The problem is, the SS didn't need these pills to do what they did. Did the citizens of Dachau do much of anything resembling numbing grief once the purpose of the "factory" in the town was revealed to them?
I think the main motivation for the gas chambers was just sheer numbers required. The Germans didn't dig the graves, the condemed did. The Germans didn't cart out the dead, the prisoners did. With the gas chambers and mausoleums (I won't call them ovens), they could be renditioned quickly without having to stop for the crude step of putting bullets in them first.
There was an NPR interview with an Iraqi man who professed to have been a torturer for Saddam Hussein. How could someone bring themselves to doing this shit, basically? The man said it's a process, an indoctrination. Unless you're already a sociopath, you have to be made into a torturer. One of the most powerful tools used was the torturing and execution of fellow indoctrinates, often times at the hand of the indoctrinates. When someone says, "torture him or you will suffer the same fate", well... human nature dictates that 999999/1000000 will do the dirty deed.
So, if you have a society that so buys into the koolaid that the Jews are responsible for all the bad that has happened to them, and it makes sense, then bad shit starts to happen. How did the Tutsis and Hutus blow up into their stark ravin' mad slashfest? It didn't just happen over nite. How does all the Hindu-v-Muslim shit in India happen? It's been developing there for over 500 years. If you grow up in an environment of bullshit, it seems like the truth. So tieing up your neighbor in barbed wire and throwing a car tire full of gasoline around his neck, and lighting it up on fire, starts to sound like a reasonable way to resolve differences in your favor.
Except that those pushing the war tend to as a whole to have avoided as much as they could any involvement with being in the military, with a couple of notable exceptions (that prove the stereotype). As it has almost always been. So unless the legislatures and bureaucrats pushing for military actions have anything personally invested (i.e., kids currently in the military or past experiences of their own to temper their actions now), then military action is an easy thing, because someone else is doing the dirty work for you, and you get to take in the relative glory of it all.
But it's been like that for a long time.
Yes, we really could use this pill for returning war vets. People who have switched their normal civilized behaviors to the exact opposite, which are required to survive in a combat situation. Traffic stopped for an accident? The rest of us slow down and gawk at it. For many truck drivers returning from Iraq, it has been well-reported that the usual way to deal with a traffic stoppage in Iraq is to hammer the gas and blow through it as quick as possible, for it could be a setup for an ambush, and those who linger in ambush zones die. If The Pill could help turn that off, that would be a good thing.
President Bush never consulted the VA, DAV, et al before initiating hostilities in Iraq & Afghanistan. But neither did President Roosevelt, President Wilson, President Eisenhower/Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon, etc. either.
The philosophical argument is interesting too. Memories are a fundamentally defining attribute of the human experience. What happens to us as human beings when we choose to modify that?
But we already try to. Gotten drunk after you got dumped by a SO, fired from a job, realized your wife has been cheating on you for the last 10 years, etc?
Gotten stoned at the end of the day to blow off a little steam?
There's "depression", and there's Major Depression. Sorry, but thinking happy thoughts, stretching the body, etc. doesn't do shit for Major Depression. Spend some time with someone diagnosed with Major Depression.
Those things can work for the people who need some sort of handholding or assurance.
I'd give just about anything to turn back the clocks before 1998, so that my wife could beg out of going to Guam to work on the KAL 800 crash there.
As much as I might want to think that it's just "all in her mind", I realize that all I have to go on are my perceptions I get from her descriptions and any of my preconceived notions or assumptions, which just don't amount to jack shit, really.
So all I can do is just keep saying, "Honey, I love you. Hopefully it'll get better one of these days."
Been shot at by people actively trying to shoot you? Your perceptions of things will be way different than watching a movie about it thinking that you are so right and correct by saying, "duck, you stupid idiot!" before some guy gets capped with a headshot. So until I've actually gone through that situation, I'll defer more towards those that have been through exactly that rather than any armchair Slashdotter or general.
Drs and dentists already use various antihypnotic drugs to reduce/eliminate your short-term memory when doing certain short-term, but invasive, procedures, in addition to anesthesia.
The funny thing is, you need to take these drugs before the stressful situation. This is a new drug that could help wipe out things after the fact.
We all can convince ourselves out of some degree of bad shit after the fact, but the things that tend to induce PTSD are at a whole different level (yes, WAYYY beyond psycho hose monster girlfriends/boyfriends, etc).
Besides, most good things also can have a negative thing about them, too. They're usually double-edged swords. So, will we let our fear of potential bad uses outweigh the potential good it could do? Probably.
Well, a broken heart is one thing. You just have to get over that one on your own.
Dealing with trauma patients on a daily basis and finally having too much of it, shooting someone to death in the line of duty (and not being able to get the face of the victim out of your head), getting raped (and living the rest of your life not being able to trust men at anything more than a superficial level), etc., and not ever being able to get away from it, well, that is more what PTSD is like. It's like a bad feedback loop that has no dampening features in it, like it's almost at a harmonic frequency being driven by inputs at that harmonic freq.
Having PTSD kind of stops you at that point, and you can't really get past it. Sure, it's all in one's head. Now, if that ex-girlfriend had seriously mindfucked you for two or three years, and finally left you hanging high and dry, perhaps with some measure of public humiliation involved, that is different.
PTSD, and dealing with it, is not like a rape victim channeling rage into anti-violence/pro-punishment advocacy. It is not Cindy Sheehan and her anti-Iraq Campaign campain [sic].
As far as pumping people with these pills... OK, so it's better to have returning soldiers with battle rage that they can't just turn off running around society, eh? Army divorce rates right now are multiples higher than the standard population. Domestic violence in households with returning vets is a couple of multiples higher than the rest of the population. Etc.
At least things are slightly better now than with post-Vietnam vets. We are aware that many soldiers returning from Iraq have been brainfucked by the situation, and need some help to decompress and leave Iraq behind, much more and longer than we previously thought, and the military branches and VA are trying to help out.
Post-Vietnam fucked over the US for at least 15 years in many facets. At least this is one area where people are trying to be proactive.
Besides... there are dentists who will essentially knock you out (liberal use of tranqs and antihypnotics) just to get your teeth cleaned. Is this necessarily a bad thing?
As far as the Pharma industry... OK, so the pharma industry wants to push pills, and will not research anything that is not patentable, like instead of giving antidepressants for post partum depression, why not try to concoct a hormone treatment protocol to help reduce the kickback that this seems to be? Hormones aren't patentable (and probably too variable, too, but it doesn't stop HRT for estrogen or testosterone loss, either).
It's not the use of medicines per se, it is the laissez-faire attitude about most doctors w.r.t. patients and drugs, and a certain lack of "pumptitude" in the population as a whole. What do you do with someone who comes in, marginally depressed, who just won't leave you alone until you give him a prescription for something? Same thing with the mom with kids who comes in a the slightest inkling of a runny nose. Eventually you cave and give them what they want, even though you know it's not what they need because they're just not listening to you.
Blah blah blah about doctors knowing more about what their patients need and how arrogant it is blah blah blah.
It's the American way now. Edge cases drive the rest of the society, instead of being isolated away from the system.
But how would it really be any worse than a hydraulic lift that has a catastrophic failure of part of the hydraulics system? No, not the seals around the moving parts, but, say, a hydraulic pump line blows off of its fitting (like this would happen without some sort of warning at all. At the very least, hydraulic fluid stinks when it is hot. a slow leak somewhere would stink enough to probably get the elevator's users to complain to someone eventually.
It wouldn't be a free fall trip to the basement, but it could be close.
Even so, they still put on mechanical safety breaks on these just in case...
You don't like nethack on Win32? That's how I get my nethack fix.
The only problems I have are getting networking to work right between the colinux environment and Windows. The instructions for it online in the colinux wiki suck.
OK, it's not fair, because that lift only has 3 stops.
It sounds like a silly system. When I get to work, and there's a large gaggle of people waiting for an elevator, I wait and get the second or third one to come down, and let the first one down fill with lots of people. Chances are, by the second or third elevator that manages to come down (assuming there is enough time between when the bulk of riders gets on the first car), there is maybe 3 or 5 people on my lift, and I get to my floor faster because I have to stop at max 5 other floors, instead of potentially max myfloor (I was working on 13th floor) stops.
Yes, Google is useful for what it is. But GMail is way more useful (OK, the 2+ GB mailbox size is nice, too) than most/all other webmail apps, and maps.google.com just totally kicks mapquest's ass for usability from a user's perspective.
Re:Absolutely: Web 2.0 is like XML but less so
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Probably related to the same reasons that in the sports world we have wonderful words like "athleticism" instead of raw physical talent, "upper ankle sprain", and other such meaningless bullshit terms.
Or all the golf pro wannabes.
Or all the Jesse James badboy wannabes.
Etc.
As Marv Levy was quoted as saying, "You don't know. You can't know. And you're never going to know (so shut the F**K up, heavily implied)", to some reporter's inane question about a football game he had just coached. I think this was what Zeldman was trying to say in too many words.
The technical parts of "web 2.0" are cool, as are some of the websites that use it effectively, because they've been desiged and implemented by people who get what it is and how to do it well.
It sounds a bit like the "ooo, VB is bad because it lets any silly fool with half a brain to develop 'applications', and they get on better with the CxOs, so I'm through with this company, even though I'm 10x the programmer than he will ever be in his lifetime", though, doesn't it?
Or the friction between DBAs who have too much of a hand in application development (as much of it should be in the db) vs developers who have too much of a hand in database design and implementation (the db is just a stupid, but fast and structured, data store), and their bosses who just want to be buzzword compliant with their golf or squash cohorts.
Why worry about what all the marketroids, venture capitalists, clueless wannabes, etc. say it is and make it out to be, even if you work with/for them?
Well, it's no different than when some moron kicked off a job that tied up the line printer for an hour when you had to print out your CS101 project before it was due, or someone else somehow managed to eat all the disk i/o or filled up/tmp, etc. Remember how long it took a VAX cluster to reconfigure when one of its machines crapped out? OK, it was cool that the whole thing didn't just blow up, but it took 5-10 minutes for everyone else's terminal sessions to go back to not being virtually locked up as if someone had remotely Ctrl+S'd every tty on the other boxes.
Me? I personally like how GMail (and maps.google) work with AJAX. Compared to their competitors, they just work WAYYY better, not only because of their AJAX stuff.
Hmm... Hybrids *are* a better kludge, but really benefit in urban/suburban driving scenarios (i.e., stop-and-go driving). Brock Yates, a serious car nut for Car & Driver Magazine, wrote an interesting article about why hybrids are cool, from a car-nut/Tim Taylor perspective: More Power, which translates to car geeks as more off the line.
Part of that is due to the instant torque of (certain) electric motors. The Lexus RX Hybrid is faster off the line and 0-60 than its normal counterpart, and IIRC, the normal one has a larger engine. Even the lowly Insight is very fun to drive, according to Yates' editorial. That the engine kicks on when needed, seemlessly, is kind of amazing. The only drawback with the Insight is that you look like you're driving a car from "Sleeper" (but no allusions to the AMC Pacer were made, either).
A 3-cyl Geo Metro is not fun to drive. There is nothing sexy about a car that sounds like a wheezing tractor under throttle. They're definitely in the "must pass" category of cars.
Part of the problem is that for Americans (and Japanese), this "go fast" gestalt with cars is an integral part of the driving experience, even if it's never turned on by the driver. I suppose that's also an American/Japanese thing, in that having the "potential" is worth paying the big bucks for, too. Can't change it, for better or for worse, with Euro-style thinking, so just accept it for what it is. Hybrids currently can provide that piece of the puzzle for Americans far more than a rattly 3-cyl 1-litre engine ever did.
Sure, the Geo Metro was advertising 50+ MPH, and that was 10-15 years ago! So what's new there?
At least from the gist of Yates' editorial, the Lexus RX Hybrid is only slightly more than a decked out RX regular. The RX Hybrid is decked out already, btw. Remember when only ABS came in luxury cars, like MB S-class, BMWs and Audis? Now it's on even freakin Hyundais and K.I.A.'s. Stock.
So what? GM came up with their own ABS braking system so as to not pay Bosch to use their system in the 80's. It of course got scoffed at in the automotive press, but I suppose it's worked good enough over time.
Does anyone else use Audi's patented Quattro system to do all-wheel drive? Nope. Everyone else fakes the elegant, passive Quattro system for a complicated endeavor using computers, the EDU, the ABS system, actively engaged clutches to shift power around, etc.
But they're not pure hybrids. The energy from the regenerative braking systems on diesel-electric locomotives is simply run through a big-ass electric heater grid and radiated away, not recaptured and stored in batteries.
Hmm... M1 tanks use Chobam armor, a British invention. USMC flies Harriers, a British invention (ok, AV8B was made by McDonaldsDouglas). M1 tank uses a 120mm smoothbore main gun, licensed from a German company. M1 came about because the German Leopard tanks modernized western tank design in the early 70s, especially comapred to M48 and M60 tanks deployed by the US at the time. Hmm... British troops use M16s? Yeah, right. The 105MM howitzer used by the US Army is a British design.
Try not to compare Rangers to SF. The Rangers are essentially crack infantry shock troops. They use Infantry tactics, and mostly Infantry equipment. The Army Special Forces are guerrila operators.
Ranger School and SF Q Course are two different beings, from what I've been told by people who have done both. Ranger School is physically demanding. SF Q Course is primarily mentally demanding, with enough physical demands thrown in to amplify any mental deficiencies. Forgetting the team's SAW at an ambush point in Ranger School will just get you a 0 for that section (and a hell of a lot of verbal abuse, flutter kicks and pushups for your team). SF school, well, the instructor might ask, "hey, where's your SAW?" when your 10 K away from that last point, and leave it to you, Team Leader, to figure out what to do about it and still make your next objective...
SF is designed to engage the locals to increase its force capabilities when needed.
Hmm... my interpretation of "Blackhawk Down" was completely different from yours. The US involvement in Somalia WAS a failure. The rescue of that crew and sacrifices made to do it was miraculous in and of itself, but it does not make the whole operation there a success. Did the US bring Aidid to justice? Nope. That was the whole point of the operation there.
Perhaps he wants to define "idiot". Having sex with prostitutes. Probably not good, even if you take away your judeochristian/islamic biases. Having unprotected sex with people you don't know...just a bad idea, even if AIDS/HIV wasn't in the picture. Holding on to silly cultural beliefs that have no rational basis, probably a bad thing, too.
It's the same thing about cars and bad drivers, though, too. Do seatbelts and airbags in the long run save more lives, or do they lull marginal drivers into a feeling of self-confidence so that they take bigger risks than they should and cause more problems when they step over their limits, thus resulting in more accidents per se that seem to involve more cars than they used to, increasing the odds of other people getting injuries, etc.?
If you work with powerful tools, the safeties on them are there to prevent stupid behaviors and accidents. But they can't prevent you from more or less intentionally causing yourself or others harm if you have a brain fart or something along the way.
If I robbed a bank of $10,000,000, then gave $9,000,000 to charities, am I suddenly warm and fuzzy?
Well, if you were a successful cocaine distributor, and you spent some sum of your $$$s on doctors offices, schools, civic improvements, etc. in the 3rd-world country you're based in, what then? Is it OK then for the US to send in a covert ops team and wipe you out? Should the locals you are dumping your largesse on hate you for all the bad things your drug is doing where it gets distributed?
Hamas does the same thing in Palestine... blow up Israelis, and do good things at home to make it harder for Mossad to infiltrate or discredit them...
I guess it all depends on where you're sitting.
If you were a rich lord or baron, Robin Hood was Public Enemy #1. If you were a poor peasant serf, you were happy that Robin Hood was there, and were not likely to help the Sheriff...
Funny thing, though is that the EU has made waves at WTO, etc., about US giving away grainstocks as part of humanitarian aid packages. Funny thing about the EU, though, is that its member countries do not produce most of the grain they use - it's all outsourced (South America, Africa). So part of that logic is, "hey, we have to pay for the stuff we give away, so the US shouldn't be able to just give away stuff it doesn't directly have to pay for", or some construed logic like that.
Money into the pockets of the corn lobby? Hmm... at least in Illinois, they are still getting far more $$$ from selling off farmland around Chicagoland and St Louis...
Illinois Rte 47, from Morris, IL to McHenry, IL, is now kind of the outer frontier of Chicagoland, at least on the west side, or at least it was 5 years ago. The towns along IL-47 (Yorkville, Huntley, et al) are growing as people move out there to work in the current western suburbs like Shaumburg, Joliet, etc.
Screwed in a relative sense. How much is the Ethanol Lobby in the US (read: Dick Durban and Dennis Hastert's constituents, et al) really getting compared to the huge subsidies just passed for petroleum companies?
Union Pacific built up a few turbine-powered locomotives (see other post) in the 50's/60's. Powerful, yes. But they couldn't figure out how to run them at idle w/o sucking down essentially the same amount of fuel as when they were under load. So, they gave up on the concept. About that time, more powerful diesel-electric locomotives became available also (that were about the same HP and pulling ability as the turbine locos).
Did you see recent PopMech or PopSci? GE is working on a hybrid locomotive. Think: SD70-class locomotive with a battery bank, so the regenerated electricity gets fed back into the batteries instead of radiated into the air, and the batteries provide the boost power... This is being driven oddly enough by new diesel engine emissions standards more than anything.
Turbine engines completely suck (fuel) when they're running at idle. When they're running under load (and a more or less constant load), they are way more efficient than reciprocating engines (diesel, otto). Union Pacific had built some gas turbine-powered locomotives in the late 50's. Powerful, yes. Efficient when actually moving a load, yes. But they needed to pull along with them a nice fuel tank car. Today's SD70's just are too good.
Same thing for the turbine-engined cars. And this work was done when gas, JP4, etc. were incredibly cheap relative to today. At least for the cars, though, they were centrifugal turbine engines (no different really than a turbocharger set up to feed its turbine off of the compresser and injecting fuel into the air flow before the turbine, with an igniter and flame cup added to the turbine section. These are not as efficient compared to axial turbines (i.e., like modern turbojet and turbofan engines).
For car or truck use, though, the step-down transmisssions would need to have serious service intervals of 50-100K mi (where it might need a quick tear-down to replace a few internal parts), survive fluid change intervals along the lines of a normal car transmission, and all this at about the same price point as a normal tranny does. Not going to happen.
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The problem is, the SS didn't need these pills to do what they did. Did the citizens of Dachau do much of anything resembling numbing grief once the purpose of the "factory" in the town was revealed to them?
I think the main motivation for the gas chambers was just sheer numbers required. The Germans didn't dig the graves, the condemed did. The Germans didn't cart out the dead, the prisoners did. With the gas chambers and mausoleums (I won't call them ovens), they could be renditioned quickly without having to stop for the crude step of putting bullets in them first.
There was an NPR interview with an Iraqi man who professed to have been a torturer for Saddam Hussein. How could someone bring themselves to doing this shit, basically? The man said it's a process, an indoctrination. Unless you're already a sociopath, you have to be made into a torturer. One of the most powerful tools used was the torturing and execution of fellow indoctrinates, often times at the hand of the indoctrinates. When someone says, "torture him or you will suffer the same fate", well... human nature dictates that 999999/1000000 will do the dirty deed.
So, if you have a society that so buys into the koolaid that the Jews are responsible for all the bad that has happened to them, and it makes sense, then bad shit starts to happen. How did the Tutsis and Hutus blow up into their stark ravin' mad slashfest? It didn't just happen over nite. How does all the Hindu-v-Muslim shit in India happen? It's been developing there for over 500 years. If you grow up in an environment of bullshit, it seems like the truth. So tieing up your neighbor in barbed wire and throwing a car tire full of gasoline around his neck, and lighting it up on fire, starts to sound like a reasonable way to resolve differences in your favor.
Except that those pushing the war tend to as a whole to have avoided as much as they could any involvement with being in the military, with a couple of notable exceptions (that prove the stereotype). As it has almost always been. So unless the legislatures and bureaucrats pushing for military actions have anything personally invested (i.e., kids currently in the military or past experiences of their own to temper their actions now), then military action is an easy thing, because someone else is doing the dirty work for you, and you get to take in the relative glory of it all.
But it's been like that for a long time.
Yes, we really could use this pill for returning war vets. People who have switched their normal civilized behaviors to the exact opposite, which are required to survive in a combat situation. Traffic stopped for an accident? The rest of us slow down and gawk at it. For many truck drivers returning from Iraq, it has been well-reported that the usual way to deal with a traffic stoppage in Iraq is to hammer the gas and blow through it as quick as possible, for it could be a setup for an ambush, and those who linger in ambush zones die. If The Pill could help turn that off, that would be a good thing.
President Bush never consulted the VA, DAV, et al before initiating hostilities in Iraq & Afghanistan. But neither did President Roosevelt, President Wilson, President Eisenhower/Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon, etc. either.
The philosophical argument is interesting too. Memories are a fundamentally defining attribute of the human experience. What happens to us as human beings when we choose to modify that?
But we already try to. Gotten drunk after you got dumped by a SO, fired from a job, realized your wife has been cheating on you for the last 10 years, etc?
Gotten stoned at the end of the day to blow off a little steam?
So your point is kind of moot.
There's "depression", and there's Major Depression. Sorry, but thinking happy thoughts, stretching the body, etc. doesn't do shit for Major Depression. Spend some time with someone diagnosed with Major Depression.
Those things can work for the people who need some sort of handholding or assurance.
I'd give just about anything to turn back the clocks before 1998, so that my wife could beg out of going to Guam to work on the KAL 800 crash there.
As much as I might want to think that it's just "all in her mind", I realize that all I have to go on are my perceptions I get from her descriptions and any of my preconceived notions or assumptions, which just don't amount to jack shit, really.
So all I can do is just keep saying, "Honey, I love you. Hopefully it'll get better one of these days."
Been shot at by people actively trying to shoot you? Your perceptions of things will be way different than watching a movie about it thinking that you are so right and correct by saying, "duck, you stupid idiot!" before some guy gets capped with a headshot. So until I've actually gone through that situation, I'll defer more towards those that have been through exactly that rather than any armchair Slashdotter or general.
Drs and dentists already use various antihypnotic drugs to reduce/eliminate your short-term memory when doing certain short-term, but invasive, procedures, in addition to anesthesia.
The funny thing is, you need to take these drugs before the stressful situation. This is a new drug that could help wipe out things after the fact.
We all can convince ourselves out of some degree of bad shit after the fact, but the things that tend to induce PTSD are at a whole different level (yes, WAYYY beyond psycho hose monster girlfriends/boyfriends, etc).
Besides, most good things also can have a negative thing about them, too. They're usually double-edged swords. So, will we let our fear of potential bad uses outweigh the potential good it could do? Probably.
Well, a broken heart is one thing. You just have to get over that one on your own.
Dealing with trauma patients on a daily basis and finally having too much of it, shooting someone to death in the line of duty (and not being able to get the face of the victim out of your head), getting raped (and living the rest of your life not being able to trust men at anything more than a superficial level), etc., and not ever being able to get away from it, well, that is more what PTSD is like. It's like a bad feedback loop that has no dampening features in it, like it's almost at a harmonic frequency being driven by inputs at that harmonic freq.
Having PTSD kind of stops you at that point, and you can't really get past it. Sure, it's all in one's head. Now, if that ex-girlfriend had seriously mindfucked you for two or three years, and finally left you hanging high and dry, perhaps with some measure of public humiliation involved, that is different.
PTSD, and dealing with it, is not like a rape victim channeling rage into anti-violence/pro-punishment advocacy. It is not Cindy Sheehan and her anti-Iraq Campaign campain [sic].
As far as pumping people with these pills... OK, so it's better to have returning soldiers with battle rage that they can't just turn off running around society, eh? Army divorce rates right now are multiples higher than the standard population. Domestic violence in households with returning vets is a couple of multiples higher than the rest of the population. Etc.
At least things are slightly better now than with post-Vietnam vets. We are aware that many soldiers returning from Iraq have been brainfucked by the situation, and need some help to decompress and leave Iraq behind, much more and longer than we previously thought, and the military branches and VA are trying to help out.
Post-Vietnam fucked over the US for at least 15 years in many facets. At least this is one area where people are trying to be proactive.
Besides... there are dentists who will essentially knock you out (liberal use of tranqs and antihypnotics) just to get your teeth cleaned. Is this necessarily a bad thing?
As far as the Pharma industry... OK, so the pharma industry wants to push pills, and will not research anything that is not patentable, like instead of giving antidepressants for post partum depression, why not try to concoct a hormone treatment protocol to help reduce the kickback that this seems to be? Hormones aren't patentable (and probably too variable, too, but it doesn't stop HRT for estrogen or testosterone loss, either).
It's not the use of medicines per se, it is the laissez-faire attitude about most doctors w.r.t. patients and drugs, and a certain lack of "pumptitude" in the population as a whole.
What do you do with someone who comes in, marginally depressed, who just won't leave you alone until you give him a prescription for something? Same thing with the mom with kids who comes in a the slightest inkling of a runny nose. Eventually you cave and give them what they want, even though you know it's not what they need because they're just not listening to you.
Blah blah blah about doctors knowing more about what their patients need and how arrogant it is blah blah blah.
It's the American way now. Edge cases drive the rest of the society, instead of being isolated away from the system.
But how would it really be any worse than a hydraulic lift that has a catastrophic failure of part of the hydraulics system? No, not the seals around the moving parts, but, say, a hydraulic pump line blows off of its fitting (like this would happen without some sort of warning at all. At the very least, hydraulic fluid stinks when it is hot. a slow leak somewhere would stink enough to probably get the elevator's users to complain to someone eventually.
It wouldn't be a free fall trip to the basement, but it could be close.
Even so, they still put on mechanical safety breaks on these just in case...
CoLinux is pretty swank from within Windows.
You don't like nethack on Win32? That's how I get my nethack fix.
The only problems I have are getting networking to work right between the colinux environment and Windows. The instructions for it online in the colinux wiki suck.
OK, it's not fair, because that lift only has 3 stops.
It sounds like a silly system. When I get to work, and there's a large gaggle of people waiting for an elevator, I wait and get the second or third one to come down, and let the first one down fill with lots of people. Chances are, by the second or third elevator that manages to come down (assuming there is enough time between when the bulk of riders gets on the first car), there is maybe 3 or 5 people on my lift, and I get to my floor faster because I have to stop at max 5 other floors, instead of potentially max myfloor (I was working on 13th floor) stops.
Yes, Google is useful for what it is. But GMail is way more useful (OK, the 2+ GB mailbox size is nice, too) than most/all other webmail apps, and maps.google.com just totally kicks mapquest's ass for usability from a user's perspective.
Probably related to the same reasons that in the sports world we have wonderful words like "athleticism" instead of raw physical talent, "upper ankle sprain", and other such meaningless bullshit terms.
Or all the golf pro wannabes.
Or all the Jesse James badboy wannabes.
Etc.
As Marv Levy was quoted as saying, "You don't know. You can't know. And you're never going to know (so shut the F**K up, heavily implied)", to some reporter's inane question about a football game he had just coached. I think this was what Zeldman was trying to say in too many words.
The technical parts of "web 2.0" are cool, as are some of the websites that use it effectively, because they've been desiged and implemented by people who get what it is and how to do it well.
It sounds a bit like the "ooo, VB is bad because it lets any silly fool with half a brain to develop 'applications', and they get on better with the CxOs, so I'm through with this company, even though I'm 10x the programmer than he will ever be in his lifetime", though, doesn't it?
Or the friction between DBAs who have too much of a hand in application development (as much of it should be in the db) vs developers who have too much of a hand in database design and implementation (the db is just a stupid, but fast and structured, data store), and their bosses who just want to be buzzword compliant with their golf or squash cohorts.
Why worry about what all the marketroids, venture capitalists, clueless wannabes, etc. say it is and make it out to be, even if you work with/for them?
Well, it's no different than when some moron kicked off a job that tied up the line printer for an hour when you had to print out your CS101 project before it was due, or someone else somehow managed to eat all the disk i/o or filled up /tmp, etc. Remember how long it took a VAX cluster to reconfigure when one of its machines crapped out? OK, it was cool that the whole thing didn't just blow up, but it took 5-10 minutes for everyone else's terminal sessions to go back to not being virtually locked up as if someone had remotely Ctrl+S'd every tty on the other boxes.
Me? I personally like how GMail (and maps.google) work with AJAX. Compared to their competitors, they just work WAYYY better, not only because of their AJAX stuff.
Damn, my latest batch of modpoints expired last night, otherwise I'd mod it up more.
Hmm... Hybrids *are* a better kludge, but really benefit in urban/suburban driving scenarios (i.e., stop-and-go driving). Brock Yates, a serious car nut for Car & Driver Magazine, wrote an interesting article about why hybrids are cool, from a car-nut/Tim Taylor perspective: More Power, which translates to car geeks as more off the line.
Part of that is due to the instant torque of (certain) electric motors. The Lexus RX Hybrid is faster off the line and 0-60 than its normal counterpart, and IIRC, the normal one has a larger engine. Even the lowly Insight is very fun to drive, according to Yates' editorial. That the engine kicks on when needed, seemlessly, is kind of amazing. The only drawback with the Insight is that you look like you're driving a car from "Sleeper" (but no allusions to the AMC Pacer were made, either).
A 3-cyl Geo Metro is not fun to drive. There is nothing sexy about a car that sounds like a wheezing tractor under throttle. They're definitely in the "must pass" category of cars.
Part of the problem is that for Americans (and Japanese), this "go fast" gestalt with cars is an integral part of the driving experience, even if it's never turned on by the driver. I suppose that's also an American/Japanese thing, in that having the "potential" is worth paying the big bucks for, too. Can't change it, for better or for worse, with Euro-style thinking, so just accept it for what it is. Hybrids currently can provide that piece of the puzzle for Americans far more than a rattly 3-cyl 1-litre engine ever did.
Sure, the Geo Metro was advertising 50+ MPH, and that was 10-15 years ago! So what's new there?
At least from the gist of Yates' editorial, the Lexus RX Hybrid is only slightly more than a decked out RX regular. The RX Hybrid is decked out already, btw. Remember when only ABS came in luxury cars, like MB S-class, BMWs and Audis? Now it's on even freakin Hyundais and K.I.A.'s. Stock.
So what? GM came up with their own ABS braking system so as to not pay Bosch to use their system in the 80's. It of course got scoffed at in the automotive press, but I suppose it's worked good enough over time.
Does anyone else use Audi's patented Quattro system to do all-wheel drive? Nope. Everyone else fakes the elegant, passive Quattro system for a complicated endeavor using computers, the EDU, the ABS system, actively engaged clutches to shift power around, etc.
But they're not pure hybrids. The energy from the regenerative braking systems on diesel-electric locomotives is simply run through a big-ass electric heater grid and radiated away, not recaptured and stored in batteries.
v es/hybrid/hybrid_default.asp locomotive...
But GE is working on a "pure" hybrid: https://www.getransportation.com/general/locomoti
Cars and big trucks are impressive, until you see a 200-car consist being hauled across wyoming at 75mph, keeping up with traffic on I-80.
Hmm... M1 tanks use Chobam armor, a British invention. USMC flies Harriers, a British invention (ok, AV8B was made by McDonaldsDouglas). M1 tank uses a 120mm smoothbore main gun, licensed from a German company. M1 came about because the German Leopard tanks modernized western tank design in the early 70s, especially comapred to M48 and M60 tanks deployed by the US at the time. Hmm... British troops use M16s? Yeah, right. The 105MM howitzer used by the US Army is a British design.
Try not to compare Rangers to SF. The Rangers are essentially crack infantry shock troops. They use Infantry tactics, and mostly Infantry equipment. The Army Special Forces are guerrila operators.
Ranger School and SF Q Course are two different beings, from what I've been told by people who have done both. Ranger School is physically demanding. SF Q Course is primarily mentally demanding, with enough physical demands thrown in to amplify any mental deficiencies. Forgetting the team's SAW at an ambush point in Ranger School will just get you a 0 for that section (and a hell of a lot of verbal abuse, flutter kicks and pushups for your team). SF school, well, the instructor might ask, "hey, where's your SAW?" when your 10 K away from that last point, and leave it to you, Team Leader, to figure out what to do about it and still make your next objective...
SF is designed to engage the locals to increase its force capabilities when needed.
Hmm... my interpretation of "Blackhawk Down" was completely different from yours. The US involvement in Somalia WAS a failure. The rescue of that crew and sacrifices made to do it was miraculous in and of itself, but it does not make the whole operation there a success. Did the US bring Aidid to justice? Nope. That was the whole point of the operation there.
Perhaps he wants to define "idiot". Having sex with prostitutes. Probably not good, even if you take away your judeochristian/islamic biases. Having unprotected sex with people you don't know...just a bad idea, even if AIDS/HIV wasn't in the picture. Holding on to silly cultural beliefs that have no rational basis, probably a bad thing, too.
It's the same thing about cars and bad drivers, though, too. Do seatbelts and airbags in the long run save more lives, or do they lull marginal drivers into a feeling of self-confidence so that they take bigger risks than they should and cause more problems when they step over their limits, thus resulting in more accidents per se that seem to involve more cars than they used to, increasing the odds of other people getting injuries, etc.?
If you work with powerful tools, the safeties on them are there to prevent stupid behaviors and accidents. But they can't prevent you from more or less intentionally causing yourself or others harm if you have a brain fart or something along the way.
If I robbed a bank of $10,000,000, then gave $9,000,000 to charities, am I suddenly warm and fuzzy?
Well, if you were a successful cocaine distributor, and you spent some sum of your $$$s on doctors offices, schools, civic improvements, etc. in the 3rd-world country you're based in, what then? Is it OK then for the US to send in a covert ops team and wipe you out? Should the locals you are dumping your largesse on hate you for all the bad things your drug is doing where it gets distributed?
Hamas does the same thing in Palestine... blow up Israelis, and do good things at home to make it harder for Mossad to infiltrate or discredit them...
I guess it all depends on where you're sitting.
If you were a rich lord or baron, Robin Hood was Public Enemy #1. If you were a poor peasant serf, you were happy that Robin Hood was there, and were not likely to help the Sheriff...
Funny thing, though is that the EU has made waves at WTO, etc., about US giving away grainstocks as part of humanitarian aid packages. Funny thing about the EU, though, is that its member countries do not produce most of the grain they use - it's all outsourced (South America, Africa). So part of that logic is, "hey, we have to pay for the stuff we give away, so the US shouldn't be able to just give away stuff it doesn't directly have to pay for", or some construed logic like that.
Money into the pockets of the corn lobby? Hmm... at least in Illinois, they are still getting far more $$$ from selling off farmland around Chicagoland and St Louis...
Illinois Rte 47, from Morris, IL to McHenry, IL, is now kind of the outer frontier of Chicagoland, at least on the west side, or at least it was 5 years ago. The towns along IL-47 (Yorkville, Huntley, et al) are growing as people move out there to work in the current western suburbs like Shaumburg, Joliet, etc.
Screwed in a relative sense. How much is the Ethanol Lobby in the US (read: Dick Durban and Dennis Hastert's constituents, et al) really getting compared to the huge subsidies just passed for petroleum companies?
Union Pacific built up a few turbine-powered locomotives (see other post) in the 50's/60's. Powerful, yes. But they couldn't figure out how to run them at idle w/o sucking down essentially the same amount of fuel as when they were under load. So, they gave up on the concept. About that time, more powerful diesel-electric locomotives became available also (that were about the same HP and pulling ability as the turbine locos).
Did you see recent PopMech or PopSci? GE is working on a hybrid locomotive. Think: SD70-class locomotive with a battery bank, so the regenerated electricity gets fed back into the batteries instead of radiated into the air, and the batteries provide the boost power... This is being driven oddly enough by new diesel engine emissions standards more than anything.
Turbine engines completely suck (fuel) when they're running at idle. When they're running under load (and a more or less constant load), they are way more efficient than reciprocating engines (diesel, otto). Union Pacific had built some gas turbine-powered locomotives in the late 50's. Powerful, yes. Efficient when actually moving a load, yes. But they needed to pull along with them a nice fuel tank car. Today's SD70's just are too good.
Same thing for the turbine-engined cars. And this work was done when gas, JP4, etc. were incredibly cheap relative to today. At least for the cars, though, they were centrifugal turbine engines (no different really than a turbocharger set up to feed its turbine off of the compresser and injecting fuel into the air flow before the turbine, with an igniter and flame cup added to the turbine section. These are not as efficient compared to axial turbines (i.e., like modern turbojet and turbofan engines).
For car or truck use, though, the step-down transmisssions would need to have serious service intervals of 50-100K mi (where it might need a quick tear-down to replace a few internal parts), survive fluid change intervals along the lines of a normal car transmission, and all this at about the same price point as a normal tranny does. Not going to happen.