Ah, well, if we're going to quote, there's this link:
Esmin Green, 49, had been waiting in the emergency room for nearly 24 hours when she toppled from her seat at 5:32 a.m. on June 19, falling face down on the floor.
She was dead by 6:35, when someone on the medical staff, flagged down by a person in the waiting room, finally approached, nudged Green with her foot, and gently prodded her shoulder, as if to wake her. The staffer then left and returned with someone wearing a white lab coat who examined her and summoned help.
Relatives said Rodriguez was vomiting blood and writhing in pain for 45 minutes while she was at a hospital waiting area. Experts have said she could have survived had she been treated early enough.
To quote those Wise And Twisted Sisters, "If that's your best, your best won't do."
Profit has nothing to do with it. If the drug companies charged less, the drugs would be more widely purchased and there would likely be less of an underground market in them. The companies charge what the market will bear, NOT what will generate the most revenue. There is a huge difference.
Drug companies have been found experimenting on Africans without informed consent and without authorization. They have done so because it's a big continent and not one with governments likely to stir things up. They have also done so because the FDA and their equivalents in other countries make it mandatory to do a certain amount of testing prior to human testing. That takes time. Testing unauthorized drugs on a population that is unlikely to complain (if it survives) means that the FDA, et al, can get the paperwork for the testing shortly after animal testing is complete. Less time wasted = longer before the patents expire.
Then, there was the whole heliobacter scandal, when paid lobbyists abused Australian researchers who had shown that the billion dollar antacid market was really worth a tiny tiny fraction of that.
(As people might gather from my posts on this discussion, I really really HATE when paid freaks set science back for the sole benefit of their paymasters.)
You are correct, but MRI scans showing tau protein throttling the living daylights out of brain cells can be done whilst the patient is alive and, if not well, at least breathing.
My father's research into Alzheimer's was interesting. He was able to show that patients with kidney failure suffered a build-up of aluminium in their bodies - including their brains - and that Alzheimer-like symptoms were to be found in such patients. He was also able to show that using desfereoxamine (a treatment for iron toxicity, but aluminium is chemically close enough to iron for this to work) allowed medical staff to leech the aluminium from patients, and that when this was done no further brain damage occurred. Those old enough may vaguely recall him demonstrating this on Tomorrow's World.
In Norway, his papers were received with great enthusiasm. In the US, home of many chemical companies dealing with aluminium, his students were treated roughly - almost violently at times.
The world has gone on a long way since that research. It now seems likely that the aluminium aspect was a related brain disorder but not "classical" Alzheimer's. I welcome the change in attitude which has led to information being shared rather than being abused. I seriously doubt that the academics behind the scandalous treatment are even still around for the most part. But I won't be happy until US academia is willing to accept that science can conflict with sponsorships, that it is not just data that should be open but what conditions were attached to the data being what it is.
It depends on the company. Some companies are designed to self-destruct. The stock sky-rockets in value because that's what happens with high-risk companies, the directors bail before the shit hits the fan, the money then acquired is used to start up the next such company. Yes, there are companies that are designed specifically for this purpose. More often, it's a shell company that is not specifically designed to fail but does take on all of the really high-risk activities on behalf of the parent company. As such, it is bound to fail eventually. However, because it is high-risk, speculators buy the stock because it'll have the highest yield. I believe the name given to such companies are "the dogs". Again, if the BOD dump their stock the moment they suspect everything is about to implode, they can make a very tidy profit.
The whole Enron fiasco was one of those two - hard to say which. What gets me most about the fallout from that is that such practices were commonplace long before Enron and still are commonplace. If you've a 409K plan report handy, look it over. High yield is always high risk, low yield is always low risk. When a company takes a dangerous gamble, it will either result in gigantic profits or a gigantic mess. Now, it's logical for all companies to take some leaps of faith, but when you see very specific companies only taking such gambles and other companies never doing so, you can see that things aren't quite.... what you'd expect.
I agree with one caveat. It is common practice (or was when I was at primary school) *AFTER* learning the conventional notation to substitute some of the conventional symbols (numbers or operators) and demonstrate that the maths still worked. That it was not some magic of the notation, but a property of the maths itself. However, substitution of this kind cannot be done before learning what the conventional symbols mean.
I do admit that my schooling was a little unorthodox. The school I went to taught graphing, Venn diagrams, basic set logic, basic numerical operations, order of precedence, ratios, reciprocals, proper, improper and vulgar fractions, and both long and short division in the first two years of primary school. I think percents may have been in there too. I don't think we covered algebraic substitution in infants, but it was certainly being taught by the first year of junior schooling (age 8). I wonder if the textbooks I learned from are online anywhere, I could look it up.
Anyways, regardless, children SHOULD be taught the basic constructs using standardized notation FIRST and should be absolutely fluent in them. They should THEN learn that numbers, operators, even entire formulae, can be substituted without breaking anything. If someone wants to then substitute x for (), the students can figure out that this is the substitution intended rather than a change of precedence. This should be easy to determine, as () = (0) = 0, and the equation isn't balanced if you plug that in. Students should absolutely be taught that if some approach A produces a nonsense answer, then there is a fault in the logic or assumptions. They should then work backwards to determine where this problem occurred, so they can correct it. Reasoning about the answer is a skill that standardized tests discourage, as you score more by writing down a lot and hoping most of it isn't too stupid than you do if you methodically ensure correctness.
If you're going into computer science, or any field of engineering, it doesn't matter if you can crunch one equation an hour or a million since you won't be the one crunching them. But you'd better damn well be able to spot a faulty assumption and be able to fix it with one hand tied behind your back.
Damn, can't access xkcd from work - the SonicWall registers it as pornographic. Errrr, ok. If they can't tell the difference, maybe resolution DOES matter.
Ah, but you used to. Source-Based Routing was only scrapped in the 1990s, and when IPSS was in use you could send a signal (a large number of CR's in a short space of time) that would force a re-route.
IPv6 originally didn't permit fragmentation and therefore you had limited control over the route by forcing the packet sizes to exceed the MTU of hops you wanted to avoid - so long as an alternative existed with a higher MTU.
There's probably a way to do so using IPSec and on-the-fly tunnels, but not though that one through yet. Same goes for IP Mobility and Network Mobility - especially the older semantics for these, where transient addresses were used and routers handled the redirection rather than having a store-and-forward mailbox on a "standard" address.
You've got to bear in mind that the retirement package is index-linked to the rate of inflation. It costs a lot of money to genetically inflate a chicken to that size.
Maybe the *AA have developed wormholes and time-travel, or are about to publish a paper on how to violate causality. Y'see, there are possibilities we must consider here. Seriously, you are absolutely correct - it does go beyond the purpose of any law. However, it might be a good thing if it is allowed to proceed - if insufficient people actually carry out the felony, then the remaining concert-goers have all been implicated in this lawsuit. I don't know how lawsuits are filed, but I imagine it's under oath. Making false statements is, itself, a serious offense - as the balloon boy parents discovered. So long as the concert-goers can produce a balance of probability of the statement being false, wouldn't that leave the festival producers vulnerable to retaliatory legal action?
I'd argue that fair queueing would not violate net neutrality as all people would have equal access to the network, with no bias and no pay-to-play. It may not work under proposed laws, but it would seem to me to be the correct solution to the problem. Yeeees, existing NN treats all packets as equal, whereas fair queueing (depending on variant) would treat all streams as equal or all endpoint-pairs as equal, but surely the point would be that in all three cases all USERS are treated equally. Which form of equality, so long as it is genuine equality, is surely a secondary discussion and the legislation should reflect that.
John/Jane Doe cases happen all the time. It's presumed that the identity of the person can, at some point, be established. I assume between pre-trial and actual trial, since a person has a right to defend themselves, but I'm not sure it's wise to take that on trust any more. However, all you have to do is find a way to put the case on hold indefinitely and you've a court case you can unleash on anyone at any time.
In that case, would pre-suing John and Jane Doe for a fatal accident/injury be cheaper than taking out life insurance? I'm fairly sure lawsuits pay out more.
At the speed of light, the car would have zero length but infinite mass. At infinite mass, it would convert itself into a black hole. Since a black hole won't allow light to escape, the light would eventually shine back on you. Since the amount of power needed in a headlight to move a typical car (plus the batteries needed to power said headlight) would be in the trillions of watts, you would be totally atomized as you were being crushed by the gravity.
Even if there was competition in each region, the removal of source-based routing means that you can't dictate which path the packet goes down, which means you can't control how much it is going to cost. The notion of peer-to-peer agreements is going to be shot all to hell without NN, so you WILL end up footing the bill according to the choices made by routers not under your control. Oh, and remember, any router that calculates the weight of a path according to what it is told is very likely to be told that extremely expensive paths have low weight. Again, not under your control, you can do bugger all about it. Since costs are likely to migrate straight to customers, intermediate network providers won't give a damn. They don't have to pay for any inefficiencies caused elsewhere, and since all customer-level ISPs will likely use one of a tiny handful (or a single) intermediate provider, it doesn't matter what ISP you use or which city/State you are in (so long as you're in a State that has that intermediate provider).
This is one of the bigger problems caused by the threat of abolishing NN. Especially in this day and age. Remember that guy a few years back who mapped out the cable routes using public info and had his thesis classified? If you cannot legally know who connects to what, where, and how at the level 1 and level 2 tiers, you are denied access to ANY information which could reveal which ISPs are likely to cost what amount for the work you intend to do over the Internet. The only way to perform the necessary market research is, in effect, to be a criminal. Not just any old criminal, Gitmo-level criminal.
Is this over-worrying? Not really. There was once a service that did not have NN. It was called the IPSS (International Packet Switch Stream) service. Do you know, even remotely, how expensive that was? $25k per year even for relatively low-volume use was not unusual. Anyone here want to spend that on Internet connectivity?
That part I wasn't waiting for, but actually this light-into-matter might be exactly what you want. Light is messy for this, but if you can have your lasers converge and convert into a stream of antimatter particles, things would surely get more interesting.
The one thing this does bugger up big time, though -- I spent HOURS trying to work out how bright headlights would need to be to propel a car backwards. The headlights would be so totally over this limit that you'd end up smashing the headlight covers in the attempt. It would also cover the street with newly-formed matter. Damaging the street is a ticketable offense.
Well, yes, I can understand the logic. However, if I understand this TIME article, very roughly 0.1% of all light aircraft flying in Alaska will crash in a given year. That figure seems very high.
Old people may have a harder time learning, but they can. Nothing stops them, it's all about the effort they're willing to put in.
It is because there are so many different things that are evolving at an incredible pace within a country that I question the wisdom of having old people in Congress or as President. It has been mentioned on Slashdot that the age at which the brain starts to seriously deteriorate is around 40, so I would argue that this should be the oldest anyone should ever enter the Senate. The traditional retirement age of 65 is there for a good reason - traditionally, even craft guilds have found people to be more of a problem than a help above that age. Ergo, nobody should be in politics above that age. It should be the absolute upper ceiling.
If these age restrictions were added in, I think you'd find the political arena suddenly had a lot more sense. (Also, you would have fewer people just about to drop dead trying to decide between a quick kickback and the state of the nation in 30-odd years. The more Congressmen there are that are likely to see the future, the more the future will matter to them.)
Slashdot Mirror
That obviously won't apply here. He was a CEO, he can be pretty much guaranteed to have been guilty of something.
Ah, well, if we're going to quote, there's this link:
Or this link:
To quote those Wise And Twisted Sisters, "If that's your best, your best won't do."
The US has a health care system? When did that happen?
Profit has nothing to do with it. If the drug companies charged less, the drugs would be more widely purchased and there would likely be less of an underground market in them. The companies charge what the market will bear, NOT what will generate the most revenue. There is a huge difference.
Drug companies have been found experimenting on Africans without informed consent and without authorization. They have done so because it's a big continent and not one with governments likely to stir things up. They have also done so because the FDA and their equivalents in other countries make it mandatory to do a certain amount of testing prior to human testing. That takes time. Testing unauthorized drugs on a population that is unlikely to complain (if it survives) means that the FDA, et al, can get the paperwork for the testing shortly after animal testing is complete. Less time wasted = longer before the patents expire.
Then, there was the whole heliobacter scandal, when paid lobbyists abused Australian researchers who had shown that the billion dollar antacid market was really worth a tiny tiny fraction of that.
(As people might gather from my posts on this discussion, I really really HATE when paid freaks set science back for the sole benefit of their paymasters.)
You are correct, but MRI scans showing tau protein throttling the living daylights out of brain cells can be done whilst the patient is alive and, if not well, at least breathing.
My father's research into Alzheimer's was interesting. He was able to show that patients with kidney failure suffered a build-up of aluminium in their bodies - including their brains - and that Alzheimer-like symptoms were to be found in such patients. He was also able to show that using desfereoxamine (a treatment for iron toxicity, but aluminium is chemically close enough to iron for this to work) allowed medical staff to leech the aluminium from patients, and that when this was done no further brain damage occurred. Those old enough may vaguely recall him demonstrating this on Tomorrow's World.
In Norway, his papers were received with great enthusiasm. In the US, home of many chemical companies dealing with aluminium, his students were treated roughly - almost violently at times.
The world has gone on a long way since that research. It now seems likely that the aluminium aspect was a related brain disorder but not "classical" Alzheimer's. I welcome the change in attitude which has led to information being shared rather than being abused. I seriously doubt that the academics behind the scandalous treatment are even still around for the most part. But I won't be happy until US academia is willing to accept that science can conflict with sponsorships, that it is not just data that should be open but what conditions were attached to the data being what it is.
It depends on the company. Some companies are designed to self-destruct. The stock sky-rockets in value because that's what happens with high-risk companies, the directors bail before the shit hits the fan, the money then acquired is used to start up the next such company. Yes, there are companies that are designed specifically for this purpose. More often, it's a shell company that is not specifically designed to fail but does take on all of the really high-risk activities on behalf of the parent company. As such, it is bound to fail eventually. However, because it is high-risk, speculators buy the stock because it'll have the highest yield. I believe the name given to such companies are "the dogs". Again, if the BOD dump their stock the moment they suspect everything is about to implode, they can make a very tidy profit.
The whole Enron fiasco was one of those two - hard to say which. What gets me most about the fallout from that is that such practices were commonplace long before Enron and still are commonplace. If you've a 409K plan report handy, look it over. High yield is always high risk, low yield is always low risk. When a company takes a dangerous gamble, it will either result in gigantic profits or a gigantic mess. Now, it's logical for all companies to take some leaps of faith, but when you see very specific companies only taking such gambles and other companies never doing so, you can see that things aren't quite.... what you'd expect.
It was the only OS they could get to work with the very strange hardware in the director-droid brains.
*bows* Thank you! (I can imagine the graphics - very easily in the case of xkcd.) And I completely agree that the story is more important.
Not the movies *I* watch. I watch the St Trinian's series strictly to see how much the producer was able to bribe the censors.
I agree with one caveat. It is common practice (or was when I was at primary school) *AFTER* learning the conventional notation to substitute some of the conventional symbols (numbers or operators) and demonstrate that the maths still worked. That it was not some magic of the notation, but a property of the maths itself. However, substitution of this kind cannot be done before learning what the conventional symbols mean.
I do admit that my schooling was a little unorthodox. The school I went to taught graphing, Venn diagrams, basic set logic, basic numerical operations, order of precedence, ratios, reciprocals, proper, improper and vulgar fractions, and both long and short division in the first two years of primary school. I think percents may have been in there too. I don't think we covered algebraic substitution in infants, but it was certainly being taught by the first year of junior schooling (age 8). I wonder if the textbooks I learned from are online anywhere, I could look it up.
Anyways, regardless, children SHOULD be taught the basic constructs using standardized notation FIRST and should be absolutely fluent in them. They should THEN learn that numbers, operators, even entire formulae, can be substituted without breaking anything. If someone wants to then substitute x for (), the students can figure out that this is the substitution intended rather than a change of precedence. This should be easy to determine, as () = (0) = 0, and the equation isn't balanced if you plug that in. Students should absolutely be taught that if some approach A produces a nonsense answer, then there is a fault in the logic or assumptions. They should then work backwards to determine where this problem occurred, so they can correct it. Reasoning about the answer is a skill that standardized tests discourage, as you score more by writing down a lot and hoping most of it isn't too stupid than you do if you methodically ensure correctness.
If you're going into computer science, or any field of engineering, it doesn't matter if you can crunch one equation an hour or a million since you won't be the one crunching them. But you'd better damn well be able to spot a faulty assumption and be able to fix it with one hand tied behind your back.
Damn, can't access xkcd from work - the SonicWall registers it as pornographic. Errrr, ok. If they can't tell the difference, maybe resolution DOES matter.
Same for UserFriendly. For television, I'd say that fans of series like Doctor Who and Blake's 7 have known this principle for decades.
Ah, but you used to. Source-Based Routing was only scrapped in the 1990s, and when IPSS was in use you could send a signal (a large number of CR's in a short space of time) that would force a re-route.
IPv6 originally didn't permit fragmentation and therefore you had limited control over the route by forcing the packet sizes to exceed the MTU of hops you wanted to avoid - so long as an alternative existed with a higher MTU.
There's probably a way to do so using IPSec and on-the-fly tunnels, but not though that one through yet. Same goes for IP Mobility and Network Mobility - especially the older semantics for these, where transient addresses were used and routers handled the redirection rather than having a store-and-forward mailbox on a "standard" address.
You've got to bear in mind that the retirement package is index-linked to the rate of inflation. It costs a lot of money to genetically inflate a chicken to that size.
There's a problem with using a TARDIS for this. Moving into the past of your own time-stream violates the First Law of Time.
Maybe the *AA have developed wormholes and time-travel, or are about to publish a paper on how to violate causality. Y'see, there are possibilities we must consider here. Seriously, you are absolutely correct - it does go beyond the purpose of any law. However, it might be a good thing if it is allowed to proceed - if insufficient people actually carry out the felony, then the remaining concert-goers have all been implicated in this lawsuit. I don't know how lawsuits are filed, but I imagine it's under oath. Making false statements is, itself, a serious offense - as the balloon boy parents discovered. So long as the concert-goers can produce a balance of probability of the statement being false, wouldn't that leave the festival producers vulnerable to retaliatory legal action?
I'd argue that fair queueing would not violate net neutrality as all people would have equal access to the network, with no bias and no pay-to-play. It may not work under proposed laws, but it would seem to me to be the correct solution to the problem. Yeeees, existing NN treats all packets as equal, whereas fair queueing (depending on variant) would treat all streams as equal or all endpoint-pairs as equal, but surely the point would be that in all three cases all USERS are treated equally. Which form of equality, so long as it is genuine equality, is surely a secondary discussion and the legislation should reflect that.
Yeah, but the last reasonable judge retired some time in the 1400s.
John/Jane Doe cases happen all the time. It's presumed that the identity of the person can, at some point, be established. I assume between pre-trial and actual trial, since a person has a right to defend themselves, but I'm not sure it's wise to take that on trust any more. However, all you have to do is find a way to put the case on hold indefinitely and you've a court case you can unleash on anyone at any time.
In that case, would pre-suing John and Jane Doe for a fatal accident/injury be cheaper than taking out life insurance? I'm fairly sure lawsuits pay out more.
At the speed of light, the car would have zero length but infinite mass. At infinite mass, it would convert itself into a black hole. Since a black hole won't allow light to escape, the light would eventually shine back on you. Since the amount of power needed in a headlight to move a typical car (plus the batteries needed to power said headlight) would be in the trillions of watts, you would be totally atomized as you were being crushed by the gravity.
Even if there was competition in each region, the removal of source-based routing means that you can't dictate which path the packet goes down, which means you can't control how much it is going to cost. The notion of peer-to-peer agreements is going to be shot all to hell without NN, so you WILL end up footing the bill according to the choices made by routers not under your control. Oh, and remember, any router that calculates the weight of a path according to what it is told is very likely to be told that extremely expensive paths have low weight. Again, not under your control, you can do bugger all about it. Since costs are likely to migrate straight to customers, intermediate network providers won't give a damn. They don't have to pay for any inefficiencies caused elsewhere, and since all customer-level ISPs will likely use one of a tiny handful (or a single) intermediate provider, it doesn't matter what ISP you use or which city/State you are in (so long as you're in a State that has that intermediate provider).
This is one of the bigger problems caused by the threat of abolishing NN. Especially in this day and age. Remember that guy a few years back who mapped out the cable routes using public info and had his thesis classified? If you cannot legally know who connects to what, where, and how at the level 1 and level 2 tiers, you are denied access to ANY information which could reveal which ISPs are likely to cost what amount for the work you intend to do over the Internet. The only way to perform the necessary market research is, in effect, to be a criminal. Not just any old criminal, Gitmo-level criminal.
Is this over-worrying? Not really. There was once a service that did not have NN. It was called the IPSS (International Packet Switch Stream) service. Do you know, even remotely, how expensive that was? $25k per year even for relatively low-volume use was not unusual. Anyone here want to spend that on Internet connectivity?
That part I wasn't waiting for, but actually this light-into-matter might be exactly what you want. Light is messy for this, but if you can have your lasers converge and convert into a stream of antimatter particles, things would surely get more interesting.
The one thing this does bugger up big time, though -- I spent HOURS trying to work out how bright headlights would need to be to propel a car backwards. The headlights would be so totally over this limit that you'd end up smashing the headlight covers in the attempt. It would also cover the street with newly-formed matter. Damaging the street is a ticketable offense.
Well, yes, I can understand the logic. However, if I understand this TIME article, very roughly 0.1% of all light aircraft flying in Alaska will crash in a given year. That figure seems very high.
Old people may have a harder time learning, but they can. Nothing stops them, it's all about the effort they're willing to put in.
It is because there are so many different things that are evolving at an incredible pace within a country that I question the wisdom of having old people in Congress or as President. It has been mentioned on Slashdot that the age at which the brain starts to seriously deteriorate is around 40, so I would argue that this should be the oldest anyone should ever enter the Senate. The traditional retirement age of 65 is there for a good reason - traditionally, even craft guilds have found people to be more of a problem than a help above that age. Ergo, nobody should be in politics above that age. It should be the absolute upper ceiling.
If these age restrictions were added in, I think you'd find the political arena suddenly had a lot more sense. (Also, you would have fewer people just about to drop dead trying to decide between a quick kickback and the state of the nation in 30-odd years. The more Congressmen there are that are likely to see the future, the more the future will matter to them.)
Pentacles, surely.