Homosexuality actually used to be classified as a mental illness in earlier revisions of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is *the* resource that is used by physicians, psychiatrists, and psychologists as a reference for diagnosing mental illness. If I remember correctly it had been removed by 1980 in the third revision (DSM-III) and is most certainly not present in the latest revision (DSM-IV, Text Revision, 2000.)
So apparently it used to be a mental illness but I don't recall any treatments for it ever being mentioned.
There are a few problems with trying to keep input devices around for forever. The first problem is that input devices get a lot of handling and wear out (except for IBM Model M keyboards, which seem to last forever.) The mice I've used have generally lasted four to seven years before their keypress switches wore out, the ball rotational sensors broke, or other physical parts wore out rendering the unit inoperable. The second is that computers keep getting newer I/O interfaces and dropping older ones, making it a pain in the butt or impossible to attach old hardware. How many new computers have an RS-232 serial port any more? How many have a PS/2 port, let alone a full DIN AT mouse or keyboard port? Sure, you can get adapters, but those tend to be a little hit-and-miss compared to onboard hardware controllers for those ports.
There are just as many or more layers of middlemen in government as in an insurance company as both are large bureaucracies. The government is perhaps even worse as it can pass rate increases and benefit reductions by law and has no competition. If the government takes over being the payer for health care, basicall only the names of the middlemen will change and little else, besides your tax bills. The only way to eliminate the extra crap is to pay for your health care out of your own pocket.
...and how long do you think that the restrictions will be limited to just porn and you can opt out? We have things like the "fairness doctrine" being kicked around in Congress to censor political speech on radio and **AA legislation for physical media. Once you give the government control, the cat is out of the bag and not going back in. Why do you think this will be one iota different?
I have had a similar experience with machines I have had and built/administered:
1. K6-2/500 on a VIA MVP4 chipset: no problems at all 2. Celeron 900 on an i810/ICH1 chipset: no problems at all 3. P4-M 2.2 on an i845MP/ICH3M chipset: integrated Intel PRO/100 NIC died 4. Duron 1600 on an NForce 2 Ultra 400 chipset: no problems at all 5. X2 4200+ on an NForce 4 SLi chip: no problems at all 6. Dual 2.8 Xeon Irwindale on an E7320/6300 chipset: integrated Intel IDE controller was recognized intermittently 7. Pentium D 820 on an i945G/ICH7 chipset: southbridge PCIe controller went AWOL, knocking out the integrated NIC 8. C2D U7500 on an i945GM/ICH7M chipset: no problems at all 9. Mobile Sempron 3600+ (65 nm) on an AMD M690T/SB600 chipset: no problems at all
The AMD units have been good to me, while the Intel ones had the problems, particularly with the southbridges.
All of the doctors I have seen have a pager if they are on duty or on call, and I am a medical student and see lots of doctors on a daily basis. Most doctors also carry a cell phone or smartphone which rings as well, but they are used for different purposes. The pagers are the "we need you to come to room XYZ now" tool while the cell or smartphone is the "We need a quick opinion on this" tool.
I hear Taiwan is a nice place and is less socialist than the United States. Their tax rates are a hell of a lot lower too. They top out at about 20% according to a friend who had spent some time there.
Yeah, the "Bush is not my president" and "Somewhere in Texas a village lost its idiot" T-shirts and all of the/. posts about "KKKarl Rove stole the election" and "the chimp" things the Democrats did after 2000 and 2004 absolutely helped their fellow countrymen and weren't asshole things to do.
Your income belongs to you, not the government. The government forcibly seizes some of your income you own as taxes. A tax break is simply seizing less money.
"Doctors love state-sponsored healthcare because those companies just pay."
I take it you are not a doctor nor have you talked to very many about this issue. Doctors by and large hate dealing with Medicare above any other entity as their reimbursements are well below what is charged ("take it or leave it, what are you going to do about it, we're the federal government") and there is a bunch of bureaucracy and red tape to get even that pittance of a payment.
That is one big advantage. Being able to export to PDF without spending a buttload of money on Adobe Acrobat or spending a lot of time to find a good Windows freeware print-to-PDF program is another advantage of OOo, and OOo 3.0 can also open and edit PDFs to some degree with the Sun PDF plugin, which is a huge feature. One last thing I have heard quite a few others praise is the ability to open almost any document file type out there right out of the box, now that OOo 3.0 has Office 2007 XML support.
Handwriting recognition in Linux can be quite decent. CellWriter (http://risujin.org/cellwriter/) is one of the better handwriting-recognition tools for *nix and it is what I use on my Gateway S-7125C tablet. It's a little better than the handwriting recognition in XP Tablet 2005 but worse than Vista's. XP Tablet will run fine on a 1.2 GHz CPU but might balk a bit at 512 MB RAM, particularly if the OP wants to use MS Office 2003 or 2007, which are far from lightweight apps. Windows Vista certainly does have excellent tablet integration, but it's just going to take one look at a machine with 512 MB RAM and laugh. That pretty much leaves Linux and Linux would run reasonably nicely on a 1.2 GHz machine with 512 MB RAM. I had Debian Lenny running on a Celeron 900 with 256 MB RAM up until just a few weeks ago and it ran pretty well for being 8-year-old hardware.
Calc I is almost always a class engineering students take the very first semester they are in college. It is an 8 am class and it requires a fair bit of non-memorizing work to pass- just like many other engineering classes but unlike a lot of the gen-ed classes that college students take their first year. I don't think it is really intended to be the typical "only 30 As and Bs in the 500-person class" type of weeder class, more of a "if you can't stand this, you're not going to last long in your other engineering classes" type of weeder class.
I had about half of the people originally in my program drop after freshman year and these seemed to be the biggest reasons:
1. Poor transition from high school. They did well in high school because they were naturally intelligent and didn't really have to work hard. They applied the same tactic to the first semester of college but since college classes commonly just have two exams, they didn't adjust their study habits early enough to be able to get a good grade. You have to get a C (70%) to pass, and that is very hard to impossible when you get a 15-30% on the midterm like a lot of people did. A lot of people just dropped the class at that point and switched majors rather than retaking the class later.
2. Distractions. Quite a few college freshman have the "I'm finally free from my parents and can do what I want!" attitude. The stereotypical distractions are booze, sex, and parties (and by parties, I really just mean more booze and sex.) It's harder to keep up on your studies if you stay out until 4 am Tuesday through Saturday, are sleeping with two different people every week, and are hung over all of the time. Those tend to affect engineers less than others in my observation, but I saw a lot of people have problems with them. Two things that are more pertinent to engineers are video games and computer games/Internet being a huge distraction. About a third of my physics class failed sophomore year because they decided to stay home and play "Halo" for a week when it first came out instead of going to class and to lab. Counter-Strike was also a popular grade-killer as well. The key is moderation, and some haven't learned that yet.
3. Laziness. These guys also did well in high school and saw that calc I was difficult as well as a required class for almost all subsequent engineering classes and said "screw it" rather than putting forth more effort.
I second this. I am a medical student and took two semesters of for-biochemistry-majors biochemistry classes as part of my undergrad major (biomedical engineering). It is not required for medical school but it *greatly* helps in the understanding of biochemistry. I also took organic as it was required for biochem, but I'd say biochem was much, much, much more pertinent. Heck, pretty much the whole M1 year *is* biochem, anyway.
I am a medical student and the esomeprazole vs. omeprazole question is a common one. Omeprazole is the racemic mixture while esomeprazole only contains the active stereoisomer. The clinical difference is that you give half of the dose of esomeprazole as you do omeprazole, but it costs a whole lot more. The clinician then asks which one you would prescribe and the correct answer is "omeprazole, as it is less expensive."
Any decent physician is actually pretty skeptical of the "next new thing," lest they be the one who did something like prescribe fenfluramine (part of Phen-fen) and damage their patients' heart valves. A lot of patients pay a bigger co-pay for brand-name drugs than they do generics and physicians want to keep their patient clientèle happy, so they try to use the least expensive option that will successfully treat the condition. I've been around bunches of physicians, and this is their general behavior.
I took calculus (I, II, III as well as differential equatinons) since I was a bio-engineering major instead of doing the typical biology route and it was a weed-out class. It was more of a weed-out course for incoming freshman engineering majors who weren't willing to go to classes at 8 am sharp and do a bunch of problem sets than it was anybody else. If they bounced lazy pre-meds in the process, that was a bonus in the administration's eyes. Generally the pre-med set took AP calc AB and BC and didn't take calc in college, or they did the juco route over the summer and transferred the credits in, avoiding the weeder classes at their real school.
The real big pre-med weeding classes at my university were the third semester of general chem (which was just for pre-meds and chem majors), organic I, algebra physics, and cell biology. Cell biology was actually pretty simple if you took biochemistry beforehand, but bio major pre-meds took cell bio sophomore year, while biochem wasn't a required class for pre-meds and was a junior class as you had to pass organic I and II. Biochem is a class that isn't generally required for medical school but definitely should be as basically all of your M1 year *is* biochem. I am very glad that I took it, even though it wasn't the easiest or most enjoyable class in the world.
The "voting for a third party is throwing your vote away" bit only happens for *one* election cycle. If a third party gets a sixth of the vote, predominantly from Obama supporters as in your scenario, McCain will win in 2008 but it sure as hell sends a message to the Democrats that they would do well to adopt some of the policies championed by the third party. The presidential elections in the U.S. have been so close recently that even a candidate that gets a few percent of the vote will cause an impact on one of the two major parties' platforms, because that few percent would have been enough to allow for the losing party to have won, ESPECIALLY if the votes are in "swing states."
A ranked system would be better to have more parties in the fray, but third parties are certainly far from useless even in the winner-take-all type of election we have right now. It's just an indirect rather than direct method of altering the outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
Homosexuality actually used to be classified as a mental illness in earlier revisions of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is *the* resource that is used by physicians, psychiatrists, and psychologists as a reference for diagnosing mental illness. If I remember correctly it had been removed by 1980 in the third revision (DSM-III) and is most certainly not present in the latest revision (DSM-IV, Text Revision, 2000.)
So apparently it used to be a mental illness but I don't recall any treatments for it ever being mentioned.
Heh, at the VA they use another system entirely, called VistA. I don't know how much that cost to implement and maintain, but it is also quite slow.
No, but quite a few do. Drive by a trailer park and look for satellite dishes. The number with them will most likely surprise you.
If you bought a Range Rover in the last five years or so, you bought a Ford with a BMW engine.
There are a few problems with trying to keep input devices around for forever. The first problem is that input devices get a lot of handling and wear out (except for IBM Model M keyboards, which seem to last forever.) The mice I've used have generally lasted four to seven years before their keypress switches wore out, the ball rotational sensors broke, or other physical parts wore out rendering the unit inoperable. The second is that computers keep getting newer I/O interfaces and dropping older ones, making it a pain in the butt or impossible to attach old hardware. How many new computers have an RS-232 serial port any more? How many have a PS/2 port, let alone a full DIN AT mouse or keyboard port? Sure, you can get adapters, but those tend to be a little hit-and-miss compared to onboard hardware controllers for those ports.
So you're saying your computer spends too much time fscking around?
There are just as many or more layers of middlemen in government as in an insurance company as both are large bureaucracies. The government is perhaps even worse as it can pass rate increases and benefit reductions by law and has no competition. If the government takes over being the payer for health care, basicall only the names of the middlemen will change and little else, besides your tax bills. The only way to eliminate the extra crap is to pay for your health care out of your own pocket.
...and how long do you think that the restrictions will be limited to just porn and you can opt out? We have things like the "fairness doctrine" being kicked around in Congress to censor political speech on radio and **AA legislation for physical media. Once you give the government control, the cat is out of the bag and not going back in. Why do you think this will be one iota different?
I have had a similar experience with machines I have had and built/administered:
1. K6-2/500 on a VIA MVP4 chipset: no problems at all
2. Celeron 900 on an i810/ICH1 chipset: no problems at all
3. P4-M 2.2 on an i845MP/ICH3M chipset: integrated Intel PRO/100 NIC died
4. Duron 1600 on an NForce 2 Ultra 400 chipset: no problems at all
5. X2 4200+ on an NForce 4 SLi chip: no problems at all
6. Dual 2.8 Xeon Irwindale on an E7320/6300 chipset: integrated Intel IDE controller was recognized intermittently
7. Pentium D 820 on an i945G/ICH7 chipset: southbridge PCIe controller went AWOL, knocking out the integrated NIC
8. C2D U7500 on an i945GM/ICH7M chipset: no problems at all
9. Mobile Sempron 3600+ (65 nm) on an AMD M690T/SB600 chipset: no problems at all
The AMD units have been good to me, while the Intel ones had the problems, particularly with the southbridges.
All of the doctors I have seen have a pager if they are on duty or on call, and I am a medical student and see lots of doctors on a daily basis. Most doctors also carry a cell phone or smartphone which rings as well, but they are used for different purposes. The pagers are the "we need you to come to room XYZ now" tool while the cell or smartphone is the "We need a quick opinion on this" tool.
Every wrong does not need to be met with another wrong, but the parent poster I replied to was wrong and I pointed that out.
I hear Taiwan is a nice place and is less socialist than the United States. Their tax rates are a hell of a lot lower too. They top out at about 20% according to a friend who had spent some time there.
Yeah, the "Bush is not my president" and "Somewhere in Texas a village lost its idiot" T-shirts and all of the /. posts about "KKKarl Rove stole the election" and "the chimp" things the Democrats did after 2000 and 2004 absolutely helped their fellow countrymen and weren't asshole things to do.
It's the steady handOUT that Obama promises that has been promising that has been able to attract voters this year.
Your income belongs to you, not the government. The government forcibly seizes some of your income you own as taxes. A tax break is simply seizing less money.
"Doctors love state-sponsored healthcare because those companies just pay."
I take it you are not a doctor nor have you talked to very many about this issue. Doctors by and large hate dealing with Medicare above any other entity as their reimbursements are well below what is charged ("take it or leave it, what are you going to do about it, we're the federal government") and there is a bunch of bureaucracy and red tape to get even that pittance of a payment.
That is one big advantage. Being able to export to PDF without spending a buttload of money on Adobe Acrobat or spending a lot of time to find a good Windows freeware print-to-PDF program is another advantage of OOo, and OOo 3.0 can also open and edit PDFs to some degree with the Sun PDF plugin, which is a huge feature. One last thing I have heard quite a few others praise is the ability to open almost any document file type out there right out of the box, now that OOo 3.0 has Office 2007 XML support.
Handwriting recognition in Linux can be quite decent. CellWriter (http://risujin.org/cellwriter/) is one of the better handwriting-recognition tools for *nix and it is what I use on my Gateway S-7125C tablet. It's a little better than the handwriting recognition in XP Tablet 2005 but worse than Vista's. XP Tablet will run fine on a 1.2 GHz CPU but might balk a bit at 512 MB RAM, particularly if the OP wants to use MS Office 2003 or 2007, which are far from lightweight apps. Windows Vista certainly does have excellent tablet integration, but it's just going to take one look at a machine with 512 MB RAM and laugh. That pretty much leaves Linux and Linux would run reasonably nicely on a 1.2 GHz machine with 512 MB RAM. I had Debian Lenny running on a Celeron 900 with 256 MB RAM up until just a few weeks ago and it ran pretty well for being 8-year-old hardware.
Linus was born in Finland but currently lives in the United States (Portland, OR.)
Calc I is almost always a class engineering students take the very first semester they are in college. It is an 8 am class and it requires a fair bit of non-memorizing work to pass- just like many other engineering classes but unlike a lot of the gen-ed classes that college students take their first year. I don't think it is really intended to be the typical "only 30 As and Bs in the 500-person class" type of weeder class, more of a "if you can't stand this, you're not going to last long in your other engineering classes" type of weeder class.
I had about half of the people originally in my program drop after freshman year and these seemed to be the biggest reasons:
1. Poor transition from high school. They did well in high school because they were naturally intelligent and didn't really have to work hard. They applied the same tactic to the first semester of college but since college classes commonly just have two exams, they didn't adjust their study habits early enough to be able to get a good grade. You have to get a C (70%) to pass, and that is very hard to impossible when you get a 15-30% on the midterm like a lot of people did. A lot of people just dropped the class at that point and switched majors rather than retaking the class later.
2. Distractions. Quite a few college freshman have the "I'm finally free from my parents and can do what I want!" attitude. The stereotypical distractions are booze, sex, and parties (and by parties, I really just mean more booze and sex.) It's harder to keep up on your studies if you stay out until 4 am Tuesday through Saturday, are sleeping with two different people every week, and are hung over all of the time. Those tend to affect engineers less than others in my observation, but I saw a lot of people have problems with them. Two things that are more pertinent to engineers are video games and computer games/Internet being a huge distraction. About a third of my physics class failed sophomore year because they decided to stay home and play "Halo" for a week when it first came out instead of going to class and to lab. Counter-Strike was also a popular grade-killer as well. The key is moderation, and some haven't learned that yet.
3. Laziness. These guys also did well in high school and saw that calc I was difficult as well as a required class for almost all subsequent engineering classes and said "screw it" rather than putting forth more effort.
I second this. I am a medical student and took two semesters of for-biochemistry-majors biochemistry classes as part of my undergrad major (biomedical engineering). It is not required for medical school but it *greatly* helps in the understanding of biochemistry. I also took organic as it was required for biochem, but I'd say biochem was much, much, much more pertinent. Heck, pretty much the whole M1 year *is* biochem, anyway.
I am a medical student and the esomeprazole vs. omeprazole question is a common one. Omeprazole is the racemic mixture while esomeprazole only contains the active stereoisomer. The clinical difference is that you give half of the dose of esomeprazole as you do omeprazole, but it costs a whole lot more. The clinician then asks which one you would prescribe and the correct answer is "omeprazole, as it is less expensive."
Any decent physician is actually pretty skeptical of the "next new thing," lest they be the one who did something like prescribe fenfluramine (part of Phen-fen) and damage their patients' heart valves. A lot of patients pay a bigger co-pay for brand-name drugs than they do generics and physicians want to keep their patient clientèle happy, so they try to use the least expensive option that will successfully treat the condition. I've been around bunches of physicians, and this is their general behavior.
Actually, you do, even if you are a GP. Acid-base chemistry is a huge part of medicine and that *is* dealing with atomic composition and interactions.
I took calculus (I, II, III as well as differential equatinons) since I was a bio-engineering major instead of doing the typical biology route and it was a weed-out class. It was more of a weed-out course for incoming freshman engineering majors who weren't willing to go to classes at 8 am sharp and do a bunch of problem sets than it was anybody else. If they bounced lazy pre-meds in the process, that was a bonus in the administration's eyes. Generally the pre-med set took AP calc AB and BC and didn't take calc in college, or they did the juco route over the summer and transferred the credits in, avoiding the weeder classes at their real school.
The real big pre-med weeding classes at my university were the third semester of general chem (which was just for pre-meds and chem majors), organic I, algebra physics, and cell biology. Cell biology was actually pretty simple if you took biochemistry beforehand, but bio major pre-meds took cell bio sophomore year, while biochem wasn't a required class for pre-meds and was a junior class as you had to pass organic I and II. Biochem is a class that isn't generally required for medical school but definitely should be as basically all of your M1 year *is* biochem. I am very glad that I took it, even though it wasn't the easiest or most enjoyable class in the world.
The "voting for a third party is throwing your vote away" bit only happens for *one* election cycle. If a third party gets a sixth of the vote, predominantly from Obama supporters as in your scenario, McCain will win in 2008 but it sure as hell sends a message to the Democrats that they would do well to adopt some of the policies championed by the third party. The presidential elections in the U.S. have been so close recently that even a candidate that gets a few percent of the vote will cause an impact on one of the two major parties' platforms, because that few percent would have been enough to allow for the losing party to have won, ESPECIALLY if the votes are in "swing states."
A ranked system would be better to have more parties in the fray, but third parties are certainly far from useless even in the winner-take-all type of election we have right now. It's just an indirect rather than direct method of altering the outcome.