ippisl

since all brain receptor become less sensitive as you expose them to their target chemical, doesn't it means that drugs will always cause some damage and be addictive ?

I think you're taking it a bit too far. If say i sell bath salts, which aren't supposed to be consumed, why would there be a need to check metabolism/toxicity and such ?

But if metabolism can transform said chemical , then sure, you've got to take it into account. But many of those drugs can be detected by pre-metabolism binding, i think.

I haven't got chemistry knowledge, but isn't the effect of say a THC analog is based on binding between THC and a certain receptor?

Wouldn't it be possible to offer kits or services for chemical manufacturers, to test the level of binding of their chemicals, and define that above a certain level of binding , you're chemical have to be regulated in some way?

At least in embedded systems, this looks like something that can be done the open source way. The success of the arduino and the mbed in building popular ecosystems has shown us that.

I can see some better version of the .net micro framework, being improved by the open source community(1), and benefiting from the ms ecosystems and tools, becoming fit for some large part of embedded systems work.

Also I can see this getting adopted since it let's embedded developers in small companies, who has some power on which tools to use, learn another skill that can better their employment opportunities.

(1)improved speed could be achieved through using the cito compiler project, which might be good enough for many projects. And for making the language hard real time, it could be done using specific implementation of reference counting, although at some speed/memory cost.

Regarding IP:

The important and hard part(if you want this to solve problems and create businesses) is to expose creators/entrepreneurs to good problems , and connect them with domain experts and the relevant knowledge.

This way, you leave the details of the solution(IP) private, which should help motivate the creation of a product and a business

By making it as a business creation platform, and highlighting the companies it started, or even the groups that that formed and are working through this, you create a very strong incentive to domain experts(which are usually very busy people, think doctors, lawyers, etc) to publish problems on the platform, preferably in some detailed, and interesting way.

And by having interesting content about really good problems, you gather high quality entrepreneurs and creators, which also post resumes and details about themselfs, to make creating good connections easier.

And by making you're content interesting, you could get much wider readership(which helps with marketing), also among people who are not entrepreneurs but might hold useful knowledge. If you'll figure someway to incentivise them to contribute, the better, but you'll have to be very carefull with signal to noise.

EDIT:also , by creating a different stream of important problems, you create stuff for bloggers/journalists to write about , which is great for marketing.

If you're interested in building something, I think an automated medical interview app, for use by consumers, focused on some subset seems more practical.

Similar things have been done before, for example Isabele health care, and other medical decision support systems.

Instead of a gradual reform, what about enabling a new medical system , bound to new relaxed laws and new people to control it, to exist side by side to the current system, that would focus on low cost healthcare ?

Maybe it would be "lower quality", but least it would offer choice for many , and be a great research lab for low cost healthcare.

Nurse practitioners are used in many countries with great results. Why is using them illegal ? of course it's because of regulatory capture and the general power doctors hold, which is probably the biggest reason why healthcare is so expensive(and also not very good).

You see it in million places: The limited number of medical schools, The lack of nurse practitioners doing the simple routine jobs in most specialties(dental, family, colonoscopy, anesthsia. Many others could exist), The lack of automation and expert systems[4] and automated patient interview[3] tools, the fact that family practitioners could replace a lot of the specialists work at lower costs[1], Many medical jobs could be done with a lot less training[2], the lack of use of proven processes like checklists[5], etc.

All those changes could save a lot of money, and raise quality. We know what to do, But how do we implement it ?

[1]http://www.rwjf.org/en/grants/grantees/project-echo.html

[2]Because there's a brain drain in africa to the west, some countries have started a 3 year surgeon degree program. Doctors who finished this degree seem to have equivalent results to fully trained doctors in simple/medium complexity surgeries.

[3]Research showed doctors only ask about half of the questions needed in a typical visit. Automated interview systems could at least gather more complete data.

[4]There's research review showing that correct implementation of decision support/expert systems could improve results.

[5]Peter provonost showed that checklists could reduce infection rates in one procedure from 8/12 percent to zero.This was around 10 years ago. I think gawande showed similar results in other stuff. checklists are still not commonly used.

Gladwell did a piece on using computers to predict a hit formula :

http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_10_16_a_formula.html

Are there any possible realistic solutions to the trusted hardware issue?

Syncany looks promising. It's open source, includes client encryption and support for multiple options of storage(google,amazon,rackspace,ftp and others),and it's only 8K loc of java.

Of course it would still need a security review.

I didn't made any argument about public vs private healthcare FINANCING. I simple said they need more money.

And i said india is good at low cost healthcare DELIVERY.

Financing and delivery are seperate parts and shouldn't be mixed thogheter in such dicsuossions.

At least according to snowden, PGP itself is secure , but client security is still awfull.And i believe anonimity(tor) is probably broken by the NSA.

But the question is: is the NSA willing to expose it's hand to spy on some occupy protestors ?

This is not a problem of regulation, but of general lack of money and/or agreement of social cost sharing.

And some other low cost services are offered to some of the poor in India like heart surgeries, artificial ankles, ambulances, eyeglasses, psychiatric services. With some money and growth they could theoretically be offered to everyone in India.

You're right.

There's a lot of interesting work on memristor memory, which is much cheaper and faster (and probably lower power) than RAM ,And a lot of interesting work on faster, lower power 3D memory interfaces.

Those and other hardware innovations could have a huge effect on the garbage collection issue, and this whole debate.

A lot depends on how thicker this would be and what the users will get in return.

But if they designed it with 5/10 optional popular hardware modules , and marketing about future modules that will come from community, this could really appeal to early adopters , and people with specific niches that need to be filled.

And technically , if this is the right way to build more innovative phones, it has a good chance to win in the general population.

Not sure where i learned about magnets. Just did some web surfing around this.

Too risky for google? why ?

They seem like a company who takes risks.see: automated cars, internet balloons, google wave, competing with amazon on fast product shipping.

Could you surf the web with it in 2001 ? if so very cool.

Thanks.

That's from 1998 , when building fabs was cheap. I wonder what manufacturing process their latest factory uses.

<rumor> I have a guess about the motoX phone: It will have a modular hardware component. Probably something similar to the jolla phone , which is build from two different parts stuck togheter by magnets. One part if your phone , and the other one is a replaceable hardware card.

This also fits the motoX ad saying "design your own phone".

The replaceable part could be designed by anyone, and it opens a lot of places for innovation: think of a microscope, or a fingerprint scanner, or nose on a chip, or high quality audio interfaces ,or unique sensors or any number of niche hardware.

Anyway , i really hope that's the case. If will be really fun to play and design with such phones.

</rumor>

There are easy to use implementations of otr like securetext android app.

I'm not sure people are willing to totally skip privacy.

One interesting data point is a snapchat. It enables private picture sharing and it's pretty popular.

Another private messaging app talks about protecting the privacy and safety of your children, I can see the app becoming popular.

Maybe by building this kinds of networks we can offer more private channels. But not sure this can lead to anti government encryption because :

A. People are interested in protection from terrorism.

B. There are plenty of ways for government to subvert this kind of apps, especially since they are owned by commercial entities.

And maybe that's a good thing, in a world where terrorists will probably have increasing technological capabilities to cause damage.

I fail to see the value of such devices to the consumer. With android devices available at $100 with 1gb, android 4, a large screen, and huge market of highly optimised apps, what can Firefox is offer, except from marketing by carriers which are usually hated by consumers?

liliputing.com/2013/06/android-gets-cheaper-meet-the-100-quad-core-phone-59-dual-core-tablet.html

It's pretty easy to add ignore flags to messages. With good encryption I think it could be hard to distinguish between real and false messages without the key , and that seems like something that can be proven mathematically.

Does advertising provide a valuable service beyond monetizing other things? My guess is mostly, no.

In a world with search engines that know everything about you and can recommended great products and services for you, there's no need for wrong incentives in the form of money to be part of this recommendation process.

And regarding brand advertising : some marketing people say that advertising do offer people some psychological value that gets implanted in the product., which makes them enjoy the product more. For example the axe deodorant ads causes some people to wonder whether using axe did helps with attraction, which changed their internal experience.

The problem again with such claims is the perverse incentives that money play here, which we see in the effects of advertising on female body image.

Really the only case I think ads are usefull are in cases they are used by non profits or the states to achieve public goals, like anti smoking ads.

I wonder if a kickstarter funding would work in this case, especially since open-source is considered a requirement for good privacy software.

This is not an ease of use problem. Using something like textSecure or redPhone is relatively easy and helps greatly with creating a private channel[1]. But there's still a huge marketing problem.

[1]There's still the problems of metadata and backdoors and of legislation around encryption.

There's a smart watch platform in kickstarter that runs .net/c# mini apps.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/secretlabs/agent-the-wor...