Re: Timing is off..
I LIKE when people emphasize words with caps.
791 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Aug 2019
"have probably prevented a killer pandemic"
I think it's probably too late to say it has been prevented. The question now is more along the lines of: How bad will it be and how well can we manage it, with the limited number of doctors and hospital beds available? The current numbers of staff and and beds are what is needed to support the current situation. It takes years to train doctors and nurses. As we've seen in China, if the numbers go too high, too quickly, the systems are overwhelmed.
What is interesting also is how different the impact is different places. I suspect - and hope - that the fatality rate will remain low in the US and most other western nations. But really, at this point we just don't know.
I suppose anyone can justify anything, but the key point is that this has nothing to do with what the culprit "knew".
He was stealing software and classified data, with the help of an inside accomplice, after he left his position.
We may see this in action this election.
What everyone knows or should know at this point is: Coronavirus is or is going to be a pandemic. There is no effective way at this point to quarantine or control its spread. By the time the world outside of China knew about it, it was already too late to take those measures. I am unaware of any effective treatment for the disease.
I don't hear anyone in the media or any politician addressing this honestly.
The mortality rate has been upped to 3.4% now, but that is still a guess. We can be pretty sure it is much higher than for the flu.
As for the number of reported cases: for all intents and purposes almost no testing is being done in the US, so we can be pretty sure that the number of actual cases is much higher than reported. As we are relying on people to "self quarantine", we can expect those numbers to explode.
FWIW: My son-in-law is an ER doc in Seattle who is sick, but they won't test him because he doesn't meet the criteria.
I believe that an applicant's criminal record should be available.
The Wall Street Journal had an article recently on a company that had a factory in Chigago with a work force that was 80% ex-cons. The conversations with the company's officers and the employees on what it takes to make that work were fascinating. It does require a lot more investment of time and effort to help these employees succeed in what may be a first for them: a steady job with a paycheck, having to be at work on time, managing finances and paying bills - a complete change in the way you live. But it works - these people are turning their lives around.
There are people out there doing God's work.
It's interesting that small startups are now working on fusion. Perhaps this is going to be like the spaceship field with rapid innovation and successes. The few companies I've read about are taking interesting and different approaches to the problem - but all are looking at systems much smaller than un the past.
I went through a period of buying cheap digital watches and just replacing them as the battery wore out, the strap broke, the screen became too scratched, etc.
The drawback was that I relied on my daughter to reset the time for the daylight saving time changes. Which meant I was an hour off until she was next at home for a semester break.
So: I can gut and rehab a house including wiring and plumbing, restore a car including the engine rebuild, and perform all the server/OS/programming tasks associated with a lifetime career in IT. But I can't set the time on a digital watch.
They did say they did not use the data to target kids for ads. So a very specific and limited denial of something they were not accused of.
I like how Google employees get upset over specfic little issues dear to their little hearts, but they are quite happy to go in to work every day, make the world a little worse in so many ways, cash their paycheck and feel smugly virtuous.
Here in the US they decided at one time that what people wanted has "hot", so that is what they got: too hot to drink, too dangerous to have in a moving vehicle and not convincingly coffee like.
Since then - at least for me - it has improved on all counts. More of a light mellow blend here - certainly not the bitter, burnt brew pushed by Starbucks and their ilk.
I managed our company's financial systems and had written the processes that allowed the different systems to talk to each other, as well as the ones that routed invoices for approval for payment, determined which invoices should be paid on which date, cut the checks, etc.
Every year the external auditors would ask me if I could enter invoices for payment and issue payment bypassing the safeguards I had put in place.
Every year I had to tell them that I could indeed do pretty much what I wanted since I was a sysadmin for the systems and had coded the processes and it was the auditor's job to make sure I had done none of those things.