There is an expectation of obscurity in public, which while not a legal expectation has served as a substitute for the legal expectation of privacy. That's ending now as cameras (and the data they upload) become ubiquitous.
Cell phones these days are cameras. Looking it one is like looking in a camera's viewfinder. If you claim it's not offensive, I'm fine with that, but then using google glass is not offensive either.
Looking at your cellphone != Holding the camera up pointing at the room with the screen towards you. When you look at your phone, where is the lens pointed? Answer: somewhere on the ground, not too far away from your feet. You only hold it vertically up near eye level when you are using the camera.
On a related note: how do you feel about people wearing Glass type devices in places that forbid recording (bathrooms, locker rooms, etc)?
SpaceX has reduced the cost per lb to low earth orbit almost 5 fold (vs Delta IV heavy, $8600/lb) and is hoping to get it down another ~2 fold ($800 per lb) with the Falcon Heavy. Which is entirely kick ass, but pretty much all of the programs that aim to bring the costs down drastically further depend on some way of not having to lift all of your oxidizer or doing away with combustion entirely for at least part of the trip (jets air breathing rockets, launch assist, etc).
If we are going to go big, go big: Launch Loop.
6 million metric tons into low earth orbit per year for ~$3 per kg. Compared to a space elevator: No uninvented materials or unobtanium required, trip time measured in minutes instead of weeks, 200x less radiation per passenger.
If we are going to dream big: build a space elevator, space fountain, or a launch loop first. After the cost of getting something into orbit drops by several orders of magnitude everything else gets easier.
If the licensing terms are expensive or onerous they won't get many users... so the name will probably also contain a paid advertisement;). Actually; I'd guess the license would ask users to submit a copy of the name and other useful info to This Genomic Life's database and then they will charge institutions a fee to search it.
But a strain isn't a collection of genetically identical organisms; the closest you would get to that would be clones. A strain refers to a group with a similar genotype or phenotype.
Prices to previously unsubsidized water consumers will fall. That's you and me and industry.
I'm not sure about that; I think pretty much every major water project has been subsidized by state and federal dollars. If rates were equalized between residential and agricultural users in Western states and users were required to actually pay back the bonds almost all of those farms would go away.
That would leave residential and business customers to cover the full cost of repaying all of those bonds without any payments from any farmers. As a Californian: ouch.
Meanwhile... Just losing CA would mean 20% of dairy, 1/3 of the vegetables and 2/3 of the fruits and nuts grown in the USA would be gone. AZ would be done two or three years later as the last of the AZ farmers' ground water was used up. More appropriate places would take up the slack - in other countries. The ones that subsidize water, infrastructure, etc. So we'd all end up paying more for both water and food.
The operator would then need to install radio antennas where its customers are located, such as in homes, businesses, and city streets. Although these access points might look like small cells (Artemis’s, pictured below, are about the size of a hat box), they’re unlike ordinary base stations. “They’re dumb devices,” Perlman says, serving merely as waypoints for relaying and deciphering signals. Each one could be placed anywhere that’s convenient and would link back to the data center through a fiber or wireless line-of-site Internet connection.
Doesn't sound expensive at all - for the operator. They'll just install pCell hardware for the customers that want it in their location at 200% of cost.
Researchers realized that the complex algorithms used during genetic tests could be closely approximated by the two basic mathematical operations. Lattice cryptology enabled homomorphic encryption, allowing computers to analyze encrypted data and return encrypted results without ever being able to decode the information.
I can't see how it would be very useful for actual genetic research either, since researchers generally need the decoded information as well as personal and family medical history when interpreting the results. The 10^9 higher computational overhead would also be a huge problem in research since, unlike a medical test where you know a pattern and are just trying to find out whether a single sample matches it, you are instead trying to find patterns shared by a group of genomes associated with a similar medical problem but which are otherwise infrequent.
I really enjoyed Primer. I don't think I'd enjoy Primer: the TV show, nor would the actors and crew enjoy working on that shoestring for 12 or 20 episodes every year.
There are two basic types of fantasy fiction: technology/science fantasy, normally called science fiction, and magical fantasy, normally just called fantasy.
Fantasy;
1.
imagination, especially when extravagant and unrestrained.
2.
the forming of mental images, especially wondrous or strange fancies; imaginative conceptualizing.
3.
a mental image, especially when unreal or fantastic; vision: a nightmare fantasy.
Three problems with that interpretation. The first is that they asked for the EPA to release
a full set of data files. for the American Cancer Society Study; the Harvard Six Cities Study; HEI/Krewski et al. 2009; Laden et al. 2006; Lepeule 2012; and Jerrett 2009. This request includes the coding of Personal Health Information (PHI).
A full set of data files would have to include all of the data taken into account in the original epidemiological study: age, sex, family health history, location of work and residence, and quite a lot of other identifying information. Just think about location: to study the effect of vehicle pollution you need to identify people living within X meters of a highway or busy street. To study the effect of emissions from a factory you need to look at the people working there and locations that are directly downwind. But de-identification requires that the residence location be no more specific than the first three digits of a zip code or an area with 20,000 people, whichever is greater, and you can't identify where someone works. You also need to look at how long a person lived at a location, where they lived before that, where they worked previously, etc until you've gone back many years. Once you release that information, even at the level suggested, then add the person's age you've probably already uniquely identified them.
Of course even if a set of data that is fully de-identified isn't useful for science it would still be useful to congress: the de-identified data would be so noisy and coarse they could say that it doesn't support the original authors' conclusions, which should be thrown out along with the EPA's laws. Mission accomplished.
The second problem is the consent forms. Unless the consent forms considered this possibility and took it into account, neither the study investigators, their institutions, nor the EPA would have the right to release the subjects' personal data publicly.
The third problem isn't legal or scientific, it's ethical. We're on Slashdot here. Considering how easy it has become to re-identify people from "de-identified" data, what are the chances of these people's privacy being preserved even if the EPA does release "properly de-identified" data sets?
If congress was serious about trying to vet these studies they would assemble a panel of epidemiologists qualified to do so and ask that they be given access to the data in a confidential setting. That's how it's done when other medical studies are re-evaluated
It would put a stop to basing EPA laws on human medical science, since you would have to get everyone whose medical records were used in the study (or their estates) to make their records public. That's what the GOP is asking for:
They are absolutely not going to propose or allow the same standard to be applied when it comes to bills on other medical or social issues, such as provision of health care, abortion laws, regulation of marriage or adoption, etc.
Medical records are confidential, and that is what the GOP is asking for. Scientists are given access on the proviso that medical privacy is respected.
What surprises me about this story is that I thought all that data had to be disclosed already. How stupid is it that we have regulations based on data that's isn't made available for independent verification?
They have been asking that the private medical data of everyone whose medical records were used during the evaluation of soot and particulate rules for the Clean Air Act be made public. The authors of those studies don't have the authority to release that data, neither does the EPA. Though I'm certain the GOP would love to berate the EPA publicly for betraying patient confidentiality if they did disclose that information
Pharma spending isn't a teeter totter between marketing and R&D. To a first approximation the more a pharma spends on marketing the more money it has available for R&D.
Universities do great research on drug targets and tool compounds, but don't actually research new drugs that much, at least not compared to biotech/Pharma. That said, about 20-25% of new drugs are invented in universities.
The original patent on sildenafil expired in 2012 and now you can get generic sildenafil in the US. The '446 patent that claims using sildenafil to treat erectile disfunction hasn't expired yet. Canada threw out the '446 Viagra patent because it didn't spell out which of the eleventy bazillion compounds it claimed was actually tested and proven to work.
There is a ton and a half of designer drugs with minor modifications, the companies are searching for 'cure' to boldness and erectile dysfunction, but thousands of fairly rare conditions will never be addressed, because under such system it is uneconomical.
Have a look at the new drugs approved last year: MS (2 drugs), multiple myeloma, COPD (2 drugs), HIV, melanoma (2 drugs), lymphoma, fungal infections, prostate and bone cancer, diabetes, depression, influenza, epilepsy, lung cancer, leukemia, dyspareunia, hypercholesterolemia, hypertension, osteoporosis. Plus a cure for Hepatitis C. Yep, nothing but boner pills
Even the crazy Europeans don't do what FDA does in terms of adding costs based on 'efficacy' requirements
Would you be talking about the FDA's fast track and breakthrough programs which accelerate the drug approval process when a drug candidate might greatly benefit serious or life-threatening conditions compared to existing drugs?
but efficacy, which shouldn't cost anything but the company's reputation in the market.
So any shell company five times removed from the actual owner can put out a roadside stall and sell cancer drugs because they won't sell fake (but harmless) drugs because, gasp, it would hurt their reputation? And how exactly is the free market supposed to determine that a new drug failed? No, really, answer that for me. Who is going to pony up enough dough to determine efficacy if the only reward is the chance to muck up a company's reputation?
Slashdot Mirror
There is an expectation of obscurity in public, which while not a legal expectation has served as a substitute for the legal expectation of privacy. That's ending now as cameras (and the data they upload) become ubiquitous.
Cell phones these days are cameras. Looking it one is like looking in a camera's viewfinder. If you claim it's not offensive, I'm fine with that, but then using google glass is not offensive either.
Looking at your cellphone != Holding the camera up pointing at the room with the screen towards you. When you look at your phone, where is the lens pointed? Answer: somewhere on the ground, not too far away from your feet. You only hold it vertically up near eye level when you are using the camera.
On a related note: how do you feel about people wearing Glass type devices in places that forbid recording (bathrooms, locker rooms, etc)?
If we are going to go big, go big: Launch Loop.
6 million metric tons into low earth orbit per year for ~$3 per kg. Compared to a space elevator: No uninvented materials or unobtanium required, trip time measured in minutes instead of weeks, 200x less radiation per passenger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop
If we are going to dream big: build a space elevator, space fountain, or a launch loop first. After the cost of getting something into orbit drops by several orders of magnitude everything else gets easier.
If the licensing terms are expensive or onerous they won't get many users ... so the name will probably also contain a paid advertisement ;). Actually; I'd guess the license would ask users to submit a copy of the name and other useful info to This Genomic Life's database and then they will charge institutions a fee to search it.
But a strain isn't a collection of genetically identical organisms; the closest you would get to that would be clones. A strain refers to a group with a similar genotype or phenotype.
Prices to previously unsubsidized water consumers will fall. That's you and me and industry.
I'm not sure about that; I think pretty much every major water project has been subsidized by state and federal dollars. If rates were equalized between residential and agricultural users in Western states and users were required to actually pay back the bonds almost all of those farms would go away.
That would leave residential and business customers to cover the full cost of repaying all of those bonds without any payments from any farmers. As a Californian: ouch.
Meanwhile ... Just losing CA would mean 20% of dairy, 1/3 of the vegetables and 2/3 of the fruits and nuts grown in the USA would be gone. AZ would be done two or three years later as the last of the AZ farmers' ground water was used up. More appropriate places would take up the slack - in other countries. The ones that subsidize water, infrastructure, etc. So we'd all end up paying more for both water and food.
Chrome. Or firefox. Or Opera ...
So long as you skip the Android browser (and Webview) the exploit can be avoided.
The operator would then need to install radio antennas where its customers are located, such as in homes, businesses, and city streets. Although these access points might look like small cells (Artemis’s, pictured below, are about the size of a hat box), they’re unlike ordinary base stations. “They’re dumb devices,” Perlman says, serving merely as waypoints for relaying and deciphering signals. Each one could be placed anywhere that’s convenient and would link back to the data center through a fiber or wireless line-of-site Internet connection.
Doesn't sound expensive at all - for the operator. They'll just install pCell hardware for the customers that want it in their location at 200% of cost.
don't 'be creepy or rude.
That admonition and constantly pointing a camera at whoever you are looking at are already at odds.
Now imagine if it records to the cloud.
Now imagine who has access to your data in the cloud.
No need to imagine: Google Glass records to Google's Cloud and the data can be analyzed by Google for its own purposes.
It's simple math: Total Resources Available = Resource Consumption Rate x Number of People
What's the best way to control this? Cost. Remove all the subsidies beyond a minimum X gallons per person. Let people and markets drive the rest.
"Corporations are people, my friend"
So now on top of everything else farmers will have to buy and administer hundreds of shell companies to get enough water to keep going.
Researchers realized that the complex algorithms used during genetic tests could be closely approximated by the two basic mathematical operations. Lattice cryptology enabled homomorphic encryption, allowing computers to analyze encrypted data and return encrypted results without ever being able to decode the information.
I can't see how it would be very useful for actual genetic research either, since researchers generally need the decoded information as well as personal and family medical history when interpreting the results. The 10^9 higher computational overhead would also be a huge problem in research since, unlike a medical test where you know a pattern and are just trying to find out whether a single sample matches it, you are instead trying to find patterns shared by a group of genomes associated with a similar medical problem but which are otherwise infrequent.
I really enjoyed Primer. I don't think I'd enjoy Primer: the TV show, nor would the actors and crew enjoy working on that shoestring for 12 or 20 episodes every year.
Fantasy;
1. imagination, especially when extravagant and unrestrained.
2. the forming of mental images, especially wondrous or strange fancies; imaginative conceptualizing.
3. a mental image, especially when unreal or fantastic; vision: a nightmare fantasy.
Verizon signs-up Oracle to tackle Amazon in the cloud
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2014/011014-verizon-oracle-277603.html
Verizon Plays Catch Up with Cloud Computing, Storage Offerings
http://cloudtimes.org/2013/12/18/verizon-plays-catch-up-with-cloud-computing-storage-offerings/
a full set of data files. for the American Cancer Society Study; the Harvard Six Cities Study; HEI/Krewski et al. 2009; Laden et al. 2006; Lepeule 2012; and Jerrett 2009. This request includes the coding of Personal Health Information (PHI).
A full set of data files would have to include all of the data taken into account in the original epidemiological study: age, sex, family health history, location of work and residence, and quite a lot of other identifying information. Just think about location: to study the effect of vehicle pollution you need to identify people living within X meters of a highway or busy street. To study the effect of emissions from a factory you need to look at the people working there and locations that are directly downwind. But de-identification requires that the residence location be no more specific than the first three digits of a zip code or an area with 20,000 people, whichever is greater, and you can't identify where someone works. You also need to look at how long a person lived at a location, where they lived before that, where they worked previously, etc until you've gone back many years. Once you release that information, even at the level suggested, then add the person's age you've probably already uniquely identified them.
Of course even if a set of data that is fully de-identified isn't useful for science it would still be useful to congress: the de-identified data would be so noisy and coarse they could say that it doesn't support the original authors' conclusions, which should be thrown out along with the EPA's laws. Mission accomplished.
The second problem is the consent forms. Unless the consent forms considered this possibility and took it into account, neither the study investigators, their institutions, nor the EPA would have the right to release the subjects' personal data publicly.
The third problem isn't legal or scientific, it's ethical. We're on Slashdot here. Considering how easy it has become to re-identify people from "de-identified" data, what are the chances of these people's privacy being preserved even if the EPA does release "properly de-identified" data sets?
If congress was serious about trying to vet these studies they would assemble a panel of epidemiologists qualified to do so and ask that they be given access to the data in a confidential setting. That's how it's done when other medical studies are re-evaluated
It would put a stop to basing EPA laws on human medical science, since you would have to get everyone whose medical records were used in the study (or their estates) to make their records public. That's what the GOP is asking for:
http://www.epw.senate.gov/publ...
They are absolutely not going to propose or allow the same standard to be applied when it comes to bills on other medical or social issues, such as provision of health care, abortion laws, regulation of marriage or adoption, etc.
Medical records are confidential, and that is what the GOP is asking for. Scientists are given access on the proviso that medical privacy is respected.
What surprises me about this story is that I thought all that data had to be disclosed already. How stupid is it that we have regulations based on data that's isn't made available for independent verification?
They have been asking that the private medical data of everyone whose medical records were used during the evaluation of soot and particulate rules for the Clean Air Act be made public. The authors of those studies don't have the authority to release that data, neither does the EPA. Though I'm certain the GOP would love to berate the EPA publicly for betraying patient confidentiality if they did disclose that information
http://www.epw.senate.gov/publ...
Universities do great research on drug targets and tool compounds, but don't actually research new drugs that much, at least not compared to biotech/Pharma. That said, about 20-25% of new drugs are invented in universities.
The original patent on sildenafil expired in 2012 and now you can get generic sildenafil in the US. The '446 patent that claims using sildenafil to treat erectile disfunction hasn't expired yet. Canada threw out the '446 Viagra patent because it didn't spell out which of the eleventy bazillion compounds it claimed was actually tested and proven to work.
So which parts of the NDA or ANDA process should be left out?
There is a ton and a half of designer drugs with minor modifications, the companies are searching for 'cure' to boldness and erectile dysfunction, but thousands of fairly rare conditions will never be addressed, because under such system it is uneconomical.
Have a look at the new drugs approved last year: MS (2 drugs), multiple myeloma, COPD (2 drugs), HIV, melanoma (2 drugs), lymphoma, fungal infections, prostate and bone cancer, diabetes, depression, influenza, epilepsy, lung cancer, leukemia, dyspareunia, hypercholesterolemia, hypertension, osteoporosis. Plus a cure for Hepatitis C. Yep, nothing but boner pills
Even the crazy Europeans don't do what FDA does in terms of adding costs based on 'efficacy' requirements
Would you be talking about the FDA's fast track and breakthrough programs which accelerate the drug approval process when a drug candidate might greatly benefit serious or life-threatening conditions compared to existing drugs?
but efficacy, which shouldn't cost anything but the company's reputation in the market.
So any shell company five times removed from the actual owner can put out a roadside stall and sell cancer drugs because they won't sell fake (but harmless) drugs because, gasp, it would hurt their reputation? And how exactly is the free market supposed to determine that a new drug failed? No, really, answer that for me. Who is going to pony up enough dough to determine efficacy if the only reward is the chance to muck up a company's reputation?