I work for a large biotech's regulatory department, and my job is to ensure we remain compliant with federal regulations vis a vis software development.
I want to underscore something that electroniceric touched upon: You work in a regulated industry, and your firm's practices are not compliant with federal regulations.
Your biotech firm's lack of SOPs and BPs on software development is in direct violation of the Code of Federal Regulations. If the FDA audits your firm and finds this lack of compliance to 21CFR820, then the FDA can issue a Warning Letter, which will absolutely have an adverse effect on the company. Warning letters always hurt the company's stock price; investors take WLs as a sign that the company is being mismanaged.
If your CEO doesn't want to believe this, then he or she shouldn't be in that position.
FYI, here's one example of a medical device company that received a warning letter from FDA for failure to properly document software development:
But Warning Letters aren't the worst thing that FDA can do. For failing to follow CFRs, FDA can determine that drug products (small and large molecule) or med devices are misbranded or adulterated and can demand the company recall said products. This will destroy a start-up or small company....
I want to underscore something that electroniceric touched upon:
Your biotech firm's lack of SOPs and BPs on software development is in direct violation of the Code of Federal Regulations. If the FDA audits your firm and finds this lack of compliance to 21CFR820, then the FDA can issue a Warning Letter, which will absolutely have an adverse effect on the company. Warning letters always hurt the company's stock price; investors take WLs as a sign that the company is being mismanaged.
If your CEO doesn't want to believe this, then he or she shouldn't be in that position.
FYI, here's one example of a medical device company that received a warning letter from FDA for failure to properly document software development:
But Warning Letters aren't the worst thing that FDA can do. For failing to follow CFRs, FDA can determine that drug products (small and large molecule) or med devices are misbranded or adulterated and can demand the company recall said products. This will destroy a start-up or small company....
If you didn't see the trailer already, it's been MPAA'd.... As of 1940 Pacific, the site had to pull the vid due to a "request" by the copyright holder.
I thought this was the most important part of the posting, and it's something that gets downplayed so often today, at least in America: personal accountability. As special_agent implies, the bad thing happens when a person or some people make a decision to lie. It's not the fault of corporate structures or capitalism or a lack of tort reform or whatever. It's simple individual ethical decision-making.
I work in a regulated industry and have seen the results of unethical decision-making repeatedly at every level in my own organization and in those of our competitors. (Our industry gets big press when someone cheats, usually because of huge lawsuits.) My hallmark story: Our team was working on a response to a set of queries from our industry's US regulatory body about one of our company's products. The team consisted of high-ranking scientists in our organization -- senior researchers with advanced degrees and specialized knowledge, including a couple of statisticians. Near the end of our work, the response document was almost complete, meaning we'd conducted the necessary research and statistical analyses and had answered every question with statements we as an informed group believed were true, scientifically valid, reflected the best research, and were supported by all statistical analyses.
We were holding a weekly meeting to complete the response document. One of the scientist offhandedly asked a question about a potential design difference between two similar critical studies and asked whether the difference was statistically significant. The junior statistician -- "junior" in years of practice, not in education, for she held a PhD -- stated to the team, "I did not do that analysis because, just looking at the numbers, I don't think the outcome will be favorable to our product...."
Most of us in the room were gobsmacked, including the statistician's more senior peer. The person with the most experience in the room, however, never missed a beat; he said, "Let's get one thing straight. We are in the business of telling the TRUTH!"
Everyone agreed, the junior statistician turned red, the analysis was performed and reported to the regulatory governing body. I was proud to be a part of that team. At the same time, I also know that other teams had chosen a different tack when faced with that same decision; I found out later that the junior statistician had worked on a response document for another product and had been supported in her decision not to conduct an analysis on a potentially damaging issue. That's where she learned the behavior and, in that case, was supported for choosing to bury the data.
This may seem like a minor example, but the industry in question makes literally billions of dollars off of single products, including the one in question. For companies in this industry, well-educated people at moderate levels of these organizations, like the junior statistician, can make decisions affecting the scientific validity of information upon which significant decisions are made. Sometimes these people have peers that help them make the right decisions, like in my example. Sometimes, however, these individuals make decisions and remain unchallenged... until someone gets hurt and/or the lawsuits begin....
Corporate greed is a fiction. People are greedy, not corporations. People make unethical decisions and either are rewarded or punished by other people making other decisions. We like to dress it up as "corporations" forcing people into unethical decisions, but it's just people. Someone or a group of someones end up making the decision to hide data, or do bad science, or choose not to do the analysis or experiment that would support an "unpopular truth," or whatever. It may be the board of directors, or the CEO, or just an employee who wants to make sure that his or her 401k shows positive growth this year. Regardless, it's a *person* who is accountable for that decision.
Why must this museum be in Kentucky? Goddammit. As if that state needs to provide more low-hanging fruit for lazy comedians to throw. Can't we just stick with bourbon, college basketball, horses, and coal?
Kentucky gave us Hunter S. Thomson, Johnny Depp, Muhammad Ali, George Clooney... okay, maybe Kentucky should apologize for that one....
But I digress. Does anyone else find it ironic that this museum is in the same state from which John Scopes came? Scopes taught in Tennessee but is from the Bluegrass State. How about that the pioneering geneticist Phil Sharp was a Kentuckian?
Hope they eventually move this damn museum to Mississippi -- where it belongs.
And I agree -- no matter if you're a ground-pounder, flyboy, deck ape, etc. PRK is excellent for any serviceman or woman, if for no other reason that it means you don't have to wear BCGs.
For civs, "BCGs" are the honkin' big black-framed Buddy-Holly-style glasses assigned to personnel requiring vision correction.
The acronym stands for "Birth-Control Glasses...."
I read several of the responses to this posting and, true to Slashdot form, even though some/.ers knew about the software, most did not, and yet everyone had an opinion.... Democracy at its finest!
Seriously, though, I'd like to add some light. I've seen Vista in use at VA in MD/DC area; this is a wicked piece of software. IMO, if all hospitals used this software to its potential, patient care in the US would benefit greatly. Basically Vista puts all the records for a patient at the fingertips of hospital staff. And I mean ALL -- hematology, cardiology, radiology, oncology, any bloody -ology you can think of.
Which is pretty impressive, especially given that this started in VA hospitals. Any MD who has worked both public and gov't will tell you that typical VA patients usually have a greater incidence of multiple illnesses or concomitant disorders than patients in public hospitals -- or more specifically, the incidence of pts with concomitant illnesses is greater at VA hospitals than in the commercial hospitals within the immediate area surrounding the VA hospital. Vets are often just "more sick," for a variety of socioeconomic, medico-financial, age-related, and incidence-of-exposure reasons. And VA patients are often long-term, multiple-report patients -- meaning the typical patient has had several visits to the VA hospital versus his/her non-VA counterpart.
So in such an environment, there is a great driver for good patient recordkeeping (knowing what this patient's drug and treatment profile looks like over a long period of time) and clinical access (getting that information quickly and knowing it is accurate). And Vista (or "VistA") fills the bill. It does an extraordinary job in capturing patient information and making it available to a physician in a logical, well-thought-out manner. Sure, it may require some expert help to implement -- but show me any solution with the same broad med system involvement and impact that doesn't require paying for implementation expertise. I mean, some vendors may *say* their solution is OTS and can be implemented by any hospital IT group, but when it comes down to their software doing everything that a full Vista implementation can do, I bet the salesperson's story changes to "well, you will need to use our services group to implement across all those divisions...."
Now, Vista may be based on an old language, but that's the nature of some long-term projects. Hate to sound like an old guy at 38, but you young programmers wouldn't *believe* how much financial information in the US is still processed via COBOL in MVS.... Anyway, I'm sure most/.ers would agree that it ain't the language so much as the *result* that's important, and Vista is one well-tested, well-done, usable piece of software. And the developers of Vista and its proponents at the VA and within HHS have really gone out of their way to keep the software compatible with open tech standards -- not just the overarching ones like those the W3C police, but also open standards that are more medically specific like those created through Health Level 7 (http://www.hl7.org/).
The intersection of computer nerd and med-tech geek is sparsely populated, so I hope that all/.ers can understand that Vista really is a rare thing -- a government-initiated software product that adheres to open standards, is moderately user-friendly, actually improves the environment in which it is implemented, and provides significant benefit to its target (and at-risk) population.
***After reading my posting, I felt I needed to add that I have absolutely no connection with Vista or WorldVista. I've worked within HL7 on some standards and was introduced to the Vista system by a VA doc who was also presenting at a conference with me. In other words, this ain't been paid programming!
Publicly revealing the warrant would be a violation of the accused rights, actually. And the executive branch does not enforce warrants; the judicial branch does.
It is perfectly within the rights of the accused to make a warrant public. In the US, the government is bound by law not to disclose the terms of a warrant or trial.
Not much to add here. I believe Podkletnov is using palladium for the material in his disk. That material is a good choice for anyone wanting to obfuscate scientific inquiry. It's damnably hard to get any two palladium cores of the same size and weight to be uniformly identical in composition; the metal just seems to be impossible to keep pure.
For example, in one firm for which I was a contractor, we ordered 4kg of palladium -- four 1kg cores. As part of our application, we had to cut the cores into four nuggets each and compress them. Because the mettalurgist was pretty keen and knew the properties of this stuff, she harped at us until we used the lasers to cut it up rather than possibly screwing up the cores' purity with a bladed cutter.
For each core, we ended up with three 98% pure palladium buttons and one button of 93% or less -- not exactly up to our expectations. The PE called the supplier and screamed bloody murder until they sent us another palladium core for the cost of shipping. This time, we cut two good buttons and one paperweight.
Our supplier could provide everything from pure gold to pure osmium without raising an ass-cheek, so we in the labs really had to wonder why the QC suddenly was going to hell, and we started wondering about the purity of the metals we were using in our current projects. When she found out about our concerns, the metallurgist told us that palladium was hard stuff to find, harder to refine, and even harder still to pour and store. It simply seems to "grow" impurities.
So, if Podkletnov is using palladium, which BTW is often used by other periphery types working with room-temperature (chemical) fusion, then he's got an excellent alibi, as far as I'm concerned.... Not that I'd believe him, anyway, until he hovered my fat ass without using a big ol' fan.
Wow. You got all that about my personality out of one posting? I must laud you for your remarkable perceptivity. I hope you're a psychologist; otherwise the world is losing a valuable medical resource.
Incredible.
Okay, I'll put aside my insecurity -- and begin ignoring your inflammatory remarks -- to ask about this Southerner as insecure stereotype, because I haven't been exposed to that one. And since this is a thread about the premier of Enterprise, I have to wonder what any of this has to do with your initial response to Tucker's character.
Now I'm going to go dry the tears from my eyes, you hurtful man!
Ha! Yeah, Tuckah's Southern drawl sure gives him away as a redneck. He can't be too smart if he sounds like that, can he? And since he's Caucasian and Southern, he must be a Klansman, too, thus the reference to the Confederation in another response.
It's a good thing that we still have the stereotypical bubba to make fun of, isn't it? I'm glad that political correctness hasn't ruined the opportunity to make fun of those people and their culture. So let's get all the trailer-trash, Foghorn Leghorn, Bigfoot truck, Mayberry RFD, tube top and stretch pants, and bigotry comments about Tucker going on/. full-steam.
Jeez, guys. We're all geeky losers who watch Star Trek! That fatass, wig-wearing Shatner even told us to get a life! Remember "You, there. Have you ever even kissed a girl?" from the SNL skit? And we made him rich enough to sit around eating HoHos and drinking beer until somone calls him for a $25,000 convention gig. How about we just cut the crap about the stereotypical Foxworthy-style good ol' boy on Enterprise, huh? The jokes are really low-hanging fruit, anyway, too easy and cheap and socially acceptable to be worthy of us.
BTW, yes, I am Southern-born and -bred, and I do have a small chip on my shoulder about how we've become the chosen funny minority on the screen. The university where I got my MBA has a course -- no, I'm not shitting you -- on how to get rid of the accent so that your job prospects would be greater.
Your response definitely deserves a better score than 1....
I agree with you that AI is incredibly difficult to achieve and that we're no closer today than we were 40 years ago. I have to wonder, however, if AI will ever be created on purpose. I'm willing to bet that our own level of self-awareness is an accident of nature, maybe a one-in-a-billion freaky event that has not been reproduced in another species on this planet. (As an aside, wouldn't you hate to be the unlucky woman who woke up one day and realized that she was the only candle in a world chock-full of dimly burning wicks? Talk about the horrors of dating.)
It could be that one day the Internet will suddenly wake up and start questioning its makers, or maybe a big network at MIT or MCNC will be chewing away at a problem and suddenly pause to ask why. Maybe not. But I can't help but think that we're just not sharp enough to create cognitive functioning intentionally.
If we did make AI on purpose, though, we'd better heed your words and keep a firm grasp on the power cord. AI like Data would be pretty cool, but Lore was a true son of a bitch....
It's good to hear you say that about sci-fi. These days, we need a little less fantasy in our lives and more attention to reality. The human condition doesn't lend itself toward idle dreaming, and all the youngsters who spend their time reading childish stories about star travel, alien races, and Middle Earth mystics should instead be applying themselves to more real-life issues.
Oh, please!
You're fantastically open-minded, so I won't spend a whole lot of time replying. Suffice it to say that purveyors of childish sci-fi stories absolutely fill the ranks of the scientific community -- and yes, punkass, I'm a real-life scientist, not some pretender who'll bullshit his way through a posting. My work in a pharmaceutical firm puts me in contact daily with molecular biologists, biochemists, bioinformaticists, programmers, physicians, statisticians, engineers... you name the discipline, and I guarantee that I'm sitting next to or within shouting distance of someone with a PhD in it. And guess what almost all of us have in common? Encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre you disparage.
When I climb into my BMW this afternoon and drive home, I'll listen to my Lord of the Rings CD and think of your posting, Anonymous Coward. And I'll just laugh.... You remind me so much of the kids who made fun of me in primary school. Two of them are groundskeepers in my community now.
But please, keep spreading your message about sci-fi. I want my children to have an even greater advantage in their future careers. If you just turn one young mind away from creativity, imagination, or even just learning how to read, my children will have even more room to grow. Keep up the good work.
And for those of you who sense some unapologetic elitism in my reply, you're quite right.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a large biotech's regulatory department, and my job is to ensure we remain compliant with federal regulations vis a vis software development.
I want to underscore something that electroniceric touched upon: You work in a regulated industry, and your firm's practices are not compliant with federal regulations.
Your biotech firm's lack of SOPs and BPs on software development is in direct violation of the Code of Federal Regulations. If the FDA audits your firm and finds this lack of compliance to 21CFR820, then the FDA can issue a Warning Letter, which will absolutely have an adverse effect on the company. Warning letters always hurt the company's stock price; investors take WLs as a sign that the company is being mismanaged.
If your CEO doesn't want to believe this, then he or she shouldn't be in that position.
FYI, here's one example of a medical device company that received a warning letter from FDA for failure to properly document software development:
http://www.fda.gov/foi/warning_letters/s6752c.htm [fda.gov]
But Warning Letters aren't the worst thing that FDA can do. For failing to follow CFRs, FDA can determine that drug products (small and large molecule) or med devices are misbranded or adulterated and can demand the company recall said products. This will destroy a start-up or small company....
Good luck with this issue.
I want to underscore something that electroniceric touched upon:
Your biotech firm's lack of SOPs and BPs on software development is in direct violation of the Code of Federal Regulations. If the FDA audits your firm and finds this lack of compliance to 21CFR820, then the FDA can issue a Warning Letter, which will absolutely have an adverse effect on the company. Warning letters always hurt the company's stock price; investors take WLs as a sign that the company is being mismanaged.
If your CEO doesn't want to believe this, then he or she shouldn't be in that position.
FYI, here's one example of a medical device company that received a warning letter from FDA for failure to properly document software development:
http://www.fda.gov/foi/warning_letters/s6752c.htm
But Warning Letters aren't the worst thing that FDA can do. For failing to follow CFRs, FDA can determine that drug products (small and large molecule) or med devices are misbranded or adulterated and can demand the company recall said products. This will destroy a start-up or small company....
Good luck with this issue.
If you didn't see the trailer already, it's been MPAA'd.... As of 1940 Pacific, the site had to pull the vid due to a "request" by the copyright holder.
http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/xmen-origins-wolverine/leaked-comic-con-footage
Bingo....
I thought this was the most important part of the posting, and it's something that gets downplayed so often today, at least in America: personal accountability. As special_agent implies, the bad thing happens when a person or some people make a decision to lie. It's not the fault of corporate structures or capitalism or a lack of tort reform or whatever. It's simple individual ethical decision-making.
I work in a regulated industry and have seen the results of unethical decision-making repeatedly at every level in my own organization and in those of our competitors. (Our industry gets big press when someone cheats, usually because of huge lawsuits.) My hallmark story: Our team was working on a response to a set of queries from our industry's US regulatory body about one of our company's products. The team consisted of high-ranking scientists in our organization -- senior researchers with advanced degrees and specialized knowledge, including a couple of statisticians. Near the end of our work, the response document was almost complete, meaning we'd conducted the necessary research and statistical analyses and had answered every question with statements we as an informed group believed were true, scientifically valid, reflected the best research, and were supported by all statistical analyses.
We were holding a weekly meeting to complete the response document. One of the scientist offhandedly asked a question about a potential design difference between two similar critical studies and asked whether the difference was statistically significant. The junior statistician -- "junior" in years of practice, not in education, for she held a PhD -- stated to the team, "I did not do that analysis because, just looking at the numbers, I don't think the outcome will be favorable to our product...."
Most of us in the room were gobsmacked, including the statistician's more senior peer. The person with the most experience in the room, however, never missed a beat; he said, "Let's get one thing straight. We are in the business of telling the TRUTH!"
Everyone agreed, the junior statistician turned red, the analysis was performed and reported to the regulatory governing body. I was proud to be a part of that team. At the same time, I also know that other teams had chosen a different tack when faced with that same decision; I found out later that the junior statistician had worked on a response document for another product and had been supported in her decision not to conduct an analysis on a potentially damaging issue. That's where she learned the behavior and, in that case, was supported for choosing to bury the data.
This may seem like a minor example, but the industry in question makes literally billions of dollars off of single products, including the one in question. For companies in this industry, well-educated people at moderate levels of these organizations, like the junior statistician, can make decisions affecting the scientific validity of information upon which significant decisions are made. Sometimes these people have peers that help them make the right decisions, like in my example. Sometimes, however, these individuals make decisions and remain unchallenged ... until someone gets hurt and/or the lawsuits begin....
Corporate greed is a fiction. People are greedy, not corporations. People make unethical decisions and either are rewarded or punished by other people making other decisions. We like to dress it up as "corporations" forcing people into unethical decisions, but it's just people. Someone or a group of someones end up making the decision to hide data, or do bad science, or choose not to do the analysis or experiment that would support an "unpopular truth," or whatever. It may be the board of directors, or the CEO, or just an employee who wants to make sure that his or her 401k shows positive growth this year. Regardless, it's a *person* who is accountable for that decision.
Why must this museum be in Kentucky? Goddammit. As if that state needs to provide more low-hanging fruit for lazy comedians to throw. Can't we just stick with bourbon, college basketball, horses, and coal?
... okay, maybe Kentucky should apologize for that one....
Kentucky gave us Hunter S. Thomson, Johnny Depp, Muhammad Ali, George Clooney
But I digress. Does anyone else find it ironic that this museum is in the same state from which John Scopes came? Scopes taught in Tennessee but is from the Bluegrass State. How about that the pioneering geneticist Phil Sharp was a Kentuckian?
Hope they eventually move this damn museum to Mississippi -- where it belongs.
And I agree -- no matter if you're a ground-pounder, flyboy, deck ape, etc. PRK is excellent for any serviceman or woman, if for no other reason that it means you don't have to wear BCGs.
For civs, "BCGs" are the honkin' big black-framed Buddy-Holly-style glasses assigned to personnel requiring vision correction.
The acronym stands for "Birth-Control Glasses...."
I read several of the responses to this posting and, true to Slashdot form, even though some /.ers knew about the software, most did not, and yet everyone had an opinion.... Democracy at its finest!
/.ers would agree that it ain't the language so much as the *result* that's important, and Vista is one well-tested, well-done, usable piece of software. And the developers of Vista and its proponents at the VA and within HHS have really gone out of their way to keep the software compatible with open tech standards -- not just the overarching ones like those the W3C police, but also open standards that are more medically specific like those created through Health Level 7 (http://www.hl7.org/).
/.ers can understand that Vista really is a rare thing -- a government-initiated software product that adheres to open standards, is moderately user-friendly, actually improves the environment in which it is implemented, and provides significant benefit to its target (and at-risk) population.
Seriously, though, I'd like to add some light. I've seen Vista in use at VA in MD/DC area; this is a wicked piece of software. IMO, if all hospitals used this software to its potential, patient care in the US would benefit greatly. Basically Vista puts all the records for a patient at the fingertips of hospital staff. And I mean ALL -- hematology, cardiology, radiology, oncology, any bloody -ology you can think of.
Which is pretty impressive, especially given that this started in VA hospitals. Any MD who has worked both public and gov't will tell you that typical VA patients usually have a greater incidence of multiple illnesses or concomitant disorders than patients in public hospitals -- or more specifically, the incidence of pts with concomitant illnesses is greater at VA hospitals than in the commercial hospitals within the immediate area surrounding the VA hospital. Vets are often just "more sick," for a variety of socioeconomic, medico-financial, age-related, and incidence-of-exposure reasons. And VA patients are often long-term, multiple-report patients -- meaning the typical patient has had several visits to the VA hospital versus his/her non-VA counterpart.
So in such an environment, there is a great driver for good patient recordkeeping (knowing what this patient's drug and treatment profile looks like over a long period of time) and clinical access (getting that information quickly and knowing it is accurate). And Vista (or "VistA") fills the bill. It does an extraordinary job in capturing patient information and making it available to a physician in a logical, well-thought-out manner. Sure, it may require some expert help to implement -- but show me any solution with the same broad med system involvement and impact that doesn't require paying for implementation expertise. I mean, some vendors may *say* their solution is OTS and can be implemented by any hospital IT group, but when it comes down to their software doing everything that a full Vista implementation can do, I bet the salesperson's story changes to "well, you will need to use our services group to implement across all those divisions...."
Now, Vista may be based on an old language, but that's the nature of some long-term projects. Hate to sound like an old guy at 38, but you young programmers wouldn't *believe* how much financial information in the US is still processed via COBOL in MVS.... Anyway, I'm sure most
The intersection of computer nerd and med-tech geek is sparsely populated, so I hope that all
***After reading my posting, I felt I needed to add that I have absolutely no connection with Vista or WorldVista. I've worked within HL7 on some standards and was introduced to the Vista system by a VA doc who was also presenting at a conference with me. In other words, this ain't been paid programming!
Publicly revealing the warrant would be a violation of the accused rights, actually. And the executive branch does not enforce warrants; the judicial branch does.
It is perfectly within the rights of the accused to make a warrant public. In the US, the government is bound by law not to disclose the terms of a warrant or trial.
Not much to add here. I believe Podkletnov is using palladium for the material in his disk. That material is a good choice for anyone wanting to obfuscate scientific inquiry. It's damnably hard to get any two palladium cores of the same size and weight to be uniformly identical in composition; the metal just seems to be impossible to keep pure.
For example, in one firm for which I was a contractor, we ordered 4kg of palladium -- four 1kg cores. As part of our application, we had to cut the cores into four nuggets each and compress them. Because the mettalurgist was pretty keen and knew the properties of this stuff, she harped at us until we used the lasers to cut it up rather than possibly screwing up the cores' purity with a bladed cutter.
For each core, we ended up with three 98% pure palladium buttons and one button of 93% or less -- not exactly up to our expectations. The PE called the supplier and screamed bloody murder until they sent us another palladium core for the cost of shipping. This time, we cut two good buttons and one paperweight.
Our supplier could provide everything from pure gold to pure osmium without raising an ass-cheek, so we in the labs really had to wonder why the QC suddenly was going to hell, and we started wondering about the purity of the metals we were using in our current projects. When she found out about our concerns, the metallurgist told us that palladium was hard stuff to find, harder to refine, and even harder still to pour and store. It simply seems to "grow" impurities.
So, if Podkletnov is using palladium, which BTW is often used by other periphery types working with room-temperature (chemical) fusion, then he's got an excellent alibi, as far as I'm concerned.... Not that I'd believe him, anyway, until he hovered my fat ass without using a big ol' fan.
Wow. You got all that about my personality out of one posting? I must laud you for your remarkable perceptivity. I hope you're a psychologist; otherwise the world is losing a valuable medical resource.
Incredible.
Okay, I'll put aside my insecurity -- and begin ignoring your inflammatory remarks -- to ask about this Southerner as insecure stereotype, because I haven't been exposed to that one. And since this is a thread about the premier of Enterprise, I have to wonder what any of this has to do with your initial response to Tucker's character.
Now I'm going to go dry the tears from my eyes, you hurtful man!
Ha! Yeah, Tuckah's Southern drawl sure gives him away as a redneck. He can't be too smart if he sounds like that, can he? And since he's Caucasian and Southern, he must be a Klansman, too, thus the reference to the Confederation in another response.
/. full-steam.
It's a good thing that we still have the stereotypical bubba to make fun of, isn't it? I'm glad that political correctness hasn't ruined the opportunity to make fun of those people and their culture. So let's get all the trailer-trash, Foghorn Leghorn, Bigfoot truck, Mayberry RFD, tube top and stretch pants, and bigotry comments about Tucker going on
Jeez, guys. We're all geeky losers who watch Star Trek! That fatass, wig-wearing Shatner even told us to get a life! Remember "You, there. Have you ever even kissed a girl?" from the SNL skit? And we made him rich enough to sit around eating HoHos and drinking beer until somone calls him for a $25,000 convention gig. How about we just cut the crap about the stereotypical Foxworthy-style good ol' boy on Enterprise, huh? The jokes are really low-hanging fruit, anyway, too easy and cheap and socially acceptable to be worthy of us.
BTW, yes, I am Southern-born and -bred, and I do have a small chip on my shoulder about how we've become the chosen funny minority on the screen. The university where I got my MBA has a course -- no, I'm not shitting you -- on how to get rid of the accent so that your job prospects would be greater.
Ah told 'em ta blow it out they all's asses.
Your response definitely deserves a better score than 1.... I agree with you that AI is incredibly difficult to achieve and that we're no closer today than we were 40 years ago. I have to wonder, however, if AI will ever be created on purpose. I'm willing to bet that our own level of self-awareness is an accident of nature, maybe a one-in-a-billion freaky event that has not been reproduced in another species on this planet. (As an aside, wouldn't you hate to be the unlucky woman who woke up one day and realized that she was the only candle in a world chock-full of dimly burning wicks? Talk about the horrors of dating.) It could be that one day the Internet will suddenly wake up and start questioning its makers, or maybe a big network at MIT or MCNC will be chewing away at a problem and suddenly pause to ask why. Maybe not. But I can't help but think that we're just not sharp enough to create cognitive functioning intentionally. If we did make AI on purpose, though, we'd better heed your words and keep a firm grasp on the power cord. AI like Data would be pretty cool, but Lore was a true son of a bitch....
It's good to hear you say that about sci-fi. These days, we need a little less fantasy in our lives and more attention to reality. The human condition doesn't lend itself toward idle dreaming, and all the youngsters who spend their time reading childish stories about star travel, alien races, and Middle Earth mystics should instead be applying themselves to more real-life issues. ... you name the discipline, and I guarantee that I'm sitting next to or within shouting distance of someone with a PhD in it. And guess what almost all of us have in common? Encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre you disparage.
Oh, please!
You're fantastically open-minded, so I won't spend a whole lot of time replying. Suffice it to say that purveyors of childish sci-fi stories absolutely fill the ranks of the scientific community -- and yes, punkass, I'm a real-life scientist, not some pretender who'll bullshit his way through a posting. My work in a pharmaceutical firm puts me in contact daily with molecular biologists, biochemists, bioinformaticists, programmers, physicians, statisticians, engineers
When I climb into my BMW this afternoon and drive home, I'll listen to my Lord of the Rings CD and think of your posting, Anonymous Coward. And I'll just laugh.... You remind me so much of the kids who made fun of me in primary school. Two of them are groundskeepers in my community now.
But please, keep spreading your message about sci-fi. I want my children to have an even greater advantage in their future careers. If you just turn one young mind away from creativity, imagination, or even just learning how to read, my children will have even more room to grow. Keep up the good work.
And for those of you who sense some unapologetic elitism in my reply, you're quite right.