16164926
submission
beachdog writes:
Poll questions:
Have you ever spotted a friend or colleague on a Slashdot discussion?
I have identified at least one acquaintance from High School.
I have identified a professor or teacher I knew in College.
I have identified someone by his distinctive politics or philosophy.
I frequently see my identical twin posting on Slashdot
I can tell when the poster is from my country.
I can tell when the poster speaks my native language.
I can tell when a post is by a famous or rich nerd.
It is all monkeys pounding on typewriters to me.
12267508
submission
beachdog writes:
My health insurance provder wants me to provide a saliva swab DNA sample and possibly a blood sample for a medical research study.
The problem I have is, how do I consent to the research and also require the knowledge found to be disclosed in a free manner?
I need a simple sentence I can insert into the consent document that will ensure that important findings are published to ensure this area of study is not tied up with patents or proprietary medical solutions.
The research side of the study looks like just the kind of science a big, busy, non-profit medical care provider might do. Their consent form is very detailed about the care they will take to keep my medical data private. But there is not a word about how they will use the resulting study data. Are they going to publish, patent or sell the data? They say nothing.
13331
submission
beachdog writes:
I am puzzled at how my experience upgrading my Ubuntu distribution is not being reflected in reviews or news.
My experience as a long time Linux user is: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS has enough configuration errors that it shouldn't be offered as an end user distribution yet.
I upgraded from the 5.05 "Breezy Badger" Ubuntu to the 6.06 "LTS" about 6 weeks after LTS was released. After a news report mentioning a bug with the X windows driver I waited 3 weeks. Nope X was still broken.
The xserver package was still broken. It immediately broke my X display. From the ubuntu forums I got instructions to push the xserver package version back. Four hours later I got my X display back.
What has happened since then is one little application after another is coming up broken. Mostly minor changes are breaking applicatons. I have not found a single major improvement in 6.06 that compensates for the 16 hours wasted. I haven't messed with ticky tacky stuff like this since the RedHat C-compiler version problem of 5 years ago.
The agony is I am a bloody desktop user doing Craigslist job search and Rails. I actually need Google Earth to "just work".
I really am the wrong guy to back up and futz with problems like "the openGL graphics functions for the mga driver seem to be broken." For a long time now, I have depended on the Debian package system to set things up right.
The upgrade water torture ticky tack list for LTS:
- Local printing broken - required delete and reinstall printers.
- Adobe acrobat no longer being called as a firefox plugin (still broken despite messing with Preferences)
- Google earth now showing OpenGL error message (still broken)
- Matrox mga video driver, can't tell if the opengl functions needed by Google earth are working.
- mplayer stopped, requires an obscure edit to /etc/mplayer.config
- sound for YouTube videos now requires opening a new alsa package and futzing with mute settings. Desktop sounds are gone. (configuration for alsa-mixer changed).
- Firefox closes all windows (or crashes) when certain web pages are closed by the server.
