Seriously? So in your book, a doctor who has spent years at medical school and practiced in the field for years more is a "palm reader," but whichever unlicensed, unregulated nobody who reads you your 23andMe test results is a "scientist"? I guess in the unmitigated bullshit stakes, that makes you a dean of medicine.

They sure would shut down Wikipedia or RXList if those services allowed you to make an appointment to consult them for medical advice. Even campus health nurses have to be licensed.

What Wikipedia offers now is pretty much the same thing as reading information out of a book. You can't stop people from doing that, and there's no law against it.

What 23andMe does is market a product that you use to extract unique information about your own body, which is then presented to you in the form of suggestions about what health measures you should take -- in other words, medical advice. Very different.

...and if you want to convince the right-wingers, come up with a number for how much all of this costs the country, in terms of hospitalizing people who don't have insurance, etc...

Don't be dense. It's not a case of "if some people get vaccines we get no cases and if nobody gets vaccinated we get 175 cases." In France, where the instance of non-vaccination is much higher than it is in the US, there were five thousand cases of measles reported in the first three months of 2011 alone. You want the US to go that way, keep thinking measles vaccination is "not a concern."

You've just crossed the divide where my perspective is different than yours. When I was a kid, there was no chicken pox vaccine and everybody got it. If you knew a kid who had it, your parents sometimes sent you over to "say hi" to that kid, in hopes that you would catch it, because generally the younger you caught it, the milder the effects. (It's not much fun coming down with full-blown chicken pox as an adult, like my friend Dave eventually did -- picture trying to shave.)

Anyway, "two weeks of hell" is hardly how I'd describe the chicken pox. Two weeks of skipping school, getting to sit in front of the TV and watch anything I wanted, eating whatever I wanted (though to be honest, my sense of taste went funny while I was sick so not everything was enjoyable) and generally having a nice bed-rest vacation is how I remember it. When I heard that they were handing out chicken pox vaccines to kids, my first thought was "pussies."

But, I guess times change.

The FDA was very clear about why they stopped it. It wasn't necessarily that the information was misleading, but that it would lead patients to make decisions about their own care without necessarily consulting a doctor, which the FDA thinks is not a good idea -- and I totally see their point, frankly.

For example, one of the things that 23andMe can tell you is how well you might respond to one drug versus another, because of your specific genetic makeup. If you take that advice and change the dosage of your medication or switch to a different medication without discussing the issue with your doctor, you could cause yourself serious harm.

On the far end of the scale, "false positives" for some diseases could be catastrophic -- say, if a woman was erroneously told she had a high chance of contracting a certain type of breast cancer and decided to have a double mastectomy, like Angelina Jolie had done.

23andMe claimed that all it was doing was giving people information. But really, the way the information was structured and presented to the customer made it clear that it was designed to be diagnostically relevant and that they should use it to make decisions about how to proceed with health care. Any service that performs that function clearly falls under the jurisdiction of the FDA, IMHO.

And there you have it, folks ... the man who, quite without irony, spreads misinformation about vaccines in a /. post specifically about how people are getting sick because of misinformation being spread about vaccines.

Get your tetanus boosters, folks. You need one every ten years.

"For all you know"... and you don't even know what it is or what company manufactures it, in fact you can't provide a single link to any source of information about it and who might have access to it. Well, I'm convinced.

You're mistaken. No known human has contracted any form of naturally-occurring smallpox (i.e. not laboratory grown) since 1977 -- and we actually know the first and last name of the last person who ever did.

You're probably thinking of some other disease. There are lots of them; smallpox is the only one we've ever gotten rid of.

I've never heard of a permanent tetanus shot. It's possible you may have misunderstood what you were being told.

TDAP is a shot that includes a tetanus booster plus a small amount of pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine -- that's the P in TDAP. You were probably vaccinated against pertussis as a child, but these days doctors recommend that people get a booster once during their adult lives. So yes, it's technically true that you only ever need one TDAP shot once you become an adult, for the P. But that doesn't mean you don't need to keep getting the tetanus boosters (the T) every ten years. That part still wears off, unless they've really come up with something brand new.

What's more, even if you've been vaccinated within the last ten years, if you step on a nail or something and the puncture wound is deep, your doctor will probably recommend you get a tetanus booster anyway, just to be on the safe side.

It does, actually. As a member of the press operating under the jurisdiction of UK libel law, I'm not going to say he committed any crime until he's convicted.

Have you read the details of how DPR got caught? Satoshi may be some kind of genius, but if Ross Ulbricht really is DPR then he definitely does not have the skills to run any kind of criminal enterprise. As for balls, stupidity can convince a person to do all kinds of things.

I, at least, am unlikely to be weaned off ethanol.

Errr... apparently Twitter IS worth more than Red Hat, but Zynga's market cap is less than half that of EA and Facebook's is less than half that of Microsoft.

Yeah, this. I've never heard it called orgo. In fact, this description of the class does't ring any bells with me at all.