But I've always dropped my laptops while carrying or transporting them, never while actually using them... so I went a different route.
Try getting a regular laptop, and putting it in one of the cases made by these guys (No, I don't work for them)
I've taken my laptop to all kinds of places, including some inhospitable places in the very area of the world where lots of bombs are currently being dropped; no problems. Those cases come with a lifetime warranty... they're waterproof, shock-resistant, dustproof (VERY important in the desert), and have automatic pressure relief valves for that unpressurized tactical airlift you're sometimes required to use.
They cost about 150$, but that's chump change compared to the price of a Mil-Spec computer; the money difference is much better spent upgrading the actual laptop.
Let's get real about the oil thing; we aren't going in there to steal their oil. Did everybody catch that? I'll say it again if anybody missed that point... We could have stolen their oil after the first gulf war, but instead we sent almost everybody home.
I have NO doubt that we intend to BUY a bunch of oil from Iraq once Saddam is gone... and why not? There is no other way for the Iraqis to fund the rebuilding of their country. Also, the whole "oil embargo" thing that Saddam previously threatened is totally bogus; many of those OPEC nations depend on income from petroleum exports to run their governments. They are just as dependent on us as we are on them (speaking as an American). Oil embargo? That's mutually assured economic destruction.
I've spent a significant amount of time in the middle east; there is very little in most of those vast deserts that's worth anything, besides oil. Countries like Saudi Arabia don't even allow any sort of tourism (apart from the muslims that travel there for the Haj)... if you're not a muslim, you can't even get into the country; they simply DON'T issue tourist visas. If it wasn't for oil, many of those countries would be economic non-entities.
We're hell-bent on preserving their oil fields; that's a no-brainer. Not only does it prevent environmental catastrophe, but we can then BUY the oil from the new Iraqi government... and what's wrong with that? Commerce... they sell, we buy, everybody wins.
That is EXACTLY my argument. Understand the hard way... appreciate its nuances... pay homage to dogma... then do it the EASY way.
Understanding how to do long division and multiplication is fine to help in mastering the concept... but doing all your daily math problems that way is a bit of a waste. If you are converting numbers between different base systems, you could do it by hand... but why? Use of a calculator is more efficient.
I don't disagree that understanding the way the periodic table is structured is useful. I do think that rote memorizing the entire thing, along with all the atomic weights, etc is not necessary.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's busy work; something a lazy teacher might use to simply occupy students rather than teach them.
Is anyone actually forced to memorize the periodic table these days? Talk about a pointless rote memorization task...
I thought "learning" like this went the way of the dinosaurs in the 80's (of course, I teach on the university level, so I'm a bit removed from elementary education). Can any education types confirm that this kind of thing still goes on?
I subscribe to the penguin theory of learning. After a certain point, your brain only holds so many recallable facts, just like an iceberg can hold only so many penguins. After that, for each new one you add, an old one must be shoved off (or at least relegated to subconscious long-term storage). I know memory is theoretically infinite, and that everything we learn is supposedly deep down in there somewhere, waiting for the right moment to be dredged up... but this kind of memorization is a waste of space on the iceberg.
No way in sacrificing childhood memories for the periodic table... too easy to just go look up a copy.
Simplicity is your friend. There is nothing wrong with the way firearms are made RIGHT NOW. You are trying to apply an unproven technological solution to a training problem.
I'm not against technological innovation, but it had better make the item MORE reliable rather than LESS.
Do you have any experience with the effects of stress during a life-and-death encounter? The loss of fine motor control, the tunnel vision, the effects of the sympathetic response? In this situation, complex is very, very bad. "By and large they do" is not good enough if MY life is depending on that firearm to function each and every time I pull that trigger. The simpler and more idiot-proof the better.
You may form your own theory about why that is... mine says that this technology is nowhere near ready for prime-time, and police officers know it. They have enough problems with regular guns malfunctioning, and those are simple, blow-back operated mechanical devices that any machinist can make. If the simple stuff sometimes fails, how can this complex system hope to do better?
How many points of failure do you need? This gun is ridiculous.
Isn't this what most geeks hate about Microsoft... too busy building in every gee-whiz feature, so that they neglect the basics, like stability and reliability? Situation seems pretty analogous to me...
No chance anyone who trusts their life to a firearm would ever carry one of these.
Here we have someone spieling a conspiracy theory about how foreign manufacturers own the NRA, and are flooding the US with cheap guns?
Excuse me?
Apart from your total ignorance of the NRA's substantial individual membership, I don't think you've recently been to a gun store or gun show. If you had, you'd have seen the prices. Most of your cheaper firearms (lorcin, davis, raven, bryco, jennings, et al) are american-made. Most of your large foreign manufacturers make some pretty expensive guns (go price a Sig-Sauer, HK, Beretta, or Glock). Taurus is the only exception, and their firearms are still muliple hundreds of dollars. As far as I'm concerned, that point alone invalidates your credibility.
Exactly how "preliminary" was this "research" you did?
Unlike a lot of people on Slashdot, I'm a hobbyist/amateur sysadmin (or is that term even appropriate?), and this book is probably just what I need.
I've been using/programming computers all my life, but have never taken a single Comp Sci or MSI course; I end up going to books and HowTo's very frequently. I run several servers at home, including an apache webserver, a samba server, etc... For a guy like me who's not 3l337, these kinds of things are a godsend.
I've spent 11years in higher education... NO WAY I'm going back for another degree; keep those understandable, non-arcane books coming.
This is just like taxonomy... some scientists like to lump similar creatures into one family or genus, while others like to split them up into different categories based on minor differences.
He might be transplanting the entire face "enbloc" including nerves, muscles, etc, but this is fraught with potential problems. Where reattaching blood vessels is relatively straightforward with standard microsurgical techniques, reattaching nerves is a much less certain proposition. I would expect the surgeon to pay close attention to skin tension lines... any plastic surgeon that didn't has no business calling himself a plastic surgeon.
Injured nerves, whether they be contused, or cleanly cut, regenerate very slowly if at all. You may not get full function back, and often will have parasthesias and neuropathy, even with a successful reattachment. I am not a neurosurgeon, but as I recall, realigning and reattaching the epineureum is the most important part of the procedure... simply aligning the nerve fibers and putting a stitch through them is not enough.
The blood vessels (facial artery, etc) would be the easy part; free flap grafts are done all the time. Reattaching nerves from another person and getting full function back... that's a much more difficult trick.
To a certain degree, you're right, but differences in skin do exist, depending on body location.
Some skin is hair-bearing, some has different sweat glands, some is thicker, and some has more or fewer nerve endings. For instance, the skin on your elbows has far fewer nerve endings than the skin of the lip.
It sounds like the surgeon is simply doing a large, complex skin graft... that's something burn surgeons have been doing for years. Burn surgeons use a device called a dermatome... in essence a large electric shaver that you can set to shave off very precise depths of skin (to thousandths of an inch) to achieve a split-thickness graft. It's worth noting that skin grafts for burn victims are often meshed to cover a larger area (if you are burned >95% of your body, there isn't much to work with, so you have to make every bit count). The cosmetic results are nowhere near normal skin, but the primary purpose of a graft in a burn patient is to reestablish the protection that intact skin gives you. Absence of skin not only makes you extremlely vulnerable to death from infection, it also causes you to evaporate off enormous amounts of fluid, resulting in rapid dehydration. Cosmesis is often secondary to simply saving a person's life... it's not pretty, but it works. If you were burned, and your ass was spared, you can be damned sure the burn surgeon would harvest the bejeesus out of your ass to cover the rest of you...
I'd be interested to know how he's selecting his patients, and whether he'll do these transplants on smokers. There are some plastic surgeons that won't do skin grafts on a smoker, since the act of smoking can actually lower your capillary oxygen transport enough to endanger the survival of a skin graft.
I'd also be interested in knowing the surgical technique he's planning on using to harvest the skin. Clearly he'll have to do it by hand, use a bit of microsurgery to reconnect the vessels... I can see this being a looong procedure.
I'd probably donate my face, if someone else needed it and I didn't (I'd donate it, just like any other "organ"... and their different bone structure should destroy any resemblance).
Now whether someone would actually *want* my face... wow, I don't know... they'd have to be pretty desperate...
DNA in a living system is set up to automatically repair itself. Your body does this with a set of enzymes that finds damaged DNA, and rebuilds the damaged section, building off the other strand as a template (remember the double helix).
However, there are people who either lack this enzyme, or have a genetic defect that makes this system nonfunctional... those people grow cancers like it's their job. The same thing happens to people on long-term immunosuppresive drugs (transplant patients, most notably).
Your body also has something called apoptosis, or programmed cell death. Some cells die at a certain point in human development, because they are programmed to do so... Who knows what extending their telomeres will do to normal human embryology?
Your body is hard-wired to take care of itself, and it does so pretty effectively. I can't help but wonder what kind of badness we'll create when we start monkeying with the human genome in earnest.
Normally I'm not a fan of modding down, but how did this get modded as funny?
Now... having a show that's so bad that the WB would cancel it is funny, but I don't personally find the fact that christopher reeve is in a wheelchair to be at all humourous.
As a parent, I think it's not just OK to filter, it's incumbent upon you to do so.
When a child is a minor and unable to understand and/or consent to the viewing of questionable materials, you'd better filter stuff for them.
I am interested in what my kids want to do (and will want to do), but under my own roof, and in my own home, I have veto power. Once they are of legal age, and living on their own, they can do whatever they want (as I did), and deal with all the consequences of those actions.
While they are a minor, the parent bears responsibility for them in all kinds of ways. You can be sure I'm not taking the responsibility without the power to enforce it.
So to answer your question: Yes, I plan to filter as long as they live in my home, and I honesty don't care whether they like it or not. Seems harsh, uncool, and authoritarian, doesn't it? Well, somebody has to be the adult, and somebody has to make the rules, and as long as I'm paying the bills, that's me. Nobody likes being the "heavy," but it IS your parental duty.
This is one of those situations where that whole "be your child's friend" philosophy breaks down.
I think we're saying the same thing here... Note I said "unfettered, unsupervised" access. Without an adult there to provide context, interpretation, and moral clarity, their pliable young mind might that that it's normal to perform some unspeakable act on a neighborhood cat. Like you, I think you cannot completely shield children from the world, but they should only be exposed at the time and age of the PARENT'S choosing... ie. when they are mature enough to learn the necessary lesson.
You are absolutely correct; kids will come across this kind of stuff... it just shouldn't be left to them to try understanding/interpreting on their own.
Filtering is a good idea, but mandatory filtering is not. Let people filter what they want to filter; any other route is doomed to failure.
As a parent myself, I think any parent who gives their child unfettered, unsupervised access to the internet is a fool; you might end up raising a kid who's a combination of Benny Hill and Ted Bundy. Kids too young to understand the difference between good/bad, normal/abnormal, etc don't need to be downloading hard-core pr0n, and faces-of-death pics.
HOWEVER... there's nothing to stop a parent from being that kind of fool, and I'm not entirely certain that you can legislate that anyway. If somebody wants their kid to think sex with goats is OK, and attend his high-school graduation in a Gimp suit, have at it... (but I'll tell you what, their kid will only date one of my kids over my slowly-cooling, twitching corpse).
Leave the filtering to the parents, if they so choose. As long as it's in the privacy of their own home, and as long as it's not kiddie pr0n, I'd say let adults download what they want.
Slashdot Mirror
But I've always dropped my laptops while carrying or transporting them, never while actually using them... so I went a different route.
Try getting a regular laptop, and putting it in one of the cases made by these guys (No, I don't work for them)
I've taken my laptop to all kinds of places, including some inhospitable places in the very area of the world where lots of bombs are currently being dropped; no problems. Those cases come with a lifetime warranty... they're waterproof, shock-resistant, dustproof (VERY important in the desert), and have automatic pressure relief valves for that unpressurized tactical airlift you're sometimes required to use.
They cost about 150$, but that's chump change compared to the price of a Mil-Spec computer; the money difference is much better spent upgrading the actual laptop.
YMMV, but that's the way I solved the problem.
Let's get real about the oil thing; we aren't going in there to steal their oil. Did everybody catch that? I'll say it again if anybody missed that point... We could have stolen their oil after the first gulf war, but instead we sent almost everybody home.
I have NO doubt that we intend to BUY a bunch of oil from Iraq once Saddam is gone... and why not? There is no other way for the Iraqis to fund the rebuilding of their country. Also, the whole "oil embargo" thing that Saddam previously threatened is totally bogus; many of those OPEC nations depend on income from petroleum exports to run their governments. They are just as dependent on us as we are on them (speaking as an American). Oil embargo? That's mutually assured economic destruction.
I've spent a significant amount of time in the middle east; there is very little in most of those vast deserts that's worth anything, besides oil. Countries like Saudi Arabia don't even allow any sort of tourism (apart from the muslims that travel there for the Haj)... if you're not a muslim, you can't even get into the country; they simply DON'T issue tourist visas. If it wasn't for oil, many of those countries would be economic non-entities.
We're hell-bent on preserving their oil fields; that's a no-brainer. Not only does it prevent environmental catastrophe, but we can then BUY the oil from the new Iraqi government... and what's wrong with that? Commerce... they sell, we buy, everybody wins.
That's a major bennie to having a cell phone.
Makes sense to me; I pay for all calls, even incoming ones... only people I WANT to hear from get the number.
*Sigh* more people calling to waste my valuable time...
The psyops have been ongoing for a while... leaflets, Email, etc.
By contrast, this is an actual combat operation, with real ordinance being launched.
Let's hope this conflict is short and effective... hooah!
That is EXACTLY my argument. Understand the hard way... appreciate its nuances... pay homage to dogma... then do it the EASY way.
Understanding how to do long division and multiplication is fine to help in mastering the concept... but doing all your daily math problems that way is a bit of a waste. If you are converting numbers between different base systems, you could do it by hand... but why? Use of a calculator is more efficient.
I don't disagree that understanding the way the periodic table is structured is useful. I do think that rote memorizing the entire thing, along with all the atomic weights, etc is not necessary.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's busy work; something a lazy teacher might use to simply occupy students rather than teach them.
I still think some of his finest work was embodied in the old classic poisoning pigeons in the park.
I love that one...
Is anyone actually forced to memorize the periodic table these days? Talk about a pointless rote memorization task...
I thought "learning" like this went the way of the dinosaurs in the 80's (of course, I teach on the university level, so I'm a bit removed from elementary education). Can any education types confirm that this kind of thing still goes on?
I subscribe to the penguin theory of learning. After a certain point, your brain only holds so many recallable facts, just like an iceberg can hold only so many penguins. After that, for each new one you add, an old one must be shoved off (or at least relegated to subconscious long-term storage). I know memory is theoretically infinite, and that everything we learn is supposedly deep down in there somewhere, waiting for the right moment to be dredged up... but this kind of memorization is a waste of space on the iceberg.
No way in sacrificing childhood memories for the periodic table... too easy to just go look up a copy.
Please.
Simplicity is your friend. There is nothing wrong with the way firearms are made RIGHT NOW. You are trying to apply an unproven technological solution to a training problem.
I'm not against technological innovation, but it had better make the item MORE reliable rather than LESS.
Do you have any experience with the effects of stress during a life-and-death encounter? The loss of fine motor control, the tunnel vision, the effects of the sympathetic response? In this situation, complex is very, very bad. "By and large they do" is not good enough if MY life is depending on that firearm to function each and every time I pull that trigger. The simpler and more idiot-proof the better.
Nobody who seriously trusts their life to a firearm would use one of these... the FOP membership would revolt enmasse.
Check this link... NJ put a smart gun law into effect, but law enforcement is exempt.
You may form your own theory about why that is... mine says that this technology is nowhere near ready for prime-time, and police officers know it. They have enough problems with regular guns malfunctioning, and those are simple, blow-back operated mechanical devices that any machinist can make. If the simple stuff sometimes fails, how can this complex system hope to do better?
How many points of failure do you need? This gun is ridiculous.
Isn't this what most geeks hate about Microsoft... too busy building in every gee-whiz feature, so that they neglect the basics, like stability and reliability? Situation seems pretty analogous to me...
No chance anyone who trusts their life to a firearm would ever carry one of these.
Here we have someone spieling a conspiracy theory about how foreign manufacturers own the NRA, and are flooding the US with cheap guns?
Excuse me?
Apart from your total ignorance of the NRA's substantial individual membership, I don't think you've recently been to a gun store or gun show. If you had, you'd have seen the prices. Most of your cheaper firearms (lorcin, davis, raven, bryco, jennings, et al) are american-made. Most of your large foreign manufacturers make some pretty expensive guns (go price a Sig-Sauer, HK, Beretta, or Glock). Taurus is the only exception, and their firearms are still muliple hundreds of dollars. As far as I'm concerned, that point alone invalidates your credibility.
Exactly how "preliminary" was this "research" you did?
Unlike a lot of people on Slashdot, I'm a hobbyist/amateur sysadmin (or is that term even appropriate?), and this book is probably just what I need.
I've been using/programming computers all my life, but have never taken a single Comp Sci or MSI course; I end up going to books and HowTo's very frequently. I run several servers at home, including an apache webserver, a samba server, etc... For a guy like me who's not 3l337, these kinds of things are a godsend.
I've spent 11years in higher education... NO WAY I'm going back for another degree; keep those understandable, non-arcane books coming.
This is just like taxonomy... some scientists like to lump similar creatures into one family or genus, while others like to split them up into different categories based on minor differences.
Looks like astronomers do it too.
Different discipline, same problem.
He might be transplanting the entire face "enbloc" including nerves, muscles, etc, but this is fraught with potential problems. Where reattaching blood vessels is relatively straightforward with standard microsurgical techniques, reattaching nerves is a much less certain proposition. I would expect the surgeon to pay close attention to skin tension lines... any plastic surgeon that didn't has no business calling himself a plastic surgeon.
Injured nerves, whether they be contused, or cleanly cut, regenerate very slowly if at all. You may not get full function back, and often will have parasthesias and neuropathy, even with a successful reattachment. I am not a neurosurgeon, but as I recall, realigning and reattaching the epineureum is the most important part of the procedure... simply aligning the nerve fibers and putting a stitch through them is not enough.
The blood vessels (facial artery, etc) would be the easy part; free flap grafts are done all the time. Reattaching nerves from another person and getting full function back... that's a much more difficult trick.
To a certain degree, you're right, but differences in skin do exist, depending on body location.
Some skin is hair-bearing, some has different sweat glands, some is thicker, and some has more or fewer nerve endings. For instance, the skin on your elbows has far fewer nerve endings than the skin of the lip.
It sounds like the surgeon is simply doing a large, complex skin graft... that's something burn surgeons have been doing for years. Burn surgeons use a device called a dermatome... in essence a large electric shaver that you can set to shave off very precise depths of skin (to thousandths of an inch) to achieve a split-thickness graft. It's worth noting that skin grafts for burn victims are often meshed to cover a larger area (if you are burned >95% of your body, there isn't much to work with, so you have to make every bit count). The cosmetic results are nowhere near normal skin, but the primary purpose of a graft in a burn patient is to reestablish the protection that intact skin gives you. Absence of skin not only makes you extremlely vulnerable to death from infection, it also causes you to evaporate off enormous amounts of fluid, resulting in rapid dehydration. Cosmesis is often secondary to simply saving a person's life... it's not pretty, but it works. If you were burned, and your ass was spared, you can be damned sure the burn surgeon would harvest the bejeesus out of your ass to cover the rest of you...
I'd be interested to know how he's selecting his patients, and whether he'll do these transplants on smokers. There are some plastic surgeons that won't do skin grafts on a smoker, since the act of smoking can actually lower your capillary oxygen transport enough to endanger the survival of a skin graft.
I'd also be interested in knowing the surgical technique he's planning on using to harvest the skin. Clearly he'll have to do it by hand, use a bit of microsurgery to reconnect the vessels... I can see this being a looong procedure.
I'd probably donate my face, if someone else needed it and I didn't (I'd donate it, just like any other "organ"... and their different bone structure should destroy any resemblance).
Now whether someone would actually *want* my face... wow, I don't know... they'd have to be pretty desperate...
brings back memories of all those "flying through the human body" type videos.
Art meets science... amazing that someone took the time to do this just for the fun of it.
Quite creative.
DNA in a living system is set up to automatically repair itself. Your body does this with a set of enzymes that finds damaged DNA, and rebuilds the damaged section, building off the other strand as a template (remember the double helix).
However, there are people who either lack this enzyme, or have a genetic defect that makes this system nonfunctional... those people grow cancers like it's their job. The same thing happens to people on long-term immunosuppresive drugs (transplant patients, most notably).
Your body also has something called apoptosis, or programmed cell death. Some cells die at a certain point in human development, because they are programmed to do so... Who knows what extending their telomeres will do to normal human embryology?
Your body is hard-wired to take care of itself, and it does so pretty effectively. I can't help but wonder what kind of badness we'll create when we start monkeying with the human genome in earnest.
Normally I'm not a fan of modding down, but how did this get modded as funny?
Now... having a show that's so bad that the WB would cancel it is funny, but I don't personally find the fact that christopher reeve is in a wheelchair to be at all humourous.
Ay Mate... that's the Largest(TM) and Most-Dangerous(TM) warez trader I've ever seen! 'ees a beauty!
Oh hell yes.
As a parent, I think it's not just OK to filter, it's incumbent upon you to do so.
When a child is a minor and unable to understand and/or consent to the viewing of questionable materials, you'd better filter stuff for them.
I am interested in what my kids want to do (and will want to do), but under my own roof, and in my own home, I have veto power. Once they are of legal age, and living on their own, they can do whatever they want (as I did), and deal with all the consequences of those actions.
While they are a minor, the parent bears responsibility for them in all kinds of ways. You can be sure I'm not taking the responsibility without the power to enforce it.
So to answer your question: Yes, I plan to filter as long as they live in my home, and I honesty don't care whether they like it or not. Seems harsh, uncool, and authoritarian, doesn't it? Well, somebody has to be the adult, and somebody has to make the rules, and as long as I'm paying the bills, that's me. Nobody likes being the "heavy," but it IS your parental duty.
This is one of those situations where that whole "be your child's friend" philosophy breaks down.
I think we're saying the same thing here... Note I said "unfettered, unsupervised" access. Without an adult there to provide context, interpretation, and moral clarity, their pliable young mind might that that it's normal to perform some unspeakable act on a neighborhood cat. Like you, I think you cannot completely shield children from the world, but they should only be exposed at the time and age of the PARENT'S choosing... ie. when they are mature enough to learn the necessary lesson.
You are absolutely correct; kids will come across this kind of stuff... it just shouldn't be left to them to try understanding/interpreting on their own.
Filtering is a good idea, but mandatory filtering is not. Let people filter what they want to filter; any other route is doomed to failure.
As a parent myself, I think any parent who gives their child unfettered, unsupervised access to the internet is a fool; you might end up raising a kid who's a combination of Benny Hill and Ted Bundy. Kids too young to understand the difference between good/bad, normal/abnormal, etc don't need to be downloading hard-core pr0n, and faces-of-death pics.
HOWEVER... there's nothing to stop a parent from being that kind of fool, and I'm not entirely certain that you can legislate that anyway. If somebody wants their kid to think sex with goats is OK, and attend his high-school graduation in a Gimp suit, have at it... (but I'll tell you what, their kid will only date one of my kids over my slowly-cooling, twitching corpse).
Leave the filtering to the parents, if they so choose. As long as it's in the privacy of their own home, and as long as it's not kiddie pr0n, I'd say let adults download what they want.
You must be a looney!
And you wouldn't love them if they came in threes?
You're not fooling anyone, you know.
Here's my favorite snowflake picture:
Inspiring picture with Snowflakes
I love that site... hilarious (and no, I don't work for them or get money from them in ANY way)