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Comment who writes the simulator? (Score 1) 173

Let's see if...

Google writes the software for the car
Google writes (or pays someone else to write) the simulator
Google runs the test
Google reports the results

Seems like with simulations we would be somehow implicitly trusting google that their simulator sufficiently models reality vs only modeling what the self driving software expected...

Although simulation has its place to improve testability during training and development, how does this test against reality? The reason to test against reality is generally to cover the stuff that you *didn't* expect. It's generally quite easy to fool yourself (and others) that something is good enough if you remove this link back to reality...

Comment Re:We already know how to prevent cancer (Score 1) 185

Let's see here what we have here...

1.Don't use tobacco...

Okay that one has some science behind it...

2. Eat a healthy diet... Although making healthy selections at the grocery store and at mealtime can't guarantee cancer prevention, it might help reduce your risk.

3. Maintain a healthy weight and be physically active... Maintaining a healthy weight might lower the risk of various types of cancer

4. Protect yourself from the sun

Apparently they didn't get the news that apparently sunscreen doesn't help

5. Get immunized...

For HepB sure, for HPV, the jury is still out as "Most infections with high-risk HPVs do not cause cancer. Many HPV infections go away on their own within 1 to 2 years. However, infections that last for many years increase a person’s risk of developing cancer..."

6. Avoid risky behaviors...

Like unprotected sex and sharing intravenous needles? Cancer is only a minor reason not do partake in these activities....

7. Get regular medical care...

Actual screening for cancer has only been clinically shown to be effective for breast, lung, colon and cervical cancer. This doesn't actually prevent cancer, only increased the odds of catching it before it becomes serious.

For some people, they tend to strongly advocate these things because it is what they do anyhow. As for the science behind a list like this, the science somewhat vague. Other than stopping smoking and getting your vaccinations, (one reducing environmental exposure and the HepB issue), it's a mixed bag when it comes to science.

The whole thing about eating health is that we really don't know what the hell we are talking about yet. First it's low fat, then it's low sugar, then eating cholesterol is bad, then we find out there's only a minimal relationship to the cholesterol we eat, and then we find out that there's good and bad cholesterol and then it doesn't really show a strong correlation.... Then vitamins good, then vitamins bad... Exercise good, too much exercise bad...

Of course, the answer is not to eat cheeseburgers and not exercise, the take away is to don't take all this crap on the internet as gospel, and all things in moderation, right? ;^)

Comment Re:We already know how to prevent cancer (Score 1) 185

Actually, it is unknown if these (or any things) reduce any specific persons' chance of getting non-environmental** forms cancer.
At best, it is only shown by correlation, and as you know correlation is not causation, it is only an average risk profile, because we do not yet know what causes most cancers, so we do not know how to prevent it. The tip off that this is pseudo-science is the copious use of the hedging word "might" in your linked article...

** as opposed to cancers like mesothelioma

Comment Re: "Not eradicated" isn't needed (Score 1) 185

Most diseases are simply treated (aka managed). A few can be cured (so that you no longer have that condition) like a bacterial infection. It may be the case that cancer is only treatable because potential cures would require changing or suppressing fundamental biochemical processes that evolved into our bodily systems (and can't be simply changed or suppressed w/o a radical redesign of our biochemical system).

I'm totally making this up, but if cancer processes were to be discovered to be mostly a function of a rapid partially undifferentiated cell division pathway that occurs when you are a blastosphere that was partly reused in the process to heal skin break or say white-blood cell production etc, etc, it wouldn't be simple to just disable this in your dna before you were born (as that would kill embryotic development). It also wouldn't be safe to disable it completely later because many other things depended on it. The fact that a certain biochemical process must be present to exist in the first place, may have resulted in our evolutionary path relying on the underlying mechanism for many other processes in a deeply nested and intertwined way that might be near impossible to for us to untangle. This may mean that cancer will never really be cured, only treated/managed.

On the flip side, if it were some sort of mutation, or dna methlyization that no critical biochemical system relies on (because it wasn't part of a deep evolutionary pathway), it might be straightforward to just screen for it, or modify dna replication processes to eliminate it, or develop some inhibiting/methlyization factor to markup the dna to avoid the process altogether. That might be considered a cure for cancer.

Today when we say someone is "cured" of cancer, we are really not being honest. The person survived the treatment and they appear to be cancer free for a period of time. The fact is that since we did not actually cure the cancer, it could go out of remission and require more treatment (sadly for some people I knew this unfortunately is not an unlikely outcome).

Of course having a "cure" might be semantical, as a lifetime of management could render it to less critical status (say like type1 diabetes), but if the underlying triggers are part of a multitude of critical biochemical process (because of evolution) it may prove to be quite hard to even have an effective treatment to manage cancer in difficult cases (and/or the side-effects could be pretty bad).

Comment Re:Pick a different job. (Score 1) 548

If you mean the quality of code that gets churned by your average coder, then yes, it is just like plumbing.

At least a plumber's work is often assembled from standard parts and inspected before it's sealed up behind a wall never to see the light again.
Sometimes I wish the code I've had to troubleshoot was assembled from standard parts and gotten a minimal once-over before going into production...

Comment Re:Is this really good news? (Score 1) 233

Our forklift drivers had to go through a 2 week certification course, with obstacle courses on several different forklifts that we had in service, plus recurring yearly testing. It was a "prestige" job on the floor.

On the flip side, one summer job when I was a teenager, I was a working in a high-tech fortune 100 company's warehouse (which shall remain nameless) and my manager decided to send me to fork-lift "school" so I could help out loading the trucks. His sole word of advice to me was that the last guy to put the forks through the walls of his office got fired on the spot, so don't screw up.

The "school" was a 2 day hands-on where I got to attempt to drive 2 different styles of forklifts for about 20mins each and watch an OSHA approved fire extinguisher operation video. I spend the rest of the summer trying not to destroy things in the warehouse.

  It was pretty prestigious job for a teenager, but I was getting slightly above minimum wage for that job...

Comment Re:not hard cosmic radiation (Score 3, Informative) 117

Yes and no-- Depends on what the ISS's orbit is. If it has a circumpolar orbit, (crosses the polar region), then it will pass through the magnetic field lines that funnel cosmic particles into the atmosphere that cause the northern lights. EG-- it would get beamed pretty intensely with concentrated cosmic particles.

If it does not have that kind of orbit, and instead stays around the equator, then no so much. Mostly radiation free, compared to outside the magnetosphere.

ISS orbit track here... Quite equatorial...

What we need to do, is send a lander to the moon loaded with some microbial and planktonic colonies, where it can get beamed by high intensity, raw solar wind radiation, (And more importantly, where we can keep close tabs on it easily) and measure how the colonies do over time.

Accidentally did that back in '67 with Surveyor 3...

The 50-100 organisms survived launch, space vacuum, 3 years of radiation exposure, deep-freeze at an average temperature of only 20 degrees above absolute zero, and no nutrient, water or energy source. (The United States landed 5 Surveyors on the Moon; Surveyor 3 was the only one of the Surveyors visited by any of the six Apollo landings. No other life forms were found in soil samples retrieved by the Apollo missions or by two Soviet unmanned sampling missions, although amino acids - not necessarily of biological origin - were found in soil retrieved by the Apollo astronauts.)

Comment a few grams of tritium a problem? (Score 2) 305

If it were only just getting a few grams of tritium, it isn't that hard to do. On the scale of a few grams you can just get something like this baby and hide it in a commercial seawater desalinization plant to get a few grams after a bit of time (and energy)...

Of course that isn't the most economical way to do it. I think a common military-industrial method today is to put lithium control rods into an experimental-sized fission reactor and collect the tritium gas that comes off... Still no fusion necessary...

Comment Re:Explains how Merkel was very calm (Score 1) 170

...when it became known that the US were bugging her phone. Probably her reaction was "What's the hubbub, it's not like we don't...".

Of course when things like this become public, you have to make a good show, though...
Feigning outrage and going viral. Isn't that what the modern internet is all about?

Comment Re:Stupid (Score 2) 200

I also have the right to record what I see.

Sadly, you do not have the absolute right to record what you see. For instance being in your hotel room and having someone film you from a peephole in the door. Even though you might be able to see it when you are standing in a public place, you have no right to record what you can see.

If the subject of the photography is in public (as opposed to a publically accessible, but privately owned place), courts have basically ruled the subjects have no expectation of privacy, so most photographic recording is fair game. This is how paparazzi get many of their photos legally...

If the photographer is in a non-public area (e.g., the publically accessible, but privately owned hotel hallway), courts have ruled that public access rules do not apply.

The grey area is when the subject is in a non-public area, but the photographer is in a public area (e.g., a drone in "public" airspace, above a private residence).

AFAIK and IANAL, the line is generally drawn that invasion of privacy requires a recording device of some sort in these situations. It stems from the idea that invasion of privacy requires the publicizing of private life of an individual that is offensive to a "reasonable" person and/or not of legitimate concern to the public. I suppose w/o a recording device, you often cannot effectively publicize it so it falls outside typical invasion scope... And of course the definitions of "offensive" and "reasonable" are generally left up to the courts to decide...

Comment Re:Surprise? (Score 1) 579

In fairness, there are at least two ways that could happen:
1) MS bribes people to complain. Unlikely, but not impossible.
2) MS bribes the relevant officials to *say* there have been overwhelming complaints. I mean, there are inevitably going to be complaints; that happens any time *anything* changes. The question is at what point they become important enough to sway the overall decision.

With that said, I suspect you're right.

OR

3) MS originally bribed officials to attempt to force ordinary people to Linux desktops knowing they would eventually complain enough to make the whole experiment fail and spin a cautionary for any that follow...

Or maybe not... ;^)

Comment if a quality project can't raise money elsewhere (Score 3, Interesting) 98

If a quality project can't raise money elsewhere from more traditional fund-raising sources, might this indicate a subtle case of pre-selection quality bias instead of an indication of any anything to do with kickstarter campaign odds?

It could simply confirm that woman entrepreneurs often have less access to traditional funding sources because their industry contact lists are shorter in certain industries (which may or may not have anything to do with positive specific gender bias on kickstarter).

This is also consistent with the fact that in industries that tend to have more even female representation, they apparently lost the bias they were measuring...

I guess you can spin the results anyway you want...

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