and in 1953 he performed the first successful carotid endarterectomy.
This man is a brilliant bloke, and a bit of a bloody legend.
I've never met the man, but because of only one of the things he pioneered, I can tell people who've just found out - after I've done an ultrasound - they've got an 80-99% blockage of their carotid artery, that they can have a short, straightforward surgery and have an excellent chance of not having any side-effects.
This beats the daylights out of having a (possibly massive) stroke, which is what happened before endarterectomy and stenting.
I can't imagine the alternative - "Yeah, you've got a critical blockage of one of your arteries. Unfortunately there's nothing we can do about it. Go home and try not to have a stroke."
Anyways, a posthumous thanks & cheers! from someone who is fortunate enough to get the advantage of your work nearly every week.
Your reasoning is circular. Ownership, by definition, is the right to control. Many people here feel that the company concerned doesn't own the copies and so, by definition, have no say about how the copies should be dealt with.
No arguments there. I was referring to those copies of the software (perhaps "copies" was an unfortunate term) still in the original company's warehouses. If they decide to burn them all, and tell you, "No, we won't sell you one," then you're stuck. Your only other options are to either find a third party who *will* sell you one, or to get over it.
Not at all, just a company's self-serving definition of it.
Regardless of whether or not people/corporations are being self-serving, it's still freedom to act. Let's face it: if I personally own some near-magical cure for some disease you've got, and I won't sell it to you for whatever reason of my own choosing, then there's nothing you can do to make me change my mind.
No argument from me on the fact that behaving in that manner is unfair and inhumane. However, all human beings have & reserve the right to be bastards, if they want, whenever they want. Nothing you or I can do, can change that.
This might not be the most popular response for our crowd here, but... either find & buy a second-hand copy of the software, or get over it.
It's true that buying second-hand raises the problem of "How do we know they've destroyed all their copies of the program, when they sell it?", but I don't pretend to have a solution to that.
However, if a company doesn't want to sell a particular product anymore, or doesn't want to sell it to _you_, then... you're out of luck. No company has an obligation to sell a particular customer anything. Righteous indignation on the phone may get them to change their mind, but it's still their mind that has to change in the end - you're not making the decision for them.
It's just a tough break - and an example of how freedom to act operates.
There's no doubt an obvious answer to this question that I'm overlooking, but regarding clouds vs. birds - couldn't you just have looked at the Doppler shift of the reflected signal?
Tasering an 80-year-old, and having him or her collapse suddenly to the ground, is as like or more likely to break a bone (perhaps a hip, much worse than an arm to repair) as a result of falling, as they are to suffer infection/clotting leading to a stroke from a broken arm. A stroke from a clot from a broken arm is extremely unlikely. Ask a doctor sometime.
Your reasoning on this doesn't stack up. Forcing an elderly lady to collapse uncontrolled to the ground is more dangerous (what about her head?) than grabbing her on the arm.
As for monitoring her heart... this raises another question - what if she's already suffering from chronic cardiac failure, AF, or some other heart disease? Tasering her is extremely dangerous in that situation.
Bottom line - tasering should *only ever* be a direct substitute for use of a firearm. If the situtation isn't so bad that you'd use a gun, then you don't use a taser.
Although this is offtopic, the last line of your post, to me at least, sums up everything important that differentiates geeks/nerds from non-geeks/nerds.
Just out of interest, any reason why you're only quoting 9 and 10 year old news stories?
Anyways, even a 39% increase (assuming the Brisbane Sunday Mail is using the stats right - I'll give you 50-50 on that one) over a low gun crime rate isn't as bad as it would be if guns were freely available.
There are just too many nutjobs out there - people who don't give a damn about others. I'd go so far as to say people who don't actually appreciate civilisation, and what it's done for them. There's more to being a modern human being, in a world with 6.7 billion people, than "OMG I want my xxx, I want my yyy, I want my zzz, and damn you all, I want..."
First off, aren't residential users *already* having their total data per month recorded? Where's the extra work there?
As for figuring out the individual charge by applying various charging schemes, I'm not buying that either. Given a decent billing department (for a 100k user ISP, I'd expect at *least* one or two people full-time employed to deal with billing), they'd have the resources - or could get them - to write up an automated script. This is the central mantra of computed automation - *once the script is written, the workload drops to very little*. It's just applying rules (and their associated exceptions) to a bunch of accounting data.
I'm assuming the script is written properly. Total writing time for such a system (considering you'd already have a computerised billing system in place) shouldn't be more than say, two weeks of concentrated work.
This is a good charging system. I like the sound of it.
Fair enough for them. I'd still be happy to consume even up to (as a roundabout figure) 4x or 5x the space, if it meant that my files were freely usable.
DRM is only something scared content producers want - I don't want it at all. Don't force it on me.
Dunno mate... it might be easy enough to learn the mechanics of the procedure in half an hour, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took a lot longer than that to learn everything else - when it's appropriate to use the treatment, contraindications, and the all-important "how to get yourself out of trouble when things go wrong". It'd be even longer before you would consider yourself competent, as opposed to just able.
(My opinion comes from my point of view at work - I'm a diagnostic ultrasound tech).
One thought comes to mind, although I've no proof, but it would *sound* plausible - perhaps the owners of the MRI machine have decided to amortise the initial cost of the machine over it's entire lifetime? Then the cost per MRI would be relatively constant (barring yearly inflation in associated costs, wages, liquid helium, & c.) over time.
Is there a tax advantage to this? (I'm in Australia, so I have no knowledge of the US tax system).
Although, as it happens, anyone who deals with RF physics will generally know Fourier's work (or at least it's practical application) intimately... still, you're right, close - but no cigar.:>
> It only takes memorization to become a doctor, they don't have to develop or invent a new process > or theory like the PhD's. Why the fuck are they treated above everyone else?
Ouch... fair enough, you might be just airing some sour grapes here, but I have to disagree.
I work with doctors (my job is ultrasounds in the neurology dept. of a large public hospital in Australia), and I can tell you this: it might only take memorization to pass your exams (although I personally have my doubts about even this assertion), but there is an _enormous_ amount of other skill required to be a good doctor.
Just to name one, a doctor worth their salt has to have excellent social & communication skills. It's often very hard to get accurate information from patients regarding their symptoms & signs. This is fair enough - they're sick, and most likely worried, and some don't want to tell you how bad things really are. But decent doctoring is so much more than just "It only takes memorization" that I think I'll just give you the benefit of the doubt, and stick that part of your post into the "whinge box".
(As for your final point, doctors are treated above everyone else primarily because people respect them for having the sheer balls to make decisions that *will* drastically affect someone's life, and be accountable for those decisions afterwards.)
I work in stroke ultrasound, and our patients often have at least two CTs during their stay. That's a *lot* of x-ray energy.
(CTs tend to have their output parameters stamped on them... our machine is generally set between 25 and 45 kW, with about a 50% duty cycle. That's a heck of a lot of juice flowing into ya...)
Makes me feel better when performing TCDs on people! (Transcranial Doppler is one other method of detecting blood clots & stenoses, although we aim for deeper, larger arteries - it's hard to get signals closer than 30-35 mm from the surface of the scalp.)
I disagree with your statement that "at least Hitler's agenda didn't completely revolve around himself."
Hitler was very much self-absorbed, to the point where his delusions included associating his own life & existence with that of the entire German Reich. He in fact planned the war to fit entirely within his lifetime (Sebastian Haffner's book "The meaning of Hitler" gives an excellent account of this).
One quote of Hitler's is particularly pointed: (23rd Nov, 1939) "As a final factor I must, in all modesty, list my own person: irreplaceable. Neither a military nor a civilian personality could take my place. Attempts on my life may be repeated... the fate of the Reich depends on me alone. I shall act accordingly."
Hitler was an A-class, self-obsessed, delusional nutjob, make no bones about it.
Unfortunately, people like you come along and pollute the analogy by assuming that the guy literally equated bandwidth to a car. No, he didn't. Strawman, R.I.P.
No, that's not quite it. Your own words show up my particular point. Bandwidth isn't a car. It might be, in some aspects, but the very fact that you and I both came up with different aspects of the analogy is where it all falls apart.
You shouldn't just throw out an analogy without indicating which aspects of the nature of the two things are analogous. That's all I'm trying to say - it's not well enough specified as an analogy, and thus could muddy the waters.
No matter how bad you think the analogy is, if you get his point it's still a good analogy.
Dead right. The thing is, I'd already gotten the point before the analogy. The analogy just made me weep for anyone trying to use it to understand aspects of the network issues they didn't quite have a handle on already.
The analogy helped me not at all.:>
Throwing in my opinion as to ways in which the analogy was flawed was probably just asking to have people respond with how my points were technically flawed more than anything else. I had a niggling feeling that people would pick on the 100% utilisation point.
The real killer for me, perhaps, was that the original poster (whose technical point was spot on, I still state!) used what could be a massively-faceted analogy (is it the mechanics we should note? is it the transport-network vs. computer network similarities? the inherent dangers to life & limb of running flat out all the time?) and unfortunately didn't state what aspects of the car analogy he was particularly pointing at.
Anyways, it was a glorified rant. I promise to close my end of the discussion on car analogies with this: Arrrgh!
Argh! I can't stand it anymore... Your point is dead on, but then you went and polluted it with a really inappropriate analogy. Seriously, the car-analogy is overused to the point of cliche-death around here.
Your car's maximum power output not being used all the time (i.e. a mechanical device, that suffers wear and tear, used in a transport system that's controlled by a bunch of independant and variously-skilled drivers) has absolutely nothing to do with not using networking connections full time at 100% data rate. The latter is because of business economic reasons, since networks have:
a) no loss incurred by running at 100% over 10% capacity (assuming reasonably decent routers, and ignoring the pretty-much-spurious congestion hassles at the routers) - compared to the car analogy, at least, and... b) no such things as "poor drivers". "Poor drivers" could only be broken routers, which would be removed from the network and replaced as soon as they're found. On the other hand, you have to live with "poor drivers" in the car system regardless of the fact that *they* should arguably be removed from the system.:>
Not just 19"..but for anything other than ultrasound,
Bah! This annoys me no end, being an US tech myself. Whenever the radiology types want a workstation, they automatically get at least dual 21" LCDs. When we want an imaging workstation, it gets the stock standard whatever-the-PC-gets-delivered-with screen... usually a 17" LCD of bog standard quality.
Still, I'll console myself with the fact that I reckon the patients like us US types better - they have to, we end up a lot more in their personal space than an X-ray tech or a CT/MR driver...:>
Slashdot Mirror
From the Wikipedia page:
and in 1953 he performed the first successful carotid endarterectomy.
This man is a brilliant bloke, and a bit of a bloody legend.
I've never met the man, but because of only one of the things he pioneered, I can tell people who've just found out - after I've done an ultrasound - they've got an 80-99% blockage of their carotid artery, that they can have a short, straightforward surgery and have an excellent chance of not having any side-effects.
This beats the daylights out of having a (possibly massive) stroke, which is what happened before endarterectomy and stenting.
I can't imagine the alternative - "Yeah, you've got a critical blockage of one of your arteries. Unfortunately there's nothing we can do about it. Go home and try not to have a stroke."
Anyways, a posthumous thanks & cheers! from someone who is fortunate enough to get the advantage of your work nearly every week.
He might not *have* Scientific Method yet... he probably forgot to get Printing Press first.
That, or perhaps he doesn't want to make The Great Library obsolete. Either way, no oil for him!
Your reasoning is circular. Ownership, by definition, is the right to control. Many people here feel that the company concerned doesn't own the copies and so, by definition, have no say about how the copies should be dealt with.
No arguments there. I was referring to those copies of the software (perhaps "copies" was an unfortunate term) still in the original company's warehouses. If they decide to burn them all, and tell you, "No, we won't sell you one," then you're stuck. Your only other options are to either find a third party who *will* sell you one, or to get over it.
Not at all, just a company's self-serving definition of it.
Regardless of whether or not people/corporations are being self-serving, it's still freedom to act. Let's face it: if I personally own some near-magical cure for some disease you've got, and I won't sell it to you for whatever reason of my own choosing, then there's nothing you can do to make me change my mind.
No argument from me on the fact that behaving in that manner is unfair and inhumane. However, all human beings have & reserve the right to be bastards, if they want, whenever they want. Nothing you or I can do, can change that.
This might not be the most popular response for our crowd here, but... either find & buy a second-hand copy of the software, or get over it.
It's true that buying second-hand raises the problem of "How do we know they've destroyed all their copies of the program, when they sell it?", but I don't pretend to have a solution to that.
However, if a company doesn't want to sell a particular product anymore, or doesn't want to sell it to _you_, then... you're out of luck. No company has an obligation to sell a particular customer anything. Righteous indignation on the phone may get them to change their mind, but it's still their mind that has to change in the end - you're not making the decision for them.
It's just a tough break - and an example of how freedom to act operates.
There's no doubt an obvious answer to this question that I'm overlooking, but regarding clouds vs. birds - couldn't you just have looked at the Doppler shift of the reflected signal?
Are you serious?
Tasering an 80-year-old, and having him or her collapse suddenly to the ground, is as like or more likely to break a bone (perhaps a hip, much worse than an arm to repair) as a result of falling, as they are to suffer infection/clotting leading to a stroke from a broken arm. A stroke from a clot from a broken arm is extremely unlikely. Ask a doctor sometime.
Your reasoning on this doesn't stack up. Forcing an elderly lady to collapse uncontrolled to the ground is more dangerous (what about her head?) than grabbing her on the arm.
As for monitoring her heart... this raises another question - what if she's already suffering from chronic cardiac failure, AF, or some other heart disease? Tasering her is extremely dangerous in that situation.
Bottom line - tasering should *only ever* be a direct substitute for use of a firearm. If the situtation isn't so bad that you'd use a gun, then you don't use a taser.
Although this is offtopic, the last line of your post, to me at least, sums up everything important that differentiates geeks/nerds from non-geeks/nerds.
I like it.
A ballsy post... and even better, ballsy moderators. Score +1 for quality on /. today :>
(as opposed to the "ugh! how distasteful! auto-mod -5 insensitive" stuff we sometimes get).
Just out of interest, any reason why you're only quoting 9 and 10 year old news stories?
:>
Anyways, even a 39% increase (assuming the Brisbane Sunday Mail is using the stats right - I'll give you 50-50 on that one) over a low gun crime rate isn't as bad as it would be if guns were freely available.
There are just too many nutjobs out there - people who don't give a damn about others. I'd go so far as to say people who don't actually appreciate civilisation, and what it's done for them. There's more to being a modern human being, in a world with 6.7 billion people, than "OMG I want my xxx, I want my yyy, I want my zzz, and damn you all, I want..."
Rant endeth
Nah, I'm not buying that.
First off, aren't residential users *already* having their total data per month recorded? Where's the extra work there?
As for figuring out the individual charge by applying various charging schemes, I'm not buying that either. Given a decent billing department (for a 100k user ISP, I'd expect at *least* one or two people full-time employed to deal with billing), they'd have the resources - or could get them - to write up an automated script. This is the central mantra of computed automation - *once the script is written, the workload drops to very little*. It's just applying rules (and their associated exceptions) to a bunch of accounting data.
I'm assuming the script is written properly. Total writing time for such a system (considering you'd already have a computerised billing system in place) shouldn't be more than say, two weeks of concentrated work.
This is a good charging system. I like the sound of it.
This is an excellent idea. Perhaps I should've thought of it before, but regardless - thanks!
Fair enough for them. I'd still be happy to consume even up to (as a roundabout figure) 4x or 5x the space, if it meant that my files were freely usable.
DRM is only something scared content producers want - I don't want it at all. Don't force it on me.
Dunno mate... it might be easy enough to learn the mechanics of the procedure in half an hour, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took a lot longer than that to learn everything else - when it's appropriate to use the treatment, contraindications, and the all-important "how to get yourself out of trouble when things go wrong". It'd be even longer before you would consider yourself competent, as opposed to just able.
(My opinion comes from my point of view at work - I'm a diagnostic ultrasound tech).
One thought comes to mind, although I've no proof, but it would *sound* plausible - perhaps the owners of the MRI machine have decided to amortise the initial cost of the machine over it's entire lifetime? Then the cost per MRI would be relatively constant (barring yearly inflation in associated costs, wages, liquid helium, & c.) over time.
Is there a tax advantage to this? (I'm in Australia, so I have no knowledge of the US tax system).
I'm not sure of your point here. You've stated the obvious about the device mentioned, i.e.:
1) you have to have one
2) you need to use it
3) it's not 100% effective
However, compared to the alternative (which is... running a tank brigade straight through an unswept minefield?), again, what is your point?
I think we've just discovered Slashdot Rule (sizeof(ruleset)+1):
:>
Never, ever, ever make a physics mistake on Slashdot - of all places.
This might help a bit, depending on whether you feel like risking running non-management-approved apps at work (let your own commonsense decide):
t able
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_por
Works quite nicely, and needs about 25 mb or so on a USB stick (or the HD)...
Although, as it happens, anyone who deals with RF physics will generally know Fourier's work (or at least it's practical application) intimately... still, you're right, close - but no cigar. :>
> It only takes memorization to become a doctor, they don't have to develop or invent a new process
> or theory like the PhD's. Why the fuck are they treated above everyone else?
Ouch... fair enough, you might be just airing some sour grapes here, but I have to disagree.
I work with doctors (my job is ultrasounds in the neurology dept. of a large public hospital in Australia), and I can tell you this: it might only take memorization to pass your exams (although I personally have my doubts about even this assertion), but there is an _enormous_ amount of other skill required to be a good doctor.
Just to name one, a doctor worth their salt has to have excellent social & communication skills. It's often very hard to get accurate information from patients regarding their symptoms & signs. This is fair enough - they're sick, and most likely worried, and some don't want to tell you how bad things really are. But decent doctoring is so much more than just "It only takes memorization" that I think I'll just give you the benefit of the doubt, and stick that part of your post into the "whinge box".
(As for your final point, doctors are treated above everyone else primarily because people respect them for having the sheer balls to make decisions that *will* drastically affect someone's life, and be accountable for those decisions afterwards.)
Something I found recently among the docs our radiology department gives to new registrars, regarding how they request for scans:
"Remember the impact of patient dose.
CT brain + CT chest + CD abdomen + CT pelvis = 1250 chest X-rays"
I work in stroke ultrasound, and our patients often have at least two CTs during their stay. That's a *lot* of x-ray energy.
(CTs tend to have their output parameters stamped on them... our machine is generally set between 25 and 45 kW, with about a 50% duty cycle. That's a heck of a lot of juice flowing into ya...)
Makes me feel better when performing TCDs on people! (Transcranial Doppler is one other method of detecting blood clots & stenoses, although we aim for deeper, larger arteries - it's hard to get signals closer than 30-35 mm from the surface of the scalp.)
I disagree with your statement that "at least Hitler's agenda didn't completely revolve around himself."
... the fate of the Reich depends on me alone. I shall act accordingly."
Hitler was very much self-absorbed, to the point where his delusions included associating his own life & existence with that of the entire German Reich. He in fact planned the war to fit entirely within his lifetime (Sebastian Haffner's book "The meaning of Hitler" gives an excellent account of this).
One quote of Hitler's is particularly pointed: (23rd Nov, 1939) "As a final factor I must, in all modesty, list my own person: irreplaceable. Neither a military nor a civilian personality could take my place. Attempts on my life may be repeated
Hitler was an A-class, self-obsessed, delusional nutjob, make no bones about it.
Unfortunately, people like you come along and pollute the analogy by assuming that the guy literally equated bandwidth to a car. No, he didn't. Strawman, R.I.P.
No, that's not quite it. Your own words show up my particular point. Bandwidth isn't a car. It might be, in some aspects, but the very fact that you and I both came up with different aspects of the analogy is where it all falls apart.
You shouldn't just throw out an analogy without indicating which aspects of the nature of the two things are analogous. That's all I'm trying to say - it's not well enough specified as an analogy, and thus could muddy the waters.
No matter how bad you think the analogy is, if you get his point it's still a good analogy.
:>
Dead right. The thing is, I'd already gotten the point before the analogy. The analogy just made me weep for anyone trying to use it to understand aspects of the network issues they didn't quite have a handle on already.
The analogy helped me not at all.
Throwing in my opinion as to ways in which the analogy was flawed was probably just asking to have people respond with how my points were technically flawed more than anything else. I had a niggling feeling that people would pick on the 100% utilisation point.
The real killer for me, perhaps, was that the original poster (whose technical point was spot on, I still state!) used what could be a massively-faceted analogy (is it the mechanics we should note? is it the transport-network vs. computer network similarities? the inherent dangers to life & limb of running flat out all the time?) and unfortunately didn't state what aspects of the car analogy he was particularly pointing at.
Anyways, it was a glorified rant. I promise to close my end of the discussion on car analogies with this: Arrrgh!
Argh! I can't stand it anymore... Your point is dead on, but then you went and polluted it with a really inappropriate analogy. Seriously, the car-analogy is overused to the point of cliche-death around here.
:>
Your car's maximum power output not being used all the time (i.e. a mechanical device, that suffers wear and tear, used in a transport system that's controlled by a bunch of independant and variously-skilled drivers) has absolutely nothing to do with not using networking connections full time at 100% data rate. The latter is because of business economic reasons, since networks have:
a) no loss incurred by running at 100% over 10% capacity (assuming reasonably decent routers, and ignoring the pretty-much-spurious congestion hassles at the routers) - compared to the car analogy, at least, and...
b) no such things as "poor drivers". "Poor drivers" could only be broken routers, which would be removed from the network and replaced as soon as they're found. On the other hand, you have to live with "poor drivers" in the car system regardless of the fact that *they* should arguably be removed from the system.
Death to the car analogy!!!
Not just 19"..but for anything other than ultrasound,
:>
Bah! This annoys me no end, being an US tech myself. Whenever the radiology types want a workstation, they automatically get at least dual 21" LCDs. When we want an imaging workstation, it gets the stock standard whatever-the-PC-gets-delivered-with screen... usually a 17" LCD of bog standard quality.
Still, I'll console myself with the fact that I reckon the patients like us US types better - they have to, we end up a lot more in their personal space than an X-ray tech or a CT/MR driver...