But there's a definite difference between "study" and "fact", which is what I think OldSoldier is not-so-clearly pointing out.
Even though you considered interpretation, you didn't consider the problem of data collection. This is assuming that we're trusting the 12,000 people that say their laptops were stolen. Probably an insignificant percentage in this case, but still a consideration for standard deviation.
My opinion is that interpretation even plays a role here. It's apparent that Dell sponsored this study, due to the fact that they averaged the number that were stolen. A more neutral number to report would be 8400, or the averaged amount lost and never returned.
My assumption is that the week time frame played a role in the numbers as well. Did the multiply a single-day's sample by 7? Hopefully not, as that would not provide any real scientific evidence. Did the sample all 365 days of a year and divide? Probably not since that would take too much time.
But "12,000 lost a week" sure does have a nice ring to it. Too bad I don't think "ooo! buy insurance!", but rather "stupid idiots!"
What kind of law is that? One of morale judgment? I'm not going to get started into laws, but the parents are not doing anything illegal. They're making the decision we, the United States, have decided to give them once they have lived for 18 years. We've stated that once you've been alive for 18 years then you are physically and mentally mature enough to understand the situation you make your conscious decision in.
Whether or not that's correct or not is a whole other ball game.
Look at Google's process. Simply speaking from an outside perspective, they have very little designated process. They use an extremely agile processes of basically "just code the shit" and it works for them. As far as testing goes, if they're working with some kind of eXtreme Programming, then hopefully they're writing their test cases first.
Look at Microsoft on the other hand, they're extremely nested in processes and cannot get out.
As for the article, I'd say there's so much more to look at. Housing, as already mentioned, is only part of the picture. What about salaries and work environments (some people do like process more than working anarchy)? I for one understand the argument of being a god among insects.
No knowledge or real research done here, just thinking "outside the box". I hear Microsoft likes that.
Why is the first response to any computer problem today "system reloads". Systems aren't really that big and scary! (Well our government might need a system reload,/offtopic)
IMHO 90% of problems can be found and fixed without a system reset. 99% of these problems are user error and just need a little maintenance. A little thinking before you click may save a lot of time and energy.
...but don't forget that 67% of statistics are made up on the spot.
I know I get spam frequently (I keep it as a counter to how recently I've checked my mail-every hour or so) but gmail, yahoo, hotmail, and my uni account all have the default filters and I never happen upon a spam message in my inbox.
I don't know about you guys but I think the only "spam" I still see is web advertisements (popups) and the occasional random MSN message.
Even though I'm a heavy and literate computer user, I still feel that they can't be making *that* much of a profit these days.
But consider the implications of this base of legislation as leverage against homosexual discrimination. Once research "proves" homosexuality is genetic, will it be illegal to discriminate against them? I know this article is all about insurance companies, but on what basis does our government stand by telling someone else (in our own country) not to discriminate while they get away with it.
And yes our government does that all the time, but we can dream...
My Solution: Google.
No really, find a cheap service (or two) that are likely to stay in business, keep updated, and offer online access. What else do you need? Sure it's not as secure as an offline system, but do the majority of people care about elite crackers seeing their family photos?
How can false opinionated stories like this be published?
With it being Sun Week on campus, I've had some recent (yesterday) exposure and discussions with some of their representatives.
Sun singlehandedly contributes the majority (Yes, above 50%) of Open Source code in the online community, thanks to their newly acquired MySQL.
Read More, and next time get your facts right.
Well if you're going to mutate a population, you might as well do it right. What fun would it be if there were only 1 X-Men from Wyoming? That only makes for some kind of Ripley's Believe It or Not, not really worldwide news worthy...
You hit right on my meaning of ethical debate. Besides the question whether or not the technology works, is it really that much better if the doctor is so far away from his patient?
What about the incredibly common debate in House MD (I'm not being scientific, just generalized thinking here), which is background information. What if you don't know everything about your patient? What if I'm allergic to something in the process of that intubation and that quick thinking decision kills me?
More on topic, what if not all the information for the machine to operate on my heart isn't known? This would lead to possibly fatal problems with the machine predicting heart/excess movement.
I think neapolitan said it better than I ever could have, since I don't have the technical training of a doctor, a few comments below.
Interesting topic about information being lost in translation. It's not quite the same, in my opinion, as something say like a drawing of a microbe. Where that drawing is a representation of the microbe, but not really the microbe itself. Besides all those side topics, what do you think about the stethoscope or machine? Is there something lost in translation?
Again, I'm agreeing that augmentation is a good thing, but the idea of removing the movement for better care doesn't make sense to me. It's taking the doctor one step away from what is really happening.
Oh I completely see and agree with your point. I guess I didn't word mine correctly.
But what about the flaws of the human mind? If a human writes the software that doesn't work, then the machine, or plane or whatever, doesn't work in all the cases. We, as humans, tend to jump to application far too quickly without understanding it first. In this sense, a machine is no longer a perfection, not even close. Far too many people die in car crashes than a perfect machine would allow.
I know I hit on a few topics here, but let me focus on the most relating ethical debate, which I am afraid of: use before perfection.
See Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940) - http://imdb.com/title/tt0032413/. The entire ethical debate is of the same nature. Is it ok to spare hundreds when it would save millions more?
So even if this doesn't interest you, what about the legal side of things. When (or IF, if you're optimistic) this occurs, who is legally held responsible for the death or injury of an individual? The supplier of the machine material? The machine designer, the manufacturer, the doctor, the patient? All of the above?
Why isn't the human body a machine? I'll grant that we can't mimic it but that doesn't mean that the systems of the body aren't mechanical in nature. Would you argue against using titanium rods to help with fractures, the use of plastic joints to replace failed joints, or other technologies that attempt to repair some mechanical failure in the body (including the use of micro-robots to perform surgery)? I guess I wasn't clear with my earlier statement. I simply meant that there is no way that I would trust a machine like this to work in a general hospital. The human body is too complex for a machine to encompass and predict all possible outcomes. I understand the need and advancement of machines in the practice of medicine, but the concept of a still image being presented to a doctor, while he may need to see the moving image to watch for signs of some other problem, is a scary one to me. If the software is written to predict the movement of a beating heart, so that the knife moves with it, so the doctor just sees a normal one, what happens when the heart beats abnormally to what it predicts? I'm assuming an improper incision. Hopefully that clears up my earlier comment.
Ethical? I'm not sure that word means what you think it means. You are advocating an almost superstitious view of how medicine should work. I'd be curious which ethical theory you are using to suggest that our modern advances in medicine are going in the wrong direction. I'm currently studying some history of medicine through literature, like Williams, Lewis, Atwood, Mann, etc.., and can only see the distance between doctors and patients expanding. It's always been a pretty wide gap, and not wanting to really get into any great literature debate (I'm no expert on either matter), I was only pointing out that the gap between doctors and patients, I believe, will only expand due to technology. To me it would be like playing a video game.
I guess this isn't a question of ethics, but it's a question of doctor/patient relations.
The human body is not a machine, and we cannot even come close to mimicking one, let alone thousands to millions.
I hope they have some biologists or MDs working on this robot, to take into account all those thousands of things the body does wrong that are impossible to predict. Nevermind machine failure or glitches.
On a more ethical standpoint, being interested in Medicine and Machines myself, I feel this is going in the opposite direction of what I hope for medicine. Distancing doctors from patients, and life from reality may prove a nasty combo.
You almost touched on a completely seperate problem with Microsoft 'versions'. When paid new releases replace security updates, it's hard to have well supported and working software. IE the change from InternetExplorer6 to IE7.
IBM does not only just "do" business in China.
Lenovo was a daughter company of Big Blue several years ago. They had been the actual manufacturers of IBM computers for some time. Recently they acquired the computer division of IBM and now own the trademarks. So nothing was changed about the hardware, the upper management and money was just shifted around a bit. Mother has Daughter, Daughter eats Mother. Lenovo is a Chinese based company as well.
And I wonder if they're going to return the batteries they bought that exploded...
"Instead of batteries, package contained bobcat. Would not buy again A--"
Someone might want to RTFA:
Looking to profit in other ways, Anderson approached the MPAA with an e-mail offering to help the movie studios' lobbying arm beat piracy [...] Among other things, Anderson proposed to implement an anti-piracy marketing campaign for the MPAA.
But he says he also offered to provide inside information on TorrentSpy
"It was an opportunity to make money, because I knew how these networks operated," he says. So he got pissed because he wasn't making advertising money, and took some illegal information to the MPAA himself.
On June 8, 2005, [...] Anderson says he told Garfield that he had "an informant that can intercept any e-mail communication." Once again, he went to the MPAA...
Anderson didn't tell Garfield he was the "informant," and that he'd already hacked into TorrentSpy's systems. So the MPAA didn't know...
The hacker, then 23 and living in Vancouver, British Columbia, claims he had cracked TorrentSpy's servers by simply guessing an administrative password. Besides my beef with him being called a hacker (instead of cracker), how is this cracking at all?
He knew the password was weak -- a combination of a name and some numbers. [...]
"I just kept changing the numbers until it fit," he says. "I guess you can call it luck. It took a little more than 30 tries." Yea, not hacking. Social engineering if anything...
Once inside, he programmed TorrentSpy's mail system to relay e-mail to a newly created external account he could access.
There's a trace of pride in his voice as he details the hack. cracking the Gibson baby. If he's so proud to be leaking this information, that's not elite (see the jargon file)
C'mon/. work on the misinforming summaries! Starting to sound like FOX
Slashdot Mirror
Not if you have Dell insurance, apparently.
You know... There's a google application for that....
But there's a definite difference between "study" and "fact", which is what I think OldSoldier is not-so-clearly pointing out.
Even though you considered interpretation, you didn't consider the problem of data collection. This is assuming that we're trusting the 12,000 people that say their laptops were stolen. Probably an insignificant percentage in this case, but still a consideration for standard deviation.
My opinion is that interpretation even plays a role here. It's apparent that Dell sponsored this study, due to the fact that they averaged the number that were stolen. A more neutral number to report would be 8400, or the averaged amount lost and never returned.
My assumption is that the week time frame played a role in the numbers as well. Did the multiply a single-day's sample by 7? Hopefully not, as that would not provide any real scientific evidence. Did the sample all 365 days of a year and divide? Probably not since that would take too much time.
But "12,000 lost a week" sure does have a nice ring to it. Too bad I don't think "ooo! buy insurance!", but rather "stupid idiots!"
What kind of law is that? One of morale judgment? I'm not going to get started into laws, but the parents are not doing anything illegal. They're making the decision we, the United States, have decided to give them once they have lived for 18 years. We've stated that once you've been alive for 18 years then you are physically and mentally mature enough to understand the situation you make your conscious decision in.
Whether or not that's correct or not is a whole other ball game.
Look at Google's process. Simply speaking from an outside perspective, they have very little designated process. They use an extremely agile processes of basically "just code the shit" and it works for them. As far as testing goes, if they're working with some kind of eXtreme Programming, then hopefully they're writing their test cases first.
Look at Microsoft on the other hand, they're extremely nested in processes and cannot get out.
As for the article, I'd say there's so much more to look at. Housing, as already mentioned, is only part of the picture. What about salaries and work environments (some people do like process more than working anarchy)? I for one understand the argument of being a god among insects.
No knowledge or real research done here, just thinking "outside the box". I hear Microsoft likes that.
Why is the first response to any computer problem today "system reloads". Systems aren't really that big and scary! (Well our government might need a system reload, /offtopic)
...but don't forget that 67% of statistics are made up on the spot.
IMHO 90% of problems can be found and fixed without a system reset. 99% of these problems are user error and just need a little maintenance. A little thinking before you click may save a lot of time and energy.
I know I get spam frequently (I keep it as a counter to how recently I've checked my mail-every hour or so) but gmail, yahoo, hotmail, and my uni account all have the default filters and I never happen upon a spam message in my inbox.
I don't know about you guys but I think the only "spam" I still see is web advertisements (popups) and the occasional random MSN message.
Even though I'm a heavy and literate computer user, I still feel that they can't be making *that* much of a profit these days.
I sincerely hope that you do not take one nitwit's comments online as truth and project assumptions into real life.
As an American currently traveling abroad, I have felt this attitude far too often and have felt ashamed for acts I do not support.
I always thought "stuff that matters" was ironic because of the term "news"... hence the "news for nerds".
But consider the implications of this base of legislation as leverage against homosexual discrimination. Once research "proves" homosexuality is genetic, will it be illegal to discriminate against them? I know this article is all about insurance companies, but on what basis does our government stand by telling someone else (in our own country) not to discriminate while they get away with it. And yes our government does that all the time, but we can dream...
My Solution: Google. No really, find a cheap service (or two) that are likely to stay in business, keep updated, and offer online access. What else do you need? Sure it's not as secure as an offline system, but do the majority of people care about elite crackers seeing their family photos?
How can false opinionated stories like this be published? With it being Sun Week on campus, I've had some recent (yesterday) exposure and discussions with some of their representatives. Sun singlehandedly contributes the majority (Yes, above 50%) of Open Source code in the online community, thanks to their newly acquired MySQL. Read More, and next time get your facts right.
Well if you're going to mutate a population, you might as well do it right. What fun would it be if there were only 1 X-Men from Wyoming? That only makes for some kind of Ripley's Believe It or Not, not really worldwide news worthy...
You hit right on my meaning of ethical debate. Besides the question whether or not the technology works, is it really that much better if the doctor is so far away from his patient?
What about the incredibly common debate in House MD (I'm not being scientific, just generalized thinking here), which is background information. What if you don't know everything about your patient? What if I'm allergic to something in the process of that intubation and that quick thinking decision kills me?
More on topic, what if not all the information for the machine to operate on my heart isn't known? This would lead to possibly fatal problems with the machine predicting heart/excess movement.
I think neapolitan said it better than I ever could have, since I don't have the technical training of a doctor, a few comments below.
Interesting topic about information being lost in translation. It's not quite the same, in my opinion, as something say like a drawing of a microbe. Where that drawing is a representation of the microbe, but not really the microbe itself. Besides all those side topics, what do you think about the stethoscope or machine? Is there something lost in translation?
Again, I'm agreeing that augmentation is a good thing, but the idea of removing the movement for better care doesn't make sense to me. It's taking the doctor one step away from what is really happening.
Oh I completely see and agree with your point. I guess I didn't word mine correctly.
But what about the flaws of the human mind? If a human writes the software that doesn't work, then the machine, or plane or whatever, doesn't work in all the cases. We, as humans, tend to jump to application far too quickly without understanding it first. In this sense, a machine is no longer a perfection, not even close. Far too many people die in car crashes than a perfect machine would allow.
I know I hit on a few topics here, but let me focus on the most relating ethical debate, which I am afraid of: use before perfection.
See Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940) - http://imdb.com/title/tt0032413/. The entire ethical debate is of the same nature. Is it ok to spare hundreds when it would save millions more?
So even if this doesn't interest you, what about the legal side of things. When (or IF, if you're optimistic) this occurs, who is legally held responsible for the death or injury of an individual? The supplier of the machine material? The machine designer, the manufacturer, the doctor, the patient? All of the above?
If the software is written to predict the movement of a beating heart, so that the knife moves with it, so the doctor just sees a normal one, what happens when the heart beats abnormally to what it predicts? I'm assuming an improper incision. Hopefully that clears up my earlier comment. Ethical? I'm not sure that word means what you think it means. You are advocating an almost superstitious view of how medicine should work. I'd be curious which ethical theory you are using to suggest that our modern advances in medicine are going in the wrong direction. I'm currently studying some history of medicine through literature, like Williams, Lewis, Atwood, Mann, etc.., and can only see the distance between doctors and patients expanding. It's always been a pretty wide gap, and not wanting to really get into any great literature debate (I'm no expert on either matter), I was only pointing out that the gap between doctors and patients, I believe, will only expand due to technology. To me it would be like playing a video game. I guess this isn't a question of ethics, but it's a question of doctor/patient relations.
The human body is not a machine, and we cannot even come close to mimicking one, let alone thousands to millions.
I hope they have some biologists or MDs working on this robot, to take into account all those thousands of things the body does wrong that are impossible to predict. Nevermind machine failure or glitches.
On a more ethical standpoint, being interested in Medicine and Machines myself, I feel this is going in the opposite direction of what I hope for medicine. Distancing doctors from patients, and life from reality may prove a nasty combo.
You almost touched on a completely seperate problem with Microsoft 'versions'. When paid new releases replace security updates, it's hard to have well supported and working software. IE the change from InternetExplorer6 to IE7.
So now we have to worry about people hacking our clothing?
"Honest officer, the pimple-face kid in my neighbor's basement made me grab her ass"
IBM does not only just "do" business in China. Lenovo was a daughter company of Big Blue several years ago. They had been the actual manufacturers of IBM computers for some time. Recently they acquired the computer division of IBM and now own the trademarks. So nothing was changed about the hardware, the upper management and money was just shifted around a bit. Mother has Daughter, Daughter eats Mother. Lenovo is a Chinese based company as well. And I wonder if they're going to return the batteries they bought that exploded... "Instead of batteries, package contained bobcat. Would not buy again A--"