> I hate talking to answering machines and usually won't leave a message > unless I have already tried calling several times with no answer and have > no other way to contact the person.
> If you do that you are telling me that your time is more important than mine.
They were interviewed on NPR. While they did practice, they didn't practice with soda bottles, because they couldn't afford enough soda for a practice run. So they pretended the bottles were there when they practiced. They only did it for real one time.
> There's always that one guy on the train/subway that's creepy and smells bad. Come to > think of it, I've been riding the train for years and never seen him.
I've seen him. Usually he's the guy who sits in the aisle seat and traps you against the glass. I once spent 30 minutes trying to keep myself from tearing open the "emergency exit" window to get some fresh air. I wonder if people would act funny if you rode the train using scuba gear.
The other guy is the obese guy who walks past all the skinny people so that he can sit next to (and half on top of) me.
My kids are 7,5, & 3. I have 2 in booster seats, and one still in a baby seat. While I agree that I can fit all three kids in a MINI Cooper, I have trouble believing it will hold the three car seats. Or do they come with integrated booster/baby seats?
I heard a story about this on NPR. Although this article didn't make it clear, I believe NPR explained that the surgeries were performed when the patients were young children, and they are in their teens now.
What we need is a dialog box that covers the entire desktop, and won't give the user the option to close it until they have retyped the error message exactly.
They will still try not to pay attention to the message, but there's a chance it will sink in anyway.
I put in a DVD and watched a movie. Sounds like most of the U.S. is watching other channels. I heard a report on NPR that said the coverage of the olympics came in 5th. Not even a bronze. We'd have to add two more medals...tin for 4th place, cardboard for 5th.
We use Dragon in a digital dictation system for the radiology department where I work. We moved to the system about 6 years ago.
We have all the problems mentioned (except drinking). There are also some others that you might not consider. For example:
As the day wears on, the radiologist will get tired, and the recognition will become worse.
Also:
A radiologist who started at 6:30AM will see the sound characteristics of the room change dramatically as more people begin working and activity in the reading room increases. Even environmental systems cycling on & off can affect the recognition.
Despite this, when we receive a complaint about the voice recognition and we observe the user in action, they usually achieve 90-95% accuracy. That is really the most the vendor ever claimed was possible.
It is my understanding that for radiology practices in which the doctors share the profits, the voice recognition systems are a hit. You can see why when you look at the numbers. When we adopted the system, we had been using transcriptionists at a cost of about $600,000/year. After the change the annual cost of the speech recognition system was about $100,000. That doesn't take into account the greatly decreased turn-around time. Now we could have your report emailed to your doctor before you get your pants back on.
> In the US at least, good eye doctors are few and far between
I wouldn't say that there's any difference between eye doctors or any other profession. There are plenty of lousy doctors, just like there are plenty of lousy lawyers, architects, mechanics, computer programmers, etc. Always, *always* make sure the person you're dealing with is competent and honest, particularly when your health is on the line.
> find a good one... > maybe even one that your insurance doesn't cover.
I have to second this. When my wife bought her practice she thought she had to accept insurances to have patients. After several years of losing money (say $10-20k/year), my wife has taken to dumping insurances as a way of increasing income. Most of her patients complain when she dumps their insurance, then they transfer their records to another doctor because they don't want to pay the extra costs or deal with the hassle of submitting their fees to their insurance for reimbursement. Within a year most are back, complaining about the lousy care they received at their new doctor.
A doctor who is really good doesn't have to accept insurances.
My wife has pared it down to just two. One she'll probably continue to accept. The other looks like it's teetering on the brink of the dump.
> A good eye doctor will explain what their doing and why their doing it...and won't > waste a lot of time trying to sell you expensive options on your glasses or contacts.
Of course, there is another side to that. There's so many people who refuse to be dilated because "it's just a scam". Or they refuse to buy new glasses because their brittle old plastic frames are fine. Sometimes there is a reason the eye doctor is recommending those options. Certainly at my wife's office, nothing is recommended without a sound reason. Speaking as the person who gets called in to do the financial analysis (as well as the person whose salary covers the annual shortfalls), it is irritating to hear people talk about being scammed. I can't speak for any other office, but at my wife's practice *I* am the only one being scammed;-)
> my eye doctor told me that looking at close up things
That leads me to what I want to say to msid:
I'm assuming that there is some type of eye specialist in Greece. Either an optometrist or ophthalmologist. Don't ask a bunch of random nerds about vision problems. You need to go to the eye nerds. Go ask an eye doctor.
FYI: At 35 I've started to wear bifocals because my near vision is going. I started getting tired after working on the computer all day. When mending clothes I couldn't figure out which end of the needle had the hole in it. Then I was having trouble reading.
I'm not concerned because I had the foresight (heh) to marry an eye doctor. If you're not already married, you folks can try that yourselves.
However, if you are concerned, you should ask a specialist. Most people have 32 teeth and two eyes and they probably get their teeth checked 10 times more often than their eyes.
> Your reply was probably the closest to the issue. In the example you gave, you caused > the issue by inviting people to write freely on the wall. Should you assume no > responsability?
Reread my post. I described the extent of my responsibility in that situation:
> However, my responsibility wouldn't extend beyond removing the offending information > when asked.
> "Change it yourself" is like saying "if skinheads painted Nazi slogans on your house > wall, just repaint it". Is that really OK and is all that should be done? Nobody > should be pursued for this?
I think you came up with a bad analogy. What you describe is vandalism. No one vandalized anything in this case.
It would be more like if I had a wall and people started putting up graffiti. If someone put up something you didn't like (truth or lie, valid or invalid, helpful or harmful), I could reasonably say, "paint over it".
It's still not a perfect analogy. Let's say it's the same situation, but I decided to use my wall as part of an art experiment, and I put a notice that invited anyone to write whatever they wanted on my wall.
Now, if an anonymous contributer wrote a lie about someone, that person might reasonably want to pursue the writer, and he should be able to. If a supermarket across the street caught the writer on their security camera, he should be able to compel them to provide him with the information he requires. I believe he could file a lawsuit and subpoena their evidence. However, my responsibility wouldn't extend beyond removing the offending information when asked. It also might be reasonable to hand a paintbrush to the libeled person, and let him know he can write the retraction if he wants to.
If he files a lawsuit, he can subpoena the ISP's records, identify the poster, and get whatever justice the law allows. If a newspaper printed the libel, he would have to file a lawsuit against the newspaper. Is there a reason it should be made *easier* on the internet?
The real issue here is people still actually believe what they read on the internet, and they shouldn't.
Still, I think posting anonymously is a fairly chickenshit thing to do. One nice thing about slashdot is it is accepted that anonymous posting implies cowardice.
Data is much, much, MUCH cheaper to maintain than children. If I could add kids for nothing more than a one time cost of $1/kid, I probably wouldn't spend any money on birth control.
First kid: bought a pickup truck so that I could drive him around when the wife has the car.
Second kid: traded the pickup for a explorer sport trac so I could fit more carseats.
Third kid: couldn't wedge more carseats in the wife's saturn, so moved to a minivan.
At this point, we could probably manage another vehicle change to expand capacity to handle 1 or even 2 more kids. However, the ongoing maintenance is going to kill us so we have to stop here. Which leads me to wonder about people with terabytes of RAID at home. Adding data is not a one time expense. At least, if you care about the data, it shouldn't be. Do you do any backup, or are you just willing to accept the loss of all that data? If you do backups, how do you do it?
Of course, another difference between kids and data is we can't delete kids to make room for more. Well, not for another 14 years. By then we'll be too old to be relied on for primary storage of new data...er, kids. We'll be relegated to short term scratch space after that (grandkids on the weekends).
Slashdot Mirror
> And yet some of the best work has been produced by men and women well past 30.
We're not talking about people *working* past 30. We're talking about people *radically* changing careers after 30. There's a difference.
There's no such thing as "spare" Lego. Just bricks awaiting their next adventure.
After all, if something is "spare", you don't really need it.
I think they already are.
> Since when are Dinosaurs boring?
Jurassic Park III
Their name says it all. A geek is someone who bites the heads off of chickens. If you want someone who knows something, hire a nerd.
> I hate talking to answering machines and usually won't leave a message
> unless I have already tried calling several times with no answer and have
> no other way to contact the person.
> If you do that you are telling me that your time is more important than mine.
Great! I was worried that you didn't understand.
They were interviewed on NPR. While they did practice, they didn't practice with soda bottles, because they couldn't afford enough soda for a practice run. So they pretended the bottles were there when they practiced. They only did it for real one time.
You'll have to mount cards in the spokes.
> There's always that one guy on the train/subway that's creepy and smells bad. Come to
> think of it, I've been riding the train for years and never seen him.
I've seen him. Usually he's the guy who sits in the aisle seat and traps you against the glass. I once spent 30 minutes trying to keep myself from tearing open the "emergency exit" window to get some fresh air. I wonder if people would act funny if you rode the train using scuba gear.
The other guy is the obese guy who walks past all the skinny people so that he can sit next to (and half on top of) me.
Are you suggesting that Americans should be learning Hindi to make it easier on the help desks outsourced to people in India? ;-)
My kids are 7,5, & 3. I have 2 in booster seats, and one still in a baby seat. While I agree that I can fit all three kids in a MINI Cooper, I have trouble believing it will hold the three car seats. Or do they come with integrated booster/baby seats?
I heard a story about this on NPR. Although this article didn't make it clear, I believe NPR explained that the surgeries were performed when the patients were young children, and they are in their teens now.
What we need is a dialog box that covers the entire desktop, and won't give the user the option to close it until they have retyped the error message exactly.
They will still try not to pay attention to the message, but there's a chance it will sink in anyway.
= = =. ='s Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equals_sign
At an absolute minimum any parent worthy of the title would already ask to speak to the friend's parents.
> Which would you rather see?
I put in a DVD and watched a movie. Sounds like most of the U.S. is watching other channels. I heard a report on NPR that said the coverage of the olympics came in 5th. Not even a bronze. We'd have to add two more medals...tin for 4th place, cardboard for 5th.
I can see how that would go.
them: We think you're misuing resources.
me: I'm not.
them: Still, we want you to monitor your network activity and let us know.
me: OK.
[weeks pass]
me: I'm not.
them: OK.
We use Dragon in a digital dictation system for the radiology department where I work. We moved to the system about 6 years ago.
We have all the problems mentioned (except drinking). There are also some others that you might not consider. For example:
As the day wears on, the radiologist will get tired, and the recognition will become worse.
Also:
A radiologist who started at 6:30AM will see the sound characteristics of the room change dramatically as more people begin working and activity in the reading room increases. Even environmental systems cycling on & off can affect the recognition.
Despite this, when we receive a complaint about the voice recognition and we observe the user in action, they usually achieve 90-95% accuracy. That is really the most the vendor ever claimed was possible.
It is my understanding that for radiology practices in which the doctors share the profits, the voice recognition systems are a hit. You can see why when you look at the numbers. When we adopted the system, we had been using transcriptionists at a cost of about $600,000/year. After the change the annual cost of the speech recognition system was about $100,000. That doesn't take into account the greatly decreased turn-around time. Now we could have your report emailed to your doctor before you get your pants back on.
> In the US at least, good eye doctors are few and far between
...and won't
;-)
I wouldn't say that there's any difference between eye doctors or any other profession. There are plenty of lousy doctors, just like there are plenty of lousy lawyers, architects, mechanics, computer programmers, etc. Always, *always* make sure the person you're dealing with is competent and honest, particularly when your health is on the line.
> find a good one...
> maybe even one that your insurance doesn't cover.
I have to second this. When my wife bought her practice she thought she had to accept insurances to have patients. After several years of losing money (say $10-20k/year), my wife has taken to dumping insurances as a way of increasing income. Most of her patients complain when she dumps their insurance, then they transfer their records to another doctor because they don't want to pay the extra costs or deal with the hassle of submitting their fees to their insurance for reimbursement. Within a year most are back, complaining about the lousy care they received at their new doctor.
A doctor who is really good doesn't have to accept insurances.
My wife has pared it down to just two. One she'll probably continue to accept. The other looks like it's teetering on the brink of the dump.
> A good eye doctor will explain what their doing and why their doing it
> waste a lot of time trying to sell you expensive options on your glasses or contacts.
Of course, there is another side to that. There's so many people who refuse to be dilated because "it's just a scam". Or they refuse to buy new glasses because their brittle old plastic frames are fine. Sometimes there is a reason the eye doctor is recommending those options. Certainly at my wife's office, nothing is recommended without a sound reason. Speaking as the person who gets called in to do the financial analysis (as well as the person whose salary covers the annual shortfalls), it is irritating to hear people talk about being scammed. I can't speak for any other office, but at my wife's practice *I* am the only one being scammed
> my eye doctor told me that looking at close up things
That leads me to what I want to say to msid:
I'm assuming that there is some type of eye specialist in Greece. Either an optometrist or ophthalmologist. Don't ask a bunch of random nerds about vision problems. You need to go to the eye nerds. Go ask an eye doctor.
FYI: At 35 I've started to wear bifocals because my near vision is going. I started getting tired after working on the computer all day. When mending clothes I couldn't figure out which end of the needle had the hole in it. Then I was having trouble reading.
I'm not concerned because I had the foresight (heh) to marry an eye doctor. If you're not already married, you folks can try that yourselves.
However, if you are concerned, you should ask a specialist. Most people have 32 teeth and two eyes and they probably get their teeth checked 10 times more often than their eyes.
> Your reply was probably the closest to the issue. In the example you gave, you caused
> the issue by inviting people to write freely on the wall. Should you assume no
> responsability?
Reread my post. I described the extent of my responsibility in that situation:
> However, my responsibility wouldn't extend beyond removing the offending information
> when asked.
> "Change it yourself" is like saying "if skinheads painted Nazi slogans on your house
> wall, just repaint it". Is that really OK and is all that should be done? Nobody
> should be pursued for this?
I think you came up with a bad analogy. What you describe is vandalism. No one vandalized anything in this case.
It would be more like if I had a wall and people started putting up graffiti. If someone put up something you didn't like (truth or lie, valid or invalid, helpful or harmful), I could reasonably say, "paint over it".
It's still not a perfect analogy. Let's say it's the same situation, but I decided to use my wall as part of an art experiment, and I put a notice that invited anyone to write whatever they wanted on my wall.
Now, if an anonymous contributer wrote a lie about someone, that person might reasonably want to pursue the writer, and he should be able to. If a supermarket across the street caught the writer on their security camera, he should be able to compel them to provide him with the information he requires. I believe he could file a lawsuit and subpoena their evidence. However, my responsibility wouldn't extend beyond removing the offending information when asked. It also might be reasonable to hand a paintbrush to the libeled person, and let him know he can write the retraction if he wants to.
If he files a lawsuit, he can subpoena the ISP's records, identify the poster, and get whatever justice the law allows. If a newspaper printed the libel, he would have to file a lawsuit against the newspaper. Is there a reason it should be made *easier* on the internet?
The real issue here is people still actually believe what they read on the internet, and they shouldn't.
Still, I think posting anonymously is a fairly chickenshit thing to do. One nice thing about slashdot is it is accepted that anonymous posting implies cowardice.
You must not be a home owner. I'd kill for a good, trustworthy carpenter.
The only thing better would be if the messiah was a plumber.
Data is much, much, MUCH cheaper to maintain than children. If I could add kids for nothing more than a one time cost of $1/kid, I probably wouldn't spend any money on birth control.
First kid: bought a pickup truck so that I could drive him around when the wife has the car.
Second kid: traded the pickup for a explorer sport trac so I could fit more carseats.
Third kid: couldn't wedge more carseats in the wife's saturn, so moved to a minivan.
At this point, we could probably manage another vehicle change to expand capacity to handle 1 or even 2 more kids. However, the ongoing maintenance is going to kill us so we have to stop here. Which leads me to wonder about people with terabytes of RAID at home. Adding data is not a one time expense. At least, if you care about the data, it shouldn't be. Do you do any backup, or are you just willing to accept the loss of all that data? If you do backups, how do you do it?
Of course, another difference between kids and data is we can't delete kids to make room for more. Well, not for another 14 years. By then we'll be too old to be relied on for primary storage of new data...er, kids. We'll be relegated to short term scratch space after that (grandkids on the weekends).
Of course, that's not the only issue to consider. How many miles per gallon of Skittles does the car get?