Anaphylaxis is a acute state where a few Very Bad Things are happening all at once, and very very quickly (over the course of a few minutes.) The key ideas are:

• The air passages in your throat and lungs swell shut so severely that you cannot physically force air in and out. Within a matter of minutes, you will loose the ability to breathe. Period.
• At the same time, your blood vessels are rapidly dilating, causing a dangerous drop in blood pressure. This is why its commonly called anaphylactic shock, because your blood pressure has dropped to the point that the blood cannot adequately perfuse vital organs, namely your brain and your heart.

So between the fact that you can't get oxygen into your lungs, and the fact that your blood can't deliver oxygen to your brain, and the fact that you feel like shit, and know very well that you're in the middle of a life-threatening emergency... you don't really have the capability to perform tasks requiring concentration and fine motor skills, such as would be required to manually draw up a precise dose of medication into a syringe and inject it into yourself.

An EpiPen or similar device is "necessary" because it is an incredibly simple mechanical device that you can operate even while in extremis. You pop a cap off both ends, and push it against your butt check. Its something that anyone, even children, can be trained to do, and to practice (obviously with a dummy device with no needle or medication). And practice until using it practically becomes a reflex, and not something that requires concentration to perform. Its easy enough to do that, even when overcome with anxiety and decrease oxygenation, people can usually manage to work an EpiPen.

I suspect you probably haven't actually experienced anaphylaxis, if people had time to talk to you and for you to convince them that everything was fine. Anaphylaxis requires rapid administration of epinephrine. So you may have had an allergic reaction, maybe even a bad one, but unless you actually experienced the sensation of being unable to force air in and out of your lungs, even when trying with all your might, you haven't truly experienced anaphylaxis. I'd also take issue with your assumption that administering an EpiPen is a "high risk emergency procedure." I suppose there is some risk of local infection, but I'm not aware of any documented cases of infection, at least anything requiring treatment, as a result of an EpiPen. (There are other risks associated with Epi administration, but infection is effectively not one of them.)

So some sort of autoinjector device, be it an EpiPen or a similar competitor, is effectively required to be able to safely manage anaphylaxis.

You don't understand, because you were not BORN MOBILE!

Many cases? There's a small handful of anomalies whose stories get retold because they are so bizarre... but that's just statistical noise compared to the billions of humans who have died, and stayed that way.

Death is something that happens with a great deal of regularity, there's actually quite a bit of research done to correlate various medical interventions with survival rates... Obviously assessment techniques and record keeping have both improved considerably since the Civil War days. I don't think what you're citing here is a substitute for actual evidence-based research.

There's also a growing body of research, conducting much more recently than the Civil War, which does indicate clear signs that a patient is in fact dead and damn near 100% unlikely to "wake up."

While I'm sure this is a concern for some people, I'm questioning whether its a realistic concern. I have some experience in the health care field (as a paramedic), and infrequently but regularly find myself working on people close-to-death, where organ procurement is a concern. I can't say that I've ever witnessed, or even heard, of any inkling of an idea that we wouldn't put forth our full efforts to save the patient in front of us in favor of potentially harvesting organs. I'm also not sure that there's any difference in care that would be rendered even if, hypothetically, we were trying to preserve donatable organs without trying to resuscitate the actual patient. Furthermore, my understanding is that there's a great deal of opaque bureaucracy between an organ donor, and the eventual recipient. It's not like an ER doc can just think, "gee, there's a guy in the bed upstairs who can really use a new kidney, might as well swap out this one while I'm here." Rather, there's a rather involved (though efficient) process by which an independent organization is notified of available organs, and matches them to a recipient, who will likely be in a different hospital quite a distance away. I don't think there's usually much contact between personnel at the "donor site" and the "recipient site."

Maps present information by region, not be age/generation. So of course the electoral college results map will appear to show support based on geography rather than by other factors.

In the USA, at least, tax-payer funded municipal services cover the overwhelming majority of the country, for both fire and ambulance service. However, most tax-payer funded ambulance services will still bill people for individual ambulance calls, even though they are tax payer funded. The reason is at least partly because the tax income simply does not cover the cost of running these services. As a paramedic, I can tell you that on any one call, we may go through a few hundred dollars of disposable equipment - most of that money is in medications, but also EKG and defibrillation supplies, IV supplies, airway management supplies, etc. The tax income simply does not cover that, so we bill separately.

You may disagree that this is an appropriate thing to do - but these services do take money to run. The money has to come from somewhere. So we can either raise taxes, or bill for actual services rendered, or both. Most of the country does both right now, seeing it as the best compromise.

On the fire side - $900/year isn't too outrageous, necessarily. If you had a taxpayer funded department, your taxes would increase somewhere in the neighborhood of $900/year. Again, the money has to come from somewhere. Municipalities basically have 3 options:

1. 1. Hire full-time, career firefighters.
2. 2. Rely on a volunteer fire department
3. 3. Contract to a private service

Most of the country does either 1 or 2 (or a combination career-volunteer department). In both cases, they need to still buy all the fire trucks, equipment, training, insurance, etc. None of that is cheap, and there is absolutely on-going maintenance costs that are quite steep. The difference between 1 and 2 is that 2 saves you the cost of salary and benefits for employees. The downside is you're going to have much less reliable response times, experience levels of responders, etc. You get what you pay for.

Actually, just yes. Speaking as a paramedic, a PE (or really anything which causes difficulty breathing lasting longer than a few seconds) is a completely legitimate reason to ask for an ambulance. That clot could move at any time, making it impossible to breath. And especially in the case described in this story, where the patient was suffering enough that he couldn't maintain full control of a vehicle without assistance - choosing to drive yourself is just silly. Just go ahead and give us a call, we don't mind. Or, at a minimum, get someone else to drive you.

Actually, no. Now, it sounds like you ended up in a shitty hospital that was poorly staffed or something - but in reality, the hospital staff triages and sees patients in order of severity, regardless of whether you arrived by ambulance or walked in. In fact, a lot of ne'er-do-wells seem to share your belief that an ambulance will get you seen faster, and thus call us for silly reasons that do not need an ambulance. And while we are more than happy to give you a ride to the hospital (non-emergent, without using the lights and sirens) - we'll drop you off in the waiting room, where you'll get triaged along with everyone else.

I agree that these factors mean that the test cannot be reliably used to just identify potentially dangerous parts of code. But I think the results could reveal some interesting information about the programmer.

As you said - if we have data showing that a developer struggled with a particular area of code, but that area ends up being of high quality - then we can see that the developer likely has a great attention to detail, and is being thorough with his design and testing. That's good information to know about a developer.

Another possibility is that the developer moved quickly through the area of code without stressing. But the code quality ends up being crap. This tells us that the developer is likely sloppy, lazy or just not very good. This may help identify an opportunity to coach a newer developer - or just to identify developers who we can't trust.

Now, I'd agree that in terms of yielding actionable data - this isn't as valuable or useful as if we were able to simply get a reliable indication of code quality. But its still something interesting to consider.

Paramedic here. We still use VHF pagers. They are simple, but reliable and rock solid. They work pretty much everywhere, and a charge will last for days. We have a complementary iPhone/Android app that will receive info when we get dispatched, but that requires an internet connection, and a series of interfaced software products to all work correctly. The pagers are maintained as a fail safe - all they require is a radio and a means of generating the tones required to signal the pager to open the squelch. In a disaster scenario, the necessary equipment can be run reliably off batteries and generators. That's just not the case with smartphone apps right now.

Hopefully Bennett Hasselton will add his insight and clarification promptly.

I post to Slashdot maybe one every few years... and it still can't convert line breaks to <br>'s?

On the occasions when Linus has responded to criticism that he's an... asshole? It basically seems like he says, "1) This is my sandbox and I can do what I want. 2) This communication style solves more problems than it causes." Linus may be correct on both these points. Linus is certainly an important enough person on an important enough project to probably be able to get away with some stuff that others might not. And its often pointed out that the people on the receiving end of these kinds of rants "had it coming" for one reason or another. That may be true as well. On the other side of the coin, though - I see participating in an open source project as a kind of volunteer work. What you stand to get out of it are mainly intangible rewards. And, if you reach a point where the stress and BS you have to put up with as a volunteer outweighs the intangible rewards, then by all means, step away and do something else with your time. In my own life, I was formerly a volunteer for a certain project (not software-related). Some parallels could be drawn between our head honcho, and Linus. Our guy had years of experience. To be fair and objective, the guy was smart, a hard worker, and his heart was in the right place. A lot of stuff got done, that wouldn't have otherwise gotten done if not for him. The guy, however, was simply an asshole. Just rude, arrogant, insensitive. I worked with/for/near/around this guy for a few years, because I believed in what we were doing, and was trying to find some admirable or redeeming qualities about this person. But, after a few years, it just got to the point where I grew tired of trying to deal with this guy, on top of my actual responsibilities, which were difficult and time consuming in and of themselves. So I walked away from this organization, which was a painful and frustrating decision because there were certainly things about it that I did enjoy and get a lot out of. But, it just wasn't worth being treated poorly by an asshole. Now its entirely possible that I should have grown a thicker skin, or that the asshole was smarter/better/righter than me and I somehow "deserved what I got" or whatever. But, fuck it, eventually I realized, 99% of my interactions with my fellow human beings were more pleasant than dealing with this guy. So, I walked away, and sunk my efforts into something similarly rewarding but without a bunch of intolerable BS. So if that's all that's going on here... then godspeed.