Lets remember that, unfortunately, the ACA is the very best that could be achieved after about 20 years of US political football games concerning national health insurance.
Remember how it was being villified by certain luminaries as leading to "Death Panels"? And when certain folks tried to kill it for being "unconstitutional"? That's the level of sanity of the political environment it was conceived in.
And even now we get posts from people who somehow don't like it (for whatever reason) but who still shy away yanking collective health insurance from a couple of milion people. Couldn't be their sense of ethics getting in the way. They're not like that. Something to do with political fallout I guess.
For better or worse, the insurance companies are simply the privatised face of national health insurance. And privatised means "for-profit". Which in turn means "maximise revenue and minimise expense". Bad news for anyone taking out or trying to claim on insurance. Fair enough. So what's your alternative? Want to set up an NHS-style system in the US? Perhaps sen. Bernie Sanders will look on that idea with favour, but absolutely no-one else will. Also be prepared to be branded a Communist, Socialist, Atheist, Satanist, Jihadist, Terrorist or simply all-round Un-American. Just a warning.
You might want to think about imposing more regulation on those insurance companies. Such as more financial transparency. Or some sort of nation-wide re-insurance. Well, good luck with either idea.
Sorry but in the mean time the ACA is what we've got. Lets try to smooth out its rough edges while we mull over what to replace it with, shall we?
Didn't have the stomach to read it in one go. It's written from a revanchist religious point of view and it lays every single failure since the fall of the Ottoman empire of the Islamic world to get its house in order and rise from a violently squabbling mob at the West's door. Apparently we have been doing Satan's work on them.
Their preferred response is "savagery", according to the author of that pamphlet. I think we can see what he means..
Somehow I don't see us working out our differences with them through reasoned debate.
It's a religious sect writ large, and it's one huge pitcher of cool-aid they've got there.
The only good news seems to be that this little masterpiece doesn't seem to base itself on the authority of Islamic texts per se. As far as I can see, it's based on an interpretation of Islam that's driven by an revanchist view of history.
That ought to give us something to work with when dealing with radicalising youths (their main supply of manpower).
Revanchism and envy are probably easier to deal with than straight-up religion.
Well, I thought of that... but I can't quite make it rhyme.
Russia wasn't bombing ISIS. It was bombing non-ISIS insurgents. That's not against ISIS interests, is it? So why piss Russia off like this?
Besides which... it must have been useful to try and split the front against them, politically if nothing else. Russia, backing Assad, would never have agreed to anything that helped anti-Assad coalitions. It would even have hindered them.
Last but not least, with the Russians in place, the coalition would have thought twice about doing bomb-runs against Assad, thus ensuring that non-Assad insurgents and Assad forces would continue to bleed each other.
On the whole I still can't see the upside for ISIS in ticking Russia off.
Perhaps someone can tell me, as I can't make head or tails of what motivates ISIS.
It is as if they've got a list of parties (nations) to piss off and are going down the list one by one. By this logic China, Japan, or Brazil ought to be next in line.
Besides which, they do seem to be doing their damnedest to drum up popular support for military action against them. Both the US and the UK will point to this attack and say to their respective electorates: "See? Told you that restraint won't help against these extremists. Now will you believe me? We need to actively engage those criminals *now* before they become too large to contain.".
I could understand (but not agree) if they just wanted to have their "caliphate". If you wanted to build a state you'd want to control territory and then secure it.
But going after a Russian airliner? The country ruled by an ex-soviet KGB colonel? The one who has shown he can (and will) use dumb (read: cheap) bombs to raze whole villages simply to get at one target? The one who comes from a long tradition that has demonstrated that as far as they're concerned normal rules of war don't exist? The one party that might otherwise be persuaded to sell arms (as long as they're to uses against US and UK forces)? Well... if they looked for another adversary they've just got one.
And France? How much of the coalition's bomb runs are carried out by French aircraft? How many of the drones do the operate over Syria and Iraq? Not all that many? Man! We gotta change that! Lets piss 'em off big time and see if they can't do better.
The only reason I can think of is that they hope to goad Paris into dropping a nuke on Raqa... decapitating ISIS... and (I suppose) starting WW-III. Could that be it? Could they really aim at igniting a full-scale war between approx. 1 bln. muslims and 4 bln. non-muslims?
Or is thinking not their long suit? Are they too absorbed in their faith for that?
I think your response seems to lean a little more towards "Faith-based" than "Fact-based".
Let's consider what the article has to say about the reason antibiotics are fast loosing their effectiveness, shall we?
The facts presented were stark and chilling. The antibiotics that have protected us from an array of lethal microbes for more than half a century are rapidly becoming ineffective. And the blame rests entirely at our own door. Rampant, irresponsible overuse of these miracle drugs, to the extent that more than 63,000 tons globally are pumped into livestock production every year, has driven the evolution of a new breed of superbugs. Before long the world may be faced with a situation last seen in the pre-penicillin era when even the most minor infections, such as those resulting from a childs grazed knee, could prove life-threatening, and every operation was fraught with danger.
Unless you want to take issue with the majority of medical practitioners and microbiological researchers, I think we can agree to take the waning effectiveness of existing antibiotics as a given. Simply because microbes evolve, and resistance to antibiotics is a strong survival trait. And why is it a survival trait? Because use in livestock industry (continuous sub-lethal doses of antibiotics in order to increase meat yield) produces the perfect environment for bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics.
As many of the posts remark, we're seeing the emergence of bacteria that are resistant to many antibiotics, some that are resistant to most of our antibiotics, and a very few that are resistant to every single one of our antibiotics. Way to go, especially since bacteria swap pieces of their DNA on a continuous basis.
The mere fact that "Some people die of multidrug resistant infections, but not many." doesn't mean it's a big problem. That's like someone dropping out of a 40 story building and saying, as they pass the 30th story, "Well, nothing happened so far. The risks must be over-hyped. So lets talk 'economics' about deploying our parachute".
The most effective way to avoid finding ourselves without effective antibiotics is to stop the production of antibiotics-resistant bacterias. As in stop antibiotics use in livestock immediately, barring perhaps genuine veternarian use to treat infection. Also infection rates in livestock production can be reduced fairly sharply by avoiding overcrowded pens. That costs money of course, but in the end it's *our* money and *our* health problem.
The next thing to do is to enforce existing limitations on antibiotics (make sure that loud ("concerned and assertive") patients cannot pressure doctors into prescribing them antibiotics where they aren't medically necessary) prescription and to ensure that people actually finish their antibiotics treatment.
Last but not least we might have a look at how we can ensure development of new antibiotics. E.g. by issuing a fresh 20-year patent if and when an antibiotic actually makes it to market within the first 20-year patent period. If it doesn't make it to market within 20 years, it's not eligible for patent extension.
That ought to ensure profitability. In addition, why not fund additional (university) research into developing new antibiotics, and seek international cooperation to spread the cost? The current road from compound to medicine is a very long one: why not focus more research on shortening that a bit?
Yes, starting with copyright lawyers. As soon as anything in this sphere emerges that is useful, it will be copyrighted.
And because of that, there will be very real legal risks for a hospital that allows its staff to just print anything and use it. Not from irate patients but from copyright holders. So they will have to impose tight controls on what gets printed and by whom, or face copyright liabilities. The field is likely thick with copyright mines already.
As a result it's only to be expected that this practice will be tightly regulated. Not by "da gubbamint" but by hospitals and commercial firms trading in "medical grade object designs".
Gun-free zone means a zone, smack in the middle of a country bristling with guns of all descriptions (at the insistence of gun-rights advocates and "proud" of it), where the rule is that you're not allowed to bring guns... which then then isn't enforced at the gate.
So, yes. This guarantees that any borderline psychiatric case can and will pick up a gun (because we're not allowed to vet people in too much detail before they get their hands on lethal hardware), and can proceed to walk into an area where guns are considered not part of daily life and start unloading.
Your suggestion: "More guns... so we can have a proper shootout when someone pulls a gun."
Instead of strapping a gun on any adult and child just in case some other American with a gun decides he wants to pull the trigger for a bit, why not actually enforce no-gun policies on campus?
Besides which... what are we talking about? Everybody goes to town about a few shootings now and then we have significant and sustained casualties every day from heart disease (i.e. overweight people due to indiscriminate production, marketing, and consumption of fat and sugary food), respiratory problems (lung cancer caused by smoking), road accidents, falls, and with assault with firearms coming in last.
People are (at last) getting tired of facebook. That means: less growth, a user-base that isn't rejuvenating at the same rate as it could, and the spectre of *gasp* declining numbers of acebook users.
Bad news for a company that just supplies a fashionable fad (as opposed to something that people actually need) and which derives revenues from advertising and resale of its users'(private) information for marketing purposes don't you think?
So it's time for a little executive involvement in keeping those warm bods signing up.
"We're getting a smaller slice of the cake? Well then.. let's make the cake bigger!"
Aha! We need more Internet users!
Cue Zuckerberg's public appeal to the UN: "more Internet users please, it's practically a Human Right!"
Besides, it's the easiest way to get more Facebook users and it doesn't cost Facebook a dime (it's supposed to be tax money that pays for increased Internet access you see).
Seen this way it's the most natural thing for mr. Zuckerberg to do. And food, shelter and healthcare? Meh. He's not active in those markets, is he?
Yes, the Volkswagen affair starkly highlights the fact that data from consumer products is insufficiently protected, leaving a window of vulnerability.
Protecting e.g. the code of the motor management system is a good first step. Leaving it at that however is sloppy work, as evidenced by the Volkswagen affair.
A more comprehensive protection would entail protecting the actual data with copyright safeguards too. Especially emission data. This data is, after all, proprietary and commercially sensitive data. Such data merits a high level of protection.
With adequate legal protection on the data itself, irresponsible and needlessly alarmist publication of unconfirmed, undigested and potentially misleading data can be prevented.
Of course there would be adequate means of raising questions and concerns with the manufacturer, on a full disclosure basis of course.
Let this be a warning for all of us: with the coming "Internet of Things" we must have DMCA protection for the data produced by devices too or risk a deluge of unauthorised, unconfirmed, and possibly alarmist data publication. We need legislative action today! Vote pro-business!
In this case I'd check in any DIY urges at the front door. You want this to work and work reliably, right?
Get a system from a reputable make and have it installed by a firm that's been doing this for awhile. This means that the central part will have a battery (in case someone cuts the mains), will be protected by tamper detection (in case mr. burglar tries to disable your alarm system), will probably have a UPS for your modem, ADSL modem, cable modem or whatever (mains again plus blown fuses), and perhaps a backup channel for alerting you that uses mobile telephony (in case they cut the cable or the phone line first).
Get a system with motion sensors, glass breakage detectors, and smoke detectors that can send alerts to your mobile phone.
Also have a few IP camera's plus a recorder installed so that you can actually check up on your home in real time if you get an alert.
That way you'll be able to actually call the police (or the fire brigade). They'll respond when you tell them you have seen the burglar / fire live on camera.
So... err... make a choice between a hobby project and a system that just works (and covers a few beginner's mistakes in installation).
It's generally allowed in the US. But for it to be worthwhile (i.e. to get interesting projects) you have to offer something interesting. Various consultancies have people of the calibre of (run of the mill) assistent profs. under contract.
Such consultancies also offer support services. E.g. people able to do the grunt work in projects (e.g. datacollection, production of drawings, coding up solutions and algorithms in end-user proof software, writing documentation, training, a helpdesk). Students are often used for drudge work in such projects but the quality of their work can be flaky.
Consultancies usually also offer continuity like replacements when the principal consultant falls ill or is otherwise incapacitated and credible guarantees of support for the next 5-10 years. Consultancies are usually able to bring in experience gleaned from other projects, and are often able to offer related specialities, aid in applying for patents, deployment on a client's specific hardware, or interfacing with a client's specific software, etc..
You've got to be pretty good as a professor to compete with that, or to be offered a consulting project while some other consultancy is hired to do the routine work. Usually you need to have a good or excellent reputation in your field when compared to other professionals .
Or you can try to undercut regular consultancies on price (you already have a day job)... but I doubt if you really want to do that.
A researcher's "utility function" is usually something of a weighted sum of research opportunities, access to inspiring colleagues and talented students, academic freedom plus non-interference from outside the academy, and salary.
Usually private industry can outbid universities in terms of salary but lags behind in terms of academic freedom, access to talented colleagues.
However, usually there are sufficient (good) academics who opt for a poor (typically for post-docs and junior assistant professors), modest (assistant to associate professors) to adequate (associate and full professors) salary (depending on whether or where you can get tenure) in an academic atmosphere over a more highly paid job where you're just another employee.
It mostly works out in the long run. Of course there are blips when you get patented ideological nutcases like gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and even core staff are pushed out. But mostly it evens out. Even for valuable tech subjects.
Very good professors (full, associate, and assistant) often manage to combine academic work and consultancy (especially at technological institutes). Especially when they aren't bogged down by their teaching workload.
I agree that an accountant should not aim for the same depth of detailed knowledge as a developer (unless he means to be one himself, in which case he should stop being an accountant), and shouldn't try to descend to code level. That's not his job-skill, so he should respect that and depend on developers to tackle that aspect of the work instead of trying to butt in.
An accountant should thoroughly understand where his job ends and where that of a developer begins (since he's the one with the opportunity to cross the line). As you say, he has a different contribution to make to the team.
On the other hand there's nothing wrong with an accountant getting to understand a little about what developers are doing. Like what makes a website tick and what developers are doing. Programming isn't rocket science after all, and mostly consists of getting lots of stupid details right quickly and reliably. Getting a feeling for how a website actually works could be quite helpful (as long as he remembers to think about (and ask for) functionality, not implementation).
My suggestion to this accountant is to look at up to three past projects that went well, and three that went wrong, and figure out what the root causes for success and failure were in terms of what business process was served in each case, what was asked for and how (organically grown versus properly specified and designed), and how the team that did them worked.
The shorter your title the more general your subject.In that case, if your article has something useful to say it's interesting to a wider audience so you end up with more citations.
The example you gave is a bit extreme, in two ways. First off, the task is pretty darned simple, and I'll admit that anyone who takes more than 15 minutes doesn't know his tools. As to spending 8 hours: that's something you see with fresh-out-of-school people who're afraid to ask questions and haven't cottoned on to the cost of their time to the company. It happens.
Not knowing particular tools can also happen, but people with higher education usually catch on in short order. That's what they're trained for.
As to not hiring Masters or PhD's for programming on the other hand: that depends on the kind of programming you do. If your company's work has a lot of stupidly simple jobs like adding columns to a database table, then apparently your company it shouldn't be looking for programmers (as in software engineers) at all. It should be looking for code-monkeys.
Not hiring anyone with a bit of education makes actually sense in that case.
Please understand that *everything* the company does is "to serve the customer better". Just look it up in our mission statement. See... that's why we have a mission statement in the first place!
If this were the NSA's doing, Cisco probably wouldn't have gone public about it (I'm assuming they'd exchange information with the NSA about a problem of this magnitude).
I have no idea what the definition of "runaway" has to do with anything, but changing conditions in the ocean really are happening.
Just like decreasing ice-caps, sea-level rises, and increasingly chaotic weather. And threatening changes in major ocean currents.. like the atlantic conveyor belt (see e.g. http://www.carbonbrief.org/blo...).
And they could be mand-made to... and in all probability are. Except in the US of course. There they're just "God hugging us closer".
- A batallion of unlicensed (and licensed) taxicab drivers that fall somewhere in between employees and and independent drivers.
The flagging service is nothing special; any company can set one up in any city. There's also nothing specifically "Ueber" about that, and I expect it to get stiff competition.
Then there is a horde of drivers, some unlicensed some licensed taxicab drivers, whom Ueber contracts to conduct rides. The worrisome part is that it's unclear whether they're qualified, insured, fit, etc. and whether they're employees or not. Fact of the matter is that Ueber both dodges the responsibilities that come with having employees and gouges drivers more for their flagging service than they'd be if they were truly independent.
It's that part of Ueber that's predatory, legally questionable and which is therefore under attack.
Then there's quality control, insurance, and liability. Which is where Ueber falls short and practices unfair competition with respect to other taxicab drivers.
We have government agencies that regulate taxicabs, make sure they uniformly adhere to certain minimum standards and won't simply abduct and rob their passengers. Without first having to look up a driver's "reviews".
There's nothing at all "irrelevant" about a government agency that does that, and it's worth having.
If Ueber wants to be a taxicab company, fine, but it will have to play by the same rules as everybody else: licensed drivers only. The fact that it's burning a load of venture capital to bend the rules is no reason to support them.
Seriously. The fact that this *can* be turned off in the enterprise version shows that there is nothing in Windows' archictecture that requires it.
As long as each and every MS Windows installation makes one administrator when one installs it, one can turn all those things off (or de-install them).
When I say "one", I don't mean the "average user" of course. It would take 'em (myself included) months of intense study to figure out how to do that (and they won't have the time, the interest, the aptitude, or the stamina for that). The good news is that they probably won't have to.
For computer-literate people there will probably be utilities / batch files to take care of Microsoft's pre-installed "tattleware" for you.
For complete end-users I also foresee a market for something like an "add-on control panel" that shows every (known) piece of "tattleware" on MS Windows and allows you to switch it off (or even de-install it). A seperate piece of software that works as a Windows "service" can ensure that this user "policy" is enforced every time Windows boots plus, say, at 2-hr intervals.
Increasing penalties for breaking and entering for a specific case, beyond what's reasonable for the majority of cases, (in my view) already twists the law beyond its legitimate purpose and is something one could legitimately call an escalation.
If activists (let alone undercover journalists) subsequently take advantage of being hired to take pictures inside farms, to avoid the (upped) charges on breaking and entering, that may be undesirable from the point of the farmers concerned but I think that curtailing free speech for that is a bridge too far. And that's what this law does.
Free speech is far more important than protecting the whatever commercial interest farmers have in avoiding negative PR (if such interests are at stake at all).
If farmers object to information on how they treat their livestock getting to the public (for fear of being considered abusive) they can either change the way they operate or be more cautious in hiring people.
Using your line of reasoning anyone who conducts undercover journalism (and potentially anyone who publishes any kind of information that makes a company looks bad but uses information on which that company might conceivably claim copyright or of which that company claims is not used for its intended purpose) would be left open to a charge (in my opinion a contrived one) of "fraud".
I think that on reflection you will agree that's too steep a price to pay. There are far too many ongoing corporate abuses for us to compromise the one effective antidote against it, namely adverse publicity based on free speech, simply because some people don't like this particular use of free speech.
On the one hand, my granny was an apothecary, and I've seen custom pills, powders, tinctures, and syrups being made about 40 years ago. So, yes, the idea (custom dosages) is anything but new.
However I appreciate that labour costs make that sort of thing (customised dosing) infeasible today (except for millionares).
As such I recognise that having a cupboard-size machine that reliably produces dozens of pills in non-standard dosages may well make it economically feasible (again) to administer individually dosed medication to patients.
It has a much more mundane application too. It could also be used to cut down on the number of pills that patients have to be fed. That's a cost-saver right there. Just consider some elderly patient suffering from a heart condition, and diabetes. They might require as many as 5-6 different pills three to four times a day in different combinations throughout the day.
I've seen nurses prepare a week's worth of pills for people in pill dispensers where you have one dispenser for each day and 4 sections to each dispenser). Filling boxes with 7 x 4 x 5 = 140 pills is a time-consuming chore I can tell you, and you really don't want to make sloppy mistakes filling those dispensers. Now imagine having to dose a ward of 20 patients.
Of course the 3D printing part is bit of a gimmic but it probably makes it cost-efficient to produce accurately dosed customised pills (customised as in all 5 or 6 ingredients put together in 1 pill) pills in series of under 20. Put 'em in boxes with a name and a barcode and you're ready to roll.
The nursing staff will love it, elderly patients will probably find it convenient, and insurers will probably like it too because it's efficient and hence drives down the cost of nursing staff.
Simple and unassuming as it is I can definitely see it becoming entrenched over the next 5-10 years for that reason alone.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember how it was being villified by certain luminaries as leading to "Death Panels"? And when certain folks tried to kill it for being "unconstitutional"? That's the level of sanity of the political environment it was conceived in.
And even now we get posts from people who somehow don't like it (for whatever reason) but who still shy away yanking collective health insurance from a couple of milion people. Couldn't be their sense of ethics getting in the way. They're not like that. Something to do with political fallout I guess.
For better or worse, the insurance companies are simply the privatised face of national health insurance. And privatised means "for-profit". Which in turn means "maximise revenue and minimise expense". Bad news for anyone taking out or trying to claim on insurance. Fair enough. So what's your alternative? Want to set up an NHS-style system in the US? Perhaps sen. Bernie Sanders will look on that idea with favour, but absolutely no-one else will. Also be prepared to be branded a Communist, Socialist, Atheist, Satanist, Jihadist, Terrorist or simply all-round Un-American. Just a warning.
You might want to think about imposing more regulation on those insurance companies. Such as more financial transparency. Or some sort of nation-wide re-insurance. Well, good luck with either idea.
Sorry but in the mean time the ACA is what we've got. Lets try to smooth out its rough edges while we mull over what to replace it with, shall we?
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11...
The article they refer to is this one:
https://azelin.files.wordpress...
Didn't have the stomach to read it in one go. It's written from a revanchist religious point of view and it lays every single failure since the fall of the Ottoman empire of the Islamic world to get its house in order and rise from a violently squabbling mob at the West's door. Apparently we have been doing Satan's work on them.
Their preferred response is "savagery", according to the author of that pamphlet. I think we can see what he means..
Somehow I don't see us working out our differences with them through reasoned debate.
It's a religious sect writ large, and it's one huge pitcher of cool-aid they've got there.
The only good news seems to be that this little masterpiece doesn't seem to base itself on the authority of Islamic texts per se. As far as I can see, it's based on an interpretation of Islam that's driven by an revanchist view of history.
That ought to give us something to work with when dealing with radicalising youths (their main supply of manpower).
Revanchism and envy are probably easier to deal with than straight-up religion.
Thanks, seems like a well-informed article. I'll read it. I wasn't aware of this line of thinking.
Russia wasn't bombing ISIS. It was bombing non-ISIS insurgents. That's not against ISIS interests, is it? So why piss Russia off like this?
Besides which ... it must have been useful to try and split the front against them, politically if nothing else. Russia, backing Assad, would never have agreed to anything that helped anti-Assad coalitions. It would even have hindered them.
Last but not least, with the Russians in place, the coalition would have thought twice about doing bomb-runs against Assad, thus ensuring that non-Assad insurgents and Assad forces would continue to bleed each other.
On the whole I still can't see the upside for ISIS in ticking Russia off.
It is as if they've got a list of parties (nations) to piss off and are going down the list one by one. By this logic China, Japan, or Brazil ought to be next in line.
Besides which, they do seem to be doing their damnedest to drum up popular support for military action against them. Both the US and the UK will point to this attack and say to their respective electorates: "See? Told you that restraint won't help against these extremists. Now will you believe me? We need to actively engage those criminals *now* before they become too large to contain.".
I could understand (but not agree) if they just wanted to have their "caliphate". If you wanted to build a state you'd want to control territory and then secure it.
But going after a Russian airliner? The country ruled by an ex-soviet KGB colonel? The one who has shown he can (and will) use dumb (read: cheap) bombs to raze whole villages simply to get at one target? The one who comes from a long tradition that has demonstrated that as far as they're concerned normal rules of war don't exist? The one party that might otherwise be persuaded to sell arms (as long as they're to uses against US and UK forces)? Well ... if they looked for another adversary they've just got one.
And France? How much of the coalition's bomb runs are carried out by French aircraft? How many of the drones do the operate over Syria and Iraq? Not all that many? Man! We gotta change that! Lets piss 'em off big time and see if they can't do better.
The only reason I can think of is that they hope to goad Paris into dropping a nuke on Raqa ... decapitating ISIS ... and (I suppose) starting WW-III. Could that be it? Could they really aim at igniting a full-scale war between approx. 1 bln. muslims and 4 bln. non-muslims?
Or is thinking not their long suit? Are they too absorbed in their faith for that?
Anybody?
I think your response seems to lean a little more towards "Faith-based" than "Fact-based".
Let's consider what the article has to say about the reason antibiotics are fast loosing their effectiveness, shall we?
Unless you want to take issue with the majority of medical practitioners and microbiological researchers, I think we can agree to take the waning effectiveness of existing antibiotics as a given. Simply because microbes evolve, and resistance to antibiotics is a strong survival trait. And why is it a survival trait? Because use in livestock industry (continuous sub-lethal doses of antibiotics in order to increase meat yield) produces the perfect environment for bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics.
As many of the posts remark, we're seeing the emergence of bacteria that are resistant to many antibiotics, some that are resistant to most of our antibiotics, and a very few that are resistant to every single one of our antibiotics. Way to go, especially since bacteria swap pieces of their DNA on a continuous basis.
The mere fact that "Some people die of multidrug resistant infections, but not many." doesn't mean it's a big problem. That's like someone dropping out of a 40 story building and saying, as they pass the 30th story, "Well, nothing happened so far. The risks must be over-hyped. So lets talk 'economics' about deploying our parachute".
The most effective way to avoid finding ourselves without effective antibiotics is to stop the production of antibiotics-resistant bacterias. As in stop antibiotics use in livestock immediately, barring perhaps genuine veternarian use to treat infection. Also infection rates in livestock production can be reduced fairly sharply by avoiding overcrowded pens. That costs money of course, but in the end it's *our* money and *our* health problem.
The next thing to do is to enforce existing limitations on antibiotics (make sure that loud ("concerned and assertive") patients cannot pressure doctors into prescribing them antibiotics where they aren't medically necessary) prescription and to ensure that people actually finish their antibiotics treatment.
Last but not least we might have a look at how we can ensure development of new antibiotics. E.g. by issuing a fresh 20-year patent if and when an antibiotic actually makes it to market within the first 20-year patent period. If it doesn't make it to market within 20 years, it's not eligible for patent extension.
That ought to ensure profitability. In addition, why not fund additional (university) research into developing new antibiotics, and seek international cooperation to spread the cost? The current road from compound to medicine is a very long one: why not focus more research on shortening that a bit?
It looks like money well spent to me.
Yes, starting with copyright lawyers. As soon as anything in this sphere emerges that is useful, it will be copyrighted.
And because of that, there will be very real legal risks for a hospital that allows its staff to just print anything and use it. Not from irate patients but from copyright holders. So they will have to impose tight controls on what gets printed and by whom, or face copyright liabilities. The field is likely thick with copyright mines already.
As a result it's only to be expected that this practice will be tightly regulated. Not by "da gubbamint" but by hospitals and commercial firms trading in "medical grade object designs".
So, yes. This guarantees that any borderline psychiatric case can and will pick up a gun (because we're not allowed to vet people in too much detail before they get their hands on lethal hardware), and can proceed to walk into an area where guns are considered not part of daily life and start unloading.
Your suggestion: "More guns ... so we can have a proper shootout when someone pulls a gun."
Instead of strapping a gun on any adult and child just in case some other American with a gun decides he wants to pull the trigger for a bit, why not actually enforce no-gun policies on campus?
Besides which ... what are we talking about? Everybody goes to town about a few shootings now and then we have significant and sustained casualties every day from heart disease (i.e. overweight people due to indiscriminate production, marketing, and consumption of fat and sugary food), respiratory problems (lung cancer caused by smoking), road accidents, falls, and with assault with firearms coming in last.
See e.g. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... and http://www.zdnet.com/article/y...
People are (at last) getting tired of facebook. That means: less growth, a user-base that isn't rejuvenating at the same rate as it could, and the spectre of *gasp* declining numbers of acebook users.
Bad news for a company that just supplies a fashionable fad (as opposed to something that people actually need) and which derives revenues from advertising and resale of its users'(private) information for marketing purposes don't you think?
So it's time for a little executive involvement in keeping those warm bods signing up.
"We're getting a smaller slice of the cake? Well then .. let's make the cake bigger!"
Aha! We need more Internet users!
Cue Zuckerberg's public appeal to the UN: "more Internet users please, it's practically a Human Right!"
Besides, it's the easiest way to get more Facebook users and it doesn't cost Facebook a dime (it's supposed to be tax money that pays for increased Internet access you see).
Seen this way it's the most natural thing for mr. Zuckerberg to do. And food, shelter and healthcare? Meh. He's not active in those markets, is he?
Protecting e.g. the code of the motor management system is a good first step. Leaving it at that however is sloppy work, as evidenced by the Volkswagen affair.
A more comprehensive protection would entail protecting the actual data with copyright safeguards too. Especially emission data. This data is, after all, proprietary and commercially sensitive data. Such data merits a high level of protection.
With adequate legal protection on the data itself, irresponsible and needlessly alarmist publication of unconfirmed, undigested and potentially misleading data can be prevented.
Of course there would be adequate means of raising questions and concerns with the manufacturer, on a full disclosure basis of course.
Let this be a warning for all of us: with the coming "Internet of Things" we must have DMCA protection for the data produced by devices too or risk a deluge of unauthorised, unconfirmed, and possibly alarmist data publication. We need legislative action today! Vote pro-business!
Get a system from a reputable make and have it installed by a firm that's been doing this for awhile. This means that the central part will have a battery (in case someone cuts the mains), will be protected by tamper detection (in case mr. burglar tries to disable your alarm system), will probably have a UPS for your modem, ADSL modem, cable modem or whatever (mains again plus blown fuses), and perhaps a backup channel for alerting you that uses mobile telephony (in case they cut the cable or the phone line first).
Get a system with motion sensors, glass breakage detectors, and smoke detectors that can send alerts to your mobile phone.
Also have a few IP camera's plus a recorder installed so that you can actually check up on your home in real time if you get an alert.
That way you'll be able to actually call the police (or the fire brigade). They'll respond when you tell them you have seen the burglar / fire live on camera.
So ... err ... make a choice between a hobby project and a system that just works (and covers a few beginner's mistakes in installation).
It's generally allowed in the US. But for it to be worthwhile (i.e. to get interesting projects) you have to offer something interesting. Various consultancies have people of the calibre of (run of the mill) assistent profs. under contract.
Such consultancies also offer support services. E.g. people able to do the grunt work in projects (e.g. datacollection, production of drawings, coding up solutions and algorithms in end-user proof software, writing documentation, training, a helpdesk). Students are often used for drudge work in such projects but the quality of their work can be flaky.
Consultancies usually also offer continuity like replacements when the principal consultant falls ill or is otherwise incapacitated and credible guarantees of support for the next 5-10 years. Consultancies are usually able to bring in experience gleaned from other projects, and are often able to offer related specialities, aid in applying for patents, deployment on a client's specific hardware, or interfacing with a client's specific software, etc..
You've got to be pretty good as a professor to compete with that, or to be offered a consulting project while some other consultancy is hired to do the routine work. Usually you need to have a good or excellent reputation in your field when compared to other professionals .
Or you can try to undercut regular consultancies on price (you already have a day job) ... but I doubt if you really want to do that.
Usually private industry can outbid universities in terms of salary but lags behind in terms of academic freedom, access to talented colleagues.
However, usually there are sufficient (good) academics who opt for a poor (typically for post-docs and junior assistant professors), modest (assistant to associate professors) to adequate (associate and full professors) salary (depending on whether or where you can get tenure) in an academic atmosphere over a more highly paid job where you're just another employee.
It mostly works out in the long run. Of course there are blips when you get patented ideological nutcases like gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and even core staff are pushed out. But mostly it evens out. Even for valuable tech subjects.
Very good professors (full, associate, and assistant) often manage to combine academic work and consultancy (especially at technological institutes). Especially when they aren't bogged down by their teaching workload.
Anybody who thinks such accounts can be identified through pattern recognition and data-mining for example?
I agree that an accountant should not aim for the same depth of detailed knowledge as a developer (unless he means to be one himself, in which case he should stop being an accountant), and shouldn't try to descend to code level. That's not his job-skill, so he should respect that and depend on developers to tackle that aspect of the work instead of trying to butt in.
An accountant should thoroughly understand where his job ends and where that of a developer begins (since he's the one with the opportunity to cross the line). As you say, he has a different contribution to make to the team.
On the other hand there's nothing wrong with an accountant getting to understand a little about what developers are doing. Like what makes a website tick and what developers are doing. Programming isn't rocket science after all, and mostly consists of getting lots of stupid details right quickly and reliably. Getting a feeling for how a website actually works could be quite helpful (as long as he remembers to think about (and ask for) functionality, not implementation).
My suggestion to this accountant is to look at up to three past projects that went well, and three that went wrong, and figure out what the root causes for success and failure were in terms of what business process was served in each case, what was asked for and how (organically grown versus properly specified and designed), and how the team that did them worked.
The shorter your title the more general your subject.In that case, if your article has something useful to say it's interesting to a wider audience so you end up with more citations.
Not knowing particular tools can also happen, but people with higher education usually catch on in short order. That's what they're trained for.
As to not hiring Masters or PhD's for programming on the other hand: that depends on the kind of programming you do. If your company's work has a lot of stupidly simple jobs like adding columns to a database table, then apparently your company it shouldn't be looking for programmers (as in software engineers) at all. It should be looking for code-monkeys.
Not hiring anyone with a bit of education makes actually sense in that case.
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
Which point to this article http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sc... which cites this article http://sciencecareers.sciencem... , which cites this researcher Matlof in this paper: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/...
The long and the short of it: "It boils down to cheap, compliant labor." -- Norman Matloff.
Please understand that *everything* the company does is "to serve the customer better". Just look it up in our mission statement. See ... that's why we have a mission statement in the first place!
If this were the NSA's doing, Cisco probably wouldn't have gone public about it (I'm assuming they'd exchange information with the NSA about a problem of this magnitude).
Just like decreasing ice-caps, sea-level rises, and increasingly chaotic weather. And threatening changes in major ocean currents .. like the atlantic conveyor belt (see e.g. http://www.carbonbrief.org/blo...).
And they could be mand-made to ... and in all probability are. Except in the US of course. There they're just "God hugging us closer".
- An app-and-server cab flagging service
- A batallion of unlicensed (and licensed) taxicab drivers that fall somewhere in between employees and and independent drivers.
The flagging service is nothing special; any company can set one up in any city. There's also nothing specifically "Ueber" about that, and I expect it to get stiff competition.
Then there is a horde of drivers, some unlicensed some licensed taxicab drivers, whom Ueber contracts to conduct rides. The worrisome part is that it's unclear whether they're qualified, insured, fit, etc. and whether they're employees or not. Fact of the matter is that Ueber both dodges the responsibilities that come with having employees and gouges drivers more for their flagging service than they'd be if they were truly independent.
It's that part of Ueber that's predatory, legally questionable and which is therefore under attack.
Then there's quality control, insurance, and liability. Which is where Ueber falls short and practices unfair competition with respect to other taxicab drivers.
We have government agencies that regulate taxicabs, make sure they uniformly adhere to certain minimum standards and won't simply abduct and rob their passengers. Without first having to look up a driver's "reviews".
There's nothing at all "irrelevant" about a government agency that does that, and it's worth having.
If Ueber wants to be a taxicab company, fine, but it will have to play by the same rules as everybody else: licensed drivers only. The fact that it's burning a load of venture capital to bend the rules is no reason to support them.
Or have it turned off for you.
Seriously. The fact that this *can* be turned off in the enterprise version shows that there is nothing in Windows' archictecture that requires it.
As long as each and every MS Windows installation makes one administrator when one installs it, one can turn all those things off (or de-install them).
When I say "one", I don't mean the "average user" of course. It would take 'em (myself included) months of intense study to figure out how to do that (and they won't have the time, the interest, the aptitude, or the stamina for that). The good news is that they probably won't have to.
For computer-literate people there will probably be utilities / batch files to take care of Microsoft's pre-installed "tattleware" for you.
For complete end-users I also foresee a market for something like an "add-on control panel" that shows every (known) piece of "tattleware" on MS Windows and allows you to switch it off (or even de-install it). A seperate piece of software that works as a Windows "service" can ensure that this user "policy" is enforced every time Windows boots plus, say, at 2-hr intervals.
If activists (let alone undercover journalists) subsequently take advantage of being hired to take pictures inside farms, to avoid the (upped) charges on breaking and entering, that may be undesirable from the point of the farmers concerned but I think that curtailing free speech for that is a bridge too far. And that's what this law does.
Free speech is far more important than protecting the whatever commercial interest farmers have in avoiding negative PR (if such interests are at stake at all).
If farmers object to information on how they treat their livestock getting to the public (for fear of being considered abusive) they can either change the way they operate or be more cautious in hiring people.
Using your line of reasoning anyone who conducts undercover journalism (and potentially anyone who publishes any kind of information that makes a company looks bad but uses information on which that company might conceivably claim copyright or of which that company claims is not used for its intended purpose) would be left open to a charge (in my opinion a contrived one) of "fraud".
I think that on reflection you will agree that's too steep a price to pay. There are far too many ongoing corporate abuses for us to compromise the one effective antidote against it, namely adverse publicity based on free speech, simply because some people don't like this particular use of free speech.
On the one hand, my granny was an apothecary, and I've seen custom pills, powders, tinctures, and syrups being made about 40 years ago. So, yes, the idea (custom dosages) is anything but new.
However I appreciate that labour costs make that sort of thing (customised dosing) infeasible today (except for millionares).
As such I recognise that having a cupboard-size machine that reliably produces dozens of pills in non-standard dosages may well make it economically feasible (again) to administer individually dosed medication to patients.
It has a much more mundane application too. It could also be used to cut down on the number of pills that patients have to be fed. That's a cost-saver right there. Just consider some elderly patient suffering from a heart condition, and diabetes. They might require as many as 5-6 different pills three to four times a day in different combinations throughout the day.
I've seen nurses prepare a week's worth of pills for people in pill dispensers where you have one dispenser for each day and 4 sections to each dispenser). Filling boxes with 7 x 4 x 5 = 140 pills is a time-consuming chore I can tell you, and you really don't want to make sloppy mistakes filling those dispensers. Now imagine having to dose a ward of 20 patients.
Of course the 3D printing part is bit of a gimmic but it probably makes it cost-efficient to produce accurately dosed customised pills (customised as in all 5 or 6 ingredients put together in 1 pill) pills in series of under 20. Put 'em in boxes with a name and a barcode and you're ready to roll.
The nursing staff will love it, elderly patients will probably find it convenient, and insurers will probably like it too because it's efficient and hence drives down the cost of nursing staff.
Simple and unassuming as it is I can definitely see it becoming entrenched over the next 5-10 years for that reason alone.