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OT: 802 - 16 years ago

Two weeks ago somebody responded to a post I made on this forum with a series of increasingly creepy messages to the seldom-read email account provided me by the University where I used to teach. This person also pretended to be a student in emails complaining about me to the chairs of two departments in which I was listed as an instructor (here's a tip: it diminishes the verisimilitude when all

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: 'G(u)ARD' your loins?!. . .HPV vaccine found to be effective in males. . . - 16 years ago

QuoteDoc No, YOU read it again. you're talking about reports, not about events. 10,000 reports = an estimated 60-100,000 events. Says you. You said QuoteDoc'Thing is, the "serious adverse events" are seizures. In 6% or more of the people who get the shot. I pointed out that you appeared to have misread the CDC report, you countered with an unsourced assertion that the re

by x-uri - Tips and Deals

Re: 'G(u)ARD' your loins?!. . .HPV vaccine found to be effective in males. . . - 16 years ago

QuoteDoc You seem to be agreeing with me and proffering a source that supports my statement. You might want to work on that a bit and come back to it. From the linked CDC document As of August 31, 2008, there have been 10,326 VAERS reports of adverse events following Gardasil vaccination in the United States. Of these reports, 94% were reports of events considered to be non-serious, and 6% w

by x-uri - Tips and Deals

Re: 'G(u)ARD' your loins?!. . .HPV vaccine found to be effective in males. . . - 16 years ago

QuoteDoc 'Thing is, the "serious adverse events" are seizures. In 6% or more of the people who get the shot. Not according to the Centers for Disease Control. They are stating that that 6% of reported adverse reactions are serious. As of August, 2008 total reported adverse reactions (serious and non-serious) number 10,326, I can't find an authoritative source for the total

by x-uri - Tips and Deals

Re: 'G(u)ARD' your loins?!. . .HPV vaccine found to be effective in males. . . - 16 years ago

I've made a half-hearted attempt to find some informed analysis about the allegations that Gardasil has been linked to a statistically significant number of injuries in otherwise healthy girls. There seems to be a lot of noise from the usual suspects in the anti-vaccination crowd, amplified by the people who are bothered that it is a vaccination given to girls before their sexual debut, for a

by x-uri - Tips and Deals

Re: Saw Colin Powell & Rudy Giuliani Speak Today - 16 years ago

When I was a grad student, getting paid with SDI money, I got to meet George H.W. Bush. He was charming and funny and altogether very cool. If charisma were an indicator of competence and righteousness he'd have been a pretty good president. Unfortunately, he was feeble-minded, morally bankrupt and irredeemably corrupt (although comparison with his wet-brained son makes him look like a wise a

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Chuck Norris? Seriously? - 16 years ago

Found this by way of scienceblogs. It's no big surprise that I don't see politically eye-to-eye with you. Actually, I stand in stark opposition to most of your politics. Still, even in our differences, I realize that we must learn to work together if we are to see our country get back on track... The President-elect is SO going to kick his ass. The President should totally conven

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: So was the move to Intel a good one after all? - 16 years ago

QuoteJoeH That may apply to the automotive embedded market. But Freescale is still selling quite a few of the 74x and 74xx and related later core variants in the embedded networking and industrial controller markets. Those are not just 601/603 variants. As for whether or not Apple would have let them, since Apple was often just getting chips that binned better, I don't think they could have

by x-uri - Tips and Deals

Re: So was the move to Intel a good one after all? - 16 years ago

QuoteArticle Accelerator PowerPC "Numerically, the PowerPC is mostly found in controllers in cars. Almost half the world's automobiles have at least one PowerPC controller in them" Those parts aren't the sort fall-out from Apple. The embedded controllers are 601/603 variants. Even if there was a market for the 970s (G5s) or the 740x (G4) that didn't sort to Apple's spec -- Apple

by x-uri - Tips and Deals

Re: the life of a president - 16 years ago

The Mirror's list of true facts seems somehow hurried and incomplete. The -- frankly horrifying -- image of Sarah Palin violating herself with a model of the Washington Monument notwithstanding, I think we could probably add some useful detail. For instance: The President only has to pay for his own meals if they are cooked by the Whitehouse staff, which is why the notoriously cheap Clinto

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: So was the move to Intel a good one after all? - 16 years ago

QuoteSilencio ... and the smaller die sizes have yielded cooler-running, more power-efficient CPUs. ???

by x-uri - Tips and Deals

Re: the life of a president - 16 years ago

I like this. And President Obama will invite professional basketball stars to join him "shooting hoops". Meanwhile, the Weekly World News reports that President-elect Obama has named an Intergalactic Ambassador

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: "Kumbya" kind of guy - 16 years ago

QuoteBlack Landlord Can I go now? They mostly come at night... mostly.

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: So was the move to Intel a good one after all? - 16 years ago

At the time that Apple announced the switch to Intel chips Freescale was already manufacturing dual-core G4 chips and IBM had been making dual core G5s for 2 years. The G5 was already clocking at 3.0 GHz, but the sort yields at this speed (that is, the number of chips that survived accelerated burn-in at this speed) were too low to offer the chip at Apple's price. At the time of the switch,

by x-uri - Tips and Deals

Re: "Kumbya" kind of guy - 16 years ago

Quotemikeylikesit Back off X, I didn't have a reason to know that either. Now that I do I've decided I don't really care Okay, let me rephrase: 1) I am irritated that "Kum Bay Yah" has come to mean a naive and ineffectual species of progressive activism. 2) I am particularly annoyed that it is often employed in this way by white conservative Christians. 3) Deboarah Gyapong ap

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: First Bad Cabinet Pick - 16 years ago

QuoteJimmypoo For those of you who need a little history lesson on just what can be done -- read up on Hitler, IG Farben and Syn Fuels. They were doing it back in 1944... Dodd's Corollary? The problem with "clean coal" is that it is a label so elastic and imprecise that it means pretty much nothing. As JoeH says, the Clean Coal (tm) being promoted by organizations like Ame

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: "Kumbya" kind of guy - 16 years ago

Funny that the 2005 Best New Canadian Christian Author wouldn't know that is as actually three words Kum By Yah, from the gullah spiritual. Seriously, how the fsck would you stumble onto this blog?

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: First Bad Cabinet Pick - 16 years ago

QuoteWags Kennedy would be an outstanding choice to head the EPA. He's worked tirelessly to represent the interests of citizens against the multi-national corps that have usurped the environmental regulatory system under the leadership of Bush. I suggest any skeptics read his book "Crimes Against Nature". While he would be an improvement over the paid representatives of the Oil Ind

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: ELection maps scaled to population - 16 years ago

Quotemikeylikesit Thanks for that graph. We will of course begin deconstructing the Obama administration at the first opportunity. It's what we do! I was actually taking issue with your identification of the people who were able to exploit new communications technologies to help make the map a bluer shade of violet as "free thinkers". While there is good correlation between freetho

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: ELection maps scaled to population - 16 years ago

QuoteMacGurl It's still a neat illustration. Kathy Thx. I did it in StudioArtist. It makes quite lovely messes, but t is challenging to get a repeatable result.

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: ELection maps scaled to population - 16 years ago

Quotemikeylikesit Quotex-uri thought better of it ?? I was going to post this QuotemikeylikesitFree thinking, non-traditional individualists ... But then I started thinking about the relative sizes of the circles and the sizes of the intersections, and whether it would be better to say "Democrats" rather than "Liberals" and how much more time I wanted to spend messi

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: ELection maps scaled to population - 16 years ago

thought better of it

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

First Bad Cabinet Pick - 16 years ago

This is what I am afraid of -- that President Obama will be susceptible to the same kind of tendencious unreason that informed the last 8 years of policy, albeit from a different group of cranks and quacks.

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: ELection maps scaled to population - 16 years ago

It is a majestic blue butterfly struggling to flap free of a red web of stupid. PZ Myer makes some interesting conjectures about why the red parts seem to be getting smaller. A big part of it was that the McCain campaign just got it wrong. Fearful white people may still be a large enough bloc to carry an election, but they picked the wrong fears to excite. The fearful white folks appe

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: Good pencil sharpener? - 16 years ago

For personal use For sharpening a bunch of pencils (as for a bubble-sheet exam), the Boston 1900 is pretty good.

by x-uri - Tips and Deals

Re: A "what if?" question...just because - 16 years ago

Quotewurm I wonder what would have transpired if McCain had decided to shun the Republican Party, chosen Joe Lieberman as his running mate, and run as an Independent. At what point in the race would he have done this? Unless he was going to fund the campaign out of his own wife's pockets, he wouldn't have gotten very far. If he managed to mount a national campaign, he likely would have

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: Okay, conservatives, where are you gonna threaten to move to? - 16 years ago

A couple of my co-workers are talking about emigrating to Australia. They weren't sure if Australia had English as the Official Language, but they were going to "seriously find out" and that would be the clincher for them.

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: Okay, so now we will have a center-right Democrat in the WH... - 16 years ago

QuoteAcer Sounds to me like the advantage of this program is that effective programs won't be discriminated against just because they have a faith-based parent organization. THAT is separation of church and state in a positive way, IMHO. If the faith-based organizations stop passing the collection plate, or refund their congregants donations in amounts equal to the funding from the Office of Fa

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: Okay, so now we will have a center-right Democrat in the WH... - 16 years ago

Quotekarsen Vouchers. I hope so. Okay. Read this slowly. I put quotation marks around the things that have quotation marks to indicate the slogans that will be used by the cynical, self-serving, and generally unhelpful Conservative Democrats to stay in office. Edit: Seriously, I have a job to go to.

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting

Re: We Are One Confused State! - 16 years ago

Quotekap Correct me if I am wrong but historically blacks had their civil rights first before women, then gays. Now that we have the first black president. Next, will be a woman. Then may be just may be the heterosexuals will not feel the need to protect their traditional marriage any more from the gay folks. So, you are saying that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?

by x-uri - 'Friendly' Political Ranting