Current hip transplants are the best tools for the job. In an ideal world, they would be better, but at the end of the day it is not even remotely financially feasible to make them better.
At the moment, most artificial hips are hemiarthroplasties (the end of the thigh bone is broken and needs replaced, the pelvic part if the joint is intact - you might get one of these if you break your thigh bone (femur) close to the joint. The rest are total hip replacements (THRs) where, more likely from severe arthritis, both parts of the joint surface need replacing. There are a variety of different types, but the best results are generally from metal on plastic or less often metal on metal joints.
These joints survive for, give or take, 10 years. Usually, 8-15 years, but with heavy wear or bad luck (this includes fat people) it can be less. Some last over 20 years. These are the hips which were put in 8-20 years ago - we won't know if the current crop are better for 8-20 years.
There are many problems in developing better hip transplants, but the surgeon's thoughts are not really one of them. They simply want the best tool for the job - they don't make the prostheses, they just put them in. A re-do hip op is much harder than the orginal, and so it's in their own interests to not have to replace them. The companies that make the hips spend years on R&D, and at great expense - if they get it wrong, it may be years before a problem is found, and if they are held liable, then that's a lot of payola. It's very hard to reproduce how a hip behaves in a person without putting it in a person, and what you are suggesting would make this even more complicated. More parts increases the chances of infection (probably the artificial hip's worst enemy) and is not a better solution just because your local car dealer does it.
At the end of the day, most people who have a hip transplant of either sort are likely to be very elderly - given that the 6-month mortality of a little old lady who breaks her hip is around 50% (yes, half will die within 6 months (almost all die within six months if it is not fixed with an operation)), and of the other 50%, the vast majority will die of other causes before the hip joint fails, you can see why they are the best tools for the job.
The problems are really with younger patients - one of the reasons why surgeons often delay THR in young people with severe arthritis - they do not want to operate three or four times on the same hip, each becoming more technically difficult, in this person's lifetime. It is preferable to wait as long as possible, as symptoms and disability allow, to reduce the number of operations they will need. Havine complicated, expensive multi-part hips as you suggest might be a better idea for some of these, but they are a minority, developing these magical implants would cost an absolute fortune, and no manufacturer has come up with something so far that would work. If you have any suggestions, then feel free to approach one and show them your ideas, but the likelihood is that someone has already tried and abandoned it for one reason or another, be it cost or complications.
Blaming the surgeon though, is a bit narrow minded and ignorant. Some surgeons might not give a damn, but all surgeons use the same tools, which are produced by a few manufacturers. I very much doubt that none of them give a damn about their patients, especially seeing as they have relatives (or themselves) that might need a new hip one day.
normals and supernormals? I don't know if that's what Asimov useed to desribe them, but surely by definition if you are not normal (i.e. what passes for normal) then you are abnormal.P.
It was overhyped nonsense. A lot of people made a lot of money out of the panic spread about Y2K. A few things might have broken, but essentially the predicted disaster was never going to happen.
Hey we sold you this! Top of the range! But it's broken, even before we sold it to you. If you pay us £500000 we'll fix them all, but if you don't your blood will boil and your head will explode, all your kids will die of pestilence, your wife will sleep around, your plane will try to reach the moon and all your elevators are belong to us.
Correct me if I'm wrong (i.e. correct me, I don't know what I'm talking about) but do radio stations pay to broadcast music?
I'd always assumed that the transmission of the songs was free, in that the songs had to get airplay to get into the charts - if no-one had heard them then no-one would know about them to buy them. I was actually under the impression that occasionally (and non-legitimately?) stations were payed to give more airtime to new music to this end. The end result being that the radio stations get listeners and hence advertising revenue, and the music producer gets their song played and hence gets money from the listeners buying the record.
Am I just being nieve (sp?) or are the webcasters getting royally shafted by this?
It's a nice touch that subjects could be debated in a high profile manner before they are established law (these laws are still in relative infancy), but if this doesn't change anything, then what's the point?
It would be good if they would encourage open debate on such subjects before they became la though, but I suppose any law which is bought in the interests of big business is at best one-sided.
This sort of stuff has been around a loooooong time. I was the resident back in Feb 2001 for a surgeon by the name of Martin Fried (pronounced Frede) who was Belgian, and did a lot of work with AESOP, his pet robot, before coming to Scotland. The funny thing was he went from (at the time) the cutting edge of surgery to work in a shitty District General Hospital where he ended up doing varicose veins and hernias for a few months, before, unsurprisingly, resigning and going back to his Professorial unit.
So this is at least 2 years out of date - a long time in cutting edge technological terms. What next on the front page of Slashdot - the pentium 3 arrrives? Just because it's the first time its been used in a sleepy rural town doesn't change its redundancy.
The robot though is apparently great - you can tell it to remember positions (e.g. a camera position for a good view of something) and then, later, just tell it to go back to position A or whatever, and you get it in exactly that same good view. And it doesn't tire or move, which can be a problem in long operations when you are holding up the big fat liver and big fat bosom of some big fat fatty who needs their gallbladder out because every big mac hurts, and is too fat for keyhole surgery.
In a few years when the operation is done entirely by the robot, with no human intervention whatsoever, then I'll be impressed. Unfortunately, I'll also have to get a new job.
It'd be interesting if someone argued that receipt of a junk fax cost them over $500 (otherwise the law would be a little pointless with "whichever is less" - should be "whichever is more".
You could easily argue that while the cost of: paper and toner for one fax is trivial, the cost of replacing paper and toner, man hours reading the fax, electricity, man hours deciding the fax is spam, deleting it, reporting it to the authorities, going through the legal process thereafter, maintainence of fax machine and a thousand other tiny things (apart from the man-hours and wasted productivity thing which could be quite large) would add up to a hefty sum (at east $500) and then the law might have some bite.
Surely all that'll happen is that the *nix users and anyone else who cares will just run open-source or pre-DRM software on pre-DRM / DRM-disabled hardware. As long as the internet doesn't have fundamental DRM enabled (I find this hard to believe at any point in the future) then people can go on as before.
This will lead to some restrictions in that you might not be able to run new software, but then you can just go and run the DRM-cracked copies that will take hours to surface. At this stage the ideology of DRM will be valid as the only people not using it are those running warez.
I think that the worries are more potential than real - if DRM is invasively implemented there will be a backlash; it's doubtful it could stand up in court (just show a Linux user running legal software with DRM disabled as a display of the stupidity of it all).
I'm fairly sure not playing video games will have little effect on these wars.
I have a limited time on this planet, and it's the only shot I'll get. So I will spend my time as I enjoy it, trying to step on others' toes as little as possible.
You may feel differently, but you can spend your life debating these issues if that's your bag. Just don't tell me how to go about my life - it's a shame and all, but I just don't care. Sounds harsh? Yes, it is. But I have my own priorities. If you think that me saying I don't care is evil and wrong, just what, exactly, have you done to help them? Donated food, money, time? Not watched your favourite TV show / film because it just didn't matter in comparison? I bet you didn't. Maybe a few pounds (bucks) or an old jacket to charity, except for a few noble exceptions. I bet you've eaten out at restaurants, watched TV, gone to work, spend some of your money on luxuries (I include alcohol), and mostly given as little of a damn as me, so don't evangelise, you self-righteous hypocrite.
If on the other hand, you live on a basic diet which provides you with just enough for your metabolism, move to Rwanda and nurse the sick, and donate any remaining money to the Red Cross, then I apologise - this post is not directed at you.
Yes, once you get used to sleeping with any noise, it's hard to change. But the noise I like is silence, and it's hard for me to change too!
Everyone likes it a different way, but the only reason that most people like the noise is that they're used to it. If you had never had a fan in your room before, you probably wouldn't like it at first.
It's no big deal that it require cooling from a technological point of view, but it just makes a lot of noise. My computer is at my desk, in the next room to my bedroom. I have to close the door so that I can sleep as the fan is annoying (Athlon XP 1500+, in case you are wondering).
I like to leave it on all the time so that I can acess my files from elsewhere without having carry any form of media (e.g. floppy / CD-R / ZIPdisk), but if either myself of my girlfriend want to work (old-fashioned pen and paper) at the desk, we really have to turn it off.
This is why people have a problem with fans - they are just too loud, even when they are quiet. A silent computer is a much more attractive idea. Obvioulsy different peole havedifferent thresholds, but in a small apartment, your threshold is often lower.
I know this got modded down as offtopic, but that's because the original poster is about a page above it so you don't see it in context. He just put point 1 up.
It's actually a very funny post. One of the best ever on Slashdot.
The analogy is by no means perfect (this is slashdot, after all), but the sysadmin has set up the WLAN to grant access to any asker. It's a bit more like letting anyone into the block who buzzes your entryphone without finding out who it is. The point is that the sysadmin could easily block the use, but instead has just been lazy and granted access to anyone. So they have permission, even if the spirit of the thing is possibly unethical.
What if the guy across the street is offering free access to his WLAN? You just happen to get the wrong one. It makes the legal aspect a bit less clear cut, but personally I think that the company should at least have bare minimum security - if anyone bypasses it then that's unquestionably illegal, but I think this is such a grey area that the law has to presume you innocent.
But in that case they are entering your house without permission, locks or no.
If I sit in a local park with my laptop, and I am granted access by the company WLAN (i.e. with permission), without any anti-security measures, then I don't see how I can be doing anything wrong. I am in a public space, I have requested a service and had that request granted by the company hardware.
If someone comes to your door and asks if they can come in, and you say yes, then you'd be hard pushed to fault them for it. If you didn't have a lock on the door, and they came in without asking, you'd have a valid complaint.
Essentially the bandwidth users have done nothing wrong unless they have stolen the bandwith, i.e. used it without permission. I find it hard to believe that the company would not have such basic security measures as access control.
Bannr ads are the least intrusive advertising(unless you count e.g. the Google sponsored links), compared with the likes of pop-ups/unders, spam, and things pretending not be be ads. These just piss people off - and I wouldn't be surprised if part of the backlash against advertising (and hence the reduction in impression payments) is that most people hate and ignore these, closing them as soon as possible. This way they are simply lost revenue for the company - if they were to use e.g. banner ads which are a little less intrusive (no-one minds the ads on magazines particularly) then they would actually get a better return as at least more people would look at them (you will notice all the/. comments about Microsoft advertising in the/. banners... these have to be read to be noticed, compared to the automatic closing of a window without even reading it.)
I don't mind banners. Just as I put up with advert breaks in TV, they subsidise the network. Just don't use pop-ups because that might actually discourage people to use it.
If you are talking about this as a way of generating 'bums-on-seats', it is a good one - if I have wireless internet, why not go to the place where I can use it for free rather than the rival shopping centre where I can't? All else being equal (a big assumption) I'd go for the access - especially if there were other things, like free terminals.
You could also try something else - like making a start page which has to be accessed to connect, with a 'Here is a message from our sponsors...' message - just once, at the start, or even every half hour or something. As long as it is not overly intrusive, it will work. You could even make them fill out a (short) demography survey (anonymous of course). Remermber that it is free, and they don't have to use it - if it's there to help generate revenue, you have to find an acceptable level for the users to put up with.
They are separate countries, but they are effectively ruled by one government, and in total all the different {countries¦provinces} make up the UK.
To the other poster who said they were separate provinces but the same country, I have no idea which is more correct - I don't know if there's a legal or official definition of a country but I imagine it's more a historical thing.
In Scotland (where I am from) we have our own monarchy (which sort of bit the dust), our own parliament (a horrible, puppet organisation of scrounging bastards who use therir position to get perks and free lunches but have little real power), a border (as far as I'm concerned the most important thing to define a country!), and although we have similar money, it's not exactly the same. Pound notes are still legal tender here although they have long since stopped being used in England.
I think to be honest the individual provinces' definitions are a metter of opinion, unless someone knows better...
I wouldn't think the CIA or the UN stat division would bother separating them for their purposes anyway, so I don't think that helps.
We do have our own football team though. They are the worst in the world.
The people worried about job losses because of automation were well justified. The only thing that prevents this from happening is human incompetence - we still have to build the damn things, or the machine that makes them.
There was no such thing as IT in today's sense around 30 years ago. Now there are friggin' millions of IT workers. Assuming a relatively constant employment rate (which we have) this means these people would have been employed in something else a few years ago - consequently, no net loss from automation.
However, if the damn things didn't break down / need to be programmed / be plugged in (a usual first suggestion by the IT guy, unfortunately because it can weed out some enquiries) then we might be in trouble. Ultimately though, human fallibility means that they all require human maintainence. Self-healing wouldn't work as the human coders would make mistakes, and technology's onward movement would require new instructions to be a constant requirement so the robots can still tell that their arm isn't working anymore since the DRM upgrade or other emergent technology.
True artificial intelligence could end it though - but then the robots would see us as cheap labour so at least we could mine or do other jobs beneath the robots.
Yes, this could have happened (see my point about a junior programmer using the code without the manager's knowledge - the principle is the same), but as I already said, this doesn't make it less wrong.
If you edited a book that was a collaboration of ten writers' work, you might not check to see if any had plagiarised. If they have, however, it is still illegal, and the publisher would still be partly responsible. The work is still plagiarised, and somewhere along the line someone knows it. My point is that while the company may be morally blame free as an entity(the manager doesn't know the work is someone else's), they are still legally responsible. The law does not hold ignorance in high regard, or else it would be a valid defense.
I am not saying that they should necessarily be punished -they did after all admit their mistake. But they remain in the wrong - punishing them would test the GPL in court and would set a precedent.
Slashdot readers see suing as wrong because the system is abused so much - this is however not an abuse! The writers of the original code should make that decision, and in their absence and for the purposes of slashdot debate, I will.:)
Slashdot Mirror
At the moment, most artificial hips are hemiarthroplasties (the end of the thigh bone is broken and needs replaced, the pelvic part if the joint is intact - you might get one of these if you break your thigh bone (femur) close to the joint. The rest are total hip replacements (THRs) where, more likely from severe arthritis, both parts of the joint surface need replacing. There are a variety of different types, but the best results are generally from metal on plastic or less often metal on metal joints.
These joints survive for, give or take, 10 years. Usually, 8-15 years, but with heavy wear or bad luck (this includes fat people) it can be less. Some last over 20 years. These are the hips which were put in 8-20 years ago - we won't know if the current crop are better for 8-20 years.
There are many problems in developing better hip transplants, but the surgeon's thoughts are not really one of them. They simply want the best tool for the job - they don't make the prostheses, they just put them in. A re-do hip op is much harder than the orginal, and so it's in their own interests to not have to replace them. The companies that make the hips spend years on R&D, and at great expense - if they get it wrong, it may be years before a problem is found, and if they are held liable, then that's a lot of payola. It's very hard to reproduce how a hip behaves in a person without putting it in a person, and what you are suggesting would make this even more complicated. More parts increases the chances of infection (probably the artificial hip's worst enemy) and is not a better solution just because your local car dealer does it.
At the end of the day, most people who have a hip transplant of either sort are likely to be very elderly - given that the 6-month mortality of a little old lady who breaks her hip is around 50% (yes, half will die within 6 months (almost all die within six months if it is not fixed with an operation)), and of the other 50%, the vast majority will die of other causes before the hip joint fails, you can see why they are the best tools for the job.
The problems are really with younger patients - one of the reasons why surgeons often delay THR in young people with severe arthritis - they do not want to operate three or four times on the same hip, each becoming more technically difficult, in this person's lifetime. It is preferable to wait as long as possible, as symptoms and disability allow, to reduce the number of operations they will need. Havine complicated, expensive multi-part hips as you suggest might be a better idea for some of these, but they are a minority, developing these magical implants would cost an absolute fortune, and no manufacturer has come up with something so far that would work. If you have any suggestions, then feel free to approach one and show them your ideas, but the likelihood is that someone has already tried and abandoned it for one reason or another, be it cost or complications.
Blaming the surgeon though, is a bit narrow minded and ignorant. Some surgeons might not give a damn, but all surgeons use the same tools, which are produced by a few manufacturers. I very much doubt that none of them give a damn about their patients, especially seeing as they have relatives (or themselves) that might need a new hip one day.
can't you sue for a load of money for this?
It would certainly be a lot less frivolous than most of the crap that picks up a huge payola in your courts.
normals and supernormals? I don't know if that's what Asimov useed to desribe them, but surely by definition if you are not normal (i.e. what passes for normal) then you are abnormal.P.
Hey we sold you this! Top of the range! But it's broken, even before we sold it to you. If you pay us £500000 we'll fix them all, but if you don't your blood will boil and your head will explode, all your kids will die of pestilence, your wife will sleep around, your plane will try to reach the moon and all your elevators are belong to us.
I'd always assumed that the transmission of the songs was free, in that the songs had to get airplay to get into the charts - if no-one had heard them then no-one would know about them to buy them. I was actually under the impression that occasionally (and non-legitimately?) stations were payed to give more airtime to new music to this end. The end result being that the radio stations get listeners and hence advertising revenue, and the music producer gets their song played and hence gets money from the listeners buying the record.
Am I just being nieve (sp?) or are the webcasters getting royally shafted by this?
It would be good if they would encourage open debate on such subjects before they became la though, but I suppose any law which is bought in the interests of big business is at best one-sided.
So this is at least 2 years out of date - a long time in cutting edge technological terms. What next on the front page of Slashdot - the pentium 3 arrrives? Just because it's the first time its been used in a sleepy rural town doesn't change its redundancy.
The robot though is apparently great - you can tell it to remember positions (e.g. a camera position for a good view of something) and then, later, just tell it to go back to position A or whatever, and you get it in exactly that same good view. And it doesn't tire or move, which can be a problem in long operations when you are holding up the big fat liver and big fat bosom of some big fat fatty who needs their gallbladder out because every big mac hurts, and is too fat for keyhole surgery.
In a few years when the operation is done entirely by the robot, with no human intervention whatsoever, then I'll be impressed. Unfortunately, I'll also have to get a new job.
You could easily argue that while the cost of: paper and toner for one fax is trivial, the cost of replacing paper and toner, man hours reading the fax, electricity, man hours deciding the fax is spam, deleting it, reporting it to the authorities, going through the legal process thereafter, maintainence of fax machine and a thousand other tiny things (apart from the man-hours and wasted productivity thing which could be quite large) would add up to a hefty sum (at east $500) and then the law might have some bite.
This will lead to some restrictions in that you might not be able to run new software, but then you can just go and run the DRM-cracked copies that will take hours to surface. At this stage the ideology of DRM will be valid as the only people not using it are those running warez.
I think that the worries are more potential than real - if DRM is invasively implemented there will be a backlash; it's doubtful it could stand up in court (just show a Linux user running legal software with DRM disabled as a display of the stupidity of it all).
I have a limited time on this planet, and it's the only shot I'll get. So I will spend my time as I enjoy it, trying to step on others' toes as little as possible.
You may feel differently, but you can spend your life debating these issues if that's your bag. Just don't tell me how to go about my life - it's a shame and all, but I just don't care. Sounds harsh? Yes, it is. But I have my own priorities. If you think that me saying I don't care is evil and wrong, just what, exactly, have you done to help them? Donated food, money, time? Not watched your favourite TV show / film because it just didn't matter in comparison? I bet you didn't. Maybe a few pounds (bucks) or an old jacket to charity, except for a few noble exceptions. I bet you've eaten out at restaurants, watched TV, gone to work, spend some of your money on luxuries (I include alcohol), and mostly given as little of a damn as me, so don't evangelise, you self-righteous hypocrite.
If on the other hand, you live on a basic diet which provides you with just enough for your metabolism, move to Rwanda and nurse the sick, and donate any remaining money to the Red Cross, then I apologise - this post is not directed at you.
Everyone likes it a different way, but the only reason that most people like the noise is that they're used to it. If you had never had a fan in your room before, you probably wouldn't like it at first.
I like to leave it on all the time so that I can acess my files from elsewhere without having carry any form of media (e.g. floppy / CD-R / ZIPdisk), but if either myself of my girlfriend want to work (old-fashioned pen and paper) at the desk, we really have to turn it off.
This is why people have a problem with fans - they are just too loud, even when they are quiet. A silent computer is a much more attractive idea. Obvioulsy different peole havedifferent thresholds, but in a small apartment, your threshold is often lower.
It's actually a very funny post. One of the best ever on Slashdot.
1. Post company website link on Slashdot
2. ????
3. Profit!!!
What if the guy across the street is offering free access to his WLAN? You just happen to get the wrong one. It makes the legal aspect a bit less clear cut, but personally I think that the company should at least have bare minimum security - if anyone bypasses it then that's unquestionably illegal, but I think this is such a grey area that the law has to presume you innocent.
If I sit in a local park with my laptop, and I am granted access by the company WLAN (i.e. with permission), without any anti-security measures, then I don't see how I can be doing anything wrong. I am in a public space, I have requested a service and had that request granted by the company hardware.
If someone comes to your door and asks if they can come in, and you say yes, then you'd be hard pushed to fault them for it. If you didn't have a lock on the door, and they came in without asking, you'd have a valid complaint.
Essentially the bandwidth users have done nothing wrong unless they have stolen the bandwith, i.e. used it without permission. I find it hard to believe that the company would not have such basic security measures as access control.
Of course I may well be wrong, that's just from high school physics and that was about 10 years ago. I may even have been wrong then...
I don't mind banners. Just as I put up with advert breaks in TV, they subsidise the network. Just don't use pop-ups because that might actually discourage people to use it.
If you are talking about this as a way of generating 'bums-on-seats', it is a good one - if I have wireless internet, why not go to the place where I can use it for free rather than the rival shopping centre where I can't? All else being equal (a big assumption) I'd go for the access - especially if there were other things, like free terminals.
You could also try something else - like making a start page which has to be accessed to connect, with a 'Here is a message from our sponsors
To the other poster who said they were separate provinces but the same country, I have no idea which is more correct - I don't know if there's a legal or official definition of a country but I imagine it's more a historical thing.
In Scotland (where I am from) we have our own monarchy (which sort of bit the dust), our own parliament (a horrible, puppet organisation of scrounging bastards who use therir position to get perks and free lunches but have little real power), a border (as far as I'm concerned the most important thing to define a country!), and although we have similar money, it's not exactly the same. Pound notes are still legal tender here although they have long since stopped being used in England.
I think to be honest the individual provinces' definitions are a metter of opinion, unless someone knows better...
I wouldn't think the CIA or the UN stat division would bother separating them for their purposes anyway, so I don't think that helps.
We do have our own football team though. They are the worst in the world.
There was no such thing as IT in today's sense around 30 years ago. Now there are friggin' millions of IT workers. Assuming a relatively constant employment rate (which we have) this means these people would have been employed in something else a few years ago - consequently, no net loss from automation.
However, if the damn things didn't break down / need to be programmed / be plugged in (a usual first suggestion by the IT guy, unfortunately because it can weed out some enquiries) then we might be in trouble. Ultimately though, human fallibility means that they all require human maintainence. Self-healing wouldn't work as the human coders would make mistakes, and technology's onward movement would require new instructions to be a constant requirement so the robots can still tell that their arm isn't working anymore since the DRM upgrade or other emergent technology.
True artificial intelligence could end it though - but then the robots would see us as cheap labour so at least we could mine or do other jobs beneath the robots.
If you edited a book that was a collaboration of ten writers' work, you might not check to see if any had plagiarised. If they have, however, it is still illegal, and the publisher would still be partly responsible. The work is still plagiarised, and somewhere along the line someone knows it. My point is that while the company may be morally blame free as an entity(the manager doesn't know the work is someone else's), they are still legally responsible. The law does not hold ignorance in high regard, or else it would be a valid defense.
I am not saying that they should necessarily be punished -they did after all admit their mistake. But they remain in the wrong - punishing them would test the GPL in court and would set a precedent.
Slashdot readers see suing as wrong because the system is abused so much - this is however not an abuse! The writers of the original code should make that decision, and in their absence and for the purposes of slashdot debate, I will. :)