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Comment Managability (Score 5, Insightful) 494

Services are easily manageable.

A bunch of us who actually manage systems tend to disagree.
Hundreds of DOS ini files, having to compile things instead of just modding a script, and not being able to step through a startup or shutdown process is not what we all consider easily manageable.

If it really were easily manageable, it would not have caught so much flak.

Sometimes you're the octopus, sometimes you're the girl.

Comment Re:Somewhere in the middle... (Score 1) 341

I'm sorry, but there are quite a few diseases out there that will kill the strongest, yet the already sickly might survive.

Measles, mumps and rubella do not fit that description. They have a very low mortality rate, and it's the weakest that tend to succumb.

Smallpox has a higher mortality rate, but also here, it's those with weak immune systems that tend to die.

This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective - diseases that don't kill its vectors are going to outcompete those that do.

I can't think of any disease which kills healthier specimens more than the weak. The avian flu scare a few years ago was initially reported as hitting the healthiest the hardest - that turned out to be misinterpreted results; it hit the most mobile part of the population more often due to a shorter than usual incubation window, not harder, which led to more young adults dying. And many elderly were already immune due to an outbreak in the 60s.

So I'm sorry, what are those "quite a few diseases out there" that you refer to?

Very frequently a "strong" or "weak" immune system has little to do with whether you catch a disease.

Very frequently, it has a lot to do with whether you survive it if you catch it.
And that is what determines whether your genes have an advantage or not. It only takes a small statistical advantage for successful genes to be selected for.

Comment Re:Somewhere in the middle... (Score 1) 341

You do realise that proximity and exposure is the biggest factor in determining who develops antigens to any given disease?

ie, chance?

Um, yes? But the diseases we vaccinate against aren't 100% lethal or 100% sterilizing.

It's not chance that determines whether someone who does catch the disease will survive as a reproductive individual. It's the overall strength of the immune system and fitness of the individual.
As long as some catch and survive a disease, evolution selects for the genes those individuals have versus those that die, become sterile or never catch the disease. Take away the risk of catching the disease, and those genes no longer have an advantage. With vaccination, those with weaker immune systems have an increased chance of surviving until reproduction, and as a result, the next generation will, on average, have weaker immune systems than if the culling had taken place.

If your father would have died from measles as a child had he caught it, due to him having a weak immune system, and he survived because he or those around him got vaccinated, chances are higher for you to have a weak immune system than the child of someone from an area without vaccinations. And if you have a weaker immune system, the risk of allergies is higher.
Of course, your father might have had a strong immune system and laughed off measles. But the reason we do vaccinate is that not everybody does. There will be lives saved, or we wouldn't do it. Even if just some survive that otherwise wouldn't have, this will have an impact on the next generation.

We choose to save lives now, and accept the genetic costs of the weakest not being culled from the herd. This isn't something that is disputed. It's a moral choice we make, but we don't get to escape paying the price - at least not until we reliably can make genetic repairs.

Comment Re:Somewhere in the middle... (Score 1) 341

In a way, you are correct, but unintentionally so.
There is a correlation, but the causation is one layer higher.

Vaccines are safe, and save lives. And that's the problem. Whenever a young life is saved, that is one person who would have been culled from the pack that now grows up and likely will procreate. Nobody can deny that.
That means that genes that earlier were weeded out now survive and spread in the population the next generation. Including genes that code for weaker immune systems, which appears to be a common factor for both propensity for dying from childhood diseases if catching them, and propensity for becoming allergic.
In short, it's not the children being vaccinated that causes autism, but their parents having been vaccinated if they survived as fertile individuals as a result of the vaccination.

Until we obtain the genetic know-how and competence for how to fix this in individuals, that's the price we have to pay for taking action in saving lives that otherwise would have been lost. The consensus (except for crackpots) seems to be that as a society, we are willing to pay that price.

That there are negative side effects to saving children's lives is not a popular thing to mention, though, so I'm waiting for the down-votes to start.

Comment Re:Matlab (Score 1) 181

And there was much bitching about how everything was so indirect and hard to figure out exactly what was going on. Of course, this was before there were good debuggers and direct compilers.

I think the point was that one should know exactly what was going on before it was run, and being able to follow the low-level flow by looking at the source without "and then, magic occurs" moments.

Simula and Ada were arguably much better languages for understanding exactly what was going on, being as unforgiving as leather clad mistresses, but "C with classes" won out because it was so similar to C. C++ is great, but it does give the programmers enough rope to hang themselves with, while obscuring what's really going on behind the scenes.

Comment Re:Idiotic (Score 1) 591

You're statement that the death penalty "will have no effect on whether a murder will happen or not" is flawed when your only example is the person who committed murder despite the death penalty.

What part of "Almost all murders happen either in affect, or in a situation where the perpetrator thinks he can get away with it" did you fail to understand? Those two types of murders is not impacted by whether there's a death penalty or not.

A couple of less common murder types are also not affected:
- Those who seek martyrdom. Actually, I think many of those would prefer there being a death penalty.
- Those who seek to go out in a blaze of glory, i.e. never be tried and sentenced.

So what murders, exactly, are affected? Who are those who will kill if there's a life sentence, but not if there's a death penalty? Statistics don't show lessened murder rates for states with capital punishment, so who are those people?

Comment Re:Idiotic (Score 5, Informative) 591

How many prison sentences have been reversed after the last appeal was over ?

Quite a few. Like when new exculpatory evidence comes to light, like someone else confessing, or recanting the testimony that led to the conviction, or new or improved technologies can determine innocence.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, from 1973 until today, 152 people have been exonerated after being sentenced to death. Unfortunately, many of them were executed before being exonerated.
Without the death sentence, many more innocents would be alive.

Comment Re:An alternative to the death penalty (Score 1) 591

*[Yes, I do appreciate that 'murder' implies an unlawful taking of human life.]

And I appreciate that you used appreciate correctly in the lesser known meaning of the word.

Anyhow, there is a case for capital punishment inflating the death toll even when not counting the capital punishment itself. If you face a likely death penalty, there is no incentive for you to not kill others. Killing others, like witnesses, can then be rationalized by it reducing the risk of getting caught, and thus die.
I have a strong suspicion that many mafia murders were done for that exact reason.

Comment Re: Stupid (Score 2) 591

That in mind. How the fuck does an America come up with all these execution methods, that don't involve just shooting them in the back of the head? If it doesn't kill them straight away, you just use a bigger round. It can't be that expensive. One gun, which you may already have, and a round of ammo.

I think that the death penalty should be personally executed by the governor of the state that allows it, under a law that makes it murder subject to capital punishment if he or she ever executes an innocent. Since the governor has the authority to pardon a death penalty, he or she cannot claim coercion.
Would Charlie Baker pull the trigger on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? Possibly.
But would Greg Abbott pull the trigger on hundreds of people in Texas, knowing that 4 out of 100 people sentenced to death are statistically innocent? Very doubtful.

Comment Re:Idiotic (Score 5, Insightful) 591

However, execution lets the convicted person off the hook the easy way compared to a lifetime of incarceration.

That's irrelevant, as the justice system is not to be a method for taking revenge, but to make society a better place to live in, with less crime.

The death sentence is flawed for other reasons. Almost all murders happen either in affect, or in a situation where the perpetrator thinks he can get away with it. In either case, having the death penalty will have no effect on whether a murder will happen or not. And it might lead to more murders, because if there's a death penalty in place, the perpetrator has nothing to lose by killing witnesses, cops, or anyone else who might get them arrested, now or in the future. The rational decision for them is to do anything not to get caught, including more murders.

Also, the costs of a death row inmate by far exceeds the costs of a long term imprisonment. (This is particularly true in the states that allow prison slave labor - which has a high correlation to the states that allow capital punishment). The many rounds of appeals that a death sentence automatically trigger cost a heck of a lot more than the room and board.

Then there are the cases of people who have been wrongly executed. One case is one too many. And a peer-reviewed study shows that as many as 4% of people convicted to die are likely innocent.
Unless there's a way to bring people back to life again, that in itself should be enough to put a stop to it.
But the unwashed masses want panem et circenses, and revenge, not justice. So the show goes on. And innocent people die.

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