>> ^Enzoblue:
>> ^Bidouleroux:
This is pretty much exactly like religion vs. atheism, with religion being of course smoking.

Anti-smoking is by far the more religious. Smoking is blamed for a host of sundry afflictions with scientific support that no one has the courage to challenge. People want it to be evil and that's what they get. No serious scientist would do any unbiased research, because if he found anything remotely pro-smoking the political fallout would ruin his career overnight.
Our surgeon general states that 70% of lung cancer victims got it from smoking, but lung cancer continues to rise with nary a blip - even though smokers per capita have fallen under 25% and have been there for a decade. If you want me to support this claim with data, sorry I can't. Neither the CDC or the ALA, or any other site I could find, will release any data cross referencing lung cancer victims and smokers. You can easily find how much carcinogens a black single mother of 2 will inhale in a 12x12 room with one smoker, but a table lookup of smokers v lung cancer victims will get you a 404 error. Try it.
That's religion. People needing an evil, ignoring the facts, suppressing the research of facts, all holding hands and attacking with fervor.
P.S.
My lungs get a clean bill of health every year, even though I've been smoking for over 20 years, simply because I've never tell the doctors I smoke. Ask your smoking friends to try that, it'll give them a chuckle.


You obviously didn't look very hard for data then. With almost zero effort I just came accross this in a high-profile peer-reviewed medical journal. There are hundreds of studies comparing mortality rates between smokers and non-smokers with data going back 100 years. I just want to point out the data in that study was from 1951-2001. In "survival rates from age 35" the difference in survival rates between smokers and non-smokers increases to about 20% difference by age 70. That is, you are looking at about 20% of all non-smokers being dead and 40% of all smokers dead. You can always look at the graphs for much more information than I can type here, but it's all very damning.

"But cancer continues to rise!" I hear in a myriad of different "X does or doesn't cause cancer" topics. What you mean to say is cancer diagnoses have continued to rise. 50 years ago we knew a fraction of what we know now about cancer. This is just one example of why statistics is a profession. There's so much to it I can't begin to describe it here.

You're a Vishnu-send, did you know that?

I already freaked out and did a quick-fix with a blip.tv embed, but it doesn't have the thumbnail, so yours is definitely the preferred method!

Sweeeet, thanks again!

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
I saw that your "You know what's bullshit?" video went dead because the uploader disabled embedding, so I copied it and uploaded it to my Dailymotion account:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9jj9c_you-know-whats-bullshity-dvds_tech

Better quality video here: http://blip.tv/file/1816913. (I can't embed from there yet .)

As edeot already mentioned, I also believe nested comments would be great. The threads would be more interesting and/or entertaining if this were available. Other ideas:

1. I've said it a hundred times before, but it bears repeating: More video hosts. Here are some solid hosts that have had a presence on the internet for over a couple of years already:

- FunnyOrDie
- 5MinLife
- blip.tv
- MyVideo.de - Sure, it's a German-language host, but they already have many videos here.
- Current TV
- Reuters - hopefully that will encourage more world news videos

BTW, none of those are region-blocked

2. Fix Vimeo and CollegeHumor so that sub-Gold members can post videos. It's my understanding that they're unable to post videos from them right now.

3. Replace the iFilm logo with Spike TV, because that's what iFilm became well over a year ago. Go ahead and type in 'www.ifilm.com' and see what happens. iFilm is no más. And then fix it so that sub-Gold members can embed their videos.

4. Thumbnails, thumbnails, thumbnails! I'm not talking about thumbnails for every video site under the sun; just give us thumbnail pictures for all of our approved hosts. Right now none of these approved hosts have thumbnail pictures:

- Google
- The Onion
- VideoJug
- Spike TV (formerly iFilm)
- MySpace
- Yahoo!
- DailyMotion
- NBC
- MTV Music
- Comedy Central
- Hulu
- Game Trailers
- Veoh

In fact we only have seven out of the 20 approved hosts that have thumbnail pics. Those are CollegeHumor, YouTube, Metacafe, Vimeo, Break, Revver, and LiveLeak. If you want people to post from more approved sites, I think you need to give us more thumbnail pics. They usually boost vote tallies, as most experienced members already know.

BTW, both Atom Films and Comedy Central use the MTV Music player, so if you can get thumbnail pics for MTV Music videos then you should be able to do the same for Atom Films and Comedy Central, which are both owned by Viacom. Viacom also owns Spike TV, but they still use a different player than the others I just mentioned.

5. Get rid of both the hobbling and Siftquisition features. Like I said before, they're good ideas in theory, but in practice they've done more harm than good.

6. Give us the option to block any user from commenting on our profile pages. This should hopefully lead to less squabbling.

7. Put up all the unassigned channels for bid, going to the members with the most star points. We have too many unassigned channels, and many of those get misused because of this.

8. Provided it doesn't significantly increase bandwidth or other operational costs, give us a game room. The membership was in favor of it, so make it so, but ONLY if it doesn't increase your costs significantly.

9. Crown members get the privilege of prima noctis with probationary members, as God has ordained it our right.

blippedy blip, bloopedy bloop

Whats sad about human achievement? Do you really understand the creativity and production which can occur with millions of man-hours? How do you think the compact fluorescent light bulb was created (86% power savings) or light emitting diodes (95% power savings) or photovoltaic cells, hybrid engines, or high efficiency generators, etc. etc.?

If you want to save the planet sell your car, sell your house, sell your light bulbs and go live in the forest; but why criticize or inhibit the engineering effort of humans which can reduce the environmental impact of a 21st century lifestyle?

That is the point Michelle Malkin is making, and I don't think there is anything sad about it.



>> ^littledragon_79:
>> ^rougy:
Of course, Michelle Malkin is already urging people to leave their lights on in celebration of "Human Achievment Hour."
(deep sigh)
I just can't believe those people, sometimes.

Checked that link out...pretty sad.

Working embed...

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -10.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -10.00

A perfect score!

I've only nudged a blip to the lower left in the three years or so since I last took the test.

legalise it and we will find out the dangers of it with a huge public voluntary experiment.

the fact that this experiment was going on for thousands of years already (before a minor blip in the 20th century) gives me great confidence.

Your video, Radiohead - In Rainbows Blip - Videotape, has made it into your personal Highest Rated Videos listing. Congratulations on a job well done. For you contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

>> ^Bidouleroux:
This is pretty much exactly like religion vs. atheism, with religion being of course smoking.


Anti-smoking is by far the more religious. Smoking is blamed for a host of sundry afflictions with scientific support that no one has the courage to challenge. People want it to be evil and that's what they get. No serious scientist would do any unbiased research, because if he found anything remotely pro-smoking the political fallout would ruin his career overnight.

Our surgeon general states that 70% of lung cancer victims got it from smoking, but lung cancer continues to rise with nary a blip - even though smokers per capita have fallen under 25% and have been there for a decade. If you want me to support this claim with data, sorry I can't. Neither the CDC or the ALA, or any other site I could find, will release any data cross referencing lung cancer victims and smokers. You can easily find how much carcinogens a black single mother of 2 will inhale in a 12x12 room with one smoker, but a table lookup of smokers v lung cancer victims will get you a 404 error. Try it.

That's religion. People needing an evil, ignoring the facts, suppressing the research of facts, all holding hands and attacking with fervor.

P.S.
My lungs get a clean bill of health every year, even though I've been smoking for over 20 years, simply because I've never tell the doctors I smoke. Ask your smoking friends to try that, it'll give them a chuckle.

A one year blip in a thirty year history does not constitute "proof" of anything. There will always be fluctuations from year to year.

Yes, I'm aware of the 500 climate-change skeptics. Well the IPCC represents the combined efforts of thousands of scientists.

The commenter monoape at Dailytech says it best:

Ah, the tired, old 1970s ice age story... http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11643

Also, you are aware that the USA is not the only country with a functioning scientific community?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

Provide evidence that they are all lying in a massive global conspiracy or that they are all wrong. Just a tiny scrap of *real* evidence that thousands of scientists in dozens of countries are all colluding in the biggest con trick in human history. Evidence that they've all been manufacturing data for decades to fool the rest of the planet - just so they can get funding to do the salaried job they were employed for anyway.

Come on - you must have *something*....

Stick to trolling, BillO. It's what you do best.

In reply to this comment by NetRunner
Sounds good to me, but I think we're in a problem more complex than that. Since these are banks, we'll see some pretty disastrous effects ripple through the economy as businesses and people's ability to get credit disappears.

What do you think about what happened to Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, they both collapsed and the government didn't intervene, yet both were successfully bought and the bad assets were dissolved. Didn't crash the market, in fact it barely caused a blip.

1. Thumbnails for all the preferred video hosts. Not every video host on the planet, mind you, but the just for the 16 preferred hosts. Hosts that currently need thumbnails (as far as I know):
- Yahoo
- Dailymotion
- Google
- Myspace
- The Onion
- Video Jug
- SpikeTV (formerly iFilm)

2. New video hosts so that sub-Gold members have more choices. A few suggestions:
- Veoh
- Funny Or Die
- blip.tv
Make sure they get thumbnails too if they're brought on board.

3. Get rid of Fora.tv and V-Social as preferred hosts. No one ever uses them.

4. Add a new tab along the top row next to "Blogs" called "Other Features." Here's what I'd like to see in the "Other Features" section:
- tag cloud
- Top 15 new comments
- and other small features that members would like to see

So is there any reputable news source for this? I couldn't find anything in a search and the newspaper and TV media have nothing to say on it. It honestly sounds like a solo anti-government alarmist blip. But if anyone can confirm this story other then the short paragraph on one anti-establishment web site I'd be interested in reading it.