Why is medical care so expensive in the US? Why do we keep hearing about doctors in hospitals working on average 74 hours a week (down from 105 a week) https://www.sharecare.com/heal... Doesn't sound like there are too many doctors to me.
You could implement this with a simple 555 timer and a handful of other components for abut $5 worth of hardware - $10 if you want it in a nice box - it would be completely unhackable, and able to run off a single battery for days.
I am not a neuroscientist, but given what we know about artificial neural networks, it seems to me that forgetting has to be a necessary part of the learning process - allowing neural pathways to be reconfigured to whatever you are learning. We know with artificial neural networks, that training towards one goal necessarily comes at the expense of other goals - and for a given network, the more different patterns it has to be able to recognize, the harder the training is and the more error prone the recognition is. Now of course the human brain is way more sophisticated than even the most complex neural networks we have devised to date, but I think the principal is the same. We start out in life with billions more synaptic connections than we have as an adult, with the number rapidly diminishing as we learn how to walk, communicate and function in society - which makes it possible for us to learn just about anything as a child, but also as we get older makes it harder for example, to pick up languages or even change our accent.
Although it is possible to learn an instrument, be good at martial arts, be able to paint a picture lworthy of hanging in a gallery, write a sonnet and remember all the details of what you had for breakfast 10 years ago, the more you try and improve one area, the more the other areas will be slightly degraded, as the synapses are rearranged to do whatever it is you are learning.
With enough practice you might be able to excel at several of these things, but something has to give. I wouldn't be surprised of the myth of the absent minded professor has some roots in this - the more specialised and in depth your learning and knowledge is on a subject, the more unrelated and unused areas will suffer. Of course, someone with an overall larger neurological capacity might be able to learn more of these things, but specialising in one thing will I think come at the expense of being a generalist. Thats why we need experts in different fields - because you literally can't learn everything and be as good at all things compared to beign very good in a particular field.
Personally speaking, I know I am awful at memorising things, but do very well at figuring out problems - I am sure if I somehow becamse a lot better at memorising things, my problem solving skills would diminish.
Now some people have started messing around with "smart drugs" that can accelerate learning, I'd lay money on it that it will turn out that they do indeed help you learn whatever it is you are doing faster, but at the cost of greater degradation of past skills and memories. I wouldn't touch those with a barge pole.
We probably could eventually optimise our genetic code for our current conditions and environment - however there is probably a lot of 'unused' code that then gets turned on when envronmental conditions change or different stresses are introduced, making it possible for us as a species to rapidly evolve into something more able to survive, so removing al that 'useless' code would most likely turn out to be a big mistake when we one day discover that actually a lot of those unused genes would have been really useful after all, now conditions have changed.
This is exactly the problem. Maths is actually pretty easy if you have someone who can explain the rules in a way that makes sense. The hard part of maths is when you get equations and formulas thrown at you that you are supposed to remember, without having enough time or an adequate enough explanation to follow through where those formulas and rules come from - and how they relate to the real world. Until you can derive the rules and results yourself, you never really fully understand maths - but unfortunately too many courses shortcut this and just head straight for a bunch of stuff you have to remember and apply - without really fully understanding where it comes from.
When we have a vote to boot out a govornment that they then ignore, we'll worry about that. Meanwhile, I like not feeling like I should throw myself to the ground every time a car backfires.
Who needs fusion? I'm already generating 25-35kwh per day off my roof, and I use about 20kwh power overall - the problem is, I only use about 10kwh of it during the time it's getting generated - the rest is getting put on to the grid for which I get a measly 7c/kwh credit - and I am buying that power back at night time for 25c/kwh. If that's not bad enough, I also get charged 7c per day for the provlege of selling my power to the utility at 7c/kwh.
I'll take 20kwh of batteries please - I have $1080 in cash waiting for you.
What makes this especially interesting, is the victory was not achieved with the sort of brute-force approach used by Deep Blue in chess.
Wake me when a computer can beat a human champion while using 100 w of power or less - about the equivalent power consumption of a human. Actually, the brain uses about 20% of this but lets be generous.
I would imagine that one big draw for older drivers is not only the cash, but also the captive audience they can tell long boring drawn-out stories to - it's a win win situation for them - get money and get some social interaction instead of being stuck at home alone.
Bit Bucket works great for me - but I use MercurialHG for revision control because although there's TortioseGit for windows which works very well, it doeesn't exist for Linux - and I find the other Git front ends on Linux a bit cumbersome to use in comparison. The TortoiseHG GUI absolutely rocks, (pretty similar to TortoiseGit) and is available for both Linux and windows.
Yes, I know you can use the command line tools, but it's a lot nicer having well integrated UI for this stuff when you start dealing with a lot of branches and many repositories.
My current favourite crack-pot theory is Its a star encompassing solar farm being built to power a galactic wide AI. About 90% of start have been covered now - we call all those ones 'dark matter'
The Uber drivers are already paying registration fees, and fuel taxes, which are proportional to mileage, not to mention income tax just like everyone else on the revenue they earn - and that revenue is 100% trackable because it's all electronic - unlike cash - so there's no tax dodging, which can happen with directly negotiated taxi rides. (eg. I'll give you $30 bucks to take me down town - no meter)
In addition Uber (and taxis) helps support the entertainment and tourism industry - the main reason to get a taxi is because you can't drive - either because you are cashed up but don't have a car (eg tourist) or because you want to enjoy a few drinks at the bar / restaurant / friend's party, and are responsibly choosing not to drink and drive.
In the latter two cases, if you drove yourself you would be spending less on alcohol resulting in overall lower income collected by the restaurant and lower tax revenue collected by the state. Taxi services and Uber actually allow the state to collect greater revenue just by existing, than if they didn't - and the restaurant / bar / entertainment industry should be rallying behind them to make it more affordable for people to get to their businesses for a nig
I used to use nVidia cards until I had a bad run of luck with a few overheating and dying prematurely. I currently have an ATI and wish I'd stuck with Nvidia - monitors don't wake up from sleep properly - I have to toggle the video source buttons or turn them off and on again (generally only one or the other wakes - sometimes neither wake, very rarely both wake - it seems to be random), and there are still corruption issues with Chrome and some opengl apps- though this is better since the last (not current) update. Never had those problems with Nvidia. One thing it has going for it - it hasn't died yet, after a couple of years use in my hot lounge room - which can get a little warm during a Gold Coast (Aus) summer.
I remember the day a kid came to school with an "unbreakable" mirror (some kind of foil backed clear plastic). He was soon proved wrong about his mirror.
Hey AC, see this big tear in my eye? that's me being all broke up about what some AC thinks. Not. Why don't you use your crappy experiences in school to try and improve others lives instead of trying to tear others down? Leave that crappy past and the losers that were part of it behind you, and build your life based on positive future goals instead of dwelling on a past you can't change.
Boo hoo - the bullys are being mean to me. I grew up with a lot of bullying and it sucked - but I never thought it'd be a great idea to go all stabby stabby (no guns here in Aus) on someone to deal with it. I learnt the best weapon was to not give a shit about what they thought or the names they called me. Some one calls you some name - haha - is that really the best you can do? Come on you have to have a better imagination than that... They usually used the same old tired nickname I got in grade 1 for supposedly having an egg shaped head - not much you can do about that. After a while, they look pretty stupid carrying on and making a big deal about calling you names you don't care about. I didn't respect them or seek their approval as peers, so why would it bother me what they call me? Admittedly it did take until about grade 8 (middle school in the US?) before I came to this enlightened outlook.
As for physical attacks - I never really had to deal with any - but then I went to a school where that'd be a pretty quick suspension or expulsion if it came to blows. Perhaps that's not the case elsewhere.
I use Synergy too - and the multiple inputs of my monitors to allow reconfiguring of which PC has two screens. eg. Linux 1 running linux on the left, workstation in the middle with two monitors connected with DVI cables, laptop on the right with Windows. Each screen has an HDMI, DVI and VGA port - switchable by pressing the input button on the screen. Each laptop is also connected to the closest monitor, using HDMI cables. Synergy server runs on the workstation, with the mouse and keyboard connected to it. Each laptop is a synergy client. so all together 3 pcs, 4 screens, 2 different operating systems.
I can flip between using a single screen or dual screens with the laptops, (which of course means using only a single screen or no screens for the workstation) in practice, I don't usually need to bother dual-screening with the linux laptop, as I tend to use it's screen to edit files on the workstation anyway, or just use it to browse documentation on the web - but I do find it useful to sometimes dual screen the windows laptop at the expense of one of the workstation screens, such as when I am doing a lot of windows development and debugging. Of course if you have 3 or 4 monitors it's easy to just insert that in the mix and not have to flip screens at all - and if you have a few more old crusty laptops or a mac or something they can very effectively become part of this setup by just adding them as additional Synergy clients. The only downside is that if you have the laptops set up in multi monitor mode when the workstation has use of both screens, you have to move the cursor across the 'hidden' screen - but of course you can just switch back to single display mode for the laptops if you aren't going to be switching displays back and forth much, and you get used to the 'blank' spot (in the mouse's travel) pretty quick .
Of course you can also copy and paste text back and forth between all three machines, which I don't believe you could do with a traditional KVM setup. On Linux, as soon as my laptop wakes (from sleep or hibernate) , it happily reconnects to this config, and works without having to reset anything. Unfortunately with Windows, sometimes when it comes out of sleep, you have to stop and restart the synergy client for it to reconnect, though it seems to have fewer issues with hibernate.
You can also layer in something like VNC or remote desktop into this mix if you need to connect to additional desktops too, of course - but the main thing is you have a whole lot of screens, a whole lot of PCs and only one keyboard and mouse to rule them all.
You assume that in a world where robots do all the work humans who do not own robots get nothing.
That assumption is correct, under a purely capitalistic society. Unless there is also a move to a more socially oriented society, there will be a lot richer few and much poorer many, when the majority of all work is done my machines.
i used to use virtual desktops - in the last millenium. Since it becamse possible to use more than one monitor, this is m preferred method of work. At work I use an Ubuntu workstation with 2x 24" monitors for my main work area - typically with one running a 3d view of whatever i'm working on (robotics stuff) and several consoles for running processes, and my main IDE on the other monitor. In addition I have an old laptop running ubuntu that I use to do stuff like pull up documentation and sometimes edit a script or config file (remotely on the workstation vis ssh), with a newer laptop running Windows 7 and visual studio. On occasion I flip the setup so the workstation has a single monitor and the laptop dual screens with the second monitor. All tied together using Synergy so I am only using the one keyboard and mouse across all the screens and machines, and allowing me to copy and paste from machine to machine. Virtual desktops are an annoyance when I accidentally drag a window too low and it flips to one of the other virtual desktops - I could really do without them. If anything, I'd like another monitor or two - because by the time you have a 3d viewer, several consoles, a linux IDE, visual studio with the client app running, some documentation open and a logfile or two open, and a couple of pgadmin windows open for seeing whats going on in the database, I still run out of desktop realestate, though switching from one virtual desktop to another would not be a very happy solution.
New cartridges are about $100 each color but give you 2000 pages. It still prints happily if a color is out.
Yes you are right - my info is out of date - it's been a while since I bought new cartridges. Actually they are AUD 130 each (about 92 USD now the Aussie dollar has tanked like the banana republic currency it is), but they print 4000 pages per cartridge. Apparently the starting cartridges are 2000 page cartridges. That's about 10 cents USD a page, including paper for color, or 3.3 cents for black & white.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is medical care so expensive in the US?
Why do we keep hearing about doctors in hospitals working on average 74 hours a week (down from 105 a week) https://www.sharecare.com/heal...
Doesn't sound like there are too many doctors to me.
You could implement this with a simple 555 timer and a handful of other components for abut $5 worth of hardware - $10 if you want it in a nice box - it would be completely unhackable, and able to run off a single battery for days.
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/...
I am not a neuroscientist, but given what we know about artificial neural networks, it seems to me that forgetting has to be a necessary part of the learning process - allowing neural pathways to be reconfigured to whatever you are learning.
We know with artificial neural networks, that training towards one goal necessarily comes at the expense of other goals - and for a given network, the more different patterns it has to be able to recognize, the harder the training is and the more error prone the recognition is. Now of course the human brain is way more sophisticated than even the most complex neural networks we have devised to date, but I think the principal is the same. We start out in life with billions more synaptic connections than we have as an adult, with the number rapidly diminishing as we learn how to walk, communicate and function in society - which makes it possible for us to learn just about anything as a child, but also as we get older makes it harder for example, to pick up languages or even change our accent.
Although it is possible to learn an instrument, be good at martial arts, be able to paint a picture lworthy of hanging in a gallery, write a sonnet and remember all the details of what you had for breakfast 10 years ago, the more you try and improve one area, the more the other areas will be slightly degraded, as the synapses are rearranged to do whatever it is you are learning.
With enough practice you might be able to excel at several of these things, but something has to give. I wouldn't be surprised of the myth of the absent minded professor has some roots in this - the more specialised and in depth your learning and knowledge is on a subject, the more unrelated and unused areas will suffer.
Of course, someone with an overall larger neurological capacity might be able to learn more of these things, but specialising in one thing will I think come at the expense of being a generalist.
Thats why we need experts in different fields - because you literally can't learn everything and be as good at all things compared to beign very good in a particular field.
Personally speaking, I know I am awful at memorising things, but do very well at figuring out problems - I am sure if I somehow becamse a lot better at memorising things, my problem solving skills would diminish.
Now some people have started messing around with "smart drugs" that can accelerate learning, I'd lay money on it that it will turn out that they do indeed help you learn whatever it is you are doing faster, but at the cost of greater degradation of past skills and memories. I wouldn't touch those with a barge pole.
Actually apparently the ancient Babylonians figured out something pretty much like it.
http://news.discovery.com/hist...
Also this indian guy in the 14 century seemed to have a pretty good go at it too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We probably could eventually optimise our genetic code for our current conditions and environment - however there is probably a lot of 'unused' code that then gets turned on when envronmental conditions change or different stresses are introduced, making it possible for us as a species to rapidly evolve into something more able to survive, so removing al that 'useless' code would most likely turn out to be a big mistake when we one day discover that actually a lot of those unused genes would have been really useful after all, now conditions have changed.
This is exactly the problem.
Maths is actually pretty easy if you have someone who can explain the rules in a way that makes sense. The hard part of maths is when you get equations and formulas thrown at you that you are supposed to remember, without having enough time or an adequate enough explanation to follow through where those formulas and rules come from - and how they relate to the real world. Until you can derive the rules and results yourself, you never really fully understand maths - but unfortunately too many courses shortcut this and just head straight for a bunch of stuff you have to remember and apply - without really fully understanding where it comes from.
When we have a vote to boot out a govornment that they then ignore, we'll worry about that.
Meanwhile, I like not feeling like I should throw myself to the ground every time a car backfires.
Who needs fusion? I'm already generating 25-35kwh per day off my roof, and I use about 20kwh power overall - the problem is, I only use about 10kwh of it during the time it's getting generated - the rest is getting put on to the grid for which I get a measly 7c/kwh credit - and I am buying that power back at night time for 25c/kwh. If that's not bad enough, I also get charged 7c per day for the provlege of selling my power to the utility at 7c/kwh.
I'll take 20kwh of batteries please - I have $1080 in cash waiting for you.
Yeah but besides seat belts, air bags, catalytic converters, locking docks, lead paint bans and clean water, what has the government ever done for us?
What makes this especially interesting, is the victory was not achieved with the sort of brute-force approach used by Deep Blue in chess.
Wake me when a computer can beat a human champion while using 100 w of power or less - about the equivalent power consumption of a human. Actually, the brain uses about 20% of this but lets be generous.
I would imagine that one big draw for older drivers is not only the cash, but also the captive audience they can tell long boring drawn-out stories to - it's a win win situation for them - get money and get some social interaction instead of being stuck at home alone.
Bit Bucket works great for me - but I use MercurialHG for revision control because although there's TortioseGit for windows which works very well, it doeesn't exist for Linux - and I find the other Git front ends on Linux a bit cumbersome to use in comparison.
The TortoiseHG GUI absolutely rocks, (pretty similar to TortoiseGit) and is available for both Linux and windows.
Yes, I know you can use the command line tools, but it's a lot nicer having well integrated UI for this stuff when you start dealing with a lot of branches and many repositories.
My current favourite crack-pot theory is Its a star encompassing solar farm being built to power a galactic wide AI. About 90% of start have been covered now - we call all those ones 'dark matter'
The Uber drivers are already paying registration fees, and fuel taxes, which are proportional to mileage, not to mention income tax just like everyone else on the revenue they earn - and that revenue is 100% trackable because it's all electronic - unlike cash - so there's no tax dodging, which can happen with directly negotiated taxi rides. (eg. I'll give you $30 bucks to take me down town - no meter)
In addition Uber (and taxis) helps support the entertainment and tourism industry - the main reason to get a taxi is because you can't drive - either because you are cashed up but don't have a car (eg tourist) or because you want to enjoy a few drinks at the bar / restaurant / friend's party, and are responsibly choosing not to drink and drive.
In the latter two cases, if you drove yourself you would be spending less on alcohol resulting in overall lower income collected by the restaurant and lower tax revenue collected by the state. Taxi services and Uber actually allow the state to collect greater revenue just by existing, than if they didn't - and the restaurant / bar / entertainment industry should be rallying behind them to make it more affordable for people to get to their businesses for a nig
I used to use nVidia cards until I had a bad run of luck with a few overheating and dying prematurely.
I currently have an ATI and wish I'd stuck with Nvidia - monitors don't wake up from sleep properly - I have to toggle the video source buttons or turn them off and on again (generally only one or the other wakes - sometimes neither wake, very rarely both wake - it seems to be random), and there are still corruption issues with Chrome and some opengl apps- though this is better since the last (not current) update.
Never had those problems with Nvidia. One thing it has going for it - it hasn't died yet, after a couple of years use in my hot lounge room - which can get a little warm during a Gold Coast (Aus) summer.
These days 2 million is a few houses in the burbs... It's more than I have but not the princely sum it once was...
Now that's what I'd call a power plant!
No links to an article - no further information - what's the basis for this guy's statements?
I remember the day a kid came to school with an "unbreakable" mirror (some kind of foil backed clear plastic).
He was soon proved wrong about his mirror.
Hey AC, see this big tear in my eye? that's me being all broke up about what some AC thinks. Not. Why don't you use your crappy experiences in school to try and improve others lives instead of trying to tear others down? Leave that crappy past and the losers that were part of it behind you, and build your life based on positive future goals instead of dwelling on a past you can't change.
Boo hoo - the bullys are being mean to me.
I grew up with a lot of bullying and it sucked - but I never thought it'd be a great idea to go all stabby stabby (no guns here in Aus) on someone to deal with it. I learnt the best weapon was to not give a shit about what they thought or the names they called me. Some one calls you some name - haha - is that really the best you can do? Come on you have to have a better imagination than that... They usually used the same old tired nickname I got in grade 1 for supposedly having an egg shaped head - not much you can do about that. After a while, they look pretty stupid carrying on and making a big deal about calling you names you don't care about. I didn't respect them or seek their approval as peers, so why would it bother me what they call me? Admittedly it did take until about grade 8 (middle school in the US?) before I came to this enlightened outlook.
As for physical attacks - I never really had to deal with any - but then I went to a school where that'd be a pretty quick suspension or expulsion if it came to blows. Perhaps that's not the case elsewhere.
I use Synergy too - and the multiple inputs of my monitors to allow reconfiguring of which PC has two screens.
eg. Linux 1 running linux on the left, workstation in the middle with two monitors connected with DVI cables, laptop on the right with Windows.
Each screen has an HDMI, DVI and VGA port - switchable by pressing the input button on the screen.
Each laptop is also connected to the closest monitor, using HDMI cables.
Synergy server runs on the workstation, with the mouse and keyboard connected to it.
Each laptop is a synergy client.
so all together 3 pcs, 4 screens, 2 different operating systems.
I can flip between using a single screen or dual screens with the laptops, (which of course means using only a single screen or no screens for the workstation)
in practice, I don't usually need to bother dual-screening with the linux laptop, as I tend to use it's screen to edit files on the workstation anyway, or just use it to browse documentation on the web - but I do find it useful to sometimes dual screen the windows laptop at the expense of one of the workstation screens, such as when I am doing a lot of windows development and debugging. Of course if you have 3 or 4 monitors it's easy to just insert that in the mix and not have to flip screens at all - and if you have a few more old crusty laptops or a mac or something they can very effectively become part of this setup by just adding them as additional Synergy clients.
The only downside is that if you have the laptops set up in multi monitor mode when the workstation has use of both screens, you have to move the cursor across the 'hidden' screen - but of course you can just switch back to single display mode for the laptops if you aren't going to be switching displays back and forth much, and you get used to the 'blank' spot (in the mouse's travel) pretty quick .
Of course you can also copy and paste text back and forth between all three machines, which I don't believe you could do with a traditional KVM setup.
On Linux, as soon as my laptop wakes (from sleep or hibernate) , it happily reconnects to this config, and works without having to reset anything.
Unfortunately with Windows, sometimes when it comes out of sleep, you have to stop and restart the synergy client for it to reconnect, though it seems to have fewer issues with hibernate.
You can also layer in something like VNC or remote desktop into this mix if you need to connect to additional desktops too, of course - but the main thing is you have a whole lot of screens, a whole lot of PCs and only one keyboard and mouse to rule them all.
Total cost: $0
Utility: priceless
Workstation:
You assume that in a world where robots do all the work humans who do not own robots get nothing.
That assumption is correct, under a purely capitalistic society.
Unless there is also a move to a more socially oriented society, there will be a lot richer few and much poorer many, when the majority of all work is done my machines.
i used to use virtual desktops - in the last millenium. Since it becamse possible to use more than one monitor, this is m preferred method of work.
At work I use an Ubuntu workstation with 2x 24" monitors for my main work area - typically with one running a 3d view of whatever i'm working on (robotics stuff) and several consoles for running processes, and my main IDE on the other monitor.
In addition I have an old laptop running ubuntu that I use to do stuff like pull up documentation and sometimes edit a script or config file (remotely on the workstation vis ssh), with a newer laptop running Windows 7 and visual studio. On occasion I flip the setup so the workstation has a single monitor and the laptop dual screens with the second monitor. All tied together using Synergy so I am only using the one keyboard and mouse across all the screens and machines, and allowing me to copy and paste from machine to machine.
Virtual desktops are an annoyance when I accidentally drag a window too low and it flips to one of the other virtual desktops - I could really do without them. If anything, I'd like another monitor or two - because by the time you have a 3d viewer, several consoles, a linux IDE, visual studio with the client app running, some documentation open and a logfile or two open, and a couple of pgadmin windows open for seeing whats going on in the database, I still run out of desktop realestate, though switching from one virtual desktop to another would not be a very happy solution.
New cartridges are about $100 each color but give you 2000 pages. It still prints happily if a color is out.
Yes you are right - my info is out of date - it's been a while since I bought new cartridges.
Actually they are AUD 130 each (about 92 USD now the Aussie dollar has tanked like the banana republic currency it is), but they print 4000 pages per cartridge.
Apparently the starting cartridges are 2000 page cartridges.
That's about 10 cents USD a page, including paper for color, or 3.3 cents for black & white.