I'm a practicing physician with a strong interest in pharmacology. I do know the technical details. Unfortunately, I apparently suck at making a point, because this is the second comment in this thread that I've had fall victim to my unclear phrasing.
To amplify: They are sedative, but they are most assuredly not glorified sleeping pills - a benzodiazepine, a barbiturate, or a central anticholinergic would be what people think of as sleeping pills, and none of those would work.
They act as "mood stabilizers", a property discovered early on (Thorazine, for example, was advertised as useful for calming the "agitated senile" patient.) This, not their sedative effect, is why they're useful for psychosis and psychiatric illness. The sedation is unfortunate but unavoidable - many, many schizophrenics won't take antipsychotics because they can't stand the feeling of being so mentally slowed.
No, schizophrenia and Alzheimer are the "both" that have hallucinations. Sorry that the phrasing wasn't clearer. That's why I said that bipolar and Alzheimer shared nothing whatsoever.
No. Antipsychotics are generally dopamine receptor blockers. While this does produce sedation (and weight gain), they are not sleeping pills. Interestingly enough, the first antipsychotics to be discovered were found by projects that were trying to find antihistamines, which were sedative because they were (accidentally) also anticholinergics;
Alzheimer disease resembles bipolar not at all and schizophrenia only tangentially (ie, both have hallucinations). Work with all three populations and you can distinguish them trivially.
Well, the Schedule II rating is a very easy way to quit getting prescribed. Amphetamines work, and they're cheap. But you *can* get high with them, so we have to restrict the crap out of them. [Insert drug war rant.]
OTOH, they're not without downsides. See, amphetamines work by increasing the catecholamine (particularly norepinephrine) levels in the brain. They push the catecholamines out of the storage vesicles into the synapses. (FWIW, cocaine works by preventing neurotransmitters from being absorbed back into the neuron that released them - it doesn't change the amount released.) So, after a few days straight of amphetamine use, you crash HARD - you no longer have any catecholamines, so you can't stay awake. A pharmacist friend of mine told me of a story told by some of her professors who had trained in the 50s, when amphetamines were either OTC or just plain prescription (not scheduled). Guys would keel over in the middle of final exams because they had been awake for 3 straight days, finally ran out of norepi, and couldn't stay awake. No solution for it but to let them have 12-24 hours to synthesize more.
Wheels on asphalt are astonishingly quiet. Have a friend try it out on you if you don't believe me - run a car up a small incline, then put it in neutral and turn off the engine. Close your eyes, tell him to go, and open your eyes when you can hear it. Do this a block away from a busy street, for added realism. See how close he is.
I am a physician, although one with a reasonable amount of insight into the IT behind the walls - it's an older hospital, and I've been there for a decade. I've SEEN the wiring closets, I've watched as miles of ethernet were run through the drop ceilings. I understand the constraints on your end - you're a cost center, not a profit center, so you get shorted on resources. But some of the ideas in this thread are just frankly nuts, and I happened to pick your comment to reply to because it didn't sound too insane.
I understand - and you do too - that there aren't going to be two separate networks. That locking down only goes so far. That requiring individual logins is a lovely concept that dies a flaming, ignominious death when you have both the doctors and the nurses upset about it. (It's too damned slow, especially on the creaky machines that we're stuck with. It takes over a minute for logging in to be complete on my office machine.) But I'd appreciate it if the kibitzers in this story would recognize why that is. There are, after all, simple economic reasons why hospital IT works the way it does, and it's not purely because the docs are prima donnas.
(Although some of us are. It's part of the selection process - if you're full of self-doubt, you're not likely to go into medicine to begin with. Anecdote: Intro to psychiatry, first year of med school - the prof standing at the front asks everyone with a Type A personality to raise their hands. Maybe ten do. He says, "Everyone with your hands down, you're lying. If you weren't Type A, you wouldn't be here." He was right.)
Anytime, and thanks for a civil response. I'd friend you if you were logged in. Disagreements over this sort of thing are fascinating windows into how people see the world. (I, for example, am comfortable playing God in a limited setting.)
Consultant (medical doctor) says "I need to access the net to be able to read research papers, proposals, and various ad hoc sites that contain research on the subjects that I deal with, along with external mail that I use because I move from hospital to hospital quite regularly.".
IT says: "You can't access the net from that machine".
So why aren't there more machines? You just had a user tell you what they need, and instead of coming up with a solution you said "no".
The important thing to remember is that a physician is absolutely a mission-critical feature of a hospital. The hospital can't make money if no one will admit patients to it. So physicians take the place that large equipment does in factories: you keep us running, all the time, with minimal interference, because the whole rest of the system depends on our being maximally utilized. That - not our gentle dispositions and sunny personalities - is why hospital execs listen to us.
I'm a physician too. Don't bother, this is their equivalent of M&M - no matter what was done, some other guy is going to pipe in and say that the only really safe thing to do was to have the computer containing medical records buried in a safe in the basement accessible only by selling off your firstborn. Like the guy upthread who suggested things like 5 min clin consult and uptodate should be privately networked...
To the IT types: if you make it really hard, people will ignore your carefully crafted systems and do it all on paper or some other method that is easy.
Could you clarify this a bit? You could boot Win95 to the DOS 7 prompt, type win and get into Windows, and then exit Windows - and be dumped to a command prompt.
I'm a pretty mild-mannered guy generally, and I don't generally get mad at people more than the occasional screaming at traffic - but my house is my house. My house is never unlocked, so the matter of an unlocked house isn't really applicable to me, but yeah - if I found you wandering around in my house I'd assume you had nefarious ideas.
I do have a rather unforgiving hatred of thieves, and while my stuff isn't worth losing my life over, the thief's life isn't worth nearly as much to me. I wouldn't shoot someone in the back, just because you can't really make that stand up in court - but as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing morally wrong with doing so. If I did discover someone creeping around, and could see them, I'd fire without warning, because it's not their stuff to take. This strikes some people as over-the-top, but everything I own represents a portion of my life that I gave up to work in order to earn it. They're not entitled to my life, not even five minutes of it.
They also enslaved an entire race of people for several hundred years before realizing that was bad.
No, they enslaved just about anyone they could get their hands on, but whites - in the lesser form of indentured servitude - weren't good plantation workers in the Caribbean (and that, not the eventual USA, was the first big New World slave market) because they weren't evolved for tropical climates. Native Americans were mostly extinct in the area, so they were out. SE Asians were eventually imported in some quantity as laborers by the British, but they were a long way away by the standards of the 1600s. Africans were adapted to the tropics, located relatively nearby, and already available for sale (because of existing slave markets in Africa).
The Atlantic slave trade was a nasty business, all right, but it had its detractors from the start. Most people were just willing to overlook them, especially considering how much money was to be made.
If you break into my house, then your life is forfeit, whether you actually take anything or not. I think that's the philosophy Hognoxious is trying to convey.
More importantly, declination doesn't vary across the distances involved - declination at the Presidio may be very different from at the Mall, but it's not too far from the declination in Oakland.
Like the iPhone or Touch. Touch controls are very comfortable if they're under your fingers when your hands are in the "keyboard position" - elbows at 90 degrees, wrist flat - which is easy to achieve with either a laptop touchpad or a small (and therefore easily movable) touchscreen device.
What I actually meant, but did a bad job of conveying, was that all you had to do to play a pirated DC game was stick the disc in the drive. One guy in a group (e.g., dorm, frat house) could do the downloads and burn at will - you could just hand out the discs and they'd play. And recipients of the burned discs could just go right ahead and copy them for their friends, too. Only the original pull from GD-ROM was hard.
Someone brought up PS1; the copy was easy, but you had to have a modchip (and thus void your warranty). A softmodded Xbox could play burned games, and copy one at a time to the HD, so major easy points there once the original mod is done, so long as you didn't mind slipping discs in to play. (And technically, it was possible to copy Xbox discs without the xbox drive, but realistically it was infinitely simpler to let the Xbox do it.) Of course, a Dreamcast didn't need to be modded at all, and would work online...
After you paid somebody to do a chip or softmod (or did it yourself), and bought a hard drive. Neither of which you needed to do with Dreamcast. Burn and go.
The only advantage to Xbox was that you could pirate a friend's game easily; Dreamcast really needed someone else to do it for you, and you d/l the ISO.
Can we cut a deal? We'll keep the hipster kids from the farms from going to New York if y'all will promise to go to LA and keep them from moving into the rest of the West.
America used to be able to take the high moral ground, and used to be viewed in a generally favorable light in the world
... and you were right on the money up to here. If you think that is the case, please think back a little further. The Marshall Plan was pretty well received in Europe, but then seeing as post-WWII central Europe was a devastated hellhole in which huge numbers of people had no homes, no jobs, and no food, it didn't take a lot to impress them. Go ask a Central American from the 1850s onward what they think of the US. Go ask a Briton whose hometown had an American base nearby in the late 40s or early 50s about the phrase "overpaid, oversexed, and over here". Dislike of America (and Americans) is a complicated topic, with a large number of reasons underlying it - European elites looked at it as a country composed of the dregs of society, while others in the Americas despise the extensive intervention in their politics. India was defining itself during the Cold War (as a "nonaligned nation") in terms of not being America, and the rest of the Third World (especially Africa) was caught up in a tug-of-war between the US and USSR.
And what has Obama done? So far, I've seen a very heavy domestic agenda, but essentially nothing on the foreign policy front except some really awful gift exchanges with Queen Elizabeth and Gordon Brown (mind you, probably deserved in Gordo's case).
There are probably some similar techniques in use now, but the Tax Reform Act of 1986 made it impossible to claim a dependent (over the age of 2? maybe? something like that) on your tax return unless said dependent had an SSN. Now, pretty much everybody has an SSN.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a practicing physician with a strong interest in pharmacology. I do know the technical details. Unfortunately, I apparently suck at making a point, because this is the second comment in this thread that I've had fall victim to my unclear phrasing.
To amplify: They are sedative, but they are most assuredly not glorified sleeping pills - a benzodiazepine, a barbiturate, or a central anticholinergic would be what people think of as sleeping pills, and none of those would work.
They act as "mood stabilizers", a property discovered early on (Thorazine, for example, was advertised as useful for calming the "agitated senile" patient.) This, not their sedative effect, is why they're useful for psychosis and psychiatric illness. The sedation is unfortunate but unavoidable - many, many schizophrenics won't take antipsychotics because they can't stand the feeling of being so mentally slowed.
No, schizophrenia and Alzheimer are the "both" that have hallucinations. Sorry that the phrasing wasn't clearer. That's why I said that bipolar and Alzheimer shared nothing whatsoever.
No. Antipsychotics are generally dopamine receptor blockers. While this does produce sedation (and weight gain), they are not sleeping pills. Interestingly enough, the first antipsychotics to be discovered were found by projects that were trying to find antihistamines, which were sedative because they were (accidentally) also anticholinergics;
Alzheimer disease resembles bipolar not at all and schizophrenia only tangentially (ie, both have hallucinations). Work with all three populations and you can distinguish them trivially.
Well, the Schedule II rating is a very easy way to quit getting prescribed. Amphetamines work, and they're cheap. But you *can* get high with them, so we have to restrict the crap out of them. [Insert drug war rant.]
OTOH, they're not without downsides. See, amphetamines work by increasing the catecholamine (particularly norepinephrine) levels in the brain. They push the catecholamines out of the storage vesicles into the synapses. (FWIW, cocaine works by preventing neurotransmitters from being absorbed back into the neuron that released them - it doesn't change the amount released.) So, after a few days straight of amphetamine use, you crash HARD - you no longer have any catecholamines, so you can't stay awake. A pharmacist friend of mine told me of a story told by some of her professors who had trained in the 50s, when amphetamines were either OTC or just plain prescription (not scheduled). Guys would keel over in the middle of final exams because they had been awake for 3 straight days, finally ran out of norepi, and couldn't stay awake. No solution for it but to let them have 12-24 hours to synthesize more.
And if they're blind?
Wheels on asphalt are astonishingly quiet. Have a friend try it out on you if you don't believe me - run a car up a small incline, then put it in neutral and turn off the engine. Close your eyes, tell him to go, and open your eyes when you can hear it. Do this a block away from a busy street, for added realism. See how close he is.
I am a physician, although one with a reasonable amount of insight into the IT behind the walls - it's an older hospital, and I've been there for a decade. I've SEEN the wiring closets, I've watched as miles of ethernet were run through the drop ceilings. I understand the constraints on your end - you're a cost center, not a profit center, so you get shorted on resources. But some of the ideas in this thread are just frankly nuts, and I happened to pick your comment to reply to because it didn't sound too insane.
I understand - and you do too - that there aren't going to be two separate networks. That locking down only goes so far. That requiring individual logins is a lovely concept that dies a flaming, ignominious death when you have both the doctors and the nurses upset about it. (It's too damned slow, especially on the creaky machines that we're stuck with. It takes over a minute for logging in to be complete on my office machine.) But I'd appreciate it if the kibitzers in this story would recognize why that is. There are, after all, simple economic reasons why hospital IT works the way it does, and it's not purely because the docs are prima donnas.
(Although some of us are. It's part of the selection process - if you're full of self-doubt, you're not likely to go into medicine to begin with. Anecdote: Intro to psychiatry, first year of med school - the prof standing at the front asks everyone with a Type A personality to raise their hands. Maybe ten do. He says, "Everyone with your hands down, you're lying. If you weren't Type A, you wouldn't be here." He was right.)
Anytime, and thanks for a civil response. I'd friend you if you were logged in. Disagreements over this sort of thing are fascinating windows into how people see the world. (I, for example, am comfortable playing God in a limited setting.)
Consultant (medical doctor) says "I need to access the net to be able to read research papers, proposals, and various ad hoc sites that contain research on the subjects that I deal with, along with external mail that I use because I move from hospital to hospital quite regularly.".
IT says: "You can't access the net from that machine".
So why aren't there more machines? You just had a user tell you what they need, and instead of coming up with a solution you said "no".
The important thing to remember is that a physician is absolutely a mission-critical feature of a hospital. The hospital can't make money if no one will admit patients to it. So physicians take the place that large equipment does in factories: you keep us running, all the time, with minimal interference, because the whole rest of the system depends on our being maximally utilized. That - not our gentle dispositions and sunny personalities - is why hospital execs listen to us.
I'm a physician too. Don't bother, this is their equivalent of M&M - no matter what was done, some other guy is going to pipe in and say that the only really safe thing to do was to have the computer containing medical records buried in a safe in the basement accessible only by selling off your firstborn. Like the guy upthread who suggested things like 5 min clin consult and uptodate should be privately networked...
To the IT types: if you make it really hard, people will ignore your carefully crafted systems and do it all on paper or some other method that is easy.
Could you clarify this a bit? You could boot Win95 to the DOS 7 prompt, type win and get into Windows, and then exit Windows - and be dumped to a command prompt.
I'm a pretty mild-mannered guy generally, and I don't generally get mad at people more than the occasional screaming at traffic - but my house is my house. My house is never unlocked, so the matter of an unlocked house isn't really applicable to me, but yeah - if I found you wandering around in my house I'd assume you had nefarious ideas.
I do have a rather unforgiving hatred of thieves, and while my stuff isn't worth losing my life over, the thief's life isn't worth nearly as much to me. I wouldn't shoot someone in the back, just because you can't really make that stand up in court - but as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing morally wrong with doing so. If I did discover someone creeping around, and could see them, I'd fire without warning, because it's not their stuff to take. This strikes some people as over-the-top, but everything I own represents a portion of my life that I gave up to work in order to earn it. They're not entitled to my life, not even five minutes of it.
Thank you, AC, for posting the most reasonable response to my comment. You need not break laws, just morals.
They also enslaved an entire race of people for several hundred years before realizing that was bad.
No, they enslaved just about anyone they could get their hands on, but whites - in the lesser form of indentured servitude - weren't good plantation workers in the Caribbean (and that, not the eventual USA, was the first big New World slave market) because they weren't evolved for tropical climates. Native Americans were mostly extinct in the area, so they were out. SE Asians were eventually imported in some quantity as laborers by the British, but they were a long way away by the standards of the 1600s. Africans were adapted to the tropics, located relatively nearby, and already available for sale (because of existing slave markets in Africa).
The Atlantic slave trade was a nasty business, all right, but it had its detractors from the start. Most people were just willing to overlook them, especially considering how much money was to be made.
If you break into my house, then your life is forfeit, whether you actually take anything or not. I think that's the philosophy Hognoxious is trying to convey.
Funnily enough, my real name *is* Steve...
More importantly, declination doesn't vary across the distances involved - declination at the Presidio may be very different from at the Mall, but it's not too far from the declination in Oakland.
It's highly profitable, that's for sure.
Like the iPhone or Touch. Touch controls are very comfortable if they're under your fingers when your hands are in the "keyboard position" - elbows at 90 degrees, wrist flat - which is easy to achieve with either a laptop touchpad or a small (and therefore easily movable) touchscreen device.
What I actually meant, but did a bad job of conveying, was that all you had to do to play a pirated DC game was stick the disc in the drive. One guy in a group (e.g., dorm, frat house) could do the downloads and burn at will - you could just hand out the discs and they'd play. And recipients of the burned discs could just go right ahead and copy them for their friends, too. Only the original pull from GD-ROM was hard.
Someone brought up PS1; the copy was easy, but you had to have a modchip (and thus void your warranty). A softmodded Xbox could play burned games, and copy one at a time to the HD, so major easy points there once the original mod is done, so long as you didn't mind slipping discs in to play. (And technically, it was possible to copy Xbox discs without the xbox drive, but realistically it was infinitely simpler to let the Xbox do it.) Of course, a Dreamcast didn't need to be modded at all, and would work online...
After you paid somebody to do a chip or softmod (or did it yourself), and bought a hard drive. Neither of which you needed to do with Dreamcast. Burn and go.
The only advantage to Xbox was that you could pirate a friend's game easily; Dreamcast really needed someone else to do it for you, and you d/l the ISO.
Can we cut a deal? We'll keep the hipster kids from the farms from going to New York if y'all will promise to go to LA and keep them from moving into the rest of the West.
America used to be able to take the high moral ground, and used to be viewed in a generally favorable light in the world
... and you were right on the money up to here. If you think that is the case, please think back a little further. The Marshall Plan was pretty well received in Europe, but then seeing as post-WWII central Europe was a devastated hellhole in which huge numbers of people had no homes, no jobs, and no food, it didn't take a lot to impress them. Go ask a Central American from the 1850s onward what they think of the US. Go ask a Briton whose hometown had an American base nearby in the late 40s or early 50s about the phrase "overpaid, oversexed, and over here". Dislike of America (and Americans) is a complicated topic, with a large number of reasons underlying it - European elites looked at it as a country composed of the dregs of society, while others in the Americas despise the extensive intervention in their politics. India was defining itself during the Cold War (as a "nonaligned nation") in terms of not being America, and the rest of the Third World (especially Africa) was caught up in a tug-of-war between the US and USSR.
And what has Obama done? So far, I've seen a very heavy domestic agenda, but essentially nothing on the foreign policy front except some really awful gift exchanges with Queen Elizabeth and Gordon Brown (mind you, probably deserved in Gordo's case).
There are probably some similar techniques in use now, but the Tax Reform Act of 1986 made it impossible to claim a dependent (over the age of 2? maybe? something like that) on your tax return unless said dependent had an SSN. Now, pretty much everybody has an SSN.