See, I agree that the officer in this video deserves to lose his life! That is freakin rediculous. Cops have more power than an average citizen, so they have more responsibility with it. And when they abuse that power and become a criminal themselves, they need higher punishments, not lower. Death should be common for cops. I smile inside with every cop killing newspaper story I see. It's sad that I feel this way towards a whole group of people, because I know that not everyone is a bad apple. But the blue wall they support each other with doesn't help. And really, it seems they have just become a mafia organization, or at least the hit men of the government going out of control with power.
And what if it was 20 wolves staying home with 2 lambs staying home and 50 wolves voting against one lamb on whats for dinner? Does that make democracy any better?
Thanks for that translation. I hadn't realized how much was included in what seemed an off-handed comment at first. My lack of knowledge on Rasputin and his genetic resistance to poison caused me to miss the point entirely. And the canaries in the coal mine line is much more powerful having gotten the previous statements.
Don't see how. First there's a lot of evidence of descent. Parts get reused over and over, species can be organized as a tree, and change is seen gradually through it. A designer wouldn't need to do incremental improvement. They could suddenly go and plug an entirely new part somewhere, but there's no evidence of that. (if you have any please provide it).
And as a design, ours is incredibly lousy. Why would a designer leave in various junk like a the remains of a tail (humans can be born with one), wisdom teeth, appendix (which does more harm than good these days), goose bumps (which would raise our fur if we still had any) and the ability some people have to move their ears (which makes perfect sense for monkeys with large ones)?
I was watching a crazy show a while ago called Ancient Aliens. One of the theories was that there is a group of genes that may have been inserted by aliens to use us as slaves for mining gold. Our ancestors were not intelligent enough to order around, and tended to be too violent. By messing with the ape genes and adding some of their own they created a slave race and could get them to mine gold for them as gods
This site describes the discovery of these genes and why it seems unlikely to be slow genetic drift. I don't see why bacteria insertion could not be the cause though, unless there are no other copies of this group of 223 genenes in our biosphere.
Personnaly I find this interesting but pretty far fetched. But I rank it above the creationist ideas. There are a lot of old religions that have people from the sky visiting or creating humans. It is not that hard to imagine ancient people would see a fire spewing ship as a dragon or the visitors as angels.
Minor point of conflict: you cannot have a universe that contains both:
1. at least one all-knowing entity and
2. at least one other entity which has free will.
The propositions conflict with one another.
By definition, the future actions of an entity with free will cannot be known. By definition, an all-knowing entity knows the future actions of all entities. Hence, a contradiction exists, and both propositions cannot be true. This is a fairly common form of logical disproof.
It's like an immovable object and an irresistible force; they simply cannot be in the same universe, because the existence of one precludes the existence of another.
This makes me think of Muad'Dib (Dune). He knows all the future paths that are possible based on his or others different actions. Just because you don't have the ability doesn't mean it isn't possible somehow. You can't see a 4 dimentional object (space dimentions only, no time), but we can use math to model them and figure out how they might exist.
Since when is a house supposed to be an investment and not just a place to live in?
But it is an investment.
What the housing bubble became wasn't investment. It was speculation. And every serious investor will tell you: never speculate with what you can't afford to lose.
Since when is something that costs you money every month considered an investment. The author of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" does not consider the house you live in to be an investment and neither do I. If you have a rental property, then that would be an investment because it brings in money. Something that costs money in repairs and maintenance plus the taxes and fees that you pay as a property owner do not make your house a good investment at all. But the finance people like to consider it one because otherwise almost nobody in America has any investments at all. Plus, they wanted to convince as many people as they could to get a house so they could sell the mortgages and loans.
The hypothetical scissors example is similar to sweeping a laser beam across the sky. A point on the beam out at the distance of Pluto's orbit would be moving faster than C. The intersection of the scissors is the same in that it isn't an actual object, but something we are creating in our minds. The scissors could be moving at 100 MPH and be almost but not exactly parallel. Then the intersection would easily move very rapidly (possible even faster than C if they were very close to parallel).
I'm not too sure there would be much of a health issue. I understood that the ink was pretty similar to regular ink, but the particles are inside little balls. I guess the composition of the balls would be what matters, but ink doesn't seem to travel trough the body after being stuck in a person's skin. Definately would need plenty of testing. And you are correct about the off color, it would have to be matched to your skin tone. The off color may not match very good once you get a tan though. It's a cool idea, but we probably won't see changeably tattoo's for quite a while.
That's funny! I did miss that it was an April fool's joke. I guess I was the fool on that one. I saw no reason that it would not work. If you gave the charge to switch the e-ink from an external source it should change them to the new image and it doesn't take power to keep the image. I guess there is a difference in that the regular displays have electrodes on both sides of the e-ink dots and the wand would only be on one side.
E-ink tattoos already exist. They sell you a hand-scanner type wand that will reprogram the e-ink that gets tattood into your skin. So you can change the matrix of pixels into clear or black and change the tattoo any time you want. They show someone with a shopping list on their arm in one picture, or a girl that does not want to show her tramp stamp off when going to visit her folks. I think it sounds like a really cool idea. If your wand breaks and you can't get a new one though, then you have a permanant tattoo. You better hope it is one you like then.
GPS does a lot more than you might think. Jamming the signal has the likelyhood of causing all the ATMs to stop functioning. So nobody can get any money.
IT WAS just after midday in San Diego, California, when the disruption started. In the tower at the airport, air-traffic controllers peered at their monitors only to find that their system for tracking incoming planes was malfunctioning. At the Naval Medical Center, emergency pagers used for summoning doctors stopped working. Chaos threatened in the busy harbour, too, after the traffic-management system used for guiding boats failed. On the streets, people reaching for their cellphones found they had no signal and bank customers trying to withdraw cash from local ATMs were refused. Problems persisted for another 2 hours.
It took three days to find an explanation for this mysterious event in January 2007. Two navy ships in the San Diego harbour had been conducting a training exercise. To test procedures when communications were lost, technicians jammed radio signals. Unwittingly, they also blocked radio signals from GPS satellites across a swathe of the city.
Didn't they try and fail to gain traction in the living room with the Apple TV product? I'm not sure what this guy is smoking, but I don't think there is too much worry about Apple challenging anything right now. Last time Steve Jobs left Apple they floundered until he came back. Now they can't get him back. They make cool products, but I think he gave direction and style to the company. Apple is more like a cult, with people wanting to be as cool as Steve is, rather than an innovative company that can make great gadgets on their own. We will see what they do over the next few years, but if I was a betting man I would short their stock after the iPhone 5 release has finished.
In the 1850's, aluminum was much more precious than gold. At that time, the ore was believed to be so tightly bonded to other elements (mostly oxygen) that it was impossible to believe that they could be separated and to attempt it was folly. Charles Martin Hall figured it out and changed the world and made a fortune. The Wright brothers were not believed. Sometimes radical things happen in science that defy the common wisdom of the day.
Comments like this make me think of the Frazier Lens. All the scientists and experts in optics that he talked to said it was impossible to make a lens (or system of lenses) that had perfect focus at infinite depth of field. (Not sure if I have the correct terms - Everything is in focus no matter the distance from the lens.) He tinkered away in his garage and figured it out. Frazier Ultimate Lens
Just try not to make yourself sound like a scientist because that tarnishes the real science going on things like dark energy and curing cancer. Bigfoot people provide ammo to creationists. And that is lame.
I'm not so sure that talking about dark energy makes you sound much better than a cryptozoologist.
The catch here is that *you* set the laptops up. Had you given the wives an Ubuntu CD and left them to their own methods, odds are they wouldn't be so happy.
Right, because they were so capable of re-installing Windows on their own anyway!!
When was the last time any of us totally created code?
Probably never - because the only way to totally create code is to directly generate machine code (not assembler) directly on the bare iron. Even at the assembler level, lat alone at higher levels, you're dependent on the guy who wrote the compiler.
How about entering the machine code in octal using press-button LEDs on the front panel of the computer. There was a long row for the instruction and a shorter row for the instruction counter. I remember doing this when I was in the Navy. The computer was the fire-control computer (YUK-20 or something) that received all of the contacts from the 3D search radar on the ship. Normal routine would involve reading the program from tape, but I do remember entering in machine code using the LEDs in class and possible for routine maintenance tests.
No, actually it's just observation. We all look around and see that houses usually don't fall down, so we trust them. Virtually none of us actually goes through the trouble to find out whether the people who built our houses are skilled professionals.
We also have building codes that if followed should produce houses that don't fall down. And since most local government in the US requires code inspections for new construction you can be fairly certain that the house you are living in was built to those standards at the minimum no matter who the builder was.
There are no images in the mind. And no dogs in dog biscuits.
There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?
The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images.
Perhaps you are one of the people who do not see images in your mind. Then you would think that nobody saw them and post what you did here.
When you search for a microsoft KB article on bing, do you complain that it showed up ahead of other relevant results? no.
Ha ha ha! Sorry to laugh at you if you were being serious. I have never been able to find Microsoft results on a search from Microsoft. But if I google the Microsoft site I end up finding tons of stuff. It's pretty sad when your own search engine can't find stuff on your own site.
And if you're not a nuclear engineer, nuclear plant manager, or member of the NRC, then your opinion is based on nothing that remotely looks like scientific thought. In other words, it's pretty much the same as a Global Warming Denier, in that you know little or nothing about the subject, but are ready to assert that the experts are idiots.
Nuclear safety or lack thereof has little to do with the engineers and managers. It is more of a politics thing. The regulators end up getting too cozy with the plants they are supposed to be inspecting. The plants get too old, but it is important that we have power for people's homes, so the regulations are relaxed and a plant that is way past it's lifetime is extentded indefinately. Plus, they build them where earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, or terroists can get at them. No matter how safe the nuclear plant is, there is still a rather large danger of meltdown. If it can't be shut down in under an hour, then I don't think it can be run safely for the 100, 200 or however long the plant is going to be kept running.
You are confusing cells in a Petri dish with a living, breathing multicellular organism.
The whole Vitamin C thing is quackery and there is no evidence that it does anything to help with common colds or influenza. It's involved primarily in collagen synthesis which might be useful for the burns patient, but not really in the influenza patient - unless you consider pulmonary fibrosis a successful outcome.
I'd rather take Linus Pauling's suggestion of a massive dose of vitamin C by IV than use a gaming console's recommendation for chemotherapy. (The follow-up study that discredited Pauling's findings has, in turn, been discredited in recent years, and vitamin C is extremely safe. That doesn't mean the method works, although there's good reason for thinking it might. It just means it's less likely to kill you than the other cures.)
I understand this is anicdotal, but my mother-in-law had cancer back when my wife was in middle school or around then. She was told she would not see her daughter graduate from high school. She did the 20,000 mg of vitamin C by IV treatment and has beaten it and is still kickin'. The human body has quite an amazing ability to heal itself when given the proper nutrients. Watch the movie "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead" sometime. The guy in that had a skin rash that would flare up from something as simple as a handshake. After 30 or 60 days of doing a fast with nothing but fresh vegetables juiced he was able to get off of the steroids that he was on to control his condition and hasn't had a reoccurance.
The most amazing thing is that doctors learn almost nothing about nutrition or diet. There is no money to be made in having people eat properly. They make their money by selling the drugs. That, and the food pyramid that the FDA recommends we eat is the same diet that farmers use to fatten up the animals for slaughter. It seems we are still pretty clueless when it comes to what it takes to stay healthy. Maybe someday we will understand it better. One can hope!
Another point that would make a program have a hard time diagnosing a disease is that not everyone has the same symptoms. We have WebMD, you can put in symtoms and get possible diseases on some web sites. But when I look at the symptoms for something that I have, I only have around half of the listed symptoms. Other people will have different ones from the list. Then other diseases have similar symptoms and the ones you have might end up being in both lists. I think Watson has a better chance at helping out than any program that has existed before. It comes down to the natural language analysis. Without that you cannot parse through all medical literature matching things up. Everything would have to be inputted into the database in a specific manner for a program to use it. With Watson, it just uses literature that it is fed.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah! OJ should have been blowed up!!!1!
See, I agree that the officer in this video deserves to lose his life! That is freakin rediculous. Cops have more power than an average citizen, so they have more responsibility with it. And when they abuse that power and become a criminal themselves, they need higher punishments, not lower. Death should be common for cops. I smile inside with every cop killing newspaper story I see. It's sad that I feel this way towards a whole group of people, because I know that not everyone is a bad apple. But the blue wall they support each other with doesn't help. And really, it seems they have just become a mafia organization, or at least the hit men of the government going out of control with power.
And what if it was 20 wolves staying home with 2 lambs staying home and 50 wolves voting against one lamb on whats for dinner? Does that make democracy any better?
Thanks for that translation. I hadn't realized how much was included in what seemed an off-handed comment at first. My lack of knowledge on Rasputin and his genetic resistance to poison caused me to miss the point entirely. And the canaries in the coal mine line is much more powerful having gotten the previous statements.
Don't see how. First there's a lot of evidence of descent. Parts get reused over and over, species can be organized as a tree, and change is seen gradually through it. A designer wouldn't need to do incremental improvement. They could suddenly go and plug an entirely new part somewhere, but there's no evidence of that. (if you have any please provide it).
And as a design, ours is incredibly lousy. Why would a designer leave in various junk like a the remains of a tail (humans can be born with one), wisdom teeth, appendix (which does more harm than good these days), goose bumps (which would raise our fur if we still had any) and the ability some people have to move their ears (which makes perfect sense for monkeys with large ones)?
I was watching a crazy show a while ago called Ancient Aliens. One of the theories was that there is a group of genes that may have been inserted by aliens to use us as slaves for mining gold. Our ancestors were not intelligent enough to order around, and tended to be too violent. By messing with the ape genes and adding some of their own they created a slave race and could get them to mine gold for them as gods
This site describes the discovery of these genes and why it seems unlikely to be slow genetic drift. I don't see why bacteria insertion could not be the cause though, unless there are no other copies of this group of 223 genenes in our biosphere.
Personnaly I find this interesting but pretty far fetched. But I rank it above the creationist ideas. There are a lot of old religions that have people from the sky visiting or creating humans. It is not that hard to imagine ancient people would see a fire spewing ship as a dragon or the visitors as angels.
Minor point of conflict: you cannot have a universe that contains both: 1. at least one all-knowing entity and 2. at least one other entity which has free will.
The propositions conflict with one another.
By definition, the future actions of an entity with free will cannot be known. By definition, an all-knowing entity knows the future actions of all entities. Hence, a contradiction exists, and both propositions cannot be true. This is a fairly common form of logical disproof.
It's like an immovable object and an irresistible force; they simply cannot be in the same universe, because the existence of one precludes the existence of another.
This makes me think of Muad'Dib (Dune). He knows all the future paths that are possible based on his or others different actions. Just because you don't have the ability doesn't mean it isn't possible somehow. You can't see a 4 dimentional object (space dimentions only, no time), but we can use math to model them and figure out how they might exist.
But it is an investment.
What the housing bubble became wasn't investment. It was speculation. And every serious investor will tell you: never speculate with what you can't afford to lose.
Since when is something that costs you money every month considered an investment. The author of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" does not consider the house you live in to be an investment and neither do I. If you have a rental property, then that would be an investment because it brings in money. Something that costs money in repairs and maintenance plus the taxes and fees that you pay as a property owner do not make your house a good investment at all. But the finance people like to consider it one because otherwise almost nobody in America has any investments at all. Plus, they wanted to convince as many people as they could to get a house so they could sell the mortgages and loans.
The hypothetical scissors example is similar to sweeping a laser beam across the sky. A point on the beam out at the distance of Pluto's orbit would be moving faster than C. The intersection of the scissors is the same in that it isn't an actual object, but something we are creating in our minds. The scissors could be moving at 100 MPH and be almost but not exactly parallel. Then the intersection would easily move very rapidly (possible even faster than C if they were very close to parallel).
I'm not too sure there would be much of a health issue. I understood that the ink was pretty similar to regular ink, but the particles are inside little balls. I guess the composition of the balls would be what matters, but ink doesn't seem to travel trough the body after being stuck in a person's skin. Definately would need plenty of testing. And you are correct about the off color, it would have to be matched to your skin tone. The off color may not match very good once you get a tan though. It's a cool idea, but we probably won't see changeably tattoo's for quite a while.
That's funny! I did miss that it was an April fool's joke. I guess I was the fool on that one. I saw no reason that it would not work. If you gave the charge to switch the e-ink from an external source it should change them to the new image and it doesn't take power to keep the image. I guess there is a difference in that the regular displays have electrodes on both sides of the e-ink dots and the wand would only be on one side.
E-ink tattoos already exist. They sell you a hand-scanner type wand that will reprogram the e-ink that gets tattood into your skin. So you can change the matrix of pixels into clear or black and change the tattoo any time you want. They show someone with a shopping list on their arm in one picture, or a girl that does not want to show her tramp stamp off when going to visit her folks. I think it sounds like a really cool idea. If your wand breaks and you can't get a new one though, then you have a permanant tattoo. You better hope it is one you like then.
GPS does a lot more than you might think. Jamming the signal has the likelyhood of causing all the ATMs to stop functioning. So nobody can get any money.
An article that was on slashdot previously.
IT WAS just after midday in San Diego, California, when the disruption started. In the tower at the airport, air-traffic controllers peered at their monitors only to find that their system for tracking incoming planes was malfunctioning. At the Naval Medical Center, emergency pagers used for summoning doctors stopped working. Chaos threatened in the busy harbour, too, after the traffic-management system used for guiding boats failed. On the streets, people reaching for their cellphones found they had no signal and bank customers trying to withdraw cash from local ATMs were refused. Problems persisted for another 2 hours.
It took three days to find an explanation for this mysterious event in January 2007. Two navy ships in the San Diego harbour had been conducting a training exercise. To test procedures when communications were lost, technicians jammed radio signals. Unwittingly, they also blocked radio signals from GPS satellites across a swathe of the city.
Didn't they try and fail to gain traction in the living room with the Apple TV product? I'm not sure what this guy is smoking, but I don't think there is too much worry about Apple challenging anything right now. Last time Steve Jobs left Apple they floundered until he came back. Now they can't get him back. They make cool products, but I think he gave direction and style to the company. Apple is more like a cult, with people wanting to be as cool as Steve is, rather than an innovative company that can make great gadgets on their own. We will see what they do over the next few years, but if I was a betting man I would short their stock after the iPhone 5 release has finished.
In the 1850's, aluminum was much more precious than gold. At that time, the ore was believed to be so tightly bonded to other elements (mostly oxygen) that it was impossible to believe that they could be separated and to attempt it was folly. Charles Martin Hall figured it out and changed the world and made a fortune. The Wright brothers were not believed. Sometimes radical things happen in science that defy the common wisdom of the day.
Comments like this make me think of the Frazier Lens. All the scientists and experts in optics that he talked to said it was impossible to make a lens (or system of lenses) that had perfect focus at infinite depth of field. (Not sure if I have the correct terms - Everything is in focus no matter the distance from the lens.) He tinkered away in his garage and figured it out. Frazier Ultimate Lens
Just try not to make yourself sound like a scientist because that tarnishes the real science going on things like dark energy and curing cancer. Bigfoot people provide ammo to creationists. And that is lame.
I'm not so sure that talking about dark energy makes you sound much better than a cryptozoologist.
The catch here is that *you* set the laptops up. Had you given the wives an Ubuntu CD and left them to their own methods, odds are they wouldn't be so happy.
Right, because they were so capable of re-installing Windows on their own anyway!!
Because it's mostly garbage? Because most people aren't interested in playing clones of 20 year old games?
Right! Because playing clones of 2 year old games is sooo much better!!!
Probably never - because the only way to totally create code is to directly generate machine code (not assembler) directly on the bare iron. Even at the assembler level, lat alone at higher levels, you're dependent on the guy who wrote the compiler.
How about entering the machine code in octal using press-button LEDs on the front panel of the computer. There was a long row for the instruction and a shorter row for the instruction counter. I remember doing this when I was in the Navy. The computer was the fire-control computer (YUK-20 or something) that received all of the contacts from the 3D search radar on the ship. Normal routine would involve reading the program from tape, but I do remember entering in machine code using the LEDs in class and possible for routine maintenance tests.
No, actually it's just observation. We all look around and see that houses usually don't fall down, so we trust them. Virtually none of us actually goes through the trouble to find out whether the people who built our houses are skilled professionals.
We also have building codes that if followed should produce houses that don't fall down. And since most local government in the US requires code inspections for new construction you can be fairly certain that the house you are living in was built to those standards at the minimum no matter who the builder was.
what hobby can't be militarized?
Blowing soap bubbles?
Pepper defense soap bubbles! Burn the eyes and nose of your oncoming attackers.
There are no images in the mind. And no dogs in dog biscuits.
There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?
The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images.
Perhaps you are one of the people who do not see images in your mind. Then you would think that nobody saw them and post what you did here.
When you search for a microsoft KB article on bing, do you complain that it showed up ahead of other relevant results? no.
Ha ha ha! Sorry to laugh at you if you were being serious. I have never been able to find Microsoft results on a search from Microsoft. But if I google the Microsoft site I end up finding tons of stuff. It's pretty sad when your own search engine can't find stuff on your own site.
And if you're not a nuclear engineer, nuclear plant manager, or member of the NRC, then your opinion is based on nothing that remotely looks like scientific thought. In other words, it's pretty much the same as a Global Warming Denier, in that you know little or nothing about the subject, but are ready to assert that the experts are idiots.
Nuclear safety or lack thereof has little to do with the engineers and managers. It is more of a politics thing. The regulators end up getting too cozy with the plants they are supposed to be inspecting. The plants get too old, but it is important that we have power for people's homes, so the regulations are relaxed and a plant that is way past it's lifetime is extentded indefinately. Plus, they build them where earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, or terroists can get at them. No matter how safe the nuclear plant is, there is still a rather large danger of meltdown. If it can't be shut down in under an hour, then I don't think it can be run safely for the 100, 200 or however long the plant is going to be kept running.
You are confusing cells in a Petri dish with a living, breathing multicellular organism.
The whole Vitamin C thing is quackery and there is no evidence that it does anything to help with common colds or influenza. It's involved primarily in collagen synthesis which might be useful for the burns patient, but not really in the influenza patient - unless you consider pulmonary fibrosis a successful outcome.
I'd rather take Linus Pauling's suggestion of a massive dose of vitamin C by IV than use a gaming console's recommendation for chemotherapy. (The follow-up study that discredited Pauling's findings has, in turn, been discredited in recent years, and vitamin C is extremely safe. That doesn't mean the method works, although there's good reason for thinking it might. It just means it's less likely to kill you than the other cures.)
I understand this is anicdotal, but my mother-in-law had cancer back when my wife was in middle school or around then. She was told she would not see her daughter graduate from high school. She did the 20,000 mg of vitamin C by IV treatment and has beaten it and is still kickin'. The human body has quite an amazing ability to heal itself when given the proper nutrients. Watch the movie "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead" sometime. The guy in that had a skin rash that would flare up from something as simple as a handshake. After 30 or 60 days of doing a fast with nothing but fresh vegetables juiced he was able to get off of the steroids that he was on to control his condition and hasn't had a reoccurance.
The most amazing thing is that doctors learn almost nothing about nutrition or diet. There is no money to be made in having people eat properly. They make their money by selling the drugs. That, and the food pyramid that the FDA recommends we eat is the same diet that farmers use to fatten up the animals for slaughter. It seems we are still pretty clueless when it comes to what it takes to stay healthy. Maybe someday we will understand it better. One can hope!
Another point that would make a program have a hard time diagnosing a disease is that not everyone has the same symptoms. We have WebMD, you can put in symtoms and get possible diseases on some web sites. But when I look at the symptoms for something that I have, I only have around half of the listed symptoms. Other people will have different ones from the list. Then other diseases have similar symptoms and the ones you have might end up being in both lists. I think Watson has a better chance at helping out than any program that has existed before. It comes down to the natural language analysis. Without that you cannot parse through all medical literature matching things up. Everything would have to be inputted into the database in a specific manner for a program to use it. With Watson, it just uses literature that it is fed.