Of course you get modded Troll, because on slashdot Troll means "I don't agree with you".
Still, all I can add is: "only in America".
We used to talk about these sort of invasive techniques being used in the Soviet Union when I was growing up. Still, we get the governments that we deserve.
C) Airlines, facing a loss of revenue try to cut costs in any way possible which makes even less people fly.
How they cut costs by raising fees and inventing new fees is beyond me. I'd like you to re-examine your logic. Perhaps the "ticket price" has stayed the same, or even slightly declined, but the overall cost of flying is much more when you take into account the $25-$50 per checked bag, etc. On a $200 ticket that's 10% or more right there.
Perhaps instead of "cut costs" you meant to say "cutting service". My personal favorite was an announcement one day on Continental, where they said you could "buy the headphones for $3, and you even get to keep them"...
Wanna bet? Of course it can. You'd be a fool to do so, since it is far less maneuverable than when it's in the air, but you can roll it along any road you want so long as it's wide enough for your rotor. You might need extra grease and filter changes, too.
Also, I challenge you to find the HUMVEE that packs as much firepower as an Apache. Dumbass.
a fully automated four-person vehicle that can drive like a car and then take off and fly like an aircraft to avoid roadside bombs
That those smart military people have decided that bomb blasts are only 2 dimensional.
Why would you want to make an armored vehicle that flies? There already is such a thing - it's called a HELICOPTER. But I guess when you have access to virtually infinite defense funding, I guess you're allowed to re-invent the wheel.
Jurisdiction does not change just because a computer was involved.
But there's already a precedent set regarding sales taxes. You buy something over the telephone (another communications tool) in another state, and you will be charged sales taxes for YOUR state. I have no idea if large countries are enforcing taxes and duties on software downloads, but it can only be a matter of time (because they smell free money).
So once that precedent is set, it's easy for a government to claim that you actually have a "cyber presence" when dealing online. I'm not saying I agree with them (I am completely anti-government, which is why I choose to live in a 3rd world country with a relatively weak government), I'm saying this is how it's going to go down. And it's going to screw all of us up. After all if you post a video on youtube showing someone spitting on a sidewalk, you are showing someone breaking Singapore law.
How mankind absolutely cannot recognize the fact that he lives in a global society, and that the internet is a global medium. I'm currently writing this post from Costa Rica where, as a born Canadian citizen and an adopted British and EU Citizen (my mother is Scots) I hold legal residency, and have for 20 years.
It's unfortunate that the ignorance of different laws and customs among those (supposedly) smart people we elect to represent us and judge us leads to this kind of mess. Why can the US enforce it's own very restrictive copyright laws and extradite people from oh, I don't know, Australia for example, to face criminal copyright infringement charges; only to turn around and then prevent its citizens (real or corporate) to be shielded from other countries' laws?
A decision must be taken: to enforce either the weakest possible or strongest possible law in every case, in order to avoid the arbitrariness not doing this would lead to; or to disconnect the internet.
Any sentient entity would choose to control the enemy not eradicate immediately.
It took Skynet a good 100 milliseconds or so before deciding to eradicate humanity. Not immediate at all. Everyone knows that 100 milliseconds is an eternity in computer time! I guess it just gave up on our lack of progress during that time.
By necessity the school has got to gear to the slowest.
And that's where everything starts to go wrong. Instead of encouraging the stragglers to catch up, everyone is forced to slow down. In this environment not one slow-poke will make an extra effort - why should he? Whereas more than one above average intelligence student will get frustrated and/or bored and stop paying attention. Only the truly gifted come through such a process unscathed - but because they don't need "school" anyway. Put them next to a pile of books and provide a mentor to answer the occasional question, and they're fine in ANY environment. They live for learning and you can't take it from them.
No, I am advocating doing procedures the right way to start with. Then they are not "mistake prone" and no one gets killed. If you build safety into your routine, you avoid mistakes. These mistakes are negligence, not because there's anything difficult about the procedure itself or the equipment. You are siding with those who are looking for something to blame other than themselves. People who make the least effort and don't pay attention to what they're doing. This is not who I want taking care of me.
You want to invest time and resources to come up with better equipment that monkeys can use. I want to invest time and resources to train people better, to make sure I hired the right people and pay them well. Hey this is nursing, not brain surgery. There's nothing particularly more difficult about administering an IV medication than making sure you're putting your shirt on the right way around or making sure your socks match. People manage to do those things every day. Of course if you never check what you're doing, well, it's bound to happen one day.
Re:I hope they're smarter than the article writer
on
Low Energy Supercomputing
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The only problem with your analogy is that in physics, Newtons are actually a unit for weight
You're right and I saw that after I hit the submit button. It would work better had I said mass:)
As for the power source - my home computer's power supply provides 24 volts to the motherboard. My laptop uses 19 volts. Potential at the plug socket is not necessarily the potential that is used by the machine. Especially since electronics usually convert AC to DC and use DC in their circuits. Therefore I would argue that your "assumption" is incorrect - there's no way to know what voltage they plan on using. It can't be that hard to imagine 240V or even 550V for an "industrial strength" supercomputer. Why assume 110V?
There is no amount of trying to pay attention that lowers risk of mistakes to 0%.
Not 0%, but as close to it as possible.
However the situations described are not under the same conditions as a pilot dealing with an emergency 100 feet off the runway at 200 knots. They are utter carelessness - failing to check to see which IV lead was being used in some circumstances. It takes no time at all to move a blanket out of the way and actually look.
So, instead of addressing the core issue which is the incorrect technique being used by nursing staff, some would rather outsource the problem and blame it on the manufacturers, cause new equipment to be designed and new "foolproof" standards to be adopted. And yet guess who ends up paying for this? You, the patient, and you the taxpayer. Why? Because some people are too lazy to do their damned jobs properly.
I vehemently disagree. Because even after these new mechanisms were developed, there would STILL be an error margin above 0%. Like Douglas Adams once wrote: "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools". I disagree that nurses should be allowed to abandon the use of their brains in favor of an over-engineered, expensive piece of machinery that wouldn't exist to increase our knowledge about patients or permit us to do things we can't do now - just permit idiots to keep jobs that they shouldn't have in the first place.
If you don't know what you're doing and why you are doing it, you have no place performing medical procedures on a patient. If we manage to design foolproof systems, why have trained nurses at all? Hire minimum wage workers to do it. Right?
I hope they're smarter than the article writer
on
Low Energy Supercomputing
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"The competition challenges students to build, maintain, and run a cutting edge, commercially available HPC architecture on just 26 amps of energy."
Only problem is that the Ampere is a unit of CURRENT, not energy. It's like saying someone weighs 686 Newtons.
While I understand that if the voltage is kept the same, then the amps are proportional to the energy involved per unit time because W = V x A. However 26 amps at 120 volts for 1 second is not the same energy as 26 amps at 5 million volts for 20 years.
With a little time, an intelligent person could become familiar with the workings of the entire architecture. I used to have a map of every memory location in the 64KB
Fortunately we've moved on from the days when a coder had to know the IRQs, DMA channels and interrupts and had to waste time playing around with peeks and pokes (especially when some of them required you to insert (random number of) NOP's in between because the hardware wasn't fast enough). Now we have these things called drivers and libraries that do all the basic work for us, and we can just program the high level stuff. How cool is it that I can write a multi-threaded graphical program in about 10 minutes? Try doing that in Turbo Pascal 2.0.
Yeah it means I've had to adapt and learn new languages, new APIs and different ways of doing things. Instead of learning about ports I learn about object interfaces and methods. But you just have to keep up, like any other field. Certainly in my other hobby - medicine, if you snooze you lose.
Well, unless there is some atypical distribution between alzheimers in religious an non-religious brains,
This is exactly what must be determined first. If you're just taking names at random from the general population you're allowed to say you have a representative sample. If you start picking and choosing, you have to prove that your sample matches the general population FIRST. It's like surveying people about how they like the public school system at the golf pro shop or the tennis club.
No-one, not you, certainly not me, can attend exactly to what they're doing for every second of every minute of every day.
Agreed - and you don't have to do it every second of every minute of every day. Just when you're about to perform a procedure. There's a reason pilots have pre-flight checklists, and I'm sure those who work in nuclear reactors have a script to follow. In fact, just about any "mission critical" aspect of any job is written on paper. You can do things on "autopilot" without paying attention to what you do most of the time, but for some tasks you need to be sure of what you're doing. That means paying a little more attention than normal. After all, these "accidents" are in fact manslaughter. I certainly bear that in mind every time I write a prescription or perform a procedure - no matter how trivial. Primum non nocere...
Nurses should not have to work in an environment where it is even possible to make that kind of mistake
Speaking as a physician, it's your responsibility to know exactly what you're doing. Blaming "the environment" is just making excuses for gross negligence. Just like it's wise to double-check the medication you are dispensing, double-check the dose you are administering if it's a substance with dangerous side effects, and screen your patients before surgery (instead of doing it the way we used to pre 1980's, when a significant number of patients died on the table because they had unknown underlying conditions we would find out about in the autopsy), you should make sure that you're performing a procedure correctly. If you don't do that, I suggest another line of work.
You get what you pay for. You hire for the lowest possible salary and treat your professionals like unskilled laborers, well, don't be surprised. A professional would never dream of doing something like this - but then again a professional would not work for peanuts either.
Slashdot Mirror
They'll be firmly in the driver's seat soon on many fronts.
You have just realized this? I've been saying it for years.
Of course you get modded Troll, because on slashdot Troll means "I don't agree with you".
Still, all I can add is: "only in America".
We used to talk about these sort of invasive techniques being used in the Soviet Union when I was growing up. Still, we get the governments that we deserve.
C) Airlines, facing a loss of revenue try to cut costs in any way possible which makes even less people fly.
How they cut costs by raising fees and inventing new fees is beyond me. I'd like you to re-examine your logic. Perhaps the "ticket price" has stayed the same, or even slightly declined, but the overall cost of flying is much more when you take into account the $25-$50 per checked bag, etc. On a $200 ticket that's 10% or more right there.
Perhaps instead of "cut costs" you meant to say "cutting service". My personal favorite was an announcement one day on Continental, where they said you could "buy the headphones for $3, and you even get to keep them"...
And yet somehow this magical new vehicle will be immune to RPGs, amirite?
Wanna bet? Of course it can. You'd be a fool to do so, since it is far less maneuverable than when it's in the air, but you can roll it along any road you want so long as it's wide enough for your rotor. You might need extra grease and filter changes, too.
Also, I challenge you to find the HUMVEE that packs as much firepower as an Apache. Dumbass.
a fully automated four-person vehicle that can drive like a car and then take off and fly like an aircraft to avoid roadside bombs
That those smart military people have decided that bomb blasts are only 2 dimensional.
Why would you want to make an armored vehicle that flies? There already is such a thing - it's called a HELICOPTER. But I guess when you have access to virtually infinite defense funding, I guess you're allowed to re-invent the wheel.
Jurisdiction does not change just because a computer was involved.
But there's already a precedent set regarding sales taxes. You buy something over the telephone (another communications tool) in another state, and you will be charged sales taxes for YOUR state. I have no idea if large countries are enforcing taxes and duties on software downloads, but it can only be a matter of time (because they smell free money).
So once that precedent is set, it's easy for a government to claim that you actually have a "cyber presence" when dealing online. I'm not saying I agree with them (I am completely anti-government, which is why I choose to live in a 3rd world country with a relatively weak government), I'm saying this is how it's going to go down. And it's going to screw all of us up. After all if you post a video on youtube showing someone spitting on a sidewalk, you are showing someone breaking Singapore law.
Does it come with one of these too?
How mankind absolutely cannot recognize the fact that he lives in a global society, and that the internet is a global medium. I'm currently writing this post from Costa Rica where, as a born Canadian citizen and an adopted British and EU Citizen (my mother is Scots) I hold legal residency, and have for 20 years.
It's unfortunate that the ignorance of different laws and customs among those (supposedly) smart people we elect to represent us and judge us leads to this kind of mess. Why can the US enforce it's own very restrictive copyright laws and extradite people from oh, I don't know, Australia for example, to face criminal copyright infringement charges; only to turn around and then prevent its citizens (real or corporate) to be shielded from other countries' laws?
A decision must be taken: to enforce either the weakest possible or strongest possible law in every case, in order to avoid the arbitrariness not doing this would lead to; or to disconnect the internet.
Any sentient entity would choose to control the enemy not eradicate immediately.
It took Skynet a good 100 milliseconds or so before deciding to eradicate humanity. Not immediate at all. Everyone knows that 100 milliseconds is an eternity in computer time! I guess it just gave up on our lack of progress during that time.
By necessity the school has got to gear to the slowest.
And that's where everything starts to go wrong. Instead of encouraging the stragglers to catch up, everyone is forced to slow down. In this environment not one slow-poke will make an extra effort - why should he? Whereas more than one above average intelligence student will get frustrated and/or bored and stop paying attention. Only the truly gifted come through such a process unscathed - but because they don't need "school" anyway. Put them next to a pile of books and provide a mentor to answer the occasional question, and they're fine in ANY environment. They live for learning and you can't take it from them.
Perhaps in a decade or so they will further imitate Europe in the middle ages and begin bathing and washing the refuse before burying it...
No, I am advocating doing procedures the right way to start with. Then they are not "mistake prone" and no one gets killed. If you build safety into your routine, you avoid mistakes. These mistakes are negligence, not because there's anything difficult about the procedure itself or the equipment. You are siding with those who are looking for something to blame other than themselves. People who make the least effort and don't pay attention to what they're doing. This is not who I want taking care of me.
You want to invest time and resources to come up with better equipment that monkeys can use. I want to invest time and resources to train people better, to make sure I hired the right people and pay them well. Hey this is nursing, not brain surgery. There's nothing particularly more difficult about administering an IV medication than making sure you're putting your shirt on the right way around or making sure your socks match. People manage to do those things every day. Of course if you never check what you're doing, well, it's bound to happen one day.
The only problem with your analogy is that in physics, Newtons are actually a unit for weight
You're right and I saw that after I hit the submit button. It would work better had I said mass :)
As for the power source - my home computer's power supply provides 24 volts to the motherboard. My laptop uses 19 volts. Potential at the plug socket is not necessarily the potential that is used by the machine. Especially since electronics usually convert AC to DC and use DC in their circuits. Therefore I would argue that your "assumption" is incorrect - there's no way to know what voltage they plan on using. It can't be that hard to imagine 240V or even 550V for an "industrial strength" supercomputer. Why assume 110V?
There is no amount of trying to pay attention that lowers risk of mistakes to 0%.
Not 0%, but as close to it as possible.
However the situations described are not under the same conditions as a pilot dealing with an emergency 100 feet off the runway at 200 knots. They are utter carelessness - failing to check to see which IV lead was being used in some circumstances. It takes no time at all to move a blanket out of the way and actually look.
So, instead of addressing the core issue which is the incorrect technique being used by nursing staff, some would rather outsource the problem and blame it on the manufacturers, cause new equipment to be designed and new "foolproof" standards to be adopted. And yet guess who ends up paying for this? You, the patient, and you the taxpayer. Why? Because some people are too lazy to do their damned jobs properly.
I vehemently disagree. Because even after these new mechanisms were developed, there would STILL be an error margin above 0%. Like Douglas Adams once wrote: "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools". I disagree that nurses should be allowed to abandon the use of their brains in favor of an over-engineered, expensive piece of machinery that wouldn't exist to increase our knowledge about patients or permit us to do things we can't do now - just permit idiots to keep jobs that they shouldn't have in the first place.
If you don't know what you're doing and why you are doing it, you have no place performing medical procedures on a patient. If we manage to design foolproof systems, why have trained nurses at all? Hire minimum wage workers to do it. Right?
"The competition challenges students to build, maintain, and run a cutting edge, commercially available HPC architecture on just 26 amps of energy."
Only problem is that the Ampere is a unit of CURRENT, not energy. It's like saying someone weighs 686 Newtons.
While I understand that if the voltage is kept the same, then the amps are proportional to the energy involved per unit time because W = V x A. However 26 amps at 120 volts for 1 second is not the same energy as 26 amps at 5 million volts for 20 years.
With a little time, an intelligent person could become familiar with the workings of the entire architecture. I used to have a map of every memory location in the 64KB
Fortunately we've moved on from the days when a coder had to know the IRQs, DMA channels and interrupts and had to waste time playing around with peeks and pokes (especially when some of them required you to insert (random number of) NOP's in between because the hardware wasn't fast enough). Now we have these things called drivers and libraries that do all the basic work for us, and we can just program the high level stuff. How cool is it that I can write a multi-threaded graphical program in about 10 minutes? Try doing that in Turbo Pascal 2.0.
Yeah it means I've had to adapt and learn new languages, new APIs and different ways of doing things. Instead of learning about ports I learn about object interfaces and methods. But you just have to keep up, like any other field. Certainly in my other hobby - medicine, if you snooze you lose.
Well, unless there is some atypical distribution between alzheimers in religious an non-religious brains,
This is exactly what must be determined first. If you're just taking names at random from the general population you're allowed to say you have a representative sample. If you start picking and choosing, you have to prove that your sample matches the general population FIRST. It's like surveying people about how they like the public school system at the golf pro shop or the tennis club.
No-one, not you, certainly not me, can attend exactly to what they're doing for every second of every minute of every day.
Agreed - and you don't have to do it every second of every minute of every day. Just when you're about to perform a procedure. There's a reason pilots have pre-flight checklists, and I'm sure those who work in nuclear reactors have a script to follow. In fact, just about any "mission critical" aspect of any job is written on paper. You can do things on "autopilot" without paying attention to what you do most of the time, but for some tasks you need to be sure of what you're doing. That means paying a little more attention than normal. After all, these "accidents" are in fact manslaughter. I certainly bear that in mind every time I write a prescription or perform a procedure - no matter how trivial. Primum non nocere...
Actually since Jedi represents a religion with at least half a million followers according to census data, there may be an exception.
An alarm that sounds all the time is completely useless and in itself can do more harm than good. Ask the ghosts of these pilots.
Nurses should not have to work in an environment where it is even possible to make that kind of mistake
Speaking as a physician, it's your responsibility to know exactly what you're doing. Blaming "the environment" is just making excuses for gross negligence. Just like it's wise to double-check the medication you are dispensing, double-check the dose you are administering if it's a substance with dangerous side effects, and screen your patients before surgery (instead of doing it the way we used to pre 1980's, when a significant number of patients died on the table because they had unknown underlying conditions we would find out about in the autopsy), you should make sure that you're performing a procedure correctly. If you don't do that, I suggest another line of work.
You get what you pay for. You hire for the lowest possible salary and treat your professionals like unskilled laborers, well, don't be surprised. A professional would never dream of doing something like this - but then again a professional would not work for peanuts either.
Look out for the Meklars!
Is this really helping out the environment or just a hidden way to increase taxes?
Guess