Some people are already doing parts of this. Take Seanan McGuire. She has a day job, and she's doing this for the sheer love of music. You probably haven't heard of her unless you're in the US (and occasionally UK) filk circuit, but she kicks ass. I don't have the background to make in-depth musical judgment calls, but she sings well enough, collects highly talented musicians around her, and writes the most incredible, complex, and singable lyric poems at the drop of a hat. A lot of her creative process is in public; she'll post first or second draft lyrics in public and let her friends wait to hear the actual song until the next convention.
Her first album was a live recording from a convention. She took pre-orders (at, IIRC, a discounted price) on the album until she had enough money gathered up to do a run of CDs, distributed the pre-ordered CDs to the people who got them, and sold the rest at her going rate.
That (as I understand it) was the seed money for the next project, a studio album. Her blog chronicles the recording process in a very widely assorted range of home studio type situations (and it's worth a read if you're into wacky hijinks). She took pre-orders on that as well, and the combination of the money from the previous stuff and the 250 pre-orders (with optional above-and-beyond sponsorship donation) produced the current CD. The rest of the run of CDs are being sold at the non-pre-order price.
I don't know what she plans to do with the music itself when she runs out of printed CDs. (She's already plotting her next album, and taking votes from her fanbase about what songs will be included in it.) It would be nice if she released it to the wild freely, though I'm guessing she might be more likely to make it available as an inexpensive paid download to at least help pay for bandwidth. It would be awesome if she could actually make a living at this and devote a larger portion of her time to it.
So the occasional round of GTA:SA (or any other violent video game) to blow off stress would be just fine in most cases, and might keep people from wanting to bash their obnoxious co-worker's head in with a brick quite so badly.
But if violent video games are all someone ever plays, they'd better have a pretty solid grasp on reality, because most violent videogames would be a really fucked-up worldview if people really started thinking that way.
If saner heads prevail in getting the message that video games in moderation are great fun, but video game addiction is dangerous, will that mean that video games will start having to carry the same kinds of warnings that keyboards and cigarettes do?
Don't mistake the opinions of the loud members of the group as shown in media for the opinions of the average member of the group.
Seems that the grandparent poster there thinks he's the mode and the loud assholes waving the Conservative Southern Baptist flag are outliers. Very loud, mediagenic, and obnoxious outliers gaining a lot of attention. This would skew the mean opinion of others about conservative Southern Baptists when the quiet, polite, fun-to-be-around and sane ones don't get media attention because they're just folks and the loud assholes are news.
I have a varying sensitivity to cigarette smoke. Some days I can stand a conversational distance downwind from a smoking friend and be just fine. Other days, smoke on the breeze eight to ten meters from the source (approximately) can trigger a sudden jump in pulse and difficulty breathing.
When someone has been in a confined, smoke-filled environment for a sufficient length of time, they carry with them (upon their clothing, breath, and person) an aura of smoke. This is the most evident with my co-workers who smoke in their cars while coming to work. Someone who is not sensitive to smoke might not notice this.
A separate smoking section or industrial air-purifiers doesn't necessarily mean that the air is clear enough for people who do happen to be sensitive. An hour or so in the non-smoking section of my local indie coffee shop (if I can stomach the open mic for that long) leaves my clothes smoky enough to disturb my old roommate.
If someone's used to the smell of smoke, all of these things would pass nearly unnoticed.
Secondhand Smoke Ninjas are so ninja they don't even know they're doing it.
When most 8-year-olds talk about flying cars, adults pat them on the head and smile. Something about what he's saying must be making sense to somebody, if people are taking him seriously.
This kid sounds like he might be young and flexible enough to learn the current set of established physics rules without taking them for granted as true. Kids don't make the same assumptions adults do. (They've got an entirely different set of assumptions.)
In all seriousness, don't consider bending it slowly with your bare hands with the intent to bend it a perfect 90 degree angle in any way comparable to slamming into it at high speed. Notice how the primary bend is right up on the string. Have you ever stood in the way of a cat on full rampage and had it plow into you? Those things can pick up serious momentum. And if that's a part of your bed at just the right height for a curious cat to stand on and try to look out the window, I would not look any further. I have had cat damage to blinds look virtually identical to this.
The most appropriate source of pressure against the principal would be the parents and other financial contributors to the school, then.
I do have a nephew, and if school rules said he couldn't participate in an out-of-school activity that I felt was creative and harmless when properly supervised, and I was willing to properly supervise him, then you betcha I'd be railing at the school officials in question and gathering up a gang of other mothers to talk some sense back into the idiots.
It's up to parents, not the government, to protect students from officious busybodies in the school system. There should be (if there isn't already) legal machinery/checks-and-balances in place to ensure that the parents get fair representation against a body of school officials, but it's really up to the parents to know their children, know what's going on in their children's schools and speak up for them.
I prefer not to block ads on the ad-supported sites I use most often for just this reason. If I like a site enough, and use it enough, I have bought memberships in the past, and I will continue to do so in the future. I far prefer the model of site usability where unpaying users see no ads, but have limited site functionality, and paying users have full site functionality. (I have a lifetime subscription to one site, and I'm enjoying bonus functionality.)
As someone who doesn't always have reliable cash flow, I don't want to have to pay actual money to use a site I use only sporadically. I have enough trouble remembering my usernames and passwords for all the places I've gone once, had to log in (and needed a unique login as myself, not bugmenot) and returned to some months or years later.
If I had to pay to use a site, I'd judge the site's quality far more sharply than I do with free sites. I have several crappy free webmail addresses with different providers. If I had to pay for them, I'd likely pick a single address and stick with it, but shop around for and expect the best service for my money. If the entire internet suddenly went paid-only, a lot of sites with poor-quality information and services that are popular because they're free would find themselves with a pitiful showing of subscribers. Currently, if I do pay for something on the web, it's because I consider it among the finest out there and deserving of my financial reward for quality and utility.
Since I'm too broke and too picky to pay for dubious-quality things I'm only going to use once, I don't mind viewing ads in return for my use of the site. I prefer to be selective in those ads that I do block. I will occasionally reward good ads by clicking through, even if I don't have an intention to purchase, allow indifferent ads to load, and penalize bad ads by blocking them.
I tend to lump ads into the following categories:
Useful - offering products/services/content I'm interested in (hardware, software, entertainment). I will click through and explore, though I don't know if I've ever made a purchase based on this.
Unobtrusive - part of a site's visual "furniture". Interestingly, I've found that I can completely overlook integral parts of the actual website that are brightly colored and placed at the top, left-hand column, or right-hand column, because I'm so used to ignoring advertisements placed there. (I wonder how many other people overlook things that the site designers go out of their way to draw attention to for the precise reason that it's designed to have attention drawn to it and they're used to ignoring advertisements?) I have far more success seeing important site content that's placed slightly below where the top ad banner would be if there was one, rather than in that top ad banner space, especially if it's brightly colored and doesn't match the rest of the site's color scheme. Most static image ads I consider "unobtrusive"; they may well be interesting to someone else.
Annoying - Brightly colored, irrelevant, blinky (repetitive flashing as opposed to actual animation), stupid. Does not prompt me to block it, because blocking's just a little more of a bother than ignoring it. Mid-screen right side panel ads are the most attention-grabbing, and the annoyance is directly proportional to the amount of attention it takes away from the content.
Actively Offensive - These, I block. I mostly block per-ad, though strong offenses cause me to block by advertised company or (worst) by advertising company. Offense comes in many different categories:
Noisy -- usually some damnably obnoxious noises, too.
Language -- Not profanity, generally, but offenses to the English language. I once clicked through a side panel ad, tracked down the contact number of the parent company, and left them a scathing answering machine message about using the wrong "It's" in their advertisement. I can put up with some thing
In all the re-posts of the exchange I've seen, I haven't seen included any of the e-mails the two must have gotten to please stop this or keep it private. I saw someone post a rather extensive list of e-mail addresses at the company; someone on that list must have seen the fur flying and surely would have sent a reasonably private e-mail to them to please stop broadcasting their personal disagreements to the entire office. The likelihood is that several, if not dozens, of people asked them to please STFU and stop clogging up their inboxes.
In the company where I work, there are a couple standard things that happen when someone's offcially getting chewed out over e-mail. One of them is that an e-mail asking for a correction or an explanation is sent out, and openly cc:-ed to the department heads of the involved parties, as well as the general manager and HR. This is not a subtle hint. I have never actually seen the results of someone ignoring a "suggestion" like that, but I would imagine that they are not pretty, and could involve some pretty stringent disciplinary proceedings.
If their HR department got not only a barrage of catfighting e-mails, but a corresponding exponential pile of politely-worded carbon copies essentially telling the ladies (and I use the term loosely) that no one but them cares about their disagreement, and to please work it out or at least make it private, I'd bet that's one pissed-off HR department.
Even with an arithmatic series, the load on HR could be impressive. Say the first mass e-mail generated 5 STFU mails, the second one generated 10, the 3rd one generated 15, and so on. By the 10th exchange, HR has a couple hundred complaints to wade through, and is wondering why the merry fuck they did not stop spamming the whole damn office with this stupid shit that no one cares about. Even with a less enthusiastic response, they are bound to have gotten more than one complaint, probably at different points in the exchange. Any reasonably-intelligent user of an e-mail system should realize that when a personal exchange being broadcast to the entire company gets complaints, it's time to take it at least semi-private. Include HR and your supervisor and their supervisor if you must, if you think you're in the right or that doing this will cover your ass, but continuing to spam the entire company after that point is inexcusable.
Speaking as a supervisor who occasionally has to deal with repeated obnoxious behavior and verbal catfights and the like, I am far less inclined to be lenient when it's clear that someone knew that what they were doing was pissing people off and kept on doing it anyway. I expect that company's HR staff doesn't differ much on that account.
If either of them had a history of complaints with HR for forwarding idiotic jokes, urban legends, or bogus virus warnings, then their firing is not in any way a surprise.
If I was looking to hook up, I would so be hitting a gaming con. The ratios are evidently highly favorable if one is female...
My best friend was at GenCon this weekend. (I wasn't, as I'm actually not a gamer, I'm just the chick who goes on Mountain Dew and Cheetos runs, and while I can listen to him read a D&D message board humor thread for hours (and get over 75% of the jokes), I suspect I'd be bored to tears at a pure gaming con.) I have cunning plans to accompany said best friend to other, less gaming-intensive cons.
Does anyone have any recommendations on which cons have the best gaming-to-general-geekage ratios, where the desired ratio is somewhere around 1:1?
In the case of ritalin and similar drugs intended to curb hyperactivity, especially in children, I would say, both anecdotally and as the result of doing a college freshman-level research paper, that while I'm very certain that it's been overprescribed and abused (I am not a doctor, but I do not think that a single half-hour session of observing a child is sufficient to label them hyperactive) that there are those cases where it is appropriate to treat hyperactivity and attention problems that don't respond to other methods.
I don't think that Ritalin is an appropriate substitute for parental and teacher time, attention, training, and exercise to run the wiggles out before sitting down to learn. If I, as an aunt, can get my six-year-old nephew to sit still and behave himself for the entirety of a three hour college lecture on a weekly basis (ten minute breaks in between sessions, during which there were bathroom visits and an opportunity to tear around like a mad thing) and the first grade teacher cannot get the same child to hold still in class, that speaks more of a too-large class size, not enough individualized attention, not enough opportunity to burn all that youthful energy on physical activity, and a behavioural problem with listening to the teacher, rather than a medical condition.
I can see using a focus-enhancing drug to prove to a kid that yes, you can too sit still and learn in class, and this is what it feels like -- and now you are going to learn to do the same thing without the pill. One of my camp buddies was on Ritalin, and he was much more focused on the drug, but much more personable and interesting to be around when unmedicated.
Similarly, I do not think that this new sleep-deprivation drug is going to in any way replace the actual sleep. It will be used and abused, and people are going to make an unholy fuss over it, but I think in the long run, people who use it wisely or people who just go with natural sleep are going to be ultimately more productive and pleasant to work with. The article does not mention side effects. There's no guarantee that people on this are going to be any more pleasant to work with while alert and sleep-deprived on this rather than on coffee. It didn't mention how much sleep someone requires after using this; it could well be something where people feel alarmingly hung-over after using unless they've gotten a solid ten to twelve hours of sleep. It doesn't mention effectiveness as a morning caffeine substitute.
The one brilliant application that does spring to mind is actually for resetting a funky biological clock: for jetlag and schedule-based insomnia. If this provides alertness without some of the harsh effects of caffeine, I would definitely apply it for myself on those days when I have to work mornings and start burning out around 3 pm. (I usually work afternoons and evenings, so my scheduled bedtime is somewhere upwards
Is the thing where active and standby cellphones cause assorted hospital equipment to do assorted nasty and lethal or near-lethal things to patients (bad medication dosages, wrong medications, and probably other malfunctions) legit or just an urban legend? If it's legit, you can add that combination to your list.
Though I'd call those hardward problems rather than software problems -- though a smart enough system might be able to figure out that some of that is lethal and shouldn't be done.
Then again, the original topic was the Shuttle & its assorted hardware problems, so...
So I'm at work for a meeting I wind up not needing to attend, and CNN's on in the break room. I'm not seeing any news stories about the shuttle, and I know I'm not going to be around any other news source for the next 5-6 hours or so.
So I send a text message from my cellphone to post a request in my blog for friends to text message me any breaking news.
Not ten minutes later, my cellphone rings. It's Boeing. (I have a friend who works for them with shuttle-related stuff. No one in his workplace was having a good day today. He took his antacids beforehand, as a precaution.)
From what he says, it looks like the whole goddamn batch of sensors is buggy; it's the same problem they had a month or two ago.
I love how I can be away from any conventional news source and still get breaking news ahead of major news sources.
The only way I would set up a child's e-mail account is to restrict incoming e-mail to a list of allowed senders. This virtually eliminates spam unless someone on the allowed sender list or with an allowed sender in their address book gets some spamming malware or someone spoofs their address.
Many free e-mail accounts, including that pit of voles, Hotmail, allow this very easily. Granted, any time the child gives their e-mail address to a friend, they'll have to get their friend's e-mail address and put it on the allowed list, but a) you'll want to remember your friend's address anyway, and b) adding new friends and existing friend/relatives' new addresses to the allowed list has got to be less of a pain than setting up a new account every time the old one gets spammed up.
A child who is too young to recognize and handle spam is probably also too young to be talking to strangers unsupervised. Even on the internet. Especially on the internet.
A former roommate told me a story about how he'd killed one of his computers. Seems he left the thing on the floor in his room.
Now, his living spaces tend to be trash heaps; it was only constant nagging from his ex-fiancee and me that kept mold from growing in their room when he was living with us. So this did not surprise me at all when he told me what happened...
For whatever reason, ants decided to visit his computer. Ants. I guess he might have spilled something in there, probably Mountain Dew. He saw the ants crawling in and out of his computer, didn't pay much attention to it, and turned the thing on.
Poof. Fried.
I laughed at him.
An ex of mine wound up with a few extra chips in his computer (chocolate and dorito) owing to leaving it open, but never before or again have I heard of ants infesting someone's computer.
In the hopes that they'll actually make a sale. I'd guess that a goodly percentage of people who put themselves on the DNC list are doing so not because they don't want to waste their time telling each individual telemarketing company to stop calling, but because sometimes they may actually buy stuff from them just to get off the phone.
Some people just do not have the inner strength or what-have-you to be "rude" enough to interrupt the smooth telemarketing schpiel and say, "No, I'm not interested, don't call here ever again." If they're even vaguely interested in a product, they may well wind up buying it. They may regret it later, and they may vow to never buy anything from a telemarketer again, and the DNC list is an easy way to avoid the situation in the first place.
It's those people, those without the willpower to say "No" to a telemarketer, that telemarketers would want to talk to.
I have worked in phone research (not sales, and sometimes the people who did the survey did get paid, depending on the client) and a surprising number of people told me that they did the survey to be polite, or they didn't hang up on me in the beginning because it would have been rude. (I had to explain the DNC list, and that it is utterly irrelevant to research organizations, several times a day.) It's those people who would be at risk of buying stuff from a telemarketer, even though they dislike being telemarketed at enough to put themselves on the DNC list.
If bearing a child is in any way linked to lowering the risk of breast cancer, then career nuns (who have never had the opportunity to bear children) would be, on the whole, more apt to have breast cancer than a random sampling of women, some of whom have had children.
All "pure research" seems fairly wasteful at the outset, but spinoff applications for the technology will be found, and those eventually will benefit society, even if the path is fairly indirect. Pure research is, IMO, one of those places where "trickle-down" does actually work.
The raw cost of putting someone up there has got to be going down fast now that the technology's been established. Yet I don't see the proposed ticket price going down in pace with the lowering cost any time in the near future.
Think of space tourism as an ingenious way to squeeze funding for development of space technologies (and whatever else) out of idle thrill-seekers. If these same rich thrill-seekers were to buy luxury cars and rent "companions" with that same money, they wouldn't be helping out new technology half so much, and still spending the money on things they may not use very much (in the case of the cars) or will only enjoy for the moment (the rented companions). The R&D on cars and whores is minimal, given that these are both very old fields.
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S/he'd always go for First Vote, at least.
Her first album was a live recording from a convention. She took pre-orders (at, IIRC, a discounted price) on the album until she had enough money gathered up to do a run of CDs, distributed the pre-ordered CDs to the people who got them, and sold the rest at her going rate.
That (as I understand it) was the seed money for the next project, a studio album. Her blog chronicles the recording process in a very widely assorted range of home studio type situations (and it's worth a read if you're into wacky hijinks). She took pre-orders on that as well, and the combination of the money from the previous stuff and the 250 pre-orders (with optional above-and-beyond sponsorship donation) produced the current CD. The rest of the run of CDs are being sold at the non-pre-order price.
I don't know what she plans to do with the music itself when she runs out of printed CDs. (She's already plotting her next album, and taking votes from her fanbase about what songs will be included in it.) It would be nice if she released it to the wild freely, though I'm guessing she might be more likely to make it available as an inexpensive paid download to at least help pay for bandwidth. It would be awesome if she could actually make a living at this and devote a larger portion of her time to it.
But if violent video games are all someone ever plays, they'd better have a pretty solid grasp on reality, because most violent videogames would be a really fucked-up worldview if people really started thinking that way.
If saner heads prevail in getting the message that video games in moderation are great fun, but video game addiction is dangerous, will that mean that video games will start having to carry the same kinds of warnings that keyboards and cigarettes do?
Seems that the grandparent poster there thinks he's the mode and the loud assholes waving the Conservative Southern Baptist flag are outliers. Very loud, mediagenic, and obnoxious outliers gaining a lot of attention. This would skew the mean opinion of others about conservative Southern Baptists when the quiet, polite, fun-to-be-around and sane ones don't get media attention because they're just folks and the loud assholes are news.
When someone has been in a confined, smoke-filled environment for a sufficient length of time, they carry with them (upon their clothing, breath, and person) an aura of smoke. This is the most evident with my co-workers who smoke in their cars while coming to work. Someone who is not sensitive to smoke might not notice this.
A separate smoking section or industrial air-purifiers doesn't necessarily mean that the air is clear enough for people who do happen to be sensitive. An hour or so in the non-smoking section of my local indie coffee shop (if I can stomach the open mic for that long) leaves my clothes smoky enough to disturb my old roommate.
If someone's used to the smell of smoke, all of these things would pass nearly unnoticed.
Secondhand Smoke Ninjas are so ninja they don't even know they're doing it.
This kid sounds like he might be young and flexible enough to learn the current set of established physics rules without taking them for granted as true. Kids don't make the same assumptions adults do. (They've got an entirely different set of assumptions.)
In all seriousness, don't consider bending it slowly with your bare hands with the intent to bend it a perfect 90 degree angle in any way comparable to slamming into it at high speed. Notice how the primary bend is right up on the string. Have you ever stood in the way of a cat on full rampage and had it plow into you? Those things can pick up serious momentum. And if that's a part of your bed at just the right height for a curious cat to stand on and try to look out the window, I would not look any further. I have had cat damage to blinds look virtually identical to this.
Have you cats?
I do have a nephew, and if school rules said he couldn't participate in an out-of-school activity that I felt was creative and harmless when properly supervised, and I was willing to properly supervise him, then you betcha I'd be railing at the school officials in question and gathering up a gang of other mothers to talk some sense back into the idiots.
It's up to parents, not the government, to protect students from officious busybodies in the school system. There should be (if there isn't already) legal machinery/checks-and-balances in place to ensure that the parents get fair representation against a body of school officials, but it's really up to the parents to know their children, know what's going on in their children's schools and speak up for them.
As someone who doesn't always have reliable cash flow, I don't want to have to pay actual money to use a site I use only sporadically. I have enough trouble remembering my usernames and passwords for all the places I've gone once, had to log in (and needed a unique login as myself, not bugmenot) and returned to some months or years later.
If I had to pay to use a site, I'd judge the site's quality far more sharply than I do with free sites. I have several crappy free webmail addresses with different providers. If I had to pay for them, I'd likely pick a single address and stick with it, but shop around for and expect the best service for my money. If the entire internet suddenly went paid-only, a lot of sites with poor-quality information and services that are popular because they're free would find themselves with a pitiful showing of subscribers. Currently, if I do pay for something on the web, it's because I consider it among the finest out there and deserving of my financial reward for quality and utility.
Since I'm too broke and too picky to pay for dubious-quality things I'm only going to use once, I don't mind viewing ads in return for my use of the site. I prefer to be selective in those ads that I do block. I will occasionally reward good ads by clicking through, even if I don't have an intention to purchase, allow indifferent ads to load, and penalize bad ads by blocking them.
I tend to lump ads into the following categories:
Interestingly, I've found that I can completely overlook integral parts of the actual website that are brightly colored and placed at the top, left-hand column, or right-hand column, because I'm so used to ignoring advertisements placed there. (I wonder how many other people overlook things that the site designers go out of their way to draw attention to for the precise reason that it's designed to have attention drawn to it and they're used to ignoring advertisements?) I have far more success seeing important site content that's placed slightly below where the top ad banner would be if there was one, rather than in that top ad banner space, especially if it's brightly colored and doesn't match the rest of the site's color scheme.
Most static image ads I consider "unobtrusive"; they may well be interesting to someone else.
In the company where I work, there are a couple standard things that happen when someone's offcially getting chewed out over e-mail. One of them is that an e-mail asking for a correction or an explanation is sent out, and openly cc:-ed to the department heads of the involved parties, as well as the general manager and HR. This is not a subtle hint. I have never actually seen the results of someone ignoring a "suggestion" like that, but I would imagine that they are not pretty, and could involve some pretty stringent disciplinary proceedings.
If their HR department got not only a barrage of catfighting e-mails, but a corresponding exponential pile of politely-worded carbon copies essentially telling the ladies (and I use the term loosely) that no one but them cares about their disagreement, and to please work it out or at least make it private, I'd bet that's one pissed-off HR department.
Even with an arithmatic series, the load on HR could be impressive. Say the first mass e-mail generated 5 STFU mails, the second one generated 10, the 3rd one generated 15, and so on. By the 10th exchange, HR has a couple hundred complaints to wade through, and is wondering why the merry fuck they did not stop spamming the whole damn office with this stupid shit that no one cares about. Even with a less enthusiastic response, they are bound to have gotten more than one complaint, probably at different points in the exchange. Any reasonably-intelligent user of an e-mail system should realize that when a personal exchange being broadcast to the entire company gets complaints, it's time to take it at least semi-private. Include HR and your supervisor and their supervisor if you must, if you think you're in the right or that doing this will cover your ass, but continuing to spam the entire company after that point is inexcusable.
Speaking as a supervisor who occasionally has to deal with repeated obnoxious behavior and verbal catfights and the like, I am far less inclined to be lenient when it's clear that someone knew that what they were doing was pissing people off and kept on doing it anyway. I expect that company's HR staff doesn't differ much on that account.
If either of them had a history of complaints with HR for forwarding idiotic jokes, urban legends, or bogus virus warnings, then their firing is not in any way a surprise.
My best friend was at GenCon this weekend. (I wasn't, as I'm actually not a gamer, I'm just the chick who goes on Mountain Dew and Cheetos runs, and while I can listen to him read a D&D message board humor thread for hours (and get over 75% of the jokes), I suspect I'd be bored to tears at a pure gaming con.) I have cunning plans to accompany said best friend to other, less gaming-intensive cons.
Does anyone have any recommendations on which cons have the best gaming-to-general-geekage ratios, where the desired ratio is somewhere around 1:1?
The only excuse for a Mary Sue or Gary Stu is for mockery purposes, and only if it's burned immediately afterwards.
Talking Back to Ritalin
Ritalin-Free Kids
No More Ritalin
The Myth of the A.D.D. Child
(some of the selections from an Amazon.com search on the word "ritalin".)
In the case of ritalin and similar drugs intended to curb hyperactivity, especially in children, I would say, both anecdotally and as the result of doing a college freshman-level research paper, that while I'm very certain that it's been overprescribed and abused (I am not a doctor, but I do not think that a single half-hour session of observing a child is sufficient to label them hyperactive) that there are those cases where it is appropriate to treat hyperactivity and attention problems that don't respond to other methods.
I don't think that Ritalin is an appropriate substitute for parental and teacher time, attention, training, and exercise to run the wiggles out before sitting down to learn. If I, as an aunt, can get my six-year-old nephew to sit still and behave himself for the entirety of a three hour college lecture on a weekly basis (ten minute breaks in between sessions, during which there were bathroom visits and an opportunity to tear around like a mad thing) and the first grade teacher cannot get the same child to hold still in class, that speaks more of a too-large class size, not enough individualized attention, not enough opportunity to burn all that youthful energy on physical activity, and a behavioural problem with listening to the teacher, rather than a medical condition.
I can see using a focus-enhancing drug to prove to a kid that yes, you can too sit still and learn in class, and this is what it feels like -- and now you are going to learn to do the same thing without the pill. One of my camp buddies was on Ritalin, and he was much more focused on the drug, but much more personable and interesting to be around when unmedicated.
Similarly, I do not think that this new sleep-deprivation drug is going to in any way replace the actual sleep. It will be used and abused, and people are going to make an unholy fuss over it, but I think in the long run, people who use it wisely or people who just go with natural sleep are going to be ultimately more productive and pleasant to work with. The article does not mention side effects. There's no guarantee that people on this are going to be any more pleasant to work with while alert and sleep-deprived on this rather than on coffee. It didn't mention how much sleep someone requires after using this; it could well be something where people feel alarmingly hung-over after using unless they've gotten a solid ten to twelve hours of sleep. It doesn't mention effectiveness as a morning caffeine substitute.
The one brilliant application that does spring to mind is actually for resetting a funky biological clock: for jetlag and schedule-based insomnia. If this provides alertness without some of the harsh effects of caffeine, I would definitely apply it for myself on those days when I have to work mornings and start burning out around 3 pm. (I usually work afternoons and evenings, so my scheduled bedtime is somewhere upwards
Though I'd call those hardward problems rather than software problems -- though a smart enough system might be able to figure out that some of that is lethal and shouldn't be done.
Then again, the original topic was the Shuttle & its assorted hardware problems, so...
So I send a text message from my cellphone to post a request in my blog for friends to text message me any breaking news.
Not ten minutes later, my cellphone rings. It's Boeing. (I have a friend who works for them with shuttle-related stuff. No one in his workplace was having a good day today. He took his antacids beforehand, as a precaution.)
From what he says, it looks like the whole goddamn batch of sensors is buggy; it's the same problem they had a month or two ago.
I love how I can be away from any conventional news source and still get breaking news ahead of major news sources.
Many free e-mail accounts, including that pit of voles, Hotmail, allow this very easily. Granted, any time the child gives their e-mail address to a friend, they'll have to get their friend's e-mail address and put it on the allowed list, but a) you'll want to remember your friend's address anyway, and b) adding new friends and existing friend/relatives' new addresses to the allowed list has got to be less of a pain than setting up a new account every time the old one gets spammed up.
A child who is too young to recognize and handle spam is probably also too young to be talking to strangers unsupervised. Even on the internet. Especially on the internet.
It is for this reason that I make a point of only blocking banner ads that actively offend me.
(Bad spelling and that *&@#$*%& Jamster frog actively offend me.)
A former roommate told me a story about how he'd killed one of his computers. Seems he left the thing on the floor in his room.
Now, his living spaces tend to be trash heaps; it was only constant nagging from his ex-fiancee and me that kept mold from growing in their room when he was living with us. So this did not surprise me at all when he told me what happened...
For whatever reason, ants decided to visit his computer. Ants. I guess he might have spilled something in there, probably Mountain Dew. He saw the ants crawling in and out of his computer, didn't pay much attention to it, and turned the thing on.
Poof. Fried.
I laughed at him.
An ex of mine wound up with a few extra chips in his computer (chocolate and dorito) owing to leaving it open, but never before or again have I heard of ants infesting someone's computer.
Why use lasers? Heinlein had it right: finely ground carbon. "Only a Moke is truly a coke!"
In the hopes that they'll actually make a sale. I'd guess that a goodly percentage of people who put themselves on the DNC list are doing so not because they don't want to waste their time telling each individual telemarketing company to stop calling, but because sometimes they may actually buy stuff from them just to get off the phone.
Some people just do not have the inner strength or what-have-you to be "rude" enough to interrupt the smooth telemarketing schpiel and say, "No, I'm not interested, don't call here ever again." If they're even vaguely interested in a product, they may well wind up buying it. They may regret it later, and they may vow to never buy anything from a telemarketer again, and the DNC list is an easy way to avoid the situation in the first place.
It's those people, those without the willpower to say "No" to a telemarketer, that telemarketers would want to talk to.
I have worked in phone research (not sales, and sometimes the people who did the survey did get paid, depending on the client) and a surprising number of people told me that they did the survey to be polite, or they didn't hang up on me in the beginning because it would have been rude. (I had to explain the DNC list, and that it is utterly irrelevant to research organizations, several times a day.) It's those people who would be at risk of buying stuff from a telemarketer, even though they dislike being telemarketed at enough to put themselves on the DNC list.
You couldn't overclock it too much, lest your processor caramelize.
If bearing a child is in any way linked to lowering the risk of breast cancer, then career nuns (who have never had the opportunity to bear children) would be, on the whole, more apt to have breast cancer than a random sampling of women, some of whom have had children.
The raw cost of putting someone up there has got to be going down fast now that the technology's been established. Yet I don't see the proposed ticket price going down in pace with the lowering cost any time in the near future.
Think of space tourism as an ingenious way to squeeze funding for development of space technologies (and whatever else) out of idle thrill-seekers. If these same rich thrill-seekers were to buy luxury cars and rent "companions" with that same money, they wouldn't be helping out new technology half so much, and still spending the money on things they may not use very much (in the case of the cars) or will only enjoy for the moment (the rented companions). The R&D on cars and whores is minimal, given that these are both very old fields.
I got my 250 megabytes today. Not that my Hotmail account is anything more than a spamtrap right now...