One problem with the substance is that the doses in which it's effective are so close to the doses in which it's toxic, as mentioned.
The other problem is that you can take a fatal overdose, and you'll be fine for three days. Then you die very horribly indeed.
A lot of the time a suicide attempt is the proverbial "cry for help". Someone overdosing on acetaminophen might take their overdose and fall asleep in a tearful puddle, feel emotionally purged and a lot better in the morning. And then discover a few days later that they are the walking dead.
Most other drugs have the virtue of making you feel ill enough to seek (or attract) medical attention. Some of them you can just literally "sleep off", with enough support.
That said, it's an excellent drug. Safe, when taken as prescribed, very few side effects, and effective, as evidenced by the enormous number of combination preparations containing it - it reduces the overall dose of opiates that need to be taken and that's a good thing.
The downside of this profligate mixing with other drugs of course, is that if you're not 100% clued up on which preparations you are taking, you might take an overdose.
I'm an ex-doctor. I had no idea that Vicodin contained it until I read TFS. I've never prescribed the stuff though. If I was living in blissful ignorance every time Greg House popped a little blue pill, imagine what the general level of knowledge is amongst Joe Public.
The tinfoil-hatted part of me thinks that they only mix acetaminophen with opiates to stop junkies abusing them anyway. Who'd be stupid enough to take a fatal overdose of something that doesn't even get you high... oh , wait, the general public, after we spent so much time and effort dumbing them down...
On a wider scale, the problem with economic immigration is that it effectively gives the employers a labour pool the size of the EU.
Why is this a problem? For the employers, it's great. For the employees, it's not good, because it drives down wages and the level of acceptable working conditions.
The effect of economic growth should be to improve the lot of the workers, not effectively lower it to the base level of misery throughout the EU.
Manufacturing jobs were globalized and they end up poorly paid in poor conditions. Employers for jobs where the workers have to be on-site in the affluent nations, like construction would LOVE it if they could accept economic migrants from, say, China.
The xenophobia is part of the emotional response, but it's not healthy to present it in such terms.
I'm not saying that the BNP doesn't have a lot of xenophobic gits in it. It does seem to. And I'd never vote for them.
The parent poster is also right that the overprivileged attitude of modern Britons is a problem.
Re:Consultants with no incentive to deliver
on
IT and Health Care
·
· Score: 1
I work directly for the NHS in the department concerned and I rewrote the tools for this team recently ; I can't speak for the costs of content production, but the development model for their updated tool set was by necessity an agile one ; it was just me working on the project, and the requirements were somewhat hazy as they'd been swallowed in the sourcecode of the abomination that preceded it (which was produced by a consultancy).
I found the project far more satisfying and productive than the typical project which is overweighed with meetings to determine requirements and specifications. The requirements were ; do what the old tools do, but better. I physically sat amongst the users and coded to their responses to ongoing builds (in addition to the mandatory meeting quota).
I can report that ;
I saved the NHS a sum greater than my salary in software licensing and ongoing support contracts, mostly by replacing components with FOSS software where applicable.
Subjectively, the tools are far more productive and of higher quality than the old version, with start times, content build times and edit speed all greatly improved, by at least an order of magnitude in the majority of cases.
Several reasonably significant patches were contributed to aforementioned FOSS projects directly as a result of this project.
I take much less than £2000 a day (alas).
The content is another matter, but in terms of the tooling, hopefully the experience will help a more agile and user-focussed approach to penetrate the NHS IT programme.
Re:NHS IT: last year's hardware at next year's pri
on
IT and Health Care
·
· Score: 1
Indeed. I work for the NHS IT programme, and in a meeting yesterday I remarked that system designers want to make trains, when what users want is helicopters.
Trains must follow a particular route and pass through a particular set of stations for that route.
Helicopters can fly where they need to and land wherever they want to.
One of the major problems is that government is stuck in the dark ages of software process, where the requirements have to be carved in stone by as many meetings as possible before implementation begins in earnest. The only successful projects I've worked on are the ones that followed a more agile pattern and delivered software early and often to clients for feedback loops to occur.
Hell, the UK government invented the abomination that is PRINCE2
Or you can get 39.974 mpg (I converted Imperial gallons into American ones to arrive at this figure, the original is 53.3 miles per imperial gallon), from 95 horsepower, and that's without all the hybrid nonsense. Top speed of 115mph.
That's for a Mini One, of course. Costs under $20,000, so for the price of a Cadillac Escalade ($63,155 for a 403 horsepower 6.2L V8 engine), you can have three of them (dare I say, a red one, a white one, and a blue one?), and still enough left over for a really bitchin' home entertainment system.
I can honestly say that I've never seen an SUV being operated "at capacity". Most of the time, the sole occupant is the driver, the back seats are empty (and are usually pristine), the cargo space is empty. My family of four did just fine with saloon cars, even to go on camping holidays. If you really need to haul a few hundred pound of gear on occasion, buy a trailer.
The real reason the SUV is popular is, of course, because they enjoy a tax subsidy intended for commercial trucks.
The sad thing was the transition to Graffiti 2, after Xerox sued them. The suit was overturned eventually, but they never had an official way to go back to Graffiti 1, you had to do some dodgy patching.
My entire compressed music collection fits in 11GB. It's not a large collection, granted. Let's say it's half the size of the average one, and round up to the nearest USB Flash drive, 32GB.
32GB flash drives start at about £45 here. Since I always work at a computer, this, plus a 1GB player that I've had for years, is more than enough. Much cheaper than a 32GB iPod touch at £400, reliable, shockproof, waterproof, portable, and most importantly, not subject to disconnection at the whim of any number of entities with an interest in tapping my income stream.
I know my sister types significantly faster with Dvorak than Qwerty; she wasn't terribly fast at Qwerty at the time, nowadays she uses Qwerty about 30% of the time and Dvorak 70% at the time and is at about ~100 WPM on Dvorak but 60 WPM on Qwerty.
It's probably due more to concerted effort to learn to type than it is to the keyboard layout. That and practice. Practice is the key performance indicator for most skills ; they surveyed violin "prodigies" and the common factor amongst all of them was tens of thousands of hours of practice.
So, yes, if you type more on dvorak you'll be faster than you are on qwerty.
All contributions are significant, code, documentation, etc. Even a good bug report or feature request is valuable.
If you've patched the software in a way that other would find useful it's also the smart thing to do. If you get your patch upstream, you no longer have to worry about managing the version control and custom builds of a component that you can now just download from the project site.
My entire vim install folder : 21MB, including docs
Memory eaten by vim on loading - 8.6MB Memory eaten by WINWORD.exe - well, it started at 17MB. All I did was let it sit there for a couple of minutes, and close the help browser, now it's eaten 20.3MB. Typed "Hello There", and it goes up to 21.4MB.
Memory consumed by vim for "Hello There" - 76 KB. Winword - 1.1MB
Hell, Word uses as much memory as vim does to load, just to save the file to Hello There.doc
They don't try to seclude followers from their families, either.
Yes they do. They just don't send in the attack lawyers.
My wife's vicar told her she shouldn't be marrying an atheist, which very nearly ended our relationship, partially because she took him seriously, and partially because I was so angry that she took him seriously.
In retrospect, it would have been a good time to leave.
If the owner was complying with the Windows EULA, the license sticker was firmly applied to the computer, so he only needs a install disk ; the serial number is already there.
Maybe they would ; after all, if cheap OSXmachines were available, they'd eat into the Windows market share. I'm sure enough people realise that a few nice design quirks aside, the only really important part of the computer is the software it runs.
The expansion in human lifespan is overwhelmingly due to a few things
* Improved nutrition
This is mostly because our enormously productive agriculture produces all the food we need, and a large variety of food. People do not routinely starve or have malnutrition in Western cultures.
* Improved sanitation
Washing with soap and good sewerage account for the most of this. People don't die in droves of cholera and a whole spectrum of other communicable diseases you get from bad water and dirty environments.
* Vaccination
'nuff said. The current counterculture of people who encourage people to avoid vaccination because of some ephemeral unproven idea that it causes autism makes me sick - these people are probably responsible for many more dead and maimed children than the entire world incidence of autism.
Manufactured food seems likely to be the main contributor to the most fashionable Western plague of the 21st century ; obesity (and those conditions that follow from it). It's much harder to eat the same number of calories when it's composed of raw foodstuffs, unless you're eating whale blubber.
giving someone soda that has no calories can be like telling them they don't have to sacrifice.
This, to me, is the essential problem with consumer culture ; the advertisers insistence that "You can have it all! At negligible personal cost!", hence products like Olestra, that lets you eat fatty food with no fat calories (at the cost of greasy anal leakage, niiiiice).
For many of the things that are finest, the cost is part of what makes them worthwhile ; I love my prowess with code, partly because of how hard won it was (and partly because it's still gosh-darned cool to make a computer do exactly what you told it to). I love my home-baked bread, because I made it. And I love my daughter not just because she's my daughter, but for the person she is - and she wouldn't be that person without a lot of damn hard work by both her parents.
Drinks? I stick to plain tea and coffee for stimulants, and water or watered fruit juice to quench my thirst. If I'm feeling expansive I'll dilute the juice with soda water. And I probably spend what I saved on soda on a good beer a few times a week.
Not the case ; the eBooks in question are probably encrypted and signed which means they can be identified unambiguously. So all you need is a "block list" of SHA-1 hashes of which eBooks a particular feature is disabled for. Since hashes are 128-bit numbers (16 bytes) you can have relatively large lists without consuming too much memory, and update them quickly over the cellular connection in the Kindle, so you could easily disable any feature for which the firmware has a stop-flag provision, for any book, at any time, on update.
Slashdot Mirror
One problem with the substance is that the doses in which it's effective are so close to the doses in which it's toxic, as mentioned.
The other problem is that you can take a fatal overdose, and you'll be fine for three days. Then you die very horribly indeed.
A lot of the time a suicide attempt is the proverbial "cry for help". Someone overdosing on acetaminophen might take their overdose and fall asleep in a tearful puddle, feel emotionally purged and a lot better in the morning. And then discover a few days later that they are the walking dead.
Most other drugs have the virtue of making you feel ill enough to seek (or attract) medical attention. Some of them you can just literally "sleep off", with enough support.
That said, it's an excellent drug. Safe, when taken as prescribed, very few side effects, and effective, as evidenced by the enormous number of combination preparations containing it - it reduces the overall dose of opiates that need to be taken and that's a good thing.
The downside of this profligate mixing with other drugs of course, is that if you're not 100% clued up on which preparations you are taking, you might take an overdose.
I'm an ex-doctor. I had no idea that Vicodin contained it until I read TFS. I've never prescribed the stuff though. If I was living in blissful ignorance every time Greg House popped a little blue pill, imagine what the general level of knowledge is amongst Joe Public.
The tinfoil-hatted part of me thinks that they only mix acetaminophen with opiates to stop junkies abusing them anyway. Who'd be stupid enough to take a fatal overdose of something that doesn't even get you high ... oh , wait, the general public, after we spent so much time and effort dumbing them down...
You just won the prize for being the person who explained it most succinctly without using exponents.
On a wider scale, the problem with economic immigration is that it effectively gives the employers a labour pool the size of the EU.
Why is this a problem? For the employers, it's great. For the employees, it's not good, because it drives down wages and the level of acceptable working conditions.
The effect of economic growth should be to improve the lot of the workers, not effectively lower it to the base level of misery throughout the EU.
Manufacturing jobs were globalized and they end up poorly paid in poor conditions. Employers for jobs where the workers have to be on-site in the affluent nations, like construction would LOVE it if they could accept economic migrants from, say, China.
The xenophobia is part of the emotional response, but it's not healthy to present it in such terms.
I'm not saying that the BNP doesn't have a lot of xenophobic gits in it. It does seem to. And I'd never vote for them.
The parent poster is also right that the overprivileged attitude of modern Britons is a problem.
I work directly for the NHS in the department concerned and I rewrote the tools for this team recently ; I can't speak for the costs of content production, but the development model for their updated tool set was by necessity an agile one ; it was just me working on the project, and the requirements were somewhat hazy as they'd been swallowed in the sourcecode of the abomination that preceded it (which was produced by a consultancy).
I found the project far more satisfying and productive than the typical project which is overweighed with meetings to determine requirements and specifications. The requirements were ; do what the old tools do, but better. I physically sat amongst the users and coded to their responses to ongoing builds (in addition to the mandatory meeting quota).
I can report that ;
The content is another matter, but in terms of the tooling, hopefully the experience will help a more agile and user-focussed approach to penetrate the NHS IT programme.
Indeed. I work for the NHS IT programme, and in a meeting yesterday I remarked that system designers want to make trains, when what users want is helicopters.
Trains must follow a particular route and pass through a particular set of stations for that route.
Helicopters can fly where they need to and land wherever they want to.
One of the major problems is that government is stuck in the dark ages of software process, where the requirements have to be carved in stone by as many meetings as possible before implementation begins in earnest. The only successful projects I've worked on are the ones that followed a more agile pattern and delivered software early and often to clients for feedback loops to occur.
Hell, the UK government invented the abomination that is PRINCE2
No, no, no.
Removing the letters from the caps just lets people know that something is out of the ordinary.
You use Dvorak, with the caps still on, as QWERTY.
Isn't this against the Fifth Amendment? In that you can't be compelled to incriminate yourself?
Darn, it isn't. These people are not being compelled to testify at a legal proceeding. Or are they?
Or you can get 39.974 mpg (I converted Imperial gallons into American ones to arrive at this figure, the original is 53.3 miles per imperial gallon), from 95 horsepower, and that's without all the hybrid nonsense. Top speed of 115mph.
That's for a Mini One, of course. Costs under $20,000, so for the price of a Cadillac Escalade ($63,155 for a 403 horsepower 6.2L V8 engine), you can have three of them (dare I say, a red one, a white one, and a blue one?), and still enough left over for a really bitchin' home entertainment system.
I can honestly say that I've never seen an SUV being operated "at capacity". Most of the time, the sole occupant is the driver, the back seats are empty (and are usually pristine), the cargo space is empty. My family of four did just fine with saloon cars, even to go on camping holidays. If you really need to haul a few hundred pound of gear on occasion, buy a trailer.
The real reason the SUV is popular is, of course, because they enjoy a tax subsidy intended for commercial trucks.
It is shocking.
Firstly, because it's basically a way around the bans on testing fusion weapons.
Secondly, because it's a really expensive way around the bans on testing fusion weapons. Multi-billion-dollar expensive.
Thirdly, because they like to pretend it has some relevance to civilian energy generation to help justify it.
And in The Future...
#1 "You mean you have to use your hands?"
#2 "That's like a baby's toy!"
The sad thing was the transition to Graffiti 2, after Xerox sued them. The suit was overturned eventually, but they never had an official way to go back to Graffiti 1, you had to do some dodgy patching.
My entire compressed music collection fits in 11GB. It's not a large collection, granted. Let's say it's half the size of the average one, and round up to the nearest USB Flash drive, 32GB.
32GB flash drives start at about £45 here. Since I always work at a computer, this, plus a 1GB player that I've had for years, is more than enough. Much cheaper than a 32GB iPod touch at £400, reliable, shockproof, waterproof, portable, and most importantly, not subject to disconnection at the whim of any number of entities with an interest in tapping my income stream.
It's not voltage that kills things, it's current. How you do you suppose non-cybernetic birds survive the experience?
You could probably leech some power from high-voltage AC lines with an induction loop, a rectifier, and a big-assed resistor.
Sometimes less, is more.
I know my sister types significantly faster with Dvorak than Qwerty; she wasn't terribly fast at Qwerty at the time, nowadays she uses Qwerty about 30% of the time and Dvorak 70% at the time and is at about ~100 WPM on Dvorak but 60 WPM on Qwerty.
It's probably due more to concerted effort to learn to type than it is to the keyboard layout. That and practice. Practice is the key performance indicator for most skills ; they surveyed violin "prodigies" and the common factor amongst all of them was tens of thousands of hours of practice.
So, yes, if you type more on dvorak you'll be faster than you are on qwerty.
All contributions are significant, code, documentation, etc. Even a good bug report or feature request is valuable.
If you've patched the software in a way that other would find useful it's also the smart thing to do. If you get your patch upstream, you no longer have to worry about managing the version control and custom builds of a component that you can now just download from the project site.
Heavy is a relative term, of course.
My entire vim install folder : 21MB, including docs
Memory eaten by vim on loading - 8.6MB
Memory eaten by WINWORD.exe - well, it started at 17MB. All I did was let it sit there for a couple of minutes, and close the help browser, now it's eaten 20.3MB. Typed "Hello There", and it goes up to 21.4MB.
Memory consumed by vim for "Hello There" - 76 KB. Winword - 1.1MB
Hell, Word uses as much memory as vim does to load, just to save the file to Hello There.doc
They don't try to seclude followers from their families, either.
Yes they do. They just don't send in the attack lawyers.
My wife's vicar told her she shouldn't be marrying an atheist, which very nearly ended our relationship, partially because she took him seriously, and partially because I was so angry that she took him seriously.
In retrospect, it would have been a good time to leave.
If the owner was complying with the Windows EULA, the license sticker was firmly applied to the computer, so he only needs a install disk ; the serial number is already there.
Maybe they would ; after all, if cheap OSXmachines were available, they'd eat into the Windows market share. I'm sure enough people realise that a few nice design quirks aside, the only really important part of the computer is the software it runs.
Hence the use of .... shims. Things like the nvidia graphics driver have shims that get compiled to make the driver compatible with the kernel.
Having the source for your app is much better though, as you just so ably demonstrated.
The expansion in human lifespan is overwhelmingly due to a few things
* Improved nutrition
This is mostly because our enormously productive agriculture produces all the food we need, and a large variety of food. People do not routinely starve or have malnutrition in Western cultures.
* Improved sanitation
Washing with soap and good sewerage account for the most of this. People don't die in droves of cholera and a whole spectrum of other communicable diseases you get from bad water and dirty environments.
* Vaccination
'nuff said. The current counterculture of people who encourage people to avoid vaccination because of some ephemeral unproven idea that it causes autism makes me sick - these people are probably responsible for many more dead and maimed children than the entire world incidence of autism.
Manufactured food seems likely to be the main contributor to the most fashionable Western plague of the 21st century ; obesity (and those conditions that follow from it). It's much harder to eat the same number of calories when it's composed of raw foodstuffs, unless you're eating whale blubber.
giving someone soda that has no calories can be like telling them they don't have to sacrifice.
This, to me, is the essential problem with consumer culture ; the advertisers insistence that "You can have it all! At negligible personal cost!", hence products like Olestra, that lets you eat fatty food with no fat calories (at the cost of greasy anal leakage, niiiiice).
For many of the things that are finest, the cost is part of what makes them worthwhile ; I love my prowess with code, partly because of how hard won it was (and partly because it's still gosh-darned cool to make a computer do exactly what you told it to). I love my home-baked bread, because I made it. And I love my daughter not just because she's my daughter, but for the person she is - and she wouldn't be that person without a lot of damn hard work by both her parents.
Drinks? I stick to plain tea and coffee for stimulants, and water or watered fruit juice to quench my thirst. If I'm feeling expansive I'll dilute the juice with soda water. And I probably spend what I saved on soda on a good beer a few times a week.
aspartame is either harmless or barely measurably harmful
It still tastes disgusting and makes your saliva also taste disgusting for some hours after consuming it.
Mind you, HFCS isn't very palatable either.
Not the case ; the eBooks in question are probably encrypted and signed which means they can be identified unambiguously. So all you need is a "block list" of SHA-1 hashes of which eBooks a particular feature is disabled for. Since hashes are 128-bit numbers (16 bytes) you can have relatively large lists without consuming too much memory, and update them quickly over the cellular connection in the Kindle, so you could easily disable any feature for which the firmware has a stop-flag provision, for any book, at any time, on update.