One area of science which has rapidly approached religious status. It's ironic that the writers talk about an alternative to God and base it in a hypothesis which has been pretty much faith-based since it was thought of.
I can see the conversation now at Blizzard's headquarters:
Bean counter: "Hey, we're making money hand over fist with World of Warcraft! How can you justify diverting money into an expensive new project without subscriptions?" Developer: "We could put subscriptions into multiplayer." Bean counter: "No, that could take away from our golden cash cow." Developer: "We... could split the single player into three map packs and charge for all three?" Bean counter: "Won't consumers feel gipped? Could that cut into sales?" Developer: "We'll add more 'mine X resource, build Y units and rush the enemy base' missions to fluff it out. Total gameplay hours will be 3 times as long!" Bean counter: "Brilliant!"
>I've always been told that most engineering fields, doctors, and athletes, have salary caps. I tried doing a google search, but all I get is page after page talking about salary caps for various sports leagues, so at least the athletes have salary caps, although from the results it looks like those are mandated by the leagues, not law. Seeing as I can't find any results to backup that statement I guess I'll have to retract it, but the rest of the post is still valid, and we do give the lawyers and judges way too much power.
I don't know about the rest, but I can comment on doctors. Doctors do not have an explicit salary cap. However, with the way billing and reimbursement works, there is an indirect salary cap (unless you do consulting outside of direct medical services, which I believe will be cracked down upon severely anyways in the near future). Doctors cannot charge free market prices for their services. That is for the protection of both their patients as well as the doctors. In a true free market, doctors could negotiate with the patient about payment before services rendered. Instead, doctors itemize and bill for their services rendered, using a standardized system known as the ICD, and then Medicare/Medicaid or third party insurers, who have already set standard reimbursement rates, will try their best to weasel out of paying for the patient care to shift the cost back to the patient and/or health care provider. Errr.... I mean, they will apply a one-size-fits-all metric, set by penny-counting bureaucrats, to each individual patient to rule which care was necessary (and to be reimbursed) and which care was not.
And what about the uninsured? When they don't "have to be seen", i.e., nonemergencies, most offices will require up-front payment (due to the high rate of nonpaying uninsured). In emergencies, where patients are obligated to be treated, the uninsured patients are usually billed but written off as a loss, due to high rate of nonpayment. Since keeping hospitals open is a public utility, the costs are usually passed on to the taxpayer.
>Hmm, then how come countries with socialized medicine (ALL the rest of the first world, mind you) have longer life expectancies, lower infant death rates, and are simply better by any reasonable measure of health care bang for the buck?
You mistake population discrepancies for the effects of health care policy. Correlation is not causation. America has the worst dietary and exercise habits in the world. Lower class America also smokes like a chimney and boasts to its buddies how many cases of beer they drank over the weekend. If you separated out America by socioeconomic status, what you would see is a first world-leading country on top of a developing nation.
Anyways, I'm miffed anytime uses population averages to show how their health care system is doing. This assumes two things: 1) people give a shit what their doctor tells them (at least when they're healthy, when it is the most important) and 2) people are utilizing the health care benefits available to them. Example in point: infant mortality rates. Every researcher and their dog knows that this is linked to prenatal care of expectant mothers and good nutrition. Coincidentally, the United States gives free prenatal care, nutritional counseling and financial incentives for healthy eating to expectant mothers. The difference? Too many expectant mothers here in America don't give a shit. They'd rather keep smoking, eat their McDonald's and not go through the hassle of a doctor's appointment.
>The HMOs and insurance companies make the rules, and unless you are willing to spend a king's ransom on a decent plan, or and emperor's ransom to pay for it all yourself, you are at their mercy.
And see, this is the fallacy of health care in America. No one here seems to understand that the most important visit to a doctor is when you are healthy. My current life expectancy, based on race, gender, family history, diet, exercise, driving record and (lack of) substance abuse is 98 years old. Take charge and take care of your own body! If you need advice on how to do that, that's what a doctor is there for during your healthy checkups. It's when patients are running into the six or seven figure coverage caps on their insurance plans, the cutoffs on experimental or palliative treatments, because their body is trashed and they need a new one... that's when it's way too late. I know I'm overgeneralizing, but the point is valid. One out of fifty or a hundred might die of something other than old age, an unforeseeable accident, or something totally preventable. But that's not the vast majority of America.
>One of the big killers in worldwide mortality statistics (after HIV and malaria) is, if I recall, "acute respiratory infection", which includes just about anything that didn't get an official diagnosis other than the obvious fact the person died of some kind of lung infection. That probably contains countless infectious agents as yet unknown to science.
You're making a mountain out of a molehill. "Acute respiratory infection" is another way of saying an elderly person with a failing immune system died of pneumonia that may or may not have turned septic.
There are many ways to get pneumonia, but the large majority of those will be garden-variety Strep. pneumo, Influenza virus, Staph. aureus, Pseudomonas and other well-known and well-characterized pathogens. Rarely will the cause of the pneumonia be identified on the death certificate or discharge report, but if someone poked around the medical chart it will usually turn up a sputum or blood culture. There is no mystery superbug or bugs out there killing tens of millions of people by "acute respiratory infection".
> So is the LHC a Bose supernova waiting to go off? Not according to the CERN theory division, which has published its calculations that show the LHC is safe (abstract). They also point out that no other superfluid helium handling facility has mysteriously blown itself to pieces."
Yes, but did they account for a resonance cascade in the calculations? I know the chances of one occurring is extremely small, but I know I've seen one happen before.
The obvious reason is that it takes time and money to publish study results, neither of which are recouped currently if the study showed negative results.
The obvious fix is to reward pharmaceutical companies financially for publishing all results. Form a subentity within the NIH with the power to purchase study data and results that can be published by the government or a peer-reviewed journal.
Every aspiring doctor should be taking organic chemistry. The knowledge learned may not be applicable in everyday practice, but the insights gained into applied pharmacology can be occasionally invaluable.
Several months ago, I was explaining why prescribing over-the-counter, generic Prilosec (omeprazole) was just as good as writing a script for "top-of-the-line" Nexium (esomeprazole). You could arrive at this knowledge one of two ways: A) read and understand the clinical research behind both drugs, especially between the lines, and that both of them are effective at treatment or B) understand that Prilosec is simply the racemic mixture, while Nexium is the filtered enantiomer.
If you were a decent critical thinker, you might even question why no one's funded a head-to-head clinical trial of Prilosec vs. Nexium. But then people might go back to using a cheap generic vs. spending billions more on the patented blockbuster. Or, maybe, it could mean the difference between a minimum-wage mom filling her prescriptions ($4 a month generics is perhaps one good thing that Wal-Mart has given to the world) or being unable to afford them.
And this just scratches the surface. Why is physostigmine an effective antidote for certain toxicities while pyridostigmine is not? Why is thiomersal exposure unlike methylmercury exposure? What's the difference between eating omega-3 fatty acids and omega-6 fatty acids? Etc.
>But really, antibiotics as we know them now are of decreasing value, and doing so at an increased rate than before.
Hmm... tell that to the makers of Zyvox, Tygacil, Doribax, and Cubicin. All of them are new potential blockbuster antibiotics on the market, and most of them are seeing widespread hospital inpatient use.
>Or maybe current ideas about "healthy eating" are incorrect in some ways.
Probably not... the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet which forms the basis of current National Institutes of Health dietary guidelines has been shown to lower blood pressure, cut the risk of having a stroke by 18% and the risk of a heart attack by 24% over a period of 24 years.
The diet consists of lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and up to 2 servings of meat a day; dairy should be low-fat or non-fat. In other words, lots of vitamins, fiber, and complex carbs. Moderate protein content, low in fat and sodium.
>However I would like to know what imbalances alcohol creates when abused to cause the physical dependence on this drug.
Alcohol is GABA-ergic, which means it has a general depressive effect on neurotransmitter function. Your body rebounds after alcohol use is stopped and neurotransmitter function goes the other way, hence the symptoms that a "dry drunk" presents with. In order to feel "normal", the alcoholic must then take something to restore the balance, whether it be another slug of whiskey or a Librium or Ativan.
>Your post basically showed that ER docs will use the year of stats classes that they took in school to interpret research any damn way they want to.
And your post basically showed that you fail to understand his point. There is a clear-cut litmus test for introducing new medical interventions: what is the effect on patient mortality and morbidity in the short-term and long-term? According to the data: not much. Are stroke patients dying less or otherwise getting better outcomes if you use a webcam? No. Are stroke patients suffering less hemorrhage as a side-effect of treatment if you use a webcam? No. There is no evidence, using this trial, that stroke patients will be better off in quality or quantity of life using webcams.
If the government doesn't step in, it won't be engineers regulating the internet either. It will be Sales and Marketing managers (or maybe someone higher up the food chain) trying to squeeze every last drop of profit from their paying customers.
We received your message regarding "unpatched Mac OS X Server security hole". We appreciate your business, and we will do everything to address your concerns as soon as possible. Unfortunately, Steve is away from his desk on leave due to health concerns related to his non-lethal pancreatic cancer. He will be happy to fix the problem with "unpatched Mac OS X Server security hole" as soon as he returns to work.
Say you're a long-time IT staffer that's been key to designing, building, and managing from the mission-critical IT infrastructure of a business. You like the job, because it has an above-average salary with top-notch benefits, good hours and great co-workers. It just has the drawback of an asshole manager above you. This asshole manager comes up to you today and demanded your medical records, because he heard a rumor that you were being treated for a life-threatening health condition that's getting worse. He wants to know if you will need to be replaced with someone that's less of a health risk, so you can start training your replacement now, or if he can just dismiss it as a wild rumor.
Do you (A) give in to his demand because it's relevant to the business or (B) tell him politely to bugger off as it's none of his business?
There seems to be a disturbingly large # of/.ers today that would choose (A), based on the comments I'm reading.
>You might want to know about your surgeon's Parkinsons.
You might, but it also might be completely irrelevant except to frighten and scare a patient with little knowledge of Parkinson's disease. There are many patients with Parkinson's that are close to 100% asymptomatic, whether it's due to the proper medication, deep-brain stimulation or another treatment. In short, making surgeons automatically disclose that they have or don't have Parkinson's is useless scaremongering that could simply drive patients away from an experienced surgeon with no loss in functionality to a less experienced, younger surgeon.
This kind of medical bogeyman argument led to all of the erroneous "well, what if my kid went to school with another kid with HIV??? DEAR GOD HE COULD GET CUT OR SOMETHING, make them disclose it" thinking in the 1980s.
>But when have you AGREED to the GPL? When did I signed a contract for it? It doesn't matter if it's distributing or using, the point of saying EULAs doesn't matter is because you've already bought the product and have it and it's yours? Same with the GPL software.
You're an idiot. The GPL is about granting rights to a consumer/user to redistributing a copyrighted work that he wouldn't have in the first place. It is, in essence, a statement by the creators that they won't sue for copyright infringement if you meet these conditions.
The Apple EULA is about restricting rights, unfairly, that you, the consumer, are granted by the First Sale doctrine. If you can't tell the difference, then you have much bigger problems other than EULAs in your future.
>>dictate use of legitimately purchased materials.
>it's not legitimately purchased any more.
>you must have bypassed the entire point that Apple sells its OS MUCH cheaper than MS does because Apple is being subsidised by hardware costs that are required to run Mac OS.
>if you aren't paying Apple for the hardware, you should pay full price for the OS.
>Think about how people accept that an 'unlocked phone' should cost more than one that is contract-assisted. So an 'unlocked' Mac OS should cost more than one bundled with a Mac computer. Simple. So pay up the extra money, or shut up.
Wow, the Apple fanbois*cough*trolls*cough* are out in full force today. Bad analogies, blind defense of Steve Jobs, spurious logic. Another brain warped by the RDF.
People don't accept that an unlocked phone should cost more than one that is contract-assisted. The service provider forces them to sign a contract saying they will buy X years of service at Y price. And then they say, "hey, here's your phone discount!". I don't recall signing any such legally-binding document when buying a copy of Mac OS X. And a click-through EULA is in no way a legally-binding document.
>lol, yeah can't argue with that. In all seriousness though, these loose ends:
>Character development(excepting Dent), character motivation(also excepting Dent),
Hmm... let's see, Bruce Wayne goes from thinking about retiring and getting back to normal life to thinking there's no one else that can do his job. He also moves from the "Batman has no limits" mindset to accepting that in the end (with the eavesdropping) that even he can't hold all of the power. Rachel goes from still loving Bruce to realizing it's time to move on. Gordon goes from arrow-straight lawman to agreeing to let Batman torture the Joker and to pinning the blame at the end on Batman for expedience. Fox realizes that there are some places he can't go for his boss, and puts his foot down.
>setting, plot, storyline,
I thought Gotham as a house of mirrors was well-done. Glass, reflections, and various degrees of transparency everywhere. Maybe it's not the cartoony Joel Schumacher city you were wanting, I dunno. If you couldn't follow the mostly straightforward plot, maybe you should go back to watching simple Event A -> Event B -> Protagonist gets the girl movies.
>cohesion with any identifiable over-arching theme besides pornographic anarchy.
Yes, the themes of civilization being an illusion, moral relativism vs absolutes, the ends justifying the means, the basic nature of man, and the protection of civil liberties in times of crisis had absolutely no place in this movie.
I'm really scratching my head, wondering how you watched The Dark Knight and came out of it thinking it was a "mishmash of compromise". Because just about everyone else who watched it came out of the theater with the opposite conclusion.
>However...I don't really get the reasoning Joker used to convert Dent into Two-Face?
I thought the Joker explained it pretty well, although the Bugs Bunny-esque nurse outfit was stealing the scene. The Joker believes everyone is like him deep inside, and he believes the facade of civilization is paper-thin, waiting for the right someone to tear it down. His corruption of Dent is a demonstration of how he's right - all it took was personal leverage followed by tragedy to push Gotham's crusading White Knight to break society's rules and then abandon them altogether.
>...Drinking has been declared *the* villain in traffic accidents, but is this realistic?...
>And so on, as you mention, there are many factors that influence one's ability to drive, why pick on alcohol exclusively.
Are you fucking kidding me??? Alcohol is a factor in 41% of all traffic-related deaths> . Most studies cite a ~50% involvement of alcohol in all fatal car wrecks. You're right, we should concentrate on cell-phone usage before picking on alcohol.
Slashdot Mirror
One area of science which has rapidly approached religious status. It's ironic that the writers talk about an alternative to God and base it in a hypothesis which has been pretty much faith-based since it was thought of.
I can see the conversation now at Blizzard's headquarters:
Bean counter: "Hey, we're making money hand over fist with World of Warcraft! How can you justify diverting money into an expensive new project without subscriptions?"
Developer: "We could put subscriptions into multiplayer."
Bean counter: "No, that could take away from our golden cash cow."
Developer: "We... could split the single player into three map packs and charge for all three?"
Bean counter: "Won't consumers feel gipped? Could that cut into sales?"
Developer: "We'll add more 'mine X resource, build Y units and rush the enemy base' missions to fluff it out. Total gameplay hours will be 3 times as long!"
Bean counter: "Brilliant!"
>I've always been told that most engineering fields, doctors, and athletes, have salary caps. I tried doing a google search, but all I get is page after page talking about salary caps for various sports leagues, so at least the athletes have salary caps, although from the results it looks like those are mandated by the leagues, not law. Seeing as I can't find any results to backup that statement I guess I'll have to retract it, but the rest of the post is still valid, and we do give the lawyers and judges way too much power.
I don't know about the rest, but I can comment on doctors. Doctors do not have an explicit salary cap. However, with the way billing and reimbursement works, there is an indirect salary cap (unless you do consulting outside of direct medical services, which I believe will be cracked down upon severely anyways in the near future). Doctors cannot charge free market prices for their services. That is for the protection of both their patients as well as the doctors. In a true free market, doctors could negotiate with the patient about payment before services rendered. Instead, doctors itemize and bill for their services rendered, using a standardized system known as the ICD, and then Medicare/Medicaid or third party insurers, who have already set standard reimbursement rates, will try their best to weasel out of paying for the patient care to shift the cost back to the patient and/or health care provider. Errr.... I mean, they will apply a one-size-fits-all metric, set by penny-counting bureaucrats, to each individual patient to rule which care was necessary (and to be reimbursed) and which care was not.
And what about the uninsured? When they don't "have to be seen", i.e., nonemergencies, most offices will require up-front payment (due to the high rate of nonpaying uninsured). In emergencies, where patients are obligated to be treated, the uninsured patients are usually billed but written off as a loss, due to high rate of nonpayment. Since keeping hospitals open is a public utility, the costs are usually passed on to the taxpayer.
>Hmm, then how come countries with socialized medicine (ALL the rest of the first world, mind you) have longer life expectancies, lower infant death rates, and are simply better by any reasonable measure of health care bang for the buck?
You mistake population discrepancies for the effects of health care policy. Correlation is not causation. America has the worst dietary and exercise habits in the world. Lower class America also smokes like a chimney and boasts to its buddies how many cases of beer they drank over the weekend. If you separated out America by socioeconomic status, what you would see is a first world-leading country on top of a developing nation.
Anyways, I'm miffed anytime uses population averages to show how their health care system is doing. This assumes two things: 1) people give a shit what their doctor tells them (at least when they're healthy, when it is the most important) and 2) people are utilizing the health care benefits available to them. Example in point: infant mortality rates. Every researcher and their dog knows that this is linked to prenatal care of expectant mothers and good nutrition. Coincidentally, the United States gives free prenatal care, nutritional counseling and financial incentives for healthy eating to expectant mothers. The difference? Too many expectant mothers here in America don't give a shit. They'd rather keep smoking, eat their McDonald's and not go through the hassle of a doctor's appointment.
>The HMOs and insurance companies make the rules, and unless you are willing to spend a king's ransom on a decent plan, or and emperor's ransom to pay for it all yourself, you are at their mercy.
And see, this is the fallacy of health care in America. No one here seems to understand that the most important visit to a doctor is when you are healthy. My current life expectancy, based on race, gender, family history, diet, exercise, driving record and (lack of) substance abuse is 98 years old. Take charge and take care of your own body! If you need advice on how to do that, that's what a doctor is there for during your healthy checkups. It's when patients are running into the six or seven figure coverage caps on their insurance plans, the cutoffs on experimental or palliative treatments, because their body is trashed and they need a new one... that's when it's way too late. I know I'm overgeneralizing, but the point is valid. One out of fifty or a hundred might die of something other than old age, an unforeseeable accident, or something totally preventable. But that's not the vast majority of America.
>One of the big killers in worldwide mortality statistics (after HIV and malaria) is, if I recall, "acute respiratory infection", which includes just about anything that didn't get an official diagnosis other than the obvious fact the person died of some kind of lung infection. That probably contains countless infectious agents as yet unknown to science.
You're making a mountain out of a molehill. "Acute respiratory infection" is another way of saying an elderly person with a failing immune system died of pneumonia that may or may not have turned septic.
There are many ways to get pneumonia, but the large majority of those will be garden-variety Strep. pneumo, Influenza virus, Staph. aureus, Pseudomonas and other well-known and well-characterized pathogens. Rarely will the cause of the pneumonia be identified on the death certificate or discharge report, but if someone poked around the medical chart it will usually turn up a sputum or blood culture. There is no mystery superbug or bugs out there killing tens of millions of people by "acute respiratory infection".
> So is the LHC a Bose supernova waiting to go off? Not according to the CERN theory division, which has published its calculations that show the LHC is safe (abstract). They also point out that no other superfluid helium handling facility has mysteriously blown itself to pieces."
Yes, but did they account for a resonance cascade in the calculations? I know the chances of one occurring is extremely small, but I know I've seen one happen before.
The obvious reason is that it takes time and money to publish study results, neither of which are recouped currently if the study showed negative results.
The obvious fix is to reward pharmaceutical companies financially for publishing all results. Form a subentity within the NIH with the power to purchase study data and results that can be published by the government or a peer-reviewed journal.
Every aspiring doctor should be taking organic chemistry. The knowledge learned may not be applicable in everyday practice, but the insights gained into applied pharmacology can be occasionally invaluable.
Several months ago, I was explaining why prescribing over-the-counter, generic Prilosec (omeprazole) was just as good as writing a script for "top-of-the-line" Nexium (esomeprazole). You could arrive at this knowledge one of two ways: A) read and understand the clinical research behind both drugs, especially between the lines, and that both of them are effective at treatment or B) understand that Prilosec is simply the racemic mixture, while Nexium is the filtered enantiomer.
If you were a decent critical thinker, you might even question why no one's funded a head-to-head clinical trial of Prilosec vs. Nexium. But then people might go back to using a cheap generic vs. spending billions more on the patented blockbuster. Or, maybe, it could mean the difference between a minimum-wage mom filling her prescriptions ($4 a month generics is perhaps one good thing that Wal-Mart has given to the world) or being unable to afford them.
And this just scratches the surface. Why is physostigmine an effective antidote for certain toxicities while pyridostigmine is not? Why is thiomersal exposure unlike methylmercury exposure? What's the difference between eating omega-3 fatty acids and omega-6 fatty acids? Etc.
>But really, antibiotics as we know them now are of decreasing value, and doing so at an increased rate than before.
Hmm... tell that to the makers of Zyvox, Tygacil, Doribax, and Cubicin. All of them are new potential blockbuster antibiotics on the market, and most of them are seeing widespread hospital inpatient use.
>Or maybe current ideas about "healthy eating" are incorrect in some ways.
Probably not... the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet which forms the basis of current National Institutes of Health dietary guidelines has been shown to lower blood pressure, cut the risk of having a stroke by 18% and the risk of a heart attack by 24% over a period of 24 years.
The diet consists of lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and up to 2 servings of meat a day; dairy should be low-fat or non-fat. In other words, lots of vitamins, fiber, and complex carbs. Moderate protein content, low in fat and sodium.
What does your fad diet do for you?
Depends on your perspective... definitely not a failure for the trial attorneys billing by the hour.
>However I would like to know what imbalances alcohol creates when abused to cause the physical dependence on this drug.
Alcohol is GABA-ergic, which means it has a general depressive effect on neurotransmitter function. Your body rebounds after alcohol use is stopped and neurotransmitter function goes the other way, hence the symptoms that a "dry drunk" presents with. In order to feel "normal", the alcoholic must then take something to restore the balance, whether it be another slug of whiskey or a Librium or Ativan.
Yes, you, too can be the Anonymous Redshirt, for only $14.99 a month!
>Your post basically showed that ER docs will use the year of stats classes that they took in school to interpret research any damn way they want to.
And your post basically showed that you fail to understand his point. There is a clear-cut litmus test for introducing new medical interventions: what is the effect on patient mortality and morbidity in the short-term and long-term? According to the data: not much. Are stroke patients dying less or otherwise getting better outcomes if you use a webcam? No. Are stroke patients suffering less hemorrhage as a side-effect of treatment if you use a webcam? No. There is no evidence, using this trial, that stroke patients will be better off in quality or quantity of life using webcams.
If the government doesn't step in, it won't be engineers regulating the internet either. It will be Sales and Marketing managers (or maybe someone higher up the food chain) trying to squeeze every last drop of profit from their paying customers.
Dear valued Apple customer:
We received your message regarding "unpatched Mac OS X Server security hole". We appreciate your business, and we will do everything to address your concerns as soon as possible. Unfortunately, Steve is away from his desk on leave due to health concerns related to his non-lethal pancreatic cancer. He will be happy to fix the problem with "unpatched Mac OS X Server security hole" as soon as he returns to work.
Sincerely,
Apple Customer Service
Say you're a long-time IT staffer that's been key to designing, building, and managing from the mission-critical IT infrastructure of a business. You like the job, because it has an above-average salary with top-notch benefits, good hours and great co-workers. It just has the drawback of an asshole manager above you. This asshole manager comes up to you today and demanded your medical records, because he heard a rumor that you were being treated for a life-threatening health condition that's getting worse. He wants to know if you will need to be replaced with someone that's less of a health risk, so you can start training your replacement now, or if he can just dismiss it as a wild rumor.
Do you (A) give in to his demand because it's relevant to the business or (B) tell him politely to bugger off as it's none of his business?
There seems to be a disturbingly large # of /.ers today that would choose (A), based on the comments I'm reading.
>You might want to know about your surgeon's Parkinsons.
You might, but it also might be completely irrelevant except to frighten and scare a patient with little knowledge of Parkinson's disease. There are many patients with Parkinson's that are close to 100% asymptomatic, whether it's due to the proper medication, deep-brain stimulation or another treatment. In short, making surgeons automatically disclose that they have or don't have Parkinson's is useless scaremongering that could simply drive patients away from an experienced surgeon with no loss in functionality to a less experienced, younger surgeon.
This kind of medical bogeyman argument led to all of the erroneous "well, what if my kid went to school with another kid with HIV??? DEAR GOD HE COULD GET CUT OR SOMETHING, make them disclose it" thinking in the 1980s.
Hey, look, some Apple fanboi modded me flamebait! I guess he can't tell the difference between granting new rights and taking away rights, either.
>But when have you AGREED to the GPL? When did I signed a contract for it? It doesn't matter if it's distributing or using, the point of saying EULAs doesn't matter is because you've already bought the product and have it and it's yours? Same with the GPL software.
You're an idiot. The GPL is about granting rights to a consumer/user to redistributing a copyrighted work that he wouldn't have in the first place. It is, in essence, a statement by the creators that they won't sue for copyright infringement if you meet these conditions.
The Apple EULA is about restricting rights, unfairly, that you, the consumer, are granted by the First Sale doctrine. If you can't tell the difference, then you have much bigger problems other than EULAs in your future.
>>dictate use of legitimately purchased materials.
>it's not legitimately purchased any more.
>you must have bypassed the entire point that Apple sells its OS MUCH cheaper than MS does because Apple is being subsidised by hardware costs that are required to run Mac OS.
>if you aren't paying Apple for the hardware, you should pay full price for the OS.
>Think about how people accept that an 'unlocked phone' should cost more than one that is contract-assisted. So an 'unlocked' Mac OS should cost more than one bundled with a Mac computer. Simple. So pay up the extra money, or shut up.
Wow, the Apple fanbois*cough*trolls*cough* are out in full force today. Bad analogies, blind defense of Steve Jobs, spurious logic. Another brain warped by the RDF.
People don't accept that an unlocked phone should cost more than one that is contract-assisted. The service provider forces them to sign a contract saying they will buy X years of service at Y price. And then they say, "hey, here's your phone discount!". I don't recall signing any such legally-binding document when buying a copy of Mac OS X. And a click-through EULA is in no way a legally-binding document.
>lol, yeah can't argue with that. In all seriousness though, these loose ends:
>Character development(excepting Dent), character motivation(also excepting Dent),
Hmm... let's see, Bruce Wayne goes from thinking about retiring and getting back to normal life to thinking there's no one else that can do his job. He also moves from the "Batman has no limits" mindset to accepting that in the end (with the eavesdropping) that even he can't hold all of the power. Rachel goes from still loving Bruce to realizing it's time to move on. Gordon goes from arrow-straight lawman to agreeing to let Batman torture the Joker and to pinning the blame at the end on Batman for expedience. Fox realizes that there are some places he can't go for his boss, and puts his foot down.
>setting, plot, storyline,
I thought Gotham as a house of mirrors was well-done. Glass, reflections, and various degrees of transparency everywhere. Maybe it's not the cartoony Joel Schumacher city you were wanting, I dunno. If you couldn't follow the mostly straightforward plot, maybe you should go back to watching simple Event A -> Event B -> Protagonist gets the girl movies.
>cohesion with any identifiable over-arching theme besides pornographic anarchy.
Yes, the themes of civilization being an illusion, moral relativism vs absolutes, the ends justifying the means, the basic nature of man, and the protection of civil liberties in times of crisis had absolutely no place in this movie.
I'm really scratching my head, wondering how you watched The Dark Knight and came out of it thinking it was a "mishmash of compromise". Because just about everyone else who watched it came out of the theater with the opposite conclusion.
>>The only problem is the dolphins are asking for Corona or Tequila....
>Screw those stupid dolphins; always laughing at us humans. Just to spite them we should fill the ocean with Bud Light!
Speaking of pissing in the ocean...
>However...I don't really get the reasoning Joker used to convert Dent into Two-Face?
I thought the Joker explained it pretty well, although the Bugs Bunny-esque nurse outfit was stealing the scene. The Joker believes everyone is like him deep inside, and he believes the facade of civilization is paper-thin, waiting for the right someone to tear it down. His corruption of Dent is a demonstration of how he's right - all it took was personal leverage followed by tragedy to push Gotham's crusading White Knight to break society's rules and then abandon them altogether.
>...Drinking has been declared *the* villain in traffic accidents, but is this realistic?...
>And so on, as you mention, there are many factors that influence one's ability to drive, why pick on alcohol exclusively.
Are you fucking kidding me??? Alcohol is a factor in 41% of all traffic-related deaths> . Most studies cite a ~50% involvement of alcohol in all fatal car wrecks. You're right, we should concentrate on cell-phone usage before picking on alcohol.