And the license bureaus are a model of business efficiency? They're not. Government contractors? Known for fleecing the government whenever possible. As long as they're only semi-private and therefore not open-market profit-driven, they're going to be like that. It's the profit drive that makes business efficient and tends to weed out corruption and waste. Not all of it, even then, but yes, it does better than government. It can't do that if there's no money in doing what they're doing.
Exactly which of these agencies are you willing to privatize? Do you even realize that privatization means that *you must pay for it*? When the government does it, it's taxed. That means everyone pays a little for each service, whether they use it or not.
That means toll roads. And pricy, because those interstates aren't going to be getting money from the people who don't like to drive on them anymore. There will be no more children's services because the children don't pay for them, so no complaining when you find out your neighbor's been beating his kids for years and nobody's done anything about it--there's no foster homes to put them in. No more social security programs because no insurance business would be willing to put bets on whether someone's going to live long enough to retire, with our lifespans extending every year. Turn law enforcement over to the private security forms exclusively and crime will skyrocket because the most vulnerable can't pay for safety.
It's all well and good to go around spouting that privatization is the solution to everything, but it'd be nice if you had some evidence that was the case.
While it's not a perfect service, I've generally been okay with Blockbuster Online. And I can say for sure that if the movie doesn't show up in a timely manner, you can have them ship another. It's automatic. They don't complain, try to talk you out of it, or make insinuations about your character, they just ship the next movie. If you end up with an extra, you just ship it back. Due to the flaky nature of the mail, I think this is necessary for any business working this way, even if it may sometimes be expensive. My first three selections from Blockbuster Online never showed up--but I got an extra month out of it, new copies shipped, and generally everything since then has been okay.
It's really fairly decent service. I can't compare to Netflix because I'm not a Netflix customer, but I think it's worth the money.
Granted, to a lesser degree. When I bought mine, the specs said it had onboard video and no AGP slot. I went and bought a PCI card. What did I find when I installed it? They upgraded the board, the new one's got AGP.
If the smaller unannounced upgrades are common with other manufacturers, too, that makes it much less of a jump to this.
I don't think I'd call it 'changing their name'. I somehow suspect that we'll still be seeing releases as Mambo from the group still affiliated with the original company, and releases of this Joomla! from this group.
And I'm extremely wary about downloading anything put out by people who can't spell or form cohesive sentences. From the announcement:
"Mambo has changed it's name to Joomla! today. After the develpers of the award wining content management system Mambo has left the rights holder of Mambo, the australian company Miro, they established a new website and will release the first version of Joomla!, which will be version 1.0.0, soon."
To which I say... huh? Somebody needs to remember things like tenses, capitalization of proper nouns, and the difference between it's and its.
I suspect most of the fervor about this didn't come from the parents in the first place. The thing is, yes, most parents want to protect their children... but most of them also know that the world does contain scary/violent/sexual things, and they're less concerned with sex on television than whether their kid is doing drugs. This is as it should be.
If you're trying to get a child to turn out well-adjusted, which is more important... making sure the kid is never exposed to sex, or making sure he actually goes outside sometimes and makes friends and has a life?
All this says, I think, is that most people really do believe the latter. Media hype generally ignores this... but since when has the media cared about reality? Remember the West Nile Virus, which is really not much more dangerous than influenza? The 'sex bracelets' which most kids had never heard of before the TV was claiming they were all having middle school orgies? This isn't any different.
The author here misses the intended audience for Flooz, as far as I could tell at the time--which is to say, those people who cannot have credit cards. Kids and teenagers. Especially teenagers. Give a kid cash and they can spend it at a local store but not online. Give them a check and they don't have an account to put it in, much less a way to spend it after. But Flooz meant that you had your choice of ways to spend the money.
Nobody was going to actually put money into a Flooz account and then use it to buy stuff for themselves, I assume, but it was a halfway decent gift idea. Not worth the hype, though. Now that you can get prepaid 'credit' cards--which I'd never heard of or seen at that point in time, myself--there's no point. But some of us did have a use for it then!
Asa makes a lot of good points here. Of course he does. Firefox rules, etc. And Firefox has done some good things.
I think what most Linux distributions and software packages need, though, is to decide what their target market *is*. There's all kinds of talk about whether Linux is 'ready for the desktop', but never about whose desktop it should be ready for.
Many Linux distros and packages are ready and working nicely on geek desktops everywhere. They do what those users want them to do. Those users like lots of configuration boxes and options and new toys. Asa makes mention of the 15 silly little games in the games folder when you install--and my first time installing Mandrake, I probably spent three hours afterwards trying all the new little games and utilities. It was good fun.
I don't think those distros should have to change. If you're good at that and you're happy doing that, then do that. You don't have to have a Windows market share. You should make a product your users like to use, and if you do that well, you're in good shape.
On the other hand, if what you're emphatically trying to do is to produce a desktop just like Windows XP and your target userbase is all the people who currently use XP, yes, everything Asa says applies. Make that a conscious decision, though. Don't just try to make Linux for the masses because somebody else says you should, for god's sake. I'm not trying to save up for a Linux box so I can have Linux for the masses. I'm saving so I can have a little icon in the corner of my screen that shows me the moon phase and run a webserver off my machine and all those good things.
Like you just said: You're from NYC. If people in LA don't have your sense of money, people in Ohio certainly won't. Or Iowa, or Missouri, or most of that big swath of the US between the two coasts.
Here, yes, we do have Starbucks. I go there regularly. I own a laptop. The fact that I'm willing to pay their exorbitant prices for coffee is because we don't have any other decent coffee shops near where I am all day. I'm absolutely not going to pay $20 to get online while I'm there. I live in Ohio, where you can buy a four-bedroom house for under $100,000 and I'm still considering $7.50 for an evening movie excessive.
For those of us in areas like this, including large swaths of the rest of the world where people don't pay a million dollars for an apartment or get six-figure incomes unless they're executives, lawyers, or doctors... $20 a month is a big chunk of our disposable income. If it wasn't on *top* of home internet access and cell phone, no, it might not be so bad. But after everything else? Yes, it's a lot of money, to logon and check email with your latte.
I think the idea, though, is to teach people that they're *allowed* to write bad novels. Anybody who doesn't write drek to start out with is lying, or possibly just unaware that their work is drek.
NaNoWriMo is not about writing something to *publish* it at the end of the month. It's about writing something. And if you write something... you're a writer.
I've got two domains that've been publicly registered for quite some time now. Neither has produced a great deal of spam, junk mailings, or anything else. Not even harassing phone calls, which to be honest I *expected* because one domain hosts a forum that can get rather hot-tempered.
So I don't think it's a protection racket. A person can live without it quite comfortably. For the paranoid or especially at risk, for an extra few cents you can have that peace of mind. Like a home or car security system, you don't need it to live quite comfortably.
If they were *asking* twenty a month, some people would still pay but yes, it'd be exorbitant. Ten dollars a year, though? Considering that yes, they have to maintain all the records and forward correspondence and such? Nothing stops *you* from forming a corporation to act as a proxy, with a post office box and a throwaway email. That, however, would probably still cost you more than $0.83 a month.
I think the going rate is more like $20/year for proxy-registered domains, and that'll probably drop in a few years once competition increases. Considering people used to pay $35 a year for just the domain, that's not exactly an insanely high price. And, for that matter, if you can't afford an extra $.83 a month, maybe you have other priorities to focus on besides your website?
There isn't supposed to have to be a concern for the supply side from the demand side. That's economics. The demand side doesn't say, "Oh, supplier, I feel so bad for all you have to put up with, so I'll pay you more!" It says, "Sorry, my demand for music is no longer such that I'll pay $18 an album. Tough cookies."
Yes, this can lead to chaos. It is, however, temporary. Suppliers who need to get $18 an album under the current model can't lower their prices, so they go out of business. But one of three things happens in return.
First possibility: New equilibrium at the new price. We discover that people really just don't want to purchase that many albums, so they only produce a few, and less popular musicians go back to playing weekend gigs at bowling alleys. It won't kill them to get day jobs.
Second possibility: Supply decreases... but people figure out that they really do still want those albums, so they start being willing to pay more, and things go back to where the RIAA wants them. This is what will happen if the copy protection stuff works, but it makes a very heavy presumption: that people are going to be willing to keep consuming that much music at that price. Personally, I don't download music anymore. But I don't buy it, either. I wouldn't be the only one.
And then, the third possibility: Change in supply side allows them to produce same amount of goods at lower price, thus meeting the demand where it wants to be. Maybe it's this pay-by-the-download thing. Maybe it's something else.
Consumers trying to be 'considerate' of the companies that produce their products totally mucks up the entire equation, and generally leads to the consumers getting totally screwed. If the companies were similarly considerate of the consumers, it might work, but they aren't. They don't care that John can't afford that album; he shouldn't care that they can't afford to sell it to him for what he has to give.
Now, how John goes about fixing that disparity may not be legal. But that's pretty par for the course, too. Remember those stories about peasants shooting the King's deer so they could eat? Parents in poverty stealing loaves of bread to feed their children? Demand for food is high, but the prices weren't what people could afford to pay. So they fixed it their own way.
Sheri S. Tepper's 'The Fresco' features *several* insect-like sentient alien species who do not in fact attempt to take over. They are, in fact, mostly good guys, and the 'bad' ones are not bent on Universal Domination.
If you don't say *what* services you rendered, and you can come up with something plausible that you did have to spend time on because of that company, while they aren't obligated to pay because you don't have a contract with them... invoicing them also shouldn't be illegal. And if they pay it, well, they chose to pay it.
There *is* access, allegedly, in some places. I get a connection in the student center, tried using it once, it comes up--in the web browser--with some kind of login screen, and then claims that my login is valid but that I'm not allowed to login without a 'secure' connection.
I wasn't even aware that there were that many places to plugin to the network, though. I haven't been bothering... hard enough finding places with outlets to recharge in the middle of the day.
This is why computers include *volume controls* with *mute options*.
I did all those things, too, but I multitask well, and type very fast, so would usually end up with free space in the periods where the instructor was waiting for everybody else to write things down.
University of Akron's also got very good wireless coverage, and they push laptops rather heavily. It was so terribly convenient. I'm not going there anymore, alas... I miss it. The speed was really blazing, and nothing compares to the ability to actually be online looking up information related to your lectures while they're happening... can make for a much greater understanding of the material.
Alas, my current school has some kind of fledgling deal going on, but so far I haven't even been able to get it to work, and they aren't very good about providing information on it.:(
Epson *hasn't*, thus far, made moves to prevent others from making ink cartridges for their printers. I've been able to get decent quality for a much, much lower price elsewhere.
I always buy my printers based on how much it'll run me to replace the ink afterwards. Not necessarily comparing *just* that, granted, but it's a big factor. These days, my favored brand is generally Epson, and my still-relatively-new Stylus C62 has been good to me. And replacement ink doesn't break the bank.
If people would *think* before they purchase and realize that Lexmark may have decent printer prices but their ink is absolutely ridiculous, such legislation would be largley unnecessary.
I don't really use Google because it returns better results. I mean, it returns pretty good results. I manage to find what I need. But I really use Google because, while they do have advertising, their advertising is not obnoxious. It doesn't pop-up, blink, animate, or pretend to be legitimate search results or articles. It *does* occasionally actually pertain to what I'm looking for, as opposed to Yahoo's continued insistance that I need to lose weight and find a man... using, of course, the insanely-expensive Ediets and Yahoo! Personals.
So, in the end, Google would win even if it took me a few minutes longer to find what I wanted, because I can *bear* spending a few minutes on Google. Ten seconds on Yahoo, and my eyes are bleeding.
...she's not teaching people to draw any 'style' at all. The concept is drawing *what you see*. Straight from life. Imagination and creativity really unnecessary.
Life drawing is one of those things that is, in fact, relatively necessary to get *good* at other kinds of drawing. It gives you the fundamentals. That is not, however, to say that it's really innovative or anything. It's not supposed to be. It's a foundation, and foundations are rarely flashy.
I'd be willing to bet that the 'after' picture, whatever you think of it, actually bears much more resemblance to the subject.
Also requires an ability to focus, just to do it--not to mention that the people who make money are usually the ones who can handle the business side, too.
* programmer
Imagine somebody with ADHD on the project mentioned--was it yesterday? A few days ago?--that was going to require 12-hour days, 7 days a week until it got done.
* performer
Refer to the 'artist' listing. The performance arts always have their by-rote portions. Memorizing lines, rehearsing dance steps.
* teacher
With a good number of these in the family, I think you must be talking out of your ass. 'Grading papers' is generally referred to as a fate similar to death, and yet it still has to get done constantly.
* researcher
Requires things like 'paperwork' and 'observation'.
* negotiator
Gee, this is vague. Negotiator of what? Regardless of that, though, researching would have to be involved, to know the issue you're working with. And a great deal of patience.
Now, referring to the *rest* of the parent post:
ECT is actually still used, by choice, by people with severe depression problems, and some of them do actually think it works. It's not quite so barbaric as it used to be, and it's generally the patient's option.
Psychiatry *was* developed and practiced by researchers, yes. But most of the problems you seem to have with it could very well be applied to medicine in general. (Leeches, anybody?) But maybe you're in favor of just going to a homeopath. Hope that works out for you.
Pharmaceutical advertising is a very controversial thing. I don't agree with it, in general. Not for Paxil, not for Allegra, not for Vioxx, not for anything else. Social anxiety, however, is not somehow less real because of it. Perhaps, like the Victorians, we should just allow people to become invalids when they develop such problems, instead of medication. Who really needs to hold down a job, anyway?
Yes, sometimes people described as having ADHD really do have other problems. This is a problem with a good number of disorders, and is not in any way limited to the mind. That does not mean that everybody with the diagnosis is either misdiagnosed or 'faking it', nor does it mean that the medications aren't plenty safe and effective for their purposes.
Yes, let's frighten people, not inform them.
on
Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Some people actually still find ECT useful. The second I don't know about; the third *worked*, but wasn't worth the price.
I'm not saying that they aren't necessarily right, but there are generally sources of information that have *less* interest in one direction or another. People who are researchers, not authors with books to publicize or, at the same time, pharmaceutical companies with meds to sell.
And, for that matter, said companies are usually fairly up-front about side effects, because people actually care more about lack of libido on SSRIs than the chance of tardive dyskinesia on an antipsychotic.
Now, I'm firmly of the belief that Ritalin's over-prescribed, especially with children. But I also have concerns about the fact that I can walk into my doctor's office, ask for Prozac, and he'll give it to me.
But in this case? The web page is pure scare tactics.
Of the people I've known in life who happened to recreationally abuse certain pharmaceuticals? It was never Ritalin. Of the people I've known with ADHD? None of them had trouble finding work because of the label, and only a few because of symptoms.
And then they start acting as if it's some global conspiracy or something. If Ritalin is over-prescribed, it's more the fault of the parents than the NIMH. And the manufacturer? Just trying to make money. Like every other corporation in the world. You can't fault a swan for swimming. It may not be *beneficial*, but it's not 'out to get you' or anyone else.
Even the charges that can be taken seriously--like that it sacrifices creativity and spontinaeity in favor of the ability to perform rote tasks? Makes me wonder if the author has actually held a real job anytime recently. Rote tasks are a part of the real world. The ability to do them? Quite necessary. Creativity and spontinaeity are great qualities, but less good at putting food on the table.
It's just bullshit. F-U-D. Preying on people who don't know any better.
...any site claiming to have 'information' on something when that site is specifically in place to try and scare people away from something (like, say, psychiatry).
Reliable info on psychiatric medications is unlikely to come from a group referring to itself as the Antipsychiatry Coalition. That is what is referred to as 'bias'.
Slashdot Mirror
And the license bureaus are a model of business efficiency? They're not. Government contractors? Known for fleecing the government whenever possible. As long as they're only semi-private and therefore not open-market profit-driven, they're going to be like that. It's the profit drive that makes business efficient and tends to weed out corruption and waste. Not all of it, even then, but yes, it does better than government. It can't do that if there's no money in doing what they're doing.
Exactly which of these agencies are you willing to privatize? Do you even realize that privatization means that *you must pay for it*? When the government does it, it's taxed. That means everyone pays a little for each service, whether they use it or not.
That means toll roads. And pricy, because those interstates aren't going to be getting money from the people who don't like to drive on them anymore. There will be no more children's services because the children don't pay for them, so no complaining when you find out your neighbor's been beating his kids for years and nobody's done anything about it--there's no foster homes to put them in. No more social security programs because no insurance business would be willing to put bets on whether someone's going to live long enough to retire, with our lifespans extending every year. Turn law enforcement over to the private security forms exclusively and crime will skyrocket because the most vulnerable can't pay for safety.
It's all well and good to go around spouting that privatization is the solution to everything, but it'd be nice if you had some evidence that was the case.
While it's not a perfect service, I've generally been okay with Blockbuster Online. And I can say for sure that if the movie doesn't show up in a timely manner, you can have them ship another. It's automatic. They don't complain, try to talk you out of it, or make insinuations about your character, they just ship the next movie. If you end up with an extra, you just ship it back. Due to the flaky nature of the mail, I think this is necessary for any business working this way, even if it may sometimes be expensive. My first three selections from Blockbuster Online never showed up--but I got an extra month out of it, new copies shipped, and generally everything since then has been okay.
It's really fairly decent service. I can't compare to Netflix because I'm not a Netflix customer, but I think it's worth the money.
Granted, to a lesser degree. When I bought mine, the specs said it had onboard video and no AGP slot. I went and bought a PCI card. What did I find when I installed it? They upgraded the board, the new one's got AGP.
If the smaller unannounced upgrades are common with other manufacturers, too, that makes it much less of a jump to this.
I don't think I'd call it 'changing their name'. I somehow suspect that we'll still be seeing releases as Mambo from the group still affiliated with the original company, and releases of this Joomla! from this group.
And I'm extremely wary about downloading anything put out by people who can't spell or form cohesive sentences. From the announcement:
"Mambo has changed it's name to Joomla! today. After the develpers of the award wining content management system Mambo has left the rights holder of Mambo, the australian company Miro, they established a new website and will release the first version of Joomla!, which will be version 1.0.0, soon."
To which I say... huh? Somebody needs to remember things like tenses, capitalization of proper nouns, and the difference between it's and its.
I suspect most of the fervor about this didn't come from the parents in the first place. The thing is, yes, most parents want to protect their children... but most of them also know that the world does contain scary/violent/sexual things, and they're less concerned with sex on television than whether their kid is doing drugs. This is as it should be.
If you're trying to get a child to turn out well-adjusted, which is more important... making sure the kid is never exposed to sex, or making sure he actually goes outside sometimes and makes friends and has a life?
All this says, I think, is that most people really do believe the latter. Media hype generally ignores this... but since when has the media cared about reality? Remember the West Nile Virus, which is really not much more dangerous than influenza? The 'sex bracelets' which most kids had never heard of before the TV was claiming they were all having middle school orgies? This isn't any different.
The author here misses the intended audience for Flooz, as far as I could tell at the time--which is to say, those people who cannot have credit cards. Kids and teenagers. Especially teenagers. Give a kid cash and they can spend it at a local store but not online. Give them a check and they don't have an account to put it in, much less a way to spend it after. But Flooz meant that you had your choice of ways to spend the money.
Nobody was going to actually put money into a Flooz account and then use it to buy stuff for themselves, I assume, but it was a halfway decent gift idea. Not worth the hype, though. Now that you can get prepaid 'credit' cards--which I'd never heard of or seen at that point in time, myself--there's no point. But some of us did have a use for it then!
Asa makes a lot of good points here. Of course he does. Firefox rules, etc. And Firefox has done some good things.
I think what most Linux distributions and software packages need, though, is to decide what their target market *is*. There's all kinds of talk about whether Linux is 'ready for the desktop', but never about whose desktop it should be ready for.
Many Linux distros and packages are ready and working nicely on geek desktops everywhere. They do what those users want them to do. Those users like lots of configuration boxes and options and new toys. Asa makes mention of the 15 silly little games in the games folder when you install--and my first time installing Mandrake, I probably spent three hours afterwards trying all the new little games and utilities. It was good fun.
I don't think those distros should have to change. If you're good at that and you're happy doing that, then do that. You don't have to have a Windows market share. You should make a product your users like to use, and if you do that well, you're in good shape.
On the other hand, if what you're emphatically trying to do is to produce a desktop just like Windows XP and your target userbase is all the people who currently use XP, yes, everything Asa says applies. Make that a conscious decision, though. Don't just try to make Linux for the masses because somebody else says you should, for god's sake. I'm not trying to save up for a Linux box so I can have Linux for the masses. I'm saving so I can have a little icon in the corner of my screen that shows me the moon phase and run a webserver off my machine and all those good things.
Some of us like our obscure toys!
Like you just said: You're from NYC. If people in LA don't have your sense of money, people in Ohio certainly won't. Or Iowa, or Missouri, or most of that big swath of the US between the two coasts.
Here, yes, we do have Starbucks. I go there regularly. I own a laptop. The fact that I'm willing to pay their exorbitant prices for coffee is because we don't have any other decent coffee shops near where I am all day. I'm absolutely not going to pay $20 to get online while I'm there. I live in Ohio, where you can buy a four-bedroom house for under $100,000 and I'm still considering $7.50 for an evening movie excessive.
For those of us in areas like this, including large swaths of the rest of the world where people don't pay a million dollars for an apartment or get six-figure incomes unless they're executives, lawyers, or doctors... $20 a month is a big chunk of our disposable income. If it wasn't on *top* of home internet access and cell phone, no, it might not be so bad. But after everything else? Yes, it's a lot of money, to logon and check email with your latte.
I think the idea, though, is to teach people that they're *allowed* to write bad novels. Anybody who doesn't write drek to start out with is lying, or possibly just unaware that their work is drek.
NaNoWriMo is not about writing something to *publish* it at the end of the month. It's about writing something. And if you write something... you're a writer.
I've got two domains that've been publicly registered for quite some time now. Neither has produced a great deal of spam, junk mailings, or anything else. Not even harassing phone calls, which to be honest I *expected* because one domain hosts a forum that can get rather hot-tempered.
So I don't think it's a protection racket. A person can live without it quite comfortably. For the paranoid or especially at risk, for an extra few cents you can have that peace of mind. Like a home or car security system, you don't need it to live quite comfortably.
If they were *asking* twenty a month, some people would still pay but yes, it'd be exorbitant. Ten dollars a year, though? Considering that yes, they have to maintain all the records and forward correspondence and such? Nothing stops *you* from forming a corporation to act as a proxy, with a post office box and a throwaway email. That, however, would probably still cost you more than $0.83 a month.
$20 per *month* to protect your privacy?
I think the going rate is more like $20/year for proxy-registered domains, and that'll probably drop in a few years once competition increases. Considering people used to pay $35 a year for just the domain, that's not exactly an insanely high price. And, for that matter, if you can't afford an extra $.83 a month, maybe you have other priorities to focus on besides your website?
There isn't supposed to have to be a concern for the supply side from the demand side. That's economics. The demand side doesn't say, "Oh, supplier, I feel so bad for all you have to put up with, so I'll pay you more!" It says, "Sorry, my demand for music is no longer such that I'll pay $18 an album. Tough cookies."
Yes, this can lead to chaos. It is, however, temporary. Suppliers who need to get $18 an album under the current model can't lower their prices, so they go out of business. But one of three things happens in return.
First possibility: New equilibrium at the new price. We discover that people really just don't want to purchase that many albums, so they only produce a few, and less popular musicians go back to playing weekend gigs at bowling alleys. It won't kill them to get day jobs.
Second possibility: Supply decreases... but people figure out that they really do still want those albums, so they start being willing to pay more, and things go back to where the RIAA wants them. This is what will happen if the copy protection stuff works, but it makes a very heavy presumption: that people are going to be willing to keep consuming that much music at that price. Personally, I don't download music anymore. But I don't buy it, either. I wouldn't be the only one.
And then, the third possibility: Change in supply side allows them to produce same amount of goods at lower price, thus meeting the demand where it wants to be. Maybe it's this pay-by-the-download thing. Maybe it's something else.
Consumers trying to be 'considerate' of the companies that produce their products totally mucks up the entire equation, and generally leads to the consumers getting totally screwed. If the companies were similarly considerate of the consumers, it might work, but they aren't. They don't care that John can't afford that album; he shouldn't care that they can't afford to sell it to him for what he has to give.
Now, how John goes about fixing that disparity may not be legal. But that's pretty par for the course, too. Remember those stories about peasants shooting the King's deer so they could eat? Parents in poverty stealing loaves of bread to feed their children? Demand for food is high, but the prices weren't what people could afford to pay. So they fixed it their own way.
Sheri S. Tepper's 'The Fresco' features *several* insect-like sentient alien species who do not in fact attempt to take over. They are, in fact, mostly good guys, and the 'bad' ones are not bent on Universal Domination.
If you don't say *what* services you rendered, and you can come up with something plausible that you did have to spend time on because of that company, while they aren't obligated to pay because you don't have a contract with them... invoicing them also shouldn't be illegal. And if they pay it, well, they chose to pay it.
There *is* access, allegedly, in some places. I get a connection in the student center, tried using it once, it comes up--in the web browser--with some kind of login screen, and then claims that my login is valid but that I'm not allowed to login without a 'secure' connection.
I wasn't even aware that there were that many places to plugin to the network, though. I haven't been bothering... hard enough finding places with outlets to recharge in the middle of the day.
This is why computers include *volume controls* with *mute options*.
I did all those things, too, but I multitask well, and type very fast, so would usually end up with free space in the periods where the instructor was waiting for everybody else to write things down.
University of Akron's also got very good wireless coverage, and they push laptops rather heavily. It was so terribly convenient. I'm not going there anymore, alas... I miss it. The speed was really blazing, and nothing compares to the ability to actually be online looking up information related to your lectures while they're happening... can make for a much greater understanding of the material.
:(
Alas, my current school has some kind of fledgling deal going on, but so far I haven't even been able to get it to work, and they aren't very good about providing information on it.
If you actually buy the Epson ink.
Epson *hasn't*, thus far, made moves to prevent others from making ink cartridges for their printers. I've been able to get decent quality for a much, much lower price elsewhere.
I always buy my printers based on how much it'll run me to replace the ink afterwards. Not necessarily comparing *just* that, granted, but it's a big factor. These days, my favored brand is generally Epson, and my still-relatively-new Stylus C62 has been good to me. And replacement ink doesn't break the bank.
If people would *think* before they purchase and realize that Lexmark may have decent printer prices but their ink is absolutely ridiculous, such legislation would be largley unnecessary.
I don't really use Google because it returns better results. I mean, it returns pretty good results. I manage to find what I need. But I really use Google because, while they do have advertising, their advertising is not obnoxious. It doesn't pop-up, blink, animate, or pretend to be legitimate search results or articles. It *does* occasionally actually pertain to what I'm looking for, as opposed to Yahoo's continued insistance that I need to lose weight and find a man... using, of course, the insanely-expensive Ediets and Yahoo! Personals.
So, in the end, Google would win even if it took me a few minutes longer to find what I wanted, because I can *bear* spending a few minutes on Google. Ten seconds on Yahoo, and my eyes are bleeding.
...she's not teaching people to draw any 'style' at all. The concept is drawing *what you see*. Straight from life. Imagination and creativity really unnecessary.
Life drawing is one of those things that is, in fact, relatively necessary to get *good* at other kinds of drawing. It gives you the fundamentals. That is not, however, to say that it's really innovative or anything. It's not supposed to be. It's a foundation, and foundations are rarely flashy.
I'd be willing to bet that the 'after' picture, whatever you think of it, actually bears much more resemblance to the subject.
* artist
Also requires an ability to focus, just to do it--not to mention that the people who make money are usually the ones who can handle the business side, too.
* programmer
Imagine somebody with ADHD on the project mentioned--was it yesterday? A few days ago?--that was going to require 12-hour days, 7 days a week until it got done.
* performer
Refer to the 'artist' listing. The performance arts always have their by-rote portions. Memorizing lines, rehearsing dance steps.
* teacher
With a good number of these in the family, I think you must be talking out of your ass. 'Grading papers' is generally referred to as a fate similar to death, and yet it still has to get done constantly.
* researcher
Requires things like 'paperwork' and 'observation'.
* negotiator
Gee, this is vague. Negotiator of what? Regardless of that, though, researching would have to be involved, to know the issue you're working with. And a great deal of patience.
Now, referring to the *rest* of the parent post:
ECT is actually still used, by choice, by people with severe depression problems, and some of them do actually think it works. It's not quite so barbaric as it used to be, and it's generally the patient's option.
Psychiatry *was* developed and practiced by researchers, yes. But most of the problems you seem to have with it could very well be applied to medicine in general. (Leeches, anybody?) But maybe you're in favor of just going to a homeopath. Hope that works out for you.
Pharmaceutical advertising is a very controversial thing. I don't agree with it, in general. Not for Paxil, not for Allegra, not for Vioxx, not for anything else. Social anxiety, however, is not somehow less real because of it. Perhaps, like the Victorians, we should just allow people to become invalids when they develop such problems, instead of medication. Who really needs to hold down a job, anyway?
Yes, sometimes people described as having ADHD really do have other problems. This is a problem with a good number of disorders, and is not in any way limited to the mind. That does not mean that everybody with the diagnosis is either misdiagnosed or 'faking it', nor does it mean that the medications aren't plenty safe and effective for their purposes.
Some people actually still find ECT useful. The second I don't know about; the third *worked*, but wasn't worth the price.
I'm not saying that they aren't necessarily right, but there are generally sources of information that have *less* interest in one direction or another. People who are researchers, not authors with books to publicize or, at the same time, pharmaceutical companies with meds to sell.
And, for that matter, said companies are usually fairly up-front about side effects, because people actually care more about lack of libido on SSRIs than the chance of tardive dyskinesia on an antipsychotic.
Now, I'm firmly of the belief that Ritalin's over-prescribed, especially with children. But I also have concerns about the fact that I can walk into my doctor's office, ask for Prozac, and he'll give it to me.
But in this case? The web page is pure scare tactics.
Of the people I've known in life who happened to recreationally abuse certain pharmaceuticals? It was never Ritalin. Of the people I've known with ADHD? None of them had trouble finding work because of the label, and only a few because of symptoms.
And then they start acting as if it's some global conspiracy or something. If Ritalin is over-prescribed, it's more the fault of the parents than the NIMH. And the manufacturer? Just trying to make money. Like every other corporation in the world. You can't fault a swan for swimming. It may not be *beneficial*, but it's not 'out to get you' or anyone else.
Even the charges that can be taken seriously--like that it sacrifices creativity and spontinaeity in favor of the ability to perform rote tasks? Makes me wonder if the author has actually held a real job anytime recently. Rote tasks are a part of the real world. The ability to do them? Quite necessary. Creativity and spontinaeity are great qualities, but less good at putting food on the table.
It's just bullshit. F-U-D. Preying on people who don't know any better.
...any site claiming to have 'information' on something when that site is specifically in place to try and scare people away from something (like, say, psychiatry).
Reliable info on psychiatric medications is unlikely to come from a group referring to itself as the Antipsychiatry Coalition. That is what is referred to as 'bias'.