First off, don't go for the person who is the cheapest. Find the most experienced doctor you can get. An inexperienced doctor can easily do massive, irreversible damage to your eyesight. Nothing is worth that risk.
I went from about 20/600 in each eye to 20/25 and 20/50. That's the good part. I have a light astigmatism in my left eye, and a medium one in my right eye. Great for daily activities that don't involve reading. The astigmatism causes a double image (within each individual eye) that makes text a little bit difficult to see properly. I also have the halos around bright lights at night that are common among lasik patients. I often find myself squinting while driving at night. I had dryness and itchyness for 6 months, and needed to use eyedrops. My eyes still feel dry a bit more than they used to. I still have a pair of glasses for reading the computer screen and tabletop gaming.
It was a highly unpleasant procedure. They keep your eye wide open with a speculum for 10-15 minutes. You get local anesthetic drops for your eye, but you can still feel the pressure of what they are doing to your eyes. The keratome (that cuts the protective layer of your eye) is attached via suction and causes you to temporarily lose vision. You get the closest possible view of them slicing the protective layer of your eye, and then peeling it back like a bedsheet, causing your vision to blur. Then you have to intently follow a red dot while a laser burns your cornea down to the desired shape. It smells like burning hair. And since your nose is about an inch away, it's very strong. Afterwards, they have to lay the protective layer back down so that it lays flat. It naturally sticks to the cornea, so if it's not laid down perfectly the first time, the doctor may have to peel it back and put it down again. Perhaps several times. Now do the other eye. If you're looking to get both eyes up to 20/25 or better, then you should expect to come back in 6 months and do it all again.
Some bad reasons to get lasik surgery: Save money on glasses/contacts. You will most likely still need to own a pair of glasses for the rest of your life.
Want perfect vision.
Your vision with glasses or contacts is most likely better than lasik will be capable of. Don't like the way you look with glasses.
Try contact lenses.
Some good reasons to get lasik.
Don't like the way you look with glasses, and you have problems wearing contact lenses. (me)
You have very bad vision and can't really do anything until you get your glasses on, or contacts in. (me)
You like to engage in activities that aren't friendly to contacts or glasses, such as swimming.
I had mine done under my medical coverage, so it didn't cost me much more than a few bottles of eye drops and a new pair of glasses (a year later). It wouldn't have been worth it if I had to pay out of pocket. I'd say I'm 'fairly satisfied'. My vision is nowhere near as good as it was before with glasses (20/15, 20/10), except that I used to have prismatic effects with the thickness of my lenses. It's great to not have to clean fog, water and dirt off my glasses. Being able to see while swimming in the pool or ocean is especially nice. What's the point of going if you can't enjoy the view?;)
... or at least one who would bother to view the video from the officer's dash camera. The officer asked if Hibbel had any ID on him, and Hibbel replied 'No, I... why should I have any ID?'. Hibbel had told the officer that he didn't have any identification the first time that he asked for it, then the officer repeatedly demanded that Hibbel produce his identification. He never directly ask Hibbel to tell him his name.
If you think the real issue is that Hibbel was hitting his daughter, then I want to know why the officer started the investigation with the suspect rather than talking to the 'victim', which they never got around to doing. A second officer was present, who could have easily talked to her, and asked if she knew who the man was. Instead, they barricaded her in the truck, and then tackled and handcuffed her once she got out. The first question the asked her once they calmed her down?... It wasn't 'do you you have any ID on you?'. It was 'What's your name?'. She promptly answered 'Mimi'. Yes, Hibbel's not too bright, and his daughter reacted about average for seeing her fathered arrested for no good reason, but the officers utterly failed to use any intelligence or reason in their questioning of Mr. Hibbel.
www.abditum.com/hiibel/no_id_arrest_MEDIUM.mov
This Supreme Court ruling isn't even relevant to the case. Hibbel never refused to tell the officer his name. He never confirmed that he had ID with him, but was refusing to show it. He just told the officer he didn't have any ID on him. The only relevant ruling would be to say that the police can arrest you for not carrying ID. I've never accused any court or judge of making up laws (in fact, I generally think they have too little discretion), but that's exactly what they did in this case.
My guess is that Hibbel's lawyer was more interested in getting his name in print next to the words Supreme Court, than getting justice for Hibbel.
Medium sized, fire-resistant (3-4 hours) safes only cost about $300-400. I don't know how your house is laid out, but at my place getting that drive would mean heading to the opposite end of the house, and probably going past the fire. Not bloody likely to happen unless we catch it early, in which case we have fire extinguishers handy in key locations. [PSA: Fire extinguishers start at $8. There's no good excuse for not having one or more in your house.]
is a tabloid rag. They publish pure speculation from low level individuals as if it came directly from god himself. I stopped listening to anything from the Post a while ago.
I quit watching Farscape altogether once I found out that it was going to end in a cliffhanger that would not be resolved. Now I have to find out when that season will be aired again.
Relating to automobiles, yes. And insurance companies are wholeheatedly with me on this issue. There aren't any teenagers in my extended family that I would toss my car keys to, nevermind letting them do anything beyond hosing it down or letting them vaccuum it out.
Sorry, but I'm -really- tired of hearing doctors, driving $100,000 cars, living in multi-million-dollar homes, with trophy wives and 6 weeks vacation on some private island...whine about how rough it is that their insurance just costs so gosh darn much.
You need a serious reality check. The typical doctor who has been practicing for more than 10 years (established) lives in a $250-400k house and drives a $40-50k car on an income of $130-250k working 60-80 hours a week. Doctors under the age of 35 usually live below the average american lifestyle. Most don't vacation more than 4 weeks a year, and usually 2 of those weeks are CME (continuing medical education). When you make 200k per year, it costs you 3.5k per week just to sit at home and relax. Or you may have to hire a replacement at $5k to replace you for the week. Surgeons (who live extravagant lifestyles) make up a small portion of doctors. Why do you (wrongly) believe that all doctors enjoy the same standard of living?
barely 1/4 of the mens room users even so much as washed their hands under running water!
That's still much higher than the general male population, especially among people who already have to wash their hands 40 times a day. Did any of those doctors treat any patients during the conferance?
There's a reason that there's about a 30% shortage of doctors in this country. It's because doctors are underpaid, overworked and over-ligitated. If your goal is to be wealthy, there are much better ways to go. IMHO, people who punitively sue doctors for honest mistakes deserve to be blacklisted. I'm agahst to hear of medical mistakes resulting in judgements in the millions of dollars even after the medical bills have been covered. Americans should be ashamed at the way we treat the doctors who have added dozens of years to our average life expectancy.
The doctor had good reason to believe that your friend was not pregnant. By your logic, it would be negligent to give morphine to any female over the age of 12 without giving them a pregnancy test first. Who's going to pay for all of these pregnancy tests that have to be administered?
We all know the horror stories about doctors amputating the wrong leg
When doctors refer to the left side of a patient's body, they are referring to what the patient considers their right side. This is because they look at it from their own perspective. It's an easy mistake to make, and most surgeries are triple checked because of that. Most patients are prepped with the word 'malpractice' written on the wrong side of the body just because it is such an easy mistake to make. Especially when a surgeon is on their third or fourth procedure of the day, or rounding out the end of a 36 hour stint in the ER.
My Great Grandmother had surgery on her intestines, and the doctors left her abdomen packed with gauze. They had to operate again because she got a peritoneal infection. This was a women in her 70s who had to go under the knife again because of a preventable medical error. She chose not to sue. I would have. There is no excuse for that level of incompetence.
There's a huge excuse for that sort of thing happening. Under ideal circumstances, every item involved in the surgery is catalogued before work begins, and checked for when they are done. But when you cut into a sick person, shit happens. Staff frequently finds that they need more supplies or a special instument NOW (because the patient is dying), and adding it to the list before using it would increase the chances of the patient dying. That log is typically the only way for them to tell what is left in the patient, aside from digging around in the belly searching for what may or may not be there. If the doctors didn't charge for the follow-up surgery, and your grandmother doesn't have long term damage from the second surgery and infection, then she is right to not sue. If you think that bowel surgery on a 70 year old woman is smooth running and risk free, you're dead wrong.
...keeping people in the practice of medicine who shouldn't even be trusted to change the oil on a car.
You should stay far away from any doctor that has any first-hand knowledge of how to change the oil on your car. Just because they have expert knowledge in medicine doesn't mean they know any more than your average american about everything else (luxury car shopping and dining out at 9pm notwithstanding).
nor that they should be compensated extraordinary sums of money for said suffering
The jews demands for reperations didn't stem from their suffering, nor did they demand it from the Germans. They demanded reperations from the insurance companies that 'lost' their policies and the banks that 'lost' their money and valuables. They jews were preyed on during WWII by people who knew that whole families would be wiped out.
Please explain exactly what is wrong with cannibalism...
Cannibalism finally became eradicated about 50 years ago (as a localized cultural norm). Most cultures stopped doing it thousands (or just hundreds) of years ago. The last culture that practiced cannibalism fed the meat of those who died to the women and children, as the hunted animals were saved for the men who did the harder labor. Most of the time, cannibalism is safe; but when a disease comes along that is passed by consuming the victim, the results are devastating to the population. Eventually, they discover the cause and add cannibalism to the list of things to never do again.
Oh, and nobody can waste an officer's time. They can only waste taxpayer money. The officer is being paid, so as far as he's concerened, he's working no matter how many delays he's faced with.
You can at a traffic stop that you won't be arrested for. If the officer has to tell his supervisor that he spent 2 hours detaining someone while the K9 unit showed up and found nothing, he's going to have big problems. Everyone should do this. What do you think taxpayers would say when they have to bring in a dozen new k9 units that aren't producing any results?
No one sees the COPS footage were the innocent person was abused, found to be innocent, and then let go -- that would not make good TV.
That wouldn't get them invited to ride along so that FOX can make more episodes. COPS is not a documentary.
I've had DirecTV for 6+ years. Normally, every channel comes in with the same perfect reception. The only problems I've had are 'rain fade' where I lose reception (down to nothing) just before the rain starts to fall when a heavy downpour is starting. My dish is over some bushes, so sometimes birds will gather around the dish for a second or so and knock it out. A plane flying by will also kill the feed for about a second (very uncommon). My reception is only knocked out for a second or so 1-2 times per week. Half hour outages 1-2 times per year. 30 second outages about 6 times per year. Heavy snow does not do anything to my reception. I'm in Kansas City, so my dish angle doesn't allow for any buildup of snow or rain. DirecTV customer service is quick. I added HBO and had it turned on before the call was over. You can also add channels via the net.
I've always had problems with cable. Signal strength drops because of cable thieves or frugal cable company turning down the power. Cut or fallen cable lines or mistaken disconnects take 24+ hours to fix. It takes big lying balls for cable providers to claim you'll get a better and more consistent feeds from them.
TiVo service only adds $5 per month. Before you sign up for DirecTV, you need to know that their TiVo package doesn't include Home Media Option (HMO) that you may want for transferring DVR material between receivers in different rooms. Not because of any incompatibilites, but because DirecTV are Hollywood Whores (TM) that refuse to add it. I'm personally looking into other providers over this issue.
After their debacle of retesting memory in their garage (apparently in the dead of winter) and remarking it at overclocked speeds, who in their right mind trusts anything coming out of OCZ? I wouldn't buy toilet paper from those guys.
Back then, every computer sold didn't come with a CD burner. To 'pirate' Quake, you had to borrow the CD from a friend. The friend eventually wanted the CD back, so there was an incentive to buy your own.
Video games will continue to get larger, and remain inconvenient to download even via broadband. Most gamers aren't willing to wait for the download of new content and hot-updates everytime they want to play the game. Part of the reason I quit Everquest is that it was double (or more) the price to let family members play too. I had to wait for new content to load in every time I started the game. And most of all, I was very distubed at having to click through the same (I hope) 50 page legal agreement every time I wanted to play.
Many games are starting to phone home every time they are run, even in single player. Gamers should get an application specific firewall like ZoneAlarm to deny these programs internet access to the net so that developers don't get used to the connection being there. Unless you're using their servers, you shouldn't have to register or do any verification. I've yet to find a single-player game that won't run without an internet connection, and I won't buy one that does (even in HL2 or Doom 3 require it, god forbid).
BTW, developers need to start adding LAN support for multiplayer games to allow one copy of a game to have at least 4 players. This is the de-facto standard on consoles (though on a single machine), and a big reason why NOCD hacks are made in the first place. Developers shouldn't expect people to buy multiple copies of a game to play with their friends.
So TruSonic budgeted a total of $60k per year to pay out in all royalties for their service. That's assuming they don't set it up so that each artist makes $24, in which case they don't have to pay anything. How fucking generous.... Perhaps they should just mail out WalMart job applications and call it even.
Consumer cameras use 3-color CCDs. NASA uses an unfiltered CCD and moves in filters to check out specific wavelengths. Many of the filters are outside the (human) visible wavelengths. One is designed only to look for water. Some are designed to look at the sky, and others check out ground detail without any regard for what's above. Others are used because a particular wavelength doesn't get scattered, and thus yields sharper pictures. The one thing they all have in common, is that by themselves, none of the filters will produce a 'true color' RGB image. So if they take an image from the near-infrared and display it in red hues, forgive them.
Anyone looking at a non-terrestrial NASA pic should know that it is only in true color if it explicitly says so. Especially images of glaxies or dust clouds, which are pretty much white and low on details.
Most importantly, the images are taken for research purposes, not sightseeing. NASA's PR department is in charge of taking 'research' and making it pretty and interesting for american taxpayers, but they don't get to decide what gets imaged in the first place. The alternative to colorizing images is to release grayscale pics labeled as near-infrared, but I think people would perceive it as obsolete technology.
Even most small towns have access from local ISPs for $10-15 per month. Dialup is shrinking as broadband becomes more available. I'd bet that at least half of MSN's dialup subscribers are just waiting until a contract expres so they can get something cheaper. People are also realizing that most of MSN's 'features' are really just branded content from free partner websites.
Oops, I meant BMP or TGA, rather than GIF. You can convert between BMP, TGA or PNG (and other lossless formats), and not lose a single pixel of detail. Once you move to JPG, you drop detail. GIFs are lossless for B&W pics, or hand drawn images that use less than 256 colors. By today's standard, they are useless for full color images, since computers don't display in 8 bit anymore. Ten years ago, GIFs could almost be considered lossless because the displays couldn't handle a higher bitdepth anyway, so you were just reducing the color depth to save processing time later.
BTW, by your definition of 'lossy', this text is a lossy approximation of my thoughts before I even touch the keyboard. Name a video or audio format that you consider lossless, or quit trolling.
You're splitting the hair pretty thin in order to redefine the english language in the image you want.
I could split the hair just as much and call this text you're reading lossy. It discards the sound of my voice as I read it aloud in order to fit into a small group of bytes. Your font and text size could be different than what I'm typing in. Just because CDs are typically mixed from many audio streams (that may include positional data, or higher fidelity) doesn't mean that the final two-channel product lost something. The final stream is simply the finished composition.
DVDs are lossy because MPG changes the picture and audio intentionally, to reduce the number of bits used. It tends to smooth out color gradients, or copy similar picture data from prior frames or other sections of the same image, rather than precisely encode from scratch. The audio doesn't include frequencies in the 1hz or 100khz range, or 360 degree photon sampling of light waves from radio up to gamma waves, but that doesn't make it lossy. There are video compression techniques that aren't lossy, but the data storage requirements are insane. It's like if I say I paid $30k for a car, rather than $29999.99. I changed the number to make it easier to say (lossy compression). If I convert the actual price into Euros, it may come out as E28546.32416, and I have to tuncate it to E28546.32 because you can't have a portion of a Euro smaller than E0.01. That doesn't make Euros lossy, just a different currency format. I could still express that amount lossily (makin up words now, woot!) as E28.5k. The difference is only preceptible to you when looking at the original data.
Anyway, under your viewpoint, there are no lossless formats, so everything is lossy. You should stop discussing lossy vs. lossless formats until you have a better understanding of what lossy and lossless compression formats actually are. Scan a picture and save it as a GIF or BMP (lossless), and then as a series of JPGs (lossy) at increasing levels of compression (all in the same resolution and colorspace). This should illustrate what 'lossy' is very clearly.
So the people who now go across the office to get to the only fax machine would suddenly be unable to leave their desk to scan documents? Don't most offices already have a computer that mostly sits unused, except as a file and print server for the network? Receiving scanned documents would be easier, since they would go directly to the intended recepient's computer. No more hiking across the office to check if your fax has arrived yet. Not having to pay for an extra phone line would probably save you enough money to buy a couple of scanners each year for every fax machine you dump. Not having to buy rolls of paper and toner cartridges should be a big plus for most people too. Once scan-and-e-mail catches on, I would expect someone to start selling lan based, autofeeding scanners that run through multiple sheets and save them to where ever you want on the network, perhaps even e-mailing them directly with a bit more setup.
A new trend is also developing in offices where people go to any computer on the network and log in to do their work, rather than having their own cubicle and machine. In this setup, you would just go to one of the computers that has a scanner when you want to send a document.
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First off, don't go for the person who is the cheapest. Find the most experienced doctor you can get. An inexperienced doctor can easily do massive, irreversible damage to your eyesight. Nothing is worth that risk.
;)
I went from about 20/600 in each eye to 20/25 and 20/50. That's the good part. I have a light astigmatism in my left eye, and a medium one in my right eye. Great for daily activities that don't involve reading. The astigmatism causes a double image (within each individual eye) that makes text a little bit difficult to see properly. I also have the halos around bright lights at night that are common among lasik patients. I often find myself squinting while driving at night. I had dryness and itchyness for 6 months, and needed to use eyedrops. My eyes still feel dry a bit more than they used to. I still have a pair of glasses for reading the computer screen and tabletop gaming.
It was a highly unpleasant procedure. They keep your eye wide open with a speculum for 10-15 minutes. You get local anesthetic drops for your eye, but you can still feel the pressure of what they are doing to your eyes. The keratome (that cuts the protective layer of your eye) is attached via suction and causes you to temporarily lose vision. You get the closest possible view of them slicing the protective layer of your eye, and then peeling it back like a bedsheet, causing your vision to blur. Then you have to intently follow a red dot while a laser burns your cornea down to the desired shape. It smells like burning hair. And since your nose is about an inch away, it's very strong. Afterwards, they have to lay the protective layer back down so that it lays flat. It naturally sticks to the cornea, so if it's not laid down perfectly the first time, the doctor may have to peel it back and put it down again. Perhaps several times. Now do the other eye. If you're looking to get both eyes up to 20/25 or better, then you should expect to come back in 6 months and do it all again.
Some bad reasons to get lasik surgery:
Save money on glasses/contacts. You will most likely still need to own a pair of glasses for the rest of your life.
Want perfect vision. Your vision with glasses or contacts is most likely better than lasik will be capable of.
Don't like the way you look with glasses. Try contact lenses.
Some good reasons to get lasik.
Don't like the way you look with glasses, and you have problems wearing contact lenses. (me)
You have very bad vision and can't really do anything until you get your glasses on, or contacts in. (me)
You like to engage in activities that aren't friendly to contacts or glasses, such as swimming.
I had mine done under my medical coverage, so it didn't cost me much more than a few bottles of eye drops and a new pair of glasses (a year later). It wouldn't have been worth it if I had to pay out of pocket. I'd say I'm 'fairly satisfied'. My vision is nowhere near as good as it was before with glasses (20/15, 20/10), except that I used to have prismatic effects with the thickness of my lenses. It's great to not have to clean fog, water and dirt off my glasses. Being able to see while swimming in the pool or ocean is especially nice. What's the point of going if you can't enjoy the view?
... or at least one who would bother to view the video from the officer's dash camera. The officer asked if Hibbel had any ID on him, and Hibbel replied 'No, I... why should I have any ID?'. Hibbel had told the officer that he didn't have any identification the first time that he asked for it, then the officer repeatedly demanded that Hibbel produce his identification. He never directly ask Hibbel to tell him his name.
If you think the real issue is that Hibbel was hitting his daughter, then I want to know why the officer started the investigation with the suspect rather than talking to the 'victim', which they never got around to doing. A second officer was present, who could have easily talked to her, and asked if she knew who the man was. Instead, they barricaded her in the truck, and then tackled and handcuffed her once she got out. The first question the asked her once they calmed her down?... It wasn't 'do you you have any ID on you?'. It was 'What's your name?'. She promptly answered 'Mimi'. Yes, Hibbel's not too bright, and his daughter reacted about average for seeing her fathered arrested for no good reason, but the officers utterly failed to use any intelligence or reason in their questioning of Mr. Hibbel.
www.abditum.com/hiibel/no_id_arrest_MEDIUM.mov
This Supreme Court ruling isn't even relevant to the case. Hibbel never refused to tell the officer his name. He never confirmed that he had ID with him, but was refusing to show it. He just told the officer he didn't have any ID on him. The only relevant ruling would be to say that the police can arrest you for not carrying ID. I've never accused any court or judge of making up laws (in fact, I generally think they have too little discretion), but that's exactly what they did in this case.
My guess is that Hibbel's lawyer was more interested in getting his name in print next to the words Supreme Court, than getting justice for Hibbel.
Medium sized, fire-resistant (3-4 hours) safes only cost about $300-400. I don't know how your house is laid out, but at my place getting that drive would mean heading to the opposite end of the house, and probably going past the fire. Not bloody likely to happen unless we catch it early, in which case we have fire extinguishers handy in key locations.
[PSA: Fire extinguishers start at $8. There's no good excuse for not having one or more in your house.]
is a tabloid rag. They publish pure speculation from low level individuals as if it came directly from god himself. I stopped listening to anything from the Post a while ago.
I quit watching Farscape altogether once I found out that it was going to end in a cliffhanger that would not be resolved. Now I have to find out when that season will be aired again.
Relating to automobiles, yes. And insurance companies are wholeheatedly with me on this issue. There aren't any teenagers in my extended family that I would toss my car keys to, nevermind letting them do anything beyond hosing it down or letting them vaccuum it out.
They had other lives before college.
:P
Ah, that would be 'High School Student'. I'm always looking for some random teenager to change the oil in my car.
Sorry, but I'm -really- tired of hearing doctors, driving $100,000 cars, living in multi-million-dollar homes, with trophy wives and 6 weeks vacation on some private island...whine about how rough it is that their insurance just costs so gosh darn much.
You need a serious reality check. The typical doctor who has been practicing for more than 10 years (established) lives in a $250-400k house and drives a $40-50k car on an income of $130-250k working 60-80 hours a week. Doctors under the age of 35 usually live below the average american lifestyle. Most don't vacation more than 4 weeks a year, and usually 2 of those weeks are CME (continuing medical education). When you make 200k per year, it costs you 3.5k per week just to sit at home and relax. Or you may have to hire a replacement at $5k to replace you for the week. Surgeons (who live extravagant lifestyles) make up a small portion of doctors. Why do you (wrongly) believe that all doctors enjoy the same standard of living?
barely 1/4 of the mens room users even so much as washed their hands under running water!
That's still much higher than the general male population, especially among people who already have to wash their hands 40 times a day. Did any of those doctors treat any patients during the conferance?
There's a reason that there's about a 30% shortage of doctors in this country. It's because doctors are underpaid, overworked and over-ligitated. If your goal is to be wealthy, there are much better ways to go. IMHO, people who punitively sue doctors for honest mistakes deserve to be blacklisted. I'm agahst to hear of medical mistakes resulting in judgements in the millions of dollars even after the medical bills have been covered. Americans should be ashamed at the way we treat the doctors who have added dozens of years to our average life expectancy.
The doctor had good reason to believe that your friend was not pregnant. By your logic, it would be negligent to give morphine to any female over the age of 12 without giving them a pregnancy test first. Who's going to pay for all of these pregnancy tests that have to be administered?
We all know the horror stories about doctors amputating the wrong leg
When doctors refer to the left side of a patient's body, they are referring to what the patient considers their right side. This is because they look at it from their own perspective. It's an easy mistake to make, and most surgeries are triple checked because of that. Most patients are prepped with the word 'malpractice' written on the wrong side of the body just because it is such an easy mistake to make. Especially when a surgeon is on their third or fourth procedure of the day, or rounding out the end of a 36 hour stint in the ER.
My Great Grandmother had surgery on her intestines, and the doctors left her abdomen packed with gauze. They had to operate again because she got a peritoneal infection. This was a women in her 70s who had to go under the knife again because of a preventable medical error. She chose not to sue. I would have. There is no excuse for that level of incompetence.
There's a huge excuse for that sort of thing happening. Under ideal circumstances, every item involved in the surgery is catalogued before work begins, and checked for when they are done. But when you cut into a sick person, shit happens. Staff frequently finds that they need more supplies or a special instument NOW (because the patient is dying), and adding it to the list before using it would increase the chances of the patient dying. That log is typically the only way for them to tell what is left in the patient, aside from digging around in the belly searching for what may or may not be there. If the doctors didn't charge for the follow-up surgery, and your grandmother doesn't have long term damage from the second surgery and infection, then she is right to not sue. If you think that bowel surgery on a 70 year old woman is smooth running and risk free, you're dead wrong.
You should stay far away from any doctor that has any first-hand knowledge of how to change the oil on your car. Just because they have expert knowledge in medicine doesn't mean they know any more than your average american about everything else (luxury car shopping and dining out at 9pm notwithstanding).
nor that they should be compensated extraordinary sums of money for said suffering
The jews demands for reperations didn't stem from their suffering, nor did they demand it from the Germans. They demanded reperations from the insurance companies that 'lost' their policies and the banks that 'lost' their money and valuables. They jews were preyed on during WWII by people who knew that whole families would be wiped out.
Please explain exactly what is wrong with cannibalism...
Cannibalism finally became eradicated about 50 years ago (as a localized cultural norm). Most cultures stopped doing it thousands (or just hundreds) of years ago. The last culture that practiced cannibalism fed the meat of those who died to the women and children, as the hunted animals were saved for the men who did the harder labor. Most of the time, cannibalism is safe; but when a disease comes along that is passed by consuming the victim, the results are devastating to the population. Eventually, they discover the cause and add cannibalism to the list of things to never do again.
Oh, and nobody can waste an officer's time. They can only waste taxpayer money. The officer is being paid, so as far as he's concerened, he's working no matter how many delays he's faced with.
You can at a traffic stop that you won't be arrested for. If the officer has to tell his supervisor that he spent 2 hours detaining someone while the K9 unit showed up and found nothing, he's going to have big problems. Everyone should do this. What do you think taxpayers would say when they have to bring in a dozen new k9 units that aren't producing any results?
No one sees the COPS footage were the innocent person was abused, found to be innocent, and then let go -- that would not make good TV.
That wouldn't get them invited to ride along so that FOX can make more episodes. COPS is not a documentary.
I've had DirecTV for 6+ years. Normally, every channel comes in with the same perfect reception. The only problems I've had are 'rain fade' where I lose reception (down to nothing) just before the rain starts to fall when a heavy downpour is starting. My dish is over some bushes, so sometimes birds will gather around the dish for a second or so and knock it out. A plane flying by will also kill the feed for about a second (very uncommon). My reception is only knocked out for a second or so 1-2 times per week. Half hour outages 1-2 times per year. 30 second outages about 6 times per year. Heavy snow does not do anything to my reception. I'm in Kansas City, so my dish angle doesn't allow for any buildup of snow or rain. DirecTV customer service is quick. I added HBO and had it turned on before the call was over. You can also add channels via the net.
I've always had problems with cable. Signal strength drops because of cable thieves or frugal cable company turning down the power. Cut or fallen cable lines or mistaken disconnects take 24+ hours to fix. It takes big lying balls for cable providers to claim you'll get a better and more consistent feeds from them.
TiVo service only adds $5 per month. Before you sign up for DirecTV, you need to know that their TiVo package doesn't include Home Media Option (HMO) that you may want for transferring DVR material between receivers in different rooms. Not because of any incompatibilites, but because DirecTV are Hollywood Whores (TM) that refuse to add it. I'm personally looking into other providers over this issue.
After their debacle of retesting memory in their garage (apparently in the dead of winter) and remarking it at overclocked speeds, who in their right mind trusts anything coming out of OCZ? I wouldn't buy toilet paper from those guys.
Back then, every computer sold didn't come with a CD burner. To 'pirate' Quake, you had to borrow the CD from a friend. The friend eventually wanted the CD back, so there was an incentive to buy your own.
Video games will continue to get larger, and remain inconvenient to download even via broadband. Most gamers aren't willing to wait for the download of new content and hot-updates everytime they want to play the game. Part of the reason I quit Everquest is that it was double (or more) the price to let family members play too. I had to wait for new content to load in every time I started the game. And most of all, I was very distubed at having to click through the same (I hope) 50 page legal agreement every time I wanted to play.
Many games are starting to phone home every time they are run, even in single player. Gamers should get an application specific firewall like ZoneAlarm to deny these programs internet access to the net so that developers don't get used to the connection being there. Unless you're using their servers, you shouldn't have to register or do any verification. I've yet to find a single-player game that won't run without an internet connection, and I won't buy one that does (even in HL2 or Doom 3 require it, god forbid).
BTW, developers need to start adding LAN support for multiplayer games to allow one copy of a game to have at least 4 players. This is the de-facto standard on consoles (though on a single machine), and a big reason why NOCD hacks are made in the first place. Developers shouldn't expect people to buy multiple copies of a game to play with their friends.
So TruSonic budgeted a total of $60k per year to pay out in all royalties for their service. That's assuming they don't set it up so that each artist makes $24, in which case they don't have to pay anything. How fucking generous.... Perhaps they should just mail out WalMart job applications and call it even.
I'm stuck at 98.7 after 31 hours. 0 seeds, and 55 peers with 96.2% average.
Consumer cameras use 3-color CCDs. NASA uses an unfiltered CCD and moves in filters to check out specific wavelengths. Many of the filters are outside the (human) visible wavelengths. One is designed only to look for water. Some are designed to look at the sky, and others check out ground detail without any regard for what's above. Others are used because a particular wavelength doesn't get scattered, and thus yields sharper pictures. The one thing they all have in common, is that by themselves, none of the filters will produce a 'true color' RGB image. So if they take an image from the near-infrared and display it in red hues, forgive them.
Anyone looking at a non-terrestrial NASA pic should know that it is only in true color if it explicitly says so. Especially images of glaxies or dust clouds, which are pretty much white and low on details.
Most importantly, the images are taken for research purposes, not sightseeing. NASA's PR department is in charge of taking 'research' and making it pretty and interesting for american taxpayers, but they don't get to decide what gets imaged in the first place. The alternative to colorizing images is to release grayscale pics labeled as near-infrared, but I think people would perceive it as obsolete technology.
Even most small towns have access from local ISPs for $10-15 per month. Dialup is shrinking as broadband becomes more available. I'd bet that at least half of MSN's dialup subscribers are just waiting until a contract expres so they can get something cheaper. People are also realizing that most of MSN's 'features' are really just branded content from free partner websites.
Oops, I meant BMP or TGA, rather than GIF. You can convert between BMP, TGA or PNG (and other lossless formats), and not lose a single pixel of detail. Once you move to JPG, you drop detail. GIFs are lossless for B&W pics, or hand drawn images that use less than 256 colors. By today's standard, they are useless for full color images, since computers don't display in 8 bit anymore. Ten years ago, GIFs could almost be considered lossless because the displays couldn't handle a higher bitdepth anyway, so you were just reducing the color depth to save processing time later.
BTW, by your definition of 'lossy', this text is a lossy approximation of my thoughts before I even touch the keyboard. Name a video or audio format that you consider lossless, or quit trolling.
You're splitting the hair pretty thin in order to redefine the english language in the image you want.
I could split the hair just as much and call this text you're reading lossy. It discards the sound of my voice as I read it aloud in order to fit into a small group of bytes. Your font and text size could be different than what I'm typing in. Just because CDs are typically mixed from many audio streams (that may include positional data, or higher fidelity) doesn't mean that the final two-channel product lost something. The final stream is simply the finished composition.
DVDs are lossy because MPG changes the picture and audio intentionally, to reduce the number of bits used. It tends to smooth out color gradients, or copy similar picture data from prior frames or other sections of the same image, rather than precisely encode from scratch. The audio doesn't include frequencies in the 1hz or 100khz range, or 360 degree photon sampling of light waves from radio up to gamma waves, but that doesn't make it lossy. There are video compression techniques that aren't lossy, but the data storage requirements are insane. It's like if I say I paid $30k for a car, rather than $29999.99. I changed the number to make it easier to say (lossy compression). If I convert the actual price into Euros, it may come out as E28546.32416, and I have to tuncate it to E28546.32 because you can't have a portion of a Euro smaller than E0.01. That doesn't make Euros lossy, just a different currency format. I could still express that amount lossily (makin up words now, woot!) as E28.5k. The difference is only preceptible to you when looking at the original data.
Anyway, under your viewpoint, there are no lossless formats, so everything is lossy. You should stop discussing lossy vs. lossless formats until you have a better understanding of what lossy and lossless compression formats actually are. Scan a picture and save it as a GIF or BMP (lossless), and then as a series of JPGs (lossy) at increasing levels of compression (all in the same resolution and colorspace). This should illustrate what 'lossy' is very clearly.
So the people who now go across the office to get to the only fax machine would suddenly be unable to leave their desk to scan documents? Don't most offices already have a computer that mostly sits unused, except as a file and print server for the network? Receiving scanned documents would be easier, since they would go directly to the intended recepient's computer. No more hiking across the office to check if your fax has arrived yet. Not having to pay for an extra phone line would probably save you enough money to buy a couple of scanners each year for every fax machine you dump. Not having to buy rolls of paper and toner cartridges should be a big plus for most people too. Once scan-and-e-mail catches on, I would expect someone to start selling lan based, autofeeding scanners that run through multiple sheets and save them to where ever you want on the network, perhaps even e-mailing them directly with a bit more setup.
A new trend is also developing in offices where people go to any computer on the network and log in to do their work, rather than having their own cubicle and machine. In this setup, you would just go to one of the computers that has a scanner when you want to send a document.