Re:Darl does NOT deserve ANY respect.
on
SCOrched Earth
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· Score: 1
This is what worries me about SCO: That their army of lawyers will wreak terrible legal havoc, not because SCO was right, or because SCO suffered damages--I strongly believe that neither of these is the case. Their army of lawyers will pull off Bill Gates style, "I don't understand your question," when the question is, "Does X concern you?" They'll pull off Bill Clinton style, "That depends on what 'is' means." They'll find loopholes and language in the law that nobody ever thought was there, with newly made-up implications that no legislator intended or thought would occur, to cause as much damage as possible to the Linux community and the free software community in general.
Except that they began this little escapade by suing IBM and their Rabid Doberman Lawyer Attack Team (TM). If there are IP lawyers in the world better than those employed by IBM, there aren't many.
Darl and company have a limited time to pump this nonsense before they slag down onto the ash heap of business. Leaping into a brush chipper isn't much of a business plan.
>Just my personnal opinion, but the problem people have with The Matrix ending is peace. War is so much more glamour these days..
Actually, my problem is more with formulaic overwrought feature-length advertisements for video games. But I probably missed the point of Revolutions. Certainly others liked it, including people I like.
LOTR, on the other hand, is something I'm really looking forward to. It helps that it started as a real live book with a plot and characters and everything. Actually, more than just a book, but the classic that is the ancestor of nearly every fantasy novel around.
From somewhere beyond medical school (active pediatrician, actually):
First, some definitions. "Virulent" describes the ability of a bug to cause disease. "Resistant" describes the (in)ability of a particular antibiotic to kill a bug. The two aren't the same, although you'd be hard-pressed to find a reporter who can tell the difference.
Staph Aureus is a relatively virulent bug. It likes to infect skin and soft tissues, it elaborates a variety of toxins, and I've seen otherwise healthy people die of it. It's the bug that causes one of the forms of Toxic Shock Syndrome.
None of the MRSA or VISA (Vancomycin Intermediate Staph Aureus) or VRSA strains are particularly more virulent, but they all have the ability to live in the presence of methicillin, and, in the case of the VxSA bugs, in the presence of some amount of vancomycin. There are still antibiotics that will kill the bugs, but since vancomycin was the one that ALWAYS worked, people got pretty worried about not having it available.
You're right that most of these are nosocomial, but recent reports (a year ago or so) of people dying of community-acquired MRSA makes this a less comfortable assumption than it used to be.
Every time you use an antibiotic, you create resistant organisms (or rather, you select the organisms that are resistant by killing the rest). In most cases that doesn't matter, because you reduce the load of organisms enough that the body can take care of the remainder. In some individuals (especially those with chronic diseases that make it harder for their own systems to clear the bugs) you never do get complete killing; those people (the old, the sick, and the congenitally disabled) are the ones that most often develop clinically significant resistant organisms. They're also the ones most likely to need whole bunches of antibiotics, so it's a hard problem.
I've lost count of the number of people who have asked me for antibiotics for their colds. I don't bother talking about resistance, because nobody cares (or believes it will happen in THEIR body). Instead I (a) explain that they're going to get better, that (b) fluids and analgesics are the best ways to keep from feeling too bad, and that (c) if I gave them antibiotics, I could give them a really nice case of diarrhea to go with their colds. Most people respond well to this line of argument.
I also explain how to look for signs of an opportunistic infection (otitis, pneumonia, etc.), and that I WILL treat those if it's indicated. Most of the patients/parents I work with seem to go away happy, and I can relax because good old Amoxicillin (high-dose BID, natch) continues to work like clockwork the few times I need to give it.
As a practicing physician (and software engineer since 1978, so don't get in a hissy fit), I have very little use for the program. Not that I don't find the idea of an expert system for diagnosis to be interesting, but it's clinically useless for most of us.
It may come as a surprise to most people, but diagnosis is not the hard part of medicine. Oh, sure, there are the occasional wierdies like the one in the article (and then I'd love to have the program), but mostly the diagnosis is either (a) not remotely in doubt, (b) irrelevant to the treatment (I don't care WHICH virus gave you diarrhea, I just care about hydration and mental status, and I don't need a computer program to help there), or (c) not something I need right now.
Clinical medicine is not mostly about diagnosis. It's mostly about disease management, triage, clinical efficiency, relationship building, and a huge dose of having to deal with every person that walks in the door, regardless of IQ, regardless of psychiatric diagnosis, and regardless of what I personally would like to do with them. Where excatly some peculiar expert system fits in with all that is something of a mystery to me.
(Oh, and surgical medicine is all of the above, plus time-critical eye-hand coordination, plus the routine inability to diagnose anything until you're in the OR, and the expert system is stone useless about then.)
New and better tools to solve problems that don't come up very often are interesting, but hardly something that will revolutionize medicine.
Not to blame everything on Microsoft, but The Register had a good article on this a while back. Why the press can't figure out that they're complementary standards, not competitive ones, is beyond me.
"Most Americans" can barely read, get most of their information from the television, and have a vague idea that "global warming is bad." They have no clue how the effect is measured. They don't know that there are any climate models, much less how they work. They don't understand what "greenhouse gases" are, and if they discovered that the Kyoto accord would have directly decreased their standard of living, they'd never have supported it. Actually, they didn't support it. They just said that it would be a good idea if those penguins didn't die. They had no idea that their profligate use of energy might have to be reduced.
I noticed two articles in my morning paper (and by the way, note that even the newspapers, as insipid and simplistic as they are, are dying for lack of interest) on global warming. One was on Peruvian glaciers; the other was on penguins. Neither article gave any details on how global warming was supposed to work, or the kind of regulations and controls that would be required to implement what some people think are the appropriate solutions. And neither article will register at all on "most Americans."
It's not a reasoned scientific debate. It's not a question with a deterministic answer. If regulatory action is taken, it will be in the absence of any useful scientific discussion. If regulatory action is not taken, it will be similarly ill-supported. It's a freaking sideshow, and it'll have the half-life they all have. Remember Farm Aid? Remember famine in Ethiopia? Remember land mines? You can be damn sure that "most Americans" don't.
Personal opinion? The first greenhouse gas we ought to get rid of is the hot air generated on the whole stupid subject.
... it has been proven that bacteria without antibiotic resistance successfully displace and kill off bacteria with antibiotic resistance in the wild... why? because to defend themselves against antibiotics, resistant bacteria are exerting a hefty metabolic toll in order to survive... without antibiotics to worry about, those bacteria who are free to devote all of their metabolic efforts to survival and reproduction will outcompete their metabolically-hobbled cousins...
Actually, that's not quite true. Some antibiotic resistance mechanisms, such as altered binding proteins, don't seem to slow the bacteria down much. You find them in nature all the time. Other mechanisms, like cellular pumps that actively punt antibiotics out of the bacterium, are much more demanding. It depends on the mechanism, the bacteria, and the threat environment.
Remember, most antibiotics and antibiotic resistance evolved long before people were involved.
More on the topic, does anyone else wonder how the heck you're going to sell "bacteria-infested" clothing to the average idiot in a clothing store?
I can just see the ads now, with happy singing bacteria dancing through the clothing fibers. Anybody want to suggest a catchy slogan?
Maybe it's just me, but I really hate things that blink, flash, or do cute things at the periphery of a page I'm trying to read. So I don't let animated GIFs move and I keep most scripting, including Java, off by default. Interestingly, the only things that this really breaks are banner ads, most of which deliberately start with an ambiguous image. Since I have animations turned off, I never see anything else.
Who cares what's being advertised if the ad itself is illegible?
"School violence" isn't a reality. Oh, violence occurs in schools all the time, but what the casual news commentator means by "school violence" -- the lone crazed gunman in the nation's schools -- is so rare as to be irrelevant to reality. But as fantasy, it's priceless.
I live in Colorado. I remember the gloating tone in the voice of Kathy Walker of KOA radio, the first news anchor to report, as she happily detailed the first information on the Columbine shooting. It was the best thing to happen to Denver media in a long, long time. They've milked it for months. They'll periodically milk it forever. Why? Not because it's relevant, but because it's entertaining.
We live in a profoundly bored culture. Even on/., we argue a lot about DVDs and MP3s, as if these were somehow important. And, by and large, we're among the LEAST bored people I can find. People look hard for things to keep them interested these days.
And what's more interesting than a real, genuine, life-and-death Cause? Get Involved! Stop Violence! Save Kids! You don't need to know or contribute anything in order to be a part of something really exciting! Heck, School Violence is Hot right now!
You think politicians and school boards are immune to this? What's more interesting, the REAL problems in schools (like lousy teachers, awful curriculum, and general indifference to education), or the thought of some kid with an AK-47? What's easier to deal with? (Hint: since there really isn't a kid with the AK-47, virtually anything you do will work. Happy day!) If enough of your colleagues and voters are on the bandwagon, it doesn't matter if you want to do this or not, you had better do this anyway. When a Cause catches fire, you better help fan the flames.
Pinkerton is responding to this. First, they buy the whole Cause hook, line, and sinker. And second, they know full well that there's money in zealotry, and money is sorta important to them too.
But honestly, they'd do it for free. They'd do it and donate the services if they had to. It's a Cause. It's excitement. It beats being bored.
Not to throw too much cold water on folks eagerly counting their teraherz, but I do note from the article that producing the chip involves using a scanning tunnelling electron microscope to knock hydrogen atoms one by one off a passivated substrate. Makes direct-write electron beam seem pretty straightforward. And even when they do produce the chip, I also note that all they do is attach the molecules; there's no switching or logic being done yet. Again, a simple matter of a little more development. Like, maybe, 20 years?
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Except that they began this little escapade by suing IBM and their Rabid Doberman Lawyer Attack Team (TM). If there are IP lawyers in the world better than those employed by IBM, there aren't many.
Darl and company have a limited time to pump this nonsense before they slag down onto the ash heap of business. Leaping into a brush chipper isn't much of a business plan.
>Just my personnal opinion, but the problem people have with The Matrix ending is peace. War is so much more glamour these days..
Actually, my problem is more with formulaic overwrought feature-length advertisements for video games. But I probably missed the point of Revolutions. Certainly others liked it, including people I like.
LOTR, on the other hand, is something I'm really looking forward to. It helps that it started as a real live book with a plot and characters and everything. Actually, more than just a book, but the classic that is the ancestor of nearly every fantasy novel around.
From somewhere beyond medical school (active pediatrician, actually):
First, some definitions. "Virulent" describes the ability of a bug to cause disease. "Resistant" describes the (in)ability of a particular antibiotic to kill a bug. The two aren't the same, although you'd be hard-pressed to find a reporter who can tell the difference.
Staph Aureus is a relatively virulent bug. It likes to infect skin and soft tissues, it elaborates a variety of toxins, and I've seen otherwise healthy people die of it. It's the bug that causes one of the forms of Toxic Shock Syndrome.
None of the MRSA or VISA (Vancomycin Intermediate Staph Aureus) or VRSA strains are particularly more virulent, but they all have the ability to live in the presence of methicillin, and, in the case of the VxSA bugs, in the presence of some amount of vancomycin. There are still antibiotics that will kill the bugs, but since vancomycin was the one that ALWAYS worked, people got pretty worried about not having it available.
You're right that most of these are nosocomial, but recent reports (a year ago or so) of people dying of community-acquired MRSA makes this a less comfortable assumption than it used to be.
Every time you use an antibiotic, you create resistant organisms (or rather, you select the organisms that are resistant by killing the rest). In most cases that doesn't matter, because you reduce the load of organisms enough that the body can take care of the remainder. In some individuals (especially those with chronic diseases that make it harder for their own systems to clear the bugs) you never do get complete killing; those people (the old, the sick, and the congenitally disabled) are the ones that most often develop clinically significant resistant organisms. They're also the ones most likely to need whole bunches of antibiotics, so it's a hard problem.
I've lost count of the number of people who have asked me for antibiotics for their colds. I don't bother talking about resistance, because nobody cares (or believes it will happen in THEIR body). Instead I (a) explain that they're going to get better, that (b) fluids and analgesics are the best ways to keep from feeling too bad, and that (c) if I gave them antibiotics, I could give them a really nice case of diarrhea to go with their colds. Most people respond well to this line of argument.
I also explain how to look for signs of an opportunistic infection (otitis, pneumonia, etc.), and that I WILL treat those if it's indicated. Most of the patients/parents I work with seem to go away happy, and I can relax because good old Amoxicillin (high-dose BID, natch) continues to work like clockwork the few times I need to give it.
As a practicing physician (and software engineer since 1978, so don't get in a hissy fit), I have very little use for the program. Not that I don't find the idea of an expert system for diagnosis to be interesting, but it's clinically useless for most of us.
It may come as a surprise to most people, but diagnosis is not the hard part of medicine. Oh, sure, there are the occasional wierdies like the one in the article (and then I'd love to have the program), but mostly the diagnosis is either (a) not remotely in doubt, (b) irrelevant to the treatment (I don't care WHICH virus gave you diarrhea, I just care about hydration and mental status, and I don't need a computer program to help there), or (c) not something I need right now.
Clinical medicine is not mostly about diagnosis. It's mostly about disease management, triage, clinical efficiency, relationship building, and a huge dose of having to deal with every person that walks in the door, regardless of IQ, regardless of psychiatric diagnosis, and regardless of what I personally would like to do with them. Where excatly some peculiar expert system fits in with all that is something of a mystery to me.
(Oh, and surgical medicine is all of the above, plus time-critical eye-hand coordination, plus the routine inability to diagnose anything until you're in the OR, and the expert system is stone useless about then.)
New and better tools to solve problems that don't come up very often are interesting, but hardly something that will revolutionize medicine.
Not to blame everything on Microsoft, but The Register had a good article on this a while back. Why the press can't figure out that they're complementary standards, not competitive ones, is beyond me.
"Most Americans" can barely read, get most of their information from the television, and have a vague idea that "global warming is bad." They have no clue how the effect is measured. They don't know that there are any climate models, much less how they work. They don't understand what "greenhouse gases" are, and if they discovered that the Kyoto accord would have directly decreased their standard of living, they'd never have supported it. Actually, they didn't support it. They just said that it would be a good idea if those penguins didn't die. They had no idea that their profligate use of energy might have to be reduced.
I noticed two articles in my morning paper (and by the way, note that even the newspapers, as insipid and simplistic as they are, are dying for lack of interest) on global warming. One was on Peruvian glaciers; the other was on penguins. Neither article gave any details on how global warming was supposed to work, or the kind of regulations and controls that would be required to implement what some people think are the appropriate solutions. And neither article will register at all on "most Americans."
It's not a reasoned scientific debate. It's not a question with a deterministic answer. If regulatory action is taken, it will be in the absence of any useful scientific discussion. If regulatory action is not taken, it will be similarly ill-supported. It's a freaking sideshow, and it'll have the half-life they all have. Remember Farm Aid? Remember famine in Ethiopia? Remember land mines? You can be damn sure that "most Americans" don't.
Personal opinion? The first greenhouse gas we ought to get rid of is the hot air generated on the whole stupid subject.
... it has been proven that bacteria without antibiotic resistance successfully displace and kill off bacteria with antibiotic resistance in the wild... why? because to defend themselves against antibiotics, resistant bacteria are exerting a hefty metabolic toll in order to survive... without antibiotics to worry about, those bacteria who are free to devote all of their metabolic efforts to survival and reproduction will outcompete their metabolically-hobbled cousins...
Actually, that's not quite true. Some antibiotic resistance mechanisms, such as altered binding proteins, don't seem to slow the bacteria down much. You find them in nature all the time. Other mechanisms, like cellular pumps that actively punt antibiotics out of the bacterium, are much more demanding. It depends on the mechanism, the bacteria, and the threat environment.
Remember, most antibiotics and antibiotic resistance evolved long before people were involved.
More on the topic, does anyone else wonder how the heck you're going to sell "bacteria-infested" clothing to the average idiot in a clothing store? I can just see the ads now, with happy singing bacteria dancing through the clothing fibers. Anybody want to suggest a catchy slogan?
Maybe it's just me, but I really hate things that blink, flash, or do cute things at the periphery of a page I'm trying to read. So I don't let animated GIFs move and I keep most scripting, including Java, off by default. Interestingly, the only things that this really breaks are banner ads, most of which deliberately start with an ambiguous image. Since I have animations turned off, I never see anything else.
Who cares what's being advertised if the ad itself is illegible?
"School violence" isn't a reality. Oh, violence occurs in schools all the time, but what the casual news commentator means by "school violence" -- the lone crazed gunman in the nation's schools -- is so rare as to be irrelevant to reality. But as fantasy, it's priceless.
/., we argue a lot about DVDs and MP3s, as if these were somehow important. And, by and large, we're among the LEAST bored people I can find. People look hard for things to keep them interested these days.
I live in Colorado. I remember the gloating tone in the voice of Kathy Walker of KOA radio, the first news anchor to report, as she happily detailed the first information on the Columbine shooting. It was the best thing to happen to Denver media in a long, long time. They've milked it for months. They'll periodically milk it forever. Why? Not because it's relevant, but because it's entertaining.
We live in a profoundly bored culture. Even on
And what's more interesting than a real, genuine, life-and-death Cause? Get Involved! Stop Violence! Save Kids! You don't need to know or contribute anything in order to be a part of something really exciting! Heck, School Violence is Hot right now!
You think politicians and school boards are immune to this? What's more interesting, the REAL problems in schools (like lousy teachers, awful curriculum, and general indifference to education), or the thought of some kid with an AK-47? What's easier to deal with? (Hint: since there really isn't a kid with the AK-47, virtually anything you do will work. Happy day!) If enough of your colleagues and voters are on the bandwagon, it doesn't matter if you want to do this or not, you had better do this anyway. When a Cause catches fire, you better help fan the flames.
Pinkerton is responding to this. First, they buy the whole Cause hook, line, and sinker. And second, they know full well that there's money in zealotry, and money is sorta important to them too.
But honestly, they'd do it for free. They'd do it and donate the services if they had to. It's a Cause. It's excitement. It beats being bored.
Not to throw too much cold water on folks eagerly counting their teraherz, but I do note from the article that producing the chip involves using a scanning tunnelling electron microscope to knock hydrogen atoms one by one off a passivated substrate. Makes direct-write electron beam seem pretty straightforward. And even when they do produce the chip, I also note that all they do is attach the molecules; there's no switching or logic being done yet. Again, a simple matter of a little more development. Like, maybe, 20 years?