Only a portion of nerds are interested in IT Operations.
ssh is not just a tool for "IT Operations". There is zero reason for anyone who has any interest in managing a server (which is the focus of the article) - running any OS from the past decade - to not be familiar with ssh. This is above even the vi / emacs feuds, everyone uses ssh.
Netcraft has Slashdot ranked around 50,500th, a bit ahead of jp.match.com and a bit behind linkedin.fr.
That really isn't much to be proud of compared to where slashdot used to be. This community used to be much more active. If you want to compare to linkedin.fr, it is important to note that the population of France is ~67M. At most maybe 25% of the population might have an interest in LinkedIn (probably much less), which would give you a maximum user base of ~17M. Except that a lot of them are going to use linkedin from other countries if they are looking to further their careers, which would probably at least cut that number in half. And if the use of LinkedIn in the US is any indication of how industrialized countries use it (or do not), you should probably cut that number down even further. I'd be surprised if there were 1M routine readers of linkedin.fr and 100,000 regular contributors.
the Slashdot effect remains as potent as ever.
As I recall the slashdot effect used to be measured in the ability of traffic coming just from slashdot to take down another site. I can't recall the last time that happened. Sure, a lot of people are using more complicated hosting now that is more resistant to high traffic loads, but if this site is supposed to highlight the lesser-known cutting-edge tech developments, there should be some less robust sites that would be showcasing some of that material. Yet to the best of my knowledge slashdot has taken down approximately zero sites in the past decade or so.
That was true at one time but you haven't been paying attention if you haven't noticed how many clueless dolts have flocked to this sight in the last several years.
Total user volume is way, way, way down compared to years past. I doubt there are even 2000 users left here who post regularly. Most of the ID numbers that are much above 1M are likely spambots that are set up by people who don't realize the traffic here isn't enough to make it worth their while to partake in any spamming here. This place makes google plus look like a happening place to be.
Slashdot users really, really, don't need to be told what OpenSSH does. We've all used it, and most slashdot users are probably using it while they are reading slashdot (even if not to read slashdot). There was no need to tell us what it is in the summary.
While an Aston Martin is out of my price range regardless, one of the key elements of a sports car is the availability of a manual transmission. I don't see any mention of how the transmission would work after this conversion. By my understanding most all-electric cars on the road today use either single speed transmissions or CVTs; neither are particularly sporting for someone who really wants to have fun driving. I hope they have something figured out for that.
Professionals in America - particularly if they are US citizens - are often at a competitive disadvantage in trying to leave the US for a job in another country. Other countries often prioritize for their own citizens, asking their employers to provide documentation on why it is warranted to hire an American. Then on top of that are the costs of actually moving, along with getting the required documents for the move to happen. I have applied to several jobs in Canada - which should be a pretty trivial move - and the employer usually gives up rather than deal with the burden of hiring an American (even though I could drive there, I already have a passport, and I score very high on the immigration tests there).
Dollars to donuts the file would've opened Just Fine if exported Just Right and the customer Just Was That Much Less Of An Idiot and actually somewhat qualified to use software. I don't think I'd even want customers who're that prickly. Cool down already.
You're absolutely right that the customer probably could have been coached through how to open the file, but it's worth noting that they probably wouldn't want to be coached on how to do that. The customer could well resent doing that, or view the shop that sent it in a non-MS format as being some sort of "fringe" group or "fly-by-night" operation.
These file formats aren't ment for interchange, and in fact even microsoft often enough isn't compatible with itself.
It is certainly true that MS file formats have been known to eat shit in transfer, or to indeed just not be compatible between what should be very close versions. But if that happens, they can at least blame MS and hopefully get another chance. If you send your file to a customer and your file didn't come from MS Office that is more than sufficient reason for them to tell you to take a hike.
Don't get me started on that shit-show. I need to bring an air sickness bag with any time I have to deal with an install of Server 12 or Server 16 for the first time - who the fuck thought those default layouts were useful or sane? The MS engineers that signed off on those should be beaten, starved, gorged, starved, beaten, hanged, quartered, duct-taped back together, drawn again, and then burned at the stake for good measure. I'm pretty sure the default layout violates some part of the Geneva Conventions, in fact.
I'll admit I don't use spreadsheets for much fancy work. So educate me. What vital functions does Excel do that LibreOffice Calc (or Gnumeric) doesn't?
In my case, I can use LibreOffice for >90% of my spreadsheet work. The missing function though is that it does not always reliably open or export MS Office formats. Being as my colleagues use MS Office, I absolutely positively have to be able to handle their files and deliver files to them that open correctly for them on the first try without them having to think about it at all. Importing from another format is not acceptable for them unfortunately and it's a hopeless endeavor to try to get them away from MS Office.
I might be too curmudgeony here, but every time I find myself having to install a newer version of MS Office I find myself missing the previous one(s) more. In my case it's not even the word processor as much as it is in the spreadsheet though. Has anyone else been bothered by how many times the "Fill" command in Excel has moved in the past 20 years? When I started really using it a lot it was under Edit (Alt-E, F, R for right). Then it was moved to Insert (Alt-I, F, R). Then it was moved somewhere else. Then it got hidden behind ribbons. Now where the hell is it?
For Fill -> Down it was easy - Ctrl-R. But no standard shortcut has ever existed for Fill -> Right. And playing hide-and-seek with it doesn't make it better either.
Your (and your ilk's) communist propaganda worked its magic
Wait, what? Where exactly was "communist propaganda" applied in the past 70 years? The US has been constantly skewing its economics in the favor of the top echelons for decades now, and the brits (the article here is actually about UK schools) have been doing the same more or less since Thatcher's days as prime minister (if not longer).
there are more poor people today
Poverty comes more from people at the bottom not having an opportunity to move up than from people at the top falling down. We just tend to pay much more attention to the top because those people can afford better PR.
there aren't enough 'rich people' to cover all of your wishes and desires
Can you name a single country where the wealthiest actually contribute even a proportional share of their income towards the operations of their government (in taxes)? The American tax code in particular is hilariously regressive.
the more incentive there is to push towards reducing of the actual taxes.
If you think poverty is a good aim, then go for it. Petition your local government to stop providing infrastructure. We'll see how your business fares when the roads deteriorate to shit, the water turns toxic, and the people can't get a decent education.
Nobody should be forced by any government's violence to support anybody's lifestyle, education, food, shelter, medical treatment costs.
You use the term "violence" as if you are entitled to redefine it to match your religious dogma. It doesn't work that way. The rest of your statement is counterfactual at best; I quoted it just to remind the rest of slashdot what a zealot you are.
I don't need to ask them. It is public information.
Then go take a look at it and report back with what you find. The money is more complicated than you describe it to be.
You just need to look at the number of cranes on every major public research university.
The university I work at has more cranes around it - private companies building housing - than on it. And again, if someone contributes millions to construct a building with their name on it, that is all that money can be used for - it can't be used to pay executives, mow the lawn, etc.
They might be using that excuse to not pay you much
My salary is not important to this discussion. I haven't asked what your'e making either.
the President of your major university is likely earning over a million a year, or high six figures
No. The president of my university makes less than $700k. While that is a lot more than I make, it's quite a ways from a million.
Universities aren't hurting: you are in a bubble.
You are making some grand sweeping statements here and have notably not provided any factual data to support them. There is room for improvement in higher education for sure, but you aren't pointing to any of the places where real benefits could be realized - especially when you are basing your conclusions on nothing.
I encourage you to reach out to the accounting office of a major public research university and ask them about the state of their endowment and what terms are attached to them. As I mentioned before many major universities around the country are facing costs that they cannot recoup through anything other than raising tuition (and student fees). As I said before if you have a $2B endowment (which mine does not have) but you are only allowed to use it to reduce tuition or help specific types of students get in, then it does you no good towards the increasing infrastructure costs of said university.
I can't speak for all universities, and I apologize if my comment gave that impression. I do know how the budget is handled where I work, and there is no such endowment here. I know that a lot of people like to oversimplify the matter with many universities for various reasons. I have also seen endowments at some institutions that carry specific terms on how they can be used; if someone leaves an endowment to help students of type XYZ attend school, you cannot use that endowment to pay for building maintenance.
Americans love to rant about how they think money is wasted in higher ed, but this article is from the UK. Not everything compares directly as their costs are a bit different.
As a full-time staffer at a major public research university in the US, I'd like to mention one cost that was not in the summary: building and grounds costs. Even if you don't want perfectly manicured lawns, you still need to maintain a level of safety on the grounds and make sure the buildings are collapsing on themselves. Many schools have faced year after year of reduced state and federal funding, and they have to pay these bills somehow. This isn't just an image thing either; a lot of grounds maintenance is about safety.
It is also worth noting that tuition helps pay for the costs of keeping the lights on, maintaining temperatures in rooms and labs, etc. Even as we go to smart(er) thermostats it is still not a trivial matter to provide efficient heat in the winter and cooling in the summer. Schools aren't allowed to bill these costs to grants.
Are executives overpaid at our schools? Almost without question. But the amount of the tuition revenue that goes to their pay is pretty small compared to other costs that the schools have to face.
You can pretend they didn't go to the middle class, but fake news is fake. We saw these tax cuts in our paychecks and you lost credibility saying we didn't.
Bull. Shit. My paycheck didn't change by a dime. Neither did my wife's paycheck. We are very much middle class.
Given a chance to change their vote, not a single one said they would.
Because the tax cuts were a bad deal. It passes debt on to future generations of workers and does not benefit current workers.
They don't care about workers, end of story.
How many times did you have to tell that to yourself before you believed it?
When Democrats abandoned the working class (ie most people) for ever more niche groups, like transgenders, that gave them a loss
I'm curious to know how you figure they did this. Their economic policies didn't change; the democrats are still the party that aims to reduce taxes on the 99% while the republicans still aim to reduce taxes for the top 1%. Their education policies didn't change; they still favor funding public education while the republicans still favor various "market based solutions" and other such tactics that are shown to reduce accessibility to education. What exactly do you think they did that favored "niche groups" over the working class?
Turns out that hating white males
Where did you see them doing this? What policies or proposals did you see that could be said to be aiming for that to happen?
This is a huge problem, and one that liberals in particular should have capitalized on this election cycle.
Indeed, they should have capitalized on it. But we're talking about the party that lost the white house to the man who is arguably the least qualified politician since the dawn of our democracy. The democrats are practically synonymous with "pulling failure from the jaws of victory". Being as truth doesn't get votes any more, they ended up pretty much where we expected - they now control one half of one third of the government.
Constant. Absolutely relentless. Forged local numbers, someone hawking something in Chinese. Forged local number, "Your credit card/Thank you for staying at Marriot/Your student loan"... Constant. Three on my cell phone just today.
Except those are not telemarketers. You are describing scammers and fraudsters. That is like grouping emails you get from stores who you asked for updates from with Nigerian 429 scams; they really are not the same thing. Telemarketers aren't saints, that's for sure, but the legitimate telemarketers do obey the law.
Unfortunately the calls that don't stop - which I get too - we can't do a damned thing about. Lenny will almost certainly only succeed in wasting the time of the legitimate telemarketers while the fraud-bots will detect the bot and hang up promptly. Similarly as the fraudsters keep changing the numbers - and forging caller ID as well - we have no mechanism by which to report them.
Lots of people are telling us how much they hate telemarketers. But how many people on slashdot have been called by a telemarketer in the last year? More specifically, how many people have been called by a telemarketer that you did not - intentionally or otherwise - solicit yourself? Telemarketers are great punching bags and all, but it's easy to overstate the magnitude of the problem here.
I know that telemarketers can be annoying - especially if you're on the Do Not Call list and they are ignoring it - but there are also telemarketers that are actually following the law and just trying to do their job. While this is certainly a more civil response than what some people propose, we still should acknowledge that there are telemarketers who do have humanity to them and aren't out to just ruin your life.
It didn't take long to find another front page article trying to tell us that science is a waste of money. Clearly we should just cut funding until the scientists finally get those time-traveling flying cars going on cold fusion. I'm sure soon we'll see a comment in here about how science already has cured cancer but it's being withheld from us because of... reasons.
I certainly agree that the physicians are overburdened, but I don't agree with the accusation of "underinvested". They are not there to be data shepherds, their job is to get the patient set up and hopefully doing better with CPAP. The physicians have a limited amount of time - often dictated by the insurance industry - to work with patients and carving out time for them to handle machine data is pretty nearly a non-starter.
After all, the physicians don't have a responsibility to provide patients with raw EKG data, why would be be expected to make raw CPAP data available? Now, the fact that the manufacturer makes it so difficult for the patients to get to is another issue, but blaming it on the physicians themselves doesn't make a lot of sense here.
Decades ago when I was in middle school I had to select a second language to study. That time happened to be another one of those periods when many of the loudest voices in the US were telling us we all needed to learn Spanish ASAP to prepare to communicate with all the people living (or yet to be born) in Mexico and South America (Brazil be damned, of course). So I followed that reasoning and suffered through 3 years of Spanish by the time I was done with high school.
Yet even then I had an inclination towards science. Now many years past college, I repeatedly realize that the language I should have taken is indeed German. While I have never met someone at a conference who speaks German but not English, I almost never meet anyone at a conference who speaks any significant degree of Spanish. In my field the top languages after English are almost certainly German, Mandarin, Hindi, Russian, Japanese, French, Italian, and Dutch (in that order). I meet more people speaking Norwegian than I meet speaking Spanish.
Sure, Spanish is useful for many people, but I could have instead studied a language of use to me back then.
Slashdot Mirror
Only a portion of nerds are interested in IT Operations.
ssh is not just a tool for "IT Operations". There is zero reason for anyone who has any interest in managing a server (which is the focus of the article) - running any OS from the past decade - to not be familiar with ssh. This is above even the vi / emacs feuds, everyone uses ssh.
Netcraft has Slashdot ranked around 50,500th, a bit ahead of jp.match.com and a bit behind linkedin.fr.
That really isn't much to be proud of compared to where slashdot used to be. This community used to be much more active. If you want to compare to linkedin.fr, it is important to note that the population of France is ~67M. At most maybe 25% of the population might have an interest in LinkedIn (probably much less), which would give you a maximum user base of ~17M. Except that a lot of them are going to use linkedin from other countries if they are looking to further their careers, which would probably at least cut that number in half. And if the use of LinkedIn in the US is any indication of how industrialized countries use it (or do not), you should probably cut that number down even further. I'd be surprised if there were 1M routine readers of linkedin.fr and 100,000 regular contributors.
the Slashdot effect remains as potent as ever.
As I recall the slashdot effect used to be measured in the ability of traffic coming just from slashdot to take down another site. I can't recall the last time that happened. Sure, a lot of people are using more complicated hosting now that is more resistant to high traffic loads, but if this site is supposed to highlight the lesser-known cutting-edge tech developments, there should be some less robust sites that would be showcasing some of that material. Yet to the best of my knowledge slashdot has taken down approximately zero sites in the past decade or so.
That was true at one time but you haven't been paying attention if you haven't noticed how many clueless dolts have flocked to this sight in the last several years.
Total user volume is way, way, way down compared to years past. I doubt there are even 2000 users left here who post regularly. Most of the ID numbers that are much above 1M are likely spambots that are set up by people who don't realize the traffic here isn't enough to make it worth their while to partake in any spamming here. This place makes google plus look like a happening place to be.
Slashdot users really, really, don't need to be told what OpenSSH does. We've all used it, and most slashdot users are probably using it while they are reading slashdot (even if not to read slashdot). There was no need to tell us what it is in the summary.
While an Aston Martin is out of my price range regardless, one of the key elements of a sports car is the availability of a manual transmission. I don't see any mention of how the transmission would work after this conversion. By my understanding most all-electric cars on the road today use either single speed transmissions or CVTs; neither are particularly sporting for someone who really wants to have fun driving. I hope they have something figured out for that.
Professionals in America - particularly if they are US citizens - are often at a competitive disadvantage in trying to leave the US for a job in another country. Other countries often prioritize for their own citizens, asking their employers to provide documentation on why it is warranted to hire an American. Then on top of that are the costs of actually moving, along with getting the required documents for the move to happen. I have applied to several jobs in Canada - which should be a pretty trivial move - and the employer usually gives up rather than deal with the burden of hiring an American (even though I could drive there, I already have a passport, and I score very high on the immigration tests there).
Dollars to donuts the file would've opened Just Fine if exported Just Right and the customer Just Was That Much Less Of An Idiot and actually somewhat qualified to use software. I don't think I'd even want customers who're that prickly. Cool down already.
You're absolutely right that the customer probably could have been coached through how to open the file, but it's worth noting that they probably wouldn't want to be coached on how to do that. The customer could well resent doing that, or view the shop that sent it in a non-MS format as being some sort of "fringe" group or "fly-by-night" operation.
These file formats aren't ment for interchange, and in fact even microsoft often enough isn't compatible with itself.
It is certainly true that MS file formats have been known to eat shit in transfer, or to indeed just not be compatible between what should be very close versions. But if that happens, they can at least blame MS and hopefully get another chance. If you send your file to a customer and your file didn't come from MS Office that is more than sufficient reason for them to tell you to take a hike.
This problem extends to Windows as well.
Don't get me started on that shit-show. I need to bring an air sickness bag with any time I have to deal with an install of Server 12 or Server 16 for the first time - who the fuck thought those default layouts were useful or sane? The MS engineers that signed off on those should be beaten, starved, gorged, starved, beaten, hanged, quartered, duct-taped back together, drawn again, and then burned at the stake for good measure. I'm pretty sure the default layout violates some part of the Geneva Conventions, in fact.
I'll admit I don't use spreadsheets for much fancy work. So educate me. What vital functions does Excel do that LibreOffice Calc (or Gnumeric) doesn't?
In my case, I can use LibreOffice for >90% of my spreadsheet work. The missing function though is that it does not always reliably open or export MS Office formats. Being as my colleagues use MS Office, I absolutely positively have to be able to handle their files and deliver files to them that open correctly for them on the first try without them having to think about it at all. Importing from another format is not acceptable for them unfortunately and it's a hopeless endeavor to try to get them away from MS Office.
I might be too curmudgeony here, but every time I find myself having to install a newer version of MS Office I find myself missing the previous one(s) more. In my case it's not even the word processor as much as it is in the spreadsheet though. Has anyone else been bothered by how many times the "Fill" command in Excel has moved in the past 20 years? When I started really using it a lot it was under Edit (Alt-E, F, R for right). Then it was moved to Insert (Alt-I, F, R). Then it was moved somewhere else. Then it got hidden behind ribbons. Now where the hell is it?
For Fill -> Down it was easy - Ctrl-R. But no standard shortcut has ever existed for Fill -> Right. And playing hide-and-seek with it doesn't make it better either.
Your (and your ilk's) communist propaganda worked its magic
Wait, what? Where exactly was "communist propaganda" applied in the past 70 years? The US has been constantly skewing its economics in the favor of the top echelons for decades now, and the brits (the article here is actually about UK schools) have been doing the same more or less since Thatcher's days as prime minister (if not longer).
there are more poor people today
Poverty comes more from people at the bottom not having an opportunity to move up than from people at the top falling down. We just tend to pay much more attention to the top because those people can afford better PR.
there aren't enough 'rich people' to cover all of your wishes and desires
Can you name a single country where the wealthiest actually contribute even a proportional share of their income towards the operations of their government (in taxes)? The American tax code in particular is hilariously regressive.
the more incentive there is to push towards reducing of the actual taxes.
If you think poverty is a good aim, then go for it. Petition your local government to stop providing infrastructure. We'll see how your business fares when the roads deteriorate to shit, the water turns toxic, and the people can't get a decent education.
Nobody should be forced by any government's violence to support anybody's lifestyle, education, food, shelter, medical treatment costs.
You use the term "violence" as if you are entitled to redefine it to match your religious dogma. It doesn't work that way. The rest of your statement is counterfactual at best; I quoted it just to remind the rest of slashdot what a zealot you are.
I don't need to ask them. It is public information.
Then go take a look at it and report back with what you find. The money is more complicated than you describe it to be.
You just need to look at the number of cranes on every major public research university.
The university I work at has more cranes around it - private companies building housing - than on it. And again, if someone contributes millions to construct a building with their name on it, that is all that money can be used for - it can't be used to pay executives, mow the lawn, etc.
They might be using that excuse to not pay you much
My salary is not important to this discussion. I haven't asked what your'e making either.
the President of your major university is likely earning over a million a year, or high six figures
No. The president of my university makes less than $700k. While that is a lot more than I make, it's quite a ways from a million.
Universities aren't hurting: you are in a bubble.
You are making some grand sweeping statements here and have notably not provided any factual data to support them. There is room for improvement in higher education for sure, but you aren't pointing to any of the places where real benefits could be realized - especially when you are basing your conclusions on nothing.
I encourage you to reach out to the accounting office of a major public research university and ask them about the state of their endowment and what terms are attached to them. As I mentioned before many major universities around the country are facing costs that they cannot recoup through anything other than raising tuition (and student fees). As I said before if you have a $2B endowment (which mine does not have) but you are only allowed to use it to reduce tuition or help specific types of students get in, then it does you no good towards the increasing infrastructure costs of said university.
I can't speak for all universities, and I apologize if my comment gave that impression. I do know how the budget is handled where I work, and there is no such endowment here. I know that a lot of people like to oversimplify the matter with many universities for various reasons. I have also seen endowments at some institutions that carry specific terms on how they can be used; if someone leaves an endowment to help students of type XYZ attend school, you cannot use that endowment to pay for building maintenance.
Americans love to rant about how they think money is wasted in higher ed, but this article is from the UK. Not everything compares directly as their costs are a bit different.
As a full-time staffer at a major public research university in the US, I'd like to mention one cost that was not in the summary: building and grounds costs. Even if you don't want perfectly manicured lawns, you still need to maintain a level of safety on the grounds and make sure the buildings are collapsing on themselves. Many schools have faced year after year of reduced state and federal funding, and they have to pay these bills somehow. This isn't just an image thing either; a lot of grounds maintenance is about safety.
It is also worth noting that tuition helps pay for the costs of keeping the lights on, maintaining temperatures in rooms and labs, etc. Even as we go to smart(er) thermostats it is still not a trivial matter to provide efficient heat in the winter and cooling in the summer. Schools aren't allowed to bill these costs to grants.
Are executives overpaid at our schools? Almost without question. But the amount of the tuition revenue that goes to their pay is pretty small compared to other costs that the schools have to face.
You can pretend they didn't go to the middle class, but fake news is fake. We saw these tax cuts in our paychecks and you lost credibility saying we didn't.
Bull. Shit. My paycheck didn't change by a dime. Neither did my wife's paycheck. We are very much middle class.
Given a chance to change their vote, not a single one said they would.
Because the tax cuts were a bad deal. It passes debt on to future generations of workers and does not benefit current workers.
They don't care about workers, end of story.
How many times did you have to tell that to yourself before you believed it?
When Democrats abandoned the working class (ie most people) for ever more niche groups, like transgenders, that gave them a loss
I'm curious to know how you figure they did this. Their economic policies didn't change; the democrats are still the party that aims to reduce taxes on the 99% while the republicans still aim to reduce taxes for the top 1%. Their education policies didn't change; they still favor funding public education while the republicans still favor various "market based solutions" and other such tactics that are shown to reduce accessibility to education. What exactly do you think they did that favored "niche groups" over the working class?
Turns out that hating white males
Where did you see them doing this? What policies or proposals did you see that could be said to be aiming for that to happen?
This is a huge problem, and one that liberals in particular should have capitalized on this election cycle.
Indeed, they should have capitalized on it. But we're talking about the party that lost the white house to the man who is arguably the least qualified politician since the dawn of our democracy. The democrats are practically synonymous with "pulling failure from the jaws of victory". Being as truth doesn't get votes any more, they ended up pretty much where we expected - they now control one half of one third of the government.
Constant. Absolutely relentless. Forged local numbers, someone hawking something in Chinese. Forged local number, "Your credit card/Thank you for staying at Marriot/Your student loan" ... Constant. Three on my cell phone just today.
Except those are not telemarketers. You are describing scammers and fraudsters. That is like grouping emails you get from stores who you asked for updates from with Nigerian 429 scams; they really are not the same thing. Telemarketers aren't saints, that's for sure, but the legitimate telemarketers do obey the law.
Unfortunately the calls that don't stop - which I get too - we can't do a damned thing about. Lenny will almost certainly only succeed in wasting the time of the legitimate telemarketers while the fraud-bots will detect the bot and hang up promptly. Similarly as the fraudsters keep changing the numbers - and forging caller ID as well - we have no mechanism by which to report them.
Lots of people are telling us how much they hate telemarketers. But how many people on slashdot have been called by a telemarketer in the last year? More specifically, how many people have been called by a telemarketer that you did not - intentionally or otherwise - solicit yourself? Telemarketers are great punching bags and all, but it's easy to overstate the magnitude of the problem here.
I know that telemarketers can be annoying - especially if you're on the Do Not Call list and they are ignoring it - but there are also telemarketers that are actually following the law and just trying to do their job. While this is certainly a more civil response than what some people propose, we still should acknowledge that there are telemarketers who do have humanity to them and aren't out to just ruin your life.
It didn't take long to find another front page article trying to tell us that science is a waste of money. Clearly we should just cut funding until the scientists finally get those time-traveling flying cars going on cold fusion. I'm sure soon we'll see a comment in here about how science already has cured cancer but it's being withheld from us because of ... reasons.
I certainly agree that the physicians are overburdened, but I don't agree with the accusation of "underinvested". They are not there to be data shepherds, their job is to get the patient set up and hopefully doing better with CPAP. The physicians have a limited amount of time - often dictated by the insurance industry - to work with patients and carving out time for them to handle machine data is pretty nearly a non-starter.
After all, the physicians don't have a responsibility to provide patients with raw EKG data, why would be be expected to make raw CPAP data available? Now, the fact that the manufacturer makes it so difficult for the patients to get to is another issue, but blaming it on the physicians themselves doesn't make a lot of sense here.
(and Christopher Walken can demonstrate if you'd like)
... walk without rhythm, and you won't attract the worm ...
Decades ago when I was in middle school I had to select a second language to study. That time happened to be another one of those periods when many of the loudest voices in the US were telling us we all needed to learn Spanish ASAP to prepare to communicate with all the people living (or yet to be born) in Mexico and South America (Brazil be damned, of course). So I followed that reasoning and suffered through 3 years of Spanish by the time I was done with high school.
Yet even then I had an inclination towards science. Now many years past college, I repeatedly realize that the language I should have taken is indeed German. While I have never met someone at a conference who speaks German but not English, I almost never meet anyone at a conference who speaks any significant degree of Spanish. In my field the top languages after English are almost certainly German, Mandarin, Hindi, Russian, Japanese, French, Italian, and Dutch (in that order). I meet more people speaking Norwegian than I meet speaking Spanish.
Sure, Spanish is useful for many people, but I could have instead studied a language of use to me back then.