The articles criticism I think stems from the same feeling of discomfort I got when I understood a bit better how drugs are developed.
As a culture I think we have a certain faith in the medical system to save us from death, the same way previous generations looked to priests to save the spirit.
The inference you mention 'high HDL is associated with low cardiac arrest, therefore a drug that increases HDL might help is more vague than a layman expects.
It's like saying 'I want a safe car, and German tend to be safe, therefore I will buy a German' - it's valid in the absence of a real understanding of how to specify and select a safe car, but it's more vague than you'd be comfortable with.
You expect an engineering company to be able to specify a safe car based on deep knowledge. But because our understanding of the disease, and of what different chemicals can do is incomplete, a drug company can't do that.
Instead, they follow as many hints as they can to select a chemical that might work, and then advance it through a series of progressively more expensive trials until they are pretty sure it does more good than harm.
That's a valid way of doing things, and at the moment it's all we can do. But it's not what a layman imagines, or certainly not what this one imagined.
It undermines our sense of control - our sense that we are immortal and can get on with making an angry birds clone to get rich because there will be plenty of time to do the projects we want to after the payoff - it's not like we are going to die of heart disease, science has our back on that one!
Or maybe I'm generalizing my personal feelings too much?
No, you're onto something here. Modern medicine is not all powerful. It does some things very well, and we live much longer because of it, but there is still so much we do not understand. I'm thankful that there are those that put the time and money into this research that furthers our comprehension.
However, there are plenty of conditions you can develop where modern medicine is only able to contain the symptoms, rather than fix the problem causing them. Autoimmune conditions (such as MS) come to mind here.
Microsoft seem to have a vision for their device which is quite different from the IPAD. Perhaps I'm reading between the lines too much.
Imagine a tablet that connected wirelessly to a nearby monitor and keyboard. Imagine arriving at your desk, placing your device in a charging station, picking up the mouse, and working on your device as a desktop.
Imagine picking up the device to go to a meeting, using it as a tablet to browse your colleagues slides while she talked. Imagine it's your turn. You touch the screen, and the projector takes its feed from your device screen instead, wirelessly. You can change slides by gesture, draw with your finger to illustrate your talk, and run the programs you have developed and make changes. After all, this is your development machine.
Laptops already do a lot of this but they are cumbersome. Mostly, people want to read on the move, and that's what a tablet is for, consuming data.
Anyway, that's where I think Microsoft is going, but it's been a long day and I'm talking out my ass. Would you actually find a device like this an improvement on a laptop?
I think this has to be tempered with an acceptance that we all have strengths and weaknesses, and sometimes you are not the right person for 'that' job.
If you are working in a team at a big company it's easy to recognize this because the person who is sits in the next cubicle. Programmers don't start making product flyers because the marketing guy always does them so well.
But working alone, when do you decide to hire another freelancer to do that bit?
A friend who designs games always hires artists to concept how important models should look. They send him some pencil sketches. Surely he could save money by coming up with an idea and just drawing it, it's not hard...
But the ideas from a good concept artist are just better than what he or I would do. They spend a lot of time getting so skilled, and if he invested that same time, no game would get made.
So yeah, knowing how to do everything is good, but spotting when you need to have spent those 10'000 hours more so...
So you've been doing the minimalist living thing?
Do you find yourself spending more or less time in the virtual world, having made the physical one a little less comfortable?
Also, as an aside, how do you deal with the expectations of the opposite gender?
I got no mail, and was signed up for ai, ml, db.
It seems only ai is open to registration so far, perhaps to get an idea of demand and discover bugs...
I'm one of those people who didn't get a Google Plus invite, so maybe I'm a bit bitter.
But no one else I know did either.
If facebook can replicate Plus's killer features, even approximately, before it gets put on open beta, it will lose it's ability to win users.
Why would you want to maintain 2 social networking profiles when both networks do approximately the same thing?
Imagining that the release is true, this will do strange things for pay bargaining. Imagine if you could look up your colleagues before asking for a rise?
On the other hand, I don't recall anything really horrific on that form. Enough data to steal my identity and take out a mortgage in my name, yes. Enough to embarrass me? no...
There may not be anything in there to embarass me but there is unequivocally enough in there for someone to steal my identity and ruin a credit rating I've been working extremely hard to build over the last three years.
Childrens names & DoB, previous addresses, employment status, national insurance number. That info alone is enough for someone experienced to do damage.
You can obtain that sort of info, by dumpster diving say, but not in anything like the scale.
Imagine that you can get this info and a pretty good idea of salary and lifestyle by running a db search in a few seconds. You can easily focus your attention on the most lucrative propositions and get info from even those that are careful to not put such info out there. Census completion is a legal requirement, everyone should be on one.
I can easily imagine looking up my colleagues salary, because here in Norway you actually can. (Well, you can look at how much tax they pay, and various websites convert that into an estimated salary)
I don't find it particularly interesting, though. People earn around what you expect them to earn.
It did ask for the household annual income. It also asks for the job title of the various householders so with a small bit of market info you could easily discern who earns what. Regardless, salary info would be the least of my concerns.
The illegal technology is so ubiquitous you don't even notice it. As far as I know the DVD player in VLC is illegal.
Does anyone remember when the blueray key was released? Without that I just don't think opensource playback would be possible, and it remains illegal to distribute.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSShttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime
In some public NATO reports, they said that during the Kosovo thing, NATO hackers took out specific Serbian radar installations to cover for the strike planes. I guess the Serbians didn't get the memo about putting critical infrastructure on a routable network...
As a culture I think we have a certain faith in the medical system to save us from death, the same way previous generations looked to priests to save the spirit.
The inference you mention 'high HDL is associated with low cardiac arrest, therefore a drug that increases HDL might help is more vague than a layman expects. It's like saying 'I want a safe car, and German tend to be safe, therefore I will buy a German' - it's valid in the absence of a real understanding of how to specify and select a safe car, but it's more vague than you'd be comfortable with. You expect an engineering company to be able to specify a safe car based on deep knowledge. But because our understanding of the disease, and of what different chemicals can do is incomplete, a drug company can't do that. Instead, they follow as many hints as they can to select a chemical that might work, and then advance it through a series of progressively more expensive trials until they are pretty sure it does more good than harm.
That's a valid way of doing things, and at the moment it's all we can do. But it's not what a layman imagines, or certainly not what this one imagined. It undermines our sense of control - our sense that we are immortal and can get on with making an angry birds clone to get rich because there will be plenty of time to do the projects we want to after the payoff - it's not like we are going to die of heart disease, science has our back on that one!
Or maybe I'm generalizing my personal feelings too much?