If you've been to any city, where you're surrounded by humans, you should rightly become quickly anti-human. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of every year, there is a constant din of inconsiderate noisy people. Cities are surrounded with mountains of garbage, and streets are filled with the stench of urine and industrial exhaust. People leave their crap all over the place, and consume resources and destroy, and are completely indifferent to the effects on those around them . . . even when, in the long term, the well-being of others is vital for mutual survival.
Then - if you've been to even the most remote places in the world, furthest from human snivilization, you've seen the effects: Our space junk litters the heavens with distracting lights across the night skies. Noisy jet planes disturb the quiet of the wilderness, and leave white trails across the pristine blue. The clearest mountain lakes are contaminated with our filth. Arctic glaciers are stained with industrial soot.
There.
Is.
No.
Escape.
We have not left one place in this world untouched and sacred.
When I was in High School - we did an experiment with a test tube, and a growth medium. We innoculated the medium with yeast. Then we monitored its growth and analyzed the contents. The yeast culture grew and grew, until the colony drowned in it's own waste, and they all died.
It seems that humanity is no smarter than yeast.
Only - we're trying as hard as we can to take every other species down with us. Humanity FTW.
I did, and I realized that the best solution was to put the solar panels in geosynchronous orbit, and beam the power back down to earth via microwaves. I had a small seed-capital problem though. . .
It's most likely screenplay writers who don't have the sufficient legal backing to make sure they don't get sued for trademark infringement. So they fall back on the next best thing; cross-licensing.
Having all the smart phones produced in China makes ZERO sense.
Unless you are a DoD Procurement officer who hopes to retire into a fat consulting gig with the American subsidiary of a Chinese smartphone manufacturer. . . . (big old fucking thousand-year-old DUH! Oldest DUH in the world. Like DUH dating back to ancient Rome.)
A couple of weeks ago, Goolge slapped Microsoft with a patent troll press-release. Now this. Or as Bugs Bunny used to say: "Of course you know, this means war.":)
Explanation for viral vaccines: Jonas Salk gave his discovery away for free. Nice guy.
Explanation for antibiotics for bacterial diseases: Companies continue to sell HIGH PRICE variants to humans, and low price variants in bulk, to farmers, which causes antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria to emerge, so, while these drugs DO cure bacterial infections now, there are many drugs which are no longer effective, and many more which will not be effective in the future, necessitating ever newer patented and higher-priced drugs (treatments) to be brought to market.
That's all fine and dandy, but when I tried a certain "common prescription drug" - I started getting heartburn. The doctor said; " wow, that's not on the published list of side-effects, that couldn't possibly be caused by that drug. keep on taking it." I kept taking it, but it kept getting worse and worse. after 4 weeks, it was getting so bad, I could not sleep at night, I started taking antacids, strong ones; and I even started taking strong proton-pump inhibitors, and gave those 5 days to start working - zero effect! I was taking 12, 20, 30 TUMS, just to tolerate it. I would feel better if I ate, but then the pain would become much worse about a half our later, so I just stopped eating.
I decided to stop taking this drug cold-turkey - which is NOT recommended, and I experienced serious "discontinuation syndrome" effects for a few days afterwards. And minor symptoms for MONTHS. But the heartburn stopped immediately the next day.
Now; AFTER I stopped, I went online, looking for information. I found that this drug was a new reformulation of a different drug. And while heartburn was not a listed side-effect of that drug either, there were tons of people complaining about it, and other listed side-effects that the doctor had said were rare. (I know: selection bias; but the heartburn was NOT EVEN LISTED by the manufacturer!). I also read about the whole saga of discontinuation syndrome, and how this entire class of drugs had this problem, and the manufacturers denied the problem for an entire decade - and then, instead of calling it "withdrawal symptoms" like every other addictive substance known to man, they invented the term "discontinuation syndrome" to describe it, and recommended a tapering-off course. Well, all these new reformulations are in supposed "time-release" form, and they do not recommend cutting those pills. (therefore, if you can't tolerate their minimum dose that they package, you are screwed. If you want to save money by buying a bulk dosage and cut them, because they're treating a long-term cronic condition, you are screwed. And if you want to taper-off them, and cut them so you can take a half pill a day for a few weeks, then a quarter pill a day for a few weeks, etc. YOU ARE SCREWED.)
That said - I understand the efficacy of this class of drug - and I do agree that for some people, they can be helpful to get out of a state to allow therapy to work, and that they are probably useful for short (3-6 month) periods of time. But for those who get on them and get stuck on them for life, they are a crutch, and big pharma does all they can to break your legs.
I hope they frak. Please please please god let them frak!
I want them to frak so bad.
Then please post the video of you crying about your poisoned drinking water on you tube. I want to watch that too. It gets boring on some Friday nights. It will be teh funny!
As it is, with price - I took a big salary hit when I was laid off in 2002, and re-hired as a temp 60 days later. I was a homeowner, married, 3 kids. I lost 60% of my income. Within 12 months, my new employer very quickly saw that they made a huge error when they hired me as a paper-shuffler, and realized that I was actually a programmer, so they made a new (permanent) position, and rehired me, and at a sizable increase. Pretty much, I guess the going rate for a junior position, but still about 75% of what I was earning before I was laid off.
I kind of just swallowed that; maybe my previous employer was overpaying me. Overpaying all of us. And that's probably why their business failed, and they had to lay off a bunch of us, and eventually, they were bought, and then that company got bought, and that company got bought; and then the next owner shut that business unit down.
Too expensive?
The money we were earning in 1997 was crazy.
I can't find the link, but there was also a recent article about stock prices too. When you recall the hubub about stock prices in the late 90's - and all the concern that they didn't follow "normal" P/E ratios, and that everyone thought that they were going to just shoot up forever, or that "tech stocks followed different rules". Then the bubble burst. But even then, the P/E values on tech stocks have been crazy.
Until last week's "correction". When you graph it out over the long-term (50+ years) - stocks, right now, are priced just about right. P/E-wise.
I diverge on this little tangent, because maybe IT/developer salaries are just about right now also. (maybe? I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. I've been known to undersell myself!!!) - Maybe the "inflated" salaries, and upscale lifestyles were a result of undeserved hype. Wouldn't we like to get a little bit more worth out of this? milk the "tech" wave some more? Sure.
Is it difficult to swallow scaling back? Yes. Especially when you've already committed to a 20 year mortgage based on a much larger salary.
As far as ATTITUDE goes: There's a difference between being inexperienced, and sucking-up, and sitting back and watching a team make the same painful and costly mistakes you've seen made over and over, 5, 10, or 15 years ago, and either speaking-up to try to stop it (or just keeping your mouth shut, because you know damn well that nobody's going to listen, ultimately - it takes a CULTURE SHIFT to embrace good process to avoid mistakes, and being a dick and complaining isn't going to change the culture of your team mates, work environment, and management. In fact, I don't think that it is possible to CHANGE the way a company works. They either do it right, or they don't, (and they either get away with not doing it right, or they don't.)
My soft place to land: A chain of bank robberies, followed by a hail of bullets. Cheaper than a social security payout, right? Benefit to society: Profits to Pfizer, on the PTSD meds they'll have to give the cop who shoots me dead. Gonna make some Pfizer exec very happy and wealthy. FTW!
This is true, and why I largely "missed the boat" with C++. . . but with Java, and php, (maybe to some degree, perl) - I was able to make that up. I don't believe I will *ever* be able to learn C++. The investment and curve are just too steep to be practical. Could I *do* it if someone else financed the time? Sure. Who will pay for that for 12 months for me?
I just looked down at my keyboard, and I was like; "WTF?!" I *do* still have one! Right between SysRq and Pause/Break. I've been using computers since 1980 (TRS-80, Apple ii, PLATO... then IBM PC's), and I can't recall a single time any of these three bitches ever did a damn thing! EVER!
Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 1
The eradication of polio did not mean the end of the March of Dimes.
Note the irony: Salk gave away the discovery of his vaccine for FREE (ie. what we today, call "Open Source" or maybe "Creative Commons")
- in today's patent environment, he would have been funded by a consortium of pharmaceutical companies, and they would have patented it; with or without his approval. Actual fielding of the vaccine would have probably been left up to an accountant after a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the vaccine, or ongoing treatments for polio sufferers yielded better profits for the company.
My full-sized box has a big screen, and 1TB of hard drive space, and a full-sized keyboard, and a mouse.
So I don't have to crow about "now my tablet can connect to all this extra what-if stuff that I don't have, or would have to pay extra for." - I actually HAVE those capabilities with my system. But that's not what tablet manufacturers want to offer users.
X-33 was the inheritor of those ideas. Canceled by congress in 1996. Yes - there were serious technical issues - but the concept, as a whole, was nowhere nearly as flawed as STS. It was quite elegant. I do not understand why there was no discussion of continuing this research when STS was canceled. Oh - yes I do: There could be no pork for a certain congressional district in Utah, if we used a sensible design.
Solid rockets (anyway) - if you're going to put PEOPLE into them, are pretty horrible, because the chunks of propellant tend to burn very unevenly, and cause vibrations. Another drawback is that combustion travels upward along the interior of the rocket body, so that heat and stress of combustion must be accounted for along the entire length of the rocket. The reliability of solid propellant is also not that great - in some cases, pieces of propellant leave the rocket unburned. (this is largely a quality-control issue, however).
In STS, the vibrations required a great deal of structural dampening and reinforcement, which added weight. The heat of combustion also caused "flare-outs" - which in Challenger, caused a catastrophic loss of vehicle.
In Ares, the vibration required a redesign, such that a huge hydraulic damping system needed to be added to absorb shock to the payload.
Solid boosters also can not be shut-down in case of an emergency (like, if the rocket goes off course), and changes in maximum thrust must be engineered into the engine, and can not be programmed into the flight profile to accommodate mission requirements.
All those criticisms said: solid rockets are absolutely ideal for ballistic missiles.
Now - liquid-fuelled (cryogenic) rockets have their own set of technical problems, but the #1 problem seems to be that you've got to keep a stable of trained and experienced engine-designers staffed and career-ed in order to keep an industry going. This is pretty expensive. And neither private industry, nor government wants to do that. (in the USA). They have no problem paying executives and administrators these kinds of salaries. But apparently aerospace engineers are not allowed to have a career long enough to pay off a mortgage, or send their kids to college.
Oh you see, it wasn't the REPUBLICANS who don't want to pay. The republicans want to continue borrowing. Or cut medicaid and welfare, or something like that. (Not sure what their plan actually is, because it doesn't actually make mathematical sense).
But it is the TEA PARTY that wants to default. See? TEA PARTY != Republican Party. They're different, get it? Blame them. Not "us". Sort of like, the Taliban. "Blame Al Qaida for your twin towers terrorist attack. Not us Taliban."
Slashdot Mirror
seriously. . . brought a tear to my eye. :)
If you've been to any city, where you're surrounded by humans, you should rightly become quickly anti-human. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of every year, there is a constant din of inconsiderate noisy people. Cities are surrounded with mountains of garbage, and streets are filled with the stench of urine and industrial exhaust. People leave their crap all over the place, and consume resources and destroy, and are completely indifferent to the effects on those around them . . . even when, in the long term, the well-being of others is vital for mutual survival.
Then - if you've been to even the most remote places in the world, furthest from human snivilization, you've seen the effects: Our space junk litters the heavens with distracting lights across the night skies. Noisy jet planes disturb the quiet of the wilderness, and leave white trails across the pristine blue. The clearest mountain lakes are contaminated with our filth. Arctic glaciers are stained with industrial soot.
There.
Is.
No.
Escape.
We have not left one place in this world untouched and sacred.
When I was in High School - we did an experiment with a test tube, and a growth medium. We innoculated the medium with yeast. Then we monitored its growth and analyzed the contents. The yeast culture grew and grew, until the colony drowned in it's own waste, and they all died.
It seems that humanity is no smarter than yeast.
Only - we're trying as hard as we can to take every other species down with us. Humanity FTW.
I did, and I realized that the best solution was to put the solar panels in geosynchronous orbit, and beam the power back down to earth via microwaves. I had a small seed-capital problem though. . .
It's most likely screenplay writers who don't have the sufficient legal backing to make sure they don't get sued for trademark infringement. So they fall back on the next best thing; cross-licensing.
Who replicates the replicants?
Having all the smart phones produced in China makes ZERO sense.
Unless you are a DoD Procurement officer who hopes to retire into a fat consulting gig with the American subsidiary of a Chinese smartphone manufacturer. . . . (big old fucking thousand-year-old DUH! Oldest DUH in the world. Like DUH dating back to ancient Rome.)
A couple of weeks ago, Goolge slapped Microsoft with a patent troll press-release. :)
Now this.
Or as Bugs Bunny used to say: "Of course you know, this means war."
Explanation for viral vaccines: Jonas Salk gave his discovery away for free. Nice guy.
Explanation for antibiotics for bacterial diseases: Companies continue to sell HIGH PRICE variants to humans, and low price variants in bulk, to farmers, which causes antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria to emerge, so, while these drugs DO cure bacterial infections now, there are many drugs which are no longer effective, and many more which will not be effective in the future, necessitating ever newer patented and higher-priced drugs (treatments) to be brought to market.
That's all fine and dandy, but when I tried a certain "common prescription drug" - I started getting heartburn. The doctor said; " wow, that's not on the published list of side-effects, that couldn't possibly be caused by that drug. keep on taking it." I kept taking it, but it kept getting worse and worse. after 4 weeks, it was getting so bad, I could not sleep at night, I started taking antacids, strong ones; and I even started taking strong proton-pump inhibitors, and gave those 5 days to start working - zero effect! I was taking 12, 20, 30 TUMS, just to tolerate it. I would feel better if I ate, but then the pain would become much worse about a half our later, so I just stopped eating.
I decided to stop taking this drug cold-turkey - which is NOT recommended, and I experienced serious "discontinuation syndrome" effects for a few days afterwards. And minor symptoms for MONTHS. But the heartburn stopped immediately the next day.
Now; AFTER I stopped, I went online, looking for information. I found that this drug was a new reformulation of a different drug. And while heartburn was not a listed side-effect of that drug either, there were tons of people complaining about it, and other listed side-effects that the doctor had said were rare. (I know: selection bias; but the heartburn was NOT EVEN LISTED by the manufacturer!). I also read about the whole saga of discontinuation syndrome, and how this entire class of drugs had this problem, and the manufacturers denied the problem for an entire decade - and then, instead of calling it "withdrawal symptoms" like every other addictive substance known to man, they invented the term "discontinuation syndrome" to describe it, and recommended a tapering-off course. Well, all these new reformulations are in supposed "time-release" form, and they do not recommend cutting those pills. (therefore, if you can't tolerate their minimum dose that they package, you are screwed. If you want to save money by buying a bulk dosage and cut them, because they're treating a long-term cronic condition, you are screwed. And if you want to taper-off them, and cut them so you can take a half pill a day for a few weeks, then a quarter pill a day for a few weeks, etc. YOU ARE SCREWED.)
That said - I understand the efficacy of this class of drug - and I do agree that for some people, they can be helpful to get out of a state to allow therapy to work, and that they are probably useful for short (3-6 month) periods of time. But for those who get on them and get stuck on them for life, they are a crutch, and big pharma does all they can to break your legs.
If it's too loud, you're too old.
I hope they frak.
Please please please god let them frak!
I want them to frak so bad.
Then please post the video of you crying about your poisoned drinking water on you tube. I want to watch that too. It gets boring on some Friday nights. It will be teh funny!
As it is, with price - I took a big salary hit when I was laid off in 2002, and re-hired as a temp 60 days later. I was a homeowner, married, 3 kids. I lost 60% of my income. Within 12 months, my new employer very quickly saw that they made a huge error when they hired me as a paper-shuffler, and realized that I was actually a programmer, so they made a new (permanent) position, and rehired me, and at a sizable increase. Pretty much, I guess the going rate for a junior position, but still about 75% of what I was earning before I was laid off.
I kind of just swallowed that; maybe my previous employer was overpaying me. Overpaying all of us. And that's probably why their business failed, and they had to lay off a bunch of us, and eventually, they were bought, and then that company got bought, and that company got bought; and then the next owner shut that business unit down.
Too expensive?
The money we were earning in 1997 was crazy.
I can't find the link, but there was also a recent article about stock prices too.
When you recall the hubub about stock prices in the late 90's - and all the concern that they didn't follow "normal" P/E ratios, and that everyone thought that they were going to just shoot up forever, or that "tech stocks followed different rules". Then the bubble burst.
But even then, the P/E values on tech stocks have been crazy.
Until last week's "correction". When you graph it out over the long-term (50+ years) - stocks, right now, are priced just about right. P/E-wise.
I diverge on this little tangent, because maybe IT/developer salaries are just about right now also. (maybe? I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. I've been known to undersell myself!!!) - Maybe the "inflated" salaries, and upscale lifestyles were a result of undeserved hype. Wouldn't we like to get a little bit more worth out of this? milk the "tech" wave some more? Sure.
Is it difficult to swallow scaling back? Yes. Especially when you've already committed to a 20 year mortgage based on a much larger salary.
As far as ATTITUDE goes:
There's a difference between being inexperienced, and sucking-up, and sitting back and watching a team make the same painful and costly mistakes you've seen made over and over, 5, 10, or 15 years ago, and either speaking-up to try to stop it (or just keeping your mouth shut, because you know damn well that nobody's going to listen, ultimately - it takes a CULTURE SHIFT to embrace good process to avoid mistakes, and being a dick and complaining isn't going to change the culture of your team mates, work environment, and management. In fact, I don't think that it is possible to CHANGE the way a company works. They either do it right, or they don't, (and they either get away with not doing it right, or they don't.)
My soft place to land:
A chain of bank robberies, followed by a hail of bullets. Cheaper than a social security payout, right?
Benefit to society:
Profits to Pfizer, on the PTSD meds they'll have to give the cop who shoots me dead. Gonna make some Pfizer exec very happy and wealthy. FTW!
This is true, and why I largely "missed the boat" with C++. . . but with Java, and php, (maybe to some degree, perl) - I was able to make that up. I don't believe I will *ever* be able to learn C++. The investment and curve are just too steep to be practical. Could I *do* it if someone else financed the time? Sure. Who will pay for that for 12 months for me?
I don't understand this comment. What's wrong with the masses pissing soup? They could sell the soup and make money!
I just looked down at my keyboard, and I was like; "WTF?!" I *do* still have one! Right between SysRq and Pause/Break. I've been using computers since 1980 (TRS-80, Apple ii, PLATO... then IBM PC's), and I can't recall a single time any of these three bitches ever did a damn thing! EVER!
The eradication of polio did not mean the end of the March of Dimes.
Note the irony: Salk gave away the discovery of his vaccine for FREE (ie. what we today, call "Open Source" or maybe "Creative Commons")
- in today's patent environment, he would have been funded by a consortium of pharmaceutical companies, and they would have patented it; with or without his approval. Actual fielding of the vaccine would have probably been left up to an accountant after a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the vaccine, or ongoing treatments for polio sufferers yielded better profits for the company.
My full-sized box has a big screen, and 1TB of hard drive space, and a full-sized keyboard, and a mouse.
So I don't have to crow about "now my tablet can connect to all this extra what-if stuff that I don't have, or would have to pay extra for." - I actually HAVE those capabilities with my system. But that's not what tablet manufacturers want to offer users.
well, no. Not tablets anyway. Tablets are a fad, and they are going away.
X-33 was the inheritor of those ideas. Canceled by congress in 1996. Yes - there were serious technical issues - but the concept, as a whole, was nowhere nearly as flawed as STS. It was quite elegant. I do not understand why there was no discussion of continuing this research when STS was canceled. Oh - yes I do: There could be no pork for a certain congressional district in Utah, if we used a sensible design.
You're over-stating the simplicity of rockets.
Solid rockets (anyway) - if you're going to put PEOPLE into them, are pretty horrible, because the chunks of propellant tend to burn very unevenly, and cause vibrations. Another drawback is that combustion travels upward along the interior of the rocket body, so that heat and stress of combustion must be accounted for along the entire length of the rocket. The reliability of solid propellant is also not that great - in some cases, pieces of propellant leave the rocket unburned. (this is largely a quality-control issue, however).
In STS, the vibrations required a great deal of structural dampening and reinforcement, which added weight.
The heat of combustion also caused "flare-outs" - which in Challenger, caused a catastrophic loss of vehicle.
In Ares, the vibration required a redesign, such that a huge hydraulic damping system needed to be added to absorb shock to the payload.
Solid boosters also can not be shut-down in case of an emergency (like, if the rocket goes off course), and changes in maximum thrust must be engineered into the engine, and can not be programmed into the flight profile to accommodate mission requirements.
All those criticisms said: solid rockets are absolutely ideal for ballistic missiles.
Now - liquid-fuelled (cryogenic) rockets have their own set of technical problems, but the #1 problem seems to be that you've got to keep a stable of trained and experienced engine-designers staffed and career-ed in order to keep an industry going. This is pretty expensive. And neither private industry, nor government wants to do that. (in the USA). They have no problem paying executives and administrators these kinds of salaries. But apparently aerospace engineers are not allowed to have a career long enough to pay off a mortgage, or send their kids to college.
Ya know, the really big ones, they went the road of the dodo. Might be a hint...
so, you're saying. . . midget porn is what will save them?
it's also why cable porn is castrated somewhat.
NO! They ABSOLUTELY can't show THAT stuff. That would totally get shut down!
. . . actually, I am hoping that they succeed in turning this country into a lawless backwater.
Because THEN, I can come and get those motherfuckers.
They think their guns will protect them. But everybody's gotta sleep sometime.
Oh you see, it wasn't the REPUBLICANS who don't want to pay. The republicans want to continue borrowing. Or cut medicaid and welfare, or something like that. (Not sure what their plan actually is, because it doesn't actually make mathematical sense).
But it is the TEA PARTY that wants to default. See? TEA PARTY != Republican Party. They're different, get it? Blame them. Not "us". Sort of like, the Taliban. "Blame Al Qaida for your twin towers terrorist attack. Not us Taliban."