Most people think of obesity initially as a function of morality, principally a lack of will power. You're obese because you have no self control over food. You eat too much.
This is reinforced by the notion of energy balance, which in turn reinforces the morality aspect, because the notion of energy balance leads to an additional conclusion, you don't get enough exercise, which is of course another failure of character. Now you're obese due to your lack of willpower to both control your eating AND exercise enough.
Even when doctors (like my doctor) try to approach the issue of weight they do it initially from the perspective of energy balance more formally, but underneath it always boils down to a failure of will power, since you aren't able to control your eating or exercise. Yet they treat other conditions like strep throat without an implied question of whether I have good hygiene or wash my heads enough.
The implied morality and self-control issues coupled with the flawed energy balance model keep doctors from pursuing more effective solutions to obesity, especially because some of the solutions defy the implied moralism. Low carbohydrate diets don't have a calorie target at all, they openly suggest you eat until you're full, and the causes are associated with too many carbohydrates which is some ways more analytic (what you eat, not how much). Drug therapies are the same kind of thing, they seem to be a "free ride" allowing immoral indulgence versus self-restraint.
I've only had to fill out paper health care forms a couple of times, but it's really easy to see how those confusing monsters can be filled out erroneously by the form filler, and then of course there are the transcription problems when forms get computer entered, either by drones in a coding center or by HR people.
What's wrong with this in comparison though, is that when the end-user uses a web site you would assume there is error checking of form logic (ie, if I fill box A and B it should be able to tell if I need to fill out box C). There's still the problem of factual error by the user but that's harder to detect.
The problem here though seems to be the data stored is erroneous due to problems with the code, not due to user error.
I think he's more surprised that more technologically savvy young people are so cavalier about it, especially at a college. Over the last 40-some years, college students have generally been pretty anti-establishment.
His opinion is that has shifted a little as college has become seen as more vocational, especially with kids focused on "business" degrees ("Fuck liberal arts, I just want to go make money") and as the economy has tightened and people see college as more of an economic stepping stone and less as a place to seek enlightenment. Cue the funeral music for the liberal arts.
My sense I shared with him is that so many kids of college age are SO public with their lives on social media and cellphones that when they feel like they don't have anything to hide, they're kind of being literal about it because they've already shared their opinons and pictures of themselves on Facebook already, so it's like "WTF? What else is there?" They have a very diminished sense of a private sphere.
Of course, I'm 47 next year, so I've accumulated a lot of things to hide...or at least a greater appreciation of a private sphere.
I'm sure there's a lot of great applications, but unifying persistent storage and memory seems like one with a lot of disruptive and performance enhancing possibilities relative to the limitations of RAM vs. disk.
A have a friend who teaches political science and history at a state college. He has been asking his students how they feel about NSA surveillance and the majority opinion is summarized "I have nothing to hide, I'm not doing anything wrong, if it increases safety it's OK."
It doesn't sound to me like a lot of "young people" are taking a very strong civil-liberties position on this. The school he teaches at is a smaller state school (ie, not the main, big-name state university) so the student body tends to be more "mainstream" than the more leftish bias you might expect at the "prestige" main campus.
And when I raise the issue among my 40-something adult peers it's surprising how little people care and the "Where's your tinfoil hat?" look people give you.
I think memristors are a really interesting development, mainly because as I understand one of the potential applications is for storage densities greater than hard disks with DRAM-like access speeds.
It's not hard to postulate applications where you combine data storage and DRAM together, resulting in big performance increases by eliminating much of the latencies involved with disk access.
It probably wouldn't have as much impact on pure CPU bound tasks but so many workloads now are I/O bound and performance limited by disk systems that having a unified DRAM + storage space could mean performance increases beyond what the additional of CPU power alone could mean.
And there's two sides to the cultural thing -- management is an equal player in the push-pull with unions and bears some responsibility for the things typically blamed on unions.
IANAL, but if a public building has a resource available in a common area without access controls or signage indicating its use is restricted, isn't it a reasonable assumption that the resource is a public accomodation available for all to use?
It seems to me that it's not reasonable to make resources available without signage or access controls in a public space and then arrest someone for actually using them.
There may be finer-grained questions about what would constitute "reasonable use" -- ie, I can't run a hose from a public drinking fountain to fill my swimming pool, and maybe charging EVs would violate reasonable use, but unless you post rules for the outlet or some kind of locking mechanism, using an outlet on the outside of a public building to charge an EV in the building's parking lot doesn't seem like theft.
I can believe the firmware issue in SAN systems, especially because I think SANs work with the drives probably more in depth than typical storage environments.
There was a period of time where we had a ton of drives failing in Equallogic SANs and not long after there was new firmware for the controllers and the drives that made the high rate of failure end.
What this makes me wonder, though, is when drives "fail" in a lot of storage environments are they really failing, or is there just some communication issue with the drive and its controller chain? I know a lot of times a failed server RAID drive can be pulled and replaced and it will just rebuild as if it was a new drive (in some cases, not ever failing again or at least not for a long time).
I don't know how, but when plugging a USB A plug it usually takes me more than two tries to get it in. USB B is easier because the plug orientation is more visually apparent.
Mini-B is less troublesome than Micro-B, which is really hard to work with in low light for old farts like me with presbyopia.
The proprietary nature of Lightning and its excessive control by Apple is bad, but as a functional connector it works pretty well. I can plug my phone in without being able to see anything and thusfar it has been plenty durable, too. (My Proclip car charger/holder uses a lightning/30pin cable in the base, so it gets pretty hard use without any issues).
I think Apple would have been smart to create a cheap licensing program for it to gain wider adoption, especially for devices that aren't phones or tablets, as well as a more open spec that would have allowed for more innovative use with iPhones for third party components. Now that a USB spec is coming that eliminates the mechanical advantage of Lightning as a plug, the proprietary nature of of Lightning will be more glaring.
There's a crude joke that I'll modify for this -- "What's the difference between crime and commerce?" "Salesmanship."
I think there's a terribly ingrained acceptance of disingenuity in our society -- think of all the ways we phrase it -- selling a bill of goods, salesmanship, blaming the buyer ("caveat emptor", as if an old Latin phrase makes being ripped off always the buyer's fault). The entire practice of selling cars, and much of the world of advertising and marketing.
Bah, Max Brooks just creates a long winded explanation to make the rest of his story plausible, but it makes less sense when you actually look at real cluster munitions strikes or the damage a rotary-barrel machine gun can do, especially when you think of shooting them relatively level into a hoard..50 caliber projectiles are big and heavy and capable of doing not just wounding damage, but structural damage to bones and possess enough energy to do this to multiple bodies at once. It only gets worse for zombies as you climb into larger munitions, many capable of fragmentation airbursts, designed for targets behind barricades or in buildings.
I think there's probably real tactical value to damaging zombies as much as possible -- a zombie missing his legs may still be capable of advancing but not like an actual zombie capable of bipedal motion. Many may actually be rendered immobile if they aren't actually killed.
And then I think of even simple mechanical machines. Look at a flail deminer -- it's basically a horizontal shaft with chains attached to heavy steel weights. It spins and pounds the ground in front of it to set off mines. Driving one of this into a hoard would simply shred the zombies. An even better effect would be the same kind of mechanism, but with the shaft horizontal and the weights spinning in the horizontal plane. Guaranteed to crush skulls.
What always bugs me about the zombie meme is the forced idea that heavy weapons are ineffective against them.
I can see where spraying an M-16 in full auto at a crowd of zombies would be ineffective, but I would think that anything above a medium machine gun would be fairly devastating. One you start talking 20mm or 30mm rotary barrel guns it's not hard to see a lot of dead zombies.
From there, stuff like any kind of conventional bomb, especially cluster bombs, seems like it would neutralize crowds of thousands very quickly.
That's pretty bleak. The Geely takeover appears to have been largely successful and they're appearing to do a lot more innovating than they did under the lost decade of Ford.
I'm a fan of tapes too, partly because in the SMB space even the dumbest luser can change a tape, but changing out a disk drive on a Windows system *always* seems to be problematic.
Usually you're stuck with USB for ease of use, and even USB2 blows for throughput and I have yet to see a new server with USB3. And then there's the whole clusterfuck with drive letter assignments and the crummy job backup software does with identifying backup media vs. needing to write to some specific path (which is as much a Windows problem as anything).
Which makes me wonder why there isn't a SCSI storage peripheral that can use hard disks as removable media but looks to the server like a tape drive with some kind of translation to write to the disk. This lets you remove the whole disk management issue from the server to the peripheral disk host, as well as retaining tape compatibility with the backup software.
You could even get a little more exotic and put space for multiple disks in the peripheral and do various and sundry mirroring/RAID for redundancy and capacity.
Given the cost of LTO-5 and -6 in quantity, it's probably not cost effective over large quantities of tape, but I would think the peripheral itself would be cheaper (solid state, largely software) and more reliable, and for many use cases, possibly faster, since it's not always easy to maintain the streaming rates necessary to eliminate shoeshining with tape drives unless you're dumping a disk-based backup direct to tape.
My only big gripe with tape is drive reliability, they seem to die more easily than even individual drives in servers and SANs. My only other complaint is the legions of morons inisisting that cheap disk is always better than tape, making you look like a dinosaur for advocating tape.
One the arguments postulated against the proposed "Vermeer technique" by art historians is that Vermeer's paintings had architectural features that were largely unknown (eg, Italian tile in Dutch buildings) and structures which were architecturally or structurally difficult to build at the time.
They use this to claim that the scenes he painted weren't renderings of actual places, so the "technique" couldn't have been used as described or was only a partial inspiration that was used as a sort of foundation for the painting.
There's probably some substantive difference in hallucinations induced by drug stimuli versus those induced by removal of stimuli.
And a sensory deprivation tank itself is probably different than an anechoic chamber, since the tank is designed to remove all stimuli. The tanks are supposed to be dark and immerse you in water so you minimize all stimuli, where the anechoic chamber is quiet, but you still have physical stimuli since you're not in the dark, etc.
Drug induced hallucinations are probably more similar to the kinds of hallucinations schizophrenics have, since these hallucinations tend to be interactive with the stimuli around you. LSD hallucination seems to be changes in the things around you (ie, walls undulate, patterns move) more so than seeing things that aren't there.
It really is, except this time there's no messy "black bag" B&E jobs to get into homes and find porno mags, read diaries and letters, etc. Just hack into their computers and it's all right there.
I would imagine that most good palliative care docs don't just depend on morphine or fentanyl, I'm sure they have a good blend involving enough sedatives and hypnotics to ensure there really is zero chance of consciousness while *just* barely avoiding drug induced respiratory failure.
And I wouldn't be at all surprised if in a lot of these situations with the right circumstances respiratory failure gets induced. Right circumstances probably means a well understood terminal condition with no recovery possible and a family seen as in agreement about end of life and a doctor who's not a total dick.
Slashdot Mirror
....even and especially when it's unspoken.
Most people think of obesity initially as a function of morality, principally a lack of will power. You're obese because you have no self control over food. You eat too much.
This is reinforced by the notion of energy balance, which in turn reinforces the morality aspect, because the notion of energy balance leads to an additional conclusion, you don't get enough exercise, which is of course another failure of character. Now you're obese due to your lack of willpower to both control your eating AND exercise enough.
Even when doctors (like my doctor) try to approach the issue of weight they do it initially from the perspective of energy balance more formally, but underneath it always boils down to a failure of will power, since you aren't able to control your eating or exercise. Yet they treat other conditions like strep throat without an implied question of whether I have good hygiene or wash my heads enough.
The implied morality and self-control issues coupled with the flawed energy balance model keep doctors from pursuing more effective solutions to obesity, especially because some of the solutions defy the implied moralism. Low carbohydrate diets don't have a calorie target at all, they openly suggest you eat until you're full, and the causes are associated with too many carbohydrates which is some ways more analytic (what you eat, not how much). Drug therapies are the same kind of thing, they seem to be a "free ride" allowing immoral indulgence versus self-restraint.
I've only had to fill out paper health care forms a couple of times, but it's really easy to see how those confusing monsters can be filled out erroneously by the form filler, and then of course there are the transcription problems when forms get computer entered, either by drones in a coding center or by HR people.
What's wrong with this in comparison though, is that when the end-user uses a web site you would assume there is error checking of form logic (ie, if I fill box A and B it should be able to tell if I need to fill out box C). There's still the problem of factual error by the user but that's harder to detect.
The problem here though seems to be the data stored is erroneous due to problems with the code, not due to user error.
I think he's more surprised that more technologically savvy young people are so cavalier about it, especially at a college. Over the last 40-some years, college students have generally been pretty anti-establishment.
His opinion is that has shifted a little as college has become seen as more vocational, especially with kids focused on "business" degrees ("Fuck liberal arts, I just want to go make money") and as the economy has tightened and people see college as more of an economic stepping stone and less as a place to seek enlightenment. Cue the funeral music for the liberal arts.
My sense I shared with him is that so many kids of college age are SO public with their lives on social media and cellphones that when they feel like they don't have anything to hide, they're kind of being literal about it because they've already shared their opinons and pictures of themselves on Facebook already, so it's like "WTF? What else is there?" They have a very diminished sense of a private sphere.
Of course, I'm 47 next year, so I've accumulated a lot of things to hide...or at least a greater appreciation of a private sphere.
I'm sure there's a lot of great applications, but unifying persistent storage and memory seems like one with a lot of disruptive and performance enhancing possibilities relative to the limitations of RAM vs. disk.
A have a friend who teaches political science and history at a state college. He has been asking his students how they feel about NSA surveillance and the majority opinion is summarized "I have nothing to hide, I'm not doing anything wrong, if it increases safety it's OK."
It doesn't sound to me like a lot of "young people" are taking a very strong civil-liberties position on this. The school he teaches at is a smaller state school (ie, not the main, big-name state university) so the student body tends to be more "mainstream" than the more leftish bias you might expect at the "prestige" main campus.
And when I raise the issue among my 40-something adult peers it's surprising how little people care and the "Where's your tinfoil hat?" look people give you.
I think memristors are a really interesting development, mainly because as I understand one of the potential applications is for storage densities greater than hard disks with DRAM-like access speeds.
It's not hard to postulate applications where you combine data storage and DRAM together, resulting in big performance increases by eliminating much of the latencies involved with disk access.
It probably wouldn't have as much impact on pure CPU bound tasks but so many workloads now are I/O bound and performance limited by disk systems that having a unified DRAM + storage space could mean performance increases beyond what the additional of CPU power alone could mean.
It MUST have been the "goddamn, dipshit, gypsy-dildo" Rodriguez brothers!
...or several of the scenes in Repo Man!
And there's two sides to the cultural thing -- management is an equal player in the push-pull with unions and bears some responsibility for the things typically blamed on unions.
IANAL, but if a public building has a resource available in a common area without access controls or signage indicating its use is restricted, isn't it a reasonable assumption that the resource is a public accomodation available for all to use?
It seems to me that it's not reasonable to make resources available without signage or access controls in a public space and then arrest someone for actually using them.
There may be finer-grained questions about what would constitute "reasonable use" -- ie, I can't run a hose from a public drinking fountain to fill my swimming pool, and maybe charging EVs would violate reasonable use, but unless you post rules for the outlet or some kind of locking mechanism, using an outlet on the outside of a public building to charge an EV in the building's parking lot doesn't seem like theft.
I can believe the firmware issue in SAN systems, especially because I think SANs work with the drives probably more in depth than typical storage environments.
There was a period of time where we had a ton of drives failing in Equallogic SANs and not long after there was new firmware for the controllers and the drives that made the high rate of failure end.
What this makes me wonder, though, is when drives "fail" in a lot of storage environments are they really failing, or is there just some communication issue with the drive and its controller chain? I know a lot of times a failed server RAID drive can be pulled and replaced and it will just rebuild as if it was a new drive (in some cases, not ever failing again or at least not for a long time).
I don't know how, but when plugging a USB A plug it usually takes me more than two tries to get it in. USB B is easier because the plug orientation is more visually apparent.
Mini-B is less troublesome than Micro-B, which is really hard to work with in low light for old farts like me with presbyopia.
Cue the anti-Lightning connector posts.
The proprietary nature of Lightning and its excessive control by Apple is bad, but as a functional connector it works pretty well. I can plug my phone in without being able to see anything and thusfar it has been plenty durable, too. (My Proclip car charger/holder uses a lightning/30pin cable in the base, so it gets pretty hard use without any issues).
I think Apple would have been smart to create a cheap licensing program for it to gain wider adoption, especially for devices that aren't phones or tablets, as well as a more open spec that would have allowed for more innovative use with iPhones for third party components. Now that a USB spec is coming that eliminates the mechanical advantage of Lightning as a plug, the proprietary nature of of Lightning will be more glaring.
McDonald's wifi is usually horribly slow for me. I do much better off LTE than their wifi.
There's a crude joke that I'll modify for this -- "What's the difference between crime and commerce?" "Salesmanship."
I think there's a terribly ingrained acceptance of disingenuity in our society -- think of all the ways we phrase it -- selling a bill of goods, salesmanship, blaming the buyer ("caveat emptor", as if an old Latin phrase makes being ripped off always the buyer's fault). The entire practice of selling cars, and much of the world of advertising and marketing.
Bah, Max Brooks just creates a long winded explanation to make the rest of his story plausible, but it makes less sense when you actually look at real cluster munitions strikes or the damage a rotary-barrel machine gun can do, especially when you think of shooting them relatively level into a hoard. .50 caliber projectiles are big and heavy and capable of doing not just wounding damage, but structural damage to bones and possess enough energy to do this to multiple bodies at once. It only gets worse for zombies as you climb into larger munitions, many capable of fragmentation airbursts, designed for targets behind barricades or in buildings.
I think there's probably real tactical value to damaging zombies as much as possible -- a zombie missing his legs may still be capable of advancing but not like an actual zombie capable of bipedal motion. Many may actually be rendered immobile if they aren't actually killed.
And then I think of even simple mechanical machines. Look at a flail deminer -- it's basically a horizontal shaft with chains attached to heavy steel weights. It spins and pounds the ground in front of it to set off mines. Driving one of this into a hoard would simply shred the zombies. An even better effect would be the same kind of mechanism, but with the shaft horizontal and the weights spinning in the horizontal plane. Guaranteed to crush skulls.
Funny how attracting the top talent only requires you to compensate *fairly*, not "well" or "very well", just fairly.
Does this mean that the strategy for hiring "average" talent involves compensating unfairly?
What always bugs me about the zombie meme is the forced idea that heavy weapons are ineffective against them.
I can see where spraying an M-16 in full auto at a crowd of zombies would be ineffective, but I would think that anything above a medium machine gun would be fairly devastating. One you start talking 20mm or 30mm rotary barrel guns it's not hard to see a lot of dead zombies.
From there, stuff like any kind of conventional bomb, especially cluster bombs, seems like it would neutralize crowds of thousands very quickly.
I don't think Volvos use Ford transmissions. My 2007 S80 uses an Aisin transmission, which I think is used on the S60 as well.
It's a six speed with the "shiftmatic" option that lets you manually go up/down a gear if you want, which is great for passing/merging.
That's pretty bleak. The Geely takeover appears to have been largely successful and they're appearing to do a lot more innovating than they did under the lost decade of Ford.
I'm a fan of tapes too, partly because in the SMB space even the dumbest luser can change a tape, but changing out a disk drive on a Windows system *always* seems to be problematic.
Usually you're stuck with USB for ease of use, and even USB2 blows for throughput and I have yet to see a new server with USB3. And then there's the whole clusterfuck with drive letter assignments and the crummy job backup software does with identifying backup media vs. needing to write to some specific path (which is as much a Windows problem as anything).
Which makes me wonder why there isn't a SCSI storage peripheral that can use hard disks as removable media but looks to the server like a tape drive with some kind of translation to write to the disk. This lets you remove the whole disk management issue from the server to the peripheral disk host, as well as retaining tape compatibility with the backup software.
You could even get a little more exotic and put space for multiple disks in the peripheral and do various and sundry mirroring/RAID for redundancy and capacity.
Given the cost of LTO-5 and -6 in quantity, it's probably not cost effective over large quantities of tape, but I would think the peripheral itself would be cheaper (solid state, largely software) and more reliable, and for many use cases, possibly faster, since it's not always easy to maintain the streaming rates necessary to eliminate shoeshining with tape drives unless you're dumping a disk-based backup direct to tape.
My only big gripe with tape is drive reliability, they seem to die more easily than even individual drives in servers and SANs. My only other complaint is the legions of morons inisisting that cheap disk is always better than tape, making you look like a dinosaur for advocating tape.
One the arguments postulated against the proposed "Vermeer technique" by art historians is that Vermeer's paintings had architectural features that were largely unknown (eg, Italian tile in Dutch buildings) and structures which were architecturally or structurally difficult to build at the time.
They use this to claim that the scenes he painted weren't renderings of actual places, so the "technique" couldn't have been used as described or was only a partial inspiration that was used as a sort of foundation for the painting.
There's probably some substantive difference in hallucinations induced by drug stimuli versus those induced by removal of stimuli.
And a sensory deprivation tank itself is probably different than an anechoic chamber, since the tank is designed to remove all stimuli. The tanks are supposed to be dark and immerse you in water so you minimize all stimuli, where the anechoic chamber is quiet, but you still have physical stimuli since you're not in the dark, etc.
Drug induced hallucinations are probably more similar to the kinds of hallucinations schizophrenics have, since these hallucinations tend to be interactive with the stimuli around you. LSD hallucination seems to be changes in the things around you (ie, walls undulate, patterns move) more so than seeing things that aren't there.
It really is, except this time there's no messy "black bag" B&E jobs to get into homes and find porno mags, read diaries and letters, etc. Just hack into their computers and it's all right there.
I would imagine that most good palliative care docs don't just depend on morphine or fentanyl, I'm sure they have a good blend involving enough sedatives and hypnotics to ensure there really is zero chance of consciousness while *just* barely avoiding drug induced respiratory failure.
And I wouldn't be at all surprised if in a lot of these situations with the right circumstances respiratory failure gets induced. Right circumstances probably means a well understood terminal condition with no recovery possible and a family seen as in agreement about end of life and a doctor who's not a total dick.