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Comment Re:Cue huge pushback from the AMA in 3...2... (Score 2) 392

IMHO, what's needed is a new, "basic doctor" type degree that has the power to prescribe most meds and monitor most medical conditions but doesn't 8-10 years of education and training costing the GDP of a small country.

There is such a thing; they are called Physician's Assistant, or PA for short. They can do nearly everything a doctor can do, including prescribe most medications. The education requirements are significantly less than that for an MD.

Comment Priorities (Score 1) 735

This is really a question of your priorities, and a little bit about whether you think your current company is likely to be successful; I say that because a small company generally has much better growth potential, but also a much higher chance of failing.

Personally I think the pay rise you mention is pretty small change. The convenience of the commute is nice. But it seems to me much more important to ask yourself if the new/bigger company offers you a better career opportunity than your existing one. Another important consideration is the personal relationships you have at your current position. In my 25+ years in software, those relationships have been far and away more important than any other consideration.

Comment Re:So what's "random" then? (Score 2) 210

Every computer programmer knows that any random number he generates programmatically is not "mathematically random". The strict definition being that the program to produce the number must be longer than the number, which, of course, is impractical. Pseudorandom is really the best we can do without special hardware.

Ah, but you are so wrong. Try a google search on "entropy gathering". There are well known ways to generate truly random sequences without any "special" hardware, using environmental noise collected from device drivers and other sources. There are Linux distros whose /dev/random implementations use these techniques. On other Unixen the EGD (Entropy Gathering Daemon) provides random sequences in a similar way.

See the Wikipedia article on /dev/random for more info.

Comment Re:Women... (Score 1) 193

Sneaky, underhanded, devious behavior is not necessarily a sign of superior intellect. It is a strategy, one of many, that might be used to counter superior physical strength.

Another strategy might be superior training, such as the use of a martial art. Or attempt to improve communication, so that the conflict can be resolved with a win/win.

Or simply avoid the conflict altogether, if possible.

Claiming that "I am devious in my dealings with you because I am more intelligent than you" merely demonstrates that you have poor ethical judgement. A devious strategy might be justified, or it might not be.

Comment Re:Random today, but still random tomorrow? (Score 1) 395

There is already a much better approach than this in use for crypto; it's called "entropy gathering". It basically amounts to sampling things like network traffic, mouse movements, &etc and using the "noisy" bits of that data plus some math to induce randomness that is unpredictable and unrepeatable.

The problem with your approach, and anything that depends purely on an algorithmic processing of data that others can access, is that it is repeatable, given the data and the algorithm. With entropy gathering the data seeding the algorithm would be extremely difficult to re-capture after the fact.

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