I have to admit that I was this way when I was younger... needles would give me panic attacks.
A few colonoscopies really put things in perspective, though. Now needles - even the massively long needled B12 injection my partner has to give me every month, which requires a few pre-injection beers - are generally a walk in the park.
I guess that's why I read this article and though, "Huh. What a waste of research time."
the countries we got it from in the first place had relatively good cardiovascular health until their youngsters started eating like us.
The country that we got it from (Japan) also wasn't using it in levels such that the Japanese were consuming tablespoons of it per day. The amount of MSG in our food continues to climb as well: there are many occasions where I go to the grocery store and see that previously MSG free products have now been formulated with a new recipe that contains MSG.
I realize that the whole MSG causing health issues is highly controversial. I definitely cannot consume it, except in the smallest of quantities. I have Crohn's Disease, and if I eat MSG, I experience acute inflammation in the terminal ileum, causing a partial intestinal blockage that leaves me writhing in the most severe pain I have ever experienced (not even slightly alleviated by high doses of oxycodone) and vomiting for about six hours, followed by two days of fever up to 104.5F and very unpleasant episodes of rigor.
It is quite difficult for me to shop now. As a further testament to the moderation of MSG in Japanese culture, apart from prepackaged curries, Japanese food is one of the safer foods that I can eat in restaurants. Chinese food is, of course, right out.
"This stuff makes LSD look like a placebo in comparison."
That's wrong too.
I think you misunderstood the poster. What I believe he was referring to was the fact that the effects of a standard dose of DMT are generally considered to be far more bizarre and intense than those of a standard LSD dose. I really don't think that he was comparing potency in terms of required dose at all. I am in agreement with him; I've read a large number of DMT and LSD trip reports, and the DMT ones generally scare the pants off of me in terms of how the drug alters your perception and understanding of the world while intoxicated.
Additionally, he said that anyone would fail a DMT drug test *if* the test looked for DMT. Whether or not such a test exists wasn't relevant to his statement. At the same time, I believe that the poster is wrong about this, because unlike GHB, we don't have DMT coursing through our bodies regularly; DMT is largely confined to the (IIRC, but I may be wrong) pituitary gland.
And, dude, you really sound like you have some hostility issues. People like you amuse me, because frankly, spouting off your nastiness, you're likely only making yourself miserable. The rest of us are too busy enjoying life to really much care whether or not we have your approval and if you hate us.
I myself have triple citizenship. I was born in the US when my mom and dad were down there temporarily (from Canada) while my dad did a postdoc. I received Canadian citizenship through my mother, and Dutch citizenship through my father, who was born in Holland.
I fully plan on taking advantage of all three during my life.
The technique is generally referred to as "molecular gastronomy", and has produced even weirder things than listed in the main article. For example, Dufresne has used "meat glue" (i.e. transglutaminase, which was, IIRC, designed to produce Chicken McNuggets) to make pasta entirely out of shrimp, and another chef has made flavoured edible menus out of soybean and potato starch with fruit and vegetable inks that come in such varieties as steak and sushi. Here's a page with some interesting links on Chow:
What's more disruptive to your inability to handle interruptions: me receiving an IM on vibrate or an usher pausing the movie, turning on the lights, and paging (as in literally, sending a page, or message carrier) to fetch me?
Obviously pausing the movie and turning on the lights. At the same time, the likelihood that that will happen is probably virtually 0, whereas, if cell phones function in a movie theatre, the likelihood that some asshats will fail to exercise cell phone decorum is quite high. I'd rather take the small chance of the former happening than the very large chance of the latter occurring.
I definitely agree with this. My parents, who are completely computer non-savvy (but use computers often), both told me when I casually brought up Vista in conversation that they heard that it was "that really crappy new Windows that should be avoided". It seems that even the general public feels that Vista is a piece of garbage, and while I don't feel that this will necessarily translate to a shift towards other OSes, I predict a very slow and painful adoption of it.
Quite a few of my friends are debating buying Mac for their next computer, especially because they've heard so many negative things about Vista (and they're not aware of the fact that getting XP instead can be an option) and they don't want to be stuck with it. I suspect that they're just talking big, but I'd love to see if Mac sales increase in the next year or so.
I, for one, have never seen anything *good* come of an EA acquisition. Anyone remember the Ultima games? EA bought Origin Systems, and the series promptly went from the brilliance of Ultimas III through VII Part 2 to the flops and incredible series ending disappointments that were Ultima VIII and IX. Both were buggy, lacking in plot, and virtually unplayable. It was terrible to have such a wonderful, complex continuing story terminate with a muffled whimper.
I certainly agree that school can be quite uninteresting at times; this was the case when I was young, and I'm sure that it's still the case now. It was always great to have a teacher that brought a subject to life and got us enthusiastic about learning, but that wasn't particularly common, at least in my case.
One valuable skill, however, that I feel that I learned from my more boring teachers was the ability to pay attention and stay focused, even in the face of serious tedium. I think that, due to the hyperactivity inherent in our technology and society these days, this is a skill that will be sorely lacking in the current young generation. Hell, I can see a deterioration of this in myself; I'm certainly not as good at concentrating at dull tasks as I was back in the 80s and 90s, and I think it's partially because I'm surrounded by highly rewarding outlets that provide instantaneous positive stimuli. Back in the day, if I wanted to play a game on my C64, I had to wait approximately one second per block for a program to load; thus, a game took in the ballpark of a minute in order to get from disk into memory. Now, if my web browser takes more than two seconds to start, I'm wondering what's wrong and feeling slightly antsy.
Look to entertainment for an even better example. Go ahead and download or rent some of your favourite, more exciting shows or movies from the 80s. They don't seem so exciting and stimulating in retrospect, do they? Things have changed and entertainment and technology are much, much more engrossing and instantaneously satisfying than they used to be. This is good on some levels, and bad on others. I have friends in their early 20s who are clearly very affected by this: if anyone attempts to, say, engage them in conversation and tell them a story that lasts more than a minute, you can see that they're really struggling to pay attention. Some of them will even pull out their cell phones and start "multi-tasking".
I'm of the opinion that this high need for stimulation is almost like an addiction and probably not healthy. Again, a lot of these same early 20 year olds that I know struggle with things like ADD and anxiety disorders: they always seem keyed up and twitchy, for lack of a better word.
So, at least in school these kids are forced to learn to pay attention, which is a highly undervalued life skill, IMO. Your boss, later on in life, is not going to go out of his way to make sure that every aspect of your job is delightfully interesting and engrossing, nor should he or she be expected to. You're going to have to sit through duller than dishwater meetings and put up with a lot of really boring grunt work on occasion; someone has to do it and I'm sure most people here can attest to the fact that it's unavoidable at times (and in many cases, quite frequently). Why should schools be any different and struggle to make every aspect of education stimulating?
As someone who currently has to take Oxycontin several times a day for pain management due to severe Crohn's Disease, this really would eliminate Oxycontin as a pain relief option for me; I *love love love* chilli peppers (my passion is studying Thai cooking), but when I'm flaring, there is no way that my body can tolerate them even in small quantities and they will make me violently ill. My intestines would resemble a minefield and I would have to camp out next to the bathroom, as the capsaicin would negate the pleasant, constipating side effect of the oxycodone (a huge boon for me).
There has also been a lot of talk in putting opioid antagonists in Oxycontin (i.e. naloxone or naltrexone) to negate the oxycodone's effects when people chew / smash the pills, but there are also inherent problems with this approach (it can induce immediate drug withdrawal in those with dependency, e.g. me).
I would be very surprised if there was a good chemical solution to this problem that didn't come with a host of problems of its own.
All the Canadian coins, including, IIRC, the 50c piece, are the same size and shape as their USD equivalents. Of course, we have more coins, notably our $1 loonie and our $2 toonie coins, which have replaced our $1 and $2 bills completely.
In Canada, it's not uncommon to receive American coins in your change, and I've never met a store that didn't accept them (taking them at the same value as the equivalent Canadian coin). Even vending machines have no troubles with them up here. I wonder if that will change now that the CAD is passing the USD?
There's a reason for this - the original intention of the XFce project was to provide a free alternative to CDE: XFce 4.2.0 release notes (search for CDE in the text)
However, at some point in development, XFce decided to largely take its own direction. Whether or not this was an attempt to update CDE or to simply become a modern desktop environment in and of its own right, I'm not sure.
I still like XFce, but being a glutton for old school punishment, I liked it better in its infancy when it was more CDEish.
CDE (Common Desktop Environment) has never been open source. It is available for Linux from Xi Graphics, but you'll pay for it and in the end, it's more hassle than it's worth due to the fact that you need to use their "Accelerated X Server" to run it instead of your standard X.org installation.
There is a petition to open source CDE that looks like it may be successful. I, for one, sincerely hope so; I know that CDE is well outdated, but I got used to using it on our school's Sun boxes during my grad studies, and I wouldn't mind at least having the option to run it at home.
I, for one, am getting really sick of this attitude, and I think it's ultimately responsible for the failings of capitalism. Google's main purpose may be, as you say, to generate revenue, but if they adopt certain publicly stated principles that may affect their ability to do so (e.g. "Do no evil"), the shareholders are investing fully aware that Google is not willing to engage in certain behaviours simply to make money. I, for one, applaud companies that adhere to a well defined code of ethics in spite of the fact that it reduces their profitability: it harbours goodwill and demonstrates respect for their customers. If the shareholders don't like it, they have no obligation to buy.
Companies really need to, IMO, stop putting the interests of their shareholders so far above the interests of their customers, which sadly seems to be the case for so many. The market has failed us because we, as consumers, generally have a choice between crappy company A and crappy company B, and hence, often no way to state our displeasure in a meaningful way.
I'm jealous of your brain. While I can successfully filter out static ads (e.g. I never notice adverts in magazines or newspapers), these days many web-based ads are animated GIFs or Flash animation, and at least for me, are much more difficult to overlook. The motion and colour changes constantly distract me from the page's content, forcing me to repeatedly have to refocus and thus making me take much longer to make it through an article.
If the web had stuck to non-pop up, non-pop under static ads, I probably wouldn't have bothered with AdBlock Plus. As it stands now, though, I find many webpages to be unusable without it. Frankly, I blame the advertisers: the entire intention of their ads are to grab your attention, and as static ads weren't cutting it, too many of them resorted to being as obnoxious as possible. They're the equivalent of a child jumping up and down screaming, "Look at me! Look at me! Are you looking at me? Look at me! Look at me!"
This is nothing new. My dad worked his life (up here in Canada) as a medical physicist researcher, studying cancer treatment. It was common for them to give cancer to rats, pigs, and dogs and then try to treat them to evaluate the efficacy and safety of new and existing techniques for curing it. We purposefully overdose animals on food additives to test their safety within humans and administer large quantities of drugs to them to determine addictive potential and an approximation of human LD50.
Whether I agree with the approach or not is a different story. (Honestly, I really don't know.)
I defy most people to pick up a can of soup or a loaf of bread and understand all of the ingredients. Most consumers have no idea what L-cysteine, stearoyl-2-lactate, hydrolyzed soy protein, and autolyzed yeast extract are.
It's to the point where it's virtually impossible to find foods that are made of easily understood, familiar ingredients. And given that chemical agents are often added at each level of processing, buying a marinated chicken breast that lists as its only ingredients chicken, soy sauce, flour, and spices is no guarantee of being natural, as it's likely that both the flour and the soy sauce contained artificial chemicals.
Even products that claim to be all-natural will often change their ingredient lists at some point without informing the consumer. Breyer's black tubs of ice cream are a key example. In their old vanilla formulation, I believe that they contained a short ingredient list consisting of milk, cream, egg, sugar, vanilla extract, and vanilla beans. Two or three years ago they began adding carrageenan, milk ingredients, etc. and never changed their labeling to reflect that their ice cream suddenly wasn't quite as "all-natural" as it had once been.
For these reasons I shop predominantly at organic food stores these days. I don't necessarily buy *organic*, but I do aim for "all-natural" (according to my discretionary common sense applied to the ingredient list and not a manufacturer claim, as the term has little meaning in a corporate sense). I don't remember the last time I consumed aspartame, MSG, HFCS, etc. on purpose, and I feel generally healthier and naturally compelled to eat less even though the food often tastes superior. (If you haven't compared a regular apple and an organic apple, you really should try it. The flavour of organic apples is usually much more intense.)
I do believe that HFCS is likely a major culprit in the obesity epidemic in the US. (As a Canadian who lived in Washington, DC for four months, I was *appalled* at how many morbidly obese people I saw daily. We have our share of overweight people in Canada, but to see someone truly as overweight as the people I saw in the US is a rare occurrence up here and usually involves visits to buffets.) At the same time, I think that it's but the tip of the iceberg in a culture of obesity that the US has set up for itself with MSG, trans fats, super sized portions, reduced interest in exercise, etc. It's very difficult to even know where to begin solving this problem when even so-called healthy foods often are laden with HFCS and other crap.
As a note, HFCS is used up here in many Canadian products, but as a dedicated ingredient list reader, I found it far more prevalent in the US.
I'd like to see a study on how many people below 50 do that, as I highly suspect you're very much the exception here. Most people I know have one PIN, a couple account names, and maybe three different passwords at most.
Having talked to the people I know about this, almost all of them admit to having dramatically reduced their CD purchases in the last five years or so. Some of them have shifted to buying their music online as MP3 files, and others have taken to downloading through P2P. Perhaps the CD is not obsolete, but as a music distribution medium, demand for CDs has likely reduced and will continue to do so.
Frankly, while I do think that CD prices are exorbitant, I don't mind paying them for good music. At the same time, I'm not interested in owning the physical media: when I do buy / receive as a gift a CD, all I do is read the liner notes once (yes, they may be nice, but how much time do people really spend looking over them), rip it, and then put it in a box in the back of my closet where it occupies space and serves no purpose. I would far rather have my 4000+ MP3 collection and the flexibility that it affords at my disposal than have to dig through a stack of CDs and change them. In my case - and for many others - I don't see an advantage to having an actual CD I can hold in my hands. It's a waste of materials for me.
Note that I still purchase entire albums in most cases, because I agree that many of the better tracks are the obscure ones, but most of my music is obscure to start with and doesn't play on the radio, so I tend to only hear of new artists and albums online and through word of mouth, so in that sense, there are no "definitive" tracks like there are with artists that receive a lot of radio play.
Then either there is a problem with this free system or it is not made readily available enough, because multiple sources that I've read recently state that approximately 18,000 people die each year in the US due to a lack of medical attention because they do not have health care. That number may be small compared to the total population of the US, but it is nonetheless distressing.
If you think that's bad, I took a graduate level graph theory course in the 2006 winter semester. I didn't pass a single assignment and got at most 15% on the final exam, and walked out of the course with a B+.
The teacher told us that he liked to make things incredibly challenging and we shouldn't be discouraged or upset with failing marks. Honestly, because of the assignment content and because I never felt I had any clue what my course mark would be due to this, it was the most unpleasant, workload-unrealstic, and stressful course I ever took. (For example, you'd start working on a proof on an assignment, and eight hours later, getting nowhere, frustrated, you turn to google to find out that the answer to the question is actually the result of a published 25 page paper. Not exactly the type of thing that should be, IMO, on an assignment, and not doable by almost anyone. Differentiating between which questions were completable in a reasonable time frame and which ones were not was also virtually impossible, so you never knew where your efforts were best expended.)
Keep in mind that some high-functioning schizophrenics are likely to deliberately lead mental health professionals to believe that they are not schizophrenic because of the possible consequences. My best friend works in mental health, and they are very adamant that their "clients" take their medications, which often have very distressing and unpleasant side effects. For a schizophrenic who is able to lead a moderately productive life, the medications will probably be worse than the schizophrenia itself, and thus they may seek to hide their condition.
Not particularly, no. Should I be angry because my taxes are going to fund public schools despite the fact that I have no children nor do I ever want any? Should I feel slighted because I pay property taxes for road maintenance when I don't own a car and don't see myself purchasing one any time in the next decade?
I certainly wish circumstances were different and that I didn't require as much of the health care pie as I do, but I had no choice in the matter. I *do* try to be responsible with my use of health care: I try to combine problems into single visits, I arrange prescription refills so that I don't need special appointments for such things, and while I probably should have gone to the ER a few times in the last month, in my experience, they usually do very little and it's a waste of my time and our money, so I refrain and wait for gastroenterologist appointments, where it is much more likely that things will get done.
While I'm not poor, I'm probably lower-middle class currently. I would gladly trade my ailment for poverty; at least then I could derive the satisfaction of being a productive member of society instead of being confined to wait for an unspecified period of time (i.e. until I go into remission or find a drug cocktail to which I respond well) for that privilege. Laying in bed for weeks at a time unable to even go buy groceries is not only unpleasant but emotionally distressing, at least for me.
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I have to admit that I was this way when I was younger... needles would give me panic attacks.
A few colonoscopies really put things in perspective, though. Now needles - even the massively long needled B12 injection my partner has to give me every month, which requires a few pre-injection beers - are generally a walk in the park.
I guess that's why I read this article and though, "Huh. What a waste of research time."
the countries we got it from in the first place had relatively good cardiovascular health until their youngsters started eating like us.
The country that we got it from (Japan) also wasn't using it in levels such that the Japanese were consuming tablespoons of it per day. The amount of MSG in our food continues to climb as well: there are many occasions where I go to the grocery store and see that previously MSG free products have now been formulated with a new recipe that contains MSG.
I realize that the whole MSG causing health issues is highly controversial. I definitely cannot consume it, except in the smallest of quantities. I have Crohn's Disease, and if I eat MSG, I experience acute inflammation in the terminal ileum, causing a partial intestinal blockage that leaves me writhing in the most severe pain I have ever experienced (not even slightly alleviated by high doses of oxycodone) and vomiting for about six hours, followed by two days of fever up to 104.5F and very unpleasant episodes of rigor.
It is quite difficult for me to shop now. As a further testament to the moderation of MSG in Japanese culture, apart from prepackaged curries, Japanese food is one of the safer foods that I can eat in restaurants. Chinese food is, of course, right out.
"This stuff makes LSD look like a placebo in comparison."
That's wrong too.
I think you misunderstood the poster. What I believe he was referring to was the fact that the effects of a standard dose of DMT are generally considered to be far more bizarre and intense than those of a standard LSD dose. I really don't think that he was comparing potency in terms of required dose at all. I am in agreement with him; I've read a large number of DMT and LSD trip reports, and the DMT ones generally scare the pants off of me in terms of how the drug alters your perception and understanding of the world while intoxicated.
Additionally, he said that anyone would fail a DMT drug test *if* the test looked for DMT. Whether or not such a test exists wasn't relevant to his statement. At the same time, I believe that the poster is wrong about this, because unlike GHB, we don't have DMT coursing through our bodies regularly; DMT is largely confined to the (IIRC, but I may be wrong) pituitary gland.
And, dude, you really sound like you have some hostility issues. People like you amuse me, because frankly, spouting off your nastiness, you're likely only making yourself miserable. The rest of us are too busy enjoying life to really much care whether or not we have your approval and if you hate us.
I myself have triple citizenship. I was born in the US when my mom and dad were down there temporarily (from Canada) while my dad did a postdoc. I received Canadian citizenship through my mother, and Dutch citizenship through my father, who was born in Holland.
I fully plan on taking advantage of all three during my life.
The technique is generally referred to as "molecular gastronomy", and has produced even weirder things than listed in the main article. For example, Dufresne has used "meat glue" (i.e. transglutaminase, which was, IIRC, designed to produce Chicken McNuggets) to make pasta entirely out of shrimp, and another chef has made flavoured edible menus out of soybean and potato starch with fruit and vegetable inks that come in such varieties as steak and sushi. Here's a page with some interesting links on Chow:
http://www.chow.com/stories/10411
What's more disruptive to your inability to handle interruptions: me receiving an IM on vibrate or an usher pausing the movie, turning on the lights, and paging (as in literally, sending a page, or message carrier) to fetch me?
Obviously pausing the movie and turning on the lights. At the same time, the likelihood that that will happen is probably virtually 0, whereas, if cell phones function in a movie theatre, the likelihood that some asshats will fail to exercise cell phone decorum is quite high. I'd rather take the small chance of the former happening than the very large chance of the latter occurring.
I definitely agree with this. My parents, who are completely computer non-savvy (but use computers often), both told me when I casually brought up Vista in conversation that they heard that it was "that really crappy new Windows that should be avoided". It seems that even the general public feels that Vista is a piece of garbage, and while I don't feel that this will necessarily translate to a shift towards other OSes, I predict a very slow and painful adoption of it.
Quite a few of my friends are debating buying Mac for their next computer, especially because they've heard so many negative things about Vista (and they're not aware of the fact that getting XP instead can be an option) and they don't want to be stuck with it. I suspect that they're just talking big, but I'd love to see if Mac sales increase in the next year or so.
I, for one, have never seen anything *good* come of an EA acquisition. Anyone remember the Ultima games? EA bought Origin Systems, and the series promptly went from the brilliance of Ultimas III through VII Part 2 to the flops and incredible series ending disappointments that were Ultima VIII and IX. Both were buggy, lacking in plot, and virtually unplayable. It was terrible to have such a wonderful, complex continuing story terminate with a muffled whimper.
I certainly agree that school can be quite uninteresting at times; this was the case when I was young, and I'm sure that it's still the case now. It was always great to have a teacher that brought a subject to life and got us enthusiastic about learning, but that wasn't particularly common, at least in my case.
One valuable skill, however, that I feel that I learned from my more boring teachers was the ability to pay attention and stay focused, even in the face of serious tedium. I think that, due to the hyperactivity inherent in our technology and society these days, this is a skill that will be sorely lacking in the current young generation. Hell, I can see a deterioration of this in myself; I'm certainly not as good at concentrating at dull tasks as I was back in the 80s and 90s, and I think it's partially because I'm surrounded by highly rewarding outlets that provide instantaneous positive stimuli. Back in the day, if I wanted to play a game on my C64, I had to wait approximately one second per block for a program to load; thus, a game took in the ballpark of a minute in order to get from disk into memory. Now, if my web browser takes more than two seconds to start, I'm wondering what's wrong and feeling slightly antsy.
Look to entertainment for an even better example. Go ahead and download or rent some of your favourite, more exciting shows or movies from the 80s. They don't seem so exciting and stimulating in retrospect, do they? Things have changed and entertainment and technology are much, much more engrossing and instantaneously satisfying than they used to be. This is good on some levels, and bad on others. I have friends in their early 20s who are clearly very affected by this: if anyone attempts to, say, engage them in conversation and tell them a story that lasts more than a minute, you can see that they're really struggling to pay attention. Some of them will even pull out their cell phones and start "multi-tasking".
I'm of the opinion that this high need for stimulation is almost like an addiction and probably not healthy. Again, a lot of these same early 20 year olds that I know struggle with things like ADD and anxiety disorders: they always seem keyed up and twitchy, for lack of a better word.
So, at least in school these kids are forced to learn to pay attention, which is a highly undervalued life skill, IMO. Your boss, later on in life, is not going to go out of his way to make sure that every aspect of your job is delightfully interesting and engrossing, nor should he or she be expected to. You're going to have to sit through duller than dishwater meetings and put up with a lot of really boring grunt work on occasion; someone has to do it and I'm sure most people here can attest to the fact that it's unavoidable at times (and in many cases, quite frequently). Why should schools be any different and struggle to make every aspect of education stimulating?
As someone who currently has to take Oxycontin several times a day for pain management due to severe Crohn's Disease, this really would eliminate Oxycontin as a pain relief option for me; I *love love love* chilli peppers (my passion is studying Thai cooking), but when I'm flaring, there is no way that my body can tolerate them even in small quantities and they will make me violently ill. My intestines would resemble a minefield and I would have to camp out next to the bathroom, as the capsaicin would negate the pleasant, constipating side effect of the oxycodone (a huge boon for me).
There has also been a lot of talk in putting opioid antagonists in Oxycontin (i.e. naloxone or naltrexone) to negate the oxycodone's effects when people chew / smash the pills, but there are also inherent problems with this approach (it can induce immediate drug withdrawal in those with dependency, e.g. me).
I would be very surprised if there was a good chemical solution to this problem that didn't come with a host of problems of its own.
That's a mistake most people make only once. In my case, three times, really, but NEVER again.
All the Canadian coins, including, IIRC, the 50c piece, are the same size and shape as their USD equivalents. Of course, we have more coins, notably our $1 loonie and our $2 toonie coins, which have replaced our $1 and $2 bills completely.
In Canada, it's not uncommon to receive American coins in your change, and I've never met a store that didn't accept them (taking them at the same value as the equivalent Canadian coin). Even vending machines have no troubles with them up here. I wonder if that will change now that the CAD is passing the USD?
There's a reason for this - the original intention of the XFce project was to provide a free alternative to CDE: XFce 4.2.0 release notes (search for CDE in the text)
However, at some point in development, XFce decided to largely take its own direction. Whether or not this was an attempt to update CDE or to simply become a modern desktop environment in and of its own right, I'm not sure.
I still like XFce, but being a glutton for old school punishment, I liked it better in its infancy when it was more CDEish.
I take it back; it looks like Xi Graphics has stopped selling CDE, so as things stand, it is not available for Linux in any capacity.
CDE (Common Desktop Environment) has never been open source. It is available for Linux from Xi Graphics, but you'll pay for it and in the end, it's more hassle than it's worth due to the fact that you need to use their "Accelerated X Server" to run it instead of your standard X.org installation.
There is a petition to open source CDE that looks like it may be successful. I, for one, sincerely hope so; I know that CDE is well outdated, but I got used to using it on our school's Sun boxes during my grad studies, and I wouldn't mind at least having the option to run it at home.
I, for one, am getting really sick of this attitude, and I think it's ultimately responsible for the failings of capitalism. Google's main purpose may be, as you say, to generate revenue, but if they adopt certain publicly stated principles that may affect their ability to do so (e.g. "Do no evil"), the shareholders are investing fully aware that Google is not willing to engage in certain behaviours simply to make money. I, for one, applaud companies that adhere to a well defined code of ethics in spite of the fact that it reduces their profitability: it harbours goodwill and demonstrates respect for their customers. If the shareholders don't like it, they have no obligation to buy.
Companies really need to, IMO, stop putting the interests of their shareholders so far above the interests of their customers, which sadly seems to be the case for so many. The market has failed us because we, as consumers, generally have a choice between crappy company A and crappy company B, and hence, often no way to state our displeasure in a meaningful way.
I'm jealous of your brain. While I can successfully filter out static ads (e.g. I never notice adverts in magazines or newspapers), these days many web-based ads are animated GIFs or Flash animation, and at least for me, are much more difficult to overlook. The motion and colour changes constantly distract me from the page's content, forcing me to repeatedly have to refocus and thus making me take much longer to make it through an article.
If the web had stuck to non-pop up, non-pop under static ads, I probably wouldn't have bothered with AdBlock Plus. As it stands now, though, I find many webpages to be unusable without it. Frankly, I blame the advertisers: the entire intention of their ads are to grab your attention, and as static ads weren't cutting it, too many of them resorted to being as obnoxious as possible. They're the equivalent of a child jumping up and down screaming, "Look at me! Look at me! Are you looking at me? Look at me! Look at me!"
This is nothing new. My dad worked his life (up here in Canada) as a medical physicist researcher, studying cancer treatment. It was common for them to give cancer to rats, pigs, and dogs and then try to treat them to evaluate the efficacy and safety of new and existing techniques for curing it. We purposefully overdose animals on food additives to test their safety within humans and administer large quantities of drugs to them to determine addictive potential and an approximation of human LD50.
Whether I agree with the approach or not is a different story. (Honestly, I really don't know.)
I defy most people to pick up a can of soup or a loaf of bread and understand all of the ingredients. Most consumers have no idea what L-cysteine, stearoyl-2-lactate, hydrolyzed soy protein, and autolyzed yeast extract are.
It's to the point where it's virtually impossible to find foods that are made of easily understood, familiar ingredients. And given that chemical agents are often added at each level of processing, buying a marinated chicken breast that lists as its only ingredients chicken, soy sauce, flour, and spices is no guarantee of being natural, as it's likely that both the flour and the soy sauce contained artificial chemicals.
Even products that claim to be all-natural will often change their ingredient lists at some point without informing the consumer. Breyer's black tubs of ice cream are a key example. In their old vanilla formulation, I believe that they contained a short ingredient list consisting of milk, cream, egg, sugar, vanilla extract, and vanilla beans. Two or three years ago they began adding carrageenan, milk ingredients, etc. and never changed their labeling to reflect that their ice cream suddenly wasn't quite as "all-natural" as it had once been.
For these reasons I shop predominantly at organic food stores these days. I don't necessarily buy *organic*, but I do aim for "all-natural" (according to my discretionary common sense applied to the ingredient list and not a manufacturer claim, as the term has little meaning in a corporate sense). I don't remember the last time I consumed aspartame, MSG, HFCS, etc. on purpose, and I feel generally healthier and naturally compelled to eat less even though the food often tastes superior. (If you haven't compared a regular apple and an organic apple, you really should try it. The flavour of organic apples is usually much more intense.)
I do believe that HFCS is likely a major culprit in the obesity epidemic in the US. (As a Canadian who lived in Washington, DC for four months, I was *appalled* at how many morbidly obese people I saw daily. We have our share of overweight people in Canada, but to see someone truly as overweight as the people I saw in the US is a rare occurrence up here and usually involves visits to buffets.) At the same time, I think that it's but the tip of the iceberg in a culture of obesity that the US has set up for itself with MSG, trans fats, super sized portions, reduced interest in exercise, etc. It's very difficult to even know where to begin solving this problem when even so-called healthy foods often are laden with HFCS and other crap.
As a note, HFCS is used up here in many Canadian products, but as a dedicated ingredient list reader, I found it far more prevalent in the US.
I'd like to see a study on how many people below 50 do that, as I highly suspect you're very much the exception here. Most people I know have one PIN, a couple account names, and maybe three different passwords at most.
Having talked to the people I know about this, almost all of them admit to having dramatically reduced their CD purchases in the last five years or so. Some of them have shifted to buying their music online as MP3 files, and others have taken to downloading through P2P. Perhaps the CD is not obsolete, but as a music distribution medium, demand for CDs has likely reduced and will continue to do so.
Frankly, while I do think that CD prices are exorbitant, I don't mind paying them for good music. At the same time, I'm not interested in owning the physical media: when I do buy / receive as a gift a CD, all I do is read the liner notes once (yes, they may be nice, but how much time do people really spend looking over them), rip it, and then put it in a box in the back of my closet where it occupies space and serves no purpose. I would far rather have my 4000+ MP3 collection and the flexibility that it affords at my disposal than have to dig through a stack of CDs and change them. In my case - and for many others - I don't see an advantage to having an actual CD I can hold in my hands. It's a waste of materials for me.
Note that I still purchase entire albums in most cases, because I agree that many of the better tracks are the obscure ones, but most of my music is obscure to start with and doesn't play on the radio, so I tend to only hear of new artists and albums online and through word of mouth, so in that sense, there are no "definitive" tracks like there are with artists that receive a lot of radio play.
Then either there is a problem with this free system or it is not made readily available enough, because multiple sources that I've read recently state that approximately 18,000 people die each year in the US due to a lack of medical attention because they do not have health care. That number may be small compared to the total population of the US, but it is nonetheless distressing.
If you think that's bad, I took a graduate level graph theory course in the 2006 winter semester. I didn't pass a single assignment and got at most 15% on the final exam, and walked out of the course with a B+.
The teacher told us that he liked to make things incredibly challenging and we shouldn't be discouraged or upset with failing marks. Honestly, because of the assignment content and because I never felt I had any clue what my course mark would be due to this, it was the most unpleasant, workload-unrealstic, and stressful course I ever took. (For example, you'd start working on a proof on an assignment, and eight hours later, getting nowhere, frustrated, you turn to google to find out that the answer to the question is actually the result of a published 25 page paper. Not exactly the type of thing that should be, IMO, on an assignment, and not doable by almost anyone. Differentiating between which questions were completable in a reasonable time frame and which ones were not was also virtually impossible, so you never knew where your efforts were best expended.)
Keep in mind that some high-functioning schizophrenics are likely to deliberately lead mental health professionals to believe that they are not schizophrenic because of the possible consequences. My best friend works in mental health, and they are very adamant that their "clients" take their medications, which often have very distressing and unpleasant side effects. For a schizophrenic who is able to lead a moderately productive life, the medications will probably be worse than the schizophrenia itself, and thus they may seek to hide their condition.
Not particularly, no. Should I be angry because my taxes are going to fund public schools despite the fact that I have no children nor do I ever want any? Should I feel slighted because I pay property taxes for road maintenance when I don't own a car and don't see myself purchasing one any time in the next decade?
I certainly wish circumstances were different and that I didn't require as much of the health care pie as I do, but I had no choice in the matter. I *do* try to be responsible with my use of health care: I try to combine problems into single visits, I arrange prescription refills so that I don't need special appointments for such things, and while I probably should have gone to the ER a few times in the last month, in my experience, they usually do very little and it's a waste of my time and our money, so I refrain and wait for gastroenterologist appointments, where it is much more likely that things will get done.
While I'm not poor, I'm probably lower-middle class currently. I would gladly trade my ailment for poverty; at least then I could derive the satisfaction of being a productive member of society instead of being confined to wait for an unspecified period of time (i.e. until I go into remission or find a drug cocktail to which I respond well) for that privilege. Laying in bed for weeks at a time unable to even go buy groceries is not only unpleasant but emotionally distressing, at least for me.