So THIS is the magic tool that TPTB need to clean up Islamist fundamentalism...
Somewhere in a Middle Eastern cave, a suicide bomber straps on his dynamite vest and martyr's headscarf. Unbeknownst to him, the scarf has been cleverly rigged with several powerful magnets. Let's see if he notices...
"Abdul... Abdul, I am calling you... hear my words, O faithful one..."
"Allah! Is it really you?"
"Abdul, you really screwed the pooch with this terror business. I never told you to blow yourself up for my sake, and there certainly aren't any virgins in it for you. Now go be a good little peasant and give all your oil to the Americans for nothing. I, Allah, have spoken."
"It's a miracle! Praise Allah... wait a second, go be a peasant? I thought I was going to get to blow stuff up! This religion sucks!"
This message was brought to you by the Central Intelligence Agency. Screwing with heads for fun and profit since 1947.
GP is right on this one. The whole business about virgin birth has a lot to do with a translation error.
The Hebrew text of Isaiah's prophecy regarding the birth of the Messiah said "And behold, the young woman will conceive a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel..." etc, etc. The scholars that produced the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Torah, translated "almah," which normally means "young woman of marriageable age," as "parthenos," meaning "maiden" or "virgin." Problem is, Hebrew already has a word for "virgin," "bethulah," which Isaiah didn't use. That put the authors of the Gospels in a bind, since the Hebrew and Greek said two different things and neither could be wrong - both were considered by the authorities of the time to be the divinely revealed word of God. Hence, they went with the more impressive-sounding miracle and made Mary a virgin. (Of course, that tied them in all kinds of exegetical knots later, but that's another story.)
And of course, once they've churned this issue into a froth of absurdity and skimmed every last bit of cream off the top, all that will be left is a lot of sour, spilled milk. Nothing worth crying over in any case.
Personally, I find the whole enterprise rather cheesy, but that's just me.
If jazz and classical is more your speed, great deals can be had through university musical programs and organizations. In my area there's University of Michigan's University Musical Society, Wayne State University's Department of Music and Oakland University's Meadow Brook Theatre and Music Festival. Tickets - and good tickets at that - can usually be had for $20-$30 for the general public, and $10-15 for students. As if the students and lesser-known performers weren't worth it (and they're usually good to brilliant), you usually get at least two "names" per season. UMS, for example, brings in Wynton Marsalis and the the Lincoln Center jazz ensemble most years, and this year's lineup features Yo-Yo Ma, Chick Corea and the Filarmonica della Scala.
Already a problem in farming, where unintentional pollination of non-GE crops by GE varieties results in the non-GE farmer losing his/her shirt to lawsuits by Monsanto et al. The "patent reform" we have on hand is completely biased toward the biotech companies. It used to be that the non-GE farmer could claim unintentional pollination as a defense; now the farmer is liable regardless of how the genes got into his/her field.
I can only imagine the fallout when we start patenting human genetic sequences. Will people have to buy their children now?
The US is piping water out of the great lakes at an astonishing rate.
Who is this mythic "The US" you speak of? Michiganders have been screaming bloody murder about people screwing up the Great Lakes for ages - last year we shut down a multi-million dollar Nestle bottling plant when the few hundred thousand gallons they asked for turned into a few hundred million gallons, and we've been a major part of every Lakes protection initiative, group and legal body to date. Seeing as we border four of the five Lakes, anything that screws with them screws with us even worse.
Of course, seeing as we'll probably be first in line for annexation once your economy completely pwns ours, let me be the first to welcome our maple-leaf-toting overlords. *(:-)
This kind of crap is infuriating for airline companies...It doesn't take much at all to kill a whole line of planes, just the vague reputation for being unsafe. A report like this, based on a flawed understanding of Carbon vs Aluminum where the "reporter" doesn't even grasp the real issue, could do real harm.
I really hate to say this because I think 99.995% of what the man writes is pure drivel, but Michael Crichton hit the nail on the head in "Airframe" - in that case, a nationally recognized TV journalist aired an expose about an allegedly unsafe aircraft without doing any research whatsoever about the plane she was slagging. Everyone at the news program basically knew that the story was pure fiction, but they aired it as news anyway for the sole purpose of driving up their ratings.
I'd venture to say that the vast majority of what passes for in-depth reporting in this country and elsewhere is sensationalism bordering on pornography. Media outlets make an absolute fetish out of death, suffering and fear, and the coverage almost never has any basis in reality - it's solely to satisfy the prurient interest of a certain subset of the public.
The point isn't that you can make and use your own gasoline, and by extension, the point with modified consoles is not that you can physically open up the case and install the modification. The issue at hand is the conflict between two points of view: that of the hack-minded consumer, who believes that he/she is entitled to do anything he/she pleases to a product that he/she owns, and that of the product manufacturer, who believes that it is entitled to stop hack-minded consumers from using their product in a non-approved manner.
Can you modify your game console - that is, are you physically capable of altering its hardware? Sure! You can make it run imported games, homebrew games, Linux, anything you please. Heck, you can turn it into a motion-sensitive coffeepot if you want. However, the console manufacturer never sold you a motion-sensitive coffeepot, and they are under no obligation to support it if that's what you build out of it. To continue the car analogy, this would be like converting your new gasoline-powered vehicle to run on biodiesel, and then complaining to the dealer when it won't run on gasoline anymore. You're completely within your rights to do that, but the carmaker is also within its rights to make you support it yourself by taking away your warranty.
When you buy a car, does the dealership forcefully prevent you from using "unapproved" gasoline ?
Actually, some dealers do just that. Mercedes will void your warranty and cancel any service contract you might have with them if you use anything other than premium fuel (91 octane rating or better), and I've heard, but not been able to confirm, that Audi does the same.
You dare deny the various fanboys their need to vent? Do you realize the catastrophe that would occur if the various camps were not allowed to spout their reasons for supporting their particular platform on a regular basis? The build up would be... wait, if we could harness that energy... nah, they need uncontrolled reactions.
Hmm... they're toxic, unstable, explosive, and prolonged exposure causes corruption...
No wonder Nintendo is doing so well. Their top selling game is made of fanboys!
You're right, it shouldn't, and the vast majority of modern healthcare equipment doesn't have such problems. However, there are still thousands of patients walking around with "legacy" implantable devices (pacers, ICDs, etc) that aren't RF-shielded, to say nothing of healthcare facilities still using older equipment that wasn't designed with today's RF environment in mind.
Then too, a lot of the "no cellular phones" strictures are there for convenience, not necessarily patient safety. Hospitals are built like very, very few modern buildings. They use massive amounts of brick, block and structural steel compared to a standard office building, and most rooms incorporate some form of RF or radiation shielding. End result: the only place you'll get a signal will be outside the building. (This is also why it's a gold-plated PITA to deploy a wireless network in a hospital - you have to install repeaters every thirty feet instead of every seventy or so, and you still wind up with signal problems.)
Close. They thought bipolar disorder was caused by an error of metabolism resulting in urea accumulation in the body, and that you could determine whether someone was bipolar or not by injecting "manic urea" into a rat and seeing whether the rat acted manic. Of course, the rats died, but they were particularly calm about it, and the reason was the lithium compounds in which the urea had been dissolved.
"Automatic 4WD" is an oxymoron, as far as Detroit nomenclature has always gone. "All-wheel drive" refers to a non-driver-controlled system in which power is always provided to all four wheels and the car's onboard sensors "decide" the ratio. "Four-wheel drive" refers to a system that the driver must engage and is either on (equal power to all four wheels) or isn't (equal power to two wheels only). What you can't have is a 4WD system that operates without the driver's input - that's just another name for AWD. Sadly, marketing beat engineering on that score.
Dr. Smith: "Mr. So-and-So, we made a terrible mistake and diagnosed you with the wrong disease. We figured out what you really have, though, and we're going to do everything in our power to cure it, at the hospital's and my expense. I am so terribly sorry that this happened to you, and I assure you that we will not let that kind of mistake happen to you or anyone else again."
Patient: "ZOMG! IM GUNNA SUE YUR BOXXORS OFF!"
And that's why the first thing they tell new medical students is to never, NEVER apologize for a mistake, because an apology is an admission of guilt that can be used in a lawsuit. Sigh.
Compaq charged $45.99 plus $17-something shipping for a set of recovery disks for a friend's machine. The machine was barely three months old when the HDD completely crumped. I installed a replacement only to find out that the "recovery disks" that came with the machine were fakes. As in, completely blank, 0 files / 0 bytes, which I confirmed on a separate machine.
Pity she wasn't even remotely capable of dealing with Windows, let alone Linux, or I would have just thrown my Ubuntu 7.04 Live CD in and have done with it.
Well, that depends on what particular flavor of Christianity you subscribe to. In Roman Catholicism, you have both cannibalism AND vampirism ("Take this and eat it... this is my body" and "Take this and drink from it... this is my blood"). Instant AO rating. In most of the Protestant faiths, the minister is supplying alcoholic beverages to the congregation - T rating, maybe M. The only sub-sects that can skate on the alcohol charge are the Pentecostals, the Methodists and the hardcore Baptists, all of whom use grape juice.
Then again, seeing as we have such a massive preponderance of born-again types in politics these days... IT'S A TRAP!!!
I was tagged "gifted" as a child because my mother taught me how to read long, long before I hit the school doors. On the kindergarten entry exams, I scored a Grade 12+ reading comprehension level. My mother wanted me in private education right off the bat, but my father talked her out of it because the area in which we lived had a very reputable public school district. Turns out the district only did a good job on the jocks and the C students. Their response to students like me was to - wait for it - put us in the special education program. I don't know if they thought intelligence was contagious or if they figured they'd just average us out, but suffice to say that they wound up with ten very bored smart kids, thirty perpetually tormented handicapped kids and two classrooms full of trouble.
It also didn't help matters that my Grade 1 teacher used the two or three gifteds she had in her classroom as teacher's aides while she snuck off to make phone calls or gossip with the other staff. The day my mother found out about that (in a parent-teacher conference, no less - the teacher was bragging about the fact that she could leave me in charge of twenty first-graders baying for smart-kid blood), she pulled my ass out of the classroom and sent me to a Catholic school. I never looked back.
Now at age 25, I can say that if I'd remained in the public system, I either would have turned into a stoner or pulled an expulsion-worthy prank by age 16. It's tough enough being a geek and fighting against everyone your own age without having to fight ignorant adults as well.
Okay, here are four experiences with three countries' health systems, either my own or immediately known to me:
1. US, elite care, insured patient: When I was a child and adolescent, we never paid for a single pediatrician's visit, eye exam, dentist's visit or any other routine care. It all fell under "professional courtesy," as my father was chief of surgery and my mother was the operating-room director at a pair of very well-known hospitals in metro Detroit, and my grandfather was a well-known dentist. Prescriptions were all run through Dad's hospital pharmacy, at cost. About the only thing we ever had to pay for was approx. $150/year to keep me in glasses - and once I switched to contact lenses, my ophthalmologist provided those at cost.
2. US, standard care, minimally insured patient: In my third year of college, I came down with an ugly case of gastroenteritis thanks to a bad hot dog at a football game. Despite my complaints to the contrary, the RA called an ambulance and had me shipped to the ED. Six hours' waiting later, they sent me home with a prescription for an anti-emetic and instructions to rehydrate myself. Total cost: $550 out of pocket for the ambulance, $100 ED copay, $25.75 for generic meclizine 25 mg (brand-name would have been $55 and change). Had I been at home or at least left to my own devices, I could have cared for myself for $7.50 - the going rate for Bonine OTC and a one-liter bottle of Pedialyte. Had I not been insured, that little episode would have cost me $1500 or more.
3. Canada, OHIP vs. US, elite care: A dear friend of mine is a native Torontonian who moved to Detroit for her residency and liked it here so much (?!) she decided to stay. According to her, she would have had minimal ability to care for her patients properly under OHIP (I kinda scratched my head at that, but she has MD after her name and I don't, so I wasn't about to question her.) Her brother was diagnosed with a suspicious kidney complaint, and his GP made him an appointment to see a urologist, who couldn't fit him in until three months later. My friend said BS to that, had him come to Detroit that weekend and see a urologist Monday morning. End result: brother had renal cell carcinoma, which was removed two weeks later. The urologist came free of charge (see above re: professional courtesy), and the nephrectomy set her family back $3500. They saw that as a perfectly acceptable trade, though, as the cancer was still confined to the kidney, which it probably would not have been by the time he got through with the OHIP urologist and so forth. He's almost ten years post-op now and doing just fine.
4. United Kingdom, NHS vs. US, standard care: Some friends of my parents are British ex-pats who came here to work with the automotive companies, have since retired and now alternate between here and the UK. Much like my Canadian friends (see above), they hop between the two systems: whatever complaints they have are diagnosed by their NHS GP, they have said complaints dealt with by American specialists on their Big Three retiree insurance, and they bounce between the two systems for prescriptions. They've not paid a dime for their healthcare in over twenty years.
As with just about anything in life, medicine is a game of trade-offs. For the vast majority of people, the socialized model (Health Canada, NHS, etc) works brilliantly. If you're one of those scandalously unlucky people who has a major complaint masquerading as something minor, your only option may be to jump the queue and pay for it, US-style. And most of the healthcare system, no matter where you are, is predicated on who you know.
So, does this mean that we females get to subtract a given amount of our body weight to compensate for our, *ahem,* assets? I can see it now, a whole new way for women to make other women feel like crap about their body images...
"Oh, I had a BMI of 17 under the old rubric, but once you knock off ten pounds for my boobs, I'm a 15.8..."
Slashdot Mirror
Somewhere in a Middle Eastern cave, a suicide bomber straps on his dynamite vest and martyr's headscarf. Unbeknownst to him, the scarf has been cleverly rigged with several powerful magnets. Let's see if he notices...
"Abdul... Abdul, I am calling you... hear my words, O faithful one..."
"Allah! Is it really you?"
"Abdul, you really screwed the pooch with this terror business. I never told you to blow yourself up for my sake, and there certainly aren't any virgins in it for you. Now go be a good little peasant and give all your oil to the Americans for nothing. I, Allah, have spoken."
"It's a miracle! Praise Allah... wait a second, go be a peasant? I thought I was going to get to blow stuff up! This religion sucks!"
This message was brought to you by the Central Intelligence Agency. Screwing with heads for fun and profit since 1947.
The Hebrew text of Isaiah's prophecy regarding the birth of the Messiah said "And behold, the young woman will conceive a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel..." etc, etc. The scholars that produced the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Torah, translated "almah," which normally means "young woman of marriageable age," as "parthenos," meaning "maiden" or "virgin." Problem is, Hebrew already has a word for "virgin," "bethulah," which Isaiah didn't use. That put the authors of the Gospels in a bind, since the Hebrew and Greek said two different things and neither could be wrong - both were considered by the authorities of the time to be the divinely revealed word of God. Hence, they went with the more impressive-sounding miracle and made Mary a virgin. (Of course, that tied them in all kinds of exegetical knots later, but that's another story.)
Personally, I find the whole enterprise rather cheesy, but that's just me.
If jazz and classical is more your speed, great deals can be had through university musical programs and organizations. In my area there's University of Michigan's University Musical Society, Wayne State University's Department of Music and Oakland University's Meadow Brook Theatre and Music Festival. Tickets - and good tickets at that - can usually be had for $20-$30 for the general public, and $10-15 for students. As if the students and lesser-known performers weren't worth it (and they're usually good to brilliant), you usually get at least two "names" per season. UMS, for example, brings in Wynton Marsalis and the the Lincoln Center jazz ensemble most years, and this year's lineup features Yo-Yo Ma, Chick Corea and the Filarmonica della Scala.
Hey, GERWALK mode worked great for the Veritech fighter. Jet propulsion with robot legs - what's not to like?
Already a problem in farming, where unintentional pollination of non-GE crops by GE varieties results in the non-GE farmer losing his/her shirt to lawsuits by Monsanto et al. The "patent reform" we have on hand is completely biased toward the biotech companies. It used to be that the non-GE farmer could claim unintentional pollination as a defense; now the farmer is liable regardless of how the genes got into his/her field. I can only imagine the fallout when we start patenting human genetic sequences. Will people have to buy their children now?
+1. This ranks right up there with Pan Am selling tickets to the Moon.
No, nobody's making popcorn, that's just the sound of millions of fanboys' heads exploding.
Directive 4, *IAA-style: Any attempt to view, hear or access "protected content" results in shutdown.
Mod parent funny. Probably the best line I've heard about ANY video game.
Of course, seeing as we'll probably be first in line for annexation once your economy completely pwns ours, let me be the first to welcome our maple-leaf-toting overlords. *(:-)
I'd venture to say that the vast majority of what passes for in-depth reporting in this country and elsewhere is sensationalism bordering on pornography. Media outlets make an absolute fetish out of death, suffering and fear, and the coverage almost never has any basis in reality - it's solely to satisfy the prurient interest of a certain subset of the public.
Can you modify your game console - that is, are you physically capable of altering its hardware? Sure! You can make it run imported games, homebrew games, Linux, anything you please. Heck, you can turn it into a motion-sensitive coffeepot if you want. However, the console manufacturer never sold you a motion-sensitive coffeepot, and they are under no obligation to support it if that's what you build out of it. To continue the car analogy, this would be like converting your new gasoline-powered vehicle to run on biodiesel, and then complaining to the dealer when it won't run on gasoline anymore. You're completely within your rights to do that, but the carmaker is also within its rights to make you support it yourself by taking away your warranty.
No wonder Nintendo is doing so well. Their top selling game is made of fanboys!
Then too, a lot of the "no cellular phones" strictures are there for convenience, not necessarily patient safety. Hospitals are built like very, very few modern buildings. They use massive amounts of brick, block and structural steel compared to a standard office building, and most rooms incorporate some form of RF or radiation shielding. End result: the only place you'll get a signal will be outside the building. (This is also why it's a gold-plated PITA to deploy a wireless network in a hospital - you have to install repeaters every thirty feet instead of every seventy or so, and you still wind up with signal problems.)
Close. They thought bipolar disorder was caused by an error of metabolism resulting in urea accumulation in the body, and that you could determine whether someone was bipolar or not by injecting "manic urea" into a rat and seeing whether the rat acted manic. Of course, the rats died, but they were particularly calm about it, and the reason was the lithium compounds in which the urea had been dissolved.
"Automatic 4WD" is an oxymoron, as far as Detroit nomenclature has always gone. "All-wheel drive" refers to a non-driver-controlled system in which power is always provided to all four wheels and the car's onboard sensors "decide" the ratio. "Four-wheel drive" refers to a system that the driver must engage and is either on (equal power to all four wheels) or isn't (equal power to two wheels only). What you can't have is a 4WD system that operates without the driver's input - that's just another name for AWD. Sadly, marketing beat engineering on that score.
Simple. Happens to physicians all the time.
Dr. Smith: "Mr. So-and-So, we made a terrible mistake and diagnosed you with the wrong disease. We figured out what you really have, though, and we're going to do everything in our power to cure it, at the hospital's and my expense. I am so terribly sorry that this happened to you, and I assure you that we will not let that kind of mistake happen to you or anyone else again."
Patient: "ZOMG! IM GUNNA SUE YUR BOXXORS OFF!"
And that's why the first thing they tell new medical students is to never, NEVER apologize for a mistake, because an apology is an admission of guilt that can be used in a lawsuit. Sigh.
Compaq charged $45.99 plus $17-something shipping for a set of recovery disks for a friend's machine. The machine was barely three months old when the HDD completely crumped. I installed a replacement only to find out that the "recovery disks" that came with the machine were fakes. As in, completely blank, 0 files / 0 bytes, which I confirmed on a separate machine.
Pity she wasn't even remotely capable of dealing with Windows, let alone Linux, or I would have just thrown my Ubuntu 7.04 Live CD in and have done with it.
At least the machines aren't running Vista, or you might see something like:
"User 'captain' is attempting to take control of the system. Cancel or Allow?"
(passenger hits "Cancel," airliner falls out of the sky)
Then again, seeing as we have such a massive preponderance of born-again types in politics these days... IT'S A TRAP!!!
It also didn't help matters that my Grade 1 teacher used the two or three gifteds she had in her classroom as teacher's aides while she snuck off to make phone calls or gossip with the other staff. The day my mother found out about that (in a parent-teacher conference, no less - the teacher was bragging about the fact that she could leave me in charge of twenty first-graders baying for smart-kid blood), she pulled my ass out of the classroom and sent me to a Catholic school. I never looked back.
Now at age 25, I can say that if I'd remained in the public system, I either would have turned into a stoner or pulled an expulsion-worthy prank by age 16. It's tough enough being a geek and fighting against everyone your own age without having to fight ignorant adults as well.
Okay, here are four experiences with three countries' health systems, either my own or immediately known to me:
1. US, elite care, insured patient: When I was a child and adolescent, we never paid for a single pediatrician's visit, eye exam, dentist's visit or any other routine care. It all fell under "professional courtesy," as my father was chief of surgery and my mother was the operating-room director at a pair of very well-known hospitals in metro Detroit, and my grandfather was a well-known dentist. Prescriptions were all run through Dad's hospital pharmacy, at cost. About the only thing we ever had to pay for was approx. $150/year to keep me in glasses - and once I switched to contact lenses, my ophthalmologist provided those at cost.
2. US, standard care, minimally insured patient: In my third year of college, I came down with an ugly case of gastroenteritis thanks to a bad hot dog at a football game. Despite my complaints to the contrary, the RA called an ambulance and had me shipped to the ED. Six hours' waiting later, they sent me home with a prescription for an anti-emetic and instructions to rehydrate myself. Total cost: $550 out of pocket for the ambulance, $100 ED copay, $25.75 for generic meclizine 25 mg (brand-name would have been $55 and change). Had I been at home or at least left to my own devices, I could have cared for myself for $7.50 - the going rate for Bonine OTC and a one-liter bottle of Pedialyte. Had I not been insured, that little episode would have cost me $1500 or more.
3. Canada, OHIP vs. US, elite care: A dear friend of mine is a native Torontonian who moved to Detroit for her residency and liked it here so much (?!) she decided to stay. According to her, she would have had minimal ability to care for her patients properly under OHIP (I kinda scratched my head at that, but she has MD after her name and I don't, so I wasn't about to question her.) Her brother was diagnosed with a suspicious kidney complaint, and his GP made him an appointment to see a urologist, who couldn't fit him in until three months later. My friend said BS to that, had him come to Detroit that weekend and see a urologist Monday morning. End result: brother had renal cell carcinoma, which was removed two weeks later. The urologist came free of charge (see above re: professional courtesy), and the nephrectomy set her family back $3500. They saw that as a perfectly acceptable trade, though, as the cancer was still confined to the kidney, which it probably would not have been by the time he got through with the OHIP urologist and so forth. He's almost ten years post-op now and doing just fine.
4. United Kingdom, NHS vs. US, standard care: Some friends of my parents are British ex-pats who came here to work with the automotive companies, have since retired and now alternate between here and the UK. Much like my Canadian friends (see above), they hop between the two systems: whatever complaints they have are diagnosed by their NHS GP, they have said complaints dealt with by American specialists on their Big Three retiree insurance, and they bounce between the two systems for prescriptions. They've not paid a dime for their healthcare in over twenty years.
As with just about anything in life, medicine is a game of trade-offs. For the vast majority of people, the socialized model (Health Canada, NHS, etc) works brilliantly. If you're one of those scandalously unlucky people who has a major complaint masquerading as something minor, your only option may be to jump the queue and pay for it, US-style. And most of the healthcare system, no matter where you are, is predicated on who you know.
"Oh, I had a BMI of 17 under the old rubric, but once you knock off ten pounds for my boobs, I'm a 15.8..."