However being able to set the thermostat with my phone is excellent.
Really? It may be 'cool' if you feel it is cool to be able to do that kind of things remotely, but how relevant is it in real life that you can control a thermostat or turn on the oven or the lighting from afar? And even if it conveys some benefit, is it valuable enough that you want to pay the price? Which may, incidentally include loss of privacy or perhaps loss of property, if the remote capabilities also allow thieves easier access.
It seems similar to the way that some cars detect rain on the windscreen and turn on the wipers - yeah, cool, but the effort it spares you consists of having to reach some 2 inches for a manual switch - is it worth paying for? It's the kind of things you would accept if they are part of a new car you buy, but you wouldn't go to your garage and pay £500 to get it fitted, would you?
Hmm? One of the things I've never actually managed to understand is, why do people want to pay for access to up to hundreds of tv channels, all showing near-identical programmes, none of which are really worth your time, and of which you are only ever going to watch a few any way? Perhaps I see it this way because I live in UK, where I can see some 5 - 10 actual tv channels on FreeView, and still only manage to find between 0 and 1 at any time that I want to watch. I have no need for chat shows, reality tv, sport, docudramas or whatever they are called; I don't want wall-to-wall passive entertainment - genuine information, well presented facts, honestly presented news etc, that's all I require.
So again, that is not a valid method of DISproving God's existence.
Which is why I wasn't trying to disprove God's existence; I'm just saying, all theologies that have made promises about what God does, have so far been false.
God cannot, however, be DISproven. It's an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
Well, up to a point. Many theologies try to make claims that amount to predictions: God will answer your prayers etc. So far, none of these have passed the test, thus demonstrating that whether God is real or not, the theologies that try to make us believe that he is, are not true. Most people would long have abandoned a concept with such a poor track record. The only reason why some people hold on to this, as far as I can see, is bullying: every time you dare raise the question of why God never answers even the most reasonable prayers, or the most desperate ones, or indeed any prayers at all, you are met with "How dare you test God?!? Who are you to demand any proof of God?!?". Bullying, plain and simple. If God was real and cared about us, he wouldn't be so petty, I'm sure.
Mr Jrauss is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, so whatever his politial leanings, he is in fact qualified to hold an opinion on science; probably more so than Eric Metaxas or a jeering Anonymous Coward.
I'm stupid. You're stupid. We're all ignorant of something.
I think we should distinguish between ignorant and stupid. Ignorance is a lack of insight and can be improved, often quite easily, whereas stupidity is a skill. The stupid person has learned to selectively avoid gaining new insight, if this insight would lead to them changing their mind on a sensitive issue; a stupid person makes the wrong decisions despite being well-educated enough that they ought to know better.
But I agree - this 'blame the victim' mindset is obviously wrong; otherwise we should be punishing children for enticing paedophiles etc. It is clearly in society's interest to protect the vulnerable, not least since we could all end up being exactly that. I think it is also worth noting that this attitude - that victims are just 'suckers that deserve what they get' - is something that lies at the basis of far too much of what is called 'capitalism' nowadays, and that is very much what drives the current, growing trends towards anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation.
It is also likely to become an ever weightier argument against the unbridled internet that everybody on/. appear to feel so strongly about. The big question is, do people feel strongly enough to go and actually start sorting out these problems?
Hah, yes, I was about to say that the missing piece of the 'smart' home is - the need for such a thing. I don't fall for the hype about how great it would be to control my dishwasher or heating with my mobile (I mean, really? Why would I want to do that?). Likewise, I don't fall for the nonsense about 'the government' wanting to intrude on my privacy - I can't see why they would, for one thing; I am worried about the grubby hands of private businesses, whose staff are not even vetted to the standards required for public office, and whose leaders seem to be above the law in most cases.
What makes me think so? Well, having a Chinese wife, who works with these issues both in academia and in commerce probably makes me more attentive to news about the relations between China and UK. What I see increasingly is that China and UK/EU are working hard to build stronger ties. Chinese companies are investing ever more heavily in UK, Chinese students are coming to universities all over Europe, but particularly in UK, etc etc. Chinese is being taught in schools in UK certainly as well as in Denmark as far as I know. It is happening, believe you me. And on a lighter note, haven't we seen a number of very good Chinese movies in the West already? As well as movies with Jackie Chan, Jet Li and others.
... the Chinese themselves are forgetting how to write their own script and use Pinyin instead.
You don't really know what you're talking about, do you? The Chinese government has tried a few times to make the Chinese use pinyin only - and failed. There are many good reasons for this. The biggest stumbling block is probably that the writing is what has enabled China to exist as one, huge nation for so long; Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible when spoken, but they are written in the same way. Speakers of both dialects agree that they are Chinese - they feel they are part of the same nation. The other reason that makes it very hard to replace Chinese characters with pinyin is that pinyin only corresponds to Mandarin, so you would have to make everybody speak Mandarin the same way. Just think about how hard it is to get one group of 25 primary schoolers to spell correctly and then multiply that with about 400000000 to get to 1 billion. It's what we call a daunting prospect.
Well, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroeish were once the same language; or going even further back, all Germanic languages originated in Scandinavia and were spread out into Europe when some of the tribes migrated south. I think languages tend to split up into dialects and later separate languages, when you are far enough apart to make it difficult to maintain regular communication. Even in tiny Denmark we have at least four major dialects that can be mutually hard to understand.
English has one thing going for it: despite its odd irregularities, it is pretty easy to learn. Chinese on the other hand is notoriously hard to read, write and speak well. I don't think many people will bother to learn Chinese as a second language.
- English is 'pretty easy to learn'? Not really - like any language, it is easy to learn the basics, but that is true for Chinese as well. Learning to communicate well in English is very hard, even to a native Englishman. I work in an international company, and I come across a lot of very awkward English from very well educated people; I really do. They are not stupid - English is difficult to master.
- Chinese: 'notoriously hard'? Not by a mile or two. It is easy to learn to pronounce, because the standard transcription system, pinyin, is phonetically very consistent, as opposed to English writing. If you want a couple of words that are pronounced in a surprising way, try place names like Uttoxeter, Billericay or Loughborough - not to mention Welsh towns, like Llandysul (yes, I'm cheating a bit here). As for Chinese characters, they are surprisingly logical and easy to both read and write, once you have learned the trick - the only problem is that there are so many, but compare that to the number of icons, road signs etc we all know. It's not a big problem.
- Chinese as a second language: I know for a fact that Chinese is taught in schools in Denmark and UK. Not yet as the first foreign language, but we may get there yet. It makes a l;ot of sense, all things considered. China is already on the charm offensive in UK in a major way - they mean business, literally, and they are building close ties to EU. I am confident that my grandchildren (I'm that old, you see) will speak good Chinese, and it makes loads of sense to learn it. Plus, it's bloody cool too.
In only 100 years' time? Nothing much will change, is my guess. Historically, we have seen that Latin(-ish) became dominant in much of Europe, then faded away again with the fading influence of the Roman church, but it held out for a very long time in academic circles - in fact, as a little anecdote, when the Flora Europaea was published from the '60es onwards, there was a debate over whether it should be published in Latin or English, according to the foreword.
English will be the trade language for a long while, but Chinese will grow in influence, no doubt, and may well be the second language in most of Europe. As for language loss - there seems to be a pattern where smaller language groups diminish, but then go through a revival when the speakers become wealthy enough to take an interest in their own, unique identity. Dialects too don't always disappear quickly, so perhaps we won't lose too much.
I'm in London. There seems to be a reasonable number of genuine jobs, but they simply don't have realistic expectations about what they can get for what they are willing to pay. It is grotesque, really, since they are unwilling to pay, say, more than £40K per year, but on the other hand, they have to pay significantly more for contractors - a very rough calculation says that each £10 per day you pay corresponds to £18000 per year (40 hours per week, 45 weeks per year), and I have a really hard time imagining any contractor wanting to get less than £35 per day ~ £63000 per year; in fact, it is probably more like £50 - £100 at least. I mean, how stupid is that? Just pay a decent salary, like £60000 per year, it would be cheaper AND they would get the people they need.
Well, in 2013 I managed to get called to interviews and then subsequently being contacted about the same jobs for months afterwards by other agents, after I had been rejected. I think the interview part of it rules out the job being fake, but you're right about the fake adverts.
Lying, cheating, invading your privacy, not cleaning up the messes they've already started, only apologizing when they get caught
Well, what did we expect? With most websites living off the fictive 'value' of advertising, how can we expect anything other than exactly this? Advertisers have always done this - just look around in the world of cosmetics and 'beauty products' with their grotesque, blatant lies; the most hilarious being L'Oreal's "Inspired by Gene Science", but there are others - such as stating that a product is '20% fat-free' (ie 80% fat) or labeling a type of olive oil as 'light' in the hope that people are stupid enough to think that this somehow contains fewer calories. Or how about this recent idea: the cheapest oils you can get has always been rape-seed oil, which was simply sold as 'salad oil'; but then it turns out that is contains a lot of healthy fatty acids, so now you can get a bottle labeled 'Rape Seed Oil' which is 5 times as expensive and even a 'Extra Virgin Rape Seed Oil' whatever that is.
Advertisers are shameless liars, and because we have been stupid enough to let them invade the internet, the place is full of this crap. And you are right - they should be rounded up and summarily executed by rolling them in honey and leaving them on ant-hills.
I think you missed the part about 65% and not "all" cancers, and some cancers are highly affected by carcinogens and some are less based on biases created in modern living.
Still, these factors play into each other. Your lifestyle and environment influence how vulnerable you are to bad luck - I have heard it said that we all have cancer all the time, but our immune system normally manages to kill off the cancerous cells; external factors can weaken our immune system to the extent that some cancer cells may survive.
The way I understand this new research is that of the cancerous mutations that survive long enough to manifest themselves as a noticeable disease, 65% are caused by mutations with unknown causes. Random simply means that we don't know the cause, as opposed to the big classes of known causes: environment, lifestyle and inheritance. And I think the big surprise is still that so large a proportion (35%) of cancers are caused by these things. IOW, over a third of cancers are known to be potentially preventable - since, when we know the cause, we may be able to do something about it.
I think the tech industry has painted itself into a corner. I had the misfortune to lose my job early in 2013 and spent almost the whole year looking before I found something; during that whole period I actually saw the same, relatively few jobs being readvertised over and over, with very little new showing up. The sector I was looking at was what you'd call 'devops', and it seemed like the companies were trying to get people with long experience in both development and system administration, but they weren't willing to pay more than what you'd pay for a middle ranking call-center operator. I can't quite imagine how anybody can imagine that being an attractive proposition to anybody with the qualifications.
So, it looks to me like a number of companies - almost all of them internet businesses - have painted themselves into a corner, where they deperately need highly qualified employees that they are never going to be able or willing to pay for.
Not necessarily a bad thing to sound like, IMO; 40 years ago you had to think and actually be insightful about what you were undertaking, because the tools and resources were so limited. And, as somebody else has already mentioned, Linus isn't against graphics and multi-core, he is against the stupid fad that blindly demands more cores at the expense of producing better cores (as well as the idiocy of wrapping everything in a graphical front-end, when that actually ends up getting in the way of doing the job).
I think what he says makes a lot of sense - when do you actually benefit from having many cores? Only when you have many, independent tasks; there are large classes of tasks that are serial in nature, which would not benefit from having several cores to run on. And most of the independent processes on the average PC are so lightweight that nothing is gained from having several cores compared to multiprocessing on a single core. Unless you are running a proper server in a data centre or performing large computations, you are likely to just waste your money, if you buy into the multi-core fad.
Francis's environmental radicalism is likely to attract resistance from Vatican conservatives and in rightwing church circles...
Isn't it strange that accepting what for all practical purposes must be called the scientific consensus is described as 'radical'? And stop calling deniers 'conservative' - a conservative is somebody who, after giving the matter some thought, feels that the old ways are best - whereas the deniers are people that refuse to apply their intellect at all, if there is a risk they might have to change their minds. I have a lot of respect for conservatives; rather less for deniers.
I think part of the story is that when you live in the more northerly regions, where seasons are more pronounced, you have to rely more on meat as a food source, and therefore have to process more saturated fat; this, on the other hand, tends to be balanced out by the need to spend more energy on keeping warm - thus it is a great advantage to be able to produce brown fat even as an adult. This may be an adaptation along similar lines as the ability to digest milk - all children can do this, obviously, but adults in cultures that have had no dairy farming generally can't; this is relatively new mutation, something like a fewish thousand years old. Anecdotally, I have noticed how many of my friends from Africa are absolutely freezing when they come to UK, even when I feel moderately warm - they probably have very little brown fat compared to me.
When the article talks about temperatures, they are of course referring to the Kelvin scale, not Celcius, hence the numbers that looks a bit on the high side. (*BING* *BING* Alert: You Have Witnessed A Joke *BING* *BING*)
EHRs in general are so fucked up that even legitimate users can't figure out what the hell is going on most times
OTOH, there are examples that work, and have done so for a long time. Some 30 years ago or so, I worked for the Danish Sygehusdatacenter - a long word that means EHR, broadly speaking (very broadly: 'Hospital Data Centre', actually). All GPs and all hospitals had to use this system, which ran on an IBM mainframe with a huge number of 3270 terminals connected across the country. It worked remarkably well, because 1) Danish health care is NOT provided by a large number of private companies with no interest in cooperation, and 2) the system was relatively simple. There were occasional problems, like when one developer printed his largish COBOL program and the usual default printer wasn't available; instead of waiting in a queue until it came back, it was automatically sent on to the next available printer, which turned out to print small metal tags for attaching to patients' beds in a provincial hospital 200 km away. They made amazing souvenirs - I still have one.
On the other hand, how would an American have looked at the same issue, if just after the 9/11 attack, somebody had joked about 'and they say Muslims don't do any good, hur hur'? The tosser who posted the 'joke' about the accident in Glasgow is not going to jail or get a fine, which is what 'freedom of speech' promises - nobody promised that you have a right to use a site, hosted by another party, to post your idiocy.
Why? Because this is going to be the MOST ACTION PACKED STAR TREK MOVIE EVER!! Fuck all that talking bullshit. This one is going to be 100mph, non-stop B A D A S S !!! More fights, more explosions, more fucking ASS KICKING than anyone has ever seen! Scene one: mad-ass crazy action. Last scene: mad-ass crazy action. Every scene in-between: mad-ass crazy action!
Set your phasers to FUCKING AWESOME, because this movie is doing some MEGACRAZY SHIT!
So, you agree? Star Trek, to most fans, has been worth following because it was trying to be more than just another mindless actions movie. Most episodes made at least an attempt at social commentary, political ideas and even somewhat plausible science. What you are talking about is something that simply ignores that in favour of a testosterone pumping re-run of 'Action-Man, the Movie' with most likely just a superficial shrug towards anything to do with science, and little enough in the way of fiction, come to that. Given the choice, I would prefer watching either 'My Little Pony' or 'BBC Parliament'; both offering more of an intellectual challenge.
I find it stupid. My problem is, I can't quite figure out who is being stupid here, except that it doesn't seem to have much to do with N Korea, if I'm any judge. They may be idiots, but they have been clever enough to hold on to power for decades in the most astonishingly ridiculous circumstances - a bit like the goings-on in the declining Roman empire. But it clearly doesn't add up, the idea that North Korea are somehow able to threaten the US into submission. I would be very interested in knowing the actual truth of the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
However being able to set the thermostat with my phone is excellent.
Really? It may be 'cool' if you feel it is cool to be able to do that kind of things remotely, but how relevant is it in real life that you can control a thermostat or turn on the oven or the lighting from afar? And even if it conveys some benefit, is it valuable enough that you want to pay the price? Which may, incidentally include loss of privacy or perhaps loss of property, if the remote capabilities also allow thieves easier access.
It seems similar to the way that some cars detect rain on the windscreen and turn on the wipers - yeah, cool, but the effort it spares you consists of having to reach some 2 inches for a manual switch - is it worth paying for? It's the kind of things you would accept if they are part of a new car you buy, but you wouldn't go to your garage and pay £500 to get it fitted, would you?
Hmm? One of the things I've never actually managed to understand is, why do people want to pay for access to up to hundreds of tv channels, all showing near-identical programmes, none of which are really worth your time, and of which you are only ever going to watch a few any way? Perhaps I see it this way because I live in UK, where I can see some 5 - 10 actual tv channels on FreeView, and still only manage to find between 0 and 1 at any time that I want to watch. I have no need for chat shows, reality tv, sport, docudramas or whatever they are called; I don't want wall-to-wall passive entertainment - genuine information, well presented facts, honestly presented news etc, that's all I require.
So again, that is not a valid method of DISproving God's existence.
Which is why I wasn't trying to disprove God's existence; I'm just saying, all theologies that have made promises about what God does, have so far been false.
God cannot, however, be DISproven. It's an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
Well, up to a point. Many theologies try to make claims that amount to predictions: God will answer your prayers etc. So far, none of these have passed the test, thus demonstrating that whether God is real or not, the theologies that try to make us believe that he is, are not true. Most people would long have abandoned a concept with such a poor track record. The only reason why some people hold on to this, as far as I can see, is bullying: every time you dare raise the question of why God never answers even the most reasonable prayers, or the most desperate ones, or indeed any prayers at all, you are met with "How dare you test God?!? Who are you to demand any proof of God?!?". Bullying, plain and simple. If God was real and cared about us, he wouldn't be so petty, I'm sure.
Mr Jrauss is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, so whatever his politial leanings, he is in fact qualified to hold an opinion on science; probably more so than Eric Metaxas or a jeering Anonymous Coward.
Everyone is stupid.
I'm stupid. You're stupid. We're all ignorant of something.
I think we should distinguish between ignorant and stupid. Ignorance is a lack of insight and can be improved, often quite easily, whereas stupidity is a skill. The stupid person has learned to selectively avoid gaining new insight, if this insight would lead to them changing their mind on a sensitive issue; a stupid person makes the wrong decisions despite being well-educated enough that they ought to know better.
But I agree - this 'blame the victim' mindset is obviously wrong; otherwise we should be punishing children for enticing paedophiles etc. It is clearly in society's interest to protect the vulnerable, not least since we could all end up being exactly that. I think it is also worth noting that this attitude - that victims are just 'suckers that deserve what they get' - is something that lies at the basis of far too much of what is called 'capitalism' nowadays, and that is very much what drives the current, growing trends towards anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation.
It is also likely to become an ever weightier argument against the unbridled internet that everybody on /. appear to feel so strongly about. The big question is, do people feel strongly enough to go and actually start sorting out these problems?
Hah, yes, I was about to say that the missing piece of the 'smart' home is - the need for such a thing. I don't fall for the hype about how great it would be to control my dishwasher or heating with my mobile (I mean, really? Why would I want to do that?). Likewise, I don't fall for the nonsense about 'the government' wanting to intrude on my privacy - I can't see why they would, for one thing; I am worried about the grubby hands of private businesses, whose staff are not even vetted to the standards required for public office, and whose leaders seem to be above the law in most cases.
What makes me think so? Well, having a Chinese wife, who works with these issues both in academia and in commerce probably makes me more attentive to news about the relations between China and UK. What I see increasingly is that China and UK/EU are working hard to build stronger ties. Chinese companies are investing ever more heavily in UK, Chinese students are coming to universities all over Europe, but particularly in UK, etc etc. Chinese is being taught in schools in UK certainly as well as in Denmark as far as I know. It is happening, believe you me. And on a lighter note, haven't we seen a number of very good Chinese movies in the West already? As well as movies with Jackie Chan, Jet Li and others.
... the Chinese themselves are forgetting how to write their own script and use Pinyin instead.
You don't really know what you're talking about, do you? The Chinese government has tried a few times to make the Chinese use pinyin only - and failed. There are many good reasons for this. The biggest stumbling block is probably that the writing is what has enabled China to exist as one, huge nation for so long; Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible when spoken, but they are written in the same way. Speakers of both dialects agree that they are Chinese - they feel they are part of the same nation. The other reason that makes it very hard to replace Chinese characters with pinyin is that pinyin only corresponds to Mandarin, so you would have to make everybody speak Mandarin the same way. Just think about how hard it is to get one group of 25 primary schoolers to spell correctly and then multiply that with about 400000000 to get to 1 billion. It's what we call a daunting prospect.
Well, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroeish were once the same language; or going even further back, all Germanic languages originated in Scandinavia and were spread out into Europe when some of the tribes migrated south. I think languages tend to split up into dialects and later separate languages, when you are far enough apart to make it difficult to maintain regular communication. Even in tiny Denmark we have at least four major dialects that can be mutually hard to understand.
English has one thing going for it: despite its odd irregularities, it is pretty easy to learn. Chinese on the other hand is notoriously hard to read, write and speak well. I don't think many people will bother to learn Chinese as a second language.
- English is 'pretty easy to learn'? Not really - like any language, it is easy to learn the basics, but that is true for Chinese as well. Learning to communicate well in English is very hard, even to a native Englishman. I work in an international company, and I come across a lot of very awkward English from very well educated people; I really do. They are not stupid - English is difficult to master.
- Chinese: 'notoriously hard'? Not by a mile or two. It is easy to learn to pronounce, because the standard transcription system, pinyin, is phonetically very consistent, as opposed to English writing. If you want a couple of words that are pronounced in a surprising way, try place names like Uttoxeter, Billericay or Loughborough - not to mention Welsh towns, like Llandysul (yes, I'm cheating a bit here). As for Chinese characters, they are surprisingly logical and easy to both read and write, once you have learned the trick - the only problem is that there are so many, but compare that to the number of icons, road signs etc we all know. It's not a big problem.
- Chinese as a second language: I know for a fact that Chinese is taught in schools in Denmark and UK. Not yet as the first foreign language, but we may get there yet. It makes a l;ot of sense, all things considered. China is already on the charm offensive in UK in a major way - they mean business, literally, and they are building close ties to EU. I am confident that my grandchildren (I'm that old, you see) will speak good Chinese, and it makes loads of sense to learn it. Plus, it's bloody cool too.
In only 100 years' time? Nothing much will change, is my guess. Historically, we have seen that Latin(-ish) became dominant in much of Europe, then faded away again with the fading influence of the Roman church, but it held out for a very long time in academic circles - in fact, as a little anecdote, when the Flora Europaea was published from the '60es onwards, there was a debate over whether it should be published in Latin or English, according to the foreword.
English will be the trade language for a long while, but Chinese will grow in influence, no doubt, and may well be the second language in most of Europe. As for language loss - there seems to be a pattern where smaller language groups diminish, but then go through a revival when the speakers become wealthy enough to take an interest in their own, unique identity. Dialects too don't always disappear quickly, so perhaps we won't lose too much.
I'm in London. There seems to be a reasonable number of genuine jobs, but they simply don't have realistic expectations about what they can get for what they are willing to pay. It is grotesque, really, since they are unwilling to pay, say, more than £40K per year, but on the other hand, they have to pay significantly more for contractors - a very rough calculation says that each £10 per day you pay corresponds to £18000 per year (40 hours per week, 45 weeks per year), and I have a really hard time imagining any contractor wanting to get less than £35 per day ~ £63000 per year; in fact, it is probably more like £50 - £100 at least. I mean, how stupid is that? Just pay a decent salary, like £60000 per year, it would be cheaper AND they would get the people they need.
Well, in 2013 I managed to get called to interviews and then subsequently being contacted about the same jobs for months afterwards by other agents, after I had been rejected. I think the interview part of it rules out the job being fake, but you're right about the fake adverts.
Lying, cheating, invading your privacy, not cleaning up the messes they've already started, only apologizing when they get caught
Well, what did we expect? With most websites living off the fictive 'value' of advertising, how can we expect anything other than exactly this? Advertisers have always done this - just look around in the world of cosmetics and 'beauty products' with their grotesque, blatant lies; the most hilarious being L'Oreal's "Inspired by Gene Science", but there are others - such as stating that a product is '20% fat-free' (ie 80% fat) or labeling a type of olive oil as 'light' in the hope that people are stupid enough to think that this somehow contains fewer calories. Or how about this recent idea: the cheapest oils you can get has always been rape-seed oil, which was simply sold as 'salad oil'; but then it turns out that is contains a lot of healthy fatty acids, so now you can get a bottle labeled 'Rape Seed Oil' which is 5 times as expensive and even a 'Extra Virgin Rape Seed Oil' whatever that is.
Advertisers are shameless liars, and because we have been stupid enough to let them invade the internet, the place is full of this crap. And you are right - they should be rounded up and summarily executed by rolling them in honey and leaving them on ant-hills.
I think you missed the part about 65% and not "all" cancers, and some cancers are highly affected by carcinogens and some are less based on biases created in modern living.
Still, these factors play into each other. Your lifestyle and environment influence how vulnerable you are to bad luck - I have heard it said that we all have cancer all the time, but our immune system normally manages to kill off the cancerous cells; external factors can weaken our immune system to the extent that some cancer cells may survive.
The way I understand this new research is that of the cancerous mutations that survive long enough to manifest themselves as a noticeable disease, 65% are caused by mutations with unknown causes. Random simply means that we don't know the cause, as opposed to the big classes of known causes: environment, lifestyle and inheritance. And I think the big surprise is still that so large a proportion (35%) of cancers are caused by these things. IOW, over a third of cancers are known to be potentially preventable - since, when we know the cause, we may be able to do something about it.
I think the tech industry has painted itself into a corner. I had the misfortune to lose my job early in 2013 and spent almost the whole year looking before I found something; during that whole period I actually saw the same, relatively few jobs being readvertised over and over, with very little new showing up. The sector I was looking at was what you'd call 'devops', and it seemed like the companies were trying to get people with long experience in both development and system administration, but they weren't willing to pay more than what you'd pay for a middle ranking call-center operator. I can't quite imagine how anybody can imagine that being an attractive proposition to anybody with the qualifications.
So, it looks to me like a number of companies - almost all of them internet businesses - have painted themselves into a corner, where they deperately need highly qualified employees that they are never going to be able or willing to pay for.
Linus sounds like a programmer from 40 years ago
Not necessarily a bad thing to sound like, IMO; 40 years ago you had to think and actually be insightful about what you were undertaking, because the tools and resources were so limited. And, as somebody else has already mentioned, Linus isn't against graphics and multi-core, he is against the stupid fad that blindly demands more cores at the expense of producing better cores (as well as the idiocy of wrapping everything in a graphical front-end, when that actually ends up getting in the way of doing the job).
I think what he says makes a lot of sense - when do you actually benefit from having many cores? Only when you have many, independent tasks; there are large classes of tasks that are serial in nature, which would not benefit from having several cores to run on. And most of the independent processes on the average PC are so lightweight that nothing is gained from having several cores compared to multiprocessing on a single core. Unless you are running a proper server in a data centre or performing large computations, you are likely to just waste your money, if you buy into the multi-core fad.
Francis's environmental radicalism is likely to attract resistance from Vatican conservatives and in rightwing church circles...
Isn't it strange that accepting what for all practical purposes must be called the scientific consensus is described as 'radical'? And stop calling deniers 'conservative' - a conservative is somebody who, after giving the matter some thought, feels that the old ways are best - whereas the deniers are people that refuse to apply their intellect at all, if there is a risk they might have to change their minds. I have a lot of respect for conservatives; rather less for deniers.
I think part of the story is that when you live in the more northerly regions, where seasons are more pronounced, you have to rely more on meat as a food source, and therefore have to process more saturated fat; this, on the other hand, tends to be balanced out by the need to spend more energy on keeping warm - thus it is a great advantage to be able to produce brown fat even as an adult. This may be an adaptation along similar lines as the ability to digest milk - all children can do this, obviously, but adults in cultures that have had no dairy farming generally can't; this is relatively new mutation, something like a fewish thousand years old. Anecdotally, I have noticed how many of my friends from Africa are absolutely freezing when they come to UK, even when I feel moderately warm - they probably have very little brown fat compared to me.
... 75 degrees to 66 degrees, ...
When the article talks about temperatures, they are of course referring to the Kelvin scale, not Celcius, hence the numbers that looks a bit on the high side. (*BING* *BING* Alert: You Have Witnessed A Joke *BING* *BING*)
EHRs in general are so fucked up that even legitimate users can't figure out what the hell is going on most times
OTOH, there are examples that work, and have done so for a long time. Some 30 years ago or so, I worked for the Danish Sygehusdatacenter - a long word that means EHR, broadly speaking (very broadly: 'Hospital Data Centre', actually). All GPs and all hospitals had to use this system, which ran on an IBM mainframe with a huge number of 3270 terminals connected across the country. It worked remarkably well, because 1) Danish health care is NOT provided by a large number of private companies with no interest in cooperation, and 2) the system was relatively simple. There were occasional problems, like when one developer printed his largish COBOL program and the usual default printer wasn't available; instead of waiting in a queue until it came back, it was automatically sent on to the next available printer, which turned out to print small metal tags for attaching to patients' beds in a provincial hospital 200 km away. They made amazing souvenirs - I still have one.
Well, true, up to a point.
On the other hand, how would an American have looked at the same issue, if just after the 9/11 attack, somebody had joked about 'and they say Muslims don't do any good, hur hur'? The tosser who posted the 'joke' about the accident in Glasgow is not going to jail or get a fine, which is what 'freedom of speech' promises - nobody promised that you have a right to use a site, hosted by another party, to post your idiocy.
unfortunately star trek was also that kind of series where they had to tell the audience everytime they made a joke.
Well, they had to do something to cater to the mostly American audience, right?
Why? Because this is going to be the MOST ACTION PACKED STAR TREK MOVIE EVER!! Fuck all that talking bullshit. This one is going to be 100mph, non-stop B A D A S S !!! More fights, more explosions, more fucking ASS KICKING than anyone has ever seen! Scene one: mad-ass crazy action. Last scene: mad-ass crazy action. Every scene in-between: mad-ass crazy action!
Set your phasers to FUCKING AWESOME, because this movie is doing some MEGACRAZY SHIT!
So, you agree? Star Trek, to most fans, has been worth following because it was trying to be more than just another mindless actions movie. Most episodes made at least an attempt at social commentary, political ideas and even somewhat plausible science. What you are talking about is something that simply ignores that in favour of a testosterone pumping re-run of 'Action-Man, the Movie' with most likely just a superficial shrug towards anything to do with science, and little enough in the way of fiction, come to that. Given the choice, I would prefer watching either 'My Little Pony' or 'BBC Parliament'; both offering more of an intellectual challenge.
I find it funny ...
I find it stupid. My problem is, I can't quite figure out who is being stupid here, except that it doesn't seem to have much to do with N Korea, if I'm any judge. They may be idiots, but they have been clever enough to hold on to power for decades in the most astonishingly ridiculous circumstances - a bit like the goings-on in the declining Roman empire. But it clearly doesn't add up, the idea that North Korea are somehow able to threaten the US into submission. I would be very interested in knowing the actual truth of the matter.