Comment Re:I loathe the medical "profession" (Score 1) 273
Not flamebait.
Not flamebait.
Yup, you've only given us proof that doctors don't give a shit about patients.
There's a cap placed on residency hours per week and hours in a row, now. Yes, it's sometimes broken, but it's a lot better than 20 years ago. And, no, it's not routine practice to fake your timesheets. Or at least where I trained ~15 years ago, and not in the training program I assist overseeing. That being said, in some subspecialty fellowships I wouldn't doubt that it's more common to do this -- But they do this to gain more experience as you may only get a once in a decade experience if you stay on call and extra 2 hours. Who would deprive themselves that?
A doctor who gives a shit about patients would deprive himself of that, because your training time is not more important than the patient.
Penmanship is not taught in medical school. But electronic perscriptions are becoming more commonplace in the last few years (both on the outpatient and inpatient sides). And the last couple decades have brought on more responsibility of the patient to know what they are taking. The outpatient medication errors are the combined fault of the physician, the pharmacist, and the patient.
Your excuse is that penmanship isn't taught in medical school? SERIOUSLY?!? Penmanship is taught in elementary school and if doctors gave a shit about patients, then they'd use the training they got when they were ten years old and write properly.
I wouldn't say that anyone routinely operates on the wrong body part. But mistakes do happen. It's now standard of care to do a "time out" with the patient, nurse, and physician all in the operating room to agree on the patient's name, date of birth, and procedure to be performed before any sedation is administered or incisions are performed. But I once had a patient respond to a different name who expected to have the same procedure performed. Fortunately he was tripped up by the date of birth.
Oh good. The patient fixed your problem for you. That's wonderful. We're paying you out the nose and you come up with a system that somehow blames the patient for mistakes. I am so sick and tired of this, "The patient needs to take responsibility for their care." bullshit. When I take my car to the mechanic, they take responsibility for fixing the damn car. My mother is moderately mentally ill and I'm constantly annoyed by doctors who constantly ask her what her medical history is. She'll make shit up because she's embarrassed that she doesn't know. I've told doctors this, but no one tries to pass along this information to the next doctor. It's somehow *her* fault when the information isn't correct. Get a computer. Take some notes. Do something to help the patient. Remember that's your job.
As for washing hands, that's a culture change. My hospital has random people anonymously assigned to watch people enter and leave patient rooms to make sure we always wash in and out. (The people are people that work on the floors anyway.) A couple verbal warnings and suddenly everyone's compliant. No need for technology.
The OP point is still valid. If medical professionals cared about their patients, then all this big brother nonsense wouldn't be necessary.
And the younger generation of physicians are more humble. But that's also because they tread medicine as more of a job and less of a calling. I guess you can't get everything.
Are you saying that humbler doctors would be a problem? Seriously? Doctors are so fucking full of themselves already that it's hard to tell them anything they don't want to hear. Guess what, to the rest of us, medicine *is* a job. You're a glorified car mechanic. It's funny that I find most car mechanics have better skills at diagnostics than more doctors do. As the patient, it isn't my *job* to fix my body. It's your *job*.
I think that's called software. No robotics needed.
If the IAU can't get off their collective asses and start doing their job properly, then they'll soon find themselves outvoted by the likes of Uwingu who are going to do it for them. The IAU only has the position it has because they did a good job of gaining consensus until recently with the whole Pluto fiasco. And if you don't think that was a fiasco, then you don't know enough about it. If they screw up exoplanet naming, then people are going to start looking to someone else or just ignore the IAU. Nobody wants that, so perhaps the IAU should stop acting like entitled pricks and do their damn job.
http://www.space.com/20665-planet-naming-controversy-iau-uwingu.html
A particular developer's inability to use Qt properly to create native-looking apps on each platform, that's hardly Qt's fault. You can get the native printing icon if that's what you want, but this developer clearly didn't bother to do it properly. Creating cross-platform apps isn't magic. That's what Java wanted to do, but it's just plain impossible. You are going to have to occasionally be aware of the quirks on each platform you're targeting. An occasional #ifdef OSX or whatever is going to be necessary if you want your app to look great. Qt doesn't purport to allow you to write your code on one platform and magically having it look fantastic on all the other platforms. It *does* purport to allow you do that by spending a little time to tweak things. Nothing you mentioned isn't fixable using Qt. But it can't do everything for you because the platforms are different, by definition.
That's fine. Plenty of people are doing it already. So nobody that matters really cares what you think.
Super easy to use for both sides. Easy enough that you can pawn off some of the IT help to other members of the family.
No, those are the actual number of results. 86500 is an estimate that Google comes up with so it doesn't have to figure out the exact number on the first page. If you include the omitted results then you get 73 unique results.
Just because google says *about* 86,500 results, doesn't mean that it's going to *actually* have that. You'd think someone who can search google that well would know this. If you go to the end of the search query, it's 73 results.
Third party candidates are a fantasy. Either fix the system so they have any chance of winning, or just stop spewing this nonsense.
They also know that it's likely the community will help support other distros if they can just get one working.
He's a douche about the whole thing. People think he's insulting because he's a total dick when he talks about religion. There are lots of folks who can critizise religion without being jerks about it. At least for me, it's not Dawkin's ideas that people are offended by, but how he expresses them. More proof Dawkins is a jerk:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/files/2011/07/dawkins_watson1.gif
Sure, if the only goal is to get to Mars, then other plans might make more sense. What we're trying to do here is create a spacefaring society. Mars is part of that, but not the only thing. Zubrin talks a lot about gravity wells, yet he proposes that we go directly from one to another.
From my blog:
http://madsoftware.blogspot.com/2007/06/my-confession.html
I have a confession to make. Forgive me. Wait, don't forgive me. I'm completely unapologetic. I am a programmer, and I don't write comments. I just needed to get that off my chest.
I don't believe in comments.
I have been writing a lot of fairly complex code lately. And all the while, the voices of dead Computer Science professors have been speaking to me. They repeat the mantra of good code commenting. I feel guilt, like when I go to church. Or when I don't make my bed in the morning. Of course, not one of them is able to give me any good suggestion of what a good set of comments is. They just tell me what isn't a good comment. So does that mean that anything else is a good comment? Like lots of swear words in the code. That's probably more useful than real comments, because they make me laugh and keep me from falling asleep at the keyboard.
Good comments, I'm told, are not just a rehash of what is already in the code. Well, if it isn't already in the code, then it isn't much use to the program is it? I don't believe in comments. I think they are mostly a waste of time. Maybe not for you, but for me they just make my life difficult. I have to make a context switch to English in order to write them. That takes time and just serves to confuse me.
Whenever I write English, I take the audience of my writing into account. Who is the audience for my comments? Some moron with a basic C++ book on his desk? Or the great man himself, Bjarne Stroustrup? Bjarne is pretty smart and will probably be able to figure out my code just fine without me, or my comments. Because he speaks C++. I speak C++ too, so that's how I like to communicate with computers and other people who speak the same language.
So I don't write comments. I'm one of those people who likes to use good variable names, good function names, and good file names. When I look at others' comments, I don't usually trust them, because they often don't make any sense. Or they are just plain wrong. That's just awesome. Like the time I first starting programming and I spent two days wondering why the second member of a pair of ints (pair) was always zero, even though the comments said it should contain some valuable piece of information. Actually, it was the first member, not the second one, which I finally figured out by actually looking at the damn code. Wonder of wonders, the code actually told me what the code did. Amazing.
I think that instead of comments we should put quotes of great authors at the top of all our code. That way, when people read our code, they will think that our code is profound, because we quote the greats of our time like, Dostoevsky, Helen Keller, or Dave Barry. And the best thing would be to just randomly pick those quotes so that when people try to make some connection between the code and the quote, they'll spend lots of time trying to figure out. Then they'll feel stupid, but won't want to admit it and we can fun of them when they can't explain the connection. And we won't have had to be smart at all, because all those people that we referred to are smart.
Have I even written comments? Of course, I slap all my comments in the headers, when I don't feel like writing documentation. Or when the function name is getting too long. Or when some fellow programmer makes me feel guilty for not following the religion of comments. What is the point of writing commments if the function name tells the whole story? Take vector for example, the size() function returns, guess what, the size of the vector. I know what you're thinking, that is completely non-intuitive. It's got to be commented. Look, if the function name can't tell you what the function does, then maybe you should change the function name. And if your function name gets too long, then maybe your function is doing too much.
Good, maintainable programs are easy to understand not because they have lots of comments explaining their complex structure, but because they are straightforward, not complex. Complex is a synonym for spaghetti. Code should be more like ravioli. Good ravioli, not that crap they give you in restaurants. Chef Boyardee is delicious. The mental model of a good program is easily understood by normal humans. And if that mental model is nice and straightforward, then the functions that act on it should also be straightforward. A function called get_ the_ thing_ and_ reroute_ the_ other_ thing_ with_ the_ thing_ you_ have_ from_ before() doesn't need to commented, it needs to be thrown out. The class it lives in probably does too. It's doing too much.
I'm religious, but not about programming. In religion, there are things that you believe just because they seem right. Code comments may feel right, but they just don't prove their value outside of giving people a good feeling. I'm going to love my enemy for no good reason, because that sounds like a good idea. But I'm not going to type any more comments until I have a mathematical proof that it's good for me, like ravioli.
Thing is, I *want* a walled garden where I can install apps without fear of destroying my phone. I love having someone else vet the apps for malware. Now, I'm not saying that google is actually doing this, but the more they lock down their app store, the better it is. My problem is with Apple's App Store which gives you no option of going outside the walled garden if I feel like it.
This restaurant was advertising breakfast any time. So I ordered french toast in the renaissance. - Steven Wright, comedian
