"I once hired for a job that required a security clearance and some deep TCP/IP packet skills. In a year I found -zero- qualified applicants"
You talk about "deep TCP/IP packet skills" as if it was some kind of arcane only the maesters of Antigua can deal with or something like that. Hint: any promisory IT freshman can do that.
So you lost a year worth of opportunity costs because you'd better not train anyone. And somehow that's the "talent pool" fault.
From the sound of it, the actual problem was finding that set of skills in somebody with the clearance at the same time.
This isn't saying that people who already got both don't exist--they may simply be thin enough on the ground that good damn luck finding one who is looking for a job. Certain combinations when you stack them can shoot you from 'unemployable' to 'expect well-paid constant employment, with no trouble switching jobs.'
Now, if your problem is finding 'BA/BS in foo with experience'? If everybody wants 'BA/BS in foo with experience' and you don't actually have a reason to require experience? Then you might be better off giving a few people with that degree a chance at the experience and keeping the best one...if your area's laws permit that and you can afford to make the deal.
In some places, firing a person is enough hassle that it isn't worth hiring somebody in hopes they'll shape up well--and if the local laws may not allow you to may somebody's employment conditional on them getting those "deep TCP/IP packet skills" you say are so easy to gain? Then they might well decide they don't really need to get those skills, or be that rare person for whom it just never makes any sense whatsoever. (The clearance is probably the harder thing to get, so it's the one that you probably want to insist on the person having whatever else...and it might well be that having deep TCP/IP packet skills is the tell on if someone is turning up with the skillset that means you can train them with the time+resources you have.)
This is bad at both ends--I don't expect to be able to talk an employer into giving me a chance to fill in the gaps in the skills they want and I have already if they're going to be stuck with me whatever, so I'm probably not going to get a job if there's always a hole.
Where I lived, there was a long period during which you didn't want a TWC installer coming in and working unsupervised. They are (were?) generally subcontractors and at that time the quality varied very wildly--and unless you had already weird cable, you really had little chance of knowing the quality of who was going to get dispatched to you...and the bad ones did more than just leave you with no working cable.
This is a legitimate reason for a landlord to ban them: "This company's installers have a tendency to do unnecessary property damage, and while some may be competent or better there's no way to ensure we get any of those."
The better solution of course is for the companies to do what the local TWC did: start actually being careful about ensuring your installers are actually competent...
Long-term, it ought to be possible by now to get it so a cable or satellite installer doesn't need to do much alteration to the building's structure--have it built into the walls like electrical wiring, so an installer's simply dealing with plugging things in, with all new lines being outside the building...which would solve the problems bad installers cause, eventually.
Historically, that is pretty much normal; talking about the known cases of colonialism by non-White cultures is a split between not wanting to mess with the eeeevil Whites narrative and part of the dark side of embracing the noble savage myth...especially the strain of it that defines 'savage' as 'not European.'
Me? I learned about these things because I found European history boring and actually did things like look for people willing to talk about stuff like China's long history of racism that makes Europeans look like newcomers, and the Native American tribes that poof'd because their neighboring tribe(s) didn't like them...but did like their land and sometimes their women. (This is the sort of thing that is part of finding good non-Eurocentric histories. Homegrown African racism doesn't take much digging; see for example the apparently still ongoing war in Darfur.)
Europeans didn't invent this stuff, they just steal the credit...as usual.
Personally? I think that it's a shame MLK Jr's dream is being discarded because there is way too much benefit to be gotten from identity politics. Complain about racism if the exact same damn crime gets a different sentence and the sole difference is completely and entirely the offender's race... Otherwise, consider veeery carefully all the racism involved in the idea that African-Americans are the only people who commit certain offenses before pushing forward on this. (Foo While Black is not an offense.)
I think it's generally more a distaste for the entire model, where you sell a 'license' instead--if this was being sold as a service instead, from the start, feelings probably would be different than if you had been told you were buying a game which implies you, well, own a copy of the game.
There have been several games I was interested in that were upfront about being in this style...and I didn't buy the ones who were priced too high for what is essentially ephemeral no matter how long it's kept running. (At least one I'd have paid distinctly more for a downloadable edition, too.)
A few, admittedly, I'd have bought if I had thought that indie servers would be a thing--and I suspect that releasing the codebase as part of sunsetting a game, especially a popular one, might be worth it for the customer goodwill. Properly downloadable content also works, but the goal should be keeping customer goodwill and not sending the message that every single game that goes out your door may be shut down by you without even an effort to let you keep offline play.
How much you can sell a game for does depend on how long the buyer feels confident of getting to put those 500 hours of play in--and you may limit your audience to hardcore enough players that they can be sure of managing that in a month, if you have even things like this game which shouldn't need the server entering coasterdom...
Our universities put lots of women through STEM majors. But when they graduate they go back to China, where they can build big things.
Or they don't give us many employment options outside of 'mad scientist,' 'evil overlord,' and 'teacher.' I'm currently teaching but I'm starting to think finding a project whose goal is to cause world peace (by killing everybody) may be more moral.
I would expect it to be set to be rather insistent about going nowhere if it detects at start-up to not be in a safe condition to drive--in fact, I'd pay extra for one that would do that while giving me a properly informative notice because the side of the road is a lousy place to be stuck waiting for roadside assistance. (A properly informative notice should give me enough information that I can make the proper calls and my mechanic will be able to actually start getting set up before the tow truck gets there. Or I will know straight off to skip the tow, my car is a crime scene. Either is good.)
As for routine maintenance... Skipping that is more expensive than not, and I see no reason to keep the car from keeping you updated. If we're going to make cars self-driving we should have them able to tell you when it's truly time for an oil change or other basics. In fact, I'd consider this all more useful than it trying to drive itself: I'd prefer a car that can tell me that it's brakes work when I turn it on over one that will drive itself off cheerfully assuming they do.
You agreed to allow MS to run the update utility, whose function is to update your PC. Honestly, since you can disable this "service" and it has been a policy to disable it everywhere I've been since the NT days, I'm not sure why you're whining now. This certainly has not been a secret. I personally don't see why anyone would allow an update service to effectively "own" their computer. MS has been notorious for doing things other than patching bugs in their security updates.
MS has decided that the appropriate response to people recognizing that "service" as at best dysfunctional is to make it no longer something that is particularly easily disabled in the consumer edition of Win10.
The bigger picture is often a gamble.
In the short term just paying off this one individual may be the easy claim, where they are on record on just not bothering to fight it. However if this sparks a bunch of claims then Microsoft may change its tatic.
The Woman didn't "Win" the lawsuit. They settled to avoid setting a legal precedent.
Settling to avoid setting a legal precedent here would--for the exact reasons you cited--be a strong indication that they expected the precedent to not be in their favor. With the shift to requiring you accept upgrades and patches with Win10, and how the rollout is going, a binding precedent here could make it very risky to fight future suits; consider how MS has rolled out Win10, and the fact it now requires most users accept whatever patches it shoves out on patch day.
Now consider what it'd mean if, by forcing those patches down people's throats, it now is financially responsible for any damage those patches do...
How you go about labeling it as extreme can effectively clamp down on utterly essential criticism--when it's something like the third gender person is suggesting someone probably need to see a mental health professional about the whole Apache helicopter thing or an open Islamist saying those guys are too over the top about jihad, they're very likely right. It can also prevent important discussions about how it may not matter if some people's overly-delicate feelings are being hurt, what's being asserted may be at its core a mass of privilege, entitlement, wishful thinking, and the implicit or explicit belief that...well...everybody is equal but some people are more equal than others, to paraphrase Orwell.
It is entirely possible for the censors to not only undergo radicalization and see all opposition to what they see as obviously Right and Good as eeeevil extremism, this could happen without them even noticing it.
Just because it's being done by private companies does not make censorship have no chilling effect, especially given the nature of the platforms they control.
Make the companies cover bonding their drivers and the (very expensive) insurance for their fleet, which will be defined by it being avalible for hire through them and not by who holds the vehicles' titles.
That adds another layer of protection for drivers and the public, and ensures that the companies will make an active effort to not have excessive vehicles on the road--have you looked at how much the insurance costs?
Actually setting a numerical cap by law or regulation benefits only those established taxi services who can afford to & will bribe politicians and the politicians who get the bribes. I want a system that protects drivers from exploitation and the public safety without increasing corruption.
Given that the taxi medallion system is pretty much governmental corruption in several different forms in its origin at least, I am all for hitting the reset button--though buying out the medallions at market value might be prohibitively expensive in some places. I'd favor starting with reforms targeting the systemic economic abuse of for-hire drivers and sunsetting the medallions instead.
Public safety and driver rights would be best served if medallions got replaced with a form of direct licensure that just means you're eligible to work as a for-hire driver...and is no longer used to cap numbers. (If caps are to exist at all, do it at the company level.)
Offhand, no, because with search results it actually should be a basic part of good practices to have transparency about things like how you're shoving certain results under the rug for Reasons other than 'not useful to person searching.' This isn't currently being promised, and I'd actually want some mechanisms in place to be able to get answers if it looks like they've effectively thrown their weight behind specific politicians and/or agendas. Once again, I'm not as much bothered by the idea that they might--what is concerning is that all the current evidence is that they will not be open and honest about doing so.
While I do prefer my search engines be apolitical, I'd rather have an honestly political one of any type over one which pretends to be to be apolitical.
The issue here is the laws being passed; many of the ones cited here seem to be a form of rent-seeking or at least are that in effect, and in this case it sounds like a lot of law enforcement time and money is going into chasing down a modern version of a ride-sharing bulletin board for which the laws are fundamentally impractical and probably not intended for. It is not likely to be financially in the position to push back against the inherent abuse of power in the targeting...
Commercial ride-sharing services should have at least some of the same legal responsibilities as traditional taxi services. Ones that are for-tips? Just require they have proof of identity for all users and records of arranged rides, that will be provided to police with warrant--possibly with no warrant needed to get a yes or no answer to "Did J Doe arrange a ride on this date using your service?" (All the warrant should do is be proof that law enforcement has a good enough reason to want the real name and personal info of whomever J Doe was with, and only get then the specified as relevant papers.)
Unless you start with the scenario being 'brakes? what brakes?' this covers the major moral problem here--and even then, the question of why an autonomous vehicle manages to suffer unexpected and sudden brake failure needs to be covered. Also left is the question of why it cannot hit the horn and trust the pedestrians to scatter, since it's reasonable to expect that the car is going to be evidence of some sort and thus it's desirable to preserve it as intact as possible--if it's due to a manufacturing defect, detection might well save a significant number of lives.
The problem is finding and getting one--it was outright easier for me to buy a PS2 than find a PS3 with backwards compatibility, though that really is something I'd have kept forward since it is likely a cheap way to get the system a large catalog right out the door...and porting should be relatively cheaper long-term too. (Sure, it might hurt sales of ports in theory, but if it's not worth updating in any way then it isn't worth porting either.l
More importantly, definitions' sources should be carefully evaluated when it comes to claiming what is and is not a civil right. I've seen some rather...creative claims that ultimately come down to 'I have the right to be given what I want with others footing the bill'--essentially, the right to be Peter Pan, with government as your (sugar) daddy.
I am in the bio field and know somebody whose athletic career was pretty much destroyed by anorexia athletica. (I suggest you try looking it up.)
Also, I'm still trying to figure out how you've managed to miss the whole problem with girls becoming more and more prone to eating disorders; these all have long-term serious health consequences even when they're not fatal, and a decent part of this is because the body image girls are pushed to adopt are ones that owe a lot to models who may well be underweight even for their build & image manipulation. It's generally most comfortable if you're female to not have people harassing you for not being supermodel-picture thin.
If you have forgotten, this whole discussion is about if somebody's should trust their daughter's medical records to the cloud, and this thread traces back to somebody pointing out that adservs might pull out her BMI and start shoving ads for diet aids at her.
I don't know if you have ever noticed but adservs are quite stupid, and in my experience the diets you see ads for online are pretty reliably snake oil--they might work, but about the safest thing that'd cause you to lose weight at that rate would be tapeworms, plus bad dieting practices can wreck your metabolism for life.
And this is how I know you're not much into biomedical sciences, since I'm generally not comfortable with keeping in use a measure that relies on the law of large numbers when that use contributes to people developing a fetishistic attachment to using it on an individual level...and if you don't understand the problem, you might want to read up a bit on error in statistics.
As for the rest--if you're fine with the process and have somebody trained to use it, calipers have serious perks (how your body distributes fat has health implications), immersing in water is the most practical way of being absolutely sure of the body's density, and you've been ignoring my point that there's serious problems with having people who are not licensed to practice medicine pressuring people who are not be obese to lose weight. The solution to the obesity epidemic should not be fueling the eating disorder epidemic.
As for the easy-to-understand rule of thumb? The waist-to-hip ratio is probably is the most simple one to work, but you actually have to take out a tape measure----natural waist to widest part of hips; greater than 0.85 for women and 1 for men is usually given as the mark for obesity. I prefer flat-out body fat measuring, and the one that just tweaks the exponent and constant can be found in its raw form and in a calculator form on the list I gave. (That said, I think my doctors just eyeballed my waist to hip ratio, considered my build, and the fact that I tend to forget to eat...)
Really, the thing that ought to be surprising isn't that the BMI is not a good measure on the individual level but that, over a sufficiently large population, it is safe to assume everybody is a white adult male office worker.
Apparently/. mobile edition has a hotkey to post without asking questions I somehow stumbled across...
You do realize you just described the behavior of the Federal government as pathological, right?
The legislature is, arguably, on balance. It's hard to make such a call on the other branches; they are such a mixed bag.
No arguments there, really, though I'd say that simply failing to address the issue is sufficient to make it merely a question of what the pathology in question is.
Don't know what insurance you have, but mine pays out pretty well for non-catastrophic, non-prescription purposes -- to our mutual benefit. I don't particularly mind paying more in premiums than I receive in services some years, the security is worth it. They probably saved themselves from substantial risk of treating me for a life-threatening illness years earlier than they now face.
Since my employer doesn't buy me insurance, I got to look through my pick of plans and I paid attention to what gets covered and what the deductibles are, and most had the deductibles high enough that functionally it would be catastrophic coverage--except, really, I'd not be able to afford the premiums by the time it actually started covering much outside of the prescription benefits... I'm fine with the idea of paying more in premiums than I get in services most years; I just don't want to be told that a policy that is very unlikely to cover any services any year is a full health insurance plan.
It's kind of like getting sold stake and being served chicken--you might not be against chicken, but if you wanted it you'd have ordered it, and at chicken prices instead of stake prices.
Simply anonymizing data sets is no longer sufficient. There's so much data out there that medical records can be linked to individuals with a high degree of certainty.
The simple methods of anonymizing data sets certainly aren't sufficient. I know because I've been around enough people doing biomedical research that there's protocols developed for that, too--but honestly I don't expect even the bare bones anonymizing protocols, as the consequences for data breeches for those being entrusted with this are functionally nonexistent.
Basically? This has all the same problems as pretty much every single other type of personal data: there's no positive obligation to secure them, so bet on next to nil until it costs them to not secure it.
Oh, I've never had anybody who is actually licensed to practice medicine telling me to lose weight based on my BMI. I have, however, had a lot of morons who aren't the least bit qualified or licensed doing it. I'm not going to attempt to guess how much of this is because the BMI is an antique and outmoded metric.
I will admit that it's apparently still pretty good when you're trying to analyze an adult population of sufficient size for the law of large numbers to give you a hand, but even then we've better equations that don't make weird assumptions about how the human body is made up...some of which have as the sole additional thing you need to calculate being the ability to do math problems that include decimal numbers. Ultimately, it's like a spherical cow: it's a highly simplified model that is useful only in very specific abstract and/or statistical circumstances, generally not at all wise to apply outside of those circumstances, and almost certain to get replaced with a better model...while people outside of the scientific field it's from will hold onto it beyond any reason describable to those who are in the associated field. (Seriously you can get vastly more accurate results as easily as using a few more digits, what is wrong with you people!?)
The justification for the health insurance mandate is that society isn't willing to let the uninsured die.
And even in the self-serving viewpoint, this still applies, as care for the uninsured drains the important resource of people who feel morally obliged to help the sick or wounded for everyone, including premium payers. Except for the pathological cases, most people get this and don't think that punishing doctors and nurses to de-incentivise charity in the medical occupation is a worthwhile societal endeavor. So below a certain baseline of care, it is indeed like automotive liability insurance.
You do realize you just described the behavior of the Federal government as pathological, right? If you choose to accept Medicare/Medicaid, you actually pretty much have to stop being willing to treat anybody for free because the laws and regulations are written in such a way that this counts as your new lowest price which is the one the government will pay (eventually, if it decides to pay).
The problem is that with how health insurance is going? Insurance isn't worth the money: what you're getting is effectively a catastrophic policy wrapped up with what may be a decent prescription drug policy, except you're being both sold and charged for a policy that (allegedly) covers distinctly more. If you wanted to avoid the problems of perverse results and incentives, it probably would have been vastly easier and more effective to either start health savings accounts, underwriting charitable clinics, or both.
But that kind of falls under the same reason as why you don't want to have medical records on the cloud--while I can very much assure you that yes, paper records are risky, my own got entirely lost, the privacy risks remain since there's absolutely no requirement for the records going through even the most basic levels of data sanitation or security...and, honestly, you can and almost certainly will get the same kinds of problems with electronic records on top of all the other risks.
It would be cheap and easy to just use a patient ID number on the records kept electronically, with the list that translates the ID numbers to names and contact information kept...not on the cloud, if it's kept electronically. It's a method used in research when you need to balance the anonymity of your research subjects but still be able to do follow-ups, because having the list means you can keep their identities as need-to-know information.
A problem can exist without the most shiny technological solution being the perfect one. The method I mention has been used for decades, if not centuries--though I suspect its earliest adopters were people engaged in espionage and less-than-legal activities.
Actually, from a medical standpoint BMI is a worse than bad measure--it basically assumes you've got a certain bone:fat:muscle ratio, which pretty automatically means it will start saying interesting things if you're not of the correct ancestry and lifestyle...and by lifestyle I mean it was developed to get it roughly okay maybe if your athletic endeavors are along the lines of 'middle manager who occasionally takes a walk for relaxation.' (Correct ancestry is a bit harder to pin down; probably Belgian given where it was developed.)
Oh, and it's utterly useless for kids because they're not even physically scaled-down adults.
Basically, if you're an athlete it's almost certainly going to insist you're morbidly obese, and if you want something that sucks? Try being where you're having trouble keeping a safe distance away from anorexia athletica--which has serious lifetime consequences--and getting people trying to get you to lose weight anyway because they consider the BMI accurate despite any and all evidence.
Yeah, the various bits of news I've heard about it basically made me feel like the whole thing is very much pandering to the Tumblr crowd--I'd not have minded something like an all-female team, but the way they've been selling it makes it feel like they just want to be seen as Feminist, and the sort where that text would be in a pretty feminine script font with blinking and sparkles. I'd have actually been happier it if was the product of blind casting, and in some ways that might have been the best way to do it anyway. Sure, it'd mean you'd have a potentially significant script revision that couldn't be done until you cast people, but it'd not come off as forced and at least mildly exploitative.
Slashdot Mirror
"I once hired for a job that required a security clearance and some deep TCP/IP packet skills. In a year I found -zero- qualified applicants"
You talk about "deep TCP/IP packet skills" as if it was some kind of arcane only the maesters of Antigua can deal with or something like that. Hint: any promisory IT freshman can do that.
So you lost a year worth of opportunity costs because you'd better not train anyone. And somehow that's the "talent pool" fault.
From the sound of it, the actual problem was finding that set of skills in somebody with the clearance at the same time.
This isn't saying that people who already got both don't exist--they may simply be thin enough on the ground that good damn luck finding one who is looking for a job. Certain combinations when you stack them can shoot you from 'unemployable' to 'expect well-paid constant employment, with no trouble switching jobs.'
Now, if your problem is finding 'BA/BS in foo with experience'? If everybody wants 'BA/BS in foo with experience' and you don't actually have a reason to require experience? Then you might be better off giving a few people with that degree a chance at the experience and keeping the best one...if your area's laws permit that and you can afford to make the deal.
In some places, firing a person is enough hassle that it isn't worth hiring somebody in hopes they'll shape up well--and if the local laws may not allow you to may somebody's employment conditional on them getting those "deep TCP/IP packet skills" you say are so easy to gain? Then they might well decide they don't really need to get those skills, or be that rare person for whom it just never makes any sense whatsoever. (The clearance is probably the harder thing to get, so it's the one that you probably want to insist on the person having whatever else...and it might well be that having deep TCP/IP packet skills is the tell on if someone is turning up with the skillset that means you can train them with the time+resources you have.)
This is bad at both ends--I don't expect to be able to talk an employer into giving me a chance to fill in the gaps in the skills they want and I have already if they're going to be stuck with me whatever, so I'm probably not going to get a job if there's always a hole.
Where I lived, there was a long period during which you didn't want a TWC installer coming in and working unsupervised. They are (were?) generally subcontractors and at that time the quality varied very wildly--and unless you had already weird cable, you really had little chance of knowing the quality of who was going to get dispatched to you...and the bad ones did more than just leave you with no working cable.
This is a legitimate reason for a landlord to ban them: "This company's installers have a tendency to do unnecessary property damage, and while some may be competent or better there's no way to ensure we get any of those."
The better solution of course is for the companies to do what the local TWC did: start actually being careful about ensuring your installers are actually competent...
Long-term, it ought to be possible by now to get it so a cable or satellite installer doesn't need to do much alteration to the building's structure--have it built into the walls like electrical wiring, so an installer's simply dealing with plugging things in, with all new lines being outside the building...which would solve the problems bad installers cause, eventually.
Historically, that is pretty much normal; talking about the known cases of colonialism by non-White cultures is a split between not wanting to mess with the eeeevil Whites narrative and part of the dark side of embracing the noble savage myth...especially the strain of it that defines 'savage' as 'not European.'
Me? I learned about these things because I found European history boring and actually did things like look for people willing to talk about stuff like China's long history of racism that makes Europeans look like newcomers, and the Native American tribes that poof'd because their neighboring tribe(s) didn't like them...but did like their land and sometimes their women. (This is the sort of thing that is part of finding good non-Eurocentric histories. Homegrown African racism doesn't take much digging; see for example the apparently still ongoing war in Darfur.)
Europeans didn't invent this stuff, they just steal the credit...as usual.
Personally? I think that it's a shame MLK Jr's dream is being discarded because there is way too much benefit to be gotten from identity politics. Complain about racism if the exact same damn crime gets a different sentence and the sole difference is completely and entirely the offender's race... Otherwise, consider veeery carefully all the racism involved in the idea that African-Americans are the only people who commit certain offenses before pushing forward on this. (Foo While Black is not an offense.)
I think it's generally more a distaste for the entire model, where you sell a 'license' instead--if this was being sold as a service instead, from the start, feelings probably would be different than if you had been told you were buying a game which implies you, well, own a copy of the game.
There have been several games I was interested in that were upfront about being in this style...and I didn't buy the ones who were priced too high for what is essentially ephemeral no matter how long it's kept running. (At least one I'd have paid distinctly more for a downloadable edition, too.)
A few, admittedly, I'd have bought if I had thought that indie servers would be a thing--and I suspect that releasing the codebase as part of sunsetting a game, especially a popular one, might be worth it for the customer goodwill. Properly downloadable content also works, but the goal should be keeping customer goodwill and not sending the message that every single game that goes out your door may be shut down by you without even an effort to let you keep offline play.
How much you can sell a game for does depend on how long the buyer feels confident of getting to put those 500 hours of play in--and you may limit your audience to hardcore enough players that they can be sure of managing that in a month, if you have even things like this game which shouldn't need the server entering coasterdom...
Our universities put lots of women through STEM majors. But when they graduate they go back to China, where they can build big things.
Or they don't give us many employment options outside of 'mad scientist,' 'evil overlord,' and 'teacher.' I'm currently teaching but I'm starting to think finding a project whose goal is to cause world peace (by killing everybody) may be more moral.
And why exactly do we need to "limit the number of cars on the road"? Is that in the consumers best interest?
The short answer is no, it isn't in the consumers' best interests, and it may never have been either--the medallion system is in fact often literally the textbook example given for rent-seeking. NPR briefly covers the topic with a mention on the negative consequences to consumers, while the Boston Globe covers why the medallion system ought to be scrapped by answering your question in detail while covering some of the abuses of drivers the medallion system creates as well.
I would expect it to be set to be rather insistent about going nowhere if it detects at start-up to not be in a safe condition to drive--in fact, I'd pay extra for one that would do that while giving me a properly informative notice because the side of the road is a lousy place to be stuck waiting for roadside assistance. (A properly informative notice should give me enough information that I can make the proper calls and my mechanic will be able to actually start getting set up before the tow truck gets there. Or I will know straight off to skip the tow, my car is a crime scene. Either is good.)
As for routine maintenance... Skipping that is more expensive than not, and I see no reason to keep the car from keeping you updated. If we're going to make cars self-driving we should have them able to tell you when it's truly time for an oil change or other basics. In fact, I'd consider this all more useful than it trying to drive itself: I'd prefer a car that can tell me that it's brakes work when I turn it on over one that will drive itself off cheerfully assuming they do.
You agreed to allow MS to run the update utility, whose function is to update your PC. Honestly, since you can disable this "service" and it has been a policy to disable it everywhere I've been since the NT days, I'm not sure why you're whining now. This certainly has not been a secret. I personally don't see why anyone would allow an update service to effectively "own" their computer. MS has been notorious for doing things other than patching bugs in their security updates.
MS has decided that the appropriate response to people recognizing that "service" as at best dysfunctional is to make it no longer something that is particularly easily disabled in the consumer edition of Win10.
The bigger picture is often a gamble. In the short term just paying off this one individual may be the easy claim, where they are on record on just not bothering to fight it. However if this sparks a bunch of claims then Microsoft may change its tatic.
The Woman didn't "Win" the lawsuit. They settled to avoid setting a legal precedent.
Settling to avoid setting a legal precedent here would--for the exact reasons you cited--be a strong indication that they expected the precedent to not be in their favor. With the shift to requiring you accept upgrades and patches with Win10, and how the rollout is going, a binding precedent here could make it very risky to fight future suits; consider how MS has rolled out Win10, and the fact it now requires most users accept whatever patches it shoves out on patch day.
Now consider what it'd mean if, by forcing those patches down people's throats, it now is financially responsible for any damage those patches do...
How you go about labeling it as extreme can effectively clamp down on utterly essential criticism--when it's something like the third gender person is suggesting someone probably need to see a mental health professional about the whole Apache helicopter thing or an open Islamist saying those guys are too over the top about jihad, they're very likely right. It can also prevent important discussions about how it may not matter if some people's overly-delicate feelings are being hurt, what's being asserted may be at its core a mass of privilege, entitlement, wishful thinking, and the implicit or explicit belief that...well...everybody is equal but some people are more equal than others, to paraphrase Orwell.
It is entirely possible for the censors to not only undergo radicalization and see all opposition to what they see as obviously Right and Good as eeeevil extremism, this could happen without them even noticing it.
Just because it's being done by private companies does not make censorship have no chilling effect, especially given the nature of the platforms they control.
Make the companies cover bonding their drivers and the (very expensive) insurance for their fleet, which will be defined by it being avalible for hire through them and not by who holds the vehicles' titles.
That adds another layer of protection for drivers and the public, and ensures that the companies will make an active effort to not have excessive vehicles on the road--have you looked at how much the insurance costs?
Actually setting a numerical cap by law or regulation benefits only those established taxi services who can afford to & will bribe politicians and the politicians who get the bribes. I want a system that protects drivers from exploitation and the public safety without increasing corruption.
Given that the taxi medallion system is pretty much governmental corruption in several different forms in its origin at least, I am all for hitting the reset button--though buying out the medallions at market value might be prohibitively expensive in some places. I'd favor starting with reforms targeting the systemic economic abuse of for-hire drivers and sunsetting the medallions instead.
Public safety and driver rights would be best served if medallions got replaced with a form of direct licensure that just means you're eligible to work as a for-hire driver...and is no longer used to cap numbers. (If caps are to exist at all, do it at the company level.)
Offhand, no, because with search results it actually should be a basic part of good practices to have transparency about things like how you're shoving certain results under the rug for Reasons other than 'not useful to person searching.' This isn't currently being promised, and I'd actually want some mechanisms in place to be able to get answers if it looks like they've effectively thrown their weight behind specific politicians and/or agendas. Once again, I'm not as much bothered by the idea that they might--what is concerning is that all the current evidence is that they will not be open and honest about doing so.
While I do prefer my search engines be apolitical, I'd rather have an honestly political one of any type over one which pretends to be to be apolitical.
The issue here is the laws being passed; many of the ones cited here seem to be a form of rent-seeking or at least are that in effect, and in this case it sounds like a lot of law enforcement time and money is going into chasing down a modern version of a ride-sharing bulletin board for which the laws are fundamentally impractical and probably not intended for. It is not likely to be financially in the position to push back against the inherent abuse of power in the targeting...
Commercial ride-sharing services should have at least some of the same legal responsibilities as traditional taxi services. Ones that are for-tips? Just require they have proof of identity for all users and records of arranged rides, that will be provided to police with warrant--possibly with no warrant needed to get a yes or no answer to "Did J Doe arrange a ride on this date using your service?" (All the warrant should do is be proof that law enforcement has a good enough reason to want the real name and personal info of whomever J Doe was with, and only get then the specified as relevant papers.)
Unless you start with the scenario being 'brakes? what brakes?' this covers the major moral problem here--and even then, the question of why an autonomous vehicle manages to suffer unexpected and sudden brake failure needs to be covered. Also left is the question of why it cannot hit the horn and trust the pedestrians to scatter, since it's reasonable to expect that the car is going to be evidence of some sort and thus it's desirable to preserve it as intact as possible--if it's due to a manufacturing defect, detection might well save a significant number of lives.
The problem is finding and getting one--it was outright easier for me to buy a PS2 than find a PS3 with backwards compatibility, though that really is something I'd have kept forward since it is likely a cheap way to get the system a large catalog right out the door...and porting should be relatively cheaper long-term too. (Sure, it might hurt sales of ports in theory, but if it's not worth updating in any way then it isn't worth porting either.l
More importantly, definitions' sources should be carefully evaluated when it comes to claiming what is and is not a civil right. I've seen some rather...creative claims that ultimately come down to 'I have the right to be given what I want with others footing the bill'--essentially, the right to be Peter Pan, with government as your (sugar) daddy.
I am in the bio field and know somebody whose athletic career was pretty much destroyed by anorexia athletica. (I suggest you try looking it up.)
Also, I'm still trying to figure out how you've managed to miss the whole problem with girls becoming more and more prone to eating disorders; these all have long-term serious health consequences even when they're not fatal, and a decent part of this is because the body image girls are pushed to adopt are ones that owe a lot to models who may well be underweight even for their build & image manipulation. It's generally most comfortable if you're female to not have people harassing you for not being supermodel-picture thin.
If you have forgotten, this whole discussion is about if somebody's should trust their daughter's medical records to the cloud, and this thread traces back to somebody pointing out that adservs might pull out her BMI and start shoving ads for diet aids at her.
I don't know if you have ever noticed but adservs are quite stupid, and in my experience the diets you see ads for online are pretty reliably snake oil--they might work, but about the safest thing that'd cause you to lose weight at that rate would be tapeworms, plus bad dieting practices can wreck your metabolism for life.
And this is how I know you're not much into biomedical sciences, since I'm generally not comfortable with keeping in use a measure that relies on the law of large numbers when that use contributes to people developing a fetishistic attachment to using it on an individual level...and if you don't understand the problem, you might want to read up a bit on error in statistics.
As for the rest--if you're fine with the process and have somebody trained to use it, calipers have serious perks (how your body distributes fat has health implications), immersing in water is the most practical way of being absolutely sure of the body's density, and you've been ignoring my point that there's serious problems with having people who are not licensed to practice medicine pressuring people who are not be obese to lose weight. The solution to the obesity epidemic should not be fueling the eating disorder epidemic.
Well, since I presume you want citations you can view instead of textbooks from bio classes... I'm going to start you with a news article that covers such things as the fact that even its inventor said it was not for use with individuals, then direct you to a a medical news site that gives some of the alternates and covers the history, along with a site that has how to work a couple of the alternates. There's quite a bit of scientific lit on the whole topic of its accuracy and validity; you're on your own there, but yes, both things are different and are important for a measure to be much good.
As for the easy-to-understand rule of thumb? The waist-to-hip ratio is probably is the most simple one to work, but you actually have to take out a tape measure----natural waist to widest part of hips; greater than 0.85 for women and 1 for men is usually given as the mark for obesity. I prefer flat-out body fat measuring, and the one that just tweaks the exponent and constant can be found in its raw form and in a calculator form on the list I gave. (That said, I think my doctors just eyeballed my waist to hip ratio, considered my build, and the fact that I tend to forget to eat...)
Really, the thing that ought to be surprising isn't that the BMI is not a good measure on the individual level but that, over a sufficiently large population, it is safe to assume everybody is a white adult male office worker.
Apparently /. mobile edition has a hotkey to post without asking questions I somehow stumbled across...
You do realize you just described the behavior of the Federal government as pathological, right?
The legislature is, arguably, on balance. It's hard to make such a call on the other branches; they are such a mixed bag.
No arguments there, really, though I'd say that simply failing to address the issue is sufficient to make it merely a question of what the pathology in question is.
Don't know what insurance you have, but mine pays out pretty well for non-catastrophic, non-prescription purposes -- to our mutual benefit. I don't particularly mind paying more in premiums than I receive in services some years, the security is worth it. They probably saved themselves from substantial risk of treating me for a life-threatening illness years earlier than they now face.
Since my employer doesn't buy me insurance, I got to look through my pick of plans and I paid attention to what gets covered and what the deductibles are, and most had the deductibles high enough that functionally it would be catastrophic coverage--except, really, I'd not be able to afford the premiums by the time it actually started covering much outside of the prescription benefits... I'm fine with the idea of paying more in premiums than I get in services most years; I just don't want to be told that a policy that is very unlikely to cover any services any year is a full health insurance plan.
It's kind of like getting sold stake and being served chicken--you might not be against chicken, but if you wanted it you'd have ordered it, and at chicken prices instead of stake prices.
Simply anonymizing data sets is no longer sufficient. There's so much data out there that medical records can be linked to individuals with a high degree of certainty.
The simple methods of anonymizing data sets certainly aren't sufficient. I know because I've been around enough people doing biomedical research that there's protocols developed for that, too--but honestly I don't expect even the bare bones anonymizing protocols, as the consequences for data breeches for those being entrusted with this are functionally nonexistent.
Basically? This has all the same problems as pretty much every single other type of personal data: there's no positive obligation to secure them, so bet on next to nil until it costs them to not secure it.
Oh, I've never had anybody who is actually licensed to practice medicine telling me to lose weight based on my BMI. I have, however, had a lot of morons who aren't the least bit qualified or licensed doing it. I'm not going to attempt to guess how much of this is because the BMI is an antique and outmoded metric.
I will admit that it's apparently still pretty good when you're trying to analyze an adult population of sufficient size for the law of large numbers to give you a hand, but even then we've better equations that don't make weird assumptions about how the human body is made up...some of which have as the sole additional thing you need to calculate being the ability to do math problems that include decimal numbers. Ultimately, it's like a spherical cow: it's a highly simplified model that is useful only in very specific abstract and/or statistical circumstances, generally not at all wise to apply outside of those circumstances, and almost certain to get replaced with a better model...while people outside of the scientific field it's from will hold onto it beyond any reason describable to those who are in the associated field. (Seriously you can get vastly more accurate results as easily as using a few more digits, what is wrong with you people!?)
The justification for the health insurance mandate is that society isn't willing to let the uninsured die.
And even in the self-serving viewpoint, this still applies, as care for the uninsured drains the important resource of people who feel morally obliged to help the sick or wounded for everyone, including premium payers. Except for the pathological cases, most people get this and don't think that punishing doctors and nurses to de-incentivise charity in the medical occupation is a worthwhile societal endeavor. So below a certain baseline of care, it is indeed like automotive liability insurance.
You do realize you just described the behavior of the Federal government as pathological, right? If you choose to accept Medicare/Medicaid, you actually pretty much have to stop being willing to treat anybody for free because the laws and regulations are written in such a way that this counts as your new lowest price which is the one the government will pay (eventually, if it decides to pay).
The problem is that with how health insurance is going? Insurance isn't worth the money: what you're getting is effectively a catastrophic policy wrapped up with what may be a decent prescription drug policy, except you're being both sold and charged for a policy that (allegedly) covers distinctly more. If you wanted to avoid the problems of perverse results and incentives, it probably would have been vastly easier and more effective to either start health savings accounts, underwriting charitable clinics, or both.
But that kind of falls under the same reason as why you don't want to have medical records on the cloud--while I can very much assure you that yes, paper records are risky, my own got entirely lost, the privacy risks remain since there's absolutely no requirement for the records going through even the most basic levels of data sanitation or security...and, honestly, you can and almost certainly will get the same kinds of problems with electronic records on top of all the other risks.
It would be cheap and easy to just use a patient ID number on the records kept electronically, with the list that translates the ID numbers to names and contact information kept...not on the cloud, if it's kept electronically. It's a method used in research when you need to balance the anonymity of your research subjects but still be able to do follow-ups, because having the list means you can keep their identities as need-to-know information.
A problem can exist without the most shiny technological solution being the perfect one. The method I mention has been used for decades, if not centuries--though I suspect its earliest adopters were people engaged in espionage and less-than-legal activities.
Actually, from a medical standpoint BMI is a worse than bad measure--it basically assumes you've got a certain bone:fat:muscle ratio, which pretty automatically means it will start saying interesting things if you're not of the correct ancestry and lifestyle...and by lifestyle I mean it was developed to get it roughly okay maybe if your athletic endeavors are along the lines of 'middle manager who occasionally takes a walk for relaxation.' (Correct ancestry is a bit harder to pin down; probably Belgian given where it was developed.)
Oh, and it's utterly useless for kids because they're not even physically scaled-down adults.
Basically, if you're an athlete it's almost certainly going to insist you're morbidly obese, and if you want something that sucks? Try being where you're having trouble keeping a safe distance away from anorexia athletica--which has serious lifetime consequences--and getting people trying to get you to lose weight anyway because they consider the BMI accurate despite any and all evidence.
Yeah, the various bits of news I've heard about it basically made me feel like the whole thing is very much pandering to the Tumblr crowd--I'd not have minded something like an all-female team, but the way they've been selling it makes it feel like they just want to be seen as Feminist, and the sort where that text would be in a pretty feminine script font with blinking and sparkles. I'd have actually been happier it if was the product of blind casting, and in some ways that might have been the best way to do it anyway. Sure, it'd mean you'd have a potentially significant script revision that couldn't be done until you cast people, but it'd not come off as forced and at least mildly exploitative.