A large part of the problem in the Explorer/Firestone fiasco was Ford telling customers to under-inflate the tires. They did this in order to compensate for a design flaw in the chassis geometry which made the vehicle more prone to roll-over.
However, as anyone who lives in a hot climate learns quickly, under-inflation causes the tire to heat up from the increased friction. If the tire gets hot enough, the layers in the tire separate, and will eventually cause a blowout. Every couple of years, the news outlets in this area will run a big story on various folks who had blowouts caused by under-inflated tires.
The evidence points to some sort of problem with the Firestone tires, but sure enough, Ford didn't get half the bitch-slapping they deserved for their part in it.
If it's such a fragile ecosystem, why are you living there? Isn't your living there doing as much harm as anything else? Human encroachment is the number 1 ecological problem. Shouldn't you and your tree-hugging friends be living cheek-by-jowl in cities to minimize ecological damage?
Um, maybe you've heard that there are cities in the desert? I happen to live in one of them.
Tree hugger? Hardly. I've got less use for them than numbskulls like those dropping vehicles on the desert. I don't mind folks using the environment, but it pisses me off when they abuse it.
Last, I don't EVER want to hear anyone driving a fat gas hog complaining about gasoline prices.
Oh I groan about it when it comes time to fill the tank, but that's just more incentive for me to keep it in the driveway. Folks look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them that I wish the government would stop fucking around in the middle east and just let the gas prices soar. It would give everyone a lot more direct incentive to save fuel, cutting down on emissions in the process.
Just in case anyone DIDNT know, one of the major reasons Americans *BUY* SUVs in the first place is because they can then buy a Luxury Vehicle and get a tax break.
Interesting statement, since I own a large SUV, and had no idea such a tax law existed.
I bought my Suburban because I do a lot of volunteer work for a couple of animal rescues, and need a vehicle that can transport several large dogs, plus any equipment/supplies I need for awareness events etc... plus tow a large trailer. I've had as many as six greyhounds plus supplies in the truck for a single run. For my part, I keep it in as good of tune as possible, and only drive it when there's no better choice.
Personally, I'm getting pretty pissed off at every bleeding heart that gives me a dirty look for having it. Or better yet, those who harangue me into defending my need for it. More and more I don't bother to explain, I just tell 'em to f-off.
As for these whack-jobs dropping vehicles into the desert, they should be prosecuted for environmental crimes. I live in the desert, it's a highly fragile ecosystem that just doesn't need any more abuse by mental midgets with weak justifications for blowing up things. The desert's already littered with tens of thousands of things that people took out to shoot up or blow up. Plus, you're just not going to get me to believe that they completely sanitized these vehicles by removing every last millileter of fuel, oil, transmission fluid, power steering fluid, engine coolant, freon, etc from the vehicle. I won't even get into the by-products from burning the vehicle that will saturate the ground for a couple hundred feet around the burn site.
But, since you have no sense, and since I'm in a bad mood, I will offer you a hint: coffee is hot, don't spill it on yourself. I like my coffee hot, but if you come over to my house you will have to sign a waiver, and don't spill it on the couch please.
I absolutely loved the Jack in the Box television commercials that were running at that time. At the bottom of the screen it said "Warning, hot coffee is hot."
Even McDonald's competitors thought the whole thing was ludicrous.
Second, why go after somebody's $100k liability coverage when you can go after a major automaker with a billion dollars in the bank?
Um, you've never been involved in a situation like this, have you? They most certainly will go for both of you.
First, no lawyer is going to leave so much as a penny behind as long as he gets a percentage of it. Second, they'll get your insurance money a lot faster than a settlement from the manufacturer, making you an attractive target for the short-term, while they go for the manufacturer in the long-term.
Oftentimes, the lack of a sales tax is the primary driver in a purchase; this is distorting the system. If the whole reason that those retailers exist is because they thrive on buyers who seek them out to avoid paying sales tax, then they are not adding a lot anyway.
Hardly. The lack of sales tax rarely offsets the shipping costs that would not have occured had the product been purchased and a brick and mortar store.
Have you ever actually programmed to the DNS protocol? If so, and you don't like the current clients (?), write your own. I've done it, it's not the easiest piece of code I've written, but it sure wasn't the most difficult either. If you've never written to the protocol, how do you know it's bad?
If things were as bad as you seem to think they are, the whole Internet system would have crumbled to rubble long ago. In reality, it has scaled amazingly well, and has been unbelievably robust.
Perhaps you should go purchase a clue, you obviously don't have one of your own.
Take 10,000 km^2 of desert, we have plenty of the stuff down in the southwest, cover it with solar cells.
Um, that's really nice, but you are apparently highly ignorant of what a desert is. A desert is not just some wasteland of sand dunes waiting to be turned into a parking lot. The Sonoran desert is covered with plant and animal life every bit as valuable as that found in the rain forests. Rather, deserts are a highly fragile ecosystem with thousands of unique species that exist nowhere else on earth. Just putting a road through a more sensitive desert area can cause huge massive damage due to changes in drainage, etc.
I'm certainly no greenpeace eco-wingnut. But I'd be one the first in line to smash every single PV panel if someone was ever actually stupid enough to try this.
Put 'em on the roof of every building you can if you could ever get the cost down far enough. But leave the desert alone, it's one of the few places we haven't completely fucked up yet.
If you got an H&R Block drone to save you money, it was an out and out miracle.
I went to them once. The drones there knew less about the tax code than I did. After paying them to screw it up, I ended up starting over from scratch and doing myself, saving $500 in the process.
Without going too much in to weight debates, maybe the point is if you're too heavy for the Segway the excercise may do you some good.
Yeah, you would think. Yet, somehow, extremely overweight people managed to get themselves classed under the ADA as handicapped, allowing them to use handicapped parking spaces so they don't have to walk so far to the store to buy their twinkies.
Weight capacity: 250 pound (110 kg) person with 75 pounds (34 kg) of cargo.
It's gonna have to do a lot better than that if it's going to succeed. Let's face it, the folks most likely to want one are those who sweat five gallons walking across the street.
The local ambulance company here just got a special ambulance for handling extremely heavy patients. (Extra-heavy rear suspension, extra-large stretcher, electric winch to pull the stretcher in, etc...) They won't even dispatch it unless the patient weighs more than 500 pounds...
The crews assigned to it hate it because they don't get to take a break all day. They run from call to call from the moment shift starts until the shift ends. Regular ambulance crews are still getting calls to handle extremely overweight patients, because there's just so damn many of them.
The way I figure it, if they don't build it to handle at least 450+ pounds, they're going to be dealing with lawsuits because they're breaking, or ADA lawsuits because it won't handle weight-challenged people.
But back on topic, am I the only one who wouldn't be seen dead driving one of these? It's so geeky in a very uncool way.
I have to disagree. The Segway is not geeky. It's something the guys in the sales and marketing departments seem to think is cool. I've yet to meet a geek who thinks it's worth its weight in dog poop.
I will agree, however, that they are seriously uncool.
Uhm, so programmers should be able to wear t-shirts and jeans while every one else is business casual (or worse, business formal)? Sorry, thankfuly, those days are over.
Maybe for you. Thankfully, some employers actually understand that what a programmer wears has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the code.
Even better, a few actually understand that when you have folks who work very hard, for long hours, and often have to fix problems at strange hours of the day, you should give them as much leeway as you can so long as it does not degrade the quality or quantity of the work done.
Hey, if you want to work for a company that treats you just like every other gear in the works, be my guest. I'd rather work for a company that values my skills, not my fashion sense. I haven't worn a dress shirt or tie at work for several years. Heck, I can't remember the last time I wore standard *shoes* to work. I usually wear sandals, though I've been known to wear ghillies or caligae.
Project management is a complete waste of time when you don't know how you're going to create the finished product. When you're doing a whole heap of things for the first time you really can't know how long it's going to take.
I think you have no idea what a real project manager does.
A project manager is not some idiot drone who does fancy graphics to tell everyone what the schedule is. A project manager is there to keep the team focused throughout the entire development cycle, including the research and specifications phase. I've had the privilege of working with a top-flight project manager. Every project he was involved in had clear specifications, came in under-schedule, under budget, with few or no mid-project changes, and had happy programmers. And most amazing of all, the end result worked, and required no post-implementation fixes.
The problems are: #1, most managers think just like you do. They think project managers are just fluff. #2, good project managers are hard to find, especially in IT, since project-management is so under-valued. The project manager I worked with spent most of his career in the aerospace industry, designing jet engines.
(Hint, aerospace corps don't always know how they're going to build something when the project starts either. But, every single project has a project manager.)
All the discussions I have had on this subject suggest to me that the people in favour of this sort of solution really aren't worried about preserving other people's rights at all.
And what rights are those?
Sorry to bust your bubble, but nobody has a right to connect to my mailserver. Not even my customers. In their case, I have a contractual obligation to them to provide the service, but it's still not a right.
I use DNS Blacklists, both public, and my own private list. On the very few occasions (two in three years) that it has impacted my clients, I have whitelisted certain addresses. These lists don't stop everything, buy they do bring the spam load down to manageable proportions.
There's only one standard list I absolutely refuse to use, and that's SpamCop's DNSBL. His methodology is so fundamentally flawed it should be a case-study in stupidity.
How do you know it's getting hacked? Under the theory of never ascribing to malice that which can be explained by incompetence...
Big Boss: Hey, sysadmin, our mail's down again, what's the problem?
Sysadmin: (Quickly alt-tabs away from Minesweeper.) Uh... it must have gotten hacked again, yeah, that's it, evil hackers are invading our email! Don't worry, we've got it handled! (Surreptitiously reaches down and presses restart button on server.)
First, the back button in IE and Mozilla has a drop-down that will show the previous 9 or so pages.
Second, there is the History button/menu, which will display a full listing broken down by site and date.
Maybe some of these "academics" should actually pull their heads out for a look at the real world now and again.
Re:From personal experience
on
Complications
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm curious if there's an additional negotiation AFTER that bill, perhaps there's an additional 80% 'hospital to insurance carrier' discount we don't hear about...
Yes, there is, though it's only about 50%.
A few years ago, I had to have surgery to repair a broken bone. The insurance company paid it, then a year later rescinded payment, So, the hospital sent me the bill. However, since it had already gone through the insurance system, it was the version of the bill that went to the insurance company. Right down at the bottom was a 50% discount for the insurance company.
This is also where I learned that the hospital administration was padding the bills. Had the anesthesiologist even given me half of the vials of medication on the bill, it would have killed me. Both the surgeon and anesthesiologist were well known to my wife and I, and flatly denied any knowledge of claiming that much medication on the bill. Seems this is the way the hospitals are "getting back" at the insurance companies for fixing prices so low on what the hospital is allowed to charge for a procedure.
Lessons learned? #1, Cash-paying customers are taking it in the shorts because of strong-arm tactics by the insurance companies. #2, if you need to pay cash on a hospital bill, especially for a surgery, have a medical professional review your bill before you pay it.
I ended up not paying the bill for two reasons. First, the insurance claim was legitimate, it wasn't my fault the hospital was stupid enough to give the money back without consulting me. Second, I told them that if I ever saw that bill again, I'd have them in court for fraud. I never heard from them again, and the charge was removed from my credit report.
Wow, Qworst sure has you trained well for low expectations.
45-60 days downtime in four years and you consider that for the most part... very reliable?
I've had cablemodem service from Cox during that same period. The longest outage was eight hours (backhoe-fade related). The average downtime per incident has been 15-30 minutes. My average annual downtime has been in the 10-12 hour range as opposed to your average of 11-15 days.
Yes, you are correct. However, that is not chemotherapy, it is radiation therapy.
It's kind of like calling a capacitor a resistor. Yes, they're both small electronic parts, and they both go on circuit boards. But they are radically different items, and are not interchangeable.
Judging by a post by the article submitter, it was the slashdot editors who decided to switch one word for the other. Apparently "chemotherapy" is a more l33t word.
Oh yeah, I'm sure you donate every dollar of your income that doesn't go to food and shelter to charity. You've never *ever* spent a single dollar on entertainment, and you only eat beans and rice. I bet you even had to borrow someone else's computer to post that message, right?
So you don't like what some folks spend on for entertainment. Big deal. I'm willing to bet you spend money for entertainment that many of us would call frivolous or stupid.
Most archetects don't use that much detail when designing a building
Please tell me you're not an architect.
Eh, I've worked with architects. Any details they add aren't usually worth the graphite they were drawn with. Architects don't actually know how to build things, and thus rarely have any concept of appropriate materials/dimensions/cost, etc. All they care about is how it looks.
It's the engineers/builders who have to transform the architect's crack-pipe hallucination into something that obeys the laws of physics, human ergonomics, and modern economics.
The guy who built this was not an architect, he's an engineer.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it would be:
if(leftFrontTire.pressure < randomVar) {
A large part of the problem in the Explorer/Firestone fiasco was Ford telling customers to under-inflate the tires. They did this in order to compensate for a design flaw in the chassis geometry which made the vehicle more prone to roll-over.
However, as anyone who lives in a hot climate learns quickly, under-inflation causes the tire to heat up from the increased friction. If the tire gets hot enough, the layers in the tire separate, and will eventually cause a blowout. Every couple of years, the news outlets in this area will run a big story on various folks who had blowouts caused by under-inflated tires.
The evidence points to some sort of problem with the Firestone tires, but sure enough, Ford didn't get half the bitch-slapping they deserved for their part in it.
If it's such a fragile ecosystem, why are you living there? Isn't your living there doing as much harm as anything else? Human encroachment is the number 1 ecological problem. Shouldn't you and your tree-hugging friends be living cheek-by-jowl in cities to minimize ecological damage?
Um, maybe you've heard that there are cities in the desert? I happen to live in one of them.
Tree hugger? Hardly. I've got less use for them than numbskulls like those dropping vehicles on the desert. I don't mind folks using the environment, but it pisses me off when they abuse it.
Last, I don't EVER want to hear anyone driving a fat gas hog complaining about gasoline prices.
Oh I groan about it when it comes time to fill the tank, but that's just more incentive for me to keep it in the driveway. Folks look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them that I wish the government would stop fucking around in the middle east and just let the gas prices soar. It would give everyone a lot more direct incentive to save fuel, cutting down on emissions in the process.
Just in case anyone DIDNT know, one of the major reasons Americans *BUY* SUVs in the first place is because they can then buy a Luxury Vehicle and get a tax break .
Interesting statement, since I own a large SUV, and had no idea such a tax law existed.
I bought my Suburban because I do a lot of volunteer work for a couple of animal rescues, and need a vehicle that can transport several large dogs, plus any equipment/supplies I need for awareness events etc... plus tow a large trailer. I've had as many as six greyhounds plus supplies in the truck for a single run. For my part, I keep it in as good of tune as possible, and only drive it when there's no better choice.
Personally, I'm getting pretty pissed off at every bleeding heart that gives me a dirty look for having it. Or better yet, those who harangue me into defending my need for it. More and more I don't bother to explain, I just tell 'em to f-off.
As for these whack-jobs dropping vehicles into the desert, they should be prosecuted for environmental crimes. I live in the desert, it's a highly fragile ecosystem that just doesn't need any more abuse by mental midgets with weak justifications for blowing up things. The desert's already littered with tens of thousands of things that people took out to shoot up or blow up. Plus, you're just not going to get me to believe that they completely sanitized these vehicles by removing every last millileter of fuel, oil, transmission fluid, power steering fluid, engine coolant, freon, etc from the vehicle. I won't even get into the by-products from burning the vehicle that will saturate the ground for a couple hundred feet around the burn site.
But, since you have no sense, and since I'm in a bad mood, I will offer you a hint: coffee is hot, don't spill it on yourself. I like my coffee hot, but if you come over to my house you will have to sign a waiver, and don't spill it on the couch please.
I absolutely loved the Jack in the Box television commercials that were running at that time. At the bottom of the screen it said "Warning, hot coffee is hot."
Even McDonald's competitors thought the whole thing was ludicrous.
Second, why go after somebody's $100k liability coverage when you can go after a major automaker with a billion dollars in the bank?
Um, you've never been involved in a situation like this, have you? They most certainly will go for both of you.
First, no lawyer is going to leave so much as a penny behind as long as he gets a percentage of it. Second, they'll get your insurance money a lot faster than a settlement from the manufacturer, making you an attractive target for the short-term, while they go for the manufacturer in the long-term.
Oftentimes, the lack of a sales tax is the primary driver in a purchase; this is distorting the system. If the whole reason that those retailers exist is because they thrive on buyers who seek them out to avoid paying sales tax, then they are not adding a lot anyway.
Hardly. The lack of sales tax rarely offsets the shipping costs that would not have occured had the product been purchased and a brick and mortar store.
Have you ever actually programmed to the DNS protocol? If so, and you don't like the current clients (?), write your own. I've done it, it's not the easiest piece of code I've written, but it sure wasn't the most difficult either. If you've never written to the protocol, how do you know it's bad?
If things were as bad as you seem to think they are, the whole Internet system would have crumbled to rubble long ago. In reality, it has scaled amazingly well, and has been unbelievably robust.
Perhaps you should go purchase a clue, you obviously don't have one of your own.
Take 10,000 km^2 of desert, we have plenty of the stuff down in the southwest, cover it with solar cells.
Um, that's really nice, but you are apparently highly ignorant of what a desert is. A desert is not just some wasteland of sand dunes waiting to be turned into a parking lot. The Sonoran desert is covered with plant and animal life every bit as valuable as that found in the rain forests. Rather, deserts are a highly fragile ecosystem with thousands of unique species that exist nowhere else on earth. Just putting a road through a more sensitive desert area can cause huge massive damage due to changes in drainage, etc.
I'm certainly no greenpeace eco-wingnut. But I'd be one the first in line to smash every single PV panel if someone was ever actually stupid enough to try this.
Put 'em on the roof of every building you can if you could ever get the cost down far enough. But leave the desert alone, it's one of the few places we haven't completely fucked up yet.
oil elected george bush... are you suprised that SUV gas mileage has only been mandated to improve 1.5 mpg?
Absolutely! After all, Clinton and Gore mandated much higher standards than...
Oh, wait, never mind.
If you got an H&R Block drone to save you money, it was an out and out miracle.
I went to them once. The drones there knew less about the tax code than I did. After paying them to screw it up, I ended up starting over from scratch and doing myself, saving $500 in the process.
Without going too much in to weight debates, maybe the point is if you're too heavy for the Segway the excercise may do you some good.
Yeah, you would think. Yet, somehow, extremely overweight people managed to get themselves classed under the ADA as handicapped, allowing them to use handicapped parking spaces so they don't have to walk so far to the store to buy their twinkies.
Logic has nothing to do with social reality.
Weight capacity: 250 pound (110 kg) person with 75 pounds (34 kg) of cargo.
It's gonna have to do a lot better than that if it's going to succeed. Let's face it, the folks most likely to want one are those who sweat five gallons walking across the street.
The local ambulance company here just got a special ambulance for handling extremely heavy patients. (Extra-heavy rear suspension, extra-large stretcher, electric winch to pull the stretcher in, etc...) They won't even dispatch it unless the patient weighs more than 500 pounds...
The crews assigned to it hate it because they don't get to take a break all day. They run from call to call from the moment shift starts until the shift ends. Regular ambulance crews are still getting calls to handle extremely overweight patients, because there's just so damn many of them.
The way I figure it, if they don't build it to handle at least 450+ pounds, they're going to be dealing with lawsuits because they're breaking, or ADA lawsuits because it won't handle weight-challenged people.
But back on topic, am I the only one who wouldn't be seen dead driving one of these? It's so geeky in a very uncool way.
I have to disagree. The Segway is not geeky. It's something the guys in the sales and marketing departments seem to think is cool. I've yet to meet a geek who thinks it's worth its weight in dog poop.
I will agree, however, that they are seriously uncool.
Uhm, so programmers should be able to wear t-shirts and jeans while every one else is business casual (or worse, business formal)? Sorry, thankfuly, those days are over.
Maybe for you. Thankfully, some employers actually understand that what a programmer wears has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the code.
Even better, a few actually understand that when you have folks who work very hard, for long hours, and often have to fix problems at strange hours of the day, you should give them as much leeway as you can so long as it does not degrade the quality or quantity of the work done.
Hey, if you want to work for a company that treats you just like every other gear in the works, be my guest. I'd rather work for a company that values my skills, not my fashion sense. I haven't worn a dress shirt or tie at work for several years. Heck, I can't remember the last time I wore standard *shoes* to work. I usually wear sandals, though I've been known to wear ghillies or caligae.
Project management is a complete waste of time when you don't know how you're going to create the finished product. When you're doing a whole heap of things for the first time you really can't know how long it's going to take.
I think you have no idea what a real project manager does.
A project manager is not some idiot drone who does fancy graphics to tell everyone what the schedule is. A project manager is there to keep the team focused throughout the entire development cycle, including the research and specifications phase. I've had the privilege of working with a top-flight project manager. Every project he was involved in had clear specifications, came in under-schedule, under budget, with few or no mid-project changes, and had happy programmers. And most amazing of all, the end result worked, and required no post-implementation fixes.
The problems are: #1, most managers think just like you do. They think project managers are just fluff. #2, good project managers are hard to find, especially in IT, since project-management is so under-valued. The project manager I worked with spent most of his career in the aerospace industry, designing jet engines.
(Hint, aerospace corps don't always know how they're going to build something when the project starts either. But, every single project has a project manager.)
All the discussions I have had on this subject suggest to me that the people in favour of this sort of solution really aren't worried about preserving other people's rights at all.
And what rights are those?
Sorry to bust your bubble, but nobody has a right to connect to my mailserver. Not even my customers. In their case, I have a contractual obligation to them to provide the service, but it's still not a right.
I use DNS Blacklists, both public, and my own private list. On the very few occasions (two in three years) that it has impacted my clients, I have whitelisted certain addresses. These lists don't stop everything, buy they do bring the spam load down to manageable proportions.
There's only one standard list I absolutely refuse to use, and that's SpamCop's DNSBL. His methodology is so fundamentally flawed it should be a case-study in stupidity.
How do you know it's getting hacked? Under the theory of never ascribing to malice that which can be explained by incompetence...
Big Boss: Hey, sysadmin, our mail's down again, what's the problem?
Sysadmin: (Quickly alt-tabs away from Minesweeper.) Uh... it must have gotten hacked again, yeah, that's it, evil hackers are invading our email! Don't worry, we've got it handled! (Surreptitiously reaches down and presses restart button on server.)
This is news?
First, the back button in IE and Mozilla has a drop-down that will show the previous 9 or so pages.
Second, there is the History button/menu, which will display a full listing broken down by site and date.
Maybe some of these "academics" should actually pull their heads out for a look at the real world now and again.
I'm curious if there's an additional negotiation AFTER that bill, perhaps there's an additional 80% 'hospital to insurance carrier' discount we don't hear about...
Yes, there is, though it's only about 50%.
A few years ago, I had to have surgery to repair a broken bone. The insurance company paid it, then a year later rescinded payment, So, the hospital sent me the bill. However, since it had already gone through the insurance system, it was the version of the bill that went to the insurance company. Right down at the bottom was a 50% discount for the insurance company.
This is also where I learned that the hospital administration was padding the bills. Had the anesthesiologist even given me half of the vials of medication on the bill, it would have killed me. Both the surgeon and anesthesiologist were well known to my wife and I, and flatly denied any knowledge of claiming that much medication on the bill. Seems this is the way the hospitals are "getting back" at the insurance companies for fixing prices so low on what the hospital is allowed to charge for a procedure.
Lessons learned? #1, Cash-paying customers are taking it in the shorts because of strong-arm tactics by the insurance companies. #2, if you need to pay cash on a hospital bill, especially for a surgery, have a medical professional review your bill before you pay it.
I ended up not paying the bill for two reasons. First, the insurance claim was legitimate, it wasn't my fault the hospital was stupid enough to give the money back without consulting me. Second, I told them that if I ever saw that bill again, I'd have them in court for fraud. I never heard from them again, and the charge was removed from my credit report.
Wow, Qworst sure has you trained well for low expectations.
... very reliable?
45-60 days downtime in four years and you consider that for the most part
I've had cablemodem service from Cox during that same period. The longest outage was eight hours (backhoe-fade related). The average downtime per incident has been 15-30 minutes. My average annual downtime has been in the 10-12 hour range as opposed to your average of 11-15 days.
Oh yeah, your service is very reliable.
We'll just have one of our Congressional whores write us a bill making it legal for us to take customers' money and give them nothing.
Um, somehow I don't see anyone in Congress being willing to allow someone else to compete with their monopoly.
Yes, you are correct. However, that is not chemotherapy, it is radiation therapy.
It's kind of like calling a capacitor a resistor. Yes, they're both small electronic parts, and they both go on circuit boards. But they are radically different items, and are not interchangeable.
Judging by a post by the article submitter, it was the slashdot editors who decided to switch one word for the other. Apparently "chemotherapy" is a more l33t word.
Time for a SERIOUS priority check.
Oh yeah, I'm sure you donate every dollar of your income that doesn't go to food and shelter to charity. You've never *ever* spent a single dollar on entertainment, and you only eat beans and rice. I bet you even had to borrow someone else's computer to post that message, right?
So you don't like what some folks spend on for entertainment. Big deal. I'm willing to bet you spend money for entertainment that many of us would call frivolous or stupid.
Friggin hypocrite.
Eh, I've worked with architects. Any details they add aren't usually worth the graphite they were drawn with. Architects don't actually know how to build things, and thus rarely have any concept of appropriate materials/dimensions/cost, etc. All they care about is how it looks.
It's the engineers/builders who have to transform the architect's crack-pipe hallucination into something that obeys the laws of physics, human ergonomics, and modern economics.
The guy who built this was not an architect, he's an engineer.