A bit got flipped in my genome last year and after having pneumonia four times in five months I'm on $5000/month meds (if I didn't have insurance). Their problem is fixable, mine is only treatable with four needles in my abdomen for 3-4 hours a week.
Last year I had pneumonia twice. Went to a lung specialist with the x-rays, before and after, of both pneumonias. The lung doctor insisted that my 103f fever was caused by asthma. Blood work, twice-vetted x-rays, and symptoms insisted pneumonia, doctor said asthma. My wife found hypogammaglobulinemia (Common Variable Immune Deficiency) online. Went to an immuneologist, pneumonia count is now up to four in five months. He's saying it's caused by allergies and that the chances of it being CVID at my age are very rare. We insist on an IgG test being run, and my level comes back 150 with the low end of the normal range being 694. Now I'm up in the low 900's since starting SCIG in August and have only been sick twice since last June. Turns out the number of people in my age bracket diagnosed is 10%. I'd gladly take a 10% chance at winning the lottery. And the number of people in the study program at NIH that I was just admitted to is over 700. I think his estimate of the number of people with my condition is waaay low.
There are exceptional help desk callers. Heck, us IT geeks who have been working with computers for three decades have to call help desks occasionally whether we like it or not. My wife is a similarly exceptional person in that her father was a pathologist and always talked about his work, she would probably have been an MD had she not preferred astrophysics and astronomy for her doctorate.
After the shitty way I was treated by the lung doctor, and the blinkered way I was treated by an immunologist, I have no problem with my wife researching my current condition and any possible future problems.
I love the fact that I can directly upload to Docs from OO. But I have a fundamental distrust of cloud docs vs local as we don't have the best of internet connectivity where I'm at.
I use MS Office for work, NeoOffice on my Mac, and Google Docs in between. I find Docs to be fine for general purpose stuff, but I agree that it is lacking fidelity.
Two cases in point.
First, I needed my wife to review a rules set for a game that I produce and Google Docs seemed to be the way to do it as she was at work and I was at home. I lost all formatting, but that was easily recreated. No big deal, lesson being share docs like this when remote collaboration is required, but plan on having to redo formatting when you finalize the project. My intent to do this again is to set up a wiki with restricted access and see what the formatting will let me do there.
Second, I contract/telecommute. Recently due to a hardware failure, I lost the database that I track time and projects in and needed a quickie replacement, so I duplicated the time entry portion in Google Docs Spreadsheet. It has been adequate, but the time/date calculation portions leave something to be desired. Again, it gets me past my problem, but it's far from ideal.
So I have to agree that Google Docs does not provide total fidelity, but it does a pretty good job within its limitations and when used wisely. And I don't need perfect fidelity for my purposes.
At least for the discovery. My wife is Dr. Russet McMillan, and I was spotting for her during that laser run. (Spotters are armed with kill switches and stand on the catwalk and watch for aircraft). She was extremely excited when she found it! Unfortunately on our next run, Sunday night, she couldn't hit it. I think our next laser run is 1am Thursday or Friday, we'll see what happens then.
I love to point out that Russet and the observatory was the final segment of the Mythbusters Lunar Landing episode.
Now I have to design a t-shirt that says "I helped to find the lost Lunokhod 1 lander and I had to make my own stupid t-shirt!" I wonder if Photoshop has a Cyrillic-looking English font.
It's well demonstrated with Lunokhod 2: that laser reflector doesn't produce returns when it's in direct sunlight, it can only be targeted when it's in shadow.
Asymmetrical warfare is tough, and when you have a country like China churning out C-802's, you can have some very unpleasant situations. Apparently it's been operational for over 20 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-802
Definitely. My boss has an interesting method for ensuring reliability for new rockets in the space program: a CEO of the contractor and an equivalent position in NASA are in the first rocket to go up. We'd have a much higher quality if we did something like this.
Agreed, Bob. I can't back you from the perspective of a parent, since I am not one nor am I likely ever to be one. The thing that causes me the most fear for my nieces (the oldest graduated HS two years ago) is the recent reports that I've been reading that human brains are really not fully formed until the mid 20's. I've observed this through watching my friends over the years and readily recognized this, I just didn't know the scientific basis.
This guy really needs for someone to give him a clue, preferably the board of directors or stockholders. I can walk in to a bookstore and browse a book, I can also read sample chapters online at Amazon usually. I can read role-playing game rules usually. Music samples and movie samples are all over the place. I can't remember the last game that I bought without playing a demo, and I used to buy a lot of computer games. I mainly got my demos from PC Gamer, and without those demos I probably wouldn't buy the game because there is so much crap out there.
The only way I would consider buying a game demo is if they were $2 and marketed like World of Warcraft's 10 day CD. If I can walk in to Best Buy and get a copy, I'll consider it. But I'm not going to spend my money and then have to download a monster file. You'd better give me free demos, readily available cheap demos, or amazingly compelling videos of game play or I'm not giving you my bucks.
Game demos are a publicity cost. Movie posters are a cost. Ash can editions are a cost. EVERYTHING costs money to make, but can be an effective publicity tool. Even though I don't program games, it shouldn't take a huge number of hours to copy out the starting area, put in 2 or 3 weapons, and release it (at least for first person shooters, which is the main thing that I play.) Sports games and strategy games are obviously going to be different for producing a pared-down copy, but it should not be that traumatic an experience to produce it.
The point of my statement is that the likelihood of ET visiting Earth is incredibly low. The number of claimed UFO sightings is very high, in terms of numbers greater than zero, not on a per capita basis. The Earth has been putting objects and people in to space for about 50 years and haven't moved people further than the moon. Our civilization will have to be a lot older before we're capable of traveling between the stars, much less between the galaxies, assuming we find a way around the barrier imposed by the speed of light (see a/. post a month or two back about staring into a 7 TEV charge as you approach the speed of light similar to staring in to the LHC). We don't know how long a civilization lasts. Assuming an extra-solar civilization existed, did their ability to travel FTL coincide with our civilization's period of sapience?
The likelihood of all of these variables aligning so that aliens would visit our world are not high. To turn your argument around, just because you think you see something doesn't mean it exists in quite the fashion that you think it is. Optical phenomena are a common occurrence and can be described using optical laws of physics.
My wife has seen a UFO. She doesn't know what it was, thus it was unidentified. But she doesn't believe it was a flying saucer.
How close is the nearest star? How long have we been beaming radio waves around the world and in to space? What is that fraction? How would they know we are here? Yes, they could be investigating all planets in the water belts of certain classes of stars, just like we're doing now with studies of extrasolar planets. But considering the energy costs of moving people or objects over such distances, would you do fly-bys or study with telescopes initially? How much does a 3.5 meter telescope cost compared to a launch to the ISS? Now scale that up to interstellar distances.
Sorry, I will continue to dismiss this. I will also continue to dismiss holocaust deniers, people who think they are genetically superior to someone whose skin color is different, and quite a few other people.
My wife would love to bitch slap this guy when I tell her about this. She has a PhD in astronomy/astrophysics and has taught classes on extra-terrestrial life, including the Drake Equation. With the increase in the general population of increasingly high definition video cameras, there should be good footage by now of UFOs. THERE ISN'T.
GET A LIFE, PEOPLE!
People don't realize how vast the distances involved are. They'll say "man didn't go to the moon", which is a piddly quarter million miles away, yet they think aliens are capable of covering interstellar/intergalactic distances with the blink of an eye.
Thank you. I use Gutenberg a lot, I'm looking more for mass market print editions. Plus, I lost my iPod Touch yesterday, which I use for reading ebooks. Yes, I can read it on my laptop, but I refuse to take my laptop to bed with me.
the more I love my Tivo. Yes, it has its limitations, but there are limits to how much I want to mess with things outside of work. I just want things to work. Tivo might screw with me, but at least my cable provider cannot.
There is a story that I'd love to see confirmation of. A communications satellite was launched and the transmitter glitched and started transmitting constantly, so it never heard the signal on the receive side to reset the transmitter. This would drain the battery and kill the bird. They contacted a ham in Texas who had an EME installation that was second to none -- he could transmit kilowatts of power through some very sophisticated antennas. They calculated when the satellite would be over his house, he blasted out the shutdown command at a far stronger level than the transmitter of the satellite was, it tore through the signal to the receiver, and the satellite reset and went back to normal operation. It was saved through working with an amateur radio operator.
My wife does EME with a laser, but she has the advantage of precision tracking through shooting the laser through a 3.5 meter telescope.
he needs to get his butt up there and fix the retro reflector on the other Lunokhod! They launched two that mounted retro reflectors for laser ranging experiments, which my wife does on a regular basis (Apache Point Observatory's Dr. Russet McMillan, as featured on Mythbusters) and they can't hit one of the LK's. The three Apollo reflectors are fine, just one of the LK's. And maybe he could upgrade the other, it doesn't work when in full sunlight.
Stupid absentee slumlords....
I've been contending for ages that car makers, now that they're essentially doing fly-by-wire, need to hire aviation engineers to make their systems triple-redundant. A car may not be "fall out of the sky if the computer fails", but slamming in to a bridge abutment at 90 MPH is just as deadly to the driver.
I had a 2000ish Isuzu Rodeo. It had drive-by-wire throttle. One day the Get Serviced Now light came on and the acceleration dropped to a pitiful number. It ran fine, still had good top speed, just no acceleration. Took it to the dealer and found out that the throttle sensor went bad, and if the computer did what it was told by the sensor, it would have trashed the tranny. So the computer locked the tranny in to 3rd gear and told me to hie me hence to a dealer. This is the sort of failure path that this sort of electronic control system needs.
You deserve (Score: 6, Say It Like It Is, Brother!)
Look at what happens in former Soviet Block countries when they get hit with earthquakes, much less the quality of their nuclear reactors (not that ours are much better at the moment).
My fav Slashdot sig, and I'm sure I'm misquoting it, is: "I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization."
You could reverse it and produce new source. It would be ugly, with system-generated variable names and no comments, but it would be readable and you could understand the logic.
But there is a technical problem. As old as their system is, guaranteed it's poorly architected by today's standards. Yes, you could directly port everything from their old POS to a new ub3r system, but it would be horrible and clunky to work with. Properly renormalize it into a new DB2 system, and you could have something very slick.
Case in point: our mainframe is in the process of being retired. There is an application using a single file, said file contains over 1,000 fields per record. When I originally spec'd it to convert to SQL Server, I broke it down into 8 or 9 tables as I'd been told that it was going to be a query-only system. When it turned out that the system was actually live, it was refactored into 30 or so tables. And this is just one Cobol app: I never saw the specs for all the other apps on this box.
There is no way that original system is properly normalized. It needs a total reengineering performed. You could port it directly as a temporary basis, but it needs an overhaul.
The bias against mainframes is sad, but as old as their equipment is, the whole thing does need to be scrapped. That said, I don't think the photo with the article is of their actual system. Our mainframe is about to be retired, and the only time it was restarted was twice a year to adjust for DST because it wasn't properly maintained and a DST patch was never installed. Our other downtime with it was mainly because the building UPS couldn't support it during power failures. Otherwise, 99% plus was not a problem, much better than our Windoze boxes.
Rewrite their apps into a DB2 database on a mainframe, provide a gateway into NCIC, and you'd really have something.
I heard a story, haven't confirmed its truthiness. A tax law was proposed to the US Congress that was incredibly byzantine, very difficult to make heads or tails of it. Some organization sat down and dissected the bill and in the end found that it benefited one person: Ross Perot.
NFS is definitely a good deal for hosting with their pay-as-you-consume pricing. I'm not as savvy with web hosting admin as I'd like, so I prefer the hand-holding that BH provides.
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A bit got flipped in my genome last year and after having pneumonia four times in five months I'm on $5000/month meds (if I didn't have insurance). Their problem is fixable, mine is only treatable with four needles in my abdomen for 3-4 hours a week.
Last year I had pneumonia twice. Went to a lung specialist with the x-rays, before and after, of both pneumonias. The lung doctor insisted that my 103f fever was caused by asthma. Blood work, twice-vetted x-rays, and symptoms insisted pneumonia, doctor said asthma. My wife found hypogammaglobulinemia (Common Variable Immune Deficiency) online. Went to an immuneologist, pneumonia count is now up to four in five months. He's saying it's caused by allergies and that the chances of it being CVID at my age are very rare. We insist on an IgG test being run, and my level comes back 150 with the low end of the normal range being 694. Now I'm up in the low 900's since starting SCIG in August and have only been sick twice since last June. Turns out the number of people in my age bracket diagnosed is 10%. I'd gladly take a 10% chance at winning the lottery. And the number of people in the study program at NIH that I was just admitted to is over 700. I think his estimate of the number of people with my condition is waaay low.
There are exceptional help desk callers. Heck, us IT geeks who have been working with computers for three decades have to call help desks occasionally whether we like it or not. My wife is a similarly exceptional person in that her father was a pathologist and always talked about his work, she would probably have been an MD had she not preferred astrophysics and astronomy for her doctorate.
After the shitty way I was treated by the lung doctor, and the blinkered way I was treated by an immunologist, I have no problem with my wife researching my current condition and any possible future problems.
Why do I think the answer is no?
I love the fact that I can directly upload to Docs from OO. But I have a fundamental distrust of cloud docs vs local as we don't have the best of internet connectivity where I'm at.
I use MS Office for work, NeoOffice on my Mac, and Google Docs in between. I find Docs to be fine for general purpose stuff, but I agree that it is lacking fidelity.
Two cases in point.
First, I needed my wife to review a rules set for a game that I produce and Google Docs seemed to be the way to do it as she was at work and I was at home. I lost all formatting, but that was easily recreated. No big deal, lesson being share docs like this when remote collaboration is required, but plan on having to redo formatting when you finalize the project. My intent to do this again is to set up a wiki with restricted access and see what the formatting will let me do there.
Second, I contract/telecommute. Recently due to a hardware failure, I lost the database that I track time and projects in and needed a quickie replacement, so I duplicated the time entry portion in Google Docs Spreadsheet. It has been adequate, but the time/date calculation portions leave something to be desired. Again, it gets me past my problem, but it's far from ideal.
So I have to agree that Google Docs does not provide total fidelity, but it does a pretty good job within its limitations and when used wisely. And I don't need perfect fidelity for my purposes.
At least for the discovery. My wife is Dr. Russet McMillan, and I was spotting for her during that laser run. (Spotters are armed with kill switches and stand on the catwalk and watch for aircraft). She was extremely excited when she found it! Unfortunately on our next run, Sunday night, she couldn't hit it. I think our next laser run is 1am Thursday or Friday, we'll see what happens then.
A better source of information on this is the UCSD press release: http://physicalsciences.ucsd.edu/news/releases/release_detail.php?release_id=296
I love to point out that Russet and the observatory was the final segment of the Mythbusters Lunar Landing episode.
Now I have to design a t-shirt that says "I helped to find the lost Lunokhod 1 lander and I had to make my own stupid t-shirt!" I wonder if Photoshop has a Cyrillic-looking English font.
The US left three: Apollo 11, 14, and 15, for a total of five potential targets.
It's well demonstrated with Lunokhod 2: that laser reflector doesn't produce returns when it's in direct sunlight, it can only be targeted when it's in shadow.
Asymmetrical warfare is tough, and when you have a country like China churning out C-802's, you can have some very unpleasant situations. Apparently it's been operational for over 20 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-802
Definitely. My boss has an interesting method for ensuring reliability for new rockets in the space program: a CEO of the contractor and an equivalent position in NASA are in the first rocket to go up. We'd have a much higher quality if we did something like this.
Agreed, Bob. I can't back you from the perspective of a parent, since I am not one nor am I likely ever to be one. The thing that causes me the most fear for my nieces (the oldest graduated HS two years ago) is the recent reports that I've been reading that human brains are really not fully formed until the mid 20's. I've observed this through watching my friends over the years and readily recognized this, I just didn't know the scientific basis.
This guy really needs for someone to give him a clue, preferably the board of directors or stockholders. I can walk in to a bookstore and browse a book, I can also read sample chapters online at Amazon usually. I can read role-playing game rules usually. Music samples and movie samples are all over the place. I can't remember the last game that I bought without playing a demo, and I used to buy a lot of computer games. I mainly got my demos from PC Gamer, and without those demos I probably wouldn't buy the game because there is so much crap out there.
The only way I would consider buying a game demo is if they were $2 and marketed like World of Warcraft's 10 day CD. If I can walk in to Best Buy and get a copy, I'll consider it. But I'm not going to spend my money and then have to download a monster file. You'd better give me free demos, readily available cheap demos, or amazingly compelling videos of game play or I'm not giving you my bucks.
Game demos are a publicity cost. Movie posters are a cost. Ash can editions are a cost. EVERYTHING costs money to make, but can be an effective publicity tool. Even though I don't program games, it shouldn't take a huge number of hours to copy out the starting area, put in 2 or 3 weapons, and release it (at least for first person shooters, which is the main thing that I play.) Sports games and strategy games are obviously going to be different for producing a pared-down copy, but it should not be that traumatic an experience to produce it.
The point of my statement is that the likelihood of ET visiting Earth is incredibly low. The number of claimed UFO sightings is very high, in terms of numbers greater than zero, not on a per capita basis. The Earth has been putting objects and people in to space for about 50 years and haven't moved people further than the moon. Our civilization will have to be a lot older before we're capable of traveling between the stars, much less between the galaxies, assuming we find a way around the barrier imposed by the speed of light (see a /. post a month or two back about staring into a 7 TEV charge as you approach the speed of light similar to staring in to the LHC). We don't know how long a civilization lasts. Assuming an extra-solar civilization existed, did their ability to travel FTL coincide with our civilization's period of sapience?
The likelihood of all of these variables aligning so that aliens would visit our world are not high. To turn your argument around, just because you think you see something doesn't mean it exists in quite the fashion that you think it is. Optical phenomena are a common occurrence and can be described using optical laws of physics.
My wife has seen a UFO. She doesn't know what it was, thus it was unidentified. But she doesn't believe it was a flying saucer.
How close is the nearest star? How long have we been beaming radio waves around the world and in to space? What is that fraction? How would they know we are here? Yes, they could be investigating all planets in the water belts of certain classes of stars, just like we're doing now with studies of extrasolar planets. But considering the energy costs of moving people or objects over such distances, would you do fly-bys or study with telescopes initially? How much does a 3.5 meter telescope cost compared to a launch to the ISS? Now scale that up to interstellar distances.
Sorry, I will continue to dismiss this. I will also continue to dismiss holocaust deniers, people who think they are genetically superior to someone whose skin color is different, and quite a few other people.
My wife would love to bitch slap this guy when I tell her about this. She has a PhD in astronomy/astrophysics and has taught classes on extra-terrestrial life, including the Drake Equation. With the increase in the general population of increasingly high definition video cameras, there should be good footage by now of UFOs. THERE ISN'T.
GET A LIFE, PEOPLE!
People don't realize how vast the distances involved are. They'll say "man didn't go to the moon", which is a piddly quarter million miles away, yet they think aliens are capable of covering interstellar/intergalactic distances with the blink of an eye.
Thank you. I use Gutenberg a lot, I'm looking more for mass market print editions. Plus, I lost my iPod Touch yesterday, which I use for reading ebooks. Yes, I can read it on my laptop, but I refuse to take my laptop to bed with me.
the more I love my Tivo. Yes, it has its limitations, but there are limits to how much I want to mess with things outside of work. I just want things to work. Tivo might screw with me, but at least my cable provider cannot.
because of this. I find the occasional used Dick in stores and the occasional omnibus, but I don't often find PKD at a reasonable price.
There is a story that I'd love to see confirmation of. A communications satellite was launched and the transmitter glitched and started transmitting constantly, so it never heard the signal on the receive side to reset the transmitter. This would drain the battery and kill the bird. They contacted a ham in Texas who had an EME installation that was second to none -- he could transmit kilowatts of power through some very sophisticated antennas. They calculated when the satellite would be over his house, he blasted out the shutdown command at a far stronger level than the transmitter of the satellite was, it tore through the signal to the receiver, and the satellite reset and went back to normal operation. It was saved through working with an amateur radio operator.
My wife does EME with a laser, but she has the advantage of precision tracking through shooting the laser through a 3.5 meter telescope.
he needs to get his butt up there and fix the retro reflector on the other Lunokhod! They launched two that mounted retro reflectors for laser ranging experiments, which my wife does on a regular basis (Apache Point Observatory's Dr. Russet McMillan, as featured on Mythbusters) and they can't hit one of the LK's. The three Apollo reflectors are fine, just one of the LK's. And maybe he could upgrade the other, it doesn't work when in full sunlight. Stupid absentee slumlords....
I've been contending for ages that car makers, now that they're essentially doing fly-by-wire, need to hire aviation engineers to make their systems triple-redundant. A car may not be "fall out of the sky if the computer fails", but slamming in to a bridge abutment at 90 MPH is just as deadly to the driver.
I had a 2000ish Isuzu Rodeo. It had drive-by-wire throttle. One day the Get Serviced Now light came on and the acceleration dropped to a pitiful number. It ran fine, still had good top speed, just no acceleration. Took it to the dealer and found out that the throttle sensor went bad, and if the computer did what it was told by the sensor, it would have trashed the tranny. So the computer locked the tranny in to 3rd gear and told me to hie me hence to a dealer. This is the sort of failure path that this sort of electronic control system needs.
You deserve (Score: 6, Say It Like It Is, Brother!)
Look at what happens in former Soviet Block countries when they get hit with earthquakes, much less the quality of their nuclear reactors (not that ours are much better at the moment).
My fav Slashdot sig, and I'm sure I'm misquoting it, is: "I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization."
You could reverse it and produce new source. It would be ugly, with system-generated variable names and no comments, but it would be readable and you could understand the logic.
But there is a technical problem. As old as their system is, guaranteed it's poorly architected by today's standards. Yes, you could directly port everything from their old POS to a new ub3r system, but it would be horrible and clunky to work with. Properly renormalize it into a new DB2 system, and you could have something very slick.
Case in point: our mainframe is in the process of being retired. There is an application using a single file, said file contains over 1,000 fields per record. When I originally spec'd it to convert to SQL Server, I broke it down into 8 or 9 tables as I'd been told that it was going to be a query-only system. When it turned out that the system was actually live, it was refactored into 30 or so tables. And this is just one Cobol app: I never saw the specs for all the other apps on this box.
There is no way that original system is properly normalized. It needs a total reengineering performed. You could port it directly as a temporary basis, but it needs an overhaul.
The bias against mainframes is sad, but as old as their equipment is, the whole thing does need to be scrapped. That said, I don't think the photo with the article is of their actual system. Our mainframe is about to be retired, and the only time it was restarted was twice a year to adjust for DST because it wasn't properly maintained and a DST patch was never installed. Our other downtime with it was mainly because the building UPS couldn't support it during power failures. Otherwise, 99% plus was not a problem, much better than our Windoze boxes.
Rewrite their apps into a DB2 database on a mainframe, provide a gateway into NCIC, and you'd really have something.
I heard a story, haven't confirmed its truthiness. A tax law was proposed to the US Congress that was incredibly byzantine, very difficult to make heads or tails of it. Some organization sat down and dissected the bill and in the end found that it benefited one person: Ross Perot.
Money talks, bullshit walks.
NFS is definitely a good deal for hosting with their pay-as-you-consume pricing. I'm not as savvy with web hosting admin as I'd like, so I prefer the hand-holding that BH provides.