1) Food is what goes into a dog, not what comes out of a dog. (Corollary: That which comes out of a dog isn't food.) 2) It's coming out of the end of the dog into which food doesn't go. (Corollary: Unless you're into that sort of thing, in which case, we don't wanna know.)
If you remain uncertain about point 2, a simple test will suffice.
Put your finger into the dog's mouth. If you cannot feel any teeth, then that isn't the mouth. What you are feeling with your finger probably isn't food, either.
Michael
Re:The USA doesn't 'buy' blood either...
on
Bloodless Surgery
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· Score: 1
I've grouped your two posts together here for my reply.
This
I believe my father, who runs a blood bank. A quick Google also reveals that red blood cells and platelets can also be frozen, as can cord blood.
Please note my original wording "Blood does not freeze well". Not that you can't freeze it; although these frozen products are not used commonly and are not readily available.
However, even the process of storing blood cold causes it to lose some function. Cold stored red blood cells have a reduced ability to deliver oxygen to the tissues compared with normal blood.
There are also circumstances, particularly in trauma or after prolonged periods on cardiopulmonary bypass, when whole blood is used instead of fractionated packed cells because of the additional benefits of replacing the plasma components. In these circumstances blood banks will (at least in Australia) often get donors in to make fresh whole blood which is transfused quickly.
The benefits of fresh blood relate mainly to the rapid fall off in activity in clotting factors with traditional storage methods. It probably is less important due to the availability of factor 7 which I referred to in my earlier post. However, there are many factors in blood which the storage process affects, and there is still probably some benefit in this regard in cases of severe bleeding.
I'm not saying that frozen blood is impossible. But its not used around the world that much (to my knowledge) for pretty good reasons.
Michael
Re:The USA doesn't 'buy' blood either...
on
Bloodless Surgery
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· Score: 1
The Red Cross makes huge profits off its blood monopoly. They also abuse that monopoly by creating artificial shortages - blood freezes well, but they won't allow that to happen. In fact, in the US, the RC doesn't sell even blood to hospitals, it leases it: if blood isn't transfused, the hospitals have to give it back after a certain period. (The EULA on blood is even worse than on software.)
Blood does not freeze "well'. It is kept at a few degrees celcius.
Plasma (the non cellular component of blood) can be frozen and in this form has a long shelf life.
You think that BSG is bad? Did you see the Lord of the Rings? Product placement all over the place! Pipeweed this, pipeweed that. Sheeesh! It's a good thing not that many people saw Lord of the Rings, or we might be facing a sequel.
Its not that that worries me... I heard that they were thinking of making a prequel... some lame story called "the hobbit" I think..
Prequels never work, of course.
Michael
Re:They've obviously compensated in some way
on
Bloodless Surgery
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· Score: 1
Odds are good the '20k in savings' is either an average savings (and hence including the ever-expensive organ transplants and other risky surgeries) or else it's a cumulative savings from the following:
* Red Cross doesn't have to expend as much effort into attracting donors with gimmicks like t-shirts and other contests when that money could be put into more useful 'core' purposes.
My understanding is that a unit of blood costs $500 Australian dollars - in a system that doesn't price blood for sale or pay donors to donate.
The costs will be higher in countries that do (eg., USA)
Blood isn't cheap. Its really expensive. One company sells recombinant factor 7 (Novo7) for around $10 000 AUD on the basis that its cheaper to replace the missing product when bleeding is intense than to just give more blood. They sell tihs drug as a cost saving measure....
My recollection of exact pricing my not be perfect (after all, my hospital gets it essentially for free) but its somewhere close to this.
I would have thought that if you cant subvert the HOSTS file then all you have to do is to intercept any DNS lookup of these MS addresses and you would have the same effect.
If you are trying to stop MS software from talking to home, then just use an external firewall.
The presentation lists events that will trigger a System Management Interrupt (SMI) and enter System Management Mode (SMM). Overheating is only one of them. Another is "century rollover". Taken literally, that would mean that anyone who could set the clock to 11:59 December 31 1999 [I'd say 2000 but I doubt the chip is mathematically correct] can enter SMM without needing physical access to the machine or to the circuit breaker for the air conditioning. Or to use the presentation's example, outl(0xB2, 0x0000000F);.
If I read this problem report correctly, then a process outside of SMM can write to the memory for SMM. (Controlled by the D_OPEN bit in the SMM control register).
So it looks like you can do it without physical access, where "it" is a privilege escalation that *starts* from root. That's getting less absurd all the time as virtualization and technologies like SELinux become more common. Also allows planting a deeper-than-root rootkit. You could escalate to God of Hardware or in the CanSecWest example to "root at securelevel -1".
Lots of people say why do this as you already have physical access to the machine so its fundamentally insecure anyway.
I'm more interested if this system level access could intercept TPM/Trusted Computing decryption so that you could intercept an audio or video stream?
I'm not going to speculate on motives, or get into the politics, but 20 years as a computer scientist and software engineer tells me this is not an accident. Even the worst programmers do not make this sort of mistake. Rather similar to the Diebold voting machine scandal, one can only wonder what forces are behind this. You can't call it negligence, not even by the greatest leap of imagination is it possible to make such a mistake, so it must be malice.
If you want a word processor, then you wouldn't need care alot about the last 9 years of development (Office 97 had a pretty good WP).
If you do presentations, then Office is a few years behind Keynote, at least as far as slick graphics goes (and what is presentation software for if not to look slick?)
Its about getting the base function good enough... if you want the best, you wouldn't use powerpoint anyway. But for alot of people, powerpoint is good enough. Trouble is, OO is getting good enough too
With a G4 in it, it was outdated the moment you opened the box.
Hardware wise that is hard to argue with - you can certainly get faster these days. I don't regret getting my 12 inch PB, as its a darn nice laptop for its size. I'm looking forward to the 12 inch equivalent (I cycle to work, so size is a prime consideration - it has to fit in my panniers), when it comes out in intel form.
In truth, apple gave up on the 12 inch power book a while ago, and I'm looking forward to its replacement. The only classic app that I run is diabloii - which I can live without although it would be nice to have. As for the rest - well, most everything seems to run one way or another. And a fast windows VM would be very nice for what I can't do without from windows.
1. Only the 15 inch model was released (not the 12 or 17 inch version) 2. You can still buy the entire range of G4 laptops 3. The release date was February whilst the iMac was immediately available.
Makes sense - I think apple wanted to make a splash at MacWorld and the laptop wasn't quite ready yet.
I wouldn't be surprised if the entire MacBook range actually ships simultaneously, even if they are announced separately.
Of course, they were announcing six months ahead of schedule, so they aren't really that far behind. And at least my shiny new (1 year old) power book doesn't quite feel outdated just yet...
You solve spam when it stops being sent, not when you stop recieving it.
These technologies wont work until they are nearly 100% effective. If even a few messages slip through to some users, some people will buy things from spam ads. Which is all the economic incentive a spammer needs. So all they do is hide the problem, not really solve it.
Actually, a good percentage of lung cancers aren't caused by smoking. I don't recall the percentage, but it's significant.
Its about 10% from memory, but that would also depend on the population prevalance of smoking also - If you sampled from a community where nobody smoked, 100% of the cancers would be caused by something other than smoking.
Its also a different kind of cancer typically (not a squamous cell one, more likely an adenocarcinoma IIRC) - in other words, it comes from a different cellular part of the lung than the squamous cells that are affected by smoking.
Michael (Happy to be corrected if anyone knows better - this is just from memory)
is this a what (paid)members see? may be its being shown to everyone by mistake? I always wished hard to find out (without paying any money of course) how do they inform the paid members of an slashdot story about to be released early... Wishes _do_ come true is it?
My subscription had lapsed, and I saw the funny title, so I used it as an excuse to get another subscription... for the record - no change whatsoever so its not related to being or not being a subscriber.
However, the small title area probably explains why so few people have seen this submission
To err is human, but to really foul things up it takes a computer.
After all - people have been trying to rig results for a long time. But this just makes it so easy for one person to potentially change the outcome of an election....
This concept is not relatively new. Randomized clinical trials, involving trying to protect the brain, in surgeries like CABG (Coronary artery bypass graft) are taking place for more than 10 years now. 5 years ago, a review of many such trials found that though stroke related deaths decreased by inducing hypothermia, they faced other non-stroke related mortality in operations and overall there was no difference between hypothermia and normothermia.
However, there is some evidence of benefit in non traumatic head injuries (eg post cardiac arrest) where cooling does provide improved neurological outcomes.
Hypothermic circulatory arrest is used routinely for certain types of aortic arch surgey where it would be difficult to maintain cerebral circulation (eg for aortic arch dissection) using conventional techniques.
If you cool someone down to something in the range of 15-24 degrees you can get 20-40 minutes of cardiac arrest without major consequence.
The articles seem to present this as something new - its really more an extension of a known technology into trauma surgery.
I suspect that the biggest problem with this level of extreme hypothermia is that blood coagulation essentially fails at these temperatures - so in the case of trauma, they are going to have to sow everything up and even then nothing will seal over - which leads to the need for massive transfusion requirements as everthing bruises up extremely badly. Massive transfusions (> 10 units of blood) are likely in themselves to cause multi organ failure, and a downward spiral of death.
This is just a technical hurdle to be overcome, but at the moment the odds of surviving this will be very low - so low that I don't think you would do it for anyone who has even a slight chance of surviving the injuries by conventional measures.
Surely if your heart is stopped and your brain dead then your soul leaves your body and you go to heaven (or hell) depending on how good you lived your life.
If you are brain dead, maybe. However, this article is not about brain death. Its about stopping brain death before it occurs.
There is alot of discussion about this point, but most people are missing the point - the idea of this technique (which isn't terribly new by the way, despite what the papers say - its the application in trauma surgery that is new) is to prevent cell death from occuring.
Your soul is no more likely to leave your body (if you believe in such things) than if you were knocked unconscious, or had an anaesthetic, or fell into the north sea and lapsed into coma. I think that even the most die hard christian would not argue that your soul leaves your body just because of one of these events had occured and you lapsed into coma.
Its about saving people close to death, not bringing back dead people.
When you say "MPEG-4", I think what you really mean is MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile, i.e. the profile used in numerous products like XviD, DivX, 3ivx, FFmpeg, and Nero Digital.
And H.264, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 and Advanced Video Coding, is defined in the MPEG-4 specification as well.
Did you just make this up? My 50" plasma is 1366 x 768, plenty big enough for 720p. I'm looking forward to HD DVDs, because I can clearly see the difference between DVDs and HD broadcasts. I'll buy an HD DVD player as soon as they have the Lord of Rings in HD.
No, I didn't make this up.
I do, however live in Ausstralia, which uses PAL rather than NTSC. The Plasma screens are still 480 or so lines, despite that PAL (which includes PAL DVD's) are 576 lines resolution. So if you display a PAL DVD on a standard definition Plasma, you are actually running on alot lower resolution than the DVD/MPEG-2 is encoded at. This has not stopped the uptake of plasma screens in Australia, or in a number of parts of the world that uses PAL for tha matter.
You are using a high definition plasma screen, which is a nice thing. And you know its resolution, which puts you ahead of the average punter which buys a HD plasma. However, alot of people buy standard def plasmas, which are (as I said in my original post) of a lower resolution than DVD's that are encoded for PAL.
What I'm really saying is this - Standard definition is good enough for most people. We have used this for over 50 years now and if the resolution wasn't enough it would have changed much sooner. In reality most of the deficiencies (eg poor colour matching with NTSC) have been fixed a while ago. The move to high definition is nice, but alot of people really don't care. If they did care, nobody would have paid for a video track of iTunes which is at a much lower resolution than standard definition. But millions of these video tracks have been paid for, mostly because the resolution is sufficient for the average consumer.
You (and most of the readers on/.) do care about resolution, and so on. There is nothing wrong with this. You are however, not like most people. (This is why you read slashdot - news for nerds). There are millions of us out there - and nearly a million id's on slashdot. We are, however, a tiny proportion of the total population. Most people don't know or care about the difference between high definition, standard defintion and what you can download on the iTunes video section. These are the people that Sony wants to sell HD to.
You won't buy a HD player most likely because you don't like the DRM on HD-DVD or Blu Ray. The average consumer wont care less about this, but they won't buy this sort of system because they don't know or care about HD versus standard definition.
As I said in my original post, the next major increment in video delivery will not be a DRM's low compression high definition movie format. It will be a low definition compact video file that has DRM. You won't like it any more than me. It seems wrong and maybe it is. Most people on slashdot feel that way about apple's AAC encrypted format - why would you buy an encrypted, limited format like that when you can have MP3's, or ogg, or even a lossless format? If you feel like this, I understand - I'm there too.
But I accept that most people aren't like me - they will be happy if things are good enough for use, and won't care if there is DRM (at least not for a while - maybe in 10 years people will start to understand when they lose their music collection because their motherboard dies before they can deauthorise their last valid computer for that account).
Thats it - we are probably on the same side of the argument, and if we aren't, well post a reply - I'll be interested in your opinion.
Hope this clarifies my earlier statements about PAL DVD's and standard definition plasma displays.
Seems a little hasty to make such a claim. VHS isnt dead yet. The only media I can think of that is dead is the 8-Track and 70 RPM.
No, its not dead at all. The HD/Blu-ray thing is a furphy for people who want to watch movies. Why?
1. Most people don't know what is high definition anyway. Plasma TV's are 488 lines, which is less than standard definition that you get with a DVD. Most people (consumers) think they are fantastic. Technophiles might notice, but considering that the electronics industry got many people to DROP the viewing resolution by going from TV to Plasma says something important about how much punters care about resolution.
2. Even if you want high definition, you don't need more storage space for it. Processing power is going up alot, and that means that more efficient codec's than MPEG-2 that DVD's use will easily do high definition in the 8.5 GB available on a standard DVD for a nice long movie.
3. So why do they want to get rid of DVD? Hardware manufacturers want more sales, and can't think of a way to get consumers to buy another (more expensive) player. They could just go for a player that does a better codec (MPEG-4 or H.264), but that needs content. And the people who provide content - who mostly don't care about hardware sales except for Sony which does both - want a new DRM/encryption as DVD's are cracked.
So, in essence, this isn't really a consumer oriented move. But this shouldn't be a surprise - how many people want DVD audio? Brought in by the content producers as there was not protection on a music CD; that hasn't killed off the music cd.
Of course, Apple actually managed to get people to get people to give up unencrypted music for the iTunes music store, but that wasn't about quality - they offered something genuinely new, which was the iPod. Your entire music collection in a tiny package (or a good subset of it on an even smaller one).
I don't see this coming with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Sure, I'd love the extra storage for hard drive backups. But for video - not the way that the content industry wants to package it - as a huge (20-30 GB) movie file that's heavily DRM'ed. No thank you. All my music comes off a hard drive now, and my videos will soon too.
I can promise you that I won't be wasting 20 GB on each movie, and that I won't be unhappy with the quality of a MPEG-4 serial episode that weighs in at 0.35 GB for a 40 minute episode.
The next real innovation won't be in larger, uncompressed storage - it will be in legal down loads of videos, at relatively modest quality, which will almostly certainly be compressed heavily to keep the traffic down. Until then, I'll keep on ripping my DVD's and digitising broadcasts.....
Would Steve Jobs have been a major success in life if he had been brought up in poverty in a third world country? I don't know - certainly he would not have been able to found Apple from such circumstances. However, I have no doubt that Steve Jobs, like Henry Ford or Thomas Edison, would have been a success in life pretty much anywhere.
Yes, maybe he would have. And maybe he would be dead of pancreatic cancer by now if he lived there, instead of having it removed successfully. Or maybe he would have died of Hepatitis or HIV (as about 40 million people in africa are going to sometime soon).
Success is a combination of luck and talent. Steve Jobs has both, and he hasn't wasted his good fortune of being in the right place in the right time.
But to think that talent alone will win you over in the face of bad circumstance - life is still a lottery, and bad things happen to good people.
"Where donors would come from is one issue that would have to be considered. "The transplant would have to come from a beating heart donor. So, say your sister was in intensive care, you would have to agree to allow their face to be removed before the ventilator was switched off. "And there is the possibility that the donor would then carry on breathing."
This doesn't happen if the brain death testing is done properly. In Austraila one of the tests for brain death is that the person is disconnected from the ventilator for 20 minutes. If they breathe, they aren't truly brain dead. If you have proper criteria for brain death - A known cause of brain injury, meet several inclusion criteria (such as the aponea test mentioned above) and don't have any exclusion criteria that can look similar (eg recent anaesthesia/ low body temperature) then you can be considered as an organ donor.
In reality, people without brainstem function are very hard to keep alive on a ventilator, because the brain regulates alot of things. For example, the brain constantly releases a constant stream of anti diuretic hormone from the pituitary gland to regulate the total amount of water in your body. With brain death this stops and the kidneys will produce the maximal amount of urine (20+ litres/day), so fluid balance fails drastically.
I have seen less experienced people not understand the proper definition of brain death - I think that this is where you get the stories about turning off ventilators and people surviving. Brain death is a rapidly termainal condition. That is why so many heart transplants are done in the middle of the night - its hard to keep the donor alive until even the next morning.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
fdiskne1: This is the best line I have heard in a while. It is very likely to replace my.sig (which has been stable for years), as it resonates with my current experiences at work.
Do you have a name or similar for me to attibute this to?
Slashdot Mirror
How do you pronounce Cthulhu?
1. Cuh-thoo-loo
2. Cloo-thoo
3. Cuh-loo-loo
4. Cuh-thu-luh
5. Cuk-koo
I think its pronounced "Hooka Chuka"
Note to mods - you have to follow the link to know if this comment is off topic or not
Michael
> Microsoft eating their own dogfood?
Just two things to say about dogfood:
1) Food is what goes into a dog, not what comes out of a dog. (Corollary: That which comes out of a dog isn't food.)
2) It's coming out of the end of the dog into which food doesn't go. (Corollary: Unless you're into that sort of thing, in which case, we don't wanna know.)
If you remain uncertain about point 2, a simple test will suffice.
Put your finger into the dog's mouth. If you cannot feel any teeth, then that isn't the mouth. What you are feeling with your finger probably isn't food, either.
Michael
I've grouped your two posts together here for my reply.
This
I believe my father, who runs a blood bank.
A quick Google also reveals that red blood cells and platelets can also be frozen, as can cord blood.
and this
Also see: http://www.bloodbook.com/storage.html [bloodbook.com]
Please note my original wording "Blood does not freeze well". Not that you can't freeze it; although these frozen products are not used commonly and are not readily available.
However, even the process of storing blood cold causes it to lose some function. Cold stored red blood cells have a reduced ability to deliver oxygen to the tissues compared with normal blood.
There are also circumstances, particularly in trauma or after prolonged periods on cardiopulmonary bypass, when whole blood is used instead of fractionated packed cells because of the additional benefits of replacing the plasma components. In these circumstances blood banks will (at least in Australia) often get donors in to make fresh whole blood which is transfused quickly.
The benefits of fresh blood relate mainly to the rapid fall off in activity in clotting factors with traditional storage methods. It probably is less important due to the availability of factor 7 which I referred to in my earlier post. However, there are many factors in blood which the storage process affects, and there is still probably some benefit in this regard in cases of severe bleeding.
I'm not saying that frozen blood is impossible. But its not used around the world that much (to my knowledge) for pretty good reasons.
Michael
The Red Cross makes huge profits off its blood monopoly. They also abuse that monopoly by creating artificial shortages - blood freezes well, but they won't allow that to happen. In fact, in the US, the RC doesn't sell even blood to hospitals, it leases it: if blood isn't transfused, the hospitals have to give it back after a certain period. (The EULA on blood is even worse than on software.)
Blood does not freeze "well'. It is kept at a few degrees celcius.
Plasma (the non cellular component of blood) can be frozen and in this form has a long shelf life.
Michael
You think that BSG is bad? Did you see the Lord of the Rings? Product placement all over the place! Pipeweed this, pipeweed that. Sheeesh! It's a good thing not that many people saw Lord of the Rings, or we might be facing a sequel.
... some lame story called "the hobbit" I think..
Its not that that worries me... I heard that they were thinking of making a prequel
Prequels never work, of course.
Michael
Odds are good the '20k in savings' is either an average savings (and hence including the ever-expensive organ transplants and other risky surgeries) or else it's a cumulative savings from the following:
* Red Cross doesn't have to expend as much effort into attracting donors with gimmicks like t-shirts and other contests when that money could be put into more useful 'core' purposes.
My understanding is that a unit of blood costs $500 Australian dollars - in a system that doesn't price blood for sale or pay donors to donate.
The costs will be higher in countries that do (eg., USA)
Blood isn't cheap. Its really expensive. One company sells recombinant factor 7 (Novo7) for around $10 000 AUD on the basis that its cheaper to replace the missing product when bleeding is intense than to just give more blood. They sell tihs drug as a cost saving measure....
My recollection of exact pricing my not be perfect (after all, my hospital gets it essentially for free) but its somewhere close to this.
Michael
I would have thought that if you cant subvert the HOSTS file then all you have to do is to intercept any DNS lookup of these MS addresses and you would have the same effect.
If you are trying to stop MS software from talking to home, then just use an external firewall.
Michael
The presentation lists events that will trigger a System Management Interrupt (SMI) and enter System Management Mode (SMM). Overheating is only one of them. Another is "century rollover". Taken literally, that would mean that anyone who could set the clock to 11:59 December 31 1999 [I'd say 2000 but I doubt the chip is mathematically correct] can enter SMM without needing physical access to the machine or to the circuit breaker for the air conditioning. Or to use the presentation's example, outl(0xB2, 0x0000000F);.
If I read this problem report correctly, then a process outside of SMM can write to the memory for SMM. (Controlled by the D_OPEN bit in the SMM control register).
So it looks like you can do it without physical access, where "it" is a privilege escalation that *starts* from root. That's getting less absurd all the time as virtualization and technologies like SELinux become more common. Also allows planting a deeper-than-root rootkit. You could escalate to God of Hardware or in the CanSecWest example to "root at securelevel -1".
Lots of people say why do this as you already have physical access to the machine so its fundamentally insecure anyway.
I'm more interested if this system level access could intercept TPM/Trusted Computing decryption so that you could intercept an audio or video stream?
Would this level of access allow you to do this?
Michael
I'm not going to speculate on motives, or get into the politics, but 20 years as a computer scientist and software engineer tells me this is not an accident. Even the worst programmers do not make this sort of mistake.
.sig
Rather similar to the Diebold voting machine scandal, one can only wonder what forces are behind this. You can't call it negligence, not even by the greatest leap of imagination is it possible to make such a mistake, so it must be malice.
See my
Michael
Well,
... if you want the best, you wouldn't use powerpoint anyway. But for alot of people, powerpoint is good enough. Trouble is, OO is getting good enough too
If you want a word processor, then you wouldn't need care alot about the last 9 years of development (Office 97 had a pretty good WP).
If you do presentations, then Office is a few years behind Keynote, at least as far as slick graphics goes (and what is presentation software for if not to look slick?)
Its about getting the base function good enough
With a G4 in it, it was outdated the moment you opened the box.
Hardware wise that is hard to argue with - you can certainly get faster these days. I don't regret getting my 12 inch PB, as its a darn nice laptop for its size. I'm looking forward to the 12 inch equivalent (I cycle to work, so size is a prime consideration - it has to fit in my panniers), when it comes out in intel form.
In truth, apple gave up on the 12 inch power book a while ago, and I'm looking forward to its replacement. The only classic app that I run is diabloii - which I can live without although it would be nice to have. As for the rest - well, most everything seems to run one way or another. And a fast windows VM would be very nice for what I can't do without from windows.
Michael
This would also explain why:
...
1. Only the 15 inch model was released (not the 12 or 17 inch version)
2. You can still buy the entire range of G4 laptops
3. The release date was February whilst the iMac was immediately available.
Makes sense - I think apple wanted to make a splash at MacWorld and the laptop wasn't quite ready yet.
I wouldn't be surprised if the entire MacBook range actually ships simultaneously, even if they are announced separately.
Of course, they were announcing six months ahead of schedule, so they aren't really that far behind. And at least my shiny new (1 year old) power book doesn't quite feel outdated just yet
Michael
You solve spam when it stops being sent, not when you stop recieving it.
These technologies wont work until they are nearly 100% effective. If even a few messages slip through to some users, some people will buy things from spam ads. Which is all the economic incentive a spammer needs. So all they do is hide the problem, not really solve it.
Bandwidth is still being wasted.
Michael
Actually, a good percentage of lung cancers aren't caused by smoking. I don't recall the percentage, but it's significant.
Its about 10% from memory, but that would also depend on the population prevalance of smoking also - If you sampled from a community where nobody smoked, 100% of the cancers would be caused by something other than smoking.
Its also a different kind of cancer typically (not a squamous cell one, more likely an adenocarcinoma IIRC) - in other words, it comes from a different cellular part of the lung than the squamous cells that are affected by smoking.
Michael (Happy to be corrected if anyone knows better - this is just from memory)
is this a what (paid)members see? may be its being shown to everyone by mistake? I always wished hard to find out (without paying any money of course) how do they inform the paid members of an slashdot story about to be released early... Wishes _do_ come true is it?
... for the record - no change whatsoever so its not related to being or not being a subscriber.
My subscription had lapsed, and I saw the funny title, so I used it as an excuse to get another subscription
However, the small title area probably explains why so few people have seen this submission
Michael
To err is human, but to really foul things up it takes a computer.
After all - people have been trying to rig results for a long time. But this just makes it so easy for one person to potentially change the outcome of an election....
Michael
This concept is not relatively new. Randomized clinical trials, involving trying to protect the brain, in surgeries like CABG (Coronary artery bypass graft) are taking place for more than 10 years now. 5 years ago, a review of many such trials found that though stroke related deaths decreased by inducing hypothermia, they faced other non-stroke related mortality in operations and overall there was no difference between hypothermia and normothermia.
However, there is some evidence of benefit in non traumatic head injuries (eg post cardiac arrest) where cooling does provide improved neurological outcomes.
Hypothermic circulatory arrest is used routinely for certain types of aortic arch surgey where it would be difficult to maintain cerebral circulation (eg for aortic arch dissection) using conventional techniques.
If you cool someone down to something in the range of 15-24 degrees you can get 20-40 minutes of cardiac arrest without major consequence.
The articles seem to present this as something new - its really more an extension of a known technology into trauma surgery.
I suspect that the biggest problem with this level of extreme hypothermia is that blood coagulation essentially fails at these temperatures - so in the case of trauma, they are going to have to sow everything up and even then nothing will seal over - which leads to the need for massive transfusion requirements as everthing bruises up extremely badly. Massive transfusions (> 10 units of blood) are likely in themselves to cause multi organ failure, and a downward spiral of death.
This is just a technical hurdle to be overcome, but at the moment the odds of surviving this will be very low - so low that I don't think you would do it for anyone who has even a slight chance of surviving the injuries by conventional measures.
My 2c worth
Michael
Surely if your heart is stopped and your brain dead then your soul leaves your body and you go to heaven (or hell) depending on how good you lived your life.
If you are brain dead, maybe. However, this article is not about brain death. Its about stopping brain death before it occurs.
There is alot of discussion about this point, but most people are missing the point - the idea of this technique (which isn't terribly new by the way, despite what the papers say - its the application in trauma surgery that is new) is to prevent cell death from occuring.
Your soul is no more likely to leave your body (if you believe in such things) than if you were knocked unconscious, or had an anaesthetic, or fell into the north sea and lapsed into coma. I think that even the most die hard christian would not argue that your soul leaves your body just because of one of these events had occured and you lapsed into coma.
Its about saving people close to death, not bringing back dead people.
Michael
Just a nit.
When you say "MPEG-4", I think what you really mean is MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile, i.e. the profile used in numerous products like XviD, DivX, 3ivx, FFmpeg, and Nero Digital.
And H.264, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 and Advanced Video Coding, is defined in the MPEG-4 specification as well.
I stand corrected, or at least informed.
Michael
Did you just make this up? My 50" plasma is 1366 x 768, plenty big enough for 720p. I'm looking forward to HD DVDs, because I can clearly see the difference between DVDs and HD broadcasts. I'll buy an HD DVD player as soon as they have the Lord of Rings in HD.
/.) do care about resolution, and so on. There is nothing wrong with this. You are however, not like most people. (This is why you read slashdot - news for nerds). There are millions of us out there - and nearly a million id's on slashdot. We are, however, a tiny proportion of the total population. Most people don't know or care about the difference between high definition, standard defintion and what you can download on the iTunes video section. These are the people that Sony wants to sell HD to.
No, I didn't make this up.
I do, however live in Ausstralia, which uses PAL rather than NTSC. The Plasma screens are still 480 or so lines, despite that PAL (which includes PAL DVD's) are 576 lines resolution. So if you display a PAL DVD on a standard definition Plasma, you are actually running on alot lower resolution than the DVD/MPEG-2 is encoded at. This has not stopped the uptake of plasma screens in Australia, or in a number of parts of the world that uses PAL for tha matter.
You are using a high definition plasma screen, which is a nice thing. And you know its resolution, which puts you ahead of the average punter which buys a HD plasma. However, alot of people buy standard def plasmas, which are (as I said in my original post) of a lower resolution than DVD's that are encoded for PAL.
What I'm really saying is this - Standard definition is good enough for most people. We have used this for over 50 years now and if the resolution wasn't enough it would have changed much sooner. In reality most of the deficiencies (eg poor colour matching with NTSC) have been fixed a while ago. The move to high definition is nice, but alot of people really don't care. If they did care, nobody would have paid for a video track of iTunes which is at a much lower resolution than standard definition. But millions of these video tracks have been paid for, mostly because the resolution is sufficient for the average consumer.
You (and most of the readers on
You won't buy a HD player most likely because you don't like the DRM on HD-DVD or Blu Ray. The average consumer wont care less about this, but they won't buy this sort of system because they don't know or care about HD versus standard definition.
As I said in my original post, the next major increment in video delivery will not be a DRM's low compression high definition movie format. It will be a low definition compact video file that has DRM. You won't like it any more than me. It seems wrong and maybe it is. Most people on slashdot feel that way about apple's AAC encrypted format - why would you buy an encrypted, limited format like that when you can have MP3's, or ogg, or even a lossless format? If you feel like this, I understand - I'm there too.
But I accept that most people aren't like me - they will be happy if things are good enough for use, and won't care if there is DRM (at least not for a while - maybe in 10 years people will start to understand when they lose their music collection because their motherboard dies before they can deauthorise their last valid computer for that account).
Thats it - we are probably on the same side of the argument, and if we aren't, well post a reply - I'll be interested in your opinion.
Hope this clarifies my earlier statements about PAL DVD's and standard definition plasma displays.
Michael
Seems a little hasty to make such a claim. VHS isnt dead yet. The only media I can think of that is dead is the 8-Track and 70 RPM.
.....
No, its not dead at all. The HD/Blu-ray thing is a furphy for people who want to watch movies. Why?
1. Most people don't know what is high definition anyway. Plasma TV's are 488 lines, which is less than standard definition that you get with a DVD. Most people (consumers) think they are fantastic. Technophiles might notice, but considering that the electronics industry got many people to DROP the viewing resolution by going from TV to Plasma says something important about how much punters care about resolution.
2. Even if you want high definition, you don't need more storage space for it. Processing power is going up alot, and that means that more efficient codec's than MPEG-2 that DVD's use will easily do high definition in the 8.5 GB available on a standard DVD for a nice long movie.
3. So why do they want to get rid of DVD? Hardware manufacturers want more sales, and can't think of a way to get consumers to buy another (more expensive) player. They could just go for a player that does a better codec (MPEG-4 or H.264), but that needs content. And the people who provide content - who mostly don't care about hardware sales except for Sony which does both - want a new DRM/encryption as DVD's are cracked.
So, in essence, this isn't really a consumer oriented move. But this shouldn't be a surprise - how many people want DVD audio? Brought in by the content producers as there was not protection on a music CD; that hasn't killed off the music cd.
Of course, Apple actually managed to get people to get people to give up unencrypted music for the iTunes music store, but that wasn't about quality - they offered something genuinely new, which was the iPod. Your entire music collection in a tiny package (or a good subset of it on an even smaller one).
I don't see this coming with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Sure, I'd love the extra storage for hard drive backups. But for video - not the way that the content industry wants to package it - as a huge (20-30 GB) movie file that's heavily DRM'ed. No thank you. All my music comes off a hard drive now, and my videos will soon too.
I can promise you that I won't be wasting 20 GB on each movie, and that I won't be unhappy with the quality of a MPEG-4 serial episode that weighs in at 0.35 GB for a 40 minute episode.
The next real innovation won't be in larger, uncompressed storage - it will be in legal down loads of videos, at relatively modest quality, which will almostly certainly be compressed heavily to keep the traffic down. Until then, I'll keep on ripping my DVD's and digitising broadcasts
My 2c worth.
Michael
Would Steve Jobs have been a major success in life if he had been brought up in poverty in a third world country? I don't know - certainly he would not have been able to found Apple from such circumstances. However, I have no doubt that Steve Jobs, like Henry Ford or Thomas Edison, would have been a success in life pretty much anywhere.
Yes, maybe he would have. And maybe he would be dead of pancreatic cancer by now if he lived there, instead of having it removed successfully. Or maybe he would have died of Hepatitis or HIV (as about 40 million people in africa are going to sometime soon).
Success is a combination of luck and talent. Steve Jobs has both, and he hasn't wasted his good fortune of being in the right place in the right time.
But to think that talent alone will win you over in the face of bad circumstance - life is still a lottery, and bad things happen to good people.
Michael
I had heard it a while back but don't know for sure who originated it. A quick Google search found this page that talks about it:
.sig is now updated.
Thanks. My
Michael
"Where donors would come from is one issue that would have to be considered. "The transplant would have to come from a beating heart donor. So, say your sister was in intensive care, you would have to agree to allow their face to be removed before the ventilator was switched off. "And there is the possibility that the donor would then carry on breathing."
This doesn't happen if the brain death testing is done properly. In Austraila one of the tests for brain death is that the person is disconnected from the ventilator for 20 minutes. If they breathe, they aren't truly brain dead. If you have proper criteria for brain death - A known cause of brain injury, meet several inclusion criteria (such as the aponea test mentioned above) and don't have any exclusion criteria that can look similar (eg recent anaesthesia/ low body temperature) then you can be considered as an organ donor.
In reality, people without brainstem function are very hard to keep alive on a ventilator, because the brain regulates alot of things. For example, the brain constantly releases a constant stream of anti diuretic hormone from the pituitary gland to regulate the total amount of water in your body. With brain death this stops and the kidneys will produce the maximal amount of urine (20+ litres/day), so fluid balance fails drastically.
I have seen less experienced people not understand the proper definition of brain death - I think that this is where you get the stories about turning off ventilators and people surviving. Brain death is a rapidly termainal condition. That is why so many heart transplants are done in the middle of the night - its hard to keep the donor alive until even the next morning.
Just FYI
Michael
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
.sig (which has been stable for years), as it resonates with my current experiences at work.
fdiskne1: This is the best line I have heard in a while. It is very likely to replace my
Do you have a name or similar for me to attibute this to?
Michael