Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I don’t buy the religious argument that getting the HPV vaccine for young women is immoral. HPV is a nasty, prevalent virus and should be eradicated with as much expediency as possible:

Gardasil, which was approved by the FDA last June, protects against four strains of human papillomavirus (HPV). Two are believed to cause 70% of cervical cancer, which strikes about 11,000 U.S. women a year. The other two strains cause 90% of genital warts–so the vaccine is a twofer.

According to the Time article, 40% of women carry the virus 2 years after sexual maturity, say at 18 years of age. By age 50, 80% of women have it in some form or another. Let’s assume the vaccine Gardasil was 90% efficient in preventing HPV; then after 50 years just 8% of women would carry the virus. Assuming everyone in America decided to vaccinate their daughters, they would see their great-grandchildren’s generation entirely disease free:

This is simply the converging sequence population*(1 – effective rate)^n. There are other factors to take into account, like the number of people who opt to receive the vaccine, which will initially be quite low, combined with the likelyhood of them being a transmitter of the virus. Since my math is sketchy tonight I feel like modeling a markov chain, but suffice to say, preventing America’s young women from contracting HPV is a good thing.

Enlighten me where Christianity comes in, please? You could argue that educating your daughters will in the future promote their immorality because they will become erudite objects of desire, and it would be nearly parallel and equally nonsensical. Never let religion stand in the way of medicine.

iBegin source does local search, sure. If I look for laundry service in East Elmhurst I get a veritable list of results, including, in #1 position, the actual location of the nearest laundromat:

That’s enough to convince me that iBegin’s data is high-quality, since it’s the actual data-selling from which they want to make money. Their edge is selling clean, structured, and updated business-information data. You can browse it all online, so you know exactly what you’re getting. For $1000 a state, or $40000 for all the US, they’ll sell you 10,820,477 unique business listings, enriched by:

• Deduplication, sorting, and filtering
• Geocoding and nearest intersection
• Automatic purchasing
• Free daily, weekly, and monthly updates
• Simple delimited data format

If you were looking to start a web business with this kind of data, iBegin source would be a great place to start. They have a unique edge on others in this market because their data is social data. Anyone viewing an entry can also update it, adding value to the content for all other users:

This might be the first commercial wikipedia-like editing system I’ve seen that could succeed, because everyone wins when the data is updated. Customers who submit a listing or automate posting new items increase their own database, iBegin’s database, and thanks to free updates, help out the entire community.

I read 15 things iBegin Source does better on a blog the other day so I was pleasantly surprised when this showed up on ReviewMe, because it’s an interesting idea. Anything build around sharing data cheaply (well, for that market anyway) is a great idea.

The addition of Plesk 8 causes numerous problems, but they are surmountable. Here’s a list of steps to go from 0 to a new distro without any hitches at all:

1) Get Yum. If you don’t have it, you can run these commands:

cd /tmp
wget yum-2.3.2-7.src.rpm
rpm -Uvh yum-2.3.2-7.src.rpm

2) Install the FC4 repository location:

wget fedora-release-4-2.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh fedora-release-4-2.noarch.rpm

3) Update everything in your standard Fedora Core 4 distro:

yum upgrade

4) Remove all kernels older than than 2.6.14:

rpm -qa “*kernel*”
yum remove kernel-2.6.14*

5) Install the FC5 repository location:

wget fedora-release-5-5.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh fedora-release-5-5.noarch.rpm

6) Update yum to the faster newer yum:

yum update yum

7) Install the atomic release locations for PSA 8.1:

wget atomic-release-1.0-3.rhfc5.art.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh atomic-release-1.0-3.rhfc5.art.noarch.rpm

Install the repository for PSA 8.1:

Add the following to the end of /etc/yum.conf:

[psa-8.1]
name=Atomic Rocket Turtle – FC5 – SW-Soft PSA 8.1 RPMS
baseurl=http://3es.atomicrocketturtle.com/atomic/psa-8.1/fedore/5/i386
gpgcheck=0

9) Upgrade everything:

yum clean all
yum upgrade

10) Fix any rpmdb / selinux issues:

/sbin/fixfiles relabel
rpm –rebuilddb
reboot

Now you should have an FC5 system with all the nice PHP bugfixes. If you use eaccelator or other PHP extensions you’ll have to install them again, and you will also want to fix up the config files before you reboot (httpd.conf, mysqld.conf, php.ini).