One serving at the salad bar not enough? Not if you use this trick!

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A couple who authorities say performed liposuction in the basement of a home has been charged with practicing medicine without a license after the female patient died.

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Artificial lung technology can help all kinds of people, but I’m especially glad to see it being used to help those wounded troops. What bothers me is the action of the bureacrats. Sure, there is such a thing as due diligence, but it isn’t as if this technology was unproven or poorly implemented.

Sixteen months after Lance Cpl. Joshua Mishoe nearly drowned in his Humvee in a canal in Iraq, he’s finally starting to breathe better.

He can walk short distances around his Florida home without getting out of breath and no longer needs supplemental oxygen at night, his mother said.

To save his life, military doctors looked outside their normal arsenal of medical tools and found something that would not only keep Joshua Mishoe alive, but within two months would help revive three other servicemembers.

Called an interventional lung assist and made by a German company called Novalung, the device is now part of the inventory a special Air Force pulmonary emergency team takes to Iraq when critical lung patients need aid.

But using it also placed doctors in the cross hairs of an investigation by the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army because the Novalung machine hadn’t made its way through the lengthy American regulations process required to approve medical devices for use.

And it led to the Army medical agency reprimanding at least one of the doctors for his actions, even as the families of the injured praised the doctors for taking bold steps to save their sons.

Do you think the military was justified in its actions? Should advanced medical technology that may not be yet approved here in the USA be used to save soldiers’ lives?

Here is a link to Novalung’s English Website.

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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has released a solicitation calling for the exploration of energy alternatives and fuel efficiency efforts in a bid to reduce the military’s reliance on traditional fuel for aircraft.

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Guitar tab website threatened by NMPA and MPA.

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NBC10 – July 26, 2006:

A Philadelphia family said they are outraged over the arrest of one of their family members.

The family of Neftaly Cruz said police had no right to come onto their property and arrest their 21-year-old son simply because he was using his cell phone’s camera. They told their story to Harry Hairston and the NBC 10 Investigators.

Cruz said that when he heard a commotion, he walked out of his back door with his cell phone to see what was happening. He said that when he saw the street lined with police cars, he decided to take a picture of the scene.

“I opened (the phone) and took a shot,” Cruz said.

Moments later, Cruz said he got the shock of his life when an officer came to his back yard gate.

“He opened the gate and took me by my right hand,” Cruz said.

Cruz said the officer threw him onto a police car, cuffed him and took him to jail.

“He opened up the gate and Neffy was coming down and he went up to Neffy, pulled him down, had Neffy on the car and was telling him, ‘You should have just went in the house and minded your own business instead of trying to take pictures off your picture phone,’” said Gerrell Martin.

And this part makes NO sense…

Police also denied that they told Cruze he was breaking the law with his cell phone.

If they admit he wasn’t breaking the law, exactly why did they arrest him? We previously covered a similar incident from New Hampshire.

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A group of Myspace users has started a petition campaign to gather a million signatures to present to Congress. A constitutional effort that impresses an old cynic like me.

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Kudos to these guys and gals. We need to develop better oil-spill cleaning technology, and harnessing Mother Nature would create a solution gentler on the environment than current means of cleanup.

In our fossil-fuel age, oil spills remain a major problem. From the Exxon Valdez to the recent Prestige disaster in Spain, several million tons of oil soils the world’s seas every year, causing ecological catastrophe. Scientists developing cleanup strategies have looked to the microbes that thrive in the wake of such spills as one solution. Now, thanks to a detailed breakdown of one of the most effective of these oil-eaters, they are closer to having biologically based remedies for such environmental disasters.

Alcanivorax borkumensis is a rod-shaped bacteria that relies on oil to provide it with energy. Relatively rare in unpolluted seas it quickly comes to dominate the marine microbial ecosystem after an oil spill, and it can be found throughout the world’s oceans. Vítor A. P. Martins dos Santos of the German Research Center for Biotechnology and his colleagues broke the marine organism’s genome into more than 3 million base pairs and then pieced them together into a complete genetic map.

We’ve been researching the use of bacteria for applications from this to power generation. Why not use nature whenever possible?

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Is America ready for the reinvented Gore?

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I went to Iraq to kill people

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Whose hardware is it anyway?

The important question we must ask is this: Who owns the hardware, and what rights should these owners of tangible property expect to be protected in the law.

As an owner of hardware I expect to be control of my hardware for any lawful purpose. Where there is software, I should have the right to replace that software with software of my own choosing, including the right to author and run my own software on the hardware if I have these skills.

In a recent article in CNet News.com, Linus Torvalds, the founder and leader of the Linux kernel project, was quoted as follows:

“Say I’m a hardware manufacturer. I decide I love some particular piece of open-source software, but when I sell my hardware, I want to make sure it runs only one particular version of that software, because that’s what I’ve validated. So I make my hardware check the cryptographic signature of the binary before I run it,” Torvalds said. “The GPLv3 doesn’t seem to allow that, and in fact, most of the GPLv3 changes seem to be explicitly designed exactly to not allow the above kind of use, which I don’t think it has any business doing.”

I strongly disagree with Torvalds language, and disagree with his objections to the enhanced GPL.

If I purchase hardware, it is my hardware and is no longer owned by the manufacturer. If my hardware checks a cryptographic signature on a binary file to verify its origins, it should be my signature signed with my key since I am the owner of the hardware.

And then here’s an article by Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing fame on Apple’s copyright protection technologies.

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All good things must come to an end.

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If anything will get kids to vote this will do it.

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This is wild.

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Creepy indeed.

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