I am not happy. That's my alma mater. (Well, not so alma, and not so mater either, if you get right down to it.) I'm glad that's not my graduation year. Imagine having to sit there and listen to this guy gas on about the value of hard work while he's kneecapping as many companies as he can get at, pushing for as many cheap H1-B workers as it'll take to put those nice little Harvard grads right out of a job, and generally just being Bill Gates.
(I'll admit the Gates Foundation does good philanthropic work, but for that I credit his wife. I never heard of him doing that stuff before he got married.)
is one side I'm seeing here, and the other is "I'd like to enjoy my work."
Dilbertization is endemic, as several people pointed out. It's in universities, old businesses, new businesses, everywhere. It's not working anywhere, but it keeps spreading like a cancer because stopping it would require using totally different organizational DNA.
Sure companies need to make a profit, and universities need enough money to stay afloat, and governments need to stay within their budgets. But money can't be the only motivation. That does not work. Organizations that scrabble purely for money soon don't make any money either. Nobody actually wants money. They want good products, or enjoyable work, or interesting educations, or uncorrupt governments. You make money by providing those things. And you can't provide those things using slave labor.
There's no point saying, "Damn slaves. They just don't work hard enough for the corporations." Slaves don't. Workers whose abilities and experience are respected and respectably paid are the ones who work hard without being whipped all the time.
And isn't that what the original post was all about?
Matt Edd's issues are real. Windows is PRE-INSTALLED. That's why it doesn't have them. That's also why Microsoft fights like Godzilla to keep any other OS from being pre-installed. If people had to do their own installs of Windows (any version), the whole world would already be using Ubuntu, even with the well-documented problems for new users (manual edits of some config files and the like).
There's no point carping that such and such is "not a *nix problem" or "is a closed-source driver problem." Only we care. Lots of people out there want it to just work. Where we should be directing our energies is getting anti-monopoly laws applied to OEMs who won't provide specs so that drivers can be written, and to companies who kill people when they pre-install anyone else's OS.
It's dead. One of the side effects listed is weight gain, which Monsanto doesn't dispute. Worse yet: weight gain in females, weight loss in males. It's all over but the shouting.
(Seriously: that's a really bad sign, especially that it's different in the two sexes. That implies disruption of endocrine function, which is Not Good.)
Hot Zone? Scientifically accurate? In what universe? I'm not saying it's a bad story, but, speaking as a boring biologist here, the whole premise is just plain silly.
Think of diseases as very small parasites. Parasites need hosts. No host, no parasite. Any disease which is as violently and quickly lethal as depicted in The Hot Zone couldn't actually spread. It would kill off its hosts so effectively, it would kill off itself. This is why the really vicious diseases are new introductions (like Marburg virus, AIDS). Eventually diseases co-evolve with their hosts so that the host can carry on somehow, and go on spreading the disease (like colds).
Tangentially, this is also one of the biggest problems with biological warfare. If a biowarfare agent is effective enough to kill enemies fast enough to do any good, it kills too fast to spread. If it works better biologically, then the enemy lives long enough to become nothing-left-to-lose soldiers, and there's no way to control the ultimate spread.
Sandcastle took the words out of my mouth in reply to the comment re Moodle support. Even without going to the formal Moodle Partners program, moodle has very active forums with some knowledgeable people participating. If you need an answer instantly, then, no, you probably won't get it. It usually takes between a few hours to a couple of days. In my experience, that's the best you can hope for from commercial tech support, too, but maybe others have better luck.
The other question I've had is why, if a university is prepared to spend several tens of thousands on course software, don't they hire a dedicated IT person to support Moodle instead? Most of the ones I know get paid a lot less than 60,000. Anybody out there have experience with a college which has tried something like that?
Yes, indeed. And, since it's written in php, anyone who knows php can--and does--write scripts to do new or improved modules every day. (Or not so improved, as the case may be.)
I second the question. Serious omission not listing Moodle. I've used it in classes, as well as WebCt. I know other profs who've used Moodle, Blackboard, and WebCT.
Blackboard was recently bought by WebCT. The license to use WebCt runs into the tens of thousands of dollars. Blackboard (not so much WebCT) had some very attractive ease-of-use features not found in Moodle (or WebCT at the time), but I can't say they were $60,000 per year better than Moodle.
Several comparisons of the main packages are available. Graf and List (2005) is an academic paper comparing nine different ones and is perhaps the most comprehensive. (2005 was a long time ago, in software time, so some of the comparisons might be different now.) They find that Moodle edges out the whole field.
At that point Sakai was just starting. Sakai is a well-funded effort at the Ivy League level to reinvent the wheel, which they're doing well, but at a licensing cost of thousands of dollars to universities. (Free to individuals, I believe.)
Munoz and Duzer (2005) at Cal State Univ. - Humboldt, compare Blackboard and Moodle, where Moodle also wins.
And for that matter, Ask Slashdot did a post on alternatives to Blackboard in 2005. Again, Moodle (and Blackboard) have come a long way since then, so comments may or may not be justified.
All the more recent, less formal evidence, suggests that Moodle has been pulling ahead, not falling behind.
http://moodle.org/ is a huge site with enough resources to drown a battleship. One of the interesting corners is a map showing where most of the thousands of moodle sites worldwide are located.
Exactly. Roads have to be free. This has been obvious for centuries. Having turnpikes, in the original meaning of the word, choked off wealth for the whole society.
The fact that we have different kinds of roads now doesn't change the basic dynamics. If we had a real government instead of a kleptocracy, the public interest would never have been sold to the highest bidder to begin with.
Crichton has no credibility after his global warming BS. But the man is an amateur at climatology. On the other hand, he did get an MD once, in the dim past. Not that it helped his novels all that much, but at least he has a bit of background in biology, and I guess it shows.
Gene patents should never have been allowed. There used to be a law that life couldn't be patented (for obvious reasons, since nobody invented it). Then, during Reagan's day, at the dawn of the biotech industry, the government decided that letting those companies patent everything in sight would give them "the incentive to continue innovating." (Where have we heard that, more recently?) They got away with it because in the good old days non-biologists barely knew what DNA was, and the whole thing involved scientists in white coats speaking long words. I kid you not.
Think for a second about what a gene is: a functional segment of DNA. Nobody invented that any more than anyone invented life. (There are yeast artificial chromosomes (YACs) and bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs). My point doesn't apply to them. They really were invented.) People were given patents for FINDING the segments. Applying the same principle to something we're more familiar with, you could go to the library, find a useful chapter in a book, and copyright it.
Biotech companies could have legitimately protected trade secrets. They could have legitimately charged money for being the brokers of knowledge about genetics, just as when somebody does library research for a third party, they get paid.
What they can't do, what they should never have been allowed to do, and what should be revoked across the board is the insane privilege to patent life.
You acknowledge them to the extent that you know them. And you make whatever effort you need to, to remember where you got things, which is probably the same thing you'd hope other people would do for you. If it's so minor, or so pervasive that you can't identify it, well, isn't that the whole point to creativity being a social value?
All I was trying to say was that it might be an idea for the rest of the world, and I include RIAA and MPAA even though they think they're a different order of being, to see how the people do it who've been at it for centuries. Sure, nobody's going to start citing chapter and verse of obscure journal articles, but the general principle does apply.
Et tu, Slashdot? Stop using RIAA's language. That makes your brain buy into the worldview. Lethem is absolutely right that creation is a gift. Yeah, you gotta get paid because you gotta eat, but creativity is priceless. You could never really be paid what it's worth. Academics deal in nothing but ideas, and they've worked out ways of handling this. YOU CITE YOUR SOURCES. And once you've done that, you're not stealing anything. As a matter of fact, you're boosting the citee (assuming you're not just tearing them to shreds.)
I tried that, but I changed the middle initial, E. for the electricity company, X. for American Express, and so on. It was fascinating. Buy a pair of binoculars, find yourself getting life insurance offers. Leave your name with a chocolatier at a food show, and get catalogs from a company making high-end mountain bikes. There was no rhyme or reason to it, and with the vast majority I never would have guessed who'd sold the name without that tell-tale little breadcrumb. (And that junk came, of course, after explicitly requestiong NO junk.)
Personally, I think 20 years would be closer to fitting the crime (There ought to be some relation between how much time they rob from everyone else and the time they have to do), and they should be sentenced to having only one email address, and one phone number, both of which would be publicized forever.
That doesn't actually matter. DCA kills the mitochondria by making them malfunction. The more active they are, the more susceptible they are to anything that disturbs their function. Also, as I understand it, DCA does not "increase their metabolic rate." It increases the rate at which potassium ions move across the membrane, which, initially, could have the effect of speeding up some cellular reactions, but ultimately will make the organelle explode or implode.
Re: "cancer uses an alternate metabolic pathway": not exactly. Cancer cells are so metabolically active that they use up all their available oxygen and go to anaerobic pathways at a higher rate than normal cells. In that sense they use an alternate pathway that doesn't use mitochondria, but that's a small part of where they get their activity. Anaerobic pathways provide only slightly more than 5% of the energy that aerobic pathways do. If cancer cells were limited to being 5% as energetic as normal cells, it's not a disease we'd have to worry about.
Actually, cancer is not common under Stone Age conditions, with relatively short life expectancies. There's some recent thinking that cancer may be the price we pay for living well past reproductive age. Nature can only "cure" problems if they cause the sufferer to have fewer (or no) children. Then that kind of genetics dies out. End of problem. But since cancer risk rises with age, ie after the child-producing years, there's nothing for Nature to work with.
Estrogen is an environmental contaminant these days, because of waste from hormone replacement patches (which retain traces) and the like. Estrogen can cause cancer. And yet, without estrogen AT THE RIGHT DOSE none of us would be here to discuss this issue.
DCA is an environmental toxin. DCA as a metabolite of trichloroethylene (TCE) is toxic and carcinogenic. DCA's toxicity -- at the right dose -- kills cells outright instead of letting them transform to cancer cells. DCA at really high doses (see earlier comments), kills all cells. In other words it kills you.
Many cancer therapies interfere with metabolism one way or another, because cancer cells have a much higher metabolic rate than normal cells. Any time there's a difference like that, you can hope to target the revved up cells while not affecting the others. The reason people's hair falls out in regular chemo is that hair cells are also very fast growing, and our current chemo drugs can't be finely tuned enough to leave active regular cells alone. Current chemo also interferes with spermatogenesis for that reason, and it's also why it makes people feel so sick.
The point of the Alberta study is that DCA --at the right dose-- seems to be more finely tunable than our current crop of chemo drugs. Whether it really is or not will become evident in the clinical trials.
Those are interesting links and it's always good to keep the downsides in mind. But, on the scientific merit I did want to add:
The first link refers to a summary about trichloroethylene environmental cleanup, and the effects of DCA as a metabolic breakdown product of TCE. This is rather different from controlled dosage in a medical application. Every cancer drug known is a violent poison whose effects at uncontrolled dosage are not pretty.
The second link is a scientific article talking, again, about the medical effects of TCE in the environment.
The third link discusses the use of DCA in a similar context to the cancer study, ie to lower metabolic rate of mitochondria. However, they were trying to lower the rate of all the patient's mitochondria, not cancerous ones, because they were trying to treat a metabolic disease. The dosage rate was 25 mg/kg/day. For a 70kg person (154 lbs), that's 1750 mg per day, which is on the order of two teaspoons-worth of pure drug. That is an enormous dose. The whole point with the cancer cells is their metabolism is so revved up that they're susceptible to much lower doses than normal cells. I don't know what the dosage in the Alberta study was, but I'd expect it to be a lot lower.
The fourth link discusses research that showed DCA-induced cell death (=apoptosis) in the smooth muscle cells of pulmonary arteries. Again, these are not cancerous cells, but they are over-active, I gather from the article, in pulmonary hypertension.
Any time there's a difference in mitochondrial activity between normal cells and targeted cells, there's the possibility that DCA could be used to selectively target the abnormal cells without harming the others. That said, anything that targets mitochondria is a vicious drug that does need to be treated with lots of caution.
The level of brainwashing in the US public on this topic is breathtaking. It comes as total news to them that we're paying about 2x per capita for less than half the service of other industrialized countries that do have UHC. It comes as news that the difference is spent on bureaucracies for hundreds of different redundant "plans," on beancounters to figure out ways to deny payments to patients, and on marketing.
It comes as such news to them that they can't believe it. It implies Fox and CNN and the rest have been lying to them, or at least not giving them the facts. And we know that never happens. So it can't be true.
Absolutely: hogwash. I've been in the university biz for decades, and my first thought when I heard about the Blackboard "patent" was, "Whaaaat? I was using course software in the mid-90s. Have they heard of prior art??"
This reeks of trying to patent everything in sight in order to use the law as a weapon in your business model.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not happy. That's my alma mater. (Well, not so alma, and not so mater either, if you get right down to it.) I'm glad that's not my graduation year. Imagine having to sit there and listen to this guy gas on about the value of hard work while he's kneecapping as many companies as he can get at, pushing for as many cheap H1-B workers as it'll take to put those nice little Harvard grads right out of a job, and generally just being Bill Gates.
(I'll admit the Gates Foundation does good philanthropic work, but for that I credit his wife. I never heard of him doing that stuff before he got married.)
is one side I'm seeing here, and the other is "I'd like to enjoy my work."
Dilbertization is endemic, as several people pointed out. It's in universities, old businesses, new businesses, everywhere. It's not working anywhere, but it keeps spreading like a cancer because stopping it would require using totally different organizational DNA.
Sure companies need to make a profit, and universities need enough money to stay afloat, and governments need to stay within their budgets. But money can't be the only motivation. That does not work. Organizations that scrabble purely for money soon don't make any money either. Nobody actually wants money. They want good products, or enjoyable work, or interesting educations, or uncorrupt governments. You make money by providing those things. And you can't provide those things using slave labor.
There's no point saying, "Damn slaves. They just don't work hard enough for the corporations." Slaves don't. Workers whose abilities and experience are respected and respectably paid are the ones who work hard without being whipped all the time.
And isn't that what the original post was all about?
Matt Edd's issues are real. Windows is PRE-INSTALLED. That's why it doesn't have them. That's also why Microsoft fights like Godzilla to keep any other OS from being pre-installed. If people had to do their own installs of Windows (any version), the whole world would already be using Ubuntu, even with the well-documented problems for new users (manual edits of some config files and the like).
There's no point carping that such and such is "not a *nix problem" or "is a closed-source driver problem." Only we care. Lots of people out there want it to just work. Where we should be directing our energies is getting anti-monopoly laws applied to OEMs who won't provide specs so that drivers can be written, and to companies who kill people when they pre-install anyone else's OS.
It's dead. One of the side effects listed is weight gain, which Monsanto doesn't dispute. Worse yet: weight gain in females, weight loss in males. It's all over but the shouting.
(Seriously: that's a really bad sign, especially that it's different in the two sexes. That implies disruption of endocrine function, which is Not Good.)
dilithium is next?
Hot Zone? Scientifically accurate? In what universe? I'm not saying it's a bad story, but, speaking as a boring biologist here, the whole premise is just plain silly.
Think of diseases as very small parasites. Parasites need hosts. No host, no parasite. Any disease which is as violently and quickly lethal as depicted in The Hot Zone couldn't actually spread. It would kill off its hosts so effectively, it would kill off itself. This is why the really vicious diseases are new introductions (like Marburg virus, AIDS). Eventually diseases co-evolve with their hosts so that the host can carry on somehow, and go on spreading the disease (like colds).
Tangentially, this is also one of the biggest problems with biological warfare. If a biowarfare agent is effective enough to kill enemies fast enough to do any good, it kills too fast to spread. If it works better biologically, then the enemy lives long enough to become nothing-left-to-lose soldiers, and there's no way to control the ultimate spread.
Sandcastle took the words out of my mouth in reply to the comment re Moodle support. Even without going to the formal Moodle Partners program, moodle has very active forums with some knowledgeable people participating. If you need an answer instantly, then, no, you probably won't get it. It usually takes between a few hours to a couple of days. In my experience, that's the best you can hope for from commercial tech support, too, but maybe others have better luck.
The other question I've had is why, if a university is prepared to spend several tens of thousands on course software, don't they hire a dedicated IT person to support Moodle instead? Most of the ones I know get paid a lot less than 60,000. Anybody out there have experience with a college which has tried something like that?
Um, hello? Vista is a new system, too, from the corporate training standpoint. I mean, it's got a new menu bar for cryin out loud.
Yes, indeed. And, since it's written in php, anyone who knows php can--and does--write scripts to do new or improved modules every day. (Or not so improved, as the case may be.)
I second the question. Serious omission not listing Moodle. I've used it in classes, as well as WebCt. I know other profs who've used Moodle, Blackboard, and WebCT.
Blackboard was recently bought by WebCT. The license to use WebCt runs into the tens of thousands of dollars. Blackboard (not so much WebCT) had some very attractive ease-of-use features not found in Moodle (or WebCT at the time), but I can't say they were $60,000 per year better than Moodle.
Several comparisons of the main packages are available. Graf and List (2005) is an academic paper comparing nine different ones and is perhaps the most comprehensive. (2005 was a long time ago, in software time, so some of the comparisons might be different now.) They find that Moodle edges out the whole field.
At that point Sakai was just starting. Sakai is a well-funded effort at the Ivy League level to reinvent the wheel, which they're doing well, but at a licensing cost of thousands of dollars to universities. (Free to individuals, I believe.)
Munoz and Duzer (2005) at Cal State Univ. - Humboldt, compare Blackboard and Moodle, where Moodle also wins.
And for that matter, Ask Slashdot did a post on alternatives to Blackboard in 2005. Again, Moodle (and Blackboard) have come a long way since then, so comments may or may not be justified.
All the more recent, less formal evidence, suggests that Moodle has been pulling ahead, not falling behind.
http://moodle.org/ is a huge site with enough resources to drown a battleship. One of the interesting corners is a map showing where most of the thousands of moodle sites worldwide are located.
Hey, thanks for some actual information!
Yeah. They're way more important that the human rights of humans. Money doesn't talk. It swears.
Exactly. Roads have to be free. This has been obvious for centuries. Having turnpikes, in the original meaning of the word, choked off wealth for the whole society.
The fact that we have different kinds of roads now doesn't change the basic dynamics. If we had a real government instead of a kleptocracy, the public interest would never have been sold to the highest bidder to begin with.
I want my airwaves back, and I want them *now*.
Crichton has no credibility after his global warming BS. But the man is an amateur at climatology. On the other hand, he did get an MD once, in the dim past. Not that it helped his novels all that much, but at least he has a bit of background in biology, and I guess it shows.
Gene patents should never have been allowed. There used to be a law that life couldn't be patented (for obvious reasons, since nobody invented it). Then, during Reagan's day, at the dawn of the biotech industry, the government decided that letting those companies patent everything in sight would give them "the incentive to continue innovating." (Where have we heard that, more recently?) They got away with it because in the good old days non-biologists barely knew what DNA was, and the whole thing involved scientists in white coats speaking long words. I kid you not.
Think for a second about what a gene is: a functional segment of DNA. Nobody invented that any more than anyone invented life. (There are yeast artificial chromosomes (YACs) and bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs). My point doesn't apply to them. They really were invented.) People were given patents for FINDING the segments. Applying the same principle to something we're more familiar with, you could go to the library, find a useful chapter in a book, and copyright it.
Biotech companies could have legitimately protected trade secrets. They could have legitimately charged money for being the brokers of knowledge about genetics, just as when somebody does library research for a third party, they get paid.
What they can't do, what they should never have been allowed to do, and what should be revoked across the board is the insane privilege to patent life.
You acknowledge them to the extent that you know them. And you make whatever effort you need to, to remember where you got things, which is probably the same thing you'd hope other people would do for you. If it's so minor, or so pervasive that you can't identify it, well, isn't that the whole point to creativity being a social value?
All I was trying to say was that it might be an idea for the rest of the world, and I include RIAA and MPAA even though they think they're a different order of being, to see how the people do it who've been at it for centuries. Sure, nobody's going to start citing chapter and verse of obscure journal articles, but the general principle does apply.
Et tu, Slashdot? Stop using RIAA's language. That makes your brain buy into the worldview. Lethem is absolutely right that creation is a gift. Yeah, you gotta get paid because you gotta eat, but creativity is priceless. You could never really be paid what it's worth. Academics deal in nothing but ideas, and they've worked out ways of handling this. YOU CITE YOUR SOURCES. And once you've done that, you're not stealing anything. As a matter of fact, you're boosting the citee (assuming you're not just tearing them to shreds.)
I tried that, but I changed the middle initial, E. for the electricity company, X. for American Express, and so on. It was fascinating. Buy a pair of binoculars, find yourself getting life insurance offers. Leave your name with a chocolatier at a food show, and get catalogs from a company making high-end mountain bikes. There was no rhyme or reason to it, and with the vast majority I never would have guessed who'd sold the name without that tell-tale little breadcrumb. (And that junk came, of course, after explicitly requestiong NO junk.)
Personally, I think 20 years would be closer to fitting the crime (There ought to be some relation between how much time they rob from everyone else and the time they have to do), and they should be sentenced to having only one email address, and one phone number, both of which would be publicized forever.
(Me? Hate spammers? Nonsense. I'm mild as milk.)That doesn't actually matter. DCA kills the mitochondria by making them malfunction. The more active they are, the more susceptible they are to anything that disturbs their function. Also, as I understand it, DCA does not "increase their metabolic rate." It increases the rate at which potassium ions move across the membrane, which, initially, could have the effect of speeding up some cellular reactions, but ultimately will make the organelle explode or implode.
Re: "cancer uses an alternate metabolic pathway": not exactly. Cancer cells are so metabolically active that they use up all their available oxygen and go to anaerobic pathways at a higher rate than normal cells. In that sense they use an alternate pathway that doesn't use mitochondria, but that's a small part of where they get their activity. Anaerobic pathways provide only slightly more than 5% of the energy that aerobic pathways do. If cancer cells were limited to being 5% as energetic as normal cells, it's not a disease we'd have to worry about.
now now now. I want it now. How come the French always get to have all the fun?
Actually, cancer is not common under Stone Age conditions, with relatively short life expectancies. There's some recent thinking that cancer may be the price we pay for living well past reproductive age. Nature can only "cure" problems if they cause the sufferer to have fewer (or no) children. Then that kind of genetics dies out. End of problem. But since cancer risk rises with age, ie after the child-producing years, there's nothing for Nature to work with.
.to say this?
Estrogen is an environmental contaminant these days, because of waste from hormone replacement patches (which retain traces) and the like. Estrogen can cause cancer. And yet, without estrogen AT THE RIGHT DOSE none of us would be here to discuss this issue.
DCA is an environmental toxin. DCA as a metabolite of trichloroethylene (TCE) is toxic and carcinogenic. DCA's toxicity -- at the right dose -- kills cells outright instead of letting them transform to cancer cells. DCA at really high doses (see earlier comments), kills all cells. In other words it kills you.
Many cancer therapies interfere with metabolism one way or another, because cancer cells have a much higher metabolic rate than normal cells. Any time there's a difference like that, you can hope to target the revved up cells while not affecting the others. The reason people's hair falls out in regular chemo is that hair cells are also very fast growing, and our current chemo drugs can't be finely tuned enough to leave active regular cells alone. Current chemo also interferes with spermatogenesis for that reason, and it's also why it makes people feel so sick.
The point of the Alberta study is that DCA --at the right dose-- seems to be more finely tunable than our current crop of chemo drugs. Whether it really is or not will become evident in the clinical trials.
Those are interesting links and it's always good to keep the downsides in mind. But, on the scientific merit I did want to add:
The first link refers to a summary about trichloroethylene environmental cleanup, and the effects of DCA as a metabolic breakdown product of TCE. This is rather different from controlled dosage in a medical application. Every cancer drug known is a violent poison whose effects at uncontrolled dosage are not pretty.
The second link is a scientific article talking, again, about the medical effects of TCE in the environment.
The third link discusses the use of DCA in a similar context to the cancer study, ie to lower metabolic rate of mitochondria. However, they were trying to lower the rate of all the patient's mitochondria, not cancerous ones, because they were trying to treat a metabolic disease. The dosage rate was 25 mg/kg/day. For a 70kg person (154 lbs), that's 1750 mg per day, which is on the order of two teaspoons-worth of pure drug. That is an enormous dose. The whole point with the cancer cells is their metabolism is so revved up that they're susceptible to much lower doses than normal cells. I don't know what the dosage in the Alberta study was, but I'd expect it to be a lot lower.
The fourth link discusses research that showed DCA-induced cell death (=apoptosis) in the smooth muscle cells of pulmonary arteries. Again, these are not cancerous cells, but they are over-active, I gather from the article, in pulmonary hypertension.
Any time there's a difference in mitochondrial activity between normal cells and targeted cells, there's the possibility that DCA could be used to selectively target the abnormal cells without harming the others. That said, anything that targets mitochondria is a vicious drug that does need to be treated with lots of caution.
The level of brainwashing in the US public on this topic is breathtaking. It comes as total news to them that we're paying about 2x per capita for less than half the service of other industrialized countries that do have UHC. It comes as news that the difference is spent on bureaucracies for hundreds of different redundant "plans," on beancounters to figure out ways to deny payments to patients, and on marketing.
It comes as such news to them that they can't believe it. It implies Fox and CNN and the rest have been lying to them, or at least not giving them the facts. And we know that never happens. So it can't be true.
The research is published in Cell, for Christ's sake. Pay attention. The link is right on the U of A page linked in the /. post.
Absolutely: hogwash. I've been in the university biz for decades, and my first thought when I heard about the Blackboard "patent" was, "Whaaaat? I was using course software in the mid-90s. Have they heard of prior art??"
This reeks of trying to patent everything in sight in order to use the law as a weapon in your business model.
Jerks.