There are plenty of great non-U distros, both user- & expert-friendly. I migrated when a 10.04 upgrade made my system unbootable, as I was already frustrated with the direction Canonical was going (this was during "we don't care what you want" window-button fiasco). I had been afraid to try any non-Ubuntu-based distros because of the myth that it's the only user-friendly option, but had nothing to lose -- and I soon discovered that I really liked many of the other well-known & not so well-known ones.
Finally, you should install Cardapio. It gives you a hierarchical (organized by category) menu of applications so you don't have to know the name of app before you search for it (a major complaint about Unity).
So basically, people should download Unity and spend time customizing it to include missing parts of the classic/standard desktop that Unity's paradigm is supposedly superior to?
I'm a volunteer pollworker in California, and that's close to how we do it, just without labeling individual ballots. The voter comes in, and: 1) we ask their name and check the alphabetical name index to be sure they belong at our precinct, then cross it out 2) we look up their name in the street-index roster and cross the name/address off 3) the voter prints & signs their name/address in a numbered roster 4) we put the roster # next to their entry in the street index & name index 5) person is allowed to vote & drops it into the ballot box within a secrecy envelope
If the person needs to vote at our precinct but is either: A) listed as absentee/vote-by-mail B) doesn't belong to our precinct and can't get to another in time Then they sign in on a special register, and place their ballot into a special envelope that they must print & sign their name on. The signatures on all of those envelopes, along with all mailed-in absentee ballots, are scanned & electronically compared to the signature from when they registered -- if it doesn't match closely, the ballot is rejected (it has happened to me a few times).
That's all assuming that the person isn't a first-time voter -- if they are, then there's another procedure involving double-checking their identity that I can't recall off the top of my head.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if our government intended the first reporter to feel mind-searing pain in order to subtly warn the rest to avoid covering, photographing, or publishing live public events the government would rather keep quiet. It wouldn't be a big surprise, considering recent cases of citizens/journalists being arrested, assaulted or deprived of their equipment for legally recording or clearly keeping note during peaceful protests where the police became aggressive.
If I was a reporter and saw a colleague (voluntarily) in severe pain, then the government guys demonstrating the device said "this is what we will be using on groups of citizens refusing to obey authorities, we cannot promise you won't be hit if you are in the area," it would certainly make me think twice about whether I wanted to show up with a recording device or stick around once the police showed up.
So personally, I'm glad the research failed. Best money we've let go to waste in a long time, if you ask me. Shame our military researchers can't manage to replicate their success more often. (Not that I wouldn't rather have the money go towards improving society so far fewer people would have reason to join in protests, but at least it's better than the weapon existing.)
Another problem is that the Office suites on iPad/Android are kind of limited.
If they're "limited" for MS Office, at least they exist -- the most I've found for handling OpenOffice Writer files is a half-finished viewer written by a student a couple of years ago.
[Boston suburbs] are not exactly as 'sprawling' as those around larger cities in warmer climates. Office parks with high tech jobs follow all the ring roads around Boston. You can easily find a place to live near them, so that any supposed sprawl doesn't have to affect your daily life at all.
I think that the real sprawl is actually in the MidWest, and maybe the parts of California that are a long way from the ocean or bay. I'm in one of the many "small city" suburbs along the coast, and we're a lot like what you describe -- there are large business parks at either end of our town, so I'd be surprised if anybody is more than a 5-10 minute drive from one at most.
There are plenty of childfree women these days, but we don't walk around proclaiming it because a lot of people still react by either insisting we don't know what we want & will change our minds or by becoming nasty towards us. Likewise, plenty of men (including geeks) *do* want kids if you ask them about it, and if they marry a woman that's on the fence, many of the guys will pester her until she gives in or the marriage fails.
That said, I'm a (childfree) woman that prefers living in a somewhat-rural suburb because I love driving my own car, living in a single-family home, and being near nature, and I really don't enjoy the crowds, noise, or problems of big cities. The cities are fine for folks that do love them, but it's just not for me.
Regarding tech industries being in cities, I think it's very similar to what it was like 14 years ago, when all of the tech companies last flooded into San Francisco... They'll stay there while the social networking & social-gaming boom is going on, then a lot of them will return to the business parks, hopefully including up here in the North Bay/Telecom Valley region.
Same thought here. I'm from the area that used to be known as Telecom Valley in the 90s, and it's a great place to have grown up or live as an adult. It's nice to jaunt down to SF to see a play/concert, visit relatives on a holiday, or "play tourist" for a day -- but I'm always happy to see the North Bay's forested hillsides & open meadows and wake up to a decently-sized backyard with trees the next morning.
What's strange about the anti-suburban attitude is that of the many people living in major cities that I've known, once they were over 25, they'd just go home after work or do something that I can easily do here in the North Bay. They periodically would go to a concert, musical or play, but it was only about as frequent as it is for people to drive 30-70 minutes to a city for a similar event.
I've known a lot of people from major cities, and after age 25, they virtually all would go home after a day at work, occasionally do things that are replicable in a decent suburb, and only did "big city" stuff as often as someone in driving distance would. People are welcome to adore cities, but they're not intrinsically superior -- any more than it's "better" to prefer cats over dogs, blue over green, chocolate ice cream over cherry, or other things.
My brother and I are from the North Bay (Sonoma County), but have tried living in major cities only to find we were miserable there. When we were growing up here in SoCo, as long as a kid had a bike and non-paranoid parents, we could ride to a friend's place, the skateboarding park (once it was created), library, movies, bookstores, playgrounds, arcade, Boys & Girls club, run around with other kids in the area (building bike ramps for jumping, video games, etc.), join a sports team, go to game nights at a local hobby store -- plus take a bus to a major mall (fun place to hang out back then), ice arena, miniature golf, arcade, or waterslide park. Folks that figure they were "bored" as suburban kids should keep in mind that kids with enough free time living *anywhere* get bored; the lack of boredom as a kid is now believed to be harmful for their ability to solve problems creatively later in life.
Teens/adults can additionally hang out downtown shopping/socializing/eating, visit wineries or breweries, see plays, tale college classes or go to seminars (there's a state university & a great community college), golf, go surfing or explore the rock formations at the beach, attend all kinds of concerts, kayak, hike in the wilderness, ride a horse competitively (any discipline), trail ride horseback, go camping, mountain bike, bike on paths in state parks (something I loved as a kid), eat at top-notch restaurants, etc. or take a quick 40-min highway drive to SF for everything they have there. Tons of stuff to do regardless of whether one has money or not, basically.
Those aspects seem pretty standard for the East Bay, North Bay, and the SF Peninsula regions.
Oh, in addition for the North Bay, *most* people up here love to drive on our highways (other than 101/37 at commute time), as traffic goes full-speed, we're surrounded by nature and can pick between long straightaways, curvy, hilly, or a mix of all 3. Personally, I don't mind being in highway traffic as long as I can comfortably have my window open, as I just put the radio on and enjoy the scenery, and driving is easy/brief enough to be no big deal. It's just when I have to drive in a major city that I tend to stress out; I could easily see how someone from a place like that would hate driving.
It may be a lie now, but that wasn't always the case. Among many other people/families that risked everything at the time, my ancestors' families risked their asses long enough running an Underground Railroad station on the Ohio River to help 2,000 people to safety, despite some very physical opposition and later a law outlawing their actions. They did it because they felt it was the right thing to do both for other human beings and as Americans regardless of what the law said -- that's real patriotism, not that flag-waving "my president right or wrong" authoritarian crap we've been seeing for the past decade-plus, and I hope I'd have the guts to do the same under similar circumstances.
plenty of municipalities have water regulations during summers or droughts.
A - those are extreme, non-everyday cases, bordering on natural disaster conditions.
Depends on where you live. I'm in Northern California, and even though we haven't had a formal drought in years, my city no longer allows us to wash our cars, driveway, sidewalk, etc. or to water our lawn/garden enough that there's ANY runoff even if the ground is sloped; the official document essentially says that all residents are expected to turn neighbors in for breaking the rules... Otherwise, we're expected to use very little water (enough for perhaps 1.5 adults showering each day & running 1 load of medium laundry per week), and there's a steep increase in the per-gallon price at each tier of usage.
Try reading Slashdot comment threads regarding the liberal arts, writing/English as a major, or even just people whose primary talent isn't in technology -- would you want to devote a significant chunk of time & energy volunteering in a community that felt that way about your field and everyone within it, even if the community is focused on an interest/hobby you have?
The Boomers were responsible though for the eventual budget cuts to NASA and education...
Let's be slightly more realistic here: no specific *generation* is responsible, conservatives are. Even when outnumbered in terms of registered voters, they very often win because more of them actually do vote, do so along party lines & as told by an authority figure, and are far less prone to burning out to the point of apathy. (They also have the "mission from god" mindset that condones just about any misbehavior that will let them defeat their rivals.)
The closest we can come to realistically blaming a generation would be to focus on the Boomers' parents, though... As a group, they were much more conservative (as their support of McCarthyism demonstrated & shows like All In The Family depicted) and really disliked the more liberal nature of the Boomers as a whole. They turned out in far greater numbers to vote than the Boomers, so as owners of expensive property here in California, they were the ones that wrecked our education budget passing prop 13 so their property taxes wouldn't keep increasing, elected Ronald Reagan & Bush I as Presidents & Reagan as governor of California. That set the stage for the political situation we have today.
From what I've read, a significant percentage of that generation was against spending on the space programs. The Baby Boomers were young enough to be entranced with the space program; that's why space-based science fiction shows & movies were so wildly popular with their generation. Psychologically/politically, the norm is for people to be at their most liberal in their 20s, remain in favor of educational spending while raising kids, and only start feeling threatened enough by the world to favor military/police spending in their senior years.
Actually, studies show the opposite -- doctors undertreat pain in patients with long-term conditions, and that is life-destroying. It wasn't until I told my doctor honestly that my pain was persistently serious enough to be making me suicidal that she finally gave me something stronger than vicodin; she told me at the time that there are extremely high barriers to prescribing any substantial narcotics, and the added paperwork & government hassles deter most doctors. Given everyone else I've found online that has even vaguely similar birth defects is being left to suffer even when it means being unable to do much beyond lie on the couch, I'd say she's right.
This. We could also finally use the maintenance-dose treatment that has an extremely high success rate in other countries as addicts wishing to get clean could then focus on getting their life straightened out instead of obtaining the next hit to avoid withdrawal. It'd be a hell of a lot better than the cycle of homelessness, hospital, and jail that our current religion/AA-based approach delivers all but a sliver of the time...
Two different reasons... Young adults take them recreationally a few times to experiment and enjoy the sensory experience, like feeling they're part of the universe or hallucinating ponies dancing across the ceiling. I haven't read it yet, but I've heard that The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe depicts their reasons really well.
Beyond that, people take illicit drugs in order to control unpleasant or intolerable symptoms from physical or mental disorders. In some cases the legal drugs are really inadequate or have nasty side-effects, in others it's because the person has a mental illness and doesn't trust psychiatrists to not lock them away, or because the person has given up on finding a doctor that can/will actually help with their condition.
...if you can't afford the drugs you need to keep you alive by the "Legal" route, it is a risk that you could be forced to take.
Very true... Out of fairness, I have to note that we do have coverage called Medicaid for people that are disabled by serious health problems -- it's just a deeply fucked-up system. It's available only to the disabled citizens that are living in serious poverty, so if a disabled person that's not in poverty can't pay for their medical needs, they can only get Medicaid if they give up almost everything they have and divorce their spouse if he/she works. Also, the system is trying to essentially find loopholes to throw as many of us under the bus as possible, because it's being overwhelmed with the much higher cost of covering the incredibly high number of pregnant & underage immigrants (or 1st/2nd generation) in need.
The higher the classification, the more stringent the reporting / prescribing rules.
There's also sub-categorization of some kind within the classifications, I assume based on the potency. A person can get a prescription for hydrocodone with little fuss -- but drugs like fentanyl (80-100x morphine) require a few in-person visits with the doctor, weight monitoring, drug testing, and a contract that dictates things unrelated to the drug. (Not that there's much point beyond making drug-testing companies richer; the people getting the drugs illegally are the ones abusing them, while the real patients like me aren't about to sell medication that protects us from near-unbearable pain levels.)
It's usually not considered rape if the 'victim' was fully consenting to the activity, fell asleep, and woke up to find the 'attacker' continuing or starting it over again.
The rape when it comes to sleep normally involves somebody either not consenting (explicitly or implicitly) OR actively refusing to participate in a sexual act, falling asleep, then waking up to find the person doing it to him/her anyway. (I had a good gay male friend that was raped that way... He openly told a new prospective boyfriend that he only has sex of any kind with protection and that he wasn't ready for more than making out, but he woke up from dozing off while cuddling at the end of a night out drinking to find the guy doing things to him that he definitely didn't agree to.)
Outside the sciences, I've never heard the phrase, "I hadn't considered that. I guess I was wrong."
How much time have you spent, excluding personal time, outside the sciences -- and are you taking into account that in the liberal arts, discussions aren't conducted to come to a common consensus but to delve more deeply into a topic by bouncing/exchanging ideas off one another?
I've known plenty of fellow people with degrees or careers in the various liberal arts fields (English, history, rhetoric, etc.) that make the same sort of claims against folks that specialized in math or sciences that you're making about them... It's largely because we're used to having both sides revise their stance on the fly based on new data/input from one another, and somebody with the binary stance of facts tends to only do that if given objective raw fact to reverse their perspective entirely.
I've been using YubNub for years so I can switch on the fly between engines, as users have added virtually every site I might encounter and I can add more as needed.
Though I do still have some weak spots in my education, particularly in english as I'm more of a math geek and have never taken the time to educate myself on the proper use of language.. So be gentle on my mistakes here;)
No, people want things the way they used to be: - Consumers only had to wait as long as it took to reproduce & transport the items. - TV contained only minimal advertising on networks and none on PBS or premium cable. - Cable was cheap and in many areas, we could buy the premium channels (Showtime, HBO, Disney, etc.) separately. - Format-shifting in order to use media on multiple devices was legal, and it was assumed that people would copy or share wherever reasonable. We all knew that as kids earned disposable income, they'd take pride in buying things instead of getting them for free, and that by then they had become loyal fans of various authors, bands, actors, and so forth.
It's not an inflated sense of entitlement for a person to want back the rights that everybody around them had until relatively recently. It's also not an inflated sense of entitlement for the creative people producing the entertainment to want to be paid for their work long-term, since they're performing skilled labor (it takes 10-20 years of hardcore practice & training to get a realistic chance at commercial success) and paid slowly over a long period rather than in large lumps like in other jobs, without the health insurance, employer-matched retirement savings or other bennies that are normal in the other skilled fields.
The only people with the entitlement problems are the individuals that don't contribute in a meaningful way to the creative work, yet expect a large share of the proceeds. THEY are the problem -- not the regular people being overcharged or the artists ultimately being underpaid.
I had some Hispanic friends as a kid here in California that excelled in school, and a few more when I was in college. However, all of them had parents that demanded they become fluent in English, integrate, and do well in school -- the kids whose parents came here during or after the wave of immigration in the late 80s are the ones having huge problems, as their parents discouraged the use of English or integrating and told them that they'd return to their 'superior' home before long (so they saw little reason to be educated here).
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There are plenty of great non-U distros, both user- & expert-friendly. I migrated when a 10.04 upgrade made my system unbootable, as I was already frustrated with the direction Canonical was going (this was during "we don't care what you want" window-button fiasco). I had been afraid to try any non-Ubuntu-based distros because of the myth that it's the only user-friendly option, but had nothing to lose -- and I soon discovered that I really liked many of the other well-known & not so well-known ones.
Finally, you should install Cardapio. It gives you a hierarchical (organized by category) menu of applications so you don't have to know the name of app before you search for it (a major complaint about Unity).
So basically, people should download Unity and spend time customizing it to include missing parts of the classic/standard desktop that Unity's paradigm is supposedly superior to?
I'm a volunteer pollworker in California, and that's close to how we do it, just without labeling individual ballots. The voter comes in, and:
1) we ask their name and check the alphabetical name index to be sure they belong at our precinct, then cross it out
2) we look up their name in the street-index roster and cross the name/address off
3) the voter prints & signs their name/address in a numbered roster
4) we put the roster # next to their entry in the street index & name index
5) person is allowed to vote & drops it into the ballot box within a secrecy envelope
If the person needs to vote at our precinct but is either:
A) listed as absentee/vote-by-mail
B) doesn't belong to our precinct and can't get to another in time
Then they sign in on a special register, and place their ballot into a special envelope that they must print & sign their name on. The signatures on all of those envelopes, along with all mailed-in absentee ballots, are scanned & electronically compared to the signature from when they registered -- if it doesn't match closely, the ballot is rejected (it has happened to me a few times).
That's all assuming that the person isn't a first-time voter -- if they are, then there's another procedure involving double-checking their identity that I can't recall off the top of my head.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if our government intended the first reporter to feel mind-searing pain in order to subtly warn the rest to avoid covering, photographing, or publishing live public events the government would rather keep quiet. It wouldn't be a big surprise, considering recent cases of citizens/journalists being arrested, assaulted or deprived of their equipment for legally recording or clearly keeping note during peaceful protests where the police became aggressive.
If I was a reporter and saw a colleague (voluntarily) in severe pain, then the government guys demonstrating the device said "this is what we will be using on groups of citizens refusing to obey authorities, we cannot promise you won't be hit if you are in the area," it would certainly make me think twice about whether I wanted to show up with a recording device or stick around once the police showed up.
So personally, I'm glad the research failed. Best money we've let go to waste in a long time, if you ask me. Shame our military researchers can't manage to replicate their success more often. (Not that I wouldn't rather have the money go towards improving society so far fewer people would have reason to join in protests, but at least it's better than the weapon existing.)
Another problem is that the Office suites on iPad/Android are kind of limited.
If they're "limited" for MS Office, at least they exist -- the most I've found for handling OpenOffice Writer files is a half-finished viewer written by a student a couple of years ago.
[Boston suburbs] are not exactly as 'sprawling' as those around larger cities in warmer climates. Office parks with high tech jobs follow all the ring roads around Boston. You can easily find a place to live near them, so that any supposed sprawl doesn't have to affect your daily life at all.
I think that the real sprawl is actually in the MidWest, and maybe the parts of California that are a long way from the ocean or bay. I'm in one of the many "small city" suburbs along the coast, and we're a lot like what you describe -- there are large business parks at either end of our town, so I'd be surprised if anybody is more than a 5-10 minute drive from one at most.
There are plenty of childfree women these days, but we don't walk around proclaiming it because a lot of people still react by either insisting we don't know what we want & will change our minds or by becoming nasty towards us. Likewise, plenty of men (including geeks) *do* want kids if you ask them about it, and if they marry a woman that's on the fence, many of the guys will pester her until she gives in or the marriage fails.
That said, I'm a (childfree) woman that prefers living in a somewhat-rural suburb because I love driving my own car, living in a single-family home, and being near nature, and I really don't enjoy the crowds, noise, or problems of big cities. The cities are fine for folks that do love them, but it's just not for me.
Regarding tech industries being in cities, I think it's very similar to what it was like 14 years ago, when all of the tech companies last flooded into San Francisco... They'll stay there while the social networking & social-gaming boom is going on, then a lot of them will return to the business parks, hopefully including up here in the North Bay/Telecom Valley region.
Same thought here. I'm from the area that used to be known as Telecom Valley in the 90s, and it's a great place to have grown up or live as an adult. It's nice to jaunt down to SF to see a play/concert, visit relatives on a holiday, or "play tourist" for a day -- but I'm always happy to see the North Bay's forested hillsides & open meadows and wake up to a decently-sized backyard with trees the next morning.
What's strange about the anti-suburban attitude is that of the many people living in major cities that I've known, once they were over 25, they'd just go home after work or do something that I can easily do here in the North Bay. They periodically would go to a concert, musical or play, but it was only about as frequent as it is for people to drive 30-70 minutes to a city for a similar event.
I've known a lot of people from major cities, and after age 25, they virtually all would go home after a day at work, occasionally do things that are replicable in a decent suburb, and only did "big city" stuff as often as someone in driving distance would. People are welcome to adore cities, but they're not intrinsically superior -- any more than it's "better" to prefer cats over dogs, blue over green, chocolate ice cream over cherry, or other things.
My brother and I are from the North Bay (Sonoma County), but have tried living in major cities only to find we were miserable there. When we were growing up here in SoCo, as long as a kid had a bike and non-paranoid parents, we could ride to a friend's place, the skateboarding park (once it was created), library, movies, bookstores, playgrounds, arcade, Boys & Girls club, run around with other kids in the area (building bike ramps for jumping, video games, etc.), join a sports team, go to game nights at a local hobby store -- plus take a bus to a major mall (fun place to hang out back then), ice arena, miniature golf, arcade, or waterslide park. Folks that figure they were "bored" as suburban kids should keep in mind that kids with enough free time living *anywhere* get bored; the lack of boredom as a kid is now believed to be harmful for their ability to solve problems creatively later in life.
Teens/adults can additionally hang out downtown shopping/socializing/eating, visit wineries or breweries, see plays, tale college classes or go to seminars (there's a state university & a great community college), golf, go surfing or explore the rock formations at the beach, attend all kinds of concerts, kayak, hike in the wilderness, ride a horse competitively (any discipline), trail ride horseback, go camping, mountain bike, bike on paths in state parks (something I loved as a kid), eat at top-notch restaurants, etc. or take a quick 40-min highway drive to SF for everything they have there. Tons of stuff to do regardless of whether one has money or not, basically.
Those aspects seem pretty standard for the East Bay, North Bay, and the SF Peninsula regions.
Oh, in addition for the North Bay, *most* people up here love to drive on our highways (other than 101/37 at commute time), as traffic goes full-speed, we're surrounded by nature and can pick between long straightaways, curvy, hilly, or a mix of all 3. Personally, I don't mind being in highway traffic as long as I can comfortably have my window open, as I just put the radio on and enjoy the scenery, and driving is easy/brief enough to be no big deal. It's just when I have to drive in a major city that I tend to stress out; I could easily see how someone from a place like that would hate driving.
I cringed, but I've heard it before from non-Bay natives; at least he didn't call it "Frisco"!
It may be a lie now, but that wasn't always the case. Among many other people/families that risked everything at the time, my ancestors' families risked their asses long enough running an Underground Railroad station on the Ohio River to help 2,000 people to safety, despite some very physical opposition and later a law outlawing their actions. They did it because they felt it was the right thing to do both for other human beings and as Americans regardless of what the law said -- that's real patriotism, not that flag-waving "my president right or wrong" authoritarian crap we've been seeing for the past decade-plus, and I hope I'd have the guts to do the same under similar circumstances.
plenty of municipalities have water regulations during summers or droughts.
A - those are extreme, non-everyday cases, bordering on natural disaster conditions.
Depends on where you live. I'm in Northern California, and even though we haven't had a formal drought in years, my city no longer allows us to wash our cars, driveway, sidewalk, etc. or to water our lawn/garden enough that there's ANY runoff even if the ground is sloped; the official document essentially says that all residents are expected to turn neighbors in for breaking the rules... Otherwise, we're expected to use very little water (enough for perhaps 1.5 adults showering each day & running 1 load of medium laundry per week), and there's a steep increase in the per-gallon price at each tier of usage.
Why is documentation for *nix always so bad?
Try reading Slashdot comment threads regarding the liberal arts, writing/English as a major, or even just people whose primary talent isn't in technology -- would you want to devote a significant chunk of time & energy volunteering in a community that felt that way about your field and everyone within it, even if the community is focused on an interest/hobby you have?
The Boomers were responsible though for the eventual budget cuts to NASA and education...
Let's be slightly more realistic here: no specific *generation* is responsible, conservatives are. Even when outnumbered in terms of registered voters, they very often win because more of them actually do vote, do so along party lines & as told by an authority figure, and are far less prone to burning out to the point of apathy. (They also have the "mission from god" mindset that condones just about any misbehavior that will let them defeat their rivals.)
The closest we can come to realistically blaming a generation would be to focus on the Boomers' parents, though... As a group, they were much more conservative (as their support of McCarthyism demonstrated & shows like All In The Family depicted) and really disliked the more liberal nature of the Boomers as a whole. They turned out in far greater numbers to vote than the Boomers, so as owners of expensive property here in California, they were the ones that wrecked our education budget passing prop 13 so their property taxes wouldn't keep increasing, elected Ronald Reagan & Bush I as Presidents & Reagan as governor of California. That set the stage for the political situation we have today.
From what I've read, a significant percentage of that generation was against spending on the space programs. The Baby Boomers were young enough to be entranced with the space program; that's why space-based science fiction shows & movies were so wildly popular with their generation. Psychologically/politically, the norm is for people to be at their most liberal in their 20s, remain in favor of educational spending while raising kids, and only start feeling threatened enough by the world to favor military/police spending in their senior years.
Actually, studies show the opposite -- doctors undertreat pain in patients with long-term conditions, and that is life-destroying. It wasn't until I told my doctor honestly that my pain was persistently serious enough to be making me suicidal that she finally gave me something stronger than vicodin; she told me at the time that there are extremely high barriers to prescribing any substantial narcotics, and the added paperwork & government hassles deter most doctors. Given everyone else I've found online that has even vaguely similar birth defects is being left to suffer even when it means being unable to do much beyond lie on the couch, I'd say she's right.
This. We could also finally use the maintenance-dose treatment that has an extremely high success rate in other countries as addicts wishing to get clean could then focus on getting their life straightened out instead of obtaining the next hit to avoid withdrawal. It'd be a hell of a lot better than the cycle of homelessness, hospital, and jail that our current religion/AA-based approach delivers all but a sliver of the time...
Why would you want a drug without a prescription?
Two different reasons... Young adults take them recreationally a few times to experiment and enjoy the sensory experience, like feeling they're part of the universe or hallucinating ponies dancing across the ceiling. I haven't read it yet, but I've heard that The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe depicts their reasons really well.
Beyond that, people take illicit drugs in order to control unpleasant or intolerable symptoms from physical or mental disorders. In some cases the legal drugs are really inadequate or have nasty side-effects, in others it's because the person has a mental illness and doesn't trust psychiatrists to not lock them away, or because the person has given up on finding a doctor that can/will actually help with their condition.
...if you can't afford the drugs you need to keep you alive by the "Legal" route, it is a risk that you could be forced to take.
Very true... Out of fairness, I have to note that we do have coverage called Medicaid for people that are disabled by serious health problems -- it's just a deeply fucked-up system. It's available only to the disabled citizens that are living in serious poverty, so if a disabled person that's not in poverty can't pay for their medical needs, they can only get Medicaid if they give up almost everything they have and divorce their spouse if he/she works. Also, the system is trying to essentially find loopholes to throw as many of us under the bus as possible, because it's being overwhelmed with the much higher cost of covering the incredibly high number of pregnant & underage immigrants (or 1st/2nd generation) in need.
The higher the classification, the more stringent the reporting / prescribing rules.
There's also sub-categorization of some kind within the classifications, I assume based on the potency. A person can get a prescription for hydrocodone with little fuss -- but drugs like fentanyl (80-100x morphine) require a few in-person visits with the doctor, weight monitoring, drug testing, and a contract that dictates things unrelated to the drug. (Not that there's much point beyond making drug-testing companies richer; the people getting the drugs illegally are the ones abusing them, while the real patients like me aren't about to sell medication that protects us from near-unbearable pain levels.)
It's usually not considered rape if the 'victim' was fully consenting to the activity, fell asleep, and woke up to find the 'attacker' continuing or starting it over again.
The rape when it comes to sleep normally involves somebody either not consenting (explicitly or implicitly) OR actively refusing to participate in a sexual act, falling asleep, then waking up to find the person doing it to him/her anyway. (I had a good gay male friend that was raped that way... He openly told a new prospective boyfriend that he only has sex of any kind with protection and that he wasn't ready for more than making out, but he woke up from dozing off while cuddling at the end of a night out drinking to find the guy doing things to him that he definitely didn't agree to.)
Outside the sciences, I've never heard the phrase, "I hadn't considered that. I guess I was wrong."
How much time have you spent, excluding personal time, outside the sciences -- and are you taking into account that in the liberal arts, discussions aren't conducted to come to a common consensus but to delve more deeply into a topic by bouncing/exchanging ideas off one another?
I've known plenty of fellow people with degrees or careers in the various liberal arts fields (English, history, rhetoric, etc.) that make the same sort of claims against folks that specialized in math or sciences that you're making about them... It's largely because we're used to having both sides revise their stance on the fly based on new data/input from one another, and somebody with the binary stance of facts tends to only do that if given objective raw fact to reverse their perspective entirely.
I've been using YubNub for years so I can switch on the fly between engines, as users have added virtually every site I might encounter and I can add more as needed.
Though I do still have some weak spots in my education, particularly in english as I'm more of a math geek and have never taken the time to educate myself on the proper use of language.. So be gentle on my mistakes here ;)
As far as I can tell, you write as well as most of the other students I knew from classes as an English major at Berkeley, so it doesn't appear to have been a major setback... I recently started teaching myself 'proper' writing and grammar, as my schools didn't bother beyond the basics in elementary school -- if you're curious about it in the future, I've found 3 books that make the task more entertaining and are pretty good references:
The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed
The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed
Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English
No, people want things the way they used to be:
- Consumers only had to wait as long as it took to reproduce & transport the items.
- TV contained only minimal advertising on networks and none on PBS or premium cable.
- Cable was cheap and in many areas, we could buy the premium channels (Showtime, HBO, Disney, etc.) separately.
- Format-shifting in order to use media on multiple devices was legal, and it was assumed that people would copy or share wherever reasonable. We all knew that as kids earned disposable income, they'd take pride in buying things instead of getting them for free, and that by then they had become loyal fans of various authors, bands, actors, and so forth.
It's not an inflated sense of entitlement for a person to want back the rights that everybody around them had until relatively recently. It's also not an inflated sense of entitlement for the creative people producing the entertainment to want to be paid for their work long-term, since they're performing skilled labor (it takes 10-20 years of hardcore practice & training to get a realistic chance at commercial success) and paid slowly over a long period rather than in large lumps like in other jobs, without the health insurance, employer-matched retirement savings or other bennies that are normal in the other skilled fields.
The only people with the entitlement problems are the individuals that don't contribute in a meaningful way to the creative work, yet expect a large share of the proceeds. THEY are the problem -- not the regular people being overcharged or the artists ultimately being underpaid.
Most young nerds now would reply, "yeah, I saw that last year, the voice acting was awesome -- but who's Neal Stephenson?"
I had some Hispanic friends as a kid here in California that excelled in school, and a few more when I was in college. However, all of them had parents that demanded they become fluent in English, integrate, and do well in school -- the kids whose parents came here during or after the wave of immigration in the late 80s are the ones having huge problems, as their parents discouraged the use of English or integrating and told them that they'd return to their 'superior' home before long (so they saw little reason to be educated here).