IRiver just put out a great 1-G player with Ogg support...
...wait for it...
...that doesn't use USB mass storage and instead only uses the proprietary MPT only available on Widnows XP.
So, they supported oggs, and then cut off the one section of the market that gives a damn about oggs... now they'll probably point to the slow sales of the model and say, "see? people don't want ogg".
The people being prayed for who knew it had higher incidences of post-surgical complications and reaped no benefits. Feel free to become at least partially acquainted with the material next time before making stupid remarks like this.
Wow... feel free to read my post before you comment on it. As I said, the study showed the opposite to be true; knowing you were being prayed for was associated with greater complications.
Anybody used DS Linux yet? I keep meaning to try it on mine. I'd love to make a DS distro that had, say, epiphany, kismet, nmap, and an irc client. That could be really useful...
Wiki/forums/reviews just remove the need for search engines and usenet to find certain kinds of information.
Wrong. They let me, John Q Whoever, publish information for others to find, and find information others have published. Now, in one sense this was true before, since every jackass could (and did) make a geocities or aol homepage. What I think is the key difference (if there is one) is that in earlier setups, making web content was seen as a separate process from consuming it. It used different tools (a text or html editor, ftp, etc.) than surfing and was done by a different -- and much smaller -- population.
Wiki, amazon, myspace, etc. (hell, even/.) all have made the process of publishing our own information not *that* distinct from the process of finding information others have published. This, btw, was Berners-Lee's goal of the project; it only took about 17 years to happen...
Of course, the downside of every jackass being able to publish information is that, well, every jackass does publish information. But, given the choice between wading through the information published by a thousand jackasses, and letting one jackass with a financial interest in the subject "select" for me, I'll pick to wade through it myself. It's why napster (and now gnutella) were better than the A&R depts of record labels. It's why amazon is better than publishers' press reviews. It's why mercola is better than NIH. It's why Linux is better than Windows. It's why democracy, for all its multiple-jackass-induced flaws, is better than a dictatorship, even a benevolent one.
Why should I care if they don't seek medical treatment?
Yes, I know, "think of the children"... but we have to be careful here. Sure, some parents won't let their children go to the doctor because they think only prayer is an appropriate response to illness or injury. IMO, that's messed up, but...
What about people who think antiretroviral drugs don't extend the lifespan of HIV positive people? What about people who think nutrition and detoxification is a better treatment for cancer than chemo and radiation? (Note that both of those categories include accomplished scientists in those fields, not just granola nutjobs.) I'm uncomfortable mandating treatment they don't want, even for "the children".
When you think of how often medical science is wrong, in fact, I have trouble justifying *ever* forcing any treatment on a patient that that patient doesn't want. Especially since medical science is so mired down in seeking single pathogens for single diseases to the detriment of examining environmental and nutritional factors.
If the price of my being able at some time in the future to refuse a treatment that I think is pseudoscience -- despite its having a lot of funding from pharmaceutical companies and being backed by the NIH -- is that I have to sit by and watch parents make decisions about their children's care that I don't agree with... well, sorry for the kids but that freedom is worth more than a life.
As for the particulars of this study, I seem to recall a theory not too long ago that if someone knew they were being prayed for (particularly if they were religious), that would have a positive effect on their recovery. ie, the purpose may have been to see if the belief itself had any effect, not whether the belief itself was true. This study suggests the opposite, which is good to know.
I'm too much of a visual guy to hide stuff too much though, and as much as I'd hate to admit it, I think virtual desktops would work better for me with animated switching between them that gave a sense of space.
I don't see any shame in admitting that. Try Enlightenment; they have very "tactile" switching.
Use one monitor, and use a window managing system that allows virtual desktops (I like Windowmaker, personally). Then tell your window manager to keep new windows in the same desktop as their parent, and notify you of their existence via the appropriate mechanism (system tray, zenity-like translucent no-focus popup, scrolling OSD, etc.)
Focus stealing is one of the reasons I find the Windows GUI essentially unusable.
The first sentence states that monopolization of that knowledge is bad. The second one states that not granting a monopoly to those cultures is bad.
I didn't read that as what he was saying. It looked more like he was attacking Monsanto, ADM, et al for going to a country like Mexico, taking samples of the corn people have been planting there for centuries, patenting those seeds, and then suing the farmers for doing what they have been doing for hundreds of years to force them to buy GM seeds that they can't replant. He's not saying the Mexican farmers should be the only ones using those seeds. He's saying agritech companies shouldn't be able to sue them for continuing to use those seeds just because the company got an absurd patent on centuries-old technology.
Think Microsoft, RIAA, SCO, MPAA, etc. are evil? What happens to our bits is nothing compared to what's happening to our food...
Microsoft isn't going to magically intercept every HTTP transaction and see if it's somebody requesting an ActiveX control, though. Won't this only affect people who apply the "security" update (actually a "keep MS from getting sued" update) that they're going to roll out? What percent of users apply security updates anyways?
If you're a Linux user and you like your madwifi driver, you can thank the OBSD ath driver. Also if you ever want a RALink driver, OpenBSD is the only OS that has one right now and it seems almost certain any ports will be based off it. Anonymous CVS? Theo came up with it after NetBSD kicked him off the commit list. Randomized mmap, stack protection... there's a lot of development being taken from openbsd. We've all got an interest here.
Can anyone tell me why BSD with it's enhanced security isn't incorporated into most Linux distros?
How Unix like is it actually?
Where to start?...
BSD is an operating system. It consists of a kernel (like linux), a userland (like GNU), and a bunch of applications which are largely source-compatible with Linux.
The BSDs share the fundamental gcc/gas/ld toolchain with GNU, but pretty much everything else (particularly the C library and make) they have their own version of. It is *possible* to run the BSD system on Linux (though not very easy), and actually very easy to run the entire GNU system on BSD. But they are different projects.
OpenBSD was the result of a squabble between Theo and the NetBSD team. This was a felicitous squabble for the rest of us, because OpenBSD is a great operating system.
(Not particular to this respondant, just needed a place to stick this comment.) When did the name change occur from "AIDS" to "HIV AIDS"? They don't call leprosy "Hansen's baccillus leprosy". I think it's that it's too hard to avoid the fact that there are idiopathetic immunodeficiency disorders (which are, presumably, acquired), so we need to distinguish them. But if the only distinguishing characteristic is the existence of certain antibodys, well....
Could one of the people who flies off the handle any time somebody expresses skepticism about the link between HIV and immunodeficiency please take a shot at any of the four questions at the end of parent post? I know I'm just "one of those HIV heretics" who's too busy killing African babies to read the literature, but my own frigging schooling in bio led me to the same damn questions and it's irritating to see people attack skeptics rather than answer them.
By the Bangui clinical definition of AIDS (which is still used in most of Africa), anyone presenting with diarrhea or pneumonia receives the diagnosis of HIV-AIDS. Even in the rare cases where tests can be performed, A) they are not 100% positive, and B) the positive results could just as easily be false positives from TB or malaria, which are known to produce false+ and are also epidemics in the region.
The cynical way to summarize it is that in Africa, "HIV-AIDS" is shorthand for "environmentally-related and infectious conditions for which there is not yet adequate relief funding". Maybe a more charitable summary would be that we simply don't know what percentage of those diagnosed in Africa as having AIDS carry the HIV virus, but it is less than 100% and greater than 0%.
There's no more reason to believe AIDS is caused by anything besides HIV than there is to believe the moon landing was faked.
There's plenty of evidence that the moon landing happened, and I'll be happy to point you to some if you're interested in seeing in. In return, please point me to:
Any evidence that persons presenting with diarrhea or pneumonia in African medical clinics are *not* counted as AIDS cases without an HIV test
Any evidence of a primate developing AIDS or SIDS (the simian kind, not cribdeath) after exposure to or infection by HIV or any related virus
Some explanation of why idiopathetic immunodeficiency syndromes identical to AIDS except for the presence of HIV antibodies should be treated as a separate disease, rather than looking for a common set of causes (this seems to deny that HIV is a *neccessary* cause of AIDS)
Some explanation of why haemopheliacs with HIV antibodies do not die significantly sooner than haemopheliacs without the antibodies
Some explanation of why several lots of Factor VIII with known HIV contamination only resulted in 1 or 2 patients out of the hundreds receiving the agent developing HIV antibodies or AIDS -- and those individuals had other risk factors
Some explanation of the presence of HIV antibodies in healthy babies and healthy adults who have not developed AIDS over a decade + of observation (this seems to dey that HIV is a *sufficient* cause of AIDS -- and if a pathogen is neither a neccessary nor a sufficient cause of a syndrome, what is it?)
Some explanation of how HIV, which does not kill lymphocites in any laboratory situation, does so in the human body
On a final note, after viewing the responses to the Harpers article this month, I would like to ask for one more piece of information:
Why the response to the mere suggestion that we be skeptical that HIV is a neccessary and sufficient cause for the development of AIDS, or that we do even some basic research to find if there are chemical or environmental factors, cofactors or causes is greeted with such hysteria.
I have this weird habit of debating creationists online. It's stupid and pointless, I know, but it can be fun. But when I talk to someone who spouts off things I know to be false, I point that person towards verifiable studies showing X or Y. I don't simply say "this has been proven in numerous studies"; I say, "you can find these studies in the Journal of Foo by Jones and Doe, et. al.". I'd like the same courtesy given to me, when all I'm suggesting is what I consider a healthy skepticism towards an at-best unsturdy hypothesis about the cause of a disease or set of diseases.
*shrug*. I'm more openminded then you may think. But for things like AIDS and mad cow I *have* read the literature and frankly I'm just not convinced that we know what's going on and I think we're getting way ahead of ourselves and possibly making things worse. That would be a fine academic point if we had effective treatments based on our hypotheses but we don't. We have gotten better at keeping the symptoms of AIDS from killing people (and I applaud all the work that people have done to do that), but even those early '90s intensive blood and marrow therapies that removed the virus and antibodies from the patient did not cure the disease. So it's a lot more than academic. Hell, check the PDR for the side effects of retrovir / azt: they are word for word the same as the defined symptoms of advanced AIDS.
The link between HIV and AIDS was widely publicized before it was subjected to any peer review. That's pop science. There was political pressure to get an answer right then, and they ran with the strongest case they had before it could be fully established. Pop science is not always wrong but it's dangerous to keep building a castle based on it without a full and unvarnished study. The fact that there are people who present *all* symptoms required for a diagnosis of AIDS (including sarcoma, pneumonia, and the other secondary conditions) and yet do not have HIV antibodies in their blood (let alone the virus), means by definition that at least in some cases something else is going on.
Think back to classic epidemiology: if even one case presents the symptoms of the disease without presence of the agent, that is enough to call that agency into question. We have thousands. Yes, HIV antibodies are prevalent in persons infected with AIDS... but the only way you can say that HIV is necessary to develop AIDS is by ignoring people with identical symptoms but without the presence of the virus, and redefine the disease as "the symptoms plus the presence of the virus". Any virus could be made causative if you do that.
The epidemiology of HIV has been studied extensively: the disease is clearly transmissible and no other factor than an existing HIV infection is associated with transmission.
Well, that's just not true, and the fact that people keep repeating it doesn't make it so.
The presence of antibodies is not a determinant of virus load (and in the case of newborns of mothers with HIV, is not even an indication of the presence of the virus).
Kashala, et al, published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases that the 'African' variety of AIDS (which as your sibling post points out is epidemiologically quite distinct from the North American / European disease, though labelling them by location is increasingly misleading as the clusters spread) can be linked more conclusively to leprosy and TB than to viral transmission.
One cluster study (one!!!) has linked sexual contact to symptomatic disease transmission in one North American population -- with symptomatic presentations wildly different from those called AIDS in the developing world. No other studies along this line have been published that I can find.
There are several different (and even conflicting) sets of criteria for the clinical diagnosis of AIDS: WHO, CDC, WHO-NEW, etc. not all of them require any test for HIV (as I mentioned, in most African clinics the simple presentation of pneumonia is sufficient to be diagnosed as AIDS). We don't even know if this is one disease.
Lederman published a study showing a stronger link between Factor VII and VIII use in haemopheliacs and symptomatic presentation than between HIV antibody presence and symptomatic presentation -- and at any rate, haemopheliacs almost never developed the sarcoma associated with other AIDS populations.
That's just a few examples off the top of my head (with the help of Google for the study citations). IMO, we're in way over our heads here and are trying to fit a 21st-century peg into a 19th-century epidemiological hole. We've been pouring toxins into our environment and our bodies for decades; the days of single-pathogen well-defined epidimics may be passing, if not already past.
... what if one of the various "environmental factors" models is right rather than the "single pathogen" model? IE, retroviruses start multiplying in people whose immune systems are shot already -- it's the symptom; not the cause.
I know we like single-pathogen disease models but frankly those are pretty rare. Especially with autoimmune and immunodeficient disorders, it's not as easy as people think to even define the given disorder in the first place, let alone establish a pathogenic cause. Take lupus: the diagnostic criteria is a list of 11 symptoms of which the patient must present 4. AIDS *was* like that for a long time, now it's defined by presentation of a short list of symptoms and presence of HIV antibodies. But then again, any death in Africa by pneumonia is counted as an AIDS case; antibodies are not even tested for. At any rate, there are numerousother that stress environmental factors.
Single pathogens are sexy for epidemiologists. They let you focus funding on a single area and clean up a mess with some drugs (which, btw, makes lots of money for pharmaceudical companies, who fund a lot of the research in the first place). Environmental causes are less sexy. They are hard to identify. They are hard to correct. And correcting them can cost a lot of money to the people funding your research.
Here is just the first of many results if you google "small town crime rate". Pick through them and you can get to the FBI stats showing that small towns have on average much higher crime rates than large cities. Unfortunately the conservative media tend to gloss over this fact, but I'm safer now living in DC than I would be if I had stayed in Mississippi where I grew up.
Why would somebody leave a big city to move to a small town, since small towns tend to have higher crime rates, worse job opportunities, and worse pollution problems?
For example the current US president comes to mind. And the Abu Ghrabi scandal. Does somebody really think that there were just a handfull of low rank soldiers who did something wrong?
That's probably a bad example because nobody above the rank of Staff Sergeant is being court martialled. I think it's ridiculous that the Colonel commanding only lost some points for promotion. There are two options: either she knew what was going on, or she didn't. If she did know, she should go to jail. But if she didn't know, to me that's even worse because it means the command had passed completely out of her control (there's *no* excuse for a colonel to be *on-site* and not no that kind of thing is going on).
Still, back in *my* days in the military you're right, the installation commander and probably even her superior would have been out on their asses or in the brig, even if they didn't physically participate in the human pyramid shenanagins.
Multiple core systems are a boon for anyone who runs multiple processes simultaneously and/or have a lot of services
Not really. It all depends on your scheduler. There's just no telling without testing if a given application / OS combination will do better or worse on dual-core.
Remember, two active applications, or two threads in an active application, does not mean those two processes or threads get to be piped to separate cores or processors. That might possibly happen but it probably won't.
I had a boss who loved to get dual-CPU systems. Why? "Because that way one CPU can run the web server and one CPU can run the database." No matter how often I tried to shake that view from his head it never left. (In point of fact, both were context switching in and out of both CPUs pretty regularly).
In short: dual core, like most parallelized technologies, doesn't do nearly as much as you think it does, and won't until our compilers and schedulers get much better than they are now.
Slashdot Mirror
IRiver just put out a great 1-G player with Ogg support...
...wait for it...
...that doesn't use USB mass storage and instead only uses the proprietary MPT only available on Widnows XP.
So, they supported oggs, and then cut off the one section of the market that gives a damn about oggs... now they'll probably point to the slow sales of the model and say, "see? people don't want ogg".
Anybody used DS Linux yet? I keep meaning to try it on mine. I'd love to make a DS distro that had, say, epiphany, kismet, nmap, and an irc client. That could be really useful...
Wrong. They let me, John Q Whoever, publish information for others to find, and find information others have published. Now, in one sense this was true before, since every jackass could (and did) make a geocities or aol homepage. What I think is the key difference (if there is one) is that in earlier setups, making web content was seen as a separate process from consuming it. It used different tools (a text or html editor, ftp, etc.) than surfing and was done by a different -- and much smaller -- population.
Wiki, amazon, myspace, etc. (hell, even /.) all have made the process of publishing our own information not *that* distinct from the process of finding information others have published. This, btw, was Berners-Lee's goal of the project; it only took about 17 years to happen...
Of course, the downside of every jackass being able to publish information is that, well, every jackass does publish information. But, given the choice between wading through the information published by a thousand jackasses, and letting one jackass with a financial interest in the subject "select" for me, I'll pick to wade through it myself. It's why napster (and now gnutella) were better than the A&R depts of record labels. It's why amazon is better than publishers' press reviews. It's why mercola is better than NIH. It's why Linux is better than Windows. It's why democracy, for all its multiple-jackass-induced flaws, is better than a dictatorship, even a benevolent one.
Why should I care if they don't seek medical treatment?
Yes, I know, "think of the children"... but we have to be careful here. Sure, some parents won't let their children go to the doctor because they think only prayer is an appropriate response to illness or injury. IMO, that's messed up, but...
What about people who think antiretroviral drugs don't extend the lifespan of HIV positive people? What about people who think nutrition and detoxification is a better treatment for cancer than chemo and radiation? (Note that both of those categories include accomplished scientists in those fields, not just granola nutjobs.) I'm uncomfortable mandating treatment they don't want, even for "the children".
When you think of how often medical science is wrong, in fact, I have trouble justifying *ever* forcing any treatment on a patient that that patient doesn't want. Especially since medical science is so mired down in seeking single pathogens for single diseases to the detriment of examining environmental and nutritional factors.
If the price of my being able at some time in the future to refuse a treatment that I think is pseudoscience -- despite its having a lot of funding from pharmaceutical companies and being backed by the NIH -- is that I have to sit by and watch parents make decisions about their children's care that I don't agree with... well, sorry for the kids but that freedom is worth more than a life.
As for the particulars of this study, I seem to recall a theory not too long ago that if someone knew they were being prayed for (particularly if they were religious), that would have a positive effect on their recovery. ie, the purpose may have been to see if the belief itself had any effect, not whether the belief itself was true. This study suggests the opposite, which is good to know.
I don't see any shame in admitting that. Try Enlightenment; they have very "tactile" switching.
Use one monitor, and use a window managing system that allows virtual desktops (I like Windowmaker, personally). Then tell your window manager to keep new windows in the same desktop as their parent, and notify you of their existence via the appropriate mechanism (system tray, zenity-like translucent no-focus popup, scrolling OSD, etc.)
Focus stealing is one of the reasons I find the Windows GUI essentially unusable.
I didn't read that as what he was saying. It looked more like he was attacking Monsanto, ADM, et al for going to a country like Mexico, taking samples of the corn people have been planting there for centuries, patenting those seeds, and then suing the farmers for doing what they have been doing for hundreds of years to force them to buy GM seeds that they can't replant. He's not saying the Mexican farmers should be the only ones using those seeds. He's saying agritech companies shouldn't be able to sue them for continuing to use those seeds just because the company got an absurd patent on centuries-old technology.
Think Microsoft, RIAA, SCO, MPAA, etc. are evil? What happens to our bits is nothing compared to what's happening to our food...
Microsoft isn't going to magically intercept every HTTP transaction and see if it's somebody requesting an ActiveX control, though. Won't this only affect people who apply the "security" update (actually a "keep MS from getting sued" update) that they're going to roll out? What percent of users apply security updates anyways?
No, I meant "felicitous", as I wrote
Well, no, that driver is still in beta, and it wasn't even around 2 years ago when I switched to OpenBSD (which at that point fully supported RT2500).
If you're a Linux user and you like your madwifi driver, you can thank the OBSD ath driver. Also if you ever want a RALink driver, OpenBSD is the only OS that has one right now and it seems almost certain any ports will be based off it. Anonymous CVS? Theo came up with it after NetBSD kicked him off the commit list. Randomized mmap, stack protection ... there's a lot of development being taken from openbsd. We've all got an interest here.
Where to start?...
BSD is an operating system. It consists of a kernel (like linux), a userland (like GNU), and a bunch of applications which are largely source-compatible with Linux.
The BSDs share the fundamental gcc/gas/ld toolchain with GNU, but pretty much everything else (particularly the C library and make) they have their own version of. It is *possible* to run the BSD system on Linux (though not very easy), and actually very easy to run the entire GNU system on BSD. But they are different projects.
OpenBSD was the result of a squabble between Theo and the NetBSD team. This was a felicitous squabble for the rest of us, because OpenBSD is a great operating system.
(Not particular to this respondant, just needed a place to stick this comment.) When did the name change occur from "AIDS" to "HIV AIDS"? They don't call leprosy "Hansen's baccillus leprosy". I think it's that it's too hard to avoid the fact that there are idiopathetic immunodeficiency disorders (which are, presumably, acquired), so we need to distinguish them. But if the only distinguishing characteristic is the existence of certain antibodys, well....
Could one of the people who flies off the handle any time somebody expresses skepticism about the link between HIV and immunodeficiency please take a shot at any of the four questions at the end of parent post? I know I'm just "one of those HIV heretics" who's too busy killing African babies to read the literature, but my own frigging schooling in bio led me to the same damn questions and it's irritating to see people attack skeptics rather than answer them.
By the Bangui clinical definition of AIDS (which is still used in most of Africa), anyone presenting with diarrhea or pneumonia receives the diagnosis of HIV-AIDS. Even in the rare cases where tests can be performed, A) they are not 100% positive, and B) the positive results could just as easily be false positives from TB or malaria, which are known to produce false+ and are also epidemics in the region.
The cynical way to summarize it is that in Africa, "HIV-AIDS" is shorthand for "environmentally-related and infectious conditions for which there is not yet adequate relief funding". Maybe a more charitable summary would be that we simply don't know what percentage of those diagnosed in Africa as having AIDS carry the HIV virus, but it is less than 100% and greater than 0%.
There's plenty of evidence that the moon landing happened, and I'll be happy to point you to some if you're interested in seeing in. In return, please point me to:
On a final note, after viewing the responses to the Harpers article this month, I would like to ask for one more piece of information:
I have this weird habit of debating creationists online. It's stupid and pointless, I know, but it can be fun. But when I talk to someone who spouts off things I know to be false, I point that person towards verifiable studies showing X or Y. I don't simply say "this has been proven in numerous studies"; I say, "you can find these studies in the Journal of Foo by Jones and Doe, et. al.". I'd like the same courtesy given to me, when all I'm suggesting is what I consider a healthy skepticism towards an at-best unsturdy hypothesis about the cause of a disease or set of diseases.
*shrug*. I'm more openminded then you may think. But for things like AIDS and mad cow I *have* read the literature and frankly I'm just not convinced that we know what's going on and I think we're getting way ahead of ourselves and possibly making things worse. That would be a fine academic point if we had effective treatments based on our hypotheses but we don't. We have gotten better at keeping the symptoms of AIDS from killing people (and I applaud all the work that people have done to do that), but even those early '90s intensive blood and marrow therapies that removed the virus and antibodies from the patient did not cure the disease. So it's a lot more than academic. Hell, check the PDR for the side effects of retrovir / azt: they are word for word the same as the defined symptoms of advanced AIDS.
The link between HIV and AIDS was widely publicized before it was subjected to any peer review. That's pop science. There was political pressure to get an answer right then, and they ran with the strongest case they had before it could be fully established. Pop science is not always wrong but it's dangerous to keep building a castle based on it without a full and unvarnished study. The fact that there are people who present *all* symptoms required for a diagnosis of AIDS (including sarcoma, pneumonia, and the other secondary conditions) and yet do not have HIV antibodies in their blood (let alone the virus), means by definition that at least in some cases something else is going on.
Think back to classic epidemiology: if even one case presents the symptoms of the disease without presence of the agent, that is enough to call that agency into question. We have thousands. Yes, HIV antibodies are prevalent in persons infected with AIDS... but the only way you can say that HIV is necessary to develop AIDS is by ignoring people with identical symptoms but without the presence of the virus, and redefine the disease as "the symptoms plus the presence of the virus". Any virus could be made causative if you do that.
Both of those misconceptions have been shown, clinically, time and time again, to be demonstrably false.
Well, that's just not true, and the fact that people keep repeating it doesn't make it so.
That's just a few examples off the top of my head (with the help of Google for the study citations). IMO, we're in way over our heads here and are trying to fit a 21st-century peg into a 19th-century epidemiological hole. We've been pouring toxins into our environment and our bodies for decades; the days of single-pathogen well-defined epidimics may be passing, if not already past.
... what if one of the various "environmental factors" models is right rather than the "single pathogen" model? IE, retroviruses start multiplying in people whose immune systems are shot already -- it's the symptom; not the cause.
I know we like single-pathogen disease models but frankly those are pretty rare. Especially with autoimmune and immunodeficient disorders, it's not as easy as people think to even define the given disorder in the first place, let alone establish a pathogenic cause. Take lupus: the diagnostic criteria is a list of 11 symptoms of which the patient must present 4. AIDS *was* like that for a long time, now it's defined by presentation of a short list of symptoms and presence of HIV antibodies. But then again, any death in Africa by pneumonia is counted as an AIDS case; antibodies are not even tested for. At any rate, there are numerous other that stress environmental factors.
Single pathogens are sexy for epidemiologists. They let you focus funding on a single area and clean up a mess with some drugs (which, btw, makes lots of money for pharmaceudical companies, who fund a lot of the research in the first place). Environmental causes are less sexy. They are hard to identify. They are hard to correct. And correcting them can cost a lot of money to the people funding your research.
Here is just the first of many results if you google "small town crime rate". Pick through them and you can get to the FBI stats showing that small towns have on average much higher crime rates than large cities. Unfortunately the conservative media tend to gloss over this fact, but I'm safer now living in DC than I would be if I had stayed in Mississippi where I grew up.
Why would somebody leave a big city to move to a small town, since small towns tend to have higher crime rates, worse job opportunities, and worse pollution problems?
That's probably a bad example because nobody above the rank of Staff Sergeant is being court martialled. I think it's ridiculous that the Colonel commanding only lost some points for promotion. There are two options: either she knew what was going on, or she didn't. If she did know, she should go to jail. But if she didn't know, to me that's even worse because it means the command had passed completely out of her control (there's *no* excuse for a colonel to be *on-site* and not no that kind of thing is going on).
Still, back in *my* days in the military you're right, the installation commander and probably even her superior would have been out on their asses or in the brig, even if they didn't physically participate in the human pyramid shenanagins.
Not really. It all depends on your scheduler. There's just no telling without testing if a given application / OS combination will do better or worse on dual-core.
Remember, two active applications, or two threads in an active application, does not mean those two processes or threads get to be piped to separate cores or processors. That might possibly happen but it probably won't.
I had a boss who loved to get dual-CPU systems. Why? "Because that way one CPU can run the web server and one CPU can run the database." No matter how often I tried to shake that view from his head it never left. (In point of fact, both were context switching in and out of both CPUs pretty regularly).
In short: dual core, like most parallelized technologies, doesn't do nearly as much as you think it does, and won't until our compilers and schedulers get much better than they are now.