That's right! Instead find the phage that kills it and make a medicine...

For the life of me I cannot understand why the phage treatment was never developed in the west to complement [and in some cases replace altogether] antibiotics. The only reason I can think off is profit. It will be difficult to patent phage strain that is naturally found in the sewer system of a hospital. Also, phages are cheap and we don't want cheap effective medicine, do we? And thus thousands of people in the so called developed nations die from super bugs every year. Those people could have been saved by a bunch of medical professionals from an institute [that looks like the stage for a B horror movie] created by Stalin [see the documentary below; it's very interesting]

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com...

Sorry, you are the idiot. The number of 60 million includes WWI, Civil war, Stalinist repressions and WWII. It is right there in the article you cite. Here is the whole excerpt:

Excess deaths over the course of World War I and the Russian Civil War (including the postwar famine) amounted to a combined total of 18 million,[114] some 10 million in the 1930s,[29] and more than 26 million in 1941–5. The postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 million smaller than it would have been if pre-war demographic growth had continued.[35] According to Catherine Merridale, "... reasonable estimate would place the total number of excess deaths for the whole period somewhere around 60 million."

Also, the population of USSR during Stalinist repressions was below 180 million. Look at the graph they show in the very same Wiki article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Notice that they are at 180 million the 50-ties, while the great Stalinist purge was in the end of the 30-ies.

I do not endorse anything evil done by the fake communists - I am myself from a former communist state. But the amazing BULSHIT that westerners are misled to believe about eastern Europe and USSR are BEYOND imagination. Seriously, get a grip!

Like, the company will actually TELL you the real reasons for not hiring you....some years ago I once caught the HRM of my company when a bit drunk and she admitted to me that she would never hire anyone with a tattoo....I was shocked beyond believe, because we are talking about cutting edge semiconductor company with more than 50% of the staff with MSc. and 30% with PhD.

The chance that you find any "normal" person in my company is close to zero...unless you go to the HR office, the finance or the administration. Everyone who actually does the job is weird....to say the least. To expect that creative hyper-thinkers would conform to common appearances is lunacy.

Picture the scene:

Engineer: CEO-san we need to move those back-up generators to higher ground in case big tsunami hits us.
CEO: how high of a tsunami are we talking about?
Engineer: pretty high
CEO: what is the chance that such tsunami comes our way
Engineer : about once every 500 years
CEO: and how much this relocation will cost?
Engineer: it will eat 2% of the profit for a year
CEO: are you nuts? You think I will go in front of the shareholders and tell them they'd get 2% less this year because of something that might happen ONCE in 500 fucking years?! I am here for another 10 years and I retire after that. I'll take the risk that this will not happen on MY watch. And here is a wakizashi, go and commit harakiri right now you insolent brat!
Engineer: yes CEO-san

Only....the next CEO will say the same; the next one too...and over time the chances that the big tsunami will come approaches....1, while every CEO sees it as "no chance it will happen on my watch; I am only here for X number of years where X is way smaller than 500".

Disclaimer: I realize that no power plant will operate for 500 years but I also realize that once in 500 years can also mean tomorrow.

Conclusion: never run critical infrastructure, health care, education, military, police and transport on profit motive only. The real profit of those things running smoothly and efficiently regardless of "cost" is way higher than the profit a company will make running it, but this huge profit will be distributed over the whole of the economy rather than a much smaller profit in the pockets of a corporation, while the LOSSES incurred by them running the business badly is soaked by all of us.

Example: for every Nederlander on /. - anything to say about the NS [trains] and the health care system of the Netherlands once they were privatized and began to run ONLY on profit motive? The NS is lying like nobody's business about the delays [you know they consider cancelled trains as not delayed -those do not go into any statistics about the quality of service; those trains do not exists!WTF?!?] and spread the losses by not delivering millions of people to work on time. I won't be surprise if for every million they make they incur losses to all businesses that is 10 times higher. As for the health care system....well enough said [otherwise I'd have to write a novel]....

Consider this. You have a group of people say at work. Say, the management begins to take decisions that damage morale for whatever reason. In the beginning only a few people grumble, over time you begin to see some talents going away but you still take new recruits and although the project naturally slows down you are still not worried. Until one day, morale collapses catastrophically, 50% leave on the spot and you go bust.

Thus the slow change eventually led to catastrophic failure. Many processes in Nature and society behave like this. The example above is how exactly morale works [I have seen it in practice and the supervisory board chairman of the said company, a man with great experience in business agreed with me that that is exactly how it works.. Its not like you have 1 kilo of morale and you can afford to take away a few grams every day until it is gone - no, when you are down to say 500 grams all of it will disappear overnight provoking catastrophe.

Same with fucking the ecosystem [climate, water, food, pollution, everything] - like the Internet it routs up around damage, but eventually if you blow enough holes it collapses catastrophically.

As we know from respectable source, there is no higher life-form in the multi-verse than a librarian. That's why Horace Woblehat is not very keen on being turned back into man. Ook?

Ohh no, not this fallacious argument again.....please read this comment of mine and explain why is it better to have 20 billion fungi eaters on earth rather than 3 billion meat eaters.

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

and also read this http://slashdot.org/comments.p... and tell me why do you think there is not enough food NOW for all people [there actually is].

Well, the censorship goes for the paper versions as well...I guess it is easier to do it in electronic format. My reply is off-topic but I just could not let this comment pass. The book market, being in the hands of corporations suffers from two issues at least:

- General censorship - only authors that are not "too controversial" are published. It is those corporations that decide which author deserves publicity, so you can have excellent books that no-one ever heard of. I have read very serious articles from all kinds of scholars on the subject [publishers, authors, journalists, ect.] and they all agree that our very culture [music, literature, cinema] is steered by corporations. It's a bit like the google echo-chamber where over time you get only the hits that you "like".

- Particular censorship - I have encountered two examples myself. One is the recent, rather popular book called "the Martian". A friend of mine downloaded somehow the last draft just before publishing. We found out that paragraphs and in some cases whole pages are missing in the officially published version. And the cut out parts were all biting, sarcastic comments on the state of humanity [very insightful observations actually]. The other censored book is also an excellent read from a modern Russian author [V. Pelevin]. In his book "Generation P" entitled in the US as "Babylon" 2 pages are missing from the first chapter because....hold on to your chair...it discusses in a very humorous way why only Pepsi was available in the USSR but not Coke, whereas in the the US Coke is bigger than Pepsi. Can you imagine the lengths at which this people will go - to censor a book that would have been read by no more than a few thousand Americans? I know the corporations did it, cause I have a friend whose job is to monitor the entire media [including Internet] of my motherland for mentions of corporations and she reports every single day to them so they can take action if they deem it necessary....they are interest what is written about them in a obscure blog in an insignificant country!!! Disgusting...

Good points!

I'd add that thinking over alien invasion is, IMO, more straightforward than speculating about AI. Ironically, if I remember correctly, it was prof. Hawking that was against looking for aliens because "they will steal our resources"

Which resources? you mean things like....I don't know...water, sand, metals, hydrocarbons.....stuff in general. Stuff, that can be found in vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly enormous quantities EVERYWHERE else but on planet Earth for example. You mean those aliens who would have the technology to cross the interstellar distances won't have the option to mine asteroids or take resources from the unimaginably huge quantities of cosmic debris; from planets [the vast majority] that would never harbor life; are they gonna burn OIL in their FTL engines? And even if they do they'd come for our oil rather than look around for their local version of Titan!?

This is soooo nuts that I am afraid I lost my trust in the man altogether.

It is proven that you need rest time to be highly efficient during the working hours. Take a look at productivity per hour work. You'd find that the countries with the lowest working hours per week score the highest. I work 8 hrs per day but when I was int he US some honest people from my profession told me whispering that they'd dilute their effort because it is simply an utopia to expect the same level of intensity when you pull 12hrs per day rather than 8.

Rest, spending time with family and friends, having enough to support yourself means dignity, means lower stress and from there [much] lower health costs [include here the better food that you can afford], lower crime [lower cost of security], lower suicide rate....the benefits for SOCIETY are enormous. I am sorry but anyone who argues against this is not living in reality and is bringing more water for the mill of evil..

I am sick of that evil game where business privatazes the profit and socializes the losses....

Funny....today at work some colleagues with kids were discussing an article stating that you think better and remember better when you write by hand because it is more difficult in general [and slower] than typing. Broad analogy would be taking a photo with digital camera or an analogue one. When you can make hundreds of photo with minimal effort and cost you produce way more bad photos than when you know you just have 32 frames and that's that.

The discussion started because I quoted a statement from a book that poets need to carve in stone - then they WILL learn to say a lot with few words, which is what poetry is...

Horay for another wave of dumbing down of our kids and grand kids in the name of profit!

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is just one man; I think you'd do better to read the actual history of Russia. During the darkest times of their feudal totalitarian system [before the revolution] the Russians were extremely religious. And it was a hell-hole [Russia]. If you think that the communist totalitarian regime made them atheists you are wrong. At the moment Russia is as nuts as the US on religion. They are VERY religious. Now, how come that after 75 years of atheism you have such explosion of religion? Who taught the new generation?

I am from Bulgaria which was considered one of the most fateful supporters of the USSR among the communist countries. We had churches and we performed all the rituals. No-one was imprisoned or killed for believing. It was not allowed to year religious symbols that are visible in school. ALL religious symbols not just Christian. Some secular modern countries of today also have similar laws.

I consider myself extremely lucky. The communist stiffed all ideology which was competing with theirs. They did it simply by removing the political and monetary power of the competition [thus religion, for instance, could still propagate in families but won't be able to spread propaganda via governmental channels, media and so on...]. So I grew up safely, not subjected to any propaganda except the communists. But their propaganda was ineffective for anyone with 2 brain cells or more because the gap between words and deeds was too large. Very quickly one realizes that those were no communists but simply power hungry criminals hiding behind a label [how different from the great US, eh:)]. Thus at the end most people from my generation [I can speak only for them] grew up with completely free minds - free of ANY bulshit ideology. The natural state of man is secular humanist [stems from biology]. The rest is BS.

Change the phone....or use Swipe. It is really annoying to read like this - the brain notices and you get a "hick-up" in your reading flow every time when you see those mistakes. LiKE tryINg To ReAD thiS FoR eXAmplE...

You know what made me poor [PhD with good job in NL]? The privatization of the health care system. In other words - libertarianism. For 7 years I was not helped properly and the system always did the minimum to send me home [cutting costs]. The problem grew into disability and I was told [no kidding] "we cannot help you further". Like they helped up to that point?!?

I found a private doctor that could really help. I could not afford it but had no other choice but to patch-up the problem while bankrupting myself. It is only a patch-up mind you. For complete treatment I need an extra 30-50 K Euros. And it is not because the doctor is greedy but because medical services have grown artificially expensive because corporations and insurance companies know the society/government will accept almost any cost for health and cough up, so all the equipment and procedures prices are hugely inflated.

But according to Randoids I am lazy and stupid. Fuck off!!!

It's politics, pure and simple.

Just another case where politics/business brainwashed people there is no problem. Now, because Nature cannot be fooled and laws of Nature cannot be broken, finally the powerful have decided to do something [because they are scared for themselves]. But the public does not buy it after so many years of lies.

So, they are wondering how to sell the facts and they go for the most obvious - don't tell the whole ecosystem is in danger and billions of people already have troubles with water, don't tell about shortage of arable land [the rest being poisoned already by Roundup and the like] and so on [the list goes for weeks].

Instead tell them it is about the most sacred thing in the world - the health of the Americans.

This whole story is revolting. Thinking about the health of the people? After making them one of the sickest first world nations while spending quadrupled amounts of money compared to the rest? Really?

Politicians are prostitutes; businessmen are evil [both facts are result of the system, which filters out such people and promotes them]. It boggles my mind that people actually expect pro active measures from governments and corporations. Those entities never lead; they follow, because the only thing they are concerned about is preserving the status quo [where they are on the top]. There will never be meaningful CHANGE about anything under this system. Get your heads around this fact if you want our civilization to survive and prosper.