Spot on! That's just what I was going to say. Public health has to be taken into account; you can't be allowed to endanger others. I'd also include some restrictions on narcotics and other addictive drugs for all the usual reasons, it's generally agreed for example that heroin abuse causes social problems.
If over-use of antibiotics is such a problem, I wonder if doctors are aware of it, or even care. In my experience, an antibiotic is frequently the first thing they try.
True. Doctors frequently prescribe antibiotics for viral infections like heavy colds, just to relieve trivial symptoms arising from secondary bacterial ENT and bronchial infections. This has become a big enough problem that the UK government this year had to send out an advisory to GPs telling them to stop doing it.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
If you can't seem to find a doctor willing to prescribe some medication for you, I think it's a safe bet to say that a) you don't need that medication; or b) it would be dangerous or lethal for you to use it.
Ha! You are the very embodiment of the problem. Don't you get it? It's not for you to say whether I need medication or not.
You seem to have this horrible animosity towards doctors
Only what's justified by experience.
I promise you doctors are in the business to keep you alive and healthy
You clearly don't understand; it looks like you need an example. I once strained my wrist badly. The merest deflection of my wrist caused by something touching my forearm or hand, caused paralysing pain even though I'd immobilised it as best I could (I'd rolled up a Computer Weekly around it, secured with a rubber belt).
I went my doctor to get it seen to because I was pretty much unable to do anything physical at all while it was like that. Apart from the constant pain. He referred me to the hospital, some distance away.
By the time I was seen at the hospital several hours had elapsed since my arrival at the doctor's surgery. but because there was no visible damage to the bones on the X-ray, they wouldn't treat it. I asked for a plaster cast, which would have helped a lot. They refused. I asked for string pain killers. They refused.
This is a most prosaic example. I only had to undergo two days of unnecessary pain because of the hospital's rules which are obviously geared towards withholding treatment whenever possible. But the same system causes much more severe consequences when the stakes are higher.
Doctors are not the last word. They get things wrong, and they have different priorities (profit, budget, triage, bureaucratic rules) than I have with regard to my well-being. I've often been in situations when I know my doctor didn't have a clue, but *I* did, by virtue of this being *my* body, and these being *my* symptoms. No-one but me can be the ultimate authority on that particular subject, no matter what certificates they have hanging on their wall.
If you disagree with that, that's your problem.
If medical training and licensing requirements are really so terrible where you live, perhaps you should move.
The UK isn't generally thought to be a backwater, medically speaking. These problems exist whenever the dispensation of treatment is controlled by a privileged priesthood operating within a "closed shop". So where would I go?
I'm glad that there are standards vis-a-vis training and licensing; we need to know that when we *do* want a doctor's advice we're not getting a fraudulent quack instead. It would benefit the public if those standards were even higher than they are now. But we should not be forced to depend upon the judgment of someone else in order to get treatment when treatment may be desperately needed and that person's judgement may be wrong.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I can follow the math. It is poorly written and makes leaps and bounds far over and beyond those pointed out by Gerlach. It is either obtuse INTENTIONALLY, or because Mills never understood the necessity for others to follow his work in order for it to be accepted. Or because there are misconceptions embodied within it that Mills himself is missing.
Can you be more explicit? Or am I just supposed to believe an AC who may or may not be able to follow the maths?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I give ALL consideration within reason to all sorts of hypotheses. If I think something is at ALL possible I will let it alone and see how it develops. I would NEVER attack something from my field in public if there were even a remote chance it was correct. My livelihood is my reputation amongst my peers.
That's what I meant when I said: Sensible scientists will keep quiet until there is irrefutable evidence to support Mills' theory. Or irrefutable evidence that he's wrong. I don't think there's either, yet.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
With respects to the whole concept of prescribing drugs, the average citizen is an idiot.
So should I be denied direct access to medication just because my next door neighbours are idiots? I think not.
This is why we have smart people who are licensed to make certain decisions for us, like doctors.
What are you talking about? Most doctors are idiots as well. Six years of gruelling study at medical school doesn't prove that you are infallible, smart or even responsible, it just proves that you can withstand six years of gruelling study at medical school. There have been more than enough scandals about incompetence, negligence and sexual assault to make this obvious.
If you have a medical problem that can be treated with prescription drugs, you have to get a doctor to make that diagnosis and decision.
For those who have to pay to see a doctor, they are victims of an extortion racket. For those whose treatment is paid for by the state, they get to wait...and wait...and wait, just for an appointment. then they have to go and wait and wait etc. in a waiting room full of sick people who are much more likely to be infecting you with something contagious than would be the case anywhere else.
The doctor writes out a prescription, so that the pharmacy knows you've gotten a doctor's consent before they go handing out potentially lethal drugs
You hope. What if the doctor doesn't know what drugs to prescribe? What if he/she prescribes drugs that are dangerous? This happens all the time. If any General Practitioner has to prescribe a medication that they are not familiar with, what do they do? They look it up in a book. In the case of British doctors, the same book I have in my study actually. They often don't even bother to check the appendix listing contra-indications. When confronted with this on more than one occasion I've had to tell the doctor "No, you can't prescribe that, because I'm already taking XYZ".
Many GPs I've dealt with seem to have rested on their laurels ever since graduation. There is very little pressure on them to keep up by reading medical journals etc. The only ongoing education most of them get is the spiel and the promotional literature from the pharmaceutical sales rep. In what way are they providing an expertise that we can't provide for themselves?
Would you really rather live in a country where anyone can buy any sort of drug and use it as he desires?
Yes, within reason.
What happens when that drug, or perhaps a certain mixture, causes sterility? Heart failure? Death? "Oh shucks, he should have known better."?
We deal with dangerous things all the time in our normal daily lives. Sharp knives. Power tools. Motor cars. Hang-gliding. SCUBA diving. Football. Large dogs. Fire. Swimming after lunch.
And *if* you're American, what about the American obsession with guns?
It has always been like this, it's called *life*. To attempt to protect everybody from hurting themselves is not only impractical, it's undesirable. We have the right to make our own choices and take our own risks. All we need is the ability to stay fully informed about those risks.
There are perfectly sane, legitimate reasons we license and prescribe drugs in this country.
They are only legitimate because they are written in law. But they are not justice. No-one has the right to tell me what I can and can't put in my body. It's *my* fucking body.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
If this is for professional 3d (OpenGL) applications then you don't want a gaming card. NVIDIA have a special OpenGL card for serious professional users.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
With respect to the processor of choice, I see no real reason not to get an AMD instead of an Intel if the price is right and the speed is sensible
Absolutely. I've had lots of problems with AMD CPUs and VIA chipsets under Windows but Linux doesn't seem to have any problems with them at all - despite the conventional wisdom that Linux stresses the system harder.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I neither lied not exaggerated. Why should I? I don't have any hidden agenda. My only animosity towards Microsoft is precisely because of my negative experiences with Windows.
...or have truely defective hardware.
I have had the same or similar problems with a range of hardware including three different CPUs, two different chipsets and four different motherboards, three different sound cards, three different graphics cards. And four different hard disk, three different sets of Simms, three different CD-ROM drives.
It's therefore a fact that there is a great deal of hardware out there upon which Win95 OSR2 and Win98SE simply will not run reliably. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here because I don't directly know of any hardware configurations upon which it will run reliably.
Windows, any version, is not as defective as you make it out to be. Windows 98 works just fine for the vast majority of people who use it.
The only remotely stable Windows 95 configurations I have ever seen was the original (pre-OSR2) Win95 release on integrated motherboards from Intel. From what I've heard, Win98SE is not stable on any configuration and the problems I've been having are widespread.
Just because YOU can't figure something out or because it doesn't work for YOU...
I can figure out plenty. I've had to learn because Windows 95 OSR/2 and Windows 98 are so temperamental. I've spent hundreds of hours studying Microsoft Knowledge Base articles and following their useless recommendations. The fact is Microsoft are extremely reluctant to admit to faults that can't be fixed which are down to inadequacies in their software, so many of the problems I've faced are simply not acknowledged.
...does not mean it's a defective product.
It doesn't work as advertised. Microsoft cannot or will not fix it. It is, by any meaningful definition, a defective product.
In attempting to refute facts which are well known to correspond to most technical users' experience, you clumsily expose yourself as a Microsoft employee. No surprise then that you post as an AC. Listen up drone; denying that the problem exists will not make it go away. At least, not here it won't.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I'm having some difficulty understanding the distinction. All I know is, it keeps locking up, crashing, going to sleep and then refusing to wake up, or refusing to let me log off or shut it down. And I've had to reinstall the damn thing more than a dozen times in the three months or so I've had it. You call that working? I don't. It's a crock. It's cost me thousands of pounds in lost productivity. And I don't consider an admonition that I should have bought NT to be a sufficient defence. If they're going to sell Win98SE and charge GBP140.00 for it I think we've a right to expect it to work without significant problems let alone hourly disasters.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
(i) A decent sized desk with enough room to have the keyboard and monitor straight in front of you *and* enough left over to have a standard letter sized sheet of paper in front of that. All too often I've had to work at a shallow desk where because of the depth of the monitor, and the desk being pushed up against a wall or another desk, I've had to have the monitor off to the side. And free space on either side too for your manuals and notepad etc.
(ii) A good keyboard. I don't like too much cleverness in keyboards. The classic KeyTronic KYB601 is my choice. Their new "ergonomic" KT2001 sucks rocks.
(iii) A good quality mouse. It should be the right size and shape to fit the hand in its resting position. I quite like the Microsoft Intellimouse myself. Even the old classic MS "Dove bar" mouse wasn't half bad. Watch out though, the OEM version isn't made to the same high quality as the proper retail version, and it shows.
(iv) A good quality high res monitor. If you need to have several windows open at a time you need 1600x1200 to avoid unnecessary mouse movement. At that resolution you need a 19inch diagonal or bigger. And the refresh rate has to be 75Hz or more, and small fonts should be clearly readable.
Oh yeah, and (v): A nearby vending machine with chocolate bars in it:o)
If I've got all those things then just about any standard adjustable office chair will do. Wrist rests? Pah.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
To my mind the difference is clear. When I buy a thousand-package CD set from SuSE for GBP25.00 I know I'm not getting any guarantees. Only an idiot would expect there to be any at such a price. Caveat Emptor.
But when I have to fork out GBP140.00 for just one CD of Win98SE without any applications I damn well expect the thing to work. When it doesn't (even after spending a fortune online to download dozens of megabytes of official updates) I think I'm quite justified in feeling ripped off. Just look at the EULA for Christ's sake. According to them we have no rights of redress at all! We're all being shafted up the ass big time and we must be stupid to let it happen.
Microsoft have got it coming to them all right.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
A better grasp of math, physics, and chemistry indeed. Can you find a single PhD physicist, chemist, or mathematician who thinks Mills is up to snuff ? ? ?
The academic establishment tends to make things very difficult for anyone who breaks ranks. Sensible scientists will keep quiet until there is irrefutable evidence to support Mills' theory.
He is basically a very obsessed individual who went WAY off track a long time ago. If he were properly schooled in mathematics, physics, or chemistry he would have been a handful to get back on track.
This is pure speculation.
Instead, look at what he is proposing. He is reinventing particle physics, without advanced training in particle physics.
So? Chemists need to know quite a bit of physics (especially including quantum physics). They can't even win their degree without it. Ditto higher maths. Quantum physics itself isn't particularly difficult to master anyway, its certainly no harder than any other branch of chemistry. Particle physics today is just tedious (it's like zoology) and is still 90% speculation.
He is reinventing single hydrogen chemistry, without substantial training in hydrogen chemistry.
Well, he is trained as a chemist, and so am I. Are you? What is "hydrogen chemistry"? anyway? As far as the mainstream is concerned, "hydrogen chemistry" is very straightforward, hardly deserving of a whole branch of chemistry all to itself. It's only got one damn electron for heaven's sake! It's the only element for which solutions have been found to its wave equations.
What's more, your remarks suggest strongly that you haven't even read his published work, from which it's abundantly clear that he does have a very good grasp of "hydrogen chemistry" as it's generally understood. He just happens to have something new to add to it.
And the comments of at least one mathematics professor (see book comments at Amazon) indicate his mathematics is merely good enough to prevent his investors from personally double checking him.
I read Ulrich Gerlach's assassination piece too. His criticisms deserve serious consideration. I'm not really able to assess the criticisms about the maths as it'd take more time than I have. But some of it may well be a failure of interpretation. Both holes in the maths and misinterpretation are likely to occur at this stage as it's a new theory and it hasn't even been submitted to referees yet. The criticisms may not be wholly significant; they don't necessarily kill the theory even if they're valid. If they did, then quantum mechanics, supersymmetry, string theory and inflation theory would never have got past first base (and the Linux kernel would never have got past version 0.1 either;o). Complex theories generally don't emerge fully formed, they often need a little massage after feedback has been obtained.
Michio Kaku doesn't swallow Mills' theory either, and I respect Kaku (I have a couple of his books). But even eminent scientists are sometimes wrong, especially when defending something. And Kaku doesn't attack the maths. I'd be surprised if he's even bothered to look.
BTW, there's another comment there now written by former Assistant Secretary of Energy Shelby T Brewer, who is also now involved with BlackLight Power. It lists Mills' impressive credentials as a scientist which must be genuine whatever you think of Brewer's objectivity.
If Mills turns out to be right it will set the whole of 20th Century physics and chemistry on its head. It would mean that people like Kaku have been wrong all their lives. So you have to expect that the establishment would fight it anyway.
Remember that Einstein wasn't believed either until he had verified experimental results.
One thing is clear - he is one heck of a salesman. Persons which such personalities can often convince large groups of relatively uneducated people to follow them. He smells just like a snake oil salesman to me.
I might believe you if Mills showed signs of raking in all the cash he could before someone exposed him. But he's not, he's just taken enough to fund the business. This suggests he expects to make money out of his discovery in a more conventional manner.
Also note that the some of the scientists who've criticised his theory have gone out of their way to state that they believe he is sincere, just misguided. Scientists generally don't do that if they think someone is a fraud, they tend to come out and say so or else just leave it unsaid.
PT Barnum was right.
From the sublime to the ridiculous. Perhaps you understand Barnum's theory better than you understand Mills' theory and thus place more faith in it. Personally I don't think its valid to compare Mills with Barnum.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Unlike the blowhard from BlacklightPower, this sounds like an important breakthrough
You're editorialising again, Hemos! An assessment of the majority reaction to the Blacklight Power story might make it seem safe to do so on this occasion, but public opinion would change pretty quickly if Randall Mills was vindicated.
Mills' claims are certainly outrageous but he's only raised enough capital from hardened venture capitalists to fund his research, and is turning would-be investors away in droves. He's obviously not a fraud. Even his critics in the physics community don't deny he is at least sincere. And don't forget he appears to have a better grasp of maths, chemistry and physics than most people - he's not ignorant or even unqualified.
His enthusiasm for his own theory isn't really enough to warrant labelling him a blowhard. It's not as if he's gone around badmouthing everybody who disagrees with him. If you believed you'd made a breakthrough that would turn science on its head, wouldn't you have something to say about it? Would that make you a blowhard?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not jumping on Mills' bandwagon either (yet). But if his ideas were completely without credibility then he'd surely have been forced out of business by now. I think we ought to give him the benefit of the doubt until his work has been properly peer reviewed by people who are qualified to assess it.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Seriously, you shouldn't write me off as an anti-Microsoft bigot. I've bought two versions of Windows in the last two years even though I already run Linux. When Microsoft comes out with a new OS I'm ready to part with the GBP70.00 to GBP140.00 it costs here, even though they've bitten me in the past. So to imply unreasoning bias is a bit uncalled for.
The thing is, every time I go through this I end up bitterly disappointed. My experiences with Win98SE have been appalling and despite hours downloading patches from Windowsupdate.com things are getting no better. The most expensive failures I've encountered on Win95 and Win98SE have been those which corrupt the registry basly enough to require a reformat and reinstallation of the OS and all applications and patches. This takes days of my time, and happens so frequently that it has cost me thousands of pounds in lost time this year alone.
Now, about the other matter.
With regard to your assertion that a registry would work better if written by someone else, try to understand this simple concept: a centralised registry is unworkable in the real world. It is therefore a bad idea, period.
It creates a single point of failure for the whole system. Remember a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If you have an entity upon which the whole system depends, and which is written to by every program on the system (and thus vulnerable to bugs and other mishaps ocurring in every program in the system), then that entity will inevitably get corrupted and the system will be unrecoverable. As with windows, you might get it to work with some manual fixes but you probably won't be able to find all the damage and the system will never be quite right again.
A registry might look cool from a theoretical architectural point of view. But this type of model hardly ever takes into account the fact that software contains bugs and that hardware sometimes fails. It would work if these things never happened. But they do, all the time, and until we see infallible hardware and guaranteed bug-free code a centralised registry will always be a liability.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's logically impossible unless you also incorporate cryptographically secure and sealed hardware. Otherwise, the encrypted content and the media stream can always be replayed.
Furthermore, you can, of course, always capture a copy at the device output, always in analog, and often even in digital format.
One of the companies developing this technology is a subsidiary of a huge corporation with almost unlimited financial resources, and they are already working on stuff for one of the biggest media companies in the world. I found out about it at a job interview with the company concerned and I had to sign an NDA so I can't say any more.
I think what you are suggesting is not that you can't implement pay-per-play, but that no software-only encryption is uncrackable. I guess that's true, but it's beyond most people if the encryption is good enough.
With regard to capturing the content at the output end, this might work for audio or graphics but I can't see how it would work with multimedia. Anyway, capturing digital music in a relatively low-fidelity analogue recording or capturing text as a series of graphic images is probably of no real concern to them, we could always do that even before the computers and the internet. What they are guarding against is control of the digital representation.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
It's not just music, but also video, text, graphics, executable code, the whole multimedia thing. Anything digital. It won't always be feasible or practical to rip it off unless you can break the encryption.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
the DMCA allows for the breaking of a protection code if it is for the purposes of interoperability. Since it's clear that transcoding RealAudio files to MP3 files would enable the song to be played in new environments (e.g., on a Rio), the creation of a transcoding tool is solidly within the realm of the DMCA's exception.
This is a very good point (you should have been a lawyer!) but unfortunately it's not the whole story.
There are new technologies in the pipeline to be released very soon, which will allow content providers to control access to their media to a much greater degree than is currently possible. I'm not just talking about the RIAA's MP3 replacement, but all downloadable digital media. What they do is to wrap the content up in an encrypted packet with a programmatic key which allows you to open it only once for each time you pay.
In other words, somewhat like the PITA streaming Real Video movies, you can play it but you can't keep it and play it again later (without paying, anyway). It's pay-per-play.
There is a great deal of pressure coming from the big media industry players and the newbie internet media wannabees to allow them this level of control over their media, content, IP or whatever you want to call it. The DMCA was engineered by precisely the same forces for just this reason.
So, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, you can't expect them to sit by and watch their latest extortion racket get rolled over by your liberal interpretation of their new law. This law is not about fairness or balance or any kind of compromise, it is about letting them keep complete control of what they see as theirs.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Not far enough. Ban pencils and notepads lest the evil information pirates write the secret knowledge down. But they might spread the information by word of mouth so let's rip their tongues out too. And cut off their hands just to be sure.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Consider, what does Linux do for the average user that Windows does not?
I think I can answer that with a degree of authority as I'm one of those people who uses linux and Windows about 50/50 at home. The answer is stability.
I run Windows 98SE and when I finally got it installed with a few apps(after a dozen abortive attempts) I thought: wow, how slick.
But by the time I'd installed a few more applications and, more to the point, all the recommended updates from windowsupdate.com, the system had become so flaky and unstable that it was regularly sending my blood pressure through the roof.
For example, one of the most recent recommended updates for IE5 made the special IE5 icon disappear completely from the desktop (there's no way to make it come back except by reinstalling... and that means re-downloading half of the updates again).
For another example, ACPI support just plain doesn't work; having reinstalled from scratch with plain old APM I find that doesn't work either; the machine frequently goes to sleep and will not wake up unless I hit the reset button despite my having standby mode completely disabled!
For another, the system frequently hangs partway through the shutdown sequence, with one of those kernel32.dll errors. You click on OK and it comes back again straight away. And you can't get the task menu up with Ctrl-Alt-Del as long as it's there, which is to say: ad infinitum. So again the only recourse is to hit the reset button.
Oh, and often enough rundll hangs on shutdown instead.
Don't imagine this is anything like a substantial summary. It's only the tip of the iceberg.
The fact is, IME Win98SE is a mess. Period. It may have the gloss when it's working, but the frequency with which it stops working completely destroys the experience for me. Often enough as a result I just switch over to Linux for several days at a time because I'm so damn disillusioned with using Windows.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
It's great that there are 30 ICQ clones, this way everyone can choose which one to use. In Windows there is just one ICQ client. Freedom of choice is why I use linux, I can pick everything I want.
Er, no you can't; you can only pick what is there and that's the whole point. You can't pick a video player to play the latest Sorenson-encoded QuickTime movie trailer, and you can't pick a finance package to do your tax return. There might be though if those with the talent and free time to code stuff didn't waste their time re-inventing the wheel. I mean, 30 versions of the same program, that's just plain silly.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Slashdot Mirror
I bid a hundred quatloos for the MST3K version!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Spot on! That's just what I was going to say. Public health has to be taken into account; you can't be allowed to endanger others. I'd also include some restrictions on narcotics and other addictive drugs for all the usual reasons, it's generally agreed for example that heroin abuse causes social problems.
If over-use of antibiotics is such a problem, I wonder if doctors are aware of it, or even care. In my experience, an antibiotic is frequently the first thing they try.
True. Doctors frequently prescribe antibiotics for viral infections like heavy colds, just to relieve trivial symptoms arising from secondary bacterial ENT and bronchial infections. This has become a big enough problem that the UK government this year had to send out an advisory to GPs telling them to stop doing it.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
If you can't seem to find a doctor willing to prescribe some medication for you, I think it's a safe bet to say that a) you don't need that medication; or b) it would be dangerous or lethal for you to use it.
Ha! You are the very embodiment of the problem. Don't you get it? It's not for you to say whether I need medication or not.
You seem to have this horrible animosity towards doctors
Only what's justified by experience.
I promise you doctors are in the business to keep you alive and healthy
You clearly don't understand; it looks like you need an example. I once strained my wrist badly. The merest deflection of my wrist caused by something touching my forearm or hand, caused paralysing pain even though I'd immobilised it as best I could (I'd rolled up a Computer Weekly around it, secured with a rubber belt).
I went my doctor to get it seen to because I was pretty much unable to do anything physical at all while it was like that. Apart from the constant pain. He referred me to the hospital, some distance away.
By the time I was seen at the hospital several hours had elapsed since my arrival at the doctor's surgery. but because there was no visible damage to the bones on the X-ray, they wouldn't treat it. I asked for a plaster cast, which would have helped a lot. They refused. I asked for string pain killers. They refused.
This is a most prosaic example. I only had to undergo two days of unnecessary pain because of the hospital's rules which are obviously geared towards withholding treatment whenever possible. But the same system causes much more severe consequences when the stakes are higher.
Doctors are not the last word. They get things wrong, and they have different priorities (profit, budget, triage, bureaucratic rules) than I have with regard to my well-being. I've often been in situations when I know my doctor didn't have a clue, but *I* did, by virtue of this being *my* body, and these being *my* symptoms. No-one but me can be the ultimate authority on that particular subject, no matter what certificates they have hanging on their wall.
If you disagree with that, that's your problem.
If medical training and licensing requirements are really so terrible where you live, perhaps you should move.
The UK isn't generally thought to be a backwater, medically speaking. These problems exist whenever the dispensation of treatment is controlled by a privileged priesthood operating within a "closed shop". So where would I go?
I'm glad that there are standards vis-a-vis training and licensing; we need to know that when we *do* want a doctor's advice we're not getting a fraudulent quack instead. It would benefit the public if those standards were even higher than they are now. But we should not be forced to depend upon the judgment of someone else in order to get treatment when treatment may be desperately needed and that person's judgement may be wrong.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I can follow the math. It is poorly written and makes leaps and bounds far over and beyond those pointed out by Gerlach. It is either obtuse INTENTIONALLY, or because Mills never understood the necessity for others to follow his work in order for it to be accepted. Or because there are misconceptions embodied within it that Mills himself is missing.
Can you be more explicit? Or am I just supposed to believe an AC who may or may not be able to follow the maths?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I give ALL consideration within reason to all sorts of hypotheses. If I think something is at ALL possible I will let it alone and see how it develops. I would NEVER attack something from my field in public if there were even a remote chance it was correct. My livelihood is my reputation amongst my peers.
That's what I meant when I said: Sensible scientists will keep quiet until there is irrefutable evidence to support Mills' theory.
Or irrefutable evidence that he's wrong. I don't think there's either, yet.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
About what?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
This is all sanctimonous, patronizing bullshit.
With respects to the whole concept of prescribing drugs, the average citizen is an idiot.
So should I be denied direct access to medication just because my next door neighbours are idiots? I think not.
This is why we have smart people who are licensed to make certain decisions for us, like doctors.
What are you talking about? Most doctors are idiots as well. Six years of gruelling study at medical school doesn't prove that you are infallible, smart or even responsible, it just proves that you can withstand six years of gruelling study at medical school. There have been more than enough scandals about incompetence, negligence and sexual assault to make this obvious.
If you have a medical problem that can be treated with prescription drugs, you have to get a doctor to make that diagnosis and decision.
For those who have to pay to see a doctor, they are victims of an extortion racket. For those whose treatment is paid for by the state, they get to wait...and wait...and wait, just for an appointment. then they have to go and wait and wait etc. in a waiting room full of sick people who are much more likely to be infecting you with something contagious than would be the case anywhere else.
The doctor writes out a prescription, so that the pharmacy knows you've gotten a doctor's consent before they go handing out potentially lethal drugs
You hope. What if the doctor doesn't know what drugs to prescribe? What if he/she prescribes drugs that are dangerous? This happens all the time. If any General Practitioner has to prescribe a medication that they are not familiar with, what do they do? They look it up in a book. In the case of British doctors, the same book I have in my study actually. They often don't even bother to check the appendix listing contra-indications. When confronted with this on more than one occasion I've had to tell the doctor "No, you can't prescribe that, because I'm already taking XYZ".
Many GPs I've dealt with seem to have rested on their laurels ever since graduation. There is very little pressure on them to keep up by reading medical journals etc. The only ongoing education most of them get is the spiel and the promotional literature from the pharmaceutical sales rep. In what way are they providing an expertise that we can't provide for themselves?
Would you really rather live in a country where anyone can buy any sort of drug and use it as he desires?
Yes, within reason.
What happens when that drug, or perhaps a certain mixture, causes sterility? Heart failure? Death? "Oh shucks, he should have known better."?
We deal with dangerous things all the time in our normal daily lives. Sharp knives. Power tools. Motor cars. Hang-gliding. SCUBA diving. Football. Large dogs. Fire. Swimming after lunch.
And *if* you're American, what about the American obsession with guns?
It has always been like this, it's called *life*. To attempt to protect everybody from hurting themselves is not only impractical, it's undesirable. We have the right to make our own choices and take our own risks. All we need is the ability to stay fully informed about those risks.
There are perfectly sane, legitimate reasons we license and prescribe drugs in this country.
They are only legitimate because they are written in law. But they are not justice. No-one has the right to tell me what I can and can't put in my body. It's *my* fucking body.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
If this is for professional 3d (OpenGL) applications then you don't want a gaming card.
NVIDIA have a special OpenGL card for serious professional users.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
With respect to the processor of choice, I see no real reason not to get an AMD instead of an Intel if the price is right and the speed is sensible
Absolutely. I've had lots of problems with AMD CPUs and VIA chipsets under Windows but Linux doesn't seem to have any problems with them at all - despite the conventional wisdom that Linux stresses the system harder.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think you are either lying...
...or have truely defective hardware.
...
...does not mean it's a defective product.
I neither lied not exaggerated. Why should I? I don't have any hidden agenda. My only animosity towards Microsoft is precisely because of my negative experiences with Windows.
I have had the same or similar problems with a range of hardware including three different CPUs, two different chipsets and four different motherboards, three different sound cards, three different graphics cards. And four different hard disk, three different sets of Simms, three different CD-ROM drives.
It's therefore a fact that there is a great deal of hardware out there upon which Win95 OSR2 and Win98SE simply will not run reliably. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here because I don't directly know of any hardware configurations upon which it will run reliably.
Windows, any version, is not as defective as you make it out to be. Windows 98 works just fine for the vast majority of people who use it.
The only remotely stable Windows 95 configurations I have ever seen was the original (pre-OSR2) Win95 release on integrated motherboards from Intel. From what I've heard, Win98SE is not stable on any configuration and the problems I've been having are widespread.
Just because YOU can't figure something out or because it doesn't work for YOU
I can figure out plenty. I've had to learn because Windows 95 OSR/2 and Windows 98 are so temperamental. I've spent hundreds of hours studying Microsoft Knowledge Base articles and following their useless recommendations. The fact is Microsoft are extremely reluctant to admit to faults that can't be fixed which are down to inadequacies in their software, so many of the problems I've faced are simply not acknowledged.
It doesn't work as advertised. Microsoft cannot or will not fix it. It is, by any meaningful definition, a defective product.
In attempting to refute facts which are well known to correspond to most technical users' experience, you clumsily expose yourself as a Microsoft employee. No surprise then that you post as an AC. Listen up drone; denying that the problem exists will not make it go away. At least, not here it won't.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I'm having some difficulty understanding the distinction. All I know is, it keeps locking up, crashing, going to sleep and then refusing to wake up, or refusing to let me log off or shut it down. And I've had to reinstall the damn thing more than a dozen times in the three months or so I've had it. You call that working? I don't. It's a crock. It's cost me thousands of pounds in lost productivity. And I don't consider an admonition that I should have bought NT to be a sufficient defence. If they're going to sell Win98SE and charge GBP140.00 for it I think we've a right to expect it to work without significant problems let alone hourly disasters.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Most important things that are often overlooked:
:o)
(i) A decent sized desk with enough room to have the keyboard and monitor straight in front of you *and* enough left over to have a standard letter sized sheet of paper in front of that. All too often I've had to work at a shallow desk where because of the depth of the monitor, and the desk being pushed up against a wall or another desk, I've had to have the monitor off to the side. And free space on either side too for your manuals and notepad etc.
(ii) A good keyboard. I don't like too much cleverness in keyboards. The classic KeyTronic KYB601 is my choice. Their new "ergonomic" KT2001 sucks rocks.
(iii) A good quality mouse. It should be the right size and shape to fit the hand in its resting position. I quite like the Microsoft Intellimouse myself. Even the old classic MS "Dove bar" mouse wasn't half bad. Watch out though, the OEM version isn't made to the same high quality as the proper retail version, and it shows.
(iv) A good quality high res monitor. If you need to have several windows open at a time you need 1600x1200 to avoid unnecessary mouse movement. At that resolution you need a 19inch diagonal or bigger. And the refresh rate has to be 75Hz or more, and small fonts should be clearly readable.
Oh yeah, and (v): A nearby vending machine with chocolate bars in it
If I've got all those things then just about any standard adjustable office chair will do. Wrist rests? Pah.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
To my mind the difference is clear. When I buy a thousand-package CD set from SuSE for GBP25.00 I know I'm not getting any guarantees. Only an idiot would expect there to be any at such a price. Caveat Emptor.
But when I have to fork out GBP140.00 for just one CD of Win98SE without any applications I damn well expect the thing to work. When it doesn't (even after spending a fortune online to download dozens of megabytes of official updates) I think I'm quite justified in feeling ripped off. Just look at the EULA for Christ's sake. According to them we have no rights of redress at all! We're all being shafted up the ass big time and we must be stupid to let it happen.
Microsoft have got it coming to them all right.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
A better grasp of math, physics, and chemistry indeed. Can you find a single PhD physicist, chemist, or mathematician who thinks Mills is up to snuff ? ? ?
;o). Complex theories generally don't emerge fully formed, they often need a little massage after feedback has been obtained.
The academic establishment tends to make things very difficult for anyone who breaks ranks. Sensible scientists will keep quiet until there is irrefutable evidence to support Mills' theory.
He is basically a very obsessed individual who went WAY off track a long time ago. If he were properly schooled in mathematics, physics, or chemistry he would have been a handful to get back on track.
This is pure speculation.
Instead, look at what he is proposing. He is reinventing particle physics, without advanced training in particle physics.
So? Chemists need to know quite a bit of physics (especially including quantum physics). They can't even win their degree without it. Ditto higher maths. Quantum physics itself isn't particularly difficult to master anyway, its certainly no harder than any other branch of chemistry. Particle physics today is just tedious (it's like zoology) and is still 90% speculation.
He is reinventing single hydrogen chemistry, without substantial training in hydrogen chemistry.
Well, he is trained as a chemist, and so am I. Are you? What is "hydrogen chemistry"? anyway? As far as the mainstream is concerned, "hydrogen chemistry" is very straightforward, hardly deserving of a whole branch of chemistry all to itself. It's only got one damn electron for heaven's sake! It's the only element for which solutions have been found to its wave equations.
What's more, your remarks suggest strongly that you haven't even read his published work, from which it's abundantly clear that he does have a very good grasp of "hydrogen chemistry" as it's generally understood. He just happens to have something new to add to it.
And the comments of at least one mathematics professor (see book comments at Amazon) indicate his mathematics is merely good enough to prevent his investors from personally double checking him.
I read Ulrich Gerlach's assassination piece too. His criticisms deserve serious consideration. I'm not really able to assess the criticisms about the maths as it'd take more time than I have. But some of it may well be a failure of interpretation. Both holes in the maths and misinterpretation are likely to occur at this stage as it's a new theory and it hasn't even been submitted to referees yet. The criticisms may not be wholly significant; they don't necessarily kill the theory even if they're valid. If they did, then quantum mechanics, supersymmetry, string theory and inflation theory would never have got past first base (and the Linux kernel would never have got past version 0.1 either
Michio Kaku doesn't swallow Mills' theory either, and I respect Kaku (I have a couple of his books). But even eminent scientists are sometimes wrong, especially when defending something. And Kaku doesn't attack the maths. I'd be surprised if he's even bothered to look.
BTW, there's another comment there now written by former Assistant Secretary of Energy Shelby T Brewer, who is also now involved with BlackLight Power. It lists Mills' impressive credentials as a scientist which must be genuine whatever you think of Brewer's objectivity.
If Mills turns out to be right it will set the whole of 20th Century physics and chemistry on its head. It would mean that people like Kaku have been wrong all their lives. So you have to expect that the establishment would fight it anyway.
Remember that Einstein wasn't believed either until he had verified experimental results.
One thing is clear - he is one heck of a salesman. Persons which such personalities can often convince large groups of relatively uneducated people to follow them. He smells just like a snake oil salesman to me.
I might believe you if Mills showed signs of raking in all the cash he could before someone exposed him. But he's not, he's just taken enough to fund the business. This suggests he expects to make money out of his discovery in a more conventional manner.
Also note that the some of the scientists who've criticised his theory have gone out of their way to state that they believe he is sincere, just misguided. Scientists generally don't do that if they think someone is a fraud, they tend to come out and say so or else just leave it unsaid.
PT Barnum was right.
From the sublime to the ridiculous. Perhaps you understand Barnum's theory better than you understand Mills' theory and thus place more faith in it. Personally I don't think its valid to compare Mills with Barnum.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Oops, my bad. Apologies to Hemos. Mild rebuke to notsosilentbob instead.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Unlike the blowhard from BlacklightPower, this sounds like an important breakthrough
You're editorialising again, Hemos! An assessment of the majority reaction to the Blacklight Power story might make it seem safe to do so on this occasion, but public opinion would change pretty quickly if Randall Mills was vindicated.
Mills' claims are certainly outrageous but he's only raised enough capital from hardened venture capitalists to fund his research, and is turning would-be investors away in droves. He's obviously not a fraud. Even his critics in the physics community don't deny he is at least sincere. And don't forget he appears to have a better grasp of maths, chemistry and physics than most people - he's not ignorant or even unqualified.
His enthusiasm for his own theory isn't really enough to warrant labelling him a blowhard. It's not as if he's gone around badmouthing everybody who disagrees with him. If you believed you'd made a breakthrough that would turn science on its head, wouldn't you have something to say about it? Would that make you a blowhard?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not jumping on Mills' bandwagon either (yet). But if his ideas were completely without credibility then he'd surely have been forced out of business by now. I think we ought to give him the benefit of the doubt until his work has been properly peer reviewed by people who are qualified to assess it.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Get thee behind me Satan!
Seriously, you shouldn't write me off as an anti-Microsoft bigot. I've bought two versions of Windows in the last two years even though I already run Linux. When Microsoft comes out with a new OS I'm ready to part with the GBP70.00 to GBP140.00 it costs here, even though they've bitten me in the past. So to imply unreasoning bias is a bit uncalled for.
The thing is, every time I go through this I end up bitterly disappointed. My experiences with Win98SE have been appalling and despite hours downloading patches from Windowsupdate.com things are getting no better. The most expensive failures I've encountered on Win95 and Win98SE have been those which corrupt the registry basly enough to require a reformat and reinstallation of the OS and all applications and patches. This takes days of my time, and happens so frequently that it has cost me thousands of pounds in lost time this year alone.
Now, about the other matter.
With regard to your assertion that a registry would work better if written by someone else, try to understand this simple concept: a centralised registry is unworkable in the real world. It is therefore a bad idea, period.
It creates a single point of failure for the whole system. Remember a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If you have an entity upon which the whole system depends, and which is written to by every program on the system (and thus vulnerable to bugs and other mishaps ocurring in every program in the system), then that entity will inevitably get corrupted and the system will be unrecoverable. As with windows, you might get it to work with some manual fixes but you probably won't be able to find all the damage and the system will never be quite right again.
A registry might look cool from a theoretical architectural point of view. But this type of model hardly ever takes into account the fact that software contains bugs and that hardware sometimes fails. It would work if these things never happened. But they do, all the time, and until we see infallible hardware and guaranteed bug-free code a centralised registry will always be a liability.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's logically impossible unless you also incorporate cryptographically secure and sealed hardware. Otherwise, the encrypted content and the media stream can always be replayed.
Furthermore, you can, of course, always capture a copy at the device output, always in analog, and often even in digital format.
One of the companies developing this technology is a subsidiary of a huge corporation with almost unlimited financial resources, and they are already working on stuff for one of the biggest media companies in the world. I found out about it at a job interview with the company concerned and I had to sign an NDA so I can't say any more.
I think what you are suggesting is not that you can't implement pay-per-play, but that no software-only encryption is uncrackable. I guess that's true, but it's beyond most people if the encryption is good enough.
With regard to capturing the content at the output end, this might work for audio or graphics but I can't see how it would work with multimedia. Anyway, capturing digital music in a relatively low-fidelity analogue recording or capturing text as a series of graphic images is probably of no real concern to them, we could always do that even before the computers and the internet. What they are guarding against is control of the digital representation.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
It's not just music, but also video, text, graphics, executable code, the whole multimedia thing. Anything digital. It won't always be feasible or practical to rip it off unless you can break the encryption.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Oh. I'm pretty sure that's not what Mr Slippery was talking about, he mentioned seeing a picture of the corporate HQ for example.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
the DMCA allows for the breaking of a protection code if it is for the purposes of interoperability. Since it's clear that transcoding RealAudio files to MP3 files would enable the song to be played in new environments (e.g., on a Rio), the creation of a transcoding tool is solidly within the realm of the DMCA's exception.
This is a very good point (you should have been a lawyer!) but unfortunately it's not the whole story.
There are new technologies in the pipeline to be released very soon, which will allow content providers to control access to their media to a much greater degree than is currently possible. I'm not just talking about the RIAA's MP3 replacement, but all downloadable digital media. What they do is to wrap the content up in an encrypted packet with a programmatic key which allows you to open it only once for each time you pay.
In other words, somewhat like the PITA streaming Real Video movies, you can play it but you can't keep it and play it again later (without paying, anyway). It's pay-per-play.
There is a great deal of pressure coming from the big media industry players and the newbie internet media wannabees to allow them this level of control over their media, content, IP or whatever you want to call it. The DMCA was engineered by precisely the same forces for just this reason.
So, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, you can't expect them to sit by and watch their latest extortion racket get rolled over by your liberal interpretation of their new law. This law is not about fairness or balance or any kind of compromise, it is about letting them keep complete control of what they see as theirs.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Not far enough. Ban pencils and notepads lest the evil information pirates write the secret knowledge down. But they might spread the information by word of mouth so let's rip their tongues out too. And cut off their hands just to be sure.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Consider, what does Linux do for the average user that Windows does not?
I think I can answer that with a degree of authority as I'm one of those people who uses linux and Windows about 50/50 at home. The answer is stability.
I run Windows 98SE and when I finally got it installed with a few apps(after a dozen abortive attempts) I thought: wow, how slick.
But by the time I'd installed a few more applications and, more to the point, all the recommended updates from windowsupdate.com, the system had become so flaky and unstable that it was regularly sending my blood pressure through the roof.
For example, one of the most recent recommended updates for IE5 made the special IE5 icon disappear completely from the desktop (there's no way to make it come back except by reinstalling... and that means re-downloading half of the updates again).
For another example, ACPI support just plain doesn't work; having reinstalled from scratch with plain old APM I find that doesn't work either; the machine frequently goes to sleep and will not wake up unless I hit the reset button despite my having standby mode completely disabled!
For another, the system frequently hangs partway through the shutdown sequence, with one of those kernel32.dll errors. You click on OK and it comes back again straight away. And you can't get the task menu up with Ctrl-Alt-Del as long as it's there, which is to say: ad infinitum. So again the only recourse is to hit the reset button.
Oh, and often enough rundll hangs on shutdown instead.
Don't imagine this is anything like a substantial summary. It's only the tip of the iceberg.
The fact is, IME Win98SE is a mess. Period. It may have the gloss when it's working, but the frequency with which it stops working completely destroys the experience for me. Often enough as a result I just switch over to Linux for several days at a time because I'm so damn disillusioned with using Windows.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think you've been tricked
That's a nice way of putting it.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
It's great that there are 30 ICQ clones, this way everyone can choose which one to use. In Windows there is just one ICQ client. Freedom of choice is why I use linux, I can pick everything I want.
Er, no you can't; you can only pick what is there and that's the whole point. You can't pick a video player to play the latest Sorenson-encoded QuickTime movie trailer, and you can't pick a finance package to do your tax return. There might be though if those with the talent and free time to code stuff didn't waste their time re-inventing the wheel. I mean, 30 versions of the same program, that's just plain silly.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction