I don't get it. We've just seen a complete reboot of the Star Trek franchise on the big screen. It introduced a new look and feel, new pacing, and raised the bar for both action and special effects set in the Star Trek universe. Myself, I found it enjoyable but ultimately braindead (and thus a big disappointment, compared to Roddenbery's original vision) -- but last I heard it did considerably better than the last several movies based on the TV series. A sequel seems inevitable, and probably at least two sequels. And so they spend months developing an MMO based on the same old, tired version of Star Trek that mainstream audiences had almost completely lost patience/interest in? Whose idea was that?
The big draw of E-Ink is that it only uses power when doing a page change.
This was my understanding as well. So maybe someone who owns a Kindle or a Nook can answer me something that has bugged me for a while: Why on earth do these things appear to have screensavers? By changing the image when the machine is idle, doesn't a screensaver actually drain the battery where normally there would be no drain at all? Does an e-ink screen really need to be "saved" (i.e. will it burn out/burn in)?
As for the competitors, they are all designed to use very little power. At least one functions in a dual mode, where it can either be an e-ink type monochrome screen or a backlit color screen.
Half a dozen links and I couldn't find one pic of the damn robot. If it was that "creepy" posing on the couch, how could you not at least snap a picture?
I don't know, but that also wasn't my point. My point was that he was claiming MySQL doesn't scale to a lot of users. Last I heard, Slashdot had a lot of users -- and it runs on MySQL.
That's definitely true, but new technology always seems to polarize the "audiophile" market. There was at least a minority of laserdisc fans who jumped onto DVD because it let them be even more 133t than their laserdisc buddies. You know the types... the ones who buy standalone D/A converters as separate components from their compact disc transports. As long as there's lots of gear to read about in magazines, there will be people who will make it their life's mission to know everything about that gear.
Maybe you didn't have any friends to swap tapes with?
Leave it to a Slashdotter to grasp at every possible chance to feel superior to people he doesn't know. But if by "swapping tapes" you mean copying them to blanks you bought at the store, then that's obviously not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the video sales market. I'm talking about going down to the video store and shelling out $35.95 for a brand-new VHS copy of Prizzi's Honor. Or are you claiming you were so rich you didn't have anything better to spend your money on? Most of the VHS tapes I saw in peoples homes were either A.) the huge-selling, high-volume titles I mentioned; B.) secondhand copies bought at video rental stores; or C.) taped off Cinemax or dubbed from rentals. Even if you did buy a few, you "swapped" the rest. Compare to DVDs, where they have copies of Kung Fu Panda and The Klumps on sale for $12 in the checkout aisle at Safeway. The people I knew who hoarded VHS tapes were anomalies -- mom's basement types. But if I saw one DVD in someone's house today I'd expect to find 30 more.
In VHS’ peak sales year – 2001 – there was enough VHS tape stock manufactured to reach from the earth to the moon more than 987 times. . . . In 2002 annual world production of DVD surpassed VHS cassettes. And in 2003, DVD-Video sales increased to 12.1 billion while VHS sales dropped to 2.4 billion.
How do I know VHS tapes didn't sell as well as DVDs? Because nothing did.
I believe the term was "priced for rental." The idea was yes, the prices were absurd -- for anyone but a VHS rental business.
The economics of VHS tapes were different, though. Unlike DVDs, comparatively few people tended to actually go out and buy them, bar a few "core" titles (Disney movies for the kids, Star Wars, Godfather, etc.) VHS tapes were bulky and not easy to store, their packaging tended to look kinda crappy on your shelf, and their picture quality really was not good. Not only did they tend to wear out just from playing them -- and occasionally your VCR would outright destroy one -- but storebought tapes weren't that great quality to begin with. Remember, this was an analog tape medium, and it was in the manufacturers' interests to duplicate them for as low cost as possible. Often this meant they were made from low-quality materials and were duplicated on high-speed equipment. From a collector's/fan's standpoint, all but a very few were 4:3 pan and scan -- so between that and the poor resolution, the only real way to see your favorite movies was to wait for them to come to a local second-run theatre. So it became a kind of Catch-22 -- because VHS tapes were never that attractive, studios were never really able to get the economies of scale that would drive the cost of VHS releases down to where mainstream customers would pay for them.
People did buy laserdiscs, though, and those collectors were among the first to jump on the DVD-buying bandwagon. When regular people got word that DVDs gave you picture quality comparable to laserdiscs without all the disc flipping and swapping, DVD sales exploded. Way back in 2001, when cheap VHS tapes had become more common and DVDs were fairly new, revenue from VHS sales was still far less than that from VHS rentals -- but it was also less than the revenue from DVD sales, even back then. (This according to the Video Software Dealers Association.) I honestly think enough people buy DVD releases regularly enough that this waiting period won't be that big of a deal -- especially in the age of home theater. Even if you have to pay $20 to buy the disc, it's still cheaper than taking a date to the movies.
Naaah, it's really much less intrusive than that. It's more like the little warning ribbon you get in the top of IE when a site wants to install an ActiveX control or something.
And FWIW, Windows 7 really does get UAC right. I routinely switched it off in Vista, but in Windows 7 I don't bother (which I think has to be a good thing).
Microsoft might be doing more than you think. TFA brings up Protected Mode Internet Explorer, but Microsoft is incorporating sandboxing-type ideas into Office 2010, too. For example, before it opens files, Word 2010 will validate them against known-good and known-bad schema. The idea is to detect potentially risky files/actions and run them with reduced privilege. So if a given file was created using an old version of Word that includes implicit vulnerabilities, for example, Word 2010 will open it in read-only mode with macros disabled, while giving the user a button to activate the disabled features (with an "it's your funeral" warning message).
This is not exactly "sandboxing," but it serves the same purpose: It helps to keep bad things from happening accidentally or out of user ignorance. In the past, if a user tried to open a file with dangerous macros, the app might throw up a warning message: "OMG if I open this file all hell will break loose!" But the user really wants to see what's in that file, so he just clicks "OK," and the damage is done. With Office 2010, there are more situations where a file will open with a slightly degraded user experience (no macros, etc), which lets users do 90 percent of what they want to do -- read the text, or copy and paste it into a new file -- without putting them at risk.
...for the 3D infomercials alone! Can you imagine all the crazy gimmicks they'll be pulling to hold your attention? It will blow your miiiiiiiinnnnd, man!!
It provides insight, yes. Just not much predictive insight.
If a bunch of people say that yes, they do want to buy a certain product, and then very few of them actually do buy it, it can tell you a number of things:
The product might be too expensive.
The product's marketing might be misrepresenting its actual features, and customers are disappointed.
The product might be hard to find (not enough supply).
Interest in the product might be a fad.
...and so on. Based on what you learn, you may be able to think of ways to tweak your business accordingly. Other than that, though, I don't see opinion surveys like this one being much more than an attempt to amplify the "buzz" about a certain product.
Maybe, but while opinion surveys can be interesting, they aren't very good indicators of actual behavior. If I asked 4,000 people whether they planned to buy a second Bible in the next 90 days -- for their children -- I bet a lot of people would answer yes. How many of them would actually go out and do it?
Part of "demand" in the economics sense is not just wanting something, but willingness to pay for something. It doesn't matter what people say; if nobody is actually buying a product, there's no demand.
It's also extremely important to understand the sampling method in a study like this (which is probably why so many of them neglect to discuss their methods). Where did the people surveyed come from? How was the sample selected? At random? How random? From the phone book? From a Web site? Were the participants self-selecting (i.e. you're only surveying people who were demonstrably interested to begin with)? Obtaining a representative statistical sample may not be a "science," as such, but it's darn close.
There are also such things as leading questions. What if the question on this survey wasn't phrased the way it's stated in the report? What if they just asked, "Who is your preferred smartphone operating system vendor: Apple, RIM, Symbian, Microsoft, or Google?" Apple fans would immediately say Apple; everybody else would say Google. The typical consumer doesn't realize that when you're asking them if they want a smartphone with a RIM OS, what you're really asking them is whether they want a BlackBerry. (And judging from my own, purely anecdotal survey -- looking around me when I'm waiting in line for something -- a lot of people do want one.)
Some people also answer "yes" to surveys because they're secretly hoping they will get something for free. Sometimes it's not so secret; what if everybody who participated in this survey got a $20 off coupon for any smartphone they wanted from Verizon. Which phone would they be thinking about while they did the survey?
They say "lies, damn lies, and statistics" because it's easy to make numbers say pretty much anything you want -- especially if you aren't sticking to sound statistical principles. In my experience, fly-by-night marketing firms seldom do. It doesn't pay the bills.
Sure. And if a grocery clerk or a truck driver told me this story and he casually mentioned Tylenol, I would think nothing of it. On the other hand, and maybe it's just because I'm a writer/editor myself, I expect reporters to nitpick. Accuracy is the job. Lack of attention to detail is the first inch down the slippery slope to sloppy journalism.
Yes, but in Europe "acetaminophen" is known as paracetamol, so this was surely ad-libbed by an American writer. It makes one question how accurately the story was reported.
Actually, dog bites are much cleaner than human bites and usually don't require prophylactic antibiotics.
This is actually a great example of why so much of this talk about antibiotics is simplistic. I've heard this nugget of conventional wisdom many times -- "dog bites are clean." It's so widespread that when my friend's four-year-old was bitten in the face by a dog, the doctor told him there was no reason to prescribe antibiotics. But if you've ever had to comfort a four-year-old girl with a serious infection in her face from having been bitten by a dog and denied antibiotics, "dog bites are clean" sounds pretty foolish.
Hospitals do not have MRSA because "hospitals are dirty." Look at it logically. MRSA can be very difficult to treat. If cleaning hospitals would keep doctors from having to treat MRSA cases, they would clean hospitals. The fact is they do clean them, very thoroughly... but it doesn't work. MRSA has the tenacity of a cockroach. Studies have shown that even the most over-the-top, costly cleaning measures still do not get rid of 100 percent of MRSA in hospitals. It is simply a fact of life.
Here is something else you might not know: There are two types of MRSA infections. There are nosocomial infections, which are the ones you get in hospitals; and then there are the other kind, which you pick up "in the wild." Wild MRSA and hospital MRSA are two different strains of the bacteria. You might cut your hand on something at home and come down with a resistant staph infection, but it would be a different infection than the kind you might catch in the hospital. The stuff you get in the hospital exists only in hospitals. It is specifically evolved to exist in those environments. And -- at least in the U.S., I can't speak for elsewhere -- it exists in every hospital. It's very likely that this development was inevitable.
I get tired of hearing people who have never studied the problem saying things like "if only everybody would wash their hands, nobody would get sick" or "if only nobody would take antibiotics, nobody would get sick." Things like that sound nice -- and it's true that washing your hands is a good idea, and it's true that antibiotics are often prescribed when they are not necessary -- but but to talk this way is to grossly oversimplify the problem.
Antibiotics have saved countless millions of lives. Are they over-prescribed? Perhaps. But all that means is that we are squandering the potential of one of the great discoveries of science. It doesn't mean that taking antibiotics is somehow "bad," or that antibiotics are somehow "making us sicker," which seems to be what so many people insinuate today.
If antibiotics don't work as well as they used to because bacteria are developing resistance, we should be sad for that. But recognize that the battle we are fighting here is essentially Man vs. Evolution. Back in the 1950s, public health professionals actually announced that the discovery of antibiotics was going to mean the end of human disease. We can see now that this was a pretty foolish thing to say. We now realize that we need to revise how we treat many diseases, and prescribing fewer antibiotics may be one way to do that. But we will also need to keep revising how we treat disease, probably throughout the lifespan of humanity.
Only sorta wrong. That article describes Caterpillar's long-term strategy as:
1. Build smaller-scale equipment in China that is actually up to snuff with Caterpillar standards. So far, Shin Caterpillar Mitsubishi's equipment lacks the quality of genuine Caterpillar products and thus isn't allowed to carry the Caterpillar brand. Caterpillar hopes to rectify that situation.
2. Once Chinese customers get used to the Caterpillar brand, the company plans to export its larger-scale industrial equipment from the U.S. for sale in China. That is, Caterpillar plans to sell high-quality American-made goods to Chinese customers. It does NOT plan to manufacture this equipment in China, because it fears its designs will be ripped off. (Though why manufacturing the equipment in the U.S. makes a difference is not clear; presumably the idea is that Chinese competitors could dismantle Caterpillar heavy equipment, but they would not be able to manufacture copies themselves that would match Caterpillar's quality unless they could peek in on Caterpillar's manufacturing process firsthand. So long as the factory remains in the U.S., they can't do that.)
Hmm. Well I'm curious what country you live in -- your laws do seem to differ somewhat from those of the U.S.
Over here, I run a number of services for the largest free email providers and online second hand card dealers. I always request a subpoena if any cop asks for private data
In the U.S., subpoenas are issued by the courts to compel witnesses to testify. Note though, that's the courts, not law enforcement. A district attorney will typically obtain a subpoena during the process of bringing a case to trial. Here, if I received a "subpoena" from a police officer with no district attorney's phone number on it, I'd suspect it was just a meaningless piece of paper. When talking to the police, you always have the right -- but not the obligation -- to remain silent.
Police offers can ask the courts to grant search warrants, but that's to search (and/or seize) property from a physical location. In other words, they could come to your colo and seize all your servers to look at the logs themselves -- but it would be a lot cheaper just to ask you. For them and for you.
As a matter of fact, it's legally questionable to even log the IP addresses.
Now you have me skeptical. I can't think of many online services that don't log IP addresses at all. How do you even analyze traffic patterns if you can't tell one request from the next? You don't have to associate IP addresses with mailing addresses, but requiring online services to not log them at all sounds like extreme overkill.
What precedent do you think is needed? You're using a service provided by Blizzard. Your use of the service means you accept Blizzard's terms of use, which are fully disclosed. If you don't like the terms, you have the option to not use the service.
If you ran a laundromat and some guy who was a suspected criminal came into the laundromat all the time, the cops would not need a warrant to come in and ask you where that guy lived, if they thought you might know. It's up to you whether you want to tell them or not -- but that's an ethical question, not a legal one.
I'm not a doctor or anything, but then, most doctors I know are so institutionalized as to look for threats to their weaker patients everywhere and they shoot for damn near sterilization, which is bad for all of us. Ask them about the new crop of staph they built for us sometime.
As for the staph, this is a very complex and fascinating subject, about which we could go on all day. Did you know that the strains of drug-resistant staph that are found in hospitals are found only in hospitals? That is to say, you might find drug-resistant staph out "in the wild," but it will be different strain of bacteria than what you could catch in a hospital. The hospital varieties have adapted to exist within that environment and they are found nowhere else in the world -- but you'll find them in every hospital. Wild stuff.
At the same time, though it's clear that hospital sterilization practices are what have put evolutionary pressure on staph bacteria to create these strains, I think I'd still rather doctors were shooting for "damn near sterilization" in the operating theater when it's my turn to go under the knife. As I say, it's a very complex problem that's nowhere close to being solved.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get it. We've just seen a complete reboot of the Star Trek franchise on the big screen. It introduced a new look and feel, new pacing, and raised the bar for both action and special effects set in the Star Trek universe. Myself, I found it enjoyable but ultimately braindead (and thus a big disappointment, compared to Roddenbery's original vision) -- but last I heard it did considerably better than the last several movies based on the TV series. A sequel seems inevitable, and probably at least two sequels. And so they spend months developing an MMO based on the same old, tired version of Star Trek that mainstream audiences had almost completely lost patience/interest in? Whose idea was that?
The big draw of E-Ink is that it only uses power when doing a page change.
This was my understanding as well. So maybe someone who owns a Kindle or a Nook can answer me something that has bugged me for a while: Why on earth do these things appear to have screensavers? By changing the image when the machine is idle, doesn't a screensaver actually drain the battery where normally there would be no drain at all? Does an e-ink screen really need to be "saved" (i.e. will it burn out/burn in)?
As for the competitors, they are all designed to use very little power. At least one functions in a dual mode, where it can either be an e-ink type monochrome screen or a backlit color screen.
Here's another article, from The Economist.
Half a dozen links and I couldn't find one pic of the damn robot. If it was that "creepy" posing on the couch, how could you not at least snap a picture?
I don't know, but that also wasn't my point. My point was that he was claiming MySQL doesn't scale to a lot of users. Last I heard, Slashdot had a lot of users -- and it runs on MySQL.
It might be MySQL's sweet spot if MySQL scaled well with large numbers of users. But it doesn't.
Are you posting AC so nobody can see your seven-digit \. id?
Notice a pattern about her Android articles?
No. What is the pattern?
For one thing, you cannot tell anything about a news article by the headline alone. More often than not, reporters don't write their own headlines.
That's definitely true, but new technology always seems to polarize the "audiophile" market. There was at least a minority of laserdisc fans who jumped onto DVD because it let them be even more 133t than their laserdisc buddies. You know the types... the ones who buy standalone D/A converters as separate components from their compact disc transports. As long as there's lots of gear to read about in magazines, there will be people who will make it their life's mission to know everything about that gear.
Maybe you didn't have any friends to swap tapes with?
Leave it to a Slashdotter to grasp at every possible chance to feel superior to people he doesn't know. But if by "swapping tapes" you mean copying them to blanks you bought at the store, then that's obviously not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the video sales market. I'm talking about going down to the video store and shelling out $35.95 for a brand-new VHS copy of Prizzi's Honor. Or are you claiming you were so rich you didn't have anything better to spend your money on? Most of the VHS tapes I saw in peoples homes were either A.) the huge-selling, high-volume titles I mentioned; B.) secondhand copies bought at video rental stores; or C.) taped off Cinemax or dubbed from rentals. Even if you did buy a few, you "swapped" the rest. Compare to DVDs, where they have copies of Kung Fu Panda and The Klumps on sale for $12 in the checkout aisle at Safeway. The people I knew who hoarded VHS tapes were anomalies -- mom's basement types. But if I saw one DVD in someone's house today I'd expect to find 30 more.
But hey, don't take my word for it:
In VHS’ peak sales year – 2001 – there was enough VHS tape stock manufactured to reach from the earth to the moon more than 987 times.
. . .
In 2002 annual world production of DVD surpassed VHS cassettes. And in 2003, DVD-Video sales increased to 12.1 billion while VHS sales dropped to 2.4 billion.
How do I know VHS tapes didn't sell as well as DVDs? Because nothing did.
I believe the term was "priced for rental." The idea was yes, the prices were absurd -- for anyone but a VHS rental business.
The economics of VHS tapes were different, though. Unlike DVDs, comparatively few people tended to actually go out and buy them, bar a few "core" titles (Disney movies for the kids, Star Wars, Godfather, etc.) VHS tapes were bulky and not easy to store, their packaging tended to look kinda crappy on your shelf, and their picture quality really was not good. Not only did they tend to wear out just from playing them -- and occasionally your VCR would outright destroy one -- but storebought tapes weren't that great quality to begin with. Remember, this was an analog tape medium, and it was in the manufacturers' interests to duplicate them for as low cost as possible. Often this meant they were made from low-quality materials and were duplicated on high-speed equipment. From a collector's/fan's standpoint, all but a very few were 4:3 pan and scan -- so between that and the poor resolution, the only real way to see your favorite movies was to wait for them to come to a local second-run theatre. So it became a kind of Catch-22 -- because VHS tapes were never that attractive, studios were never really able to get the economies of scale that would drive the cost of VHS releases down to where mainstream customers would pay for them.
People did buy laserdiscs, though, and those collectors were among the first to jump on the DVD-buying bandwagon. When regular people got word that DVDs gave you picture quality comparable to laserdiscs without all the disc flipping and swapping, DVD sales exploded. Way back in 2001, when cheap VHS tapes had become more common and DVDs were fairly new, revenue from VHS sales was still far less than that from VHS rentals -- but it was also less than the revenue from DVD sales, even back then. (This according to the Video Software Dealers Association.) I honestly think enough people buy DVD releases regularly enough that this waiting period won't be that big of a deal -- especially in the age of home theater. Even if you have to pay $20 to buy the disc, it's still cheaper than taking a date to the movies.
Ahhh good - UAC all over again....
Naaah, it's really much less intrusive than that. It's more like the little warning ribbon you get in the top of IE when a site wants to install an ActiveX control or something.
And FWIW, Windows 7 really does get UAC right. I routinely switched it off in Vista, but in Windows 7 I don't bother (which I think has to be a good thing).
Microsoft might be doing more than you think. TFA brings up Protected Mode Internet Explorer, but Microsoft is incorporating sandboxing-type ideas into Office 2010, too. For example, before it opens files, Word 2010 will validate them against known-good and known-bad schema. The idea is to detect potentially risky files/actions and run them with reduced privilege. So if a given file was created using an old version of Word that includes implicit vulnerabilities, for example, Word 2010 will open it in read-only mode with macros disabled, while giving the user a button to activate the disabled features (with an "it's your funeral" warning message).
This is not exactly "sandboxing," but it serves the same purpose: It helps to keep bad things from happening accidentally or out of user ignorance. In the past, if a user tried to open a file with dangerous macros, the app might throw up a warning message: "OMG if I open this file all hell will break loose!" But the user really wants to see what's in that file, so he just clicks "OK," and the damage is done. With Office 2010, there are more situations where a file will open with a slightly degraded user experience (no macros, etc), which lets users do 90 percent of what they want to do -- read the text, or copy and paste it into a new file -- without putting them at risk.
...for the 3D infomercials alone! Can you imagine all the crazy gimmicks they'll be pulling to hold your attention? It will blow your miiiiiiiinnnnd, man!!
It provides insight, yes. Just not much predictive insight.
If a bunch of people say that yes, they do want to buy a certain product, and then very few of them actually do buy it, it can tell you a number of things:
Probably, because that's what "demand" implies?
Maybe, but while opinion surveys can be interesting, they aren't very good indicators of actual behavior. If I asked 4,000 people whether they planned to buy a second Bible in the next 90 days -- for their children -- I bet a lot of people would answer yes. How many of them would actually go out and do it?
Part of "demand" in the economics sense is not just wanting something, but willingness to pay for something. It doesn't matter what people say; if nobody is actually buying a product, there's no demand.
It's also extremely important to understand the sampling method in a study like this (which is probably why so many of them neglect to discuss their methods). Where did the people surveyed come from? How was the sample selected? At random? How random? From the phone book? From a Web site? Were the participants self-selecting (i.e. you're only surveying people who were demonstrably interested to begin with)? Obtaining a representative statistical sample may not be a "science," as such, but it's darn close.
There are also such things as leading questions. What if the question on this survey wasn't phrased the way it's stated in the report? What if they just asked, "Who is your preferred smartphone operating system vendor: Apple, RIM, Symbian, Microsoft, or Google?" Apple fans would immediately say Apple; everybody else would say Google. The typical consumer doesn't realize that when you're asking them if they want a smartphone with a RIM OS, what you're really asking them is whether they want a BlackBerry. (And judging from my own, purely anecdotal survey -- looking around me when I'm waiting in line for something -- a lot of people do want one.)
Some people also answer "yes" to surveys because they're secretly hoping they will get something for free. Sometimes it's not so secret; what if everybody who participated in this survey got a $20 off coupon for any smartphone they wanted from Verizon. Which phone would they be thinking about while they did the survey?
They say "lies, damn lies, and statistics" because it's easy to make numbers say pretty much anything you want -- especially if you aren't sticking to sound statistical principles. In my experience, fly-by-night marketing firms seldom do. It doesn't pay the bills.
Very few people doing anything serious with MySQL use MyISAM much. InnoDB ships with it and is a nice engine.
And (ironically?) Innobase is already a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle.
Sure. And if a grocery clerk or a truck driver told me this story and he casually mentioned Tylenol, I would think nothing of it. On the other hand, and maybe it's just because I'm a writer/editor myself, I expect reporters to nitpick. Accuracy is the job. Lack of attention to detail is the first inch down the slippery slope to sloppy journalism.
She needed stitches. But not antibiotics, apparently, cuz it was a dog bite (and they're "clean").
Yes, but in Europe "acetaminophen" is known as paracetamol, so this was surely ad-libbed by an American writer. It makes one question how accurately the story was reported.
Actually, dog bites are much cleaner than human bites and usually don't require prophylactic antibiotics.
This is actually a great example of why so much of this talk about antibiotics is simplistic. I've heard this nugget of conventional wisdom many times -- "dog bites are clean." It's so widespread that when my friend's four-year-old was bitten in the face by a dog, the doctor told him there was no reason to prescribe antibiotics. But if you've ever had to comfort a four-year-old girl with a serious infection in her face from having been bitten by a dog and denied antibiotics, "dog bites are clean" sounds pretty foolish.
Hospitals do not have MRSA because "hospitals are dirty." Look at it logically. MRSA can be very difficult to treat. If cleaning hospitals would keep doctors from having to treat MRSA cases, they would clean hospitals. The fact is they do clean them, very thoroughly ... but it doesn't work. MRSA has the tenacity of a cockroach. Studies have shown that even the most over-the-top, costly cleaning measures still do not get rid of 100 percent of MRSA in hospitals. It is simply a fact of life.
Here is something else you might not know: There are two types of MRSA infections. There are nosocomial infections, which are the ones you get in hospitals; and then there are the other kind, which you pick up "in the wild." Wild MRSA and hospital MRSA are two different strains of the bacteria. You might cut your hand on something at home and come down with a resistant staph infection, but it would be a different infection than the kind you might catch in the hospital. The stuff you get in the hospital exists only in hospitals. It is specifically evolved to exist in those environments. And -- at least in the U.S., I can't speak for elsewhere -- it exists in every hospital. It's very likely that this development was inevitable.
I get tired of hearing people who have never studied the problem saying things like "if only everybody would wash their hands, nobody would get sick" or "if only nobody would take antibiotics, nobody would get sick." Things like that sound nice -- and it's true that washing your hands is a good idea, and it's true that antibiotics are often prescribed when they are not necessary -- but but to talk this way is to grossly oversimplify the problem.
Antibiotics have saved countless millions of lives. Are they over-prescribed? Perhaps. But all that means is that we are squandering the potential of one of the great discoveries of science. It doesn't mean that taking antibiotics is somehow "bad," or that antibiotics are somehow "making us sicker," which seems to be what so many people insinuate today.
If antibiotics don't work as well as they used to because bacteria are developing resistance, we should be sad for that. But recognize that the battle we are fighting here is essentially Man vs. Evolution. Back in the 1950s, public health professionals actually announced that the discovery of antibiotics was going to mean the end of human disease. We can see now that this was a pretty foolish thing to say. We now realize that we need to revise how we treat many diseases, and prescribing fewer antibiotics may be one way to do that. But we will also need to keep revising how we treat disease, probably throughout the lifespan of humanity.
I had an Apple ][+. I guess that's the 80s equivalent of "I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan!"
Only sorta wrong. That article describes Caterpillar's long-term strategy as:
1. Build smaller-scale equipment in China that is actually up to snuff with Caterpillar standards. So far, Shin Caterpillar Mitsubishi's equipment lacks the quality of genuine Caterpillar products and thus isn't allowed to carry the Caterpillar brand. Caterpillar hopes to rectify that situation.
2. Once Chinese customers get used to the Caterpillar brand, the company plans to export its larger-scale industrial equipment from the U.S. for sale in China. That is, Caterpillar plans to sell high-quality American-made goods to Chinese customers. It does NOT plan to manufacture this equipment in China, because it fears its designs will be ripped off. (Though why manufacturing the equipment in the U.S. makes a difference is not clear; presumably the idea is that Chinese competitors could dismantle Caterpillar heavy equipment, but they would not be able to manufacture copies themselves that would match Caterpillar's quality unless they could peek in on Caterpillar's manufacturing process firsthand. So long as the factory remains in the U.S., they can't do that.)
Hmm. Well I'm curious what country you live in -- your laws do seem to differ somewhat from those of the U.S.
Over here, I run a number of services for the largest free email providers and online second hand card dealers. I always request a subpoena if any cop asks for private data
In the U.S., subpoenas are issued by the courts to compel witnesses to testify. Note though, that's the courts, not law enforcement. A district attorney will typically obtain a subpoena during the process of bringing a case to trial. Here, if I received a "subpoena" from a police officer with no district attorney's phone number on it, I'd suspect it was just a meaningless piece of paper. When talking to the police, you always have the right -- but not the obligation -- to remain silent.
Police offers can ask the courts to grant search warrants, but that's to search (and/or seize) property from a physical location. In other words, they could come to your colo and seize all your servers to look at the logs themselves -- but it would be a lot cheaper just to ask you. For them and for you.
As a matter of fact, it's legally questionable to even log the IP addresses.
Now you have me skeptical. I can't think of many online services that don't log IP addresses at all. How do you even analyze traffic patterns if you can't tell one request from the next? You don't have to associate IP addresses with mailing addresses, but requiring online services to not log them at all sounds like extreme overkill.
What precedent do you think is needed? You're using a service provided by Blizzard. Your use of the service means you accept Blizzard's terms of use, which are fully disclosed. If you don't like the terms, you have the option to not use the service.
If you ran a laundromat and some guy who was a suspected criminal came into the laundromat all the time, the cops would not need a warrant to come in and ask you where that guy lived, if they thought you might know. It's up to you whether you want to tell them or not -- but that's an ethical question, not a legal one.
I'm not a doctor or anything, but then, most doctors I know are so institutionalized as to look for threats to their weaker patients everywhere and they shoot for damn near sterilization, which is bad for all of us. Ask them about the new crop of staph they built for us sometime.
As for the staph, this is a very complex and fascinating subject, about which we could go on all day. Did you know that the strains of drug-resistant staph that are found in hospitals are found only in hospitals? That is to say, you might find drug-resistant staph out "in the wild," but it will be different strain of bacteria than what you could catch in a hospital. The hospital varieties have adapted to exist within that environment and they are found nowhere else in the world -- but you'll find them in every hospital. Wild stuff.
At the same time, though it's clear that hospital sterilization practices are what have put evolutionary pressure on staph bacteria to create these strains, I think I'd still rather doctors were shooting for "damn near sterilization" in the operating theater when it's my turn to go under the knife. As I say, it's a very complex problem that's nowhere close to being solved.