I have really enjoyed listening to early (and modern) US supreme court oral arguments. These are available as mp3s, with a creative commons license (Hmmm... legal legal mp3s... and can be found here: http://www.oyez.org/oyez/resource/nitf/273/
They provide a basis for our legal system, and reflect some pretty important times in our history. Plus, there are inevitably arguments for and against that I had never considered, (Can I mod justices +1 insightful?)
Perhaps you might want to (anonymously) remind them that by assuming management of individuals computers (not uni. owned) like that, they are also assuming some liability. Who gets sued, if they miss a virus or something, and it eats your term paper... theoretically you could sue them... I bet they haven't thought of that.
IAAMS (I am a medical student). Decent troll - I'll bite.
The only thing the reovirus provides is a vector -- a way to deliver genetic information to the relevent cells. While I haven't looked too deep into the linked articles, I am pretty sure that the actual anti-cancer properties are coded for in a gene that has been spliced into the reovirus.
They are using reovirus because getting infected with it doesn't cause symptoms, and it's probably easy to genetically modify to deliver the engineered gene. Similar techniques have been used with gene therapy for cystic fibrosis by delivering the CFTR gene (missing in CF patients) with respiratory syncitial virus, which does cause symptoms (Hmm, maybe we ought to be using reovirus instead...).
The naturally occurring reovirus, while it doesn't produce symptoms, certainly won't do anything for cancer, since it doesn't contain the anti-cancer gene that the Oncolytics people have grafted in. According to the FAQ, >70% of people have been infected with reovirus before, so following this line of logic why does anyone get cancer?
Disclaimer: I am not (yet) a licensed physician, but am only a medical student. Don't follow my advice without first consulting your physician...
Traditionally ADHD has been treated with stimulants (specifically amphetamines, such as ritalin, adderol, etc.). Newer drugs are slowly coming to market such as (non-stimulant, non-addictive) atomoxetine (brand name: strattera). The psychiatrist I rotated with two months ago absolutely raved about it, so I looked it up. Several more similar medications are currently in the FDA approval process, and should be on the market shortly. While amphetamines work, I would be scared to use them long term - consider switching to something else in a couple of years...
Heretofore the **AA's were pursuing legal tactics to fine/mandate thier agenda. This worked because they have lots of {money, lawyers, lackeys in high places}. Now they are going to be taking on a group of equal or larger clout: The ISP's.
It will be funny to see AOL-TW engaging in self-hating behavior...
you would have to reboot to have the TPM enabled at power-on to set proper "root of trust" (you can't just turn it on midstream, since a TCPA system is supposed to hash the BIOS & bootloader).
If this is true, then how do we get our free bootloader (lilo?) to work? Will (insert free bootloader here) have to switch to binary only releases, and pass every one through a certificate authority?
I have a gut-wrenching feeling that either we aren't hearing the whole story, or this guy is oblivious to the larger strategies at work here...
(Disclaimer: I am currently consulting for a firm that is developing a Palm cradle with built-in dication/voice recognition capabilities for the medical transcription market...)
Since the asker wanted to know WHY nobody has done this yet, I'll spell it out:
Basically the major pitfalls to developing this are:
1) Crappy algorithms that mangle what you really said into something unrelated:)
2) Power Consumption
3) Interfacing to the PDA (not hard to do, but non-trivial)
4) Limited PDA capabilities (Remember that Palm's DragonBall is a RISC architecture, and things like speech recognition NEED floating point math which must be emulated)
The solutions:
1) Somebody (not unlike me...) has to code the already existing better algorithms (check the literature - speech recognition is a mature technology, and publications abound) into a usable chunk of code, instead of simply recycling ViaVoice or NaturallySpeaking's libraries.
2) Add more battery storage.
3) Use another processor to do the conversion, then simply write it to the Palm in a serial stream.
I would just wait about a year, then ask that question again to your physician friends, and see what they whip out of their pockets...:)
Several comments have been made to the effect of "Why bother complying". This shows lack of understanding of the problems at hand. Compliance with HIPAA is required for all healthcare providers who submit medicare/medicaid claims electronically (all doctors will basically have to by 2005 anyway). Non-compliance could cost a doctor his medicare number )which can take years to get in the first place). Without the ability to be paid for medicare/medicaid patients, the doc will stop seeing those patients, which nationwide make up about 20% of the average medical practice patient base. Go ahead, YOU take a 20% pay cut voluntarily.:)
As a medical student, (with a BS in computer engineering), I can vouch for the current mood of uncertainty in this area. Much of this is because so many doctors, nurses, billing staff, etc. are not computer saavy. Check the computer labs at your local medical school, and you will find all of the Macs occupied, and the PCs gathering dust because no one has the time/desire to use M$ windows. I am sure that I am the only person at my school who uses anything other than windows/mac for anything...
What we need is obvious: Secure desktop systems with billing and practice management software, secure email, and basic wordprocessing. Here's the catch: It has to be incredibly easy to use. Many nursing students, billing lackys, transcriptionists, etc. have those trade-school jobs because they only barely graduated high school. Steep learning curves are bad, since it wastes the office staff time that the doctor is paying $10-$20/per hour/per person for.
I was living in Brasil during the last presidential election (1998), and they were using the same electronic system then. There were some reports of attempted fraud, but not electronically.
Due to the high illiteracy rate in the Northeast, campaigners would hand out a R$5 bill, with a card containing a candidates picture, and the numbers required to vote for that candidate (no names, text, or anything else). The most frequent complaint of fraud was that they did this during the morning of the election (not allowed), not that they were essentially paying for votes!
The other problems that occured were that some areas didn't have access to electricity, that some voting machines got stolen and were never turned in, that some (idle)threats were made against those that voted a certain way. It appeared, though, that the electronics worked pretty well, at least none of them "blue-screened".
Personally, I'm opposed to the idea of electronic voting, because there is no hard-copy to use as "proof of vote".
As an EE entering med school, my outlook is a bright as I could ever hope for.
The bottom line is to figure out what you want to be doing every day for the next forty years and then plot the best way to get there from where you now are.
Don't limit yourself by taking the easy way either, that extra effort almost always pays off. (Like all those idiots that think their MS A+ cert. is better than a college degree, and will earn them 100K/yr) Return on investment applies to your time management also, so work your a** off, and eventually you'll get where you want to be.
it would only run Windows PPC binaries, in other words, nothing
Hold on there... WinNT DOES exist for the PPC architecture (granted, rs6k's not macs) but windowsPPC does exist - a WINE port would not be trivial, either. Is this perhaps what your boss wants to work on?:)
Although you are probably looking for a digital solution, don't overlook the solutions that already exist. Security camera VCR's (available at RadioShack et al.) can put 24 hours (or more) of video on a single VHS tape. Get a few VCR's (at $200 each), and a pallet of VHS tapes at Sam's club, and you could record all the video you want!
If you had read the whole article you would see that they are primarily calling their database ENGINE and INTERFACE their IP, not just the content of the database. While it still sucks, at least we should use valid arguments.
My sparc2's (also LX's, IPX's, Classic's) run Redhat 6.2 (iso's are readily availible) - IMHO one of the more secure and stable linux distros. While it may not have the latest KDE whistles, who the fsck cares? Redhat still has updates for 6.2-sparc on their ftp server. Solaris is bloat on these old machines, but a well tuned Redhat install is hard to beat...
So far, almost all development has been with PCI based PowerMAC's. It seems everyone (except the benevolent folk's at MkLinux have forgotton that many PowerMac's feature NuBus. I know, it's slow, you say; proprietary you say, but by golly, when I've got 10 of these and want a beowulf... No, seriously, what else is going on to get Linux supported on the older PowerMAC's?
How are the folks at distributed.net doing with their RC5 attempt? How do I sign up for the "TeamSlashdot" and donate my (albeit humble) proc time to winning (maybe) more money so that Slashdot could (maybe) afford some real bandwidth...
UMR Rulez
Re:But is this really for the better?
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 1
I figure it to be about 13 billion us dollars. If 90% of his net worth is divested in Micro$haft stock, and he lost 15% of it, thats like, more than the US defense budget or something... (sucks to be him today...)
Slashdot Mirror
Kids these days can't get, or haven't even heard of most of the the really thought provoking stuff that fed my generation:
Chemistry sets
Amateur radio
Erector sets - not flimsey plastic crap
Boy Scout projects
Cool WWII surplus at scrap prices
BB guns (for trajectory analysis:)
Okay, guys, go find some hobbies that require thoughtful complex construction, and Get the hell off my lawn!
http://www.oyez.org/oyez/resource/nitf/273/
They provide a basis for our legal system, and reflect some pretty important times in our history. Plus, there are inevitably arguments for and against that I had never considered, (Can I mod justices +1 insightful?)
Perhaps you might want to (anonymously) remind them that by assuming management of individuals computers (not uni. owned) like that, they are also assuming some liability. Who gets sued, if they miss a virus or something, and it eats your term paper... theoretically you could sue them... I bet they haven't thought of that.
The only thing the reovirus provides is a vector -- a way to deliver genetic information to the relevent cells. While I haven't looked too deep into the linked articles, I am pretty sure that the actual anti-cancer properties are coded for in a gene that has been spliced into the reovirus.
They are using reovirus because getting infected with it doesn't cause symptoms, and it's probably easy to genetically modify to deliver the engineered gene. Similar techniques have been used with gene therapy for cystic fibrosis by delivering the CFTR gene (missing in CF patients) with respiratory syncitial virus, which does cause symptoms (Hmm, maybe we ought to be using reovirus instead...).
The naturally occurring reovirus, while it doesn't produce symptoms, certainly won't do anything for cancer, since it doesn't contain the anti-cancer gene that the Oncolytics people have grafted in. According to the FAQ, >70% of people have been infected with reovirus before, so following this line of logic why does anyone get cancer?
Traditionally ADHD has been treated with stimulants (specifically amphetamines, such as ritalin, adderol, etc.). Newer drugs are slowly coming to market such as (non-stimulant, non-addictive) atomoxetine (brand name: strattera). The psychiatrist I rotated with two months ago absolutely raved about it, so I looked it up. Several more similar medications are currently in the FDA approval process, and should be on the market shortly. While amphetamines work, I would be scared to use them long term - consider switching to something else in a couple of years...
Heretofore the **AA's were pursuing legal tactics to fine/mandate thier agenda.
This worked because they have lots of {money, lawyers, lackeys in high places}. Now they are going to be taking on a group of equal or larger clout: The ISP's.
It will be funny to see AOL-TW engaging in self-hating behavior...
you would have to reboot to have the TPM enabled at power-on to set proper "root of trust" (you can't just turn it on midstream, since a TCPA system is supposed to hash the BIOS & bootloader).
If this is true, then how do we get our free bootloader (lilo?) to work? Will (insert free bootloader here) have to switch to binary only releases, and pass every one through a certificate authority?
I have a gut-wrenching feeling that either we aren't hearing the whole story, or this guy is oblivious to the larger strategies at work here...
Since the asker wanted to know WHY nobody has done this yet, I'll spell it out:
Basically the major pitfalls to developing this are: :)
1) Crappy algorithms that mangle what you really said into something unrelated
2) Power Consumption
3) Interfacing to the PDA (not hard to do, but non-trivial)
4) Limited PDA capabilities (Remember that Palm's DragonBall is a RISC architecture, and things like speech recognition NEED floating point math which must be emulated)
The solutions:
1) Somebody (not unlike me...) has to code the already existing better algorithms (check the literature - speech recognition is a mature technology, and publications abound) into a usable chunk of code, instead of simply recycling ViaVoice or NaturallySpeaking's libraries.
2) Add more battery storage.
3) Use another processor to do the conversion, then simply write it to the Palm in a serial stream.
I would just wait about a year, then ask that question again to your physician friends, and see what they whip out of their pockets... :)
As a medical student, (with a BS in computer engineering), I can vouch for the current mood of uncertainty in this area. Much of this is because so many doctors, nurses, billing staff, etc. are not computer saavy. Check the computer labs at your local medical school, and you will find all of the Macs occupied, and the PCs gathering dust because no one has the time/desire to use M$ windows. I am sure that I am the only person at my school who uses anything other than windows/mac for anything...
What we need is obvious: Secure desktop systems with billing and practice management software, secure email, and basic wordprocessing. Here's the catch: It has to be incredibly easy to use. Many nursing students, billing lackys, transcriptionists, etc. have those trade-school jobs because they only barely graduated high school. Steep learning curves are bad, since it wastes the office staff time that the doctor is paying $10-$20/per hour/per person for.
Due to the high illiteracy rate in the Northeast, campaigners would hand out a R$5 bill, with a card containing a candidates picture, and the numbers required to vote for that candidate (no names, text, or anything else). The most frequent complaint of fraud was that they did this during the morning of the election (not allowed), not that they were essentially paying for votes!
The other problems that occured were that some areas didn't have access to electricity, that some voting machines got stolen and were never turned in, that some (idle)threats were made against those that voted a certain way. It appeared, though, that the electronics worked pretty well, at least none of them "blue-screened".
Personally, I'm opposed to the idea of electronic voting, because there is no hard-copy to use as "proof of vote".
The bottom line is to figure out what you want to be doing every day for the next forty years and then plot the best way to get there from where you now are.
Don't limit yourself by taking the easy way either, that extra effort almost always pays off. (Like all those idiots that think their MS A+ cert. is better than a college degree, and will earn them 100K/yr) Return on investment applies to your time management also, so work your a** off, and eventually you'll get where you want to be.
Hold on there... WinNT DOES exist for the PPC architecture (granted, rs6k's not macs) but windowsPPC does exist - a WINE port would not be trivial, either. Is this perhaps what your boss wants to work on?
Although you are probably looking for a digital solution, don't overlook the solutions that already exist. Security camera VCR's (available at RadioShack et al.) can put 24 hours (or more) of video on a single VHS tape. Get a few VCR's (at $200 each), and a pallet of VHS tapes at Sam's club, and you could record all the video you want!
If you had read the whole article you would see that they are primarily calling their database ENGINE and INTERFACE their IP, not just the content of the database. While it still sucks, at least we should use valid arguments.
All your posts are belong to you...
My sparc2's (also LX's, IPX's, Classic's) run Redhat 6.2 (iso's are readily availible) - IMHO one of the more secure and stable linux distros. While it may not have the latest KDE whistles, who the fsck cares? Redhat still has updates for 6.2-sparc on their ftp server. Solaris is bloat on these old machines, but a well tuned Redhat install is hard to beat...
So far, almost all development has been with PCI based PowerMAC's. It seems everyone (except the benevolent folk's at MkLinux have forgotton that many PowerMac's feature NuBus. I know, it's slow, you say; proprietary you say, but by golly, when I've got 10 of these and want a beowulf... No, seriously, what else is going on to get Linux supported on the older PowerMAC's?
This exhibit of Aurora Borealis was brought to you by Microsoft corp. - We make things happen(tm)
How are the folks at distributed.net doing with their RC5 attempt? How do I sign up for the "TeamSlashdot" and donate my (albeit humble) proc time to winning (maybe) more money so that Slashdot could (maybe) afford some real bandwidth...
UMR Rulez
I figure it to be about 13 billion us dollars. If 90% of his net worth is divested in Micro$haft stock, and he lost 15% of it, thats like, more than the US defense budget or something... (sucks to be him today...)