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Comment Re:Education funding and excessive medicallisation (Score 0) 558

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder of social development and language use. Whoever wrote the stuff above clearly had little problem with social and language use, but OBVIOUSLY had been a victim of pseudoscience propaganda. Are you serious you have a disorder such as autism? I don't honestly think so...

Comment Re:Bath salts (Score 1) 377

this depends on which laboratory you are talking about. most regional toxicology laboratory are able to detect these drugs (usually by LC-MS/MS), and then chemical standards of these drugs are commercially available (despite, perhaps, the big price tag on the chemical standards which are ~1 grand a piece...)

Comment Re:It is wonderful, but it's only in mice (Score 1) 104

depending on where the patient live, depending on whether they got insurance, depending on their insurance coverage,
they can now choose

(1) to die now and leave a fortune to their wife, sons and daughters
(2) to die later and leave everyone broke

and that is a difficult question. when i worked back then as a junior doctor in an oncology center, they had trouble buying those "expensive" "next generation" chemotherapy which may last a few cycle (only), which was already a money hog to the family... now they have to buy it for years.

imagine the difficulty. there are still quite a number of countries where health insurance is not common and/or insurance company are not covering these type of drugs....

as for the new TKIs, i think they will only be more expensive. give it another 20-30 years, when the patents expire, then we can talk again on this...

Comment Re:Deadlier? (Score 1) 104

hepatitis B is now quite treatable. resistance since the introduction of entacavir and adefovir is very low. cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma is now considered preventable with these therapy. the problem is the access to medication in the far east.

the virulence of hepatitis B is quite low in terms of environmental source. it is primarily transmitted by body fluid transmission.

Comment Re:Deadlier? (Score 5, Informative) 104

the deal with these is that flu, pneumonia and perhaps urinary tract infection is almost always the presentation of the patient in the death episode. it's not fair comparing it to flu. Among those who died of flu, it is rather rare to find a person who enjoyed relatively good past health and is young.

Hepatitis C (and hepatitis B), on the other hand, leads to cirrhosis, hepatocellular cellular carcinoma and liver failure. It is exactly one of those diseases which will cause deterioration of the patient's health to such extent that a flu could kill.

It is rather unfair to compare Hep C to Flu in terms of mortality.

Comment It is wonderful, but it's only in mice (Score 4, Insightful) 104

Well, there are more than a hundred discoveries like these that demonstrated effectiveness of curing the uncurables in the past decade. Of those which went through the testing in man, well, maybe 2 or 3...

Back then, avastin, glivec and so on were expected to be magical cures for cancers.. now they exist only as expensive life-prolonging (with or without quality) therapy and only for those who are rich.

Comment that happens on all sort of examination (Score 3, Informative) 238

not just medical examination. it is just a co-incidence that the medical profession is one that is tangled with most examinations. speaking of examinations, though, the most important examination for us medical doctors are usually conducted in the oral style (viva examination) which allowed impromptu questions set immediately, testing the doctor on how they would handle a patient step-by-step. i'm not sure about the american system but that's true for most british systems.

Comment Re:makes sense (Score 1) 103

<quote>REAL GLASS fiber optics are heavier than copper cable, with the approximate atomic weight of copper being 29 and silicon dioxide being 30 having two oxygen atoms at 8 and one silicon atom at 14.</quote>

<quote><p>The plastic stuff is even heavier, (C5O2H8) for a total of approximately 54. Glass handles more power than pretty much every plastic given its lower thermal conductivity and higher tolerance to heat buildup.</p><p>Extremely thin glass fiber can be almost as flexible as a plastic fiber, and carry more energy.</p></quote>

atomic mass has little to do with the mass density of solid structure, for the matter. For plastics it is even a more complicated matter, even for plastics made of a single monomer, depending on the condition the plastic is formed there may be different density.

Your geek badge is herein revoked. not only that you should not tell others to go back to their chemistry class, it is you who need to go back to your high school physical chemistry.

Comment Re:retire it (Score 1) 417

<quote><p>The G4 is to the G5 as the Pentium 3 is to the Pentium 4 :)</p></quote>

Sorry, but i just don't get it... do you mean that the G4 is 1) clocked slower, 2) having a superior, more efficient architecture, 3) don't use as much energy compared with G5?
Google

Google Planning New Undersea Cable Across Pacific? 144

tregetour writes "Google is planning a multi-terabit undersea communications cable across the Pacific Ocean for launch in 2009, Communications Day reports: 'Google would not strictly confirm or deny the existence of the Unity plan today, with spokesman Barry Schnitt telling our North American correspondent Patrick Neighly that "Additional infrastructure for the Internet is good for users and there are a number of proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We're not commenting on any of these plans." However, Communications Day understands that Unity would see Google join with other carriers to build a new multi-terabit cable. Google would get access to a fibre pair at build cost handing it a tremendous cost advantage over rivals such as MSN and Yahoo, and also potentially enabling it to peer with Asia ISPs behind their international gateways — considerably improving the affordability of Internet services across Asia Pacific.'"
Patents

802.11n May Never Happen Due to Patent Concerns 174

afabbro writes "The Register is reporting that the 802.11n standard is imperiled because the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization has refused to submit a Letter of Assurance, promising not to sue those who implement the standard. '...the realization that CSIRO holds essential patents, and has failed to provide a Letter of Assurance as required by the IEEE, could prevent the standard ever being finalized ... 802.11n promises to deliver a fivefold increase in speed, and double the range of 802.11g. Indeed in many cases it's already delivering something approximating that, as pre-standard kit has been available for almost a year. In May the Wi-Fi Alliance got so bored waiting for the IEEE to complete the standard that they started certifying kit as conforming to the draft, even though the final version isn't expected until 2008."

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