Really easy fix - just tell the user not to treat their laptop like a fucking place mat in a greasy spoon diner. I've had at least a dozen personal Apple laptops over the years and tested and worked on thousands more. Never had a key go bad on any of mine, and any time I've ever seen a problem with a user's keyboard, they were 99% of the time a slob who spilled food crumbs and who-knows-what-else into their keyboard and track pad. If you insist on treating your precious technology like a baby's bib, then get a cherry switch keyboard you can stick in the dishwasher once a week and put a vinyl cover over the built-in keys. Easy peasy.
Third hand smoke and farts are legitimate concerns, but until manufacturers stop putting toxic fragrance chemicals in personal care and laundry products I will be keeping my own private, personal vehicle for health reasons. Any time I take public transit I get sick for days. In the future, maybe people will wake up and stop drenching themselves in poison.
*Grommets are the deadheads who don't bathe, AKA louse sprinklers (when they do their dread-lock spin dance).
Actually, my hair is 1/16" long and I am very clean. For me, cleanliness also happens to mean free of extraneous chemicals, especially ones that stink. I use botanical and mineral-based deodorant, so I usually don't stink of ripe human at all. My fragrance-free lifestyle allows me to smell and taste my food and beverages better, experience the great outdoors in all its olfactory glory, and know exactly when everything in my refrigerator is no longer edible, among other benefits. That, and I don't get headaches and my immune system is like an industrial wood chipper. Until someone walks up to me sporting a three-to-five-dryer-sheets dose of freshness, when all that changes drastically with each second of exposure making it worse. Headache, runny nose, sneezing, burning watery eyes, exposed skin itching, swollen lymph nodes, respiratory distress, nausea, occasional vomiting, tremors and flu-like symptoms. I could go on, but to answer your question, I'm not a Grommet. Are you an Axe Boy? A perfumigator? A walking roach bomb? Do people know you've arrived at a party before you even walk through the door? Would I be able to track you down by following a trail of dead insects in your wake? I would rather huff the fumes of a steaming pile of wet pig shit than suffer a downy-unstoppable-axe-irish-spring-drakkar sprunt idiot any day of the week, but I guess that's just me.
Good point. This is why the current strategy of killing off most of the 99% with microwave radiation -- wi-fi, "smart" appliances & cell phones/towers -- is a much better strategy.
People will just die off from "nothing". Smart.
Take off the foil hat, it won't save you from the real threat: all the toxic, totally unregulated shit that's in the air "fresheners" and laundry products, body sprays and perfumes, personal care products, textile chemicals, flame retardants, cleaning products, and all the other shit they have convinced so many people they must have in order for their lives to be complete. They put it in everything. They put some fucking bubblegum stinking perfume in my windshield wiper fluid, for fucks sake. I guess now some people can't handle the smell of ethanol, so they have to make it smell purrdy! (otherwise known as “masking fragrance” which doesn’t have to be disclosed on any label.) They put perfume in garbage bags, cat shit litter, children's toys, cars, and the ventilation systems of retail stores and airplanes. People think this shit is made from flowers and spices; it's not. It is basically the chemical waste left over from the distillation of gasoline, but some geniuses have figured out how to recombine and manipulate this crap so they can sell it to people for money, instead of having to dispose of it as the hazardous waste it really is. We're talking carcinogens, teratogens, neurotoxins, endocrine disruptors, skin sensitizers and allergens, asthma triggers. Things that fuck with your DNA expression. Paradichlorobenzene, anyone? That's what gives me migraines, not my fucking smart electric meter, which I've had for months now and can detect no ill effects from whatsoever. People are dying from "nothing" alright, only it's called strange diseases that can't be traced to a single, specific cause, which is exactly how the chemical waste peddling corporations like it. Our chemical laws are outdated and toothless, corporations are given "trade secret" exemptions and are constantly coming up with new permutations on the same old crap to skirt whatever whack-a-mole efforts are made to control them. Ban BPA? They just switch to its cousin, BPS. The ubiquity of this cloud of toxins virtually guarantees impunity for the perpetrators. You can't prove your Glade gave you cancer or made your kid slow, so they're in the clear and your problems are "externalities" as far as the corporate accountants are concerned.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was The Flying Hockey Stick, in which a kid straps an umbrella and a fan to a hockey stick, assembles a very long chain of extension cords and then proceeds to fly all around the world on various adventures. Even as a child I knew that such a contraption would never work in real life, but the important take-away for me was that I learned the willful suspension of disbelief in the interest of enjoying a fanciful story. Obviously, anyone who invests real money in a scheme to deploy airborne heavier-than-air wind turbine power generators is either engaging in the same sort of self-delusion, or dumber than a box of armpit hair. I hear there's one born every minute.
that's one less faggot in the world. i hope his partner is denied any and all death benefits. bladder cancer my ass. he died from sucking one too many cocks.
Funny how you start your homophobic rant by quoting a rock song written and sung by a queer, then you assume that someone referring to Mr. Banks' spouse as his "partner" implies a same-sex relationship. In fact, his partner is a woman, you ignorant piece of maggot slime. Fuck you, hater. I know, I know... YHBT YHL etc.
The original tubular Apple iSight camera had a three-piece mechanical iris lens cover made of white plastic that would open and close when the front bezel was twisted, in addition to the LED on top of the device. It was behind a glass cover, so there was absolutely no functional value to this "door" other than to let the user know that the camera could not possibly be looking at them when the device was switched off. I'm sure it must have added greatly to the cost of the camera, but Jobs and Co. must have thought inspiring a feeling of privacy and security in the user important enough to justify the cost. Once cameras got small and cheap enough to build into every machine, this method of visual feedback was dispensed with, at least on machines built by Apple. I have explained to countless Mac clients over the years that the light is indeed hard-wired to the camera and cannot be disabled, that after I get done configuring their machine it will be safe from any and all malware (assuming they do not change certain settings), yet if they still feel the least bit uneasy, a piece of tape or post-it note over the camera is nothing to be embarrassed about. After all, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you...
On the upside, maybe the compressed air will keep crumbs and other foreign matter out from underneath the keys, thus helping to prevent one of the most common modes of failure with existing keyboard technology.
The Extended Keyboard II is actually an ancient barge of a keyboard; beige plastic with the old six-color Apple logo in the corner. I picked up 10 of them for $50 on eBay a few years ago. It connects via the long-obsolete Apple Desktop Bus, requiring an adaptor for use with USB. I find the current keyboard offerings from Apple to be mediocre at best. If I am going to be typing more than a few paragraphs, I prefer to break out the old beige keybarge. I have often heard them referred to as "The One True Keyboard" by those who know. For me, the only thing that ever came close was the original keyboard that came with my IBM PC/XT (long since landfilled). I liked the springy sounds it made. Each key had a slightly different tone. Would love to have samples of those sounds to assign to keypresses. The sounds of serious typing...
Have they been slashdotted? All the so-called mirrors I have found so far point back to them. Does anyone have a link to a working mirror or a torrent?
I was just browsing pictures on NASA's site the other day that showed workers on lifts wearing harnesses. In an environment where dropping a wrench could cause millions of dollars in damage, these have got to be some of the most careful workers around, which leads me to believe that something really unusual must have happened, like several things going wrong at once. TFA is quite short on details. It goes without saying that damage to expensive equipment can not be compared to the loss of a human life, but I'm saying it anyway.
Children do not have the same rights as adults under most legal systems. Additionally, while they are in school, the school is usually given some form of guardianship-by-proxy over the children, so that some adult is always in control of, and has responsibility for, those children. This probably explains why the school administrator felt justified in coercing the child to log in to her facebook account from school, even though the postings in question were probably not made from school grounds. Regardless from where the postings were made, the fact that these children felt entitled to make slanderous statements in response to perceived slights shows a profound lack of judgement and an obvious failure of their parents, and the educational system, to instill in them a sense of propriety, decency and common sense. As usual, I weep for the future.
Like I really want the security of my city depending on someone who's been huffing exhaust fumes and performing a mundane, repetitive task all day. Also, having humans touch currency that is then going to be shuffled in with other currency and redistributed to countless other humans passing over the bridge seems to me an ideal vector for any number of terrorist chemical or biological attacks. Other than that, the Homeland Security angle sounds like a great argument.
Time Pilot 1984 was a kick-ass 2D scroller. But then I am a dinosaur whose FPS skills peaked with Quake and UT (where you could always set your FOV to whatever you wanted, IIRC). Whatever. I'll still kick your schoolboy ass at paintball or conkers or petanque or tennis or nine ball. "Never give a sword to a man who can't dance." - Confucius. Oh, and you can stay on my lawn, I don't give a shit about it.
As someone who has unboxed, set up and distributed literally thousands of Macs over the years, I can safely say that the vast majority of users do not need, want or care about most of the cables, adapters and other stuff that comes in the box. If selling some of those things separately can lower the cost of the base machine for those who don't need them, not to mention keeping millions of unwanted dongles out of landfills, I'm all for it.
I see many other ways that public safety is compromised over money and the bottom lines of many big industries besides just Big Medicine. What if, just to idly speculate, the root cause(s) of Autistic Spectrum Disorders turned out to have something to do with one or more of the Persistent Organic Pollutants that pregnant women and developing babies in this and other "developed" nations are pretty much marinating in for most of their lives? You think Big Petroleum or any of its marvelous industries (electronics, personal care and fragrance, cleaning products, plastics, processed food, etc.) are going to like being implicated in that? The army of lawyers they unleash will make a horde of Uruk-hai look like Tribbles.
Re:Eau de Janeway drives me crazy
on
Star Trek Fragrances
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Bringing this back on-topic, I feel exactly the same way about perfume. All I want is to breathe clean air, but every time I go out in public some asshole has to ruin it for me. What the fuck makes people think they have the right to pollute my personal airspace with that obnoxious garbage? Every time some Axe-boy walks past and fills my nostrils with the reek of synthetic male puberty pheromones I have to stifle a very strong primal urge to snap their scrawny neck like a toothpick. When I finally do crack and go off on my rampage, my defense will be chemically-induced temporary insanity. The first one to go will be the one who calls me a "whiner" or some such; then I will give them something to whine about for the last few seconds of their life.
The meter ticketing cops will have it easy when the system provides them with a map of all the active, occupied meters sorted by which one will run out next. The possibility of feeding a meter remotely by cell phone does not mean everyone will take advantage of this, and the revenuers count on a good percentage of them failing to, just as the purveyors of mail-in rebates count on most people forgetting to fill out the forms, filling them incorrectly, losing the paper, sending it late, etc. The last time we bought a machine at the Apple store the specialist filled out all that crap for us and submitted it electronically, so we "wouldn't have to think about it," but I don't expect to see a meter cop running around reminding people to feed their meter any time soon. Of course, you look to the ones who stand to gain the most. I am the walrus.
can a windows user or a mac user confirm this? Does it work in Safari?
All their flashy flash crap works in Safari. However, if I click the "Learn More" button, it automagically redirects me to the download page for Messenger for Mac, which hasn't been updated in at least a year. I'm just burning to get my hands on a Windoze machine and find out what I'm missing out on. </irony>
Sadly, many people think that the cult of the "twelve-steppers" is their only recourse for support in their attempts at addiction recovery. One poster here suggests a "more secularly-oriented AA" rather than mentioning any groups that are secular by charter. One such group is LifeRing Secular Recovery, which provides support, through FTF meetings and online chat rooms, without demanding that you submit to a higher power, say prayers, admit you are "powerless" or any such falderal. There are no steps, just guidelines, which everyone is encouraged to use in formulating their own plan for recovery. For those of us who subscribe to a naturalist world-view, it is a welcome alternative to the rigidity of the AA mindset. If AA demands honesty, they ought to first examine the hypocrisy of their founder, a notorious womanizer who simply traded one addiction for another and then used his status and fame to fuel it. Personally, I can do without the prayers, the deadly indoor smoking and the cult mentality that will get you hounded out of their clubhouse if you dare to question any of their dogma. Sure, they have helped a lot of people (while downplaying the rampant recidivism among their ranks), but that argument is like using the fact that seat belts have saved a lot of lives as an excuse to continue manufacturing unsafe automobiles. There are alternatives.
If your blood is thinning you need to see a doctor
I have polycythemia, you insensitive clod!!! Seriously, I am supposed to go to a doctor (or blood bank) to have my blood thinned on purpose. I think my ancestors were the ones the vampires were always leeching off of, and it developed as a survival trait. Now, instead of just giving blood, I can sell off my spare joules. I got pints and quarts here, who wants?
Slashdot Mirror
Really easy fix - just tell the user not to treat their laptop like a fucking place mat in a greasy spoon diner. I've had at least a dozen personal Apple laptops over the years and tested and worked on thousands more. Never had a key go bad on any of mine, and any time I've ever seen a problem with a user's keyboard, they were 99% of the time a slob who spilled food crumbs and who-knows-what-else into their keyboard and track pad. If you insist on treating your precious technology like a baby's bib, then get a cherry switch keyboard you can stick in the dishwasher once a week and put a vinyl cover over the built-in keys. Easy peasy.
Third hand smoke and farts are legitimate concerns, but until manufacturers stop putting toxic fragrance chemicals in personal care and laundry products I will be keeping my own private, personal vehicle for health reasons. Any time I take public transit I get sick for days. In the future, maybe people will wake up and stop drenching themselves in poison.
Your a grommet* aren't you?
*Grommets are the deadheads who don't bathe, AKA louse sprinklers (when they do their dread-lock spin dance).
Actually, my hair is 1/16" long and I am very clean. For me, cleanliness also happens to mean free of extraneous chemicals, especially ones that stink. I use botanical and mineral-based deodorant, so I usually don't stink of ripe human at all. My fragrance-free lifestyle allows me to smell and taste my food and beverages better, experience the great outdoors in all its olfactory glory, and know exactly when everything in my refrigerator is no longer edible, among other benefits. That, and I don't get headaches and my immune system is like an industrial wood chipper. Until someone walks up to me sporting a three-to-five-dryer-sheets dose of freshness, when all that changes drastically with each second of exposure making it worse. Headache, runny nose, sneezing, burning watery eyes, exposed skin itching, swollen lymph nodes, respiratory distress, nausea, occasional vomiting, tremors and flu-like symptoms. I could go on, but to answer your question, I'm not a Grommet. Are you an Axe Boy? A perfumigator? A walking roach bomb? Do people know you've arrived at a party before you even walk through the door? Would I be able to track you down by following a trail of dead insects in your wake? I would rather huff the fumes of a steaming pile of wet pig shit than suffer a downy-unstoppable-axe-irish-spring-drakkar sprunt idiot any day of the week, but I guess that's just me.
Good point. This is why the current strategy of killing off most of the 99% with microwave radiation -- wi-fi, "smart" appliances & cell phones/towers -- is a much better strategy.
People will just die off from "nothing". Smart.
Take off the foil hat, it won't save you from the real threat: all the toxic, totally unregulated shit that's in the air "fresheners" and laundry products, body sprays and perfumes, personal care products, textile chemicals, flame retardants, cleaning products, and all the other shit they have convinced so many people they must have in order for their lives to be complete. They put it in everything. They put some fucking bubblegum stinking perfume in my windshield wiper fluid, for fucks sake. I guess now some people can't handle the smell of ethanol, so they have to make it smell purrdy! (otherwise known as “masking fragrance” which doesn’t have to be disclosed on any label.) They put perfume in garbage bags, cat shit litter, children's toys, cars, and the ventilation systems of retail stores and airplanes. People think this shit is made from flowers and spices; it's not. It is basically the chemical waste left over from the distillation of gasoline, but some geniuses have figured out how to recombine and manipulate this crap so they can sell it to people for money, instead of having to dispose of it as the hazardous waste it really is. We're talking carcinogens, teratogens, neurotoxins, endocrine disruptors, skin sensitizers and allergens, asthma triggers. Things that fuck with your DNA expression. Paradichlorobenzene, anyone? That's what gives me migraines, not my fucking smart electric meter, which I've had for months now and can detect no ill effects from whatsoever. People are dying from "nothing" alright, only it's called strange diseases that can't be traced to a single, specific cause, which is exactly how the chemical waste peddling corporations like it. Our chemical laws are outdated and toothless, corporations are given "trade secret" exemptions and are constantly coming up with new permutations on the same old crap to skirt whatever whack-a-mole efforts are made to control them. Ban BPA? They just switch to its cousin, BPS. The ubiquity of this cloud of toxins virtually guarantees impunity for the perpetrators. You can't prove your Glade gave you cancer or made your kid slow, so they're in the clear and your problems are "externalities" as far as the corporate accountants are concerned.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was The Flying Hockey Stick, in which a kid straps an umbrella and a fan to a hockey stick, assembles a very long chain of extension cords and then proceeds to fly all around the world on various adventures. Even as a child I knew that such a contraption would never work in real life, but the important take-away for me was that I learned the willful suspension of disbelief in the interest of enjoying a fanciful story. Obviously, anyone who invests real money in a scheme to deploy airborne heavier-than-air wind turbine power generators is either engaging in the same sort of self-delusion, or dumber than a box of armpit hair. I hear there's one born every minute.
that's one less faggot in the world. i hope his partner is denied any and all death benefits. bladder cancer my ass. he died from sucking one too many cocks.
Funny how you start your homophobic rant by quoting a rock song written and sung by a queer, then you assume that someone referring to Mr. Banks' spouse as his "partner" implies a same-sex relationship. In fact, his partner is a woman, you ignorant piece of maggot slime. Fuck you, hater. I know, I know... YHBT YHL etc.
The original tubular Apple iSight camera had a three-piece mechanical iris lens cover made of white plastic that would open and close when the front bezel was twisted, in addition to the LED on top of the device. It was behind a glass cover, so there was absolutely no functional value to this "door" other than to let the user know that the camera could not possibly be looking at them when the device was switched off. I'm sure it must have added greatly to the cost of the camera, but Jobs and Co. must have thought inspiring a feeling of privacy and security in the user important enough to justify the cost. Once cameras got small and cheap enough to build into every machine, this method of visual feedback was dispensed with, at least on machines built by Apple. I have explained to countless Mac clients over the years that the light is indeed hard-wired to the camera and cannot be disabled, that after I get done configuring their machine it will be safe from any and all malware (assuming they do not change certain settings), yet if they still feel the least bit uneasy, a piece of tape or post-it note over the camera is nothing to be embarrassed about. After all, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you...
On the upside, maybe the compressed air will keep crumbs and other foreign matter out from underneath the keys, thus helping to prevent one of the most common modes of failure with existing keyboard technology.
The Extended Keyboard II is actually an ancient barge of a keyboard; beige plastic with the old six-color Apple logo in the corner. I picked up 10 of them for $50 on eBay a few years ago. It connects via the long-obsolete Apple Desktop Bus, requiring an adaptor for use with USB. I find the current keyboard offerings from Apple to be mediocre at best. If I am going to be typing more than a few paragraphs, I prefer to break out the old beige keybarge. I have often heard them referred to as "The One True Keyboard" by those who know. For me, the only thing that ever came close was the original keyboard that came with my IBM PC/XT (long since landfilled). I liked the springy sounds it made. Each key had a slightly different tone. Would love to have samples of those sounds to assign to keypresses. The sounds of serious typing...
Membrane keyboards suck. But yes, I did know what you meant :)
Typing this on an Apple Extended Keyboard II plugged into an iMate USB To ADB Adaptor. Best. Keyboard. Ever.
Have they been slashdotted? All the so-called mirrors I have found so far point back to them.
Does anyone have a link to a working mirror or a torrent?
I was just browsing pictures on NASA's site the other day that showed workers on lifts wearing harnesses. In an environment where dropping a wrench could cause millions of dollars in damage, these have got to be some of the most careful workers around, which leads me to believe that something really unusual must have happened, like several things going wrong at once. TFA is quite short on details. It goes without saying that damage to expensive equipment can not be compared to the loss of a human life, but I'm saying it anyway.
Children do not have the same rights as adults under most legal systems. Additionally, while they are in school, the school is usually given some form of guardianship-by-proxy over the children, so that some adult is always in control of, and has responsibility for, those children. This probably explains why the school administrator felt justified in coercing the child to log in to her facebook account from school, even though the postings in question were probably not made from school grounds. Regardless from where the postings were made, the fact that these children felt entitled to make slanderous statements in response to perceived slights shows a profound lack of judgement and an obvious failure of their parents, and the educational system, to instill in them a sense of propriety, decency and common sense. As usual, I weep for the future.
Like I really want the security of my city depending on someone who's been huffing exhaust fumes and performing a mundane, repetitive task all day. Also, having humans touch currency that is then going to be shuffled in with other currency and redistributed to countless other humans passing over the bridge seems to me an ideal vector for any number of terrorist chemical or biological attacks. Other than that, the Homeland Security angle sounds like a great argument.
Time Pilot 1984 was a kick-ass 2D scroller. But then I am a dinosaur whose FPS skills peaked with Quake and UT (where you could always set your FOV to whatever you wanted, IIRC). Whatever. I'll still kick your schoolboy ass at paintball or conkers or petanque or tennis or nine ball. "Never give a sword to a man who can't dance." - Confucius. Oh, and you can stay on my lawn, I don't give a shit about it.
As someone who has unboxed, set up and distributed literally thousands of Macs over the years, I can safely say that the vast majority of users do not need, want or care about most of the cables, adapters and other stuff that comes in the box. If selling some of those things separately can lower the cost of the base machine for those who don't need them, not to mention keeping millions of unwanted dongles out of landfills, I'm all for it.
I see many other ways that public safety is compromised over money and the bottom lines of many big industries besides just Big Medicine. What if, just to idly speculate, the root cause(s) of Autistic Spectrum Disorders turned out to have something to do with one or more of the Persistent Organic Pollutants that pregnant women and developing babies in this and other "developed" nations are pretty much marinating in for most of their lives? You think Big Petroleum or any of its marvelous industries (electronics, personal care and fragrance, cleaning products, plastics, processed food, etc.) are going to like being implicated in that? The army of lawyers they unleash will make a horde of Uruk-hai look like Tribbles.
"HEEL to the bawls..." - Bas Ruten
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3K-mrlYG7Y
i think i need underpants made out of this stuff.
Bringing this back on-topic, I feel exactly the same way about perfume. All I want is to breathe clean air, but every time I go out in public some asshole has to ruin it for me. What the fuck makes people think they have the right to pollute my personal airspace with that obnoxious garbage? Every time some Axe-boy walks past and fills my nostrils with the reek of synthetic male puberty pheromones I have to stifle a very strong primal urge to snap their scrawny neck like a toothpick. When I finally do crack and go off on my rampage, my defense will be chemically-induced temporary insanity. The first one to go will be the one who calls me a "whiner" or some such; then I will give them something to whine about for the last few seconds of their life.
The meter ticketing cops will have it easy when the system provides them with a map of all the active, occupied meters sorted by which one will run out next. The possibility of feeding a meter remotely by cell phone does not mean everyone will take advantage of this, and the revenuers count on a good percentage of them failing to, just as the purveyors of mail-in rebates count on most people forgetting to fill out the forms, filling them incorrectly, losing the paper, sending it late, etc. The last time we bought a machine at the Apple store the specialist filled out all that crap for us and submitted it electronically, so we "wouldn't have to think about it," but I don't expect to see a meter cop running around reminding people to feed their meter any time soon. Of course, you look to the ones who stand to gain the most. I am the walrus.
All their flashy flash crap works in Safari. However, if I click the "Learn More" button, it automagically redirects me to the download page for Messenger for Mac, which hasn't been updated in at least a year. I'm just burning to get my hands on a Windoze machine and find out what I'm missing out on. </irony>
I think you are confusing atheism with nihilism. This is a popular fallacy among religious zealots, and is nicely debunked here.
Sadly, many people think that the cult of the "twelve-steppers" is their only recourse for support in their attempts at addiction recovery. One poster here suggests a "more secularly-oriented AA" rather than mentioning any groups that are secular by charter. One such group is LifeRing Secular Recovery, which provides support, through FTF meetings and online chat rooms, without demanding that you submit to a higher power, say prayers, admit you are "powerless" or any such falderal. There are no steps, just guidelines, which everyone is encouraged to use in formulating their own plan for recovery. For those of us who subscribe to a naturalist world-view, it is a welcome alternative to the rigidity of the AA mindset. If AA demands honesty, they ought to first examine the hypocrisy of their founder, a notorious womanizer who simply traded one addiction for another and then used his status and fame to fuel it. Personally, I can do without the prayers, the deadly indoor smoking and the cult mentality that will get you hounded out of their clubhouse if you dare to question any of their dogma. Sure, they have helped a lot of people (while downplaying the rampant recidivism among their ranks), but that argument is like using the fact that seat belts have saved a lot of lives as an excuse to continue manufacturing unsafe automobiles. There are alternatives.
I have polycythemia, you insensitive clod!!! Seriously, I am supposed to go to a doctor (or blood bank) to have my blood thinned on purpose. I think my ancestors were the ones the vampires were always leeching off of, and it developed as a survival trait. Now, instead of just giving blood, I can sell off my spare joules. I got pints and quarts here, who wants?