If everyone did what we told them we would all be out of business. However, people being people this will never happen. How many times have you heard about a caries vaccine being right around the corner?
Unfortunately dental care IS very expensive. One of the issues is that you spend far more time in the chair than you do in a physician's office. Another is the ridiculous prices dentists get charged for virtually all instruments, materials and supplies. Overhead is a large part of the bill.
Wow. I can't get over the number of incorrect assumptions you are making.
First, I have lots of un- or underinsured patients that can't afford perio or endo treatment; this problem gets worse during recessions.
Second, the study proving that periodontal disease CAUSES heart disease has yet to be completed AFAIK it's due in '08. (Either that or the guys at U. Penn don't know what they're talking about) Yes, there are studies showing a CORRELATION between the two, but as we all know, correlation is NOT causation.
Third, who says I wasn't taught about dentures? I do a TON of dentures but if you think about it, dentures indicate a failure of previous dental treatment. My practice suffers because I could earn a lot more money providing perio, endo, implant and crown & bridge services to a given patient. How much do you earn doing extractions and dentures? How much would you earn doing more complex treatments that would preserve natural dentition?
As a practicing dentist I can positively say that health care is NOT recession proof. I have seen lots of folks with untreated or undertreated medical conditions when they lack insurance or the resources for treatment. Health care is less and less of a good deal for Doctors of all types because of decreasing insurance payments and increasing hassle.
Elsewhere in this discussion it is being said that the purpose of higher education is to earn more money. This may be true for some, but it's also true that education allows you to do something more interesting or fulfilling.
Regarding the original topic, my graduating class was about 1/3 were asian immigrants with a sprinkling of middle easterners, africans and caribbean types. Of the asians the majority were Vietnamese (incidentally these folks were the most patriotic Americans you might find - they love it here) I don't know of anyone that went back to their country of origin.
No. The design of a nuclear bomb is very different from that of any nuclear reactor. They CAN spew radioactive material all over as with Chernobyl, but that was a very different and flawed design.
It should be possible to design a completely idiot proof reactor that would automatically disable itself in the event of coolant loss. Dunno why reactors aren't designed like that from the start.
Considering that the majority of all CO2, particulate, soot and trace elements like mercury are spewed into the atmosphere by coal fired plants, I don't understand why the environmentalists aren't clamoring for more nuke plants. I'm guessing that the antiwar/antinuclear weapon factions didn't make the distinction between bombs and power plants.
If they ever manage to bring out cheap solar panels and an economical storage system I'll be first in line. Freedom from big utilities, no terror threat due to decentralization - no downside!
HEY! I *like* Boston - even if it IS run by overreacting morons. (the same could be said about the TSA and the US government at large)
My whole point is not about the items in question, but the behaviour of the person involved. Airport guy sees something weird--> subject doesn't respond clearly--> ssecurity event triggered.
How could she NOT know that airport security is jacked up to unreasonable levels? How could security know that she was not mentally ill and acting irrationally? People smart enough to build bombs can be mentally ill. "Suicide by Cop" is not an unknown phenomenon.
I understand your point, in fact I agree with you completely about all the points you make here. I also note that you did not answer my question.
Most of the people here seem to be missing the essential point about this incident: Security is trained to look for things that are out of the ordinary, since they can't be expected to know at a glance whether an object is or is not a weapon.
It was the behaviour of the suspect after being questioned that triggered the arrest. How can they know that she was not fucking nuts?
Correct. Please note that in this case the "suspect" was not injured, possibly owing to the presence of mind and restraint of the officers involved. I never said she *should* have been shot, just that she COULD have been shot. Neither you nor I know anything about what happened except what we have been told. Since that's all I have to go on, that's what I used as a basis for comment.
The article specifically states that she ignored questions about the shirt and putty then walked away. The TSA must account for the fact that some people are fucking nuts. This woman lives in a very rarified world where electronics tinkering is both commonplace and expected.
The reason it is and should be a crime is because you simply cannot have a policy where people toting things that look like bombs can board aircraft. Should it really be the TSA's responibility to determine that something is a fake? Is it reasonable to expect security personnel to accurately analyze suspicious items on the fly in a check-in line?
She's very lucky they didn't shoot her through the head. With the crowds of people around the main concern is the safety of the bystanders. The guards responded with amazing self restraint: Remember, they are just people with families, lives etc.. If she HAD been fucking nuts, she could have killed them all in a picosecond.
It would be an interesting tool in addition to, but probably not replacing the traditional journal system.
In any given field, the number of people working on specific aspects of a given probem can be small - there may only be one or two people publishing in a specific area and they already know about all the existing research. Additionally, they know which journals might publish research relevant to their particular niche. They also might be the only people in the world really qualified to assign tags and rankings. A karma type system could make research more accessible to outsiders to a given field and make it simpler and faster to gain an overview of relevant research.
Bell labs WAS an anomaly owing to it's monopoly parentage. What really sucks is that verizon, comcast and the rest are working as hard as they can to re-establish the monopolies. Hence we get all the problems and none of the benefits of the OLD monopoly.
I stand corrected on two counts - my spelling and for suggesting that political interference in free markets is anything new. It's just that it seems to me that it is being used more brazenly (think microsoft and ISO) than it used to be, but this could simply be the result of better reporting.
The reason the peer review process works is because (generally speaking) the ones who actually review are well known in their respective fields. If you publish something in their field, you had better be familiar with their work. I'm not sure a slashdot/firehose type system would really work for scientific articles. You want the system to be fairly conservative with regards to resisting trends. If something is a sea change/paradigm shift it ought to take a while to be accepted while it is being evaluated as the consequences can serious if a mistake is made (think medical research) and research fraud is not unknown. The way you describe how things are displayed on the front page might work for news, but for scientific research it's really more important that articles be accessible and well organized. Science is a concensus, but it is hopefully a learned concensus.
Bell Labs doesn't really exist anymore because the visionary guys who ran the likes of Bell, HP, etc., have been replaced by corporate greedhead drones who diligently "enhance shareholder value" by offshoring anything that isn't nailed down.
New milennium capitalism uses political means to artificially support a business model and short-circuit free market competition. If you can't win by competing, pay off the political process to rig the rules in your favor.
What is basically happening is that the publishers want to protect their little piles of paper via legislative means. If they actually had something worthwhile, people would pony up for access. In the old days libraries would pay for hard copies because there really was no other way to do it and the prices were fairly reasonable. Individuals might personally subscribe to a relevant journal. Now that there is no reason to actually print hard copies the publishers are fighting tooth and nail to stay in business.
If the government wanted to do something useful, they could set up a framework in which legitimate peer reviewed journals could be published online free of charge.
If we are going to have an information superhighway it shouldn't be a toll road.
If you use the watermark to trigger a banner ad on a player, it could convince the RIAA that there is an ad-revenue stream and cause them to drop the DRM and lawsuits.
Unfortunately it will be used to connect specific downloads to individuals allowing the RIAA to target their lawsuits more accurately. It will still be as impossible to prove in court but will drive an even deeper wedge between the RIAA and reality.
The only way the RIAA will stop suing is when someone wins a countersuit big enough to affect the bottom line of the corporations supporting them.
Heh. I know a few folks that work for the patent office. Wonderful, intelligent folks tasked with the impossible, who also have no control over the politics of policy.
It's interesting that all the critics of my original post seem to have made the same mistake I was trying to illustrate in the first place. People are important to PEOPLE, but probably not to the rest of the universe. I have no clue at to what the true structure, function or nature of the universe could possibly be and hold no illusions in that regard - only that it is so huge and complex that the human brain is incapable of perceiving the whole of it. What do we, as a species really know about our place in it? Nothing. Anyone claiming otherwise is doing so as a matter of faith, not fact. Science? Just scratching the surface-but certainly worth the effort.
A joke: Scientists announce they discovered how to create life in the lab, so God comes down and says "ok, lets have a creation contest-you go first!" So the scientists say "ok then, we'll just take some dirt and..." at which point God says "Wait a minute - make your own dirt"!
This is all a load of egocentric horseshit. Even a comedy writer like Doug Adams understood how unbelievable large the universe really is, and how unbelievably unimportant humans are in the scheme of things.
Religion and other romanticisms are just a mental sleight of hand to make up for the fact that the universe will uncaringly grind us all to dust.
We are far more dependent on the ecosystem of this planet than anyone seems to want to admit. That harebrained experiment with the "biosphere" a few years ago proved that one pregnant roach - or some other bug - can and will screw up the best laid plan.
All these pie in the sky engineering types should be forced to study cellular structure and function until they all realize that the most complex devices and processes they can design are tinkertoys compared to nature.
All this talk of consiousness and meaning and the perception of beauty is irrelevant nonsense as we haven't the slightest idea of the true nature and function of the universe. Every time we crack one mystery we find its built upon another that's an order of magnitude more difficult to understand.
What really needs to happen is for people to start planning on the mundane. Go hold a door open for someone and the human universe will be better off.
The expensive machines will only be affordable for large corporations. Money that used to go to PEOPLE now gets funneled directly into the pockets of the executives and shareholders. If you thought corporate executive compensation was out of control now, just keep watching.
I'm deeply concerned about the continued corporatization/automation of virtually every segment of the workforce. Mom and Pop shops of all types have been getting squeezed out for years, leaving fewer and fewer opportunities for people to "bootstrap" themselves into prosperity. Although automated production and corporate chain stores do tend to lower prices for consumers, it's very unclear to me where the cycle ends. If Wal-Mart sold nothing but automatically produced goods in stores which are automatically restocked, the only people making a living will be the corporate execs and a few techy types to install and maintain the machinery.
Henry Ford understood that his workers needed a decent wage so they could buy Fords.
Of course, the corporations have to be able to sell stuff to someone to make a profit and a free market is an amazing thing. As you said, it's going to be an interesting century, especially since the centers of economic power will belong to nations with opressive, dictatorial governments like China.
People EXPECT doctors to do something, even when nothing is wrong. I've caught myself doing it and I *am* a doctor. It's human nature.
When I took my board exams I studied old exams for weeks. The information in the exams wasn't really stuff directly from the curriculum; we covered the material but the focus was slightly different. In any case large portions of the information required to be regurgitated for the exam could be classified as "background" - stuff you need to be aware of but doesn't directly affect you in your daily work.
The exam WAS multiple choice and I credit test-taking skills as much as my education for passing on the first try. Logic and the process of elimination can increase your odds to about 50/50 in most cases.
Me, too. These are art objects paying homage to designs from the beginnings of sci-fi and science itself. If you dont get the humor in the vials "phlogiston and aether" this is not for you.
I can understand someone disliking bad and/or inappropriate set design, but some folks will have a bad attitude toward everything - honestly it's their loss.
Oh, this is too rich. When I got my BA in Psychology, what I was taught about cognitive dissonance was NOTHING like what you describe. I would correct you but a) it's not worth my time and b) you are much funnier as an ignoramus.
Occam's razor simply states that the simplest explanation is the most likely. These morons are claiming all kinds of bullshit about preplanted explosive charges, massive conspiracy, orchestrated mass murder on the part of the government, etc. and other morons are eating it up like froot loops.
The SIMPLEST explaination is that jetliners slamming into the towers and the resulting fire caused the collapse. I don't need to concoct an idiotic story involving aliens, shadow government conspiracy, Elvis and the Illuminati to draw my conclusions. I'm only willing to waste so many neurons on fantasy. The "natural thing to do" is to apply some common sense, not waste my time on bogus "evidence". A few more years of experience under your belt any perhaps you too will have a functioning bullshit detector.
Go look up the definition for "sophomore" if you can figure out how to work a dictionary.
Slashdot Mirror
you forgot Beowolf clusters...
If everyone did what we told them we would all be out of business. However, people being people this will never happen. How many times have you heard about a caries vaccine being right around the corner?
Unfortunately dental care IS very expensive. One of the issues is that you spend far more time in the chair than you do in a physician's office. Another is the ridiculous prices dentists get charged for virtually all instruments, materials and supplies. Overhead is a large part of the bill.
Wow. I can't get over the number of incorrect assumptions you are making.
First, I have lots of un- or underinsured patients that can't afford perio or endo treatment; this problem gets worse during recessions.
Second, the study proving that periodontal disease CAUSES heart disease has yet to be completed AFAIK it's due in '08. (Either that or the guys at U. Penn don't know what they're talking about) Yes, there are studies showing a CORRELATION between the two, but as we all know, correlation is NOT causation.
Third, who says I wasn't taught about dentures? I do a TON of dentures but if you think about it, dentures indicate a failure of previous dental treatment. My practice suffers because I could earn a lot more money providing perio, endo, implant and crown & bridge services to a given patient. How much do you earn doing extractions and dentures? How much would you earn doing more complex treatments that would preserve natural dentition?
As a practicing dentist I can positively say that health care is NOT recession proof. I have seen lots of folks with untreated or undertreated medical conditions when they lack insurance or the resources for treatment. Health care is less and less of a good deal for Doctors of all types because of decreasing insurance payments and increasing hassle.
Elsewhere in this discussion it is being said that the purpose of higher education is to earn more money. This may be true for some, but it's also true that education allows you to do something more interesting or fulfilling.
Regarding the original topic, my graduating class was about 1/3 were asian immigrants with a sprinkling of middle easterners, africans and caribbean types. Of the asians the majority were Vietnamese (incidentally these folks were the most patriotic Americans you might find - they love it here) I don't know of anyone that went back to their country of origin.
No. The design of a nuclear bomb is very different from that of any nuclear reactor. They CAN spew radioactive material all over as with Chernobyl, but that was a very different and flawed design.
It should be possible to design a completely idiot proof reactor that would automatically disable itself in the event of coolant loss. Dunno why reactors aren't designed like that from the start.
Considering that the majority of all CO2, particulate, soot and trace elements like mercury are spewed into the atmosphere by coal fired plants, I don't understand why the environmentalists aren't clamoring for more nuke plants. I'm guessing that the antiwar/antinuclear weapon factions didn't make the distinction between bombs and power plants.
If they ever manage to bring out cheap solar panels and an economical storage system I'll be first in line. Freedom from big utilities, no terror threat due to decentralization - no downside!
HEY! I *like* Boston - even if it IS run by overreacting morons. (the same could be said about the TSA and the US government at large)
My whole point is not about the items in question, but the behaviour of the person involved. Airport guy sees something weird--> subject doesn't respond clearly--> ssecurity event triggered.
How could she NOT know that airport security is jacked up to unreasonable levels? How could security know that she was not mentally ill and acting irrationally? People smart enough to build bombs can be mentally ill. "Suicide by Cop" is not an unknown phenomenon.
How should airport security deal with that?
I understand your point, in fact I agree with you completely about all the points you make here. I also note that you did not answer my question.
Most of the people here seem to be missing the essential point about this incident: Security is trained to look for things that are out of the ordinary, since they can't be expected to know at a glance whether an object is or is not a weapon.
It was the behaviour of the suspect after being questioned that triggered the arrest. How can they know that she was not fucking nuts?
Correct. Please note that in this case the "suspect" was not injured, possibly owing to the presence of mind and restraint of the officers involved. I never said she *should* have been shot, just that she COULD have been shot. Neither you nor I know anything about what happened except what we have been told. Since that's all I have to go on, that's what I used as a basis for comment.
The article specifically states that she ignored questions about the shirt and putty then walked away. The TSA must account for the fact that some people are fucking nuts. This woman lives in a very rarified world where electronics tinkering is both commonplace and expected.
The reason it is and should be a crime is because you simply cannot have a policy where people toting things that look like bombs can board aircraft. Should it really be the TSA's responibility to determine that something is a fake? Is it reasonable to expect security personnel to accurately analyze suspicious items on the fly in a check-in line?
She's very lucky they didn't shoot her through the head. With the crowds of people around the main concern is the safety of the bystanders. The guards responded with amazing self restraint: Remember, they are just people with families, lives etc.. If she HAD been fucking nuts, she could have killed them all in a picosecond.
It would be an interesting tool in addition to, but probably not replacing the traditional journal system.
In any given field, the number of people working on specific aspects of a given probem can be small - there may only be one or two people publishing in a specific area and they already know about all the existing research. Additionally, they know which journals might publish research relevant to their particular niche. They also might be the only people in the world really qualified to assign tags and rankings. A karma type system could make research more accessible to outsiders to a given field and make it simpler and faster to gain an overview of relevant research.
It was more of a homage to Cryptonomicon than a serious statement.
Bell labs WAS an anomaly owing to it's monopoly parentage. What really sucks is that verizon, comcast and the rest are working as hard as they can to re-establish the monopolies. Hence we get all the problems and none of the benefits of the OLD monopoly.
I stand corrected on two counts - my spelling and for suggesting that political interference in free markets is anything new. It's just that it seems to me that it is being used more brazenly (think microsoft and ISO) than it used to be, but this could simply be the result of better reporting.
The reason the peer review process works is because (generally speaking) the ones who actually review are well known in their respective fields. If you publish something in their field, you had better be familiar with their work. I'm not sure a slashdot/firehose type system would really work for scientific articles. You want the system to be fairly conservative with regards to resisting trends. If something is a sea change/paradigm shift it ought to take a while to be accepted while it is being evaluated as the consequences can serious if a mistake is made (think medical research) and research fraud is not unknown. The way you describe how things are displayed on the front page might work for news, but for scientific research it's really more important that articles be accessible and well organized. Science is a concensus, but it is hopefully a learned concensus.
Bell Labs doesn't really exist anymore because the visionary guys who ran the likes of Bell, HP, etc., have been replaced by corporate greedhead drones who diligently "enhance shareholder value" by offshoring anything that isn't nailed down.
New milennium capitalism uses political means to artificially support a business model and short-circuit free market competition. If you can't win by competing, pay off the political process to rig the rules in your favor.
What is basically happening is that the publishers want to protect their little piles of paper via legislative means. If they actually had something worthwhile, people would pony up for access. In the old days libraries would pay for hard copies because there really was no other way to do it and the prices were fairly reasonable. Individuals might personally subscribe to a relevant journal. Now that there is no reason to actually print hard copies the publishers are fighting tooth and nail to stay in business.
If the government wanted to do something useful, they could set up a framework in which legitimate peer reviewed journals could be published online free of charge.
If we are going to have an information superhighway it shouldn't be a toll road.
If you use the watermark to trigger a banner ad on a player, it could convince the RIAA that there is an ad-revenue stream and cause them to drop the DRM and lawsuits.
Unfortunately it will be used to connect specific downloads to individuals allowing the RIAA to target their lawsuits more accurately. It will still be as impossible to prove in court but will drive an even deeper wedge between the RIAA and reality.
The only way the RIAA will stop suing is when someone wins a countersuit big enough to affect the bottom line of the corporations supporting them.
Heh. I know a few folks that work for the patent office. Wonderful, intelligent folks tasked with the impossible, who also have no control over the politics of policy.
It's interesting that all the critics of my original post seem to have made the same mistake I was trying to illustrate in the first place. People are important to PEOPLE, but probably not to the rest of the universe. I have no clue at to what the true structure, function or nature of the universe could possibly be and hold no illusions in that regard - only that it is so huge and complex that the human brain is incapable of perceiving the whole of it. What do we, as a species really know about our place in it? Nothing. Anyone claiming otherwise is doing so as a matter of faith, not fact. Science? Just scratching the surface-but certainly worth the effort.
A joke: Scientists announce they discovered how to create life in the lab, so God comes down and says "ok, lets have a creation contest-you go first!" So the scientists say "ok then, we'll just take some dirt and..." at which point God says "Wait a minute - make your own dirt"!
Incidentally, I am not religious.
This is all a load of egocentric horseshit. Even a comedy writer like Doug Adams understood how unbelievable large the universe really is, and how unbelievably unimportant humans are in the scheme of things.
Religion and other romanticisms are just a mental sleight of hand to make up for the fact that the universe will uncaringly grind us all to dust.
We are far more dependent on the ecosystem of this planet than anyone seems to want to admit. That harebrained experiment with the "biosphere" a few years ago proved that one pregnant roach - or some other bug - can and will screw up the best laid plan.
All these pie in the sky engineering types should be forced to study cellular structure and function until they all realize that the most complex devices and processes they can design are tinkertoys compared to nature.
All this talk of consiousness and meaning and the perception of beauty is irrelevant nonsense as we haven't the slightest idea of the true nature and function of the universe. Every time we crack one mystery we find its built upon another that's an order of magnitude more difficult to understand.
What really needs to happen is for people to start planning on the mundane. Go hold a door open for someone and the human universe will be better off.
The expensive machines will only be affordable for large corporations. Money that used to go to PEOPLE now gets funneled directly into the pockets of the executives and shareholders. If you thought corporate executive compensation was out of control now, just keep watching.
I'm deeply concerned about the continued corporatization/automation of virtually every segment of the workforce. Mom and Pop shops of all types have been getting squeezed out for years, leaving fewer and fewer opportunities for people to "bootstrap" themselves into prosperity. Although automated production and corporate chain stores do tend to lower prices for consumers, it's very unclear to me where the cycle ends. If Wal-Mart sold nothing but automatically produced goods in stores which are automatically restocked, the only people making a living will be the corporate execs and a few techy types to install and maintain the machinery.
Henry Ford understood that his workers needed a decent wage so they could buy Fords.
Of course, the corporations have to be able to sell stuff to someone to make a profit and a free market is an amazing thing. As you said, it's going to be an interesting century, especially since the centers of economic power will belong to nations with opressive, dictatorial governments like China.
People EXPECT doctors to do something, even when nothing is wrong. I've caught myself doing it and I *am* a doctor. It's human nature.
When I took my board exams I studied old exams for weeks. The information in the exams wasn't really stuff directly from the curriculum; we covered the material but the focus was slightly different. In any case large portions of the information required to be regurgitated for the exam could be classified as "background" - stuff you need to be aware of but doesn't directly affect you in your daily work.
The exam WAS multiple choice and I credit test-taking skills as much as my education for passing on the first try. Logic and the process of elimination can increase your odds to about 50/50 in most cases.
Yes, exactly. The fact remains that the word efficiently communicated the intended meaning. However I am in fact trendy, a Tard AND I speak.
trendy tard speak or not, as soon as I heard the term "Steampunk" I knew exactly what they were talking about.
Me, too. These are art objects paying homage to designs from the beginnings of sci-fi and science itself. If you dont get the humor in the vials "phlogiston and aether" this is not for you.
I can understand someone disliking bad and/or inappropriate set design, but some folks will have a bad attitude toward everything - honestly it's their loss.
Oh, this is too rich. When I got my BA in Psychology, what I was taught about cognitive dissonance was NOTHING like what you describe. I would correct you but a) it's not worth my time and b) you are much funnier as an ignoramus.
Occam's razor simply states that the simplest explanation is the most likely. These morons are claiming all kinds of bullshit about preplanted explosive charges, massive conspiracy, orchestrated mass murder on the part of the government, etc. and other morons are eating it up like froot loops.
The SIMPLEST explaination is that jetliners slamming into the towers and the resulting fire caused the collapse. I don't need to concoct an idiotic story involving aliens, shadow government conspiracy, Elvis and the Illuminati to draw my conclusions. I'm only willing to waste so many neurons on fantasy. The "natural thing to do" is to apply some common sense, not waste my time on bogus "evidence". A few more years of experience under your belt any perhaps you too will have a functioning bullshit detector.
Go look up the definition for "sophomore" if you can figure out how to work a dictionary.