Something buried deep in the article that is worth mentioning. Propranolol was put on the market in 1964 and has been widely used for high blood pressure and migraine headaches. The history of propranolol is here. My 10-year-old sister-in-law is on it for migraines. Her 8-year-old cousin was on it for several years for a heart arrythmia prior to getting surgery. Newer beta blockers like metoprolol (with lower side effects) are universally reccommended (with a few exceptions) to patients with heart disease.
To answer several posters questions: the side effects are well-known. The biggest includes dizziness from low blood pressure (if you had normal BP to start with). It can exacerbate asthma in people with this condition. Although it is associated with exercise intolerance (because of an inability to raise your heart rate), beta blockers' traditional association with depression and fatigue has been more controversial lately.
But I would agree with the statement in the article that one or two pills would be fairly harmless as far as side effects go. This is a drug that thousands of people have stayed on for decades.
Someone brought up the issue of attacking a treated victim's testimony in court. I wouldn't be surprised if this new data means lawyers will start attacking the testimony of all witnesses on beta blockers for whatever reason. And I would bet probably 25% of Congress (I'm guessing based on age and sex) is on a beta blocker.
When I took Driver's Ed in the US in 1995 (that's not that long ago, is it?), we drove an old Buick that had been junked. The auto-shop class at the school's tech center repaired and fitted with an extra passenger-side brake and gave it to the high school.
It had no power steering, no power brakes, and a funny smell. The steering wheel was set at about 45 degrees off of where it should be, so you had to hold it to the left to keep the car going straight.
I'm upgrading from a broken-down Kyocera 7135Kyocera Smartphone to a Treo 650.
For more than a year, I was in complete heaven. I did not pay for a data plan, and got info for logging into a 3G data connection from PDA Phone Home. A net connection was billed as regular voice minutes. Couple that with unlimited nights and weekends, and I could use the Internet at will.
I could hook the phone up to my laptop using the USB cable and connect at 28.8-36.6 anywhere with cell service and surf at will after 9pm.
Now several users are upgrading from 2-year-old Kyoceras to the Treo 650 and are getting burned, even with the slower/older QNC service.
I suppose I should have felt lucky that I got cheap cellular internet access for so long, but it's hard to start paying for something when you got a free ride before.
Incidentally, it is thought that what we feel as "muscle memory" is contained in the cerebellum. This is part of the brain that processes proprioception (the sense of where your limbs are in space) and does the complex math required to do things like throw a ball at a target.
But things remembered in the cerebellem don't have to be consciously thought about.
When you're drunk, the cerebellum is hit rather hard, thus you stumble and have to look at your feet. The nose-to-finger test cops do is a test proprioception.
So you probably couldn't type your PIN if you were drunk either.
Thanks everybody for all your help! I didn't expect such a great response. Here's some comments of my own.
1. I completely respect what photographers do as artists, and I specifically respect the photographer I talked to. I don't feel like his prices were scams or ripoffs. I recognize he would be putting in a lot of work, and the pictures were amazing. My fiancee has been a musician in dozens of weddings, and she knows he's highly recommended. I think his prices were fair for what he offered, but they were simply out of our price range. As much as we would like to spend $3000 on wedding photography, we can't.
2. I especially appreciated posts from the photographers on why they want to keep copyrights. I realize now that I don't need the full copyright signed over to me. But I do want a full license for reproduction, modification, publication, distribution, etc. The photographer can keep his originals, my family members can buy their prints from him, and he can use them for his portfolio. But I also want no restrictions on what my fiancee and I can do with the images.
3. I probably want a photographer who uses some (or all) digital photography because hi-res digital images would be more useful to me than negatives. I would want hi-res files of the images both before and after retouching. I could compromise on 150 dpi jpgs delivered with the photos and hi-res files a year later.
4. When I talked to the photographer, said he would give me "medium quality" images suitable for the web. This made me think of 72dpi. But I could very well have reasons to want to print 300dpi images on my crappy inkjet. Or my fiancee may divorce me, and wants to put up a picture on her website of me with devil horns and pointy moustache. I know the photographer as an artist might not like that, but she should have the rights to do that.
5. Part of the reason I don't want to deal with these restrictions is because I don't know what we will want to do with the pictures in future. What if, 20 years from now, I buy some fancy hi-definition OLED picture frame to hang on my wall. Boy, I sure wish I had some high-resolution images of my wedding to put on that screen!
Or what if my daughter is running for President, and she wants to put my wedding pictures in her cheesy Mom-and-Apple-Pie 30 minute campaign spot transmitted directly to voters' brains? Would she have the legal rights to use those images? I think she should.
I remember reading an article in a magazine several years ago about this. It was around 1994-95 when the DVD standard was being hammered out.
16:9 was chosen because it was a compromise between 4:3 and the various movie formats. There were mathematical reasons why they arrived at 16:9, but I forget what they were. I know 16:9 is the square of 4:3. I think it had to do with, yes, 16:9 being very close to 1.85 and 2.35:1 being close to 4/3ds of 16:9.
I do vividly remember there was a diagram with rectangles representing all the popular aspect ratios, and 16:9 fit between them in some ideal way. It also had to do with things like how a letterboxed DVD would look on a legacy TV, how a 4:3 TV show would look on a 16:9 screen, etc.
No, they don't have rapes to investigate (well, maybe a few). The FBI deals with Federal crimes, and a rape would be a state case. If someone was a serial rapist, and committing crimes in several states, maybe the FBI would get involved. The FBI also gets involved in kidnapping (because of the likelihood of the kidnapper crossing state lines.
Other people have mentioned that this doesn't sound like it should be a federal case. I'm guessing that because "Internet Stuff" tends to involve parties in several states, the FBI might get involved.
Whether it scares you or not, my medical school can be mostly attended online, as well.
All the lectures are recorded in RealAudio, and most of the lecturers show slides in PowerPoint (available for download). The ones that use standard overheads put the handouts in our mailboxes. The students pool together to make transcripts of the lectures, which are very high quality. Tests are online.
The upshot of this is about half of the class rarely attends lectures. Some students NEVER attend the lectures, live 2 hours away, and drive in once a week for the clinical stuff in the hospitals. Just today, a review lecture had an attendance of 14 people out of 160. (I was there because I had to record the RealAudio)
This is just for the first two "basic science" years. Years 3 and 4 are in the hospital wards, getting hands-on experience. Obviously, that can't be done over the web.
I've found that in med school, there is more of an attitude that the students are in charge, and an acknowledgement that people learn in different ways. The faculty will generally go out of their way to make sure you can get all the material. The students are motivated enough to learn on their own. If they learn best by skipping class, the faculty is OK with this.
Practially EVERYBODY in medical school has one, and most doctors do too. Of course, considering most medical references run 4 megs or more, this 2MB device need not apply.
Say a cell is infected by a virus, it will present pieces of the virus on the cell surface.
A T-Cell comes along, checks out this virus piece, and sends a signal saying "Hey, that's a virus! You're infected! It would be better for all of us if you just commit suicide."
After getting this signal, the infected cell turns on its apoptosis genes and kills itself in a sensible, precisely controlled manner.
This is just one example of apoptosis, but you can see how the controlled suicide of a few cells is beneficial to an organism.
I am quite nostalgic about Napster too. I remember a summer during Napster's heyday, the last summer my sister and I lived in the same house (before I graduated college and got a job in another city).
She would set up her laptop next to my desktop, and we were plugged into our parents' new cable modem. We would stay up all night, downloading songs, talking about music and life, and sharing new bands we discovered.
I recently got a discontinued Eyemodule for my old discontinued Handspring Visor ($30, why not?)
I'm having a lot of fun because of the simple fact that people don't know it's a camera. My friends are used to me using a PDA, and now I can get cool candid shots.
I feel like the fuzzy, low-res pictures I'm collecting are a better catalog of my life than the "say cheese" pictures from my film camera.
I could see a phone on a camera being used in much the same way. Yes, it's a toy. But it's a fun toy. Of course, I didn't rush out an buy this eyemodule 2 years ago when it was $200.
Personally, I feel excited about the form factor of the new Kyocera 7135
I like Graffiti, but I feel a number keypad is very necessary.
It seems like this Kyocera might finally get it right. (Although many people are complaining that it doesn't have the new features of PalmOS 5)
There are brands of caffeinated water. While it wouldn't have the long-lasting effect of a patch, it could skip some of the problems with coffee and cola.
While many of the preserved texts are still here because of luck, I think the ancient Egyptians were planning for the future. That is what is so fascinating about them. It is evident in the scale of their monuments and the way they preserved their dead. The Egyptians did everything in their power to make sure their culture would be remembered for eternity. And they're doing pretty well so far.
On one hand, this does get a customer paying twice as much. On the other hand, the companies prefer customers that use small amounts of bandwidth. A customer who goes to the expense of getting two lines is probably a hardcore bandwidth fiend. The ISP would probably prefer 2 customers who download in moderation.
Of course, maybe this bandwidth fiend would now only be downloading Linux ISO's and lawfully purchased pornographic movies 12 hours a day, instead of 24, and paying more of his/her share.
But I have a feeling these routers will be much more attractive to small business customers. I'm not really sure how pricing schemes for business accounts go. But I once worked for a company with 20 employees, and about 30 computers. They had about 15 computers on one cable modem, and the rest on the other modem. I think a router like this would be attractive to such a office.
I can open it up, and change fans with no screws. The drive cages and external drive rails are awesome.
Earthlink's Phantom Bill
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 1
I once signed up for Earthlink's DSL. They said that I was in an eligble area, and took my credit card number, etc.
2 weeks later, a Covad guy came out, and said that because of some hills and creeks, I was actually too far away, and couldn't get the service. Earthlink sent me an e-mail the next day saying that my service had been cancelled. There was an offer for dial-up service, which I declined. My business with them was done.
6 months later there was a $50 bill from Earthlink on my credit card statement! I called them up, and after holding, I reached a human. Of course, I didn't have my username and password. They didn't have my name. I gave them my credit card number, and that showed up on the rep's screen. But he said the number wasn't associated with an account!
He sent a $50 credit to my credit card number, which solved the money problem. Of course, I wanted to know why they still had my number. I asked them to delete the number from their records. He said he couldn't do that, because he could only cancel accounts, and I didn't have an account! What the hell?
Luckily I was changing banks that month, and dumping that credit card. So if they still have that number, it's no longer valid.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Find a new use for an old drug that costs 22 cents a pill.
2. Give it out one or two pills at a time.
3. ???
4. Profit
But I would agree with the statement in the article that one or two pills would be fairly harmless as far as side effects go. This is a drug that thousands of people have stayed on for decades.
Someone brought up the issue of attacking a treated victim's testimony in court. I wouldn't be surprised if this new data means lawyers will start attacking the testimony of all witnesses on beta blockers for whatever reason. And I would bet probably 25% of Congress (I'm guessing based on age and sex) is on a beta blocker.
Umm, I guess I had a different experience.
When I took Driver's Ed in the US in 1995 (that's not that long ago, is it?), we drove an old Buick that had been junked. The auto-shop class at the school's tech center repaired and fitted with an extra passenger-side brake and gave it to the high school.
It had no power steering, no power brakes, and a funny smell. The steering wheel was set at about 45 degrees off of where it should be, so you had to hold it to the left to keep the car going straight.
It's a heckuva lot cheaper than our last trip to Vegas.
For more than a year, I was in complete heaven. I did not pay for a data plan, and got info for logging into a 3G data connection from PDA Phone Home. A net connection was billed as regular voice minutes. Couple that with unlimited nights and weekends, and I could use the Internet at will.
I could hook the phone up to my laptop using the USB cable and connect at 28.8-36.6 anywhere with cell service and surf at will after 9pm.
Now several users are upgrading from 2-year-old Kyoceras to the Treo 650 and are getting burned, even with the slower/older QNC service.
I suppose I should have felt lucky that I got cheap cellular internet access for so long, but it's hard to start paying for something when you got a free ride before.
Incidentally, it is thought that what we feel as "muscle memory" is contained in the cerebellum. This is part of the brain that processes proprioception (the sense of where your limbs are in space) and does the complex math required to do things like throw a ball at a target.
But things remembered in the cerebellem don't have to be consciously thought about.
When you're drunk, the cerebellum is hit rather hard, thus you stumble and have to look at your feet. The nose-to-finger test cops do is a test proprioception.
So you probably couldn't type your PIN if you were drunk either.
Thanks everybody for all your help! I didn't expect such a great response. Here's some comments of my own.
1. I completely respect what photographers do as artists, and I specifically respect the photographer I talked to. I don't feel like his prices were scams or ripoffs. I recognize he would be putting in a lot of work, and the pictures were amazing. My fiancee has been a musician in dozens of weddings, and she knows he's highly recommended. I think his prices were fair for what he offered, but they were simply out of our price range. As much as we would like to spend $3000 on wedding photography, we can't.
2. I especially appreciated posts from the photographers on why they want to keep copyrights. I realize now that I don't need the full copyright signed over to me. But I do want a full license for reproduction, modification, publication, distribution, etc. The photographer can keep his originals, my family members can buy their prints from him, and he can use them for his portfolio. But I also want no restrictions on what my fiancee and I can do with the images.
3. I probably want a photographer who uses some (or all) digital photography because hi-res digital images would be more useful to me than negatives. I would want hi-res files of the images both before and after retouching. I could compromise on 150 dpi jpgs delivered with the photos and hi-res files a year later.
4. When I talked to the photographer, said he would give me "medium quality" images suitable for the web. This made me think of 72dpi. But I could very well have reasons to want to print 300dpi images on my crappy inkjet. Or my fiancee may divorce me, and wants to put up a picture on her website of me with devil horns and pointy moustache. I know the photographer as an artist might not like that, but she should have the rights to do that.
5. Part of the reason I don't want to deal with these restrictions is because I don't know what we will want to do with the pictures in future. What if, 20 years from now, I buy some fancy hi-definition OLED picture frame to hang on my wall. Boy, I sure wish I had some high-resolution images of my wedding to put on that screen!
Or what if my daughter is running for President, and she wants to put my wedding pictures in her cheesy Mom-and-Apple-Pie 30 minute campaign spot transmitted directly to voters' brains? Would she have the legal rights to use those images? I think she should.
I just realized that this book is available in PDF format at the website of my school's library (U. of Alabama in Birmingham)
A student log-in is required, of course.
I hadn't even realized that my school carried e-books. Each individual page is a separate PDF, so dowloading it for offline viewing would be annoying.
Anyway, if my college has it, yours might have it too.
And even mentioned on slashdot
I remember reading an article in a magazine several years ago about this. It was around 1994-95 when the DVD standard was being hammered out.
16:9 was chosen because it was a compromise between 4:3 and the various movie formats. There were mathematical reasons why they arrived at 16:9, but I forget what they were. I know 16:9 is the square of 4:3. I think it had to do with, yes, 16:9 being very close to 1.85 and 2.35:1 being close to 4/3ds of 16:9.
I do vividly remember there was a diagram with rectangles representing all the popular aspect ratios, and 16:9 fit between them in some ideal way. It also had to do with things like how a letterboxed DVD would look on a legacy TV, how a 4:3 TV show would look on a 16:9 screen, etc.
No, they don't have rapes to investigate (well, maybe a few). The FBI deals with Federal crimes, and a rape would be a state case. If someone was a serial rapist, and committing crimes in several states, maybe the FBI would get involved. The FBI also gets involved in kidnapping (because of the likelihood of the kidnapper crossing state lines.
Other people have mentioned that this doesn't sound like it should be a federal case. I'm guessing that because "Internet Stuff" tends to involve parties in several states, the FBI might get involved.
I feel for your. I have a P-2046, and I love it. But I'm in the US, so I didn't have any problems getting it.
Whether it scares you or not, my medical school can be mostly attended online, as well.
All the lectures are recorded in RealAudio, and most of the lecturers show slides in PowerPoint (available for download). The ones that use standard overheads put the handouts in our mailboxes. The students pool together to make transcripts of the lectures, which are very high quality. Tests are online.
The upshot of this is about half of the class rarely attends lectures. Some students NEVER attend the lectures, live 2 hours away, and drive in once a week for the clinical stuff in the hospitals. Just today, a review lecture had an attendance of 14 people out of 160. (I was there because I had to record the RealAudio)
This is just for the first two "basic science" years. Years 3 and 4 are in the hospital wards, getting hands-on experience. Obviously, that can't be done over the web.
I've found that in med school, there is more of an attitude that the students are in charge, and an acknowledgement that people learn in different ways. The faculty will generally go out of their way to make sure you can get all the material. The students are motivated enough to learn on their own. If they learn best by skipping class, the faculty is OK with this.
Practially EVERYBODY in medical school has one, and most doctors do too. Of course, considering most medical references run 4 megs or more, this 2MB device need not apply.
In the example he gave:
Say a cell is infected by a virus, it will present pieces of the virus on the cell surface.
A T-Cell comes along, checks out this virus piece, and sends a signal saying
"Hey, that's a virus! You're infected! It would be better for all of us if you just commit suicide."
After getting this signal, the infected cell turns on its apoptosis genes and kills itself in a sensible, precisely controlled manner.
This is just one example of apoptosis, but you can see how the controlled suicide of a few cells is beneficial to an organism.
I am quite nostalgic about Napster too. I remember a summer during Napster's heyday, the last summer my sister and I lived in the same house (before I graduated college and got a job in another city).
She would set up her laptop next to my desktop, and we were plugged into our parents' new cable modem. We would stay up all night, downloading songs, talking about music and life, and sharing new bands we discovered.
Good times.
I recently got a discontinued Eyemodule for my old discontinued Handspring Visor ($30, why not?)
I'm having a lot of fun because of the simple fact that people don't know it's a camera. My friends are used to me using a PDA, and now I can get cool candid shots.
I feel like the fuzzy, low-res pictures I'm collecting are a better catalog of my life than the "say cheese" pictures from my film camera.
I could see a phone on a camera being used in much the same way. Yes, it's a toy. But it's a fun toy. Of course, I didn't rush out an buy this eyemodule 2 years ago when it was $200.
Personally, I feel excited about the form factor of the new Kyocera 7135 I like Graffiti, but I feel a number keypad is very necessary. It seems like this Kyocera might finally get it right. (Although many people are complaining that it doesn't have the new features of PalmOS 5)
Water Joe comes to mind.
I have an acquaintance that works for Microsoft. He said one day he left the bathroom and forgot to zip up his fly.
.NET initiative. They are now more open and accessible."
When a co-worker pointed this out, he replied "My pants are part of the
While many of the preserved texts are still here because of luck, I think the ancient Egyptians were planning for the future. That is what is so fascinating about them. It is evident in the scale of their monuments and the way they preserved their dead. The Egyptians did everything in their power to make sure their culture would be remembered for eternity. And they're doing pretty well so far.
On one hand, this does get a customer paying twice as much. On the other hand, the companies prefer customers that use small amounts of bandwidth. A customer who goes to the expense of getting two lines is probably a hardcore bandwidth fiend. The ISP would probably prefer 2 customers who download in moderation.
Of course, maybe this bandwidth fiend would now only be downloading Linux ISO's and lawfully purchased pornographic movies 12 hours a day, instead of 24, and paying more of his/her share.
But I have a feeling these routers will be much more attractive to small business customers. I'm not really sure how pricing schemes for business accounts go. But I once worked for a company with 20 employees, and about 30 computers. They had about 15 computers on one cable modem, and the rest on the other modem. I think a router like this would be attractive to such a office.
Hmm... Here's a good game! Name (in your opinion) the three songs that contrast most strongly.
My vote goes to:
Stomp Box
Lie Still, Little Bottle
We Want a Rock
I love my Antec Case.
I can open it up, and change fans with no screws. The drive cages and external drive rails are awesome.
I once signed up for Earthlink's DSL. They said that I was in an eligble area, and took my credit card number, etc.
2 weeks later, a Covad guy came out, and said that because of some hills and creeks, I was actually too far away, and couldn't get the service. Earthlink sent me an e-mail the next day saying that my service had been cancelled. There was an offer for dial-up service, which I declined. My business with them was done.
6 months later there was a $50 bill from Earthlink on my credit card statement! I called them up, and after holding, I reached a human. Of course, I didn't have my username and password. They didn't have my name. I gave them my credit card number, and that showed up on the rep's screen. But he said the number wasn't associated with an account!
He sent a $50 credit to my credit card number, which solved the money problem. Of course, I wanted to know why they still had my number. I asked them to delete the number from their records. He said he couldn't do that, because he could only cancel accounts, and I didn't have an account! What the hell?
Luckily I was changing banks that month, and dumping that credit card. So if they still have that number, it's no longer valid.