The FDA has not approved this, because they have not tested it and do not know if it is effective AND safe.
You may feel free to continue to get this kind of treatment, and take the risks that are involved in it. The FDA exists to make sure you are aware of those risks, and to stop businesses who make unsupported claims from doing so. Your insurance company can also deny any claims you may make that could feasibly have been caused by buying this procedure.
This guy is making claims that are currently unsupported by a properly documented body of science, selling a procedure that has not been fully tested in humans and may have unknown side effects, including death by cancer. The FDA exists to make sure that, should you choose to engage in a procedure, you understand the risks involved in that procedure and how likely it is you will benefit.
You may continue putting your stem cells where you please. No one says everyone who does things to you needs to be a doctor. Maybe along with chiropractor, homeopathic consultant, and crystal therapist, we'll have a stem cell therapy technician. But understand that your insurance company might not be terribly happy with you making body modifications they don't understand and haven't been approved, so if you come down with cancer and it metastasizes from your knee to your liver, they aren't on the hook for the millions of dollars it will take to make you comfortable in your last few years.
The FDA exists to try and identify what things are good for people, and what things can harm them. They try to encourage the former and discourage the latter. If something is harmless but not effective, they allow its sale as long as no claims are made that cannot be supported. If something is harmful, they have the power to regulate its sale and use. Until something is proven safe, it is necessary for them to treat it as potentially harmful.
If you don't like the nanny state bullshit that involves, please do feel free to engage in any treatment you choose. You want to go off and engage in experimental and unproven stuff and you've got the money? Go for it! I'm not trying to be mean, though, when I say that if it doesn't work out for you please don't expect my insurance rates to cover you on it, and don't expect a lot of sympathy.
If this doctor is not disclosing the risks of the procedure to his patients, he must be stopped until he discloses the risks fully. If his patients are knowingly taking this risk, then more power to 'em.
Unless significant numbers of his patients develop cancer, I have to agree.
Oh, wait, we don't know.
That's the point.
I wish him and his patients luck. But the fact is, he's risking his patients using this procedure. There's a very good chance the procedure will turn out to be safe, but.. there's a chance it won't. I certainly hope he's doing a better job of disclosing the risks to his actual patients than his PR firm is doing with this article.
And in that disclosure I hope he's mentioning that health complications brought on by unapproved procedures are not covered by most insurance policies, so if one of his patients develops cancer their insurance company has a really good way to disqualify them from coverage. Even if the cancer is unrelated to the treatment, the question can be raised.
I salute the doctor, and more importantly the patients, for taking the risks in the name of expanding medical knowledge. I hope they know that's what they are doing.
Great, except of course cancer doesn't always play nice and develop immediately, or even within a couple of years. Plus, he's injected millions of stem cells per patient. Cancer may not develop immediately around the injection site, the cells might migrate somewhere else before a few of them mutate.
This is something that the FDA has been trying to get long-term controlled studies on. Eventually, this guy's new "study" will be one of them, no doubt, but I certainly hope that the worst that comes of this is that the FDA looks like they were slow and dim-witted waiting for data before making a decision.
Because the alternative is ugly. Unlikely, true, but ugly.
Except that injecting stem cells doesn't necessarily mean all of them will stay nicely in the area where you injected them. If they're naughty enough to turn into cancer cells, you can bet they won't be nice enough to stay in place.
So, would you risk not only losing that leg, but your liver as well? How about an unknown risk of a fully-metastasized cancer all through your body? Does that change the equation?
I imagine stem cells would make an easily-metastasized base from which to develop cancer. I'm not a doctor, but if you ask a competent one they'll tell you they don't know yet either. It hasn't been fully tested in humans. Hence why the FDA is freaking out.
And, to head off the inevitable question of "well, what's the risk, then?".. Medical science appears to lack that information right now. This is why the FDA has not yet approved this procedure - they don't know the risks and they need human trials, and getting human trials on risky procedures is HARD.
These patients are going to find out for the rest of us. We should thank them for that. Hopefully they understand what they are getting themselves into. I really hope this pans out as a viable procedure. There's a good chance it will. And it could help so many people.
But right now this procedure could just as easily be a relatively short term death sentence for an unknown percentage of these patients.
THESE are the human trials. They are happening right now.
Stick with the back pain for now. Stem cells are still in the experimental stage on humans, hence this doctor's flaunting of FDA regs.
Unless you have a particular desire to be a guinea pig, or your quality of life is so poor that it's worth the risk of dying of cancer (and having your health insurance able to bail out on coverage because you had a non-FDA-approved procedure that contributed to it)...
It's not embryonic stem cell issues at work here, it's the unknown effect of taking stem cells from the marrow, concentrating them, and re-injecting them into the patient. Stem cells might grow into the material you want, or they might go all cancerous. Testing it is hard because people die if it goes badly, and without testing the FDA isn't about to put a seal of approval on it.
So, on one hand this guy's a maverick boldly testing out a new procedure and helping his patients in the short term, and doing clinical trials on real patients to determine the risk levels. On the other, he's putting each and every one of them at an unknown level of risk of dying of a virulent strain of cancer.
Only history will tell if he was a heroic maverick, bucking the system and getting good medicine done a' la hundreds of bad American cop movies (and we'll all point and laugh at the slow stupid FDA for not making a faster decision and wasting our tax dollars delaying real help to real people), or a reckless asshole who ended up killing a bunch of patients with particularly virulent strains of cancer and, by doing so without FDA approval, managed to screw up their medical coverage of that condition so they ended up dying in pain and broke (and we'll all point at the FDA for not stopping this nefarious villain like they were supposed to and wasting our tax dollars allowing real people to be killed by dangerous experiments).
Well, we apparently have a pool of willing volunteers who are knowingly accepting medical treatment from a doctor that is not FDA approved. You know for sure this guy's malpractice insurance isn't going to cover it if his patients all end up with sudden cases of terminal cancer, and in the meantime his procedures on willing subjects are going to give the FDA tons of useful data. So, studies are being done, no worries about malpractice insurance rates going up. Sounds like a winner to me.
I just hope the risks have been explained to the patients who are receiving the treatment. I mean, REALLY explained. Not in terms of the vacuous testimonials on this site, but in terms of "we don't know how big the risk really is yet, because we don't do this a lot in humans."
I know a few people who are suffering from severely reduced mobility (permanent crutches) who get far less exercise than they would if their legs worked properly. If you told them there was a $10,000 cash treatment that gave them an 75%+ chance of significant improvement within a year year, but a chance they could eventually develop cancer, I expect at least a couple of them would go for it. One of them is in her 40s and due to weight (brought on by 15 years of waiting to qualify for surgery) is a relatively poor candidate for knee replacement. She can't exercise because she can barely get out of bed, and she can't get surgery because she can't exercise (any movement = pain), so she's in a nursing home. I think she'd gladly trade a risk of dying of cancer a couple of decades from now for the ability to get some exercise and at least enjoy those decades.
Just in case you were asking a serious question, and not looking to insert a South Park reference...
These are autologous stem cells (meaning YOUR OWN). No harvesting from anyone other than you.
They harvest a small amount of your own bone marrow, extract the stem cells from it, and inject them into the spots where they are needed.
Having said all that, this is a really glowing report that claims to be taking a harsh look at the company, then uses testimonials and reference materials from their own web site to "prove" it. It may be legit, but I smell just the faintest tang of green-colored artificial grass product.
It would, but I think Nokia wants to patent it for mobile phones. Then someone will patent it for car remote fobs, then someone else will patent it for media players, then someone else will patent it for those sneakers that light up, then someone else will patent it for vibrators, then Apple will ban the use of the technology because someone has patented another use of it that could be sexually suggestive.
If you took that $25 million and added it to TARP, it wouldn't even show up as a percentage of the $514 billion disbursed so far. "Illegal" cybertheft would account for 0.005% of overall cybertheft.
How is it a big deal that cybercrime netted $25 million nationwide?
Tell General Motors to send back some pocket change from the $50 billion they are currently holding. At 9% APR, the interest on the money for about two days would cover it.
Heck, if we charged GM's "0.9% APR" on the TARP money for just a day and a half, we'd have more than enough cover the entire years' worth of cybertheft, and enough left over to cover a good chunk of actual bank robberies, too.
"You'll think outside the box in the way that WE tell you to, dammit".
I don't think I've ever heard another definition of the term "think outside the box". It's almost invariably used to mean, "I do not agree with what you are saying, therefore your worldview is too limited to comprehend the magnificence that is my idea. I am Ozymandias, king of thinkers! Look upon my thoughts, ye mighty, and despair!"
It is very rarely used to mean "innovate" or "be creative". After all, management asks it of people they pack like lemmings into dull beige-fabric boxes.
That's been an issue since AMD introduced their first consumer chip, and that has been a LOT longer than ten years.
Intel built similar models, so you could almost always say "286 faster than 8086/8088" and within a specific line you could shop by clock speeds (8088 "turbo" ran at 8mhz, which kicked the pants off the 4.77mhz original one). The memory limit was 512k, and you could bump it to 640k if you wanted to deal with "extended" memory. Later on, it got a tad more confusing, you had to also decide if you wanted a math coprocessor, and you got to add more memory. But overall you were comparing the evolution of a single line of processors, all single-core.
Then AMD came out with their processor line which was largely capable of doing more work per clock cycle (though this is an oversimplification and there were a lot more factors that differentiated the two).
Regardless, the whole "Megahertz" rating was no longer a comparison across the board. AMD pulled out the marketing-speak and named their processors for a while based on a semi-vaugely-accurate-ish "Megahertz Equivalence" number which was based on artificial benchmarks, though any actual comparison between the two depended heavily on what kind of workload you were doing on the machine.
As far as the C2D thing with Intel, AMD is just as guilty of that - they will build out a bunch of quad-cores and find defective cores, so they'll turn off the bad cores and sell them as dual-core under their own model name.
Overall, I tend to choose AMD because I don't need the very fastest thing out there (and I certainly don't have the budget for it anyway!), and AMD is generally cheaper at the price/performance ratio level. From there, I choose the latest socket at the time that is still very mainstream (AM3 at the moment), then just choose how many cores I need, what speed I want each core to be, and pick the lowest wattage rating that meets that spec because lower wattage means less power draw and, just as importantly, less need for cooling.
For $65, I picked up a Regor II, for $100 I picked up a Gigabyte motherboard with ATI 4200 graphics, and I overspent a little on the memory to get 4GB of Corsair memory. Add in $100 for a 1TB hard drive, throw in my old case, optical drive (the board has one IDE port) and power supply (65w processor, no need for a fancy new power supply, my 350W Antec TruPower one is plenty!) , and I've got a pretty spiffy little machine for $350.
I'm not a gamer, but it can handle 1080p over fullscreen flash with nary a hitch, and runs compiz in Linux Mint with nary a problem. It's a very cheap sweet spot, and the machine is almost utterly silent (quiet fan for the CPU, 120mm case fan, and a quiet fan for the TruPower).
It's really pretty simple. You can narrow it down pretty quickly based on your needs. If you want to run the latest games, concentrate on the highest clock speeds you can manage (and really focus on the GPU of course). More cores are not necessarily your friend, more gigahertz are. If you want a decent desktop-class machine, look for the processors in the $50-100 range and find the best motherboard you can find to mount them in (and use a commonly-available socket so you can change out processors if you need more grunt), and look for low power consumption because that means less noise.
Yes, if only there were a resource that gave encyclopedic information online. It's such a shame that no one has thought of that!
Perhaps you could use Google to get directions to the nearest library where the reference librarian could look up "Words Per Minute" in the World Book.
40 wpm isn't bad for someone who might have to reply to 20 messages a day, as long as you aren't writing "War and Peace" for each reply.
If you had to type 50 words in each reply, you've typed 1000 words in a day. At 40wpm, you've burned 1/2 hour typing up your replies. At 80 wpm, you'd still take 15 minutes, so you've really only wasted 15 minutes of your day. If that.
Plus, if your emails are very clear and understandable, you'll have less time wasted dealing with the ramifications of a poorly-chosen word or phrase.
I read somewhere that there is another component in urine that actually prevents the decomposition of feces. That could easily be chalked up to "I read it on the Internet, it must be true!" but regardless, you already pee and poop in a cesspool, and if the current levels of urea were sufficient the problem wouldn't exist.
Since the primary purpose of this bag seem to be to introduce additional urea into the equation, it just seems like the crystals themselves are going to be a lot easier to extract and ship rather than using them to line a bioplastic bag.
This is an industrialized-nation answer - the real selling point is that no one has to look at feces, it's wrapped in a neat plastic bag. If these work, they should sell like hotcakes for camping.
Cost inefficiencies aside...
What kind of additional chemicals are involved in making the bag itself, what will be bag degrade into, and what are the implications on the farmland from the introduction of hundreds of these little gems per person per year?
So then we just need larger bags so the bodies can decompose more safely after they die of starvation?
Hmm, good point. Do they make these in extra-large? That'd be a win-win - in Ethiopia they could use them as body bags, in America we'd have something big enough to use after a curry binge.
Slashdot Mirror
The FDA has not approved this, because they have not tested it and do not know if it is effective AND safe.
You may feel free to continue to get this kind of treatment, and take the risks that are involved in it. The FDA exists to make sure you are aware of those risks, and to stop businesses who make unsupported claims from doing so. Your insurance company can also deny any claims you may make that could feasibly have been caused by buying this procedure.
This guy is making claims that are currently unsupported by a properly documented body of science, selling a procedure that has not been fully tested in humans and may have unknown side effects, including death by cancer. The FDA exists to make sure that, should you choose to engage in a procedure, you understand the risks involved in that procedure and how likely it is you will benefit.
You may continue putting your stem cells where you please. No one says everyone who does things to you needs to be a doctor. Maybe along with chiropractor, homeopathic consultant, and crystal therapist, we'll have a stem cell therapy technician. But understand that your insurance company might not be terribly happy with you making body modifications they don't understand and haven't been approved, so if you come down with cancer and it metastasizes from your knee to your liver, they aren't on the hook for the millions of dollars it will take to make you comfortable in your last few years.
The FDA exists to try and identify what things are good for people, and what things can harm them. They try to encourage the former and discourage the latter. If something is harmless but not effective, they allow its sale as long as no claims are made that cannot be supported. If something is harmful, they have the power to regulate its sale and use. Until something is proven safe, it is necessary for them to treat it as potentially harmful.
If you don't like the nanny state bullshit that involves, please do feel free to engage in any treatment you choose. You want to go off and engage in experimental and unproven stuff and you've got the money? Go for it! I'm not trying to be mean, though, when I say that if it doesn't work out for you please don't expect my insurance rates to cover you on it, and don't expect a lot of sympathy.
If this doctor is not disclosing the risks of the procedure to his patients, he must be stopped until he discloses the risks fully. If his patients are knowingly taking this risk, then more power to 'em.
Unless significant numbers of his patients develop cancer, I have to agree.
Oh, wait, we don't know.
That's the point.
I wish him and his patients luck. But the fact is, he's risking his patients using this procedure. There's a very good chance the procedure will turn out to be safe, but .. there's a chance it won't. I certainly hope he's doing a better job of disclosing the risks to his actual patients than his PR firm is doing with this article.
And in that disclosure I hope he's mentioning that health complications brought on by unapproved procedures are not covered by most insurance policies, so if one of his patients develops cancer their insurance company has a really good way to disqualify them from coverage. Even if the cancer is unrelated to the treatment, the question can be raised.
I salute the doctor, and more importantly the patients, for taking the risks in the name of expanding medical knowledge. I hope they know that's what they are doing.
Great, except of course cancer doesn't always play nice and develop immediately, or even within a couple of years. Plus, he's injected millions of stem cells per patient. Cancer may not develop immediately around the injection site, the cells might migrate somewhere else before a few of them mutate.
This is something that the FDA has been trying to get long-term controlled studies on. Eventually, this guy's new "study" will be one of them, no doubt, but I certainly hope that the worst that comes of this is that the FDA looks like they were slow and dim-witted waiting for data before making a decision.
Because the alternative is ugly. Unlikely, true, but ugly.
Except that injecting stem cells doesn't necessarily mean all of them will stay nicely in the area where you injected them. If they're naughty enough to turn into cancer cells, you can bet they won't be nice enough to stay in place.
So, would you risk not only losing that leg, but your liver as well? How about an unknown risk of a fully-metastasized cancer all through your body? Does that change the equation?
I imagine stem cells would make an easily-metastasized base from which to develop cancer. I'm not a doctor, but if you ask a competent one they'll tell you they don't know yet either. It hasn't been fully tested in humans. Hence why the FDA is freaking out.
And, to head off the inevitable question of "well, what's the risk, then?".. Medical science appears to lack that information right now. This is why the FDA has not yet approved this procedure - they don't know the risks and they need human trials, and getting human trials on risky procedures is HARD.
These patients are going to find out for the rest of us. We should thank them for that. Hopefully they understand what they are getting themselves into. I really hope this pans out as a viable procedure. There's a good chance it will. And it could help so many people.
But right now this procedure could just as easily be a relatively short term death sentence for an unknown percentage of these patients.
THESE are the human trials. They are happening right now.
The important question is: LC/s, lc/s, or LCS?
I'm sure BrainSlayer will at least ask you to register for the pay version of DD-WRT. :)
Stick with the back pain for now. Stem cells are still in the experimental stage on humans, hence this doctor's flaunting of FDA regs.
Unless you have a particular desire to be a guinea pig, or your quality of life is so poor that it's worth the risk of dying of cancer (and having your health insurance able to bail out on coverage because you had a non-FDA-approved procedure that contributed to it)...
Embryonic stem cells had nothing to do with this. Read the article. They are extracting stem cells from the patient.
This has been delayed because of the risks to the patient, not because of the pro-life/pro-choice debate.
It's not embryonic stem cell issues at work here, it's the unknown effect of taking stem cells from the marrow, concentrating them, and re-injecting them into the patient. Stem cells might grow into the material you want, or they might go all cancerous. Testing it is hard because people die if it goes badly, and without testing the FDA isn't about to put a seal of approval on it.
So, on one hand this guy's a maverick boldly testing out a new procedure and helping his patients in the short term, and doing clinical trials on real patients to determine the risk levels. On the other, he's putting each and every one of them at an unknown level of risk of dying of a virulent strain of cancer.
Only history will tell if he was a heroic maverick, bucking the system and getting good medicine done a' la hundreds of bad American cop movies (and we'll all point and laugh at the slow stupid FDA for not making a faster decision and wasting our tax dollars delaying real help to real people), or a reckless asshole who ended up killing a bunch of patients with particularly virulent strains of cancer and, by doing so without FDA approval, managed to screw up their medical coverage of that condition so they ended up dying in pain and broke (and we'll all point at the FDA for not stopping this nefarious villain like they were supposed to and wasting our tax dollars allowing real people to be killed by dangerous experiments).
Well, we apparently have a pool of willing volunteers who are knowingly accepting medical treatment from a doctor that is not FDA approved. You know for sure this guy's malpractice insurance isn't going to cover it if his patients all end up with sudden cases of terminal cancer, and in the meantime his procedures on willing subjects are going to give the FDA tons of useful data. So, studies are being done, no worries about malpractice insurance rates going up. Sounds like a winner to me.
I just hope the risks have been explained to the patients who are receiving the treatment. I mean, REALLY explained. Not in terms of the vacuous testimonials on this site, but in terms of "we don't know how big the risk really is yet, because we don't do this a lot in humans."
I know a few people who are suffering from severely reduced mobility (permanent crutches) who get far less exercise than they would if their legs worked properly. If you told them there was a $10,000 cash treatment that gave them an 75%+ chance of significant improvement within a year year, but a chance they could eventually develop cancer, I expect at least a couple of them would go for it. One of them is in her 40s and due to weight (brought on by 15 years of waiting to qualify for surgery) is a relatively poor candidate for knee replacement. She can't exercise because she can barely get out of bed, and she can't get surgery because she can't exercise (any movement = pain), so she's in a nursing home. I think she'd gladly trade a risk of dying of cancer a couple of decades from now for the ability to get some exercise and at least enjoy those decades.
Just in case you were asking a serious question, and not looking to insert a South Park reference...
These are autologous stem cells (meaning YOUR OWN). No harvesting from anyone other than you.
They harvest a small amount of your own bone marrow, extract the stem cells from it, and inject them into the spots where they are needed.
Having said all that, this is a really glowing report that claims to be taking a harsh look at the company, then uses testimonials and reference materials from their own web site to "prove" it. It may be legit, but I smell just the faintest tang of green-colored artificial grass product.
It would, but I think Nokia wants to patent it for mobile phones. Then someone will patent it for car remote fobs, then someone else will patent it for media players, then someone else will patent it for those sneakers that light up, then someone else will patent it for vibrators, then Apple will ban the use of the technology because someone has patented another use of it that could be sexually suggestive.
Good point.
If you took that $25 million and added it to TARP, it wouldn't even show up as a percentage of the $514 billion disbursed so far. "Illegal" cybertheft would account for 0.005% of overall cybertheft.
How is it a big deal that cybercrime netted $25 million nationwide?
Tell General Motors to send back some pocket change from the $50 billion they are currently holding. At 9% APR, the interest on the money for about two days would cover it.
Heck, if we charged GM's "0.9% APR" on the TARP money for just a day and a half, we'd have more than enough cover the entire years' worth of cybertheft, and enough left over to cover a good chunk of actual bank robberies, too.
"You'll think outside the box in the way that WE tell you to, dammit".
I don't think I've ever heard another definition of the term "think outside the box". It's almost invariably used to mean, "I do not agree with what you are saying, therefore your worldview is too limited to comprehend the magnificence that is my idea. I am Ozymandias, king of thinkers! Look upon my thoughts, ye mighty, and despair!"
It is very rarely used to mean "innovate" or "be creative". After all, management asks it of people they pack like lemmings into dull beige-fabric boxes.
my junk usually doesn't survive 10
Turn off your spam filter for a little while, you'll get plenty of possible solutions for that. :)
consisting of a HP Compaq running Vista Basic.
Silly boy! You can change desktop wallpaper in Vista Basic. What you meant to say was "Windows Seven Starter".
That's been an issue since AMD introduced their first consumer chip, and that has been a LOT longer than ten years.
Intel built similar models, so you could almost always say "286 faster than 8086/8088" and within a specific line you could shop by clock speeds (8088 "turbo" ran at 8mhz, which kicked the pants off the 4.77mhz original one). The memory limit was 512k, and you could bump it to 640k if you wanted to deal with "extended" memory. Later on, it got a tad more confusing, you had to also decide if you wanted a math coprocessor, and you got to add more memory. But overall you were comparing the evolution of a single line of processors, all single-core.
Then AMD came out with their processor line which was largely capable of doing more work per clock cycle (though this is an oversimplification and there were a lot more factors that differentiated the two).
Regardless, the whole "Megahertz" rating was no longer a comparison across the board. AMD pulled out the marketing-speak and named their processors for a while based on a semi-vaugely-accurate-ish "Megahertz Equivalence" number which was based on artificial benchmarks, though any actual comparison between the two depended heavily on what kind of workload you were doing on the machine.
As far as the C2D thing with Intel, AMD is just as guilty of that - they will build out a bunch of quad-cores and find defective cores, so they'll turn off the bad cores and sell them as dual-core under their own model name.
Overall, I tend to choose AMD because I don't need the very fastest thing out there (and I certainly don't have the budget for it anyway!), and AMD is generally cheaper at the price/performance ratio level. From there, I choose the latest socket at the time that is still very mainstream (AM3 at the moment), then just choose how many cores I need, what speed I want each core to be, and pick the lowest wattage rating that meets that spec because lower wattage means less power draw and, just as importantly, less need for cooling.
For $65, I picked up a Regor II, for $100 I picked up a Gigabyte motherboard with ATI 4200 graphics, and I overspent a little on the memory to get 4GB of Corsair memory. Add in $100 for a 1TB hard drive, throw in my old case, optical drive (the board has one IDE port) and power supply (65w processor, no need for a fancy new power supply, my 350W Antec TruPower one is plenty!) , and I've got a pretty spiffy little machine for $350.
I'm not a gamer, but it can handle 1080p over fullscreen flash with nary a hitch, and runs compiz in Linux Mint with nary a problem. It's a very cheap sweet spot, and the machine is almost utterly silent (quiet fan for the CPU, 120mm case fan, and a quiet fan for the TruPower).
It's really pretty simple. You can narrow it down pretty quickly based on your needs. If you want to run the latest games, concentrate on the highest clock speeds you can manage (and really focus on the GPU of course). More cores are not necessarily your friend, more gigahertz are. If you want a decent desktop-class machine, look for the processors in the $50-100 range and find the best motherboard you can find to mount them in (and use a commonly-available socket so you can change out processors if you need more grunt), and look for low power consumption because that means less noise.
Or, as Dragon would have interpreted that: "Tall king is fast turd hen Thai ping." :)
Yes, if only there were a resource that gave encyclopedic information online. It's such a shame that no one has thought of that!
Perhaps you could use Google to get directions to the nearest library where the reference librarian could look up "Words Per Minute" in the World Book.
40 wpm isn't bad for someone who might have to reply to 20 messages a day, as long as you aren't writing "War and Peace" for each reply.
If you had to type 50 words in each reply, you've typed 1000 words in a day. At 40wpm, you've burned 1/2 hour typing up your replies. At 80 wpm, you'd still take 15 minutes, so you've really only wasted 15 minutes of your day. If that.
Plus, if your emails are very clear and understandable, you'll have less time wasted dealing with the ramifications of a poorly-chosen word or phrase.
"Most"
The ones that don't are the really dangerous ones.
Has it been confirmed that you can make a beowulf cluster of these, then? Could we be close to the dream of acceptable Vista performance?
Oh, wait, how many terabytes of RAM can the chipset that runs these handle?
I read somewhere that there is another component in urine that actually prevents the decomposition of feces. That could easily be chalked up to "I read it on the Internet, it must be true!" but regardless, you already pee and poop in a cesspool, and if the current levels of urea were sufficient the problem wouldn't exist.
Since the primary purpose of this bag seem to be to introduce additional urea into the equation, it just seems like the crystals themselves are going to be a lot easier to extract and ship rather than using them to line a bioplastic bag.
This is an industrialized-nation answer - the real selling point is that no one has to look at feces, it's wrapped in a neat plastic bag. If these work, they should sell like hotcakes for camping.
Cost inefficiencies aside...
What kind of additional chemicals are involved in making the bag itself, what will be bag degrade into, and what are the implications on the farmland from the introduction of hundreds of these little gems per person per year?
No, because in order to get a pilot's license you must be proficient in English. Sorry.
So then we just need larger bags so the bodies can decompose more safely after they die of starvation?
Hmm, good point. Do they make these in extra-large? That'd be a win-win - in Ethiopia they could use them as body bags, in America we'd have something big enough to use after a curry binge.