No worries, mate. I appreciate the chance to have a discussion I understand (a lot of the articles here go right over my head). I also appreciate the lack of flames...
Some of the discussions here are mature and informative, and others...well you've been around here longer than I have
I understand your point, and read the article you link for professional reasons some time ago. When they talk about the relative risk decreasing with time after infection, this poses a significant question - does the infection cause the problem, or does the immune response cause the problem (like arthritis following streptococcal infection)? Also, long latent cysts (again, reference the article you linked) present a diminishing relative risk over time. The study is not designed to determine whether that relative risk decreases to zero.
We do not know that dormant T. gondii infection is a risk in and of itself, because having the cyst form means that you once had the active form. We do know that previous infections present various problems whose severity seems to depend on:
1) Severity of infection 2) Age at which infection started 3) Length of time which has passed since infection
Which provides some circumstantial evidence that the active infection phase causes the majority of problems.
I get your point, and love my cat, too, but the precautions need to be a bit more than you make out. Cats who "clean up" themselves by licking the fur around their rectum just push the infectious material around their fur. After the saliva dries, T. gondii remains infectious for some time afterwards. Really, pregnant women should wash their hands after handling cats.
That said, nobody should "re-home" an animal just because they're too lazy to take a little extra effort for 9 months, unless you're talking about "re-home" as in "here mom, take care of my cat for a few months and I'll take her back".
I do understand that the chance of becoming infected is low. It's important too to acknowledge that the damage of infection is catastrophic. (Pun fully intended)
Before we get too carried away, note that the numbers indicate the number of people with the antibodies to toxoplasma gondii, not the number of people with active infection. Antibodies just mean you have been infected at some point in your life - and the mental status changes seem to be primarily in those infected as infants or born to infected mothers. This connects well with the known etiology of toxoplasmosis, and is why the MD tells your pregnant wife/girlfriend/mom to stay away from cats.
Still, it is really interesting how many diseases have been found recently to be of infectious etiology - ulcers (no, it's not the pizza), many forms of heart disease, and now possibly some forms of schizophrenia. Makes prevention at least plausible...
"What does it say about the US Patent office and software patents that these patents have made it through trials, appeals, etc and only now has the Patent Office decided they weren't any good in the first place?"
This is a political decision, but related more to the US Senate/House than to the administration. I have been waiting for the politicos to stuff this one, and as the deadline for RIM drew near, they are doing so.
Now we can just hope that this has an effect on the USPTO beyond just the RIM case, extending to the other questionable patents they have approved...
Where this really shines is with an OS which loads entirely to the drive. I have one of the early ones, and have it on a machine using Slax installed to the drive. Power up to live time is under 35 seconds - as close to instant on as I need.
Oh, and the "10 hour" battery is more like 8 or so, but who's counting. OK, I am. But hooked into a UPS, the system is rock-solid, and totally silent.
Broaden the meaning of this question and there is no doubt - the recent explosion of news events regarding DRM, especially the Sony issue, has hardened the opinions of many of us. Perhaps the use of GPL code did not itself have an effect, but the whole mess certainly did
Yes, that was frustrating. Fortunately, VMWare patched it pretty quickly, but you had to re-download the whole thing.
I think still, though, the analogy holds up - surgical gloves dont prevent you accidentally infecting yourself with a scalpel, but are a best practice for infection control anyway. Sandboxing your browser may not be perfect either, but it has protected our practice from the nasty bits web for some time now, and we are by no means an IT-savy bunch.
If you use Windows, go get the vmware browser appliance and use it - connecting to the internet through a virtual machine is like wearing gloves in the OR - it's just common sense.
Most people don't realise it, but you can get non-FDA approved therapies, including drug therapies, in this country unless they have been banned for some reason (like heroin, for example, or Laetril). Non approved drugs can be imported for personal use on order of a physician.
We in the medical fields do, however, have a responsibility to protect the public from fraud. It is hard to make an informed decision even if you are trained, and have the facts at your disposal. And to say "well, I'm dying anyway, what can it hurt" doesn't take into consideration the many harms done by bad therapy - delay in proper treatment (if any), co-morbidities, and even economic ills. I mean, you're dying - do you want to impoverish your soon-to-be widow by spending everything on worthless treatments? How about your kids?
I'm not saying stem cell research is worthless - it's almost undoubtably not. Healthcare decisions are hard, though. TFA(uthor) does not give enough credit to the thought and work which should be done before giving these therapies to anyone, dying or not.
I'm no computer expert, but I do understand the argument against "security by obscurity" which has to do with FOSS vs closed source software.
Medicine is different, though. HIPPA basically requires that you use this kind of security (obscurity). Let me give you an example. If I have your (HIPPA protected) chart in the office on my desk, that's OK. If I leave it in the waiting room, it's not. Information does not have to be hidden from a determined (and illegal!) search, because, well, that's illegal, and because medical practice would grind to a halt if you added that much paperwork overhead.
But if you make it too easy for someone to "accidentally" stumble on HIPPA protected information, you're in a lot of troub le. And Google desktop does exactly that - offering "suggested" completions as you type, allowing you to find out that your neighbor Paul Smith has a patient letter on my computer while you were looking for your dad Paul Jones.
AC has never been any kind of site administrator, eh? Those "stupid" other MDs in the practice, what were they thinking? Installing software from a source they trust (Google), but failing to anticipate the ramifications of doing so, doesn't seem unreasonable to them...
If you have any kind of data which needs to be kept private (we have HIPPA compliance to worry about at our medical office), using Google desktop is a bit scary. Yes, it allows you to "lock out" certain data sources, but on machines where private data passes in a lot of different formats, things can easily slip through the cracks.
Of course, we don't have it on our main office machines, because they are running Slackware. Our machines that are locked into Windows for hardware interface reasons had to have Desktop removed from them after a couple of almost-incidents.
You're exactly right about Yahoo bashing - I use Google for search, but Yahoo's IM client works better with Linux. And Google (still) has made little to no effort to make their "beta" Google Earth work with Linux (which I use) or Mac OSX (which my wife uses). So why does Google get all the good press on Slashdot (and elsewhere)?
And I have a gmail and yahoo email account - waiting to see which one turns evil first!
"Competition between two standards we believe is a very good thing"
From past experience, Microsoft only believes this when the leading standard is someone elses. Once Microsoft's standard holds the most mindshare/marketshare, then they don't like competition anymore.
Honestly (and no, I'm not a programmer), the potential here scares me. It seems to me that "interactive" automated intrusion is going to be a serious issue for security. Yes, the truly prudent are (as usual) safe, but the gap between the "luser" and people like me and my co-workers is going to get smaller.
I really do have some of our local users using vmplayer virtual machines to access the internet (the ones with Windows laptops) - and a lot of services shut down (chat, in particular) that some would like to use.
Those who know more than I (most of you) - any comments?
Caffeine has not been shown to have any long term effect on blood pressure. It does cause transient increases in new users. Decaffinated coffee has been shown to adversely effect cholesterol levels, but caffinated coffee has not been shown to have this problem. Interestingly, coffee of either kind which was not made using a paper filter (using a percolator, turkish coffee, etc) has been shown to have some adverse effects on lipid levels. Coffee has been shown to have protective effects to a small degree against colon/stomach cancer, and now, maybe, liver disease.
That was more than you probably wanted to know, but this is something I'm actually informed about for a change.
While I sympathise with his outrage, you would think that a man who takes such pride in founding the "Freedom Forum First Amendment Center" might be a little slower to try to bring his legal people to bear on this issue. Might the original article have been merely misinformed rather than malicious?
His right to publish a rebuttal in the op-ed section is safe, but then he (apparently) has money.
Check out vmplayer - it allows you to run live CDs in a seperate virtual machine, runs on linux or windows, and it's free. They even have a pre-built virtual machine which runs Firefox in Ubuntu.
If I have to use Windows, I run Slax in a virtual machine (use DamnSmall if you're short of RAM - they have a very compact version on their site which runs with QEMU).
If I have to use Windows and IE, I use Slax KillBill, WINE, and install IE (check out the sidenet installation for IE - it's slick and it works). Then I complain to the website administrator.
I have been using KOffice for the last couple of years for word processing at work (machines there are just too slow for Openoffice). As a wp, KOffice is ready for prime time. The spreadsheet app, unfortunately, lags pretty far behind even openoffice in terms of features. I'ts good enough for simple tasks though.
I have to admit, I've never found it to be buggy. Of course, I guess it depends on what version you got with your distro. The only complaint I had was that the docs aren't exactly written with your average office "joe" in mind.
Perhaps I would have drawn less fire if I had stated that better. They are concerned about the possibility that these botnets could be used in a way which is detrimental to national security, not about the possibility that botnets exist.
Then again, being as this is Slashdot, this probably wouldn't have helped either.
Anyhow, was just replying to the "why is Homeland Security?" question, and probably should have put it better. Sometimes preview is no help when I know what I mean.
The dept of Homeland Security has been worried for some time about the possibility of foreign nationals creating botnets which might allow them to ddos critical online national assets. That's what has them interested (and wierdly on the right side) in this case.
So now, can Sony be pursued for violation of the USA/Patriot act?/me gets migraine from wishing ill on everyone involved
Slashdot Mirror
No worries, mate. I appreciate the chance to have a discussion I understand (a lot of the articles here go right over my head). I also appreciate the lack of flames...
Some of the discussions here are mature and informative, and others...well you've been around here longer than I have
I understand your point, and read the article you link for professional reasons some time ago. When they talk about the relative risk decreasing with time after infection, this poses a significant question - does the infection cause the problem, or does the immune response cause the problem (like arthritis following streptococcal infection)? Also, long latent cysts (again, reference the article you linked) present a diminishing relative risk over time. The study is not designed to determine whether that relative risk decreases to zero.
We do not know that dormant T. gondii infection is a risk in and of itself, because having the cyst form means that you once had the active form. We do know that previous infections present various problems whose severity seems to depend on:
1) Severity of infection
2) Age at which infection started
3) Length of time which has passed since infection
Which provides some circumstantial evidence that the active infection phase causes the majority of problems.
I get your point, and love my cat, too, but the precautions need to be a bit more than you make out. Cats who "clean up" themselves by licking the fur around their rectum just push the infectious material around their fur. After the saliva dries, T. gondii remains infectious for some time afterwards. Really, pregnant women should wash their hands after handling cats.
That said, nobody should "re-home" an animal just because they're too lazy to take a little extra effort for 9 months, unless you're talking about "re-home" as in "here mom, take care of my cat for a few months and I'll take her back".
I do understand that the chance of becoming infected is low. It's important too to acknowledge that the damage of infection is catastrophic. (Pun fully intended)
Before we get too carried away, note that the numbers indicate the number of people with the antibodies to toxoplasma gondii, not the number of people with active infection. Antibodies just mean you have been infected at some point in your life - and the mental status changes seem to be primarily in those infected as infants or born to infected mothers. This connects well with the known etiology of toxoplasmosis, and is why the MD tells your pregnant wife/girlfriend/mom to stay away from cats.
Still, it is really interesting how many diseases have been found recently to be of infectious etiology - ulcers (no, it's not the pizza), many forms of heart disease, and now possibly some forms of schizophrenia. Makes prevention at least plausible...
"What does it say about the US Patent office and software patents that these patents have made it through trials, appeals, etc and only now has the Patent Office decided they weren't any good in the first place?"
This is a political decision, but related more to the US Senate/House than to the administration. I have been waiting for the politicos to stuff this one, and as the deadline for RIM drew near, they are doing so.
Now we can just hope that this has an effect on the USPTO beyond just the RIM case, extending to the other questionable patents they have approved...
Where this really shines is with an OS which loads entirely to the drive. I have one of the early ones, and have it on a machine using Slax installed to the drive. Power up to live time is under 35 seconds - as close to instant on as I need.
Oh, and the "10 hour" battery is more like 8 or so, but who's counting. OK, I am. But hooked into a UPS, the system is rock-solid, and totally silent.
Pretty cool
Broaden the meaning of this question and there is no doubt - the recent explosion of news events regarding DRM, especially the Sony issue, has hardened the opinions of many of us. Perhaps the use of GPL code did not itself have an effect, but the whole mess certainly did
http://slashdot.org/it/02/12/19/1329243.shtml?tid= 128
not for long - the "bad guys" keep getting smarter, and the degree of error needed to get your box taken over is getting vanishingly small...
Yes, that was frustrating. Fortunately, VMWare patched it pretty quickly, but you had to re-download the whole thing.
I think still, though, the analogy holds up - surgical gloves dont prevent you accidentally infecting yourself with a scalpel, but are a best practice for infection control anyway. Sandboxing your browser may not be perfect either, but it has protected our practice from the nasty bits web for some time now, and we are by no means an IT-savy bunch.
As another reply noted, you could use SAMBA, but the easiest way for me is to save them to a USB key drive.
If you use Windows, go get the vmware browser appliance and use it - connecting to the internet through a virtual machine is like wearing gloves in the OR - it's just common sense.
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm/browserapp.html
Most people don't realise it, but you can get non-FDA approved therapies, including drug therapies, in this country unless they have been banned for some reason (like heroin, for example, or Laetril). Non approved drugs can be imported for personal use on order of a physician.
We in the medical fields do, however, have a responsibility to protect the public from fraud. It is hard to make an informed decision even if you are trained, and have the facts at your disposal. And to say "well, I'm dying anyway, what can it hurt" doesn't take into consideration the many harms done by bad therapy - delay in proper treatment (if any), co-morbidities, and even economic ills. I mean, you're dying - do you want to impoverish your soon-to-be widow by spending everything on worthless treatments? How about your kids?
I'm not saying stem cell research is worthless - it's almost undoubtably not. Healthcare decisions are hard, though. TFA(uthor) does not give enough credit to the thought and work which should be done before giving these therapies to anyone, dying or not.
I'm no computer expert, but I do understand the argument against "security by obscurity" which has to do with FOSS vs closed source software.
Medicine is different, though. HIPPA basically requires that you use this kind of security (obscurity). Let me give you an example. If I have your (HIPPA protected) chart in the office on my desk, that's OK. If I leave it in the waiting room, it's not. Information does not have to be hidden from a determined (and illegal!) search, because, well, that's illegal, and because medical practice would grind to a halt if you added that much paperwork overhead.
But if you make it too easy for someone to "accidentally" stumble on HIPPA protected information, you're in a lot of troub le. And Google desktop does exactly that - offering "suggested" completions as you type, allowing you to find out that your neighbor Paul Smith has a patient letter on my computer while you were looking for your dad Paul Jones.
AC has never been any kind of site administrator, eh? Those "stupid" other MDs in the practice, what were they thinking? Installing software from a source they trust (Google), but failing to anticipate the ramifications of doing so, doesn't seem unreasonable to them...
If you have any kind of data which needs to be kept private (we have HIPPA compliance to worry about at our medical office), using Google desktop is a bit scary. Yes, it allows you to "lock out" certain data sources, but on machines where private data passes in a lot of different formats, things can easily slip through the cracks.
Of course, we don't have it on our main office machines, because they are running Slackware. Our machines that are locked into Windows for hardware interface reasons had to have Desktop removed from them after a couple of almost-incidents.
YMMV
You're exactly right about Yahoo bashing - I use Google for search, but Yahoo's IM client works better with Linux. And Google (still) has made little to no effort to make their "beta" Google Earth work with Linux (which I use) or Mac OSX (which my wife uses). So why does Google get all the good press on Slashdot (and elsewhere)?
And I have a gmail and yahoo email account - waiting to see which one turns evil first!
"Competition between two standards we believe is a very good thing"
From past experience, Microsoft only believes this when the leading standard is someone elses. Once Microsoft's standard holds the most mindshare/marketshare, then they don't like competition anymore.
Just what I've observed
OK, I shouldn't do this but...
Those who know more than I (do) is correct. The "do" is understood. Your way would be "those who know more than me do"
Nice try, sucka
Posting without Karma bonus 'cause this is dumb
Honestly (and no, I'm not a programmer), the potential here scares me. It seems to me that "interactive" automated intrusion is going to be a serious issue for security. Yes, the truly prudent are (as usual) safe, but the gap between the "luser" and people like me and my co-workers is going to get smaller.
I really do have some of our local users using vmplayer virtual machines to access the internet (the ones with Windows laptops) - and a lot of services shut down (chat, in particular) that some would like to use.
Those who know more than I (most of you) - any comments?
Caffeine has not been shown to have any long term effect on blood pressure. It does cause transient increases in new users. Decaffinated coffee has been shown to adversely effect cholesterol levels, but caffinated coffee has not been shown to have this problem. Interestingly, coffee of either kind which was not made using a paper filter (using a percolator, turkish coffee, etc) has been shown to have some adverse effects on lipid levels. Coffee has been shown to have protective effects to a small degree against colon/stomach cancer, and now, maybe, liver disease.
That was more than you probably wanted to know, but this is something I'm actually informed about for a change.
While I sympathise with his outrage, you would think that a man who takes such pride in founding the "Freedom Forum First Amendment Center" might be a little slower to try to bring his legal people to bear on this issue. Might the original article have been merely misinformed rather than malicious?
His right to publish a rebuttal in the op-ed section is safe, but then he (apparently) has money.
Freedom is slippery.
Check out vmplayer - it allows you to run live CDs in a seperate virtual machine, runs on linux or windows, and it's free. They even have a pre-built virtual machine which runs Firefox in Ubuntu.
If I have to use Windows, I run Slax in a virtual machine (use DamnSmall if you're short of RAM - they have a very compact version on their site which runs with QEMU).
If I have to use Windows and IE, I use Slax KillBill, WINE, and install IE (check out the sidenet installation for IE - it's slick and it works). Then I complain to the website administrator.
I have been using KOffice for the last couple of years for word processing at work (machines there are just too slow for Openoffice). As a wp, KOffice is ready for prime time. The spreadsheet app, unfortunately, lags pretty far behind even openoffice in terms of features. I'ts good enough for simple tasks though.
I have to admit, I've never found it to be buggy. Of course, I guess it depends on what version you got with your distro. The only complaint I had was that the docs aren't exactly written with your average office "joe" in mind.
Perhaps I would have drawn less fire if I had stated that better. They are concerned about the possibility that these botnets could be used in a way which is detrimental to national security, not about the possibility that botnets exist.
Then again, being as this is Slashdot, this probably wouldn't have helped either.
Anyhow, was just replying to the "why is Homeland Security?" question, and probably should have put it better. Sometimes preview is no help when I know what I mean.
The dept of Homeland Security has been worried for some time about the possibility of foreign nationals creating botnets which might allow them to ddos critical online national assets. That's what has them interested (and wierdly on the right side) in this case.
/me gets migraine from wishing ill on everyone involved
So now, can Sony be pursued for violation of the USA/Patriot act?