Seriously, the linked article is dated 1 June 2007. The World Bank policy paper it covers is from April 2007 (http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDS ContentServer/IW3P/IB/2007/04/13/000016406_2007041 3145045/Rendered/PDF/wps4202.pdf).
Quote from the paper (also quoted in the salon article):
The AK-47's ubiquity [in conflicts in third world countries] could alternatively be explained as a result of a path dependent process. Economic historians recognize that an inferior product may persist when a small but early advantage becomes large over time and builds up a legacy that makes switching costly (David 1975). In the case of the AK-47 that early advantage may be that as a Soviet invention it was not subject to patent and so could be freely copied.
Either this patent story is a joke, or Sergei Ivanov is spending too much time on teh internets...
I am really uncomfortable in being put in a position of appearing to defend Microsoft. However, it occurs to me that some of the "secret extension" hackery you reference is, at least in part, a reflection of how hard it is to write open-ended, extensible file formats that work in a multitude of circumstances. On the flip side: when you're coding against a deadline set by marketing (we _need_ office 2007 _before_ 2008, guys!) a few corners gotta be cut. Hard to embed multimedia in a spreadsheet? Just hack together an ActiveX control to do it for you and stuff it in the file format. Oh, only works on Windows? Well that works for 95% of the population. Need to save a complex data relationship to disc? Why bother serializing? Just blop the object out of memory to disc wrapped in a tag. Don't you think defining and _adhering_ to a complex file format is one or two orders of magnitude harder that just getting something something put together that kinda works for us and the guys in the Poser Point group? Don't you think that the Office code base is a bit of a mess at this point in time?
Two non-Office examples:
1) It seems like its easier for someone to pull together some hackery-quackery using frontpage/VB or flash than to put together some custom cross-platform DHTML for a cool web effect. Is exclusion of browsers on minority platforms a primary goal, or only an unintended consequence?
2) In 1997 a lot of "open source" code wouldn't compile on a 64 bit linux machine (DEC Alpha). Were the 32-bit processor folks conspiring against the nascent 64 bit folks?
Malice? Not necessarily. The rhetoric will whip up the already-converted, but I think it will fall flat on the ears of the undecided. While I agree that it would seem that being opaque and/or incomprehensible has been a really strong aspect the Microsoft business strategy, I think we'll have a better chance of being taken seriously if we stick to technical considerations (including so-called "IP" entanglements).
The only _documented_ methods of transmission of CJD that I am aware of are dural and corneal grafts, and treatment with cadaveric human growth hormone. Variant Creutzfeldt Jacobs Disease (vCJD) is linked with BSE through some pretty good epidemiological data, and the association is pretty widely accepted by the scientific community. Just FYI, you know, since I'm not really into the vegeratianism vs. meat-eating debate or anything...but I have switched from roast beef sandwiches to turkey since the Canadian mad cow incident. The problem is that vCJD doesn't manifest until 10-20 years after exposure, and either you make decisions based on preliminary data or else its already too late.
"now you could strip all the patented code, and fix it into a working driver, and provide source for it, but ATI already has been doing that for years, yet all I see from the/. community is a bunch of Nvidia fanboy ravings of how good the closed source Nvidia drivers are."
Correction: there is an open source radeon driver that only supports 3D acceleration for cards up to and including the 9200 models. Newer models are only have 3D acceleration with the closed source 3D driver.
Up until ATI stopped releasing 3D programming information to the community, ATI-based cards were all I bought and recommended. The reason is pragmatic: I didn't have to worry about the card working with a new kernel version or the latest -mm patchset. This was my choice, in _spite_ of occasionally incomplete GL implementations (I seem to remember problems with Scorched3D on my radeon).
The last ATI card I bought was a 9200. Now, I buy nvidia. I may be stuck with a closed source driver, but at least it is a _good_ closed source driver. The latest version can do 3D acceleration over multiple cards (xinerama) if all GPUs are similar, which makes for a stunning game of quake on my triple-head system.
If S3 came up with an open source driver that was included in the kernel sources and a marginally competent 3D implementation, I would use them for future purchases in a heartbeat.
if i had to guess, it would be that the parent is from the US, and the grandparent is from Australia or the UK. in those countries, the "6 monthly" formulation is the norm for every six months. having been a visiting physician in papua new guinea (ex-australian protectorate) i had to get used to a medication dosage schedule of "6 hourly" meaning once every six hours and not six every hour.
first of all, there's no such thing as a perfect reflector, so there's always going to be be some loss. but there's a grand tradition of frictionless planes and other such things in these though experiments, so we'll give you that.
second, unless you have perfectly coherent light (super laser), you'll have dissipation of the beam. we'll spot that, too (see above).
once those have been taken care of, the dealbreaker is going to be that the reflected photons are red-shifted when they bounce off each sail.
the energy of a photon (E) is equal to Plank's constant (h) times the frequency (f).
the increase in kinetic energy of the sail is conserved conserved due to a lower frequency of the reflected photon.
So, in 2000 I spent a few months in a mission hospital in Papua New Guinea. The many tribes of central Papua New Guinea (the highlands) were isolated, stone-age peoples as recently as the 1950s. It was a very interesting time, and I was struck more than once by the differences between our cultures.
Getting to the point of the story: coming back from Mt Hagen after stocking up on supplies, I got the driver to stop the van so I could take a good picture of one of the outstandingly beautiful waterfalls that dotted the countryside. The driver warned me to be discrete, but a small crowd of villagers gathered at the base of the falls started chasing me (several of whom were young males armed with machetes). It seems that they felt that they owned the falls, and that they wanted to be paid for the privelege of taking a picture of their falls.
At that time, it seemed to me to be one of the stranger, more un-western attitudes I had encountered.
Now...
Well, either they were more advanced than I realized, or we're headed back to the Stone Age.
Military aircraft are not built using standard parts. Everything is custom. So everything is brutally expensive. Cut back on the custom nature of this hardware, and you'd save a lot of money.
done
the joint strike fighter is a new fighter platform that will share a common chassis and subsystems, while allowing for customization for the roles required by the various services (ob google). this will allow the navy version to land on carriers, the marine version to have VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) ability, and the air force version to be maximized for speed/range/maneuverability. and all while maximizing the commonality of the supply chain and support crew
Hey, has it crossed anyone's mind that maybe IBM is bankrolling SCO's linux suit?
Ok, it's a but far fetched. But the more I think about it, the more diabolically plausible it seems:
What kind of moron would lead their puny little tech company into direct confrontation with the IBM behemoth? Counterargument: morons do exist.
GPL uncertainties are being exploited by the old guard proprietary software companies (read: Microsoft)
Every one in the linux camp has been looking for a GPL test case
What if some Machivellian genius at IBM is orchestrating this? Every day SCO seems more and more like some absurd character from an anti-capitalist farce. What a beautiful test case. They are absolutely unsympathetic as an antagonist. IBM has a flawless legal department. This has none of the ambiguity of the 2600 or Jon cases. How much did IBM spend painting "peace, love, linux" through NYC? How much would it take to buy of a couple of smarmy executives from a failing tech company? (or maybe it was the threat of releasing those compromising pics from the latest NAMBLA rally?)
And Boies? Maybe he's still sore at Microsoft for the de facto loss in the anti-trust case. Maybe he's deep cover for the penguinistas, out for blood in a scorched earth campaign against the Redmond giant.
Think on this: IBM didn't have to include a mention of the GPL in their counter suit. There's enough of an argument in the rest of the brief to shut SCO up and shut them down. The GPL could conceivable hurt IBM in the future if they want to pull shennanigans with the linux codebase in the future. This GPL mention has the potential of being and incredible gift to the community.
Ok. I'll go re-fold my tinfoil hat. 20 years from now when the truth comes out, remember you heard it from me first.
the very last CD i bought was the linkin park "reanimation" album, and that was the direct result of downloading it off the RIAA website after the labor day hack last year, listening to it and (surprise!) liking it!...
lemelson, the patent originator, should be well known to the slashdot crowd, but on the internet, institutional memory is an oxymoron
the delay in patent filing is not due to USPTO ineptitude. rather, this is classic lemelson tactics:
stake an overly broad patent claim
when patent office declines patent on grounds of it being too general, rewrite it, trying to adjust claims such that it takes into account techinical innovations that have occurred since #1
repeat steps 1 and 2 until the patent office grants you a patent: congratulations, you've just gotten a patent on someone else's work!
for an example, google for "lemelson" and "machine vision." (here's a link for the google impaired.) briefly, lemelson patented the idea that some sort of machine could do quality inspection of items coming off of an assembly line. he had no invention, he had a wish. he ammended and ammended and ammended that patent for 30 years before it was accepted. in the meantime, laser bar code readers had been invented (by someone else), and he had changed the wording on his patent application to include that technological development. Viola! he invented laser bar code readers, ex post facto, and his estate went on a suing spree.
FWIW, the USPTO changed the policies that allowed this in the mid 90s. still sucks.
I say this as an M.D. who relies on a pot of coffe to get going in the morning, and 2-3 20 oz cokes and/or a vente starbucks in the afternoon:
coffee has several known effects on an organism's health:
coffee's effect on wakefulness is likely mediated by interfering with adenosine receptors in the frontal lobes of the brain (competitive antagonism). although I personally feel that coffee makes me more alert and attentive, there is always the possibility that this is a fabrication of my own self-perception. which is to say: i do not know of an objective way of supporting the statement "coffee enhances my mental functioning despite being sleep deprived."
antagonism of adenosine receptors in the heart leads to an increased tendency for the cardiac muscle to contract spontaneously. this leads to an extra contraction known as a PVC (premature ventricular contraction). i do not know what the health implications of this are. common sense would suggest that there is little consequence to this unless you have a very sick heart to begin with.
caffiene is a weak diuretic (it makes you pee). this can promote the formation of kidney stones in some people. it can also dehydrate you, which is why you should never hit the StarBucks just before you cross Death Valley by foot.
caffiene both increases acid production in the stomach and weakens the tone of the sphincter (valve) between the esophagus and the stomach. this results in gastroesophageal reflux (heart burn). gastroesophageal reflux, if severe, can lead to esophagitis, Barrett's esophagus (metaplasia, e.g. precancerous change), and adenocarcionoma (cancer) of the esophagus. i don't know of any studies that show an increased risk of developing esophageal cancer in coffee drinkers, but such a study would be retrospective and probably very difficult to pull off with sufficient power.
Lastly, and I know this is kinda weak: people who drink X number of cups of coffee each day _may_ have an increased chance of developing bladder cancer.
all in all, though, coffee is a pretty benign habit. in a public health sense, it pales in comparison to simple things, like limiting saturated fats, not smoking, moderate alcohol intake, and wearing seat belts.
95% of drivers over 18 years of age think it's not a crime to go up to 7 mph over the speed limit.
100% of fourth graders think that they shouldn't have to pay anyone to sing "happy birthday" in class.
82% of record company CEOs didn't think that they did anything wrong when they conspired to raise the cost of a CD.
100% of christine aguileras surveyed thought it was ok to teach fourth grade girls how to be whores.
ok, i'm not sure what i'm getting at (especially with that last one...), but it's something along the lines of "law doesn't equal ethics." you can buy a law, but Leges sine moribus vanae ("Laws without morals are useless.")
Stop stealing that intellectual property from SCO already. Have you no shame? The gig is up: there's no way you could keep putting this stuff out without ripping off the hard working SCO programmers.
what i think amazing is that back in the day (1996), the posts on usenet announcing the beginning of the KDE (way back then, it was the 'Kool Desktop Environment') development effort specifically cited CDE as inspiration.
want proof? check out this article from the Google archive.
then KDE sparked the Gnome effort...
...and now Gnome's replacing CDE.
but i'm left wondering how Kevin Bacon fits into it all
a company sells a stack of cardboard, each sheet of which has squares punched out of it. when you put the appropriate piece of cardboard over the matching page of your classic collection of "alpha flight" comic books, you get to miss all the panels pertaining to the whole storyline about hank the sasquatch turning into a woman (eew!). would that be illegal?
wait, wait...i got a better one:
how about those semi-transparent computer screen eye glasses from the IBM commercial? well, how about if there was a program that would automatically overlay all billboards in your line of site with pleasing works of art? should coca-cola be able to sue your ass?
wait, wait...i got an even better one:
what if you could turn the tv off for some time each day, or what if you could go to the bathroom during the commercials without being reported to the department of the homeland advertising counsel?
uh, i guess that last one hasn't happened yet. nevermind. i guess we still have all the freedoms we need. go to sleep, america!
four years of no income while working/studying 800-100 hours per week
three to five years of working 80-120 hours per week (my personal longest week was 128 hours) for $35-45,000 per year
now, you have to start or buy into a practice (=more loans)
the upshot of this is that financially, a new doctor is heavily in debt, and has worked very hard for 7 to 9 years (or more, if he's done a fellowship) for little or no pay. several friends of mine have had approximately $250,000 educational debt + interest upon graduating medical school.
now, no one is going to cry for physicians. we get along. however, i saw a calculation a few years ago that if you took two kids getting out of high school, and one went to college and med school and became a physician, and the other trained as a journeyman and became a master plumber, the total lifetime earnings of the doctor wouldn't surpass the plumber until they were 60 years old or so.
as for you family doctor, there's the 8 hour office day, but before that there was probably 90 minutes rounding on his patients in the hospital, and afterwards there's probably another two hours of charting, follow-up calls, and paperwork. and then on top of that, every few days (depends on how many people are in his practice), he'll be on call for emergencies.
number one: every doctor had helping people in mind when they entered the profession; there's too many other ways of making good money that don't involve working 60 hour shifts.
number two: just from the angle of self interest, only a stupid surgeon would operate on a patient that wouldn't benefit from the procedure. the most important part of a successful surgery is careful patient selection. a surgeon's worst nightmare is a patient that keeps coming back to clinic with complaints that the surgery didn't help...or, god forbid, with complications of a surgery (surgeons like to operate, not see patients in clinic).
but i see i've already put more thought into this response than you put into your troll, so you win this round...
you must be posting AC because the slashdot rabble have been getting entirely too many mod points recently, and to point out that the correct taxonomy for your post is ironicus sarcasticus rather than trollus maximus would sort of ruin the style of the post. never-the-less, this is pretty competently crafted, and deserving of a solid "ha!"
You know, someone just asked me if there was software that would let you copy DVDs. They wanted to...(wait for it...) use a copy for the DVD player in their Honda odyssey so they could keep the orignals at home and undamaged (kids, minivans and optical discs don't play well together).
I told them there was no such software.
Now I know differently. Thanks, MPAA, I guess you do add value, after all!
In the near future, our world has become unlivable because of the fleet of lawyers unleashed by the music industry. Ever since ASCAP published the sheet music for the aleatoric masterpiece "Circadian Rhythms," every man, woman, and child...heck, every multicellular organism on Earth has been subject to paying royalties.
Earth cries out for a savior...
...and finds one in the Church of Latter Day Saints, who raises up an elite force of commandos from within their priesthood. These LDS clergy, later referred to as the Clerics, wage a holy war to wrest control of humanity from the minions of the music industry, and, against overwhelming odds, succeeds!
In the aftermath, it is agreed than not only must lawyers be banished from the earth, so must artists, musicians, authors, and scupltors. Enforcement of the prohibition is handed over to the Clerics. Any form of art deemed to promote the the practice of law is to be purged. Humanity achieves an...equilibrium...that it had long thought lost forever.
What happens next? Wait until December 6th to find out! Oh, wait...I'm in Cleveland. Goddam! Well, move to LA, New York, or one of the top 20 markets and find out on December 6th.
Slashdot Mirror
How is an AK-47 like a QWERTY keyboard?
h tww/2007/06/01/ak_47/
S ContentServer/IW3P/IB/2007/04/13/000016406_2007041 3145045/Rendered/PDF/wps4202.pdf).
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/?last_story=/tech/
Seriously, the linked article is dated 1 June 2007. The World Bank policy paper it covers is from April 2007 (http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WD
Quote from the paper (also quoted in the salon article):
The AK-47's ubiquity [in conflicts in third world countries] could alternatively be explained as a result of a path dependent process. Economic historians recognize that an inferior product may persist when a small but early advantage becomes large over time and builds up a legacy that makes switching costly (David 1975). In the case of the AK-47 that early advantage may be that as a Soviet invention it was not subject to patent and so could be freely copied.
Either this patent story is a joke, or Sergei Ivanov is spending too much time on teh internets...
I am really uncomfortable in being put in a position of appearing to defend Microsoft. However, it occurs to me that some of the "secret extension" hackery you reference is, at least in part, a reflection of how hard it is to write open-ended, extensible file formats that work in a multitude of circumstances. On the flip side: when you're coding against a deadline set by marketing (we _need_ office 2007 _before_ 2008, guys!) a few corners gotta be cut. Hard to embed multimedia in a spreadsheet? Just hack together an ActiveX control to do it for you and stuff it in the file format. Oh, only works on Windows? Well that works for 95% of the population. Need to save a complex data relationship to disc? Why bother serializing? Just blop the object out of memory to disc wrapped in a tag. Don't you think defining and _adhering_ to a complex file format is one or two orders of magnitude harder that just getting something something put together that kinda works for us and the guys in the Poser Point group? Don't you think that the Office code base is a bit of a mess at this point in time?
Two non-Office examples:
1) It seems like its easier for someone to pull together some hackery-quackery using frontpage/VB or flash than to put together some custom cross-platform DHTML for a cool web effect. Is exclusion of browsers on minority platforms a primary goal, or only an unintended consequence?
2) In 1997 a lot of "open source" code wouldn't compile on a 64 bit linux machine (DEC Alpha). Were the 32-bit processor folks conspiring against the nascent 64 bit folks?
Malice? Not necessarily. The rhetoric will whip up the already-converted, but I think it will fall flat on the ears of the undecided. While I agree that it would seem that being opaque and/or incomprehensible has been a really strong aspect the Microsoft business strategy, I think we'll have a better chance of being taken seriously if we stick to technical considerations (including so-called "IP" entanglements).
The only _documented_ methods of transmission of CJD that I am aware of are dural and corneal grafts, and treatment with cadaveric human growth hormone. Variant Creutzfeldt Jacobs Disease (vCJD) is linked with BSE through some pretty good epidemiological data, and the association is pretty widely accepted by the scientific community. Just FYI, you know, since I'm not really into the vegeratianism vs. meat-eating debate or anything...but I have switched from roast beef sandwiches to turkey since the Canadian mad cow incident. The problem is that vCJD doesn't manifest until 10-20 years after exposure, and either you make decisions based on preliminary data or else its already too late.
Quoth the poster:
/. community is a bunch of Nvidia fanboy ravings of how good the closed source Nvidia drivers are."
"now you could strip all the patented code, and fix it into a working driver, and provide source for it, but ATI already has been doing that for years, yet all I see from the
Correction: there is an open source radeon driver that only supports 3D acceleration for cards up to and including the 9200 models. Newer models are only have 3D acceleration with the closed source 3D driver.
Up until ATI stopped releasing 3D programming information to the community, ATI-based cards were all I bought and recommended. The reason is pragmatic: I didn't have to worry about the card working with a new kernel version or the latest -mm patchset. This was my choice, in _spite_ of occasionally incomplete GL implementations (I seem to remember problems with Scorched3D on my radeon).
The last ATI card I bought was a 9200. Now, I buy nvidia. I may be stuck with a closed source driver, but at least it is a _good_ closed source driver. The latest version can do 3D acceleration over multiple cards (xinerama) if all GPUs are similar, which makes for a stunning game of quake on my triple-head system.
If S3 came up with an open source driver that was included in the kernel sources and a marginally competent 3D implementation, I would use them for future purchases in a heartbeat.
uh, excuse me sir.
but wouldn't a driver who drove wrecklessly not be in an accident?
if i had to guess, it would be that the parent is from the US, and the grandparent is from Australia or the UK. in those countries, the "6 monthly" formulation is the norm for every six months. having been a visiting physician in papua new guinea (ex-australian protectorate) i had to get used to a medication dosage schedule of "6 hourly" meaning once every six hours and not six every hour.
just FYI
first of all, there's no such thing as a perfect reflector, so there's always going to be be some loss. but there's a grand tradition of frictionless planes and other such things in these though experiments, so we'll give you that.
second, unless you have perfectly coherent light (super laser), you'll have dissipation of the beam. we'll spot that, too (see above).
once those have been taken care of, the dealbreaker is going to be that the reflected photons are red-shifted when they bounce off each sail.
the energy of a photon (E) is equal to Plank's constant (h) times the frequency (f).
the increase in kinetic energy of the sail is conserved conserved due to a lower frequency of the reflected photon.
frak the adverts!
man, i think the advertisers broke a sacred bond of trust when they made the advertisements come on 50db higher than the show they're inserted into.
and frak the networks!
how do you like USA network where
so, frack em all, i say.
So, in 2000 I spent a few months in a mission hospital in Papua New Guinea. The many tribes of central Papua New Guinea (the highlands) were isolated, stone-age peoples as recently as the 1950s. It was a very interesting time, and I was struck more than once by the differences between our cultures.
Getting to the point of the story: coming back from Mt Hagen after stocking up on supplies, I got the driver to stop the van so I could take a good picture of one of the outstandingly beautiful waterfalls that dotted the countryside. The driver warned me to be discrete, but a small crowd of villagers gathered at the base of the falls started chasing me (several of whom were young males armed with machetes). It seems that they felt that they owned the falls, and that they wanted to be paid for the privelege of taking a picture of their falls.
At that time, it seemed to me to be one of the stranger, more un-western attitudes I had encountered.
Now...
Well, either they were more advanced than I realized, or we're headed back to the Stone Age.
Military aircraft are not built using standard parts. Everything is custom. So everything is brutally expensive. Cut back on the custom nature of this hardware, and you'd save a lot of money.
done
the joint strike fighter is a new fighter platform that will share a common chassis and subsystems, while allowing for customization for the roles required by the various services (ob google). this will allow the navy version to land on carriers, the marine version to have VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) ability, and the air force version to be maximized for speed/range/maneuverability. and all while maximizing the commonality of the supply chain and support crew
KUM ShOT: the Kommon Unified Model Shared Object Thingey.
Hey, has it crossed anyone's mind that maybe IBM is bankrolling SCO's linux suit?
Ok, it's a but far fetched. But the more I think about it, the more diabolically plausible it seems:
What if some Machivellian genius at IBM is orchestrating this? Every day SCO seems more and more like some absurd character from an anti-capitalist farce. What a beautiful test case. They are absolutely unsympathetic as an antagonist. IBM has a flawless legal department. This has none of the ambiguity of the 2600 or Jon cases. How much did IBM spend painting "peace, love, linux" through NYC? How much would it take to buy of a couple of smarmy executives from a failing tech company? (or maybe it was the threat of releasing those compromising pics from the latest NAMBLA rally?)
And Boies? Maybe he's still sore at Microsoft for the de facto loss in the anti-trust case. Maybe he's deep cover for the penguinistas, out for blood in a scorched earth campaign against the Redmond giant.
Think on this: IBM didn't have to include a mention of the GPL in their counter suit. There's enough of an argument in the rest of the brief to shut SCO up and shut them down. The GPL could conceivable hurt IBM in the future if they want to pull shennanigans with the linux codebase in the future. This GPL mention has the potential of being and incredible gift to the community.
Ok. I'll go re-fold my tinfoil hat. 20 years from now when the truth comes out, remember you heard it from me first.
the very last CD i bought was the linkin park "reanimation" album, and that was the direct result of downloading it off the RIAA website after the labor day hack last year, listening to it and (surprise!) liking it! ...
lemelson, the patent originator, should be well known to the slashdot crowd, but on the internet, institutional memory is an oxymoron
the delay in patent filing is not due to USPTO ineptitude. rather, this is classic lemelson tactics:
for an example, google for "lemelson" and "machine vision." (here's a link for the google impaired.) briefly, lemelson patented the idea that some sort of machine could do quality inspection of items coming off of an assembly line. he had no invention, he had a wish. he ammended and ammended and ammended that patent for 30 years before it was accepted. in the meantime, laser bar code readers had been invented (by someone else), and he had changed the wording on his patent application to include that technological development. Viola! he invented laser bar code readers, ex post facto, and his estate went on a suing spree.
FWIW, the USPTO changed the policies that allowed this in the mid 90s. still sucks.
I say this as an M.D. who relies on a pot of coffe to get going in the morning, and 2-3 20 oz cokes and/or a vente starbucks in the afternoon:
coffee has several known effects on an organism's health:
coffee's effect on wakefulness is likely mediated by interfering with adenosine receptors in the frontal lobes of the brain (competitive antagonism). although I personally feel that coffee makes me more alert and attentive, there is always the possibility that this is a fabrication of my own self-perception. which is to say: i do not know of an objective way of supporting the statement "coffee enhances my mental functioning despite being sleep deprived."
antagonism of adenosine receptors in the heart leads to an increased tendency for the cardiac muscle to contract spontaneously. this leads to an extra contraction known as a PVC (premature ventricular contraction). i do not know what the health implications of this are. common sense would suggest that there is little consequence to this unless you have a very sick heart to begin with.
caffiene is a weak diuretic (it makes you pee). this can promote the formation of kidney stones in some people. it can also dehydrate you, which is why you should never hit the StarBucks just before you cross Death Valley by foot.
caffiene both increases acid production in the stomach and weakens the tone of the sphincter (valve) between the esophagus and the stomach. this results in gastroesophageal reflux (heart burn). gastroesophageal reflux, if severe, can lead to esophagitis, Barrett's esophagus (metaplasia, e.g. precancerous change), and adenocarcionoma (cancer) of the esophagus. i don't know of any studies that show an increased risk of developing esophageal cancer in coffee drinkers, but such a study would be retrospective and probably very difficult to pull off with sufficient power.
Lastly, and I know this is kinda weak: people who drink X number of cups of coffee each day _may_ have an increased chance of developing bladder cancer.
all in all, though, coffee is a pretty benign habit. in a public health sense, it pales in comparison to simple things, like limiting saturated fats, not smoking, moderate alcohol intake, and wearing seat belts.
In other news:
ok, i'm not sure what i'm getting at (especially with that last one...), but it's something along the lines of "law doesn't equal ethics." you can buy a law, but Leges sine moribus vanae ("Laws without morals are useless.")
Stop stealing that intellectual property from SCO already. Have you no shame? The gig is up: there's no way you could keep putting this stuff out without ripping off the hard working SCO programmers.
what i think amazing is that back in the day (1996), the posts on usenet announcing the beginning of the KDE (way back then, it was the 'Kool Desktop Environment') development effort specifically cited CDE as inspiration.
want proof? check out this article from the Google archive.
then KDE sparked the Gnome effort...
...and now Gnome's replacing CDE.
but i'm left wondering how Kevin Bacon fits into it all
ok
how about this:
a company sells a stack of cardboard, each sheet of which has squares punched out of it. when you put the appropriate piece of cardboard over the matching page of your classic collection of "alpha flight" comic books, you get to miss all the panels pertaining to the whole storyline about hank the sasquatch turning into a woman (eew!). would that be illegal?
wait, wait...i got a better one:
how about those semi-transparent computer screen eye glasses from the IBM commercial? well, how about if there was a program that would automatically overlay all billboards in your line of site with pleasing works of art? should coca-cola be able to sue your ass?
wait, wait...i got an even better one:
what if you could turn the tv off for some time each day, or what if you could go to the bathroom during the commercials without being reported to the department of the homeland advertising counsel?
uh, i guess that last one hasn't happened yet. nevermind. i guess we still have all the freedoms we need. go to sleep, america!
you may have a race condition if someone starts a thread about nazis starting a nuclear attack on the internet.
the upshot of this is that financially, a new doctor is heavily in debt, and has worked very hard for 7 to 9 years (or more, if he's done a fellowship) for little or no pay. several friends of mine have had approximately $250,000 educational debt + interest upon graduating medical school.
now, no one is going to cry for physicians. we get along. however, i saw a calculation a few years ago that if you took two kids getting out of high school, and one went to college and med school and became a physician, and the other trained as a journeyman and became a master plumber, the total lifetime earnings of the doctor wouldn't surpass the plumber until they were 60 years old or so.
as for you family doctor, there's the 8 hour office day, but before that there was probably 90 minutes rounding on his patients in the hospital, and afterwards there's probably another two hours of charting, follow-up calls, and paperwork. and then on top of that, every few days (depends on how many people are in his practice), he'll be on call for emergencies.
number one: every doctor had helping people in mind when they entered the profession; there's too many other ways of making good money that don't involve working 60 hour shifts.
number two: just from the angle of self interest, only a stupid surgeon would operate on a patient that wouldn't benefit from the procedure. the most important part of a successful surgery is careful patient selection. a surgeon's worst nightmare is a patient that keeps coming back to clinic with complaints that the surgery didn't help...or, god forbid, with complications of a surgery (surgeons like to operate, not see patients in clinic).
but i see i've already put more thought into this response than you put into your troll, so you win this round...
you must be posting AC because the slashdot rabble have been getting entirely too many mod points recently, and to point out that the correct taxonomy for your post is ironicus sarcasticus rather than trollus maximus would sort of ruin the style of the post. never-the-less, this is pretty competently crafted, and deserving of a solid "ha!"
You know, someone just asked me if there was software that would let you copy DVDs. They wanted to...(wait for it...) use a copy for the DVD player in their Honda odyssey so they could keep the orignals at home and undamaged (kids, minivans and optical discs don't play well together).
I told them there was no such software.
Now I know differently. Thanks, MPAA, I guess you do add value, after all!
In the near future, our world has become unlivable because of the fleet of lawyers unleashed by the music industry. Ever since ASCAP published the sheet music for the aleatoric masterpiece "Circadian Rhythms," every man, woman, and child...heck, every multicellular organism on Earth has been subject to paying royalties.
Earth cries out for a savior...
...and finds one in the Church of Latter Day Saints, who raises up an elite force of commandos from within their priesthood. These LDS clergy, later referred to as the Clerics, wage a holy war to wrest control of humanity from the minions of the music industry, and, against overwhelming odds, succeeds!
In the aftermath, it is agreed than not only must lawyers be banished from the earth, so must artists, musicians, authors, and scupltors. Enforcement of the prohibition is handed over to the Clerics. Any form of art deemed to promote the the practice of law is to be purged. Humanity achieves an...equilibrium...that it had long thought lost forever.
What happens next? Wait until December 6th to find out! Oh, wait...I'm in Cleveland. Goddam! Well, move to LA, New York, or one of the top 20 markets and find out on December 6th.