I would estimate, not being even remotely qualified, that the number of devices you'd need to effectively search the entire oceans for submarines would be an order or magnitude greater than the number of devices you'd need to search the land for, er, land submarines. I mean, armoured trucks or something. And if such an effort did signal the end of submarines, then what are all your small cheap robot drones actually for now?

Damn things would probably turn around and take over.

Whereas the article, should you choose to read it, makes it perfectly clear that there was plenty of video on the internet prior to youtube.

The point it, I think, the youtube was the first one to do it that didn't suck. In a way it's sad, but very often the revolution comes along when someone suddenly decides to implement technology in a way that doesn't suck.

That's a really silly position to take. Operator overloads are incredibly useful, and are one of the things that really helps to make a language more expressive. They can be abused, but so can any part of any language, and taking them out because once you saw someone do something bad with them was an overreaction. And you can't seriously imagine that it's even remotely possible to provide built-in language support for mathematical operations on all possible mathematical objects.

Good lord I've been doing it wrong for years....

Well - that's a pretty fair point. I would like to think that there's something between 'children' spaces - and completely no-holes-barred burning-alive-videos-ahoy spaces. I'm not sure I'd exactly consider youtube to be a 'childrens' space - it's certainly not curated with 'children' in mind - but I'm very happy that they take down the ISIS videos from there.

Presumably there are spaces where these videos don't get taken down, and if there was something deeply wrong with me and I actually wanted to see someone get beheaded, then I suppose I could go there and watch such things. Seems to me it should probably be treated on a par with child pornography though.

Dresden.

I mean, I know it was a long time ago, but I think it counts. Also - I would imagine it unlikely that none of the civilian casualties of the current round of US 'wars' were burned alive.

Not allowing children to see videos of people being meeting violent, terrifying and agonising deaths is not 'fascist style totalitarianism' - and would cause children rather more than 'slight discomfort'. Contrary to a couple of rather bizarre posts above, this is nothing at all like Hansel and Gretel.

I think when 'freedom of speech' is used to justify the public dissemination of videos of a terrified human being being burned alive in a cage, it deserves to be examined a bit more closely. I don't think you've 'got this' at all.

And of course, terrorists aren't trying to remove freedom - they're trying to distract you from the fact that there's only actually a small number of them in a country quite a long way away. They're trying to terrify you. Which, if you keep on allowing their videos to be kept online in the name of the rather poorly-defined notion of 'free speech', you will be making all the easier.

This is the thing. The economy of the web, in the sense of who is paying for all those 'free' sites, is built upon advertising. Personally, I don't like that very much, and in particular I dislike advertising in general.

This does not change the fact that advertisers are paying for those sites so that you can view them for 'free'. Thus blocking advertising is not an ethical act by a well-known test for ethics (what would happen if everyone did it?).

So - don't install adblock, and if you hate advertising that much, don't visit sites that employ them to pay their bills. This will result in a fairly restricted web browsing experience - but perhaps the time saved can to do something more productive instead? For myself, I just deal with the ads. And sometimes, despite myself, when they seem to be advertising something that I might be interested in, I even click on them. Once, and no-one is more surprised at this than me, I even bought something.

Really? Was the dietry advice given pre-war to eat as few fresh fruit and vegetables as possible? "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" is a saying dating back to the 19th century, which is certainly post some wars, but not I assume post the war you're talking about.

Anyway - sorry - I don't mean to bicker. Instead I just mean to thank you for you link - I'll take a close look at their site. In my prior comment I was trying to talk more generally about such an organisation, but nusi certainly seems a good start.

Is EBOV Ebola? In what sense do you mean that it has stopped? Are you suggesting that it's gone for good - that would be a reasonable interpretation of the term 'stopped' - or that the current outbreak has ended? My understanding of Ebola is that it's so deadly, and spreads so easily, that outbreaks tend to burn themselves out once you isolate areas. Sure not pretty though.

I looked up your quote regarding chronic diseases being due to nutrient deficiencies, but no popular search engines provided any hits - However I assume it's Linus Pauling. He of the megavitamins.

It's most fortunate that cancer is now an unheard-of illness since it was discovered that it may be trivially treated by high dosages of vitamin C. To Linus we should all be grateful.

Perhaps instead of asking me, in my ignorance, to enlighten the audience - perhaps instead you could tell us all of Potter and Shaefer, and the incontestable efficacy of vitamin cocktails in fighting Ebola.

The reason you take one multivitamin pill a day is because you are an idiot.*
Fixed that.

* Or you have a vitamin deficiency diagnosed by an actual doctor who used tests to determine this. And even then, eating food will probably be cheaper.

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.".

Thanks - this is the quote I was trying to remember. If anyone can put centuries worth of dietary advice in fewer words, well then they'd sell a whole bunch of bumper stickers.

Damn right.

Firstly, I don't think that science's position on diet has changed a great deal. Plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, regular exercise, don't overdo the booze - I mean it's not all that hard. Omega-this, and poly-unsaturated that, and free-radicals the other - this sort of nonsense is the fault of lazy and sensationalist reporting, not of science.

Science does not make any attempt to defend itself against this - and arguably this isn't science's job anyway. It needs to be some-one's job, but it isn't at the moment. I don't even know how one would go about setting up a dis-interested and objective organisation who's task was purely to disseminate scientific knowledge in an easy to understand form. Perhaps it's not even possible.

But really, if you don't know how to eat properly, then you really haven't been paying even basic attention to basic science. Scott Adams is right in the sense that people are confused (Paleo diet? Seriously?), but science itself isn't confused. And nor should you be.