As you might surmise, I am a heart surgeon, and I have used the DaVinci system. (FYI the precursor is housed in the MIT tech museum on campus).
An unfortunate trend in medicine (particularly when it comes to the heart), is that marketing an idea/gizmo (and owning stock in the company) is extremely lucrative, as the delivery of heart care is highly competitive, and lots of money can be made if you are the "first" in your area to have a "new" technology. Hence, there is high interest in offering the latest procedure to people, in the hopes of drumming up business.
This, however, runs straight into the dictum in medicine to "don't be the first, and don't be the last" to adopt a new procedure/treatment/medicine.
The reason for the dictum is that real people's lives are at stake, and medical history (including the present) is replete with medications and procedures and treatments that were supposed to be "great" and turned out to actual harm people, after being evaluated in wide public usage. For a example from This week, just look at the recent HIV vaccine trial, that actually made people WORSE rather than better.
Oh by the way, in surgery, its the SURGEON, not the tools that matter. As for the DaVinci...in cases I've seen, it takes a straight forward operation ("traditional" mitral valve repair for example) that could be completed in 2-3 hours with less than 1% risk of death or serious complication, and turns it into a day long affair with worse results...in addition, you need a $1,000,000 machine (which needs a hefty service contract to maintain), more personnel, a bigger operating room,...you get my drift....I am unaware of ANY published study that proves the superiority of the DaVinci system in heart surgery, over traditional surgeries, when evaluating mortality (death rate), and morbidity (complication rate).
NOW, if you happen to be a paid consultant for the DaVinci company, or you have stock options in the company....it's great!! If your the poor joe that gets his heart operated on by someone who has secondary gain involved in his decision making process...God Bless....
Follow the money!!!
Does that mean the system is bad? Not at all, its a tool...in the right hands, for the right purpose, it may be ideal.
What would I want done, if I needed heart surgery....go to a surgeon, and ask him/her what their results are (death rate, complication rate), and choose the best results....would i ask if they used a robot or did the surgery "off-pump" or what kind of artificial valve they preferred, etc, no..because that doesn't matter if your death or maimed....
"In the 1960s Nobel Laureate Wiliam Shockley (1910-1989), a physicist at Stanford University who advocated programs of voluntary sterilization of people with lower than the average IQ score of 100'
he's a more complex individual than you kids know about...
i hate to be cynical, but this is nothing but an orchestrated effort to lay the groundwork for a monetary claim against "The Rich Industrialized West" a.k.a., the U.S.
First off, the article doesn't even have the date correct for when the island disappeared..22 years ago (that would be 1988). So let's dispense with accuracy right there..
Second, the river delta in question is FAMOUS for flooding and killing/displacing hundreds of thousands...geez it's the drainage basin for the freakin Himalayan mountain range...
Bangladesh is in bottom quintile in per capita GDP.
'In future, therefore, when affected countries demand assistance from the rich countries of the world in helping address climate-related disasters such as floods, it will not be for a request for charity but for compensation, appealing to their moral responsibility, if not their legal liability, to make good the damage and destruction for which their activities have, directly or indirectly, been partially responsible.'
this is all sponsored and written under the auspices of that famously neutral organization the U.N.
this is a giant effort at laying the groundwork for demanding monetary compensation, not aid, for flooding that has been going on FOREVER in that country. These islands didn't "sink", they where washed away 22 years ago from flooding, that has been going on for millenia....
in the enviromental arena...it's never about the enviroment, it's always about money, and getting someone who has it, to fork it over to someone else, who wants it.
NASA is "really neat", heck we're talking astronauts...however, it is a massive goverment program that must fight for the hearts and minds (and tax dollars) of the american public, and the congress, particularly after the shuttle disasters made folks wonder if the risk/benefit of manned space flight was worth $20,000,000,000.00 a year.
So, NASA even while NASA is trying to diversify, and get retire the shuttle, it still has lots of vested interests that want manned space flight to continue. So, it has to come up with something it can market and sell to the Congress and ultimately the public.
NASA has distributed it's sites throughout the U.S., so as to maximize congressional support for "the home town boys", and now appears to be following the Zeitgeist, to determine what its next "mission" should be. The general public doesn't really understand Hubble telescope looking at Dark Matter (heck, nobody understands dark matter), so that doesn't sell well...but Doomsday scenarios!! Hey, everyone gets that! Global warming?? Heck, lets turn those telescopes around and look at the earth with them..that's understandable!!
Yep, this is called marketing, it's just that simple..
This article is a rip off of the movie Soylent Green.
"Set in the year 2022, the film depicts a dystopia, a Malthusian catastrophe that takes place because humanity has failed to pursue sustainable development and has not halted population growth. New York City's population is 40,000,000, with over half unemployed. Global warming, air and water pollution have produced a year-round heatwave and a thin yellow smog in the daytime. Food and fuel resources are scarce because of animal and plant decimation, housing is dilapidated and overcrowded, and widespread government-sponsored euthanasia is encouraged as a means of reducing overpopulation.'
it was the ultimate tree-hugger's depiction of the end on the world because of man's evil consumptive habits.. dead oceans global warming air polution no trees
ironically enough, the hero of the movie was Charlton Heston, in real life a gun toting, red-blooded conservative.
hmm...."by the end of the next century" since it's the beginning of this century, that indicates the prediction is nearly 200 years in the future..
just as an exercise, let's see what the state of mankind was 200 years ago...
lewis and clark were exploring the west (no states west of the mississippi) Napoleon invades Berlin (now there's a twist!) War of 1812 U.S. vs. Britain semaphore system developed (internet?, heck folks were waving flags around to move data) first battery invented little ice age ends civil war ottoman empire postage stamp invented
i hardly think those alive 200 years ago were in any position to predict what mankind's situation, much less the weather was going to be like in 200 years. likewise, it's preposterous on it's face, to assume any prediction 200 years into the future will be accurate.
in 200 years, i don't think we have any idea what the energy producing technologies will consist of.
this article (Microsoft founder funds mapping of rodent brain "software") plus the article about Intel having a 80 core processor ("hardware")
makes me fearful that they are secretly developing an AI "rodent" that will overrun the planet.
we will have to purchase frequent "upgrades" to keep the bugger from eating our young, and the inevitable infection with viruses or worms will threaten the safety of mankind itself..
we will be forced to escape the earth to save ourselves....oh crikey!!, doesn't Paul Allen have money invested in space travel as well....
the U.N wants to impose a "user" tax, and God knows what else...
this is a money grab...
if it ain't broke, don't fix it...why would we want to cede control of a major economic force in our country to outside control..this isn't about "arrrogance" or "totalitarian" control of the internet by the U.S., this is plain old self-interest. Anyone who argues pursuing "self-interest" is somehow bad is just plain crazy....
the U.N crowd is pursuing it's own self-interest...a taxable "international" endeavor that will generate funds for a bloated organization, whose administrators appear answerable to no one.
for those who loathe the U.S., at least we have a system where the politicians can get voted out of office....many of the members of the U.N. have despots, dictators, or "elected-for-life" leaders...you may believe the U.S. has a rotten political system, but rest assured, just about every other political system out there is worse....
Lawyers and liability insurance will nix this idea
on
Wi-Fi From The Sky
·
· Score: 1
our buddies the lawyers won't ever let this get off the ground. they will sue sue sue if one of these balloons falls from the sky (insurance policies will be higher near higher density population areas), and you can be sure some one will sue because they are "scared" just knowing the balloon is overhead..heck i can see a class action suit ("Thousands scared by balloon overhead, and out of sight!)
i say this half in jest, and half seriously. if you have 5% of the campus accounting for 50% of the bandwidth usage, and as one of the other posters has noted, with the bulk of this being porn, maybe the university has a obligation to identify these people and offer them addiction counciling. think about it. serious comments appreciated.
yeah brother! i remember those halcyon days. after you got done waiting to punch up your cards, you submitted your "job" to the computer center staff (does that count as "file-sharing"?), and had to wait until they ran it.
when teletype terminals came in (connected to a control data 6600 mainframe), i remember that they had unlimited cpu utilization time, until i ran a prime number generator for one day that used up over 60 minutes of cpu time. the next day, they capped cpu usage at 10 seconds/session (remember that most programs would execute fully in fractions of a second).
absolutely agree. ANTHRO is your answer, if you have the money. I have two of their "carts". they are infinitely adjustable/customizable, you can add on levels, side carts, undertables, etc. These tables are the "Aeron" of computer tables. gets you ultra organized in as small a space as you wish, and portable to boot (wheels, different sizes depending on flooring material!) highly recommended. built like a tank, good looking, well thought out and engineered.
Nasa should hold a national lottery for a ticket to ride the shuttle..solves their funding problems, good PR as well, as everyone regardless of income gets a chance to "ride" if they buy a ticket.
Slashdot Mirror
As you might surmise, I am a heart surgeon, and I have used the DaVinci system. (FYI the precursor is housed in the MIT tech museum on campus).
An unfortunate trend in medicine (particularly when it comes to the heart), is that marketing an idea/gizmo (and owning stock in the company) is extremely lucrative, as the delivery of heart care is highly competitive, and lots of money can be made if you are the "first" in your area to have a "new" technology. Hence, there is high interest in offering the latest procedure to people, in the hopes of drumming up business.
This, however, runs straight into the dictum in medicine to "don't be the first, and don't be the last" to adopt a new procedure/treatment/medicine.
The reason for the dictum is that real people's lives are at stake, and medical history (including the present) is replete with medications and procedures and treatments that were supposed to be "great" and turned out to actual harm people, after being evaluated in wide public usage. For a example from This week, just look at the recent HIV vaccine trial, that actually made people WORSE rather than better.
Oh by the way, in surgery, its the SURGEON, not the tools that matter. As for the DaVinci...in cases I've seen, it takes a straight forward operation ("traditional" mitral valve repair for example) that could be completed in 2-3 hours with less than 1% risk of death or serious complication, and turns it into a day long affair with worse results...in addition, you need a $1,000,000 machine (which needs a hefty service contract to maintain), more personnel, a bigger operating room,...you get my drift....I am unaware of ANY published study that proves the superiority of the DaVinci system in heart surgery, over traditional surgeries, when evaluating mortality (death rate), and morbidity (complication rate).
NOW, if you happen to be a paid consultant for the DaVinci company, or you have stock options in the company....it's great!!
If your the poor joe that gets his heart operated on by someone who has secondary gain involved in his decision making process...God Bless....
Follow the money!!!
Does that mean the system is bad? Not at all, its a tool...in the right hands, for the right purpose, it may be ideal.
What would I want done, if I needed heart surgery....go to a surgeon, and ask him/her what their results are (death rate, complication rate), and choose the best results....would i ask if they used a robot or did the surgery "off-pump" or what kind of artificial valve they preferred, etc, no..because that doesn't matter if your death or maimed....
"In the 1960s Nobel Laureate Wiliam Shockley (1910-1989), a physicist at Stanford University who advocated programs of voluntary sterilization of people with lower than the average IQ score of 100'
he's a more complex individual than you kids know about...
i hate to be cynical, but this is nothing but an orchestrated effort to lay the groundwork for a monetary claim against "The Rich Industrialized West" a.k.a., the U.S.
t ion=readEditorials&itemid=125&language=1
First off, the article doesn't even have the date correct for when the island disappeared..22 years ago (that would be 1988). So let's dispense with accuracy right there..
Second, the river delta in question is FAMOUS for flooding and killing/displacing hundreds of thousands...geez it's the drainage basin for the freakin Himalayan mountain range...
Bangladesh is in bottom quintile in per capita GDP.
and finally, lets not forget this article..
'Bangladesh floods: rich nations 'must share the blame'
http://www.scidev.net/Editorials/index.cfm?fuseac
pretty much lays it out...they're after money..
'In future, therefore, when affected countries demand assistance from the rich countries of the world in helping address climate-related disasters such as floods, it will not be for a request for charity but for compensation, appealing to their moral responsibility, if not their legal liability, to make good the damage and destruction for which their activities have, directly or indirectly, been partially responsible.'
this is all sponsored and written under the auspices of that famously neutral organization the U.N.
this is a giant effort at laying the groundwork for demanding monetary compensation, not aid, for flooding that has been going on FOREVER in that country. These islands didn't "sink", they where washed away 22 years ago from flooding, that has been going on for millenia....
in the enviromental arena...it's never about the enviroment, it's always about money, and getting someone who has it, to fork it over to someone else, who wants it.
NASA is "really neat", heck we're talking astronauts...however, it is a massive goverment program that must fight for the hearts and minds (and tax dollars) of the american public, and the congress, particularly after the shuttle disasters made folks wonder if the risk/benefit of manned space flight was worth $20,000,000,000.00 a year.
So, NASA even while NASA is trying to diversify, and get retire the shuttle, it still has lots of vested interests that want manned space flight to continue. So, it has to come up with something it can market and sell to the Congress and ultimately the public.
NASA has distributed it's sites throughout the U.S., so as to maximize congressional support for "the home town boys", and now appears to be following the Zeitgeist, to determine what its next "mission" should be. The general public doesn't really understand Hubble telescope looking at Dark Matter (heck, nobody understands dark matter), so that doesn't sell well...but Doomsday scenarios!! Hey, everyone gets that! Global warming?? Heck, lets turn those telescopes around and look at the earth with them..that's understandable!!
Yep, this is called marketing, it's just that simple..
This article is a rip off of the movie Soylent Green.
"Set in the year 2022, the film depicts a dystopia, a Malthusian catastrophe that takes place because humanity has failed to pursue sustainable development and has not halted population growth. New York City's population is 40,000,000, with over half unemployed. Global warming, air and water pollution have produced a year-round heatwave and a thin yellow smog in the daytime. Food and fuel resources are scarce because of animal and plant decimation, housing is dilapidated and overcrowded, and widespread government-sponsored euthanasia is encouraged as a means of reducing overpopulation.'
it was the ultimate tree-hugger's depiction of the end on the world because of man's evil consumptive habits..
dead oceans
global warming
air polution
no trees
ironically enough, the hero of the movie was Charlton Heston, in real life a gun toting, red-blooded conservative.
hmm...."by the end of the next century"
since it's the beginning of this century, that indicates the prediction is nearly 200 years in the future..
just as an exercise, let's see what the state of mankind was 200 years ago...
lewis and clark were exploring the west (no states west of the mississippi)
Napoleon invades Berlin (now there's a twist!)
War of 1812 U.S. vs. Britain
semaphore system developed (internet?, heck folks were waving flags around to move data)
first battery invented
little ice age ends
civil war
ottoman empire
postage stamp invented
i hardly think those alive 200 years ago were in any position to predict what mankind's situation, much less the weather was going to be like in 200 years. likewise, it's preposterous on it's face, to assume any prediction 200 years into the future will be accurate.
in 200 years, i don't think we have any idea what the energy producing technologies will consist of.
this article (Microsoft founder funds mapping of rodent brain "software")
plus the article about Intel having a 80 core processor ("hardware")
makes me fearful that they are secretly developing an AI "rodent" that will overrun the planet.
we will have to purchase frequent "upgrades" to keep the bugger from eating our young, and the inevitable infection with viruses or worms will threaten the safety of mankind itself..
we will be forced to escape the earth to save ourselves....oh crikey!!, doesn't Paul Allen have money invested in space travel as well....
follow the money...
the U.N wants to impose a "user" tax, and God knows what else...
this is a money grab...
if it ain't broke, don't fix it...why would we want to cede control of a major economic force in our country to outside control..this isn't about "arrrogance" or "totalitarian" control of the internet by the U.S., this is plain old self-interest. Anyone who argues pursuing "self-interest" is somehow bad is just plain crazy....
the U.N crowd is pursuing it's own self-interest...a taxable "international" endeavor that will generate funds for a bloated organization, whose administrators appear answerable to no one.
for those who loathe the U.S., at least we have a system where the politicians can get voted out of office....many of the members of the U.N. have despots, dictators, or "elected-for-life" leaders...you may believe the U.S. has a rotten political system, but rest assured, just about every other political system out there is worse....
our buddies the lawyers won't ever let this get off the ground. they will sue sue sue if one of these balloons falls from the sky (insurance policies will be higher near higher density population areas), and you can be sure some one will sue because they are "scared" just knowing the balloon is overhead..heck i can see a class action suit ("Thousands scared by balloon overhead, and out of sight!)
operational profit?
some basic math (with VERY generous assumptions)
60,000 riders X 365 d/yr = 21,900,000 fares/year
assume 40 year lifetime of monorail
no repairs, no maintance costs, no employees to pay, no unions, no pension plan,...
40 yrs X 21,900,000 fares/yr = 876,000,000 fares
looks like the minimum fare (assuming full occupancy 24/7/365) better be at least $2.00 just to meet the original build cost.
i am guessing the minimum breakeven fare will more likely be $5.00 - $10.00
how about just getting more buses?
i say this half in jest, and half seriously. if you have 5% of the campus accounting for 50% of the bandwidth usage, and as one of the other posters has noted, with the bulk of this being porn, maybe the university has a obligation to identify these people and offer them addiction counciling. think about it. serious comments appreciated.
yeah brother! i remember those halcyon days. after you got done waiting to punch up your cards, you submitted your "job" to the computer center staff (does that count as "file-sharing"?), and had to wait until they ran it.
when teletype terminals came in (connected to a control data 6600 mainframe), i remember that they had unlimited cpu utilization time, until i ran a prime number generator for one day that used up over 60 minutes of cpu time. the next day, they capped cpu usage at 10 seconds/session (remember that most programs would execute fully in fractions of a second).
absolutely agree. ANTHRO is your answer, if you have the money. I have two of their "carts". they are infinitely adjustable/customizable, you can add on levels, side carts, undertables, etc. These tables are the "Aeron" of computer tables. gets you ultra organized in as small a space as you wish, and portable to boot (wheels, different sizes depending on flooring material!) highly recommended. built like a tank, good looking, well thought out and engineered.
Just remember Tuna's Rule: All computers work at the same speed when they are turned off.
Nasa should hold a national lottery for a ticket to ride the shuttle..solves their funding problems, good PR as well, as everyone regardless of income gets a chance to "ride" if they buy a ticket.