Same deal here. Severe lower back pain. Numbness in parts of my legs.
Doctors, MRI's, pain specialists, chiropractors - nothing. (Of course, ins wouldn't pay for surgery! - unless there was "loss of functionality" - ie. I became paralyzed)
A physical therapist checked me out, and said that the therapy the Dr. ordered was a waste of time for me, and had me try something else - and FINALLY, after 5 years of suffering, my condition improved. I'm not ALL better - but I caught the damage before there was permanent impairment.
Operant conditioning is a fine topic for a psych 101 class. Fortunately, it's not how human beings actually think and behave, in most cases. Most people are far more complicated than that.
Yes - $ for grades will instill a perverse morality, and create a fairly coin-operated cohort of students. But then again, what sort of society are they going to be living in? The question is: will these kids be able to rise above these values they're being taught, and understand that life is about more than money? The answer is: school would be far from the only place this "value" is being thrown at them. Who's teaching them other values, and which message is louder?
Well, we need to look at two other recent crashes.
The guy who landed his plane in the Potomac saving all his passengers, was clearly a case of individual heroism, and skill and experience of the pilot.
The guy who crashed a small commuter plane into a suburban house in New York, however, because he was busy chatting with his co-pilot about his inexperience with icing conditions, in a plane whose auto-pilot was engaged, a month after a warning bulletin had gone out to pilots about NOT flying on auto-pilot in icing conditions. . . in a plane whose design and configuration (wing-over-fuselage, turboprop) is KNOWN to not play-nice in icing conditions, was a brilliant example of how an underpaid, undertrained, inexperienced pilot, in conjunction with poorly designed equipment (plane with an autopilot that can't handle sudden loss of lift in icing conditions - lack of sufficient de-icing and ice-detecting equipment) can cause a catastrophic failure, that is otherwise survivable.
We can design the equipment to handle all the rough edge-cases. If we sufficiently engineer the equipment to handle them. Then with proper maintenance, the equipment will perform consistently. What percentage of those edge cases do you engineer for. ALL of them? How much does that cost? Can we predict EVERY situation?
On the other hand, you can educate and train and pay for the most experienced supermen pilots in the world, and put them in every plane - probably costs a lot more than a microchip mass-produced by children in taiwan; and even the most experienced pilots can't counter some situations.
The REAL problem here - is that aerospace engineers design planes, design computers, flight software, etc. - and they do their job well, solving all the problems of flight. Their "backup" equipment, is a well-trained, well-paid pilot.
Then you get an ignorant bean-counter working for the airline, who responds to a price-spike in a commodity like jet fuel, by cutting corners in operations, maintenance, or quality of the labor force. The accountant is now making a decision to change a variable that the aerospace engineers were counting on. Any number of variables. Now you have a less predictable outcome.
Loss of life is the result. Suffering families of people who just needed to get from point a to point b.
Does the airline suffer? Does the accountant suffer? No. Not much.
I have in-laws in suburban Phoenix, and there is an "anti-light pollution" ordinance in effect there. NO STREETLIGHTS. It is very eerie and strange, driving around dense suburbs, in near total darkness. You see the headlights of the other traffic, the endless banality of the lighted signs at strip-malls, but aside from the safety lights in the parking lots, no lights on the street.
In contrast, I (very fortunately) live in a fairly rural area in California; though we DO have streetlights. And the view of the stars at night is better in Phoenix. I have to drive about a half hour away from home to get a decent view of the night sky.
Now: compared to where I grew up - Chicago. . . I remember being disappointed when Haley's Comet came around. I couldn't even see the damn thing on a clear night. And that was after an hour's drive out into the "country".
Light pollution ordinances seem to be a very fascistic way to address this; public-safety is really more important than everyone being able to see stars from their backyard. It's an old notion that is apparently dying for us. It's sad. But as we (humanity) breed faster than cockroaches, I don't really see much alternative.
Except that crowdsourcing (and ELECTIONS) suffer from selection bias. The squeaky wheels will go out of their way to drown out every other voice. And no moderation system is perfect. (Except slashdot's! Please don't ban me!)
But a demographic survey *IS* a scientifically rigorous way to obtain, not only "popular opinion" (however you'd like to define it) but also, how an election might turn out.
The problem with surveys is: the surveyor chooses the topic. The problem with crowdsourced surveys is: the subjects choose the topic. (but the loudest voices win).
I think either suffers from sort of a Heisenberg's Indeterminacy problem. You can observe the zeitgeist, or you can observe a particular topic. But you poison the results by looking at both.
It would have likely failed with a zillion "permission denied" errors - as frequently occurs on Macs, no matter who you're logged in as and no matter what password you enter.
Now if it drills down, chown/chmod 777's everything, THEN rm -rf, you'd be in deep shit.
I generally have 3-5 separate windows open (sometimes running under different user accounts), each with dozens of tabs; I like to keep tabs in a given window grouped according to a topic.
I use a separate window just for "daily" web links (news, comics, slashdot, ars, gizmodo, etc.)
Then each project or topic I may be researching gets another window of its own.
Basically I'm solving two problems inherent in the web paradigm: 1. Persistence. What I read and bookmark today, may be completely different when I click the bookmark tomorrow. 2. Navigability. Sometimes - I can't remember the google search term (sometimes, google will give me a completely different set of results than I used; plus, out of the 10 links I may initially click on, read, and evalute - maybe only 2 or 3 are any good; I keep those open. When I come back to the original search page later, all I see are links I've followed in the past - I don't know which ones I've eliminated. - so unless I kept those open until I have time for a deeper evaluation, I can't always remember which ones were crap.) =- the navigability problem is essentially the fact that bookmarks are too hard to make, and too difficult to organize (or keep organized) semantically (easier than FILES tho. . . ) - and too hard to get rid of once they're "stale". (either the content has gone stale, or my own mental "working state" has gone stale).
Believe me: with a typical tab-load of 200+. . . I've pondered this problem. I'm smart enough to create and identify it, but apparently not smart enough to solve it.
First place I ever saw tabs was Compaq's "Tabworks" - for Compaq oem machines running Windows 3.1. It was Teh Awesome replacement for MS Program Manager.
(of course, back then, QEMM was the only REAL solution to get a DOS machine to actually be useful).
The practice is probably legal, in a marketplace where there's more than 2 competitors. In this case, Intel has 1 competitor, and has a clearly overwhelming marketshare advantage to begin with, BEFORE you consider anticompetitive practices.
This is really bad for the marketplace - bad for consumers - bad for innovation, it's actually REALLY bad for intel's own long-term interest. Becoming a monopoly is great for short-term profits. But long term, if you've got no incentive to innovate, then you sit around with your thumb up your butt, do nothing, and your best staff leaves to go start their own companies. (which most often, promptly get squashed, if any of you are familiar with the history of the dotcom era).
What I don't get is; I was REALLY bothered by all the same EXACT things you cite - and yet, NOBODY else here is criticizing these things.
I - actually liked the new-angle on the old Star Trek Canon. I think it played nicely to the tongue-in-cheek way we look back at the 1970's, in general, now.
And I know - Star Trek never really payed more than lip-service to scientific literacy. At least TOS, more than TNG. But - holy crap, some of the premises in the plot made me want to vomit. I walked out of there incredibly insulted - just on the poor quality of the writing. If you're pushing a product that has a PRODUCTION COST of $150m; that writing should not have passed the smell-test. Even if your design-goal is "over-the-top mindless-fun" - I was starting to wonder when I was going to see Will Ferrel in that damn movie.
This movie COULD HAVE been great. It was really close to great. But the little things that sucked, sucked worse than the largest black hole in the universe.
I think you're spot-on about Heinlein being a Technological Optimist. But not a Human Optimist. . . He believes (as do many) that war and conflict drive technological advancement. So; the proposition that War is Inevitable, is not really a negative prospect for the civilization, as a whole. Just the individuals who die in the war. The end result: a few folks die (who would die anyway; pretty much the weak ones, right?) and civilization advances! Huzzah!
I don't know about that match up, but I am greatly relieved that I will not one day be facing an install dialog for "MyDB/2". Or "LotusBeans" . . . just the thought of that. . . fuck! I wish Sun hadn't been bought by Oracle, but better Oracle than IBM or (shudder) MS.
So - if this city is under 20 feet of water in the next 20 years due to rising sea-levels induced by global warming, isn't this all basically a huge waste of time and wishful thinking? (not to mention the very common hurricanes damaging the panels every few years).
Seems like wind-power would be a better idea for Florida. If you build your towers tall enough, they'll still provide power long after your town has been submerged.
(this might have been a good idea 30 years ago - back when Jimmy Carter was president, and everyone was making fun of him for trying to get the nation to think about renewable energy. . . but now - it's just too little too late)
Nobody was resolving differences. There were no differences to resolve. It was all about "harsh business practices" - Fact is; Saddam didn't want to sell access to oil fields to western companies. He wanted to hang onto it until AFTER global oil production peak passed - as it would be worth much more in the future. These companies made sure the right people were elected (in the US, the UK, Australia, and Italy, to be specific) to get the job done.
The result?
You and I get stuck with the tax bill (and the economic fallout (ie. the housing bubble) from dumping interest rates so Bush could borrow the money for this adventure); and we all look like dumbasses. Poor dumbasses.
The western oil companies decided it wasn't worth the effort/risk anyway, and bailed.
I hope the Iraqis love their "democracy" - as much as the Afghanis appear to.
When are we going to hold the politicians -- both the ones who lied and the ones who willingly chose to believe it -- to account for their actions? apparently, we get that choice every 4 years.
That said; Someone invades MY country, I don't care what religion they are, or how well-meaning they are. Invade my country, destroy my roads and bridges, kill my neighbor's kids, bomb my place of work so I'm cut off from any constructive livelihood. . . ?
I guaranfuckingtee you, I will not only be building bombs in my kitchen, but I will be teaching classes on how to build bombs. I will kill your invading soldiers. I will go to your homeland and kill your civilians. I will defend my home with my dying breath.
I am an American, and I don't own any firearms. But that can change, easily enough.
I think the main problem with this discussion is that there is a deliberate conflation of the legal term "war" - which refers to a legal state of matters, with the common term "war" which can be just about anything, including a "war on poverty" "war on drugs" "war on terrorism" or "jihad on infidels".
In the common use: yeah, pretty much anything goes, and truth be told, all civilians are legitimate combatants; because every day we fight, by working our jobs, having children, and teaching an ideology to them.
But in reality - we like to use rules and laws to sort of, keep things "real". It's hard to talk about condoning things like the 9/11 attacks as legitimate war; just as it's hard to talk about condoning things like prisoner abuse, Fallujah, and Pat Tillman, as legitimate, legal, war-activities.
There's a latin phrase that says: "inter arma silent leges" which says: "at times of war, the law is silent". Well - that's also a convenient excuse for criminals, isn't it?
Yeah - internationally binding, but ONLY if the people who commit the crimes are on the LOSING side. The winners basically do whatever the hell they want.
Tell me I'm wrong - but wait until AFTER Dick Cheney's body is pulled down from the gallows having been executed for ordering torture. (hint: ain't ever gonna happen.)
Slashdot Mirror
Same deal here.
Severe lower back pain. Numbness in parts of my legs.
Doctors, MRI's, pain specialists, chiropractors - nothing.
(Of course, ins wouldn't pay for surgery! - unless there was "loss of functionality" - ie. I became paralyzed)
A physical therapist checked me out, and said that the therapy the Dr. ordered was a waste of time for me, and had me try something else - and FINALLY, after 5 years of suffering, my condition improved. I'm not ALL better - but I caught the damage before there was permanent impairment.
Operant conditioning is a fine topic for a psych 101 class.
Fortunately, it's not how human beings actually think and behave, in most cases. Most people are far more complicated than that.
Yes - $ for grades will instill a perverse morality, and create a fairly coin-operated cohort of students. But then again, what sort of society are they going to be living in? The question is: will these kids be able to rise above these values they're being taught, and understand that life is about more than money? The answer is: school would be far from the only place this "value" is being thrown at them. Who's teaching them other values, and which message is louder?
Well, we need to look at two other recent crashes.
The guy who landed his plane in the Potomac saving all his passengers, was clearly a case of individual heroism, and skill and experience of the pilot.
The guy who crashed a small commuter plane into a suburban house in New York, however, because he was busy chatting with his co-pilot about his inexperience with icing conditions, in a plane whose auto-pilot was engaged, a month after a warning bulletin had gone out to pilots about NOT flying on auto-pilot in icing conditions. . . in a plane whose design and configuration (wing-over-fuselage, turboprop) is KNOWN to not play-nice in icing conditions, was a brilliant example of how an underpaid, undertrained, inexperienced pilot, in conjunction with poorly designed equipment (plane with an autopilot that can't handle sudden loss of lift in icing conditions - lack of sufficient de-icing and ice-detecting equipment) can cause a catastrophic failure, that is otherwise survivable.
We can design the equipment to handle all the rough edge-cases. If we sufficiently engineer the equipment to handle them. Then with proper maintenance, the equipment will perform consistently. What percentage of those edge cases do you engineer for. ALL of them? How much does that cost? Can we predict EVERY situation?
On the other hand, you can educate and train and pay for the most experienced supermen pilots in the world, and put them in every plane - probably costs a lot more than a microchip mass-produced by children in taiwan; and even the most experienced pilots can't counter some situations.
The REAL problem here - is that aerospace engineers design planes, design computers, flight software, etc. - and they do their job well, solving all the problems of flight. Their "backup" equipment, is a well-trained, well-paid pilot.
Then you get an ignorant bean-counter working for the airline, who responds to a price-spike in a commodity like jet fuel, by cutting corners in operations, maintenance, or quality of the labor force. The accountant is now making a decision to change a variable that the aerospace engineers were counting on. Any number of variables. Now you have a less predictable outcome.
Loss of life is the result. Suffering families of people who just needed to get from point a to point b.
Does the airline suffer? Does the accountant suffer?
No.
Not much.
I have in-laws in suburban Phoenix, and there is an "anti-light pollution" ordinance in effect there. NO STREETLIGHTS. It is very eerie and strange, driving around dense suburbs, in near total darkness. You see the headlights of the other traffic, the endless banality of the lighted signs at strip-malls, but aside from the safety lights in the parking lots, no lights on the street.
In contrast, I (very fortunately) live in a fairly rural area in California; though we DO have streetlights. And the view of the stars at night is better in Phoenix. I have to drive about a half hour away from home to get a decent view of the night sky.
Now: compared to where I grew up - Chicago. . . I remember being disappointed when Haley's Comet came around. I couldn't even see the damn thing on a clear night. And that was after an hour's drive out into the "country".
Light pollution ordinances seem to be a very fascistic way to address this; public-safety is really more important than everyone being able to see stars from their backyard. It's an old notion that is apparently dying for us. It's sad. But as we (humanity) breed faster than cockroaches, I don't really see much alternative.
. . . not to mention, given the FLAKINESS of the general population, can you imagine the number of false hits?
"oops, I entered the wrong number by mistake, was that the PIN or the duress code? I dunno. . ."
Pretty soon, instead of the SWAT team, it would be an off duty cop that drives by 30 days later to double-check.
With friggin lasers on their heads.
Except that crowdsourcing (and ELECTIONS) suffer from selection bias.
The squeaky wheels will go out of their way to drown out every other voice.
And no moderation system is perfect. (Except slashdot's! Please don't ban me!)
But a demographic survey *IS* a scientifically rigorous way to obtain, not only "popular opinion" (however you'd like to define it) but also, how an election might turn out.
The problem with surveys is: the surveyor chooses the topic.
The problem with crowdsourced surveys is: the subjects choose the topic. (but the loudest voices win).
I think either suffers from sort of a Heisenberg's Indeterminacy problem. You can observe the zeitgeist, or you can observe a particular topic. But you poison the results by looking at both.
.. what if it had invoked 'rm -rf ~'?
It would have likely failed with a zillion "permission denied" errors - as frequently occurs on Macs, no matter who you're logged in as and no matter what password you enter.
Now if it drills down, chown/chmod 777's everything, THEN rm -rf, you'd be in deep shit.
I generally have 3-5 separate windows open (sometimes running under different user accounts), each with dozens of tabs; I like to keep tabs in a given window grouped according to a topic.
I use a separate window just for "daily" web links (news, comics, slashdot, ars, gizmodo, etc.)
Then each project or topic I may be researching gets another window of its own.
Basically I'm solving two problems inherent in the web paradigm:
1. Persistence. What I read and bookmark today, may be completely different when I click the bookmark tomorrow.
2. Navigability. Sometimes - I can't remember the google search term (sometimes, google will give me a completely different set of results than I used; plus, out of the 10 links I may initially click on, read, and evalute - maybe only 2 or 3 are any good; I keep those open. When I come back to the original search page later, all I see are links I've followed in the past - I don't know which ones I've eliminated. - so unless I kept those open until I have time for a deeper evaluation, I can't always remember which ones were crap.) =- the navigability problem is essentially the fact that bookmarks are too hard to make, and too difficult to organize (or keep organized) semantically (easier than FILES tho. . . ) - and too hard to get rid of once they're "stale". (either the content has gone stale, or my own mental "working state" has gone stale).
Believe me: with a typical tab-load of 200+. . . I've pondered this problem. I'm smart enough to create and identify it, but apparently not smart enough to solve it.
First place I ever saw tabs was Compaq's "Tabworks" - for Compaq oem machines running Windows 3.1. It was Teh Awesome replacement for MS Program Manager.
(of course, back then, QEMM was the only REAL solution to get a DOS machine to actually be useful).
No iTunes.
Seriously - that is the ONLY reason.
(and I think, if iTunes deletes any more of my wife's MP3's, this may soon cease being an issue. . . )
I can't understand why anyone would be turned on by AJ.
She's been with Billy Bob Thornton. So, that's just pretty damn scary.
Would Not Touch Her.
(not even after 2 dozen {insert_beer_of_choice} )
The practice is probably legal, in a marketplace where there's more than 2 competitors. In this case, Intel has 1 competitor, and has a clearly overwhelming marketshare advantage to begin with, BEFORE you consider anticompetitive practices.
This is really bad for the marketplace - bad for consumers - bad for innovation, it's actually REALLY bad for intel's own long-term interest. Becoming a monopoly is great for short-term profits. But long term, if you've got no incentive to innovate, then you sit around with your thumb up your butt, do nothing, and your best staff leaves to go start their own companies. (which most often, promptly get squashed, if any of you are familiar with the history of the dotcom era).
What I don't get is; I was REALLY bothered by all the same EXACT things you cite - and yet, NOBODY else here is criticizing these things.
I - actually liked the new-angle on the old Star Trek Canon. I think it played nicely to the tongue-in-cheek way we look back at the 1970's, in general, now.
And I know - Star Trek never really payed more than lip-service to scientific literacy. At least TOS, more than TNG. But - holy crap, some of the premises in the plot made me want to vomit. I walked out of there incredibly insulted - just on the poor quality of the writing. If you're pushing a product that has a PRODUCTION COST of $150m; that writing should not have passed the smell-test. Even if your design-goal is "over-the-top mindless-fun" - I was starting to wonder when I was going to see Will Ferrel in that damn movie.
This movie COULD HAVE been great. It was really close to great. But the little things that sucked, sucked worse than the largest black hole in the universe.
I think you're spot-on about Heinlein being a Technological Optimist. But not a Human Optimist. . . He believes (as do many) that war and conflict drive technological advancement. So; the proposition that War is Inevitable, is not really a negative prospect for the civilization, as a whole. Just the individuals who die in the war. The end result: a few folks die (who would die anyway; pretty much the weak ones, right?) and civilization advances! Huzzah!
SnOracle!
I don't know about that match up, but I am greatly relieved that I will not one day be facing an install dialog for "MyDB/2". Or "LotusBeans" . . . just the thought of that. . . fuck! I wish Sun hadn't been bought by Oracle, but better Oracle than IBM or (shudder) MS.
When I was in college, I knew a guy who said that his father always taught him this bit of wisdom: "All women are untrustworthy, decadent, and evil."
I scoffed, of course. What a terrible thing to say - to generalize about people. Stereotyping of the worst sort.
Unfortunately, since that day, I have yet to encounter a counterexample.
So - if this city is under 20 feet of water in the next 20 years due to rising sea-levels induced by global warming, isn't this all basically a huge waste of time and wishful thinking? (not to mention the very common hurricanes damaging the panels every few years).
Seems like wind-power would be a better idea for Florida. If you build your towers tall enough, they'll still provide power long after your town has been submerged.
(this might have been a good idea 30 years ago - back when Jimmy Carter was president, and everyone was making fun of him for trying to get the nation to think about renewable energy. . . but now - it's just too little too late)
Nobody was resolving differences. There were no differences to resolve. It was all about "harsh business practices" - Fact is; Saddam didn't want to sell access to oil fields to western companies. He wanted to hang onto it until AFTER global oil production peak passed - as it would be worth much more in the future. These companies made sure the right people were elected (in the US, the UK, Australia, and Italy, to be specific) to get the job done.
The result?
You and I get stuck with the tax bill (and the economic fallout (ie. the housing bubble) from dumping interest rates so Bush could borrow the money for this adventure); and we all look like dumbasses. Poor dumbasses.
The western oil companies decided it wasn't worth the effort/risk anyway, and bailed.
I hope the Iraqis love their "democracy" - as much as the Afghanis appear to.
When are we going to hold the politicians -- both the ones who lied and the ones who willingly chose to believe it -- to account for their actions? apparently, we get that choice every 4 years.
Someone else is going to complain on your behalf. They might even distort facts a bit here and there.
That said;
Someone invades MY country, I don't care what religion they are, or how well-meaning they are. Invade my country, destroy my roads and bridges, kill my neighbor's kids, bomb my place of work so I'm cut off from any constructive livelihood. . . ?
I guaranfuckingtee you, I will not only be building bombs in my kitchen, but I will be teaching classes on how to build bombs. I will kill your invading soldiers. I will go to your homeland and kill your civilians. I will defend my home with my dying breath.
I am an American, and I don't own any firearms. But that can change, easily enough.
I think the main problem with this discussion is that there is a deliberate conflation of the legal term "war" - which refers to a legal state of matters, with the common term "war" which can be just about anything, including a "war on poverty" "war on drugs" "war on terrorism" or "jihad on infidels".
In the common use: yeah, pretty much anything goes, and truth be told, all civilians are legitimate combatants; because every day we fight, by working our jobs, having children, and teaching an ideology to them.
But in reality - we like to use rules and laws to sort of, keep things "real". It's hard to talk about condoning things like the 9/11 attacks as legitimate war; just as it's hard to talk about condoning things like prisoner abuse, Fallujah, and Pat Tillman, as legitimate, legal, war-activities.
There's a latin phrase that says: "inter arma silent leges" which says: "at times of war, the law is silent". Well - that's also a convenient excuse for criminals, isn't it?
Yeah - internationally binding, but ONLY if the people who commit the crimes are on the LOSING side. The winners basically do whatever the hell they want.
Tell me I'm wrong - but wait until AFTER Dick Cheney's body is pulled down from the gallows having been executed for ordering torture. (hint: ain't ever gonna happen.)