I am an epileptologist, and I would certainly love to see more effective anti-seizure drugs on the market. But although the newer anticonvulsants aren't necessarily better at stopping seizures than older ones (like the classic four: phenytoin, carbamazepine, phenobarbital, and valproic acid), they are better tolerated, have fewer severe adverse effects, have much more predictable serum concentrations, fewer drug-drug interactions, and require little to no routine bloodwork monitoring. For the 1% of the population suffering from epilepsy who have to take these drugs on a regular basis, this has been a significant change.
It was brave. It took guts. I wish he had just a little more bravery and a little more guts and as much oomph as it took when he held his only-a-little-powerful position. Because now he holds a no-powerful position, vis-a-vis the question at hand. People seeing the light only after they've led horrible organizations do not interest me all that much. Unless it's a prelude to leading a bigger, badder organization to undo the damage.
I am a neurologist. During training, an MMSE was basically a required component of a history and physical exam of any patient with cognitive complaints. It has its limits, but within them it is very useful.
It's pretty hard to believe that a collection of cognitive tests, almost all of which can be and are used separately in a more customized examination of the patient's sensorium, can be so creative as to be copyrighted.
The idea that the Sweet 16 could infringe because it contains "orienation" and "memory recall" items similar to the MMSE is absurd; questions about orientation and immediate/delayed recall are standard with or without the MMSE.
This is absolutely infuriating from a clinical perspective.
*Nods*. Right. My comment ought not to be construed as a statement along the lines of, "Screw the authors! Gimme!" It's just a goddamn shame that this hasn't been pulled off.
All I want--far, far more than Netflix or Rhapsody--is to be able to give somebody money on a monthly basis to have access to nearly every book in every library in the world. Just somebody make this easy. I don't want to have to think, "Is reading a chapter of this obscure work on Russian formalism worth $0.50?" I just want to fucking click on a link, and read it.
Been an Ubuntu fan for an awfully long time, and evangelized it onto the hard drive of several relatives and work colleagues. I fucking hate Unity. I'm running Natty right now on "Ubuntu Classic" mode to avoid it; and despite all the wonderful things Canonical has brought to desktop Linux, the silliness of this decision has me thinking of moving my main PC to another distro; I've got Fedora 15, Arch, Gentoo, and a few others waiting in the pipeline.
Reading about this, it occurred to me that there could be more safety in this area. I have worked in ICUs where the patient had two IVs, a central line, an arterial line, a lumbar drain, and an endotracheal tube: around the patient were crowded a mechanical ventilator, three IV poles equpped with IV pumps, a monitor, and a crash cart. The nurses were helped in this by, for instance, labeling each line with a small tag. Also, generally in ICUs nurses take care of two or three patients max for twelve hours at a time, meaning they can attain familiarity.
At the same time, it would take an awfully ingenious method to get most automated sphygmomanometer air lines hooked into an IV line. That's just completely stupid.
The most fun, absolutely wonderful things. You, the girls, and your wife. While her health will allow it. Take a trip, for instance. And don't make it all stressfull, and don't invest it with too much meaning. It's a fun jaunt, the whole family
Wasn't there an article here sometime lately about Android phones overtaking iPhones? Can't Google flip a switch and give millions and millions of smartphones WebM like that? (Imagine snapping sound.)
So what does "really secure" mean? What's acceptable--or more to it, what is an acceptable expenditure of capital, both in cash and in irritation?
What are the paragons of the "really secure"? People always reference Fort Knox. Is Fort Knox really secure? The gold depository indeed is very difficult to infiltrate, very difficult to steal from. But is it impossible? Or for that matter, would it be impossible to destroy or scatter? A small-scale nuclear weapon could sublimate the entire deposit. The security of Fort Knox makes it very unlikely it will be compromised, that's all. Just as a jail makes escape very improbable, the population squatting around it very unlikely to be accosted by inmates. But not impossible. There's no impossible except in mathematics and physics.
So how rare can we make attempts on air transport? Well, since 2001 there has not been a civilian death due to terrorism on commercial aircraft. There have been two noteworthy attempts, both foiled by a mixture of equipment malfunction, bomber incompetence, and fellow passenger vigilance. Most flight-safety wallahs will tell you disasters happen not because of a simple malfunction but because three, four, or five different systems all failed. The fail-safe, the redundant fail-safe, the alternate computer were all rendered useless. Terrorist attacks can happen when similar strings of failure happen in the security apparatus. You can make them rarer but at cost.
Already commercial flights are unflyable. The airlines' penny-pinching clamps down on checked baggage, so everyone tries to drag through as much carryon as they can, which is exactly what the TSA discourages. To get from one city to another by plane, I have to show ID, I have to forego anything as basic as a regular bottle of shampoo, toothpaste, or mouthwash. Forget razors. They've already figured out what infinitesimal space can accommodate 99% of passengers with less than 1% risk of DVT and press us in to fit. My wife can't even come through security to see me off.
What else can I give up? Perhaps I don't need luggage. Everyone can simply buy new clothes at the destination. Hotels will stock up on toiletries and surcharges. Everyone will doff their shoes in the terminal; airports will be like Japanese houses. Slippers on the plane and whatever you can scavenge at your destination. Go through metal detectors naked. Well, they've got machines that do that essentially anyway and they want to roll them out. Each person spends five minutes with a Bruce Willis look-alike who asks for aspirins and grills you about your destination. "Our records show you visited Aunt Millie just five months ago--what is your real agenda here!?" Special papers for transport. Each seat with seatbelts only releaseable by the captain or designated air marshal. Nothing bad could come of that. No more paper--paper cuts, you see. Tickets carried on USB drives with a USB fee added.
Just what would make you feel safer? "Really secure" can't happen with commercial air transport because there are too many people. Millions of people, every day, getting on and off planes. If you've got a couple billion dollars in gold locked up in one place, you can make it real secure. Esp. if you have a tank division nearby. If you're talking tens of thousands of flights and millions of people, day-in-day-out, it can't happen. Not without denying every single one of them basic human decency. A few attempts will get through, and will hopefully get foiled. The terrorist masterminds, who are always working on something to hit us where we least expect it, aren't likely to be targeting planes anyway. Their plans already worked, people are already terrified and cowed.
The worst thing is that horrible processes and institutions outlast their exigencies. TSA will be around doing the same or worse crap fifteen years after there are any credible threats to commercial air. A whole generation is ruined on air travel, and we're still not building anything else to compete. Trains, anyone? Fuck it, I'll just drive to Cali next time I'm bound there.
The Olivetti has worth because of its link to a physical product. I wouldn't value the PC or Mac of an author as much because it was only a general-purpose machine that happened to be used as a literary tool by virtue of the software on it. And I wouldn't pay anything for a decades-old binary image of Emacs. When writing on computer, the text becomes its own thing, it transcends the physical. In some ways, I dislike it because of that. I really enjoy the physical link with the text I get when writing with pen, when clacking on a manual typewriter, or otherwise. The advantages of text sublimated from the physical are great--better storage and search, versioning, editing, independent control of presentation, logical layout, etc. But it makes the tool used to make it less interesting, more mundane, more merely processing. The Olivetti, like my Pelikan, are precision tools purposely made for writing. In this way they become the paraphernalia of the writer, the adjutants of his talent. You pay for that connection. With stuff like this it's always the connection that's important. Beige boxes--even flashy Macs--don't have it.
In our resident clinic we look after people who typically don't look after themselves. We don't tell them to cut out fat and watch their cholesterol. But we are concerned after their hearts. A great percentage of them have at least three or four risk factors for heart disease: tobacco use, diabetes mellitus, high LDL levels, for starters. High-fat diets can increase LDL levels, as well as high-fructose diets, so cardiac patients are told to lower their fat content, although (and esp. in a resident clinic) in practice diet is rarely enough to get people to their goals for risk reduction. Eating habits can lead to disordered endocrine response, eg big insulin spikes, and over time can contribute to insulin resistance, so eating several square meals per day is helpful. Cardiovascular exercise is good for the heart, period. Already-lethargic cardiovascular systems don't cope as well with ischemic injury if a heart attack occurs.
So I don't know what we're telling people that's so wrong. Certainly, if all any of our patients ever come out of the exam room with is, "Eat less fat, exercise," we haven't done our jobs and we deserve castigation. But we spend time on this thing; preventive health is the most efficient health.
It's just another thing that some of the Linux community puts above having things Just Work(tm)
I understand it differently. The Linux community works because of the GPL. You can't have Linux without the GPL. So this philosophy thing, this breaking of stuff that Just Works, is in the name of keeping together a much bigger and important thing.
Web OSes, software-as-a-service, it all sucks. Why would enterprise software makers offer software-as-a-service? So they can have complete control over the software, completely lock it down, make you pay to lease it forever. I don't want my apps on some server somewhere I may sporadically fail to connect to, I don't want to send packets clear across North America just to read a fucking text file. And it's not like we've got some dire shortage of computing ability to force the centralization: my seven year-old computer has more than enough power and storage to do everything I need a computer to do.
Browsers suck for UI. They are made for viewing HTML, and any other purpose is strained at best. Why a crippled, slow Web OS through shitty UI when you have a modern, fully-optimized, local operating system already installed on your machine?
but it's a natural and necessary progression of the movement to clamp down on those who find the need to constantly communicate more important than the safety of their fellow travelers.
Why do they let people on the road who can't communicate and drive? That's the real problem. Get rid of them, and those of us who find the need to constantly communicate to be entirely compatible with not wrapping our cars around other cars would have a double benefit: safer and emptier streets.
Let Wikipedia run ads. Nice, unobtrusive, easily-blocked ads. Maybe someone will come along and write an article on the arcane subject of blocking them.
Slashdot Mirror
...ought not to be defined by the government against which it is wielded.
No, that would be a perilepidopterist!
I am an epileptologist, and I would certainly love to see more effective anti-seizure drugs on the market. But although the newer anticonvulsants aren't necessarily better at stopping seizures than older ones (like the classic four: phenytoin, carbamazepine, phenobarbital, and valproic acid), they are better tolerated, have fewer severe adverse effects, have much more predictable serum concentrations, fewer drug-drug interactions, and require little to no routine bloodwork monitoring. For the 1% of the population suffering from epilepsy who have to take these drugs on a regular basis, this has been a significant change.
Yeah, sure, okay.
It was brave. It took guts. I wish he had just a little more bravery and a little more guts and as much oomph as it took when he held his only-a-little-powerful position. Because now he holds a no-powerful position, vis-a-vis the question at hand. People seeing the light only after they've led horrible organizations do not interest me all that much. Unless it's a prelude to leading a bigger, badder organization to undo the damage.
Add Hawley to the list of people for whom wisdom (or the audacity to voice it) came too late in their careers to make any difference.
I am a neurologist. During training, an MMSE was basically a required component of a history and physical exam of any patient with cognitive complaints. It has its limits, but within them it is very useful.
It's pretty hard to believe that a collection of cognitive tests, almost all of which can be and are used separately in a more customized examination of the patient's sensorium, can be so creative as to be copyrighted.
The idea that the Sweet 16 could infringe because it contains "orienation" and "memory recall" items similar to the MMSE is absurd; questions about orientation and immediate/delayed recall are standard with or without the MMSE.
This is absolutely infuriating from a clinical perspective.
*Nods*. Right. My comment ought not to be construed as a statement along the lines of, "Screw the authors! Gimme!" It's just a goddamn shame that this hasn't been pulled off.
All I want--far, far more than Netflix or Rhapsody--is to be able to give somebody money on a monthly basis to have access to nearly every book in every library in the world. Just somebody make this easy. I don't want to have to think, "Is reading a chapter of this obscure work on Russian formalism worth $0.50?" I just want to fucking click on a link, and read it.
Been an Ubuntu fan for an awfully long time, and evangelized it onto the hard drive of several relatives and work colleagues. I fucking hate Unity. I'm running Natty right now on "Ubuntu Classic" mode to avoid it; and despite all the wonderful things Canonical has brought to desktop Linux, the silliness of this decision has me thinking of moving my main PC to another distro; I've got Fedora 15, Arch, Gentoo, and a few others waiting in the pipeline.
So really they're going to allow the possibility of publishers to allow lending.
Because *I* want to have a say in how the next technological regime for literature will be structured, I download and copy books.
Reading about this, it occurred to me that there could be more safety in this area. I have worked in ICUs where the patient had two IVs, a central line, an arterial line, a lumbar drain, and an endotracheal tube: around the patient were crowded a mechanical ventilator, three IV poles equpped with IV pumps, a monitor, and a crash cart. The nurses were helped in this by, for instance, labeling each line with a small tag. Also, generally in ICUs nurses take care of two or three patients max for twelve hours at a time, meaning they can attain familiarity.
At the same time, it would take an awfully ingenious method to get most automated sphygmomanometer air lines hooked into an IV line. That's just completely stupid.
The most fun, absolutely wonderful things. You, the girls, and your wife. While her health will allow it. Take a trip, for instance. And don't make it all stressfull, and don't invest it with too much meaning. It's a fun jaunt, the whole family
Those memories will last.
Wasn't there an article here sometime lately about Android phones overtaking iPhones? Can't Google flip a switch and give millions and millions of smartphones WebM like that? (Imagine snapping sound.)
So what does "really secure" mean? What's acceptable--or more to it, what is an acceptable expenditure of capital, both in cash and in irritation?
What are the paragons of the "really secure"? People always reference Fort Knox. Is Fort Knox really secure? The gold depository indeed is very difficult to infiltrate, very difficult to steal from. But is it impossible? Or for that matter, would it be impossible to destroy or scatter? A small-scale nuclear weapon could sublimate the entire deposit. The security of Fort Knox makes it very unlikely it will be compromised, that's all. Just as a jail makes escape very improbable, the population squatting around it very unlikely to be accosted by inmates. But not impossible. There's no impossible except in mathematics and physics.
So how rare can we make attempts on air transport? Well, since 2001 there has not been a civilian death due to terrorism on commercial aircraft. There have been two noteworthy attempts, both foiled by a mixture of equipment malfunction, bomber incompetence, and fellow passenger vigilance. Most flight-safety wallahs will tell you disasters happen not because of a simple malfunction but because three, four, or five different systems all failed. The fail-safe, the redundant fail-safe, the alternate computer were all rendered useless. Terrorist attacks can happen when similar strings of failure happen in the security apparatus. You can make them rarer but at cost.
Already commercial flights are unflyable. The airlines' penny-pinching clamps down on checked baggage, so everyone tries to drag through as much carryon as they can, which is exactly what the TSA discourages. To get from one city to another by plane, I have to show ID, I have to forego anything as basic as a regular bottle of shampoo, toothpaste, or mouthwash. Forget razors. They've already figured out what infinitesimal space can accommodate 99% of passengers with less than 1% risk of DVT and press us in to fit. My wife can't even come through security to see me off.
What else can I give up? Perhaps I don't need luggage. Everyone can simply buy new clothes at the destination. Hotels will stock up on toiletries and surcharges. Everyone will doff their shoes in the terminal; airports will be like Japanese houses. Slippers on the plane and whatever you can scavenge at your destination. Go through metal detectors naked. Well, they've got machines that do that essentially anyway and they want to roll them out. Each person spends five minutes with a Bruce Willis look-alike who asks for aspirins and grills you about your destination. "Our records show you visited Aunt Millie just five months ago--what is your real agenda here!?" Special papers for transport. Each seat with seatbelts only releaseable by the captain or designated air marshal. Nothing bad could come of that. No more paper--paper cuts, you see. Tickets carried on USB drives with a USB fee added.
Just what would make you feel safer? "Really secure" can't happen with commercial air transport because there are too many people. Millions of people, every day, getting on and off planes. If you've got a couple billion dollars in gold locked up in one place, you can make it real secure. Esp. if you have a tank division nearby. If you're talking tens of thousands of flights and millions of people, day-in-day-out, it can't happen. Not without denying every single one of them basic human decency. A few attempts will get through, and will hopefully get foiled. The terrorist masterminds, who are always working on something to hit us where we least expect it, aren't likely to be targeting planes anyway. Their plans already worked, people are already terrified and cowed.
The worst thing is that horrible processes and institutions outlast their exigencies. TSA will be around doing the same or worse crap fifteen years after there are any credible threats to commercial air. A whole generation is ruined on air travel, and we're still not building anything else to compete. Trains, anyone? Fuck it, I'll just drive to Cali next time I'm bound there.
This is the genus of consumer-friendly innovation net neutrality would kill. Do we really want that?
The Olivetti has worth because of its link to a physical product. I wouldn't value the PC or Mac of an author as much because it was only a general-purpose machine that happened to be used as a literary tool by virtue of the software on it. And I wouldn't pay anything for a decades-old binary image of Emacs. When writing on computer, the text becomes its own thing, it transcends the physical. In some ways, I dislike it because of that. I really enjoy the physical link with the text I get when writing with pen, when clacking on a manual typewriter, or otherwise. The advantages of text sublimated from the physical are great--better storage and search, versioning, editing, independent control of presentation, logical layout, etc. But it makes the tool used to make it less interesting, more mundane, more merely processing. The Olivetti, like my Pelikan, are precision tools purposely made for writing. In this way they become the paraphernalia of the writer, the adjutants of his talent. You pay for that connection. With stuff like this it's always the connection that's important. Beige boxes--even flashy Macs--don't have it.
Use LaTeX and Gobby.
Made worse by UK statute giving the police the authority to order the disclosure of encryption keys or the decryption of encrypted data.
Yay fifth amendment and subsequent interpretations equating disclosing cipher keys with self-incrimination!
In our resident clinic we look after people who typically don't look after themselves. We don't tell them to cut out fat and watch their cholesterol. But we are concerned after their hearts. A great percentage of them have at least three or four risk factors for heart disease: tobacco use, diabetes mellitus, high LDL levels, for starters. High-fat diets can increase LDL levels, as well as high-fructose diets, so cardiac patients are told to lower their fat content, although (and esp. in a resident clinic) in practice diet is rarely enough to get people to their goals for risk reduction. Eating habits can lead to disordered endocrine response, eg big insulin spikes, and over time can contribute to insulin resistance, so eating several square meals per day is helpful. Cardiovascular exercise is good for the heart, period. Already-lethargic cardiovascular systems don't cope as well with ischemic injury if a heart attack occurs.
So I don't know what we're telling people that's so wrong. Certainly, if all any of our patients ever come out of the exam room with is, "Eat less fat, exercise," we haven't done our jobs and we deserve castigation. But we spend time on this thing; preventive health is the most efficient health.
I understand it differently. The Linux community works because of the GPL. You can't have Linux without the GPL. So this philosophy thing, this breaking of stuff that Just Works, is in the name of keeping together a much bigger and important thing.
Web OSes, software-as-a-service, it all sucks. Why would enterprise software makers offer software-as-a-service? So they can have complete control over the software, completely lock it down, make you pay to lease it forever. I don't want my apps on some server somewhere I may sporadically fail to connect to, I don't want to send packets clear across North America just to read a fucking text file. And it's not like we've got some dire shortage of computing ability to force the centralization: my seven year-old computer has more than enough power and storage to do everything I need a computer to do.
Browsers suck for UI. They are made for viewing HTML, and any other purpose is strained at best. Why a crippled, slow Web OS through shitty UI when you have a modern, fully-optimized, local operating system already installed on your machine?
Why do they let people on the road who can't communicate and drive? That's the real problem. Get rid of them, and those of us who find the need to constantly communicate to be entirely compatible with not wrapping our cars around other cars would have a double benefit: safer and emptier streets.
Let Wikipedia run ads. Nice, unobtrusive, easily-blocked ads. Maybe someone will come along and write an article on the arcane subject of blocking them.
Every game was eventually a new and original concept, and some of them actually caught on.
Please tell me why this is fucking front-page stuff.
Label == tag. Pull out your thesaurus, go to a blank page, and scribble it in there.