There was a popular article last week discussing how doctors were ignoring evidence and logic because so-called experts in their fields hadn't instructed them what to do yet. They refused to think for themselves.
The idea that a doctor only used this form because an expert told them to, and didn't think about it for even a minute, does not fill me with confidence. Why would this thought process be confined to one area?
"I'm a doc. I have no idea of the legality of such "contracts", but it doesn't matter - such a practice is completely unethical.
"Nor is it going to help a physician when a patient makes a complaint to your medical licensing board.
"If you're doing your job as a physician you aren't a "provider" to "consumers" - you are hopefully a professional working in the best interests of a patient or population of patients regardless of your own personal interests - this horseshit obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with that goal."
What action should I take to get this clause removed? I don't care if they share the tapes with the police when they have a warrant. I do care if they end up on the Internet. I want to walk to my apartment, not have my life broadcast to strangers.
Hopefully more people will become educated on the matter and refuse to be a patient of such physicians and dentists.
http://lagunaskincenter.com/RegistrationForms.aspx
I agree to the mutual privacy agreement and authorize the office to retain full copyrights to any communication or online posts related to my treatment and services.
http://www.academylaser.com/user/PatientSignInForms.pdf
This doctor demands a five year gag order on all his patients!
http://www.rejuvalife.md/forms/patientreg09.pdf
This doctor seems to imply he would try to find loopholes in HIPAA to use your records for marketing if not for you agreeing to keep quiet on Yelp.
"The agreement is based on a template supplied by an organization called Medical Justice, and similar agreements have been popping up in doctors' offices across the country. As we dug into the story, we began to wonder if Medical Justice was taking advantage of medical professionals' lack of sophistication about the law. Doctors and dentists are understandably worried about damage to their reputations from negative reviews, and medical privacy laws do make it tricky for them to respond when their work is unfairly maligned. Although Dr. Cirka declined repeated requests for an interview, his emailed statements (and the statements of his staff) suggest he doesn't understand the terms of the agreement he asks his patients to sign."
Doctors aren't lawyers. Most just want to stay in business and do their job without getting sued. That's where organizations like Medical Justice come in. Attacking the individual Doctors on an issue like this does no good. Because they weren't the people who thought up the chain of logic that led to the creation of this form. So they can't argue the pros and cons of its existence. Meaning they might agree with every counter point you present but still stick with the agreement because they are "trusting experts"
If Ars or anyone else wants to really make a difference in this arena they need to engage those "experts" and take the accusations to that organization (they clearly tried to do this, my issue is with their attack on the doctor)
The problem with the author calling-out an individual doctor is it makes a case for the agreement. By singling out one doctor and attacking him for an industry practice it says "patients can be irrational online" which will make doctors fear the online world more (and hence give more credence to organizations that claim the best way to deal with patients is to censor them)
Maybe EFF could do some SEO efforts to get on google's front page talking about what they really mean to balance everybody trying to sell them.
I must resist the temptation to anthropomorphize it. No, I don't feel sad for the poor rover stuck in a cold sandtrap on another planet, cruelly abandoned after years of faithful service. I do not feel sorry for it. I know that it's no more alive than the computer on which I'm typing this, that it's just a few random bits of electronics and some electric motors.
And yet... sob
How is this an advance on looking at a conventionally numbered ruler (with a similar bracket to touch the top of the head) and writing down the number? It's technological and presumably expensive, but it isn't delivering any discernible benefit that I can see. Measuring height via computer vision + Gray code would be very useful in security applications where you want to log biometric information for a large number of people efficiently (camera + abstract-looking wall design in an access corridor or at a security checkpoint), but if you're paying a human to take the measurement you might as well use a scale that's easily human-readable (ie at a glance). I hope the doctor's scale was at least using bluetooth or similar to automatically update the patient's digital record...but I wouldn't bet on it.
(it's from a few visualizations of permutations I did a while ago: http://billmill.org/permvis.html )
http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Mod_skypopen_Skype_Endpoint_...
... which is good until Skype starts trying to detect this kind of stuff.
By these standards, the much derided IE specific features were a great thing for the web. Welcome to HTML 5, where "Best viewed in XXX" is the old new rage. I thought we'd left this behind in 2005?
I don't think it's been touched since sometime in 2008, but it's still fun. (Though notably more primitive)
Edit: The website for it is rather sparse and stale, but drop us a note at 'support' at the above domain name and it'll get to the original author of the code.
Edit: Also, not trying to steal your thunder or anything, what you're doing is different and new, what I linked is quite unmaintained. Just pointing out some similar work who's author I know well, and who might be fun to have chat with about it.
I think i'll stick to canvas but definetly a neat hack.
There's no such thing as a perfect design. Most experienced computer engineers I talked to agreed that absorbing this simple lesson constitutes the first step in learning how to get machines out the door. Often, they said, it is the most talented engineers who have the hardest time learning when to stop striving for perfection. West was the voice from the cave, supplying that information: “Ok. It's right. Ship it.”
He would bind his team with mutual trust, he had decided. When a person signed up to do a job for him, he would in turn trust that person to accomplish it; he wouldn't break it down into little pieces and make the task small, easy and dull.
With Tom, it's the last two percent that counts. What I now call ‘the ability to ship product' " to get it out the door.
That's great insight into how to motivate people to do their best.
I read the book The Soul of a New Machine many years ago, but already long enough after it was published that the technology sounded a bit primitive. It was a grippingly good read, a glimpse into how different personalities mesh to solve a tough technical problem.
Around 1998, West started a new internet focused business unit called THiiNLINE. One of the unit's products was an embedded Linux based wireless router for the home. As a lucky beta-tester, I enjoyed wireless laptop access to my dialup internet connection well before such devices became common. At the time, THiiNLINE was considered a crazy venture. The past thirteen years have proven that West's vision was on the right track.
I had the extreme good fortune of having a Microkid as my mentor for seven years. I learned a ton from him and like to think that I picked up some of the "The Soul of a New Machine" ethos. For that, I will always be thankful to Mr. West and the Eagle group he created.
RIP, Mr. West.
Sure, they're making huge profits right now. But prices should reflect future earnings potential, and what are they going to be doing in ten, twenty, thirty years from now?
They were the first folks to stumble across the secret of making addictive social games. But I see these as a fad, not a long-term trend. There's only so many variations on [ * ]ville you can play before you get bored of it, and only so many times you can be talked into spamming all your friends.
Sure, maybe they'll keep on adapting and having hit after hit. But what are their real advantages? A few programmers who sort-of know how to make a sort-of good game, and some rather nebulous slice of social graph. Compare to some game publishers who have a lot of experience in making many profitable games instead of a little bit of experience making a couple of variations on just one:
Activision/Blizzard: $12.87 billion
Electronic Arts: $7.75 billion
Take Two Interactive: $1.38 billion
If it's 1967, you might want to buy RCA Records, but you don't want to buy The Monkees. The record company can keep on adapting to changing fashions and business conditions and will keep putting out hits for decades to come, but the band will have a brief revenue spike and then vanish.
I'm only interested in trying it with about $200.
This would be my first time trading. Does anyone know which service would be good for this? ETrade?
I want to criticize the high valuation, but in fairness I don't know enough about the company or industry.
[1] http://blogs.forbes.com/afontevecchia/2011/03/02/zynga-revea...
"Thrudb is a set of simple services built on top of the Apache Thrift framework that provides indexing and document storage services for building and scaling websites. Its purpose is to offer web developers flexible, fast and easy-to-use services that can enhance or replace traditional data storage and access layers."
No long under development though.
2. You don't provide benchmarks.
If your solution is really so fast, then you must be making benchmarks continuously. How else would you know if you are improving and whether you are actually fast or just faster than [a tree | clouds | a ricecorn].
So either you lie about your performance or you choose to purposefully hide your incredibly well performing benchmarks.
Which explanation do you prefer?
ARM is generally a lot more sane than x86 when it comes to writing close to the metal, although there's a lot less info about stuff out there. Often reading the manuals for the chipset will get you what you want though..
So, on a related note, would you be suitably impressed with a resume if it lists that it has a bare bones file system / shell implemented ?
Is anyone aware of a similar site for compilers? Or anything else? I've never liked wikipedia's wiki books, their coverage can be spotty, but I like that idea too.
A reporter was trying to interview my mother about my sister. My mother said, "It's not that we don't think you're important but ...". This wound up in print as, "It's...that we dont think you're important."
Remember, it is the job of the media to get a compelling story out there. They don't care about the truth. They don't care about informing people. They want to create interesting stories that suck people in, and punish people who fail to give them access to information that they wanted (whether or not they had any right to pry).
When we see subjects that we understand misreported in the media, we invariably cringe. When you see subjects you don't know anything about reported in the media, your default assumption should be that if you knew the subject better, you would cringe, and the only reason you're not cringing is that you don't know better.
“If I did not have the background that I had, I don't think I would have had the guts to say what I said about Stuxnet,” Langner says now, finishing his second glass of wine during lunch at a Viennese restaurant in Hamburg. Langner studied psychology and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Berlin. He fell into control systems by accident and found that he loved the fiendishly painstaking work. Every control system is like a bespoke suit made from one-of-a-kind custom fabric"tailored precisely for the conditions of that industrial installation and no other. In a profession whose members have a reputation for being unable to wear matching socks, Langner is a bona fide dandy. “My preference is for Dolce & Gabbana shoes,” he says. “Did you notice, yesterday I wore ostrich?” Langner loves the attention that his theories have gotten. He is waiting, he says, for “an American chick,” preferably a blonde, and preferably from California, to notice his blog and ask him out.
This looks bad in isolation. But the piece is enormous; more than 60 grafs long. Langner's complaint makes it sound like a hit piece. It's not; it's simply using those (apparently misleading) details to add some color. The article is ostensibly not even about Langner, even though it quotes and discusses him warmly throughout.
I don't want to sound like I'm defending bad reporting, but the VF articles has substantive concerns about Langner as well --- for instance, his prevalence as a authoritative source for lots of other journalism about Stuxnet --- and one way to dodge that is to redirect attention to stupid stuff like what kinds of shoes he really prefers.
It is simply not possible to appreciate the sheer awfulness of mainstream media reporting until someone has actually reported on you. It is so much worse than you think."
-Eliezer Yudkowsky, http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/predictible-fakers.htm...
Never count on a reporter to act in good faith any more than you would count on that from the police or from a lawyer. They will disembowel you.
This advice is much less applicable, happily, to technical publications in your field, or to 'citizen journalism,' but you still have to be cautious there. The major difference is that with technical publications or citizen journalists, you may have some actual leverage, and they may have some idea what you're talking about. You have no leverage, as a specialist, over the NYT, so they don't care what harm they do to you - what the heck are you going to do to them? And the average reporter for, say, Fox News, doesn't know what the heck, say, Bruce Schneier is talking about. They are worse than laypeople, actually, because they have an incentive to misunderstand.
Don't talk to the mainstream media. They will lie to you, and they are not your friends.
The only US states that require all-party notification of a conversation being recorded are:
California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington.
All other states allow you to record a conversation without notifying the other party provided you are party to the conversation. If the conversation crosses state lines, Federal law applies which only requires one party to know the call is being recorded.
A PR rep being in the room during the interviews never would have let this get out of hand in the way that it did, and they would have framed the interview better to suit the tech company. This is just a case of an unsophisticated tech guy being trodden on by an experienced journalist in order to suit the journalists goals for the story.
PR might be 90% useless now, but there are good PR people out there who could have helped in this case.
Btw I am a huge fan of VF but I thought the Stuxnet piece was weak. I am surprised that some of the more experienced tech journalists are not all over the story releasing articles, books, touring lecture, etc. the mainstream mass market would eat up this story in a hurry (movie deal!)
http://www.amazon.com/Mediasmart-How-Handle-Reporter/dp/0964...
by a reporter whose work I used to see on my local TV news, explaining how subjects of news stories can turn the tables on reporters by understanding more of the news business. The tips in the book are frank and useful--including sometimes declining to be interviewed.
Their fact checking is completely useless. They don't check any of the most important or fundamental claims, only the very trivial. Editors apparently don't care or are incompetent.
In the case I'm intimately familiar with the reporter made no claim or attempt at impartiality. He was actively hostile and came close to threatening. He was on a witch hunt and continued his vendetta over a couple years of trumped up articles until he realized no one else bought his bullshit.
I pray for the day when shitty journalists can't hide under the umbrella of a "respected" brand like Vanity Fair. It's too much power with no effective checks or balances.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/stuxnet-2...
And its HN submission (1 comment):
When I was in Boy Scouts and we visited a police station (which was trying to convince us that crime does not pay), they went to great lengths to explain how radio, and the ability for all of the officers to communicate, gave them a tremendous advantage over the criminal who was attempting to flee a crime scene.
Flash forward to Napster and complaints at how difficult it was for one law enforcement officer (or agency) to police a band of criminals with out-of-band communications infrastructure.
Then forward slightly further to Gulf War 1 where the key targets in the opening salvos were the communication hubs and infrastructure which enabled Iraqi forces to communicate both with headquarters and with each other. With communication out Iraqi units that were, on paper, 'stronger' than the coalition forces deployed against them in parts of the battlefield surrendering, in part because they weren't aware of supporting units nearby.
Finally Egypt, Libya, and Yemen are good examples of communication infrastructure favoring a disperse group in their efforts to overthrow an established presence.
It is no surprise that folks who have used communications superiority as an advantage against their adversaries are keenly aware of the disadvantage of not having the communication 'high ground.' Those folks will work tirelessly both in the open and underground to give themselves the advantage.
It's incredible to think of the value that has been added to so many companies for the price of a single large series A.
Now it seems that YC has learned empirically that determination is the more important predictor of success (see intro to The Anatomy of Determination).
A concern for YC might be: with this new emphasis on determination, it might become the next thing applicants try to "fake" to get accepted?
Damn, that's a good return, if you assume all positions were held and an 8% stake taken then that should yield $240 million, or an ROI (CAGR) of 116% since 2005. (This assumes the 5 million was all invested in 2005).
Anyone have a good metric to factor dilution from future rounds?
It's crucial to look at the founders, because that's what does the work. Just as Catmull says of movies, a successful startup is made of many creative ideas; also, many implementation challenges, flexible adaptations and tests of determination that is very hard for one person to handle.
A startup is an on-going process, not a one-off event.
The total value of YC companies is $3 billion. While, the total amount invested by YC is $5 million.
Very impressive results when you consider that YC takes about a 6% stake for its initial investment. Congratulations to all involved.
As YC funds more companies, the value of the "We're a YC company" branding diminishes faster. Whatsmore, there's some curious economics in how YC companies do business with other YC companies. If the bulk of customers of YC companies are other YC companies, then you what you have is basically just a pyramid scheme. It's also kinda lame to hear Paul Graham play favorites and talk about how great Sam Altman is all the time.
Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System (seminal paper which won various awards):
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...
That link actually takes you to a complete list of Lamport's works.
The first link is the paper which constituted the proof of the theorem, the other two provide more context and background.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.20....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem
http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/brewers-cap-theor...
link: http://www.ece.ucsb.edu/Faculty/Rabiner/ece259/Reprints/tuto...
I'll also add "Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem" (by Sandberg et al.) - fantastic read.
* The stable marriage problem (D. Gale and L. S. Shapley: "College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage", American Mathematical Monthly 69, 9-14, 1962.), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem
* Knuth's Dancing Links algorithm http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/papers/dancing-color...
Paper and Journal article list is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
Its one of the most important theories of the modern science age of the 19th/20th century
I think if WebP offered useful features JPEG doesn't, like alpha channel support or support for higher bit depths or useful new metadata, that'd at least justify it, and people would be creating new demos that showed off the technology. We saw this with the uptake of support for PNG after people started showing how PNG's support for alpha transparency made it possible to do interesting things that you couldn't with JPEG/GIF. WebP has no such compelling feature.
The test images we put together turned into nearly unrecognizable blocky messes when compressed with JPEG, if they fit at all. The same test images, compressed with WebP, looked surprisingly decent and were quite usable.
That said, if our photo storage budget had been 10 kbytes instead of 5 kbytes, JPEG would have been fine for the project's purposes. It was that last little squeeze that really killed JPEG.
* Jpeg has some fancy features not seen in WebP (4:4:4 YCrCb, CMYK support, etc)
* Jpeg's compression is "good enough", and nobody cares about diskspace (cited Facebook 85%, Flickr 96% quality level)
* If WebP, why not Jpeg XR?
* WebP has no alpha channel support!
* There are "low hanging fruit" in Jpeg optimization such as progressive encoding.
Each of these points in isolation may be valid, but together they give me the feeling that he was arguing surgically. He said Jpeg is already very good, Jpeg is actually bad but there are low hanging fruit to improve it, and whether Jpeg is good or bad doesn't matter because nobody cares.
Personally I feel the "75% is already very good" argument to be the weakness. Facebook pictures are very poor compared to the original, and if diskspace is not a problem they would have increased it to 96% like Flickr.
I hope Mozilla supports the format and let the users decide.
Case in point: the first image of a landscape has two major noticeable artifacts: the shadow of the mountain (mid-right) reveals the blocky compression of WebP. Second, the compression algorithm tends to smooth out a lot of detail. Observe how the vegetation gets mushed out. The clouds as well (mostly on the top left).
Great for video, not so much for images (from the gallery above anyway). I would like to see a better comparison with WebP vs JPEG but compressed to about the same file size and with a RAW source (to remove any compression bias).
But DNF does look like it's going to be really good, and I'm actually looking forward to play through it. The 2k (publishers) guys were at Gadget Show Live (a 100,000+ consumer event in the UK that I'm involved with), and spent quite a bit of time talking about the game there, as well as trying out the demo. (They claim that a colleague of mine and I were the first people not related to the developement to play it in the UK, which I'm slightly proud of).
It's obvious the amount of passion that's gone into the game, and it's obvious how hard they've tried not to let down the fans who have been waiting for so long. And, most importantly, it's obvious that they weren't afraid of making a FUN fps title, not a game that does it's best to make you think you're in a real-life situation.
Really hope it's as commercially successful as it deserves to be, and as I think it will be.
edit: To give an idea of how it will live up to people's hopes, here is a picture of Paul (my colleague mentioned above) http://lockerz.com/s/91561838 playing the game. He's 39 and doesn't have a huge amount of time for playing games now days. He was at E3 in 1999 (was it 98?) when they first demo'd DNF, and has been waiting since then - when I told him he could play it at Gadget Show Live, he was like a kid on Christmas morning. And he absolutely loved it, was blown away by how much fun it was. (Side note, if anyone reading this went to the event, you might recognise Paul as being the presenter from the main stage in the Game Zone hall =].)
This includes the space race, from initial challenge to actually landing on the moon.
Most game manufacturers don't tout cohesive as a feature... it's supposed to be a given. I hope I'm wrong, but given what I know about the development of DNF, I can't help but suspect that the reason they are mentioning it so loudly is because it isn't.
Seriously, this looks great. I am afraid I am no longer the target audience but I'll probably try it for nostalgia's sake. I have the strangest feeling that - like rewatching Star Blazers now that I'm not ten - it's not going to hold up that well, but if anyone can do it right, it's Gearbox.
It's also disappointing they didn't accomplished a stunning graphic after more than 12 years of development.
Regardless of the graphic it's almost the only game of his kind and I still expecting a good gameplay with many jokes.
Hail to the king baby.
Sorry to be blunt, but word clouds are just ε over meaningless.
Plain and simple, would you want to create a startup and someone make tshirts and make money off your brand or logo?
Can you patent icons? Aren't US software patents business process patents? I've read some number of software patents and can't remember a single one patenting things like a 4x4 grid of icons or colorful square pictures with rounded corners. Didn't Lotus v. Borland set precedent for a lack of look and feel copyright? [1]
Said another way, WTF?
[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Lotus_Softwar...
And, quite frankly, I would really prefer a vanilla Android interface to this.
http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23theheist
Would be interesting to see the impact on their sales.
Yes, Wikipedia is a remarkable feat, but let's take a deep breath before we elevate it to the same status as the Great Wall of China, Notre Dame, Taj Mahal and Angkor Vat.
And think the idea through: If Wikipedia can get on, is there any reason, what so ever, that Facebook can't? And hasn't the world heritage list lost all meaning by then?
(i) "represents a masterpiece of human creative genius"
(ii) "exhibits an important interchange of human values, over a span of time, or within a cultural area of the world, on developments in architecture or technology, monumental arts, town-planning, or landscape design"
(iii) "bears a unique or exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or which has disappeared"
(iv) "is an outstanding example of a type of building, architectural, or technological ensemble or landscape which illustrates a significant stage in human history"
(v) "is an outstanding example of a traditional human settlement, land-use, or sea-use which is representative of a culture, or human interaction with the environment especially when it has become vulnerable under the impact of irreversible change"
(vi) "is directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs, with artistic and literary works of outstanding universal significance"
I'd say Wikipedia passes all of these to an extent, although maybe it is a bit too soon to say so. Who are we to say that our current period is a "significant stage in human history"?
What, pray tell, is the point of any of this?
I get 'UNESCO' for, say, nice places that deserve recognition and protection, but... a web site? Are they going to cough up cash? Whose cash?
Although "need for protection" is not listed in the criteria for selection according to UNESCO's website (http://whc.unesco.org/en/criteria), the "Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage" which established the concept of World Heritage Sites specifically states that World Heritage Sites are to be used for protection of threatened sites. Page 1 of http://whc.unesco.org/archive/convention-en.pdf states it all quite clearly.
Wouldn't that mean that it couldn't be changed.... ;-)
EDIT: Downvoted for this! It stands to reason that a true measure of greatness comes with time. This is the reason that the 'pontification' process has these checks of time. To let reason and proper debate hold sway over other considerations.
Granted, it's always alarming to learn when companies either store plain-text or store reversible encrypted passwords where they hold the key, but it's not surprising. Sometimes, usability, convenience and customer experience are more important than IT security, thus mgt decides that these things are acceptable risks.
1) In my experience, it's often harder to set your app up to use reversible encryption instead of hashes, especially if you're using an existing authentication library. In a case like this, I would assume the path of least resistance is more likely.
2) Storing passwords as reversible encryption is almost as bad, as the person who compromises your security would likely have access to your application code (and therefore the key to decrypt the passwords), and the negligible benefits of being able to retrieve passwords are not usually worth the potential liability.
From a customer service standpoint, I don't plan to ever let people know I am doing this because they will try to call me out on being evil about it.
Can we make one?
1: https://twitter.com/#!/igrigorik/status/69120340063825920
This just means the password is easily convertible to plaintext - either because it's stored in plaintext or because it's encrypted and their support folks are able to decrypt it. The former is completely indefensible, the latter is "just" very very bad.
All you did was talk to a Newegg rep, you said he mis understood you and email you your Newegg password. What evidence do you have and in what logical reasoning does that lead to Newegg storing passwords in plain text?
He could have used your info and looked it up in the Newegg system, probably clicked a check box that says "email password" the system could have decrypted it and sent you the password.
I've seen many sites that actually send you your username and current passwords if you forgot. It doesn't mean that when it's stored on their system it was not encrypted.
Edit: to clarify, my whole point is in reference to how the password is stored in plain text.
c'mon. really?
no. put my vote in the box marked 'plain text.'
m3mnoch.
If they leak my info, then I'll care.
Of course, Newegg should adopt a strong hash policy since they've introduced a single point of failure.
There are many available solutions that make it easy to have a different, secure password for each site you visit.