Thank you. I was going to post this. His entire premise about the results being skewed by people dropping out of a study is incorrect. If the one program of bland diet and strenuous exercise worked well, but 90% of the participants dropped out because they hated it then that program's standard ITT stats would reflect this (and it would be scored lower than a more moderate program that had fewer dropouts).

It was at this point I stopped reading the submitter's premise. This counts as irony, right? Giving advice about how to give advice, but the metaadvice is so poorly constructed that it's ineffective...

Excellent plan! With all that added pressure making it a top priority we should be able to anticipate seeing Congressional action on it by, say, 2076.

You vastly overstate the yield of an antimatter weapon.

antimatter weapon yield calculator

That's not how I would have chosen to describe Rule 34 and the various furry/vore/inflationist "enthusiast groups", but I guess I should make allowances for poetic license in others' posts.

Bruce Perens is on record as a notorious hoplophobe.

I lost a lot of the respect I had for him based on his public vitriol in the Newton post on Slashdot. I don't think it's respectable to pick and choose which human rights you support, and the individual right to keep and bear arms is fundamental to the universal right to self-defense.

At least ESR is consistent in supporting liberty in all its forms, in computing and in real life (much to Bruce's obvious chagrin, per the above link).

I think the two-tier health care thing (cf. UK NHS) can be sold in red states if it were marketed correctly. This is probably a cultural issue as well... what is a convincing argument in one area simply doesn't resonate at all in the others.

However, your point is absolutely correct: compromise only works if the gap is not an insurmountable gulf, otherwise the result of compromise is untenable (e.g. Obamacare). In the case of the Obamacare/the individual mandate, it had to be ramrodded through without any deliberation (or even being read by the legislators), then had to be immediately validated by a 5-4 supreme court ruling that was a farce (who honestly believes that forcing people to buy products is consistent with the Constitution?). The law is so buggy that it required the executive to unconstitutionally unilaterally modify it (the judiciary's silence is deafening here). Meanwhile, half the country hopes for repeal because the entire process was non-consensual. Barring any progress in the "correct" direction, the country finds gridlocking the federal government desirable because at least if the government isn't doing anything then it isn't forcibly "making things worse".

This is the future of our union, barring some commanding supermajority hold on Congress and the Presidency for at least a decade, ala FDR. I believe he really did a lot to damage our country (obviously, views about this differ), but he did manage to shift the Overton Window.

Everyone hates Congress, but keeps voting the same people in. Why? Because they hope their culture will gain an upper hand and force it upon the rest of the country. It's always "those other people" who are the problem, right? *cough*

I think it is logical that there will always be wedge issues in any society, but the Overton Window indicates what they will be. I'm sure that the healthcare/individual mandate wedge issue in the US is very far displaced from the UK's wedge issues. I can't imagine what it would be like if we were still in a single country/kingdom trying to reconcile our divergent cultures into a single coherent UK/American colonies culture.

I'm also disturbed by political "victories" in courts where the ruling is "basically, your state law is too different from the rest of the country". I refer most recently to the federal courts demanding that IL and CA start issuing concealed handgun carry permits to all applicants who are not legally barred from having one. The federal court gave the IL legislature a deadline to pass a law allowing this. Now, obviously I believe this is an expansion of human rights in these states, but WTF?! Having this forced on a state against their will with the rationale of "you're too different, no self-determination for you!" feels very wrong.

This is great to hear. I'm in a red state and my friends and I are sick of liberals forcing their policies on us. I'm even willing to let you think it is your states "getting away from" our states, if that matters to you (haha). Essentially, it has come to the point where both sides look at the other and shake their head because the culture is so foreign. I don't think a compromise culture is desirable for either side of the divide.

Look at all the 5-4 split Supreme Court rulings. Do you admit, as I do, hoping the Supreme Court balance will swing in favor of the culture you support so that contentious aspects of your culture can be forced on the rest of the nation "for their own good"? For example, I am hoping for assertions of human rights such as the Constitutional individual right to keep and bear arms in areas where these rights have heretofore been unconstitutionally blocked. Regardless of which issues are key from each individual's perspective, the fact that we as a nation must routinely rely on the Supreme Court to mandate these policies is a sign of serious sociopolitical & cultural dysfunction.

I really believe that secession/dissolution is tenable and wouldn't lead to collapse. Much has been said about the net flow of tax money from blue states to red states, but I believe what would actually happen is that blue state food prices would jump significantly to compensate for their now lowered wealth transfer tax burden. The Farm Bill food subsidies for the past 70+ years represent most of this tax wealth transfer to the red states and these laws have really screwed up the agricultural/food markets. The Farm Bills' subsidies have led to such abominations as HFCS and corn for ethanol. Who knows? Secession might even lead to innovations in our food supply if we start using the land to grow something other than corn that humans can't eat (literally, the preponderance of corn grown is for animal feed/industrial purposes and tastes like chalk).

Back on topic: what could we call this movement? The Nonpartisan Coalition for Amicable Secession? Hm, that doesn't have a pithy acronym. I'm open to suggestions.

Did you miss the part where the contracts allowed the producers to intentionally misrepresent anything the participants said or did? I know I'm cynical, but what do *you* imagine would happen to any such message by the time the show was released for public consumption?

"I love working on diverse teams! Teams with men, women, people from other cultures... I doest matter! Teams with a monoculture may function, but working with them kind of sucks." becomes "I love women, but working with them kind of sucks." after editing. Completely legit, per their contract.

Funny you should choose neonatal screening as an example in support of your argument. Firstly, the things that *are* screened are a carefully curated list of unambiguous genetic defects that 1) have immediate deleterious effect on the development of the child and 2) have an intervention that will alter the trajectory of the disease. This is why, for example, no one screens the population for Tay Sachs. In fact, the ~30 tests that are part of the standard panel now are all that's left after *hundreds* of candidate disorders were considered for screening and rejected by the American College of Medical Genetics.

Secondly, the positive predictive value of these neonatal screenings is incredibly low. That means that for every true positive result (i.e. a disorder detected correctly) there are 50 to 100 false positive results, which are subsequently ruled out by a different, more specific confirmatory test. However, this same problem (low PPV) is endemic in the mammogram/pap smear/PSA tests, and these result in deleterious effects on many people who have false positive results compared to the number of lives saved from true positive results.

Also, it's worth noting that they still perform the neonatal screening because the human cost of missing a diagnosis in an infant for these *treatable* diseases is so profound, but many parents are put under serious stress due to the false positive results.

Going back to the BRCA example: ask any medical geneticist what is the single most important screening tool. Every one of them will tell you it is "family history". If family history indicates a specific risk, they may counsel further testing such as BRCA. This is different than en masse population genetic screening for "cancer risks".

Recall the original poster was citing cancer risk. Have any examples of a trend toward expanded *cancer* screening? I gave two widely known examples of the trend moving in the opposite direction for cancer screening (in fact, these are probably the two most publicly visible/prevalent types of cancer screening), and correlated this to the issue of laypeople misinterpreting GWAS "cancer risk" data such as was provided by 23andme.

Tangentially, I hope that Theranos actually manages to pull off their plans for microfluidics testing. Look at their projected pricing, and the fact that they want this to be available at every corner Walgreens.

Yes, BRCA is a counterexample. It is also an outlier, and testing for BRCA can usually be guided by a simple family history. If there is BRCA in the family, there will be a very high incidence of breast/prostate cancer in the family. If that's the case in your family, consider talking to a medical geneticist and possibly getting BRCA testing. As before, I'm not proposing people be barred from having tests done to learn their status, but I am against goading people (especially if it's not going to be helpful).

In general, the 23andme type GWAS crap isn't helpful for the layperson. The type of results returned (before the FDA cease & desisted them) were freaking people out due to the "increased risk effect". If it gives the person a nudge to live a healthier life (diet, exercise, dropping bad habits) then that's great, and those lifestyle changes are going to have a far greater effect than most any "increased risk" result from a GWAS.

As for my general point regarding aggressive screening & intervention: how many breast cancers have been ironically iatrogenically induced by the radiation dose from routine mammograms vs lives saved by early detection? How many non-BRCA breasts have been surgically removed due to benign conditions that were "suspect" on mammography? Also, don't discount the pain and stress of having a breast biopsy of suspicious findings on mammogram.

Aggressive screening is a double-edged sword, and that's why medicine is backing away from swinging it so enthusiastically.

From what I have seen, people at risk for Huntington aren't exactly irresponsibly breeding. You have to recall that most of them were traumatized as children by having their parent(s) and/or siblings become ill, be institutionalized, and die.

I haven't heard of any who were nihilistically refusing to learn their status while potentially passing this on to their kids via their genes. Usually, it seems they are doing the test to see whether they can have a family/future or if they should be planning which facility they want to be institutionalized in/what kind of funeral they wish to have.

This probably holds double for males, because Huntington disease often displays anticipation (effects are stronger/worse/sooner) if passed down via the father. Trinucleotide repeat disorders are a bitch.

That's sort of a 20th century mindset. The current consensus seems to be in favor of backing away from annual mammograms, not checking PSA, not doing routine dental x-rays, etc. The problem is that with all these screenings we have introduced ironic iatrogenic issues: treating benign conditions because test results were weird (or false positives). In the end, the data shows this isn't improving outcomes. Just imagine if you had your prostate nuked because your PSA was positive, and you lost your ability to achieve an erection for the rest of your life, then five years later it turns out studies say, "oops, that wasn't really necessary!"

Extrapolate this to GWAS type stuff and you get the picture. I mean, I'm not arguing the information should be withheld from people who want it, but I strongly believe people shouldn't be forced to learn or disclose this data.

Those cases where forewarned doesn't help are definitely at issue. The classical example is Huntington disease. It's an autosomal dominant death sentence and there is no treatment or way to alter the course of the disease. Some people don't want to know. There is actually a very elaborate three-phase commit for testing/getting results for Huntington disease, and geneticists won't perform the test on a minor.

Okay, I admit to not fully researching this, but because I have found svn externals useful in the past I thought I would inquire.

Is this something repo (used in the Android Open Source Project, I call it "meta-git") could handle? From my experience with it, repo did many of the same things I would have used a svn external for. I admit the workflow for repo didn't seem very polished, but it did allow AOSP/CyanogenMod to meta-version various git repos for a build.

Secondly, if you dont mind going into detail, what about git modules fell short? I would like to avoid pitfalls if possible.

I disagree.

I will note that my backup camera has a very wide field of view and often can see things to the side of the vehicle that I cannot (c.f. backing out of a parking space with large vehicles on either side blocking the view from the driver's seat).

Oh, and my backup camera system gives an audible alert if there is a moving vehicle or pedestrian within its field of view.

Do I still turn my head before beginning to reverse? Yes, but I have yet to see something relevant to the impending reverse that was not also visible in my backup camera.