The problem with early detection is that many diseases are actually benign in their early stages, and, when detected, their detection can actually cause more harm for the patient. For instance, early cancer detection increases the likelihood that the patient will start chemo. Some cancers wind up being handled by the body, but *all* chemo treatments harm patients. So, early detection sometimes leads to more harm than benefit (plus an unfortunate issue with "success" rates - the cancer treatments get to include in their "success" count cancers that the body would have cleaned up anyway).

I may be wrong on this, but in the US, HIPAA would rule the day on such a case, no? That would mean that 200k Pounds Sterling would be a wee drop in the bucket compared to the fine such an organization would face here should it face a data leak of that magnitude.

You're making substantial assumptions about what kind of teeth HIPAA has. When I worked at a medical software company -- wherein I was directly responsible for systems handling patient data, went through HIPAA training, and worked directly with our HIPAA compliance officer to determine technical measures -- it was damned near toothless; what we spent hiring said officer and taking said measures was much more than we would have been fined for a single breach. (We wouldn't have been able to sell the system or satisfy investors unless we could pass an audit, so it was the right business decision to make, but much of what our compliance officer told us was how much work we didn't have to do; the actual compliance requirements often fell far short of what I considered best practices).

"Or are those contracts written so horribly that the company gets paid for a nonfunctional product?"

The problem is that a lot of these types of contracts are written with a clause such that launching them publicly is an implicit acceptance of the project as a finished product. So, since they at least tried to launch it, that means that the project is "finished", and everything else is billed hourly on top of it.

It has been over a decade since I last worked with Oracle, so things may have changed. But when I worked on an Oracle project, it cost a huge amount of money, took way too long, didn't work well, and required double the number of staff to manage the application. After Oracle left, a second company came along behind who specializes in fixing stuff that Oracle broke. This company, I don't remember its name, literally does its business as cleaning up Oracle's trash. They didn't even promise good results, only "I know how much pain you are in, we'll make it not hurt quite so much." Interestingly, this particular project wound up as a "success story" on Oracle's website.

Must be nice to be able to fail at a project such that they owed you $69 million, but you don't actually have to make it work.

Perhaps states should make a rule stating that large projects must be broken up into deliverables of $1 million increments.

which viewpoint prevailed (if any)?

Nobody won -- the developer is holding the property, which remains zoned industrial, until market conditions (financing availability) and political considerations give them more leeway in its use.

I understand the plain meaning of the words. I objected to their subtext. This, too, should be fairly straightforward English language comprehension.

Gentrification typically displaces people who are previously reasonably happy living in a neighborhood "unfit for human habitation".

If the prior residents considered it fit for themselves (or, at least, the best fit available given their means)... well, you tell me what conclusion I should draw.

Uh, no - it means people who make significantly less money than me tend to live in unsafe places.

...and when those places are "gentrified", the people in question are forced to move by rising rents, typically into another "unsafe" location but now with more transportation time/costs.

I will never understand how flowing money into an area is bad.

Pricing people out of the homes and neighborhoods they're established in is disruptive. If your rents go up by 50% -- or you own, but your property taxes double -- that's a nontrivial personal hardship, particularly for folks who don't have wiggle room in their budgets to start with.

I live in East Austin -- a historically poor neighborhood. Last time I got involved in community governance was interesting -- went to a meeting to discuss whether a developer should be given a license to redevelop a recycling plant into a condominium project.

Half the people there -- including the faction I showed up with -- wanted to insist on mixed-use development with storefront space. The other group -- representing historical neighborhood residents -- wanted to ensure that low-income housing was included in the development. It wasn't feasible to accommodate both of us with the available funding; suffice to say that the debate process was informative.

[...] everything to do with gentrification - Not a bad word, BTW, it just means making the slums safe for human habitation again.

So people who make less money than you are also less than human?

If you can't appreciate why gentrification is a problem, I suggest that you're living in quite a bubble.

I hope this is satire to mock climate deniers.

I do information security for a living. [...]

So do I.

Pulling off an effective MITM assumes that the ends aren't doing effective mutual validation. Now, that's true much, much more often than it should be, but jumping from "most people do X badly" to "Y's effort to implement X is doomed to failure" isn't exactly a reasonable position when X doesn't violate any theoretical constraints (as so many attempted products do -- "X must have a key to decrypt Y, but must not be able to copy Y", etc).

...and you need to keep control of that vehicle for a few weeks to get it into a friendly port for unloading, during which time (1) folks with guns are doing their best to find you, and (2) you have no hostages to use as bargaining chips if they do so.

That's an awfully high-risk venture to get the kind of talent you'd need to hijack control in the first place [stealing private keys used to encrypt/authenticate the control chanel, etc] to sign off on.

Yeah. Pretty much everyone agrees on the first bit, that somehow Mt Gox got into trouble, and tried to get out of it by gambling with the customers' money like a bank (but uninsured!). The question is what that trouble was. It does not go back to when bitcoin was worth pennies, that I'm pretty confident of. I'm also pretty confident that it wasn't the transaction malleability bug itself - at worst, that could have drained the

However, the transaction malleability bug might have been the trigger - or rather, the bank run it provoked was the trigger. As people were trying to withdraw bitcoin, Gox tried to dip into their long-term storage (cold wallet) - and they made an unpleasant discovery.

What? That some of the cold wallets were empty, drained by an unfaithful employee? That they'd lost the passwords to some cold wallets? I don't know. Anyway, they briefly tried some desperate things with the money they had, in order to fix the problem before anyone knew. It failed. Then they went to other exchanges for a "bailout", trying to buy more time to fix the issue. Then the other exchanges demanded they come clean and reported them to the authorities.