Yeah, but how many people were editing 4k video in 2007? I'm sure the 3 people at the time weren't worrying about scheduling their Fusion ioDrives across workloads, either, just pounding them into submission. Wider adoption usually means mixed workloads where scheduling scarce resources matters more and is more complicated.
FWIW I don't know if I agree with the article premise -- it seems like most of these resource scheduling decisions/monitoring/adjustments are being made in hypervisors now (think VMware DRS, as only one example). And a lot of storage resource allocation isn't even done at the hypervisor level, it's done in the SAN which simply allocates maximum storage bandwidth to to the host and figures out on its own which storage to use.
I was a network manager at a large-ish company and took a job at a smaller consulting company.
I work much harder at the small company than I did at the large company. The only time I worked harder at the large company was when doing large, time-sensitive projects (ie, get to pause/finish stage or network is broken).
The upside of the large company workload was that I think I my knowledge was much higher resolution, because I had time to focus and dig into details. At the consulting job, I have much more experiential knowledge but very little time to focus on details.
Does Microsoft promote people into Windows/Office executive positions more or less permanently, or does it rotate people in and out of those jobs so that nobody is wed to the success of those products permanently?
If those were the jobs people strived for and then hung onto, it's easy to see how the most ambitions people would work to get into those jobs and then use their skills (political and otherwise) to maintain those products pre-eminence and power to keep those jobs and suppress disruptive technologies that might displace them.
If those products were seen as self-sustaining and needing only slight guidance, then maybe Microsoft could have kept merely average people in those positions and/or made them less lucrative to push more ambitions and talented people into other areas of the company that could have benefitted from more aggressive and ambitious people who could have furthered more innovative stuff.
My guess is that Windows & Office were seen as the jewels and where the "best" people went, where they got fat and rich and did everything to suppress anything which might disrupt their fortunes. It almost sounds like the politics of Rome or the kind of thing that cripples an aristocratic society over time by preventing disruptions and innovations that would topple the established order.
Maybe someday we'll read a "Rise & Fall of the Microsoft Empire" that portrays Gates as Augustus and Ballmer as Nero or Commodus.
What bothers me is that whatever value the Metro interface has as a touch interface -- and it has been generally well reviewed on Windows phones, although I personally haven't used it in that scenario -- it's seriously unpopular in a desktop environment and on Windows 8 it doesn't seem to add any value and in many ways is extremely annoying.
And it's not like I'm the only one with this opinion or experience.
Microsoft's continuing push of this kind of interface on its desktop operating system seems to be more hubris and denial -- they're pushing whatever their business agenda is, not what anyone sees as a valuable improvement in anyone's user experience. They want one UI across all devices so they can be a phone/tablet/desktop consumer company. They're not doing it because somehow big, touch tiles help improve the windows desktop experience.
No matter what CPU they had chosen, wouldn't they have had to migrate off it to x86 eventually? It's not like any of the alternatives like MIPS or Alpha have endured or kept up with Intel.
Maybe in hindsight they should have gone x86 off the bat but at the time RISC had a lot of hype and interest even from Microsoft.
Although a switch to MIPS instead of PowerPC might make one of my favorite alternative history stories, an Apple/SGI merger in the early 90s, more plausible as merging MacOS and IRIX would have been simpler.
Isn't there a kind of general problem in urban academic settings where you have senior, often male, academics surrounded by young students, some of whom are in a dependent client relationship with the senior academics. Senior academic uses authority, persuasion and more than a little red wine to bed the younger students?
Now let's all go out in the field and camp. Maybe overseas. In a remote location. Where you can't leave or even make a phone call. Limited privacy, communal living. Long nights with alcohol and/or drugs.
I kind of hate to use the phrases "going tribal" or "Lord of the Flies" but it's not hard to see how this situations can turn kind of ugly pretty quickly.
And it's not also hard to see how it's not just driven by the gross, predatory senior academic. You might add in the attractive but less talented student who uses her sexuality to compete, or the smarter but less attractive students with less social sophistication who gets in over her head.
I think its due to the nature of the voting system (winner take all, even if you don't poll a majority). But it also seems to be endemic to many democracies, they tend to gravitate to two party systems. The UK has Labor and the Conservatives, the Germans have Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats.
But even in countries with larger third parties, they're seldom major parts of government. I think the current coalition government in the UK is one of the few times the Liberal Democrats have been in government. In Germany the FDP has mostly been a kingmaker rather than a majority party capable of forming its own government.
We just started using ranked choice voting for elections in Minneapolis, which in theory eliminates the "lost vote" problem by allowing you to make third parties your first choice but still vote "defensively" by making some other candidate a secondary choice.
So far it doesn't seem to have led to a lot of radical change in outcomes other than making the election results take a couple of extra days due to the calculations involved when there's a dozen candidates.
You don't know if it's true, but it sure seems that in spite of the weaknesses reviews really seem to be popular and they generally appear to be accurate based upon my experiences. Can you imagine Amazon without reviews?
My sense is that the true weakness with crowdsourced reviews isn't that they're too negative, but they skew mediocrity a little too positive.
Maybe they could allow direct sales, but require that any company performing direct sales both have some minimum in-state physical presence for sales/service proportionate to the volume of cars they sell as well as allowing third party establishments to perform those tasks for them in some mutually agreed upon way?
This way, Tesla can sell cars direct but has to have some kind of bricks-and-mortar presence in states they sell them. They could all be owned by Tesla, but they wouldn't have to be if someone wanted to run the physical presence for them in the way Tesla wanted it done.
Since the existing car makers now sell a huge volume of cars in order to do direct sales they would have to duplicate the existing dealership network they have now, which would be hugely expensive. This would be the "save" for existing car dealers -- they wouldn't necessarily have to fear GM/Toyota/Ford suddenly selling direct because in order to do so, those makers would have to build out huge bricks-and-mortar presences. It would make so much more sense for the existing makers to stick with the existing dealerships.
I think that's generally good advice, but the thing that has always been a turnoff about skilled trades is that they seem to operate in a very hostile, class-centric mode, as if the labor relations equation remains stuck in some kind of black and white movie about striking workers from the 1930s.
Like most people who have done IT admin at bigger facilities during the 1990s and early 2000s as IT technology expanded, I worked a lot with electricians on data center build-outs, cabling, etc. I was always impressed with the guys I worked with -- they seemed real smart and they could do/fix about anything. But their work environment seemed kind of harsh compared to a typical IT work environment.
But I think if you were looking for a job that was nearly impossible to outsource, electrician would be pretty high on the list. A lot of stuff can only be done by licensed electricians legally and I don't see that changing for basic safety reasons and (kind of negatively) there's a gatekeeper effect that will keep it that way for the same reasons that doctors, lawyers and other types of professionals make it so only they can do certain tasks.
And I would bet with the growth in solar and the widespread adoption of electric cars over the next 50 years there will be an increasing in need for electrical work. The neighborhood grid will have to expand to accommodate a huge influx of cars trying to rapid-charge in dense areas and that's definitely the kind of high voltage work that an electrician will have to do.
Most of Microsoft's internals changes are good and can generally be seen as progress, and certainly an API usable across platforms makes sense.
The problem with Microsoft around these things is that they always feel the need to change the GUI to promote whatever nonsense bubbles to the top of marketing's mind.
With other Windows versions the GUI changes were mostly about glitz or copying MacOS but with Win8 the changes seemed to be trying to force an iPad paradigm down everyone's throats and it failed utterly.
I didn't even care about the electricity cost in some cases. I wanted more light from my in-built 1955 light fixtures without risking a fire, so I bought CFLs with 100 watt light output that only used 37w of power and put them in sockets only rated for 60w incandescents.
In some cases, like outdoor lights turned on a lot I did care about electricity and used CFLs there because they were cheaper.
The Metro-ization of Windows has failed badly. You don't even need to look at Netcraft to prove it.
So why insist on a hybrid Start menu? Is this just simply the result of some assholes who simply refuse to admit their idea sucked greasy balls and by God they're going to fucking jam it down some throats anyway?
I haven't used a pure Win 8 device (phone or tablet) in its native mode so I'm withholding personal judgement on it that mode. It gets reasonable reviews (or at least the phone does) from people who have used it like that, but nobody I know is super enthusiastic about it from a desktop perspective at all. Nobody.
You would have think with Ballmer's exit SOMEBODY at Microsoft might have been willing to say "we shouldn't metro-ize the desktop. They really don't like it."
And they came to the conclusion that paper bills were cheaper than coins.
Coins cost more to make. Canada had to mint 1.6 $1 coins for every paper bill they replaced because people hang onto them and hoarding coins is somehow a benefit to the government.
Personally I think the explanation/justification is somewhat tortured. I haven't listened to the podcast in a while but I think it comes down to some fairly esoteric economics, including seigniorage, the difference between the cost of producing the coins and the value of the coin.
I think they also factored in the cost of the conversion activity of business to accommodate $1 coins -- cash registers, vending machines, etc.
Oxycodone has required a printed prescription on paper for a long time -- no refills, no phone in. I think hydrocodone (aka Vicodin) was scheduled lower and that made it eligible for phone-in prescriptions and refills without a new prescription, although I believe they recently re-scheduled it to be the same as oxycodone.
I have to sign for every prescription, from opiates to my high blood pressure medication to antibiotics. I can't remember not having to sign for them.
Ironically, I think the dependence on paper prescriptions as being more secure than electronic submission is kind of strange. Surely forging a paper prescription is easier than an electronic submission. I'm also surprised the DEA hasn't just created a mandatory centralized opiate prescribing system where all prescriptions are funneled through them.
I'm not endorsing this, mind you, but they could tighten it down to the point where the only way to prescribe a narcotic is for a doctor to log into a DEA terminal, complete with two-factor authentication, complete the prescription form and have it sent to the pharmacy, all under their watchful eye.
The FDA has been mulling a total ban on acetaminophen combinations only recently, I presume this is because the most recent research probably indicated that the benefits were outweighed by the risks.
The physicians assistant who prescribed only oxycodone without acetaminophen to me was the youngest of the prescribers I've dealt with, so I'm also assuming her more recent education included this newer thinking.
The oxycodone dosage she gave me was the same as the combination offered elsewhere -- 5 mg. I found that the APAP-free version seemed more effective -- faster onset of benefit with no obvious reduction in duration or overall benefit.
The PA also prescribed other medication to try to enhance the oxycodone, hydroxazine and amytriptaline. Unfortunately both of these had significant side effects. Hydroxazine made me really sleepy and amytriptaline made it very hard to get up.
The funny thing is, try to explain this to your doctor when she wants to prescribe an opiate like oxycodone.
In about half the cases I've been prescribed opiates the doctor refused to prescribe oxycodone on its own -- I was told it was Percocet (oxycodone + acetaminophen) or nothing, they would not write a prescription for just oxycodone. I had one surgeon do it reluctantly, pointedly asking me why and not really liking my answer that I felt it was dangerous and could add in acetaminophen on my own if I felt it was helpful.
I did have one specialist who wrote that way and when I asked her why she prescribed that way she said current research showed the liver risk outweighed the small benefits. Ironically she was the "less educated" physicians assistant and not a full MD.
I think most doctors believe its beneficial but I also think they somehow see acetaminophen opiate formulations as some kind of bulwark against abuse. Either because they believe it is so much more effective paired with acetaminophen and you'll be inclined to take less overall or that people "know" acetaminophen is bad in quantity and it will serve as a deterrent to excessive dosage, especially people with a history of drug abuse.
I also think they are highly skeptical of someone asking for a specific opiate formulation, even when they initiate the prescription (ie, you have an obvious injury and they prescribe an opiate). It's highly ironic that they're so worried about addiction they're willing to risk serious liver toxicity.
As a Minnesotan, I don't see unknown Mike McFadden making a lot of headway against Franken. The dedicated ideologues may vote for him but Minnesota isn't the kind of a state where hard-core ideology will win elections. And he surely won't win campaigning against Franken on a platform of letting Comcast do whatever it wants.
I think he'd be most vulnerable in his own party to someone like Betty McCollum (a current House member) if she wanted the Senate.
Since it would seem to only lead to more focus on the mafia-like nature of the Russian government and the shadowy links between Russian government, intelligence and organized crime.
I'm sure the US-haters and the Russian propagandists will begin their usual moral equivocation, NSA, CIA, banking, etc.
How much of the grueling training is done simply to be grueling and exclude people based on their lack of stamina? Think of law school assignments where they throw a 100 page brief at you Friday to be handed in Monday that requires analyzing dozens of circuit, appeals and Supreme Court decisions, maybe a few hundred pages of congressional record to determine intent and then some history for context? Or the marathon race of medical residency where 100 hours is a normal week and 36 hours straight is a standard shift?
I think in some sense these kinds of things are done not because they make the profession any better but because they are exclusionary and keep the pool of competitors smaller. If you look at less exclusive jobs that need to be done right in organizations that depend on them being done right you see training done for results in a saner fashion vs. some kind of weird torture test.
What do these systems cost without the inbuilt subsidies that monetize your information?
I'm presuming they seem attractive to people generally because they seem to be inexpensive. Some of this low cost is due to the ever-decreasing costs of the hardware, both in terms of on-site devices (eg, cameras, sensors) and the back end "cloud services" that enable end-user analytics and web connectivity. But a lot of this cheapness seems to involve subsidies provided by monetizing the information they gather and selling it to third parties.
I'm curious what these services would cost if they were offered without any monetization. Would they be cheap enough to be appealing?
I'm mostly thinking of turnkey solutions, not DIY systems where people cobble together their own collection of hardware and software. These may be cheap in dollar cost outlay but if you factor in the cost of labor, time and expertise are pretty expensive and not available to most people.
I won't knock what you're doing but I'm curious what you get out of it that you couldn't get out of a Rand McNally trucker's road atlas and a dedicated GPS.
The dedicated GPS would give you turn-turn directions without any data service and the atlas would give you decent printed maps for most highway planning.
As kids in the 70s we covered most of the Deep South and Eastern Seaboard in an RV with just a paper map. I don't remember us getting lost and we sure seemed to spend a lot of time off the beaten path.
I suppose the trip planning part would be OK if you were really compulsive about it, but it seems like a lot of work.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but how many people were editing 4k video in 2007? I'm sure the 3 people at the time weren't worrying about scheduling their Fusion ioDrives across workloads, either, just pounding them into submission. Wider adoption usually means mixed workloads where scheduling scarce resources matters more and is more complicated.
FWIW I don't know if I agree with the article premise -- it seems like most of these resource scheduling decisions/monitoring/adjustments are being made in hypervisors now (think VMware DRS, as only one example). And a lot of storage resource allocation isn't even done at the hypervisor level, it's done in the SAN which simply allocates maximum storage bandwidth to to the host and figures out on its own which storage to use.
I was a network manager at a large-ish company and took a job at a smaller consulting company.
I work much harder at the small company than I did at the large company. The only time I worked harder at the large company was when doing large, time-sensitive projects (ie, get to pause/finish stage or network is broken).
The upside of the large company workload was that I think I my knowledge was much higher resolution, because I had time to focus and dig into details. At the consulting job, I have much more experiential knowledge but very little time to focus on details.
I think there's an old joke:
Q: "How many people work at Microsoft?"
a: "About 20%"
Does Microsoft promote people into Windows/Office executive positions more or less permanently, or does it rotate people in and out of those jobs so that nobody is wed to the success of those products permanently?
If those were the jobs people strived for and then hung onto, it's easy to see how the most ambitions people would work to get into those jobs and then use their skills (political and otherwise) to maintain those products pre-eminence and power to keep those jobs and suppress disruptive technologies that might displace them.
If those products were seen as self-sustaining and needing only slight guidance, then maybe Microsoft could have kept merely average people in those positions and/or made them less lucrative to push more ambitions and talented people into other areas of the company that could have benefitted from more aggressive and ambitious people who could have furthered more innovative stuff.
My guess is that Windows & Office were seen as the jewels and where the "best" people went, where they got fat and rich and did everything to suppress anything which might disrupt their fortunes. It almost sounds like the politics of Rome or the kind of thing that cripples an aristocratic society over time by preventing disruptions and innovations that would topple the established order.
Maybe someday we'll read a "Rise & Fall of the Microsoft Empire" that portrays Gates as Augustus and Ballmer as Nero or Commodus.
What bothers me is that whatever value the Metro interface has as a touch interface -- and it has been generally well reviewed on Windows phones, although I personally haven't used it in that scenario -- it's seriously unpopular in a desktop environment and on Windows 8 it doesn't seem to add any value and in many ways is extremely annoying.
And it's not like I'm the only one with this opinion or experience.
Microsoft's continuing push of this kind of interface on its desktop operating system seems to be more hubris and denial -- they're pushing whatever their business agenda is, not what anyone sees as a valuable improvement in anyone's user experience. They want one UI across all devices so they can be a phone/tablet/desktop consumer company. They're not doing it because somehow big, touch tiles help improve the windows desktop experience.
No matter what CPU they had chosen, wouldn't they have had to migrate off it to x86 eventually? It's not like any of the alternatives like MIPS or Alpha have endured or kept up with Intel.
Maybe in hindsight they should have gone x86 off the bat but at the time RISC had a lot of hype and interest even from Microsoft.
Although a switch to MIPS instead of PowerPC might make one of my favorite alternative history stories, an Apple/SGI merger in the early 90s, more plausible as merging MacOS and IRIX would have been simpler.
Isn't there a kind of general problem in urban academic settings where you have senior, often male, academics surrounded by young students, some of whom are in a dependent client relationship with the senior academics. Senior academic uses authority, persuasion and more than a little red wine to bed the younger students?
Now let's all go out in the field and camp. Maybe overseas. In a remote location. Where you can't leave or even make a phone call. Limited privacy, communal living. Long nights with alcohol and/or drugs.
I kind of hate to use the phrases "going tribal" or "Lord of the Flies" but it's not hard to see how this situations can turn kind of ugly pretty quickly.
And it's not also hard to see how it's not just driven by the gross, predatory senior academic. You might add in the attractive but less talented student who uses her sexuality to compete, or the smarter but less attractive students with less social sophistication who gets in over her head.
I think its due to the nature of the voting system (winner take all, even if you don't poll a majority). But it also seems to be endemic to many democracies, they tend to gravitate to two party systems. The UK has Labor and the Conservatives, the Germans have Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats.
But even in countries with larger third parties, they're seldom major parts of government. I think the current coalition government in the UK is one of the few times the Liberal Democrats have been in government. In Germany the FDP has mostly been a kingmaker rather than a majority party capable of forming its own government.
We just started using ranked choice voting for elections in Minneapolis, which in theory eliminates the "lost vote" problem by allowing you to make third parties your first choice but still vote "defensively" by making some other candidate a secondary choice.
So far it doesn't seem to have led to a lot of radical change in outcomes other than making the election results take a couple of extra days due to the calculations involved when there's a dozen candidates.
You don't know if it's true, but it sure seems that in spite of the weaknesses reviews really seem to be popular and they generally appear to be accurate based upon my experiences. Can you imagine Amazon without reviews?
My sense is that the true weakness with crowdsourced reviews isn't that they're too negative, but they skew mediocrity a little too positive.
...longer, better patents and copyrights, more EULAs.
This is really what we need, aspiring politicians appealing to plutocrats.
Maybe they could allow direct sales, but require that any company performing direct sales both have some minimum in-state physical presence for sales/service proportionate to the volume of cars they sell as well as allowing third party establishments to perform those tasks for them in some mutually agreed upon way?
This way, Tesla can sell cars direct but has to have some kind of bricks-and-mortar presence in states they sell them. They could all be owned by Tesla, but they wouldn't have to be if someone wanted to run the physical presence for them in the way Tesla wanted it done.
Since the existing car makers now sell a huge volume of cars in order to do direct sales they would have to duplicate the existing dealership network they have now, which would be hugely expensive. This would be the "save" for existing car dealers -- they wouldn't necessarily have to fear GM/Toyota/Ford suddenly selling direct because in order to do so, those makers would have to build out huge bricks-and-mortar presences. It would make so much more sense for the existing makers to stick with the existing dealerships.
I think that's generally good advice, but the thing that has always been a turnoff about skilled trades is that they seem to operate in a very hostile, class-centric mode, as if the labor relations equation remains stuck in some kind of black and white movie about striking workers from the 1930s.
Like most people who have done IT admin at bigger facilities during the 1990s and early 2000s as IT technology expanded, I worked a lot with electricians on data center build-outs, cabling, etc. I was always impressed with the guys I worked with -- they seemed real smart and they could do/fix about anything. But their work environment seemed kind of harsh compared to a typical IT work environment.
But I think if you were looking for a job that was nearly impossible to outsource, electrician would be pretty high on the list. A lot of stuff can only be done by licensed electricians legally and I don't see that changing for basic safety reasons and (kind of negatively) there's a gatekeeper effect that will keep it that way for the same reasons that doctors, lawyers and other types of professionals make it so only they can do certain tasks.
And I would bet with the growth in solar and the widespread adoption of electric cars over the next 50 years there will be an increasing in need for electrical work. The neighborhood grid will have to expand to accommodate a huge influx of cars trying to rapid-charge in dense areas and that's definitely the kind of high voltage work that an electrician will have to do.
Most of Microsoft's internals changes are good and can generally be seen as progress, and certainly an API usable across platforms makes sense.
The problem with Microsoft around these things is that they always feel the need to change the GUI to promote whatever nonsense bubbles to the top of marketing's mind.
With other Windows versions the GUI changes were mostly about glitz or copying MacOS but with Win8 the changes seemed to be trying to force an iPad paradigm down everyone's throats and it failed utterly.
I didn't even care about the electricity cost in some cases. I wanted more light from my in-built 1955 light fixtures without risking a fire, so I bought CFLs with 100 watt light output that only used 37w of power and put them in sockets only rated for 60w incandescents.
In some cases, like outdoor lights turned on a lot I did care about electricity and used CFLs there because they were cheaper.
Will this influence the tax gimmick where the HQ is overseas so the profits don't have to have taxes paid on them?
Why is it the money can evade the government but the data can't?
The Metro-ization of Windows has failed badly. You don't even need to look at Netcraft to prove it.
So why insist on a hybrid Start menu? Is this just simply the result of some assholes who simply refuse to admit their idea sucked greasy balls and by God they're going to fucking jam it down some throats anyway?
I haven't used a pure Win 8 device (phone or tablet) in its native mode so I'm withholding personal judgement on it that mode. It gets reasonable reviews (or at least the phone does) from people who have used it like that, but nobody I know is super enthusiastic about it from a desktop perspective at all. Nobody.
You would have think with Ballmer's exit SOMEBODY at Microsoft might have been willing to say "we shouldn't metro-ize the desktop. They really don't like it."
And they came to the conclusion that paper bills were cheaper than coins.
Coins cost more to make. Canada had to mint 1.6 $1 coins for every paper bill they replaced because people hang onto them and hoarding coins is somehow a benefit to the government.
Personally I think the explanation/justification is somewhat tortured. I haven't listened to the podcast in a while but I think it comes down to some fairly esoteric economics, including seigniorage, the difference between the cost of producing the coins and the value of the coin.
I think they also factored in the cost of the conversion activity of business to accommodate $1 coins -- cash registers, vending machines, etc.
Oxycodone has required a printed prescription on paper for a long time -- no refills, no phone in. I think hydrocodone (aka Vicodin) was scheduled lower and that made it eligible for phone-in prescriptions and refills without a new prescription, although I believe they recently re-scheduled it to be the same as oxycodone.
I have to sign for every prescription, from opiates to my high blood pressure medication to antibiotics. I can't remember not having to sign for them.
Ironically, I think the dependence on paper prescriptions as being more secure than electronic submission is kind of strange. Surely forging a paper prescription is easier than an electronic submission. I'm also surprised the DEA hasn't just created a mandatory centralized opiate prescribing system where all prescriptions are funneled through them.
I'm not endorsing this, mind you, but they could tighten it down to the point where the only way to prescribe a narcotic is for a doctor to log into a DEA terminal, complete with two-factor authentication, complete the prescription form and have it sent to the pharmacy, all under their watchful eye.
The FDA has been mulling a total ban on acetaminophen combinations only recently, I presume this is because the most recent research probably indicated that the benefits were outweighed by the risks.
The physicians assistant who prescribed only oxycodone without acetaminophen to me was the youngest of the prescribers I've dealt with, so I'm also assuming her more recent education included this newer thinking.
The oxycodone dosage she gave me was the same as the combination offered elsewhere -- 5 mg. I found that the APAP-free version seemed more effective -- faster onset of benefit with no obvious reduction in duration or overall benefit.
The PA also prescribed other medication to try to enhance the oxycodone, hydroxazine and amytriptaline. Unfortunately both of these had significant side effects. Hydroxazine made me really sleepy and amytriptaline made it very hard to get up.
The funny thing is, try to explain this to your doctor when she wants to prescribe an opiate like oxycodone.
In about half the cases I've been prescribed opiates the doctor refused to prescribe oxycodone on its own -- I was told it was Percocet (oxycodone + acetaminophen) or nothing, they would not write a prescription for just oxycodone. I had one surgeon do it reluctantly, pointedly asking me why and not really liking my answer that I felt it was dangerous and could add in acetaminophen on my own if I felt it was helpful.
I did have one specialist who wrote that way and when I asked her why she prescribed that way she said current research showed the liver risk outweighed the small benefits. Ironically she was the "less educated" physicians assistant and not a full MD.
I think most doctors believe its beneficial but I also think they somehow see acetaminophen opiate formulations as some kind of bulwark against abuse. Either because they believe it is so much more effective paired with acetaminophen and you'll be inclined to take less overall or that people "know" acetaminophen is bad in quantity and it will serve as a deterrent to excessive dosage, especially people with a history of drug abuse.
I also think they are highly skeptical of someone asking for a specific opiate formulation, even when they initiate the prescription (ie, you have an obvious injury and they prescribe an opiate). It's highly ironic that they're so worried about addiction they're willing to risk serious liver toxicity.
As a Minnesotan, I don't see unknown Mike McFadden making a lot of headway against Franken. The dedicated ideologues may vote for him but Minnesota isn't the kind of a state where hard-core ideology will win elections. And he surely won't win campaigning against Franken on a platform of letting Comcast do whatever it wants.
I think he'd be most vulnerable in his own party to someone like Betty McCollum (a current House member) if she wanted the Senate.
Maybe an An-225 full of a 6 TB hard disks?
Since it would seem to only lead to more focus on the mafia-like nature of the Russian government and the shadowy links between Russian government, intelligence and organized crime.
I'm sure the US-haters and the Russian propagandists will begin their usual moral equivocation, NSA, CIA, banking, etc.
How much of the grueling training is done simply to be grueling and exclude people based on their lack of stamina? Think of law school assignments where they throw a 100 page brief at you Friday to be handed in Monday that requires analyzing dozens of circuit, appeals and Supreme Court decisions, maybe a few hundred pages of congressional record to determine intent and then some history for context? Or the marathon race of medical residency where 100 hours is a normal week and 36 hours straight is a standard shift?
I think in some sense these kinds of things are done not because they make the profession any better but because they are exclusionary and keep the pool of competitors smaller. If you look at less exclusive jobs that need to be done right in organizations that depend on them being done right you see training done for results in a saner fashion vs. some kind of weird torture test.
What do these systems cost without the inbuilt subsidies that monetize your information?
I'm presuming they seem attractive to people generally because they seem to be inexpensive. Some of this low cost is due to the ever-decreasing costs of the hardware, both in terms of on-site devices (eg, cameras, sensors) and the back end "cloud services" that enable end-user analytics and web connectivity. But a lot of this cheapness seems to involve subsidies provided by monetizing the information they gather and selling it to third parties.
I'm curious what these services would cost if they were offered without any monetization. Would they be cheap enough to be appealing?
I'm mostly thinking of turnkey solutions, not DIY systems where people cobble together their own collection of hardware and software. These may be cheap in dollar cost outlay but if you factor in the cost of labor, time and expertise are pretty expensive and not available to most people.
I won't knock what you're doing but I'm curious what you get out of it that you couldn't get out of a Rand McNally trucker's road atlas and a dedicated GPS.
The dedicated GPS would give you turn-turn directions without any data service and the atlas would give you decent printed maps for most highway planning.
As kids in the 70s we covered most of the Deep South and Eastern Seaboard in an RV with just a paper map. I don't remember us getting lost and we sure seemed to spend a lot of time off the beaten path.
I suppose the trip planning part would be OK if you were really compulsive about it, but it seems like a lot of work.