I hate to say it but 4G for an emergency network is just a money sink. I hate to have a defeatist attitude but at least in my small new england town this would be a complete waste of time and money and effort. We have no unified dispatch system. All land line 911 calls go to police. If you want Fire or Ambulance it's transferred to the Fire department, who then transfers medical calls to the ambulance. If you call from a cell phone it goes to the state police regional office first, then to the local state police barracks, then to town police, etc. Police and fire are on separate frequencies. ICS is a joke and never implemented. EMA is run with all donated equipment and goodwill of Ham operators. Better than nothing? certainly but not by much. I put an IP camera onto their EMA vehicle, punched a hole in their firewall and the chiefs were able to view the scene and control the camera from the EOC. It took me 10 minutes but it was like the natives seeing an airplane. The average Police/fire/EMA chief is 50+ years old and typically holds a grease pencil, not an iPad.

Example, there was a mill fire in the neighboring city. Multiple towns responded. No ICS, no communication plan, everyone on one channel walking all over each other. There is no way any of these communities could implement, monitor or effectively use a 4G solution.

I've been casually trying to learn some basic bioinformatics skills and have played with biopython for about a year. My son is a a senior in HS and has been thinking about a BS in Microbiology and a minor in CompSci. We've been to a couple of University open houses lately and they all are pushing bioinformatics programs. I see chatter about it online and even on TV. I even discovered that one of my cousins just got his PhD in bioinformatics. It's everywhere!

Is there a risk that 4 years from now there will be WAY too many bioinformatics grads? I'd hate to reccommend a field to my son where the employment bubble will burst soon. Any thoughts about job prospects down the road? [ mitigating factor - We're near Boston which appears to be the hub of the industry on the east coast ]

And AMD stock slips below $4 per share losing about half of its value in the last year. I've always been an AMD fan but never an ATi fan and I don't think they ever recovered after that tragic acquisition.

I'm sure some people got good deals in the flash crash but IIRC didn't the NYSE back out many of the trades saying that they were erroneous?

Thanks for the info. I will try to find some medical journals. We have a family member with Parkinson's so we might start with that. As far as the statistics, yes, he is taking a class and luckily his mom is a statistician :)

Hi and thanks for the offer to answer questions. I'm going to repost something I wrote in the google science fair thread:

Ok slashdotters, I've had no luck getting this question answered elsewhere so I might as well try here. My son is very interested in coding. He's competent in Java and he's picking up c quite well. He's taken an interest in GPU programming and I know over the next year he will do OK with those concepts too (I've been able to get both OpenCL and CUDA code up and running). In other words, we've got the computer end of a sci fair project pretty well established. The problem is that while I know generally what bioinformatics is all about, I have no background or resources in the appropriate biology to help him find a worthy project.

Ideally, what he wants is 1) a bioinformatics problem with a large data set (yes I realize that is redundant by definition) 2) one that would benefit from GPU programming 3) a problem that makes some kind of physical testable prediction that could be tested.

Last year a kid (from Canada?) did a drug interaction study where he took candidate compounds and determined where on a protein they would attach. From that he found two compounds that could mate at the same time because their locations did not interfere. Thus increasing the effectivity. He actually clinically tested "his" drug on cells. Pretty impressive. I'm not expecting my son to reach that level but I'd like to find something real world and challenging that couples computer science with a physical biological process.

any input is greatly appreciated! gary.huntress@gmail.com

Ok slashdotters, I've had no luck getting this question answered elsewhere so I might as well try here. My son is very interested in coding. He's competent in Java and he's picking up c quite well. He's taken an interest in GPU programming and I know over the next year he will do OK with those concepts too (I've been able to get both OpenCL and CUDA code up and running). In other words, we've got the computer end of a sci fair project pretty well established. The problem is that while I know generally what bioinformatics is all about, I have no background or resources in the appropriate biology to help him find a worthy project.

Ideally, what he wants is 1) a bioinformatics problem with a large data set (yes I realize that is redundant by definition) 2) one that would benefit from GPU programming 3) a problem that makes some kind of physical testable prediction that could be tested.

Last year a kid (from Canada?) did a drug interaction study where he took candidate compounds and determined where on a protein they would attach. From that he found two compounds that could mate at the same time because their locations did not interfere. Thus increasing the effectivity. He actually clinically tested "his" drug on cells. Pretty impressive. I'm not expecting my son to reach that level but I'd like to find something real world and challenging that couples computer science with a physical biological process.

any input is greatly appreciated! gary.huntress@gmail.com

The video is very interesting, but one thing really does annoy me. He talks about discovering the initial vuln and how they were able to understand it literally within minutes (around slide 15/16) and they realized how serious it was (100% successful loading of a DLL from a WebDAV path via LoadLib because control panel icons are handled in a different (broken) way).

Hey says that the vuln existed for years and that a 7 year old could exploit it because it was included in Metasploit (slide 16). He clearly indicated that Metasploit knew about this before MS and that they were tipped off by 1 or 2 other 3rd party malware researchers who sent in "just another LNK exploit" that they happened to bother to look at. He even said "it's a good thing we did [look at it]".

So this tells me that MS does NOT bother to review Metasploit scripts to get a leg up on zero days..... that surprised and annoys me.

I'm an EMT, there are 5 radios in my ambulance. I don't need more ways to talk to people. I need policies, documentation, good equipment, and most of all consistent interoperability training between multiple departments and jurisdictions. I really don't think the fix is more spectrum.

My condo association installed Meraki based wifi to service 250 condo units on at least 5 acres. I have no major complaints, other than occasionally I find a coverage dead zone.

My desktop at work is part of a very large (many thousands) windows domain. My time from boot to usable desktop is measured in minutes, many of them, rarely under 10 minutes. I get to stare at "Applying Personal Settings" for much of that period. Yes, the help desk has been called many times. The only course of action is to completely rebuild the system. Nobody can seem to troubleshoot a windows domain performance problem.

Let me know when the devices are approved for type 1 encryption. THAT will really make them useful in the battlefield.

My son is playing AS right now with a few of his friends. I yelled over "hey did you know that AS can be...." "yeah yeah, played as a FPS.. it sucks"

I have one son in college and two in high school. I know a huge number of their HS friends, their interests and their abilities. One in 50 would be even remotely interested or benefit from learning LaTeX, and their interest would have nothing at all to do with chemistry. If you really use LaTeX you know that it is not a word processor. HS kids are generally comfortable with a word processor and IMHO there is no benefit in teaching them a new non-chemistry concept and toolchain such as LaTeX.

My friend is a university chemistry professor. She has complained endlessly that her incoming students lack fundamental math skills. They mindlessly write down whatever their calculator tells them even though it may be off by many orders of magnitude. They are unable to formulate or solve simple ratios and they have almost no concept of significant digits. I know these aren't chemistry skills but if you want students to succeed in college chemistry, I think it would help if you substantially reinforce the math while you are introducing basic chemistry topics.