Yeah - when pharmaceutical companies are spending twice as much on Marketing as they do on R&D. . . I'll believe that they're frustrated by lack of progress on the "big" problems of medical science.
LOL - the biggest innovation to come out of the pharmaceutical industry in the past 20 years is to patent the analogs of existing chemicals whose patents are about to expire. Double the profit! Oh yeah. That, and boner pills.
I believe in Democracy: because people should always have a say in things that affect them. But that democracy should be INFORMED by science.
Ideally, science is a perfect guide. But realistically, we've seen so many cases where science has been skewed by money. (just like Democracy). I think that there is plenty of room; GOBS OF IT, for scientific understanding, among laypeople.
As a non-scientist, I fully understand that lack of understanding of advanced math and statistics, knowledge of science can do more harm than good. (ie. science, as depicted in our popular media and entertainment). I understand that not everybody has the capacity to be taught advanced math and statistics. I think that is more of a failure of our educational and economic systems than say, for example, biology. We have to try harder, as a civilization.
I agree; I actually love Bill Nye and Neil DeGrasse Tyson; but I don't think that either of them have been even slightly effective, compared to Sagan. Sagan really did it best, and our world is far dimmer with his loss.
I don't think he was an enthusiastic/ideological Nazi. He was just unfortunate to have been enmeshed in the German industrial hierarchy when he was recruited to work on their missile program.
You could argue that after a vehicle failure (STS/Challenger); we didn't shut everything down and analyze it to make it safer. If we had, we would have thrown out the ATK-booster and side-tank design, and built a new shuttle. Instead, we kept shovelling pork at ATK, and fired the program up again months later. It wasn't the same defect that destroyed Columbia, but it was the same design mentality: #1 priority was appease congress by sending their districts pork, no matter how technically irrelevant the design was. (don't get me wrong. ATK makes fine ICBM's. But that technology has no place in manned spaceflight). So, I'm not sure which system was worse, the US-1970's corporate welfare system, or the Soviets' "It works because the Kremlin said so!" system. Buran was similarly ballsy. . .
Sure - they have a right to take nude selfies - and I suppose I don't even blame them for expecting them to be private on a network-connected device; in a world where they're not paying attention to the tech-press, where any idiot really *SHOULD* know that it's not a bright idea.
(Even if all you're paying attention to is Snowden; you should know that the three-letter agencies see EVERYTHING, and they DO have employees who break the rules and violate your privacy for the lulz. - you don't even need to be well-versed in all the latest goings on of illegal 4chan hackery. This is something we pay taxes to have happen. So we can feel safe about "terrorism").
Who I blame: is the tech industry pundits, hucksters, and con men, who are trying to sell us the idea that network-connected devices, and privacy can work together. (and I'd even say that maybe, they can: but just not in any current user-friendly way).
It's NOT blaming the victim to point this out. The point of this is: the "cloud" is a SCAM. They're trying to rent your own data to you, and trying to con you into believing it's safe. This is the point that really needs to be made. I really don't think that a bunch of self-absorbed overpaid entertainers' private lives actually matters here, compared to the massive fraud that is "cloud services".
Should there be an expectation of privacy? YES. But in reality - nobody should expect privacy if you put your nudes on a network-connected device. Hackers gonna hack, and VERY BAD PEOPLE are going to con you into spending a crapton of money on supposedly "safe" devices and technologies, which are clearly NOT SAFE AT ALL.
There is NO WAY IN HELL that the current or next set of congresscritters, and most voters, are going to accept: "aaagh! Communist Socialist Takeover Plot!"
And if they did, I doubt that the resulting system would not be without significant gameable loopholes.
This issue also dovetails nicely with our new Political Pundit class of wealthy upper-class washouts from MBA programs. These guys take a few history classes, and all of a sudden they see this threat from the great Ottomans who will rise again to wreak havock on Western Civilization. So these dudes get up there on FoxNews and cry about how there are a few hundred heavily armed illiterate thugs 10000 miles away sitting on their oil patch, threatening to kill infidels, and suddenly, a genocidal war is looking like a good idea.
And along with that, are the Christian Fundamentalist whackjobs in the US, who are mostly too retarded to make bombs, otherwise you wouldn't be able to tell them from ISIS. These guys get into their apocolyptic prophecy, and this Islam stuff fits right in with the story they all want to hear mommy and daddy read to them before tucking into bed: That Jesus is going to save them from the evil brown-skinned people.
It's also a nice recipe for self-sustaining endless war profiteering.
Add all that together, and it's no wonder this is our #1 national obsession.
This dude is nothing more than a rightwing political hack. And his delusional fantasy of a 30 year war is absurd - because you have to ask; after 13 years, and somewhere between $4-$6 Trillion dollars; and a wrecked economy, who, exactly is going to PAY for this 30-year-war?
It's too expensive. We can't pay. The cartel of private banks who run the FED are no longer interested in running the printing presses to continue paying for this shit: they made that fact abundantly clear in 2008. Until Corporate America ponies up the cash (ie: pay your taxes, bitches), our budget for building bombs, planes, and other expensive disposable toys, is about zero.
I could be a little bit distracted by using the navigation function on my smartphone, or I could be extremely distracted, and even make sudden maneuvers to catch turn-offs when I'm totally fucking lost because of incompetent or non-existent road signage.
Even if they get Nuance, and put it on their devices to replace S-Voice; I predict it will be completely useless, because they're still going to wrap it with their craptacular TouchWiz interface.
They will attempt to force-tie it in to other craptacular Samsung apps, and it will die because NOBODY LIKES VENDOR LOCK-IN, STUPID MOTHERFUCKERS!
I think it's also true, largely, with outsourcing.
If a company cuts high-paid domestic workers, and contracts out to an overseas consulting firm (or call center, or whatever) - whether or not this actually saves money overall (in most cases, it actually does NOT) - is irrelevant.
The only relevant factor, is it makes the CEO seem "ruthless in the pursuit of profit" - and this boosts the stock price, much in the same way as "brawndo's got what plants crave". It's also the same with high CEO compensation. If a company pays a well-known rockstar CEO 300x what their average worker earns, it's seen as a "smart move" - even if it starves the operating budget of revenue for workers to produce actual products or innovate. (this is the same reason that sales-guys tend to buy overpriced luxury cars: for the appearance of wealth and therefore "success" as an effective salesperson).
Institutional investors are pretty smart people, but there are a LOT of idiots out there, and even institutional investors will follow a trend if they think it will make them money. Fundamentals be damned. Hence, the invisible hand shoves itself further up the bunghole of our economy : lube-free.
Nuance was just the convenient front-end (speech recognition) - and that technology is actually very "old" (in internet terms): Mid-1990's.
What Nuance has that its competitors don't have, is a method of using pronunciation guides, which were captured using very painstaking intensive studies of speakers. Variations in individual speech patterns (mannerisms, dialects, accents) have been boiled down to statistical models. These models inform the recognizer, so that "training" isn't necessary, and speech recognition can be more of a plug-n-play thing. It's a huge boost in usability over other speech recognition software. And it required a huge up-front investment. There are few cases where intellectual property is a legitimate idea to protect in software - and this is one of them. Otherwise, there would have been no incentive for the geniuses at Nuance to have come up with this scheme, and invest in the research required to create the statistical models.
If other companies want to build a competing solution for speech recognition, I'm not aware of any encumbrance on the method (software patents are a thing, but this method is not patented afaik) - but they still have to come up with their own statistical models, because Nuance's are protected.
Well, back in my day, you used to have to expose the IC to a UV light to get it to clear the registers so you could even install a new firmware. These young kids with their newfangled firmware flash images! (get off my lawn)
As far as "displaced tens of millions of people per year" goes, this includes Syrian refugees who were forced off of their farms due to climate-change induced drought; triggering the Syrian civil war.
We're willing to spend billions on bombing the militants that arose from this war. We're not willing to spend a dime to address climate change (carbon reduction and sequester).
I was warned by my doctor about borderline hypertension. She recommended exercise and weight loss. I lost 40 lbs, and started exercising regularly. Guess what? With daily BP monitoring, my BP did not go down. Then she put me on an alpha blocker called terazosin, and there was no change in BP. I read about the DASH diet, and while I didn't formally adopt a strict regimen, I made myself aware of the salt-content of things I generally ate, and eliminated added salt, and tried to keep my amount under 1500 mg per day. Guess what? My BP went down to a normal range. (otherwise unmedicated).
I'm not sure how relevant that is in the face of statistical evidence from groups of people, but the results were pretty clear in my individual case.
The problem I have with this, is that I never got tested before/after or on an ongoing basis, to report what my sodium levels actually were. That would probably have been more convincing.
The problem with this whole "stress" hypothesis, is that I've heard many medical professionals pronounce that I, or some other person's underlying medical condition was caused by "stress". Unfortunately, exactly ZERO of these pronouncements were driven by hard data: (blood test reporting levels of "stress" hormones, or whatever other indicator you'd like to use).
"Getting stress under control" is such an abstract pronouncement for MOST people, it is not only useless, but probably does more harm than good, because then the Doctor gets to charge you his exorbitant fee for doing doctorly-things, while pretty much invoking this "stress" voodoo, with absolutely no scientific basis. Absolutely NOBODY, can control the quantity of cortisol and adrenaline squirting from their glands. Are there things that a person can do, which have a good chance of reducing these hormones in their body? Sure. Does that work as a cure for stress? Who knows? Lets see data and cause-and-effect, and for that matter, let's see actual test-results that can tell me whether I'm really under stress, or if my doctor just thinks so.
I don't doubt that stress plays a role in some of these illnesses and conditions. I am just not prepared to accept it at some doctor's word, that their irrational belief in the "stress fairy" is enough to be valid medical advice in all cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah - when pharmaceutical companies are spending twice as much on Marketing as they do on R&D. . . I'll believe that they're frustrated by lack of progress on the "big" problems of medical science.
LOL - the biggest innovation to come out of the pharmaceutical industry in the past 20 years is to patent the analogs of existing chemicals whose patents are about to expire. Double the profit! Oh yeah. That, and boner pills.
I believe in Democracy: because people should always have a say in things that affect them.
But that democracy should be INFORMED by science.
Ideally, science is a perfect guide. But realistically, we've seen so many cases where science has been skewed by money. (just like Democracy). I think that there is plenty of room; GOBS OF IT, for scientific understanding, among laypeople.
As a non-scientist, I fully understand that lack of understanding of advanced math and statistics, knowledge of science can do more harm than good. (ie. science, as depicted in our popular media and entertainment). I understand that not everybody has the capacity to be taught advanced math and statistics. I think that is more of a failure of our educational and economic systems than say, for example, biology. We have to try harder, as a civilization.
I agree; I actually love Bill Nye and Neil DeGrasse Tyson; but I don't think that either of them have been even slightly effective, compared to Sagan. Sagan really did it best, and our world is far dimmer with his loss.
I dunno. I lose the ability to do simple arithmetic when I'm stoned. I have no idea how Sagan was able to comprehend multivariate calculus.
Grandpa!!
Right after the cure for diabetes!
I don't think he was an enthusiastic/ideological Nazi. He was just unfortunate to have been enmeshed in the German industrial hierarchy when he was recruited to work on their missile program.
You could argue that after a vehicle failure (STS/Challenger); we didn't shut everything down and analyze it to make it safer. If we had, we would have thrown out the ATK-booster and side-tank design, and built a new shuttle. Instead, we kept shovelling pork at ATK, and fired the program up again months later. It wasn't the same defect that destroyed Columbia, but it was the same design mentality: #1 priority was appease congress by sending their districts pork, no matter how technically irrelevant the design was. (don't get me wrong. ATK makes fine ICBM's. But that technology has no place in manned spaceflight). So, I'm not sure which system was worse, the US-1970's corporate welfare system, or the Soviets' "It works because the Kremlin said so!" system. Buran was similarly ballsy. . .
Sure - they have a right to take nude selfies - and I suppose I don't even blame them for expecting them to be private on a network-connected device; in a world where they're not paying attention to the tech-press, where any idiot really *SHOULD* know that it's not a bright idea.
(Even if all you're paying attention to is Snowden; you should know that the three-letter agencies see EVERYTHING, and they DO have employees who break the rules and violate your privacy for the lulz. - you don't even need to be well-versed in all the latest goings on of illegal 4chan hackery. This is something we pay taxes to have happen. So we can feel safe about "terrorism").
Who I blame: is the tech industry pundits, hucksters, and con men, who are trying to sell us the idea that network-connected devices, and privacy can work together.
(and I'd even say that maybe, they can: but just not in any current user-friendly way).
It's NOT blaming the victim to point this out. The point of this is: the "cloud" is a SCAM. They're trying to rent your own data to you, and trying to con you into believing it's safe. This is the point that really needs to be made. I really don't think that a bunch of self-absorbed overpaid entertainers' private lives actually matters here, compared to the massive fraud that is "cloud services".
Should there be an expectation of privacy? YES.
But in reality - nobody should expect privacy if you put your nudes on a network-connected device. Hackers gonna hack, and VERY BAD PEOPLE are going to con you into spending a crapton of money on supposedly "safe" devices and technologies, which are clearly NOT SAFE AT ALL.
Single Payer is politically untenable in the USA.
There is NO WAY IN HELL that the current or next set of congresscritters, and most voters, are going to accept: "aaagh! Communist Socialist Takeover Plot!"
And if they did, I doubt that the resulting system would not be without significant gameable loopholes.
Why are we picking on Muslims though?
Because, Israel.
This issue also dovetails nicely with our new Political Pundit class of wealthy upper-class washouts from MBA programs. These guys take a few history classes, and all of a sudden they see this threat from the great Ottomans who will rise again to wreak havock on Western Civilization. So these dudes get up there on FoxNews and cry about how there are a few hundred heavily armed illiterate thugs 10000 miles away sitting on their oil patch, threatening to kill infidels, and suddenly, a genocidal war is looking like a good idea.
And along with that, are the Christian Fundamentalist whackjobs in the US, who are mostly too retarded to make bombs, otherwise you wouldn't be able to tell them from ISIS. These guys get into their apocolyptic prophecy, and this Islam stuff fits right in with the story they all want to hear mommy and daddy read to them before tucking into bed: That Jesus is going to save them from the evil brown-skinned people.
It's also a nice recipe for self-sustaining endless war profiteering.
Add all that together, and it's no wonder this is our #1 national obsession.
This dude is nothing more than a rightwing political hack. And his delusional fantasy of a 30 year war is absurd - because you have to ask; after 13 years, and somewhere between $4-$6 Trillion dollars; and a wrecked economy, who, exactly is going to PAY for this 30-year-war?
It's too expensive. We can't pay. The cartel of private banks who run the FED are no longer interested in running the printing presses to continue paying for this shit: they made that fact abundantly clear in 2008. Until Corporate America ponies up the cash (ie: pay your taxes, bitches), our budget for building bombs, planes, and other expensive disposable toys, is about zero.
I could be a little bit distracted by using the navigation function on my smartphone, or I could be extremely distracted, and even make sudden maneuvers to catch turn-offs when I'm totally fucking lost because of incompetent or non-existent road signage.
I know who I'd rather share the road with.
great comment! Thank you!
Even if they get Nuance, and put it on their devices to replace S-Voice; I predict it will be completely useless, because they're still going to wrap it with their craptacular TouchWiz interface.
They will attempt to force-tie it in to other craptacular Samsung apps, and it will die because NOBODY LIKES VENDOR LOCK-IN, STUPID MOTHERFUCKERS!
I think it's also true, largely, with outsourcing.
If a company cuts high-paid domestic workers, and contracts out to an overseas consulting firm (or call center, or whatever) - whether or not this actually saves money overall (in most cases, it actually does NOT) - is irrelevant.
The only relevant factor, is it makes the CEO seem "ruthless in the pursuit of profit" - and this boosts the stock price, much in the same way as "brawndo's got what plants crave". It's also the same with high CEO compensation. If a company pays a well-known rockstar CEO 300x what their average worker earns, it's seen as a "smart move" - even if it starves the operating budget of revenue for workers to produce actual products or innovate. (this is the same reason that sales-guys tend to buy overpriced luxury cars: for the appearance of wealth and therefore "success" as an effective salesperson).
Institutional investors are pretty smart people, but there are a LOT of idiots out there, and even institutional investors will follow a trend if they think it will make them money. Fundamentals be damned. Hence, the invisible hand shoves itself further up the bunghole of our economy : lube-free.
Well, this article is incredibly misleading.
Nuance is NOT the core-technology behind SIRI.
SIRI's search AI was the core technology.
Nuance was just the convenient front-end (speech recognition) - and that technology is actually very "old" (in internet terms): Mid-1990's.
What Nuance has that its competitors don't have, is a method of using pronunciation guides, which were captured using very painstaking intensive studies of speakers. Variations in individual speech patterns (mannerisms, dialects, accents) have been boiled down to statistical models. These models inform the recognizer, so that "training" isn't necessary, and speech recognition can be more of a plug-n-play thing. It's a huge boost in usability over other speech recognition software. And it required a huge up-front investment. There are few cases where intellectual property is a legitimate idea to protect in software - and this is one of them. Otherwise, there would have been no incentive for the geniuses at Nuance to have come up with this scheme, and invest in the research required to create the statistical models.
If other companies want to build a competing solution for speech recognition, I'm not aware of any encumbrance on the method (software patents are a thing, but this method is not patented afaik) - but they still have to come up with their own statistical models, because Nuance's are protected.
If the low hanging fruit is gone, then you plant more trees (invest in R&D), and grow more fruit.
It's nothing more than the business culture, and "ROI mentality" that Taco Cowboy mentions.
They're interested in THIS quarter's numbers. Who gives a shit about next quarter. Cash-in, pump-n-dump, grab the money and run.
Well, back in my day, you used to have to expose the IC to a UV light to get it to clear the registers so you could even install a new firmware. These young kids with their newfangled firmware flash images! (get off my lawn)
As far as "displaced tens of millions of people per year" goes, this includes Syrian refugees who were forced off of their farms due to climate-change induced drought; triggering the Syrian civil war.
We're willing to spend billions on bombing the militants that arose from this war.
We're not willing to spend a dime to address climate change (carbon reduction and sequester).
Oh, so it's NOT an unmitigated disaster. It's a mitigated disaster. That's much better!
press superkey.
type "terminal"
press enter.
Keyboard-free.
meanwhile, existing towns are running out of water.
Oh well, I guess these people can just move.
I'll tell you what.
I was warned by my doctor about borderline hypertension. She recommended exercise and weight loss. I lost 40 lbs, and started exercising regularly. Guess what? With daily BP monitoring, my BP did not go down. Then she put me on an alpha blocker called terazosin, and there was no change in BP. I read about the DASH diet, and while I didn't formally adopt a strict regimen, I made myself aware of the salt-content of things I generally ate, and eliminated added salt, and tried to keep my amount under 1500 mg per day. Guess what? My BP went down to a normal range. (otherwise unmedicated).
I'm not sure how relevant that is in the face of statistical evidence from groups of people, but the results were pretty clear in my individual case.
The problem I have with this, is that I never got tested before/after or on an ongoing basis, to report what my sodium levels actually were. That would probably have been more convincing.
The problem with this whole "stress" hypothesis, is that I've heard many medical professionals pronounce that I, or some other person's underlying medical condition was caused by "stress". Unfortunately, exactly ZERO of these pronouncements were driven by hard data: (blood test reporting levels of "stress" hormones, or whatever other indicator you'd like to use).
"Getting stress under control" is such an abstract pronouncement for MOST people, it is not only useless, but probably does more harm than good, because then the Doctor gets to charge you his exorbitant fee for doing doctorly-things, while pretty much invoking this "stress" voodoo, with absolutely no scientific basis. Absolutely NOBODY, can control the quantity of cortisol and adrenaline squirting from their glands. Are there things that a person can do, which have a good chance of reducing these hormones in their body? Sure. Does that work as a cure for stress? Who knows? Lets see data and cause-and-effect, and for that matter, let's see actual test-results that can tell me whether I'm really under stress, or if my doctor just thinks so.
I don't doubt that stress plays a role in some of these illnesses and conditions. I am just not prepared to accept it at some doctor's word, that their irrational belief in the "stress fairy" is enough to be valid medical advice in all cases.