ackfoo

IIRC, the guy who gave him a ride to the start of the trail tried to give him a map that would have showed the cable not far from where he tried to ford on his way back, but was prevented by high water.

McCandless had some idiotic notion that the map would degrade the purity of his experience of nature, or something like that, so he refused.

How ridiculous that someone who was a fan of the book would die trying to ford the same river at the same place that stopped McCandless. Did they not read that part of the book where Krakauer decribed the cable, or did they just not remember it?

If you look down the list of deliveries included in the article, you will see that at least one of the other doctors has an unusually low rate of weekend deliveries, but that they peak significantly on Thursday and Friday.

This is likely because many OB-Gyns induce labour for the opposite reason to that which is alleged of Shuen: so their weekend golf game doesn't get screwed up by a delivery.

In truth, there is little difference between inducing labour for financial versus personal reasons. No doctor ever said to a patient, "I have a tee-off time at 9:30 Sunday so we have to get this baby out now."

This means that the issue of consent is identical in both cases. Consent means "informed consent". It doesn't matter if you're trying to get the extra billing for a weekend delivery or if you are trying keep the weekend call schedule quiet; it doesn't matter if you pop a misoprostol in during a vag exam or go through the formal induction process with the hospital. If the patient doesn't know the REAL reason, it's still a crime because of the absence of INFORMED consent.

This has been happening as long as there have been OB-Gyns. Babies come when they want, and doctors have always tried to manipulate that for their own preference.

Shuen's crucifixion is therefore more the result of his motivation than the fact of his behaviour. He was apparently doing for money what almost every OB-Gyn does for reasons that we consider more noble, or at least understandable, but which are actually no different because they prioritize something other than the health of the baby and the mother.

Even if doctors were truly altruistic, reality would still require inductions for the banal reason of hospital staff scheduling or resource availability. We are fools if we think this is any different from what Shuen did.

Any system motivated and rewarded by money will always suffer from these sorts of imperfections, as will any system that is not motivated by money.

It is the height of naivete to think otherwise. Shuen just flew a little closer to the sun than everyone else.

Also, the article neglects the obvious problem with chain of custody. Once you throw an exam glove in the garbage, it's gone. If Shuen ever got his day in an actual court, his lawyer would tear that evidence apart to the point where it would have to be disregarded by a judge or jury. It's not fair to trot it out now in this hatchet piece as if it is the smoking gun.

Keep in mind that the nurses justifiably hated Shuen because he (admittedly) behaved like a complete asshole to them. Nurses are really good at finding clever ways to take you out under those circumstances. You have to interpret that piece of evidence in light of the unbridled hostility of those who collected it.

I applaud your motivation, and I agree with your suggestion, but that's not where most cancer comes from. Most cancer arises out of a random failure of the mechanisms underlying apoptosis.

Random mutation rates are linked to rates of cell division. There is an error every x number of times a cell divides. The faster cells divide (say, because of inflammation caused by cigarette smoke), the greater the risk of a random mutation that will disable the normal mechanisms of cell death.

Environmental mutagens and carcinogens play a part by damaging DNA or increasing cell division rates (asbestos, for example, which destroys immune cells come to engulf the invader, leading to a cycle of cell damage) but they are only a tiny part of the picture.

Cancer is caused by math, in a very real sense. Mutation rates * cell division rates = risk of cancer. You can absolutely get cancer without any adverse environmental exposure, which is why some children get cancer very early on--genetic factors increase risk.

The universe is chaotic. There is often no reason for what happens to an individual. It's just random chance. Man's search for meaning is often futile.

The real issue here goes far beyond freedom of speech; the real issue is about the nature of knowledge.

Human nutrition is not a science for the simple reason that it is not possible to subject it to the scientific method. It is unethical and impractical to divide humans up randomly and feed them different diets to observe the outcome. The NAZIs tried stuff like this, but we have tended to discount their results because the data was obtained under deplorable circumstances.

The result is that we don't really know definitively what should compose the human diet. State governments and academic institutions cover up this fact with an avalanche of highly-suspect papers and degrees and training and certification.

Unfortunately, most of the research and regulation of human nutrition is subject to interference by economic lobby groups like the dairy industry and the wheat producers.

Influence and bias tend to inform the licensing process for nutritionists. Science has little to do with it.

Even worse, the state licences a lot of so-called health professionals whose disciplines have even less to do with science than nutritionists: chiropractors, naturopaths, and homeopaths.

Just because we dress something up with training and a license does not mean that it is valid.

Anyone who wishes to challenge these unfounded and biased, but deeply ingrained, systems will have a hard time.

In a just world, only disciplines with a sound scientific basis would be regulated by the state because it is impossible for the state to know whether a licensed, but unscientific, nutritionist is creating more or less harm than this unlicensed, but probably well-meaning, woman.

People are, on average, incredibly stupid. Some of those who aren't will inevitably take advantage of this for money and power.

When stupid people use http and see a warning, they don't think, "huh, I have no login here, provide no personal information, and the information I am receiving is not in any way critical--if it is spoofed by a bad actor, it doesn't matter" and bypass the warning. Instead, their little primitive brains do the fight-or-flight herd behaviour and click "get me out of here".

This puts the CA in the potential position of extorting money from those who must, of necessity, cater to stupid people. It also gives the CA complete control over who gets to publish their information. Forcing the need for a CA is simply totalitarianism.

The only way a CA can exist in a world where https is functionally mandatory is if legislation forces the CA to be free as in beer, fully transparent, and prohibited from arbitrary action by an appeal system that is fast, efficient, and also free as in beer.

Otherwise, we have lost everything that was good about the Web. End of story.

No, it's not, which is largely the fault of moron doctors and the government who are idiotically conducting a campaign against vaporization.

The primary health risk of cigarette smoking comes from the products of incomplete hydrocarbon combustion. These cause inflammation (leading to chronic lung disease) and many are carcinogenic.

An intelligent realist understands that most people are ignorant and prone to addictive behaviors, and will intervene where possible to substitute a lower-risk behaviour for a higher-risk one.

Instead, stupid doctors have refocussed their (otherwise appropriate) campaign against smoking on vaporization, and the government has moronically banned it in all the same places as smoking.

This stupidity has spilled over into marijuana legalization, causing vaporization liquids to remain illegal and denying users access to a relatively safe, measured, convenient dosage format with a long shelf life.

Patients taking marijuana for medical reasons are thereby screwed.

I despise stupid people making decisions in large groups. What a clusterfuck.

The problem with Airbnb is that it transfers the cost of the increased traffic to the other residents. Some party asshat barfs in the lobby sofa and everyone in the building has to pay for that.

I applaud their chutzpah, but if I find them operating in my building, they will get tossed out with all the civil penalties we can muster.

Eyeballs! We want your eyebaaaals!

Not a drug. Not a hormone. Ginned up controversy written by someone with only a rudimentary understanding of biology and a deadline.

Headlines today: "Shapely Blonde With Piercing Blue Eyes May Have Discovered Cure For Cancer Or Something".

It's the idiocracy. Give up.

I don't understand what is wrong with the folks over at Mozilla. Are they stupid, or are they taking bribes?

How about an option for, "No, I don't want notifications from any website, ever!"

How about an option for, "Don't auto-play video, including silent video, ever. Not audio either. Never. Just don't."

How about an option for "I know what cookies are. Never, ever warn me about them again. Ever."

I don't know if the devs are just young and inexperienced, or if they are truly brain-damaged, or if they are corrupt and some advertiser said, "Here's a million dollars to leave those notification prompts in, heh, heh, heh".

At this point it's like smoking in movies. There has to be some cigarette maven with a pallet of cash going into the production office on the back lot somewhere, because otherwise why does every young director show all the 'cool' people puffing away on something that's going to waterboard you with COPD for the last 40 years of your life?

Mozilla, we don't want any of that shit. Fuck that shit.

How about changing the bill so that men have to wear exactly the same thing that they force their women to wear? Or else no one gets to wear any religious symbols.

Because I think, subconsciously, that what makes me bananas about religious symbols is not the symbols themselves, but the gender-inequality with which they are applied.

Muslim coverings are a very thinly-disguised misogyny. Same with kippahs and the stuff they force nuns to wear.

I support very strongly people's right to wear a symbol of any ridiculous, half-assed, imaginary bullshit that some shithead told them about and they believed on zero evidence.

But when it is a symbol of unequal treatment of women, of subjugation, of silent misery, it makes me angry to see it because it is not consistent with the equal rights that I associate with our country.

That, if only subconsciously, is where this is probably coming from.

"harlet, wrench, slut"

LOL. Also, keep your nuts covered or you're screwed.

Hatchet. Job.

An article written by a non-pilot about an article by a GA pilot with no experience as an ATP.

The elephant in the room is not the type-rating issue so much as the speculative cause of the crashes: if your aircraft is out-of-trim and control pressure cannot restore it, you have a runaway trim condition and you need to disable the electric trim system immediately.

If, in these cases, it turns out that the AOA sensor was faulty, that is only one of many possible causes for a runaway trim condition.

The core problem is not the specific cause, but the failure of pilots to respond appropriately to a common and easily-remedied situation.

The killer app for The Boring Company is to extend existing underground pedestrian systems in cities with bad winters.

Oh what I would not pay to have a network of pedestrian side-tunnels to get me the 0.5 miles to the subway on a -20 day with winds of 40mph.

If Boring Co. successfully pitched city officials to spend my tax dollars on underground walkways to get me to the subway without freezing my face off in January, I'd carry them through the streets on my shoulders (in summer) and build a shrine to Elon at city hall.

I had no idea they were into moving livestock.

That's not really accurate. Boeing is under continuous attack by hatchet jobs like this that insinuate they cut corners and are solely responsible for these accidents.

First, we don't have final reports from the investigators yet, so it's awfully early to point the finger.

Second, every major aviation accident is multi-factorial. It's never just one failure that causes it.

If it does turn out to be the faulty AOA indicator causing the electric trim to go nose-down, there are still a number of other obvious contributing factors in addition to the faulty sensor.

The public is demanding low airfare prices because they are getting squeezed by the increasing disparity of wealth worldwide. Wages are not rising as fast as prices, and as the cost of doing business with China slowly rises due to the trade war, prices start to creep up and the squeeze increases.

Airlines respond by flying pilots with lower time and lesser training, paying them less, and working them harder.

Pilots spend less time in the simulator working on abnormal conditions, and while they are undoubtedly great at monitoring normal flights and navigating controlled airspace, they have less experience hand-flying approaches and dealing with rare equipment failures and emergencies.

Every pilot should have adequate simulator time to be competent with every emergency procedure for which there is a checklist, but that is not the reality. The three seconds allotted by the FAA to diagnose critical systems failures is simply not enough if you can't find and execute the correct checklist in that time period.

In the old days, every single pilot from a Cessna 152 on up knew exactly what a badly trimmed airplane felt like and how to fix it instantly. When you felt that extra force on the controls, you would instinctively rotate the trim wheel in the direction of the force that you were needing to apply.

Same for electric trim systems: if the force doesn't ease the way it should, you have a runaway and you need to interrupt power to the electric trim system.

But that is hand-flying, stick-and-rudder-type stuff. If you're not getting the hand-flying time and the simulated failure time, you just don't develop that instinct.

It's not entirely Boeing's fault that an aircrew can't recognize and counter a runaway electric trim, no matter what the details in the flight manual. It's only reasonable to assume that basic level of competency.

Why does it only block videos with sound?

I would like one prominent check box in the settings that says, "Never, ever auto-play videos. Ever."

I cannot imagine thinking, "You know what this site needs? A video that starts playing by itself!"

There's an oversupply of stupid people. It is causing problems all over.

I got my Galaxy S4 from the reuse/recycle program that I started in my building. Works great. Free.

That link provides no actual information. It's like a superhero film: junk food for the mind.

Here's the actual article at Check Point, not linked from the garbage article: https://research.checkpoint.com/simbad-a-rogue-adware-campai...

Turns out the malware is delivered in the RXDrioder SDK, which developers incorporated to get ad revenue, I guess.

Check Point claims that the app developers appear to have been hoodwinked into incorporating the SDK because they are independent of the SDK developer. Which may mean that these DL numbers are not as inflated as people think.

Fuck. If that's true, our app market really is driven by 12-year-old boys. Which is why my serious technical apps with years of development behind them are selling like 3 copies. And why Apple thinks innovation equals new emojis.

Ensure correct coin cell polarity before inserting it. Papyr does not have reverse polarity protection, and will get damaged if battery is inserted reversed.

Seriously? They couldn't manage to add one diode?

Agreed. I just got rid of my iPad Pro 12.9 because I could not do anything with it. No browser with WebDAV and decent content blocking. No development tools. No serious network tools (IOS won’t let you have access to a MAC address).

For the price, I should not have to run to my laptop every time I want to do something serious.

You need to not work more. The bug numbers out of Luquillo are terrifying: 98% gone in the forest floor, 80% gone in the canopy. These are supported by numbers elsewhere.

Productivity is a self-destructive idea. Forget climate change; if the bug numbers are correct, we're going to lose the pollinators within a few years, and all your money won't another minute buy.

We all need to do the absolute minimum necessary to survive and stop reproducing until our numbers and lifestyle return to a sustainable level. This is now a dire and desperate matter of survival of our species.

I have signed up for this one. I do not believe it is frivolous as Macrumors asserts. This is a big problem for me as an Apple Developer. I enabled two-factor by accident during one of my frequent reinstalls and I did not get around to trying to turn it off until 3 weeks later—one week too late.

I maintain a large number of older IOS devices for testing my apps. They do not cache the trust information, so they require two-factor at every login. I also reinstall MacOS frequently so I can convert legacy code out of old versions of Xcode, requiring various old versions of MacOS. Two-factor is kicking my butt every day.

I talked to Apple support, but they told me to get stuffed. You would think they would treat their developers a bit better.

I recently bought a new Samsung tablet.

If the article is correct, then humans suffer from a common profound, disabling and dangerous mental illness. The correct approach is not pandering to this illness but attempting to cure it.

We shall destroy our planet in a very few years if we continue to tear out its heart for fashion. We must instead build for quality, function, and to last.

If your motivation in buying a $1000+ phone is to create envy, you are not fit to live here. Can we change this through mass marketing? Do we need new laws to make this happen? Should we jail or perhaps sterilize those with this trait? How extreme are the measures we need to take when our survival as a species is at stake?

It is pointless to debate the relatively weak data behind climate change when we have strong evidence of a mass extinction event that will likely end our species within a few decades. This may be the last moment that change is possible.

Why do people listen to Bill Gates? He had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time and he cut a deal that has become the sine qua non of bad deals (for IBM).

Then he went on to produce the worst OS in history, held together by gum and bits of string. It was only successful initially because there was no other viable choice. Its later success was fuelled by inertia and predatory trade practices.

Windows created enormous suffering for an unprecedentedly large number of people because of poor design choices. Anyone trying to use a computer had to spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to fix that computer.

All of which resulted in a guy with billions but no particular insight into reality. If you want Bill Gates-level ideas, ask any other old family member around the table at Thanksgiving.

Getting lucky in business and having a lot of money doesn’t qualify you to run the world, and it doesn’t confer insight or wisdom.

What an idiotic discussion. Energy-efficient buildings can reduce our power demands by 85%. Then we can talk about which nuclear power plants to shut down, instead of arguing about whether we should build more.

The free market prioritizes cheap buildings and profit. One law that requires energy-efficiency for all new structures ends the argument.

No offence, but participating in the nuclear argument makes you a moron.

A pile of crap written by a marketing goon. Here’s my list:

1. Get rid of the marketing goons. All they will tell you is how to follow the crowd. Making your own path will be harder and slower to success, but eventually more valuable and rewarding.

2. Get out there and live. Dive into an area of expertise. Only once you have achieved genuine proficiency and a depth of specialized knowledge will you understand that part of the universe well enough to think of a truly great innovation.

3. Forget money. Make something that is great and useful to you. Eventually, the money will come. If it doesn’t, it means you weren’t lucky enough, and that’s life. You still made something great, and that’s better than wasting your life chasing money and fame by doing something stupid.

4. Start with the small problems and work your way up. Theranos failed because they tackled a huge problem (low volume blood analysis) before solving all the small problems along the way.

5. Try to do something useful. If you prioritize making money over making something worthwhile, you are just going to accelerate our destruction. Remember, a study recently showed 98% of bugs in a rain forest had gone. If that doesn’t sound like the end of days to you, you need to wake up. A dying planet doesn’t need another way to trade fucking derivatives. If you’re going to destroy the planet to do it, it better be worth it.

6. Remember the big ideas. Curing disease, reversing aging, understanding protein folding, and figuring out what the unknown 95% of the universe is made of. If you spend you life on these problems, it won’t be wasted, even if you are not particularly successful. And you don’t have to chase a big idea to notice clues along the way, or to make the tools that others can use to get further along a meaningful path.

I often hear people proudly say, “I’m not technical...” but this is an anachronism. We live in a technical world now. If you’re not technical, you’re a dinosaur and you might as well die off. There’s no point pandering to dinosaurs.

The way you wrote your product page and app description is fascinating not because it was so oblique as to be completely meaningless, but because you appear to have been so thoroughly unaware of that fact.

This is an extremely common problem with technical documentation. We find pages and pages of description of frameworks and libraries created without simply answering the fundamental question, “What does this do?” And those pages could be easily replaced with one brief annotated example.

Technical people are often unaware that they have created a desert of meaning and substance.

Highly doubtful that I would ever buy any software sold on a monthly subscription basis. The best parts of my life have been a result of avoiding being tied to monthly fees. Without them, you are free to travel and move about at will.

Monthly fees are a ball and chain thought up by corporations to create modern slaves. Psychological and, to some extent, physical captivity.

"Today engineers will succeed in restoring water and power to your area, leaving you with hours of hard sledgehammer work to get it back the way you like it." --The Onion

The data underlying this study were taken most recently in January 2013. I wonder why it took almost six years to publish the results? Given the catastrophic nature of the findings, six years seems a long time to wait before publication.

It's hard to replicate this kind of data six or seven years out. If someone repeats the survey this year and gets different numbers, it can be discounted as an anomaly. It would have been better if the study could have been repeated right away: in the same year, or in the following year.

Also, the authors are overwhelmingly biased in favour of climate change as the cause. This is mainly a bug count. How hard is it to count the bugs and present the data and the analysis, leaving speculation about the cause to the discussion? I have to be very suspicious of a study that starts off implicating climate change instead of following the evidence. Especially when the conclusion is "we need more money to study this".

It does not make much sense to try so hard to fit climate change to the curve of this data. If it turns out that something else is operative, such as pesticide use, or the unusual solar minimum, or the unexpectedly rapidly diminishing magnetic field, then we have missed an early indication of something huge.

There is overwhelming evidence that humans are screwing up this planet, but no matter how politically correct and funding-expedient it may be to nail everything with the climate change hammer, it's not really how science is supposed to work.

It's hard to lay an insect apocalypse at the door of a 2C change in temperature. Measuring the temperature of a whole planet is hard. Pons & Fleischmann had trouble measuring the temperature change in a beaker and look at the stupidity that occasioned.

Lister & Garcia mostly rely upon increased variability in the weather to make the connection, but the fundamental mechanism is never explored. It's pretty hard to swallow that all the insects in a tropical rain forest died because they were a little too warm a few days out of the year.

Climate change has become a religion, and, like a religion, it makes a lot of money for its practitioners.

If 98% of the bugs in Luquillo are dead, then we are likely in dire trouble. If true, this finding is way too important to screw up with curve-fitting.