I know that I'm arguing with a trolling AC, but for the other readers of slashdot, you should know that the grandparent's post refers to the controversy regarding the analysis of the Patriot system during the first Gulf war. There was a huge propaganda machine behind the Patriot's "successes" which turned out to be very near zero indeed. This was covered in a series of hearings in the early 90's...

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/docops/pl920908.htm

You can also read up on this from transcripts from the hearings after the war.

In the interests of fairness, here is a rebuttal / review.

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/docops/zimmerman.htm

I remain unconvinced -- from reading this (almost 20 years ago) I concluded that at best, the military did not know for sure that these worked well.

It was at Harvard in the mid 90's, but I don't think the course is THAT unique (I know that MIT, Carnegie Mellon, University of Michigan, and numerous other colleges have similar courses.)

The schematics for the computer we build is available -- appears that they still build the same computer!

http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~phys123/classnotes/bigpic_0409_bw.png

This is almost exactly what Woz did -- after the course you still have a wonderful respect for him, but at the same time realize that it is humanly do-able, not taking anything away from his great work. Some of the subsequent projects other groups in our course did were incredible; one guy built a custom video D/A output with sprite-drawing subroutines so you could play his custom assembly-written pacman with the hex keypad on a standard oscilloscope. I still have photos of mine in action somewhere.

Agreed. This is little more than assembling something from a recipe (IKEA, anyone?) that teaches you little. The descriptions "solder that resistor" and the fact he clearly doesn't understand the details of things makes it a less interesting experience.

I would recommend a course on digital electronics instead -- many of these courses (including mine in college) have you assemble a 6502 computer yourself from components, and then you will understand the role of the memory and data buses, counter, memory addresses, A/D converters, in addition to understanding CPU timing, latches, machine code, and elementary programming, etc., etc. We built one that displayed output on an oscilloscope and hex LEDs. It will be 10 times as much effort, but infinitely more rewarding. One of the most difficult yet fun courses that I took in my life.

Exactly. People overvalue the concept of "idea" and undervalue the concept of aggressive business positioning, development, marketing, capital, and a lot of, well, work.

I was at Harvard when facebook was "born." I was persistently skeptical about the whole thing, as the concept was not new *at all*, and friendster was reigning supreme, which I kind of thought was a silly fad. I was subsequently astounded over the years how facebook has taken off. (I am still astounded.) But, had the founders listened to me, or saw that their idea was "taken," it would have gone nowhere.

That being said, I wouldn't give a highly established potential competitor research data that you have gotten to get your idea off the ground. Despite my words, I also hold a few patents, but these are mostly defensive positioning and required by my corporation.

Nebulous "ideas" have an insignificant chance of being "thought of" already. What you need to do is get honest feedback about the barriers to implementation, then just go and do it!

I am happy to see some thought go in to "routine" matters like this -- too often I feel that laptop keyboards have abominable designs, such as shrunken space bars and control keys, miniscule arrow keys, or nonstandard placement of arrow keys, etc.

However, I would say the esc enlargement on my Lenovo is unneeded -- its location above the other keys means it is struck accurately. I would venture to say the same for the delete key, which I could locate with my eyes closed by its characteristic placement. I think the aesthetics of the vertical extension of these keys is going to be negative.

For my money, I wish they would just lay off the IBM keyboard design. Thinkpads should not have a Windows key. :)

Yes, it is an annoying debate tactic but weak and relatively easy to recognize. Diligent readers can recognize this though, and the glaring errors often come painfully to light in the discussions.

Anyway, the Airbus systems have multiple levels of computer massaging of the pilot's input, called different "flight laws." Read up about it here:

Airbus flight laws

In the most direct law, yes, the system will still not allow you to do things like rip the rudder off the airplane (A300 was not FBW) or clearly overstress the aircraft and destroy the wings. This is a good thing -- of course, there is perhaps some imaginary situation where it would be better to destroy the aircraft to ameliorate some aspect of an impending crash, however, the vast majority (all ever recorded in an actual crash?) of inputs that can destroy aircraft are not intentional nor required. Also, the 'direct law' will allow a pilot to potentially overstress the aircraft in the event of computer failure or discordant input.

The role of conflicting pilot input is also well thought out (described in the link), and the airbus designers were aware of these (pseudo)philosophical objections to excessive computer control. I do not think there is much of a conflict among people familiar with the operation and implementation.

I spent many years in medical school doing research work on viruses, including work with SIV. This article is very optimistic in some of its summaries. HIV and SIV are qualitatively different in the extent of "hypervariability" in their surface proteins. It is generally accepted to be "easier" to create antibodies to SIV, which has been done for many years.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7865316?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DiscoveryPanel.Pubmed_Discovery_RA&linkpos=1&log$=relatedarticles&logdbfrom=pubmed

The technique described is very interesting, don't get me wrong, and I hope it works. However, there are *already* many techniques that appear to immunize against this HIV analog, which do not work for human HIV. The two are significantly different.

Yes, I totally agree. Linux has many, many critics, from users, "prousers / powerusers", developers, and other corporations e.g. M$ (although agreed, these are more often just attacks.)

Where I thought his article was very insightful, however, was the typical response "Linux is free..." where I agree with his analysis. This, however, reflects on us, the Linux community. I cringe when I see somebody say, "It is free, what do you expect?" or "you have no right to complain." Users have every right to (nonabusively and in a civil fashion) criticize software.

If Debian (stable) suddenly stopped working, my organization would lose thousands of person-hours of lost productivity. In many ways, doing somebody a half-favor is often worse than doing them nothing at all:

Imagine if I volunteered to repair your garage, but then did a half-assed job and quit halfway through. It would cost you MORE in the end to clean up and switch to another provider. Would it be then ok to say "I did that for FREE, how can you complain?"

Obviously this is a continuum, and many of the criticisms are unfounded or just whining. But, as a whole, if we want Linux to continue to succeed we, as developers and users alike, should listen and respond constructively ourselves to any (also constructive) criticism that is provided by the community.

Agreed totally. I wish more people realized this and thought like you.

I, too, can write obfuscated code and appear "genius-like." It is a whole lot harder to bring *everybody* along than to rocket yourself ahead, make yourself appear to be esoteric and "invaluable," and, in a sense, bully everybody else into compliance. Now, we don't have enough details on the particular story to know if his colleagues actually were bad.

However, I spend a good deal of every day helping people that may be not as quick or sharp as me in many ways, but that is my job.

Finally a point regarding documentation -- I'm sure that every programmer here has come back to code that he/she wrote, and thought, "Man, this guy (me) is a genius. However, it just took me 30 minutes to understand how I did this!"

Early on in my programming life, I thought this was indicative of my awesomeness as a programmer. Now, I just think it is poor documentation, and largely a waste of time. If I can't figure out how I did something a year ago, it would take other people twice as long... They may appreciate the clever implementation, but in the large scheme of things that is not efficient, nor awesome.

I was totally with you until your (faulty) conclusion. Creating a draconian police-state is not a way to improve productivity, and will just make people hate you. I would not work at any place where they check my bags at the exit (other than the FBI/NSA/CIA, etc.)

Our hospital had the same problem as you - they gave us all SecureID RSA keyfobs, and everybody hated it. It was annoying to have to have something with you all the time.

What they did to replace it, is (IMHO) a very good compromise - VPN access with a system of "recognizing" the computer (Juniper proprietary -- I assume it is some sort of certificate) and enforced strong passwords. You have to answer a bunch of questions to register the computer, but then afterward it is simple username/password signon. Secure enough for banking online, and secure enough for our corporation / hospital.

>Cisco, NASA Plan "Planetary Skin'

I am actually pretty happy with the default theme. A lot of green, though.

Reference? I don't think this is true... In general a doctor can not abandon a patient in need (ER doctor, rural doctor, etc.), and can not systematically discriminate (I won't treat Italians / African Americans, etc.), but they are free to treat whoever they want otherwise.

Regarding signing an agreement to post negative comments, I would think this requires a prior court case, because I doubt any such language in the Medicare/aid legislature rules are specific enough to be directly applied. I'm sure the wording of the contract the doctors are making patients sign is also ambiguous or specific enough ("electronic mass medium / internet webforum" or whatever term they used might have not even existed really when the medicare provision was drafted).

Alas, that is how lawyers make their millions and become parasites of the system in some ways, but do good things for many people in other ways.

As a doctor, I would just add that doctors that are nice, and doctors that are skilled, are weakly correlated. Patients are, in general, able to evaluate the first trait, but not as well the second. It is a shame, because misunderstandings happen -- you see every permutation: very good doctors that don't have excellent people skills, very good doctors that are jerks because they think they are so good, (technically) bad doctors that are really nice, doctors with substance abuse problems, patients that are completely unreasonable and on their fifth physician whom they will shortly badmouth, and good doctors that told the patient something honestly that they didn't want to hear, who subsequently leave and badmouth the doctor.

It's a very complex issue, and difficult to sum up in a little pithy paragraph or two.

What I would counter to this particular 'problem,' is, make a list of doctors who make you sign such contract, and post it for everybody to see. That would surely not be illegal, and just do not go to any of these doctors. It is like a prenuptial agreement -- I can see how it would be useful / essential for some people, but I wouldn't want to be anywhere near a situation that requires this.

Although the web makes this sort of thing possible, the same web will help to mitigate the damage. I'm very happy people post this thing for all to see.

After reading all of these letters, I don't think that anybody would really take this guy seriously. He is running the equivalent of a modified 419 scam (pay us a little to prevent a big payout in the future.) The repeated requests for confidentiality should be a tipoff.

Hopefully not too many small websites without proper legal counsel to advise them on this sort of thing have not been taken....