If it wasn't for the asinine toll-free registration process here. Being as toll-free numbers are registered through "Responsible Organizations (RespOrgs)" - which is an oxymoron to be kind - rather than anything resembling a centralized registry, it is insanely difficult to find out who is actually behind a given toll-free number. RespOrgs have no obligation - indeed they often say they are not allowed - to disclose even a company name or mailing address behind a toll-free number. And with the absurd number of RespOrgs for the toll-free system, by the time someone is able to file a complaint with a RespOrg regarding a toll-free number the company has already changed numbers and RespOrgs (at which point the first RespOrg might not even have the data for the first number anymore).
Why on earth this is acceptable - especially when traditional numbers are registered and traceable - is beyond me.
We don't have enough information to know why it wasn't diagnosed. It said that she had the symptoms for 8 years, but it doesn't say how many doctors she saw about them, or where or when. This could just as easily be a communications breakdown as much as a problem with quack doctors; if she changed doctors over the 8 years (which is a common patient reaction when they have undiagnosed problems) then the records might not have followed her completely. For that matter the article doesn't say if the family ever moved in the last 8 years; it is unfortunately rather common for patient's records to be incompletely copied from one clinic to another when patients change their primary care providers.
Also worth noting from the article:
Crohn's disease is often misdiagnosed or diagnosed very late, says Dr. Corey Siegel, director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
"Granulomas are oftentimes very hard to find and not always even present at all," Siegel said. "I commend Jessica for her meticulous work."
Sorry I never got around to mailing it to you; the slashdot hater quotient script has now been (re)posted with the spaces correctly rendered to make it a bit less train-wreck-ish. Feel free to do your worst with it.
I regularly find myself compiling scientific applications that were written in fortran. Which means that plenty of scientific software development is still done in fortran as well. Even if the students aren't going to write their own software, there is a good chance that they will at some point need to be able to install scientific software, and a little basic knowledge of fortran can go a long ways towards understanding the snafus that they will likely encounter along the way.
That is in no way something of insignificant value in addition to learning the basic logic structure of a language like fortran.
I'm pretty sure there are databases that can store and serve up documents based on criteria. Couldn't you set up a centralized web server with an SQL backend that hosts those files for you? You would be able to then keep track of who is using which document and when, and regulate who can do what with different documents as well. As a bonus you should be able to ditch SMB while you're at it and move to a more robust OS for your critical files. Centralizing those documents would also make it dramatically easier to back them up at regular intervals.
... back in the 90s, but then the local top40 station started playing boy bands nonstop and my black hole was, itself, pulled into the resulting immense vacuum.
Sure, you could follow "traditional" measure of beta testing your software, but what fun is that? Try the Slashdot Method(TM) instead, and launch your beta testing into the next level! Just follow our easy step-by-step instructions
First: Make a plausible-sounding claim about a company people don't like (cable, MS, RIAA, telco, etc)
Second: Claim that your software can help diagnose these problems
Third: Watch as suckers from all over the world download your new program
Fourth: When the truth happens that your claim holds less water than a screen door, point out that your software helped show that, and was never supposed to fix anything anyways
Fifth: Point out that you still do a better job beta-testing before release than these guys
In my experience, when a passenger must leave the plane before take off (usually for health reasons), the flight will be delayed because as a security measure, that passengers luggage must also be removed from the airplane and checked.
Sounds plausible. Though that isn't really the situation I was trying to describe.
So if someone where to exercise their hypothetical right of leaving a plane which they think is a socialist death trap, all the other passengers will be delayed (if they are lucky) for 45-60 minutes
That isn't really what I was trying to describe, and I apologize if I was ambiguous.
Rather, what I was trying to say is that if a passenger is flying on Socialist Death-Trap Airlines (SM), they already knew that before they arrived at the airport. And indeed, unless they are using some particularly odd method of purchasing tickets, they already knew before arriving at the airport that they would be flying on a SuperSocialist-Robo1000 Auto-Plane. None of this information was withheld from them prior to their arrival at the gate; they could have made the decision prior to checking in for their flight whether or not they agreed with (their pre-conceived notion of) the control systems of their aircraft.
In other words, by the time a passenger arrives at the airport, they have already received (or at the very least been given access to) the identity of the aircraft they are about to fly on. They could have chosen before going to the airport to not fly on that plane; they have no right to bitch about the specific model of aircraft once they are checked in.
So in short, while it might not strictly meet every possible definition of "deplane", they passenger had a right to refuse that plane, and they forfeited that right when they checked in for their flight.
As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer.
I don't know how everyone else is buying their tickets; but when I book my tickets online I always see at least an indication of what plane will be flying the route I am about to pay for; usually I get to pick my seat on a map of that plane as well. Certainly if I don't like the plane that will be flying that route, I could choose another route or another carrier until I get a plane that I like.
In other words, by the time you made it to the plane, you already consented to fly on that aircraft. If you don't like it when you get on it, you should have paid more attention when you bought your ticket.
If you want to run windows, but the software they want you to install bothers you, you could try running cygwin (with sshd) on your box. When I was at a school that regularly did campus-wide scans, I had a win2k box running cygwin and at least one of their scans saw it as a "unix" box, rather than a windows box.
If their scans tell them that you are running unix, and you tell them you are running unix, they will probably believe you.
Of course another option would be to just not use your own computer on their network. You could have it in your dorm and not on the network; using only their systems when you need network/internet access. Obviously that approach has costs, too, but you wouldn't have to worry about the fate of your own machine.
They can take all the measures they want to secure the root, if they keep letting unscrupulous registrars sell domains it all will be for naught anyways. Wake me up if they ever decide that for some reason they feel security and stability are suddenly more important than profit.
A price cut announced for the Wii console. It has been out for almost three years now, and still sells at the price it was initially released at.
Granted, the console is still selling fine at this same price - and hence demand seems to remain - but this seems like an unusually long time for the components within the system to have not fallen in price.
Why are we buying the products of these fascist dictatorships?
Part of the answer to your first question is also availability. There are some markets where the Chinese goods have such a lock on production that it is nearly impossible to not buy something made in China.
Sure, you can buy a Chinese made widget for less than an American made widget almost without exception. However, there are times when no amount of money will buy a non-Chinese widget because no such item exists.
Furthermore, your statement
products of these fascist dictatoriships
Is itself an absurd over-simplification of the situation. Just because a product is made in China does not mean it inherently supports the Chinese government. Sure, taxes are (generally) paid but your $.99 widget almost certainly profits a greedy western capitalist much more than the Chinese government.
if you buy Chinese goods, you support oppression
Not always true. As I said, there are times that you don't have a choice in the matter. Sometimes the only way to purchase the item you need for whatever task is at hand is to purchase a Chinese made version of it. If you don't believe me then take a look through the tool section of your favorite home improvement / hardware / discount / general merchandise store. There are some items that if you need them today, you have no choice but to buy Chinese - and if your choice is to buy Chinese or allow your basement to flood with water, I have a suspicion on which way you will likely choose.
It's semantics, really, but the popularity of a product can be gauged across the entire population (pretty much useless), it can be gauged across the potential market (useful), or it can be gauged against the existing market (most useful [for marketing]).
I understand your point, but I disagree with the application of such sweeping terms as "enormously popular" for something that is currently essentially a niche product. This same kind of logic could be used to say that the Segway Human Transporter is an "enormously popular" two-wheeled electric-powered transportation device, or that the Tesla Roadster is an "enormously popular" high-performance electric car.
For that matter, you could go in the other direction and say that the Toyota Camry is an "abysmal failure" in terms of transportation because there are more people on planet earth that do not own one than there are that do (same could be said for the iPod as a means of entertainment).
So sure you can scale the terms as much as you want, but that doesn't mean they retain meaning indefinitely. And the eBook market wasn't developed in the hopes of selling only to the very short list of people who have purchased eBook readers so far; they want to expand in the same way that digital music has expanded. Which means they have yet to develop a device that is anywhere near qualifying as "enormously popular".
Amazon's Kindle an enormously popular eBook reader.
I'm not sure the description "enormously popular" is deserved. Just because it is out selling other eBook readers doesn't make it "enormously popular"; how many of these have actually sold?
It doesn't seem that the eBook market has really expanded to the point of anything yet being worthy of the "enormously popular" status, AFAIK.
When I was in middle school they gave all the kids a laminated bus pass
When I was in middle school, we were hacking the busses ourselves in a way. Neighborhoods would be served sometimes by multiple busses, such that walking 2 blocks further than your "scheduled" stop would put you on a bus that might be a shorter route, have fewer kids, or have that person who you just really want to sit by. But middle school kids should, at the least, know their own neighborhoods well enough to know if they are on the right bus to go home or not.
the bus numbers spray painted on the sidewalk so everyone who had to ride the bus knew exactly where to line up. Nobody ever got on the wrong bus because nobody ever got in the wrong line
That works well for kids who know how to read. However a lot of schools now don't really have "literate" children until 2nd grade. This is something that changed appallingly fast, too. When I went to grade school, I could read and write before I started kindergarten. When my oldest younger siblings went to school, they couldn't read and write until they were at least in 2nd grade - and we went through the same school system.
Hence even if the numbers are sprayed on the sidewalk, those numbers won't do you any good if the kids can't read them.
It was posted in a journal entry here on slashdot over a week ago. Looks like another fantastic job of the editors of not noticing newsworthy writings on this site.
Sure the easy suggestion is to do as so many people already have and advise that the guy in question buy another PC. However there is one thing that it seems we are overlooking here:
The cost of administering an additional (presumably windows) PC. Going from the care and feeding routine of one to the same for two is not trivial, especially if both systems are used regularly. And few women consider windows administration to be a sexy task for their man to do.
Have it run either skype or magicjack. I have heard that the second is planning to support Linux "soon". I would definitely be more interested in cheap phone service at home if it didn't require me to have a desktop computer on whenever I wanted to make a call.
... There was not a single VLB (VESA Local Bus) accelerator on that list. As I recall, the VLB slot was made for video acceleration, so they rather missed the boat by omitting those cards. Starting at Voodoo (except they started with ViRGE) is not a very comprehensive history of 3d acceleration.
The first draft did not include Craig Venter's DNA
Actually, it was partially his DNA.
The first draft i believe was a consensus of 10 humans of varying gender and race
The part you refer to was from the public half of the human genome project.
Which is overlooking the fact that there was simultaneously a privately-funded (as in J Craig Venter funded) genome project that was trying to compete with the publicly funded effort and publish a draft sequence first. The private effort actually used some released portions of the public effort (the public effort was more successful at the hard-to-sequence areas), but it was primarily taken from Venter's DNA.
(as well as his dog's)
True, Venter's poodle is, for better or worse, the current genomic standard for Canis Familiaris
Good job of not reading my post. I guess that is why you posted AC, because you didn't want anything resembling a name to be associated with your paranoia and spin.
For starters, I already stated that
insurance companies
Need to disappear. The idiotic for-profit megabuck healthcare system we have in the US is not ethical or sustainable. We can learn from what other countries have been doing for 50 years and implement single-payer, universal health care; and then the worries about genetic-based health care fee structure discrimination should be addressed.
employers, HR depts
If you employer wants to can you - or not hire you to begin with - they'll find a mechanism. Genetic testing is pretty irrelevant in that matter.
governments
Can you find an example of governments doing something nefarious with genetic data? I didn't think so. If you want to wear a tinfoil hat, feel free to do so; but don't try to convince us it is a normal thing to do.
Or just google "$100 genome"
You are free to fear it if you want. However I feel it is a good thing. This is similar to what the Archon X prize will be someday awarded for and as a scientist I think that is a very noble competition. However as a biochemist I am not aware of any technology available at this moment that makes that level of completion possible in that little time and money.
... the make-up of J Craig Venter's genome, as he used himself for human DNA in the first draft. It doesn't seem to have hurt him too much to have that information out.
Although indeed if the US would at least catch up to 1960's era Europe and institute universal single-payer health care, I would be much quicker to volunteer for this. Unfortunately as others have pointed out there is abundant opportunity for our for-profit insurance companies to abuse this information to make our lives more difficult (and more expensive to boot).
Slashdot Mirror
If it wasn't for the asinine toll-free registration process here. Being as toll-free numbers are registered through "Responsible Organizations (RespOrgs)" - which is an oxymoron to be kind - rather than anything resembling a centralized registry, it is insanely difficult to find out who is actually behind a given toll-free number. RespOrgs have no obligation - indeed they often say they are not allowed - to disclose even a company name or mailing address behind a toll-free number. And with the absurd number of RespOrgs for the toll-free system, by the time someone is able to file a complaint with a RespOrg regarding a toll-free number the company has already changed numbers and RespOrgs (at which point the first RespOrg might not even have the data for the first number anymore).
Why on earth this is acceptable - especially when traditional numbers are registered and traceable - is beyond me.
how come it wasn't diagnosed?
We don't have enough information to know why it wasn't diagnosed. It said that she had the symptoms for 8 years, but it doesn't say how many doctors she saw about them, or where or when. This could just as easily be a communications breakdown as much as a problem with quack doctors; if she changed doctors over the 8 years (which is a common patient reaction when they have undiagnosed problems) then the records might not have followed her completely. For that matter the article doesn't say if the family ever moved in the last 8 years; it is unfortunately rather common for patient's records to be incompletely copied from one clinic to another when patients change their primary care providers.
Also worth noting from the article:
Crohn's disease is often misdiagnosed or diagnosed very late, says Dr. Corey Siegel, director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
"Granulomas are oftentimes very hard to find and not always even present at all," Siegel said. "I commend Jessica for her meticulous work."
Those that don't learn UNIX are doomed to reinvent it. Poorly.
One may interpret that saying as someone trying to incite a Linux / BSD war. We lost good men from both sides the last time that happened...
fm6:
Sorry I never got around to mailing it to you; the slashdot hater quotient script has now been (re)posted with the spaces correctly rendered to make it a bit less train-wreck-ish. Feel free to do your worst with it.
I regularly find myself compiling scientific applications that were written in fortran. Which means that plenty of scientific software development is still done in fortran as well. Even if the students aren't going to write their own software, there is a good chance that they will at some point need to be able to install scientific software, and a little basic knowledge of fortran can go a long ways towards understanding the snafus that they will likely encounter along the way.
That is in no way something of insignificant value in addition to learning the basic logic structure of a language like fortran.
I'm pretty sure there are databases that can store and serve up documents based on criteria. Couldn't you set up a centralized web server with an SQL backend that hosts those files for you? You would be able to then keep track of who is using which document and when, and regulate who can do what with different documents as well. As a bonus you should be able to ditch SMB while you're at it and move to a more robust OS for your critical files. Centralizing those documents would also make it dramatically easier to back them up at regular intervals.
... back in the 90s, but then the local top40 station started playing boy bands nonstop and my black hole was, itself, pulled into the resulting immense vacuum.
In my experience, when a passenger must leave the plane before take off (usually for health reasons), the flight will be delayed because as a security measure, that passengers luggage must also be removed from the airplane and checked.
Sounds plausible. Though that isn't really the situation I was trying to describe.
So if someone where to exercise their hypothetical right of leaving a plane which they think is a socialist death trap, all the other passengers will be delayed (if they are lucky) for 45-60 minutes
That isn't really what I was trying to describe, and I apologize if I was ambiguous.
Rather, what I was trying to say is that if a passenger is flying on Socialist Death-Trap Airlines (SM), they already knew that before they arrived at the airport. And indeed, unless they are using some particularly odd method of purchasing tickets, they already knew before arriving at the airport that they would be flying on a SuperSocialist-Robo1000 Auto-Plane. None of this information was withheld from them prior to their arrival at the gate; they could have made the decision prior to checking in for their flight whether or not they agreed with (their pre-conceived notion of) the control systems of their aircraft.
In other words, by the time a passenger arrives at the airport, they have already received (or at the very least been given access to) the identity of the aircraft they are about to fly on. They could have chosen before going to the airport to not fly on that plane; they have no right to bitch about the specific model of aircraft once they are checked in.
So in short, while it might not strictly meet every possible definition of "deplane", they passenger had a right to refuse that plane, and they forfeited that right when they checked in for their flight.
As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer.
I don't know how everyone else is buying their tickets; but when I book my tickets online I always see at least an indication of what plane will be flying the route I am about to pay for; usually I get to pick my seat on a map of that plane as well. Certainly if I don't like the plane that will be flying that route, I could choose another route or another carrier until I get a plane that I like.
In other words, by the time you made it to the plane, you already consented to fly on that aircraft. If you don't like it when you get on it, you should have paid more attention when you bought your ticket.
If you want to run windows, but the software they want you to install bothers you, you could try running cygwin (with sshd) on your box. When I was at a school that regularly did campus-wide scans, I had a win2k box running cygwin and at least one of their scans saw it as a "unix" box, rather than a windows box.
If their scans tell them that you are running unix, and you tell them you are running unix, they will probably believe you.
Of course another option would be to just not use your own computer on their network. You could have it in your dorm and not on the network; using only their systems when you need network/internet access. Obviously that approach has costs, too, but you wouldn't have to worry about the fate of your own machine.
They can take all the measures they want to secure the root, if they keep letting unscrupulous registrars sell domains it all will be for naught anyways. Wake me up if they ever decide that for some reason they feel security and stability are suddenly more important than profit.
A price cut announced for the Wii console. It has been out for almost three years now, and still sells at the price it was initially released at.
Granted, the console is still selling fine at this same price - and hence demand seems to remain - but this seems like an unusually long time for the components within the system to have not fallen in price.
Why are we buying the products of these fascist dictatorships?
Part of the answer to your first question is also availability. There are some markets where the Chinese goods have such a lock on production that it is nearly impossible to not buy something made in China.
Sure, you can buy a Chinese made widget for less than an American made widget almost without exception. However, there are times when no amount of money will buy a non-Chinese widget because no such item exists.
Furthermore, your statement
products of these fascist dictatoriships
Is itself an absurd over-simplification of the situation. Just because a product is made in China does not mean it inherently supports the Chinese government. Sure, taxes are (generally) paid but your $.99 widget almost certainly profits a greedy western capitalist much more than the Chinese government.
if you buy Chinese goods, you support oppression
Not always true. As I said, there are times that you don't have a choice in the matter. Sometimes the only way to purchase the item you need for whatever task is at hand is to purchase a Chinese made version of it. If you don't believe me then take a look through the tool section of your favorite home improvement / hardware / discount / general merchandise store. There are some items that if you need them today, you have no choice but to buy Chinese - and if your choice is to buy Chinese or allow your basement to flood with water, I have a suspicion on which way you will likely choose.
It's semantics, really, but the popularity of a product can be gauged across the entire population (pretty much useless), it can be gauged across the potential market (useful), or it can be gauged against the existing market (most useful [for marketing]).
I understand your point, but I disagree with the application of such sweeping terms as "enormously popular" for something that is currently essentially a niche product. This same kind of logic could be used to say that the Segway Human Transporter is an "enormously popular" two-wheeled electric-powered transportation device, or that the Tesla Roadster is an "enormously popular" high-performance electric car.
For that matter, you could go in the other direction and say that the Toyota Camry is an "abysmal failure" in terms of transportation because there are more people on planet earth that do not own one than there are that do (same could be said for the iPod as a means of entertainment).
So sure you can scale the terms as much as you want, but that doesn't mean they retain meaning indefinitely. And the eBook market wasn't developed in the hopes of selling only to the very short list of people who have purchased eBook readers so far; they want to expand in the same way that digital music has expanded. Which means they have yet to develop a device that is anywhere near qualifying as "enormously popular".
Amazon's Kindle an enormously popular eBook reader.
I'm not sure the description "enormously popular" is deserved. Just because it is out selling other eBook readers doesn't make it "enormously popular"; how many of these have actually sold?
It doesn't seem that the eBook market has really expanded to the point of anything yet being worthy of the "enormously popular" status, AFAIK.
When I was in middle school they gave all the kids a laminated bus pass
When I was in middle school, we were hacking the busses ourselves in a way. Neighborhoods would be served sometimes by multiple busses, such that walking 2 blocks further than your "scheduled" stop would put you on a bus that might be a shorter route, have fewer kids, or have that person who you just really want to sit by. But middle school kids should, at the least, know their own neighborhoods well enough to know if they are on the right bus to go home or not.
the bus numbers spray painted on the sidewalk so everyone who had to ride the bus knew exactly where to line up. Nobody ever got on the wrong bus because nobody ever got in the wrong line
That works well for kids who know how to read. However a lot of schools now don't really have "literate" children until 2nd grade. This is something that changed appallingly fast, too. When I went to grade school, I could read and write before I started kindergarten. When my oldest younger siblings went to school, they couldn't read and write until they were at least in 2nd grade - and we went through the same school system.
Hence even if the numbers are sprayed on the sidewalk, those numbers won't do you any good if the kids can't read them.
It was posted in a journal entry here on slashdot over a week ago. Looks like another fantastic job of the editors of not noticing newsworthy writings on this site.
Why shops at retail stores for electronics anymore?
There are no locations for the new circuit city. All their retail stores are still closed. The new circuitcity.com is online-only.
Sure the easy suggestion is to do as so many people already have and advise that the guy in question buy another PC. However there is one thing that it seems we are overlooking here:
The cost of administering an additional (presumably windows) PC. Going from the care and feeding routine of one to the same for two is not trivial, especially if both systems are used regularly. And few women consider windows administration to be a sexy task for their man to do.
Have it run either skype or magicjack. I have heard that the second is planning to support Linux "soon". I would definitely be more interested in cheap phone service at home if it didn't require me to have a desktop computer on whenever I wanted to make a call.
... There was not a single VLB (VESA Local Bus) accelerator on that list. As I recall, the VLB slot was made for video acceleration, so they rather missed the boat by omitting those cards. Starting at Voodoo (except they started with ViRGE) is not a very comprehensive history of 3d acceleration.
The first draft did not include Craig Venter's DNA
Actually, it was partially his DNA.
The first draft i believe was a consensus of 10 humans of varying gender and race
The part you refer to was from the public half of the human genome project.
Which is overlooking the fact that there was simultaneously a privately-funded (as in J Craig Venter funded) genome project that was trying to compete with the publicly funded effort and publish a draft sequence first. The private effort actually used some released portions of the public effort (the public effort was more successful at the hard-to-sequence areas), but it was primarily taken from Venter's DNA.
(as well as his dog's)
True, Venter's poodle is, for better or worse, the current genomic standard for Canis Familiaris
For starters, I already stated that
insurance companies
Need to disappear. The idiotic for-profit megabuck healthcare system we have in the US is not ethical or sustainable. We can learn from what other countries have been doing for 50 years and implement single-payer, universal health care; and then the worries about genetic-based health care fee structure discrimination should be addressed.
employers, HR depts
If you employer wants to can you - or not hire you to begin with - they'll find a mechanism. Genetic testing is pretty irrelevant in that matter.
governments
Can you find an example of governments doing something nefarious with genetic data? I didn't think so. If you want to wear a tinfoil hat, feel free to do so; but don't try to convince us it is a normal thing to do.
Or just google "$100 genome"
You are free to fear it if you want. However I feel it is a good thing. This is similar to what the Archon X prize will be someday awarded for and as a scientist I think that is a very noble competition. However as a biochemist I am not aware of any technology available at this moment that makes that level of completion possible in that little time and money.
... the make-up of J Craig Venter's genome, as he used himself for human DNA in the first draft. It doesn't seem to have hurt him too much to have that information out.
Although indeed if the US would at least catch up to 1960's era Europe and institute universal single-payer health care, I would be much quicker to volunteer for this. Unfortunately as others have pointed out there is abundant opportunity for our for-profit insurance companies to abuse this information to make our lives more difficult (and more expensive to boot).