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Comment More testing Better Medicine (Score 3, Insightful) 46

The medical industry already profits greatly from medical testing. Testing earns the industry lots of money; then, patients with positive results receive follow-up treatments, which nets the industry even more money.

Everyone screens for cancer now. Breast cancer. Colorectal cancer. Prostate cancer. The list goes on. (I'm even a cancer survivor myself.) And yet, to this day, studies question whether more testing results in longer life spans. Generally, it does not. Meanwhile, all the testing and treatments and post-surgery therapies reduces one's quality of life, especially the older one gets.

The cited article says it best: "How could it be that many cancer screenings don’t have an impact on overall lifespan? While screenings prevent some deaths from cancer, they don’t prevent all...At the same time, cancer screenings have associated harms such as false positive results, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment (not to mention the financial cost of all these cascade events). It could be that the benefits of screening that some people receive get washed out by the harms that others experience when looking at screening on a population level."

We are already pricing ourselves out of paradise when it comes to medical care, and full-body MRIs are only going to make it worse.

Comment Correction needed in both directions (Score 1) 43

First,mandatory screen time needs to be limited. If they want text books in ebook form, great, but they'll need a way to restrict school issued pads to school work during the school day.

On the flip side, I have more than once heard a parent complaining that homework is being given that requires a computer to complete where a school doesn't allow chromebooks to be taken home. That's equally absurd. Not every family can afford to give each kid a computer, and sometimes computers break. It's not like parents can just grab an extra one at the corner store like they would a pack of pencils or paper. If school work requires a computer and/or internet connection, the school should provide it. If that includes homework, the students must be allowed to take it home.

If the schools don't like that or can't afford it, they can issue text books and homework that can be completed with pencil and paper (yes, that includes accepting hand written essays).

And as for not letting parents view the assignments, that's ridiculous. Of course the parents have a right to see it. If some company wants to claim that to be proprietary information, I guess the school can't use it at all.

It's crazy to complain about students on their screens too much and then have mandatory screen time. It's equally ridiculous to complain that parents need to be more involved and then shut parents out.

/rant

Comment Re:Linus is right, but this is really not news (Score 1) 73

Before NT, Windows was an absolute mess. I think the only reason most people put up with it was that they didn't know anything better was possible and since Windows was so widespread it was a misery everyone shared.

I think that many of those people were also recent DOS users. Given that DOS systems would often simply freeze up several times per day and require a reboot (easy to do since any bug in the user's application could do this), once they added a protected mode pseudo-kernel to Windows (maybe starting with Windows/386 2.1), it was actually a slight improvement over what they were used to since DOS crashes could sometimes be isolated to one virtual terminal.

Comment Re:Sounds like enshitification (Score 1) 122

Agreed. This is all stuff that at MOST should be accessible over the LAN. The ESP32 is cheap and provides the WiFi and enough power to run a simple RESTful web app. If I actually need/want to access it remotely, it'll be through a well protected integrated web servie on a jump box.

A cheaper manufacturer could probably make the ESP32 do double duty as the primary micro-controller with a suitable interrupt routine.

Comment Re:I assume you are joking, but ... (Score 1) 154

We are only a year out from the murder of a health-insurance executive, so the police are more on edge than usual.

Then we need to threaten such things much more often, so that the cops will eventually get used to it, and relax. ;-)

Debian never tried to kill me through my computer. I'd appreciate it if my car manufacturer made their car as safe as my computer.

Fuck it, I just want a Debian car. Then I won't need to extract bloody vengeance from beyond the grave, as my zombie revenant tracks down the CEO of Subaru, and the rotting flesh of my hands tightens around his throat as payment for the time a popup distracted me.

Comment Re:fuck this guy (Score 1, Insightful) 42

I disagree, I am glad that there are ways to make money with or on the internet, and that there are many useful services available, either paid, or paid for by ads. Sure, there's a lot of slop, nefarious data harvesting, or downright fraud, but with that comes a lot of good as well. Well beyond the things at our disposal back when it was still largely a thing of academia.

Comment There's no consensus definition of E2E encryption (Score 1) 89

Some people are busting out "definitions" of "End to End Encryption" but people were already using that as in informal descriptive term long before your formalized technical jargon was made up. Nobody should be surprised if there are mismatches. Have faith in our faithlessness.

I personally view the term as an attempt to call semi-bullshit on SMTP and IMAP over SSL/TLS. In the "old" (though not very old) days, if you sent a plaintext email (no PGP!), some people would say "oh, it's encrypted anyway, because the connection is encrypted between your workstation and the SMTP server, the connection from there to some SMTP relay is encrypted, the connection from there to the final SMTP server is encrypted, and the recipient's connection to the IMAP server is encrypted."

To which plenty of people, like me, complained "But it's still plaintext at every stop where it's stored along the way! You should use PGP, because then, regardless of the connection security, or lack of security on all the connections, it is encrypted end to end. Never trust the network, baby!"

Keep in mind that even when I say that, this is without any regard for key security! When I say E2E encrypted, it is implied that the key exchange may have been done poorly/incorrectly, mainly because few people really get to be sure they're not being MitMed when they use PGP. You can exchange keys correctly, but it's enough of a PITA that, in the wild, you rarely get to. You usually just look up their key on some keyserver and hope for the best. Ahem. And I say "usually" as if even that happens often. [eyeroll]

Indeed, every time I hear about some new secure messaging app/protocol, the first thing I wonder is "how do they do key exchange?" and I'm generally mistrusting of it, by default. And sometimes, I'm unpleasantly unsurprised, err I mean, cynically confirmed.

But anyway, if my E2E definition matches yours, great! And if it doesn't, well, that's ok and it's why we descend into the dorky details, so that we can be sure we're both talking about the same thing.

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