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Comment Re: They stopped allowing online English tutoring. (Score 1) 159

I believe the rule was only for children as students. I know for a fact that lots of us resident Americans do zoom based English tutoring for adults with unusually high voices. Translation: These days Chinese parents just register themselves as the students and their kids take the online tutoring.

Comment it IS fraud (Score 1) 89

It *IS* fraud because I never gave them this credit card to charge me on. Saying it's not fraud would mean anyone I buy something from could charge me on any credit card they wanted, not just the one I gave them.

Late last year I cancelled a Citi credit card dues to come actual fraud charges. A month later, a charge appeared on the replacement card from an organization that had been billing me monthly for something. I flagged it as fraud in my online console, noting I had given the new card number to nobody. I got an immediate temporary credit. A month or two later, the credit was permanent. Worked as expected.

Submission + - Core PostgreSQL developer dies in airplane crash (postgresql.org)

kriston writes: Core PostgreSQL developer Simon Riggs dies in airplane crash in Duxford, England. Riggs was the sole occupant of a Cirrus SR22-T which crashed on March 26 after performing touch-and-go maneuvers.
Riggs was responsible for much of the enterprise-level features in PostgreSQL including point-in-time recovery, synchronous replication, and hot standby. He also was the head of the company 2ndQuadrant that provides PostgreSQL support.

Comment might alleviate nurse shortage and raise wages (Score 1) 1

During the pandemic there seemed to be nurse shortages in every major city as nurses reported being severely overworked. Half of what a nurse does for me at a doctor appointment is simply transcribe answers into a computer form. Something a high school student could do. I don't think I'm willing to take much medical advice from an AI yet without confirming with a real nurse or doctor, but I think an AI could educate me quite a bit before I talked to a nurse or doctor in person to confirm. Well within a few years at least, but reviewing and confirming with a real person would catch AI errors.

An AI might take over these low level tasks and leave the ones requiring nursing skills to real nurses. This would help alleviate the shortages and might also raise the wages of nurses by making them more productive, in terms of doing more work that really needs to be done by a nurse, not a well trained high school graduate. A quick search will show lots of articles out there on a nursing shortage.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fb...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalmatters.org%2Fhealth%2F...

Comment Reward Brother by buying a cartridge (Score 1) 166

You and HP have inspired me. I have also used Brother printers exclusively for over a decade. Never thrown one away - just passed on to someone else. But I buy cheaper third party ink which works great. My New Year's resolution is to buy some Brother cartridges to reward them for their products that are good citizens and dnot acting like HP printers. BROTHER INC, if you're listening, give me a donation link and I'd even give you a few bucks every time I buy a non-Brother cartridge!

Comment Re:Espionage ain't what it used to be - patents (Score 1) 93

Ironically Airbus and Rolls Royce still sit on lots of patents especially around the clever engine ramp door systems which was made Concorde really possible.

Since the Concorde stopped flying in 2003 and French patents are good for 20 years, you would think they're not sitting on many patents any more.

Submission + - US Senators issued satellite phones (cbsnews.com)

SonicSpike writes: Amid growing concerns of security risks to members of Congress, over 50 senators have been issued satellite phones for emergency communication, people familiar with the measures told CBS News. The devices are part of a series of new security measures being offered to senators by the Senate Sergeant at Arms, who took over shortly after the protest an the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The satellite phone technology has been offered to all 100 senators. CBS News has learned at least 50 have accepted the phones, which Senate administrative staff recommend senators keep in close proximity during their travels.

In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee last month, Senate Sergeant at Arms Karen Gibson said satellite communication is being deployed "to ensure a redundant and secure means of communication during a disruptive event."

Gibson said the phones are a security backstop in the case of an emergency that "takes out communications" in part of America. Federal funding will pay for the satellite airtime needed to utilize the phone devices.

Submission + - Surgeon General: There isn't enough evidence that social media is safe for kids (statnews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Amid what he called the worst youth mental health crisis in recent memory, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory Tuesday warning about social media’s impact on developing young brains.

“Through the last two and a half years I’ve been in office, I’ve been hearing concerns from kids and parents,” Murthy told STAT. “Parents are asking ‘Is social media safe for my kids?’ Based on our review of the data, there isn’t enough evidence that it is safe for our kids.”

The surgeon general’s report comes in the wake of a recent health advisory on teens and social media use from the American Psychological Association, which noted the increased risk of anxiety and depression among adolescents who are exposed to discrimination and bullying online. Other research has shown that adolescents ages 12-15 who spent more than three hours per day on social media face a heightened risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes compared to those who spent less time online.

Comment Don't care if Zillow manipulates it's prices (Score 1) 89

to control the housing market.

Based on my own recent home sale experience, the estimated prices on Zillow (the Zestimates) do seem to be systemically higher than competitors like Redfin, although OpenDoor ended up paying us something in between Redfin and Zillow. So there is plenty of competition and Zillow is not controlling anything.

That said, as an inflation gauge, I don't really care if Zillow's price is systemically too high or too low. I only care about how much it changes over time.

FYI, Redfin has their own scam going because they not only offer to buy your home at the low end of price spectrum, they try to up sell you to their consumer real estate agent if you think you want more than the Redfin cash offer for your home. They get commission either way. Zillow on the other hand, apparently found the iAgent market unprofitable and is exiting the business. Over-estimated prices make it easier for their real estate agent business, still going, to attract customers but I suspect made it harder to buy properties at a price enabling them to profit from the flip.

Comment Re:Try looking at all of them. (Score 1) 85

But what if they use facial recognition to identify CXO's of major corporations, politicians, and engineers doing interesting R&D at competitors to a big Chinese firm first. (Engineers would be easy to identify based on pictures/video taken at technical conferences where everyone wears badges with their name/company.) If the TV identifies anyone interesting, it records audio and video and sends back to China where they transcribe and data mine before passing off the translated Mandarin version to a human. That could be VERY deeply interesting to the Chinese government.

Comment use facial recognition to only stop non-employees (Score 1) 336

Wouldn't it be so much simpler if trained some facial recognition software to recognize everyone in the employee database and then walked around with a Google Glass camera looking at people? You could, mostly, only stop non-employees, at whatever confidence level you want.

You would think Google would know how to use their own products better....

And before you flame, yes, get good ID pix of non-whites and do whatever training necessary to recognize non-whites with the same error rate as whites.

Comment Re:Trump won anyway (Score 1) 197

MY approach would be to talk to them instead of his authoritarian demands.

You've never had children, have you? Occasionally, talking just won't work and its necessary to threaten a nuclear consequence to get them to believe you are serious. But rarely if ever is it necessary to actually follow through. It's a negotiating tactic.

I see a president frustrated that no matter what he says or does, most of the media tries to turn it against him. So whatever Trump says, the media and progressives will claim that China is NOT controlling the WHO and that it is NOT a detriment to democracies all over the world. They will disagree that at best, the WHO was allowing China to distort and hide information about the origins and evolution of the pandemic in Wuhan. They will say we should not even consider that at worst, the WHO was helping China hide crimes related to the pandemic. So there would no way to convince the bureaucracy to, in good faith, negotiate a solution. The only way to get this to happen was to go nuclear.

If the US does "unwithdraw" from the WHO, these problems will be corrected without having to deal with the press and progressives. If that happens, who will have got what they wanted and improved the US' future relationship with the WHO?

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