I guess I would distinguish between massively in debt and being poor. Donald Trump and Bernie Ebbers are massively in debt, but I wouldn't describe them as poor. To be sure, massive debt is a major source of stress and anxiety, but most of the physicians I have known have known have had sufficient cash flow even when just starting out to make their debt payments, cover the necessities of life, and even a few of the luxuries. In my view being poor means not being able to send your kids to the dentist, depending on food stamps to feed your family, and having to pay full fare on the bus to work because you can't come up with enough cash to buy a monthly pass.
The main complaint I've heard from doctors has not been that they aren't paid well, but that they aren't able to do the work they entered medicine to do, i.e. more of their time goes to filling out insurance and medicare forms and less to patient care.
Yes there are bad doctors... but they are few... and are far outnumbered by the honest, hard-working, give-a-damn doctors
No question of this. I absolutely agree.
Yes, I realize it's not good for the patients that a "bad" doctor continues to practice
"Not good" is a euphanism. It can be lethal.
Doctors do police themselves to a degree...
I would suggest that we trade tort law reform for much more stringent self-policing by physicians. Since we patients cannot attend M&M, and most medical board hearings are closed, our means of evaluating the competency of physicians is very limted. We can only seek remedies to our injuries after the fact, and that is what has led to the current malpractice mess. I know that it can be very hard to accuse a collegue of incompetence, but as I believe you say elsewhere, physicians are used to making hard choices.
I am not a doctor, but some of my dearest friends are doctors and dentists. Although all of them feel harried by the press of work, they are all doing quite well financially. Still, this is subjective, let's look at the numbers.
According to the 2000 occupational survey by the US Dept. of Labor the mean annual salary of a family practice physician in the U.S. is $107,780. Note that dentists and the various flavors of physicians have the highest mean annual salaries of all the listed occupations, beating out even lawyers and CEOs.
I couldn't find national figures, but in Washington state a family practice physician who doesn't deliver babies pays an average of $10,000 a year in malpractice insurance. I recognize that the hours are long, and the responsility great, but this is still not a bad living. Bear in mind that other professions also have professional expenses and long hours.
There is a crisis in malpractice coverage of several important specialites (1/6th of all the neurosurgeons in Seattle lost their coverage last week), but general whining about how poor physicians are is not going to fly.
So we shouldn't pursue remedies through the courts, and we shouldn't ask doctors to be self-policing, does that mean we should just accept that some doctors will practice sub-standard medicine and lump it? As many have noted one of the problems with the tort system is that it requires lay people to evaluate technical medical questions. I don't see any alternative to at least some degree of self-policing by physicians since they are the ones best able to judge the technical issues involved.
At least as far as software is concerned, the PUBLIC EXPECTS BUGS and doesn't try to sue you out of existence when your program crashes
And that is entirely a good thing? Actually I think you'll find that when software touches on life and death issues it is just as subject to suit.
Well, if the choice is between millions of people dying and hundreds of thousands dying for the want of drugs, then maybe we should consider whether the patent system for pharmaceuticals is broken as designed.
I think this is exactly the choice that exists, but that it is hardly the fault of the patent system or the pharmaceutical companies. It's because we don't live in the garden of Eden. The world is filled with awful diseases, and cures for many of them can only be found by supporting hundreds of thousands of people doing medical research. You may choose to support them by using the power of the state to tax its citizens, or by letting capitalists risk their capital, but either way you've got to fork out a lot of resources, and both methods have nasty drawbacks.
It's all very well to mutter plattitudes about the lives at stake being above petty economic concerns, but it seems to me that it is always someone else who is being asked to make the economic sacrifice. What resources have you donated to the quest for life-saving drugs? (I don't intend a personal attack by that question, it applies equally well to me). Should the unions be forced to donate their pension funds rather then invest them with the expectation of a profit? Should the physicians and scientists donate their time? How about the dishwashers and janitors?
There's a heavy anti-IP slant on Slashdot, and that's a shame
I suspect many Slashdot readers are prejudiced by their involvement with software. Software development has a low cost of entry. The situation is very different in other industries, say for example biotech. Even if the inventor is motivated solely by the thrill of discovery, and the prospect of helping humankind, it is very hard to find someone who is willing to sterilize glassware or Xerox human trials reports, 8 hours a day for five years for free. Then there are the costs of reagents, cold rooms, instrumentation etc. Not cheap at all, so the only way it get done is by government fiat, or the prospect of a return on investment through IP rights.
Before patents the only means of recouping your research investment was keeping your knowledge a trade secret. Trade secrets are laughable in software since anyone can disassemble your code, but they can be a real obstacle in other industries. Taking the example again of biotech, having a sample of the final product does not reveal the synthetic pathway used to build it. Offering a limited monopoly in exchange for being required to reveal your process seem to me a reasonable trade.
This isnâ(TM)t to say that there arenâ(TM)t huge problems in our current patent system, but I think Slashdot readers are too prone to assume that their experience in software generalizes to other industries.
I agree. This is my favorite sci-fi novel bar none, and one of my favorite novels in any genre. The fate of the priest in the first pilgrim's tale still scares the bejeebers out of me.
Dan Simmons is coming out with a new novel this summer: a sci-fi treatment of the Illiad called "Illium"
Meaning is way too strong a word, but I thought that the philisophical hand waving about the nature of reality was necessary to explain how everybody had come to be moving around a computer simulation where super powers were theirs for the asking.
Consider the awful Disney movie "Tron" by comparison. Same basic plot, but no real motivation for how the characters came to be in the computer. I am way more willing to beleive that I am really living in a tank of jello with wires running into my head then to believe that a laser scanner can turn me into a computer program. Bring on the super powers.
I went to the Matrix expecting a 90's version of TRON, and was thrilled to see they had the decency to cover the naked premise with a philisophical fig leaf.
I will go see almost any piece of junk that Hollywood puts out. However, I was very pleasantly suprized when I saw "The Matrix". I had expected something like "Tron", but when Neo took the red pill and was delivered into the "real world". I thought "Holy cow, the writers must have read Stanislaw Lem's "The Futurological Congresses!". So I went for the eye candy buy stayed for the homages to Lem and Gibson.
IMHO the Matrix movies are not serious discussions of the nature of reality and free will. That would be too didactic. However, I think that the movies use the existance of those philisophical questions to acheive the suspension of disbelief needed for good story telling. That is why I put the Matrix movies a cut above most action movies which depend on unexplained, unmovtivated, miraculous events so they can get to the chase scene as quickly as possible (the above mentioned Tron being a heinous example).
Re:Doctors are NOT trained like engineers
on
Build Your Own ECG
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· Score: 2, Insightful
But aren't you comparing bad doctors to good engineers? On the one hand bridges do collapse and chemical plants do explode, and lots of people have died because of engineering failures. And on the other hand many doctors do make difficult diagnosis and perform succesful treatments.
I'm curious though, if a surgeon had saved your uncle from loss of mobility and preserved his ability to make an income would he have paid him more then 3/4 of a million for the procedure?
It stikes me that there is a very odd asymmetry between what we say medical procedures are worth, and how we assess dammages if they go wrong, eg a doctor who saves a limb is paid $25k while a doctor who through a mistake causes a limb to be lost has to pay $500k.
I've heard that mainframe shops take a very strict attitude towards unexpected downtime. I've heard a couple "friend of friend" stories about admins being fired on the spot when a system crashed. Any truth to this?
I'm currently working on an MS in Applied Math and 1/3 of the students are women. When I was getting my B.S. 25 years ago there might have been 1 woman in an upper division math class of 20 students. This is huge change and I think it lends some credence to the notion that math was seen as a "boy's club"
Hmm. I could understand your reaction if they were adding operator overloading, but assert seems pretty benign. Can you give an example of a confusing use of assert?
My personal belief is that all the garbage about not needing to know how the machine works because you're writing in is simply an excuse for laziness or simple lack of interest.
I think we can all agree that more knowlege is better then less knowlege, but I think your are failing to take into account the 'guns vs butter' tradeoffs of education and how diverse the tools and goals of computer programming have become.
I am currently working in bioinformatics. Much of the work in bioinformatics is done in perl and java. For a worker in this field a thourough knowledge of algorithms and the abstractions of those languages is going to deliver a much greater benefit then knowledge of any particular machine architecure.
To put the matter concretely: I have two books on my desk, "Inner Loops", a guide to optimizing code for the x86 architecture, and "Computational Molecular Biology" a survey of algorithms used in bioinformatics. It is going to take me several months to work through either of them. Which do you think will provide the most benefit to my work? If I was writing web servers rather then bioinformatics tools do you think I would give a different answer?
If a programmer has never done assembly, it says something about their lack of interest in programming
All it really says is that their interest in programming is not like your interest in programming. Computer programming has become a huge field, and different sub-fields require interests and different skill sets. Being able to write a bullet-proof device driver in C or assembler does not translate to being able to write efficient SQL and visa versa.
As an example, I currently work in bioinformatics. Much of the work in bioinformatics is being done in java or perl, and algorithms are of far more concern then machine architecture. I would be much more interested in seeing candidates who had a solid grasp of the abstractions of those languages and used their free time to study biology or graph theory.
This is an absurdly narrow view of computer programming. While appropriate to some types of software projects it would be entirely wrong for others.
Much of what computer science has accomplished in the last 50 years has been to hide the hardware behind abstractions more suited to the tasks at hand. If I'm running a team bulding a web application I'm going to be looking for folks who really understand user interfaces, HTTP, TCP/IP, and security issues. Experience in assembly is not necessiarily going to shed a lot of light on their knowlege in these areas. One of the sharpest guys I ever worked with was a trade school graduate and an absolute wizard with SQL. He had no knowlege of processor architechture. I had to explain floating point number representation to him. However, he had totally internalized the relational database model, and he could crank out efficient queries in minutes that it took me days to understand.
If I was writing a database engine I would want people who really understood the low-level hardware envirnoment. But if I writing an applications that uses a database engine I'll happily trade that low level knowledge for someone who really understands the abstractions of the engine.
Well, forone thing beavers have built dams the same way for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. Changes in scale and method of beaver dams take place on evolutionary time scales. Ecosystems can adapt
Ecosystems can adapt, but sometimes the way they adapt is by shedding thousands of species. Three billion years ago the dominant life forms on earth were variations on anerobic bacteria. Then organisms appeared that excreted oxygen and began spewing out what was a deadly poison to most of the existing ecosystem. Thousands of species disappeared in a very short time and the world was forever changed. Of course nobody mourns this mass extinction because most of us are oxygen metabolizers now.
Your second point is one I can whole heartedly agree with. We would be foolish beyond comprehension to so change our environment that it can no longer support us. However, I think we should be honest and admit that our motivation is self interest, not a theological obligation to preserve the ecosystem status quo. To prefer old growth douglas fir to lodgepole pine or spotted owls to crows is a human judgement, not a law of nature.
SCID is popularly known as "bubble boy syndrome". Children with this syndome have essentially no immune response and usually die of massive infection a year or two after birth. It caught the popular eye a couple of decades ago when a boy suffering from this disease was kept alive for 12 years by raising him in a sterile environment. I believe the standard treatment for SCID now is a bone marrow transplant. I don't know the success rate for bone marrow transplants but they are certainly no piece of cake. In some cases I think they can also be treated with an enzyme extracted from cow marrow (sort of like insulin for diabetics or clotting factor for hemophilliacs).
It turns out that a quarter of SCID cases are due to a mutation of the gene for the enzyme adenosine deaminase, thus the interest in treating with gene therapy. The idea being that you splice a good copy of the gene into a retro virus, extract stems cells from the patient's bone marrow, infect the stem cells with the virus, the virus inserts itself along with the good copy of the gene into the patient's genome, where it starts making the needed enzyme, inject the stem cells back into the patient, where they start dividing and producing functional white blood cells. I believe all nine of the children in the French study developed fully functional immune systems! That is a truly astounding result. The parents and the doctors were elated.
Unfortunately two of the children later developed leukimia like symptoms. I believe they are both responding to chemotherapy, but trials have halted until the side-effect is better understood. The current guess is that we don't have any control over where the virus inserts itself in the genome and it may turn out the particular virus that was used has an unfortunate tendency to plunk itself down in a region that regulates cell divsion. This is a terrible disease and if the leukima can be controlled it may still turn out that gene therapy is the way to go, but it is still wildly experimental and so only appropriate to those in truly desperate straits.
Living and non-living are categories imposed by humans and not by a natural law. Categories like this are useful insofar as they provide insight into natural phenomena, but you should avoid taking them so seriously that you descend into theological hair-splitting. Some biologists count viruses as life becaus they can reproduce, other biologists count them as non-life because they don't have a metabolism. It is worthwhile keeping in mind the differences between a virus and say a bacteria, but don't get hung up on the label attached to them. That is largely a matter of fashion.
Gene therapy is NOT a standard treatment for anything. It is still experimental and has been shut down completely two or three times in the last decade because of unexpected deaths of patients. The only success of gene therapy to date has been a French study in which 9 children with SCID (Severe Combined Immune Deficiency) were succesfully treated with gene therapy. Even this study has been halted for now because two of the patients have developed leukemia-like symptoms.
Doubtless gene therapy has great promise, but it will be decades before it is a standard treatment.
You've really hit the nail on the head. In some contexts the SSN is used as an identifier but in other contexts it is used as a shared secret for authentication. It's not unlike using your user name as your password. I'm not sure a National ID card would help. People will still insist on the convenience of authenticating themselves over the phone so they'll just end up reading the national id number over the phone instead of the SSN. What is really required is a unique shared secret for everyone you conduct transactions with, or a national public key infrastructure. I don't think people will be willing to accept the complexity of either one.
I think the only thing that keeps this from being even more of a problem then it is, is that most people are relatively honest, and the perceived threat of criminal prosecution if you are caught.
Format, install, restore data/configuration/apps off tape backup
Loosing all the data modified since the last backup, which people may not thank you for.
Sometimes you're stuck, and its what you have to do, but isn't the whole purpose of a recovery console to avoid having to do a full system rebuild and restore because of some triffling problem like a bad sector or a forgotten password?
It is more complicated then that. Minor changes that cause major effects can be quite stable. Consider sickle-cell anemia. The most common form of sickle-cell is due to a single base change from an 'A' to a 'T'. This results in a single amino acid change in hemoglobin. This is about as small a genetic change as you can get, but it has a huge effect on the recipient.
If you get two copies of the "standard" gene, you are fine. If you get one copy of the standard gene and one copy of the variant you are fine. However, if you pick up two copies of the variant gene, you are subject to sickle cell crisis that are not only excruciatingly painful, but are sometimes life threatening.
It turns out that natural selection acts very slowly and incompletely on genetic variations that are only deleterious when you get two copies of the variant. In some sense a "bad" gene can hide out by tagging along with a "good" gene. In the case of sickle-cell, it also turns out that having just one copy of the variant confers resistance to malaria which is a very beneficial thing if you live in an area where malaria is common.
To anthropomorphize shamelessly, natural selection doesn't give a rip about individuals, and is perfectly willing to preserve potentially lethal genetic variations in the population as long as they provide a benefit or are neutral to the majority of the population.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I would distinguish between massively in debt and being poor. Donald Trump and Bernie Ebbers are massively in debt, but I wouldn't describe them as poor. To be sure, massive debt is a major source of stress and anxiety, but most of the physicians I have known have known have had sufficient cash flow even when just starting out to make their debt payments, cover the necessities of life, and even a few of the luxuries. In my view being poor means not being able to send your kids to the dentist, depending on food stamps to feed your family, and having to pay full fare on the bus to work because you can't come up with enough cash to buy a monthly pass.
The main complaint I've heard from doctors has not been that they aren't paid well, but that they aren't able to do the work they entered medicine to do, i.e. more of their time goes to filling out insurance and medicare forms and less to patient care.
No question of this. I absolutely agree.
"Not good" is a euphanism. It can be lethal.
I would suggest that we trade tort law reform for much more stringent self-policing by physicians. Since we patients cannot attend M&M, and most medical board hearings are closed, our means of evaluating the competency of physicians is very limted. We can only seek remedies to our injuries after the fact, and that is what has led to the current malpractice mess. I know that it can be very hard to accuse a collegue of incompetence, but as I believe you say elsewhere, physicians are used to making hard choices.
I am not a doctor, but some of my dearest friends are doctors and dentists. Although all of them feel harried by the press of work, they are all doing quite well financially. Still, this is subjective, let's look at the numbers.
According to the 2000 occupational survey by the US Dept. of Labor the mean annual salary of a family practice physician in the U.S. is $107,780. Note that dentists and the various flavors of physicians have the highest mean annual salaries of all the listed occupations, beating out even lawyers and CEOs.
I couldn't find national figures, but in Washington state a family practice physician who doesn't deliver babies pays an average of $10,000 a year in malpractice insurance. I recognize that the hours are long, and the responsility great, but this is still not a bad living. Bear in mind that other professions also have professional expenses and long hours.
There is a crisis in malpractice coverage of several important specialites (1/6th of all the neurosurgeons in Seattle lost their coverage last week), but general whining about how poor physicians are is not going to fly.
And that is entirely a good thing? Actually I think you'll find that when software touches on life and death issues it is just as subject to suit.
I think this is exactly the choice that exists, but that it is hardly the fault of the patent system or the pharmaceutical companies. It's because we don't live in the garden of Eden. The world is filled with awful diseases, and cures for many of them can only be found by supporting hundreds of thousands of people doing medical research. You may choose to support them by using the power of the state to tax its citizens, or by letting capitalists risk their capital, but either way you've got to fork out a lot of resources, and both methods have nasty drawbacks.
It's all very well to mutter plattitudes about the lives at stake being above petty economic concerns, but it seems to me that it is always someone else who is being asked to make the economic sacrifice. What resources have you donated to the quest for life-saving drugs? (I don't intend a personal attack by that question, it applies equally well to me). Should the unions be forced to donate their pension funds rather then invest them with the expectation of a profit? Should the physicians and scientists donate their time? How about the dishwashers and janitors?
I suspect many Slashdot readers are prejudiced by their involvement with software. Software development has a low cost of entry. The situation is very different in other industries, say for example biotech. Even if the inventor is motivated solely by the thrill of discovery, and the prospect of helping humankind, it is very hard to find someone who is willing to sterilize glassware or Xerox human trials reports, 8 hours a day for five years for free. Then there are the costs of reagents, cold rooms, instrumentation etc. Not cheap at all, so the only way it get done is by government fiat, or the prospect of a return on investment through IP rights.
Before patents the only means of recouping your research investment was keeping your knowledge a trade secret. Trade secrets are laughable in software since anyone can disassemble your code, but they can be a real obstacle in other industries. Taking the example again of biotech, having a sample of the final product does not reveal the synthetic pathway used to build it. Offering a limited monopoly in exchange for being required to reveal your process seem to me a reasonable trade.
This isnâ(TM)t to say that there arenâ(TM)t huge problems in our current patent system, but I think Slashdot readers are too prone to assume that their experience in software generalizes to other industries.
I agree. This is my favorite sci-fi novel bar none, and one of my favorite novels in any genre. The fate of the priest in the first pilgrim's tale still scares the bejeebers out of me.
Dan Simmons is coming out with a new novel this summer: a sci-fi treatment of the Illiad called "Illium"
Meaning is way too strong a word, but I thought that the philisophical hand waving about the nature of reality was necessary to explain how everybody had come to be moving around a computer simulation where super powers were theirs for the asking.
Consider the awful Disney movie "Tron" by comparison. Same basic plot, but no real motivation for how the characters came to be in the computer. I am way more willing to beleive that I am really living in a tank of jello with wires running into my head then to believe that a laser scanner can turn me into a computer program. Bring on the super powers.
I went to the Matrix expecting a 90's version of TRON, and was thrilled to see they had the decency to cover the naked premise with a philisophical fig leaf.
I will go see almost any piece of junk that Hollywood puts out. However, I was very pleasantly suprized when I saw "The Matrix". I had expected something like "Tron", but when Neo took the red pill and was delivered into the "real world". I thought "Holy cow, the writers must have read Stanislaw Lem's "The Futurological Congresses!". So I went for the eye candy buy stayed for the homages to Lem and Gibson.
IMHO the Matrix movies are not serious discussions of the nature of reality and free will. That would be too didactic. However, I think that the movies use the existance of those philisophical questions to acheive the suspension of disbelief needed for good story telling. That is why I put the Matrix movies a cut above most action movies which depend on unexplained, unmovtivated, miraculous events so they can get to the chase scene as quickly as possible (the above mentioned Tron being a heinous example).
But aren't you comparing bad doctors to good engineers? On the one hand bridges do collapse and chemical plants do explode, and lots of people have died because of engineering failures. And on the other hand many doctors do make difficult diagnosis and perform succesful treatments.
I'm curious though, if a surgeon had saved your uncle from loss of mobility and preserved his ability to make an income would he have paid him more then 3/4 of a million for the procedure?
It stikes me that there is a very odd asymmetry between what we say medical procedures are worth, and how we assess dammages if they go wrong, eg a doctor who saves a limb is paid $25k while a doctor who through a mistake causes a limb to be lost has to pay $500k.
I've heard that mainframe shops take a very strict attitude towards unexpected downtime. I've heard a couple "friend of friend" stories about admins being fired on the spot when a system crashed. Any truth to this?
I'm currently working on an MS in Applied Math and 1/3 of the students are women. When I was getting my B.S. 25 years ago there might have been 1 woman in an upper division math class of 20 students. This is huge change and I think it lends some credence to the notion that math was seen as a "boy's club"
Hmm. I could understand your reaction if they were adding operator overloading, but assert seems pretty benign. Can you give an example of a confusing use of assert?
I think we can all agree that more knowlege is better then less knowlege, but I think your are failing to take into account the 'guns vs butter' tradeoffs of education and how diverse the tools and goals of computer programming have become.
I am currently working in bioinformatics. Much of the work in bioinformatics is done in perl and java. For a worker in this field a thourough knowledge of algorithms and the abstractions of those languages is going to deliver a much greater benefit then knowledge of any particular machine architecure.
To put the matter concretely: I have two books on my desk, "Inner Loops", a guide to optimizing code for the x86 architecture, and "Computational Molecular Biology" a survey of algorithms used in bioinformatics. It is going to take me several months to work through either of them. Which do you think will provide the most benefit to my work? If I was writing web servers rather then bioinformatics tools do you think I would give a different answer?
All it really says is that their interest in programming is not like your interest in programming. Computer programming has become a huge field, and different sub-fields require interests and different skill sets. Being able to write a bullet-proof device driver in C or assembler does not translate to being able to write efficient SQL and visa versa.
As an example, I currently work in bioinformatics. Much of the work in bioinformatics is being done in java or perl, and algorithms are of far more concern then machine architecture. I would be much more interested in seeing candidates who had a solid grasp of the abstractions of those languages and used their free time to study biology or graph theory.
This is an absurdly narrow view of computer programming. While appropriate to some types of software projects it would be entirely wrong for others.
Much of what computer science has accomplished in the last 50 years has been to hide the hardware behind abstractions more suited to the tasks at hand. If I'm running a team bulding a web application I'm going to be looking for folks who really understand user interfaces, HTTP, TCP/IP, and security issues. Experience in assembly is not necessiarily going to shed a lot of light on their knowlege in these areas. One of the sharpest guys I ever worked with was a trade school graduate and an absolute wizard with SQL. He had no knowlege of processor architechture. I had to explain floating point number representation to him. However, he had totally internalized the relational database model, and he could crank out efficient queries in minutes that it took me days to understand.
If I was writing a database engine I would want people who really understood the low-level hardware envirnoment. But if I writing an applications that uses a database engine I'll happily trade that low level knowledge for someone who really understands the abstractions of the engine.
Ecosystems can adapt, but sometimes the way they adapt is by shedding thousands of species. Three billion years ago the dominant life forms on earth were variations on anerobic bacteria. Then organisms appeared that excreted oxygen and began spewing out what was a deadly poison to most of the existing ecosystem. Thousands of species disappeared in a very short time and the world was forever changed. Of course nobody mourns this mass extinction because most of us are oxygen metabolizers now.
Your second point is one I can whole heartedly agree with. We would be foolish beyond comprehension to so change our environment that it can no longer support us. However, I think we should be honest and admit that our motivation is self interest, not a theological obligation to preserve the ecosystem status quo. To prefer old growth douglas fir to lodgepole pine or spotted owls to crows is a human judgement, not a law of nature.
SCID is popularly known as "bubble boy syndrome". Children with this syndome have essentially no immune response and usually die of massive infection a year or two after birth. It caught the popular eye a couple of decades ago when a boy suffering from this disease was kept alive for 12 years by raising him in a sterile environment. I believe the standard treatment for SCID now is a bone marrow transplant. I don't know the success rate for bone marrow transplants but they are certainly no piece of cake. In some cases I think they can also be treated with an enzyme extracted from cow marrow (sort of like insulin for diabetics or clotting factor for hemophilliacs).
It turns out that a quarter of SCID cases are due to a mutation of the gene for the enzyme adenosine deaminase, thus the interest in treating with gene therapy. The idea being that you splice a good copy of the gene into a retro virus, extract stems cells from the patient's bone marrow, infect the stem cells with the virus, the virus inserts itself along with the good copy of the gene into the patient's genome, where it starts making the needed enzyme, inject the stem cells back into the patient, where they start dividing and producing functional white blood cells. I believe all nine of the children in the French study developed fully functional immune systems! That is a truly astounding result. The parents and the doctors were elated.
Unfortunately two of the children later developed leukimia like symptoms. I believe they are both responding to chemotherapy, but trials have halted until the side-effect is better understood. The current guess is that we don't have any control over where the virus inserts itself in the genome and it may turn out the particular virus that was used has an unfortunate tendency to plunk itself down in a region that regulates cell divsion. This is a terrible disease and if the leukima can be controlled it may still turn out that gene therapy is the way to go, but it is still wildly experimental and so only appropriate to those in truly desperate straits.
Living and non-living are categories imposed by humans and not by a natural law. Categories like this are useful insofar as they provide insight into natural phenomena, but you should avoid taking them so seriously that you descend into theological hair-splitting. Some biologists count viruses as life becaus they can reproduce, other biologists count them as non-life because they don't have a metabolism. It is worthwhile keeping in mind the differences between a virus and say a bacteria, but don't get hung up on the label attached to them. That is largely a matter of fashion.
Gene therapy is NOT a standard treatment for anything. It is still experimental and has been shut down completely two or three times in the last decade because of unexpected deaths of patients. The only success of gene therapy to date has been a French study in which 9 children with SCID (Severe Combined Immune Deficiency) were succesfully treated with gene therapy. Even this study has been halted for now because two of the patients have developed leukemia-like symptoms.
Doubtless gene therapy has great promise, but it will be decades before it is a standard treatment.
You've really hit the nail on the head. In some contexts the SSN is used as an identifier but in other contexts it is used as a shared secret for authentication. It's not unlike using your user name as your password. I'm not sure a National ID card would help. People will still insist on the convenience of authenticating themselves over the phone so they'll just end up reading the national id number over the phone instead of the SSN. What is really required is a unique shared secret for everyone you conduct transactions with, or a national public key infrastructure. I don't think people will be willing to accept the complexity of either one.
I think the only thing that keeps this from being even more of a problem then it is, is that most people are relatively honest, and the perceived threat of criminal prosecution if you are caught.
Loosing all the data modified since the last backup, which people may not thank you for.
Sometimes you're stuck, and its what you have to do, but isn't the whole purpose of a recovery console to avoid having to do a full system rebuild and restore because of some triffling problem like a bad sector or a forgotten password?
It is more complicated then that. Minor changes that cause major effects can be quite stable. Consider sickle-cell anemia. The most common form of sickle-cell is due to a single base change from an 'A' to a 'T'. This results in a single amino acid change in hemoglobin. This is about as small a genetic change as you can get, but it has a huge effect on the recipient.
If you get two copies of the "standard" gene, you are fine. If you get one copy of the standard gene and one copy of the variant you are fine. However, if you pick up two copies of the variant gene, you are subject to sickle cell crisis that are not only excruciatingly painful, but are sometimes life threatening.
It turns out that natural selection acts very slowly and incompletely on genetic variations that are only deleterious when you get two copies of the variant. In some sense a "bad" gene can hide out by tagging along with a "good" gene. In the case of sickle-cell, it also turns out that having just one copy of the variant confers resistance to malaria which is a very beneficial thing if you live in an area where malaria is common.
To anthropomorphize shamelessly, natural selection doesn't give a rip about individuals, and is perfectly willing to preserve potentially lethal genetic variations in the population as long as they provide a benefit or are neutral to the majority of the population.