It's not even Touring complete. All of its "programming" is just sequencing. It's as much of a robot as Teddy Ruxbin.
To actually program with this you have to replace the controller with an Arduino.
Even worse, it's also not Turing complete:-) And Teddy Ruxpin is a mite offended - or he would at least be able to pretend he was if he were able to be properly programmed. But kids loved him - my sisters included. Of course, crappy cassette player embedded in him tended to eat tapes...
Get over it. Castro was better than the American-backed Batista he replaced. Despite the embargo (which has been voted against by all but 2 countries 24 times in the UN as a violation of human rights), Cubans have universal health care that is on a par with the US in terms of things like life expectancy and infant mortality.
In the face of the embargo, the best way to ensure survival as an independent country was a dictatorship. That's reality.
Besides, if you want to talk about murdering leaders, take a gander at Obama's kill list. Or the more than 600 assassination attempts the US made on Castro.
Castro was a man of his time, no more, no less. Acknowledging that he wasn't the 100% evil demon that he's been painted as is something adults can do. As for you and the rest of the Anonymous Coward crowd, I'd tell you to grow up, but you wouldn't understand the concept.
Sajjan joined the The British Columbia Regiment (Duke of Connaught's Own) in 1989 as a trooper and was commissioned in 1991. He eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He was deployed overseas four times in the course of his career: once to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and three times to Afghanistan.
Sajjan was wounded during his service in Bosnia. Sajjan began his 11-year career as an officer of the Vancouver Police Department after returning from his Bosnian deployment. He ended his career with the VPD as a detective with the department's gang crimes unit specializing in drug trafficking and organized-crime investigator.
Sajjan's first deployment to Afghanistan was right before Operation Medusa in 2006, during which he took leave from his work in the Vancouver Police Department's gang squad. He deployed with the 1st Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment Battle Group in Kandahar and worked as a liaison officer with the Afghan police. His fluency in Punjabi, his first language, allowed him to be understood by Urdu-speaking Afghans without translators, especially by village leaders who were invaluable to his intelligence gathering. Sajjan found that corruption in the Afghan government was driving recruitment to the Taliban and managed to uncover most Taliban defensive positions in the Kandahar region. After reporting these findings to Brigadier General David Fraser, Sajjan was tasked with helping the general plan aspects of Operation Medusa.
During Operation Medusa, four Canadian soldiers under Sajjan's command were killed in the fighting. Fraser evaluated Sajjan's leadership during the operation as "nothing short of brilliant." When Sajjan returned to Vancouver, Fraser sent a letter to the police department calling Sajjan “the best single Canadian intelligence asset in theatre,” and stated that his work saved “a multitude of coalition lives.”
Upon his return, Sajjan left his position with the Vancouver Police, but stayed as a reservist and started his own consulting business that taught intelligence gathering techniques to Canadian and American military personnel. He also consulted for US policy analyst and Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin, which began as a correspondence over Sajjan's views on how to tackle the Afghan opium trade and evolved into a collaboration as advisers to American military and diplomatic leaders in Afghanistan.
Sajjan returned to Afghanistan for another tour of duty in 2009, taking another tour of leave from the VPD to do so. Having already taken two leaves of absence, Sajjan had to leave the VPD for his third tour of duty in 2010, during which he was assigned as a Special Assistant to then Major-General James L. Terry, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan.
It's only politics that is causing problems with fighter jet procurement. Other countries have had run-off contests between manufacturers in less than a year.
As for the rest of the cabinet, saying I'm underwhelmed is being charitable.
Why all the hate comments? Try the serious mother-fucking hypocrisy. Ran on a campaign that included as a key element that we needed to get rid of the first-past-the-post election system before the next federal election, and has since done everything possible to make sure that won't happen, going so far as to claim that Canadians don't want it changed.
He might have valid reasons for other policy decisions, but there is no way this one passes the smell test.
Trudeau: "There are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is 'Go on and bleed' It's more important to keep law and order in society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of..."
Reporter (uinterrupting) "At any cost? How far would you go with that?"
Trudeau: "Well, just watch me."
And then he suspended civil liberties under the War Measures Act (@9:16).
The separatists hated him for it, but hey, if you don't like it, just leave - but you don't get to take anything more than you brought into the country when you joined (Quebec was a lot smaller when it became, with Ontario and parts of the maritimes, Canada). And if Canada is divisible, so is Quebec, so parts that don't want to separate will remain part of Canada. That would have left a few small "independent duchies" of separatists completely cut off from each other, and from the majority of Quebec and Canada (and the US as well). And no access to the St Lawrence, since the federal government has sovereignty over all land within 200' of any body of water.
In short, a big "fuck you" to the FLQ and separatists, based on law and logic.
Huge difference between father and son. You might like Justin, but like him or hate him, you had to respect Pierre.
Now back on topic - the "Hour of Code" is bullshit. Why not have an "Hour of Electricity" to help people learn that you can't plug both the kettle and the toaster into the same electrical circuit? Or the "Hour of Plumbing" to to learn how to replace the washer in a leaky tap? The "Hour of Cooking" so that the "microwave pizza pocket generation" can lean how to make a grilled cheese sandwich without f*cking it up or causing a fire? And how about the "Hour of RTFM" to teach people the importance of reading instructions BEFORE they break something? To save the health care system money, why not the "Hour of Evolution" so that people understand why giving antibiotics for every runny nose will lead to superbugs?
All of these are more important than any "Oh look I sort of - kind of - well not really but don't burst my bubble - coded a game."
In a system of Capitalism, anything is possible. Especially when the kindergartner has parents.
Let's see... one heart, two lungs, two kidneys, two corneas, one liver, skin, tendons, the membrane around the brain, stem cells, esophagus, stomach, duodenum, intestines, teeth, bones for grafts, marrow, small bones in the ear... some of those kindergarten kids are worth more than they'll ever earn in their lifetimes. The days when your body is worth $1.98 for the chemicals in it are long gone.
Don't you believe in evolution? Why would you want to prevent them from protesting on the highway? It might not be as effective as lasers on sharks or nuking them from orbit, but a car still does the job old-skool.
You need to watch Moneyball to see how math has changed how baseball is played. Until Oakland As GM Billy Beane tried it, nobody used it. Now every team uses it. Who would have thought that calculus was needed to have a winning team?
It usually takes about half the current practitioners to die out for new ideas to gain currency, and that has pretty much always been the case in many endeavors. Case in point - post-menopausal hormone therapy. Premarin and Prempro were two of the most sold drugs in the US until 2004, when the government closed down the Women's Health Initiative study because of higher risks associated with HRT.
Now we know the study was bullshit, because every single woman in the study was using Premarin or Prempro - forms of estrogen collected from the urine of pregnant mares that are not bio-compatible with humans, and contain enzymes simply not meant to be found in human beings. Cut one open and you can smell the horse piss.
And yet doctors still do everything they can to discourage women from HRT based on that study, even though it's based on horse hormones, and not estradiol (a form of biocompatible estrogen). Even though women have lost so much bone density that some of them break their ribs just by sneezing. When this condition occurs in children, we do everything we can, but because it's old people, somehow the same medical condition is "normal" and not worth the risks of treating. Look at broken hips - 56% of men who break their hips never return home, same as 37% of women. And yet hormone therapy can prevent this in both sexes. Estrogen is also a potent antidepressant, and obviously guys on testosterone therapy are going to feel better about themselves as well. Duh! Better to have many more suicides than a few more strokes because suicide is the patient's fault.
It's like we're not to be trusted in being able to evaluate what the best option is for our individual situations based on full disclosure of all risks and benefits. So much for patient autonomy and informed consent.
All thanks to group think in the medical community.
Au contraire, people need to have a basic grasp of evolution to understand why it's dangerous to prescribe antibiotics for every runny nose, and why prescribing antibiotics for viruses is stupid. Bacteria evolving resistance to current antibiotics affects everyone directly or indirectly when you turn kids into petri dishes for evolving the next generation of antibiotic-resistant bugs.
No derivative value? So we don't need to develop drugs to combat fast-evolving bugs? Keep thinking like that - it's the quickest, most ironic way to remove you from the gene pool.
Cripes, don't give them any more ideas!!! You know that the banks and lenders will get behind it at the slightest whisper. Get them so deep into debt before they finish high school and they're worse off than indentured slaves because they can never get out of hock.
No, this is a "think of the children" moment - they cancelled a program that was useless. Here's a thought - why not put the money into real education instead of "good optics initiatives" that are little more than opportunities for businesses to get free advertising to kids paid for by the tax man.
Your arguments are bullshit when it comes to experimental treatments. People can give consent after being informed that the treatment may make their disease or condition worse, or even kill them.
The same applies to people in drug trials. In blind tests, you cannot tell people whether they will receive the test treatment or not, and if you haven't noticed, All consent forms for treatment, even in hospitals, contain the stipulation that the patient has been informed of any risks (and "any risks" includes death) before consent can be given.
It is universally recognized that ANY and ALL treatments carry a risk, that every medication has side effects, and that it is the right of the patient, unless they are unable to give or withhold consent, to make an informed decision.
You might want to look at things like advanced medical directives, where you can give consent to procedures that will, for example, reduce pain even though they will hasten your death. Get with the times.
If the patient has a fatal illness, it doesn't matter - they're going to die. That's what fatal illness means. And then we have people screaming not to give those same patients heroin because they might get addicted.
Also, since this is a test, you don't know if the placebo is less dangerous than the treatment being tested - or you wouldn't need to run the test. Your arguments are not based in law, nor are they in agreement with the physician's code of ethics, which works by informed consent in such cases.
Seeing as 90% of all medical research is flawed, (and no, this is not some crank - it's pretty much accepted in research because of the evidence, as well as researchers personal knowledge/experience of bad studies we need to test against placebos, because some of the supposedly beneficial treatments are later found to be harmful.
Remember thalidomide? Or more recently, the panic over hormone replacement therapy because the biggest, best trial of HRT ever was started prematurely because it purported to show harmful effects of estrogen? 10s of millions of women world-wide were suddenly put on antidepressants to help deal with menopause side-effects. Turns out that the study was bogus, but more than a decade later, many doctors still haven't got the memo.
The flaw in the study was in using only estrogen from pregnant mare urine (Premarin and Prempro). Equine estrogen is not bio-identical to human estrogen (estradiol estrogen is), but it also contains equine enzymes that the human body has never seen in nature and can't handle - which cause, among other things, liver failure. Having horse enzymes in your blood, your organs, your brain... that's going to cause problems. Also, progestins were included in HRT even though not needed, further increasing the risk. So this "definitive" study was harmful to people.
Heart attack is the #1 killer of women (no, not breast cancer). Estrogen helps protect against cardiovascular diseases. So people on a placebo would have been healthier, with less chance of sudden death.
Studies also show it's a potent anti-depressive, and delays the onset of Alzheimers and other dementias. Those are sentences of a slow death. It also reduces or stops suicidal ideation.
It also slows down bone demineralization by enabling the digestive system to take up more calcium (which is why calcium supplementation by itself doesn't work - if your body can't absorb it, you'll just eliminate it). 28% of women and 37% of men who fracture their hip die within one year. Considering that 1 in 3 women and 1 in 5 men will get at least 1 hip fracture, that's a significant amount of women who are now at higher risk because of this "greatest study ever."
So even the best studies need to be re-done, because if this study had included a placebo as well as Premarin, and also included other sources of estrogen such as estradiol, Premarin would have been singled out as the biggest contribution to health risk from HRT.
So placebos have a place - they would have saved millions of women from premature death, not endangered them further. That's why we do studies, and why we include placebos. Plus, placebos also work even when the patient is told that it's just a sugar pill. That's why you compare the benefits of a course of treatment with a placebo as well as no treatment. Why prescribe a drug with bad side effects when a placebo performs either as well or better? Not including placebos places people depending on the results of the study to make informed decisions at risk of making bad decisions. Some of those are fatal.
Plenty of places give a discount for cash - you just have to ask for it. Even some big-box stores. They hate those cash-back credit cards because that "cash back" is also deducted, in addition to the regular credit card merchant fees, and there's no way to tell just by looking at the card what, if any, cash back they're going to be hit for.
What - you thought the credit card companies were giving you that money out of their pockets? They're using their duopoly status to gouge retailers.
"United States coins and currency (including Federal Reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal Reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues." Not accepting cash means that the banks take a cut, which means credit card dollars have less value to a creditor than bank notes.
Want to pay Uber in cash? Book a ride to a destination other than where you want to go. When the driver gets there, tell them you'll cancel the ride and pay him cash to take you to your real destination - just like a real taxi service. Think of it as "dark money."
You give a fake destination so that Uber won't see that the driver went to the place the cancelled ride was supposed to go to, so no evidence they were cut out of the loop.
A diabetic usually knows if he has diabetic retinopathy. Needing to go to an ophthalmologist is usually the second or third clue. Just like neuropathy, retinopathy is a complication that's fairly easy to self diagnose.
What are the symptoms of diabetic retinopathy and DME?
The early stages of diabetic retinopathy usually have no symptoms. The disease often progresses unnoticed until it affects vision. Bleeding from abnormal retinal blood vessels can cause the appearance of “floating” spots. These spots sometimes clear on their own. But without prompt treatment, bleeding often recurs, increasing the risk of permanent vision loss. If DME occurs, it can cause blurred vision.
Because the disease progresses slowly, you most likely won't notice until stage 4 - when blood vessels in your retina cause floaters that block your vision. You'll probably assume that any temporary blurriness (which doesn't always happen) is caused by fatigue or eye strain, and since you don't really notice it after a while, and adapt to it, you don't realize what happens.
Diabetic retinopathy may progress through four stages:
1.
Mild nonproliferative retinopathy. Small areas of balloon-like swelling in the retina’s tiny blood vessels, called microaneurysms, occur at this earliest stage of the disease. These microaneurysms may leak fluid into the retina.
2. Moderate nonproliferative retinopathy. As the disease progresses, blood vessels that nourish the retina may swell and distort. They may also lose their ability to transport blood. Both conditions cause characteristic changes to the appearance of the retina and may contribute to DME.
3. Severe nonproliferative retinopathy. Many more blood vessels are blocked, depriving blood supply to areas of the retina. These areas secrete growth factors that signal the retina to grow new blood vessels.
4. Proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR). At this advanced stage, growth factors secreted by the retina trigger the proliferation of new blood vessels, which grow along the inside surface of the retina and into the vitreous gel, the fluid that fills the eye. The new blood vessels are fragile, which makes them more likely to leak and bleed. Accompanying scar tissue can contract and cause retinal detachment—the pulling away of the retina from underlying tissue, like wallpaper peeling away from a wall. Retinal detachment can lead to permanent vision loss.
Wrong. Even when patients are informed that they are receiving a placebo, it has an effect. Want proof?
Dr. Ted J. Kaptchuk, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard-wide Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter (PiPS) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, has been studying placebos for more than 20 years. His most recent work on these “open-label placebos,” as they’re called, is fascinating. I had a chance to interview him in person earlier this year.
In one study, Kaptchuk looked at people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a common condition that causes abdominal cramping and diarrhea or constipation that can be debilitating for many. Half of the study volunteers were told they were getting an “open-label” placebo and the others got nothing at all. He found that there was a dramatic and significant improvement in the placebo group’s IBS symptoms, even though they were explicitly told they were getting a “sugar pill” without any active medication.
Also, nice way to be intentionally silly - you don't tell them that they are receiving a placebo - you inform them that they will receive either the placebo or the treatment being tested. You don't have to tell them which. Just that the distribution will be at random.
Placebos are often considered “fake” treatments. You may have heard them described as “sugar pills.” They usually take the form of pills, injections, or even entire procedures that are used in clinical trials to test “real” treatments. For example, one group of study participants is given an active drug and another group is given a placebo, which looks exactly like the active medication but is completely inactive. The participants can’t tell whether they’re getting the fake drug or the real drug. The researchers wait to see if the people taking the real one do better (or worse) than those taking the fake one.
Call it what you want but it doesn't change the fact that a government that doesn't have the majority in any chamber is a minority government, and needs the support of others to pass legislation. Makes no difference if it's a parliamentary form of government or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't we say this about any libraries though? But, I see your point. So many "coding" toys teach what programming isn't. Like this lump of gold.
http://www.meccano.com/meccano...
It's not even Touring complete. All of its "programming" is just sequencing. It's as much of a robot as Teddy Ruxbin. To actually program with this you have to replace the controller with an Arduino.
Even worse, it's also not Turing complete :-) And Teddy Ruxpin is a mite offended - or he would at least be able to pretend he was if he were able to be properly programmed. But kids loved him - my sisters included. Of course, crappy cassette player embedded in him tended to eat tapes ...
"Coding is easy" --Justin Trudeau
If it was so easy, then why is the final game so shitty? Makes me want flash games back - at least they're far more responsive.
Get over it. Castro was better than the American-backed Batista he replaced. Despite the embargo (which has been voted against by all but 2 countries 24 times in the UN as a violation of human rights), Cubans have universal health care that is on a par with the US in terms of things like life expectancy and infant mortality.
In the face of the embargo, the best way to ensure survival as an independent country was a dictatorship. That's reality.
Besides, if you want to talk about murdering leaders, take a gander at Obama's kill list. Or the more than 600 assassination attempts the US made on Castro.
Castro was a man of his time, no more, no less. Acknowledging that he wasn't the 100% evil demon that he's been painted as is something adults can do. As for you and the rest of the Anonymous Coward crowd, I'd tell you to grow up, but you wouldn't understand the concept.
Come on, our minister of defense is a real bad-ass.
Sajjan joined the The British Columbia Regiment (Duke of Connaught's Own) in 1989 as a trooper and was commissioned in 1991. He eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He was deployed overseas four times in the course of his career: once to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and three times to Afghanistan.
Sajjan was wounded during his service in Bosnia. Sajjan began his 11-year career as an officer of the Vancouver Police Department after returning from his Bosnian deployment. He ended his career with the VPD as a detective with the department's gang crimes unit specializing in drug trafficking and organized-crime investigator.
Sajjan's first deployment to Afghanistan was right before Operation Medusa in 2006, during which he took leave from his work in the Vancouver Police Department's gang squad. He deployed with the 1st Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment Battle Group in Kandahar and worked as a liaison officer with the Afghan police. His fluency in Punjabi, his first language, allowed him to be understood by Urdu-speaking Afghans without translators, especially by village leaders who were invaluable to his intelligence gathering. Sajjan found that corruption in the Afghan government was driving recruitment to the Taliban and managed to uncover most Taliban defensive positions in the Kandahar region. After reporting these findings to Brigadier General David Fraser, Sajjan was tasked with helping the general plan aspects of Operation Medusa.
During Operation Medusa, four Canadian soldiers under Sajjan's command were killed in the fighting. Fraser evaluated Sajjan's leadership during the operation as "nothing short of brilliant." When Sajjan returned to Vancouver, Fraser sent a letter to the police department calling Sajjan “the best single Canadian intelligence asset in theatre,” and stated that his work saved “a multitude of coalition lives.”
Upon his return, Sajjan left his position with the Vancouver Police, but stayed as a reservist and started his own consulting business that taught intelligence gathering techniques to Canadian and American military personnel. He also consulted for US policy analyst and Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin, which began as a correspondence over Sajjan's views on how to tackle the Afghan opium trade and evolved into a collaboration as advisers to American military and diplomatic leaders in Afghanistan.
Sajjan returned to Afghanistan for another tour of duty in 2009, taking another tour of leave from the VPD to do so. Having already taken two leaves of absence, Sajjan had to leave the VPD for his third tour of duty in 2010, during which he was assigned as a Special Assistant to then Major-General James L. Terry, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan.
It's only politics that is causing problems with fighter jet procurement. Other countries have had run-off contests between manufacturers in less than a year.
As for the rest of the cabinet, saying I'm underwhelmed is being charitable.
Why all the hate comments? Try the serious mother-fucking hypocrisy. Ran on a campaign that included as a key element that we needed to get rid of the first-past-the-post election system before the next federal election, and has since done everything possible to make sure that won't happen, going so far as to claim that Canadians don't want it changed.
He might have valid reasons for other policy decisions, but there is no way this one passes the smell test.
The big difference between Pierre and Justin Trudeau is that Pierre didn't try to please everyone or suck at the teat of political correctness during the FLQ bombings, kidnappings, and murder. (@5:44)
Trudeau: "There are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is 'Go on and bleed' It's more important to keep law and order in society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of ..."
Reporter (uinterrupting) "At any cost? How far would you go with that?"
Trudeau: "Well, just watch me."
And then he suspended civil liberties under the War Measures Act (@9:16).
The separatists hated him for it, but hey, if you don't like it, just leave - but you don't get to take anything more than you brought into the country when you joined (Quebec was a lot smaller when it became, with Ontario and parts of the maritimes, Canada). And if Canada is divisible, so is Quebec, so parts that don't want to separate will remain part of Canada. That would have left a few small "independent duchies" of separatists completely cut off from each other, and from the majority of Quebec and Canada (and the US as well). And no access to the St Lawrence, since the federal government has sovereignty over all land within 200' of any body of water.
In short, a big "fuck you" to the FLQ and separatists, based on law and logic.
Huge difference between father and son. You might like Justin, but like him or hate him, you had to respect Pierre.
Now back on topic - the "Hour of Code" is bullshit. Why not have an "Hour of Electricity" to help people learn that you can't plug both the kettle and the toaster into the same electrical circuit? Or the "Hour of Plumbing" to to learn how to replace the washer in a leaky tap? The "Hour of Cooking" so that the "microwave pizza pocket generation" can lean how to make a grilled cheese sandwich without f*cking it up or causing a fire? And how about the "Hour of RTFM" to teach people the importance of reading instructions BEFORE they break something? To save the health care system money, why not the "Hour of Evolution" so that people understand why giving antibiotics for every runny nose will lead to superbugs?
All of these are more important than any "Oh look I sort of - kind of - well not really but don't burst my bubble - coded a game."
How much profit can you make off a kindergartner?
In a system of Capitalism, anything is possible. Especially when the kindergartner has parents.
Let's see ... one heart, two lungs, two kidneys, two corneas, one liver, skin, tendons, the membrane around the brain, stem cells, esophagus, stomach, duodenum, intestines, teeth, bones for grafts, marrow, small bones in the ear ... some of those kindergarten kids are worth more than they'll ever earn in their lifetimes. The days when your body is worth $1.98 for the chemicals in it are long gone.
Don't you believe in evolution? Why would you want to prevent them from protesting on the highway? It might not be as effective as lasers on sharks or nuking them from orbit, but a car still does the job old-skool.
You need to watch Moneyball to see how math has changed how baseball is played. Until Oakland As GM Billy Beane tried it, nobody used it. Now every team uses it. Who would have thought that calculus was needed to have a winning team?
Try Computer Animation moron....
Unfortunately morons are already animated enough without computers :-)
Agreed that 90% of all studies have been found to be either badly set up or outright wrong, but that's the nature of the beast. 90% of everything is crap, and it takes time to separate the wheat from the bullshit. But we do eventually get it right.
It usually takes about half the current practitioners to die out for new ideas to gain currency, and that has pretty much always been the case in many endeavors. Case in point - post-menopausal hormone therapy. Premarin and Prempro were two of the most sold drugs in the US until 2004, when the government closed down the Women's Health Initiative study because of higher risks associated with HRT.
Now we know the study was bullshit, because every single woman in the study was using Premarin or Prempro - forms of estrogen collected from the urine of pregnant mares that are not bio-compatible with humans, and contain enzymes simply not meant to be found in human beings. Cut one open and you can smell the horse piss.
And yet doctors still do everything they can to discourage women from HRT based on that study, even though it's based on horse hormones, and not estradiol (a form of biocompatible estrogen). Even though women have lost so much bone density that some of them break their ribs just by sneezing. When this condition occurs in children, we do everything we can, but because it's old people, somehow the same medical condition is "normal" and not worth the risks of treating. Look at broken hips - 56% of men who break their hips never return home, same as 37% of women. And yet hormone therapy can prevent this in both sexes. Estrogen is also a potent antidepressant, and obviously guys on testosterone therapy are going to feel better about themselves as well. Duh! Better to have many more suicides than a few more strokes because suicide is the patient's fault.
It's like we're not to be trusted in being able to evaluate what the best option is for our individual situations based on full disclosure of all risks and benefits. So much for patient autonomy and informed consent.
All thanks to group think in the medical community.
Au contraire, people need to have a basic grasp of evolution to understand why it's dangerous to prescribe antibiotics for every runny nose, and why prescribing antibiotics for viruses is stupid. Bacteria evolving resistance to current antibiotics affects everyone directly or indirectly when you turn kids into petri dishes for evolving the next generation of antibiotic-resistant bugs.
No derivative value? So we don't need to develop drugs to combat fast-evolving bugs? Keep thinking like that - it's the quickest, most ironic way to remove you from the gene pool.
Cripes, don't give them any more ideas!!! You know that the banks and lenders will get behind it at the slightest whisper. Get them so deep into debt before they finish high school and they're worse off than indentured slaves because they can never get out of hock.
No, this is a "think of the children" moment - they cancelled a program that was useless. Here's a thought - why not put the money into real education instead of "good optics initiatives" that are little more than opportunities for businesses to get free advertising to kids paid for by the tax man.
Your arguments are bullshit when it comes to experimental treatments. People can give consent after being informed that the treatment may make their disease or condition worse, or even kill them.
The same applies to people in drug trials. In blind tests, you cannot tell people whether they will receive the test treatment or not, and if you haven't noticed, All consent forms for treatment, even in hospitals, contain the stipulation that the patient has been informed of any risks (and "any risks" includes death) before consent can be given.
It is universally recognized that ANY and ALL treatments carry a risk, that every medication has side effects, and that it is the right of the patient, unless they are unable to give or withhold consent, to make an informed decision.
You might want to look at things like advanced medical directives, where you can give consent to procedures that will, for example, reduce pain even though they will hasten your death. Get with the times.
Also, since this is a test, you don't know if the placebo is less dangerous than the treatment being tested - or you wouldn't need to run the test. Your arguments are not based in law, nor are they in agreement with the physician's code of ethics, which works by informed consent in such cases.
Seeing as 90% of all medical research is flawed, (and no, this is not some crank - it's pretty much accepted in research because of the evidence, as well as researchers personal knowledge/experience of bad studies we need to test against placebos, because some of the supposedly beneficial treatments are later found to be harmful.
Remember thalidomide? Or more recently, the panic over hormone replacement therapy because the biggest, best trial of HRT ever was started prematurely because it purported to show harmful effects of estrogen? 10s of millions of women world-wide were suddenly put on antidepressants to help deal with menopause side-effects. Turns out that the study was bogus, but more than a decade later, many doctors still haven't got the memo.
The flaw in the study was in using only estrogen from pregnant mare urine (Premarin and Prempro). Equine estrogen is not bio-identical to human estrogen (estradiol estrogen is), but it also contains equine enzymes that the human body has never seen in nature and can't handle - which cause, among other things, liver failure. Having horse enzymes in your blood, your organs, your brain ... that's going to cause problems. Also, progestins were included in HRT even though not needed, further increasing the risk. So this "definitive" study was harmful to people.
Heart attack is the #1 killer of women (no, not breast cancer). Estrogen helps protect against cardiovascular diseases. So people on a placebo would have been healthier, with less chance of sudden death.
Studies also show it's a potent anti-depressive, and delays the onset of Alzheimers and other dementias. Those are sentences of a slow death. It also reduces or stops suicidal ideation.
It also slows down bone demineralization by enabling the digestive system to take up more calcium (which is why calcium supplementation by itself doesn't work - if your body can't absorb it, you'll just eliminate it). 28% of women and 37% of men who fracture their hip die within one year. Considering that 1 in 3 women and 1 in 5 men will get at least 1 hip fracture, that's a significant amount of women who are now at higher risk because of this "greatest study ever."
So even the best studies need to be re-done, because if this study had included a placebo as well as Premarin, and also included other sources of estrogen such as estradiol, Premarin would have been singled out as the biggest contribution to health risk from HRT.
So placebos have a place - they would have saved millions of women from premature death, not endangered them further. That's why we do studies, and why we include placebos. Plus, placebos also work even when the patient is told that it's just a sugar pill. That's why you compare the benefits of a course of treatment with a placebo as well as no treatment. Why prescribe a drug with bad side effects when a placebo performs either as well or better? Not including placebos places people depending on the results of the study to make informed decisions at risk of making bad decisions. Some of those are fatal.
If it's just about getting location data to improve service, let them track the driver. They already do - problem solved.
They already have the info by tracking the driver's phone. They don't need to track yours as well, except to push ads. They were lying. Again.
Plenty of places give a discount for cash - you just have to ask for it. Even some big-box stores. They hate those cash-back credit cards because that "cash back" is also deducted, in addition to the regular credit card merchant fees, and there's no way to tell just by looking at the card what, if any, cash back they're going to be hit for.
What - you thought the credit card companies were giving you that money out of their pockets? They're using their duopoly status to gouge retailers.
"United States coins and currency (including Federal Reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal Reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues." Not accepting cash means that the banks take a cut, which means credit card dollars have less value to a creditor than bank notes.
Want to pay Uber in cash? Book a ride to a destination other than where you want to go. When the driver gets there, tell them you'll cancel the ride and pay him cash to take you to your real destination - just like a real taxi service. Think of it as "dark money."
You give a fake destination so that Uber won't see that the driver went to the place the cancelled ride was supposed to go to, so no evidence they were cut out of the loop.
Doesn't change the protocols. That's why it's called science.
Some fool wrote:
A diabetic usually knows if he has diabetic retinopathy. Needing to go to an ophthalmologist is usually the second or third clue. Just like neuropathy, retinopathy is a complication that's fairly easy to self diagnose.
No, diabetics don't know they have diabetic retinopathy in the early stages
. WTF did you get that idea from?
What are the symptoms of diabetic retinopathy and DME?
The early stages of diabetic retinopathy usually have no symptoms. The disease often progresses unnoticed until it affects vision. Bleeding from abnormal retinal blood vessels can cause the appearance of “floating” spots. These spots sometimes clear on their own. But without prompt treatment, bleeding often recurs, increasing the risk of permanent vision loss. If DME occurs, it can cause blurred vision.
Because the disease progresses slowly, you most likely won't notice until stage 4 - when blood vessels in your retina cause floaters that block your vision. You'll probably assume that any temporary blurriness (which doesn't always happen) is caused by fatigue or eye strain, and since you don't really notice it after a while, and adapt to it, you don't realize what happens.
Diabetic retinopathy may progress through four stages:
1. Mild nonproliferative retinopathy. Small areas of balloon-like swelling in the retina’s tiny blood vessels, called microaneurysms, occur at this earliest stage of the disease. These microaneurysms may leak fluid into the retina.
2. Moderate nonproliferative retinopathy. As the disease progresses, blood vessels that nourish the retina may swell and distort. They may also lose their ability to transport blood. Both conditions cause characteristic changes to the appearance of the retina and may contribute to DME.
3. Severe nonproliferative retinopathy. Many more blood vessels are blocked, depriving blood supply to areas of the retina. These areas secrete growth factors that signal the retina to grow new blood vessels.
4. Proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR). At this advanced stage, growth factors secreted by the retina trigger the proliferation of new blood vessels, which grow along the inside surface of the retina and into the vitreous gel, the fluid that fills the eye. The new blood vessels are fragile, which makes them more likely to leak and bleed. Accompanying scar tissue can contract and cause retinal detachment—the pulling away of the retina from underlying tissue, like wallpaper peeling away from a wall. Retinal detachment can lead to permanent vision loss.
Wrong. Even when patients are informed that they are receiving a placebo, it has an effect. Want proof?
Dr. Ted J. Kaptchuk, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard-wide Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter (PiPS) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, has been studying placebos for more than 20 years. His most recent work on these “open-label placebos,” as they’re called, is fascinating. I had a chance to interview him in person earlier this year.
In one study, Kaptchuk looked at people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a common condition that causes abdominal cramping and diarrhea or constipation that can be debilitating for many. Half of the study volunteers were told they were getting an “open-label” placebo and the others got nothing at all. He found that there was a dramatic and significant improvement in the placebo group’s IBS symptoms, even though they were explicitly told they were getting a “sugar pill” without any active medication.
Also, nice way to be intentionally silly - you don't tell them that they are receiving a placebo - you inform them that they will receive either the placebo or the treatment being tested. You don't have to tell them which. Just that the distribution will be at random.
Placebos are often considered “fake” treatments. You may have heard them described as “sugar pills.” They usually take the form of pills, injections, or even entire procedures that are used in clinical trials to test “real” treatments. For example, one group of study participants is given an active drug and another group is given a placebo, which looks exactly like the active medication but is completely inactive. The participants can’t tell whether they’re getting the fake drug or the real drug. The researchers wait to see if the people taking the real one do better (or worse) than those taking the fake one.
Call it what you want but it doesn't change the fact that a government that doesn't have the majority in any chamber is a minority government, and needs the support of others to pass legislation. Makes no difference if it's a parliamentary form of government or not.