Concerts make very little money compared to album sales. Especially for smaller name bands. Picture this: Big name band puts out new album, sells 500,000 copies with an income of about $1.00 each. That's half a million dollars, plus what the label paid them to record it in the first place - Probably about another $500,000 - Total, $1 million.
Sounds plausible, but not really accurate. Record companies give artists miniscule royalties from each CD sold, and they recoup the cost of recording/producing/etc from the artist's tiny fraction of the royalties. The overhead for live performances is not as high as you suggest above, and live concerts are indeed a major source of income for artists. Although they had it worse than the typical band, the Goo Goo Doll's plight with their record company, as recently aired on VH1, really illustrates how badly the labels will try to screw the artists. Their "A Boy Named Goo" CD was selling like mad, the cut "Name" was all over the airwaves, and they were on top of the world. When they got home from their tour, they got their first royaly statement in the mail. After sales of the CD (selling really well) and recording/production costs were considered, the band owed the label something like $100,000. Ridiculous. They sued and settled out of court to nondisclosed terms. They toured some more so that they could pay for the ongoing legal battle.
The point? Touring pays well, royalties from CD sales are usually quite unfair to the artist.
Artists will take more control of the process: Prices for quality digital recording workstations (PC based, or machines such as the Roland VS1680) are falling. Distribution, traditionally a stumbling block for artists who were able to get over the recording/production hurdle, is being solved by the internet with sites such as MP3.com and the like. Promotion & advertising? Well, in the "old days" it was word of mouth around town. Now it will be word of mouth around the world.
Artists will become "overnight sucesses" when a critical mass of people on the net who like their stuff spreads the word. There will be a lucky few whose mp3 archives will be slashdotted one day by a link or story in a highly visible forum, and their careers will be catapulted. We will need record companies about as much as we will need travel agents.
Does anyone happen to know if there was ever any research done which points towards an atrophy in brain cells caused by Alzheimers as opposed to it simply destroying brain cells?
Yes. The brain, as a whole, atrophies because of the loss of cells. The brain cells, on the other hand, do not atrophy, but rather become derranged (e.g. neurofibrillary tangles and plaques) and/or die. Under the microscope, Altzheimer's disease looks much different than simple nonspecific loss of brain cells. The neurons are dying in a very peculiar way.
The cause of Altzheimer's disease remains elusive. There are a few epidemiological, molecular, and histopathological correlates known, but it has not been shown to be one of the prion diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jacob, Kuru, Fatal Familial Insomnia, "Mad Cow" disease, etc.
As for gene therapy being useless for a prion disease, it shouldn't necessarily be dismissed summarily. After all, genes can manufacture proteins that can bind to other proteins (prions) and potentially activate/inactivate them, etc.
No. Free beer will mainly replace wine coolers and milkshakes. On the beer side, free beer poses so many risks that SCO beer perceives no direct competition in this area.
Why is the Free Beer Hype Good For SCO Beer?
The Free beer hype has generated a lot of interest in beer in frosty mugs. SCO beer has been the largest supplier of beer in frosty mugs for the past 20 years previous to this.
Why should I use SCO beer for my party and not Free Beer
Free beer, at this moment, is just a play thing for chemistry students. No one can be held accountable should you become drunk. Plus, SCO beer has born on dating, so that you won't mistakenly drink a 1998 bottle during your Y2K party.
Which Free Beer Should I Use?
There are over forty different kinds of free beer competing with eachother, and each one seems to have a different taste. That's just too many kinds of beer to chose from. Therefore it makes more sense to by a single commercial beer like SCO beer.
Well, I hate to rain on your parade, but as a medical student, I believe that your opinion has almost no basis in fact.
My condolences. There's still time to drop out and join an internet startup;-^)
If you have bilateral temporal hemianopsia, I know right where the lesion is.
Almost always a lesion involving the chiasm, such as a pituitary adenoma or craniopharyngioma.
In fact, give me 100 patients with the same presenting visual disturbance, and the lesion will be in the same spot.
Unfortunately, this isn't quite accurate. Loss of vision in one eye might be caused by a central retinal artery embolus, a fracture involving the optic canal, an optic nerve glioma (intrinsic to the nerve), clinoidal segment aneurysm or meningioma (extrinsic compression), or perhaps a degenerative disease of the retina.
We know where the visual cortex is. We know how it receives data. We even know quite a bit on how he brain processes images, and what stages and levels of neurons do what processing. And it's the same in you, me, and Linus.
To a first approximation. Primary cortical areas are the most conserved, but higher order associative areas are poorly understood and difficult to map. I'm sure you are familiar with Penfield's experiments involving cortical stimulation during awake craniotomies for epilepsy. We still do not really understand these experiments. Moreover, there can be considerable variability between people of different sexes (more bilaterality of language representation in females), age (relative weakening of uncrossed pathways after childhood), and even among individuals. This is why we must do amytal tests and intraoperative cortical mapping in some cases. This is why it is probably a good idea to stimulate and record before making thalamotomy lesions, rather than simply depending upon a generic atlas
I will agree with the concept that interfacing directly with the cortex is probably technologically impossible for the reasons you state. However, getting data to the visual cortex, or any other part of the brain, for that matter, isn't that difficult.
A direct cortical interface is not that unrealistic. Although it would probably be impossible to implement an electrode grid with the same resolution of native visual cortex, it is reasonable to expect that we can achieve light, shapes, and shadows.
I'm sure you are also familiar with cochlear implants - electrodes essentially stimulating the cochlear nerve. At first, these patients hear a lot of distortion, but over time, their brain seems to tune itself to the input and they have serviceable hearing.
Also read Merznik's (sp?) work on cortical plasticity. Even in primary sensory or auditory cortex, the homotopic maps can be altered somewhat by changes in sensory inputs. Hence, representations of fingers change when they are sutured together, representations of tones change with auditory conditioning, and the relative sizes of barrel fields representing whiskers change with differential manipulation of the rodent's whiskers. I'm sure that this type of plasticity will be exploited in neurorestorative strategies.
Agreed. Using Apache modules via mod_perl, you can avoid the overhead involved in forking a new process, and you can maintain persistent database connections via Apache::DBI. Definitely get the well written O'Reilly Book "Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C". You can use as much or as little of the Apache API as you want.
If you don't want to learn how to construct a module, but would rather stick to the CGI protocol, mod_perl can still help you through Apache::Registry. It keeps your cgi scripts precompiled and ready to go, and you can still take advantage of persistent database connections. The downsides? Increased memory consumption for each httpd process, and more attention must be paid to initializing variables that are no longer wiped clean between requests.
Without patent protection, I'm not sure whether I would want to go ahead with my project, investing time and money in development.
But if it is useful, then someone else will develop it for free, and then you and everyone else could just use the free version.
Imagine if mathematicians had to pay in order to use theorems proved and then patented by other mathematicians. The interconnected scaffolding of modern mathematics, and all of its power, would never have developed. Just as theorems are the building blocks for mathematics, algorithms are the building blocks for computer science.
Plus 18 billion (=60 million slaves * 300 years) man-years worth of agricultural labour time, at an average wage of US$100/year with compound interest accumulated on same since the mid seventeenth century -- say US$2.5trillion ought to clear the books? Then we can talk about punitive damages. jsm
Okay, so do the descendants of murderers or other criminals owe the descendants of the murdered for lost wages, mental anguish, and other punitive damages. Are the descendants of criminals responsible? Do the modern Babylonians owe money to the decendants of the israelites they enslaved? Will little German boys and girls born in the year 2100 still owe money to the little Jewish boys and girls?
I personally know very few white people whose ancesters were even in the country during slavery. Do the vast number of people descended from european immigrants that came after slavery was abolished still owe resititution? I would be willing to bet that the number of "white people" descended from post slavery immigrants exceeds the number descended from plantation owners. What about immigrants of other races living here that own land? Do they owe money too? Do the African decendants of those who initially sold people into slavery also owe money and land?
The fallacy in your argument is that you believe people living in America today are responsible for the actions of those who are long dead and gone. How could they be? If you go back in time far enough, I'm sure that everyone has an ancester that has caused uncompensated damages to someone else's ancester. You caveman ancester may have maimed my caveman ancester's left leg, leaving him unable to hunt and gather effectively. Let's see now how much compound interest has accumulated from those damages!
...by that time we'll have robots to do it for us, oh wait, no that won't work... Who is going to build the manufactoring plant? Who is going to build the components?
Other robots! Once the system is bootstrapped, it should not require much human labor.
Only redressing the wrongs (by returning the car). Return the stolen property. That is not punishing the descendants.
Freedom, which is the thing that was stolen, cannot be returned to the slaves at this point. The life my great grandfather lost at the hands of your murderous great grandmother's second cousin cannot be returned. So how are you going to make it up to me?
This comment gives me the creeps. "We need to keep a third of the population uneducated, because we'll need servants."
What if it's your own brother or sister or mother that has to make those fries?
We do still live in squalid times. But not for long. Soon it will be robots that make those fies! And they will take care of a lot of other demeaning work too. Farming and other means of food production will continue to become more efficient. Cheap prefab houses will snap together. Cheap universal computers and net access. Eventually, cheap medicines. It's coming. People will live longer and longer, and in more comfort.
The standard of living in the ghetto today far exceeds the ghettos of the past centuries. Nice Nike shoes, television, plenty of food. We can only wish that we now had access to some of the toys that will be commonplace in the ghettos of the year 2100. But I am sure that there will be those who complain that the ghetto kids are still stuck with class "D" holodecks and obselete gravity boots while all the rich kids are getting cool new neural implants.
It's not that a poor black kid in a ghetto _physically_ can't go get a paperroute, and eventually buy a PC, but that the idea is so alien to his or her surroundings that it practically never happens.
The problem with couching the problem in racial terms is that it implies that the idea of learning about computers is foreign because the child has black skin when, in fact, there are absolutely no significant racial obsticles to learning about computers. As several people have pointed out, they are dirt cheap. Kids with absolutely no training whatsoever can learn how to use and program computers (neither of my parents knew anything about computers when I got my Vic 20 in middle school and bought a few magazines with the BASIC code for simple games).
The fact that computers are low priority in the ghetto does not stem from the fact that a particular ghetto is predominantly black. The problem is with the ghetto subculture, in which children are more concerned with basic survival and their relationship with gangs than with their intellectual development. It is not just a black thing - similar problematic subcultures exist in many racial groups thoughout the world. The "black ghetto" subculture is probably just as interested in computers as any "italian ghetto" subculture or "white trash trailer park" subculture. It's not the skin. It's the subculture. If I were a middle class educated black, I would take offense to the idea that my race puts me at an intellectual disadvantage.
No doubt, a middle class kid of any race will have easier access to $$ for a computer and books, or more likely, there will already be a computer waiting for him when he crawls out of the crib. A middle class kid of any race will likely become more educated in any particular intellectual pursuit that you care to name, not just computer science.
I simply do not believe that skin color is a significant obstacle to intellectual pursuit in this age. Nor do I believe that a recent history of oppression counts an a direct obstacle either. The British empire was quite adept at oppression, and yet many of their former subjects in the east are quite determined to learn about computers. The mayor and most positions of power in my city are held by African Americans - there is no "white oppression" here. Yet the now nonoppressed "black ghetto" subculture has not taken an interest in computers. Even though people of their race (but not subculture) are in power. It has nothing to do with oppression. That particular subculture just isn't very interested in computers. The American Amish subculture hasn't been particularly oppressed, and the Amish still aren't very interested in technology. And they are not particularly weathly either. Is this a problem? Should we be spending more tax money so that we can expose more Amish kids to the computers that their subculture denies them. After all, those kids didn't choose to be born into that subculture, and they actually seem to have even less of a choice to take up computers than the poor black ghetto kid. How can we just stand by and let the Amish kids remain computer illiterate? Well, one difference here is that the Amish subculture does place some emphasis on education and intellectual pursuit, whereas the "black ghetto" subculture does not.
The controversy presented here is laughable when, despite a lot of time, money, and ideas, we still haven't solved the basic problem of teaching everybody in our country how to read and write. The same obstacles we have faced with this longstanding problem will be there when you try to teach computers. So why don't we concentrate on reading and writing before worrying too much about web surfing skills that depend on reading and writing. After we master those problems, then we can move on to the social gaps in mathematics, physics, astronomy, geography, chemistry, and philosophy.
Let's not complain about a flat tire when we don't even have an engine!
Oh well. I just think that what they are doing sucks. If they succeed and become the nr 1 dist, thereby bringing RedHat down, they wont have a dist anymore. Shame on them.
I don't think RH has to be too worried here. They really have a huge lead in the market and have established a "name brand" that has more or less become the reference distribution for major projects that are ported to Linux. Also, it's not going to be just about selling the OS, but also service and support. I think RH will be the distro of choice (with juicy support contracts) for the PHB's for some time to come.
Perhaps "multifaceted" would have been clearer. Besides, there are so many interesting dependencies between the topics presented that I hesitate to say that the topics are truely orthogonal. Maybe the book could best be represented by a differentiable manifold in Hilbert space, or an oscillating string in six dimensions.
...and support for BLOB (don't know if MySQL support BLOB). I don't need these features, but it's nice to know there available.
MySQL supports them. I really like the ease with which one can throw around large blocks of text using MySQL - easier than with postgres or Oracle IMHO.
I looked long and hard at both of these when I started doing db backed web development (about 1 year ago). I started with postgres, but there were occasional dropped connections and even server crashes. I really liked the feature set of postgres, but the consensus at that time was that mySQL was more stable - so I switched. And it was true. Not one crash or problem of any kind yet with lean and mean MySQL. I would like to see a larger limit on varchar, and subselects (coming soon!).
When was the last time you spent some time in a modern hospital?
Last night. And the night before that, and the night before that, ad infinitum....:-(
Nowadays all the information is transferred over the network. Our products cannot work unless connected to the hospital network.
Of course, the scanners are networked. But how much does this help people other than radiologists? Some hospitals are installing radiology "terminals" to make images readily accessible to all providers, but these are the exception rather than the rule. The same applies to electronic medical records. The healthcare industry is way behind in IT - partly because of reluctance of doctors to learn new ways of interacting with the medical record.
I agree. Of course something better will come along. Something always does. It doesn't diminish the achievement, and probably won't mean the end of the open source paradigm.
Personally, I'm hoping to be running a cutting edge open source OS on my massively parallel Feynman Wavefunction 2000 quantum computer by 2015. I will still visit Linux when I go to the Smithsonian though.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. Last September, my wife had a focused radiation treatment to her brain. Anyway, the question is this: would open source development benefit software that controls radiation machines? I don't think it would.
Yes! It would. One of the most critical parts of the procedure that your wife had was the selection of the target(s), the selection of the collimator, and the dose. You want to really zap the target, but spare nearby important structures. These decisions are often made by "educated guess" - paramters are entered, and the display shows the dose delivered and the dropoff of the radiation as it relates to surrounding structures. If this was a Gamma Knife machine, several spherical targets were chosen (since the device is roughly spherical) in order to approximate the desired target. This is a nontrivial problem that is not yet automated and optimized. If an open source project to choose the optimal parameters was created (using genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, or whatever), the treatment plan can still be modeled and directly compared to the best "educated guess" solution to see which one delivers more radiation to your tumor and less radiation to your optic nerves - before pushing the button.
Open source works better when there is a large developer base.
But there potentially is a large developer base. Several very important medical advancements were made by nonmedical people who had an affected loved one. Often they didn't perfect their inventions in time to save their loved one, but many others benefitted. Everyone will have a loved one get sick and/or die. Medical charities are common. Many people donate money to help advance medical research or to buy medical treatment for those who cannot afford it. If someone is going to donate their coding skills for open source projects anyway, why not donate their coding skills for such a noble cause.
All the work has to be documented for regulatory porpuses, incl. all the formal/informal meetings, and we even have to save our notebooks. How will you collect all this information from the harddrives of 10s of the people that helped that OpenSourced project? How will you enforce them to save all the papers they sketched on?
Archived email and newsgroups (alt.frameless_stereotaxy.modules.coordinate_trans form, etc) for discussions. A CVS or other database to trace development of the source.
The sad fact is that the medical industry is slower than other industries to adopt new technologies or pardigms. Computerized medical records? A few places have them. Most do not. This is like trying to run a bank or stock brokerage with file cabinets. Yet, this is how it's done in most hospitals. Your medical information or xrays cannot be summoned over the network - they are stuffed in dimly lit shelves in the basement, often out of order and difficult to retrieve. Or they are checked out to another hospital or doctor's office. Do you think that your doctor will know about your life threatening allergies or other medical conditions when you roll into the trauma center unconcious? He has your drivers license and SSN from your wallet, after all. Nope. Amazon.com or E-Trade knows more about you, because they have your records in a database. OK, enough flaming about that.
I would like to see all medical related software and file formats become open source, simply because the power of peer review will make it safer. This should apply even if the source was developed by a private company and is proprietary. If John D. Hacker's wife is on the ventilator, he might just sit down and look over its code. Maybe he will find a bug and submit a fix to the device company.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you go to Rice University? If not, then where?
Sounds plausible, but not really accurate. Record companies give artists miniscule royalties from each CD sold, and they recoup the cost of recording/producing/etc from the artist's tiny fraction of the royalties. The overhead for live performances is not as high as you suggest above, and live concerts are indeed a major source of income for artists. Although they had it worse than the typical band, the Goo Goo Doll's plight with their record company, as recently aired on VH1, really illustrates how badly the labels will try to screw the artists. Their "A Boy Named Goo" CD was selling like mad, the cut "Name" was all over the airwaves, and they were on top of the world. When they got home from their tour, they got their first royaly statement in the mail. After sales of the CD (selling really well) and recording/production costs were considered, the band owed the label something like $100,000. Ridiculous. They sued and settled out of court to nondisclosed terms. They toured some more so that they could pay for the ongoing legal battle.
The point? Touring pays well, royalties from CD sales are usually quite unfair to the artist.
Artists will take more control of the process: Prices for quality digital recording workstations (PC based, or machines such as the Roland VS1680) are falling. Distribution, traditionally a stumbling block for artists who were able to get over the recording/production hurdle, is being solved by the internet with sites such as MP3.com and the like. Promotion & advertising? Well, in the "old days" it was word of mouth around town. Now it will be word of mouth around the world.
Artists will become "overnight sucesses" when a critical mass of people on the net who like their stuff spreads the word. There will be a lucky few whose mp3 archives will be slashdotted one day by a link or story in a highly visible forum, and their careers will be catapulted. We will need record companies about as much as we will need travel agents.
Yes. The brain, as a whole, atrophies because of the loss of cells. The brain cells, on the other hand, do not atrophy, but rather become derranged (e.g. neurofibrillary tangles and plaques) and/or die. Under the microscope, Altzheimer's disease looks much different than simple nonspecific loss of brain cells. The neurons are dying in a very peculiar way.
The data are not great, but the relevant studies actually suggest a higher incidence of Altzheimer's in poorly educated people.
As for gene therapy being useless for a prion disease, it shouldn't necessarily be dismissed summarily. After all, genes can manufacture proteins that can bind to other proteins (prions) and potentially activate/inactivate them, etc.
unixes = backwater, cheesy, don't-change-if-ain't-broken, hacks rulz, /. rulz.
Apple = OSX = BSD = Unix
Apple was broken, so they changed to Unix, where hacks rulz.
No. Free beer will mainly replace wine coolers and milkshakes. On the beer side, free beer poses so many risks that SCO beer perceives no direct competition in this area.
Why is the Free Beer Hype Good For SCO Beer?
The Free beer hype has generated a lot of interest in beer in frosty mugs. SCO beer has been the largest supplier of beer in frosty mugs for the past 20 years previous to this.
Why should I use SCO beer for my party and not Free Beer
Free beer, at this moment, is just a play thing for chemistry students. No one can be held accountable should you become drunk. Plus, SCO beer has born on dating, so that you won't mistakenly drink a 1998 bottle during your Y2K party.
Which Free Beer Should I Use?
There are over forty different kinds of free beer competing with eachother, and each one seems to have a different taste. That's just too many kinds of beer to chose from. Therefore it makes more sense to by a single commercial beer like SCO beer.
Ah, the Star Trek Visor!
My condolences. There's still time to drop out and join an internet startup ;-^)
If you have bilateral temporal hemianopsia, I know right where the lesion is.
Almost always a lesion involving the chiasm, such as a pituitary adenoma or craniopharyngioma.
In fact, give me 100 patients with the same presenting visual disturbance, and the lesion will be in the same spot.
Unfortunately, this isn't quite accurate. Loss of vision in one eye might be caused by a central retinal artery embolus, a fracture involving the optic canal, an optic nerve glioma (intrinsic to the nerve), clinoidal segment aneurysm or meningioma (extrinsic compression), or perhaps a degenerative disease of the retina.
We know where the visual cortex is. We know how it receives data. We even know quite a bit on how he brain processes images, and what stages and levels of neurons do what processing. And it's the same in you, me, and Linus.
To a first approximation. Primary cortical areas are the most conserved, but higher order associative areas are poorly understood and difficult to map. I'm sure you are familiar with Penfield's experiments involving cortical stimulation during awake craniotomies for epilepsy. We still do not really understand these experiments. Moreover, there can be considerable variability between people of different sexes (more bilaterality of language representation in females), age (relative weakening of uncrossed pathways after childhood), and even among individuals. This is why we must do amytal tests and intraoperative cortical mapping in some cases. This is why it is probably a good idea to stimulate and record before making thalamotomy lesions, rather than simply depending upon a generic atlas
I will agree with the concept that interfacing directly with the cortex is probably technologically impossible for the reasons you state. However, getting data to the visual cortex, or any other part of the brain, for that matter, isn't that difficult.
A direct cortical interface is not that unrealistic. Although it would probably be impossible to implement an electrode grid with the same resolution of native visual cortex, it is reasonable to expect that we can achieve light, shapes, and shadows.
I'm sure you are also familiar with cochlear implants - electrodes essentially stimulating the cochlear nerve. At first, these patients hear a lot of distortion, but over time, their brain seems to tune itself to the input and they have serviceable hearing.
Also read Merznik's (sp?) work on cortical plasticity. Even in primary sensory or auditory cortex, the homotopic maps can be altered somewhat by changes in sensory inputs. Hence, representations of fingers change when they are sutured together, representations of tones change with auditory conditioning, and the relative sizes of barrel fields representing whiskers change with differential manipulation of the rodent's whiskers. I'm sure that this type of plasticity will be exploited in neurorestorative strategies.
Very interesting guy with an associative memory. Kinda what I would expect from Dave Barry if he were a programmer with a chemistry background.
If you don't want to learn how to construct a module, but would rather stick to the CGI protocol, mod_perl can still help you through Apache::Registry. It keeps your cgi scripts precompiled and ready to go, and you can still take advantage of persistent database connections. The downsides? Increased memory consumption for each httpd process, and more attention must be paid to initializing variables that are no longer wiped clean between requests.
But if it is useful, then someone else will develop it for free, and then you and everyone else could just use the free version.
Imagine if mathematicians had to pay in order to use theorems proved and then patented by other mathematicians. The interconnected scaffolding of modern mathematics, and all of its power, would never have developed. Just as theorems are the building blocks for mathematics, algorithms are the building blocks for computer science.
Freedom!
Okay, so do the descendants of murderers or other criminals owe the descendants of the murdered for lost wages, mental anguish, and other punitive damages. Are the descendants of criminals responsible? Do the modern Babylonians owe money to the decendants of the israelites they enslaved? Will little German boys and girls born in the year 2100 still owe money to the little Jewish boys and girls?
I personally know very few white people whose ancesters were even in the country during slavery. Do the vast number of people descended from european immigrants that came after slavery was abolished still owe resititution? I would be willing to bet that the number of "white people" descended from post slavery immigrants exceeds the number descended from plantation owners. What about immigrants of other races living here that own land? Do they owe money too? Do the African decendants of those who initially sold people into slavery also owe money and land?
The fallacy in your argument is that you believe people living in America today are responsible for the actions of those who are long dead and gone. How could they be? If you go back in time far enough, I'm sure that everyone has an ancester that has caused uncompensated damages to someone else's ancester. You caveman ancester may have maimed my caveman ancester's left leg, leaving him unable to hunt and gather effectively. Let's see now how much compound interest has accumulated from those damages!
Other robots! Once the system is bootstrapped, it should not require much human labor.
Freedom, which is the thing that was stolen, cannot be returned to the slaves at this point. The life my great grandfather lost at the hands of your murderous great grandmother's second cousin cannot be returned. So how are you going to make it up to me?
What if it's your own brother or sister or mother that has to make those fries?
We do still live in squalid times. But not for long. Soon it will be robots that make those fies! And they will take care of a lot of other demeaning work too. Farming and other means of food production will continue to become more efficient. Cheap prefab houses will snap together. Cheap universal computers and net access. Eventually, cheap medicines. It's coming. People will live longer and longer, and in more comfort.
The standard of living in the ghetto today far exceeds the ghettos of the past centuries. Nice Nike shoes, television, plenty of food. We can only wish that we now had access to some of the toys that will be commonplace in the ghettos of the year 2100. But I am sure that there will be those who complain that the ghetto kids are still stuck with class "D" holodecks and obselete gravity boots while all the rich kids are getting cool new neural implants.
The problem with couching the problem in racial terms is that it implies that the idea of learning about computers is foreign because the child has black skin when, in fact, there are absolutely no significant racial obsticles to learning about computers. As several people have pointed out, they are dirt cheap. Kids with absolutely no training whatsoever can learn how to use and program computers (neither of my parents knew anything about computers when I got my Vic 20 in middle school and bought a few magazines with the BASIC code for simple games).
The fact that computers are low priority in the ghetto does not stem from the fact that a particular ghetto is predominantly black. The problem is with the ghetto subculture, in which children are more concerned with basic survival and their relationship with gangs than with their intellectual development. It is not just a black thing - similar problematic subcultures exist in many racial groups thoughout the world. The "black ghetto" subculture is probably just as interested in computers as any "italian ghetto" subculture or "white trash trailer park" subculture. It's not the skin. It's the subculture. If I were a middle class educated black, I would take offense to the idea that my race puts me at an intellectual disadvantage.
No doubt, a middle class kid of any race will have easier access to $$ for a computer and books, or more likely, there will already be a computer waiting for him when he crawls out of the crib. A middle class kid of any race will likely become more educated in any particular intellectual pursuit that you care to name, not just computer science.
I simply do not believe that skin color is a significant obstacle to intellectual pursuit in this age. Nor do I believe that a recent history of oppression counts an a direct obstacle either. The British empire was quite adept at oppression, and yet many of their former subjects in the east are quite determined to learn about computers. The mayor and most positions of power in my city are held by African Americans - there is no "white oppression" here. Yet the now nonoppressed "black ghetto" subculture has not taken an interest in computers. Even though people of their race (but not subculture) are in power. It has nothing to do with oppression. That particular subculture just isn't very interested in computers. The American Amish subculture hasn't been particularly oppressed, and the Amish still aren't very interested in technology. And they are not particularly weathly either. Is this a problem? Should we be spending more tax money so that we can expose more Amish kids to the computers that their subculture denies them. After all, those kids didn't choose to be born into that subculture, and they actually seem to have even less of a choice to take up computers than the poor black ghetto kid. How can we just stand by and let the Amish kids remain computer illiterate? Well, one difference here is that the Amish subculture does place some emphasis on education and intellectual pursuit, whereas the "black ghetto" subculture does not.
The controversy presented here is laughable when, despite a lot of time, money, and ideas, we still haven't solved the basic problem of teaching everybody in our country how to read and write. The same obstacles we have faced with this longstanding problem will be there when you try to teach computers. So why don't we concentrate on reading and writing before worrying too much about web surfing skills that depend on reading and writing. After we master those problems, then we can move on to the social gaps in mathematics, physics, astronomy, geography, chemistry, and philosophy.
Let's not complain about a flat tire when we don't even have an engine!
I don't think RH has to be too worried here. They really have a huge lead in the market and have established a "name brand" that has more or less become the reference distribution for major projects that are ported to Linux. Also, it's not going to be just about selling the OS, but also service and support. I think RH will be the distro of choice (with juicy support contracts) for the PHB's for some time to come.
Perhaps "multifaceted" would have been clearer. Besides, there are so many interesting dependencies between the topics presented that I hesitate to say that the topics are truely orthogonal. Maybe the book could best be represented by a differentiable manifold in Hilbert space, or an oscillating string in six dimensions.
MySQL supports them. I really like the ease with which one can throw around large blocks of text using MySQL - easier than with postgres or Oracle IMHO.
I looked long and hard at both of these when I started doing db backed web development (about 1 year ago). I started with postgres, but there were occasional dropped connections and even server crashes. I really liked the feature set of postgres, but the consensus at that time was that mySQL was more stable - so I switched. And it was true. Not one crash or problem of any kind yet with lean and mean MySQL. I would like to see a larger limit on varchar, and subselects (coming soon!).
When was the last time you spent some time in a modern hospital?
Last night. And the night before that, and the night before that, ad infinitum .... :-(
Nowadays all the information is transferred over the network. Our products cannot work unless connected to the hospital network.
Of course, the scanners are networked. But how much does this help people other than radiologists? Some hospitals are installing radiology "terminals" to make images readily accessible to all providers, but these are the exception rather than the rule. The same applies to electronic medical records. The healthcare industry is way behind in IT - partly because of reluctance of doctors to learn new ways of interacting with the medical record.
Personally, I'm hoping to be running a cutting edge open source OS on my massively parallel Feynman Wavefunction 2000 quantum computer by 2015. I will still visit Linux when I go to the Smithsonian though.
Yes! It would. One of the most critical parts of the procedure that your wife had was the selection of the target(s), the selection of the collimator, and the dose. You want to really zap the target, but spare nearby important structures. These decisions are often made by "educated guess" - paramters are entered, and the display shows the dose delivered and the dropoff of the radiation as it relates to surrounding structures. If this was a Gamma Knife machine, several spherical targets were chosen (since the device is roughly spherical) in order to approximate the desired target. This is a nontrivial problem that is not yet automated and optimized. If an open source project to choose the optimal parameters was created (using genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, or whatever), the treatment plan can still be modeled and directly compared to the best "educated guess" solution to see which one delivers more radiation to your tumor and less radiation to your optic nerves - before pushing the button.
Open source works better when there is a large developer base.
But there potentially is a large developer base. Several very important medical advancements were made by nonmedical people who had an affected loved one. Often they didn't perfect their inventions in time to save their loved one, but many others benefitted. Everyone will have a loved one get sick and/or die. Medical charities are common. Many people donate money to help advance medical research or to buy medical treatment for those who cannot afford it. If someone is going to donate their coding skills for open source projects anyway, why not donate their coding skills for such a noble cause.
Archived email and newsgroups (alt.frameless_stereotaxy.modules.coordinate_trans form, etc) for discussions. A CVS or other database to trace development of the source.
The sad fact is that the medical industry is slower than other industries to adopt new technologies or pardigms. Computerized medical records? A few places have them. Most do not. This is like trying to run a bank or stock brokerage with file cabinets. Yet, this is how it's done in most hospitals. Your medical information or xrays cannot be summoned over the network - they are stuffed in dimly lit shelves in the basement, often out of order and difficult to retrieve. Or they are checked out to another hospital or doctor's office. Do you think that your doctor will know about your life threatening allergies or other medical conditions when you roll into the trauma center unconcious? He has your drivers license and SSN from your wallet, after all. Nope. Amazon.com or E-Trade knows more about you, because they have your records in a database. OK, enough flaming about that.
I would like to see all medical related software and file formats become open source, simply because the power of peer review will make it safer. This should apply even if the source was developed by a private company and is proprietary. If John D. Hacker's wife is on the ventilator, he might just sit down and look over its code. Maybe he will find a bug and submit a fix to the device company.
A Radiology file format. I've been looking for some open source code to manipulate these files - do you know of any?