To paraphrase what I think he is saying is that I, nor you, nor the government actually can give or take away any type of rights at all. These are things that exist but cannot simply be handed out like physical things since they are given by either god or the natural order of the universe.
I'm aware of this. It's called natural law, and I subscribe to it. It's the belief that we as human beings simply have certain rights, and governments can recognize them or not, but the government cannot take the right away, only repress it. The other end is that a man's rights are only what his government permits. Liberalism, in the classic, revolutionary sense, was a philosophy of natural law, and Jefferson rightfully said once:
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law" because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
In the context of my original points, I was referring not to the rights inherent with being a human being, those cannot be taken away. However, other rights can be. We generally call these "privileges" or whatever. Miranda rights, for example. It's a stretch to believe that the natural of the human soul is that we are born with the right to an attorney. This is an additional statutory right. They can be awarded and taken away. These are the types of rights I was referring to in the above post.
I realized a few years ago that your typical lawyer doesn't know jack about technology, and you're typical IT person doesn't know jack about the law, judging by the number of Slashdot posters who run their mouths about IP rights without understanding them, or asserting the right to do things that they clearly have no right to do (note: saying you should have a right that you don't have is fine, saying you do have a right that you don't have is ignorant; this is the practice I'm referring to).
So I decided that, since I'm an argumentative armchair law nerd, I may as well get paid for it.
But mostly, I want out of IT because it's generally unstable and I don't find the work to be satisfying. The contributions I wish to make to the world do not lie in software development, and so I'm getting out.
It seems to me that this is stating the obvious: the over-sexualized female avatars in games are there to attract male players, not women. If game makers want to draw in a female audience, they need to have characters that women want to play - and that means strong, complex, and capable... not falling out of her clothes.
I dunno. When my girlfriend signed up to play Warcraft she expressed supreme disappointment that none of the female models on the horde side were "hot" and she's anxiousl awaiting the expansion pack and Blood Elves. I think a more likely explanation for female disinterest in gaming is that women just aren't into gaming. It doesn't appeal strongly to the social instincts of the (and I'm generalizing) female psyche. When you do see lots of women gaming, they're often involved in MMORPGs and often heavily engage in the social aspect of it. Unrealistic two-dimensional female characters don't help attract women gamers, certainly, but most women I've seen sit down to make an avatar in a game pound out the sexiest thing they can come up with.
I have been threatened and harassed from people who do a "whois" on my web site address and then come find me. When you've got a family and children you become a little touchy about that kind of stuff. Not that finding me is really that difficult but I see no reason to make it any easier. So my domain registration info is garbage.
For about four bucks I got this little metal device with a script written on it that, when read even by a non-programmer, contains addressing information that, if decoded, can provide whomever locates my lost dog with the clue as to where to return it. The decoding process is well-known, everybody learns how to do it as a child.
I signed up because I liked their line about Catholic/Jesuit values, not being just another number, and how they take care of their students. However, I had problems my freshman year and was struggling and the University actually threw up roadblocks to make it more difficult for me to seek help. I wanted to change majors and they wouldn't let me. This meant I had no access to an advisor who knew anything about the degree I wanted, and my current advisor was frustrated by the process. He even called the liberal arts college and demanded to know why I couldn't transfer. They said my GPA was too low to change majors, he said that was bullshit and told me that a more likely explanation is that I'm not on a scholarship and the Engineering college costs a lot more than the college of liberal arts. After a second year of much better grades but still being unable to change majors or get an advising appointment, I left.
They fear the fundamentalists too much. The majority of Christians are fairly reasonable people who aren't going to boycott anything. This is one of those rare issues where companies are excessively defferential towards what they perceive to be a mainstream. Like the bank that stopped using a pig in its advertisement to avoid offending Muslims, I don't think American corporations need to fear fundamentalist Christians nearly as much as they do.
I did not say that Chinese "way ahead of us." (that was the GP). I just said that when comparing one should not underestimate Chines and overestimate NASA. We should be comparing the quality now and the missions from 10 or 15 years ago should not influence our judgment. Your sentence "I'm amazed the shuttles launch at all." pretty much confirms it.
It's not fair to compare the quality now because you're not comparing analogous space programs. The US and the USSR made for a fair comparison right up through the late 1970's. The US and China do not. Our goals are different and we are not in competition. I do not deny that right now China's manned space program is more successful. When China has probes approaching the heliopause, orbiting Saturn, driving across Mars, landing on asteroids, crashing into Jupiter, landing on Titan, and is gathering all of the science that the world scientific community is currently benefiting from due to American and European space exploration initiatives, I'll admit that it's "as successful" as NASA. Until then, no, it's not.
Oh I don't know, the Boy Scouts seem to be doing a pretty good job with the land they own. It may not be open to the public, but it is generally pretty well cared for.
The Boy Scouts and Ducks Unlimited are hardly representative samples of private enterprise in the United States.
With some help from Sabre Security, Sebastian Porst and Matti Nikki have identified some stolen GPL'd code in Sony's rootkit. Ironically the code in question seems to be VLC's demux/mp4/drms.c -- the de-DRMS code which circumvents Apple's DRM, written by 'DVD' Jon Lech Johansen and Sam Hocevar.
Stolen? I think you mean "shared." Ideas don't have owners. Information wants to be free. Only greedy capitalists think otherwise. You can't steal code, stop trying to confuse the consumer with scare tactics and red herrings like pretending copyright infringement is theft. It's not. We all know this. What Sony did should be totally legal and it only isn't because the copyright system is broken. Fight the man. Support Sony. What's next, P2P?
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a libertarian Republican. People like me are also sometimes called liberals, just not in the USA. Actually, I take that back. I would have been called a liberal up until about 1963. Anyway, take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Now, you can be extremely dogmatic and tell me that anything done by anyone that isn't in the name of private enterprise is doomed to fail.
I'm not sure I understand your statement. Is "in the name of private enterprise" synonymous with free enterprise? Because if so, I will be dogmatic and claim that without economic freedom you will never have true liberty, the human being naturally yearns for liberty, and he will eventually fight for it. If you mean "private enterprise" in the sense of The Very Big Corporation of America increasing its earnings projection by eighteen cents, well yeah that's no help when it comes to feeding people with no money or natural resources living under uncaring governments.
But I challenge you to show how private enterprise would have filled all of the vital functions that the aforementioned UN agencies have filled over the last 50 years.
I would claim that private enterprise could have, and could have done a far better job. Not that the UN did a bad job, but the private sector is almost always more efficient and more effective. Almost always. The real problem is that the private sector has no real motivation to invest a ton of money in such an endeavor, and when you hire the work out, you get bloated government contracts that are viewed as "free" money by the private sector, and there's no incentive to be efficient.
And no, this is not a question of 'If you had waited long enough, the market would have done it'.
No, I agree. Markets do not go and liberate people. Democracies do.
Any longer wait and more people would have died of smallpox; any longer wait for refugee camps to be built and people die of cholera. And of course, there's not really any profit to be made in these situations anyway. That's when the international community simply says 'Right, let's solve it'. Consensually.
As it must. I am 100% in favor of free enterprise and capitalism abut there's a problem with free markets: if you don't have any money, the market really isn't concerned with you. That's where governments step in. I don't trust private enterprise to take care of national parks and poverty. I don't trust the government to do it either, but we can vote the government out of power. With the tangled web of corporate cannibalistic ownership, most people have no idea which corporate amalgams they're supporting when they buy any given product.
You guys jump on this "censorship" crap but try saying this in the middle of a crowed mall "the war is wrong, Bush is an idiot and Americans are just too violent and apathetic to stop it." You'll get your own form of censorship known as a beating. I've formed crowds in Burger Kings in upper state New York simply for suggesting that "the xenophobic pschopaths need to watch some foreign media for a minute".
I've formed crowds in Burger Kings in upper state New York simply for suggesting that "the xenophobic pschopaths need to watch some foreign media for a minute".
I call bullshit. If you said, "Xenophobic Pschopath" the people of upstate New York would think you're talking about a Slovakian forward in the NHL. "He played wing for the Sabres in '78 right?"
I've lived in this country my whole life and have had political discussions in a variety of public places, including schools, malls, bowling alleys, bars, clubs, street corners, bus stops, cafes, restaurants, taxi cabs, parking lots, grocery aisles, hardware stores, farmer's markets, corn fields (I used to detassle and let me tell you, walking through corn for 12 hours a day, you start talking about ANYTHING), car pools, office cubicles, and God knows how many other places. I've had these conversations in Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Virginia, Florida, Washington DC, Nebraska, Colorado, Chicago, Indianpolis, St. Louis, Toronto, and God knows what other areas of the country. And not once have I ever been so much as threatened with physical violence because of my opinions. Never. Not once.
The closest I ever came was when I was working at McDonald's in college and one of our "pit crew" was a Hispanic immigrant. I ran into him on the bus once and started up a conversation. He was learning English, and I speak enough Spanish to hold a conversation, so I was helping him through a sports article in the local paper about football, which was doubly difficult for him since he not only didn't understand the English very well, but he didn't understand the subject matter very well. The conversation turned towards metric football (soccer) and I dissed Mexico's performance. Most of our Hispanic employees were from Honduras, but this particular guy was from Mexico City, and he said, joking, that he'd cortar my huevos.
Perhaps the manner in which you express your opinions incites people to violence.
America has endured for 200 years?
I said the nation's first Republic has. And I'm right.
That's why you murder your presidents and admend your constitution?
Presidents are murdered because people are not universally good or sane. The history of political violence against our leader is pretty low-key here compared to most places in the world. We're among the few nations that transition national leadership peacefully on a regular schedule.
We amend the Constitution because it's an imperfect document created by imperfect men who recognized their mortality and faliability and wrote into the document a clear process for its own modification.
How exactly does pointing out either of these phenomena back up your point? You'll have to connect the dots for me on that one.
The "america" of 1700's is not the america of today.
I didn't claim that it was.
And anyone who puts France on some higher moral standing than America has clearly never been to France.
I've never been there, I know about it only what I read. And no, my sources are not confined to whatever the American press has to say about it.
That being said France is not a bad place and certainly more inviting at times then some places in the US.
Almost any place in the world will, "at times" be more "inviting" that "some places" in the US. Could you possible be more vague and wishy washy?
Point is vague stereotypes and generalizations do nobody any good.
But vague and spineless statements like "France is not a bad place and certainl
They launched spacecraft on 15.10.2003 and 12.10.2005.
If two is a trend, then American's 15-year uninterrupted streak of successful shuttle flights ought to be the line we draw before we announce that the Chinese are "way ahead of us." At a minimum, they should match that streak and exceed it by at least one launch. It's like a new basketball player who scores 28 points in his first two games and people say, "god, he's WAY ahead of Jordon. Jordon can't even lace his shoes up these days." It's a completely unfair, inaccurate, and stupid assessment to make. That's my point.
And they seem to be able to keep the pace.
Because of two launches? They've had a total of one interval between launches, dude. What's the standard deviation for a sample size of N = 1?
If there is a report from Chinese space program it says: "China successfuly launched another space mission" the reports from NASA say: "After N years of delay NASA lanuched another space shuttle. Problems X and Y re-occured during start/landing. We cannot expect another launch for Z following years."
Yes, because the Chinese are using technology developed during the last 5 to 10 years. NASA has been successfully, with one exception in the last nearly 20 years, technology developed in the 1970's. I'm amazed the shuttles launch at all.
You can be very well proud of your space program.
I'm not especially proud of it, I think it's mostly a waste of money. The manned part, that is. Our unmanned probe research is spectacular. So is Europe's, really. It's a shame that Beagle II was lost.
But it would be nice if you could demonstrate usefullness of your experience more often.
The vapidity of this statement is beyond my ability to articulate. The scientific merit of manned space flight is dubious. Historically it's only been done to flex international scientific muscle, and after the Cold War wound down, there's been little legitimate use for it. Garbage like velcro and microwaves are usually thrown out there as "proof" that the space program is valuable, but one has to assume, for that argument to have any merit, that we'd have never developed those things without a space program. And I think we most likely would have.
Personally I view he space program as ultimately a philosophcal and pseudospiritual endeavor. The "big questions" that space exploration seeks to answer are the very first questions that mankind ever asked itself - who are we, where did we come from, and is there anybody else out there? Even when we explain our biological origins, we want to know how the we stand on came to be. We want to know where the sun came from, and the moon. And the more we learn, the more we want to know the how and why of reality. At its ultimate end, I believe that space exploration is the natural continuation of an innate desire in our species to unceasingly expand the outer frontiers of our knowledge and understanding of the physical space occupy in what is ultimately the pursuit of answers to those questions. It's ironic, perhaps, that our most heavily intellectual and scientific endeavors ultimately serve to answer the same questions that spawned the world's most anti-intellectual organizations - religion.
France == good. American == bad. France == free and libre. America == unfree and corrupt. France is a model of a healthy socialist nation; free health care, peace-loving, non-violent, liberated. America is bad. Mmm'kay!
This is honestly not a troll, I don't want to start a flame war, but whenever I read stuff like this coming on the heels of editorials by media pundits about how France is a model of what America ought to strive for, I thank God that the people who believe this aren't in power. I'll take today's America over today's France. America's first Republic has endured for 200 years. France's falls apart, historically, about once every 40-60.
The Chinese are already ahead of us. At least THEY can put a man in orbit.
Yeah, they're up to, what... 2 now? Yeah, WAY ahead of us, they're sitting at about 1958 at the moment as far as space race progress goes. I'd say something pithy about their remarkable survival rating so far, but given the closed speech society that exists over there, I'm not willing to claim that they've had no fatalities. They could have had dozens at this point, we'd never know.
Any iTunes phone has to go out with Apple's approval, since the song format is proprietary. I'd blame this problem on some legal wrangling with the RIAA's members before Apple. Apple has nothing to make but money off of a successful MP3 phone, and they don't stand to lose much by a rival phone that doesn't support their format. iTunes users will get the Apple phone or an iPod, period. If there's a conspiracy under all of this (and I don't think there is), I'd be more likely to lay it at the feet of the RIAA, who probably thought, "MP3 player + wireless communication = internetz song swapping! Oh noes!" and put pressure on Apple to cap the song limit or otherwise cripple the device to the point where it technically does exist but is functionally useless. Sort of like today's Democratic party.
The software merrily blasted multiple patients with lethal doses of radiation, when it could have done "ludicrously simple" math and popped an alert dialog. Yes, the doctors screwed up. No, the developer does not get a pass. He is also to blame. The failure condition should not have been possible.
Typical software standards (e.g. version X.0 is effectively a public beta) absolutely do NOT apply to life-critical equipment. End of story.
The software recommends a dose. It's up the dosimitrist to verify that the recommended dose is correct. This is like saying that the Pentium chip with the floating point error should have the simple math to correct its own error. The software is given a gantry angle, beam angle, collimator data, etc, and calculates what the delivered dose ought to be to hit their goal. I don't think some of you responding to my post really understand how this software works, because you keep suggesting simple solutions to the "bug" that wouldn't have solved anything.
This post in particular... I can't even characterize how ignorant your statement is. Alert dialogs... there's just no way for the software to "know" that there's a problem here. It's up to the user to double check these things. What "failure condition" are you talking about?
Your example is incomplete. Imagine that you type "rm -rf / junk" and the system responds "Delete/junk?", so you answer "Y" and it then deletes the whole filesystem.
That's at all what happened, and is a far more flawed analogy than mine.
It is most certainly a bug. First, there is a mismatch between what is shown on the screen and what the system is doing.
That is not what happened. The write-up is not completely accurate. The screen showed EXACTLY what the doctors requested, but they misinterpretted what it was.
Second, the system obviously had gaps in its validation of input. This makes it no less of a bug than many of the others listed (eg fingerd bug).
The input was valid, or the block would not have been rendered. The input produced a cerrobend block that included a plane of everything except for the space enclosed by the coordinates they provided. This is why you hand-check results. See below.
Furthermore, it is the responsibility of designers and developers of medical software to ensure that potential hazards are identified and mitigated.
This is done with susprising rigor in RTP shops, but Multidata was well-known for being behind on its paperwork. Regardless, a hazard like this would not likely have any software mitigation built in.
A hazard of "calculated dose does not match image shown on screen" is not some obscure hazard that no one would have thought of - it is the first that comes to mind!
That's not quite what happened. Again, the write-up is inaccurate.
Please tell me that these people are not involved in medical software anymore.
Plenty of them are, they just work for different companies now in the same industry.
No. When you design software that is explicitly intended to perform potentially lethal actions on human beings, you absolutely make sure it's foolproof. You do input validation at every freaking step, then double-check the result before you pull the trigger.
If I go in for LASIK and get my retina burned off because some technician turned the wrong dial up to 11, you bet your ass I'm suing the manufacturer right along side the clinic. It should not be possible for the user to screw up the software when life is on the line.
The software does indeed do input validation. Here's how it works:
What they did was specify a block shape. This is a common feature of RTP software. You enter coordinates for the block and the software "closes" the shape. What they did was enter the coordinates in a certain order, say, clockwise to counter-clockwise. The software then closed the structure internally. For example, imagine a Cartesian 2-d graph and you want to define a square. You put in (1,1), (1,-1), (-1,-1), (-1,1), and you get a 2x2 square, right? But which part is the "inside" of it? The part contained within that shape or the part outside of it?
Depending on what order the coordinates were entered in, the software would determine the "interior" of the cerrobend block to be everything but the area that the doctors laid out, so they wanted a square but they got a plane with a square cut out of it.
This kind of thing is exactly why the results on screen should be hand-checked. The math is ludicrously simple to do this, a high school student could run the dose calc formula in a few minutes. It's nothing more than simple algebra to get an approximation that falls within 0.1% tolerance of the delivered dose.
It's both. The program should not have accepted easily recognised invalid input and the user should not have entered it.
The input was not invalid. See below.
I don't care if it's not in the spec, it's commonly accepted programming practice that all input should be bounds checked and any program that doesn't do that is crap.
It checked the input and rendered the requested shape. What they got out of it was not what they were expecting, and they didn't hand-check the results, which would have revealed that the shape they defined was interpretted by the software to be everything BUT the area they wished to protect. This kind of error cannot be removed from code other than to remove the ability to do this, which no planner would tolerate, it's a common and oft-used feature.
Your rm example is not equivalent as command line programs are by design flexible; in unusual circumstances it may be exactly what the operator wants to do.
RTP software is also designed to be flexible. No two cancer cases are alike, every treatment is very unique and requires a unique solution.
I'm going to cut-and-paste this response to everybody's thread here since everybody's saying the same thing.
The write-up is inaccurate. What they did was specify a block shape. This is a common feature of RTP software. YOu enter coordinates for the block and the software "closes" the shape. What they did was enter the coordinates in a certain order, say, clockwise to counter-clockwise. The software then closed the structure internally. For example, imagine a Cartesian 2-d graph and you want to define a square. You put in (1,1), (1,-1), (-1,-1), (-1,1), and you get a 2x2 square, right? But which part is the "inside" of it? The part contained within that shape or the part outside of it?
Depending on what order the coordinates were entered in, the software would determine the "interior" of the cerrobend block to be everything but the area that the doctors laid out, so they wanted a square but they got a plane with a square cut out of it.
This kind of thing is exactly why the results on screen should be hand-checked. The math is ludicrously simple to do this, a high school student could run the dose calc formula in a few minutes. It's nothing more than simple algebra to get an approximation that falls within 0.1% tolerance of the delivered dose.
Except that the software didn't break well. It should have either reported that the action wasn't allowed or calculated correctly. It shouldn't look like it's working but give erroneous results. If a single block with a hole isn't supported, why are you allowed to select it?
The write-up is inaccurate. What they did was specify a block shape. This is a common feature of RTP software. YOu enter coordinates for the block and the software "closes" the shape. What they did was enter the coordinates in a certain order, say, clockwise to counter-clockwise. The software then closed the structure internally. For example, imagine a Cartesian 2-d graph and you want to define a square. You put in (1,1), (1,-1), (-1,-1), (-1,1), and you get a 2x2 square, right? But which part is the "inside" of it? The part contained within that shape or the part outside of it?
Depending on what order the coordinates were entered in, the software would determine the "interior" of the cerrobend block to be everything but the area that the doctors laid out, so they wanted a square but they got a plane with a square cut out of it.
This kind of thing is exactly why the results on screen should be hand-checked. The math is ludicrously simple to do this, a high school student could run the dose calc formula in a few minutes. It's nothing more than simple algebra to get an approximation that falls within 0.1% tolerance of the delivered dose.
If they were so competant(sic) and intelligent, why didn't they make it impossible to create invalid configurations of the blocks?
They did. The configuration that the doctors in Panama laid out was valid, and the dose was calculated correctly. What happened was that they misunderstood the result.
In a series of accidents, therapy planning software created by Multidata Systems International, a U.S. firm, miscalculates the proper dosage of radiation for patients undergoing radiation therapy.
I used to work with the lead programmer on this software package from Multidata. We worked together at two different companies for a total of about four years.
Multidata's software allows a radiation therapist to draw on a computer screen the placement of metal shields called "blocks" designed to protect healthy tissue from the radiation. But the software will only allow technicians to use four shielding blocks, and the Panamanian doctors wish to use five.
This is also made very clear in the documentation. This isn't a bug at all, the dosimitrists misused the software.
The doctors discover that they can trick the software by drawing all five blocks as a single large block with a hole in the middle. What the doctors don't realize is that the Multidata software gives different answers in this configuration depending on how the hole is drawn: draw it in one direction and the correct dose is calculated, draw in another direction and the software recommends twice the necessary exposure.
Exactly. They tried to create a feature that the software did not support, and they did so in a manner that broke the software.
At least eight patients die, while another 20 receive overdoses likely to cause significant health problems. The physicians, who were legally required to double-check the computer's calculations by hand, are indicted for murder.
It's not a software bug, it's a user error. This isn't a bug any more than it's a "bug" that your Linux box stops working properly if you do sudo rm -rf/. The users of the product knew better.
To be fair, Multidata was not a great shop from a procedural standpoint - the guy who ran it was insane, but the software was rock solid. I actually worked with a number of former Multidata employees who jumped ship and went to a rival shop that builds similar software, and they were all fairly competant and intelligent.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask Dan Rather and CBS whether or not anybody thinks Blogs are important.
...the content lobby has more money than you. Details at 11:00.
I'm aware of this. It's called natural law, and I subscribe to it. It's the belief that we as human beings simply have certain rights, and governments can recognize them or not, but the government cannot take the right away, only repress it. The other end is that a man's rights are only what his government permits. Liberalism, in the classic, revolutionary sense, was a philosophy of natural law, and Jefferson rightfully said once:
In the context of my original points, I was referring not to the rights inherent with being a human being, those cannot be taken away. However, other rights can be. We generally call these "privileges" or whatever. Miranda rights, for example. It's a stretch to believe that the natural of the human soul is that we are born with the right to an attorney. This is an additional statutory right. They can be awarded and taken away. These are the types of rights I was referring to in the above post.
Sorry for the ambiguity.
So I decided that, since I'm an argumentative armchair law nerd, I may as well get paid for it.
But mostly, I want out of IT because it's generally unstable and I don't find the work to be satisfying. The contributions I wish to make to the world do not lie in software development, and so I'm getting out.
I dunno. When my girlfriend signed up to play Warcraft she expressed supreme disappointment that none of the female models on the horde side were "hot" and she's anxiousl awaiting the expansion pack and Blood Elves. I think a more likely explanation for female disinterest in gaming is that women just aren't into gaming. It doesn't appeal strongly to the social instincts of the (and I'm generalizing) female psyche. When you do see lots of women gaming, they're often involved in MMORPGs and often heavily engage in the social aspect of it. Unrealistic two-dimensional female characters don't help attract women gamers, certainly, but most women I've seen sit down to make an avatar in a game pound out the sexiest thing they can come up with.
I have been threatened and harassed from people who do a "whois" on my web site address and then come find me. When you've got a family and children you become a little touchy about that kind of stuff. Not that finding me is really that difficult but I see no reason to make it any easier. So my domain registration info is garbage.
For about four bucks I got this little metal device with a script written on it that, when read even by a non-programmer, contains addressing information that, if decoded, can provide whomever locates my lost dog with the clue as to where to return it. The decoding process is well-known, everybody learns how to do it as a child.
I signed up because I liked their line about Catholic/Jesuit values, not being just another number, and how they take care of their students. However, I had problems my freshman year and was struggling and the University actually threw up roadblocks to make it more difficult for me to seek help. I wanted to change majors and they wouldn't let me. This meant I had no access to an advisor who knew anything about the degree I wanted, and my current advisor was frustrated by the process. He even called the liberal arts college and demanded to know why I couldn't transfer. They said my GPA was too low to change majors, he said that was bullshit and told me that a more likely explanation is that I'm not on a scholarship and the Engineering college costs a lot more than the college of liberal arts. After a second year of much better grades but still being unable to change majors or get an advising appointment, I left.
They fear the fundamentalists too much. The majority of Christians are fairly reasonable people who aren't going to boycott anything. This is one of those rare issues where companies are excessively defferential towards what they perceive to be a mainstream. Like the bank that stopped using a pig in its advertisement to avoid offending Muslims, I don't think American corporations need to fear fundamentalist Christians nearly as much as they do.
It's not fair to compare the quality now because you're not comparing analogous space programs. The US and the USSR made for a fair comparison right up through the late 1970's. The US and China do not. Our goals are different and we are not in competition. I do not deny that right now China's manned space program is more successful. When China has probes approaching the heliopause, orbiting Saturn, driving across Mars, landing on asteroids, crashing into Jupiter, landing on Titan, and is gathering all of the science that the world scientific community is currently benefiting from due to American and European space exploration initiatives, I'll admit that it's "as successful" as NASA. Until then, no, it's not.
The Boy Scouts and Ducks Unlimited are hardly representative samples of private enterprise in the United States.
Stolen? I think you mean "shared." Ideas don't have owners. Information wants to be free. Only greedy capitalists think otherwise. You can't steal code, stop trying to confuse the consumer with scare tactics and red herrings like pretending copyright infringement is theft. It's not. We all know this. What Sony did should be totally legal and it only isn't because the copyright system is broken. Fight the man. Support Sony. What's next, P2P?
Now, you can be extremely dogmatic and tell me that anything done by anyone that isn't in the name of private enterprise is doomed to fail.
I'm not sure I understand your statement. Is "in the name of private enterprise" synonymous with free enterprise? Because if so, I will be dogmatic and claim that without economic freedom you will never have true liberty, the human being naturally yearns for liberty, and he will eventually fight for it. If you mean "private enterprise" in the sense of The Very Big Corporation of America increasing its earnings projection by eighteen cents, well yeah that's no help when it comes to feeding people with no money or natural resources living under uncaring governments.
But I challenge you to show how private enterprise would have filled all of the vital functions that the aforementioned UN agencies have filled over the last 50 years.
I would claim that private enterprise could have, and could have done a far better job. Not that the UN did a bad job, but the private sector is almost always more efficient and more effective. Almost always. The real problem is that the private sector has no real motivation to invest a ton of money in such an endeavor, and when you hire the work out, you get bloated government contracts that are viewed as "free" money by the private sector, and there's no incentive to be efficient.
And no, this is not a question of 'If you had waited long enough, the market would have done it'.
No, I agree. Markets do not go and liberate people. Democracies do.
Any longer wait and more people would have died of smallpox; any longer wait for refugee camps to be built and people die of cholera. And of course, there's not really any profit to be made in these situations anyway. That's when the international community simply says 'Right, let's solve it'. Consensually.
As it must. I am 100% in favor of free enterprise and capitalism abut there's a problem with free markets: if you don't have any money, the market really isn't concerned with you. That's where governments step in. I don't trust private enterprise to take care of national parks and poverty. I don't trust the government to do it either, but we can vote the government out of power. With the tangled web of corporate cannibalistic ownership, most people have no idea which corporate amalgams they're supporting when they buy any given product.
I've formed crowds in Burger Kings in upper state New York simply for suggesting that "the xenophobic pschopaths need to watch some foreign media for a minute".
I call bullshit. If you said, "Xenophobic Pschopath" the people of upstate New York would think you're talking about a Slovakian forward in the NHL. "He played wing for the Sabres in '78 right?"
I've lived in this country my whole life and have had political discussions in a variety of public places, including schools, malls, bowling alleys, bars, clubs, street corners, bus stops, cafes, restaurants, taxi cabs, parking lots, grocery aisles, hardware stores, farmer's markets, corn fields (I used to detassle and let me tell you, walking through corn for 12 hours a day, you start talking about ANYTHING), car pools, office cubicles, and God knows how many other places. I've had these conversations in Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Virginia, Florida, Washington DC, Nebraska, Colorado, Chicago, Indianpolis, St. Louis, Toronto, and God knows what other areas of the country. And not once have I ever been so much as threatened with physical violence because of my opinions. Never. Not once.
The closest I ever came was when I was working at McDonald's in college and one of our "pit crew" was a Hispanic immigrant. I ran into him on the bus once and started up a conversation. He was learning English, and I speak enough Spanish to hold a conversation, so I was helping him through a sports article in the local paper about football, which was doubly difficult for him since he not only didn't understand the English very well, but he didn't understand the subject matter very well. The conversation turned towards metric football (soccer) and I dissed Mexico's performance. Most of our Hispanic employees were from Honduras, but this particular guy was from Mexico City, and he said, joking, that he'd cortar my huevos.
Perhaps the manner in which you express your opinions incites people to violence.
America has endured for 200 years?
I said the nation's first Republic has. And I'm right.
That's why you murder your presidents and admend your constitution?
Presidents are murdered because people are not universally good or sane. The history of political violence against our leader is pretty low-key here compared to most places in the world. We're among the few nations that transition national leadership peacefully on a regular schedule.
We amend the Constitution because it's an imperfect document created by imperfect men who recognized their mortality and faliability and wrote into the document a clear process for its own modification.
How exactly does pointing out either of these phenomena back up your point? You'll have to connect the dots for me on that one.
The "america" of 1700's is not the america of today.
I didn't claim that it was.
And anyone who puts France on some higher moral standing than America has clearly never been to France.
I've never been there, I know about it only what I read. And no, my sources are not confined to whatever the American press has to say about it.
That being said France is not a bad place and certainly more inviting at times then some places in the US.
Almost any place in the world will, "at times" be more "inviting" that "some places" in the US. Could you possible be more vague and wishy washy?
Point is vague stereotypes and generalizations do nobody any good.
But vague and spineless statements like "France is not a bad place and certainl
If two is a trend, then American's 15-year uninterrupted streak of successful shuttle flights ought to be the line we draw before we announce that the Chinese are "way ahead of us." At a minimum, they should match that streak and exceed it by at least one launch. It's like a new basketball player who scores 28 points in his first two games and people say, "god, he's WAY ahead of Jordon. Jordon can't even lace his shoes up these days." It's a completely unfair, inaccurate, and stupid assessment to make. That's my point.
And they seem to be able to keep the pace.
Because of two launches? They've had a total of one interval between launches, dude. What's the standard deviation for a sample size of N = 1?
If there is a report from Chinese space program it says: "China successfuly launched another space mission" the reports from NASA say: "After N years of delay NASA lanuched another space shuttle. Problems X and Y re-occured during start/landing. We cannot expect another launch for Z following years."
Yes, because the Chinese are using technology developed during the last 5 to 10 years. NASA has been successfully, with one exception in the last nearly 20 years, technology developed in the 1970's. I'm amazed the shuttles launch at all.
You can be very well proud of your space program.
I'm not especially proud of it, I think it's mostly a waste of money. The manned part, that is. Our unmanned probe research is spectacular. So is Europe's, really. It's a shame that Beagle II was lost.
But it would be nice if you could demonstrate usefullness of your experience more often.
The vapidity of this statement is beyond my ability to articulate. The scientific merit of manned space flight is dubious. Historically it's only been done to flex international scientific muscle, and after the Cold War wound down, there's been little legitimate use for it. Garbage like velcro and microwaves are usually thrown out there as "proof" that the space program is valuable, but one has to assume, for that argument to have any merit, that we'd have never developed those things without a space program. And I think we most likely would have.
Personally I view he space program as ultimately a philosophcal and pseudospiritual endeavor. The "big questions" that space exploration seeks to answer are the very first questions that mankind ever asked itself - who are we, where did we come from, and is there anybody else out there? Even when we explain our biological origins, we want to know how the we stand on came to be. We want to know where the sun came from, and the moon. And the more we learn, the more we want to know the how and why of reality. At its ultimate end, I believe that space exploration is the natural continuation of an innate desire in our species to unceasingly expand the outer frontiers of our knowledge and understanding of the physical space occupy in what is ultimately the pursuit of answers to those questions. It's ironic, perhaps, that our most heavily intellectual and scientific endeavors ultimately serve to answer the same questions that spawned the world's most anti-intellectual organizations - religion.
This is honestly not a troll, I don't want to start a flame war, but whenever I read stuff like this coming on the heels of editorials by media pundits about how France is a model of what America ought to strive for, I thank God that the people who believe this aren't in power. I'll take today's America over today's France. America's first Republic has endured for 200 years. France's falls apart, historically, about once every 40-60.
Yeah, they're up to, what ... 2 now? Yeah, WAY ahead of us, they're sitting at about 1958 at the moment as far as space race progress goes. I'd say something pithy about their remarkable survival rating so far, but given the closed speech society that exists over there, I'm not willing to claim that they've had no fatalities. They could have had dozens at this point, we'd never know.
Any iTunes phone has to go out with Apple's approval, since the song format is proprietary. I'd blame this problem on some legal wrangling with the RIAA's members before Apple. Apple has nothing to make but money off of a successful MP3 phone, and they don't stand to lose much by a rival phone that doesn't support their format. iTunes users will get the Apple phone or an iPod, period. If there's a conspiracy under all of this (and I don't think there is), I'd be more likely to lay it at the feet of the RIAA, who probably thought, "MP3 player + wireless communication = internetz song swapping! Oh noes!" and put pressure on Apple to cap the song limit or otherwise cripple the device to the point where it technically does exist but is functionally useless. Sort of like today's Democratic party.
Typical software standards (e.g. version X.0 is effectively a public beta) absolutely do NOT apply to life-critical equipment. End of story.
The software recommends a dose. It's up the dosimitrist to verify that the recommended dose is correct. This is like saying that the Pentium chip with the floating point error should have the simple math to correct its own error. The software is given a gantry angle, beam angle, collimator data, etc, and calculates what the delivered dose ought to be to hit their goal. I don't think some of you responding to my post really understand how this software works, because you keep suggesting simple solutions to the "bug" that wouldn't have solved anything.
This post in particular ... I can't even characterize how ignorant your statement is. Alert dialogs ... there's just no way for the software to "know" that there's a problem here. It's up to the user to double check these things. What "failure condition" are you talking about?
That's at all what happened, and is a far more flawed analogy than mine.
It is most certainly a bug. First, there is a mismatch between what is shown on the screen and what the system is doing.
That is not what happened. The write-up is not completely accurate. The screen showed EXACTLY what the doctors requested, but they misinterpretted what it was.
Second, the system obviously had gaps in its validation of input. This makes it no less of a bug than many of the others listed (eg fingerd bug).
The input was valid, or the block would not have been rendered. The input produced a cerrobend block that included a plane of everything except for the space enclosed by the coordinates they provided. This is why you hand-check results. See below.
Furthermore, it is the responsibility of designers and developers of medical software to ensure that potential hazards are identified and mitigated.
This is done with susprising rigor in RTP shops, but Multidata was well-known for being behind on its paperwork. Regardless, a hazard like this would not likely have any software mitigation built in.
A hazard of "calculated dose does not match image shown on screen" is not some obscure hazard that no one would have thought of - it is the first that comes to mind!
That's not quite what happened. Again, the write-up is inaccurate.
Please tell me that these people are not involved in medical software anymore.
Plenty of them are, they just work for different companies now in the same industry.
If I go in for LASIK and get my retina burned off because some technician turned the wrong dial up to 11, you bet your ass I'm suing the manufacturer right along side the clinic. It should not be possible for the user to screw up the software when life is on the line.
The software does indeed do input validation. Here's how it works:
What they did was specify a block shape. This is a common feature of RTP software. You enter coordinates for the block and the software "closes" the shape. What they did was enter the coordinates in a certain order, say, clockwise to counter-clockwise. The software then closed the structure internally. For example, imagine a Cartesian 2-d graph and you want to define a square. You put in (1,1), (1,-1), (-1,-1), (-1,1), and you get a 2x2 square, right? But which part is the "inside" of it? The part contained within that shape or the part outside of it?
Depending on what order the coordinates were entered in, the software would determine the "interior" of the cerrobend block to be everything but the area that the doctors laid out, so they wanted a square but they got a plane with a square cut out of it.
This kind of thing is exactly why the results on screen should be hand-checked. The math is ludicrously simple to do this, a high school student could run the dose calc formula in a few minutes. It's nothing more than simple algebra to get an approximation that falls within 0.1% tolerance of the delivered dose.
The input was not invalid. See below.
I don't care if it's not in the spec, it's commonly accepted programming practice that all input should be bounds checked and any program that doesn't do that is crap.
It checked the input and rendered the requested shape. What they got out of it was not what they were expecting, and they didn't hand-check the results, which would have revealed that the shape they defined was interpretted by the software to be everything BUT the area they wished to protect. This kind of error cannot be removed from code other than to remove the ability to do this, which no planner would tolerate, it's a common and oft-used feature.
Your rm example is not equivalent as command line programs are by design flexible; in unusual circumstances it may be exactly what the operator wants to do.
RTP software is also designed to be flexible. No two cancer cases are alike, every treatment is very unique and requires a unique solution.
I'm going to cut-and-paste this response to everybody's thread here since everybody's saying the same thing.
The write-up is inaccurate. What they did was specify a block shape. This is a common feature of RTP software. YOu enter coordinates for the block and the software "closes" the shape. What they did was enter the coordinates in a certain order, say, clockwise to counter-clockwise. The software then closed the structure internally. For example, imagine a Cartesian 2-d graph and you want to define a square. You put in (1,1), (1,-1), (-1,-1), (-1,1), and you get a 2x2 square, right? But which part is the "inside" of it? The part contained within that shape or the part outside of it?
Depending on what order the coordinates were entered in, the software would determine the "interior" of the cerrobend block to be everything but the area that the doctors laid out, so they wanted a square but they got a plane with a square cut out of it.
This kind of thing is exactly why the results on screen should be hand-checked. The math is ludicrously simple to do this, a high school student could run the dose calc formula in a few minutes. It's nothing more than simple algebra to get an approximation that falls within 0.1% tolerance of the delivered dose.
The write-up is inaccurate. What they did was specify a block shape. This is a common feature of RTP software. YOu enter coordinates for the block and the software "closes" the shape. What they did was enter the coordinates in a certain order, say, clockwise to counter-clockwise. The software then closed the structure internally. For example, imagine a Cartesian 2-d graph and you want to define a square. You put in (1,1), (1,-1), (-1,-1), (-1,1), and you get a 2x2 square, right? But which part is the "inside" of it? The part contained within that shape or the part outside of it?
Depending on what order the coordinates were entered in, the software would determine the "interior" of the cerrobend block to be everything but the area that the doctors laid out, so they wanted a square but they got a plane with a square cut out of it.
This kind of thing is exactly why the results on screen should be hand-checked. The math is ludicrously simple to do this, a high school student could run the dose calc formula in a few minutes. It's nothing more than simple algebra to get an approximation that falls within 0.1% tolerance of the delivered dose.
They did. The configuration that the doctors in Panama laid out was valid, and the dose was calculated correctly. What happened was that they misunderstood the result.
I used to work with the lead programmer on this software package from Multidata. We worked together at two different companies for a total of about four years.
Multidata's software allows a radiation therapist to draw on a computer screen the placement of metal shields called "blocks" designed to protect healthy tissue from the radiation. But the software will only allow technicians to use four shielding blocks, and the Panamanian doctors wish to use five.
This is also made very clear in the documentation. This isn't a bug at all, the dosimitrists misused the software.
The doctors discover that they can trick the software by drawing all five blocks as a single large block with a hole in the middle. What the doctors don't realize is that the Multidata software gives different answers in this configuration depending on how the hole is drawn: draw it in one direction and the correct dose is calculated, draw in another direction and the software recommends twice the necessary exposure.
Exactly. They tried to create a feature that the software did not support, and they did so in a manner that broke the software.
At least eight patients die, while another 20 receive overdoses likely to cause significant health problems. The physicians, who were legally required to double-check the computer's calculations by hand, are indicted for murder.
It's not a software bug, it's a user error. This isn't a bug any more than it's a "bug" that your Linux box stops working properly if you do sudo rm -rf /. The users of the product knew better.
To be fair, Multidata was not a great shop from a procedural standpoint - the guy who ran it was insane, but the software was rock solid. I actually worked with a number of former Multidata employees who jumped ship and went to a rival shop that builds similar software, and they were all fairly competant and intelligent.