I'm not a doctor, but I am a pharmacy student taking an antibiotics/infectious disease class right now. My advice is to find an infectious disease specialist somewhere like a university hospital start getting treatment. Most patients that present with a serious infectious disease are placed on empiric therapy (a combination of big drugs like Zosyn, Gentamycin, and Vancomycin) until cultures are grown. They will take sputum cultures and when results come back the antibiotic therapy will be adjusted appropriately.
Looking through my infectious disease handbook, actinomyces does seem to have all the symptoms you describe. It grows optimally under anaerobic conditions, so the lab should be notified if actinomyces is suspected. Growth is slow and possibly nonexistant if antibiotics have been used already. If this bug is correctly identified, the drug of choice is intravenous Penicillin G (10-20 million units per day) for about 3 weeks, followed by high dose oral penicillin.
Bottom line: Talk to an ID specialist and tell him or her your story. State that you are suspecting actinomyces, then get some cultures grown and start antibiotic therapy.
That's one of the more insightful comments made in this discussion.
Apple is showing benchmarks that make their product look roughly twice as fast as the PC counterpart. I don't even have to look at the finer details to call it ridiculously exaggerated. The fact is that there has yet to be a computer released to the general population that has been tremendously faster than its competitors. A huge advantage thus far has been defined as a Pentium 4 being 10% faster than an Athlon.
Apple, or any other computer company, is not going to release a product that is years ahead of the competition. Months maybe, but definitely not years.
While I'm on the subject, Apple has been claiming for years that their computers are faster, easier to use, and reasonably priced. That sounds like a killer combination to me. So what is their market share again? Five percent? Either the public doesn't like things like fast, easy, and cheap, or someone is full of crap. I'd bet on the latter.
Refresh rates != response time
on
LCD Overtaking CRT
·
· Score: 5, Informative
"...where the refresh rates of LCDs are not satisfactory yet."
I believe the poster is mistakenly trying to apply CRT terminology to LCDs. The refresh rate of a CRT, which is the number of times an image is painted on the screen per second, doesn't quite apply to LCDs. What does apply, however, is the response time. This is usually measured in ms and refers to the time period for a pixel to completely change its state. Response times are typically around 25 ms, but are often slower for black -> white transitions. Slow response gives the effect known as ghosting and makes these panels undesirable to gamers.
As for the graphics artists, it's kind of a mixed bag. They get perfect geometries as a trade off for true color. Most modern LCDs operate at only 24 bit color.
The office user/casual gamer makes up the vast majority of the population and won't notice any of these downfalls. Thus, despite the price, these things are selling like hotcakes due to the easiness on the eyes and uber-coolness. Besides, chicks dig em.;)
"Right this way, Mr. Hussein, we've changed our attitude toward Iraq and have decided to trade nuclear arms. Yes sir, step on board to see the finest weapons grade plutonium."
I'll agree that the more people that lend their talents, the better science will be. Unfortunately, people aren't looking for just "more". In the academic realm there's a racial and gender bias involved in everything, to the point that it's blatant discrimination against whites and males.
I can understand wanting a diverse political science class, or a diverse art class. But this is physics. There's a right answer and a wrong answer. I'm not sure how growing up as a black or as a woman will change anyone's ability to formulate laws regarding quantum mechanics or better understand black holes. When people who don't belong in the career get in and realize they a.) aren't naturally gifted in the area and b.) picked it because the path was "easy", then I think we have a major problem. It hurts both the field and the individual.
We already have a very level playing field in the sciences. Let ambition and ability sort them out.
Good God man. Calm down about your "Republican echo chamber" and wake up to American politics. Start naming any politicians, Democrat or Republican, that aren't hypocrites, liars, or cowards. Politics has absolutely nothing to do with liberal vs. conservative or Democrat vs. Republican and everything to do with rich vs. poor.
What's really sad is not the fact that Bush is in office, but the fact that the Democratic party couldn't cough up a candidate to utterly trouce him in the election. Any halfway decent candidate would've beaten him in a landslide and look what happened. Now we have corporate America even more thoroughly entrenced in the government.
I've really been impressed with the service Insight broadband has been providing. Here in Lexington, KY we get 3 Mbps downstream for $45. They don't really advertise it (most probably wouldn't understand anyway) but I went ahead and figured it up when I started consistently getting 350 KB/s downloads.
No, I don't sit around outside on my front stoop. I go running outside or if I'm home on the farm I do work. Wow, the heat causes sweat. Big deal. That's why people drink water. Dehydration will kill you, but heat alone will not (small children and elderly being the exception).
American society is way too afraid of being "smelly" or "icky". Take a shower every day and don't flip out if someone doesn't smell like a rose garden.
Florida? Hahaha! That's funniest thing I've heard all day.
Aww, must be rough living in Florida with that sea-breeze and hot, icky ocean.
Try living in Kentucky. Our temperatures hit 100F in the summer with incredible humidity and no breeze. Then, in the winter, we get 5F with 90% relative humidity. The rest of the time it stays at 40F or 50F and rains.
I don't suppose the different costs of living would reflect this, now would they?
>If you don't feel more comfortable in an air conditioned building, you have some kind of temperature regulation problem, or a problem with dealing with humidity.
I think you have a problem understanding the words "very little". In programmer terms, very little != nothing. Cool air is a luxury. It is _not_ penicillin or pasteurized milk.
I don't automatically feel comfortable in an air conditioned building, either. Some places are just too damned cold. For some reason, people think it should be 60F in the summer and 80F in the winter.
>That it uses power?
Using power is not a big deal. But when a device uses more power than anything else in your household, we're talking about an impact. Until we have these wonderful ways of "cleanly" generating electricity, this should be something to consider.
>Build a nuclear power plant and all the problems are solved.
Is this a joke? Have you never heard of nuclear waste, meltdowns, or thermal pollution? Nuclear reactors are by _no means_ a panacea. Ask your neighbor if he would mind if you built a nuclear power plant across the street from him and begin trucking in uranium. Now ask yourself where all these miracle facilities are for a technology that was born in WWII.
> In that case, you should have no problem with nuclear power plants -- otherwise you are an environmentalist nutcase
Right. Anyone that has a problem with transporting nuclear material and storing substances that will not be safe for thousands of years must be a lunatic.
Tell you what, here's a solution to the debate over where to store nuclear waste. Screw Yucca Mountain. Let's store it in New Jersey. Everyone in the Ohio Valley has to deal with the emissions from our coal-burning plants, so let's make it equal. Let those who produce the waste deal with it and a few attitudes may change.
>Two, why be in discomfort when it causes little to no environmental harm? You just haven't backed up your theory that well...
Once again, you fail to realize the correlation between power drain and environmental damage. Here's a little experiment. Crank your air conditioning down all the way and leave it there for this month. Check your next electric bill.
Gee, I wonder how all those electrons were magically produced?
>If your local power comes from coal or gas, I feel for you.
I live in the heart of both coal production and consumption. No, I'm not happy with the sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide levels, but it's at least a manageable problem. Nuclear power generation works just fine in theory, but the theorists fail to consider the time-honored phrase "Shit happens". The residents of Paducah, Kentucky found this out not long ago when they discovered that radioactive material had been leaching into the ground.
Of course, everybody should be on nuclear power, right?
>Summer also brought increases in diseases like >malaria and yellow fever.
I realize this. These problems were later dealt with using pesticides and antibiotics, which have done incredibly more for society than air conditioning. On a side note, a doctor I know once remarked that the greatest advancement for prolonging human lifespan was the purification of drinking water. This is probably a fairly accurate statement.
People in the U.S. don't avoid malaria and yellow fever with air conditioning, they avoid it by paving everything and draining the swamps. Assuredly, these problems would not make a comeback if every unit were turned off for a summer.
Yes, you would be wrong. I live in Lexington, KY. It gets hot as hell here.
The people that die are the elderly (no, I'm not recommending we deprive them of air conditioning) and the young. Children die when they get locked in cars with no ventilation. That's a different story altogether.
This is probably a pretty unpopular comment to make to a crowd of geeks in the heat of summer, but I'll say it anyways. While air conditioning is a great scientific and engineering achievement, I'm not sure that it's been a great advantage to society. It's done very little to improve the quality of life for humans and quite a bit to degrade it. I am by no means an avid environmentalist, yet anyone can recognize all the damage caused by freon and the tremendous strain that condensors place on the power grid.
What amazes me most is how Americans have begun to view air conditioning as a "necessity". Are we insane? The necessities in life are food, oxygen, and heat in climates with extreme cold. Nevertheless, the petroleum supplies are depleted at an increasing rate so that people can be more comfortable as they sit in traffic with the A/C on full blast.
Yes, it's a nice invention. Hospitals can benefit tremendously from it. But it's nowhere near a necessity and if humans would tolerate a little discomfort, the Earth might be in much better shape.
I think I addressed the causes earlier when I said the primary problem is lack of willpower and laziness. Sounds like a pretty direct statement of cause to me. The moral language bit, however, is completely offtopic and I'm clueless as to how that post can be construed as such.
The cause and effect issue is fine, but I'd spend considerably less time contemplating it and more time acting. Any significant, valid cause has already been thought of and you aren't going to contribute anything. This isn't the microprocessor industry. Creative thought may yield a few more fad diets, but once again, stick to the old methods of proper diet and exercise. Let's see, eating crappy food and leading a sedentary lifestyle will make you fat. Could it be that laziness is a cause for sitting the couch and watching T.V.? Or maybe lack of willpower is responsible for the purchase of those candy bars? These are not new concepts.
I'm not telling people that I think everybody should be like me. I'm saying there are choices that have to be made, like whether you want to keep a steady supply of Oreos and Breyer's ice cream in the house or put that money away for your child's college education. This is not moral language, it's just basic financial and health sense that many choose not to heed. And for the record, I abhor moral advice coming from anyone other than close family, thus I don't give it. Food and morality? Give me a break. Maybe if you're Jewish or Hindu.
I'll agree that people learn eating habits early on and tend to maintain them. However, the pretense that "survivor mode + stress + asymetric information = bad foods" is silly. The only reason people eat poorly is sheer laziness and lack of willpower. Yes, this is likely grounds for me to be considered a troll, but I've come from a similar background and I find it hard to extend sympathy. I was raised in a family hovering above the poverty level in the middle of Kentucky, which by all rights should doom me to smoking and obesity. Neither of those problems caught on.
What I find hardest to believe is that overweight people are in need of "proper advice or information" to help overcome their problem. Ask anybody what healthy food is and I guarantee they can list things like fruits and vegetables. This is not uncommon knowledge. It's essentially like smoking-- sure they know it's bad, but changing requires effort and going against the norm. Oh, and quit falling for fads. There is no miracle pill or magical set of electroshock therapy that will make you look great while you sit on the couch. Do the things that nobody likes, such as exercise and eating right, and I guarantee results. It's a simple concept: If calories in are less than calories out, then weightloss occurs.
The final issue I have with your argument irritates me above all others. Anybody that is poor and is truly in survivor mode should not be buying junk food. It's the reason they never get out of poverty and why America is so deep in debt. People cannot afford to be nickel and dimed when they buy Doritos and Coca-Cola. Buying all that unhealthy food costs money (if you don't believe me, compare the price of Doritos to pinto beans) and you've gotta eat some things that taste like crap if you ever want to get anywhere. The world is not a comfortable, caring place. The choice is willpower or poverty and obesity. Exercise a little, eat right, and just toughen up. Parents can make things harder for us but we are by no means slaves to our backgrounds. I'm not sure who to attribute it to, but the quote I'm looking for is "Wallowing in mud is not a way to get yourself clean."
I'll agree that CD-R drives have definitely become a commodity, but for the power user it still isn't to the point that "a drive is a drive". If you intend on making full use of that drive, it still pays to stick with a reputable vendor such as Plextor or TDK. For example, some drives are much better at others at backing up copy-protected games. Even the firmware revision can mean the difference between a successful copy and a coaster.
Plus, when it comes to audio CD's, any audiophile will vouch for the black tray and optimized power circuitry on the Plextor for reducing burn errors. In the end, if backing up data and burning the occasional audio CD is all you do, then by all rights "a drive is a drive". Buy the cheapest one you find. However, when it comes to making that burner sweat with ripping CD's, backing up games, or producing high quality audio.. spend the extra cash and buy a big name.
And yes, I do think burning a picture on a CD is a gimmick. But how fun would a geek's life be if all his pursuits had to be productive? =)
Ahh, looks like the MPAA has found a novel new way to plug the "analog hole"-- just get rid of the analog devices! What a relief. Now I can rest assured that the industry will be making the money they deserve, selling those copy-proof DVDs.
Did you fail high school english? I would recommend actually reading the entire post before automatically hitting reply and karma whoring. The statement "Wal-Mart isn't really rooted in the technology industry" is 100% accurate if you read carefully. Being rooted in the industry and being powered by new technology are two ENTIRELY different things. From the standpoint of sales, which is what's being discussed, Wal-Mart is about as dependent on computer sales as Microsoft is on the price of potatoes. Anyone that doesn't believe this can check Wal-Mart's steady growth rate throughout the recent tech slump.
Yes, as you pointed out, they have an advanced framework powering their business. But so does almost any gigantic, successful company. This is remarkable, but has nothing to do with their risk involved in selling PCs.
One thing I think people often forget to consider is the familiarity the sysadmin has with administering his particular distro. With the exception of a few, even the some of the most hardcore Linux zealots cut their teeth on Windows before switching to Linux. Thus, no matter how secure an OS is, it's only as good as the person running it-- and the majority of the population is better at running Windows. I think that the open source nature and sheer simplicity (in design, anyways) of Linux lends itself to being a much more capable performer, given an experienced user. It just happens to take a lot more time and effort to patch, recompile, reinstall, and reboot than it does to download and execute the latest patch from Microsoft. And of course, being geeks, we have the burden of upholding one of Larry Wall's three sacred virtues... laziness.;)
First of all, it's quite humorous to see that nowhere in the article does it mention implications caused by rolling your windows down. And what kind of havoc would a convertible wreak on a sensor that's calculating miniscule amounts of ethanol? Hmm..
But as for the part about being a designated driver, I can't stand the contradictions they send out. In my town, we always got the lectures in high school that went "If you drink, have someone else drive you home." However, The Pig always neglected to mention the second part of that statement.. Have someone else drive you home so we can bust your ass for public intoxication. I've seen friends riding around in the back seat with a perfectly sober driver hauled into the drunk tank. I'm not sure I see the crime in riding around drunk in the back of someone's car.. sure, it's not the best way to live out your life but you aren't gonna kill anybody. So thanks to our friends at TCU, we have drunks riding around with their windows down and people with designated drivers getting thrown in the clink. God bless America.
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I'm not a doctor, but I am a pharmacy student taking an antibiotics/infectious disease class right now. My advice is to find an infectious disease specialist somewhere like a university hospital start getting treatment. Most patients that present with a serious infectious disease are placed on empiric therapy (a combination of big drugs like Zosyn, Gentamycin, and Vancomycin) until cultures are grown. They will take sputum cultures and when results come back the antibiotic therapy will be adjusted appropriately.
Looking through my infectious disease handbook, actinomyces does seem to have all the symptoms you describe. It grows optimally under anaerobic conditions, so the lab should be notified if actinomyces is suspected. Growth is slow and possibly nonexistant if antibiotics have been used already. If this bug is correctly identified, the drug of choice is intravenous Penicillin G (10-20 million units per day) for about 3 weeks, followed by high dose oral penicillin.
Bottom line: Talk to an ID specialist and tell him or her your story. State that you are suspecting actinomyces, then get some cultures grown and start antibiotic therapy.
Hope you get better Patrick!
"Get over yourself."
That's one of the more insightful comments made in this discussion.
Apple is showing benchmarks that make their product look roughly twice as fast as the PC counterpart. I don't even have to look at the finer details to call it ridiculously exaggerated. The fact is that there has yet to be a computer released to the general population that has been tremendously faster than its competitors. A huge advantage thus far has been defined as a Pentium 4 being 10% faster than an Athlon.
Apple, or any other computer company, is not going to release a product that is years ahead of the competition. Months maybe, but definitely not years.
While I'm on the subject, Apple has been claiming for years that their computers are faster, easier to use, and reasonably priced. That sounds like a killer combination to me. So what is their market share again? Five percent? Either the public doesn't like things like fast, easy, and cheap, or someone is full of crap. I'd bet on the latter.
"...where the refresh rates of LCDs are not satisfactory yet."
;)
I believe the poster is mistakenly trying to apply CRT terminology to LCDs. The refresh rate of a CRT, which is the number of times an image is painted on the screen per second, doesn't quite apply to LCDs. What does apply, however, is the response time. This is usually measured in ms and refers to the time period for a pixel to completely change its state. Response times are typically around 25 ms, but are often slower for black -> white transitions. Slow response gives the effect known as ghosting and makes these panels undesirable to gamers.
As for the graphics artists, it's kind of a mixed bag. They get perfect geometries as a trade off for true color. Most modern LCDs operate at only 24 bit color.
The office user/casual gamer makes up the vast majority of the population and won't notice any of these downfalls. Thus, despite the price, these things are selling like hotcakes due to the easiness on the eyes and uber-coolness. Besides, chicks dig em.
"Right this way, Mr. Hussein, we've changed our attitude toward Iraq and have decided to trade nuclear arms. Yes sir, step on board to see the finest weapons grade plutonium."
I'll agree that the more people that lend their talents, the better science will be. Unfortunately, people aren't looking for just "more". In the academic realm there's a racial and gender bias involved in everything, to the point that it's blatant discrimination against whites and males.
I can understand wanting a diverse political science class, or a diverse art class. But this is physics. There's a right answer and a wrong answer. I'm not sure how growing up as a black or as a woman will change anyone's ability to formulate laws regarding quantum mechanics or better understand black holes. When people who don't belong in the career get in and realize they a.) aren't naturally gifted in the area and b.) picked it because the path was "easy", then I think we have a major problem. It hurts both the field and the individual.
We already have a very level playing field in the sciences. Let ambition and ability sort them out.
Good God man. Calm down about your "Republican echo chamber" and wake up to American politics. Start naming any politicians, Democrat or Republican, that aren't hypocrites, liars, or cowards. Politics has absolutely nothing to do with liberal vs. conservative or Democrat vs. Republican and everything to do with rich vs. poor.
What's really sad is not the fact that Bush is in office, but the fact that the Democratic party couldn't cough up a candidate to utterly trouce him in the election. Any halfway decent candidate would've beaten him in a landslide and look what happened. Now we have corporate America even more thoroughly entrenced in the government.
I've really been impressed with the service Insight broadband has been providing. Here in Lexington, KY we get 3 Mbps downstream for $45. They don't really advertise it (most probably wouldn't understand anyway) but I went ahead and figured it up when I started consistently getting 350 KB/s downloads.
Screw that uncapping nonsense. This is great.
No, I don't sit around outside on my front stoop. I go running outside or if I'm home on the farm I do work. Wow, the heat causes sweat. Big deal. That's why people drink water. Dehydration will kill you, but heat alone will not (small children and elderly being the exception).
American society is way too afraid of being "smelly" or "icky". Take a shower every day and don't flip out if someone doesn't smell like a rose garden.
Florida? Hahaha! That's funniest thing I've heard all day.
Aww, must be rough living in Florida with that sea-breeze and hot, icky ocean.
Try living in Kentucky. Our temperatures hit 100F in the summer with incredible humidity and no breeze. Then, in the winter, we get 5F with 90% relative humidity. The rest of the time it stays at 40F or 50F and rains.
I don't suppose the different costs of living would reflect this, now would they?
>If you don't feel more comfortable in an air conditioned building, you have some kind of temperature regulation problem, or a problem with dealing with humidity.
I think you have a problem understanding the words "very little". In programmer terms, very little != nothing. Cool air is a luxury. It is _not_ penicillin or pasteurized milk.
I don't automatically feel comfortable in an air conditioned building, either. Some places are just too damned cold. For some reason, people think it should be 60F in the summer and 80F in the winter.
>That it uses power?
Using power is not a big deal. But when a device uses more power than anything else in your household, we're talking about an impact. Until we have these wonderful ways of "cleanly" generating electricity, this should be something to consider.
>Build a nuclear power plant and all the problems are solved.
Is this a joke? Have you never heard of nuclear waste, meltdowns, or thermal pollution? Nuclear reactors are by _no means_ a panacea. Ask your neighbor if he would mind if you built a nuclear power plant across the street from him and begin trucking in uranium. Now ask yourself where all these miracle facilities are for a technology that was born in WWII.
> In that case, you should have no problem with nuclear power plants -- otherwise you are an environmentalist nutcase
Right. Anyone that has a problem with transporting nuclear material and storing substances that will not be safe for thousands of years must be a lunatic.
Tell you what, here's a solution to the debate over where to store nuclear waste. Screw Yucca Mountain. Let's store it in New Jersey. Everyone in the Ohio Valley has to deal with the emissions from our coal-burning plants, so let's make it equal. Let those who produce the waste deal with it and a few attitudes may change.
>Two, why be in discomfort when it causes little to no environmental harm? You just haven't backed up your theory that well...
Once again, you fail to realize the correlation between power drain and environmental damage. Here's a little experiment. Crank your air conditioning down all the way and leave it there for this month. Check your next electric bill.
Gee, I wonder how all those electrons were magically produced?
>If your local power comes from coal or gas, I feel for you.
I live in the heart of both coal production and consumption. No, I'm not happy with the sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide levels, but it's at least a manageable problem. Nuclear power generation works just fine in theory, but the theorists fail to consider the time-honored phrase "Shit happens". The residents of Paducah, Kentucky found this out not long ago when they discovered that radioactive material had been leaching into the ground.
Of course, everybody should be on nuclear power, right?
>Summer also brought increases in diseases like >malaria and yellow fever.
I realize this. These problems were later dealt with using pesticides and antibiotics, which have done incredibly more for society than air conditioning. On a side note, a doctor I know once remarked that the greatest advancement for prolonging human lifespan was the purification of drinking water. This is probably a fairly accurate statement.
People in the U.S. don't avoid malaria and yellow fever with air conditioning, they avoid it by paving everything and draining the swamps. Assuredly, these problems would not make a comeback if every unit were turned off for a summer.
Yes, you would be wrong. I live in Lexington, KY. It gets hot as hell here.
The people that die are the elderly (no, I'm not recommending we deprive them of air conditioning) and the young. Children die when they get locked in cars with no ventilation. That's a different story altogether.
This is probably a pretty unpopular comment to make to a crowd of geeks in the heat of summer, but I'll say it anyways. While air conditioning is a great scientific and engineering achievement, I'm not sure that it's been a great advantage to society. It's done very little to improve the quality of life for humans and quite a bit to degrade it. I am by no means an avid environmentalist, yet anyone can recognize all the damage caused by freon and the tremendous strain that condensors place on the power grid.
What amazes me most is how Americans have begun to view air conditioning as a "necessity". Are we insane? The necessities in life are food, oxygen, and heat in climates with extreme cold. Nevertheless, the petroleum supplies are depleted at an increasing rate so that people can be more comfortable as they sit in traffic with the A/C on full blast.
Yes, it's a nice invention. Hospitals can benefit tremendously from it. But it's nowhere near a necessity and if humans would tolerate a little discomfort, the Earth might be in much better shape.
I think I addressed the causes earlier when I said the primary problem is lack of willpower and laziness. Sounds like a pretty direct statement of cause to me. The moral language bit, however, is completely offtopic and I'm clueless as to how that post can be construed as such.
The cause and effect issue is fine, but I'd spend considerably less time contemplating it and more time acting. Any significant, valid cause has already been thought of and you aren't going to contribute anything. This isn't the microprocessor industry. Creative thought may yield a few more fad diets, but once again, stick to the old methods of proper diet and exercise. Let's see, eating crappy food and leading a sedentary lifestyle will make you fat. Could it be that laziness is a cause for sitting the couch and watching T.V.? Or maybe lack of willpower is responsible for the purchase of those candy bars? These are not new concepts.
I'm not telling people that I think everybody should be like me. I'm saying there are choices that have to be made, like whether you want to keep a steady supply of Oreos and Breyer's ice cream in the house or put that money away for your child's college education. This is not moral language, it's just basic financial and health sense that many choose not to heed. And for the record, I abhor moral advice coming from anyone other than close family, thus I don't give it. Food and morality? Give me a break. Maybe if you're Jewish or Hindu.
I'll agree that people learn eating habits early on and tend to maintain them. However, the pretense that "survivor mode + stress + asymetric information = bad foods" is silly. The only reason people eat poorly is sheer laziness and lack of willpower. Yes, this is likely grounds for me to be considered a troll, but I've come from a similar background and I find it hard to extend sympathy. I was raised in a family hovering above the poverty level in the middle of Kentucky, which by all rights should doom me to smoking and obesity. Neither of those problems caught on.
What I find hardest to believe is that overweight people are in need of "proper advice or information" to help overcome their problem. Ask anybody what healthy food is and I guarantee they can list things like fruits and vegetables. This is not uncommon knowledge. It's essentially like smoking-- sure they know it's bad, but changing requires effort and going against the norm. Oh, and quit falling for fads. There is no miracle pill or magical set of electroshock therapy that will make you look great while you sit on the couch. Do the things that nobody likes, such as exercise and eating right, and I guarantee results. It's a simple concept: If calories in are less than calories out, then weightloss occurs.
The final issue I have with your argument irritates me above all others. Anybody that is poor and is truly in survivor mode should not be buying junk food. It's the reason they never get out of poverty and why America is so deep in debt. People cannot afford to be nickel and dimed when they buy Doritos and Coca-Cola. Buying all that unhealthy food costs money (if you don't believe me, compare the price of Doritos to pinto beans) and you've gotta eat some things that taste like crap if you ever want to get anywhere. The world is not a comfortable, caring place. The choice is willpower or poverty and obesity. Exercise a little, eat right, and just toughen up. Parents can make things harder for us but we are by no means slaves to our backgrounds. I'm not sure who to attribute it to, but the quote I'm looking for is "Wallowing in mud is not a way to get yourself clean."
I'll agree that CD-R drives have definitely become a commodity, but for the power user it still isn't to the point that "a drive is a drive". If you intend on making full use of that drive, it still pays to stick with a reputable vendor such as Plextor or TDK. For example, some drives are much better at others at backing up copy-protected games. Even the firmware revision can mean the difference between a successful copy and a coaster.
Plus, when it comes to audio CD's, any audiophile will vouch for the black tray and optimized power circuitry on the Plextor for reducing burn errors. In the end, if backing up data and burning the occasional audio CD is all you do, then by all rights "a drive is a drive". Buy the cheapest one you find. However, when it comes to making that burner sweat with ripping CD's, backing up games, or producing high quality audio.. spend the extra cash and buy a big name.
And yes, I do think burning a picture on a CD is a gimmick. But how fun would a geek's life be if all his pursuits had to be productive? =)
Ahh, looks like the MPAA has found a novel new way to plug the "analog hole"-- just get rid of the analog devices! What a relief. Now I can rest assured that the industry will be making the money they deserve, selling those copy-proof DVDs.
All your VCR are belong to us!
Did you fail high school english? I would recommend actually reading the entire post before automatically hitting reply and karma whoring. The statement "Wal-Mart isn't really rooted in the technology industry" is 100% accurate if you read carefully. Being rooted in the industry and being powered by new technology are two ENTIRELY different things. From the standpoint of sales, which is what's being discussed, Wal-Mart is about as dependent on computer sales as Microsoft is on the price of potatoes. Anyone that doesn't believe this can check Wal-Mart's steady growth rate throughout the recent tech slump.
Yes, as you pointed out, they have an advanced framework powering their business. But so does almost any gigantic, successful company. This is remarkable, but has nothing to do with their risk involved in selling PCs.
One thing I think people often forget to consider is the familiarity the sysadmin has with administering his particular distro. With the exception of a few, even the some of the most hardcore Linux zealots cut their teeth on Windows before switching to Linux. Thus, no matter how secure an OS is, it's only as good as the person running it-- and the majority of the population is better at running Windows. I think that the open source nature and sheer simplicity (in design, anyways) of Linux lends itself to being a much more capable performer, given an experienced user. It just happens to take a lot more time and effort to patch, recompile, reinstall, and reboot than it does to download and execute the latest patch from Microsoft. And of course, being geeks, we have the burden of upholding one of Larry Wall's three sacred virtues... laziness. ;)
First of all, it's quite humorous to see that nowhere in the article does it mention implications caused by rolling your windows down. And what kind of havoc would a convertible wreak on a sensor that's calculating miniscule amounts of ethanol? Hmm..
But as for the part about being a designated driver, I can't stand the contradictions they send out. In my town, we always got the lectures in high school that went "If you drink, have someone else drive you home." However, The Pig always neglected to mention the second part of that statement.. Have someone else drive you home so we can bust your ass for public intoxication. I've seen friends riding around in the back seat with a perfectly sober driver hauled into the drunk tank. I'm not sure I see the crime in riding around drunk in the back of someone's car.. sure, it's not the best way to live out your life but you aren't gonna kill anybody. So thanks to our friends at TCU, we have drunks riding around with their windows down and people with designated drivers getting thrown in the clink. God bless America.