I think the "P" stands for "professional".

Ok, by the time you posted this brain fart of a post, the story had been up for ~six hours with a myriad of comments. The original article, many comments, and the summary all point out that this study involved elective surgeries or 'planned surgery'. Did you read anything other than the headline? Did you not understand "planned surgery"?

Weird, maybe you need to find a better group of specialists. I can tell you from first hand experience, at least one of Dick Cheney's cardiologists does surgeries after Wednesday. Now, I'm not saying he's the best cardiologist in the world, but I'd be willing to bet that someone as wealthy and connected as the Evil Dick wasn't being treated by people who could barely sober up enough to get through Hollywood Upstairs Medical College.

Coming from a family with a doctor and multiple nurses, I can say you are spot on. Another factor is that some doctors and nurses, particularly in emergency medicine, prefer the cases that come in at night and on the weekends.

GP had an interesting theory, but given the way it's worded, it's merely a troll rather than an alternative hypothesis.

(Oh, and three shifts for nurses is not as common an arrangement as it used to be. GF has almost exclusively worked 12 hour shifts for ~10 years.)

And yet Ms. Pac Man on the same system displayed nowhere near the same amount of suckitude.

Tennis appears to use purely single elimination, but they track each player's win/loss ratios against different opponents (equivalent to round-robin results) to give them a ranking, then use the ranking to seed the single elimination tournaments to make sure the top seeds do not meet each other early in the tournament.

The trouble with this approach is that it favours the incumbents. Imagine there's this amazing tennis player, who never lost a match... he'd get seeded number one. Two youngsters eventually manage to get better than him, and get to 2 and 3 in the world, no one else is close. Each youngster has a 60% chance to beat the number 1, and a 50/50 chance against each other.

With the current tennis seedings, the youngsters will get put in the same half of the draw and meet in the semi-final every time. The youngsters each have a 50% chance to lose in the semi-final, a 20% chance to lose in the final, and a 30% chance to win in the final. The number 1 has a 50% chance to lose in the final, and a 50% chance to win. Therefore the number 1 player maintains his number 1 ranking despite being worse than both the youngsters.

The example here is simplistic, but I believe it demonstrates the overall problem of seeding.

I haven't got a decent solution yet, though ;)

I have never used a single AMD system and see no reason to believe that they will ever make anything that would change my mind.

So... you'd continue to buy Intel even if someone else made a better processor? A few years back, AMD did have better processors... better in both performance/price and performance/watt. I had one, and it was a great PC which I ran for 7 years or so... now I'm back with Intel. I really don't understand blind brand loyalty.

I don't really begrudge any slack jawed gamers their massive nuclear power plant busting AMD systems with the absurd overkill of space heater SLI graphics; it's just not anything that has the slightest relevance to anything I could ever care about.

High end gaming systems are almost invariably Intel based at the moment, because they are the quickest processors on the market at the moment. Low / mid gaming systems are more often AMD, because they offer as good or better performance / price. Lower end gaming systems are unlikely to run SLI configurations.

The slack jaw gamers you're spouting drivel about (all the time claiming you don't care about) don't exist.... if they do, they run Intel.

That would be the opinion of the poster. Opinion is pretty well protected by the first amendment. Further, they are neither true nor false. (TBH, it might be part of a falsifiable statement, but the way you have presented it, I rather doubt that is the case.)

But does he know Jimmy, Sally or Suzy from Canada?

Speaking as a government contractor, I can assure you there's at least one more way to get paid for not doing something.

Assuming soil is half as dense than water (it was while driving, so I couldn't look it up), you get 3 tons of soil.

Why would you assume that? Here's a hint - if it sinks, it is denser than water, and if it floats, it's lighter than water.

I'd personally guess that soil's about twice a dense as water, which actually gives you 12 tonnes.

No... really, it is. When asked how tall I am, I can say, "i'm six two". Just that, 3 words.

Heh... with metric my height is 2. Incidently, it makes my BMI easy to work out, especially when I used to weigh 100kg.... 100/2^2.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that people that believe either ID or associated beliefs must be stupid.

I don't. I never have. I'm a flirting Christian in that I love some of the tenets of the religion (I don't believe in god yet... that is a small drawback). It's just nothing to do with the scientific method. ID ascribes something to something that by definition cannot be proven or disproven, A book I love to illustrate my views is A J Ayers' "Language, Truth and Logic".

Android is a platform built for the pleasure of the technical elite, with a promise to non-technical users of being their gateway into the new world of mobile computing. But that is a lie; it's simply a PC you can put in your pocket that brings along for the ride every ill ever conceived of on a PC and more besides.

This is modded interesting, here?

Android is in what way a platform for the technical elite? It is outselling Apple's offerings 4:1. It is easy for people to install what they like on it... that's the attraction, not a disadvantage.

Android has both a large user base of generally satisfied customers and more freedom for those customers. Apple has a tiny market share by comparison, and locks customers into its own software. Claiming that android is for the technical elite is like claiming donuts are for the culinary elite.