The statement is just sensational. The quick run through their comment history makes them a shill.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not a shill. I'm just a sell-out.
I want to be able to do whatever I want whenever I want however I want, and I understand that I might just have to pay something for that privilege, but I'd rather not. I see it as a good thing that I can get free services, and I'll speak well of things that work well for me. It's ancillary that the ads will better match what I might actually be interested in buying, and as long as they're unobtrusive, I don't mind seeing them......but Turing help them if they play sound.
I'm not even particularly loyal. I'm currently writing this comment using Chrome on a Windows VM on a Linux laptop. I do use Google Drive for synchronizing files, and a goodly amount of my data is hosted on Google's services, but that's only because they seem to best fit my needs. I also use DropBox and SpiceWorks extensively (mostly due to their excellent support for my iPad), and host most of my personal projects (especially ones I don't want Google snooping through) on a server run by my university.
If my comments ever end up being 95% about how great Google's products are over Microsoft or Apple, please assume my account has been hacked, and mod me into oblivion.
It's also worth noting that Chromebooks aren't actually useless without Drive... It'd be more accurate to say they're suffering from reduced functionality, or if you really want to go for sensationalism, say they're "crippled". It's also worth noting that the outage is affecting only some users. My account seems to be perfectly accessible from my office and my remote server, so I'm going to assume that "most Chromebooks" are functioning just fine for most purposes.
A chromebook is a terminal to the Web. It's still useful for accessing most of the Web. There's just a popular service that's not available at the moment.
Ah, where would a Google story be without a Microsoft shill? Devil's advocate or not, your comment history shows a pretty obvious bias.
Meanwhile, iOS devices lose their magical ability to sync when iCloud goes down, and Windows Azure loses its ability to do anything when it goes down. Google Drive being down (per Google) or showing "sluggishness" (per your article) isn't any different. If somebody's moronic enough to store their important stuff on any cloud, I have no sympathy for them.
But when was the last time you saw a story even on this site about a new discovery from ISS?
It's been about as long as it's been since I've seen Slashdot have decent editing. Slashdot's a digest site, though, so it only reports what people submit, so it only reflects what's famous now.
For example, after all these years we still don't have any experiments to see whether centrifugal "simulated gravity" would be helpful in mitigating the health effects of long-duration flights. Not even with mice! That would seem like a no-brainer.
Close. Running an experiment like that would indeed require several people to have no brains. Sure, we can put people (or mice) in a centrifuge and spin them, but that doesn't really teach us much that's useful. How much force is actually needed to mitigate what effects? How much of the energy budget should be allotted to spinning, rather than propulsion? Does the spinning need to be constant (mandating a ring-shaped spaceship), or is a spinning sleep chamber sufficient? How does diet affect the effects?
Hollywood's depiction of science as a series of groundbreaking epiphanies doesn't actually work. Sure, once in a while we stumble on amazing things, but more often it's just a long slow process of observations. That's what they're doing now on the ISS. There's a lot of experiments regarding cellular growth and function, and several for figuring out exactly how to counter those adverse health effects. The experiments aren't as headline-inducing as sticking mice in a centrifuge, but they're more helpful in the long run.
I haven't heard of too many "earth shattering" breakthroughs from the ISS program, and lately all the excitement has been in the private sector.
So it's no different from any other government research?
I've been out of the research scene for a few too many years, but as I understand it, most of the research done about the ISS is fairly mundane stuff that can't be done on Earth - growing crystals in low gravity, testing materials' resistance to radiation, and the like. There's nothing inherently earth-shattering about knowing that this particular material survived slightly better than that particular material. When the discoveries from the ISS do finally make their way back to earth, they're simply "new technology" rather than "new technology developed in space".
Those new technologies, with their slightly-better lifespans and their slightly-lighter weight, will be part of the spacecraft that will actually let us go places. Thus far, we've done a fairly impressive job of not killing ourselves when venturing forth into the hostile environment outside our home, but we've seen how harsh the environment is. We know that we'll need better technology to make a human trip to Mars (or elsewhere) safely, or even to make unmanned trips to other planets cheaper and more reliable. Now's a good time to slow down, improve our abilities, then run off to extraterrestrial destinations again.
The race is exciting, but we still need a pit crew.
As with all such ideas, the devil's in the details.
The US does use inquisitorial systems for some minor things like traffic violations, where it's unlikely that anyone's circumstances will be exceptional enough to matter.
As the AC suggested, cases where someone cannot afford a good lawyer, but whose case can be utterly ruinous if they don't have one (namely, criminal cases), may be entitled to a pro-bono lawyer appointed by the court, so effectively the court is acting as the defendant's lawyer. It is unfortunate that this doesn't apply to civil cases, which are financially just as ruinous, but that's fraught with disaster, too. Should there be some dollar amount of savings that someone must have to be considered rich enough for their own lawyer?
The bottom line is that everything's flawed in somebody's eyes, so judicial systems have mostly fallen into the "government plays the game" camp and the "government is the referee" camp. Combining the two might indeed be possible, but then the referee's a player as well, and that's bound to be troublesome.
To what extent, though? Can a court investigation take the time to really understand the sentimental value placed on an item?
The main difference in the systems is that an inquisitorial court tries to treat the case purely objectively, from the standpoint of an outside observer. Objectively speaking, that statue is just a statue. Yes, there may be some allotment for sentimental value, but that value is determined by the investigator. In contrast, an adversarial court just tries to ensure an objective procedure that gives each participant an equal opportunity to present their perspective. Subjective values like an amount of harm are left subjective, and they stay as such through judgement. The theory is that the judgement itself may better fit the crime in the eyes of the aggrieved.
My apologies for the long post, but there are a very large number of asinine statements that I feel need some correction and clarification. At this point you might just be trolling, but it's a lovely Sunday afternoon, and I have some time to kill.
That's all well and good as long as you know how to "determine" fairness and justice.
More to the point, the adversarial court system tries not to determine such things itself, instead letting each side express how badly they've already been affected by the dispute. An adversarial court tries to determine first whether the defendant is responsible for the plaintiff's problems, then tries to just even out the grief. Again, it's the inquisitorial system where the government assumes the power to determine what's right or wrong, rather than the people.
US courts are set up in such a way to deliberately obfuscate the law.
Nope. US courts, like most common law courts, are set up to behave consistently, in the interest of minimizing corruption. It's very easy to spot when judges rulings are contrary to a precedent, and it's then easy to raise questions of corruption. This is an instance where the court is not trusted implicitly. Judges are expected to follow precedent, or justify their decisions when they decide precedent should not apply. That way, if a judge is bribed, it's still very difficult to actually favor anyone.
Federal courts in the US are a mess. There are entire books worth of byzantine rules that even the lawyers have trouble understanding. To make matters worse, each of the federal districts has their own local rules as well (because every federal district court needs it's own rules for what font size motions should be in...).
Yes, they are, and yes, there are, but this is beside the point. Those law books and messy rules on font sizes usually don't actually apply to any given case, and any violation of the rules is easily forgiven by judges. The rules are there primarily to speed the judgement process by ensuring consistency. Yes, lawyers have trouble understanding them, much the same as programmers have trouble understanding undocumented code. However, it is easy to determine which sections of the text actually matter to the case at hand, and which do not. One does not need to be an expert on alcohol import laws to argue in a case of theft.
Pro se parties are routinely discriminated against.
We discriminate against people representing themselves in much the same way as we discriminate against people repairing their own cars, cooking their own food, or building their own houses. Law is indeed a complicated discipline, and people who pick up a Law 101 textbook are unqualified to represent themselves, just as a man with a hammer is unqualified to build a building to modern safety standards. If someone chooses to represent themselves in a complicated case, they may end up doing more harm than good, just as easily as building one's own house can end up producing a death trap.
Of course, judges know this, and I've seen judges give more leniency to pro se parties, especially in terms of those font-size rules and other formalities. What's important is that the circumstances are presented accurately and honestly. Formality is easily discarded in the interest of serving (not determining) justice, while a fully-trained lawyer is expected to be able to comply with all the rules of the legal dance, for the sake of keeping the court system unobstructed.
Lawyers essentially have unlimited power to issue subpoenas; the US is one of the only countries that allows lawyers to do this with no oversight. Pro se parties cannot do this.
Absolutely incorrect. Courts issue subpoenas. Lawyers may only sometimes, depending on the jurisdictions, issue subpoenas themselves, but that's only as an agent of the court. Pro se parties are assumed to not know the law of what ca
In an inquisitorial court, the notions of "fairness" and "justice" are determined by the inquisitors, rather than the people actually harmed. Nevermind how much an offense actually harmed you - it's what the judge thinks that matters. That sentimental statue that the mugger smashed? The one your great-great-grandmother carved while on a ship coming over from Europe? In the eyes of the inquisitorial court, it's just a trinket, and is of no consequence.
While an inquisitorial system does give a more objective sense of justice, the people involved don't really get any outcome that seems fair. This is why inquisitorial systems in practice have such poor reception. Consider how much hatred is seen even here on Slashdot for arbitration clauses in contracts. People expect that the inquisitorial arbitration will simply side in favor of the bigger company, and don't expect a fair chance to present their own side of the story.
Inquisitorial systems are also games, but the game is different. Rather than argue for one's case with reason and law, one gambles with the statistics of inquisitors. Since there is no risk of of encountering a particularly skilled opponent, any criminal can simply adjust their illegal activities to the skill of the state, since only the state can argue against them. A few well-placed bribes can ensure that investigators never really find anything too badly wrong, regardless of how the aggrieved may want to interpret the law.
The adversarial system is based on the concepts that only the aggrieved can determine how badly they've been harmed, and the state cannot be implicitly trusted. The government is supposed to be only the representative of the society, closely following society's standards for morality and formality as the plaintiff's arguments change. In an inquisitorial system, the state is assumed to be an infallible and absolute embodiment of fairness. The inquisitorial system's opinions of right and wrong only change as judges retire.
That's just a few reason why most countries actually have an adversarial system for most grievances, and only a handful actually use an inquisitorial system.
I know much about ADHD, having been clinically diagnosed quite a while ago. You're absolutely correct.
Moving around my college's dorms also wouldn't help, as I did it every year with no real difference in noise level. Sure, there were halls that claimed to be "academically oriented" and enforced more quiet hours each night... but that enforcement only moved as quickly as the advisor could run through the hall after the drunks passing through.
Medication is a godsend. It's so nice to be able to experience life without the constant distractions, multiple trains of thought, and forgetting important things. That said, medication is hell. While medicated, I could feel my mind being limited. I now describe it as having a multicore processor running only a single-threaded program. I can tell that there are still more thoughts in my head, but I can't access them. I'm forced to stay focused, whether I want to or not.
Still, being on medication for a few years was helpful, until the side effects were overwhelming and I had to stop. I now know what "normal" feels like, and I can tell when I'm getting a little too distracted to focus on work. Then I have to take a break, get some coffee (self-medicating with caffeine, which is just mild enough to help a bit without the discomfort), and spend a few minutes meditating. Just a few relaxing breaths, listening to the distractions around me, and allowing myself to get used to the noises and distractions, so they're less intrusive. Then I can work.
OK I admit I didn't click on your link, so I was responding to your post as if it was "real"... does anyone click on links on slashdot?
I like to think they do before asking for a citation.
How do you keep a government from taking and spending more and more money on the military industrial complex, when people are so easily manipulated?
You quit assuming that the government is the enemy. The government is made of regular old people. Yes, they can push money off to military causes and vote for spying, but they can also be convinced to fight for privacy. What we should learn from history is that pursuing a government witch hunt doesn't actually improve privacy or advance peace, but instead only makes the targetted officials more likely to engage in fervent sabre-rattling, to demonstrate their devout patriotism.
The way I see it, we're stuck in a cycle where the public doesn't trust the government to keep us safe. There are international and domestic threats that really have been around for centuries, but we're just now realizing that we're vulnerable. The government officials respond to this distrust by jumping on whatever popular demand they see, but what they see is dominated by lobbyists. The members of the public don't write any letters or support any campaigns to counter the lobbyists, because they don't trust the government to follow their demands. Of course, those demands are subject to being easily manipulated, as you mentioned...
The real problem is that people are independent, and have a diverse spectrum of opinions on a diverse spectrum of issues. When the political winds blow against our particular ideals, we shouldn't cry about conspiracies and attack the legitimacy of the political system. Instead we should persuade others, both in and out of government, to join our own causes so that our ideas eventually hold the minds of a majority of representatives.
Big Data is however big you need it to be. It's not a certain size, or speed, or software, but rather a philosophy.
Simply put, Big Data methodologies are to gather all the data that can be gathered, and store it on a nice cheap database, without concern for storage efficiency. When a question arises, analyse the relevant data for an answer. This is in contrast to more traditional methods, where data is gathered only to solve expected questions.
Slashdot's archives were not generated from a Big Data approach. They store only comments and a few sparse details (to my knowledge). However, they can still be used in a Big Data system to some effect, if they happen to store the information that's needed (such as IP address, timestamps, and keywords, if the question is to track political opinions by geography over time).
It's not what you store or how you store it, but how you decide what to store. What makes Big Data approaches useful is that they store everything from the beginning, so as business needs change, the data from the past is likely just as useful as new data. What makes Big Data difficult is that the databases must be properly capable of storing all the gathered data as fast as it arrives, and must do so cheaply.
Fictional hyperbole? Yes. Yes it is, as is the current Chinese cyberwar conspiracy. That is the whole point of quoting Senator McCarthy's 1950 speech almost word-for-word. I did add a bit of introduction and changes references to "Communism" into something more modern, but otherwise the paranoia is his, not mine.
There's a conspiracy at all levels of every branch of the government, threatening to undermine the very freedoms America was founded on. It is so pervasive and the agents are so highly trained that they are only detectable in subtle ways. The agents of the conspiracy will never reveal their actions, and it is only by this secrecy that the conspiracy has persisted for so long and affected our government in so many ways. For decades, the American economy has suffered while China's has boomed, and the American people are entitled to know who is responsible for the tremendous economic victory in Asia and the dismal American defeat-the greatest defeat any nation has suffered in war or peace.
It is essential, therefore, that we put the spotlight of exposure on those who are responsible for this disaster. This is important, not for the purpose of exposing past failures, but because those same men are now doing America's planning for the future. Unfortunately they have become so deeply entrenched that almost every power of the Government is used to sabotage any attempt to expose and root them out...
...I have tried to give you the highlights of a difficult and dangerous situation that exists. You have as a flaming backdrop to my remarks the facts of the world as you find them today. Cyberwar is no longer a creeping threat to America. It is a racing doom that comes closer to our shore each day. To resist it we must be intelligently strong.
Such strength will come only from men and women dedicated to the wholehearted defense of democracy. The average American who constitutes the heart and soul of this Nation is so dedicated. We must be sure that those who seek to lead up today are equally dedicated. We cannot survive on half loyalties any more than we can find the facts of conspiracy with half-truths.
Legal marriage is done with full knowledge and consent. If a woman were to unilaterally declare herself married, and somehow produce the appropriate papers, the fraudulent marriage itself wouldn't be legal. On the other hand, a man entering into marriage is (or at least should be, and this is aided by varying laws) aware that his fiancee's fortune depends on his own, so he may wish to take certain precautions as he sees fit, such as a pre-nuptual agreement or a legal will.
My point is not to advocate for or against gambling, or even for or against attaching fortunes, as that happens to all of us daily whether we want it to or not. What I most object to is a "rephrasing" that conveniently shifts the universe of discourse. There are many aspects to the question of whether gambling should be permitted or not, and the question of enforcement is merely one aspect, not the "proper" phrasing.
That rephrasing cleverly hides a different question, of whether anyone has the right to bind their own fortune to another's, without all parties' full awareness and consent.
This is the heart of many of gambling's problems, especially those involving professional sports. Once someone has placed a large enough wager, it is in their best interest to try to affect the outcome, which usually involves breaking other laws and restricting others' freedom. Not every wager can be rigged effectively, but enough can be so as to produce an effective funding mechanism for organized crime.
This question is whether you should have the right to interfere with the integrity of my sports, games, and politics.
It's not the government that is out to get you, the freedom-loving individual. It's the other freedom-loving individuals, whose freedom and yours have come into conflict. They're the ones who will fight you, and they're the ones who will use the government as a weapon in that fight.
The government is indeed a brutal tool, but it's a double-edged sword, that will decide for itself who will be struck. That decision is based on the opinions of judges throughout history, who have made decisions on the subjective evidence of whose freedom must be suppressed to bring about the most benefit for society.
To sway those judges to your favor, promise and demonstrate a benefit to society and respect for the freedom and happiness of others. To turn those judges against you, promise to incite mayhem and subvert government authority, and give others the tools and encouragement to do so.
I was going to make my usual patent-related post about how it's actually a neat solution (useful) to use a cell phone's speakerphone as a modem, how many other engineers have ended up using NFC chips to solve the same problem (non-obvious), and how it's not something currently done (novel), making the patent valid.
Then I took the advice I usually spout, and read the claims rather than making a knee-jerk reaction post. All of the claims are reproduced here for your convenience:
1. A method of sharing information for accessing content on a computing device, comprising: generating, on a first device, an encoded information signal, the information signal including information associated with accessing the content; outputting the encoded information signal as an audible signal; audibly receiving, at a second device, the encoded information signal; decoding the information signal to identify the information associated with accessing the content; and accessing the content with the second device utilizing at least part of the information associated with accessing the content, wherein the second device accesses the content from a source other than the first device.
Damn. That's the shortest claims section I've ever read.
The last bit is actually the most useful piece of information, and holds the real purpose of the patent: The second device accesses the content from a source other than the first device. It's not really the 300-baud modem that's being patented, but the rather using the 300-baud modem to transmit only a link to content found somewhere else (namely, Amazon's servers).
...You really don't know a thing about photography, do you?
In photographic development, quantity only comes after quality - or at least it did before the days of good corner-store minilabs. Professional labs catered to professionals, whose jobs depended on having good prints. With only a fixed number of professional photographers in the country, competition was fierce, and any drop in quality noticeably affected order counts. The lab I worked in was, at the time, in the top 10 in North America, both in number of orders processed and in customer ratings.
If you weren't involved in professional photography ten years ago, I dare say you have no idea what you're talking about. Back then, a professional could look at a print and tell you roughly what kind of camera was used with what film, and whether the film had been processed professionally or at a 1-hour shop, and whether the prints were optical or digital. Now, digital cameras and Walgreens minilabs have gotten good enough that professional labs are going out of business, because quality's much easier to come by cheaply. Now the only difference between a professional photographer and a soccer-mom home-business "photog" is the artistry they put into the composition.
Wow. I was going to reply to your other post, saying more or less what this guy did, but then real work got in the way, and now I think it's more appropriate to reply here:
Fuck that AC.
In all conflicts (and especially lawsuits), there's one side, the other side, and the truth, all distinct. Personally, I'm inclined to believe your friend's death was preventable, though I'm not going to opine whether it was the radiologist or your friend himself who could have prevented it. Settling out of court doesn't really end debate, because there's usually no actual guilt admitted.
One question that remains, however, is whether having his records would have helped prevent your friend's death. If a trained radiologist didn't think that white dot was suspicious, would your friend have seen anything worth questioning? Maybe, and maybe not. As you noted, a second x-ray should have been done at the time, but maybe it was declined, or rejected by insurance, or any other circumstance lost to history. A second opinion should be always be considered for anything that doesn't improve with treatment, and that obviously didn't happen here.
That doesn't excuse everyone else from getting in the way of their own treatment by nitpicking over their records. We absolutely need a better system for catching mistakes, but I don't think handing out patients' records will help as much as advocates seem to think.
If there's a consensus in the medical field that such behavior is professional and normal, than a lawyer won't get anywhere with it, and should get slapped down by the courts for trying.
They should, but don't. The courts don't have a way to determine "consensus". Rather, one doctor comes up and says his view, and another doctor comes up and says whatever he's paid to. No comment on which doctor is the hospital's and which is the patient's.
Full access to medical records is necessary, but not sufficient, for that understanding. Perhaps such records should be accompanied by explanations of why the more "interesting" bits are there.
That'd be nice, but that takes time and money to prepare, and won't really help cut back the complaints from belligerent patients. Personally, I think it'd be great if insurance companies did exactly this (providing a review of how unusual your case is) since they already have full access to all records, trained medical staff, and statistics to determine a reasonable amount of "consensus", but it'd be too expensive to set up. They'd rather cut costs by denying everything until they're forced to pay.
That is a better analogy., but loses a bit of the (apparently off-the-mark) humor I was going for.
While cough syrup is indeed a miniscule amount of alcohol, it can trigger a psychological need for more. That old craving for vodka comes back, and it's just not quite so easy to walk past that bar after work, but it's fine because they're no longer addicted, right? And after that first drink - boy, was it tasty - what's another? Back in the day you'd have four before feeling anything...
The most dangerous thing to an addict is the thought of being "cured". Yes, it happens, but it's one of those things that's more rare than people think.
In a lawsuit, the trouble's already arrived, and the records can do more good than harm.
The real problem isn't really patients knowing their records, but rather patients taking their records out of context, without understanding what each note means. Ten minutes on the Internet, and patients get a huge list of questions about every trivial detail in their records, and they'll be sure to waste the doctor's time with them at the next appointment. They'll think that a noted tiny chance of a problem is a major issue, They'll see every mistake is a gamble with their life.
Not every patient, of course... but just enough to make medicine even harder than it is.
An interesting anecdote: About two decades ago, my father developed cancer. He had surgery, which went well and led to a complete recovery. At one of his follow-up appointments, his doctor told him something from his record, that he'd kept secret. As it turns out, my father had actually died on the table. He's always known he was allergic to all seafood (and that was noted in the record), but it's actually a particular iodine compound that's the culprit. That compound was used in the normal surgical antiseptic, and was never before thought to be an allergen. During surgery, he had a severe reaction and had a severe heart attack.
The surgeons of course noticed immediately, treated the heart attack, then finished the cancer surgery, then the doctors included treatment afterward to clean up the mess. It was all detailed in the record, and any inquiry (or future surgical plans) would have clearly seen it, but it wasn't something my father needed to know in the months after surgery. After such an ordeal, the extra stress of knowlege would have only hindered recovery. Ignorance can indeed be bliss.
Slashdot Mirror
The statement is just sensational. The quick run through their comment history makes them a shill.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not a shill. I'm just a sell-out.
I want to be able to do whatever I want whenever I want however I want, and I understand that I might just have to pay something for that privilege, but I'd rather not. I see it as a good thing that I can get free services, and I'll speak well of things that work well for me. It's ancillary that the ads will better match what I might actually be interested in buying, and as long as they're unobtrusive, I don't mind seeing them... ...but Turing help them if they play sound.
I'm not even particularly loyal. I'm currently writing this comment using Chrome on a Windows VM on a Linux laptop. I do use Google Drive for synchronizing files, and a goodly amount of my data is hosted on Google's services, but that's only because they seem to best fit my needs. I also use DropBox and SpiceWorks extensively (mostly due to their excellent support for my iPad), and host most of my personal projects (especially ones I don't want Google snooping through) on a server run by my university.
If my comments ever end up being 95% about how great Google's products are over Microsoft or Apple, please assume my account has been hacked, and mod me into oblivion.
It's also worth noting that Chromebooks aren't actually useless without Drive... It'd be more accurate to say they're suffering from reduced functionality, or if you really want to go for sensationalism, say they're "crippled". It's also worth noting that the outage is affecting only some users. My account seems to be perfectly accessible from my office and my remote server, so I'm going to assume that "most Chromebooks" are functioning just fine for most purposes.
A chromebook is a terminal to the Web. It's still useful for accessing most of the Web. There's just a popular service that's not available at the moment.
Ah, where would a Google story be without a Microsoft shill? Devil's advocate or not, your comment history shows a pretty obvious bias.
Meanwhile, iOS devices lose their magical ability to sync when iCloud goes down, and Windows Azure loses its ability to do anything when it goes down. Google Drive being down (per Google) or showing "sluggishness" (per your article) isn't any different. If somebody's moronic enough to store their important stuff on any cloud, I have no sympathy for them.
But when was the last time you saw a story even on this site about a new discovery from ISS?
It's been about as long as it's been since I've seen Slashdot have decent editing. Slashdot's a digest site, though, so it only reports what people submit, so it only reflects what's famous now.
For example, after all these years we still don't have any experiments to see whether centrifugal "simulated gravity" would be helpful in mitigating the health effects of long-duration flights. Not even with mice! That would seem like a no-brainer.
Close. Running an experiment like that would indeed require several people to have no brains. Sure, we can put people (or mice) in a centrifuge and spin them, but that doesn't really teach us much that's useful. How much force is actually needed to mitigate what effects? How much of the energy budget should be allotted to spinning, rather than propulsion? Does the spinning need to be constant (mandating a ring-shaped spaceship), or is a spinning sleep chamber sufficient? How does diet affect the effects?
Hollywood's depiction of science as a series of groundbreaking epiphanies doesn't actually work. Sure, once in a while we stumble on amazing things, but more often it's just a long slow process of observations. That's what they're doing now on the ISS. There's a lot of experiments regarding cellular growth and function, and several for figuring out exactly how to counter those adverse health effects. The experiments aren't as headline-inducing as sticking mice in a centrifuge, but they're more helpful in the long run.
I haven't heard of too many "earth shattering" breakthroughs from the ISS program, and lately all the excitement has been in the private sector.
So it's no different from any other government research?
I've been out of the research scene for a few too many years, but as I understand it, most of the research done about the ISS is fairly mundane stuff that can't be done on Earth - growing crystals in low gravity, testing materials' resistance to radiation, and the like. There's nothing inherently earth-shattering about knowing that this particular material survived slightly better than that particular material. When the discoveries from the ISS do finally make their way back to earth, they're simply "new technology" rather than "new technology developed in space".
Those new technologies, with their slightly-better lifespans and their slightly-lighter weight, will be part of the spacecraft that will actually let us go places. Thus far, we've done a fairly impressive job of not killing ourselves when venturing forth into the hostile environment outside our home, but we've seen how harsh the environment is. We know that we'll need better technology to make a human trip to Mars (or elsewhere) safely, or even to make unmanned trips to other planets cheaper and more reliable. Now's a good time to slow down, improve our abilities, then run off to extraterrestrial destinations again.
The race is exciting, but we still need a pit crew.
As with all such ideas, the devil's in the details.
The US does use inquisitorial systems for some minor things like traffic violations, where it's unlikely that anyone's circumstances will be exceptional enough to matter.
As the AC suggested, cases where someone cannot afford a good lawyer, but whose case can be utterly ruinous if they don't have one (namely, criminal cases), may be entitled to a pro-bono lawyer appointed by the court, so effectively the court is acting as the defendant's lawyer. It is unfortunate that this doesn't apply to civil cases, which are financially just as ruinous, but that's fraught with disaster, too. Should there be some dollar amount of savings that someone must have to be considered rich enough for their own lawyer?
The bottom line is that everything's flawed in somebody's eyes, so judicial systems have mostly fallen into the "government plays the game" camp and the "government is the referee" camp. Combining the two might indeed be possible, but then the referee's a player as well, and that's bound to be troublesome.
To what extent, though? Can a court investigation take the time to really understand the sentimental value placed on an item?
The main difference in the systems is that an inquisitorial court tries to treat the case purely objectively, from the standpoint of an outside observer. Objectively speaking, that statue is just a statue. Yes, there may be some allotment for sentimental value, but that value is determined by the investigator. In contrast, an adversarial court just tries to ensure an objective procedure that gives each participant an equal opportunity to present their perspective. Subjective values like an amount of harm are left subjective, and they stay as such through judgement. The theory is that the judgement itself may better fit the crime in the eyes of the aggrieved.
My apologies for the long post, but there are a very large number of asinine statements that I feel need some correction and clarification. At this point you might just be trolling, but it's a lovely Sunday afternoon, and I have some time to kill.
That's all well and good as long as you know how to "determine" fairness and justice.
More to the point, the adversarial court system tries not to determine such things itself, instead letting each side express how badly they've already been affected by the dispute. An adversarial court tries to determine first whether the defendant is responsible for the plaintiff's problems, then tries to just even out the grief. Again, it's the inquisitorial system where the government assumes the power to determine what's right or wrong, rather than the people.
US courts are set up in such a way to deliberately obfuscate the law.
Nope. US courts, like most common law courts, are set up to behave consistently, in the interest of minimizing corruption. It's very easy to spot when judges rulings are contrary to a precedent, and it's then easy to raise questions of corruption. This is an instance where the court is not trusted implicitly. Judges are expected to follow precedent, or justify their decisions when they decide precedent should not apply. That way, if a judge is bribed, it's still very difficult to actually favor anyone.
Federal courts in the US are a mess. There are entire books worth of byzantine rules that even the lawyers have trouble understanding. To make matters worse, each of the federal districts has their own local rules as well (because every federal district court needs it's own rules for what font size motions should be in...).
Yes, they are, and yes, there are, but this is beside the point. Those law books and messy rules on font sizes usually don't actually apply to any given case, and any violation of the rules is easily forgiven by judges. The rules are there primarily to speed the judgement process by ensuring consistency. Yes, lawyers have trouble understanding them, much the same as programmers have trouble understanding undocumented code. However, it is easy to determine which sections of the text actually matter to the case at hand, and which do not. One does not need to be an expert on alcohol import laws to argue in a case of theft.
Pro se parties are routinely discriminated against.
We discriminate against people representing themselves in much the same way as we discriminate against people repairing their own cars, cooking their own food, or building their own houses. Law is indeed a complicated discipline, and people who pick up a Law 101 textbook are unqualified to represent themselves, just as a man with a hammer is unqualified to build a building to modern safety standards. If someone chooses to represent themselves in a complicated case, they may end up doing more harm than good, just as easily as building one's own house can end up producing a death trap.
Of course, judges know this, and I've seen judges give more leniency to pro se parties, especially in terms of those font-size rules and other formalities. What's important is that the circumstances are presented accurately and honestly. Formality is easily discarded in the interest of serving (not determining) justice, while a fully-trained lawyer is expected to be able to comply with all the rules of the legal dance, for the sake of keeping the court system unobstructed.
Lawyers essentially have unlimited power to issue subpoenas; the US is one of the only countries that allows lawyers to do this with no oversight. Pro se parties cannot do this.
Absolutely incorrect. Courts issue subpoenas. Lawyers may only sometimes, depending on the jurisdictions, issue subpoenas themselves, but that's only as an agent of the court. Pro se parties are assumed to not know the law of what ca
In an inquisitorial court, the notions of "fairness" and "justice" are determined by the inquisitors, rather than the people actually harmed. Nevermind how much an offense actually harmed you - it's what the judge thinks that matters. That sentimental statue that the mugger smashed? The one your great-great-grandmother carved while on a ship coming over from Europe? In the eyes of the inquisitorial court, it's just a trinket, and is of no consequence.
While an inquisitorial system does give a more objective sense of justice, the people involved don't really get any outcome that seems fair. This is why inquisitorial systems in practice have such poor reception. Consider how much hatred is seen even here on Slashdot for arbitration clauses in contracts. People expect that the inquisitorial arbitration will simply side in favor of the bigger company, and don't expect a fair chance to present their own side of the story.
Inquisitorial systems are also games, but the game is different. Rather than argue for one's case with reason and law, one gambles with the statistics of inquisitors. Since there is no risk of of encountering a particularly skilled opponent, any criminal can simply adjust their illegal activities to the skill of the state, since only the state can argue against them. A few well-placed bribes can ensure that investigators never really find anything too badly wrong, regardless of how the aggrieved may want to interpret the law.
The adversarial system is based on the concepts that only the aggrieved can determine how badly they've been harmed, and the state cannot be implicitly trusted. The government is supposed to be only the representative of the society, closely following society's standards for morality and formality as the plaintiff's arguments change. In an inquisitorial system, the state is assumed to be an infallible and absolute embodiment of fairness. The inquisitorial system's opinions of right and wrong only change as judges retire.
That's just a few reason why most countries actually have an adversarial system for most grievances, and only a handful actually use an inquisitorial system.
I know much about ADHD, having been clinically diagnosed quite a while ago. You're absolutely correct.
Moving around my college's dorms also wouldn't help, as I did it every year with no real difference in noise level. Sure, there were halls that claimed to be "academically oriented" and enforced more quiet hours each night... but that enforcement only moved as quickly as the advisor could run through the hall after the drunks passing through.
Medication is a godsend. It's so nice to be able to experience life without the constant distractions, multiple trains of thought, and forgetting important things. That said, medication is hell. While medicated, I could feel my mind being limited. I now describe it as having a multicore processor running only a single-threaded program. I can tell that there are still more thoughts in my head, but I can't access them. I'm forced to stay focused, whether I want to or not.
Still, being on medication for a few years was helpful, until the side effects were overwhelming and I had to stop. I now know what "normal" feels like, and I can tell when I'm getting a little too distracted to focus on work. Then I have to take a break, get some coffee (self-medicating with caffeine, which is just mild enough to help a bit without the discomfort), and spend a few minutes meditating. Just a few relaxing breaths, listening to the distractions around me, and allowing myself to get used to the noises and distractions, so they're less intrusive. Then I can work.
OK I admit I didn't click on your link, so I was responding to your post as if it was "real"... does anyone click on links on slashdot?
I like to think they do before asking for a citation.
How do you keep a government from taking and spending more and more money on the military industrial complex, when people are so easily manipulated?
You quit assuming that the government is the enemy. The government is made of regular old people. Yes, they can push money off to military causes and vote for spying, but they can also be convinced to fight for privacy. What we should learn from history is that pursuing a government witch hunt doesn't actually improve privacy or advance peace, but instead only makes the targetted officials more likely to engage in fervent sabre-rattling, to demonstrate their devout patriotism.
The way I see it, we're stuck in a cycle where the public doesn't trust the government to keep us safe. There are international and domestic threats that really have been around for centuries, but we're just now realizing that we're vulnerable. The government officials respond to this distrust by jumping on whatever popular demand they see, but what they see is dominated by lobbyists. The members of the public don't write any letters or support any campaigns to counter the lobbyists, because they don't trust the government to follow their demands. Of course, those demands are subject to being easily manipulated, as you mentioned...
The real problem is that people are independent, and have a diverse spectrum of opinions on a diverse spectrum of issues. When the political winds blow against our particular ideals, we shouldn't cry about conspiracies and attack the legitimacy of the political system. Instead we should persuade others, both in and out of government, to join our own causes so that our ideas eventually hold the minds of a majority of representatives.
Big Data is however big you need it to be. It's not a certain size, or speed, or software, but rather a philosophy.
Simply put, Big Data methodologies are to gather all the data that can be gathered, and store it on a nice cheap database, without concern for storage efficiency. When a question arises, analyse the relevant data for an answer. This is in contrast to more traditional methods, where data is gathered only to solve expected questions.
Slashdot's archives were not generated from a Big Data approach. They store only comments and a few sparse details (to my knowledge). However, they can still be used in a Big Data system to some effect, if they happen to store the information that's needed (such as IP address, timestamps, and keywords, if the question is to track political opinions by geography over time).
It's not what you store or how you store it, but how you decide what to store. What makes Big Data approaches useful is that they store everything from the beginning, so as business needs change, the data from the past is likely just as useful as new data. What makes Big Data difficult is that the databases must be properly capable of storing all the gathered data as fast as it arrives, and must do so cheaply.
Pretty prose though.
It'd be purple, but perhaps red would be a better color...
I think the phrase "Whoosh!" applies.
Fictional hyperbole? Yes. Yes it is, as is the current Chinese cyberwar conspiracy. That is the whole point of quoting Senator McCarthy's 1950 speech almost word-for-word. I did add a bit of introduction and changes references to "Communism" into something more modern, but otherwise the paranoia is his, not mine.
There's a conspiracy at all levels of every branch of the government, threatening to undermine the very freedoms America was founded on. It is so pervasive and the agents are so highly trained that they are only detectable in subtle ways. The agents of the conspiracy will never reveal their actions, and it is only by this secrecy that the conspiracy has persisted for so long and affected our government in so many ways. For decades, the American economy has suffered while China's has boomed, and the American people are entitled to know who is responsible for the tremendous economic victory in Asia and the dismal American defeat-the greatest defeat any nation has suffered in war or peace.
It is essential, therefore, that we put the spotlight of exposure on those who are responsible for this disaster. This is important, not for the purpose of exposing past failures, but because those same men are now doing America's planning for the future. Unfortunately they have become so deeply entrenched that almost every power of the Government is used to sabotage any attempt to expose and root them out...
...I have tried to give you the highlights of a difficult and dangerous situation that exists. You have as a flaming backdrop to my remarks the facts of the world as you find them today. Cyberwar is no longer a creeping threat to America. It is a racing doom that comes closer to our shore each day. To resist it we must be intelligently strong.
Such strength will come only from men and women dedicated to the wholehearted defense of democracy. The average American who constitutes the heart and soul of this Nation is so dedicated. We must be sure that those who seek to lead up today are equally dedicated. We cannot survive on half loyalties any more than we can find the facts of conspiracy with half-truths.
Legal marriage is done with full knowledge and consent. If a woman were to unilaterally declare herself married, and somehow produce the appropriate papers, the fraudulent marriage itself wouldn't be legal. On the other hand, a man entering into marriage is (or at least should be, and this is aided by varying laws) aware that his fiancee's fortune depends on his own, so he may wish to take certain precautions as he sees fit, such as a pre-nuptual agreement or a legal will.
My point is not to advocate for or against gambling, or even for or against attaching fortunes, as that happens to all of us daily whether we want it to or not. What I most object to is a "rephrasing" that conveniently shifts the universe of discourse. There are many aspects to the question of whether gambling should be permitted or not, and the question of enforcement is merely one aspect, not the "proper" phrasing.
That rephrasing cleverly hides a different question, of whether anyone has the right to bind their own fortune to another's, without all parties' full awareness and consent.
This is the heart of many of gambling's problems, especially those involving professional sports. Once someone has placed a large enough wager, it is in their best interest to try to affect the outcome, which usually involves breaking other laws and restricting others' freedom. Not every wager can be rigged effectively, but enough can be so as to produce an effective funding mechanism for organized crime.
This question is whether you should have the right to interfere with the integrity of my sports, games, and politics.
It's not the government that is out to get you, the freedom-loving individual. It's the other freedom-loving individuals, whose freedom and yours have come into conflict. They're the ones who will fight you, and they're the ones who will use the government as a weapon in that fight.
The government is indeed a brutal tool, but it's a double-edged sword, that will decide for itself who will be struck. That decision is based on the opinions of judges throughout history, who have made decisions on the subjective evidence of whose freedom must be suppressed to bring about the most benefit for society.
To sway those judges to your favor, promise and demonstrate a benefit to society and respect for the freedom and happiness of others. To turn those judges against you, promise to incite mayhem and subvert government authority, and give others the tools and encouragement to do so.
I was going to make my usual patent-related post about how it's actually a neat solution (useful) to use a cell phone's speakerphone as a modem, how many other engineers have ended up using NFC chips to solve the same problem (non-obvious), and how it's not something currently done (novel), making the patent valid.
Then I took the advice I usually spout, and read the claims rather than making a knee-jerk reaction post. All of the claims are reproduced here for your convenience:
1. A method of sharing information for accessing content on a computing device, comprising: generating, on a first device, an encoded information signal, the information signal including information associated with accessing the content; outputting the encoded information signal as an audible signal; audibly receiving, at a second device, the encoded information signal; decoding the information signal to identify the information associated with accessing the content; and accessing the content with the second device utilizing at least part of the information associated with accessing the content, wherein the second device accesses the content from a source other than the first device.
Damn. That's the shortest claims section I've ever read.
The last bit is actually the most useful piece of information, and holds the real purpose of the patent: The second device accesses the content from a source other than the first device. It's not really the 300-baud modem that's being patented, but the rather using the 300-baud modem to transmit only a link to content found somewhere else (namely, Amazon's servers).
Jeff just patented an audio QR code.
...You really don't know a thing about photography, do you?
In photographic development, quantity only comes after quality - or at least it did before the days of good corner-store minilabs. Professional labs catered to professionals, whose jobs depended on having good prints. With only a fixed number of professional photographers in the country, competition was fierce, and any drop in quality noticeably affected order counts. The lab I worked in was, at the time, in the top 10 in North America, both in number of orders processed and in customer ratings.
If you weren't involved in professional photography ten years ago, I dare say you have no idea what you're talking about. Back then, a professional could look at a print and tell you roughly what kind of camera was used with what film, and whether the film had been processed professionally or at a 1-hour shop, and whether the prints were optical or digital. Now, digital cameras and Walgreens minilabs have gotten good enough that professional labs are going out of business, because quality's much easier to come by cheaply. Now the only difference between a professional photographer and a soccer-mom home-business "photog" is the artistry they put into the composition.
Wow. I was going to reply to your other post, saying more or less what this guy did, but then real work got in the way, and now I think it's more appropriate to reply here:
Fuck that AC.
In all conflicts (and especially lawsuits), there's one side, the other side, and the truth, all distinct. Personally, I'm inclined to believe your friend's death was preventable, though I'm not going to opine whether it was the radiologist or your friend himself who could have prevented it. Settling out of court doesn't really end debate, because there's usually no actual guilt admitted.
One question that remains, however, is whether having his records would have helped prevent your friend's death. If a trained radiologist didn't think that white dot was suspicious, would your friend have seen anything worth questioning? Maybe, and maybe not. As you noted, a second x-ray should have been done at the time, but maybe it was declined, or rejected by insurance, or any other circumstance lost to history. A second opinion should be always be considered for anything that doesn't improve with treatment, and that obviously didn't happen here.
That doesn't excuse everyone else from getting in the way of their own treatment by nitpicking over their records. We absolutely need a better system for catching mistakes, but I don't think handing out patients' records will help as much as advocates seem to think.
If there's a consensus in the medical field that such behavior is professional and normal, than a lawyer won't get anywhere with it, and should get slapped down by the courts for trying.
They should, but don't. The courts don't have a way to determine "consensus". Rather, one doctor comes up and says his view, and another doctor comes up and says whatever he's paid to. No comment on which doctor is the hospital's and which is the patient's.
Full access to medical records is necessary, but not sufficient, for that understanding. Perhaps such records should be accompanied by explanations of why the more "interesting" bits are there.
That'd be nice, but that takes time and money to prepare, and won't really help cut back the complaints from belligerent patients. Personally, I think it'd be great if insurance companies did exactly this (providing a review of how unusual your case is) since they already have full access to all records, trained medical staff, and statistics to determine a reasonable amount of "consensus", but it'd be too expensive to set up. They'd rather cut costs by denying everything until they're forced to pay.
The expert knowledge is in knowing what's consequential and what isn't.
That is a better analogy., but loses a bit of the (apparently off-the-mark) humor I was going for.
While cough syrup is indeed a miniscule amount of alcohol, it can trigger a psychological need for more. That old craving for vodka comes back, and it's just not quite so easy to walk past that bar after work, but it's fine because they're no longer addicted, right? And after that first drink - boy, was it tasty - what's another? Back in the day you'd have four before feeling anything...
The most dangerous thing to an addict is the thought of being "cured". Yes, it happens, but it's one of those things that's more rare than people think.
In a lawsuit, the trouble's already arrived, and the records can do more good than harm.
The real problem isn't really patients knowing their records, but rather patients taking their records out of context, without understanding what each note means. Ten minutes on the Internet, and patients get a huge list of questions about every trivial detail in their records, and they'll be sure to waste the doctor's time with them at the next appointment. They'll think that a noted tiny chance of a problem is a major issue, They'll see every mistake is a gamble with their life.
Not every patient, of course... but just enough to make medicine even harder than it is.
An interesting anecdote: About two decades ago, my father developed cancer. He had surgery, which went well and led to a complete recovery. At one of his follow-up appointments, his doctor told him something from his record, that he'd kept secret. As it turns out, my father had actually died on the table. He's always known he was allergic to all seafood (and that was noted in the record), but it's actually a particular iodine compound that's the culprit. That compound was used in the normal surgical antiseptic, and was never before thought to be an allergen. During surgery, he had a severe reaction and had a severe heart attack.
The surgeons of course noticed immediately, treated the heart attack, then finished the cancer surgery, then the doctors included treatment afterward to clean up the mess. It was all detailed in the record, and any inquiry (or future surgical plans) would have clearly seen it, but it wasn't something my father needed to know in the months after surgery. After such an ordeal, the extra stress of knowlege would have only hindered recovery. Ignorance can indeed be bliss.