He's the President of the USA but cannot work out how to use an iPod or xBox?
And this is coming from the man who "accidentally" let it slip, whilst he was campaigning for the Presidency that he had an iPod of his own. Does his wife have to put music on it for him? Or his children maybe?
You're absolutely right--he must be some kind of a slacker moron, because in his copious free time he doesn't even bother to keep up with the latest gizmos. He's probably wasting his time figuring out useless crap like how to make the planet a better place for his children or some shit like that. I mean, really, what kind of fucktarded N008 can't even be bothered to surf over to pirate bay to rip off his own music?
In addition to the selection bias already mentioned (people more likely to get the flu are more likely to get flu shots), there's another good reason why it might be that people who didn't get the seasonal flu vaccine are less likely to have gotten the H1N1 flu--that's because they're far more likely to have gotten the regular ("seasonal") flu instead! Turns out that whenever we get a viral illness, our bodies ramp up production of interferons and generally "batten down the hatches" to make us more resistant to viral illnesses in general for a short period of time (weeks) afterwards.
If I'm right, then the powers-that-be in the Canadian health system may be wearing a lot of egg on their faces in the next few months, as the "real" (northern hemisphere) flu season hits. Over time, the unvaccinated people who initially resisted H1N1 because they caught a seasonal flu will once more become fully susceptible to the H1N1 strain as well.
Lawyers and accountants are not engineers, and thus don't generally have good understandings of the actual technologies that their companies work with. Instead, like most suits, they seek to avoid controversy and insure against risks they can't understand at all costs--even prohibitively high ones. The people who have the deepest pockets have the most to lose if an enterprise goes south and the least to gain (in relative terms) if it works.
As someone who just forked over $35 to Apple to get them to kindly remove the DRM from his old iTunes library, I can assure you that DRM is still making money for Apple, despite Jobs' lame protests that he personally thinks DRM sucks and he's happy that they don't have to do that any more. The whole thing kind of reminds me of how Microsoft once managed to turn their biggest problem--a reputation for building horribly buggy products that was years in the making--into a major profit center by selling their ever-growing buglist and the known workarounds (aka the MSDN library). Before MSDN (and the related profit center known as Microsoft Tech Support), companies with buggy software generally lost money on the customer service end of things.
Nah, when it comes down to it, the marketing/business strategy wing of Apple is just plain evil. Don't get me wrong-- Apple clearly values great design. I own an iPhone and I love it. But I'm pretty much locked into using iTunes to download apps for my iPhone, and Apple has gone out of its way to ensure that Linux and iTunes won't mix. This is part of a recurring theme--Apple makes some awesome stuff, but in order to maintain high prices, they have no qualms about ruthlessly screwing over any customers who get too uppity and independent.
"Spooky" would imply that there was some mystery to it. To anyone who was paying attention, it only required enough common sense to know that foxes shouldn't be allowed to guard henhouses. There wasn't any mystery.
Just like there wasn't much of a mystery about the lack of WMDs in Iraq before the war to anybody who was paying any attention at all to how the Carlyle Group and Halliburton's subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root were going to make hundreds of billions of dollars of profit from Cheney's unabashed manipulation of the intelligence coming out of the CIA:
Seriously. My ex-wife is a stem cell researcher and has been working for the last several years on spinal cord injury. We're not talking "complete severing" here, we're talking minor contusions. And the results have been pretty modest at best. I'm thinking that any results of the magnitude claimed in this article would have been all over the front page of Science mag, Nature, etc. This seriously smells of SCAM.
Nth'ed on web monkey. I don't have the same negative baggage associated with the term that some do-- i.e. to me, "web monkey" doesn't refer only to a beginning webster (just made that term up since I suddenly needed an alternate name for practitioners of the craft), perhaps because I'm not one.
I don't know how it's currently done, but I can think of a trivial solution to that much of the problem, at least: Not only do you keep an index to the current location of block 0, but you keep a counter with it. And maybe an index and a counter to that index. And maybe an index and a counter to that index (etc.) "But wait!," you say, "you *still* have to update the counters and the indices to the indices, and, and..." Yes, you do. But you can do so in a logarithmic fashion, so the higher up the chain of indices a counter/index pair is, the more static they are. With this approach, ultimately your "root index" can change as infrequently as you want-- averaging out to once a year (or even less) if you so desire.
The "hygiene hypothesis" is one hypothesis to explain the prevalence of asthma among kids who stay indoors a lot. But that hypothesis doesn't explain the particularly high prevalence of asthma among black inner city kids--they don't live in particularly clean/fastidious environments. Turns out there's another hypothesis that's at least as plausible: Vitamin D deficiency.
Being indoors a lot equates to a lack of adequate sun exposure, which causes Vitamin D deficiency, which is now epidemic. (And having dark skin, which is great for protection against melanoma and sunburn, turns out to be not so good when it comes to producing Vitamin D--particularly in northern latitudes.) Vitamin D deficiency has now been linked to tons of health problems--not just osteoporosis, but also many types of cancers, as well as depression, diabetes (both types), heart disease, autism, multiple sclerosis, and (among many other conditions--you guessed it) asthma.
I'd recommend people check out www.vitamindcouncil.org for more info about Vitamin D in general. As to the specific links to asthma, well, I'd provide some links, but I'm guessing anybody who cares to look for more evidence can use Google as well as I can.:^)
With enough of those other "little glitches" you mentioned I can totally see why you decided it was about time to upgrade to something newer, but the point I'd like to make is that deciding to go the "new(er) car route" solely because the cost of repairs is more than the trade-in book value is false economy... assuming that you know everything else about the car is in reasonably good shape. (I realize this assumption might not apply in your case.) Book value reflects only the market value of a typical car of that model and vintage; that's not the same value that I'd give to a well-maintained car in good shape with a newly replaced transmission.
Don't expect to see something like that on the road any time soon not in any number worth mentioning anyhow.
I don't. But I can fantasize might have happened if Aptera Motors had been the recipient of a sizable chunk of that $25 billion of "improved efficiency" money that was squandered on Detroit.
So, why didn't you bother to get the transmission fixed on your '98 Corolla? At only 104K miles, that's not much. My '98 Corolla (manual transmission, with about 160K miles) still gets me from point A to point B while getting about 35 mpg. But then, I tend to drive really fast on highways (75mph+); I'm sure it would do even better if I dropped it down to, say, 65.
> if someone attempts to squash your freedom of speech, they have violated the spirit of the law, if not technically successful...
Agreed. But for some reason the powers that be won't let us docs post negative reviews about any of our patients to warn our peers that they want to just stay as far the frak away as possible. I can only imagine how much health care could be improved for the masses if docs had freedom of speech and actual autonomy regarding our business dealings/associations. We don't--we're generally at the mercy of the insurance companies, and in many cases we're forced to sign contracts of our own that prevent us from bitching about how badly those companies are shafting us. Among other things.
Not going to knock MJ for other purposes (like having a little bit of illegal fun now and then), but why bother with something that 'maybe helps a little' if you're really trying to prevent Alzheimer's? The science is out: if you want to take something that REALLY helps prevents AD (and also coronary artery disease and Parkinson's, among other things), talk to your doctor about getting started on simvastatin: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070719011237.htm
Not to knock NASA (I'm rather fond of them), but what are they doing in the weather prediction biz, anyway? Last I checked, weather and climate studies were in NOAA's domain.
Cross-agency collaborations are great and appropriate, but in general I'd just as soon see NASA's budget dollars stay invested in space research.
But there really aren't a lot of "somewhere elses", other than craigslist, at least, not in a realistic sense. And craigslist is only an okay option for people who are happy selling locally at a fixed price (or perhaps "best offer", if you want to be technical about it.)
Other than that... hmm. Certainly there are a whole myriad of tiny itty-bitty auction sites out there (I would guess), but aside for some very narrow specialty niches, ebay enjoys an incredible barrier-to-entry advantage in the auction-house market. Why? Because when selling, just about everybody wants the biggest possible market for their wares. Hence, just about everybody goes to the biggest market. Duh.
This will not change until/unless eBay shoots itself in the foot by getting so greedy on sales commissions that they manage to piss off a critical mass of people. And even then, they'll still enjoy enough of a natural advantage that they can just back off a percentage point, wipe out their fledgling upstart competitor, and carry on as before.
I wonder if this same kind of chicken little type fearmongering is the same thing that the "global warming" religion followers are doing...
Yeah, seriously. I mean, if any of the disaster scenarios that THOSE freaks were talking about were real, then wouldn't you first expect to see things like massive thawing of thermal reservoirs like the polar ice caps, permafrost, and the glaciers?
The DNC running a white person against an incumbent President Powell... could be a problem, especially if people are willing to believe that he himself was duped by Bush and Cheney during the first 4 years of the Bush kleptocracy and they're willing to overlook the whole lying to the UN thing and then effectively lying to the American people about the state of affairs wit his boss by keeping his mouth shut and not resigning until after the 2004 election.
But running anyone against an incumbent President Condi? That should be a cakewalk. I've never been impressed about much about Rice beyond her academic credentials. Okay, so she knows how to dress stylishly (love those boots!)
But her job is handling foreign policy for the Bush administration. Think about how well *that* is going.
Read his fscking books. There's a lot more to the man than an empty suit and a talent for making pretty speeches. Just because he has the ability to play the game and attract loyal devotion from a large number of people does not in any way mean that he's clueless--only that he knows what it takes to get elected.
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He's the President of the USA but cannot work out how to use an iPod or xBox?
And this is coming from the man who "accidentally" let it slip, whilst he was campaigning for the Presidency that he had an iPod of his own.
Does his wife have to put music on it for him? Or his children maybe?
You're absolutely right--he must be some kind of a slacker moron, because in his copious free time he doesn't even bother to keep up with the latest gizmos. He's probably wasting his time figuring out useless crap like how to make the planet a better place for his children or some shit like that. I mean, really, what kind of fucktarded N008 can't even be bothered to surf over to pirate bay to rip off his own music?
Damn. There I was, thinking it was only a picture of Satan.
Although I'd rather counter their logic with:
I don't want my girlfriend to know I'm buying her a nice set of ear rings for Christmas. I guess I shouldn't be doing it then...
Or posting about it on slashdot, for that matter...
"Obvious" is often a lot more so in retrospect, or once someone has already pointed something out. We'll see.
In addition to the selection bias already mentioned (people more likely to get the flu are more likely to get flu shots), there's another good reason why it might be that people who didn't get the seasonal flu vaccine are less likely to have gotten the H1N1 flu--that's because they're far more likely to have gotten the regular ("seasonal") flu instead! Turns out that whenever we get a viral illness, our bodies ramp up production of interferons and generally "batten down the hatches" to make us more resistant to viral illnesses in general for a short period of time (weeks) afterwards.
If I'm right, then the powers-that-be in the Canadian health system may be wearing a lot of egg on their faces in the next few months, as the "real" (northern hemisphere) flu season hits. Over time, the unvaccinated people who initially resisted H1N1 because they caught a seasonal flu will once more become fully susceptible to the H1N1 strain as well.
Lawyers and accountants are not engineers, and thus don't generally have good understandings of the actual technologies that their companies work with. Instead, like most suits, they seek to avoid controversy and insure against risks they can't understand at all costs--even prohibitively high ones. The people who have the deepest pockets have the most to lose if an enterprise goes south and the least to gain (in relative terms) if it works.
As someone who just forked over $35 to Apple to get them to kindly remove the DRM from his old iTunes library, I can assure you that DRM is still making money for Apple, despite Jobs' lame protests that he personally thinks DRM sucks and he's happy that they don't have to do that any more. The whole thing kind of reminds me of how Microsoft once managed to turn their biggest problem--a reputation for building horribly buggy products that was years in the making--into a major profit center by selling their ever-growing buglist and the known workarounds (aka the MSDN library). Before MSDN (and the related profit center known as Microsoft Tech Support), companies with buggy software generally lost money on the customer service end of things.
Nah, when it comes down to it, the marketing/business strategy wing of Apple is just plain evil. Don't get me wrong-- Apple clearly values great design. I own an iPhone and I love it. But I'm pretty much locked into using iTunes to download apps for my iPhone, and Apple has gone out of its way to ensure that Linux and iTunes won't mix. This is part of a recurring theme--Apple makes some awesome stuff, but in order to maintain high prices, they have no qualms about ruthlessly screwing over any customers who get too uppity and independent.
Offtopic, eh?
And there I was, thinking the topic had something to do with how the ease of finding information on the web affects how we analyze history.
Me suspects the moderator merely has a different take on politics than I do. So much for freedom of speech.
"Spooky" would imply that there was some mystery to it. To anyone who was paying attention, it only required enough common sense to know that foxes shouldn't be allowed to guard henhouses. There wasn't any mystery.
Just like there wasn't much of a mystery about the lack of WMDs in Iraq before the war to anybody who was paying any attention at all to how the Carlyle Group and Halliburton's subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root were going to make hundreds of billions of dollars of profit from Cheney's unabashed manipulation of the intelligence coming out of the CIA:
http://www.counterpunch.org/shor0521.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/leopold03202003.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/vips03152003.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern06272003.html
Amazing notion... money can corrupt?
Um, not.
Seriously. My ex-wife is a stem cell researcher and has been working for the last several years on spinal cord injury. We're not talking "complete severing" here, we're talking minor contusions. And the results have been pretty modest at best. I'm thinking that any results of the magnitude claimed in this article would have been all over the front page of Science mag, Nature, etc. This seriously smells of SCAM.
Nth'ed on web monkey. I don't have the same negative baggage associated with the term that some do-- i.e. to me, "web monkey" doesn't refer only to a beginning webster (just made that term up since I suddenly needed an alternate name for practitioners of the craft), perhaps because I'm not one.
I don't know how it's currently done, but I can think of a trivial solution to that much of the problem, at least: Not only do you keep an index to the current location of block 0, but you keep a counter with it. And maybe an index and a counter to that index. And maybe an index and a counter to that index (etc.) "But wait!," you say, "you *still* have to update the counters and the indices to the indices, and, and..." Yes, you do. But you can do so in a logarithmic fashion, so the higher up the chain of indices a counter/index pair is, the more static they are. With this approach, ultimately your "root index" can change as infrequently as you want-- averaging out to once a year (or even less) if you so desire.
The "hygiene hypothesis" is one hypothesis to explain the prevalence of asthma among kids who stay indoors a lot. But that hypothesis doesn't explain the particularly high prevalence of asthma among black inner city kids--they don't live in particularly clean/fastidious environments. Turns out there's another hypothesis that's at least as plausible: Vitamin D deficiency.
Being indoors a lot equates to a lack of adequate sun exposure, which causes Vitamin D deficiency, which is now epidemic. (And having dark skin, which is great for protection against melanoma and sunburn, turns out to be not so good when it comes to producing Vitamin D--particularly in northern latitudes.) Vitamin D deficiency has now been linked to tons of health problems--not just osteoporosis, but also many types of cancers, as well as depression, diabetes (both types), heart disease, autism, multiple sclerosis, and (among many other conditions--you guessed it) asthma.
I'd recommend people check out www.vitamindcouncil.org for more info about Vitamin D in general. As to the specific links to asthma, well, I'd provide some links, but I'm guessing anybody who cares to look for more evidence can use Google as well as I can. :^)
With enough of those other "little glitches" you mentioned I can totally see why you decided it was about time to upgrade to something newer, but the point I'd like to make is that deciding to go the "new(er) car route" solely because the cost of repairs is more than the trade-in book value is false economy... assuming that you know everything else about the car is in reasonably good shape. (I realize this assumption might not apply in your case.) Book value reflects only the market value of a typical car of that model and vintage; that's not the same value that I'd give to a well-maintained car in good shape with a newly replaced transmission.
Don't expect to see something like that on the road any time soon not in any number worth mentioning anyhow.
I don't. But I can fantasize might have happened if Aptera Motors had been the recipient of a sizable chunk of that $25 billion of "improved efficiency" money that was squandered on Detroit.
So, why didn't you bother to get the transmission fixed on your '98 Corolla? At only 104K miles, that's not much. My '98 Corolla (manual transmission, with about 160K miles) still gets me from point A to point B while getting about 35 mpg. But then, I tend to drive really fast on highways (75mph+); I'm sure it would do even better if I dropped it down to, say, 65.
Why? Because the Volt sucks. Not only will it be too expensive, it won't even be particularly energy efficient.
What should own that market segment instead? Something MUCH more promising, like, say, the Aptera 2e.
http://www.aptera.com/.
> if someone attempts to squash your freedom of speech, they have violated the spirit of the law, if not technically successful...
Agreed. But for some reason the powers that be won't let us docs post negative reviews about any of our patients to warn our peers that they want to just stay as far the frak away as possible. I can only imagine how much health care could be improved for the masses if docs had freedom of speech and actual autonomy regarding our business dealings/associations. We don't--we're generally at the mercy of the insurance companies, and in many cases we're forced to sign contracts of our own that prevent us from bitching about how badly those companies are shafting us. Among other things.
Not going to knock MJ for other purposes (like having a little bit of illegal fun now and then), but why bother with something that 'maybe helps a little' if you're really trying to prevent Alzheimer's? The science is out: if you want to take something that REALLY helps prevents AD (and also coronary artery disease and Parkinson's, among other things), talk to your doctor about getting started on simvastatin: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070719011237.htm
Not to knock NASA (I'm rather fond of them), but what are they doing in the weather prediction biz, anyway? Last I checked, weather and climate studies were in NOAA's domain.
Cross-agency collaborations are great and appropriate, but in general I'd just as soon see NASA's budget dollars stay invested in space research.
But there really aren't a lot of "somewhere elses", other than craigslist, at least, not in a realistic sense. And craigslist is only an okay option for people who are happy selling locally at a fixed price (or perhaps "best offer", if you want to be technical about it.)
Other than that... hmm. Certainly there are a whole myriad of tiny itty-bitty auction sites out there (I would guess), but aside for some very narrow specialty niches, ebay enjoys an incredible barrier-to-entry advantage in the auction-house market. Why? Because when selling, just about everybody wants the biggest possible market for their wares. Hence, just about everybody goes to the biggest market. Duh.
This will not change until/unless eBay shoots itself in the foot by getting so greedy on sales commissions that they manage to piss off a critical mass of people. And even then, they'll still enjoy enough of a natural advantage that they can just back off a percentage point, wipe out their fledgling upstart competitor, and carry on as before.
Yeah, but what if MTV and GTA cause our descendants to devolve into cannibals with a fondness for shish kebab?
I wonder if this same kind of chicken little type fearmongering is the same thing that the "global warming" religion followers are doing...
Yeah, seriously. I mean, if any of the disaster scenarios that THOSE freaks were talking about were real, then wouldn't you first expect to see things like massive thawing of thermal reservoirs like the polar ice caps, permafrost, and the glaciers?
Oh, wait....
The DNC running a white person against an incumbent President Powell... could be a problem, especially if people are willing to believe that he himself was duped by Bush and Cheney during the first 4 years of the Bush kleptocracy and they're willing to overlook the whole lying to the UN thing and then effectively lying to the American people about the state of affairs wit his boss by keeping his mouth shut and not resigning until after the 2004 election.
But running anyone against an incumbent President Condi? That should be a cakewalk. I've never been impressed about much about Rice beyond her academic credentials. Okay, so she knows how to dress stylishly (love those boots!)
But her job is handling foreign policy for the Bush administration. Think about how well *that* is going.
Read his fscking books. There's a lot more to the man than an empty suit and a talent for making pretty speeches. Just because he has the ability to play the game and attract loyal devotion from a large number of people does not in any way mean that he's clueless--only that he knows what it takes to get elected.