At $2000 a ton, I'm left wondering how this incredibly ubiquitous material is considered expensive...perhaps someone can describe this to me. From my understanding, the TiO2 is applied using a caustic wash process, again very straightforward. I'm interested in knowing how this is difficult or expensive.
Please pay attention to your FAR's. This can be granted an airworthiness cert as a Restricted category any day of the week. Some of the aerobatic planes I see every day at my airport are certified as Restricted, and have a whopping 30 minutes' fuel capacity (think early Yaks). In addition, if you use full power while doing many (most?) common aerobatic maneuvers, you need some lessons. Life is not that hard. And if you can't imagine life without a 4-hour plus reserve endurance, you've just grounded yourself from anything but the most capable aircraft in general aviation today. Fine. The rest of us will enjoy the sky with the desperately inferior equipment you cannot bear to use while you sit on the ground whining and pining. The 5000 hour MTBF is the most humorous. No aero piston engine in existence has ever met that requirement. Period. Your 172 and/or RV-10 will never meet either of these ideals, or even come close, no matter how much you dream a little dream over the shiny brochures.
Electric planes will happen slowly, and may eventually carve out mission niches that they can address competently.
My company in the mid 90's had an online resume system for internal postings that allowed people to post resumes anonymously, and hiring managers could share postings and information selectively based on whatever criteria they wanted, effectively filtering job seekers.
Half the battle is accessibility. Arduino does that well. It accomplishes what many want it to do without fuss and esotericisms of "good" code. I'd rather have a set of tools I can work with for a one-off task. It beats waiting for an uppity code jockey who insists that it will take 4 weeks, $14k in developer tools,$2k in class fees, etc., to accomplish what a lot of sixth graders eagerly do in a few evenings from scratch. I've seen it happen- right where I work, and it is frustrating.
The thought that scientific ballooning is necessarily easy is naive. The idea is to get cutting edge science at the edge of space for 1/10th to 1/20 the cost, 1/4 to 1/3 the time, and with cutting edge, often off-the-shelf technology rather than the retrograde schlock that is hardened/proven well enough for a stodgy satellite mission. The odds against success include:
1. Ridiculously thin resources. Satellites are launched with the unfathomable overhead. The resources are often the first attempt by academics and engineers, including undergraduate and graduate talent, with little guidance but plenty of smarts. 2. Difficult thermal environment. The thermal environment for a balloon is often more severe than for any satellite. The severe convective environment during ascent, the huge albedo and IR that is smaller for a satellite. 3. Communication limits. There is very limited bandwidth for communication available with a "high speed" vhf link (while it lasts). 4. Structural requirements- the com limitations mean that the gondola must survive a landing at perhaps 12mph vertically in a 30 mph crosswind on rocky terrain, perhaps after being dragged (some have been dragged hundreds of miles due to parachute problems) without ruining the pricey bits and preserving the precious stored data.
All this for a fraction of what a firm that has suckled at the tit of high overhead, government funded enterprise could dream of doing, and in a fraction of the time.
The two missions are not similar at all, and ballooning deserves a great deal of respect. The launch phase is very difficult, requiring timing, skill, and luck. Despite all these problems, the CSBF has something like a 92% success rate. A launch platform firm would cough nervously and excuse themselves from the room if one wanted this level of success.
Best wishes to the Compton team in getting back in the air. I know our upcoming balloon mission will need all th happy thoughts we can get for our upcoming mission in the summer.
The Rutgers vehicle depended on primary batteries, which is arguably the wiser choice for a variety of reasons. Primary batteries are used to successfully deploy ARGUS probes for years at a relatively low cost (I believe $5k a copy or less), and even power the displacement pumps used for profiling. The passive wax system is nothing new and can be more economical for longer missions than primary batteries for profiling control, although there is really no size or weight advantage. The use of the phase change system to power mission electronics seems very interesting, but I would argue that it is a solution or niche missions (read military and perhaps some energy industry apps here). The primary batteries are cheap, no larger, and likely cheaper to deploy in development and fabrication costs than the mechanical fluid energy extractor employed.
Teledyne is likely seeking military biz on this one. They were/are also in development of stealthy passive gliders that could move into position under water at station for years.
The vehicle has a probe that sticks out over the surface upon surfacing. After a short wait to allow the hydrophobic antenna cover to shed water, the GPS antenna is used to get data, and the Iridium antenna is used to send a message via SMS to the network with the data from a COTS PTS sensor and the GPS data and other health data.
...in scientific ballooning. They do this, pretty much all the time, year around, *all* over the world, and have invested a great deal in programs to allow missions eventually last for several months on a regular basis. In the past, they have put sizable balloons up for a year or more at a time (in the 60's, no less).
Scientific ballooning is my current profession. Stunning inroads in astronomy and earth science are being created every year. The mission profile is rapidly growing.
They provide a large body of resources to amateur DIYers for their own EOS operations as well.
It's a troll of an article if I ever saw one. Very odd.
The core of this "news" item is already well-documented in canines. The development of the neural crest during fetal development and subsequent maturation is affected by not-so-subtle hormonal changes instigated by environmental changes from domestication during term. The neural crest affects the initiation, duration, completion, and other aspects of developmental processes. These include cartilage distribution and growth, gland development, and other aspects that definitively affect physical and behavior development. As we "domesticate" canines, they retain many characteristics that are exemplary of a wild puppy throughout their lives. As the domestication influence is removed, the neural crest changes revert and a normal wild adult will occur fully within two or four generations.
Even more interesting is that this domestication shift creates a developmental relationship that is "sticky", or stable. Many of the behaviors exhibited by domesticated animals are shown to domesticate offspring as well even with drastic reductions in domestication inputs from humans.
What this means is that the change towards domestication can occur rather rapidly, and the departure from domestication can be difficult at first but then very rapid after maternal behavioral inputs die off (hysteresis).
Why wouldn't this happen in humans as well? It is complete speculation on my part, but the sudden appearance of agriculturation and the lack of significant examples of a flow back to hunter/gathering once agriculturizaton has occurred seems to have similar characteristics.
If a law is pointless or ineffectual, then surely there is also scant reason to repeal it by the way any administrative system works. Think Patriot Act or other examples in the tome that chronicles the unraveling of privacy or personal security we thought we signed up for.
If you want to travel without being searched, get a pilot license. Buy a plane. Go fly yourself. I've been searched exactly once during a border crossing when flying myself, and they wanted to make sure I wasn't bringing fruit into the country. As a side benefit, I've never been arbitrarily selected for a bribe and told to pay up or go to jail as I was when I drove once (until they found out I could understand him perfectly, and understand the car repair receipt he was waving at me, saying it was a warrant for my arrest).
I know you were intending to be funny, but who needs fMRI? Regular MRI is NOT expensive to achieve. GE strategically declines to manufacture low cost MRI equipment because it has established a north american market based on a very high priced, very lucrative business model. The installation of less expensive equipment that provides 80% to 90% of the capabilities of the most cutting edge products would inevitably diffuse into the north american market model. This is their own rationale, not mine.
The real hurdle in the MRI game is the data acquisition and processing, not the hardware. It's very specialized. Experts go from one MRI giant to the other and back again over their careers. It would be a bubble that would utterly collapse should someone with enough chutzpah arrive on the scene...
I call BS. I have been involved in medical device development and licensing for some time. I can ballpark what the liability for a device such as this would be, and it is pretty small. The reality of the medical device industry is that it is a bubble that is largely propped up by low expectations, high regulatory barrier to entry, and other inherent consequences of our current medical device market system.
Take, for example, a glucose monitor (specifically, the most widely used system on the market in the US). The consequences of a technical failure are relatively high, including severe injury to the user. However, the insurance coverage for this type of device is barely 5% of the total retail cost of the sensor unit, and just over 8% of the retail cost of the disposable strips. The majority of the cost is from development overhead and ongoing quality assurance. The margins are still huge- fine. Here is the problem: independent testing results bear little in common with the reports filed with the FDA regarding accuracy and precision of the units. In fact, using their own test strips with calibrated samples of human plasma, the units only had a 60% confidence interval of indicating blood sugar to within within 15 points and the precision was not believable to within 20 points. Subsequent anecdotal testing by coworkers was consistent with our lab results (we were making an Iphone wart to to perform glucose management well before it seemed everyone wanted to do the same thing). One person saw blood sugar go from 70 to 110 to 87 within 10 minutes just because he tested with three different monitors with the same lot of strips. Our monitor was within a few points over 95% of the time, with about 3-point tall error bars.
The rub in this is that our device was going to sell for $12 versus $75, give superior results, and link to a wealth of online management tools. We couldn't do it because of the regulatory barriers, and even more because insurance companies would be slow to adopt a new device.
There are other examples in every doctor office. Hand/eye coordination test software that has less sophistication than PONG, or the first interactive app your kids ever wrote, yet the software costs $4200 plus annual licensing fees and docs bill it at $220 per use. This one is a doozy because I know the guy who wrote it and HE fully acknowledges this from the left seat of his sports car and life that has no other discernible source of income.
While I cannot offer a solution (that would be palatable to the majority of Americans with a shriveled connection to the inner and outer workings of their own lives), this example is not a new thing, but is is an example of something I have a great deal more respect for: innovation linked to something we quaintly used to call value.
As for the actual application, I cannot fathom that the same functionality could not be achieved for far less.
I suppose you'll be the one to decide how "Darwinian" we should be.....what constitutes messing with things too much.....what constitutes a worthy life......who shall die to make room for you, etc. Your argument is untenable. Become as "tao" as possible"? Gimme a break- maybe we are; maybe we (you, me) just suck at it....
This thread is a wild goose chase..... the fly isn't the problem. The fly is the vector for the Trypanosomiasis disease. The fly is the only vector that is normally dangerous to humans, although wild animals can carry the disease (by contracting the parasite from the same flies that hmans do). Other modes of communication are extremely rare (aside from contaminated water with fly larvae). The fly is indigenous to a distinct swath of latitudes in subsaharan Africa. If the number of vector insects is reduced, then there will be an exponential decline in the infection rate in humans and wild animals. This in turn will reduce the number of infected flies, etc. In short, cutting the number of positive flies in suburban environs by half could effect a reduction in the human infection rates of around 75% or more. There are controlled studies to back these numbers up. The parasite itself requires a dense poulation of flies to sustain itself in any given body of water as well. These levels appear to be significant enough that eradication would effectively occur even if the fly populations could be reduced to something much greater than 0%. In short, a thriving fly population reduced to a third or even half of its previous thriving level could effect either unsustainability in the parasite population or possibly even eradication of the pest.......
Remember smallpox? Very different disease, very different public infectious behavior as an epidemic, yet it too exhibits similar characteristics regarding a sustainable critical human population, as do most infectious diseases.
Privacy is a basic human need or desire. If you disagree, skip the rest of the post- it will mean nothing to you.
First of all, privacy allows diversity. Until human nature changes, there will always be the urge to contain, limit, discourage, and take punative measures against those whose behavior or ideas are different than some prescribed norm dictated by less than democratic activism . While there are fleeting successes and short-lived theories of openness in society, the record is replete with examples of quite the opposite story, long-lived, harmful, and distasteful as they are to many of us now.
Second, openness is preferential. The desire for privacy, being a basic element of human nature, is meted and doled unequally when it becomes a commodity by virtue of restriction. Think drug war- accountability becomes impossible or irrelevant. Authority and power gain access to more, and one becomes a symbol for the other.
The measures in place will have absolutely no impact on the security of this nation against enemies from abroad. A five minute brainstorm session with several of your friends could net more schemes for attacking our country that would have been more effective, easier, and more visible than anything having to do with 9-11, and you can bet there have always been folks who spend 24/7 thinking about how to do it abroad for decades. And it gets better......they have the head start.
......as in BS. They use a pro forma accounting method that does not take into account their debt service, their returned merchandise, their unuseable inventory, or their looming debt payments on the horizon (long term notes), or other key accountable factors. Their definition of profit is based on recievables, not cash flow
Illegal? It looks like Monsanto was trespassing on his land- pollen drift or no pollen drift. There was no way the farmer could have avoided the cross-pollination- if Monsanto wants to exercise its corporate rights, it had better exercise its corporate responsibility and keep its wick in its trousers. This suit is akin to voluntarily putting trash on the curb or having a neighbor's fruit tree lean over your yard in my opinion. Yes, the farmer deliberately selected the strain by roundup-ing his crop to select the resistant type. I can select which dumpsters I want to search for goodies in if I like. If Monsanto wants to patent it and claim a right to protect it, they had better be willing to figure out a way to reign in their pollen pollution t do it. If the farmer had planted a wild type that "polluted" their GM product by the same sort of cross-pollination, you can bet they would try to sue the farmer for that as well......it happens every day with rice crops in asia- they sue if a farmer uses certain types of rice that are less delicious to pests (it causes the pest load to increase on their own, heavily sprayed varieties that yield more but are more susceptible to pest damage).
Grob, the three points you make are interesting, but incomplete.
First, while you could find any number of engineers (or plumbers, politicians, math teachers, or any one else at all) to think of nuclear as a clean source of energy, a lot of learned folks know otherwise. The US hasn't actually mined for nuclear products in decades. We are using supplies gleaned from the past, or mined elsewhere. The legacy of this effort is comletely missing from the innocuous consequences you put on the table. It has been, frankly, devastating compared to coal or gas- cancer bills the government is even staggering to pay off, superfund sites, radioactive areas cordoned off, radioactive atmospheric and airborne particulate problems, etc. The future of uranium mining hasn't changed a bit since then- we haven't had to (yet). In addition, disposal is the other half of the equation that is completely missing from the debate. We cannot convince a body of knowledgeable people that we have an acceptable disposal solution. We store the waste in our existing (numerous) facilites, and they are at or approaching capacity in MOST cases. The costs for the "final solution" never have been ammortized into the costs of nuclear energy we see in the press. Why? The costs are currently astronomically problematic, both in safety and dollars.
Your second point is simply wrong. While there are profitable nuclear plants out there, most plants have never produced more energy than was required to build and fuel them. In fact, the most efficient designs on the table in the US require upwards of 12 years to break even. Most current projects have been decommissioned before this time. France's programs tout profitability ONLY when subsidies are included, their uniquely high coal or alternative source costs are accounted for, and their convenient waste disposal program (yes, the Pacific Ocean, only recently preferred over their own Atlantic coastlines) is ignored.
Your third point is misleading. The water cycles (or whatever transfer cycles are uses) are indeed very clean. This is a bit like saying that the Ford Excursion is a clean vehicle because it has that new car smell. It's a red herring. The fuelling process is polluting. The mining for the resource is polluting. Disposal is polluting and uncertain.
Until we address these problems, nuclear power will remain an albatross without the supply of mental hygiene the nuclear power industry seeks to promote. The reason its palatable to people is that they want to believe this stuff with the same earnestness they did in the 50's- and because there's a lot of money in it.
The larger problem, as in history, is the issue of oversight. How would the list of undesireables be generated? Would it extend to others aside from unilaterally proclaimed terrorists, or could it be used for, say, traffic ticket holders, dead beat parents, tax evaders, draft dodgers, members of the minority political parties, reporters from suspicious non-syndicated news agencies, dark-skinned immigrants.....
If you are saying it wouldn't happen, just ask yourself how ludicrous you sound when these assurances are regularly reviewed with embarrassment, guilt, shame, and pledges of 'never again' for decades afterwards in our country's recent history time and time again.
There are at least two issues that bother me about ID cards that I find intractable. The first is the question that they are really necessary at all in the first place. How could they possibly be used to avert problems in a meaningful way? They can surely do no more to inhibit determined individuals than the Pledge of Allegiance can prevent Billy from pulling Suzy's hair in class. As I am generally a fan of need-based legislation, the compelling reason for this idea escapes me. The UK apparently came to the same decision years ago on this count alone.
The second issue that bothers me is the fact that the government is not very good about managing these kinds of initiatives. For one, the effort involved in developing accountability for the use and scripting of this kind of information has been seriously neglected in the past. Without this key element, there will be lives, careers, families, and reputations carelessly,casually, and wrongfully impacted, and as before, there will be no accountability.
Larry is simply being classically manic in front of a reporter again. Most people will wake up in a few months and feel rather embarrassed they felt compelled to needlessly and pointlessly relinquish the uniquely rare civil liberties they possessed, codified or not, in the name of some vague media-driven sense of patiotism or security.
This depends entirely on your audience. Many B-B sites (the only ones that seem to serve an actual purpose these days that are able to make money) are serving an audience behind corporate installs where the systems do not have/are not allowed to have these flashy junky things. There is a time and a place for them....just not everywhere. If you want people to come to your site, the best approach is often to allow them to see the site with no reasonable caveats. In my opinion, good design means implementing any flashy fluff very carefully to enhance an enabled user rather than detract from a non-enabled user.
Depends. PV technology ranks as a poser in the green energy industry- I'd rather they burned coal. It's closer to nuclear in terms of dirtiness in just about every category imaginable.....with today's alternatives, the only appropriate use for PV as a green resource is in remote off-grid apps.
The first aspirin patent was not for the chemical itself, but for the buffering agent that was added to it to make it more acceptable to sensitive stomachs. The chemical itself was merely an extract at the time from one or more types of willow plants and has sold and used universally for at least thousands of years. Aspirin patents generally cover particular applications (for symptomology, etc), formulations (the synthetic version is extremely similar yet interestingly less effective that an equivalent quantity of the natural extract. The synth version is less harsh on the stomach, though), production methods, etc, but the basic ingredient could not have been patented except in error.
Let's hope the software industry takes a clue from this idea- you can't patent water.
Slashdot Mirror
At $2000 a ton, I'm left wondering how this incredibly ubiquitous material is considered expensive...perhaps someone can describe this to me. From my understanding, the TiO2 is applied using a caustic wash process, again very straightforward. I'm interested in knowing how this is difficult or expensive.
eek.
Please pay attention to your FAR's. This can be granted an airworthiness cert as a Restricted category any day of the week. Some of the aerobatic planes I see every day at my airport are certified as Restricted, and have a whopping 30 minutes' fuel capacity (think early Yaks). In addition, if you use full power while doing many (most?) common aerobatic maneuvers, you need some lessons. Life is not that hard. And if you can't imagine life without a 4-hour plus reserve endurance, you've just grounded yourself from anything but the most capable aircraft in general aviation today. Fine. The rest of us will enjoy the sky with the desperately inferior equipment you cannot bear to use while you sit on the ground whining and pining. The 5000 hour MTBF is the most humorous. No aero piston engine in existence has ever met that requirement. Period. Your 172 and/or RV-10 will never meet either of these ideals, or even come close, no matter how much you dream a little dream over the shiny brochures.
Electric planes will happen slowly, and may eventually carve out mission niches that they can address competently.
My company in the mid 90's had an online resume system for internal postings that allowed people to post resumes anonymously, and hiring managers could share postings and information selectively based on whatever criteria they wanted, effectively filtering job seekers.
This is prior art.
Actually, I use mine to deconvolve a spherically distorted JPEG into a panorama. It does this very well. It stored data to an SD chip.
Half the battle is accessibility. Arduino does that well. It accomplishes what many want it to do without fuss and esotericisms of "good" code. I'd rather have a set of tools I can work with for a one-off task. It beats waiting for an uppity code jockey who insists that it will take 4 weeks, $14k in developer tools,$2k in class fees, etc., to accomplish what a lot of sixth graders eagerly do in a few evenings from scratch. I've seen it happen- right where I work, and it is frustrating.
The thought that scientific ballooning is necessarily easy is naive. The idea is to get cutting edge science at the edge of space for 1/10th to 1/20 the cost, 1/4 to 1/3 the time, and with cutting edge, often off-the-shelf technology rather than the retrograde schlock that is hardened/proven well enough for a stodgy satellite mission. The odds against success include:
1. Ridiculously thin resources. Satellites are launched with the unfathomable overhead. The resources are often the first attempt by academics and engineers, including undergraduate and graduate talent, with little guidance but plenty of smarts.
2. Difficult thermal environment. The thermal environment for a balloon is often more severe than for any satellite. The severe convective environment during ascent, the huge albedo and IR that is smaller for a satellite.
3. Communication limits. There is very limited bandwidth for communication available with a "high speed" vhf link (while it lasts).
4. Structural requirements- the com limitations mean that the gondola must survive a landing at perhaps 12mph vertically in a 30 mph crosswind on rocky terrain, perhaps after being dragged (some have been dragged hundreds of miles due to parachute problems) without ruining the pricey bits and preserving the precious stored data.
All this for a fraction of what a firm that has suckled at the tit of high overhead, government funded enterprise could dream of doing, and in a fraction of the time.
The two missions are not similar at all, and ballooning deserves a great deal of respect. The launch phase is very difficult, requiring timing, skill, and luck. Despite all these problems, the CSBF has something like a 92% success rate. A launch platform firm would cough nervously and excuse themselves from the room if one wanted this level of success.
Best wishes to the Compton team in getting back in the air. I know our upcoming balloon mission will need all th happy thoughts we can get for our upcoming mission in the summer.
succinct. but the system is a phase change system, not a liquid density system.
The Rutgers vehicle depended on primary batteries, which is arguably the wiser choice for a variety of reasons. Primary batteries are used to successfully deploy ARGUS probes for years at a relatively low cost (I believe $5k a copy or less), and even power the displacement pumps used for profiling. The passive wax system is nothing new and can be more economical for longer missions than primary batteries for profiling control, although there is really no size or weight advantage. The use of the phase change system to power mission electronics seems very interesting, but I would argue that it is a solution or niche missions (read military and perhaps some energy industry apps here). The primary batteries are cheap, no larger, and likely cheaper to deploy in development and fabrication costs than the mechanical fluid energy extractor employed.
Teledyne is likely seeking military biz on this one. They were/are also in development of stealthy passive gliders that could move into position under water at station for years.
The vehicle has a probe that sticks out over the surface upon surfacing. After a short wait to allow the hydrophobic antenna cover to shed water, the GPS antenna is used to get data, and the Iridium antenna is used to send a message via SMS to the network with the data from a COTS PTS sensor and the GPS data and other health data.
...in scientific ballooning. They do this, pretty much all the time, year around, *all* over the world, and have invested a great deal in programs to allow missions eventually last for several months on a regular basis. In the past, they have put sizable balloons up for a year or more at a time (in the 60's, no less).
Scientific ballooning is my current profession. Stunning inroads in astronomy and earth science are being created every year. The mission profile is rapidly growing.
They provide a large body of resources to amateur DIYers for their own EOS operations as well.
It's a troll of an article if I ever saw one. Very odd.
The core of this "news" item is already well-documented in canines. The development of the neural crest during fetal development and subsequent maturation is affected by not-so-subtle hormonal changes instigated by environmental changes from domestication during term. The neural crest affects the initiation, duration, completion, and other aspects of developmental processes. These include cartilage distribution and growth, gland development, and other aspects that definitively affect physical and behavior development. As we "domesticate" canines, they retain many characteristics that are exemplary of a wild puppy throughout their lives. As the domestication influence is removed, the neural crest changes revert and a normal wild adult will occur fully within two or four generations.
Even more interesting is that this domestication shift creates a developmental relationship that is "sticky", or stable. Many of the behaviors exhibited by domesticated animals are shown to domesticate offspring as well even with drastic reductions in domestication inputs from humans.
What this means is that the change towards domestication can occur rather rapidly, and the departure from domestication can be difficult at first but then very rapid after maternal behavioral inputs die off (hysteresis).
Why wouldn't this happen in humans as well? It is complete speculation on my part, but the sudden appearance of agriculturation and the lack of significant examples of a flow back to hunter/gathering once agriculturizaton has occurred seems to have similar characteristics.
If a law is pointless or ineffectual, then surely there is also scant reason to repeal it by the way any administrative system works. Think Patriot Act or other examples in the tome that chronicles the unraveling of privacy or personal security we thought we signed up for.
If you want to travel without being searched, get a pilot license. Buy a plane. Go fly yourself. I've been searched exactly once during a border crossing when flying myself, and they wanted to make sure I wasn't bringing fruit into the country. As a side benefit, I've never been arbitrarily selected for a bribe and told to pay up or go to jail as I was when I drove once (until they found out I could understand him perfectly, and understand the car repair receipt he was waving at me, saying it was a warrant for my arrest).
I know you were intending to be funny, but who needs fMRI? Regular MRI is NOT expensive to achieve. GE strategically declines to manufacture low cost MRI equipment because it has established a north american market based on a very high priced, very lucrative business model. The installation of less expensive equipment that provides 80% to 90% of the capabilities of the most cutting edge products would inevitably diffuse into the north american market model. This is their own rationale, not mine.
The real hurdle in the MRI game is the data acquisition and processing, not the hardware. It's very specialized. Experts go from one MRI giant to the other and back again over their careers. It would be a bubble that would utterly collapse should someone with enough chutzpah arrive on the scene...
I call BS. I have been involved in medical device development and licensing for some time. I can ballpark what the liability for a device such as this would be, and it is pretty small. The reality of the medical device industry is that it is a bubble that is largely propped up by low expectations, high regulatory barrier to entry, and other inherent consequences of our current medical device market system.
Take, for example, a glucose monitor (specifically, the most widely used system on the market in the US). The consequences of a technical failure are relatively high, including severe injury to the user. However, the insurance coverage for this type of device is barely 5% of the total retail cost of the sensor unit, and just over 8% of the retail cost of the disposable strips. The majority of the cost is from development overhead and ongoing quality assurance. The margins are still huge- fine. Here is the problem: independent testing results bear little in common with the reports filed with the FDA regarding accuracy and precision of the units. In fact, using their own test strips with calibrated samples of human plasma, the units only had a 60% confidence interval of indicating blood sugar to within within 15 points and the precision was not believable to within 20 points. Subsequent anecdotal testing by coworkers was consistent with our lab results (we were making an Iphone wart to to perform glucose management well before it seemed everyone wanted to do the same thing). One person saw blood sugar go from 70 to 110 to 87 within 10 minutes just because he tested with three different monitors with the same lot of strips. Our monitor was within a few points over 95% of the time, with about 3-point tall error bars.
The rub in this is that our device was going to sell for $12 versus $75, give superior results, and link to a wealth of online management tools. We couldn't do it because of the regulatory barriers, and even more because insurance companies would be slow to adopt a new device.
There are other examples in every doctor office. Hand/eye coordination test software that has less sophistication than PONG, or the first interactive app your kids ever wrote, yet the software costs $4200 plus annual licensing fees and docs bill it at $220 per use. This one is a doozy because I know the guy who wrote it and HE fully acknowledges this from the left seat of his sports car and life that has no other discernible source of income.
While I cannot offer a solution (that would be palatable to the majority of Americans with a shriveled connection to the inner and outer workings of their own lives), this example is not a new thing, but is is an example of something I have a great deal more respect for: innovation linked to something we quaintly used to call value.
As for the actual application, I cannot fathom that the same functionality could not be achieved for far less.
I suppose you'll be the one to decide how "Darwinian" we should be.....what constitutes messing with things too much.....what constitutes a worthy life......who shall die to make room for you, etc. Your argument is untenable. Become as "tao" as possible"? Gimme a break- maybe we are; maybe we (you, me) just suck at it....
This thread is a wild goose chase..... the fly isn't the problem. The fly is the vector for the Trypanosomiasis disease. The fly is the only vector that is normally dangerous to humans, although wild animals can carry the disease (by contracting the parasite from the same flies that hmans do). Other modes of communication are extremely rare (aside from contaminated water with fly larvae). The fly is indigenous to a distinct swath of latitudes in subsaharan Africa. If the number of vector insects is reduced, then there will be an exponential decline in the infection rate in humans and wild animals. This in turn will reduce the number of infected flies, etc. In short, cutting the number of positive flies in suburban environs by half could effect a reduction in the human infection rates of around 75% or more. There are controlled studies to back these numbers up. The parasite itself requires a dense poulation of flies to sustain itself in any given body of water as well. These levels appear to be significant enough that eradication would effectively occur even if the fly populations could be reduced to something much greater than 0%. In short, a thriving fly population reduced to a third or even half of its previous thriving level could effect either unsustainability in the parasite population or possibly even eradication of the pest.......
Remember smallpox? Very different disease, very different public infectious behavior as an epidemic, yet it too exhibits similar characteristics regarding a sustainable critical human population, as do most infectious diseases.
Privacy is a basic human need or desire. If you disagree, skip the rest of the post- it will mean nothing to you.
First of all, privacy allows diversity. Until human nature changes, there will always be the urge to contain, limit, discourage, and take punative measures against those whose behavior or ideas are different than some prescribed norm dictated by less than democratic activism . While there are fleeting successes and short-lived theories of openness in society, the record is replete with examples of quite the opposite story, long-lived, harmful, and distasteful as they are to many of us now.
Second, openness is preferential. The desire for privacy, being a basic element of human nature, is meted and doled unequally when it becomes a commodity by virtue of restriction. Think drug war- accountability becomes impossible or irrelevant. Authority and power gain access to more, and one becomes a symbol for the other.
The measures in place will have absolutely no impact on the security of this nation against enemies from abroad. A five minute brainstorm session with several of your friends could net more schemes for attacking our country that would have been more effective, easier, and more visible than anything having to do with 9-11, and you can bet there have always been folks who spend 24/7 thinking about how to do it abroad for decades. And it gets better......they have the head start.
......as in BS. They use a pro forma accounting method that does not take into account their debt service, their returned merchandise, their unuseable inventory, or their looming debt payments on the horizon (long term notes), or other key accountable factors. Their definition of profit is based on recievables, not cash flow
Illegal? It looks like Monsanto was trespassing on his land- pollen drift or no pollen drift. There was no way the farmer could have avoided the cross-pollination- if Monsanto wants to exercise its corporate rights, it had better exercise its corporate responsibility and keep its wick in its trousers. This suit is akin to voluntarily putting trash on the curb or having a neighbor's fruit tree lean over your yard in my opinion. Yes, the farmer deliberately selected the strain by roundup-ing his crop to select the resistant type. I can select which dumpsters I want to search for goodies in if I like. If Monsanto wants to patent it and claim a right to protect it, they had better be willing to figure out a way to reign in their pollen pollution t do it. If the farmer had planted a wild type that "polluted" their GM product by the same sort of cross-pollination, you can bet they would try to sue the farmer for that as well......it happens every day with rice crops in asia- they sue if a farmer uses certain types of rice that are less delicious to pests (it causes the pest load to increase on their own, heavily sprayed varieties that yield more but are more susceptible to pest damage).
Grob, the three points you make are interesting, but incomplete.
First, while you could find any number of engineers (or plumbers, politicians, math teachers, or any one else at all) to think of nuclear as a clean source of energy, a lot of learned folks know otherwise. The US hasn't actually mined for nuclear products in decades. We are using supplies gleaned from the past, or mined elsewhere. The legacy of this effort is comletely missing from the innocuous consequences you put on the table. It has been, frankly, devastating compared to coal or gas- cancer bills the government is even staggering to pay off, superfund sites, radioactive areas cordoned off, radioactive atmospheric and airborne particulate problems, etc. The future of uranium mining hasn't changed a bit since then- we haven't had to (yet). In addition, disposal is the other half of the equation that is completely missing from the debate. We cannot convince a body of knowledgeable people that we have an acceptable disposal solution. We store the waste in our existing (numerous) facilites, and they are at or approaching capacity in MOST cases. The costs for the "final solution" never have been ammortized into the costs of nuclear energy we see in the press. Why? The costs are currently astronomically problematic, both in safety and dollars.
Your second point is simply wrong. While there are profitable nuclear plants out there, most plants have never produced more energy than was required to build and fuel them. In fact, the most efficient designs on the table in the US require upwards of 12 years to break even. Most current projects have been decommissioned before this time. France's programs tout profitability ONLY when subsidies are included, their uniquely high coal or alternative source costs are accounted for, and their convenient waste disposal program (yes, the Pacific Ocean, only recently preferred over their own Atlantic coastlines) is ignored.
Your third point is misleading. The water cycles (or whatever transfer cycles are uses) are indeed very clean. This is a bit like saying that the Ford Excursion is a clean vehicle because it has that new car smell. It's a red herring. The fuelling process is polluting. The mining for the resource is polluting. Disposal is polluting and uncertain.
Until we address these problems, nuclear power will remain an albatross without the supply of mental hygiene the nuclear power industry seeks to promote. The reason its palatable to people is that they want to believe this stuff with the same earnestness they did in the 50's- and because there's a lot of money in it.
The larger problem, as in history, is the issue of oversight. How would the list of undesireables be generated? Would it extend to others aside from unilaterally proclaimed terrorists, or could it be used for, say, traffic ticket holders, dead beat parents, tax evaders, draft dodgers, members of the minority political parties, reporters from suspicious non-syndicated news agencies, dark-skinned immigrants.....
If you are saying it wouldn't happen, just ask yourself how ludicrous you sound when these assurances are regularly reviewed with embarrassment, guilt, shame, and pledges of 'never again' for decades afterwards in our country's recent history time and time again.
There are at least two issues that bother me about ID cards that I find intractable. The first is the question that they are really necessary at all in the first place. How could they possibly be used to avert problems in a meaningful way? They can surely do no more to inhibit determined individuals than the Pledge of Allegiance can prevent Billy from pulling Suzy's hair in class. As I am generally a fan of need-based legislation, the compelling reason for this idea escapes me. The UK apparently came to the same decision years ago on this count alone.
The second issue that bothers me is the fact that the government is not very good about managing these kinds of initiatives. For one, the effort involved in developing accountability for the use and scripting of this kind of information has been seriously neglected in the past. Without this key element, there will be lives, careers, families, and reputations carelessly,casually, and wrongfully impacted, and as before, there will be no accountability.
Larry is simply being classically manic in front of a reporter again. Most people will wake up in a few months and feel rather embarrassed they felt compelled to needlessly and pointlessly relinquish the uniquely rare civil liberties they possessed, codified or not, in the name of some vague media-driven sense of patiotism or security.
This depends entirely on your audience. Many B-B sites (the only ones that seem to serve an actual purpose these days that are able to make money) are serving an audience behind corporate installs where the systems do not have/are not allowed to have these flashy junky things. There is a time and a place for them....just not everywhere. If you want people to come to your site, the best approach is often to allow them to see the site with no reasonable caveats. In my opinion, good design means implementing any flashy fluff very carefully to enhance an enabled user rather than detract from a non-enabled user.
Depends. PV technology ranks as a poser in the green energy industry- I'd rather they burned coal. It's closer to nuclear in terms of dirtiness in just about every category imaginable.....with today's alternatives, the only appropriate use for PV as a green resource is in remote off-grid apps.
The first aspirin patent was not for the chemical itself, but for the buffering agent that was added to it to make it more acceptable to sensitive stomachs. The chemical itself was merely an extract at the time from one or more types of willow plants and has sold and used universally for at least thousands of years. Aspirin patents generally cover particular applications (for symptomology, etc), formulations (the synthetic version is extremely similar yet interestingly less effective that an equivalent quantity of the natural extract. The synth version is less harsh on the stomach, though), production methods, etc, but the basic ingredient could not have been patented except in error. Let's hope the software industry takes a clue from this idea- you can't patent water.