As others have noted, you can just replace the text with "[redacted]", which also removes the length guessing.
Some people have noted some (ridiculous) concerns (like file formats storing changes, which could simply be disabled, and should be caught by the audit procedure afterwards - there is an audit, right?!?). So if you really want the print-out-and-scan-in type of dumbed down method, then:
* save to a bitmap or jpeg. * black out the text in there...no need for the useless media conversion (print/scan).
Of course, that only works if you turn "track changes" off in word...:)
Yeah but you need a massive amount of fuel to accelerate to C and then slow down again. About 40,000 times the size of the shuttle's boosters.
Perhaps this is why, despite our best efforts, no other civilization has contacted us. It's simply too hard to bridge the huuuuge gap between the stars.
Yes, if I was going to build a universe with all sorts of playthings in it, I'd probably separate the experiments with enough spacetime that when the odd experiment blows up it doesn't really affect any others around it.
Not that I think that the universe was actually designed, but if it was, that would be how I would do it.
If it was so easy to make cars twice as efficient, don't you think we would have done that already?
That line was put in for the SUV drivers out there. We have already made cars that are twice as efficient as a SUV.
However, there are whole new classes of hybrids out there that get good fuel efficiency. And some very efficient conventional engines. They just don't make it into many current vehicles. However, if we adopted these vehicles in a wide spread manner then the overall efficiency of the car fleet would probably nearly double.
Responding to an AC - I should feed the trolls....
The first - energy. It cant be avoided. To make fuel from CO2 you need energy. Nuclear, wind, solar. It doesn't matter what really, but you will need some input and this technology cannot address that.
The second - why do this. Actually, it makes sense to have a liquid fuel base. Transportation runs on liquid fuel as a store of energy. If we make liquid fuels from solar, for example, we can store solar energy in a useful form for when it is dark.
So without commenting on this particular technology - which everyone has quite rightly stated won't work without considering energy inputs - the general concept of creating a liquid fuel energy store has some merit.
Having said this, I've spent quite a bit of time looking at a rather different liquid fuel store which I think has more promise than hydrocarbons.
That fuel is ammonia.
Whilst its only half as energy dense as diesel, its not that hard to make from electricity. In fact, it can be made by electrolysis fairly easily, and this has been done for nearly 100 years. so its not exactly new technology.
Nor is the ability to use it in a standard internal combustion engine. In fact, it was being used as a fuel for buses over 60 years ago and it works in a standard engine with little modification.
Because its less energy dense than diesel, its a lot easier to make synthetically, but has enough energy per litre to be worthwhile. Whilst having half the range per litre of fuel is an inconvenience, I am sure that we could live pretty much as we do today with vehicle technology that is available today.
We either accept half the range, or build the fuel tanks twice as big, or maybe even make the cars twice as efficient. All of these are easy options really.
I think that we have all gotten so fixated on fossil fuels that we have ignored a really low technology solution here.
Is that what you say to your dad/mom/daughter/son/best friend/grandma when they come to you in tears because they just lost three years of photos or cubase masters?
I guess that they really should consider getting a mac for this reason - integrated backup - the reason I went to 10.5
I think that this isn't a good sign for the xbox either. Existing owners feeling that they have obsolete hardware, and a clear advantage to the playstation.
Microsoft has damaged its whole gaming platform by getting into a sparring match with Sony over video formats.
I don't really care, to be honest. Were it not for a couple networking-related issues, I'd have all of my non-Macs running Vista. It runs fine on my machines.
No. If someone breaks my door down, I don't care if it is a policeman, a soldier, a thief or a vampire, I have the right and obligation to defend my family and my space with deadly force.
Personally I think that you are being a bit paranoid here about your response. It makes you as bad as the group you rally against.
Except maybe for the vampires. To my understanding deadly force is pretty ineffective against them. (Just a friendly tip on that one:)
I looked. Which one do you claim as the 9/11 size attack? And again, who would you have invaded in response, as you were already in Northern Ireland?
I think that a couple come to mind:
Bishopsgate To quote from wikipedia: On 24 April 1993 it was the site of a Provisional Irish Republican Army truck bomb, which killed journalist Ed Henty, injured over 40 people and caused £1 billion worth of damage, including the destruction of St Ethelburga's church, and serious damage to Liverpool St. Tube Station. Police had received a coded warning, but were still evacuating the area at the time of the explosion. The insurance payments required were so enormous, that Lloyd's of London almost went bankrupt under the strain, and there was a crisis in the London insurance market. The area had already suffered damage from the Baltic Exchange bombing the year before.
or how about the Baltic exchange bombing the year earlier: On April 10, 1992 the facade of the Exchange's offices at 30 St Mary Axe was partially demolished, and the rest of the building was extensively damaged in a Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb attack. The bomb was contained in a large white truck and consisted of a fertilizer device wrapped with a detonation cord made from Semtex. It killed three people: Paul Butt, 29, Baltic Exchange employee Thomas Casey, 49, and 15-year old Danielle Carter. The bomb also caused damage to surrounding buildings, many of which were also badly damaged by the Bishopsgate bombing the following year. The bomb caused £800 million worth of damage, £200 million more than the total damaged caused by the 10,000 explosions that had occurred during the Troubles in Northern Ireland up to that point.
Just because they happened to go off after hours or gave a warning doesnt make it any less of a terrorist incident. Yes, less people died in each of these attacks because of this. But that was partly luck due to the time of day and the speed of the response by the police to evacuate buildings.
As noted in wikipedia, the IRA let off over 10 000 bombs over the course of 30 years, mostly in Ireland, but a significant number in Britain. Trucks with fertiliser that took out whole buildings.
I suspect that the IRA never thought of using a plane as a weapon, and its probably good that they didn't.
I don't know much about the Northern Ireland conflict. Was there a 9/11 size attack in the UK? Was there a government that officially gave sanctuary to the terrorists? And lastly, weren't you guys already in Northern Ireland, conducting combat operations? Who would you have invaded?
I'd suggest this wikipedia article and look at the terrorist attacks between 1970 and 2001.
I'm not saying I agree with the Iraq war, but just that using the 3,000 death number as your sole criteria is myopic. I definitely agreed with the Afghanistan war. Did you? And if so, it must have been justified by something more than 3,000 people dying vs the number of traffic deaths.
I see your reasoning. You agreed to the war.
By the same reasoning you would accept it as ok when Jihad is declared on America. If you accept war because of threat, then surely you accept it in others?
*But they attacked us first* - No doubt the validation of the war, we aren't the aggressors.
Except that the USA attacked Iraq, and by and large these people weren't planning terrorist actions against the US, or probably much anyone else outside of Iraq.
If you lived in a country, and another country invades you, would it be ok to launch a war on them?
The truth is, war begets war.
If the UK followed the principles you have espoused, and launched an all out assault on terror, they would still be at war in Ireland.
I lived in the UK during some of the bombings - and they were far more frequent than anything that the USA has experienced - and the amazing thing was the amount of restraint that the UK showed.
The contrast between Northern Ireland and Iraq is all the evidence you need as to why war is not the solution to terrorism.
Normally I'd call this my 2c worth, but this would be more like my $2 worth.
Obviously you haven't spent any real time with paramedics, ER Personnel, or ex-frontline combat soldiers. Gallows humor is a time-tested method of sanity retainment. Even though I am none of the above, I know that if I didn't laugh at all the stupid shit that goes on in the world I would have killed myself a long damned time ago. It's entirely too fucking depressing.
Yes, one of the most funny lines I ever heard was during a resusicitation of a sad young man who, having been discharged out of a psych ward for depression went straight to a train line, and jumped in front of the oncoming train.
The train was a high speed one, and he succeeded in going through the windscreen and ending up with the train driver. Severe injuries to both arms and legs plus possible head and neck injuries, but actually it was a survivable set of injuries. In the end he lost both legs over this, so he really did have something extra to make him depressed after this.
The train was moving so fast that it basically made it all the way down to the next train station before pulling to a stop.
During the initial resuscitation everything was really intense. We couldn't even get a drip in him initially as both arms and legs were out of action, and his neck was in a collar.
After about 30 minutes of really hard work stabilising him, one of the surgical consultants arrived, and the story thus far was told to them as they were looking in the resus bay.
The surgeons immediate comment on hearing the story, without blinking, was:
"So you mean he didn't get booked for travelling without a ticket?"
It was the funniest thing I had heard that week, and absolutely everyone lost it.
Strange as it may sound, it really helped the team spirit and we continued on to salvage what we could out of a bad situation.
Is Alzheimer's an unavoidable disease? I don't have any actual papers in front of me, but I thought I heard that frequent use of the mind and critical thinking were a great way to keep your brain "in shape." Maybe knowing that you have Alzheimer's disease will give you the chance to live a normal life with the occasional crossword, sudoko, critical reading, etc.
Its not untreatable, and there are a lot of promising new therapies coming online.
However, right here and now, if you know you are going to get the disease in the future, you can:
Exercise mentally - learning a new language, or other mental exercises, delay the onset.
Exercise physically - for reasons that are unclear, physical exercise seems to be protective.
Anti-inflammatory drugs (aspirin and non steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) seem to be protective, and may be worthwhile if you have a high risk of developing the disease
And cholinesterase blocker drugs will improve cognition in the face of a falling neuron count - improving function although not modifying the disease itself.
Whilst there are many ethical questions to screening tests for diseases you cannot treat, alzheimers does not fit into that category. We all die of something. Its all about getting the most quality time on the planet. Having a test for this would be a good thing.
Please also note that there are already tests that can identify risk of alzheimers, such as for the ApoE epsilon 4 genotype, so the concept of a screening test that helps separate types of demetia already exists.
Doh! I was always wondering who was in front of me.
Just for the hall of fame:
CmdrTaco (1)
Hemos (2)
drendite (3)
CowboyNeal (4)
samzenpus (5)
jgoldsch (6)
CLorox (7)
Emmett Plant (8)
keith (9)
I always wondered how to do this until I read this thread - its actually pretty easy to look up someone's uid, by checking your relationship with them. Its all in the address bar.
There is a certain amount of fear of outsiders in every country. Americans with Mexicans. The French with north Africans. Austrians and Germans with the Turks. Hong Kongers with mainlanders.
Any yet here in Australia, we are mostly afraid of those from within - our own indigenous people, the aborigines.
Phishing has reached the point that if you have an open redirector or proxy on your web site, someone will use it to borrow your reputation for their scam. Open redirectors are now like open mail relays - a nice Internet feature that had to be shut down because of exploits.
So fix those open redirectors, people, or expect to be listed as a phishing-friendly site.
Great post - very informative.
Seems to me that we need a redirection block (if that is possible) whereby the browser doesn't accept a redirection without a user prompt (unless the redirection is whitelisted).
That would seem to be the way that you could nuke redirection - at the web browser. (I presume that redirection requires the browser to accept a request for redirection)
I'll second that. In addition, without a transplant, she stands a decent chance of living a long full life. Transplant patients don't last that long, on average.
I think that you are being a bit harsh there.
Survival figures vary - overall in the USA the five-year survival rate is 71.2 percent for males and 66.9 percent for females. Its better than that in some units. This person's survival after a transplant would be alot higher than this as young people do better on average than older recipiants.
Over 2/3 alive at 5 years, and actually pretty similar at 10 years - bearing in mind that most of bad outcomes are in the first year, and that this is all causes of death, including deaths that were unrelated to the transplant.
The main bad thing about heart transplants is not getting enough hearts.
Having said this, you will see a significant number of people who do not require transplantation due to spontaneous recovery of function.
They still require two major operations - the VAD insertion and the VAD removal - so its not exactly a walk in the park.
And the VAD's such as this can have quite significant complications. The are good but not necessarily the only solution.
Hopefully some day we can just build one big fucker of a solar plant on the moon and send it back to Earth with microwaves 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The Moon rotates (relative to the sun), so unless you build these things on a swivel mount at the lunar poles you may have trouble with this idea.
You could put it at a Lagrange point. However, I think its a long way to send a technician when there is a blackout.
However... the price is dropping. At some point very soon- you could give 1 million houses free solar power each year. And then they question is why are we wasting blood and treasure in a foreign land.
OTH- I think that solar will not get much cheaper than oil for a long time.
You would be assuming then that the price of oil is fixed?
Of course, solar power only has advantages in certain environments. Almost no power source is universally producible. For instance, only some parts of America can provide significant natural gas resources. Only certain portions are capable of coal or oil. Likewise, there is a limitation on places that can provide significant resources for wind-power or solar-power.
This isn't to suggest that it isn't worth the effort, but I am unclear whether we have the potential to expand facilities in those appropriate areas enough that they could power the entire country well into the future. (For example, solar power in Portland, Oregon is relatively pointless for mass-consumption since you need actual sunlight to generate the electricity).
You don't need to have good areas near you. You should build the power generators where they are most efficient, and send the power by grid. This applies to Solar, Geothermal, Wind, Tidal. Power losses using High Voltage Direct Current"(HVDC) are about 3% per 1000 kilometers. So if you would have more than a 10% increase power output by putting your renewable power source somewhere else, but that place is 3000 km away, you still can get more usable power at your end by doing so.
Obviously you don't have to do this, and with some forms or energy (eg wind) you may want generators everywhere just to load balance - Somwhere in the world, every day, the wind blows.
But could solar power cells in the desert power air conditioners on the coast? You bet. Could solar power cells in north africa power northern Europe? Certainly.
The technology for power transmission is here. The technology for power storage is not, as yet.
HVDC has the potential to make renewable power sources, such as solar, work. There is no reason why you cant even have solar power feeding the grids of cities during the night. And this is going to be very important when we start to look beyond fossil fuels to power everything.
Yeeees. Yes, give into the dark side. influencing large populations through pain, suffering, and death isn't that big of a deal. It's like the Mafia. The amount of resources we spend on that is far out of proportion to the actual damages.
After all, it's not like they kill *that* many people.
Also, rape shouldn't be a crime anymore. It's just sex. Get over it.
I'm not suggesting that we give in to the dark side.
However, I don't see any point punishing the 19 suicide terrorists that flew the planes into things. They are kind of dead now.
So sure, go after the masterminds, if you want. But we haven't really done this. You cant catch them with an army, at least not easily.
Sure, we did get Saddam with an army. Two problems there, however. Firstly he isn't a terrorist. That made him much easier to catch. Secondly, we now have much more terrorist activity because of what we did. Fortunately most of it is still in Iraq. Fortunate for us, less fortunate for the Iraqi's. Sadly, there are more deaths now from this than was ever the case from the death squads that Saddam had. Lets just hope is stays confined to Iraq, because if even 1% of them get to the first world, the amount of terrorist attacks we are experiencing are going to rocket up.
I'm not advocating that we ignore the terrorists. Just that our current responses are mis-directed. Even the governments of the world are starting to see this.
We would have saved alot more lives if we had focussed on dealing with what we can deal with. The solution to terrorism isn't obvious, and it takes time. But it has been done - look at Northern Ireland. It wasn't the army that solved that problem, and increasing firepower there would have been the wrong thing to do. If we had done that, we would still have people driving trucks with fertiliser into the centre of London. Its not as if NY is the only big city that's had a building taken out by terrorists.
Just a little food for thought.
Armies fight other armies. This works in conventional war. Worked in the two world wars. Was the right thing to do. Fails miserably against terrorism.
And none of this applies to safety on planes. All that planes need is a door that locks properly between the pilots cabin and the passengers, and you could probably let terrorists take hand grenades on board without another september 11 happening - sure, planes would crash, they do even without terrorists. But the terrorists wouldn't be able to take control of planes again, and this would largely stop them bothering.
Much better than all the rubbish that we put up with every time we catch a plane now. Cheaper than invading other countries. It doesn't get revenge, of course, but as I have pointed out - the people who did this are dead already. Our biggest priority is to make it impossible to happen again, and that solution only requires a door with a good lock.
ZFS is already available for BSD and there is a useland implementation for Linux. How much more open do you need?
Its not the more open that you need. You need less open for ZFS to make it part of linux.
Once Apple adopts ZFS as well as BSD it won't be long before it goes to linux.
I do realise that this post sits on a fine line between insightful, troll and flamebait - but bear in mind I'm just commenting on how most good user features on OS X are now also available on Linux. And apple does have a way of making low level stuff useful to the user without a command line. I have little doubt that Time Machine on Lepoard will be reproduced on Linux rapidly, and this will be a good thing. Time Machine doesn't require ZFS (just a modification of HFS was sufficient), but it doesn't hurt it either, and it will prompt everyone to look long and hard at file systems.
So, you don't need more open to get ZFS into the linux kernel. You need apple to do it. This is perhaps a sad commentary on open source that they will end up following when they should be leading, but I'm pretty sure that this is what will happen.
For those that doubt, bookmark this comment and come and talk to me in a year.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh!?!?!
As others have noted, you can just replace the text with "[redacted]", which also removes the length guessing.
Some people have noted some (ridiculous) concerns (like file formats storing changes, which could simply be disabled, and should be caught by the audit procedure afterwards - there is an audit, right?!?). So if you really want the print-out-and-scan-in type of dumbed down method, then:
* save to a bitmap or jpeg. ...no need for the useless media conversion (print/scan).
* black out the text in there
Of course, that only works if you turn "track changes" off in word... :)
Michael.
Most isp's don't give out ip6 addresses
Most home routers don't handle ip6 (apple is a notable exception here)
This is going to be a bit ugly for a while.
Yeah but you need a massive amount of fuel to accelerate to C and then slow down again. About 40,000 times the size of the shuttle's boosters.
Perhaps this is why, despite our best efforts, no other civilization has contacted us. It's simply too hard to bridge the huuuuge gap between the stars.
Yes, if I was going to build a universe with all sorts of playthings in it, I'd probably separate the experiments with enough spacetime that when the odd experiment blows up it doesn't really affect any others around it.
Not that I think that the universe was actually designed, but if it was, that would be how I would do it.
Michael
If it was so easy to make cars twice as efficient, don't you think we would have done that already?
That line was put in for the SUV drivers out there. We have already made cars that are twice as efficient as a SUV.
However, there are whole new classes of hybrids out there that get good fuel efficiency. And some very efficient conventional engines. They just don't make it into many current vehicles. However, if we adopted these vehicles in a wide spread manner then the overall efficiency of the car fleet would probably nearly double.
Responding to an AC - I should feed the trolls....
There are two issues here.
The first - energy. It cant be avoided. To make fuel from CO2 you need energy. Nuclear, wind, solar. It doesn't matter what really, but you will need some input and this technology cannot address that.
The second - why do this. Actually, it makes sense to have a liquid fuel base. Transportation runs on liquid fuel as a store of energy. If we make liquid fuels from solar, for example, we can store solar energy in a useful form for when it is dark.
So without commenting on this particular technology - which everyone has quite rightly stated won't work without considering energy inputs - the general concept of creating a liquid fuel energy store has some merit.
Having said this, I've spent quite a bit of time looking at a rather different liquid fuel store which I think has more promise than hydrocarbons.
That fuel is ammonia.
Whilst its only half as energy dense as diesel, its not that hard to make from electricity. In fact, it can be made by electrolysis fairly easily, and this has been done for nearly 100 years. so its not exactly new technology.
Nor is the ability to use it in a standard internal combustion engine. In fact, it was being used as a fuel for buses over 60 years ago and it works in a standard engine with little modification.
Because its less energy dense than diesel, its a lot easier to make synthetically, but has enough energy per litre to be worthwhile. Whilst having half the range per litre of fuel is an inconvenience, I am sure that we could live pretty much as we do today with vehicle technology that is available today.
We either accept half the range, or build the fuel tanks twice as big, or maybe even make the cars twice as efficient. All of these are easy options really.
I think that we have all gotten so fixated on fossil fuels that we have ignored a really low technology solution here.
Michael
Know what happens to a frog demon when it gets hit by chain lightning?
The same thing that happens to anything else?
LOL. Brilliant paraphrase - I didn't see it coming but loved it.
Points for knowing your lines from the X-men movie and paraphrasing them.
Extra bonus points if you knew this was a Joss Whedon part of the script too.
Michael
I guess that they really should consider getting a mac for this reason - integrated backup - the reason I went to 10.5
Michael
I think that this isn't a good sign for the xbox either. Existing owners feeling that they have obsolete hardware, and a clear advantage to the playstation.
Microsoft has damaged its whole gaming platform by getting into a sparring match with Sony over video formats.
Michael
Even more interesting, from the same web site:
Apple Inc most recent quarter of cash reserves is 18.45 billion. Microsoft has 19 billion.
Surprisingly close.
Except, of course, when it doesn't.
Such as for your networking...
Do you not see what you have really just said?
Michael
Personally I think that you are being a bit paranoid here about your response. It makes you as bad as the group you rally against.
Except maybe for the vampires. To my understanding deadly force is pretty ineffective against them. (Just a friendly tip on that one
Michael
I think that a couple come to mind:
Bishopsgate To quote from wikipedia:
On 24 April 1993 it was the site of a Provisional Irish Republican Army truck bomb, which killed journalist Ed Henty, injured over 40 people and caused £1 billion worth of damage, including the destruction of St Ethelburga's church, and serious damage to Liverpool St. Tube Station. Police had received a coded warning, but were still evacuating the area at the time of the explosion. The insurance payments required were so enormous, that Lloyd's of London almost went bankrupt under the strain, and there was a crisis in the London insurance market. The area had already suffered damage from the Baltic Exchange bombing the year before.
or how about the Baltic exchange bombing the year earlier:
On April 10, 1992 the facade of the Exchange's offices at 30 St Mary Axe was partially demolished, and the rest of the building was extensively damaged in a Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb attack. The bomb was contained in a large white truck and consisted of a fertilizer device wrapped with a detonation cord made from Semtex. It killed three people: Paul Butt, 29, Baltic Exchange employee Thomas Casey, 49, and 15-year old Danielle Carter.
The bomb also caused damage to surrounding buildings, many of which were also badly damaged by the Bishopsgate bombing the following year. The bomb caused £800 million worth of damage, £200 million more than the total damaged caused by the 10,000 explosions that had occurred during the Troubles in Northern Ireland up to that point.
Just because they happened to go off after hours or gave a warning doesnt make it any less of a terrorist incident. Yes, less people died in each of these attacks because of this. But that was partly luck due to the time of day and the speed of the response by the police to evacuate buildings.
As noted in wikipedia, the IRA let off over 10 000 bombs over the course of 30 years, mostly in Ireland, but a significant number in Britain. Trucks with fertiliser that took out whole buildings.
I suspect that the IRA never thought of using a plane as a weapon, and its probably good that they didn't.
Michael
I'd suggest this wikipedia article and look at the terrorist attacks between 1970 and 2001.
Michael
I see your reasoning. You agreed to the war.
By the same reasoning you would accept it as ok when Jihad is declared on America. If you accept war because of threat, then surely you accept it in others?
*But they attacked us first* - No doubt the validation of the war, we aren't the aggressors.
Except that the USA attacked Iraq, and by and large these people weren't planning terrorist actions against the US, or probably much anyone else outside of Iraq.
If you lived in a country, and another country invades you, would it be ok to launch a war on them?
The truth is, war begets war.
If the UK followed the principles you have espoused, and launched an all out assault on terror, they would still be at war in Ireland.
I lived in the UK during some of the bombings - and they were far more frequent than anything that the USA has experienced - and the amazing thing was the amount of restraint that the UK showed.
The contrast between Northern Ireland and Iraq is all the evidence you need as to why war is not the solution to terrorism.
Normally I'd call this my 2c worth, but this would be more like my $2 worth.
Michael
Yes, one of the most funny lines I ever heard was during a resusicitation of a sad young man who, having been discharged out of a psych ward for depression went straight to a train line, and jumped in front of the oncoming train.
The train was a high speed one, and he succeeded in going through the windscreen and ending up with the train driver. Severe injuries to both arms and legs plus possible head and neck injuries, but actually it was a survivable set of injuries. In the end he lost both legs over this, so he really did have something extra to make him depressed after this.
The train was moving so fast that it basically made it all the way down to the next train station before pulling to a stop.
During the initial resuscitation everything was really intense. We couldn't even get a drip in him initially as both arms and legs were out of action, and his neck was in a collar.
After about 30 minutes of really hard work stabilising him, one of the surgical consultants arrived, and the story thus far was told to them as they were looking in the resus bay.
The surgeons immediate comment on hearing the story, without blinking, was:
"So you mean he didn't get booked for travelling without a ticket?"
It was the funniest thing I had heard that week, and absolutely everyone lost it.
Strange as it may sound, it really helped the team spirit and we continued on to salvage what we could out of a bad situation.
Michael
Its not untreatable, and there are a lot of promising new therapies coming online.
However, right here and now, if you know you are going to get the disease in the future, you can:
And cholinesterase blocker drugs will improve cognition in the face of a falling neuron count - improving function although not modifying the disease itself.
Whilst there are many ethical questions to screening tests for diseases you cannot treat, alzheimers does not fit into that category. We all die of something. Its all about getting the most quality time on the planet. Having a test for this would be a good thing.
Please also note that there are already tests that can identify risk of alzheimers, such as for the ApoE epsilon 4 genotype, so the concept of a screening test that helps separate types of demetia already exists.
For a concise reference, see Wikipedia
Michael
Just for the hall of fame:
I always wondered how to do this until I read this thread - its actually pretty easy to look up someone's uid, by checking your relationship with them. Its all in the address bar.
Michael
Any yet here in Australia, we are mostly afraid of those from within - our own indigenous people, the aborigines.
Michael
Great post - very informative.
Seems to me that we need a redirection block (if that is possible) whereby the browser doesn't accept a redirection without a user prompt (unless the redirection is whitelisted).
That would seem to be the way that you could nuke redirection - at the web browser. (I presume that redirection requires the browser to accept a request for redirection)
Michael
I think that you are being a bit harsh there.
Survival figures vary - overall in the USA the five-year survival rate is 71.2 percent for males and 66.9 percent for females. Its better than that in some units. This person's survival after a transplant would be alot higher than this as young people do better on average than older recipiants.
Over 2/3 alive at 5 years, and actually pretty similar at 10 years - bearing in mind that most of bad outcomes are in the first year, and that this is all causes of death, including deaths that were unrelated to the transplant.
The main bad thing about heart transplants is not getting enough hearts.
Having said this, you will see a significant number of people who do not require transplantation due to spontaneous recovery of function.
They still require two major operations - the VAD insertion and the VAD removal - so its not exactly a walk in the park.
And the VAD's such as this can have quite significant complications. The are good but not necessarily the only solution.
Michael
The Moon rotates (relative to the sun), so unless you build these things on a swivel mount at the lunar poles you may have trouble with this idea.
You could put it at a Lagrange point. However, I think its a long way to send a technician when there is a blackout.
Michael
You would be assuming then that the price of oil is fixed?
Michael
You don't need to have good areas near you. You should build the power generators where they are most efficient, and send the power by grid. This applies to Solar, Geothermal, Wind, Tidal. Power losses using High Voltage Direct Current"(HVDC) are about 3% per 1000 kilometers. So if you would have more than a 10% increase power output by putting your renewable power source somewhere else, but that place is 3000 km away, you still can get more usable power at your end by doing so.
Obviously you don't have to do this, and with some forms or energy (eg wind) you may want generators everywhere just to load balance - Somwhere in the world, every day, the wind blows.
But could solar power cells in the desert power air conditioners on the coast? You bet. Could solar power cells in north africa power northern Europe? Certainly.
The technology for power transmission is here. The technology for power storage is not, as yet.
HVDC has the potential to make renewable power sources, such as solar, work. There is no reason why you cant even have solar power feeding the grids of cities during the night. And this is going to be very important when we start to look beyond fossil fuels to power everything.
Michael
I'm not suggesting that we give in to the dark side.
However, I don't see any point punishing the 19 suicide terrorists that flew the planes into things. They are kind of dead now.
So sure, go after the masterminds, if you want. But we haven't really done this. You cant catch them with an army, at least not easily.
Sure, we did get Saddam with an army. Two problems there, however. Firstly he isn't a terrorist. That made him much easier to catch. Secondly, we now have much more terrorist activity because of what we did. Fortunately most of it is still in Iraq. Fortunate for us, less fortunate for the Iraqi's. Sadly, there are more deaths now from this than was ever the case from the death squads that Saddam had. Lets just hope is stays confined to Iraq, because if even 1% of them get to the first world, the amount of terrorist attacks we are experiencing are going to rocket up.
I'm not advocating that we ignore the terrorists. Just that our current responses are mis-directed. Even the governments of the world are starting to see this.
We would have saved alot more lives if we had focussed on dealing with what we can deal with. The solution to terrorism isn't obvious, and it takes time. But it has been done - look at Northern Ireland. It wasn't the army that solved that problem, and increasing firepower there would have been the wrong thing to do. If we had done that, we would still have people driving trucks with fertiliser into the centre of London. Its not as if NY is the only big city that's had a building taken out by terrorists.
Just a little food for thought.
Armies fight other armies. This works in conventional war. Worked in the two world wars. Was the right thing to do. Fails miserably against terrorism.
And none of this applies to safety on planes. All that planes need is a door that locks properly between the pilots cabin and the passengers, and you could probably let terrorists take hand grenades on board without another september 11 happening - sure, planes would crash, they do even without terrorists. But the terrorists wouldn't be able to take control of planes again, and this would largely stop them bothering.
Much better than all the rubbish that we put up with every time we catch a plane now. Cheaper than invading other countries. It doesn't get revenge, of course, but as I have pointed out - the people who did this are dead already. Our biggest priority is to make it impossible to happen again, and that solution only requires a door with a good lock.
Michael
Its not the more open that you need. You need less open for ZFS to make it part of linux.
Once Apple adopts ZFS as well as BSD it won't be long before it goes to linux.
I do realise that this post sits on a fine line between insightful, troll and flamebait - but bear in mind I'm just commenting on how most good user features on OS X are now also available on Linux. And apple does have a way of making low level stuff useful to the user without a command line. I have little doubt that Time Machine on Lepoard will be reproduced on Linux rapidly, and this will be a good thing. Time Machine doesn't require ZFS (just a modification of HFS was sufficient), but it doesn't hurt it either, and it will prompt everyone to look long and hard at file systems.
So, you don't need more open to get ZFS into the linux kernel. You need apple to do it. This is perhaps a sad commentary on open source that they will end up following when they should be leading, but I'm pretty sure that this is what will happen.
For those that doubt, bookmark this comment and come and talk to me in a year.
Michael.