Microsoft decides that it's in their best interest for all customers to use identical UIs, so they make Metro the standard interface on phones, video game systems, tablets, desktops, and servers. Apple decides that it's in their customers' best interest for products to have similar but individualized UIs, so they create tailored interfaces for tiny, small, and large displays.

That, in a nutshell, is the difference between the two companies (and why Apple is eating Microsoft's lunch in every category where they directly compete).

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.

The New England Patriots make about $428M a year across 16 games, each of which takes an average of 192 minutes. That works out to about $139K per minute. If Bill Belichick thinks he can work more efficiently with papyrus and a scribe, there'd be a tiny replica of the Nile in the basement of Gillette Stadium by the end of the day.

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.

Well, on the surface, I'd agree with you. Ha ha, see what I did there?

But usually in a marketing deal like this, memos come down explicitly stating that the brand name should be used often and conspicuously when referring to the product. Otherwise, whats the point of spending the money?

This is not actually news though it's one more study on the pile. My wife is a physician and her instructors in med school pointed out that the relationship between salt and high blood pressure was based on correlations, not a causal chain. Basically it was a logical hypothesis that people started acting upon before it was ever established as fact. A lot of patients with high blood pressure problems (apparently - I'm not a doctor) have issues relating to osmotic gradients and other biological functions where salt is involved. So the theory went that by controlling sodium you could help control these problems. A good theory. But a good theory isn't a necessarily fact and it sounds like a lot of medical effort went into controlling sodium before anyone actually could test to see if it really mattered. Apparently the answer is turning out to be that it doesn't matter nearly as much as we thought.

Oblig XKCD

And you've never done anything that endangered others? (If you say "never" I'm going to call you a liar)

And he has served time in prison for that. You think he doesn't understand the consequences? I know the guy and his situation and you do not. I know what he's been through and I know how he has comported himself for the last several years. Don't be so eager to dole out "justice" for people you've never met. He had his license pulled for 10 years. He had to prove to a judge that he had straightened out. He had to have an interlock on his car even when granted a provisional license for 2 years. He had to get drug tested regularly. He had to show up to work every day for several years. Honestly I trust this guy more than I would trust you if we just met on the street.

We do that every day. I trust thousands of drivers I pass daily to stay in their lane. We depend on each other to not screw up all the time.

Same thing. Shouldn't be legal. It's basically the same activity so should be covered under the same rules.

No it does not because those other services you mentioned are not least common denominator services. Pretty much every phone has SMS - not all phones are smart phones. Plenty of people do not have twitter or other similar messaging services and even when they do they don't all have the same ones.

Distracted driving laws are A) inconsistent, B) only enforceable after the fact and C) are widely and demonstrably ignored. Disabling all texting while in a vehicle in motion would proactively prevent a lot of accidents and is much easier to enforce.

It might be transmitted but it still doesn't guarantee delivery or notify you if the message was not received. With a phone call you know for certain if the other party received the message. Kind of an important detail.

Yep. For product liability reasons. People can't help themselves and there is no way to determine if the driver or the passenger is the one working on it.

I don't have ANY problem with allowing any sort of communication to 911 at any time. If there is a reason to contact 911 that probably is ok even if driving.

I really don't see that as a problem. Very few text messages are so urgent they cannot wait a little while.

It wouldn't. It means you just wait until you stop and then you can text to your heart's desire. The point is that we may be worrying too much about making sure passengers aren't inconvenienced and forgetting the big picture problem that people are dying because they can't resist texting while driving. Since determining who is driving and who isn't is too hard, maybe the least-worst answer is simply to not allow it at all for anyone while in motion. If you've got a better idea I'm all ears but everyone so far is throwing up their hands and saying we can't solve the problem. I respectfully disagree with that stance.