Government hospitals (like VA hospitals) have NO money to even fix aging equipment, let alone buy new or have fancy things like IT.
HUH ????
The VAs electronic health system is called VistA, and it is the EMR in the largest health system in the US. It covers all veterans, it is used nationwide, and it is so prevalent that most everyone who talks about standardizing medical records and medical data all talk about matching the VistA system in doing so.
The nugget of this is not explained really in the article:
Cost is *NOT* the barrier, but "lucrative business model hidden" what they mean is the intrinsic structure of how medical care is delivered and who gets to be responsible for care delivery.
In my opinion, refusal to openly adopt electronic medical records is a direct result of overt protectionism by physicians and surgeons. For good reason, society has left medical care in the hands of competent, trained people. However, competency and training has been industrialized to only 1 kind of person, with one kind of standardized training: the MD, and basically no one else, regardless of training or ability is allowed by license to practice medicine, or reap the financial rewards of such extreme responsibility. NPs have wiggled their way in a bit and DOs are close, but basically no one else.
When physicians are required to interact in electronic, shared systems, they can't lord over all the responsibility in care environments, and then they won't be the only ones who run all the medical care and take home most all the money. They will lose their self-created and maintained monopoly on responsibility for care.
Anyone who has worked a hospital environment learns in the first few weeks exactly what the MD care delivery scheme is all about.
Frankly I think most observers have extremely little information about what is real and reliable half way around the world.
The most reliable things I've seen so far are the large events, and the events reported independently in a similar way by several different sources: there was an election, it has led to unrest. One group in power is now in rising conflict with another group that wants power. Several people have died. Really beyond that, assertions of any particular thing day-to-day are pretty unreliable for me, and I've been reading and following this pretty closely.
As to whether a foreign power is involved, I think that is an extremely difficult question to answer as a remote consumer of "news" and Internet reports. Any group or nation powerful enough to be involved inside Iran now would have as a prerequisite the ability to control tightly the access and dissemination of information internally and the stories released to the public, plus would probably have a desire for secrecy regarding their involvement.
Given recent history of multiple invasions in the region, the high value of resources in the region, plus historical precedent for outside regime support (specifically in Iran) - on what basis of reliable fact does one base the conclusion of foreign involvement or non involvement in the current demonstrations and issues in Iran? What do you consider to be the most reliable sources in the current fog of conflict and disinformation? Twitter? Some random Blogger? CNN? Your government? People you know personally?
My only point is this: Even if there were outside groups directly influencing events, how would people know about it? I don't think they would.
Is it just me, or do some people have a whole lot of time on their hands?
professional gaming? twittering? blogging? arguing over who gets to love whom? discussing how the US president swats a fly?
Now, discussing the name origins of characters that appear in video games??!?
Don't we have a some real problems to address, like, oh, we're going to run out of easily available water and energy, and the environment is going to change so much that about a billion people will lose their home over the next 15 years?
In this news, we see the real issue: That the slippery slope of making some information illegal is too steep. The primary issue that free global flow of information will do is dramatically reduce the need for centralized government power at the country level, in many ways. If people allow their governments to start making some information illegal, even for good reasons, then the norm of censorship will be accepted and expanded.
Frankly, the main driver behind making such images illegal seems to be that we don't have the resources or the effort to catch people who actually harm children - so instead they make the next closest thing police *can* find illegal. This is lazy police work.
I believe that a free and open society would work best if there were no restrictions on *access* to information once it is available. Laws would only restrict behaviors: The bits are not the issue, human behavior is. Thus, no image or stream of bits would ever be illegal (as I see it), only *actions* that people take that directly result in harm to other people. This would make the job of police much harder, yes, but the benefits become obvious quickly when reading this news.
No one yet has provided me a compelling argument for why we need to use electronic voting.
It seems to be simply a combination of techno-fetish with an illogical push toward "the new thing" which someone has sold as "better".
Yes, it is hard to conduct an election. Making machines do the counting would reduce the human effort, but the cost way is too high. While I was open to the concept initially, the graft and fraud uncovered leaves me with no confidence any longer that the machines in an election booth will enable a fair election, and thus, a just political system.
However, literary expression and W3C validation result from different kinds of rule sets: the latter being rigidly logical, the former relying on implicit assumptions and unexplained connections to create an effect while the receiver parses the input. Or in short: that was a feature.
It is this complexity: how breaking the rules in specific ways leads to effective results in a complex messy world that leads me to believe that even in the bast-case scenarios of the soon impending artificial intelligence technology explosion, good ole' wet human reasoning still has a long foreseeable future of value.
Wasn't VeriSign the one who set up the brain-dead system where now we all get to pay them (or a few connected competitors) for the privilege to share secure content with https?
I hope we do that again for DNS servers!
</snark>
But seriously, what's the busines model for maintaining the certs?
How do they plan to handle legitimate file sharing, e.g. content released without a fee or supported by voluntary sponsorship?
Do they plan to tax that too?
If they plan to handle it differently, how will they assess the legal status of the bits being shared? If they plan to handle it the same, that seems grossly unfair to the artists and independent producers.
it would seem this might make for the most challenging AI - one that learns and mimics good human players. I have yet to see any games that can do this well
Your points are well made: but it is typically privacy protection that will allow people to voice opinions and facts without persecution, not anonymity as I wrote it above, nor as most people understand the word, "anonymous". You're points strike exactly at the subtle difference between the two ideas.
In your examples these people were not (strictly speaking) anonymous, but rather their identity was hidden from the public and from those who would harm them. Some people did know the identity of the heroes you mention, and those who knew could not and were not compelled to reveal the identity of the person: it is for exactly this and other examples that we need strong(er) *privacy* protections. Journalists who are protected by the courts when asked to reveal sources or whistle blowers, for example. Publishers who can and do publish works by pseudonym is another example.
Anonymity typically means that no one knows (or can know) who the actor or author is because the ratio of possible sources to the total group is too high to dig through and find the source. This is a fundamentally different case to when a known person is doing something dangerous and others are enabled and empowered (even expected) to protect that person's identity.
Privacy is the ability to protect ones personal information from others - preventing others from accessing information about yourself.
Anonymity is removing information which could identify a person as a specific individual from a group.
These two ideas are close, but subtly different. Privacy can be an absolute concept - preventing information access and use for certain information can be binary: either others can access it or not. Anonymity is almost never absolute: simply knowing a human posted text has anonymity to 1 in about 6.7 Billion(ish). If you know any other information, the degree of anonymity goes down: Posted online: 1 in 2 Billion, in English: 1 in 400million. A male in the US implies 1 in about 190Million. A person who lives a particular zip code: anonymous to about 1 in 20 thousand. Examining the content one exposes: a person in Chicago, who is interested in the Chicago Cubs, and opposes the fare increase -- digging into details like that can make a person anonymous to about 1 in a few hundred with enough work.
Asserting anything about anonymity must include the idea that anonymity is always a sliding scale, and depends a lot on every bit of information a person chooses to put out into the world.
I do *not* think anonymity is a right, nor should we try to enforce it or preserve it. Anonymity is an anachronism in recent human history. People act better when they know they are not anonymous.
Privacy protections on the other hand are very important. Personal information sets, socially defined, that one chooses to protect and chooses to prevent others from being able to access of use once they have it are extremely important, and should be promoted and protected strongly.
We offer a service to Content Creators who license digital material with share-friendly licenses (like Creative Commons) and distribute the full quality content. We do not charge Content Creators for this service. We also offer to optionally collect sponsorship for the Content Creator (sent to them by check quarterly), and now (just recently) support external sponsorship links to Paypal, Google Checkout or other services.
Sure - I've posted ideas many times, and suggested them to WPF, but the levels of red tape are absurd. The vast majority of people don't even know what a wiki really is, much less how to compare historical versions to see how old certain lines are; but yes, I'm aware of the history tab - and for the mid 1990's when wikis were developed, that was great. We can do much better now.
off the top of my head this morning:
Stop assuming each page is a linear series of edits. Use a branch and merge model or a hub and spoke model like git.
Create explicit reputation systems for editors, based both on real-world credentials and on quantitative metrics of WP editing history. Drop the assumption that democracy by plurality works (it doesn't) and start creating clear incentives for people with experience and wisdom to contribute.
Create a new view method for handling high-edit-rate sections of articles and recent edits, specifically in how the information is displayed to warn readers that sentences or paragraphs have been recently changed. Given the rich and interesting nature of how the data is collected, that it is displayed by default in plain text is missing a huge amount of very valuable info for the reader.
Give up the assumption that only notable things have pages. Let everything people want have pages, just don't organize them in a way that gives them all an equal level of priority and publicity. As it is now, there is only 1 publication set of WP pages, and all pages are equivalent in that set. No need for that, really.
Don't publish all pages to the public, have sets of "preliminary" or lower quality pages available to logged in users only that over time will mature into public pages.
Start charging an optional small, monthly or annual fee, to sponsor the project, adjusted in amount for the economics of the country from which you access the site. Put messages on the site (not ads) reminding people that only through sponsorship does the service remain free - remove the messages if people pay for access.
The basic premise of the project evolved rapidly as the encyclopedia was developed in the early years- creating rules, policies and a vibrant and effective community; and now is a massive and globe-changing entity. However, to remain relevant, the site and the ideas that drive it must continue to evolve. To me, as a slightly disinterested outside observer, it seems that Wikipedia hasn't changed what they do or how they do it now for several years.
There is *so much* they could do to make explicit and transparent the edits, the timeliness of added information, and many other things - to handle issues like this - but they are not. Why?
Farmers are a tough one for me to pool together into other wasteful spending areas. While paying farmers to not grow food is absurd, there is a shared common need for food production that is more complex than the immediacy and commercial nature of market forces alone. If done correctly, I support subsidies to small, successful farms to maintain food production diversity, and to maintain food production capacity for the nation - *even if* the market does not support those same factors. The disconnect in food distribution means that consumers have no connection to where their food comes from, nor do they have functional incentives to purchase in patterns that will ensure future healthy food supplies. Someone has to keep tabs on the big picture of where the nation's food is coming from and if the entities that produce that food are sustainable; that should be a function of a government, though I'm not sure the US federal government really has this as its mission wrt food.
No person, country, or industry deserves to be saddled with the name of a deadly infectious disease that happens by random evolutionary chance.
We have a similar problem with random tropical storms that can eventually turn deadly, and we have in place standard, non-offensive naming system. It uses an annual system with alpha-ordered names. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone_naming
Given the ever-growing global population and the *inevitable* concomitant increase in pandemic diseases, we will eventually need to come up with preemptive arbitrary unoffensive names like we do for storms.
Get the WHO or some robust international group to make a set of arbitrary, alpha-ordered, gender-unbiased names, and any time one reaches pandemic stage 4 (or some stage of early but serious global problem), assign the next name.
Like:
Arthur Flu Betty Stomach Bug Carl Flu Denise Spotty Fever Eric Virus Florence Worms
"bandwidth" is just a fiction created to pay for expenses in (expensive) infrastructure with defined capacity.
The whole debate about "bandwidth" costs is a farce - because the marginal cost for additional bits is near *zero*. huge portion of the cost is hardware and sunk costs in maintenance and labor, with a very small (marginal) portion in power. For those companies with the tools and access to provide connectivity, selling the "bandwidth" story is easier than trying to explain they have capital costs and debt to cover and salaries of employees to support.
actually meeting ones need is very different than being the best choice in a poor set of proffered options. equating popularity with applicability is a weak link at best in the real world, or simply a naive troll attempt.
typically things are "popular" because they are promoted heavily, people are creatures of habit, and most are highly susceptible to marketing methods
Regarding your opinion, I disagree: Comic Sans is a bad font. Typeface designers, graphic designers, and most people with good taste and a trained eye for design all agree (go talk to a bunch of RISD graduates or typeface designers). In this case CS was not marketed - it has just been chosen often by untrained people who don't really understand the effect of their choice.
As for your other examples, they are bad too: unskilled music, unhealthy food, and insecure operating system combined with predatory monopolistic business practices resulting in lack of choice. Everyone has an opinion, perhaps we'll just disagree.
Your post misinterpreted my position, attributed statements and beliefs to me I do not agree with, and then attacked me personally for the position you ascribed to me: "nut job", "idiot", "worst excuse for a scientist", "religious nut", "scientologist", "silly", and "do[ing]... retarded shit". Um... bad day there? The ad hominem attacks belie the weakness of the position. Several points you make are generally correct, if maybe a bit ivory-tower, but I'm not interested in a point by point discussion with you - not worth it.
I'd suggest you go to college, go get a science degree, get a job teaching science, get funding, do science for a while, do peer review, publish... actually go do it, or just pick up a copy of Thomas Kuhn and read it until you understand it.
It is so sad that people even allow "creationism" as a debate still. Get a real spine and tell these people to shut up and leave the room.
Here, these words will help: "Collective, viral mental illness" "Collective, viral mental illness" "Collective, viral mental illness"
(keep repeating it...)
They need treatment and counseling to address their illness. There was no virgin birth. There was no loaves and fishes feeding thousands. There was no man who came back to life. There was no garden of Eden. It is grossly ridiculous to discuss the world as 6000 years old. They are stories! There was no placement of fossils to test our "faith". And most of all, we have zero observations to support the story of a sentient creator. Personally, I don't know if there is a God, but collectively teaching blatant falsehoods should be completely unacceptable and called as such every single time.
Loudly.
Men wrote the bible. It was written long after the historical figure "Jesus of Nazareth" died. Men created the church, every church. There is absolutely no space for discussion with "creation scientists". Those with a straight face who "teach" such extreme views, (see for example here (if you can stomach it without vomiting): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_CLIGJW6Ic ) are *mentally ill* and should be offered treatment.
Even if a large group of people are deluded, they are still deluded.
The beauty of share-friendly licenses is that in every case the license provisions allow for verbatim copies. Other restrictions and rights may exist, but at a minimum you are allowed to keep and share a copy of the information.
So no, as long as you can use the information how you want, you do not need an expensive mobile data plan. Get a cheap USB stick or a flash drive+headphones (an ipod) and play away!
Slashdot Mirror
Government hospitals (like VA hospitals) have NO money to even fix aging equipment, let alone buy new or have fancy things like IT.
HUH ????
The VAs electronic health system is called VistA, and it is the EMR in the largest health system in the US. It covers all veterans, it is used nationwide, and it is so prevalent that most everyone who talks about standardizing medical records and medical data all talk about matching the VistA system in doing so.
The nugget of this is not explained really in the article:
Cost is *NOT* the barrier, but "lucrative business model hidden" what they mean is the intrinsic structure of how medical care is delivered and who gets to be responsible for care delivery.
In my opinion, refusal to openly adopt electronic medical records is a direct result of overt protectionism by physicians and surgeons. For good reason, society has left medical care in the hands of competent, trained people. However, competency and training has been industrialized to only 1 kind of person, with one kind of standardized training: the MD, and basically no one else, regardless of training or ability is allowed by license to practice medicine, or reap the financial rewards of such extreme responsibility. NPs have wiggled their way in a bit and DOs are close, but basically no one else.
When physicians are required to interact in electronic, shared systems, they can't lord over all the responsibility in care environments, and then they won't be the only ones who run all the medical care and take home most all the money. They will lose their self-created and maintained monopoly on responsibility for care.
Anyone who has worked a hospital environment learns in the first few weeks exactly what the MD care delivery scheme is all about.
Frankly I think most observers have extremely little information about what is real and reliable half way around the world.
The most reliable things I've seen so far are the large events, and the events reported independently in a similar way by several different sources: there was an election, it has led to unrest. One group in power is now in rising conflict with another group that wants power. Several people have died. Really beyond that, assertions of any particular thing day-to-day are pretty unreliable for me, and I've been reading and following this pretty closely.
As to whether a foreign power is involved, I think that is an extremely difficult question to answer as a remote consumer of "news" and Internet reports. Any group or nation powerful enough to be involved inside Iran now would have as a prerequisite the ability to control tightly the access and dissemination of information internally and the stories released to the public, plus would probably have a desire for secrecy regarding their involvement.
Given recent history of multiple invasions in the region, the high value of resources in the region, plus historical precedent for outside regime support (specifically in Iran) - on what basis of reliable fact does one base the conclusion of foreign involvement or non involvement in the current demonstrations and issues in Iran? What do you consider to be the most reliable sources in the current fog of conflict and disinformation? Twitter? Some random Blogger? CNN? Your government? People you know personally?
My only point is this: Even if there were outside groups directly influencing events, how would people know about it? I don't think they would.
Is it just me, or do some people have a whole lot of time on their hands?
professional gaming?
twittering?
blogging?
arguing over who gets to love whom?
discussing how the US president swats a fly?
Now, discussing the name origins of characters that appear in video games??!?
Don't we have a some real problems to address, like, oh, we're going to run out of easily available water and energy, and the environment is going to change so much that about a billion people will lose their home over the next 15 years?
I don't get it.
In this news, we see the real issue: That the slippery slope of making some information illegal is too steep. The primary issue that free global flow of information will do is dramatically reduce the need for centralized government power at the country level, in many ways. If people allow their governments to start making some information illegal, even for good reasons, then the norm of censorship will be accepted and expanded.
Frankly, the main driver behind making such images illegal seems to be that we don't have the resources or the effort to catch people who actually harm children - so instead they make the next closest thing police *can* find illegal. This is lazy police work.
I believe that a free and open society would work best if there were no restrictions on *access* to information once it is available. Laws would only restrict behaviors: The bits are not the issue, human behavior is. Thus, no image or stream of bits would ever be illegal (as I see it), only *actions* that people take that directly result in harm to other people. This would make the job of police much harder, yes, but the benefits become obvious quickly when reading this news.
No one yet has provided me a compelling argument for why we need to use electronic voting.
It seems to be simply a combination of techno-fetish with an illogical push toward "the new thing" which someone has sold as "better".
Yes, it is hard to conduct an election. Making machines do the counting would reduce the human effort, but the cost way is too high. While I was open to the concept initially, the graft and fraud uncovered leaves me with no confidence any longer that the machines in an election booth will enable a fair election, and thus, a just political system.
LOL
touché - fantastically self referential!
However, literary expression and W3C validation result from different kinds of rule sets: the latter being rigidly logical, the former relying on implicit assumptions and unexplained connections to create an effect while the receiver parses the input.
Or in short: that was a feature.
It is this complexity: how breaking the rules in specific ways leads to effective results in a complex messy world that leads me to believe that even in the bast-case scenarios of the soon impending artificial intelligence technology explosion, good ole' wet human reasoning still has a long foreseeable future of value.
Wasn't VeriSign the one who set up the brain-dead system where now we all get to pay them (or a few connected competitors) for the privilege to share secure content with https?
I hope we do that again for DNS servers!
</snark>
But seriously, what's the busines model for maintaining the certs?
How do they plan to handle legitimate file sharing, e.g. content released without a fee or supported by voluntary sponsorship?
Do they plan to tax that too?
If they plan to handle it differently, how will they assess the legal status of the bits being shared?
If they plan to handle it the same, that seems grossly unfair to the artists and independent producers.
could you catalog user actions and use them as possible inputs for your AI?
like this: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1165583&cid=27243769
it would seem this might make for the most challenging AI - one that
learns and mimics good human players. I have yet to see any games
that can do this well
a longer description of Power Factor:
http://www.ee.bgu.ac.il/~instlab/Experiments/05_FlurLamp/PowerFactor1.pdf
Your points are well made: but it is typically privacy protection that will allow people to voice opinions and facts without persecution, not anonymity as I wrote it above, nor as most people understand the word, "anonymous". You're points strike exactly at the subtle difference between the two ideas.
In your examples these people were not (strictly speaking) anonymous, but rather their identity was hidden from the public and from those who would harm them. Some people did know the identity of the heroes you mention, and those who knew could not and were not compelled to reveal the identity of the person: it is for exactly this and other examples that we need strong(er) *privacy* protections. Journalists who are protected by the courts when asked to reveal sources or whistle blowers, for example. Publishers who can and do publish works by pseudonym is another example.
Anonymity typically means that no one knows (or can know) who the actor or author is because the ratio of possible sources to the total group is too high to dig through and find the source. This is a fundamentally different case to when a known person is doing something dangerous and others are enabled and empowered (even expected) to protect that person's identity.
Privacy is the ability to protect ones personal information from others - preventing others from accessing information about yourself.
Anonymity is removing information which could identify a person as a specific individual from a group.
These two ideas are close, but subtly different. Privacy can be an absolute concept - preventing information access and use for certain information can be binary: either others can access it or not. Anonymity is almost never absolute: simply knowing a human posted text has anonymity to 1 in about 6.7 Billion(ish). If you know any other information, the degree of anonymity goes down: Posted online: 1 in 2 Billion, in English: 1 in 400million. A male in the US implies 1 in about 190Million. A person who lives a particular zip code: anonymous to about 1 in 20 thousand. Examining the content one exposes: a person in Chicago, who is interested in the Chicago Cubs, and opposes the fare increase -- digging into details like that can make a person anonymous to about 1 in a few hundred with enough work.
Asserting anything about anonymity must include the idea that anonymity is always a sliding scale, and depends a lot on every bit of information a person chooses to put out into the world.
I do *not* think anonymity is a right, nor should we try to enforce it or preserve it. Anonymity is an anachronism in recent human history. People act better when they know they are not anonymous.
Privacy protections on the other hand are very important. Personal information sets, socially defined, that one chooses to protect and chooses to prevent others from being able to access of use once they have it are extremely important, and should be promoted and protected strongly.
repeat after us, "We the people"
We offer a service to Content Creators who license digital material with share-friendly licenses (like Creative Commons) and distribute the full quality content. We do not charge Content Creators for this service. We also offer to optionally collect sponsorship for the Content Creator (sent to them by check quarterly), and now (just recently) support external sponsorship links to Paypal, Google Checkout or other services.
see http://beta.legaltorrents.com/
Sure - I've posted ideas many times, and suggested them to WPF, but the levels of red tape are absurd. The vast majority of people don't even know what a wiki really is, much less how to compare historical versions to see how old certain lines are; but yes, I'm aware of the history tab - and for the mid 1990's when wikis were developed, that was great. We can do much better now.
off the top of my head this morning:
Stop assuming each page is a linear series of edits. Use a branch and merge model or a hub and spoke model like git.
Create explicit reputation systems for editors, based both on real-world credentials and on quantitative metrics of WP editing history. Drop the assumption that democracy by plurality works (it doesn't) and start creating clear incentives for people with experience and wisdom to contribute.
Create a new view method for handling high-edit-rate sections of articles and recent edits, specifically in how the information is displayed to warn readers that sentences or paragraphs have been recently changed. Given the rich and interesting nature of how the data is collected, that it is displayed by default in plain text is missing a huge amount of very valuable info for the reader.
Give up the assumption that only notable things have pages. Let everything people want have pages, just don't organize them in a way that gives them all an equal level of priority and publicity. As it is now, there is only 1 publication set of WP pages, and all pages are equivalent in that set. No need for that, really.
Don't publish all pages to the public, have sets of "preliminary" or lower quality pages available to logged in users only that over time will mature into public pages.
Start charging an optional small, monthly or annual fee, to sponsor the project, adjusted in amount for the economics of the country from which you access the site. Put messages on the site (not ads) reminding people that only through sponsorship does the service remain free - remove the messages if people pay for access.
Why is Wikipedia no longer innovating?
The basic premise of the project evolved rapidly as the encyclopedia was developed in the early years- creating rules, policies and a vibrant and effective community; and now is a massive and globe-changing entity. However, to remain relevant, the site and the ideas that drive it must continue to evolve. To me, as a slightly disinterested outside observer, it seems that Wikipedia hasn't changed what they do or how they do it now for several years.
There is *so much* they could do to make explicit and transparent the edits, the timeliness of added information, and many other things - to handle issues like this - but they are not. Why?
Farmers are a tough one for me to pool together into other wasteful spending areas. While paying farmers to not grow food is absurd, there is a shared common need for food production that is more complex than the immediacy and commercial nature of market forces alone. If done correctly, I support subsidies to small, successful farms to maintain food production diversity, and to maintain food production capacity for the nation - *even if* the market does not support those same factors. The disconnect in food distribution means that consumers have no connection to where their food comes from, nor do they have functional incentives to purchase in patterns that will ensure future healthy food supplies. Someone has to keep tabs on the big picture of where the nation's food is coming from and if the entities that produce that food are sustainable; that should be a function of a government, though I'm not sure the US federal government really has this as its mission wrt food.
No person, country, or industry deserves to be saddled with the name of a deadly infectious disease that happens by random evolutionary chance.
We have a similar problem with random tropical storms that can eventually turn deadly, and we have in place standard, non-offensive naming system. It uses an annual system with alpha-ordered names.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone_naming
Given the ever-growing global population and the *inevitable* concomitant increase in pandemic diseases, we will eventually need to come up with preemptive arbitrary unoffensive names like we do for storms.
Get the WHO or some robust international group to make a set of arbitrary, alpha-ordered, gender-unbiased names, and any time one reaches pandemic stage 4 (or some stage of early but serious global problem), assign the next name.
Like:
Arthur Flu
Betty Stomach Bug
Carl Flu
Denise Spotty Fever
Eric Virus
Florence Worms
etc ...
"bandwidth" is just a fiction created to pay for expenses in (expensive) infrastructure with defined capacity.
The whole debate about "bandwidth" costs is a farce - because the marginal cost for additional bits is near *zero*. huge portion of the cost is hardware and sunk costs in maintenance and labor, with a very small (marginal) portion in power. For those companies with the tools and access to provide connectivity, selling the "bandwidth" story is easier than trying to explain they have capital costs and debt to cover and salaries of employees to support.
actually meeting ones need is very different than being the best choice in a poor
set of proffered options. equating popularity with applicability is a weak link
at best in the real world, or simply a naive troll attempt.
typically things are "popular" because they are promoted heavily, people are
creatures of habit, and most are highly susceptible to marketing methods
Regarding your opinion, I disagree: Comic Sans is a bad font. Typeface designers,
graphic designers, and most people with good taste and a trained eye for design
all agree (go talk to a bunch of RISD graduates or typeface designers). In this
case CS was not marketed - it has just been chosen often by untrained people who
don't really understand the effect of their choice.
As for your other examples, they are bad too: unskilled music, unhealthy food, and
insecure operating system combined with predatory monopolistic business practices
resulting in lack of choice. Everyone has an opinion, perhaps we'll just disagree.
Your post misinterpreted my position, attributed statements and beliefs to me I do not agree with, and then attacked me personally for the position you ascribed to me: "nut job", "idiot", "worst excuse for a scientist", "religious nut", "scientologist", "silly", and "do[ing]... retarded shit". Um... bad day there? The ad hominem attacks belie the weakness of the position. Several points you make are generally correct, if maybe a bit ivory-tower, but I'm not interested in a point by point discussion with you - not worth it.
I'd suggest you go to college, go get a science degree, get a job teaching science, get funding, do science for a while, do peer review, publish... actually go do it, or just pick up a copy of Thomas Kuhn and read it until you understand it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions
Would you hire a great UI designer and make a brand new layout or skin that is easier to read and navigate?
I have my preferences pared back to skeletal for readability - but makes the site look painfully ugly
It is so sad that people even allow "creationism" as a debate still. Get a real
spine and tell these people to shut up and leave the room.
Here, these words will help:
"Collective, viral mental illness"
"Collective, viral mental illness"
"Collective, viral mental illness"
(keep repeating it...)
They need treatment and counseling to address their illness. There was
no virgin birth. There was no loaves and fishes feeding thousands. There
was no man who came back to life. There was no garden of Eden. It is
grossly ridiculous to discuss the world as 6000 years old. They are stories!
There was no placement of fossils to test our "faith". And most of all, we
have zero observations to support the story of a sentient creator. Personally,
I don't know if there is a God, but collectively teaching blatant falsehoods
should be completely unacceptable and called as such every single time.
Loudly.
Men wrote the bible. It was written long after the historical figure "Jesus
of Nazareth" died. Men created the church, every church. There is absolutely
no space for discussion with "creation scientists". Those with a straight face
who "teach" such extreme views, (see for example here (if you can stomach it
without vomiting): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_CLIGJW6Ic ) are
*mentally ill* and should be offered treatment.
Even if a large group of people are deluded, they are still deluded.
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http://beta.legaltorrents.com/torrents/390-the-best-of-indie-rock-vol-1
http://beta.legaltorrents.com/torrents/393-the-best-of-indie-pop-vol-1
plus lots more on thier site.