Re: Pfffft.
So instead, I should annoy people by saying I could care less.
Nnnnnnnng... must resist... HmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmaaaaaaarGH...
No, I will be strong, I won't fall for the bait...
4260 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010
@Teiwaz
And no one had their finger in their ear, the universal gesture to warn listeners a folk song was about to be committed...
I thought the normal warning was the long drawn out "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas" in a whiny voice...
Or a similarly long chord played on either the fiddle or accordion - or is that warning of a Morrissment...
:)
In Ireland, the use of "feck" seems to have become so commonplace that is no longer considered to be a corruption of fuck, and is considered quite a mild expletive and is often used freely in conversation.
I'll just leave this here for those who haven't seen it:
For each given disease, there are signs, symptoms, and other markers helping you to make the diagnoses.
Yes, this is true to a certain extent, but even then there can be marked differences between patients.
Although accepted knowledge is that a patient who has a heart attack will present with chest pain, be pale and sweaty, and have heart arrhythmias or visible changes on an ecg, there are many documented cases where this is not the case, and the patient may be unaware that they have had a heart attack at all.
In similar fashion, a patient suffering with sepsis may easily be misdiagnosed as having flu, or some other illness, if they do not present with the classic symptoms.
The classic signs and symptoms have to be a starting point, obviously, but it is dangerous to rely too heavily, or focus too narrowly on what is expected, both in diagnosis and treatment of illnesses.
With regard to accidents, then they are definitely random occurrences, and trying to predict future instances from past data is foolish.
The training data was fed into the neural network, so that it could spot patterns and make recommendations for new patients based on their records.
The problem with this approach is that human illnesses, accidents etc may not have consistent patterns, they can be completely random. Two patients with the same gross symptoms and history may have completely different outcomes. That's why strict protocol based medicine (the patient has this, so we will do that) has proven to be ineffectual compared to more traditional methods.
Whilst not quite the same, I have first-hand experience of this misguided attempt to predict future outcomes based on historical data. In the mid-nineties I was working as a paramedic with a UK ambulance service.
A local university research team came up with the idea that they could improve ambulance response times by predicting where emergency calls would occur, based on supposed patterns in historical data of previous years. The idea was that ambulances would be sent to loiter in the predicted area, so that they would be closer when a call came in.
Instead of trialling this with any simulation, the ambulance service decided to do it live, so they started using the software to position the ambulances around the county.
It soon became apparent that except for a few isolated occasions where it guessed correctly, the overall impact was that the ambulances were nearly always in the wrong place, and that response times were worsening, not improving.
The trial was abandoned early, despite the university's insistence that their idea would work if it was given more time.
If you take a step back you would realise that the idea that previous years' data of emergency calls would have any bearing on future occurrences is unlikely at best, but the university research group were convinced that it was a reasonable assumption.
In the same way, trying to predict how a patient will react to treatment, based on patterns of historical data of previous patients, is a flawed idea.
Anyone else used speech and search before Google was famous? Like Dragon and Altavista?
I used Microsoft Speech API (v4) to speech enable some software for blind users, back in the late 1990s / early noughties, using both text-to-speech and speech recognition, written in Delphi. I think I used Dragon's voice files for that at one stage but then swapped to Lernout & Hauspie British voices.
@TRT
Am I the only one here who understands the definition of TRESPASS in this context to be "entering another person's land or property without permission"?
No you aren't. I understand perfectly, unlike the dimwits above.
You cannot trespass with permission, because if you have permission it is no longer trespass. It's quite clear.
solutions should confirm only that a person is aged 18 or over, rather than confirming their identity.
Right.
So, as already mentioned, that pretty much only leaves the "Are You 18 or over" checkbox as the solution of choice...
Anything else like Credit Card validation, AdultPass etc would require proof of identity as well.
You just need to listen to how it is pronounced, Alistair, Alastair etc.
Except that almost universally, people pronounce my name as my username is spelled, and I'm sure Mr Dabbs gets the same, too. Even if I carefully emphasise the second "A":
Hi, I'm Alastair, pleased to meet you.
Hi Alister.
AAAAAARRRRRRGH!
I was christened Alastair, but quickly gave up on the idea that anybody - even immediate family - would ever spell it correctly. Birthday cards over the years have been written to any number of variants, so I can probably claim at least 20 pseudonyms.
I have never frequented Starbucks, but were I ever to attempt transactions with one of their baristas, I think I would just accept defeat and go for Fred. Let's see them mess that up!
Oh and did one of your cups say Avast - that's some serious mangling of Alistair!
Are they really expecting the driver to get out and use a box on a cable like many cranes have? Or maybe to yell instructions at the tow vehicle?
No, they expect you not to tow trailers or caravans, be a pedestrian, or a horse rider or a cyclist. For truly autonomous cars to work, they must be the only item allowed on the roads, and will only take you from clearly defined point "A" to clearly defined point "B".
It appears that with all these "innovations" what is considered normal behaviour now will be curtailed to meet the limitations of the new technology.
To me, this seems the wrong way to go about things, the new technology should be designed to work within the constraints of current behaviour, but that's not how it seems to be at the moment.
There's something very inspirational about a spacecraft that flies into space and lands back on the ground.
That's why, whatever your thoughts on Mr Musk, the SpaceX booster landings tick all the boxes - it's how spacecraft should be, as we've seen for over half a century of Sci-Fi movies.
And rightly so!
I'm no supporter of the Conservatives, but I'm pretty sure they didn't go to the developer:
"Oh, and please make sure our app includes loads of bugs, and is more full of security holes than Adobe Flash"
It's fun to blame the party, but it's the company who sold them the app whose fault it is.
Given that all higher forms of life uses electrical signals to control muscles, communicate pain, and do the whole "thinking" thing, it shouldn't really come as a surprise that bacteria have the ability to swap electrons.
The evolution of life from single-celled beings to multi-cellular organisms must have started from such basic building blocks, and the ability to pass electrical signals between cells is essential for that process, whether you are a bacteria or a eukaryote.
For much of human history, there was not even the concept of a 'civilian'.
And yet, for a certain period, it was only professional soldiers who fought.
I remember reading an account somewhere of one of the classical Greek wars of Alexander's time, where the combating soldiers were fighting, in a city, dodging round the incumbent citizens who were trying to carry on with their normal lives.
Even in First World War France, if you came back thirty miles or so from the trenches, civilian life pretty much carried on as normal.