I've done this in real life. Sort of. I drove a combat vehicle while serving in the military and used a thermal imaging system at night as my primary means of guiding the vehicle through the streets of... some well-known Iraqi cities. The point of view given is from above and behind the driver's hatch, and since it was pretty much pitch black outside, my only means of seeing where I was going was the thermal camera, called a DVE. Using the Driver's Visual Enhancement meant I was not looking directly at the road at all, but at a LCD screen displaying the output of the camera over and behind my right shoulder (about two feet to the right, a foot or so behind, and three or four feet above, to be specific). It was a little trippy at first, but by and large, it wasn't a problem once I got used to it, which didn't take long.
I noticed I too undergo certain anatomical changes in response to visual stimuli, though I did not need a blood test to figure it out. For example, whenever I see a cute, sexy blond girl... or a brunette... or a redhead... especially a redhead, for some reason... I develop symptoms vaguely akin to those experienced by people with certain lower back injuries, namely, a sudden and inexplicable stiffening of some particular tissues, making standing up and walking difficult, much like, (again) sufferers of certain kinds of lower back injury...
Before you decide, ask yourself... if you needed brain surgery, would you prefer the doctor who actually read-up on how to perform it, invested the time and practiced, got good at it, or the one who logged onto slashdot and asked the community how to perform brain surgery? No one can learn your math for you. What you do about this depends on why you need the higher level math course. Option One, you take the easy way out, and then you crash and burn in the math class, having cheated yourself out of the foundation knowledge you need to succeed in the course, or... Option Two, you bite the bullet, and purchase a textbook for each of the classes you need a refresher on, and work every problem in each book, which if you still have the knowledge dormant, shouldn't be all that hard. If you are unable to solve the problems, refer to the text. If you still can't figure it out, go to the learning center/tutoring center, and ask for help there. If you go with option one, and by some miracle pass, hopefully neither your future, nor anyone else' future, actually depends on your skill at math. BTW: I know whereof I speak. I took College Algebra in 1996, and Trigonometry in 2002. Before enrolling in Pre-Calculus, I got a college algebra book and a trig book at a used bookstore ($2.95 for the algebra, $4.50 for the trig) and went through them. I had forgotten more than I'd realized, and if I'd tried to walk into PreCalc without remembering what Completing the Square was, or the Bernoulli Triangle, etc., I would have been in deep trouble.
I'm sorry, um... what is this OpenSolaris thing of which you speak? Oh... one of the ex-Unixes that for some mysterious reason is still breathing despite the plethora of alternatives which aren't liable to be yanked away from unsuspecting users and sysadmins. In retrospect, that whole AT&T versus everyone suit was probably the best thing that could have happened, painful as it was, to the Unix using community.
Sorry, forgot. Interesting Wiki Article though. Some of it is beyond me, although it may also be that it's closing in on two in the morning, several days past my bedtime.
This is great news for me! With all patent concerns swept away, surely the injunction against my cells copying their own genetic code will be lifted, and they can resume their normal mitotic and meiotic activities! This is really wonderful because since the question came up, they have been unable to reproduce, (legally) and consequently, I have been feeling really sick lately. What a breath of fresh air!:)
Folks, most of the posts on here seem to be jokes about upgrades to vision. I have a mild form of the red/green thing, and to me, there is no moral dilemma, to fix or not to fix. Rather than extrapolating the point of view that there are moral implications towards people augmenting nature, consider the opposite. If it is morally questionable to help someone see the entire "normal visible spectrum", then it should be considered just as morally iffy to fix someone who is nearsighted, farsighted, or has astigmatism, myopia, etc. If we can fix, by adding an appropriate lens, or by using a laser to adjust the shape of the lens, if we can, without having any trouble sleeping at night, then I think we CAN in fact do this, because it's not really any different from what is done when people are given canes to walk with, or hearing aids to hear better with.
in whether or not the could, that they didn't consider whether or not they should... consequently, Google begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug...
Google: where your privacy went to die.
The researchers are, I think onto something here, but not what everyone seems to think. I saw this story carried on another site originally, and so I am willing to give it more credit than I would a typical "Idle" story... having read TFA, I suggest this merits our attention. The implication of the article is that it has to do with obesity, and although there may exist a very distant relationship, I don't think the obesity connection is what we should consider. No, I think it may be a function of the amount of food on, and the typical size of the average person's dinner plate at or around the time the painting was made. As people got progressively better at farming, and as governments became more proficient at ensuring political and/or economic stability for the masses, the amount of food available probably went WAY up. The size of the portions in the paintings doubtless reflects a bias on the part of the painter to presume that portion size historically is similar to what he experienced during his own lifetime. I think that is a better conclusion to draw than, "OMG, we've been getting progressively fatter for over a thousand years!"
You know, this sounds (npi) neat, but the revolution is I think in how much energy they could harvest with this technique. It might be easier, and not require the water, BTW, or at least, not require the water to be consumed (by breaking into H2 and O) by using a mechanical amplifier/impedance matcher akin to the way the inner ear works, and then mechanically rectifying THAT, to produce electrical power in a more conventional fashion. What I mean is, rather than having to electrolyze water, isn't there a shorter way to use sound to make usable energy? Seems to me that the breakthrough isn't so much a "HEY EVERYONE!!! We can use sound to make electricity, throw your gasoline-using devices AWAY!" moment as a "HEY EVERYONE!!! Check out this neat and novel approach to an old problem which while it may never be commercially viable as a replacement for conventional sources of energy, which is really neat and cool from a technological perspective!" type of moment.
This guy once tried to convince me that the fastest fixed-wing aircraft was the space shuttle. At that time I'm pretty sure it was the SR-71 Blackbird (and to the best of my knowledge it still is). The reason it's not the space shuttle is that the space shuttle is a SPACE craft, that just happens to have a pair of stubby little wings.
The same goes for this supposed "car". In order for a car to set a land-speed record, it should have to be powered exclusively by its wheels, and the wheels should in turn be required to be powered by a piston engine, not a jet and certainly not a damned rocket. Anything else would be like having the SR-71 Blackbird going full speed with its landing gear grazing a runway, and calling THAT a land speed record.
No, it should have to be an actual car, otherwise it's just meaningless.
I propose February 31st, every year, be known henceforth as "Square Root of Negative One Day," or maybe "iDay" (which will be great for all those Apple fans out there). This new holiday will be observed March 3rd, or March 2nd in a Leap Year. Celebrations should focus principally on complex mathematics, but also on honest politicians, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and temporary taxes.
~Hal
Exxon Corp., (NASDAQ: XOM) has proposed congress levy a tax to clean up the messes left by their ships every time one spills a couple million gallons of crude oil into a previously (more-or-less) unspoilt environment. Because... it's not like it was ANY fault of theirs, OH NO! NOT THEIR MESS. Why doesn't Misro$oft start taxing people for using their competitor's prod...ucts... oh yeah, they basically do. BTW, moderators: It's not "bashing" if they deserve it. Aaaand... they so do.
and I can tell you all from personal, first-hand knowledge, that California, collectively and in general, has lost its goddamned marbles. This is exactly the kind of stupid shit that helped me conclude I should live somewhere not-foaming-at-the-mouth insane, and it's why I moved away, and why I will never move back. Should call it Crazyifornia. I know this sounds like a rant, but I can back this up. Ever heard of Proposition 65? For over a decade now, any business that uses ANY chemical or compound which is on this miles-long list of substances "known" to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defect, or other reproductive harm, has to post notices (known as Prop. 65 Warnings) in prominent locations around their businesses. So a restaurant which cleans its windows with an ammonia-based cleaner has to have a warning, same as the business which uses such things as hydrofluoric acid, 95% hydrogen peroxide, radioactive materials, etc. This is just GREAT, because those signs are EVERYWHERE and it does no good, because you can't tell from them which businesses are displaying the sign because of a single little bottle of blue cleanser, and which ones have 50 barrels of phosgene (COCl2) in the basement. This is but one of a hundred examples of Calinsanity. Sadly, I can't think of any viable solution to the problem.
I've known a lot of people who'd been prescribed antibiotics at some point in the past, who still had some lying around, long after the reason they were taking them had cleared up. I usually find this out when one tells me he/she wasn't feeling well, but took some antibiotics. I then ask, "so, you went to see the doctor?" and they reply "no, I had some left over from last May, you know, when I had..." While IANAD, I have worked in the medical field, and know you don't just USE antibiotics (or any prescription drug,) whenever you don't feel right unless you happen to have the medical knowledge to prescribe same. A lot of people bitch about dosing livestock with antibiotics, and that's simply NOT the reason these "super-bugs" are developing. Cattle, as a for-instance, don't stop taking their meds when they feel better, (being convinced they don't need to keep taking them). Only human beings are stupid enough to do that. The livestock who are "pumped full of drugs" (including antibiotics) are FREE of infections, because they HAVE been pumped full of antibiotics. For those here who are only PASSINGLY familiar with Darwin's observations, resistance occurs when a colony of organisms is ALMOST wiped out. The survivors reproduce, and all their children inherit their slightly increased resistance which allowed them to survive in the first place. Repeat until Super. This is how this occurs. It happens because some people CAN'T follow instructions, when they are told by their doctors to take ALL of the prescription, and decide they'd better "hang onto the last little bit, just in case", which ends up turning their bodies into Petri dishes for whatever it is/may be attacking them. This becomes the case, if not for the infection for which they were prescribed the medicine, then the next one when they use up the rest they saved. People hear the word "antibiotic" and don't realize there are dozens of different ones, perhaps even hundreds, and they don't all work on every little thing, and none of them work on viral infections. Maybe, just maybe, if they want to contain this impending plague, (which will make the Bubonic Plague look like a minor cold,) it is time to take steps. For example: they could start treating antibiotics as controlled substances, and require them to be administered by medical personnel, IN PERSON, i.e., in a hospital or clinic, instead of sending people home with them counting on them to follow instructions, which so many people, take my word for this, CAN'T OR WON'T DO. Many drugs are treated the way they are because of the potential dangers posed to the patients if they are taken without medical supervision, (the reason why there is a difference between "prescription" and "over the counter",) but we SHOULD be making the same consideration for the safety of the general public. But... we won't. Get ready. It's going to get ugly, I think. But of course, there is good news: as the populace gets wiped out, the cost of housing should go way down, due to high-supply and low demand as large numbers of people get wiped out. The ease with which people travel from location to location is going to spread these 'bugs' like a wildfire in a tornado.
Were Mozart, Beethoven, and... all those other guys people have never heard of (like Chopin, Berlioz, Shubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Copland, Puccini, Mussorgsky, Greig, Handel, Prokofiev, Janacek, Vivaldi, Rossini, Ravel, Respighi, Strauss, Stravinsky, Orff, Offenbach, Bach, Bach, or Bach... the list goes on and on... for extra credit, do you know which of these composers was an American?) merely clever mathematicians? I think it's unfair to paint them that way, just because a computer can replicate something similar, doesn't mean it used the same process. A good synthesizer can make a sound indistinguishable (by people) from the sound made by a guitar string resonating, by filtering "white-noise" to select only that part of the wave which sounds like said guitar string. This does not mean there's actually a string resonating within the synthesizer. The output may be indistinguishable, but that doesn't mean guitars are no longer useful because there are certain things about a guitar a synthesizer can never replicate. For instance, how good does a synthesizer sound when it has no power? Then again, what about the romance factor? Might as well ask if a chef is necessary, since he/she is, in reality, just a food-chemist. So enjoy your computer-composed music. As for me, I am going to listen to "Billy the Kid Rodeo," or "Night on a Bald Mountain," or "Symphonie Fantastique," or "Sinfonietta," or maybe "Tosca", confident that no computer will ever create anything quite like them.
As we move closer and closer to the day we have all these neat little ports added forcibly to our arms, legs, and back, to handle the bodily functions it will be impossible to deal with ourselves, because we will each be immersed in an amnion-like fluid, in special pods, while we are tricked into thinking that what we think is real, is in fact a vast, virtual-reality world referred to by the machines running it as "the Matrix".
Row row row your boat, gently down the stream... merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but an RPG.
Gee, might be time to turn the computer's power switch to the "On Full Force" position, exit the rectangular wall port cover apparatus, and perform that "play" activity under that giant blue "wall paper" we used to call "the sky". Before you forget how.
Whaahahahahahaa, oh my, I haven't laughed like this since the last time I heard that joke, about 1995 it was.
Sorry, if it wasn't, glad you got a chuckle. I don't think you heard the "Misro$oft" part, I take personal credit for that variation of their name, and think it's funny and clever, if I do say so myself. A combination connoting the Miserable Software they produce. I just checked Google, there's no references to it there. There is a listing for "Micro$oft", (with a "c" instead of an "s",) which the Urban Dictionary defines as "A derogotitory (sic) term for microsoft's (sic) EVIL practice of EARNING MONEY!"
Sure... if the word "EARNING" can be stretched to include income resulting from fraud or outright theft.;-b (THAT, BTW, I can tell was sarcasm.)
Anyway, if it was sarcasm, I must tell you that underneath Misro$oft's Win/DOS, is still old, crappy, cludgey barfware. There is nothing quite like a working alternative, seeing you how things CAN be with an OS, to show you how wretched the current solution truly is.
I know this is going to end up -6, Troll, but... Misro$oft's bread-and-butter is in having applications which are dependent upon their OS, and making sure their OS never works well enough, in any one of about a dozen ways, to enable users to disregard updates.
A common misconception is that M$ programmers are at odds with malware authors, and the discoverers/publishers of exploits, and that simply isn't the case. Malware constantly popping up which attacks M$-OS-running computers doesn't hurt their bottom line, in fact, quite the opposite. I think it's obvious that they use this phenomenon as an anti-piracy tool. M$'s true enemy (ironically) is software pirates, who DO hurt their bottom line.
You see, Misro$oft makes software that has problems deliberately, so that first, you can't safely use it without automatic updates (which you CAN'T GET if M$'s servers can't verify your copy is legit, leaving you exposed to malware if you are running a pirated version) and second, so that you need to upgrade when they tell you to, ensuring more revenue for themselves.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if M$ was the source of a lot of the malware themselves. Who else knows the holes in their own software better?
Anyway, why not try Linux instead, and see how good software CAN be when the effort is to try to get the code as close as possible to right, THE FIRST TIME?
Speaking of earlier versions of Win/DOS, though, a friend tried to convince me, (I think it was around when 98 or ME came out,) that M$ had finally come out with a reasonably stable OS that didn't crash much, and could go for DAYS without needing to be rebooted.
I replied to this poor, deluded fool that M$'s bread and butter was in making crap, which is why they will NEVER make something that works, it would be an absolute disaster for their evil business model of fleecing customers. I finished by pointing out that even if they HAD done it, woopedy-fucking-doo, after like, over ten years of development, and billions of dollars down the shitter, M$ FINALLY made something that works. Color me unimpressed.
The future will bear out my words here today, regardless of what any moderators think - if you don't believe, just wait. When Misro$oft Win/DOS 8 comes out in about 3 or 4 years, and they announce they will not update Win/DOS 7 anymore, and that henceforth, the license for the new OS will stipulate that you pay per hour of computer use, every year, in order for Win/DOS 8 to continue working, and oh, by the way, you can't, for one reason or another use 7 anymore, you'll know why I, and so many others like me, bailed for Linux (or others) just as soon as we were able. For me, it was when Fedora 11 autodetected hardware that I had to TELL Vista was there explicitly, and I found that (using the Live-CD) everything... just... WORKED, without my having to struggle or
That something is different now, environmentally? Maybe the kids haven't changed, and if you took a time-machine, and grabbed pre-teens from the depression-era and dropped them into, well, now, you might end up with kids having the same problems.
Between immense changes in diet, the radical changes in culture, degradation of the quality of the air they've grown up breathing, (in the last 20 years, versus 80-100 years ago,) the near non-potability of most American municipal water supplies, all manner of heavy metals making it into their brains from aluminum leaching out of their soda cans, to fugitive dust containing toxic, carcinogenic, and even occasionally radioactive materials, it's a wonder their turning out as well as they are.
I've read a lot of posts here on/. under this heading that suggests kids today are whiny, bitchy, spoiled brats, who should not exhibit signs of mental illness, implying being susceptible to such problems as a weakness, or form of character flaw -- as if they're doing this on purpose. To those of you who think that, before you call kids today 'pussies' for having all manner of mental problems, consider there may be other possible causes beyond their individual or collective control.
Slashdot Mirror
I've done this in real life. Sort of. I drove a combat vehicle while serving in the military and used a thermal imaging system at night as my primary means of guiding the vehicle through the streets of... some well-known Iraqi cities. The point of view given is from above and behind the driver's hatch, and since it was pretty much pitch black outside, my only means of seeing where I was going was the thermal camera, called a DVE. Using the Driver's Visual Enhancement meant I was not looking directly at the road at all, but at a LCD screen displaying the output of the camera over and behind my right shoulder (about two feet to the right, a foot or so behind, and three or four feet above, to be specific). It was a little trippy at first, but by and large, it wasn't a problem once I got used to it, which didn't take long.
I noticed I too undergo certain anatomical changes in response to visual stimuli, though I did not need a blood test to figure it out. For example, whenever I see a cute, sexy blond girl... or a brunette... or a redhead... especially a redhead, for some reason... I develop symptoms vaguely akin to those experienced by people with certain lower back injuries, namely, a sudden and inexplicable stiffening of some particular tissues, making standing up and walking difficult, much like, (again) sufferers of certain kinds of lower back injury...
Thanks to the ubiquity of Misro$soft WinDOS, they are. Oddly, it hasn't helped.
Before you decide, ask yourself... if you needed brain surgery, would you prefer the doctor who actually read-up on how to perform it, invested the time and practiced, got good at it, or the one who logged onto slashdot and asked the community how to perform brain surgery? No one can learn your math for you. What you do about this depends on why you need the higher level math course. Option One, you take the easy way out, and then you crash and burn in the math class, having cheated yourself out of the foundation knowledge you need to succeed in the course, or... Option Two, you bite the bullet, and purchase a textbook for each of the classes you need a refresher on, and work every problem in each book, which if you still have the knowledge dormant, shouldn't be all that hard. If you are unable to solve the problems, refer to the text. If you still can't figure it out, go to the learning center/tutoring center, and ask for help there. If you go with option one, and by some miracle pass, hopefully neither your future, nor anyone else' future, actually depends on your skill at math. BTW: I know whereof I speak. I took College Algebra in 1996, and Trigonometry in 2002. Before enrolling in Pre-Calculus, I got a college algebra book and a trig book at a used bookstore ($2.95 for the algebra, $4.50 for the trig) and went through them. I had forgotten more than I'd realized, and if I'd tried to walk into PreCalc without remembering what Completing the Square was, or the Bernoulli Triangle, etc., I would have been in deep trouble.
I'm sorry, um... what is this OpenSolaris thing of which you speak? Oh... one of the ex-Unixes that for some mysterious reason is still breathing despite the plethora of alternatives which aren't liable to be yanked away from unsuspecting users and sysadmins. In retrospect, that whole AT&T versus everyone suit was probably the best thing that could have happened, painful as it was, to the Unix using community.
Sorry, forgot. Interesting Wiki Article though. Some of it is beyond me, although it may also be that it's closing in on two in the morning, several days past my bedtime.
This is great news for me! With all patent concerns swept away, surely the injunction against my cells copying their own genetic code will be lifted, and they can resume their normal mitotic and meiotic activities! This is really wonderful because since the question came up, they have been unable to reproduce, (legally) and consequently, I have been feeling really sick lately. What a breath of fresh air! :)
Yep. Little Bobby Tables, we call him...
You all do realize that electrons spin backwards there, right?
Folks, most of the posts on here seem to be jokes about upgrades to vision. I have a mild form of the red/green thing, and to me, there is no moral dilemma, to fix or not to fix. Rather than extrapolating the point of view that there are moral implications towards people augmenting nature, consider the opposite. If it is morally questionable to help someone see the entire "normal visible spectrum", then it should be considered just as morally iffy to fix someone who is nearsighted, farsighted, or has astigmatism, myopia, etc. If we can fix, by adding an appropriate lens, or by using a laser to adjust the shape of the lens, if we can, without having any trouble sleeping at night, then I think we CAN in fact do this, because it's not really any different from what is done when people are given canes to walk with, or hearing aids to hear better with.
in whether or not the could, that they didn't consider whether or not they should... consequently, Google begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug...
Google: where your privacy went to die.
The researchers are, I think onto something here, but not what everyone seems to think. I saw this story carried on another site originally, and so I am willing to give it more credit than I would a typical "Idle" story... having read TFA, I suggest this merits our attention. The implication of the article is that it has to do with obesity, and although there may exist a very distant relationship, I don't think the obesity connection is what we should consider.
No, I think it may be a function of the amount of food on, and the typical size of the average person's dinner plate at or around the time the painting was made. As people got progressively better at farming, and as governments became more proficient at ensuring political and/or economic stability for the masses, the amount of food available probably went WAY up. The size of the portions in the paintings doubtless reflects a bias on the part of the painter to presume that portion size historically is similar to what he experienced during his own lifetime. I think that is a better conclusion to draw than, "OMG, we've been getting progressively fatter for over a thousand years!"
No text here. Just a subject. I think that says it all, don't you?
You know, this sounds (npi) neat, but the revolution is I think in how much energy they could harvest with this technique. It might be easier, and not require the water, BTW, or at least, not require the water to be consumed (by breaking into H2 and O) by using a mechanical amplifier/impedance matcher akin to the way the inner ear works, and then mechanically rectifying THAT, to produce electrical power in a more conventional fashion. What I mean is, rather than having to electrolyze water, isn't there a shorter way to use sound to make usable energy? Seems to me that the breakthrough isn't so much a "HEY EVERYONE!!! We can use sound to make electricity, throw your gasoline-using devices AWAY!" moment as a "HEY EVERYONE!!! Check out this neat and novel approach to an old problem which while it may never be commercially viable as a replacement for conventional sources of energy, which is really neat and cool from a technological perspective!" type of moment.
This guy once tried to convince me that the fastest fixed-wing aircraft was the space shuttle. At that time I'm pretty sure it was the SR-71 Blackbird (and to the best of my knowledge it still is). The reason it's not the space shuttle is that the space shuttle is a SPACE craft, that just happens to have a pair of stubby little wings.
The same goes for this supposed "car". In order for a car to set a land-speed record, it should have to be powered exclusively by its wheels, and the wheels should in turn be required to be powered by a piston engine, not a jet and certainly not a damned rocket. Anything else would be like having the SR-71 Blackbird going full speed with its landing gear grazing a runway, and calling THAT a land speed record.
No, it should have to be an actual car, otherwise it's just meaningless.
I propose February 31st, every year, be known henceforth as "Square Root of Negative One Day," or maybe "iDay" (which will be great for all those Apple fans out there). This new holiday will be observed March 3rd, or March 2nd in a Leap Year. Celebrations should focus principally on complex mathematics, but also on honest politicians, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and temporary taxes.
~Hal
Exxon Corp., (NASDAQ: XOM) has proposed congress levy a tax to clean up the messes left by their ships every time one spills a couple million gallons of crude oil into a previously (more-or-less) unspoilt environment. Because... it's not like it was ANY fault of theirs, OH NO! NOT THEIR MESS. Why doesn't Misro$oft start taxing people for using their competitor's prod...ucts... oh yeah, they basically do. BTW, moderators: It's not "bashing" if they deserve it. Aaaand... they so do.
and I can tell you all from personal, first-hand knowledge, that California, collectively and in general, has lost its goddamned marbles. This is exactly the kind of stupid shit that helped me conclude I should live somewhere not-foaming-at-the-mouth insane, and it's why I moved away, and why I will never move back. Should call it Crazyifornia. I know this sounds like a rant, but I can back this up. Ever heard of Proposition 65? For over a decade now, any business that uses ANY chemical or compound which is on this miles-long list of substances "known" to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defect, or other reproductive harm, has to post notices (known as Prop. 65 Warnings) in prominent locations around their businesses. So a restaurant which cleans its windows with an ammonia-based cleaner has to have a warning, same as the business which uses such things as hydrofluoric acid, 95% hydrogen peroxide, radioactive materials, etc. This is just GREAT, because those signs are EVERYWHERE and it does no good, because you can't tell from them which businesses are displaying the sign because of a single little bottle of blue cleanser, and which ones have 50 barrels of phosgene (COCl2) in the basement. This is but one of a hundred examples of Calinsanity. Sadly, I can't think of any viable solution to the problem.
I've known a lot of people who'd been prescribed antibiotics at some point in the past, who still had some lying around, long after the reason they were taking them had cleared up. I usually find this out when one tells me he/she wasn't feeling well, but took some antibiotics. I then ask, "so, you went to see the doctor?" and they reply "no, I had some left over from last May, you know, when I had..." While IANAD, I have worked in the medical field, and know you don't just USE antibiotics (or any prescription drug,) whenever you don't feel right unless you happen to have the medical knowledge to prescribe same. A lot of people bitch about dosing livestock with antibiotics, and that's simply NOT the reason these "super-bugs" are developing. Cattle, as a for-instance, don't stop taking their meds when they feel better, (being convinced they don't need to keep taking them). Only human beings are stupid enough to do that. The livestock who are "pumped full of drugs" (including antibiotics) are FREE of infections, because they HAVE been pumped full of antibiotics. For those here who are only PASSINGLY familiar with Darwin's observations, resistance occurs when a colony of organisms is ALMOST wiped out. The survivors reproduce, and all their children inherit their slightly increased resistance which allowed them to survive in the first place. Repeat until Super. This is how this occurs. It happens because some people CAN'T follow instructions, when they are told by their doctors to take ALL of the prescription, and decide they'd better "hang onto the last little bit, just in case", which ends up turning their bodies into Petri dishes for whatever it is/may be attacking them. This becomes the case, if not for the infection for which they were prescribed the medicine, then the next one when they use up the rest they saved. People hear the word "antibiotic" and don't realize there are dozens of different ones, perhaps even hundreds, and they don't all work on every little thing, and none of them work on viral infections. Maybe, just maybe, if they want to contain this impending plague, (which will make the Bubonic Plague look like a minor cold,) it is time to take steps. For example: they could start treating antibiotics as controlled substances, and require them to be administered by medical personnel, IN PERSON, i.e., in a hospital or clinic, instead of sending people home with them counting on them to follow instructions, which so many people, take my word for this, CAN'T OR WON'T DO. Many drugs are treated the way they are because of the potential dangers posed to the patients if they are taken without medical supervision, (the reason why there is a difference between "prescription" and "over the counter",) but we SHOULD be making the same consideration for the safety of the general public. But... we won't. Get ready. It's going to get ugly, I think. But of course, there is good news: as the populace gets wiped out, the cost of housing should go way down, due to high-supply and low demand as large numbers of people get wiped out. The ease with which people travel from location to location is going to spread these 'bugs' like a wildfire in a tornado.
Were Mozart, Beethoven, and... all those other guys people have never heard of (like Chopin, Berlioz, Shubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Copland, Puccini, Mussorgsky, Greig, Handel, Prokofiev, Janacek, Vivaldi, Rossini, Ravel, Respighi, Strauss, Stravinsky, Orff, Offenbach, Bach, Bach, or Bach... the list goes on and on... for extra credit, do you know which of these composers was an American?) merely clever mathematicians?
I think it's unfair to paint them that way, just because a computer can replicate something similar, doesn't mean it used the same process. A good synthesizer can make a sound indistinguishable (by people) from the sound made by a guitar string resonating, by filtering "white-noise" to select only that part of the wave which sounds like said guitar string. This does not mean there's actually a string resonating within the synthesizer. The output may be indistinguishable, but that doesn't mean guitars are no longer useful because there are certain things about a guitar a synthesizer can never replicate. For instance, how good does a synthesizer sound when it has no power? Then again, what about the romance factor? Might as well ask if a chef is necessary, since he/she is, in reality, just a food-chemist. So enjoy your computer-composed music. As for me, I am going to listen to "Billy the Kid Rodeo," or "Night on a Bald Mountain," or "Symphonie Fantastique," or "Sinfonietta," or maybe "Tosca", confident that no computer will ever create anything quite like them.
As we move closer and closer to the day we have all these neat little ports added forcibly to our arms, legs, and back, to handle the bodily functions it will be impossible to deal with ourselves, because we will each be immersed in an amnion-like fluid, in special pods, while we are tricked into thinking that what we think is real, is in fact a vast, virtual-reality world referred to by the machines running it as "the Matrix".
Row row row your boat, gently down the stream... merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but an RPG.
Gee, might be time to turn the computer's power switch to the "On Full Force" position, exit the rectangular wall port cover apparatus, and perform that "play" activity under that giant blue "wall paper" we used to call "the sky". Before you forget how.
Oh, you!
Sorry, I fscked it up for you. :-)
Misro$oft Win/DOS
Whaahahahahahaa, oh my, I haven't laughed like this since the last time I heard that joke, about 1995 it was.
Sorry, if it wasn't, glad you got a chuckle. I don't think you heard the "Misro$oft" part, I take personal credit for that variation of their name, and think it's funny and clever, if I do say so myself. A combination connoting the Miserable Software they produce. I just checked Google, there's no references to it there. There is a listing for "Micro$oft", (with a "c" instead of an "s",) which the Urban Dictionary defines as "A derogotitory (sic) term for microsoft's (sic) EVIL practice of EARNING MONEY!"
Sure... if the word "EARNING" can be stretched to include income resulting from fraud or outright theft. ;-b (THAT, BTW, I can tell was sarcasm.)
Anyway, if it was sarcasm, I must tell you that underneath Misro$oft's Win/DOS, is still old, crappy, cludgey barfware. There is nothing quite like a working alternative, seeing you how things CAN be with an OS, to show you how wretched the current solution truly is.
I know this is going to end up -6, Troll, but... Misro$oft's bread-and-butter is in having applications which are dependent upon their OS, and making sure their OS never works well enough, in any one of about a dozen ways, to enable users to disregard updates.
A common misconception is that M$ programmers are at odds with malware authors, and the discoverers/publishers of exploits, and that simply isn't the case. Malware constantly popping up which attacks M$-OS-running computers doesn't hurt their bottom line, in fact, quite the opposite. I think it's obvious that they use this phenomenon as an anti-piracy tool. M$'s true enemy (ironically) is software pirates, who DO hurt their bottom line.
You see, Misro$oft makes software that has problems deliberately, so that first, you can't safely use it without automatic updates (which you CAN'T GET if M$'s servers can't verify your copy is legit, leaving you exposed to malware if you are running a pirated version) and second, so that you need to upgrade when they tell you to, ensuring more revenue for themselves.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if M$ was the source of a lot of the malware themselves. Who else knows the holes in their own software better?
Anyway, why not try Linux instead, and see how good software CAN be when the effort is to try to get the code as close as possible to right, THE FIRST TIME?
Speaking of earlier versions of Win/DOS, though, a friend tried to convince me, (I think it was around when 98 or ME came out,) that M$ had finally come out with a reasonably stable OS that didn't crash much, and could go for DAYS without needing to be rebooted.
I replied to this poor, deluded fool that M$'s bread and butter was in making crap, which is why they will NEVER make something that works, it would be an absolute disaster for their evil business model of fleecing customers. I finished by pointing out that even if they HAD done it, woopedy-fucking-doo, after like, over ten years of development, and billions of dollars down the shitter, M$ FINALLY made something that works. Color me unimpressed.
The future will bear out my words here today, regardless of what any moderators think - if you don't believe, just wait. When Misro$oft Win/DOS 8 comes out in about 3 or 4 years, and they announce they will not update Win/DOS 7 anymore, and that henceforth, the license for the new OS will stipulate that you pay per hour of computer use, every year, in order for Win/DOS 8 to continue working, and oh, by the way, you can't, for one reason or another use 7 anymore, you'll know why I, and so many others like me, bailed for Linux (or others) just as soon as we were able. For me, it was when Fedora 11 autodetected hardware that I had to TELL Vista was there explicitly, and I found that (using the Live-CD) everything... just... WORKED, without my having to struggle or
Between immense changes in diet, the radical changes in culture, degradation of the quality of the air they've grown up breathing, (in the last 20 years, versus 80-100 years ago,) the near non-potability of most American municipal water supplies, all manner of heavy metals making it into their brains from aluminum leaching out of their soda cans, to fugitive dust containing toxic, carcinogenic, and even occasionally radioactive materials, it's a wonder their turning out as well as they are.
I've read a lot of posts here on /. under this heading that suggests kids today are whiny, bitchy, spoiled brats, who should not exhibit signs of mental illness, implying being susceptible to such problems as a weakness, or form of character flaw -- as if they're doing this on purpose. To those of you who think that, before you call kids today 'pussies' for having all manner of mental problems, consider there may be other possible causes beyond their individual or collective control.