I took Organic in school, the only way to get through it is to suffer. My course was meant not to teach, but to weed out pre-meds.
Believe it or not, there are people who actually understand what all those stupid electrons do. Those are the ones who become chemists.
The rest of us, a category that includes you, me and (he leaves not the slightest doubt about this) the submitter, have no choice but to suck it up and memorize the damn things. Also, I'd suggest to him that organizing the reactions according to his personal theory is only going to interfere with any understanding that might seep into his head as to what's really going on in the molecules. There's a reason they organize the course the way they do.
But I don't think it's any coincidence that other entertainment industries started going to crap when people started caring more about our manufactured pop stars and their gossip than they did about the product.
As much as I always enjoy this sort of crotchety-old-man grumbling about how the world has completely gone to hell, and things aren't like back in the good old days of the 1980's -- "manufactured pop stars and their gossip" have been around for centuries. Does Bob Colayco think Hollywood was any different in the 60's, in the 40's, in the 20's?
What you do is fun and interesting, but it is not rigorous.
Obviously, when they get positive results, they're meaningful. When they get negative results, they're showing falsification within the space that they're testing, which is usually well within any sane real-world conditions.
It may not be True Science, but scientific research as normally practiced is a lot closer to Mythbusters than to your Platonic ideal.
Or you can go with the abovementioned Lakota Express and outsource to (American) Indians! See, technology giveth and it taketh away.
Re:What about the research benefits?
on
Faster DNA Testing
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The summary is (typically) moronic, but these super-fast amplification schemes have been coming and going almost since PCR was invented decades ago. They never seem to be worthwhile in practice, though, so I'm skeptical about seeing huge performance gains from this one either.
I couldn't make sense of the linked results page -- try this one.
So, the Americans won the Halo and CS titles, the Koreans won Starcraft, the Brazilians won Need For Speed, the Germans won FIFA Soccer, the Japanese won DOA... seems about right.
The other thing is that they'd like to claim that there's some sort of ownership rights inherent in the techniques employed by natives around the world, such that if you learn something useful from them and their folk remedies, you should have to pay for it.
My point is that these claims, which have no time limit and require no new effort on the part of the claimholder, are entirely unlike patents as they exist anywhere in the world. (They do, though, resemble how many of the anti-IP loudmouths think patents work.)
Again, I don't especially object to it. It's nowhere near as obnoxious or dangerous as voiding patents on any particularly valuable drugs "because people are more important than profits", especially because natural products aren't remotely as important as they're made out to be. But it's dishonest to present them as "Taste of Own Patent Medicine".
Lets be fair, the lab didn't want to help anyone with their knowledge except themselves and their shareholders. TFA was about the other side wanting equivalent protection as the one the US requires.Basically, a tit for tat.
This has nothing to do with equivalent protection. Equivalent would be filing patents on traditional knowledge and trying to make money from them until they expire. There is nothing in US or any other patent law (you guys realize that other companies have patents and that most big pharmas are Europe-based, right?) that allows you to wait hundreds or thousands of years until someone else finds something useful before demanding ownership of it.
In fact, I have no problem with compensating countries for such resources. (The value of natural compounds is wildly exaggerated because 1) it's a romantic idea and 2) it's a useful carrot with which to encourage poor countries to preserve their forests. If the price gets too high, pharmas will simply ignore natural products and rely entirely on their chemists.) But this is hardly "tit for tat".
Tolkien? Jules Verne? (I'm not a devotee, but she has a huge geek following -- Ayn Rand?) That other woman who writes those coma-inducing books the sci-fi buffs drool over, ummm, Ursula LeGuin?
The tragedies that preceded their deaths-- Abel died essentially out of poverty; Galois, poor and already half-mad, in a pistol duel-- have served as a valuable lesson to the mathematical community ever since: spot genius early and foster it.
Galois, IIRC, was the one who stayed up all night before the duel, frantically writing down every half-formed mathematical insight for posterity. Which probably didn't help his shooting. He was only 20, I think.
I haven't touched Usenet in years except for searching archives, so maybe this what ISPs already do, but -- I'd start by ditching all the binaries groups. What's left isn't *that* big, even with the spam, you keep your handful of Usenet-posting geezers, and if you lose the w4r3z crowd, well, they were probably costing more in bandwidth usage and subpoena nuisance than they're worth.
On the other hand, they can't really advertise Usenet as a feature to users who aren't familiar with it. It's too complicated, and too much of a sewer nowadays.
Spammers just suck. They showed up in this environment (that admittedly was already buckling under the load of new users), left it a smoking ruin and moved on. How much money could they even have made?
But whether you're blocking the receptor with a chemical antagonist or a biological, it's still "pharmaceutical". The submitter's notion that gene therapy is an attractive "alternative to pharmaceuticals" is simply insane.
Incidentally, there are lab mouse strains that don't have many of the anxiety behaviors like center avoidance. The article gives the impression that the knockout animals are utterly unmouselike, which is untrue.
I've spent the last couple of days getting modded down for vaguely defending Microsoft against the dopier sort of Open Source zealots, so maybe that gives me some credibility to say -- he's absolutely right.
This is where the benefit of having the source code comes in. Not so you can jabber about how you need to look through a hundred megs of source to make sure there are no bugs, but so you can change a line or two of code (at least, I assume so) instead of implementing one of the hairball schemes people are propsing to work around the default behavior.
You mean on the toolbars? Of course! Any sane user customizes the toolbars for his needs. You don't turn off the menus -- you limit the toolbar to an appropriate set of buttons.
KDE and GNOME copied the Microsoft behavior; if you can do it there, you can do it in Office.
Furthermore, each friendly automatic feature in Office must be shut off independently (often through some separate tab in the preferences window), if I recall correctly. Why can't they have a single check mark to let you disable all automated editing?
I absolutely agree. I'd guess the current system is a case of settings being organized according to the underlying codebase instead of in a way that makes sense to the user.
Personally, I love LaTeX. It does exactly what I tell it to. Nothing more, nothing less.
To my taste, Excel hits a perfect balance of doing what I mean, not what I tell it. Word, until you turn all those damn things off, is more frustrating than helpful. On the other hand, having some spelling autocorrection (or at least error flagging) in Lotus Freaking Notes would make it at least a little less unbearable.
I can't type my name in MS Word ("Sumner") without it auto-"correcting" to "Summer".
Hmmm. Well, if it's any consolation, they seem to have added "Sumner" to the default dictionary at some point in the last decade. I suppose history teachers got sick of reading papers about the Civil War begining with the assault on "Fort Summer".
Also, it no longer auto-corrects "Linux" to "lunchbox" and "CORBA" to "COBRA".
Y'know, you can turn that stuff off! It requires a bit of poking around, but if you're capable of tweaking the modelines in XF86Config, you're probably able to find the settings to turn off automatic bulletting.
Yeah, I once had a coworker who simply stopped showing up to work altogether and it took well over a month for our boss to notice. I don't find this story quite as astonishing as "Simon" seems to think I should.
Ooookayyy, let me get this straight: Massachusetts adopts a regulation designed to exclude current versions of Microsoft Office, leaving blind users without a working alternative. This prompts criticism, not of the people who implemented it, not of the people and companies who lobbied for it, but of Microsoft, because they should have spent more time improving their competitors' products in order to allow their own to be more readily barred.
Wow, that's quite a theology these "clergy" have! Where do I sign up?
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Guy Who Invented Lotus Notes,
If I have to use a second piece of software written by you, I swear I'll chew my fingers off.
Signed,
Everyone Who Has To Use That Nightmarish Piece Of Crap
Believe it or not, there are people who actually understand what all those stupid electrons do. Those are the ones who become chemists.
The rest of us, a category that includes you, me and (he leaves not the slightest doubt about this) the submitter, have no choice but to suck it up and memorize the damn things. Also, I'd suggest to him that organizing the reactions according to his personal theory is only going to interfere with any understanding that might seep into his head as to what's really going on in the molecules. There's a reason they organize the course the way they do.
That was my first thought, but, no -- this is Fayette County Circuit Judge James Moore, not Supreme Court Chief justice Roy Moore.
As much as I always enjoy this sort of crotchety-old-man grumbling about how the world has completely gone to hell, and things aren't like back in the good old days of the 1980's -- "manufactured pop stars and their gossip" have been around for centuries. Does Bob Colayco think Hollywood was any different in the 60's, in the 40's, in the 20's?
Obviously, when they get positive results, they're meaningful. When they get negative results, they're showing falsification within the space that they're testing, which is usually well within any sane real-world conditions.
It may not be True Science, but scientific research as normally practiced is a lot closer to Mythbusters than to your Platonic ideal.
Or you can go with the abovementioned Lakota Express and outsource to (American) Indians! See, technology giveth and it taketh away.
The summary is (typically) moronic, but these super-fast amplification schemes have been coming and going almost since PCR was invented decades ago. They never seem to be worthwhile in practice, though, so I'm skeptical about seeing huge performance gains from this one either.
So, the Americans won the Halo and CS titles, the Koreans won Starcraft, the Brazilians won Need For Speed, the Germans won FIFA Soccer, the Japanese won DOA ... seems about right.
My point is that these claims, which have no time limit and require no new effort on the part of the claimholder, are entirely unlike patents as they exist anywhere in the world. (They do, though, resemble how many of the anti-IP loudmouths think patents work.)
Again, I don't especially object to it. It's nowhere near as obnoxious or dangerous as voiding patents on any particularly valuable drugs "because people are more important than profits", especially because natural products aren't remotely as important as they're made out to be. But it's dishonest to present them as "Taste of Own Patent Medicine".
While I stand partially corrected, Ayn Rand's major works were written well after 1931.
This has nothing to do with equivalent protection. Equivalent would be filing patents on traditional knowledge and trying to make money from them until they expire. There is nothing in US or any other patent law (you guys realize that other companies have patents and that most big pharmas are Europe-based, right?) that allows you to wait hundreds or thousands of years until someone else finds something useful before demanding ownership of it.
In fact, I have no problem with compensating countries for such resources. (The value of natural compounds is wildly exaggerated because 1) it's a romantic idea and 2) it's a useful carrot with which to encourage poor countries to preserve their forests. If the price gets too high, pharmas will simply ignore natural products and rely entirely on their chemists.) But this is hardly "tit for tat".
Tolkien? Jules Verne? (I'm not a devotee, but she has a huge geek following -- Ayn Rand?) That other woman who writes those coma-inducing books the sci-fi buffs drool over, ummm, Ursula LeGuin?
FWIW, I have a very attractive, smart, nice female coworker who met her fiance through Match.com.
Galois, IIRC, was the one who stayed up all night before the duel, frantically writing down every half-formed mathematical insight for posterity. Which probably didn't help his shooting. He was only 20, I think.
On the other hand, they can't really advertise Usenet as a feature to users who aren't familiar with it. It's too complicated, and too much of a sewer nowadays.
Spammers just suck. They showed up in this environment (that admittedly was already buckling under the load of new users), left it a smoking ruin and moved on. How much money could they even have made?
That's why those of us with precise intellects prefer the word "shiznit" to minimize such ambiguizzlety.
Incidentally, there are lab mouse strains that don't have many of the anxiety behaviors like center avoidance. The article gives the impression that the knockout animals are utterly unmouselike, which is untrue.
This is where the benefit of having the source code comes in. Not so you can jabber about how you need to look through a hundred megs of source to make sure there are no bugs, but so you can change a line or two of code (at least, I assume so) instead of implementing one of the hairball schemes people are propsing to work around the default behavior.
KDE and GNOME copied the Microsoft behavior; if you can do it there, you can do it in Office.
In Rob's defense, at least he can spell "dig" correctly. (Probably.)
I absolutely agree. I'd guess the current system is a case of settings being organized according to the underlying codebase instead of in a way that makes sense to the user.
Personally, I love LaTeX. It does exactly what I tell it to. Nothing more, nothing less.
To my taste, Excel hits a perfect balance of doing what I mean, not what I tell it. Word, until you turn all those damn things off, is more frustrating than helpful. On the other hand, having some spelling autocorrection (or at least error flagging) in Lotus Freaking Notes would make it at least a little less unbearable.
Hmmm. Well, if it's any consolation, they seem to have added "Sumner" to the default dictionary at some point in the last decade. I suppose history teachers got sick of reading papers about the Civil War begining with the assault on "Fort Summer".
Also, it no longer auto-corrects "Linux" to "lunchbox" and "CORBA" to "COBRA".
Y'know, you can turn that stuff off! It requires a bit of poking around, but if you're capable of tweaking the modelines in XF86Config, you're probably able to find the settings to turn off automatic bulletting.
Yeah, I once had a coworker who simply stopped showing up to work altogether and it took well over a month for our boss to notice. I don't find this story quite as astonishing as "Simon" seems to think I should.
Wow, that's quite a theology these "clergy" have! Where do I sign up?