I'm pretty sure earplugs, a helmet and a heavy jacket would be an effective counter measure for this thing. Earplugs and an motorcycle helmet can shield your hearing from continurous noise up to around 150 dBA. The mass of a thick jacket should filter out any high frequency components of the impulses. Just add a plexiglass shield for the low frequencies and you should be able to rush this thing and kick it over.
So who are the people who will be "unable to pay"? I want to be in that group and still have access to unlimited downloads. Of course then I would be stealing from other students rather than the RIAA.
A better analogy than those presented would be the expectation of privacy for post cards sent to a PO box. This is exactly what is going on with email sent without encryption over the internet.
Since, IANAL I don't know what the limits are for searching a PO box, but I'm sure there are precedents for this.
I wonder if you can get around this by just using a calling card and going through another 800 number. There are lots of times I have to return a call (work) to people that I don't want to have my cell number. I know you could just find another phone, but going through a calling card might be easier lots of times.
As far as the domestic violence stuff...I can see it cutting both ways because this makes it easier to document who is making those harassign phone calls and put them back in jail.
The problem with this is that in many states you need to get a certificate of need to be able to get a build a new MRI or CT scanner. The states are kind of stingy with these under the guise of cost control. There were some studies in the 1980's that showed increased health care costs in cities that had lots of MRIs and hospital beds, and they concluded that this correlation meant that the way to reduce health care costs was to limit the tertiary services that were available. Stupid idea, but the established docs and insurance companies were all for it and got it pushed through lots of states.
"hypochondriacs, which are quickly recognized by doctors and ignored...the 'shortages' people are talking about are for surgery and MRIs and whatnot, none of which you can visit without a reason"
While surgeons have much less patience for people without easily identifiable physical pathology, lots of health care dollars are spent (note: not wasted) on MRIs and other diagnostic studies for hypochondriacs. The diagnoses of conversion disorder or malingering, and other psychosomatic illnesses are not ones that you can easily recognize. In fact you have to make sure you are not missing some kind of organic pathology before you even consider these diagnosis. Combine that with the fact that these people frequently switch doctors and start the whole process over again, and you will realize that lots of money gets spent on disorders with no physical pathology.
"Being on a waiting list for an organ, however, does suck - but that seems to be the case regardless of medical system; short of countries where there's a lively 'grey'/black market in organs. "
What about countries with "socially just" health care system that have decided that certain organ transplants are not economically feasible? Then it really sucks!
I guess it doesn't suck for those who are rich enough to go to grey market hospitals in other countries. So much for a socially just system.
A serious disadvantage in finding a job??? You have to be kidding. I am a physician and scientist. I have received multiple NIH grants and treat patients every day. I have not found either of these jobs any more difficult by not accepting evolutionary theory in its current incarnation. The only difficulty I have faced by not accepting evolution as fact has been ridicule at dinner parties among my friends who studied liberal arts rather than engineering in college.
Evolution is an approximation...a guess. This is similar to most science. However, unlike most hard science, there is no prospectively testable hypotheses which can be feasibly tested experimentally. There is a reason that most of its current "researchers" are in social science departments at second tier institutions begging for NSF funds. It has not produced many useful predictions.
New York City had Republican Mayors and the state had a Republican Govenor in 2000 and 2004, but it still went blue in both federal elections. NY, MA and CA Republicans != IA, AZ, and FL Republicans.
Based on your stats, it would seem safer to do a line of coke than go to the ER if you were having a heart attack. After all, those physicians all went into medicine so they could slaughter people.
What you are missing is that if all those people that died from OD's had never done drugs, they would still be alive. Most of the people who died in the OR or from a medication error were pretty sick and didn't have much reserve, so they often would have died in weeks to months regardless of the medical intervention.
In most cars the airbags are triggered by sensors actually in the airbag module, not the engine control module. So the airbag will still deploy if the car hits a tree or something...unless the RF blast actually induces a current in the airbag module and triggers it to deploy before an accident. I've heard of this happening back in the early days of airbag development from RF generated by the ignition system. Nowadays, I think the airbags are pretty well shielded, but 100 J is a big pulse.
The linked abstract says they were able to acquire the images using low field strength because they used SQUIDS. The problem with this strategy is you trade a huge room with a large supercooled magnet for a large room that is magnetically shielded and smaller supercooled sensors. Once produced in quantity the cost and size will probably be about the same. With lower image quality for lower field strengths. The one advantage may be for people with magnetically sensitive implantable devices such as cochlear implants, defibrillators or older pacemakers.
Almost all cars in the last 15 years remember the top speed and rpm you traveled in the past 30 days or so. If he got the ticket on the highway, I would think this second line of evidence might help bolster his case.
Yes but did they control for the reason the people received a transfusion. Its not like the ER just gives everyone that walks through the door with chest pain a transfusion. There is an underlying reason for each of those transfusions that probably made them at higher risk for stroke or and MI (things like being on blood thinners because of previous heart attacks, blood clots, or strokes).
I would guess that people who received blood transfusions are also at higher risk for pneumonia and cancer.
And if NO would fix all this, they should just give them generic oral nitrates, not some crazy system to add NO to banked blood.
...will start being entered into a Microsoft database, as soon as all my patient's release this info to MS AND someone pays me for the time it takes to enter it. In other words...never. There is just no incentive to physicians to start entering their patients' info into this database. And for all those of you who say, "well then six different people won't have to ask me what drugs I'm allergic to." I say tough. If you are really that concerned that an ER has an accurate medical history on you even if you are unconscious, then pay someone to do a thorough history and physical exam. Get a copy and give it to your emergency contact. Shrink it down to fit in our wallet/purse and wear a bracelet that says "My medical history is in my wallet/purse, call my friend XXX for more info". It will cost you about $150 and ANY ER will be able to use it.
The reason that most medschool grads want to specialize is that the pay is much better. HMO's have shifted most of the risk of being an insurance company onto the primary care physician (internist, family doc and pediatricians). Most specialties are procedure based and have been able to avoid things like capitation, staying funded mostly of a fee for service basis. The good news for patients is that most medical specialties require 3 years of training in internal medicine before applying for a specialty fellowship. And the surgical specialties...lets just say you are better off not having most surgeons as you primary care physician. The shortage of primary care physicians would dry up in less than five years if the reimbursement for primary care actually paid the bills. Most medicine specialists can do primary care, it just doesn't pay for them to spend their time on it.
I can understand leaving mfg. names out of the paper, but I would be interested to see how big a factor drive speed was in failure rates. Did any of the other papers presented address this?
I would bet the unfortunately lady had other medical problems that were either not diagnosed or ignored. Most likely she had kidney and cardiac problems. Unless you have kidney problems you would have to drink more than a half gallon of water per hour to develop hyponatremia, and even then people usually develop seizures quite a bit before cardiac arrest. While she may have not known about or ignored these problems, the radio station is gonna have a huge liability if they didn't ask her about them before the contest.
The cost of the drives isn't that bad, but you have to reliably get those drives on a network and keep them backed up. This means servers, redundancy, backup tapes, and electric bills. These are the real costs of storage space.
>> Universities aren't the only ones who get patents based on gvt. money. Take a look at small business and student loans/grants. These are both heavily subsidized, but we don't expect anyone who uses these programs to give away anything they produce as a result of these funds.
>Well, perhaps we should. I don't want businesses patenting the things that my taxes paid them to develop either. If they're going to lock it away, they can pay for it themselves.
So you basically think that anyone who took a federal student loan should never be able to patent anything that is based on the education they got with that loan. How about all the tax breaks the federal gvt gives (not taking healtcare benefits or IRAs)? Should these be considered subsidies that make a company not able to patent anything. The problem is our gvt has decided to use subsidies and tax breaks to try to encourage certain behaviors in corporations and individuals. Your tax dollars are not buying you the right to any products that company happens to make, it is paying encourage that company to make products the gvt likes. It sounds as if you just hate the patent system and want to make filing for patents an activity the gvt discourages.
>>The problem is that your tax dollars would then be subsidizing generic pharmaceutical companies in these developing countries and the grey market used to sell them back to developed counries.
>...which benefits people here by giving them access to cheaper imported drugs. Sounds good so far.
No it wouldn't because it is illegal to import those drugs. If you don't care about legality or quality control, you can already buy all kinds of knockoff drugs. Big relief agencies don't because they want to appease their donors.
>>Since they have lost licensing fees, Universities would need to supplement their incocme in some other way (ie increase tuition).
>That sounds fair. Right now, tuition at our universities is being subsidized by everyone in the world who uses a drug that's patented by one of those universities. If that goes away and tuition rises, then we'll be paying a bit more, but it's not as if those other countries owe us tuition subsidies.
They do not owe the current students a tuition subsidy, but they do owe compensation to the professors and institution that developed the drug. No drug is developed entirely by government grants. My mention of increasing tuition was only to indicate one of the consequences that may happen because of denying the compensation owed to these investors.
>> Uh, how many drugs are on the market without ANY competition? >There is no competition for the production of a patented drug; that's the whole purpose of patents.
The parent's point is that the competition for the patented drug are other drugs in its class and other drugs used to treat the same diseases/symptoms. Think Prilosec, Nexium, Protonix, Zantac, Petpo
>> Most drugs compete with cheap medications - but people aren't satisfied with the cheap meds because the more expensive ones work better. >Indeed. So, as I was saying, the GP's assertion that "Everyone benefits, believe it or not" is wrong, because the people who can't afford the more effective treatments don't benefit; in fact, when the high prices enabled by patents are the reason they can't afford them, just the opposite happens.
And in fifteen years, the expensive meds are the cheap ones. In five years, they have competition from drugs in the same class and are moderately priced.
>>But, would the more expensive meds exist if it weren't for the drug industry that developed them? >When their development was funded by tax money? Probably, yes. The money is there for someone to do the research; it doesn't really matter who.
Except that tax dollars did not fund the Phase I, II and III trials required by the FDA before a druge get approved. These are some of the highest costs in developing a drug (aside from marketing...but don't get me started on that).
>>Uh, most drug company R&D isn't government subsidized. University R&D is a different story, and I'd tend to agree with your point there. >Good thing this story is specifically about university R&D, then. Universities aren't the only ones who get patents based on gvt. money. Take a look at small business and student loans/grants. These are both heavily subsidized, but we don't expect anyone who uses these programs to give away anything they produce as a result of these funds.
>>In any case, as I've suggested elsewhere there is a simple solution. Just have the NIH start a drug development program in competition with industry, and see how it works. No need to have price fixing, or abolish patents. >What's being suggested here is neither price fixing nor the abolishment of patents. The suggestion, as laid out in the article summary, is for "universities to adopt licensing policies that would facilitate access to all university-derived medicines in developing countries". There already is access. The problem is that your tax dollars would then be subsidizing generic pharmaceutical companies in these developing countries and the grey market used to sell them back to developed counries. Since they have lost licensing fees, Universities would need to supplement their incocme in some other way (ie increase tuition). This decreases access to the education needed to develop future drugs and ultimately raises their price/delays their development.
Hospital administrators are just as greedy as your avereage teenie bopper downloading the latest Justin Timberlake track. If their IT dept could setup 50 Radiology viewing terminals for the price of one, they would do it. While we like to put "Medicine" up on a pedestal of nobility, these guys are jsut as human as anyone else and with tighter and tighter margins they will look for any way to cut corners they can.
Of course the medical imaging software guys know this, which is why they have gone to leased/managed servers (with a limit on the number of concurrent "free" clients).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure earplugs, a helmet and a heavy jacket would be an effective counter measure for this thing. Earplugs and an motorcycle helmet can shield your hearing from continurous noise up to around 150 dBA. The mass of a thick jacket should filter out any high frequency components of the impulses. Just add a plexiglass shield for the low frequencies and you should be able to rush this thing and kick it over.
So who are the people who will be "unable to pay"?
I want to be in that group and still have access to unlimited downloads.
Of course then I would be stealing from other students rather than the RIAA.
A better analogy than those presented would be the expectation of privacy for post cards sent to a PO box. This is exactly what is going on with email sent without encryption over the internet.
Since, IANAL I don't know what the limits are for searching a PO box, but I'm sure there are precedents for this.
Mod Parent Up!
This is one of the most insightful comments in this thread.
I wonder if you can get around this by just using a calling card and going through another 800 number. There are lots of times I have to return a call (work) to people that I don't want to have my cell number. I know you could just find another phone, but going through a calling card might be easier lots of times.
As far as the domestic violence stuff...I can see it cutting both ways because this makes it easier to document who is making those harassign phone calls and put them back in jail.
The problem with this is that in many states you need to get a certificate of need to be able to get a build a new MRI or CT scanner. The states are kind of stingy with these under the guise of cost control. There were some studies in the 1980's that showed increased health care costs in cities that had lots of MRIs and hospital beds, and they concluded that this correlation meant that the way to reduce health care costs was to limit the tertiary services that were available.
Stupid idea, but the established docs and insurance companies were all for it and got it pushed through lots of states.
"hypochondriacs, which are quickly recognized by doctors and ignored...the 'shortages' people are talking about are for surgery and MRIs and whatnot, none of which you can visit without a reason"
While surgeons have much less patience for people without easily identifiable physical pathology, lots of health care dollars are spent (note: not wasted) on MRIs and other diagnostic studies for hypochondriacs. The diagnoses of conversion disorder or malingering, and other psychosomatic illnesses are not ones that you can easily recognize. In fact you have to make sure you are not missing some kind of organic pathology before you even consider these diagnosis. Combine that with the fact that these people frequently switch doctors and start the whole process over again, and you will realize that lots of money gets spent on disorders with no physical pathology.
"Being on a waiting list for an organ, however, does suck - but that seems to be the case regardless of medical system; short of countries where there's a lively 'grey'/black market in organs. "
What about countries with "socially just" health care system that have decided that certain organ transplants are not economically feasible? Then it really sucks!
I guess it doesn't suck for those who are rich enough to go to grey market hospitals in other countries. So much for a socially just system.
A serious disadvantage in finding a job???
You have to be kidding. I am a physician and scientist. I have received multiple NIH grants and treat patients every day. I have not found either of these jobs any more difficult by not accepting evolutionary theory in its current incarnation. The only difficulty I have faced by not accepting evolution as fact has been ridicule at dinner parties among my friends who studied liberal arts rather than engineering in college.
Evolution is an approximation...a guess. This is similar to most science. However, unlike most hard science, there is no prospectively testable hypotheses which can be feasibly tested experimentally. There is a reason that most of its current "researchers" are in social science departments at second tier institutions begging for NSF funds. It has not produced many useful predictions.
Why is SCO still news?
Sounds like the creditors are getting what they deserve. Lay down with dogs...
New York City had Republican Mayors and the state had a Republican Govenor in 2000 and 2004, but it still went blue in both federal elections. NY, MA and CA Republicans != IA, AZ, and FL Republicans.
Based on your stats, it would seem safer to do a line of coke than go to the ER if you were having a heart attack. After all, those physicians all went into medicine so they could slaughter people.
What you are missing is that if all those people that died from OD's had never done drugs, they would still be alive. Most of the people who died in the OR or from a medication error were pretty sick and didn't have much reserve, so they often would have died in weeks to months regardless of the medical intervention.
In most cars the airbags are triggered by sensors actually in the airbag module, not the engine control module. So the airbag will still deploy if the car hits a tree or something...unless the RF blast actually induces a current in the airbag module and triggers it to deploy before an accident. I've heard of this happening back in the early days of airbag development from RF generated by the ignition system. Nowadays, I think the airbags are pretty well shielded, but 100 J is a big pulse.
The linked abstract says they were able to acquire the images using low field strength because they used SQUIDS. The problem with this strategy is you trade a huge room with a large supercooled magnet for a large room that is magnetically shielded and smaller supercooled sensors. Once produced in quantity the cost and size will probably be about the same. With lower image quality for lower field strengths.
The one advantage may be for people with magnetically sensitive implantable devices such as cochlear implants, defibrillators or older pacemakers.
Almost all cars in the last 15 years remember the top speed and rpm you traveled in the past 30 days or so. If he got the ticket on the highway, I would think this second line of evidence might help bolster his case.
Yes but did they control for the reason the people received a transfusion. Its not like the ER just gives everyone that walks through the door with chest pain a transfusion. There is an underlying reason for each of those transfusions that probably made them at higher risk for stroke or and MI (things like being on blood thinners because of previous heart attacks, blood clots, or strokes).
I would guess that people who received blood transfusions are also at higher risk for pneumonia and cancer.
And if NO would fix all this, they should just give them generic oral nitrates, not some crazy system to add NO to banked blood.
...will start being entered into a Microsoft database, as soon as all my patient's release this info to MS AND someone pays me for the time it takes to enter it. In other words...never. There is just no incentive to physicians to start entering their patients' info into this database. And for all those of you who say, "well then six different people won't have to ask me what drugs I'm allergic to." I say tough. If you are really that concerned that an ER has an accurate medical history on you even if you are unconscious, then pay someone to do a thorough history and physical exam. Get a copy and give it to your emergency contact. Shrink it down to fit in our wallet/purse and wear a bracelet that says "My medical history is in my wallet/purse, call my friend XXX for more info". It will cost you about $150 and ANY ER will be able to use it.
The reason that most medschool grads want to specialize is that the pay is much better. HMO's have shifted most of the risk of being an insurance company onto the primary care physician (internist, family doc and pediatricians). Most specialties are procedure based and have been able to avoid things like capitation, staying funded mostly of a fee for service basis.
The good news for patients is that most medical specialties require 3 years of training in internal medicine before applying for a specialty fellowship. And the surgical specialties...lets just say you are better off not having most surgeons as you primary care physician.
The shortage of primary care physicians would dry up in less than five years if the reimbursement for primary care actually paid the bills. Most medicine specialists can do primary care, it just doesn't pay for them to spend their time on it.
I can understand leaving mfg. names out of the paper, but I would be interested to see how big a factor drive speed was in failure rates. Did any of the other papers presented address this?
I would bet the unfortunately lady had other medical problems that were either not diagnosed or ignored. Most likely she had kidney and cardiac problems. Unless you have kidney problems you would have to drink more than a half gallon of water per hour to develop hyponatremia, and even then people usually develop seizures quite a bit before cardiac arrest. While she may have not known about or ignored these problems, the radio station is gonna have a huge liability if they didn't ask her about them before the contest.
The cost of the drives isn't that bad, but you have to reliably get those drives on a network and keep them backed up. This means servers, redundancy, backup tapes, and electric bills. These are the real costs of storage space.
>> Universities aren't the only ones who get patents based on gvt. money. Take a look at small business and student loans/grants. These are both heavily subsidized, but we don't expect anyone who uses these programs to give away anything they produce as a result of these funds.
>Well, perhaps we should. I don't want businesses patenting the things that my taxes paid them to develop either. If they're going to lock it away, they can pay for it themselves.
So you basically think that anyone who took a federal student loan should never be able to patent anything that is based on the education they got with that loan. How about all the tax breaks the federal gvt gives (not taking healtcare benefits or IRAs)? Should these be considered subsidies that make a company not able to patent anything. The problem is our gvt has decided to use subsidies and tax breaks to try to encourage certain behaviors in corporations and individuals. Your tax dollars are not buying you the right to any products that company happens to make, it is paying encourage that company to make products the gvt likes.
It sounds as if you just hate the patent system and want to make filing for patents an activity the gvt discourages.
>>The problem is that your tax dollars would then be subsidizing generic pharmaceutical companies in these developing countries and the grey market used to sell them back to developed counries.
>...which benefits people here by giving them access to cheaper imported drugs. Sounds good so far.
No it wouldn't because it is illegal to import those drugs. If you don't care about legality or quality control, you can already buy all kinds of knockoff drugs. Big relief agencies don't because they want to appease their donors.
>>Since they have lost licensing fees, Universities would need to supplement their incocme in some other way (ie increase tuition).
>That sounds fair. Right now, tuition at our universities is being subsidized by everyone in the world who uses a drug that's patented by one of those universities. If that goes away and tuition rises, then we'll be paying a bit more, but it's not as if those other countries owe us tuition subsidies.
They do not owe the current students a tuition subsidy, but they do owe compensation to the professors and institution that developed the drug. No drug is developed entirely by government grants.
My mention of increasing tuition was only to indicate one of the consequences that may happen because of denying the compensation owed to these investors.
>> Uh, how many drugs are on the market without ANY competition?
>There is no competition for the production of a patented drug; that's the whole purpose of patents.
The parent's point is that the competition for the patented drug are other drugs in its class and other drugs used to treat the same diseases/symptoms. Think Prilosec, Nexium, Protonix, Zantac, Petpo
>> Most drugs compete with cheap medications - but people aren't satisfied with the cheap meds because the more expensive ones work better.
>Indeed. So, as I was saying, the GP's assertion that "Everyone benefits, believe it or not" is wrong, because the people who can't afford the more effective treatments don't benefit; in fact, when the high prices enabled by patents are the reason they can't afford them, just the opposite happens.
And in fifteen years, the expensive meds are the cheap ones. In five years, they have competition from drugs in the same class and are moderately priced.
>>But, would the more expensive meds exist if it weren't for the drug industry that developed them?
>When their development was funded by tax money? Probably, yes. The money is there for someone to do the research; it doesn't really matter who.
Except that tax dollars did not fund the Phase I, II and III trials required by the FDA before a druge get approved. These are some of the highest costs in developing a drug (aside from marketing...but don't get me started on that).
>>Uh, most drug company R&D isn't government subsidized. University R&D is a different story, and I'd tend to agree with your point there.
>Good thing this story is specifically about university R&D, then.
Universities aren't the only ones who get patents based on gvt. money. Take a look at small business and student loans/grants. These are both heavily subsidized, but we don't expect anyone who uses these programs to give away anything they produce as a result of these funds.
>>In any case, as I've suggested elsewhere there is a simple solution. Just have the NIH start a drug development program in competition with industry, and see how it works. No need to have price fixing, or abolish patents.
>What's being suggested here is neither price fixing nor the abolishment of patents. The suggestion, as laid out in the article summary, is for "universities to adopt licensing policies that would facilitate access to all university-derived medicines in developing countries".
There already is access. The problem is that your tax dollars would then be subsidizing generic pharmaceutical companies in these developing countries and the grey market used to sell them back to developed counries. Since they have lost licensing fees, Universities would need to supplement their incocme in some other way (ie increase tuition). This decreases access to the education needed to develop future drugs and ultimately raises their price/delays their development.
There is no free lunch.
As a surgeon, I was actually pretty impressed with his skill at minimizing blood loss while performing a proctocephelectomy.
Hospital administrators are just as greedy as your avereage teenie bopper downloading the latest Justin Timberlake track. If their IT dept could setup 50 Radiology viewing terminals for the price of one, they would do it.
While we like to put "Medicine" up on a pedestal of nobility, these guys are jsut as human as anyone else and with tighter and tighter margins they will look for any way to cut corners they can.
Of course the medical imaging software guys know this, which is why they have gone to leased/managed servers (with a limit on the number of concurrent "free" clients).