I'm in a mixed mac-windows shop (with linux servers for all that), but I know one thing: on a Mac, printing just works, and it always did, no ifs, no buts -- at least for every printer I've ever run into in the last couple of years. Heck, Apple's contributed their changes to CUPS back, so that these days CUPS (a print server running on most Unices, including OS/X) will not only detect most business-grade printers on the network, it will also query them via SNMP to get ink/toner/paper levels etc. This aspect generally a nightmare on Windows, where every printer vendor comes up with their own bloatware just to get a couple integers out of a printer. WTF? The same HP printers are a nightmare to keep working on Windows, their drivers are iffy, they routinely "wedge" their settings in the registry (I restore them nightly via a script), etc. For a small company, I'd migrate most everyone to macs for nothing else but printing support. The only thing holding us back is Solid Edge and I really don't want people to suffer via vmware, even though it would probably work just fine. I use Alibre since my designs are simpler, and it works perfectly via Fusion.
Printing is really a big PITA on Windows, and this got nothing to do with the fact that we print via Samba -- all of the problems reproduce on otherwise non-networked machines when you attach them directly to printers. We have Windows printing set up to use local printer ports (nothing to do with any hardware ports, it's a Win-specific printing term), because the more convenient (central driver sourcing!) option of using server ports was eventually fubard' when we had to update the printer drivers for reasons unrelated to networking. I spent considerable time with wireshark to confirm that Samba wasn't to blame, a legal Windows Server we loaned (an entire preinstalled machine) had exactly same problems, and it looked the same on the wire.
Oh, and HPs universal print drivers are a complete piece of shit, they plain old don't work on hardware that they purport to officially support. I don't know whose fault is it, but HP printers (old and new) work admirably from a Mac, and now from any recent Linux machine too, but the older ones (a decade old, to be exact) just suck on Windows unless you tweak things -- even though there is absolutely nothing wrong with them, hardware-wise, and they provide all the performance we need. At home I have some "throwaway" LaserJet P1006 and it performs amazingly well: standby-to-first page-out in less than 15 seconds, supported out of the box on the iMac, what else would one want. On Windows the driver is a piece of bloated crap.
As much as I think that CUPS is an underdocumented quirky system, somehow Apple got it to work way better than printing on Windows, and I'd love it if/when MS would switch to printing via CUPS.
The presumption is that the higher ups made a decision to use software that does in fact fit their needs better. Not knowing any better, I'd go with statistics of some personal anecdotes, and those say that about 3 out of 4 decisions to switch from platform (non-MS) to MS are done for no good business reason.
That's nothing but a generalization and extrapolation. I don't see much wrong in having principles and sticking to them. Heck, I'd argue that being a spineless bastard who will take whatever shit falls from high on and slave away without complaining does not make you good. I don't see his "expectations" as being unreasonable without further corroboration. You just decided to see it all in a bad light; I, OTOH, see no reason to classify his decision as "good", "bad", or "unreasonable": we're not him, for crying out loud, is everyone a freaking oracle to just know what went through the guy's mind? Without knowing more, the only rational way to approach his plight is by treating it with neutrality it deserves. The guy is looking for a FOSS job, if you have nothing to offer perhaps shut the fuck up?
It doesn't have to be irrational. Au contraire, to me it seems like a perfectly rational decision. The guy is not happy at the job, is it irrational to quit because of that? Happiness or lack thereof is a fact, you don't have to rationalize it for it to be true. People have tastes, wishes, desires, none of this stuff is necessarily driven by rational thought.
Woohoo, what is it today, a generalization day? People have drives and ambitions. I'd much rather someone who is outspoken and has a passion, than someone who will just nod at the meetings, but wish he was doing other things.
Private donors have a dark side to them: institutions that live on donations become slaves to the donors, and donors' ideas may not (and usually don't!) align with what's generally good for the academic integrity of an institution of higher learning.
My pet peeve: collegiate sports in the U.S. Many in the academia somewhat reluctantly agree that providing public entertainment is not necessarily in the core mission of, say, a Big Ten university. So, in an ideal world, they'd be able to simply disband the football team, demolish the stadiums, and focus on what academia is all about. The concept of sports scholarships is broken beyond wildest comprehension: just because someone has a hobby that can possibly generate the school some money should entitle them to having their education paid for?! WTF? As far as I'm concerned, everything but academic and family pursuits are a hobby as far as college is concerned. Now, in reality, no college will ever disband their big-name public-facing athletic teams. Why? Because their donations would largely dry out. They are slaves to donors. It's fucked up, that's what it is: they cannot decide for themselves what's good, they must listen to people who are "in" mostly for name/brand recognition, and for skybox passes at the stadium.
It's the same with budgets in government. Any sane business will have reserves and surpluses that they decide how to spend on. Long-term strategic planning involves saving up money (or getting loans) and doing projects with those funds. In government, it's all ass-backwards. They cannot have a surplus because otherwise their budgets are cut, and thus they wastefully spend any excess funds at end of the fiscal year. Moreover, they cannot make rational business decisions: everything becomes political because they have to beg for money to do anything "extra" (that shouldn't be "extra" but normal strategic planning in the first place).
I find it very hard to believe that the 4G transmitter would be active at all if there was no decent beacon head by the handset. So if there's no 4G coverage at all, I doubt there will be any extra battery drain.
Poor 4G coverage means there is some coverage, but low signal level, so the headset has to blast at full power so that the tower will hear back from it, and it had probably to do plenty of retransmits, keeping its transmitter on at max power and for much longer.
What I don't understand is this: the tower would be transmitting most of the time anyway. Of course towers can do beam shaping and adaptive transmit power, but I think that there's room for having a high power spatially multiplexed beacon. If the phone doesn't hear the beacon, there's no reason whatsoever to transmit. I think someone must have dropped the ball on the implementation of the protocol -- I presume the spec is not broken so badly that a handset would net to transmit just to confirm that there's a 4G tower nearby?!
It's time to dust off the old concept of hard sectored discs;) Realistically, of course, it's a bit more complex than that.
First of all, modern hard drives have a servo track that's used to maintain radial position of the head servo. Instead of each hard drive having a very accurate (and expensive) radial and axial head position sensor, you pay for it once, install it in the factory, use it to accurately guide a hard drive to write the servo track. Its cost is amortized over thousands of drives made. This is probably the reason for a covered up radial slot in many hard drive enclosures: I guess it's used for the sensor to couple with the head system while the drive writes the servo track. Or perhaps the servo platter is prewritten outside the disc? Someone familiar with how it's made please chip in!
The servo track can be also used to provide angular position feedback. A rough estimate of angular position of the spindle is available first from the Hall sensors in the spindle motor. A somewhat more accurate estimate can be had from back-EMF from the spindle motor windings. This still is methinks a couple orders of magnitude away from what's needed to pack sectors tightly on the drive -- thus the feedback can come from the servo track. Not having to read the data tracks helps with packing the sectors: there's no read-write switchover overhead (if it were significant -- perhaps it isn't nowadays). The servo head is always reading, and the data heads can be kept in write/erase standby. It'd be nondestructive, but read amplifiers are disconnected to prevent saturating them -- amplifier overload recovery is slow. Heck, if you want an amp that recovers from overloads quickly, you have to split it into more stages, and you need fast clamps between each stage. There are other similar approaches to this problem, too, and perhaps modern read amps are designed to deal with overloads gracefully -- I never tested a recent one. Stuff from a decade ago was painfully slow on overloads (tried to reuse a head amp from a hard drive for a non-drive-related project).
Alas, this ultra-fast-writing drive would unfortunately need very accurate position sensors -- both angular and radial. It's an engineering issue to make those affordable, as is the design of the optochip with femtosecond laser and its driver and serializer. The latter would probably take a couple serial lanes and multiplex them -- I presume it's not all that easy to push 10gbit/s data between external chips and the laser driver/laser combo. I think that to make it all practical you need an on-chip serializer, write precompensation, driver, and the diode. Perhaps the diode would be "tacked on" later to a substrate that has everything else. I only imagine that bond wire parasitics, even over a couple mm, become kinda important when the laser waveform has a 100GHz bandwidth...
There is nothing that the OS can provide, really, that you can't do on the application level, as far as GC is concerned. Of course if you have anything concrete, please pitch in, but so far I can't really think of anything. I've just said that garbage collection is not invisible unless you have hardware assist: case in point is Firefox's garbage collection pauses, and there's not much you can do about those; they take cycles, they have to traverse a lot of memory. You can have javascript implementations that limit the amount of live memory, and limit garbage creation where they can, and thus you have javascript on Opera and in Safari -- it performs quite admirably compared to Firefox's, but that's because those implementations try hard to limit memory use. If their memory use would balloon to what's "normal" with leaky add-ins/extensions in Firefox, you'd be facing the same problem, they don't have access to some GC magic that Firefox wouldn't.
I'm not arguing that status quo is fucked up. I'm arguing that it needs to change, and people need to be pushed to be rational. What you're claiming is that to understand the fucked up mind of most politicians and laypeople, you need special education. I'm not arguing otherwise. What I'm arguing is that politicians themselves, in order to be able to really claim that they have any moral backbone (most are religious and proud of it, right?), need to stop lying left right and center. And if you're pretending that you have "things to say" (theories) that predict the outcomes (I will do X in order for Y to happen, with Y being somehow desirable), this affords the same scrutiny that any scientific theory would. Now, of course, it may well be that there's no way to know that Y will be achieved by doing X, but you have to claim just as much and be frank about it.
I don't see how treating things in a correct way is somehow a "mistake". The public must be educated that if anything has supposed predictive power, it needs to be treated accordingly. Sure it can't be done in a day. If liberal education somehow makes you think you can spew random bullshit and it should escape scrutiny, then screw that kind of education I'd say.
It's not about talking like scientists at all. Getting across what a theory is doesn't need to be incomprehensible to the "common man".
I'd love to be able to offer discouraging first-hand accounts, but the truth is that even on 6 year old hardware with upgraded RAM, MS Office offers excellent performance. That's my anecdote, and I'm talking about systems that have both latest LibreOffice and MS Office 2010 installed -- old Windows XP based Dell clunkers, off-corporate-lease. LibreOffice is glacial at startup (roughly order of magnitude slower), and it's glacial at reading MS Office formatted files. Never mind the incompatibilities: try explaining to our office administrator that it's MS's fault. We had to pony up the cash for Office, people have to work with externally provided documents and no one wants to waste time reformatting them to work. MS knew full well what they were doing by not doing any formal specification of office document formats (formal in what a computer scientist would call formal -- I'd expect to see plenty of logic expressions, automatons, etc).
If we could have well synchronized time (down to a small fraction of observed wave's period), and sensors that could heterodyne the incoming optical signal, then we could simply frequency-shift the optical signal, digitize the I and Q (preserves phase and amplitude), record it with the timestamps, and do interferometry completely offline. No adaptive optics needed, it'd be all done digitally. It's done that way for some radioastronomy and is no big deal, the only problems are technical when you think of doing it for optical observations. As in: we're not there yet to do optical I-Q heterodyning, but perhaps we're close enough. Once that becomes mainstream, 130m equivalent diameter will be nothing noteworthy, we'll be probably able to observe moon at sub-millimeter resolutions and it'd be amateurs doing that. My expectation is that it'll be possible in well less than a 100 years.
I think Feynman said it all when he was lamenting the sad shape of education in Brazil. It's an old problem, and it doesn't want to go away. Some systems of education just fake the whole process, it's a perfect cargo cult.
How is it, then, that, say, in Poland you can do medical school as a 6 year integrated program, starting straight out of high school, while in the U.S. you need an undergrad degree followed by what, 5 more years? I don't think that the polish model produces any worse doctors...
You want someone who writes well, he should be taking writing courses, not some general English crap. If you want a doctor who know when politicians are full of it, you need one who understands what science is, and that everything that has predictive power is subject to the scrutiny afforded to scientific theories. Theories, in the scientific sense of the word (not the popular one!), are essentially knowledge with predictive power. If someone claims such, it doesn't matter whether he's a politician or a scientist: the claim affords testability, reproducibility, and various "attacks". Just because a theory is uttered by a non-scientist doesn't make it exempt. This seems to be lost on many.
That's a lot of money for little benefit, it seems. You have one anecdote to show for probably 2 years of life mostly wasted on those "well-roundedness" courses? Are you crazy?
I'd actually love for all of my doctors to be brilliant assholes -- I care for them to diagnose and work on whatever the disease is, pleasantries I don't give a crap about if I'm sick and getting worse. The nurses better be nice, though. And, as far as care goes, I've got a wife, too, and she's got me. Ha.
Lab technicians cannot issue diagnoses, like pathologists or radiologists or even cardiologists do -- even those of those MDs who do nothing but look at stuff and never ever see the patient, heck, there's plenty of them who do all their work remotely -- after all, they specialize in interpretation of diagnostic data and that's it. Why the heck would you need more than 4 years of training in total for that is beyond me. It's wasted time, and don't try to persuade me otherwise.
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I'm in a mixed mac-windows shop (with linux servers for all that), but I know one thing: on a Mac, printing just works, and it always did, no ifs, no buts -- at least for every printer I've ever run into in the last couple of years. Heck, Apple's contributed their changes to CUPS back, so that these days CUPS (a print server running on most Unices, including OS/X) will not only detect most business-grade printers on the network, it will also query them via SNMP to get ink/toner/paper levels etc. This aspect generally a nightmare on Windows, where every printer vendor comes up with their own bloatware just to get a couple integers out of a printer. WTF? The same HP printers are a nightmare to keep working on Windows, their drivers are iffy, they routinely "wedge" their settings in the registry (I restore them nightly via a script), etc. For a small company, I'd migrate most everyone to macs for nothing else but printing support. The only thing holding us back is Solid Edge and I really don't want people to suffer via vmware, even though it would probably work just fine. I use Alibre since my designs are simpler, and it works perfectly via Fusion.
Printing is really a big PITA on Windows, and this got nothing to do with the fact that we print via Samba -- all of the problems reproduce on otherwise non-networked machines when you attach them directly to printers. We have Windows printing set up to use local printer ports (nothing to do with any hardware ports, it's a Win-specific printing term), because the more convenient (central driver sourcing!) option of using server ports was eventually fubard' when we had to update the printer drivers for reasons unrelated to networking. I spent considerable time with wireshark to confirm that Samba wasn't to blame, a legal Windows Server we loaned (an entire preinstalled machine) had exactly same problems, and it looked the same on the wire.
Oh, and HPs universal print drivers are a complete piece of shit, they plain old don't work on hardware that they purport to officially support. I don't know whose fault is it, but HP printers (old and new) work admirably from a Mac, and now from any recent Linux machine too, but the older ones (a decade old, to be exact) just suck on Windows unless you tweak things -- even though there is absolutely nothing wrong with them, hardware-wise, and they provide all the performance we need. At home I have some "throwaway" LaserJet P1006 and it performs amazingly well: standby-to-first page-out in less than 15 seconds, supported out of the box on the iMac, what else would one want. On Windows the driver is a piece of bloated crap.
As much as I think that CUPS is an underdocumented quirky system, somehow Apple got it to work way better than printing on Windows, and I'd love it if/when MS would switch to printing via CUPS.
Nope, the original AC said it was 60 for all academics (implied: in that school). The "in Japan" part? -- you just made that up.
The presumption is that the higher ups made a decision to use software that does in fact fit their needs better. Not knowing any better, I'd go with statistics of some personal anecdotes, and those say that about 3 out of 4 decisions to switch from platform (non-MS) to MS are done for no good business reason.
That's nothing but a generalization and extrapolation. I don't see much wrong in having principles and sticking to them. Heck, I'd argue that being a spineless bastard who will take whatever shit falls from high on and slave away without complaining does not make you good. I don't see his "expectations" as being unreasonable without further corroboration. You just decided to see it all in a bad light; I, OTOH, see no reason to classify his decision as "good", "bad", or "unreasonable": we're not him, for crying out loud, is everyone a freaking oracle to just know what went through the guy's mind? Without knowing more, the only rational way to approach his plight is by treating it with neutrality it deserves. The guy is looking for a FOSS job, if you have nothing to offer perhaps shut the fuck up?
It doesn't have to be irrational. Au contraire, to me it seems like a perfectly rational decision. The guy is not happy at the job, is it irrational to quit because of that? Happiness or lack thereof is a fact, you don't have to rationalize it for it to be true. People have tastes, wishes, desires, none of this stuff is necessarily driven by rational thought.
Desktop Macs will, IIRC, operate quite well with an all-MS server. They can log in to an AD, can't they?
Woohoo, what is it today, a generalization day? People have drives and ambitions. I'd much rather someone who is outspoken and has a passion, than someone who will just nod at the meetings, but wish he was doing other things.
Private donors have a dark side to them: institutions that live on donations become slaves to the donors, and donors' ideas may not (and usually don't!) align with what's generally good for the academic integrity of an institution of higher learning.
My pet peeve: collegiate sports in the U.S. Many in the academia somewhat reluctantly agree that providing public entertainment is not necessarily in the core mission of, say, a Big Ten university. So, in an ideal world, they'd be able to simply disband the football team, demolish the stadiums, and focus on what academia is all about. The concept of sports scholarships is broken beyond wildest comprehension: just because someone has a hobby that can possibly generate the school some money should entitle them to having their education paid for?! WTF? As far as I'm concerned, everything but academic and family pursuits are a hobby as far as college is concerned. Now, in reality, no college will ever disband their big-name public-facing athletic teams. Why? Because their donations would largely dry out. They are slaves to donors. It's fucked up, that's what it is: they cannot decide for themselves what's good, they must listen to people who are "in" mostly for name/brand recognition, and for skybox passes at the stadium.
It's the same with budgets in government. Any sane business will have reserves and surpluses that they decide how to spend on. Long-term strategic planning involves saving up money (or getting loans) and doing projects with those funds. In government, it's all ass-backwards. They cannot have a surplus because otherwise their budgets are cut, and thus they wastefully spend any excess funds at end of the fiscal year. Moreover, they cannot make rational business decisions: everything becomes political because they have to beg for money to do anything "extra" (that shouldn't be "extra" but normal strategic planning in the first place).
I find it very hard to believe that the 4G transmitter would be active at all if there was no decent beacon head by the handset. So if there's no 4G coverage at all, I doubt there will be any extra battery drain.
Poor 4G coverage means there is some coverage, but low signal level, so the headset has to blast at full power so that the tower will hear back from it, and it had probably to do plenty of retransmits, keeping its transmitter on at max power and for much longer.
What I don't understand is this: the tower would be transmitting most of the time anyway. Of course towers can do beam shaping and adaptive transmit power, but I think that there's room for having a high power spatially multiplexed beacon. If the phone doesn't hear the beacon, there's no reason whatsoever to transmit. I think someone must have dropped the ball on the implementation of the protocol -- I presume the spec is not broken so badly that a handset would net to transmit just to confirm that there's a 4G tower nearby?!
You got a dud for the battery. Happens sometimes. That's not normal behavior from your phone, and the most likely culprit is the battery itself.
It's leeches all the way down anyway ;)
It's time to dust off the old concept of hard sectored discs ;) Realistically, of course, it's a bit more complex than that.
First of all, modern hard drives have a servo track that's used to maintain radial position of the head servo. Instead of each hard drive having a very accurate (and expensive) radial and axial head position sensor, you pay for it once, install it in the factory, use it to accurately guide a hard drive to write the servo track. Its cost is amortized over thousands of drives made. This is probably the reason for a covered up radial slot in many hard drive enclosures: I guess it's used for the sensor to couple with the head system while the drive writes the servo track. Or perhaps the servo platter is prewritten outside the disc? Someone familiar with how it's made please chip in!
The servo track can be also used to provide angular position feedback. A rough estimate of angular position of the spindle is available first from the Hall sensors in the spindle motor. A somewhat more accurate estimate can be had from back-EMF from the spindle motor windings. This still is methinks a couple orders of magnitude away from what's needed to pack sectors tightly on the drive -- thus the feedback can come from the servo track. Not having to read the data tracks helps with packing the sectors: there's no read-write switchover overhead (if it were significant -- perhaps it isn't nowadays). The servo head is always reading, and the data heads can be kept in write/erase standby. It'd be nondestructive, but read amplifiers are disconnected to prevent saturating them -- amplifier overload recovery is slow. Heck, if you want an amp that recovers from overloads quickly, you have to split it into more stages, and you need fast clamps between each stage. There are other similar approaches to this problem, too, and perhaps modern read amps are designed to deal with overloads gracefully -- I never tested a recent one. Stuff from a decade ago was painfully slow on overloads (tried to reuse a head amp from a hard drive for a non-drive-related project).
Alas, this ultra-fast-writing drive would unfortunately need very accurate position sensors -- both angular and radial. It's an engineering issue to make those affordable, as is the design of the optochip with femtosecond laser and its driver and serializer. The latter would probably take a couple serial lanes and multiplex them -- I presume it's not all that easy to push 10gbit/s data between external chips and the laser driver/laser combo. I think that to make it all practical you need an on-chip serializer, write precompensation, driver, and the diode. Perhaps the diode would be "tacked on" later to a substrate that has everything else. I only imagine that bond wire parasitics, even over a couple mm, become kinda important when the laser waveform has a 100GHz bandwidth...
There is nothing that the OS can provide, really, that you can't do on the application level, as far as GC is concerned. Of course if you have anything concrete, please pitch in, but so far I can't really think of anything. I've just said that garbage collection is not invisible unless you have hardware assist: case in point is Firefox's garbage collection pauses, and there's not much you can do about those; they take cycles, they have to traverse a lot of memory. You can have javascript implementations that limit the amount of live memory, and limit garbage creation where they can, and thus you have javascript on Opera and in Safari -- it performs quite admirably compared to Firefox's, but that's because those implementations try hard to limit memory use. If their memory use would balloon to what's "normal" with leaky add-ins/extensions in Firefox, you'd be facing the same problem, they don't have access to some GC magic that Firefox wouldn't.
I'm not arguing that status quo is fucked up. I'm arguing that it needs to change, and people need to be pushed to be rational. What you're claiming is that to understand the fucked up mind of most politicians and laypeople, you need special education. I'm not arguing otherwise. What I'm arguing is that politicians themselves, in order to be able to really claim that they have any moral backbone (most are religious and proud of it, right?), need to stop lying left right and center. And if you're pretending that you have "things to say" (theories) that predict the outcomes (I will do X in order for Y to happen, with Y being somehow desirable), this affords the same scrutiny that any scientific theory would. Now, of course, it may well be that there's no way to know that Y will be achieved by doing X, but you have to claim just as much and be frank about it.
I don't see how treating things in a correct way is somehow a "mistake". The public must be educated that if anything has supposed predictive power, it needs to be treated accordingly. Sure it can't be done in a day. If liberal education somehow makes you think you can spew random bullshit and it should escape scrutiny, then screw that kind of education I'd say.
It's not about talking like scientists at all. Getting across what a theory is doesn't need to be incomprehensible to the "common man".
I'd love to be able to offer discouraging first-hand accounts, but the truth is that even on 6 year old hardware with upgraded RAM, MS Office offers excellent performance. That's my anecdote, and I'm talking about systems that have both latest LibreOffice and MS Office 2010 installed -- old Windows XP based Dell clunkers, off-corporate-lease. LibreOffice is glacial at startup (roughly order of magnitude slower), and it's glacial at reading MS Office formatted files. Never mind the incompatibilities: try explaining to our office administrator that it's MS's fault. We had to pony up the cash for Office, people have to work with externally provided documents and no one wants to waste time reformatting them to work. MS knew full well what they were doing by not doing any formal specification of office document formats (formal in what a computer scientist would call formal -- I'd expect to see plenty of logic expressions, automatons, etc).
If we could have well synchronized time (down to a small fraction of observed wave's period), and sensors that could heterodyne the incoming optical signal, then we could simply frequency-shift the optical signal, digitize the I and Q (preserves phase and amplitude), record it with the timestamps, and do interferometry completely offline. No adaptive optics needed, it'd be all done digitally. It's done that way for some radioastronomy and is no big deal, the only problems are technical when you think of doing it for optical observations. As in: we're not there yet to do optical I-Q heterodyning, but perhaps we're close enough. Once that becomes mainstream, 130m equivalent diameter will be nothing noteworthy, we'll be probably able to observe moon at sub-millimeter resolutions and it'd be amateurs doing that. My expectation is that it'll be possible in well less than a 100 years.
I think Feynman said it all when he was lamenting the sad shape of education in Brazil. It's an old problem, and it doesn't want to go away. Some systems of education just fake the whole process, it's a perfect cargo cult.
How is it, then, that, say, in Poland you can do medical school as a 6 year integrated program, starting straight out of high school, while in the U.S. you need an undergrad degree followed by what, 5 more years? I don't think that the polish model produces any worse doctors...
You want someone who writes well, he should be taking writing courses, not some general English crap. If you want a doctor who know when politicians are full of it, you need one who understands what science is, and that everything that has predictive power is subject to the scrutiny afforded to scientific theories. Theories, in the scientific sense of the word (not the popular one!), are essentially knowledge with predictive power. If someone claims such, it doesn't matter whether he's a politician or a scientist: the claim affords testability, reproducibility, and various "attacks". Just because a theory is uttered by a non-scientist doesn't make it exempt. This seems to be lost on many.
That's a lot of money for little benefit, it seems. You have one anecdote to show for probably 2 years of life mostly wasted on those "well-roundedness" courses? Are you crazy?
Make sure you don't have hernias. Men do get urinary problems due to hernias.
I'd actually love for all of my doctors to be brilliant assholes -- I care for them to diagnose and work on whatever the disease is, pleasantries I don't give a crap about if I'm sick and getting worse. The nurses better be nice, though. And, as far as care goes, I've got a wife, too, and she's got me. Ha.
Lab technicians cannot issue diagnoses, like pathologists or radiologists or even cardiologists do -- even those of those MDs who do nothing but look at stuff and never ever see the patient, heck, there's plenty of them who do all their work remotely -- after all, they specialize in interpretation of diagnostic data and that's it. Why the heck would you need more than 4 years of training in total for that is beyond me. It's wasted time, and don't try to persuade me otherwise.