This "take it or leave it" attitude is part of the problem. Aside from there being a lot of sly deception (does it clearly state on the box that you are buying a license rather than a game, and that it is worth less second hand, and that if you buy second hand you get a cut down version?) companies need to form relationships with their customers, and part of any relationship is a two way dialogue.
Customers have every right to complain, and in fact in this case it is absolutely vital because if they don't and the game fails to sell it will be blamed on piracy. We need to make it clear that the nasty DRM is what made it fail in the marketplace.
After a horrible delivery fiasco, I was forced recently to buy a textbook via an adobe DRM type encryption method. I will never do it again. What I expected was something closer to a PDF file. What I actually got was a broken PDF-like document, only viewable in a horrible viewer with the lack of a decent zoom feature, the inability to *print* pages that I need (it will let you print some of them, but not others, and it doesn't tell you before you try it), an incomplete product (compared to the physical book) filled with broken links to the publishers website, and a 2 hour headache finding the links to the prior version of the book to make it work in a cumbersome wrapper. I'm annoyed enough that I'm trying to get a refund on it, and may push it as far as going for a charge back from my credit card company under the defective goods clause. If anyone from Bedford/St Martins is reading this: You need to step up, and deliver what you promise.
If people are having DRM experiences with games anything close to what I just had with a DRM protected textbook -- they indeed have every right to complaint, and need to do it loudly.
I try to set aside an hour a day just for conversation with my wife. Sometimes it has to be on the phone, but usually we can work it in for face to face time. Its a very good thing for us. The conversation lets her decompress, gives me a chance to reconnect with her, share a bit of my day (even if I do a lot more listening than talking), and because that time is almost always there she doesn't feel the need to interrupt every few seconds when I'm trying to say watch a hockey game, or get some bit of work done. She knows she is a priority, because its usually the second thing we do when we get home; the first thing is collie attack, and the dogs have less patience than even children (I rarely make it through the front hallway without at least one of them biting on my hand to demand attention). It makes for a much happier home if you can keep that face-to-face talk time going, and its usually scheduled around the same time of day!
What I can't stand about most young people (aka, people my age) is that they have to be texting wherever the fuck they go. Kids today think it's OK to just go ahead and text while in the middle of a conversation. It's not even a "hey, I have to take this, sorry" like you get when the person you're talking to receives a phone call. Every time someone starts texting in the middle of a conversation I have an urge to punch them right in the face. They don't realize that texting is diverting their attention from the conversation and that that's rude to do. I don't care what form of technology it is, diverting your attention from a conversation is rude. I cannot for the live of me comprehend this behavior.
Unfortunately, a lot of it now begins with the parents that buy their kids handhelds as a way to babysit them in the car because it makes their life easier. They also use them to babysit them in Church, because it makes the parents hour there a lot easier to not have squirrel-like children fighting, disrupting the service, drawing a scene, talking, and whatever else during. The same parents usually have a DVD player in the mini-van, a WII/XBox at home, a pair of DS's/DSi's for their kids, and tend to doll out the ipod/ipad's for Christmas. After the kids become hopelessly addicted to the little blue screen they also become somewhat easier to control by threatening to take their electronics away. It can make family trips a little less aggravating, and even I'll give in on a road trip to make the experience better. (I also wear ear plugs for those, and not just for the road noise!)
The downside of the electronics is that you can end up with tweens that have poor social skills, will bury their heads in the devices when company is over, and can't sit still without a handheld device to play on.
I'm not above this problem myself. Although I can take credit for not contributing to the problem; I didn't buy any of the handhelds for them. However, I did them let them in the house for two kids age 11, and 7 against my better judgment. Its a bit of torture, but all of the electronics (including the TV) will go bye bye for the duration of Lent. When we did this last year, the first week of it was pure torture, but by about the 2nd week the kids had adapted to doing other things. The effect does wear off quickly when the electronics are returned, but some of the benefits socially linger on for awhile.
Eharmony is pretty much a waste of time, even for the devout Christian looking for a partner.
I met my beloved through an ad I placed on Craigslist. Of course, she will never admit to using Craigslist for how we met. ha People DO actually use the site for something other than hookups; its just not known as well for that side of it.
PoF was a complete waste of my time. I talked to a couple people, but I never wanted to meet any of them. With Craigslist I got so many responses, so quickly that it became a process of weeding out the psychos, and other problems from the ones I wanted to meet. Despite having in bold letters that I did not want to hear from anyone that was married, or going through a divorce; I still got 4 responses from married women looking to hookup, and 3 more from those whom claimed to be "separated" or some other version of the same.
The ironic bit is that I almost didn't meet my beloved at all. Her email to me got sent to the spam folder. Roughly 99% of what I get from Yahoo is spam, so the filter flagged it. If I hadn't taken a second to look, I wouldn't have responded to her at all, and would have missed on the pass four years of a truly fantastic woman. Her email sat in my spam folder for over a week, and she thought I wasn't truly interested by the time I contacted her.
YMMV, but Craigslist has proven itself a lot more effective than the big dating sites for me.
Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I tend to think it was more divine design.
That rarely happens, at least in the United States.
And even if it does, in many cases you will be in a better facility than a maximum-security prison, depending on the state and the crime you are accused of. You will likely eventually be released, and you will have not been convicted of the crime, therefore retaining your civil rights (if you were accused of a felony).
That, or eventually they crack the crypto.
Apparently you haven't been in a family court lately. In Missouri as a case in point, you have *no right to appeal any contempt ruling*. Meaning, not only will you sit in jail indefinitely in a nasty county lockup facility, you will have no means to free yourself from a wrongful contempt charge. In addition to which, our wonderful Missouri law adds the extra kicker of "No other judge may remove, nor revoke the contempt order of another".
I used to really miss my 21" Iiyama displays. I had a heavily reinforced, and extremely large desk to accommodate 4 of them. Ever try to wall mount 4 100lb CRT's in a small area? It can be done, but you generally have to do some structural work, or at least install steel plates on both sides of the studs to handle it. I knew a few people that had 10-12 mounted that way. They didn't just have to work on the mounting issue, they had to improve the airflow to the room to make the room less of a sauna in the summer.
Wall mounting 4-6 LCD's (or 12 if you are a stock broker, and have taken your Ritalin), and still having room for 2 more on the desktop is trivial now. You also don't have to call in the HVAC guy to add more ducting to increase the airflow to deal with the heat.
VGA I can probably live without, although some of my displays have shown some surprising longevity, but DVI will be a bit painful not to have on the board.
My biggest gripe with things like Steam is that if I buy a game, and it sucks or doesn't work well on my hardware -- I can't sell the game. This doesn't bother me too much if its $2-12 for a game, but it is a major bite when the games are $40+.
For the most part things like Steam work okay, and they do provide some value to the end user in the form of getting updates, and patches. However, not everything will let you do things like play a game in offline mode. I often don't know what will, and will not work until I download it. Nor can I guarantee those functions will remain tomorrow.
It's not silly. We're just more sensitive to aesthetics.
In the case of my boys I don't think its aesthetics. I think the real reason is marketing. Their favorite wii game right now has absolutely horrible graphics. Its a DragonballZ game where, much like the cartoon, the fight scenes are pretty much just three images repeated over, and over again. They aren't even very good images at that, but the kids like that game so much they fight over who gets to play all of the time.
I've had some luck getting them to play with older consoles, and the games are a lot cheaper. One of the best ones though was a cheapie "21 games in one" system. The graphics were poor, but it had great games like Galaga on it that are very enjoyable to play.
Our Wii system is in use for netflix about 1/3 of the time. It would be used more than that, but we have Uverse, and a DVR.
Most of the pharmacy internships wont let you do much more than file paperwork, stock shelves, and handle minor bookkeeping tasks. A lowly pharmacy technician gets more out of their regular employment in terms of training than the average pharmacy internship. (Yes, there are exceptions, but they are few.) However, those internship, and practicum hours are required to get the doctorate degree.
The only useful internships I saw where with places that did review for patients in long term care facilities, with insurance companies (ironic beyond belief that insurance companies are often doing a better job training future pharmacists than are hospitals, and community pharmacies), and a handful of very small pharmacies where the individual PIC made a decision to do something educational with it. The hospitals don't want the liability issues, but they do want the free "stock boy" help...
Okay, I'm somewhere in the middle of calc II...so I can't comment fully on calculus, but all of trigonometry can be written into 2 pages (1 if you write small). Most of algebra can be written into a couple pages. If you can truly grasp the meaning of those couple pages of concepts, you could get indeed know enough to reason out trig, and algebra problems from maybe 5 pages maximum of cheat sheets. I don't doubt he took a lot longer than week though. The true test of these things is being able to reason out the correct application. That takes some serious time working on actual problems.
Can a pebble bed reactor survive: The complete & total loss of any supporting structures which keep the fuel pebbles at a distance, the simultaneous loss of its cooling system, and the complete loss of *every single control system in place*? Plus the complete failure of humans not to do *exactly the wrong thing in every single instance in a crisis*? Or to not be able to do anything at all? (Say chemical weapon attack?) Not hours, not days, not weeks, indefinitely -- without being a risk to those living in the surrounding community?
That is the real test. These aren't toys, and its no small danger we live with. I live next to something with the potential to destroy the 1/3 of the agricultural capacity of the United States, and make areas of 3 states unlivable for generations to come.
I'm a big believer in multiple event scenarios, and in the tremendous overconfidence in tables for how strong something really is & narcissistic egos of engineers that have killed numerous people with their pronouncements of "that is simply an impossible scenario"..only to watch it happen.
I'm a big believer in incredible amounts of human error, and a tremendous decline in the quality of the education system; to the point that a fair number of those with even advanced degrees aren't worth their salt. If it can't be run, and maintained by people with a 70 IQ, it just might be a problem. Never underestimate the effect of those 50 bonus points on the hiring test for minorities, social promotion in schools, and future government mandated quotas for degrees, and management promotion.
If your reactor can be screwed up because the maintenance person Tyrone puts in the wrong size bolt after a hard night of celebrating his/her recent casino win with an all nighter of amphetamine, cocaine, alcohol, and sex with random strangers (possibly for money)... You know what? It will probably happen. If your reactor can be screwed up because Susie decided she needed to have an excuse not to come home so she is able to cheat on her husband by smashing the levee that feeds the water to your plant...you know what? It will probably happen. (The few of you who live in or near Machens, Missouri, and West Alton, Missouri know why I reference such an event.)
We are reasonably near the New Madrid fault line. I really do not believe a pressurized water reactor like they have at Callaway would survive a seismic event even remotely close to what Japan experienced. The propaganda minister at Ameren tells us:
Emergency Safety Systems include six emergency power sources: â 2 Ameren power lines to the site â 2 Emergency Diesel Generators (onsite) â 1 power line from local Rural Co-op â 4 Standby Diesel Generators (offsite) Additional Emergency Safety Features: âSteam powered cooling water pump with DC battery powered controls system âA 30-day cooling water supply stored on-site in a seismically designed retention pond.
All well, and good. Except in my scenario, the upwind rail line has a pair of trains passing at the exact same time of the seismic event. Each of the trains has tanker cars filled with a total of half a million gallons of things that react to cause long lasting fire, and/or creating a poison gas cloud that kills everyone downwind (meaning every single nuclear plant employee, including recent big winner at the casino Tyrone) for miles around. The twin events or the earthquake, and train accident make the area inaccessible due to chemical contamination, numerous bridge collapses, and the rerouting of surrounding rivers (not unprecedented). The water feeds for the plant are now broken, as are any power lines from anywhere else underground or otherwise. Due to problems with the communications system, and widespread power outages -- outside authorities remain unaware of the situation, and are mobilized to other areas before the extent of the crisis is realized.
...and for profit companies really don't care how you do there, or if you complete the program. They still have your money. That is the real rub with some of these schools. The completion rates for the programs are often very low. If all you get out of it is a massive pile of debt, you haven't improved your situation one iota.
Well, they certainly wont be having a 'revolution' over registering their cell phone. At worst the drug dealers, and those who truly need/want to keep that ability will import activated phones from somewhere else, or pay the homeless guy $10 or a vial of rock to register the phone for them. Speaking of which, it could end up being a nice niche market for awhile until the loophole gets closed if you were to say buy a huge block of airtime from a major carrier, and setup your shop just outside of US jurisdiction. Regulation creates opportunity, and often profits which make the illegal drug trade look paltry.
What this really is -- The beginning of government mandated health care rationing. Anyone who really thinks otherwise is deluding themselves. This is going to spark a way for health insurance, with government health insurance plans for veterans, the elderly, and the poor being the first, but not the last to be subject to denials of care based on a list generated by congress (*at the behest of insurance companies).
I've dealt with this stupidity before. I have a rare and progressive neurological disease called neurosarcoidosis. A change in my state laws gave insurance companies a blanket pass for denying coverage of experimental treatments and care. With no approved treatment for neurosarcoidosis, they thus began to deny every single claim for treatment.
With nothing more than varying the compression of the pill, or using a time release method developed in the 50's mostly involving coating half of a capsules content in wax -- companies have claimed new patients for a variety of pain drugs. With every single one of them being extremely old substances, well out of any patent on any country laws on earth.
Having achieved these patents with no more innovation than a few simple blood plasma level tests, and a few grand for a better pill press. The drug companies have proceeded to mark up the same substances 160,000%, 500,000%, 110,000%, 57,000%, 84,000% respectively for the top selling compounds. Even the illegal drugs markets for cocaine & heroin do not achieve these levels of markup in any form.
Similarly, the markup in generic versions of the few of these pain killers which have become generic is a startling 6000% above costs by the time they hit retail.
I feel so served by this regulation, let me tell you. I love government intervention in my ability to buy drugs. If they were so careless as to allow me to purchase directly from the manufacturer, I might be able to do such horrible things as buy a year and half worth for less than $25 instead of $740.00 a month for a single RX from community pharmacy. Absolute horror.
I wonder how much two way transfer there is between bacteria, viruses and human genes. We know the bacteria are far from static targets, and some of them definitely have the ability to influence your genes (in particular ones that hijack cells like cell wall deficient bacteria) and vice versa. We see far higher rates of certain "autoimmune" diseases in health care workers, likely for this reason. But it might point out another factor in why they get sick and another health care worker exposed to the same organisms doesn't. I'm also wondering if some of these infectious organisms might acquire the ability to turn off copies and if this factor is not a static target over a lifetime (in which case genetic risk counseling might be pretty wildly inaccurate depending on later exposures)?
Not that I consider this flaw terribly serious unless it has the ability to compromise other encryption algos run on the machine aside from user passwords. I've never considered windows encryption secure, so never bothered with it. A person with admin rights could do what they wanted anyway as far as the system goes.
The real downside of W2K is that MS has given it the shaft for awhile, even when it wasn't in extended support they were still not supporting it very well for the last couple years as far as the add ons and other things that came out during that period. Its a shame too, W2K properly tuned is a very fast & light OS.
Maybe I'll buy up someones old XP or Server 2003 license to run on the desktop to tide me over until they finally yank out enough of Vista to make it tolerable, its replacement comes out, or Linux finally learns to handle triple and quad displays properly.
Thats because penicillin didn't exist in 1932, and it didn't become the treatment for Syphilis until the late 50's. By the time it had, every single person in the experimental would be at the latent stage by more than 20 years where it was unlikely to do anything for them.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA34A.htm Of course, the view you are given of Tuskegee is slanted & far from the truth of what actually happened. At the time the approved treatment was a series of arsenic injections, they were painful, and there was serious doubt as to whether or not it had any benefit vs. doing nothing. A large number of blacks did not complete the standard treatment, and there was no tracking for them at the time. What isn't commonly reported, they did offer treatment to all of the participants, many took it - the arsenic based treatment, the same treatment given to whites, many declined. Those that declined the treatment as well as those who accepted it were followed for a small cash stipend. 95% of syphilis goes into remission without treatment, a small portion of that crowd develops problems from latent syphilis.
The government didn't infect any of these people. Every single one of them was offered treatment. Every single one of them in the non-treatment group rejected treatment. Now it sounds a little different, doesn't it?
I'm sure you honestly believe that, and I know why you do. People are paid money to influence opinion until the point when you can't recognize the truth when its right in front of your eyes.
We wouldn't have the highest prison population in the world if the government trusted the people.
We wouldn't have the highest prison rate in the world if we were not importing so many people that were criminally inclined. In particular for the crimes of murder, serious assaults, and armed robbery. This is what the vast majority of people in *prison* are there for. Of course, rape is up there as well.
We know this is the case because you can compare crime rates from the 1950's when the USA was a largely homogeneous population with a crime rate similar to Canada's. We only took the road down extended prison stays, more draconian sentencing laws, and larger prison populations as a result of the violence after the Kennedy Immigration act, and after several severe riots.
"es, smoking causes a low grade inflammatory response throughout the whole body (part of the immune response). While this may lessen IBD" Actually, smoking lowers TNF-A (one of the more inflammatory cytokines in the body), and stimulates the production of ACTH which in turn stimulates more production of cortisol (a rather anti-inflammatory and immune suppressive steroid).
While I think of smoking as mostly immune suppressive, its a little more complicated than that. Certain bacteria prefer an environment higher in TNF-A, some bacteria have a preference for slightly necrotic tissue as well. Smoking creates a hostile environment for some organisms and a welcoming environment for others. You immune system needs large quantities of TNF-A to get rid of things like TB and pneumonia. (Which is why smokers tend to be more vulnerable to these.)
One of the reasons smokers having a difficult time quitting is steroid withdrawal. The inflammatory response in their bodies increases when they try to quit, the "cough" actually gets worse. You throw the double whammy of TNF-A spiking - airways become more constricted, aches and pains in the body increase. Its got to be quite unpleasant.
I have a feeling that is smoking has any effect on AD it will be due to nicotine having immune system effects. In particular, it lowers tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-A). Changing the TNF-A level favors certain bacteria (like pneumonia) and discourages others by making the environment more hostile. It also stimulates ACTH directly which in turn affects gene transcription of insulin by producing more cortisol (which kicks 1,25-D out of the receptor for it for a period of time.) Ultimately, I believe AD will be found to be a multi bacterial exposure disease, with a heavy emphasis on exposure and modification of spirochetes & other slow growing intracellular bacteria that have the ability to hide for prolonged periods of time in nerve tissues and even hijack immune system cells.
Bacteria are far from static targets, they trade DNA & RNA with other organisms, and those most persistent(having demonstrated the greatest ability to hide from your immune system) tend to be the pool they are most likely to trade with. They also can trade DNA & RNA with the host to better hide from your immune system, and occasionally pick up traits (for example making the enzyme which converts 25-D into 1,25-D - which helps them hide from aspects of the latent immune system). 1,25-D is heavily involved in insulin transcription.
I'm not going to go as far as to say that lyme and neurosyphilis are the primary culprits. But they do demonstrate abilities to hide from the immune system, can go latent for long periods, and can cause profound AD like states many years later. Not everyone who acquires these bacteria goes on to develop AD or dementia. But a fair portion of them do, and autopsies find high numbers of them in dementia patients. Perhaps its because they acquired the right combination of multiple infectious exposures to hide & parasite more effectively? Perhaps that ability is not limited to spirochetes but can by gene transfer between bacteria (and possibly even viruses) be transferred to any bacteria that has the ability to take on a mycoplasma or L-form state?
Research is indeed emerging that shows links to bacteria and heart disease, diabetes II, hypothyroid, rheumatoid arthritis, most of the vascular diseases, and MS. Part of the hurdle is most research is looking for one bacteria to cause 100% of every problem. I think the problem is more likely to be a pool of bacteria that can, over time, produce better bugs than the immune system can adapt to and a cumulative exposure problem. It follows that as the gene pool of persistent bacteria grows you are going to end up with badder and badder bugs. These are far from static targets.
Yet another ANC victory, brought to you by the same people who brought you the highest murder rate in the world, nearly halved lifespans of black citizens in less than a decade, and reduced the GDP of South Africa by more than half... They've even managed to enact policies which have reduced gold & diamond mining production.
What?!? You seriously expected telecommunications to be any different from every other outcome measure in the country since ANC rule? 15 more years of ANC rule & S. Africa is headed from a place that started with the highest GDP in all of Africa and first world infrastructure -- all of the way to Zimbabweville.
I would not place a lot of faith in any of this. I think that they studying the wrong genes, I think they need to spend more time studying the genes of bacteria and infectious organisms. While I'm fully aware that gene transfer between certain bacteria (and even a few viruses)and the host is indeed a two way street, and you may see gene sequences come up that way that you might not otherwise... I don't see this as having any real potential to diagnose, cure, or do anything other than extort money from those who may or may not actually get sick. Most of these diseases are far more likely to be caused by persistent bacterial pathogens picking up traits from other persistent bacterial pathogens (and even viral pathogens in some cases) to do new things. They do pick up occasionally protein markers from your own body, or traits like making the converting enzymes for different steroids in your body (Sarcoidosis and Rheumatoid Arthritis are a case in point - both of these have extra-renal conversion of 25-D into 1,25-D in the macrophages [granulomas are just concentrations of macrophages encased in calcium in sarcoidosis] that they've been able to witness being hijacked by bacteria). Its a little scary when bacteria are actually taking over and living in the immune cells that are supposed to be destroying them, but such is the case, and thats been demonstrated in both Sarcoidosis and Rheumatoid Arthritis. The chemistry in Crohns disease is very similar, and it very likely has a similar set of infectious activity occuring.
Now I'm not talking about run of the mill cell walled bacteria, I'm talking about intracellular bacteria, l-forms, mycoplasma, spirochetes... Though the bacteria involved may be relatively common, if they pick up new genes to do new things - even some of the non-pathogenics may become so. Given the fairly large number of people who have improved substantially (and dare I say quite a few cured) not using immune suppression - but using antibiotics to treat diseases like Crohns, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Sarcoidosis (which has no correlation between so called autoantibodies and disease activity), and even more recently Multiple Sclerosis... Given that aside from not being able to culture easily many of these bacteria we can still take them, inject them in an animal and they are pathogenic there and cause many of the same problems (an excellent example of this is the relatively common pathogen Chlamydia Pneumonia which is thought merely to cause a mild respiratory infection but has dramatic links to scarring of the blood vessels, heart disease, and many other problems)....and given that geneticists still can't point to a gene that "definitively causes" any of these - and they've never come up with any useful treatments this way by studying the host -- which would you rather have the money spent on? Getting a better understanding of the bacteria and the changes they go through - so we can find better ways to kill them when the immune system is compromised (something with real hope of curing people, and actually preventing most of the degenerative diseases that actually kill us), or studying our genes so they can find new ways to bill us? Some of these bacteria are indeed very hard to kill, and so little is being done there to research this properly. I would go as far as to say clinical medicine has its head burried so far in the sand about persistent infections that even the STD's that are mycoplasma caused - that they know the current treatments fail more than they cure - they still don't want to acknowledge the need to do more.
These folks are still looking for the gene for smoking, next they will do it for TV watching. They still claim several diseases, easily provable not to be by the most basic math are genetic diseases. I've learned to take a view of these type of announcements with all of the hurrah of reading spam in my inbox. What good comes of it for the end user? None. I've heard the same promises since the 80's, and what have they prevented or cured?... Zip... Show me some results, because all I see is a huge waste of money that took it from real research with the potential to actually genuinely help people.
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This "take it or leave it" attitude is part of the problem. Aside from there being a lot of sly deception (does it clearly state on the box that you are buying a license rather than a game, and that it is worth less second hand, and that if you buy second hand you get a cut down version?) companies need to form relationships with their customers, and part of any relationship is a two way dialogue.
Customers have every right to complain, and in fact in this case it is absolutely vital because if they don't and the game fails to sell it will be blamed on piracy. We need to make it clear that the nasty DRM is what made it fail in the marketplace.
After a horrible delivery fiasco, I was forced recently to buy a textbook via an adobe DRM type encryption method. I will never do it again. What I expected was something closer to a PDF file. What I actually got was a broken PDF-like document, only viewable in a horrible viewer with the lack of a decent zoom feature, the inability to *print* pages that I need (it will let you print some of them, but not others, and it doesn't tell you before you try it), an incomplete product (compared to the physical book) filled with broken links to the publishers website, and a 2 hour headache finding the links to the prior version of the book to make it work in a cumbersome wrapper. I'm annoyed enough that I'm trying to get a refund on it, and may push it as far as going for a charge back from my credit card company under the defective goods clause. If anyone from Bedford/St Martins is reading this: You need to step up, and deliver what you promise.
If people are having DRM experiences with games anything close to what I just had with a DRM protected textbook -- they indeed have every right to complaint, and need to do it loudly.
I try to set aside an hour a day just for conversation with my wife. Sometimes it has to be on the phone, but usually we can work it in for face to face time. Its a very good thing for us. The conversation lets her decompress, gives me a chance to reconnect with her, share a bit of my day (even if I do a lot more listening than talking), and because that time is almost always there she doesn't feel the need to interrupt every few seconds when I'm trying to say watch a hockey game, or get some bit of work done. She knows she is a priority, because its usually the second thing we do when we get home; the first thing is collie attack, and the dogs have less patience than even children (I rarely make it through the front hallway without at least one of them biting on my hand to demand attention). It makes for a much happier home if you can keep that face-to-face talk time going, and its usually scheduled around the same time of day!
What I can't stand about most young people (aka, people my age) is that they have to be texting wherever the fuck they go. Kids today think it's OK to just go ahead and text while in the middle of a conversation. It's not even a "hey, I have to take this, sorry" like you get when the person you're talking to receives a phone call. Every time someone starts texting in the middle of a conversation I have an urge to punch them right in the face. They don't realize that texting is diverting their attention from the conversation and that that's rude to do. I don't care what form of technology it is, diverting your attention from a conversation is rude. I cannot for the live of me comprehend this behavior.
Unfortunately, a lot of it now begins with the parents that buy their kids handhelds as a way to babysit them in the car because it makes their life easier. They also use them to babysit them in Church, because it makes the parents hour there a lot easier to not have squirrel-like children fighting, disrupting the service, drawing a scene, talking, and whatever else during. The same parents usually have a DVD player in the mini-van, a WII/XBox at home, a pair of DS's/DSi's for their kids, and tend to doll out the ipod/ipad's for Christmas. After the kids become hopelessly addicted to the little blue screen they also become somewhat easier to control by threatening to take their electronics away. It can make family trips a little less aggravating, and even I'll give in on a road trip to make the experience better. (I also wear ear plugs for those, and not just for the road noise!)
The downside of the electronics is that you can end up with tweens that have poor social skills, will bury their heads in the devices when company is over, and can't sit still without a handheld device to play on.
I'm not above this problem myself. Although I can take credit for not contributing to the problem; I didn't buy any of the handhelds for them. However, I did them let them in the house for two kids age 11, and 7 against my better judgment. Its a bit of torture, but all of the electronics (including the TV) will go bye bye for the duration of Lent. When we did this last year, the first week of it was pure torture, but by about the 2nd week the kids had adapted to doing other things. The effect does wear off quickly when the electronics are returned, but some of the benefits socially linger on for awhile.
Eharmony is pretty much a waste of time, even for the devout Christian looking for a partner.
I met my beloved through an ad I placed on Craigslist. Of course, she will never admit to using Craigslist for how we met. ha People DO actually use the site for something other than hookups; its just not known as well for that side of it.
PoF was a complete waste of my time. I talked to a couple people, but I never wanted to meet any of them. With Craigslist I got so many responses, so quickly that it became a process of weeding out the psychos, and other problems from the ones I wanted to meet. Despite having in bold letters that I did not want to hear from anyone that was married, or going through a divorce; I still got 4 responses from married women looking to hookup, and 3 more from those whom claimed to be "separated" or some other version of the same.
The ironic bit is that I almost didn't meet my beloved at all. Her email to me got sent to the spam folder. Roughly 99% of what I get from Yahoo is spam, so the filter flagged it. If I hadn't taken a second to look, I wouldn't have responded to her at all, and would have missed on the pass four years of a truly fantastic woman. Her email sat in my spam folder for over a week, and she thought I wasn't truly interested by the time I contacted her.
YMMV, but Craigslist has proven itself a lot more effective than the big dating sites for me.
Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I tend to think it was more divine design.
That rarely happens, at least in the United States.
And even if it does, in many cases you will be in a better facility than a maximum-security prison, depending on the state and the crime you are accused of. You will likely eventually be released, and you will have not been convicted of the crime, therefore retaining your civil rights (if you were accused of a felony).
That, or eventually they crack the crypto.
Apparently you haven't been in a family court lately. In Missouri as a case in point, you have *no right to appeal any contempt ruling*. Meaning, not only will you sit in jail indefinitely in a nasty county lockup facility, you will have no means to free yourself from a wrongful contempt charge. In addition to which, our wonderful Missouri law adds the extra kicker of "No other judge may remove, nor revoke the contempt order of another".
I used to really miss my 21" Iiyama displays. I had a heavily reinforced, and extremely large desk to accommodate 4 of them. Ever try to wall mount 4 100lb CRT's in a small area? It can be done, but you generally have to do some structural work, or at least install steel plates on both sides of the studs to handle it. I knew a few people that had 10-12 mounted that way. They didn't just have to work on the mounting issue, they had to improve the airflow to the room to make the room less of a sauna in the summer.
Wall mounting 4-6 LCD's (or 12 if you are a stock broker, and have taken your Ritalin), and still having room for 2 more on the desktop is trivial now. You also don't have to call in the HVAC guy to add more ducting to increase the airflow to deal with the heat.
VGA I can probably live without, although some of my displays have shown some surprising longevity, but DVI will be a bit painful not to have on the board.
My biggest gripe with things like Steam is that if I buy a game, and it sucks or doesn't work well on my hardware -- I can't sell the game. This doesn't bother me too much if its $2-12 for a game, but it is a major bite when the games are $40+.
For the most part things like Steam work okay, and they do provide some value to the end user in the form of getting updates, and patches. However, not everything will let you do things like play a game in offline mode. I often don't know what will, and will not work until I download it. Nor can I guarantee those functions will remain tomorrow.
It's not silly. We're just more sensitive to aesthetics.
In the case of my boys I don't think its aesthetics. I think the real reason is marketing. Their favorite wii game right now has absolutely horrible graphics. Its a DragonballZ game where, much like the cartoon, the fight scenes are pretty much just three images repeated over, and over again. They aren't even very good images at that, but the kids like that game so much they fight over who gets to play all of the time.
I've had some luck getting them to play with older consoles, and the games are a lot cheaper. One of the best ones though was a cheapie "21 games in one" system. The graphics were poor, but it had great games like Galaga on it that are very enjoyable to play.
Our Wii system is in use for netflix about 1/3 of the time. It would be used more than that, but we have Uverse, and a DVR.
Most of the pharmacy internships wont let you do much more than file paperwork, stock shelves, and handle minor bookkeeping tasks. A lowly pharmacy technician gets more out of their regular employment in terms of training than the average pharmacy internship. (Yes, there are exceptions, but they are few.) However, those internship, and practicum hours are required to get the doctorate degree.
The only useful internships I saw where with places that did review for patients in long term care facilities, with insurance companies (ironic beyond belief that insurance companies are often doing a better job training future pharmacists than are hospitals, and community pharmacies), and a handful of very small pharmacies where the individual PIC made a decision to do something educational with it. The hospitals don't want the liability issues, but they do want the free "stock boy" help...
Okay, I'm somewhere in the middle of calc II ...so I can't comment fully on calculus, but all of trigonometry can be written into 2 pages (1 if you write small). Most of algebra can be written into a couple pages. If you can truly grasp the meaning of those couple pages of concepts, you could get indeed know enough to reason out trig, and algebra problems from maybe 5 pages maximum of cheat sheets. I don't doubt he took a lot longer than week though. The true test of these things is being able to reason out the correct application. That takes some serious time working on actual problems.
Can a pebble bed reactor survive: The complete & total loss of any supporting structures which keep the fuel pebbles at a distance, the simultaneous loss of its cooling system, and the complete loss of *every single control system in place*? Plus the complete failure of humans not to do *exactly the wrong thing in every single instance in a crisis*? Or to not be able to do anything at all? (Say chemical weapon attack?) Not hours, not days, not weeks, indefinitely -- without being a risk to those living in the surrounding community?
That is the real test. These aren't toys, and its no small danger we live with. I live next to something with the potential to destroy the 1/3 of the agricultural capacity of the United States, and make areas of 3 states unlivable for generations to come.
I'm a big believer in multiple event scenarios, and in the tremendous overconfidence in tables for how strong something really is & narcissistic egos of engineers that have killed numerous people with their pronouncements of "that is simply an impossible scenario" ..only to watch it happen.
I'm a big believer in incredible amounts of human error, and a tremendous decline in the quality of the education system; to the point that a fair number of those with even advanced degrees aren't worth their salt. If it can't be run, and maintained by people with a 70 IQ, it just might be a problem. Never underestimate the effect of those 50 bonus points on the hiring test for minorities, social promotion in schools, and future government mandated quotas for degrees, and management promotion.
If your reactor can be screwed up because the maintenance person Tyrone puts in the wrong size bolt after a hard night of celebrating his/her recent casino win with an all nighter of amphetamine, cocaine, alcohol, and sex with random strangers (possibly for money) ... You know what? It will probably happen. If your reactor can be screwed up because Susie decided she needed to have an excuse not to come home so she is able to cheat on her husband by smashing the levee that feeds the water to your plant ...you know what? It will probably happen. (The few of you who live in or near Machens, Missouri, and West Alton, Missouri know why I reference such an event.)
We are reasonably near the New Madrid fault line. I really do not believe a pressurized water reactor like they have at Callaway would survive a seismic event even remotely close to what Japan experienced. The propaganda minister at Ameren tells us:
Emergency Safety Systems include six emergency power sources:
â 2 Ameren power lines to the site
â 2 Emergency Diesel Generators (onsite)
â 1 power line from local Rural Co-op
â 4 Standby Diesel Generators (offsite)
Additional Emergency Safety Features:
âSteam powered cooling water pump with DC battery powered controls system
âA 30-day cooling water supply stored on-site in a seismically designed retention pond.
All well, and good. Except in my scenario, the upwind rail line has a pair of trains passing at the exact same time of the seismic event. Each of the trains has tanker cars filled with a total of half a million gallons of things that react to cause long lasting fire, and/or creating a poison gas cloud that kills everyone downwind (meaning every single nuclear plant employee, including recent big winner at the casino Tyrone) for miles around. The twin events or the earthquake, and train accident make the area inaccessible due to chemical contamination, numerous bridge collapses, and the rerouting of surrounding rivers (not unprecedented). The water feeds for the plant are now broken, as are any power lines from anywhere else underground or otherwise. Due to problems with the communications system, and widespread power outages -- outside authorities remain unaware of the situation, and are mobilized to other areas before the extent of the crisis is realized.
...and for profit companies really don't care how you do there, or if you complete the program. They still have your money. That is the real rub with some of these schools. The completion rates for the programs are often very low. If all you get out of it is a massive pile of debt, you haven't improved your situation one iota.
Well, they certainly wont be having a 'revolution' over registering their cell phone. At worst the drug dealers, and those who truly need/want to keep that ability will import activated phones from somewhere else, or pay the homeless guy $10 or a vial of rock to register the phone for them. Speaking of which, it could end up being a nice niche market for awhile until the loophole gets closed if you were to say buy a huge block of airtime from a major carrier, and setup your shop just outside of US jurisdiction. Regulation creates opportunity, and often profits which make the illegal drug trade look paltry.
What this really is -- The beginning of government mandated health care rationing. Anyone who really thinks otherwise is deluding themselves. This is going to spark a way for health insurance, with government health insurance plans for veterans, the elderly, and the poor being the first, but not the last to be subject to denials of care based on a list generated by congress (*at the behest of insurance companies).
I've dealt with this stupidity before. I have a rare and progressive neurological disease called neurosarcoidosis. A change in my state laws gave insurance companies a blanket pass for denying coverage of experimental treatments and care. With no approved treatment for neurosarcoidosis, they thus began to deny every single claim for treatment.
With nothing more than varying the compression of the pill, or using a time release method developed in the 50's mostly involving coating half of a capsules content in wax -- companies have claimed new patients for a variety of pain drugs. With every single one of them being extremely old substances, well out of any patent on any country laws on earth.
Having achieved these patents with no more innovation than a few simple blood plasma level tests, and a few grand for a better pill press. The drug companies have proceeded to mark up the same substances 160,000%, 500,000%, 110,000%, 57,000%, 84,000% respectively for the top selling compounds. Even the illegal drugs markets for cocaine & heroin do not achieve these levels of markup in any form.
Similarly, the markup in generic versions of the few of these pain killers which have become generic is a startling 6000% above costs by the time they hit retail.
I feel so served by this regulation, let me tell you. I love government intervention in my ability to buy drugs. If they were so careless as to allow me to purchase directly from the manufacturer, I might be able to do such horrible things as buy a year and half worth for less than $25 instead of $740.00 a month for a single RX from community pharmacy. Absolute horror.
I wonder how much two way transfer there is between bacteria, viruses and human genes. We know the bacteria are far from static targets, and some of them definitely have the ability to influence your genes (in particular ones that hijack cells like cell wall deficient bacteria) and vice versa. We see far higher rates of certain "autoimmune" diseases in health care workers, likely for this reason. But it might point out another factor in why they get sick and another health care worker exposed to the same organisms doesn't. I'm also wondering if some of these infectious organisms might acquire the ability to turn off copies and if this factor is not a static target over a lifetime (in which case genetic risk counseling might be pretty wildly inaccurate depending on later exposures)?
Not that I consider this flaw terribly serious unless it has the ability to compromise other encryption algos run on the machine aside from user passwords. I've never considered windows encryption secure, so never bothered with it. A person with admin rights could do what they wanted anyway as far as the system goes.
The real downside of W2K is that MS has given it the shaft for awhile, even when it wasn't in extended support they were still not supporting it very well for the last couple years as far as the add ons and other things that came out during that period. Its a shame too, W2K properly tuned is a very fast & light OS.
Maybe I'll buy up someones old XP or Server 2003 license to run on the desktop to tide me over until they finally yank out enough of Vista to make it tolerable, its replacement comes out, or Linux finally learns to handle triple and quad displays properly.
Thats because penicillin didn't exist in 1932, and it didn't become the treatment for Syphilis until the late 50's. By the time it had, every single person in the experimental would be at the latent stage by more than 20 years where it was unlikely to do anything for them.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA34A.htm Of course, the view you are given of Tuskegee is slanted & far from the truth of what actually happened. At the time the approved treatment was a series of arsenic injections, they were painful, and there was serious doubt as to whether or not it had any benefit vs. doing nothing. A large number of blacks did not complete the standard treatment, and there was no tracking for them at the time. What isn't commonly reported, they did offer treatment to all of the participants, many took it - the arsenic based treatment, the same treatment given to whites, many declined. Those that declined the treatment as well as those who accepted it were followed for a small cash stipend. 95% of syphilis goes into remission without treatment, a small portion of that crowd develops problems from latent syphilis.
The government didn't infect any of these people. Every single one of them was offered treatment. Every single one of them in the non-treatment group rejected treatment. Now it sounds a little different, doesn't it?
I'm sure you honestly believe that, and I know why you do. People are paid money to influence opinion until the point when you can't recognize the truth when its right in front of your eyes.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/corrtyp.htm
We wouldn't have the highest prison population in the world if the government trusted the people.
We wouldn't have the highest prison rate in the world if we were not importing so many people that were criminally inclined. In particular for the crimes of murder, serious assaults, and armed robbery. This is what the vast majority of people in *prison* are there for. Of course, rape is up there as well.
We know this is the case because you can compare crime rates from the 1950's when the USA was a largely homogeneous population with a crime rate similar to Canada's. We only took the road down extended prison stays, more draconian sentencing laws, and larger prison populations as a result of the violence after the Kennedy Immigration act, and after several severe riots.
"es, smoking causes a low grade inflammatory response throughout the whole body (part of the immune response). While this may lessen IBD" Actually, smoking lowers TNF-A (one of the more inflammatory cytokines in the body), and stimulates the production of ACTH which in turn stimulates more production of cortisol (a rather anti-inflammatory and immune suppressive steroid).
While I think of smoking as mostly immune suppressive, its a little more complicated than that. Certain bacteria prefer an environment higher in TNF-A, some bacteria have a preference for slightly necrotic tissue as well. Smoking creates a hostile environment for some organisms and a welcoming environment for others. You immune system needs large quantities of TNF-A to get rid of things like TB and pneumonia. (Which is why smokers tend to be more vulnerable to these.)
One of the reasons smokers having a difficult time quitting is steroid withdrawal. The inflammatory response in their bodies increases when they try to quit, the "cough" actually gets worse. You throw the double whammy of TNF-A spiking - airways become more constricted, aches and pains in the body increase. Its got to be quite unpleasant.
I have a feeling that is smoking has any effect on AD it will be due to nicotine having immune system effects. In particular, it lowers tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-A). Changing the TNF-A level favors certain bacteria (like pneumonia) and discourages others by making the environment more hostile. It also stimulates ACTH directly which in turn affects gene transcription of insulin by producing more cortisol (which kicks 1,25-D out of the receptor for it for a period of time.) Ultimately, I believe AD will be found to be a multi bacterial exposure disease, with a heavy emphasis on exposure and modification of spirochetes & other slow growing intracellular bacteria that have the ability to hide for prolonged periods of time in nerve tissues and even hijack immune system cells.
Bacteria are far from static targets, they trade DNA & RNA with other organisms, and those most persistent(having demonstrated the greatest ability to hide from your immune system) tend to be the pool they are most likely to trade with. They also can trade DNA & RNA with the host to better hide from your immune system, and occasionally pick up traits (for example making the enzyme which converts 25-D into 1,25-D - which helps them hide from aspects of the latent immune system). 1,25-D is heavily involved in insulin transcription.
I'm not going to go as far as to say that lyme and neurosyphilis are the primary culprits. But they do demonstrate abilities to hide from the immune system, can go latent for long periods, and can cause profound AD like states many years later. Not everyone who acquires these bacteria goes on to develop AD or dementia. But a fair portion of them do, and autopsies find high numbers of them in dementia patients. Perhaps its because they acquired the right combination of multiple infectious exposures to hide & parasite more effectively? Perhaps that ability is not limited to spirochetes but can by gene transfer between bacteria (and possibly even viruses) be transferred to any bacteria that has the ability to take on a mycoplasma or L-form state?
Research is indeed emerging that shows links to bacteria and heart disease, diabetes II, hypothyroid, rheumatoid arthritis, most of the vascular diseases, and MS. Part of the hurdle is most research is looking for one bacteria to cause 100% of every problem. I think the problem is more likely to be a pool of bacteria that can, over time, produce better bugs than the immune system can adapt to and a cumulative exposure problem. It follows that as the gene pool of persistent bacteria grows you are going to end up with badder and badder bugs. These are far from static targets.
Yet another ANC victory, brought to you by the same people who brought you the highest murder rate in the world, nearly halved lifespans of black citizens in less than a decade, and reduced the GDP of South Africa by more than half... They've even managed to enact policies which have reduced gold & diamond mining production.
What?!? You seriously expected telecommunications to be any different from every other outcome measure in the country since ANC rule? 15 more years of ANC rule & S. Africa is headed from a place that started with the highest GDP in all of Africa and first world infrastructure -- all of the way to Zimbabweville.
I would not place a lot of faith in any of this. I think that they studying the wrong genes, I think they need to spend more time studying the genes of bacteria and infectious organisms. While I'm fully aware that gene transfer between certain bacteria (and even a few viruses)and the host is indeed a two way street, and you may see gene sequences come up that way that you might not otherwise... I don't see this as having any real potential to diagnose, cure, or do anything other than extort money from those who may or may not actually get sick. Most of these diseases are far more likely to be caused by persistent bacterial pathogens picking up traits from other persistent bacterial pathogens (and even viral pathogens in some cases) to do new things. They do pick up occasionally protein markers from your own body, or traits like making the converting enzymes for different steroids in your body (Sarcoidosis and Rheumatoid Arthritis are a case in point - both of these have extra-renal conversion of 25-D into 1,25-D in the macrophages [granulomas are just concentrations of macrophages encased in calcium in sarcoidosis] that they've been able to witness being hijacked by bacteria). Its a little scary when bacteria are actually taking over and living in the immune cells that are supposed to be destroying them, but such is the case, and thats been demonstrated in both Sarcoidosis and Rheumatoid Arthritis. The chemistry in Crohns disease is very similar, and it very likely has a similar set of infectious activity occuring.
... Given that aside from not being able to culture easily many of these bacteria we can still take them, inject them in an animal and they are pathogenic there and cause many of the same problems (an excellent example of this is the relatively common pathogen Chlamydia Pneumonia which is thought merely to cause a mild respiratory infection but has dramatic links to scarring of the blood vessels, heart disease, and many other problems). ...and given that geneticists still can't point to a gene that "definitively causes" any of these - and they've never come up with any useful treatments this way by studying the host -- which would you rather have the money spent on? Getting a better understanding of the bacteria and the changes they go through - so we can find better ways to kill them when the immune system is compromised (something with real hope of curing people, and actually preventing most of the degenerative diseases that actually kill us), or studying our genes so they can find new ways to bill us? Some of these bacteria are indeed very hard to kill, and so little is being done there to research this properly. I would go as far as to say clinical medicine has its head burried so far in the sand about persistent infections that even the STD's that are mycoplasma caused - that they know the current treatments fail more than they cure - they still don't want to acknowledge the need to do more.
... Zip ... Show me some results, because all I see is a huge waste of money that took it from real research with the potential to actually genuinely help people.
Now I'm not talking about run of the mill cell walled bacteria, I'm talking about intracellular bacteria, l-forms, mycoplasma, spirochetes... Though the bacteria involved may be relatively common, if they pick up new genes to do new things - even some of the non-pathogenics may become so. Given the fairly large number of people who have improved substantially (and dare I say quite a few cured) not using immune suppression - but using antibiotics to treat diseases like Crohns, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Sarcoidosis (which has no correlation between so called autoantibodies and disease activity), and even more recently Multiple Sclerosis
These folks are still looking for the gene for smoking, next they will do it for TV watching. They still claim several diseases, easily provable not to be by the most basic math are genetic diseases. I've learned to take a view of these type of announcements with all of the hurrah of reading spam in my inbox. What good comes of it for the end user? None. I've heard the same promises since the 80's, and what have they prevented or cured?