Re:H-1Bs are not the solution- Nation of Lawyers
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High Tech High 2.0
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· Score: 1
Doctors already are being outsourced. There are dozens of companies now where, for a few grand a month, you can have your X-rays, CT/MRI scans, ultrasounds, etc. read by some guy in India or China, and within whatever time frame you specify, the report will be sent back to you as a fax or a PDF. The same thing is rapidly happening with pathology and a few other primarily visual specialties - any field where you look at an image or listen to a soundtrack can and is being outsourced. Those services were started as a way to provide rapid access to specialty care in underserved regions, but as with just about everything, they're now being used to cut costs at big hospitals in major cities.
Meanwhile, on the home front, we're replacing internists, pediatricians and family practice doctors with nurse practitioners as fast as we possibly can, and replacing nurses with practice aides (most of whom are foreign imports, some illegal at that) and volunteers. Anything, ANYTHING not to have to pay someone to take care of sick people.
Zendu: Would that be the one out by Oakland Mall? I've had similar service issues there, and I too have quietly set my purchases aside and left. Interestingly, though, a friend of mine who's a Mac enthusiast says that they practically offer free hookers to the Mac contingent - free in-store service, free upgrades, anything to keep you from going to the Apple Store.
I'm not sure which direction you're driving from, but the CompUSA in Auburn Hills is pretty good, and at least one of their "Techknowledgists" (CUSA's lame-ass attempt to compete with the Geek Squad) knows his shit and is great on customer service. It'd be a shame if that store winds up closing.
Directive 4: Any attempt to view copyrighted content with a bionic eye results in system shutdown.
What did you think would happen? It's not an eye, it's a product - and we can't very well have our products working against our best interests, can we?
So, let me see if I have this right: On the one hand, these chains of concrete balls are supposed to slow down the mudflow by means of friction. On the other hand, they're supposed to decrease the volume of mudflow (and hence increase the pressure on the mud reservoir) by decreasing the diameter of its major vent. To me, that looks like the two forces will cancel out, and that may well be the best case scenario. If the pressure overwhelms the friction provided by the balls, you've turned a medium-velocity flow into a high-velocity one, to say nothing of potentially ejecting large chunks of debris.
TFA describes said mud reservoir as under sufficient pressure that drilling extra vents hasn't reduced the mudflow at all, and the amount of mud being emitted has overwhelmed all previously attempted damming/diversion measures. IANA geologist, but that's got to be a hell of a lot of pressure. I'm not sure any man-made measure (be it throwing virgins down the borehole or otherwise) is going to stop it, and this business of throwing giant concrete balls at it seems like foolishness of the first order.
I'm reminded of a scene from an old TV series, which despite being about submarines, contains perhaps the best line ever about dropping man-made objects into volcanoes:
"I'll carry on working. I don't think [geologist] or his ceramic suppositories will mind my absence."
::shrugs:: I'm sure there are some people who find comparing Linux distros to be quite a turn-on. "Come on back to my place, I'll show you my Edgy Eft..."
PS3 consoles are fairly easily available in metropolitan Detroit, too. All of our local Circuit City stores have two or three on the shelves, and so do Gamestop and Wal-Mart. Wii consoles, however, can't be found at any local store.
Despite the current situation of our economy, there are still plenty of rich corporate types in the metro area with lots of cash and minimal barriers to spending it. The PS3, for whatever reasons, isn't generating much interest.
I finally bid farewell to my StarTac last year, when the Verizon rep told me that I had to get a new phone because mine wasn't E911 compliant and would no longer be supported on their network. I had that phone for eight years, and it was the best phone I'd ever had - it did everything I wanted, nothing I didn't, made calls everywhere and got great battery life. (Amazing how long you can get a battery to last when you're not powering a color screen, camera, MP3 player and all the other garbage that's built into modern phones.)
I'm using a Treo 650 now, and while I like having everything on one device, I still miss my old StarTac.
Once upon a time, junior high and high schools routinely taught their students fairly advanced woodworking and metalworking skills, and allowed them relatively free access to industrial machining equipment to do so. I believe that class was called "shop." It also went along with a class called "industrial drafting," wherein these same kids were taught to create detailed, usable blueprints and diagrams of working mechanical equipment. Of course, nobody teaches that kind of class anymore.
(Full disclosure: The author is a healthcare professional.)
If I had a dollar for every jerk that blames healthcare costs on those awful, overpaid, fat-cat physicians, I could retire tomorrow. Frankly I'm getting sick and tired of repeating the rebuttal, but here we go again:
...higher pay for doctors, and more benefits to retain nurses.
Higher pay for doctors? Last I looked, the CMS just announced a 5% cut in physician reimbursement immediately, with deeper cuts for some specialties, and more cuts totaling 40% by 2015. Your average family practice doctor might make $100,000/year out of med school, but that doesn't go too far when the government takes 50% right off the bat, you have to pay for hospital dues ($5000/year in most places), malpractice insurance (anywhere from $10,000/year to $250,000/year depending on your specialty and location of practice), continuing medical education (average $10,000/year), and school loans (the sky's the limit). Oh, and you do have to keep a roof over your head, clothes on your back, etc. I know dozens of doctors who've chucked it and gone to work as insurance brokers and real estate salespeople because the pay was better.
For example, if you are willing to work for the VA for a few years, they'll pay for your med school. Let's see that for the IT industry.
Um, no; the program you're thinking of is the National Health Service Corps, and in order to qualify for that you have to agree to pursue one of the healthcare tracks the government is promoting at that time (right now it's internal med, peds, family practice and OB/GYN), agree to live and work for at least the term of your scholarship (for most health professions, that's four to eight years) in the "underserved health region" of the government's choice, and be transferred to another "underserved region" at any time. If you violate any of those terms, you owe the full cost of EVERYTHING, no pro-rating for years served. Thanks but no thanks - if I wanted the government to own me and my degree, I'd join the Army.
You also fail to notice that unlike information science professionals, healthcare professionals are required to carry ruinously expensive malpractice insurance (in some places and in some specialties, this can be up to $250,000/year out of the physician's pocket), can be sued at any time for no reason whatever, and have absolutely no recourse against such action. I'd love to see IT people work under the threat of being sued out of existence by any random idiot who thinks he/she has been done wrong by The Man.
Finally, both the US and the various European nations are importing nurses from Africa and the Philippines en masse because home-grown nurses are allegedly too expensive (note that in the US, we're talking about $45,000/year on average without health benefits - not exactly an astronomical pay package). Foreign medical graduates have been less of a commodity because there's all kinds of expensive testing they have to complete to assure everyone that they're not going to kill someone first crack out of the box (and for all I hear people touting other countries' educational systems, the majority of foreign healthcare professionals I've dealt with have been competent at best and usually rather a bit worse than that. Lest you call me bigoted, that includes people from just about every major European and Asian nation.)
Your final conclusion is absolutely correct - in both cases, the consumer is forced to eat cost increases so that business can profit. However, in the case of healthcare it has nothing to do with physicians and nurses. It's entirely to do with our broken healthcare market and the profits of insurance companies at the expense of everyone else in the system.
Why? If Webspace is subject to the ADA, which governs the use of physical space, then why shouldn't it be subject to all the other laws, regulations and restrictions that are placed on the use of physical space?
That's the real slippery slope here: if the ruling goes for the NFB, the legal door is open to lumping Webspace with physical property, i.e. land or a building, which opens up a gigantic can of worms. If Webspace is to be treated the same as physical property, then you can impose all kinds of restrictions on its use and application. For example, if your buddy has a Website that distributes something you don't like, or that attracts unsavory attention, or you just think is ugly, you can go before your local government and call for a zoning ordinance prohibiting the construction of certain kinds of "structures" on "property" that's hosted within the city limits. You could force any Website hosted on a server in a given geographic location to have any set of features you desire. After all, if it's property subject to federal law, why shouldn't it be subject to state or local property zoning?
It will be interesting to see how retailers react to this. Perhaps we'll see seperate pages now for the regular surfer vs. the blind surfers.
Add two words to your post, and I detect the whiff of a potential lawsuit...
Perhaps we'll see seperate BUT EQUAL pages now for the regular surfer vs. the blind surfers.
Seems to me like the lawyers put all of us in a lovely Catch-22. Leave your site as is, and you're violating the ADA. Design a separate Website to comply with ADA, and you're violating the Civil Rights Act. Strip down your existing Website to comply with both, and your non-disabled customers go elsewhere because your site doesn't have all the blinkenlights of some other guy's non-compliant site.
Shakespeare had it right 400 years ago: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
But there is no way you can take on an, say an APC, full of soldiers with automatic weapons and body armor, without anti-personnel explosive or chemical weapons. Or fortifications.
I don't know, the Afghani and Iraqi insurgents seem to be doing a fabulous job with Soviet-era AKs and IEDs straight out of the Anarchist's Cookbook.
Trying to arm yourself against the government is an excercise in futility and can only lead to people looking at you kinda funny in the street.
1) It wasn't so futile against the British, nor against the Nazis, nor is it currently futile in the Middle East. Guerilla warfare is a fabulously effective doctrine for overcoming numerical and/or material superiority. Remember, a bomber or a tank can only destroy what it sees.
2) The idea isn't to walk around festooned with arms and tell the whole world how much you hate the government and how they're putting mind control devices in everyone's breakfast cereal. That, I agree, puts you into tinfoil-hat territory. The idea is to have a backup option to protect yourself in case of disaster.* Think of it as an antivirus package, if you like.
* "Disaster" need not be a government crackdown - natural disasters and riots tend to spawn looters and other criminal trash, and those can be quite effectively deterred by a show of force. In fact, the weapon need not even be loaded - one of the most effective ways to stop a home invasion is to indicate that you're armed, and nothing scares off a burglar faster than the sound of someone racking a shotgun.
Somehow, I rather suspect the discovery of this bug so close to the release date isn't a coincidence. Let's review:
1) Vista has suffered from massive flaws, bugs, etc. ever since it was still called Longhorn.
2) Most of the IT community believes there's no chance Vista will be released on time.
3) Microsoft swears on its collective mothers' graves that Vista will be released on time.
4) Weeks before the scheduled release, a "massive and totally unexpected" bug forces the release to be postponed.
Smart money says that MS cooked up the bug to buy themselves an extra week or two of code/debug time. That money also says that in two weeks, they'll find another massive flaw, and so on...
Well, they tried to build in a Morph Ball, but after the first four prototypes resulted in horribly mangled, broken test pilots, the designers wisely decided to move on.;)
Depends. If you make a game where you're Othello commanding the Venetian armies, but there's no other depth to the game, then all you have is a warfare sim. Fun, appealing, but not necessarily highbrow.
To me, "highbrow" entertainment, be it literary, cinematic, musical or gaming, is that which has multiple layers that can be accessed as you gain more understanding of the work and its context. These works contain stories within stories, if you will. To continue using Othello as an example, the story can be about race relations, political intrigue, 16th-century trade warfare, the tragedy of human emotion, or a guy who goes batshit jealous and kills his wife.
I would argue that there are games that meet this definition of "highbrow." The Myst and Longest Journey series immediately spring to mind, but I'm sure there are just as many people out there that will vehemently disagree with me. As with all art, your definitions and interpretations are personal.
Yeah, but you'd think someone would figure it out when the dog starts listening to Yanni and spending hundreds of dollars on his wardrobe...
Seriously, though, I know I'd be suspicious of a champion dog/bitch with no offspring, and there are also, *ahem,* behavioral cues to help one differentiate between an intact and an altered animal. Then too, you can enter an altered or even an unregistered dog in most forms of dog sport through AKC's Indefinite Listing Privilege system. You just can't be in a conformation show (which, depending on who you ask, may just be an overblown beauty contest anyway).
The other major selling point, that the dog has psychological issues from the loss of his original parts that can be cured by installing a pair of silicone fakes, ranks right up with pet psychology and pet homeopathy - stupid stuff that bored, rich humans torment their pets with.
"I thought we agreed on total body prosthesis - now lose the arm!"
The shoulder attachment segment even looks a little bit like the "demo" arm they had in the lab in that movie - see also http://www.ric.org/bionic/photo3.php. Pity this arm isn't nearly as powerful - apparently it can't even crack a nut, much less break every bone in someone's hand...
Me, I'm holding out for the cyber-brain implants. Who wouldn't want to be able to surf the 'net from the comfort of their very own skull? Just think of how much you could get done during those boring work meetings...
"And if you'll turn to page 247 of the budget proposal..."
::blank eyes as the entire audience is watching cyber-porn::
Not exactly. IANAMD, but I'm pretty sure that the procedure involved locating the remaining afferent segments of the musculocutaneous, axillary and radial nerves and re-attaching them to the patient's pectoralis major. Those nerves originate in the spinal cord and travel through the upper chest to get to the arm, so it's not hard to get enough nerve to work with, even with a shoulder-level amputation.
Controlling the arm is a creative use of phantom limb syndrome, basically. The user thinks "I want to bend my right arm," and the brain transmits "contract right brachialis 1.3cm/contract right biceps 1.1cm/relax right triceps as needed" down the appropriate nerves, but the nerves that used to go there are wired to specific parts of the pectoralis, and hence you get a pattern of chest muscle movement for each attempted arm movement. A few dozen repetitions of each movement gives you enough "baseline" to program the hardware, and the user's degree of fine control gets better over time as the brain adapts to using the new limb.
Re:But if you've been "blessed by the hi-def gods"
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PS3 Problems Parried
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· Score: 1
Not only that, but there may be other limiting factors involved as well. We will never be able to have anything other than a 4:3 CRT, 32" or less, in our living room. Why? Because that's the only form factor our entertainment hutch will accept, and the hutch is built into the wall (and hence can't be removed without taking out the entire wall). We'd love to have a widescreen TV, and we have more than enough disposable income to afford one, but we have no place to put it.
Preaching to the choir, here; I firmly believe that the Norton family is one of the worst collections of programs in existence. I've used several incarnations up to Internet Security 2005, and I have yet to find one that doesn't add at least three minutes to boot time. And let's not even mention the CCAPP.EXE that absolutely refuses to die when you attempt to shut down Windows. Currently I'm using AVG on my Windows systems.
However, you can't really claim malice on behalf of Symantec et al. (Well, maybe you can, but that seems to have more in common with gratuitous Microsoft-bashing - logic along the lines of "We think $COMPANY_NAME software is badly written, badly written software is evil, therefore $COMPANY_NAME is evil.") Yeah, their software sucks, but there's no evidence that a team of engineers at Symantec sat down and said "How can we make our software crash machines, corrupt data and turn computers into zombie systems?"
In the end, Norton et al do what they advertise, which is stop viruses. Yes, they're bloated and intrusive, but show me commercially available software that isn't. (By which I mean that you can walk into your average computer retail chain and pick up a copy.) There's a difference between shoddy-product bad and maliciously bad, and that's all I was trying to indicate.
My first experience with Mold-A-Rama was at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, at the age of six. I carried that little gray U-505 around in my pocket for months before it was lost in a tragic clothes-dryer accident. (Teach me not to check my pockets before throwing my clothes in the hamper.)
I haven't been to Henry Ford in a long time. Might be a good reason to go.:)
...user stupidity makes a dandy explanation. If there is a universal truth in today's networked world, it is that the gullibility of the average Netizen knows no bounds. I'd be willing to bet that you could write a program that claims to turn your printer into a replicator, and some doofus would buy it.
This ranks right up there with the scores of malware programs that pretend to be malware removers. I assume the original poster would have us believe that all those are really written by the likes of Symantec and McAfee?
...nobody in my family can watch medically themed shows. Dad's a surgeon, Mom's an OR nurse turned hospital administrator, I'm a surgical device rep turned healthcare IT consultant. When we're not trying to beat each other to the diagnoses, we're screaming over the inaccuracies.
Suspension of disbelief only works if you willingly decide to shut off your rational mind and buy into what you're seeing. I'd argue that not only does one's level of expertise in the field being portrayed play a role, but also one's degree of rationality in general. Someone who engages in a great deal of magical thinking may be more likely to suspend his/her rational faculties than someone who, by profession or personality, operates on a more logical basis. To wit, one who has a great deal of scientific training will be less likely overall to buy into the notion of cloned dinosaurs or fifty-foot-tall space aliens than someone who doesn't - even if the scientist doesn't know much about the specific field being portrayed, he/she knows that general logic precludes the existence of such things.
Of course, this is all conjecture on my part, so I could be dead wrong. It'd make a great topic for a psych paper, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Doctors already are being outsourced. There are dozens of companies now where, for a few grand a month, you can have your X-rays, CT/MRI scans, ultrasounds, etc. read by some guy in India or China, and within whatever time frame you specify, the report will be sent back to you as a fax or a PDF. The same thing is rapidly happening with pathology and a few other primarily visual specialties - any field where you look at an image or listen to a soundtrack can and is being outsourced. Those services were started as a way to provide rapid access to specialty care in underserved regions, but as with just about everything, they're now being used to cut costs at big hospitals in major cities.
Meanwhile, on the home front, we're replacing internists, pediatricians and family practice doctors with nurse practitioners as fast as we possibly can, and replacing nurses with practice aides (most of whom are foreign imports, some illegal at that) and volunteers. Anything, ANYTHING not to have to pay someone to take care of sick people.
I'm not sure which direction you're driving from, but the CompUSA in Auburn Hills is pretty good, and at least one of their "Techknowledgists" (CUSA's lame-ass attempt to compete with the Geek Squad) knows his shit and is great on customer service. It'd be a shame if that store winds up closing.
What did you think would happen? It's not an eye, it's a product - and we can't very well have our products working against our best interests, can we?
TFA describes said mud reservoir as under sufficient pressure that drilling extra vents hasn't reduced the mudflow at all, and the amount of mud being emitted has overwhelmed all previously attempted damming/diversion measures. IANA geologist, but that's got to be a hell of a lot of pressure. I'm not sure any man-made measure (be it throwing virgins down the borehole or otherwise) is going to stop it, and this business of throwing giant concrete balls at it seems like foolishness of the first order.
I'm reminded of a scene from an old TV series, which despite being about submarines, contains perhaps the best line ever about dropping man-made objects into volcanoes:
"I'll carry on working. I don't think [geologist] or his ceramic suppositories will mind my absence."
::shrugs:: I'm sure there are some people who find comparing Linux distros to be quite a turn-on. "Come on back to my place, I'll show you my Edgy Eft..."
Despite the current situation of our economy, there are still plenty of rich corporate types in the metro area with lots of cash and minimal barriers to spending it. The PS3, for whatever reasons, isn't generating much interest.
I'm using a Treo 650 now, and while I like having everything on one device, I still miss my old StarTac.
If I had a dollar for every jerk that blames healthcare costs on those awful, overpaid, fat-cat physicians, I could retire tomorrow. Frankly I'm getting sick and tired of repeating the rebuttal, but here we go again:
Higher pay for doctors? Last I looked, the CMS just announced a 5% cut in physician reimbursement immediately, with deeper cuts for some specialties, and more cuts totaling 40% by 2015. Your average family practice doctor might make $100,000/year out of med school, but that doesn't go too far when the government takes 50% right off the bat, you have to pay for hospital dues ($5000/year in most places), malpractice insurance (anywhere from $10,000/year to $250,000/year depending on your specialty and location of practice), continuing medical education (average $10,000/year), and school loans (the sky's the limit). Oh, and you do have to keep a roof over your head, clothes on your back, etc. I know dozens of doctors who've chucked it and gone to work as insurance brokers and real estate salespeople because the pay was better. Um, no; the program you're thinking of is the National Health Service Corps, and in order to qualify for that you have to agree to pursue one of the healthcare tracks the government is promoting at that time (right now it's internal med, peds, family practice and OB/GYN), agree to live and work for at least the term of your scholarship (for most health professions, that's four to eight years) in the "underserved health region" of the government's choice, and be transferred to another "underserved region" at any time. If you violate any of those terms, you owe the full cost of EVERYTHING, no pro-rating for years served. Thanks but no thanks - if I wanted the government to own me and my degree, I'd join the Army.You also fail to notice that unlike information science professionals, healthcare professionals are required to carry ruinously expensive malpractice insurance (in some places and in some specialties, this can be up to $250,000/year out of the physician's pocket), can be sued at any time for no reason whatever, and have absolutely no recourse against such action. I'd love to see IT people work under the threat of being sued out of existence by any random idiot who thinks he/she has been done wrong by The Man.
Finally, both the US and the various European nations are importing nurses from Africa and the Philippines en masse because home-grown nurses are allegedly too expensive (note that in the US, we're talking about $45,000/year on average without health benefits - not exactly an astronomical pay package). Foreign medical graduates have been less of a commodity because there's all kinds of expensive testing they have to complete to assure everyone that they're not going to kill someone first crack out of the box (and for all I hear people touting other countries' educational systems, the majority of foreign healthcare professionals I've dealt with have been competent at best and usually rather a bit worse than that. Lest you call me bigoted, that includes people from just about every major European and Asian nation.)
Your final conclusion is absolutely correct - in both cases, the consumer is forced to eat cost increases so that business can profit. However, in the case of healthcare it has nothing to do with physicians and nurses. It's entirely to do with our broken healthcare market and the profits of insurance companies at the expense of everyone else in the system.
That's the real slippery slope here: if the ruling goes for the NFB, the legal door is open to lumping Webspace with physical property, i.e. land or a building, which opens up a gigantic can of worms. If Webspace is to be treated the same as physical property, then you can impose all kinds of restrictions on its use and application. For example, if your buddy has a Website that distributes something you don't like, or that attracts unsavory attention, or you just think is ugly, you can go before your local government and call for a zoning ordinance prohibiting the construction of certain kinds of "structures" on "property" that's hosted within the city limits. You could force any Website hosted on a server in a given geographic location to have any set of features you desire. After all, if it's property subject to federal law, why shouldn't it be subject to state or local property zoning?
Shakespeare had it right 400 years ago: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
2) The idea isn't to walk around festooned with arms and tell the whole world how much you hate the government and how they're putting mind control devices in everyone's breakfast cereal. That, I agree, puts you into tinfoil-hat territory. The idea is to have a backup option to protect yourself in case of disaster.* Think of it as an antivirus package, if you like.
* "Disaster" need not be a government crackdown - natural disasters and riots tend to spawn looters and other criminal trash, and those can be quite effectively deterred by a show of force. In fact, the weapon need not even be loaded - one of the most effective ways to stop a home invasion is to indicate that you're armed, and nothing scares off a burglar faster than the sound of someone racking a shotgun.
Did someone accidentally stick a Post-It note on one of the test machines?
1) Vista has suffered from massive flaws, bugs, etc. ever since it was still called Longhorn.
2) Most of the IT community believes there's no chance Vista will be released on time.
3) Microsoft swears on its collective mothers' graves that Vista will be released on time.
4) Weeks before the scheduled release, a "massive and totally unexpected" bug forces the release to be postponed.
Smart money says that MS cooked up the bug to buy themselves an extra week or two of code/debug time. That money also says that in two weeks, they'll find another massive flaw, and so on...
Well, they tried to build in a Morph Ball, but after the first four prototypes resulted in horribly mangled, broken test pilots, the designers wisely decided to move on. ;)
To me, "highbrow" entertainment, be it literary, cinematic, musical or gaming, is that which has multiple layers that can be accessed as you gain more understanding of the work and its context. These works contain stories within stories, if you will. To continue using Othello as an example, the story can be about race relations, political intrigue, 16th-century trade warfare, the tragedy of human emotion, or a guy who goes batshit jealous and kills his wife.
I would argue that there are games that meet this definition of "highbrow." The Myst and Longest Journey series immediately spring to mind, but I'm sure there are just as many people out there that will vehemently disagree with me. As with all art, your definitions and interpretations are personal.
Seriously, though, I know I'd be suspicious of a champion dog/bitch with no offspring, and there are also, *ahem,* behavioral cues to help one differentiate between an intact and an altered animal. Then too, you can enter an altered or even an unregistered dog in most forms of dog sport through AKC's Indefinite Listing Privilege system. You just can't be in a conformation show (which, depending on who you ask, may just be an overblown beauty contest anyway).
The other major selling point, that the dog has psychological issues from the loss of his original parts that can be cured by installing a pair of silicone fakes, ranks right up with pet psychology and pet homeopathy - stupid stuff that bored, rich humans torment their pets with.
The shoulder attachment segment even looks a little bit like the "demo" arm they had in the lab in that movie - see also http://www.ric.org/bionic/photo3.php. Pity this arm isn't nearly as powerful - apparently it can't even crack a nut, much less break every bone in someone's hand...
"And if you'll turn to page 247 of the budget proposal..."
Controlling the arm is a creative use of phantom limb syndrome, basically. The user thinks "I want to bend my right arm," and the brain transmits "contract right brachialis 1.3cm/contract right biceps 1.1cm/relax right triceps as needed" down the appropriate nerves, but the nerves that used to go there are wired to specific parts of the pectoralis, and hence you get a pattern of chest muscle movement for each attempted arm movement. A few dozen repetitions of each movement gives you enough "baseline" to program the hardware, and the user's degree of fine control gets better over time as the brain adapts to using the new limb.
Not only that, but there may be other limiting factors involved as well. We will never be able to have anything other than a 4:3 CRT, 32" or less, in our living room. Why? Because that's the only form factor our entertainment hutch will accept, and the hutch is built into the wall (and hence can't be removed without taking out the entire wall). We'd love to have a widescreen TV, and we have more than enough disposable income to afford one, but we have no place to put it.
However, you can't really claim malice on behalf of Symantec et al. (Well, maybe you can, but that seems to have more in common with gratuitous Microsoft-bashing - logic along the lines of "We think $COMPANY_NAME software is badly written, badly written software is evil, therefore $COMPANY_NAME is evil.") Yeah, their software sucks, but there's no evidence that a team of engineers at Symantec sat down and said "How can we make our software crash machines, corrupt data and turn computers into zombie systems?"
In the end, Norton et al do what they advertise, which is stop viruses. Yes, they're bloated and intrusive, but show me commercially available software that isn't. (By which I mean that you can walk into your average computer retail chain and pick up a copy.) There's a difference between shoddy-product bad and maliciously bad, and that's all I was trying to indicate.
I haven't been to Henry Ford in a long time. Might be a good reason to go. :)
This ranks right up there with the scores of malware programs that pretend to be malware removers. I assume the original poster would have us believe that all those are really written by the likes of Symantec and McAfee?
Suspension of disbelief only works if you willingly decide to shut off your rational mind and buy into what you're seeing. I'd argue that not only does one's level of expertise in the field being portrayed play a role, but also one's degree of rationality in general. Someone who engages in a great deal of magical thinking may be more likely to suspend his/her rational faculties than someone who, by profession or personality, operates on a more logical basis. To wit, one who has a great deal of scientific training will be less likely overall to buy into the notion of cloned dinosaurs or fifty-foot-tall space aliens than someone who doesn't - even if the scientist doesn't know much about the specific field being portrayed, he/she knows that general logic precludes the existence of such things.
Of course, this is all conjecture on my part, so I could be dead wrong. It'd make a great topic for a psych paper, though.