A clear indicator that our medical system needs reform is that corporations can engage in profit-maximizing behavior like this by treating sick people as a "resource" or "market."
Doctors, labs, chemists, and even insurers are entitled to a fair profit for their services provided. However, they are not entitled to behave like wall street tycoons and start "innovating" in ways to screw us, and each other.
Or at least they shouldn't be. The fact that they are is the root of the problem with health care in the US right now, but no one in DC wants to talk about it. Because everyone doing the talking is on the take from a healthcare corporation somewhere.
This has at least two potentially controversial issues.
The first is the USPTO "we'll patent anything, including arse-wiping techniques" attitude, already familiar to Slashdot. I don't need to elaborate on that. Not here, anyway.
The second is how much right to protection from competition does a corporation have when it comes to essential needs, such as clean water and basic healthcare? At what point does such protection interfere with patients' rights to basic needs?
In other words, if a monopoly on a test allows a company to price that test however they like, how does this effect individual patients? How does it affect the population of patients with that disease? And how does it affect the general state of health care?
The way these questions are currently answered is part of the problem with Health Care in the US. Corporations and captured regulators make those decisions now, so medical decisions are treated as a business decisions... not as essential service decisions. And while healthcare businesspeople are entitled to make a reasonable profit, they operate as if they're entitled to maximize profits. And therefore the market holds them to the same standards as banks and other industries, e.g., they're failures if they don't maximize their rate of increase of profits.
This in turn leads to all kinds of secondary problems, such as inequitable access to health care, and a de-emphasis on preventive care, because it's much more profitable to sell Actos and Byetta to diabetics than preventing them from becoming diabetics in the first place. At what point do we say "STOP! This unrestrained capitalism is KILLING us!" and apply some sort of humane regulation??
Seriously, the comments on this article point out one thing very clearly: Your average slashdotter is a middle-to-high income white person who has no idea what the real world is actually like.
I've come to that same realization this morning, as well. Somewhat to my dismay. But I also know from experience that slashdotters with more logic and objectivity are also slower to post.
I did read your posting history. And I agree with your description of those comments. However, your GGP comment is either a troll, or you did not even read the summary before replying, much less the linked news article. Or you really are that callous, which I don't want to assume - that's why I asked if you were aware how it sounded.
On further reflection, I believe you hurriedly replied to the title of the/. article, and were therefore misled.
Your last idea is close, very close. I played the same games on AOL at a nickel a minute (NWN, GSIII, etc), and ran up $400/month bills regularly, even though it severely strained my finances at the time. That's a huge barrier; you had to be pretty damn addicted to pay that kind of scratch month in and month out. Sure, there were some d-bags, but they were far fewer, probably only the few who could afford someone else to pay their massive AOL bills.
Serious gamers are willing to pay $3/hr for their games, but trolling and griefing just isn't worth $3/hr to very many folks, certainly not enough to detract from the serious gamers' experiences.
And ironically, when AOL went flat rate, I abandoned their games, because I just couldn't get on. AOL had perpetual busy signals for three months, and by the time I could connect again, the addiction had broken. And the atmosphere was different - the games were full of beggars, clue-resistant newbs, and griefers. (And of course, playing CivII, Baldur's Gate and WCIII satisfied my gaming needs at far better cost efficiency.)
Nowadays, playing WoW is like going to an urban basketball court, instead of playing at AOL's private club. You gotta know which courts [realms] to play on, and at which times, and have a posse [guild] to hang with, especially in the rough neighborhoods [pvp servers].
Wow. I've never encountered a more appropriate slashdot alias in my life. Do you have any idea how racist and bigoted you sound, or are you just trolling?
Oh great. You had to do it. You had to mention $nameofgamethatshallnotbementioned. Now I'm not going to be able to think of anything but $nameofgamethatshallnotbementioned, until I go on a sleepless 72-hour $nameofgamethatshallnotbementioned binge and get it out of my system. Thanks for ruining my weekend, you insensitive clod.
WoW's innovation was to eliminate risk to the character as a requirement for level gain. This made it more accessible to mainstream players.
I mean, I've played hardcore on past MMOs and MUDs where risks were greater - XP loss, equipment loss, even permadeath. But the average Joe Sixorc who has invested twelve months of game play collecting uber gear doesn't want to risk it being destroyed or stolen by a mob or another PC -- even if that kind of "danger" is what makes the game most exhilarating and rewarding.
No, Joe Sixorc wants a treadmill with guaranteed advancement, an escape from the real world -- where he can work his ass off and still not achieve anything -- into a world where all he has to do is follow a script and get a guaranteed "Ding!" without the risk of driving the entire character off a cliff, or losing his precious +9 knife of ogre slaying.
I'm not complaining, just observing. If what they were going for was a formula to break MMORPGs into the mainstream, then Blizzard got it right, intentionally or not.
You're aiming for a "+1 Funny," but I'd give you an "Insightful." Considering the scale of the mean volume of his ejaculate, it would be far easier to make relative measurements of the individual samples, especially in non-ideal conditions such as porn movie sets.
Thus, The North Pole series could serve as useful research material, provided one could make an accurate objective assessment of the attractiveness of each female partner.
This idea is validated by my past observations that the dude really does launch a bigger fleet of tadpoles when the actress is a hottie. He appears to make especially messy glazes on the faces of cute blondes.
That sounds like the 1970s version of walking into a Turner's Outdoorsman and asking the man behind the gun counter for a "phased plasma pulse-laser in the forty watt range."
A world without insanely cheap, plentiful CPU cycles, digital mass storage and RAM. Therefore, games were all analog and generally involved things called balls, and lots of dirt, and it carried the risk of a range of bodily injuries from scuffed knees to broken bones. Similarly, porn was recorded in analog form -- i.e., stored in your biological neural network (aka, "spank bank") -- for, ahem, later retrieval. If you were lucky, you could find a photographic album of naked women, cars, and left-wing politics (aka, "playboy") hidden in your father's workbench. And we had sex with corporeal, fleshy things sporting the occasional hairy and/or saggy bits (aka,
"girls")... unlike the waxed silicone representations of today.
That world was called... the Nineteen Seventies.
Re:Instant Pausing, Frame By Frame
on
VLC 1.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Hey - go ahead and mod him Funny, but porn is srs bsns. Wankers are the power user of video players. We need:
Instant Pausing
frame step forward AND frame step backward
skip ahead, skip time set in prefs (default something like 5 seconds)
thumbwheel support and a slider bar
bookmarks with thumbnails
robust error handling for bad files and scratched DVDs
ignore autoplay and other odious crap installed on commercial DVDs
timely codec updates
If VLC can at least manage the first four, I may pay for an upgrade to OS X 10.5 - I'm getting tired of Quicktime Player and DVD Player.
I have a similar reaction to Marijuana as your wife -- however, this only occurs if I drink first. If I smoke then drink, no problems. But if I get drunk, then smoke, it's "puke up yesterday's breakfast" time.
"Almost as good?" Hardly. The WowWee toys fly with moving wings, yes, but they're more glider than ornithopter, and require a rudder. The Aerovironment NAV is a true ornithopter, the flapping movement of its wings provides all lift and thrust and 3-axis control. But because this is slashdot, you're excused for opining out of ignorance, even when it could be cured by RTFA.
When I was a pimply, hormone-addled teen going thru puberty, I could identify every female in my high school, from behind, at a distance of up to a quarter mile.
Despite the prevalence of ultra-tight acid-washed jeans in the early 80's, my skill didn't rely solely on shape, oh no. A detailed analysis of cyclic ambulatory gluteal displacement was key to identification.
I thought I was the only one who had this talent, until much later when I learned it is actually common. (Same goes for the "mental VCR," aka spankbank, but that's another story.)
Yea, coherent light would become a controlled substance. Wicked Lasers would be contraband. Laser junkies would be hanging around the NIF, begging for spare photons. It wouldn't be pretty.
So, thanks for the foresight. I'll have them run a copper wire alongside my fiber, just in case.
Slashdot Mirror
Troll? How does this rate "-1 Troll?" Do I sound like I'm trolling? Eesh.
Pedant here. It's "pedant."
And it's "it's."
A clear indicator that our medical system needs reform is that corporations can engage in profit-maximizing behavior like this by treating sick people as a "resource" or "market."
Doctors, labs, chemists, and even insurers are entitled to a fair profit for their services provided. However, they are not entitled to behave like wall street tycoons and start "innovating" in ways to screw us, and each other.
Or at least they shouldn't be. The fact that they are is the root of the problem with health care in the US right now, but no one in DC wants to talk about it. Because everyone doing the talking is on the take from a healthcare corporation somewhere.
This has at least two potentially controversial issues.
The first is the USPTO "we'll patent anything, including arse-wiping techniques" attitude, already familiar to Slashdot. I don't need to elaborate on that. Not here, anyway.
The second is how much right to protection from competition does a corporation have when it comes to essential needs, such as clean water and basic healthcare? At what point does such protection interfere with patients' rights to basic needs?
In other words, if a monopoly on a test allows a company to price that test however they like, how does this effect individual patients? How does it affect the population of patients with that disease? And how does it affect the general state of health care?
The way these questions are currently answered is part of the problem with Health Care in the US. Corporations and captured regulators make those decisions now, so medical decisions are treated as a business decisions... not as essential service decisions. And while healthcare businesspeople are entitled to make a reasonable profit, they operate as if they're entitled to maximize profits. And therefore the market holds them to the same standards as banks and other industries, e.g., they're failures if they don't maximize their rate of increase of profits.
This in turn leads to all kinds of secondary problems, such as inequitable access to health care, and a de-emphasis on preventive care, because it's much more profitable to sell Actos and Byetta to diabetics than preventing them from becoming diabetics in the first place. At what point do we say "STOP! This unrestrained capitalism is KILLING us!" and apply some sort of humane regulation??
I've come to that same realization this morning, as well. Somewhat to my dismay. But I also know from experience that slashdotters with more logic and objectivity are also slower to post.
I did read your posting history. And I agree with your description of those comments. However, your GGP comment is either a troll, or you did not even read the summary before replying, much less the linked news article. Or you really are that callous, which I don't want to assume - that's why I asked if you were aware how it sounded.
On further reflection, I believe you hurriedly replied to the title of the /. article, and were therefore misled.
Your last idea is close, very close. I played the same games on AOL at a nickel a minute (NWN, GSIII, etc), and ran up $400/month bills regularly, even though it severely strained my finances at the time. That's a huge barrier; you had to be pretty damn addicted to pay that kind of scratch month in and month out. Sure, there were some d-bags, but they were far fewer, probably only the few who could afford someone else to pay their massive AOL bills.
Serious gamers are willing to pay $3/hr for their games, but trolling and griefing just isn't worth $3/hr to very many folks, certainly not enough to detract from the serious gamers' experiences.
And ironically, when AOL went flat rate, I abandoned their games, because I just couldn't get on. AOL had perpetual busy signals for three months, and by the time I could connect again, the addiction had broken. And the atmosphere was different - the games were full of beggars, clue-resistant newbs, and griefers. (And of course, playing CivII, Baldur's Gate and WCIII satisfied my gaming needs at far better cost efficiency.)
Nowadays, playing WoW is like going to an urban basketball court, instead of playing at AOL's private club. You gotta know which courts [realms] to play on, and at which times, and have a posse [guild] to hang with, especially in the rough neighborhoods [pvp servers].
Or better yet, send your money to the EFF (see my sig), who DOES pay attention to abuses like illegal wiretapping.
Wow. I've never encountered a more appropriate slashdot alias in my life. Do you have any idea how racist and bigoted you sound, or are you just trolling?
Oh great. You had to do it. You had to mention $nameofgamethatshallnotbementioned. Now I'm not going to be able to think of anything but $nameofgamethatshallnotbementioned, until I go on a sleepless 72-hour $nameofgamethatshallnotbementioned binge and get it out of my system. Thanks for ruining my weekend, you insensitive clod.
You're criticizing the arbitrary number he chose to illustrate his idea, and ignoring his idea altogether.
Well, it's certainly not the 1965 Bloop, aka "Debbie." Even if it was, it wouldn't necessarily rule out it being a shoggoth, either.
The answer to that question is "Because all their friends are there," which is why the only thing that will kill WoW is WoW2.
WoW's innovation was to eliminate risk to the character as a requirement for level gain. This made it more accessible to mainstream players.
I mean, I've played hardcore on past MMOs and MUDs where risks were greater - XP loss, equipment loss, even permadeath. But the average Joe Sixorc who has invested twelve months of game play collecting uber gear doesn't want to risk it being destroyed or stolen by a mob or another PC -- even if that kind of "danger" is what makes the game most exhilarating and rewarding.
No, Joe Sixorc wants a treadmill with guaranteed advancement, an escape from the real world -- where he can work his ass off and still not achieve anything -- into a world where all he has to do is follow a script and get a guaranteed "Ding!" without the risk of driving the entire character off a cliff, or losing his precious +9 knife of ogre slaying.
I'm not complaining, just observing. If what they were going for was a formula to break MMORPGs into the mainstream, then Blizzard got it right, intentionally or not.
You're aiming for a "+1 Funny," but I'd give you an "Insightful." Considering the scale of the mean volume of his ejaculate, it would be far easier to make relative measurements of the individual samples, especially in non-ideal conditions such as porn movie sets.
Thus, The North Pole series could serve as useful research material, provided one could make an accurate objective assessment of the attractiveness of each female partner.
This idea is validated by my past observations that the dude really does launch a bigger fleet of tadpoles when the actress is a hottie. He appears to make especially messy glazes on the faces of cute blondes.
Then you'll want to switch to pissing in their heater core intake. Perhaps after eating some asparagus.
That sounds like the 1970s version of walking into a Turner's Outdoorsman and asking the man behind the gun counter for a "phased plasma pulse-laser in the forty watt range."
A world without insanely cheap, plentiful CPU cycles, digital mass storage and RAM. Therefore, games were all analog and generally involved things called balls, and lots of dirt, and it carried the risk of a range of bodily injuries from scuffed knees to broken bones. Similarly, porn was recorded in analog form -- i.e., stored in your biological neural network (aka, "spank bank") -- for, ahem, later retrieval. If you were lucky, you could find a photographic album of naked women, cars, and left-wing politics (aka, "playboy") hidden in your father's workbench. And we had sex with corporeal, fleshy things sporting the occasional hairy and/or saggy bits (aka, "girls")... unlike the waxed silicone representations of today.
That world was called... the Nineteen Seventies.
Hey - go ahead and mod him Funny, but porn is srs bsns. Wankers are the power user of video players. We need:
If VLC can at least manage the first four, I may pay for an upgrade to OS X 10.5 - I'm getting tired of Quicktime Player and DVD Player.
I have a similar reaction to Marijuana as your wife -- however, this only occurs if I drink first. If I smoke then drink, no problems. But if I get drunk, then smoke, it's "puke up yesterday's breakfast" time.
Unfortunately, I often forget this when drunk.
Yes, it's the same one. I viewed it on AV's site this morning before the slashdotting.
"Almost as good?" Hardly. The WowWee toys fly with moving wings, yes, but they're more glider than ornithopter, and require a rudder. The Aerovironment NAV is a true ornithopter, the flapping movement of its wings provides all lift and thrust and 3-axis control. But because this is slashdot, you're excused for opining out of ignorance, even when it could be cured by RTFA.
When I was a pimply, hormone-addled teen going thru puberty, I could identify every female in my high school, from behind, at a distance of up to a quarter mile.
Despite the prevalence of ultra-tight acid-washed jeans in the early 80's, my skill didn't rely solely on shape, oh no. A detailed analysis of cyclic ambulatory gluteal displacement was key to identification.
I thought I was the only one who had this talent, until much later when I learned it is actually common. (Same goes for the "mental VCR," aka spankbank, but that's another story.)
Is this going to be a part of the study?
Precisely. Asimov's mystery (and Niven's "Tasp") were the inspiration for my OP. You win a cookie! (_)
Yea, coherent light would become a controlled substance. Wicked Lasers would be contraband. Laser junkies would be hanging around the NIF, begging for spare photons. It wouldn't be pretty.
So, thanks for the foresight. I'll have them run a copper wire alongside my fiber, just in case.