Are you talking about the way things are, or the way they should be?
IP is, according to the law, the same as P. If you are saying that it shouldn't be that way, that's a different discussion.
Interesting, you're actually making my argument for me. The law treats IP differently than physical property, because it is different. That is why we have separate laws protecting physical property and intellectual property (and significantly different criminal and even civil penalties for violations of such law).
Comparing theft of physical property to intellectual property is an old, tired argument that has never ever worked. Please stop making this comparison. Stealing a Ford off of a lot deprives an entity of a physical asset. Paying for intellectual property under false pretenses due to locality restrictions is completely different. Even copying that IP for no remuneration is different, because it is not depriving an entity of a physical asset. Piracy is not the same as theft and never has been.
Does this justify piracy? No.
Does it justify using the same old tired argument and false analogy? Also no.
I'm not really sure, either. However, I can say that in some Google Fiber markets, Comcast is trying to compete with Gb downloads (still crappy 35 Mb/s uploads). I saw the same thing when FIOS came to my neighborhood and my local cable provider began offering faster service. It's a hell of a lot of capital investment, and I'm sure that Google sees an endgame in it. I would be surprised if it involved spewing ads that other ISP's wouldn't, but then again - if enough of us use Google services, I'm sure that they'll turn a buck on it.
How would that, keeping them in check, benefit Google?
That is a good question. How does a fair and open internet benefit Google? Let's not forget that residential ISP's have been forcing content providers (e.g. Netflix) to purchase exclusive internet connectivity to their backbones rather than upgrading their backhauls at intermediary providers...effectively double-dipping with their customers. They're trying to go after YouTube (a Google company) as well, and I assume that if Google Play takes off, they'll go after that too.
Also, due to Verizon and AT&T mobile's metering, Netflix is downgrading video bandwidth for these customers. If Google is able to make end roads into these markets, their competition may force other providers into line, making a better experience for Google customers as well as avoiding nasty double-dipping fees from providers.
At least, that's just my guess if the original hypothesis is correct. Who knows, maybe Google is trying to turn a buck on building regional ISP's. I just find that harder to believe than the idea that I proposed.
Even if you want to do fixed point wireless (which doesn't have a great history) I'm not sure where they could get the spectrum they need to launch a service that would compete with the likes of AT&T and Verizon.
An interesting perspective, but it might just be that competing with the likes of AT&T and Verizon is exactly what Google wants to do. It's been speculated that one of the intended purposes of Google Fiber is "...to keep vendors, distributors and regulators on their feet." Mobile providers sell fairly expensive metered bandwidth, and their many of their policies haven't always been customer-friendly. Introducing unmetered wireless gigabit internet might just be a way to keep the mobile providers in check. Besides, wireless infrastructure would likely be far less expensive than FTTP.
I like seeing stories like this here because occasionally, there is good discussion and analysis on Slashdot. If you don't want to see this story here, move along to the next story.
Because all labeling does is slap a label onto a product that says "GMO". It says nothing about the genes modified (for example, whether if a plant is Roundup Ready or vitamin A enriched). It does not educate consumers, as just being GE does not tell the whole story. GMO labeling for the claimed purpose of informing consumers is as disingenuous as requiring voter ID in order to stop non-existent voter fraud. I feel that it is being used as a tool for several other purposes, including furthering fears generated by junk science (that has been outright fraudulent, in some cases). This is not to say that I don't have problems with the business practices of a certain seed company, but I don't believe that generic GMO labeling laws are an appropriate way to handle what I believe are patent abuses.
Besides, there are already federal rules for organic food labeling, and this already means no GMO ingredients.
This dormant cyber pathogen must be some sort of neo-Asherah virus from the terrorists! They will control our minds! Apple must write a nam-shub so that the FBI can protect us!
Your tax dollars at work, folks. Anyone else want to send this DA some of Stephenson's early work to save him the trouble of having to reinvent the wheel?
They went public when Apple asked them not to. So yes they did do it for publicity and "trial by media" to be more precise. If it was all about the court case they would have done it in court instead of by press release.
That does make sense. If the courts act reasonably and back down, the DoJ may have been successful in appealing to the public's sense of emotion/outrage and push Congress to pass the legislature that they want.
That turns it into a comedy - the FBI going public and then accusing Apple of doing it for publicity.
Did they employ some clowns thrown out of the NSA after Snowden or something? It sounds like something the Star Trek Set guy would do.
Sort of...the FBI didn't do it for publicity. They did it to set precedent, and this case was chosen very carefully by the DoJ in order to achieve this (by tugging at heart strings and a sense of panic in the wake of terrorism). There are plenty of other investigations that they could have made similar demands under. If Apple cooperated with the FBI and it was done under seal, then it could not be used as precedent to use the courts to force Apple to do the same in future cases.
Er what? I thought the Rosa Parks moments was a good thing? Someone has their analogies confused...
I think that you're not looking at the analogy from a relative perspective, rather, it appears that you may be looking at that term from a point of absolute good and bad. The Rosa Parks moment, in historical context, was an inflection point for the civil rights movement. DoJ is trying to use this as an inflection point in their fight against encryption (hence the use of the term "Rosa Parks moment"). It's not necessarily a good thing for all of us, but a good thing for DoJ, as an appeal to emotion/outrage and an inflection point in the encryption/surveillance debate. I can't speak for the GPP, but I believe that this is where he's coming from. Are you with me now?
It's probably easier to just compromise the endpoints. Strong crypto is already out there. It's open, it's documented, and it's in the wild. There is no way that the American government can put that toothpaste back in the tube, short of declaring anyone with strong crypto a criminal (very unlikely). GPG can already do the trick for secure communications - but the built-in device stuff is a low-hanging fruit that is easy to chase after-the-fact. The easier and most likely route of attack is compromising the endpoints. If the endpoint is compromised, encryption can be circumvented rendered useless in several different ways (hopefully, unbeknownst to the users). Military, intelligence and law enforcement already know this. I would be very surprised if they didn't have their own hackers to hit high-value targets with endpoint attacks to circumvent encryption.
This is more about the low-hanging fruit stuff that gets into the hands of ordinary consumers. Local police departments with more limited resources also have a keen interest in the Apple case.
You dont get it. This is the FBI's 'Rosa Parks' moment. They are using an incendiary case to force the issue that unbreakable encryption should not be allowed in casual use. They are trying to force the idea that it should be illegal to make an unbreakable lock and they are using this case to ram it home. They dont really give a shit about the data in this case, they want to cow the tech sector into not making their jobs harder.
THIS! I wish that I had mod points. You are correct, the case is entirely political. The Guardian has an article that explains in depth what you very succinctly stated. The big takeaway is that the actual data in this case doesn't really matter. However, the feds were fishing for the perfect inflammatory case to establish legal precedent (NPR had a great story on it earlier this week with a legal analyst who said that the Justice Department knew exactly what they were doing when they chose this case). Tim Cook is spot on in fighting this as a precedent matter more than anything else.
It sounds like you're talking about two different things, but are then combining them into the same argument. My post is only about NOx emissions. Your post is about diesel particulate emissions, which you appear to have lumped this into the VW diesel scandal. The diesel VW scandal is only about NOx emissions (and I would still consider linking specific deaths to this a pretty far-reaching stretch, and will be nearly impossible to prove in specific cases). To the best of my knowledge, the diesel VW scandal has nothing to do with diesel particulate emissions, only NOx.
But nobody ever mentions the actual level - which is pretty damn important because 40 times 1 part per thousand is a lot more significant than 40 times 1 part per trillion.
Jetta (LNT system):
EPA Limit: 0.043 g/km
EPA Dyno Test (cheat number): 0.022 g/km
WVU Test (actual number): 0.61-1.5 g/km
Passat (SCR/Urea-based system):
EPA Limit: 0.043 g/km
EPA Dyno Test (cheat number): 0.016 g/km
WVU Test (actual number): 0.34-0.67 g/km
These emissions levels are in g/km, which is pollutants over distance (which can probably be converted to time, if you dig around the actual study to find average speeds attained, but I'm supposed to be working right now...so you can try to dig that up on your own:). However, I do not believe that these numbers can be converted into actual pollutant volume (e.g. PPM/PPB/PPT). Perhaps you can scavenge that from the WVU study's raw data. I'd be interested in what you find.
I am also interested in finding is a trend in the NOx regulation in the US. I've dug around a bit, but have not yet found it. E.g. - did the actual NOx levels meet previous standards? Are the current standards that VW had to cheat to get around unrealistic? Beyond this, the wiki article does cite some projections regarding the number of deaths that have been/will be caused by the cheat, but I'd like to have a better perspective than that.
First, your claim that the lawsuit is on the basis of a person's desire for 15 minutes of fame appears to be completely baseless. If you had to read the comments thread, the originator of the suit posts here. S/he explains the motives several different times. S/he does not ever state that he seeks fame from this. Instead, there are several principles that are outlined. Did you happen to read something that I didn't, or yours just a massive, unsupported assumption? For what it's worth, several very important Supreme Court rulings have come from lawsuits just like this. They're not all just people looking for a few minutes of fame...and I don't see any indication that this is, either.
Secondly, can you provide any evidence that AIT would make airline travel any safer? Google is your friend here (see "security theater"). Without going into several links that you can dig up for yourself from independent sources, the answer is an overwhelming and easy "no". I do appreciate one of your points - when there is another terrorist attack involving airline passenger travel (and there probably will be), the public will ask what was missed, why, and how to prevent it in the future...but let's not fool ourselves and act like baseless additional security measures are actually doing anything beyond wasting our time and violating civil liberties.
The failures that you have described, I have seen in several places. Telehealth equipment purchased with some sort of rural healthcare grant and dumped on a clinic by technical staff, and left to gather dust because it was not implemented properly. In my experience, it's really easy to get this wrong. As you know, tech people are neither providers nor managed care operators.
You are correct that when I use the term "telemedicine", I tend to use it in the broadest possible way. You alluded to this in your comment - and I'll reiterate that just using the novel terminology (e.g. da Vinci machine and telemed robots) does not do justice to the work that has gone into getting telemedicine where it is now. Telecommunications technology has been used for healthcare since it's inception, and in these broad terms, it certainly counts as telemedicine (early telephone and telegraph use, not to mention NASA's work on remote monitoring for astronauts). We take the low-hanging-fruit solutions where we can, but there is so much regulatory and bureaucratic friction ensuring that telemedicine adoption happens very slowly. (Cross-state physician and nursing licensing is always a problem, CMS regulations prevent billing in many cases, state boards of medical examiners are passing protectionist measures to make it difficult to perform telemedicine - especially across state lines, etc). In building a system, I start small, and take the small victories on the low-hanging-fruit. More often than not, it's the healthcare providers who need to buy into the technology and they are the ones who come up with ideas for how to use the technology. It's very often that I hear something like "I've got a regular ENT clinic, and don't need that scope, but could I use this for after-hours coverage when I only have an RN on duty? I'd bet that with video supervision, we could really reduce the number of ER transports, which is exactly what our client is asking for."
With respect to cardiology, in many cases, a cardiac echo machine and tech are easier (and cheaper) to transport than a cardiologist. It really depends on the circumstance. If it's easy to refer a patient to a clinic with the appropriate equipment down the street, then it makes sense. In a large hospital that already has echo cardio equipment onsite, then it's a no-brainer. In a massive self-contained environment (e.g. native American reservation, prison system, VA network, or university system), this isn't always possible - and this is where we can bring the equipment and tech to the patient. These are the environments where we have seen the greatest successes.
You are also correct in that nobody is going to just "connect" two EHR's overnight. Most of the federal law revolving around these was not really for portability in the charts, but in billing codes. Even that is very complicated and cumbersome. However, getting a partner provider (or a remote employee) access to an EMR is very easy to do.
Yeah, we're closer than it would appear in our opinions on this. It would appear that you've been on the wrong end of more than one bad telemedicine implementation. Throwing technology at a non-problem does nothing for anyone. Pie-in-the-sky promises and deploying poorly implemented systems and walking away moves us backwards on all levels. I've spent the better part of the last decade blowing the dust off of these implementation and making them work. What I do is not bleeding edge robots, but finding small victories wherever possible and then working with stakeholders to identify other opportunities to grow their program (or overcome obstacles that have prevented them from using the technology in the first places). I'm sure that we both totally agree that telemedicine is not a fix-all that will replace in-person care. I've never made this promise to anyone, and never will. However, I've been increasingly surprised by what we've been able to accomplish even with older equipment.
The idiot TFA basically wants to talk about other things - patents and point of care robots, but really does nothing to discuss the lack of ubiquity that evangelists have been promising.
This is probably the only part of your post that I agree with. Telemedicine is more than telepresence robots, but it's working right now for many people who wouldn't otherwise have access to care. I'm sorry that it's not doing more for you right now.
Telemedicine can work for a simple doctor / patient interview but falls apart for anything more complex because medicine is quite a bit more than simply a doctor / patient interview. The remote site typically doesn't have the diagnostic gear that the consultant needs. The consultant typically doesn't have access to all of the records. And the remote site may not have the staff or equipment to treat the patient, even if the diagnosis is clear.
I don't mean to attack you, but what you're saying suggests that you either don't work in healthcare, or have never worked within a successfully implemented telehealth program. Further, it sounds like you're confusing telehealth with m-health and home care. I'll say this much as a concession: telehealth isn't for everyone, all the time. If the patient site has qualified staff, telemedicine can absolutely increase access to specialist care for people in rural areas. Your medical record argument does not hold much water, as EMR's and EMAR's are very real things that most modern practices have access to. I've also built shadow record systems to provide consultants with images of patient charts as well. Do some patients need to see a specialist in person for many procedures? Most certainly. The technology absolutely has its limitations, and telemedicine will never replace in-person care. Further, for most of us, many procedures require an onsite visit. Does that mean that the technology has not lived up to it's promise? Absolutely not. You're misinformed.
Telemedicine can work for a simple doctor / patient interview but falls apart for anything more complex because medicine is quite a bit more than simply a doctor / patient interview. The remote site typically doesn't have the diagnostic gear that the consultant needs. The consultant typically doesn't have access to all of the records. And the remote site may not have the staff or equipment to treat the patient, even if the diagnosis is clear.
Yes and no, but the basic thesis is incorrect. I've spent the last 8 years building and managing a telemedicine network and my company's providers use the technology to see over 6,000 patients per month. Using fairly basic specialty exam cameras and properly trained presenters, many patients in rural settings can be seen and diagnosed by specialists who are far away - who these patients would have not had access to. Perhaps they will have to travel onsite to have certain procedures performed, but the initial consult and follow-up visit can be performed remotely.
So at anything other than the most basic level, it has been thrown together technological bits that have long sought out a reasonable use case.
Again, yes and no. I completely agree that if you just throw technology at a problem without having healthcare operators be a part of the implementation, it will fail. However, there are quite a few more reasonable use cases. I can name a few low-hanging fruits that are being widely used right now:
Behavioral health (this is a no-brainer, and productivity is higher than in-person in some clinical settings)
Dermatology (generals special derm cam, but a general exam camera works, too)
Radiology (um, teleradiology is radiology now
Cardiology (tele-EKG was one of the first uses of telemedicine, many decades ago - this tends to do well with a tele-steth, but it works exactly like any other stethoscope - any RN can operate one)
In fact, they have to, because haggling is their entire profit margin.
Actually, haggling only represents part of their profit margin. Nearly every manufacturer provides a dealer with a holdback on every sale, usually around 3%. In addition, there are also factory-to-dealer incentives (which dealers are not obligated to pass along to customers), where manufacturers sell cars for less than the invoice price. There are various other rebate programs that manufacturers use to help dealers with their margins and move vehicles. Many manufacturers are willing to sell greater volumes at lower margins (especially when it comes to fleet sales).
It doesn't invalidate your point, but dealers don't survive on the haggling process alone.
Also, if a manufacturer sells directly, what stops states and localities from collecting taxes on the same and use of the vehicle?
Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
on
FDA Bans Trans Fat
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· Score: 3, Informative
You can't (or at least you shouldn't) fry anything in Olive oil. It will smoke and degrade into potentially unhealthy chemicals.
This is only true for lower quality extra virgin olive oil. High quality extra virgin olive oil with low acidity has a high smoke point. Also, virgin olive oil has a smoke point comparable to refined canola oil (only slightly lower), at 199C vs 204C. For reference, there is a chart of smoke points here. Unless you are using extra virgin olive oil, you are safe frying in light olive oil at about 199C.
...Of course, this being the internet, you have the usual suspects crying chicken little, the sky is falling.
They're also smugly saying "I told you so" - and doing so seemingly without understanding the situation. The situation hasn't changed since the beginning: don't use the service if you don't trust the encryption. If the service is breached and the (open source, peer reviewed) encryption stands up to attack, then the threat is astronomically minimal.
"We" is the people that actually do work in the tech industry & engineering. When I go to work in the morning I don't care if you're white, black, purple, gay, straight, trans-gendered, female, pierced, tattooed, et al. All I care about (those that I work about care about) is if you get your work done and if it's quality work. It's been that way for a while and it's been that way with most people I work with and know.
It's why a lot of similar industries don't care about your attire and you can get away with piercings, colored hair and tattoos
It's great that all you care about is results. I wish that there were more people like you. However, it doesn't mean that the tech industry is immune from the wage gap (or position gap) between men and women. It has and it continues to happen. There are some companies who are pioneers in this sense, too. However, these are not the norm. While I am optimistic about progress, we have a long way to go to establish equality. I welcome hearing about it on Slashdot, as the topic is worthy of discussion. To squelch discussion is being complicit with the status quo, which is a form of racism/sexism in and of itself. Please don't take that as me accusing you of anything. It's not my point. My point is to explain the merits of discussing it here.
That's the thing. I believe in social justice. And the way to get 'social justice' is to stop pointing out the differences and turning sides against each other. Women and LGBT have been in 'industry' for a long time. (Grace Murray Hopper graduated from Yale in the 30s) It's not an issue for most people. The only people that think it's an issue are the ones that are trying to grandstand it into something more than it is.
Tim Cook wasn't really deep in the closet before he came out, it's just that it was a non-issue around Apple.
I agree that the tech industry is diverse. However, it continues to be a male-dominated industry. If certain people feel alienated, or there is a wage/position gap - should they not be free to voice their opinion? Should they not be welcome to engage in discussion about it (it's not like anyone is forcing anyone else to participate in it)? What makes Slashdot the wrong place for it? I mean, if they're "nerds" in their field, should they head over to Ms-Slashdot.org and discuss it there? Just because the CEO of Apple's sexuality was a non-issue, does it mean that others in other companies do not experience it on a wholesale basis? Another example: while I am a huge admirer of Grace Hopper, her story is an exceptional one, considering that she practically stands along among history's female computer pioneers.
With respect to how to achieve social justice, I don't know if I agree with you. There is really no way to point out how inequality within the status quo without someone feeling attacked. Every online discussion that I have ever read about gender equality or racism results in a person in the majority (who is usually white, male, and/or heterosexual) attacking back, or at least pushing back in a way that indicates that they feel threatened. This type of behavior is endemic to the status quo. An attempt at social change that will negatively affect the privileged will often result in a negative response. At best, activists of social justice are accused of being divisive or stirring the pot. Maybe they are being divisive, but maybe they're right to be if they've been living with inequality their entire lives.
I also understand your point about grandstanding. However, if we agree to stipulate that there are
Slashdot Mirror
Are you talking about the way things are, or the way they should be?
IP is, according to the law, the same as P. If you are saying that it shouldn't be that way, that's a different discussion.
Interesting, you're actually making my argument for me. The law treats IP differently than physical property, because it is different. That is why we have separate laws protecting physical property and intellectual property (and significantly different criminal and even civil penalties for violations of such law).
Imagine we're talking about a car.
Comparing theft of physical property to intellectual property is an old, tired argument that has never ever worked. Please stop making this comparison. Stealing a Ford off of a lot deprives an entity of a physical asset. Paying for intellectual property under false pretenses due to locality restrictions is completely different. Even copying that IP for no remuneration is different, because it is not depriving an entity of a physical asset. Piracy is not the same as theft and never has been.
Does this justify piracy? No.
Does it justify using the same old tired argument and false analogy? Also no.
I'm not really sure, either. However, I can say that in some Google Fiber markets, Comcast is trying to compete with Gb downloads (still crappy 35 Mb/s uploads). I saw the same thing when FIOS came to my neighborhood and my local cable provider began offering faster service. It's a hell of a lot of capital investment, and I'm sure that Google sees an endgame in it. I would be surprised if it involved spewing ads that other ISP's wouldn't, but then again - if enough of us use Google services, I'm sure that they'll turn a buck on it.
How would that, keeping them in check, benefit Google?
That is a good question. How does a fair and open internet benefit Google? Let's not forget that residential ISP's have been forcing content providers (e.g. Netflix) to purchase exclusive internet connectivity to their backbones rather than upgrading their backhauls at intermediary providers...effectively double-dipping with their customers. They're trying to go after YouTube (a Google company) as well, and I assume that if Google Play takes off, they'll go after that too.
Also, due to Verizon and AT&T mobile's metering, Netflix is downgrading video bandwidth for these customers. If Google is able to make end roads into these markets, their competition may force other providers into line, making a better experience for Google customers as well as avoiding nasty double-dipping fees from providers.
At least, that's just my guess if the original hypothesis is correct. Who knows, maybe Google is trying to turn a buck on building regional ISP's. I just find that harder to believe than the idea that I proposed.
Even if you want to do fixed point wireless (which doesn't have a great history) I'm not sure where they could get the spectrum they need to launch a service that would compete with the likes of AT&T and Verizon.
An interesting perspective, but it might just be that competing with the likes of AT&T and Verizon is exactly what Google wants to do. It's been speculated that one of the intended purposes of Google Fiber is "...to keep vendors, distributors and regulators on their feet." Mobile providers sell fairly expensive metered bandwidth, and their many of their policies haven't always been customer-friendly. Introducing unmetered wireless gigabit internet might just be a way to keep the mobile providers in check. Besides, wireless infrastructure would likely be far less expensive than FTTP.
I like seeing stories like this here because occasionally, there is good discussion and analysis on Slashdot. If you don't want to see this story here, move along to the next story.
Not only are you incorrect, but this incorrect assertion confuses correlation with causation.
Why do you think it stigmatizes anything?
Because all labeling does is slap a label onto a product that says "GMO". It says nothing about the genes modified (for example, whether if a plant is Roundup Ready or vitamin A enriched). It does not educate consumers, as just being GE does not tell the whole story. GMO labeling for the claimed purpose of informing consumers is as disingenuous as requiring voter ID in order to stop non-existent voter fraud. I feel that it is being used as a tool for several other purposes, including furthering fears generated by junk science (that has been outright fraudulent, in some cases). This is not to say that I don't have problems with the business practices of a certain seed company, but I don't believe that generic GMO labeling laws are an appropriate way to handle what I believe are patent abuses.
Besides, there are already federal rules for organic food labeling, and this already means no GMO ingredients.
This dormant cyber pathogen must be some sort of neo-Asherah virus from the terrorists! They will control our minds! Apple must write a nam-shub so that the FBI can protect us!
Your tax dollars at work, folks. Anyone else want to send this DA some of Stephenson's early work to save him the trouble of having to reinvent the wheel?
They went public when Apple asked them not to. So yes they did do it for publicity and "trial by media" to be more precise. If it was all about the court case they would have done it in court instead of by press release.
That does make sense. If the courts act reasonably and back down, the DoJ may have been successful in appealing to the public's sense of emotion/outrage and push Congress to pass the legislature that they want.
That turns it into a comedy - the FBI going public and then accusing Apple of doing it for publicity. Did they employ some clowns thrown out of the NSA after Snowden or something? It sounds like something the Star Trek Set guy would do.
Sort of...the FBI didn't do it for publicity. They did it to set precedent, and this case was chosen very carefully by the DoJ in order to achieve this (by tugging at heart strings and a sense of panic in the wake of terrorism). There are plenty of other investigations that they could have made similar demands under. If Apple cooperated with the FBI and it was done under seal, then it could not be used as precedent to use the courts to force Apple to do the same in future cases.
Er what? I thought the Rosa Parks moments was a good thing? Someone has their analogies confused...
I think that you're not looking at the analogy from a relative perspective, rather, it appears that you may be looking at that term from a point of absolute good and bad. The Rosa Parks moment, in historical context, was an inflection point for the civil rights movement. DoJ is trying to use this as an inflection point in their fight against encryption (hence the use of the term "Rosa Parks moment"). It's not necessarily a good thing for all of us, but a good thing for DoJ, as an appeal to emotion/outrage and an inflection point in the encryption/surveillance debate. I can't speak for the GPP, but I believe that this is where he's coming from. Are you with me now?
It's probably easier to just compromise the endpoints. Strong crypto is already out there. It's open, it's documented, and it's in the wild. There is no way that the American government can put that toothpaste back in the tube, short of declaring anyone with strong crypto a criminal (very unlikely). GPG can already do the trick for secure communications - but the built-in device stuff is a low-hanging fruit that is easy to chase after-the-fact. The easier and most likely route of attack is compromising the endpoints. If the endpoint is compromised, encryption can be circumvented rendered useless in several different ways (hopefully, unbeknownst to the users). Military, intelligence and law enforcement already know this. I would be very surprised if they didn't have their own hackers to hit high-value targets with endpoint attacks to circumvent encryption.
This is more about the low-hanging fruit stuff that gets into the hands of ordinary consumers. Local police departments with more limited resources also have a keen interest in the Apple case.
You dont get it. This is the FBI's 'Rosa Parks' moment. They are using an incendiary case to force the issue that unbreakable encryption should not be allowed in casual use. They are trying to force the idea that it should be illegal to make an unbreakable lock and they are using this case to ram it home. They dont really give a shit about the data in this case, they want to cow the tech sector into not making their jobs harder.
THIS! I wish that I had mod points. You are correct, the case is entirely political. The Guardian has an article that explains in depth what you very succinctly stated. The big takeaway is that the actual data in this case doesn't really matter. However, the feds were fishing for the perfect inflammatory case to establish legal precedent (NPR had a great story on it earlier this week with a legal analyst who said that the Justice Department knew exactly what they were doing when they chose this case). Tim Cook is spot on in fighting this as a precedent matter more than anything else.
Verizon is still using 4G LTE, which does not always qualify as true 4G spec.
It sounds like you're talking about two different things, but are then combining them into the same argument. My post is only about NOx emissions. Your post is about diesel particulate emissions, which you appear to have lumped this into the VW diesel scandal. The diesel VW scandal is only about NOx emissions (and I would still consider linking specific deaths to this a pretty far-reaching stretch, and will be nearly impossible to prove in specific cases). To the best of my knowledge, the diesel VW scandal has nothing to do with diesel particulate emissions, only NOx.
But nobody ever mentions the actual level - which is pretty damn important because 40 times 1 part per thousand is a lot more significant than 40 times 1 part per trillion.
The actual levels are posted here.
Here's the long and short of it:
Jetta (LNT system):
EPA Limit: 0.043 g/km
EPA Dyno Test (cheat number): 0.022 g/km
WVU Test (actual number): 0.61-1.5 g/km
Passat (SCR/Urea-based system):
EPA Limit: 0.043 g/km
EPA Dyno Test (cheat number): 0.016 g/km
WVU Test (actual number): 0.34-0.67 g/km
These emissions levels are in g/km, which is pollutants over distance (which can probably be converted to time, if you dig around the actual study to find average speeds attained, but I'm supposed to be working right now...so you can try to dig that up on your own :). However, I do not believe that these numbers can be converted into actual pollutant volume (e.g. PPM/PPB/PPT). Perhaps you can scavenge that from the WVU study's raw data. I'd be interested in what you find.
I am also interested in finding is a trend in the NOx regulation in the US. I've dug around a bit, but have not yet found it. E.g. - did the actual NOx levels meet previous standards? Are the current standards that VW had to cheat to get around unrealistic? Beyond this, the wiki article does cite some projections regarding the number of deaths that have been/will be caused by the cheat, but I'd like to have a better perspective than that.
Your premise is incorrect on many levels.
First, your claim that the lawsuit is on the basis of a person's desire for 15 minutes of fame appears to be completely baseless. If you had to read the comments thread, the originator of the suit posts here. S/he explains the motives several different times. S/he does not ever state that he seeks fame from this. Instead, there are several principles that are outlined. Did you happen to read something that I didn't, or yours just a massive, unsupported assumption? For what it's worth, several very important Supreme Court rulings have come from lawsuits just like this. They're not all just people looking for a few minutes of fame...and I don't see any indication that this is, either.
Secondly, can you provide any evidence that AIT would make airline travel any safer? Google is your friend here (see "security theater"). Without going into several links that you can dig up for yourself from independent sources, the answer is an overwhelming and easy "no". I do appreciate one of your points - when there is another terrorist attack involving airline passenger travel (and there probably will be), the public will ask what was missed, why, and how to prevent it in the future...but let's not fool ourselves and act like baseless additional security measures are actually doing anything beyond wasting our time and violating civil liberties.
The failures that you have described, I have seen in several places. Telehealth equipment purchased with some sort of rural healthcare grant and dumped on a clinic by technical staff, and left to gather dust because it was not implemented properly. In my experience, it's really easy to get this wrong. As you know, tech people are neither providers nor managed care operators.
You are correct that when I use the term "telemedicine", I tend to use it in the broadest possible way. You alluded to this in your comment - and I'll reiterate that just using the novel terminology (e.g. da Vinci machine and telemed robots) does not do justice to the work that has gone into getting telemedicine where it is now. Telecommunications technology has been used for healthcare since it's inception, and in these broad terms, it certainly counts as telemedicine (early telephone and telegraph use, not to mention NASA's work on remote monitoring for astronauts). We take the low-hanging-fruit solutions where we can, but there is so much regulatory and bureaucratic friction ensuring that telemedicine adoption happens very slowly. (Cross-state physician and nursing licensing is always a problem, CMS regulations prevent billing in many cases, state boards of medical examiners are passing protectionist measures to make it difficult to perform telemedicine - especially across state lines, etc). In building a system, I start small, and take the small victories on the low-hanging-fruit. More often than not, it's the healthcare providers who need to buy into the technology and they are the ones who come up with ideas for how to use the technology. It's very often that I hear something like "I've got a regular ENT clinic, and don't need that scope, but could I use this for after-hours coverage when I only have an RN on duty? I'd bet that with video supervision, we could really reduce the number of ER transports, which is exactly what our client is asking for."
With respect to cardiology, in many cases, a cardiac echo machine and tech are easier (and cheaper) to transport than a cardiologist. It really depends on the circumstance. If it's easy to refer a patient to a clinic with the appropriate equipment down the street, then it makes sense. In a large hospital that already has echo cardio equipment onsite, then it's a no-brainer. In a massive self-contained environment (e.g. native American reservation, prison system, VA network, or university system), this isn't always possible - and this is where we can bring the equipment and tech to the patient. These are the environments where we have seen the greatest successes.
You are also correct in that nobody is going to just "connect" two EHR's overnight. Most of the federal law revolving around these was not really for portability in the charts, but in billing codes. Even that is very complicated and cumbersome. However, getting a partner provider (or a remote employee) access to an EMR is very easy to do.
Yeah, we're closer than it would appear in our opinions on this. It would appear that you've been on the wrong end of more than one bad telemedicine implementation. Throwing technology at a non-problem does nothing for anyone. Pie-in-the-sky promises and deploying poorly implemented systems and walking away moves us backwards on all levels. I've spent the better part of the last decade blowing the dust off of these implementation and making them work. What I do is not bleeding edge robots, but finding small victories wherever possible and then working with stakeholders to identify other opportunities to grow their program (or overcome obstacles that have prevented them from using the technology in the first places). I'm sure that we both totally agree that telemedicine is not a fix-all that will replace in-person care. I've never made this promise to anyone, and never will. However, I've been increasingly surprised by what we've been able to accomplish even with older equipment.
The idiot TFA basically wants to talk about other things - patents and point of care robots, but really does nothing to discuss the lack of ubiquity that evangelists have been promising.
This is probably the only part of your post that I agree with. Telemedicine is more than telepresence robots, but it's working right now for many people who wouldn't otherwise have access to care. I'm sorry that it's not doing more for you right now.
Telemedicine can work for a simple doctor / patient interview but falls apart for anything more complex because medicine is quite a bit more than simply a doctor / patient interview. The remote site typically doesn't have the diagnostic gear that the consultant needs. The consultant typically doesn't have access to all of the records. And the remote site may not have the staff or equipment to treat the patient, even if the diagnosis is clear.
I don't mean to attack you, but what you're saying suggests that you either don't work in healthcare, or have never worked within a successfully implemented telehealth program. Further, it sounds like you're confusing telehealth with m-health and home care. I'll say this much as a concession: telehealth isn't for everyone, all the time. If the patient site has qualified staff, telemedicine can absolutely increase access to specialist care for people in rural areas. Your medical record argument does not hold much water, as EMR's and EMAR's are very real things that most modern practices have access to. I've also built shadow record systems to provide consultants with images of patient charts as well. Do some patients need to see a specialist in person for many procedures? Most certainly. The technology absolutely has its limitations, and telemedicine will never replace in-person care. Further, for most of us, many procedures require an onsite visit. Does that mean that the technology has not lived up to it's promise? Absolutely not. You're misinformed.
Telemedicine can work for a simple doctor / patient interview but falls apart for anything more complex because medicine is quite a bit more than simply a doctor / patient interview. The remote site typically doesn't have the diagnostic gear that the consultant needs. The consultant typically doesn't have access to all of the records. And the remote site may not have the staff or equipment to treat the patient, even if the diagnosis is clear.
Yes and no, but the basic thesis is incorrect. I've spent the last 8 years building and managing a telemedicine network and my company's providers use the technology to see over 6,000 patients per month. Using fairly basic specialty exam cameras and properly trained presenters, many patients in rural settings can be seen and diagnosed by specialists who are far away - who these patients would have not had access to. Perhaps they will have to travel onsite to have certain procedures performed, but the initial consult and follow-up visit can be performed remotely.
So at anything other than the most basic level, it has been thrown together technological bits that have long sought out a reasonable use case.
Again, yes and no. I completely agree that if you just throw technology at a problem without having healthcare operators be a part of the implementation, it will fail. However, there are quite a few more reasonable use cases. I can name a few low-hanging fruits that are being widely used right now:
In fact, they have to, because haggling is their entire profit margin.
Actually, haggling only represents part of their profit margin. Nearly every manufacturer provides a dealer with a holdback on every sale, usually around 3%. In addition, there are also factory-to-dealer incentives (which dealers are not obligated to pass along to customers), where manufacturers sell cars for less than the invoice price. There are various other rebate programs that manufacturers use to help dealers with their margins and move vehicles. Many manufacturers are willing to sell greater volumes at lower margins (especially when it comes to fleet sales).
It doesn't invalidate your point, but dealers don't survive on the haggling process alone.
Also, if a manufacturer sells directly, what stops states and localities from collecting taxes on the same and use of the vehicle?
You can't (or at least you shouldn't) fry anything in Olive oil. It will smoke and degrade into potentially unhealthy chemicals.
This is only true for lower quality extra virgin olive oil. High quality extra virgin olive oil with low acidity has a high smoke point. Also, virgin olive oil has a smoke point comparable to refined canola oil (only slightly lower), at 199C vs 204C. For reference, there is a chart of smoke points here. Unless you are using extra virgin olive oil, you are safe frying in light olive oil at about 199C.
...Of course, this being the internet, you have the usual suspects crying chicken little, the sky is falling.
They're also smugly saying "I told you so" - and doing so seemingly without understanding the situation. The situation hasn't changed since the beginning: don't use the service if you don't trust the encryption. If the service is breached and the (open source, peer reviewed) encryption stands up to attack, then the threat is astronomically minimal.
Bah, your brain has been proven very susceptible to rubber hose cryptographic attacks.
Who's we white man?
Now I'm white and a man?
I really hope that you were joking too. I don't know you, so just in case - here's the joke that I was referencing. :)
"We" is the people that actually do work in the tech industry & engineering. When I go to work in the morning I don't care if you're white, black, purple, gay, straight, trans-gendered, female, pierced, tattooed, et al. All I care about (those that I work about care about) is if you get your work done and if it's quality work. It's been that way for a while and it's been that way with most people I work with and know.
It's why a lot of similar industries don't care about your attire and you can get away with piercings, colored hair and tattoos
It's great that all you care about is results. I wish that there were more people like you. However, it doesn't mean that the tech industry is immune from the wage gap (or position gap) between men and women. It has and it continues to happen. There are some companies who are pioneers in this sense, too. However, these are not the norm. While I am optimistic about progress, we have a long way to go to establish equality. I welcome hearing about it on Slashdot, as the topic is worthy of discussion. To squelch discussion is being complicit with the status quo, which is a form of racism/sexism in and of itself. Please don't take that as me accusing you of anything. It's not my point. My point is to explain the merits of discussing it here.
That's the thing. I believe in social justice. And the way to get 'social justice' is to stop pointing out the differences and turning sides against each other. Women and LGBT have been in 'industry' for a long time. (Grace Murray Hopper graduated from Yale in the 30s) It's not an issue for most people. The only people that think it's an issue are the ones that are trying to grandstand it into something more than it is.
Tim Cook wasn't really deep in the closet before he came out, it's just that it was a non-issue around Apple.
I agree that the tech industry is diverse. However, it continues to be a male-dominated industry. If certain people feel alienated, or there is a wage/position gap - should they not be free to voice their opinion? Should they not be welcome to engage in discussion about it (it's not like anyone is forcing anyone else to participate in it)? What makes Slashdot the wrong place for it? I mean, if they're "nerds" in their field, should they head over to Ms-Slashdot.org and discuss it there? Just because the CEO of Apple's sexuality was a non-issue, does it mean that others in other companies do not experience it on a wholesale basis? Another example: while I am a huge admirer of Grace Hopper, her story is an exceptional one, considering that she practically stands along among history's female computer pioneers.
With respect to how to achieve social justice, I don't know if I agree with you. There is really no way to point out how inequality within the status quo without someone feeling attacked. Every online discussion that I have ever read about gender equality or racism results in a person in the majority (who is usually white, male, and/or heterosexual) attacking back, or at least pushing back in a way that indicates that they feel threatened. This type of behavior is endemic to the status quo. An attempt at social change that will negatively affect the privileged will often result in a negative response. At best, activists of social justice are accused of being divisive or stirring the pot. Maybe they are being divisive, but maybe they're right to be if they've been living with inequality their entire lives.
I also understand your point about grandstanding. However, if we agree to stipulate that there are