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Comment Re:Failure should be celebrated (Score 1) 444

Journals should be highly interested in posting failures. We can all learn about an approach that did not work. Failure tends to be replicated a lot and it is wasting a lot of time and money.

Knowing that an approach does not work would save a lot of time. It would also help to know if a certain experimental setup did not work and that a different setup should be tried.

Comment Re:It has always been that way (Score 1) 444

I think the problem with this is our society.

For some reason we tend to only think that positive results matter. Negative results are just as valuable. If you do a really well done 10 year study and find no connection then we learn a lot.

In many aspects of our society winning is all that matters and that has spilled over into our science funding.

If we started to truly value negative results we would progress much faster scientifically and we would also have much better science quality. The current system favors making very safe bets that are basically impossible to be wrong on and then have others make another tiny step from that one.

Comment Re:They're bums, why keep them around (Score 5, Interesting) 743

Even the USA would split apart without these kinds of transfer payments. Most of the states in the south receive more in federal money than they pay in taxes. Actually for most of the USA you can separate red vs blue states based on if they are net positive or net negative on tax paid vs federal dollars coming back. There are states upset about this but it does stabilize the country.

Comment Re:Waiting for them to die. (Score 1) 609

I would love to see a party that was fiscally conservative, basically stayed out of all these wars and peacekeeping missions, did more negotiations for foreign policy and basically left people choose their own social lives. I am sick and tired of all the anti-woman and anti-gay stuff I see coming out of politicians.

Gay people should be allowed to get married just because of equal protection under the law, end the discussion and move on.

Women should be allowed to have abortions because I don't have the right to impose my morality on other people. It doesn't matter if I think abortion is right or wrong it is not my place to make that decision and I wish we had politicians that would take that viewpoint. Just make it a non-issue and focus on economic issues.

I want a real focus on infrastructure, fixing roads, bridges, power etc since bad infrastructure costs our economy a pretty vast amount of money. I want a real focus on modern education for degrees our economy needs.

I also want actual immigration reform. If we really do need migrant workers to pick food then make a special visa for that. Saying it is illegal and then bringing them in anyways is not helpful.

Mostly I want skilled immigration reform. I want the H1B visa program ended since it ends up being more like indentured servitude and has far too many loopholes. Instead I want to see skilled labor able to easily get into the country on a regular visa like any other first world country. There are people I know with PhDs in VERY rare fields and they can't get into the USA. They would help our economy a lot and would not be taking a job from a qualified US citizen. Heck there are some fields where a skillset is so rare we have hundreds of job openings and tens of candidates on earth. Let them all in!

My view on guns is lets worry about more important issues and once we fix infrastructure, education, the economy etc lets see if guns still matter.

As for the stupid censorship that some politicians push and all the stuff they want to control to protect the children ... screw them.

Comment Re:This law will not stand... (Score 1) 545

Religious views do not give you the right to put millions of others at risk. Viruses mutate and that is inevitable. A vaccine is also not 100% effective in many people it just gives them a kind of limited immunity. We don't have treatments for many of the things we have vaccines for. If measles mutates it will kill millions of people and there is no guarantee how long it would take us to make a new vaccine.

In the end I don't care what your religion is I care if you are putting others at risk. Refusing to vaccinate is putting others at risk. You may not want to accept the biology on that or believe that your deity will never let that happen but most of the rest of the human race has accepted this and if you want to live with them you have to accept it also. If you don't want to live under our understanding of biology and vaccines then you can have religious freedom by yourself away from all other human contact.

Comment Re:This law will not stand... (Score 2) 545

Viruses don't care about your religion. Their mutation rate does not care what deity you believe in. It is too dangerous for society to allow humans to play incubators for the measles. It will eventually mutate and bypass the current vaccine. If it does many millions will die until we figure out a way to make a new vaccine.

The ONLY way to prevent this is to make sure there are not enough hosts for the virus to survive.

Your religious freedoms don't allow endangering everyone else around you. We also have people that have religious views on human sacrifice and we don't allow that either.

There are limits to religious freedom and this has to be one of those limits. A legitimate medical reason should be the ONLY way to get exempted from a vaccine unless you want to go live as a hermit and never encounter humans again.

Comment Don't live in an echo chamber (Score 1) 179

There is a simple way to avoid having fb or any other social network keeping you in a "bubble". Pop the bubble! Meet people with views you don't share, and talk to them. I am "far-left" by US standards, though I believe the NFA needs to be destroyed and the ATF dismantled, because I believe in personal liberty and rights while restricting the liberties and "rights" of corporations but still believe that estate taxes are necessary to prevent certain families from accumulating all the wealth. Friends include Bush-style neo-conservatives, libertarians, and more. The up side of this is that beliefs and ideas get shared, and discussions happen. I know I've changed my stance on some issues due to discussions, and I've been told that they have as well.

As for why more liberals "unfriend" people is because I see more conservative people posting "If you don't believe then just unfriend me now." After the third one of those posts in a month, I asked a conservative friend if he really wanted me to unfriend him because I did not agree with his post; he did not and has since stopped posting those memes.

Comment No real choice but to accept it (Score 4, Insightful) 312

It doesn't matter if you think this is a good idea or a bad idea since as a society we have no choice but to accept it and figure out how to best integrate it into our society. 3D printers exist now and they will continue to get better. They can print things like weapons just as they can engines, food or any number of other things. What can be printed is going to continue to advance fairly rapidly. In the end how to 3D print something is just a file and there is no way to control files.

The music industry has tried to stop music sharing and the movie industry has tried to stop moving sharing and we all now how effective that way.

We can choose to bury our heads in the sand and not see that our technology has advanced to the point where it has destabilized certain aspects of our society or we can try to figure out a new stability point.

Comment Re:Law enforcement doing what they should do (Score 1) 254

See, I think the part that everyone is missing is that by posting this on April 28th, he wasn't possibly referring to the moment of silence or the traffic that the memorial gets. And there is the context, YikYak is meant to be local, so this statement was not meant to be read by people outside the Blacksburg area. And to the staff. faculty, and students-turned-townies, this read like a threat.

So the cops investigated. They warned the campus, and the student turned himself in.

Comment Re:i don't understand the premise of the post (Score 1) 254

You don't seem to understand how the US system works. You might want to brush up on Article 3, and Marbury v. Madison. Now, if you don't like that the SCOTUS has review over even the Constitution, then you've had since 1803 to start an Amendment process to change that.

Until then, shouting "fire" in a crowded place stays illegal until the Court's ruling is revised or their power is amended.

Comment Re:Poster sounds sympathetic, but sounds like thre (Score 1) 254

Because none of the freshmen, hell even most the senior grad students, were around for the original shooting. It's been 8 years, that's enough time for freshmen who were here to have graduated, and gotten done a combined masters/PhD. Eight years ago, those freshmen would have been in 5th grade, probably in another state! The community of Blacksburg, though, remembers; mostly because there was the escaped cop killer at the beginning of that term that had the campus locked down and people scared, and a student beheaded at the end of that term. The faculty, staff, and townies like me hear a threat like that and get worried.

Even the staff at NRVCS get worried, since that was another of the targets. I have friends working there now, and had family working there the day shit happened in '07.

Maybe if the anon student hadn't posted "another 4 16 moment is going to happen" (moment, wtf?) followed with "Just a warning" (okay, that sounds . . . threatening) then maybe people wouldn't have reacted the way they did.

Comment Re:It was a good idea that needed some work (Score 1) 239

As I said I think the pricing was massively off. Steam should have had the standard 30%, 10% for Bethesda for tool development, documentation etc and 60% for the mod author.

However the basic idea is a good one. Donation just means free. So many say this stuff should all just be donation but people don't donate EVER pretty much. No matter how good something is they don't donate.

It would have been nice to see what mod developers would have done if they where being paid enough to do full time mod development and gained several years of experience.

It just seems that ideas today must work on day 1 perfectly and must not upset a few people because otherwise they cry like babies on social media until whatever upset them is taken down. It is highly destructive behavior and it currently carries no consequences of any kind. You can help ruin someones life, cause large economic damage and there is zero responsibility and it is considered completely okay until it happens to you. Heck we have people that still consider SWATing a joke.

Comment It was a good idea that needed some work (Score 1) 239

Overall the idea was good and sure the first implementation had problems but pretty much all new systems have that. However, it seems that most would rather jump on a hate bandwagon and destroy something instead of actually giving constructive criticism to fix it.

Bethesda put money into making tools for modders. If this has worked then Bethesda would have had justifiable resources to put back into better modding tools, documentation, examples etc.

Modders don't do all the work by themselves. They build on top of many others work.

I don't know what a fair contribution would be for each party but the idea of being able to charge for mods is a good one. The donation system clearly does not work and so many that are in favor of it NEVER donate. It is just seen as free.

Maybe in a few years we would have ended up with modders as a full time job for some of our favorite games and they would keep putting out real content that we could all enjoy. However, humans people never waited to see for anything. It was different and therefore bad and that means it has to go.

People say they want new ideas but they really don't and this whole social media thing is getting way out of hand. We have these hate bandwagons that state and it is too easy for everyone to jump on board without thinking. The ideas just spread all over the internet as all people have to do is copy and image and say they are part of the hate.

It is going to take a long while before we figure out a way to deal with this but these hate bandwagons are just getting so tiring.

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