The challenge of digitizing the 1040 and related forms is that, as soon as (perhaps even before, if you bother to do thorough research) you've got it digitized, the laws change. Perpetually moving target, changing at least quarterly - sometimes more often, with most changes lacking complete definition, potentially nuanced by case law.
Regan wasn't elected until the '80s, and I'd find it hard to give him credit for the perpetual spiral of poverty, that's been a hallmark of American Democracy since forever. The land of Equal Opportunity - well, except for those kids with rich parents, they get more equal opportunities than the rest.
I've "bought in" to 3 kickstarter like projects... One - an RC paper airplane, came off very much like a long lead time order fulfillment. Another, attempting to compete with Amazon Firestick and Chromecast, perhaps predictably, faltered when they tried to swim with the competition in delivery of "protected content" and ultimately refunded the "investment;" personally, I didn't want delivery of protected content and they weren't going there when I bought in, but I understand why they later decided it was "essential to the product," and from that point, their failure was all too predictable. The third: Jolla Tablet, remains to be seen.
I've worked in a half dozen startup environment companies where a 33% success rate would be huge, and investors rarely get anything back from failures in "the real world." If you're putting money into kickstarter and similar projects, you have to know that money is at risk, subject to anything from delays to total loss. I view it more as "philanthropic investment" than product purchase. You're tossing these guys a few bucks because you believe in them, and maybe if they succeed you get the first round of cool widgets when they come out. So far, I've always eventually gotten product or a refund - that's a really amazing track record in the world of inexperienced business people.
If you want to purchase products with hard delivery dates and money back guarantees, stick to Amazon. Startup ventures are something else entirely.
Oh, giving more room in the law for "judgement" is a formula for graft and corruption - it's sound science from the technical end, and a fiasco on the political reality end.
I think something that could address both sides would be more openness and transparency in the system. The veil of "trade secrets" hides much more than it should, if an entity wants to develop something as intimate and serious as a drug to be used by the general population, seems to me that the general population should have rights to the highest levels of transparency during development, testing and post-market surveillance.
Umm.... the 60 year old is the executive in the company. The choice is between stuffing the "development" pipeline with incremental profit builders, remixes of known technology, essentially hollywood sequels, or: do actual research and development of truly new (i.e. risky) things.
You remind me of a guy I bought a truckload of firewood from in backwoods Alabama - his pappy had been hospitalized for 6 months before dying, the hospital managed to run up enough bills to foreclose on the family land, talking about a couple of hundred acres that had been passed down for 5 or 6 generations... it is definitely all about the profits, what astounds me is that people take the bait so often.
Another story, in Houston, guy in his 40s is diagnosed with terminal cancer, at 1 year to live he's accepted his fate, comes in to work 3 days a week and spends the other 4 tying fishing flies and using them. At 6 months to live, some leech from MDAnderson talks him into "trying something bold that just might work." Accompanied by resounding applause from friends and family, he goes for it, absolutely destroys the quality of his remaining life, now instead of fishing with him, people visit him in the hospital where he's suffering "the treatment." He dies, right on schedule, but with almost $300,000 of additional debt from "the treatment."
Experimental medicine the "gift" that keeps on giving. (Translate gift from German for the true meaning...)
Greens functions are for deriving solutions to previously unsolved diff-eqs. 25 years of medical and scientific R&D work (commercial sector) have presented me a single need to solve a differential equation with anything other than successive approximation.
Just knowing that Greens functions exist would prompt me to figure them out, if the need ever arose. I've had a few esoteric mathematical challenges over the years that were worth sitting down and deriving a complex solution for. For what it's worth, that class was a bum steer from my advisor, the other two techniques taught in it (can't remember the names anymore, related to closed loop integration around singularities on Gaussian surfaces, IIRC) were even more useless than Greens, absolutely never came up in my practice - even though I had them mastered in 1988.
Placebo-controlled double-blinded trials doesn't even start to tell the story. What's the population size in the study? Are we really satisfied with 95/5 confidence? If a drug is for a specific population with a short term, specific need and it is demonstrated effective in smallish but appropriate sample trials (PCDBetc.) then, sure, let it out, maybe even with smaller populations or fewer phases than currently employed. If you're coming out with the next vaccine proposed to be administered to every 6 month old child, I wouldn't mind putting that through a 20 year testing program before rolling it out to more than 20% of the population. As it is, we roll this crap out on everybody, all at once, and it's well neigh impossible to do proper epidemiology on the effects.
We do have compassionate use that covers some of the extreme cases, but a more progressive sliding scale than: "full testing for everything" and "compassionate use for application on people who are essentially dead already" would be a good thing, IMO.
Partly because, I see a sliding scale like this calling for _more_ stringent testing on drugs that are likely to be used by children, expectant mothers, and large populations of otherwise healthy people. If the drug is applicable to a specific disease state and expected to run a limited course, that might get less stringent testing than the current regime, but drugs like antihistamines that millions of people are popping chronically for months or years at a stretch - those really need _more_ scrutiny than they are currently getting. Ditto for vaccines that are proposed to be administered to 99%+ of the population.
Thanks for the fact fixing... I don't research and verify for/. comment posting, that was from memory, lived in Texas 2005-2006 and became aware of the situation while I was living there, so maybe it hit market in 2007, but the firestorm was definitely brewing in 2006, maybe earlier.
And, whether pharma succeeded or failed, they had something in the works with Perry, and others, to push legal requirements for their vaccines. Vaccines aren't "legally required" anywhere, but the law does strongly encourage participation, requiring time consuming hoop jumping paperwork to enroll children in school if you want to opt out.
As for "precancerous lesions" that was the reality around about 2000 (could have been 1999, does it matter?) The first line treatment was a biopsy that cut a ring around the cervix, risking cervical incompetence. At the time, you could get an HPV test and if strains 15, 18 or 21 were found, your odds of getting cancer were significantly higher (and, I'm probably wrong about the strain numbers, too, so don't take what you read in off-the-cuff forums on the internet as gospel research, kiddies), but in the end analysis, it's all statistics, and if the cells from the smear look cancerous, which is a very subjective test - subject to high rates of false positives, and almost as high rates of false negatives, then you'd better just get the treatment instead of risking cancer. Luckily, there are treatment options, and selecting a good surgeon who is good with his particular method (we went with hot-wire LEEP and a guy who had been practicing for 25 years), then cervical incompetence risk is significantly diminished.
If you mod me down, I will become stronger than you can possibly imagine.
Any blanket system that pretends to know what's safe and effective for all things of a class invariably fails with false negatives and false positives.
Speed limit 65mph, day and night, rain and shine, all vehicle types, all weather... simple to remember, at least.
If a drug has enough market potential, a company will run multiple trials at all phases and quietly shut down those that are looking bad at the outset. This skews the statistics, toward profit over effectiveness, and sometimes even safety.
Other drugs with less market potential might still be proven safe and effective enough with less testing, or perhaps more post-market surveillance.
Marketing has bigger, and much faster, ROI than R&D.
I worked for a grant funded company once, the federal grants paid us for 6 months to develop the product, then they paid us for another 18 months to develop and prosecute the FDA submission for permission to market the product. We got our permission to market, but the federal grants didn't pay for marketing, so the product ultimately fizzled.
I've seen plenty of new vaccines developed, the one that comes to mind at the moment is HPV - in 2000, HPV was just a nuisance that women got regular pap smears for, then cervical resurfacing when they came up positive with "precancerous lesions." We asked "What about HPV testing" when presented with a "just cut a loop around the cervix, it might mean you won't be able to carry a child to term, but it will prevent cancer" diagnosis in 2000, and were told "oh, that's all theoretical stuff, you can get tested, but at the end of the day, we need to take out the precancerous stuff to be sure..."
Fast forward to 2005 and there's a new "HPV vaccine" legally required to be administered to all Texas schoolgirls virtually on the day it was cleared for use by the FDA. Tell me there's no profit in a vaccine that state Governors push laws through to require for school attendance.
Because drugs have been patented and sold for obscene piles of money, the regulatory environment has "stepped up their game," in requiring newer drugs to prove their safety and efficacy with obscenely expensive testing protocols before coming to market. Not only does this "protect the public," it also happens to protect the income stream of those who are selling the current crop of drugs, so it's a very strongly enforced agenda.
Mr. sponge diver is frustrated because he knows about a chemical which he suspects (probably correctly) is "the next great antibiotic" but he is powerless to bring it to the mass market. In a case of accidental strategy, these super-antibiotics are being held back by the status quo which is effectively treating the vast majority of infections - if the day should ever come where MRSA+10 gets loose and starts killing Senators' children, these super-antibiotics will be primed for development and marketing. If we develop them to market earlier, we'll just end up with MRSA+11 that we really don't have anything we can do about.
I'm more frustrated by the medical device side of the regulatory and economic reality, where "one simple trick" can save hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives a year, but that's not enough to excite investors because the business model isn't as attractive as the hundreds of other widgets they look at every day. No normal M.D. and his friends have enough resources to develop even a simple product to market, unless that product can do more than save lives - it also has to demonstrate a clear ability to make a profit while doing so. Certain fields like cardiology and oncology are so well funded that any crazy idea can get developed, while boring fields like pulmonary and endocrinology get left in the dust.
So, I had an esoteric maths class once where the prof handed out all past final exams as study tools. The exam was pre-announced to be "answer 5 questions of your choosing from 9 given." The class had covered 3 concepts, 2 which I had mastered, plus Green's functions. I doubled down and bet that the prof wouldn't put 5 Green's functions questions on the test, and he didn't - exactly. 4 questions were on the 2 skills I had mastered, so I answered them quickly and easily. 4 more were explicit: solve using Greens' functions - which I skipped. The final question was a differential equation which simply asked: "What is the solution to: blah + blah / x + blah / x^2 = 0 ?" which I recognized from a past exam which solved "blah * x^2 + blah * x + blah = 0" I solved it "by inspection" and demonstrated the correctness of the solution. Still got a B in the class instead of an A, even after scoring 100% on a final exam that had a median class score below 50% - discussed it with the prof later, and he said "you still don't know how to use Green's functions, do you?" "Obviously not, didn't seem they would be required for the final." B for cleverness, for the A you'd need to learn the archaic skill that has been ground to fine talc and recorded in tables of solved differential equations that were mostly developed and published by 1900. 25 years later, still haven't had a use for Green's functions.
Seems to me that places like Google are crawling with kids who have learned all the esoteric CS algorithms and theories and already applied the hell out of them. Do they really need more people with the same skillset? Homogeneity isn't competitive in the long run.
You have billions of dollars, and a business that makes billions more per year.
Do you choose to continue that business and rake in personal rewards like a G5 and an island to fly it to, or do you invest the billions on a risky venture that might pay off some time in the next 10 to 15 years?
Answer from the perspective of a 60 year old with multiple cancers.
I think it means that publication is free and easy these days, and that a professor's ramblings seem important enough to himself that he thinks he might share this wisdom with the world. Now, the fool that picked up this piece of drivel and paraded it around as worthwhile, he's not doing his job as editor/critic. Luckily, I rarely RTFA, so I'm mostly immune to this all too common form of slap-dashery.
Still, I stand by the statement: I'd rather read a piece written by somebody who has something they want to say themselves, as opposed to somebody who is being paid to make somebody else's point for them.
Google has been reading your mail, deeply, for over a decade. This is just them letting you know how good they are at it. Personally, I think they should push services like this to make people aware of just how much their "private" communications are scrutinized and processed, not only by Google, but by anyone with access to the data stream.
You really don't want to take the time to hand-craft a polite and thoughtful response, so they give you the option to click on a canned one and use that instead.
Or, we could, you know, pay people to do other things?
If food, clothing, shelter, health care and education are covered - why not pay people to landscape, create art, design, waste resources on sentimental projects like restoring old cars and houses, make billion dollar movies, etc.? We're already doing a lot of this, if the people sitting on their cash hoards were somehow incentivized to support more of it, we'd have less poverty and more cool stuff.
Heartbleed, for one, but once it's "outed" something like Heartbleed is addressed quickly.
If you're running a bit of the kernel that applies to 1% of the users of an obscure 1% piece of hardware and that bug gets outed - response time to fix that bug will probably be less impressive.
If an exploit exists in the code and nobody knows about it (or, more importantly, uses it), does it really matter?
Slashdot Mirror
The challenge of digitizing the 1040 and related forms is that, as soon as (perhaps even before, if you bother to do thorough research) you've got it digitized, the laws change. Perpetually moving target, changing at least quarterly - sometimes more often, with most changes lacking complete definition, potentially nuanced by case law.
Regan wasn't elected until the '80s, and I'd find it hard to give him credit for the perpetual spiral of poverty, that's been a hallmark of American Democracy since forever. The land of Equal Opportunity - well, except for those kids with rich parents, they get more equal opportunities than the rest.
I haven't used a benchmark to do practical work, ever.
I've "bought in" to 3 kickstarter like projects... One - an RC paper airplane, came off very much like a long lead time order fulfillment. Another, attempting to compete with Amazon Firestick and Chromecast, perhaps predictably, faltered when they tried to swim with the competition in delivery of "protected content" and ultimately refunded the "investment;" personally, I didn't want delivery of protected content and they weren't going there when I bought in, but I understand why they later decided it was "essential to the product," and from that point, their failure was all too predictable. The third: Jolla Tablet, remains to be seen.
I've worked in a half dozen startup environment companies where a 33% success rate would be huge, and investors rarely get anything back from failures in "the real world." If you're putting money into kickstarter and similar projects, you have to know that money is at risk, subject to anything from delays to total loss. I view it more as "philanthropic investment" than product purchase. You're tossing these guys a few bucks because you believe in them, and maybe if they succeed you get the first round of cool widgets when they come out. So far, I've always eventually gotten product or a refund - that's a really amazing track record in the world of inexperienced business people.
If you want to purchase products with hard delivery dates and money back guarantees, stick to Amazon. Startup ventures are something else entirely.
Oh, giving more room in the law for "judgement" is a formula for graft and corruption - it's sound science from the technical end, and a fiasco on the political reality end.
I think something that could address both sides would be more openness and transparency in the system. The veil of "trade secrets" hides much more than it should, if an entity wants to develop something as intimate and serious as a drug to be used by the general population, seems to me that the general population should have rights to the highest levels of transparency during development, testing and post-market surveillance.
Umm.... the 60 year old is the executive in the company. The choice is between stuffing the "development" pipeline with incremental profit builders, remixes of known technology, essentially hollywood sequels, or: do actual research and development of truly new (i.e. risky) things.
You remind me of a guy I bought a truckload of firewood from in backwoods Alabama - his pappy had been hospitalized for 6 months before dying, the hospital managed to run up enough bills to foreclose on the family land, talking about a couple of hundred acres that had been passed down for 5 or 6 generations... it is definitely all about the profits, what astounds me is that people take the bait so often.
Another story, in Houston, guy in his 40s is diagnosed with terminal cancer, at 1 year to live he's accepted his fate, comes in to work 3 days a week and spends the other 4 tying fishing flies and using them. At 6 months to live, some leech from MDAnderson talks him into "trying something bold that just might work." Accompanied by resounding applause from friends and family, he goes for it, absolutely destroys the quality of his remaining life, now instead of fishing with him, people visit him in the hospital where he's suffering "the treatment." He dies, right on schedule, but with almost $300,000 of additional debt from "the treatment."
Experimental medicine the "gift" that keeps on giving. (Translate gift from German for the true meaning...)
Greens functions are for deriving solutions to previously unsolved diff-eqs. 25 years of medical and scientific R&D work (commercial sector) have presented me a single need to solve a differential equation with anything other than successive approximation.
Just knowing that Greens functions exist would prompt me to figure them out, if the need ever arose. I've had a few esoteric mathematical challenges over the years that were worth sitting down and deriving a complex solution for. For what it's worth, that class was a bum steer from my advisor, the other two techniques taught in it (can't remember the names anymore, related to closed loop integration around singularities on Gaussian surfaces, IIRC) were even more useless than Greens, absolutely never came up in my practice - even though I had them mastered in 1988.
Placebo-controlled double-blinded trials doesn't even start to tell the story. What's the population size in the study? Are we really satisfied with 95/5 confidence? If a drug is for a specific population with a short term, specific need and it is demonstrated effective in smallish but appropriate sample trials (PCDBetc.) then, sure, let it out, maybe even with smaller populations or fewer phases than currently employed. If you're coming out with the next vaccine proposed to be administered to every 6 month old child, I wouldn't mind putting that through a 20 year testing program before rolling it out to more than 20% of the population. As it is, we roll this crap out on everybody, all at once, and it's well neigh impossible to do proper epidemiology on the effects.
Depends on the drug, depends on the application.
We do have compassionate use that covers some of the extreme cases, but a more progressive sliding scale than: "full testing for everything" and "compassionate use for application on people who are essentially dead already" would be a good thing, IMO.
Partly because, I see a sliding scale like this calling for _more_ stringent testing on drugs that are likely to be used by children, expectant mothers, and large populations of otherwise healthy people. If the drug is applicable to a specific disease state and expected to run a limited course, that might get less stringent testing than the current regime, but drugs like antihistamines that millions of people are popping chronically for months or years at a stretch - those really need _more_ scrutiny than they are currently getting. Ditto for vaccines that are proposed to be administered to 99%+ of the population.
Thanks for the fact fixing... I don't research and verify for /. comment posting, that was from memory, lived in Texas 2005-2006 and became aware of the situation while I was living there, so maybe it hit market in 2007, but the firestorm was definitely brewing in 2006, maybe earlier.
And, whether pharma succeeded or failed, they had something in the works with Perry, and others, to push legal requirements for their vaccines. Vaccines aren't "legally required" anywhere, but the law does strongly encourage participation, requiring time consuming hoop jumping paperwork to enroll children in school if you want to opt out.
As for "precancerous lesions" that was the reality around about 2000 (could have been 1999, does it matter?) The first line treatment was a biopsy that cut a ring around the cervix, risking cervical incompetence. At the time, you could get an HPV test and if strains 15, 18 or 21 were found, your odds of getting cancer were significantly higher (and, I'm probably wrong about the strain numbers, too, so don't take what you read in off-the-cuff forums on the internet as gospel research, kiddies), but in the end analysis, it's all statistics, and if the cells from the smear look cancerous, which is a very subjective test - subject to high rates of false positives, and almost as high rates of false negatives, then you'd better just get the treatment instead of risking cancer. Luckily, there are treatment options, and selecting a good surgeon who is good with his particular method (we went with hot-wire LEEP and a guy who had been practicing for 25 years), then cervical incompetence risk is significantly diminished.
If you mod me down, I will become stronger than you can possibly imagine.
Any blanket system that pretends to know what's safe and effective for all things of a class invariably fails with false negatives and false positives.
Speed limit 65mph, day and night, rain and shine, all vehicle types, all weather... simple to remember, at least.
If a drug has enough market potential, a company will run multiple trials at all phases and quietly shut down those that are looking bad at the outset. This skews the statistics, toward profit over effectiveness, and sometimes even safety.
Other drugs with less market potential might still be proven safe and effective enough with less testing, or perhaps more post-market surveillance.
Human biomass is a small part of the ecosystem.
Our food animals outweigh us, by a significant multiple.
Marketing has bigger, and much faster, ROI than R&D.
I worked for a grant funded company once, the federal grants paid us for 6 months to develop the product, then they paid us for another 18 months to develop and prosecute the FDA submission for permission to market the product. We got our permission to market, but the federal grants didn't pay for marketing, so the product ultimately fizzled.
I've seen plenty of new vaccines developed, the one that comes to mind at the moment is HPV - in 2000, HPV was just a nuisance that women got regular pap smears for, then cervical resurfacing when they came up positive with "precancerous lesions." We asked "What about HPV testing" when presented with a "just cut a loop around the cervix, it might mean you won't be able to carry a child to term, but it will prevent cancer" diagnosis in 2000, and were told "oh, that's all theoretical stuff, you can get tested, but at the end of the day, we need to take out the precancerous stuff to be sure..."
Fast forward to 2005 and there's a new "HPV vaccine" legally required to be administered to all Texas schoolgirls virtually on the day it was cleared for use by the FDA. Tell me there's no profit in a vaccine that state Governors push laws through to require for school attendance.
Because drugs have been patented and sold for obscene piles of money, the regulatory environment has "stepped up their game," in requiring newer drugs to prove their safety and efficacy with obscenely expensive testing protocols before coming to market. Not only does this "protect the public," it also happens to protect the income stream of those who are selling the current crop of drugs, so it's a very strongly enforced agenda.
Mr. sponge diver is frustrated because he knows about a chemical which he suspects (probably correctly) is "the next great antibiotic" but he is powerless to bring it to the mass market. In a case of accidental strategy, these super-antibiotics are being held back by the status quo which is effectively treating the vast majority of infections - if the day should ever come where MRSA+10 gets loose and starts killing Senators' children, these super-antibiotics will be primed for development and marketing. If we develop them to market earlier, we'll just end up with MRSA+11 that we really don't have anything we can do about.
I'm more frustrated by the medical device side of the regulatory and economic reality, where "one simple trick" can save hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives a year, but that's not enough to excite investors because the business model isn't as attractive as the hundreds of other widgets they look at every day. No normal M.D. and his friends have enough resources to develop even a simple product to market, unless that product can do more than save lives - it also has to demonstrate a clear ability to make a profit while doing so. Certain fields like cardiology and oncology are so well funded that any crazy idea can get developed, while boring fields like pulmonary and endocrinology get left in the dust.
So, I had an esoteric maths class once where the prof handed out all past final exams as study tools. The exam was pre-announced to be "answer 5 questions of your choosing from 9 given." The class had covered 3 concepts, 2 which I had mastered, plus Green's functions. I doubled down and bet that the prof wouldn't put 5 Green's functions questions on the test, and he didn't - exactly. 4 questions were on the 2 skills I had mastered, so I answered them quickly and easily. 4 more were explicit: solve using Greens' functions - which I skipped. The final question was a differential equation which simply asked: "What is the solution to: blah + blah / x + blah / x^2 = 0 ?" which I recognized from a past exam which solved "blah * x^2 + blah * x + blah = 0" I solved it "by inspection" and demonstrated the correctness of the solution. Still got a B in the class instead of an A, even after scoring 100% on a final exam that had a median class score below 50% - discussed it with the prof later, and he said "you still don't know how to use Green's functions, do you?" "Obviously not, didn't seem they would be required for the final." B for cleverness, for the A you'd need to learn the archaic skill that has been ground to fine talc and recorded in tables of solved differential equations that were mostly developed and published by 1900. 25 years later, still haven't had a use for Green's functions.
Seems to me that places like Google are crawling with kids who have learned all the esoteric CS algorithms and theories and already applied the hell out of them. Do they really need more people with the same skillset? Homogeneity isn't competitive in the long run.
You have billions of dollars, and a business that makes billions more per year.
Do you choose to continue that business and rake in personal rewards like a G5 and an island to fly it to, or do you invest the billions on a risky venture that might pay off some time in the next 10 to 15 years?
Answer from the perspective of a 60 year old with multiple cancers.
I think it means that publication is free and easy these days, and that a professor's ramblings seem important enough to himself that he thinks he might share this wisdom with the world. Now, the fool that picked up this piece of drivel and paraded it around as worthwhile, he's not doing his job as editor/critic. Luckily, I rarely RTFA, so I'm mostly immune to this all too common form of slap-dashery.
Still, I stand by the statement: I'd rather read a piece written by somebody who has something they want to say themselves, as opposed to somebody who is being paid to make somebody else's point for them.
And you would prefer to read an article from a professor who is writing as a tool of his institution and/or grant committee?
Google has been reading your mail, deeply, for over a decade. This is just them letting you know how good they are at it. Personally, I think they should push services like this to make people aware of just how much their "private" communications are scrutinized and processed, not only by Google, but by anyone with access to the data stream.
Don't like it? Encrypt.
You really don't want to take the time to hand-craft a polite and thoughtful response, so they give you the option to click on a canned one and use that instead.
It's greeting cards, modernized.
Or, we could, you know, pay people to do other things?
If food, clothing, shelter, health care and education are covered - why not pay people to landscape, create art, design, waste resources on sentimental projects like restoring old cars and houses, make billion dollar movies, etc.? We're already doing a lot of this, if the people sitting on their cash hoards were somehow incentivized to support more of it, we'd have less poverty and more cool stuff.
Heartbleed, for one, but once it's "outed" something like Heartbleed is addressed quickly.
If you're running a bit of the kernel that applies to 1% of the users of an obscure 1% piece of hardware and that bug gets outed - response time to fix that bug will probably be less impressive.
If an exploit exists in the code and nobody knows about it (or, more importantly, uses it), does it really matter?
Most importantly, you have to trust those parts of the kernel code that you run and very few other people do.
Big bad exploits get caught. Sneaky ones can hang around for awhile.