Kind of ignorant to assume that such information sharing, which is only about 25 years old, is so absolutely vital that anyone who questions it is foolish. I don't recall vast numbers of people dying in ER's across the country pre-internet as opposed to post. It's useful, no doubt, and saves some lives, but if the data can't be handled responsibly, it's reasonable to ask whether the benefit is worth the cost of exposing millions of people to massive breaches of privacy and risk of identity theft. In any event, since you have positioned yourself as knowledgable about emergent care, I can assume that you are fully aware that the quick life-and-death decisions in ER's happen more quickly than would allow for a read-through of someone's medical history. In fact, too much data has been shown to lead to more misdiagnoses in ER's.

So? Pretty much any security measures on anything can be compromised eventually. That doesn't mean they aren't worthwhile. The sort of operation that Snowden pulled off is much harder and rarer than some random group of hackers on the other side of the world taking shots at a system at their leisure.

And people like you refuse to accept that your foreign opinions are irrelevant. We will do what we like, and you will always have to live with it. All you are doing is trying to make yourself feel superior by mouthing off, but sadly for you true superiority is in being able to ignore the rest of the world and live quite well.

True, there are a few "geniuses." I hate to use that term and use it in a bland sense. I came from academics and have myself met more than a few Nobel Prize winners and people with tenure at Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. One of the truest things ever said (by a colleague of mine) was that true greatness comes with a dose of humility. I've met a few of tech's local geniuses, but I've met or at least been in the same room with many, many tech celebrities and so-called "geniuses." I've never once been even mildly impressed by the latter. In fact, I have a very strong aversion to all the billionaire business types and vc's and wannabe CEO's. Invent a language or other technology that makes a bunch of new things possible, I'll be impressed. Found a company that sells for a few billion, don't care.

If you actually believe that the entire political class isn't a power bloc in contrast to the populace, if you actually believe that the democrats are "in power" and calling all the shots, if you actually don't understand the difference between what they say and do in public and what they say and do behind closed doors, you are one of the many benighted fucks who are the actual cause of our problems. An ignorant and easily duped populace is the means to their ends. And it's "i.e." dipshit, for id est, not "Ie." Moreover, it's used to start a subordinate clause, not a sentence. Your 8th-grade level education is expressing itself on a grammatical level too. "Superwiz"? Fuck. You wish.

It's a public policy issue, not a people in white coats issue. So, the public gets to comment, and the burden is on the CDC and the rest of the government to prove that what they are doing is necessary by public standards. The only people who trust the white coats to make consistently smart decisions in the public interest are people who have an ideological investment in believing that they make great decisions far above what we mere mortals can, and those who are profoundly ignorant and follow the government's lead regularly. For everyone else, for everyone with a brain and no ideological investment, questioning is practically an ethical mandate.

That's not even remotely plausible. You can't develop a writing system overnight. The first and only thing surviving the invention of a writing system certainly wouldn't be a large codex. Such a work would also not be produced in a vacuum. Writing systems are developed with a future reading community in mind. They record things for posterity and allow for certain sort of communication that either need to be recorded or which are directed at people who are accustomed to writing. It's not plausible that everyone capable of reading the thing just died off without telling anyone, and the book floated itself into the hands of Westerners. Moreover, if you look at the examples of writing systems developed relatively late in history, they are derived from existing writing systems for other languages. You don't just invent such things from scratch, unless it's a personal system, in which case it's really a cipher. Moreover, if the system weren't derived from that of another language, it would have to be inspired to some degree by native iconography. If either case were true, the thing would have been easy to decipher. If people claim that they have identified Nahuatl, that identification is only possible if the system is derived from earlier Nahuatl iconography, which as noted, would have made the interpretation quite easy long since, or it's some sort of phonemic transcription, which is something they could only have learned from another language community with a writing system in so short a space. In the latter case, the system would certainly have been adapted from that system.

There's also the old adage, which too many people never manage to understand, that just because it doesn't cost the user money, that doesn't mean it's free.

Minor point, but having lived in Mountain View all this time, I missed the part where "it worked well for over five years." It never worked very well, except sometimes in a few spots.

Awesome. I feel better for having read some of these issues so well articulated.

If not being calm means producing articulate and informed comments of substance, in a context where most comments are as brain dead as yours, I think the country needs less calming down. You've also missed the important point, which is often lost on the psychologically stunted, that just getting what's yours, in this case a better job for oneself, doesn't mean society's problems no longer matter. Some people actually have principles and such. Some people aren't completely self-absorbed.