They can't block port 25 unconditionally - they have no dialup support.
What this means is that if you travel with a laptop, the only way you are going to be able to get connectivity while on the road is to have a separate dialup service.
What this effectively means is that in order to avoid having to switch your configuration around between home and not home, and to maintain a single email address, you ignore Comcast's mail service, and user your dialup ISP's mail servers all the time (via SMTP AUTH), and use the dialup ISP's mail account as our primary email address.
At which point, Comcast's value to you is nothing more than "IP dialtone" at a higher speed than you get via dialup (too bad they don't charge less for this type of usage).
Yeah, it's relatively trivial to export a couple of configurations on Windows with regedit, which would let you double-click to change the settings, but it takes someone with some knowledge to do that (for example, knowing it can be done).
OutLook has some features for doing this as well, but OutLook is one of the reasons blocking is an issue in the first place.
The bottom line is that an ISP that doesn't offer alternate access not tied to your physical location can't afford to effectively block access to the servers of ISPs who don't have that same problem, if they want to attract customers.
Of course, this problem is much reduced, if they start offering dialup access for their cable Internet service subscribers who happen to be on the road, but they show no signs of doing that.
I thought your story problem was rhetorical; I didn't realize you expected me to post results for grading.
The reason I thought it was rhetorical was because the blood levels were non-zero, after doing the math.
As to your specific points:
a) there's no indication in the literature that aspartame interferes with schizophrenic medications,
Correct. However, the literature supports that metabolic byproducts of aspartame do interfere with schizophrenic medication.
b) there's no warning on the medications that aspartame interferes with schizophrenic medications
This is invalid logic; cigarettes didn't have warnings for years, either; did they only become dangerous only after the warnings were affixed? There are plenty of compounds classified as food additives or nutritional suplements that have dire interactions with medications, and which are not listed on the label of those medications.
We can conclude nothing about aspartame from the lack of warnings on medications.
c) lithium isn't used as an anti-schizophrenic medication (as you claimed)
Your statement is incorrect. As one example, please see paragrph 3:
d) your anecdotal evidence doesn't even make sense.
I understand that my original posting was largely anecdotal, in that it referenced my personal perception of my observation of events which occurred circa 1984 with chronically mentally ill patients in programs involved with Weber County Mental Health, in Ogden Utah.
I'm sorry that it doesn't make sense to you, but I was not posting it for your benefit, I was posting it for the benefit of the lay-person who posted regarding the diagnosis of his sister. For information to be useful, it has to be accessible to its intended audience.
You might as well be making the argument that Chewbacca was a wookie, and since wookies have nothing to do with this, then aspartame must not affect dopamine.
You are arguing anecdotally, citing your own postings.
Redismissing the rampant Internet misinformation does nothing to invalidate anything I've presented, since I'm not parroting the misinformation. In fact, the only one bringing it up is you.
The reason for the age of the journal articles is due to me only doing a cursory search, and then intentionally editing out references which were not directly on point, rather than trying to "throw everything and see what sticks".
Let's get back on point, and fix that omission on my part.
Take one of the metabolic byproducts of aspartame that you admit to, phenylalanine, and do a PubMed search on it and schizophrenia. Here's the URL for the NIH PubMed search engine:
Please enter the terms "schizophrenia phenylalanine".
You will get back 258 articles, of which about 17 are relevent to our current discussion. Of those, many demonstrate a positive correlation between phenylalanine and increased symptoms in schizophrenia.
If you are willing to ignore the relevancy scoping I (again) self-imposed, you will also notice that the vast majority of the 258 articles returned indicate dopamine antagonism by phenylalanine.
In fact, if you drop the schizophrenia term, and change the search terms to "dopamine phenylalanine" instead, you will get 7226 results; of the ones that examined any potential correlation, most of them agree with me.
So much for your statement "Aspartame has no effect on the dopamine receptors."
I suggest you read the medical literature. Specifically, you should read Lancet, the New England Journal of Medecine, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and the Journal of Neurochemistry.
Yes, there are plenty of nuts on the Internet suggesting a link between aspartame and cancer, alzheimers, "Gulf War Syndrome", etc.. I'm not one of them.
Here are some reputable journal cites.
I'd be happy to examine any contradictory peer reviewed journal published papers you care to cite in return.
Thanks.
Aspartame. Review of safety issues. Council on Scientific Affairs. Journal of the American Medical Association. Vol. 254 No. 3, July 19, 1985
Department of Health and Human Services. Quarterly Report on Adverse Reactions Associated with Aspartame Ingestion. DHHS, Washington, DC, Oct. 1, 1986.
Johns, D. R. Migraine provoked by aspartame. N. Engl. J. Med. 315-456 (1986)
Yokogoshi, H., Roberts, C. H., Caballero, B., and Wurtman, R.J. Effects of aspartame and glucose administration on brain and plasma levels of large neutral amino acids and brain 5-hydroxyindoles. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 40: 1-7 (1984).
Fernstrom, J. D., Fernstrom, M. H., and Gillis, M. A. Acute Effects of aspartame on large neutral amino acids and monoamines in rat brain. Life Sci. 32: 1651-1658 (1983).
Stegink, L. D., Filer, L. J., Jr., Baker, G. L., and McDonnell, J. E. Effect of an abuse dose of aspartame upon plasma and erythrocyte levels of amino acids in phenylketonuric heterozygous and normal adults. J. Nutr. 110: 2216-2224 (1980).
Fernstrom, J. D., and Faller, D. V. Neutral amino acids in the brain: Changes in response to food ingestion. J. Neurochem. 30: 1531-1538 (1978)
Oldendorf, W. H. Brain uptake of radiolabeled amino acids, amines, and hexoses after arterial injection. Am. J. Physiol. 221:1629-1639 (1971).
Milner, J. D., Irie, K., and Wurtman, R. J. Effects of phenylalanine on the release of endogenous dopamine from rat striatal slices. J. Neurochem. 47: 1444-1448 (1986).
Pinto, J. M. B., and Maher, T. J. Aspartame administration potentiates pentylenetetrazole- and fluorothyl-induced seizures in mice. Neuropharmacology, in press.
Avoid aspartame (Nutrasweet) if you are schitzophrenic. It bonds to the N-Dopamine receptors, and makes medications which moderate N-Dopamine uptake, like the Lithium salts normally used to treat conditions like schitzophrenia, less effective.
My mother was a psychiatric social worker who dealt with the chronically mentally ill at around the time "Tab" came out. Mentally ill people frequently have poor body images, and fad dieting is common; a new diet drink on the market, and they were all drinking it. Fully 75% of them ended up in the state hospital for 72 hours until their medication levels could be sorted out. This happened a number of times, until someone clued into what was happening, and adjusted the medication according to the amount of aspartame they would have in them in a non-supervised, non-hospital setting. The best outcome is to get them off anything, over the counter products or dietary suplements, which could negatively impact the effectiveness of their medication.
Another common occurance with people in this boat is self medication, so watch for it. Abuse of tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana, and sometimes harder drugs, is common. The main reason for this is that people expect drunk or stoned people to talk to themselves (for example), and it's socially acceptable, but an apparently sober person talking to themselves or otherwise acting abnormally is cause for alarm. So they self medicate to "fit in". Think about that the next time you see a "party animal" friend acting out.
Other than that, she needs to be as religious about taking her medication as a diabetic is about taking insulin or someone with an organ transplant is about taking their prednezone, or someone with AIDS is about taking their cocktail. These are conditions which are treatable, but cannot be/aren't cured at present.
Just to add another point of view... this may be a bad thing.
[usual disclaimers here; I'm a layperson who has to deal with issues related to things like this occasionally]
The difference between a real company and an intellectual property holding company is that a real company has some skin in the game when it comes to treating patents as trading cards. An IP holding company doesn't.
As a simple example, consider two companies, "A" and "B", with a patent portfolio of 100 patents each, and real products that they are trying to sell.
When company A says to company B "you're infringing patent A17", B can use its portfolio defensively, and come back with "yes, but you're infringing patent B34; let's trade licenses".
If company A is an IP holding company, there's nothing company B can do but pay whatever extortionate price: Company A has no product, and is therefore not infringing any of B's IP. B is pretty much hanging in the wind.
The only place this isn't true is where B has some IP that A acknowledges is the basis of derivative IP held by A, _and_ A values the ability to continue sublicensing it without B raising sublicense fees for the original work in response to the extortion suit.
IF SCO is, effectively shedding their vulnerable assets, and IF they really have IP assets, this could be an entrenchment where it could end up being very hard to dig them out for a very long time.
The only real recourse to this sort of business model is for company B to attack companies that are infringing B's portfolio, and which are owned by the same people who own company A - effectively countering extortion with blackmail.
Yeah, I'm one of those people who think we need intellectual property law reform.
I have three domains registered and parked with Tucows International. They all look like they are Linux boxes running Apache.
I'm not saying that I wouldn't deploy that combination, if the domains were live instead of parked, but it's pretty clear that the Netcraft numbers have some skew to them.
To be clear about this, there's a similar skew towards IIS on some parking hosts.
Maybe Netcraft could block inclusion of domain parking hosts?
I have a solution for the "bad money" problem that comes from spending money on artists who are then not successful.
Hire people with taste to make your decisions.
If the money you make is success ratio * attempts, then it's pretty obvious that if you *have* to have a minimum number of attempts, then the way to increase your income/decrease your costs is to change your success ratio.
About 23 years too late. The Berkeley Tokomak achieved break-even, as published in "Fusion" Magazine, back in 1981. One of the people involved was Dr. Dr. John Coonrod, who was also involved in building the first whole-body CAT scanner.
SETI@Home is not vectorized. Even on a G4, they could get a factor of almost 10 on throughput, were they to vectorize the client.
When this was pointed out to them by Apple employees, the SETI@Home people did nothing about it, preferring to keep the client code the same on all platforms, rather than achieve their workload numbers in a fraction of the time (apparently one Apple employee by himself is sitting at about 15th place on number of workunits processed).
It's actually really annoying, but from what I hear, SETI@Home is wrapping up, and they are working on new clients for different problem sets (also not vectorized).
Acrobat PDFWriter is available for download from Adobe, for free. You have to scratch around on their site for it, but it's been there fore a long time now, since people started writing free software that would cost them market share and control of the PDF standard.
No need to wave a dead chicken over GhostScript...
U.S. Trade Secret law is very specific... once a Trade Secret is disclosed, it's disclosed, and there's no getting it back.
SCO appears to be trying to close the barn door after the horse has escaped. The only thing they can get out of this, at least as far as any Trade Secret disclosure, is trebled damages for their loss of the secret, based on their reasonably expected loss of revenue, and a public records acknowledgement that they no longer own the Trade Secrets, if any, that were disclosed.
USL tried this "My Secret Was Disclosed But I Still Get To Keep It" tactic vs. UCB when BSDI infringed the UNIX trademark, woke the USL lawyers up, couldn't get them back to sleep, and then ended up hiding behind UCB. They ended up settling under undisclosed terms, which is usually code for "We Get To Save Face".
Sun bought out of their UNIX license for ~$120M from Novell in 1994, so their damages would be an adjusted $360M, maximum. I'm guessing the adjustment would be down, not up, given the current value of the technology sector, compared to 1994... *de*flation is a bugger. They might get 1/10th of what they got from Microsoft the other day, and then pay it back to IBM in patent licenses.
As far as patents are concerned, the most important patents that Linux may be infringing do not belong to Caldera/SCO, they belong to Novell, and they belong to Lucent and AT&T.
Caldera/SCO generally do not have assignment of these patents; instead, they have a non-exclusive license to them.
In fact, a simple patent search reveals Caldera is the assignee of a grand total of 3 active patents: 6,529,784 in their own name, and 6,104,392 and 6,362,836, in the name of SCO.
Comparatively, Novell has 205 active patents assigned to them; Lucent has 6,725. Microsoft has 2,621.
If anyone *might* have a cause of action, it would be Novell or Lucent, but neither of them are suicidal enough these days.
Oh yeah... and IBM has 33,196 active patents assigned to them... wonder who's going to win a "patent trading card" fight, if IBM legal becomes "Engaged".
Investment was made in ~1986 from my recollection of events. Of course, if you weren't in the computer industry in 1986, you probably wouldn't remember it happening.
Microsoft holds equity stakes in a large number of companies; some of them are really surprising. For example: they have 1.9M shares of Borland stock.
You should read their SEC filings for their Section 13G and Section 13G/A filings. Unfortunately, if you want to see the filings from ~1986, you'll have to travel and look at MicroFiche (something else that was used the 1980's;^)).
Diplomas are Union Cards... or at least they are being treated as the modern day equivalent, these days.
Getting a CS, or *any* degree is not the same thing as going to a trade school, and it's time that people quit treating it that way.
If you went after your CS degree chasing the idea of money, then you are better off changing your major to something you enjoy doing, rather than something that you do for the money.
Let me ask: do you want a job? Or do you want a career? If you just want a job, being a trucker or an assembly line worker at GM generally pays more than being a software engineer.
In the hey-day of Silicon Valley, all you had to do is say you were a "2nd year CS student", and you would be hired by some desperate company, with more funding than good sense, to be a warm body to fill a cubicle, at some inflated salary... what a disaster for everyone: a bunch of partially trained computer scientists who think they are being paid a lot because of the value of what's inside their heads, rather than what's inside their pants (a butt for filling a chair). No more, and the industry is better for it.
The bottom line is that the people who chase a particular degree because "I think that's where the money is", rather than "I think I will enjoy doing this for the rest of my life" are losers. They always have been.
These are the same people who used to want to be doctors, and then used to want to be lawyers. Now they are the people who used to want to be computer scientists.
Creating a life for yourself is all about finding something you enjoy doing, and then finding someone to pay you to do it, not about finding something that someone will pay you to do, and suffering through it.
You will be much happier, and so will your future spouse and kids, when it turns out you don't beat them over being trapped in a job that's "work" for you, when it should be something you enjoy doing.
Very easy. Install a cell on the plane, and charge out the nose for the phone calls, same or worse than the "AirPhone" charges.
This is the same solution I proposed a while back for use of cell phones in movie theatres: just make it cost $5/minute for a phone call, and the problem will go away.
PS: Actually, the real reason that they ban cell phones and other electronic devices on aircraft during take off and landing is that it interferes with the 1960's vintage ILS (Instrument Landing System).
Consumer electronics can interfere with ILS, if they are noisy enough, and/or if the equipment is older (e.g. ILS I instead of ILS II on the ground, or the GSE is not integrated into the VOR in the aircraft, so that Glide Slope is not tuned automatically, etc.).
If the aircraft is 6 degrees high coming in, it can invert "up" and "down" signals from the ILS GSE. This same thing can happen with electronic equipment interference inside the aircraft, if it happens to hit a harmonic, even if the aircraft is dead on on its approach.
The ILS was designed a long time ago, and hasn't been really upgraded until recently (ILS II is installed in San Francisco, for example, because of the fog, and in Salt Lake City because of the poor visability).
Not all aircraft are equipped with ILS II: I was flying into SLC to meet my dad, and my plane was out of SFO, so it had it; my dad's didn't. Visiblty was such that my plane was able to land, but my dad's had to divert to Boise, Idaho (100 feet vs. 300 feet).
Almost all international flights have ILS II capability in the aircraft, and almost all international airports also have it (Canada just upgraded one of theirs to the tune of well over a million dollars); that's why you see 802.11b on some international carriers, like Luftansa, but not domestic flights.
It will probably be some time before all the equipment at all the airports, and all the aircraft in every fleet, are upgraded. Expect it to show up on domestic flights between SFO and DFW, DFW and ATL, etc., first, before it shows up elsewhere domestically.
For the people who have flown in private jets and not been told to turn off their equipment: you probably had "hands on" pilots and good visability. Most commercial airline pilots are "wire heads", and would get really up tight if they had to land based on visuals alone: they really trust their instruments. It makes sense: a 747 is a lot more complicated than a Lear or a small turboprop. The story would probably have been different if visability was down to some uncomfortable level for your pilot.
PS: If you want more information, Google for "Instrument Landing System".
The important gateing factors on any Open Source project are:
1) Motivation (a problem to solve, that people
can agree upon)
2) Working code (something that comes close to
solving the problem, or from which people can
see a solution)
3) Community (communications and peers to provide
a context in which the work can take place)
A lot of people have #1, so they declare a Source Forge project, try to cookie-cutter #3 (impossible to do), and leverage having #1 and #3 into someone creating #2 (also impossible to do).
Mozilla had #1, some of #3, and almost none of #2 for a very, very long time, and it's still suffering the backlash from it (for example). BSD did not take off until Bill Jolitz made it boot. Fetchmail sort of works, but no one cares. Etc..
As a matter of fact, I claim that, given any #2, I can *find* #1, and *create* #3.
It's trivially easy to start Open Source projects by the dozens, if you are even a halfway decent coder: just make something good enough to work, but lacking enough to convince a group of people that they could (and should) improve it, rewrite it, or otherwise do better.
That sounds like most modern commercial software, to me, since it has legacy design factors from the 1980's/1990's causing it to need documentation, support, and training materials as part of the (no longer relevent) copy protection systems that grew up around the software developement process.
Seriously, it took a *lot* of skill to come up with the first Word Processor that needed documentation for people to be able to use it ("PC Write"). The author, Bob Wallace, said at one convention where he spoke, "Software...", gestured expressively above and to the sides of his head, "...is all up here. I sell manuals.".
SMTPAUTH, ODMR are commonly available from most providers.
Most ISPs support this, though they do not advertise it, as such. Normally, all you have to do is change the server name, and tell it to use SMTP AUTH. For example, for EarthLink, the server is "smtpauth.earthlink.com"; works for any dialup account, so long as you include your domain name in the login.
ODMR is harder and easier; it wasn't supported by anyone for a very long time; we had the first implementation, written by Jennifer Meyers (of BUGTRAQ/Security Focus/"geek-girl" fame) as part of our "IBM Web Connections" service (IBM Global Small Business division, formerly Whistle Communications). Sad to say, though we beat everyone by about 3 years, IBM Web Connections and the InterJet are no more. 8-(.
These days, everyone and their dog supports it, and you can usually get it very cheaply; a Yahoo or Google search for "ODMR" and "mail" will give you about 2,600 and 3,300 hits, respectvely, with the Yahoo results skewed to service providers instead of source code.
The parent of this post was so funny that I had to go to the fridge, get a full glass of milk, and spit it up through my nose!
-- Terry
I expect that some people will still see it...
on
Foiling Cinema Pirates
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I expect that some people will still see it...
There's a large variance in human persistence of vision; it's more of a bell curve. The reason for this is evolutionary; studies have shown that some people have better visual resolution, while other have better motion detection thresholds. For example, my resolution is lousy, but my color vision has better frequency discrimination, and I can detect even very slight motion in my peripheral vision ("How did you know I had come into the room?").
It seems to me that they are targetting the center of the curve only, and that they will lose the people on the edges.
Personally, I expect to be on the wrong end of the curve for this, and it will probably annoy me enough that I will stop going to movies, just as I've replaced all the landlord provided long life flourescents in my apartment with incandescents, because the 60Hz "flicker" drives me nuts when I try to watch TV or work on the computer (there's a reason that some people like to work in a dark office; it's because the alternative is unbearable to them; expect these people to not go to movies with this "feature", either).
When this happens, they will also lose the people who are members of those people's social networks, and who are more willing to select some other form of entertainment (e.g. "Dave and Busters" or whatever) than go to a movie without one of their friends.
A sidebar about the code that goes back to Microsoft...
It seems to me that I would prefer that *all* code be returned and integrated by Microsoft, not just the code they choose to integrate, excepting platform specific changes.
What this basically means to you and me is that, even if we get a hold of the WinCE source code, and compile it up for our WinCE-based device, we aren't going to be able to run it, because it will be missing some non-abstracted vendor pieces specific to the device.
This seriously resticts the utility of having the source code to device vendors *only*; third parties, including software developers, need not apply.
This is similar to what you would have if PalmOS was licensed under the same terms: sure, you can compile and modify it all you want, but it would never run on your Handspring Visor (or whatever).
In other words, this is actually not a license beneficial to developers in general, it's only beneficial to vendors.
Better if Microsoft forced abstraction of vendor components, in such a way that the existing binary vendor components could be recombined with a modified WinCE to allow people other than the vendor to use the vendor's platform for things the vendor thinks are only marginal profitability (e.g. I modify the code for a small WinCE device to add support for a bar code scanner, and resell the devices with my code to inventory control services).
As it is, there's only a device vendor benefit.
So quit complaining about the per-unit royalty: it doesn't matter. And quit complaining about the license-back: it also doesn't matter.
Slashdot Mirror
They can't block port 25 unconditionally - they have no dialup support.
What this means is that if you travel with a laptop, the only way you are going to be able to get connectivity while on the road is to have a separate dialup service.
What this effectively means is that in order to avoid having to switch your configuration around between home and not home, and to maintain a single email address, you ignore Comcast's mail service, and user your dialup ISP's mail servers all the time (via SMTP AUTH), and use the dialup ISP's mail account as our primary email address.
At which point, Comcast's value to you is nothing more than "IP dialtone" at a higher speed than you get via dialup (too bad they don't charge less for this type of usage).
Yeah, it's relatively trivial to export a couple of configurations on Windows with regedit, which would let you double-click to change the settings, but it takes someone with some knowledge to do that (for example, knowing it can be done).
OutLook has some features for doing this as well, but OutLook is one of the reasons blocking is an issue in the first place.
The bottom line is that an ISP that doesn't offer alternate access not tied to your physical location can't afford to effectively block access to the servers of ISPs who don't have that same problem, if they want to attract customers.
Of course, this problem is much reduced, if they start offering dialup access for their cable Internet service subscribers who happen to be on the road, but they show no signs of doing that.
-- Terry
The reason I thought it was rhetorical was because the blood levels were non-zero, after doing the math.
As to your specific points: Correct. However, the literature supports that metabolic byproducts of aspartame do interfere with schizophrenic medication. This is invalid logic; cigarettes didn't have warnings for years, either; did they only become dangerous only after the warnings were affixed? There are plenty of compounds classified as food additives or nutritional suplements that have dire interactions with medications, and which are not listed on the label of those medications.
We can conclude nothing about aspartame from the lack of warnings on medications. Your statement is incorrect. As one example, please see paragrph 3:
NAMI reference on Lithium Carbonate and its use in the treatment of schizophrenia
I understand that my original posting was largely anecdotal, in that it referenced my personal perception of my observation of events which occurred circa 1984 with chronically mentally ill patients in programs involved with Weber County Mental Health, in Ogden Utah.
I'm sorry that it doesn't make sense to you, but I was not posting it for your benefit, I was posting it for the benefit of the lay-person who posted regarding the diagnosis of his sister. For information to be useful, it has to be accessible to its intended audience.
-- Terry
You might as well be making the argument that Chewbacca was a wookie, and since wookies have nothing to do with this, then aspartame must not affect dopamine.
i ?C MD=search&DB=pubmed
You are arguing anecdotally, citing your own postings.
Redismissing the rampant Internet misinformation does nothing to invalidate anything I've presented, since I'm not parroting the misinformation. In fact, the only one bringing it up is you.
The reason for the age of the journal articles is due to me only doing a cursory search, and then intentionally editing out references which were not directly on point, rather than trying to "throw everything and see what sticks".
Let's get back on point, and fix that omission on my part.
Take one of the metabolic byproducts of aspartame that you admit to, phenylalanine, and do a PubMed search on it and schizophrenia. Here's the URL for the NIH PubMed search engine:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcg
Please enter the terms "schizophrenia phenylalanine".
You will get back 258 articles, of which about 17 are relevent to our current discussion. Of those, many demonstrate a positive correlation between phenylalanine and increased symptoms in schizophrenia.
If you are willing to ignore the relevancy scoping I (again) self-imposed, you will also notice that the vast majority of the 258 articles returned indicate dopamine antagonism by phenylalanine.
In fact, if you drop the schizophrenia term, and change the search terms to "dopamine phenylalanine" instead, you will get 7226 results; of the ones that examined any potential correlation, most of them agree with me.
So much for your statement "Aspartame has no effect on the dopamine receptors."
-- Terry
I suggest you read the medical literature. Specifically, you should read Lancet, the New England Journal of Medecine, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and the Journal of Neurochemistry.
Yes, there are plenty of nuts on the Internet suggesting a link between aspartame and cancer, alzheimers, "Gulf War Syndrome", etc.. I'm not one of them.
Here are some reputable journal cites.
I'd be happy to examine any contradictory peer reviewed journal published papers you care to cite in return.
Thanks.
Aspartame. Review of safety issues. Council on Scientific Affairs. Journal of the American Medical Association. Vol. 254 No. 3, July 19, 1985
Department of Health and Human Services. Quarterly Report on Adverse Reactions Associated with Aspartame Ingestion. DHHS, Washington, DC, Oct. 1, 1986.
Johns, D. R. Migraine provoked by aspartame. N. Engl. J. Med. 315-456 (1986)
Drake, M.E. Panic attacks and excessive aspartame ingestion. Lancetii: 631 (1986)
Yokogoshi, H., Roberts, C. H., Caballero, B., and Wurtman, R.J. Effects of aspartame and glucose administration on brain and plasma levels of large neutral amino acids and brain 5-hydroxyindoles. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 40: 1-7 (1984).
Fernstrom, J. D., Fernstrom, M. H., and Gillis, M. A. Acute Effects of aspartame on large neutral amino acids and monoamines in rat brain. Life Sci. 32: 1651-1658 (1983).
Stegink, L. D., Filer, L. J., Jr., Baker, G. L., and McDonnell, J. E. Effect of an abuse dose of aspartame upon plasma and erythrocyte levels of amino acids in phenylketonuric heterozygous and normal adults. J. Nutr. 110: 2216-2224 (1980).
Fernstrom, J. D., and Faller, D. V. Neutral amino acids in the brain: Changes in response to food ingestion. J. Neurochem. 30: 1531-1538 (1978)
Oldendorf, W. H. Brain uptake of radiolabeled amino acids, amines, and hexoses after arterial injection. Am. J. Physiol. 221:1629-1639 (1971).
Milner, J. D., Irie, K., and Wurtman, R. J. Effects of phenylalanine on the release of endogenous dopamine from rat striatal slices. J. Neurochem. 47: 1444-1448 (1986).
Pinto, J. M. B., and Maher, T. J. Aspartame administration potentiates pentylenetetrazole- and fluorothyl-induced seizures in mice. Neuropharmacology, in press.
-- Terry
Avoid aspartame (Nutrasweet) if you are schitzophrenic. It bonds to the N-Dopamine receptors, and makes medications which moderate N-Dopamine uptake, like the Lithium salts normally used to treat conditions like schitzophrenia, less effective.
My mother was a psychiatric social worker who dealt with the chronically mentally ill at around the time "Tab" came out. Mentally ill people frequently have poor body images, and fad dieting is common; a new diet drink on the market, and they were all drinking it. Fully 75% of them ended up in the state hospital for 72 hours until their medication levels could be sorted out. This happened a number of times, until someone clued into what was happening, and adjusted the medication according to the amount of aspartame they would have in them in a non-supervised, non-hospital setting. The best outcome is to get them off anything, over the counter products or dietary suplements, which could negatively impact the effectiveness of their medication.
Another common occurance with people in this boat is self medication, so watch for it. Abuse of tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana, and sometimes harder drugs, is common. The main reason for this is that people expect drunk or stoned people to talk to themselves (for example), and it's socially acceptable, but an apparently sober person talking to themselves or otherwise acting abnormally is cause for alarm. So they self medicate to "fit in". Think about that the next time you see a "party animal" friend acting out.
Other than that, she needs to be as religious about taking her medication as a diabetic is about taking insulin or someone with an organ transplant is about taking their prednezone, or someone with AIDS is about taking their cocktail. These are conditions which are treatable, but cannot be/aren't cured at present.
-- Terry
Just to add another point of view... this may be a bad thing.
[usual disclaimers here; I'm a layperson who has to deal with issues related to things like this occasionally]
The difference between a real company and an intellectual property holding company is that a real company has some skin in the game when it comes to treating patents as trading cards. An IP holding company doesn't.
As a simple example, consider two companies, "A" and "B", with a patent portfolio of 100 patents each, and real products that they are trying to sell.
When company A says to company B "you're infringing patent A17", B can use its portfolio defensively, and come back with "yes, but you're infringing patent B34; let's trade licenses".
If company A is an IP holding company, there's nothing company B can do but pay whatever extortionate price: Company A has no product, and is therefore not infringing any of B's IP. B is pretty much hanging in the wind.
The only place this isn't true is where B has some IP that A acknowledges is the basis of derivative IP held by A, _and_ A values the ability to continue sublicensing it without B raising sublicense fees for the original work in response to the extortion suit.
IF SCO is, effectively shedding their vulnerable assets, and IF they really have IP assets, this could be an entrenchment where it could end up being very hard to dig them out for a very long time.
The only real recourse to this sort of business model is for company B to attack companies that are infringing B's portfolio, and which are owned by the same people who own company A - effectively countering extortion with blackmail.
Yeah, I'm one of those people who think we need intellectual property law reform.
-- Terry
Why Netcraft results are somewhat skewed?
"Domain parking".
I have three domains registered and parked with Tucows International. They all look like they are Linux boxes running Apache.
I'm not saying that I wouldn't deploy that combination, if the domains were live instead of parked, but it's pretty clear that the Netcraft numbers have some skew to them.
To be clear about this, there's a similar skew towards IIS on some parking hosts.
Maybe Netcraft could block inclusion of domain parking hosts?
I have a solution for the "bad money" problem that comes from spending money on artists who are then not successful.
Hire people with taste to make your decisions.
If the money you make is success ratio * attempts, then it's pretty obvious that if you *have* to have a minimum number of attempts, then the way to increase your income/decrease your costs is to change your success ratio.
-- Terry
About 23 years too late. The Berkeley Tokomak achieved break-even, as published in "Fusion" Magazine, back in 1981. One of the people involved was Dr. Dr. John Coonrod, who was also involved in building the first whole-body CAT scanner.
-- Terry
SETI@Home is not vectorized. Even on a G4, they could get a factor of almost 10 on throughput, were they to vectorize the client.
When this was pointed out to them by Apple employees, the SETI@Home people did nothing about it, preferring to keep the client code the same on all platforms, rather than achieve their workload numbers in a fraction of the time (apparently one Apple employee by himself is sitting at about 15th place on number of workunits processed).
It's actually really annoying, but from what I hear, SETI@Home is wrapping up, and they are working on new clients for different problem sets (also not vectorized).
-- Terry
Acrobat PDFWriter is available for download from Adobe, for free. You have to scratch around on their site for it, but it's been there fore a long time now, since people started writing free software that would cost them market share and control of the PDF standard.
No need to wave a dead chicken over GhostScript...
-- Terry
Our great^12 grandchildren are going to look back on news stories like this one and *laugh their feelers off*...
-- Terry
Some thoughts on Trade Secrets, Patents...
U.S. Trade Secret law is very specific... once a Trade Secret is disclosed, it's disclosed, and there's no getting it back.
SCO appears to be trying to close the barn door after the horse has escaped. The only thing they can get out of this, at least as far as any Trade Secret disclosure, is trebled damages for their loss of the secret, based on their reasonably expected loss of revenue, and a public records acknowledgement that they no longer own the Trade Secrets, if any, that were disclosed.
USL tried this "My Secret Was Disclosed But I Still Get To Keep It" tactic vs. UCB when BSDI infringed the UNIX trademark, woke the USL lawyers up, couldn't get them back to sleep, and then ended up hiding behind UCB. They ended up settling under undisclosed terms, which is usually code for "We Get To Save Face".
Sun bought out of their UNIX license for ~$120M from Novell in 1994, so their damages would be an adjusted $360M, maximum. I'm guessing the adjustment would be down, not up, given the current value of the technology sector, compared to 1994... *de*flation is a bugger. They might get 1/10th of what they got from Microsoft the other day, and then pay it back to IBM in patent licenses.
As far as patents are concerned, the most important patents that Linux may be infringing do not belong to Caldera/SCO, they belong to Novell, and they belong to Lucent and AT&T.
Caldera/SCO generally do not have assignment of these patents; instead, they have a non-exclusive license to them.
In fact, a simple patent search reveals Caldera is the assignee of a grand total of 3 active patents: 6,529,784 in their own name, and 6,104,392 and 6,362,836, in the name of SCO.
Comparatively, Novell has 205 active patents assigned to them; Lucent has 6,725. Microsoft has 2,621.
If anyone *might* have a cause of action, it would be Novell or Lucent, but neither of them are suicidal enough these days.
Oh yeah... and IBM has 33,196 active patents assigned to them... wonder who's going to win a "patent trading card" fight, if IBM legal becomes "Engaged".
-- Terry
Investment was made in ~1986 from my recollection of events. Of course, if you weren't in the computer industry in 1986, you probably wouldn't remember it happening.
;^)).
Microsoft holds equity stakes in a large number of companies; some of them are really surprising. For example: they have 1.9M shares of Borland stock.
You should read their SEC filings for their Section 13G and Section 13G/A filings. Unfortunately, if you want to see the filings from ~1986, you'll have to travel and look at MicroFiche (something else that was used the 1980's
Microsoft SEC filings on stock held
-- Terry
Holy Percival Lowell, Batman!
I *swear to God*, there's *canals* on Earth!
-- Terry
Diplomas are Union Cards... or at least they are being treated as the modern day equivalent, these days.
Getting a CS, or *any* degree is not the same thing as going to a trade school, and it's time that people quit treating it that way.
If you went after your CS degree chasing the idea of money, then you are better off changing your major to something you enjoy doing, rather than something that you do for the money.
Let me ask: do you want a job? Or do you want a career? If you just want a job, being a trucker or an assembly line worker at GM generally pays more than being a software engineer.
In the hey-day of Silicon Valley, all you had to do is say you were a "2nd year CS student", and you would be hired by some desperate company, with more funding than good sense, to be a warm body to fill a cubicle, at some inflated salary... what a disaster for everyone: a bunch of partially trained computer scientists who think they are being paid a lot because of the value of what's inside their heads, rather than what's inside their pants (a butt for filling a chair). No more, and the industry is better for it.
The bottom line is that the people who chase a particular degree because "I think that's where the money is", rather than "I think I will enjoy doing this for the rest of my life" are losers. They always have been.
These are the same people who used to want to be doctors, and then used to want to be lawyers. Now they are the people who used to want to be computer scientists.
Creating a life for yourself is all about finding something you enjoy doing, and then finding someone to pay you to do it, not about finding something that someone will pay you to do, and suffering through it.
You will be much happier, and so will your future spouse and kids, when it turns out you don't beat them over being trapped in a job that's "work" for you, when it should be something you enjoy doing.
-- Terry
This was solved a long time ago...
...the missing mass is AOL disks.
-- Terry
Cell Phones On Planes: An Economic Solution
Very easy. Install a cell on the plane, and charge out the nose for the phone calls, same or worse than the "AirPhone" charges.
This is the same solution I proposed a while back for use of cell phones in movie theatres: just make it cost $5/minute for a phone call, and the problem will go away.
PS: Actually, the real reason that they ban cell phones and other electronic devices on aircraft during take off and landing is that it interferes with the 1960's vintage ILS (Instrument Landing System).
-- Terry
Consumer electronics can interfere with ILS, if they are noisy enough, and/or if the equipment is older (e.g. ILS I instead of ILS II on the ground, or the GSE is not integrated into the VOR in the aircraft, so that Glide Slope is not tuned automatically, etc.).
If the aircraft is 6 degrees high coming in, it can invert "up" and "down" signals from the ILS GSE. This same thing can happen with electronic equipment interference inside the aircraft, if it happens to hit a harmonic, even if the aircraft is dead on on its approach.
The ILS was designed a long time ago, and hasn't been really upgraded until recently (ILS II is installed in San Francisco, for example, because of the fog, and in Salt Lake City because of the poor visability).
Not all aircraft are equipped with ILS II: I was flying into SLC to meet my dad, and my plane was out of SFO, so it had it; my dad's didn't. Visiblty was such that my plane was able to land, but my dad's had to divert to Boise, Idaho (100 feet vs. 300 feet).
Almost all international flights have ILS II capability in the aircraft, and almost all international airports also have it (Canada just upgraded one of theirs to the tune of well over a million dollars); that's why you see 802.11b on some international carriers, like Luftansa, but not domestic flights.
It will probably be some time before all the equipment at all the airports, and all the aircraft in every fleet, are upgraded. Expect it to show up on domestic flights between SFO and DFW, DFW and ATL, etc., first, before it shows up elsewhere domestically.
For the people who have flown in private jets and not been told to turn off their equipment: you probably had "hands on" pilots and good visability. Most commercial airline pilots are "wire heads", and would get really up tight if they had to land based on visuals alone: they really trust their instruments. It makes sense: a 747 is a lot more complicated than a Lear or a small turboprop. The story would probably have been different if visability was down to some uncomfortable level for your pilot.
PS: If you want more information, Google for "Instrument Landing System".
-- Terry
The important gateing factors on any Open Source project are:
1) Motivation (a problem to solve, that people
can agree upon)
2) Working code (something that comes close to
solving the problem, or from which people can
see a solution)
3) Community (communications and peers to provide
a context in which the work can take place)
A lot of people have #1, so they declare a Source Forge project, try to cookie-cutter #3 (impossible to do), and leverage having #1 and #3 into someone creating #2 (also impossible to do).
Mozilla had #1, some of #3, and almost none of #2 for a very, very long time, and it's still suffering the backlash from it (for example). BSD did not take off until Bill Jolitz made it boot. Fetchmail sort of works, but no one cares. Etc..
As a matter of fact, I claim that, given any #2, I can *find* #1, and *create* #3.
It's trivially easy to start Open Source projects by the dozens, if you are even a halfway decent coder: just make something good enough to work, but lacking enough to convince a group of people that they could (and should) improve it, rewrite it, or otherwise do better.
That sounds like most modern commercial software, to me, since it has legacy design factors from the 1980's/1990's causing it to need documentation, support, and training materials as part of the (no longer relevent) copy protection systems that grew up around the software developement process.
Seriously, it took a *lot* of skill to come up with the first Word Processor that needed documentation for people to be able to use it ("PC Write"). The author, Bob Wallace, said at one convention where he spoke, "Software...", gestured expressively above and to the sides of his head, "...is all up here. I sell manuals.".
-- Terry
SMTPAUTH, ODMR are commonly available from most providers.
Most ISPs support this, though they do not advertise it, as such. Normally, all you have to do is change the server name, and tell it to use SMTP AUTH. For example, for EarthLink, the server is "smtpauth.earthlink.com"; works for any dialup account, so long as you include your domain name in the login.
ODMR is harder and easier; it wasn't supported by anyone for a very long time; we had the first implementation, written by Jennifer Meyers (of BUGTRAQ/Security Focus/"geek-girl" fame) as part of our "IBM Web Connections" service (IBM Global Small Business division, formerly Whistle Communications). Sad to say, though we beat everyone by about 3 years, IBM Web Connections and the InterJet are no more. 8-(.
These days, everyone and their dog supports it, and you can usually get it very cheaply; a Yahoo or Google search for "ODMR" and "mail" will give you about 2,600 and 3,300 hits, respectvely, with the Yahoo results skewed to service providers instead of source code.
-- Terry
OMG!!
The parent of this post was so funny that I had to go to the fridge, get a full glass of milk, and spit it up through my nose!
-- Terry
I expect that some people will still see it...
There's a large variance in human persistence of vision; it's more of a bell curve. The reason for this is evolutionary; studies have shown that some people have better visual resolution, while other have better motion detection thresholds. For example, my resolution is lousy, but my color vision has better frequency discrimination, and I can detect even very slight motion in my peripheral vision ("How did you know I had come into the room?").
It seems to me that they are targetting the center of the curve only, and that they will lose the people on the edges.
Personally, I expect to be on the wrong end of the curve for this, and it will probably annoy me enough that I will stop going to movies, just as I've replaced all the landlord provided long life flourescents in my apartment with incandescents, because the 60Hz "flicker" drives me nuts when I try to watch TV or work on the computer (there's a reason that some people like to work in a dark office; it's because the alternative is unbearable to them; expect these people to not go to movies with this "feature", either).
When this happens, they will also lose the people who are members of those people's social networks, and who are more willing to select some other form of entertainment (e.g. "Dave and Busters" or whatever) than go to a movie without one of their friends.
-- Terry
Obligatory Simpsons reference...
Quick! Someone put out the Sprinfield tire fire! We're going to need it for fuel for spaceship one!
-- Terry
A sidebar about the code that goes back to Microsoft...
It seems to me that I would prefer that *all* code be returned and integrated by Microsoft, not just the code they choose to integrate, excepting platform specific changes.
What this basically means to you and me is that, even if we get a hold of the WinCE source code, and compile it up for our WinCE-based device, we aren't going to be able to run it, because it will be missing some non-abstracted vendor pieces specific to the device.
This seriously resticts the utility of having the source code to device vendors *only*; third parties, including software developers, need not apply.
This is similar to what you would have if PalmOS was licensed under the same terms: sure, you can compile and modify it all you want, but it would never run on your Handspring Visor (or whatever).
In other words, this is actually not a license beneficial to developers in general, it's only beneficial to vendors.
Better if Microsoft forced abstraction of vendor components, in such a way that the existing binary vendor components could be recombined with a modified WinCE to allow people other than the vendor to use the vendor's platform for things the vendor thinks are only marginal profitability (e.g. I modify the code for a small WinCE device to add support for a bar code scanner, and resell the devices with my code to inventory control services).
As it is, there's only a device vendor benefit.
So quit complaining about the per-unit royalty: it doesn't matter. And quit complaining about the license-back: it also doesn't matter.
-- Terry