You used to be able to upgrade the storage and the RAM pre-Retina. Now the RAM is soldered into the motherboard and the storage is a PCI Express-based (SATA-based in 2012-2013) chip in a proprietary socket. Also, now the battery is a series of bare cells held in place with very strong adhesive, and everything is locked away by pentalobe screws. Easy to repair it certainly is not.
The argument isn't stupid. It's actually an ad hominem. I wouldn't normally support ad hominem arguments, but in this case it's not just attacking the credibility of the other party. It's attacking the credibility of all the party shills jumping on the "Clinton is evil" bandwagon. It's arguing against certain readers in particular for being OK with it when their side did it but not OK with it now. Myself, I don't even remember this Bush "scandal".
If you thought Bush was bad and you think this is bad, that's fine. If you don't care about either, that's OK too. If you only care about one and not the other, that's hypocritical. Let's not talk hypotheticals or generalizations. Cahuenga wasn't picking sides; s/he was mainly pointing out that it's too late to worry about the other side doing it once it's OK because they already have. Nobody should be but can we stop acting so surprised and outraged that it did? Focus on the future in which Clinton's emails are unprecedentedly available to the public (not just by FOIA or subpoena like normal) and she doesn't do this anymore. I'd like to think that future includes nobody doing it again but no amount of fake outrage is going to make that happen anyway.
And if your outrage is genuine, well power to you but you are in a vanishingly small minority lost in a sea of party shills ready to attack Clinton for anything and everything
Don't call me a party loyalist. I don't really like Clinton. I just find this whole thing ridiculous.
All politicians are hypocrites regardless of this situation. The attackers I'm talking about are the media circus happening over this manufactured scandal. Then all the Twitterati and the rest of social media that has just made media circuses worse as they've grown in presence. I don't expect politicians to do any better than attack their opponents for whatever stupid reason they've got this week. But I would hope that the rest of us would stop acting like the only reason to use a private email account instead of a work email account is to hide something. We all know somebody that ignores the rules (or has tried to and been told to stop).
Clueless sycophants will defend politicians anyways. She's Ms. Clinton after all. Naturally she gets a pass.
You mean the same way that clueless sycophants will attack opposing politicians? She's Hillary Rodham Fucking Clinton after all. Naturally she is a demon woman trying to destroy the American way and cover the world in pantsuits.
...I don't really like her myself, but this is ridiculous.
This isn't an argument that it was OK. It's an argument that those attacking her are being hypocrites. There's an awful lot of hypocrisy going around and I am shocked by the number of people who act like they know of absolutely nobody that forwards work email to a private account. It's wrong and loads of people do it anyway, whether they're working in government or elsewhere. The only reason to make such a big deal of it is because she's expected to announce a run for the president and far too many people want to shoot her down for whatever stupid reason they can find.
Steve Jobs was mentioned by the OP. His cancer only progressed to the incurable stage because he wasted years trying alternative therapies like you are suggesting rather than the proven effective strategies that could have halted his rare treatable form of pancreatic cancer. The OP who is doing the right thing by accepting reality and using what time he has left to benefit his loved ones. I say this for the benefit of those in the earlier stages who still have a chance: believing in unaccepted alternative treatments is dangerously attractive to the highly educated innovative types. Innovation requires us to question authority and pursue the neglected alternatives. But innovation also means failing 20 times before you succeed. You don't have 20 failures to make with your health. You get one chance to treat a terminal disease. Two or three if you're really lucky. Don't put off conventional therapies with known success rates so you can try that one weird trick.
...I was about to say something about reconciliation and making the first gesture toward peace, but you've discredited yourself fairly well. Anarchy only appeals to a rather small minority of the population, and the minority is even smaller once people start really thinking about what it would be like without a government to maintain roads, staff fire departments, hire teachers...hell screw that, what really whittles down the minority is thinking about how fast the terrorists would take over the country without any - ANY - military left to stop them.
What's with all the disrespect for secretaries? Have you never been in an office with one, or do you just assume that an office of a dozen plus people just magically holds itself together? A secretary answers the phones, keeps things organized, keeps the copiers stocked, and above all knows enough about their coworkers' business as to tell the difference between a question that can be simply answered and one that needs the coworker's attention. A doctor's expertise is quite a bit more advanced than fielding the same question coming from dozens of people, and that doctor's time is more valuable being spent on things that actually require a judgment call. And while secretaries won't know why patient X needs X medication (at least not until spending years on the job and learning by osmosis), you can be sure that secretaries know every single prescription made because the doctor will have tasked them with sending them all to the pharmacy.
Secretaries spend their entire workday making everyone else around them more productive. It is not something a monkey could do. It is not something every person could do either. And they know an awful lot more about the work their coworkers do then you think. These people silently keep the world running smoothly. The least you could do is say "thank you" instead of running around like a snarky asshole acting like what they do amounts to nothing.
It does make sense that there is money to be made in education. But I've never known anybody who says to themselves, "Gee, you know who makes money hand over fist? Teachers!"
Let's not underestimate the real power of data. Look at targeted advertising. It was really creepy a few years ago, wasn't it? Back when Target notified a teenage girl's family that she was pregnant (with helpful "she might like this" emails) before she told them? Ever wonder why that stuff doesn't happen so much anymore? It's because the advertising agencies know that it's super creepy so now something like 90% of ads are intentionally random. But they still get the 10% right.
You suggest the thermostat temperature alone may pique the interest of various surveillance agencies. I know you think you're joking, but this may be the one point of data they need to make an otherwise suspicious individual statistically significant. And don't make the mistake of thinking human beings are the ones suggesting what data is suspicious in what ways. The key to the entire data mining explosion is that when you have enough data about everything, you can set up an algorithm to figure out the statistical connections. Maybe it's really only suspicious if the thermostat is set 2 higher on Tuesday from 3am-4:45am. And 99% of the time that happens, it's because of a specific crime in progress.
We live in an age where we have been mostly liberated from the tyranny of humans trying to make those kinds of connections. Finally, with enough data about an individual, the computer knows what you're doing. The danger, of course, is still that humans will use that knowledge toward the wrong ends. First and foremost is the likelihood that human agents will abuse their power. Second is the likelihood that they will willfully misinterpret the results. And third is that they will almost certainly use the data to enforce existing rules rather than to analyze the actual social impact.
We have good reason to fear the invasion of our privacy. We have better reason to fear that anything else will truly understand what we are doing and why. We have the greatest reason to fear that this power will belong not to robot overlords but to people still bound by our legacy of rules instituted before this power existed.
So, computers stop being computers, and instead just become part of the embedded hardware?
That's the heart of my argument. If a tool works right when it's installed, it shouldn't need to be replaced unless you want it to work differently. Doctors shouldn't have to learn version +1 of the medical software just because the one they were using doesn't work on the new version of Windows that has to be installed because the old thing is full of security holes that will never be patched. But of course if you need different data protocol or different policies or new features...well, upgrade the software for those reasons. I'm not saying the software can't ever be updated; just that it shouldn't have to be updated on a schedule regardless of whether you need the new features. And a Wi-Fi interface is a terrible example, because if there wasn't any Wi-Fi when the thing was set up it's already going to be wired anyway.
Linux comes in versions only because that makes sense for deployment. Red Hat makes an implicit contract that if your stuff works in version 4, it won't break as long as you stay with version 4. But RHEL 4 has a lot of different packages that might not be exactly compatible with the RHEL 5 equivalents. As far as I know, though, if you strip away a lot of those things you end up with some long-lived stable tools and APIs that only improve in performance and security with updates. It doesn't need to be Linux either; it could easily be BSD. But ultimately all of this comes from my initial assumption that the medical computer is to be used only for the custom medical software which can be developed for any OS the developer chooses.
You're right about the real world, of course. The 90s were a different time and weren't often very user-friendly outside of Windows and Mac OS. Hardware drivers for all the necessary peripherals shouldn't have to change all the time but unfortunately they do. But I have a hard time believing that any software updates 5 years down the line won't require hardware updates. I may be idealistic, but I'm not that idealistic.
It fails in part because the textbook creators are so wrapped up in protecting their intellectual property that using the device to pull up the textbook becomes a nightmare.
Which is why it's great to see the tablets are filled with so much locally-cached free content.
South Africa is not America, and computer illiteracy won't stop poor black kids from learning how to use what sounds like basically an e-reader. And in this case, it sounds like they got the content right:
Content from Wikipedia, the BBC, the complete works of Shakespeare and Khan Academy is all cached locally for teachers to reference during lessons and pupils to use for self-directed study and research.
Every human being (within a range of effectiveness correlated to social intelligence) does collect and analyze every interaction they have with every other human being. We don't have the same kind of large-scale stable memory that computers do so only the results of the analysis are remembered, which is why first impressions matter so much. All of this happens in the background of our minds, rather than with some kind of conscious cataloging process. In other words, our wetware includes special architecture to solve this exact problem in a memory-constrained environment.
Don't underestimate the human brain, and don't underestimate how hard it is to replicate some of its built-in functions. This is hard stuff; we only got this smart either by the design of a much smarter being or by MILLIONS of years of evolution (or some combination of both). Sure, we know that our computers have a lot of processing power and access to ALL THE DATA, but actually writing the algorithm is a big achievement. A big achievement for a number of hard-working people.
Technology only marches forward through the hard work of the great many individuals that make up our humanity. Don't forget or belittle that.
You should really sign in when posting something so informative (although some citations would be really nice). That way you can get good karma to give your posts an automatic +1 or +2 and it's easier to track when people reply.
Using Windows in health care was a really stupid idea in my opinion. Not your stupid idea, mind you. A stupid idea on the part of all the software developers who chose to target it. What you really need is a good and secure core OS with very few features, which you can upgrade forever without breaking compatibility. Then you need packages on top of that core to provide all the user-facing features like the desktop environment, which shouldn't ever need to be updated (since they should be relying on the core OS for security). All the healthcare-specific applications shouldn't ever need to be rebuilt or updated (except for security updates). None of this 10-year support window requiring a large expensive rollout of new software when it runs out. No need to waste developer time on updating existing applications for new APIs when you could be developing the next great thing instead. So why isn't the whole healthcare infrastructure built on Linux?
Average consumers probably weren't ready in 2000 for an NT-based operating system. Not without the compatibility stuff they introduced in XP. Backwards compatibility has been the only thing making Windows relevant for a very long time, but unfortunately maintaining it tends to keep them from actually making Windows work better.
Just because they aren't teaching it well doesn't mean that's not what they were trying to teach. They've been trying and failing to teach people to be smart for as long as education has been available to disinterested children. For some reason we haven't figured out in however many millennia how to teach knowledge to anyone that isn't there of their own volition to learn it.
The charter people say the traditional schools are wrong for only teaching intelligence, because reasons. The traditional people say the charter school is wrong for focusing more on personality, because reasons. So everyone is wrong. Who's right?
If only we had some kind of methodology for figuring out whether an idea is wrong or right. I think I'd call it...science.
Slashdot Mirror
You used to be able to upgrade the storage and the RAM pre-Retina. Now the RAM is soldered into the motherboard and the storage is a PCI Express-based (SATA-based in 2012-2013) chip in a proprietary socket. Also, now the battery is a series of bare cells held in place with very strong adhesive, and everything is locked away by pentalobe screws. Easy to repair it certainly is not.
They must be paying off the right regulators...
What regulators? This is the 21st century dammit. Regulations are for industries that existed when our government worked.
The argument isn't stupid. It's actually an ad hominem. I wouldn't normally support ad hominem arguments, but in this case it's not just attacking the credibility of the other party. It's attacking the credibility of all the party shills jumping on the "Clinton is evil" bandwagon. It's arguing against certain readers in particular for being OK with it when their side did it but not OK with it now. Myself, I don't even remember this Bush "scandal".
If you thought Bush was bad and you think this is bad, that's fine. If you don't care about either, that's OK too. If you only care about one and not the other, that's hypocritical. Let's not talk hypotheticals or generalizations. Cahuenga wasn't picking sides; s/he was mainly pointing out that it's too late to worry about the other side doing it once it's OK because they already have. Nobody should be but can we stop acting so surprised and outraged that it did? Focus on the future in which Clinton's emails are unprecedentedly available to the public (not just by FOIA or subpoena like normal) and she doesn't do this anymore. I'd like to think that future includes nobody doing it again but no amount of fake outrage is going to make that happen anyway.
And if your outrage is genuine, well power to you but you are in a vanishingly small minority lost in a sea of party shills ready to attack Clinton for anything and everything
Don't call me a party loyalist. I don't really like Clinton. I just find this whole thing ridiculous.
All politicians are hypocrites regardless of this situation. The attackers I'm talking about are the media circus happening over this manufactured scandal. Then all the Twitterati and the rest of social media that has just made media circuses worse as they've grown in presence. I don't expect politicians to do any better than attack their opponents for whatever stupid reason they've got this week. But I would hope that the rest of us would stop acting like the only reason to use a private email account instead of a work email account is to hide something. We all know somebody that ignores the rules (or has tried to and been told to stop).
Clueless sycophants will defend politicians anyways. She's Ms. Clinton after all. Naturally she gets a pass.
You mean the same way that clueless sycophants will attack opposing politicians? She's Hillary Rodham Fucking Clinton after all. Naturally she is a demon woman trying to destroy the American way and cover the world in pantsuits.
...I don't really like her myself, but this is ridiculous.
"the other side does it"
This isn't an argument that it was OK. It's an argument that those attacking her are being hypocrites. There's an awful lot of hypocrisy going around and I am shocked by the number of people who act like they know of absolutely nobody that forwards work email to a private account. It's wrong and loads of people do it anyway, whether they're working in government or elsewhere. The only reason to make such a big deal of it is because she's expected to announce a run for the president and far too many people want to shoot her down for whatever stupid reason they can find.
...mumble mumble sopeniaed [sic] mumble mumble benghazi mumble mumble fucking mumble mumble power mumble mumble felon...
Steve Jobs was mentioned by the OP. His cancer only progressed to the incurable stage because he wasted years trying alternative therapies like you are suggesting rather than the proven effective strategies that could have halted his rare treatable form of pancreatic cancer. The OP who is doing the right thing by accepting reality and using what time he has left to benefit his loved ones. I say this for the benefit of those in the earlier stages who still have a chance: believing in unaccepted alternative treatments is dangerously attractive to the highly educated innovative types. Innovation requires us to question authority and pursue the neglected alternatives. But innovation also means failing 20 times before you succeed. You don't have 20 failures to make with your health. You get one chance to treat a terminal disease. Two or three if you're really lucky. Don't put off conventional therapies with known success rates so you can try that one weird trick.
...I was about to say something about reconciliation and making the first gesture toward peace, but you've discredited yourself fairly well. Anarchy only appeals to a rather small minority of the population, and the minority is even smaller once people start really thinking about what it would be like without a government to maintain roads, staff fire departments, hire teachers...hell screw that, what really whittles down the minority is thinking about how fast the terrorists would take over the country without any - ANY - military left to stop them.
That is, if Canada doesn't annex us first.
What's with all the disrespect for secretaries? Have you never been in an office with one, or do you just assume that an office of a dozen plus people just magically holds itself together? A secretary answers the phones, keeps things organized, keeps the copiers stocked, and above all knows enough about their coworkers' business as to tell the difference between a question that can be simply answered and one that needs the coworker's attention. A doctor's expertise is quite a bit more advanced than fielding the same question coming from dozens of people, and that doctor's time is more valuable being spent on things that actually require a judgment call. And while secretaries won't know why patient X needs X medication (at least not until spending years on the job and learning by osmosis), you can be sure that secretaries know every single prescription made because the doctor will have tasked them with sending them all to the pharmacy.
Secretaries spend their entire workday making everyone else around them more productive. It is not something a monkey could do. It is not something every person could do either. And they know an awful lot more about the work their coworkers do then you think. These people silently keep the world running smoothly. The least you could do is say "thank you" instead of running around like a snarky asshole acting like what they do amounts to nothing.
If you see something, say something.
It does make sense that there is money to be made in education. But I've never known anybody who says to themselves, "Gee, you know who makes money hand over fist? Teachers!"
But then something dawned on him: He could make more money teaching.
What? You lost me there.
Let's not underestimate the real power of data. Look at targeted advertising. It was really creepy a few years ago, wasn't it? Back when Target notified a teenage girl's family that she was pregnant (with helpful "she might like this" emails) before she told them? Ever wonder why that stuff doesn't happen so much anymore? It's because the advertising agencies know that it's super creepy so now something like 90% of ads are intentionally random. But they still get the 10% right.
You suggest the thermostat temperature alone may pique the interest of various surveillance agencies. I know you think you're joking, but this may be the one point of data they need to make an otherwise suspicious individual statistically significant. And don't make the mistake of thinking human beings are the ones suggesting what data is suspicious in what ways. The key to the entire data mining explosion is that when you have enough data about everything, you can set up an algorithm to figure out the statistical connections. Maybe it's really only suspicious if the thermostat is set 2 higher on Tuesday from 3am-4:45am. And 99% of the time that happens, it's because of a specific crime in progress.
We live in an age where we have been mostly liberated from the tyranny of humans trying to make those kinds of connections. Finally, with enough data about an individual, the computer knows what you're doing. The danger, of course, is still that humans will use that knowledge toward the wrong ends. First and foremost is the likelihood that human agents will abuse their power. Second is the likelihood that they will willfully misinterpret the results. And third is that they will almost certainly use the data to enforce existing rules rather than to analyze the actual social impact.
We have good reason to fear the invasion of our privacy. We have better reason to fear that anything else will truly understand what we are doing and why. We have the greatest reason to fear that this power will belong not to robot overlords but to people still bound by our legacy of rules instituted before this power existed.
So, computers stop being computers, and instead just become part of the embedded hardware?
That's the heart of my argument. If a tool works right when it's installed, it shouldn't need to be replaced unless you want it to work differently. Doctors shouldn't have to learn version +1 of the medical software just because the one they were using doesn't work on the new version of Windows that has to be installed because the old thing is full of security holes that will never be patched. But of course if you need different data protocol or different policies or new features...well, upgrade the software for those reasons. I'm not saying the software can't ever be updated; just that it shouldn't have to be updated on a schedule regardless of whether you need the new features. And a Wi-Fi interface is a terrible example, because if there wasn't any Wi-Fi when the thing was set up it's already going to be wired anyway.
Linux comes in versions only because that makes sense for deployment. Red Hat makes an implicit contract that if your stuff works in version 4, it won't break as long as you stay with version 4. But RHEL 4 has a lot of different packages that might not be exactly compatible with the RHEL 5 equivalents. As far as I know, though, if you strip away a lot of those things you end up with some long-lived stable tools and APIs that only improve in performance and security with updates. It doesn't need to be Linux either; it could easily be BSD. But ultimately all of this comes from my initial assumption that the medical computer is to be used only for the custom medical software which can be developed for any OS the developer chooses.
You're right about the real world, of course. The 90s were a different time and weren't often very user-friendly outside of Windows and Mac OS. Hardware drivers for all the necessary peripherals shouldn't have to change all the time but unfortunately they do. But I have a hard time believing that any software updates 5 years down the line won't require hardware updates. I may be idealistic, but I'm not that idealistic.
It fails in part because the textbook creators are so wrapped up in protecting their intellectual property that using the device to pull up the textbook becomes a nightmare.
Which is why it's great to see the tablets are filled with so much locally-cached free content.
Content from Wikipedia, the BBC, the complete works of Shakespeare and Khan Academy is all cached locally for teachers to reference during lessons and pupils to use for self-directed study and research.
Every human being (within a range of effectiveness correlated to social intelligence) does collect and analyze every interaction they have with every other human being. We don't have the same kind of large-scale stable memory that computers do so only the results of the analysis are remembered, which is why first impressions matter so much. All of this happens in the background of our minds, rather than with some kind of conscious cataloging process. In other words, our wetware includes special architecture to solve this exact problem in a memory-constrained environment.
Don't underestimate the human brain, and don't underestimate how hard it is to replicate some of its built-in functions. This is hard stuff; we only got this smart either by the design of a much smarter being or by MILLIONS of years of evolution (or some combination of both). Sure, we know that our computers have a lot of processing power and access to ALL THE DATA, but actually writing the algorithm is a big achievement. A big achievement for a number of hard-working people.
Technology only marches forward through the hard work of the great many individuals that make up our humanity. Don't forget or belittle that.
it's biased towards the standard white American
More like the standard white American college student research subject?
You should really sign in when posting something so informative (although some citations would be really nice). That way you can get good karma to give your posts an automatic +1 or +2 and it's easier to track when people reply.
where I have the most friends...and have no real connection to that town anymore.
Right.
Using Windows in health care was a really stupid idea in my opinion. Not your stupid idea, mind you. A stupid idea on the part of all the software developers who chose to target it. What you really need is a good and secure core OS with very few features, which you can upgrade forever without breaking compatibility. Then you need packages on top of that core to provide all the user-facing features like the desktop environment, which shouldn't ever need to be updated (since they should be relying on the core OS for security). All the healthcare-specific applications shouldn't ever need to be rebuilt or updated (except for security updates). None of this 10-year support window requiring a large expensive rollout of new software when it runs out. No need to waste developer time on updating existing applications for new APIs when you could be developing the next great thing instead. So why isn't the whole healthcare infrastructure built on Linux?
Average consumers probably weren't ready in 2000 for an NT-based operating system. Not without the compatibility stuff they introduced in XP. Backwards compatibility has been the only thing making Windows relevant for a very long time, but unfortunately maintaining it tends to keep them from actually making Windows work better.
Just because they aren't teaching it well doesn't mean that's not what they were trying to teach. They've been trying and failing to teach people to be smart for as long as education has been available to disinterested children. For some reason we haven't figured out in however many millennia how to teach knowledge to anyone that isn't there of their own volition to learn it.
The charter people say the traditional schools are wrong for only teaching intelligence, because reasons. The traditional people say the charter school is wrong for focusing more on personality, because reasons. So everyone is wrong. Who's right?
If only we had some kind of methodology for figuring out whether an idea is wrong or right. I think I'd call it...science.