The question is by who? If the power company isn't careful and routes those controls over a public network that they do not fully control then all bets are off regarding who controls the system.

I'm thinking you haven't worked too closely with a power company lately. The grid is positively archaic and certainly doesn't have the fine grained control you seem to think it does. The power company around me actively resists investing in upgrading their service faster than a pace that you could describe as glacial. They also seriously do not give a shit about their customers because they don't have to. Where else are they going to go?

In the last 24 months I have power company employees damage my property, start a fire (no joke), kill some wildlife, trespass, and cut down trees they had no right to cut down and cause enough trouble that our township supervisor (our version of a mayor) actually came on site to find out what the problem was. And I'm supposed to believe these people will have the competence and diligence to worry about some clever hacker turning on my AC? Yeah, I doubt it.

There are plenty of use cases though they may or may not apply to you. I have controls on certain lights in my house because I forget to turn them off. It's also nice to be able to control multiple lights at the same time for specific purposes. If I'm setting up to watch a movie it's nice to not have to hit several switches, dim the lights, turn on a bunch of devices, etc. Instead of me wandering through the house turning stuff off at night, I can simply push one button and set everything. Same with when I come home. I can check if I've left lights on or turn them on remotely if needed. It's certainly a luxury and not a necessity I'll admit but that doesn't mean it isn't useful or that I don't have a use for it.

Furthermore fine grained controls can save power. While the technology is still new so the economic payback is sometimes iffy, I do get satisfaction out of not wasting power needlessly.

Sounds like that may not apply to you. I tinker with my thermostat more often than that and having some controls actually is pretty helpful to me. I have a Nest thermostat and I've found it pretty helpful to be able to control and check the house temperature through my smartphone.

But you might want the ability to turn it off in case you left it running for some reason. It's quite possible to make a control that only turns things off. It's also possible to have it notify you that it is on if you leave the premises.

Be careful generalizing your own situation. There are plenty of us out here who actually do find some of this stuff useful.

There is plenty of malware out there that has no purpose other than causing problems for others. Some @$$hole amusing themselves. There are WAY too many smart bored young hackers with a chip on their shoulder. Someone is going to cause problems just because they can.

Plus if someone really wanted to cause problems they could turn EVERYONES air conditioner up all at the same time on the same day to try to overload the system.

Dive and motivation are necessary but not sufficient. Having those attributes doesn't mean they have a good product or the product with the best price/performance ratio. I have no idea of the relative merits of either company regarding this project but just because SpaceX is the new hotness doesn't mean anything. While I have no affiliation I've actually done some work at Boeing (many years ago) so I have at least a basic understanding of how that company works and what their culture is like. (FYI the part of Boeing I dealt with has a combative work culture I didn't enjoy at all) I'm confident they could offer a technologically competitive product. (economically competitive is less certain) Boeing has been sending up rockets for a long time so they are hardly new to the game.

Boeing has a much much longer development record. Of course that might also work against Boeing but SpaceX does not have a long track record to go on. I'm as impressed with SpaceX as many others here but if they want to play with the big boys it isn't going to be easy and yes they are high(er) risk in certain ways. This means they need to be clearly better (economically and/or technologically) or they stand a good chance of losing to the "safe bet".

Umm, this IS the competition between these companies. This one bidding competition isn't the end-all-be-all regardless of which firm wins this contract. Plus you haven't exactly proven the assertion that Boeing is actually engaging in corrupt practices here. While I certainly wouldn't be shocked to hear that they were, that isn't anything close to proof. Absent evidence saying that SpaceX should get the contract because you suspect Boeing (without proof) of corruption is not a strong argument in favor of SpaceX.

That's not correct either logically or from an accounting perspective. The opposite of customer is not product. The opposite of customer is vendor. Every transaction has two and only two parties. If you aren't the customer then you are the vendor for that transaction. Unless you plan to go into slavery the product isn't you. The product is data about you. What that makes you is the vendor of the product. Google "buys" this data in exchange for IT services and they then sell the data to advertising customers. In that transaction chain Google buys from you and that is how you appear on Google's financial statements - as a supplier, not a customer.

That doesn't make them necessarily a customer for that transaction. As far as Google is concerned they are vendors because Google "pays" users via an in-kind exchange of services for data which they then sell to their customers for cash. In that transaction chain the user is properly considered a vendor to Google and that is how they would show up on Google's financial statements. In that transaction Google would be your customer rather than the other way around.

That makes you a vendor/supplier rather than a customer. Google "buys" your data with an in-kind exchange for IT services and then they sell it to advertisers. You aren't a customer, you are a vendor in that transaction chain.

I'm an accountant.

Unless you are sending cash to slashdot, your relationship to them is most accurately described as that of a vendor or a supplier if you prefer that term. You provide data to slashdot in exchange for entertainment which is a form of in-kind exchange. Slashdot then uses that data to sell advertising to their paying customers. From an accounting perspective by providing this forum to you, you would be on slashdot's books as either Cost of Goods Sold or more likely some kind of Operating Expense. This effectively makes you a vendor to them, not a customer because they don't sell you anything.

It can get a little murkier if you have a paid subscription but they still advertise to you because then you become both a customer and a vendor. Which you are depends on the transaction in question. Logically it would make sense to have the subscription be treated as a contra-expense because then you don't have to have this dual relationship. But it's more likely that they would book it as income and have the user on the books as both a customer and (indirectly) as a vendor.

That doesn't make you a customer. That makes you a charity recipient.

In any case the general relationship between Google users (as opposed to paying advertising clients) is that the user is properly thought of as a vendor or supplier. We supply data to Google in exchange for in-kind services (email, search etc) which Google then turns into a product which they sell to their paying customers. Customers are people who pay you and vendors are people you pay. Google "pays" users for their data with online services which is a sort of barter really. They then process that data into a product they can sell to their customers which generally are advertisers.

What sometimes confuses people is that Google also sells IT services (like data storage or corporate email) but what that simply means is that someone can be both a vendor and a customer depending on the specific transaction. This is perfectly normal. It's not at all uncommon for companies to sell stuff to each other and have both a vendor relationship and a customer relationship but they can be only one or the other for a given transaction. The key distinction to determine whether they are the vendor or customer is (generally) the direction of the cash flow for the particular transaction in question. In cases in-kind exchanges its a little fuzzier so you have to look at what they do with the item received.

The few remaining corpses of people 100+ years dead will most likely not give you the information you seek. There simply is not enough material remaining even among that which is well preserved to make authoritative claims regarding entire populations. At best we might get some hints and get some limited insight but there will be pretty sharp limits on making serious comparisons. Furthermore, I don't know how much time you've spend working with medical records but I've spent a lot of time with them in my professional life. Even modern medical records can be pretty bad. Medical records from 100+ years ago are very difficult to glean useful information from in a lot of cases. Not saying it can't be done but our understanding of medicine has advanced rather a lot since then.

That's putting it mildly. It's an interesting project you propose but you seem to be making it sound much easier than it is. That is a very challenging study.

That doesn't automatically mean that it affects mortality or patient outcomes. The human body is complicated. Just because it seems logical doesn't mean it actually is a problem.

There is no causal link known between gluten and the obesity epidemic. Gluten sensitivity appear to be merely the latest in a long string of fads jumped on by people who are hypochondriacs as the demand for gluten free products has hugely exceeded known affected population. While there are a relatively small number of people with coeliac disease and other sensitivities, there is no (credible) published evidence that avoiding gluten has any benefit for most people or that it is a primary driver in the current obesity epidemic.

That is little more than a hypothesis. We do not know with any certainty what causes Alzheimer's disease. Anyone who claims we do is selling something or confused. We are learning lots about it but we do not fully understand the disease process. There may be a correlation regarding eggs and cholesterol but the studies simply haven't been done to establish any sort of causal link in the disease process.

Furthermore you might consider linking to the source material you cite rather than an editorial in a random non-peer reviewed website that refers negatively to statin drugs as "mainstream medicine". That is not what I would consider an unbiased or credible source and it casts your argument in a worse light than it probably deserves.

We know what happens to blood pressure in the short term. Salt affects blood pressure = known fact. We've understood that for a very long time. That is completely different from proving that salt affects heart disease or salt affects mortality in patients with heart conditions. Those things are MUCH harder to test because they require large, long term population studies. They're expensive and difficult studies to do. The problem is that people took the fact that salt affects blood pressure and applied it (without evidence) to treatment of heart disease when there was no known causal link between the two.

This is the logic that was used:
    A) We know salt affects blood pressure.
+ B) We know high blood pressure can cause negative patient outcomes in patients with heart problems.
= C) Therefore controlling salt should reduce negative patient outcomes

The problem is that A + B does not equal C. We just assumed that it did because it sounded right. You have two bits of data that seem to add up to a logical result but it turns out that the equation is more complicated and thus our simple "answer" is wrong.

Fair enough. Do you have sufficient expertise that you are able to interpret the evidence? Is the evidence clear? Is the evidence properly gathered and analyzed? Do we have enough evidence to draw firm conclusions or merely enough to nudge the direction of inquiry? Will the patient die before you can get conclusive evidence?

Fact is that the human body is complicated and sometimes a good sounding theory is the best we have to go on. A lot of diagnosis are basically well informed probabilistic guesses because we don't completely understand the underlying disease process. Sometimes you have to act before you can be certain of your case. For instance if you have a bacterial infection it can take days to culture the infectious organism and the patient can die before you get a definitive answer. So the doctor has to take an educated guess before he has the evidence. Sometimes a consensus opinion is the best we can do.

What people miss about consensus opinions is why they matter. What a consensus is NOT useful for is as evidence proving or disproving a theory about physical phenomena. A consensus IS useful for as evidence against the (political) argument that there are substantially conflicting opinions when there in fact are not. A consensus is useful for establishing standard of care. A consensus is (sometimes) useful for protection against legal liability.

As I understand it, that is a big part of the basis of the theory behind controlling sodium in heart patients. Osmotic gradient controlled through reduced sodium. Good sounding theory. However just because that sounds sensible doesn't mean it actually matters in medical outcomes. The human body is complicated and sometimes good sounding theories turn out to be completely incorrect. This appears to be one of those good sounding but false theories.