This is short-sighted thinking. Sure, they make a lot in 6 months, a year, maybe two years. But then something goes horribly wrong (in their eyes), and shit starts to fall apart.
Yup - as pointed out in the article metrics can cause myopia. I remember going to Six Sigma training and the emphasis was on distilling any process improvement into a set of maybe 5-6 measures at most that you'll aim to optimize or control. However, in the real world sometimes your ability to make a product (and therefore money) could (gasp!) depend on more than 6 things. In such a case you end up with one project after another micro-optimizing some attributes at the risk of reducing the performance of the whole. After a few years and dozens of these projects, suddenly your process starts failing left and right seemingly for completely unrelated causes. So many things have been changed that what was a non-optimal but controlled situation is now completely out of control.
The thing is, I believe that stuff like Six Sigma is fundamentally sound. The problem is that PHB-types like to translate good process control into a single powerpoint slide that you can present to an executive. A process with 50 measures doesn't make for a good slide, and invites questions like 'how expensive are all these measures anyway?" However, if you're trying to improve something like "patient outcomes in a hospital" or "reliability of air traffic control systems" or anything more than turning screws out of a lathe then sometimes you have to embrace the fact that what you're doing only works right because lots of people care, not because it is easy.
I dunno, I'm a paramedic, and the only metric I've ever been judged by is the number of patients I kill (Still 0!). Note, that's not the same thing as the number of patients I fail to save.
So, it is better to avoid saving 100 people if it increases the risk of killing one of them? Sometimes these kinds of measures of quality create perverse incentives.
At my workplace quality is often measured by the pound - of paperwork, that is. The problem with this is that the decision to fix a bug or not usually rests on the cost/benefits, and the cost is greatly influenced by the number of pounds of paperwork required. So, measures designed to improve "quality" by this measure drive up costs and mean that we decide to fix fewer bugs. So, quality goes down when we try to raise it.
I could easily see the same thing happening in the medical profession where "do no harm" translates in practice into "do no good either." In fact, for somebody graded purely on the number of mistakes they commit their best strategy is to do nothing at all.
How on android can you actually configure the phone to direct all traffic through the VPN? Every time I've tried it the phone won't make the VPN the default route, so internet traffic goes out in the clear...
In the corporate world they also have companies behind those expensive machines that can write a proper driver (when forced to).
Uh, clearly you've never owned one of those high-end machines. It is pretty common for them not to receive long-term support, since the vendor wants you to buy a new one, and the people who buy those machines rarely have any IT background and ask questions in advance like "how long will you support the OS?"
In the corporate world they also have bosses who will say "Why upgrade to X? Our Y already works, why spend $Z?". XP will get security updates until April of 2014.
Yup - and we'd be running XP on such a machine until around then. However, what if the machine still isn't ready for replacement then? If you want it on the network then there are a lot of issues with not upgrading the OS.
3) Can't be run on a locked-down 32-bit system past April, 2014 because of security FUD
Well, we've certainly taken this approach for our NT-based machines. However, this is really not a great position to be in. Good security means defense in depth, and you just don't have that when you're running an OS that hasn't been patched in 10 years. The world's greatest perimeter firewall won't help you if somebody plugs a flash drive into the thing.
But, you've actually made my point for me in some sense - the reason that XP is supported until April 2014 is because MS does bend over backwards to provide long-term support for their OSes, and APIs. Why would a company drop 32-bit support if they're willing to support a product for almost 15 years in the first place?
I'm sure they'll drop 32-bit at some point, but I can't imagine that it costs them a huge amount to keep it as an option, and as long as the benefits outweigh the costs they'll do it - even if it makes the purists cringe. MS has never done anything for the purists - if you could cram 4GB of RAM onto an old 25MHz 486SX motherboard I wouldn't be surprised if Vista booted just fine on it (eventually), even without the floating point instruction set (I have to admit I'm suddenly morbidly curious).
Sure, on my desktop at home I've been running 64-bit linux since the socket 754 days. However, at work around the same time I was still nursing a VAX along to the graveyard. That's just the nature of long-term capital investments.
You don't need to determine the value of information to benefit from it. Sure, I think that citations are a good thing and they should be added. However, I was able to appreciate the point you were trying to make without your having referenced a series of studies on the relative value of posting more information without references vs less information with a long series of footnotes.
In any case, I'd say a majority of Wikipedia editors are likely to agree with you, which is why everybody and their uncle is pointing out why they don't bother contributing.
The better option would have been to deny users the choice and only offer 64-bit builds of Vista and 7. "But it doesn't work with my 14 year old scanner!!!" Then keep using Windows XP?
The reason Windows is so popular in the corporate world is because they don't do stuff like what you suggest. You're thinking about a $50 scanner, but maybe in the corporate world they have 300 $5000 multi-function devices. Or, maybe they have 100 $100k mass spectrometers. Or, maybe they've got a $15M MRI machine. If your vendor doesn't release new drivers then you can't upgrade your OS. Sure, you can run XP for a while, but not forever if you want security patches. Do you really want to throw away a $15M MRI machine that works fine because your OS isn't getting security updates any longer?
Microsoft has generally supported their OS FAR longer than just about anybody else, and this is one of the reasons that they're so hard to displace. In the linux world we call "long term support" a few years. Microsoft still supports XP, and that was out not long after Y2K. Think about what you were doing around Y2K...
Sure, but my point is that simply not having references shouldn't be grounds to remove material. The reason for removing material should be that it is wrong. Now, references are a good way to settle any debates.
However, I see no harm in letting an article start out light on references and gain them over time, rather than squashing contributions because they're not at publication quality from the beginning.
Sure - citation that Merck did the Phase III trials: The FUTURE II Study Group (May 2007). "Quadrivalent vaccine against human papillomavirus to prevent high-grade cervical lesions". The New England Journal of Medicine 356 (19): 1915–27. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa061741. PMID 17494925. Retrieved 2009-11-11. (From Wikipedia)
The reality is that almost all successful drugs are the result of some level of research and development from any number of organizations. HPV was actually more of a case of this than is typical. When drugs are licensed the financial compensation tends to be based on how far the various partners took the compound on their own. Even if all a company does is Phase III trials and the regulatory applications they are incurring a huge amount of cost, and usually most of the risk as well. After all, if the HPV vaccine was rejected by reguatory agencies then the companies who collected their license payments wouldn't have to return them, and that happens all the time.
In any case, I do support basic reforms like reigning in patent lifetimes (especially for incremental improvements), changing the way costs are bourne by patients, and so on. I'm fine with letting government hold the patents (freely licensing them), and instead just using a fee-for-service model to pay industry. There are a lot of potential ways to improve the system. However, the current system just can't work if there isn't significant opportunity for profit since it involves a lot of up-front risk-taking.
If the knowledge condensed in the Wikipedia article can't be supported by any references, no one will be able to acquire the knowledge to take care of the article again.
Are you suggesting that if I post an article on glycolysis on Wikipedia and don't include references, that there is a risk that human kind might lose the knowledge of glycolysis and we might have to re-discover it to edit the article?
Nothing wrong with references and discussing anything that is controversial and not referenced. However, suggesting that the ONLY way people can edit articles is by reading the already-cited references seems a bit extreme.
I don't think it is a conspiracy or anything like that. I think that the level of pain required to get anything done has reached a point where contribution is impossible unless:
1. You're willing to pay astroturfers to navigate the process. If you're willing to pay me $100/hr for a few weeks I don't mind moderating 37 debates/votes and escalating 12 points to the arbitration committee, and backing up every three word change up with 12 pages on the discussion tab with WP:ALPHABETSOUP being every 5th word.
2. You are in a position of power within wikipedia, like you're a sysadmin or on the arbitration committee or whatever. That hasn't stopped Jimbo's articles from getting nominated for deletion, but it helps a great deal.
3. You're completely insane and care SO much about getting your three words changed that you're willing to do all that nonsense without being paid for it. In turn, when somebody else wants to change three words you become the champion of the cause of fighting it until they've done the same.
Actually, nothing puzzles me more about the medical system than the fact that teeth are treated differently than everything else. Obviously there is history at work here.
Look, I can understand not having ordinary medical insurance cover somebody wanting to have their teeth whitened, or maybe even having it cleaned. However, when somebody breaks a tooth how is that different from breaking a bone? You're talking about pain and potential permanent injury to some part of your body.
I know somebody whose kid needed serious orthodontics work. We're not talking about a cosmetic gap in the teeth - we're talking about pulling several teeth and straightening others out (well, the extra teeth fell out on their own mostly with the corrections). Now, we treat ingrown toenails under medical insurance - why not seriously out-of-whack teeth (where we're talking about long-term pain and damage if they aren't fixed).
Cosmetic surgery is one thing, but there is no reason that serious dental problems should be treated in the way that they are.
Citation please? For such a popular drug info online is relatively hard to find, but as best as I can tell Merck performed the Phase III clinical trials on Gardasil. At least, that is what Wikipedia states. If you have references to large-scale trials performed by anybody else I'm certainly interested.
Note that I'm referring to large-scale trials. Lots of companies do Phase I/II trials - they aren't terribly expensive (especially in Phase I - where you just need a dozen healthy guys and you don't need to pay their doctors). Phase III is where the trials cost tens of millions of dollars easily - with thousands of patients spanning a year or two with a very uncertain outcome.
Studies have shown that even very careful workers make transcription errors from time to time. Being careful or smart isn't adequate to prevent them. The only thing that really does work is having a process that checks for errors, and ensuring that the number of transcriptions is minimized (often using computer systems). In some health-related fields such processes are required by law.
A hospital in a first-world nation that isn't computerized will have adequate staff to implement these kinds of processes, and training on them. A hospital in a first-world nation that is computerized won't - and if it has to implement manual processes in an emergency it will make more mistakes. That isn't because people are dumb - it is because they are not operating in the manner in which they are accustomed.
If somebody threw you in an ER in a hospital that made extensive use of computers you'd look pretty "stupid" as well - you'd have no idea where to find information you need and you'd be the slowest person in the hospital. That doesn't reflect on your intelligence - just that you are out of your element.
At work we use lots of computer systems in a regulated industry. We always talk about what to do when systems are down, but I think the reality is that unless they were down for more than a week most people would just try to work on other things or let work come to a halt. Things like paper forms don't exist any longer, and where we used to have armies of people to scan and file required paperwork we might now have one or two since the volume of paper is so much lower. If people had to work on paper it would probably take them a day or two just to find some acid-free paper to write on, and once they're done chances are the paper would sit in their drawers until the building burns down because nobody would know what to do with it, despite the company being legally required to be able to produce it.
Could a company use computers but maintain the ability to work without them? Sure. However, such a thing costs money, and if your competitors aren't preparing for doomsday then chances are you'll be out of business before doomsday actually arrives.
The issue is liability. For good reason there are a lot of regulations around medical devices, but often in the end these regulations can conspire to make things worse.
The regulations say that you need to prove that your device works as intended. That means strict configuration control. That means testing before making changes, and tons of paperwork. Lots of testing and paperwork before making changes isn't that compatible with patch Tuesday.
Now, the guy selling the X-Ray machine gets $200k for selling you an X-Ray machine. They don't make much money testing its software every month when MS comes out with another patch. The easiest option for them is to certify it as it originally shipped and tell you that any changes are on you.
So, now the hospital can either leave the machine alone, or THEY incur all the costs on patch Tuesday.
Then the question comes up of who to sue every time a patient dies. The question really isn't what caused the patient to die - the question is who has money and can be shown to have violated some regulation who had anything to do with the patient's care. So, following the process is critical to minimizing the cost of litigation.
I can imagine that people working in that field could get quite fatalistic about all of it. Yup, it sucks, and yup, it kills more people than it should - but hey, my part of the process is being run by the book so go look elsewhere to fire somebody. In the end you can't lose your job because the system sucks, but you can easily lose it if you didn't fill out form 123A in triplicate while the virus was busy propagating.
This shows hospitals would rather close than treat someone for free.
While I agree that this is backwards, can we possibly envision a society where important things like medical care actually are funded adequately, and where we don't spend such a huge amount of money on billing?
It might just be possible to spend less per patient to treat them, to have enough doctors to cover everybody, and to find some equitable way to pay for it all without there being a class of people who have to pay 10x as much for the same care, except for the 80% of time they just go bankrupt and pay 1% of the bill (after they're done losing their homes/etc).
There isn't a magic bullet that will cure the US healthcare system, but there are a bazillion ways to improve it...
Carbon was from the OS 9 days - it needed to die, and it was deprecated really early in OS X's life.
I dunno. I can probably install calculator from windows 3.0 on a 64-bit edition of windows, and I bet it will work just fine. I wouldn't be surprised if calculator from windows 2 works.
For all its flaws - Microsoft almost never gets rid of an AI. You can call that a flaw, but it is a flaw that sells well in the enterprise market. It was only in the last 8 years that my employer really got rid of the last of their 3270 applications. Sure, it is ancient, but it worked and while lots of money was being spent on software development it was nice that they didn't have to spend it on a working app just because it was old.
Ten year old software is an eternity in the consumer market, which Apple understands well. Ten year old software really is just getting started in the enterprise market. If you spend $75M on an ERP system you bet that you're going to not want to replace it every five years. Why do you think half the companies out there are still running IE6?
Microsoft also offers security updates on an OS ten years after it was sold. Sure, they don't sell as many Vista upgrades that way, but it does mean that they get to collect their $30 or whatever every time a company buys a computer.
Microsoft learned a long time ago that the best way to get enterprise business is to be able to say "yes" to every line in an RFP.
Yup - a few Saturdays ago I made an emergency call to a doctor (on a holiday weekend no less) and after discussion brought a urine sample to a hospital over a suspected urinary tract infection.
Now, for an ordinary person it might not have been the right call, but in this case the person it concerned had been in the hospital intensive care unit three times (a week each) with sepsis that originated in urinary tract infections. It has been kept under control for a few years now with vigilance and a bottle of antibiotics in the cabinet at all times. While an average person could probably put up with it for a few days that would be taking a risk of serious escalation in this particular case.
The doctor understood this, and being a Saturday there aren't a lot of options when you have a container full of urine that either is going to get tested or spoil. The testing was necessary since obviously the doctors like staying on top of what is going on, and beyond that they can't legally be writing prescriptions for antibiotics without any kind of evidence that the patient needs them.
Plus, if a patient is suffering I just don't see the value in making them wait several days for an office appointment. One of my pet-peeves with the medical system in general is that it largely runs on a M-F 9-5 basis. When aforementioned patient has been in the hospital or other acute therapy providers on a weekend they basically just keep you in a holding pattern with no real progression in care unless the therapy you're already on just happens to be working. I'm fine with letting doctors have more convenient schedules, but surely we can keep hospitals fully operational on weekends, let alone at night?
I'd assert that it is completely impossible for a human to avoid forming an opinion the instant they receive stimulus of any kind. If that's the standard you're pushing for, then human juries are just out. I'd also assert that it is impossible for a human to be completely without bias: that's just how our brains work - we use our experiences to evaluate our sensory input.
I think what matters more is that somebody can appreciate their own bias and holistically consider the entire situation before issuing a verdict.
The only thing new with Twitter is that people actually do their communications in the open, rather than just chatting with friends in some hard-to-monitor forum.
Unless the jury was sequestered the guy goes home every night and can browse whatever he wants, and talk to whoever he wants to.
If I were in charge I'd just let the jurors gather whatever information they care to. Sooner or later we'll get to the point where every crime is captured on camera anyway - that's just the information revolution. Trying to control information just sounds like something out of the dark ages.
Perhaps a significant portion of the FF user-base that browses slashdot does.
After you remove that 0.1% of the Firefox userbase, I imagine the percentage that runs noscript is pretty low. I imagine that the adblock userbase is larger, since it has an effect noticeable to the average user.
Firefox has something like a third of the browser market. If most of those users were running noscript web authors would be doing things a LOT differently.
If you're considering killing a man, common decency demands you at least provide him with a jury that can be trusted to follow instructions.
I think the greater travesty is that we apparently live in a society where "follow instructions" somehow is equated with "uphold justice."
Frankly if I were on trial for murder I'd be a lot more interested in jurors who can do the latter than the former. If you want something that follows instructions you'd do better to use a jury of court employees or computer programs.
And that is exactly why nobody with an IQ about about 110 ends up serving on a jury - at least not more than once. I'm not sure that we're better off for it...
Slashdot Mirror
This is short-sighted thinking. Sure, they make a lot in 6 months, a year, maybe two years. But then something goes horribly wrong (in their eyes), and shit starts to fall apart.
Yup - as pointed out in the article metrics can cause myopia. I remember going to Six Sigma training and the emphasis was on distilling any process improvement into a set of maybe 5-6 measures at most that you'll aim to optimize or control. However, in the real world sometimes your ability to make a product (and therefore money) could (gasp!) depend on more than 6 things. In such a case you end up with one project after another micro-optimizing some attributes at the risk of reducing the performance of the whole. After a few years and dozens of these projects, suddenly your process starts failing left and right seemingly for completely unrelated causes. So many things have been changed that what was a non-optimal but controlled situation is now completely out of control.
The thing is, I believe that stuff like Six Sigma is fundamentally sound. The problem is that PHB-types like to translate good process control into a single powerpoint slide that you can present to an executive. A process with 50 measures doesn't make for a good slide, and invites questions like 'how expensive are all these measures anyway?" However, if you're trying to improve something like "patient outcomes in a hospital" or "reliability of air traffic control systems" or anything more than turning screws out of a lathe then sometimes you have to embrace the fact that what you're doing only works right because lots of people care, not because it is easy.
I dunno, I'm a paramedic, and the only metric I've ever been judged by is the number of patients I kill (Still 0!). Note, that's not the same thing as the number of patients I fail to save.
So, it is better to avoid saving 100 people if it increases the risk of killing one of them? Sometimes these kinds of measures of quality create perverse incentives.
At my workplace quality is often measured by the pound - of paperwork, that is. The problem with this is that the decision to fix a bug or not usually rests on the cost/benefits, and the cost is greatly influenced by the number of pounds of paperwork required. So, measures designed to improve "quality" by this measure drive up costs and mean that we decide to fix fewer bugs. So, quality goes down when we try to raise it.
I could easily see the same thing happening in the medical profession where "do no harm" translates in practice into "do no good either." In fact, for somebody graded purely on the number of mistakes they commit their best strategy is to do nothing at all.
How on android can you actually configure the phone to direct all traffic through the VPN? Every time I've tried it the phone won't make the VPN the default route, so internet traffic goes out in the clear...
In the corporate world they also have companies behind those expensive machines that can write a proper driver (when forced to).
Uh, clearly you've never owned one of those high-end machines. It is pretty common for them not to receive long-term support, since the vendor wants you to buy a new one, and the people who buy those machines rarely have any IT background and ask questions in advance like "how long will you support the OS?"
In the corporate world they also have bosses who will say "Why upgrade to X? Our Y already works, why spend $Z?". XP will get security updates until April of 2014.
Yup - and we'd be running XP on such a machine until around then. However, what if the machine still isn't ready for replacement then? If you want it on the network then there are a lot of issues with not upgrading the OS.
3) Can't be run on a locked-down 32-bit system past April, 2014 because of security FUD
Well, we've certainly taken this approach for our NT-based machines. However, this is really not a great position to be in. Good security means defense in depth, and you just don't have that when you're running an OS that hasn't been patched in 10 years. The world's greatest perimeter firewall won't help you if somebody plugs a flash drive into the thing.
But, you've actually made my point for me in some sense - the reason that XP is supported until April 2014 is because MS does bend over backwards to provide long-term support for their OSes, and APIs. Why would a company drop 32-bit support if they're willing to support a product for almost 15 years in the first place?
I'm sure they'll drop 32-bit at some point, but I can't imagine that it costs them a huge amount to keep it as an option, and as long as the benefits outweigh the costs they'll do it - even if it makes the purists cringe. MS has never done anything for the purists - if you could cram 4GB of RAM onto an old 25MHz 486SX motherboard I wouldn't be surprised if Vista booted just fine on it (eventually), even without the floating point instruction set (I have to admit I'm suddenly morbidly curious).
Sure, on my desktop at home I've been running 64-bit linux since the socket 754 days. However, at work around the same time I was still nursing a VAX along to the graveyard. That's just the nature of long-term capital investments.
You don't need to determine the value of information to benefit from it. Sure, I think that citations are a good thing and they should be added. However, I was able to appreciate the point you were trying to make without your having referenced a series of studies on the relative value of posting more information without references vs less information with a long series of footnotes.
In any case, I'd say a majority of Wikipedia editors are likely to agree with you, which is why everybody and their uncle is pointing out why they don't bother contributing.
The better option would have been to deny users the choice and only offer 64-bit builds of Vista and 7.
"But it doesn't work with my 14 year old scanner!!!" Then keep using Windows XP?
The reason Windows is so popular in the corporate world is because they don't do stuff like what you suggest. You're thinking about a $50 scanner, but maybe in the corporate world they have 300 $5000 multi-function devices. Or, maybe they have 100 $100k mass spectrometers. Or, maybe they've got a $15M MRI machine. If your vendor doesn't release new drivers then you can't upgrade your OS. Sure, you can run XP for a while, but not forever if you want security patches. Do you really want to throw away a $15M MRI machine that works fine because your OS isn't getting security updates any longer?
Microsoft has generally supported their OS FAR longer than just about anybody else, and this is one of the reasons that they're so hard to displace. In the linux world we call "long term support" a few years. Microsoft still supports XP, and that was out not long after Y2K. Think about what you were doing around Y2K...
Sure, but my point is that simply not having references shouldn't be grounds to remove material. The reason for removing material should be that it is wrong. Now, references are a good way to settle any debates.
However, I see no harm in letting an article start out light on references and gain them over time, rather than squashing contributions because they're not at publication quality from the beginning.
Sure - citation that Merck did the Phase III trials:
The FUTURE II Study Group (May 2007). "Quadrivalent vaccine against human papillomavirus to prevent high-grade cervical lesions". The New England Journal of Medicine 356 (19): 1915–27. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa061741. PMID 17494925. Retrieved 2009-11-11. (From Wikipedia)
The reality is that almost all successful drugs are the result of some level of research and development from any number of organizations. HPV was actually more of a case of this than is typical. When drugs are licensed the financial compensation tends to be based on how far the various partners took the compound on their own. Even if all a company does is Phase III trials and the regulatory applications they are incurring a huge amount of cost, and usually most of the risk as well. After all, if the HPV vaccine was rejected by reguatory agencies then the companies who collected their license payments wouldn't have to return them, and that happens all the time.
In any case, I do support basic reforms like reigning in patent lifetimes (especially for incremental improvements), changing the way costs are bourne by patients, and so on. I'm fine with letting government hold the patents (freely licensing them), and instead just using a fee-for-service model to pay industry. There are a lot of potential ways to improve the system. However, the current system just can't work if there isn't significant opportunity for profit since it involves a lot of up-front risk-taking.
If the knowledge condensed in the Wikipedia article can't be supported by any references, no one will be able to acquire the knowledge to take care of the article again.
Are you suggesting that if I post an article on glycolysis on Wikipedia and don't include references, that there is a risk that human kind might lose the knowledge of glycolysis and we might have to re-discover it to edit the article?
Nothing wrong with references and discussing anything that is controversial and not referenced. However, suggesting that the ONLY way people can edit articles is by reading the already-cited references seems a bit extreme.
I don't think it is a conspiracy or anything like that. I think that the level of pain required to get anything done has reached a point where contribution is impossible unless:
1. You're willing to pay astroturfers to navigate the process. If you're willing to pay me $100/hr for a few weeks I don't mind moderating 37 debates/votes and escalating 12 points to the arbitration committee, and backing up every three word change up with 12 pages on the discussion tab with WP:ALPHABETSOUP being every 5th word.
2. You are in a position of power within wikipedia, like you're a sysadmin or on the arbitration committee or whatever. That hasn't stopped Jimbo's articles from getting nominated for deletion, but it helps a great deal.
3. You're completely insane and care SO much about getting your three words changed that you're willing to do all that nonsense without being paid for it. In turn, when somebody else wants to change three words you become the champion of the cause of fighting it until they've done the same.
Excellent - a citation then? Particular around the details of the trials that they did complete beyond the fact that they apparently did some?
Actually, nothing puzzles me more about the medical system than the fact that teeth are treated differently than everything else. Obviously there is history at work here.
Look, I can understand not having ordinary medical insurance cover somebody wanting to have their teeth whitened, or maybe even having it cleaned. However, when somebody breaks a tooth how is that different from breaking a bone? You're talking about pain and potential permanent injury to some part of your body.
I know somebody whose kid needed serious orthodontics work. We're not talking about a cosmetic gap in the teeth - we're talking about pulling several teeth and straightening others out (well, the extra teeth fell out on their own mostly with the corrections). Now, we treat ingrown toenails under medical insurance - why not seriously out-of-whack teeth (where we're talking about long-term pain and damage if they aren't fixed).
Cosmetic surgery is one thing, but there is no reason that serious dental problems should be treated in the way that they are.
Citation please? For such a popular drug info online is relatively hard to find, but as best as I can tell Merck performed the Phase III clinical trials on Gardasil. At least, that is what Wikipedia states. If you have references to large-scale trials performed by anybody else I'm certainly interested.
Note that I'm referring to large-scale trials. Lots of companies do Phase I/II trials - they aren't terribly expensive (especially in Phase I - where you just need a dozen healthy guys and you don't need to pay their doctors). Phase III is where the trials cost tens of millions of dollars easily - with thousands of patients spanning a year or two with a very uncertain outcome.
Studies have shown that even very careful workers make transcription errors from time to time. Being careful or smart isn't adequate to prevent them. The only thing that really does work is having a process that checks for errors, and ensuring that the number of transcriptions is minimized (often using computer systems). In some health-related fields such processes are required by law.
A hospital in a first-world nation that isn't computerized will have adequate staff to implement these kinds of processes, and training on them. A hospital in a first-world nation that is computerized won't - and if it has to implement manual processes in an emergency it will make more mistakes. That isn't because people are dumb - it is because they are not operating in the manner in which they are accustomed.
If somebody threw you in an ER in a hospital that made extensive use of computers you'd look pretty "stupid" as well - you'd have no idea where to find information you need and you'd be the slowest person in the hospital. That doesn't reflect on your intelligence - just that you are out of your element.
At work we use lots of computer systems in a regulated industry. We always talk about what to do when systems are down, but I think the reality is that unless they were down for more than a week most people would just try to work on other things or let work come to a halt. Things like paper forms don't exist any longer, and where we used to have armies of people to scan and file required paperwork we might now have one or two since the volume of paper is so much lower. If people had to work on paper it would probably take them a day or two just to find some acid-free paper to write on, and once they're done chances are the paper would sit in their drawers until the building burns down because nobody would know what to do with it, despite the company being legally required to be able to produce it.
Could a company use computers but maintain the ability to work without them? Sure. However, such a thing costs money, and if your competitors aren't preparing for doomsday then chances are you'll be out of business before doomsday actually arrives.
The issue is liability. For good reason there are a lot of regulations around medical devices, but often in the end these regulations can conspire to make things worse.
The regulations say that you need to prove that your device works as intended. That means strict configuration control. That means testing before making changes, and tons of paperwork. Lots of testing and paperwork before making changes isn't that compatible with patch Tuesday.
Now, the guy selling the X-Ray machine gets $200k for selling you an X-Ray machine. They don't make much money testing its software every month when MS comes out with another patch. The easiest option for them is to certify it as it originally shipped and tell you that any changes are on you.
So, now the hospital can either leave the machine alone, or THEY incur all the costs on patch Tuesday.
Then the question comes up of who to sue every time a patient dies. The question really isn't what caused the patient to die - the question is who has money and can be shown to have violated some regulation who had anything to do with the patient's care. So, following the process is critical to minimizing the cost of litigation.
I can imagine that people working in that field could get quite fatalistic about all of it. Yup, it sucks, and yup, it kills more people than it should - but hey, my part of the process is being run by the book so go look elsewhere to fire somebody. In the end you can't lose your job because the system sucks, but you can easily lose it if you didn't fill out form 123A in triplicate while the virus was busy propagating.
This shows hospitals would rather close than treat someone for free.
While I agree that this is backwards, can we possibly envision a society where important things like medical care actually are funded adequately, and where we don't spend such a huge amount of money on billing?
It might just be possible to spend less per patient to treat them, to have enough doctors to cover everybody, and to find some equitable way to pay for it all without there being a class of people who have to pay 10x as much for the same care, except for the 80% of time they just go bankrupt and pay 1% of the bill (after they're done losing their homes/etc).
There isn't a magic bullet that will cure the US healthcare system, but there are a bazillion ways to improve it...
Keep in mind windows will probably still run apps that were written against APIs that existed before Apple reached MacOS7.
Ten years sounds like a lot of time until you think about how many apps are still written in COBOL.
Carbon was from the OS 9 days - it needed to die, and it was deprecated really early in OS X's life.
I dunno. I can probably install calculator from windows 3.0 on a 64-bit edition of windows, and I bet it will work just fine. I wouldn't be surprised if calculator from windows 2 works.
For all its flaws - Microsoft almost never gets rid of an AI. You can call that a flaw, but it is a flaw that sells well in the enterprise market. It was only in the last 8 years that my employer really got rid of the last of their 3270 applications. Sure, it is ancient, but it worked and while lots of money was being spent on software development it was nice that they didn't have to spend it on a working app just because it was old.
Ten year old software is an eternity in the consumer market, which Apple understands well. Ten year old software really is just getting started in the enterprise market. If you spend $75M on an ERP system you bet that you're going to not want to replace it every five years. Why do you think half the companies out there are still running IE6?
Microsoft also offers security updates on an OS ten years after it was sold. Sure, they don't sell as many Vista upgrades that way, but it does mean that they get to collect their $30 or whatever every time a company buys a computer.
Microsoft learned a long time ago that the best way to get enterprise business is to be able to say "yes" to every line in an RFP.
Yup - a few Saturdays ago I made an emergency call to a doctor (on a holiday weekend no less) and after discussion brought a urine sample to a hospital over a suspected urinary tract infection.
Now, for an ordinary person it might not have been the right call, but in this case the person it concerned had been in the hospital intensive care unit three times (a week each) with sepsis that originated in urinary tract infections. It has been kept under control for a few years now with vigilance and a bottle of antibiotics in the cabinet at all times. While an average person could probably put up with it for a few days that would be taking a risk of serious escalation in this particular case.
The doctor understood this, and being a Saturday there aren't a lot of options when you have a container full of urine that either is going to get tested or spoil. The testing was necessary since obviously the doctors like staying on top of what is going on, and beyond that they can't legally be writing prescriptions for antibiotics without any kind of evidence that the patient needs them.
Plus, if a patient is suffering I just don't see the value in making them wait several days for an office appointment. One of my pet-peeves with the medical system in general is that it largely runs on a M-F 9-5 basis. When aforementioned patient has been in the hospital or other acute therapy providers on a weekend they basically just keep you in a holding pattern with no real progression in care unless the therapy you're already on just happens to be working. I'm fine with letting doctors have more convenient schedules, but surely we can keep hospitals fully operational on weekends, let alone at night?
I'd assert that it is completely impossible for a human to avoid forming an opinion the instant they receive stimulus of any kind. If that's the standard you're pushing for, then human juries are just out. I'd also assert that it is impossible for a human to be completely without bias: that's just how our brains work - we use our experiences to evaluate our sensory input.
I think what matters more is that somebody can appreciate their own bias and holistically consider the entire situation before issuing a verdict.
The only thing new with Twitter is that people actually do their communications in the open, rather than just chatting with friends in some hard-to-monitor forum.
Unless the jury was sequestered the guy goes home every night and can browse whatever he wants, and talk to whoever he wants to.
If I were in charge I'd just let the jurors gather whatever information they care to. Sooner or later we'll get to the point where every crime is captured on camera anyway - that's just the information revolution. Trying to control information just sounds like something out of the dark ages.
Perhaps a significant portion of the FF user-base that browses slashdot does.
After you remove that 0.1% of the Firefox userbase, I imagine the percentage that runs noscript is pretty low. I imagine that the adblock userbase is larger, since it has an effect noticeable to the average user.
Firefox has something like a third of the browser market. If most of those users were running noscript web authors would be doing things a LOT differently.
That would make sense if you were building a web browser that could run inside a web browser...
If you're considering killing a man, common decency demands you at least provide him with a jury that can be trusted to follow instructions.
I think the greater travesty is that we apparently live in a society where "follow instructions" somehow is equated with "uphold justice."
Frankly if I were on trial for murder I'd be a lot more interested in jurors who can do the latter than the former. If you want something that follows instructions you'd do better to use a jury of court employees or computer programs.
And that is exactly why nobody with an IQ about about 110 ends up serving on a jury - at least not more than once. I'm not sure that we're better off for it...