who cry "karma whore" like 4 year old children, that should be moderated down.
This copy-paste is the only reason anyone can read the article while the source is being slashdotted... and this is the only copy where the author didn't screw up the greater-than and less-than symbols.... so without this... no one would even know what this story was about until hours from now.
I don't see the benefit in having folks come and visit for a few years, undercut the locals in the job market (slighlty or moderately), and then split, taking their expertise back to whever they came from. It's wrong in every possible way.
I figure we want these guys to stay here just as much as they want it. The alternative is that they return home to populate the 3rd world economy they came from with competition that doesn't get paid in dollars.
If Ford makes a car overseas, (in the theoretical, alternate universe where big business still pays taxes, that has little relationship with reality anymore) they have to pay a "tariff" to bring it back into the country in order to drive it or sell it here.
The problem with software is that there's no there there. There's nothing to tax - it's a bunch of bits of indeterminate value. Poof. And even if you tried to tax it, electronic "smuggling" is so easy we wouldn't even dignify it with that term.
Add to that the fact that the communication and quality problems with foreign work that everybody whines about are about 50% veiled racism, 45% exaggeration of special-cases, and 5% truth. What will you get? The domestic software industry of the first world has no future. Period. It's just too easy and too cheap not to go to India. And everyone already is. Perhaps many American programmers will as well - if you don't mind the weather, at least you can live more comfortably there on what the work is worth.
The only thing forestalling that is actually the reverse of what everyone is claiming - a shortage of skilled workers outside the United States. It won't last, of course... and especially not with the H1-B program exporting so many talented folks back to their homes.
I think the interest of the American technology worker lies with the mythical "brain drain" of America - sucking in the best and the brightest from elsewhere in the world, and actually keeping them here.
Or let me put it another way: would you rather compete with new immigrant workers who will undercut you by 10-20%? Or foreign firms who will undercut you by 75%?
Thanks for the idea. I've tried listening to just the PS; I think my biggest single noise complaint is the CPU cooler, although the graphics card figures in as well. I have thought about shelling out for a better one anyway; maybe I'll give it a try at some point.
My case isn't so bad, but I don't have a lot of options for where to place the fans. I figure you're right, though, and actually, now that I think about it, I figure the next logical move is really a new case.
Yeah, I thought about that. The reason that I think it's actually not the bios is the pattern of activity... the fan slows down (making a small but noticeable downward change in the pitch of the fan noise) when the load goes up. But I'd think if it where the bios reducing speed to match lower demand, it'd be the opposite. It is subtle, but you do notice it if you're paying attention.
Your point made me think about it again, though, and I realized I can check the CPU and case fan speeds with the hardware monitor. So I ran a very, very brief and rough test, stressing the CPU and watching the CPU fan speed. Inconclusive; I think I see about a 5% decrease in CPU fan speed at 100% utilization, but it's tough to be sure with the low resolution (and I suspect, low reliability) of the sensor. I think it's really made to spot a failure, not much more. I also note a tiny but perceptible increase in the 12v line voltage level under full load. I guess I should have paid more attention in EE class; I don't know what this could mean.
This makes me wonder further about how much power I'm actually using. By my (again, very coarse) math, I shouldn't be close to using all of the 350W the power supply can deliver, but I can't see investing in equipment to check.
I used to think worry about noise was something only Mac-having aesthetes did. I'd never had a "noise problem," and I could only see it being an issue for those using the gear in some kind of rarefied experimental or engineering setting (or making music, etc).
Then I got a new AMD PC. It's not outrageous by current standards; XP2100+, GF4 ti4400. I suppose a better (read: more expensive) vendor might have spent time tuning the case, fans, and airflow to get it quieter... had I known, I might have considered spending the money on more expensive brand. But I did what I always do; buy the almost-cheapest hardware for the almost-best specs. And, basically, this approach has always served me well, except for this time, and only because of the noise.
Oh wow, it is loud.
I've seen the firey-flash thermal death movies of what happens when you remove the heatsink from a current AMD that were circulating a while ago; actually, I got my motherboard just as they started really getting into temperature monitoring and safety features for AMD CPUs. I can read in the hardware monitor, not to mention feel in the air, how hot this computer gets. Actually, I can hear the power involved; this is also the first PC I've had which, when the CPU is fully loaded, I can actually hear the power draw slowing down the fans. This still astounds me.
My computer sounds like a running vacuum cleaner. Well, I exaggerate, but it is loud. Loud enough to be a serious nuisance. Loud enough that you turn up the volume of music. Loud enough that you don't want to watch movies or hang out in the room while it's on. And it blows me away. This is a PC for god's sake. I've never had to worry about noise on a PC before.
I've since invested in "quiet" fans and "smart" fans. These help a little, but not much. I realize that the services of the professionals Dell/Gateway/Apple/etc employs for designing cases to cope with this are worth some of the money they charge on the other end. Although I never ever expected noise would be the thing that drove me back to the big vendors.
So I find myself reading this article and actually seriously contemplating the purchase of this watercooler, despite the fact that I am not, and have no intention of becoming, an overclocker, and at ~$275, this gear is almost 1/3d what I paid for the entire rest of the computer - not to mention the risk of giving my gear a bath.
And I find harkening back to all of those science fiction books I read which incidentally noted water-cooled PCs in the world of the future. How silly that seemed in 1989. And yet now, at the rate power consumption and heat are growing, I start to wonder... might we see factory-installed water cooling coming from the major retailers in few years?
Just to cope with the noise? Or even because they have no choice, noise or not?
Your idea may fly eventually, but right now Moore's Law hasn't caught up with it. Workable 3D game engines have a very tightly honed feature set. They work because of a massive, carefully chosen set of compromises.
This is how it will turn out. Assume everybody will come and throw a stone soup party on the engine. A few months later you're already getting 0.25fps, and everyone is pointing fingers. You have to pick and choose, or give up. Well, picking and choosing is what everyone is already doing, and moreover they set out from the start to do it, so...
With a very, very well managed project - I almost think of a couple people working full-time on managing it, you can go farther than a few months, and maybe do some interesting things, but at the end of the day, you won't get to the destination you're imagining for another few years at least.
However, your willingness to dismess out of hand the, shall we call it, intuition, of someone who is clearly at least educated both in the anatomy of hearing and the signals-processing fundamentals, is just as baseless.
Of course, given a critical evaluation of the text itself, dismissal is a good guess. There are a lot of red flags there, especially at the end. Certainly, it's not clear to me what calibratory function the signals otherwise masked by psychoacoustic (or neuroacoustic, as the author says) compression might serve - this is the most important part of the theory, and there's no real attempt by the author to treat it in detail. But (self-consciously) little sketches like this, many of which by students with even less coherence or credibiliy, are often a prelude to important discoveries, good and bad.
If I were a betting man, I would confidently bet you were right. But just the same, I hope a few members of the medical community (I think this would take a background in neurolobiology/cog. sci/audiology) see this, and at least consider it. You could probably devise a relatively inexpensive animal study or two that could safely close off this kind of speculation.
I wish slashdot had more marketing types around. What we need are more good ideas for making privacy understandable to people who have enjoyed it all their lives and won't otherwise know why it's worth keeping until after it's gone.
Screw reciprocity. I am 100% for surveiling those in government, although this will be more feasible for some than others.
Realistically, it will have to be 100% blanket surveillance of those we chose to be effective - every letter, fax, night vision the bedroom - the whole deal. Congressmen, and the President, for instance, will make many claims that this is outrageous, etc. but only one class of such complaints really moves me, which is that "matters of national security," etc. prevent the publishing of such surveillance. To this I propose spot reviews by n (5-15?) randomly selected members of opposition political partie(s) for asserting that a) no crime occurred, and b) making an embargo on the data for n years (5? 25?).
The accountability is long overdue, and they don't call it the public life for nothing. It sounds ridiculous at first, but it would work. It would drive a lot of the people you don't want out of politics virtually overnight. Public service in elected office (and I don't think just elected officials should be eligible for such a program) is a solemn duty with the heaviest responsibilities to the people. Both common logic and "reasonable suspicion" should compell us to take this step.
But I see no reason why this requires "reciprocity" for private citizens.
The federal government has for purposes of this discussion, unlimited money. And I'm not sure you realize the scale of what's possible with carte blanche funding.
Take a look at Google sometime to get a sense of the scale of what's possible just with some private investment, licensing and advertising revenues.
They can do it. It'll be about focusing, winnowing, and summarizing the datastream carefully at various stages.
I know you think what you're saying makes sense...
on
Pay to Play the U.S. Way
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· Score: 5, Insightful
One thing's for sure. There's free speech, and then there's the modern mass media. TV and radio, and the new economies of broadcast that come with them, didn't exist until long after the Constitution began to yellow. You can stick your head in the sand and pretend that we should leave the mass media as uncontrolled as regular speech, but then you'll get an awful mess as a result... like we have!
Not only that, but there is a startlingly common hypocrisy by those who claim that "Dan Heskett" on a street corner, the local paper, the local radio station, and the TV networks, should all receive equal treatment in our society. Everyone knows that what goes on TV has immense effects. Yet there's this smarmy doublethink surrounding it. You have ideologues who claim the sanctity of the current political system vis a vis TV under the umbrella of the venerable Fourth Estate, but who can within minutes (and without considering it strange) rabidly campaign to censor "harmful" and "dangerous" images like a stray nipple or a proscribed word. But I'm sure you believe nudity, cursing, and graphic violence on TV is fine, because, after all, this is America.
And it's easy for us to not examine that thoroughly because it's scary to most people that, yes, really, what we see on TV affects our beliefs, behaviors, and decisions, often in the most literal and pedantic way. In fact, directly. Massively. The whole advertising industry is a 12-figure testimony to this fact. TV and radio have supplanted the community culture that came before them, and replaced it with a uniform source, and that has big consequences. And unlike newspapers, I cannot start a TV station if I'm unhappy with the local coverage. In fact, I think as an exercise, before you start going on about the sacredness of your press and its speech, you should go figure out what it takes to start your own radio station.
Or what the penalties are for "unauthorized" broadcasts.
It turns out, "we" take threats to the current broadcaster's hegemony with the most deadly seriousness. Perhaps because... "unregulated" broadcasting is... in the words of the FCC: dangerous.
This is one reason why the Internet is such a positive invention. But I digress.
New systems, new playing field, new rules. Right now the rules are that you have to pay astronomical sums to the broadcast trust for a few seconds of airtime. They can refuse your business, or not. If one of the broadcast trust members wants to devote an entire channel to Republican propaganda and call it "Fox News", hey, it's good to be the king.
You can hypothesize bad new rules - straw men of censorship and totalitarianism that you hold up when your fundamentalist take on the First Amendment is questioned, but you can't abdicate responsibility for thinking of a better way to have a mass-media embued democracy. In other words, rather than hiding your head in the sand, or crying about the wrong way to do things, consider what good alternatives there are to having political control go to those with the best ties, financial and otherwise, to the media.
The Swiss simply said, if I understand it correctly from another poster here, no political ads allowed on TV and radio. If they didn't, let's consider it hypothetically anyway. You don't quite know how to level the modern playing field, so you just go back to the system the Framers understood - one where all political speech is far more equal, because anyone can afford newsprint, and practically anyone can become their own publisher. Censorship, as another responder pointed out, can take many forms. You are invoking the specter of Soviet Russia where the real danger is more that of the Highway Patroll. You just can't drive faster that 65 MPH, sir. No, no one can. Not even if they're His Majesty Rupert Murdoch the First.
Dan Heskett can curse on the street. In New York, "Danette Heskett" can even walk around on the street topless. Yet we think that broadcasting curses and nipples is so dangerous that the thought of it ending up on NBC where a parent might somehow momentarily lapse in their parental supervision and allow their child to see it sends us into conniptions. And yet we can simultaneously believe that laissez fair is a good idea for political speech in the media.
Astounding, isn't it?
One of the few "conservative" beliefs I harbor is a faith in the right to self-defense. I believe that if we truly grant that ordinary men and women can bear the responsibility to vote, or to raise children without supervision, we have no choice but to assume they are up to the trivial (and millenia old) right of owning and carrying a weapon. Yet, just as with driver's licenses, we acknowledge that for the general safety of all, some basic prudence is in order, and we do some paperwork, and we have some simple ground rules.
In advocating "free speech" as your only guiding principle when discussing politics and the mass media, you are like a pro-weapon extremist who believes that nuclear weapons should be unregulated.
Actually, writing as you are, today, in America, you're like a pro-weapon extremist making a speach on how regulating nuclear weapons is wrong from inside a gigantic, smoking, eerily luminescent blast crater.
Still, from one admirer of the Constitution to another, I hope you will take my arguments in the spirit of good faith and respect with which they are intended.
I've thought about this one a lot. Port blocking and other targeted attacks on P2P wont work (they can always be circumvented in a variety of ways), but it is still possible to attack the usage of bandwidth itself - and I believe this is what they will do.
The feds are both for sale and beholden to the news outlets; a double whammy. The major media guys own them. The FCC is dismantling all of the "competition" parts of the TA96, and allowing telecoms and media megamergers right and left. I'm already reading about bandwidth "shortages" that don't exist; the writing is on the wall. The broadband suppliers (especially cable, who are generally owned outright by the media giants, i.e. Time Warner) are publicly floating ideas to end broadband as we know it. In other words, no more unlimited bandwidth; instead, quotas, caps, and per-traffic charges.
May sound crazy, but it's already happened in Canada and Australia ("test markets"); it could start here in as soon as the next 12 months. The only wildcard are the telcos, who "need to come on board" with content control rather than salivate over the potential flood of customers to DSL if cable gets crippled and/or suffers a massive traffic-based price increase. Then again, as the telcos consolidate, it gets easier and easier to "play ball" with a smaller and smaller boardroom full of people, and this is the boardroom at its best: in engineering the switch to bit-based-pricing, we're talking about price-fixing on a massive, even global scale. And who doesn't want to make lots and lots of money?
There are complications, though, in that there are a number of legitimate uses for bandwidth on or near the scale that P2P uses it. Video games, for instance, and especially the new class of broadband-only games, would be destroyed by such a move - and there are billions at stake in that industry alone. So if the collateral damage to other wealthy players is high enough, we might have some hope.
Perhaps the discontent of millions of citizens would be a factor too, if this were still a democracy in more than name.
The EOL may be today, but the massive R&D effort necessary to keep a high-end CPU architecture in the game ended a long time ago. Even if HP reversed course, they'd be starting from scratch, in a sense. The real end of the Alpha happened some time ago, probably during or not long after the DEC/Compaq merger.
It sounds eminently reasonable - the best for all concerned. 30 days is not a long embargo, and their list of exceptions seems to me extremely thorough. This appears to answer criticism that "premature disclosure" is irresponsible (a criticism which I don't give much merit, but others disagree) with an intelligent and nuanced policy.
The message to vendors: we'll cooperate with you, if you act responsibly and respond quickly.
Quickly being the operative word. The tragic thing in the disclosure and response-time debate is the assumption that if the white-hat side discovers a flaw, they're the only ones who've found it... and just because you can't find a paper or an exploit after a bit of looking doesn't mean it's not out there.
Certainly, there is a long history of big vendors (I wont name any names... ah, whatever, Microsoft) who completely ignore (i.e. wont return calls) or yes the helpful hackers to death (i.e. yes, it's on the list, we'll have a new patch _any day now_ - rinse, repeat for 6 months), and then whine when the disclosure becomes public... even as the publicity stings them to finally bestir themselves to release a patch. So I'm very glad to hear of those in the security community making a logical response to it all.
Pavlovich lives in Texas. The DVD-CCA (the particular media-industry front organization prosecuting Pavlovich) sued him in California ("playing hardball" - forcing him into a more expensive long-distance defense), making a specious argument that "because he knew DeCSS would harm industries based in California," that state has jurisdiction.
The lower courts in California agreed. However, the quality of jurisprudence is fortunately a little higher in the California Supreme Court. They kicked it back. Now DVD-CCA will have to start over in another state (probably Texas, or potentially Illinois - where Pavlovich may have done some of the LiViD work while in school).
The case is far from over, in fact, it's just getting started, and it's anybody's guess what will come of it. One hopes one of these will find its way to the USSC while there's still a few shreds of dignity left at that bench; in which case, the DMCA would get the treatment it deserves. But it would depend on many things...
Specifically, with respect to the jurisdiction (which is an interesting, if academic, question), the California supremes held:
The exercise of jurisdiction over a nonresident defendant comports with these Constitutions "if the defendant has such minimum contacts with the state that the assertion of jurisdiction does not violate ' "traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice."
They go on to indicate their position:
According to DVD CCA, California should exercise jurisdiction over Pavlovich because he should have known that third parties may use the misappropriated code to illegally copy movies on DVD's and that licensees of the misappropriated technology resided in California. In other words, DVD CCA is asking this court to exercise jurisdiction over a defendant because he should have known that his conduct may harm--not a California plaintiff--but industries associated with that plaintiff. As a practical matter, such a ruling makes foreseeability of harm the sole basis for jurisdiction in contravention of controlling United States Supreme Court precedent. (See Burger King, supra, 471 U.S. at p. 474.)
Indeed, such a broad interpretation of the effects test would effectively eliminate the purposeful availment requirement in the intentional tort context for select plaintiffs. [emphasis theirs]
Very simple, actually.
I expect the DVD-CCA's attorneys to get their law on ghetto-style; that means every nasty trick they can think of to rack up costs and price Pavlovich out of the fight. Home-court advantage has a nice synergy, too.
What I find interesting are the series of decisions supporting them which led up to this ruling. Perhaps one of the biggest weaknesses of the legal system is that there is no good way to handle bad judges once they get into the system.
It seems to me there are two important facts in this case:
First, that a powerful family is able to call in favors from the FBI and others in local law enforcement. Particularly stunning are the details of the unequal treatment of offenders (i.e. George Runner).
In a free, democratic society, those in government would have someone to answer to if among tens of thousands of people who committed the same crime, many were given wildly different responses depending on their background (i.e. ethnicity, religion, relationship to wealthy families).
Second, and this is something I hear a lot about lately, that the FBI is apparently empowered to s ieze property practically at random (his Windows CD's?) and hang on to it indefinitely (i.e. Wirtz's possessions "may never be returned"?).
In a free and democratic society, there is oversight regarding what law enforcement officers can take away from you - they have to have a legitimate reason for every article taken, and they absolutely have to return it promptly after their need is concluded.
Here we get to the crux of the issue - something I am wishing I could have postscripted into my original post, since it would have saved me some considerable typing later. I am not interested in attacking the robot, or the surgeon. I have no bias, nor prejudgement about what caused the accident - I accept it as ambiguous. Now, look at the type of procedure being perfomed. Precisely the sort of thing that limits "sensory inputs" to the surgeon. Look at the type of injury; an aorta cut going unnoticed for 90 minutes. This should hopefully answer your question about anyone should anticipate that the problem was related to the technique, and/or possibly limitations in the device itself.
I am deeply disillusioned with the media industry, though in this case, I am not even making an allegation of corruption. Foremost, they have an inherent problem with their dependency on advertising and sponsorship, often by the very companies they are reporting on. Like Aurther Andersen doing "consulting" for Enron while "auditing" their finances. Then there's the inexplicable consolidation, which leaves ownership of huge swaths of the media in a single pair of hands. You are naive to assume the media is doing the right thing in a particular instance. But I digress.
You say "I do not advocate silence. I advocate discretion." We have a very specific context, in which I don't think you even have that hair to split. I understand your point, and your anecdote about saccharine is instructive, but your false dilemma remains. There is a long distance between the "discretion" of glossing over recent fatalities during in-depth coverage of a device or technique, and doing "immense harm to...progress." A terribly long distance.
I am not advocating irresponsible or "unscrupulous" journalism; however, I worry that with your emphasis on "discretion," you are. I think it obvious that journalists doing in-depth coverage of DaVinci could report on the fatality, and even quote experts involved in the investigation, without arousing panic that would set back science.
Frankly, both "discretion" and "openness" have been tried over the years in various media cultures. As it turns out, a policy of "discretion" is unambiguously dangerous (did you ever spend any time in the Soviet Union?) and a policy of "openness," for all its "perils" is unquestionably safer, not to mention its respect for the dignity of the audience.
Let an unscrupulous journalist fear-monger about robots surgeons. I will line up with you to condemn it. This doesn't even touch my point.
Also, I wanted to ask; do you think I am correct in my understanding that massive-dose experiments are conducted in order to discover through "saturation conditions" what potential cumulative effects and other risk factors might be; thus increasing the case for further (including long-term) study? Or will you imply that massive-dose experiments are simply animal torture which serves no scientific purpose? To put it in perspective, I don't avoid eating saccharine, but I think you're equally out of bounds implying, as you perhaps have in both cases we've discussed so far, that there is no risk that these new developments won't pan out in the end, and no gain in media coverage of any problems.
Thanks, I think. I'm got a chuckle and appreciated your point at the same time. I'm no libertarian, and I'm no neoliberal either (whatever that is). I don't actually like the fact that we have consumer-targeted advertisements for drugs and devices like the DaVinci; it's just that it seems to be the status quo now... Perhaps, in a world of declining healthcare standards, it's inevitable.
That's just it - reporters are meant to stay out of the judgement business. The idea is to just report facts. And in in-depth coverage, they shouldn't fail to report a fatality like this because "it might scare people."
It's called sleight of hand. It can leave the reader with a false impression that those numbers have some legitimacy. Much like the article left many readers with the false impression that the DaVinci was "unambiguously" not to blame for the accident.
1) No mechanical fault != no fault. I'm amazed I have to point out this distinction so often.
2) "There are new failure modes possible." Exactly. See? I think you already understand.
3) "I'll accept 10 robot-related deaths per year in exchange for the prevention of 100 lethal post-op infections due to poor wound healing." You just made those numbers up. Wouldn't it be nice if that were true? That's what the trial is meant to establish.
4) I have no criticism for the robot or its designers. Any judgement (positive or negative) would be premature. My point is about the news media, which has sloppily or mysteriously (probably the former) failed to mention some relevant facts when reporting in-depth about the device - like a very recent fatality under provocative circumstances.
Do you think surgeons perfoming that kind of operation (removing a cancerous kidney) routinely sever the aorta and then fail to notice for 90 minutes? This sort of info is just the sort of thing that rounds off a well-written story on a new technique.
We have a few points to clear up. Foremost, the article clearly does not draw the conclusion you claim, and your own quote underscores the point quite nicely. It relates only a statement by the hospital administrator. These are two entirely different things. This is only a claim by one of the parties, and moreover, an administrator with an incentive to avoid lawsuits/negative publicity. The only claim you can make about what the article "says" is a negative one. It does not say what caused the accident at all; it only points out, "something went terribly wrong."
I'm not even sure how you can believe your own words. By your "no room for ambiguity" standards, this should be an article titled "surgeon error results in patient death." It should say not "something went terribly wrong," but "the surgeon made a terrible mistake."
Fortunately, you immediately contradict yourself by admitting that it is unclear what caused the problem - the correct conclusion to draw from the article. Perhaps, if you were considering surgery with this tool, you would suddenly take a much keener interest in these fine points. By the way, taking into account the nature of the injuries, do you think this would have happened without the robot?
Your reasons for silence by journalists are particularly specious. Finding "no mechanical problems" should not be confused with "finding no problems" - again, two entirely different things. Even as a layman, I would not assume the problem was mechanical. Nor would I assume that any part of the machine "acted without prompting." Neither are very reassuring assertions. Rather, considering the circumstances (aorta cut going unnoticed for 90 minutes), one expects an interface problem, or a problem with the underlying technique. Remember, you're working in unconventional ways in tight spaces. The purpose of these trials is to evaluate the risks. Cases like this can expose important ones.
Perhaps if people left choices about medical treatments to their doctors, and there were no regular ads for drugs, medical facilities, and services targeted directly at consumers, you could make the argument that the mainstream press could be forgiven the omission. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
What do you consider "undue media attention?" Should fatalities be kept secret? Or just "not reported" in most venues? Would you like to discuss the difference? And remember, we're not talking about a quick spot; this is during extensive coverage of the device and the technique... not even then?
But where you've made the largest leap of all is the false dilemma between silence and "a media scare [that] could easily set this medical development back several years." I'm frankly shocked; proper handling, full disclosure, and maximum awareness of cases like this push medical development forward, not backwards. The only thing they might set backwards are the bottom line of the company selling the drug/device/procedure. The incentive on the part of that company to minimize such evidence, to "make the product appear to be perfect" is very powerful, often with hundreds of millions and even billions at stake...
I'm surprised to find myself getting this basic, but the foundation of both capitalism and democracy is one of full disclosure, where voters and buyers are trusted to make their own decisions given all the facts. It does not admit "fear of scaring people off" as a reason not to discuss fatalities resulting from a new product or service.
It just goes to show; there are people around who will argue the contrary to anything. I know if you were considering surgery with this machine you'd be upset if you felt these facts weren't getting out.
It's not the journalist's job to decide what was the fault of the machine and what wasn't. I basically trust the surgeons to do the right thing; it's the journalists I'd keep my eye on.
As I've said elsewhere, it's unclear how the accident happened, obviously, but with something like this I consider both the underlying technique as well as the user interface potential risk factors. Of course, it could just have been human error, but that's the whole point of risk factor analysis; the line between "human error" and a false expectation or a design problem does not actually exist.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is the highest irony...
That the poster did it as an AC... which means they get no karma.
Ooh. Double-dumbass.
who cry "karma whore" like 4 year old children, that should be moderated down.
This copy-paste is the only reason anyone can read the article while the source is being slashdotted... and this is the only copy where the author didn't screw up the greater-than and less-than symbols.... so without this... no one would even know what this story was about until hours from now.
Dumbass.
I don't see the benefit in having folks come and visit for a few years, undercut the locals in the job market (slighlty or moderately), and then split, taking their expertise back to whever they came from. It's wrong in every possible way.
I figure we want these guys to stay here just as much as they want it. The alternative is that they return home to populate the 3rd world economy they came from with competition that doesn't get paid in dollars.
If Ford makes a car overseas, (in the theoretical, alternate universe where big business still pays taxes, that has little relationship with reality anymore) they have to pay a "tariff" to bring it back into the country in order to drive it or sell it here.
The problem with software is that there's no there there. There's nothing to tax - it's a bunch of bits of indeterminate value. Poof. And even if you tried to tax it, electronic "smuggling" is so easy we wouldn't even dignify it with that term.
Add to that the fact that the communication and quality problems with foreign work that everybody whines about are about 50% veiled racism, 45% exaggeration of special-cases, and 5% truth. What will you get? The domestic software industry of the first world has no future. Period. It's just too easy and too cheap not to go to India. And everyone already is. Perhaps many American programmers will as well - if you don't mind the weather, at least you can live more comfortably there on what the work is worth.
The only thing forestalling that is actually the reverse of what everyone is claiming - a shortage of skilled workers outside the United States. It won't last, of course... and especially not with the H1-B program exporting so many talented folks back to their homes.
I think the interest of the American technology worker lies with the mythical "brain drain" of America - sucking in the best and the brightest from elsewhere in the world, and actually keeping them here.
Or let me put it another way: would you rather compete with new immigrant workers who will undercut you by 10-20%? Or foreign firms who will undercut you by 75%?
Thanks for the idea. I've tried listening to just the PS; I think my biggest single noise complaint is the CPU cooler, although the graphics card figures in as well. I have thought about shelling out for a better one anyway; maybe I'll give it a try at some point.
My case isn't so bad, but I don't have a lot of options for where to place the fans. I figure you're right, though, and actually, now that I think about it, I figure the next logical move is really a new case.
Yeah, I thought about that. The reason that I think it's actually not the bios is the pattern of activity... the fan slows down (making a small but noticeable downward change in the pitch of the fan noise) when the load goes up. But I'd think if it where the bios reducing speed to match lower demand, it'd be the opposite. It is subtle, but you do notice it if you're paying attention.
Your point made me think about it again, though, and I realized I can check the CPU and case fan speeds with the hardware monitor. So I ran a very, very brief and rough test, stressing the CPU and watching the CPU fan speed. Inconclusive; I think I see about a 5% decrease in CPU fan speed at 100% utilization, but it's tough to be sure with the low resolution (and I suspect, low reliability) of the sensor. I think it's really made to spot a failure, not much more. I also note a tiny but perceptible increase in the 12v line voltage level under full load. I guess I should have paid more attention in EE class; I don't know what this could mean.
This makes me wonder further about how much power I'm actually using. By my (again, very coarse) math, I shouldn't be close to using all of the 350W the power supply can deliver, but I can't see investing in equipment to check.
Ah well. Anyway, good thought.
I used to think worry about noise was something only Mac-having aesthetes did. I'd never had a "noise problem," and I could only see it being an issue for those using the gear in some kind of rarefied experimental or engineering setting (or making music, etc).
Then I got a new AMD PC. It's not outrageous by current standards; XP2100+, GF4 ti4400. I suppose a better (read: more expensive) vendor might have spent time tuning the case, fans, and airflow to get it quieter... had I known, I might have considered spending the money on more expensive brand. But I did what I always do; buy the almost-cheapest hardware for the almost-best specs. And, basically, this approach has always served me well, except for this time, and only because of the noise.
Oh wow, it is loud.
I've seen the firey-flash thermal death movies of what happens when you remove the heatsink from a current AMD that were circulating a while ago; actually, I got my motherboard just as they started really getting into temperature monitoring and safety features for AMD CPUs. I can read in the hardware monitor, not to mention feel in the air, how hot this computer gets. Actually, I can hear the power involved; this is also the first PC I've had which, when the CPU is fully loaded, I can actually hear the power draw slowing down the fans. This still astounds me.
My computer sounds like a running vacuum cleaner. Well, I exaggerate, but it is loud. Loud enough to be a serious nuisance. Loud enough that you turn up the volume of music. Loud enough that you don't want to watch movies or hang out in the room while it's on. And it blows me away. This is a PC for god's sake. I've never had to worry about noise on a PC before.
I've since invested in "quiet" fans and "smart" fans. These help a little, but not much. I realize that the services of the professionals Dell/Gateway/Apple/etc employs for designing cases to cope with this are worth some of the money they charge on the other end. Although I never ever expected noise would be the thing that drove me back to the big vendors.
So I find myself reading this article and actually seriously contemplating the purchase of this watercooler, despite the fact that I am not, and have no intention of becoming, an overclocker, and at ~$275, this gear is almost 1/3d what I paid for the entire rest of the computer - not to mention the risk of giving my gear a bath.
And I find harkening back to all of those science fiction books I read which incidentally noted water-cooled PCs in the world of the future. How silly that seemed in 1989. And yet now, at the rate power consumption and heat are growing, I start to wonder... might we see factory-installed water cooling coming from the major retailers in few years?
Just to cope with the noise? Or even because they have no choice, noise or not?
Crazy.
Your idea may fly eventually, but right now Moore's Law hasn't caught up with it. Workable 3D game engines have a very tightly honed feature set. They work because of a massive, carefully chosen set of compromises.
This is how it will turn out. Assume everybody will come and throw a stone soup party on the engine. A few months later you're already getting 0.25fps, and everyone is pointing fingers. You have to pick and choose, or give up. Well, picking and choosing is what everyone is already doing, and moreover they set out from the start to do it, so...
With a very, very well managed project - I almost think of a couple people working full-time on managing it, you can go farther than a few months, and maybe do some interesting things, but at the end of the day, you won't get to the destination you're imagining for another few years at least.
However, your willingness to dismess out of hand the, shall we call it, intuition, of someone who is clearly at least educated both in the anatomy of hearing and the signals-processing fundamentals, is just as baseless.
Of course, given a critical evaluation of the text itself, dismissal is a good guess. There are a lot of red flags there, especially at the end. Certainly, it's not clear to me what calibratory function the signals otherwise masked by psychoacoustic (or neuroacoustic, as the author says) compression might serve - this is the most important part of the theory, and there's no real attempt by the author to treat it in detail. But (self-consciously) little sketches like this, many of which by students with even less coherence or credibiliy, are often a prelude to important discoveries, good and bad.
If I were a betting man, I would confidently bet you were right. But just the same, I hope a few members of the medical community (I think this would take a background in neurolobiology/cog. sci/audiology) see this, and at least consider it. You could probably devise a relatively inexpensive animal study or two that could safely close off this kind of speculation.
And I have a feeling we're in good company.
I wish slashdot had more marketing types around. What we need are more good ideas for making privacy understandable to people who have enjoyed it all their lives and won't otherwise know why it's worth keeping until after it's gone.
Screw reciprocity. I am 100% for surveiling those in government, although this will be more feasible for some than others.
Realistically, it will have to be 100% blanket surveillance of those we chose to be effective - every letter, fax, night vision the bedroom - the whole deal. Congressmen, and the President, for instance, will make many claims that this is outrageous, etc. but only one class of such complaints really moves me, which is that "matters of national security," etc. prevent the publishing of such surveillance. To this I propose spot reviews by n (5-15?) randomly selected members of opposition political partie(s) for asserting that a) no crime occurred, and b) making an embargo on the data for n years (5? 25?).
The accountability is long overdue, and they don't call it the public life for nothing. It sounds ridiculous at first, but it would work. It would drive a lot of the people you don't want out of politics virtually overnight. Public service in elected office (and I don't think just elected officials should be eligible for such a program) is a solemn duty with the heaviest responsibilities to the people. Both common logic and "reasonable suspicion" should compell us to take this step.
But I see no reason why this requires "reciprocity" for private citizens.
The federal government has for purposes of this discussion, unlimited money. And I'm not sure you realize the scale of what's possible with carte blanche funding.
Take a look at Google sometime to get a sense of the scale of what's possible just with some private investment, licensing and advertising revenues.
They can do it. It'll be about focusing, winnowing, and summarizing the datastream carefully at various stages.
One thing's for sure. There's free speech, and then there's the modern mass media. TV and radio, and the new economies of broadcast that come with them, didn't exist until long after the Constitution began to yellow. You can stick your head in the sand and pretend that we should leave the mass media as uncontrolled as regular speech, but then you'll get an awful mess as a result... like we have!
Not only that, but there is a startlingly common hypocrisy by those who claim that "Dan Heskett" on a street corner, the local paper, the local radio station, and the TV networks, should all receive equal treatment in our society. Everyone knows that what goes on TV has immense effects. Yet there's this smarmy doublethink surrounding it. You have ideologues who claim the sanctity of the current political system vis a vis TV under the umbrella of the venerable Fourth Estate, but who can within minutes (and without considering it strange) rabidly campaign to censor "harmful" and "dangerous" images like a stray nipple or a proscribed word. But I'm sure you believe nudity, cursing, and graphic violence on TV is fine, because, after all, this is America.
And it's easy for us to not examine that thoroughly because it's scary to most people that, yes, really, what we see on TV affects our beliefs, behaviors, and decisions, often in the most literal and pedantic way. In fact, directly. Massively. The whole advertising industry is a 12-figure testimony to this fact. TV and radio have supplanted the community culture that came before them, and replaced it with a uniform source, and that has big consequences. And unlike newspapers, I cannot start a TV station if I'm unhappy with the local coverage. In fact, I think as an exercise, before you start going on about the sacredness of your press and its speech, you should go figure out what it takes to start your own radio station.
Or what the penalties are for "unauthorized" broadcasts.
It turns out, "we" take threats to the current broadcaster's hegemony with the most deadly seriousness. Perhaps because... "unregulated" broadcasting is... in the words of the FCC: dangerous.
This is one reason why the Internet is such a positive invention. But I digress.
New systems, new playing field, new rules. Right now the rules are that you have to pay astronomical sums to the broadcast trust for a few seconds of airtime. They can refuse your business, or not. If one of the broadcast trust members wants to devote an entire channel to Republican propaganda and call it "Fox News", hey, it's good to be the king.
You can hypothesize bad new rules - straw men of censorship and totalitarianism that you hold up when your fundamentalist take on the First Amendment is questioned, but you can't abdicate responsibility for thinking of a better way to have a mass-media embued democracy. In other words, rather than hiding your head in the sand, or crying about the wrong way to do things, consider what good alternatives there are to having political control go to those with the best ties, financial and otherwise, to the media.
The Swiss simply said, if I understand it correctly from another poster here, no political ads allowed on TV and radio. If they didn't, let's consider it hypothetically anyway. You don't quite know how to level the modern playing field, so you just go back to the system the Framers understood - one where all political speech is far more equal, because anyone can afford newsprint, and practically anyone can become their own publisher. Censorship, as another responder pointed out, can take many forms. You are invoking the specter of Soviet Russia where the real danger is more that of the Highway Patroll. You just can't drive faster that 65 MPH, sir. No, no one can. Not even if they're His Majesty Rupert Murdoch the First.
Dan Heskett can curse on the street. In New York, "Danette Heskett" can even walk around on the street topless. Yet we think that broadcasting curses and nipples is so dangerous that the thought of it ending up on NBC where a parent might somehow momentarily lapse in their parental supervision and allow their child to see it sends us into conniptions. And yet we can simultaneously believe that laissez fair is a good idea for political speech in the media.
Astounding, isn't it?
One of the few "conservative" beliefs I harbor is a faith in the right to self-defense. I believe that if we truly grant that ordinary men and women can bear the responsibility to vote, or to raise children without supervision, we have no choice but to assume they are up to the trivial (and millenia old) right of owning and carrying a weapon. Yet, just as with driver's licenses, we acknowledge that for the general safety of all, some basic prudence is in order, and we do some paperwork, and we have some simple ground rules.
In advocating "free speech" as your only guiding principle when discussing politics and the mass media, you are like a pro-weapon extremist who believes that nuclear weapons should be unregulated.
Actually, writing as you are, today, in America, you're like a pro-weapon extremist making a speach on how regulating nuclear weapons is wrong from inside a gigantic, smoking, eerily luminescent blast crater.
Still, from one admirer of the Constitution to another, I hope you will take my arguments in the spirit of good faith and respect with which they are intended.
I've thought about this one a lot. Port blocking and other targeted attacks on P2P wont work (they can always be circumvented in a variety of ways), but it is still possible to attack the usage of bandwidth itself - and I believe this is what they will do.
The feds are both for sale and beholden to the news outlets; a double whammy. The major media guys own them. The FCC is dismantling all of the "competition" parts of the TA96, and allowing telecoms and media megamergers right and left. I'm already reading about bandwidth "shortages" that don't exist; the writing is on the wall. The broadband suppliers (especially cable, who are generally owned outright by the media giants, i.e. Time Warner) are publicly floating ideas to end broadband as we know it. In other words, no more unlimited bandwidth; instead, quotas, caps, and per-traffic charges.
May sound crazy, but it's already happened in Canada and Australia ("test markets"); it could start here in as soon as the next 12 months. The only wildcard are the telcos, who "need to come on board" with content control rather than salivate over the potential flood of customers to DSL if cable gets crippled and/or suffers a massive traffic-based price increase. Then again, as the telcos consolidate, it gets easier and easier to "play ball" with a smaller and smaller boardroom full of people, and this is the boardroom at its best: in engineering the switch to bit-based-pricing, we're talking about price-fixing on a massive, even global scale. And who doesn't want to make lots and lots of money?
There are complications, though, in that there are a number of legitimate uses for bandwidth on or near the scale that P2P uses it. Video games, for instance, and especially the new class of broadband-only games, would be destroyed by such a move - and there are billions at stake in that industry alone. So if the collateral damage to other wealthy players is high enough, we might have some hope.
Perhaps the discontent of millions of citizens would be a factor too, if this were still a democracy in more than name.
The EOL may be today, but the massive R&D effort necessary to keep a high-end CPU architecture in the game ended a long time ago. Even if HP reversed course, they'd be starting from scratch, in a sense. The real end of the Alpha happened some time ago, probably during or not long after the DEC/Compaq merger.
It sounds eminently reasonable - the best for all concerned. 30 days is not a long embargo, and their list of exceptions seems to me extremely thorough. This appears to answer criticism that "premature disclosure" is irresponsible (a criticism which I don't give much merit, but others disagree) with an intelligent and nuanced policy.
The message to vendors: we'll cooperate with you, if you act responsibly and respond quickly.
Quickly being the operative word. The tragic thing in the disclosure and response-time debate is the assumption that if the white-hat side discovers a flaw, they're the only ones who've found it... and just because you can't find a paper or an exploit after a bit of looking doesn't mean it's not out there.
Certainly, there is a long history of big vendors (I wont name any names... ah, whatever, Microsoft) who completely ignore (i.e. wont return calls) or yes the helpful hackers to death (i.e. yes, it's on the list, we'll have a new patch _any day now_ - rinse, repeat for 6 months), and then whine when the disclosure becomes public... even as the publicity stings them to finally bestir themselves to release a patch. So I'm very glad to hear of those in the security community making a logical response to it all.
Pavlovich lives in Texas. The DVD-CCA (the particular media-industry front organization prosecuting Pavlovich) sued him in California ("playing hardball" - forcing him into a more expensive long-distance defense), making a specious argument that "because he knew DeCSS would harm industries based in California," that state has jurisdiction.
The lower courts in California agreed. However, the quality of jurisprudence is fortunately a little higher in the California Supreme Court. They kicked it back. Now DVD-CCA will have to start over in another state (probably Texas, or potentially Illinois - where Pavlovich may have done some of the LiViD work while in school).
The case is far from over, in fact, it's just getting started, and it's anybody's guess what will come of it. One hopes one of these will find its way to the USSC while there's still a few shreds of dignity left at that bench; in which case, the DMCA would get the treatment it deserves. But it would depend on many things...
Specifically, with respect to the jurisdiction (which is an interesting, if academic, question), the California supremes held:
The exercise of jurisdiction over a nonresident defendant comports with these Constitutions "if the defendant has such minimum contacts with the state that the assertion of jurisdiction does not violate ' "traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice."
They go on to indicate their position:
According to DVD CCA, California should exercise jurisdiction over Pavlovich because he should have known that third parties may use the misappropriated code to illegally copy movies on DVD's and that licensees of the misappropriated technology resided in California. In other words, DVD CCA is asking this court to exercise jurisdiction over a defendant because he should have known that his conduct may harm--not a California plaintiff--but industries associated with that plaintiff. As a practical matter, such a ruling makes foreseeability of harm the sole basis for jurisdiction in contravention of controlling United States Supreme Court precedent. (See Burger King, supra, 471 U.S. at p. 474.)
Indeed, such a broad interpretation of the effects test would effectively eliminate the purposeful availment requirement in the intentional tort context for select plaintiffs.
[emphasis theirs]
Very simple, actually.
I expect the DVD-CCA's attorneys to get their law on ghetto-style; that means every nasty trick they can think of to rack up costs and price Pavlovich out of the fight. Home-court advantage has a nice synergy, too.
What I find interesting are the series of decisions supporting them which led up to this ruling. Perhaps one of the biggest weaknesses of the legal system is that there is no good way to handle bad judges once they get into the system.
It seems to me there are two important facts in this case:
First, that a powerful family is able to call in favors from the FBI and others in local law enforcement. Particularly stunning are the details of the unequal treatment of offenders (i.e. George Runner).
In a free, democratic society, those in government would have someone to answer to if among tens of thousands of people who committed the same crime, many were given wildly different responses depending on their background (i.e. ethnicity, religion, relationship to wealthy families).
Second, and this is something I hear a lot about lately, that the FBI is apparently empowered to s ieze property practically at random (his Windows CD's?) and hang on to it indefinitely (i.e. Wirtz's possessions "may never be returned"?).
In a free and democratic society, there is oversight regarding what law enforcement officers can take away from you - they have to have a legitimate reason for every article taken, and they absolutely have to return it promptly after their need is concluded.
This is probably the best AC troll I've seen all year.
Congratulations.
Here we get to the crux of the issue - something I am wishing I could have postscripted into my original post, since it would have saved me some considerable typing later. I am not interested in attacking the robot, or the surgeon. I have no bias, nor prejudgement about what caused the accident - I accept it as ambiguous. Now, look at the type of procedure being perfomed. Precisely the sort of thing that limits "sensory inputs" to the surgeon. Look at the type of injury; an aorta cut going unnoticed for 90 minutes. This should hopefully answer your question about anyone should anticipate that the problem was related to the technique, and/or possibly limitations in the device itself.
I am deeply disillusioned with the media industry, though in this case, I am not even making an allegation of corruption. Foremost, they have an inherent problem with their dependency on advertising and sponsorship, often by the very companies they are reporting on. Like Aurther Andersen doing "consulting" for Enron while "auditing" their finances. Then there's the inexplicable consolidation, which leaves ownership of huge swaths of the media in a single pair of hands. You are naive to assume the media is doing the right thing in a particular instance. But I digress.
You say "I do not advocate silence. I advocate discretion." We have a very specific context, in which I don't think you even have that hair to split. I understand your point, and your anecdote about saccharine is instructive, but your false dilemma remains. There is a long distance between the "discretion" of glossing over recent fatalities during in-depth coverage of a device or technique, and doing "immense harm to...progress." A terribly long distance.
I am not advocating irresponsible or "unscrupulous" journalism; however, I worry that with your emphasis on "discretion," you are. I think it obvious that journalists doing in-depth coverage of DaVinci could report on the fatality, and even quote experts involved in the investigation, without arousing panic that would set back science.
Frankly, both "discretion" and "openness" have been tried over the years in various media cultures. As it turns out, a policy of "discretion" is unambiguously dangerous (did you ever spend any time in the Soviet Union?) and a policy of "openness," for all its "perils" is unquestionably safer, not to mention its respect for the dignity of the audience.
Let an unscrupulous journalist fear-monger about robots surgeons. I will line up with you to condemn it. This doesn't even touch my point.
Also, I wanted to ask; do you think I am correct in my understanding that massive-dose experiments are conducted in order to discover through "saturation conditions" what potential cumulative effects and other risk factors might be; thus increasing the case for further (including long-term) study? Or will you imply that massive-dose experiments are simply animal torture which serves no scientific purpose? To put it in perspective, I don't avoid eating saccharine, but I think you're equally out of bounds implying, as you perhaps have in both cases we've discussed so far, that there is no risk that these new developments won't pan out in the end, and no gain in media coverage of any problems.
Thanks, I think. I'm got a chuckle and appreciated your point at the same time. I'm no libertarian, and I'm no neoliberal either (whatever that is). I don't actually like the fact that we have consumer-targeted advertisements for drugs and devices like the DaVinci; it's just that it seems to be the status quo now... Perhaps, in a world of declining healthcare standards, it's inevitable.
That's just it - reporters are meant to stay out of the judgement business. The idea is to just report facts. And in in-depth coverage, they shouldn't fail to report a fatality like this because "it might scare people."
It's called sleight of hand. It can leave the reader with a false impression that those numbers have some legitimacy. Much like the article left many readers with the false impression that the DaVinci was "unambiguously" not to blame for the accident.
So I'll be brief.
1) No mechanical fault != no fault. I'm amazed I have to point out this distinction so often.
2) "There are new failure modes possible." Exactly. See? I think you already understand.
3) "I'll accept 10 robot-related deaths per year in exchange for the prevention of 100 lethal post-op infections due to poor wound healing." You just made those numbers up. Wouldn't it be nice if that were true? That's what the trial is meant to establish.
4) I have no criticism for the robot or its designers. Any judgement (positive or negative) would be premature. My point is about the news media, which has sloppily or mysteriously (probably the former) failed to mention some relevant facts when reporting in-depth about the device - like a very recent fatality under provocative circumstances.
Do you think surgeons perfoming that kind of operation (removing a cancerous kidney) routinely sever the aorta and then fail to notice for 90 minutes? This sort of info is just the sort of thing that rounds off a well-written story on a new technique.
We have a few points to clear up. Foremost, the article clearly does not draw the conclusion you claim, and your own quote underscores the point quite nicely. It relates only a statement by the hospital administrator. These are two entirely different things. This is only a claim by one of the parties, and moreover, an administrator with an incentive to avoid lawsuits/negative publicity. The only claim you can make about what the article "says" is a negative one. It does not say what caused the accident at all; it only points out, "something went terribly wrong."
I'm not even sure how you can believe your own words. By your "no room for ambiguity" standards, this should be an article titled "surgeon error results in patient death." It should say not "something went terribly wrong," but "the surgeon made a terrible mistake."
Fortunately, you immediately contradict yourself by admitting that it is unclear what caused the problem - the correct conclusion to draw from the article. Perhaps, if you were considering surgery with this tool, you would suddenly take a much keener interest in these fine points. By the way, taking into account the nature of the injuries, do you think this would have happened without the robot?
Your reasons for silence by journalists are particularly specious. Finding "no mechanical problems" should not be confused with "finding no problems" - again, two entirely different things. Even as a layman, I would not assume the problem was mechanical. Nor would I assume that any part of the machine "acted without prompting." Neither are very reassuring assertions. Rather, considering the circumstances (aorta cut going unnoticed for 90 minutes), one expects an interface problem, or a problem with the underlying technique. Remember, you're working in unconventional ways in tight spaces. The purpose of these trials is to evaluate the risks. Cases like this can expose important ones.
Perhaps if people left choices about medical treatments to their doctors, and there were no regular ads for drugs, medical facilities, and services targeted directly at consumers, you could make the argument that the mainstream press could be forgiven the omission. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
What do you consider "undue media attention?" Should fatalities be kept secret? Or just "not reported" in most venues? Would you like to discuss the difference? And remember, we're not talking about a quick spot; this is during extensive coverage of the device and the technique... not even then?
But where you've made the largest leap of all is the false dilemma between silence and "a media scare [that] could easily set this medical development back several years." I'm frankly shocked; proper handling, full disclosure, and maximum awareness of cases like this push medical development forward, not backwards. The only thing they might set backwards are the bottom line of the company selling the drug/device/procedure. The incentive on the part of that company to minimize such evidence, to "make the product appear to be perfect" is very powerful, often with hundreds of millions and even billions at stake...
I'm surprised to find myself getting this basic, but the foundation of both capitalism and democracy is one of full disclosure, where voters and buyers are trusted to make their own decisions given all the facts. It does not admit "fear of scaring people off" as a reason not to discuss fatalities resulting from a new product or service.
It just goes to show; there are people around who will argue the contrary to anything. I know if you were considering surgery with this machine you'd be upset if you felt these facts weren't getting out.
It's not the journalist's job to decide what was the fault of the machine and what wasn't. I basically trust the surgeons to do the right thing; it's the journalists I'd keep my eye on.
As I've said elsewhere, it's unclear how the accident happened, obviously, but with something like this I consider both the underlying technique as well as the user interface potential risk factors. Of course, it could just have been human error, but that's the whole point of risk factor analysis; the line between "human error" and a false expectation or a design problem does not actually exist.