Or the alternative, nobody's going to succeed. That happens often enough as rich people want to live forever, well so far that's not for sale. if I got the choice between dying myself or two of my organ transplants saving lives, I'd choose living. Doesn't matter if a thousand or a million or a billion lives would live without me, you've no moral right to ask me to sacrifice my life.
For project design, architecture, debugging, etc, the effective person is not the one leaping up and down, having meetings, calling people... no, it's the one sitting rather quietly thinking "if we did it this way, we'd save 5 years of work".
At a former employer of mine you should have heard their ace scrum team. They basically got their own corner of the floor - it didn't have doors but separated from the rest by meeting rooms - because their constant chatter was annoying everybody else. I've worked quite a bit in project rooms and unless I'm really deep into a mind twister catching a few glimpses into what other people are discussing is more useful than hurtful. It's way more distracting when people are talking about something else entirely.
The US is pretty much the exception to the rule as most countries are nation states. Particularly when it comes to immigration and when immigrants tend to lean a particular way politically the government is often accused of selling out the people - those culturally native to the region - for political gain through immigrant votes and that can send a lot of sparks flying. Sure the culture engages but the national identity, social norms, language, food culture, music, fashion, art forms, sports interests and so on is more of a popularity contest because everybody agrees I can order Thai food even though people speak highly of preserving the local cuisine. The organic growth of culture is something else entirely than the wholesale import of a foreign culture that clashes with ours on fundamental values like secular law, equality of the sexes, freedom of speech etc. and despite coming to our country they insist we adapt to accommodate them, their god and their culture. Of course they're not the only ones with superstitions, but if they want me to have an alcohol-free, pork-free Christm.. "holiday season" celebration then screw giving up hundreds of years of tradition for cultural appeasement.
Other than that, yeah sure I could probably live under any decent government with proper rule of law and decent civil rights, certainly any western ones and probably others like Japan, I haven't really looked into it because it was never very relevant to me. I guess I'd bring my culture along but hopefully not too much in the flag-waving, chest thumping way. I guess there's a floating line between culturally extinguishing yourself, being easily integrated, being hardly integrated though your children will be and the "I'm not here to adapt to your culture, I'm here to spread mine and so's my whole family". And if you think this sounds a little exaggerated, ask the Native Americans how they feel. You invite some settlers, which probably seemed a good idea at first. Until it turns out that it probably wasn't, but then the settlers had more men and more guns. We know people have left the country to go fight for IS and for every person who went there'll be many more that support them, yet we keep increasing their recruitment base. And we keep pretending they're only being meanies because we weren't being nice enough to them, oddly enough nobody suggests that insanity when it comes to schoolyard bullies.
I think we're far more technologically capable than we're socially willing to use telecommuting. We don't use it much for that, but we have geographically distinct locations working together and it's really not a problem to get the work done. I did use to work for a consulting company and despite there being hundreds of employees, many thousands if you include our owners it felt like a 1-3 person shop with nameless corporate functions because those were the only colleagues I was seeing on a regular basis. Particularly when I was out all by myself there was a pretty big barrier to calling somebody up just to chit-chat, particularly since we'd both be billing our clients for it. I like having an office and colleagues I could talk to, actually once I worked in a start-up incubator where we weren't bigger than that we all talked together and it didn't really need to be the same company. And I'm somewhat of an introvert, I can't imagine how socially starved an extrovert would be. Of course you might say you should cover your social needs outside work, but it's a pretty solid chunk of your day.
Translation services are still crap, but I think we're moving towards more and more people learning a "world language" as a second language if it's not their first. It doesn't have to be English but I think most countries with <10 million people have some bigger language to work with. In Western Europe it's English, Eastern Europe many know somewhat Russian, Middle East it's Arabic, South East Asia probably Chinese, Latin America Spanish or Portugese, Africa mostly English and French. At least in richer countries not being able to communicate with 99%+ of the world isn't acceptable anymore. And that's only going to be become a bigger and bigger network effect to fewer and fewer languages. Other languages are also fairly big but have zero traction to become a world language like German, Italian, Japanese or Bengali, there's only a few real candidates that see significant use by non-natives.
As for currencies, that's probably the stupidest of all. My VISA card already is almost like magic when it comes to paying in any currency for a relatively trivial fee in context. If I was staying anywhere for a long time I'd open a bank account and exchange at an even better rate. A major function of currency is to allow economies to fluctuate, like the Greek debt crisis happened because the rest of the EU with Germany in particular didn't want to let them devalue the whole euro zone. An economy run on a crypto currency would be the same thing, except it would be a technological barrier instead of a political barrier. Nobody needs to hold cash for a long period of time unless they want to, if you want you can buy gold or whatever else you think has "real" value for it and sell it again when you want money.
I don't think the physical screen will go away, neither will keyboard and mouse. But the box is not necessary unless you're a gamer or power user, laptops and AIOs are plenty for most people. With a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse and Miracast/AirPlay/WiDi or a docking station for wired equivalents you can get the same interfaces with a tablet or smart phone in the center. I think the grandparent is right that within the next 10 years either Apple or Google or both will take a real stab at delivering PC functionality without the traditional PC. You know that Apple's Continuity for example is prep work for a "morphing" computer, you are in tablet mode and flip it to laptop mode and all your applications get handed off to the new interface but on the same physical device.
Even if it wouldn't be a mathematical proof, for practical purposes the potential would be tapped out if the top computers started drawing all the time. I just checked an in the "superfinal" between the top two 11 out of 64 rounds ended in a victory, 7 in favor of the strongest and 4 in favor of the other. That's a pretty good indication there's potential for improvement.
I'm thinking insurance fraud. Putting in claims for procedures not completed. Sure, doctors and staff can do it now, but with outside attackers it might become more likely.
Hospitals keep a very close track of their income, so I doubt it would be possible to bill a procedure without inside help. Even then it's a risky proposition because the liability for medical fraud may exceed the liability for economic fraud by far. Imagine if a doctor thought he'd had the procedure but he really didn't and the patient died, you might be looking at a million dollar malpractice lawsuit for a thousand dollar feigned procedure. I guess it could happen more with small add-on charges, but I doubt outright faking is very common.
The least common denominator is the print button, it might not have any interoperability but there'll be no security by obscurity. In the hospital, you're likely to run into three kinds of systems:
1) The patient administration system (PAS) which keeps track of all the logistics like scheduling appointments, staff lists, equipment, operating rooms, cleaning of rooms and all that. It's somewhat related to the journal in the sense that when you've seen the doctor there should be journal entry for it, but for a major hospital it's also many other things. It might be integrated in the EPJ, but it might also be its own system.
2) The electronic patient journal (EPJ) which is pretty much all about record keeping but when it comes down to it is all about text. Any structured information is supposed to be supported by the text entries, in fact in the US I heard there are professional medical coders that do it so the doctor just writes the journal text. Here it's mostly the doctor itself, but those rules can get quite complicated if there's multi-trauma or symptoms of underlying conditions or complications of procedures that are typically coded differently from "simple" code lookups. Your discharge report is typically also stored here.
3) All the actual medical systems, of which there are typically thousands in a large hospital and they all keep changing all the time to support advances in medicine. The bulk of your electronic health data never leaves these systems. They have to support the record keeping requirements, but that basically just means adding auditing to the field along with the field itself. There's no requirement that they should be able to dump this data out in any format and if it were you'd end up with a hilariously huge specification that would change daily with elements like <x-$company-$product-$major-$minor-$revision> elements doing database to xml dumps.
There are lots of isolated attempts to standardize certain bits and pieces, like for example electronic referrals, prescriptions, lab requests, sending of x-ray images and to add more structured data, but they're much more limited in scope and you can certify compliance. Exporting the whole EPJ and importing it somewhere else is a huge beast. Also it's not entirely certain you'd want that. Say you have been to the hospital for an ugly STD and later for an eye infection. They want to send you to an eye specialist, does the whole journal go? Should your general practicioner have a huge hospital system? There's a lot of issues to be resolved with regards to a "global" journal.
One of the more difficult aspects is that at least here today the journal is not entirely yours. For psychiatric patients or where the doctor suspects child abuse, domestic violence or is speculating into possible conditions to check for the doctor can make private notes that are only available to themselves, not the patient itself. It has its uses but if everything flows freely it could also become a gossip column which is not the intent. The journal is also the doctor's working tool, you don't want him to start keeping a shadow system because by default the system is on broadcast. By far most doctors take their job very seriously and are just trying to help.
A homeless bum can burn down a million dollar house, doesn't mean there's any point in trying to get a million bucks out of him. I'm assuming the settlement was for all Hotfile's actual money because otherwise they'd just spend more on lawyers with Sony getting less in the end, while the $80 million was some kind of imaginary "what we would like to have been paid" damages.
Joe Public can say "You settled with a commercial infringer for 4/800 = 1/200 = 0.5cents a file. As I am not a commercial operation lets start the negotiation at 1/10th of that or 0.05cents a file."
And they say "Say hello to statutory damages, that's $750 minimum per infringement. We don't need to offer you anything, no matter what settlements we've reached in the past. Now, do you want this to be expensive or very expensive?"
Well since we haven't invented human cloning yet - though I can't wait to hear Bennet Haselton's opinion on the matter - that should be the one and only right? I'll take all four pairs of headphones, delivery to the galaxy known as KKs3. Warp speed delivery please, that'll be 7 million years of blissful silence before his radio signals reach earth.
Does this mean it's official? 2015 is The Year of the Linux Desktop?
My crystal ball might be a little wonky, but I'm pretty sure that 2015 is not the year of the AMD desktop whether they run Linux or not. I suspect Q4 is going to be another bloody quarter for AMD, apart from the console sales they haven't had any killer CPUs/GPUs for the holidays. So if YotLD happens, I suspect their Linux drivers had very little to do with it.
Well you don't have to be a psychic to know what he's thinking: "How can we get our hands on some more metadata so we show users photos they want to remember?" Do you know what marketers did when they started getting too good at recognizing changes in shopping patterns like women being pregnant and consumers felt it was creepy? They made coupons with anti-offers, like next to the baby gear they were trying to sell you they'd put a lawn mower. That way users felt it was random and then it was okay. Besides that'd probably tie in well with their advertising, what mood you're in is probably very related to what ads you're susceptible to at the moment.
The major problem is that the cheapest way to get beads is by the tub. This is - as you might expect - a tub of various colors of beads... all mixed together. Want a black bead? You need to hunt through the tub to find one. Or you can do what we do and manually sort through thousands of beads and group similar colors together in another container.
The only thing you really need to know is - do you think they actually make them in mixed colors? Nah... they make a batch of a gazillion red beads, then blue beads, then green beads, then yellow beads... the tub is just their mix to maximize sales, they know that you'll end up with leftovers and will buy more expensive pure color packs to round it out. It's like how there's a silent conspiracy between hot dog sausages and hot dog bun makers, they avoid matching numbers so you'll always go out shopping more to make use of the leftovers. It's not exactly a coincidence when you end up with a tub full of colors you don't want.
It might be news to you, but capitalism - at least in the Russian variety and I wouldn't hold my breath on the US variety as of late - means a lot of the wealth has been accumulated on a few hands. I'm not sure that people are worse off on an absolute scale, but there's actually quite many feeling that they're worse off compared to everybody else. In Greece for example SYRIZA - the "Coalition of the Radical Left" - has been up to 27% in the polls lately. That's the birthplace of democracy, not some shithole that's never known anything different. Which I suppose is nicer than the way Germans reacted in the 1930s to the economic buttfucking of the Allies, I guess. In a dysfunctional economy most everything will seem like it's worth trying and they can be very productive in unconventional ways. Like the German war machine that nearly broke Europe's back in WWII was build by a country allegedely on the brink of bankruptcy. But money is money and guns in guns and what the lacked in the former they got plenty in the latter. Don't underestimate Russia and China just because they're not western.
The question is if your diminishing return is less than their diminishing return. My impression is that with fiber connections you have a fairly high cost just because they need to maintain a fiber line, end point equipment, maintenance, service, support, billing and so on. From there they usually offer huge leaps in speed for relatively modest price gains, often like double the speed for 15-20% price gains and that shit multiplies. I could pay about 75% of my current rate to have 20 Mbit instead of 100 Mbit, even though I don't absolutely need 100 Mbit very often it's not worth it. That goes up to a point, then you need some kind of special equipment and the cost skyrockets when you pass out of the "normal" class of equipment and into special gear. Today gigabit isn't actually available to me and if it were it'd cost 200% extra, it's not worth it but if it was 50% I'd probably take it. And my motherboard wouldn't need upgrading.
I'd say 10G is a different story and only about bragging rights at this point, but who knows what the future will bring. If "everybody else" had symmetric gigabit lines, 10G might have a few uses. Sure it costs a bazillion now, but so would a 100 Mbit line not that long ago. It would be a lot more useful to get people on gigabit lines though, it's no good having a huge pipe if nobody can keep up. Already with my 100 Mbit symmetric my upstream is often faster than their downstream, having gigabit would not help at all but if they get upgraded it'd make more sense for me to upgrade. Like for example there's a rural roll-out that'll probably cover my cabin next year, if that's true I could do 100 Mbit offsite, online backup between machines I control. That would be rather neat.
So from his point of view, the movies have been a bit of a disaster. He'd been hoping for something he could take classes along to. Instead, the movies, are dark, brooding, serious, dark and extremely violent in places. They're absolutely not suitable for the age range the book is pitched at and, in any case, they miss the fundamental quality of what makes the book so great. It's not a disaster for him - the book is still there and always will be there. But his view was that it was a missed opportunity to give the "best children's book ever written" a proper adaptation.
It wouldn't work. And I'm not saying that to be cruel, but a major part of the viewing audience would have seen LotR first and quite frankly hate the Hobbit done according to the book. And all that negativity would surely rub off on the movie, even if it was perfectly suited for boys age 12. Most people wanted LotR: The prequel and that's what they got. I'll go out on a limb here and say they actually made it a decent character drama with Thorin Oakenshield losing himself and finding himself again. Bilbo torn between loyalty to his party and doing what he thought was right. And it did a fair job to explain why everybody hates each other so much, dwarves and elvens and men.
I didn't care much for the romantic angle, but I guess it kept the girlfriend factor up. It was a bit long-winded, it was one movie stretched into three. The big action scenes are good, the small fight scenes about as painful as LotR. Remember Legolas' skateboarding and the counting contest with Gimli? Yeah, about the same. And don't forget the armies actually do clash in the book as well, Bilbo just isn't a big part of it. I guess they could have made it his story, but again that's not what most people wanted. They know how that story ends, with him returning to the Shire with the Ring so there's no excitement there they want the story of Middle Earth. Maybe it could have been done different if the Hobbit had been first, but not now.
The best software does its job quietly and doesn't need a bunch of attention from the user, allowing you to do your actual work. Something that seems to be lost on the makers of many other software projects, OSS and commercial.
Really? Seems to me Microsoft does a wonderful job, considering how many of their users don't know a thing about their computer.
The situation they require manual controls for is when you drive into a blizzard/flood, and the car drives until it's unsafe to stop and unsafe to continue.
I can imagine that going over so well with consumers "Hi! It's me, your autonomous car here. You know how I drove you up in the mountains and to this mountain pass? Well now there's a blizzard coming so I quit. Now I know you haven't touched the wheel in a month because I've been doing your commute and I wouldn't drive under these conditions, but you'll probably freeze to death if you don't get down so... best of luck? Toodeloo."
Seriously, he's going to die like the rest of us. I've seen how far we've come in medicine and I see how far we haven't gotten yet. The body starts failing one way then another way and it just keeps piling up as you get 70-90 years old. Cancer is just one of many, many things that are likely to kill you before you're 120.
It's actually very common here in Europe, it's a public service but the government issues some form of tender to buy it from the private sector. And yes, they do often suck at writing the contract and following up that what's been ordered is delivered in correct quality and quantity. If you ask for "a security guard" you get a body with a pulse, if you ask them to have mandatory training, pass certifications and exams you'll get that, but if you don't ask you don't get it even if they're totally unfit for the job. The ones you're buying from is in the business of making money, they'll cut corners if the contract permits them to. And you got issues with continuity and such, but people complain about public departments full of public employees that have a more or less permanent monopoly on what they're doing too. It's easy to get complacent at all levels when you can just say "it takes what it takes" and get funded next year too.
There are ~30 million commercial flights and around 2 hijackings per year, so that nobody's tried at Frankfurt might be just statistics. None of the confirmed hijackings since 2001 has casualties, though I suppose there's mysteries like MH370. Even if you assume the worst though, statistically you're far more likely to die from technical malfunction or pilot error. Or external causes like being shot down by a missile like MH17, but I guess that's location dependent. Unless you can bring a bomb on board to take down the plane yourself there's no way people will let you cease control of the craft anymore, so hijacking as we knew it is a past era. Most of it is just preventing a stabbing that could just as well have happened on the bus or tram or subway, it just happens to be up on a plane.
At this point they are the best way to send cargo to the ISS and in a few year will be the best way to send astronauts in LEO, but if they want to go any further they're going to need a new rocket (stronger than the Falcon 9 heavy).
Uh, you do realize the Falcon Heavy has a payload of 13200 kg to Mars and will be more powerful than any current operational rocket?
NASA as the actual plan for their SLS while SpaceX only has ideas for now.
They have a great plan, but they don't have the money. The Falcon Heavy is funded and should be operational in the first half of next year while NASA is years away from a date that's probably slipping. And I'm not sure why you're saying SpaceX is the one on the drawing board, the boosters are essentially "headless" Falcon 9s while the SLS is a new design. Sure, when or if the SLS flies it'll be in a class of its own we haven't seen since the Saturn V. I wouldn't hold my breath though, while the Falcon Heavy seems very likely that will happen.
For your simplified example, it is probably cheaper -- and just as secure -- to have an operator enter the dozen or so keystrokes to order "produce x amount of class y steel" than to design, build, install and support a more automated method. Human involvement has the added bonus of (nominally) intelligent oversight of the intended behavior for the day.
Do you have any idea what the error rate for manual data entry is? Typically about 0.5% of the entries will be wrong. Retyping information is a very error prone process.
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Two year old eating bats. Right. He was probably hunting them too. With guns.
No, that's just in America.
Or the alternative, nobody's going to succeed. That happens often enough as rich people want to live forever, well so far that's not for sale. if I got the choice between dying myself or two of my organ transplants saving lives, I'd choose living. Doesn't matter if a thousand or a million or a billion lives would live without me, you've no moral right to ask me to sacrifice my life.
For project design, architecture, debugging, etc, the effective person is not the one leaping up and down, having meetings, calling people ... no, it's the one sitting rather quietly thinking "if we did it this way, we'd save 5 years of work".
At a former employer of mine you should have heard their ace scrum team. They basically got their own corner of the floor - it didn't have doors but separated from the rest by meeting rooms - because their constant chatter was annoying everybody else. I've worked quite a bit in project rooms and unless I'm really deep into a mind twister catching a few glimpses into what other people are discussing is more useful than hurtful. It's way more distracting when people are talking about something else entirely.
The US is pretty much the exception to the rule as most countries are nation states. Particularly when it comes to immigration and when immigrants tend to lean a particular way politically the government is often accused of selling out the people - those culturally native to the region - for political gain through immigrant votes and that can send a lot of sparks flying. Sure the culture engages but the national identity, social norms, language, food culture, music, fashion, art forms, sports interests and so on is more of a popularity contest because everybody agrees I can order Thai food even though people speak highly of preserving the local cuisine. The organic growth of culture is something else entirely than the wholesale import of a foreign culture that clashes with ours on fundamental values like secular law, equality of the sexes, freedom of speech etc. and despite coming to our country they insist we adapt to accommodate them, their god and their culture. Of course they're not the only ones with superstitions, but if they want me to have an alcohol-free, pork-free Christm.. "holiday season" celebration then screw giving up hundreds of years of tradition for cultural appeasement.
Other than that, yeah sure I could probably live under any decent government with proper rule of law and decent civil rights, certainly any western ones and probably others like Japan, I haven't really looked into it because it was never very relevant to me. I guess I'd bring my culture along but hopefully not too much in the flag-waving, chest thumping way. I guess there's a floating line between culturally extinguishing yourself, being easily integrated, being hardly integrated though your children will be and the "I'm not here to adapt to your culture, I'm here to spread mine and so's my whole family". And if you think this sounds a little exaggerated, ask the Native Americans how they feel. You invite some settlers, which probably seemed a good idea at first. Until it turns out that it probably wasn't, but then the settlers had more men and more guns. We know people have left the country to go fight for IS and for every person who went there'll be many more that support them, yet we keep increasing their recruitment base. And we keep pretending they're only being meanies because we weren't being nice enough to them, oddly enough nobody suggests that insanity when it comes to schoolyard bullies.
I think we're far more technologically capable than we're socially willing to use telecommuting. We don't use it much for that, but we have geographically distinct locations working together and it's really not a problem to get the work done. I did use to work for a consulting company and despite there being hundreds of employees, many thousands if you include our owners it felt like a 1-3 person shop with nameless corporate functions because those were the only colleagues I was seeing on a regular basis. Particularly when I was out all by myself there was a pretty big barrier to calling somebody up just to chit-chat, particularly since we'd both be billing our clients for it. I like having an office and colleagues I could talk to, actually once I worked in a start-up incubator where we weren't bigger than that we all talked together and it didn't really need to be the same company. And I'm somewhat of an introvert, I can't imagine how socially starved an extrovert would be. Of course you might say you should cover your social needs outside work, but it's a pretty solid chunk of your day.
Translation services are still crap, but I think we're moving towards more and more people learning a "world language" as a second language if it's not their first. It doesn't have to be English but I think most countries with <10 million people have some bigger language to work with. In Western Europe it's English, Eastern Europe many know somewhat Russian, Middle East it's Arabic, South East Asia probably Chinese, Latin America Spanish or Portugese, Africa mostly English and French. At least in richer countries not being able to communicate with 99%+ of the world isn't acceptable anymore. And that's only going to be become a bigger and bigger network effect to fewer and fewer languages. Other languages are also fairly big but have zero traction to become a world language like German, Italian, Japanese or Bengali, there's only a few real candidates that see significant use by non-natives.
As for currencies, that's probably the stupidest of all. My VISA card already is almost like magic when it comes to paying in any currency for a relatively trivial fee in context. If I was staying anywhere for a long time I'd open a bank account and exchange at an even better rate. A major function of currency is to allow economies to fluctuate, like the Greek debt crisis happened because the rest of the EU with Germany in particular didn't want to let them devalue the whole euro zone. An economy run on a crypto currency would be the same thing, except it would be a technological barrier instead of a political barrier. Nobody needs to hold cash for a long period of time unless they want to, if you want you can buy gold or whatever else you think has "real" value for it and sell it again when you want money.
I don't think the physical screen will go away, neither will keyboard and mouse. But the box is not necessary unless you're a gamer or power user, laptops and AIOs are plenty for most people. With a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse and Miracast/AirPlay/WiDi or a docking station for wired equivalents you can get the same interfaces with a tablet or smart phone in the center. I think the grandparent is right that within the next 10 years either Apple or Google or both will take a real stab at delivering PC functionality without the traditional PC. You know that Apple's Continuity for example is prep work for a "morphing" computer, you are in tablet mode and flip it to laptop mode and all your applications get handed off to the new interface but on the same physical device.
Even if it wouldn't be a mathematical proof, for practical purposes the potential would be tapped out if the top computers started drawing all the time. I just checked an in the "superfinal" between the top two 11 out of 64 rounds ended in a victory, 7 in favor of the strongest and 4 in favor of the other. That's a pretty good indication there's potential for improvement.
I'm thinking insurance fraud. Putting in claims for procedures not completed. Sure, doctors and staff can do it now, but with outside attackers it might become more likely.
Hospitals keep a very close track of their income, so I doubt it would be possible to bill a procedure without inside help. Even then it's a risky proposition because the liability for medical fraud may exceed the liability for economic fraud by far. Imagine if a doctor thought he'd had the procedure but he really didn't and the patient died, you might be looking at a million dollar malpractice lawsuit for a thousand dollar feigned procedure. I guess it could happen more with small add-on charges, but I doubt outright faking is very common.
The least common denominator is the print button, it might not have any interoperability but there'll be no security by obscurity. In the hospital, you're likely to run into three kinds of systems:
1) The patient administration system (PAS) which keeps track of all the logistics like scheduling appointments, staff lists, equipment, operating rooms, cleaning of rooms and all that. It's somewhat related to the journal in the sense that when you've seen the doctor there should be journal entry for it, but for a major hospital it's also many other things. It might be integrated in the EPJ, but it might also be its own system.
2) The electronic patient journal (EPJ) which is pretty much all about record keeping but when it comes down to it is all about text. Any structured information is supposed to be supported by the text entries, in fact in the US I heard there are professional medical coders that do it so the doctor just writes the journal text. Here it's mostly the doctor itself, but those rules can get quite complicated if there's multi-trauma or symptoms of underlying conditions or complications of procedures that are typically coded differently from "simple" code lookups. Your discharge report is typically also stored here.
3) All the actual medical systems, of which there are typically thousands in a large hospital and they all keep changing all the time to support advances in medicine. The bulk of your electronic health data never leaves these systems. They have to support the record keeping requirements, but that basically just means adding auditing to the field along with the field itself. There's no requirement that they should be able to dump this data out in any format and if it were you'd end up with a hilariously huge specification that would change daily with elements like <x-$company-$product-$major-$minor-$revision> elements doing database to xml dumps.
There are lots of isolated attempts to standardize certain bits and pieces, like for example electronic referrals, prescriptions, lab requests, sending of x-ray images and to add more structured data, but they're much more limited in scope and you can certify compliance. Exporting the whole EPJ and importing it somewhere else is a huge beast. Also it's not entirely certain you'd want that. Say you have been to the hospital for an ugly STD and later for an eye infection. They want to send you to an eye specialist, does the whole journal go? Should your general practicioner have a huge hospital system? There's a lot of issues to be resolved with regards to a "global" journal.
One of the more difficult aspects is that at least here today the journal is not entirely yours. For psychiatric patients or where the doctor suspects child abuse, domestic violence or is speculating into possible conditions to check for the doctor can make private notes that are only available to themselves, not the patient itself. It has its uses but if everything flows freely it could also become a gossip column which is not the intent. The journal is also the doctor's working tool, you don't want him to start keeping a shadow system because by default the system is on broadcast. By far most doctors take their job very seriously and are just trying to help.
A homeless bum can burn down a million dollar house, doesn't mean there's any point in trying to get a million bucks out of him. I'm assuming the settlement was for all Hotfile's actual money because otherwise they'd just spend more on lawyers with Sony getting less in the end, while the $80 million was some kind of imaginary "what we would like to have been paid" damages.
Joe Public can say "You settled with a commercial infringer for 4/800 = 1/200 = 0.5cents a file. As I am not a commercial operation lets start the negotiation at 1/10th of that or 0.05cents a file."
And they say "Say hello to statutory damages, that's $750 minimum per infringement. We don't need to offer you anything, no matter what settlements we've reached in the past. Now, do you want this to be expensive or very expensive?"
That they moved the news up from 11?
Well since we haven't invented human cloning yet - though I can't wait to hear Bennet Haselton's opinion on the matter - that should be the one and only right? I'll take all four pairs of headphones, delivery to the galaxy known as KKs3. Warp speed delivery please, that'll be 7 million years of blissful silence before his radio signals reach earth.
Does this mean it's official? 2015 is The Year of the Linux Desktop?
My crystal ball might be a little wonky, but I'm pretty sure that 2015 is not the year of the AMD desktop whether they run Linux or not. I suspect Q4 is going to be another bloody quarter for AMD, apart from the console sales they haven't had any killer CPUs/GPUs for the holidays. So if YotLD happens, I suspect their Linux drivers had very little to do with it.
Well you don't have to be a psychic to know what he's thinking: "How can we get our hands on some more metadata so we show users photos they want to remember?" Do you know what marketers did when they started getting too good at recognizing changes in shopping patterns like women being pregnant and consumers felt it was creepy? They made coupons with anti-offers, like next to the baby gear they were trying to sell you they'd put a lawn mower. That way users felt it was random and then it was okay. Besides that'd probably tie in well with their advertising, what mood you're in is probably very related to what ads you're susceptible to at the moment.
The major problem is that the cheapest way to get beads is by the tub. This is - as you might expect - a tub of various colors of beads... all mixed together. Want a black bead? You need to hunt through the tub to find one. Or you can do what we do and manually sort through thousands of beads and group similar colors together in another container.
The only thing you really need to know is - do you think they actually make them in mixed colors? Nah... they make a batch of a gazillion red beads, then blue beads, then green beads, then yellow beads... the tub is just their mix to maximize sales, they know that you'll end up with leftovers and will buy more expensive pure color packs to round it out. It's like how there's a silent conspiracy between hot dog sausages and hot dog bun makers, they avoid matching numbers so you'll always go out shopping more to make use of the leftovers. It's not exactly a coincidence when you end up with a tub full of colors you don't want.
It might be news to you, but capitalism - at least in the Russian variety and I wouldn't hold my breath on the US variety as of late - means a lot of the wealth has been accumulated on a few hands. I'm not sure that people are worse off on an absolute scale, but there's actually quite many feeling that they're worse off compared to everybody else. In Greece for example SYRIZA - the "Coalition of the Radical Left" - has been up to 27% in the polls lately. That's the birthplace of democracy, not some shithole that's never known anything different. Which I suppose is nicer than the way Germans reacted in the 1930s to the economic buttfucking of the Allies, I guess. In a dysfunctional economy most everything will seem like it's worth trying and they can be very productive in unconventional ways. Like the German war machine that nearly broke Europe's back in WWII was build by a country allegedely on the brink of bankruptcy. But money is money and guns in guns and what the lacked in the former they got plenty in the latter. Don't underestimate Russia and China just because they're not western.
The question is if your diminishing return is less than their diminishing return. My impression is that with fiber connections you have a fairly high cost just because they need to maintain a fiber line, end point equipment, maintenance, service, support, billing and so on. From there they usually offer huge leaps in speed for relatively modest price gains, often like double the speed for 15-20% price gains and that shit multiplies. I could pay about 75% of my current rate to have 20 Mbit instead of 100 Mbit, even though I don't absolutely need 100 Mbit very often it's not worth it. That goes up to a point, then you need some kind of special equipment and the cost skyrockets when you pass out of the "normal" class of equipment and into special gear. Today gigabit isn't actually available to me and if it were it'd cost 200% extra, it's not worth it but if it was 50% I'd probably take it. And my motherboard wouldn't need upgrading.
I'd say 10G is a different story and only about bragging rights at this point, but who knows what the future will bring. If "everybody else" had symmetric gigabit lines, 10G might have a few uses. Sure it costs a bazillion now, but so would a 100 Mbit line not that long ago. It would be a lot more useful to get people on gigabit lines though, it's no good having a huge pipe if nobody can keep up. Already with my 100 Mbit symmetric my upstream is often faster than their downstream, having gigabit would not help at all but if they get upgraded it'd make more sense for me to upgrade. Like for example there's a rural roll-out that'll probably cover my cabin next year, if that's true I could do 100 Mbit offsite, online backup between machines I control. That would be rather neat.
So from his point of view, the movies have been a bit of a disaster. He'd been hoping for something he could take classes along to. Instead, the movies, are dark, brooding, serious, dark and extremely violent in places. They're absolutely not suitable for the age range the book is pitched at and, in any case, they miss the fundamental quality of what makes the book so great. It's not a disaster for him - the book is still there and always will be there. But his view was that it was a missed opportunity to give the "best children's book ever written" a proper adaptation.
It wouldn't work. And I'm not saying that to be cruel, but a major part of the viewing audience would have seen LotR first and quite frankly hate the Hobbit done according to the book. And all that negativity would surely rub off on the movie, even if it was perfectly suited for boys age 12. Most people wanted LotR: The prequel and that's what they got. I'll go out on a limb here and say they actually made it a decent character drama with Thorin Oakenshield losing himself and finding himself again. Bilbo torn between loyalty to his party and doing what he thought was right. And it did a fair job to explain why everybody hates each other so much, dwarves and elvens and men.
I didn't care much for the romantic angle, but I guess it kept the girlfriend factor up. It was a bit long-winded, it was one movie stretched into three. The big action scenes are good, the small fight scenes about as painful as LotR. Remember Legolas' skateboarding and the counting contest with Gimli? Yeah, about the same. And don't forget the armies actually do clash in the book as well, Bilbo just isn't a big part of it. I guess they could have made it his story, but again that's not what most people wanted. They know how that story ends, with him returning to the Shire with the Ring so there's no excitement there they want the story of Middle Earth. Maybe it could have been done different if the Hobbit had been first, but not now.
The best software does its job quietly and doesn't need a bunch of attention from the user, allowing you to do your actual work. Something that seems to be lost on the makers of many other software projects, OSS and commercial.
Really? Seems to me Microsoft does a wonderful job, considering how many of their users don't know a thing about their computer.
The situation they require manual controls for is when you drive into a blizzard/flood, and the car drives until it's unsafe to stop and unsafe to continue.
I can imagine that going over so well with consumers "Hi! It's me, your autonomous car here. You know how I drove you up in the mountains and to this mountain pass? Well now there's a blizzard coming so I quit. Now I know you haven't touched the wheel in a month because I've been doing your commute and I wouldn't drive under these conditions, but you'll probably freeze to death if you don't get down so... best of luck? Toodeloo."
Seriously, he's going to die like the rest of us. I've seen how far we've come in medicine and I see how far we haven't gotten yet. The body starts failing one way then another way and it just keeps piling up as you get 70-90 years old. Cancer is just one of many, many things that are likely to kill you before you're 120.
It's actually very common here in Europe, it's a public service but the government issues some form of tender to buy it from the private sector. And yes, they do often suck at writing the contract and following up that what's been ordered is delivered in correct quality and quantity. If you ask for "a security guard" you get a body with a pulse, if you ask them to have mandatory training, pass certifications and exams you'll get that, but if you don't ask you don't get it even if they're totally unfit for the job. The ones you're buying from is in the business of making money, they'll cut corners if the contract permits them to. And you got issues with continuity and such, but people complain about public departments full of public employees that have a more or less permanent monopoly on what they're doing too. It's easy to get complacent at all levels when you can just say "it takes what it takes" and get funded next year too.
There are ~30 million commercial flights and around 2 hijackings per year, so that nobody's tried at Frankfurt might be just statistics. None of the confirmed hijackings since 2001 has casualties, though I suppose there's mysteries like MH370. Even if you assume the worst though, statistically you're far more likely to die from technical malfunction or pilot error. Or external causes like being shot down by a missile like MH17, but I guess that's location dependent. Unless you can bring a bomb on board to take down the plane yourself there's no way people will let you cease control of the craft anymore, so hijacking as we knew it is a past era. Most of it is just preventing a stabbing that could just as well have happened on the bus or tram or subway, it just happens to be up on a plane.
At this point they are the best way to send cargo to the ISS and in a few year will be the best way to send astronauts in LEO, but if they want to go any further they're going to need a new rocket (stronger than the Falcon 9 heavy).
Uh, you do realize the Falcon Heavy has a payload of 13200 kg to Mars and will be more powerful than any current operational rocket?
NASA as the actual plan for their SLS while SpaceX only has ideas for now.
They have a great plan, but they don't have the money. The Falcon Heavy is funded and should be operational in the first half of next year while NASA is years away from a date that's probably slipping. And I'm not sure why you're saying SpaceX is the one on the drawing board, the boosters are essentially "headless" Falcon 9s while the SLS is a new design. Sure, when or if the SLS flies it'll be in a class of its own we haven't seen since the Saturn V. I wouldn't hold my breath though, while the Falcon Heavy seems very likely that will happen.
For your simplified example, it is probably cheaper -- and just as secure -- to have an operator enter the dozen or so keystrokes to order "produce x amount of class y steel" than to design, build, install and support a more automated method. Human involvement has the added bonus of (nominally) intelligent oversight of the intended behavior for the day.
Do you have any idea what the error rate for manual data entry is? Typically about 0.5% of the entries will be wrong. Retyping information is a very error prone process.