I thought the CPU choice was more of a battery life thing -- the Atom processors (N500/N550) had much better power consumption profile (at the expense of processing) than a normal x86/AMD processor. The battery life on my ASUS netbook was around 8 to 10 hours, which was great. Having used a netbook for a couple of years it seems like the real hardware compromise was the video, which really slowed things down.

Still, the portability of the netbook was great and worked well for lightweight development (e.g. VIM as opposed to eclipse/VS) at a price a student could afford.

That happened to me with my ex-girlfriend. All of a sudden she popped up on my "You may know..." list. Needless to say, it was duly ignored. Her step-dad also showed up one day as well...Not sure if he looked me up or if she used his computer.

Either way, my wife and I had a good laugh about it. My main point to her was that it was kind of cool knowing how these things work (an underlying machine learning algorithm to group things, I would guess). She is glad she married a nerd.

FYI - ALS is primarily a neurodegenerative disease where the neurons themselves are dying off and not a demyelinating disease where the neurons remain intact but loose their myelin sheath.

That may have been true a decade ago, but now journals (e.g. JAMA, NEJM, Lancet) are fairly serious about clamping down on conflicts of interest, ghost writing, and other shady practices. For example here is one example of the required disclosure (for JAMA). Of course, someone could still lie/dissemble/etc... But this would be considered as the aberrant flow.

In a sense though the damage is done. If you search for ghost-writing and rofecoxib you can see articles regarding the extent of the problem in the late 90's with respect to Vioxx. It's a long road to getting back credibility/trust.

Dammit. We just can't have anything nice around here. I agree with you that this is probably the beginning of the end. The combination of behemoth sized international publishing company and small software company does not appear to favor the small software company.

I'm pissed as I just started using Mendeley last week and really like it. (*sigh*) I've used zotero before but it just wasn't that great/intuitive, but maybe I will have to give it a second shot.

The Americans I am most personally worried about are those who lack the critical thinking skills or desire to realize that we are dealing with complex situations with multiple competing forces at work. Lacking the skills or desire to have some kind of larger insight, they reflexively place issues into the categories of "Left" or "Right", "Conservative" or "Liberal", etc.. which lumps things into a preconceived morass of assumptions, assertions, and logical fallacies. Unable to appreciate the complexities of situations, they demonize people whose thought patterns do not fit nicely with their own.

Nothing like a lover's quarrel on Valentine's day...

If you live below the poverty line, then you may be eligible for medicaid. YMMV. Void where prohibited. Not applicable in all states (literally).

$10 got me a legit copy of Windows 7 ultimate edition through my university. Can't get much hardware (or even incremental improvement) for that amount of money. As someone who has made good $$$ off of software development, I don't think that $10 is too much to help support other developers. I've contributed more cash o FOSS projects than $10 over the years, that's for sure!

I have a kindle fire and read PDF's (medical textbooks) on it all the time. I do have to zoom in, but that "sticks" from page to page so I just have to do it once. Note -- this is with the Mantano reader (free version) which handles pdf better than the native kindle app (e.g. allows highlighting, freehand notes, etc..)

I have tried converting the PDF to mobi/epub with calibre (which works) but the layout gets really crappy -- especially with respect to the legends of figures/images/tables.

From my understanding, storing documents with patient identifying information on the 3rd party mainframe...errr..THE CLOUD...would constitute a HIPAA violation, unless that 3rd party had some kind of agreement about privacy and the like. Anyone know if these cloud document storing solutions such as Skydrive, Google Docs, etc... are liable for HIPAA violations (which can be $10k in fines a pop, IIRC)?

As other sib posters of mine have pointed out, this is in fact wrong. Historically (as in Ancient Greece), tasting urine for sweetness was how the disease got its name (it's not called 'mellitus' for nothing!). These days the diagnosis is through measuring levels of sugar in the blood, although most recently, measuring the surrogate marker of HbA1c can now be used to make a formal diagnosis. Before this you could either do a fasting blood sugar level, a glucose tolerance test, or having a rip roaring single glucose level with evidence of end organ damage (among other ways of diagnosis, which I am sure there some).

Testing of urine is done routinely (guideline is once per year) to look for microalbuminemia -- essentially damage to the renal apparatus caused by high blood sugar. If someone is in DKA, they would have high urine ketones, but this is not what is looked for in routine urine testing.

Once the diagnosis is made, it can be categorized (e.g. Type I, Type II, iotragenic, neoplastic, etc...).

This was one of my thoughts as well as I started reading Piers Anthony in 5th or 6th grade. The Xanth novels are great for puns. Many of his other series or short stories have decidedly more mature themes (Minnie's Crew...I remember reading THAT in 8th grade. Yikes!). Still, I remember reading (and re-reading) Cthon, the Bid of a Space Tyrant series, the Blue Adept/Phase series, and the Greek mythology based ones (forget the name of those books) with fondness.

And I'm not completely screwed up (although opinions on this may vary). :)