Quoting the last five (short) paragraphs of the story:
The White House has so far been unable to fill top leadership posts at the Homeland Security department's division charged with protecting the Internet and other communications systems from attacks.
The administration's first choice to run the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Division was former Defense Intelligence Agency Director James Clapper.
Clapper, a retired Air Force lieutenant and the head of the National Imagery and Mapping Center, unexpectedly pulled his name from consideration.
John Tritak, former director of the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office and pegged as the administration's pick for deputy undersecretary for infrastructure protection at the Homeland Security Department, is still a name under consideration, though he recently left the government.
Another noted name in online security, Ron Dick, director of the FBI's cyber threat and warning bureau, has also resigned from government service.
Is anyone else disturbed by the way first choice candidates seem to be running away from any involvement with government internet security?
'He' is the singular indefinite pronoun in English...
and later 'She' is the singular pronoun of personification in English...
Bah! You are attempting to apply rules of latin grammar to english. This didn't work in the 18th and 19th centuries when it was all the rage among the hoity-toity upper class. Why do you think it has any relevance to today's slashdot readers?
I suppose you also object to splitting infinitives! You would not allow us "To boldly go where no one has gone before"?!
Fie! Get thee hence and never return! Should slashdot ever need a grammar policeman, let them at least be policing the native structure of English and not foisting foreign rules upon us!
There are some interesting usage notes from the The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language at Dictionary.com/he (and see also the links from there to "she" and "they" and the usage notes at those locations). These show that there is major disagreement in usage of "he" and "she" in ambiguous contexts, and the use of "he" as a representative sampling of a mixed group is now considered appropriate by only a minority of the publisher's Usage Panel.
The zero-sum economy is one of those wonderful humanist myths.
This far, we are in agreement. There's a bunch of stuff further in your post that I think is pure hooey, but hey I'm not interested in arguing right now. I'm too deep in my nightcap and feeling to mellow for that.
But I will say this, kind of in support of one of your views:
Those who talk about a zero-sum economy are [expletive deleted] persons who are too stupid to know where their self interest lays.
I wish these [e.d.] persons would stop with the relative comparisons of their piece of the pie with everyone elses' piece of the pie. Because so long as they are demanding that everyone pay attention to that comparison, they are interfering with those of us who are interested in seeing the damn pie get bigger. Since they can't seem to get out of the aphorisms, here's one I'll throw to them that maybe some of them can latch onto, and maybe paddle over to where they are more a part of the solution than they are part of the problem.
A rising tide lifts all boats.
Wow. I've impressed myself. I can compose in HTML while carrying more of a bottle of sangria under my skin than I could safely operate heavy equipment with. Which always struck me as strange because the most dangerous thing I've got at hand is a pretty lightweight chain saw. It could cut through a forearm in jig time, you betcha.
Ever think about how much damage would be done to the economy if MS suddenly folded?
Now come back to the real world. If there was any risk of Microsoft folding from any kind of marketplace pressures, the courts would not have found Microsoft to be a monopoly.
Thanks, that's very useful. I might have thought about looking at Intel's site if my caffeine stream wasn't suffering from overnight ebb when I wrote my query.
An interesting quote from the site:
The first processor was the Intel 4004 with a 4 Bit data bus [introduced in 1971]. It wasn't powerful enough for a computer, but some early pocket calculators based on this chip.
So Pioneer 10 was developed before even the predecessor of the first CPU chip was available. That's something, huh? That bird is way, way out there, still trying to talk, with a CPU of discrete pieces that would maybe be a double handful of parts.
Were there 8088 chips back in 1972? Was the 8080 even in use then?
More generally, is there a timeline on the web somewhere that shows when various chips and technologies were introduced? What search terms would you use to find it?
...At the end of the press conference, the spokesman for the insurance company underwriting the satellites lost in the latest Ariane failure was heard to remark
"Why can't they get it right?? I mean, this isn't butterfly science, you know"
Much of the fiber that was laid along the I-5 corridor was expected to stay dark for a long time. It doesn't cost that much more to lay excess capacity, once you've committed to buying the rights of way and doing the trenching. The story is weak for suggesting that the dotcom crash caused all the dark fiber-- it didn't. Depending on which segment you chose to look at, anywhere from 50% to 75% or more of the fiber would still be dark even if the dotcoms and the economy had continued to boom along.
The story is also weak for implying that this extra capacity is wasted. That isn't so; it will be there when the need develops. My town has twice reviewed the costs and bennies of lighting up some of that fiber to attract new businesses. So far other problems in the economy have ruled against it, but sooner or later a number of towns in southern Oregon and northern California will do this.
Another weakness in the story is its implication that the dark fiber has cost a lot of jobs in Oregon. There has been much moaning and gnashing of teeth around here because all those cable laying jobs have gone away, but that didn't happen because of dark cable. That happened because, gee, once the cable's in place I guess we don't need any of these ditch-diggers any more, huh?
I think the story is right on the money that too many companies were chasing this business opportunity.
As I said, they need the organisational and software skills to make use of the power they have available. And IT management with some vision... and balls. This is the real issue.
You are right!
As usual, the technological problems are the easy ones. The difficult problems in this area are managerial. And if you have any experience dealing with wetware, you know that it takes a lot more than balls and vision to get this kind of thing implemented properly. It takes money, lots of it, for planning, training, meetings, and all the other crap that has to be done when dealing with people.
Seems to me like Gateway is offering something very interesting that could affect a lot of "make or buy, or do without" decisions. If they can sell time on their grid for less than the TCO of developing and maintaining an in-house grid, then they've got a winner. They'll be able to sell service to your company, even though you've got eleventy jillion workstations sitting around, because management will see that its more costly to get you-all to get your act together than to buy Gateway's service.
The DMCA is a federal law and thus any action brought under the DMCA will be heard in federal courts, not state courts.
I believe you are the one that's wrong. As I recall from my Business Law course oh so many years ago, state courts can and do handle a lot of civil cases that involve federal law. That seems reasonable: it is a less expensive way to do things. I know for a fact that a state court in California can try a civil case under Delaware state law when a contract between plaintif and defendant has stipulated that any suit is to be judged according to Delaware law.
I don't know how widely this ruling will apply. IANAL, but my understanding is that this would only definitely apply within that specific jurisdiction, but that other jurisdictions would be very likely to accept the same argument when it is presented to them.
Further info available this morning:
Reuters[see note below] report on the ruling contains the following:
The decision will also likely affect the some 500 other individuals living outside of California who were sued along with Pavlovich for posting the code, said Allonn Levy, Pavlovich's lawyer said.
He said the decision to limit such lawsuits on the issue of jurisdiction sets a precedent that would be followed by courts in other states.
"This is such a cutting edge issue," Levy said. "Now that it is the law of the land in California I would expect that other states will do the same."
This guy is a lawyer, making the same point: the California movie industry cannot bring every DMCA related case to its local court. It will have to determine where the alledged crime occurred and file suit there.
[Note: I couldn't get a direct link to the story to work. Use their search engine with the words "California court" to find the article.
> > This is another important step on the long road to overturning the DMCA.
> No... no, actually it's nothing of the sort. As the majority's concluding words said, Pavlovich may still have to face the music, just not in California.
This has a significant impact on the logistics of DMCA suits. It means that these plaintiffs in similar actions will have to determine the appropriate jurisdiction for for their suits and will not always have the home court advantages (mostly of pushing up the costs of defendants who have to travel from other jurisdictions). While not a major victory over DMCA, this is a definite victory in constraining DMCA's implementation.
I don't know how widely this ruling will apply. IANAL, but my understanding is that this would only definitely apply within that specific jurisdiction, but that other jurisdictions would be very likely to accept the same argument when it is presented to them.
I've had to take my computer down a couple of times because the CPU overheated. Your 'so what?' means I don't have a reliable machine until I find a way to make it run cooler.
Sheesh.
Go buy yourself a can of air duster, noodle out how to open your CPU case, and blast them hot dust bunnies out of its innards.
The aorta runs from its arch over the heart to where it bifurcates in the pelvic bowl into the left and right femoral arteries. The kidneys sit very close to the aorta, and another huge vessel, the inferior vena cava. The kidneys connect between these two.
During renal surgery, the patient is positioned on his side and the table is bent upward to stretch the area between the base of the rib cage and the crest of the pelvis. One of the implications of this is that bleeding from a nicked vessel could easily go undetected with the blood pooling at the bottom of the abdominal cavity. This would be consistent with the ninety minute delay before the patient developed signs of trouble. If he had not been recovering from anesthesia, he may well have reported a lot of pain and shown signs of an "impending doom" anxiety that would have tipped off the nursing staff to a problem. But during those ninety minutes he would have been returning to consciousness.
I am very puzzled by one aspect of this case. It seems from the reports that excision of the kidney was intended from the start. That would require the kind of long incision whose avoidance is one of the chief reasons for using the robot. Also the renal procedure is an abdominal one, not a thoracic one, and the risks that the robot was designed to minimize are much less severe in the abdominal cavity. So I'm puzzled about what the perceived benefits for using the robot in this area were supposed to have been.
The CNN article was talking of the use of this robotic technique in cardiac surgery.
The patient death concerned the use of the same equipment, but in renal surgery. This is a very different situation-- the surgical approach is entirely different-- the whole operating room is set up differently. Very different techniques are in use. The profiles of risk factors are extremely different both in the OR and postop.
This is analogous to developing a trans-Sahara four wheel drive vehicle and all the procedures for its safe use, and then trying to adapt it to arctic conditions. Yeah, snow drifts and sand dunes have a lot in common. With some modifications to the procedures, the vehicle might well be as safe on the snow as on the sand. But the fact of an accident in a Montana blizzard of itself means nothing with regards to the vehicle's safe performance in the Sahara.
In my opinion the news has acted responsibly in not tying the fatal renal operation into a report on a new and extensively developed set of cardiac procedures. There is as yet no reasonable basis for making that connection, and there might never be.
Re:Lacks any ability to glide
on
Fanwing Planes?
·
· Score: 1
Uh, wow. I'm sort of at a loss as to how to reply to this.
Let's start by suggesting that it's usually good practice to read the article(s) and at least scan through the comments before you post your response. That can save you a lot of embarrassment.
Now I know in this case the article was badly slashdotted, but even a cursory scan through the comments would have shown a couple of instances where people had made verbatim copies of enough of the original material that you should have gotten a clue. Also there were a couple links into the Google archives that worked just fine. And several links to supplementary material that I found interesting, any one of which would have suggested to you that a fanwing must be something very different from an autogyro.
Okay, enough generalities.
Uh, no. The birds would suffer a similar fate no matter what kind of aircraft they hit.
BRRRRZZZZZ! Wrong answer!
The fanwing is the only lift/propulsion system I have ever heard of that blows air away from its blades. This makes it unique, and makes it very unlikely that small birds could come in contact with the blades when it is operational. Jets and propellers all develop thrust along their axis of rotation. These squirrel cage fans work entirely differently.
The Fanwing is a new name on an old concept: It's called an autogyro.
BRRRRZZZZZ! Wrong answer!
Well, I can give you a partial credit, say 10%, since it is true that fanwing technology was anticipated in the 1920s and that Appleton wrote a book relying on a similar principle in the 1960s (_Tom Swift and his Ultrasonic Barrelplane_ or something like that).
Autogyros or gyrocopters are something entirely different.
Enjoy the rest of your day. And polish up your critical reading skills.
Re:Lacks any ability to glide
on
Fanwing Planes?
·
· Score: 2
I wonder what this design does to birds?
It looks like the design would tend to blow birds and trash up and over.
Will people in developing countries be able to justify the expenditure of $250 on a device that may be helpful but is not essential?
Alice is a shrewd 17 year old who plans to build on her investment in a Simputer and a cell phone until she achieves world domination. With the optimism of youth, she figures that will happen when she's about 25. After all, she needs two years to pay off the Co-op loan she took to get the things, and then she needs to really learn how read and write, too. That might take a little while. But she's willing to put off starting her family until she's 25. Much as she wants kids, she wants to be rich, first.
One of Alice's clients of the day is Bob, who is a 28 year old who has a full set of socket wrenches, a number of other tools, a backpack, and an excellent memory of the exploded diagrams of the half dozen different types of Briggs & Stratton engines that are in use within walking distance. Today he brings Alice a broken fan belt from Chuck's rototiller. With him helping her figure out the part identification code, Alice is able to find a store that has a replacement in stock, fifteen miles-- a round-trip walk of only a day-- away. That's much better than the fifty mile trip to the city.
Chuck, who tagged along with Bob in a very worried fashion, is delighted at this good news. Three years ago his tiller had also broken down in the middle of planting season, and it had taken a week of sending a runner around to the distant towns to find the needed part. A week without work had thrown off the usual schedule, and while his farmer clients understood these things happen, some of their wives were angry at him because their kids had to be pulled out of school to hoe the fields, and those families had become the butt of village jokes for months. Nobody likes to be called "old fashioned", not that way. Chuck had lost something much more important than just the loss of income in that debacle, and he did not want to repeat it.
Alice, the shrewd businesswoman, suggested that if Bob and Chuck wanted her to, maybe she could try to broker a delivery deal and get the new belt into Bob's hands before noon. At first they thought she was joking: same day delivery, better even than the mythical FedEx! But after a few minutes of enjoyable haggling, the three agreed to a payment. Then Alice chased them out of hearing distance, while she did furtive things with the internet access and the cell phone. No, I won't reveal her trade secrets, so don't ask me. Something about a regional network of teenage girls with Simputers, but you didn't hear that from me.
The upshot was that 10 minutes later Chuck started sloshing across the western marsh to the highway, where he was to flag down a Frito Lay delivery truck heading east. The driver would give him the fan belt, and also a dozen batteries and a bag of potato chips for Alice. Meanwhile, Bob went back to the rototiller and began removing cover plates and things that needed to come off before the new belt could go on.
End of story: Chuck is back in business before the day has even started to get hot. Bob's reputation for fast, friendly, quality field service is even more enhanced. That evening Alice counts the day's take with a laugh, and then gently tells her latest suitor that no, she's not yet ready to marry. There is a world out there and she is going to claim her piece of it. Marriage and children have to wait awhile.
The body is very good about breaking up proteins before they're absorbed. Otherwise you couldn't eat a steak without throwing your whole system out of whack.
I agree that the genes are not jumping from corn to soybeans.
That genes can do inter-species jumps is proven. This is common among some bacteria and viruses-- check out the swapping that is constantly going on between avian, swine, and human influenza species. Look at the problems with MRSA-- it isn't just that some staph aureus strains have become methycillin resistant; the greater problem is that this resistance is being transmitted across bacterial species to other pathogens. There is no good reason to suppose that eukaryotes (plants and animals) have not retained this ability (to incorporate new genetic material from ingested or invasive organisms) to some degree.
So while a jump from corn to soybean is highly unlikely, a jump from corn to smut or ergot or root blight cannot be ruled out. The possibility of transfer from such a disease to another crop is therefore present. Further, if the post-harvest residue is being composted in an environmentally friendly way, the chance for genetic transfer from the decaying corn plants into some resident of the complex ecosystem of the compost heap is very much present.
The concept of "species" is a very useful taxonomic mental construct. But when engineering, we've got to think in terms of system functions and not be limited to the bounaries of our classification schemes.
Here's the sound bite:
It is silly to think that new genes are introduced only into a species when they are put out in the field. Once they are moved out of the laboratory, new genes are introduced into an ecosystem.
Perhaps you shouldn't be so sure that the barriers that are so obvious in your model of the world accurately reflect reality. You assume too much.
[After a brief review establishing that cross species transfer of genetic material is proven in the laboratory in bacteria, the author asks]
Does transfer of genes across species lines occur in the higher organisms? Certainly the mechanism for such transfer is there. Plants and animals are infected with viruses whose hosts range include many different species and it is a common observation that animal viruses can assemble into their particles genetic material from their host. In addition, eukaryotic cells carry transposable elements (McClintock, 1956; Symposium, 1981), apparently in greater abundance than in bacteria. Recently an animal virus carrying a chromosomal transposable element has been described (Miller & Miller, 1982). In fact there are already some indications of lateral gene transfer involving higher organisms. Buslinger, Rusconi & Birnstiel (1982) have reported that two distantly related sea urchins have histone genes that are nearly identical at the nucleotide sequence level. [snipping 5 citations of similar nature]... Singh, Purdom & Jones (1980) have found that a middle repetitive sequence from reptilesâ"a sequence that they suspect is a transposable elementâ"cross hybridizes with sequences from fruit flies and mice. Possibly, what may turn out to be one of the most dramatic examples of a transposable element crossing species boundaries is the P factors that are found in Drosophila melanogaster (Engels, 1983). It appears as if the P factor has become established in the fly population only in the past 50 years.
From "Cross-species Gene Transfer; Implications for a New Theory of Evolution" by MICHAEL SYVANEN (Harvard Medical School), published in The Jorunal of Theoretical Biology: Link to article (.pdf)
(Be gentle... I expect the site is easily slashdotted... that's why I copied the quote here)
It took me more time to copy'n'paste the quote than it did to find this article using Google, and this was just the first of over 60,000 hits on "cross species gene transfer". Anyone who bothers to look will see that this is one of the earlier papers on the subject, from 1985. There has been quite a bit of activity in the last 17 years.
Cross species transfers of genetic material happen. That is why there is a debate about the risks to benefit ratios of using this technology outside the laboratory. The new genes are not added to just corn, but to a complex stew of multiple species, when this is done in the dirt.
Slashdot Mirror
Quoting the last five (short) paragraphs of the story:
Is anyone else disturbed by the way first choice candidates seem to be running away from any involvement with government internet security?
from the desk of Howard Schmidt
Subject: Plan for implementing National Cybersecurity Strategy
'He' is the singular indefinite pronoun in English...
and later
'She' is the singular pronoun of personification in English...
Bah! You are attempting to apply rules of latin grammar to english. This didn't work in the 18th and 19th centuries when it was all the rage among the hoity-toity upper class. Why do you think it has any relevance to today's slashdot readers?
I suppose you also object to splitting infinitives! You would not allow us "To boldly go where no one has gone before"?!
Fie! Get thee hence and never return! Should slashdot ever need a grammar policeman, let them at least be policing the native structure of English and not foisting foreign rules upon us!
There are some interesting usage notes from the The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language at Dictionary.com/he (and see also the links from there to "she" and "they" and the usage notes at those locations). These show that there is major disagreement in usage of "he" and "she" in ambiguous contexts, and the use of "he" as a representative sampling of a mixed group is now considered appropriate by only a minority of the publisher's Usage Panel.
The zero-sum economy is one of those wonderful humanist myths.
This far, we are in agreement. There's a bunch of stuff further in your post that I think is pure hooey, but hey I'm not interested in arguing right now. I'm too deep in my nightcap and feeling to mellow for that.
But I will say this, kind of in support of one of your views:
Those who talk about a zero-sum economy are [expletive deleted] persons who are too stupid to know where their self interest lays.
I wish these [e.d.] persons would stop with the relative comparisons of their piece of the pie with everyone elses' piece of the pie. Because so long as they are demanding that everyone pay attention to that comparison, they are interfering with those of us who are interested in seeing the damn pie get bigger. Since they can't seem to get out of the aphorisms, here's one I'll throw to them that maybe some of them can latch onto, and maybe paddle over to where they are more a part of the solution than they are part of the problem.
A rising tide lifts all boats.
Wow. I've impressed myself. I can compose in HTML while carrying more of a bottle of sangria under my skin than I could safely operate heavy equipment with. Which always struck me as strange because the most dangerous thing I've got at hand is a pretty lightweight chain saw. It could cut through a forearm in jig time, you betcha.
Nighty night now.
Ever think about how much damage would be done to the economy if MS suddenly folded?
Now come back to the real world. If there was any risk of Microsoft folding from any kind of marketplace pressures, the courts would not have found Microsoft to be a monopoly.
Thanks, that's very useful. I might have thought about looking at Intel's site if my caffeine stream wasn't suffering from overnight ebb when I wrote my query.
An interesting quote from the site:
The first processor was the Intel 4004 with a 4 Bit data bus [introduced in 1971]. It wasn't powerful enough for a computer, but some early pocket calculators based on this chip.
So Pioneer 10 was developed before even the predecessor of the first CPU chip was available. That's something, huh? That bird is way, way out there, still trying to talk, with a CPU of discrete pieces that would maybe be a double handful of parts.
Wow. Those guys back then were smart.
Were there 8088 chips back in 1972? Was the 8080 even in use then?
More generally, is there a timeline on the web somewhere that shows when various chips and technologies were introduced? What search terms would you use to find it?
Somehow, I think that we are a long [way] from using these as a weapons delivery system...
Well, yes, I fully agree. But this isn't rocket science, you know.
gdr
...At the end of the press conference, the spokesman for the insurance company underwriting the satellites lost in the latest Ariane failure was heard to remark
"Why can't they get it right?? I mean, this isn't butterfly science, you know"
The story isn't complete.
Much of the fiber that was laid along the I-5 corridor was expected to stay dark for a long time. It doesn't cost that much more to lay excess capacity, once you've committed to buying the rights of way and doing the trenching. The story is weak for suggesting that the dotcom crash caused all the dark fiber-- it didn't. Depending on which segment you chose to look at, anywhere from 50% to 75% or more of the fiber would still be dark even if the dotcoms and the economy had continued to boom along.
The story is also weak for implying that this extra capacity is wasted. That isn't so; it will be there when the need develops. My town has twice reviewed the costs and bennies of lighting up some of that fiber to attract new businesses. So far other problems in the economy have ruled against it, but sooner or later a number of towns in southern Oregon and northern California will do this.
Another weakness in the story is its implication that the dark fiber has cost a lot of jobs in Oregon. There has been much moaning and gnashing of teeth around here because all those cable laying jobs have gone away, but that didn't happen because of dark cable. That happened because, gee, once the cable's in place I guess we don't need any of these ditch-diggers any more, huh?
I think the story is right on the money that too many companies were chasing this business opportunity.
"CH2O" was a common shorthand for "carbohydrate" many years ago-- I expect that is still the case.
All carbohydrates, by definition, have a basic ratio of one part carbon to two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.
As I said, they need the organisational and software skills to make use of the power they have available. And IT management with some vision... and balls. This is the real issue.
You are right!
As usual, the technological problems are the easy ones. The difficult problems in this area are managerial. And if you have any experience dealing with wetware, you know that it takes a lot more than balls and vision to get this kind of thing implemented properly. It takes money, lots of it, for planning, training, meetings, and all the other crap that has to be done when dealing with people.
Seems to me like Gateway is offering something very interesting that could affect a lot of "make or buy, or do without" decisions. If they can sell time on their grid for less than the TCO of developing and maintaining an in-house grid, then they've got a winner. They'll be able to sell service to your company, even though you've got eleventy jillion workstations sitting around, because management will see that its more costly to get you-all to get your act together than to buy Gateway's service.
Hope I'm not going to mung this comment.
MUNG: first known recursive acronym: MUNG Until No Good.
The DMCA is a federal law and thus any action brought under the DMCA will be heard in federal courts, not state courts.
I believe you are the one that's wrong. As I recall from my Business Law course oh so many years ago, state courts can and do handle a lot of civil cases that involve federal law. That seems reasonable: it is a less expensive way to do things. I know for a fact that a state court in California can try a civil case under Delaware state law when a contract between plaintif and defendant has stipulated that any suit is to be judged according to Delaware law.
Other commentary supports this. See saucesee's comment and DavidBrown's comment.
I do regret it when people spread around disinformation about our legal systems.
Posted with apologies to non-USA readers
I don't know how widely this ruling will apply. IANAL, but my understanding is that this would only definitely apply within that specific jurisdiction, but that other jurisdictions would be very likely to accept the same argument when it is presented to them.
Further info available this morning:
Reuters [see note below] report on the ruling contains the following:
This guy is a lawyer, making the same point: the California movie industry cannot bring every DMCA related case to its local court. It will have to determine where the alledged crime occurred and file suit there.
[Note: I couldn't get a direct link to the story to work. Use their search engine with the words "California court" to find the article.
> > This is another important step on the long road to overturning the DMCA.
> No... no, actually it's nothing of the sort. As the majority's concluding words said, Pavlovich may still have to face the music, just not in California.
This has a significant impact on the logistics of DMCA suits. It means that these plaintiffs in similar actions will have to determine the appropriate jurisdiction for for their suits and will not always have the home court advantages (mostly of pushing up the costs of defendants who have to travel from other jurisdictions). While not a major victory over DMCA, this is a definite victory in constraining DMCA's implementation.
I don't know how widely this ruling will apply. IANAL, but my understanding is that this would only definitely apply within that specific jurisdiction, but that other jurisdictions would be very likely to accept the same argument when it is presented to them.
I've had to take my computer down a couple of times because the CPU overheated. Your 'so what?' means I don't have a reliable machine until I find a way to make it run cooler.
Sheesh.
Go buy yourself a can of air duster, noodle out how to open your CPU case, and blast them hot dust bunnies out of its innards.
The aorta runs from its arch over the heart to where it bifurcates in the pelvic bowl into the left and right femoral arteries. The kidneys sit very close to the aorta, and another huge vessel, the inferior vena cava. The kidneys connect between these two.
During renal surgery, the patient is positioned on his side and the table is bent upward to stretch the area between the base of the rib cage and the crest of the pelvis. One of the implications of this is that bleeding from a nicked vessel could easily go undetected with the blood pooling at the bottom of the abdominal cavity. This would be consistent with the ninety minute delay before the patient developed signs of trouble. If he had not been recovering from anesthesia, he may well have reported a lot of pain and shown signs of an "impending doom" anxiety that would have tipped off the nursing staff to a problem. But during those ninety minutes he would have been returning to consciousness.
I am very puzzled by one aspect of this case. It seems from the reports that excision of the kidney was intended from the start. That would require the kind of long incision whose avoidance is one of the chief reasons for using the robot. Also the renal procedure is an abdominal one, not a thoracic one, and the risks that the robot was designed to minimize are much less severe in the abdominal cavity. So I'm puzzled about what the perceived benefits for using the robot in this area were supposed to have been.
The CNN article was talking of the use of this robotic technique in cardiac surgery.
The patient death concerned the use of the same equipment, but in renal surgery. This is a very different situation-- the surgical approach is entirely different-- the whole operating room is set up differently. Very different techniques are in use. The profiles of risk factors are extremely different both in the OR and postop.
This is analogous to developing a trans-Sahara four wheel drive vehicle and all the procedures for its safe use, and then trying to adapt it to arctic conditions. Yeah, snow drifts and sand dunes have a lot in common. With some modifications to the procedures, the vehicle might well be as safe on the snow as on the sand. But the fact of an accident in a Montana blizzard of itself means nothing with regards to the vehicle's safe performance in the Sahara.
In my opinion the news has acted responsibly in not tying the fatal renal operation into a report on a new and extensively developed set of cardiac procedures. There is as yet no reasonable basis for making that connection, and there might never be.
Uh, wow. I'm sort of at a loss as to how to reply to this.
Let's start by suggesting that it's usually good practice to read the article(s) and at least scan through the comments before you post your response. That can save you a lot of embarrassment.
Now I know in this case the article was badly slashdotted, but even a cursory scan through the comments would have shown a couple of instances where people had made verbatim copies of enough of the original material that you should have gotten a clue. Also there were a couple links into the Google archives that worked just fine. And several links to supplementary material that I found interesting, any one of which would have suggested to you that a fanwing must be something very different from an autogyro.
Okay, enough generalities.
Uh, no. The birds would suffer a similar fate no matter what kind of aircraft they hit.
BRRRRZZZZZ! Wrong answer!
The fanwing is the only lift/propulsion system I have ever heard of that blows air away from its blades. This makes it unique, and makes it very unlikely that small birds could come in contact with the blades when it is operational. Jets and propellers all develop thrust along their axis of rotation. These squirrel cage fans work entirely differently.
The Fanwing is a new name on an old concept: It's called an autogyro.
BRRRRZZZZZ! Wrong answer!
Well, I can give you a partial credit, say 10%, since it is true that fanwing technology was anticipated in the 1920s and that Appleton wrote a book relying on a similar principle in the 1960s (_Tom Swift and his Ultrasonic Barrelplane_ or something like that).
Autogyros or gyrocopters are something entirely different.
Enjoy the rest of your day. And polish up your critical reading skills.
I wonder what this design does to birds?
It looks like the design would tend to blow birds and trash up and over.
Propellers and jet engines suck. Fanwings don't.
Will people in developing countries be able to justify the expenditure of $250 on a device that may be helpful but is not essential?
Alice is a shrewd 17 year old who plans to build on her investment in a Simputer and a cell phone until she achieves world domination. With the optimism of youth, she figures that will happen when she's about 25. After all, she needs two years to pay off the Co-op loan she took to get the things, and then she needs to really learn how read and write, too. That might take a little while. But she's willing to put off starting her family until she's 25. Much as she wants kids, she wants to be rich, first.
One of Alice's clients of the day is Bob, who is a 28 year old who has a full set of socket wrenches, a number of other tools, a backpack, and an excellent memory of the exploded diagrams of the half dozen different types of Briggs & Stratton engines that are in use within walking distance. Today he brings Alice a broken fan belt from Chuck's rototiller. With him helping her figure out the part identification code, Alice is able to find a store that has a replacement in stock, fifteen miles-- a round-trip walk of only a day-- away. That's much better than the fifty mile trip to the city.
Chuck, who tagged along with Bob in a very worried fashion, is delighted at this good news. Three years ago his tiller had also broken down in the middle of planting season, and it had taken a week of sending a runner around to the distant towns to find the needed part. A week without work had thrown off the usual schedule, and while his farmer clients understood these things happen, some of their wives were angry at him because their kids had to be pulled out of school to hoe the fields, and those families had become the butt of village jokes for months. Nobody likes to be called "old fashioned", not that way. Chuck had lost something much more important than just the loss of income in that debacle, and he did not want to repeat it.
Alice, the shrewd businesswoman, suggested that if Bob and Chuck wanted her to, maybe she could try to broker a delivery deal and get the new belt into Bob's hands before noon. At first they thought she was joking: same day delivery, better even than the mythical FedEx! But after a few minutes of enjoyable haggling, the three agreed to a payment. Then Alice chased them out of hearing distance, while she did furtive things with the internet access and the cell phone. No, I won't reveal her trade secrets, so don't ask me. Something about a regional network of teenage girls with Simputers, but you didn't hear that from me.
The upshot was that 10 minutes later Chuck started sloshing across the western marsh to the highway, where he was to flag down a Frito Lay delivery truck heading east. The driver would give him the fan belt, and also a dozen batteries and a bag of potato chips for Alice. Meanwhile, Bob went back to the rototiller and began removing cover plates and things that needed to come off before the new belt could go on.
End of story: Chuck is back in business before the day has even started to get hot. Bob's reputation for fast, friendly, quality field service is even more enhanced. That evening Alice counts the day's take with a laugh, and then gently tells her latest suitor that no, she's not yet ready to marry. There is a world out there and she is going to claim her piece of it. Marriage and children have to wait awhile.
The body is very good about breaking up proteins before they're absorbed. Otherwise you couldn't eat a steak without throwing your whole system out of whack.
Mad cow disease.
Nuff said.
I agree that the genes are not jumping from corn to soybeans.
That genes can do inter-species jumps is proven. This is common among some bacteria and viruses-- check out the swapping that is constantly going on between avian, swine, and human influenza species. Look at the problems with MRSA-- it isn't just that some staph aureus strains have become methycillin resistant; the greater problem is that this resistance is being transmitted across bacterial species to other pathogens. There is no good reason to suppose that eukaryotes (plants and animals) have not retained this ability (to incorporate new genetic material from ingested or invasive organisms) to some degree.
So while a jump from corn to soybean is highly unlikely, a jump from corn to smut or ergot or root blight cannot be ruled out. The possibility of transfer from such a disease to another crop is therefore present. Further, if the post-harvest residue is being composted in an environmentally friendly way, the chance for genetic transfer from the decaying corn plants into some resident of the complex ecosystem of the compost heap is very much present.
The concept of "species" is a very useful taxonomic mental construct. But when engineering, we've got to think in terms of system functions and not be limited to the bounaries of our classification schemes.
Here's the sound bite:
It is silly to think that new genes are introduced only into a species when they are put out in the field. Once they are moved out of the laboratory, new genes are introduced into an ecosystem.
Perhaps you shouldn't be so sure that the barriers that are so obvious in your model of the world accurately reflect reality. You assume too much.
It took me more time to copy'n'paste the quote than it did to find this article using Google, and this was just the first of over 60,000 hits on "cross species gene transfer". Anyone who bothers to look will see that this is one of the earlier papers on the subject, from 1985. There has been quite a bit of activity in the last 17 years.
Cross species transfers of genetic material happen. That is why there is a debate about the risks to benefit ratios of using this technology outside the laboratory. The new genes are not added to just corn, but to a complex stew of multiple species, when this is done in the dirt.