It's a disorder. That's why it's called a disorder.
What's next? 'Epilepsy isn't even a real illness.'. 'Near-sightedness isn't even a real illness.'. 'Death isn't even a real illness.'. 'Being eaten by wolves isn't even a real illness.'.
No shit, Sherlock. 'illness' isn't the only medical thing that exists. Disorders are a type of medical condition, just like illnesses are a different type of medical condition.
In addition to both those groups, there's a group who actually do have 'ADHD', but not to the extent of having any sort of actual 'disorder', which requires them to be unable to function normally.
They can't function in school, yes, but school is hardly 'normal'. Put them in a better environment and they could function.
Sadly, not only do they often end up drugged, we're at the point where we're drugging kids without ADHD at all, who are just poorly behaved!
Meanwhile, those kids who do have ADHD to the level it's actually a 'disorder', who actually cannot function no matter what the environment, are being totally ignored because of being lumped in with all the other kids. Including suffering a backlash against all the fake ADHD misbehavior kids.
But not all diagnoses of ADHD are wrong, nor is medication needed in all instances. There are plenty of people who do just fine with ADHD, sans medication, and plenty of doctors/parents/educators/whatever with enough sense to realize this.
Indeed. A big part of the problem is the school environment, especially as people with ADHD tend to be a) bright, and b) lazy.
And by "do fine with ADHD" I don't mean do fine with a misdiagnosed version, I mean actual, genuine ADHD.
That's the problem with discussing this. There's fake ADHD, and real ADHD, and real ADHD can be broken down into 'actual behavior disorder', where they can't cope in general vs. 'school behavior disorder', where they can't cope with the insanely stifling rules of school, but would be fine if they could just move around and talk and stuff.
And a lot of people seem to think at least one, maybe two, of those groups don't exist.
Most of the negative traits can be overcome with practice. It's really only the severe cases that actually need meds, and then often only during childhood.
Yup. Almost all ADHD evolves into a manageable form by adulthood.
And most of the negative traits of children should be solved simply by a better environment.
Yes, I have ADHD, and yes, it's a correct diagnosis in my case. It was also caught late. Never medicated, never needed to, and only one professional has seriously suggested I should consider doing so.
I had ADD, without hyperactivity. Now they call it ADHD-PI, apparently.
It was caught early, and they actually did try drugs for a bit, but there was no noticeable change in my behavior. It didn't do anything for my concentration at all. Which is why I think a lot of the drugs simply reduce the hyperactivity, without any change in 'attention', and are simply used to make it better for other people, which is a horrendously immoral reason to drug someone.
Yes, I'm aware some kids seem to be better off. But most of the kids should just be put in a different environment, where they don't have to sit still for hours at a time and can move around...and then we can talk about drugs if they still can't concentrate.
Specifically, I don't have a lot of issue with short-term drugs. If aspirin helps a headache, it helps.
I do, however, make sure I know what the hell I'm taking, as opposed to just randomly grabbing stuff off the shelf. Read the damn active ingredients, people. Learn what they are.
Oh, and don't buy medication that are just two or three of them randomly mixed together. Cold medication is especially bad about that. Never ever buy 'daytime' medication...half the time that's just normal cough medication with a stimulant added! Learn what each active ingredient is, and take a painkiller plus a cough suppressant plus drink a Mountain Dew, don't take whatever random mix they put in there. Drugs do things, buy the drugs, not the packaging. Learn how each drug does or doesn't work on you.
Incidentally, 'something that actually addresses the cause of the pain'...you do know that a lot of headaches are caused by dilation of the blood vessels in the brain, right? And the thing that addresses that is...aspirin. You might only have chronic tension headaches, which can be helped with neck massage, but chronic headaches caused by exertion can't be helped by anything but constricting the blood vessels. (Or not exerting, but that obviously causes other problems.)
Same with a sinus headache...either you take antihistamines to keep the allergen out, or you take something to constrict the blood vessels in your brain once you start the allergic reaction. (Or you keep yourself hermetically sealed in a box.)
I find that most people who think things like painkillers are over-prescribed don't have pain that can't be helped other ways.
I don't have that sort of pain either, but I have had surgery, and I have broken my wrist and had to scream at the school officials for fifteen minutes before they'd believe me, and there's a difference between 'My head hurts slight because of sinuses' and actual pain. (And I presume there's a different between headaches and migraines, too, but never had a migraine.)
However, where I agree with you is that the requirements for taking long-term drugs should be a good deal higher, because the potential for fucking you up is a lot worse. And the requirements for taking long-term drugs to deal with behavior (As opposed to an actual medical condition.) should be so high that I'm sure we've over-prescribing by a factor of 1000.
Instead we've got people prescribing stuff all over the place. Not just kids, but adults too...like the crap for pretend, or at most temporary, depression. Yes, there is actual real medical depression...and almost none of those idiots have it. In fact, considering the recent results with placebos, it's entirely possible those medications do nothing.
Drugs can solve short-term problems. And with actual medical issues, including actual brain imbalances, they can solve problems in the long-term...but half the people taking them don't have any medical problems at all.
Indeed. My mother is a special ed teacher, and I hung out in her classroom after school, and people with behavior disorders don't 'want' to do things, they just do things.
There are three groups here, and many people debating here seem to have forgotten one or two of the groups:
1) Actual ADD and ADHD, where people cannot concentrate under normal conditions. That is the only actual 'disorder'.
2) 'Normally managed' AD(H)D where children cannot manage under school conditions, and a better solutions to drugging them is to just give them some damn different conditions.
This is what I had in school, and still have. I could operate fine in normal conditions....but I couldn't sit ramrod straight for hours on end with my hands my lap. And I still can't...even when working, I have to get up and walk around, and I don't drive more than an hour before getting out of my car for a minute or two. (Because otherwise I get distracted by stuff.)
This isn't a disorder, as people aren't 'supposed' to be able to operate under those conditions anyway. It is a perfectly normal variation in humans. Some people can sit still for long amounts of time, and some people are restless. It's only when this, under normal conditions (Not crazy school conditions) interferes with participation in society that it's a 'disorder'.
3) 'Pretend' AD(H)D, which is essentially 'Kid has too much energy and behaves somewhat inappropriately because he doesn't want to do stuff'. (Actual hyperactive people, almost by definition, do not have 'too much energy'...in fact, they're tired a lot, because, duh, they do too much. That's hyperactivity.)
Sadly, drugging them often 'works', because it keeps them awake at night and half asleep all day. (Aka, the 'zombie' effect.)
Strangely enough, almost everyone I've heard of with 1 says they've 'grown out of it', whereas no one with 2 seems to. I'm starting to suspect that people with 1 just end up with 2, but they honestly don't notice it, because, compared to their previous behavior, it's a lot more normal. Whereas those of us who had 2 to start with know it's the same.
My mom is a special education teacher, and after school, I'd usually go to her class. I saw a lot of behavior disorders, along with a lot of learning disorders. (She varies in what she handles.)
People don't realized there's quite a broad spectrum, or what behavior disorders actually look like. People who simply don't want to sit in their seat don't have a behavior disorder. People who can't seem to stop picking up their desk and running around the room holding it have a behavior disorder.
People who are randomly(1) violent have a behavior disorder, but it's not ADHD that I've ever heard of. They might also have ADHD, but doing something about the ADHD is unlikely to fix the violence behavior disorder. (And 'doing something' by is giving them stimulants is probably not a clever idea for people already violent.)
1) People who are violent for 'a reason', OTOH, probably just have an anger management issue, which is also, strictly speaking, a behavior disorder, but they'd do better in counseling instead of being in special ed.
Well, that isn't anywhere near as harmful. Almost no one is misdiagnosed with a hearing impairment, so a test isn't anything but a waste of time.
In fact, I actually think they've started testing all kids for hearing impairment in elementary school. I seem to recall something like that when I was a kid. Seems like a good idea.
I don't think they actually use a doctor, they just have kids put on headphones and raise their hands when they hear noises, and then pass the results on to the parents if the kid can't seem to hear some of them, leaving it to the parents to do something about it.
The problem, however, is that we don't know enough about the neurology of the illness to define a biological threshold between "normal" and "ill."
Disorders are supposed to be defined by 'peers'.
Disorders are something that renders you unable to do 'normal' stuff. I.e., you have a sleep disorder if you can't sleep enough to stay awake during the day...but if you sleep three hours a night and that actually works for you, you don't have a sleep disorder. You have a sleep 'oddity' or something, and probably should tell a doctor just in case there's some hidden problem, but it's not a 'disorder'.
The problem is that, somehow, the incredibly unnatural environment of schools somehow got defined as 'normal'.
People no more have a 'attention deficit disorder' if they can't cope in a school environment than they have 'cyclic vomiting syndrome' if they vomit uncontrollably in zero-gee or have 'primary insomnia' if they can't sleep on a bed of nails.
Some children with severe attention disorders would not do well in any kind of learning environment without treatment with drugs.
Some children with random behavior disorders don't do well in any sort of learning environment even with drugs.
Just because there are behavior disorders that look like extreme cases of ADD doesn't mean that 'normal' ADD is the same thing.
That sort of logic is where we keeping going wrong with this. We've decided to see this a 'scale of disorder', and because we've started looking at it that way, and because the far end is is a behavior disorder, we've decided that any of that behavior is a sign of it.
By that logic, all shy people have very mild autism, and all non-quadriplegics people are slightly spastic.
Of course, in a sense, that's true, because disorders tend to be a single aspect of normal behavior exaggerated. (Human brains rarely invent entirely new behaviors out of whole cloth.)
So we call things 'disorders' when they reach a point that they cause problems for people. But, it seems that we've forgotten to add 'under normal conditions' or define what those are.
For example, sleep disorders. It's only a sleep disorder if you constantly can't sleep under normal conditions for more than one month. Most people would be unable to sleep in a running disco, even if they had a month to adjust. Is that a sleep disorder? No. Likewise, no one can sleep with the head positioned too far below their heart.
Likewise, attention deficit disorder is when someone can't pay attention to things under normal conditions.
The problem there is, of course, that schools aren't normal conditions. Someone doesn't have ADD if they can't pay attention there. Schools, in fact, are incredibly unnatural conditions.
Now, there are indeed people who can't pay attention ever, at all. And they have an actual disorder. And others who can only pay attention in specific conditions, like with loud music playing. They also have a disorder, although theirs is more manageable.
Someone who can't pay attention while sitting upright behind a desk and forbidden to move or play with things does not have one, though. It's not even an 'manageable' disorder, it's not a disorder at all.
That is not the sort of environment humans are supposed to operate in. It's like calling throwing up in zero-gee a disorder, or the inability to play the piano a disorder. Um, no.
Now, because of how schools are set up, it's entirely possible such students need to be classified as having a 'disorder' to get into 'special education', where they can get a more normal-ish environment that they can cope with. But if they can operate in a normal environment, where normal rules apply like 'You can walk around' and 'You can talk to people', we should not mistake this for an actual medical disorder, and we sure as hell shouldn't be giving them drugs for it.
I find it interesting that a friend of mine in high school said that drinking Mountain Dew before bed would help him sleep.
This is a very bad idea. Stimulants might calm down someone with ADD so that they get to sleep faster and wake less, but they sure as hell won't make them sleep better.
Stimulants just sorta make it look like you're asleep. It's better to be awake half the night and tossing and turning the rest of it than to take a stimulant and lay perfectly calm in bed all night, apparently asleep, but your mind and body not actually doing the things that they're supposed to do when you're asleep.
For one thing, with sleeping badly, their body will eventually get fed up with it and make them sleep, or dump them straight into REM sleep the second they go to sleep, so that the stuff that needs to happen can happen. Insomnia almost never progresses to the point of physically or mentally harming people in the long term.
Whereas drugs keeping those things from happening...well, the body can't get around those.
If someone really can't sleep without drugs, they should take actual sleeping aids, not caffeine!
The point of 'sleep' is not to lay quietly in bed, it is for the body to do 'sleep' stuff! That's like curing sleep apnea (where you stop breathing during sleep, and hence wake up.) by sleeping with a plastic bag over your head.
I would think this is the same effect as Ritalin.
Indeed, and that's part of the reason so many of the people taking it look like zombies...they're half asleep during the day, because they're half asleep at night.
With enough stimulants, of course, they can still walk around, and of course won't fall asleep during class (Or ever.), but...um...
What it's doing is stimulating a part of your brain that, for you, is under-stimulated by default.
Because it is under-stimulated, your brain craves some sort of input, so you pay attention to random things instead of what you're trying to do. You have started to 'preemptively multitask'.
So, Ritalin is indeed a stimulant, even for people with ADD. It's just first affecting a part of the brain that is in charge of 'reacting to input' by throwing a bunch of static in there so you're not wanting more input.
Many drugs seem to have the 'opposite effect' of what people think. Alcohol, for example, is an depressant, but it first depresses inhibitions, so people tend to be more active, or at least more talkative, on small amounts of it. (In fact, you can figure out what it's depressed by what 'sort of drunk' someone is. Lazy drunks have depressed motor control, for example. Angry drunks have depressed inhibitions and also are normally bottling up anger.)
Meanwhile, tobacco is a stimulant, but hilariously the mental stimulation is undone by the calm that satisfying the addiction has. They aren't making themselves 'more calm', they're making themselves 'less calm' by default and undoing that with their tobacco fix!
It's sorta funny how some people like to claim there's no litmus test for ADD...stimulants are the test.
Everyone takes a stimulant and gets calmer is under-stimulated. Everyone who is distractable due to being under-stimulated has 'ADD'.
The amount of stimulation someone's brain wants is not some subjective diagnosis. It's pretty easy to objectively test...you give them stimulants(1) until they are at their calmest, and you hit the level. (For people already at the correct level, you could stick them in a sensory-deprivation tank and then drug them.)
Now, whether or not they have to the point we should be drugging them to reach this level is unknown. Perhaps we should, I dunno, make school less insanely boring.
The interesting fact that while stimulants appear to 'calm' people with ADD, all they actually do is make it more interesting in their own head...people don't actually pay more attention. They just fidget less.
Yes, we're actually just drugging them so they sit still and don't distract others while their brain is distracted bogus input.
1) Please note that while autistics are, in a small way, overstimulated (hence retreating from a world they can't cope with), aka, the opposite of ADD, giving them depressants does not appear to work. Stimulants give enough 'false input' for the brain to deal with that the person acts calm, but depressants can't remove the actual input.
What would be really nice is if, at the same time, we'd stop doing the domain check.
After all, that's solely to make sure the signed cert is using the right domain, there's no point in doing it if we were informed that domain is using that cert to start with.
And, without the domain check, we can just use the same cert on multiple domains, and thus not worry about having an IP address for each one.
Probably could just use a * cert without any changes at all beyond the DNS-verify thing.
If a valet refuses to return my car, I'm calling the cops
At which point he will eventually be arrested and charged...but not for theft.
Actually, cars are sorta weird in three ways, in that if he's driving the car around, he's using up your gas, which is theft by conversion. Two, 'possession' of a car is somewhat weird, legally. Third, when you loan a car to a valet, you're actually loaning it to the place of business, and if he drives off with it, he's stolen it from the business too.
Fourth, and most importantly, cars are actually covered under their own laws, and not normal theft law. In some places, simply getting into a car you don't own can be grand theft auto, despite the fact that you clearly didn't 'steal' the car if you didn't move it, as almost every definition of theft requires moving the object....but not grand theft auto.
I have no idea what the laws are covering cars say about refusing to return one, but cars aren't actually treated the same, WRT theft, as anything else.
In Arizona, refusing to return a car when you are told to because you are in default is a Class 6 felony - 6 to 18 months in prison. I'm surprised car repo companies don't lobby against that law - makes then kinda redundant.
And first the car company has to prove someone is in default. Via the courts. Which is my point.
The bank can't just walk up to you and say 'We demand our car back' and have you arrested. They have to file papers with a court, and have you declared in default. (Which is essentially the 'lawsuit' I was talking about that happens in general, although as neither the facts nor the law are in dispute, car repossessing usually doesn't actually make it to court.) Then, armed with a court order, they can show up with a cop and have you arrested if you don't turn it over.
...or, as they usually do, they can just take it back themselves, without involving the court, as their loan terms allow them to do. I.e., for the purpose of the law, they're also the owners, just not in 'possession' of it. If they can physically take possession, it's legal for them to do so. (Assuming they don't break other laws, which car repossessers aren't supposed to do...although they often do.)
The important thing is that you've demonstrated the superiority of your likes and dislikes over someone else's likes and dislikes. Your likes and dislikes are clearly better.
Way to show all those lemmings what's what! Those dumb 'consumers', listening to radio and always doing what everyone tells them.
Well, the stuff they like is dumb. Only losers listen to the radio!
There's an xkcd comic that I should link to here, about people who don't watch TV, but teh google has failed me.
Indeed, I get baffled by the complaint that without the RIAA, no artist would be massively popular.
That would be a good thing. (Have you tried buying damn tickets to a concert lately?)
We'd be much better off for all sorts of reasons if there were hundred times as many 'popular' groups, each with a hundredth the fanbase, and no one using the RIAA at all to promote their stuff. The only people worse off would be the RIAA and (possibly) the tiny percentage of bands that the RIAA chooses to make popular.
People forget we used to have much the same thing for Hollywood stars. Studios would lock them into multi-picture contracts and promote the hell out of them, they'd make no money, and they'd get discarded at the end or when popularity dipped. But it was the only game in town...it's not like there was anyone else making movies, just like there's no one else getting songs on the radio.
So actors unionized.
We still have super stars who can't act worth a damn, we still have crap being shoved down our throat, but there's actually room for independent stuff. (And independent films are a hell of a lot more work than independent music.)
We don't have studios signing up every new actor that walks into Hollywood, and then ignoring 95% of them, like the music industry does. Or, hell, a better analogy with the music industry would be to charge them to be in movies, and they only get the money back if the movie makes a profit, which would suck, as studios do the same crazy record-keeping that the music industry does, where nothing makes a profit.
It's hardly perfect, but the movie industry seems to operate a lot better than the music industry. Yeah, yeah, there's plenty of complaints about how that industry decides to make movies entirely by computer based on what it thinks people like, like the music industry, and comes out solely with sucky pre-digested crap, but you're going to get that behavior out or any large business.
But now it has to behave somewhat reasonably towards actors and writers and stuff. And people aren't stuck in contracts with companies that don't care about them, so they can go do independent films and, now, web films, and do okay.
And like I said, a lot of the stuff stopping independent films was the expense, and the fact they didn't have a good distribution model unless a major studio stepped in. (Note, the studios step in after...they don't go around signing the filmmakers up, charging them for the privilege of making a movie, and then letting it die, so whatever you think of them, they're better than music studios.) Those facts have just changed for film, and the movie industry is dealing...unlike the music industry, which had those fact change a decade ago, and still hasn't dealt with it.
Get with the program, man, that was released on Friday.
Holy crap, they're IN MY BRAIN. IN MY BRAIN. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH.
Either that, or I am somehow subconsciously receiving all draft RFCs directly into my brain.
No, seriously, I've thought this since I started hearing about DNSSEC. 'Hey, wait, if we have a way to verify that a DNS response is from the proper owners, then why not simply use that to transmit a fingerprint of a cert, to 'sign' it that way?'
Good to see others have pointed that out, and maybe someone will do something about it.
Heh, that is mostly what I meant, although I don't quite see the point of storing entire certs. I guess that's for offline-encryption, encrypting email and whatnot. IIRC that's what X.509 is for.
When you can exchange certs in real time over the connection, like with SSL, you just need to make sure the cert fingerprint is right, so that's all you need OoB.
Self-signed connections are not more secure than HTTP unless you have independently verified the certificate.
Yes they are.
Spying on those connections vs. HTTP connections, requires more work, and hence are objectively 'more secure' by any measure of 'secure'. You have to MitM them to spy on them, whereas you don't for normal HTTP connections.
Also, you have to MitM in real time, where it can be detected. (And should be, as browsers should warn when certs change.) Whereas simply recording traffic is utterly undetectable.
What you're asserting is that they're not perfectly secure. Which, really, no general purpose computer ever is. Unsigned certs are certainly more secure than unencrypted.
What's more, if browsers treated self-signed certificates the same way it treated HTTP connections, 90% of users would never realize something was wrong. Until about 2 generations ago, most browsers popped up simple dialog boxes that users clicked through on autopilot before sending sensitive information to phishers. If they ignored dialog boxes, there's no way that simply not showing the lock is going to bring a problem to the user's attention.
Then SSL encryption is already totally, utterly broken. If you can do a MitM attack, and users 'don't care about the lock icon', all you do is make sure that no links go to the SSL portion of the site. Just edit the stream in real time to change https to http, and optionally have some sort of simply logic to remember what URLs you did that do, so your proxy can retrieve SSL pages for those URLs. (As some web sites will complain if you access some parts not via https.)
Yes, maybe 2% of the users have bookmarked the SSL site to start with, or type in https: to get there, but if 'they don't care about the lock icon', that seems unlikely for them to have done.
It doesn't involve educating users, it just involves not putting giant-ass popup warnings in their face and panicking them.
I've constantly said that user-signed SSL connections shouldn't get a lock at all. That's it. Pretend they are unencrypted to the end user. If browsers want to be clever, they can invent some other signal like a a doorknob or something.
Then web servers can just transparently use them.
Of course, there's no way this will happen now. But it's what should have happened. The idea of having DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER alerts on connections on that are more secure than normal HTTP was idiotic, but probably unfixable, unless we invent some new protocol.
I suggest some sort of STARTSSL-like concept, where either the browser can say 'This request is encrypted' or the server can say 'Here is an encrypted reply'. (Neither of which require the other.) Hopefully even over a keep-alive connection, switching back and forth as needed, although that might have security implications. Part of HTTP 2.0 or something.
I'm not sure how you'd identify requests you want the browser to send encrypted to the server...perhaps the browser should just send all POSTs encrypted by default and with links, you could use a rel='encrypted' attribute. Or perhaps POSTs should have a 'turn on' or, better, a 'turn off', encryption attribute.
The server, of course, should just encrypt whatever the hell it wants, after the browser sends an 'Accept-Encryption' attribute, or perhaps that should be part of Accept-Encoding.
And, of course, as I said elsewhere, you stick the fingerprint of this cert in a DNSSEC-secured DNS TXT record.
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Hey, idiot, ADHD isn't an 'illness' at all.
It's a disorder. That's why it's called a disorder.
What's next? 'Epilepsy isn't even a real illness.'. 'Near-sightedness isn't even a real illness.'. 'Death isn't even a real illness.'. 'Being eaten by wolves isn't even a real illness.'.
No shit, Sherlock. 'illness' isn't the only medical thing that exists. Disorders are a type of medical condition, just like illnesses are a different type of medical condition.
In addition to both those groups, there's a group who actually do have 'ADHD', but not to the extent of having any sort of actual 'disorder', which requires them to be unable to function normally.
They can't function in school, yes, but school is hardly 'normal'. Put them in a better environment and they could function.
Sadly, not only do they often end up drugged, we're at the point where we're drugging kids without ADHD at all, who are just poorly behaved!
Meanwhile, those kids who do have ADHD to the level it's actually a 'disorder', who actually cannot function no matter what the environment, are being totally ignored because of being lumped in with all the other kids. Including suffering a backlash against all the fake ADHD misbehavior kids.
But not all diagnoses of ADHD are wrong, nor is medication needed in all instances. There are plenty of people who do just fine with ADHD, sans medication, and plenty of doctors/parents/educators/whatever with enough sense to realize this.
Indeed. A big part of the problem is the school environment, especially as people with ADHD tend to be a) bright, and b) lazy.
And by "do fine with ADHD" I don't mean do fine with a misdiagnosed version, I mean actual, genuine ADHD.
That's the problem with discussing this. There's fake ADHD, and real ADHD, and real ADHD can be broken down into 'actual behavior disorder', where they can't cope in general vs. 'school behavior disorder', where they can't cope with the insanely stifling rules of school, but would be fine if they could just move around and talk and stuff.
And a lot of people seem to think at least one, maybe two, of those groups don't exist.
Most of the negative traits can be overcome with practice. It's really only the severe cases that actually need meds, and then often only during childhood.
Yup. Almost all ADHD evolves into a manageable form by adulthood.
And most of the negative traits of children should be solved simply by a better environment.
Yes, I have ADHD, and yes, it's a correct diagnosis in my case. It was also caught late. Never medicated, never needed to, and only one professional has seriously suggested I should consider doing so.
I had ADD, without hyperactivity. Now they call it ADHD-PI, apparently.
It was caught early, and they actually did try drugs for a bit, but there was no noticeable change in my behavior. It didn't do anything for my concentration at all. Which is why I think a lot of the drugs simply reduce the hyperactivity, without any change in 'attention', and are simply used to make it better for other people, which is a horrendously immoral reason to drug someone.
Yes, I'm aware some kids seem to be better off. But most of the kids should just be put in a different environment, where they don't have to sit still for hours at a time and can move around...and then we can talk about drugs if they still can't concentrate.
I halfway agree with you.
Specifically, I don't have a lot of issue with short-term drugs. If aspirin helps a headache, it helps.
I do, however, make sure I know what the hell I'm taking, as opposed to just randomly grabbing stuff off the shelf. Read the damn active ingredients, people. Learn what they are.
Oh, and don't buy medication that are just two or three of them randomly mixed together. Cold medication is especially bad about that. Never ever buy 'daytime' medication...half the time that's just normal cough medication with a stimulant added! Learn what each active ingredient is, and take a painkiller plus a cough suppressant plus drink a Mountain Dew, don't take whatever random mix they put in there. Drugs do things, buy the drugs, not the packaging. Learn how each drug does or doesn't work on you.
Incidentally, 'something that actually addresses the cause of the pain'...you do know that a lot of headaches are caused by dilation of the blood vessels in the brain, right? And the thing that addresses that is...aspirin. You might only have chronic tension headaches, which can be helped with neck massage, but chronic headaches caused by exertion can't be helped by anything but constricting the blood vessels. (Or not exerting, but that obviously causes other problems.)
Same with a sinus headache...either you take antihistamines to keep the allergen out, or you take something to constrict the blood vessels in your brain once you start the allergic reaction. (Or you keep yourself hermetically sealed in a box.)
I find that most people who think things like painkillers are over-prescribed don't have pain that can't be helped other ways. I don't have that sort of pain either, but I have had surgery, and I have broken my wrist and had to scream at the school officials for fifteen minutes before they'd believe me, and there's a difference between 'My head hurts slight because of sinuses' and actual pain. (And I presume there's a different between headaches and migraines, too, but never had a migraine.)
However, where I agree with you is that the requirements for taking long-term drugs should be a good deal higher, because the potential for fucking you up is a lot worse. And the requirements for taking long-term drugs to deal with behavior (As opposed to an actual medical condition.) should be so high that I'm sure we've over-prescribing by a factor of 1000.
Instead we've got people prescribing stuff all over the place. Not just kids, but adults too...like the crap for pretend, or at most temporary, depression. Yes, there is actual real medical depression...and almost none of those idiots have it. In fact, considering the recent results with placebos, it's entirely possible those medications do nothing.
Drugs can solve short-term problems. And with actual medical issues, including actual brain imbalances, they can solve problems in the long-term...but half the people taking them don't have any medical problems at all.
I could not help it
Indeed. My mother is a special ed teacher, and I hung out in her classroom after school, and people with behavior disorders don't 'want' to do things, they just do things.
There are three groups here, and many people debating here seem to have forgotten one or two of the groups:
1) Actual ADD and ADHD, where people cannot concentrate under normal conditions. That is the only actual 'disorder'.
2) 'Normally managed' AD(H)D where children cannot manage under school conditions, and a better solutions to drugging them is to just give them some damn different conditions.
This is what I had in school, and still have. I could operate fine in normal conditions....but I couldn't sit ramrod straight for hours on end with my hands my lap. And I still can't...even when working, I have to get up and walk around, and I don't drive more than an hour before getting out of my car for a minute or two. (Because otherwise I get distracted by stuff.)
This isn't a disorder, as people aren't 'supposed' to be able to operate under those conditions anyway. It is a perfectly normal variation in humans. Some people can sit still for long amounts of time, and some people are restless. It's only when this, under normal conditions (Not crazy school conditions) interferes with participation in society that it's a 'disorder'.
3) 'Pretend' AD(H)D, which is essentially 'Kid has too much energy and behaves somewhat inappropriately because he doesn't want to do stuff'. (Actual hyperactive people, almost by definition, do not have 'too much energy'...in fact, they're tired a lot, because, duh, they do too much. That's hyperactivity.)
Sadly, drugging them often 'works', because it keeps them awake at night and half asleep all day. (Aka, the 'zombie' effect.)
Strangely enough, almost everyone I've heard of with 1 says they've 'grown out of it', whereas no one with 2 seems to. I'm starting to suspect that people with 1 just end up with 2, but they honestly don't notice it, because, compared to their previous behavior, it's a lot more normal. Whereas those of us who had 2 to start with know it's the same.
My mom is a special education teacher, and after school, I'd usually go to her class. I saw a lot of behavior disorders, along with a lot of learning disorders. (She varies in what she handles.)
People don't realized there's quite a broad spectrum, or what behavior disorders actually look like. People who simply don't want to sit in their seat don't have a behavior disorder. People who can't seem to stop picking up their desk and running around the room holding it have a behavior disorder.
People who are randomly(1) violent have a behavior disorder, but it's not ADHD that I've ever heard of. They might also have ADHD, but doing something about the ADHD is unlikely to fix the violence behavior disorder. (And 'doing something' by is giving them stimulants is probably not a clever idea for people already violent.)
1) People who are violent for 'a reason', OTOH, probably just have an anger management issue, which is also, strictly speaking, a behavior disorder, but they'd do better in counseling instead of being in special ed.
Well, that isn't anywhere near as harmful. Almost no one is misdiagnosed with a hearing impairment, so a test isn't anything but a waste of time.
In fact, I actually think they've started testing all kids for hearing impairment in elementary school. I seem to recall something like that when I was a kid. Seems like a good idea.
I don't think they actually use a doctor, they just have kids put on headphones and raise their hands when they hear noises, and then pass the results on to the parents if the kid can't seem to hear some of them, leaving it to the parents to do something about it.
He simply couldn't focus on his homework, even when we put him in a quiet, calm environment.
THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES
Jesus Christ, why would you do exactly the wrong thing?
People with ADD are under-stimulated. They don't need calm, they need distractions. If they don't have any, they will invent them.
Try playing some damn music or something. Do homework and something else at the same time, like eating.
Or, hey, you could just drug him with meth for a decade or so. See how that works out.
The problem, however, is that we don't know enough about the neurology of the illness to define a biological threshold between "normal" and "ill."
Disorders are supposed to be defined by 'peers'.
Disorders are something that renders you unable to do 'normal' stuff. I.e., you have a sleep disorder if you can't sleep enough to stay awake during the day...but if you sleep three hours a night and that actually works for you, you don't have a sleep disorder. You have a sleep 'oddity' or something, and probably should tell a doctor just in case there's some hidden problem, but it's not a 'disorder'.
The problem is that, somehow, the incredibly unnatural environment of schools somehow got defined as 'normal'.
People no more have a 'attention deficit disorder' if they can't cope in a school environment than they have 'cyclic vomiting syndrome' if they vomit uncontrollably in zero-gee or have 'primary insomnia' if they can't sleep on a bed of nails.
...unless, of course, the Ritalin screws up their sleep, in which case they'll start walking around half-asleep, and, tada, problem solved.
Some children with severe attention disorders would not do well in any kind of learning environment without treatment with drugs.
Some children with random behavior disorders don't do well in any sort of learning environment even with drugs.
Just because there are behavior disorders that look like extreme cases of ADD doesn't mean that 'normal' ADD is the same thing.
That sort of logic is where we keeping going wrong with this. We've decided to see this a 'scale of disorder', and because we've started looking at it that way, and because the far end is is a behavior disorder, we've decided that any of that behavior is a sign of it.
By that logic, all shy people have very mild autism, and all non-quadriplegics people are slightly spastic.
Of course, in a sense, that's true, because disorders tend to be a single aspect of normal behavior exaggerated. (Human brains rarely invent entirely new behaviors out of whole cloth.)
So we call things 'disorders' when they reach a point that they cause problems for people. But, it seems that we've forgotten to add 'under normal conditions' or define what those are.
For example, sleep disorders. It's only a sleep disorder if you constantly can't sleep under normal conditions for more than one month. Most people would be unable to sleep in a running disco, even if they had a month to adjust. Is that a sleep disorder? No. Likewise, no one can sleep with the head positioned too far below their heart.
Likewise, attention deficit disorder is when someone can't pay attention to things under normal conditions.
The problem there is, of course, that schools aren't normal conditions. Someone doesn't have ADD if they can't pay attention there. Schools, in fact, are incredibly unnatural conditions.
Now, there are indeed people who can't pay attention ever, at all. And they have an actual disorder. And others who can only pay attention in specific conditions, like with loud music playing. They also have a disorder, although theirs is more manageable.
Someone who can't pay attention while sitting upright behind a desk and forbidden to move or play with things does not have one, though. It's not even an 'manageable' disorder, it's not a disorder at all.
That is not the sort of environment humans are supposed to operate in. It's like calling throwing up in zero-gee a disorder, or the inability to play the piano a disorder. Um, no.
Now, because of how schools are set up, it's entirely possible such students need to be classified as having a 'disorder' to get into 'special education', where they can get a more normal-ish environment that they can cope with. But if they can operate in a normal environment, where normal rules apply like 'You can walk around' and 'You can talk to people', we should not mistake this for an actual medical disorder, and we sure as hell shouldn't be giving them drugs for it.
I find it interesting that a friend of mine in high school said that drinking Mountain Dew before bed would help him sleep.
This is a very bad idea. Stimulants might calm down someone with ADD so that they get to sleep faster and wake less, but they sure as hell won't make them sleep better.
Stimulants just sorta make it look like you're asleep. It's better to be awake half the night and tossing and turning the rest of it than to take a stimulant and lay perfectly calm in bed all night, apparently asleep, but your mind and body not actually doing the things that they're supposed to do when you're asleep.
For one thing, with sleeping badly, their body will eventually get fed up with it and make them sleep, or dump them straight into REM sleep the second they go to sleep, so that the stuff that needs to happen can happen. Insomnia almost never progresses to the point of physically or mentally harming people in the long term.
Whereas drugs keeping those things from happening...well, the body can't get around those.
If someone really can't sleep without drugs, they should take actual sleeping aids, not caffeine! The point of 'sleep' is not to lay quietly in bed, it is for the body to do 'sleep' stuff! That's like curing sleep apnea (where you stop breathing during sleep, and hence wake up.) by sleeping with a plastic bag over your head.
I would think this is the same effect as Ritalin.
Indeed, and that's part of the reason so many of the people taking it look like zombies...they're half asleep during the day, because they're half asleep at night.
With enough stimulants, of course, they can still walk around, and of course won't fall asleep during class (Or ever.), but...um...
What it's doing is stimulating a part of your brain that, for you, is under-stimulated by default.
Because it is under-stimulated, your brain craves some sort of input, so you pay attention to random things instead of what you're trying to do. You have started to 'preemptively multitask'.
So, Ritalin is indeed a stimulant, even for people with ADD. It's just first affecting a part of the brain that is in charge of 'reacting to input' by throwing a bunch of static in there so you're not wanting more input.
Many drugs seem to have the 'opposite effect' of what people think. Alcohol, for example, is an depressant, but it first depresses inhibitions, so people tend to be more active, or at least more talkative, on small amounts of it. (In fact, you can figure out what it's depressed by what 'sort of drunk' someone is. Lazy drunks have depressed motor control, for example. Angry drunks have depressed inhibitions and also are normally bottling up anger.)
Meanwhile, tobacco is a stimulant, but hilariously the mental stimulation is undone by the calm that satisfying the addiction has. They aren't making themselves 'more calm', they're making themselves 'less calm' by default and undoing that with their tobacco fix!
If that's how Ritalin affect you, you don't have ADD.
It's sorta funny how some people like to claim there's no litmus test for ADD...stimulants are the test.
Everyone takes a stimulant and gets calmer is under-stimulated. Everyone who is distractable due to being under-stimulated has 'ADD'.
The amount of stimulation someone's brain wants is not some subjective diagnosis. It's pretty easy to objectively test...you give them stimulants(1) until they are at their calmest, and you hit the level. (For people already at the correct level, you could stick them in a sensory-deprivation tank and then drug them.)
Now, whether or not they have to the point we should be drugging them to reach this level is unknown. Perhaps we should, I dunno, make school less insanely boring.
The interesting fact that while stimulants appear to 'calm' people with ADD, all they actually do is make it more interesting in their own head...people don't actually pay more attention. They just fidget less.
Yes, we're actually just drugging them so they sit still and don't distract others while their brain is distracted bogus input.
1) Please note that while autistics are, in a small way, overstimulated (hence retreating from a world they can't cope with), aka, the opposite of ADD, giving them depressants does not appear to work. Stimulants give enough 'false input' for the brain to deal with that the person acts calm, but depressants can't remove the actual input.
What would be really nice is if, at the same time, we'd stop doing the domain check.
After all, that's solely to make sure the signed cert is using the right domain, there's no point in doing it if we were informed that domain is using that cert to start with.
And, without the domain check, we can just use the same cert on multiple domains, and thus not worry about having an IP address for each one.
Probably could just use a * cert without any changes at all beyond the DNS-verify thing.
If a valet refuses to return my car, I'm calling the cops
At which point he will eventually be arrested and charged...but not for theft.
Actually, cars are sorta weird in three ways, in that if he's driving the car around, he's using up your gas, which is theft by conversion. Two, 'possession' of a car is somewhat weird, legally. Third, when you loan a car to a valet, you're actually loaning it to the place of business, and if he drives off with it, he's stolen it from the business too.
Fourth, and most importantly, cars are actually covered under their own laws, and not normal theft law. In some places, simply getting into a car you don't own can be grand theft auto, despite the fact that you clearly didn't 'steal' the car if you didn't move it, as almost every definition of theft requires moving the object....but not grand theft auto.
I have no idea what the laws are covering cars say about refusing to return one, but cars aren't actually treated the same, WRT theft, as anything else.
In Arizona, refusing to return a car when you are told to because you are in default is a Class 6 felony - 6 to 18 months in prison. I'm surprised car repo companies don't lobby against that law - makes then kinda redundant.
And first the car company has to prove someone is in default. Via the courts. Which is my point.
The bank can't just walk up to you and say 'We demand our car back' and have you arrested. They have to file papers with a court, and have you declared in default. (Which is essentially the 'lawsuit' I was talking about that happens in general, although as neither the facts nor the law are in dispute, car repossessing usually doesn't actually make it to court.) Then, armed with a court order, they can show up with a cop and have you arrested if you don't turn it over.
The important thing is that you've demonstrated the superiority of your likes and dislikes over someone else's likes and dislikes. Your likes and dislikes are clearly better.
Way to show all those lemmings what's what! Those dumb 'consumers', listening to radio and always doing what everyone tells them.
Well, the stuff they like is dumb. Only losers listen to the radio!
There's an xkcd comic that I should link to here, about people who don't watch TV, but teh google has failed me.
Indeed, I get baffled by the complaint that without the RIAA, no artist would be massively popular.
That would be a good thing. (Have you tried buying damn tickets to a concert lately?)
We'd be much better off for all sorts of reasons if there were hundred times as many 'popular' groups, each with a hundredth the fanbase, and no one using the RIAA at all to promote their stuff. The only people worse off would be the RIAA and (possibly) the tiny percentage of bands that the RIAA chooses to make popular.
People forget we used to have much the same thing for Hollywood stars. Studios would lock them into multi-picture contracts and promote the hell out of them, they'd make no money, and they'd get discarded at the end or when popularity dipped. But it was the only game in town...it's not like there was anyone else making movies, just like there's no one else getting songs on the radio.
So actors unionized.
We still have super stars who can't act worth a damn, we still have crap being shoved down our throat, but there's actually room for independent stuff. (And independent films are a hell of a lot more work than independent music.)
We don't have studios signing up every new actor that walks into Hollywood, and then ignoring 95% of them, like the music industry does. Or, hell, a better analogy with the music industry would be to charge them to be in movies, and they only get the money back if the movie makes a profit, which would suck, as studios do the same crazy record-keeping that the music industry does, where nothing makes a profit.
It's hardly perfect, but the movie industry seems to operate a lot better than the music industry. Yeah, yeah, there's plenty of complaints about how that industry decides to make movies entirely by computer based on what it thinks people like, like the music industry, and comes out solely with sucky pre-digested crap, but you're going to get that behavior out or any large business.
But now it has to behave somewhat reasonably towards actors and writers and stuff. And people aren't stuck in contracts with companies that don't care about them, so they can go do independent films and, now, web films, and do okay.
And like I said, a lot of the stuff stopping independent films was the expense, and the fact they didn't have a good distribution model unless a major studio stepped in. (Note, the studios step in after...they don't go around signing the filmmakers up, charging them for the privilege of making a movie, and then letting it die, so whatever you think of them, they're better than music studios.) Those facts have just changed for film, and the movie industry is dealing...unlike the music industry, which had those fact change a decade ago, and still hasn't dealt with it.
Get with the program, man, that was released on Friday.
Holy crap, they're IN MY BRAIN. IN MY BRAIN. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH.
Either that, or I am somehow subconsciously receiving all draft RFCs directly into my brain.
No, seriously, I've thought this since I started hearing about DNSSEC. 'Hey, wait, if we have a way to verify that a DNS response is from the proper owners, then why not simply use that to transmit a fingerprint of a cert, to 'sign' it that way?'
Good to see others have pointed that out, and maybe someone will do something about it.
Heh, that is mostly what I meant, although I don't quite see the point of storing entire certs. I guess that's for offline-encryption, encrypting email and whatnot. IIRC that's what X.509 is for.
When you can exchange certs in real time over the connection, like with SSL, you just need to make sure the cert fingerprint is right, so that's all you need OoB.
What I suggest is, now that DNSSEC has taken off, we invent some sort of TXT DNS record that contains the fingerprint of that domain's SSL key.
Even without DNSSEC, this would add a layer of security. With DNSSEC, I'm having trouble figuring out a workable attack against it.
Self-signed connections are not more secure than HTTP unless you have independently verified the certificate.
Yes they are.
Spying on those connections vs. HTTP connections, requires more work, and hence are objectively 'more secure' by any measure of 'secure'. You have to MitM them to spy on them, whereas you don't for normal HTTP connections.
Also, you have to MitM in real time, where it can be detected. (And should be, as browsers should warn when certs change.) Whereas simply recording traffic is utterly undetectable.
What you're asserting is that they're not perfectly secure. Which, really, no general purpose computer ever is. Unsigned certs are certainly more secure than unencrypted.
What's more, if browsers treated self-signed certificates the same way it treated HTTP connections, 90% of users would never realize something was wrong. Until about 2 generations ago, most browsers popped up simple dialog boxes that users clicked through on autopilot before sending sensitive information to phishers. If they ignored dialog boxes, there's no way that simply not showing the lock is going to bring a problem to the user's attention.
Then SSL encryption is already totally, utterly broken. If you can do a MitM attack, and users 'don't care about the lock icon', all you do is make sure that no links go to the SSL portion of the site. Just edit the stream in real time to change https to http, and optionally have some sort of simply logic to remember what URLs you did that do, so your proxy can retrieve SSL pages for those URLs. (As some web sites will complain if you access some parts not via https.)
Yes, maybe 2% of the users have bookmarked the SSL site to start with, or type in https: to get there, but if 'they don't care about the lock icon', that seems unlikely for them to have done.
Erm, in what universe would Verizon find it slightly hard to make a fake cert?
It doesn't involve educating users, it just involves not putting giant-ass popup warnings in their face and panicking them.
I've constantly said that user-signed SSL connections shouldn't get a lock at all. That's it. Pretend they are unencrypted to the end user. If browsers want to be clever, they can invent some other signal like a a doorknob or something.
Then web servers can just transparently use them.
Of course, there's no way this will happen now. But it's what should have happened. The idea of having DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER alerts on connections on that are more secure than normal HTTP was idiotic, but probably unfixable, unless we invent some new protocol.
I suggest some sort of STARTSSL-like concept, where either the browser can say 'This request is encrypted' or the server can say 'Here is an encrypted reply'. (Neither of which require the other.) Hopefully even over a keep-alive connection, switching back and forth as needed, although that might have security implications. Part of HTTP 2.0 or something.
I'm not sure how you'd identify requests you want the browser to send encrypted to the server...perhaps the browser should just send all POSTs encrypted by default and with links, you could use a rel='encrypted' attribute. Or perhaps POSTs should have a 'turn on' or, better, a 'turn off', encryption attribute.
The server, of course, should just encrypt whatever the hell it wants, after the browser sends an 'Accept-Encryption' attribute, or perhaps that should be part of Accept-Encoding.
And, of course, as I said elsewhere, you stick the fingerprint of this cert in a DNSSEC-secured DNS TXT record.