it's not about getting the job back if he does stuff in civil court, it's about getting the pay, for being wrongfully fired/arrested. and then having all the press, and maybe getting a 7 figure It job for some private security firm.
if he's not crazy, and management wanted all the passwords to critical routers and systems so they could 'allow' inbound stupid ports that should be blocked by default so they can download their work files over the internet without using encryption..at home...
the details are too slim right now to really know exactly what was going on.
and what i suggest isn't that far from what people really do want to get set up, my county case manager keeps talking about people wanting to be able to access their work files from home... given how boneheaded management is they probably said 'then set up file and networking sharing with windows!' unblock that port so the entire internet can flood their computer systems with malware!
a VPN could solve things but what if management just doesn't understand VPNs vs 'windows file sharing'
the last time this court case was mentioned on/. i looked into the history of this guy. he was a dot-bomber in the gaming industry, when the dust cleared he was out of a job and looking for ways to make money, and became a patent troll. He started in California, then moved to nevada, then moved his court cases to the capitol of patent troll court cases, that city in texas which sees the most patent cases of like any court nation wide...
it's convenient, because that county has very few criminal cases, and the judge does everything as quick as possible. you won't get tied up in legal maneuvering. oh yeah, and the juries there always go after the guy with the deep pockets who hire the slimy lawyers who practically get thrown out of court for trying to make the whole process drag on...
but here's the thing, because of the number of patent suit people who just settle out of court, rather than face that judge who doesn't know how to take a bribe... with a hostile jury... that statistically they don't have a massive stack of legal victories. if you settle out of court, it'll cost you less, and Microsoft, who as originally also a plaintiff did just that almost 6 months ago and for less than Nintendo is going to pay.
It's commendable that the judge won't take bribes and is hostile to maneuvering tactics by lawyers. but it's also scary that anybody with half a brain who can abuse the patent system knows they're going to win...
I wouldn't be surprised if that judge eventually had a hitman kill him at his home, i guess the patent trolls haven't gone after the wrong kind of people yet.
wmp does whatever you have codecs installed for it to do. and i am not a windows media player guy, i liked version 2 or whatever the small simple gui one... then they made it winamp, but without the 'classic' winamp skin (i always use winamps classic skin if i use it at all)
the thing was it was a rant against containers like h264 and ogm containers sound great on the outside, as do 'non burned in subtitles' but in reality they suck hardcore, every media player handles containers differently, not to mention containers can contain malicious code such as launching a web browser to a malware site that tries to trick the user into downloading and running a trojan horse..
but yeah i should taken away karma bonus on that post...
now if only h264 didn't use atrocious, buggy, awful non-burned in subtitles that don't render correctly if you're missing the 'fonts' (especially the foreign language fonts!) the encoder assumed everyone in the world has!
there is a reason the non-burned in subtitles in DVDs are so atrocious looking it's so that EVERY DVD player could do subtitles right.
I've even had non-burned in subtitles CRASH VLC media player!!! WTF do they only think of windows media player version 20.9.1029.3! or whatever it is they use?
if a file is available in avi and MKV format i always go with AVI because the subtitles look so much better! they don't crowd each other, they don't 'grow larger that the screen border' when you maximize the screen, they don't 'stay so long you can't read the next piece of text'
ugh i hate mkvs you know they could just burn in the subtitles, but because mkv is a container they don't bother.. it's like slacking on the subtitle quality control, they don't even need to preview how it works, cause it's not like people are going to say 'make a version 2 so i can see all the subtitles right!'
you think linux not working on a laptop is bad! my 'dads' pc ran and loaded 7.10 fine, no issues. but 8.04 despite upgrading fine SIMPLY WON'T INSTALL.
this on a commodity desktop system with popular motherboard and part sets!
and on my system at home 8.04 ubuntu won't work at all, it hangs on trying to load gnome, i can get gnome to work in fail safe mode, but it wont' do that automatically! i switched to KDE via meta package and Kubuntu ran no issues.
I'm starting to worry about the future of ubuntu/kubuntu... did he hire the wrong kind of programmers? not enough men on the team to cope with the 'pace' of open source innovation?
or are buzzwords higher priority than basic functionality? I think the whole 'just use 1 CD' as the installer might be limiting them, i know knoppix has had to remove popular software before just to get it on 1 CD... is it time for linux to go DVD media images exclusively? last i checked a DVD burner cost $30 and a blank cost around $1 (for non garbage grade media) and it's not like you have to make the image 4.7 GB 1GB is plenty. for now.
then the most logical way to do things is to count the number of cores, and do threads -1 from that total.
always leave 1 core free... by default. with quad cores out and 8 cores promised, and no sign of things changing, it's time to rethink defaults.
oh hey, any open source program that supports multiple instances doesn't even need to thread, just run x copies, if it's a batch encode/transcode process... but threading is useful for n-pass encoding.
while i agree this guy might not have lost complete control, from my own experience, yes someone with paranoid schizophrenia CAN lose complete control over their actions. it's a very rare symptom, that only occurs with the very worst people, who stop taking their meds, or have gone untreated, or perhaps have 'self' medicated with alcohol. (alcohol as a depressant, can in some small way mitigate some of the symptoms of psychosis, just as some anti-depressants can Cause symptoms of psychosis)
there was one particular day, where i have absolutely no memories of what i did, but apparently i kept saying 'i'm so hungy, i'm starving' i was in a AFH not a group home so they actually gave me more food than they should have, that night when they finally realized i was having hospital bad symptoms (despite medication) i threw up on the way to the hospital, i had over eaten to the point of vomiting...
complete lack of self control, it is a possible symptom of a mental illness that can effect as many a 1% of people. now, if the guy really had a complete lack of self control, he's probably not going to be able to get himself an attorney that would be able to use witness testimony to save his butt... anyways it's a rare symptom of a rare mental illness, and psychosis can result from stress as well, and this guy was under a lot of stress. if it was the stress that made his symptoms, then he should seriously consider a different line of work, when he gets out of prison. and considering he's white collar, and the jail systems are over crowded anyways, he probably won't even be in jail for more than a year or two anyways.
where i live, pastors visit the group homes, the hospitals have multiple bibles, ad well as books on the '12-step' (read, bible thumping) program for AA, the book itself is geared towards anyone with addictive personality, and in accepting faith as a solution...
not to mention, weekly singing groups in one of the hospitals, it was a wide variety of songs, but i had delusional thoughts about some of the song selections.. (btw the current meds were invented in the 1990's or later and are way better than the '1950's era anti-psychotics) one of the thoughst i had strange thoughts about was 'dust in the wind'
hospitals for mental illness/addiction do push god onto patients. as far as atheist dogma, the thing about atheism is that anyone can make their own dogma, it's not like 'read this one book and then you'll get it' and Christianity is all like 'read this one book' the bible. and now we have a 1600 year old version missing parts of the bible that are 'accepted' as part of the modern bible.
the people pushing atheism on society often have their own motivations, kind of like America trying to push Christianity onto say, japan. they celebrate Christmas in japan, except in the temples.. it's a recurring theme in anime, like 'daa daa daa' (UFO baby) or even kimagure orange road, in the one christmas episode.. where they kept 'time traveling' to do the holiday over and over...
I grew up with computers. it's a bit hard to get rid of something i use every day... where would i get my music without a computer to play mp3s or internet radio? don't say FM radio, because that has way more commercials than internet radio, and mp3s have no commercials... CD-players are a very simple computer, but a computer none the less...
I could live without internet, more easily than i could live without computers... the internet is the scary part even behind a nice hardened firewall.
the medication companies claim only 1% of people have my mental illness, luckily for pharma, they have dozens of uses for most of the meds originally made for people in sanitariums.
are depression medications abused, yeah, of course. big pharma is always looking at how to make more money.
ironically, allergy medications, one of the most common symptoms people take medication for, wind up being OTC very quickly, so that insurance companies don't have to pay massive amounts of money to pharmaceuticals
well there were times where i questioned things, but there were entire weeks, where i blacked out all memories completely, to top things off i had very little contact with other people, other than via the internet, and at night when my dad was home, on the weekends when mom was home i apparently had a few very weird conversations, that upset her... as for myself, i refused to even go to a evaluation for the job service.... i was very wary of people, especially doctors, even though the thoughts are often classic paranoia, and i knew that the thoughts were so overpowering... I was like 'i have to get the virus off the computer' and all i did was basically nothing useful because i couldn't stay coherent long enough.
i forgot to mention, one day i was convinced by turning the 'power' off at the main breaker, i could stop the virus from infecting things, unless they had battery power....
my mom eventually talked me into going into a hospital, and i spend my 2 weeks at that hospital trying to get out of the hospital, afraid that there were people there infected by the virus... i wound up hopping to a lot of different hospitals, and finally group homes, when medications seemed to be helping, but i was eventually changed to new meds again, when i had a 3-day relapse.
they tried me on a lot of different medications. I saw a lot of different people with different mental illnesses. someone else suggested that stress can cause problems, but not all mental illnesses can be treated just by living a low stress life style. it's true i did have stress, had lost like my 3rd job in 1 year, stress from spending too much time in online RTSes trying to win. but then why didn't the symptoms go away, over 4 months while i wasn't doing any of those things? they didn't go away until i was medicated...
it's nice some people can self treat mild mental illness by not doing stressful work, it's even in the movie office space... for myself, medication was 100% necessary.
Mine is very real. I doubt you've ever spent 6 months in a hospital trying to tell people that human beings are being infected by a computer virus. (note: the computer virus was real, and i was the only person who could actually get it off the machines, because it was infecting the BIOS and had 'symptoms' like going to the desktop in the middle of a full screen video game, that other people dismissed as being 'real')
To this date, with medication I still am hazy on if computer viruses can infect human beings, on a bad day, i look for malware in every OS on every computer i have, with every tool available to me, including many useful FOSS tools like dban which allows complete erasure of the drive...
"You are the product of a society that is unable to deal with stress and disappointment."
I'll give you that, but you've never gone 6 days unwilling to eat food or drink tap water because it's poisoned, luckily this symptom has been dealt with with medication.
you've probably never hidden in a basement with aluminum covering you to block the mind control waves either. related to this is using a FM radio from the 1980's and 3 cell phones, wrapped in aluminum foil to see if they really block broadcaster waves. While you're still slightly concerned about the type of high energy particles that can go through entire mountains...
"Have you ever looked at mental illness in other countries. It is tiny compared to the USA."
That may be, in a rural environment, telling people about stuff i was worried about every day and shit my family would likely instead of taking me to a doctor, that they couldn't afford would just humor me, and try to keep me eating foods and drinking water. Also, I would likely die at a much younger age, because of the lack of medical treatment overall. Not being treated by doctors is not the same as 'not having mental illness.'
"You embody the problem with the world today. A lack of conviction and discipline that has spread like wildfire."
Except my mental illness is real, my doctor even increased my medicines last week, because he though i was having too many symptoms with just 1 medication.
"Go on with your drug induced normality. You will not be mourned."
If only the drugs actually caused normality. Mine do not, i still have paranoid thoughts ever single day, they're random and unpredictable, and medication only does so much. I don't hear voices, i don't 'see things' that other people don't see, i don't walk around calling people names that i don't recognize, as if i was in a dream, and i don't wind up in a hospital writing notes about everything that i'm worried about thinking that magically if i write it a system administrator of the universe (it's all just a simulation in a computer after all) would be able to deal with the problems if i simply wrote enough notes...
I have 4 boxes of various paperwork including my 'note' writing phase.
you sir, have never been mentally ill so you know not what it is like. you've never been convinced, with you were in a hospital that another mental patient could read your mind, and control you for not looking at the pictures of their family when they asked you nicely to look at the photos.
I'd say the guy is probably suffering from mental illness.
there are a lot of people who simply never get diagnosed, because they seem to be able to function normally without medication... myself i've had lesser symptoms dating all the way to childhood, but until i had a 'severe' hospitalization requireing symptoms people just didn't think that i was bad off enough.
just imagine how people will be confused in 1600 years when they find the 'original' flying spaghetti monster documents. we'd better start making printouts in as many languages as possible, perhaps carved in stone.
HVDC experiences about 3% losses over 800 km you seemed to imply a need for HVDC to put power source and power use near each other. this is not true. HVAC suffers 3% losses at about 4 KM for comparison.
electric cars are going to charge at night time, this is a problem, since most renewable energy has a hard time being produced at night time. there are some methods i've heard of being used for storing wind and solar power into the night time, but they've all been fairly esoteric, and require large, stable underground rock formations like caves or abandoned mine shafts.
hydrogen can be produced at any time of day, as long as the refueling station has enough storage capacity. this means potentially that renewable solar or wind power can be used to produce the night time demand of hydrogen, easily. but again, it depends on the real world efficiency of hydrogen combustion, if it's as bad as current gasoline engines it's not good, if it's as efficient as large diesel engines, then it's getting more attractive, especially if that efficiency ramps down to a smaller engine size they way diesel doesn't.
and then there are those researches who build ultra light gasoline powered cars that get over 3000 mpg, and i wonder, is the 10% efficiency because of intentional engineering issues? or does gasoline really not scale as well to high power engines as it does to low power engines. sigh. http://www.gear6.net/2006/06/ubc_engineers_r.html i mean i know it's smaller than a motorcycle, and has a tiny engine, and it's all made of space age materials that are ultra light... but how come they can tweak that engine to not produce waste heat? why can't car engine designers do the same thing? did they add a cycle where water is injected and turns to steam?
the whole point of 85% - 97% efficient electrolysis is that you 'pump water and electricity to refueling stations' it's not impossible, it does take rethinking the grid, but i lime in a city of around 30,000 people and there are 6 or 7 gasoline refueling stations, why is getting enough electric current to that small a number of locations a logistics problem? why would we have trucks or pipelines at all? i don't get it, why would you say we'd need to truck it?
BTW apparently electric cars are about 25% efficient, if hydrogen combustion can do 35% efficiency then it is better than electric charging.... i was wondering if it was more efficient in a ICE because it turns into water, and the water turns to steam from the heat of combustion, adding horse power to each stroke...
normal gasoline engines are around 10% efficient, although there are really efficient diesel engines a semi can haul many many times the weight of a normal car, and still use a reasonable amount of fuel, because diesel is so efficient.
as far as 'h2' being so dangerous, i'd like to point out that in world war 2 wood gas was used widely in normal ICE designs, wood gas is by volume 14% hydrogen gas, and 50% nitrogen, the only combustible gas besides hydrogen is 3% methane. pure hydrogen fuel is very dangerous, but nitrogen+ hydrogen gas maybe with a little CO2 (like wood gas has, skip the CO though) and you've got a nice stable fuel. it does add to the cost, even though nitrogen and CO2 can be easily captured or produced...
your doomsday scenario is entirely based on the usage of pure hydrogen fuel, and we're not going to be putting pure hydrogen fuel into an ICE because it is Too potent without inert gases.
oh i forgot, you said 'in the heat of battle you wouldn't have time'
i hate to break it to you but, if they're firing back at you, if you didn't get behind that building, you're either on the ground pretending to be dead, or drowning in a pool of your own blood.
but the cowards that they are they prefer roadside bombs, because they they cant be captured/killed or interrogated if they aren't shot dead... it still might find practical use.
that's not really the point, why buy m-16's sniper rifles, special crowd control guns, and hand guns when you can have a 'one size fits all' multi-weapon? the concept behind this gun lets you switch from one purpose to another without buying separate guns.
i still think it's a pork barrel project, even if the rounds don't heat the gun as much as gun powder, hydrogen propelled bullets have their own problems..
I can think of at least 2 places, where the military might like to have a multi purpose gun, Iraq and Afghanistan, just toggle it to 'stun' and fire away without worries that it wasn't the right guy, if you need lethal force because they're firing back at you, then you can switch the setting while hiding behind a building.
i wondered that too, i have an aluminum frame bike i've had it for 4 years now, nothing has gone wrong with it... and my dad has a steel frame bike from the 60's or 70's that has rust on it, it's still fine but...
i know aluminum can corrode too, and in aircraft it can suffer metal fatigue, but you'd have to be awfully heavy to cause metal fatigue to an aluminum frame..
"With electric motors you still have to consider the efficiency of the plant that's supplying the electricity to power them"
well, for one thing those losses are built into the price you pay for power, electricity isn't going to go up to 30 cents a killowatt hour because of a plug in hybrid.
for another thing, the current grid isn't really built around efficiency... DC current is the most efficient way to pump energy, because it doesn't create a di-electric magnetic field that interacts with the earths magnetic field to convert electricity into heat. (line losses are built into the price, though) in order for electric cars to really be efficient, we'd need a lot of upgrades to the current power grid, #1 being the use of HVDC to get power from distant atomic or renewable power plants to metro areas, to cover the increased adoption.
#2 would be abandoning AC current to the home. it's not going to happen in my lifetime, but Edison was right, if only semiconductors had existed at the time and he could have made HVDC compete with AC currents ability to go long stretches.. and thus enable long distance DC grids...
sigh, but semiconductors do exist today can you imagine how much cheaper electronics would be if we didn't have to have rectifiers to turn the AC back into DC for everything we power on? (except incandescent lights and universal electric motors)
the fact that there are only 2 devices that actually run on AC the whole AC grid is patently stupid in an era where DC can easily be converted to a wide range of voltages by semiconductor mass produced parts..
"The real problems with hydrogen are as follows: It has to come from somewhere, and you have to distribute it to people somehow. Every other problem (even embrittlement!) can be solved with existing technology. We still have no cost-effective way to produce and distribute hydrogen."
2008 called, 85% efficient electrolysis with the promise of 97% 'by the time hydrogen cars roll out' is here now, i'll forgive you for missing it, as it was a roland p/. article, so i'm linking directly to the article, not slashdot.
now, you were saying? 85% energy efficiency makes hydrogen combustion look tasty, because of a number of things. 1. hydrogen, like gasoline can quickly refuel a vehicle, with a LOT of power 2. there are very few fueling stations, so making grids that can handle high voltages to make hydrogen is easy, doing this to each house is HARD. that's why we have 110 or 220 at home, not 6000 volts.
using the numbers in that article filling up a hydrogen car at 85% efficiency 4660 kilowatt hours. for the equivalency of 120 gallons of gas. or $466 for the equivalent energy of 120 gallons of gas, this assumes that hydrogen combustion/fuel cells is at the same efficiency of petroleum, sorry i'm bad at math so someone else will have to post a correction if they know the efficiencies of fuel cells/hydrogen combustion. BTW that's $3.88 a gallon. at 97% efficiency that's $3.20 a gallon.
battery based hybrids get better mileage, "In general terms... 1 kilowatt-hour--will move an electric car about four miles down the road." so $.10 for 4 miles, if 1 gallon gets you 33 miles, then $0.82 per gallon for an electric vehicle
but that doesn't compare the real story either, and this guy is comparing a household battery charger, compared to a plug in electrics hybrid charger. in his article, so i don't know how fast 19 amps at 110 V can charge (plug in will use charging arrays duh) or 39 amps at 220 v if you wire a special plug, then we have to consider if you have 2 plug-ins or not, and if you ran separate lines for them or not... well i won't do the math...
the point being, electric cars get great economy, hydrogen i don't know where it falls, but it doesn't make sense to promote hydrogen if battery tech has evolved to the point where electric cars are better for the pocket book, and don't take forever to store that power..
I've got a nice big fusion power source for ya, it's exactly 1 AU away, take a stab in the dark as to which one I'm talking about.
if you want to be technical, all energy come from fusion, the idea is that at the very beginning of time there was nothing but hydrogen in the universe, and all elements are a by product of giant stars that went supernova or were torn apart by other stars going super nova, and so on...
i mean the theory could be wrong, elements other than hydrogen might have existed, but there is no real way to prove where the universe started from, you can only prove how old various solid forms of matter are, based on decay, etc.
if the universe is THAT old, then a lot of things that don't make sense (like why everything is so far apart from everything else) kind of begin to make more sense.
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it's not about getting the job back if he does stuff in civil court, it's about getting the pay, for being wrongfully fired/arrested. and then having all the press, and maybe getting a 7 figure It job for some private security firm.
if he's not crazy, and management wanted all the passwords to critical routers and systems so they could 'allow' inbound stupid ports that should be blocked by default so they can download their work files over the internet without using encryption..at home...
the details are too slim right now to really know exactly what was going on.
and what i suggest isn't that far from what people really do want to get set up, my county case manager keeps talking about people wanting to be able to access their work files from home... given how boneheaded management is they probably said 'then set up file and networking sharing with windows!' unblock that port so the entire internet can flood their computer systems with malware!
a VPN could solve things but what if management just doesn't understand VPNs vs 'windows file sharing'
the last time this court case was mentioned on /. i looked into the history of this guy. he was a dot-bomber in the gaming industry, when the dust cleared he was out of a job and looking for ways to make money, and became a patent troll. He started in California, then moved to nevada, then moved his court cases to the capitol of patent troll court cases, that city in texas which sees the most patent cases of like any court nation wide...
it's convenient, because that county has very few criminal cases, and the judge does everything as quick as possible. you won't get tied up in legal maneuvering. oh yeah, and the juries there always go after the guy with the deep pockets who hire the slimy lawyers who practically get thrown out of court for trying to make the whole process drag on...
but here's the thing, because of the number of patent suit people who just settle out of court, rather than face that judge who doesn't know how to take a bribe... with a hostile jury... that statistically they don't have a massive stack of legal victories. if you settle out of court, it'll cost you less, and Microsoft, who as originally also a plaintiff did just that almost 6 months ago and for less than Nintendo is going to pay.
It's commendable that the judge won't take bribes and is hostile to maneuvering tactics by lawyers. but it's also scary that anybody with half a brain who can abuse the patent system knows they're going to win...
I wouldn't be surprised if that judge eventually had a hitman kill him at his home, i guess the patent trolls haven't gone after the wrong kind of people yet.
wmp does whatever you have codecs installed for it to do. and i am not a windows media player guy, i liked version 2 or whatever the small simple gui one... then they made it winamp, but without the 'classic' winamp skin (i always use winamps classic skin if i use it at all)
the thing was it was a rant against containers like h264 and ogm containers sound great on the outside, as do 'non burned in subtitles' but in reality they suck hardcore, every media player handles containers differently, not to mention containers can contain malicious code such as launching a web browser to a malware site that tries to trick the user into downloading and running a trojan horse..
but yeah i should taken away karma bonus on that post...
now if only h264 didn't use atrocious, buggy, awful non-burned in subtitles that don't render correctly if you're missing the 'fonts' (especially the foreign language fonts!) the encoder assumed everyone in the world has!
there is a reason the non-burned in subtitles in DVDs are so atrocious looking it's so that EVERY DVD player could do subtitles right.
I've even had non-burned in subtitles CRASH VLC media player!!! WTF do they only think of windows media player version 20.9.1029.3! or whatever it is they use?
if a file is available in avi and MKV format i always go with AVI because the subtitles look so much better! they don't crowd each other, they don't 'grow larger that the screen border' when you maximize the screen, they don't 'stay so long you can't read the next piece of text'
ugh i hate mkvs you know they could just burn in the subtitles, but because mkv is a container they don't bother.. it's like slacking on the subtitle quality control, they don't even need to preview how it works, cause it's not like people are going to say 'make a version 2 so i can see all the subtitles right!'
http://www.ubuntu.com/support/community/webforums http://www.ubuntu.com/support/community/chatirc
for something like that they might actually reply, they(the community) never reply to MY problems with ubuntu.
you think linux not working on a laptop is bad! my 'dads' pc ran and loaded 7.10 fine, no issues. but 8.04 despite upgrading fine SIMPLY WON'T INSTALL.
this on a commodity desktop system with popular motherboard and part sets!
and on my system at home 8.04 ubuntu won't work at all, it hangs on trying to load gnome, i can get gnome to work in fail safe mode, but it wont' do that automatically! i switched to KDE via meta package and Kubuntu ran no issues.
I'm starting to worry about the future of ubuntu/kubuntu... did he hire the wrong kind of programmers? not enough men on the team to cope with the 'pace' of open source innovation?
or are buzzwords higher priority than basic functionality? I think the whole 'just use 1 CD' as the installer might be limiting them, i know knoppix has had to remove popular software before just to get it on 1 CD... is it time for linux to go DVD media images exclusively? last i checked a DVD burner cost $30 and a blank cost around $1 (for non garbage grade media) and it's not like you have to make the image 4.7 GB 1GB is plenty. for now.
then the most logical way to do things is to count the number of cores, and do threads -1 from that total.
always leave 1 core free... by default. with quad cores out and 8 cores promised, and no sign of things changing, it's time to rethink defaults.
oh hey, any open source program that supports multiple instances doesn't even need to thread, just run x copies, if it's a batch encode/transcode process... but threading is useful for n-pass encoding.
while i agree this guy might not have lost complete control, from my own experience, yes someone with paranoid schizophrenia CAN lose complete control over their actions. it's a very rare symptom, that only occurs with the very worst people, who stop taking their meds, or have gone untreated, or perhaps have 'self' medicated with alcohol. (alcohol as a depressant, can in some small way mitigate some of the symptoms of psychosis, just as some anti-depressants can Cause symptoms of psychosis)
there was one particular day, where i have absolutely no memories of what i did, but apparently i kept saying 'i'm so hungy, i'm starving' i was in a AFH not a group home so they actually gave me more food than they should have, that night when they finally realized i was having hospital bad symptoms (despite medication) i threw up on the way to the hospital, i had over eaten to the point of vomiting...
complete lack of self control, it is a possible symptom of a mental illness that can effect as many a 1% of people. now, if the guy really had a complete lack of self control, he's probably not going to be able to get himself an attorney that would be able to use witness testimony to save his butt... anyways it's a rare symptom of a rare mental illness, and psychosis can result from stress as well, and this guy was under a lot of stress. if it was the stress that made his symptoms, then he should seriously consider a different line of work, when he gets out of prison. and considering he's white collar, and the jail systems are over crowded anyways, he probably won't even be in jail for more than a year or two anyways.
where i live, pastors visit the group homes, the hospitals have multiple bibles, ad well as books on the '12-step' (read, bible thumping) program for AA, the book itself is geared towards anyone with addictive personality, and in accepting faith as a solution...
not to mention, weekly singing groups in one of the hospitals, it was a wide variety of songs, but i had delusional thoughts about some of the song selections.. (btw the current meds were invented in the 1990's or later and are way better than the '1950's era anti-psychotics) one of the thoughst i had strange thoughts about was 'dust in the wind'
hospitals for mental illness/addiction do push god onto patients. as far as atheist dogma, the thing about atheism is that anyone can make their own dogma, it's not like 'read this one book and then you'll get it' and Christianity is all like 'read this one book' the bible. and now we have a 1600 year old version missing parts of the bible that are 'accepted' as part of the modern bible.
the people pushing atheism on society often have their own motivations, kind of like America trying to push Christianity onto say, japan. they celebrate Christmas in japan, except in the temples.. it's a recurring theme in anime, like 'daa daa daa' (UFO baby) or even kimagure orange road, in the one christmas episode.. where they kept 'time traveling' to do the holiday over and over...
ah well.
I grew up with computers. it's a bit hard to get rid of something i use every day... where would i get my music without a computer to play mp3s or internet radio? don't say FM radio, because that has way more commercials than internet radio, and mp3s have no commercials... CD-players are a very simple computer, but a computer none the less...
I could live without internet, more easily than i could live without computers... the internet is the scary part even behind a nice hardened firewall.
the medication companies claim only 1% of people have my mental illness, luckily for pharma, they have dozens of uses for most of the meds originally made for people in sanitariums.
are depression medications abused, yeah, of course. big pharma is always looking at how to make more money.
ironically, allergy medications, one of the most common symptoms people take medication for, wind up being OTC
very quickly, so that insurance companies don't have to pay massive amounts of money to pharmaceuticals
well there were times where i questioned things, but there were entire weeks, where i blacked out all memories completely, to top things off i had very little contact with other people, other than via the internet, and at night when my dad was home, on the weekends when mom was home i apparently had a few very weird conversations, that upset her... as for myself, i refused to even go to a evaluation for the job service.... i was very wary of people, especially doctors, even though the thoughts are often classic paranoia, and i knew that the thoughts were so overpowering... I was like 'i have to get the virus off the computer' and all i did was basically nothing useful because i couldn't stay coherent long enough.
i forgot to mention, one day i was convinced by turning the 'power' off at the main breaker, i could stop the virus from infecting things, unless they had battery power....
my mom eventually talked me into going into a hospital, and i spend my 2 weeks at that hospital trying to get out of the hospital, afraid that there were people there infected by the virus... i wound up hopping to a lot of different hospitals, and finally group homes, when medications seemed to be helping, but i was eventually changed to new meds again, when i had a 3-day relapse.
they tried me on a lot of different medications. I saw a lot of different people with different mental illnesses. someone else suggested that stress can cause problems, but not all mental illnesses can be treated just by living a low stress life style. it's true i did have stress, had lost like my 3rd job in 1 year, stress from spending too much time in online RTSes trying to win. but then why didn't the symptoms go away, over 4 months while i wasn't doing any of those things? they didn't go away until i was medicated...
it's nice some people can self treat mild mental illness by not doing stressful work, it's even in the movie office space... for myself, medication was 100% necessary.
"Your mental illness is not real."
Mine is very real. I doubt you've ever spent 6 months in a hospital trying to tell people that human beings are being infected by a computer virus. (note: the computer virus was real, and i was the only person who could actually get it off the machines, because it was infecting the BIOS and had 'symptoms' like going to the desktop in the middle of a full screen video game, that other people dismissed as being 'real')
To this date, with medication I still am hazy on if computer viruses can infect human beings, on a bad day, i look for malware in every OS on every computer i have, with every tool available to me, including many useful FOSS tools like dban which allows complete erasure of the drive...
"You are the product of a society that is unable to deal with stress and disappointment."
I'll give you that, but you've never gone 6 days unwilling to eat food or drink tap water because it's poisoned, luckily this symptom has been dealt with with medication.
you've probably never hidden in a basement with aluminum covering you to block the mind control waves either. related to this is using a FM radio from the 1980's and 3 cell phones, wrapped in aluminum foil to see if they really block broadcaster waves. While you're still slightly concerned about the type of high energy particles that can go through entire mountains...
"Have you ever looked at mental illness in other countries. It is tiny compared to the USA."
That may be, in a rural environment, telling people about stuff i was worried about every day and shit my family would likely instead of taking me to a doctor, that they couldn't afford would just humor me, and try to keep me eating foods and drinking water. Also, I would likely die at a much younger age, because of the lack of medical treatment overall. Not being treated by doctors is not the same as 'not having mental illness.'
"You embody the problem with the world today. A lack of conviction and discipline that has spread like wildfire."
Except my mental illness is real, my doctor even increased my medicines last week, because he though i was having too many symptoms with just 1 medication.
"Go on with your drug induced normality. You will not be mourned."
If only the drugs actually caused normality. Mine do not, i still have paranoid thoughts ever single day, they're random and unpredictable, and medication only does so much. I don't hear voices, i don't 'see things' that other people don't see, i don't walk around calling people names that i don't recognize, as if i was in a dream, and i don't wind up in a hospital writing notes about everything that i'm worried about thinking that magically if i write it a system administrator of the universe (it's all just a simulation in a computer after all) would be able to deal with the problems if i simply wrote enough notes...
I have 4 boxes of various paperwork including my 'note' writing phase.
you sir, have never been mentally ill so you know not what it is like. you've never been convinced, with you were in a hospital that another mental patient could read your mind, and control you for not looking at the pictures of their family when they asked you nicely to look at the photos.
I'd say the guy is probably suffering from mental illness.
there are a lot of people who simply never get diagnosed, because they seem to be able to function normally without medication... myself i've had lesser symptoms dating all the way to childhood, but until i had a 'severe' hospitalization requireing symptoms people just didn't think that i was bad off enough.
just imagine how people will be confused in 1600 years when they find the 'original' flying spaghetti monster documents. we'd better start making printouts in as many languages as possible, perhaps carved in stone.
"I don't buy the one size fits all thing"
neither did i, that's why i said 'i think it's just a pork barrel project'
HVDC experiences about 3% losses over 800 km you seemed to imply a need for HVDC to put power source and power use near each other. this is not true. HVAC suffers 3% losses at about 4 KM for comparison.
electric cars are going to charge at night time, this is a problem, since most renewable energy has a hard time being produced at night time. there are some methods i've heard of being used for storing wind and solar power into the night time, but they've all been fairly esoteric, and require large, stable underground rock formations like caves or abandoned mine shafts.
hydrogen can be produced at any time of day, as long as the refueling station has enough storage capacity. this means potentially that renewable solar or wind power can be used to produce the night time demand of hydrogen, easily. but again, it depends on the real world efficiency of hydrogen combustion, if it's as bad as current gasoline engines it's not good, if it's as efficient as large diesel engines, then it's getting more attractive, especially if that efficiency ramps down to a smaller engine size they way diesel doesn't.
and then there are those researches who build ultra light gasoline powered cars that get over 3000 mpg, and i wonder, is the 10% efficiency because of intentional engineering issues? or does gasoline really not scale as well to high power engines as it does to low power engines. sigh. http://www.gear6.net/2006/06/ubc_engineers_r.html i mean i know it's smaller than a motorcycle, and has a tiny engine, and it's all made of space age materials that are ultra light... but how come they can tweak that engine to not produce waste heat? why can't car engine designers do the same thing? did they add a cycle where water is injected and turns to steam?
the whole point of 85% - 97% efficient electrolysis is that you 'pump water and electricity to refueling stations' it's not impossible, it does take rethinking the grid, but i lime in a city of around 30,000 people and there are 6 or 7 gasoline refueling stations, why is getting enough electric current to that small a number of locations a logistics problem? why would we have trucks or pipelines at all? i don't get it, why would you say we'd need to truck it?
BTW apparently electric cars are about 25% efficient, if hydrogen combustion can do 35% efficiency then it is better than electric charging.... i was wondering if it was more efficient in a ICE because it turns into water, and the water turns to steam from the heat of combustion, adding horse power to each stroke...
normal gasoline engines are around 10% efficient, although there are really efficient diesel engines a semi can haul many many times the weight of a normal car, and still use a reasonable amount of fuel, because diesel is so efficient.
as far as 'h2' being so dangerous, i'd like to point out that in world war 2 wood gas was used widely in normal ICE designs, wood gas is by volume 14% hydrogen gas, and 50% nitrogen, the only combustible gas besides hydrogen is 3% methane. pure hydrogen fuel is very dangerous, but nitrogen+ hydrogen gas maybe with a little CO2 (like wood gas has, skip the CO though) and you've got a nice stable fuel. it does add to the cost, even though nitrogen and CO2 can be easily captured or produced...
your doomsday scenario is entirely based on the usage of pure hydrogen fuel, and we're not going to be putting pure hydrogen fuel into an ICE because it is Too potent without inert gases.
oh i forgot, you said 'in the heat of battle you wouldn't have time'
i hate to break it to you but, if they're firing back at you, if you didn't get behind that building, you're either on the ground pretending to be dead, or drowning in a pool of your own blood.
but the cowards that they are they prefer roadside bombs, because they they cant be captured/killed or interrogated if they aren't shot dead... it still might find practical use.
that's not really the point, why buy m-16's sniper rifles, special crowd control guns, and hand guns when you can have a 'one size fits all' multi-weapon? the concept behind this gun lets you switch from one purpose to another without buying separate guns.
i still think it's a pork barrel project, even if the rounds don't heat the gun as much as gun powder, hydrogen propelled bullets have their own problems..
I can think of at least 2 places, where the military might like to have a multi purpose gun, Iraq and Afghanistan, just toggle it to 'stun' and fire away without worries that it wasn't the right guy, if you need lethal force because they're firing back at you, then you can switch the setting while hiding behind a building.
i wondered that too, i have an aluminum frame bike i've had it for 4 years now, nothing has gone wrong with it... and my dad has a steel frame bike from the 60's or 70's that has rust on it, it's still fine but...
i know aluminum can corrode too, and in aircraft it can suffer metal fatigue, but you'd have to be awfully heavy to cause metal fatigue to an aluminum frame..
just be careful, paper doesn't overclock well, and once it starts smoldering it'll fry out the rest of the chip by bringing it up to 451F
"With electric motors you still have to consider the efficiency of the plant that's supplying the electricity to power them"
well, for one thing those losses are built into the price you pay for power, electricity isn't going to go up to 30 cents a killowatt hour because of a plug in hybrid.
for another thing, the current grid isn't really built around efficiency... DC current is the most efficient way to pump energy, because it doesn't create a di-electric magnetic field that interacts with the earths magnetic field to convert electricity into heat. (line losses are built into the price, though) in order for electric cars to really be efficient, we'd need a lot of upgrades to the current power grid, #1 being the use of HVDC to get power from distant atomic or renewable power plants to metro areas, to cover the increased adoption.
#2 would be abandoning AC current to the home. it's not going to happen in my lifetime, but Edison was right, if only semiconductors had existed at the time and he could have made HVDC compete with AC currents ability to go long stretches.. and thus enable long distance DC grids...
sigh, but semiconductors do exist today can you imagine how much cheaper electronics would be if we didn't have to have rectifiers to turn the AC back into DC for everything we power on? (except incandescent lights and universal electric motors)
the fact that there are only 2 devices that actually run on AC the whole AC grid is patently stupid in an era where DC can easily be converted to a wide range of voltages by semiconductor mass produced parts..
"The real problems with hydrogen are as follows: It has to come from somewhere, and you have to distribute it to people somehow. Every other problem (even embrittlement!) can be solved with existing technology. We still have no cost-effective way to produce and distribute hydrogen."
2008 called, 85% efficient electrolysis with the promise of 97% 'by the time hydrogen cars roll out' is here now, i'll forgive you for missing it, as it was a roland p /. article, so i'm linking directly to the article, not slashdot.
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206801669
now, you were saying? 85% energy efficiency makes hydrogen combustion look tasty, because of a number of things. 1. hydrogen, like gasoline can quickly refuel a vehicle, with a LOT of power 2. there are very few fueling stations, so making grids that can handle high voltages to make hydrogen is easy, doing this to each house is HARD. that's why we have 110 or 220 at home, not 6000 volts.
http://www.hybridcars.com/electric-cars/power-of-pump.html
a really nice summary of why electric cars that plug in at home never panned out.
using the numbers in that article filling up a hydrogen car at 85% efficiency 4660 kilowatt hours. for the equivalency of 120 gallons of gas. or $466 for the equivalent energy of 120 gallons of gas, this assumes that hydrogen combustion/fuel cells is at the same efficiency of petroleum, sorry i'm bad at math so someone else will have to post a correction if they know the efficiencies of fuel cells/hydrogen combustion. BTW that's $3.88 a gallon. at 97% efficiency that's $3.20 a gallon.
battery based hybrids get better mileage, "In general terms... 1 kilowatt-hour--will move an electric car about four miles down the road." so $.10 for 4 miles, if 1 gallon gets you 33 miles, then $0.82 per gallon for an electric vehicle
but that doesn't compare the real story either, and this guy is comparing a household battery charger, compared to a plug in electrics hybrid charger. in his article, so i don't know how fast 19 amps at 110 V can charge (plug in will use charging arrays duh) or 39 amps at 220 v if you wire a special plug, then we have to consider if you have 2 plug-ins or not, and if you ran separate lines for them or not... well i won't do the math...
the point being, electric cars get great economy, hydrogen i don't know where it falls, but it doesn't make sense to promote hydrogen if battery tech has evolved to the point where electric cars are better for the pocket book, and don't take forever to store that power..
I've got a nice big fusion power source for ya, it's exactly 1 AU away, take a stab in the dark as to which one I'm talking about.
if you want to be technical, all energy come from fusion, the idea is that at the very beginning of time there was nothing but hydrogen in the universe, and all elements are a by product of giant stars that went supernova or were torn apart by other stars going super nova, and so on...
i mean the theory could be wrong, elements other than hydrogen might have existed, but there is no real way to prove where the universe started from, you can only prove how old various solid forms of matter are, based on decay, etc.
if the universe is THAT old, then a lot of things that don't make sense (like why everything is so far apart from everything else) kind of begin to make more sense.