The foreign aid budget is relatively small compared to the budget. The military budget is large, but a lot of that money goes to US Companies and taxpayers. The foreign aid budget was much larger during the cold war when we used it to counter communist influence. Something like 26 Billion out of 2.9 trillion dollars in 2008, I think, compared to 626.6 billion on Defense not counting the two wars.

I believe the US gives a great deal of foreign aid through the IMF and such--aid programs where we lend money to developing nations so that they can buy our DRM'd agricultural seeds or patented anti-retroviral drugs, in part.

We also give a tremendous amount on a non-governmental basis. The good work done by private donors in this country is amazing, but is done out of personal generosity rather than legislative intent. As such, it's not being footed by the American taxpayer so much as the generous American. Obviously, giving is down in the recession.

The problem is we need to be very careful in how widely we apply the results of medical studies. We need to depend on them, Doctors should be aware of the results of the ones in their field, and there should be rigorous peer review, but they shouldn't be enforced as a determinitive factor in care except perhaps where results are extreme, because statistics in a given study aren't necessarily indicative of what is likely to happen in a particular case--for example, a huge Danish study said a few years back that extensive lymphadenectomies (i.e. taking out a good portion of the body's filtering and draining system) didn't result in longer life for patients recovering from gastric cancer resections, and that it was a bad idea because higher mortality rates occured in-hospital.

But it's harder surgery, and if a surgeon doesn't do it all the time he or she may not be able to do it well. That doesn't mean that it's not the best operation for the patient, and a patient's best chance for surival continued to include a radical lymphadenectomy from an experienced surgeon as part fo the procedure--despite the establishment's research-backed arguments against it.. Further, the study used to support arguments against it was only applicable in cases where splenectomy was done at the same time as gastrectomy, which wasn't the case for many if not most of the cases the argument was applied to.

And, to top it all off, after years of this debate new results came out from the patients of the Danish study showing their five or ten year survival rates were a lot higher with the radical lymphadenectomy.

I would hate to be a gastric cancer patient in the interim who understood why the study showed such bad results but who wasn't allowed to have the more radical procedure because "it's a medical treatment that doesn't work" according to the establishment. And worse than my hating it, I could easily die because of it.

Similarly, that back surgeries to relieve pain are usually no better than nonsurgical treatment doesn't mean back surgery should not be used--it means that either it should be more targeted or surgeons should be better-trained in that kind of surgery.

There are many calls for doing less medicine because of its skyrocketing costs. But we don't need less medicine, we need smarter medicine.

At $110 to file for a small entity, a provisional patent only costs a little bit. If you can't afford it and these are potentially useful medical devices, just go to a patient who would have benefited from it and ask for a little help, or go to a good doctor or med student and offer to let him or her write up the journal article *After* you file the provisional patent application. For that matter, I'm sure you can get five hundred or a thousand bucks from an undergrad in the sciences for the chance to write up something really medically useful, because they could put it on their apps to med or grad school.

IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and assume (as you should with every slashdot comment that could be interpreted as in a legal field) that I don't know what I'm talking about, but you can certainly write a little document saying simply what your agreement is with the person and sign it. There are a lot of people out there with at least a little disposable income--if you tell anyone who has a little money and who's experienced the pain of dealing with the medical system that you want to make a new medical device available for public use for free, you'll get the $110 for a provisional patent application.

If you also want a patentability finding and publication you can file a real utility patent application, but that costs a little more and the format is more rigid--you'd probably need a patent agent or attorney to help you draw it up.

I believe--but am not 100% sure--that the provisional application would handle the matter if it covers the subject matter of the patent.

Also, not to be silly about it, but did you try asking the USPTO what they would suggest? They know this stuff and it should just take them a minute to answer. Alternatively, one of the patients' rights or support groups might be willing to help.

The problem is that the general perspective of the UN by the US Citizenry is quite bad, largely because our politicians and news media began dissing and discounting the UN when they started saying things we didn't like.

It's more complicated than that--but there is actually such a thing as statecraft, and a lot of it goes on behind the scenes, and our news broadcasters usually don't care about it because it's too complicated to explore in a sound byte. Some of it goes on at the UN. Some of it makes a difference in developing nations, in the development of free markets, the somewhat successful (though we still have a long way to go) progress in the fight against slavery, work on preventing climate change, and even on occasion successfully prosecuting (or even just stopping) war crimes and certain malevolent acts.

It's a terribly flawed system, and I don't pretend to be an expert--but from what I've seen and what I know from people who actually know more about the UN than what they get on the nightly news, while there IS a lot of counterproductive or ridiculous activity, there is also a lot of good work that they do and that they try to do in various areas.

Those problems, by the way, happen here. Tens of thousands of slaves are brought into the United States every year. Climate change will kill us if we don't do more about it, opening up new markets (and stabilizing regions enough so that business can be done there successfully) helps us as investors, consumers, and producers, and a stable world is better for our Citizens abroad and at home.

So the UN does help us, in those ways and others. Sometimes it is ridiculous and is rightly mocked (a state of governance hardly unique to the UN), but more of the ignore-the-UN sentiment in the US comes from them doing things we don't like. We had disagrements with them on a few things, so our leaders and the press moved away from them, and now we're twenty years later. (I actually don't recall how many years later--I'm thinking, in particular, of the time we were indicted in the World Court for terrorism. We were backing an anti-communist regime with some CIA help, IIRC, back during the Cold War when we cared more about Communism than about Terrorism. The help included recommending they use terrorism to achieve their political objectives.) There have certainly been other things we've disagreed on over the years.

I'll also agree on the Veto point below--that the UN, and not another international body, is such a major international voice is very useful to us because we have the veto power in the security council. For one thing, other countries do care about the UN, and it's therefore useful to us to be able to have at least some influence over the UN's policies and positions.

It does, to some degree, because they are moving at least a little bit more toward accepting and enforcing IP law, and as the domestic IP grows they'll have stronger interests in enforcement of IP law in general. (Because they'll want other countries to recognize their IP rights.)

What's more interesting about this to the /. crowd, I should think, is the movement from first-to-invent to first-to-file. That is, the "inventor" in the U.S. won't be the person who invented something first, it'll be the person who first filed it at the patent office claiming to be the inventor.

Every other country in the world does it that way, but it's quite a philisophical change from our system.

It would be nice if they had a list of Antivirus programs that were effective and/or operating systems affected, nice and prominent somewhere linked from the article.

FYI, from the security bulletin:

Affected software:
XP Service Pack 2 & 3
XP Pro x64 and x64 Service Pack 2
Server 2003 Service Packs 1 & 2
Server 2003 x64 and x64 Service Pack 2
Server 2003 with SP1 and SP2 for Itanium

Non-affected:
Win2K SP 4
Vista & Vista SP1
Vista x64&SP1
Server 2008 32
Server 2008 x64
Server 2008 Itanium

A friend of mine bought one for reading in the subway. He finds it great, and he points out correctly that for avid readers it's wonderful just from the standpoint of space conservation. For Manhattan-dwellers especially, that's a major selling point.

It's a pretty good product--the only bad thing about it is from the publisher's standpoint, since IIRC it requires you to prepare your books in a new format (which is a not-insignificant undertaking) and Amazon has near-complete control over the pricing structure. (The pricing structure thing hurts authors, too.)

Countering that is that it will make some books more accessible. It doesn't take much work to get books now, but the ability to have them in front of you and easily readable right away combined with sample chapters gives you at least part of the convenience of actually walking into a bookstore, only you get it anyplace you can get the data connection.

I can't speak to the durability, though, because it's still a new toy. Give it a year and see how it holds up in different conditions. But overall, this is definitely a shiny product, in the good sense as opposed to the coefficient-of-specular-reflection-is-too-high sense. It'll probably really help Amazon once the economy picks back up, since more people will have the income to spend on a Kindle and they'll have had a chance to improve it.

> Wikipedia now creates the truth. If they say 2+2=5, then 2+2=5. You will learn to love Big Wiki.

2+2 does equal five, though.

let x = 1
The derivative of x is 1. The derivative of 1 is zero. Therefore the derivative of the equation == 1 == 0.

2+2 = 2+2+0, by additive identity.
but 0=1.

Therefore 2+2 = 2+2+1.

Therefore 2+2=5.

2+2=5

It's Flexible Frank!

They always pick movies that are enhanced by their commentary, and yet which contain their own wonderful comic moments. The deadpan acting of a man who talks about what happened "while I was... green," for example.

FYI, I was thinking along the lines of the two biggest beliefs at present: Creationism and Evolution. Intelligent Design, I agree, is ridiculous marketing-speak.

Creationism is in the bible used by multiple major world religions; there's nothing wrong with saying "this is what these people believe" or "this is what these texts say." In point of fact, while separation of church and state is generally a good thing, knowing the beginning of religious books that have had major influences on world events for millenia would seem to be useful educationally regardless of whether you approach academics from an atheistic, agnostic, or religious perspective.

Seriously, think of the children. The teenagers, rather. Whenever I hear this debate roar its head, that seems like the first place to go. It's not like a high school freshman is going to be scarred for life by hearing two sides of an argument. "These people believe this for this reason. These other people believe this for this other reason."

Their heads don't explode. It's okay. It may even *gasp* make them think about opposing ideas. They've done it before, since when they wanted a cookie and their parents didn't want them to have the cookie.

If we spent the time we spend on the evolution debate on education instead, we'd be a lot better off.

There are a few big publishing houses that print a tremendous percentage of our books. Fewer than there were a few years ago, due to consolidation.

But at least one of the six major houses has stopped purchasing new books from authors, either completely stopped or near-completely stopped. Times are tough for everyone but bankruptcy lawyers. (And their times are tougher when ours are better.)

Profit Margins in publishing are usually razor-thin. (The mega-blockbusters are the exception.)

Barnes and Noble shows a 2% Margin, for example, with a 36% drop in stock price this year.

It's hard to make a profit in books, even good books.

The old information is there, I believe, and you know what the patient did. It is, ultimately, the patient's record, and if he sees something that is obviously incorrect he should be able to note that without the added hassle and expense of a doctor's visit for... correcting the record. The audit trail makes it workable.

The problem isn't always one of qualification--sometimes it's one of a doctor who didn't listen or who jotted something down quickly which--while accurate--was woefully incomplete.

As to the records disappearing, it's not BS. At a good hospital, they usually don't. But there are a lot of hospitals that are not good. When the risk of a law suit presents itself, medical records often disappear, become deliberately vague, or flat-out lie. Medical ethics classes notwithstanding. When a patient gets a staph infection from a needle prick at a hospital, the doctor will avoid telling the patient or noting in the record how it happened. When an almost criminal misdiagnosis results in multiple unsucessful surgeries rather than detecting a cancer (which the symptoms suggested), the records disappear.

I'm not saying it happens everywhere--but it does happen regularly, and more frequently than you think. Medical ethics aren't as strictly adhered to as the ideal would suggest. They should be, for the most part, but they're not. There are still docs people go to for notes to get off work, who practice insurance fraud in exchange for the notes and deal drugs out the back door. There are still hospitals where washing hands before touching a patient, and not touching non-sterile surfaces after washing hands, are not common rules. Yes, in the U.S.

A patient in the ideal case has immediate access to his records. But a request for records that are obviously about something that was done wrong in the past is a red flag for a lawsuit.