I didn't hear Dr. Offit's statement but if you are correctly paraphrasing him then he's excluding at the very least adverse events such as death, which do occur for vaccines (rarely) including COVID, and in my mind should not be excluded from counts of "long term side effects".

FWIW, I've had COVID (tested positive and had symptoms). I also subsequently chose to be vaccinated. I also experienced what I believe were side effects of my vaccine, one of which persists three months after my second dose (which, anecdotally, would seem to contradict Dr. Offit). Aside, I also know my PCP did not report my event as was required. (I know this because I know what information is required for collection and I know he didn't ask for it.)

Despite the above, I would still recommend to everyone who can: get vaccinated.

Yes, there are risks for vaccination. We've now vaccinated enough people that we have observed side effects, some quite serious. These are, contextually though, rare and probabilistically much smaller than the risks of not being vaccinated, even if we allow for under reporting of vaccine side effects or (hypothetical) over reporting of COVID deaths and long term sequelae.

If you are seriously trying to avoid risk, your best best is to be vaccinated.

"How far are we willing to go to protect others?"

Fair question. For many of us though, the drawbacks to vaccination are less than those being unvaccinated, so "do it for yourself if no one else" is sufficient justification.

Of course, there are all sorts of people who have legitimate reasons to not get vaccinated and I wouldn't want to malign them. However, given the numbers of people who opt out of vaccination, I think it's fair to say that a lot of people are opting out for selfish reasons. Or ignorance. Ignoring others for a moment: given that this puts individuals at risk and they can't see that is, well, discouraging.

If you know enough people, you will know those who have died of COVID. My circle of acquaintances include those who have lost family members, not all of the old or immunocompromised.

If you work in health care, e.g. a hospital, odds are you know of many people who died, old and young, and people in their 30's and 40's who did not die but essentially lost livelihood due to COVID sequelae.

Most of us brush the illness off as a minor inconvenience. Not all of us do. These cases aren't frequent but they are more frequent than those suffering from sever vaccination side effects.

Bottom line: unless you can't, please get vaccinated. For yourself if no one else.

But to get back to your question, there was a time, in the US at least, where "Ask not what your country can do for you ...." resonated more broadly across the political spectrum. There was an awareness that we owe each other ... something. Now, I suppose, not so much.

That said, even if you are young and healthy and aren't worried about the consequences of getting COVID, you may be one of those who will unknowingly pass it on, perhaps to a family with elderly or sick family members. In today's climate it's unpopular to plead for the common good. But please, consider this.

As to your implied slippery slope argument, I think you have a point, although I disagree with both of your examples (alcoholism and obesity). As something of an aside though, I recently found myself reviewing literature on smallpox epidemics around the turn of the 19th-20th centuries and I have to say that this "where will this invasive governmental intervention end" argument seems to have been popular even with a disease with double digit mortality rates. It makes me wonder if for certain types of people there's never sufficient cause for societal responsibility.

Python analytical and graphing packages continue to mature and I'm less inclined to dismiss it as a statistical/analytical tool as I would have back in say 2010. However, SAS and R are in a whole different league. Unless you plan to write your analytical libraries from scratch, there are all sorts of tasks where Python is not a functional replacement.

As far as R vs. SAS, I can think of specific tasks that are still straightforward only in one or the other, but assuming you know the languages and libraries, there's less of this than there once was. In my opinion, SAS still beats R in clarity of documentation, reliability, and general library maintenance. It's what you pay for (several thousand, USD, per seat per year, last I licensed it). It used to be a truism that if you work in an FDA regulated space (e.g. pharmaceutical or diagnostics) you ran SAS. I've seen that change over the past few years, but I can only comment anecdotally.

As far as how much time it takes to implement/run code in R or SAS, well ... that probably depends on how mature your organization is. A lot of large organizations maintain code libraries for standardized analyses and reports. My own opinion is that it's faster to write de novo code in R than SAS, but if you already have your reporting templates and analytical macros written in SAS, it's probably worth paying the licensing fee to keep running SAS. Bear in mind that the functional libraries for both R and SAS are complicated enough that a new hire who wants to switch will take years learning and improving, and you are probably paying 2-300k USD fully loaded for the headcount needed to rewrite code.

But personally, I'd love to see Python win this race. It's still has several laps to catch up though.

CliffsNotes for "Dune"

"MacOS is a different ecosystem with its own office productivity apps. Most MacOS users are not going to use Office 365."

Do the numbers to back this up? (I ask because it's counterintuitive. Unless you operate in a fully mac environment it's hard to work this way.)

"Something can be medicine, or it can be a trade secret, but it can't be both."

If you are saying that a company hiding exclusively behind "patented method" or "trade secret" type claims is likely peddling junk, then I'm right there with you. But my inner pedant notes that there are a lot of trade secrets in medicine, especially diagnostics. For example, even when companies publish clinical results they do not publish a complete specification of how their diagnostic assays were developed or manufactured. Patents provide some protection, but trade secrets are a part of this.

"...machine learning (another red flag) methods"

As long as I'm quibbling ... my own $0.02, but machine learning per se isn't the red flag. Perfectly valid methods outside of traditional statistics work their way into clinically validated products. You can't always tell because of how the results are published or patented (e.g., a simple support vector machine generates a linear model indistinguishable in form from classical statistical techniques). Where I am with you is that there is a lot of hype, especially in these small start ups. They like to throw buzzwords around such as "machine learning" and "artificial intelligence" to dazzle and distract. That said, I would consider all claims about complex predictive models suspect, come they from start-ups or established IVD manufacturers, at least until I can see their analytical and clinical validity results. After that ... case by case.

We could assess my bona fides but if you assume I am insincere then I don't imagine any evidence will suffice.

How about we consider the phrasing and the context for a moment? "Moronic prude" is much like "religious nut-job" in that it is inherently pejorative. It is a label useful only for dismissing the opinions of others. (How could they possibly have values in perspective? After all, they are prudes?)

So, when I read Lumpy's post, I tried to look beyond the label to the context: "the sex scenes and outright violence in some of the books would have the moronic prude parents today suing everyone in sight for every reason." Ok, now I think I know who he is referring to. Beyond the occasional talk radio I listen to, I've lived in the Bible belt and even spent a few years in Utah so I've been exposed to the, er, militantly religious. But taken in that context, his point seemed ... hyperbolic -- i.e. oooh, the religious right taking legal action against teachers who have their students read Starship Troopers or Ringworld or the Lensman for the rampent sex scenes. Surely there are men with less straw in them. Does he really think religious conservatives are so prudish or did a better example (e.g. Ian Banks, Guy Gavriel Kay, Tannith Lee or other authors of the grimly dark or erotic) just not spring to mind?

I've been in a similar situation. In fact, I've seen this recently arise with one my children. The interesting thing is that the parent I'm thinking of who objects strongly to D&D has no problem with his son playing any number of violent or fantastic video games -- just something about D&D sets them off. But then from other conversations I know he can be very rational on other issues (and possible even rational on the topic of D&D as well, since we haven't discussed it in detail.) In any case, the Vocal Yokels aren't always as prudish, crazy, or even as facile as they may first appear.

I appreciate the sentiment, but I find that how people are judged often depends on the order of presented evidence. Were I to have led off my response by talking about (e.g.) the type of language, media, activities I allow in my house ... well, I wonder if you'd say the same.

But yes, I know a few people who, in my own judgment, are exceptionally prudish -- non-thinkers who march to the strident beat of their preferred demagogue, and some unstable enough to also qualify as nutjobs. These people are not that common, in my opinion. More common by far are the close-minded sorts on both sides who casually toss labels, and refuse to take a deep breath and engage with some measure of patience.

Oh well. I guess my point, assuming I have one, is that once you apply a pejorative label to a person, they become varelse and it becomes impossible to grok them.

(Weak attempt to drag this back in a SciFi direction, but it's the best I have at the moment.)

You have me scratching my head here. I'll play the prude parent here for a moment (because I am one in Real Life), but if you are reading these authors for their sex scenes then you missed the boat. Heinlein (e.g.) keeps coming back to sexual topics, but if you are reading from his most influential works you aren't going to find much that is explicit. And Doc Smith? Maybe I just read the wrong books ...

Violence of course is another thing, but the Christian Conservatives I assume you are alluding to do not get worked up over violence the way they do about explicit sex. (If they did, their Bibles would be significantly shorter.)

Hah, Nursery rhymes would hardly cut it. I can just see a teacher trying to read "Ding, Dong, Bell" to a class and try to get around the tittering.

Anyway, taking a shot at "moronic prudes" puts you in fine company on slashdot, but I can't help but be amused from my vantage point. Yes, prudes do get worked up over class room material, but the reasons why they complain are seldom simple. E.g., when I complained about my high school daughter watching Scrubs and Casino Royal in school, it wasn't about the material per se but because she was watching them in English (no subtitles, nothing) in Spanish class. You see, they took two weeks off because the teacher couldn't bring herself to put together a lesson plan. I'm sure I'll go down in the school history as just another local religious nut job though.

Or, another example: I just finished reading to my youngest son. The language was occasionally vulgar so I balderized as I read. The book:A Night in the Lonesome October, one of my halloween favorites by Zelazny.

Anyway, pigeon-hole us as you will, but the prudes hardly have a monopoly on idiocy and closed-mindedness. Just something to bear in mind as you wind back to huck that stone. You may be guilty of, if nothing else, unintentional irony.

I may be missing your point, but I don't see how affluence negates what I wrote. If anything, the fact that I was raised with somewhat limited opportunities as a child (neither parent had a college education, only attended public schools, etc, lower economic status, etc.) would lead me to expect that my children, who are definitely raised under affluent circumstances, should fare batter. But despite the fact that we spend more on their education, and they spend longer days in school and more days a year in school than I ever did, the quality of education seems roughly the same.

In any case, your main point seems to be that pitching this proposal as a "quality of education" concern is something of a pretext and what really is at stake here is adequate babysitting for the underprivileged. Fine. I think that's the obvious conclusion, myself. Let's just not pretend that this is about improving the quality of education then, ok?

I can accept the principle about cognitive spacing, but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant.

My experience (and I acknowledge this is purely anecdotal) is that schools nowadays have mastered the art of wasting time. I've raised kids in three states, both coasts, varying ages, with two of them now in college. My conclusion is that US schools do not teach kids that their time matters, and having reviewed the curriculum for various programs and compared with my own elementary education I'm convinced that we are accomplishing, if not less, then certainly no more than we accomplished back when I was in elementary ed.

Mind, I didn't go to great schools. My high school was the typically crowded urban mess -- police officers and metal detectors added the year after I graduated, but I was able to take two languages including Latin, 5 years of math, and computer programming courses through assembly language. However, both my school year and day were significantly shorter than any children have experienced so far (high school ended at 1:20 p.m. for us, early enough for us to work afternoons).

I have now cycled my high school age children through all of the public schools available in my area, with little qualitative difference among them. Much of the material is the purest pap, and any advanced coursework they've taken has come through university online courses. Basically, my kids go to public school, waste away their time, then come home and we get started.

The notion of given the public schools more of their day turns my stomach.

If they contributed to your project under Ms-PL and then sued you over patents for that code, then they have no legal standing because by contributing under that license, they made a patent grant already. A problem is there only if your own part of code (not the code they contributed) infringes on their patent. In which case, yes, it works the way you describe.

In practice, the first scenario is far more important, since this is the usual tactics of hijacking GPLv2 projects by "patent poisoning" them. The second scenario is much less common, and it's not clear why a license should give you blanket protection against any kind of patent in the first place (if you want that, lobby your legislators to repeal patent law).
 

Here is one other thoughtI had.

I have sometimes thought about putting a fake label on my computer, that would suggest to computers that this is an obsolete computer, not worth stealing. I would like to get a sticker that says something like "386 SX with Windows ME inside." I could use that instead of the "Linux inside" nameplate, which my computer currently has.

With my computer's heavy steel case, lifting my computer is about like lifting a bag of cement. But perhaps I should make it even heavier and harder to steal, buy having a few hundred pounds of very thick steel plates welded onto the inside and/or outside of the case.

No, really, it's not okay. Once you establish the precedent that it's okay to break the law as long as someone in the executive branch told you to, you have handed an insane amount of power to the government. The correct response to this kind of request from the executive branch is to request confirmation from the judiciary and the precedent that you want to set is that not requiring this confirmation is dangerous to your future wellbeing.

No, but it was real. Fortunately I'd moved, and didn't end up with him for a client.

They brought her to the scene, and he said, "Yeah, that's her; she's the one I robbed."

This was a couple of years before the lineup of mugging victims or whatever they were in that spoof movie (Hot Shots?).

Yes, criminals are capital-S STUPID!

If they, as a group, had what we think of as "ordinary intelligence," we'd be in *BIG* trouble . .
hawk, esq.

Same as they have now for abstinence-only sex education and evolution-hostile science. None.

But the parents aren't powerless. My mom, when I was young, made sure I knew a few things before going to school. One thing was that teachers are humans. Humans make mistakes. Humans do things that they think is the right thing but isn't. And some humans are just genuinely bad.

It served me well in school, through my mandatory religion (Catholicism) classes*, my broken science classes**, and my incredibly incompetent sex ed classes***. Still serves me well.

( * In a public school, no less.)

( ** Several memorable stories about that. One teacher didn't like the science book so never used it, just went off what she thought she remembered, because obviously her brain was perfect. Guess what? She didn't remember Newton's Laws of Motion correctly. Another prefixed the chapter on empirical knowledge and scientific method with a speech that could be summed up as "The scientific method is good, unless it finds something against God. Then God wins." The test for the chapter had a high-value question about the speech, of course.)

( *** The teacher had three kids, I was a teenage virgin. I was convinced I knew more about sex than she did. In fact, a decade or so along, I still think I knew more about sex than she did.)