siddster - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Smoke up America! (Score 4, Informative) 122

by siddster on Sunday June 21, 2009 @02:57PM (#28412601) Attached to: Mayo Clinic Reports Dramatic Outcomes In Prostate Cancer Treatment

I smoke and I've researched this issue into the ground. Its pretty accurate.

No you haven't! This is a classic case of data dredging and selective presentation of data. For starters, amongst smokers with small primary lung cancers, smoking cessation is associated with an almost 3-fold reduction in cancer recurrence.
(annals of internal medicine http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/abstract/119/5/383)

Not only that, but sustained quitters (14.5 years in this study ... data in the pdf and you'll need a subscription to access it... http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/abstract/142/4/233) had a 2.2 fold reduced incidence of lung cancer if they stayed cigarette free for that duration. Granted, that the risk never came back to baseline but its a far cry from declaring that smoking cessation doesn't reduce cancer mortality.

Also, smoking cessation dramatically reduces heart disease and stroke mortality. The number one killer of smokers (surprise, surprise!) is not cancer but in fact heart disease. Heart disease is also the leading cause of death in the US with 1 in 3 people dying of heart trouble. Hence, even if the benefits in terms of cancer reduction are modest, smoking cessation considerably reduces the number of people dying.

Get your facts right!

Comment Re:I Can Think of Possibilities ... (Score 1) 592

by siddster on Wednesday September 10, 2008 @11:47PM (#24957155) Attached to: Senator Questions Rise In US Texting Prices

With all due respect I think the so called rise in price is total BS.
It's funny how cellular phone companies in the US have actually managed to convince people to pay to receive SMS messages. This service is pretty much free in large chunks of the world. Frankly, most cell-phone policies in the US are anti-trust worthy. (like paying to receive calls for instance.. another free service in most parts of the developed and developing parts of the world)

Having Your ID Stolen Leads to Job Loss, Prosecution 404

Posted by Zonk on Thursday April 03, 2008 @05:33PM from the jobs-are-for-living-though dept.

ConfusedVorlon writes "The BBC reports on the sad case of Simon Bunce. Mr. Bunce had his identity stolen, and credit cards were made to capitalize on the theft. Some of those cards were used at sites offering child pornography, and as a result Mr. Bunce was swept up in Operation Ore. The poor man was prosecuted for his 'crime', and was eventually found innocent, but in the meantime he lost his job. It took him six months to find another at a quarter of the salary. 'The police's computer technicians take several months to examine [his computers and records], and Mr Bunce could not afford to wait to repair the damage done to his reputation. "I knew there'd been a fundamental mistake made and so I had to investigate it." Recent surveys suggest that as many as one in four Britons have been affected by it. In 2007 more than 185,000 cases of identity theft were identified by Cifas, the UK's fraud prevention service, an increase of almost 8% on 2006.'"

Engineers Make Good Terrorists? 467

Posted by Zonk on Thursday April 03, 2008 @04:11PM from the what's-wrong-with-an-engineering-degree dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Engineers' focus and attention to details, along with their perceived lack of social skills, make them ideal targets to be recruited as terrorists, according to EETimes. Planning skills make engineers good 'field operatives' was written up by Raphael Perl, who heads the Action against Terrorism Unit of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He offers that 'Engineers ideally make excellent strategic planners, and they make excellent field operatives. They think differently from how other people think.' That may sound like a stereotype, but Perl claims that 'because of those traits, terrorist groups actively recruit engineers.' He says that Al-Qaeda has widely acknowledged that a significant number of the group's top leadership had engineering backgrounds." This is the second time in just a few months that engineers have been likened to terrorists.

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