I'm a medical informaticist, and I don't completely agree with part of the above. I, too, read the wikipedia entry on bioinformatics and saw that my field is lumped in w/ bioinformatics, which is something I don't agree with. Perhaps to a layperson, the difference between "bio" and "medical" is not a big one, but practically speaking it is quite big. (The parent of this didn't lump, just mentioned it in passing, but I wanted to comment on it.)
Basically, someone like myself might not be too knowledgeable about what I refer to as bioinformatics, which I consider to be everything from DNA->proteins->cell cycles. Bioinformatics focuses on solving problems of data management of the vast amount of information in the above fields, which is a huge undertaking. It also happens to deal more with vast databases and data mining.
A bioinformaticist, on the other hand, is probably not very aware of what I do in my job, which is quite different. I deal on a daily basis with how we manage large datasets of patient-specific data, with the goal of improving medical care. We also deal w/ data mining and database design and all that, but it has a very different focus and uses very different tools. Our solutions are largely focused around caring for patients.
That being said, there is a middle ground of largely research projects that attempt to span that gap. There are some groups working on making data available from the bioinformatics world merge w/ the medical informatics world to be useful in some way to clinicians, but I would estimate the fruit of that labor to be 10-15 years out. These projects are mostly driven by bioinformaticists, since they're more experienced with dealing with their huge datasets and doing the data mining that they do, while the medical informaticists would be more interested in how they feed data into something like that and get something useful out.
At any rate, someone who labels themselves as a "bioinformaticist" and is doing EMR research is clearly just gunning for research money using the bio label (there's more money there).
Read the -1 FUD post, because that's useful, but here's my take on your questions (and I'm not a lawyer, so this is just my interpretation). If you want support at all for MySQL from the company, you need a commercial license. You didn't ask that, but that's the easy one.
If you don't redistribute it, you don't need the commercial license. Note that if you don't distribute code from any open source license, including GPL, you don't need to open your code. OS licenses are based on copyright law, and copyright law doesn't restrict private use, only redistribution (in a general sense). The caveat to that is that I've heard there are some licenses that specifically require you to submit back changes you've made, even if you don't redistribute it, but I don't have any experience w/ those.
Your second question is trickier. The tone on the licensing site is that yes, you would need a license to do that, unless you released your code under the GPL license. This is the whole "linked library" issue that a lot of commercial entities use to say why they don't use GPL software. However, if you made your system db-agnostic, such that the user could use any database and configured that choice on their own, then I don't think you would have to. You should be making your app db-agnostic anyway, but that means you can't embed non-ANSI-standard SQL statements in your code (i.e. statements that could only run on MySQL) or use other MySQL-specific functions and not distribute it as GPL'ed code. You couldn't redistribute the MySQL w/ your code in that case, but you said you weren't going to anyway.
The silence issue also exists for the electric cars. At low speeds or coasting they run pretty much silent and, since they're a lot larger, could pose as much of a threat. If you've ever run through LA and almost been hit by one popping out of a blind alley (cuz nobody stops at the end of alleys here) that you weren't able to hear while approaching, you know what I'm talking about...
Since half of the posts in response to this article will devolve into some sort of argument about what is and isn't an "addiction", I feel I need to define it.
An addiction is any behavior that someone does in preference to other things and which results in adverse effects on another aspect of their life (e.g. relationships, job, assets, etc). Both of those things are important. If you just prefer to do something but it's not causing a problem, it's not an addiction.
Note that there is nothing in the definition describing "withdrawal" or whether it's psychological or physical or anything like that. Most of those things come from people's half understanding of substance abuse terminology, and have nothing to do with it. There is confusion over "dependence" and "addiction", such that people can be addicted to drugs (using them and having life problems) and be either physically dependent (e.g. heroin), mentally dependent (e.g. cocaine) or neither, although the last one is rare with drugs (it more applies to things like gambling and such).
I don't believe the Netscape project is open source (which is their right under MPL) and so I couldn't find out how they embedded IE into Firefox.
Are there any other open source projects that will let you embed the IE rendering engine into Firefox? I've seen the Mozilla ActiveX project, but was unable to get that working. It also lacks the simplicity of a toggle to switch rendering modes.
I hate to say it, but like it or not there are a lot of legacy applications out there that require IE, and that we are unable to change without a lot of time, money, and arm-twisting to the vendors who provide them. We would love to switch to Firefox across our enterprise, but the IE-requirement has our hands tied. But a Firefox browser that we could set up w/ a whitelist of what pages should toggle to the IE rendering engine, now that is something we could work with...
One key part of all the proposals I've seen is that the patient ultimately has control over who gets to see their data. Without that provision in place, no patient or hospital or doctor would ever agree to use the network, so it will be in there. Then basically what would happen (depending on how you implemented it) is providers would need an authorization from the patient before the network would grant access to the data. The patient also would be able to put a stop on any information in any system from ever being released. That actually isn't any different than right now, anyone can request someone to never release their records and they have to abide by that. I'm as paranoid as the next guy, but personal control of info is a top priority in many of the proposals so I feel confident it will remain in place (like it is now).
This is quite controversial, and I've seen in other responses that they would not use a national ID because there has been very strong opposition to this in the past. I could argue both sides of this, but my guess is that there won't be and we'll have to use a combination of name, date of birth, and something like location of birth to match everyone up. Odds are that it will be a mess for quite a while.
It's because HL7 is a messaging standard, not a medical record standard. If you've looked at what a single lab result looks like in HL7 v3, it fills probably three regular pages. Imagine sending hundreds of those, one for each lab result for each patient, across the network to another hospital to take a look. Imagine doing that for the hundreds of thousands of patients seen daily by care providers everywhere. It would be insane. Plus v3 is only set up for some billing stuff, and lab and pharmacy results. There's nothing for documents, radiology reports, etc etc.
What is needed is a medical record standard, where those messages are bundled up into something that more closely resembles an entire medical record. It would cut down on size, and make sure the whole thing gets to where it needs to go, and the interfacing would be much simpler. I know the HL7 organization is trying to do this as well, but they've been having mtgs about it now for almost 2 years and nothing's come out of it. Considering v3 took about 10 years to create, and their website hasn't been updated in about 4, I'm not expecting speedy work out of the HL7 organization...
This is misleading. He didn't actually make a conscious decision one day and say "let's start funding stem cell research". Through the NIH it was getting funded as part of the scientific research the gov't supports. What he did do was make a conscious decision to terminate that support.
This is a disturbing trend I've seen cropping up a few times lately, but it seems like all of their useful introductory documentation (at least what they refer to on their website) is available in book format that you have to pay money for. Is the code really open and free if you have to pay money to learn how to use it?
The location of my vehicle could reasonably be considered public knowledge. One only has to stand on the public road and watch me drive by to see the intuitiveness of that. If GPS was a laser beam that you projected onto my vehicle, or a robot that followed me around, then I couldn't say a thing.
However, a GPS device is an actual physical device that they had to plant on this person's car, i.e. inside one of his "effects". How did they get it there, throw it into an open window? I doubt it; they physically had to enter the vehicle and place it in there, or somehow glue it to the outside. Both of those, whether they are actively searching or not, are really a search because if they stumbled across a kilo of cocaine, I guarantee they would be wanting to arrest the guy.
You have to draw the line somewhere. If I were a cop that wanted to search the car of someone I suspected but had no proof of, I would place a GPS transmitter in their car and "accidentally" see the stuff I wanted.
Besides, the Constitution is not meant to be read 100% literally the way you are. The intent of it is meant to be followed by the gov't, and the final arbiters of what it actually "means" are the Supreme Court. Just because it doesn't say "vehicles", doesn't mean that wasn't their intent and how it would be interpreted.
Re:Human Error and Logic
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Robots in Medicine
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· Score: 4, Informative
All prescriptions in a hospital are reviewed by a pharmacist before being entered into the computer system. If the hospital has computerized physician order entry, they additionally go through checking as the order is placed. Nurses still take the drug in their hand and review it before they administer it. Humans still review everything.
This replaces the very error-prone menial task of filling up vials with the appropriate dose and concentration of medicines. Assuming the system works as intended, there is absolutely nothing being lost here, only gained.
I mean, none of us do, but we do that assuming that the brief synopsis provided by the poster is an accurate abstract of the topic. Perhaps the topic of this should be "Incredibly paranoid poster submits interesting technology article." Then again, that's probably why all my submissions get rejected...
I realize that the rabid OS fans on this site think that this is the worst possible thing to ever occur on planet earth, but the rest of us live and work in a world where ActiveX is a reality. Our vendors only supply certain applications on the web using ActiveX. You know what? We then need to standardize on using IE across the enterprise for those few apps that everyone needs. We cannot change the vendor. We cannot just lose those apps. We cannot get rid of IE.
Enter a browser that is *mostly* Firefox, but for which you can use IE/ActiveX for the sites that need it. In other words, 95% of our enterprise could now be using Firefox technology, and only IE where they have to. Which allows us to change our mantra of "only IE is supported" to "we support IE and Netscape". We can then turn around and tell our vendors "you know what, you're the only vendor that still uses ActiveX" and they can't respond "but why does it matter cuz you're using IE?"
I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but if they allow us to control the rendering of sites by URL in a config somewhere, this will be the first nail in IE's coffin around where I work...
They've been working on one for some time, or so I've been informed by someone in a position to know these things. There is a long delay between the idea stage and the release stage, though, so it probably won't be out for a bit. I'm guessing they've been keeping a low profile so that they don't inadvertantly confuse everyone into joining up with CoH thinking it's the "superhero game" they've been hearing about.
I just got it as well, and my first impression was that the people who designed it had not used any other DVR on the market, and are like "Tivo-what?" The UI has a lot to be desired, but I still use it for the ability to tape my shows.
That being said, they also "upgraded" me from my old AT&T plan to the new Comcast equivalent when they put in my DVR without telling me, which means I have to pay $8 more per month and I lost the STARZ package. So to get that back, I gotta pay another $10/month. So my new DVR is costing me $28/month ($18 to get my old channels, $10 for DVR). Which explains why I'm going to switch to satellite...
They already have a cheap fuel source, it's called coal. And they have no qualms about working with some of the "less savory" countries to get the oil that they need (i.e. Iran).
Now, there's only so long they'll be able to run on coal (basically til everyone starts keeling over from black lung) but that point is probably a decade or two off. Your point about the USA going backwards is entirely accurate, though, and this election confirmed that Americans are really not that concerned with the vested oil interest or the environment, though, so China may beat us, although it won't be from their innovation, but from our lack of foresight.
You all need to read the book the
End of Oil. It goes into detail about the economics of the energy supply and why nuclear energy is a non-starter in the USA, especially given our current/new president. If the poster purely wants to discuss the economics, then that's fine, but the economics are only a piece of the puzzle and not the major piece (as he/she alludes to). It's like me as a doctor saying "I know you have lung cancer and are dying, but let's talk about your sex life". Kind of missing the major issues...
The parent is right, the poster didn't actually read the article they were posting about. If you want campaign finance reform to work, even the slightly-less-broken one we have now, then it needs to apply everywhere.
Money in politics is like Radon in my house, seeps in through every tiny crack and kills me slowly...
I found more info on it, this from a study done about 4 years ago in California (since I was curious why that map showed essentially nothing over Los Angeles, which has a ton of traffic, improved emissions standards notwithstanding). It didn't actually answer my question, but it's interesting nonetheless (pasted from a PDF). While this talks mostly about traffic, it does mention power plants, which is probably responsible for some of the really wacky ones you see on there (like China's incredible numbers, and the concentration around Lake Michigan, despite having far fewer cars than DC or LA). Just a hunch. The original reference is located here: http://www.oehha.ca.gov/air/pdf/oehhano2.pdf
"The primary sources for NO2 are internal combustion engines, both gasoline and diesel powered, as well as point sources, especially power plants. U.S. emissions of NOx in 1996-1997 were approximately 23,000 short tons per year, with roughly 11,000 tons contributed by fuel combustion from non-transportation sources (Office of Air and Radiation, 1998). In 1991, 8.9 million people resided in counties that exceeded the NAAQS for NO2, with the highest annual concentrations occurring in Southern California (Bascom et al., 1996). National mean concentrations of NO2 decreased 14% from 1988 to 1997, to about 20 ppb, although NOx emissions decreased little during that time period, and increased 1% in 1996-1997 (Office of Air and Radiation, 1998). Since 1970, total NOx emissions have increased 11% and emissions from coal-fired power plants have increased 44%. During the past 5 years, all U.S. counties have been in compliance with the Federal NO2 standard.
"Compliance with the Federal NAAQS for NO2 does not preclude substantial shortterm peak concentrations, and the California standard of 0.25 ppm for 1 hour continues to be exceeded, although with less frequency. In 1999, maximum one-hour values for NO2 were highest in the counties of Riverside (0.307 ppm) and Imperial (0.286), with annual mean concentrations of 0.022 and 0.035, respectively (Office of Air and Radiation, 1998).
"Because NO2 concentrations are related to traffic density, commuters in heavy traffic may be exposed to higher concentrations of NO2 than those indicated by regional monitors. In one study of personal exposures by Los Angeles commuters (Baker et al., 1990), invehicle NO2 concentrations, averaged over 1 week of travel, ranged from 0.028 to 0.170 ppm, with a mean of 0.078 ppm. This was 50% higher than ambient concentrations measured at local monitoring sites.
"Indoor NO2 levels, in the presence of an unvented combustion source, may exceed those found outdoors. Natural gas or propane cooking stoves release NO2, as do kerosene heaters. Peak levels exceeding 2.0 ppm have been measured in homes with gas stoves (Leaderer et al., 1984), and exposures during cooking have been measured as high as 0.6 ppm for up to 45 minutes (Goldstein et al., 1988). It is important to recognize that outdoor NO2 levels provide a "background" for the higher peaks that may occur indoors; thus higher outdoor levels may drive higher peaks indoors, with outdoor levels contributing approximately 50% to indoor levels (Marbury et al., 1988).
"Distance of residences from roadways appears to influence indoor NO2 levels. In Tokyo, Japan, NO2 exposure among adult women, age 40-60 years, was determined at varying distances from the roadside, using personal monitoring and monitoring inside and outside the home (Nakai et al., 1995). The highest mean personal exposure levels were found in women living closest to the roadway at 63.4 ppb, compared with 55.3 ppb farthest from the roadway. Personal monitoring in homes with unvented combustion sources were less clearly correlated to distance from the roadway than homes without combustion sources. In another study in the Netherlands (Roorda-Knape et al., 1999), NO2 levels in school classrooms were found to be significantly
Looks like it's largely spilling out from the major industrial areas, which doesn't jive with the article you quote, but does go along w/ the article that the picture is in. It's spilling largely from the Detroit/Chicago area in the USA (as well as Pittsburgh/south NJ), eastern China, and southern England on that map, which coincides nicely w/ industrial centers. There really wasn't anything on top of Canada, I grew up under the northern end of that big red blob, and I was in upstate NY.
One of the lower posters also raised a good point. Being a successful economy means you can use your sources of energy to create more money. The USA has mastered this, largely because we were one of the first nations to do this, and because we were blessed w/ huge amounts of wood, then coal, and then oil that allowed us to get so far ahead. This is grossly oversimplified, but a lot of our infrastructure is already paid for, so our energy is cheap. Contrast that w/ China, who is just now trying to create that "good living through more energy" that we've enjoyed for decades, and you realize that their costs are higher. If they did it in a environmental way, it would cost even more, and they wouldn't make it as far w/ the same amount of money. It's easy to see why they have a black cloud, cuz that's what their money dictates. They'll spend more money in the future on it, but not until their (newly wealthier) middle class starts demanding it, and then they'll pass the cost along.
Unless your computer cost $150 or less, and the games you enjoy typically involve a lot of file transfers, your above comment doesn't make a lot of sense.
Also, nobody would claim the XBox is a superior machine from a productivity standpoint, because nobody uses it for productivity. It's for games. Games that are not about file transfers.
And frankly, I hope we both get modded off-topic. No XBox zealots have even posted on the thread yet...
Registering and keeping your own names out of everyone else's hands is a much simpler and cheaper way to do it, rather than getting into nasty, expensive lawsuits later on over who gbrowser.com is owned by. How much did the Lindows lawsuit cost MS, both in terms of $$ and public good will?
From my understanding (and no, I don't have any evidence to point to, this is/. after all and I'm too lazy) the Patriot Act was written behind closed doors by members of the republican party in a kind of marathon session that didn't allow any discussion w/ anyone else. They gave it out to members at about midnight, and the vote was the next day. The bulk of the act was written in the manner of "change the word 'some' to 'all' in paragraph 10, section 13, line 3 of article 212.1" so that it would have taken you forever to read it and figure out what the changes actually were.
All of this resulted in everyone voting pretty much unanimously for a law that few had even read, because they were being held to a "vote for this or you're unpatriotic", a method that was so unsubtle that you just have to read the name of the law to see it. And here we are.
I don't think any of this came from Kerry's hand. Perhaps he had done stuff w/ this in the past, but the Patriot Act is all GW and his people.
This article should be taken with a grain of salt. First of all, it's about as minor a medical discovery as you could find, in terms of potential impact of the study, where it was published, etc. (makes me wonder if the submitter was an author). There was a massive article on a similar topic in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, which actually studied actual humans and their actual outcomes (link here) that didn't make it onto slashdot, and proved essentially the same thing. This is just talking about a lab proof about antioxidants, which are currently only one theory as to why alcohol is good for you. In other words, this is nice to know, but doesn't prove anything we didn't already know.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a medical informaticist, and I don't completely agree with part of the above. I, too, read the wikipedia entry on bioinformatics and saw that my field is lumped in w/ bioinformatics, which is something I don't agree with. Perhaps to a layperson, the difference between "bio" and "medical" is not a big one, but practically speaking it is quite big. (The parent of this didn't lump, just mentioned it in passing, but I wanted to comment on it.)
Basically, someone like myself might not be too knowledgeable about what I refer to as bioinformatics, which I consider to be everything from DNA->proteins->cell cycles. Bioinformatics focuses on solving problems of data management of the vast amount of information in the above fields, which is a huge undertaking. It also happens to deal more with vast databases and data mining.
A bioinformaticist, on the other hand, is probably not very aware of what I do in my job, which is quite different. I deal on a daily basis with how we manage large datasets of patient-specific data, with the goal of improving medical care. We also deal w/ data mining and database design and all that, but it has a very different focus and uses very different tools. Our solutions are largely focused around caring for patients.
That being said, there is a middle ground of largely research projects that attempt to span that gap. There are some groups working on making data available from the bioinformatics world merge w/ the medical informatics world to be useful in some way to clinicians, but I would estimate the fruit of that labor to be 10-15 years out. These projects are mostly driven by bioinformaticists, since they're more experienced with dealing with their huge datasets and doing the data mining that they do, while the medical informaticists would be more interested in how they feed data into something like that and get something useful out.
At any rate, someone who labels themselves as a "bioinformaticist" and is doing EMR research is clearly just gunning for research money using the bio label (there's more money there).
Read the -1 FUD post, because that's useful, but here's my take on your questions (and I'm not a lawyer, so this is just my interpretation). If you want support at all for MySQL from the company, you need a commercial license. You didn't ask that, but that's the easy one.
If you don't redistribute it, you don't need the commercial license. Note that if you don't distribute code from any open source license, including GPL, you don't need to open your code. OS licenses are based on copyright law, and copyright law doesn't restrict private use, only redistribution (in a general sense). The caveat to that is that I've heard there are some licenses that specifically require you to submit back changes you've made, even if you don't redistribute it, but I don't have any experience w/ those.
Your second question is trickier. The tone on the licensing site is that yes, you would need a license to do that, unless you released your code under the GPL license. This is the whole "linked library" issue that a lot of commercial entities use to say why they don't use GPL software. However, if you made your system db-agnostic, such that the user could use any database and configured that choice on their own, then I don't think you would have to. You should be making your app db-agnostic anyway, but that means you can't embed non-ANSI-standard SQL statements in your code (i.e. statements that could only run on MySQL) or use other MySQL-specific functions and not distribute it as GPL'ed code. You couldn't redistribute the MySQL w/ your code in that case, but you said you weren't going to anyway.
The silence issue also exists for the electric cars. At low speeds or coasting they run pretty much silent and, since they're a lot larger, could pose as much of a threat. If you've ever run through LA and almost been hit by one popping out of a blind alley (cuz nobody stops at the end of alleys here) that you weren't able to hear while approaching, you know what I'm talking about...
Since half of the posts in response to this article will devolve into some sort of argument about what is and isn't an "addiction", I feel I need to define it.
An addiction is any behavior that someone does in preference to other things and which results in adverse effects on another aspect of their life (e.g. relationships, job, assets, etc). Both of those things are important. If you just prefer to do something but it's not causing a problem, it's not an addiction.
Note that there is nothing in the definition describing "withdrawal" or whether it's psychological or physical or anything like that. Most of those things come from people's half understanding of substance abuse terminology, and have nothing to do with it. There is confusion over "dependence" and "addiction", such that people can be addicted to drugs (using them and having life problems) and be either physically dependent (e.g. heroin), mentally dependent (e.g. cocaine) or neither, although the last one is rare with drugs (it more applies to things like gambling and such).
I don't believe the Netscape project is open source (which is their right under MPL) and so I couldn't find out how they embedded IE into Firefox.
Are there any other open source projects that will let you embed the IE rendering engine into Firefox? I've seen the Mozilla ActiveX project, but was unable to get that working. It also lacks the simplicity of a toggle to switch rendering modes.
I hate to say it, but like it or not there are a lot of legacy applications out there that require IE, and that we are unable to change without a lot of time, money, and arm-twisting to the vendors who provide them. We would love to switch to Firefox across our enterprise, but the IE-requirement has our hands tied. But a Firefox browser that we could set up w/ a whitelist of what pages should toggle to the IE rendering engine, now that is something we could work with...
One key part of all the proposals I've seen is that the patient ultimately has control over who gets to see their data. Without that provision in place, no patient or hospital or doctor would ever agree to use the network, so it will be in there. Then basically what would happen (depending on how you implemented it) is providers would need an authorization from the patient before the network would grant access to the data. The patient also would be able to put a stop on any information in any system from ever being released. That actually isn't any different than right now, anyone can request someone to never release their records and they have to abide by that. I'm as paranoid as the next guy, but personal control of info is a top priority in many of the proposals so I feel confident it will remain in place (like it is now).
This is quite controversial, and I've seen in other responses that they would not use a national ID because there has been very strong opposition to this in the past. I could argue both sides of this, but my guess is that there won't be and we'll have to use a combination of name, date of birth, and something like location of birth to match everyone up. Odds are that it will be a mess for quite a while.
It's because HL7 is a messaging standard, not a medical record standard. If you've looked at what a single lab result looks like in HL7 v3, it fills probably three regular pages. Imagine sending hundreds of those, one for each lab result for each patient, across the network to another hospital to take a look. Imagine doing that for the hundreds of thousands of patients seen daily by care providers everywhere. It would be insane. Plus v3 is only set up for some billing stuff, and lab and pharmacy results. There's nothing for documents, radiology reports, etc etc.
What is needed is a medical record standard, where those messages are bundled up into something that more closely resembles an entire medical record. It would cut down on size, and make sure the whole thing gets to where it needs to go, and the interfacing would be much simpler. I know the HL7 organization is trying to do this as well, but they've been having mtgs about it now for almost 2 years and nothing's come out of it. Considering v3 took about 10 years to create, and their website hasn't been updated in about 4, I'm not expecting speedy work out of the HL7 organization...
This is misleading. He didn't actually make a conscious decision one day and say "let's start funding stem cell research". Through the NIH it was getting funded as part of the scientific research the gov't supports. What he did do was make a conscious decision to terminate that support.
This is a disturbing trend I've seen cropping up a few times lately, but it seems like all of their useful introductory documentation (at least what they refer to on their website) is available in book format that you have to pay money for. Is the code really open and free if you have to pay money to learn how to use it?
The location of my vehicle could reasonably be considered public knowledge. One only has to stand on the public road and watch me drive by to see the intuitiveness of that. If GPS was a laser beam that you projected onto my vehicle, or a robot that followed me around, then I couldn't say a thing.
However, a GPS device is an actual physical device that they had to plant on this person's car, i.e. inside one of his "effects". How did they get it there, throw it into an open window? I doubt it; they physically had to enter the vehicle and place it in there, or somehow glue it to the outside. Both of those, whether they are actively searching or not, are really a search because if they stumbled across a kilo of cocaine, I guarantee they would be wanting to arrest the guy.
You have to draw the line somewhere. If I were a cop that wanted to search the car of someone I suspected but had no proof of, I would place a GPS transmitter in their car and "accidentally" see the stuff I wanted.
Besides, the Constitution is not meant to be read 100% literally the way you are. The intent of it is meant to be followed by the gov't, and the final arbiters of what it actually "means" are the Supreme Court. Just because it doesn't say "vehicles", doesn't mean that wasn't their intent and how it would be interpreted.
All prescriptions in a hospital are reviewed by a pharmacist before being entered into the computer system. If the hospital has computerized physician order entry, they additionally go through checking as the order is placed. Nurses still take the drug in their hand and review it before they administer it. Humans still review everything.
This replaces the very error-prone menial task of filling up vials with the appropriate dose and concentration of medicines. Assuming the system works as intended, there is absolutely nothing being lost here, only gained.
I mean, none of us do, but we do that assuming that the brief synopsis provided by the poster is an accurate abstract of the topic. Perhaps the topic of this should be "Incredibly paranoid poster submits interesting technology article." Then again, that's probably why all my submissions get rejected...
I realize that the rabid OS fans on this site think that this is the worst possible thing to ever occur on planet earth, but the rest of us live and work in a world where ActiveX is a reality. Our vendors only supply certain applications on the web using ActiveX. You know what? We then need to standardize on using IE across the enterprise for those few apps that everyone needs. We cannot change the vendor. We cannot just lose those apps. We cannot get rid of IE.
Enter a browser that is *mostly* Firefox, but for which you can use IE/ActiveX for the sites that need it. In other words, 95% of our enterprise could now be using Firefox technology, and only IE where they have to. Which allows us to change our mantra of "only IE is supported" to "we support IE and Netscape". We can then turn around and tell our vendors "you know what, you're the only vendor that still uses ActiveX" and they can't respond "but why does it matter cuz you're using IE?"
I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but if they allow us to control the rendering of sites by URL in a config somewhere, this will be the first nail in IE's coffin around where I work...
They've been working on one for some time, or so I've been informed by someone in a position to know these things. There is a long delay between the idea stage and the release stage, though, so it probably won't be out for a bit. I'm guessing they've been keeping a low profile so that they don't inadvertantly confuse everyone into joining up with CoH thinking it's the "superhero game" they've been hearing about.
I just got it as well, and my first impression was that the people who designed it had not used any other DVR on the market, and are like "Tivo-what?" The UI has a lot to be desired, but I still use it for the ability to tape my shows.
That being said, they also "upgraded" me from my old AT&T plan to the new Comcast equivalent when they put in my DVR without telling me, which means I have to pay $8 more per month and I lost the STARZ package. So to get that back, I gotta pay another $10/month. So my new DVR is costing me $28/month ($18 to get my old channels, $10 for DVR). Which explains why I'm going to switch to satellite...
They already have a cheap fuel source, it's called coal. And they have no qualms about working with some of the "less savory" countries to get the oil that they need (i.e. Iran).
Now, there's only so long they'll be able to run on coal (basically til everyone starts keeling over from black lung) but that point is probably a decade or two off. Your point about the USA going backwards is entirely accurate, though, and this election confirmed that Americans are really not that concerned with the vested oil interest or the environment, though, so China may beat us, although it won't be from their innovation, but from our lack of foresight.
You all need to read the book the End of Oil. It goes into detail about the economics of the energy supply and why nuclear energy is a non-starter in the USA, especially given our current/new president. If the poster purely wants to discuss the economics, then that's fine, but the economics are only a piece of the puzzle and not the major piece (as he/she alludes to). It's like me as a doctor saying "I know you have lung cancer and are dying, but let's talk about your sex life". Kind of missing the major issues...
The parent is right, the poster didn't actually read the article they were posting about. If you want campaign finance reform to work, even the slightly-less-broken one we have now, then it needs to apply everywhere.
Money in politics is like Radon in my house, seeps in through every tiny crack and kills me slowly...
I found more info on it, this from a study done about 4 years ago in California (since I was curious why that map showed essentially nothing over Los Angeles, which has a ton of traffic, improved emissions standards notwithstanding). It didn't actually answer my question, but it's interesting nonetheless (pasted from a PDF). While this talks mostly about traffic, it does mention power plants, which is probably responsible for some of the really wacky ones you see on there (like China's incredible numbers, and the concentration around Lake Michigan, despite having far fewer cars than DC or LA). Just a hunch. The original reference is located here: http://www.oehha.ca.gov/air/pdf/oehhano2.pdf
"The primary sources for NO2 are internal combustion engines, both gasoline and
diesel powered, as well as point sources, especially power plants. U.S. emissions of NOx
in 1996-1997 were approximately 23,000 short tons per year, with roughly 11,000 tons
contributed by fuel combustion from non-transportation sources (Office of Air and
Radiation, 1998). In 1991, 8.9 million people resided in counties that exceeded the NAAQS
for NO2, with the highest annual concentrations occurring in Southern California (Bascom et
al., 1996). National mean concentrations of NO2 decreased 14% from 1988 to 1997, to
about 20 ppb, although NOx emissions decreased little during that time period, and
increased 1% in 1996-1997 (Office of Air and Radiation, 1998). Since 1970, total NOx
emissions have increased 11% and emissions from coal-fired power plants have increased
44%. During the past 5 years, all U.S. counties have been in compliance with the Federal
NO2 standard.
"Compliance with the Federal NAAQS for NO2 does not preclude substantial shortterm
peak concentrations, and the California standard of 0.25 ppm for 1 hour continues to
be exceeded, although with less frequency. In 1999, maximum one-hour values for NO2
were highest in the counties of Riverside (0.307 ppm) and Imperial (0.286), with annual
mean concentrations of 0.022 and 0.035, respectively (Office of Air and Radiation, 1998).
"Because NO2 concentrations are related to traffic density, commuters in heavy traffic
may be exposed to higher concentrations of NO2 than those indicated by regional monitors.
In one study of personal exposures by Los Angeles commuters (Baker et al., 1990), invehicle
NO2 concentrations, averaged over 1 week of travel, ranged from 0.028 to 0.170
ppm, with a mean of 0.078 ppm. This was 50% higher than ambient concentrations
measured at local monitoring sites.
"Indoor NO2 levels, in the presence of an unvented combustion source, may exceed
those found outdoors. Natural gas or propane cooking stoves release NO2, as do kerosene
heaters. Peak levels exceeding 2.0 ppm have been measured in homes with gas stoves
(Leaderer et al., 1984), and exposures during cooking have been measured as high as 0.6
ppm for up to 45 minutes (Goldstein et al., 1988). It is important to recognize that outdoor
NO2 levels provide a "background" for the higher peaks that may occur indoors; thus higher
outdoor levels may drive higher peaks indoors, with outdoor levels contributing
approximately 50% to indoor levels (Marbury et al., 1988).
"Distance of residences from roadways appears to influence indoor NO2 levels. In
Tokyo, Japan, NO2 exposure among adult women, age 40-60 years, was determined at
varying distances from the roadside, using personal monitoring and monitoring inside and
outside the home (Nakai et al., 1995). The highest mean personal exposure levels were
found in women living closest to the roadway at 63.4 ppb, compared with 55.3 ppb farthest
from the roadway. Personal monitoring in homes with unvented combustion sources were
less clearly correlated to distance from the roadway than homes without combustion
sources. In another study in the Netherlands (Roorda-Knape et al., 1999), NO2 levels
in school classrooms were found to be significantly
Looks like it's largely spilling out from the major industrial areas, which doesn't jive with the article you quote, but does go along w/ the article that the picture is in. It's spilling largely from the Detroit/Chicago area in the USA (as well as Pittsburgh/south NJ), eastern China, and southern England on that map, which coincides nicely w/ industrial centers. There really wasn't anything on top of Canada, I grew up under the northern end of that big red blob, and I was in upstate NY.
One of the lower posters also raised a good point. Being a successful economy means you can use your sources of energy to create more money. The USA has mastered this, largely because we were one of the first nations to do this, and because we were blessed w/ huge amounts of wood, then coal, and then oil that allowed us to get so far ahead. This is grossly oversimplified, but a lot of our infrastructure is already paid for, so our energy is cheap. Contrast that w/ China, who is just now trying to create that "good living through more energy" that we've enjoyed for decades, and you realize that their costs are higher. If they did it in a environmental way, it would cost even more, and they wouldn't make it as far w/ the same amount of money. It's easy to see why they have a black cloud, cuz that's what their money dictates. They'll spend more money in the future on it, but not until their (newly wealthier) middle class starts demanding it, and then they'll pass the cost along.
Unless your computer cost $150 or less, and the games you enjoy typically involve a lot of file transfers, your above comment doesn't make a lot of sense.
Also, nobody would claim the XBox is a superior machine from a productivity standpoint, because nobody uses it for productivity. It's for games. Games that are not about file transfers.
And frankly, I hope we both get modded off-topic. No XBox zealots have even posted on the thread yet...
Registering and keeping your own names out of everyone else's hands is a much simpler and cheaper way to do it, rather than getting into nasty, expensive lawsuits later on over who gbrowser.com is owned by. How much did the Lindows lawsuit cost MS, both in terms of $$ and public good will?
From my understanding (and no, I don't have any evidence to point to, this is /. after all and I'm too lazy) the Patriot Act was written behind closed doors by members of the republican party in a kind of marathon session that didn't allow any discussion w/ anyone else. They gave it out to members at about midnight, and the vote was the next day. The bulk of the act was written in the manner of "change the word 'some' to 'all' in paragraph 10, section 13, line 3 of article 212.1" so that it would have taken you forever to read it and figure out what the changes actually were.
All of this resulted in everyone voting pretty much unanimously for a law that few had even read, because they were being held to a "vote for this or you're unpatriotic", a method that was so unsubtle that you just have to read the name of the law to see it. And here we are.
I don't think any of this came from Kerry's hand. Perhaps he had done stuff w/ this in the past, but the Patriot Act is all GW and his people.
This article should be taken with a grain of salt. First of all, it's about as minor a medical discovery as you could find, in terms of potential impact of the study, where it was published, etc. (makes me wonder if the submitter was an author). There was a massive article on a similar topic in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, which actually studied actual humans and their actual outcomes (link here) that didn't make it onto slashdot, and proved essentially the same thing. This is just talking about a lab proof about antioxidants, which are currently only one theory as to why alcohol is good for you. In other words, this is nice to know, but doesn't prove anything we didn't already know.