Yes, but why the hell would modern hackers(who are after money, rather than bragging rights) give a shit about your air conditioner?
There is plenty of malware out there that has no purpose other than causing problems for others. Some @$$hole amusing themselves. There are WAY too many smart bored young hackers with a chip on their shoulder. Someone is going to cause problems just because they can.
Plus if someone really wanted to cause problems they could turn EVERYONES air conditioner up all at the same time on the same day to try to overload the system.
SpaceX is a young and aggressive company with clear drive and motivation to succeed.
Dive and motivation are necessary but not sufficient. Having those attributes doesn't mean they have a good product or the product with the best price/performance ratio. I have no idea of the relative merits of either company regarding this project but just because SpaceX is the new hotness doesn't mean anything. While I have no affiliation I've actually done some work at Boeing (many years ago) so I have at least a basic understanding of how that company works and what their culture is like. (FYI the part of Boeing I dealt with has a combative work culture I didn't enjoy at all) I'm confident they could offer a technologically competitive product. (economically competitive is less certain) Boeing has been sending up rockets for a long time so they are hardly new to the game.
While they might have been a risky bet because they were new, they would have backed their development record.
Boeing has a much much longer development record. Of course that might also work against Boeing but SpaceX does not have a long track record to go on. I'm as impressed with SpaceX as many others here but if they want to play with the big boys it isn't going to be easy and yes they are high(er) risk in certain ways. This means they need to be clearly better (economically and/or technologically) or they stand a good chance of losing to the "safe bet".
We need competition between these companies and giving SpaceX a chance to shine will make Boeing stop screwing over the U.S.
Umm, this IS the competition between these companies. This one bidding competition isn't the end-all-be-all regardless of which firm wins this contract. Plus you haven't exactly proven the assertion that Boeing is actually engaging in corrupt practices here. While I certainly wouldn't be shocked to hear that they were, that isn't anything close to proof. Absent evidence saying that SpaceX should get the contract because you suspect Boeing (without proof) of corruption is not a strong argument in favor of SpaceX.
That's not correct either logically or from an accounting perspective. The opposite of customer is not product. The opposite of customer is vendor. Every transaction has two and only two parties. If you aren't the customer then you are the vendor for that transaction. Unless you plan to go into slavery the product isn't you. The product is data about you. What that makes you is the vendor of the product. Google "buys" this data in exchange for IT services and they then sell the data to advertising customers. In that transaction chain Google buys from you and that is how you appear on Google's financial statements - as a supplier, not a customer.
The user's relationship with Gmail does involve payment in the form of consideration, and they are customers.
That doesn't make them necessarily a customer for that transaction. As far as Google is concerned they are vendors because Google "pays" users via an in-kind exchange of services for data which they then sell to their customers for cash. In that transaction chain the user is properly considered a vendor to Google and that is how they would show up on Google's financial statements. In that transaction Google would be your customer rather than the other way around.
Sure they are customers. They are paying with their personal data, which Google hords and then sells to third parties.
That makes you a vendor/supplier rather than a customer. Google "buys" your data with an in-kind exchange for IT services and then they sell it to advertisers. You aren't a customer, you are a vendor in that transaction chain.
Of course I'm one of slashdot's customers. Slashdot would be out of business if we (the customers) stopped coming to their website.
I'm an accountant.
Unless you are sending cash to slashdot, your relationship to them is most accurately described as that of a vendor or a supplier if you prefer that term. You provide data to slashdot in exchange for entertainment which is a form of in-kind exchange. Slashdot then uses that data to sell advertising to their paying customers. From an accounting perspective by providing this forum to you, you would be on slashdot's books as either Cost of Goods Sold or more likely some kind of Operating Expense. This effectively makes you a vendor to them, not a customer because they don't sell you anything.
It can get a little murkier if you have a paid subscription but they still advertise to you because then you become both a customer and a vendor. Which you are depends on the transaction in question. Logically it would make sense to have the subscription be treated as a contra-expense because then you don't have to have this dual relationship. But it's more likely that they would book it as income and have the user on the books as both a customer and (indirectly) as a vendor.
A customer is someone who receives a service from a company, even if the (monetary) price for that service is zero.
That doesn't make you a customer. That makes you a charity recipient.
In any case the general relationship between Google users (as opposed to paying advertising clients) is that the user is properly thought of as a vendor or supplier. We supply data to Google in exchange for in-kind services (email, search etc) which Google then turns into a product which they sell to their paying customers. Customers are people who pay you and vendors are people you pay. Google "pays" users for their data with online services which is a sort of barter really. They then process that data into a product they can sell to their customers which generally are advertisers.
What sometimes confuses people is that Google also sells IT services (like data storage or corporate email) but what that simply means is that someone can be both a vendor and a customer depending on the specific transaction. This is perfectly normal. It's not at all uncommon for companies to sell stuff to each other and have both a vendor relationship and a customer relationship but they can be only one or the other for a given transaction. The key distinction to determine whether they are the vendor or customer is (generally) the direction of the cash flow for the particular transaction in question. In cases in-kind exchanges its a little fuzzier so you have to look at what they do with the item received.
All we need are dissection records or dissection of well-preserved corpses from the era, so as to examine the state of organs.
The few remaining corpses of people 100+ years dead will most likely not give you the information you seek. There simply is not enough material remaining even among that which is well preserved to make authoritative claims regarding entire populations. At best we might get some hints and get some limited insight but there will be pretty sharp limits on making serious comparisons. Furthermore, I don't know how much time you've spend working with medical records but I've spent a lot of time with them in my professional life. Even modern medical records can be pretty bad. Medical records from 100+ years ago are very difficult to glean useful information from in a lot of cases. Not saying it can't be done but our understanding of medicine has advanced rather a lot since then.
Finding the source material is difficult.
That's putting it mildly. It's an interesting project you propose but you seem to be making it sound much easier than it is. That is a very challenging study.
But it does help with water retention, right? And you would imagine that as the body retained more water it would become generally more pressurised?
That doesn't automatically mean that it affects mortality or patient outcomes. The human body is complicated. Just because it seems logical doesn't mean it actually is a problem.
That has given us margarine (plastic for your body), high carbohydrate diets loaded with wheat gluten, and the result is massive obesity - and all the concomitant health issues.
There is no causal link known between gluten and the obesity epidemic. Gluten sensitivity appear to be merely the latest in a long string of fads jumped on by people who are hypochondriacs as the demand for gluten free products has hugely exceeded known affected population. While there are a relatively small number of people with coeliac disease and other sensitivities, there is no (credible) published evidence that avoiding gluten has any benefit for most people or that it is a primary driver in the current obesity epidemic.
You NEED a good amount of cholesterol for a healthy nervous system, and avoiding eggs and cholesterol containing foods in general is thought to be responsible for the increase in Alzheimer's disease, among other issues.
That is little more than a hypothesis. We do not know with any certainty what causes Alzheimer's disease. Anyone who claims we do is selling something or confused. We are learning lots about it but we do not fully understand the disease process. There may be a correlation regarding eggs and cholesterol but the studies simply haven't been done to establish any sort of causal link in the disease process.
Furthermore you might consider linking to the source material you cite rather than an editorial in a random non-peer reviewed website that refers negatively to statin drugs as "mainstream medicine". That is not what I would consider an unbiased or credible source and it casts your argument in a worse light than it probably deserves.
You would think sometime in the last few centuries someone would of bothered to get a few people together, control their food intake, adjust salt intake, and see what happened. If we are studying water retention, and its effect it could be a short-term study of around a week.
We know what happens to blood pressure in the short term. Salt affects blood pressure = known fact. We've understood that for a very long time. That is completely different from proving that salt affects heart disease or salt affects mortality in patients with heart conditions. Those things are MUCH harder to test because they require large, long term population studies. They're expensive and difficult studies to do. The problem is that people took the fact that salt affects blood pressure and applied it (without evidence) to treatment of heart disease when there was no known causal link between the two.
This is the logic that was used:
A) We know salt affects blood pressure. + B) We know high blood pressure can cause negative patient outcomes in patients with heart problems. = C) Therefore controlling salt should reduce negative patient outcomes
The problem is that A + B does not equal C. We just assumed that it did because it sounded right. You have two bits of data that seem to add up to a logical result but it turns out that the equation is more complicated and thus our simple "answer" is wrong.
This is one of the many examples of why I don't care about consensus opinion. Show us evidence, or go away.
Fair enough. Do you have sufficient expertise that you are able to interpret the evidence? Is the evidence clear? Is the evidence properly gathered and analyzed? Do we have enough evidence to draw firm conclusions or merely enough to nudge the direction of inquiry? Will the patient die before you can get conclusive evidence?
Fact is that the human body is complicated and sometimes a good sounding theory is the best we have to go on. A lot of diagnosis are basically well informed probabilistic guesses because we don't completely understand the underlying disease process. Sometimes you have to act before you can be certain of your case. For instance if you have a bacterial infection it can take days to culture the infectious organism and the patient can die before you get a definitive answer. So the doctor has to take an educated guess before he has the evidence. Sometimes a consensus opinion is the best we can do.
What people miss about consensus opinions is why they matter. What a consensus is NOT useful for is as evidence proving or disproving a theory about physical phenomena. A consensus IS useful for as evidence against the (political) argument that there are substantially conflicting opinions when there in fact are not. A consensus is useful for establishing standard of care. A consensus is (sometimes) useful for protection against legal liability.
But it does help with water retention, right? And you would imagine that as the body retained more water it would become generally more pressurised?
As I understand it, that is a big part of the basis of the theory behind controlling sodium in heart patients. Osmotic gradient controlled through reduced sodium. Good sounding theory. However just because that sounds sensible doesn't mean it actually matters in medical outcomes. The human body is complicated and sometimes good sounding theories turn out to be completely incorrect. This appears to be one of those good sounding but false theories.
This is not actually news though it's one more study on the pile. My wife is a physician and her instructors in med school pointed out that the relationship between salt and high blood pressure was based on correlations, not a causal chain. Basically it was a logical hypothesis that people started acting upon before it was ever established as fact. A lot of patients with high blood pressure problems (apparently - I'm not a doctor) have issues relating to osmotic gradients and other biological functions where salt is involved. So the theory went that by controlling sodium you could help control these problems. A good theory. But a good theory isn't a necessarily fact and it sounds like a lot of medical effort went into controlling sodium before anyone actually could test to see if it really mattered. Apparently the answer is turning out to be that it doesn't matter nearly as much as we thought.
The problem is, his second chance came at the cost of endangering innocent people.
And you've never done anything that endangered others? (If you say "never" I'm going to call you a liar)
We're talking about someone who endangers everyone else on the road should he "screw up" again.
And he has served time in prison for that. You think he doesn't understand the consequences? I know the guy and his situation and you do not. I know what he's been through and I know how he has comported himself for the last several years. Don't be so eager to dole out "justice" for people you've never met. He had his license pulled for 10 years. He had to prove to a judge that he had straightened out. He had to have an interlock on his car even when granted a provisional license for 2 years. He had to get drug tested regularly. He had to show up to work every day for several years. Honestly I trust this guy more than I would trust you if we just met on the street.
It isn't right that your life is ruined because of a single screwup, but it also isn't right that someone else has to risk their life being ruined to avoid that.
We do that every day. I trust thousands of drivers I pass daily to stay in their lane. We depend on each other to not screw up all the time.
Depends. What if you send a tweet? Now what if the tweet is sent via data over TCP/IP instead of SMS?
Same thing. Shouldn't be legal. It's basically the same activity so should be covered under the same rules.
Same end result, but difference in transmission medium defeats the whole "SMS isn't reliable" argument stone cold.
No it does not because those other services you mentioned are not least common denominator services. Pretty much every phone has SMS - not all phones are smart phones. Plenty of people do not have twitter or other similar messaging services and even when they do they don't all have the same ones.
Or why we need specific rules banning it, versus simply applying existing distracted-driving laws?
Distracted driving laws are A) inconsistent, B) only enforceable after the fact and C) are widely and demonstrably ignored. Disabling all texting while in a vehicle in motion would proactively prevent a lot of accidents and is much easier to enforce.
You're forgetting though that a text message is far more likely to be transmitted than a phone call when there is minimal signal.
It might be transmitted but it still doesn't guarantee delivery or notify you if the message was not received. With a phone call you know for certain if the other party received the message. Kind of an important detail.
Every GPS I've laid my hands on in the past two years has had a motion-lockout enabled on it.
Yep. For product liability reasons. People can't help themselves and there is no way to determine if the driver or the passenger is the one working on it.
I wonder how that'll get along with the "any cell phone must be able to dial 911 even if it has no service and is locked" law?
I don't have ANY problem with allowing any sort of communication to 911 at any time. If there is a reason to contact 911 that probably is ok even if driving.
I can see other issues, like not being able to use it while in a cab or bus
I really don't see that as a problem. Very few text messages are so urgent they cannot wait a little while.
Ok, then how does the app know that you're on a bus and not driving?
It wouldn't. It means you just wait until you stop and then you can text to your heart's desire. The point is that we may be worrying too much about making sure passengers aren't inconvenienced and forgetting the big picture problem that people are dying because they can't resist texting while driving. Since determining who is driving and who isn't is too hard, maybe the least-worst answer is simply to not allow it at all for anyone while in motion. If you've got a better idea I'm all ears but everyone so far is throwing up their hands and saying we can't solve the problem. I respectfully disagree with that stance.
During a home invasion, when you don't want to expose your hiding place by speaking.
Not relevant to the whether to allow texting while in a passenger vehicle. I actually don't have a problem with allowing text messages to a 911 operator at any time just like we require phones to always be able to dial 911. (I question their utility but that's a separate issue) There probably is a good reason to allow any sort of communications to 911 even while driving. But generally speaking I cannot think of any reason why we need to allow general purpose texting while in a motor vehicle that is in motion.
A woman hiding under the bed or in a closet with an attacker in the house comes to mind.
Are you aware of a lot of closets that drive on the road? The discussion is for whether or not to allow texting while in a passenger vehicle. I'm sure people can come up with corner cases where texting might make sense but I cannot think of a single one for passenger vehicles.
I'd say this is nowhere near. The generic name is "tablet" and not "iPad".
Maybe to you but that's not the way the real world works. People absolutely do call all tablets "iPads" regardless of actual make. They refer to any MP3 player as an "iPod" whether it actually is or isn't. People don't search, they "Google".
No it isn't accurate but it is what happens. If you correct them they will ignore you. Most people really, seriously DO NOT CARE that it isn't actually accurate. All adhesive bandages are Band-Aids. All nasal tissue is Kleenex. All transparent tape is Scotch tape. All photocopies are Xeroxes. It happens. Get over it.
Because you almost certainly don't need the information that moment and too many people can't resist the temptation to text while driving. You'll survive without the text and as a result so will some other people.
I have an app on my phone that reads my text message if I am in my car. I never respond and it is no more distracting than the radio.
Good for you but that doesn't establish any compelling need for you to receive or send a text message while driving. After all if it was critical they could have called you instead. I'm willing to be convinced but "because I want to" isn't a good enough argument for me given the safety issues involved.
So I should be punished for their failings?
Do you stop at stop lights even when there is no traffic? Sometimes part of living in a civil society is dealing with a little personal inconvenience to ensure safety and order. Maybe you are the responsible one (I have not reason to doubt it) but since the rest of us have no way to be sure of that you might have to deal with having to wait for that text message to arrive.
Give them a fat ticket and be happy with the income and worry about real issues like drunk and flat out careless drivers in general.
People who text while driving are every bit as dangerous as people who drink and drive. There are plenty of studies that support this. While anecdotal, I actually know more people who have been in accidents caused by distracted (texting) driving than by drunk drivers. Texting is the leading cause of death for teen drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but why the hell would modern hackers(who are after money, rather than bragging rights) give a shit about your air conditioner?
There is plenty of malware out there that has no purpose other than causing problems for others. Some @$$hole amusing themselves. There are WAY too many smart bored young hackers with a chip on their shoulder. Someone is going to cause problems just because they can.
Plus if someone really wanted to cause problems they could turn EVERYONES air conditioner up all at the same time on the same day to try to overload the system.
SpaceX is a young and aggressive company with clear drive and motivation to succeed.
Dive and motivation are necessary but not sufficient. Having those attributes doesn't mean they have a good product or the product with the best price/performance ratio. I have no idea of the relative merits of either company regarding this project but just because SpaceX is the new hotness doesn't mean anything. While I have no affiliation I've actually done some work at Boeing (many years ago) so I have at least a basic understanding of how that company works and what their culture is like. (FYI the part of Boeing I dealt with has a combative work culture I didn't enjoy at all) I'm confident they could offer a technologically competitive product. (economically competitive is less certain) Boeing has been sending up rockets for a long time so they are hardly new to the game.
While they might have been a risky bet because they were new, they would have backed their development record.
Boeing has a much much longer development record. Of course that might also work against Boeing but SpaceX does not have a long track record to go on. I'm as impressed with SpaceX as many others here but if they want to play with the big boys it isn't going to be easy and yes they are high(er) risk in certain ways. This means they need to be clearly better (economically and/or technologically) or they stand a good chance of losing to the "safe bet".
We need competition between these companies and giving SpaceX a chance to shine will make Boeing stop screwing over the U.S.
Umm, this IS the competition between these companies. This one bidding competition isn't the end-all-be-all regardless of which firm wins this contract. Plus you haven't exactly proven the assertion that Boeing is actually engaging in corrupt practices here. While I certainly wouldn't be shocked to hear that they were, that isn't anything close to proof. Absent evidence saying that SpaceX should get the contract because you suspect Boeing (without proof) of corruption is not a strong argument in favor of SpaceX.
You're not the customer. You're the product.
That's not correct either logically or from an accounting perspective. The opposite of customer is not product. The opposite of customer is vendor. Every transaction has two and only two parties. If you aren't the customer then you are the vendor for that transaction. Unless you plan to go into slavery the product isn't you. The product is data about you. What that makes you is the vendor of the product. Google "buys" this data in exchange for IT services and they then sell the data to advertising customers. In that transaction chain Google buys from you and that is how you appear on Google's financial statements - as a supplier, not a customer.
The user's relationship with Gmail does involve payment in the form of consideration, and they are customers.
That doesn't make them necessarily a customer for that transaction. As far as Google is concerned they are vendors because Google "pays" users via an in-kind exchange of services for data which they then sell to their customers for cash. In that transaction chain the user is properly considered a vendor to Google and that is how they would show up on Google's financial statements. In that transaction Google would be your customer rather than the other way around.
Sure they are customers. They are paying with their personal data, which Google hords and then sells to third parties.
That makes you a vendor/supplier rather than a customer. Google "buys" your data with an in-kind exchange for IT services and then they sell it to advertisers. You aren't a customer, you are a vendor in that transaction chain.
Of course I'm one of slashdot's customers. Slashdot would be out of business if we (the customers) stopped coming to their website.
I'm an accountant.
Unless you are sending cash to slashdot, your relationship to them is most accurately described as that of a vendor or a supplier if you prefer that term. You provide data to slashdot in exchange for entertainment which is a form of in-kind exchange. Slashdot then uses that data to sell advertising to their paying customers. From an accounting perspective by providing this forum to you, you would be on slashdot's books as either Cost of Goods Sold or more likely some kind of Operating Expense. This effectively makes you a vendor to them, not a customer because they don't sell you anything.
It can get a little murkier if you have a paid subscription but they still advertise to you because then you become both a customer and a vendor. Which you are depends on the transaction in question. Logically it would make sense to have the subscription be treated as a contra-expense because then you don't have to have this dual relationship. But it's more likely that they would book it as income and have the user on the books as both a customer and (indirectly) as a vendor.
A customer is someone who receives a service from a company, even if the (monetary) price for that service is zero.
That doesn't make you a customer. That makes you a charity recipient.
In any case the general relationship between Google users (as opposed to paying advertising clients) is that the user is properly thought of as a vendor or supplier. We supply data to Google in exchange for in-kind services (email, search etc) which Google then turns into a product which they sell to their paying customers. Customers are people who pay you and vendors are people you pay. Google "pays" users for their data with online services which is a sort of barter really. They then process that data into a product they can sell to their customers which generally are advertisers.
What sometimes confuses people is that Google also sells IT services (like data storage or corporate email) but what that simply means is that someone can be both a vendor and a customer depending on the specific transaction. This is perfectly normal. It's not at all uncommon for companies to sell stuff to each other and have both a vendor relationship and a customer relationship but they can be only one or the other for a given transaction. The key distinction to determine whether they are the vendor or customer is (generally) the direction of the cash flow for the particular transaction in question. In cases in-kind exchanges its a little fuzzier so you have to look at what they do with the item received.
All we need are dissection records or dissection of well-preserved corpses from the era, so as to examine the state of organs.
The few remaining corpses of people 100+ years dead will most likely not give you the information you seek. There simply is not enough material remaining even among that which is well preserved to make authoritative claims regarding entire populations. At best we might get some hints and get some limited insight but there will be pretty sharp limits on making serious comparisons. Furthermore, I don't know how much time you've spend working with medical records but I've spent a lot of time with them in my professional life. Even modern medical records can be pretty bad. Medical records from 100+ years ago are very difficult to glean useful information from in a lot of cases. Not saying it can't be done but our understanding of medicine has advanced rather a lot since then.
Finding the source material is difficult.
That's putting it mildly. It's an interesting project you propose but you seem to be making it sound much easier than it is. That is a very challenging study.
But it does help with water retention, right? And you would imagine that as the body retained more water it would become generally more pressurised?
That doesn't automatically mean that it affects mortality or patient outcomes. The human body is complicated. Just because it seems logical doesn't mean it actually is a problem.
That has given us margarine (plastic for your body), high carbohydrate diets loaded with wheat gluten, and the result is massive obesity - and all the concomitant health issues.
There is no causal link known between gluten and the obesity epidemic. Gluten sensitivity appear to be merely the latest in a long string of fads jumped on by people who are hypochondriacs as the demand for gluten free products has hugely exceeded known affected population. While there are a relatively small number of people with coeliac disease and other sensitivities, there is no (credible) published evidence that avoiding gluten has any benefit for most people or that it is a primary driver in the current obesity epidemic.
You NEED a good amount of cholesterol for a healthy nervous system, and avoiding eggs and cholesterol containing foods in general is thought to be responsible for the increase in Alzheimer's disease, among other issues.
That is little more than a hypothesis. We do not know with any certainty what causes Alzheimer's disease. Anyone who claims we do is selling something or confused. We are learning lots about it but we do not fully understand the disease process. There may be a correlation regarding eggs and cholesterol but the studies simply haven't been done to establish any sort of causal link in the disease process.
Furthermore you might consider linking to the source material you cite rather than an editorial in a random non-peer reviewed website that refers negatively to statin drugs as "mainstream medicine". That is not what I would consider an unbiased or credible source and it casts your argument in a worse light than it probably deserves.
You would think sometime in the last few centuries someone would of bothered to get a few people together, control their food intake, adjust salt intake, and see what happened. If we are studying water retention, and its effect it could be a short-term study of around a week.
We know what happens to blood pressure in the short term. Salt affects blood pressure = known fact. We've understood that for a very long time. That is completely different from proving that salt affects heart disease or salt affects mortality in patients with heart conditions. Those things are MUCH harder to test because they require large, long term population studies. They're expensive and difficult studies to do. The problem is that people took the fact that salt affects blood pressure and applied it (without evidence) to treatment of heart disease when there was no known causal link between the two.
This is the logic that was used:
A) We know salt affects blood pressure.
+ B) We know high blood pressure can cause negative patient outcomes in patients with heart problems.
= C) Therefore controlling salt should reduce negative patient outcomes
The problem is that A + B does not equal C. We just assumed that it did because it sounded right. You have two bits of data that seem to add up to a logical result but it turns out that the equation is more complicated and thus our simple "answer" is wrong.
This is one of the many examples of why I don't care about consensus opinion. Show us evidence, or go away.
Fair enough. Do you have sufficient expertise that you are able to interpret the evidence? Is the evidence clear? Is the evidence properly gathered and analyzed? Do we have enough evidence to draw firm conclusions or merely enough to nudge the direction of inquiry? Will the patient die before you can get conclusive evidence?
Fact is that the human body is complicated and sometimes a good sounding theory is the best we have to go on. A lot of diagnosis are basically well informed probabilistic guesses because we don't completely understand the underlying disease process. Sometimes you have to act before you can be certain of your case. For instance if you have a bacterial infection it can take days to culture the infectious organism and the patient can die before you get a definitive answer. So the doctor has to take an educated guess before he has the evidence. Sometimes a consensus opinion is the best we can do.
What people miss about consensus opinions is why they matter. What a consensus is NOT useful for is as evidence proving or disproving a theory about physical phenomena. A consensus IS useful for as evidence against the (political) argument that there are substantially conflicting opinions when there in fact are not. A consensus is useful for establishing standard of care. A consensus is (sometimes) useful for protection against legal liability.
But it does help with water retention, right? And you would imagine that as the body retained more water it would become generally more pressurised?
As I understand it, that is a big part of the basis of the theory behind controlling sodium in heart patients. Osmotic gradient controlled through reduced sodium. Good sounding theory. However just because that sounds sensible doesn't mean it actually matters in medical outcomes. The human body is complicated and sometimes good sounding theories turn out to be completely incorrect. This appears to be one of those good sounding but false theories.
This is not actually news though it's one more study on the pile. My wife is a physician and her instructors in med school pointed out that the relationship between salt and high blood pressure was based on correlations, not a causal chain. Basically it was a logical hypothesis that people started acting upon before it was ever established as fact. A lot of patients with high blood pressure problems (apparently - I'm not a doctor) have issues relating to osmotic gradients and other biological functions where salt is involved. So the theory went that by controlling sodium you could help control these problems. A good theory. But a good theory isn't a necessarily fact and it sounds like a lot of medical effort went into controlling sodium before anyone actually could test to see if it really mattered. Apparently the answer is turning out to be that it doesn't matter nearly as much as we thought.
Oblig XKCD
The problem is, his second chance came at the cost of endangering innocent people.
And you've never done anything that endangered others? (If you say "never" I'm going to call you a liar)
We're talking about someone who endangers everyone else on the road should he "screw up" again.
And he has served time in prison for that. You think he doesn't understand the consequences? I know the guy and his situation and you do not. I know what he's been through and I know how he has comported himself for the last several years. Don't be so eager to dole out "justice" for people you've never met. He had his license pulled for 10 years. He had to prove to a judge that he had straightened out. He had to have an interlock on his car even when granted a provisional license for 2 years. He had to get drug tested regularly. He had to show up to work every day for several years. Honestly I trust this guy more than I would trust you if we just met on the street.
It isn't right that your life is ruined because of a single screwup, but it also isn't right that someone else has to risk their life being ruined to avoid that.
We do that every day. I trust thousands of drivers I pass daily to stay in their lane. We depend on each other to not screw up all the time.
Depends. What if you send a tweet? Now what if the tweet is sent via data over TCP/IP instead of SMS?
Same thing. Shouldn't be legal. It's basically the same activity so should be covered under the same rules.
Same end result, but difference in transmission medium defeats the whole "SMS isn't reliable" argument stone cold.
No it does not because those other services you mentioned are not least common denominator services. Pretty much every phone has SMS - not all phones are smart phones. Plenty of people do not have twitter or other similar messaging services and even when they do they don't all have the same ones.
Or why we need specific rules banning it, versus simply applying existing distracted-driving laws?
Distracted driving laws are A) inconsistent, B) only enforceable after the fact and C) are widely and demonstrably ignored. Disabling all texting while in a vehicle in motion would proactively prevent a lot of accidents and is much easier to enforce.
You're forgetting though that a text message is far more likely to be transmitted than a phone call when there is minimal signal.
It might be transmitted but it still doesn't guarantee delivery or notify you if the message was not received. With a phone call you know for certain if the other party received the message. Kind of an important detail.
Every GPS I've laid my hands on in the past two years has had a motion-lockout enabled on it.
Yep. For product liability reasons. People can't help themselves and there is no way to determine if the driver or the passenger is the one working on it.
I wonder how that'll get along with the "any cell phone must be able to dial 911 even if it has no service and is locked" law?
I don't have ANY problem with allowing any sort of communication to 911 at any time. If there is a reason to contact 911 that probably is ok even if driving.
I can see other issues, like not being able to use it while in a cab or bus
I really don't see that as a problem. Very few text messages are so urgent they cannot wait a little while.
Ok, then how does the app know that you're on a bus and not driving?
It wouldn't. It means you just wait until you stop and then you can text to your heart's desire. The point is that we may be worrying too much about making sure passengers aren't inconvenienced and forgetting the big picture problem that people are dying because they can't resist texting while driving. Since determining who is driving and who isn't is too hard, maybe the least-worst answer is simply to not allow it at all for anyone while in motion. If you've got a better idea I'm all ears but everyone so far is throwing up their hands and saying we can't solve the problem. I respectfully disagree with that stance.
Disabling based on motion would disable it for passengers as well.
Yes it would. The point is that it doesn't really matter.
A passenger should be able to use his phone.
Why? Seriously. "Because" isn't an answer. We can allow any phone to text or call 911 at any time if there is an emergency.
During a home invasion, when you don't want to expose your hiding place by speaking.
Not relevant to the whether to allow texting while in a passenger vehicle. I actually don't have a problem with allowing text messages to a 911 operator at any time just like we require phones to always be able to dial 911. (I question their utility but that's a separate issue) There probably is a good reason to allow any sort of communications to 911 even while driving. But generally speaking I cannot think of any reason why we need to allow general purpose texting while in a motor vehicle that is in motion.
A woman hiding under the bed or in a closet with an attacker in the house comes to mind.
Are you aware of a lot of closets that drive on the road? The discussion is for whether or not to allow texting while in a passenger vehicle. I'm sure people can come up with corner cases where texting might make sense but I cannot think of a single one for passenger vehicles.
I'd say this is nowhere near. The generic name is "tablet" and not "iPad".
Maybe to you but that's not the way the real world works. People absolutely do call all tablets "iPads" regardless of actual make. They refer to any MP3 player as an "iPod" whether it actually is or isn't. People don't search, they "Google".
No it isn't accurate but it is what happens. If you correct them they will ignore you. Most people really, seriously DO NOT CARE that it isn't actually accurate. All adhesive bandages are Band-Aids. All nasal tissue is Kleenex. All transparent tape is Scotch tape. All photocopies are Xeroxes. It happens. Get over it.
NFL: One of the few industries where smooth talking idiots can rake in millions spewing bullshit.
You didn't forget about religion, politics, finance, auto sales, TV news, real estate, and insurance did you?
The NFL is small potatoes in the making money through BS industry.
Why? Really why should I wait?
Because you almost certainly don't need the information that moment and too many people can't resist the temptation to text while driving. You'll survive without the text and as a result so will some other people.
I have an app on my phone that reads my text message if I am in my car. I never respond and it is no more distracting than the radio.
Good for you but that doesn't establish any compelling need for you to receive or send a text message while driving. After all if it was critical they could have called you instead. I'm willing to be convinced but "because I want to" isn't a good enough argument for me given the safety issues involved.
So I should be punished for their failings?
Do you stop at stop lights even when there is no traffic? Sometimes part of living in a civil society is dealing with a little personal inconvenience to ensure safety and order. Maybe you are the responsible one (I have not reason to doubt it) but since the rest of us have no way to be sure of that you might have to deal with having to wait for that text message to arrive.
Give them a fat ticket and be happy with the income and worry about real issues like drunk and flat out careless drivers in general.
People who text while driving are every bit as dangerous as people who drink and drive. There are plenty of studies that support this. While anecdotal, I actually know more people who have been in accidents caused by distracted (texting) driving than by drunk drivers. Texting is the leading cause of death for teen drivers.