This is not a pap smear. It's a vaginal vault smear. The two are listed as different procedure codes and consume different resources....
Please explain in what way they consume different resources? When I do a pap smear, I insert the vaginal speculum, use the cyto brush to take a sample from the cervix, and then prepare the smear slide with the material from the cyto brush. When I do a vaginal vault smear, I do exactly the same using the same equipment, only that instead of brushing the cervix I brush the area where it used to be.
Then I send the slide to the pathologist who views it under the microscope - and again, from his perspective resource use (time, skills, devices) will be exactly the same.
I don't know under what health system you live and what your profession / experience is. I have worked as a doctor in Germany, Norway, and Australia and have been performing pap smears and vaginal vault smears for almost two decades. I discuss the indication with all patients, especially with women after hysterectomy. As I stated - some will not need smears any more after a total hysterectomy, but this cannot be generalized. Some will certainly benefit from continued smears.
In the current health system I work under (Australia), there is no remuneration for doing the smears - it is covered by the consultation. That is, whether I just discuss the need for smears with a patient or discuss and actually do it, the health system pays me exactly the same.
Hence, I certainly have no benefit from doing it, nor does the woman who has to suffer the smear - unless there is a potential health/survival benefit for her. Why would any doctor in his/her right mind do any unnecessary smears in such a system? (They might in an anomalous private health system which rewards needless procedures, as typical for the USA - but fortunately I don't have to work in such). Doctors in typical public health systems certainly think twice whether it is worth the time and effort in each individual case, and most of us don't do things just "out of tradition" as the inflammatory report suggested.
Only "scientists" who get their "facts" wrong!
on
Why Doctors Hate Science
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· Score: 3, Informative
A few facts first: 1) Pap smears still make sense in women after a hysterectomy. It is then called a vaginal vault smear. It is meaningful at the very least in women who had abnormal smears prior to hysterectomy, because abnormal cells can have spread to the surrounding vaginal wall
2) Some surgeons leave a stump of the cervix behind when they perform a subtotal hysterectomy. Not common practice any more, but used to be very common in many countries and can have some advantages for the stability of the pelvic floor. Not all women who had a hysterectomy know whether they still have a cervix stump or not.
3) When the hysterectomy was performed for malignancy, eg cancer of the uterus, the vaginal vault smear can be useful to detect early recurrence
Hence. some women may not need pap smears after a total hysterectomy - but in many women this is still a meaningful and cost effective procedure - which is why even public health systems are still happy to pay for them.
The article does not seem to take this properly into account - because most scientists have only a very limited insight into medical problems. I should know - I did a science degree first before becoming a MD.
If you would have bothered to read my post you would have noted that this is about patient health records. OF COURSE they are encrypted.
The reason why not a differential backup is because a highly normalized huge database with lots of blobs is very difficult to back up differentially/incrementally in a way that allows fastest possible restore (which we might need).
I do use database replication via VPN - but we also need an audit trail that holds water in court and points of safe return (concerning errorpropagation in backups), so we cannot do away with full backups.
This is not a pimply faced youth's porn and music collection - this is important data that can save or destroy lives depending how it is handled and accessed.
When all I had were floppy disks, my first 5MB hard disk seemed so huge that I started wondering how I would fill it. Question was answered within weeks. Few years later I spent seveal thousands of dollars for a monstruous 5GB hard disk, assuming that would be the end of all my storage troubles.
Nowadays, in my medical practice, my backup volume is at present 25 GB. It grows by about 1GB per month. That is what I have to transfer every night to an offsite backup facility.
Images I receive from radiology can be several GB a day when they transfer MRI and CT images, and so forth
Plus, once you got the bandwidth, you can start doing some real video conferencing at a frame rate and resolution that actually makes it usable - and you will burn through many GB in no time.
Here's the problem from a usability standpoint: I want to install a media player. I don't know that I need to install mplayer, xine or totem. (What is a totem and WTF does it have to do with playing media? WTF is a xine anyhow?) THe 'Add/Remove Programs' in Ubuntu addresses some of this, but try installing an app that plays podcasts WITHOUT KNOWING that democracyplayer and VLC play podcasts. apt-cache search podcast
or enter "podcast" as a search term in your GUI software installation tool. How hard is this? Certainly easier than strolling through dozens of software shops or dredging the web
I believe the very best situation arises when a company actually sees the benefits of Open Source and can reap some profit from doing it.
There is nothing wrong if both customer as well as vendor benefit and both sides can be happy about a deal without one side ripping the other one off - it is the Nirvana of commerce
Good on Sun for doing what they did and are still doing.
Well - think. What do you want to achieve? Is it a) your children and wife can move around freely without fear of being molested or preyed upon any time of the day b) you get a sense of revenge by "punishing the offender"
As a father of four, a) is my goal. Anything that achieves it must be a good thing, even if it leaves no room for b)
The USA have one of the harshest legal systems - one of the very few civilized countries still dishing out "capital punishment" - and yet there are few if any other countries with such a large percentage of people in jail, with such a high rate of capital crimes, with such a high rate of sexual offenses.
Look around the world - for example the Scandinavian countries. They have a more evidence based approach towards dealing with crime and the prevention of it, and hey - it works. When we still livedin Norway, my two daughters and my wife could go out whenever and wherever they liked without fear. It is almost like this in rural Australia, and there may be some peaceful rural places in the US too - but as a rule this is not the case. Most of the US populace live in home made fear, and evidence *proves* that punishment is not the solution. Intelligent beings look for other solutions if the one they tried doesn't work.
PS - regarding the story above, I do not know the girl in question, have not personally seen her, and do not know whether the allegation of prostitution or age appearance has any substance or not. The event did not happen in our area, the convict simply moved to our area after serving his sentence and was forced to leave again because of the ensuing witch hunt. My posting should NOT be considered as condoning in any way sexual acts of adults with minors of age either, or of this case in particular (and don't get caught in details since I have no way of knowing whether any of these allegations were true or not - I posted it as an excellent example to stimulate some debate whether a) it is appropriate to use the blanket label "sex offender" indiscriminately b) it is appropriate to deprive people of human rights on an ongoing basis on account of sentences that already have been fully served
In my practice I see a variety of patients who have been convicted for sex offences - ranging from predatory paedophiles to people who made a simple bona fide mistake. The former are people who suffer from a mental illness - they need treatment and not punishment, and should not be released onto society before there is evidence that the treatment actually works. The latter usually get punished way beyond their "crime" and really should be entitled to living a normal life after serving their sentence.
I practice in Australia - another country of puritan heritage, but fortunately not as openly hostile towards sex as the US, and courts here tend to be less "Mickey Mouse" style. Nevertheless, one of my patients fell for a 15yo prostitute and had non-penetrative sex with her, one single time. Independent witnesses all reported they would have taken her for at least 18 if not older. The "perpetrator" had no prior offence and the circumstances were such that he was not actively seeking such connection but it happened spontaneously when she was allegedly actively seeking such relation
For that the man got 5 years of which he served 3. Since he was announced as a paedophile to his inmates when he was jailed, they scalded him badly with boiling water and beat him up badly before they had opportunity of learning the whole story. When he was released, he moved to my town. He is a religious man who confided into a local priest who had nothing better to do than walk from door to door and warn people about the dangerous paedophile who moved into town. A really nasty witch hunt started against him where even otherwise nice and educated people blindly joined in. Is this just? Will it improve anything? Will this protect any children?
The legislation mentioned in this article which deprives so called "sex offenders" regardless of their background of essential human rights is obscene, and the people producing such legislation either ignorant or criminal.
I did not say the US was inferior - I said it was not much advanced as society. Eventually it will get there, though your current government seems hellbound in pushing you guys back into the medieval dark ages.
In any sufficiently advanced society attributes like race, ethnicity and religion don't matter any more. While the Scandinavian countries once were indeed ethnically fairly homogenous, in the past decades they have been taking in refugees from the poorest countries on Earth (many African and Asian countries) in much larger numbers (proportionally to population) than most other countries. In fact, the small arctic town I used to live in probably had more black people than the average US town would have. But we all got along just fine, and it did not lead to any situation where we would have required "more lawyers", and there certainly was no increase in crime.
Why? Because, as societies advance, the huge gulf between the extreme rich and extreme poor vanishes. There are still differences between the wealthy and less wealthy, but nobody is poor any more - the main incentives for crime (poverty, envy) has been taken away. The biggest difference is probably the absence of fear - you don't have to fear to loose your job (because social security will take care of you), to fall sick (because health care is free and to the highest standard), what will become of your children (because all education is free including tertiary), and so forth. Once you don't have to suffer these essential fears every day any more, you can become creative, and less spiteful / hateful than those living under constant fear.
I always find it amusing when people in the US fall for the fear mongering regarding anything "social" - in my income class in the US I would live in constant fear of people abducting my children, of people breaking into my properties etc. - how do I know? Because we briefly tried to live in Seattle. Nowadays we live in Australia - because I love the climate, the country, the lush rainforests where we have our property, scuba, sailing.... I could move here because free education provided me with sought-after skills, education I never would have been able to afford in the US.
This is not so. As far as "advanced societies" goes, the US rank maybe in the upper mid field, but nowhere near the top as for example the Scandinavian societies which incidentally cope with a small fraction of the lawyers (per capita) that the US seems to think they need.
As we speak, the US has the highest per capita ratio of prisoners of all OECD countries - that is, in no other OECD country that many people are locked away in jails - yet at the same time it is one of the unsafest countries too; sad records in homicides, gunshot wounds, rape, armed robbery, break-and-enter compared to most OECD countries again.
Looks like the herds of lawyers in the US are not doing the population any good - I think in a free market they will do everything to "create business", even if this means they turn a high proportion of the population into criminals.
Well, speak for yourself. While I agree that it is nice to have as much enjoyable sex as you can, I can tell you that age has very little to do with it. As a family doctor, the sex life of people is something I am quite familiar with. And, as opposed to "studies", I don't get answers from people ticking boxes "for fun" or "to impress the questioner", but a glimpse into what happens in the real world in average and not-so-average people.
I have patients in their eighties who still enjoy an active sex life. My wife is in her mid-forties and I consider her at least as attractive as she was as a teen (we have been together for 27 years now, and no, she does not read slashdot), and have many patients in their fifties who are every little bit as attractive as teens.
See, it is a question of how you keep your body and mind. There are fat pimply teens and beautiful ones, and likewise there are many versions of elderly bodies. Just takes some effort to keep attractive, but it is doable (my wife for example belly dances and jogs 10km every day). Likewise it takes some effort to retain sexual stamina and ability, but it is doable. If someone has smoked for 20 years, he will most likely be impotent because he has destroyed the delicate microcirculation in his perineum. But somebody taking care of his/her body, why, they can enjoy sex as often and as long as in their teens at nearly any age.
>> MS has the resources to actually generate amazingly good products and dominate on a level playing field.
Well, and how did they get those resources? By generating crappy products and being able to sell them by preventing a level playing field. That strategy worked for two decades now, why should they change tack?
Stockholm syndrome is specific to hostage situations. It hardly applies when a mature male teenager has sexual experiences with a young attractive female teacher. Where is the trauma, the near death experience here?
In that specific case, I actually went through all the available documents. For the record: I do not watch TV, I do not even own a TV.
I am a doctor who has some "sex offenders" among my patients. They range from rapists and paedophiles to people who harmed nobody but those with a narrow religiously based world view (eg people having sex in a public place without intent of being discovered, like in a bush after dark in a park).
I define sex offenders as people who cause grief to others through non-consensual acts.
However, U.S. legislation has a much broader view on this, depending on state - in some states the term includes virtually everybody who doesn't fit into a very narrow minded strongly religiously biased cultural view.
My first observation would be that very different people are lumped together under the same tag, a tag which will cause suffering way beyond whatever suffering they may or may not have caused to others.
We all remember the case of a female teacher having had consensual sex with a physically fully developed but legally under age boy. She was convicted as a sex offender, put to jail, and after she was released, the boy married her. Who has suffered here? The boy? Obviously not. He said so, and he demonstrated it by marrying her after she was released from prison. Only he woman suffered grievously under the assault by the legal system, and will probably suffer from the consequences of the conviction and the label of "sex offender" the rest of her life. To what avail? Just to have satisfied the puritan narrow minded views of a few judges and religious zealots.
Plenty of legal cases, mostly from the US, going along similar lines.
The point is that a number of people are deprived of their constitutional and basic human rights. While I agree that in some extreme cases this might be necessary in order to defend others, in the majority of people who are tagged with the label of "sex offender"this is definitely not the case.
The US judicial system is increasingly mutating from a system designed to protect people into a system to enforce the narrow world view of a few zealots; a system that cannot even be reconciled with the constitution.
A government is spending taxpayers money. They should feel obliged to get the biggest band for buck long term. Since most of the costs will probably go into ongoing system maintenance, there is hardly another distribution that can beat the Debian packaging system - especially regarding long term consistency.
The other benefit not going with a specific commercial distro with their proprietary (even if open!) quirks, but rather with generic Debian is that you will find it easier to get qualified administrators too - that has at least been the experience with our medical centre's IT infrastructure
Theft as a concept in law originated at a time when resources were not multipliable indefinitely. If you have two apples and I steal one, you have only one left. If you have two files and I copy them both, you still have the two files.
Unless you can prove that the person who copied the file would have been prepared to pay the asked price for it I fail to see how theft has been committed - the owner still has the original files, and the copier enjoys what he otherwise never would have enjoyed because he never would have been prepared to pay the price.
One can argue that this would be an incentive for all to download and nobody to pay, but reality demonstrates us that this is not the case - most consumers (like me) still pay honestly when they believe the price is value for money even if they are just one mouse click away from a free download.
This is an outrightly dangerous fire hazard. I would strongly advise against it. It also traps moisture which probably will condense along the plastic and end up where you don't want it.
When we start writing down passwords, we compromise them. Obviously. Instead, we should learn how to algorithmically generate good passwords ourselves, so that we don't need to memorize a complex character sequence, but just the way how to generate it.
Example: I take the second and fifth letter of the site name I want to log in, which I use as an index to a poem, movie or book name I know, of which I take in turn letters and numbers...
While this process sounds complex, once you get used to "your" algorithm you don't even have to think much about it any more. That way, I am now using up to 48 quality passwords (long, mixed capitalization, including punctuation, interdispersed numbers) without having any troubles at all remembering.
Re:Sounds like a shame
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Iron Council
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· Score: 1
*NEVER* rely on some critic's opinion on a book. Tastes are different, and our own social background, education etc. - all things impacting on our reading experience - are different too.
I for my part have devoured the Iron Council, and I am already longing to read it again. One of these books where you get sad when you realize there are only a few pages left. It allows me to completely submerge into another world, very few authors accomplish this. My 16 year old son thinks the same, he is currently reading it for the second time
No. Like the USA, it is a federation of state, only that the "Feds" (= Euro Parliament) have a lot less to say in Europe than the Feds in the US at present.
Wouldn't be easy for example to drag Europe into invading other countries, because not one single entity (like the US president) has the power to do so. It would have to be put to vote before the EU parliament, and fat chance of them passing going to war.
Maybe the egg for the USA - but considering that countries like Germany already have started a nationwide rollout of Hydrogen fuel station, in reality the US is just starting to catch up so that they won't be left behind when everybody else is already long running on cleaner fuels.
Most important is that almost all spam we get is actually advertising for US companies; products and services sold or rendered in the US by US companies. Only a small minority of companies advertising by the spam we receive is located in Korea, China or Russia (at least what is caught in the spam filters of our 28 servers, according to our own analysis)
I don't give a hoot about which country spam is sent from - it's the companies contracting spammers for their services in the first place that should feel the full grunt of anti-spam laws. Companies benefitting from spam should have all their assets confiscated - the proof of spamming would be in proving that they paid for spam.
Two years ago we switched the whole IT infrastructure of our paperless 3 doctor clinic (7 employees, plus a subsidiary at the local hospital outpatient department) to Debian Linux, running mostly in-house developed software. I must say since we did that move (which involved an initial rather chaotic 2 weeks) system administration is almost zero.
Security updates happen seamlessly and automatically in the background, new software installation is a breeze, we haven't had a single unscheduled reboot, an administrator work essentially boils down to set up new user accounts, service printers, swap DVD blanks for daily backups, and read the AIDE reports regarding system integrity.
The most important point - and this is where Debian really distinguishes itself from SuSE and RedHat - is that we got rid of counterproductive "release" cycles. Upgrading a RedHat system from one version to the next can be a hairrising experience, and I suppose that's the same with all other commercial distros depending on the "release cycle" paradigm.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not a pap smear. It's a vaginal vault smear. The two are listed as different procedure codes and consume different resources. ...
Please explain in what way they consume different resources?
When I do a pap smear, I insert the vaginal speculum, use the cyto brush to take a sample from the cervix, and then prepare the smear slide with the material from the cyto brush.
When I do a vaginal vault smear, I do exactly the same using the same equipment, only that instead of brushing the cervix I brush the area where it used to be.
Then I send the slide to the pathologist who views it under the microscope - and again, from his perspective resource use (time, skills, devices) will be exactly the same.
I don't know under what health system you live and what your profession / experience is. I have worked as a doctor in Germany, Norway, and Australia and have been performing pap smears and vaginal vault smears for almost two decades. I discuss the indication with all patients, especially with women after hysterectomy. As I stated - some will not need smears any more after a total hysterectomy, but this cannot be generalized. Some will certainly benefit from continued smears.
In the current health system I work under (Australia), there is no remuneration for doing the smears - it is covered by the consultation. That is, whether I just discuss the need for smears with a patient or discuss and actually do it, the health system pays me exactly the same.
Hence, I certainly have no benefit from doing it, nor does the woman who has to suffer the smear - unless there is a potential health/survival benefit for her. Why would any doctor in his/her right mind do any unnecessary smears in such a system? (They might in an anomalous private health system which rewards needless procedures, as typical for the USA - but fortunately I don't have to work in such). Doctors in typical public health systems certainly think twice whether it is worth the time and effort in each individual case, and most of us don't do things just "out of tradition" as the inflammatory report suggested.
A few facts first:
1) Pap smears still make sense in women after a hysterectomy. It is then called a vaginal vault smear. It is meaningful at the very least in women who had abnormal smears prior to hysterectomy, because abnormal cells can have spread to the surrounding vaginal wall
2) Some surgeons leave a stump of the cervix behind when they perform a subtotal hysterectomy. Not common practice any more, but used to be very common in many countries and can have some advantages for the stability of the pelvic floor. Not all women who had a hysterectomy know whether they still have a cervix stump or not.
3) When the hysterectomy was performed for malignancy, eg cancer of the uterus, the vaginal vault smear can be useful to detect early recurrence
Hence. some women may not need pap smears after a total hysterectomy - but in many women this is still a meaningful and cost effective procedure - which is why even public health systems are still happy to pay for them.
The article does not seem to take this properly into account - because most scientists have only a very limited insight into medical problems. I should know - I did a science degree first before becoming a MD.
If you would have bothered to read my post you would have noted that this is about patient health records. OF COURSE they are encrypted.
The reason why not a differential backup is because a highly normalized huge database with lots of blobs is very difficult to back up differentially/incrementally in a way that allows fastest possible restore (which we might need).
I do use database replication via VPN - but we also need an audit trail that holds water in court and points of safe return (concerning errorpropagation in backups), so we cannot do away with full backups.
This is not a pimply faced youth's porn and music collection - this is important data that can save or destroy lives depending how it is handled and accessed.
When all I had were floppy disks, my first 5MB hard disk seemed so huge that I started wondering how I would fill it. Question was answered within weeks. Few years later I spent seveal thousands of dollars for a monstruous 5GB hard disk, assuming that would be the end of all my storage troubles.
Nowadays, in my medical practice, my backup volume is at present 25 GB. It grows by about 1GB per month. That is what I have to transfer every night to an offsite backup facility.
Images I receive from radiology can be several GB a day when they transfer MRI and CT images, and so forth
Plus, once you got the bandwidth, you can start doing some real video conferencing at a frame rate and resolution that actually makes it usable - and you will burn through many GB in no time.
or enter "podcast" as a search term in your GUI software installation tool. How hard is this? Certainly easier than strolling through dozens of software shops or dredging the web
I believe the very best situation arises when a company actually sees the benefits of Open Source and can reap some profit from doing it.
There is nothing wrong if both customer as well as vendor benefit and both sides can be happy about a deal without one side ripping the other one off - it is the Nirvana of commerce
Good on Sun for doing what they did and are still doing.
Quick! Somebody squash it before it replicates! Look what happened to Earth where they missed the chance when there were only a few of them around ...
Well - think. What do you want to achieve? Is it
a) your children and wife can move around freely without fear of being molested or preyed upon any time of the day
b) you get a sense of revenge by "punishing the offender"
As a father of four, a) is my goal. Anything that achieves it must be a good thing, even if it leaves no room for b)
The USA have one of the harshest legal systems - one of the very few civilized countries still dishing out "capital punishment" - and yet there are few if any other countries with such a large percentage of people in jail, with such a high rate of capital crimes, with such a high rate of sexual offenses.
Look around the world - for example the Scandinavian countries. They have a more evidence based approach towards dealing with crime and the prevention of it, and hey - it works. When we still livedin Norway, my two daughters and my wife could go out whenever and wherever they liked without fear. It is almost like this in rural Australia, and there may be some peaceful rural places in the US too - but as a rule this is not the case. Most of the US populace live in home made fear, and evidence *proves* that punishment is not the solution. Intelligent beings look for other solutions if the one they tried doesn't work.
PS - regarding the story above, I do not know the girl in question, have not personally seen her, and do not know whether the allegation of prostitution or age appearance has any substance or not. The event did not happen in our area, the convict simply moved to our area after serving his sentence and was forced to leave again because of the ensuing witch hunt.
My posting should NOT be considered as condoning in any way sexual acts of adults with minors of age either, or of this case in particular (and don't get caught in details since I have no way of knowing whether any of these allegations were true or not - I posted it as an excellent example to stimulate some debate whether
a) it is appropriate to use the blanket label "sex offender" indiscriminately
b) it is appropriate to deprive people of human rights on an ongoing basis on account of sentences that already have been fully served
In my practice I see a variety of patients who have been convicted for sex offences - ranging from predatory paedophiles to people who made a simple bona fide mistake. The former are people who suffer from a mental illness - they need treatment and not punishment, and should not be released onto society before there is evidence that the treatment actually works. The latter usually get punished way beyond their "crime" and really should be entitled to living a normal life after serving their sentence.
I practice in Australia - another country of puritan heritage, but fortunately not as openly hostile towards sex as the US, and courts here tend to be less "Mickey Mouse" style. Nevertheless, one of my patients fell for a 15yo prostitute and had non-penetrative sex with her, one single time. Independent witnesses all reported they would have taken her for at least 18 if not older. The "perpetrator" had no prior offence and the circumstances were such that he was not actively seeking such connection but it happened spontaneously when she was allegedly actively seeking such relation
For that the man got 5 years of which he served 3. Since he was announced as a paedophile to his inmates when he was jailed, they scalded him badly with boiling water and beat him up badly before they had opportunity of learning the whole story. When he was released, he moved to my town. He is a religious man who confided into a local priest who had nothing better to do than walk from door to door and warn people about the dangerous paedophile who moved into town. A really nasty witch hunt started against him where even otherwise nice and educated people blindly joined in. Is this just? Will it improve anything? Will this protect any children?
The legislation mentioned in this article which deprives so called "sex offenders" regardless of their background of essential human rights is obscene, and the people producing such legislation either ignorant or criminal.
I did not say the US was inferior - I said it was not much advanced as society. Eventually it will get there, though your current government seems hellbound in pushing you guys back into the medieval dark ages.
.... I could move here because free education provided me with sought-after skills, education I never would have been able to afford in the US.
In any sufficiently advanced society attributes like race, ethnicity and religion don't matter any more.
While the Scandinavian countries once were indeed ethnically fairly homogenous, in the past decades they have been taking in refugees from the poorest countries on Earth (many African and Asian countries) in much larger numbers (proportionally to population) than most other countries. In fact, the small arctic town I used to live in probably had more black people than the average US town would have. But we all got along just fine, and it did not lead to any situation where we would have required "more lawyers", and there certainly was no increase in crime.
Why? Because, as societies advance, the huge gulf between the extreme rich and extreme poor vanishes. There are still differences between the wealthy and less wealthy, but nobody is poor any more - the main incentives for crime (poverty, envy) has been taken away. The biggest difference is probably the absence of fear - you don't have to fear to loose your job (because social security will take care of you), to fall sick (because health care is free and to the highest standard), what will become of your children (because all education is free including tertiary), and so forth. Once you don't have to suffer these essential fears every day any more, you can become creative, and less spiteful / hateful than those living under constant fear.
I always find it amusing when people in the US fall for the fear mongering regarding anything "social" - in my income class in the US I would live in constant fear of people abducting my children, of people breaking into my properties etc. - how do I know? Because we briefly tried to live in Seattle. Nowadays we live in Australia - because I love the climate, the country, the lush rainforests where we have our property, scuba, sailing
This is not so. As far as "advanced societies" goes, the US rank maybe in the upper mid field, but nowhere near the top as for example the Scandinavian societies which incidentally cope with a small fraction of the lawyers (per capita) that the US seems to think they need.
As we speak, the US has the highest per capita ratio of prisoners of all OECD countries - that is, in no other OECD country that many people are locked away in jails - yet at the same time it is one of the unsafest countries too; sad records in homicides, gunshot wounds, rape, armed robbery, break-and-enter compared to most OECD countries again.
Looks like the herds of lawyers in the US are not doing the population any good - I think in a free market they will do everything to "create business", even if this means they turn a high proportion of the population into criminals.
Well, speak for yourself. While I agree that it is nice to have as much enjoyable sex as you can, I can tell you that age has very little to do with it.
As a family doctor, the sex life of people is something I am quite familiar with. And, as opposed to "studies", I don't get answers from people ticking boxes "for fun" or "to impress the questioner", but a glimpse into what happens in the real world in average and not-so-average people.
I have patients in their eighties who still enjoy an active sex life. My wife is in her mid-forties and I consider her at least as attractive as she was as a teen (we have been together for 27 years now, and no, she does not read slashdot), and have many patients in their fifties who are every little bit as attractive as teens.
See, it is a question of how you keep your body and mind. There are fat pimply teens and beautiful ones, and likewise there are many versions of elderly bodies. Just takes some effort to keep attractive, but it is doable (my wife for example belly dances and jogs 10km every day). Likewise it takes some effort to retain sexual stamina and ability, but it is doable. If someone has smoked for 20 years, he will most likely be impotent because he has destroyed the delicate microcirculation in his perineum. But somebody taking care of his/her body, why, they can enjoy sex as often and as long as in their teens at nearly any age.
>> MS has the resources to actually generate amazingly good products and dominate on a level playing field.
Well, and how did they get those resources? By generating crappy products and being able to sell them by preventing a level playing field.
That strategy worked for two decades now, why should they change tack?
Stockholm syndrome is specific to hostage situations. It hardly applies when a mature male teenager has sexual experiences with a young attractive female teacher. Where is the trauma, the near death experience here?
In that specific case, I actually went through all the available documents. For the record: I do not watch TV, I do not even own a TV.
I am a doctor who has some "sex offenders" among my patients. They range from rapists and paedophiles to people who harmed nobody but those with a narrow religiously based world view (eg people having sex in a public place without intent of being discovered, like in a bush after dark in a park).
I define sex offenders as people who cause grief to others through non-consensual acts.
However, U.S. legislation has a much broader view on this, depending on state - in some states the term includes virtually everybody who doesn't fit into a very narrow minded strongly religiously biased cultural view.
My first observation would be that very different people are lumped together under the same tag, a tag which will cause suffering way beyond whatever suffering they may or may not have caused to others.
We all remember the case of a female teacher having had consensual sex with a physically fully developed but legally under age boy. She was convicted as a sex offender, put to jail, and after she was released, the boy married her. Who has suffered here? The boy? Obviously not. He said so, and he demonstrated it by marrying her after she was released from prison. Only he woman suffered grievously under the assault by the legal system, and will probably suffer from the consequences of the conviction and the label of "sex offender" the rest of her life. To what avail? Just to have satisfied the puritan narrow minded views of a few judges and religious zealots.
Plenty of legal cases, mostly from the US, going along similar lines.
The point is that a number of people are deprived of their constitutional and basic human rights. While I agree that in some extreme cases this might be necessary in order to defend others, in the majority of people who are tagged with the label of "sex offender"this is definitely not the case.
The US judicial system is increasingly mutating from a system designed to protect people into a system to enforce the narrow world view of a few zealots; a system that cannot even be reconciled with the constitution.
A government is spending taxpayers money. They should feel obliged to get the biggest band for buck long term. Since most of the costs will probably go into ongoing system maintenance, there is hardly another distribution that can beat the Debian packaging system - especially regarding long term consistency.
The other benefit not going with a specific commercial distro with their proprietary (even if open!) quirks, but rather with generic Debian is that you will find it easier to get qualified administrators too - that has at least been the experience with our medical centre's IT infrastructure
Theft as a concept in law originated at a time when resources were not multipliable indefinitely.
If you have two apples and I steal one, you have only one left.
If you have two files and I copy them both, you still have the two files.
Unless you can prove that the person who copied the file would have been prepared to pay the asked price for it I fail to see how theft has been committed - the owner still has the original files, and the copier enjoys what he otherwise never would have enjoyed because he never would have been prepared to pay the price.
One can argue that this would be an incentive for all to download and nobody to pay, but reality demonstrates us that this is not the case - most consumers (like me) still pay honestly when they believe the price is value for money even if they are just one mouse click away from a free download.
This is an outrightly dangerous fire hazard. I would strongly advise against it.
It also traps moisture which probably will condense along the plastic and end up where you don't want it.
When we start writing down passwords, we compromise them. Obviously.
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Instead, we should learn how to algorithmically generate good passwords ourselves, so that we don't need to memorize a complex character sequence, but just the way how to generate it.
Example: I take the second and fifth letter of the site name I want to log in, which I use as an index to a poem, movie or book name I know, of which I take in turn letters and numbers
While this process sounds complex, once you get used to "your" algorithm you don't even have to think much about it any more. That way, I am now using up to 48 quality passwords (long, mixed capitalization, including punctuation, interdispersed numbers) without having any troubles at all remembering.
*NEVER* rely on some critic's opinion on a book. Tastes are different, and our own social background, education etc. - all things impacting on our reading experience - are different too.
I for my part have devoured the Iron Council, and I am already longing to read it again. One of these books where you get sad when you realize there are only a few pages left. It allows me to completely submerge into another world, very few authors accomplish this. My 16 year old son thinks the same, he is currently reading it for the second time
No. Like the USA, it is a federation of state, only that the "Feds" (= Euro Parliament) have a lot less to say in Europe than the Feds in the US at present.
Wouldn't be easy for example to drag Europe into invading other countries, because not one single entity (like the US president) has the power to do so. It would have to be put to vote before the EU parliament, and fat chance of them passing going to war.
Maybe the egg for the USA - but considering that countries like Germany already have started a nationwide rollout of Hydrogen fuel station, in reality the US is just starting to catch up so that they won't be left behind when everybody else is already long running on cleaner fuels.
The egg has hatched elsewhere already!
Most important is that almost all spam we get is actually advertising for US companies; products and services sold or rendered in the US by US companies. Only a small minority of companies advertising by the spam we receive is located in Korea, China or Russia (at least what is caught in the spam filters of our 28 servers, according to our own analysis)
I don't give a hoot about which country spam is sent from - it's the companies contracting spammers for their services in the first place that should feel the full grunt of anti-spam laws. Companies benefitting from spam should have all their assets confiscated - the proof of spamming would be in proving that they paid for spam.
Two years ago we switched the whole IT infrastructure of our paperless 3 doctor clinic (7 employees, plus a subsidiary at the local hospital outpatient department) to Debian Linux, running mostly in-house developed software.
I must say since we did that move (which involved an initial rather chaotic 2 weeks) system administration is almost zero.
Security updates happen seamlessly and automatically in the background, new software installation is a breeze, we haven't had a single unscheduled reboot, an administrator work essentially boils down to set up new user accounts, service printers, swap DVD blanks for daily backups, and read the AIDE reports regarding system integrity.
The most important point - and this is where Debian really distinguishes itself from SuSE and RedHat - is that we got rid of counterproductive "release" cycles. Upgrading a RedHat system from one version to the next can be a hairrising experience, and I suppose that's the same with all other commercial distros depending on the "release cycle" paradigm.