Got my mother a mail-order Swiss 'Lynx' from a local supplier (neat kit but no frequency matching - good result for non-cheap but moderate cost). When I tried to order the second the locals had been closed down. My theory is that all the costs of fitting, tuning, replacement, retail storefronts, are piled onto the tiny device. Undercut that, and some Professional Union will see you dead. Time for some 'unbundling', Mr. Regulator, and let's see the true costs of each element of service. This is NOT the usual medical-devices, beware-litigation domain.
Used the English 'NHS Direct' system 3 times (at night, for children and elderlies). Thorough script, reassuring qualified nurse, triage between 'take aspirin', 'see doc tomorrow', 'request night visit', and even 'emergency ambulance now' (they get your location first). And of course whichever the option, everything is free here. Rumour says it's been massively more popular than expected - Surprise! It's certainly one of my quickdial numbers.
Yeah, but. Seen centuries later, from the other end, there are 200 X 2 eyes, and as a lecturer you DO know them all, and how they are responding. We students (then) all knew why she was at the back, and why it wasn't good for her, and so did he. That's Pastoral Care, even at lecture-level. Same lecturer does the tutorials - when it works, it's a fully-connected system (and she got a better degree-class than I did).
If you give the sort of 'lecture' where notes on a laptop (or even in pencil) are an adequate result, you don't deserve your Chair. A proper lecture motivates, enthuses, explains, gives insights into creativity - no notes can ever do justice to that. So: no laptops please, nor... lecturers backs turned while they fill space with impenetrable garbled equations. You can get that stuff in your own time from standard references. On the topic, I want(ed) to know what makes that particular Professor tick. The best of them used eye-contact - to a girl at the top-back of the lecture-theater: "do you like being alone?"
Surely the point most comments here are missing is that *methyl* alcohol is already a poison. So it's a kindly thought, and not mere authoritarian wickedness, to put something in that makes it unpalatable, or truly vomitworthy. Denaturing *ethyl* alcohol is a different matter - if you have to, you want something both unpalatable and difficult to remove, but of course it shouldn't be poisonous of itself - just in case of abuse
Found a Sony W205 fully immersed in a roadside puddle, where it must have been for 2 days minimum. Dried it externally, put in warm place for 2 weeks and it worked mostly - keyboard took another week to be reliable. Then returned to surprised owner who thought their music was lost (it had been on top of car). May have helped that the original impact had ejected (and crushed) the battery.
The wife had a bad shoulder, and a Chiropractor helped a lot each time she visited. Then she found the breast lump herself and after a little neat surgery and some big radiation - no more bad shoulder! We still wonder whether an earlier diagnosis would have been safer, whether it's wisest to try conservative treatment first on something with no other symptoms, or whether the lymphatic surgery just happened to cut a nerve so coincidentally the shoulder's better too. Sadly one cannot be one's own 'control'. Moral - don't ever delay a 'Classic' diagnosis.
Did you see that for a manufacturer to get a license they have to dedicate a hardware button to the Bing-thing? I like my HTC with antiquated Windows Mobile, but with that condition I wouldn't upgrade even if it were feasible and free.
Friend bought a new running-treadmill with this sort of stuff built in. It had to go back twice for unreliable readings. That's what he said. You've guessed it - he's now doing well after heart bypass surgery.
Tempting technology afloat, but if you put a transponder as well as a 'message'-in-a-bottle, even here on earth, how confident would you be that it wouldn't just get stuck on the shore in a few days/weeks?
If Google knew anything about me, they wouldn't serve gross weight-loss and hideous teeth-whitening ads alongside respectable web sources. Nor would those sources allow it alongside their brand. Hypothesis: is this nastiness being quietly encouraged so that we actively PREFER them to know more?
Before satnav, I could cross London at any angle using a sort of mental dead-reckoning. Now you get halfway with guidance and don't even know where you are. Divert in a direction you know to be clever, and it shouts 'turn around when possible' or leads you in an unannounced complete circle to get back on its misconceived and gridlocked initial route. Whatever happened to 'Foldex' maps? They were good enough for my father's bombing runs abroad.
I dropped my VCR97 (remember?) on the train station while going to Hogwarts, or similar. It imploded nicely. (happy days!). They delayed the train half an hour while police tried to find whose blood was on all the baggage in the van. We took our hobbies seriously, then. One look at me, and the train was cleared to leave.
Come on, ISO, where are you? We all need the best (or alternatively, least-worst) glidepath now. When I retired, the argument was all about proprietary formats for formatted text, and this and that. USians seemed to want to take the lead on everything and thereby 'offer' formal Secretariat (and steering). Now there's something worth doing - fixit, folks - and non-proprietary, pretty-please.
I want to pass contacts just one web link to help them decide:
-have I got it already?
-if I have, what do I do next?
-if I have not, how do I avoid getting it?
They all have AV, and most are on auto-update, but they need reassurance (and I couldn't ask them to edit the registry or tussle with TweakUI). I do not see anywhere a single point of contact for unsophisticated users with the above reasonable questions. And has anyone said that running the Microsoft update will remove *existing* infections?
Don't forget that homoeopathy was at its most popular when conventional medicine was at its most dangerous (arsenic, mercury, 'bleeding') - so it may have had genuine survival value then.
Not the best example of 'superstition', when 'no treatment' can be safer than 'bad treatment' whatever the placebo effect.
I wish I'd kept up-to-date with programming over the last 40 years. But I got too busy managing something or other. Now I can see what's really needed for human systems is a 'rule engine' (with a friendly UI, and superb net-interoperability). Sure, someone has to do the machine code, but the **user** needs something truly high-level. Object orientation comes close, but I can't see how the ever-adapting 'rules' fit in (that's real-world rules, like contractual terms and multi-factor conditional branches). 'JUDE' comes close, but seems to miss a real-world interface and perhaps compilation. This insight can hardly be a novelty - who's got one, and is it open-source?
Great thread, sensible and informative, mostly. One thing that used to be mentioned when the UK came off its 'coal-fix', was that fossil fuel is complex hydrocarbon and really too useful to go burning in your hearth or vehicle. If so, it's not strictly 'ethanol versus oil'. The calcs should factor in the 'opportunity cost' of saving oil for uses which 'add more value' (not to mention the co-products which come out of the cracking). Any accountants out there?
Top-level 'human interfaces'. Groups of buttons/symbols/layouts that do ubiquitous things (play/record/cancel media, fix environmental settings/heating/aircon, setup timeswitches, make a call, extract money from the wall... what else? It does already happen in some sectors, but there's too much incentive to 'do it in a (patentable) original way' or 'do it with a minimum number of mysteriously multifunction buttons'. We want a uniform (extensible) physical 'user layer'. If there were voluntary 'Standards' which mfgrs could cite to reassure consumers that their kit would be easy to use, people might pay attention. (I won't get into onscreen PC issues, but software folk could also note). When I had things to do with this area, the dictum was - you don't have to design for disability: that's part of the definition of good design.
Here in the UK, where Euro-Eco-Commies are inflicting the same thing on us, there has been panic buying of incandescents in local shops. We like the colour temperature, you see. Also, we have bayonet not ES bases (advantage being that on 240volts the brass skirt cannot be 'live') so as the good burghers stock up for the grey decades ahead, all you can get in shops is screw threads that no one can ever use.
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Thank goodness for Hungary. How soon do you think the Greenie-Gauleiters will close them down?
Got my mother a mail-order Swiss 'Lynx' from a local supplier (neat kit but no frequency matching - good result for non-cheap but moderate cost). When I tried to order the second the locals had been closed down. My theory is that all the costs of fitting, tuning, replacement, retail storefronts, are piled onto the tiny device. Undercut that, and some Professional Union will see you dead. Time for some 'unbundling', Mr. Regulator, and let's see the true costs of each element of service. This is NOT the usual medical-devices, beware-litigation domain.
Used the English 'NHS Direct' system 3 times (at night, for children and elderlies). Thorough script, reassuring qualified nurse, triage between 'take aspirin', 'see doc tomorrow', 'request night visit', and even 'emergency ambulance now' (they get your location first). And of course whichever the option, everything is free here. Rumour says it's been massively more popular than expected - Surprise! It's certainly one of my quickdial numbers.
Yeah, but. Seen centuries later, from the other end, there are 200 X 2 eyes, and as a lecturer you DO know them all, and how they are responding. We students (then) all knew why she was at the back, and why it wasn't good for her, and so did he. That's Pastoral Care, even at lecture-level. Same lecturer does the tutorials - when it works, it's a fully-connected system (and she got a better degree-class than I did).
If you give the sort of 'lecture' where notes on a laptop (or even in pencil) are an adequate result, you don't deserve your Chair. A proper lecture motivates, enthuses, explains, gives insights into creativity - no notes can ever do justice to that. So: no laptops please, nor... lecturers backs turned while they fill space with impenetrable garbled equations. You can get that stuff in your own time from standard references. On the topic, I want(ed) to know what makes that particular Professor tick. The best of them used eye-contact - to a girl at the top-back of the lecture-theater: "do you like being alone?"
Surely the point most comments here are missing is that *methyl* alcohol is already a poison. So it's a kindly thought, and not mere authoritarian wickedness, to put something in that makes it unpalatable, or truly vomitworthy. Denaturing *ethyl* alcohol is a different matter - if you have to, you want something both unpalatable and difficult to remove, but of course it shouldn't be poisonous of itself - just in case of abuse
Found a Sony W205 fully immersed in a roadside puddle, where it must have been for 2 days minimum. Dried it externally, put in warm place for 2 weeks and it worked mostly - keyboard took another week to be reliable. Then returned to surprised owner who thought their music was lost (it had been on top of car). May have helped that the original impact had ejected (and crushed) the battery.
The wife had a bad shoulder, and a Chiropractor helped a lot each time she visited. Then she found the breast lump herself and after a little neat surgery and some big radiation - no more bad shoulder! We still wonder whether an earlier diagnosis would have been safer, whether it's wisest to try conservative treatment first on something with no other symptoms, or whether the lymphatic surgery just happened to cut a nerve so coincidentally the shoulder's better too. Sadly one cannot be one's own 'control'. Moral - don't ever delay a 'Classic' diagnosis.
115 GeV? Sounds like Fermilab is on half power too. When Europe gets there at full power, it will surely be 240 GeV. Ever heard of 'mains hum'?
Did you see that for a manufacturer to get a license they have to dedicate a hardware button to the Bing-thing? I like my HTC with antiquated Windows Mobile, but with that condition I wouldn't upgrade even if it were feasible and free.
Friend bought a new running-treadmill with this sort of stuff built in. It had to go back twice for unreliable readings. That's what he said. You've guessed it - he's now doing well after heart bypass surgery.
...and the venture money comes from Russia. Only the first chess move, so far.
No mod points left, but yes. At this point in history we need some sense of personal responsibility.
Tempting technology afloat, but if you put a transponder as well as a 'message'-in-a-bottle, even here on earth, how confident would you be that it wouldn't just get stuck on the shore in a few days/weeks?
If Google knew anything about me, they wouldn't serve gross weight-loss and hideous teeth-whitening ads alongside respectable web sources. Nor would those sources allow it alongside their brand. Hypothesis: is this nastiness being quietly encouraged so that we actively PREFER them to know more?
Before satnav, I could cross London at any angle using a sort of mental dead-reckoning. Now you get halfway with guidance and don't even know where you are. Divert in a direction you know to be clever, and it shouts 'turn around when possible' or leads you in an unannounced complete circle to get back on its misconceived and gridlocked initial route. Whatever happened to 'Foldex' maps? They were good enough for my father's bombing runs abroad.
I dropped my VCR97 (remember?) on the train station while going to Hogwarts, or similar. It imploded nicely. (happy days!). They delayed the train half an hour while police tried to find whose blood was on all the baggage in the van. We took our hobbies seriously, then. One look at me, and the train was cleared to leave.
Come on, ISO, where are you? We all need the best (or alternatively, least-worst) glidepath now. When I retired, the argument was all about proprietary formats for formatted text, and this and that. USians seemed to want to take the lead on everything and thereby 'offer' formal Secretariat (and steering). Now there's something worth doing - fixit, folks - and non-proprietary, pretty-please.
I want to pass contacts just one web link to help them decide: -have I got it already? -if I have, what do I do next? -if I have not, how do I avoid getting it? They all have AV, and most are on auto-update, but they need reassurance (and I couldn't ask them to edit the registry or tussle with TweakUI). I do not see anywhere a single point of contact for unsophisticated users with the above reasonable questions. And has anyone said that running the Microsoft update will remove *existing* infections?
Don't forget that homoeopathy was at its most popular when conventional medicine was at its most dangerous (arsenic, mercury, 'bleeding') - so it may have had genuine survival value then. Not the best example of 'superstition', when 'no treatment' can be safer than 'bad treatment' whatever the placebo effect.
Do read the rather scientific reply from the proprietors: http://www.hawkeyeinnovations.co.uk/UserFiles/File/Microsoft%20Word%20-%20The%20Cardiff%20University%20press%20release%20of%20June.pdf
I wish I'd kept up-to-date with programming over the last 40 years. But I got too busy managing something or other. Now I can see what's really needed for human systems is a 'rule engine' (with a friendly UI, and superb net-interoperability). Sure, someone has to do the machine code, but the **user** needs something truly high-level. Object orientation comes close, but I can't see how the ever-adapting 'rules' fit in (that's real-world rules, like contractual terms and multi-factor conditional branches). 'JUDE' comes close, but seems to miss a real-world interface and perhaps compilation. This insight can hardly be a novelty - who's got one, and is it open-source?
Great thread, sensible and informative, mostly. One thing that used to be mentioned when the UK came off its 'coal-fix', was that fossil fuel is complex hydrocarbon and really too useful to go burning in your hearth or vehicle. If so, it's not strictly 'ethanol versus oil'. The calcs should factor in the 'opportunity cost' of saving oil for uses which 'add more value' (not to mention the co-products which come out of the cracking). Any accountants out there?
Top-level 'human interfaces'. Groups of buttons/symbols/layouts that do ubiquitous things (play/record/cancel media, fix environmental settings/heating/aircon, setup timeswitches, make a call, extract money from the wall... what else? It does already happen in some sectors, but there's too much incentive to 'do it in a (patentable) original way' or 'do it with a minimum number of mysteriously multifunction buttons'. We want a uniform (extensible) physical 'user layer'. If there were voluntary 'Standards' which mfgrs could cite to reassure consumers that their kit would be easy to use, people might pay attention. (I won't get into onscreen PC issues, but software folk could also note). When I had things to do with this area, the dictum was - you don't have to design for disability: that's part of the definition of good design.
Here in the UK, where Euro-Eco-Commies are inflicting the same thing on us, there has been panic buying of incandescents in local shops. We like the colour temperature, you see. Also, we have bayonet not ES bases (advantage being that on 240volts the brass skirt cannot be 'live') so as the good burghers stock up for the grey decades ahead, all you can get in shops is screw threads that no one can ever use.