This is why we are upset at Apple. They should not be writing it down somewhere. While the subpoena itself may not be considered an invasion of privacy, the act of Apple recording your location (which is now being subpoenaed) most certainly is. Is this hard to grasp?

Actually, you have things reversed here. The fine *was* for releasing a butt-load of patient records, not for refusing to release patient records. What happened is that they refused for a while, then got snarky and sent them like 50 boxes of thousands of records, with the few records originally requested buried in the thousands of other records just to make life difficult for the agency requesting the original documents. I assume that the agency requesting the original documents was authorized to receive those original documents, but not authorized to receive the thousands of others that came along with them (I work in healthcare research -- trust me, getting approval to receive personally identifiable information is extremely non-trivial, they would have only been authorized to receive those documents originally requested). Bam! -- massive HIPPA fine due to the thousands of extra patient records that were released.

The original slashdot submission tried to spin it as a fine for refusing to release records, but if you RTFA you will see that it was quite the opposite. If you repeatedly obstruct an agency that can fine you, then give them the finger by burying them in 50-some boxes of unrequested documents in violation of HIPPA, you sure as Hell are going to be fined for releasing those documents.

I sense a lot of hate and rant here. Let me try to address some of these issues based on my own experience:

I'm a biophysicist, did a 3-year post-doc in a biology lab, and have been doing disease-related data analysis professionally for the past several years. I can attest that there are a lot of off-the-shelf solutions that ALMOST, but not quite, fit whatever problem you are tackling. If I wasn't a good programmer, I simply would not be able to get any good data analysis done, since the tools to do it properly often don't exist and I have to write them myself (or modify existing ones if I have source code). And file format conversions, parsing, and merging of data are a never ending nightmare, especially with public data sets.

Your uncle does have a point here. While I wouldn't necessarily say that biologists need to be able to program -- we can't all be good at all things -- it is definitely advantageous to have someone on staff with a firm grasp of both biology and programming, either to serve as an interpreter between the hardcore biologists (Biology department) and the hardcore programmers (CS, Engineering), or to code up solutions themselves. Biologist generally don't have the programming background to produce useful programs, and CS/engineers generally don't have enough biological background to produce useful programs (not applicable to real-world noisy data and biological constraints). You need someone with good knowledge of both.

I used to use recursion in C as well, until I fed an algorithm too large of a problem and it segfaulted. Why? Because it recursed too deep and blew stack. The correct solution is indeed to implement it as a loop and use your own allocated array for your recursion stack, so that you will never run out of "stack" during your recursion. I still often prototype an algorithm with recursive functions on small test data to make sure it works correctly, but then I go and reimplement it as a loop so that it can then be used on arbitrarily large/complex data (and verify my results against the simpler to understand/debug recursive function version). Again, your uncle has a valid point here.

He may be stuck using his old archaic technology, but he does have 40 years of experience in his field, and along the way has encountered and learned from many pitfalls. Don't discount his rants (at least not all of them) just because he's using old stuff. A lot of it is still relevant today, you just may not have experienced the reasons for why it is relevant yet.

Matlab and FORTRAN both have their strengths and weaknesses, just as any other language. I've not used Matlab much, since it costs money, and academic labs generally don't have much of that. I've not used FORTRAN much (other than to compile/fix old scientific code), because until the early 2000's or so, there wasn't a free FORTRAN compiler that supported anything beyond F77 (I believe F90 introduced dynamic memory allocation?), and by that time I was already proficient in C. So, both of these languages may have less uptake/use than they "should" due to monetary factors.

That said, I know a lot of mathematicians who do great stuff in Matlab. It has a lot of libraries that do a lot of powerful nice stuff, which can greatly reduce development time. FORTRAN has a *ton* of well vetted high performance scientific and mathematical libraries out there. Don't trash a language just because it's not your favorite or it's old. Often times they still work very well if used for the right purposes. Those purposes just may not be the same as your current purposes/applications.

"and we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere... and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys."

Mice. Microsoft has always (I'm thinking all the way back to my first IBM compatible in 1993) made very good mice. Especially ergonomic mice. While not a gaming mouse, my Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 is the most comfortable mouse for office use that I have ever used, and has one Hell of a good battery life. In the early days of laser gaming mice, I bought one that had higher precision and better response times than the then-current Logitech offerings. Logitech makes fine mice now too (I currently have a very comfortable MX500 gaming mouse at home), but it seems like historically they tended to lag a little bit behind Microsoft.

Microsoft mice are just about the only product they make that I have always had a positive opinion of, and still do. Their keyboards generally aren't too bad (damn Windows keys, give me back my 101 !!), but it's still mice I think of when it comes to a product I can respect out of Microsoft. I love to bash Microsoft as much as the next guy here, but I have to give them credit for their mice.

Um, wouldn't that be openSUSE?

I'm not so sure the HIPAA fine is in regard to denying patients access to their own data. I work at a medical institution, and went through a half day's worth of online HIPAA training a few months ago. It included the whole history of lots of bad things that have happened in the past, why we need patient privacy, ethics, various examples of who can and can not access the data, etc.. The entire training course was all about protecting patient privacy from third parties. Nowhere was there any discussion about patients having the right to access their own data. If there is a provision regarding this in HIPAA, I can say that it's definately not included in standard training courses (and my course was a standard course from a company that many institutions use for their HIPAA training).

If you read further in the article, you will see that HHS requested the patient records on behalf of the patients who had filed complaints. Rather than simply provide records for the 41 patients in question, Cignet complied by pulling the standard legal BS of swamping them with 59 boxes of records, including those of ~4500 *other* individuals. THIS is likely where the HIPAA fine is coming from -- the release of records for 4500 patients to a party not authorized to see them (I assume HHS was only authorized to see the records of the 41 individuals who filed complaints). This would work out to be roughly $1000 per "incident".

This was incredible stupidity on Cignet's part. They got what they deserved.

What? No jokes about stimulation through ephaptic coupling?

Until recently, I worked in research at a major pharmaceutical company. Thus, I have some understanding of how the whole process works going from development of a drug, through clinical trials, to final approval and marketing. First to file would be a *bad thing* for the pharmaceutical industry.

Clinical trials cost a lot of money and, depending on the disease, can take a lot of time. It can take a while just to develop a drug to the point of taking it into clinical trials, too. Patents only last 17-20 years. If it takes 7-10 years just to go through the full development and approval process, that may leave only 7-12 years of patent life in which to recoup your investment and generate profit, after which time the generics will seriously erode your profits. Any time a drug goes off patent = huge loss of income.

Thus, as it is now, drugs are patented as late in the process as possible, so as to maximize the amount of patent life left at the end of the approval process in which to make profit. They can wait as long as possible now, due to the fact that they keep meticulous records (including lab notebooks) of every step in the process, so that if a competitor files before them, they can challenge the patent based on first to invent. With the change to first to file, they will have to file for the patent extremely early in the development process, shaving time off their already small patent-time-limited profitability window.

Clinical trials are very expensive to run (this is not a bad thing, we *want*drugs to be rigorously tested before being prescribed), and due to the relatively short sales window before the end of patent life, drug companies only have a relatively short period in which to recoup their investment. If we switch to first to file, drug companies must file even earlier than they do now, which leaves even less time to make profit before the drug goes off patent. There would also be increased paranoia (and likelihood) of the competition stealing your ideas. I can not see how this would be a desirable outcome.

There's also the whole issue of the global market. If they are already having to file extremely early in non-US markets due to first-to-file in other countries, then maybe it just comes down to reduced profits in the US. I still can't see how they would be in favor of a net reduction in usable patent life in the US, though. Then again, they may just not care any more. I'm seeing more and more of a trend toward giving up on inventing drugs in-house and simply buying out other companies to get their patent rights. If drug companies are no longer inventing their own drugs, then maybe this becomes not so much an issue to them.

What? The Many More button actually does something, like prompt you for a number/date? When I click on it, it just gives the swirly waiting icon for a few seconds, then does nothing at all. I have no way to access stories from previous dates.

I'm running Seamonkey 2.0.10, WinXP, with various Slashdot interface options enabled/disabled to make it look as close to the old V1 site as possible, same settings I've been using since they switched to V2. Hell, I can't even edit my preferences properly since my larger fonts cause the options to not fit in the interface window. So, I don't know if the Many More button is broken in general, or broken due to some obscure interface setting within Slashdot.

Wikipedia has the following to say on the subject:

"In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but his intact frogs attempted to escape the water."

So, not only can you kill hypothetical frogs this way, but also real zombie frogs.

I do computational biology, and have published in biophysics, genomics, and photosynthesis fields as well. It might take 10-15 citations just to properly cite all the various software packages used in the methods, which doesn't leave many left for the rest of the manuscript. This usually results in the methods being shunted into the online supplement, leaving only a shell of a methods section in the article proper. Such forcing of important content into the online supplement (sometimes non-peer reviewed and almost never typeset by the Journal) due to word/figure/table/citation limits is a whole another beef of mine. Science and Nature are the two biggest offenders, for sure. I have other beefs with Science and Nature, too, but they are the high impact journals, and PIs want to publish in high impact journals because it looks good for funding/positions, so we would often submit to them first. PNAS is a much better journal, IMHO, than Science and Nature, but they too have too-low citation limits (don't remember the number, just that they were still too low). After the high impact journals have been exhausted, then yes, we can submit to journals with better publication policies. But by that time the article is already written, so noone is going to go back and expand it out to the new word limit or add back in extra citations, because by that time we've already been through several months worth of submission process.

124 citations?! I am shocked! But not necessarily for the reasons you might think. Most scientific journals that I am familiar with these days, both from reading them and submitting manuscripts to them, limit the number of citations allowed in a manuscript to ~30. It can be incredibly difficult (and frustrating) to whittle citations down to only 30, since then you have to decide "well, which papers are REALLY the most important ones for me to cite here," and the authors of the remaining relevant citations get shafted. Sometimes it just takes more than 30 citations to properly cover the existing literature. I applaud BMJ for not setting such absurd limits on citation numbers.

What difference does the sex of the rabbit make when counting how many rabbits are in the crate? Are you saying that the mixed-sex crate is uncountable due to the explosion of the rabbit population inside leading to > 9 rabbits per box?