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Medicine

Radiation Therapy Mistakes Cost Lives 215

Posted by kdawson from the feel-the-burn dept.
jmtpi recommends a long NY Times investigative report about how powerful medical linear accelerators have contributed to at least two deaths in the New York area. Although the mistakes were largely due to human error, buggy software also played a role. "...the records described 621 mistakes from 2001 to 2008... most were minor... The Times found that on 133 occasions, devices used to shape or modulate radiation beams... were left out, wrongly positioned, or otherwise misused. On 284 occasions, radiation missed all or part of its intended target or treated the wrong body part entirely. ... Another patient with stomach cancer was treated for prostate cancer. Fifty patients received radiation intended for someone else, including one brain cancer patient who received radiation intended for breast cancer."
Google

Hiding From Google 228

Posted by kdawson from the cake-and-eat-it dept.
penguinrecorder writes "Google offers Web users a simple trade-off: Let the search giant track a substantial portion of your comings and goings around the Web, and it will offer you a free, superior online experience. Now independent security researcher Moxie Marlinspike is making Web users a counter-offer: take Google's giveaways and keep your privacy too. On Tuesday, Marlinspike launched a service he calls GoogleSharing, a plug-in for Firefox designed to give users access to Google's online offerings while cloaking their identity from the company's data collection tools. By hosting a proxy server with a collection of Google 'identities,' the privacy software will allow users temporarily to route their traffic through another computer that masks their identity by mixing their online actions with those of other users. The system is totally transparent, with no special 'alternative' websites to visit. Your normal work flow should be exactly the same." GoogleSharing only works for those services not requiring a Google login; for the latter, no proxying is done.
Microsoft

Bill Gates Remembers 1979 310

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-don't dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Last week Gizmodo had a special celebration of 1979, the last year before a digital tsunami hit, that put Bill Gates in a nostalgic mood this week. Bill chimed in with his own memories of that seminal year when everything changed. 'In 1979, Microsoft had 13 employees, most of whom appear in that famous picture that provides indisputable proof that your average computer geek from the late 1970s was not exactly on the cutting edge of fashion,' wrote Gates. 'By the end of the year we'd doubled in size to 28 employees. Even though we were doing pretty well, I was still kind of terrified by the rapid pace of hiring and worried that the bottom could fall out at any time.' What made Gates feel a little more confident was that he began to sense that BASIC was on the verge of becoming the standard language for microcomputers. 'By the middle of 1979, BASIC was running on more than 200,000 Z-80 and 8080 machines and we were just releasing a new version for the 8086 16-bit microprocessor. As the numbers grew, we were starting to think beyond programming languages, too, and about the possibility of creating applications that would have real mass appeal to consumers.' Gates remembers that in 1979 there were only 100 different software products that had more than $100 M in annual sales and all of them were for mainframes. 'In April, the 8080 version of BASIC became the first software product built to run on microprocessors to win an ICP Million Dollar Award. Today, I would be surprised if the number of million-dollar applications isn't in the millions itself' writes Gates. 'More important, of course, is the fact that more than a billion people around the world use computers and digital technology as an integral part of their day-to-day lives. That's something that really started to take shape in 1979.'"

Comment "Self sustaining base" (Score 2, Insightful) 519

by riker1384 (#28479591) Attached to: Buzz Aldrin's Radical Plan For NASA

No, that is a indeed a fantasy. A self-sustaining base has to be able to produce food, clean water and energy. It has to be able to make replacement parts, and that means mines, chemical plants, machine shops, factories and chip-fabrication facilities. Oh, and also universities. That is a pure, utter fantasy given our current technology and our capacity for space travel. We can't make a self-sustaing colony on Antarctica or underwater, so why would you think we can do it on another planet?

Comment Re:How do you reinvent Trek? (Score 1) 444

by riker1384 (#27151043) Attached to: Could Fuller Take Trek Back To TV?
I believe JMS addressed the question of re-doing the CGI. He said that they had lost all the 3D models, so they had no way of updating the graphics. They would have to do everything from scratch, and nothing would look exactly the same. There are also other issues, such as the prominent early-90's fashion in the early episodes. It looks pretty dated.

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