> How a F-35 will knock 11 enemies (your 11:1 ratio) if he could carry a maximum of four air-to-air missiles (internally, if you want to remain "invisible" to radar)?
First mission: kill some bad guys Next mission: kill some bad guys 100 missions later: get shot down
Generally, a pilot doesn't keep flying around after a mission, waiting to get shot. You do your job, then go home. If you do your job 11 times and you're still alive, that's the 11:1 kill ratio.
> Anyone who has thought about trying to combine a Corvette with a pickup truck with a front loader understands what an utterly ridiculous idea
In some ways, it makes sense to have dedicated equipment designed for each job. If you're designing a truck for construction industry, build it like a Ford F-350. If you're designing a car to drive to work and back, a Honda Civic. On the other hand, the Ford F-150 is incredibly popular. It's small enough to have reasonable gas mileage as a daily driver AND you can stop at the hardware store on the way home and pick up some 2X4s or plywood. Versatility can be a very good thing.
Many wars have been lost by the side who had prepared to fight the previous war. Jets like this are a long term proposition and the F-35 will probably be flying in 2045. Are you sure that in 2045, (or 2025) you'll want a plane narrowly optimized for the role you needed to fill in the Gulf War of the 1990s? A more generalist platform may well be better suited for the unknown conditions of the next three wars.
For clarity, its RANGE is 1300 miles. Its COMBAT RADIUS is 600 on internal fuel. Which means it can fly 600 miles, maneuver around a a target for a short while, turn around, and fly 600 miles back. Alternatively, it can fly 900 miles to a target, turn, and fly 400 miles to a friendly area to refuel or land.
That's a BS excuse. Obama could fire the people responsible for this, or just order them to release the records. There ARE jbts in the US government, and as head of the government, Obama is head of the jack booted thugs.
> If you can't see how a physical connection to shared infrastructure is different to two grocery stores or two cell companies you might want to take some time to acquaint yourself with the differences,
Roads are infrastructure, my friend. In my case , one road, called WJB Parkway, connects me to the Kroger grocery store. Another road, hwy 6, connects me to the Walmart store. Yet another, Villa Maria, connects me to the HEB grocery store. It would be more efficient to have one road, going to one store. That store could then sell rotten bananas for $6/pound since there would be no competition.
Lol. Try filtering red, blue, and green while making a post. You'll notice that you can't, because you couldn't see anythind. Red is at one end of the spectrum, so you can filter it and everything just looks a little blue, because you've filtered out the low end of the spectrum. You can filter out blue by filtering the high end of the spectrum. You can filter green by filtering the middle of the spectrum.
If you block the low end (red), the middle (green) and the high end (blue), you've just blocked ALL light.
Ps - the local FAA field office can approve unterminated (or terminated) laser effects outdoors, so it IS possible to do it safely and legally. The FAA might just tell the operator to point the laser this direction, not that direction (such as not toward the approach corridor for a local airport).
Absolutely they can and it's not unusual. I'd you operate a laser more powerful than a handheld pointer, you ccarb easily get busted for pointing skyward whether aircraft fly by or not. Any decent DJ or light jockey knows not to point lighting upward outdoors.
You may have noticed in the last few years club lasers have almost universally switched to scatter effects, where there are two hundred weak beams rather than one strong beam. That's largely because a strong beam can get you in trouble in several ways. Heck, just having an overpower laser at a show without a permit is a big fine - even if it is pointed at the ceiling.
> History has proven that privatisation universally results in increase of charges to the individual and major reductions in the provisions of services.
You are far to the left and Al Gore and Bill Clinton on that one. They made a big deal about reducing bureaucratic waste and getting things done faster by hiring the private companies that did the same job for half the price and in half the time. I think Gore even wrote a book about it.
> It is logical, governments attempts to provide the maximum possible service
They better not, not in the US. In the US they are supposed to provide the FAIREST possible service, with the most possible input from the taxpayers who are paying for it. If my (govt service) is better than yours, that's unfair and wrong. If I live in the boonies and are therefore limited to 1 mbps, everyone else should be limited to 1 mbps too.
> Private industry attempts to provide the least possible service for the maximum possible cha rge, for fuck sake they publicly brag about, it's called profit.
Please look up the definitionbof profit. Profit = the value generated minus the cost incurred. Maximum profit, therefore, is when you have the best service (therefore most sales) at the lowest cost.
> PR=B$ types to run around spreading the delusion that corporations love you, the really, really do).
They love your money. They can get your money in either of two ways. A) you choose to give them your money in exchange for their service, because theirs is the best or B) the local government essentially forces you to give them your money because they don't allow you to have any choice. In the US, internet service is mostly b. Thelocal governments grant monopolies to one cable provider and one phone provider. Coincidentally, the same company that government grants monopoly power so they overcharge you also turns around and donates the money they got from you to the politicians. So the politicians force you to give Comcast too much money, then Comcast gives that money to the politicians who helped set the thing up. Here's a great solution - get MORE politicians involved!
> It doesn't make sense to install multiple fibers.
In the same way that it doesn't "make sense" to have multiple cell towers covering the same area. Thing is, there used to be one company with cell towers in this area. The company with the towers charged $85 / month. Another company came in and offered unlimited everything for $45 / month. Now there are three or four and I pay $30 / month.
Competition is inefficient in a way, but it's how you go from $85 2G to $30 4G.
It doesn't "make sense" to have multiple grocery stores servicing the same area, the duplication is wasteful. Why have two barbershops servicing Ive neighborhood? It would be more efficient to have one. Theoretically, communism would be more efficient - if people were perfect. If people weren't lazy, if tbthey were perfectly charitable, if people didn't want to earn money to buy nice things, you'd
have one service provider per neighborhood. When dealing with actual humans - well ask the Soviets or the Cubans how well that worked.
You wouldn't run Linux on Mac hardware, of course. If you like Linux, but Linux isn't appropriate / available in a particular situation, OSX is well worth looking at. Examples would be if you need to run specific software that is available for Windows and Mac but not Linux, or if your large organization supports Windows and Mac but not Linux. That would include any of the Adobe tools, AutoCAD, etc. Most of the time, probably 99.9% of the time, Linux has software that does what you need. However, if you actually have to run Adobe Flash CS6, Mac will run that along with whatever free software you're accustomed to from Linux.
In my case, the agency I work for provides employees with Windows or Mac desktops. Linux isn't an option. Since I much prefer Linux but it wasn't an available choice, I chose Mac and I have no regrets. I pop open a bash shell and work just exactly as I do on Linux.
I found this part interesting, as it is a question I've been wondering about. It may directly affect my career - soon.
TFA said: > a large number of publications in low-ranking journals can be just as good as a few in the big ones. That’s “perhaps the most interesting finding,”
That is indeed interesting. I work on the fringes of academia, where most people don't publish at all, but the boss certainly wants people to. So I'm just starting to learn about how to get my work out there. Number if citations matters, I've read, so now I need to find out how one goes about getting exposure so that people might cite my work.
I guess it IS worthwhile for me to submit lower-impact journals related to my field, information security.
>, Apple runs the apps I need. (If Linux did, I'd use that instead, but they don't yet.)
I used Linux exclusively for many years. I was pleasantly surprised how natural OSX felt when I started using it. I knew that OSX is certified Unix, but I expected it to feel at least as different as FreeBSD. I certainly recommend OSX (not iOS) for people who like Linux.
I'd wager that the judge is fully aware of that and has issued appropriate orders freezing assets until such time as it is determined which assets should actually be seized permanently. This judge DID just rule that Lumen View is a patent troll who is abusing the court system. Judges don't like it when you do that. Three years from now, the people involved might ultimately get their bank accounts released, but the judge knows how to make it an expensive pita to get the order overturned.
> > "A remarkably higher frequency of acute alcohol intoxication"
> Which says ZERO about addiction.
Let me translate for you. "a high frequency of acute alcohol intoxication" means "getting shitfaced drunk all the time". If you don't think that getting shitfaced all the time has anything to do with being a drunk, well that's your issue.
I've certainly found this to be true in my experience being self-employed. Customers would buy whatever I recommended because my recommendations were clearly based on significant technical knowledge. Of course it was also important that at times I would advise them NOT to buy product X from my company. If the product wasn't a good fit, I'd definitely let them know. Sometimes I'd suggest that they add a calendar entry nine months later, to see if their business was ready for the product at a later date, because they didn't need to spend the money on it _yet_.
I was a professional magician before I was in IT, so I enjoyed your post. A good sysadmin / programmer who knows how to use their shell and scripting language can also do what looks like magic. "You spend four hours every Friday doing that? Here, let me just type this in real quick... done." You can accomplish in seconds what takes hours for other people to do. In other words:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clarke
It seems I've struck a nerve. Perhaps you've been personally affected by alcoholism or alcohol abuse in your family and have some strong feelings about it. I can relate - most men in my family have abused alcohol, and done all which that entails.
> the first hit on your search is the wikipedia entry which has no mention of alcoholism, addiction or craving or really ANYTHING about your theory. How amazing is it that this straight-forward and obvious explanation for the majority of alcohol addiction isn't even mentioned in the wikipedia entry chemical?
If you like wikipedia for an overview of the subject, the wikipedia page you mentioned actually DOES say the absence of the enzyme may be related to "a remarkably higher frequency of acute alcohol intoxication". For example, that page says:
"A remarkably higher frequency of acute alcohol intoxication among East Asians than among Caucasians could be related to the absence of a catalytically active form of the mitochondrial isozyme."
Please note what you are claiming I said is precisely the opposite of what I said. I said this is NOT an "explanation for the majority of alcohol addiction". In fact, in the post you just replied to, I linked to my other post in the thread in which I say very explicitly:
> once you take care of the enzyme in an active alcoholic, you're left with just a regular drug addict - alcohol is a drug, of course. > You've treated the thing that makes alcohol addicts different from other addicts, but they're still an addict
Alcohol addiction is what you would have remaining AFTER you fixed the enzyme problem, or what you observe in alcoholics who do not lack the enzyme. Alcohol addiction PLUS the missing enzyme = type I alcoholism.
Note also I didn't say anything at all about "the majority of alcohol addiction". What I said was "a large percentage of alcoholics". As research progresses, we may in fact refine our definitions to distinguish between those who currently EXPERIENCE addiction to alcohol at the moment vs those who ARE, by the very nature of their genetic makeup, alcoholics. Alcoholics in this sense may not be the majority people who have experienced alcohol addiction. My somewhat-informed guess would be that roughly 30% of people whose quality of life is significantly negatively affected by their own drinking lack the enzyme. That leaves 70% of "drinkers" who are not in this class.
Please understand the isozyme is nothing more or less than a key difference between those addicted to alcohol vs those addicted to other drugs. It indicates one reason that a subject may become addicted to alcohol, and one reason that alcohol addiction differs from other drugs. Therefore it doesn't explain the totality of alcoholism - fix the enzyme and you're still left a drug addict, and involved with drug addiction. See also: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Consider another well-known disease that involves a missing compound needed for metabolism - diabetes. Supplying insulin helps a diabetic patient, but doesn't "cure" the disease.
It certainly seems plausible that by identifying people who lack the enzyme and either a) providing the enzyme or b) warning them of the problem, many cases could be avoided. People who lack the enzyme but abstain from alcohol seem to be okay generally, so that would seem a reasonable strategy. However, digestion of food creates alcohol, so that's an area where further study may be needed.
The other thing is, once you take care of the enzyme in an active alcoholic, you're left with just a regular drug addict - alcohol is a drug, of course. You've treated the thing that makes alcohol addicts different from other addicts, but they're still an addict. We know also that alcoholism includes some positive feedback cycles. People often have a drink when negative events happens in their lives. When they drink excessively, that causes more negative events. The alcoholic typically ends up in a cycle of dependency. Indeed, it seems that many people identified as alcoholic have only the psychological dependance and are not lacking the indicated enzyme. Enzyme therapy therefore wouldn't be expected to work in these "type II" drinkers. It may turn "type I" (enzymatic alcoholics) into type II (psychologically dependent), but that doesn't seem to be a huge win. Enzyme therapy would probably need to be combined with treatment for the psychological side as well
Looking at it another way, there are two primary issues with alcoholics. A) when they drink, they can't stop and B) they start drinking, even given the knowledge of B. Treating A doesn't fix the odd metal obsession that we see manifested in B.
Alcoholism would be among the least useful compulsive behaviors to compare because a large percentage of alcoholics metabolize alcohol differently than non-alcoholics. Therefore a significant portion of the problem is purely physical, not behavioral or centered in the brain. Potheads might be a better comparison - as far as we know, everyone's body processes THC in essentially the same way. There are of course many other compulsive behaviors that seem to be purely psychological / behavioral / brain-based, as opposed to being caused in part by differences in other bodily systems.
Specifically, we know that the difference in alcohol processing is not a RESULT of drinking because non-drinkers who were siblings of alcoholics often displayed the same trait. It appears likely that these siblings were genetically predisposed to become alcoholics, but had not activated the condition by introducing alcohol into their system. The metabolic difference happens after alcohol turns into acetaldehyde. Most people have TWO enzymes that quickly break down the acetaldehyde. Many alcoholics are missing one of the two enzymes, which is controlled by a certain gene that has been mapped. With one of the enzymes missing, the acetaldehyde remains for a much longer period of time. During the period that acetaldehyde is present in significant amounts, the alcoholic experiences the phenomenon of craving - an overpowering desire for more alcohol. Therefore, it seems that alcoholism is largely caused by the lack of an important enzyme, rather than a difference in brain function.
Of course, if a person who is missing the enzyme never becomes intoxicated in the first place, the craving will not be triggered. Also, there are many people who drink excessively but do not lack the enzyme and therefore probably do not have the craving effect. There are of course behavioral and psychological factors involved for these people, who could be called "hard drinkers".
> that doesn't mean your kitchen has a balancing mechanism to keep it from getting warm in the summer.
My freezer sure does have a mechanism to keep the temperature stable , regardless of outdoor temperatures. Do you have a freezer made in 1872? It might be time to upgrade.
I would say that unreasonable restrictions on employee access make data less safe. Many people WILL get access to whatever they need to do their job effectively. There is always a way, whether it's a technical bypass or having friends in the right department. Where I work, three of us are good friends. There are almost nothing that isn't accessible to one of us. If I needed access to something to get done what needs to be done, I'd get access. The only question is whether or not I'd be allowed to tell the security team that I was accessing the data.
Suppose an organization decides that they've had enough of trojans, so they l decree that everyone gets the approved desktop image and noone may install the software they need to do their job effectively and efficiently. To enforce this, employees get only a very limited account on the machine, similar to the default Guest account in Windows.
The result? The IT department no longer knows what software is being used since employees have to keep it secret (or be unable to do their job effectively). They don't know how the software got there. Maybe a lot of people are doing their work on personally-owned laptops, so company data is now handled on the same system their kids use to play online games.
I suppose that makes sense - if a CPU can have millions of transistors in less than one square inch, the wafer density is way to high to have only a few hundred diodes on a chip large enough to handle the heat. Unless of course much, much larger process sizes were much, much less expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
> How a F-35 will knock 11 enemies (your 11:1 ratio) if he could carry a maximum of four air-to-air missiles (internally, if you want to remain "invisible" to radar)?
First mission: kill some bad guys
Next mission: kill some bad guys
100 missions later: get shot down
Generally, a pilot doesn't keep flying around after a mission, waiting to get shot. You do your job, then go home. If you do your job 11 times and you're still alive, that's the 11:1 kill ratio.
> Anyone who has thought about trying to combine a Corvette with a pickup truck with a front loader understands what an utterly ridiculous idea
In some ways, it makes sense to have dedicated equipment designed for each job. If you're designing a truck for construction industry, build it like a Ford F-350. If you're designing a car to drive to work and back, a Honda Civic. On the other hand, the Ford F-150 is incredibly popular. It's small enough to have reasonable gas mileage as a daily driver AND you can stop at the hardware store on the way home and pick up some 2X4s or plywood. Versatility can be a very good thing.
Many wars have been lost by the side who had prepared to fight the previous war. Jets like this are a long term proposition and the F-35 will probably be flying in 2045. Are you sure that in 2045, (or 2025) you'll want a plane narrowly optimized for the role you needed to fill in the Gulf War of the 1990s? A more generalist platform may well be better suited for the unknown conditions of the next three wars.
For clarity, its RANGE is 1300 miles. Its COMBAT RADIUS is 600 on internal fuel. Which means it can fly 600 miles, maneuver around a a target for a short while, turn around, and fly 600 miles back. Alternatively, it can fly 900 miles to a target, turn, and fly 400 miles to a friendly area to refuel or land.
That's a BS excuse. Obama could fire the people responsible for this, or just order them to release the records. There ARE jbts in the US government, and as head of the government, Obama is head of the jack booted thugs.
> If you can't see how a physical connection to shared infrastructure is different to two grocery stores or two cell companies you might want to take some time to acquaint yourself with the differences,
Roads are infrastructure, my friend. In my case , one road, called WJB Parkway, connects me to the Kroger grocery store. Another road, hwy 6, connects me to the Walmart store. Yet another, Villa Maria, connects me to the HEB grocery store. It would be more efficient to have one road, going to one store. That store could then sell rotten bananas for $6/pound since there would be no competition.
Lol. Try filtering red, blue, and green while making a post. You'll notice that you can't, because you couldn't see anythind. Red is at one end of the spectrum, so you can filter it and everything just looks a little blue, because you've filtered out the low end of the spectrum. You can filter out blue by filtering the high end of the spectrum. You can filter green by filtering the middle of the spectrum.
If you block the low end (red), the middle (green) and the high end (blue), you've just blocked ALL light.
Ps - the local FAA field office can approve unterminated (or terminated) laser effects outdoors, so it IS possible to do it safely and legally. The FAA might just tell the operator to point the laser this direction, not that direction (such as not toward the approach corridor for a local airport).
Absolutely they can and it's not unusual. I'd you operate a laser more powerful than a handheld pointer, you ccarb easily get busted for pointing skyward whether aircraft fly by or not. Any decent DJ or light jockey knows not to point lighting upward outdoors.
You may have noticed in the last few years club lasers have almost universally switched to scatter effects, where there are two hundred weak beams rather than one strong beam. That's largely because a strong beam can get you in trouble in several ways. Heck, just having an overpower laser at a show without a permit is a big fine - even if it is pointed at the ceiling.
> History has proven that privatisation universally results in increase of charges to the individual and major reductions in the provisions of services.
You are far to the left and Al Gore and Bill Clinton on that one. They made a big deal about reducing bureaucratic waste and getting things done faster by hiring the private companies that did the same job for half the price and in half the time. I think Gore even wrote a book about it.
> It is logical, governments attempts to provide the maximum possible service
They better not, not in the US. In the US they are supposed to provide the FAIREST possible service, with the most possible input from the taxpayers who are paying for it. If my (govt service) is better than yours, that's unfair and wrong. If I live in the boonies and are therefore limited to 1 mbps, everyone else should be limited to 1 mbps too.
> Private industry attempts to provide the least possible service for the maximum possible cha rge, for fuck sake they publicly brag about, it's called profit.
Please look up the definitionbof profit. Profit = the value generated minus the cost incurred. Maximum profit, therefore, is when you have the best service (therefore most sales) at the lowest cost.
> PR=B$ types to run around spreading the delusion that corporations love you, the really, really do).
They love your money. They can get your money in either of two ways. A) you choose to give them your money in exchange for their service, because theirs is the best or B) the local government essentially forces you to give them your money because they don't allow you to have any choice. In the US, internet service is mostly b. Thelocal governments grant monopolies to one cable provider and one phone provider. Coincidentally, the same company that government grants monopoly power so they overcharge you also turns around and donates the money they got from you to the politicians. So the politicians force you to give Comcast too much money, then Comcast gives that money to the politicians who helped set the thing up. Here's a great solution - get MORE politicians involved!
> It doesn't make sense to install multiple fibers.
In the same way that it doesn't "make sense" to have multiple cell towers covering the same area. Thing is, there used to be one company with cell towers in this area. The company with the towers charged $85 / month. Another company came in and offered unlimited everything for $45 / month. Now there are three or four and I pay $30 / month.
Competition is inefficient in a way, but it's how you go from $85 2G to $30 4G.
It doesn't "make sense" to have multiple grocery stores servicing the same area, the duplication is wasteful. Why have two barbershops servicing Ive neighborhood? It would be more efficient to have one. Theoretically, communism would be more efficient - if people were perfect. If people weren't lazy, if tbthey were perfectly charitable, if people didn't want to earn money to buy nice things, you'd
have one service provider per neighborhood. When dealing with actual humans - well ask the Soviets or the Cubans how well that worked.
You wouldn't run Linux on Mac hardware, of course. If you like Linux, but Linux isn't appropriate / available in a particular situation, OSX is well worth looking at. Examples would be if you need to run specific software that is available for Windows and Mac but not Linux, or if your large organization supports Windows and Mac but not Linux. That would include any of the Adobe tools, AutoCAD, etc. Most of the time, probably 99.9% of the time, Linux has software that does what you need. However, if you actually have to run Adobe Flash CS6, Mac will run that along with whatever free software you're accustomed to from Linux.
In my case, the agency I work for provides employees with Windows or Mac desktops. Linux isn't an option. Since I much prefer Linux but it wasn't an available choice, I chose Mac and I have no regrets. I pop open a bash shell and work just exactly as I do on Linux.
> so I won't be caught dead with a mac or iphone or ipad.
Pretty much anything that runs on Linux will run equally well on a Mac. OSX isn't locked down like iOS is.
I found this part interesting, as it is a question I've been wondering about. It may directly affect my career - soon.
TFA said:
> a large number of publications in low-ranking journals can be just as good as a few in the big ones. That’s “perhaps the most interesting finding,”
That is indeed interesting. I work on the fringes of academia, where most people don't publish at all, but the boss certainly wants people to. So I'm just starting to learn about how to get my work out there. Number if citations matters, I've read, so now I need to find out how one goes about getting exposure so that people might cite my work.
I guess it IS worthwhile for me to submit lower-impact journals related to my field, information security.
>, Apple runs the apps I need. (If Linux did, I'd use that instead, but they don't yet.)
I used Linux exclusively for many years. I was pleasantly surprised how natural OSX felt when I started using it. I knew that OSX is certified Unix, but I expected it to feel at least as different as FreeBSD. I certainly recommend OSX (not iOS) for people who like Linux.
I'd wager that the judge is fully aware of that and has issued appropriate orders freezing assets until such time as it is determined which assets should actually be seized permanently. This judge DID just rule that Lumen View is a patent troll who is abusing the court system. Judges don't like it when you do that. Three years from now, the people involved might ultimately get their bank accounts released, but the judge knows how to make it an expensive pita to get the order overturned.
> > "A remarkably higher frequency of acute alcohol intoxication"
> Which says ZERO about addiction.
Let me translate for you. "a high frequency of acute alcohol intoxication" means "getting shitfaced drunk all the time". If you don't think that getting shitfaced all the time has anything to do with being a drunk, well that's your issue.
I've certainly found this to be true in my experience being self-employed. Customers would buy whatever I recommended because my recommendations were clearly based on significant technical knowledge. Of course it was also important that at times I would advise them NOT to buy product X from my company. If the product wasn't a good fit, I'd definitely let them know. Sometimes I'd suggest that they add a calendar entry nine months later, to see if their business was ready for the product at a later date, because they didn't need to spend the money on it _yet_.
I was a professional magician before I was in IT, so I enjoyed your post. A good sysadmin / programmer who knows how to use their shell and scripting language can also do what looks like magic. "You spend four hours every Friday doing that? Here, let me just type this in real quick ... done." You can accomplish in seconds what takes hours for other people to do. In other words:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clarke
It seems I've struck a nerve. Perhaps you've been personally affected by alcoholism or alcohol abuse in your family and have some strong feelings about it. I can relate - most men in my family have abused alcohol, and done all which that entails.
> the first hit on your search is the wikipedia entry which has no mention of alcoholism, addiction or craving or really ANYTHING about your theory. How amazing is it that this straight-forward and obvious explanation for the majority of alcohol addiction isn't even mentioned in the wikipedia entry chemical?
If you like wikipedia for an overview of the subject, the wikipedia page you mentioned actually DOES say the absence of the enzyme may be related to "a remarkably higher frequency of acute alcohol intoxication". For example, that page says:
"A remarkably higher frequency of acute alcohol intoxication among East Asians than among Caucasians could be related to the absence of a catalytically active form of the mitochondrial isozyme."
Please note what you are claiming I said is precisely the opposite of what I said. I said this is NOT an "explanation for the majority of alcohol addiction". In fact, in the post you just replied to, I linked to my other post in the thread in which I say very explicitly:
> once you take care of the enzyme in an active alcoholic, you're left with just a regular drug addict - alcohol is a drug, of course.
> You've treated the thing that makes alcohol addicts different from other addicts, but they're still an addict
Alcohol addiction is what you would have remaining AFTER you fixed the enzyme problem, or what you observe in alcoholics who do not lack the enzyme. Alcohol addiction PLUS the missing enzyme = type I alcoholism.
Note also I didn't say anything at all about "the majority of alcohol addiction". What I said was "a large percentage of alcoholics". As research progresses, we may in fact refine our definitions to distinguish between those who currently EXPERIENCE addiction to alcohol at the moment vs those who ARE, by the very nature of their genetic makeup, alcoholics. Alcoholics in this sense may not be the majority people who have experienced alcohol addiction. My somewhat-informed guess would be that roughly 30% of people whose quality of life is significantly negatively affected by their own drinking lack the enzyme. That leaves 70% of "drinkers" who are not in this class.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=metabolis...
Please understand the isozyme is nothing more or less than a key difference between those addicted to alcohol vs those addicted to other drugs. It indicates one reason that a subject may become addicted to alcohol, and one reason that alcohol addiction differs from other drugs. Therefore it doesn't explain the totality of alcoholism - fix the enzyme and you're still left a drug addict, and involved with drug addiction. See also:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Consider another well-known disease that involves a missing compound needed for metabolism - diabetes. Supplying insulin helps a diabetic patient, but doesn't "cure" the disease.
It certainly seems plausible that by identifying people who lack the enzyme and either a) providing the enzyme or b) warning them of the problem, many cases could be avoided. People who lack the enzyme but abstain from alcohol seem to be okay generally, so that would seem a reasonable strategy. However, digestion of food creates alcohol, so that's an area where further study may be needed.
The other thing is, once you take care of the enzyme in an active alcoholic, you're left with just a regular drug addict - alcohol is a drug, of course. You've treated the thing that makes alcohol addicts different from other addicts, but they're still an addict. We know also that alcoholism includes some positive feedback cycles. People often have a drink when negative events happens in their lives. When they drink excessively, that causes more negative events. The alcoholic typically ends up in a cycle of dependency. Indeed, it seems that many people identified as alcoholic have only the psychological dependance and are not lacking the indicated enzyme. Enzyme therapy therefore wouldn't be expected to work in these "type II" drinkers. It may turn "type I" (enzymatic alcoholics) into type II (psychologically dependent), but that doesn't seem to be a huge win. Enzyme therapy would probably need to be combined with treatment for the psychological side as well
Looking at it another way, there are two primary issues with alcoholics. A) when they drink, they can't stop and B) they start drinking, even given the knowledge of B. Treating A doesn't fix the odd metal obsession that we see manifested in B.
Alcoholism would be among the least useful compulsive behaviors to compare because a large percentage of alcoholics metabolize alcohol differently than non-alcoholics. Therefore a significant portion of the problem is purely physical, not behavioral or centered in the brain. Potheads might be a better comparison - as far as we know, everyone's body processes THC in essentially the same way. There are of course many other compulsive behaviors that seem to be purely psychological / behavioral / brain-based, as opposed to being caused in part by differences in other bodily systems.
Specifically, we know that the difference in alcohol processing is not a RESULT of drinking because non-drinkers who were siblings of alcoholics often displayed the same trait. It appears likely that these siblings were genetically predisposed to become alcoholics, but had not activated the condition by introducing alcohol into their system. The metabolic difference happens after alcohol turns into acetaldehyde. Most people have TWO enzymes that quickly break down the acetaldehyde. Many alcoholics are missing one of the two enzymes, which is controlled by a certain gene that has been mapped. With one of the enzymes missing, the acetaldehyde remains for a much longer period of time. During the period that acetaldehyde is present in significant amounts, the alcoholic experiences the phenomenon of craving - an overpowering desire for more alcohol. Therefore, it seems that alcoholism is largely caused by the lack of an important enzyme, rather than a difference in brain function.
Of course, if a person who is missing the enzyme never becomes intoxicated in the first place, the craving will not be triggered. Also, there are many people who drink excessively but do not lack the enzyme and therefore probably do not have the craving effect. There are of course behavioral and psychological factors involved for these people, who could be called "hard drinkers".
> that doesn't mean your kitchen has a balancing mechanism to keep it from getting warm in the summer.
My freezer sure does have a mechanism to keep the temperature stable , regardless of outdoor temperatures. Do you have a freezer made in 1872? It might be time to upgrade.
I would say that unreasonable restrictions on employee access make data less safe. Many people WILL get access to whatever they need to do their job effectively. There is always a way, whether it's a technical bypass or having friends in the right department. Where I work, three of us are good friends. There are almost nothing that isn't accessible to one of us. If I needed access to something to get done what needs to be done, I'd get access. The only question is whether or not I'd be allowed to tell the security team that I was accessing the data.
Suppose an organization decides that they've had enough of trojans, so they l decree that everyone gets the approved desktop image and noone may install the software they need to do their job effectively and efficiently. To enforce this, employees get only a very limited account on the machine, similar to the default Guest account in Windows.
The result? The IT department no longer knows what software is being used since employees have to keep it secret (or be unable to do their job effectively). They don't know how the software got there. Maybe a lot of people are doing their work on personally-owned laptops, so company data is now handled on the same system their kids use to play online games.
I suppose that makes sense - if a CPU can have millions of transistors in less than one square inch, the wafer density is way to high to have only a few hundred diodes on a chip large enough to handle the heat. Unless of course much, much larger process sizes were much, much less expensive.