JAMA is the Journal of the American Medical Association - a publication of the AMA.
Membership in the AMA has nothing to do with the competency of a doctor. A better indicator would be something like board certification, reputation, bedside manner - anything other than membership in an organization.
- Was the doctor using what would have been good judgment back then? Medicine changes very quickly - what is seen as stupid now may have been the right thing to do back then. (Example: thalidomide - simply, its teratogenic properties were not known. Nobody *wanted* deformed babies.) - Are the current health problems due to the incorrect treatment, or instead are the result of the original pathologic condition that was mistaken for cancer? Or some other factor? - How, precisely, do you know she was misdiagnosed?
It's easy to make tear-jerking assertions like this in hindsight. The doctor may very well have been a bad one, and should not have been practicing. But without more details, it's impossible to decide whether the doctor in question was, in fact, incompetent.
As an IT worker (I hesitate to call you a pro), you produce nothing valuable.
OK, fair enough. Anyone who is full of himself to the point of getting in the way of others doesn't deserve his job. Treating your customers like crap (in IT support, the rest of the company is your customer) should be worth an immediate pink slip.
But I think you are undervaluing your IT staff. Your company would not be able turn a profit without its IT infrastructure any more than it can turn a profit without an engineers, marketing, or accountants.
A company can exist for a couple weeks without R&D, launching new marketing initiatives, or probably even doing their books. But try giving your IT staff a week's vacation and then tell us how your company is doing. Have fun fixing your borked Exchange server and your worm-infested network.
I have met many, many doctors. I am typing this from inside the hospital complex that houses my school.
I didn't mean to say that doctors are perfect, just that there is a large effort to only bring well-meaning people into the field. Like in any field, there are a number of bad doctors still practicing.
Double and triple billing is of course not justifiable.
It seems like the doctors in this care are trying to recoup their costs in an unethical manner. Health care is in a crunch nowadays. Medicare/Medicaid don't begin to cover the provider's costs, so they have to make up for it on patients who have real insurance. (One reason why hospital supplies are freakishly expensive when you see them on your bill.)
As for your toe, well, everyone makes mistakes. It sucks when it happens, especially in healthcare, but that risk is the price you pay for having medical care in the first place. I have a hard time believing your doctor didn't know where the joints are in the foot or how to use lidocaine properly, or that he or she purposely wanted to cause you pain. Expecting 100% reliability from anything, human or machine, is unreasonable.
And I'm sure that has something to do with fed-up sysadmins. Really!
I don't see doctors making websites about what idiots we are when we call them for medical advice.
Aside from most of them not knowing how to make websites, I can think of a few reasons for this.
1. Much of the time, it isn't the user/patient's fault she is sick. Can you blame the patient for getting colon cancer?
2. At least nowadays, potential medical students are rigorously screened during the interview process for the genuine desire to help people. Those who are in it for the money are shown the door even before they start school. (I know, I'm a med student and have been through this process.) How many tech support people are in it for the satisfaction?
3. A doctor making fun of her stupid patients in a public forum would take a really big reputation hit if her name was made public. Medicine is a hard enough field to be in without purposely making yourself look like a giant asshole. By contrast, do you know the last name of any techs you've talked to on a support call?
4. People look up to doctors. Sure our (USA's) healthcare system has its problems, but I don't know anyone who doesn't think the average competent doctor is a pretty smart person and worthy of their respect. If you are respected for your position and work, you are less likely to lash back at the general public.
I did exactly what the poster claims could not be done. Perhaps I got lucky, but here is what I did:
Was using a Sprint phone with Chicago suburbs area code. (And living in another state, I might add.) Moved to NYC. Bought a T-Mobile phone with a NY area code. A bit later, had T-Mobile port my Sprint number over.
Number portability is great! Because of cell phones, area codes are irrelevant, so I figured there was no reason to lose my old number which had served me for so long. (Plus I was getting random calls in Chinese, a language I don't know, meant for the former owner of the NY number.) I know zero, count 'em, zero people for whom area code has any relevance.
$86 million is the sort of money Microsoft finds when they pull up their couch cushions. I suspect that they don't expect SCO to succeed at all - they just want to give the appearance that open source software is highly vulnerable to attack by random morons. If you are a PHB deciding between Linux (the new kid on the block as far as you are concerned) and Windows (I have that on my laptop! And it's shiny!) this kicks Linux down a notch. Most PHBs don't care about whose IP goes where as long as it doesn't make them vulnerable.
If Windows is found to contain someone else's unlicensed code, the rightful code owners are not going to sue end users, period. MS would either sue them into the ground or settle with them out of court to get them to shut up. The analogous thing can't happen with Linux because no one entity controls it from a legal standpoint. So, score Windows 1, Linux 0.
Like everyone else with at least one functioning neuron, I think SCO will lose. But the damage to Linux credibility has been done. Even when this is resolved, there is always the class of PHBs who will think back to this whole mess and how it could have cost them money. These feelings won't last forever or necessarily outweigh the benefits of Linux, but for Microsoft, it has been well worth the money.
The govermnent already funds way more medical research than does NASA.
NIH's current budget is about $29 billion (NIH funds the vast majority of biology/medical research in the US). NASA's current budget is about $15.3 billion.
Free Software is an incredibly awesome idea. It's too bad that its biggest proponents (ESR notwithstanding) speak the doublespeak of communism.
I'm not a political scientist; here is my uninformed, amateurish view:
Socialism/communism/ is a fine idea if it is not compulsory. It's based on the ideal that the participants work primarily not for their own individual welfare, but for the good of the community, and it supports those who can't work. In Real Life, this is a terrible idea because it removes any real incentive to work - why work when those who do work don't have a much higher quality of life than those who don't?
But in the world of open source and Free software, most programmers contribute because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside, and also to achieve fame and hone their skills. I've coded GPL software because I thought it was a nice thing to do. If you don't like this model, you can extricate yourself from the OSS world easily. And you won't starve or be shot by your friendly local dictator.
So IMHO socialist ideals works pretty well for open source development. In the end it's a glorified version of community service that can happily exist within the confines of a capitalistic society. There is a distinction between OSS and real life. Make my entire society socialist, though, and I'm moving the f*ck out.
It seems to me that part of the problem is that small websites can't afford to provide high-bandwidth services. At US$1 per gigabyte transferred (at least this is the case for the small and unrepresentative number of hosting providers I have looked at), there is virtually no way a hobbyist could afford to provide broadband content to any significant number of people. The obvious solution would then be to have visitors contribute something to the site, but as of yet there is no viable micropayment system.
Once everyone has upstream bandwidth in the tens of megabits, and their OS isn't vulnerable to so many worms out of the box (I've seen an XP box get infected within 10 minutes after install, without adding any software that didn't come with XP) there will be growth in devices and software that enable the average user to create broadband content. Then there will be a compelling reason for everyone to have broadband. Sort of a chicken and egg situation.
If the bandwidth piggybacks on pipes meant for HDTV, we'd avoid this catch completely, because there would be a compelling non-Internet reason to have that 100Mbit in every home.
Another issue is that in the current legal climate there is significant incentive not to give the average user a lot of bandwidth, because it enables sharing of files that ??AA has rights to, and they have considerable political power and a penchant for litigation. This holds back growth of general connectivity, impeding the development of better applications for it. So the problem I have with ??AA, "starving artists" notwithstanding, is that they are holding back the United States as a developer and consumer of technology in general, and thus doing a lot of damage to the economy well outside their intended scope.
I tried to buy a phone and service from AT&T Wireless last November, only to find that their store literally was incapable of selling me one because "their computers were down." This was the case for days. I've seen postings online by their employees detailing what a mess their internal systems are. Hopefully Cingular knows what they are getting into in terms of merging their operations.
Also it's important to remember here that AT&T Wireless hasn't been a part of AT&T proper since 2001. They are a separate company with rights to the name and logo.
The Linus Torvalds theme park would be free to enter. You'd get roller coaster blueprints at the gate. The park would consist of 100 yards of roller coaster parts and a pile of oxyacetylene torches in the corner. The other patrons of the park would be happy to show you how to build a roller coaster, but if you haven't memorized everything on the blueprint as well as several physics textbooks you'll be yelled at for being too stupid to ride a rollercoaster.
Then Darl would come by and scream at the top of his lungs that he owns the entire thing because roller coasters make him puke, just like the paint he sniffs, so they must be one and the same.
"When I stopped my TV Licence on my empty house, they sent me letters literally every 4 weeks threatening me. It was horrible."
You know, if we had TV licensing in the USA, it wouldn't be threatening letters we'd get, it would be lawsuits and raids by teams of law enforcement agent impersonators. And just think of the propganda: "336 TV show equivalents stolen per WEEK! Per CHANNEL! Per TELEVISION! And the criminal had THREE of them! That means 15,000 shows PIRATED!"
There was a post on Slashdot some time ago (sorry, too lazy to dredge it up) in which the poster stated he had seen Apple's internal version of Mac OS X running on x86. Given Darwin's support for x86 and the presumed simplicity of porting Aqua and friends to that kernel, I don't see why Apple wouldn't throw at least a little bit of effort into maintaining said x86 version, if only for the benefits of killing weaselly bugs that crop up when doing multiplatform work as well as hedging their bet in case PPC stops being a viable platform.
$200 for 2GB seems an awful lot to the average consumer, when one can pay $300 for five times the space in the 10GB version. Pricing it like this makes the 2GB player look like a terrible value. Even as a student with little disposable income, I would much rather pay the extra $100 than sacrifice 8GB.
That is, unless there is some amazing killer feature to it. Obscenely long battery life? Really small? It would have to be amazingly sexy for it to be worth $200 when the premium for the next higher model is so little given the much greater capacity.
Also, the quoted price is $70 each for the media in 100k quantities. Perhaps this price is artificially raised for Apple's competitors, by agreement with Apple, in order to discourage them from buying the same media from Cornice and making knockoff players. And maybe Cornice does not have the capacity to make too many more of these things above and beyond Apple's order, and jacking up the price for everyone but Apple saves them from losing face by denying orders. Cornice loses nothing, Apple gets to make their player, and competitors are left high and dry.
I've said this before - if come tomorrow these "microPods" actually exist and are selling for $100, I will buy one immediately. Let's hope it'll be easy to coerce Linux to talk to it:)
I'll have my credit card ready
on
Rumors of Mini iPods
·
· Score: 2, Informative
2GB? $100? Made by Apple? I will buy one of these the very second they become available. At that price I won't worry about the battery dying after a couple years, I won't have iPod envy when the new version comes out, I won't cry if I drop it on the floor and break it. A wonderful idea, Apple - I only wonder if they will be able to make enough of them.
...answering the survey and pretending Windows is the greatest thing ever, and they don't have to change a thing to fend off Linux, thereby helping ensure its domination?
But there wasn't *supposed* to be a plot to Kill Bill! It didn't even pretend to have one! Anything that you might have mistaken for a plot was just to make the action scenes cooler.
Kill Bill succeeded doing the only thing that it set out to do: cut people into tiny pieces. I didn't expect a plot, didn't get one, and enjoyed the movie thoroughly.
I few days ago I bought a phone and signed up for service from T-Mobile. According to the rep, whom I spoke to in person, after 3 months of service they will unlock my phone for me without charge, so I can take my phone overseas.
Slashdot Mirror
JAMA is the Journal of the American Medical Association - a publication of the AMA.
Membership in the AMA has nothing to do with the competency of a doctor. A better indicator would be something like board certification, reputation, bedside manner - anything other than membership in an organization.
More details please?
- Was the doctor using what would have been good judgment back then? Medicine changes very quickly - what is seen as stupid now may have been the right thing to do back then. (Example: thalidomide - simply, its teratogenic properties were not known. Nobody *wanted* deformed babies.)
- Are the current health problems due to the incorrect treatment, or instead are the result of the original pathologic condition that was mistaken for cancer? Or some other factor?
- How, precisely, do you know she was misdiagnosed?
It's easy to make tear-jerking assertions like this in hindsight. The doctor may very well have been a bad one, and should not have been practicing. But without more details, it's impossible to decide whether the doctor in question was, in fact, incompetent.
As an IT worker (I hesitate to call you a pro), you produce nothing valuable.
OK, fair enough. Anyone who is full of himself to the point of getting in the way of others doesn't deserve his job. Treating your customers like crap (in IT support, the rest of the company is your customer) should be worth an immediate pink slip.
But I think you are undervaluing your IT staff. Your company would not be able turn a profit without its IT infrastructure any more than it can turn a profit without an engineers, marketing, or accountants.
A company can exist for a couple weeks without R&D, launching new marketing initiatives, or probably even doing their books. But try giving your IT staff a week's vacation and then tell us how your company is doing. Have fun fixing your borked Exchange server and your worm-infested network.
I have met many, many doctors. I am typing this from inside the hospital complex that houses my school.
I didn't mean to say that doctors are perfect, just that there is a large effort to only bring well-meaning people into the field. Like in any field, there are a number of bad doctors still practicing.
Double and triple billing is of course not justifiable.
It seems like the doctors in this care are trying to recoup their costs in an unethical manner. Health care is in a crunch nowadays. Medicare/Medicaid don't begin to cover the provider's costs, so they have to make up for it on patients who have real insurance. (One reason why hospital supplies are freakishly expensive when you see them on your bill.)
As for your toe, well, everyone makes mistakes. It sucks when it happens, especially in healthcare, but that risk is the price you pay for having medical care in the first place. I have a hard time believing your doctor didn't know where the joints are in the foot or how to use lidocaine properly, or that he or she purposely wanted to cause you pain. Expecting 100% reliability from anything, human or machine, is unreasonable.
And I'm sure that has something to do with fed-up sysadmins. Really!
I don't see doctors making websites about what idiots we are when we call them for medical advice.
Aside from most of them not knowing how to make websites, I can think of a few reasons for this.
1. Much of the time, it isn't the user/patient's fault she is sick. Can you blame the patient for getting colon cancer?
2. At least nowadays, potential medical students are rigorously screened during the interview process for the genuine desire to help people. Those who are in it for the money are shown the door even before they start school. (I know, I'm a med student and have been through this process.) How many tech support people are in it for the satisfaction?
3. A doctor making fun of her stupid patients in a public forum would take a really big reputation hit if her name was made public. Medicine is a hard enough field to be in without purposely making yourself look like a giant asshole. By contrast, do you know the last name of any techs you've talked to on a support call?
4. People look up to doctors. Sure our (USA's) healthcare system has its problems, but I don't know anyone who doesn't think the average competent doctor is a pretty smart person and worthy of their respect. If you are respected for your position and work, you are less likely to lash back at the general public.
I did exactly what the poster claims could not be done. Perhaps I got lucky, but here is what I did:
Was using a Sprint phone with Chicago suburbs area code. (And living in another state, I might add.) Moved to NYC. Bought a T-Mobile phone with a NY area code. A bit later, had T-Mobile port my Sprint number over.
Number portability is great! Because of cell phones, area codes are irrelevant, so I figured there was no reason to lose my old number which had served me for so long. (Plus I was getting random calls in Chinese, a language I don't know, meant for the former owner of the NY number.) I know zero, count 'em, zero people for whom area code has any relevance.
$86 million is the sort of money Microsoft finds when they pull up their couch cushions. I suspect that they don't expect SCO to succeed at all - they just want to give the appearance that open source software is highly vulnerable to attack by random morons. If you are a PHB deciding between Linux (the new kid on the block as far as you are concerned) and Windows (I have that on my laptop! And it's shiny!) this kicks Linux down a notch. Most PHBs don't care about whose IP goes where as long as it doesn't make them vulnerable.
If Windows is found to contain someone else's unlicensed code, the rightful code owners are not going to sue end users, period. MS would either sue them into the ground or settle with them out of court to get them to shut up. The analogous thing can't happen with Linux because no one entity controls it from a legal standpoint. So, score Windows 1, Linux 0.
Like everyone else with at least one functioning neuron, I think SCO will lose. But the damage to Linux credibility has been done. Even when this is resolved, there is always the class of PHBs who will think back to this whole mess and how it could have cost them money. These feelings won't last forever or necessarily outweigh the benefits of Linux, but for Microsoft, it has been well worth the money.
The govermnent already funds way more medical research than does NASA.
NIH's current budget is about $29 billion (NIH funds the vast majority of biology/medical research in the US). NASA's current budget is about $15.3 billion.
Free Software is an incredibly awesome idea. It's too bad that its biggest proponents (ESR notwithstanding) speak the doublespeak of communism.
I'm not a political scientist; here is my uninformed, amateurish view:
Socialism/communism/ is a fine idea if it is not compulsory. It's based on the ideal that the participants work primarily not for their own individual welfare, but for the good of the community, and it supports those who can't work. In Real Life, this is a terrible idea because it removes any real incentive to work - why work when those who do work don't have a much higher quality of life than those who don't?
But in the world of open source and Free software, most programmers contribute because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside, and also to achieve fame and hone their skills. I've coded GPL software because I thought it was a nice thing to do. If you don't like this model, you can extricate yourself from the OSS world easily. And you won't starve or be shot by your friendly local dictator.
So IMHO socialist ideals works pretty well for open source development. In the end it's a glorified version of community service that can happily exist within the confines of a capitalistic society. There is a distinction between OSS and real life. Make my entire society socialist, though, and I'm moving the f*ck out.
So, where is the EFF's team of lawyers? Wouldn't they want to jump all over this and help this brave lady?
It seems to me that part of the problem is that small websites can't afford to provide high-bandwidth services. At US$1 per gigabyte transferred (at least this is the case for the small and unrepresentative number of hosting providers I have looked at), there is virtually no way a hobbyist could afford to provide broadband content to any significant number of people. The obvious solution would then be to have visitors contribute something to the site, but as of yet there is no viable micropayment system.
Once everyone has upstream bandwidth in the tens of megabits, and their OS isn't vulnerable to so many worms out of the box (I've seen an XP box get infected within 10 minutes after install, without adding any software that didn't come with XP) there will be growth in devices and software that enable the average user to create broadband content. Then there will be a compelling reason for everyone to have broadband. Sort of a chicken and egg situation.
If the bandwidth piggybacks on pipes meant for HDTV, we'd avoid this catch completely, because there would be a compelling non-Internet reason to have that 100Mbit in every home.
Another issue is that in the current legal climate there is significant incentive not to give the average user a lot of bandwidth, because it enables sharing of files that ??AA has rights to, and they have considerable political power and a penchant for litigation. This holds back growth of general connectivity, impeding the development of better applications for it. So the problem I have with ??AA, "starving artists" notwithstanding, is that they are holding back the United States as a developer and consumer of technology in general, and thus doing a lot of damage to the economy well outside their intended scope.
I tried to buy a phone and service from AT&T Wireless last November, only to find that their store literally was incapable of selling me one because "their computers were down." This was the case for days. I've seen postings online by their employees detailing what a mess their internal systems are. Hopefully Cingular knows what they are getting into in terms of merging their operations.
Also it's important to remember here that AT&T Wireless hasn't been a part of AT&T proper since 2001. They are a separate company with rights to the name and logo.
The Linus Torvalds theme park would be free to enter. You'd get roller coaster blueprints at the gate. The park would consist of 100 yards of roller coaster parts and a pile of oxyacetylene torches in the corner. The other patrons of the park would be happy to show you how to build a roller coaster, but if you haven't memorized everything on the blueprint as well as several physics textbooks you'll be yelled at for being too stupid to ride a rollercoaster.
Then Darl would come by and scream at the top of his lungs that he owns the entire thing because roller coasters make him puke, just like the paint he sniffs, so they must be one and the same.
OK, I'm not trying to be anal here but people who don't know might be misled by the following in the article:
Apple's G5 towers are comparable in speed to the fastest x86-derived CPUs and systems; in other words, the Intel Itanium and AMD Athlon64.
Itanium is not x86 derived. It has its own novel instruction set.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the demo CD for Sun's Java Desktop System that I got at LinuxWorld this year is based on Morphix.
Quoted from the site linked in the parent:
"When I stopped my TV Licence on my empty house, they sent me letters literally every 4 weeks threatening me. It was horrible."
You know, if we had TV licensing in the USA, it wouldn't be threatening letters we'd get, it would be lawsuits and raids by teams of law enforcement agent impersonators. And just think of the propganda: "336 TV show equivalents stolen per WEEK! Per CHANNEL! Per TELEVISION! And the criminal had THREE of them! That means 15,000 shows PIRATED!"
A Beowulf cluster of glass!
Wait, that's called a "building". Never mind.
The campus bookstore here has an average price of $400...per book. We are talking a 300 page book for $400.
Good lord! I've never paid nearly that much for a medical textbook. Which campus do you refer to?
There was a post on Slashdot some time ago (sorry, too lazy to dredge it up) in which the poster stated he had seen Apple's internal version of Mac OS X running on x86. Given Darwin's support for x86 and the presumed simplicity of porting Aqua and friends to that kernel, I don't see why Apple wouldn't throw at least a little bit of effort into maintaining said x86 version, if only for the benefits of killing weaselly bugs that crop up when doing multiplatform work as well as hedging their bet in case PPC stops being a viable platform.
$200 for 2GB seems an awful lot to the average consumer, when one can pay $300 for five times the space in the 10GB version. Pricing it like this makes the 2GB player look like a terrible value. Even as a student with little disposable income, I would much rather pay the extra $100 than sacrifice 8GB.
:)
That is, unless there is some amazing killer feature to it. Obscenely long battery life? Really small? It would have to be amazingly sexy for it to be worth $200 when the premium for the next higher model is so little given the much greater capacity.
Also, the quoted price is $70 each for the media in 100k quantities. Perhaps this price is artificially raised for Apple's competitors, by agreement with Apple, in order to discourage them from buying the same media from Cornice and making knockoff players. And maybe Cornice does not have the capacity to make too many more of these things above and beyond Apple's order, and jacking up the price for everyone but Apple saves them from losing face by denying orders. Cornice loses nothing, Apple gets to make their player, and competitors are left high and dry.
I've said this before - if come tomorrow these "microPods" actually exist and are selling for $100, I will buy one immediately. Let's hope it'll be easy to coerce Linux to talk to it
2GB? $100? Made by Apple? I will buy one of these the very second they become available. At that price I won't worry about the battery dying after a couple years, I won't have iPod envy when the new version comes out, I won't cry if I drop it on the floor and break it. A wonderful idea, Apple - I only wonder if they will be able to make enough of them.
...answering the survey and pretending Windows is the greatest thing ever, and they don't have to change a thing to fend off Linux, thereby helping ensure its domination?
But there wasn't *supposed* to be a plot to Kill Bill! It didn't even pretend to have one! Anything that you might have mistaken for a plot was just to make the action scenes cooler.
Kill Bill succeeded doing the only thing that it set out to do: cut people into tiny pieces. I didn't expect a plot, didn't get one, and enjoyed the movie thoroughly.
Should kernel.org be slow for you, use a mirror, such as this one.
I few days ago I bought a phone and signed up for service from T-Mobile. According to the rep, whom I spoke to in person, after 3 months of service they will unlock my phone for me without charge, so I can take my phone overseas.