Since we're conjecturing about possibilities, I suppose we need to take this to the next level.
When is it, do you think, that MS and the other Illuminati plan to immanentize the eschaton? Is there any hope that the Sacred Chao will prevail against them (or even make a moo-ve in that direction)? Where oh where is Eris when Europe so needs her?
I think that puts the conversation over the top.
On a (slightly) more serious note: have you considered that the powerful European entities you posit are more likely to encourage the judges to find against Microsoft and confiscate all Windows and MS Office source code by fiat, so that this great wealth-endowing resource can be released into the public domain for the common good of all?
Do you remember when Gates and Balmer publicly laughed at the USA court that was threatening MS with daily fines for non-compliance, not that many years ago? G&B changed their tune in a hurry when their lawyers told them that such a strategy would result in MS bank accounts being frozen and MS corporate officers being charged with contempt of court (and facing immediate jail time).
On a more prosaic level, european IT strategists for the companies that might buy Vista and Office 12 subscriptions 10,000 seats at a time are now having to factor in the possibility of MS screwing up as they work their "what-if" crystal balls. While it is a low probability item, it is possible that MS might be unable to support its users for weeks at a time due to court imposed sanctions (through frozen bank accounts or court-sealed buildings). That kind of risk should never have to be included in an IT strategy; the long term IT strategy for a big company should never have to include a footnote that addresses a possible vulnerability caused illegal activities of one of the service providers.
I find Perl to be great for exploring problem spaces and prototyping. It is also an excellent tool for one-shots, and for persons who have to learn programming while focusing on something else (for instance, grad students and research assistants). But I think there are much better languages for large projects and long term maintenance.
I don't think this is a limitation of Perl. It arises because any large or long term project is going to involve some programmers who have only a year of experience-- and what's worse, some programmers who have repeated their first year experience 9 times over. There is a need to protect the code base from these people, and a restrictive language is necessary to do that. At least for now.
What I would like to see in Perl 7 (better yet, in Parrot 2) is a metalanguage construct that would allow project leaders to specify what must be done and what is forbidden. The compiler is the appropriate place to enforce such rules (and in this sense, Perl is a compiled language). Maybe this is already being addressed with the ability to modify Perl's grammar?
As to speed issues, I've never noticed any after running perl code through perl2exe (I've been working on WinXX boxes). The binaries produced seem as fast as any others, though to be honest I've never been concerned about the speed. I've just wanted to avoid putting Perl itself on the computers of clever employees who aren't wise with regard to programming.
If the crash site could be found, it would be reasonable to plan a future mission to explore it. We would have the same opportunities to learn about Mars as the Beagle2 did, but we would also have an opportunity to learn some useful things about our own technology. We might not learn why the crash happened (yet then again we might), but we would certainly learn something important about how our materials weather in the martian environment.
Since there is so much potential value in doing a post mortem, it makes a lot of sense to me to devote some time now to locating the crash site, using the best equipment we've got in the area.
For similar reasons, I think our next visit to the Moon should include a detailed inspection of one of the lunar rovers that the USA has left up there. How better to learn how to build equipment for that environment than to study the degradation of equipment that was abandoned there 35 years ago?
Pro'ly should take another photo of that boot print, too. Hey, somebody is taking notes here, right? And somebody will arrange to translate these ideas into Chinese?
I go in with a checklist of questions, and openly consult it when my turn comes up. I like to keep the questions open-ended for the most part, since I'm probably going to learn more important things from how they answer rather than specific answers.
Tell me a bit about the history of the position?
Your web site said blah about foo. Please tell me why that's important?
Who will be my resource people when I start working here? Can you tell me a little bit about their backgrounds?
Anything else specific that I'm curious about, either from the job description or from the web site, that did not come up in the interview
[This one is critical] What is the next step in the hiring process? [Make sure answer includes when I can expect feedback and who my follow-up contact person is]
I like the idea of asking about the short term priorities. I think I'll include that.
So the cost of operation of a traffic light or illuminated road sign would be paid directly by the vehicles using that route. That could be a solid argument for installing these even where traditional sources of power are easily available.
It would certainly be hard to argue against using these on the approach to a toll booth.
Are there other editors that can put comments in a different font?
UltraEdit lets you put comments in italics (as well as choice of color, etc-- all the usual syntax highlighting). Not sure if that is what you mean though. It is a text editor, so the actual font can't be controlled from within the file.
Still, anyone who's thinking about checking out Notepad++ should think about taking a look at UltraEdit. It's got a nice set of tools and is reasonably extensible (macros and templates). I began using it about 10 years ago, and have done quite a bit of web development and a few Perl based projects with it.
Another one that I've been looking at lately is Programmer's Notepad. It is not as strong as UE in some ways (more limited in regular expression replacements, for instance), but it is FOSS, which would be more compatible with a teaching project I'm thinking about. (The Portland FOSSL: a Free and Open Source Software Laboratory. Intent is to start developing an office workforce that is competent in OOo, Firebird, Tbird, etc... and also provide local businesses with an opportunity to explore the feasibility of going to FOSS products.)
Edward, Edward
Here is my answer true:
I'd be crazy
To fall for the likes of you!
You can't afford a carriage
So there will be no marriage.
I'll not be seen
Upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two!
That's great in theory. So how, in practice, will a sIFR site let me know that it isn't really a spoof of a sIFRed site? How will it let the googlebots know that what they see is really, truly, for sure, what the browser shows?
Sure, the underlying text says "Home of the International Association of Lizard Watchers", but maybe the supposedly sIFRed image of that name is goatse or Tub Girl?
I agree that Perl is great for simple scripts and just getting work done. I've used it extensively to prepare quality assurance and resource utilization data sets for analysis in the hospital setting. At times this is very finicky work because making costs comparisons between intensive care units and long term care units can become an apples to oranges situation if you are not careful in how you prepare the data.
Compiled Perl can also be good for the Fellow who is charged with updating a FORTRAN library of turbulence modelling to something that is less of a resource hog and more transparent to validation testing. But the Fellow will have to bring his own disciplined mind to the job, because Perl isn't going to impose any discipline of its own on his project.
Of course in software houses, that freedom from language-imposed disciplines is anathema. Perl probably will never have much place in the professional programmer's realm where there is too much that has to be protected from the cleverness of new programmers.
Congratulations, you've taken that analogy and killed it deader than dead. I think you've given all the associated metaphors a thorough thrashing as well, but I don't know for sure since frankly the carnage is unappealing and after a quick first read, I'm disinclined to look it over again.
I do wish however that you hadn't beaten this horse to death in my front yard.
On a more positive note, I might never have learned that Stephen Hawking had done some very creative interior designing during a remodeling of his home, had someone else not added a correction to your posts.
[Moderators: moderating this post "Off Topic" is okay. In fact, it deserves that.]
If I hear a master carpenter say that he advises people to buy Black Diamond hammers because they are more versatile and easier to control, I don't dismiss him as a non-expert because he is, after all, only a user and not a toolmaker. I don't disparage his opinion because he doesn't know anything about tempering metals or designing ergonomic handles.
Torvalds is a master at his craft, and his craft involves using GUIs. He says that KDE is better than Gnome because it is easier for him to control it and because it is more versatile. That's all. His interest in GUI construction doesn't matter-- what matters is that he is a sophisticated GUI user. It is on that basis that I give his opinion considerable weight.
Perl is not something that anyone outside of a programming professional "ought to know". If anything, it's the opposite: they ought to stay away from it, and learn a language with a halfway sane syntax and semantics, as opposed to a warmed-over Unixy shell scripting language that went through a brief period of overuse during the dotcom bubble.
A little tetchy about Perl, are you? Did you have to maintain somebody else's Q&D prototype that turned into an on-going mission-critical app or something?
Since these are physics grad students, I think Perl fits their situation very well. They will either learn good mental discipline and how to impose it on Perl's free ways, or their one-shots and custom data exploration tools will be crappy and they'll wash out. OTOH, they will be working with a swiss army chainsaw that can handle any of their needs from literature search through data analysis.
Perl is a great language for people who are willing to impose their own discipline upon it. But it is true that the discipline has to come from the programmer's mind. A programmer who isn't willing to use strict;
where it should be used should not be allowed near anything as powerful as Perl. Perhaps they should be told to go away, and come back after they've had a few years of experience.
Ha ha-- mod parent into -5 oblivion for being too funny for words, please.
I respect Torvalds' opinion because
I'm pretty sure that over the years Torvalds has become somewhat proficient in the use of GUIs, which is sufficient experience to come to an informed opinion about what's good or bad about their use;
I'm pretty sure that Torvalds knows how to think through the long term implications of design philosophies, such as whether to put rubber blades on the swiss army knife so users won't cut themselves;
I'm quite certain that somewhere along the way, Torvalds has learned to avoid stirring up unnecessary controversies since he seems to limit himself to only one or two a year;
Yet despite that last point, he said this not only once, but twice, in a forum where it really counts.
But to be balanced about it, I don't think much of Torvalds taste in automobiles and my GF thinks he chooses dorky clothes. Yet despite these criticisms, I do think that I will now favor KDE over Gnome. Because Linus is my hero and he is a champion of FOSS and all that's holy in the binary realms.
You speak as if exercise will be a replacement for pharmaceutical-based solutions.
I regret that you were able to draw that conclusion from my words, since it was not intended. I was offering exercise as one of several possible examples to counter the assertion that "...these landing pads are not a natural part of the body...", and the implication that allopathic medicine was the only possible way to find an effective treatment for metastatic disease.
Medical practice based on the allopathic model has provided a number of successes, especially when measured by the profits of the legal drug manufacturers and distributors. But prior to Copernicus, astronomical practice based on epicyclic models had been very successful with the pragmatics of calendar development and navigation. But both then and now society has advanced to where an old model has to be replaced by one that better reflects reality if further advances are to be made.
As you so aptly suggest, if US society is going to meet the emerging health care problems of obesity, it needs to move beyond the limitations of the allopathic model. There is no drug or treatment that will magically undo all the damage that too many calories with too little exercise does to the biological systems. This seems true of cancer therapy as well: after 50+ years of intense research governed by allopathic principles, we don't have any better understanding of the underlying mechanism of these diseases and we've got only a handful of somewhat successful treatments.
For those who like cliches, it is time to smash the box and thus force everybody to look outside it. The allopathic model is a mindset that is too limiting to allow proper formulation of useful ideas. Let it go; stop thinking about finding "magic bullets" that will correct
"unnatural conditions". There are plenty of other approaches to health care and disease management. It is usually better to say "I don't have any idea what is happening" than to adhere to a set of beliefs that don't fit the facts. And allopathy no longer fits the known facts well enough to be useful.
...when a reversal happens, we're left without the Earth's magnetic field, which protects us from lethal cosmic rays...
A quick google shows that this incorrect. The atmosphere continues to block most incoming radiation even during those times when the magnetic field has completely collapsed. 'Cosmic ray' is not the right choice of wording here, either-- very little of the incoming radiation meets the definition of cosmic ray, which is good because neither the magnetosphere nor the atmosphere provides much protection against true cosmic rays.
Magnetic field reversals coincide with mass surface life extinctions
This is completely incorrect. There have been numerous studies to look for correlations between pole reversals and extinction rates; no significant correlations have been found by any of the serious researchers (though it is currently fashionable among the half-baked set to claim otherwise--- the fun of Chicken Little Syndrome).
Here's one reputable source: the British Geological Survey. Google will reveal thousands more, but you'll need to sort out which ones are authoritative and which suffer from CLS.
...these landing pads are not a natural part of the body....
When I read TFA I didn't find anything to suggest that this is case. Did you learn this from other sources, or is this supposition?
It seems to me that it is just as likely that these "landing pads" are usually a normal mechanism of health maintenance that has been subverted by the cancer. For example, it would not surprise me to learn that "landing pad" formation is a normal and important step in mending a broken bone (callus formation). The article doesn't say, and I'm not sufficiently motivated to google it out.
...so denying the ability for them to be created is much more beneficial....
I don't think this is necessarily true. It could also be that stimulating the normal mechanisms for "landing pad" formation would deprive the primary tumor of available conscripts for its envoys through competition. For instance, the constant repair of minor injuries that is a normal part of athletic training programs might protect against metastatic processes, while actually increasing the total amount of "landing pad" activity.
If something like this is going on, then the implications for prevention and treatment of the metastatic diseases are profoundly different from the allopathic approach-- rather than our multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry going off in a search for a new patentable drug, we would be better served by exploring physiotherapies, like perhaps intensive bicycle riding (think Lance Armstrong, and his success in fighting cancer).
Of course the potential profit in putting patients with breast or prostate cancer on bicycles is much less than developing a new pharmaceutical for the legal drug trade-- so much so that it doesn't seem likely that any research leading in this direction would get much funding.
Of course it's important! to IBM. They are using the standard, and they want a government to support it, which will be, in turn, supporting the use of IBM products because they use the standard.
Emphasis added. Do this
s/products/services/
and the statement will be more correct. IBM appears to be planning to sell a bundle of FOSS with the services to set up and maintain the package, similar to Red Hat, etc. The distinction is important since it offers MA and other potential clients a way to avoid vendor lock-in, and thus more leverage in shaping the package and services to fit their future needs.
I think the key point in all of this is that IBM has now said very clearly that OpenOffice.org is not the only player in the OpenDocument world. Since IBM can offer key pieces that OpenOffice can't offer with any credibility at this time (like courseware for retraining secretarial staff, custom services for reworking macros, etc), I think their timely announcement is of great importance.
In the meantime, China seems to be the only large country that's actually working on decreasing CO2 output.
There are some grass roots changes happening elsewhere that are very hard to measure, let alone assess the results. Although the USA federal government rejected Kyoto, several states have adopted Kyoto goals for environmental policies (example: Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware have created the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative). Some USA municipalities have made significant changes in their infrastructure to comply with the Kyoto Protocol (example: Portland Oregon has met the first Kyoto goal of rolling back CO2 releases to pre-1990 levels. Other USA cities are beginning to recognize that encouraging their residents to adopt better habits wrt recycling, transportation, and so on not only generates lots of warm, fuzzy feelings but improves the local economy.
The Kyoto Protocol has been having a significant effect on public policy even within nations that didn't sign it. I'm personally pessimistic about whether any of this will avert the coming catastrophe (somehow the 6 billion people on earth today has to be reduced to the 2 billion that seems to be the earth's sustainable carrying capacity-- call me Malthus). But on the positive side, those who survive the next 50 years are likely to have habits wrt to reduce-reuse-recycle and mass transit that will be as significant in their new world as sanitation facilities are in today's cities.
None of the girls I've known have ever complained that I'm short of inches where it counts. Maybe 14 or 15 inches is enough for a guy n the go?
I do like a big desktop screen. But I like a portable computer that is, well, portable. I once saw a stretch limo VW bug... but other than it being a "funny one-time", I didn't see any point to it. I guess your values and mine are very different.
It seems to still be true that there are plenty of portable laptop computers that run Linux just fine. At least I haven't heard anything yet to suggest otherwise. And certainly there can be no disagreement that Linux is a very poor choice for anyone who wants to score high on the conspicuous consumption scale.
If windows does everything you need well then why are you trying to move off it? Political reasons?
The usual reasons. Long term costs: getting away from enforced upgrade cycles. And long term archival access: Going with data formats that I'll be able to use when I'm old and gray, without jumping through lots of hoops with outdated mickeymouse applications.
I don't much care whether information wants to be free. I wannabe free, and that means FOSS.
Slashdot Mirror
Since we're conjecturing about possibilities, I suppose we need to take this to the next level.
When is it, do you think, that MS and the other Illuminati plan to immanentize the eschaton? Is there any hope that the Sacred Chao will prevail against them (or even make a moo-ve in that direction)? Where oh where is Eris when Europe so needs her?
I think that puts the conversation over the top.
On a (slightly) more serious note: have you considered that the powerful European entities you posit are more likely to encourage the judges to find against Microsoft and confiscate all Windows and MS Office source code by fiat, so that this great wealth-endowing resource can be released into the public domain for the common good of all?
Do you remember when Gates and Balmer publicly laughed at the USA court that was threatening MS with daily fines for non-compliance, not that many years ago? G&B changed their tune in a hurry when their lawyers told them that such a strategy would result in MS bank accounts being frozen and MS corporate officers being charged with contempt of court (and facing immediate jail time).
On a more prosaic level, european IT strategists for the companies that might buy Vista and Office 12 subscriptions 10,000 seats at a time are now having to factor in the possibility of MS screwing up as they work their "what-if" crystal balls. While it is a low probability item, it is possible that MS might be unable to support its users for weeks at a time due to court imposed sanctions (through frozen bank accounts or court-sealed buildings). That kind of risk should never have to be included in an IT strategy; the long term IT strategy for a big company should never have to include a footnote that addresses a possible vulnerability caused illegal activities of one of the service providers.
I find Perl to be great for exploring problem spaces and prototyping. It is also an excellent tool for one-shots, and for persons who have to learn programming while focusing on something else (for instance, grad students and research assistants). But I think there are much better languages for large projects and long term maintenance.
I don't think this is a limitation of Perl. It arises because any large or long term project is going to involve some programmers who have only a year of experience-- and what's worse, some programmers who have repeated their first year experience 9 times over. There is a need to protect the code base from these people, and a restrictive language is necessary to do that. At least for now.
What I would like to see in Perl 7 (better yet, in Parrot 2) is a metalanguage construct that would allow project leaders to specify what must be done and what is forbidden. The compiler is the appropriate place to enforce such rules (and in this sense, Perl is a compiled language). Maybe this is already being addressed with the ability to modify Perl's grammar?
As to speed issues, I've never noticed any after running perl code through perl2exe (I've been working on WinXX boxes). The binaries produced seem as fast as any others, though to be honest I've never been concerned about the speed. I've just wanted to avoid putting Perl itself on the computers of clever employees who aren't wise with regard to programming.
Perl/Tk rocks.
If the crash site could be found, it would be reasonable to plan a future mission to explore it. We would have the same opportunities to learn about Mars as the Beagle2 did, but we would also have an opportunity to learn some useful things about our own technology. We might not learn why the crash happened (yet then again we might), but we would certainly learn something important about how our materials weather in the martian environment.
Since there is so much potential value in doing a post mortem, it makes a lot of sense to me to devote some time now to locating the crash site, using the best equipment we've got in the area.
For similar reasons, I think our next visit to the Moon should include a detailed inspection of one of the lunar rovers that the USA has left up there. How better to learn how to build equipment for that environment than to study the degradation of equipment that was abandoned there 35 years ago?
Pro'ly should take another photo of that boot print, too. Hey, somebody is taking notes here, right? And somebody will arrange to translate these ideas into Chinese?
I go in with a checklist of questions, and openly consult it when my turn comes up. I like to keep the questions open-ended for the most part, since I'm probably going to learn more important things from how they answer rather than specific answers.
I like the idea of asking about the short term priorities. I think I'll include that.
So the cost of operation of a traffic light or illuminated road sign would be paid directly by the vehicles using that route. That could be a solid argument for installing these even where traditional sources of power are easily available.
It would certainly be hard to argue against using these on the approach to a toll booth.
Are there other editors that can put comments in a different font?
UltraEdit lets you put comments in italics (as well as choice of color, etc-- all the usual syntax highlighting). Not sure if that is what you mean though. It is a text editor, so the actual font can't be controlled from within the file.
Still, anyone who's thinking about checking out Notepad++ should think about taking a look at UltraEdit. It's got a nice set of tools and is reasonably extensible (macros and templates). I began using it about 10 years ago, and have done quite a bit of web development and a few Perl based projects with it.
Another one that I've been looking at lately is Programmer's Notepad. It is not as strong as UE in some ways (more limited in regular expression replacements, for instance), but it is FOSS, which would be more compatible with a teaching project I'm thinking about. (The Portland FOSSL: a Free and Open Source Software Laboratory. Intent is to start developing an office workforce that is competent in OOo, Firebird, Tbird, etc... and also provide local businesses with an opportunity to explore the feasibility of going to FOSS products.)
UltraEdit
Programmer's Notepad
Notepad++
Here is the little-known second verse:
Edward, Edward
Here is my answer true:
I'd be crazy
To fall for the likes of you!
You can't afford a carriage
So there will be no marriage.
I'll not be seen
Upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two!
No content is hidden with sIFR.
That's great in theory. So how, in practice, will a sIFR site let me know that it isn't really a spoof of a sIFRed site? How will it let the googlebots know that what they see is really, truly, for sure, what the browser shows?
Sure, the underlying text says "Home of the International Association of Lizard Watchers", but maybe the supposedly sIFRed image of that name is goatse or Tub Girl?
I find that half of time the hard-found information that I post to slashdot is somehow considered Funny...
I enjoy half the posts on slashdot less than half as much as I'd like, and I dislike less than half the posts more than half as much as they deserve.
or something like that. Whatever.
--
And anyway, it ain't the dihydrogen monoxide that'll kill ya, it's the danged hydric acid. If ya got one den ya got t'other.
You are preaching to the choir.
I agree that Perl is great for simple scripts and just getting work done. I've used it extensively to prepare quality assurance and resource utilization data sets for analysis in the hospital setting. At times this is very finicky work because making costs comparisons between intensive care units and long term care units can become an apples to oranges situation if you are not careful in how you prepare the data.
Compiled Perl can also be good for the Fellow who is charged with updating a FORTRAN library of turbulence modelling to something that is less of a resource hog and more transparent to validation testing. But the Fellow will have to bring his own disciplined mind to the job, because Perl isn't going to impose any discipline of its own on his project.
Of course in software houses, that freedom from language-imposed disciplines is anathema. Perl probably will never have much place in the professional programmer's realm where there is too much that has to be protected from the cleverness of new programmers.
Congratulations, you've taken that analogy and killed it deader than dead. I think you've given all the associated metaphors a thorough thrashing as well, but I don't know for sure since frankly the carnage is unappealing and after a quick first read, I'm disinclined to look it over again.
I do wish however that you hadn't beaten this horse to death in my front yard.
On a more positive note, I might never have learned that Stephen Hawking had done some very creative interior designing during a remodeling of his home, had someone else not added a correction to your posts.
[Moderators: moderating this post "Off Topic" is okay. In fact, it deserves that.]
With karma good enough to burn,
If I hear a master carpenter say that he advises people to buy Black Diamond hammers because they are more versatile and easier to control, I don't dismiss him as a non-expert because he is, after all, only a user and not a toolmaker. I don't disparage his opinion because he doesn't know anything about tempering metals or designing ergonomic handles.
Torvalds is a master at his craft, and his craft involves using GUIs. He says that KDE is better than Gnome because it is easier for him to control it and because it is more versatile. That's all. His interest in GUI construction doesn't matter-- what matters is that he is a sophisticated GUI user. It is on that basis that I give his opinion considerable weight.
Perl is not something that anyone outside of a programming professional "ought to know". If anything, it's the opposite: they ought to stay away from it, and learn a language with a halfway sane syntax and semantics, as opposed to a warmed-over Unixy shell scripting language that went through a brief period of overuse during the dotcom bubble.
A little tetchy about Perl, are you? Did you have to maintain somebody else's Q&D prototype that turned into an on-going mission-critical app or something?
Since these are physics grad students, I think Perl fits their situation very well. They will either learn good mental discipline and how to impose it on Perl's free ways, or their one-shots and custom data exploration tools will be crappy and they'll wash out. OTOH, they will be working with a swiss army chainsaw that can handle any of their needs from literature search through data analysis.
Perl is a great language for people who are willing to impose their own discipline upon it. But it is true that the discipline has to come from the programmer's mind. A programmer who isn't willing to
use strict;
where it should be used should not be allowed near anything as powerful as Perl. Perhaps they should be told to go away, and come back after they've had a few years of experience.
Ha ha-- mod parent into -5 oblivion for being too funny for words, please.
I respect Torvalds' opinion because
But to be balanced about it, I don't think much of Torvalds taste in automobiles and my GF thinks he chooses dorky clothes. Yet despite these criticisms, I do think that I will now favor KDE over Gnome. Because Linus is my hero and he is a champion of FOSS and all that's holy in the binary realms.
You speak as if exercise will be a replacement for pharmaceutical-based solutions.
I regret that you were able to draw that conclusion from my words, since it was not intended. I was offering exercise as one of several possible examples to counter the assertion that "...these landing pads are not a natural part of the body...", and the implication that allopathic medicine was the only possible way to find an effective treatment for metastatic disease.
Medical practice based on the allopathic model has provided a number of successes, especially when measured by the profits of the legal drug manufacturers and distributors. But prior to Copernicus, astronomical practice based on epicyclic models had been very successful with the pragmatics of calendar development and navigation. But both then and now society has advanced to where an old model has to be replaced by one that better reflects reality if further advances are to be made.
As you so aptly suggest, if US society is going to meet the emerging health care problems of obesity, it needs to move beyond the limitations of the allopathic model. There is no drug or treatment that will magically undo all the damage that too many calories with too little exercise does to the biological systems. This seems true of cancer therapy as well: after 50+ years of intense research governed by allopathic principles, we don't have any better understanding of the underlying mechanism of these diseases and we've got only a handful of somewhat successful treatments.
For those who like cliches, it is time to smash the box and thus force everybody to look outside it. The allopathic model is a mindset that is too limiting to allow proper formulation of useful ideas. Let it go; stop thinking about finding "magic bullets" that will correct "unnatural conditions". There are plenty of other approaches to health care and disease management. It is usually better to say "I don't have any idea what is happening" than to adhere to a set of beliefs that don't fit the facts. And allopathy no longer fits the known facts well enough to be useful.
A quick google shows that this incorrect. The atmosphere continues to block most incoming radiation even during those times when the magnetic field has completely collapsed. 'Cosmic ray' is not the right choice of wording here, either-- very little of the incoming radiation meets the definition of cosmic ray, which is good because neither the magnetosphere nor the atmosphere provides much protection against true cosmic rays.
Magnetic field reversals coincide with mass surface life extinctions
This is completely incorrect. There have been numerous studies to look for correlations between pole reversals and extinction rates; no significant correlations have been found by any of the serious researchers (though it is currently fashionable among the half-baked set to claim otherwise--- the fun of Chicken Little Syndrome).
Here's one reputable source: the British Geological Survey. Google will reveal thousands more, but you'll need to sort out which ones are authoritative and which suffer from CLS.
When I read TFA I didn't find anything to suggest that this is case. Did you learn this from other sources, or is this supposition?
It seems to me that it is just as likely that these "landing pads" are usually a normal mechanism of health maintenance that has been subverted by the cancer. For example, it would not surprise me to learn that "landing pad" formation is a normal and important step in mending a broken bone (callus formation). The article doesn't say, and I'm not sufficiently motivated to google it out.
I don't think this is necessarily true. It could also be that stimulating the normal mechanisms for "landing pad" formation would deprive the primary tumor of available conscripts for its envoys through competition. For instance, the constant repair of minor injuries that is a normal part of athletic training programs might protect against metastatic processes, while actually increasing the total amount of "landing pad" activity.
If something like this is going on, then the implications for prevention and treatment of the metastatic diseases are profoundly different from the allopathic approach-- rather than our multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry going off in a search for a new patentable drug, we would be better served by exploring physiotherapies, like perhaps intensive bicycle riding (think Lance Armstrong, and his success in fighting cancer).
Of course the potential profit in putting patients with breast or prostate cancer on bicycles is much less than developing a new pharmaceutical for the legal drug trade-- so much so that it doesn't seem likely that any research leading in this direction would get much funding.
Who the hell is noone anyway?
noone is anyone's lover:
anyone lived in a pretty how town
.
.
.
children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her
--ee cumings (http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/118 80)
Of course it's important! to IBM. They are using the standard, and they want a government to support it, which will be, in turn, supporting the use of IBM products because they use the standard.
Emphasis added. Do this
s/products/services/
and the statement will be more correct. IBM appears to be planning to sell a bundle of FOSS with the services to set up and maintain the package, similar to Red Hat, etc. The distinction is important since it offers MA and other potential clients a way to avoid vendor lock-in, and thus more leverage in shaping the package and services to fit their future needs.
I think the key point in all of this is that IBM has now said very clearly that OpenOffice.org is not the only player in the OpenDocument world. Since IBM can offer key pieces that OpenOffice can't offer with any credibility at this time (like courseware for retraining secretarial staff, custom services for reworking macros, etc), I think their timely announcement is of great importance.
Yes, but does it contain internet slang?
This might be the dictionary you are looking for:
The Urban Dictionary
In the meantime, China seems to be the only large country that's actually working on decreasing CO2 output.
There are some grass roots changes happening elsewhere that are very hard to measure, let alone assess the results. Although the USA federal government rejected Kyoto, several states have adopted Kyoto goals for environmental policies (example: Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware have created the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative). Some USA municipalities have made significant changes in their infrastructure to comply with the Kyoto Protocol (example: Portland Oregon has met the first Kyoto goal of rolling back CO2 releases to pre-1990 levels. Other USA cities are beginning to recognize that encouraging their residents to adopt better habits wrt recycling, transportation, and so on not only generates lots of warm, fuzzy feelings but improves the local economy.
The Kyoto Protocol has been having a significant effect on public policy even within nations that didn't sign it. I'm personally pessimistic about whether any of this will avert the coming catastrophe (somehow the 6 billion people on earth today has to be reduced to the 2 billion that seems to be the earth's sustainable carrying capacity-- call me Malthus). But on the positive side, those who survive the next 50 years are likely to have habits wrt to reduce-reuse-recycle and mass transit that will be as significant in their new world as sanitation facilities are in today's cities.
Medic 1: "Nah, look he's fine, his long-term yearly heart rate has only dropped 0.05%"
Would someone mod parent up?
This is the best presentation of the dangers of one common abuse of statistics that I have ever seen.
None of the girls I've known have ever complained that I'm short of inches where it counts. Maybe 14 or 15 inches is enough for a guy n the go?
I do like a big desktop screen. But I like a portable computer that is, well, portable. I once saw a stretch limo VW bug... but other than it being a "funny one-time", I didn't see any point to it. I guess your values and mine are very different.
It seems to still be true that there are plenty of portable laptop computers that run Linux just fine. At least I haven't heard anything yet to suggest otherwise. And certainly there can be no disagreement that Linux is a very poor choice for anyone who wants to score high on the conspicuous consumption scale.
If windows does everything you need well then why are you trying to move off it? Political reasons?
The usual reasons. Long term costs: getting away from enforced upgrade cycles. And long term archival access: Going with data formats that I'll be able to use when I'm old and gray, without jumping through lots of hoops with outdated mickeymouse applications.
I don't much care whether information wants to be free. I wannabe free, and that means FOSS.