Is it just me, or have news sites forgotten the meaning of "paragraph"? I mean, you look at the article, and (almost) every paragraph is made from 1-2 sentances (mostly just 1). From Wikipedia:
A paragraph (from the Greek paragraphos, "to write beside" or "written beside") is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. Paragraphs consist of one or more sentences.
I know that you don't have to have literary masterpieces with wonderfully woven paragraphs made from many interlocked sentances, but give me a break, you could at least consolidate some of those paragraphs in the "randomly selected article" into one paragraph. Example:
U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton, overseeing the longtime copyright fight between Viacom and Google over YouTube, on Wednesday granted summary judgment for the search company.
"The court has decided that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement," Google said on its site.
"The decision follows established judicial consensus," Google continued, "that online services like YouTube are protected when they work cooperatively with copyright holders to help them manage their rights online."
Yes, I guess part of my problem is with the medium, but not with the whole Internet, but more specifically with Twitter. I wrote about it in more details here, so please read it.
You treat his death with respect not because he deserves respect, but because you do. If you start treating death with disrespect, you will not deserve respect. Look at the video of the Apache soldiers that shot the people in Iraq. We can argue all we want about whether those shot at were unarmed civilians or armed terrorists, but what dismayed many was how lightly the soldiers treated the shooting.
I wasn't talking about the death penalty but about the announcement, which I believe was inappropriate. If you are a state that believes in the death penalty and want to defend it against criticism, the first step is to be above reproach yourself.
Thank you, this is the first reply that had me stop and think about the issue from a different point of view. You are correct, length does not matter (withhold obvious jokes, please). As a physician I sometimes write a whole page of information about a patient, but sometimes a short sentence suffices. So in that you are correct. I guess what offended me is that using Twitter still has the impression of an off-handed manner. Maybe it's an anachronistic point of view, but I think it's not completely off. I'm sure you could find a reference of someone saying what I just said about government announcement over the Internet 10 years ago, but still, as Twitter is a medium built around impulsive, everyday events, using it for confirmation of a death-sentence is a bit too much for me.
A) Yes, correct, a point that does not change my main argument. B) Sorry, in my haste to reply (yes, I am at work) I skipped a few words. Should have written "...the AG of one of the states of the United States...".
The man who was sentenced was a scumbag, a murder, a low-life. Whatever adjective you use, I'm with you, that does not mean we should stoop to his level. Staying decent yourself in the face of immoral people is part of not falling for the "Dark Side". If you want to claim yourself enlightened, one of the first steps is acting like it in all circumstances, including when informing of the execution of a murderer.
When you have a radical, religious, fascist fanatic writing blogs all over the Internet, you do not expect him to show some decency. From the AG of the great democracy, USA, I expect a bit more. That is why I wrote "all-time low". Not because it's the worst we've seen, but because I still believe that the taking of someone's life, no matter your stance on capital punishment, deserves a bit more than 140 characters in Twitter.
Since you are talking about new features like embedded Flash and PDF, I assume you use either the beta or dev build of Chrome which are obviously less stable than the regular release, especially the dev version. Comparing dev Chrome to stable Opera is unfair. i use the dev version and I find it very stable, I can only assume that the regular version is less crash-prone.
Although I generally agree with you, it is logical to ask for damages that are higher than what you really lost. If I evade taxes to the tune of 1000$, and the court fines me for 1000$, I have no reason not to evade taxes again. Thats why I need to pay the 1000$ + statuary damages/added fines/etc. The same is here. If the total damage you, allegedly, caused are 60$, the law suit should be for more than that, in order to deter you from doing it again. Of course, 150,000$ per song is excessive, but you catch my drift.
I agree that sometimes a minor complaint is only the symptom to a major issue, and further, I agree that some doctors (I would call them Not-So-Good-Doctors) are quick to discount the patient's complaint and give him something to get rid of whatever pains him. OTOH, most of the people that have a small complaint don't have a big/major disease behind it. Do you want us to perform a CT for everyone with a stomach-ache? Apart from the cost, there is the issue of radiation exposure - I don't think you would want to be exposed to so much radiation for something that is almost always not serious. Perform a cathatarization to everyone with chest pain? I think more people would die from complications of the procedure than would be saved from having not missed a few heart attacks. So the solution? Listen to the patient, perform a meticulous examination and follow-up on the patient. One thing that recurs many times at presentations of rare/special cases is the need for repeat examinations. Symptoms that appear mild at the inital examination may evolve after some time has elapsed. And yes, many doctors need more humility.
How do you find a good car mechanic? You ask around with friends, go to a few different mechanics and use your gut feelings and experience. No shortcuts. Sorry.
I know it was a joke, but there is such a thing as referred pain - a gastric ulcer (AKA minor stomach problem) can cause chest pain; and a heart attack can cause upper abominal pain.
It's even more problematic than you think. As a doctor, many times I have patients coming to me with "agonizing abdominal pain" - they are sure it's appendicitis. If you check their stomach or ask them "does it hurt here?" they jump and cry and wail, etc. etc. But if I start talking to them on other subjects (What do you do in your life? Are you married? Children?) and get them diverted, I find out many times that they "forget" about their pain and the stomach is as soft and non-tender as can be. This is one of the reasons that no app can replace a physical exam by a doctor. You need the doctor-patient relationship to strip away the anxiety and find out the true magnitude of the symptoms. So, yes, an app like the one in TFA could be nice as a handy reference, but nothing beats the good-old face-to-face meeting.
Do you prefer that all experimental compounds would be tested directly on humans? Do you know how many compounds do not pass even the animal testing stage? The tests on animals are not supposed to find drugs that can be used on humans (AKA people), but are supposed to find candidate drugs to be tested on a small set of humans (AKA Phase 0 of Phase I clinical trials). If these trials are successful the researchers go on to the next stages of testing. It is a foregone conclusion that most compounds will fail in clinical trials, although they were successful on animals. That is one of the reasons that drug development is so expensive. This does not mean that animal experiments are a fraud, it only means that it has limitations that need to be understood - and most researchers understand them. Obviously, you don't.
Well, people here voiced all kinds of reasons why video call aren't useful, but I think David Foster Wallace summed it up best in his amazing novel, Infinite Jest. The book was published in 1996 and revolved about a future USA (~10-20 years in the future). In the following excerpt he gives an assay about why video calls failed (past tense):
Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation [...] let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet -- and this was the retrospectively marvelous part -- even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided.
[...] Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener's expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those caller who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking extra rude, absentminded, or childishly self-absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.
There is a bit more at this link and a lot more at the book itself, which I highly recommend.
First of all, although BP is a larger airline than El-Al, I do believe El-Al is more susceptible to attack, given that it is Israel's national airline, so the statistics are a bit more problematic than they appear. Second, I'm sure that Israel's policy is a real deterrent, but I wouldn't discount their airport and on-flight security measures altogether. I believe that El-Al shows that you need a comprehensive security plan - i.e. pre-flight and in-flight measures coupled with policies to cope with an attack once it happens.
Slashdot Mirror
You just attach a few sticks together, obviously!
And they go to 11!
Not yet, you mean :)
Is it just me, or have news sites forgotten the meaning of "paragraph"? I mean, you look at the article, and (almost) every paragraph is made from 1-2 sentances (mostly just 1). From Wikipedia:
A paragraph (from the Greek paragraphos, "to write beside" or "written beside") is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. Paragraphs consist of one or more sentences.
I know that you don't have to have literary masterpieces with wonderfully woven paragraphs made from many interlocked sentances, but give me a break, you could at least consolidate some of those paragraphs in the "randomly selected article" into one paragraph. Example:
U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton, overseeing the longtime copyright fight between Viacom and Google over YouTube, on Wednesday granted summary judgment for the search company.
"The court has decided that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement," Google said on its site.
"The decision follows established judicial consensus," Google continued, "that online services like YouTube are protected when they work cooperatively with copyright holders to help them manage their rights online."
/off topic
Sorry, had to get it out of my system.
Yes, I guess part of my problem is with the medium, but not with the whole Internet, but more specifically with Twitter. I wrote about it in more details here, so please read it.
You treat his death with respect not because he deserves respect, but because you do. If you start treating death with disrespect, you will not deserve respect. Look at the video of the Apache soldiers that shot the people in Iraq. We can argue all we want about whether those shot at were unarmed civilians or armed terrorists, but what dismayed many was how lightly the soldiers treated the shooting.
I wasn't talking about the death penalty but about the announcement, which I believe was inappropriate. If you are a state that believes in the death penalty and want to defend it against criticism, the first step is to be above reproach yourself.
Thank you, this is the first reply that had me stop and think about the issue from a different point of view.
You are correct, length does not matter (withhold obvious jokes, please). As a physician I sometimes write a whole page of information about a patient, but sometimes a short sentence suffices. So in that you are correct.
I guess what offended me is that using Twitter still has the impression of an off-handed manner. Maybe it's an anachronistic point of view, but I think it's not completely off. I'm sure you could find a reference of someone saying what I just said about government announcement over the Internet 10 years ago, but still, as Twitter is a medium built around impulsive, everyday events, using it for confirmation of a death-sentence is a bit too much for me.
A) Yes, correct, a point that does not change my main argument.
B) Sorry, in my haste to reply (yes, I am at work) I skipped a few words. Should have written "...the AG of one of the states of the United States...".
The man who was sentenced was a scumbag, a murder, a low-life. Whatever adjective you use, I'm with you, that does not mean we should stoop to his level. Staying decent yourself in the face of immoral people is part of not falling for the "Dark Side". If you want to claim yourself enlightened, one of the first steps is acting like it in all circumstances, including when informing of the execution of a murderer.
When you have a radical, religious, fascist fanatic writing blogs all over the Internet, you do not expect him to show some decency. From the AG of the great democracy, USA, I expect a bit more. That is why I wrote "all-time low". Not because it's the worst we've seen, but because I still believe that the taking of someone's life, no matter your stance on capital punishment, deserves a bit more than 140 characters in Twitter.
I guess we need to rewrite Slashdot rule no. 1: "Any discussion could be used to bash Apple".
Since you are talking about new features like embedded Flash and PDF, I assume you use either the beta or dev build of Chrome which are obviously less stable than the regular release, especially the dev version. Comparing dev Chrome to stable Opera is unfair.
i use the dev version and I find it very stable, I can only assume that the regular version is less crash-prone.
Until recently I even believed A* was an international standard for paper size.
It is, and so is the metric system. At least in the US they're driving on the right side of the road. :)
I completely agree with you, just wanted to clear the point about suing for more than actual damages. I agree that 150,000$ is way too much.
Although I generally agree with you, it is logical to ask for damages that are higher than what you really lost. If I evade taxes to the tune of 1000$, and the court fines me for 1000$, I have no reason not to evade taxes again. Thats why I need to pay the 1000$ + statuary damages/added fines/etc.
The same is here. If the total damage you, allegedly, caused are 60$, the law suit should be for more than that, in order to deter you from doing it again. Of course, 150,000$ per song is excessive, but you catch my drift.
I bet you meant this!
I agree that sometimes a minor complaint is only the symptom to a major issue, and further, I agree that some doctors (I would call them Not-So-Good-Doctors) are quick to discount the patient's complaint and give him something to get rid of whatever pains him. OTOH, most of the people that have a small complaint don't have a big/major disease behind it. Do you want us to perform a CT for everyone with a stomach-ache? Apart from the cost, there is the issue of radiation exposure - I don't think you would want to be exposed to so much radiation for something that is almost always not serious. Perform a cathatarization to everyone with chest pain? I think more people would die from complications of the procedure than would be saved from having not missed a few heart attacks.
So the solution? Listen to the patient, perform a meticulous examination and follow-up on the patient. One thing that recurs many times at presentations of rare/special cases is the need for repeat examinations. Symptoms that appear mild at the inital examination may evolve after some time has elapsed.
And yes, many doctors need more humility.
How do you find a good car mechanic? You ask around with friends, go to a few different mechanics and use your gut feelings and experience. No shortcuts. Sorry.
I know it was a joke, but there is such a thing as referred pain - a gastric ulcer (AKA minor stomach problem) can cause chest pain; and a heart attack can cause upper abominal pain.
It's even more problematic than you think. As a doctor, many times I have patients coming to me with "agonizing abdominal pain" - they are sure it's appendicitis. If you check their stomach or ask them "does it hurt here?" they jump and cry and wail, etc. etc. But if I start talking to them on other subjects (What do you do in your life? Are you married? Children?) and get them diverted, I find out many times that they "forget" about their pain and the stomach is as soft and non-tender as can be.
This is one of the reasons that no app can replace a physical exam by a doctor. You need the doctor-patient relationship to strip away the anxiety and find out the true magnitude of the symptoms. So, yes, an app like the one in TFA could be nice as a handy reference, but nothing beats the good-old face-to-face meeting.
Yep, but you have to admit that Macron 1 took it to the edge.
Towards the end you moved from Transformers into a Macron 1 analogy, but other then that - +1 Funny.
Do you prefer that all experimental compounds would be tested directly on humans? Do you know how many compounds do not pass even the animal testing stage?
The tests on animals are not supposed to find drugs that can be used on humans (AKA people), but are supposed to find candidate drugs to be tested on a small set of humans (AKA Phase 0 of Phase I clinical trials). If these trials are successful the researchers go on to the next stages of testing. It is a foregone conclusion that most compounds will fail in clinical trials, although they were successful on animals. That is one of the reasons that drug development is so expensive. This does not mean that animal experiments are a fraud, it only means that it has limitations that need to be understood - and most researchers understand them. Obviously, you don't.
Well, people here voiced all kinds of reasons why video call aren't useful, but I think David Foster Wallace summed it up best in his amazing novel, Infinite Jest. The book was published in 1996 and revolved about a future USA (~10-20 years in the future). In the following excerpt he gives an assay about why video calls failed (past tense):
Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation [...] let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet -- and this was the retrospectively marvelous part -- even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided.
[...] Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener's expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those caller who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking extra rude, absentminded, or childishly self-absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.
There is a bit more at this link and a lot more at the book itself, which I highly recommend.
First of all, although BP is a larger airline than El-Al, I do believe El-Al is more susceptible to attack, given that it is Israel's national airline, so the statistics are a bit more problematic than they appear.
Second, I'm sure that Israel's policy is a real deterrent, but I wouldn't discount their airport and on-flight security measures altogether. I believe that El-Al shows that you need a comprehensive security plan - i.e. pre-flight and in-flight measures coupled with policies to cope with an attack once it happens.