I'm an engineer too, and I've met a decent number of female engineers. Not a huge number, but certainly not as rare as unicorns.
The thing is: almost all of them were not Americans. They were mostly Indian, Chinese, etc. I can probably count on one hand the number of female, American-born engineers I've met. And every single one of them worked at one very large chipmaking corporation, which probably had a very strong recruitment program for female engineers.
Solar's production curve does not match the peak user curve of electrical power.
Where'd you get that idea? Most power is used in the middle of the day, when it's hot and everyone turns on their A/C. Solar produces the most power right in the middle of the day, when the sun is shining brightest. Solar is perfect for supplying peak loads in places where people use A/C.
1. Hydro 2. Nuclear 3. Geothermal. 1 and 3 are location limted.
2 is location limited too: you can't put nuclear close to a fault line, in a place where there's tornadoes or hurricanes, and you generally need to put it next to a river for cooling though you can also use giant cooling towers. And of course, you can't put it anywhere near a metro area.
I've used both Uber and Lyft several times each (probably about 10-15 trips total, more of them with Lyft because it's cheaper). It's always worked out pretty well, though there's times when there's no drivers nearby (seems to be more of a problem with Lyft actually) so you'll wait a while. However, this compares favorably to regular cabs where I've taken those in the same area as I used Lyft/Uber and had to wait an hour for them to show up. The prices are much, much lower with Uber/Lyft too: taking a cab anywhere at all costs $20, but with Lyft/Uber it was usually under $10. And of course there's the massive convenience factor. The cab companies are stuck in the 1970s: you have to look them up in a phone book, call them, ask for a cab to come to your location, give them your street address, etc. Then you have to actually tell the stupid driver where to turn and navigate for him because he doesn't know where the hell anything is and doesn't use GPS.
Sure, taxis are fast and convenient in Manhattan because they're plentiful and the drivers actually know where stuff is, but anywhere else in the country, taxis are a giant, expensive, pain in the ass.
Transplanting fat-rat microbes into skinny rats resulted in the skinny rats turning fat. The science behind it really isn't hard to understand: different animals have different microbe cultures in their guts, which process foods differently. So what on earth would make you think that this couldn't possibly happen with people, and that it's perfectly safe to transplant fat-person microbes into a skinny person?
2. Well it obviously did work here: the skinny person got fat thanks to the transplant from the fat person. Good job!
Besides, people do all kinds of crazy and dangerous stuff to try to lose weight now, including a) liposuction and b) stomach stapling. Why the hell would you not try FMT instead, which seems far less invasive and risky than cutting someone open for surgery? Hmmm... which should I try first, taking some antibiotics and then swallowing a pill with someone's fecal matter to repopulate my intestines with better bacteria, or being put under general anaesthesia and having holes cut in me and a suction tube stuck in to suck the fat out? Or better yet being cut open and having my stomach modified so I can barely eat any food at all?
Similarly, systemd has a fixed (external) API. GNOME and KDE adhere to desktop standards and don't have terribly hard links to the other layers. And so on with the other pieces of software on the system. I know you're not a developer (where is your store anyway?) so I know you're not actually trolling, but it's kind of ignorant-verging-on-insulting to imply that these projects can't keep a stable API. Because if the interfaces actually were being changed every nanosecond, no one would be able to use them for longer than a nanosecond.
Actually, you're wrong about GNOME. It does not have a stable API, and gtk (maintained by the Gnome devs) is constantly changing, which is why some projects (Razor, I think?) have abandoned it for Qt which does have a stable API. The Gnome devs don't care about having a stable gtk API because they solely control it and don't really care about extensions, so people who write them have to change them every time a new release comes along. It's a mess, but that's the Gnome project for you.
But you're right about everything else: they use stable APIs to interface with each other.
Breaking an API marked as stable is a huge no-no for a developer. Implying that this is a common thing among Linux software projects would be insulting if it were actually credible.
Well it IS common with Gnome, which was the pre-eminent desktop DE for Linux until Gnome3 came out and made so many people jump ship for other DEs. Why any non-Gnome developer would bother messing around with the cluster, I have no idea.
You're overgeneralizing. I'm skinny and I definitely have a strong sweet tooth. As long as I exercise enough and avoid HFCS and crap like sodas, I stay skinny. (This isn't to say that I keep my sugar consumption low; I do eat quite a bit of sugar, but it's all sucrose and carbs, and I certainly don't eat like a bird.)
Different people have radically different digestive systems and tolerances and metabolisms; that's the bottom line.
Given the sedentary lifestyle of much of modern society, it seems there should be medical research into making our digestive systems *less* efficient.
1) I'm pretty sure this link has been known about for some time. I was reading articles to this effect several years ago. So why on earth did they decide to do a FMT from an obese patient when I, a layman on Slashdot and not a medical professional in any way, already knew that there was strong evidence that gut bacteria affected obesity and there were experiments showing this in animals?
And 2) Why are there not already treatments for obesity using FMTs from skinny people? Instead of just feeling sorry for fat people because they have crappy gut flora, and given that we already do fecal matter transplants and have even come up with simply frozen pills people can swallow instead of having a tube jammed down their throat, doesn't it logically follow that for severely obese people, this treatment is a no-brainer?
They often are the only ones to have several uF ceramic caps
Huh? I buy 10uF 1206 Samsung caps from Arrow all the time. These things aren't hard to find; they're always in stock and there's many different mfgrs. The things that can be hard to find are particular ICs, since they're usually single-source and get bought up in big lots.
Actually, no (at least not completely). Digi-Key is a favorite shopping spot for many hobbyists because they have cheap shipping, and an incredible inventory. The prices are rather high though, but for people ordering only single-digit quantities, it's not out of line. But unlike a lot of places, Digi-Key will ship small orders by First Class Mail for next to nothing, whereas most other distributors want to send everything UPS Ground for $10+ per shipment. If you just want to order a handful of cheap parts, that shipping charge is a killer, but with Digi-Key it's quite economical.
Of course, the bulk of their business is probably selling to engineers in prototype quantities. Buying production quantities from them is idiotic, however, because their prices are high; you can always get better prices somewhere else like Avnet or Arrow or Future.
Mouser's kinda in the middle: they have a very good inventory (unlike Avnet, Arrow, and Future, which are more limited to which manufacturers they carry and they're out of stock of a lot of stuff at times), and their prices are cheaper than Digi-Key's. Mouser's my go-to store most of the time for buying smaller quantities of things, or prototype quantities, or sometimes for things the other places just don't carry.
The Scandinavian languages might have the same roots as German, but as a native German I could not make sense of what I read when I was in Denmark and Iceland.
Yes, they are pretty different, but if you already know English and German, it should be easier and faster for you to pick up Danish or Swedish than if you know English and Spanish.
Oh please. People are still using XP/IE6 not because of a particular cycle, but because their company is using some shitty internal web app that only works on IE6.
I'm no database expert by any means, but isn't it possible to put the database (its data store I mean, not the application) on a separate partition or drive, and mount that at boot-up time? Shouldn't that solve this problem?
Nope, the last article I saw basically said it was equally divided between the left and right-leaning voters. On the left side is the Prius-driving, organic-buying, vegan, "hippie" crowd, on the right side is the evangelical, Whole Foods-loving (WF's CEO is a rightie), anti-evolution-education, anti-government crowd.
The common thread between both of them is they're educated (but not in medicine), and they favor a lot of "alternative medicine" BS.
Actually, I thought I read a headline recently that said some new research pointed to the possibility that mothers taking anti-depressants might be at higher risk of their child developing autism. Of course, correlation doesn't prove causation, but given that autism rates have increased a lot in recent years, and anti-depressant use has skyrocketed, there might be something to it.
When I got vaccinated as a kid, I always ended up sick at some point that same year.
So as a kid, you got sick with polio, mumps, measles, and whooping cough, and lived to tell about it?
I got sick a lot as a kid too. As an adult, I don't get sick much at all. It's normal for kids to get sick a lot: they're in school with hundreds of other kids, and catch it from them. There's a reason some people call kids "disease vectors".
If you want to pick a language to learn based on a single book, go ahead; I'd prefer to use a more comprehensive set of criteria in picking a language to learn.
If literary works and other arts are that important to you, you'd probably be better off picking Italian or maybe French. Spain was a world power back in the 1500s and 1600s, true, but after that it became completely irrelevant. Don Quixote was published in the early 1600s; what have they done since then? The truly excellent works of Frenchman Alexandre Dumas, by contrast, came out in the 1800s. And I'll take The Count of Monte Cristo over Don Quixote any day.
Interesting point, but most German engineers are going to speak English better than you can speak German. I imagine the same is true for Japan.
That's most likely true for German, not so much for Japanese and definitely not for Chinese.
The advantage of Spanish (or what people realize less often, French) is that you have large poorer territories in South America and especially Africa where perhaps there'd be more difficulty getting someone with US tech experience to head up an office.
If you're going into STEM, why would you be "heading up an office" in Africa or South America? That's for business majors. Besides, South and Central America are the most dangerous places in the world to live these days, so you'd have to be nuts to want to move there. El Salvador and Honduras lead the world in murder rates, with IIRC 1 in 9 men being murdered there. You'd be safer moving to Iraq.
A lot of Americans do move to Germany (not usually permanently) for business assignments because there's a lot of multinational companies that work in both places. Knowledge of German will help a lot there, both in the office (though most professionals there speak English), and especially outside the office. Lots of lower-class Germans do not speak much English, so when you want to go shop in a pastry shop or wherever, it helps a lot to be conversational. And in Germany, you don't have to worry much about some drug gang killing or kidnapping you, unlike Central America.
Additionally, knowledge of German is a big help if you do any business or travel to the Scandinavian countries, since those languages are Germanic too and very similar to German. Same goes for Netherlands. And don't forget Austria and especially Switzerland, where German is also spoken (though for Switzerland this depends on which part, there's a big German part and a big French part, and a smaller Italian part).
This is primarily a question of how much we value general education though. People forget the main reason to learn a second language is just an exercise in learning and seeing how another language works. Most people are never going to speak a second language well enough to use it professionally.
For most people, that's true, but you might as well pick a language that's used by advanced, world-leading nations and economies, not a language that's only useful in backwards, violent nations, just in case you do get an assignment or opportunity to live there for a while.
It also helps that English is itself a Germanic language, and a lot closer to it grammatically than it is to Spanish. German really isn't too hard for a native English speaker to learn. The Romance languages are a little more difficult because English is farther from them (it borrows a fair amount from French thanks to the Normans, and also a lot of borrowing from others after that).
I took German. German is the language of many engineers, and a place where there's lots of tech companies. Spanish is the language of kitchen line cooks and janitors and landscapers. There's almost no Spanish-speaking engineers or programmers out there.
If you're going into a STEM field, the languages you should be looking at are German, Japanese, and Mandarin (not necessarily in that order, it really depends on what sub-field within STEM you're interested in). If your goal in life is to start a restaurant or a landscaping business, however, Spanish would be an asset.
I mostly agree that people should be able to buy whatever the hell they want, and things sold should be what they claim to be, under threat of government action if they aren't (as that is "fraud").
However, and this is really another separate issue IMO, saying the FDA shouldn't evaluate claims is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, the government screws up sometimes (esp. when things are decided by Congresscritters instead of scientists or medical professionals, which is what happened with pot), and yes, sometimes scientists engage in fraudulent behavior in order to get tenure or grants, but that doesn't mean it's overwhelmingly common. What you're suggesting is like saying that rape laws obviously aren't working since lots of women are raped, so let's just get the government out of the business of punishing rapists and legalize it. Or that public schools are pretty horrible in many parts of the country, so let's just close them all down and get the government out of the education business, and let parents educate their own kids. For the most part, requiring pharmaceuticals to be rigorously tested for safety and efficacy does work, which is why we have so many drugs now that work wonders, compared to, say, the state of the pharmaceutical industry in 1900. When mistakes or evil things happen, we have laws and a court system to deal with that and fix it, plus we have free press (including countless internet sites) to inform people of when things happen. But to suggest that regular Joe Schmoes are at all qualified to make educated decisions about what does and what doesn't work is just ridiculous, especially when the penalty for taking the incorrect drug, or the incorrect dosage, can be death. A doctor prescribing something can't know this stuff either; he's relying on clinical trials and FDA certification to know that something is effective and safe to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Most power is used by industry, not residences. People work during the day.
Also, I'm quite sure that your information is not correct for the southwest desert states.
Good luck getting the NIMBYs to agree to it. No one wants to live next to a nuclear plant. Would you?
I'm an engineer too, and I've met a decent number of female engineers. Not a huge number, but certainly not as rare as unicorns.
The thing is: almost all of them were not Americans. They were mostly Indian, Chinese, etc. I can probably count on one hand the number of female, American-born engineers I've met. And every single one of them worked at one very large chipmaking corporation, which probably had a very strong recruitment program for female engineers.
It's like I've said before: every group is its own worst enemy.
Women's quest for equality is going to be hampered far, far more by other women than it ever will by men.
Solar's production curve does not match the peak user curve of electrical power.
Where'd you get that idea? Most power is used in the middle of the day, when it's hot and everyone turns on their A/C. Solar produces the most power right in the middle of the day, when the sun is shining brightest. Solar is perfect for supplying peak loads in places where people use A/C.
1. Hydro
2. Nuclear
3. Geothermal.
1 and 3 are location limted.
2 is location limited too: you can't put nuclear close to a fault line, in a place where there's tornadoes or hurricanes, and you generally need to put it next to a river for cooling though you can also use giant cooling towers. And of course, you can't put it anywhere near a metro area.
This is why we should be building SkyTran instead of continuing to push outdated transit solutions from the 19th century.
I've used both Uber and Lyft several times each (probably about 10-15 trips total, more of them with Lyft because it's cheaper). It's always worked out pretty well, though there's times when there's no drivers nearby (seems to be more of a problem with Lyft actually) so you'll wait a while. However, this compares favorably to regular cabs where I've taken those in the same area as I used Lyft/Uber and had to wait an hour for them to show up. The prices are much, much lower with Uber/Lyft too: taking a cab anywhere at all costs $20, but with Lyft/Uber it was usually under $10. And of course there's the massive convenience factor. The cab companies are stuck in the 1970s: you have to look them up in a phone book, call them, ask for a cab to come to your location, give them your street address, etc. Then you have to actually tell the stupid driver where to turn and navigate for him because he doesn't know where the hell anything is and doesn't use GPS.
Sure, taxis are fast and convenient in Manhattan because they're plentiful and the drivers actually know where stuff is, but anywhere else in the country, taxis are a giant, expensive, pain in the ass.
1. People are animals.
Transplanting fat-rat microbes into skinny rats resulted in the skinny rats turning fat. The science behind it really isn't hard to understand: different animals have different microbe cultures in their guts, which process foods differently. So what on earth would make you think that this couldn't possibly happen with people, and that it's perfectly safe to transplant fat-person microbes into a skinny person?
2. Well it obviously did work here: the skinny person got fat thanks to the transplant from the fat person. Good job!
Besides, people do all kinds of crazy and dangerous stuff to try to lose weight now, including a) liposuction and b) stomach stapling. Why the hell would you not try FMT instead, which seems far less invasive and risky than cutting someone open for surgery? Hmmm... which should I try first, taking some antibiotics and then swallowing a pill with someone's fecal matter to repopulate my intestines with better bacteria, or being put under general anaesthesia and having holes cut in me and a suction tube stuck in to suck the fat out? Or better yet being cut open and having my stomach modified so I can barely eat any food at all?
Similarly, systemd has a fixed (external) API. GNOME and KDE adhere to desktop standards and don't have terribly hard links to the other layers. And so on with the other pieces of software on the system. I know you're not a developer (where is your store anyway?) so I know you're not actually trolling, but it's kind of ignorant-verging-on-insulting to imply that these projects can't keep a stable API. Because if the interfaces actually were being changed every nanosecond, no one would be able to use them for longer than a nanosecond.
Actually, you're wrong about GNOME. It does not have a stable API, and gtk (maintained by the Gnome devs) is constantly changing, which is why some projects (Razor, I think?) have abandoned it for Qt which does have a stable API. The Gnome devs don't care about having a stable gtk API because they solely control it and don't really care about extensions, so people who write them have to change them every time a new release comes along. It's a mess, but that's the Gnome project for you.
But you're right about everything else: they use stable APIs to interface with each other.
Breaking an API marked as stable is a huge no-no for a developer. Implying that this is a common thing among Linux software projects would be insulting if it were actually credible.
Well it IS common with Gnome, which was the pre-eminent desktop DE for Linux until Gnome3 came out and made so many people jump ship for other DEs. Why any non-Gnome developer would bother messing around with the cluster, I have no idea.
You're overgeneralizing. I'm skinny and I definitely have a strong sweet tooth. As long as I exercise enough and avoid HFCS and crap like sodas, I stay skinny. (This isn't to say that I keep my sugar consumption low; I do eat quite a bit of sugar, but it's all sucrose and carbs, and I certainly don't eat like a bird.)
Different people have radically different digestive systems and tolerances and metabolisms; that's the bottom line.
Given the sedentary lifestyle of much of modern society, it seems there should be medical research into making our digestive systems *less* efficient.
The thing I don't understand is this:
1) I'm pretty sure this link has been known about for some time. I was reading articles to this effect several years ago. So why on earth did they decide to do a FMT from an obese patient when I, a layman on Slashdot and not a medical professional in any way, already knew that there was strong evidence that gut bacteria affected obesity and there were experiments showing this in animals?
And 2) Why are there not already treatments for obesity using FMTs from skinny people? Instead of just feeling sorry for fat people because they have crappy gut flora, and given that we already do fecal matter transplants and have even come up with simply frozen pills people can swallow instead of having a tube jammed down their throat, doesn't it logically follow that for severely obese people, this treatment is a no-brainer?
I used to have a girlfriend who pronouned "bowl" that way.
They often are the only ones to have several uF ceramic caps
Huh? I buy 10uF 1206 Samsung caps from Arrow all the time. These things aren't hard to find; they're always in stock and there's many different mfgrs. The things that can be hard to find are particular ICs, since they're usually single-source and get bought up in big lots.
Actually, no (at least not completely). Digi-Key is a favorite shopping spot for many hobbyists because they have cheap shipping, and an incredible inventory. The prices are rather high though, but for people ordering only single-digit quantities, it's not out of line. But unlike a lot of places, Digi-Key will ship small orders by First Class Mail for next to nothing, whereas most other distributors want to send everything UPS Ground for $10+ per shipment. If you just want to order a handful of cheap parts, that shipping charge is a killer, but with Digi-Key it's quite economical.
Of course, the bulk of their business is probably selling to engineers in prototype quantities. Buying production quantities from them is idiotic, however, because their prices are high; you can always get better prices somewhere else like Avnet or Arrow or Future.
Mouser's kinda in the middle: they have a very good inventory (unlike Avnet, Arrow, and Future, which are more limited to which manufacturers they carry and they're out of stock of a lot of stuff at times), and their prices are cheaper than Digi-Key's. Mouser's my go-to store most of the time for buying smaller quantities of things, or prototype quantities, or sometimes for things the other places just don't carry.
The Scandinavian languages might have the same roots as German, but as a native German I could not make sense of what I read when I was in Denmark and Iceland.
Yes, they are pretty different, but if you already know English and German, it should be easier and faster for you to pick up Danish or Swedish than if you know English and Spanish.
Oh please. People are still using XP/IE6 not because of a particular cycle, but because their company is using some shitty internal web app that only works on IE6.
I'm no database expert by any means, but isn't it possible to put the database (its data store I mean, not the application) on a separate partition or drive, and mount that at boot-up time? Shouldn't that solve this problem?
Nope, the last article I saw basically said it was equally divided between the left and right-leaning voters. On the left side is the Prius-driving, organic-buying, vegan, "hippie" crowd, on the right side is the evangelical, Whole Foods-loving (WF's CEO is a rightie), anti-evolution-education, anti-government crowd.
The common thread between both of them is they're educated (but not in medicine), and they favor a lot of "alternative medicine" BS.
Actually, I thought I read a headline recently that said some new research pointed to the possibility that mothers taking anti-depressants might be at higher risk of their child developing autism. Of course, correlation doesn't prove causation, but given that autism rates have increased a lot in recent years, and anti-depressant use has skyrocketed, there might be something to it.
When I got vaccinated as a kid, I always ended up sick at some point that same year.
So as a kid, you got sick with polio, mumps, measles, and whooping cough, and lived to tell about it?
I got sick a lot as a kid too. As an adult, I don't get sick much at all. It's normal for kids to get sick a lot: they're in school with hundreds of other kids, and catch it from them. There's a reason some people call kids "disease vectors".
If you want to pick a language to learn based on a single book, go ahead; I'd prefer to use a more comprehensive set of criteria in picking a language to learn.
If literary works and other arts are that important to you, you'd probably be better off picking Italian or maybe French. Spain was a world power back in the 1500s and 1600s, true, but after that it became completely irrelevant. Don Quixote was published in the early 1600s; what have they done since then? The truly excellent works of Frenchman Alexandre Dumas, by contrast, came out in the 1800s. And I'll take The Count of Monte Cristo over Don Quixote any day.
Interesting point, but most German engineers are going to speak English better than you can speak German. I imagine the same is true for Japan.
That's most likely true for German, not so much for Japanese and definitely not for Chinese.
The advantage of Spanish (or what people realize less often, French) is that you have large poorer territories in South America and especially Africa where perhaps there'd be more difficulty getting someone with US tech experience to head up an office.
If you're going into STEM, why would you be "heading up an office" in Africa or South America? That's for business majors. Besides, South and Central America are the most dangerous places in the world to live these days, so you'd have to be nuts to want to move there. El Salvador and Honduras lead the world in murder rates, with IIRC 1 in 9 men being murdered there. You'd be safer moving to Iraq.
A lot of Americans do move to Germany (not usually permanently) for business assignments because there's a lot of multinational companies that work in both places. Knowledge of German will help a lot there, both in the office (though most professionals there speak English), and especially outside the office. Lots of lower-class Germans do not speak much English, so when you want to go shop in a pastry shop or wherever, it helps a lot to be conversational. And in Germany, you don't have to worry much about some drug gang killing or kidnapping you, unlike Central America.
Additionally, knowledge of German is a big help if you do any business or travel to the Scandinavian countries, since those languages are Germanic too and very similar to German. Same goes for Netherlands. And don't forget Austria and especially Switzerland, where German is also spoken (though for Switzerland this depends on which part, there's a big German part and a big French part, and a smaller Italian part).
This is primarily a question of how much we value general education though. People forget the main reason to learn a second language is just an exercise in learning and seeing how another language works. Most people are never going to speak a second language well enough to use it professionally.
For most people, that's true, but you might as well pick a language that's used by advanced, world-leading nations and economies, not a language that's only useful in backwards, violent nations, just in case you do get an assignment or opportunity to live there for a while.
It also helps that English is itself a Germanic language, and a lot closer to it grammatically than it is to Spanish. German really isn't too hard for a native English speaker to learn. The Romance languages are a little more difficult because English is farther from them (it borrows a fair amount from French thanks to the Normans, and also a lot of borrowing from others after that).
Or you could just save yourself the time and expense and hire an English-speaking one instead.
So why'd you take Spanish then?
I took German. German is the language of many engineers, and a place where there's lots of tech companies. Spanish is the language of kitchen line cooks and janitors and landscapers. There's almost no Spanish-speaking engineers or programmers out there.
If you're going into a STEM field, the languages you should be looking at are German, Japanese, and Mandarin (not necessarily in that order, it really depends on what sub-field within STEM you're interested in). If your goal in life is to start a restaurant or a landscaping business, however, Spanish would be an asset.
I mostly agree that people should be able to buy whatever the hell they want, and things sold should be what they claim to be, under threat of government action if they aren't (as that is "fraud").
However, and this is really another separate issue IMO, saying the FDA shouldn't evaluate claims is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, the government screws up sometimes (esp. when things are decided by Congresscritters instead of scientists or medical professionals, which is what happened with pot), and yes, sometimes scientists engage in fraudulent behavior in order to get tenure or grants, but that doesn't mean it's overwhelmingly common. What you're suggesting is like saying that rape laws obviously aren't working since lots of women are raped, so let's just get the government out of the business of punishing rapists and legalize it. Or that public schools are pretty horrible in many parts of the country, so let's just close them all down and get the government out of the education business, and let parents educate their own kids. For the most part, requiring pharmaceuticals to be rigorously tested for safety and efficacy does work, which is why we have so many drugs now that work wonders, compared to, say, the state of the pharmaceutical industry in 1900. When mistakes or evil things happen, we have laws and a court system to deal with that and fix it, plus we have free press (including countless internet sites) to inform people of when things happen. But to suggest that regular Joe Schmoes are at all qualified to make educated decisions about what does and what doesn't work is just ridiculous, especially when the penalty for taking the incorrect drug, or the incorrect dosage, can be death. A doctor prescribing something can't know this stuff either; he's relying on clinical trials and FDA certification to know that something is effective and safe to use.