Via online/distance ed. We had to go to campus to write the exams though or have someone they approved of proctor us. They usually let us use our computer though but still they were walking around and checked that at least before the exam you'd shut off your wireless. What really sucked was a stats course where the proof insisted on hand written assignments and exam and specifically noted that if he can't read it he wouldn't give you marks. This after about 10 years out of school where the longest thing I've written was about 1 paragraph and my writing was never good. 3 hrs of writing ferociously hand drawing plots etc. Argh. Nice guy but, argh.
I don't think law has anything to do with it. It is an investigation. What happened in what sequence leading up to the crash. It will be lawyers and victims afterwards that decide who gets sued, charged, fined etc (if their dead good luck) if anyone.
But does anyone else find it funny (in a sick way) that the two agencies involved in flight safety had a mid-air collision? At that point calling in the TSB is like calling in the triads to sort out what happened between the crips and bloods:-) Somehow we need non-biased people in this incident but when it comes to professions we let them police themselves (doctors, accountants, lawyers etc).
The beautiful thing with vi and emacs is syntax highlighting imho. Often I get examples of langauges that I don't actually use myself (but were part of a project I downloaded or whatever). The great thing with Vim and emacs is they usually will highlight things well for you helping you visually figure out some of the syntax to get a quick idea of what is going on in the code. Want to open a Matlab file and just see what it contains not wait 20 sec for matlab to open or settle for ugly text editor monochrome font? Vi is the way to go.
Anyways a lot of the time I find myself looking at code files without the need to edit them so I don't have the need for easy to use editing features I just want it to open quick with highlighting so if it is something like lisp (which I don't know) I can at least get a bit of training wheels to guide me around the code.
Unions ah the 70's just called:-) Seriously though never worked in a union environment, or at least in one where I was part of the union. Also mostly healthcare (essential service, back to work legislation in a clock cycle), military (against the law to form a union), or academic (you can strike but you won't graduate) have been most of my working conditions. Hard to form a union when you are 5 guys in a 500 employee company. Strikes are usually about actual grievances: too little pay, too long hours, etc. This would be more of an experiment: testing the theory that IT has little value, or at best minimum wage in a third world country value.
No you need people there so someone that knows what they are doing can confirm that the backups run, can act if you are being attacked, can create new accounts, remind users how to configure outlook if they move to another computer etc. I wasn't suggesting leave and in one day everything will break so they'll know they need us I meant more like power down the servers and go home for the day.
I know and the internet was broke for 2 hours here. Companies are cheap cheap cheap with internet bandwidth. Perhaps that would change if they were playing on the cloud but I wouldn't count on it. My work for example: 2000 employees in a hospital setting. 20Mbps internet connection and we are a "teaching" hospital (we teach slow students very slowly apparently). Now imagine everyone needing the internet for their word processor, email, pdfs, medical images, browsing, etc. Even "low bandwidth" activities aren't when you have ~600 people at a time all doing it on a 20Mbps connection. One person of those 600 decides to look at a 4D CT set and the network stops for ~50s for everyone. Not good.
Agreed. and BYOD policies mean more time involved in figuring out how to get someones gadget to play nice with the corporate network and more gadgets. If everyone can bring their tablet and phone versus the old way where you had to be important enough to warrant a standardized corporate gadget lots more gadgets per user. Much more gadget types etc. Nothing but work and headaches in the future for Tier 1 guys... enjoy:-)
I agree. I had a guy interview me that when I told him what I was currently making he said "oh people here eventually make that kind of money but maybe 5-7 years." He even had the nerve to ask me if I had friends that wanted work and they could work for his company too and we could be roommates to share expenses. Really? Experienced software engineers are supposed to wait 5 years to make the same money they currently are and live with roommates to get by. Fantastic. Companies complain about not being able to fill positions because they want Ferrari employees on Civic salaries.
It's not just throttling, chances are their servers don't have something that can handle 4Gbps reliably since their connection likely isn't that large, if they are only serving webpages there is little need (say even a 1MB page) you'd need to get ~500 hits per second to need that bandwidth (43M a day) chances are you don't. People that would go nuts for this: distributed nightly backups, HD content uncompressed I think is pretty close to this size (not talking BR but straight from the cameera streaming) one connection per building kind of setups etc. I can see ISPs adding a box to an apartment building and then selling 250MBps to ~20 apartments rather than having to manage the boxes somewhere else/per flat hookup etc).
Simple solution to get management to understand the value of IT have a no IT day. One day, no email, internet, IP phone etc. They'll come back crying before lunch time.
So then it is at least a $2000 problem than right? They have to sequence your healthy tissue and the tumor to determine what will kill one and not the other. Also assuming that the tumor doesn't have multiple types of mutations.
I disagree. The idea has value to someone that knows how to market, build factories etc. Since it is rare that one person will know how to do something or even know how to determine if someone they are planning on hiring to do it is competent making things patentable actually helps. You know longer have to be interested in doing the whole thing yourself or know people that can. They can find you and you can pass off that risk to them the people better able to estimate the cost of execution, probability of market success etc.
As mentioned by another poster genes change, they also get more or less activated depending on environmental factors, chance events etc. Everyone would likely have hundreds of things that their gene says they are more likely to get in their lifetime. They would then have to be continually monitored to see if those genes have become active, would get paranoid when having kids. "Oh my God you have the same really low risk gene as I do and it has been shown in a couple contradictory papers to have a slight correlation to a higher than average chance of clumsiness we shouldn't have kids then just to be safe.". Not to mention the big brother risk where something is shown to make it more likely that you'd be a criminal. I could see the FBI saying something like "Oh every serial killer has this gene lets have these people all report in once a month with what they did and were they were "just in case". Even if only 0.001% of people with that gene turn into killers they'd still piss all over your freedom because they know that the killers are all in that group somewhere. "What you don't want to make our streets safe? Do you have something to hide?"
Or the more basic: insurance companies just use the hundred things that you might get based on your genes as an excuse to jack your premiums. "You have no family history, well you've just been lucky but you are a higher risk because you have this gene so we are going to have to charge you more."
Cost of chemicals? Machines I think cost in the neighborhood of 100-300k. Doing a complete sequence in less than a day would be great but still not really practical. Is a lab going to have 100 of these bad boys or are only ~250 people (assuming labs don't work weekends) going to get sequenced a year per hospital or whatever? Gene sequencing in general isn't very scientific they don't start with a testable hypothesis and then do measurements. They try to test everything and then come up with a hypothesis to explain it. Having your genes sequenced completely is most likely not necessary. What is needed is a better understanding of what is important and just sequencing those parts. I don't need a $1000 test to tell me what colour my hair is.
Patents need to have value in themselves though. If I come up with a brilliant idea for a new vacuum cleaner I need to be able to license it (which implies that the patent has value) or sell it since I don't want to spend the rest of my life dealing with/making vacuum cleaners. My value is coming up with ideas not running vacuum cleaner factories.
Interesting. I lived in Dresden which is in Sachsen apparently in the middle of the pack. Could be they were radiators but the flats had a boiler? In Canada you generally don't have radiators in your rooms unless you are using electric. Schools have them and a boiler often but for housing it is either radiator with electricity and a register and forced air if you have gas (large majority of houses).
Hard to do because a lot of companies are only worth their patents. All the companies going bankrupt would have nothing to sell to recoup money for their creditors/shareholders etc. I agree a good idea but hard to implement (both yours and mine).
Yeah. Lots will argue that the army is used as a terror weapon often too. One idiot drops a really crappily made Syrian rocket into a parking lot and maybe kills a couple people. Israel drives on through with tanks blows up a few apartment buildings, arrests a crap load of people and builds a bunch more settlements. No declaration of war, no conversation with the Palestinian government etc. Reminds me of a Sepultura song:
Tanks on the streets Confronting police Bleeding the Plebs Raging crowd Burning cars Bloodshed starts Who'll be alive?!
Chaos A.D. Army in siege Total alarm I'm sick of this Inside the state War is created No man's land What is this shit?!
Refuse/Resist Refuse
Funny also the song starts with a heart beat: Max Cavalera's (son? kid anyways) named Zyon. (maybe pronounced differently in Portuegese but funny though).
Read an article a while back about drug patents. I think they actually had a proposed law not sure which country, but anyways it was to tie the reimbursement rate to the marginal value of the new drug. Ie. if your new drug is only just as good as the next best alternative of care you get no premium. If it is 20% better (hard to measure but their is quality of life measures that can be used) than you get a 20% premium or some multiple of that anyways. The beauty of this is if they ratchet up what the standard of care is every few years than the patients don't really matter any more. You get a few years of premiums when you are actually a premium product, if doctors get brain washed into prescribing prozaic when something else is better than they bill at a lower price for the lower quality of care they are giving you not a premium price because they are selling you the patiented product (not sure if Prozaic is still on patent but just an example).
Software needs a mechanism like that IMHO. Pricing for licensing should be in proportion to the benefit added. A $50 fee per phone for the ability to have a "post on Facebook" button of something like that is ridiculous but if it is the whole phone OS than maybe. Similarly with dev toolkits but they get away with it because they just charge you once. If you just want a nice pie chart widget you shouldn't have to drop 3k for all the other controls that a vendor decides to throw in. I'm sorry I'm not making a car sim so I don't need 20 speedometer chart types:-) So often I run into things like that where I could justify paying say $50 to save me an afternoon building something myself/browsing on crazy hoping to find a non-broken example code that I can use but end up with a multi-thousand dollar tool that does the little thing I need plus 200 othe things I don't care a less for. Mah off topic rant but any control builders out there offer a la carte options. I'll pay a 2-5X premium for a single control rather than buy hundreds that I likely will never use before the current tech is obsolete.
Do they not own the patents any more, were they invalidated or worked around? 17 years or whatever doesn't seem to have passed since the magic mouse or whatever iGadget it was that come out with touch first. I realize years of development but by my guess there should still be 10 years or so left on that patent. I think with the iPhone it was more of Apple locked down all the suppliers and then sold like hotcakes sucking up all potential supply for a year or two. It wasn't a patent issue I don't think just supplier issue (if you have a contract saying I get all the widgets I want first and you start using a lot of widgets the suppliers can't give any to anyone else).
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Via online/distance ed. We had to go to campus to write the exams though or have someone they approved of proctor us. They usually let us use our computer though but still they were walking around and checked that at least before the exam you'd shut off your wireless. What really sucked was a stats course where the proof insisted on hand written assignments and exam and specifically noted that if he can't read it he wouldn't give you marks. This after about 10 years out of school where the longest thing I've written was about 1 paragraph and my writing was never good. 3 hrs of writing ferociously hand drawing plots etc. Argh. Nice guy but, argh.
I don't think law has anything to do with it. It is an investigation. What happened in what sequence leading up to the crash. It will be lawyers and victims afterwards that decide who gets sued, charged, fined etc (if their dead good luck) if anyone.
But does anyone else find it funny (in a sick way) that the two agencies involved in flight safety had a mid-air collision? At that point calling in the TSB is like calling in the triads to sort out what happened between the crips and bloods :-) Somehow we need non-biased people in this incident but when it comes to professions we let them police themselves (doctors, accountants, lawyers etc).
The beautiful thing with vi and emacs is syntax highlighting imho. Often I get examples of langauges that I don't actually use myself (but were part of a project I downloaded or whatever). The great thing with Vim and emacs is they usually will highlight things well for you helping you visually figure out some of the syntax to get a quick idea of what is going on in the code. Want to open a Matlab file and just see what it contains not wait 20 sec for matlab to open or settle for ugly text editor monochrome font? Vi is the way to go.
Anyways a lot of the time I find myself looking at code files without the need to edit them so I don't have the need for easy to use editing features I just want it to open quick with highlighting so if it is something like lisp (which I don't know) I can at least get a bit of training wheels to guide me around the code.
Unions ah the 70's just called :-) Seriously though never worked in a union environment, or at least in one where I was part of the union. Also mostly healthcare (essential service, back to work legislation in a clock cycle), military (against the law to form a union), or academic (you can strike but you won't graduate) have been most of my working conditions. Hard to form a union when you are 5 guys in a 500 employee company. Strikes are usually about actual grievances: too little pay, too long hours, etc. This would be more of an experiment: testing the theory that IT has little value, or at best minimum wage in a third world country value.
No you need people there so someone that knows what they are doing can confirm that the backups run, can act if you are being attacked, can create new accounts, remind users how to configure outlook if they move to another computer etc. I wasn't suggesting leave and in one day everything will break so they'll know they need us I meant more like power down the servers and go home for the day.
I know and the internet was broke for 2 hours here. Companies are cheap cheap cheap with internet bandwidth. Perhaps that would change if they were playing on the cloud but I wouldn't count on it. My work for example: 2000 employees in a hospital setting. 20Mbps internet connection and we are a "teaching" hospital (we teach slow students very slowly apparently). Now imagine everyone needing the internet for their word processor, email, pdfs, medical images, browsing, etc. Even "low bandwidth" activities aren't when you have ~600 people at a time all doing it on a 20Mbps connection. One person of those 600 decides to look at a 4D CT set and the network stops for ~50s for everyone. Not good.
Agreed. and BYOD policies mean more time involved in figuring out how to get someones gadget to play nice with the corporate network and more gadgets. If everyone can bring their tablet and phone versus the old way where you had to be important enough to warrant a standardized corporate gadget lots more gadgets per user. Much more gadget types etc. Nothing but work and headaches in the future for Tier 1 guys ... enjoy :-)
I agree. I had a guy interview me that when I told him what I was currently making he said "oh people here eventually make that kind of money but maybe 5-7 years." He even had the nerve to ask me if I had friends that wanted work and they could work for his company too and we could be roommates to share expenses. Really? Experienced software engineers are supposed to wait 5 years to make the same money they currently are and live with roommates to get by. Fantastic. Companies complain about not being able to fill positions because they want Ferrari employees on Civic salaries.
It's not just throttling, chances are their servers don't have something that can handle 4Gbps reliably since their connection likely isn't that large, if they are only serving webpages there is little need (say even a 1MB page) you'd need to get ~500 hits per second to need that bandwidth (43M a day) chances are you don't. People that would go nuts for this: distributed nightly backups, HD content uncompressed I think is pretty close to this size (not talking BR but straight from the cameera streaming) one connection per building kind of setups etc. I can see ISPs adding a box to an apartment building and then selling 250MBps to ~20 apartments rather than having to manage the boxes somewhere else/per flat hookup etc).
Make it $50-100 and you'll see some demand :-)
Simple solution to get management to understand the value of IT have a no IT day. One day, no email, internet, IP phone etc. They'll come back crying before lunch time.
Shitheads will be shitheads.
So then it is at least a $2000 problem than right? They have to sequence your healthy tissue and the tumor to determine what will kill one and not the other. Also assuming that the tumor doesn't have multiple types of mutations.
I disagree. The idea has value to someone that knows how to market, build factories etc. Since it is rare that one person will know how to do something or even know how to determine if someone they are planning on hiring to do it is competent making things patentable actually helps. You know longer have to be interested in doing the whole thing yourself or know people that can. They can find you and you can pass off that risk to them the people better able to estimate the cost of execution, probability of market success etc.
As mentioned by another poster genes change, they also get more or less activated depending on environmental factors, chance events etc. Everyone would likely have hundreds of things that their gene says they are more likely to get in their lifetime. They would then have to be continually monitored to see if those genes have become active, would get paranoid when having kids. "Oh my God you have the same really low risk gene as I do and it has been shown in a couple contradictory papers to have a slight correlation to a higher than average chance of clumsiness we shouldn't have kids then just to be safe.". Not to mention the big brother risk where something is shown to make it more likely that you'd be a criminal. I could see the FBI saying something like "Oh every serial killer has this gene lets have these people all report in once a month with what they did and were they were "just in case". Even if only 0.001% of people with that gene turn into killers they'd still piss all over your freedom because they know that the killers are all in that group somewhere. "What you don't want to make our streets safe? Do you have something to hide?"
Or the more basic: insurance companies just use the hundred things that you might get based on your genes as an excuse to jack your premiums. "You have no family history, well you've just been lucky but you are a higher risk because you have this gene so we are going to have to charge you more."
Not to mention not all genes are active not sure if the sequencing would also say which ones are active too.
Cost of chemicals? Machines I think cost in the neighborhood of 100-300k. Doing a complete sequence in less than a day would be great but still not really practical. Is a lab going to have 100 of these bad boys or are only ~250 people (assuming labs don't work weekends) going to get sequenced a year per hospital or whatever? Gene sequencing in general isn't very scientific they don't start with a testable hypothesis and then do measurements. They try to test everything and then come up with a hypothesis to explain it. Having your genes sequenced completely is most likely not necessary. What is needed is a better understanding of what is important and just sequencing those parts. I don't need a $1000 test to tell me what colour my hair is.
Patents need to have value in themselves though. If I come up with a brilliant idea for a new vacuum cleaner I need to be able to license it (which implies that the patent has value) or sell it since I don't want to spend the rest of my life dealing with/making vacuum cleaners. My value is coming up with ideas not running vacuum cleaner factories.
Interesting. I lived in Dresden which is in Sachsen apparently in the middle of the pack. Could be they were radiators but the flats had a boiler? In Canada you generally don't have radiators in your rooms unless you are using electric. Schools have them and a boiler often but for housing it is either radiator with electricity and a register and forced air if you have gas (large majority of houses).
Yeah but they were people that belonged there that just wanted their own country, oh wait where have I heard that before ;-)
Hard to do because a lot of companies are only worth their patents. All the companies going bankrupt would have nothing to sell to recoup money for their creditors/shareholders etc. I agree a good idea but hard to implement (both yours and mine).
Yeah. Lots will argue that the army is used as a terror weapon often too. One idiot drops a really crappily made Syrian rocket into a parking lot and maybe kills a couple people. Israel drives on through with tanks blows up a few apartment buildings, arrests a crap load of people and builds a bunch more settlements. No declaration of war, no conversation with the Palestinian government etc. Reminds me of a Sepultura song:
Tanks on the streets
Confronting police
Bleeding the Plebs
Raging crowd
Burning cars
Bloodshed starts
Who'll be alive?!
Chaos A.D.
Army in siege
Total alarm
I'm sick of this
Inside the state
War is created
No man's land
What is this shit?!
Refuse/Resist
Refuse
Funny also the song starts with a heart beat: Max Cavalera's (son? kid anyways) named Zyon. (maybe pronounced differently in Portuegese but funny though).
Read an article a while back about drug patents. I think they actually had a proposed law not sure which country, but anyways it was to tie the reimbursement rate to the marginal value of the new drug. Ie. if your new drug is only just as good as the next best alternative of care you get no premium. If it is 20% better (hard to measure but their is quality of life measures that can be used) than you get a 20% premium or some multiple of that anyways. The beauty of this is if they ratchet up what the standard of care is every few years than the patients don't really matter any more. You get a few years of premiums when you are actually a premium product, if doctors get brain washed into prescribing prozaic when something else is better than they bill at a lower price for the lower quality of care they are giving you not a premium price because they are selling you the patiented product (not sure if Prozaic is still on patent but just an example).
Software needs a mechanism like that IMHO. Pricing for licensing should be in proportion to the benefit added. A $50 fee per phone for the ability to have a "post on Facebook" button of something like that is ridiculous but if it is the whole phone OS than maybe. Similarly with dev toolkits but they get away with it because they just charge you once. If you just want a nice pie chart widget you shouldn't have to drop 3k for all the other controls that a vendor decides to throw in. I'm sorry I'm not making a car sim so I don't need 20 speedometer chart types :-) So often I run into things like that where I could justify paying say $50 to save me an afternoon building something myself/browsing on crazy hoping to find a non-broken example code that I can use but end up with a multi-thousand dollar tool that does the little thing I need plus 200 othe things I don't care a less for. Mah off topic rant but any control builders out there offer a la carte options. I'll pay a 2-5X premium for a single control rather than buy hundreds that I likely will never use before the current tech is obsolete.
Do they not own the patents any more, were they invalidated or worked around? 17 years or whatever doesn't seem to have passed since the magic mouse or whatever iGadget it was that come out with touch first. I realize years of development but by my guess there should still be 10 years or so left on that patent. I think with the iPhone it was more of Apple locked down all the suppliers and then sold like hotcakes sucking up all potential supply for a year or two. It wasn't a patent issue I don't think just supplier issue (if you have a contract saying I get all the widgets I want first and you start using a lot of widgets the suppliers can't give any to anyone else).