Actually, I'd say the flaming started a little earlier...if I understand the term properly. And several of my friends in the medical community were entirely unsurprised by the stats. One of them noted that people are notoriously hard to kill, and an awful lot of them have probably survived a whole lot more mistakes. Another is a nurse, and she provided quite a bit of anecdotal evidence to flesh out the numbers.
It might actually be interesting if we could add up the number of interactions between any person and any illegal drug, and the number of interactions between patients and doctors, and see what the totals might be. Perhaps you'd like to go back to school yourself and find out?
Why, if what they say is true, does my girlfriend say she hates pr0n, but I like it? By now, either I should hate it, or she should love it. Which indicates that one of us must be lying. And since I'm the one forking out hard-earned bucks...
Yippee!!! Time to haul my ass off the couch and race to the video store for that Collector's Boxed Edition of Star Whores, Do Jedis Dream of Electric Sheep.
"Oh, and Slashdot...please stop with the non-sense (sic). most of you are software or hardware nerds. You're not lawyers, doctors or surgeons. Leave the arm-chair medicine to someone more qualified such as my colleagues. Honestly, some of these comments are embarrassing."
Perhaps I could direct your embarrassment to a more appropriate place by drawing your attention to this:
"Ever since the Institute of Medicine released a report in 2000, entitled "To Err is Human," in which it reported that physician error accounted for between 44,000 and 98,000 hospital patient deaths a year in the US, there has been a strong debate in the medical field about when, if and under what conditions physicians ought to apologize to their patients when a mistake in care has been made."
Deaths due to illegal drug use in 1997 were pegged at less than 16,000 by the National Office of Drug Control Policy. It would seem that your colleagues managed to slaughter almost three times as many people as all the illegal drugs in the United States.
A lot of those deaths were the direct result of arrogance, carelessness, stubbornness, and good old-fashioned stupidity, and easily avoidable. A few more could have been prevented if you or your colleagues had shown the courage to speak up when a drunk, senile or otherwise incompetent doctor staggered into the operating room to commit yet another act of manslaughter. Professional courtesy is supposed to have boundaries, though the tone of your "Anonymous Coward" post indicates that you probably don't understand this basic fact. It is also just about statistically certain that many, many cases where death, morbidity or disfigurement resulted have gone unreported, so it's reasonable to assume these horrifying numbers are actually higher.
The last time I looked, us poor, unqualified "armchair medics" hadn't acquired quite the body count you and your colleagues have amassed. And given your attitude (the term "arrogant puppy" comes unavoidably to mind), it seems unlikely that there will be a change in the medical community's tendency to slaughter the innocent any time soon.
I guess what I'm trying to say in my somewhat long-winded, pedantic way is, "Fuck off."
It saddens me to say that this comes as no surprise whatsoever. Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party government is the most loathsome pack of bum-kissing Bush wannabes you're ever going to meet. The fact that they would sell out the Canadian people for their crooked corporate paymasters is entirely predictable.
The opposition parties are in disarray, and will probably fail to take any effective action in spite of the Conservative Party's minority status.
Harper has been enormously successful by forbidding most of the party to speak to the media...ever. Concentration of ownership in the Canadian news media has reached a level in Canada that would horrify most Americans (though they're getting a taste of it), and they've meekly accepted the situation. Harper has thus been able to keep quite a few ultra-far-right idiots, wild-eyed religious fundamentalists and assorted other whack jobs festering on the Conservative back benches from coming to the notice of complacent Canadians.
There are some very un-nice people calling the shots in Canada these days.
Sorry, I forgot to mention that some people are such incredible dicks even loving mothers would rather watch their children starve than work for them. These people typically have trouble finding employees, interns and sometimes friends. Even their family pets run away to the SPCA to be euthanized. I don't suppose (cough) you know anybody like that (cough)?
And the planet would be Earth. Where are you from, by the way?
No decent scientist will try to tell you that what can be graphed or observed or replicated in experiments is all that exists. Science is no more than the voluntary wearing of blinders in order to concentrate on what is provable by a very specific kind of observation. It has so far been an incredibly valuable and effective tool, which explains why religions, quacks and charlatans are forever trying to wield it like a magic wand to support whatever idiocy they're trying to sell at the moment.
The thing about science that makes it special is that it's self-correcting. Yes, you certainly get an "establishment view" that is sometimes difficult to unseat. But even the most dogmatic scientist will accede to genuine proof. One did so recently at considerable cost because his work was being misused by Creationists.
In Einstein's time, it was almost impossible to find experimental proof of Relativity or Quantum Mechanics. All they had were thought experiments and math that offered seemingly nonsensical views of the fundamental nature of reality. When gravitational lensing was observed, Relativity got quite a boost in the scientific community. As our tools have improved, so has our understanding. If he were alive today, I doubt very much whether Einstein would have much to say against Quantum Physics.
Bottom line: science is susceptible to evidence. Religion and opinion aren't.
I should probably have said this a lot better, but it's late and I'm tired.
Anyone who expects Microsoft to keep its word on a matter like this is possessed of a level of ingenuousness approached only by two-year-olds, puppies and sociology professors.
Why pay for something when you can get it for free (even if you're only paying pennies on the dollar by outsourcing)? Comedy clubs have used this model for years with "Open Mike" nights, and media outlets have their unpaid "interns".
There is an endless supply of desperate, talented people who will do anything for free in the hope that their gifts will get them noticed by an employer. Employers, of course, are quick to exploit this reservoir of free talent without mercy or restraint.
"Aircraft six-niner-niner, please go to 5,000 feet heading two-zero-fiver and assume your place in the holding pattern. We will have a landing slot for you in three-zero minutes. I say again, we will land you it three-zero minutes. Over."
"This is Aircraft six-niner-niner.....I'll be back."
I feel your pain. I'm a dinosaur, but even I've figured out that Firefox and Opera (it runs on my PDA) are the way to go. I keep IE around for when I occasionally do an on-line virus scan (they usually use ActiveX) or when a web page gives me problems (very rare). Sooner or later I'll take a look at Safari, just because it's there.
I simply cannot understand why people don't do what I've done as a matter of course. I'm no genius, so it isn't that friggin' hard. My Aunt, who's 80, asked me to install "that Fox thing you use" about a year ago. As soon as she caught on to the "tabs" idea, she went nuts.
What a wonderful change! So now, I can be standing in front of a couple of hundred people, and instead of spontaneously "phoning home" and then going into drone mode, my laptop will start screaming at the audience, inaccurately, that the guy giving a PowerPoint presentation on Business Ethics stole the operating system he's using.
If I was ever stupid enough to install Vista and this happened to me, I swear to God there'd be legal consequences. Another marketing triumph from the tools at Microsoft, and another reason why my next OS will be Linux.
I doubt whether the RIAA will be stupid enough to get caught like this twice. I'm desperately hoping that the "infringee" has the inclination and the resources to drag their asses into court and beat the legal crap out of them.
Do NOT let them settle. This needs to be on the public record.
Even if they won, what delicious irony if they had to spend a whack of money on a successful defense, only to have it turned against them in subsequent cases!
I've got a 1G SanDisk card in my Tungsten E2, and I like quality. That means big files and limited space. Fortunately, my media player likes Ogg. It means I can keep about 80 - 100 high-quality tunes available along with the photos, graphics, Office files and such I carry around for real-world use.
I understand that Ogg Vorbis isn't really going anywhere, but for me it's the best answer around. Earned me major points at a company party when it turned out the DJ disobeyed instructions and brought along a collection of the same tired old crap they play at half the weddings in the free world. A two-minute trip to the Dollar Store for a patch cord and it was Stone Roses, Tanita Tikaram, Buzzcocks and Dandy Warhols instead of the goddamned Chicken Dance.
Nobody likes spam, spyware and viruses, but I'm not entirely convinced the solution might not be worse than the problem. You can bet your bottom dollar that if truly bulletproof security becomes available, it will very quickly become the exclusive property of governments, multi-national corporations and the like. I don't know how that situation would be used to screw the average person, but I am absolutely certain that we'd better have some lubricant handy.
Perhaps a game that taught reading skills? A child in Grade 1 who can't read is a scary thought. My nephew and niece, who are bright but not geniuses, were reading comic books, "How And Why" books and the like at that age.
Thanks for that story. One of the reasons I spend time on this site is because I can pick real-world information on software and hardware I may want to use or buy.
You're not alone. I'm also going to keep XP going for as long as possible, too.
I never had a problem with Apple, it's just that 'way back, business went DOS/IBM and Apple got frozen out. By the time that situation changed, I worked on a Windows machine and therefore had one at home.
I'm pretty sure my next desktop machine will use a Linux OS, but that won't be 'til XP finally croaks. As far as I'm concerned, you're 100% right. Linux isn't quite ready for prime time yet. Very soon, but not yet. With any luck, they'll come up with a kick-ass OS just when Microsoft releases the Vista successor.
I'm not sure I want to lay out all the extra coin for an Apple. I might, though, for a laptop. It depends on what they come up with, and what my needs are.
they find some way to keep people using the interface from viewing pr0n. Especially if any of the gesture-driven controls they're contemplating get implemented.
There's a parasite that spends part of its life cycle in a snail, part in a bird's digestive system. It selectively destroys a piece of the snail's brain that makes it want to stay on the underside of the leaf it's feeding on, where a bird won't notice it. So the snail moves up to the top of the leaf and proudly announces its new desire to get a sun tan.
Maybe sui-disant liberals fear criticism. Real ones don't. It's a mistake often made by people who think the term "liberal" is pejorative. Doctorow is a dick. Your inaccurate generalization makes a strong argument in favour of including you in that category with him.
Slashdot Mirror
It is obvious you are an experienced and caring person. I shall accept your valuable advice in the spirit in which it is intended.
Actually, I'd say the flaming started a little earlier...if I understand the term properly. And several of my friends in the medical community were entirely unsurprised by the stats. One of them noted that people are notoriously hard to kill, and an awful lot of them have probably survived a whole lot more mistakes. Another is a nurse, and she provided quite a bit of anecdotal evidence to flesh out the numbers.
It might actually be interesting if we could add up the number of interactions between any person and any illegal drug, and the number of interactions between patients and doctors, and see what the totals might be. Perhaps you'd like to go back to school yourself and find out?
Why, if what they say is true, does my girlfriend say she hates pr0n, but I like it? By now, either I should hate it, or she should love it. Which indicates that one of us must be lying. And since I'm the one forking out hard-earned bucks...
Yippee!!! Time to haul my ass off the couch and race to the video store for that Collector's Boxed Edition of Star Whores, Do Jedis Dream of Electric Sheep.
Thank you, Slashdot, thank you!
"Oh, and Slashdot...please stop with the non-sense (sic). most of you are software or hardware nerds. You're not lawyers, doctors or surgeons. Leave the arm-chair medicine to someone more qualified such as my colleagues. Honestly, some of these comments are embarrassing."
Perhaps I could direct your embarrassment to a more appropriate place by drawing your attention to this:
"Ever since the Institute of Medicine released a report in 2000, entitled "To Err is Human," in which it reported that physician error accounted for between 44,000 and 98,000 hospital patient deaths a year in the US, there has been a strong debate in the medical field about when, if and under what conditions physicians ought to apologize to their patients when a mistake in care has been made."
Deaths due to illegal drug use in 1997 were pegged at less than 16,000 by the National Office of Drug Control Policy. It would seem that your colleagues managed to slaughter almost three times as many people as all the illegal drugs in the United States.
http://www.drbilllong.com/CurrentEventsVIII/Apologizing.html and http://www.ncjrs.gov/ondcppubs/publications/policy/ndcs00/chap2_10.html if you want to go look for yourself
A lot of those deaths were the direct result of arrogance, carelessness, stubbornness, and good old-fashioned stupidity, and easily avoidable. A few more could have been prevented if you or your colleagues had shown the courage to speak up when a drunk, senile or otherwise incompetent doctor staggered into the operating room to commit yet another act of manslaughter. Professional courtesy is supposed to have boundaries, though the tone of your "Anonymous Coward" post indicates that you probably don't understand this basic fact. It is also just about statistically certain that many, many cases where death, morbidity or disfigurement resulted have gone unreported, so it's reasonable to assume these horrifying numbers are actually higher.
The last time I looked, us poor, unqualified "armchair medics" hadn't acquired quite the body count you and your colleagues have amassed. And given your attitude (the term "arrogant puppy" comes unavoidably to mind), it seems unlikely that there will be a change in the medical community's tendency to slaughter the innocent any time soon.
I guess what I'm trying to say in my somewhat long-winded, pedantic way is, "Fuck off."
This phenomenon is well-known, and has frequently been described in scientific literature under the term "Politicojournalistivorism".
It saddens me to say that this comes as no surprise whatsoever. Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party government is the most loathsome pack of bum-kissing Bush wannabes you're ever going to meet. The fact that they would sell out the Canadian people for their crooked corporate paymasters is entirely predictable.
The opposition parties are in disarray, and will probably fail to take any effective action in spite of the Conservative Party's minority status.
Harper has been enormously successful by forbidding most of the party to speak to the media...ever. Concentration of ownership in the Canadian news media has reached a level in Canada that would horrify most Americans (though they're getting a taste of it), and they've meekly accepted the situation. Harper has thus been able to keep quite a few ultra-far-right idiots, wild-eyed religious fundamentalists and assorted other whack jobs festering on the Conservative back benches from coming to the notice of complacent Canadians.
There are some very un-nice people calling the shots in Canada these days.
Sorry, I forgot to mention that some people are such incredible dicks even loving mothers would rather watch their children starve than work for them. These people typically have trouble finding employees, interns and sometimes friends. Even their family pets run away to the SPCA to be euthanized. I don't suppose (cough) you know anybody like that (cough)?
And the planet would be Earth. Where are you from, by the way?
No decent scientist will try to tell you that what can be graphed or observed or replicated in experiments is all that exists. Science is no more than the voluntary wearing of blinders in order to concentrate on what is provable by a very specific kind of observation. It has so far been an incredibly valuable and effective tool, which explains why religions, quacks and charlatans are forever trying to wield it like a magic wand to support whatever idiocy they're trying to sell at the moment.
The thing about science that makes it special is that it's self-correcting. Yes, you certainly get an "establishment view" that is sometimes difficult to unseat. But even the most dogmatic scientist will accede to genuine proof. One did so recently at considerable cost because his work was being misused by Creationists.
In Einstein's time, it was almost impossible to find experimental proof of Relativity or Quantum Mechanics. All they had were thought experiments and math that offered seemingly nonsensical views of the fundamental nature of reality. When gravitational lensing was observed, Relativity got quite a boost in the scientific community. As our tools have improved, so has our understanding. If he were alive today, I doubt very much whether Einstein would have much to say against Quantum Physics.
Bottom line: science is susceptible to evidence. Religion and opinion aren't.
I should probably have said this a lot better, but it's late and I'm tired.
Anyone who expects Microsoft to keep its word on a matter like this is possessed of a level of ingenuousness approached only by two-year-olds, puppies and sociology professors.
Why pay for something when you can get it for free (even if you're only paying pennies on the dollar by outsourcing)? Comedy clubs have used this model for years with "Open Mike" nights, and media outlets have their unpaid "interns".
There is an endless supply of desperate, talented people who will do anything for free in the hope that their gifts will get them noticed by an employer. Employers, of course, are quick to exploit this reservoir of free talent without mercy or restraint.
"Aircraft six-niner-niner, please go to 5,000 feet heading two-zero-fiver and assume your place in the holding pattern. We will have a landing slot for you in three-zero minutes. I say again, we will land you it three-zero minutes. Over."
"This is Aircraft six-niner-niner.....I'll be back."
I feel your pain. I'm a dinosaur, but even I've figured out that Firefox and Opera (it runs on my PDA) are the way to go. I keep IE around for when I occasionally do an on-line virus scan (they usually use ActiveX) or when a web page gives me problems (very rare). Sooner or later I'll take a look at Safari, just because it's there.
I simply cannot understand why people don't do what I've done as a matter of course. I'm no genius, so it isn't that friggin' hard. My Aunt, who's 80, asked me to install "that Fox thing you use" about a year ago. As soon as she caught on to the "tabs" idea, she went nuts.
What a wonderful change! So now, I can be standing in front of a couple of hundred people, and instead of spontaneously "phoning home" and then going into drone mode, my laptop will start screaming at the audience, inaccurately, that the guy giving a PowerPoint presentation on Business Ethics stole the operating system he's using.
If I was ever stupid enough to install Vista and this happened to me, I swear to God there'd be legal consequences. Another marketing triumph from the tools at Microsoft, and another reason why my next OS will be Linux.
Pirate this, you cretinous half-wits!
I doubt whether the RIAA will be stupid enough to get caught like this twice. I'm desperately hoping that the "infringee" has the inclination and the resources to drag their asses into court and beat the legal crap out of them.
Do NOT let them settle. This needs to be on the public record.
Even if they won, what delicious irony if they had to spend a whack of money on a successful defense, only to have it turned against them in subsequent cases!
I've got a 1G SanDisk card in my Tungsten E2, and I like quality. That means big files and limited space. Fortunately, my media player likes Ogg. It means I can keep about 80 - 100 high-quality tunes available along with the photos, graphics, Office files and such I carry around for real-world use.
I understand that Ogg Vorbis isn't really going anywhere, but for me it's the best answer around. Earned me major points at a company party when it turned out the DJ disobeyed instructions and brought along a collection of the same tired old crap they play at half the weddings in the free world. A two-minute trip to the Dollar Store for a patch cord and it was Stone Roses, Tanita Tikaram, Buzzcocks and Dandy Warhols instead of the goddamned Chicken Dance.
Don't worry about it. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. WallyWorld still has one to go.
Nobody likes spam, spyware and viruses, but I'm not entirely convinced the solution might not be worse than the problem. You can bet your bottom dollar that if truly bulletproof security becomes available, it will very quickly become the exclusive property of governments, multi-national corporations and the like. I don't know how that situation would be used to screw the average person, but I am absolutely certain that we'd better have some lubricant handy.
And your feeling on oligopolies?
Perhaps a game that taught reading skills? A child in Grade 1 who can't read is a scary thought. My nephew and niece, who are bright but not geniuses, were reading comic books, "How And Why" books and the like at that age.
Thanks for that story. One of the reasons I spend time on this site is because I can pick real-world information on software and hardware I may want to use or buy.
You're not alone. I'm also going to keep XP going for as long as possible, too.
I never had a problem with Apple, it's just that 'way back, business went DOS/IBM and Apple got frozen out. By the time that situation changed, I worked on a Windows machine and therefore had one at home.
I'm pretty sure my next desktop machine will use a Linux OS, but that won't be 'til XP finally croaks. As far as I'm concerned, you're 100% right. Linux isn't quite ready for prime time yet. Very soon, but not yet. With any luck, they'll come up with a kick-ass OS just when Microsoft releases the Vista successor.
I'm not sure I want to lay out all the extra coin for an Apple. I might, though, for a laptop. It depends on what they come up with, and what my needs are.
I shall heroically resist the overwheliming temptation to link the terms "silenced genes" and "beanless chili" in a sentence.
I deserve and expect applause.
they find some way to keep people using the interface from viewing pr0n. Especially if any of the gesture-driven controls they're contemplating get implemented.
There's a parasite that spends part of its life cycle in a snail, part in a bird's digestive system. It selectively destroys a piece of the snail's brain that makes it want to stay on the underside of the leaf it's feeding on, where a bird won't notice it. So the snail moves up to the top of the leaf and proudly announces its new desire to get a sun tan.
You can guess how Act II works out.
Maybe sui-disant liberals fear criticism. Real ones don't. It's a mistake often made by people who think the term "liberal" is pejorative. Doctorow is a dick. Your inaccurate generalization makes a strong argument in favour of including you in that category with him.