I'm pretty sure that Russia - which has never abandoned their goal to rebuild the Soviet Union - has no particular interest in any candidate, but desires to cause the maximum in hate, discontent. and confusion. They don't even have to DO anything; just CLAIM that they did.
And members of both parties, but the Democrats especially, are digging as deep a hole as they can. They think that they can make partisan gains by destroying the OTHER party more than they are damaging their own.
The "gun in the house" question was added BY the government when they provided "guidance" on what sorts of questions and EHR system ought to include. That's why there was so much uproar when the State of Florida prohibited doctors from asking the question.
"Gun in the house" question; everybody should answer "Yes, of course, doesn't everyone?" whether or not you have a gun. Then answer "That isn't relevant" if the doctor asks any followup questions about it.
"Job title" =/= "type of work you do". Asking about "job title" may tell the doctor nothing about what I do. My job title of "Solutions Engineer", which is what it says o my business card, doesn't actually tell anybody that I install, configure and support scanners and document imaging systems.
Even now, EMR systems routinely crash in the switch from DST standard time. Turning the clocks back an hour sometimes erases the last hour's worth of data. Not bad for doctor's offices, but terrible for hospitals and nurses on the 11-7 shift.
Doctors hate their computers because they are doctors, not programmers, and they don't like using crappy EMR (Electronic Medical Records) systems. A 15 minute patient visit includes 2 minutes actually examining the patient and 13 minutes trying to navigate through programmer-designed forms that have too many fields and not enough spaces for notes.
I've known nurses who have retired rather than use the horribly-designed EMR systems.
This has always puzzled me. Violence and murder, on film or in TV programming, is generally allowed, with a "PG" or "R" rating or equivalent. Sex is rated "X" or "XXX" depending on the explicitness. And yet, in real life, most people (outside Chicago, at least) will probably never witness a murder or experience a shooting.
But most people WILL see and touch and have sex with other naked people, hopefully many thousands of times. Seems to me that we should celebrate depictions of sex,and discourage depictions of murder.
The QWERTY has the advantage that it exists. I learned to type on it 60 yearsago. DVORACK and all the other keyboard styles MIGHT be better, but we'd to have a cohort of children who learned a new keyboard style nearly from birth.
The LEGISLATURE has the power to make laws; not the President (not even Obama!) or the FCC. Wanting the Executive branch of government to do something that Congress won't is a perversion of our system of LIMITED government,
Actually, I'm an engineer and a conservative Libertarian. I've been involved in several of these "class actions", and an currently in "the class" for another, in which a lawyer has filed suit against a travel agent for calls to numbers on the "Do Not Call" list. The lawyer is getting several million dollars; the class members MIGHT get about 5 bucks. It's been going on for 2 years now, and I haven't seen a penny.
The settlement amount isn't enough to hurt the business, but it's a windfall for the lawyers, and the class members - those of us who had to hang up on all those unwanted calls - get chickenfeed.
Previous class actions, such as the lawsuit filed against monitor makers for advertising monitors larger than the viewable areas, generally yeild a coupon for a few bucks off the next purchase, without any actual cash being paid to anybody other than the scummy lawyers. The lawyers got millions in THAT action as well, while I got a limited-time coupon for $25 off my next purchase of something that I wasn't going to buy anyway.
Class action lawsuits pay the lawyers, not the aggrieved people.
Class Action lawsuits are pointless; the lawyers get millions, the "class members" get a couple of bucks - MAYBE. Judges need to require that at least 75% of the money go to the class members, with much less to the lawyers.
Physics is, we believe, pretty much the same all over. In biology, that's not the case. In general, a drug works well for SOME people, which is why we need three different drugs for any disease. One will work for about 50% of the population, another may work for 25% of the population, and another for 20%. For some diseases, there are people who won't be helped by ANY of these.
Your point about needing custom-DNA-specific drugs is an excellent one, but as you say, we've barely begun down that road. So far, I've read of only a couple of success stories for custom DNA-developed anti-cancer drugs.
You need to balance risk with expected reward. We can afford to waste a few million on a crackpot idea for space travel, because on the remote chance it works, we'd have something really valuable.
Researching bigfoot.... A trail camera costs under a hundred dollars; I have one in my backyard to take pictures of the skunks, stray cats, racoons and possums that are rustling in the leaves and grass out there. Anybody who wants to research bigfoot can deploy a dozen of these in a day, then retrieve them a month later. No dedicated researcher required, and it can be done for pocket change. And if you find one, what have you got? A bigfoot. Big deal.
"You don't need a manual to drive a Chevy or a Suzuki car."
To DRIVE? No, you don't. But where's the gas cap release lever, or how do you set the clock, or reprogram the radio? Every model is different, and manuals can help.
Of course, not even a THICK manual covers everything. I bought a Chevy HHR car, and one of the trip computer functions is calculating remaining oil life. But the manual doesn't cover how to reset the computer when you change the oil; I had to Google that and watch a Youtube video, because it's REALLY not obvious.
Dead-tree manuals are expensive to print, heavy to ship, often contain errors, and cannot be quickly updated when you change the device. Also, not searchable. AND most people don't read them. I used to WRITE them and I never read them.
A CD with a PDF of the manual is light and cheap, and is searchable. A line in the "Help" documentation that links to an online manual is lighter and cheaper, and the online manual is not only searchable but also updateable for errors or changes in the device.
It's possible that there are unseen - or at least, so-far-unnoticed - effects at work that might be the result of being so deep in the Earth's, or the Sun's, gravity well. Can we be CERTAIN that things might not work just a little differently at a distance of, say, 1000AU? I think we need to keep at least an open mind about the POSSIBILITY that the warped space we're living in so near the Sun might have at least a slight effect.
Science fiction author Jerry Pournelle used to advocate that NASA and DARPA should spend 90% of their budgets on routine research following established theories - and spend 10% on "crackpot" theories that might either be utter nonsense or groundbreaking. The "Dean Drive", for example, or the ElectroMagnetic Drive - which NASA _is_ looking at, just because it would be such an enormous leap forward in the unlikely event that it works.
I think "Quantized Inertia" would fall into that same category; likely nonsense, but it's remotely possibly an enormous leap forward. Or perhaps "Quantized Intertia" is how the EM drive (supposedly) works? It's certainly worth trying. One needs to keep an open mind, conduct thorough experiments with detailed descriptions and HONEST results. Pournelle suggested that 19 our of 20 times, the result would be the expected nonsense, but if even one time out of 20 was successful, it would pay for itself a hundredfold.
I generally don't respond to AC's, but this is simply nonsense. There hasn't been any "global warming" since 2000, and essentially zero sea level rise since 1900. While disaster is always a possibility, it's hardly a probability and certainly NOT a certainty. I would wager real money that the global climate will be COOLER by 2050 - except I won't be alive to collect my winnings.
Not even the inevitable expansion of the Sun as it evolves into a red giant is a certain disaster; we already KNOW HOW to move the Earth. We just don't have the technology - yet. By the time we need to move the Earth to orbit Jupiter, we'll be able to do that.
There shouldn't be anything surprising that Greece would use drones to find tax cheats. Remember, they were among the early adopters to use Google Earth to find backyard swimming pools that didn't appear on the tax rolls. Greeks have a very "Catch me if you can!" attitude toward their own tax collectors.
I don't know how "best" might be defined. Pixels? Resolution? Color quality? At some point, when all the phone cameras are taking good photographs, I don't think it matters much. My iPhone 8 takes very good pictures. My Essential PH1 phone takes very good pictures. Which one is better? Damn if I can tell.
The best camera is the one you have with you all the time; you can have the most phenomenal camera in the universe in your closet at home, but the one you have is better than the one over there. And at some point, people are just arguing over trivial bragging rights.
Even the guys who designed LinkedIn says we're all using it wrong. Invite people you actually KNOW. Don't invite everybody in your address book. Don't accept links from people you don't know and work with. Don't recommend people for a skill unless you KNOW that he has that skill. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to refuse skill recommendations for skills that you either know you don't have, or don't want to be known FOR.
It all sucks, because we've been using it in a sucky way. At this point, there probably isn't a way to fix things; the database is already too corrupt to fix.
Anything electronic can be faked, and so we need to start encouraging people to UNDERSTAND that "Seeing Isn't Believing". Just because you saw it on a screen doesn't mean it's true.
Ummm.... No. Not even close. John Deere has the right to make whatever products they like and market them however they want. As does Husqvarna and Kubotai and every other manufacturer. But they are ALL required to deal honestly with the customers, and restrictive "terms of use" must be FULLY DISCLOSED at the time of sale.
And once the product is sold, it BELONGS TO the purchaser. They can break it, modify it, fix it, whatever they want. "Right to Repair" laws ought to be unneeded because they should be flipping obvious. If Deere wants to sell tractors that cannot be repaired, then the dealer needs to have big signs up in the showrooms. And they'd better make sure sure that you can't take them apart with ordinary tools.
If the crash detection pops up a prompt for the user to answer some questions, and nobody does, is it smart enough to call 911 anyway? Because somebody responding to on-screen questions means that SOMEBODY was at least conscious enough to respond.
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I'm pretty sure that Russia - which has never abandoned their goal to rebuild the Soviet Union - has no particular interest in any candidate, but desires to cause the maximum in hate, discontent. and confusion. They don't even have to DO anything; just CLAIM that they did.
And members of both parties, but the Democrats especially, are digging as deep a hole as they can. They think that they can make partisan gains by destroying the OTHER party more than they are damaging their own.
The "gun in the house" question was added BY the government when they provided "guidance" on what sorts of questions and EHR system ought to include. That's why there was so much uproar when the State of Florida prohibited doctors from asking the question.
"Gun in the house" question; everybody should answer "Yes, of course, doesn't everyone?" whether or not you have a gun. Then answer "That isn't relevant" if the doctor asks any followup questions about it.
"Job title" =/= "type of work you do". Asking about "job title" may tell the doctor nothing about what I do. My job title of "Solutions Engineer", which is what it says o my business card, doesn't actually tell anybody that I install, configure and support scanners and document imaging systems.
Even now, EMR systems routinely crash in the switch from DST standard time. Turning the clocks back an hour sometimes erases the last hour's worth of data. Not bad for doctor's offices, but terrible for hospitals and nurses on the 11-7 shift.
Doctors hate their computers because they are doctors, not programmers, and they don't like using crappy EMR (Electronic Medical Records) systems. A 15 minute patient visit includes 2 minutes actually examining the patient and 13 minutes trying to navigate through programmer-designed forms that have too many fields and not enough spaces for notes.
I've known nurses who have retired rather than use the horribly-designed EMR systems.
This has always puzzled me. Violence and murder, on film or in TV programming, is generally allowed, with a "PG" or "R" rating or equivalent. Sex is rated "X" or "XXX" depending on the explicitness. And yet, in real life, most people (outside Chicago, at least) will probably never witness a murder or experience a shooting.
But most people WILL see and touch and have sex with other naked people, hopefully many thousands of times. Seems to me that we should celebrate depictions of sex,and discourage depictions of murder.
The QWERTY has the advantage that it exists. I learned to type on it 60 yearsago. DVORACK and all the other keyboard styles MIGHT be better, but we'd to have a cohort of children who learned a new keyboard style nearly from birth.
CONGRESS can do this, Not the FCC. Not the President, Not the Courts. CONGRESS. Talk to your Representative and Senators,
The LEGISLATURE has the power to make laws; not the President (not even Obama!) or the FCC. Wanting the Executive branch of government to do something that Congress won't is a perversion of our system of LIMITED government,
Actually, I'm an engineer and a conservative Libertarian. I've been involved in several of these "class actions", and an currently in "the class" for another, in which a lawyer has filed suit against a travel agent for calls to numbers on the "Do Not Call" list. The lawyer is getting several million dollars; the class members MIGHT get about 5 bucks. It's been going on for 2 years now, and I haven't seen a penny.
The settlement amount isn't enough to hurt the business, but it's a windfall for the lawyers, and the class members - those of us who had to hang up on all those unwanted calls - get chickenfeed.
Previous class actions, such as the lawsuit filed against monitor makers for advertising monitors larger than the viewable areas, generally yeild a coupon for a few bucks off the next purchase, without any actual cash being paid to anybody other than the scummy lawyers. The lawyers got millions in THAT action as well, while I got a limited-time coupon for $25 off my next purchase of something that I wasn't going to buy anyway.
Class action lawsuits pay the lawyers, not the aggrieved people.
Class Action lawsuits are pointless; the lawyers get millions, the "class members" get a couple of bucks - MAYBE. Judges need to require that at least 75% of the money go to the class members, with much less to the lawyers.
Physics is, we believe, pretty much the same all over. In biology, that's not the case. In general, a drug works well for SOME people, which is why we need three different drugs for any disease. One will work for about 50% of the population, another may work for 25% of the population, and another for 20%. For some diseases, there are people who won't be helped by ANY of these.
Your point about needing custom-DNA-specific drugs is an excellent one, but as you say, we've barely begun down that road. So far, I've read of only a couple of success stories for custom DNA-developed anti-cancer drugs.
You need to balance risk with expected reward. We can afford to waste a few million on a crackpot idea for space travel, because on the remote chance it works, we'd have something really valuable.
Researching bigfoot.... A trail camera costs under a hundred dollars; I have one in my backyard to take pictures of the skunks, stray cats, racoons and possums that are rustling in the leaves and grass out there. Anybody who wants to research bigfoot can deploy a dozen of these in a day, then retrieve them a month later. No dedicated researcher required, and it can be done for pocket change. And if you find one, what have you got? A bigfoot. Big deal.
"You don't need a manual to drive a Chevy or a Suzuki car."
To DRIVE? No, you don't. But where's the gas cap release lever, or how do you set the clock, or reprogram the radio? Every model is different, and manuals can help.
Of course, not even a THICK manual covers everything. I bought a Chevy HHR car, and one of the trip computer functions is calculating remaining oil life. But the manual doesn't cover how to reset the computer when you change the oil; I had to Google that and watch a Youtube video, because it's REALLY not obvious.
Dead-tree manuals are expensive to print, heavy to ship, often contain errors, and cannot be quickly updated when you change the device. Also, not searchable. AND most people don't read them. I used to WRITE them and I never read them.
A CD with a PDF of the manual is light and cheap, and is searchable. A line in the "Help" documentation that links to an online manual is lighter and cheaper, and the online manual is not only searchable but also updateable for errors or changes in the device.
It's possible that there are unseen - or at least, so-far-unnoticed - effects at work that might be the result of being so deep in the Earth's, or the Sun's, gravity well. Can we be CERTAIN that things might not work just a little differently at a distance of, say, 1000AU? I think we need to keep at least an open mind about the POSSIBILITY that the warped space we're living in so near the Sun might have at least a slight effect.
Science fiction author Jerry Pournelle used to advocate that NASA and DARPA should spend 90% of their budgets on routine research following established theories - and spend 10% on "crackpot" theories that might either be utter nonsense or groundbreaking. The "Dean Drive", for example, or the ElectroMagnetic Drive - which NASA _is_ looking at, just because it would be such an enormous leap forward in the unlikely event that it works.
I think "Quantized Inertia" would fall into that same category; likely nonsense, but it's remotely possibly an enormous leap forward. Or perhaps "Quantized Intertia" is how the EM drive (supposedly) works? It's certainly worth trying. One needs to keep an open mind, conduct thorough experiments with detailed descriptions and HONEST results. Pournelle suggested that 19 our of 20 times, the result would be the expected nonsense, but if even one time out of 20 was successful, it would pay for itself a hundredfold.
I generally don't respond to AC's, but this is simply nonsense. There hasn't been any "global warming" since 2000, and essentially zero sea level rise since 1900. While disaster is always a possibility, it's hardly a probability and certainly NOT a certainty. I would wager real money that the global climate will be COOLER by 2050 - except I won't be alive to collect my winnings.
Not even the inevitable expansion of the Sun as it evolves into a red giant is a certain disaster; we already KNOW HOW to move the Earth. We just don't have the technology - yet. By the time we need to move the Earth to orbit Jupiter, we'll be able to do that.
There shouldn't be anything surprising that Greece would use drones to find tax cheats. Remember, they were among the early adopters to use Google Earth to find backyard swimming pools that didn't appear on the tax rolls. Greeks have a very "Catch me if you can!" attitude toward their own tax collectors.
I don't know how "best" might be defined. Pixels? Resolution? Color quality? At some point, when all the phone cameras are taking good photographs, I don't think it matters much. My iPhone 8 takes very good pictures. My Essential PH1 phone takes very good pictures. Which one is better? Damn if I can tell.
The best camera is the one you have with you all the time; you can have the most phenomenal camera in the universe in your closet at home, but the one you have is better than the one over there. And at some point, people are just arguing over trivial bragging rights.
Even the guys who designed LinkedIn says we're all using it wrong. Invite people you actually KNOW. Don't invite everybody in your address book. Don't accept links from people you don't know and work with. Don't recommend people for a skill unless you KNOW that he has that skill. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to refuse skill recommendations for skills that you either know you don't have, or don't want to be known FOR.
It all sucks, because we've been using it in a sucky way. At this point, there probably isn't a way to fix things; the database is already too corrupt to fix.
Anything electronic can be faked, and so we need to start encouraging people to UNDERSTAND that "Seeing Isn't Believing". Just because you saw it on a screen doesn't mean it's true.
It's all phony.
Ummm.... No. Not even close. John Deere has the right to make whatever products they like and market them however they want. As does Husqvarna and Kubotai and every other manufacturer. But they are ALL required to deal honestly with the customers, and restrictive "terms of use" must be FULLY DISCLOSED at the time of sale.
And once the product is sold, it BELONGS TO the purchaser. They can break it, modify it, fix it, whatever they want. "Right to Repair" laws ought to be unneeded because they should be flipping obvious. If Deere wants to sell tractors that cannot be repaired, then the dealer needs to have big signs up in the showrooms. And they'd better make sure sure that you can't take them apart with ordinary tools.
If the crash detection pops up a prompt for the user to answer some questions, and nobody does, is it smart enough to call 911 anyway? Because somebody responding to on-screen questions means that SOMEBODY was at least conscious enough to respond.