The worst thing about long names is that they are typically used in a complicated situation where there aren't any good names available. Imagine you're trying to pick a name for a class that
displays the result of querying a database view
in an SWT Table, wrapped in a JFace TableViewer
with several views of the data for the user to choose from
in an Eclipse RCP view component
in an application that some jerk named the "MonViewer"
How about monview.views.DBViewTableViewTableViewerView?
Thank you for making this point better than I ever could. Let me restate it for people without a sense of humor. When a programmer has an ego attachment to the indentation in his code, it's because changing the indentation to another reasonable indentation scheme will make his code look like crap. Relying on ad-hoc indentation to make code readable is a poor attempt to dress up poorly-written code. The only exception is lengthy sections of essentially tabular data*.
(*) This does NOT include lining up function arguments when you call a function three or four times in a row. Just let the arguments fall where they may.
First of all, my life's work is not oranges, so my choking on an orange would be unremarkable.
You didn't understand what I said. Something that is banal and predictable doesn't merit special mention. If the world's leading coconut geneticist gets killed on vacation by a falling coconut, that's funny. If an anti-alcohol activist's wife runs off with a whiskey magnate, there's probably something significant there. If a guy is killed on the highway by an overturned truck full of underwear and -- dun dun duhn! -- he's actually wearing underwear at the time, that isn't exactly an amazing coincidence. So. Hans Reiser worked on a filesystem. Filesystems have tree structures galore. Tree structures, since before Hans Reiser was born, have been described using parent-child-sibling terminology. Hans Reiser is embroiled in a drama involving his wife and kids. Coincidence? Yes. An entirely meaningless and unremarkable coincidence.
you're reading way too much into the inclusion of the code snippets about the author's intentions
Unless the author's only aspiration is to be a popular Farker, he meant for the code snippets to be somehow relevant and meaningful. It was a serious piece about love and abandonment and murder. Taking a superficial connection and riding it throughout an entire piece is just bad writing.
Third, the fact that a brilliant programmer is a whack-job is not a comment on you, so drop the defensive tone.
Nice try. I'm not exactly on guard against geek-hostile news coverage coming from Wired Magazine. There are people who would read it that way, but they don't condescend to read Wired. I'm just frustrated that a story I'm keenly interested in is getting such crappy coverage. Well, maybe I am defensive. It's embarrassing how thoroughly the national news media have ignored a seemingly sensational news story. Beautiful woman, love triangle, genius, kinky sex, possible serial murder, and the best we get is a few hundred words from the local CBS affiliate. It's like the geek stank is actively repelling the media. It seems like it should be the opposite -- it should be a cinch to get the whole country fascinated in this drama, and then maybe be secondarily interested in the geeky aspects of the story. Where the hell is our Norman Mailer, to make our geek drama into a national sensation?
He did try very hard to find the truth and to write about it no matter where the facts lay, and if it turned out the facts were shades of gray with no clear conclusion, in the end he had to write what he perceived to be true, and not make something up or spin the facts into something that might have had a more satisfying conclusion.
Those weren't his only two choices. You make it sound like it's an especially challenging task for a writer to do his job without access to the full and unambiguous truth. That's the normal situation faced by any writer doing a substantial story. Heck, most of the news stories in any newspaper rely on incomplete information from a handful interested sources. If every writer faced with a messy story chose between presenting a deceptively neat explanation and writing explicitly about his own reaction to the facts, there wouldn't be anything left worth reading.
I think it's quite ignorant to compare BDSM and bisexuality to insanity as people seem to be doing.
It starts from puritanism, but it immediately becomes circular. People who feel insane, who feel incapable of feeling, thinking, or acting like "normal" people, tend to gravitate towards tastes and interests that they feel reflect their deviant and defective nature. For example, there are men who hate themselves, who consider themselves weak and worthless, who express that by compulsively dabbling in joyless homosexuality. I don't believe they get along well with "real" homosexuals, who recognize them as pathetic homophobes. Masochism can be a way of expressing feelings of worthlessness; swinging can (for women) be a way of expressing self-hatred; sadism can be a way of expressing sociopathy. Not all pathological individuals who participate in alternative sexual lifestyles are shunned by "healthy" participants. For one thing, people can fake it. For another, people don't tend to look for excuses to exclude willing sexual partners. Women who are sexually compliant for obviously pathological reasons are just as popular, and evidently much more common, than psychologically healthy women who participate in the same activities.
I'm sure the irony of that attitude completely escapes him. If only life were as simple as having the will and the skill to slaughter the bad guys. Instead, we struggle in endless confusion over who the good and bad guys are, and exactly how good or bad they in fact are. It makes perfect sense that a guy who desired to escape from those questions could be cuckolded by a guy who reveled in ambiguity. The world is full of confusion. Maybe Nina felt that a guy who could cope with ambiguity was stronger, more masculine, than a guy who couldn't. No matter what Hans' other strengths might be, his inability to deal with the uncertainties of the real world and social relations is a severe handicap.
I'd like to clarify that I don't think the raging macho inferiority complex was an Army thing that "rubbed off" on Hans, but rather was something that originated in Hans as a reaction to feeling inadequate at something that his father excelled at and cared deeply about.
these comments seem really strange even by computer code comment standards
Nope. "Lifecycle" is a common metaphor for the... lifecycle of entities with finite spans of existence that can be divided into stages. See, I can't even come up with a second term to avoid repeating myself. Lifecycle isn't a metaphor; it's the metaphor. Anyone using a different metaphor must be using a very unusual system that would be alien to the vast majority of programmers. Birth, maturity, death, and some kind of post-death state are common stages that are identified in an entity's lifecycle. I've never heard heaven or hell used except in a joking sense, but Unix processes can become zombies, and I've heard of objects being put in a cemetary or morgue between death and disposal. Sometimes there's a way of "resurrecting" an object after death, though this is rare, and somewhat magical. Objects are, however, commonly "reincarnated" -- reborn from a post-death state -- to avoid the costs of disposal and creation.
If you choked to death eating an orange, and someone found a months-old shopping list in your office containing the item "oranges," would that be ironic? No. It would be completely unremarkable.
It is not surprising that filesystem code would contain tree terminology such as "parent," "child," and "sibling," and lifecycle terminology such as "death." In fact, it's predictable. That's how the damn lazy reporter found those code snippets in the first place. He knew they were there; anyone who knows a damn thing about programming would know they were there. The reporter just grepped them out and presented them in such a way as to suggest to people who don't know better that a) they have some significance, and b) that they represent some real research on his part.
It makes me angry when journalists abuse their audience's ignorance like that.
How much of the Army rubbed off onto Hans can be debated, but with that background, there is much more to the story.
Such as a raging macho inferiority complex. It's easy to imagine how that happened. Little Hans was an egomaniacal prodigy, and his father -- unable to dispute Hans' genius -- talked about manhood and military service whenever he needed to remind Hans that he wasn't a complete and perfect human being. Hans was sensitive and took his father's rebukes far more seriously than Dad did. But he never let on, so his father continued to lay it on nice and thick whenever Hans acted like a conceited dingleberry. Result: an unfixable inferiority complex, an obsession with developing this part of himself through video games and martial arts, and a desire to also prove his manhood vicariously through his son.
I agree. It was self-centered writing of a sort that requires more talent -- much more talent -- to pull off. It's a rookie mistake to fall in love with one's own reaction to a subject and write about that instead of the subject itself. The article is about the writer's experience interviewing Hans Reiser, and frankly, I felt that was a poor choice of topics, especially in light of the alternatives. Very few people are fascinating enough to reduce a newsworthy story to a means of self-illumination without their readers feeling cheated.
generally swing for the experts, in this case the police
Police tend to make snap judgments of people and then work hard to make a case for the prosecutors. Prosecutors tend to pursue any case they think they can win. Winning depends on the jurors. Jurors tend to... well, jurors tend to be the same people who made huge hits out of Geraldo, professional wrestling, and CSI. When jurors are essentially your boss's boss, that must warp your idea of what it means to do your job.
So, in what part of this chain are there "experts" who specialize in guilt and innocence? Like any other low-paid professionals, police officers get called in once or twice a year for a talk about their "numbers," which determine who gets raises and who gets "performance improvement plans." Officers process routine jobs as efficiently as they can and try to keep their numbers up. If being a police officer is like any other job in America, a tough case is nothing but a bad break that ruins your numbers for the month with no compensation for handling it well, unless it happens to be high profile, in which case you'll come under severe pressure to provide the appearance of a successful outcome. And why would being a police officer be any different from being an accountant or a factory foreman?
Think about it. How much skill could you develop at your job if all your boss cared about was the opinion of a rotating board of randomly chosen idiots?
I guess the only thing to do is not tell the doctor she's had a previous diagnosis. That's what I tend to do anyway. Doctors have much more respect for each other than for patients. When they hear, "A doctor told me one thing, but I'm not sure he's right," they tend to think you're a nut. A certain percentage of people really are wandering around looking for attention, and doctors like to feel smart by making snap judgments of people. My friend has taken a lot of ribbing from older doctors for running lots of tests on certain people who came in with mysterious complaints. "You'll learn to spot them," they say. Some people get taken seriously, and others get written off as crazy. Whatever method doctors use to make that distinction has not been through rigorous medical trials, I'm sure.
1. You haven't gone beyond the first doctor's realm of influence. My impression is that doctors who feel collegial towards each other prefer to present a unified front to patients, but beyond that they have little problem saying other doctors are wrong. That feeling of collegiality is based on personal connections or on a feeling of professional subordination to a highly regarded doctor. It has limits, and doctors' egos work against it. Correcting another doctor's mistake is a way of showing one's superiority.
2. Your friend doesn't have insurance. Doctors are supposed to hand out medical care to whoever needs it, but it always comes out of somebody's pocket. They've worked out a balance of power with the insurance companies that allows them to provide a certain level of care for the insured. For uninsured people, well, my friend is naive and inexperienced and recommends costly tests for uninsured people. He says it's not really a problem as long as the tests are necessary. I'm more cynical; I think it's just a matter of time before someone straightens him out.
3. There's a drug that treats the exact same symptoms your friend has, and people use it to get high. My friend claims a person has to build up quite a track record before being labeled a pill tourist, but I think his colleagues are a bunch of arrogant pricks who pride themselves on making snap judgments about these things.
If the reason is 1), going to a different clinic or hospital where the doctors don't know her first doctor well might help. If the reason is 2), going to a different hospital or clinic under different management might help. If the reason is 3), going to a different hospital or clinic where the doctors haven't all heard that your friend is a pill tourist might help.
It seems that these "extremely hard tests" are exhausting all-day or multi-day affairs with several hundred questions. With that many random events in the sample, the variance will be pretty low.
A normal person may score "wildly differently" on a 300-question exam from one attempt to the next, but the variance will be based more on differences in preparation, physical and mental comfort, stress, and how much sleep he got the night before.
The article's math indeed illustrates this point very clearly.
The article's math is actually pretty pathetic. For one, he assumes that a person who knows half as much will guess just as accurately. For another, his entire point seems to be based on implying that the less knowledgeable person has a good chance of scoring as well as the more knowledgeable one, but he only calculates that probability for a trivial, extreme case. Why doesn't he tell us the probability for one of the more reasonable cases he describes? Either he never bothered calculating those probabilities, or he decided they weakened his case. I don't particularly care which one; his credibility is approximately zero either way.
I guess it depends on where you work, but my friend's experience was that things changed immediately when he got his first job. Everyone is keenly aware of the potential of a malpractice lawsuit, but the doctors talk pretty freely with each other behind the patients' backs, laughing at the nut cases and making fun of the pill tourists. One guy kept a known addict who came in with "back pain" in an exam room for six hours, coming in between his other patients, bringing exotic-looking implements into the examining room and holding them against the patient's body, furrowing his brow, making serious noises, and then disappearing for half an hour. At the end of the day he told her to take three Advil a day and "come back as often as you feel is necessary."
I don't know how freely the doctors admit mistakes, but my friend tells me about his colleagues' mistakes every once in a while, so they aren't exactly secrets.
What I was trying to communicate is that I think it's wrong to say 'Sex and the City' proves that porn of any kind is popular. 'Sex in the City' contains snippets of sex that are very frank but also very, very brief, so brief you can't attribute any of the popularity of the show to people enjoying the actual sex scenes. Considering that the plot often centers around sex, the show actually works very hard to minimize the amount of sex on-screen. It's hard to say what that implies about the audience; if you saw it out of context, it would prove that that even these scandalous modern women who demand frank discussions of sex etc. can't handle more than a tiny taste of pornography. On the other hand, it broke ground by including any sex at all, so who knows. Maybe the decision to make sex off-limits to the writers was a marketing mistake, or maybe the writers just had no idea how to incorporate on-screen sex into their writing. I'm sure they're trained to be open-minded, but they don't have many examples to follow -- porn is crap, and most graphic depictions of sex in art movies are either very brief, calculated to induce discomfort, or depicting pathological behavior. There isn't much precedent for portraying the fairly healthy sex lives of a fairly normal bunch of nice American girls, so maybe the writers just punted.
Nope, not trolling. When I watch porn, I reflexively imagine doing what the people onscreen are doing. When I imagine having unprotected sex with a chick who has unprotected sex with guys she barely knows, I just can't feel comfortable. Not that I wouldn't do it under the right (wrong?) circumstances, but the aversion is strong enough that I never have. I even passed up my first chance to have non-commercial sex with a chick who weighed less than me, because there was no condom and we were both too drunk to drive to the store. If you knew what that meant to me (a typical late-blooming Slashdot geek), you wouldn't doubt the sincerity of my previous post.
And as for the remarks about fat chicks, sorry, that category has real social significance, and I am not perfect. There are some things for which I would stand up against scorn, ridicule, and shame, but obesity isn't one of them. I conform to social mores when it comes to dealing with overweight women. I would never admit it in person to anybody, but that's why I keep my Slashdot id secret -- so I have someplace to be honest. If I seem like a troll, then that reflects poorly on my real-life behavior, not my sincerity here.
After much thought I realized how I screwed up the analogy. In each one of the cases I listed, the key to the thing's appeal is also the key to its infamy. None of those things can be rehabilitated by removing the vileness, because to remove the vileness makes it pointless. Soft-core porn is an attempt to rehabilitate hard-core porn by removing the graphic sex, which I don't find vile at all. Therefore, my analogy misrepresents my feelings about frank portrayals of sex. People who do think it's yucky to watch naked people having sex will find that the analogy works for them.
That should be, "the extraordinary sexual eagerness or submission of a woman who receives it," and "just because I know this stuff does not mean I'm the luckiest guy in the world." That should at least make my post understandable.
My theory is that the cumshot is a perfect combination of the following factors:
The event is centered around the man's orgasm; the woman's role is to receive and appreciate. Considerations of her sexual functioning, which are highly anxiety-inducing, are completely absent.
The cumshot can express either of the primary male fantasies of simple sex: that the woman is extremely eager, or that she is extremely submissive and compliant. The event centers around the woman's face, so her eagerness or misery is especially evident.
Most women find it objectionable, which highlights the extraordinary sexual eagerness or submission a woman who receives it.
The forcefulness and volume of the ejaculation is an easy measure of the quality of the act. A simple, concrete understanding of masculinity puts a man's mind at ease; subtlety makes him anxious. There's nothing less subtle than splattering a chick's face with a massive load. A bit of acting on the woman's part confirms the understanding.
Given all this, I understand why the cumshot is a staple device, rather than a fetish, but I am still surprised that there is no market for porn that is specifically guaranteed to be free of cumshots. I imagine it would be free of other things, too, but I'm not sure.
Complicating this is the fact that many women who enjoy porn have adapted to the porn model of sex, which skews the market. Some chicks, especially ones who grew up in repressive environments, have a lot of affection for pornography and associate it with their sexual emancipation. They interpret any criticism of mainstream pornography as a step down a slippery slope that ends in repression of female sexuality. They try hard to like cumshots and feel bad about not being able to "take it like a pro" through the back door. (They're also paranoid about people looking down on their sexuality. The smallest suspicion of judgment turns them into neurotic, inhibited wrecks. So no, just because I know this stuff does not mean I'm not the luckiest guy in the world.)
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. After I took a writing class, my code became much more nonverbose.
foo.getBar().getBaz().twiddle(froob.blag(foo.getBa r().getBaz().getBazHandle().getHandleControl()), foo.getBar().getBaz().hasSexyHandle())).cromulate( );
The worst thing about long names is that they are typically used in a complicated situation where there aren't any good names available. Imagine you're trying to pick a name for a class that
- displays the result of querying a database view
- in an SWT Table, wrapped in a JFace TableViewer
- with several views of the data for the user to choose from
- in an Eclipse RCP view component
- in an application that some jerk named the "MonViewer"
How about monview.views.DBViewTableViewTableViewerView?Thank you for making this point better than I ever could. Let me restate it for people without a sense of humor. When a programmer has an ego attachment to the indentation in his code, it's because changing the indentation to another reasonable indentation scheme will make his code look like crap. Relying on ad-hoc indentation to make code readable is a poor attempt to dress up poorly-written code. The only exception is lengthy sections of essentially tabular data*.
(*) This does NOT include lining up function arguments when you call a function three or four times in a row. Just let the arguments fall where they may.
You didn't understand what I said. Something that is banal and predictable doesn't merit special mention. If the world's leading coconut geneticist gets killed on vacation by a falling coconut, that's funny. If an anti-alcohol activist's wife runs off with a whiskey magnate, there's probably something significant there. If a guy is killed on the highway by an overturned truck full of underwear and -- dun dun duhn! -- he's actually wearing underwear at the time, that isn't exactly an amazing coincidence. So. Hans Reiser worked on a filesystem. Filesystems have tree structures galore. Tree structures, since before Hans Reiser was born, have been described using parent-child-sibling terminology. Hans Reiser is embroiled in a drama involving his wife and kids. Coincidence? Yes. An entirely meaningless and unremarkable coincidence.
Unless the author's only aspiration is to be a popular Farker, he meant for the code snippets to be somehow relevant and meaningful. It was a serious piece about love and abandonment and murder. Taking a superficial connection and riding it throughout an entire piece is just bad writing.
Nice try. I'm not exactly on guard against geek-hostile news coverage coming from Wired Magazine. There are people who would read it that way, but they don't condescend to read Wired. I'm just frustrated that a story I'm keenly interested in is getting such crappy coverage. Well, maybe I am defensive. It's embarrassing how thoroughly the national news media have ignored a seemingly sensational news story. Beautiful woman, love triangle, genius, kinky sex, possible serial murder, and the best we get is a few hundred words from the local CBS affiliate. It's like the geek stank is actively repelling the media. It seems like it should be the opposite -- it should be a cinch to get the whole country fascinated in this drama, and then maybe be secondarily interested in the geeky aspects of the story. Where the hell is our Norman Mailer, to make our geek drama into a national sensation?
Those weren't his only two choices. You make it sound like it's an especially challenging task for a writer to do his job without access to the full and unambiguous truth. That's the normal situation faced by any writer doing a substantial story. Heck, most of the news stories in any newspaper rely on incomplete information from a handful interested sources. If every writer faced with a messy story chose between presenting a deceptively neat explanation and writing explicitly about his own reaction to the facts, there wouldn't be anything left worth reading.
Pfffft, a finite group can't be called "large" by any stretch of the imagination.
It starts from puritanism, but it immediately becomes circular. People who feel insane, who feel incapable of feeling, thinking, or acting like "normal" people, tend to gravitate towards tastes and interests that they feel reflect their deviant and defective nature. For example, there are men who hate themselves, who consider themselves weak and worthless, who express that by compulsively dabbling in joyless homosexuality. I don't believe they get along well with "real" homosexuals, who recognize them as pathetic homophobes. Masochism can be a way of expressing feelings of worthlessness; swinging can (for women) be a way of expressing self-hatred; sadism can be a way of expressing sociopathy. Not all pathological individuals who participate in alternative sexual lifestyles are shunned by "healthy" participants. For one thing, people can fake it. For another, people don't tend to look for excuses to exclude willing sexual partners. Women who are sexually compliant for obviously pathological reasons are just as popular, and evidently much more common, than psychologically healthy women who participate in the same activities.
I'm sure the irony of that attitude completely escapes him. If only life were as simple as having the will and the skill to slaughter the bad guys. Instead, we struggle in endless confusion over who the good and bad guys are, and exactly how good or bad they in fact are. It makes perfect sense that a guy who desired to escape from those questions could be cuckolded by a guy who reveled in ambiguity. The world is full of confusion. Maybe Nina felt that a guy who could cope with ambiguity was stronger, more masculine, than a guy who couldn't. No matter what Hans' other strengths might be, his inability to deal with the uncertainties of the real world and social relations is a severe handicap.
I'd like to clarify that I don't think the raging macho inferiority complex was an Army thing that "rubbed off" on Hans, but rather was something that originated in Hans as a reaction to feeling inadequate at something that his father excelled at and cared deeply about.
Nope. "Lifecycle" is a common metaphor for the... lifecycle of entities with finite spans of existence that can be divided into stages. See, I can't even come up with a second term to avoid repeating myself. Lifecycle isn't a metaphor; it's the metaphor. Anyone using a different metaphor must be using a very unusual system that would be alien to the vast majority of programmers. Birth, maturity, death, and some kind of post-death state are common stages that are identified in an entity's lifecycle. I've never heard heaven or hell used except in a joking sense, but Unix processes can become zombies, and I've heard of objects being put in a cemetary or morgue between death and disposal. Sometimes there's a way of "resurrecting" an object after death, though this is rare, and somewhat magical. Objects are, however, commonly "reincarnated" -- reborn from a post-death state -- to avoid the costs of disposal and creation.
If you choked to death eating an orange, and someone found a months-old shopping list in your office containing the item "oranges," would that be ironic? No. It would be completely unremarkable.
It is not surprising that filesystem code would contain tree terminology such as "parent," "child," and "sibling," and lifecycle terminology such as "death." In fact, it's predictable. That's how the damn lazy reporter found those code snippets in the first place. He knew they were there; anyone who knows a damn thing about programming would know they were there. The reporter just grepped them out and presented them in such a way as to suggest to people who don't know better that a) they have some significance, and b) that they represent some real research on his part.
It makes me angry when journalists abuse their audience's ignorance like that.
Such as a raging macho inferiority complex. It's easy to imagine how that happened. Little Hans was an egomaniacal prodigy, and his father -- unable to dispute Hans' genius -- talked about manhood and military service whenever he needed to remind Hans that he wasn't a complete and perfect human being. Hans was sensitive and took his father's rebukes far more seriously than Dad did. But he never let on, so his father continued to lay it on nice and thick whenever Hans acted like a conceited dingleberry. Result: an unfixable inferiority complex, an obsession with developing this part of himself through video games and martial arts, and a desire to also prove his manhood vicariously through his son.
I agree. It was self-centered writing of a sort that requires more talent -- much more talent -- to pull off. It's a rookie mistake to fall in love with one's own reaction to a subject and write about that instead of the subject itself. The article is about the writer's experience interviewing Hans Reiser, and frankly, I felt that was a poor choice of topics, especially in light of the alternatives. Very few people are fascinating enough to reduce a newsworthy story to a means of self-illumination without their readers feeling cheated.
Police tend to make snap judgments of people and then work hard to make a case for the prosecutors. Prosecutors tend to pursue any case they think they can win. Winning depends on the jurors. Jurors tend to... well, jurors tend to be the same people who made huge hits out of Geraldo, professional wrestling, and CSI. When jurors are essentially your boss's boss, that must warp your idea of what it means to do your job.
So, in what part of this chain are there "experts" who specialize in guilt and innocence? Like any other low-paid professionals, police officers get called in once or twice a year for a talk about their "numbers," which determine who gets raises and who gets "performance improvement plans." Officers process routine jobs as efficiently as they can and try to keep their numbers up. If being a police officer is like any other job in America, a tough case is nothing but a bad break that ruins your numbers for the month with no compensation for handling it well, unless it happens to be high profile, in which case you'll come under severe pressure to provide the appearance of a successful outcome. And why would being a police officer be any different from being an accountant or a factory foreman?
Think about it. How much skill could you develop at your job if all your boss cared about was the opinion of a rotating board of randomly chosen idiots?
I guess the only thing to do is not tell the doctor she's had a previous diagnosis. That's what I tend to do anyway. Doctors have much more respect for each other than for patients. When they hear, "A doctor told me one thing, but I'm not sure he's right," they tend to think you're a nut. A certain percentage of people really are wandering around looking for attention, and doctors like to feel smart by making snap judgments of people. My friend has taken a lot of ribbing from older doctors for running lots of tests on certain people who came in with mysterious complaints. "You'll learn to spot them," they say. Some people get taken seriously, and others get written off as crazy. Whatever method doctors use to make that distinction has not been through rigorous medical trials, I'm sure.
A few possibilities come to mind.
1. You haven't gone beyond the first doctor's realm of influence. My impression is that doctors who feel collegial towards each other prefer to present a unified front to patients, but beyond that they have little problem saying other doctors are wrong. That feeling of collegiality is based on personal connections or on a feeling of professional subordination to a highly regarded doctor. It has limits, and doctors' egos work against it. Correcting another doctor's mistake is a way of showing one's superiority.
2. Your friend doesn't have insurance. Doctors are supposed to hand out medical care to whoever needs it, but it always comes out of somebody's pocket. They've worked out a balance of power with the insurance companies that allows them to provide a certain level of care for the insured. For uninsured people, well, my friend is naive and inexperienced and recommends costly tests for uninsured people. He says it's not really a problem as long as the tests are necessary. I'm more cynical; I think it's just a matter of time before someone straightens him out.
3. There's a drug that treats the exact same symptoms your friend has, and people use it to get high. My friend claims a person has to build up quite a track record before being labeled a pill tourist, but I think his colleagues are a bunch of arrogant pricks who pride themselves on making snap judgments about these things.
If the reason is 1), going to a different clinic or hospital where the doctors don't know her first doctor well might help. If the reason is 2), going to a different hospital or clinic under different management might help. If the reason is 3), going to a different hospital or clinic where the doctors haven't all heard that your friend is a pill tourist might help.
Good luck.
A normal person may score "wildly differently" on a 300-question exam from one attempt to the next, but the variance will be based more on differences in preparation, physical and mental comfort, stress, and how much sleep he got the night before.
The article's math is actually pretty pathetic. For one, he assumes that a person who knows half as much will guess just as accurately. For another, his entire point seems to be based on implying that the less knowledgeable person has a good chance of scoring as well as the more knowledgeable one, but he only calculates that probability for a trivial, extreme case. Why doesn't he tell us the probability for one of the more reasonable cases he describes? Either he never bothered calculating those probabilities, or he decided they weakened his case. I don't particularly care which one; his credibility is approximately zero either way.
I guess it depends on where you work, but my friend's experience was that things changed immediately when he got his first job. Everyone is keenly aware of the potential of a malpractice lawsuit, but the doctors talk pretty freely with each other behind the patients' backs, laughing at the nut cases and making fun of the pill tourists. One guy kept a known addict who came in with "back pain" in an exam room for six hours, coming in between his other patients, bringing exotic-looking implements into the examining room and holding them against the patient's body, furrowing his brow, making serious noises, and then disappearing for half an hour. At the end of the day he told her to take three Advil a day and "come back as often as you feel is necessary."
I don't know how freely the doctors admit mistakes, but my friend tells me about his colleagues' mistakes every once in a while, so they aren't exactly secrets.
What I was trying to communicate is that I think it's wrong to say 'Sex and the City' proves that porn of any kind is popular. 'Sex in the City' contains snippets of sex that are very frank but also very, very brief, so brief you can't attribute any of the popularity of the show to people enjoying the actual sex scenes. Considering that the plot often centers around sex, the show actually works very hard to minimize the amount of sex on-screen. It's hard to say what that implies about the audience; if you saw it out of context, it would prove that that even these scandalous modern women who demand frank discussions of sex etc. can't handle more than a tiny taste of pornography. On the other hand, it broke ground by including any sex at all, so who knows. Maybe the decision to make sex off-limits to the writers was a marketing mistake, or maybe the writers just had no idea how to incorporate on-screen sex into their writing. I'm sure they're trained to be open-minded, but they don't have many examples to follow -- porn is crap, and most graphic depictions of sex in art movies are either very brief, calculated to induce discomfort, or depicting pathological behavior. There isn't much precedent for portraying the fairly healthy sex lives of a fairly normal bunch of nice American girls, so maybe the writers just punted.
Nope, not trolling. When I watch porn, I reflexively imagine doing what the people onscreen are doing. When I imagine having unprotected sex with a chick who has unprotected sex with guys she barely knows, I just can't feel comfortable. Not that I wouldn't do it under the right (wrong?) circumstances, but the aversion is strong enough that I never have. I even passed up my first chance to have non-commercial sex with a chick who weighed less than me, because there was no condom and we were both too drunk to drive to the store. If you knew what that meant to me (a typical late-blooming Slashdot geek), you wouldn't doubt the sincerity of my previous post.
And as for the remarks about fat chicks, sorry, that category has real social significance, and I am not perfect. There are some things for which I would stand up against scorn, ridicule, and shame, but obesity isn't one of them. I conform to social mores when it comes to dealing with overweight women. I would never admit it in person to anybody, but that's why I keep my Slashdot id secret -- so I have someplace to be honest. If I seem like a troll, then that reflects poorly on my real-life behavior, not my sincerity here.
Yes, but the fictional characters they portray are not.
Stupidity and disease are major turn-offs for me.
After much thought I realized how I screwed up the analogy. In each one of the cases I listed, the key to the thing's appeal is also the key to its infamy. None of those things can be rehabilitated by removing the vileness, because to remove the vileness makes it pointless. Soft-core porn is an attempt to rehabilitate hard-core porn by removing the graphic sex, which I don't find vile at all. Therefore, my analogy misrepresents my feelings about frank portrayals of sex. People who do think it's yucky to watch naked people having sex will find that the analogy works for them.
Whew, mod me -1, poorly written and edited.
That should be, "the extraordinary sexual eagerness or submission of a woman who receives it," and "just because I know this stuff does not mean I'm the luckiest guy in the world." That should at least make my post understandable.
Given all this, I understand why the cumshot is a staple device, rather than a fetish, but I am still surprised that there is no market for porn that is specifically guaranteed to be free of cumshots. I imagine it would be free of other things, too, but I'm not sure.
Complicating this is the fact that many women who enjoy porn have adapted to the porn model of sex, which skews the market. Some chicks, especially ones who grew up in repressive environments, have a lot of affection for pornography and associate it with their sexual emancipation. They interpret any criticism of mainstream pornography as a step down a slippery slope that ends in repression of female sexuality. They try hard to like cumshots and feel bad about not being able to "take it like a pro" through the back door. (They're also paranoid about people looking down on their sexuality. The smallest suspicion of judgment turns them into neurotic, inhibited wrecks. So no, just because I know this stuff does not mean I'm not the luckiest guy in the world.)