computer have become faulty, you no longer have a way to control the car. It's a bit like playing a game and having your controller stop responding while your character goes running into a room full of bosses, only in this case, you're the character. This is a lot more common in cars today that most of us are aware; there are many cars out there that have millions of lines of code designed to prevent you from making a catastrophic mistake, but who knows what can happen if this goes wrong. The steering seems to be the only thing that was still available in this case.
