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Medicine

Look-Alike Tubes Lead To Hospital Deaths 520

Posted by timothy from the no-wait-this-one-goes-in-your-mouth dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "In hospitals around the country, nurses connect and disconnect interchangeable clear plastic tubing sticking out of patients' bodies to deliver or extract medicine, nutrition, fluids, gases or blood — sometimes with deadly consequences. Tubes intended to inflate blood-pressure cuffs have been connected to intravenous lines leading to deadly air embolisms, intravenous fluids have been connected to tubes intended to deliver oxygen, leading to suffocation, and in 2006 a nurse at in Wisconsin mistakenly put a spinal anesthetic into a vein, killing 16-year-old who was giving birth. 'Nurses should not have to work in an environment where it is even possible to make that kind of mistake,' says Nancy Pratt, a vocal advocate for changing the system. Critics say the tubing problem, which has gone on for decades, is an example of how the FDA fails to protect the public. 'FDA could fix this tubing problem tomorrow, but because the agency is so worried about making industry happy, people continue to die,' says Dr. Robert Smith." This reminds me of the sort of problem that Michael Cohen addressed in a slightly different medical context (winning a MacArthur Foundation grant) a few years ago.
Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer Turns 15 271

Posted by CmdrTaco from the and-the-internet-has-never-been-the-same dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Software giant Microsoft's Internet Explorer turned 15 years old on Monday. The company recently said it would launch the Internet Explorer 9 public beta version on September 15, 2010. The software giant launched the first version of the browser, Internet Explorer 1, on August 16, 1995. It was a revised version of Spyglass Mosaic, which Microsoft had licensed from Spyglass Inc."

Comment WTF? (Score 0, Troll) 285

by Pictish Prince (#33246016) Attached to: The Fuel Cost of Obesity

[...]
As it turns out, part of the problem is us.
[...]

Speak for yourself, White Man.

Yeah, obese people are everywhere in the US today, mostly due to the plastic shite the corporations provide for them to eat. I haven't owned a motor vehicle since 1991 and, guess what? I'm slim & trim from walking and biking.

That's just skirting around the problem, though. In the last couple of decades I've observed a steady trend towards A) larger gas-guzzling vehicles and B) single person occupancy. Americans hold it to be their right (and it is) to drive alone 5 blocks to the supermarket in their huge goddam vehicles. However, if they simply understood the implications of their actions on the environment I feel we'd see far less of it. But instead, the TeeVee has them pissing their britches watching out for murderers, rapists and now terrorists so they will never, ever EVER stop to give someone a ride, even on the hottest or coldest days of the year. On the flip-side, one would be far more inclined to walk to their destination if there were a good chance they'd be offered a ride, as was the case a mere 30 years ago (I remember).

One more thing: I detest BP (and other mega corps) as much as anyone, but blaming them for the destruction of aquatic and wetland habitats and countless rare and valuable species is logically and morally equivalent to blaming Mexico for the US drug problem. The market will work, bringing the supply to where there is the demand, no matter how much imbecile legislation is passed. The problem is the ignorance of the average US citizen. Find some way to fix that and a lot of huge problems simply disappear. I was hopeful that the switch to digital TV would so frustrate a large number of viewers that they would simply give up the tube. That would have had a chance to break the increasingly sophisticated mind control the mega corps have over a vast majority of the US population. Alas, I was wrong and now I and to some degree every inhabitant of this planet are paying the price.

Crime

Child Porn As a Weapon 774

Posted by Soulskill from the guilty-until-proven-innocent dept.
VoiceOfDoom writes "Want to get rid of your boss and move up to his position? Put kiddie porn on his computer then call the cops! This was the cunning plan envisaged by handyman Neil Weiner of east London after falling out with school caretaker Edward Thompson too many times. Thankfully, Weiner didn't cover his tracks quite well enough to avoid being found out — earlier boasts about his plan to friends at a BBQ provided the police with enough evidence to arrest him for trying to pervert the course of justice. Frighteningly, however, between being charged with possession of indecent images and being exonerated, innocent (if 'grumpy') Thompson was abused and ostracized for eight months by neighbors and colleagues. With computer forensics for police work often being performed by 'point 'n click'-trained, nearly-retired cops, or languishing in a 6-month queue for private sector firms to attend to it, the uncomfortable question is raised: how easily might this trick have succeeded if Weiner had been a little more intelligent about it?"
Google

Google CEO Schmidt Predicts End of Online Anonymity 591

Posted by timothy from the scott-mcneally-1999 dept.
Andorin writes "A tweet from the EFF pointed me to a short article detailing part of Eric Schmidt's speech to the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe on August 4. According to Schmidt, true transparency and anonymity on the Internet will become a thing of the past because of the need to combat criminal and 'anti-social' behavior. 'Governments will demand it,' he says, referring to full accountability and a 'name service for people,' possibly hinting towards mandatory Internet passports. The CEO of Google also made a couple of somewhat creepy references to the availability of information: 'If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use artificial intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go ... show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos!'"
Businesses

High-Frequency Programmers Revolt Over Pay 1018

Posted by kdawson from the crying-all-the-way dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Programmers who design and code algorithms for investment banking are unhappy with their salaries. Many of them receive a low 6-figure salary whereas their bosses — who manipulate these algorithms and execute the trades — often earn millions. One such anonymous programmer points out that he was paid $150,000 per year, whereas the software he wrote was generating $100,000 per day."
Government

SFLC Wants To Avoid Death by Code 247

Posted by timothy from the me-too-me-too dept.
foregather writes "The Software Freedom Law Center has released some independent research on the safety of software close to our hearts: that inside of implantable medical devices like pacemakers and insulin pumps. It turns out that nobody is minding the store at the regulatory level and patients and doctors are blocked from examining the source code keeping them alive. From the article: 'The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for evaluating the risks of new devices and monitoring the safety and efficacy of those currently on market. However, the agency is unlikely to scrutinize the software operating on devices during any phase of the regulatory process unless a model that has already been surgically implanted repeatedly malfunctions or is recalled. ... Despite the crucial importance of these devices and the absence of comprehensive federal oversight, medical device software is considered the exclusive property of its manufacturers, meaning neither patients nor their doctors are permitted to access their IMD's source code or test its security.'"
Security

Microsoft Has No Plans To Patch New Flaw 217

Posted by timothy from the who-uses-usb-drives-anyhow dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft has acknowledged the vulnerability that the new malware Stuxnet uses to launch itself with .lnk files, but said it has no plans to patch the flaw right now. The company said the flaw affects most current versions of Windows, including Vista, Server 2008 and Windows 7 32- and 64-bit. Meanwhile, the digital certificate that belonging to Realtek Semiconductor that was used to sign a pair of drivers for the new Stuxnet rootkit has been revoked by VeriSign. The certificate was revoked Friday, several days after news broke about the existence of the new malware and the troubling existence of the signed drivers."
Star Wars Prequels

George Lucas C&Ds 'Lightsaber Laser' 481

Posted by timothy from the illegal-operation dept.
dward90 writes "George Lucas thinks that bulky, handheld lasers shouldn't be produced because they are his intellectual property. From CNN: 'George Lucas wants to force a laser company to stop making a new, high-powered product he says looks too much like the famous lightsaber from his classic sci-fi series. Lucasfilm Ltd. has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Hong Kong-based Wicked Lasers, threatening legal action if it doesn't change its Pro Arctic Laser series or stop selling it altogether.'"

Comment Re:No it isn't (Score 1) 1186

by Pictish Prince (#32721244) Attached to: Tattoos For the Math and Science Geek?

Why is employment optional in a society which offers people no alternative means by which to sustain themselves? We're all raised to be a part of this machine, and one cannot simply find some nice, fertile spot of land to raise crops and lovestock these days.

"Lovestock"? I guess biotech is farther along than I realized.
Handhelds

What iOS 4 Does (and Doesn't Do) For Business 253

Posted by CmdrTaco from the step-one-is-downloading-it dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Galen Gruman investigates what businesses can expect from Apple's new iOS 4. Multitasking, the biggest new capability, is for now simply a promise, as apps will need to be retrofitted to make use of the capability. The other big new capability for IT, a set of APIs that allow BlackBerry-like management of the iPhone, such as auditing of policies and apps, over-the-air provisioning of apps without iTunes, and over-the-air configuration and policy management, also remains in the realm of promise, as the various mobile management tools that have been reworked to take advantage of the new iOS 4 capabilities won't be available until July or later. And despite the fact that email works more as it does on the desktop, iOS 4 still fails to deliver several email capabilities key to business users, including zipped attachment management, junk mail filtering, message rules, and message flagging."
Science

Fermilab Experiment Hints At Multiple Higgs Particles 271

Posted by kdawson from the so-many-particles-mister-fermi dept.
krou writes "Recent results from the Dzero experiment at the Tevatron particle accelerator suggest that those looking for a single Higgs boson particle should be looking for five particles, and the data gathered may point to new laws beyond the Standard Model. 'The DZero results showed much more significant "asymmetry" of matter and anti-matter — beyond what could be explained by the Standard Model. Bogdan Dobrescu, Adam Martin and Patrick J Fox from Fermilab say this large asymmetry effect can be accounted for by the existence of multiple Higgs bosons. They say the data point to five Higgs bosons with similar masses but different electric charges. Three would have a neutral charge and one each would have a negative and positive electric charge. This is known as the two-Higgs doublet model.'" There's more detail in this writeup from Symmetry Magazine, a joint publication of SLAC and Fermilab. Here's the paper on the arXiv.
Privacy

FBI's Facebook Monitoring Leads To Arrest In England 329

Posted by timothy from the bomb-president-motorcade-rutabaga dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that armed police were called to a UK school earlier today after being advised of a potential threat by the FBI. The school stated that the FBI 'raised the alarm after Internet scanning software picked up a suspicious combination of words,' strongly implying that they are carrying out routine, automated surveillance of social networking sites. While in this case it does appear that there may have been a genuine threat, the story nonetheless raises significant privacy concerns."

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