Maszman Speaks!

As hard as it may be to believe given the num­ber of ads cholesterol-lowering drugs Zetia and Vytorin don’t actu­ally pro­tect you from heart attacks and strokes.

Oddly enough, in Canada where pre­scrip­tion drug adver­tis­ing is not per­mit­ted these drugs are pre­scribed far less than in the US.

Let’s say you’re a maker of sound cards for PCs. And you nat­u­rally come out with dri­vers for Vista. But despite your team of pro­gram­mers the dri­vers suck. But one of your cus­tomers fig­ures out how to fix them and starts mak­ing work­ing dri­vers avail­able. What do you do? If you’re Cre­ative you angrily tell that cus­tomer to imme­di­ately stop dis­trib­ut­ing work­ing Vista dri­vers.

Creative’s users are in an uproar.

You can go up…

Orig­i­nally uploaded by tom­masz

…but you can’t go down.

I won­der if they’ll bother fix­ing this or not. It seems main­te­nance is no longer a pri­or­ity given the pend­ing sale.

As much as I hes­i­tate to accuse any­one of hav­ing com­mon sense these days (it needs to be renamed given how few peo­ple pos­sess it), at least the MCC Board has fig­ured out it messed up and needs a chance to fix things. While this won’t nec­es­sar­ily derail the GOP’s strong arm tac­tics, it might result in a new pres­i­dent who has at least some aca­d­e­mic experience.

Lower Falls

Orig­i­nally uploaded by tom­masz

I was exper­i­ment­ing with slow shut­ter speeds to blur the motion, but this still wasn’t what I wanted. I’m going to try a neu­tral den­sity fil­ter next time.

Some peo­ple are suing Fer­mi­lab and CERN to sus­pend work on the Large Hadron Col­lider until the risks are bet­ter under­stood. The risks are some­what unusual: “the exper­i­ment might cre­ate globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of mat­ter that would destroy the planet.”