DiamondMM was actively hostile toward Linux users while AMD was relatively helpful...
... it seemed like ATI did an about-face the moment they bought out Diamond and inherited the anti-Linux attitude. I've been pro-Nvidia since then.
And they did another about-face when they got bought by AMD, and, not surprisingly, have adopted AMD's open-friendly, linux-friendly attitude. This all happened a couple of years ago, didn't you hear about it?
So you might want to give AMD/ATI another look, or at least read up on how they've changed their behavior and what they've been doing lately (releasing a ton of tech docs for their chips - putting Linux support at the same level as Windows support in their driver development process, etc).
Disclaimer: I'm a happy owner of a system with an AMD CPU and AMD/ATI 790GX on-board graphics.
If it comes from your opponents, no, but if it comes from your own team(*), then its usually a sign that you need to find a new team to play with.
(*) It wasn't individual Reps deciding on their own to run against Specter, it was the Republican Party itself that went out looking for people to run against him.
In today's Republican Party not only is "liberal" a dirty word, but so is "moderate". They will pay a heavy price for this (permanent minority status - because they won't be able to win anywhere outside the Deep South consistently), but right now, they don't appear to care.
The politician who orders the forceful annexing of all non-democratic countries...
Did you just compare a non-profit foundation, which operates completely within the law, and which only exists by convincing lots of people to voluntarily give it money, to an armed psychotic and a dictator?
Thats just bizarre...
The EFF is a fringe group
Your idea of what "fringe" means, also needs a little help...
Has anyone noticed how more and more stuff gets moved from the Linux kernel into user space these days; FUSE is a good example.
From what I've read, a FUSE implemented filesystem is slower than one whose driver is in the kernel. If ext4 was implemented using FUSE you might have a point, but so far all the important, widely-used, high-performance filesystems are in the kernel.
You're missing one option: borrow the money.... and when times are good, you should be paying back the deficit,
Uhh, what do you think Bush was doing the for last 8 years? How else could he start 2 wars while simultaneously lowering taxes, multiple times?
The rule is simple: the Dems tax, and the Reps borrow from our grandkids, thats how its worked for the last 20 years or so. The problem with Dems taxing is obvious, but the problem with the Reps borrowing is that they never get around to that last part you mentioned: paying down the debt. In fact, when you put them in charge of the purse strings, they seem to find as many reasons to spend money as the Dems do. Funny how that works.
A) Our private sector is getting its butt whipped trying to compete against the private sectors of the rest of the industrialized world because they don't have a healthcare burden on them.
B) "on your own" sounds a lot like what we got now. Hmm, 25% uninsured, another ~20% under-insured, double digit healthcare cost inflation, and America's dirty little sekrit: "The Uninsurables".
And no, 50 states trying 50 different patchwork solutions, and in some cases of course, deliberate non-solutions, will never solve the problem. Never mind the poorest states, who no one seriously believes will be able to do *anything* meaningful for their populations. This wouldn't work first because a large part of the industry is multi-state, and second because the only way to control the costs is to get as many people as possible into large insurance pools so you can offset the cost of the sick people by having lots of healthy people in the system at the same time (everyone else in the world has grokked this fact but us, for some reason). The only way to achieve very large pools, is to go nation-wide.
So basically we've got the most expensive health care system in the world, providing the least amount of the most important kind of care (basic primary care), and it doesn't even cover our entire population. You do realize we are the fscking laughing stock of the entire industrialized world because of this (and because they're taking financial advantage of us due to 'A' above), right?
Between the rising masses of uninsured (whose existance exerts an increasing stress upon whats left of the system) and the cost inflation (which in turn accelerates the number of people entering the ranks of the uninsured - notice the feedback loop here?), our health care system's outlook makes Social Security's future look positively rosy.
Oh, lets not even get into the billions of dollars in damage to our economy thats happening every year because for an increasing number of people, a single incident of major illness or major surgery means bankruptcy. And if you can't see how that is hurting all of us, then just think of this, the uninsured, and the cost inflation, as hidden taxes, that we all end up paying whether we know it or not.
We also pay in other ways: has your local hospital shut its ER because it can't afford to run it anymore? If you get sick, how far will you have to be driven to get to a hospital? Does your community have a scarcity of primary care physicians willing/able to take new patients? If a large number of people can't find a doctor, even if they have insurance, then you might as well consider them to be "uninsured" as well, and adding to that stress on the system.
So in the end, one way or the other, we *will* be forced to change, since no amount of hand waving about "personal liberties and freedoms" can change the fact that our health care (non-)system is headed for a financial meltdown if it doesn't change course.
The combination of increasing uninsured and runaway costs, is a slow acting, but inevitably lethal, poison. Its a train wreck looking for a place to happen. Its not if, its when, and yes, its just that simple.
The only question is how long do we put off the inevitable, where the longer we wait the more painful and *expensive* the final reckoning becomes.
Re:Evolution versus artificial modification
on
Cosmetic Neurology
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· Score: 1
We progress not just because of blind evolution forces, but also (of course) because everyone selects who to have children with.
Hmmm, from what I've seen of human sexual behavior and mate selection, it often involves a significant amount of blind, impulsive forces too.
Obviously, people wants to with 'better' people, whatever that may entail.
That's only on a good day, on a bad day, a lot of people, men in particular, will settle for a very loose definition of 'better'.
Whether you want to class that under 'evolution forces' is a matter of semantics.
I consider a lot of human behavior, but especially human sexual behavior, to be strongly *driven* by evolutionary forces, so basically yes, evolution has been playing games with our hormones for millions of years. It wants us to procreate, a 'better' mate is always preferred of course, but its never actually been *required*.
Many of the arguments about what makes something moral has more to do with self-interest than morality.
Yes, some behaviorist theorize morality positions like mine, are ultimately self-interest motivated, just at a higher, more abstract level.
Example 1: being concerned about the well being of others beyond my own relatives is actually a desire to maintain order within the society, i.e., if bad things are happening somewhere, those things might get out of hand, cause things to go from bad to worse, and the situation ends up spreading back to affect me.
Example 2: A negative response to any hostility or discrimination being directed at some other group is ultimately a desire to see that that kind of hostility doesn't end up getting directed at my group.
So if it makes you feel better to believe its all ultimately just about "self-interest" then go for it.
However, you're right about one other thing: this isn't something I spend any time *thinking* about. My reaction to the OP suggesting we let millions of people die just to solve the currently nonexistent "problem" of excessive population, was instant and visceral, just as I suspect it was for the poster you originally responded to.
So if you believe anyone claiming some moral point has consciously and deliberately thought the whole issue through, knowingly starting from some position of self-interest, then you'd be wrong, and I have no idea how to explain that to you.
Perhaps it comes from some recent human evolutionary trait that originated as our social behavior and interactions began to get very complex, perhaps when we began to congegrate together in groups larger than the prehistoric "tribe", or simply a learned trait acquired from the environment, e.g. parents, but whatever the origin, for some, its just *there*, builtin.
I don't know if any of this is an acceptable answer, but its the best I can do.
They just weren't able to look through that solar flare fog.
:)
Well, since I made that post I've learned that the current quiet period of the Solar Minimum seems to be lasting a lot longer than it was expected to, so the effective peak of solar activity may not only be less energetic than was first thought, it will also likely occur after 2012, in the following year or the next. The hole in the magnetic shield is still a worry though.
Anyway, not only is that good news in and of itself, it might finally help to get these 2 issues, Mayan predictions and the coming Solar Max period, separated from one another so we....
You know, as much as I'd like to agree with you, I'd have to guess that more people will get the "Ni!" and "killer rabbit" references than recognize the game environment I was alluding to.
I now rarely see roguelike references even here on/. anymore, although I don't spend any time in the games section, maybe they're more common there.
So you say that "if enough people agree with it, then it doesn't matter...".
For centuries most people accepted slavery.
I said it didn't matter who originated the "standard", not that the standard itself didn't matter.
Once any idea, good or bad, achieves sufficient popularity, it becomes pointless to try to personalize the argument by singling out the person you are talking with, since most people will just recognize this as the "if you can't attack the message, attack the messenger" tactic.
My point was that if that's how morality is defined - by tribal, national or cultural consensus, then how can anyone be so certain about their own moral judgements
I don't believe there is such a thing as an absolute morality, at least not outside of fundamentalist religions, and I don't believe either the GP or I were implying that. We were just stating our opinions.
It's interesting that you ended up with what is also known as the "golden rule" as your principle test. It's a good rule. Someone named J. Christ is often credited as the author though he credited his "dad".
So? If an idea makes sense to me, I don't care where it originated. Besides, a lot of those Christian "rules" existed before Christianity. I think it was Hannarabi in Babylon that started that whole "murder-is-bad-don't-kill" idea, along with the rule of law concept, and that was a few *millenia* before Christ. The Christians just did what I'm doing now: adopting ideas that I like, regardless of their origin.
about the tendency to groupthink and to attempt preemptively discount contrary opinions by taking the stance that the author and the like-minded had a monopoly on truth and morality.
No, I think you just assume anyone who shows compassion towards their fellow man, or even just uses the word "morality", can only possibly be doing so for religious reasons. You're basically just looking for a fight with one of those "religious nuts" you keep referring to.
You do realize that the concept of "morality" is also one of those things that existed before any of the major religions appeared, right?
When there is a disaster in the world, it isn't a given amongst mankind that we should all rush whatever assistance we can.
Yet a lot of people do just that, and yes, its not a "given", or some kind of requirement, nobody said it was.
Some cultures are a bit more fatalistic and see natural disasters differently.... and others think that it's a waste of precious resources to react to disasters instead of preventing them.
Not everyone agrees with me, well duh, I knew that already, and alluded to that at the end of my post.
I don't think we should assume that holding these points of view necessarily makes someone less moral or immoral.
And I *do* think we should, especially with viewpoints that exhibit a callous disregard for human life. Those who hold such ideas are free to continue thinking callously, I'm free to continue calling it as I see it, immoral, and you're free to continue to disagree. We're now back to square one.
I'm now wondering what bothers you the most at this point: the fact that I don't agree with your viewpoint, or the fact that religion is not my reason for disagreeing with you?:)
Note that the article you link to calls them transformers for HVDC links./me Head explodes!
Yikes! I didn't notice that. After some googling I found out a couple of things:
1) China is apparently building both HVAC and HVDC projects, so both kinds are being made for them. Jeez, what *isn't* China building right now?
2) HVDC has advantages over HVAC which is why it seems to be overtaking the use of HVAC. According to this pdf, HVAC deployment around the world is almost stagnant:
3) There *are* HVAC transformers out there that go as high as 1000kV (apparently India has some of these), but there are few of them
4) I obviously used the wrong picture, didn't check the fine print, and since UHVAC or just UHV, where U=ultra, transformers are very rare the only picture of one I could find was on page 9 of this Siemens pdf file:
Its an 800kV HVAC xformer that they say can be upgraded to 1000kV. If size impresses you, you may want to take a look at that one, its *much* bigger than the 800kV HVDC transformer in the first pic.:)
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much info out there that is not in PDF files, and for some reason that Siemens file doesn't render quite right for me in my PDF viewer. There *seems* to be parts of that slide-show like report thats talking about 1200kV HVAC, but the transformer page (9), only mentions 800kV-1000kV, and parts of the text in the report aren't rendering for me, so even after a lot of googling, I still don't know for sure what the biggest HVAC transformer in the world is rated at. Bottom line, AFAICT: 1000kV or 1200kV for HVAC and 800kV for HVDC. Wow.
Re:Evolution versus artificial modification
on
Cosmetic Neurology
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· Score: 1
Weston Price's work well documented that primitive people's had very low incidences of tooth decay
Its not hard to avoid tooth decay if you're average lifespan is only going to be about 25 to 30.
Virtually *all* of our chronic medical issues we're dealing with now are directly or indirectly caused by our dramatically increased lifespans, and this is not being driven by evolution, but by our "cheating of evolution". Why? Because evolution was never interested in us living long lives.
This whole conversation to me is a little strange, actually.
Where did this idea that "evolution" was ever "on our side" or was helping us become better *individuals* come from? Folks, evolution doesn't give a *damn* about us as individuals, all it wants us to do is grow up fast, procreate to pass on our genes, then die quickly to get out of the way so our kids can repeat the whole sad sequence all over again.
As far as I'm concerned, humanity's long term future will only be assured once we reach the advanced technological stage when we can cut evolution entirely out of the loop. Cheat it? Hell, we need to kill it.
Not to be insulting, but these are not magic pills that make you do what you are supposed to.
+1
some people do experience a sort of 'high' while on doses above what they realy need, which may pulverize any apathy and genuinely lead them to doing (even enjoying) tasks they would not normally.
In the case of CNS stimulants, the 'high' isn't like a hallucinogenic 'high', you'll just have a lot of mental energy to go "do things".
Now in my case, with an excessive dose, I'd just get so caught up in doing things that I already liked to do, I'd end up ignoring those things that I needed to be doing, thus my +1 above.:)
So, like most things in life, too much of a CNS stimulant will not be a "good thing".
And as hedwards said in his response to you, it has no effect on intellect, nor IMHO, does it help with creativity, it will just, with the right dosage, give you the energy & concentration to allow you to *apply* what intellect/creativity you already have.
But isn't Wellbutrin supposed to be an anti-depressant? I would think that unconquerable apathy is a part of depression.
As someone who has taken both, which one helps you depends entirely on what your specific problem is. In my case the Wellbutrin might as well have been a placebo for all the good it did me.
If the depression is the *symptom* of something else, then an anti-depressant may do you no good if that underlying problem isn't dealt with. On the other hand...
In other words, while there's certainly overlap in symptoms and treatment, adderall and wellbutrin are for two different problems.
I'm not so sure of this. If, for example, someone has a depression whose primary, dominant symptom is extreme fatigue, then something like a CNS stimulant (Adderall) may end up helping more than an anti-depressant (Wellbutrin), even though the underlying problem is still "Depression".
I think the real reason why some drugs help some people but not others is simply because the medical community quite simply doesn't yet have a clue how the brain really works, as a complete system, at the chemical level.
I mean no offense to the medical community in that, but look at all the anti-depressants that have been "discovered" so far. Most of them were essentially found by *accident* (much like how Viagra was discovered while looking for a blood pressure medication, IIRC), and for many of them, no one can actually explain in detail how they work, and more importantly, *why* they work.
The main reason for this is we still don't have a clear understanding of what chronic (severe) depression is, how it works, what things trigger its development, or even how to "measure" it in any empirical way. The same situation applies to most of the other diseases that exist solely within the brain, e.g., diseases whose actions and effects (symptoms) can only be seen as, often subtle, and sometimes conflicting!, changes in behavior, e.g., some chronically depressed people lose their appetite, while others eat too much, but both are suffering from depression - why the difference?.
If all the activity is happening deep in the brain, at the level of the synapses and neuro-receptors and the horde of chemical "messengers" that effect those receptors (and each other!), then the problem remains hard to understand because the brain is still largely an indecipherable black box to medical science.
Until we grok the brain, *completely*, we aren't going to, for example: 1) Understand what Chronic Major Depression is, 2) What Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is, 3) What the difference between those two is, since right now the list of symptoms for both is identical, and we have no clinical way to test for either of them, much less tell them apart, 4) What ADD and ADHD are, and why the hyperactivity symptom only shows up *some* of the time, 5) Why ADD/ADHD in children sometimes triggers Chronic Depression along *with* the ADD/ADHD as adults, 6)... Well, because the brain is so darned fundamental, yet also so darned complicated, but so *not* understood, this list is virtually endless...
"Depressives have Prozac,... and overachievers have Adderall."
Just an FYI, Adderall and similar drugs are now being prescribed to many "Depressives" as well. That article you link to is 3 years old, so I imagine the trend of using CNS stimulants for Major Depression wasn't as common then as now.
Except that it bans fairly benign drugs while authorizing the dangerous alcohol and the uninteresting dependency-hazard that is nicotine. I'd like some coherence here.
+1
The obvious inconsistency we have has always bothered me.
According to a Lancet study, LSD, amphetamines, ecstasy or cannabis are all less dangerous than alcohol both in terms of dependence and side effects.
Less dangerious and often far more powerful. That the GP compares nicotine and caffeine to amphetamines as if thats an apples-to-apples comparison clearly shows he's never used Adderal, Ritalin, or similar CNS stimulant. Forget the apple-to-orange comparison mistake, this is more like comparing a peanut to a watermelon. Not meaningful at all.
That's interesting. So your statement preemptively declares all opposing positions as being "unreasonable".
If the only opposing position we're talking about is deliberately standing by and allowing millions of people to die from a relatively easily preventable cause, then yes, I don't have a problem with preemptively calling that immoral.
Why is death by disease immoral?
Its not, but a large number of deaths by an easily prevented disease is (or should be).
Why is not making extraordinary efforts to treat the diseases of others immoral?
This entirely depends on how we define "extraordinary".
By who's standard other than yours?
If enough people agree with it, then it doesn't *matter* who originated the "standard". Why did you even bother to ask this? You know darn well the GP's attitude is, in general, held by a lot of people. If this attitude wasn't widespread, the world wouldn't have nearly as many aid organizations as it does (Red Cross, CARE, Doctors Without Borders, et cetera ad nauseum).
If you are a religious person
I'm not religious, I'm just a rather ordinary member of that very social species we call "homo sapiens", who, when he sees or hears of another member of the same species dying a pointless death, has the guts to think of more than just himself and ask himself the question "What if that was me?".
You don't need "religion" to see the GP's point of view, you just have to have the ability to "put yourself in someone else's shoes", so to speak.
Of course, I'm also a realist, and I know that despite my opinion, "immoral" behavior such as standing by while others are lost to easily preventable deaths will continue, for all sorts of reasons, with, I suspect, the main reason being that for every person who asks themselves the question "What if that was me?" in the above situation, there is at least one other person who doesn't think about anything beyond their initial reaction of "Whew! Glad that wasn't me!". Well, no one has ever accused humanity of being homogeneous.:)
Chickens, Pigs, and Humans. In some parts of the world, they are in close proximity to each other.
BINGO! Someone please mod the parent up, just for this.
There are *vast* stretches of poor and under-developed Asia and Africa where you find these three species very close together, including finding pigs in human dwellings with the chickens pecking on the ground just outside the front door. It is because of this that the vast majority of new strains of influenza that originate every year come mainly from Southeast Asia.
Also, please no more flying pig jokes, folks. From our (human) perspective, the only avian species we need to worry about is the lowly (non-flying) chicken, which is the only avian species that (in large parts of the world) is in close, constant proximity to pigs and ourselves. Although avian strains of influenza do infect other birds, it is *very* likely that the avian influenza RNA found in this latest H1N1 strain originated in chickens, was passed to pigs, then came to us.
However, flu viruses are extremely mutagenic, and in reality mutate constantly.
A problem with flu vaccines is they must be made from a strain that exists in early summer (to have time to make enough) but there is a strong chance that the virus will have mutated enough by the winter that the vaccine is not as effective, or has no effectiveness.
They mutate so much every year that the CDC basically has to "restart" its influenza program every year. They "restart" by looking for any new strains coming out of Southeast Asia, plus any known (dangerous) mutations of last year's common strains still out in the wild, and then try to formulate vaccines to counter the most *likely* strain to show up later in that flu season.
This explains why CDC's existing stockpile of vaccine might be useless in the face of a sudden, unexpected outbreak of a new influenza strain (like this one?). There is no such thing as a vaccine for all strains of influenza. Because this multi-headed hydra mutates so quickly, we currently can't create a single silver bullet that can deal with (all the different versions of) it.
A mutation of the 1918/1919 variant is called "swine flu" and is common in pigs today. That particular strain cannot infect humans. It was previously believed that the 1918/1919 strain was originally a swine flu, but recent research suggests it mutated from a bird flu. No one really knows for sure, however.
The only part of this text that I'm absolutely sure of is where you say no one really knows for sure, and thats especially true of the comparisons to the 1918 strain, as influenza mutates so much and exchanges RNA between the major strains so frequently that its virtually pointless to compare a modern strain to an ancient one. It doesn't really tell you anything *for sure*.:)
Keeping in mind that the connection between humans, pigs, and chickens is a *very* old one, thus so is influenza, then, for example, its just as likely that the 1918 strain, like strains today, picked up a lot of avian influenza RNA while in pigs before getting passed to us. So what would you call it then: Avian flu, or Swine flu? In other words, how much avian RNA can a "swine flu" have, and still be called a "swine flu" (or vice versa)?
"swine flu" is just a reference to any one of the influenza strains that are endemic in pigs, just as "avian flu" refers to all influenza types found in birds. Unfortunately for "swine flu" though, this is not only a large list, but a list thats starting to overlap extensively with both humans and avians, because, for example, it now includes H1N2 and H3N2 which are strains that include *avian* influenza RNA.
In fact, once you start reading about these subtypes, its easy to get confused. Consider this statement referring to "avian flu":
Alternatively, I hear you can pray in python now,...
That tends to happen when you attempt to use a snake as your intermediary with God.
[weird humor with obscure references]
The only thing that sacrificing a snake at an altar to Python will get you is a wide-angle disintegration beam. The only thing that will save you from that YASD is if you are playing a Knight and have (N)amed your weapon "Ni!". FWIW, the *best* thing to sacrifice there is a "killer rabbit", that'll get you MAXVALUE brownie points from your God, as well as the coveted message: "You feel that GVR is pleased".
[/weird humor with obscure references]
To those who don't get the above, that's ok, its fairly obscure, the important thing to remember is this: The Python programming language was NOT named after the snake.:)
Do you have this info for '97 and '98? I was just wondering what the sunspot activity was for the first year of the *last* cycle (if ~2008 is the start of the new cycle, then ~1997 was the start of the last one, or has NASA backtracked from calling 2008 the start of a new one?).
Mainly my question is: Was the first year of the last solar cycle as quiet as 2008 was?
because never in the history of humanity has a transformer blown up by a solar flair
1) We aren't talking about solar flares, the real boogeyman here is called a "coronal mass ejection".
2) How long has humanity had electricity, and thus high voltage transformers? On the cosmic scale, it hasn't been that long at all.
3) The only reason Canada didn't lose any transformers during the 1989 geomagnetic storm (triggered by a CME) was because circuit breakers started tripping all over the place, and the circuit breakers are there to protect the transformers from current which *would* have otherwise blown them up, or more accurately, melted them down and/or set them on fire.
Slashdot Mirror
DiamondMM was actively hostile toward Linux users while AMD was relatively helpful ...
And they did another about-face when they got bought by AMD, and, not surprisingly, have adopted AMD's open-friendly, linux-friendly attitude. This all happened a couple of years ago, didn't you hear about it?
So you might want to give AMD/ATI another look, or at least read up on how they've changed their behavior and what they've been doing lately (releasing a ton of tech docs for their chips - putting Linux support at the same level as Windows support in their driver development process, etc).
Disclaimer: I'm a happy owner of a system with an AMD CPU and AMD/ATI 790GX on-board graphics.
But, it will be to no avail, he will lose his seat next election anyway
Can I have some of what you're smoking?
He hasn't lost his seat, he's just guaranteed it.
So competition is a bad thing?
If it comes from your opponents, no, but if it comes from your own team(*), then its usually a sign that you need to find a new team to play with.
(*) It wasn't individual Reps deciding on their own to run against Specter, it was the Republican Party itself that went out looking for people to run against him.
In today's Republican Party not only is "liberal" a dirty word, but so is "moderate". They will pay a heavy price for this (permanent minority status - because they won't be able to win anywhere outside the Deep South consistently), but right now, they don't appear to care.
In socialist USA, the government owns corporations
And in the real USA, the corporations own the government...
The crazy guy with the gun ...
The politician who orders the forceful annexing of all non-democratic countries ...
Did you just compare a non-profit foundation, which operates completely within the law, and which only exists by convincing lots of people to voluntarily give it money, to an armed psychotic and a dictator?
Thats just bizarre...
The EFF is a fringe group
Your idea of what "fringe" means, also needs a little help...
Has anyone noticed how more and more stuff gets moved from the Linux kernel into user space these days; FUSE is a good example.
From what I've read, a FUSE implemented filesystem is slower than one whose driver is in the kernel. If ext4 was implemented using FUSE you might have a point, but so far all the important, widely-used, high-performance filesystems are in the kernel.
You're missing one option: borrow the money. ... and when times are good, you should be paying back the deficit,
Uhh, what do you think Bush was doing the for last 8 years? How else could he start 2 wars while simultaneously lowering taxes, multiple times?
The rule is simple: the Dems tax, and the Reps borrow from our grandkids, thats how its worked for the last 20 years or so. The problem with Dems taxing is obvious, but the problem with the Reps borrowing is that they never get around to that last part you mentioned: paying down the debt. In fact, when you put them in charge of the purse strings, they seem to find as many reasons to spend money as the Dems do. Funny how that works.
but your on your own when it comes to healthcare
EPIC FAIL.
A) Our private sector is getting its butt whipped trying to compete against the private sectors of the rest of the industrialized world because they don't have a healthcare burden on them.
B) "on your own" sounds a lot like what we got now. Hmm, 25% uninsured, another ~20% under-insured, double digit healthcare cost inflation, and America's dirty little sekrit: "The Uninsurables".
And no, 50 states trying 50 different patchwork solutions, and in some cases of course, deliberate non-solutions, will never solve the problem. Never mind the poorest states, who no one seriously believes will be able to do *anything* meaningful for their populations. This wouldn't work first because a large part of the industry is multi-state, and second because the only way to control the costs is to get as many people as possible into large insurance pools so you can offset the cost of the sick people by having lots of healthy people in the system at the same time (everyone else in the world has grokked this fact but us, for some reason). The only way to achieve very large pools, is to go nation-wide.
So basically we've got the most expensive health care system in the world, providing the least amount of the most important kind of care (basic primary care), and it doesn't even cover our entire population. You do realize we are the fscking laughing stock of the entire industrialized world because of this (and because they're taking financial advantage of us due to 'A' above), right?
Between the rising masses of uninsured (whose existance exerts an increasing stress upon whats left of the system) and the cost inflation (which in turn accelerates the number of people entering the ranks of the uninsured - notice the feedback loop here?), our health care system's outlook makes Social Security's future look positively rosy.
Oh, lets not even get into the billions of dollars in damage to our economy thats happening every year because for an increasing number of people, a single incident of major illness or major surgery means bankruptcy. And if you can't see how that is hurting all of us, then just think of this, the uninsured, and the cost inflation, as hidden taxes, that we all end up paying whether we know it or not.
We also pay in other ways: has your local hospital shut its ER because it can't afford to run it anymore? If you get sick, how far will you have to be driven to get to a hospital? Does your community have a scarcity of primary care physicians willing/able to take new patients? If a large number of people can't find a doctor, even if they have insurance, then you might as well consider them to be "uninsured" as well, and adding to that stress on the system.
So in the end, one way or the other, we *will* be forced to change, since no amount of hand waving about "personal liberties and freedoms" can change the fact that our health care (non-)system is headed for a financial meltdown if it doesn't change course.
The combination of increasing uninsured and runaway costs, is a slow acting, but inevitably lethal, poison. Its a train wreck looking for a place to happen. Its not if, its when, and yes, its just that simple.
The only question is how long do we put off the inevitable, where the longer we wait the more painful and *expensive* the final reckoning becomes.
We progress not just because of blind evolution forces, but also (of course) because everyone selects who to have children with.
Hmmm, from what I've seen of human sexual behavior and mate selection, it often involves a significant amount of blind, impulsive forces too.
Obviously, people wants to with 'better' people, whatever that may entail.
That's only on a good day, on a bad day, a lot of people, men in particular, will settle for a very loose definition of 'better'.
Whether you want to class that under 'evolution forces' is a matter of semantics.
I consider a lot of human behavior, but especially human sexual behavior, to be strongly *driven* by evolutionary forces, so basically yes, evolution has been playing games with our hormones for millions of years. It wants us to procreate, a 'better' mate is always preferred of course, but its never actually been *required*.
Many of the arguments about what makes something moral has more to do with self-interest than morality.
Yes, some behaviorist theorize morality positions like mine, are ultimately self-interest motivated, just at a higher, more abstract level.
Example 1: being concerned about the well being of others beyond my own relatives is actually a desire to maintain order within the society, i.e., if bad things are happening somewhere, those things might get out of hand, cause things to go from bad to worse, and the situation ends up spreading back to affect me.
Example 2: A negative response to any hostility or discrimination being directed at some other group is ultimately a desire to see that that kind of hostility doesn't end up getting directed at my group.
So if it makes you feel better to believe its all ultimately just about "self-interest" then go for it.
However, you're right about one other thing: this isn't something I spend any time *thinking* about. My reaction to the OP suggesting we let millions of people die just to solve the currently nonexistent "problem" of excessive population, was instant and visceral, just as I suspect it was for the poster you originally responded to.
So if you believe anyone claiming some moral point has consciously and deliberately thought the whole issue through, knowingly starting from some position of self-interest, then you'd be wrong, and I have no idea how to explain that to you.
Perhaps it comes from some recent human evolutionary trait that originated as our social behavior and interactions began to get very complex, perhaps when we began to congegrate together in groups larger than the prehistoric "tribe", or simply a learned trait acquired from the environment, e.g. parents, but whatever the origin, for some, its just *there*, builtin.
I don't know if any of this is an acceptable answer, but its the best I can do.
They just weren't able to look through that solar flare fog.
:)
Well, since I made that post I've learned that the current quiet period of the Solar Minimum seems to be lasting a lot longer than it was expected to, so the effective peak of solar activity may not only be less energetic than was first thought, it will also likely occur after 2012, in the following year or the next. The hole in the magnetic shield is still a worry though.
Anyway, not only is that good news in and of itself, it might finally help to get these 2 issues, Mayan predictions and the coming Solar Max period, separated from one another so we....
ah heck, what am I thinking?, this is /.
never mind.
Nethack is not obscure!
:)
You know, as much as I'd like to agree with you, I'd have to guess that more people will get the "Ni!" and "killer rabbit" references than recognize the game environment I was alluding to.
I now rarely see roguelike references even here on /. anymore, although I don't spend any time in the games section, maybe they're more common there.
But, hey, in this case, I hope I'm wrong...
So you say that "if enough people agree with it, then it doesn't matter ...".
For centuries most people accepted slavery.
I said it didn't matter who originated the "standard", not that the standard itself didn't matter.
Once any idea, good or bad, achieves sufficient popularity, it becomes pointless to try to personalize the argument by singling out the person you are talking with, since most people will just recognize this as the "if you can't attack the message, attack the messenger" tactic.
My point was that if that's how morality is defined - by tribal, national or cultural consensus, then how can anyone be so certain about their own moral judgements
I don't believe there is such a thing as an absolute morality, at least not outside of fundamentalist religions, and I don't believe either the GP or I were implying that. We were just stating our opinions.
It's interesting that you ended up with what is also known as the "golden rule" as your principle test. It's a good rule. Someone named J. Christ is often credited as the author though he credited his "dad".
So? If an idea makes sense to me, I don't care where it originated. Besides, a lot of those Christian "rules" existed before Christianity. I think it was Hannarabi in Babylon that started that whole "murder-is-bad-don't-kill" idea, along with the rule of law concept, and that was a few *millenia* before Christ. The Christians just did what I'm doing now: adopting ideas that I like, regardless of their origin.
about the tendency to groupthink and to attempt preemptively discount contrary opinions by taking the stance that the author and the like-minded had a monopoly on truth and morality.
No, I think you just assume anyone who shows compassion towards their fellow man, or even just uses the word "morality", can only possibly be doing so for religious reasons. You're basically just looking for a fight with one of those "religious nuts" you keep referring to.
You do realize that the concept of "morality" is also one of those things that existed before any of the major religions appeared, right?
When there is a disaster in the world, it isn't a given amongst mankind that we should all rush whatever assistance we can.
Yet a lot of people do just that, and yes, its not a "given", or some kind of requirement, nobody said it was.
Some cultures are a bit more fatalistic and see natural disasters differently. ... and others think that it's a waste of precious resources to react to disasters instead of preventing them.
Not everyone agrees with me, well duh, I knew that already, and alluded to that at the end of my post.
I don't think we should assume that holding these points of view necessarily makes someone less moral or immoral.
And I *do* think we should, especially with viewpoints that exhibit a callous disregard for human life. Those who hold such ideas are free to continue thinking callously, I'm free to continue calling it as I see it, immoral, and you're free to continue to disagree. We're now back to square one.
I'm now wondering what bothers you the most at this point: the fact that I don't agree with your viewpoint, or the fact that religion is not my reason for disagreeing with you? :)
Note that the article you link to calls them transformers for HVDC links. /me Head explodes!
Yikes! I didn't notice that. After some googling I found out a couple of things:
1) China is apparently building both HVAC and HVDC projects, so both kinds are being made for them. Jeez, what *isn't* China building right now?
2) HVDC has advantages over HVAC which is why it seems to be overtaking the use of HVAC. According to this pdf, HVAC deployment around the world is almost stagnant:
http://library.abb.com/global/scot/scot221.nsf/veritydisplay/ad19434ceddd4ffac125705e0034e83d/$File/Bulk%20Power%20Transmission%20at%20800%20kV%20DC.pdf
3) There *are* HVAC transformers out there that go as high as 1000kV (apparently India has some of these), but there are few of them
4) I obviously used the wrong picture, didn't check the fine print, and since UHVAC or just UHV, where U=ultra, transformers are very rare the only picture of one I could find was on page 9 of this Siemens pdf file:
http://www.ptd.siemens.de/070201_AC1000kV_GRIDTECH.pdf
Its an 800kV HVAC xformer that they say can be upgraded to 1000kV. If size impresses you, you may want to take a look at that one, its *much* bigger than the 800kV HVDC transformer in the first pic. :)
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much info out there that is not in PDF files, and for some reason that Siemens file doesn't render quite right for me in my PDF viewer. There *seems* to be parts of that slide-show like report thats talking about 1200kV HVAC, but the transformer page (9), only mentions 800kV-1000kV, and parts of the text in the report aren't rendering for me, so even after a lot of googling, I still don't know for sure what the biggest HVAC transformer in the world is rated at. Bottom line, AFAICT: 1000kV or 1200kV for HVAC and 800kV for HVDC. Wow.
Weston Price's work well documented that primitive people's had very low incidences of tooth decay
Its not hard to avoid tooth decay if you're average lifespan is only going to be about 25 to 30.
Virtually *all* of our chronic medical issues we're dealing with now are directly or indirectly caused by our dramatically increased lifespans, and this is not being driven by evolution, but by our "cheating of evolution". Why? Because evolution was never interested in us living long lives.
This whole conversation to me is a little strange, actually.
Where did this idea that "evolution" was ever "on our side" or was helping us become better *individuals* come from? Folks, evolution doesn't give a *damn* about us as individuals, all it wants us to do is grow up fast, procreate to pass on our genes, then die quickly to get out of the way so our kids can repeat the whole sad sequence all over again.
As far as I'm concerned, humanity's long term future will only be assured once we reach the advanced technological stage when we can cut evolution entirely out of the loop. Cheat it? Hell, we need to kill it.
Not to be insulting, but these are not magic pills that make you do what you are supposed to.
+1
some people do experience a sort of 'high' while on doses above what they realy need, which may pulverize any apathy and genuinely lead them to doing (even enjoying) tasks they would not normally.
In the case of CNS stimulants, the 'high' isn't like a hallucinogenic 'high', you'll just have a lot of mental energy to go "do things".
Now in my case, with an excessive dose, I'd just get so caught up in doing things that I already liked to do, I'd end up ignoring those things that I needed to be doing, thus my +1 above. :)
So, like most things in life, too much of a CNS stimulant will not be a "good thing".
And as hedwards said in his response to you, it has no effect on intellect, nor IMHO, does it help with creativity, it will just, with the right dosage, give you the energy & concentration to allow you to *apply* what intellect/creativity you already have.
But isn't Wellbutrin supposed to be an anti-depressant? I would think that unconquerable apathy is a part of depression.
As someone who has taken both, which one helps you depends entirely on what your specific problem is. In my case the Wellbutrin might as well have been a placebo for all the good it did me.
If the depression is the *symptom* of something else, then an anti-depressant may do you no good if that underlying problem isn't dealt with. On the other hand...
In other words, while there's certainly overlap in symptoms and treatment, adderall and wellbutrin are for two different problems.
I'm not so sure of this. If, for example, someone has a depression whose primary, dominant symptom is extreme fatigue, then something like a CNS stimulant (Adderall) may end up helping more than an anti-depressant (Wellbutrin), even though the underlying problem is still "Depression".
I think the real reason why some drugs help some people but not others is simply because the medical community quite simply doesn't yet have a clue how the brain really works, as a complete system, at the chemical level.
I mean no offense to the medical community in that, but look at all the anti-depressants that have been "discovered" so far. Most of them were essentially found by *accident* (much like how Viagra was discovered while looking for a blood pressure medication, IIRC), and for many of them, no one can actually explain in detail how they work, and more importantly, *why* they work.
The main reason for this is we still don't have a clear understanding of what chronic (severe) depression is, how it works, what things trigger its development, or even how to "measure" it in any empirical way. The same situation applies to most of the other diseases that exist solely within the brain, e.g., diseases whose actions and effects (symptoms) can only be seen as, often subtle, and sometimes conflicting!, changes in behavior, e.g., some chronically depressed people lose their appetite, while others eat too much, but both are suffering from depression - why the difference?.
If all the activity is happening deep in the brain, at the level of the synapses and neuro-receptors and the horde of chemical "messengers" that effect those receptors (and each other!), then the problem remains hard to understand because the brain is still largely an indecipherable black box to medical science.
Until we grok the brain, *completely*, we aren't going to, for example: 1) Understand what Chronic Major Depression is, 2) What Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is, 3) What the difference between those two is, since right now the list of symptoms for both is identical, and we have no clinical way to test for either of them, much less tell them apart, 4) What ADD and ADHD are, and why the hyperactivity symptom only shows up *some* of the time, 5) Why ADD/ADHD in children sometimes triggers Chronic Depression along *with* the ADD/ADHD as adults, 6) ... Well, because the brain is so darned fundamental, yet also so darned complicated, but so *not* understood, this list is virtually endless...
"Depressives have Prozac, ... and overachievers have Adderall."
Just an FYI, Adderall and similar drugs are now being prescribed to many "Depressives" as well. That article you link to is 3 years old, so I imagine the trend of using CNS stimulants for Major Depression wasn't as common then as now.
Except that it bans fairly benign drugs while authorizing the dangerous alcohol and the uninteresting dependency-hazard that is nicotine. I'd like some coherence here.
+1
The obvious inconsistency we have has always bothered me.
According to a Lancet study, LSD, amphetamines, ecstasy or cannabis are all less dangerous than alcohol both in terms of dependence and side effects.
Less dangerious and often far more powerful. That the GP compares nicotine and caffeine to amphetamines as if thats an apples-to-apples comparison clearly shows he's never used Adderal, Ritalin, or similar CNS stimulant. Forget the apple-to-orange comparison mistake, this is more like comparing a peanut to a watermelon. Not meaningful at all.
That's interesting. So your statement preemptively declares all opposing positions as being "unreasonable".
If the only opposing position we're talking about is deliberately standing by and allowing millions of people to die from a relatively easily preventable cause, then yes, I don't have a problem with preemptively calling that immoral.
Why is death by disease immoral?
Its not, but a large number of deaths by an easily prevented disease is (or should be).
Why is not making extraordinary efforts to treat the diseases of others immoral?
This entirely depends on how we define "extraordinary".
By who's standard other than yours?
If enough people agree with it, then it doesn't *matter* who originated the "standard". Why did you even bother to ask this? You know darn well the GP's attitude is, in general, held by a lot of people. If this attitude wasn't widespread, the world wouldn't have nearly as many aid organizations as it does (Red Cross, CARE, Doctors Without Borders, et cetera ad nauseum).
If you are a religious person
I'm not religious, I'm just a rather ordinary member of that very social species we call "homo sapiens", who, when he sees or hears of another member of the same species dying a pointless death, has the guts to think of more than just himself and ask himself the question "What if that was me?".
You don't need "religion" to see the GP's point of view, you just have to have the ability to "put yourself in someone else's shoes", so to speak.
Of course, I'm also a realist, and I know that despite my opinion, "immoral" behavior such as standing by while others are lost to easily preventable deaths will continue, for all sorts of reasons, with, I suspect, the main reason being that for every person who asks themselves the question "What if that was me?" in the above situation, there is at least one other person who doesn't think about anything beyond their initial reaction of "Whew! Glad that wasn't me!". Well, no one has ever accused humanity of being homogeneous. :)
Chickens, Pigs, and Humans. In some parts of the world, they are in close proximity to each other.
BINGO! Someone please mod the parent up, just for this.
There are *vast* stretches of poor and under-developed Asia and Africa where you find these three species very close together, including finding pigs in human dwellings with the chickens pecking on the ground just outside the front door. It is because of this that the vast majority of new strains of influenza that originate every year come mainly from Southeast Asia.
Also, please no more flying pig jokes, folks. From our (human) perspective, the only avian species we need to worry about is the lowly (non-flying) chicken, which is the only avian species that (in large parts of the world) is in close, constant proximity to pigs and ourselves. Although avian strains of influenza do infect other birds, it is *very* likely that the avian influenza RNA found in this latest H1N1 strain originated in chickens, was passed to pigs, then came to us.
However, flu viruses are extremely mutagenic, and in reality mutate constantly.
A problem with flu vaccines is they must be made from a strain that exists in early summer (to have time to make enough) but there is a strong chance that the virus will have mutated enough by the winter that the vaccine is not as effective, or has no effectiveness.
They mutate so much every year that the CDC basically has to "restart" its influenza program every year. They "restart" by looking for any new strains coming out of Southeast Asia, plus any known (dangerous) mutations of last year's common strains still out in the wild, and then try to formulate vaccines to counter the most *likely* strain to show up later in that flu season.
This explains why CDC's existing stockpile of vaccine might be useless in the face of a sudden, unexpected outbreak of a new influenza strain (like this one?). There is no such thing as a vaccine for all strains of influenza. Because this multi-headed hydra mutates so quickly, we currently can't create a single silver bullet that can deal with (all the different versions of) it.
A mutation of the 1918/1919 variant is called "swine flu" and is common in pigs today. That particular strain cannot infect humans. It was previously believed that the 1918/1919 strain was originally a swine flu, but recent research suggests it mutated from a bird flu. No one really knows for sure, however.
The only part of this text that I'm absolutely sure of is where you say no one really knows for sure, and thats especially true of the comparisons to the 1918 strain, as influenza mutates so much and exchanges RNA between the major strains so frequently that its virtually pointless to compare a modern strain to an ancient one. It doesn't really tell you anything *for sure*. :)
Keeping in mind that the connection between humans, pigs, and chickens is a *very* old one, thus so is influenza, then, for example, its just as likely that the 1918 strain, like strains today, picked up a lot of avian influenza RNA while in pigs before getting passed to us. So what would you call it then: Avian flu, or Swine flu? In other words, how much avian RNA can a "swine flu" have, and still be called a "swine flu" (or vice versa)?
"swine flu" is just a reference to any one of the influenza strains that are endemic in pigs, just as "avian flu" refers to all influenza types found in birds. Unfortunately for "swine flu" though, this is not only a large list, but a list thats starting to overlap extensively with both humans and avians, because, for example, it now includes H1N2 and H3N2 which are strains that include *avian* influenza RNA.
In fact, once you start reading about these subtypes, its easy to get confused. Consider this statement referring to "avian flu":
All known viruses that
Alternatively, I hear you can pray in python now, ...
That tends to happen when you attempt to use a snake as your intermediary with God.
[weird humor with obscure references]
The only thing that sacrificing a snake at an altar to Python will get you is a wide-angle disintegration beam. The only thing that will save you from that YASD is if you are playing a Knight and have (N)amed your weapon "Ni!". FWIW, the *best* thing to sacrifice there is a "killer rabbit", that'll get you MAXVALUE brownie points from your God, as well as the coveted message: "You feel that GVR is pleased".
[/weird humor with obscure references]
To those who don't get the above, that's ok, its fairly obscure, the important thing to remember is this: The Python programming language was NOT named after the snake. :)
or has NASA backtracked from calling 2008 the start of a new one?
Never mind, I just found a couple of things that suggest NASA, nor anyone else, really know when cycle 24 will actually start:
http://solarchaos.blogspot.com/2008/11/history-of-cycle-24-predictions.html
http://solarchaos.blogspot.com/2009/04/nasa-4.html
And this shows actual sunspots have been deviating from predicted sunspots for the last 6 months or so:
http://sidc.oma.be/html/wolfjmms.html
Interesting! Thanks.
From your blog:
1999 146.3
2000 173
2001 170.3
2002 176.7
2003 109.2
2004 68.6
2005 48.9
2006 26.1
2007 12.8
2008 4.7
Do you have this info for '97 and '98? I was just wondering what the sunspot activity was for the first year of the *last* cycle (if ~2008 is the start of the new cycle, then ~1997 was the start of the last one, or has NASA backtracked from calling 2008 the start of a new one?).
Mainly my question is: Was the first year of the last solar cycle as quiet as 2008 was?
because never in the history of humanity has a transformer blown up by a solar flair
1) We aren't talking about solar flares, the real boogeyman here is called a "coronal mass ejection".
2) How long has humanity had electricity, and thus high voltage transformers? On the cosmic scale, it hasn't been that long at all.
3) The only reason Canada didn't lose any transformers during the 1989 geomagnetic storm (triggered by a CME) was because circuit breakers started tripping all over the place, and the circuit breakers are there to protect the transformers from current which *would* have otherwise blown them up, or more accurately, melted them down and/or set them on fire.