However, the description of him as suicidal and the fact that he waited so long before getting a second test seems to indicate that either he doesn't know much about HIV transmission or he did engage in behavior that put him at HIV infection risk.
From News of the World article, "Gay Andrew, from Largs, Ayrshire, caught the virus from his HIV-positive boyfriend Juan." Does that count?;)
However that doesn't explain how someone can get infected, and then cure. If he had that mutation, then he would never have got infected in the first place.
Assuming all the tests were correct, I'd say this is something completely different.
Many of those people were old and poor, and didn't have regular access to modern medical treatment.
Were these people old? I thought most of the people who have caught it so far have been young (farm-hands, etc).
And wouldn't their lack of access to medicine make them less likely to pick things up in the first place? Sure, bad sanitation means there are more (bacterial) nasties to pick up, but surely people who constantly rely on medicine to fight off nasties would have worse natural defence against these kind of things?
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
The flu did not kill them, the bacterial pneumonia they caught did.
To paraphrase a/. comment I saw very recently (but can't be bothered finding to reference properly): Guns don't kill people - bullets do. Wait, no... Bullets don't kill people, the injuries they sustain do.
IANAD, but I cannot think of many viruses actually kill people. HIV doesn't, it just completely messes up a persons immune system, and they generally die of something else (frequently bacterial).
Bird flu is killing about 50% of (reported) human victims. You seem to be placing a lot of trust in modern medicine in the face of a pretty extreme statistic. Do you know something about the victims' medical records that we don't? I haven't read anything about all the bird flu victims being elderly or generally unhealthy.
Enterprises using Skype risk a communication barrier with countries and institutions that have already banned the service. false
I particularly like this one. Can anyone think of any communications product that would not risk a communication barrier with countries and institutions that had banned the service?
I can - Skype. If you need to call Fred Smith at Acme Corp, who has banned Skype, then you can call him on Skype Out, or pick up a standard telephone (assuming your company or country has not banned or obsoleted them;)).
And of course AMD has been doing something similar for ages (although their scheme is somewhat simpler). For example, an Athlon64 3000+ doesn't run at 3GHz - it only runs at 1.8GHz.
Where in the hell can you return an opened CD these days?
I've done it a few times at various stores in Australia. I just take it back and politely explain that it doesn't play in my CD player (I normally don't bother mentioning that my CD player is PC based), and they normally just give me store credit.
Only once have they argued that "you can't return CDs", at which point I explained that nowhere on the product is it referred to as a CD (they can't for licensing reasons, right?), and that I bought it in good faith, thinking it was a CD. They got the manager, who gave me a store credit.
That sounds like garbage: If the method is patented, then it is by definition published (Try www.uspto.gov). That's the whole point of patents. Sure, if you want their actual implementation, then you're going to need to deal with NDAs and all that garbage.
Also, (IANAL, and I am not American), but aren't educational institutions exempt from patents in the US?
Most people will happily pay good money to play MMORPGs. Sure, he has lost the opportunity cost of having his money invested elsewhere, but will still make that back by the sounds of things.
Assuming he turns a real profit, we should remember that he has done it while playing a style of game that most people happily pay to play.
He hasn't lost his entire investment like I think we all assumed he would when we first heard about this last year.
Ok - Let's assume that this was a court enforced payment, rather than an out-of-court settlement as in this case. I completely accept that the school should be punished, mainly because it prevents organisations from doing the same thing - but can you remind me again why it is the kid who gets this payment? Sure, compensate him for his legal bills, and give him some amount to cover the hurt he must have suffered from taking a week off school, but don't let him pocket the punitive side.
I'm not in the US. I live in a country where if I break the law, I have to compensate the victim for any losses they incur as a result of my crime (and these are not always just actual financial losses). The courts separately punish me for breaking the law. This may be in the form of a jail sentence, community service order, or quite frequently, a fine, which is paid to the government - the victim is compensated separately.
To pay the fine to the victim, is like having the family of a murder victim carry out the imprisonment of the murderer.
Do I get to sue the mods for modding me down? $100k would be fine.
On a more serious note: how is it that a couple of mods find my post insightful, others disagree and mod it overrated, and I get modded down past the starting point? It's not like it was troll or flamebait.
You mean I can rent it out by the week? $117,500, huh? Where do I sign up?:D
But seriously, where does the figure come from? Who decides "how much free speech is worth"? Are you saying your free speech is worth $117,500? $1M? $10M? My freedom of speech is not for sale: It is a fundamental right, and not for sale or trade.
$117,500 is a hell of a lot of money (will set that guy up quite nicely). The school did something fundamentally wrong, so _fine_ the school, or discipline the people who screwed up (to prevent them, and other schools from doing it again in the future), and compensate the kid in line with what he experienced.
That easy, huh? So when my grand-mother wants to install HyperBingo3000, how exactly does that model stop it from spying on everything she does?
People seem to be assuming that spyware is something that magically appears on PCs. That is rarely the case - It is usually bundled with other software.
Ooh - thanks for the stats, but you're missing my point.
Yes, Apple has seen a huge proportional growth in the past year; a rate significantly higher than that of PCs - a commendable achievement. I don't disagree with that. According to the stats you linked, they sold 1,244,000 more PCs in the past 12 months than they did in the 12 months prior.
However, that does not mean that over a million PC users have "converted". Other posts have pointed out they are neglecting that PC users may have bought Macs but not have been "converted". It is also quite plausible that much of this growth has come from within their own market (Price drops, attractive upgrade paths). It is also possible that they have been selling units to people who did not have computers.
If we take their definition that any increase in sales is the result of "conversions", and apply it to the PC market, let's see what we get (from your stats): PC Sales Q4'03->Q3'04: 167,762,000 PC Sales Q4'04->Q3'05: 185,500,000
By their definition, while about a million PC users have converted over to Macs, over 22 million have converted back the other way. This is obviously not the case, but I think does a pretty good job of demonstrating that their interpretation of the numbers is just plain wrong.
Further to that, the article makes no attempt to quantify Mac users who are buying PCs. It is all very well that a million users (who may have been PC users) have bought Macs, but if 2 million Mac users have bought PCs in the same period, then that does not bode too well for the Mac.
In fact if you use their logic, and assume that any nominal growth in market A is caused by people in market B (and disregard all other markets), it probably doesn't look good for them. (I have nothing to back it up, but I doubt the nominal growth of the PC market would be less than that of the Mac in the same period).
Argh - So now the Europan's are using feet and the American's are using metres? I think I must've just walked through a ripple in time-space or something.
I completely agree with the idea that digital media is less fragile than printed media.
However, here's an interesting counter point: There is a (albeit small) chance that a book, left unattended, will survive 6000 years. Digital media has a relatively short unattended life, and ultimately relies on reproduction for its long life. There's no way a disk, left to its own devices, will last 6000 years (even without physical damage, disks simply cannot survive long). If our civilisation were to end tomorrow, it would be the printed media, not the digital media, that would be preserved for 6000 years.
Easy - they just use the compression method disclosed in US Patent 5,533,051.. It can apparently compress arbitrary random data, including encrypted and compressed data!:p
While I liked his creativity, it was evident his depth of grasp of the workings of programming were as deep as VS allowed him. Cute screens with cute input buttons and cute input boxes. But nothing in the sense of real code.
This only demonstrates that Visual Studio is a bad environment for "teaching yourself", not that using Visual Studio is a bad thing in our professional lives. VS has fully fledged languages behind it (nothing stopping you from compiling/linking from the command-line...). There is nothing about VS that intrinsically limits the depth of one's understanding.
For Professionals: I think this point from the professional's perspective is really well covered by Andy Hunt and David Thomas in Section 35 of "The Pragmatic Programmer": "Evil Wizards".
In summary: If you use code generated by wizards and other similar tools without understanding what that code does, you are going to run into problems. Wizards and generators are tools that can increase your productivity (why bother writing code a computer can write for you?), but if you don't understand what they're doing, then you are going to run into troubles. Finally, their tip: "Don't use wizard code you don't understand".
For students: Regardless of the language/environment that kids start on, they need someone to guide them. They need to be taught the underlying concepts behind functions and classes. They need to be taught a few fundamental design concepts. They need to be taught some of the common idioms. If they aren't then how can they get it right? For the VS learners, it will be the flashy wizard generated dialogs that do very little, and ungracefully. For the console/C learners, it will be the almost-as-flashy text based menus (generated with reams of printfs), that do very little, and ungracefully.
Yeah - I originally learnt to program (in Turbo Pascal and C) in a self-directed manner, and I had the same problem as the kid you talk about. It wasn't until many years later at Uni, that I finally learnt to program.
Reminds me of the solar powered flashlight. It shines into its own solar cell to recharge itself.
It's not quite like that. Metals release energy when they oxidise. The problem is, you need to take oxidised metals from mines (or perhaps the waste from one of these cars), and refine them, which requires a heap of energy - as with all portable power sources, it will cost more energy at a centralised location than you're going to get out of the car.
You have two stages to the reaction: Mg + H20 -> MgO + H2, which releases enough energy to keep the temp up enough to keep the temperature up, and keep the oxidation progressing nicely. You pull the MgO aside, introduce O2 from the atmosphere, and 2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O.
So the net effect is: 2Mg + O2 + (2H2O) -> 2MgO + (2H2O) + energy. You're basically doing the same thing as when you burn Magnesium, but in two stages because you can "burn" it faster this way.
Rather than being like trying to run a solar torch on its own light, it is like running a torch on batteries. When the batteries run out, they need to be replaced or recharged.
Slashdot Mirror
However, the description of him as suicidal and the fact that he waited so long before getting a second test seems to indicate that either he doesn't know much about HIV transmission or he did engage in behavior that put him at HIV infection risk.
;)
From News of the World article, "Gay Andrew, from Largs, Ayrshire, caught the virus from his HIV-positive boyfriend Juan." Does that count?
However that doesn't explain how someone can get infected, and then cure. If he had that mutation, then he would never have got infected in the first place.
Assuming all the tests were correct, I'd say this is something completely different.
Many of those people were old and poor, and didn't have regular access to modern medical treatment.
Were these people old? I thought most of the people who have caught it so far have been young (farm-hands, etc).
And wouldn't their lack of access to medicine make them less likely to pick things up in the first place? Sure, bad sanitation means there are more (bacterial) nasties to pick up, but surely people who constantly rely on medicine to fight off nasties would have worse natural defence against these kind of things?
The flu did not kill them, the bacterial pneumonia they caught did.
/. comment I saw very recently (but can't be bothered finding to reference properly): Guns don't kill people - bullets do. Wait, no... Bullets don't kill people, the injuries they sustain do.
To paraphrase a
IANAD, but I cannot think of many viruses actually kill people. HIV doesn't, it just completely messes up a persons immune system, and they generally die of something else (frequently bacterial).
Bird flu is killing about 50% of (reported) human victims. You seem to be placing a lot of trust in modern medicine in the face of a pretty extreme statistic. Do you know something about the victims' medical records that we don't? I haven't read anything about all the bird flu victims being elderly or generally unhealthy.
Enterprises using Skype risk a communication barrier with countries and institutions that have already banned the service. false
;)).
I particularly like this one. Can anyone think of any communications product that would not risk a communication barrier with countries and institutions that had banned the service?
I can - Skype. If you need to call Fred Smith at Acme Corp, who has banned Skype, then you can call him on Skype Out, or pick up a standard telephone (assuming your company or country has not banned or obsoleted them
And of course AMD has been doing something similar for ages (although their scheme is somewhat simpler). For example, an Athlon64 3000+ doesn't run at 3GHz - it only runs at 1.8GHz.
Where in the hell can you return an opened CD these days?
I've done it a few times at various stores in Australia. I just take it back and politely explain that it doesn't play in my CD player (I normally don't bother mentioning that my CD player is PC based), and they normally just give me store credit.
Only once have they argued that "you can't return CDs", at which point I explained that nowhere on the product is it referred to as a CD (they can't for licensing reasons, right?), and that I bought it in good faith, thinking it was a CD. They got the manager, who gave me a store credit.
That sounds like garbage: If the method is patented, then it is by definition published (Try www.uspto.gov). That's the whole point of patents. Sure, if you want their actual implementation, then you're going to need to deal with NDAs and all that garbage.
Also, (IANAL, and I am not American), but aren't educational institutions exempt from patents in the US?
Most people will happily pay good money to play MMORPGs. Sure, he has lost the opportunity cost of having his money invested elsewhere, but will still make that back by the sounds of things.
Assuming he turns a real profit, we should remember that he has done it while playing a style of game that most people happily pay to play.
He hasn't lost his entire investment like I think we all assumed he would when we first heard about this last year.
Ok - Let's assume that this was a court enforced payment, rather than an out-of-court settlement as in this case. I completely accept that the school should be punished, mainly because it prevents organisations from doing the same thing - but can you remind me again why it is the kid who gets this payment? Sure, compensate him for his legal bills, and give him some amount to cover the hurt he must have suffered from taking a week off school, but don't let him pocket the punitive side.
I'm not in the US. I live in a country where if I break the law, I have to compensate the victim for any losses they incur as a result of my crime (and these are not always just actual financial losses). The courts separately punish me for breaking the law. This may be in the form of a jail sentence, community service order, or quite frequently, a fine, which is paid to the government - the victim is compensated separately.
To pay the fine to the victim, is like having the family of a murder victim carry out the imprisonment of the murderer.
But it wasn't a fine - it was an out of court compensation payment.
I'd accept it if it were a fine - the fine would be set at some suitable point that detered others from doing the same thing.
But how is this kid entitled to that money?
Do I get to sue the mods for modding me down? $100k would be fine.
On a more serious note: how is it that a couple of mods find my post insightful, others disagree and mod it overrated, and I get modded down past the starting point? It's not like it was troll or flamebait.
You mean I can rent it out by the week? $117,500, huh? Where do I sign up? :D
But seriously, where does the figure come from? Who decides "how much free speech is worth"? Are you saying your free speech is worth $117,500? $1M? $10M? My freedom of speech is not for sale: It is a fundamental right, and not for sale or trade.
$117,500 is a hell of a lot of money (will set that guy up quite nicely). The school did something fundamentally wrong, so _fine_ the school, or discipline the people who screwed up (to prevent them, and other schools from doing it again in the future), and compensate the kid in line with what he experienced.
So fine them - that seems like a more equitable way of detering.
While I completely agree that the school was in the wrong... $117,500???
How do the courts justify a payment of that much money over some relatively minor punishment (It's not like the punishment was cruel or unusual).
That easy, huh? So when my grand-mother wants to install HyperBingo3000, how exactly does that model stop it from spying on everything she does?
People seem to be assuming that spyware is something that magically appears on PCs. That is rarely the case - It is usually bundled with other software.
Ooh - thanks for the stats, but you're missing my point.
Yes, Apple has seen a huge proportional growth in the past year; a rate significantly higher than that of PCs - a commendable achievement. I don't disagree with that. According to the stats you linked, they sold 1,244,000 more PCs in the past 12 months than they did in the 12 months prior.
However, that does not mean that over a million PC users have "converted". Other posts have pointed out they are neglecting that PC users may have bought Macs but not have been "converted". It is also quite plausible that much of this growth has come from within their own market (Price drops, attractive upgrade paths). It is also possible that they have been selling units to people who did not have computers.
If we take their definition that any increase in sales is the result of "conversions", and apply it to the PC market, let's see what we get (from your stats):
PC Sales Q4'03->Q3'04: 167,762,000
PC Sales Q4'04->Q3'05: 185,500,000
By their definition, while about a million PC users have converted over to Macs, over 22 million have converted back the other way. This is obviously not the case, but I think does a pretty good job of demonstrating that their interpretation of the numbers is just plain wrong.
Further to that, the article makes no attempt to quantify Mac users who are buying PCs. It is all very well that a million users (who may have been PC users) have bought Macs, but if 2 million Mac users have bought PCs in the same period, then that does not bode too well for the Mac.
In fact if you use their logic, and assume that any nominal growth in market A is caused by people in market B (and disregard all other markets), it probably doesn't look good for them. (I have nothing to back it up, but I doubt the nominal growth of the PC market would be less than that of the Mac in the same period).
Argh - So now the Europan's are using feet and the American's are using metres? I think I must've just walked through a ripple in time-space or something.
I completely agree with the idea that digital media is less fragile than printed media.
However, here's an interesting counter point: There is a (albeit small) chance that a book, left unattended, will survive 6000 years. Digital media has a relatively short unattended life, and ultimately relies on reproduction for its long life. There's no way a disk, left to its own devices, will last 6000 years (even without physical damage, disks simply cannot survive long). If our civilisation were to end tomorrow, it would be the printed media, not the digital media, that would be preserved for 6000 years.
But I digress...
Oh no - we're all screwed...
"US04375625 Method and apparatus for penetrating tin-foil hats"
Accoding to this, yes, it looks like inventors are entitled to compensation if a secrecy order is placed on their patent.
Easy - they just use the compression method disclosed in US Patent 5,533,051.. It can apparently compress arbitrary random data, including encrypted and compressed data! :p
--
"Shannon was a fool." -- David C. James
While I liked his creativity, it was evident his depth of grasp of the workings of programming were as deep as VS allowed him. Cute screens with cute input buttons and cute input boxes. But nothing in the sense of real code.
This only demonstrates that Visual Studio is a bad environment for "teaching yourself", not that using Visual Studio is a bad thing in our professional lives. VS has fully fledged languages behind it (nothing stopping you from compiling/linking from the command-line...). There is nothing about VS that intrinsically limits the depth of one's understanding.
For Professionals: I think this point from the professional's perspective is really well covered by Andy Hunt and David Thomas in Section 35 of "The Pragmatic Programmer": "Evil Wizards".
In summary: If you use code generated by wizards and other similar tools without understanding what that code does, you are going to run into problems. Wizards and generators are tools that can increase your productivity (why bother writing code a computer can write for you?), but if you don't understand what they're doing, then you are going to run into troubles. Finally, their tip: "Don't use wizard code you don't understand".
For students: Regardless of the language/environment that kids start on, they need someone to guide them. They need to be taught the underlying concepts behind functions and classes. They need to be taught a few fundamental design concepts. They need to be taught some of the common idioms. If they aren't then how can they get it right? For the VS learners, it will be the flashy wizard generated dialogs that do very little, and ungracefully. For the console/C learners, it will be the almost-as-flashy text based menus (generated with reams of printfs), that do very little, and ungracefully.
Yeah - I originally learnt to program (in Turbo Pascal and C) in a self-directed manner, and I had the same problem as the kid you talk about. It wasn't until many years later at Uni, that I finally learnt to program.
Reminds me of the solar powered flashlight. It shines into its own solar cell to recharge itself.
It's not quite like that. Metals release energy when they oxidise. The problem is, you need to take oxidised metals from mines (or perhaps the waste from one of these cars), and refine them, which requires a heap of energy - as with all portable power sources, it will cost more energy at a centralised location than you're going to get out of the car.
You have two stages to the reaction: Mg + H20 -> MgO + H2, which releases enough energy to keep the temp up enough to keep the temperature up, and keep the oxidation progressing nicely. You pull the MgO aside, introduce O2 from the atmosphere, and 2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O.
So the net effect is: 2Mg + O2 + (2H2O) -> 2MgO + (2H2O) + energy. You're basically doing the same thing as when you burn Magnesium, but in two stages because you can "burn" it faster this way.
Rather than being like trying to run a solar torch on its own light, it is like running a torch on batteries. When the batteries run out, they need to be replaced or recharged.