Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Oh boo-hoo! (Score 1) 330

Freedom of speech does imply meaningful access to an audience of some kind. Now yes, that audience must also have the readily-available freedom to not-listen and I don't think the Bill of Rights guaranteed a particular or captive audience, but an audience, at some level, there must be.

I lost you here.... the first amendment doesn't guarantee _anyone_ has to listen to you - it isn't saying "someone should be able to listen to you", it says "if the government happens to be in your audience, they can't retaliate based only on what you said".

I.E. if you want to go drunkenly shouting [insert extremist position here] propaganda at 3 in the morning in a small town deserted for the winter, and the only one who hears you is the local cop - the first amendment means he can't arrest you just for _what you say_. If you make your own website that says Donald Trump is a pumpkin, and the only person who ever goes there is Donald Trump himself - the first amendment means he can't arrest you just because he doesn't like what you said.

There is _no right to an audience_. A right to an audience would imply an _obligation_ for someone else to listen to you. And the Bill of Rights only creates obligations for the _government_, not for individuals.

Comment Re:Both? (Score 1) 515

I use both(*), because not all indenting is for blocks - sometimes it's for a multiline list/string/dictionary, and for those I usually try to line up the second lines to
match where it started in the previous line to look better, and that depends on the length of the function name so isn't always an exact multiple of the tab width.

But I think you can also read from this that people who use spaces may care more about what their code looks like, which usually means they might care a bit more about what their code does as well.

(*), because my IDE converts all the tabs to spaces anyways - yes, I mostly am working in Python.

Comment Re:M'eh (Score 1) 78

Jessica Alba,

other people mentioned The Honest Company, which was at one time valued at nearly $2 billion.

will.i.am,

Currently working for Intel (on the side) as their Director of Creative Innovation.

Gwyneth Paltrow

Don't know as much here, business-wise, but she also has mostly got out of acting (afaik) and moved on to business (and it's e-business), see goop.com...

I don't know the other guy.

Comment Innovation Bookshelf (Score 1) 102

Didn't see it posted....

Steven Johnson's "Where Good Things Come From" lays out a pretty good framework for innovative environments. ('Emergent' is also pretty good).

Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" is also a good read.

And last, Dietrich Dorner's "The Logic of Failure" might be also good, from the other direction....

Comment how communist is china? (Score 1) 147

Are these people also benefiting from government handouts, or is that still a thing in China (was it ever)? Is there (was there ever) any kind of medical safety net? This makes a lot more sense if this is the equivalent of a teenager getting a side job while still living in their parents' house - if they already have some of their basic needs met, then this is really for luxuries anyways - lots of people are willing to trading working hard for a higher standard of living, but there's likely to be many others who are willing to trade a lower standard of 'stuff' to get more free time...

Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 335

The most accurate division I've seen between 'left' and 'right', at least in the US, is the balance between mercy and justice - the left (=Democrats for the purpose of this article) prefers mercy to justice, the right (=Republicans) prefers justice to mercy. Some issues don't fall on this continuum (and many of them end up being about who receives mercy or justice), but a suprising number of them do.

Neither party has a monopoly on overspending, overregulating, corruption, etc. in pursuit of those goals... you will see general guidelines that are different (e.g. R = small government, D=social programs) but both will bend in pursuit of their overall goals... Politics is mostly how this gets worked out in the real world.

Example: Capital Punishment. Ds are the party of eternal hope - if there is any chance that even one killer could be rehabilitated, give them that chance, so it never makes sense to execute someone.
Rs are the party of avoiding more victims - giving someone a chance to be rehabilitated, means there is a chance they could kill again. That person's life should not be sacrified for the killer's mercy.
Both have merits IMHO. Currently, we balance this by allowing executions, but having them be somewhat rare - out of more than 15,000 murders (including manslaughter) in the US in 2015, there were 28 executions.

Comment Re:Enjoy having the crap sued out of you, L.A. (Score 1) 390

I don't know... in my opinion, 'Minority Report' (the short story, not the movie) went out of its way to defend it, even saying that while a conspiracy was trying to discredit pre-crime, it really was only possible to wrongly accuse Anderson because of his unique position. I don't know what PKD intended it to say, but that's how I read it...

Comment 'Invisible hand' is an emergent property (Score 1) 1350

The invisible hand is really just trying to say that the overall economics of the system are an emergent property of what goes on at lower levels... i.e. the price of wheat is a direct result of many individual buy and sell transactions. they just didn't have the concepts to describe it back then.

Comment Re:Knowledge is the solution (Score 2) 1051

It is very difficult to find this information. However, it is (sort of) available... i don't know of an actual death rate from vaccines exactly. Even this is hard to find, but there is a federal program (the 'Vaccine Injury Compensation Program') which compensates victims who have been harmed by compulsory vaccinations, and a summary chart of claims, accepted claims, and payouts is here:

http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecom...

I had found a different, more accessible document before, but can't really find it now. Similar information though. On the other hand, the statistics for the prevalence of diseases that have vaccines for them is much more available, at CDC:

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pu...

Influenza has the highest compensated total (932 in 8 years). Looking at DTaP might be a better comparison... ~75 million doses in 8 years with 105 compensated cases (including death, but other things too). Combined Diptheria/Tetanus/Pertussis together, the CDC chart only goes to 2011 (so missing a couple years) but it shows no D cases, ~150 or so T cases, and nearly 100,000 P cases over the 7 years in question, with total deaths in that time period: 0 for D, 9 for T, ~18 for P (and none in the last 4 years on the chart, so trend was definitely down).

Would help to have a trend line for the compensated cases too. In any case, the statistics show that as of ~2011, you had a better chance of not dying by not getting the vaccine, but the chance in either case was vanishingly small.

Of course, the issue here is a free rider syndrome - if everyone else gets the vaccine, I can get the benefits (reduced chance of catching a bad disease) while everyone else bears the risks (possible chance of side effects from the vaccine). But if enough people don't get the vaccine, then the numbers change quickly as more people catch the disease.

We vaccinated, but we waited until after age 2 to give their immune system time to build up. Seemed like the best balance.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her birth." -- Milton

Working...