Certainly some of the claims in the patent are what are known as "context management", and would have significant prior art. The specific linking of them to the exact framework they describe (web-based context switching and data tracking within contexts) may or may not have prior art, it's kind of hard to tell w/o spending more time than I care to reading the material. I certainly think that I used tools that could do much of that prior to 2003 though.
We have a couple of programmers like this, and I can tell you, they pretty much all wind up like Josh if they're bad enough. The problem is that their antisocial behavior results in huge sections of code, even within a "group" project, that only they understand. Over time, that means they become more "valuable" only because they're the only ones who know the code, and as such they tend to develop seniority, which makes them even more dangerous as they implement their craziness elsewhere. They also drive away other more reasonable and often just as competent developers, who themselves can't tolerate how mgmt tolerates the crazy in their midst, and elevates them despite them not doing the right thing. It's a vicious cycle.
In other words, both the developer and their manager are at fault. If that dev, at the age of 22 fresh out of college, had been told within a month of their first job that they could change their behavior or be unemployed, most would have changed. The ones who wouldn't or couldn't would be (and should be) unemployed, and living in their parents' basement working on some open source project. Not doing so is the classic short-term gain at a long-term cost, and managers need to look at it in that sense in order to make the proper business decision. Sometimes that makes sense, but most times it doesn't.
Telemedicine is really only useful for these sorts of interventions. Basically consultations where you can rely on somebody else to gather the necessary info (in this case history and physical by an ER physician), or where you need no physical contact whatsoever (like telepsychiatry).
I personally wouldn't want to be treated by an NP or PA in some foreign country, it's bad enough when they can actually examine me. Nor will that happen anytime soon, as insurers would not pay for it, and patients refuse to pay out-of-pocket for their care.
California has had both managed care and tort reform for decades now, and there hasn't been a significant drop in the number of doctors working here, nor are doctors complaining about outrageous insurance fees. Not causative, but if managed care was doing what you say, we'd all be out of jobs by now. We certainly work for less money than in middle america, though.
Truth is that more malpractice cases are settled out of court now than before, because the insurance companies don't want to pay whatever a jury might think is just, and no hospital wants their reputation damaged publicly. There's more of a driver for this in areas w/o tort reform because the jury awards can be so much higher and, therefore, more publicized. Insurance companies, despite very rare cases with high damage awards (most of which seem to be dropped on appeal) use that to justify charging outrageous premiums to MDs. And, if they do settle out of court, that typically means the MD forever carries that blemish on their record and has to report that case everytime they apply for a license, job, etc. The insurance companies have done a good job of passing the buck on to everyone else but them.
Although this is almost a philosophical question, from a scientific standpoint there's very little difference (that I've ever heard of) between positive and negative stress. They all create the same reactions in the body. It probably has more to do with chronic vs. acute stress. Positive stress (e.g. getting a new job and having to change your lifestyle to accomodate it, having a new baby, heading off to college) are typically more of an acute nature and therefore usually don't have the negative side effects. Conversely, poverty, joblessness, diseases, and certain other negative stresses are typically very long-term in nature. We know that long-term stress is worse, but that people can even decompensate with short-term stress, and there are a lot of people who have very bad negative reactions even with positive stressors. Lots of psychology mixed into that, but at a high level it's true.
As for people who function at different baseline stress levels, I can relate one study I know of. They looked at people's reaction after a disaster (I forget which one, an earthquake I believe) and what they did in the immediate aftermath. Some people shut down completely and did nothing. Most got more active and began doing things at a higher level. Some people, normally not active and not classic "leaders", began directing the activities of others in a very effective manner. The end result was a curve that was developed (x axis was stress, y axis was functionality) and it showed a slow upslope as stress got higher, most people performed at a higher level, but at the highest level there was a cliff-like drop off, where people all of a sudden ceased to function at high stress loads.
The theory that came out of that (and having gone to medical school and operating in exactly the environment you describe where people "choose" demanding workloads, one that I think has face validity) is that individuals have different personal ways of moving along that curve that correspond to their own personal tolerance for stress. Someone who can't handle stress would fall off the end very quickly, and you could say is already operating at their highest point. Someone who can handle a lot of stress is almost impossible to push high enough to get over that cliff, and you can dump more and more stress and they simply keep handling it. That latter group actually get bored in low stress environments and can feel their personal functionality decline, and therefore avoid them (I'm one of those people). Vacation is often so boring I start to get depressed (which in itself is somewhat of a depressing thought!).
A lazy but skilled person will go nowhere in life, and will be a bitter old person, regretting how they didn't do anything with their life.
A motivated but less-skilled person will likely become a millionaire.
If you read anything from extremely dedicated, successful people (there's a transcribed speech I read a couple of months ago from one of the people at Bell Labs in the old days who goes into this in great detail if you can find it), they all say (as in every single one of them) that it doesn't matter if you've got a great idea or not, what matters is that you put in time to see it through to fruition. Most entrepreneurs are not geniuses, but are motivated.
As a small example, there's someone who I work with who is a really bad programmer. She has no sense of process, rolls out new bugs with every release (and by release I mean "goes in and changes code in the production system" it's that bad), generally makes a dismal show of the whole programming thing. And yet, she's extremely successful within our enterprise. Why? She works about 14 hours a day, including weekends, and makes up for her lack of skill out-of-the-gate by putting in extra hours to fix it. If she had a "handler" who was her exact opposite (and who wouldn't strangle her) she'd be a millionaire by now...
There's a couple of problems with what's going on, and they've gotten worse because they've gone on for a period of time. The first is that you feel that the incentive to submit articles is that you send the/. readers to the URL they chose. I would argue that the entire incentive should be that you shared something geeky with fellow geeks, and they enjoyed it. The URL should post to the actual best information, not some rehash on a personal blog. I don't want to waste my mind finding a cool article, and then click on a link that simply takes me to some guy's site, where he might not have even linked where *he* found the article. Then I have to google it. Please don't waste my time.
But let me argue it another way. Let's say I agreed with you that they should be able to keep that URL. The reality is that we, the readers, are not happy with that, and you're seeing the discussion become about the submitter and not the story. There's a reason for that. We are all smart enough to understand what they're doing - spamming/. with stories to increase the page views on their personal blog.
Either way I see it, it comes to the same thing. And in the end, who are your customers?
This seems to make good sense for moving heavy goods, especially because it's probably quite fuel-efficient, can carry oversized loads relatively easily to any location, and would have virtually no impact on the current transportation infrastructure in the country, which is straining under heavy load (like rail cargo).
It also seems like a smaller version would be useful as a personal air transport system. Make it more like a blimp and less like an airplane (I guess just make it a blimp) and park it on top of your garage. Wanna go visit your parents across the country? Fuel up the steam engine, pack all your stuff and hop in and go. Since it's a blimp, catastrophic failures (e.g. entire family killed in a plane crash) would be very unlikely, it's not very expensive (although not cheap), and a heck of a lot of fun.
Someone else mentioned this, but these are very high ticket items. Each one could probably go for $10-20k, if not more, just for the prosthesis. When mass produced, they're probably $1k to produce, so that's a pretty hefty profit that goes directly to the company selling it (there wouldn't be a middleman on this stuff since it's all "wholesale"). Batteries? Repairs and upgrades? Lots of money to be made. Also, patients would save up cash to make this investment themselves if their insurance wouldn't pay for it, which most probably would.
There's also a big drive from the professional side I would imagine, since each of these would require individualization to the customer (since everyone's amputation is different) and possibly surgery depending on how they hook it to the nervous system. There's a lot of potential billings from those, as well as the ongoing care for it.
That being said, most of these biomedical research things come out of a research institute, funded by either gov't or private funding, and then when they think they can make a product out of it, hop to the business world and get productized. The R&D costs are largely paid for already, and the only costs are in bringing it to market, so it's not nearly as expensive as if they were paying for this from scratch. I only skimmed the website, so not sure where on this continuum this project is.
mmm... book made of cheese...
on
Java Puzzlers
·
· Score: 1
Wal-mart: Buy a smaller car, cuz next week we're going to start paying you less. McDonald's: Buy our salads and lose weight; it will cut your fuel costs by not dragging your fat butt (which you must have got at Burger King and not here) around. UPS: Don't take it there and waste gas yourself, pay us to. GM and Ford: Trade in that old, fuel-inefficient sedan for a new, advanced-fuel-utilization sport-utility vehicle. You know you want to!
Not just to mock this, but what incentives do these companies really have for their bottom line that would inspire them to make this an issue? As a rule, top companies stay out of potentially politically-charged issues, and this is, unfortunately, one of those.
It has definitely chaned how I buy (or rather, don't buy) new games. Basically WoW is so good, and takes up all of my allotted game time, that whenever a new game comes out I have to really look at whether or not I think it's good enough to get me to play that rather than WoW. There haven't been many that I've purchased since WoW came out, and those have left me disappointed, so now I have an XBox and a PS2 sitting there, unused for months.
The social aspect is also a big draw, in that I have quite a few friends who are likewise addicted to WoW, so I can log in and chat with them as well. Single-players or XBox Live games just aren't as good at that aspect.
Psychopath is not a clinical term, the proper term for someone with these traits is sociopath, or antisocial personality disorder. Found this article which seems to capture it pretty well.
It's probably good they didn't use the clinical term, though, cuz the quiz is a very superficial assessment of what the disorder is, which has resulted in all the posts w/ topics like "this is very common" or "every politician is this". Jeffrey Dahmer was a sociopath. Most politicians and business leaders are narcissistic and grandiose, but are not sociopaths.
The only thing doctors are required by law to report is information regarding abuse and violence in the home (domestic/spousal/child/elderly abuse). The rest already does require a warrant.
That's what I meant (the malicious explanation part); I certainly know what the terms *should* mean. There's nothing more irritating than sitting in an RFP and have the salesperson make some statement like "we have an open system, so it's all under your control" when what they're saying is please submit the appropriate feature request and we will implement it after the PO clears. Or use "open standard" to refer to their proprietary web service that happens to use SOAP and XML (the "standard" part of it).
I've even seen them go so far (knowing that we're a very heavy open source shop) to say "we use Apache!" or say "it's just like open source" when they don't allow us access to the Apache, and it's nothing like open source.
Microsoft has pulled the same trick using the other term, with their Shared Source idea. Very irritating when you're trying to explain what "open source" actually means to people who have neither an understanding of programming nor an understanding of intellectual property law.
What they're trying to do is make it so that the term "open source" doesn't just become another marketing term that has no actual meaning. I've seen a lot of closed source, proprietary vendors referring in their marketing to "open standards" or "open systems" trying to leech off of the open source term and get credit where they don't deserve it (and it works all too often). If you have to back up your "open source" claim with an OSI-approved license, it's harder to pull that crap.
I do agree with you though that their statement that there should be fewer OS licenses is outside of the scope of what they should be doing. Approve them or don't, realizing that they're talking about other peoples' copyrighted material that they can license however they want, but leave philosophical discussions to some other group. I agree with that stance, they just shouldn't be the ones pushing it.
Actually, the worst is that, since they aren't doctors themselves, they miss the warning signs of a serious condition, treat themselves unsuccessfully based on some crap they read online, and 6 months later when they finally get around to seeing a doctor their condition is no longer treatable, or serious damage has been done during the delay. You'd be amazed at the myriad ways patients try to delay seeing a doctor, perhaps thinking that if no doctor has told them they're sick, they're not actually sick. This is just a new way, and it gives people the ability to blame something external to themselves for their bad decisions (the internet told me!).
There's a fair amount of stuff that can be voice-activated these days (the Mac I'm writing this on has a lot on it by default) so I imagine that depending on what he wanted to do on the computer, he might be able to go that route. I've also seen foot pedal input devices, although I imagine that those are really limited. I haven't actually used any of these things, but that might give you a start.
This is very true. There are a lot of legacy vendor systems that are IE only, which force us to have IE installed as the base system on our computers (users can't be taught to switch browsers, nor should they). If Firefox had a toggle, especially one that could be scripted or read a flag that told it which to render in so it could switch automatically depending on what they're looking at, it would be a godsend. I could rip IE out tomorrow and replace it w/ Firefox, and then I wouldn't have to listen to vendors whine "but you still use IE, why do you want us to make our thing work in Firefox?!?"
This analogy is only true superficially. While a sufficiently motivated person could develop as much or more knowledge than a help desk person about a topic, it would be essentially impossible for a person who had never done medical school to do something similar in the medical field. There's simply too much information to know, and the interconnections between those disparate bis of information (which is truly the most important part) cannot be grasped without a larger view. Whenever I have patients who come to me with information they've looked up, it's always a good thing because it means the patient is interested in their health. Getting someone to have enough of a vested interest in their own health that they're willing to change their behavior is a difficult thing.
However, the actual content of what they've researched is usually not helpful to me at all, since they typically overlook subtle but important points, and tend to overemphasize symptoms that are having an emotional impact on them but aren't really that important from a disease standpoint. As an example, the parent post mentions a run-in over some antiviral therapy. Without having heard the story myself, I don't know, but a possible other option for the doctor's seeming inappropriate behavior was that they heard the story differently, and possibly felt that the earlier symptoms were not related. Those drugs are also used more often if there are others in the vicinity that could be affected by the disease, so maybe the poster had an elderly relative living with them and the doctor thought it best to use the antiviral, not to help the patient, but to prevent someone else from getting it. There are a ton of factors that play into these decisions, and no doctor has the time to explain them all, and in the end it's a judgement call.
The only times I've seen it be useful is in a case where the patient is being treated for some sort of chronic condition that isn't improving, and they can spend the time that the doctor cannot researching some of the more obscure possibilities lying around. There's something like 10,000 journal articles a month created to sift through, and nobody has that kind of time.
That being said, there are some doctors who aren't very good, and no doctor is good at everything, so the buyer should always be aware of that. You should also realize that *you* are the customer, and the customer is always right, so if you're not happy with your care, find another doctor and get another opinion. There's no excuse to stay with someone you're unhappy with.
IANAL, but they're basically arguing trademark infringement, but their chances of proving that the use of Tiger to name an operating system is diluting their mark's use in selling computers on the internet is pretty slim. Their argument that it's hurting them by dropping their ranking in Google is even worse - here's a hint, don't choose a standard english word as the name of your company and expect to sit easily atop the searches for that name. Yahoo, Kazaa, etc will never have that problem.
One guess as to why do it now...and if you answered "free publicity" you win!
Playing devil's advocate here a little bit, who in this scenario is actually causing the problems? Is it Joe User, who is simply using the same software that 95% of the other users are using, or is it Techie McSmarts who is using all this "fringe" software and causing a ruckus whenever the rest of the Joe's compatriots produce a file he can't read?
I actually agree with you completely, I'm just pointing out that to the user that's still using the old software, and who doesn't have a political or philosophical disagreement with that software, and who isn't techie enough to care about how "under the hood" their software is junk, your argument isn't really going to convince them of anything. They could care less if it was written by a pack of rabid monkeys intend on world domination, as long as they get to get their work done and in on time to their boss.
Now when the OS alternative actually solves problems for them that the proprietary one couldn't, then you can hook them. Linux crossed that threshold years ago on servers, but has not on the desktop. Firefox probably just crossed that threshold, and some other projects are about to cross that line, and when they do, people will use it.
Feinstein is a California democrat, which means that she probably gets a huge chunk of her change from media companies. Oh look, sure enough, it's number four on her list (with number one being lawyers). Surprise surprise.
That being said, I don't think this is draconian since if you stole the amount of money you could potentially cost a business by doing this, you'd go to jail for much longer. I would agree if you said our Senate has bigger fish to be frying atm...
Slashdot Mirror
He found a better way to get girls - become the world's richest man exploiting a monopoly. I think I just created an infinite loop of irony.
Certainly some of the claims in the patent are what are known as "context management", and would have significant prior art. The specific linking of them to the exact framework they describe (web-based context switching and data tracking within contexts) may or may not have prior art, it's kind of hard to tell w/o spending more time than I care to reading the material. I certainly think that I used tools that could do much of that prior to 2003 though.
We have a couple of programmers like this, and I can tell you, they pretty much all wind up like Josh if they're bad enough. The problem is that their antisocial behavior results in huge sections of code, even within a "group" project, that only they understand. Over time, that means they become more "valuable" only because they're the only ones who know the code, and as such they tend to develop seniority, which makes them even more dangerous as they implement their craziness elsewhere. They also drive away other more reasonable and often just as competent developers, who themselves can't tolerate how mgmt tolerates the crazy in their midst, and elevates them despite them not doing the right thing. It's a vicious cycle.
In other words, both the developer and their manager are at fault. If that dev, at the age of 22 fresh out of college, had been told within a month of their first job that they could change their behavior or be unemployed, most would have changed. The ones who wouldn't or couldn't would be (and should be) unemployed, and living in their parents' basement working on some open source project. Not doing so is the classic short-term gain at a long-term cost, and managers need to look at it in that sense in order to make the proper business decision. Sometimes that makes sense, but most times it doesn't.
Telemedicine is really only useful for these sorts of interventions. Basically consultations where you can rely on somebody else to gather the necessary info (in this case history and physical by an ER physician), or where you need no physical contact whatsoever (like telepsychiatry). I personally wouldn't want to be treated by an NP or PA in some foreign country, it's bad enough when they can actually examine me. Nor will that happen anytime soon, as insurers would not pay for it, and patients refuse to pay out-of-pocket for their care.
California has had both managed care and tort reform for decades now, and there hasn't been a significant drop in the number of doctors working here, nor are doctors complaining about outrageous insurance fees. Not causative, but if managed care was doing what you say, we'd all be out of jobs by now. We certainly work for less money than in middle america, though.
Truth is that more malpractice cases are settled out of court now than before, because the insurance companies don't want to pay whatever a jury might think is just, and no hospital wants their reputation damaged publicly. There's more of a driver for this in areas w/o tort reform because the jury awards can be so much higher and, therefore, more publicized. Insurance companies, despite very rare cases with high damage awards (most of which seem to be dropped on appeal) use that to justify charging outrageous premiums to MDs. And, if they do settle out of court, that typically means the MD forever carries that blemish on their record and has to report that case everytime they apply for a license, job, etc. The insurance companies have done a good job of passing the buck on to everyone else but them.
Although this is almost a philosophical question, from a scientific standpoint there's very little difference (that I've ever heard of) between positive and negative stress. They all create the same reactions in the body. It probably has more to do with chronic vs. acute stress. Positive stress (e.g. getting a new job and having to change your lifestyle to accomodate it, having a new baby, heading off to college) are typically more of an acute nature and therefore usually don't have the negative side effects. Conversely, poverty, joblessness, diseases, and certain other negative stresses are typically very long-term in nature. We know that long-term stress is worse, but that people can even decompensate with short-term stress, and there are a lot of people who have very bad negative reactions even with positive stressors. Lots of psychology mixed into that, but at a high level it's true.
As for people who function at different baseline stress levels, I can relate one study I know of. They looked at people's reaction after a disaster (I forget which one, an earthquake I believe) and what they did in the immediate aftermath. Some people shut down completely and did nothing. Most got more active and began doing things at a higher level. Some people, normally not active and not classic "leaders", began directing the activities of others in a very effective manner. The end result was a curve that was developed (x axis was stress, y axis was functionality) and it showed a slow upslope as stress got higher, most people performed at a higher level, but at the highest level there was a cliff-like drop off, where people all of a sudden ceased to function at high stress loads.
The theory that came out of that (and having gone to medical school and operating in exactly the environment you describe where people "choose" demanding workloads, one that I think has face validity) is that individuals have different personal ways of moving along that curve that correspond to their own personal tolerance for stress. Someone who can't handle stress would fall off the end very quickly, and you could say is already operating at their highest point. Someone who can handle a lot of stress is almost impossible to push high enough to get over that cliff, and you can dump more and more stress and they simply keep handling it. That latter group actually get bored in low stress environments and can feel their personal functionality decline, and therefore avoid them (I'm one of those people). Vacation is often so boring I start to get depressed (which in itself is somewhat of a depressing thought!).
A lazy but skilled person will go nowhere in life, and will be a bitter old person, regretting how they didn't do anything with their life.
A motivated but less-skilled person will likely become a millionaire.
If you read anything from extremely dedicated, successful people (there's a transcribed speech I read a couple of months ago from one of the people at Bell Labs in the old days who goes into this in great detail if you can find it), they all say (as in every single one of them) that it doesn't matter if you've got a great idea or not, what matters is that you put in time to see it through to fruition. Most entrepreneurs are not geniuses, but are motivated.
As a small example, there's someone who I work with who is a really bad programmer. She has no sense of process, rolls out new bugs with every release (and by release I mean "goes in and changes code in the production system" it's that bad), generally makes a dismal show of the whole programming thing. And yet, she's extremely successful within our enterprise. Why? She works about 14 hours a day, including weekends, and makes up for her lack of skill out-of-the-gate by putting in extra hours to fix it. If she had a "handler" who was her exact opposite (and who wouldn't strangle her) she'd be a millionaire by now...
There's a couple of problems with what's going on, and they've gotten worse because they've gone on for a period of time. The first is that you feel that the incentive to submit articles is that you send the /. readers to the URL they chose. I would argue that the entire incentive should be that you shared something geeky with fellow geeks, and they enjoyed it. The URL should post to the actual best information, not some rehash on a personal blog. I don't want to waste my mind finding a cool article, and then click on a link that simply takes me to some guy's site, where he might not have even linked where *he* found the article. Then I have to google it. Please don't waste my time.
/. with stories to increase the page views on their personal blog.
But let me argue it another way. Let's say I agreed with you that they should be able to keep that URL. The reality is that we, the readers, are not happy with that, and you're seeing the discussion become about the submitter and not the story. There's a reason for that. We are all smart enough to understand what they're doing - spamming
Either way I see it, it comes to the same thing. And in the end, who are your customers?
This seems to make good sense for moving heavy goods, especially because it's probably quite fuel-efficient, can carry oversized loads relatively easily to any location, and would have virtually no impact on the current transportation infrastructure in the country, which is straining under heavy load (like rail cargo).
It also seems like a smaller version would be useful as a personal air transport system. Make it more like a blimp and less like an airplane (I guess just make it a blimp) and park it on top of your garage. Wanna go visit your parents across the country? Fuel up the steam engine, pack all your stuff and hop in and go. Since it's a blimp, catastrophic failures (e.g. entire family killed in a plane crash) would be very unlikely, it's not very expensive (although not cheap), and a heck of a lot of fun.
Someone else mentioned this, but these are very high ticket items. Each one could probably go for $10-20k, if not more, just for the prosthesis. When mass produced, they're probably $1k to produce, so that's a pretty hefty profit that goes directly to the company selling it (there wouldn't be a middleman on this stuff since it's all "wholesale"). Batteries? Repairs and upgrades? Lots of money to be made. Also, patients would save up cash to make this investment themselves if their insurance wouldn't pay for it, which most probably would.
There's also a big drive from the professional side I would imagine, since each of these would require individualization to the customer (since everyone's amputation is different) and possibly surgery depending on how they hook it to the nervous system. There's a lot of potential billings from those, as well as the ongoing care for it.
That being said, most of these biomedical research things come out of a research institute, funded by either gov't or private funding, and then when they think they can make a product out of it, hop to the business world and get productized. The R&D costs are largely paid for already, and the only costs are in bringing it to market, so it's not nearly as expensive as if they were paying for this from scratch. I only skimmed the website, so not sure where on this continuum this project is.
drool...
Wal-mart: Buy a smaller car, cuz next week we're going to start paying you less.
McDonald's: Buy our salads and lose weight; it will cut your fuel costs by not dragging your fat butt (which you must have got at Burger King and not here) around.
UPS: Don't take it there and waste gas yourself, pay us to.
GM and Ford: Trade in that old, fuel-inefficient sedan for a new, advanced-fuel-utilization sport-utility vehicle. You know you want to!
Not just to mock this, but what incentives do these companies really have for their bottom line that would inspire them to make this an issue? As a rule, top companies stay out of potentially politically-charged issues, and this is, unfortunately, one of those.
The social aspect is also a big draw, in that I have quite a few friends who are likewise addicted to WoW, so I can log in and chat with them as well. Single-players or XBox Live games just aren't as good at that aspect.
It's probably good they didn't use the clinical term, though, cuz the quiz is a very superficial assessment of what the disorder is, which has resulted in all the posts w/ topics like "this is very common" or "every politician is this". Jeffrey Dahmer was a sociopath. Most politicians and business leaders are narcissistic and grandiose, but are not sociopaths.
The only thing doctors are required by law to report is information regarding abuse and violence in the home (domestic/spousal/child/elderly abuse). The rest already does require a warrant.
That's what I meant (the malicious explanation part); I certainly know what the terms *should* mean. There's nothing more irritating than sitting in an RFP and have the salesperson make some statement like "we have an open system, so it's all under your control" when what they're saying is please submit the appropriate feature request and we will implement it after the PO clears. Or use "open standard" to refer to their proprietary web service that happens to use SOAP and XML (the "standard" part of it).
I've even seen them go so far (knowing that we're a very heavy open source shop) to say "we use Apache!" or say "it's just like open source" when they don't allow us access to the Apache, and it's nothing like open source.
Microsoft has pulled the same trick using the other term, with their Shared Source idea. Very irritating when you're trying to explain what "open source" actually means to people who have neither an understanding of programming nor an understanding of intellectual property law.
What they're trying to do is make it so that the term "open source" doesn't just become another marketing term that has no actual meaning. I've seen a lot of closed source, proprietary vendors referring in their marketing to "open standards" or "open systems" trying to leech off of the open source term and get credit where they don't deserve it (and it works all too often). If you have to back up your "open source" claim with an OSI-approved license, it's harder to pull that crap.
I do agree with you though that their statement that there should be fewer OS licenses is outside of the scope of what they should be doing. Approve them or don't, realizing that they're talking about other peoples' copyrighted material that they can license however they want, but leave philosophical discussions to some other group. I agree with that stance, they just shouldn't be the ones pushing it.
The OP is correct: 1) Open Dreamweaver. 2) Commands > Clean Up Word HTML... 3) Rejoice
Actually, the worst is that, since they aren't doctors themselves, they miss the warning signs of a serious condition, treat themselves unsuccessfully based on some crap they read online, and 6 months later when they finally get around to seeing a doctor their condition is no longer treatable, or serious damage has been done during the delay. You'd be amazed at the myriad ways patients try to delay seeing a doctor, perhaps thinking that if no doctor has told them they're sick, they're not actually sick. This is just a new way, and it gives people the ability to blame something external to themselves for their bad decisions (the internet told me!).
There's a fair amount of stuff that can be voice-activated these days (the Mac I'm writing this on has a lot on it by default) so I imagine that depending on what he wanted to do on the computer, he might be able to go that route. I've also seen foot pedal input devices, although I imagine that those are really limited. I haven't actually used any of these things, but that might give you a start.
This is very true. There are a lot of legacy vendor systems that are IE only, which force us to have IE installed as the base system on our computers (users can't be taught to switch browsers, nor should they). If Firefox had a toggle, especially one that could be scripted or read a flag that told it which to render in so it could switch automatically depending on what they're looking at, it would be a godsend. I could rip IE out tomorrow and replace it w/ Firefox, and then I wouldn't have to listen to vendors whine "but you still use IE, why do you want us to make our thing work in Firefox?!?"
This analogy is only true superficially. While a sufficiently motivated person could develop as much or more knowledge than a help desk person about a topic, it would be essentially impossible for a person who had never done medical school to do something similar in the medical field. There's simply too much information to know, and the interconnections between those disparate bis of information (which is truly the most important part) cannot be grasped without a larger view. Whenever I have patients who come to me with information they've looked up, it's always a good thing because it means the patient is interested in their health. Getting someone to have enough of a vested interest in their own health that they're willing to change their behavior is a difficult thing.
However, the actual content of what they've researched is usually not helpful to me at all, since they typically overlook subtle but important points, and tend to overemphasize symptoms that are having an emotional impact on them but aren't really that important from a disease standpoint. As an example, the parent post mentions a run-in over some antiviral therapy. Without having heard the story myself, I don't know, but a possible other option for the doctor's seeming inappropriate behavior was that they heard the story differently, and possibly felt that the earlier symptoms were not related. Those drugs are also used more often if there are others in the vicinity that could be affected by the disease, so maybe the poster had an elderly relative living with them and the doctor thought it best to use the antiviral, not to help the patient, but to prevent someone else from getting it. There are a ton of factors that play into these decisions, and no doctor has the time to explain them all, and in the end it's a judgement call.
The only times I've seen it be useful is in a case where the patient is being treated for some sort of chronic condition that isn't improving, and they can spend the time that the doctor cannot researching some of the more obscure possibilities lying around. There's something like 10,000 journal articles a month created to sift through, and nobody has that kind of time.
That being said, there are some doctors who aren't very good, and no doctor is good at everything, so the buyer should always be aware of that. You should also realize that *you* are the customer, and the customer is always right, so if you're not happy with your care, find another doctor and get another opinion. There's no excuse to stay with someone you're unhappy with.
IANAL, but they're basically arguing trademark infringement, but their chances of proving that the use of Tiger to name an operating system is diluting their mark's use in selling computers on the internet is pretty slim. Their argument that it's hurting them by dropping their ranking in Google is even worse - here's a hint, don't choose a standard english word as the name of your company and expect to sit easily atop the searches for that name. Yahoo, Kazaa, etc will never have that problem.
One guess as to why do it now...and if you answered "free publicity" you win!
Playing devil's advocate here a little bit, who in this scenario is actually causing the problems? Is it Joe User, who is simply using the same software that 95% of the other users are using, or is it Techie McSmarts who is using all this "fringe" software and causing a ruckus whenever the rest of the Joe's compatriots produce a file he can't read?
I actually agree with you completely, I'm just pointing out that to the user that's still using the old software, and who doesn't have a political or philosophical disagreement with that software, and who isn't techie enough to care about how "under the hood" their software is junk, your argument isn't really going to convince them of anything. They could care less if it was written by a pack of rabid monkeys intend on world domination, as long as they get to get their work done and in on time to their boss.
Now when the OS alternative actually solves problems for them that the proprietary one couldn't, then you can hook them. Linux crossed that threshold years ago on servers, but has not on the desktop. Firefox probably just crossed that threshold, and some other projects are about to cross that line, and when they do, people will use it.
That being said, I don't think this is draconian since if you stole the amount of money you could potentially cost a business by doing this, you'd go to jail for much longer. I would agree if you said our Senate has bigger fish to be frying atm...