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Comment Re:The "green" movement is an oxymoron. (Score 1) 510

Sorry, but this is idiotic.The global temperature is nowhere near "deep freeze." (Water freezes at 0 C; average global temperature is well above that)
What we have are temperatures where the most fertile areas of the globe have temperatures and rainfall consistent with highly productive agriculture.
What we have are temperatures where immense numbers of people living near the coasts are reasonably safe from catastrophic flooding
What we have are temperatures where only a few isolated areas of the global get too hot for human beings to survive without air conditioning.

Comment Re:What to do? Some science, please. (Score 1) 510

But I do not see the AGW crowd trying to prevent ocean waves from crashing into the coast, releasing water vapor into the atmosphere.

That's because it wouldn't affect the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.

The key difference is that if you put extra CO2 into the atmosphere it just stays there for a long period of time.
But if you put extra water vapor into the atmosphere, it pretty quickly condenses right back out.

Comment Re:Global warming (Score 4, Informative) 232

No, it wasn't "the same so-called scientists," it was a couple of guys who were out of the mainstream, although it got some sensationalist play in the mainstream media. Even back then, the consensus favored warming due to CO2 release, although there was a lot more uncertainty about how much. Anybody who cares about facts rather than propaganda can easily verify this for themselves--the original scientific literature of the time is available in any major university library and much of it, or at least the abstracts, is available online.

Comment Re:Apple just buy out Intel (Score 1) 100

More like, by adopting Intel's process technology they could save 20% or more of the power used by all of their mobile devices, not to mention the billions of dollars they contribute to Intel's profit margin currently. If Apple owned Intel, they could even resume manufacturing Flash RAM in-house.

...and as compared to simply paying Intel to do this for them, they are going to save...more than the purchase price of the entire company? Really?

Comment Re:Apple just buy out Intel (Score 1) 100

I very much doubt that Apple will buy a business which would force Apple to get into an entirely new industry that is only marginally connected with Apple's core business. Intel's value is primarily due to supplying chips to an entire industry. So what would Apple get in turn for buying Intel? Cheaper pricing? The savings would hardly make up for the cost of purchasing Intel. Make Intel exclusively an Apple supplier? Even leaving aside the question of Intel's current obligations, this would mean throwing much of Intel's market value down the toilet. But if Intel vanishes as a supplier of silicon to the industry, this would simply create a huge incentive and opportunity for other firms to step into the gap--and to offer Intel's engineers sky-high-premiums to induce them to jump ship. The only reason for Apple to buy Intel would be if there were some sort of synergy. But could Apple improve on what Intel is already doing? Intel is the industry leader, and Apple's strength is in consumer design, not chip fabrication. Perhaps Apple could push Intel to develop superior products for mobile devices--but the guys at Intel aren't stupid, which means they are probably already doing this as best they can. Apple is a huge market, and Intel would love to sell them more chips.

Comment Interesting? (Score 1) 251

What's interesting about this story, at least for me, is that iPad sales have tanked

If you compare a quarter just after a new iPad model was introduced to a quarter where the last new iPad model is anticipated in the near future.

How could it be otherwise? What is interesting or meaningful about that?

Comment Re:My opinion has changed on the subject (Score 1) 668

As somebody who does research on autism, I can tell you that a huge amount of serious research is being done, but it is being ignored by people who are so obsessed with the vaccine notion that they are unable to consider any other possibilities. Study after study has been done on vaccines and mercury, and it has been a blind alley. We don't know what causes autism, but we do know that it isn't vaccines and it isn't mercury.

I know that many people would like to blame it on something that we are exposed to. Nobody is dismissing the possibility, but so far the evidence does not support the idea that there is some simple cause. I can tell you for certain that if there were anything as simple as the relationship between smoking and cancer (which was strongly suspected by scientists years before it became widely accepted), it would have been found by now. Best evidence at this point points toward a genetic vulnerability perhaps complicated or triggered by environmental factors, which may be nonspecific things like prenatal maternal stress or viral infections.

And no, diagnostic criteria for autism have broadened, not narrowed. And there is far more incentive to diagnose it, since there are now therapies that are helpful in some cases. Many of the kids diagnosed with autism today would have simply been dismissed as mentally retarded a few decades ago (Temple Grandin's mother's doctor advised that she simply be institutionalized). Indeed, as autism diagnoses have risen, diagnoses of mental retardation have declined.

Comment Re:Vaccine contamination; anti-vaccine irresponsib (Score 1) 668

Recently, the CDC put up and then removed a page linking polio vaccines to cancer-causing viruses (http://healthimpactnews.com/2013/cdc-disappears-page-linking-polio-vaccines-to-cancer-causing-viruses/).

You've got it slightly wrong. First, it does not appear that the virus in question (SV40) ever caused cancer in man, and the problem was fixed long ago. Considering the danger presented by polio at the time, even with the SV40, you were better off getting the vaccine than not getting it. (I'm pretty sure that I got that vaccine myself). And anyway, this applies only to live-virus oral polio vaccine. Injected polio vaccine is treated so that there can be no live viruses of any kind in it.

Comment Re:My opinion has changed on the subject (Score 1) 668

1. Too many vaccinations for a little body to handle is a problem. I know they space them out already, but it's a problem for many kids because they aren't getting good enough nutrition to support a healthy immune system. After all, vaccinations RELY on a healthy immune system. If they aren't ready, it's either useless, a problem or both.

This is one of those things that sounds reasonable, but is nevertheless nonsense. Vaccines are given at a stage when the immune system has been found to be mature enough to respond. If it did not, the worst that would happen with most vaccines (the ones that have no live organism) would be that the vaccine would be ineffective. And the "too many" notion simply doesn't make sense. Every little scratch, scrape, or rash exposes a child to a huge number of microorganisms, which are present in the environment and on the skin in huge numbers. Not to mention in microorganisms in food or transmitted by coughs and sneezes. Compared to this, vaccines are a small drop in a very large bucket.

The autism rates are still climbing. It's now like 1 in 50

This seems to be mostly (maybe entirely) increased diagnosis. There was a recent survey of adults in the UK that applied modern diagnostic criteria and found an incidence close to 1% for people up to their 70's, indicating that there has been little if any change in incidence of autism over time. And the nature of the survey was such that it would not have picked up nonverbal autistic adults, so that is surely an underestimate of the true incidence.

Comment Re:a "before" and an "after" in the life of our so (Score 2) 668

Autism is a developmental disorder. It manifests at a particular stage of development. This is around the time when children normally receive their vaccinations, and unvaccinated children also tend to manifest autism around this time. Given the huge number of vaccinated children, many will be diagnosed with autism around the time of their vaccinations, just purely by chance. It is natural to see causality in such an association, particularly if the child had a common vaccine reaction, such as a fever, even if it is coincidental.

I imagine that if we gave vaccinations in the teen years, there would be people just as convinced that the vaccination caused their child to be schizophrenic, because that is the age when schizophrenia typically manifests.

Comment Which imposition is greatest? (Score 1) 668

Nazi's executed people with genetic defects and diseases in the "public interest", and while you may think it is fine to forcibly inject people with vaccines that are morally objectionable, I am sure you would hate it if they forced their beliefs on you

And wouldn't you agree that it is also wrong to force your beliefs upon others by exposing them against their will to an unvaccinated child who could be a carrier for numerous dangerous diseases? In a society, we all impose our beliefs upon one other to some extent. So we are dependent upon reason and evidence to minimize the harm that results.

Science can be wrong, it has happened many times in the past

As with so many things in life, you have to play the odds. Nobody knows everything, and anybody can be wrong. But choices based upon the best evidence are less likely to be wrong. As the saying goes, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong--but that's the way to bet."

If they don't get vaccinated are they a hazard to you who is vaccinated? The answer is no

Sorry but this is really ignorant. Vaccines reduce the risk of infection from an encounter with an infected individual, but they don't reduce it to zero. If the exposure is high enough, a vaccinated person can still contract the disease. In addition, part of the protection provided by vaccines is due to the fact that mass vaccination reduces the probability that you will encounter in infected individual. If enough people are vaccinated so each infected person passes the disease on to less than one other person on average, then the disease cannot propagate, and dies out.

On top of that, there are people who are unvaccinated, not because they have irrational fears of vaccines, but because they are immunocompromised or allergic to some component of a vaccine. These people are completely dependent upon the vaccination of others for their protection

Comment Re:The boring truth (Score 1) 668

Thimerosal was introduced as a preservative in multi-dose vaccine vials after bacterial contamination incidents resulting in fatal infections. Thimerosal prevents this from happening. That sounds like a pretty good idea.

And what are the names of the "other preservatives" with evidence of safety and efficacy comparable to thimerosal which was used for decades on millions of people with no evidence that it ever hurt anybody? How were these studies done? Where, specifically, is the evidence for the safety of these "other preservatives" published?

Comment Re:Meh. (Score 2) 607

It's funny how people have this recollection of past Apple products being these dramatically original products. The only Apple product for which this could actually have been said to be the case was the original Mac (an even that is debatable). Every other major product was greeted at introduction with comments like "It's been done before," "a me-too product," "a niche product." And in the years between releases of new Apple product categories, there have always been numerous comments that to the effect that Apple has lost its creativity.

I guess people like to imagine in retrospect that they were perceptive enough to recognize at introduction that the iPod, iPhone, iMac, and iPad were going to be great commercial successes. But in fact, none of them were startlingly original in any obvious ways. All resembled products that had been done before. What has distinguished Apple's products has always been execution rather than concept.

That also means that I can't judge the significance of the changes to OS X or iOS. There were very few features that I haven't seen before. On the other had, none of them have every been done quite right. I won't be able to judge them until I can actually play with them to see if the execution is up to Apple's past standards.

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