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Comment It's time to fine. (Score 5, Informative) 240

Working with EMR systems for small clinics has shown me that unless fines are given out to these companies developing this software they will make it as difficult and expensive to exchange records with different systems as possible. It is far more profitable for them to make it hard to exchange and then make their clients convince other offices to use the same software if they want to make it easy.

Comment Re:Humans have too much (Score 3, Interesting) 206

Are you 'tarded or something. Tracking ACoward can be much harder than an actual username. Logged in users with a long posting history leak all kinds of information about who they are, information that can possibly trace back to them without an IP address. At worst both just leave an IP, which if measures are taken, such as proxies or hacked machines can be near impossible to track.

Comment Re:Mod up 1000+ (Score 1) 448

>I propose all arms going to third parties be given rounds with propellants / explosives that chemically degrade over time.

That's not going to happen.

We still shoot ammo made in WW2. It's very likely many of the mortars fired in the past decade were produced in the Vietnam era. 18 months is silly stupid short in itself and you are begging for defeat. Most of our own weapons are stockpiled for years if not decades before a conflict occurs. Because if a 'real serious' enemy shows up, all they have to do is hit your chemical industry and game over, you only have a year of ammo left at most. Even worse, you're not going to stockpile the amount of weapons needed to keep a hypothetical strong Russia or China needed from overwhelming you because you are risk adverse to going bad. Lastly your weaponry has to work reliably in all conditions, not just the desert, you have the jungle, the sea, the frozen wastes. You are really just begging for your own soldiers to get killed.

Comment Energy costs? (Score 1) 421

Me>So you want year round school in the south, but do you want to pay for it?

Other person>But it's the same amount of days, they are just spread apart differently.

Me> But not all days are created equal, when it's 105F out, you're spending a whole lot of electricity to keep the place cool. Even worse, most school busses are not equipped with air conditioning and would have to be refitted or replaced.

http://www.yourhoustonnews.com...

Comment Learn more during summer (Score 1) 421

This is a huge point most educators miss. School actually teaches you very little about life outside of school. School is a very limited subset, and very unrealistic reproduction of reality. If I don't like where I work, I get a different job. Unless your parents move (or are rich) you don't get another school. A huge part of a vast portion of society will working alone or in small groups. Not in a room with 20+ other people with the same task.

Comment Re:Ok Cupid.... (Score 1) 161

>The particularly stupid part was messing with their match algorithm.

You are making a false assumption because you are dealing with a biological system.

If you made a screen to sift sand, that screen will reliably sift sand of a certain size because they sand has no choice in the matter and does not evolve.

On the other hand if you make an antibiotic that kills bacteria X you will quickly find out that in just a few generations almost all of bacteria are resistant to the antibiotic.

Culture evolves, religious views change, human relationship standards evolve. 50 years ago it was probably a bad idea to pair a black guy and white woman, not so much so these days (in most places). Saying that a sorting process is going to stand up to that change, when that sorting process itself feeds back in to the system is pretty unrealistic.

Comment Re:what? (Score 2) 161

>lying about compatibility on a dating site.

Here's the gist of it, they already were lying about compatibility, or at least what you think of as compatibility. Different cultures have distinctly different criteria for selecting mates and it evolves over time. There is no golden rule, no algorithm, no magic. They throw a bunch of different shit at the wall and see what sticks. Why they look so good at finding matches is not actually finding matches but weeding the unmatchable out. Take them out, and most other people can date a pretty wide range of other people with just a few points of similarity.

The fact you don't think that their matching changes over time boggles my mind. Culture evolves and changes, technology evolves and changes, communication evolves and changes, to think some kind of static algorithm could possibly work at matching people under those influence is insanity.

Comment Re:A/B Testing (Score 1) 161

>OKCupid flipped bad matches to good matches

To be fair on this point is there any objective measure on what a good or bad match is? The entire system on OKCupid is made and defined by OKCupid, there is no objectivity. Therefore a good match == bad match == imaginary purple dinosaur. There are plenty of writeups online about just this subject. Human happiness in relationships is not as formulaic as OKC would like you to believe.

The FB thing is definitely more objectively definable. As in many bits of information was posted, only bits of information that fell under content X were shown to other users.

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