Ding ding ding, and its exactly this mentality that is continuing the decline of the sense of community
JackMeyhoff implied that this was a uniquely American problem, and I pointed out that it isn't. If people don't understand that this phenomenon is common to all rich, Western nations, people can't address it.
No, the real problem is idiots like you who reduce discussions like this to phrases like "ding ding ding".
The disease involves the buildup of plaques in the thalamus; that would eventually kill you even without sleep deprivation. So, most likely, both death and insomnia are separate manifestations of a common, underlying, fatal disease.
In the wild it is dangerous to be unconscious for hours at a time. If it wasn't absolutely necessary, then nature would have found a way to avoid it.
In the wild, sleep is a good thing: it keeps animals quiet, motionless, and out of trouble when they can't function and/or when their energy balance would be bad. They still wake up immediately if there is danger.
Animals can easily adapt to avoid sleep if their ecological niche requires it, but for most, sleep is a good thing from the point of survival.
Being in a state of very low alertness in a jungle is something which would have been filtered out by evolution long long ago.
Actually, resting motionless and quietly in a safe place when you can't see and can't defend yourself is a good thing for survival, and if a predator should find you, you're no worse off, since you wake up immediately.
In fact, one hypothesis about the origin of sleep is that it occurred exactly in order to keep animals out of trouble.
This sort of bullshit is going on all over the world. Some European countries force you to pay hundreds of dollars a year to the government just to access the Internet (in addition to ISP fees). In the UK, you are being watched and recorded wherever you go and lifetime memberships to the upper house are handed out by corrupt politicians in return form money. The EU took DMCA and carnivore-type programs and made it even tighter. Censorship in Asia is even more severe. Chances are that your country is infringing on personal liberties even more than the US, and chances are that its citizens are such herd animals that they aren't even bothering to complain about it.
So, what country are you from that you think you can point fingers? Come on, we want to know.
On Sept. 3, a man leaving Orlando, Fla., filed a lengthy complaint because he said a screener touched him "like no man ever has -- not even my doctor." "This type of bodily inspection, privately or publicly, is undignified," he wrote. "Have terrorists succeeded in making us that scared of each other?"
Well, again, I think this is more a problem of how it's working right now than a problem with how it would work if it were working correctly.
The way things work is determined by laws, so if things aren't working correctly right now, then the laws need to be changed.
I actually think patents tend to encourage a bit of innovation,
Sure. And at the same time, they also discourage a lot of innovation. Until proponents of patents can conclusively demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the costs, there is no justification for having a patent system at all.
The idea for a patent system is that you can register your idea for a reasonable period, after which it becomes public.
Of course, that's the idea. That's a potential benefit. There are also costs, including the fact that patents not only encourage innovation, they also discourage it. The question is whether the benefits outweigh the costs, and it is far from "self-evident" that they do. In fact, in a number of application areas, economists have done the math and found that the benefits are smaller than the costs.
I'm not sure what you mean about things being "hidden" in patents. If you patent something, it's not hidden by definition, because you have to spell it out.
Patents often leave out essential detail that is necessary to create useful implementations, yet such patents routinely hold up in court. As a result, patents fail to accomplish their intended purpose: disclosure in a form that would allow the public to use the invention after the patent terms is over.
I think you've got it backwards, actually. Implementation is cheap, once the idea is understood. If the only barrier was implementation, then there would be nothing new, only things that we knew could be done, that we have finally become able to produce.
And the evidence for this assertion is... what exactly?
The reason for the patent system is to keep people from hiding their ideas away
That is the justification. But if you look at how the patent system is actually being used, people still hide away a lot of important stuff, and the actual underlying inventions are often developed at universities and with public funds.
I don't disagree that the patent system is completely screwed up right now, but the solution is not to throw it away. It has a purpose.
It has an intended purpose; whether it actually accomplishes that purpose is something that has never been established.
FWIW, I don't think sudden changes in the patent system are a good idea. But there are a bunch of things that need to be implemented over time:
* standards for patentability need to be raised considerably * patent holders need to submit working samples and schematics/source code for any product they intend to protect * the presumption that an issued patent is valid needs to be removed; during a court challenge, the patent holder needs to defend the validity of the patent * it needs to become easier to challenge patents * lack of enforcement or use needs to lead to a loss of the patent * we need to use public policy to decide what classes of inventions ought to be patentable * groups like MPEGLA may need to get broken up under anti-trust enforcement
Medical Device manufacturers, or their proxy, DO fully validate closed source software that is used in critical medical devices.
Well, you have failed to come up with any reasonable argument for why that should be cheaper for COTS than for open source software. The only reason it would be cheaper is if COTS is audited less thoroughly.
Just because random joe blow on the Internet doesn't get to browse through a codebase doesn't render it automatically suspect.
Of course, I'm assuming that the people doing the validation have access to the COTS code under NDAs. That's not the point. In fact, source code access, while necessary, is essentially meaningless by itself for validation. Do you seriously think that looking at a few million lines of production C code lets you say anything about whether the software is suitable for use in critical environments?
What renders COTS automatically suspect is that you don't get access to all the development metadata. In fact, in many cases, you can't even control or even verify whether the software you are running is the software you audited.
You're also misrepresenting the FDA software validation guidelines by trying to pretend that FDA software validation amounts to an analysis of the source code; that is not what the guidelines require.
There's nothing at all fraudulent about any of it.
There is something fraudulent about deliberately choosing a category of software that companies know that they have less information on and thereby lets them save money on the validation process. And hopefully, sooner or later, some smart lawyers are going to get big settlements against companies that do that.
With an open source solution, the entire body of code would need to be thoroughly audited and qualified
In principle, open source code needs to be revalidated no more and no less between changes than closed source. The difference is that with closed source code, manufacturers never find out about a lot of changes or bugs, so they can pretend they don't have to validate the code or worry about those bugs.
Hopefully, the courts will sooner or later realize that this use of closed source is not just irresponsible but fraudulent (since device manufacturers are aware that they can't fully validate closed source software) and hold them responsible.
how does one acquire skills? How does one apply learned information to the real world? How do you solve problems, especially ones that you've never seen before? Oh. Right. Intelligence.
Wrong. Intelligence means something much more specific.
The way I see it, either he himself is a genius, or he's surrounded himself by genius advisors, in which case he's at least smart enough to take their advice.
Or, more likely, a political machinery picked a convenient figurehead; all he needs to do is read the teleprompter.
Quite to the contrary: OSS comes with complete, auditable changelogs, cryptographic checksums, full bug databases, and published, down-to-the second correspondences between releases and source code. Almost no commercial vendor (certainly not Microsoft) gives you that level of information and detail.
There are only "fewer versions" of software like Excel because commercial companies often patch software without changing the version number, and because they leave many known bugs unfixed until a major new release. So, when you choose COTS, you are running an unknown version of a software that has likely numerous bugs that the vendor knows about, but you don't know about.
if it is a largely used piece of software (say Excel), it is likely its usage in other medical instruments has been validated before.
You mean the piece of software that thinks that 850*77.1=100000?
FDA has to be somewhat lenient with respect to COTS, because otherwise instruments would cost too much do design if everyone had to reinvent the spreadsheet and validate it.
Ah, the truth comes out: the FDA can't properly audit COTS, and medical device manufacturers are using that in order to cut corners on software auditing and validation. Heck, if the bugs are secret and the patches are unnumbered, your company can always claim that you just didn't know. But you do know, you just choose to ignore it. Let's hope this will come out in court next time one of your devices in involved in medical malpractice.
I've been involved in the design and implementation of a few medical and bio-medical instruments.
Scary.
Let's hope a bunch of companies like yours will be sued out of existence for trying to circumvent proper software validation by hiding behind commercial vendors. Maybe then people like you will get the message.
Bush is a political genius. I don't agree with his policies any more than most people on Slashdot, but the way he's going about getting things done is evidence of being extremely intelligent
No, it is not. Being able to get things done may be a sign of political and social skills, but those skills are not the same as "intelligence".
Some people have been trying to muddy the waters by renaming "social skills" to "social intelligence"; if you like that terminology, then one can say that Bush may have high social intelligence, but there is little evidence that he has high general intelligence.
The "Bushisms" nonsense is an act he puts on to make Joe Sixpack like him more, and thus vote for him.
Well, dishonesty and deception also can be a path to success.
It's to allow the originator to be reimbursed for their efforts.
That is incorrect. The justification for patents is their benefits for society. Monetary rewards for the originators is merely a means to an end. If there were no benefit to society, then there would be no justification for giving the originators any rewards. In that way, patents and copyrights are fundamentally different from property.
We have more content than at all other times in history combined and languages, machinery and systems are more interoperable than at any other time. But you don't see it.
Of course, we have more content and interoperability than ever before. However, it is erroneous for you to attribute that to patents or copyrights; the primary factor in this growth is clearly technological, in particular, since much of that growth occurred during a time during which copyrights and patents were less restrictive than they are today. I would argue that we would have even more content and even better interoperability with shorter copyright terms and stricter patentability criteria. But people like you just don't understand the issues.
Only if you have the hackeneyed view of intelligence = good at math.
No, I don't. Furthermore, the definition of "intelligence" isn't decided by "views", it's decided by the scientific community.
Consider other intelligences like: spacial; Jimi Hendrix played the guitar like a genius. musical: Johann Sebastian Bach wrote and played the most intricate Fugues. The list goes on and on...
Neither Hendrix nor Bach needed to have had exceptional intelligence to achieve what they did. See idiot savant.
The underlying assumption here is that being smarter helps people be successful, but the correlation between intelligence and success is relatively small.
So, many of the drugs may not be doing a whole lot to help people achieve more success.
Some banks offer one-time credit card numbers that you can just generate dynamically over the web. Unlike gift cards, they don't cost extra, you don't have to prepay, and you can get them in any amount you need.
but if you want to make a penny on it you can't unless you own the property rights.
This is wrong. In the days of DRM, compilers, 1000% annual growth, video on demand, etc., there are plenty of ways of making money without copyrights or patents. The justification for copyrights and patents is that, on balance, they make information flow more freely, allow for more interoperability, etc. I don't see that happening.
Copyrights and patents need teeth, and the teeth they need are that they are valid *only* if the information that they cover is actually publicly usable and can fall into the public domain after expiration of the copyright/patent. No DRM'ed media or binary-only computer program should be covered.
Slashdot Mirror
Or idiots like you who do not realize that this is exactly what i'm agreeing with.
I realized that. That doesn't make starting a response with "ding ding ding" any more appropriate.
Ding ding ding, and its exactly this mentality that is continuing the decline of the sense of community
JackMeyhoff implied that this was a uniquely American problem, and I pointed out that it isn't. If people don't understand that this phenomenon is common to all rich, Western nations, people can't address it.
No, the real problem is idiots like you who reduce discussions like this to phrases like "ding ding ding".
The disease involves the buildup of plaques in the thalamus; that would eventually kill you even without sleep deprivation. So, most likely, both death and insomnia are separate manifestations of a common, underlying, fatal disease.
In the wild it is dangerous to be unconscious for hours at a time. If it wasn't absolutely necessary, then nature would have found a way to avoid it.
In the wild, sleep is a good thing: it keeps animals quiet, motionless, and out of trouble when they can't function and/or when their energy balance would be bad. They still wake up immediately if there is danger.
Animals can easily adapt to avoid sleep if their ecological niche requires it, but for most, sleep is a good thing from the point of survival.
Being in a state of very low alertness in a jungle is something which would have been filtered out by evolution long long ago.
Actually, resting motionless and quietly in a safe place when you can't see and can't defend yourself is a good thing for survival, and if a predator should find you, you're no worse off, since you wake up immediately.
In fact, one hypothesis about the origin of sleep is that it occurred exactly in order to keep animals out of trouble.
The laws still exist, but they were ruled unconstitutional.
But there are still plenty of former British colonies that have such ridiculous laws.
This sort of bullshit is going on all over the world. Some European countries force you to pay hundreds of dollars a year to the government just to access the Internet (in addition to ISP fees). In the UK, you are being watched and recorded wherever you go and lifetime memberships to the upper house are handed out by corrupt politicians in return form money. The EU took DMCA and carnivore-type programs and made it even tighter. Censorship in Asia is even more severe. Chances are that your country is infringing on personal liberties even more than the US, and chances are that its citizens are such herd animals that they aren't even bothering to complain about it.
So, what country are you from that you think you can point fingers? Come on, we want to know.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22346693/
Lithion ion batteries don't use lithium metal; when they catch fire, it's not a "metal fire".
Well, again, I think this is more a problem of how it's working right now than a problem with how it would work if it were working correctly.
The way things work is determined by laws, so if things aren't working correctly right now, then the laws need to be changed.
I actually think patents tend to encourage a bit of innovation,
Sure. And at the same time, they also discourage a lot of innovation. Until proponents of patents can conclusively demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the costs, there is no justification for having a patent system at all.
Buy the Dell and install Ubuntu Linux on it: you get nice hardware and nice software.
The idea for a patent system is that you can register your idea for a reasonable period, after which it becomes public.
Of course, that's the idea. That's a potential benefit. There are also costs, including the fact that patents not only encourage innovation, they also discourage it. The question is whether the benefits outweigh the costs, and it is far from "self-evident" that they do. In fact, in a number of application areas, economists have done the math and found that the benefits are smaller than the costs.
I'm not sure what you mean about things being "hidden" in patents. If you patent something, it's not hidden by definition, because you have to spell it out.
Patents often leave out essential detail that is necessary to create useful implementations, yet such patents routinely hold up in court. As a result, patents fail to accomplish their intended purpose: disclosure in a form that would allow the public to use the invention after the patent terms is over.
I think you've got it backwards, actually. Implementation is cheap, once the idea is understood. If the only barrier was implementation, then there would be nothing new, only things that we knew could be done, that we have finally become able to produce.
And the evidence for this assertion is... what exactly?
The reason for the patent system is to keep people from hiding their ideas away
That is the justification. But if you look at how the patent system is actually being used, people still hide away a lot of important stuff, and the actual underlying inventions are often developed at universities and with public funds.
I don't disagree that the patent system is completely screwed up right now, but the solution is not to throw it away. It has a purpose.
It has an intended purpose; whether it actually accomplishes that purpose is something that has never been established.
FWIW, I don't think sudden changes in the patent system are a good idea. But there are a bunch of things that need to be implemented over time:
* standards for patentability need to be raised considerably
* patent holders need to submit working samples and schematics/source code for any product they intend to protect
* the presumption that an issued patent is valid needs to be removed; during a court challenge, the patent holder needs to defend the validity of the patent
* it needs to become easier to challenge patents
* lack of enforcement or use needs to lead to a loss of the patent
* we need to use public policy to decide what classes of inventions ought to be patentable
* groups like MPEGLA may need to get broken up under anti-trust enforcement
Medical Device manufacturers, or their proxy, DO fully validate closed source software that is used in critical medical devices.
Well, you have failed to come up with any reasonable argument for why that should be cheaper for COTS than for open source software. The only reason it would be cheaper is if COTS is audited less thoroughly.
Just because random joe blow on the Internet doesn't get to browse through a codebase doesn't render it automatically suspect.
Of course, I'm assuming that the people doing the validation have access to the COTS code under NDAs. That's not the point. In fact, source code access, while necessary, is essentially meaningless by itself for validation. Do you seriously think that looking at a few million lines of production C code lets you say anything about whether the software is suitable for use in critical environments?
What renders COTS automatically suspect is that you don't get access to all the development metadata. In fact, in many cases, you can't even control or even verify whether the software you are running is the software you audited.
You're also misrepresenting the FDA software validation guidelines by trying to pretend that FDA software validation amounts to an analysis of the source code; that is not what the guidelines require.
There's nothing at all fraudulent about any of it.
There is something fraudulent about deliberately choosing a category of software that companies know that they have less information on and thereby lets them save money on the validation process. And hopefully, sooner or later, some smart lawyers are going to get big settlements against companies that do that.
With an open source solution, the entire body of code would need to be thoroughly audited and qualified
In principle, open source code needs to be revalidated no more and no less between changes than closed source. The difference is that with closed source code, manufacturers never find out about a lot of changes or bugs, so they can pretend they don't have to validate the code or worry about those bugs.
Hopefully, the courts will sooner or later realize that this use of closed source is not just irresponsible but fraudulent (since device manufacturers are aware that they can't fully validate closed source software) and hold them responsible.
how does one acquire skills? How does one apply learned information to the real world? How do you solve problems, especially ones that you've never seen before? Oh. Right. Intelligence.
Wrong. Intelligence means something much more specific.
The way I see it, either he himself is a genius, or he's surrounded himself by genius advisors, in which case he's at least smart enough to take their advice.
Or, more likely, a political machinery picked a convenient figurehead; all he needs to do is read the teleprompter.
In contrast, OSS varies a lot and often.
Quite to the contrary: OSS comes with complete, auditable changelogs, cryptographic checksums, full bug databases, and published, down-to-the second correspondences between releases and source code. Almost no commercial vendor (certainly not Microsoft) gives you that level of information and detail.
There are only "fewer versions" of software like Excel because commercial companies often patch software without changing the version number, and because they leave many known bugs unfixed until a major new release. So, when you choose COTS, you are running an unknown version of a software that has likely numerous bugs that the vendor knows about, but you don't know about.
if it is a largely used piece of software (say Excel), it is likely its usage in other medical instruments has been validated before.
You mean the piece of software that thinks that 850*77.1=100000?
FDA has to be somewhat lenient with respect to COTS, because otherwise instruments would cost too much do design if everyone had to reinvent the spreadsheet and validate it.
Ah, the truth comes out: the FDA can't properly audit COTS, and medical device manufacturers are using that in order to cut corners on software auditing and validation. Heck, if the bugs are secret and the patches are unnumbered, your company can always claim that you just didn't know. But you do know, you just choose to ignore it. Let's hope this will come out in court next time one of your devices in involved in medical malpractice.
I've been involved in the design and implementation of a few medical and bio-medical instruments.
Scary.
Let's hope a bunch of companies like yours will be sued out of existence for trying to circumvent proper software validation by hiding behind commercial vendors. Maybe then people like you will get the message.
Bush is a political genius. I don't agree with his policies any more than most people on Slashdot, but the way he's going about getting things done is evidence of being extremely intelligent
No, it is not. Being able to get things done may be a sign of political and social skills, but those skills are not the same as "intelligence".
Some people have been trying to muddy the waters by renaming "social skills" to "social intelligence"; if you like that terminology, then one can say that Bush may have high social intelligence, but there is little evidence that he has high general intelligence.
The "Bushisms" nonsense is an act he puts on to make Joe Sixpack like him more, and thus vote for him.
Well, dishonesty and deception also can be a path to success.
Copyright doesn't make sense and probably won't be enforceable abroad.
The usual thing to do in these cases is to get a trademark; they might be able to obtain and enforce that internationally.
medical devices running open-source software are extremely rare because of the perceived difficulty in obtaining FDA validation
Do you have any pointers to actual decision makers talking about this "perceived difficulty"?
And why would anybody think anyway that open source software should have a harder time getting approved than closed source software?
It's to allow the originator to be reimbursed for their efforts.
That is incorrect. The justification for patents is their benefits for society. Monetary rewards for the originators is merely a means to an end. If there were no benefit to society, then there would be no justification for giving the originators any rewards. In that way, patents and copyrights are fundamentally different from property.
We have more content than at all other times in history combined and languages, machinery and systems are more interoperable than at any other time. But you don't see it.
Of course, we have more content and interoperability than ever before. However, it is erroneous for you to attribute that to patents or copyrights; the primary factor in this growth is clearly technological, in particular, since much of that growth occurred during a time during which copyrights and patents were less restrictive than they are today. I would argue that we would have even more content and even better interoperability with shorter copyright terms and stricter patentability criteria. But people like you just don't understand the issues.
Only if you have the hackeneyed view of intelligence = good at math.
No, I don't. Furthermore, the definition of "intelligence" isn't decided by "views", it's decided by the scientific community.
Consider other intelligences like: spacial; Jimi Hendrix played the guitar like a genius. musical: Johann Sebastian Bach wrote and played the most intricate Fugues. The list goes on and on...
Neither Hendrix nor Bach needed to have had exceptional intelligence to achieve what they did. See idiot savant.
The underlying assumption here is that being smarter helps people be successful, but the correlation between intelligence and success is relatively small.
So, many of the drugs may not be doing a whole lot to help people achieve more success.
Some banks offer one-time credit card numbers that you can just generate dynamically over the web. Unlike gift cards, they don't cost extra, you don't have to prepay, and you can get them in any amount you need.
but if you want to make a penny on it you can't unless you own the property rights.
This is wrong. In the days of DRM, compilers, 1000% annual growth, video on demand, etc., there are plenty of ways of making money without copyrights or patents. The justification for copyrights and patents is that, on balance, they make information flow more freely, allow for more interoperability, etc. I don't see that happening.
Copyrights and patents need teeth, and the teeth they need are that they are valid *only* if the information that they cover is actually publicly usable and can fall into the public domain after expiration of the copyright/patent. No DRM'ed media or binary-only computer program should be covered.