but I had a pretty busy week. "Metformin decreases hepatic glucose production, decreases intestinal absorption of glucose, and improves insulin sensitivity by increasing peripheral glucose uptake and utilization" (from the package insert). However the primary mechanism of action by far is the last of these (improving insulin sensitivity), which is why it is used in type I as well as type II diabetes. Perhaps I oversimplified, but the OP seemed not to be looking for complexity.
By the way, I love wikipedia, but it is often quite wrong about prescription drugs (not too far off this time, though). Try drugs.com or drugdigest.org - both are free and have good info. Wikipedia is just too vulnerable to armchair experts to be a good medical resource.
disclaimer: I am a pharmacologist. I do not work for Merck or any other drug company. I do work for an ICU specialist group.
This drug works by decreasing the amount of sugar produced by the liver. In most type II diabetics the liver produces too much, for reasons we only partly understand. It also makes the pancreas produce more insulin in response to high blood sugar. This mechanism is also defective in type II diabetes, again for reasons poorly understood. It does these things by a new mechanism of action, and is the first drug that affects the first problem I listed above.
Does your father go to an endocrinologist? Diabetes is still not as well understood as we would like, and this is the third brand new treatment for diabetes in the last couple of years (one of them is for type I diabetics only). There are a lot of new options out there.
I had some "friends of friends" who were running the reinstall loop due to malware. I gave them an old but locked down linksys router to connect through. Problem solved, but many don't know to do this sort of thing...
One of the local medical offices "needed SP2" for some software they ran on a closed local network of 4 or 5 computers (i.e. totally unconnected to the internet). Somebody with just enough knowledge to be dangerous hooked the computers (one at a time) directly to a DSL line usually used for a protected system, and ran Microsoft update to get SP2.
All of the "well duh" folks miss the point. There are a lot of people out there with reinstall CDs for older machines. When their machine gets hit with malware, many of them "reload" windows and some of these head for Microsoft update.
The point is that they are too late - they're perfectly likely to get hit before update can protect them, and perfectly likely to get hit with something as bad as what they had before.
If works immediately became public domain upon the death of the author/creator, the elderly/infirm would have a hell of a time getting published. Think about Stephen Hawking - would you, if you ran a publishing company, put up money for a book knowing that he is in fragile health?
I am not an author - don't even work in a related field. Still, creative content in some cases requires big dollar backing, and writing a book requires massive commitments of time with no payback until the very end, if ever, for the author. So having an immediate reversion to public domain upon the death of the author would help silence people like Hawking, Archbishop Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and the like by making publishing their works high risk financially. Maybe they are famous enough to make it worth the risk, but what about the less well-known?
I am also not in favor of the 70 year rule, and am not an expert. We need a better answer.
You hit the nail on the head - my country is turning (in places) into a police state. OK, OK, it's not smart to exercise your free speech in certain times and places. I wouldn't call a local police officer an "idiot" on a routine traffic stop on a dark country lane, even though it would be legal to do so if you weren't threatening
That being said, this is inexcusable. My wife and I aren't going to travel to a cousin's wedding this winter because it has become an exhausting, aggravating, and sometimes demeaning struggle to fly from place to place within the US.
If we (the people of the United States) don't use our right to vote this year and in 2008 to shake up those who imposed these draconian "solutions" to terrorism, well, shame on us all.
I want email to be fast. Pine fast. And so after getting an invite to switch to Yahoo mail beta in May (or so), I used it for 5 days, then switched back to regular yahoo mail. The bouncing ball, the adverts...does Yahoo not recognise that we might have only 3-4 minutes to check our email at work?
Is Gmail primitive in appearance by comparison? Sure, but it works, and it is significantly faster. Usefully faster. I won't be switching back.
I have to agree with you - Debian is still live and kicking. Still I also think that Debian, like everything else, will have its day and then pass into history.
That's what the ensuing flameware will be about if you boil it down. How fast is Debian dying.
All this developer is saying is that he personally feels that the egalatarian/authoritarian balance is probably skewed in favor of the former in Debian.
And I have no opinion re Mark Shuttleworth, but ask all students of history: When does a benevolent authoritarian run a more efficient state than a republic/democracy? Every time. The trick is how to keep a succession of benevolent authoritarians...
It's easy to forget that not too long ago I was waiting for the latest upgrade to IE, downloading and installing it manually, because it was the best browser out there. I appreciate the efforts of the developers, too.
But I can't thank Microsoft. Because they quit trying to be the best and tried instead to lock out and eliminate competition, through means familiar enough to everybody here that I'm not going to repeat them.
And I don't think I'm just saying "what have they done for me lately" - Microsoft's war on the competition went some way towards undoing the good things that came from their competition with Netscape.
I agree with you, otherwise (for whatever that's worth). Just a thought
I've had a similar problem myself. Still, I don't think that this means that a rating system isn't useful or valid, just that we both would like the games to be rated accurately. After all, with no rating system, you'd probably have bought the Shrek II game, with the same result.
of a 10 year old and a 7 year old. And you know, the rating system really does help to some degree. If a game is rated "M" I can turn it down. If it's rated "T" I know to look carefully before purchasing. If it's rated "E" I know that my 7 year old won't be shocked/disturbed, and so on. What I hate to see is putting restrictions on games based on the rating - give me (the parent) a heads up as to content, then let me decide, thanks.
at the end - the Senate bill would only require that net neutrality be "studied", not enforced. This is a tactic employed by both parties - introduce a bill for publicity in one branch of the legislature, introduce a version which is watered down into oblivion in the other, and kill it in committee during the process of "reconciling" the House and Senate versions.
This is particularly often seen with the House bill being the publicity seeker - Reps need to run for office every 2 years...
Up to a point, I have to agree with you. The average home user is just not used to the level of annoyance it takes to train and maintain an outgoing firewall. I installed ZoneAlarm on my parent's computer, and get calls or emails routinely asking if they should OK a particular program's desire to access the internet. And many corporate users don't really care about the defaults - they are going to have IT manage it anyway.
But I have to ask, what is the point of Microsoft splitting Vista into however many different versions if not to have a granular response to problems like this? Many of XPs problems are related to its homogeneity...
"That is a mindset that should be discouraged from being advocated."
And thought I was still not awake. Then I read it again - still didn't make sense. Then I went to the website for Frost & Sullivan to see where they found this bozo...
"Our partnership services provide you with the innovative solutions to maximize your growth opportunities and dominate your competition. Our methodology is designed to empower you with global perspective in four distinct disciplines: technical; econometric; application; and market."
And the update manager gets the beta for your existing Breezy install. Just tried it on one box, and it worked without a hitch. Each round of upgrades gets a little smoother. I was worried about the 6-month release cycle when Ubuntu first announced it, but the ease of transition lately has made this a non-issue, at least for me.
I'd have to agree with you. One of the main reasons Debian has been slow to update has been the range of architectures and applications they attempt to simultaneously support. Other distros update faster, but most of them take one of two paths: a) limit supported architecture (usually to the x86 and x86 64) or b) support only a small subset of applications.
Really, as much as I'd love to see Debian update faster, I'd hate to see them take one of those expediencies to get the job done.
You're right in that this does not come close to having the number of neurons needed to help in disseminated diseases like Alzheimers. Where it might have promise sooner is in cases of severe locallized injury, such as spinal damage strokes from a small clot, or damaged nerves in an amputation/partial amputation type injury.
We have yet to succeed except in a few lab experiments in regrowing neural tissue. Stem cells might help, but then again might not. Any means to reconnect damaged neurons could have profound impacts on the treatment of some types of injury. This is especially true since this particular method would avoid much of the moral/ethical wrangling involved in the use of stem cells.
HIPAA, yep, I can almost type sometimes. Anyway, the regs require you to exercise due diligence with regard to transmitting private data. Problem is, with new technologies, nobody knows what the Feds will decide due diligence would be...
You'd be amazed what a practice like ours spends on long distance. So we'd love to use VOIP, but our HIPAA officer freaks out about stuff that's not specifically covered in the regs.
You know - I appreciate exactly what you're saying. This really isn't a bad country in a lot of ways, but it's always easier to complain about the things that are broken than to fix them. I'm trying to do better at that, but...
You remind me of the Churchill quote. You know, the one about democracy being the worst system of government except for all the others.
...is that the US (yes, I live there) will use security fears relating to terrorism to ban or severely restrict this technology. Some elements of our government seem almost Luddite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite) these days.
Sad, because this kind of encryption would permit greater use of this technology in medicine under HIPPA privacy regulations.
You hit it right on the head. Having Dell push hardware manufacturers to support FOSS would be a great boost for Linux. Having them try to "standardize" the Linux world would be a complete failure, and worthless to boot.
And you have heard correctly - most new systems don't come with a full install CD anymore (I buy for a medical practice). Now, you get either a "recovery" CD (most of which wipe your partitioning) or the aforementioned ghost partition (usually with an option to burn a CD backup).
It was one of the things which helped me sell Linux to the practice, when we had to buy an off-the-shelf copy of Win XP for a machine (which came with Win XP) that took an unexplained OS crap and couldn't be retored from the partition.
I remember my last intentional switch to Windows (Win 95). It, too, was going to have all these wonderful new features (better GUI, better memory management, multitasking). I tried for 2 years to get the same level of stability I had in DOS, and then went to OS/2. And machines which didn't ship with Win 95 were even more of a beast to get working correctly if you had added stuff to your box.
IMHO, "upgrading" to Vista will be the same thankless task, and it will be at least a year before machines shipped with Vista are going to be "right". Microsoft will rush this job because it's already so late that they almost have to.
For everybody else who says "thank heavens I use Firefox" in these threads, please read parent post. This is a problem held over from when OS used metadata/extensions to figure out what to do with a file, automatically, before we had to worry about the bad guys trying to manipulate this data. These techniques date back to single-user systems, and they are vulnerable.
(Usual disclaimer: I use a unix>windows mix at work, mac at home, and use primarily firefox on all three).
People need to learn techniques to lock down their boxes - different OS are not all equally vulnerable, but are all vulnerable.
Looks like a Trojan, not a virus. And any OS (disclosure: I admin a mixed Linux/windows system at work and the wife has a Mac at home) is vulnerable to Trojan attack with varying degrees of user "assistance". Our internet capable machines at work are livecd only for this reason (Slax FWIW). Windows laptops use DSL imbedded (at the moment).
Use protection, browse safely, and the net is a pretty safe place still...
Slashdot Mirror
but I had a pretty busy week. "Metformin decreases hepatic glucose production, decreases intestinal absorption of glucose, and improves insulin sensitivity by increasing peripheral glucose uptake and utilization" (from the package insert). However the primary mechanism of action by far is the last of these (improving insulin sensitivity), which is why it is used in type I as well as type II diabetes. Perhaps I oversimplified, but the OP seemed not to be looking for complexity.
By the way, I love wikipedia, but it is often quite wrong about prescription drugs (not too far off this time, though). Try drugs.com or drugdigest.org - both are free and have good info. Wikipedia is just too vulnerable to armchair experts to be a good medical resource.
disclaimer: I am a pharmacologist. I do not work for Merck or any other drug company. I do work for an ICU specialist group.
This drug works by decreasing the amount of sugar produced by the liver. In most type II diabetics the liver produces too much, for reasons we only partly understand. It also makes the pancreas produce more insulin in response to high blood sugar. This mechanism is also defective in type II diabetes, again for reasons poorly understood. It does these things by a new mechanism of action, and is the first drug that affects the first problem I listed above.
Does your father go to an endocrinologist? Diabetes is still not as well understood as we would like, and this is the third brand new treatment for diabetes in the last couple of years (one of them is for type I diabetics only). There are a lot of new options out there.
I had some "friends of friends" who were running the reinstall loop due to malware. I gave them an old but locked down linksys router to connect through. Problem solved, but many don't know to do this sort of thing...
One of the local medical offices "needed SP2" for some software they ran on a closed local network of 4 or 5 computers (i.e. totally unconnected to the internet). Somebody with just enough knowledge to be dangerous hooked the computers (one at a time) directly to a DSL line usually used for a protected system, and ran Microsoft update to get SP2.
You can imagine the results...
All of the "well duh" folks miss the point. There are a lot of people out there with reinstall CDs for older machines. When their machine gets hit with malware, many of them "reload" windows and some of these head for Microsoft update.
The point is that they are too late - they're perfectly likely to get hit before update can protect them, and perfectly likely to get hit with something as bad as what they had before.
This really is a problem.
Slamming linux and the kernel developers immediately before your release, and having it posted on distrowatch. Nice going, guys.
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20061002
If works immediately became public domain upon the death of the author/creator, the elderly/infirm would have a hell of a time getting published. Think about Stephen Hawking - would you, if you ran a publishing company, put up money for a book knowing that he is in fragile health?
I am not an author - don't even work in a related field. Still, creative content in some cases requires big dollar backing, and writing a book requires massive commitments of time with no payback until the very end, if ever, for the author. So having an immediate reversion to public domain upon the death of the author would help silence people like Hawking, Archbishop Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and the like by making publishing their works high risk financially. Maybe they are famous enough to make it worth the risk, but what about the less well-known?
I am also not in favor of the 70 year rule, and am not an expert. We need a better answer.
You hit the nail on the head - my country is turning (in places) into a police state. OK, OK, it's not smart to exercise your free speech in certain times and places. I wouldn't call a local police officer an "idiot" on a routine traffic stop on a dark country lane, even though it would be legal to do so if you weren't threatening
That being said, this is inexcusable. My wife and I aren't going to travel to a cousin's wedding this winter because it has become an exhausting, aggravating, and sometimes demeaning struggle to fly from place to place within the US.
If we (the people of the United States) don't use our right to vote this year and in 2008 to shake up those who imposed these draconian "solutions" to terrorism, well, shame on us all.
I want email to be fast. Pine fast. And so after getting an invite to switch to Yahoo mail beta in May (or so), I used it for 5 days, then switched back to regular yahoo mail. The bouncing ball, the adverts...does Yahoo not recognise that we might have only 3-4 minutes to check our email at work?
Is Gmail primitive in appearance by comparison? Sure, but it works, and it is significantly faster. Usefully faster. I won't be switching back.
I have to agree with you - Debian is still live and kicking. Still I also think that Debian, like everything else, will have its day and then pass into history.
That's what the ensuing flameware will be about if you boil it down. How fast is Debian dying.
All this developer is saying is that he personally feels that the egalatarian/authoritarian balance is probably skewed in favor of the former in Debian.
And I have no opinion re Mark Shuttleworth, but ask all students of history: When does a benevolent authoritarian run a more efficient state than a republic/democracy? Every time. The trick is how to keep a succession of benevolent authoritarians...
It's easy to forget that not too long ago I was waiting for the latest upgrade to IE, downloading and installing it manually, because it was the best browser out there. I appreciate the efforts of the developers, too.
But I can't thank Microsoft. Because they quit trying to be the best and tried instead to lock out and eliminate competition, through means familiar enough to everybody here that I'm not going to repeat them.
And I don't think I'm just saying "what have they done for me lately" - Microsoft's war on the competition went some way towards undoing the good things that came from their competition with Netscape.
I agree with you, otherwise (for whatever that's worth). Just a thought
I've had a similar problem myself. Still, I don't think that this means that a rating system isn't useful or valid, just that we both would like the games to be rated accurately. After all, with no rating system, you'd probably have bought the Shrek II game, with the same result.
of a 10 year old and a 7 year old. And you know, the rating system really does help to some degree. If a game is rated "M" I can turn it down. If it's rated "T" I know to look carefully before purchasing. If it's rated "E" I know that my 7 year old won't be shocked/disturbed, and so on. What I hate to see is putting restrictions on games based on the rating - give me (the parent) a heads up as to content, then let me decide, thanks.
at the end - the Senate bill would only require that net neutrality be "studied", not enforced. This is a tactic employed by both parties - introduce a bill for publicity in one branch of the legislature, introduce a version which is watered down into oblivion in the other, and kill it in committee during the process of "reconciling" the House and Senate versions.
This is particularly often seen with the House bill being the publicity seeker - Reps need to run for office every 2 years...
Up to a point, I have to agree with you. The average home user is just not used to the level of annoyance it takes to train and maintain an outgoing firewall. I installed ZoneAlarm on my parent's computer, and get calls or emails routinely asking if they should OK a particular program's desire to access the internet. And many corporate users don't really care about the defaults - they are going to have IT manage it anyway.
But I have to ask, what is the point of Microsoft splitting Vista into however many different versions if not to have a granular response to problems like this? Many of XPs problems are related to its homogeneity...
Wow. I read
"That is a mindset that should be discouraged from being advocated."
And thought I was still not awake. Then I read it again - still didn't make sense. Then I went to the website for Frost & Sullivan to see where they found this bozo...
"Our partnership services provide you with the innovative solutions to maximize your growth opportunities and dominate your competition. Our methodology is designed to empower you with global perspective in four distinct disciplines: technical; econometric; application; and market."
Couldn't they have found somebody else?
gksudo "update-manager -d"
And the update manager gets the beta for your existing Breezy install. Just tried it on one box, and it worked without a hitch. Each round of upgrades gets a little smoother. I was worried about the 6-month release cycle when Ubuntu first announced it, but the ease of transition lately has made this a non-issue, at least for me.
I'd have to agree with you. One of the main reasons Debian has been slow to update has been the range of architectures and applications they attempt to simultaneously support. Other distros update faster, but most of them take one of two paths: a) limit supported architecture (usually to the x86 and x86 64) or b) support only a small subset of applications.
Really, as much as I'd love to see Debian update faster, I'd hate to see them take one of those expediencies to get the job done.
You're right in that this does not come close to having the number of neurons needed to help in disseminated diseases like Alzheimers. Where it might have promise sooner is in cases of severe locallized injury, such as spinal damage strokes from a small clot, or damaged nerves in an amputation/partial amputation type injury.
We have yet to succeed except in a few lab experiments in regrowing neural tissue. Stem cells might help, but then again might not. Any means to reconnect damaged neurons could have profound impacts on the treatment of some types of injury. This is especially true since this particular method would avoid much of the moral/ethical wrangling involved in the use of stem cells.
HIPAA, yep, I can almost type sometimes. Anyway, the regs require you to exercise due diligence with regard to transmitting private data. Problem is, with new technologies, nobody knows what the Feds will decide due diligence would be...
You'd be amazed what a practice like ours spends on long distance. So we'd love to use VOIP, but our HIPAA officer freaks out about stuff that's not specifically covered in the regs.
You know - I appreciate exactly what you're saying. This really isn't a bad country in a lot of ways, but it's always easier to complain about the things that are broken than to fix them. I'm trying to do better at that, but...
You remind me of the Churchill quote. You know, the one about democracy being the worst system of government except for all the others.
...is that the US (yes, I live there) will use security fears relating to terrorism to ban or severely restrict this technology. Some elements of our government seem almost Luddite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite) these days.
Sad, because this kind of encryption would permit greater use of this technology in medicine under HIPPA privacy regulations.
You hit it right on the head. Having Dell push hardware manufacturers to support FOSS would be a great boost for Linux. Having them try to "standardize" the Linux world would be a complete failure, and worthless to boot.
And you have heard correctly - most new systems don't come with a full install CD anymore (I buy for a medical practice). Now, you get either a "recovery" CD (most of which wipe your partitioning) or the aforementioned ghost partition (usually with an option to burn a CD backup).
It was one of the things which helped me sell Linux to the practice, when we had to buy an off-the-shelf copy of Win XP for a machine (which came with Win XP) that took an unexplained OS crap and couldn't be retored from the partition.
I remember my last intentional switch to Windows (Win 95). It, too, was going to have all these wonderful new features (better GUI, better memory management, multitasking). I tried for 2 years to get the same level of stability I had in DOS, and then went to OS/2. And machines which didn't ship with Win 95 were even more of a beast to get working correctly if you had added stuff to your box.
IMHO, "upgrading" to Vista will be the same thankless task, and it will be at least a year before machines shipped with Vista are going to be "right". Microsoft will rush this job because it's already so late that they almost have to.
For everybody else who says "thank heavens I use Firefox" in these threads, please read parent post. This is a problem held over from when OS used metadata/extensions to figure out what to do with a file, automatically, before we had to worry about the bad guys trying to manipulate this data. These techniques date back to single-user systems, and they are vulnerable.
(Usual disclaimer: I use a unix>windows mix at work, mac at home, and use primarily firefox on all three).
People need to learn techniques to lock down their boxes - different OS are not all equally vulnerable, but are all vulnerable.
Looks like a Trojan, not a virus. And any OS (disclosure: I admin a mixed Linux/windows system at work and the wife has a Mac at home) is vulnerable to Trojan attack with varying degrees of user "assistance". Our internet capable machines at work are livecd only for this reason (Slax FWIW). Windows laptops use DSL imbedded (at the moment).
Use protection, browse safely, and the net is a pretty safe place still...