http://lmgtfy.com/?q=rct+mmr

Anything else, smartass?

What citations could you possibly need? Haven't you read the news at any point in the past several years?

Large swaths of North America have had almost zero cases for a couple of decades. And in the course of the last decade or so, we've gone from that to vilifying disneyland for being a disease vector, and clumps of outbreaks have been appearing in various major population centres, especially around those where the anti-vaxxer movements have been highest.

I'm not going to waste my time spoonfeeding you information when you're literally one google search away from finding it yourself.

Actually, there IS a very good reason. It's called insurance, because shit happens. There will be a small segment of people who react badly to vaccines, because there are small segments of people who react badly to all sorts of ridiculous things, from onions to sunlight.

Unfortunately, a majority of these people don't even know until AFTER they've already been exposed and go into anaphylactic shock or worse.

But the benefit to getting the entire population vaccinated is so overwhelmingly great that the idea of NOT vaccinating people is just ludicrously irresponsible, so this little insurance fund was set up to help those that draw the short stick.

We will never be prepared for a global epidemic as long as anti-scientific morons are able to influence and/or dictate policy.

For example: The vaccination efforts of the last century have effectively been wiped out thanks to the idiotic anti-vaxxer movement, causing measles cases to surge, and are continuing to increase. I'm planning on talking to my doctor about the possibility of a measles booster just to keep my family safe.

And then there's the whole Thimerosol thing, which single-handedly destroyed our ability to easily distribute vaccines en masse. All because some assholes with zero chemistry knowledge freaked out because there was a mercury atom in the molecule. It doesn't occur to these people that if they took common table salt and consumed their component elements, your body would dissolve, punctuated by explosions.

So no, I expect that we are going to see more and more small epidemics of various diseases, and it's probably going to get significantly worse, all thanks to uneducated morons who think their ignorance has the same weight as hard-won knowledge.

What do you mean 'at one point'? People still call it that. :)

Or, you know, I could RTFA and find out that it's actually an effort to create a FILE FORMAT for sharing 3d spatial audio data. Dunno if there's already such a thing, but if there isn't then it definitely makes sense to have one.

What's wrong with OpenAL?

I love standards! There are so many to choose from!

If the knock offs have better battery than the original, I'll take the knock offs any day.

I saw this article first on IFLScience, and wowee... the comments were the equivalent of repeatedly thwacking multiple hornets nests with sticks. The sheer number of people up in arms about this study is jawdropping.

While not really surprising, it is depressing. Especially when you consider the fact that the majority of people who were outraged had no idea what homeopathy actually was. Countless comments about how willow bark, st. johns wort, etc worked for them and therefore the study was just a big conspiracy by big pharma, etc. They were completely oblivious to the fact that what they were talking about wasn't even homeopathy.

I'm torn between wanting to try to educate these people, or just declaring it a lost cause and troll them until they burst a blood vessel or something.

Perhaps someone should to point out to the Indian Gov't that Barbara Streisand was a woman. ;)

I'm seeing so many posts about how people "will never buy from Lenovo again because they can't be trusted" etc etc, and can't help shrug cynically.

I wonder how many of these same people buy Sony products despite not just one, but an entire string of blatantly anti-consumer decisions (of which the rootkit CDs were just one)

Or Microsoft, which has a very long history of not just anti-consumer, but crushing the PC industry and suberting entire standards bodies. But in the last couple years they've thrown a few open source bones... yeah that totally makes up for the last 20+ years of damage they have caused.

So yeah, I hope everyone gets to enjoy their collective outrage while it lasts, cause before you know it you'll find your comments will get modded troll by people who think you're just overreacting.

Does this mean there will or won't be 4 more weeks of winter on the comet?

It's already been demonstrated that when people believe a given thing, they will go out of their way to *continue* believing that thing. Even if you show them an overwhelming amount of evidence that they are wrong, rather than convincing them to change their opinion, they will instead double-down on their existing belief.

Combine that with the fact that there is a ridiculous amount of crap out there, from 'vaccines cause autism' idiots to Fox News, we *need* some kind of filtering to eliminate the nonsense that is put up there with the explicit purpose of misinforming people.

The only concern against something like this, is how easily/likely it would be for governments to subvert for pushing propoganda.

Of course, the end result will probably be that people stop using Google, cause being able to confirm their bias is far more important to people than the search engine they use.