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Government

Submission + - TSA Pat Downs, Searches After Passengers Get Off T (shtfplan.com) 4

intellitech writes: According to a first-hand video account from a train station in Savannah, Georgia, the Transportation Security Administration is now performing security pat downs and bag searches AFTER passengers disembark from their trips. This could be expected from a country like China or the former Soviet Union, but there is simply no legitimate justification for such actions in the United States of America, unless our government is now attempting to mimic authoritarian regimes, which seems very much to be the case.
Technology

Submission + - Carbon nanotubes show promise as bionic components (wiley.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A recent paper in the nanotechnology journal Small suggests carbon nanotubes arrays might be suitable for bionic devices. Inflammatory responses and foreign-body histiocytic reactions are not substantially elevated when compared to negative controls following 12 weeks implantation.

Submission + - Supreme Court Gives Immunity to Vaccines (washingtonpost.com) 1

locallyunscene writes: In a ruling Tuesday the US Supreme Court upheld a law that provides immunity from lawsuits for vaccine companies and requires that

going before a special tribunal set up by Congress is the only way parents can be compensated for the negative side effects that in rare instances accompany vaccinations.

The dissenting justices in this case were Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg who argued this is a

regulatory vacuum in which no one — neither the FDA nor any other federal agency, nor state and federal juries — ensures that vaccine manufacturers adequately take account of scientific and technological advancements

Is this law necessary to protect vaccine companies from pseudo-science like the autism and vaccine linked studies, or is it too much of an overreach by removing the power to decide from The People and The States?

Comment Re:the rating system is broken (Score 1) 771

In the US, you have to be 16 to get into an R-rated movie. It's rated exactly the same. Moreover, it wasn't just a couple a boobs. There was also, rape, graphic violence with blood and gore, and (of course) a blue penis. Our rating system needs work (nipple = R, barring the Titanic exception, but show the Joker can jam pencils and explosive into people for a PG13), but Watchmen wasn't really borderline material.

Comment Re:Kill most all viruses, invulnerable ones yet li (Score 1) 218

Your assertion that vaccines would create super bugs has historically been proven false. Those outbreaks were in places where vaccination rates and standards of care are low, and there is no evidence that they were caused by your hypothetical "unvaccinable" bugs (also: currently no usable vaccine for Yersinia pestis). Moreover, why should the prospect of eventually creating resistance deter us from preventing or curing disease? There is no inherent reason why this should be true. With antibiotics, your option is to create resistance and save lives, or to not use antibiotics and have people die. Obviously it's not exactly that simple (option 3: use antibiotics responsibly and avoid selecting for resistance), but my point still stands. In conclusion: vaccines have not been shown to create super bugs, nor is obvious why this should be a deterrent to their use.

Comment Re:How is it anti-science to teach... (Score 1) 726

The government has not tried to legislate in evolution as a "strong" theory. There are thousands upon thousands of academic papers supporting it already; the legislation part is only to defend against those who reject said evidence. Without being a serious mental contortionist, nothing in biology makes sense except in the context of evolution.

Comment Re:Wow (Score 3, Insightful) 832

Dude, vaccines aren't 100%. Not everyone who gets a shot is immune to the disease. For some diseases it's more variable than others (see: BCG vaccine for TB), and it's not always clear why, although HLA haplotypes have been put forward as a potential explanation. That pretty much counters every one of your arguments. So keep that in mind whenever you go to write another anti-vaccination rant and think first, "Hey, if vaccines - like virtually everything else in medicine - aren't 100% effective, how does this affect what I'm planning to say?"

Comment Re:He's right (Score 5, Informative) 832

http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c5347.full

http://download.thelancet.com/flatcontentassets/pdfs/S0140673610601754.pdf

Wakefield has been widely discredited for quite some time. His results have never been duplicated, studies have failed to demonstrate a link between vaccines and autism, and the scapegoat additive thiomersal (or thimerosal) was taken out of vaccines in 2001 to no effect.

Comment Re:I agree (Score 1) 596

It's still a shortcut, and it still piggybacks on Google's superior engine. Whereas Google would be able to figure out that "torsoraphy" is a misspelled "tarsorrhaphy," Microsoft - rather than figuring this out - looks at Google to see what they corrected it to be, and then gives the user that search result. Bottom line: wherever they are deficient they use Google to fill in, and that means Bing is worse (and they realize it).

Comment Re:Cheating? (Score 4, Interesting) 693

It's cheating because instead of generating good search results, they look at someone else's search results and output those. It's not theft, it's not illegal, but it is kind of a shitty thing to do. Or, here's how the guy interviewed in TFA said it (pretty well if you ask me):

“It’s cheating to me because we work incredibly hard and have done so for years but they just get there based on our hard work,” said Singhal. “I don’t know how else to call it but plain and simple cheating. Another analogy is that it’s like running a marathon and carrying someone else on your back, who jumps off just before the finish line.”

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