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Comment Separate from the rebranding of covid.gov... (Score 5, Insightful) 213

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

Comment Re: PHP (Score 1) 30

PHP has been a disaster since the beginning. People start out as novice programmers who don't know about better with PHP and it happily lets them shoot themselves in the foot. It's as if the language was specifically designed to encourage it, even. Also check out https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Freddit.com%2Fr%2Flolphp for a long list of PHP fails. Go update your WordPress and all plugins, too. You know it needs it.

Comment Re:How funny (Score 4, Interesting) 63

I am founder/mod on 8 subreddits. They are not censored or "managed" in any way other than removing obvious commercial spam and harmful scams solely per my own personal preferences as the moderator. I've never had any communications with reddit corporate.

Also, fuck you /u/spez for turning off the API for third party apps.

Comment Re: Why isn't there a cure? (Score 1) 33

The problem is complicated and hard to reduce to a paragraph or two.

My point seems to be missed:

To get to cures, we have to side-step the free market. I'm not criticizing them. They see opportunity and do their jobs. The problem is that there is minimal, if any, opportunity in cures.

The only solution is to make up the profitability shortfall so as to improve citizens' lives.

I don't give a hoot about the political perspective on this. My focus is on getting to cures. End of story.

Comment Why isn't there a cure? (Score 1) 33

Why is there no cure for diabetes? Because it doesn't make economic sense. There's an incredible industry around diabetes and a cure would harm it significantly.

Before we go on, it's easy to yell Big Pharma - but they are just doing there jobs and, if they don't want to increase profits, they will get fired and somebody else will step in to fill their shoes.

How do we solve the problem of both Diabetes 1 and 2?

It's going to take governments with guts. The guts to form a Public Private Partnership to really execute on cures.

Every country on the planet should each take on one or more diseases and be the centre of expertise for that disease - with a focus on a cure, NOT on treatments.

If we ranked of the top killers, they would be Coronary Artery Disease, Strokes, Flu, Pneumonia, TB, COPD, Respiratory Cancers, Diabetes, Prostate, Breast, Alzheimers and other Cancers - not to mention Cirrhosis and Diarheal diseases

If each of the G19 took on two each, we'd be done with these scourges in a decade.

Comment Re:1995 (Score 1) 181

I just checked and it looks like my post history only goes back to 2011? DId slashdot dump all of the older stuff? :((((

My UID number here is four digits. I used to write a LOT here. So unfortunate if they had to blow away all of the old stuff.

Comment 1995 (Score 1) 181

I saw this on Facebook, commented there, but then decided I should log in here, just for old time's sake, and comment the same:

The year of the Linux Desktop was 1995 for me.

Check my post history going back nearly that far. Wow, I haven't logged into slashdot in many years. Once Facebook, reddit, etc. came along they totally replaced slashdot in my mind. I'm glad to see that it's still here.

Comment Power sources in general (Score 1) 151

What about power sources in general?

- Power Tools

- SLR Cameras

- EV Bikes, cars etc.

etc.

We all know that every manufacturer wants to lock you into their 'system' by virtue of their battery packs. Why aren't we, as consumers, demanding standardization along with right-to-repair so that cheap cells can be replaced rather than buying expensive, custom power packs that are welded together?

Comment It's the last thing we need. (Score 1) 209

What we need is a filing SYSTEM. Users have no concept of file nomenclature or filing strategies. We don't need a new container for files, we need an automated library system to store and retrieve them.

What files should be saved? Which files are useless? What do we store in the cloud and what do we keep locally? How do we merge-purge storage media? Where can we organize photos? etc. etc.

Take a typical phone user. Look at how often they scroll and scroll. What a bloody waste of time. We need a filing system that is intuitive so that they can find the pictures they want just by describing what they are looking for... etc. etc.

Think of every typical office. The server file system is often a huge disaster. No order, no structure - just random folders that are deemed 'important' and that files are dumped into....

I could go on and on but I know I'm boring you. Go back to designing your new filing system and screw the reason we need it.

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