"wise Islamic scholars" = people who dig blowing up any statue depicting a figure other than Allah or Saddam.
"wise Irish monks" = people who could not read the texts they slavishly reproduced at the urging of their (surely wise) superiors. Some of these guys wrote the damned bibble quite often, but very few ever read it.
"painting the spiritual lives of billions of people and thousands of years of history with that same dirty brush" = daring to criticize, albeit with sharp tongue and not always in the most respectful manner, the mockery of human intelligence that is organized, and disorganized, religion. Folks, if it relies on the supernatural, it's bunk. Fantasy is all fine and good, but you can't confuse it with reality just 'cause jeebus said so.
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
----- Transcript of session follows -----
550... Host unknown (Name server: hr.house.gov: host not found)
Quick! Call someone! The government's not working!
I'll admit, it's an uninformed reply from an uninformed source, but might you not have better luck with BearShare? I think those other things were some kinda girly 80s toy.
Not only does he share the same number of genes, but Art Caplan was found to have about as much integrity as an ear of corn, as well. Most in the philosphical/ethical-minded community agree: Talking heads don't come any more hollow. But we can thank Art for one thing - he'll certainly get the Jeezers riled up. It's one thing for that Scopes fella' to compare us to apes, but ears of corn? Some southern-fried fundamentalizers are gonna git you, sucka!
is that Oreos(R)(TM)(patent pending) tend to get eaten black-part first. Carried to a bizzare and irretrievably buzzed extreme, what this means is that in the event of a global catastrophe, in which all (hu)mankind turns to cannibalism, Clarence Thomas will be devoured before Natalie Portman. Meanwhile all grits of any kind will have ceased to exist.
Re:That's not what they mean by "unique."
on
Who Owns Your Body?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, the use of human tissue for research DOES fall under the rules for human subject research (Protection of Human Research Subjects, 45 CFR 46), and there are very specific provisions regarding the storage of tissue for research (or nonresearch) purposes.
To store tissues for research without consent, regardless of whether the tissue was originally obtained for clincal or research purposes, is a bit of a no-no, to say the least. Of course, it happens every day, as yardgnome's post suggests. Point is, it shouldn't.
Again, slightly OT, but this is an issue I've been dealing with at work lately. When specimens from minor subjects (under 18 in my state) are stored, they are usually stored under parental consent. Problem is, when the minor subject turns 18, that parental consent is no longer legally effective, and the researchers holding the tissue have 3 options. They can strip the sample completely of identifiers (yes, there is unique DNA, but we don't think we're dealing with Bond villains here), they can destroy the sample (the default approach at my institution), or they can try to contact the formerly minor subject to obtain consent for continued storage. Most opt for the 3rd option, and we have no way to know if they ever comply. Sucks that so much of human subject protection relies on the honor system, especially with the drugcos lapping up subjects' blood like faceless concrete vampires. But I digress. And now I eat.
It already made for an interesting court case... Moore v. Regents, State of California. IANAL, and IDCTBAME (I don't claim to be a medical ethicist), but my understanding of the Moore case (hopefully not too OT, and hopefully not part of the original article, as I'll openly admit not having taken the time to read it) follows:
Mr. Moore had a rare type of "hairy" leukemia. The doctors who diagnosed it asked him to sign a "consent form" so that they could study the disease and (potentially) make money from it.
Mr. Moore refused consent.
"By accident," some of Mr. Moore's tumor sample was stored anyway, and research on those samples resulted in lucrative biomed development.
When this happened, the researchers realized that Mr. Moore had actually refused consent, and being utterly stupid people with balls of purest brass, they called him up and said, "hey, this discovery we made off of your cancer without your permission turns out to be worth billions. Are you sure you won't reconsider that consent thing?"
Mr. Moore sued.
Mr. Moore eventually LOST the case. Many excuses have been given. One of the most popular was that the tissue was disease, and not part of Mr. Moore's body, thus he had no property right to it once it had been removed for surgical/diagnostic purposes (and the surgical consent form from the hospital no doubt gave the researchers "rights" to the tissue). Another is that the profit didn't come from Mr. Moore's tumor, but only from original developments created from research based on tumor specimens, thus the original source of the tumor had no claim to cash. All of these excuses, and I'll show my bias again here, are crap.
The HIPAA (medical data privacy) regulations will hopefully stimulate more active consenting of patient/subjects for things like this. The insurance industry is lobbying heavily right now to defeat HIPAA, and the Shrub (yeah, more bias) is listening, since HIPAA fell into the "last minute" acts from SuperBill. Hope that the moneygrubbers who deny people necessary care to protect the bottom line don't also get to deny those people the basic right to be ASKED what happens to their sensitive medical information, or the assorted stuff that gets removed from them.
OT PS - Most of the "cooperative group" cancer studies funded by the NIH now include, as a condition of entry (and this is important, as clinical trial participation is effectively the standard of care for many cancers), that subjects give the sponsor (the cooperative group or drug company) blood samples and tumor specimens "for unspecified future research." More frightening - they've recently started to ask for not just the pound of flesh, but also the linkage files which tie that tissue to the original owner. Data and tissue privacy nightmare. Quite against the current federal regulations against asking subjects to waive or appear to waive any rights (which I had assumed included property rights to their tissue). Our tax dollars at work, folks. For the benefit of whichever GlaxoPfizerLillyGenentechCo. shouts "IP!" first.
Sorry for the long rant, but thought I had some pertinent info. to contribute.
I'm all with the idea, but, in all fairness, "pathy" implies a pathological condition, not a field of study. "Ridiculology" would be a good term for the study of the ridiculous. "Ridiculography" would be a term for the study of the physical bounds of the ridiculous. But "Ridiculopathy" would refer to a condition in which one uncontrollably, or by nature, ridicules things, or a condition in which one irreversibly devolves into a ridiculous state (i.e., Czar Rudy Giuliani may suffer from ridiculopathy under the second definition).
Not that the "radiculo" camp has a legal leg to stand on in asking you to C&D use of your invented word, but they do at least have a point, buried somewhere in those latin roots.
gnotella was (is?) one of the many gnutella clones. Used to be available for dl at gnotella.nerdherd.net, but not sure if it kept up with the times developmentally (i.e., may have been supplanted by bearshare, etc.). As a famous toy soldier used to tell me every AM, "knowing is half the battle."
Not so useful? Sounds to me as though they're not much larger than the "ingesticam" recently thrown before the FDA. Wouldn't it be nice if that little caplet-shaped device could, for instance, snag polyps, or obtain biopsies from suspicious areas? Once the tools get that small, at least in the GI tract, the nightmare of perforation becomes a mere worry of errant, non-penetrating slices.
When I was in school we had someone who would creep around the stacks, presumably late at night, defecating in books in a seemingly indiscriminate pattern. Still, I've never found sticky pages in a library book...
Should be on your short-list for speaker manufacturers. They specialize in bipolar speaker design (front and back firing drivers, not manic depressive woofers), and their products range in size from massive towers with built-in amplified subwoofers down to more slender towers lacking the built in amps and side-firing 18" LF driver. I understand that using a pair of the big ones up front and a pair of the smaller ones (same drivers, or same tweeters, minimally) for surround rocks. They make a center channel speaker, but I don't think it is a bipolar design - that should not have an impact on the voice-matching between the front three. Granted, the system I just put together in ASCII will cost ~2300 for speakers alone, but you can go much cheaper with DT and not sacrifice sound quality - only sound depth with those dual built-in 18" subs. Also check out Roton for Adcom-quality solid state components at half the price. Those British can apparently craft solid electronics.
How cool could it get? You could cram 3 or 4 workstations worth of processing power into it, and it'd still be a chair (albeit an expensive, self-heating chair). IMHO, if you want this thing to be worthwhile, it has to:
a) include wireless ethernet for things like starting the jacuzzi bubbles and remotely blending drinks, and
b) provide tactile stimulation to enhance whatever activities one might be enjoying in one's mega-lazy-go-boy chair (I'm thinking motion simulators, here, not the Doc Johnson jerk-o-matic (with realistic hair)).
The ability to hover and silently move about the house (or wherever) would be nice, but sounds a little too jetsons even for my optimistic naivete.
Are you suggesting that we create a violent new super-race of attack-nutria to sic on spammers? I'd go along with it, but as folks in Looserana have found, there's no market for nutria pelt. Surely spammer pelt is equally worthless.
You grant patent protection on inventions (in your scenario, the cure that is developed). You DO NOT grant patent protection on a piece of genetic code for the sole purpose of PREVENTING OTHERS working in the same area from making the discovery you're trying to make first. It used to be called competition - if you're real good at gene-cowboying, and you invent the "cure" first, then you get patent protection on the cure. These are not mining rights, people, and they should not be distributed, like mining rights, to the first grizzled genetecist who drives a stake in the ground. Let them DO something, then reward them. Don't give them broad patents to lurk under R&D bridges, demanding tolls of innocent, or at least less vile and malicious, passersby.
The cost/benefit ratio here is very similar to the trade-offs inherent in changing one's browser settings for "security" (really privacy/confidentiality) reasons. Although I doubt that the implications in medical care will be nearly as annoying as the various prompts and warnings one encounters in browser-privatizing.
I agree with your claim that non-medical use of medical record information should always be by permission, but my colleagues in public health research truly resent that claim. For many years, there have been 4 criteria at 45 CFR 46.116 which are required to be met in order for the requirement to obtain a research subject's informed consent may be waived. Those are:
"the research involves no more than minimal risk to subjects"
"the waiver [of the requirement to obtain informed consent]... will not adversely affect the rights and welfare of the subjects"
"the research could not be practicably carried out without the waiver"
and "whenever appropriate, the subjects will be provided with additional pertinent information after [unconsented] participation."
My understanding is that HIPPA raises this to 8 criteria, and I've not yet had the chance to read the 4 new ones. Researchers who count on ready access to medical records for data are pissed. People who insist on privacy at all costs are somewhat (though not entirely) pleased. As robbway suggests, time will tell if the new privacy measures are "worth it" for citizens or if they are the death knell of population-based public health research, but it must be recognized that this has been a very delicate balancing act for policy makers. They should be applauded for having the cajones to even try.
Sweet Jeebus, are you trying to install the 4th Reich? Such scaremongering and irrational fear of people with medical conditions belongs at Liberty University, not on/.
Personally, I think we ought to force social conservatives to wear ID tags so that they might be spat upon at will by HIV-infected junkies with paranoid psychoses.
Slashdot Mirror
"wise Irish monks" = people who could not read the texts they slavishly reproduced at the urging of their (surely wise) superiors. Some of these guys wrote the damned bibble quite often, but very few ever read it.
"painting the spiritual lives of billions of people and thousands of years of history with that same dirty brush" = daring to criticize, albeit with sharp tongue and not always in the most respectful manner, the mockery of human intelligence that is organized, and disorganized, religion. Folks, if it relies on the supernatural, it's bunk. Fantasy is all fine and good, but you can't confuse it with reality just 'cause jeebus said so.
WWJD = "whoa! when'd jeebus die?"
Quick! Call someone! The government's not working!
I'll admit, it's an uninformed reply from an uninformed source, but might you not have better luck with BearShare? I think those other things were some kinda girly 80s toy.
Nein! "Virtual hard drive" est VERBOTEN!
Not only does he share the same number of genes, but Art Caplan was found to have about as much integrity as an ear of corn, as well. Most in the philosphical/ethical-minded community agree: Talking heads don't come any more hollow. But we can thank Art for one thing - he'll certainly get the Jeezers riled up. It's one thing for that Scopes fella' to compare us to apes, but ears of corn? Some southern-fried fundamentalizers are gonna git you, sucka!
is that Oreos(R)(TM)(patent pending) tend to get eaten black-part first. Carried to a bizzare and irretrievably buzzed extreme, what this means is that in the event of a global catastrophe, in which all (hu)mankind turns to cannibalism, Clarence Thomas will be devoured before Natalie Portman. Meanwhile all grits of any kind will have ceased to exist.
Perhaps you're looking for the goatse.cx guy?
To store tissues for research without consent, regardless of whether the tissue was originally obtained for clincal or research purposes, is a bit of a no-no, to say the least. Of course, it happens every day, as yardgnome's post suggests. Point is, it shouldn't.
Again, slightly OT, but this is an issue I've been dealing with at work lately. When specimens from minor subjects (under 18 in my state) are stored, they are usually stored under parental consent. Problem is, when the minor subject turns 18, that parental consent is no longer legally effective, and the researchers holding the tissue have 3 options. They can strip the sample completely of identifiers (yes, there is unique DNA, but we don't think we're dealing with Bond villains here), they can destroy the sample (the default approach at my institution), or they can try to contact the formerly minor subject to obtain consent for continued storage. Most opt for the 3rd option, and we have no way to know if they ever comply. Sucks that so much of human subject protection relies on the honor system, especially with the drugcos lapping up subjects' blood like faceless concrete vampires. But I digress. And now I eat.
Mr. Moore had a rare type of "hairy" leukemia. The doctors who diagnosed it asked him to sign a "consent form" so that they could study the disease and (potentially) make money from it.
Mr. Moore refused consent.
"By accident," some of Mr. Moore's tumor sample was stored anyway, and research on those samples resulted in lucrative biomed development.
When this happened, the researchers realized that Mr. Moore had actually refused consent, and being utterly stupid people with balls of purest brass, they called him up and said, "hey, this discovery we made off of your cancer without your permission turns out to be worth billions. Are you sure you won't reconsider that consent thing?" Mr. Moore sued.
Mr. Moore eventually LOST the case. Many excuses have been given. One of the most popular was that the tissue was disease, and not part of Mr. Moore's body, thus he had no property right to it once it had been removed for surgical/diagnostic purposes (and the surgical consent form from the hospital no doubt gave the researchers "rights" to the tissue). Another is that the profit didn't come from Mr. Moore's tumor, but only from original developments created from research based on tumor specimens, thus the original source of the tumor had no claim to cash. All of these excuses, and I'll show my bias again here, are crap.
The HIPAA (medical data privacy) regulations will hopefully stimulate more active consenting of patient/subjects for things like this. The insurance industry is lobbying heavily right now to defeat HIPAA, and the Shrub (yeah, more bias) is listening, since HIPAA fell into the "last minute" acts from SuperBill. Hope that the moneygrubbers who deny people necessary care to protect the bottom line don't also get to deny those people the basic right to be ASKED what happens to their sensitive medical information, or the assorted stuff that gets removed from them.
OT PS - Most of the "cooperative group" cancer studies funded by the NIH now include, as a condition of entry (and this is important, as clinical trial participation is effectively the standard of care for many cancers), that subjects give the sponsor (the cooperative group or drug company) blood samples and tumor specimens "for unspecified future research." More frightening - they've recently started to ask for not just the pound of flesh, but also the linkage files which tie that tissue to the original owner. Data and tissue privacy nightmare. Quite against the current federal regulations against asking subjects to waive or appear to waive any rights (which I had assumed included property rights to their tissue). Our tax dollars at work, folks. For the benefit of whichever GlaxoPfizerLillyGenentechCo. shouts "IP!" first.
Sorry for the long rant, but thought I had some pertinent info. to contribute.
Please don't feed the trolls.
I'm all with the idea, but, in all fairness, "pathy" implies a pathological condition, not a field of study. "Ridiculology" would be a good term for the study of the ridiculous. "Ridiculography" would be a term for the study of the physical bounds of the ridiculous. But "Ridiculopathy" would refer to a condition in which one uncontrollably, or by nature, ridicules things, or a condition in which one irreversibly devolves into a ridiculous state (i.e., Czar Rudy Giuliani may suffer from ridiculopathy under the second definition). Not that the "radiculo" camp has a legal leg to stand on in asking you to C&D use of your invented word, but they do at least have a point, buried somewhere in those latin roots.
gnotella was (is?) one of the many gnutella clones. Used to be available for dl at gnotella.nerdherd.net, but not sure if it kept up with the times developmentally (i.e., may have been supplanted by bearshare, etc.). As a famous toy soldier used to tell me every AM, "knowing is half the battle."
Not so useful? Sounds to me as though they're not much larger than the "ingesticam" recently thrown before the FDA. Wouldn't it be nice if that little caplet-shaped device could, for instance, snag polyps, or obtain biopsies from suspicious areas? Once the tools get that small, at least in the GI tract, the nightmare of perforation becomes a mere worry of errant, non-penetrating slices.
Security through obscrutiny... is that like victory through strategery?
When I was in school we had someone who would creep around the stacks, presumably late at night, defecating in books in a seemingly indiscriminate pattern. Still, I've never found sticky pages in a library book...
"Eh, there's a mouse in my mobo..."
Should be on your short-list for speaker manufacturers. They specialize in bipolar speaker design (front and back firing drivers, not manic depressive woofers), and their products range in size from massive towers with built-in amplified subwoofers down to more slender towers lacking the built in amps and side-firing 18" LF driver. I understand that using a pair of the big ones up front and a pair of the smaller ones (same drivers, or same tweeters, minimally) for surround rocks. They make a center channel speaker, but I don't think it is a bipolar design - that should not have an impact on the voice-matching between the front three. Granted, the system I just put together in ASCII will cost ~2300 for speakers alone, but you can go much cheaper with DT and not sacrifice sound quality - only sound depth with those dual built-in 18" subs. Also check out Roton for Adcom-quality solid state components at half the price. Those British can apparently craft solid electronics.
a) include wireless ethernet for things like starting the jacuzzi bubbles and remotely blending drinks, and
b) provide tactile stimulation to enhance whatever activities one might be enjoying in one's mega-lazy-go-boy chair (I'm thinking motion simulators, here, not the Doc Johnson jerk-o-matic (with realistic hair)).
The ability to hover and silently move about the house (or wherever) would be nice, but sounds a little too jetsons even for my optimistic naivete.
Alternate headline: EBay mail-rapes users.
Are you suggesting that we create a violent new super-race of attack-nutria to sic on spammers? I'd go along with it, but as folks in Looserana have found, there's no market for nutria pelt. Surely spammer pelt is equally worthless.
You grant patent protection on inventions (in your scenario, the cure that is developed). You DO NOT grant patent protection on a piece of genetic code for the sole purpose of PREVENTING OTHERS working in the same area from making the discovery you're trying to make first. It used to be called competition - if you're real good at gene-cowboying, and you invent the "cure" first, then you get patent protection on the cure. These are not mining rights, people, and they should not be distributed, like mining rights, to the first grizzled genetecist who drives a stake in the ground. Let them DO something, then reward them. Don't give them broad patents to lurk under R&D bridges, demanding tolls of innocent, or at least less vile and malicious, passersby.
A clever disguise, Senator Hatch, but we all still remember your anonymous posts about the benefits of extending the Claritin patent...
I agree with your claim that non-medical use of medical record information should always be by permission, but my colleagues in public health research truly resent that claim. For many years, there have been 4 criteria at 45 CFR 46.116 which are required to be met in order for the requirement to obtain a research subject's informed consent may be waived. Those are:
"the research involves no more than minimal risk to subjects"
"the waiver [of the requirement to obtain informed consent]... will not adversely affect the rights and welfare of the subjects"
"the research could not be practicably carried out without the waiver"
and "whenever appropriate, the subjects will be provided with additional pertinent information after [unconsented] participation."
My understanding is that HIPPA raises this to 8 criteria, and I've not yet had the chance to read the 4 new ones. Researchers who count on ready access to medical records for data are pissed. People who insist on privacy at all costs are somewhat (though not entirely) pleased. As robbway suggests, time will tell if the new privacy measures are "worth it" for citizens or if they are the death knell of population-based public health research, but it must be recognized that this has been a very delicate balancing act for policy makers. They should be applauded for having the cajones to even try.
When the hell did the US annex Quebec? Or, alternatively, when the hell did Canada start calling itself America?
Personally, I think we ought to force social conservatives to wear ID tags so that they might be spat upon at will by HIV-infected junkies with paranoid psychoses.