We can just use Jupiter as fuel for Spaceship Earth.

Woven graphene, all the way to space. The Yellowstone Space Elevator.

You seem to be mistaken in your logic. If you prevent it sometimes, then you do in fact prevent it. Your argument is based on a perceived absolute that is not actually implied by the words used.

It is well established that in people who eat a non-balanced diet, introducing anti-oxidants reduces their cancer risk. (that means it prevents cancer!) However, people who eat whole foods (e.g., a traditional balanced diet) already have the protective level of nutrients that the human body is evolved to expect, and additional anti-oxidants don't help. Nor does eating only whole foods, or extra whole foods.

If you're ready to vilify peanuts because a small number of people have allergies, I don't think you're really ready for rational discussion.

You're conflating the nutters with the real research, unfortunately. Presumably you think you're being very sciencey. But no amount of lame, fraudulent diet books will undo the giant mountain of research that says a traditional diet including substantial amounts and variety of whole fruits and vegetables will reduce the risk of cancer. (and almost all other significant ailments) The risks don't go away, but almost any "grandma diet" is going to be protective when compared to a diet based on processed foods.

Eating processed meats is correlated with increased colon cancer, for example.

Eating "fiddleheads" is known to cause cancer.

Eating foods rich in anti-oxidants is known to prevent cancer... in people with low anti-oxidant levels. So it is true that a traditional healthy diet of balanced ingredients can appear protective for people currently eating a narrow diet of processed foods. However, additional anti-oxidants beyond the levels achieved by a traditional balanced diet do not appear protective.

But there are absolutely known foods that increase cancer risks.

If the bacon is natural bacon, then it is not a risky food for cancer. If it is the processed, reformed lard attached to small pieces of processed pork scraps, then it has not been studied to see if it has the same risks as processed lunch meats and hotdogs.

But if it was herd immunity instead of herd mentality, then maybe the conclusion would be different too. ;)

That said, you succeed in introducing probability in one place, then you follow by trying to reject it when working in the other direction. The word "prevent" does not require or imply an absolute, though. If the context is already probabilistic risk of some event (cancer) then you only have to reduce the event in order to have prevented some cases.

If you're pointing out that "preventing some cases" is not "preventing all cases," you're just correcting the part you misunderstood, not what was being said. And preventing some is still preventing. ;)

Your attempted correction doesn't prevent any misunderstanding, that much is certain.

That is not consistent with the current medical theory of cancer, where all of the different risk factors each could cause cancer, but the actual cancer you get was caused by a single one of those instances of cell damage.

Very very different than the theory for nearly every other type of disease based on harmful substances, where only past certain thresholds or combinations do things start to cause disease.

Not true; diet is known to have lots of effects on cancer treatment. Many of the treatments involve taking lots of toxic medicines, and a healthy diet can make the difference between a successful treatment, or not.

Learning the wrong thing is just as stupid as believing some book based on an individuals claimed experience.

The lesson here is just that the specifics she claimed were not true for her; it actually tells us nothing about the relative value of nutrition in cancer treatment; it doesn't support or refute any science at all, and in fact, it has nothing to do with science and it never did.

Reasonable beliefs about diet and cancer risk/treatment can only be based in medical science. Anything else is wild speculation, and a false speculation is just garbage.

This is just the kind of ignorance I'd expect to see on slashdot voted up to +5, especially since it is nasty and full of excrement-language and logical fallacy. It even throws out the word "snake oil" while also making unsubstantiated medical claims. But the opposite bullshit is not truth, it is just horseshit.

Reducing risk is the same as preventing if you're one of the people who would have gotten it. It may not be knowable for an individual person, but that doesn't actually matter to any of the involved decision-making; personal or public-health.

Risk means that for some people will really happen. If you reduce a risk, then for some people who it would have happened to otherwise, now it won't. So when you have a large population to talk about, even if you don't know who they are, if you're sure the risk was reduced, then you're sure that the thing was prevented too.

That is true of all risk analysis where the risk is high enough that the bad thing does really sometimes happen.

ASUS has a full product line including PCs, but they're a TV/monitor/tablet company mostly. Toshiba still sells laptops, but they mostly do other stuff.

(disclaimer: I own lots of ASUS stuff, and nothing from Acer)

Apple is mostly a phone, laptop, and portable audio company. They do still sell a few PCs, of course.

Donald Trump vs Michael Dell battling to the death with the sharpened bones of downsizing victims.

Thunderdome: The Apprentice

The future of television.

And if you need to decompress after being subjected to that, here is a good old anti-TV song to help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The part that some apple fans miss is that the rest of the world doesn't use your "PC means Microsoft Windows" code-words. PC means "Personal Computer."

The funniest though are the people still saying "wintel." That one always creacked me up, especially the time I was running a linux PC with a cyrix CPU and an apple guy kept pronouncing "linux PC" as "a wintel." Of course, Apple's personal computers are also running Intel now. Though most of my PCs are on AMD.

Here is another PC that used to be popular:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Right, nothing screams "artsy 99%-er" like a $350 fashion watch. That isn't even spiffy, because it is for the po'r.

If the worst abuse was lying to Congress, something that happens every day Congress is pretending to do work, then that isn't exactly a bombshell.

If that is all you remember of what was reported, or that is somehow among the 10 worst things, it hardly seems Snowden made a quality sacrifice.

I'll tell you who has a better memory, though: the NSA. I'm sure they've learned real lessons about handling leaks and managing newspaper editors to maintain the fog.

As far as, worrying about "law breaking" by people working is secret, actually, the danger seems much worse than that. It seems actually that the danger is so huge and deep that as long as they're working in secret, they haven't actually "done anything" yet. I hope it stays that way. There will always be bad apples, there will be a few "law breakers" in the national security apparatus, and even the local police, and some of them will do bad things. But that is just regular crime, it is not a special aspect of this situation.

The existence of the leaks brings into question deeper issues than that. Did Snowden leak something real, or was he the NSA plant to throw us off? Are the Constitutional violations just to fake-protect us from imaginary threats, or is there some as-yet-unleaked conspiracy? Why would they break so many laws, on such thin legal justification, just out of a sense of wanting to enforce the law more strictly? Who killed JFK? Are post-JFK Presidents even in charge, or is some shadowy group in charge? The problem with specific conspiracy theories is that you don't know what you don't know. It is not that conspiracies never exist, just that the people promoting them wouldn't know. It is easier to know that you're being lied to than to know what the lie is. Snowden didn't leak anything that uncovers a lie big enough to really explain the claimed programs. There is no way to know anything based on it, and it doesn't even claim to provide any answers about that stuff. From one end of the spectrum being, "Snowden is still working for the NSA and it was all a ruse" to "Alien lizard people are calling the shots," either of these and the whole range between could be true.

We have more information, but all that does here is increase our ignorance by raising more (and deeper) questions that we're answering. And way too small of a percentage of the people who are offended by the programs even care about the truth in order for any positive effects to be apparent. It seems that only those against Snowden will react to him in a unified way, and those who support him will be running in a zillion directions shouting different crazy nonsense. The few people asking rational follow-up questions are ignored.

The whole thing reminds me mostly of Roswell and "weather balloons." It is entirely possible that neither of the two main sides of the narrative are providing useful explanations for whatever the real events were/are.

Why lie? I mean, if you support what he did, support what he did. There should be no need to make up fibs.

He didn't ever raise anything with his supervisors. He did mention in passing that he personal disagreements with the legal analysis, but he didn't actually make a complaint, or report anything through the provided channels for complaints.

He also didn't go to congress, which is where there are elected officials who answer directly to the public and also have security clearances and legal mandate to oversee these programs.

If your position is that he didn't go through proper channels for some good reason, stick to that. Maybe that is true, maybe not; maybe somebody agrees, maybe not. But there is no need to trot out the tired lie that he actually used proper channels.

The first 6 months they were trickling out training PDFs that are refuted by the (more authoritative) stuff they leaked later. And all the big ticket stuff took well over a year to get published. By then, the details that matter would all be changed in anticipation of the leaks.

The way it was done, I don't see how it increases our knowledge. How do we even know he isn't a CIA agent leaking false data to hide whatever the real NSA programs are? We don't. We have no way of knowing which parts are true, if any; nothing appears to have changed; nothing was done in a way that would give interested civilians increased data on what is really happening at the time they're reading it.

He absolutely made the "journalists" the judges, and they judged that it needed to be trickled out for click-bait, starting with sensational-sounding stuff that was true, and then slowly ratcheting up to the shocking stuff after it has been too long to matter.

It did cause an extra 5 or 10 minutes of air time to go to Senator Wyden and his complaints about the programs. But those complaints already existed, and so far he's getting almost no support from his colleagues.