I actually tried this a number of years ago (probably about 7 or 8 years now) with some friends of mine in the same situation as you are in, playing Earthdawn. We went through a couple of phases with this. For the first one, we used an IRC client. My friend who was maintaining the IRC server wrote a little bot that would do dice rolls for us, so you could type in "d20 + d6" and it would do the roll for you. In ED, it was steps, but that's not relevant.
This worked fairly well overall, but the pacing of the game was very slow, primarily due to all the typing necessary. I was the GM and was typing fast (I think I could do 60-70 wpm back then) and it still felt like the game crawled. That, and my wrists and hands were crippled by the end. It was fun, but it wasn't the same.
Then we tried using an internet video way of doing it. As you can imagine, the video 7-8 years ago wasn't great, although sadly it isn't that much worse than it is right now. We were all on academic networks so we have nice fat pipes. The chat one worked out pretty well, but then we added a couple of people from a mailing list who didn't have access, so we had to drop it and go back to typing. A few years later, I tried the old WebRPG, and it didn't really help the problem any, you still had to type it all in.
Based on that experience, I would say that there are a couple of things you would need in any application. First of all, you need to use some sort of voice chat, which is actually fairly easy to use these days (I would expect, although I haven't done it myself). If you don't use voice chat, then perhaps a voice recognition thing for the GM to cut down on typing. If all else fails, try and type up as many descriptions ahead of time so you can cut & paste them into the IRC. You will still be overwhelmed by ad hoc discussions, but this should help a bit.
The other thing you need is some sort of common workspace to do things in, primarily for rolling dice and a whiteboard for maps or stuff. We didn't have the whiteboard and did okay, but we were either outdoors or in very small dungeons, so it wasn't that necessary. I also drew up some maps and put them on my website to help the players out if they were really desperate. The rolling dice stuff could be handled by what I imagine are a lot of secure little apps to do this with. If you have IRC, write a bot.
IRC is also handy for secret messages where voice doesn't work, so I would recommend to use IRC at least for that. It also can work as a back-up system for people who have problems with the video, which we definitely had 7-8 years ago, and quite frequently at that. It's still worthwhile so you don't ruin a whole gaming session because someone can't get their microphone to work or something. You should do a dry run at least once ahead of your first planned session, and this will need almost as much time as a true session. It may not seem worthwhile, but you'd be surprised.
Last but not least, don't try and GM drunk. I tried that a couple of times, and it was fun for all involved, but a bit ridiculous...:)
Most people in the comments are focusing on actual bugs and crashes in a system causing deaths. While that could certainly happen, those types of errors are more visible and actually a much "better" error to have than some other types. If the system crashes, it may have some immediate effects depending on its purpose, but if it's something that causes its action through an actual user, they are generally harmless, though very annoying. An example of the difference is that if the software designed to run a ventilator has a bug that causes it to crash, since it is directly providing life to a person, when it crashes someone will probably die. On the other hand, systems designed to give information to a clinician, who can then act upon it are going to be very aware when that system is down, and so much less likely to make an error based on that outage.
The more insidious "errors" if you want to call them that are ones that are errors of design and process, and not execution. If a piece of software is designed with certain assumptions in mind, and something happens outside of the parameters of those assumptions, the software will appear to be working correctly when in fact there may be egregious errors. There are a lot of instances of this in everyday practice.
Lastly, what we run across is that clinicians are used to a world of paper, where everything obviously either there or not. You know that there's a problem, and there is transparency to the error, so you can factor that into your decision-making. In a clinical system, the transparency is not there, and a subtle flaw can mislead someone making a clinical decision into making a poor one.
Of course, the above are all gross generalities, as is any discussion of errors in complex systems, but I hope you get the idea.
This isn't a core problem with the law, it's a core problem with most people's understanding of the law and the way it's applied in our current legal setting. The law allows for something like $100k penalty or damages per copyright violation if you are found to have done that. However, there are a lot of fair use provisions that protect many uses of copyrighted material from falling under this, i.e. educational use, personal use, backups, etc. To prove you violated copyright in these cases, the court typically looks at four things, among them whether or not you profited from the violation and whether or not you knew you were doing it. I would honestly be very surprised to find that someone who downloaded a single copy of a story from an online site that claimed it was free to download would ever be found guilty of copyright violation and pay any penalties.
That being said, there was a recent disturbance in the force -- the DMCA. That makes it easier for copyright holders to cause problems for people, basically by putting many of the original fair use provisions on hold in a way that hasn't found its way through the courts yet. I'm hoping it will and it will be smashed down, but it hasn't happened yet. This doesn't change the basic premise of the law as I tried to describe it above.
It also put the copyright holders in a position they had never had before where they feel emboldened to go around rattling their swords. The RIAA can threaten people with very expensive lawsuits which, even if those people won (which they probably would given a fair shake), they would have to pay craploads of money defending themselves. Estimates of copyright case costs are somewhere around $200,000 per case. In most cases it's way cheaper just to pay the fine unless you can find some kind soul to protect you for the eventual win. The other downside is that the person sued for copyright violation doesn't come out ahead ever even if they win. At their most lucky, they could win court expenses, but that's not even a guarantee. So you won your case, but you're still out $200k. And that's how these big companies can pull it off. It has nothing to do with the law about copyright, which was never meant to be applied in these cases anyway.
Construction types who are considered to be "skilled" (I only put that in quotes because the definition of skilled is...see below) get paid a lot of cash, something on the order of $30-50/hour or more, depending on the job and their "skill" level. The ones I can think of are electricians and plumbers to whom this applies, and I'm talking about the US here (I have no idea what goes on in UK). My dollar figures are dated as well, this is what they were making a decade ago when I used to work in construction.
The "skilled" comment is based on the fact that these people need to actually get certifications from what is essentially a union in order to practice their trade. They move up through ranks like journeyman and such, which they can use in their marketing to get jobs and demand their fees. I think they also have to be licensed in the state, and plumbing and electrical installations need to be inspected by a plumber and electrician in addition to the general inspection all projects get. They can charge a premium for all this.
You should also pardon the pun in the parent's comment "expensive shit." You certainly wind up playing in a lot of shit, but you can charge good money for that if that's something you want to do. Gastroenterologists also enjoy that same benefit...
They mentioned that they are going to go check the nearby rock outcropping named "Big Bend" and do basically the same that they did on this rock, in order to see if these rocks were laid down there. I think they're checking exactly that, i.e. whether or not this whole area is laid down with rocks of the same origin (soaked in water), or if they were thrown here by a collision or something.
They said that they weren't sure if the rocks were sedimentary or not. From the sounds of it they aren't, but they did happen to be "soaked in water" or whatever the quote was, allowing the concretions to form in spaces in already existing rock. They haven't found any evidence of layering yet, as far as I know, which would mean sedimentary.
I lived in NYC for four years about six years ago, and I never even bothered to hit the button. All it did was expose me to tourist germs residing on the button. Everyone who lived there knew that they didn't work.
However, there is a big psychological component, and I've even found myself jamming on the button in frustration, mostly to have something to do (it's more socially acceptable than punching the guy standing next to you). Very similar to hitting the door close button on most elevators, or pulling onto the sensor pads at intersections during rush hour. Whether you like it or not, you are being ignored all the time...
"those dumb chairs" is a pretty ignorant comment by the poster. They won about every industrial design award when they came out, including the top industrial design award around (whatever it's called, I'm not in industrial design myself). They're not just fancy, they're considered to be ergonomic masterpieces...
Although I haven't had the opportunity to give this talk yet, I've been keeping my eyes open to what people are saying where I am. A lot of other people have made good comments, I'll only state the key points I would make.
I got nailed a few months ago in a discussion on this issue by someone asking the question of an internal group that was proposing to develop an application based on an open-source framework. The question was simple: "What happens if you decide to leave, how do we support it?" All the arguments that came into my head wouldn't work, those evaluating this were not technologically savvy and could care less about actually having the source (few people actually do care about that, a point made strongly elsewhere). In a pure George Castanza moment, afterwards I realized that although there isn't a good answer to that question, there is a very valid rebuttal question: "What happens when the private company who you purchased software from goes out of business/gets purchased/stops supporting that product?" At least to me, it was a new way to look at the same question, and since that's probably the most common question that will come up, since people are always looking for support, it's very important.
Other than that, two things: (1) check cio.com because they have a lot of articles and research on how to sell open source to your business people, and (2) don't be a zealot, they can smell it on you, but approach it from a rational business angle and have answers/rebuttals to the typical questions (see above) and it will impress the business types, who could honestly not care less about the religion of open source.
First, as everyone says, get a lawyer to look at this. Mucking around with this stuff without that is asking for trouble.
Second, you need to figure out if you are willing to work at a job that won't allow you to make these changes to accomodate your outside job. If you're desperate for a job, you may say yes to that question. I was unwilling to when I did it. You'll see why this is important in a minute.
Now (and this is all what my lawyer told me, so this is second-hand) these contracts involve only you signing them; the company itself does not sign them. (In my situation the intellectual property agreement was separate from my actual job contract, that may not be the same for you, in which case this might not work.) In that situation, you are agreeing to be bound by their terms, since this is pretty much a one-way deal. What that means practically is that you can make whatever changes you want to to that document before you sign it, since you're the only one who needs to sign it. It's basically stating "this is what I agree to," which is different than what they proposed.
Then it goes to that employer, who needs to look at that and decide if they are willing to accept the changes you've made or not. If so, it's a done deal, and it's relatively easy for them because they don't have to sign it. If they are not willing, they can come back to you and tell you that. Then you have to invoke your decision from above and tell them if that's a deal breaker for you or not. I tend to think that the smarter the company, the more likely they are to not care about this, but that's a gross generalization.
As a last point, you may need to do a reality check and see if what you're asking is reasonable. For instance, if you work for a video game company, and you also make video games as your business, no company in their right mind is going to agree to that. It would be obvious to anyone that there will be a seepage of intellectual property there, or at the least you would be operating without their best interests in mind. If there's no crossover, though (I was working on computer stuff but got hired as a doctor, and they were more concerned about biomedical research than web sites) then it shouldn't be a problem. You can still try and get away with the first one of those, but don't be surprised when it fails.
That is a good analogy, but I'll use it to make a slightly different point. I can read most Latin and figure out what it means, but I've never taken any course in it. I did, however, already know English (I know, not that useful) and learned both spanish and french, and then went into medicine (which has a lot of Latin naming schemes, if you didn't know). Knowing all these derivations basically made me pretty good in Latin.
Now I'm not suggesting that by learning Perl, PHP, Java, C, C++, VisualBasic, etc you will ever get to a point where you can understand assembly, but I think if you have a broad exposure to all of those derivations of assembly you can learn the same thing, which is how to code good code in a way that makes sense. I don't know assembly, but I have a pretty good feel for what it does by having broad experience at a higher level.
There's not a lot more to say about my career than what I said above, but I'm basically the medical director of the IT systems at an academic medical center. What that means is trickier, but I'm involved in all the clinical systems that we develop and roll out, primarily from an MD perspective but also heavily involved in the IT part. I am probably more IT heavy than the typical person filling my role because of my experience, but you could do this without a deep understanding of IT, especially if your place doesn't develop a lot of its own stuff. I kind of pre-screen the projects so we're not putting out something MD's will hate, and I also act as the MD liaison, since they prefer to talk to me than most of the tech people (no offense to tech people, it's a MD culture thing I think). Like any job in this area, it helps to know your subject matter, so I'd do some programming and read up on various IT subjects at a high level, but you can also expect a large amount of on-the-job learning in this stuff, since without a practical grounding the info is all just book knowledge. It's not dissimilar to residency in that respect.
I tend to be more towards the "real world experience" side of the equation, probably because that's how I got here. This path relies a little bit more on luck, I think, because you need to get that job or that experience somewhere. The "formal training" branch is probably more of a sure thing, but it also takes a couple of years and you have to have interest in doing research, because the medical informatics programs are focused on researching this stuff. I was never interested in research, so that path didn't really appeal to me. In fact, I specifically chose to not do one of those fellowships, figuring they wouldn't teach me much more than what I already knew. If I had to do it again, I just might go that route for the additional credentials and contacts you would get, but I would choose this job over that any day.
The job stuff is a little weird. The job I got wasn't posted anywhere, I got it through networking. I think probably most of the jobs you get in this are found that way, but I have no basis for that other than just talking to people who work in the field. AMIA.org probably has the best listing in one place, but that stuff is scattered all over the place. You might also look specifically at the websites of companies you're interested in working with, and I've even seen ads in regular journals. I didn't do it that way, though, so I'm probably not the best person to ask. However, ask around especially if you know anyone locally who's doing medical IT, they probably know of local jobs that they heard about through the grapevine and can hook you up.
You also might want to look at your interests and see if that's even what you want. Since you were into micro as an undergrad, you might be more interested in bioinformatics as a field. If that's the case, I'm definitely not the right person to ask. However, I can tell you that your skills would be useful there, and you probably want to learn Perl (for historical reasons everything in that field is programmed in Perl), and you might want to read through the bioinformatics book from O'Reilly, which seemed interesting. There's a ton of online info in that industry, and it's probably easier to find job info in that, but it's also heavy on the research (i.e. not for me).
Oops, I (for no good reason, I guess) assumed there was a way to send messages here. You can just ask me stuff in this thread, I'll see them and respond. Sorry about that.
As probably one of the few (or the only) posters that has actually done what you want to do, I'll post my comments. I'm a little bit earlier in my path; I completed residency and a fellowship, but then was able to score a job doing computer stuff at the local academic medical center (which is a gross understatement, but I'm not going to be more specific). Now I'm going on two years of working in computers in medicine, and I don't think I'll ever go back. I do miss seeing patients, so I might work that back in a day a week or so, but just haven't had the time.
There was a lot of advice from IT people about their field, and I guess looking at those, you should figure out specifically what you want to do. If you want to go back to school to get your CS degree and do some Java programming (or whatever) for your local IT company, then I think you'd be starting at square one again, and (unless you've done this already) you'd really need to go through and take at least the last two years of undergrad again to get the CS background required to do that. You'd then run into the job market as it is right now (bad) and a serious cut in pay from where you are now. I wouldn't recommend that path, and that's not at all what I did.
What I would recommend is pursuing IT as an MD, and use your unique skills to do that. Medicine, in general, is very minimally computerized compared to other information-intensive industries (business, industry, even law). However, that's not to say it can't be or shouldn't be, it just traditionally hasn't been done for a lot of cultural reasons, as well as being more difficult. The other problem is that there simply aren't enough people doing IT in medicine that know both fields, so the IT solutions that we typically see are very poorly done, and the MD-derived solutions are IT disasters. Someone with faculties in both areas is a significant asset.
I also saw some comments about the shortage of MD's in a particular area and how they could use more MD's and not more IT people. That's a separate problem, best taken up with your local federal gov't, since the lack of MD's has more to do with the removal of incentives for people to become MD's, which is directly related to the HMO industry permeating and changing the entire structure to favor business and not the physician and patient, but that's a different topic.
You can certainly save more lives than you ever would as an MD if you do IT as an MD, since even very subtle effects, when encoded in something that hundreds or thousands of other MD's use to enhance their practice has remarkable effects over time. If I can make a product that decreases length-of-stay at my facility by only one-third of a day, I can save patients tens of thousands of days in the hospital a year, which you and I know is a good thing for everyone.
Lastly, the knowledge you need to do something like this. I started out as an engineering student, and was always something of a computer geek, but then switched to biology and then went into medicine. However, when I was in medicine I worked on web design and programming since 1995 (which was very early) and so had a good background. I have no specific CS training, but didn't really need it because I got my training "in the field." You may need to brush up on that stuff, and there are a lot of options for pursuing either a CS masters as an MD, or doing a Medical Informatics fellowship to get the same training (although those tend to be more research-oriented). The job market for this stuff is both tight and not tight. If you are willing to move and have the necessary skills, you could probably easily find a job. However, the jobs are sparsely located and tend to be found in metropolitan areas, so if you live in the middle of nowhere and don't want to move, you're probably going to be out of luck.
Hope this helps, feel free to message me for more info.
I do this all the time. I refer to this process as "sending in a request to the central office" and I usually do it for things that I know I know, but it's not urgent that I remember it right away. Since I'm one of those unfortunate people who remember just about everything, but am unable to recall anything, this is a daily thing for me. It's most obvious when I recognize someone but can't remember where from, those usually take some central processing to figure out.
Typically I'll get a result back within anywhere from a few hours to a week or so, and it comes back in a rush, almost as if my brain's main office door burst open and some tired young clerk ran in waving papers over his head screaming "we found it, sir, we found it!"
I agree. Has anyone found any mention of who they actually sent it to? They make the vague statement "to Congress" but does that mean they mass-mailed everyone this letter? I'm not exactly replete with free time to draft a letter addressing this if my representatives haven't even seen this one.
BTW, it appears that SCO didn't quite do enough research on the proper honorifics to use for a letter (which I hope we would at least use).
There are actually good reasons to both of those rules, and the 7+-2 article did a better job of mentioning these than the 3-click article did.
The research that the 7+-2 rule is based on has to do with short-term memory, not how many people can read through. The point of this rule is that if people are "browsing" when they come to the site, meaning that they are not sure what they are looking for, they have to look through all the options and choose one. If there are more options than they can store in short-term memory, they have to do multiple browses to find what they want. As an example, if the site has 20 links, and the most appropriate link is link #10, the person needs to browse the whole list once, ask themself if any of those were appropriate (which they may or may not remember), then rebrowse from the top for that choice, or start over. Since they might not remember even seeing an appropriate one, they may have to do this multiple times to move more of the list into long-term memory so they can analyze it better, or just make a choice that doesn't take into account all the options. If the list had been 7+-2 in length, they could have made that determination in their short-term memory much more quickly.
If, on the other hand, every user coming to your site knows what they are looking for and where it is, they can look through 100 or more links to find it and as soon as they see it, they will click on it. They are not browsing, but searching for a specific thing.
The 3-click rule is almost related to the above, and it involves browsing vs. searching. If a browser makes a choice at the top they feel is appropriate (again not sure if they're in the right spot), if they don't find what they're looking for in 3-clicks they probably determined they chose incorrectly initially and will back up and start again. If they have definite progress towards their destination, they will go dozens of links deep to find it.
A searcher who knows what they are looking for is more confident about their initial choice and will keep digging to find it. The 3-click rule doesn't really apply to them.
The 3-click rule is much more of a guideline, and should really be that they need to see progress to their goal after 3 clicks or they'll turn back. It was also created because you must have created a mess if someone has to dig through 25 steps to find what they're looking for; I would call that failed site design even if people were willing to go that far. The article referenced was generally pretty poor as far as a study goes, they didn't give any information about what these people were doing, if they knew what they were looking for, etc. It doesn't really prove anything, and certainly doesn't "debunk" the guideline, which is pretty much based on common sense.
The clip mentions this, but nicotine is very hazardous to your health. I distinctly remember one of my crappy college jobs, which involved cleaning and organizing cabinets full of chemical compounds for a lab, filled with acids and toxins (it was a lab that studied pesticides). The container that was the most heavily protected and labelled as toxic? You guessed it, nicotine. It was in a sealed glass jar, containing another plastic container that held the actual container of the nicotine, all labelled as extremely poisonous.
Nicotine is extremely cardiotoxic, and can easily kill you if you took too much of it. The amount in an individual cigarette is pretty miniscule, but the longterm cardiac damage is what winds up killing smokers as often as lung cancer does. Too bad nicotine also happens to be one of the most potent neuro stimulants...
doctors are gouging the hell out of the patients, hospitals are bending them over and raping them hard in costs.
Wrong. If you have insurance, I could charge you $18,000 for an aspirin, and $150,000 for an office visit, but I'm going to get paid the same thing regardless, because the insurance companies have fixed the costs (something around $2 and $50, more or less).
However, if you don't have insurance, then you are screwed, because the hospital and doctors bill the same over-inflated costs to you (which they have to because the insurance people underpay them so much), and unlike an insurance company where they take what they can get from them, they expect you to pay it. This is why the high uninsured rates (and going higher, thanks Bush!) are bad, and why bankruptcy related to healthcare costs is such a big deal.
First of all, I guarantee that UCSF had a contract protecting PHI with that sub-contractor. The UC system had several thousand subcontractors with whom they had to rewrite agreements before the deadline in April. Any with whom they did not have a contract were terminated.
Secondly, the hospital is not liable because they were sent unencrypted email of PHI. That doesn't even make common sense, if that could happen then I could email my doctor my last x-ray result, then sue him for breaking my confidentiality. Unless her medical records show up somewhere, she can claim no damages, and therefore have no suit, although IANAL (look at my username). The gov't, however, is another matter entirely...
The author of this article misses a key point, and is hostile towards the open-source software because of it. The point that he misses is that the company who use this software agree to the GPL license through its use. The GPL is included with every bit of code that is covered by it, typically at the top in big bold letters. People, typically working for free in their own time, have written this code to provide something useful to others, also working for free, to build their code. That is how open source works. These people don't ask for money for their products, but they do, through the GPL, request that if you do happen to like what they have written that you pass it along to everyone you redistribute it to.
This is all spelled out in the GPL. Found with every bit of code. Agreed to by every one of these companies who use that code.
So when Linksys, and then Cisco, distribute the code, which was licensed under GPL, without redistributing it, they are breaking that agreement that they made. This sort of licensing agreement is exactly the same conceptually as licensing agreements that don't allow you to give copies of Windows XP to your buddy. In that case, you paid money and agreed through the license to not redistribute. In the GPL case, you paid nothing, and agreed to redistribute it.
Now many people think this is a fair deal. Some people, and apparently the author of this article, do not. That's okay. You simply do not have to use the GPL'ed code. Just like, if you really wanted a bit of software you could hand over to your friends legally, you don't choose Windows XP.
In particular, though, my "favorite" line was this: "But the Free Software Foundation doesn't want royalties--it wants you to burn down your house, or at the very least share it with cloners." This doesn't even make sense. If by cloners you mean to say "someone who would copy your code and use it themselves" then yes, that's what the GPL is all about. That philosophy is why these companies had the software to put in their routers to begin with. If anything, they were the original "cloners." Burning down your house is also ridiculous, like I stated above, they agreed to the license when they chose to use that software. If you build your "house" on software that you intend to use without honoring the licensing agreement, then you've broken the agreement, and deserve to have it "burnt down." If I built a business reselling copies of Windows XP and Microsoft came a-knocking, I don't think I'd have a legitimate complaint against Microsoft.
Please, do some research and learn something about licensing laws before publishing something like this, especially in a financial magazine. This sort of ignorance happens all the time on technology boards, but here?
Step 1: Cut up the card and throw it away.
Step 2: Call the credit card company and cancel the account with them, and be sure to inform them of what happened. File a complaint with them, and with luck they'll track down who slammed you and get back their money. Be sure to say something like "because this was done to me, I'm never going to get a credit card from you out of principle."
Step 3: Contact the Better Business Bureau and file a complaint. All of those complaints get followed up on, and even if nothing happens, you've created a paper trail that might, someday, help someone else take them out.
Step 4: Join the rest of us in sitting back and enjoying the spam until our gov't makes it all illegal, because there's about squat you can do to stop it.
This answers the question that came into my head last night when I saw a tv ad for the iPod which prominently displayed in the middle of it the phrase "Mac or PC." I haven't followed it that closely, so it didn't strike me too much at the time. The whole ad showed a bunch of shadow people dancing around to a couple of songs, interspersed with little phrases (like the above) on a solid-color background.
The full quote is: "In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up." --Martin Niemoeller
Slashdot Mirror
I actually tried this a number of years ago (probably about 7 or 8 years now) with some friends of mine in the same situation as you are in, playing Earthdawn. We went through a couple of phases with this. For the first one, we used an IRC client. My friend who was maintaining the IRC server wrote a little bot that would do dice rolls for us, so you could type in "d20 + d6" and it would do the roll for you. In ED, it was steps, but that's not relevant.
:)
This worked fairly well overall, but the pacing of the game was very slow, primarily due to all the typing necessary. I was the GM and was typing fast (I think I could do 60-70 wpm back then) and it still felt like the game crawled. That, and my wrists and hands were crippled by the end. It was fun, but it wasn't the same.
Then we tried using an internet video way of doing it. As you can imagine, the video 7-8 years ago wasn't great, although sadly it isn't that much worse than it is right now. We were all on academic networks so we have nice fat pipes. The chat one worked out pretty well, but then we added a couple of people from a mailing list who didn't have access, so we had to drop it and go back to typing. A few years later, I tried the old WebRPG, and it didn't really help the problem any, you still had to type it all in.
Based on that experience, I would say that there are a couple of things you would need in any application. First of all, you need to use some sort of voice chat, which is actually fairly easy to use these days (I would expect, although I haven't done it myself). If you don't use voice chat, then perhaps a voice recognition thing for the GM to cut down on typing. If all else fails, try and type up as many descriptions ahead of time so you can cut & paste them into the IRC. You will still be overwhelmed by ad hoc discussions, but this should help a bit.
The other thing you need is some sort of common workspace to do things in, primarily for rolling dice and a whiteboard for maps or stuff. We didn't have the whiteboard and did okay, but we were either outdoors or in very small dungeons, so it wasn't that necessary. I also drew up some maps and put them on my website to help the players out if they were really desperate. The rolling dice stuff could be handled by what I imagine are a lot of secure little apps to do this with. If you have IRC, write a bot.
IRC is also handy for secret messages where voice doesn't work, so I would recommend to use IRC at least for that. It also can work as a back-up system for people who have problems with the video, which we definitely had 7-8 years ago, and quite frequently at that. It's still worthwhile so you don't ruin a whole gaming session because someone can't get their microphone to work or something. You should do a dry run at least once ahead of your first planned session, and this will need almost as much time as a true session. It may not seem worthwhile, but you'd be surprised.
Last but not least, don't try and GM drunk. I tried that a couple of times, and it was fun for all involved, but a bit ridiculous...
Most people in the comments are focusing on actual bugs and crashes in a system causing deaths. While that could certainly happen, those types of errors are more visible and actually a much "better" error to have than some other types. If the system crashes, it may have some immediate effects depending on its purpose, but if it's something that causes its action through an actual user, they are generally harmless, though very annoying. An example of the difference is that if the software designed to run a ventilator has a bug that causes it to crash, since it is directly providing life to a person, when it crashes someone will probably die. On the other hand, systems designed to give information to a clinician, who can then act upon it are going to be very aware when that system is down, and so much less likely to make an error based on that outage.
The more insidious "errors" if you want to call them that are ones that are errors of design and process, and not execution. If a piece of software is designed with certain assumptions in mind, and something happens outside of the parameters of those assumptions, the software will appear to be working correctly when in fact there may be egregious errors. There are a lot of instances of this in everyday practice.
Lastly, what we run across is that clinicians are used to a world of paper, where everything obviously either there or not. You know that there's a problem, and there is transparency to the error, so you can factor that into your decision-making. In a clinical system, the transparency is not there, and a subtle flaw can mislead someone making a clinical decision into making a poor one.
Of course, the above are all gross generalities, as is any discussion of errors in complex systems, but I hope you get the idea.
This isn't a core problem with the law, it's a core problem with most people's understanding of the law and the way it's applied in our current legal setting. The law allows for something like $100k penalty or damages per copyright violation if you are found to have done that. However, there are a lot of fair use provisions that protect many uses of copyrighted material from falling under this, i.e. educational use, personal use, backups, etc. To prove you violated copyright in these cases, the court typically looks at four things, among them whether or not you profited from the violation and whether or not you knew you were doing it. I would honestly be very surprised to find that someone who downloaded a single copy of a story from an online site that claimed it was free to download would ever be found guilty of copyright violation and pay any penalties.
That being said, there was a recent disturbance in the force -- the DMCA. That makes it easier for copyright holders to cause problems for people, basically by putting many of the original fair use provisions on hold in a way that hasn't found its way through the courts yet. I'm hoping it will and it will be smashed down, but it hasn't happened yet. This doesn't change the basic premise of the law as I tried to describe it above.
It also put the copyright holders in a position they had never had before where they feel emboldened to go around rattling their swords. The RIAA can threaten people with very expensive lawsuits which, even if those people won (which they probably would given a fair shake), they would have to pay craploads of money defending themselves. Estimates of copyright case costs are somewhere around $200,000 per case. In most cases it's way cheaper just to pay the fine unless you can find some kind soul to protect you for the eventual win. The other downside is that the person sued for copyright violation doesn't come out ahead ever even if they win. At their most lucky, they could win court expenses, but that's not even a guarantee. So you won your case, but you're still out $200k. And that's how these big companies can pull it off. It has nothing to do with the law about copyright, which was never meant to be applied in these cases anyway.
Construction types who are considered to be "skilled" (I only put that in quotes because the definition of skilled is...see below) get paid a lot of cash, something on the order of $30-50/hour or more, depending on the job and their "skill" level. The ones I can think of are electricians and plumbers to whom this applies, and I'm talking about the US here (I have no idea what goes on in UK). My dollar figures are dated as well, this is what they were making a decade ago when I used to work in construction.
The "skilled" comment is based on the fact that these people need to actually get certifications from what is essentially a union in order to practice their trade. They move up through ranks like journeyman and such, which they can use in their marketing to get jobs and demand their fees. I think they also have to be licensed in the state, and plumbing and electrical installations need to be inspected by a plumber and electrician in addition to the general inspection all projects get. They can charge a premium for all this.
You should also pardon the pun in the parent's comment "expensive shit." You certainly wind up playing in a lot of shit, but you can charge good money for that if that's something you want to do. Gastroenterologists also enjoy that same benefit...
They mentioned that they are going to go check the nearby rock outcropping named "Big Bend" and do basically the same that they did on this rock, in order to see if these rocks were laid down there. I think they're checking exactly that, i.e. whether or not this whole area is laid down with rocks of the same origin (soaked in water), or if they were thrown here by a collision or something.
They said that they weren't sure if the rocks were sedimentary or not. From the sounds of it they aren't, but they did happen to be "soaked in water" or whatever the quote was, allowing the concretions to form in spaces in already existing rock. They haven't found any evidence of layering yet, as far as I know, which would mean sedimentary.
This article was discussed on All Things Considered on NPR last week sometime (probably Wednesday, because it was the night it was pouring in LA).
I lived in NYC for four years about six years ago, and I never even bothered to hit the button. All it did was expose me to tourist germs residing on the button. Everyone who lived there knew that they didn't work.
However, there is a big psychological component, and I've even found myself jamming on the button in frustration, mostly to have something to do (it's more socially acceptable than punching the guy standing next to you). Very similar to hitting the door close button on most elevators, or pulling onto the sensor pads at intersections during rush hour. Whether you like it or not, you are being ignored all the time...
"those dumb chairs" is a pretty ignorant comment by the poster. They won about every industrial design award when they came out, including the top industrial design award around (whatever it's called, I'm not in industrial design myself). They're not just fancy, they're considered to be ergonomic masterpieces...
Although I haven't had the opportunity to give this talk yet, I've been keeping my eyes open to what people are saying where I am. A lot of other people have made good comments, I'll only state the key points I would make.
I got nailed a few months ago in a discussion on this issue by someone asking the question of an internal group that was proposing to develop an application based on an open-source framework. The question was simple: "What happens if you decide to leave, how do we support it?" All the arguments that came into my head wouldn't work, those evaluating this were not technologically savvy and could care less about actually having the source (few people actually do care about that, a point made strongly elsewhere). In a pure George Castanza moment, afterwards I realized that although there isn't a good answer to that question, there is a very valid rebuttal question: "What happens when the private company who you purchased software from goes out of business/gets purchased/stops supporting that product?" At least to me, it was a new way to look at the same question, and since that's probably the most common question that will come up, since people are always looking for support, it's very important.
Other than that, two things: (1) check cio.com because they have a lot of articles and research on how to sell open source to your business people, and (2) don't be a zealot, they can smell it on you, but approach it from a rational business angle and have answers/rebuttals to the typical questions (see above) and it will impress the business types, who could honestly not care less about the religion of open source.
Was anyone able to actually find the developer's suite they're talking about (the one based on Eclipse)? They don't seem to actually have it posted...
and here's my advice.
First, as everyone says, get a lawyer to look at this. Mucking around with this stuff without that is asking for trouble.
Second, you need to figure out if you are willing to work at a job that won't allow you to make these changes to accomodate your outside job. If you're desperate for a job, you may say yes to that question. I was unwilling to when I did it. You'll see why this is important in a minute.
Now (and this is all what my lawyer told me, so this is second-hand) these contracts involve only you signing them; the company itself does not sign them. (In my situation the intellectual property agreement was separate from my actual job contract, that may not be the same for you, in which case this might not work.) In that situation, you are agreeing to be bound by their terms, since this is pretty much a one-way deal. What that means practically is that you can make whatever changes you want to to that document before you sign it, since you're the only one who needs to sign it. It's basically stating "this is what I agree to," which is different than what they proposed.
Then it goes to that employer, who needs to look at that and decide if they are willing to accept the changes you've made or not. If so, it's a done deal, and it's relatively easy for them because they don't have to sign it. If they are not willing, they can come back to you and tell you that. Then you have to invoke your decision from above and tell them if that's a deal breaker for you or not. I tend to think that the smarter the company, the more likely they are to not care about this, but that's a gross generalization.
As a last point, you may need to do a reality check and see if what you're asking is reasonable. For instance, if you work for a video game company, and you also make video games as your business, no company in their right mind is going to agree to that. It would be obvious to anyone that there will be a seepage of intellectual property there, or at the least you would be operating without their best interests in mind. If there's no crossover, though (I was working on computer stuff but got hired as a doctor, and they were more concerned about biomedical research than web sites) then it shouldn't be a problem. You can still try and get away with the first one of those, but don't be surprised when it fails.
That is a good analogy, but I'll use it to make a slightly different point. I can read most Latin and figure out what it means, but I've never taken any course in it. I did, however, already know English (I know, not that useful) and learned both spanish and french, and then went into medicine (which has a lot of Latin naming schemes, if you didn't know). Knowing all these derivations basically made me pretty good in Latin.
Now I'm not suggesting that by learning Perl, PHP, Java, C, C++, VisualBasic, etc you will ever get to a point where you can understand assembly, but I think if you have a broad exposure to all of those derivations of assembly you can learn the same thing, which is how to code good code in a way that makes sense. I don't know assembly, but I have a pretty good feel for what it does by having broad experience at a higher level.
There's not a lot more to say about my career than what I said above, but I'm basically the medical director of the IT systems at an academic medical center. What that means is trickier, but I'm involved in all the clinical systems that we develop and roll out, primarily from an MD perspective but also heavily involved in the IT part. I am probably more IT heavy than the typical person filling my role because of my experience, but you could do this without a deep understanding of IT, especially if your place doesn't develop a lot of its own stuff. I kind of pre-screen the projects so we're not putting out something MD's will hate, and I also act as the MD liaison, since they prefer to talk to me than most of the tech people (no offense to tech people, it's a MD culture thing I think). Like any job in this area, it helps to know your subject matter, so I'd do some programming and read up on various IT subjects at a high level, but you can also expect a large amount of on-the-job learning in this stuff, since without a practical grounding the info is all just book knowledge. It's not dissimilar to residency in that respect.
I tend to be more towards the "real world experience" side of the equation, probably because that's how I got here. This path relies a little bit more on luck, I think, because you need to get that job or that experience somewhere. The "formal training" branch is probably more of a sure thing, but it also takes a couple of years and you have to have interest in doing research, because the medical informatics programs are focused on researching this stuff. I was never interested in research, so that path didn't really appeal to me. In fact, I specifically chose to not do one of those fellowships, figuring they wouldn't teach me much more than what I already knew. If I had to do it again, I just might go that route for the additional credentials and contacts you would get, but I would choose this job over that any day.
The job stuff is a little weird. The job I got wasn't posted anywhere, I got it through networking. I think probably most of the jobs you get in this are found that way, but I have no basis for that other than just talking to people who work in the field. AMIA.org probably has the best listing in one place, but that stuff is scattered all over the place. You might also look specifically at the websites of companies you're interested in working with, and I've even seen ads in regular journals. I didn't do it that way, though, so I'm probably not the best person to ask. However, ask around especially if you know anyone locally who's doing medical IT, they probably know of local jobs that they heard about through the grapevine and can hook you up.
You also might want to look at your interests and see if that's even what you want. Since you were into micro as an undergrad, you might be more interested in bioinformatics as a field. If that's the case, I'm definitely not the right person to ask. However, I can tell you that your skills would be useful there, and you probably want to learn Perl (for historical reasons everything in that field is programmed in Perl), and you might want to read through the bioinformatics book from O'Reilly, which seemed interesting. There's a ton of online info in that industry, and it's probably easier to find job info in that, but it's also heavy on the research (i.e. not for me).
Oops, I (for no good reason, I guess) assumed there was a way to send messages here. You can just ask me stuff in this thread, I'll see them and respond. Sorry about that.
As probably one of the few (or the only) posters that has actually done what you want to do, I'll post my comments. I'm a little bit earlier in my path; I completed residency and a fellowship, but then was able to score a job doing computer stuff at the local academic medical center (which is a gross understatement, but I'm not going to be more specific). Now I'm going on two years of working in computers in medicine, and I don't think I'll ever go back. I do miss seeing patients, so I might work that back in a day a week or so, but just haven't had the time.
There was a lot of advice from IT people about their field, and I guess looking at those, you should figure out specifically what you want to do. If you want to go back to school to get your CS degree and do some Java programming (or whatever) for your local IT company, then I think you'd be starting at square one again, and (unless you've done this already) you'd really need to go through and take at least the last two years of undergrad again to get the CS background required to do that. You'd then run into the job market as it is right now (bad) and a serious cut in pay from where you are now. I wouldn't recommend that path, and that's not at all what I did.
What I would recommend is pursuing IT as an MD, and use your unique skills to do that. Medicine, in general, is very minimally computerized compared to other information-intensive industries (business, industry, even law). However, that's not to say it can't be or shouldn't be, it just traditionally hasn't been done for a lot of cultural reasons, as well as being more difficult. The other problem is that there simply aren't enough people doing IT in medicine that know both fields, so the IT solutions that we typically see are very poorly done, and the MD-derived solutions are IT disasters. Someone with faculties in both areas is a significant asset.
I also saw some comments about the shortage of MD's in a particular area and how they could use more MD's and not more IT people. That's a separate problem, best taken up with your local federal gov't, since the lack of MD's has more to do with the removal of incentives for people to become MD's, which is directly related to the HMO industry permeating and changing the entire structure to favor business and not the physician and patient, but that's a different topic.
You can certainly save more lives than you ever would as an MD if you do IT as an MD, since even very subtle effects, when encoded in something that hundreds or thousands of other MD's use to enhance their practice has remarkable effects over time. If I can make a product that decreases length-of-stay at my facility by only one-third of a day, I can save patients tens of thousands of days in the hospital a year, which you and I know is a good thing for everyone.
Lastly, the knowledge you need to do something like this. I started out as an engineering student, and was always something of a computer geek, but then switched to biology and then went into medicine. However, when I was in medicine I worked on web design and programming since 1995 (which was very early) and so had a good background. I have no specific CS training, but didn't really need it because I got my training "in the field." You may need to brush up on that stuff, and there are a lot of options for pursuing either a CS masters as an MD, or doing a Medical Informatics fellowship to get the same training (although those tend to be more research-oriented). The job market for this stuff is both tight and not tight. If you are willing to move and have the necessary skills, you could probably easily find a job. However, the jobs are sparsely located and tend to be found in metropolitan areas, so if you live in the middle of nowhere and don't want to move, you're probably going to be out of luck.
Hope this helps, feel free to message me for more info.
I do this all the time. I refer to this process as "sending in a request to the central office" and I usually do it for things that I know I know, but it's not urgent that I remember it right away. Since I'm one of those unfortunate people who remember just about everything, but am unable to recall anything, this is a daily thing for me. It's most obvious when I recognize someone but can't remember where from, those usually take some central processing to figure out.
Typically I'll get a result back within anywhere from a few hours to a week or so, and it comes back in a rush, almost as if my brain's main office door burst open and some tired young clerk ran in waving papers over his head screaming "we found it, sir, we found it!"
BTW, it appears that SCO didn't quite do enough research on the proper honorifics to use for a letter (which I hope we would at least use).
There are actually good reasons to both of those rules, and the 7+-2 article did a better job of mentioning these than the 3-click article did.
The research that the 7+-2 rule is based on has to do with short-term memory, not how many people can read through. The point of this rule is that if people are "browsing" when they come to the site, meaning that they are not sure what they are looking for, they have to look through all the options and choose one. If there are more options than they can store in short-term memory, they have to do multiple browses to find what they want. As an example, if the site has 20 links, and the most appropriate link is link #10, the person needs to browse the whole list once, ask themself if any of those were appropriate (which they may or may not remember), then rebrowse from the top for that choice, or start over. Since they might not remember even seeing an appropriate one, they may have to do this multiple times to move more of the list into long-term memory so they can analyze it better, or just make a choice that doesn't take into account all the options. If the list had been 7+-2 in length, they could have made that determination in their short-term memory much more quickly.
If, on the other hand, every user coming to your site knows what they are looking for and where it is, they can look through 100 or more links to find it and as soon as they see it, they will click on it. They are not browsing, but searching for a specific thing.
The 3-click rule is almost related to the above, and it involves browsing vs. searching. If a browser makes a choice at the top they feel is appropriate (again not sure if they're in the right spot), if they don't find what they're looking for in 3-clicks they probably determined they chose incorrectly initially and will back up and start again. If they have definite progress towards their destination, they will go dozens of links deep to find it.
A searcher who knows what they are looking for is more confident about their initial choice and will keep digging to find it. The 3-click rule doesn't really apply to them.
The 3-click rule is much more of a guideline, and should really be that they need to see progress to their goal after 3 clicks or they'll turn back. It was also created because you must have created a mess if someone has to dig through 25 steps to find what they're looking for; I would call that failed site design even if people were willing to go that far. The article referenced was generally pretty poor as far as a study goes, they didn't give any information about what these people were doing, if they knew what they were looking for, etc. It doesn't really prove anything, and certainly doesn't "debunk" the guideline, which is pretty much based on common sense.
The clip mentions this, but nicotine is very hazardous to your health. I distinctly remember one of my crappy college jobs, which involved cleaning and organizing cabinets full of chemical compounds for a lab, filled with acids and toxins (it was a lab that studied pesticides). The container that was the most heavily protected and labelled as toxic? You guessed it, nicotine. It was in a sealed glass jar, containing another plastic container that held the actual container of the nicotine, all labelled as extremely poisonous.
Nicotine is extremely cardiotoxic, and can easily kill you if you took too much of it. The amount in an individual cigarette is pretty miniscule, but the longterm cardiac damage is what winds up killing smokers as often as lung cancer does. Too bad nicotine also happens to be one of the most potent neuro stimulants...
doctors are gouging the hell out of the patients, hospitals are bending them over and raping them hard in costs.
Wrong. If you have insurance, I could charge you $18,000 for an aspirin, and $150,000 for an office visit, but I'm going to get paid the same thing regardless, because the insurance companies have fixed the costs (something around $2 and $50, more or less).
However, if you don't have insurance, then you are screwed, because the hospital and doctors bill the same over-inflated costs to you (which they have to because the insurance people underpay them so much), and unlike an insurance company where they take what they can get from them, they expect you to pay it. This is why the high uninsured rates (and going higher, thanks Bush!) are bad, and why bankruptcy related to healthcare costs is such a big deal.
Two comments:
First of all, I guarantee that UCSF had a contract protecting PHI with that sub-contractor. The UC system had several thousand subcontractors with whom they had to rewrite agreements before the deadline in April. Any with whom they did not have a contract were terminated.
Secondly, the hospital is not liable because they were sent unencrypted email of PHI. That doesn't even make common sense, if that could happen then I could email my doctor my last x-ray result, then sue him for breaking my confidentiality. Unless her medical records show up somewhere, she can claim no damages, and therefore have no suit, although IANAL (look at my username). The gov't, however, is another matter entirely...
I submitted a very similar reply:
The author of this article misses a key point, and is hostile towards the open-source software because of it. The point that he misses is that the company who use this software agree to the GPL license through its use. The GPL is included with every bit of code that is covered by it, typically at the top in big bold letters. People, typically working for free in their own time, have written this code to provide something useful to others, also working for free, to build their code. That is how open source works. These people don't ask for money for their products, but they do, through the GPL, request that if you do happen to like what they have written that you pass it along to everyone you redistribute it to.
This is all spelled out in the GPL. Found with every bit of code. Agreed to by every one of these companies who use that code.
So when Linksys, and then Cisco, distribute the code, which was licensed under GPL, without redistributing it, they are breaking that agreement that they made. This sort of licensing agreement is exactly the same conceptually as licensing agreements that don't allow you to give copies of Windows XP to your buddy. In that case, you paid money and agreed through the license to not redistribute. In the GPL case, you paid nothing, and agreed to redistribute it.
Now many people think this is a fair deal. Some people, and apparently the author of this article, do not. That's okay. You simply do not have to use the GPL'ed code. Just like, if you really wanted a bit of software you could hand over to your friends legally, you don't choose Windows XP.
In particular, though, my "favorite" line was this: "But the Free Software Foundation doesn't want royalties--it wants you to burn down your house, or at the very least share it with cloners." This doesn't even make sense. If by cloners you mean to say "someone who would copy your code and use it themselves" then yes, that's what the GPL is all about. That philosophy is why these companies had the software to put in their routers to begin with. If anything, they were the original "cloners." Burning down your house is also ridiculous, like I stated above, they agreed to the license when they chose to use that software. If you build your "house" on software that you intend to use without honoring the licensing agreement, then you've broken the agreement, and deserve to have it "burnt down." If I built a business reselling copies of Windows XP and Microsoft came a-knocking, I don't think I'd have a legitimate complaint against Microsoft.
Please, do some research and learn something about licensing laws before publishing something like this, especially in a financial magazine. This sort of ignorance happens all the time on technology boards, but here?
Step 1: Cut up the card and throw it away.
Step 2: Call the credit card company and cancel the account with them, and be sure to inform them of what happened. File a complaint with them, and with luck they'll track down who slammed you and get back their money. Be sure to say something like "because this was done to me, I'm never going to get a credit card from you out of principle."
Step 3: Contact the Better Business Bureau and file a complaint. All of those complaints get followed up on, and even if nothing happens, you've created a paper trail that might, someday, help someone else take them out.
Step 4: Join the rest of us in sitting back and enjoying the spam until our gov't makes it all illegal, because there's about squat you can do to stop it.
This answers the question that came into my head last night when I saw a tv ad for the iPod which prominently displayed in the middle of it the phrase "Mac or PC." I haven't followed it that closely, so it didn't strike me too much at the time. The whole ad showed a bunch of shadow people dancing around to a couple of songs, interspersed with little phrases (like the above) on a solid-color background.
The full quote is:
"In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."
--Martin Niemoeller
Feel free to mod offtopic...