The way I understand it, there are a few reasons (besides the fact that many people straight up procrastinated). I think the main one is that the coupon program ran out of money, so the millions of people who procrastinated now have no options. You might blame them for being lazy, but there were a log of other factors. Some people ordered coupons even though they didn't need them "just in case", there was probably some abuse. I've heard lots of stories about people who ordered the coupons as soon as they were available only to find out that all converter boxes in their area were out of stock until after the coupons expired (see previous/. stories for lots of examples of this). I've also heard, although I have no proof of this, that lots "Coupon eligible receivers" that people bought online were fraudulent.
I tend to side with keeping the deadline as it is. Despite all the problems, there will never be a time when everyone is ready, so what makes February 17th worse than any other time? If they're going to fix the problems with the program to make sure that everyone who gets a box needs one, then I guess I might support a delay, but otherwise, screw it, just go for it.
That requires effort. Say what you will about the music labels' methods in combating piracy, but they do provide the extremely valuable service of telling me what I should like.
Besides, capitalism guarantees that only the most talented artists will become popular, doesn't it?
If you really want to put an end to this sort of behavior, we'll have to start by changing our actual collective values and ethics
I actually agree with what you're saying, but guess what: part of the "Koolaid" you mention is that many Americans seem to believe that fixes to problems should be easy, cheap and instantaneous.
I was trying to think of a way to say this in one sentence that would be funny, but couldn't think of anything. So I guess I'll steal from Homer Simpson: "Can't someone else do it?"
I mean, why should I work hard to slowly improve our society by changing people's hearts and minds? The effects will take forever and barely be noticeable. I can get the KarmaStar Morality System for only $19.95 plus shipping and handling, guaranteed to make you three times as good a person in 6 weeks or your money back!
The office of President alone cannot control the economy
That's crap! There is exactly one person to blame for all our current troubles, and that person is conveniently a member of the party you are opposed to. Wake up, man!
A lot of comments are suggesting that this is to prevent surreptitious upskirt shots. Is New York's 3rd Congressional District really so replete with women exposing themselves in public that random people taking pictures of them is becoming a serious problem?
Do you think it was really Linux that hurt Microsoft?
You ask this question of the director of the Linux Foundation? The question contains the answer. It's about as objective as Stephen Colbert asking, "George W. Bush: Great President or the Greatest President?"
This article reads like a couple of self-satisfied nerds patting each other on the back (to use a less colorful metaphor than I'd like to). I'll rejoice on the day that Linux's increased market share in the desktop world hurts Microsoft's dominance, but I seriously doubt that it did this year.
If Microsoft really said Linux was hurting them (and I didn't see where in TFA it says they did, please point me to it if you did), it's probably because they don't want to admit that they are partially at fault. I don't see why they don't just blame it on a massive global recession.
Let's just hope that RusOS operates a little better than Russia itself. Otherwise:
-The menus will contain every feature ever planned for RusOS, but none of the ones that are actually implemented.
-During times of heavy load, the scheduler will block all processes from using the CPU, to prevent deadlock.
-Users of RusOS will frequently and loudly proclaim how horrible it is, and will angrily chastise you if you agree with them.
I spent some time in Russia, although I have not been overly studious about Russian history. My understanding is that, during communism there were no goods in the stores. Now, there are plenty of goods, but no one can afford to buy them.
I also get the impression that your average Russian has no desire to do the kinds of things that Americans would see as necessary to help the economy (start a small business, take risks, etc), because of the assumption, which is fair given the last 1000 years or so, that someone will just come in and take it all away and/or destroy it.
Of course, these are just the impressions of a stupid American who only understands the Russian Soul to the extent it can be taught in a language class, and didn't take much Russian history. I could be way off.
I have no idea if I have this right, but I sure had fun thinking about it and writing it.
Imagine time is simply a clock. The time you experience is the time you see on the clock. When you are close to the clock and the clock is stationary relative to you, then light leaves the clock and reaches you (almost) simultaneously, so that every second that passes for the clock passes for you, too.
Now, if you accelerate relative to the clock, light will be leaving the clock at the same rate, but it will take longer and longer to reach you, so you will see the clock slowing down.
When you stop accelerating near the speed of light, the light that left the clock when you stopped accelerating will be what you see. The light that left the clock at some point will be VERY SLOWLY overtaking you, so it will seem like time has stopped at the clock, even though it is still moving for you.
Now, when you decelerate, all the light that left the clock between when you last received light and now will catch up to you, and it will look like time is speeding up, so from your perspective, all the time you spent near the speed of light will catch up to you.
To you, it will appear that as much time has passed as it took you. Of course, in the clock's reference frame, much more time will have passed, because there is a lot of light that left the clock while you were decelerating that hasn't reached you yet.
You actually will not see the difference unless you try to go back, because you will pass all the light that hasn't caught up to you yet and all the light that leaves while you're in transit.
Unless you're writing a compiler, how much does a person need about linkers besides that.c files get compiled into.o files and.o files get linked into an executable?
Many people only know what they have needed to know so far in their lives/careers, but it doesn't mean they're incapable of learning, nor does it mean that Compilers is a required course for a Masters' degree.
Does this mean that even though I'm a competent (dare I say, good) developer, that when I'm applying for a job I need to claim I'm a lead developer with 10 years experience to get an interview? Thanks for the tip!
Signed, a programmer whose only work experience is 3 years working on an in-house database in an arcane language no one has heard of.
Within physics, there is a difference between theorists (people who do try to prove things using math) and experimentalists (people who do experiments to test the theorists' theories).
Most physicists see themselves as either one or the other, and often the two do not get along. Theorists see experimentalists as being corrupted by real world problems when really all the problems can be solved by a little hard thought (and maybe some math). They think experiments shouldn't be called "science" but "engineering". Experimentalists see theorists as having pointless jobs because nothing they ever do will ever produce something useful to the human race, by their very nature.
In reality, of course, they are dependent on each other, because without the theorists' theories the experimentalists have nothing to test, and without the hope of some kind of payoff from experimentalists, theorists will never get funding.
Also, as a non-physicist, it can be fun to pit theorists and experimentalists against each other in battles to the death and watch what happens.
The public outcry that you'll have the first time a hospital administers medication that a patient is allergic to because the IT staff is still in the middle of restoring backups will (or at least should) be epic.
As likely as your scenario is that the doc doesn't know the patient is allergic because the clinic never sent over the part of the chart that had that in there, or the allergy was diagnosed at a different hospital.
Lastly, hospitals have carefully implemented procedures to deal with server outages, for exactly those reasons.
There are barely any political divisions on this issue. I'm as big a Bush-hater as anyone on Slashdot, but even he did a lot to forward the process of digital health records.
No politician is going to stand up and say, "We need to stay on paper for as long as possible!" That's just silly.
If I were designing it, I would make individual organizations store the data however they want/can, then have the government maintain some kind of authentication service so that if I need records from clinic X, I send the request through the government server but clinic X is the one who actually sends me the data. A lot of organizations are already doing this kind of thing with city-wide or state-wide agreements between distinct hospitals with different software.
Then again, whether they do it my way or someone else's, if the government is in charge they'll be sure to insert a few pieces that will make the whole system not work, so it's barely worth arguing about.
It's perfectly clear what that message is supposed to mean. And the protocol is certainly well defined enough that no two vendors will ever interpret the definitions of "Internal Patient ID", "External Patient ID" and "Supplemental Patient ID" differently.
I used to work in Healthcare IT, and I semi-honestly believe that we should just wait until all the middle-aged and older doctors and nurses who have not been using computers their whole lives retire.
If I were a doctor, I would refuse to work at a place that made me write with a pen all day, or worse, dictate into a tape recorder. I would go nuts without a computerized system. However, from what I saw, user training and acceptance is one of the biggest hurdles to a successful implementation.
At my first doctor's appointment after I started my old job, my doctor looked over my "first time patient" survey and said, "You work at company X, huh? I dictated my notes for 25 years, then they installed your software and made me type everything." Then he proceeded to enter his username and password. One. Key. At. A. Time. With. His. Index. Finger.
Computerized tools are only as powerful as the people using them, and lets face it: when it comes to technology, most people over 40 are stupid. Couple that with the fact that most people over 40 refuse to learn something new (hell, I'm 27 and I bitch that the XBOX controller has too many damn buttons) and you can see why it's so hard.
This brings up an interesting point (to me anyway). The reason I don't keep a blog is because I feel like my life is not interesting enough. I did keep a blog when I was traveling abroad, though, because I kept seeing an doing interesting things. Even then, though, it was an umbilical cord. I didn't really know at the time if my friends were reading it, but it was always fun to write it.
Recently, I was at a talk that was really boring, and I thought I'd pass the time by writing down my thoughts. As it turns out, that was pretty much just as boring as thinking them. Why would anyone ever want to know every stupid thing I do?
I seriously hate to defend Twitter, because I generally agree that it's stupid, but keep in mind that some people leave their hometowns after they grow up. I live in Indiana, but most of my friends are in Minnesota and Wisconsin, with many elsewhere in the country and some on other continents.
It's not always practical to physically hang out with people, and writing dozens of e-mails to various friends and family members saying "How are you doing?" is not the most ideal way to keep in touch. Before Facebook, I communicated regularly with exactly 2 geographically distant friends, and kinda/sorta kept in touch with maybe 20 others. Now, I can see what everyone is up to, and how they're doing. It doesn't replace seeing them, or even sending one-to-one e-mails, but it's better than nothing.
Of course, this is only defending the general idea of passive methods of communication like Twitter and Facebook because regular face-to-face interaction is not practical if you have more than about 10 friends. In practice, I don't give a crap what the person who was in my high school economics class ate for dinner last night. I get annoyed reading people's Facebook statuses, I can't imagine reading Twitter updates.
This is actually how all DNA sequencing is already done. Most genome projects try to get 8-10X coverage, which means they sequence 8-10 times as much DNA as exists in the genome in the hopes that most bases occur in 8-10 of the reads that make up each location in the final sequence. Typically, if all 7 of 8 are the same, the 8th is considered an error, whereas if 5 of 8 are A and 3 of 8 are T it is treated as a SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism. In layman's terms, a difference between your mom's version and your dad's version of the same sequence).
It seems they already figured this into their error rate:
We have shown that with just 15 molecules, a consensus sequence with 99.3% median accuracy can be formed with no detectable sequence context bias and a uniform error profile within reads.
They go on to say this may prevent it from being useful for sequencing new genomes from scratch, but it will may help with the kind of applications currently being used in the medical community, like identifying genes that cause cancer, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
If you ever talk to a Russian, the phrase "Russian _____s are the best in the world" is actually a fairly common one.
I had this conversation times, as well:
Russian: I hate my country, I want to move to America.
Me: Yeah, I agree, I can't wait to get home.
Russian: WHAT!!!! Russia is the greatest country on earth! How dare you!
I don't understand why you're modded troll...
The way I understand it, there are a few reasons (besides the fact that many people straight up procrastinated). I think the main one is that the coupon program ran out of money, so the millions of people who procrastinated now have no options. You might blame them for being lazy, but there were a log of other factors. Some people ordered coupons even though they didn't need them "just in case", there was probably some abuse. I've heard lots of stories about people who ordered the coupons as soon as they were available only to find out that all converter boxes in their area were out of stock until after the coupons expired (see previous /. stories for lots of examples of this). I've also heard, although I have no proof of this, that lots "Coupon eligible receivers" that people bought online were fraudulent.
I tend to side with keeping the deadline as it is. Despite all the problems, there will never be a time when everyone is ready, so what makes February 17th worse than any other time? If they're going to fix the problems with the program to make sure that everyone who gets a box needs one, then I guess I might support a delay, but otherwise, screw it, just go for it.
That requires effort. Say what you will about the music labels' methods in combating piracy, but they do provide the extremely valuable service of telling me what I should like.
Besides, capitalism guarantees that only the most talented artists will become popular, doesn't it?
This article should be linked in the summary, not the one that is over a month old.
If you really want to put an end to this sort of behavior, we'll have to start by changing our actual collective values and ethics
I actually agree with what you're saying, but guess what: part of the "Koolaid" you mention is that many Americans seem to believe that fixes to problems should be easy, cheap and instantaneous.
I was trying to think of a way to say this in one sentence that would be funny, but couldn't think of anything. So I guess I'll steal from Homer Simpson: "Can't someone else do it?"
I mean, why should I work hard to slowly improve our society by changing people's hearts and minds? The effects will take forever and barely be noticeable. I can get the KarmaStar Morality System for only $19.95 plus shipping and handling, guaranteed to make you three times as good a person in 6 weeks or your money back!
The office of President alone cannot control the economy
That's crap! There is exactly one person to blame for all our current troubles, and that person is conveniently a member of the party you are opposed to. Wake up, man!
A lot of comments are suggesting that this is to prevent surreptitious upskirt shots. Is New York's 3rd Congressional District really so replete with women exposing themselves in public that random people taking pictures of them is becoming a serious problem?
Why don't I live there?
Do you think it was really Linux that hurt Microsoft?
You ask this question of the director of the Linux Foundation? The question contains the answer. It's about as objective as Stephen Colbert asking, "George W. Bush: Great President or the Greatest President?"
This article reads like a couple of self-satisfied nerds patting each other on the back (to use a less colorful metaphor than I'd like to). I'll rejoice on the day that Linux's increased market share in the desktop world hurts Microsoft's dominance, but I seriously doubt that it did this year.
If Microsoft really said Linux was hurting them (and I didn't see where in TFA it says they did, please point me to it if you did), it's probably because they don't want to admit that they are partially at fault. I don't see why they don't just blame it on a massive global recession.
-The menus will contain every feature ever planned for RusOS, but none of the ones that are actually implemented.
-During times of heavy load, the scheduler will block all processes from using the CPU, to prevent deadlock.
-Users of RusOS will frequently and loudly proclaim how horrible it is, and will angrily chastise you if you agree with them.
I spent some time in Russia, although I have not been overly studious about Russian history. My understanding is that, during communism there were no goods in the stores. Now, there are plenty of goods, but no one can afford to buy them.
I also get the impression that your average Russian has no desire to do the kinds of things that Americans would see as necessary to help the economy (start a small business, take risks, etc), because of the assumption, which is fair given the last 1000 years or so, that someone will just come in and take it all away and/or destroy it.
Of course, these are just the impressions of a stupid American who only understands the Russian Soul to the extent it can be taught in a language class, and didn't take much Russian history. I could be way off.
I have no idea if I have this right, but I sure had fun thinking about it and writing it.
Imagine time is simply a clock. The time you experience is the time you see on the clock. When you are close to the clock and the clock is stationary relative to you, then light leaves the clock and reaches you (almost) simultaneously, so that every second that passes for the clock passes for you, too.
Now, if you accelerate relative to the clock, light will be leaving the clock at the same rate, but it will take longer and longer to reach you, so you will see the clock slowing down.
When you stop accelerating near the speed of light, the light that left the clock when you stopped accelerating will be what you see. The light that left the clock at some point will be VERY SLOWLY overtaking you, so it will seem like time has stopped at the clock, even though it is still moving for you.
Now, when you decelerate, all the light that left the clock between when you last received light and now will catch up to you, and it will look like time is speeding up, so from your perspective, all the time you spent near the speed of light will catch up to you.
To you, it will appear that as much time has passed as it took you. Of course, in the clock's reference frame, much more time will have passed, because there is a lot of light that left the clock while you were decelerating that hasn't reached you yet.
You actually will not see the difference unless you try to go back, because you will pass all the light that hasn't caught up to you yet and all the light that leaves while you're in transit.
Are all good for you with the correct Moderation.
I want to do more things in Moderation, but I only get 5 chances to do so and they expire after 3 days. Then it's back to 3 Whoppers a day for dinner!
Mod: -1 Flamebroiled
Unless you're writing a compiler, how much does a person need about linkers besides that .c files get compiled into .o files and .o files get linked into an executable?
Many people only know what they have needed to know so far in their lives/careers, but it doesn't mean they're incapable of learning, nor does it mean that Compilers is a required course for a Masters' degree.
Does this mean that even though I'm a competent (dare I say, good) developer, that when I'm applying for a job I need to claim I'm a lead developer with 10 years experience to get an interview? Thanks for the tip!
Signed, a programmer whose only work experience is 3 years working on an in-house database in an arcane language no one has heard of.
Touche. But will the experimentalists be satisfied with your result, or will they want to have the fight anyway, just to be sure?
Within physics, there is a difference between theorists (people who do try to prove things using math) and experimentalists (people who do experiments to test the theorists' theories).
Most physicists see themselves as either one or the other, and often the two do not get along. Theorists see experimentalists as being corrupted by real world problems when really all the problems can be solved by a little hard thought (and maybe some math). They think experiments shouldn't be called "science" but "engineering". Experimentalists see theorists as having pointless jobs because nothing they ever do will ever produce something useful to the human race, by their very nature.
In reality, of course, they are dependent on each other, because without the theorists' theories the experimentalists have nothing to test, and without the hope of some kind of payoff from experimentalists, theorists will never get funding.
Also, as a non-physicist, it can be fun to pit theorists and experimentalists against each other in battles to the death and watch what happens.
The public outcry that you'll have the first time a hospital administers medication that a patient is allergic to because the IT staff is still in the middle of restoring backups will (or at least should) be epic.
This kind of thing already happens ALL THE TIME. Stopping preventable medical errors is one of the huge reasons hospitals install EMRs in the first place. Here is the first article I found on this topic (not necessarily the best)
As likely as your scenario is that the doc doesn't know the patient is allergic because the clinic never sent over the part of the chart that had that in there, or the allergy was diagnosed at a different hospital.
Lastly, hospitals have carefully implemented procedures to deal with server outages, for exactly those reasons.
There are barely any political divisions on this issue. I'm as big a Bush-hater as anyone on Slashdot, but even he did a lot to forward the process of digital health records.
No politician is going to stand up and say, "We need to stay on paper for as long as possible!" That's just silly.
If I were designing it, I would make individual organizations store the data however they want/can, then have the government maintain some kind of authentication service so that if I need records from clinic X, I send the request through the government server but clinic X is the one who actually sends me the data. A lot of organizations are already doing this kind of thing with city-wide or state-wide agreements between distinct hospitals with different software.
Then again, whether they do it my way or someone else's, if the government is in charge they'll be sure to insert a few pieces that will make the whole system not work, so it's barely worth arguing about.
MSH|123|918231092|200901121107|||ADT^A08|||||
PID|||1000220223^^^SD&1837^^^ID||COWARD^ANONYMOUS^^^^^^^^^^^^^|123^MAIN^ST^NEW YORK^NY^||||||8183||||
It's perfectly clear what that message is supposed to mean. And the protocol is certainly well defined enough that no two vendors will ever interpret the definitions of "Internal Patient ID", "External Patient ID" and "Supplemental Patient ID" differently.
I used to work in Healthcare IT, and I semi-honestly believe that we should just wait until all the middle-aged and older doctors and nurses who have not been using computers their whole lives retire.
If I were a doctor, I would refuse to work at a place that made me write with a pen all day, or worse, dictate into a tape recorder. I would go nuts without a computerized system. However, from what I saw, user training and acceptance is one of the biggest hurdles to a successful implementation.
At my first doctor's appointment after I started my old job, my doctor looked over my "first time patient" survey and said, "You work at company X, huh? I dictated my notes for 25 years, then they installed your software and made me type everything." Then he proceeded to enter his username and password. One. Key. At. A. Time. With. His. Index. Finger.
Computerized tools are only as powerful as the people using them, and lets face it: when it comes to technology, most people over 40 are stupid. Couple that with the fact that most people over 40 refuse to learn something new (hell, I'm 27 and I bitch that the XBOX controller has too many damn buttons) and you can see why it's so hard.
Those were all really good political non-answers. Kudos to your candidates for so gracefully dodging the question.
This brings up an interesting point (to me anyway). The reason I don't keep a blog is because I feel like my life is not interesting enough. I did keep a blog when I was traveling abroad, though, because I kept seeing an doing interesting things. Even then, though, it was an umbilical cord. I didn't really know at the time if my friends were reading it, but it was always fun to write it.
Recently, I was at a talk that was really boring, and I thought I'd pass the time by writing down my thoughts. As it turns out, that was pretty much just as boring as thinking them. Why would anyone ever want to know every stupid thing I do?
I seriously hate to defend Twitter, because I generally agree that it's stupid, but keep in mind that some people leave their hometowns after they grow up. I live in Indiana, but most of my friends are in Minnesota and Wisconsin, with many elsewhere in the country and some on other continents.
It's not always practical to physically hang out with people, and writing dozens of e-mails to various friends and family members saying "How are you doing?" is not the most ideal way to keep in touch. Before Facebook, I communicated regularly with exactly 2 geographically distant friends, and kinda/sorta kept in touch with maybe 20 others. Now, I can see what everyone is up to, and how they're doing. It doesn't replace seeing them, or even sending one-to-one e-mails, but it's better than nothing.
Of course, this is only defending the general idea of passive methods of communication like Twitter and Facebook because regular face-to-face interaction is not practical if you have more than about 10 friends. In practice, I don't give a crap what the person who was in my high school economics class ate for dinner last night. I get annoyed reading people's Facebook statuses, I can't imagine reading Twitter updates.
This is actually how all DNA sequencing is already done. Most genome projects try to get 8-10X coverage, which means they sequence 8-10 times as much DNA as exists in the genome in the hopes that most bases occur in 8-10 of the reads that make up each location in the final sequence. Typically, if all 7 of 8 are the same, the 8th is considered an error, whereas if 5 of 8 are A and 3 of 8 are T it is treated as a SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism. In layman's terms, a difference between your mom's version and your dad's version of the same sequence).
It seems they already figured this into their error rate:
We have shown that with just 15 molecules, a consensus sequence with 99.3% median accuracy can be formed with no detectable sequence context bias and a uniform error profile within reads.
They go on to say this may prevent it from being useful for sequencing new genomes from scratch, but it will may help with the kind of applications currently being used in the medical community, like identifying genes that cause cancer, etc.