I can see the case for avoiding overt offense just for giggles(Hey, let's call the downs babies 'mongoloids' just like the good old days!); but this WHO suggestion seems both excessively broad(eg. diseases named for people almost always honor discoverers or significant researchers, which is hardly stigmatizing; diseases named after locations, unless novel as all hell, tend to better known than their place of origin/discovery pretty quickly) and deeply futile(the veterinarians and epidemiologists of the world are suddenly going to stop making reference to animal vectors? Like hell.)

Plus, even brutally banal acronyms tend to find pejorative meanings that suit peoples' impressions of a disease pretty quickly. 'Severe acute respiratory syndrome' does its best to mean nothing; but people were still calling it 'severe asian respiratory syndrome' within days of its announcement. Plus, our supply of 'Novel Something Syndrome' form names is going to dry up real quick once the first one stops being novel and a second one shows up.

Some sort of systematic naming convention, ideally shorter than the causal organism's entire genetic code, would be nice; but informal naming is always kind of a mess and seems unlikely to change.

Most security-related hardware is also (and probably largely for this purpose) kept low-voltage/data cabling only, so you can usually do it without getting a full electrician involved.

Especially if you want outdoor mounts, there are still any number of mistakes that can lead to moisture problems, compromise insulation, damage fire barriers, and so on, so you don't want to scrape the bottom of the barrel too hard; but there aren't too many formal requirements compared to mains voltage work or structural modifications.

I know that smearing 'security' all over things is popular; but isn't this almost comically similar to non-security job descriptions?

Suitably high level technical skill pays very well, 'Director of' and 'Chief Something Officer' pay well to very well, 'consultants' are either quite expensive or powerless peons who have been reclassified to avoid labor laws that apply to real employees; and installation technicians aren't quite below the poverty line.

It depends on what is being simulated; but if the user is expected to do something useful under dire conditions(trigger ejection seat or the like), it may not be possible to usefully 'simulate' without beating on them a bit. A simulator that produces people who can calmly press the correct button when presented with the appropriate visual and audio stimuli; but panics, or flinches and jars the controls, when exposed to the shocks of a real mechanical system really failing might well get some users killed.

It's probably unhelpful to actually damage them; but the sensations of (sometimes violent) movement are a big part of operating some types of hardware and somebody who isn't experienced with them is arguably maltrained, or at least trained only to a very limited level.

That they have thought of them doesn't imply they have any good answers.

The problem is that even if you can anticipate 90% of the things that can happen out there, there will always be a 10% you can't anticipate. You don't anticipate them as a driver either. There's no way for "the incredibly smart people" to make decisions ahead of time for things they cannot think of.

For humans, it takes a couple of decades of learning how to be a human, so you understand that if a policeman with a gun walks up to your car, you do not move, but if a shady looking person does the same, you gun it out of there. Or any other of unanticipated things that drivers encounter. Millions of them every day.

I think the war will be how fast and reliable they are. A system that's safer but takes longer to get people from A to B, or gives up and stops for any little thing in order to increase safety won't be too popular.

My life has only so many minutes. I don't want to spend more of them than I have to being slow cargo.

You are not considering the speed they're going at and which roads they are going on. It's easy to avoid accidents when going sub-25 speeds on a predefines subset of roads. Whether you're human or not.

Until we see some data on how autonomous cars do on all kinds of roads and driving speeds and conditions, I don't think we should extol their safety. Going 55 mph over a hilltop on a country road, or avoiding a deer is a bit different. Or a busy bumper-to-bumper city street where no-one will let you over in the next line unless you force the issue.

I'd also ask how long it took for the car to get from A to B, and how it compares to a human driver. Time is important to people; enough so that we're willing to deal with risks to save time.

There's something in the air. Lately even Joe Scarborough and some of the FOX News regulars have occasionally balked at the bullshit.

Probably the solar system is passing through a cloud of hippie gas or something.

Only the penny-stock corporations. But it's easier for a herd of camels to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich corporation to go to Heaven.

You should read more of his posts.

Everyone except rich people and wannabes, apparently. It's the MAKE MONEY FAST mentality that has mortally wounded our economy over the past 35 years.

I especially like it when someone wants their representatives to eliminate entitlements, but don't dare touch their medicare and social security.

Full disclosure: I probably qualify as "old", and perhaps "confused" too. (Though if both, the later may not be caused by the former.)

It's more of a sleight of hand trick: the actual issue on the table was price; the 'FWD.us' flacks did a quick swap to capability (so that they could assert that those lazy workers could have gotten the job if they just up-skilled some more or something); and then abandoned the issue before anyone could point out that 'make yourself able to get the job' is not a matter of 'become more capable'; but 'become cheaper and more powerless.'

At least when these guys are talking about actually unskilled individuals what they say is somewhere close to true-ish, albeit not very helpful(yes, it is true that people with no skills and tepid intelligence are fucked. Any plans on how the bottom couple of quintiles are going to just train their way into being somebody you'd let touch an application, much less pay to do so?); but this one is a pure cost move. The workers were able to get the job, that's why they had it. They did have the skills, that's how they trained their replacements. They just weren't cheap enough.

Obviously, if you run a company whose two main costs are techies and electricity, you want to be able to hire techies for whatever qualifies as subsistence wages in Uttar Pradesh; but don't pretend that that's about 'skills', and don't fucking pretend you are doing us a favor by preaching some wise words about job creation at the same time.

Scotty will have the power back just in time.

The floating gates are isolated; but not perfectly, and on a modern high density device(especially an MLC one) it doesn't take much leakage to result in the wrong result.

Decay within a week is pretty aggressive for anything you'd have the nerve to sell; but all flash memory can be expected to lose its contents over time.