An airconditioner cannot effectively 'cool' per se, it merely move heat around from inside a room to outside the room. Whereas of it's pretty easy to convert electrical energy to heat. Accordingly, the efficiency rating of cooling an area below the outside temperature is *always* worse (A *lot* worse IIRC but I don't have the numbers at my fingertips) than heating the same area above the outside temperature. Talk to someone that works in air conditioning.
Because using an incandescent bulb for 'heating' is about as sensible as recommending a heat lamp for a reading light. At the end of the day sue it's kinda sorta true, but neither one will be as efficient as simply using a separate device known as a 'furnace' or 'lamp' respectively.
Dumb, bad, and frankly conservative rationalization logic.
The article you cite seems to be saying that there is no such thing as the placebo effect, which would imply that the information cited in the article is not only misinterpreted, but actively wrong.
Except the article is quite clear about the fact that the statistical data has become sufficiently strong that these companies are overcoming their secrecy bias in order to compare notes, strong circumstantial evidence that the reporter is *not* getting confused.
I'm thinking PalMD, our anonymous 'Practicing Internist' may not actually know wtf he's talking about.
"There has to be some sort of way to compensate the artist for the hours and the sweat and the blood and the tears and the extreme, extreme expense that goes into making music"
Such as, for instance - paying for the song, and then being allowed to *DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT WITH IT*
Except of course, they're slowly evolving to be more beautiful all the time -
Yes, all too soon they will simply be gorgeous at any age, and we will be stupid whenever we talk to them, incapable of holding down jobs - THE END IS NIGH!!!!
Or maybe that's "Men win again" - One of those two.
Yeah, pretty much my reaction. I remember reading "A New Kind of Science", and although I don't want to claim it wasn't interesting, it certainly wasn't anything paradigm shifting.
Sorry - Cellular Automata are algorithmic systems, subject to the exact same logic that Bell Theorem proved could not reproduce the results of Quantum Mechanics.
For that matter, if efforts were made to educate *people* and help them out.
It always makes me laugh - here in the midwest we don't want to 'waste money' on welfare, education, and so on, because we want lower taxes.
But we're take more from the federal government than we send to D.C. in taxes, while those effete tax and spend liberals on the coasts *typically* (Now's a bad time to defend this, due to the recession) send more in taxes than they get back.
So all these "independent libertarians" and "John Galt's wannabees" out here are actually the ones living at the expense of others, *because* they refuse to actually invest in society.
Well, I have to start with the fact that Margaret Singers 'Studies' on cults and thought control have been pretty thoroughly debunked. I'm not a rabid non-believer, but Phillip Zimbardo has a lot more empirical research supporting his (much more limited) thesis of how people are influenced, and her work has, at best, not stood the test of time.
So, the mere fact that there are forms of rehabilitation with good track records does a pretty good job of distinguishing it from Margaret Singer's 'Thought Control' Thesis. Her theories don't play out in the real world.
Moreover, however intuitively obvious it might be, the track record of 'just punishment' as a method for preventing crime is abysmal. It's hard to separate the lousy record in general from the fact that the average 'just punishment' for a crime averages in melanin and income too - it seems to be 'just' to give high income white people shorter sentences than low income black people, even for identical crimes - if I was being *really* sophist I would say the lower recidivism rate of people with shorter sentences proves that harsh sentencing has a negative effect on recidivism, but I'll be good and say it's a compounding factor that makes it difficult to estimate the effects.
However you *can* judge the effects in a given area of changes in the law, and there's no correlation with longer sentencing and lower crime rate -or- lower recidivism. There just isn't - end of story.
Like other right-wing myths like 'welfare queens', 'No one would confess to a crime they didn't commit', and 'torturing terrorists will get good intelligence', just ain't so.
Just to stop the inevitable accusations of pulling data from 'pansy liberal textbooks' my 'pansy liberal professor' in "Criminal Justice" was a large, muscular black man that has helped run maximum security prisons in the Mid-West. He could kick 'my arse', 'your arse', and 'both our arses, together'.
Unfortunately, prison studies don't back up that intuition - damn near anything works better than a 'just punishment' (although the fact that the average for 'just punishment' seems to figure in melanin and income does *not* help).
And in the BTW - Margaret Singer's 'Cult' studies have been pretty much debunked for decades now. That kind of 'Thought Control' just doesn't work, and thus, not working, cannot really be considered the same as 'Rehabilitation' which has a pretty well proven track record of lowering recidivism.
Just to stop the inevitable accusation of 'book knowledge' before it gets aired - The 'elite liberal pansy' that taught my 'Criminal Justice' class on this was a large black man that had actually helped run prisons in the Mid-west. Could also kick my ass and yours too - .
I believe it was Frontline (Or maybe NOW?), that did a story on him, but I'm not finding it at the moment.
From what I can see/remember, his statistics frankly suck. They have a lousy prosecution rate, they use public monies for personal agenda's, enforce the law strictly on 'furriners' and ignore it on Caucasians, and frankly sound like they have the competence of Boss Hogg and Roscoe P Coltrane.
Personally, I'm not a sweet enough guy to fire a guy for being a sociopath. This guy has a pretty long record of being an *incompetent* sociopath.
Sadly, he seems to be competent at getting re-elected - I saw one of his campaign commercials, and he was (almost literally) explaining "Ignore the statistics - I'm Sheriff Joe! Who are you going to listen to, your good white buddy Sheriff Joe, or those liberal elitists at the Newspaper that are looking at the actual records!", and sadly, they ignored the statistics and re-elected him.
I'm assuming they still have a lot of lead paint there - only thing that makes sense to me.
The problem is, if this were an eight year old really bad exploit in Windows, the article would be explaining how the authors pointed this out to Microsoft 7 years and six months ago, were threatened with legal hell if they said anything to anyone, the exploit has been in the wild though three versions of windows for six years, they finally managed to get a gag order revoked now, and we're just now finding out about it.
Instead we are finding out about an old, but only just uncovered (by white hat) exploit, and there is a reasonable chance my PC will be patched by the time I get home tonight.
A 'bias' or 'prejudice' is judging in advance of the facts. When a judgment is based on a long prior history, the term is 'Experience'.
A) If this was something you were good at, you would be doing it your self. B) They have root. Implies C) Your standing behind them and watching is irrelevant to the question of whether they can steal from you.
If you cannot trust them, it's not going to make a whit of difference either way. If you can, it will also not make a whit of difference either way.
So you need to make a decision - either hire someone you *can* trust, even if you have to train them up yourself, or hire someone already trained, even if the 'trust' half of the relationship has to develop over time. This is a situation where the 'golden mean' between those extremes seems worse than either of the other options. Decide your priority and go with it.
Umm - google 'Bible' and 'Usury' and you get "Results 1 - 10 of about 1,780,000 for bible usury. (0.10 seconds)"
There are (of course) arguments about the exact interpretation - a 'fundamentalist' view would be pretty clear that charging interest is strictly forbidden, but I am always amazed at the fundamentalist ability to declare they believe in word for word truth in the bible, then rationalize away ignoring all the paragraphs that apply to the people holding their leashes.
And talking about usury in regard to credit checks doesn't entirely strike me as 'Off Topic'
Contrawise, I remember a hospital bill I had in the 90's (Context: Got rear-ended by *two* cars, my back has never recovered. In Indiana it turns out that, having neither a wife, nor children, your expectation of getting any money out of the court is so low ambulance chasers won't take your case unless you can pay ahead. I got $5,000 from their insurance. I kid you not.) that I had a receipt proving I paid off - the first four times the hospital came back and tried to say I owed them money that is.
Which happened every two years or so - by the fifth (or so) time they 'rediscovered' my 'unpaid' bill, I had moved twice since the original accident, and could no longer pay it, which of course they ended up selling this 'uncollected' debt to a collection agency.
You can imagine the fun this went through - I ended up simply digging my heels in and outlasting them (Although I suspect that I was fortunate enough to have a collection officer that (in turn) at least suspected I was telling the truth and didn't pursue it as far as they might have) until it was dropped off my credit report finally. By good fortune, that ended up being just a few months before I had the opportunity to buy a house at the same time GWB buggered up the economy so badly I was eligible for an interest rate that in a sane universe would have gotten the dipshit fired.
So I came out of that a lot better than I might have. It could just as easily gone the other way around and kept me from ever getting on top of things without a sub-prime loan or something equally horrendous.
The problem is none of these are equivalent to the 'crime' in question. We're not talking about the digital equivalent of breaking and entering into a locked store in the middle of the night.
We're talking about the digital equivalent of being invited onto property during the course of doing public business during standard business hours, then having the manager accuse you of breaking and entering - and asserting that merely because the door was unlocked and you were doing standard business during standard business hours, you are still breaking and entering.
And having the Judge somehow find this logical.
Three things badly need to happen.
A) The courts need to overturn several dumb on the face of them precedents that are holding consumers to contracts in ways expressly forbidden by the Uniform Commercial Code. There are all sorts of shortcuts available 'Between Merchants' that are exceptions applied to make doing business convenient. Unfortunately, the coursts have expressly said that these distinctions are a pain to decide on, so they treat everyone as a merchant - the exact opposite of what the UCC actually reads where the consumer protections are actually clearly written in the main text and the merchants are clearly listed as exceptions.
B) The "Owner of a Copy" Provisions of copyright need to be enforced. I wish the term were defined properly in USC 17 definitions like it should be, but there are provisions throughout the copyright act that explicitly limit the whole "You don't own a copy, you own a license" argument - spells them out in black and white. The courts have flat out ignored them.
C) Courts that think UCC code shouldn't apply to License agreements should quit writing wonderfully sarcastic opinions about the UCC and software licenses that ignore the actual wording of the UCC as written is favor of enforcing illegal agreements and say that there is no such legal document as a 'license'. If it's a contract, enforce it as a contract. If it's not a contract, don't enforce it - but don't treat the UCC as a smorgasboard and pick the paragraph you like.
Sorry - I'm about disgusted with the number of frankly stupid legal opinions about licenses and copyright - I used to buy into the "Well, copyright is a really specialized part of the law" arguments I heard, but with the exception of the deliberately vague 'fair use' tests, UCC and copyright law are written clearly - the problem here is court precedents that ignore perfectly plain use of well defined language.
Neo: You can't scare me with this Gestapo crap. I know my rights. I want my phone call. Agent Smith: Tell me, Mr. Anderson... what good is a phone call... if you're unable to speak?
"Chakrabarty (08-964 Chakrabarty.pdf) Brief by Scott Kieff and Richard Epstein argue that patent rights operate "like a beacon in the dark" to start conversations between innovative entities and potential users."
"like a beacon in the dark . . . leading the gullible across an unmapped minefield, held aloft by cannibals intent staking your crippled body to the ground and eating your remains (with or without your being dead first)." might be a better description there - {G}
More to the point - the Newscorp (And the Journal), like any other company, have every right to subcontract out service. Or not subcontract out service.
But there is a real entitlement issue going on when, having done so, they think it's somehow unfair for them to not know the clients of the subcontracter. Hate to tell you this Murdoch, welcome to the world of real business.
Sorry, I don't hate Paint.net - but it took me no time at all to go back to Gimp.
I would recommend SMplayer as a media player as well.
The other choice seem prettt reasonable though - I never had a problem downchecking the pdf toolbar (I used it - it's actually not bad, I just didn't need it)
The 'obsession' today is so prevalent that I can't turn around without hearing someone talk about how unhealthy it is - .
I've had the advantage of knowing several models and designers, and (while there have definitely been points of genuine obsession with unhealthy bodytypes) I think it's worth realizing that 90% of the models that fit this stereotype do cat walk modeling.
In catwalk modeling you are looking at (For lack of a better word) clothing 'prototypes', things that may, or may not, be put into production. It is far easier for a designer to design said prototypes for that thin bodytype and alter it for the middle and far end of the bellcurve than the reverse order.
Now, agreed that there are unhealthy people that *aspire* to that bodytype when it is not healthy for them (Bad analogy about a building 'aspiring' to look like a blueprint because it was not working and frankly underrates actual models for whom that body-type is healthy {-- deleted), but lets not make a minority psychological issue into a massive cultural problem.
It's easy to come up with exceptions in media to the rule that, frankly, most attractive stars are in fact both attractive and healthy - that bell curve is definitely skewed towards the left. But, not nearly as far to the left as a lot of people trying to show off how incredibly not affected by 'the mainstream standard of beauty' would like to pretend.
Or I could of course be completely wrong. Because everyone else was thinking about the continuity and I was the only geek actually looking at Rebecca Romjin when she seduced the guard in X-men II of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm - that doesn't even make sense.
An airconditioner cannot effectively 'cool' per se, it merely move heat around from inside a room to outside the room. Whereas of it's pretty easy to convert electrical energy to heat. Accordingly, the efficiency rating of cooling an area below the outside temperature is *always* worse (A *lot* worse IIRC but I don't have the numbers at my fingertips) than heating the same area above the outside temperature. Talk to someone that works in air conditioning.
Pug
Because using an incandescent bulb for 'heating' is about as sensible as recommending a heat lamp for a reading light. At the end of the day sue it's kinda sorta true, but neither one will be as efficient as simply using a separate device known as a 'furnace' or 'lamp' respectively.
Dumb, bad, and frankly conservative rationalization logic.
Pug
Y'okay.
The article you cite seems to be saying that there is no such thing as the placebo effect, which would imply that the information cited in the article is not only misinterpreted, but actively wrong.
Except the article is quite clear about the fact that the statistical data has become sufficiently strong that these companies are overcoming their secrecy bias in order to compare notes, strong circumstantial evidence that the reporter is *not* getting confused.
I'm thinking PalMD, our anonymous 'Practicing Internist' may not actually know wtf he's talking about.
Pug
"There has to be some sort of way to compensate the artist for the hours and the sweat and the blood and the tears and the extreme, extreme expense that goes into making music"
Such as, for instance - paying for the song, and then being allowed to *DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT WITH IT*
These people have entitlement issues.
Pug
Except of course, they're slowly evolving to be more beautiful all the time -
Yes, all too soon they will simply be gorgeous at any age, and we will be stupid whenever we talk to them, incapable of holding down jobs - THE END IS NIGH!!!!
Or maybe that's "Men win again" - One of those two.
Pug
Yeah, pretty much my reaction. I remember reading "A New Kind of Science", and although I don't want to claim it wasn't interesting, it certainly wasn't anything paradigm shifting.
Sorry - Cellular Automata are algorithmic systems, subject to the exact same logic that Bell Theorem proved could not reproduce the results of Quantum Mechanics.
Bell's Theorem for the Win
Feh - most of it he's dead on right about, but he has forgotten one fundamental.
Rule of Cool trumps all!
{G} - Pug
For that matter, if efforts were made to educate *people* and help them out.
It always makes me laugh - here in the midwest we don't want to 'waste money' on welfare, education, and so on, because we want lower taxes.
But we're take more from the federal government than we send to D.C. in taxes, while those effete tax and spend liberals on the coasts *typically* (Now's a bad time to defend this, due to the recession) send more in taxes than they get back.
So all these "independent libertarians" and "John Galt's wannabees" out here are actually the ones living at the expense of others, *because* they refuse to actually invest in society.
Sigh - Pug
Apologies - it told me it rejected that first post, and it never showed up until after I posted again - Pug
Well, I have to start with the fact that Margaret Singers 'Studies' on cults and thought control have been pretty thoroughly debunked. I'm not a rabid non-believer, but Phillip Zimbardo has a lot more empirical research supporting his (much more limited) thesis of how people are influenced, and her work has, at best, not stood the test of time.
So, the mere fact that there are forms of rehabilitation with good track records does a pretty good job of distinguishing it from Margaret Singer's 'Thought Control' Thesis. Her theories don't play out in the real world.
Moreover, however intuitively obvious it might be, the track record of 'just punishment' as a method for preventing crime is abysmal. It's hard to separate the lousy record in general from the fact that the average 'just punishment' for a crime averages in melanin and income too - it seems to be 'just' to give high income white people shorter sentences than low income black people, even for identical crimes - if I was being *really* sophist I would say the lower recidivism rate of people with shorter sentences proves that harsh sentencing has a negative effect on recidivism, but I'll be good and say it's a compounding factor that makes it difficult to estimate the effects.
However you *can* judge the effects in a given area of changes in the law, and there's no correlation with longer sentencing and lower crime rate -or- lower recidivism. There just isn't - end of story.
Like other right-wing myths like 'welfare queens', 'No one would confess to a crime they didn't commit', and 'torturing terrorists will get good intelligence', just ain't so.
Just to stop the inevitable accusations of pulling data from 'pansy liberal textbooks' my 'pansy liberal professor' in "Criminal Justice" was a large, muscular black man that has helped run maximum security prisons in the Mid-West. He could kick 'my arse', 'your arse', and 'both our arses, together'.
Just sayin' - Pug
You would think that intuitively.
Unfortunately, prison studies don't back up that intuition - damn near anything works better than a 'just punishment' (although the fact that the average for 'just punishment' seems to figure in melanin and income does *not* help).
And in the BTW - Margaret Singer's 'Cult' studies have been pretty much debunked for decades now. That kind of 'Thought Control' just doesn't work, and thus, not working, cannot really be considered the same as 'Rehabilitation' which has a pretty well proven track record of lowering recidivism.
Just to stop the inevitable accusation of 'book knowledge' before it gets aired - The 'elite liberal pansy' that taught my 'Criminal Justice' class on this was a large black man that had actually helped run prisons in the Mid-west. Could also kick my ass and yours too - .
Just sayin' - Pug
I believe it was Frontline (Or maybe NOW?), that did a story on him, but I'm not finding it at the moment.
From what I can see/remember, his statistics frankly suck. They have a lousy prosecution rate, they use public monies for personal agenda's, enforce the law strictly on 'furriners' and ignore it on Caucasians, and frankly sound like they have the competence of Boss Hogg and Roscoe P Coltrane.
Personally, I'm not a sweet enough guy to fire a guy for being a sociopath. This guy has a pretty long record of being an *incompetent* sociopath.
Sadly, he seems to be competent at getting re-elected - I saw one of his campaign commercials, and he was (almost literally) explaining "Ignore the statistics - I'm Sheriff Joe! Who are you going to listen to, your good white buddy Sheriff Joe, or those liberal elitists at the Newspaper that are looking at the actual records!", and sadly, they ignored the statistics and re-elected him.
I'm assuming they still have a lot of lead paint there - only thing that makes sense to me.
Pug
The problem is, if this were an eight year old really bad exploit in Windows, the article would be explaining how the authors pointed this out to Microsoft 7 years and six months ago, were threatened with legal hell if they said anything to anyone, the exploit has been in the wild though three versions of windows for six years, they finally managed to get a gag order revoked now, and we're just now finding out about it.
Instead we are finding out about an old, but only just uncovered (by white hat) exploit, and there is a reasonable chance my PC will be patched by the time I get home tonight.
A 'bias' or 'prejudice' is judging in advance of the facts. When a judgment is based on a long prior history, the term is 'Experience'.
Pug
A) If this was something you were good at, you would be doing it your self.
B) They have root.
Implies
C) Your standing behind them and watching is irrelevant to the question of whether they can steal from you.
If you cannot trust them, it's not going to make a whit of difference either way. If you can, it will also not make a whit of difference either way.
So you need to make a decision - either hire someone you *can* trust, even if you have to train them up yourself, or hire someone already trained, even if the 'trust' half of the relationship has to develop over time. This is a situation where the 'golden mean' between those extremes seems worse than either of the other options. Decide your priority and go with it.
Pug
Umm - google 'Bible' and 'Usury' and you get "Results 1 - 10 of about 1,780,000 for bible usury. (0.10 seconds)"
There are (of course) arguments about the exact interpretation - a 'fundamentalist' view would be pretty clear that charging interest is strictly forbidden, but I am always amazed at the fundamentalist ability to declare they believe in word for word truth in the bible, then rationalize away ignoring all the paragraphs that apply to the people holding their leashes.
And talking about usury in regard to credit checks doesn't entirely strike me as 'Off Topic'
Pug
Contrawise, I remember a hospital bill I had in the 90's (Context: Got rear-ended by *two* cars, my back has never recovered. In Indiana it turns out that, having neither a wife, nor children, your expectation of getting any money out of the court is so low ambulance chasers won't take your case unless you can pay ahead. I got $5,000 from their insurance. I kid you not.) that I had a receipt proving I paid off - the first four times the hospital came back and tried to say I owed them money that is.
Which happened every two years or so - by the fifth (or so) time they 'rediscovered' my 'unpaid' bill, I had moved twice since the original accident, and could no longer pay it, which of course they ended up selling this 'uncollected' debt to a collection agency.
You can imagine the fun this went through - I ended up simply digging my heels in and outlasting them (Although I suspect that I was fortunate enough to have a collection officer that (in turn) at least suspected I was telling the truth and didn't pursue it as far as they might have) until it was dropped off my credit report finally. By good fortune, that ended up being just a few months before I had the opportunity to buy a house at the same time GWB buggered up the economy so badly I was eligible for an interest rate that in a sane universe would have gotten the dipshit fired.
So I came out of that a lot better than I might have. It could just as easily gone the other way around and kept me from ever getting on top of things without a sub-prime loan or something equally horrendous.
Pug
Patent-office-grants-patent-for-using-x-in-way-expressly-designed-to-be-used
Covers 90% of all patent threads in the last ten years
The problem is none of these are equivalent to the 'crime' in question. We're not talking about the digital equivalent of breaking and entering into a locked store in the middle of the night.
We're talking about the digital equivalent of being invited onto property during the course of doing public business during standard business hours, then having the manager accuse you of breaking and entering - and asserting that merely because the door was unlocked and you were doing standard business during standard business hours, you are still breaking and entering.
And having the Judge somehow find this logical.
Three things badly need to happen.
A) The courts need to overturn several dumb on the face of them precedents that are holding consumers to contracts in ways expressly forbidden by the Uniform Commercial Code. There are all sorts of shortcuts available 'Between Merchants' that are exceptions applied to make doing business convenient. Unfortunately, the coursts have expressly said that these distinctions are a pain to decide on, so they treat everyone as a merchant - the exact opposite of what the UCC actually reads where the consumer protections are actually clearly written in the main text and the merchants are clearly listed as exceptions.
B) The "Owner of a Copy" Provisions of copyright need to be enforced. I wish the term were defined properly in USC 17 definitions like it should be, but there are provisions throughout the copyright act that explicitly limit the whole "You don't own a copy, you own a license" argument - spells them out in black and white. The courts have flat out ignored them.
C) Courts that think UCC code shouldn't apply to License agreements should quit writing wonderfully sarcastic opinions about the UCC and software licenses that ignore the actual wording of the UCC as written is favor of enforcing illegal agreements and say that there is no such legal document as a 'license'. If it's a contract, enforce it as a contract. If it's not a contract, don't enforce it - but don't treat the UCC as a smorgasboard and pick the paragraph you like.
Sorry - I'm about disgusted with the number of frankly stupid legal opinions about licenses and copyright - I used to buy into the "Well, copyright is a really specialized part of the law" arguments I heard, but with the exception of the deliberately vague 'fair use' tests, UCC and copyright law are written clearly - the problem here is court precedents that ignore perfectly plain use of well defined language.
Pug
Neo: You can't scare me with this Gestapo crap. I know my rights. I want my phone call.
Agent Smith: Tell me, Mr. Anderson... what good is a phone call... if you're unable to speak?
"Chakrabarty (08-964 Chakrabarty.pdf) Brief by Scott Kieff and Richard Epstein argue that patent rights operate "like a beacon in the dark" to start conversations between innovative entities and potential users."
"like a beacon in the dark . . . leading the gullible across an unmapped minefield, held aloft by cannibals intent staking your crippled body to the ground and eating your remains (with or without your being dead first)." might be a better description there - {G}
Pug
More to the point - the Newscorp (And the Journal), like any other company, have every right to subcontract out service. Or not subcontract out service.
But there is a real entitlement issue going on when, having done so, they think it's somehow unfair for them to not know the clients of the subcontracter. Hate to tell you this Murdoch, welcome to the world of real business.
Pug
Paint.net versus GIMP? WTF?!?!?
Sorry, I don't hate Paint.net - but it took me no time at all to go back to Gimp.
I would recommend SMplayer as a media player as well.
The other choice seem prettt reasonable though - I never had a problem downchecking the pdf toolbar (I used it - it's actually not bad, I just didn't need it)
Pug
I'm sure that judge also agrees that copying copyrighted materials over the internet without permission is providing a service too.
Of course he does - anything else would be rank hypocrisy.
I of course think that they're both unethical, but I am neither a judge nor a hypocritical bitch of the Copyright industry - but I repeat myself.
Pug
Somewhere there's a hackers going "I *KNEW* I needed to write down that password!!!"
Pug
The 'obsession' today is so prevalent that I can't turn around without hearing someone talk about how unhealthy it is - .
I've had the advantage of knowing several models and designers, and (while there have definitely been points of genuine obsession with unhealthy bodytypes) I think it's worth realizing that 90% of the models that fit this stereotype do cat walk modeling.
In catwalk modeling you are looking at (For lack of a better word) clothing 'prototypes', things that may, or may not, be put into production. It is far easier for a designer to design said prototypes for that thin bodytype and alter it for the middle and far end of the bellcurve than the reverse order.
Now, agreed that there are unhealthy people that *aspire* to that bodytype when it is not healthy for them (Bad analogy about a building 'aspiring' to look like a blueprint because it was not working and frankly underrates actual models for whom that body-type is healthy {-- deleted), but lets not make a minority psychological issue into a massive cultural problem.
It's easy to come up with exceptions in media to the rule that, frankly, most attractive stars are in fact both attractive and healthy - that bell curve is definitely skewed towards the left. But, not nearly as far to the left as a lot of people trying to show off how incredibly not affected by 'the mainstream standard of beauty' would like to pretend.
Or I could of course be completely wrong. Because everyone else was thinking about the continuity and I was the only geek actually looking at Rebecca Romjin when she seduced the guard in X-men II of course.
Pug