In the long run we are all dead. But in the next few years *radiologists* are going to find themselves in serious trouble I think.
Radiology is a highly paid specialty, so the incentive to automate it is there.
Much of the work consists of sitting in a dark room reading images that were acquired somewhere else. No need for manual dexterity or going from room to room, mostly no need for bedside manner. The closest most patients come to interacting with a radiologist is having the primary care doctor show them the report written by the radiologist after viewing the images. That means that if the analytical part of the radiologist work can be automated you are mostly done, since shipping the images to a neural net and getting back a report is the same as shipping the image to a reading room and getting back a report.
So there is incentive to automate and it is practical to automate. But they keep coming up with new things that imaging can be used for, and developing new and better imaging technologies, so the number of things to automate is large and increasing.
Neural nets are making amazing advances in automated diagnosis, but so far as I am aware everything is on a disease by disease basis. So there is a network that can diagnose pneumonia, which likely won't care about lung cancers. And you need a completely different net for cardiac CT, and for brain perfusion, and for virtual colonoscopies, and for musculoskeletal (if not one for knees, and one for ankles...), etc. And every one of those issues needs a large body of images to train the network on, meaning that common issues will be quickly automated and uncommon ones will take a long time to be addressed.
Radiologists won't go away, but I think all the common work will get automated, leading to a smaller number of even more highly paid specialists.
If the fundamental problem is that in starting jobs with no salary information, women get paid less than men, and that follows them through a career, how will having no salary information at every turn be better?
The theory is that this makes negotiating more equal - employers can still ask what you made, but if they do they also have to disclose the salary range of the position. Say I am making 25K, but their range for the position is 33K to 45K - if they lowball me at 33K, I can counter that my experience should put me at 40K.
But in the old world, they don't tell you the range, but instead say "great news, we can increase your salary to 30K - that's a 20% bump!". And you don't have enough information to know that they are getting a steal.
None of this is something people couldn't have negotiated on their own, but it levels the playing field a little bit.
Some require a drug test, others don't. It's silly, I am not going to be operating a bus, I'm going to be driving a keyboard and mouse, maybe an oscilloscope if I get suckered into lab work. All ask for your previous salary on the job application.
I would suspect that it's more about you being a soft target for extortion. Drug addicts can get themselves into precarious positions of having to find a way to repay large sums of money.
LK
I would bet that in most cases it is mostly a defensive reaction to potential bad publicity. Nobody wants to see a news story along the lines of "Initrode, which unlike many of its peers does not require pre-employment drug screens, was unable to provide an answer as to why the drug abuse went undetected for so long". And the potentially perfectly accurate response of "because for many years their was no evidence of drug abuse in their work output" doesn't help once the mob gets warmed up.
"According to court documents obtained by Bleeping Computer, Grupe asked management to resign..." What was management's answer when asked to resign? Did they?
Well, after they had had to deal with "inadequate language", how could they not resign?
I did not RTFA, but the language in the summary is rather tortured.
My question is... where does the First Amendment end and overt bribery begin? As it stands now, the CU verdict has pretty much put any electable seat in the country up for sale. Or, do we just want to say that the invisible hand will take care of all this, as we ride down the lassez faire ideology into another Great Depression?
Actually, it is not true that elections are for sale. Because of gerrymandering, most seats are so safe for one party or the other that even huge amounts of cash don't budge the needle meaningfully. Political advertising and campaign spending matters, but no matter what you spend, you aren't going to elect Hillary in rural Mississippi, or Trump in Berkeley.
Now the behavior of elected officials may be influenced by donations to reelection campaigns, but mostly that is when they are in and safely incumbent.
I disagree totally with libertarian principles, but I think that it's pretty clear to everyone that they are a large segment of American politics and that our political parties don't necessarily reflect the broad divisions in our society very well. I would like to institute a voting system which would more accurately reflect the support there is for your party. I think it would be better for the nation for us to have more choices at the polls, and more meaningful ones
I often wonder if we would have better outcomes with a parliamentary systems, with a mixture of regional representation and at-large candidates. Having lots of parties would mean that people would find parties that match their ideals, and parties getting some seats gives them some influence. And having more at large candidates reduces the winner-take-all aspect of state by state campaigning, without going all the way to a nationwide popular vote.
It seems that the two party system leaves lots of people feeling like neither candidate represents them well.
You admit then it's just more of the same of what we have experienced the last 25 years. Why is it now suddenly AI? It's just a marketing gimmick.
The techniques were described as AI 25 years ago as well, it is just that the scale and applicability of them is hugely different now.
Perhaps where we are foundering is expectations. When I took an AI course back in college we learned about expert systems, neural networks, associative arrays and other things I don't remember, and all of those were algorithms or approaches that would be used to build AI. I have no problem with calling useful systems built on those techniques AI, even if they don't pass the Turing test.
I think the reason few are actually doing anything with AI is that it hasn't been turned into a product yet. Ask a financial analyst how they intend to use AI to improve their forecasts, and they will give you a blank look. Sell them a product that you feed a bunch of data into and a forecast spits out, that uses AI under the hood, and they will be happy to buy it. But they don't have the ability to start from scratch.
Kind of like a study asking "Why aren't house builders using superconductors?" Because they have no idea how to put them to use until they get out of lab settings and get built into products.
So long as AI is implementing techniques that work on general purpose computers, programmers will look at it and say that that is not AI, that is just code running this algorithm or that. You keep waiting for the magic to happen, and keep finding out that it is just software.
But so what? Neural nets are making great strides in specific applications, and even though we know how they work in general, the specific way they put together associations still surprises us and lets them come up with answers we didn't expect, or implementations we would never have come up with. Computers playing Jeopardy don't do anything a human can't do, but the fact that they can do it at all is a huge leap forward compared to where we were 20 years ago. And sure the hardware is a million times faster, but as the saying goes, quantity has a quality all its own.
Going back to the point of magic happening, what would it take for you to decide something was AI? And if you discovered you understood all of the techniques that went in to that, would it stop being AI?
When software runs a device that you literally depend on to live you have a right to it's source code.
If you are going to stand on principle, why not go for "When you need a device to live, you have a right to the device"? Having access to the source code is mostly meaningless, and far less consequential than having access to the actual device.
You must have never been audited before. Audits cost time and money and you have to prove every little thing you claimed on your tax returns. It's meant to catch cheaters but it very often times also catches out people who are simply not prepared for one and even if you manage to get through one without getting whacked with interest or penalties you still spent quite a significant amount of time and money to do so.
Once upon a time there were two types of audits. The really feared audits were TCMA - Taxpayer Compliance Measurement Audits. These were in depth, line by line audits of randomly selected taxpayers. The purpose was to get statistical baseline data about taxpayers and tax cheats. That data went into the models that selected non-random audits of taxpayers suspected of cheating.
As I understand it, TCMA audits stopped a number of years ago, but many of the horror stories people have about audits go back to that era.
Most audits today are targeted. The IRS sends you a letter saying that they are challenging particular aspects of your return, and asking for documentation of whatever they don't believe. Those can still suck, but it isn't a line by line fishing expedition, unless they think there is significant fraud happening.
Your golf-clubs will be kept at a storage facility, which will automatically load the clubs onto a small self-driving car that will roll out to wherever you want it.
Don't forget, cars don't just move people, they move objects too. There's only logistical reasons why your golf bag itself can't be a self-driving car, or at the very lease easily slotted onto one.
An interesting notion, and one I admit I haven't considered. But from a cost perspective I question it. What does it cost to rent a personal possessions locker, and how much extra to have my possessions meet me at my destination and go back to the locker when I am done with them? Now I am renting two cars instead of one, or paying (and possibly waiting) for one car to go get my stuff, pick me up at a different location, and take me where I want to go.
Shitty 'self driving cars' will fail spectacularly in the marketplace once people truly understand the reality of them: your real freedom taken away, as you're strapped into some machine that you have zero real control over.
I for one will be very happy to have a machine do the driving for me. I already use adaptive cruise control and traffic jam assist on my commute, and I would happily turn over the drudgery of driving to a machine. I derive no joy from driving, though I know many people who do, and I don't begrudge them that.
But I question the common perception that self driving cars are going to lead huge drops in car ownership. Right now my golf clubs and gym bag are in my car, and my sunglasses, and my bike rack, and my music collection. And compared to the amount of crap I see in other peoples vechicles, I am the model of tidiness. Music can migrate to my phone, and I can carry my sunglasses easily enough, but how do I call for a car that has a bike rack that fits a recumbent bike? I can take my golf clubs in an uber type car to work, then to the course, then back home, but that is a bunch of schlepping that is easier when I can just leave my clubs in the trunk. What about child seats? Will parents have to provide their own car seats, or count on calling a car that has one or more available?
None of these things is a showstopper, but if I am already spending money to own my car, why wouldn't I spend money to own my self driving car, that already has my stuff in it? I can see two car families turning into one car families, but I suspect many people will still want to own their own vehicle.
You don't need eye protection any more than you do on a normal day. In fact you need less. Much less.
Take the amount of time you spend staring at the sun on a normal day and compare it to the amount of time you plan to spend staring at the eclipse factored by the average amount of eclipse coverage over that time. A few minutes of staring at an eclipse is nothing compared to about a century of existing on this planet. Unless you're a cave dweller. And like I said, if you're worried about it, use your built in sunglasses by squinting. If you're a pussy, use regular ol' sunglasses that block UV.
I know exactly what you mean! People keep telling me that I shouldn't put my hand in the gas flame of my stove, because I will get burned. But I say that the flame in my gas furnace is way bigger, and heats my whole freaking house! And yet apparently it is safe to use 5 months out of the year, even when I am asleep. But put a dinky little flame on the stove, and all of a sudden people are like "OH NOES, DON'T TOUCH THE FLAMES!". Pussies.
Then a new disruptive technology will come along and start the process all over again.
Not likely. If the past few decades have been any indication, storage capacities will grow and available bandwidth will increase, and people's idea of "small" will grow. Mobile apps will be 2 GB, and people will be saying, "Man, these app sizes are growing out of control. Remember the good old days when an app like this would only be 1 GB?"
And people still won't care. I am at the age where I have to stop myself from telling stories of the "why when I was your age I thought 64KB was a lot of memory" kind, and as long as I have enough storage and bandwidth that that app sizes don't fill up my phone or take forever to download I don't pay any attention at all to the app sizes. And as someone who has done project management over the years, I know I am not going to put effort into shrinking down package size until my customers start telling me I have to.
So long as bandwidth and storage grow faster than app sizes, solve more interesting problems.
... but nothing beats win+r mspaint ctrl+p crop save
Actually, I would say that win key, snip, return, drag, save beats that hands down.
The snipping tool has been part of Windows since Win 7, it takes screen shots and it can do trivial markup. Doesn't have every feature of mspaint, but for screenshots it is a 90% solution.
Why wouldn't you look for work when unemployment was 4.4%? Should be pretty easy to find a job
Which is likely why the number of jobs increased and the unemployment rate increased. The labor market is good enough that it is enticing people who previously were not looking for work into doing so. Effectively moving people from the U-6 or U-4 pool into U-3.
It's a cash cow. Tolls never go away despite what you've may have read. They go on forever as maintenance costs and to fund the next "big project". So once a toll, always a toll.
The worst are dynamic metering based tolls. If there's a wreck on a major road in some states, the toll/hov section instantly jacks up the price until enough people stay in the parking lot until that flipped over 18 wheeler is shoved off of it.
It is hardly a cash cow. Toll roads rarely make money when debt service is taken into account. They cover their operating expenses, but have trouble recouping construction costs.
Dynamic tolls are the only ones that make sense if you want to use a free market perspective. When the toll road is more desirable you jack up the price so that it maintains value to the people willing to pay the price. Otherwise you get the scenario of people paying to use a toll lane that isn't moving faster than the non-toll lane.
But that is not to say that people are happy to pay market based pricing. Same thing as Uber getting raged at for cranking up rates in times of high demand.
If you go to India you can find tens (hundreds?) of millions of people who have been vegetarian all their lives. Not strict vegan, but vegetarian. I think you will find that it is a perfectly normal and sustainable dietary regimen.
Excepting outliers like Eskimos or nomads that live almost exclusively on animal products, I suspect that for most of human history people's diets have been primarily vegetarian with sporadic meat consumption.
Sporadic meat consumption is probably enough for a bunch of trace nutrients, and non-vegan vegetarians have it easier than pure vegans.
In practice HIPAA is rarely used against "bad actors". In just about every single hospital encounter my family has been involved with HIPAA was violated multiple times by doctors and nurses (multiple different patients, different doctors, different hospitals). Some of the breaches family members cared about, others were "harmless" but violations nonetheless.
When I referenced "bad actors", I meant that the health system is not absolved of responsibility if they get hacked - it is still a breach, and they are still liable. The bad actors who committed the breach would be liable under other laws like CFAA, but didn't have the duty to safeguard PHI in the first place.
Sorry to hear about your experiences with HIPAA violations. I work with the IT groups of hospital systems, and those people are terrified of HIPAA violations. There are pretty broad exceptions to HIPAA relating to delivery of care, and I can well believe that translates to more casual attitudes at the point of care. FWIW, I think they PHI notice you have to be given by the hospital should include contact information on how to make a complaint if you want to follow up.
Better question: Why are such records stored on servers sufficiently accessible that Google can index them in the first place?
Because there are no penalties for shitty security.
Maybe, maybe not. In the USA, the HIPAA acts governs how medical providers and affiliates are required to deal with PHI (protected health information). There are indeed significant penalties associated with disclosure of PHI, and there is no exemption for malware or other bad actors. Even more alarming for the healthcare industry, HIPAA includes *personal* liability, not just corporate liability (http://managedhealthcareexecutive.modernmedicine.com/managed-healthcare-executive/content/tags/hipaa/hipaa-rule-makes-you-personally-liable), so PHI security is taken very seriously.
But HIPAA doesn't govern what I can do with my own medical records - if I want to post them on a publicly accessible website that is just fine. And since records are required as input to all sorts of medical research and software development projects, anonymized and pseudonymized data is everywhere. I have personally seen CT studies claiming to be for Frodo Baggins, Meriadoc Brandybuck, and Daffy Duck. Those are not PHI and are not an issue under HIPAA, but I don't know whether or not Google would be smart enough to recognize these as not actual medical records.
I have an LG TV, and I have gotten pretty prominent notifications that changing setting X will significantly affect power consumption. So I have no idea if LG is gaming the system, but they seem pretty upfront about what affects energy use, and make it pretty apparent to the operator.
And that's the problem! How can these certifications be taken seriously if they require policies that will either lead to even worse passwords or (if you try to enforce better passwords AND regular changes) to Post-It notes under everyone's keyboard!
I won't defend force password changes - in most cases they are harmful. But depending on the threat you are concerned about, post it notes under the keyboard or word+month+year may not be an issue. If you are concerned with external, random attacks, then the attacker has no ability to get at the post it note, and doesn't know a priori that the weak password patterns exist. Those practices aren't good, but they aren't opening you up to the threat vector you are most worried about.
Are you worried about employee A spoofing employee B's credentials? Then you are much more worried about those things. But enforcing no shared credentials usually requires addressing the root cause of why employees share credentials, and password policies are just the tip of the iceberg.
done right, both ITIL and ISO 9000 give you one thing: predictable, repeatable output. Maybe your desktop guys are not very good at reinstalling Windows, and maybe your X-Ray QA is not good at spotting bad weld jobs on titanium alloy. But if you're an ISO 9000 or ITIL shop, the procedure will always be the same so you can know in advance that 24% of desktops will need re-imaging and that 61% of QA will give false positive, so you can adjust your planning accordingly. The actual quality is not better or worse, but it's consistent.
By that definition of "quality", a McDonalds meal is of higher quality than a french chef's 4 course menu. The burger flipper has QA measures in place to make a burger taste like the same cardboard from Alaska to Zaire while the chef never can reproduce a meal exactly to the point if he has to take into account natural variations in availability and taste of fresh and/or local produced ingredients.
Or wine... what gives the 2002 Chateau de quelque chose it's special quality is that it can not be reproduced easily.
For McDonald's, that probably is the quality measure they prefer. People don't go to McD because it is is great food, it is food that is fast, cheap, widely available and utterly predictable. None of those qualities is going to be important to a French chef, and they will use a different measure of quality.
To restate what others have said, ISO-9000 and other quality frameworks focus on repeatability, and the ability to change your quality system. The unspoken assumption is that any vaguely rational organization will look at repeatedly bad results and take action to improve them. If you don't improve them, you have just wasted everyone's time.
Slashdot Mirror
Doctors are history
In the long run we are all dead. But in the next few years *radiologists* are going to find themselves in serious trouble I think.
Radiology is a highly paid specialty, so the incentive to automate it is there.
Much of the work consists of sitting in a dark room reading images that were acquired somewhere else. No need for manual dexterity or going from room to room, mostly no need for bedside manner. The closest most patients come to interacting with a radiologist is having the primary care doctor show them the report written by the radiologist after viewing the images. That means that if the analytical part of the radiologist work can be automated you are mostly done, since shipping the images to a neural net and getting back a report is the same as shipping the image to a reading room and getting back a report.
So there is incentive to automate and it is practical to automate. But they keep coming up with new things that imaging can be used for, and developing new and better imaging technologies, so the number of things to automate is large and increasing.
Neural nets are making amazing advances in automated diagnosis, but so far as I am aware everything is on a disease by disease basis. So there is a network that can diagnose pneumonia, which likely won't care about lung cancers. And you need a completely different net for cardiac CT, and for brain perfusion, and for virtual colonoscopies, and for musculoskeletal (if not one for knees, and one for ankles...), etc. And every one of those issues needs a large body of images to train the network on, meaning that common issues will be quickly automated and uncommon ones will take a long time to be addressed.
Radiologists won't go away, but I think all the common work will get automated, leading to a smaller number of even more highly paid specialists.
If the fundamental problem is that in starting jobs with no salary information, women get paid less than men, and that follows them through a career, how will having no salary information at every turn be better?
The theory is that this makes negotiating more equal - employers can still ask what you made, but if they do they also have to disclose the salary range of the position. Say I am making 25K, but their range for the position is 33K to 45K - if they lowball me at 33K, I can counter that my experience should put me at 40K.
But in the old world, they don't tell you the range, but instead say "great news, we can increase your salary to 30K - that's a 20% bump!". And you don't have enough information to know that they are getting a steal.
None of this is something people couldn't have negotiated on their own, but it levels the playing field a little bit.
Some require a drug test, others don't. It's silly, I am not going to be operating a bus, I'm going to be driving a keyboard and mouse, maybe an oscilloscope if I get suckered into lab work. All ask for your previous salary on the job application.
I would suspect that it's more about you being a soft target for extortion. Drug addicts can get themselves into precarious positions of having to find a way to repay large sums of money.
LK
I would bet that in most cases it is mostly a defensive reaction to potential bad publicity. Nobody wants to see a news story along the lines of "Initrode, which unlike many of its peers does not require pre-employment drug screens, was unable to provide an answer as to why the drug abuse went undetected for so long". And the potentially perfectly accurate response of "because for many years their was no evidence of drug abuse in their work output" doesn't help once the mob gets warmed up.
"According to court documents obtained by Bleeping Computer, Grupe asked management to resign..." What was management's answer when asked to resign? Did they?
Well, after they had had to deal with "inadequate language", how could they not resign?
I did not RTFA, but the language in the summary is rather tortured.
My question is... where does the First Amendment end and overt bribery begin? As it stands now, the CU verdict has pretty much put any electable seat in the country up for sale. Or, do we just want to say that the invisible hand will take care of all this, as we ride down the lassez faire ideology into another Great Depression?
Actually, it is not true that elections are for sale. Because of gerrymandering, most seats are so safe for one party or the other that even huge amounts of cash don't budge the needle meaningfully. Political advertising and campaign spending matters, but no matter what you spend, you aren't going to elect Hillary in rural Mississippi, or Trump in Berkeley.
Now the behavior of elected officials may be influenced by donations to reelection campaigns, but mostly that is when they are in and safely incumbent.
I disagree totally with libertarian principles, but I think that it's pretty clear to everyone that they are a large segment of American politics and that our political parties don't necessarily reflect the broad divisions in our society very well. I would like to institute a voting system which would more accurately reflect the support there is for your party. I think it would be better for the nation for us to have more choices at the polls, and more meaningful ones
I often wonder if we would have better outcomes with a parliamentary systems, with a mixture of regional representation and at-large candidates. Having lots of parties would mean that people would find parties that match their ideals, and parties getting some seats gives them some influence. And having more at large candidates reduces the winner-take-all aspect of state by state campaigning, without going all the way to a nationwide popular vote.
It seems that the two party system leaves lots of people feeling like neither candidate represents them well.
You admit then it's just more of the same of what we have experienced the last 25 years. Why is it now suddenly AI? It's just a marketing gimmick.
The techniques were described as AI 25 years ago as well, it is just that the scale and applicability of them is hugely different now.
Perhaps where we are foundering is expectations. When I took an AI course back in college we learned about expert systems, neural networks, associative arrays and other things I don't remember, and all of those were algorithms or approaches that would be used to build AI. I have no problem with calling useful systems built on those techniques AI, even if they don't pass the Turing test.
I think the reason few are actually doing anything with AI is that it hasn't been turned into a product yet. Ask a financial analyst how they intend to use AI to improve their forecasts, and they will give you a blank look. Sell them a product that you feed a bunch of data into and a forecast spits out, that uses AI under the hood, and they will be happy to buy it. But they don't have the ability to start from scratch.
Kind of like a study asking "Why aren't house builders using superconductors?" Because they have no idea how to put them to use until they get out of lab settings and get built into products.
So long as AI is implementing techniques that work on general purpose computers, programmers will look at it and say that that is not AI, that is just code running this algorithm or that. You keep waiting for the magic to happen, and keep finding out that it is just software.
But so what? Neural nets are making great strides in specific applications, and even though we know how they work in general, the specific way they put together associations still surprises us and lets them come up with answers we didn't expect, or implementations we would never have come up with. Computers playing Jeopardy don't do anything a human can't do, but the fact that they can do it at all is a huge leap forward compared to where we were 20 years ago. And sure the hardware is a million times faster, but as the saying goes, quantity has a quality all its own.
Going back to the point of magic happening, what would it take for you to decide something was AI? And if you discovered you understood all of the techniques that went in to that, would it stop being AI?
When software runs a device that you literally depend on to live you have a right to it's source code.
If you are going to stand on principle, why not go for "When you need a device to live, you have a right to the device"? Having access to the source code is mostly meaningless, and far less consequential than having access to the actual device.
You must have never been audited before. Audits cost time and money and you have to prove every little thing you claimed on your tax returns. It's meant to catch cheaters but it very often times also catches out people who are simply not prepared for one and even if you manage to get through one without getting whacked with interest or penalties you still spent quite a significant amount of time and money to do so.
Once upon a time there were two types of audits. The really feared audits were TCMA - Taxpayer Compliance Measurement Audits. These were in depth, line by line audits of randomly selected taxpayers. The purpose was to get statistical baseline data about taxpayers and tax cheats. That data went into the models that selected non-random audits of taxpayers suspected of cheating.
As I understand it, TCMA audits stopped a number of years ago, but many of the horror stories people have about audits go back to that era.
Most audits today are targeted. The IRS sends you a letter saying that they are challenging particular aspects of your return, and asking for documentation of whatever they don't believe. Those can still suck, but it isn't a line by line fishing expedition, unless they think there is significant fraud happening.
You're not quite thinking this through.
Your golf-clubs will be kept at a storage facility, which will automatically load the clubs onto a small self-driving car that will roll out to wherever you want it.
Don't forget, cars don't just move people, they move objects too. There's only logistical reasons why your golf bag itself can't be a self-driving car, or at the very lease easily slotted onto one.
An interesting notion, and one I admit I haven't considered. But from a cost perspective I question it. What does it cost to rent a personal possessions locker, and how much extra to have my possessions meet me at my destination and go back to the locker when I am done with them? Now I am renting two cars instead of one, or paying (and possibly waiting) for one car to go get my stuff, pick me up at a different location, and take me where I want to go.
Shitty 'self driving cars' will fail spectacularly in the marketplace once people truly understand the reality of them: your real freedom taken away, as you're strapped into some machine that you have zero real control over.
I for one will be very happy to have a machine do the driving for me. I already use adaptive cruise control and traffic jam assist on my commute, and I would happily turn over the drudgery of driving to a machine. I derive no joy from driving, though I know many people who do, and I don't begrudge them that.
But I question the common perception that self driving cars are going to lead huge drops in car ownership. Right now my golf clubs and gym bag are in my car, and my sunglasses, and my bike rack, and my music collection. And compared to the amount of crap I see in other peoples vechicles, I am the model of tidiness. Music can migrate to my phone, and I can carry my sunglasses easily enough, but how do I call for a car that has a bike rack that fits a recumbent bike? I can take my golf clubs in an uber type car to work, then to the course, then back home, but that is a bunch of schlepping that is easier when I can just leave my clubs in the trunk. What about child seats? Will parents have to provide their own car seats, or count on calling a car that has one or more available?
None of these things is a showstopper, but if I am already spending money to own my car, why wouldn't I spend money to own my self driving car, that already has my stuff in it? I can see two car families turning into one car families, but I suspect many people will still want to own their own vehicle.
You don't need eye protection any more than you do on a normal day. In fact you need less. Much less.
Take the amount of time you spend staring at the sun on a normal day and compare it to the amount of time you plan to spend staring at the eclipse factored by the average amount of eclipse coverage over that time. A few minutes of staring at an eclipse is nothing compared to about a century of existing on this planet. Unless you're a cave dweller. And like I said, if you're worried about it, use your built in sunglasses by squinting. If you're a pussy, use regular ol' sunglasses that block UV.
I know exactly what you mean! People keep telling me that I shouldn't put my hand in the gas flame of my stove, because I will get burned. But I say that the flame in my gas furnace is way bigger, and heats my whole freaking house! And yet apparently it is safe to use 5 months out of the year, even when I am asleep. But put a dinky little flame on the stove, and all of a sudden people are like "OH NOES, DON'T TOUCH THE FLAMES!". Pussies.
Then a new disruptive technology will come along and start the process all over again.
Not likely. If the past few decades have been any indication, storage capacities will grow and available bandwidth will increase, and people's idea of "small" will grow. Mobile apps will be 2 GB, and people will be saying, "Man, these app sizes are growing out of control. Remember the good old days when an app like this would only be 1 GB?"
And people still won't care. I am at the age where I have to stop myself from telling stories of the "why when I was your age I thought 64KB was a lot of memory" kind, and as long as I have enough storage and bandwidth that that app sizes don't fill up my phone or take forever to download I don't pay any attention at all to the app sizes. And as someone who has done project management over the years, I know I am not going to put effort into shrinking down package size until my customers start telling me I have to.
So long as bandwidth and storage grow faster than app sizes, solve more interesting problems.
... but nothing beats win+r mspaint ctrl+p crop save
Actually, I would say that win key, snip, return, drag, save beats that hands down.
The snipping tool has been part of Windows since Win 7, it takes screen shots and it can do trivial markup. Doesn't have every feature of mspaint, but for screenshots it is a 90% solution.
Social Security age is one thing, but the average retirement age in the US has remained around 62-63.
Why wouldn't you look for work when unemployment was 4.4%? Should be pretty easy to find a job
Which is likely why the number of jobs increased and the unemployment rate increased. The labor market is good enough that it is enticing people who previously were not looking for work into doing so. Effectively moving people from the U-6 or U-4 pool into U-3.
It's a cash cow. Tolls never go away despite what you've may have read. They go on forever as maintenance costs and to fund the next "big project". So once a toll, always a toll.
The worst are dynamic metering based tolls. If there's a wreck on a major road in some states, the toll/hov section instantly jacks up the price until enough people stay in the parking lot until that flipped over 18 wheeler is shoved off of it.
It is hardly a cash cow. Toll roads rarely make money when debt service is taken into account. They cover their operating expenses, but have trouble recouping construction costs.
Dynamic tolls are the only ones that make sense if you want to use a free market perspective. When the toll road is more desirable you jack up the price so that it maintains value to the people willing to pay the price. Otherwise you get the scenario of people paying to use a toll lane that isn't moving faster than the non-toll lane.
But that is not to say that people are happy to pay market based pricing. Same thing as Uber getting raged at for cranking up rates in times of high demand.
If you go to India you can find tens (hundreds?) of millions of people who have been vegetarian all their lives. Not strict vegan, but vegetarian. I think you will find that it is a perfectly normal and sustainable dietary regimen.
Excepting outliers like Eskimos or nomads that live almost exclusively on animal products, I suspect that for most of human history people's diets have been primarily vegetarian with sporadic meat consumption.
Sporadic meat consumption is probably enough for a bunch of trace nutrients, and non-vegan vegetarians have it easier than pure vegans.
In practice HIPAA is rarely used against "bad actors". In just about every single hospital encounter my family has been involved with HIPAA was violated multiple times by doctors and nurses (multiple different patients, different doctors, different hospitals). Some of the breaches family members cared about, others were "harmless" but violations nonetheless.
When I referenced "bad actors", I meant that the health system is not absolved of responsibility if they get hacked - it is still a breach, and they are still liable. The bad actors who committed the breach would be liable under other laws like CFAA, but didn't have the duty to safeguard PHI in the first place.
Sorry to hear about your experiences with HIPAA violations. I work with the IT groups of hospital systems, and those people are terrified of HIPAA violations. There are pretty broad exceptions to HIPAA relating to delivery of care, and I can well believe that translates to more casual attitudes at the point of care. FWIW, I think they PHI notice you have to be given by the hospital should include contact information on how to make a complaint if you want to follow up.
Better question: Why are such records stored on servers sufficiently accessible that Google can index them in the first place?
Because there are no penalties for shitty security.
Maybe, maybe not. In the USA, the HIPAA acts governs how medical providers and affiliates are required to deal with PHI (protected health information). There are indeed significant penalties associated with disclosure of PHI, and there is no exemption for malware or other bad actors. Even more alarming for the healthcare industry, HIPAA includes *personal* liability, not just corporate liability (http://managedhealthcareexecutive.modernmedicine.com/managed-healthcare-executive/content/tags/hipaa/hipaa-rule-makes-you-personally-liable), so PHI security is taken very seriously.
But HIPAA doesn't govern what I can do with my own medical records - if I want to post them on a publicly accessible website that is just fine. And since records are required as input to all sorts of medical research and software development projects, anonymized and pseudonymized data is everywhere. I have personally seen CT studies claiming to be for Frodo Baggins, Meriadoc Brandybuck, and Daffy Duck. Those are not PHI and are not an issue under HIPAA, but I don't know whether or not Google would be smart enough to recognize these as not actual medical records.
I have an LG TV, and I have gotten pretty prominent notifications that changing setting X will significantly affect power consumption. So I have no idea if LG is gaming the system, but they seem pretty upfront about what affects energy use, and make it pretty apparent to the operator.
And that's the problem! How can these certifications be taken seriously if they require policies that will either lead to even worse passwords or (if you try to enforce better passwords AND regular changes) to Post-It notes under everyone's keyboard!
I won't defend force password changes - in most cases they are harmful. But depending on the threat you are concerned about, post it notes under the keyboard or word+month+year may not be an issue. If you are concerned with external, random attacks, then the attacker has no ability to get at the post it note, and doesn't know a priori that the weak password patterns exist. Those practices aren't good, but they aren't opening you up to the threat vector you are most worried about.
Are you worried about employee A spoofing employee B's credentials? Then you are much more worried about those things. But enforcing no shared credentials usually requires addressing the root cause of why employees share credentials, and password policies are just the tip of the iceberg.
done right, both ITIL and ISO 9000 give you one thing: predictable, repeatable output. Maybe your desktop guys are not very good at reinstalling Windows, and maybe your X-Ray QA is not good at spotting bad weld jobs on titanium alloy. But if you're an ISO 9000 or ITIL shop, the procedure will always be the same so you can know in advance that 24% of desktops will need re-imaging and that 61% of QA will give false positive, so you can adjust your planning accordingly. The actual quality is not better or worse, but it's consistent.
By that definition of "quality", a McDonalds meal is of higher quality than a french chef's 4 course menu. The burger flipper has QA measures in place to make a burger taste like the same cardboard from Alaska to Zaire while the chef never can reproduce a meal exactly to the point if he has to take into account natural variations in availability and taste of fresh and/or local produced ingredients.
Or wine... what gives the 2002 Chateau de quelque chose it's special quality is that it can not be reproduced easily.
For McDonald's, that probably is the quality measure they prefer. People don't go to McD because it is is great food, it is food that is fast, cheap, widely available and utterly predictable. None of those qualities is going to be important to a French chef, and they will use a different measure of quality.
To restate what others have said, ISO-9000 and other quality frameworks focus on repeatability, and the ability to change your quality system. The unspoken assumption is that any vaguely rational organization will look at repeatedly bad results and take action to improve them. If you don't improve them, you have just wasted everyone's time.