I actually fail to see what is really that new with this

Reading is one thing, comprehending is another. For the first time, we know what can get rid of this very bad bug in a mammal, without using the previously accepted (and not at all controversial) fecal transplant when other antibiotics fail.

Mouse or not, this gives a target to look for in humans. And assuming all of the ingredients are human-compatible, this should result in a good step towards curing a very painful and debilitating condition.

The principle has been known for a while, but the exact mix that works for this particular bug has not been known. Hopefully you see where the big deal is now. Previous treatments offered certain strains which only succeeded under certain circumstances, most likely when the patient had some of the missing flora.

I won't address the rant, it is a blend of ignorance, well-trodden fact, incomplete understanding, internal inconsistency, and a few others that can't be specified because they are wrapped around other fallacies. If you indeed can read, you should read less mainstream media, and certainly quit reading slashdot comments.

Rather than further mod you to oblivion, I chose to leave both your initial reply, where you admit to willfully remaining ignorant on something you dismiss, and the followup where you actually admit to learn something.

I think I like it better this way.

Especially after being hacked several times already. Standard response among large companies is to make new rules and clamp down everything. That should have happened two breaches ago.

On the other hand, I spent 45 minutes tonight trying to search for what the dial does on an HDTV antenna. Fine tuning knob they say. It allows you to fine-tune something so your something comes in better. Every hit was either a review or some shopping site.

I even removed some by adding "-purchase -buy -store" and the top 5 never changed. I don't want to buy it, I want to know what the fuck it does.

In the AltaVista days, I could find what I wanted in the first page. Northern lights, I could find it in the top 5. Before Google's IPO, I always told people I could find what they couldn't because I "knew how to program google". The search term(s) are the important part.

Today's google just doesn't have that edge. It tries to infer what you want, and it skews the result towards adverts. I have an advert running on OTA tv which says that Google reps will be in town. 80% of moms google something after being exposed to an ad. Grow your business, attend the whatever it is.

I'mma tell you, like Wu told me. Cash rules everything, around me.

I even resorted to Bing last week. To see which was better. Bing found some things Google didn't. And it pains me to say that, partly because Bing is a stupid name, and partly because Microsoft did something right. Outside of their developer tools, I can't compliment MS beyond being in the right place at the right time.

If I can't find out how something works because Google wants me to buy something with their referring, something is either wrong with Google, or wrong with the internet.

I'd say it was the internet, but given Google's local advertising, I'm leaning towards Google again.

Biologically speaking, it is straight people who keep producing gay offspring. If straight people really wanted to stop the gay, they would quit having gay kids.

Or alternatively, the insistence of a man marrying a woman and having children, and anything else being proof of queerness, is an imposition straight people make on the gays.

If we just let the gays go be gay and not pass on their gayness, they would either die off if it's genetic, or live happy lives without being persecuted.

So yeah, seems okay to be gay. If your lineage dies off that's what nature intended, or what your deity intended, or what destiny decided. It's an individual choice. If the individual is okay with that, it speaks for itself. If not, I guess they will try as hard as they can to infiltrate the other sex, or be infiltrated, to pass on the genes. And spread the gay further.

I'm fine with that.

Did you use CTRL-X or CTRL-C? Or Edit/Copy vs. Edit/Cut?

I'm guessing it was copy. Copy and paste. Like Xerox, a copier. Not a cutter.

"Cut and paste job" refers to the older method of physically cutting apart something to make a new work. Like Thomas Jefferson's Bible. It is also pejorative, implying something that can be done by one with little brain.

You can say the piss poor editing is a "cut and paste" job, because it is. A user being too lazy to "copy and paste" is pejorative enough, going the extra mile is not just unnecessary but actually clouds your meaning.

Language evolves, and I have already lost this fight. But hopefully this helps people.

You can argue that society is wrong, and I think make some good arguments for that, but George Carlin's argument is, quite frankly, a bad argument.

Way to miss the point. Carlin was the court jester, the only one allowed to mock the King. He was a philosopher who made a living picking out absurdities and presenting them to an audience. He didn't have an "Act", he had a lecture.

He wasn't making an argument, and everyone here trying to pull apart an argument that doesn't exist are tilting at windmills which also do not exist.

He was not making an argument, he was simply pointing out something that, in a certain context, appears to be an absurdity. It is more word play than anything else.

If you watch his lecture, he specifically says he doesn't understand it, not that it should be legal. The closest he gets to an argument is

why is it illegal to sell something that is perfectly legal to give away?

Further, he compares military recognition for killing or maiming people, with going to jail for giving someone an orgasm. There's your argument, if you want to find one.

This whole "thing plus other thing" nonsense is a red herring, and everyone who participated is an idiot.

And China is going to become very interesting for that reason.

Not because of government conspiracy, but due to social constructs which favor male children. And I think there is just as much "people in power" conspiracy going on in places where prostitution is illegal. Which is to say, none. If there were, Nevada would be heavily pressured to conform, or at least disallow anyone from out of state to participate.

Your observation is not incorrect, but taking it to the next level and implying that it is intentionally being used for that purpose is quite a jump. Especially when more obvious explanations abound, such as the inherited so-called Puritanical views, and the incestuous cycle where it's seen as wrong, so it becomes a political issue, and then "everyone knows" that it should be outlawed. So the voter pandering continues.

Many of the people voting to keep it illegal, and enforcing the law, are very much for the idea personally, and they have to keep up the facade. If everyone just blurted out what they really thought, honestly, we would have a lot less opposition. We have to get past the social construct before we can talk about it being an oppressive position.

I was interested in finding people from school, which is a bit difficult when people have unlisted mobile numbers and have moved to different cities. Facebook made it simple to find all but the one person I really wanted to find. That's a pretty good percentage, and had I persisted I could have gone through the friends-of-friends route.

I caught up with where people are, talked to the ones I wanted to talk to, filtered out the ones who found me. Then torched my account and haven't been back.

They can't e-mail or call if they don't know your number, and they can't stop by if they don't know that you moved.

It is especially good for situations like people off to college in different cities or states, keeping in touch with people from high school. I was writing letters in 1993, since my younger friends didn't have e-mail. With something like Facebook I could have made fewer trips home, keep in touch with friends from time to time, and maintain contact at university.

There are numerous other scenarios in which something like Facebook is a good solution.

Farmville is not one. Friending people you don't really want to talk to is not one. Leaving details which let people piece together things you want kept secret is not one. Having all of your friends available so you can talk in person or on the phone in real-time is not one.

Some people work odd hours, and staying in touch by leaving status updates so the group knows what everyone else is doing, or planning, is quite convenient.

I plan to hop on every 5 years to see who is alive, dead, married, divorced, moved, or suddenly rich and/or partially famous. And then slowly burn the account so it doesn't even resemble me, and let it go dormant.

Try telling that to someone who lives in a country where being gay can still get you killed, such as present-day Iraq, Pakistan or Jamaica.

Surely you recognise the word "becoming", and the distinction between the younger generation, who do not control the laws, and the elders who do? GP post is dead-on:

Sexual orientation is becoming less important, especially to the younger generation.

That's not always practical if the "safe" distance is in another country.

If a defense is impossible, you have to fall back on the next best defense. That doesn't change the best defense. The best defense against your parents finding out about your sexual orientation from someone else will always be to tell them yourself, from whatever distance is safe.

Facebook is social networking, and people have to realize that their socializations will be revealed. Socializing in public will reveal these sorts of things unintentionally, online or in person. Facebook's position is the only sane one in this case, since people do need to be educated about this sort of thing. Facebook shirks that duty while acknowledging it, since their business model depends on you revealing this information, at least to FB if not to your friends.

And soon it won't matter. Not soon enough, but tolerance is growing in general.

Fuck me sideways. The one time I have JavaScript enabled I mis-moderate. I understand the reasoning behind not being able to edit a comment, but re-moderating within a minute or two, when moderation takes place instantly with no confirmation should be the minimum allowed.

The computer hacker collective Anonymous has distanced itself from WikiLeaks, claiming the whistleblowers' site has become too focused on the personal tribulations of its founder, Julian Assange.

To be fair, "claiming" could be a collective verb or not. So the bold was inappropriate.

Fuck you, JavaScript programmers. I do your job better and more sensibly every day. Some of you are okay, but the others should be screwed with a 2 by 4, sideways.

I was going to suggest many of those. My few additions:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. No explanation, just go read it.

Milgram Obedience Studies - Groupthink. For obvious reasons.

The Fountainhead - individualism to a limited extent is a positive thing, but Atlas Shrugged just punches the idea into the ground repeatedly. Roark is still an inspiration in my programming. Bag the ideology and all the idiots who reply based on ideology. I stopped reading for a few years after that one.

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates - Tom Robbins. I read a page at random from hundreds of books over several years. This one got me reading again. I'd say that was a significant impact.

Consciousness Explained - Daniel C. Dennett - it's a little out of date at this point, but pretty much relevant.

Rousseau - The social contact. Helps navigate the coworker waters.

Survival of the Sickest - Moalem. Interesting look at why we are the way we are.

Curiously, each of these has made me a better employed programmer. Each has its own construct of the universe. When certain issues or problems come up, these models help put ideas in context so they can be explained. A framework for all situations.

Don't forget to learn a foreign language, or refresh it if you took it a long time ago. Different languages have different ways of describing the same thing.French and Japanese for the niche, Spanish and Chinese for the mass market, German and/or something Nordic for the "origin of English" perspective, or if you want to change your way of life something truly obscure.

You don't need years, just minutes. Ptolemaic system already did it. In fact, there are working physical models which demonstrate the relative positions of planets given a geocentric alignment.

Good Fuck, did you not consider that someone else might have done this in the thousands of years since we have had enlightened beings on our planet? Ptolemy based his work on the Babylonians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model

Somewhere around the discovery of the functions of the Antikythera Mechanism, slashdot had a link to a website where you could switch between a geo- vs helio- centric view of the solar system, an animation which displayed what was happening at that moment in time. I could not find it in time for apathy to set in, Bing it if you feel the need.

Here's a picture for you to start with, undoubtedly created from a model

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Geoz_wb_en.svg&page=1

"If it worked for our founding fathers..." is a terrible argument. Even when you're trying to say that things get old faster so they same time period is effectively longer.

I take the opinion that most of the copyright-based industries are actually false economies. They have built up a business model based on the scarcity of a tangible object (vinyl or paper), and expect to continue that via artificial scarcity. It doesn't make any sense.

The duration argument has already been made. Optimum length for a copyright for both the owner and society as a whole is 14-17 years, depending on who you ask. It has nothing to do with the circumstances long ago. We adjust as times change.

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/research-optimal-copyright-term-is-14-years/

Allow me to elaborate on laurelraven's 3-letter pimp-slap. ADP (Automatic Data Processing) has a market cap of 28.83B. According to ADP's 10-k from 2009, ADP processed payroll for 570,000 companies, delivered 51 million year-end tax statements (W-2), delivered 39 million employer payroll tax returns and deposits.

That's a pretty large site. Judging by the ignorance of your response, I'd say this is your first experience in taking the piss. Remember, the dinosaurs were on top of the Darwinian survivalist chain until that unpleasantness quite a few million years ago now. I bet they felt just as smug.

Now why don't you and laurelraven make up, kiss, and figure out how to make Mozilla aware of this new development?