As the OP says, your body recovers from most infections by itself. Many antibiotics have unpleasant side effects - some can even cause permanent damage.
So you should only take antibiotics if the disease is significantly worse than the antibiotics. Overuse of antibiotics has caused many of them to become less effective, and so doctors have to resort to the really nasty ones more and more often.
As an example, if you have a cold, skip the antibiotics even if you have a secondary infection (unless it is really bad - ask the doc - do I really need antibiotics? A good doc will tell you the truth).
Gargle whisky if you want to kill the bacteria in your throat;). Or just gargle a warm water+salt+lime+honey solution (which might sting less;) ).
As for medical treatment for cancer, if the treatment is extremely expensive, makes you feel like shit for months, only gives you a small chance of a cure, you might prefer to not take treatment (especially if you are older - heck if you are older the treatment could kill you or weaken you so something else kills you).
Sometimes the best medical treatment is no treatment, or just palliative.
While moderate exercise (even just walking) is scientifically proven to be beneficial to the average person, I'm not so sure about doing marathons, Tour de France and other stuff.
We could hypothetically say "Spiderman is pushing X and is still climbing walls and swinging from building to building", that's no proof that it will benefit the average person.
As you say, genes count a lot. Some people recover from certain injuries faster than others even at the same age. There are many people who aren't tough enough for rugby, even if they tried - they'd get some knee injury and that's it. The tough ones are the ones who stay. Self selecting sample.
Recently I tried to play a DVD, and vlc crashed on me after a few seconds.
I thought maybe I needed the latest version, so I downloaded the latest at that time v0.9.8a, and while it seems they have finally made the subtitles look better, it crashed too.
Media Player Classic and Windows Media Player had no probs playing it.
I also never managed to get VLC to remember the deinterlace setting I pick (I tried the various filter and stupid obscure config stuff found on google and still it didn't work).
Overall I have a bad impression of VLC. Best to only use it if the other players can't play it.
p.s. if you are using Media Player Classic, avoid the haali media splitter crap. It causes crashes and instability[1], especially if you are using it with other stuff like windows movie maker (which someone found out the hard way - not me fortunately).
Actually in my previous office, our desktops had UPSes. Main use of the UPSes were so we could shutdown stuff nicely and also hopefully help protect the PCs from surges etc.
But that doesn't really matter so much in terms of productivity. Once the power goes out, the airconditioning stops working. Not long after the airconditioning stops working, most people stop working.
As Lee Kuan Yew (the ex-Prime Minister of Singapore) has said - the modern air conditioner is one of mankind's greatest inventions.
No airconditioning = no high density work/living places in tropical climates.
1) They like to troll (maybe just to get hits). 2) They also want to be a "Bridge Troll" collecting toll on a bridge they don't own. 3) Their bias is quite disgusting sometimes.
Quote: "After a standard system upgrade you need to reboot your computer to effect the necessary changes"
2009-01-29 is less than 6 months ago.
Both my XP and Ubuntu machines have been pretty stable.
Believe me, from a technical POV, Linux isn't really better than Vista or XP in security (in practice only a few write "conficker" worms for Linux, but just imagine what a malware author could do with bash, perl and relatives).
The strange thing is they are allegedly trying to protect children by threatening those very children with child porn charges etc.
Couldn't that be viewed as a form of child abuse?
After all if you're really a child and suddenly you face the prospect of being sent to jail and appearing in court etc, wouldn't that have a high chance of scarring you for life?
If I were a child/teen, I'd rather take a caning from my dad than have the full force of the "justice system" being thrown at me.
FWIW, it's easier to escape my dad than it is to escape crazy people throwing the law book at you.
Yes defining a decent default takes lots of effort and thought. FWIW Microsoft does many little things better than KDE, and apparently the Mac UIs aren't too bad.
For example, the taskbar in the previous KDE (when set to more than one row in height) ordered tasks from top to bottom first, then only left to right. Whereas Windows does it from left to right first then top to bottom. IMO, the way windows does it is better because with windows, if you close one task in the middle, only the leftmost and rightmost tasks will change positions. Whereas with the KDE method, if you close one task, ALL tasks to the right of the closed task will change vertical position! That makes it harder to keep track of where things are.
Subtle things like icons and colours used in them are also important (and hard to get right). I found the KDE and other "Linux desktop app" icons so indistinct that I still had difficulty _rapidly_ telling stuff apart even after 3 years of using KDE. Maybe I have brain damage or something. Icons seem to have similar shades, or similar shapes. KDE's stupid idea of naming a lot of their stuff starting with K doesn't help me.
"For KDE, why won't you then customize it to your heart's desire?"
That is not the point. Read his post - he said "I could turn off or tweak most of that junk".
If the OSS GUI people keep picking crappy defaults and require 90% of the people to customize/tweak stuff to achieve "decent usability", then that means their desktops are unsuitable for public use - it means they FAIL! Sure one may feel Windows requires lots of tweaking etc to be decent, but it has the market advantage of being "defacto/preinstalled".
A good GUI designer picks good defaults, so that 90% of the people will find it tolerable or even usable and won't need to customize it.
Think of GUI design as "user choice + huffman coding". The most popular options should be only one or two clicks/choices away, the advanced options should still be possible, just more steps.
GNOME fails the latter - they seem to have the development philosophy of totally removing/hiding features just because they might confuse the user.
KDE fails for having poor defaults. Look at their latest default menu, how many people want to keep clicking backwards and forwards to navigate their stupid new menu to look for the application to launch? BTW I tried Kubuntu recently and KDE was crashing way too often - so that's another fail.
1) The typical desktop user would not know how to customize his/her desktops OR want to know, so the desktop environment FAILS if it requires customization to achieve a good level of usability.
2) Even if there are "resident geeks" around to customize stuff for the desktop users, this results in zillions of different customizations because every geek will have their own favourite customization. This creates a big problem when users try to call 3rd party "Customer Support/Helpdesk" - the helpdesk agents and people writing the helpdesk scripts won't even know where the caller's taskbar will be.
At least with windows, the typical user's "start button" will be in the lower left hand (windows users who have moved it elsewhere don't normally call support to look for basic help- they call support to try to get to some higher level tech;) ).
How would the designer pick the defaults? They could test various designs with a large sample of users.
Just asking people what they want doesn't work that well, because often the users themselves don't know what they want or don't say it. After all, millions of people wanted chunky spaghetti sauce, but never said it in surveys till Howard Moscovitz did some taste tests with dozens (100?) variations of spaghetti sauce and found that a lot of people liked chunky sauces (at that time there were ZERO chunky sauces on the supermarket shelves!).
So a good designer will narrow down the variations (getting rid of the totally crappy ones - you don't bother testing varieties of spaghetti sauce that are totally awful) to a manageable number of varieties for testing.
There was a time when the "Made in China" 2500mAh Energizer AA NiMH rechargeable batteries were better than the "Made in Japan" ones. They had a much lower self discharge.
1) Compression is very useful. I helped save a lot of bandwidth at my prev company just by suggesting and helping to enable mod_gzip on just one server.
2) Long urls might be wasting bandwidth, but they're "small potatoes" in the greater scheme of things. Just one big fat image could use more bandwidth than 100 urls, and typically be less compressible.
"If you can't remember the pain from 5 seconds ago or don't care"
1) There's an IMMENSE difference between "can't remember" and "don't care".
2) Whether the victim can remember or not, is irrelevant to the definition of torture. Another thing - there are also many ways you can torture a person without applying pain. Just use your imagination a bit. There are some people who actually don't care about pain very much, but they do care about other things. Go figure.
3) There are so many different sorts of remembering. Even if one part of your brain isn't working and can't remember, the other parts might and react accordingly. Say you have one of those unfortunates who cannot convert short term memories to long term, and you induce pain on him whenever he picks the "wrong object", after a while he might consistently not pick the wrong object, but he just can't tell you why, or remember why.
In practice people will hardly ever use your POV that weight is solely the effect of gravity on mass, since it's not that useful.
For most people, weight means "apparent weight". The force that a weighing scale (theoretical or otherwise) would measure if you could put the object on it.
Which in many circumstances will be something like:
mass * acceleration due to gravity - bouyancy due to fluid/air the object is in - the force due to the earth spinning + "other stuff".
"other stuff" could include downforce.
This is more useful since the object could break stuff it goes over if the "practical weight" is too high even if the m*g is less than the limits.
For example, for the speed record on ice attempt, they'll have to figure out whether the ice can take the max "apparent weight".
IMO, weight= m*g is best left for high school physics. People dealing with stuff in the real world will use weight = "apparent weight".
And they're not going to use two words where one word will do.
Some place where they like scarring children for life by threatening them with child porn charges? Think of the children, really.
Makes me wonder whether the prosecutors in Pennsylvania are a greater threat to children than those evil people who have pics of nude pics of teenagers.
Sure, but many parents appear to think that not allowing teenagers to see certain stuff on TV is part of changing them from "sex crazed monsters full of uncontrollable hormones", into well domesticated humans.
If that's not the parents responsibility then whose is it? The Government? Can't be the Gov - since everyone here is anti-nanny state right? Can't be solely the teenagers responsibility, since they're the ones pumped up with all those hormones.
So should the parents let the sex crazed monsters do whatever they want?
I don't think so.
From what I observe (hey I'm a slashdotter so I can't speak from personal experience;) ), for a lot of people, sex creates a very strong bond.
I've told a friend that he shouldn't go about having sex with just any girl he finds attractive, because based on track record he is one of those people. He should find someone who is sufficiently compatible first, then only sexually bond with them. Bonding with someone incompatible results in a lot of pain.
Most parents want to spare their children from unnecessary pain. Some of them are still going to experience all of that anyway, but that does not mean you do not try.
Lastly, if you want to domesticate dogs properly, you don't let them do whatever they want. Same applies for domesticating humans.
Once you have a big system, it's YOUR SYSTEM itself that is the biggest "problem" for you. Not whether it's on OSS.
For example, say some years ago someone built a huge complex system that somehow was reliant on MySQL 3.x (because it appeared to be the least bad choice at that time - e.g. postgres95 was too slow, Oracle = $$$$$, etc).
Now the system works, with known bugs and known workarounds, and worse, with lots of stuff that's custom made to deal with the deficiencies and bugs of MySQL 3.
As a result, it is going to cost a lot to migrate the system to a more recent version of MySQL, or some other DB. Development, testing, extra hardware, time, lost productivity.
Analogy: if you only build a small hut on top of FOSS, moving it to something else is a small problem. That changes once you build a big factory on it.
If the company hasn't budgeted for the cost of upgrading, then it's stuck with the old software.
There's plenty of FOSS out there that has a poor record for backward compatibility, and poor support for old versions.
Yes the upgrades might be free, but you can't use them till you figure out what you have to change in your million-lines-of-code system.
1) It's statistically likely that people like him are in your military already. . 2) Arming the US population with M16s just makes it more likely that the US will have to use the military on the US population. Think about it- when the cops are outgunned, they send in the troops.
If the police and politicians are doing the wrong things too often, you should fix that, and I don't think the way you fix that is by giving everyone guns.
Slashdot Mirror
The tap water tastes different?
Some people spend their spare $$ on fizzy drinks, some on coffee, I don't see anything wrong with doing something similar for water.
I drink distilled/RO water because I prefer the taste to tap water. Clean.
Some cheap brands or filtering/distilling equipment leave too much acetone behind, so I don't like those as well.
As the OP says, your body recovers from most infections by itself. Many antibiotics have unpleasant side effects - some can even cause permanent damage.
;). Or just gargle a warm water+salt+lime+honey solution (which might sting less ;) ).
So you should only take antibiotics if the disease is significantly worse than the antibiotics. Overuse of antibiotics has caused many of them to become less effective, and so doctors have to resort to the really nasty ones more and more often.
As an example, if you have a cold, skip the antibiotics even if you have a secondary infection (unless it is really bad - ask the doc - do I really need antibiotics? A good doc will tell you the truth).
Gargle whisky if you want to kill the bacteria in your throat
As for medical treatment for cancer, if the treatment is extremely expensive, makes you feel like shit for months, only gives you a small chance of a cure, you might prefer to not take treatment (especially if you are older - heck if you are older the treatment could kill you or weaken you so something else kills you).
Sometimes the best medical treatment is no treatment, or just palliative.
AFAIK Lance is an outlier.
While moderate exercise (even just walking) is scientifically proven to be beneficial to the average person, I'm not so sure about doing marathons, Tour de France and other stuff.
We could hypothetically say "Spiderman is pushing X and is still climbing walls and swinging from building to building", that's no proof that it will benefit the average person.
As you say, genes count a lot. Some people recover from certain injuries faster than others even at the same age. There are many people who aren't tough enough for rugby, even if they tried - they'd get some knee injury and that's it. The tough ones are the ones who stay. Self selecting sample.
Recently I tried to play a DVD, and vlc crashed on me after a few seconds.
I thought maybe I needed the latest version, so I downloaded the latest at that time v0.9.8a, and while it seems they have finally made the subtitles look better, it crashed too.
Media Player Classic and Windows Media Player had no probs playing it.
I also never managed to get VLC to remember the deinterlace setting I pick (I tried the various filter and stupid obscure config stuff found on google and still it didn't work).
Overall I have a bad impression of VLC. Best to only use it if the other players can't play it.
p.s. if you are using Media Player Classic, avoid the haali media splitter crap. It causes crashes and instability[1], especially if you are using it with other stuff like windows movie maker (which someone found out the hard way - not me fortunately).
[1] http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/codecs_and_filters/haalimediasplitter.cfm
Actually in my previous office, our desktops had UPSes. Main use of the UPSes were so we could shutdown stuff nicely and also hopefully help protect the PCs from surges etc.
But that doesn't really matter so much in terms of productivity. Once the power goes out, the airconditioning stops working. Not long after the airconditioning stops working, most people stop working.
As Lee Kuan Yew (the ex-Prime Minister of Singapore) has said - the modern air conditioner is one of mankind's greatest inventions.
No airconditioning = no high density work/living places in tropical climates.
IMO space tourism has been the most useful experiment the ISS has conducted.
And at the rate things are going it will remain the most useful experiment.
1) They like to troll (maybe just to get hits).
2) They also want to be a "Bridge Troll" collecting toll on a bridge they don't own.
3) Their bias is quite disgusting sometimes.
"Prosecuting a child for the law that's suppose to protect the child from older predators is stupid."
Stupid? Why not call it child abuse?
Go show me how it isn't, or would damage the child less than the least of legally recognized forms of child abuse.
I sure wouldn't want any child to be "molested" by the "Justice System".
> I have an uptime of about 6 months on Ubuntu since the last time I rebooted to put an extra hard drive in. I don't have to reboot for updates.
You need to reboot for some linux kernel updates to take effect.
See: http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-715-1
Quote: "After a standard system upgrade you need to reboot your computer to effect the necessary changes"
2009-01-29 is less than 6 months ago.
Both my XP and Ubuntu machines have been pretty stable.
Believe me, from a technical POV, Linux isn't really better than Vista or XP in security (in practice only a few write "conficker" worms for Linux, but just imagine what a malware author could do with bash, perl and relatives).
BTW Macs are technically worse in security according to at least one expert ( http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pwn2own-mac-hack,2254-6.html ). And I have reasons to agree ;).
The strange thing is they are allegedly trying to protect children by threatening those very children with child porn charges etc.
Couldn't that be viewed as a form of child abuse?
After all if you're really a child and suddenly you face the prospect of being sent to jail and appearing in court etc, wouldn't that have a high chance of scarring you for life?
If I were a child/teen, I'd rather take a caning from my dad than have the full force of the "justice system" being thrown at me.
FWIW, it's easier to escape my dad than it is to escape crazy people throwing the law book at you.
Yes defining a decent default takes lots of effort and thought. FWIW Microsoft does many little things better than KDE, and apparently the Mac UIs aren't too bad.
For example, the taskbar in the previous KDE (when set to more than one row in height) ordered tasks from top to bottom first, then only left to right. Whereas Windows does it from left to right first then top to bottom. IMO, the way windows does it is better because with windows, if you close one task in the middle, only the leftmost and rightmost tasks will change positions. Whereas with the KDE method, if you close one task, ALL tasks to the right of the closed task will change vertical position! That makes it harder to keep track of where things are.
Subtle things like icons and colours used in them are also important (and hard to get right). I found the KDE and other "Linux desktop app" icons so indistinct that I still had difficulty _rapidly_ telling stuff apart even after 3 years of using KDE. Maybe I have brain damage or something. Icons seem to have similar shades, or similar shapes. KDE's stupid idea of naming a lot of their stuff starting with K doesn't help me.
"For KDE, why won't you then customize it to your heart's desire?"
;) ).
That is not the point. Read his post - he said "I could turn off or tweak most of that junk".
If the OSS GUI people keep picking crappy defaults and require 90% of the people to customize/tweak stuff to achieve "decent usability", then that means their desktops are unsuitable for public use - it means they FAIL! Sure one may feel Windows requires lots of tweaking etc to be decent, but it has the market advantage of being "defacto/preinstalled".
A good GUI designer picks good defaults, so that 90% of the people will find it tolerable or even usable and won't need to customize it.
Think of GUI design as "user choice + huffman coding". The most popular options should be only one or two clicks/choices away, the advanced options should still be possible, just more steps.
GNOME fails the latter - they seem to have the development philosophy of totally removing/hiding features just because they might confuse the user.
KDE fails for having poor defaults. Look at their latest default menu, how many people want to keep clicking backwards and forwards to navigate their stupid new menu to look for the application to launch? BTW I tried Kubuntu recently and KDE was crashing way too often - so that's another fail.
1) The typical desktop user would not know how to customize his/her desktops OR want to know, so the desktop environment FAILS if it requires customization to achieve a good level of usability.
2) Even if there are "resident geeks" around to customize stuff for the desktop users, this results in zillions of different customizations because every geek will have their own favourite customization. This creates a big problem when users try to call 3rd party "Customer Support/Helpdesk" - the helpdesk agents and people writing the helpdesk scripts won't even know where the caller's taskbar will be.
At least with windows, the typical user's "start button" will be in the lower left hand (windows users who have moved it elsewhere don't normally call support to look for basic help- they call support to try to get to some higher level tech
How would the designer pick the defaults? They could test various designs with a large sample of users.
Just asking people what they want doesn't work that well, because often the users themselves don't know what they want or don't say it. After all, millions of people wanted chunky spaghetti sauce, but never said it in surveys till Howard Moscovitz did some taste tests with dozens (100?) variations of spaghetti sauce and found that a lot of people liked chunky sauces (at that time there were ZERO chunky sauces on the supermarket shelves!).
So a good designer will narrow down the variations (getting rid of the totally crappy ones - you don't bother testing varieties of spaghetti sauce that are totally awful) to a manageable number of varieties for testing.
There was a time when the "Made in China" 2500mAh Energizer AA NiMH rechargeable batteries were better than the "Made in Japan" ones. They had a much lower self discharge.
Go look it up: energizer china japan 2500mah
"The only thing you can trust is a bitmap image"
The colours will vary. Various displays/programs might stretch or crop the image.
You could use that same reasoning for China and India.
The terrible things their governments do make it possible for them to have jobs there.
Depends on your virtual machine. Lots of virtualization software/hardware has bugs.
See:
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/32597/discuss
And:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=+site:www.securityfocus.com+vmware+vulnerability
I'm sure the others have problems too.
1) Compression is very useful. I helped save a lot of bandwidth at my prev company just by suggesting and helping to enable mod_gzip on just one server.
2) Long urls might be wasting bandwidth, but they're "small potatoes" in the greater scheme of things. Just one big fat image could use more bandwidth than 100 urls, and typically be less compressible.
"If you can't remember the pain from 5 seconds ago or don't care"
1) There's an IMMENSE difference between "can't remember" and "don't care".
2) Whether the victim can remember or not, is irrelevant to the definition of torture. Another thing - there are also many ways you can torture a person without applying pain. Just use your imagination a bit. There are some people who actually don't care about pain very much, but they do care about other things. Go figure.
3) There are so many different sorts of remembering. Even if one part of your brain isn't working and can't remember, the other parts might and react accordingly. Say you have one of those unfortunates who cannot convert short term memories to long term, and you induce pain on him whenever he picks the "wrong object", after a while he might consistently not pick the wrong object, but he just can't tell you why, or remember why.
The "weight = m * g" definition is not very useful.
The only use for that definition I've had is in high school physics exams.
The more useful definition is weight = "apparent weight".
Where weight = the actual force the object would exert on the surface it's on.
And that is not m * g.
It's m * g + downforce - bouyancy - force due to the earth spinning, and all sorts of other stuff.
In practice people will hardly ever use your POV that weight is solely the effect of gravity on mass, since it's not that useful.
For most people, weight means "apparent weight". The force that a weighing scale (theoretical or otherwise) would measure if you could put the object on it.
Which in many circumstances will be something like:
mass * acceleration due to gravity - bouyancy due to fluid/air the object is in - the force due to the earth spinning + "other stuff".
"other stuff" could include downforce.
This is more useful since the object could break stuff it goes over if the "practical weight" is too high even if the m*g is less than the limits.
For example, for the speed record on ice attempt, they'll have to figure out whether the ice can take the max "apparent weight".
IMO, weight= m*g is best left for high school physics. People dealing with stuff in the real world will use weight = "apparent weight".
And they're not going to use two words where one word will do.
How about you put on your robe and wizard hat?
Some place where they like scarring children for life by threatening them with child porn charges? Think of the children, really.
Makes me wonder whether the prosecutors in Pennsylvania are a greater threat to children than those evil people who have pics of nude pics of teenagers.
Sure, but many parents appear to think that not allowing teenagers to see certain stuff on TV is part of changing them from "sex crazed monsters full of uncontrollable hormones", into well domesticated humans.
;) ), for a lot of people, sex creates a very strong bond.
If that's not the parents responsibility then whose is it? The Government? Can't be the Gov - since everyone here is anti-nanny state right? Can't be solely the teenagers responsibility, since they're the ones pumped up with all those hormones.
So should the parents let the sex crazed monsters do whatever they want?
I don't think so.
From what I observe (hey I'm a slashdotter so I can't speak from personal experience
I've told a friend that he shouldn't go about having sex with just any girl he finds attractive, because based on track record he is one of those people. He should find someone who is sufficiently compatible first, then only sexually bond with them. Bonding with someone incompatible results in a lot of pain.
Most parents want to spare their children from unnecessary pain. Some of them are still going to experience all of that anyway, but that does not mean you do not try.
Lastly, if you want to domesticate dogs properly, you don't let them do whatever they want. Same applies for domesticating humans.
The problem doesn't go away for FOSS.
Once you have a big system, it's YOUR SYSTEM itself that is the biggest "problem" for you. Not whether it's on OSS.
For example, say some years ago someone built a huge complex system that somehow was reliant on MySQL 3.x (because it appeared to be the least bad choice at that time - e.g. postgres95 was too slow, Oracle = $$$$$, etc).
Now the system works, with known bugs and known workarounds, and worse, with lots of stuff that's custom made to deal with the deficiencies and bugs of MySQL 3.
As a result, it is going to cost a lot to migrate the system to a more recent version of MySQL, or some other DB. Development, testing, extra hardware, time, lost productivity.
Analogy: if you only build a small hut on top of FOSS, moving it to something else is a small problem. That changes once you build a big factory on it.
If the company hasn't budgeted for the cost of upgrading, then it's stuck with the old software.
There's plenty of FOSS out there that has a poor record for backward compatibility, and poor support for old versions.
Yes the upgrades might be free, but you can't use them till you figure out what you have to change in your million-lines-of-code system.
1) It's statistically likely that people like him are in your military already. .
2) Arming the US population with M16s just makes it more likely that the US will have to use the military on the US population. Think about it- when the cops are outgunned, they send in the troops.
If the police and politicians are doing the wrong things too often, you should fix that, and I don't think the way you fix that is by giving everyone guns.