Let me get this straight... You all bitch and moan when Katrina hits and the federal government does not step in to help. But one reason that federal governement does not help at that time is that it can't send federal troops into Louisiana without that state's permission.
The federal leader is villified eight ways to Sunday for his lack of participation. So he gets passed a bill which does grant him the right to act with troops in just such an emergency as the people seem to have demanded he should have done in the first place.
And then you bitch again!
Geesus, get a clue. The federal government shouldn't have this new right AND it shouldn't be expected to help with disasters such as Katrina which are primarily a local state issue. And yes... I do believe this; go ahead label me cruel and incompassionate; I've just thought out a situation logically whereas others react with what makes them feel good. I live in California on top of primary earthquake zones. I'm *EXPECTING* a disasterous earthquake in my lifetime. Gulf coast residents and leaders are idiots if they don't similarly expect hurricane disasters and adequately prepare for it. I expect my state and county governments to be planning and saving for earthquakes and it is their responsibility to handle it; not the federal government.
I'm still waiting for people to wake up and realize that we're NOT suppose to have a large and powerful federal government. That it's NOT supposed to be responsible for the properity and welfare if its citizens. It's suppose to be a federation of sovereign states who, aside from basic inalienable human rights and military protection against foreign aggressors. take care of themselves. That people are expected to take care of themselves too.
As long as we continue to vote for socialist politicians of the ilk we have been for the past 100 years then you get exactly this... A loss of rights, of freedoms, of control and you support and encourage inefficiency, waste and sloth in everyone.
But don't worry. There is an end coming... You just won't like it; but you will pay for it and you will pay for it with every last penny you have.
Either do it better, find a market with enough demand or just simply get out of the way.
Tell me... why should we NOT sell cheaper agricultural products to africa? Just so an African farmer
can be employed? Do you realize in that case that you might be allowing a single person to flourish
while punishing everybody else who is forced to pay more for their food than if you were there??
Subsidies or not, we are supplying the same, or better, product cheaper and there isn't a valid
reason not to do so.
And, yes, I gree with you. We should abolish subsidies... ALL of them, every last one. Get rid of
all the entitlements too while you're at it. But that is all a different rant.
Your comments are valid and insightful. And while I agree with most of it here a couple of quick responses...
Five *years*... YEARS! I do not have that kind of time.
It sounds like you make money from the presence of your web pages. This justifies the additional effort as you get compensated for the time to make them compliant and the removal of your pages would significantly reduce your revenue. I do not get compensated and the removal actually boosts my revenue (in terms of gained time).
Yes. I may be confusing "completed understanding" and "complete understanding contained there". My interpretation doesn't matter. It's the interpretation that the jury decides that will matter. I am not going to risk my career or finances on the whim of lawyers and 12 jurors (I am highly biased against jurors because I think they are generally the twelve stupidest people who can be easily manipulated that the lawyers can find.)
My slides are highly technical in many cases and rely on graphical illustrations and graphs to convey specific and subtle concepts. (Behavior of Red-Black or B-tree data structures during insertion and deletion for example. What can be illustrated in half a dozen graphical pictures would take me something like 20 narrative descriptive pages of text. Even then I doubt I could accurately describe and convey the exact same meaning as the illustrations do. As a result I would not be producing compliant pages.
The original position of my university was: "You must do this and NO we don't provide ANY resources to help you do this. It is your responsibility." We do not have any content management systems. We are a huge bureaucracy that wastes most of our revenue on presidential salaries and union bosses and uninformed decisions. We can't agree on a single content management system and there wouldn't be any money to fund it anyways. (The CSU spent 408 MILLION dollars on just a PeopleSoft employment and student management system and it SUCKS. I could have hand selected 100 of the best CSU programming students, managed them and paid each of them a million dollars and provided a better service at a quarter of the cost.) Now we are told that there are some "templates" available and that the Center on Disabilities has people to help with translation. Well, the templates don't match or support my content, almost all of the science or math disciplines either. And my colleague talked with the center on disabilities. There is less help there than you think since ADA compliance is not their official responsibilities and there is no way they employ anybody that could understand my material sufficiently well enough to help translate it into a compliant nature.
Basically, I'm glad it is working for you. That your effort yielded a positive return is excellent. Unfortunately I do not see it becoming feasible for me to provide compliance for the foreseeable future. I'm not resisting being compliant. It's just not
possible at this time for my content.
I still assert the federal law is stupid. It is worded in such a fashion that anybody manufacturing and selling bicycles must make
their product accessible to quadriplegics. The law is well intentioned but stupidily enacted with little to no intelligence to make it feasible and functional. My university's draconian policy makes it even more impoosible to comply with.
What???!!! I vote not to subsidize this. In fact I vote to abolish all other current government subsidies. I vote that I will take care of myself and my own trash on my own dime by providing equivalent value to others and that everybody else should do the same thing!
See, the problem with government and the current public is that there exist people who think "Oh, the government will pay for it", when in fact a government has no money to pay for anything. What you really meant to say was:
The cost-effectiveness still concerns me, but [forcibly taking money from everybody] can take care of that.
I'm already forced to put up with this nonsense for protection, healthcare, wages, food costs, transportation, housing and education as well as stupid and/or lazy people. Let's start by not adding trash management to it as well (though I'm pretty certain it already has been.)
This post is absolutely no surprise to me. In 1998 it became federal law that ADA compliance was mandatory. The problem is that the ADA was written with such absolute language that there is no hope for compliance because there is no room in the wording for any sort of reasoning. (As my roommate put it "it is worded to require fluffy bunnies and unicorns.")
I am a university professor. I teach computer science. It is routine for my students to request that I publish my lecture slides on line. In the past I have done this to accommodate different modes of learning that exist in any population of students. There are certain university mandated rules that I must follow in order to accommodate our disabled students, such as allowing for sign language translators present during my lectures if a deaf student requests it. The university however does not, and cannot, mandate that I provide lecture materials via a web page. In fact I don't even have to have a web page.
However, If I do choose to present a web page then, like Target it must be ADA compliant. Which for scientific and musical disciplines is nearly impossible to achieve. Now, it gets worse. CSU Long Beach is currently being sued for non-compliant web pages. My university has just established an administrative policy that was dictated by our president's office and not voted on by any faculty governance, a policy to prevent such litigation against our university from being successful. That policy reads, and I quote:
Any person using any kind of standard Web browsing technology must be able to visit any site and get a full and complete understanding of the information contained there, as well as have the full and complete ability to interact with the site
Read that and parse it carefully... Now we can actually be sued by a non-diasabled student who went through my class and fails due to lack of effort, stupidity or both. They can argue that they studied from my web page and failed to "get a full and complete understanding of the information". But it gets worse still. See the university has a mandatory policy. So technically it will be difficult to sue the university since they had a policy to prevent such "negligence". But in our hypothetical example my slides didn't meet policy. So I would be considered personally negligent and I could be sued personally by the student.
So I have two choices:
I can make my pages fully compliant with the federal law and the university policy. I already work more than 40 hours a week, I do not understand the legal nuances of the federal law or the university policy and I do not know enough about web page development to reliably make 100% compliant pages nor do I known much about the breadth and depth of human disabilities or how to accommodate them effectively. My faculty responsibilities do not include, and I am not paid an additional salary, to learn and implement such knowledge, but
I can simply remove my web pages. When students ask if I can publish my lecture notes on line I will simply say "No." Problem solved to everbody's legal satisfaction.
So the instant anybody requests that I make my pages more compliant I will select 2. I will have choice 2 fully and permanently implemented within 30 seconds of the request. It takes the least amount of effort, saves me time each week and eliminates the greatest amount of risk, both personal and corporate. So no more web pages the instant anybody on campus asks me to make them more compliant.
Yes. I know how stupid this is. Yes, out of 100 students each semester I have maybe one, or two, disabled students and I am in effect punishing the other 98% of my students. This irks me a great deal because I try to be as open and helpful with my students as possible. But I cannot afford a personal lawsuit nor will I risk losing my job on the grounds of providing non-compliant pages that I am not required to provide in the first place.
To the law makers: Grow a logical, reasonable lobe in your brain. Write laws that make sense and that the public has some hope of complying with.
And if you find that it actually was you who were wrong all this time will you apologize for wasting all the funds, effort and resources that could have provided more effective solutions for problems known to exist today? such as cancer, birth defects, energy, poverty, or intolerance?
Probably not.
I say "screw you" for prematurely blaming a huge group of people for something that may or may not happen twenty years from now especially since you personally know so little about the topic you are discussing. (I'm not an expert either; but I didn't use my ignorance to feel superior to others by placing them on a guilt trip.) I'm at least open minded enough to realize that all of the experts have not reached a reasonable concensus on this issue and the "skeptics" here have also brought up valid points worth researching and debating rather than the fallacy you put forth.
I pretty much hate all advertisements based on the fact that they are almost always lies and they use every phallacy in the book to knowingly trick people. TiVo is my friend.
I'm ok with somebody highlighting positive qualities of their product while downplaying negative ones. It's just a fact that all products have good and bad points and you're lucky if your good points vastly outwieght the bad ones and you've got some hard marketing to do if you're faced with the opposite scenario.
My pet peeves is that advertisers don't highlight and downplay. They actually use logical fallacies to trick people into believing that a negative doesn't exist, is actually a positive or that all products share a worse negative. And they do this knowingly or negligently.
Take the "Get a Mac" commercials. First off. Why is one of the characters dressed drastically different from the other??? One is dressed in stereotypical corporate fashion while the other in stereotypical hip, loose fashion. This has nothing to do with the capabilities of the products compared. But it was clearly an intentional selection. Why?... In order to have the consumer identify the products as having all the negatives we typically associate with corporate america and the positives of youth and freedom in a favorable fashion for Macs. But I know lots of corporate people who use and love Macs for business purposes and I know lots of artists who use PC platforms for creative work. Why not swap age and wardrobe on the two actors and play the exact same commercial?? shouldn't make a difference should it?
second: Why is the Mac proponent sharp and pithy while the PC champion is rather dull witted? Again, they are trying to send the message "you'll be stupid if you buy a PC" which has absolutely nothing to do with the actual merits of the product. Yes. People come in a variety of flavors including stupid and smart. I've seen plenty of stupid people using Macs and a lot of smart people using PC platforms. Again, why not switch the intelligence/insight capabilities of the two characters?
Third: Everybody seems to be all gung-ho about the humor of these ads. Does making a funny ad make the product any better? No. But they rely on this to get you to buy a product. Hey I like commercials with hot, semi-naked women in them too, but that doesn't make the product better; neither does a funny ad.
fourth: They rely on common ignorance in order to propogate lies. Macs can do spreadsheets just fine and PCs can do graphics just as well. I have yet to see anything done on a Mac that I can't do on a Windows machine. Nothing. In fact you can usually get whatever software package you want for either platform. For software not made for both there is generally a suitably similar alternative. And for every instance where you can say: "But not this package/application!!" I can find you an example for the other platform. Basically, I can do graphics, spreadsheets and application development on both platforms equally well. But the commercials specifically imply that you cannot. relying on the ignorance of the consumer to agree. And I hate people who rely on a person's ignorance in order to manipulate them into a desired behavior. This is no different than con-artists.
So, no. I don't really find these commercials particularly insightful, helpful, ethical or even funny. But that is my opinion of almost all advertising and marketing
Thank you for your excellent work especially given the historical, unprofessional nature of your opponents. Most of/. appreciates your work and would like to assist you.
Should you ever wish to resume your pursuit of excellence please just post a list of your immature opponents in this forum and I'm pretty sure that, through the use of methods they are familiar with, they will be quickly and quietly rendered incapable of bothering you, your family or your friends anymore./p>
Ummm.... How about "destruction of public property". Possibly a US-only law. But the point is: They did describe it in a reasonably precise manner. (IANA but "Anti Social Behavior" may be the English equivalent.)
And boo hoo. poor children... Old enough to know not to damage public property. Boo hoo.. poor parents. Old enough to know to teach your kids not to destroy public property.
But maybe I'm truly evil... I'd like to see people locked up for throwing their damn cigarette butts all over my portion of the world. Similarly I would like my portion of the public trees protected from vandals too.
So I saw AoE about a month ago and I started a graduate thesis project for analyzing and specifying different mail server architectures for my institution. The institution currently has 330Gig of mail storage and complains that this is too much usage when somebody complains their quota is too small.
I don't have the bucks to buy a terabyte of storage to prove them wrong but I do have a lab with 16 computers. So we recently ran the vblade servers on 10 of the machines and exported a 130Gig partition from each machine. Then we took one of the other machines to use as a file server. It builds a RAID6/dev/md0 out of the 10 exported/dev/etherd/eX.Y devices and then exports/dev/md0 via NFS (currently). The result is a terabyte mail storage that can suffer the loss of any two vblade machines (loss of the single NFS server and central ethernet switch is still a problem.)
How well does it work? Well we just set it up so results aren't conclusive but bonnie results show the various disk operations to the/dev/md0 device is almost identical to a raw local partition. Nice.
An iSCSI killer? no, different purposes. But AoE is excellent and has it's place. A very good place.
Since a lot of this thread deals with BSG raising the bar and how it outclasses B5 I'd like to weigh in on the issue.
BSG is good. I like it. My TiVo likes it too. It has raised the bar. (Though I think the script is terrible and discontinous and the acting isn't very good. But overall concept and production are excellent and there isn't always a status quo.
Take for example the season finale... "And a year later...". BAH! lazy writers!.
But B5, now talk about raising the bar. It had a comprehensive five year plot (sure, a few episodes were sidetracks/deadends), No status quos, way deeper characters than BSG has, fantastic CGI with realistic physics and all the actors were good if not outstanding.
When people are talking about BSG raising the bar you have to realize that it aired ten years after B5 (almost 10% of the time film has been around and 25% of the time computers have been common.) Does BSG have better CGI? Better production? sure. But B5 essentially did all of what BSG does, did it ten years earlier and did it before anyone else thought of it; at least all in one show.
While BSG may be an evolution in Sci-Fi, B5 was a revolution.
My simply opinion is she killed HP. If for no other reason than during the Compaq merger it was decided that the design and manufacture of HP calculators would be killed off.
These calculators were/are fantastic. I especially liked the 16C during high school for its simplicity and ruggedness. Still wish I had it but I lost it somewhere. I also owned a 28S and liked it for its advanced features, basic graphing and the fact that it was a clamshell which protected it from the oils, chips and other environment contaminents from the machining environment that I worked in a lot of the time back then. Also wish I still had it but, again, I lost it somewhere during the last ten years.
But HP just makes basic crud now along the lines of Dell, Gateway or Lexmark.
To survive the next hundred years we have to have a system that rewards and punishes the proper people instead of the near opposite that we have now. For not working you get welfare, For not following laws you get free room, food, physical therapy and education. For not taking care of yourself properly you get free medicaid.
The problem is that none of this is free. It requires resources to provide this and that means real costs in terms of money, energy and effort that has to come from somewhere. Now it's fine if somebody out there who feels bad for such people, or guilty, or whatever, chooses to supply money, energy or effort to whomever they wish. But what we do right now is punish everybody regardless of what they would choose. We mandate that everybody else pays for such resources even though they're the ones who make the intelligent choices and sacrifices that led them to being able to provide their own resources. Oh, you're like me? You can take care of yourself... You don't want to carry everybody else's burdens on top of your own and give them an easy ride compared to yours... Too bad. You, like me, are their slave. And yes, it's slavery. We are being forced to spend at least one third of our productive time working for no pay to ourselves.
And the problem is that the people that are incapable of taking care of themselves are consuming more than the rest of us can possibly provide. And they're demanding more every single day.
So what needs to be done? Simple. Stop promising to provide all this crap unless it's earned. Nobody gets anything unless they pay for it somehow. Do people die under such a system as I propose? Yes. Lots of them. Millions actually. Smokers die because they have substantial medical needs later that they cannot afford. Drug addicts die because there won't be any free rehabilitation centers and services for them. Old people die because they failed to save enough money when they were young and productive. Millions, at first. (and by the way last I checked, everybody still dies some time so don't pretend like this is some horrible outcome that could have been prevented.)
But I see the question as flawed. "What do we have to do to survive the next one hundred years?" is short sighted. Hell, survive the next 100? Simple. drain the earth. Consume all the oil as fast as you want. Be as inefficient as possible. Deforest and extinguish as many plants and species as you require for what you need now. Pump as much pollutants in to the air as you need to in order to produce what you need now, in just this moment. Yep, the earth will last the 100 years you requested.
The real question is "What do we have to do to survive indefinitely?" (barring such items as the death of the sun.) And to do that we have to have sustainable resources, economics, politics and policies. Taking from those who have to give to those who have not does not fit this model. Oh, sure you can find me a few truly unlucky people who, if given a gob of resources would flurish and use it wisely indefinitely; maybe even be able to generate a surplus to help another person. For every such person you show me I'm sure I can find a dozen stupid, lazy slobs, each of whom would happily consume wastefully the gross product of a dozen efficient, hard working people while providing nothing in return. We need to stop feeding such people and let them be weeded out from the gene pool so that what we are left with is efficient productive based people.
You're reading this and thinking... "He can't be serious, can he?" Yes... I am. Read my sig. It sums up a simple policy that goes a long way towards surviving indefinitely, let alone just the span of a single lifetime.
The description of the images snapped for me as "important" would read like:
6/21/2006, img 30048: Cute blonde
6/21/2006, img 30049: Hot Redhead
6/21/2006, img 30050: Could her skirt be any shorter?
6/21/2006, img 30051: Check her out.
6/21/2006, img 30052: Screenshot of incomplete code, yes I should get back to that.
6/21/2006, img 30053: Whoa! her legs are awesome! ...
Do I really need my depravity documented with a chronological image archive?
See the point is this... Yes, global warming is probably occurring. (If by "global warming" you mean the average measured temperature at certain locations on the globe measured over a significant period of time, say thirty years, has increased.) Then yep, I wouldn't bet against you that you could find such a location.
The news here is:
Is it caused by something mankind is doing or is it something that would have happened anyways even if the dinosaurs weren't wiped out? (and didn't become intelligent and drive to air-conditioned offices in their own fuel inefficient cars and cause the same sort of problems due to similar activity.)
Is it going to make significant global changes in a timespan so short that it makes sense to waste the amount of resources that we are currently spending on this problem?
Three can it even be corrected with reasonable resources if it needs to be?
What the climatologists are saying is: No, no and no.
There is not enough accurate evidence [yet] to indicate that it is our fault. It's equally plausible at this time that global climate change is the result of other natural factors such as magnetic field fluctuation, out-gassing from volcanoes or fluctuations in the Sun's activity. It's stupid to act as though it was our fault for two reasons. The first is that it most probably results in an ineffective and wasteful solution. Second it focuses on an invalid conclusion which distracts us from identifying the real cause. Mankind's desire to blame itself for this occurrance is, I think, I misplaced attempt to delude ourselves into thinking we are more powerful than we really are.
No, It's not a global problem. As the article points out areas that have seen changes that one would think could be the result of global warming actually haven't seen permanent change and that such changes have not occurred world wide. Thus global warming does not seem to be affecting a long term, permanent climate change. Thus it doesn't make sense to spend vast resources in a reactionary manner to "fix" a problem that may not even be there. Other areas that are classic fear tools (such as the polar ice caps) are seeing a net increase in that surface feature which is contrary to public desire/opinion/fear. Again, don't spend rediculous sums of resources on something that you aren't convinced is happening. And while you (pq) personally may be convinced, I and a host of climatologists are not and I would thank you to stop spending my money on your fantasies.
And lastly, even if it is occurring, you, me, them... we'll all be dead before it's a real problem. Yes, yes... the great good, future of mankind... even if I bought into all that propaganda crap. The resources that you encourage me to spend now to make life better for non-existent people two hundred years in the future are resources that I could spend better right now to improve somebody's life who actually needs it right now.
I am so sick of listening to how mankind is the cause of everything. How our actions are so important. Here's the deal people... We as a race of beings are totally insignificant. period. We possibly could change the climate of the world in a rapid fashion if that was the sole goal of all humanity. But one random belch of unusual solar activity or a volcanic eruption could undo all our efforts, or do the job far better, in half the amount of time. Frankly the ball of rock that we cling to, and the universe in general, does not care or notice that we exist regardless of anything that we do.
So, my point is: NO. it is not too late for this argument.
(But I really like the boat cliche, the absolute assertion and the citation of a known heavily biased publication to make for what you thought was a conclusive argument.)
I second this! Why the hell does my phone need to support smell?? What type of insecure individual needs to build a relationship with their phone?
I hated every one of these phones for several reason: Stupid technology (smell), Childish throwbacks (care-bears/pretty pony necklace), Stupid design premise (relationship/feelings with an inanimate object).
Where is the damn phone design that includes: Long battery life, excellent reception, low-cost/high-bandwidth capabilities? Durable/Rugged? Good coverage? How about a screen not made of glass so it doesn't crack? How about a god damn belt clip that doesn't eject the phone over sewer grates or concrete floors?
Seriously, exactly what "theory" do they believe they are teaching these design idiots? Hasn't any other techie had to work with these types of people before? I have and let me tell you... they're involvement doesn't help produce a product on time, on budget or with a valuable feature set. They're children with arrested development problems. They defend their style as being "creative" when it's really just the result of avoiding reality. Should you find yourself faced with one: Give them a cute, simple toy to play with, set them aside in a corner and ignore them until the product is done. Then ask them what colors it should ship in. (Slap them if their answer includes the word "Pantone")
There are a few things correct about your reply and many that aren't. The correct things are the addition of information, or extreme specific counter-examples, that I did not mention in my post such as Mr. Brazda being a qualified and highly regarded piercer or that incompetent doctors/surgeons exist. Neither of which did I rule out or deny the possibility of.
Is Mr. Brazda a qualified surgeon with a license to practice? No. As for piercing work I would agree that he might be the best and highly knowledgable in THAT field. I would probably trust him to perform piercings on myself. But he acted unethically just agreeing to perform this surgery. Is he a person qualified or equipped to diagnose and treat the injury presented by the patient? He might be delusional and believe so but a medical board would disagree. Piercing wizard... possibly. Surgeon... No.
Mr. Larratt could have documented his treatment with a decent surgeon as well. In fact it could have wound up being a much more accurate and comprehensive educational article. I know I get copies of my medical records and copies of X-rays for personal records. He could have too.
I would argue, based on his choice of treatment, that he probably does not know the extent of the risk he was taking which included loss of senesation, digits, limb or life. Maybe I'm different, I view those as risks that aren't worth going through just to provide some pictures on the web.
I did read the article. Did you? The female patient example you bring up did not have her general practioner "fuck it up" as you indicate. The surgery became more complicated than he was competent to perform and he refered her to a more competent and specialized surgeon. This was handled by the doctor in a sound, ethical and proper manner. She CHOSE to ignore that advice and left it as is. SHE fucked it up.
Doctors. I didn't say all doctors are better than anybody who isn't a doctor. Logic 101. I would suggest that in the future when an author says "mechanic" you assume they meant a decent mechanic. It's an obvious implication and you are reaching for extremes to support your weak position. I never said that Mr. Brazda wasn't a competent piercer, I said that all indications pointed to his being unqualified as a surgeon. Yes, I've seen more than my share of incompetent doctors with no talent and who are motivated solely by money. Your providing a single anecdotal example of an incompetent doctor is in no way proof that Mr. Brazda is just as good as even the average surgeon. It is up to the patient to do some research and investigation in order to evaluate the competency of a good doctor. But I'm certain that excellent, qualified surgeons can be found. One should have been sought for the problem presented but wasn't.
Again, because you can point out a handful of patients for which a cleansed wound and antibotics did not do the trick and resulted in a (possibly) worse outcome does not indicate that the method you describe of leaving the infecting agent in the wound to allow for drainage is a better choice. The piercing is a functionless foreign body. It would be generally accepted best practices to remove any such foreign body when the removal promotes proper healing and does not present a greater risk. I would further argue that the advice about how to treat an infected piercing given by the body-modifier is highly biased. They are not licensed (in the United States at least) to prescribe antibotics. Therefore, in order to maintain their reputation and the trust of their clients they are going to be biased to market a treatment that does not require prescriptions as being just as effective when it is not. Further, we aren't talking about an infected piercing are we? We're talking about infected (with complications), multiple, disintegrating, possibly migrating, toxic implants that weren't manufactured to medical standards to begin with.
Clueless? It was not a quip; it was a fact. Surgical operating rooms are a far more sterile environment than a piercing s
Never said the body-modifier was stupid. I said the patient was. Designing a tool that is useful and excellent for others does not make you competent at its use. I never ruled out the possibility of the bod-mod artist being the best at his field but he shouldn't have been doing this type of surgical correction.
I never said that the guy who wrote the article didn't run the bmezine. I still highly doubt his intelligence based on the factors presented and is choice of treatment.
You are comparing apples to oranges. Breast implants (modern silicone or saline) were developed by plastic surgeons, a group of people far more expert at developing, testing and correcting implantable products than body-modification artists. Earlier breast augmentation may have been designed and performed by far less qualified people using dangerous materials but the results were pretty atrocious. You are helping me prove my point.
Like the other reply: Check out the photos in the article. That is NOT a sterile operating room-like environment for several reasons. No surgical gowns, no respitory mask, no hair control, needlessly exposed skin. And these are just the things I can see in ONE picture. Geeeze...
I just had to reply to this thread after reading the bmezine article.
Here's the summary of my opinion: "Children do not try this at home. Hell, don't even try this at your good friends home like the original idiot did."
Frankly, this guy is an idiot. The first thing that came to my mind when seeing his fingertip was: Blood infection. Bright red, vascular looking, painful... blood infection. This is NOT something you should take to your "body-mod" friend to be "fixed". This is flat out an emergency room visit. I'm not a medical doctor but if this is a blood infection it has the ability to travel quickly, infect organs and cause death in a surprisingly rapid fashion.
This is something that needs professional medical equipment to make sure the damage is repaired properly. He's "guessing" they migrated together... He needs an X-ray, not a guess. He needs this for several reasons. To pinpoint where the damage and pieces are so they can be removed with minimal invasion instead of poking around until you've found it all. He also needs follow-up X-rays to confirm that all pieces were found and removed.
I certainly would not go to my body-mod (oh hell, let's just call a spade a spade... body-hack) for the repair. For best results I would be looking for this to be done by a vascular surgeon or neurologist so that I have the best chance of not loosing any senesitivity in my finger and preventing any vascular damage that could result in necrosis.
He needs this to be done in a sterile environment not on somebody's desk. He risks an equal or worse post-hack infection (that would sort of be like a post-surgical secondary infection but this was NOT surgery; this was an adult being stupid.)
I hope most slashdotters don't think this is cool, cause it's not.
IANAHM: While I agree a perforated cardiac muscle is nearly 100% fatal I would argue that a direct head shot is equally fatal (possibly more so).
I found this article http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0406web/shock.html about a trauma surgeon's experiences with gunshot victims in several urban areas. Most notable to support my belief are two passages:
"The thing we're looking for when we slash the chest open is a bullet injury to the heart where the bleeding has been only in a modest amount, but it's accumulating inside" the heart, Cornwell explains. "Then he's in cardiac arrest not because he's bled out, like most gunshot victims, but because the motor can't pump anymore."
If you're the surgeon at such a moment, what you do is simple yet sublime. You slash a hole in the human heart. You watch while the stopped-up blood spills out. Then you stick your finger over that slash like it's the proverbial hole in a dike, and you race to an operating room where you sew up the heart you just slashed, only by now it's thumping stronger and steadier with each stitch.
Which leads me to believe that a reasonably large number of cardiac perforations are not fatal. In fact there seems to be a routine, if slightly barbaric, method for restoring the hydraulic functionality of the heart and that the perforation does not, in itself, disable the heart.
"No new medicine or advance in surgical technique will ever save a patient with a direct gunshot wound to the head,"
And that leads me to believe that at least this trauma surgeon views such wounds as more hopeless. (Though his statement doesn't discriminate between the location of entry and exit points which I think might make a difference since a bullet entering the face at certain points has to travel through several layers of bone and much more soft tissue before damaging the central nervous system compared to an entry wound in the back of the head.)
I guess, of course, that my recommendation for hitmen (or hitwomen) for obtaining the greatest chance of success is, given sufficient time and opportunity, to perform both.
Frankly, this has got to be my least favorable argument for justifying anything...
you wouldn't even know it was going on.
It's the same as saying "You know what, I really want to take advantage of you by doing something that I know you wouldn't approve of but I'll rationalize it as ethical and avoid having to ask your permission by saying that what you don't know doesn't exist. So I can't possibly be doing anything wrong since it isn't happening."
No, nobody really wants "software as a service". What they want is a company that "services its software".
All other tangible products come with warranties these days. If it's delivered broken it is repaired at the cost of the manufacturer. Microsoft wants to push the cost of their mistakes onto the customer through a restrictive subscription model.
Software as a service is working for Google because currently they aren't limiting its use nor charging a subscription/service fee for it.
It's not just "catch up", there's a big difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me get this straight... You all bitch and moan when Katrina hits and the federal government does not step in to help. But one reason that federal governement does not help at that time is that it can't send federal troops into Louisiana without that state's permission.
The federal leader is villified eight ways to Sunday for his lack of participation. So he gets passed a bill which does grant him the right to act with troops in just such an emergency as the people seem to have demanded he should have done in the first place.
And then you bitch again!
Geesus, get a clue. The federal government shouldn't have this new right AND it shouldn't be expected to help with disasters such as Katrina which are primarily a local state issue. And yes... I do believe this; go ahead label me cruel and incompassionate; I've just thought out a situation logically whereas others react with what makes them feel good. I live in California on top of primary earthquake zones. I'm *EXPECTING* a disasterous earthquake in my lifetime. Gulf coast residents and leaders are idiots if they don't similarly expect hurricane disasters and adequately prepare for it. I expect my state and county governments to be planning and saving for earthquakes and it is their responsibility to handle it; not the federal government.
I'm still waiting for people to wake up and realize that we're NOT suppose to have a large and powerful federal government. That it's NOT supposed to be responsible for the properity and welfare if its citizens. It's suppose to be a federation of sovereign states who, aside from basic inalienable human rights and military protection against foreign aggressors. take care of themselves. That people are expected to take care of themselves too.
As long as we continue to vote for socialist politicians of the ilk we have been for the past 100 years then you get exactly this... A loss of rights, of freedoms, of control and you support and encourage inefficiency, waste and sloth in everyone.
But don't worry. There is an end coming... You just won't like it; but you will pay for it and you will pay for it with every last penny you have.
Oh. boo f*cking hoo!
Either do it better, find a market with enough demand or just simply get out of the way.
Tell me... why should we NOT sell cheaper agricultural products to africa? Just so an African farmer can be employed? Do you realize in that case that you might be allowing a single person to flourish while punishing everybody else who is forced to pay more for their food than if you were there??
Subsidies or not, we are supplying the same, or better, product cheaper and there isn't a valid reason not to do so.
And, yes, I gree with you. We should abolish subsidies... ALL of them, every last one. Get rid of all the entitlements too while you're at it. But that is all a different rant.
Your comments are valid and insightful. And while I agree with most of it here a couple of quick responses...
Basically, I'm glad it is working for you. That your effort yielded a positive return is excellent. Unfortunately I do not see it becoming feasible for me to provide compliance for the foreseeable future. I'm not resisting being compliant. It's just not possible at this time for my content.
I still assert the federal law is stupid. It is worded in such a fashion that anybody manufacturing and selling bicycles must make their product accessible to quadriplegics. The law is well intentioned but stupidily enacted with little to no intelligence to make it feasible and functional. My university's draconian policy makes it even more impoosible to comply with.
What???!!! I vote not to subsidize this. In fact I vote to abolish all other current government subsidies. I vote that I will take care of myself and my own trash on my own dime by providing equivalent value to others and that everybody else should do the same thing!
See, the problem with government and the current public is that there exist people who think "Oh, the government will pay for it", when in fact a government has no money to pay for anything. What you really meant to say was:
I'm already forced to put up with this nonsense for protection, healthcare, wages, food costs, transportation, housing and education as well as stupid and/or lazy people. Let's start by not adding trash management to it as well (though I'm pretty certain it already has been.)
This post is absolutely no surprise to me. In 1998 it became federal law that ADA compliance was mandatory. The problem is that the ADA was written with such absolute language that there is no hope for compliance because there is no room in the wording for any sort of reasoning. (As my roommate put it "it is worded to require fluffy bunnies and unicorns.")
I am a university professor. I teach computer science. It is routine for my students to request that I publish my lecture slides on line. In the past I have done this to accommodate different modes of learning that exist in any population of students. There are certain university mandated rules that I must follow in order to accommodate our disabled students, such as allowing for sign language translators present during my lectures if a deaf student requests it. The university however does not, and cannot, mandate that I provide lecture materials via a web page. In fact I don't even have to have a web page.
However, If I do choose to present a web page then, like Target it must be ADA compliant. Which for scientific and musical disciplines is nearly impossible to achieve. Now, it gets worse. CSU Long Beach is currently being sued for non-compliant web pages. My university has just established an administrative policy that was dictated by our president's office and not voted on by any faculty governance, a policy to prevent such litigation against our university from being successful. That policy reads, and I quote:
Read that and parse it carefully... Now we can actually be sued by a non-diasabled student who went through my class and fails due to lack of effort, stupidity or both. They can argue that they studied from my web page and failed to "get a full and complete understanding of the information". But it gets worse still. See the university has a mandatory policy. So technically it will be difficult to sue the university since they had a policy to prevent such "negligence". But in our hypothetical example my slides didn't meet policy. So I would be considered personally negligent and I could be sued personally by the student.
So I have two choices:So the instant anybody requests that I make my pages more compliant I will select 2. I will have choice 2 fully and permanently implemented within 30 seconds of the request. It takes the least amount of effort, saves me time each week and eliminates the greatest amount of risk, both personal and corporate. So no more web pages the instant anybody on campus asks me to make them more compliant.
Yes. I know how stupid this is. Yes, out of 100 students each semester I have maybe one, or two, disabled students and I am in effect punishing the other 98% of my students. This irks me a great deal because I try to be as open and helpful with my students as possible. But I cannot afford a personal lawsuit nor will I risk losing my job on the grounds of providing non-compliant pages that I am not required to provide in the first place.
To the law makers: Grow a logical, reasonable lobe in your brain. Write laws that make sense and that the public has some hope of complying with.
To my students: I am truly and deeply sorry.
And if you find that it actually was you who were wrong all this time will you apologize for wasting all the funds, effort and resources that could have provided more effective solutions for problems known to exist today? such as cancer, birth defects, energy, poverty, or intolerance?
Probably not.
I say "screw you" for prematurely blaming a huge group of people for something that may or may not happen twenty years from now especially since you personally know so little about the topic you are discussing. (I'm not an expert either; but I didn't use my ignorance to feel superior to others by placing them on a guilt trip.) I'm at least open minded enough to realize that all of the experts have not reached a reasonable concensus on this issue and the "skeptics" here have also brought up valid points worth researching and debating rather than the fallacy you put forth.
I pretty much hate all advertisements based on the fact that they are almost always lies and they use every phallacy in the book to knowingly trick people. TiVo is my friend.
I'm ok with somebody highlighting positive qualities of their product while downplaying negative ones. It's just a fact that all products have good and bad points and you're lucky if your good points vastly outwieght the bad ones and you've got some hard marketing to do if you're faced with the opposite scenario.
My pet peeves is that advertisers don't highlight and downplay. They actually use logical fallacies to trick people into believing that a negative doesn't exist, is actually a positive or that all products share a worse negative. And they do this knowingly or negligently.
Take the "Get a Mac" commercials. First off. Why is one of the characters dressed drastically different from the other??? One is dressed in stereotypical corporate fashion while the other in stereotypical hip, loose fashion. This has nothing to do with the capabilities of the products compared. But it was clearly an intentional selection. Why?... In order to have the consumer identify the products as having all the negatives we typically associate with corporate america and the positives of youth and freedom in a favorable fashion for Macs. But I know lots of corporate people who use and love Macs for business purposes and I know lots of artists who use PC platforms for creative work. Why not swap age and wardrobe on the two actors and play the exact same commercial?? shouldn't make a difference should it?
second: Why is the Mac proponent sharp and pithy while the PC champion is rather dull witted? Again, they are trying to send the message "you'll be stupid if you buy a PC" which has absolutely nothing to do with the actual merits of the product. Yes. People come in a variety of flavors including stupid and smart. I've seen plenty of stupid people using Macs and a lot of smart people using PC platforms. Again, why not switch the intelligence/insight capabilities of the two characters?
Third: Everybody seems to be all gung-ho about the humor of these ads. Does making a funny ad make the product any better? No. But they rely on this to get you to buy a product. Hey I like commercials with hot, semi-naked women in them too, but that doesn't make the product better; neither does a funny ad.
fourth: They rely on common ignorance in order to propogate lies. Macs can do spreadsheets just fine and PCs can do graphics just as well. I have yet to see anything done on a Mac that I can't do on a Windows machine. Nothing. In fact you can usually get whatever software package you want for either platform. For software not made for both there is generally a suitably similar alternative. And for every instance where you can say: "But not this package/application!!" I can find you an example for the other platform. Basically, I can do graphics, spreadsheets and application development on both platforms equally well. But the commercials specifically imply that you cannot. relying on the ignorance of the consumer to agree. And I hate people who rely on a person's ignorance in order to manipulate them into a desired behavior. This is no different than con-artists.
So, no. I don't really find these commercials particularly insightful, helpful, ethical or even funny. But that is my opinion of almost all advertising and marketing
Thank you for your excellent work especially given the historical, unprofessional nature of your opponents. Most of /. appreciates your work and would like to assist you.
Should you ever wish to resume your pursuit of excellence please just post a list of your immature opponents in this forum and I'm pretty sure that, through the use of methods they are familiar with, they will be quickly and quietly rendered incapable of bothering you, your family or your friends anymore./p>
Ummm.... How about "destruction of public property". Possibly a US-only law. But the point is: They did describe it in a reasonably precise manner. (IANA but "Anti Social Behavior" may be the English equivalent.)
And boo hoo. poor children... Old enough to know not to damage public property. Boo hoo.. poor parents. Old enough to know to teach your kids not to destroy public property.
But maybe I'm truly evil... I'd like to see people locked up for throwing their damn cigarette butts all over my portion of the world. Similarly I would like my portion of the public trees protected from vandals too.
So I saw AoE about a month ago and I started a graduate thesis project for analyzing and specifying different mail server architectures for my institution. The institution currently has 330Gig of mail storage and complains that this is too much usage when somebody complains their quota is too small.
I don't have the bucks to buy a terabyte of storage to prove them wrong but I do have a lab with 16 computers. So we recently ran the vblade servers on 10 of the machines and exported a 130Gig partition from each machine. Then we took one of the other machines to use as a file server. It builds a RAID6 /dev/md0 out of the 10 exported /dev/etherd/eX.Y devices and then exports /dev/md0 via NFS (currently). The result is a terabyte mail storage that can suffer the loss of any two vblade machines (loss of the single NFS server and central ethernet switch is still a problem.)
How well does it work? Well we just set it up so results aren't conclusive but bonnie results show the various disk operations to the /dev/md0 device is almost identical to a raw local partition. Nice.
An iSCSI killer? no, different purposes. But AoE is excellent and has it's place. A very good place.
Since a lot of this thread deals with BSG raising the bar and how it outclasses B5 I'd like to weigh in on the issue.
BSG is good. I like it. My TiVo likes it too. It has raised the bar. (Though I think the script is terrible and discontinous and the acting isn't very good. But overall concept and production are excellent and there isn't always a status quo.
Take for example the season finale... "And a year later...". BAH! lazy writers!.
But B5, now talk about raising the bar. It had a comprehensive five year plot (sure, a few episodes were sidetracks/deadends), No status quos, way deeper characters than BSG has, fantastic CGI with realistic physics and all the actors were good if not outstanding.
When people are talking about BSG raising the bar you have to realize that it aired ten years after B5 (almost 10% of the time film has been around and 25% of the time computers have been common.) Does BSG have better CGI? Better production? sure. But B5 essentially did all of what BSG does, did it ten years earlier and did it before anyone else thought of it; at least all in one show.
While BSG may be an evolution in Sci-Fi, B5 was a revolution.
My simply opinion is she killed HP. If for no other reason than during the Compaq merger it was decided that the design and manufacture of HP calculators would be killed off.
These calculators were/are fantastic. I especially liked the 16C during high school for its simplicity and ruggedness. Still wish I had it but I lost it somewhere. I also owned a 28S and liked it for its advanced features, basic graphing and the fact that it was a clamshell which protected it from the oils, chips and other environment contaminents from the machining environment that I worked in a lot of the time back then. Also wish I still had it but, again, I lost it somewhere during the last ten years.
But HP just makes basic crud now along the lines of Dell, Gateway or Lexmark.
To survive the next hundred years we have to have a system that rewards and punishes the proper people instead of the near opposite that we have now. For not working you get welfare, For not following laws you get free room, food, physical therapy and education. For not taking care of yourself properly you get free medicaid.
The problem is that none of this is free. It requires resources to provide this and that means real costs in terms of money, energy and effort that has to come from somewhere. Now it's fine if somebody out there who feels bad for such people, or guilty, or whatever, chooses to supply money, energy or effort to whomever they wish. But what we do right now is punish everybody regardless of what they would choose. We mandate that everybody else pays for such resources even though they're the ones who make the intelligent choices and sacrifices that led them to being able to provide their own resources. Oh, you're like me? You can take care of yourself... You don't want to carry everybody else's burdens on top of your own and give them an easy ride compared to yours... Too bad. You, like me, are their slave. And yes, it's slavery. We are being forced to spend at least one third of our productive time working for no pay to ourselves.
And the problem is that the people that are incapable of taking care of themselves are consuming more than the rest of us can possibly provide. And they're demanding more every single day.
So what needs to be done? Simple. Stop promising to provide all this crap unless it's earned. Nobody gets anything unless they pay for it somehow. Do people die under such a system as I propose? Yes. Lots of them. Millions actually. Smokers die because they have substantial medical needs later that they cannot afford. Drug addicts die because there won't be any free rehabilitation centers and services for them. Old people die because they failed to save enough money when they were young and productive. Millions, at first. (and by the way last I checked, everybody still dies some time so don't pretend like this is some horrible outcome that could have been prevented.)
But I see the question as flawed. "What do we have to do to survive the next one hundred years?" is short sighted. Hell, survive the next 100? Simple. drain the earth. Consume all the oil as fast as you want. Be as inefficient as possible. Deforest and extinguish as many plants and species as you require for what you need now. Pump as much pollutants in to the air as you need to in order to produce what you need now, in just this moment. Yep, the earth will last the 100 years you requested.
The real question is "What do we have to do to survive indefinitely?" (barring such items as the death of the sun.) And to do that we have to have sustainable resources, economics, politics and policies. Taking from those who have to give to those who have not does not fit this model. Oh, sure you can find me a few truly unlucky people who, if given a gob of resources would flurish and use it wisely indefinitely; maybe even be able to generate a surplus to help another person. For every such person you show me I'm sure I can find a dozen stupid, lazy slobs, each of whom would happily consume wastefully the gross product of a dozen efficient, hard working people while providing nothing in return. We need to stop feeding such people and let them be weeded out from the gene pool so that what we are left with is efficient productive based people.
You're reading this and thinking... "He can't be serious, can he?" Yes... I am. Read my sig. It sums up a simple policy that goes a long way towards surviving indefinitely, let alone just the span of a single lifetime.
The description of the images snapped for me as "important" would read like:
...
6/21/2006, img 30048: Cute blonde
6/21/2006, img 30049: Hot Redhead
6/21/2006, img 30050: Could her skirt be any shorter?
6/21/2006, img 30051: Check her out.
6/21/2006, img 30052: Screenshot of incomplete code, yes I should get back to that.
6/21/2006, img 30053: Whoa! her legs are awesome!
Do I really need my depravity documented with a chronological image archive?
Yeah... actually, I guess that would be nice.Get back!! He's Mine!!!
See the point is this... Yes, global warming is probably occurring. (If by "global warming" you mean the average measured temperature at certain locations on the globe measured over a significant period of time, say thirty years, has increased.) Then yep, I wouldn't bet against you that you could find such a location.
The news here is:
What the climatologists are saying is: No, no and no.
I am so sick of listening to how mankind is the cause of everything. How our actions are so important. Here's the deal people... We as a race of beings are totally insignificant. period. We possibly could change the climate of the world in a rapid fashion if that was the sole goal of all humanity. But one random belch of unusual solar activity or a volcanic eruption could undo all our efforts, or do the job far better, in half the amount of time. Frankly the ball of rock that we cling to, and the universe in general, does not care or notice that we exist regardless of anything that we do.
So, my point is: NO. it is not too late for this argument.
(But I really like the boat cliche, the absolute assertion and the citation of a known heavily biased publication to make for what you thought was a conclusive argument.)
I second this! Why the hell does my phone need to support smell?? What type of insecure individual needs to build a relationship with their phone?
I hated every one of these phones for several reason: Stupid technology (smell), Childish throwbacks (care-bears/pretty pony necklace), Stupid design premise (relationship/feelings with an inanimate object).
Where is the damn phone design that includes: Long battery life, excellent reception, low-cost/high-bandwidth capabilities? Durable/Rugged? Good coverage? How about a screen not made of glass so it doesn't crack? How about a god damn belt clip that doesn't eject the phone over sewer grates or concrete floors?
Seriously, exactly what "theory" do they believe they are teaching these design idiots? Hasn't any other techie had to work with these types of people before? I have and let me tell you... they're involvement doesn't help produce a product on time, on budget or with a valuable feature set. They're children with arrested development problems. They defend their style as being "creative" when it's really just the result of avoiding reality. Should you find yourself faced with one: Give them a cute, simple toy to play with, set them aside in a corner and ignore them until the product is done. Then ask them what colors it should ship in. (Slap them if their answer includes the word "Pantone")
Sure... but do you really need to smell the server you SSH'd into? Do you really need to build a "relationship" with your phone in order to SSH?
There are a few things correct about your reply and many that aren't. The correct things are the addition of information, or extreme specific counter-examples, that I did not mention in my post such as Mr. Brazda being a qualified and highly regarded piercer or that incompetent doctors/surgeons exist. Neither of which did I rule out or deny the possibility of.
Is Mr. Brazda a qualified surgeon with a license to practice? No. As for piercing work I would agree that he might be the best and highly knowledgable in THAT field. I would probably trust him to perform piercings on myself. But he acted unethically just agreeing to perform this surgery. Is he a person qualified or equipped to diagnose and treat the injury presented by the patient? He might be delusional and believe so but a medical board would disagree. Piercing wizard... possibly. Surgeon... No.
Mr. Larratt could have documented his treatment with a decent surgeon as well. In fact it could have wound up being a much more accurate and comprehensive educational article. I know I get copies of my medical records and copies of X-rays for personal records. He could have too.
I would argue, based on his choice of treatment, that he probably does not know the extent of the risk he was taking which included loss of senesation, digits, limb or life. Maybe I'm different, I view those as risks that aren't worth going through just to provide some pictures on the web.
I did read the article. Did you? The female patient example you bring up did not have her general practioner "fuck it up" as you indicate. The surgery became more complicated than he was competent to perform and he refered her to a more competent and specialized surgeon. This was handled by the doctor in a sound, ethical and proper manner. She CHOSE to ignore that advice and left it as is. SHE fucked it up.
Doctors. I didn't say all doctors are better than anybody who isn't a doctor. Logic 101. I would suggest that in the future when an author says "mechanic" you assume they meant a decent mechanic. It's an obvious implication and you are reaching for extremes to support your weak position. I never said that Mr. Brazda wasn't a competent piercer, I said that all indications pointed to his being unqualified as a surgeon. Yes, I've seen more than my share of incompetent doctors with no talent and who are motivated solely by money. Your providing a single anecdotal example of an incompetent doctor is in no way proof that Mr. Brazda is just as good as even the average surgeon. It is up to the patient to do some research and investigation in order to evaluate the competency of a good doctor. But I'm certain that excellent, qualified surgeons can be found. One should have been sought for the problem presented but wasn't.
Again, because you can point out a handful of patients for which a cleansed wound and antibotics did not do the trick and resulted in a (possibly) worse outcome does not indicate that the method you describe of leaving the infecting agent in the wound to allow for drainage is a better choice. The piercing is a functionless foreign body. It would be generally accepted best practices to remove any such foreign body when the removal promotes proper healing and does not present a greater risk. I would further argue that the advice about how to treat an infected piercing given by the body-modifier is highly biased. They are not licensed (in the United States at least) to prescribe antibotics. Therefore, in order to maintain their reputation and the trust of their clients they are going to be biased to market a treatment that does not require prescriptions as being just as effective when it is not. Further, we aren't talking about an infected piercing are we? We're talking about infected (with complications), multiple, disintegrating, possibly migrating, toxic implants that weren't manufactured to medical standards to begin with.
Clueless? It was not a quip; it was a fact. Surgical operating rooms are a far more sterile environment than a piercing s
Never said the body-modifier was stupid. I said the patient was. Designing a tool that is useful and excellent for others does not make you competent at its use. I never ruled out the possibility of the bod-mod artist being the best at his field but he shouldn't have been doing this type of surgical correction.
I never said that the guy who wrote the article didn't run the bmezine. I still highly doubt his intelligence based on the factors presented and is choice of treatment.
You are comparing apples to oranges. Breast implants (modern silicone or saline) were developed by plastic surgeons, a group of people far more expert at developing, testing and correcting implantable products than body-modification artists. Earlier breast augmentation may have been designed and performed by far less qualified people using dangerous materials but the results were pretty atrocious. You are helping me prove my point.
Like the other reply: Check out the photos in the article. That is NOT a sterile operating room-like environment for several reasons. No surgical gowns, no respitory mask, no hair control, needlessly exposed skin. And these are just the things I can see in ONE picture. Geeeze...
I just had to reply to this thread after reading the bmezine article.
Here's the summary of my opinion: "Children do not try this at home. Hell, don't even try this at your good friends home like the original idiot did."
Frankly, this guy is an idiot. The first thing that came to my mind when seeing his fingertip was: Blood infection. Bright red, vascular looking, painful... blood infection. This is NOT something you should take to your "body-mod" friend to be "fixed". This is flat out an emergency room visit. I'm not a medical doctor but if this is a blood infection it has the ability to travel quickly, infect organs and cause death in a surprisingly rapid fashion.
This is something that needs professional medical equipment to make sure the damage is repaired properly. He's "guessing" they migrated together... He needs an X-ray, not a guess. He needs this for several reasons. To pinpoint where the damage and pieces are so they can be removed with minimal invasion instead of poking around until you've found it all. He also needs follow-up X-rays to confirm that all pieces were found and removed.
I certainly would not go to my body-mod (oh hell, let's just call a spade a spade... body-hack) for the repair. For best results I would be looking for this to be done by a vascular surgeon or neurologist so that I have the best chance of not loosing any senesitivity in my finger and preventing any vascular damage that could result in necrosis.
He needs this to be done in a sterile environment not on somebody's desk. He risks an equal or worse post-hack infection (that would sort of be like a post-surgical secondary infection but this was NOT surgery; this was an adult being stupid.)
I hope most slashdotters don't think this is cool, cause it's not.
IANAHM: While I agree a perforated cardiac muscle is nearly 100% fatal I would argue that a direct head shot is equally fatal (possibly more so).
I found this article http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0406web/shock.html about a trauma surgeon's experiences with gunshot victims in several urban areas. Most notable to support my belief are two passages:Which leads me to believe that a reasonably large number of cardiac perforations are not fatal. In fact there seems to be a routine, if slightly barbaric, method for restoring the hydraulic functionality of the heart and that the perforation does not, in itself, disable the heart.
And that leads me to believe that at least this trauma surgeon views such wounds as more hopeless. (Though his statement doesn't discriminate between the location of entry and exit points which I think might make a difference since a bullet entering the face at certain points has to travel through several layers of bone and much more soft tissue before damaging the central nervous system compared to an entry wound in the back of the head.)
I guess, of course, that my recommendation for hitmen (or hitwomen) for obtaining the greatest chance of success is, given sufficient time and opportunity, to perform both.Sort of...
Frankly, this has got to be my least favorable argument for justifying anything...
you wouldn't even know it was going on.
It's the same as saying "You know what, I really want to take advantage of you by doing something that I know you wouldn't approve of but I'll rationalize it as ethical and avoid having to ask your permission by saying that what you don't know doesn't exist. So I can't possibly be doing anything wrong since it isn't happening."
Grrrrrr!No, nobody really wants "software as a service". What they want is a company that "services its software".
All other tangible products come with warranties these days. If it's delivered broken it is repaired at the cost of the manufacturer. Microsoft wants to push the cost of their mistakes onto the customer through a restrictive subscription model.
Software as a service is working for Google because currently they aren't limiting its use nor charging a subscription/service fee for it.
It's not just "catch up", there's a big difference.