The problem is that the best interests of the doctor are not aligned with the best interests of the patient. Instead, we've got a situation where the best interests of the doctor are to "play it safe, spend as much as necessary, preserve life at ALL costs (because that won't get me sued)". The tail is wagging the dog, in the form of a very small percentage of patients who will someday sue their doctors.

However, the solution is not tort reform--in the sense of limiting verdicts--because the problem is not the size of verdicts. The problem is the things that doctors do in over-the-top efforts to avoid really frivolous lawsuits. (Believe it or not, many doctors are devastated when they lose a patient, and to then be sued by the patient's family just makes it worse. So, to defend their own self-image, they of course do *everything* they can to avoid being sued. Which is very expensive.) I think something more akin to the "good samaritan" laws, where the nature of a doctor's obligations are spelled out, would be a better choice.

Elsevier, Wiley, Springerlink, JSTOR, and other sites in Google Scholar appear to be indexed despite all the cloaking they do.

Same here. Google text ads don't bother me in the slighest.

I do wonder though, are the ads Ars use generally pay-per-view or pay-per-click? If they are pay-per-click, I doubt anyone who uses ad-blockers would be clicking them anyway.

No, that would be a clank.

I run a small computer repair shop, and we first started seeing this ATAPI.SYS virus a few weeks ago. When I would submit it to VirusTotal, it would always come back as clean on every single virus scanning engine - but I could tell it was infected. I even had a computer in here just yesterday which had the infected ATAPI.SYS file, yet it was not detected as such - even when the hard drive was mounted as a secondary drive in another system and scanned with several up-to-date antivirus programs.

The virus itself is actually quite a clever little beast. After infecting the file, it sets the file modification time back to the original date & time, which makes it hard to tell that it's been modified. Also, I've noticed that the byte counts between infected and non-infected versions of the file are almost always identical. But to do that, it appears to be injecting its code into the area normally used to store the file version information. The upshot is, if you check the file properties and there's no file version information (the Version tab under XP or the Details tab under Vista/Win7), there's a good chance the file is infected.

I have not had any computers come in to the shop with the BSOD mentioned in the articles yet, but I'm expecting them at any time...

Bah, what's the big deal? I give out my phone number all the time. Here it is:

(234)567-8910

Apparently I've got an Ohio number...

At least if you're "lazy". It is a lot better than having to bounce in and out of the advanced options

I'd moderate this retarded if I could, but it's not an option. Probably Palin had it removed. Anyway, allow me to explain.

Not sure if I'm being clear here, but a "standard change" is not an estimate - it's something we've done before and know exactly how long it takes. If you are doing any actual estimating, the more "estimating" you do vs. using historical data, the more range of error you'll have. I'll babble on this subject for a while, but that's the gist of this post.

There are different types of changes. If you're estimating something you've done a hundred times, you know exactly how long it will take. Something like custom configuration for a client, routine maintenance, things like that. You'll be correct on how long it takes.

If a customer wants a new web service, and you've never done a web service, you're going to be wrong no matter how much you quantify. You can determine how many objects you need to create/update, but you can't tell how long it will take.

In other words, estimating has to take into account many different things:

How many objects will be updated/added
How many of those will be trivial vs. complex changes
Level of familiarity of the person/people implementing it
Assumption that the number of objects is correct, and nothing was missed
Necessary documentation available *and correct*
Historical accuracy of estimating (are you getting better at estimating overall?)
Historical accuracy of estimating the kind of change requested (are you getting better at estimating *this*?)
Overhead of gates/reviews and change control or other process
Testing resource availability, familiarity with the new items, correct documentation supplied to whomever is testing

If MSDN or man page isn't correct, you're going to do a lot of debugging. If the client's web service you're connecting to doesn't match what you were given, you're doing rewrites once you hit testing. If your change is ready to go but a company-wide routing change is scheduled for the same date so you can't test your implementation, you're stuck. If the CSS works until someone enters a long comment, and you need to find a workaround to the layout, you're better off just saying won't fix.

Bottom line, the more foreign something is, the more incorrect you will be. If you are estimating something you've already done, there's not need to estimate - it's already done! So by definition, we are either dealing with something simple like search/replace and run, or something foreign where you're going to be wrong no matter what.

I'll close with - in a modern company, all code should be reusable. So you only do things once. So you can't learn to estimate more accurately, since you're always estimating something different. The only way to have accurate estimating is to have a solid team working together for a while, and doing similar work. Just limit yourself to things you know, and you'll be right.

If they're using force to bring about change, Doesn't that make them terrorists under the patriot act?

I think we should round up all the /b/tards and send them off to gitmo.

I'm not sure those statements are related, But if we can use the first to pull off the second i'm all for it.

When you "buy" Windows, you don't purchase the software. You purchase a license to run the software, on a particular number of machines (1 for the typical home user). Included is the installation media for your convenience.

If you have a license for a product, and are running it, I don't see how Microsoft could have a problem with this. They could have an opinion, but no legal basis and certainly no way to enforce their opinion.

They would have to say the "license" is simply a suggestion, and that they are selling you a specific product like a chair, such that when it becomes broken it is no longer functional, or up to you to repair. They will never do this, for many reasons. Selling a physical product means you can disassemble or alter in any way you see fit, like evening up a table's legs, which they don't want you to do to Windows. Re-selling your license (validly, e.g. by wiping your drive and switching to linux first) means they have to activate the OS on a different machine, which adds support costs, so they'd prefer you not be able to re-sell, or at least think you can't. So many reasons, but they will never sell you a physical product.

As long as you have a license, and are following it by not installing on more machines than is allowed, I don't see any loophole. It has to be legal. Of course, this depends on what you did to pirate it, so you have to be within the bounds of DMCA laws if applicable, or if your locality recognizes EULAs you might have to follow an "original media" clause, but if that's the case you just call Microsoft and say you can't use your product because the disc went bad, and they refuse while trying to get you to buy a reduced-cost license to ensure you're legit, and you have a good old-fashioned lawsuit.

Since a lawsuit involves court costs at a minimum and lawyer's time most likely, it seems biased against the average user that they would have to go through the legal system to properly obtain what they paid for. That is the key to this whole WGA mess in the first place, when WGA called you a thief even when you aren't. And you are denied usage of something you purchased. It's cheaper to buy the compliance license than fighting in court individually, so I don't get why this wasn't certified class action instantly. Probably just a poorly thought out argument, which the judge shot holes though.

Maybe because, as an autistic, my morality is rather pragmatic- John Paul II's Theology of the Body makes sense to me precisely *because* it fits in with evolution and survival of the species. Respect for human life between conception and natural death also fits in strongly with the liberal neurodiversity side of things; a mutation that might be seen as negative in one light (like sickle cell anemia and the lessened ability to process and use oxygen) can be positive in another light (immunity to malaria); and at first glance we human beings just don't have the intelligence to know the difference.

If, as theistic Intelligent Designers claim, God created evolution and it's his method of engineering, then reducing the genetic diversity of the species is indeed taking the power of life and death, the central power of evolution, out of the hands of God and giving it to man. And based on our inability to know long term good from evil with mutations that are normal to the human species, yes, that becomes a moral argument.

There. Fixed that for you.