"How about letting the human species's immune system continue to adapt for the flu rather than short-circuiting continued adaptation the way we are in countless other areas by creating drugs that then eventually become ineffective as the diseases evolve while human immune systems devolve and put all that research time and money toward some of the infinite number of more pressing problems that need to be addressed now?"
That sounds great, but adaptation at the level of a species as we understand it happens through evolution. To clarify, you're basically saying, "Let the weak die (of pneumonia and complications) and the strong survive." If you believe that, perhaps by your logic we really should refrain from vaccinating kids. If they die young before reproducing, then evolution has been served. With luck, in about 20 generations we may see some difference, although we're talking about random processes (i.e. there's no guarantee).
But the old are past child-bearing age. They've passed on their genes or they haven't. How is the species to be served by their suffering? Personally, comments like the quote sound more like pseudo-science than reasonable argument. It seems like wisdom to say we meddle too much until it is your precious 3-year-old daughter in the intensive care unit.
> "Armed Hand-gun license/permit and ability to supply own weapon a Huge Plus! : translation: "we're cheap! You're desperate AND stupid! Let's talk!"
That's not the way I would translate that. Now if they had a policy of forbidding handguns to employees with a concealed weapon permit I would find that stupid.
If the job entails being the victim of attacks with lethal force (and being repeated tasered and beaten is exactly that) then personally I think it's very rational to prefer an employee that has the training and resources to defend him/herself.
I have studied little biology or medical subjects though I've read studies about this same sort of thing happening with asthma, polio & allergies. I think I've posted about this before but anecdotally I noticed there were no farmers who had allergies or asthma as I grew up and worked on farms with them. The young kids would play in hay and run around in the mud outside when it rained. So it seems that a problem with being an overly hygienic society today (as the article notes) is that we don't expose our young to these pathogens early on so they never adapt to them and suffer exposure to them later. This is why I recommend against anyone installing an air purifier in their home. It's a great idea--if you never plan on leaving your home.
Sorry, it's just anecdotes. I grew up and lived on a farm. I played in the hay barn, and ate dirt and dog food like any other kid. We had the windows open and the breeze blew through.
And I had allergies my whole life that made me miserable. When I became an adult, I was the first person at our local clinic to have to finished my allergy test prematurely (because my reaction was too strong to complete the final two rounds). I registered positive for 14 of 15 of the materials (pollens, molds, etc.) in the test.
It's nice to say that allergies come from being too clean. It seems wholesome somehow. Perhaps there is something to the notion, but it ain't everything.
Wrong! It is random, actually. It's right there in the summary of the/. artice:
"Suppose the formula is in A1. =A1+1 returns 100,001, which appears to show the formula is in fact 100,000... =A1*2 returns 131,070, as if A1 had 65,535 (which it should have been). =A1*1 keeps it at 100,000. =A1-1 returns 65,534. =A1/1 is still 100,000. =A1/2 returns 32767.5."
So it's just not a simple rendering bug... on random ocassions, it calculates further using the faulty value.
Actually, you know not what you speak of. I tested the bug in front of my Statistics class this week. If the formula is in A1, and you put =A1+1 into A2 it does indeed display 100,000. But if you put =A2+1 into another cell, it display 65,537.
So indeed, A1, A2, A3 internally appear to have the correct representation. Unfortunately, A1 and A2 display incorrectly.
> On their website, they gloss over the past and don't offer a reason why I should trust them again. I'm inclined to believe that new management will help ensure proactive measures are taken, but I'm also tempted to go reward some other charity.
That is so true. I just checked my desk drawer to see that I still had my Linux Fund card, but I'm totally switched to a rewards card and I'm not likely to change back unless my new company really pisses me off.
> If your grandmother is on a respirator, the last thing she needs is for someone to interrogate her. She's your grandmother, not a dying secret agent.
You sir have no idea what you are talking about. I had a close family member who was unable to communicate for weeks (among other disabilities). She said that was absolutely the worst part of her hospital experience.
Talking to a person who wants to talk back is little comfort. Being unable to communicate is being in prison, solitary confinement, whether there are other people there or not.
> I never got the impression that anyone choosing Windows over Linux was doing so because of the SCO case.
This happened at my workplace. Of course the manager that bought into all of the FUD was an idiot and has since moved on to some other suckers. Once he left, Linux started to pick up much faster for us.
For us, that means the ruling will cause no change. Wherever that manager works now, however, it could make a difference.
Ok, so now I'm scratching my head. How is this a fundamentally different paradigm? In CVS, basically anyone can check out the whole tree and make any changes the like.
Consider this. I once patched several small bugs in a piece of free software that was important to me. I added a couple of other modest improvements as well, all over a period of several weeks. Because encryption was involved, and encryption is easy to get wrong, the author was careful to vet my work with a mathematician in the field before merging my changes.
While I was waiting for my changes to be merged, I was also following the development of the software, which continued as usual.
His project was maintained in CVS, and I was currently using CVS at the time. Since my changes had not been applied to his tree, I had two options: (1) checkout his tree and never commit my changes or (2) start my own separate repository and continually apply patches generated from a read-only checkout of his CVS.
That was a pathetic experience, and I've never considered a non-distributed SCM system since. With git, this would have been a trivial exercise.
I took a look at git a while ago and was completely underwhelmed. The UI was so bad it was useless, and it didn't "seem" to do anything that Darcs didn't do. (I used to love Darcs because of the automatic patch dependency computations).
I used to love darcs too until my repositories started to grow too large for it and I was waiting 5 minutes for commits. When I switched to git, it was so fast I had to check that it did something (I thought I had done a broken install at first). That's fast. None of my repositories have outgrown git.
"Every nerd knows it's easy to score if you're rich, while it's much harder to score waving your wang around and pointing out how big it is."
It's only anecdotal, but I knew a guy at college with a pretty big wanker, and he did tend to pull it out and wave it around at pretty much every party. And that was generally enough to entice some female at the party to go home with him and try it out. So it might not be such a bad strategy.
Open an account with TDAmeritrade.com then. I just helped my brother-in-law open an IRA with them using Firefox under Linux. The whole process was fine. And their fees are cheaper than eTrade.
Consider trying Firstrade.com. I haven't tried them yet, but their fees are also cheaper than eTrade, and you may find they work with you browser of choice.
A friend and I decided together to switch about 10 years ago. So one April Fool's day, I made the plunge. It seemed a very auspicious day to begin. I did it exactly the way that I learned to type (i.e. single-letter lessons, then digraphs, etc.).
I disagree with those folks who claim they keycaps are unimportant though. I don't look at the keys, and I never did when I was a QWERTY typist either, but if you accidentally look down and they keys are wrong it is very jarring for your brain. I pretty much use IBM keyboards exclusively and either pull off the keycaps, or add stickers with both layouts. At home I've used the stickers so the other layout is on there if my wife has to use the computer.
I can't believe how expensive it is to get a generic keyboard with dual-printed keycaps, so I've never bought one. One advantage of the stickers is the little bumps that help you find the home row are still in the right place. If you move the keycaps, you will definitely miss those little guys. I regularly set my hands down off-by-one on keyboards where I've moved the caps.
My friend and I both found something similar in our experience. We tend to touchtype Dvorak but hunt and peck QWERTY. That's pretty handy when you sit down at someone else's computer. I just do sort of fast hunt-and-peck typing.
As for learning time, it took a few days to be more-or-less capable. It took a month to regain my QWERTY speed, and it took about a year for it to be really comfortable (my criterion for "really comfortable" may be higher than other's). One of the things that prompted me to change was left-wrist discomfort. That did not improve right away, since it was hard to relax while concentrating on the new layout. At the one-year mark it occurred to me that my wrist hadn't really bothered me in some time, although I don't really know how long it had been.
Like others, I found the VI keys to be the worst. Somehow, in your mind 'dw' aren't keys the same as when you are typing. They are 'delete word'. So even when my keys were right when typing, my Vi was abysmal. Over time that went away, but it was distinctly harder. I never used a lot of Ctrl-X, C, V but I imagine that heavy users of those will feel the same way. You're not really thinking about the letters when you hit those.
If I were to do it today, I don't know if I would choose Dvorak again or one of the other alternatives. Today was the first time I'd ever heard of Colemak for example, and it seems to have some merit. I might choose Dvorak because it has a greater number of users, and it's plenty fringe enough. On the other hand, it is so far from mainstream that maybe you ought to just make your best estimate of keyboard quality and try to pick what you think is actually the best.
It seems tricky to me. On the one hand, it is clear that some people are making income selling on ebay. On the other hand, it isn't income every time you sell something. If you have a garage sale and sell off your extra junk it isn't income.
If someone gives you a gift which you turn around and sell, that doesn't make a gift income. It is still a gift. Who's to say what you are selling on ebay were not gifts that didn't work out?
When you start with Linux, you use the stock kernel, because it is easily available and works. When you gain experience, you start to compile your own. When you become a professional sysadmin, you use the stock kernels, because they are easily available and work.
That is so true. It drives me nuts when a system is "special" and I have to go back and compile a custom kernel for it. I've been trying to standardize back to stock kernels for quite a while now. Definitely less headache when possible. The more systems you run, the more convenient stock kernels are.
The misconception that the brain is full of little conductors, and that its operation is just like a computer, with electrical voltages and organic logic gates giving rise to "thoughts" is dear to the common mind. This misconception is responsible for the glamour exercised by one of the great follies of the age: the notion that we are in an essential and important way like computers, and that computers could be made to be--in some deeply significant way--like us.
It might be one of the great follies of the age, but recently I had a close family member die. It was her wish to be cremated, so her body wasn't embalmed and made up for viewing. At the funeral home, the close family viewed her before she went to the crematorium.
It was different than seeing the made-up bodies at a viewing. I had this profound feeling that a person really is a very complicated machine, and that when the machine gets grossly out of whack it ceases to operate and you die.
A gut feeling in one person doesn't preclude the existence of a soul. But I don't see that we aren't in some essential way "mechanical" even if we are not like (modern) computers.
I don't buy much music online, but when I was interested in some drum music I ran across Calabash Music ( http://calabashmusic.com/ ). It was dead simple to sample music; it comes at a reasonable-to-me bitrate as straight MP3s. And the price of songs was in line with what I would expect.
I haven't actually made any purchases, but what I've read makes me think I probably will.
I will consider Java more highly when it is something that comes as part of my distro, i.e. when it is GPL. Personally, I've felt that the thing wrong with Java is the high bar to entry. If you want to give someone your Java program, you've got to make sure they've got a JRE installed. Notice how many projects bundle a JRE with their program---lame.
If you remove that bar to entry, it makes Java much more palatable.
BTW, low bar to entry is one of the reasons JavaScript is such a way cooler language than anyone ever gives it credit for. Say what you like about its shortcomings; there is an immense benefit to being able to point someone at a URL and they can run your program.
That minority opinion was especially clear and sensible. It is unfortunate that common sense so often goes out the window when computers become involved.
Someone just asked me the other day why you might use Linux. I told them that in my experience you often see one of a few reasons.
1) You toasted your Windows and you don't have media or a valid license or time to hassle through that. I've seen this with quite a few college student notebooks at school. You dump Ubuntu on there, and while it might not work exactly the way your Windows did, at least your computer is doing useful work again without dumping a bunch of money down for a Retail Windows purchase.
2) You've bought into the "free as in freedom" idea. If you learn about free software, you'll find there's this whole philosophy of ideas behind it. Among the import ideas in the philosophy are that it's cool if you can share (legitimate) copies of the software you use. Sharing Linux isn't piracy, it's community. And some people love that.
3) You find something particularly appealing about the environment. Sometimes it is just subtle things that work differently than Windows, but you find they click. A lot of people who like programming have the potential to be drawn to Linux for some reason. Or people who enjoy tinkering with their computer. There is no limit to the amount of tinkering that is possible (if that is your interest) when you use Linux.
Personally, I tend to fall under categories 2) and 3).
The best farmers in Iowa get over 20 times more yield per acre than the average farmers in Africa, and its not inherently due to the Iowa dirt just being superior dirt.
No, a very big reason that Iowa farmers get good yields is fertilizers. Making fertilizer is enormously energy-intensive unfortunately. There's a reason that fertilizer can be made into explosives easily.
Since we are discussing potential scarcity of energy, it is important to remember that it will translate to a scarcity (or expense) in terms of fertilizer, and ultimately a stagnation or drop in crop yield.
I don't see this. It seems on its face to be an intelligent kind of argument, but I don't think it is. For one thing, getting an immunization is a way of developing your immune system. For another, there are documented cases of diseases essentially being wiped out.
It seems to me you are confusing viruses and bacteria. When we treat bacteria, we make stronger bugs. There's an obvious mechanism there in fact. We apply a kind of environmental stressor that selects in an evolution sense for resistant mutations of the bacteria.
As I understand it, the mutations that cause different versions of the flu actually occur in animal populations like birds and pigs. There are always going to be new versions of the flu because they will always exist and mutate in those populations. But I don't see any reason that humans have to jump on that train.
Personally, I am one of those people that gets a flu shot every year. So does my wife, who is in a risk population, and my school-age daughter. Why train my immune system with a week of crappy health, when I can train it with a 5 second 'stick' and a couple days of mild immune response?
Getting my young daughter vaccinated has been a huge boon. The number of ear infections and other infections (requiring antibiotics) in our family is way less since I started getting her vaccinations. When you look at it that way, getting our shots has meant less reliance on antibiotics. From a "let's don't invent super-bugs" perspective, I have to say my individual experience is on the side of getting the shots.
I've borrowed the DVDs of the series from friends, but I have to say that I think they are way overpriced. I find is especially dorky that they release each half season for essentially the full price of other shows. I can buy a whole season of Stargate SG-1, an excellent show that has been on for 10 years, and it costs less than half of a season of BSG.
I won't do it. It's a great show, and I'm glad to borrow it from people willing to fork out the dough. But it isn't worth it to me. And I think it's probably not worth it to other people either.
Slashdot Mirror
"How about letting the human species's immune system continue to adapt for the flu rather than short-circuiting continued adaptation the way we are in countless other areas by creating drugs that then eventually become ineffective as the diseases evolve while human immune systems devolve and put all that research time and money toward some of the infinite number of more pressing problems that need to be addressed now?"
That sounds great, but adaptation at the level of a species as we understand it happens through evolution. To clarify, you're basically saying, "Let the weak die (of pneumonia and complications) and the strong survive." If you believe that, perhaps by your logic we really should refrain from vaccinating kids. If they die young before reproducing, then evolution has been served. With luck, in about 20 generations we may see some difference, although we're talking about random processes (i.e. there's no guarantee).
But the old are past child-bearing age. They've passed on their genes or they haven't. How is the species to be served by their suffering? Personally, comments like the quote sound more like pseudo-science than reasonable argument. It seems like wisdom to say we meddle too much until it is your precious 3-year-old daughter in the intensive care unit.
> "Armed Hand-gun license/permit and ability to supply own weapon a Huge Plus! : translation: "we're cheap! You're desperate AND stupid! Let's talk!"
That's not the way I would translate that. Now if they had a policy of forbidding handguns to employees with a concealed weapon permit I would find that stupid.
If the job entails being the victim of attacks with lethal force (and being repeated tasered and beaten is exactly that) then personally I think it's very rational to prefer an employee that has the training and resources to defend him/herself.
Sorry, it's just anecdotes. I grew up and lived on a farm. I played in the hay barn, and ate dirt and dog food like any other kid. We had the windows open and the breeze blew through.
And I had allergies my whole life that made me miserable. When I became an adult, I was the first person at our local clinic to have to finished my allergy test prematurely (because my reaction was too strong to complete the final two rounds). I registered positive for 14 of 15 of the materials (pollens, molds, etc.) in the test.
It's nice to say that allergies come from being too clean. It seems wholesome somehow. Perhaps there is something to the notion, but it ain't everything.
Actually, you know not what you speak of. I tested the bug in front of my Statistics class this week. If the formula is in A1, and you put =A1+1 into A2 it does indeed display 100,000. But if you put =A2+1 into another cell, it display 65,537.
So indeed, A1, A2, A3 internally appear to have the correct representation. Unfortunately, A1 and A2 display incorrectly.
> On their website, they gloss over the past and don't offer a reason why I should trust them again. I'm inclined to believe that new management will help ensure proactive measures are taken, but I'm also tempted to go reward some other charity.
That is so true. I just checked my desk drawer to see that I still had my Linux Fund card, but I'm totally switched to a rewards card and I'm not likely to change back unless my new company really pisses me off.
> If your grandmother is on a respirator, the last thing she needs is for someone to interrogate her. She's your grandmother, not a dying secret agent.
You sir have no idea what you are talking about. I had a close family member who was unable to communicate for weeks (among other disabilities). She said that was absolutely the worst part of her hospital experience.
Talking to a person who wants to talk back is little comfort. Being unable to communicate is being in prison, solitary confinement, whether there are other people there or not.
> I never got the impression that anyone choosing Windows over Linux was doing so because of the SCO case.
This happened at my workplace. Of course the manager that bought into all of the FUD was an idiot and has since moved on to some other suckers. Once he left, Linux started to pick up much faster for us.
For us, that means the ruling will cause no change. Wherever that manager works now, however, it could make a difference.
Consider this. I once patched several small bugs in a piece of free software that was important to me. I added a couple of other modest improvements as well, all over a period of several weeks. Because encryption was involved, and encryption is easy to get wrong, the author was careful to vet my work with a mathematician in the field before merging my changes.
While I was waiting for my changes to be merged, I was also following the development of the software, which continued as usual.
His project was maintained in CVS, and I was currently using CVS at the time. Since my changes had not been applied to his tree, I had two options: (1) checkout his tree and never commit my changes or (2) start my own separate repository and continually apply patches generated from a read-only checkout of his CVS.
That was a pathetic experience, and I've never considered a non-distributed SCM system since. With git, this would have been a trivial exercise.
I used to love darcs too until my repositories started to grow too large for it and I was waiting 5 minutes for commits. When I switched to git, it was so fast I had to check that it did something (I thought I had done a broken install at first). That's fast. None of my repositories have outgrown git.
I don't know if it is a good tutorial, but a skeleton bare "good start" is at http://limestone.truman.edu/~dbindner/gitnotes/git -notes.html
"Every nerd knows it's easy to score if you're rich, while it's much harder to score waving your wang around and pointing out how big it is."
It's only anecdotal, but I knew a guy at college with a pretty big wanker, and he did tend to pull it out and wave it around at pretty much every party. And that was generally enough to entice some female at the party to go home with him and try it out. So it might not be such a bad strategy.
Open an account with TDAmeritrade.com then. I just helped my brother-in-law open an IRA with them using Firefox under Linux. The whole process was fine. And their fees are cheaper than eTrade.
Consider trying Firstrade.com. I haven't tried them yet, but their fees are also cheaper than eTrade, and you may find they work with you browser of choice.
A friend and I decided together to switch about 10 years ago. So one April Fool's day, I made the plunge. It seemed a very auspicious day to begin. I did it exactly the way that I learned to type (i.e. single-letter lessons, then digraphs, etc.).
I disagree with those folks who claim they keycaps are unimportant though. I don't look at the keys, and I never did when I was a QWERTY typist either, but if you accidentally look down and they keys are wrong it is very jarring for your brain. I pretty much use IBM keyboards exclusively and either pull off the keycaps, or add stickers with both layouts. At home I've used the stickers so the other layout is on there if my wife has to use the computer.
I can't believe how expensive it is to get a generic keyboard with dual-printed keycaps, so I've never bought one. One advantage of the stickers is the little bumps that help you find the home row are still in the right place. If you move the keycaps, you will definitely miss those little guys. I regularly set my hands down off-by-one on keyboards where I've moved the caps.
My friend and I both found something similar in our experience. We tend to touchtype Dvorak but hunt and peck QWERTY. That's pretty handy when you sit down at someone else's computer. I just do sort of fast hunt-and-peck typing.
As for learning time, it took a few days to be more-or-less capable. It took a month to regain my QWERTY speed, and it took about a year for it to be really comfortable (my criterion for "really comfortable" may be higher than other's). One of the things that prompted me to change was left-wrist discomfort. That did not improve right away, since it was hard to relax while concentrating on the new layout. At the one-year mark it occurred to me that my wrist hadn't really bothered me in some time, although I don't really know how long it had been.
Like others, I found the VI keys to be the worst. Somehow, in your mind 'dw' aren't keys the same as when you are typing. They are 'delete word'. So even when my keys were right when typing, my Vi was abysmal. Over time that went away, but it was distinctly harder. I never used a lot of Ctrl-X, C, V but I imagine that heavy users of those will feel the same way. You're not really thinking about the letters when you hit those.
If I were to do it today, I don't know if I would choose Dvorak again or one of the other alternatives. Today was the first time I'd ever heard of Colemak for example, and it seems to have some merit. I might choose Dvorak because it has a greater number of users, and it's plenty fringe enough. On the other hand, it is so far from mainstream that maybe you ought to just make your best estimate of keyboard quality and try to pick what you think is actually the best.
It seems tricky to me. On the one hand, it is clear that some people are making income selling on ebay. On the other hand, it isn't income every time you sell something. If you have a garage sale and sell off your extra junk it isn't income.
If someone gives you a gift which you turn around and sell, that doesn't make a gift income. It is still a gift. Who's to say what you are selling on ebay were not gifts that didn't work out?
That is so true. It drives me nuts when a system is "special" and I have to go back and compile a custom kernel for it. I've been trying to standardize back to stock kernels for quite a while now. Definitely less headache when possible. The more systems you run, the more convenient stock kernels are.
It might be one of the great follies of the age, but recently I had a close family member die. It was her wish to be cremated, so her body wasn't embalmed and made up for viewing. At the funeral home, the close family viewed her before she went to the crematorium.
It was different than seeing the made-up bodies at a viewing. I had this profound feeling that a person really is a very complicated machine, and that when the machine gets grossly out of whack it ceases to operate and you die.
A gut feeling in one person doesn't preclude the existence of a soul. But I don't see that we aren't in some essential way "mechanical" even if we are not like (modern) computers.
I am what I say I am.
Money is neither lost nor created. It only changes form and location.
I don't buy much music online, but when I was interested in some drum music I ran across Calabash Music ( http://calabashmusic.com/ ). It was dead simple to sample music; it comes at a reasonable-to-me bitrate as straight MP3s. And the price of songs was in line with what I would expect.
I haven't actually made any purchases, but what I've read makes me think I probably will.
I will consider Java more highly when it is something that comes as part of my distro, i.e. when it is GPL. Personally, I've felt that the thing wrong with Java is the high bar to entry. If you want to give someone your Java program, you've got to make sure they've got a JRE installed. Notice how many projects bundle a JRE with their program---lame.
If you remove that bar to entry, it makes Java much more palatable.
BTW, low bar to entry is one of the reasons JavaScript is such a way cooler language than anyone ever gives it credit for. Say what you like about its shortcomings; there is an immense benefit to being able to point someone at a URL and they can run your program.
That minority opinion was especially clear and sensible. It is unfortunate that common sense so often goes out the window when computers become involved.
Someone just asked me the other day why you might use Linux. I told them that in my experience you often see one of a few reasons.
1) You toasted your Windows and you don't have media or a valid license or time to hassle through that. I've seen this with quite a few college student notebooks at school. You dump Ubuntu on there, and while it might not work exactly the way your Windows did, at least your computer is doing useful work again without dumping a bunch of money down for a Retail Windows purchase.
2) You've bought into the "free as in freedom" idea. If you learn about free software, you'll find there's this whole philosophy of ideas behind it. Among the import ideas in the philosophy are that it's cool if you can share (legitimate) copies of the software you use. Sharing Linux isn't piracy, it's community. And some people love that.
3) You find something particularly appealing about the environment. Sometimes it is just subtle things that work differently than Windows, but you find they click. A lot of people who like programming have the potential to be drawn to Linux for some reason. Or people who enjoy tinkering with their computer. There is no limit to the amount of tinkering that is possible (if that is your interest) when you use Linux.
Personally, I tend to fall under categories 2) and 3).
I don't see this. It seems on its face to be an intelligent kind of argument, but I don't think it is. For one thing, getting an immunization is a way of developing your immune system. For another, there are documented cases of diseases essentially being wiped out.
It seems to me you are confusing viruses and bacteria. When we treat bacteria, we make stronger bugs. There's an obvious mechanism there in fact. We apply a kind of environmental stressor that selects in an evolution sense for resistant mutations of the bacteria.
As I understand it, the mutations that cause different versions of the flu actually occur in animal populations like birds and pigs. There are always going to be new versions of the flu because they will always exist and mutate in those populations. But I don't see any reason that humans have to jump on that train.
Personally, I am one of those people that gets a flu shot every year. So does my wife, who is in a risk population, and my school-age daughter. Why train my immune system with a week of crappy health, when I can train it with a 5 second 'stick' and a couple days of mild immune response?
Getting my young daughter vaccinated has been a huge boon. The number of ear infections and other infections (requiring antibiotics) in our family is way less since I started getting her vaccinations. When you look at it that way, getting our shots has meant less reliance on antibiotics. From a "let's don't invent super-bugs" perspective, I have to say my individual experience is on the side of getting the shots.
I've borrowed the DVDs of the series from friends, but I have to say that I think they are way overpriced. I find is especially dorky that they release each half season for essentially the full price of other shows. I can buy a whole season of Stargate SG-1, an excellent show that has been on for 10 years, and it costs less than half of a season of BSG.
I won't do it. It's a great show, and I'm glad to borrow it from people willing to fork out the dough. But it isn't worth it to me. And I think it's probably not worth it to other people either.