Mr. Barlow belongs to the "keep the people stupid" school of thought.
I mean I am a doctor. I could complain that the "internet" is a real pain in the ass because patients come in asking lots of questions nowadays. In fact some of them come up with diseases even I have never heard of (except as a footnote in some text). I could claim that INFORMATION IS BAD and is standing in the way of my medical practice.
Or I could make sure I was good at my job, congratulate those patients who manage to correctly self-diagnose, and educate the ones who don't. But I guess asking a politician to put some effort into his job is going over the top.
The Google-specific program components are available only in machine-readable binary code, which makes it impossible to analyze the internal processing.
No. It makes it very difficult and tedious and impractical to analyze. It is not, however, impossible.
Very few tests fall into the must have category (without this the patient dies or suffers a bad outcome).
So you would have your decision criteria being the life or death of a patient. Nice. Yes, I am glad that you are not a physician.
Most are of the nice to have/needed for optimum treatment
Hello? That's what doctors try to achieve, when we're not staying current.
So if I understand you, you propose SUB optimal treatment, provided it doesn't actually KILL patients?
Seriously, I know a few doctors who lack diagnostic confidence (and/or skill) and therefore make up for it by trying to brute-force the process via the lab, ordering every available test under the sun in order to hopefully come up with a clue (kind of like medical TV shows, actually). However these doctors are in the minority. Usually when a test is ordered - there's a REASON (even if it's not life and death).
The police and the courts should bear the following in mind when considering the recordings:
"If the police are doing nothing wrong, then they have absolutely nothing to fear from being recorded".
Unfortunately the "recording" of police should not be left entirely to police owned CCTV systems. Because those systems can malfunction at the most inconvenient times, causing the images to disappear right when, for example, someone called Charles de Menezes gets shot in the head for his crime of wearing a jacket on a warm day.
While the police have a job to do, and most of them do a damned good one at that; they are still human beings. And as such not infallible and not immune to all sorts of temptation - from wrongly kicking someone in the face who probably deserved it (but deserving has no place in law), to covering one's or one's buddy's ass in an ugly situation, these things can and DO happen. People should not be punished for recording something that is happening - especially in a public place or in the privacy of the recorder's own home. The Romans coined the saying: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The government cannot be trusted blindly. There lies the path to tyranny.
Because accounting/human resources think that people only get sick Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm, so why budget for a functional 7 days a week lab? But when accountants think about efficiency in health care, they HATE to see empty beds because they think that the hospital is being "inefficient" when actually it's the other way around. So Mrs. Jones gets to stay that extra couple of days because more filled beds means we can get a bigger budget.
Of course there are pitfalls everywhere in health care - because if you start doing like some insurance companies and paying bonuses on DISCHARGES, suddenly you will start getting sick people being discharged before they're ready. However making doctors beg for lab work is ridiculous. At the hospital I worked at, if you didn't put "urgent" on the lab request, it could take 2-3 days. So everyone put "urgent" on everything. How stupid is that?
From TFA: The managers said the move is aimed at easing pressure on hospital workers charged with performing blood tests by making doctors consider whether the tests are essential.
Let me clarify that I am a physician. Thank god I don't work in the UK, however.
This is typical of the problems you get when a hospital is run by "business administrators". Please note: ALL TESTS ORDERED BY A DOCTOR ARE ESSENTIAL. What, you think we like to take time out of our lives to write down lab orders, and take more time interpreting them, just to push paper around? Because we have stock in ballpoint pen manufacturers?
Honestly any person who alters a medical instruction - say nursing staff who fail to dispense correct, prescribed medication or lab staff who decide not to perform correct, prescribed tests are taking a MEDICAL decision. This implies two things: first, they are practicing medicine without being licensed to do so. Secondly, the must assume responsibility for the consequences of their decision. If something happens to a patient because the lab "deemed" that the test was "not necessary", guess whose fault it is?
This is a thinly veiled attempt to reduce hospital costs by not hiring more lab workers to cover the weekends. Or some idiot in accounting thinks that if he limits the amount of testing, he will essentially limit costs (because of course running no tests is far cheaper than running tests). The hidden cost of course is the morbidity/mortality of the patients. But hey, what's an extra day in the hospital for the patient - the bed will be filled by SOMEONE anyway, right?
Unfortunately I find that physicians are too good natured or too wrapped up in their work to get organized and tackle crap like this head on. Perhaps the hospital administrators should start saying "please" to the physicians for them to come to work every day./rant
The worst ones are the laws saying that the "regulations of (agency X) will have the force of law"... Suddenly the tax-paying voting public is removed from the loop and placed at the whim of regulations and "guidelines".
Well, sometimes laws are passed which limit the government's freedom, effectively increasing everyone else's.
IANAL but my understanding is that laws are actually passed to grant the government power. The default state for the government is that it is not allowed to to anything. The default state for the citizen is that he is allowed to do anything. The government requires a law to give it specific powers over the citizen. If there is no law supporting a course of action, the government is forbidden from doing it. Likewise, people can do anything they want until a law is created that limits them.
At least, that's how it works in civilized countries.
I'm trying hard to remember where I saw a law passed that actually increased our freedoms.
Kind of a contradiction in terms, really. Laws NEVER increase freedom. By definition they do just the opposite for "somebody", setting (hopefully) concrete boundaries.
While not all laws are bad, unfortunately we seem to be legislating and restricting every single aspect of human nature. By default you are required to know the law since ignorance of the law does not excuse you from non compliance with the law. However law degrees for all citizens are not mandatory at the kindergarten level (which is the age where some people have begun to be held accountable under the law) yet.
In fact, I think this should be another law./sarcasm
People were being bigots, and that's Just Not Right.
And you are the biggest bigot of all, Mr. Holier than Thou. Because you talk about bigotry instead of standing up for the principles of free Western civilization, while that framework is being eroded from under your very feet. If you are white, I am sure there are parts of town you refuse to go to, bigot or not. And the same applies if you belong to another ethnic group. The hatred is out there, and the guy that stabs or shoots or bombs you isn't going to care if you are or aren't a bigot. He will kill you for what you stand for to him, not for who you are.
So if you want to go ahead and ignore everything that's happening around you, watching government after government cave in because of the threat of violence from radical muslims, go ahead. That's what living in a free society means. However do not get in the way of us "bigots" as we struggle to keep you free by forcing the governments to finally choose to abide by our long standing principles, or declare themselves puppets of the new caliphate.
However the radical muslims would do well to remember that most of us come from Viking stock...
Fighting hateful behavior with more hateful behavior is sophomoric.
And to paraphrase Clausewitz, war is won by the most violent. While no one is shooting anyone over this (yet), acting mature will not work when dealing with loud-mouthed ideaologues who will take any opportunity to strip you of your rights (while at the same time granting themselves more political power). Stand up, or shut up.
They should do a little more research, as I wish them luck getting across the Darien Gap. There IS no highway from Panama to Colombia - they'll have to take the ferry like everyone else.
In my opinion religion taps in to that same idiotic section of the brain used for sporting events, "national pride", and politics. It's not YOUR sports team that is winning and you have contributed ZERO to the effort. It's only "your" country through the accident of your birth - you didn't get to choose where you would be born. And as for politics, you might be ready to kill your neighbor because you think corrupt candidate A is better than corrupt candidate B, but neither of them give a shit about you.
Religion is the same thing. You didn't choose it, your parents chose it for you. You cannot affect it (if you try you are branded a heretic). And (insert god here) doesn't give a shit about you, but he is in constant need of a great deal of money because unlike the Fed, gods apparently can't print their own.
I have designed a CPU that uses only one transistor, requires absolutely no power, and is infinitely fast! Of course at the moment the only instruction it can run is NOP, but I'm working on the problem...
Garbage in, garbage out, professor. A computer that isn't accurate is no longer useful. We might as well go back to using thousands of humans to double-check other thousands of humans. Oh wait no those require FAR more energy and time.
The goal is to reduce power consumption and improve performance.
Well that's fine if you are an academic who measures "performance" in "operations per second". Usually, however, computers are used to make CORRECT calculations. What use is a blazing fast computer that is no longer reliable? If you allow a fraction of errors, considering the speed of CPU's and the length of time they can be running, you can expect these errors to compound and magnify over time eventually corrupting the whole program/data.
That would certainly add a whole different line of thought as to how stars are born. I guess we'll have to wait for the offspring to see who the likely parent was. I'm looking at YOU, Jupiter...
Good thing all scientists know that surveys are the least reliable type of study. Especially on highly subjective matters like religion. That way we can tell right away their value is zero. But I guess it sells magazines for those who like to pretend that they are intellectuals.
Wars WILL start over the "scarcity" of water. But wait! There suddenly isn't less water on the planet than there used to be. If anything thanks to global warming (man made or not) and glacial/arctic melting, there is MORE water on the planet. The problem is there are TOO MANY PEOPLE. So everyone gets less water. The amount of water available PER CAPITA per unit time is shrinking fast.
When people start breeding responsibly and limiting themselves to replacement, instead of keeping their women in a state of perpetual pregnancy, this sort of problem will only get worse. Yes there will be a fight to find out who gets to be king of the sewers. But what a shame, I actually thought we were supposed to be the "intelligent" species. But hey, the pope says condom/birth control is "bad". Somehow raping small children isn't. No I'm not being fair, it's not just the Catholics that breed like rabbits - but it's part of the problem.
because average intelligence (IQ 100) is reached by half of the population by definition.
That's not the average IQ, that's the median IQ. Median means that exactly half the population are over 100, and exactly half the population are under 100. The median is the 50% mark. NOT the average. Of course from someone sitting at over 160, it's pretty frustrating.
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Mr. Barlow belongs to the "keep the people stupid" school of thought.
I mean I am a doctor. I could complain that the "internet" is a real pain in the ass because patients come in asking lots of questions nowadays. In fact some of them come up with diseases even I have never heard of (except as a footnote in some text). I could claim that INFORMATION IS BAD and is standing in the way of my medical practice.
Or I could make sure I was good at my job, congratulate those patients who manage to correctly self-diagnose, and educate the ones who don't. But I guess asking a politician to put some effort into his job is going over the top.
Well, there's a lack of McDonald's hamburgers on this world too, so perhaps there is human life down there after all, consuming all the hamburgers.
While the hypothesis is cute, it doesn't "prove" anything.
The Google-specific program components are available only in machine-readable binary code, which makes it impossible to analyze the internal processing.
No. It makes it very difficult and tedious and impractical to analyze. It is not, however, impossible.
Outlawing mockery makes a mockery of the law...
The courts should be no place for rude people to be educated, or for those who hold grudges to get satisfaction.
Very few tests fall into the must have category (without this the patient dies or suffers a bad outcome).
So you would have your decision criteria being the life or death of a patient. Nice. Yes, I am glad that you are not a physician.
Most are of the nice to have/needed for optimum treatment
Hello? That's what doctors try to achieve, when we're not staying current.
So if I understand you, you propose SUB optimal treatment, provided it doesn't actually KILL patients?
Seriously, I know a few doctors who lack diagnostic confidence (and/or skill) and therefore make up for it by trying to brute-force the process via the lab, ordering every available test under the sun in order to hopefully come up with a clue (kind of like medical TV shows, actually). However these doctors are in the minority. Usually when a test is ordered - there's a REASON (even if it's not life and death).
With a video camera he wouldn't have gone down the stairs.
Nah, with a video camera the officers involved in helping the suspect slip would receive a 1 month suspension with pay.
But don't...
The police and the courts should bear the following in mind when considering the recordings:
"If the police are doing nothing wrong, then they have absolutely nothing to fear from being recorded".
Unfortunately the "recording" of police should not be left entirely to police owned CCTV systems. Because those systems can malfunction at the most inconvenient times, causing the images to disappear right when, for example, someone called Charles de Menezes gets shot in the head for his crime of wearing a jacket on a warm day.
While the police have a job to do, and most of them do a damned good one at that; they are still human beings. And as such not infallible and not immune to all sorts of temptation - from wrongly kicking someone in the face who probably deserved it (but deserving has no place in law), to covering one's or one's buddy's ass in an ugly situation, these things can and DO happen. People should not be punished for recording something that is happening - especially in a public place or in the privacy of the recorder's own home. The Romans coined the saying: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The government cannot be trusted blindly. There lies the path to tyranny.
Lab and tech are short-staffed on weekends
Because accounting/human resources think that people only get sick Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm, so why budget for a functional 7 days a week lab? But when accountants think about efficiency in health care, they HATE to see empty beds because they think that the hospital is being "inefficient" when actually it's the other way around. So Mrs. Jones gets to stay that extra couple of days because more filled beds means we can get a bigger budget.
Of course there are pitfalls everywhere in health care - because if you start doing like some insurance companies and paying bonuses on DISCHARGES, suddenly you will start getting sick people being discharged before they're ready. However making doctors beg for lab work is ridiculous. At the hospital I worked at, if you didn't put "urgent" on the lab request, it could take 2-3 days. So everyone put "urgent" on everything. How stupid is that?
From TFA: The managers said the move is aimed at easing pressure on hospital workers charged with performing blood tests by making doctors consider whether the tests are essential.
Let me clarify that I am a physician. Thank god I don't work in the UK, however.
This is typical of the problems you get when a hospital is run by "business administrators". Please note: ALL TESTS ORDERED BY A DOCTOR ARE ESSENTIAL. What, you think we like to take time out of our lives to write down lab orders, and take more time interpreting them, just to push paper around? Because we have stock in ballpoint pen manufacturers?
Honestly any person who alters a medical instruction - say nursing staff who fail to dispense correct, prescribed medication or lab staff who decide not to perform correct, prescribed tests are taking a MEDICAL decision. This implies two things: first, they are practicing medicine without being licensed to do so. Secondly, the must assume responsibility for the consequences of their decision. If something happens to a patient because the lab "deemed" that the test was "not necessary", guess whose fault it is?
This is a thinly veiled attempt to reduce hospital costs by not hiring more lab workers to cover the weekends. Or some idiot in accounting thinks that if he limits the amount of testing, he will essentially limit costs (because of course running no tests is far cheaper than running tests). The hidden cost of course is the morbidity/mortality of the patients. But hey, what's an extra day in the hospital for the patient - the bed will be filled by SOMEONE anyway, right?
Unfortunately I find that physicians are too good natured or too wrapped up in their work to get organized and tackle crap like this head on. Perhaps the hospital administrators should start saying "please" to the physicians for them to come to work every day. /rant
The worst ones are the laws saying that the "regulations of (agency X) will have the force of law"... Suddenly the tax-paying voting public is removed from the loop and placed at the whim of regulations and "guidelines".
Well, sometimes laws are passed which limit the government's freedom, effectively increasing everyone else's.
IANAL but my understanding is that laws are actually passed to grant the government power. The default state for the government is that it is not allowed to to anything. The default state for the citizen is that he is allowed to do anything. The government requires a law to give it specific powers over the citizen. If there is no law supporting a course of action, the government is forbidden from doing it. Likewise, people can do anything they want until a law is created that limits them.
At least, that's how it works in civilized countries.
I'm trying hard to remember where I saw a law passed that actually increased our freedoms.
Kind of a contradiction in terms, really. Laws NEVER increase freedom. By definition they do just the opposite for "somebody", setting (hopefully) concrete boundaries.
While not all laws are bad, unfortunately we seem to be legislating and restricting every single aspect of human nature. By default you are required to know the law since ignorance of the law does not excuse you from non compliance with the law. However law degrees for all citizens are not mandatory at the kindergarten level (which is the age where some people have begun to be held accountable under the law) yet.
In fact, I think this should be another law. /sarcasm
People were being bigots, and that's Just Not Right.
And you are the biggest bigot of all, Mr. Holier than Thou. Because you talk about bigotry instead of standing up for the principles of free Western civilization, while that framework is being eroded from under your very feet. If you are white, I am sure there are parts of town you refuse to go to, bigot or not. And the same applies if you belong to another ethnic group. The hatred is out there, and the guy that stabs or shoots or bombs you isn't going to care if you are or aren't a bigot. He will kill you for what you stand for to him, not for who you are.
So if you want to go ahead and ignore everything that's happening around you, watching government after government cave in because of the threat of violence from radical muslims, go ahead. That's what living in a free society means. However do not get in the way of us "bigots" as we struggle to keep you free by forcing the governments to finally choose to abide by our long standing principles, or declare themselves puppets of the new caliphate.
However the radical muslims would do well to remember that most of us come from Viking stock...
Fighting hateful behavior with more hateful behavior is sophomoric.
And to paraphrase Clausewitz, war is won by the most violent. While no one is shooting anyone over this (yet), acting mature will not work when dealing with loud-mouthed ideaologues who will take any opportunity to strip you of your rights (while at the same time granting themselves more political power). Stand up, or shut up.
Time for "Everybody except Pakistan and Bangladesh Draw Mohammed Day"...
Spending as much time in any other job would've paid the trip with less risk involved.
Especially if anyone in Central/South America finds out exactly how much all those batteries are worth.
"What car, gringo? I diden see no car"
15,000 miles down the Pan American Highway
They should do a little more research, as I wish them luck getting across the Darien Gap. There IS no highway from Panama to Colombia - they'll have to take the ferry like everyone else.
In my opinion religion taps in to that same idiotic section of the brain used for sporting events, "national pride", and politics. It's not YOUR sports team that is winning and you have contributed ZERO to the effort. It's only "your" country through the accident of your birth - you didn't get to choose where you would be born. And as for politics, you might be ready to kill your neighbor because you think corrupt candidate A is better than corrupt candidate B, but neither of them give a shit about you.
Religion is the same thing. You didn't choose it, your parents chose it for you. You cannot affect it (if you try you are branded a heretic). And (insert god here) doesn't give a shit about you, but he is in constant need of a great deal of money because unlike the Fed, gods apparently can't print their own.
Yep. Apple computers never crash.
I have designed a CPU that uses only one transistor, requires absolutely no power, and is infinitely fast! Of course at the moment the only instruction it can run is NOP, but I'm working on the problem...
Garbage in, garbage out, professor. A computer that isn't accurate is no longer useful. We might as well go back to using thousands of humans to double-check other thousands of humans. Oh wait no those require FAR more energy and time.
The goal is to reduce power consumption and improve performance.
Well that's fine if you are an academic who measures "performance" in "operations per second". Usually, however, computers are used to make CORRECT calculations. What use is a blazing fast computer that is no longer reliable? If you allow a fraction of errors, considering the speed of CPU's and the length of time they can be running, you can expect these errors to compound and magnify over time eventually corrupting the whole program/data.
That would certainly add a whole different line of thought as to how stars are born. I guess we'll have to wait for the offspring to see who the likely parent was. I'm looking at YOU, Jupiter...
Funny, I'm a scientist and they didn't ask me.
Good thing all scientists know that surveys are the least reliable type of study. Especially on highly subjective matters like religion. That way we can tell right away their value is zero. But I guess it sells magazines for those who like to pretend that they are intellectuals.
Wars WILL start over the "scarcity" of water. But wait! There suddenly isn't less water on the planet than there used to be. If anything thanks to global warming (man made or not) and glacial/arctic melting, there is MORE water on the planet. The problem is there are TOO MANY PEOPLE. So everyone gets less water. The amount of water available PER CAPITA per unit time is shrinking fast.
When people start breeding responsibly and limiting themselves to replacement, instead of keeping their women in a state of perpetual pregnancy, this sort of problem will only get worse. Yes there will be a fight to find out who gets to be king of the sewers. But what a shame, I actually thought we were supposed to be the "intelligent" species. But hey, the pope says condom/birth control is "bad". Somehow raping small children isn't. No I'm not being fair, it's not just the Catholics that breed like rabbits - but it's part of the problem.
because average intelligence (IQ 100) is reached by half of the population by definition.
That's not the average IQ, that's the median IQ. Median means that exactly half the population are over 100, and exactly half the population are under 100. The median is the 50% mark. NOT the average. Of course from someone sitting at over 160, it's pretty frustrating.