I saw the head of the Federal Electoral commision say there was fraud - but to caveat that, he was referring to questions about not allowing observers in to see the counts somewhere, which is illegal, rather than any comment about ballot stuffing.

The trouble with indoctrination is that you can still be indocrinated - everyone so vociferously against Trump has been. You can dislike him and still have an adult discussion about politics but I don't see very many of those wherever Trump is concerned by his (sometimes completely deranged) detractors.

and the "thing burning" is the toast you're making.

The manufacturer of the BD equipment says it has a 84% sensitivity rate (page 12). It also says that positive results do not indicate covid, as it can be triggered by other bacteria or viral infections.

It also says that the negative result does not indicate you're free of covid either.

https://www.fda.gov/media/1397...

what it does say is that any positive result is required to be sent to the government, so no doubt the "people who have covid" stats you'll get tomorrow will include Musk. Twice. And then possibly twice again because he had 2 PCR tests.

I guess its crazy times, so rubbish testing is used as definitive these days.People want to believe, and today they want to believe a test is 100% accurate.

The document from the manufacturer is not so convincing:

REPORTING OF RESULTS Positive Test â" Positive for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antigen.

Positive results indicate the presence of viral antigens, but clinical correlation with patient history and other diagnostic information is necessary to determine infection status.

Positive results do not rule out bacterial infection or co-infection with other viruses. The agent detected may not be the definite cause of disease. Laboratories within the United States and its territories are required to report all positive results to the appropriate public health authorities.

Negative Test â" Negative results are presumptive. Negative test results do not preclude infection and should not be used as the sole basis for treatment or other patient management decisions, including infection control decisions, particularly in the presence of clinical signs and symptoms consistent with COVID-19, or in those who have been in contact with the virus. It is recommended that these results be confirmed by a molecular testing method, if necessary, for patient management.

so if you have a positive test, they say you need to get tested properly. and if you have a negative test, you need to get tested properly too. Bonkers, but even more so the positive test results are required to be sent to the government as positive, for statistical purposes. So I wonder if Musk has counted as "having covid" twice in the official "how many peopel have covid" statistics that are wheeled out.

Page 12 of the manufacturer specs shows the sensitivity rate of 84%.

Oh it would, you'd be surprised how sensitive you are to sound delays.

By that I don't mean "speed of sound" in absolute terms but the delay between the speakers if theyr'e positioned non-equidistantly.

My hifi amp has a microphone on a long cable for this - you put it where you sit, and it broadcasts a tone to decide how much of a delay to add to each of the speakers so you get the sound at the same time. I guess its more for the audiophile than the general listener, but even then, a tiny delay in sound can give you a "something's wrong but I'm not sure what it is" feeling.

COBOL is a specialised language that excels at volume processing tasks - like when I was taught it, the first thing you're given to do is merge a set of payroll and employee datasets. 3 lines of COBOL later you think, "well that was easy". And 2 of them were print statements.

Its a bit like SQL, great language for what its designed to do, and what it does is exactly what financial systems do mostly - manipulate vast sets of data.

Delphi was incredibly popular for a very long time.

It should have been adopted instead of Visual Basic, but like so many other failures-in-the-name-of-profit-and-control, MS saw it off.

There is ElectionGuard which is software supported by MS (but made by people who hopefully know what they're doing) that is open source and I think solves many of the technical problems with cyber voting - including paper trails and user-verification of their ballot.

The real issue though is votier registration, and that's not going to be fixable until you give someone their voter ID and tell them to look after it. No more registering on the day at a drive-through voting booth with a driving licence you pull out of a stack of fakes.

Often the time taken to count many votes in many states is that they allow mailed-in ballots to be counted weeks after the election date, if they have a correct postmark.

This might say something about the quality of the USPS than the election systems. But it certainly looks bad.

This is also why Trump was calling for ballot counting to stop - some states (eg PA) have laws saying all ballots received after 8pm on election day are automatically invalid. So many states, so many different laws and regulations. I'm surprised you even get a result at all. Thank goodness the media is there to impartially call it for us :-)

Yeh, what's 1000 dead Americans every day. Who cares when the normal daily death rate for this time of year is around 8000

This is /., at least get your shitposting slightly accurate.

I'm told this test is to determine if you do not have the virus as its positive detection rate is so fallible. (84% according to the manufacturers)

So if you test negative - then you do not have the virus.
If you test positive, then you should go and have a better test. That's all its there for, quick, inaccurate tests that can let most people continue working where a lengthy test is inapplicable for the circumstances.

Its not about "confirmed detection of the virus", that's really stupid thing to say when 2 came back positive and 2 negative.

Horrible things... that only FB is allowed to do with its carefully gathered private data.

They just don't like any competition, got absolutely nothing to do with ethics.

We live in a world where people will read on the internet rumours that a bunch of virgins await them if they commit acts of atrocity against others, that they read on the internet were doing bad things against your mates, and will do far worse than pop off shots with an AR-15.

You think we should ban Islam then?

The reasonable person interpretation is perfectly sane, you just can't treat everyone as a child and run the world in such a lowest-common-denominator fashion. You definitely cannot do it because of one person acting stupidly.

Yes you can - because you're not correlating the rate of masks and infections in a perfect, medical environment, but the use of masks by the general public. Of whom I think are no better or worse than we were 100 years ago.

so today, the masks being worn are done so in no siginifcant difference than they would have been years ago, any argument that "they might have done this, that or the other" is stupid - people are doing the same today. Hell, I even saw Joe Biden pull his mask down to cough!

I read some poked holes to smoke, and today I see people wearing them on their chins while they chatter on their phones. I read "its made of gauze", but the commentators don't realise ts not bandages but medical gauze - a material issued by the Japanese gov during their flu epidemic lasy tear. Lots of excuses why its different this time, none substantial.

I think people are excusing masks for preventing much more than they do, suddenly all nasty transmission is "droplets" and not aerosolised breath.

The original advice was sound, in spring the advice was not to wear them and then suddenly one day in June officials changed their minds overnight and never stopped to say why, just that we must. If there was new evidence then you'd have thought they'd have made a big fuss over it as a reason why. They didn't though.

And yet, I see Japan (a strong mask-wearing country) had a flu pandemic just last year. How is that possible given your insistence that masks work so well.

Or Spanish Flu 100 years ago, studies afterwards showed zero difference between cities that mandated masks and those that did not.

I'll even point you to the WHO guidelines that still talk about mask wearing as having little evidence of effectiveness for viral transmission.

You say your article as a demonstration of mask wearing, but it shows a lot of other factors were involved, particularly a lockdown that NYC didn't impose. I have a feeling not leaving the house prevents spread far more than anything else.

Here's a better study showing the in-effectiveness of masks, and it goes out of its way to say that masks still work (note that all of the things they mention in the article apply to us today, with out crappy masks made of thin cloth that peopel reuse far too often and change and clean far too little)

https://update.lib.berkeley.ed...

So, no, I'm not some conspiracy theorist "denier", but someone who cares about science over panic, who thinks mask wearing is something governments have imposed as a political gesture to show they're doing something, when they really are flailing around.

And do masks make things worse? Perhaps they do, there's little evidence for it because there's few studies made, but those that have found that masks are worse than not wearing one.

Tghat's the most worrying part. So you go ahead and continue to be a science denier while you wear your mask religiously.

https://thefederalist.com/2020...

the government of course!

After all in the UK, to ensure the spread was contained, they imposed a curfew - 10pm you were out the door and the doors closed or the shop owner would get a big fine (one fast food takeaway was fined because even though the customer had a receipt with 10pm on it, he wasn't handed his food until 4 minutes past)

So everyone in a bar would be kicked out the door at the same time.

In a non-fascist world, the bar would have a 11pm close trime, and people would be allowed to drift off as and when they finish up, like we did for decades in the UK. But the small-minded government came along and told us it knew better, and made things worse.