Maybe I should make this simpler for the hard of thinking.

Smoking impacts your chances of getting lung cancer. It is not a 100% guarantee, but it's pretty damn high. It is called an impact by anyone with anything close to an intellect that actually functions.

Having a vaccine impacts your chances of getting a disease. It's not a magic forcefield. It increases the payload needed to overwhelm the initial immune response, and it increases the severity of the infection needed to be anything more than a brief annoyance, but it isn't Harry Potter. And some would probably whinge about magic fields if it were. In many cases, the impact is a 90-95% level of protection, but we call it an impact.

God, the level of brain-dead morons here is so depressing.

If X alters Y, then yes X impacts Y. That's, like, basic terminology.

I do not specify magnitudes anywhere. If you saw them, please see your local pdoc as you're hallucinating.

Do you have problems with English?

Physics has used indirect testing for many years, and I don't think anyone expected string theory to be any different.

There are research papers that detail specific properties that must be present in any string theory-based model of gravity, for example. If we find, in our efforts to study quantum gravity, that those properties can't hold, then string theory cannot be correct. Not just a specific string theory, ANY string theory at all.

Any string theory that requires a supersymmetry that is reachable by the LHC once it gets updated will be falsified within a very short space of time. If we persist in not seeing supersymmetry after this further round of updates (and we've already had several to improve luminosity), then none of the string theories involved can be correct. They have to be false.

None of these allowing string theory would prove string theory "true", but if any are false then string theory cannot be true. If ALL of them permit string theory, then whether or not string theory describes anything real, the maths that has been done must nonetheless describe real things.

You are correct, AI (which is basically a neural network, and thus really just a glorified classifier) is superbly good at classification and if you want to classify what a condition is and how it connects to other conditions, then classifiers are by far the fastest and most reliable way to do this. You've said as much yourself, and I absolutely agree with you on every detail of what you've said about AI.

A lot of my private research into AI is to push it to the absolute limits and see where it fails. It fails in some fascinating ways, too. So, yeah, I also agree with your conclusion. It is really good in some areas and completely bad/potentially damaging in others. My personal efforts are centred around trying to parameterise exactly where that line is, but ultimately I think we're both absolutely agreed there is a line and we need to know where it is.

Providers have fatigue because they're overworked - in terms of caseload, in terms of cognitive effort per case that's needed, and in terms of how long their shifts end up being. You're right that AI could have reduced the caseload and cognitive effort, but you're right in what you say about the medical services needing more staff and shorter hours per staff member, and that it's an entirely legal failure cascade.

It's not clear to me how to fix the law (analysis suggests politician skulls are made of some sort of dwarf star alloy that seems to occupy most of the head region). I've generaly filed politics under Social Quantum Mechanics (you can either see the solution or create policy, but never both at the same time).

Please, do "educamate" me. It's the best you're gonna do, given that I probaly understand medicine, biology, and indeed statistics to a far higher level to some snotty-nosed brat whose UID runs into 7 digits.

What you eat and drink, what you do, how you stand, how much you exercise, who you hang out with - you're seriously telling me these don't have an impact on health? Whew, you've got a LOT of learning to do. I didn't know anyone was still that naive, post the 18th century.

Your physical and mental health, past around 50, is directly dependent on how you treated your body up to that point. Anyone who says otherwise is either an AI or a nematode cos there's no way anyone with more than 6 functional neurons can imagine otherwise.

Old age is only bad because you were moronic through childhood and adulthood, resulting in a body that couldn't handle old age.

Sorry, I have no sympathy for your self-inflicted issues.

Because any medical system worthy of the name treats everyone to the highest standard they can.

Of course, that raises some serious questions about whether the system the US has is worthy of being called "medical"

Steve Jobs had too much ego to consider anything outside of the stuff he did (hence the panic over the web) but Apple learning from BeOS (and possibly Plan9 as well) would probably not have hurt.

And the climate has the deciding vote, yes. No nation has immunity from the consequences. Britain has just gone through a heatwave hotter than the most severe summer on record. In May. This matters - a lot - because most of our water comes from snowpacks formed during the winter. We are in for a really bad summer and it is likely we'll suffer significant deaths from both running out of water and - after summer breaks - the inevitable catastrophic floods that will follow.

I doubt anywhere in Europe will fare better.

Russia has expended all its resources (and those of several other nations) on an incredibly stupid war and therefore has nothing to put in place to handle any climate emergency they might suffer. Of course, it's also possible that one of the reactors in Ukraine will explode. If the prevailing winds are blowing into Russia at the time, that could be really inconvenient.

It's hard to tell if the global stupidity is priceless or worthless. Depends on how many can survive it.

Then why didn't they work collectively to put someone on the ballot they could vote for? I mean, let's face it - the two top parties manage around 50% of the vote in each election out of 60% of the people. So they only really have support from 30% of the nation each. Your alternative has the potential to win 40% of the people, pushing both the alternatives so far out of the picture that both parties will be forced to choose between oblivion or reality.

But you don't.

Why?

It's not about money, the 40% who aren't voting aren't voting less because of how much each side spends. All you need is to be known. And lots of people manage that daily.

So what is it about? It's about the fact that what you're saying is nothing but excuses and you know it.There isn't an option that 40% of the nation will like, because 100% of the nation is determined to hate anyone different to them.

I guess you didn't read very carefully. They found a marker that appears 5 years before a diagnosis and also part of the mechanism of smoking and other things causing lung cancer AND potentially how to interrupt it. That's a good bit more than simply finding a well known correlation.

They are big. The breasts on that character are large C-cups or small D-cups. They just aren't comically unrealistically big.

I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

If you are using signed and end-to-end encrypted emails, let me tell you:

You're merely using email as a transport mechanism, where ANY OTHER SUCH MECHANISM would suffice and be just as secure.

Including things like Jabber, etc.

Email is utterly monopolised because if you want to send/receive email to the major players... you MUST abide by whatever ridiculous restrictions they put on things (e.g. 10 DNS lookups for SPF, blacklists, domain verification, spam categorisation, etc.) regardless. Even if you're only using it as a communications medium for encrypted, signed comms, you still have to comply.

Email as a protocol needs to die. The stuff we do by email can be done PROPERLY AND BETTER by just basing the same top layers on something else that actually works and does the end-to-end encryption, domain verification, signing, authnetication etc. for you anway).

Bolting shit onto email to make it "work" is no different to how bolting shit onto FTP to make it "secure" was. You still have to deal with NAT traversal, packet-rewriting, etc. and all kinds of other nonsense that come FROM that use of a terrible, inefficient, outdated protocol as the base of your communications.

Email just needs to die.

That's all there is too it.

It was designed for a different era, and makes many, many terrible assumptions, and throws most of them out of the window in the worst possible way at the worst possible time.

Plus, it's built on "honesty", and everything security, or authentication, or even just claiming who you actually are as an email sender are all bolt-ons that don't work to their full extent.

Even with DNSSEC+SPF+TLS+DKIM+greylisting+limiting.... there's still no way to reliably know who can see your email, and that it's secured end-to-end and that people are who they APPEAR to be, and no way to reliably discard email that you don't want to receive or people have no place sending in the first place.

We need to just bin the whole thing. POP3, IMAP, SMTP, the lot.