Well, they can't patent sugar itself - only this use at most (would Mary Poppins count as prior art?). However, it will need to be manufactured to GMP standards and the particular brand of sugar being administered would need to be shown to be bioequivalent to the sugar used in the trials. So, expect to pay a few bucks for your one-spoon measured dose.
Of course, that is only required if the company making the sugar wants to sell it with advertising that indicates that it is medically useful. I doubt anybody will go to this level of trouble. However, with litigation being what it is, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody comes out with such a brand and doctors all flock to it (nobody ever got sued for prescribing Niaspan(TM)).
What might be more likely is that somebody comes up with some kind of novel sugar analog that CAN be patented, and that would be expensive, but would likely have stronger clinical support (since with financial backing you can do more trials/etc).
We really need more publicly-funded clinical trials. Right now most trials have huge conflicts of interest, and they are only run on expensive products, since those are the only ones where somebody has the financial interest to pay the cost of an expensive trial.
Yup - it is like arguments that pills are x% of healthcare costs. The absolute or per-capita costs matter a lot more than the percentage, since ultimately no matter what you do it still all adds up to 100%. I can see being concerned about admin overhead, but not which technology is used.
As long as IT is saving more money than it costs, then it is a sound investment. Amazon isn't an IT company per se, but clearly IT is a MAJOR enabler there.
It's not that they don't exist - it seems that they all have good jobs already.
Perhaps you need to simply offer them more? I'm sure if you posted on monster.com - "programmers with knowledge of XOR needed, starting salary $500k" you wouldn't have trouble finding candidates.
As wages rise, more people who are capable would enter the field. When smart people can do better in finance, medical, or legal, then that is where they will go.
In the long-term, the job market for smart people isn't segmented by industry. If you have different hiring scales for different jobs, then you're just advertising that you don't want the smart people to take the lower-paying jobs.
In some places Economics is an easy degree. Not everywhere. I had a friend who taught one of the introductory level Economics courses for majors. He shocked his class by giving them one week to finish "Wealth of Nations" at the start of the course, and it didn't get easier from there.
Forcing students to read The Wealth of Nations in a week is just an exercise in measuring dedication and the amount of spare time a person is willing to spend on an arbitrary project, or possibly somebody's ability to speed-read. I don't need to pay somebody to force me to read books - the whole point of paying educators is to receive a more efficient education than one would get hanging out in a library all day.
The success of a program should not be measured in how hard it made people work.
If he really wanted people to have read a book by the end of the first week, it should have been listed as a course pre-requisite. Or, are you suggesting that only teenagers without anything important going on in their life are the only ones who should take university courses?
The receiver has to make a choice when to switch a 0 to a 1, with long slopes, noise and ringing this can cause problems even if its a "digital" signal.
Sure, but that is why we have standards which dictate those kinds of things. If the clock ticks every 1ns, then as long as the voltage has stabilized in significantly less time than that, nobody cares whether it took 5 or 50ps to switch.
Of course the voltage can't switch in zero time - that would probably require various infinities and energy densities that exceed those of the big bang. However, modern engineering gets awfully close, though from what I understand nowhere near what is possible in the optical world (where interactions are measured in femptoseconds).
Well, it was around that time when my own company started pushing more on records retention. Probably one of those general management trends of the day - probably some companies got creamed in discovery (consider that this wasn't long after the whole Microsoft email fiasco).
Love all the conflicting management recommendations that this led to. Legal would send out emails like "meet in person, rather than using email" and finance would send out "use electronic tools like email instead of having expensive in-person meetings."
I think the way it ended up shaking out is that most bottom-line employees use email, and most high-level managers that make the kinds of decisions that get companies sued tend to do it all in meetings without minutes.
Legally it is best for a company to have a policy and stick to it - what gets you in trouble is when one division shreds on a perfect schedule, and another doesn't. Then if the first gets sued the second gets used as an example to suggest that the first was planning something nefarious. That may or may not be true.
I almost wonder if this is something that should be the subject of government guidelines. I know that in many industries particular types of documentation have a retention schedule mandated by law (almost always short compared to most litigation). When you think about technology - is there really any reason to ever throw out a document? You could probably build a machine that sits next to a photocopier and which coverts a document to PDF, does OCR, uploads it to a server, and then dumps into a shredder. The server could then do deduplication and index everything (where it originated, where it was tossed, etc). Your document management system would send clean electronic PDFs to the same server, so in the ideal case where the document was printed and then tossed the scanned version never gets retained unless it has writing on it.
The problem remains: nobody actually wants a mission-critical system that sorta-kinda-works, but breaks down catastophically in unexpected circumstances.
Arguably that is what we already have, if you just consider the pilot part of the system. I think the issue is our contorted liability law. If you held the aircraft vendor liable for provable pilot error on the principle that they built the aircraft with the inclusion of pilot controls, then perhaps you'd see more of a move towards automation. Aircraft manufacturers are liable for automated system failures, but not for pilot error, and thus they have no incentive to get rid of the pilot - especially when training should give them some remote chance of recovering from a system failure and you can hang a defense on that.
Fourthly, we need to take an honest look at our nuclear fuel cycle, which is retarded. We need to start reprocessing fuel, not just storing it in dry casks. There is a huge amount of wasted energy not being extracted from those rods.
Agreed. Non-proliferation keeps getting cited here, but how much does it cost to throw away and store all that perfectly usable fuel that could be burned down to a much more manageable quantity?
For the kinds of money spent on the waste disposal problem you could just garrison a few platoons of marines at every nuclear plant in the US. Or, you could just federalize the whole nuclear industry and get around a LOT of red tape and mess (probably improving safety as well). The US military somehow manages to keep terrorists from stealing relatively compact nuclear bombs - keeping them from opening up reactor cores and extracting plutonium should be fairly trivial.
Actually, people who spend all day in MS Word and Excel are probably the audience. That is probably 80% of the corporate world - a HUGE target audience.
Just as android was a way to drive the cloud (and adsense) for the consumer, Chrome OS seems to be a way to drive the cloud for people who need a more laptop-like experience, or an enterprise solution.
Chrome Apps can run offline. The problem is that only about three of them actually do - and they're all notepad clones. Most Chrome apps are little more than bookmarks to a website.
I'd like to see Google come up with an offline Google Docs app. Granted, they'd then have to solve concurrency issues.
However, HTML5 was designed to solve problems like the one you just brought up. You would simply download the textbook before class, and one time only.
I think they're looking at this as an inroads into the enterprise. Strategically that may make good sense. The biggest issue for them is the need to have 100% coverage with cloud-based apps to make it work, or a robust chrome remoteing solution (which they are apparently working on).
Figure for a few hundred dollars you get a fully managed piece of hardware with near-zero provisioning required. Reimaging it just takes a boot off a USB drive and maybe 10 minutes of waiting. Settings are fully synced and all that. It basically is your thin-client desktop in a much more consumer-friendly package (3G modem, etc). I see Android and iPads as being more consumption-oriented - great for browsing facebook, youtube, or netflix, not so great for typing up a letter or your homework. Chrome OS is good enough to send emails, and not just read them and reply "sounds good."
1. Does that thinkpad get directly shipped to the end user with the stock image? Who installs the user's apps on it? Do they get paid, or if the user has to do it, does the user get paid? How many hours are they going to spend fussing with that $800 laptop? If a human touches it for two hours add $150 to the price.
2. What happens when there is some kind of software conflict on the thinkpad? How long to backup any files on the device, reimage it, reload software, restore data files, and return to the user? How long is the user down?
3. What happens when McAfee decides to push out another update that turns the Thinkpad into a paperweight for a day or two? How much money does it take to reimage every PC in your business or fuss with the definitions when it won't boot right?
4. Does that corporate management feature include full disk encryption? How much does that cost you to keep running? If you don't have that, then what happens to your company when one is lost?
The concept behind a Chrome notebook is that:
1. Nothing you care about long-term is stored on the device. No data, no settings, no nothing. 2. Provisioning involves logging in, and nothing else, unless you want the enterprise provisioning features, and then it just involves one extra login step. 3. Devices are interchangeable. Just keep a spare or two in a closet and if one breaks you issue another and the user is up and running with maybe a minute of setup time (all settings sync). 4. Devices are update-managed and have full disk encryption with TPM support. I suspect the provisioning features include remote wipe as well. 5. No doubt that monthly fee includes some kind of hardware refresh over time - so as devices get old you just magically get new ones in the mail or whatever.
If Google adds a feature where larger customers get their devices shippped with the enterprise provisioning already enabled, then it is even cheaper - just have them ship direct to your employee and they're running.
The only real downside is that everything has to be web-based. I think that in most office settings the devices would otherwise pay for themselves. In theory if you are a small office your only hardware ownership investment might be a router, assuming that doesn't come free from your ISP or whatever. With this and Google apps you could maintain an office with virtually zero IT contractor spend.
Just require all vessels at sea in a designated safe-passage corridor have an operational transponder issued by the USN. The transponder would of course broadcast a unique ID, and would only be issued after appropriate registration. A safe-passage fee would pay for the economic costs of administering the program and for the ordnance expended on vessels that lack a transponder.
Vessels that lack a transponder would be immediately seized and a fine would be required for return of the vessel. Vessels whose value (including cargo) clearly does not warrant the cost to tow to port would be scuttled. Since the fine would be designed to recover the towing costs the vessel owner isn't really out anything.
Legitimate merchants would not mind the intrusion - the transit fees would be lower than their insurance savings. The safe passage zones would be far enough offshore that things like recreational or small fishing boats would not be impacted. The zones would be wide enough that anyone penetrating the corridor would be detected and intercepted before reaching any merchants inside.
My understanding is that the pirates travel hundreds of miles to find ships to capture - so the goal isn't to secure the beach, but rather the middle of the ocean where there can't be that much legitimate traffic.
What do you think about the fact that counter-piracy forces killed more people than pirates themselves ? Before 2011 it could even be said that more hostages were killed by counter-piracy forces than Somali pirates.
That would be important if the primary purpose of counter-piracy forces was to save people who are already being held hostage. Their primary purpose is to eliminate piracy, and keep future sailors from being taken hostage in the first place.
How many hostages would have been killed by pirates if there were no counter-piracy efforts limiting their numbers?
The pirates are still responsible for hostages that die in rescue raids. The hostages wouldn't need rescuing but for their actions.
I'm sure that if you always paid off kidnappers that a higher percentage of kidnap victims would come out unharmed, but the number of kidnappings would also likely go WAY up. Appeasement isn't usually a good solution. I'm not saying the solution is as simple as killing pirates, but I suspect that killing pirates will be a big component of any good solution.
So, just have a floating arms markets outside of Somali waters in various convenient locations. Ships planning to sail through rent guns on the one end (maybe crews also), and drop them off when they're past the danger zone.
Under commonly practiced legal theory what you describe is completely routine. Also, "IP Addresses" have no enumerated constitutional rights, so the trials would go very quickly (about as fast as the clerk can read off the docket and the judge can say "guilty" and whap the gavel). "Due" process on steroids.
Yup, and if my wife's doctor had thought to tell her to keep an eye on her sugar because of her gestational diabetes issues, she might have been spared the retinopathy which was the first symptom she had.
Fasting glucose is a very inexpensive test - while not perfect it only costs about a quarter to do with a portable monitor. I'd of course recommend lab confirmation, but it almost seems like the sort of thing you should encourage to have people do semi-annually for a nominal fee at a pharmacy.
Sure, and that worked well for you since you're a doctor and trust your father in law not to sue you.
If I tried the same thing with my wife:
1. I'd have to beg the labs to run a test in the first place. Many don't run tests without a doctor's orders. 2. I'd have to pay list price for any tests I run. That test that costs the insurance company $15 costs me $75 easily. That adds up fast. 3. If I stop one medication, and the doctor finds out, then they probably will refuse to treat my wife further since she is non-compliant. Now she can't get the other medications that are important for her to take.
Unfortunately in our society doctors are the gatekeepers to medical care. You're forbidden by law from trying to treat yourself, and doctors are generally not compelled to treat you unless you have an acute problem. Insurance companies also are not compelled to pay for things without a doctor's recommendation, and while in principle I would be fine with that to an extent our messed up medical system doesn't charge fair prices to people who aren't insured.
You can try to pick a different doctor, but nobody wants a difficult patient, and it isn't like a typical suburb has hundreds of specialists in whatever. If you need an endocrinologist or vascular surgeon or whatever you usually only have a handful within a 20 minute drive.
My wife has also been subject to the "treat the chart / labs" treatment. At times in intensive care I've seen doctors literally stop by for 3 minutes to talk to her, and spend an hour at the desk writing up orders or whatever. I suspect the only reason you even see them once a day (often at a time when nobody coherent is in the room) is because they couldn't bill you or whatever otherwise.
I do think that most doctors mean well. They are probably swamped and playing it by the numbers probably statistically works out. However, I don't think it works out for everybody. Certainly the tendency to play it safe has probably cost my wife at least a week or two of her life in hospital beds at the tail end of hospitalizations, and the result of that is my wife would probably rather bleed to death at home than show up at the ER (and that just means her problems are that much worse when she is hospitalized).
I also suspect that giant complex algorithms are part of the problem. During a few hospitalizations I've been CC'ed on letters to hospitals haggling over insurance because some clinical criteria or another wasn't met. Most likely her labs/signs indicated that she was stable, and the doctor was probably just a little concerned about silly little things like multiple strokes over several days despite being on the best standard of care and was reluctant to discharge her. So, if the doctor isn't following some algorithm, they just have to fill out 10X the amount of paperwork to justify every little thing they do.
An NPR episode interviewed a doctor who made a similar argument. If they just order some test nobody fights them, but if they don't, they have to explain the decision 47 times and there is a risk that one of those times will be to a jury. Also, the doctor doesn't really tend to accept as much blame for the odd case of deep-vein-thrombosis or whatever from over-hospitalization, but they are pretty likely to take it hard if they find out they discharged a patient with a hidden problem.
I do think that lots of people mean well, but it still doesn't work out great all the time.
Agreed, and I have to say I'm impressed at the level of disclosure and monitoring by Lastpass on this one. If anything it increases my sense of security using their service.
What is my alternative? I can't run Keepass, so my next best option is to just pick a few passwords and re-use them on many sites. Now instead of having to hack the site of the super-paranoid Lastpass admins who notify people when there is even a hint of intrusion, they just have to hack any one of my more important sites and they can access all the others.
If I'm aware of the Lastpass breach I can go ahead and change my passwords - almost certainly in less time than it takes to access my passwords.
I don't use Lastpass for my most critical accounts, either.
Believe it or not it is based on Gentoo.:) Not that you'd recognize it. However, it isn't a surprising choice as Gentoo is an ideal starting point if you want to completely change things up since it is a bit like Linux From Scratch but with more tools for maintenance. You can completely strip out just about anything from it.
in any case, you're actually just showing that chrome OS has limitations. we all knew that from the start. Most of us use lots of software, not just a browser. Chrome OS is not designed to replace all our stuff, its a fairly web-purposed OS, and is designed for a fairly specific use-case.
I think we'll see it merged with Android before long... in order to satisfy the "non-web" apps requirement of all current OSes.
True, but password syncing in the browser is a major feature. I prefer Lastpass to Chrome's own password syncing, since it is more cross-platform, and also because it completely ignores the don't-cache-passwords setting on most websites. I've gone looking for the relevant lines of the chromium source to disable that feature but none of my attempts have worked thus far. What good is a password syncing service if websites can disable it - of course any web admin doesn't want you saving your password. Good users always pick different random passwords for every site and don't write them down. Alas, such users don't exist and won't until we're cyborgs with Keepass embedded in our brains, at which point somebody will still want to disable password caching in our brains.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Android merge at some point - not the whole OS, but perhaps the ability to install android apps as chrome apps. They use a similar trust model/etc.
But, that's why I don't use Keepass. My initial problem was figuring out a way to sync passwords with my Chrome-based laptop. Previously I just kept them in a gpg-protected text file on a single server that I'd NX into.
I looked at Keepass before using Lastpass precisely for the reasons that everybody likes it. The problem is that it didn't meet my requirements, and Lastpass does.
When somebody eventually ports it I'm sure I'll end up running it. My point was that Keepass isn't a solution for everybody, even if it is a solution for 99% of everybody. I'm pretty accustomed to being part of that 1% though, and many other Slashdotters probably are as well.
Hey - if all I cared about was availability of apps I'd probably be running Windows.
Chrome OS does not support Mono, and it does not support running native code or X11-based applications locally. In theory it will support them running remotely at some point in time.
Keepass would need to be ported to a 100% pure Chrome extension to work on Chrome OS. That's just the nature of the best - it is like an Android or iOS phone - completely different API from any other desktop OS and applications need a fair amount of rewriting to support it.
I guess the ultimate testimony to the failure of Java is that we've had about 3-5 new major OSes launched in the last two years and none of them run binaries that run on other platforms, although half of them run apps primarily written in a derivative of Java.
Looks like you just found out the big problem with Chrome OS. You barely run Linux then, in the sense of being a distro that has WILDLY different build requirements from all other desktop distros. It's almost like saying, "Sure I run Linux, the DD-WRT distro, just give me a link".
Well, I knew about that problem going in. However, it doesn't change the fact that Keepass doesn't meet my requirements. Otherwise I love the platform and it would probably be my first choice.
Chrome integration is a must, and that means I'll have to wait until somebody ports it, or do it myself. I prefer to work on other projects, so I use Lastpass in the meantime...
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Well, they can't patent sugar itself - only this use at most (would Mary Poppins count as prior art?). However, it will need to be manufactured to GMP standards and the particular brand of sugar being administered would need to be shown to be bioequivalent to the sugar used in the trials. So, expect to pay a few bucks for your one-spoon measured dose.
Of course, that is only required if the company making the sugar wants to sell it with advertising that indicates that it is medically useful. I doubt anybody will go to this level of trouble. However, with litigation being what it is, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody comes out with such a brand and doctors all flock to it (nobody ever got sued for prescribing Niaspan(TM)).
What might be more likely is that somebody comes up with some kind of novel sugar analog that CAN be patented, and that would be expensive, but would likely have stronger clinical support (since with financial backing you can do more trials/etc).
We really need more publicly-funded clinical trials. Right now most trials have huge conflicts of interest, and they are only run on expensive products, since those are the only ones where somebody has the financial interest to pay the cost of an expensive trial.
Yup - it is like arguments that pills are x% of healthcare costs. The absolute or per-capita costs matter a lot more than the percentage, since ultimately no matter what you do it still all adds up to 100%. I can see being concerned about admin overhead, but not which technology is used.
As long as IT is saving more money than it costs, then it is a sound investment. Amazon isn't an IT company per se, but clearly IT is a MAJOR enabler there.
It's not that they don't exist - it seems that they all have good jobs already.
Perhaps you need to simply offer them more? I'm sure if you posted on monster.com - "programmers with knowledge of XOR needed, starting salary $500k" you wouldn't have trouble finding candidates.
As wages rise, more people who are capable would enter the field. When smart people can do better in finance, medical, or legal, then that is where they will go.
In the long-term, the job market for smart people isn't segmented by industry. If you have different hiring scales for different jobs, then you're just advertising that you don't want the smart people to take the lower-paying jobs.
There are no easy majors; only easy departments.
In some places Economics is an easy degree. Not everywhere. I had a friend who taught one of the introductory level Economics courses for majors. He shocked his class by giving them one week to finish "Wealth of Nations" at the start of the course, and it didn't get easier from there.
Forcing students to read The Wealth of Nations in a week is just an exercise in measuring dedication and the amount of spare time a person is willing to spend on an arbitrary project, or possibly somebody's ability to speed-read. I don't need to pay somebody to force me to read books - the whole point of paying educators is to receive a more efficient education than one would get hanging out in a library all day.
The success of a program should not be measured in how hard it made people work.
If he really wanted people to have read a book by the end of the first week, it should have been listed as a course pre-requisite. Or, are you suggesting that only teenagers without anything important going on in their life are the only ones who should take university courses?
The receiver has to make a choice when to switch a 0 to a 1, with long slopes, noise and ringing this can cause problems even if its a "digital" signal.
Sure, but that is why we have standards which dictate those kinds of things. If the clock ticks every 1ns, then as long as the voltage has stabilized in significantly less time than that, nobody cares whether it took 5 or 50ps to switch.
Of course the voltage can't switch in zero time - that would probably require various infinities and energy densities that exceed those of the big bang. However, modern engineering gets awfully close, though from what I understand nowhere near what is possible in the optical world (where interactions are measured in femptoseconds).
Well, it was around that time when my own company started pushing more on records retention. Probably one of those general management trends of the day - probably some companies got creamed in discovery (consider that this wasn't long after the whole Microsoft email fiasco).
Love all the conflicting management recommendations that this led to. Legal would send out emails like "meet in person, rather than using email" and finance would send out "use electronic tools like email instead of having expensive in-person meetings."
I think the way it ended up shaking out is that most bottom-line employees use email, and most high-level managers that make the kinds of decisions that get companies sued tend to do it all in meetings without minutes.
Legally it is best for a company to have a policy and stick to it - what gets you in trouble is when one division shreds on a perfect schedule, and another doesn't. Then if the first gets sued the second gets used as an example to suggest that the first was planning something nefarious. That may or may not be true.
I almost wonder if this is something that should be the subject of government guidelines. I know that in many industries particular types of documentation have a retention schedule mandated by law (almost always short compared to most litigation). When you think about technology - is there really any reason to ever throw out a document? You could probably build a machine that sits next to a photocopier and which coverts a document to PDF, does OCR, uploads it to a server, and then dumps into a shredder. The server could then do deduplication and index everything (where it originated, where it was tossed, etc). Your document management system would send clean electronic PDFs to the same server, so in the ideal case where the document was printed and then tossed the scanned version never gets retained unless it has writing on it.
The problem remains: nobody actually wants a mission-critical system that sorta-kinda-works, but breaks down catastophically in unexpected circumstances.
Arguably that is what we already have, if you just consider the pilot part of the system. I think the issue is our contorted liability law. If you held the aircraft vendor liable for provable pilot error on the principle that they built the aircraft with the inclusion of pilot controls, then perhaps you'd see more of a move towards automation. Aircraft manufacturers are liable for automated system failures, but not for pilot error, and thus they have no incentive to get rid of the pilot - especially when training should give them some remote chance of recovering from a system failure and you can hang a defense on that.
Fourthly, we need to take an honest look at our nuclear fuel cycle, which is retarded. We need to start reprocessing fuel, not just storing it in dry casks. There is a huge amount of wasted energy not being extracted from those rods.
Agreed. Non-proliferation keeps getting cited here, but how much does it cost to throw away and store all that perfectly usable fuel that could be burned down to a much more manageable quantity?
For the kinds of money spent on the waste disposal problem you could just garrison a few platoons of marines at every nuclear plant in the US. Or, you could just federalize the whole nuclear industry and get around a LOT of red tape and mess (probably improving safety as well). The US military somehow manages to keep terrorists from stealing relatively compact nuclear bombs - keeping them from opening up reactor cores and extracting plutonium should be fairly trivial.
Actually, people who spend all day in MS Word and Excel are probably the audience. That is probably 80% of the corporate world - a HUGE target audience.
Just as android was a way to drive the cloud (and adsense) for the consumer, Chrome OS seems to be a way to drive the cloud for people who need a more laptop-like experience, or an enterprise solution.
Chrome Apps can run offline. The problem is that only about three of them actually do - and they're all notepad clones. Most Chrome apps are little more than bookmarks to a website.
I'd like to see Google come up with an offline Google Docs app. Granted, they'd then have to solve concurrency issues.
However, HTML5 was designed to solve problems like the one you just brought up. You would simply download the textbook before class, and one time only.
I think they're looking at this as an inroads into the enterprise. Strategically that may make good sense. The biggest issue for them is the need to have 100% coverage with cloud-based apps to make it work, or a robust chrome remoteing solution (which they are apparently working on).
Figure for a few hundred dollars you get a fully managed piece of hardware with near-zero provisioning required. Reimaging it just takes a boot off a USB drive and maybe 10 minutes of waiting. Settings are fully synced and all that. It basically is your thin-client desktop in a much more consumer-friendly package (3G modem, etc). I see Android and iPads as being more consumption-oriented - great for browsing facebook, youtube, or netflix, not so great for typing up a letter or your homework. Chrome OS is good enough to send emails, and not just read them and reply "sounds good."
A couple of questions:
1. Does that thinkpad get directly shipped to the end user with the stock image? Who installs the user's apps on it? Do they get paid, or if the user has to do it, does the user get paid? How many hours are they going to spend fussing with that $800 laptop? If a human touches it for two hours add $150 to the price.
2. What happens when there is some kind of software conflict on the thinkpad? How long to backup any files on the device, reimage it, reload software, restore data files, and return to the user? How long is the user down?
3. What happens when McAfee decides to push out another update that turns the Thinkpad into a paperweight for a day or two? How much money does it take to reimage every PC in your business or fuss with the definitions when it won't boot right?
4. Does that corporate management feature include full disk encryption? How much does that cost you to keep running? If you don't have that, then what happens to your company when one is lost?
The concept behind a Chrome notebook is that:
1. Nothing you care about long-term is stored on the device. No data, no settings, no nothing.
2. Provisioning involves logging in, and nothing else, unless you want the enterprise provisioning features, and then it just involves one extra login step.
3. Devices are interchangeable. Just keep a spare or two in a closet and if one breaks you issue another and the user is up and running with maybe a minute of setup time (all settings sync).
4. Devices are update-managed and have full disk encryption with TPM support. I suspect the provisioning features include remote wipe as well.
5. No doubt that monthly fee includes some kind of hardware refresh over time - so as devices get old you just magically get new ones in the mail or whatever.
If Google adds a feature where larger customers get their devices shippped with the enterprise provisioning already enabled, then it is even cheaper - just have them ship direct to your employee and they're running.
The only real downside is that everything has to be web-based. I think that in most office settings the devices would otherwise pay for themselves. In theory if you are a small office your only hardware ownership investment might be a router, assuming that doesn't come free from your ISP or whatever. With this and Google apps you could maintain an office with virtually zero IT contractor spend.
Just require all vessels at sea in a designated safe-passage corridor have an operational transponder issued by the USN. The transponder would of course broadcast a unique ID, and would only be issued after appropriate registration. A safe-passage fee would pay for the economic costs of administering the program and for the ordnance expended on vessels that lack a transponder.
Vessels that lack a transponder would be immediately seized and a fine would be required for return of the vessel. Vessels whose value (including cargo) clearly does not warrant the cost to tow to port would be scuttled. Since the fine would be designed to recover the towing costs the vessel owner isn't really out anything.
Legitimate merchants would not mind the intrusion - the transit fees would be lower than their insurance savings. The safe passage zones would be far enough offshore that things like recreational or small fishing boats would not be impacted. The zones would be wide enough that anyone penetrating the corridor would be detected and intercepted before reaching any merchants inside.
My understanding is that the pirates travel hundreds of miles to find ships to capture - so the goal isn't to secure the beach, but rather the middle of the ocean where there can't be that much legitimate traffic.
What do you think about the fact that counter-piracy forces killed more people than pirates themselves ? Before 2011 it could even be said that more hostages were killed by counter-piracy forces than Somali pirates.
That would be important if the primary purpose of counter-piracy forces was to save people who are already being held hostage. Their primary purpose is to eliminate piracy, and keep future sailors from being taken hostage in the first place.
How many hostages would have been killed by pirates if there were no counter-piracy efforts limiting their numbers?
The pirates are still responsible for hostages that die in rescue raids. The hostages wouldn't need rescuing but for their actions.
I'm sure that if you always paid off kidnappers that a higher percentage of kidnap victims would come out unharmed, but the number of kidnappings would also likely go WAY up. Appeasement isn't usually a good solution. I'm not saying the solution is as simple as killing pirates, but I suspect that killing pirates will be a big component of any good solution.
So, just have a floating arms markets outside of Somali waters in various convenient locations. Ships planning to sail through rent guns on the one end (maybe crews also), and drop them off when they're past the danger zone.
Do you work for the DEA or something?
Under commonly practiced legal theory what you describe is completely routine. Also, "IP Addresses" have no enumerated constitutional rights, so the trials would go very quickly (about as fast as the clerk can read off the docket and the judge can say "guilty" and whap the gavel). "Due" process on steroids.
Yup, and if my wife's doctor had thought to tell her to keep an eye on her sugar because of her gestational diabetes issues, she might have been spared the retinopathy which was the first symptom she had.
Fasting glucose is a very inexpensive test - while not perfect it only costs about a quarter to do with a portable monitor. I'd of course recommend lab confirmation, but it almost seems like the sort of thing you should encourage to have people do semi-annually for a nominal fee at a pharmacy.
Sure, and that worked well for you since you're a doctor and trust your father in law not to sue you.
If I tried the same thing with my wife:
1. I'd have to beg the labs to run a test in the first place. Many don't run tests without a doctor's orders.
2. I'd have to pay list price for any tests I run. That test that costs the insurance company $15 costs me $75 easily. That adds up fast.
3. If I stop one medication, and the doctor finds out, then they probably will refuse to treat my wife further since she is non-compliant. Now she can't get the other medications that are important for her to take.
Unfortunately in our society doctors are the gatekeepers to medical care. You're forbidden by law from trying to treat yourself, and doctors are generally not compelled to treat you unless you have an acute problem. Insurance companies also are not compelled to pay for things without a doctor's recommendation, and while in principle I would be fine with that to an extent our messed up medical system doesn't charge fair prices to people who aren't insured.
You can try to pick a different doctor, but nobody wants a difficult patient, and it isn't like a typical suburb has hundreds of specialists in whatever. If you need an endocrinologist or vascular surgeon or whatever you usually only have a handful within a 20 minute drive.
My wife has also been subject to the "treat the chart / labs" treatment. At times in intensive care I've seen doctors literally stop by for 3 minutes to talk to her, and spend an hour at the desk writing up orders or whatever. I suspect the only reason you even see them once a day (often at a time when nobody coherent is in the room) is because they couldn't bill you or whatever otherwise.
I do think that most doctors mean well. They are probably swamped and playing it by the numbers probably statistically works out. However, I don't think it works out for everybody. Certainly the tendency to play it safe has probably cost my wife at least a week or two of her life in hospital beds at the tail end of hospitalizations, and the result of that is my wife would probably rather bleed to death at home than show up at the ER (and that just means her problems are that much worse when she is hospitalized).
I also suspect that giant complex algorithms are part of the problem. During a few hospitalizations I've been CC'ed on letters to hospitals haggling over insurance because some clinical criteria or another wasn't met. Most likely her labs/signs indicated that she was stable, and the doctor was probably just a little concerned about silly little things like multiple strokes over several days despite being on the best standard of care and was reluctant to discharge her. So, if the doctor isn't following some algorithm, they just have to fill out 10X the amount of paperwork to justify every little thing they do.
An NPR episode interviewed a doctor who made a similar argument. If they just order some test nobody fights them, but if they don't, they have to explain the decision 47 times and there is a risk that one of those times will be to a jury. Also, the doctor doesn't really tend to accept as much blame for the odd case of deep-vein-thrombosis or whatever from over-hospitalization, but they are pretty likely to take it hard if they find out they discharged a patient with a hidden problem.
I do think that lots of people mean well, but it still doesn't work out great all the time.
Sure, but if you're running such an OS, you need an alternative - like Lastpass.
As I've posted elsewhere, for various reasons Keepass would have been my first choice - but it just wasn't a choice for me.
Agreed, and I have to say I'm impressed at the level of disclosure and monitoring by Lastpass on this one. If anything it increases my sense of security using their service.
What is my alternative? I can't run Keepass, so my next best option is to just pick a few passwords and re-use them on many sites. Now instead of having to hack the site of the super-paranoid Lastpass admins who notify people when there is even a hint of intrusion, they just have to hack any one of my more important sites and they can access all the others.
If I'm aware of the Lastpass breach I can go ahead and change my passwords - almost certainly in less time than it takes to access my passwords.
I don't use Lastpass for my most critical accounts, either.
I thought chrome OS was built on ubuntu?
Believe it or not it is based on Gentoo. :) Not that you'd recognize it. However, it isn't a surprising choice as Gentoo is an ideal starting point if you want to completely change things up since it is a bit like Linux From Scratch but with more tools for maintenance. You can completely strip out just about anything from it.
in any case, you're actually just showing that chrome OS has limitations. we all knew that from the start. Most of us use lots of software, not just a browser. Chrome OS is not designed to replace all our stuff, its a fairly web-purposed OS, and is designed for a fairly specific use-case.
I think we'll see it merged with Android before long... in order to satisfy the "non-web" apps requirement of all current OSes.
True, but password syncing in the browser is a major feature. I prefer Lastpass to Chrome's own password syncing, since it is more cross-platform, and also because it completely ignores the don't-cache-passwords setting on most websites. I've gone looking for the relevant lines of the chromium source to disable that feature but none of my attempts have worked thus far. What good is a password syncing service if websites can disable it - of course any web admin doesn't want you saving your password. Good users always pick different random passwords for every site and don't write them down. Alas, such users don't exist and won't until we're cyborgs with Keepass embedded in our brains, at which point somebody will still want to disable password caching in our brains.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Android merge at some point - not the whole OS, but perhaps the ability to install android apps as chrome apps. They use a similar trust model/etc.
Of course I'm used to it. :)
But, that's why I don't use Keepass. My initial problem was figuring out a way to sync passwords with my Chrome-based laptop. Previously I just kept them in a gpg-protected text file on a single server that I'd NX into.
I looked at Keepass before using Lastpass precisely for the reasons that everybody likes it. The problem is that it didn't meet my requirements, and Lastpass does.
When somebody eventually ports it I'm sure I'll end up running it. My point was that Keepass isn't a solution for everybody, even if it is a solution for 99% of everybody. I'm pretty accustomed to being part of that 1% though, and many other Slashdotters probably are as well.
Hey - if all I cared about was availability of apps I'd probably be running Windows.
Chrome OS does not support Mono, and it does not support running native code or X11-based applications locally. In theory it will support them running remotely at some point in time.
Keepass would need to be ported to a 100% pure Chrome extension to work on Chrome OS. That's just the nature of the best - it is like an Android or iOS phone - completely different API from any other desktop OS and applications need a fair amount of rewriting to support it.
I guess the ultimate testimony to the failure of Java is that we've had about 3-5 new major OSes launched in the last two years and none of them run binaries that run on other platforms, although half of them run apps primarily written in a derivative of Java.
Looks like you just found out the big problem with Chrome OS. You barely run Linux then, in the sense of being a distro that has WILDLY different build requirements from all other desktop distros. It's almost like saying, "Sure I run Linux, the DD-WRT distro, just give me a link".
Well, I knew about that problem going in. However, it doesn't change the fact that Keepass doesn't meet my requirements. Otherwise I love the platform and it would probably be my first choice.
Chrome integration is a must, and that means I'll have to wait until somebody ports it, or do it myself. I prefer to work on other projects, so I use Lastpass in the meantime...