That's not quite the right analogy. It's more like if you were deciding between Coke and Pepsi, and told both companies that you'd be selecting on the basis of taste. Suppose now that Pepsi's research shows that people strongly prefer Pepsi over Coke -- but you choose Coke anyway. That's sort of what's going on here.
I agree on your modification of the analogy - however, what seems to be missing here is that research.
That said, as I noted in my other post, I don't understand where the actual legal issue is in all this.
Based on their own words in hte article, it seems to be nothing more than a fishing expitition. I hope Mass. gets them for filing a claim with absolutely no evidence at all and smacks the shit out of them to the tune of lawyers' fees.
There is a lot of frustration among Democratic voters right now, about the crappy selection of presidential candidates. We felt like we got railroaded with Dukkakis in '88, and while Clinton was a pleasant surprise in '92, there was a lot of consternation about Lieberman in 2000 (and it should be clear by now, that Lieberman did more harm to Gore's campaign than Nader could ever dream to) - and Kerry in '04.
Democratic voters feel their principles have been betrayed. That their party is beholden to monied special interests (especially the mafIAA). Is it any wonder that a stooge like Bush can win?
Never understood it myself. I'm independent, no party affiliation. I've watched with dismay in the last 10-15 years as the Republicans have crawled into bed with religious nutjobs. In response, the post-Clinton Democrats, rather than seizing the opportunity and crushing the Reps with a centrist candidate who could establish long-term dominance, have responded by throwing out a series of candidates who are more and more hard-line, shrill, and utterly unappealing to independent voters. They haven't put forth a coherent plan aside from their (rightful) disdain of Bush. They've tossed their support of the first amendment in their push to cozy up to the media companies (MAFIAA) and to be seen as more family values oriented (Gore/Lieberman/Hilary with their anti-violent music/games push). I think the growing tendency of the Democrat leadership toward condescending wanna-be intellectualism and truly venomous campaigning is really turning off a lot of the country, never mind the selling out.
Put another way, in the run-up to the 2004 election Bush was saddled by a 9/11 economy that had not fully recovered, a war we were by that point not winning, and no idea where Osama was. Even a remotely appealing candidate would have destroyed him. Who gets nominated? A condescending stereotypical Massachussets Democrat with a lot of baggage. Of course, he is destroyed in the red states by 20+ point margins and loses enough of the peripheral states (Ohio, Fla) that he loses. This, while Lieberman or Edwards probably would have beaten Bush. Lieberman probably takes Fla, Edwards probably a mix of SC, VA, NC, or OH, possibly others.
To more properly address your points, I'm not comfortable with Obama because he's an inexperienced ideologue, and I find that incredibly scary (I don't even want to ponder the fate of Universal Health Care in this country). Hilary has experience, but I have no idea what she'll do when president because the only thing she seems to stand for is her own self-aggrandizement. I assume it's a two-dog race now, so no point discussing the also rans.
As an independent, *I* feel betrayed, because I'd like one party to have the sense to go more centrist. Don't much care which party.
Regarding Dem presidential candidates, I completely agree with you - the Dems haven't come up with a truly appealing candidate that they actually planned to run since, what, Kennedy? LBJ was an accident, Carter won because he wasn't Nixon/Ford, and the frontrunners like Cuomo bailed in early '92 when Bush I had a 90% approval rating, leaving the surprising win to Bill.
Anyone remember when a worker would just go in, get hired by a company, and work for them? Now it seems like everything but the most professional jobs are getting outsourced either oversees or to temp, staffing services, and contractor agencies.
How many people here still work for companies where the secretaries and janitors (sorry, don't have the inclination to use the newer politically-correct terms) actually are full-time, fully-vested, non-contracted company employees? I'm praying there are are least a few of you who do.
In part, you can thank the well-meaning labor laws passed in the last 30 years that
1) basically make it damn near impossible for an employee to fire anyone for cause, and
2) put the burden of the government's failed social programs onto employers
In addition:
3) It's much easier for managers to hide financials from upper management and board of directors when using contractors, salaries are hard to hide.
4) It's a popular way of doing 'try before you buy' - companies don't want to be stuck practically forever with an underperforming employee, so they want you to do contractor or temp status for a few months before signing you on as an employee.
For good or bad, there are a lot of reasons companies use contractors. And as you're seeing here, it's not limited to the low end of the totem pole - I've seen six-figure contracting jobs (and been offered some). Personally, I'm not interested in that sort of thing. Especially when any relocation is involved - no way I'm moving across the damned country for a 3-month tryout.
Thats why they have Amicus curiae briefs. If Google just wanted to help YouTube defend themselves, they could have filed such a brief for much less than the 1.6 billion (or whatever it was) they spent on YouTube. Or if they really wanted to take an active role in the lawsuit, they could have waited for it to be filed and then bail out YouTube for much less money. Though its questionable whether or not they would have ever been sued in the first place had YouTube not been bought by someone who could pay up.
As mentioned, that runs the risk that 'Tube cuts a sweetheart deal with the labels before Google can do it. As it stands, I'd have to imagine the spectre of a lawsuit was included in the YouTube purchase price; it's not like you needed a crystal ball to see this coming. So I'm sure Google knew what they were getting into.
No one in their right mind wants to ride in a Hummer...the ride is for crap. And no one in the US can fit in a Prius. THey are made for skinny people, and we Americans are fat.
Speak for yourself, lardass. My skinny American ass drives a Prius.
I agree with a lot of that. One thing I've always thought is that the patent length should vary somehow by field, simply because the pace of development is different. 7 years isn't that long in drug development, that's maybe one development cycle, but that's probably about 3 software development cycles.
Well, that $100 million is very small compared to how much the pharmaceutical companies spend on advertising. So it doesn't seem as important to them.
Both the marketing and R&D are dependent on maintaining a relatively high market price. Naturally, if they didn't have the patent protection, they wouldn't spend the huge marketing budget either. This is why, for example, you don't typically see drugs advertised after they go generic. There are exceptions (Tylenol, Advil) which are able to maintain strong brand loyalty, but they originally achieved this during a period of patent protection. Still, the marketing budget for these drugs plummet after they go generic.
A better system for pharmaceutical companies would be for them to be able to protect their formulations by trade secret for a certain period of time, say 5 years or so. The only entity that needs to know about the formulations would be the FDA for safety approval during the 5 year protection period. After the 5 year protection period, the pharmaceutical company releases the formulation to the public domain so that generics can be made.
Well, speaking as a chemist, I can tell you for sure that it would take a chemistry graduate student under a day to reverse engineer the trade secret formulation. That's the basic problem, no market barrier, no technological barrier after the original research and development. So the only remaining remedy is actual market protection (ie, patent).
Well, they often do the basic research now, before selling the results to companies The problem is the very expensive development - the clinical trials, and all that. We'd be in the position of having colleges do all that, but it's really not what they're set up for. And of course the gov. would have to subsidize it.
And look at it this way too - let's say we have the government spend $100M per drug developed (even if academics do it, the gov pays). Now companies come in and take the result and sell it on the cheap. Basically, what we've just said is "Hello, Merck, Phizer. Would you like the US government to take over your R&D? Oh, we'll do it for free." Seems like the US taxpayer gets screwed (at least, more directly than he is now). Also realize that since drugs are used internationally, we'd basically be doing free R&D for the entire world, where even rich European nations would be able to take our results - unless the patent-free zone applied domestically only.
At the end of the day, it's a problem of game theory. Assuming all people do what's in their best interests (which doesn't always apply, but still), drug development will basically stop without patents, or under your case the US taxpayer ends up footing the bill for worldwide drug development, which we can't realistically do.
All patents need to be abolished. They do nothing but hold back progress.
Sure hippie. Just as soon as you explain to me how, without patents, a drug company would invest $100M in R&D for a drug that will take comptetitors $1M to copy, driving the price down to the point that they never recover their initial investment. And if your answer is "the government will do it!" look at the fantastic job they do running US public schools.
Patents are a necessary part of scientific development. Doesn't mean I'll defend the current system, but pretty much any scientist will admit that some form of patent protection is abolutely necessary for many forms of research. This is particularly true for fields in which the barrier to market entry is low compared to the one-time research required to invent a product - like drug development.
People are immediatly shouting "prior art!" I don't care about prior art as much as I care about the fact that it's another software patent and unworthy of being patented.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument why Babbage's engine, which uses physical mechanical gears to implement an algorithm, is inherently more patentable than the same algorithm in software. How about if I use an FPGA instead? Is it patentable then?
I realize that software has seen more bad patents than it should, but that suggests that the system should be cleaned up, not tossed. And software patents aren't nearly as bad as the nebulous "business model" patents or "natural discovery" patents.
Note that the worst offender usually offered up as the problem child of software patents - "one-click" - was not a software patent, rather a business model patent.
And you overlook the fact that despite his hand-waving and joking statement, he ended up being more right than all those professionals and practicioners that have generally at least 7 years of medical to practioner based education. Oh, I guess if you call them professionals, they know what they are doing and are experts, right?
Had he made this statement BEFORE, and not AFTER the article came out, you might have a point. As it is, he's another guy who says 'oh, that's obvious' about research after it's done. And you missed my point that one could have said 'oh, that's obvious' in the other direction if it had turned out that the breathing part of CPR was critical.
You know shit about what goes on in medical education. Little has to do with coming up with new things; the profession is mainly about learning about learning mass of material (rote), and getting it beat into you to do what is the accepted since usually doing something outside the norm harms people (another form of rote). You want to know why doctors are suckers to the pharm salesrep? Because they are too stupid to do the analysis themselves.
Don't get me started, they're definitely idiots. I correctly diagnosed myself with a disease I'd had for 8 years without a doctor even getting close. However, the unwashed masses are even dumber. And while medical education is sad, occasionally decent research is done. The original CPR method saved lives, that's not arguable. And the new research may help save more. So I think your rant is OT.
btw, yes, I do assert. For one, I went to medical school. For two, they've been practicing CPR a certain way for years...and WERE WRONG
Scientists are wrong all the time, doesn't mean we stop doing science. And from the way you say you went to medical school, but don't say you're a doctor, I'm guessing you quit, so that doesn't make you the best source. What are you doing now? Doctor? Scientist? Pumping gas?
You really don't get it do you? All they freaking had to do was check oxygen levels on blood cycling to central organs and systems and compare to known physiological data for failure, for starters. Fact is, no one really bothered to check what was best, otherwise it would have been revealed earlier, not after decades. This is basic science. Several elements in CPR, the two main ones being breaths and compressions. What happens if you do one or the other? Damn people, even the basic science people should be pissed; at the very least, one or the other should have been some of the basic variables (or glorified control, depending on how you approach things) in the experiments (i.e. do nothing (control), flip to back only, flip to stomach, breaths only, compressions only, breaths to compressions, etc.).
You seem to be good at armchair research, but your skills on actual research seem questionable. How do you set up such a study? Do you have a set of 1000 dying people on hand who need resuscutation? For christ's sake, at least think this shit through. Research on dying people is kind of hard to do for some obvious ethical reasons.
Oh, and just wondering, why the hell are you so angry? Go get laid.
So if the person is still breathing but their heart has stopped, rescue breaths provide no benefit. DUH!
It's not that much of a 'duh'. The idea originally behind CPR is that you manually perform the action of the heart through the chest compressions, and that the chest compressions don't do much good without some fresh O2 in there. As such, one could ask what good CPR is without the breathing part?
The research basically just shows that circulating the remaining O2 in the blood and stimulating the heart muscle is much more valuable than stopping occasionally to ensure the air is fresh, but that's not a determination you could make with no education, experience, or actually performing the research.
If you're going to call 'duh', you're asserting thay you know more about medicine than the medical professionals who created it and have practiced it all these years. I don't think that's the case, and as is usually the case, the facts are more complicated than it seems to laypeople.
The police could produce video recordings, from either a police car or a statically mounted video camera. These are also pefectly good for proving speeding too.
Yup, I'm figuring that the cruisercam of some jackass texting while driving would be a good source of income for the local yokels. I'd hate to try it to prove speeding though, except for blatant cases. It'd really suck to have to explain trig to a jury.;)
Yes, but as long as police seem to be focused on easily provable violations like speed limits and tags expiring, somewhat nebulous laws like careless driving laws are just not going to be enforced. I'm not saying I agree with that, but it's the truth. If there is a specific law against using Blackberries, that makes for an easy conviction and you might be able to get police to get off their lazy duffs and enforce such a law. God forbid they have to show up in court and say "Yes," when the judge asks if the driver was driving carelessly. They'd much rather ticket something that you're not likely to go to court over.
It's not just laziness, it's resources. If the police accuse someone of reckless driving due to someone using a blackberry, first they have to prove that it happened, and they have to prove that it's reckless. That could encourage a large number of people ticketed on that basis to fight it, and the courts can't handle all that and it would basically require the cops to spend all their time in court supporting the ticket.
It makes sense to establish a general reckless driving statutes as well as specific things that are defined by the legislature as reckless. This way, all the cop needs to do is get a picture for a slam-dunk case that more than likely, doesn't get fought.
SUN will provide support for openoffice, at a price.
You don't get support for any other office suite for free either, you either have to pay for it and get support bundled, or you pay for it and then pay extra for support. At least openoffice is free, so those who don't want support don't need to pay anything.
Agreed, but it's simply not Dell's place to put unsupported software on their machines. Farming out the support isn't a great option for them either given their attempt to dispel the notion that they don't care enough about customer service. Put another way, why does Dell need to bundle it since OO is free and easy to install? If the answer involves people that wouldn't normally be able to find OO, these people will definitely need support, Dell won't be willing to farm it out, and in the end Dell has probably determined that it's more trouble than it's worth.
Why would Dell offer support for OpenOffice? Does Dell offer support for Microsoft Office? As far as I know, Microsoft provides the support for Microsoft Office, and I can't see why Dell would offer support for OpenOffice since they have nothing to do with its development.
Because they can't put it on the machines and tell customers who call up with questions "Sorry, we don't support this, and not only that, no one will." The really low-end beige box manufacturers can do that, but Dell can't.
Put another way: what is the phone number people can call with questions about Open Office? Help forums and news groups won't be acceptable answers to Dell's customer base.
That's actually not true. If Dell were to add an option on their website saying "OpenOffice $25", they would be allowed to charge the $25 to bundle OpenOffice with a Dell computer.
Technically true, but to bother supporting it they'd need a given threshold of their customers to choose it, and I'm guessing they don't think they will. Might also be afraid of the public backlash when some idiot consumer reporter at a TV station breaks the big story that Dell is charging customers for something they can download for free.
"On a slightly more serious note, no self respecting spy submarine will emit a ping to this service ever. There is no way you would want to give your position away so freely."
Not all submursibles are submarines. Think underwater research. And even submarines often operate in non-espionage missions; remember all the stories about sub sonar killing whales? This isn't the cold war anymore - most of our subs probably operate loud and proud most of the time.
Left vs Right is orthogonal from Libertarianism. Some of the most libertarian organisations are the most right wing. eg. the survivalists in USA.
I wouldn't say it's orthogonal - more like two vectors whose dot product varies wildly over time.;) The libertarians used to be almost 100% republican, but I think they're very disillusioned by today's party, but the Dems haven't really shifted to account for it and steal the votes, either.
For example, if I desaturate a photo I'm throwing away tons of color information. If that color information is still being written to the file, the file isn't as small as it could be.
Maybe, but if it gets rid of detail - which is the only way it would get markedly smaller when desaturating - is that what you really want to do? I think the idea isn't really related to compression, but of reversibility - I'm guessing that the color balance info is stored somewhere in the file along with some compressed (or not) version of the raw pixel info, with color levelling being done on the fly when viewing.
In any event, in situations you describe, JPG will still be around for you if it's what you want..
I did a similar thing - I'm fairly happy with what I make now, but I'd have gone into teaching for a few years if it meant that some of my loans went away.
A lot of states do have such plans. I was thinking even now, I'd be happy to do some weekend stuff if the schools had those sorts of programs.
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Well, Gore got more votes than the guy who got awarded the office; that's the counterintuitive bit.
It still feels like we got a president based on the rounding error that is the electoral college.
OT of course, but if you don't count the dead that voted, the same can be said of Kennedy and Nixon in '60.
That's not quite the right analogy. It's more like if you were deciding between Coke and Pepsi, and told both companies that you'd be selecting on the basis of taste. Suppose now that Pepsi's research shows that people strongly prefer Pepsi over Coke -- but you choose Coke anyway. That's sort of what's going on here.
I agree on your modification of the analogy - however, what seems to be missing here is that research.
That said, as I noted in my other post, I don't understand where the actual legal issue is in all this.
Based on their own words in hte article, it seems to be nothing more than a fishing expitition. I hope Mass. gets them for filing a claim with absolutely no evidence at all and smacks the shit out of them to the tune of lawyers' fees.
"You're not entitled to my money" is that lesson.
As long as you're OK not being entitled to their music. Support local indie bands, yada.
There is a lot of frustration among Democratic voters right now, about the crappy selection of presidential candidates. We felt like we got railroaded with Dukkakis in '88, and while Clinton was a pleasant surprise in '92, there was a lot of consternation about Lieberman in 2000 (and it should be clear by now, that Lieberman did more harm to Gore's campaign than Nader could ever dream to) - and Kerry in '04. Democratic voters feel their principles have been betrayed. That their party is beholden to monied special interests (especially the mafIAA). Is it any wonder that a stooge like Bush can win?
Never understood it myself. I'm independent, no party affiliation. I've watched with dismay in the last 10-15 years as the Republicans have crawled into bed with religious nutjobs. In response, the post-Clinton Democrats, rather than seizing the opportunity and crushing the Reps with a centrist candidate who could establish long-term dominance, have responded by throwing out a series of candidates who are more and more hard-line, shrill, and utterly unappealing to independent voters. They haven't put forth a coherent plan aside from their (rightful) disdain of Bush. They've tossed their support of the first amendment in their push to cozy up to the media companies (MAFIAA) and to be seen as more family values oriented (Gore/Lieberman/Hilary with their anti-violent music/games push). I think the growing tendency of the Democrat leadership toward condescending wanna-be intellectualism and truly venomous campaigning is really turning off a lot of the country, never mind the selling out.
Put another way, in the run-up to the 2004 election Bush was saddled by a 9/11 economy that had not fully recovered, a war we were by that point not winning, and no idea where Osama was. Even a remotely appealing candidate would have destroyed him. Who gets nominated? A condescending stereotypical Massachussets Democrat with a lot of baggage. Of course, he is destroyed in the red states by 20+ point margins and loses enough of the peripheral states (Ohio, Fla) that he loses. This, while Lieberman or Edwards probably would have beaten Bush. Lieberman probably takes Fla, Edwards probably a mix of SC, VA, NC, or OH, possibly others.
To more properly address your points, I'm not comfortable with Obama because he's an inexperienced ideologue, and I find that incredibly scary (I don't even want to ponder the fate of Universal Health Care in this country). Hilary has experience, but I have no idea what she'll do when president because the only thing she seems to stand for is her own self-aggrandizement. I assume it's a two-dog race now, so no point discussing the also rans.
As an independent, *I* feel betrayed, because I'd like one party to have the sense to go more centrist. Don't much care which party.
Regarding Dem presidential candidates, I completely agree with you - the Dems haven't come up with a truly appealing candidate that they actually planned to run since, what, Kennedy? LBJ was an accident, Carter won because he wasn't Nixon/Ford, and the frontrunners like Cuomo bailed in early '92 when Bush I had a 90% approval rating, leaving the surprising win to Bill.
Anyone remember when a worker would just go in, get hired by a company, and work for them? Now it seems like everything but the most professional jobs are getting outsourced either oversees or to temp, staffing services, and contractor agencies. How many people here still work for companies where the secretaries and janitors (sorry, don't have the inclination to use the newer politically-correct terms) actually are full-time, fully-vested, non-contracted company employees? I'm praying there are are least a few of you who do.
In part, you can thank the well-meaning labor laws passed in the last 30 years that
1) basically make it damn near impossible for an employee to fire anyone for cause, and
2) put the burden of the government's failed social programs onto employers
In addition:
3) It's much easier for managers to hide financials from upper management and board of directors when using contractors, salaries are hard to hide.
4) It's a popular way of doing 'try before you buy' - companies don't want to be stuck practically forever with an underperforming employee, so they want you to do contractor or temp status for a few months before signing you on as an employee.
For good or bad, there are a lot of reasons companies use contractors. And as you're seeing here, it's not limited to the low end of the totem pole - I've seen six-figure contracting jobs (and been offered some). Personally, I'm not interested in that sort of thing. Especially when any relocation is involved - no way I'm moving across the damned country for a 3-month tryout.
Thats why they have Amicus curiae briefs. If Google just wanted to help YouTube defend themselves, they could have filed such a brief for much less than the 1.6 billion (or whatever it was) they spent on YouTube. Or if they really wanted to take an active role in the lawsuit, they could have waited for it to be filed and then bail out YouTube for much less money. Though its questionable whether or not they would have ever been sued in the first place had YouTube not been bought by someone who could pay up.
As mentioned, that runs the risk that 'Tube cuts a sweetheart deal with the labels before Google can do it. As it stands, I'd have to imagine the spectre of a lawsuit was included in the YouTube purchase price; it's not like you needed a crystal ball to see this coming. So I'm sure Google knew what they were getting into.
No one in their right mind wants to ride in a Hummer...the ride is for crap. And no one in the US can fit in a Prius. THey are made for skinny people, and we Americans are fat.
Speak for yourself, lardass. My skinny American ass drives a Prius.
I agree with a lot of that. One thing I've always thought is that the patent length should vary somehow by field, simply because the pace of development is different. 7 years isn't that long in drug development, that's maybe one development cycle, but that's probably about 3 software development cycles.
Well, that $100 million is very small compared to how much the pharmaceutical companies spend on advertising. So it doesn't seem as important to them.
Both the marketing and R&D are dependent on maintaining a relatively high market price. Naturally, if they didn't have the patent protection, they wouldn't spend the huge marketing budget either. This is why, for example, you don't typically see drugs advertised after they go generic. There are exceptions (Tylenol, Advil) which are able to maintain strong brand loyalty, but they originally achieved this during a period of patent protection. Still, the marketing budget for these drugs plummet after they go generic.
A better system for pharmaceutical companies would be for them to be able to protect their formulations by trade secret for a certain period of time, say 5 years or so. The only entity that needs to know about the formulations would be the FDA for safety approval during the 5 year protection period. After the 5 year protection period, the pharmaceutical company releases the formulation to the public domain so that generics can be made.
Well, speaking as a chemist, I can tell you for sure that it would take a chemistry graduate student under a day to reverse engineer the trade secret formulation. That's the basic problem, no market barrier, no technological barrier after the original research and development. So the only remaining remedy is actual market protection (ie, patent).
Serious question: How well would academia do?
Well, they often do the basic research now, before selling the results to companies The problem is the very expensive development - the clinical trials, and all that. We'd be in the position of having colleges do all that, but it's really not what they're set up for. And of course the gov. would have to subsidize it.
And look at it this way too - let's say we have the government spend $100M per drug developed (even if academics do it, the gov pays). Now companies come in and take the result and sell it on the cheap. Basically, what we've just said is "Hello, Merck, Phizer. Would you like the US government to take over your R&D? Oh, we'll do it for free." Seems like the US taxpayer gets screwed (at least, more directly than he is now). Also realize that since drugs are used internationally, we'd basically be doing free R&D for the entire world, where even rich European nations would be able to take our results - unless the patent-free zone applied domestically only.
At the end of the day, it's a problem of game theory. Assuming all people do what's in their best interests (which doesn't always apply, but still), drug development will basically stop without patents, or under your case the US taxpayer ends up footing the bill for worldwide drug development, which we can't realistically do.
All patents need to be abolished. They do nothing but hold back progress.
Sure hippie. Just as soon as you explain to me how, without patents, a drug company would invest $100M in R&D for a drug that will take comptetitors $1M to copy, driving the price down to the point that they never recover their initial investment. And if your answer is "the government will do it!" look at the fantastic job they do running US public schools.
Patents are a necessary part of scientific development. Doesn't mean I'll defend the current system, but pretty much any scientist will admit that some form of patent protection is abolutely necessary for many forms of research. This is particularly true for fields in which the barrier to market entry is low compared to the one-time research required to invent a product - like drug development.
People are immediatly shouting "prior art!" I don't care about prior art as much as I care about the fact that it's another software patent and unworthy of being patented.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument why Babbage's engine, which uses physical mechanical gears to implement an algorithm, is inherently more patentable than the same algorithm in software. How about if I use an FPGA instead? Is it patentable then?
I realize that software has seen more bad patents than it should, but that suggests that the system should be cleaned up, not tossed. And software patents aren't nearly as bad as the nebulous "business model" patents or "natural discovery" patents.
Note that the worst offender usually offered up as the problem child of software patents - "one-click" - was not a software patent, rather a business model patent.
And you overlook the fact that despite his hand-waving and joking statement, he ended up being more right than all those professionals and practicioners that have generally at least 7 years of medical to practioner based education. Oh, I guess if you call them professionals, they know what they are doing and are experts, right?
Had he made this statement BEFORE, and not AFTER the article came out, you might have a point. As it is, he's another guy who says 'oh, that's obvious' about research after it's done. And you missed my point that one could have said 'oh, that's obvious' in the other direction if it had turned out that the breathing part of CPR was critical.
You know shit about what goes on in medical education. Little has to do with coming up with new things; the profession is mainly about learning about learning mass of material (rote), and getting it beat into you to do what is the accepted since usually doing something outside the norm harms people (another form of rote). You want to know why doctors are suckers to the pharm salesrep? Because they are too stupid to do the analysis themselves.
Don't get me started, they're definitely idiots. I correctly diagnosed myself with a disease I'd had for 8 years without a doctor even getting close. However, the unwashed masses are even dumber. And while medical education is sad, occasionally decent research is done. The original CPR method saved lives, that's not arguable. And the new research may help save more. So I think your rant is OT.
btw, yes, I do assert. For one, I went to medical school. For two, they've been practicing CPR a certain way for years...and WERE WRONG
Scientists are wrong all the time, doesn't mean we stop doing science. And from the way you say you went to medical school, but don't say you're a doctor, I'm guessing you quit, so that doesn't make you the best source. What are you doing now? Doctor? Scientist? Pumping gas?
You really don't get it do you? All they freaking had to do was check oxygen levels on blood cycling to central organs and systems and compare to known physiological data for failure, for starters. Fact is, no one really bothered to check what was best, otherwise it would have been revealed earlier, not after decades. This is basic science. Several elements in CPR, the two main ones being breaths and compressions. What happens if you do one or the other? Damn people, even the basic science people should be pissed; at the very least, one or the other should have been some of the basic variables (or glorified control, depending on how you approach things) in the experiments (i.e. do nothing (control), flip to back only, flip to stomach, breaths only, compressions only, breaths to compressions, etc.).
You seem to be good at armchair research, but your skills on actual research seem questionable. How do you set up such a study? Do you have a set of 1000 dying people on hand who need resuscutation? For christ's sake, at least think this shit through. Research on dying people is kind of hard to do for some obvious ethical reasons.
Oh, and just wondering, why the hell are you so angry? Go get laid.
So if the person is still breathing but their heart has stopped, rescue breaths provide no benefit. DUH!
It's not that much of a 'duh'. The idea originally behind CPR is that you manually perform the action of the heart through the chest compressions, and that the chest compressions don't do much good without some fresh O2 in there. As such, one could ask what good CPR is without the breathing part?
The research basically just shows that circulating the remaining O2 in the blood and stimulating the heart muscle is much more valuable than stopping occasionally to ensure the air is fresh, but that's not a determination you could make with no education, experience, or actually performing the research.
If you're going to call 'duh', you're asserting thay you know more about medicine than the medical professionals who created it and have practiced it all these years. I don't think that's the case, and as is usually the case, the facts are more complicated than it seems to laypeople.
The police could produce video recordings, from either a police car or a statically mounted video camera. These are also pefectly good for proving speeding too.
Yup, I'm figuring that the cruisercam of some jackass texting while driving would be a good source of income for the local yokels. I'd hate to try it to prove speeding though, except for blatant cases. It'd really suck to have to explain trig to a jury. ;)
I was wondering where my tidy-whities went...
It's 'tighty'. Those things definitely aren't 'tidy' after you leave that nice racing stripe in them.
Yes, but as long as police seem to be focused on easily provable violations like speed limits and tags expiring, somewhat nebulous laws like careless driving laws are just not going to be enforced. I'm not saying I agree with that, but it's the truth. If there is a specific law against using Blackberries, that makes for an easy conviction and you might be able to get police to get off their lazy duffs and enforce such a law. God forbid they have to show up in court and say "Yes," when the judge asks if the driver was driving carelessly. They'd much rather ticket something that you're not likely to go to court over.
It's not just laziness, it's resources. If the police accuse someone of reckless driving due to someone using a blackberry, first they have to prove that it happened, and they have to prove that it's reckless. That could encourage a large number of people ticketed on that basis to fight it, and the courts can't handle all that and it would basically require the cops to spend all their time in court supporting the ticket.
It makes sense to establish a general reckless driving statutes as well as specific things that are defined by the legislature as reckless. This way, all the cop needs to do is get a picture for a slam-dunk case that more than likely, doesn't get fought.
SUN will provide support for openoffice, at a price. You don't get support for any other office suite for free either, you either have to pay for it and get support bundled, or you pay for it and then pay extra for support. At least openoffice is free, so those who don't want support don't need to pay anything.
Agreed, but it's simply not Dell's place to put unsupported software on their machines. Farming out the support isn't a great option for them either given their attempt to dispel the notion that they don't care enough about customer service. Put another way, why does Dell need to bundle it since OO is free and easy to install? If the answer involves people that wouldn't normally be able to find OO, these people will definitely need support, Dell won't be willing to farm it out, and in the end Dell has probably determined that it's more trouble than it's worth.
Why would Dell offer support for OpenOffice? Does Dell offer support for Microsoft Office? As far as I know, Microsoft provides the support for Microsoft Office, and I can't see why Dell would offer support for OpenOffice since they have nothing to do with its development.
Because they can't put it on the machines and tell customers who call up with questions "Sorry, we don't support this, and not only that, no one will." The really low-end beige box manufacturers can do that, but Dell can't.
Put another way: what is the phone number people can call with questions about Open Office? Help forums and news groups won't be acceptable answers to Dell's customer base.
That's actually not true. If Dell were to add an option on their website saying "OpenOffice $25", they would be allowed to charge the $25 to bundle OpenOffice with a Dell computer.
Technically true, but to bother supporting it they'd need a given threshold of their customers to choose it, and I'm guessing they don't think they will. Might also be afraid of the public backlash when some idiot consumer reporter at a TV station breaks the big story that Dell is charging customers for something they can download for free.
"On a slightly more serious note, no self respecting spy submarine will emit a ping to this service ever. There is no way you would want to give your position away so freely." Not all submursibles are submarines. Think underwater research. And even submarines often operate in non-espionage missions; remember all the stories about sub sonar killing whales? This isn't the cold war anymore - most of our subs probably operate loud and proud most of the time.
Left vs Right is orthogonal from Libertarianism. Some of the most libertarian organisations are the most right wing. eg. the survivalists in USA.
I wouldn't say it's orthogonal - more like two vectors whose dot product varies wildly over time. ;) The libertarians used to be almost 100% republican, but I think they're very disillusioned by today's party, but the Dems haven't really shifted to account for it and steal the votes, either.
Come on, don't post shit that funny as AC.
For example, if I desaturate a photo I'm throwing away tons of color information. If that color information is still being written to the file, the file isn't as small as it could be.
Maybe, but if it gets rid of detail - which is the only way it would get markedly smaller when desaturating - is that what you really want to do? I think the idea isn't really related to compression, but of reversibility - I'm guessing that the color balance info is stored somewhere in the file along with some compressed (or not) version of the raw pixel info, with color levelling being done on the fly when viewing.
In any event, in situations you describe, JPG will still be around for you if it's what you want..
I did a similar thing - I'm fairly happy with what I make now, but I'd have gone into teaching for a few years if it meant that some of my loans went away.
A lot of states do have such plans. I was thinking even now, I'd be happy to do some weekend stuff if the schools had those sorts of programs.