Gefion - Slashdot User

What US Health Care Needs 584

Posted by kdawson on Monday June 21, 2010 @02:15AM from the velluvial-matrix dept.

Medical doctor and writer Atul Gawande gave the commencement address recently at Stanford's School of Medicine. In it he lays out very precisely and in a nonpartisan way what is wrong with the institution of medical care in the US — why it is both so expensive and so ineffective at delivering quality care uniformly across the board. "Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has... enumerated and identified... more than 13,600 diagnoses — 13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we've discovered beneficial remedies... But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we're struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver. ... And then there is the frightening federal debt we will face. By 2025, we will owe more money than our economy produces. One side says war spending is the problem, the other says it's the economic bailout plan. But take both away and you've made almost no difference. Our deficit problem — far and away — is the soaring and seemingly unstoppable cost of health care. ... Like politics, all medicine is local. Medicine requires the successful function of systems — of people and of technologies. Among our most profound difficulties is making them work together. If I want to give my patients the best care possible, not only must I do a good job, but a whole collection of diverse components must somehow mesh effectively. ... This will take science. It will take art. It will take innovation. It will take ambition. And it will take humility. But the fantastic thing is: This is what you get to do."

The Nuts and Bolts of PlayStation 3D 154

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday April 20, 2010 @06:20AM from the wait-till-the-bayonetta-guys-get-ahold-of-this dept.

The Digital Foundry blog took an in-depth look at how Sony is introducing 3D technology to PlayStation 3 games. They give a step-by-step description of how the system generates a 3D frame (or rather, a pair of frames), and the graphical hurdles that need be to overcome to ensure the games look good. The article also discusses some of the subtle effects 3D technology can have on gameplay: "'One interesting thing came through in the immersion aspect was that in the first-person camera view, it felt so much more like being there. Typically when most people play MotorStorm, something like 90 per cent play in the third-person view,' Benson explains. 'As soon as we put the 3D settings in place, the first-person view became a lot more popular, a lot more people were using that view. This could indicate that 3D could perhaps change the standards, if you like.' ... 'We found that in the first-person view the game is giving you all the sorts of cues that you're used to in normal driving: speed perception, the ability to judge distances, things like that. It's far easier to avoid track objects.' The insertion of true stereoscopic 3D into MotorStorm also brings about a new sense of appreciation of the scale and size of the game world and the objects within it."

Sony Refuses To Sanction PS3 "Other OS" Refunds 396

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 16, 2010 @03:34AM from the you-paid-for-what-we-say-you-paid-for dept.

Stoobalou writes "Sony says that it has no intention of reimbursing retailers if they offer users partial refunds for fat PS3s. Last week, the first PS3 user successfully secured a partial refund from Amazon UK as compensation for the removal of the ability to run Linux on the console. The user quoted European law in order to persuade the online retailer that the goods he had bought in good faith were no longer fit for his purposes because of the enforcement of firmware update 3.21, which meant that users who chose to keep the Other OS functionality would lose the ability to play the latest games or connect to the PlayStation Network."

Comment Re:Kind Of Vague (Score 1) 547

by Gefion on Thursday April 15, 2010 @03:07PM (#31861518) Attached to: How Many Hours a Week Can You Program?

Strangely enough, I noticed exactly that "zone" behavior in college a few years back... worked right through the night completely oblivious to the time/space continuum and having a blast until it was the next morning and the first class of the next day started walking in the lab. I stepped away from the desk, decided I didn't have the will or fortitude to master my own obsession, and instead of becoming a lost hermit in a cave writing awesome code (in my own mind), switched careers to engineering and then to the ultimate sell out on /., to technology sales.

A Hyper-Velocity Impact In the Asteroid Belt? 114

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 19, 2010 @11:38AM from the i-played-that-game dept.

astroengine writes "Astronomers have spotted something rather odd in the asteroid belt. It looks like a comet, but it's got a circular orbit, similar to an asteroid. Whether it's an asteroid or a comet, it has a long, comet-like tail, suggesting something is being vented into space. Some experts think it could be a very rare comet/asteroid hybrid being heated by the sun, but there's an even more exciting possibility: It could be the first ever observation of two asteroids colliding in the asteroid belt."

Submission + - Vegetarian spider found

Submitted by

Smivs

on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @03:50PM

Smivs writes: "The BBC are reporting on a spider that dines almost exclusively on plants . It is the first-known predominantly vegetarian spider; all of the other known 40,000 spider species are thought to be mainly carnivorous. Bagheera kiplingi, which is found in Central America and Mexico, bucks the meat-eating trend by feasting on acacia plants. The jumping arachnid, which is 5-6mm long, has developed a taste for the tips of the acacia plants — known as Beltian bodies — which are packed full of protein. To reach this leafy fare, the spider has to evade the attention of ants, which live in the hollow spines of the tree, but the crafty Bagheera kiplingi has found a way to evade the ants and safely reach it's food."

Server Failure Destroys Sidekick Users' Backup Data 304

Posted by timothy on Sunday October 11, 2009 @05:29AM from the oh-well-enough-said dept.

Expanding on the T-Mobile data loss mentioned in an update to an earlier story, reader stigmato writes "T-Mobile's popular Sidekick brand of devices and their users are facing a data loss crisis. According to the T-Mobile community forums, Microsoft/Danger has suffered a catastrophic server failure that has resulted in the loss of all personal data not stored on the phones. They are advising users not to turn off their phones, reset them or let the batteries die in them for fear of losing what data remains on the devices. Microsoft/Danger has stated that they cannot recover the data but are still trying. Already people are clamoring for a lawsuit. Should we continue to trust cloud computing content providers with our personal information? Perhaps they should have used ZFS or btrfs for their servers."

Why AT&T Should Dump the iPhone's Unlimited Data Plan 501

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 10, 2009 @01:40PM from the traffic-shaping-on-the-go dept.

Pickens writes "Farhad Manjoo has a provocative story at Slate asserting that while the iPhone has prompted millions of people to join AT&T, it has also hurt the company's image because all of those customers use their phones too much, and AT&T's network is getting crushed by the demand. The typical smartphone customer consumes about 40 to 80 megabytes of wireless capacity a month, while the typical iPhone customer uses 400 MB a month. As more people sign up, local cell towers get more congested, and your own phone performs worse. He says the problem is that a customer who uses 1 MB a month pays the same amount as someone who uses 1,000 MB, and the solution is tiered pricing. 'Of course, users would cry bloody murder at first,' writes Manjoo. 'I'd call on AT&T to create automatic tiers — everyone would start out on the $10/100 MB plan each month, and your price would go up automatically as your usage passes each 100 MB tier.' He says the key to implementing the policy is transparency, and that the iPhone should have an indicator like the battery bar that changes color as you pass each monthly tier. 'Some iPhone fans will argue that metered pricing would kill the magic of Apple's phone — that sense of liberation one feels at being able to access the Internet from anywhere, at any time. The trouble is, for many of us, AT&T's overcrowded network has already killed that sense, and now our usual dealings with Apple's phone are tinged with annoyance.'"

Comment Re:Why this is a good thing (Score 1) 517

by Gefion on Thursday September 17, 2009 @02:43PM (#29457057) Attached to: Lawyer Demands Jury Stops Googling

As I recall, France has a system, unlike our adversarial process, similar to this where the Judge is the chief determiner of fact and ask questions directly of witnesses, etc. Slightly vaguer memory around I think the lawyers act as agents of the court in helping determine the complete facts of the case with the Judge. A bit different courtroom experience than for our average American litigant, I would presume.

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