I should have probably explained the difference between earth dust and moon dust.
Not that the dust is very different, but how it behaves is. Dust on the moon doesn't slow down, because of the lack of the atmosphere. That means any sort of landing is going to throw dust straight out in all directions, and that dust will be moving as fast as it started ten seconds later, when it hits buildings and even astronauts. Not good.
As long as we put some part of the moon between that landing, and the buildings, we should be fine. And it really shouldn't be hard to figure out how to use an existing geographic feature for that purpose.
Or, alternately, we could figure some sort of concrete and just pave the strip, but a) we don't know how to make concrete out of lunar materials, and b) it almost certainly would take water, which would be in tight supply.
You mean...building one out of lunar materials is easier than using a pre-fabricated one out of lunar materials?
That seems incorrect to me.
And the point of this wall is simply to ensure that dirt throw off by landings does not directly fly over and sandblast the buildings, it's not like it need to be some sort of special design. It just needs to be a few meters thick.
There's plenty of geographical features that could block dust, heck, there's probably one with a ready-made cut-through where part of the crater wall collapsed or got knocked out by another impact.
In fact, it doesn't need to be a 'wall' at all. It could simply be a height difference. Although then you need to haul things up and down, which is harder than simply walking around a wall.
Of course, in the end, on the moon, you want to build underground, but we're not at that point, and anyway you still need a door near the landing strip.
Why not use a crater wall? Put the landing strip on the outside, the base on the inside, and cut a tunnel? (And build a ramp over/around for the big stuff.)
Dude, I don't know what show you've been watching, but it wasn't Scrubs.
Scrubs is rarely about patients, almost never about their care, and when it is about their care most of the time it's about about them dying or being hard to deal with. Scrubs is, first and foremost, a show about doctors and their life, not medicine.
Seriously, there have been half a dozen 'patient dies, doctors blame themselves' episodes, a dozen 'patient is dying and no one can stop it' episodes, and maybe two 'Hey, we actually saved this guy because we're smart!' episodes. (One of the latter being an actual parody of House.)
They even had an episode where a bunch of bad luck and misdiagnoses appear to kill a patient, and J.D. rewinds time in his head and imagines what would have happened if all those crappy coincidences hadn't happened and everything had happened perfectly...and the patient still dies.
Often the episodes with dying patients will have the voiceover explicitly talk about how everyone expects doctors to walk in and magically save everyone, when in reality, doctors don't do anything of the sort. They fix problems they know how to fix, and try to make everyone else comfortable, and that even the best doctor in the world doesn't know everything and can result in you dying when you could have lived.
Considering how many people think that they can diagnose themselves, I can actually see a huge market for doctors who actually explain things. Which is sorta the halfway step to trying to figure things out yourself.
All the doctors around here prescribe antibiotics for colds. I actually went to one when I had bronchitis, and he prescribed me some, and I had to stop him and ask 'Are you doing this because you think I have a bacterial infection, or you are doing this because fools often demand antibiotics when they have viral infections? Because I'm not one of those fools, and I'd rather not pay for antibiotics to inanely fight a virus.'.
He stared at me for a second and laughed, and said, yes, he actually did suspect it was bacterial, for a reason that I've forgotten. And then he admitted that, yes, that if there was any chance it wasn't a virus, and the patient wanted it, he'd give them antibiotics.
I don't pretend to be a doctor, I can't diagnose myself beyond a few emergency things like 'This is a symptom of heart attack, I better call 911 now.' But I like to think I'm intelligence enough to understand what's wrong with me when a doctor figures it out and tells me. Likewise, I can deal with the idea that the doctor doesn't know 100% what's wrong with me, and just has a set of possibilities.
But placebos aren't ineffective. They are so surprising effective that we have, wait for it, an 'effect' named for that.
And, as someone else here pointed out, there actually are prescription placebos with no side effects, like Cebocap and Obecalp, which are actually sugar pills. (And right now someone who just read this is staring in shock at a pill bottle that they thought had medication in it.)
Right. The spiraling costs of health care in the US are due almost entirely to an industry that has set itself up between health care consumers and health care producers, and makes more money the less health care it transfers through itself.
Hey, dumbass, they're listening for (new) irregularities in your heartbeart, and for any sort of chest congestion. It's a basic 'is this person's heart or lungs about to kill them?' check.
I'm not a doctor, and even I know that.
You think that isn't a good use of 45 seconds, you go tell the people who suddenly kneel over because they have previously undetected heart problems.
There are legitimate arguments about the cost of various testing and if the money would be better spent elsewhere, but this is one of the few tests that is completely free, so that's a somewhat idiotic argument to make here.
The reason doctors do that test, and other free tests like blood pressure and reflexes check and pupil dilation, is that they are free tests they can do right there to see if there's some serious problem. They have better ways of testing for various things, but a free 'Is this person functioning within normal parameters' test cannot hurt and can pick up major problems. Again, for free.
I cannot stress 'free' enough. Not only in money but in time...no, it's not even wasting doctor's time...they need to observe patients during regular checkups, and might as well test them during it. People get uncomfortable when doctors just stare at them. And there's the placebo effect, if people think doctors think they're healthy, they are somewhat more healthy.
Anyway, most doctors aren't supposed to be scientists. They're diagnostic engineers. You don't fix broken things, or keep them running, with 'science'. Often, diagnostic engineers have a checklist of things they do, even if everything on that checklist isn't 100% applicable. It's a waste of time, and sometimes of money (Although not in this case.) but that doesn't make the field of medicine 'non-scientific', it makes most doctors not scientists.
Which almost no practitioner claims to be. Health care is scientific, using both statistics and scientific experiments to understand health. But it's off in labs and universities and experimental drug programs, not in some doctor giving you a checkup.
Any sort of insurance that is common enough to be the main gatekeeper to an industry will eventually destroy said industry.
Health insurance is the only sort of insurance that does that. They're large enough that they threaten to withdraw all their business from a hospital if the hospital doesn't play by their rules, so all hospitals have to take whatever crap the industry as a whole shoves out.
This is like a 'vertical industry', where one industry's output (health care) is consumed mostly by another industry (health insurance), not consumers. Except totally perverted in that the industry doesn't want to buy health care, that just costs them money, because they're not actually reselling health care, just the promise of it.
They make the same amount of income regardless of how much they pass along, so the less they pass along, the better. This has, quite predictably, destroyed both the health care industry and the people who actually wish to purchase health care. It's like if Walmart operated on 'whatever you can carry out the door is yours for free', and made their money by charging you insane prices for parking, so it was in their best interests to make the store as confusing and unusable as possible, so you'd stay there longer and walk out empty-handed. Good for Walmart, bad for people trying to buy stuff and people trying to sell them stuff!
The people would make an end-run around this entire mess and go directly to the health care, but the health insurance industry has, at this point, rigged the game so badly that health care without insurance is twice as much as it with insurance, because they've exerted pressure on hospitals to give them discounts, and this entire setup has additionally forced health care prices absurdly high in general.
As for other insurance, despite car and homeowner insurance existing, most car repairs and house construction are paid for by individuals. And life insurance, of course, isn't in front of an industry.
Scientist figure out rules, non-scientists try to use those rules. 10 million women getting pap smears who don't need them is a lot better than 10 million who do need them not getting them. (Or even 1 million.)
Calling it 'culture', as mysidia pointed out below, is a rather biased term. The term is 'best practices', and it's designed to err on the side of caution, especially WRT standard testing.
If there are a few more 'if' statements that need to be put in 'best practices', by all means, put them in, but stop acting like there's some sort of industry wide practice of over testing on everything. If anything, there's an industry-wide practice of too little testing, even if one or two of the things that commonly do get tested for are unneeded in certain circumstances.(1)
Ask various people who have had different type of cancers, and had doctors suspect it, but were unable to get a test that their insurance would pay for. People with cervical cancer are 'lucky' in that pap smears are cheap enough that insurance companies can't justify not paying for them...people with cancer that needs a biopsy to confirm are often sitting there with everyone suspecting it's cancer but no cheap way to prove it, and unable to afford an expensive way, so unable to get any treatment. (And, no, Dan Froomkin, you cannot get a cancer biopsy in an ER.)
(Although, as has been pointed out, women can get cervical cancer 'without a cervix', because there can still be cervix cells left hanging around. Although it's probably so unlikely as to not be worth testing for, just like breast cancer in men isn't really worth testing for, although it's possible.)
Actually, the market is more regulated than it would be under universal, single payer, health care.
At least under that, there would be one set of rules about what would be treated and how, instead of constantly having to run each and every treatment by each and every insurance company.
Nintendo had a choice. They could either continue the graphic arms race with Sony and MS, and attempt to capture the 20 million or so 'serious gamers' by adding yet another 20% incremental increase in graphics quality that cost $200...
...or they could simply rebrand their Gamecube, design a new controller that lets 'non-gamers' who don't want to spend hours pushing buttons play, and sell more than both Sony and MS put together. Oh, and they make a $50 profit on each sale, instead of the losses that Sony and MS make. And they're able to sell for cheaper, avoiding the absurd upward trend that game consoles have had for the last decade.
Boy, what dumbasses for picking the second choice. They must cry themselves to sleep on their pillows stuffed with money.
Instead of whining about the Wii, how about you recognize it's not aimed at you 'serious gamers' who want eight bajillion FPS.
This method may result in better PS3 games in four or five years, whereas providing a 'crutch' to programmers might result in the process taking seven years.
However, for the first couple of years, it's going to result in high entry costs and worse looking games, and Sony has apparently forgotten it has competitors.
While they're doing this, MS is going to keep churning out easy-to-program-if-you-have-a-PC-port boxes, and Nintendo is going to keep churning out the same console they've had for eight years that everyone knows how to program for by now, along with a fun new input device.
The point is to not have some ideal game in a decade, because, in a decade, no one's going to be buying PS3s.
And, to top it off, I assert there's a point where graphics aren't really the things selling the game, and the entire console's industry focus on them exclusively has been harming them. As evidenced by the Wii's explosion, and DDR and Rock Star before them, there's an entire untapped market out there that doesn't want to sit pushing buttons, and doesn't give a flying fuck about real-time shaders and quad framebuffers.
The real question that Sony should ask themselves is if people are going to buy a 9 year-old console to play a cool game?
Or will they move over to MS's X-Box 720 or whatever and play the exact same game, along with a bunch of other games that came out at the same time as the 720 because, duh, it's easy to program for.
I mean, duh, the XBox itself is a counterexample of this. MS essentially walked into the marketplace because programming for the XBox was easy if the game had a Windows version. Ease of programming=more games and better games.
And Nintendo isn't giving a shit about 'utilizing hardware to the max', has essentially given up on building faster boxes, and has decided to build fun ones. (They have a point. Consoles really are fast enough to do essentially anything you want. Hell, my computer is fast enough to real-time near perfect 3D rendering.)
I have a feeling that Sony is trying to pull off a NES, where some of the best games for that came out years later, but has forgotten that a) There were very little competitors at the time, and b) A lot of that was the entire industry maturing.
(Before anyone think I'm being unfair, or if I'm just wrong about something, be aware I haven't had a console since the NES.)
Exactly, and this is why IT needs a responsive process where needed applications, can be installed via a simple request within a day or two. And even useful but not technically 'needed' applications like NotePad++ and other simple tools that most users wouldn't care about, but one guy really wants it.
Even mp3 players are okay, if you let them listen to music/radio at work, although it'd be a good idea to make them sign a statement that their mp3s will be legal, and they won't download or trade with coworkers any at work, or put them on shared drives, and that they understand all of them can be deleted by admin whim from their machine.
As long as it's not a security risk or legal-liability risk for the company, or something completely inappropriate for work like a game, install it. (p2p is both a security and legal-liability risks, and inappropriate use of the network resources. And, to top it off, it's hard to find a p2p network not covered in porn, which introduces other legal liabilities into the workplace.)
If they don't have that ability, if they can't get 'non-bad' software installed, there were be legit gripes, and people will take them up the chain of command, and you'll run the risk that people will become 'exempt' to the rules, and will become able to install anything they want because they 'need' to be...and then will happily install all sorts of crap.
No, just install the damn non-dangerous software people ask for. All too often companies claim software needs to be 'approved', but most of that is nonsense. Obviously commercial software needs correct licenses, but if someone wants to install a program like NotePad++ that isn't 'approved', a few minutes of reading about it and making sure it's not spyware infested and licensed freely should be able to get it past any hurdles. (I just picked that program because I have it installed.)
If you can counter each 'But I want install software on my computer!' request with 'If you'd tell us application you want to install, we'll get right on it. Should have it in by tomorrow.', the legit gripes will vanish, and people won't take their 'I want to run Limewire!' gripe to anyone.
Of course, all this falls apart if applications need to run as admin.
'blocks from' might have been a bit unclear. Although sane people might realize there's no such thing as 'sunlight from the moon', and I meant 'blocks all sunlight from reaching the moon', in the same way you'd say 'blocks the football player from the endzone'.
Um, no. The moon cannot be obscured from the earth. A lunar eclipse is when the earth blocks all sunlight from the moon.
A lunar eclipse and a solar eclipse are not the same thing with the sun and moon flipped around, as people, including slashdot editors, seem to think.
If things always have the same name regardless of where they are viewed,
Nice strawman. I didn't say 'things' did, I said that these things did. Or, to put it more clearly, extrapolating the names we use on earth for these phenomenon to other locations is pretty stupid, considering the names we use on earth are pretty stupid.
Wouldn't an eclipse where the moon blocks the sun be a, "Terran eclipse," regardless of where it's observed from? I mean, your system appears to be be, "That which receives less light is the eponym."
Well, yes, if we named things logically. We don't, or a 'solar eclipse' would be a 'Terran Eclipse' to start with. Even from earth.
Arguing based on the names is like arguing that 'Postmodernism' is, by definition, impossible. Well, yes, if by 'modern' in that we actually meant 'present day'. However, what that's talking about is the style of art called 'Modernism', and Postmodernism is the style that came immediately after it.
For your logic to work, the only time a solar eclipse would be possible if it the sun got between the moon and the Earth.
No, that would be true if I was, in fact, asserting exactly the opposite of what I was asserting, that the names were logically related to what they were describing. They clearly aren't, hence the inability to change them around based on POV. There are no historical terms for describing things from the POV of someone on the moon, for obvious reasons.
Just because something sounds like a scientific term doesn't mean we can just randomly use it as one, and 'solar eclipse' vs 'lunar eclipse' are not actually describing the same phenomenon with the sun and moon switched around. We don't actually have any term to describe 'the earth blocking your location from the sun' except 'night'.
This isn't a solar eclipse, this is a lunar eclipse.
That's what it's called when the earth blocks the sunlight hitting the moon, which is what happened here.
A solar eclipse is when the moon blocks the sunlight hitting the earth. (And would appear, from the moon, as a dark spot moving across the face of the earth.)
Viewing it from the other place doesn't change the name of it. The names are not relative, they're legacy names that don't mean anything. (Otherwise a solar eclipse would be called an 'earth eclipse' or something.)
Well, with the actor's guild, the minimum wage is due to the fact that there are literally tens of thousands of lower-end actors competing for the same roles. Some of them very hungry, some of them rather delusional that the next role will be their big break. Thus if there wasn't a acting minimum wage given for a non-extra role, and a slightly higher one for a speaking role, (This is called 'scale'.), actors would underbid each other down to state minimum wage. Or, hell, for free.
Talking about 'reasonable' is not relevant. Guilds and unions are not 'reasonable', they are groups of people in the same industry who work together to force their employers to do something. It's certainly reasonable for them.
In industries where there are identically jobs requires essentially the same skill and same work, it makes sense to set the wage per-job and per-experience and all sorts of things via unions.
In industries where that is not true, a guild does a lot less, but it still does things like protecting people starting out in the industry. Screen actors got ripped off badly by studios for the first 60 years of their existence. There are reruns on TV Land that people still watch that the actors don't make a penny from. (Neither do the writer, or the director, or anyone except the studio.)
I don't know how much the various actors guilds actually require actors get paid in residues now, but what they don't require, they offer actors information about what 'fair' deals are, and even write or at least examine and approve standard contracts. (Simply educating people to take a percentage of the gross instead of the net helps a lot.)
Photographers don't have a useful guild not because it wouldn't make sense for them, but because not enough of them work for organizations with a bunch of photographers. Many of them aren't working for anyone at all...they're contractual hires by random people.
And I'm not aware of any guild that operates the way you think a photography guild would operate, by setting a minimum price on sold goods.
In fact, that would probably be a violation of anti-trust laws. Unions are exempt when negotiating wages, not prices. A bunch of small business owners who work for themselves, can't negotiating price fixing, and make it legal by calling it a 'union'.
The bar for criminal copyright violation is quite low, for better or worse.
Um, did you bother to read that cite? Did you follow through to 506? Ironically, you just disproved your own point and even what I said about 'mostly'.
Criminal penalties only apply for copyright if, and I quote, it is 'a computer program, a musical work, a motion picture or other audiovisual work, or a sound recording'.
All those things are very well defined, and a password is none of them. (And before you argue it is one of them, actually cite the definition first, or I'll ignore it. You don't get to pretend you know what those things are defined as, they are very explicitly defined in copyright law.)
I was under the mistaken impression criminal penalties could apply to written works, which is all anyone could argue a password is. They cannot. Criminal penalties cannot apply here.
If they weren't, they could never be used. They're stored in the computers that they are used to govern.
As pretty much everyone who's worked with computers at all knows, this is simply factually wrong. Passwords are not stored in computers. A hash of the password is stored.
If merely storing something in "encrypted/hashed/obfuscated" etc. form means it is not actually copied or stored, what a great loophole in copyright you've found! Woohoo! Perhaps the same defense will work with mp3s?
Yes, if you only record a hash of music instead of the actual music, you have not produced a copyrightable piece of music. (This is a bit moot as you don't have a copy of said music anyway, so it'd be a bit hard stopping people from copying something that doesn't exist.)
This isn't the same as saying that making a hash of an mp3 and trading it isn't a copyright violation...although it actually isn't. If you can't turn it back into music, it does not count as a 'copy'. (You , of course, are about to argue that 'hashes' can somehow be turned back into music, because you are a moron and don't understand what a 'hash' is.)
However, even if the original copy is the copy in the computer, he still didn't have a copy and can't be forced to turn it over, moron.
I swear to God, you have produced the most fucking stupid legal theory that ever existed. Even if you're 100% right about passwords being copyrighted, you're still completely wrong as he clearly didn't make a copy, and hence cannot be in violation of copyright. (You're about to argue that the copy 'in his head' counts, but a) no, remembering stuff really isn't a violation of copyright, but as you're a moron who doesn't understand copyright, I point to b) he made that 'copy' as part of his job in a presumable legal manner.)
Yeah, sometimes 'unions' end up in places that 'guilds' should be.
In the modern world, those terms are often interchangeable, but guilds aren't there to set prices except at the lowest rung of the ladder. For example, the Actors Guilds set 'scale', below which you can't hire an actor, but they don't have any caps on the top.
A barber's guild, something to represent them to the outside world and ensure that there are minimum standards (For example, that people actually know how to cut hair.) and minimum prices (So that employees aren't pay minimum wage to cut five people's hair, at 10 dollars each, an hour.) makes sense. A barber's union does not.
AT&T really should have refused to budge, or sued the cruise ship on behave of him. Neither AT&T or the international carrier should have to pay. They both did exactly what they were supposed to do, operating both legally and morally. AT&T forwarded a bill like it's supposed to do as a telephone company, and the international carrier carried a call at exactly the prices it said it would, and sent the correct bill to the operator of a telephone number.
Of course, the problem is that total morons, a lot of slashdot readers included, will assume AT&T are the villains, and hence bad PR.
A different subset, who think they are smarter, assume the international carrier is the villain, especially considering how they have a reputation for overcharge, although they don't really. Yes, there's a profit, but, OTOH, the equipment is expensive, live tracking of satellites and all and the rented bandwidth on multiple satellites is expensive. And, ironically, very few people actually use it because it's so expensive, which makes it even harder to recoup fixed costs.
It obviously makes a profit, but they're not rolling in money.
Neither of them could have done anything different, and the cruise ship is entirely at fault.
So, the person that sent the bill initially (the international carrier) isn't responsible when their system bills someone in the US for international calls when it is quite likely that their tower was operating illegally at the time?
I guess the international carrier is just supposed to magically know where the cruise ship with a satellite dish aimed at their satellite is located?
If they just "sell the service" to the cruise ships, the who turns it on and off? The cruise director? Then it isn't provided by the carrier, but by the cruise ship.
Um, duh. Are you under the misconception that international carriers would have someone physically on the ship? That seems like a rather extreme use of resources.
No. They've provided a product and service to the cruise ship...a cell 'tower' they probably install, and a sat uplink they also install. And provide a satellite for the uplink to aim at. This service is only legal to operate in international waters, and I'm certainly they explain this to the cruise ship and demonstrate where the on/off switch is.
But in any case, what happened here is someone was hijacked by a rogue tower and billed by AT&T for usage he incurred while in an area covered by AT&T.
No. What happened is that someone was hijacked by a rogue tower and billed by an international carrier for usage he incurred that AT&T has no idea of where it happened.
Pretending it is AT&T is dishonest. It was no more AT&T than your local phone company is billing you for long distance charges because they appear on your local bill.
The way the phone system works is that any reputably phone company can bill any number in the entire world. The phone company in charge of said number puts that amount on their bill, and pays the billing company that amount. They have absolutely no idea if the charge is legitimate, or where it's made, or under what circumstances. You can call that stupid if you want, but it is the actual functioning of the phone system.
No matter the cause of the mess, AT&T is the *only* entity that can fix his bill, and if AT&T was screwed out of money because of it, they should contact the person that passed them the fraudulent bill, as well as contacting the FCC or anyone else that needs to get involved about the rogue tower operating in Miami.
AT&T cannot 'fix' his bill. All they can do is eat the charges, or refuse to pay.
Neither should the international carrier 'fix the bill'. What people seem to be missing is that the international did carry the call, which probably cost it a small fortune in satellite time. This wasn't their fault in any way.
What should have happened here is that he should have contacted the cruise ship for a refund. They made this mistake, they should pay for it. And he should possibly have included the FCC in this process.
Slashdot Mirror
I should have probably explained the difference between earth dust and moon dust.
Not that the dust is very different, but how it behaves is. Dust on the moon doesn't slow down, because of the lack of the atmosphere. That means any sort of landing is going to throw dust straight out in all directions, and that dust will be moving as fast as it started ten seconds later, when it hits buildings and even astronauts. Not good.
As long as we put some part of the moon between that landing, and the buildings, we should be fine. And it really shouldn't be hard to figure out how to use an existing geographic feature for that purpose.
Or, alternately, we could figure some sort of concrete and just pave the strip, but a) we don't know how to make concrete out of lunar materials, and b) it almost certainly would take water, which would be in tight supply.
You mean...building one out of lunar materials is easier than using a pre-fabricated one out of lunar materials?
That seems incorrect to me.
And the point of this wall is simply to ensure that dirt throw off by landings does not directly fly over and sandblast the buildings, it's not like it need to be some sort of special design. It just needs to be a few meters thick.
There's plenty of geographical features that could block dust, heck, there's probably one with a ready-made cut-through where part of the crater wall collapsed or got knocked out by another impact.
In fact, it doesn't need to be a 'wall' at all. It could simply be a height difference. Although then you need to haul things up and down, which is harder than simply walking around a wall.
Of course, in the end, on the moon, you want to build underground, but we're not at that point, and anyway you still need a door near the landing strip.
Why not use a crater wall? Put the landing strip on the outside, the base on the inside, and cut a tunnel? (And build a ramp over/around for the big stuff.)
Dude, I don't know what show you've been watching, but it wasn't Scrubs.
Scrubs is rarely about patients, almost never about their care, and when it is about their care most of the time it's about about them dying or being hard to deal with. Scrubs is, first and foremost, a show about doctors and their life, not medicine.
Seriously, there have been half a dozen 'patient dies, doctors blame themselves' episodes, a dozen 'patient is dying and no one can stop it' episodes, and maybe two 'Hey, we actually saved this guy because we're smart!' episodes. (One of the latter being an actual parody of House.)
They even had an episode where a bunch of bad luck and misdiagnoses appear to kill a patient, and J.D. rewinds time in his head and imagines what would have happened if all those crappy coincidences hadn't happened and everything had happened perfectly...and the patient still dies.
Often the episodes with dying patients will have the voiceover explicitly talk about how everyone expects doctors to walk in and magically save everyone, when in reality, doctors don't do anything of the sort. They fix problems they know how to fix, and try to make everyone else comfortable, and that even the best doctor in the world doesn't know everything and can result in you dying when you could have lived.
Considering how many people think that they can diagnose themselves, I can actually see a huge market for doctors who actually explain things. Which is sorta the halfway step to trying to figure things out yourself.
All the doctors around here prescribe antibiotics for colds. I actually went to one when I had bronchitis, and he prescribed me some, and I had to stop him and ask 'Are you doing this because you think I have a bacterial infection, or you are doing this because fools often demand antibiotics when they have viral infections? Because I'm not one of those fools, and I'd rather not pay for antibiotics to inanely fight a virus.'.
He stared at me for a second and laughed, and said, yes, he actually did suspect it was bacterial, for a reason that I've forgotten. And then he admitted that, yes, that if there was any chance it wasn't a virus, and the patient wanted it, he'd give them antibiotics.
I don't pretend to be a doctor, I can't diagnose myself beyond a few emergency things like 'This is a symptom of heart attack, I better call 911 now.' But I like to think I'm intelligence enough to understand what's wrong with me when a doctor figures it out and tells me. Likewise, I can deal with the idea that the doctor doesn't know 100% what's wrong with me, and just has a set of possibilities.
But placebos aren't ineffective. They are so surprising effective that we have, wait for it, an 'effect' named for that.
And, as someone else here pointed out, there actually are prescription placebos with no side effects, like Cebocap and Obecalp, which are actually sugar pills. (And right now someone who just read this is staring in shock at a pill bottle that they thought had medication in it.)
Right. The spiraling costs of health care in the US are due almost entirely to an industry that has set itself up between health care consumers and health care producers, and makes more money the less health care it transfers through itself.
Hey, dumbass, they're listening for (new) irregularities in your heartbeart, and for any sort of chest congestion. It's a basic 'is this person's heart or lungs about to kill them?' check.
I'm not a doctor, and even I know that.
You think that isn't a good use of 45 seconds, you go tell the people who suddenly kneel over because they have previously undetected heart problems.
There are legitimate arguments about the cost of various testing and if the money would be better spent elsewhere, but this is one of the few tests that is completely free, so that's a somewhat idiotic argument to make here.
The reason doctors do that test, and other free tests like blood pressure and reflexes check and pupil dilation, is that they are free tests they can do right there to see if there's some serious problem. They have better ways of testing for various things, but a free 'Is this person functioning within normal parameters' test cannot hurt and can pick up major problems. Again, for free.
I cannot stress 'free' enough. Not only in money but in time...no, it's not even wasting doctor's time...they need to observe patients during regular checkups, and might as well test them during it. People get uncomfortable when doctors just stare at them. And there's the placebo effect, if people think doctors think they're healthy, they are somewhat more healthy.
Anyway, most doctors aren't supposed to be scientists. They're diagnostic engineers. You don't fix broken things, or keep them running, with 'science'. Often, diagnostic engineers have a checklist of things they do, even if everything on that checklist isn't 100% applicable. It's a waste of time, and sometimes of money (Although not in this case.) but that doesn't make the field of medicine 'non-scientific', it makes most doctors not scientists.
Which almost no practitioner claims to be. Health care is scientific, using both statistics and scientific experiments to understand health. But it's off in labs and universities and experimental drug programs, not in some doctor giving you a checkup.
Any sort of insurance that is common enough to be the main gatekeeper to an industry will eventually destroy said industry.
Health insurance is the only sort of insurance that does that. They're large enough that they threaten to withdraw all their business from a hospital if the hospital doesn't play by their rules, so all hospitals have to take whatever crap the industry as a whole shoves out.
This is like a 'vertical industry', where one industry's output (health care) is consumed mostly by another industry (health insurance), not consumers. Except totally perverted in that the industry doesn't want to buy health care, that just costs them money, because they're not actually reselling health care, just the promise of it.
They make the same amount of income regardless of how much they pass along, so the less they pass along, the better. This has, quite predictably, destroyed both the health care industry and the people who actually wish to purchase health care. It's like if Walmart operated on 'whatever you can carry out the door is yours for free', and made their money by charging you insane prices for parking, so it was in their best interests to make the store as confusing and unusable as possible, so you'd stay there longer and walk out empty-handed. Good for Walmart, bad for people trying to buy stuff and people trying to sell them stuff!
The people would make an end-run around this entire mess and go directly to the health care, but the health insurance industry has, at this point, rigged the game so badly that health care without insurance is twice as much as it with insurance, because they've exerted pressure on hospitals to give them discounts, and this entire setup has additionally forced health care prices absurdly high in general.
As for other insurance, despite car and homeowner insurance existing, most car repairs and house construction are paid for by individuals. And life insurance, of course, isn't in front of an industry.
This is because very few doctors are scientists.
Scientist figure out rules, non-scientists try to use those rules. 10 million women getting pap smears who don't need them is a lot better than 10 million who do need them not getting them. (Or even 1 million.)
Calling it 'culture', as mysidia pointed out below, is a rather biased term. The term is 'best practices', and it's designed to err on the side of caution, especially WRT standard testing.
If there are a few more 'if' statements that need to be put in 'best practices', by all means, put them in, but stop acting like there's some sort of industry wide practice of over testing on everything. If anything, there's an industry-wide practice of too little testing, even if one or two of the things that commonly do get tested for are unneeded in certain circumstances.(1)
Ask various people who have had different type of cancers, and had doctors suspect it, but were unable to get a test that their insurance would pay for. People with cervical cancer are 'lucky' in that pap smears are cheap enough that insurance companies can't justify not paying for them...people with cancer that needs a biopsy to confirm are often sitting there with everyone suspecting it's cancer but no cheap way to prove it, and unable to afford an expensive way, so unable to get any treatment. (And, no, Dan Froomkin, you cannot get a cancer biopsy in an ER.)
(Although, as has been pointed out, women can get cervical cancer 'without a cervix', because there can still be cervix cells left hanging around. Although it's probably so unlikely as to not be worth testing for, just like breast cancer in men isn't really worth testing for, although it's possible.)
No, it's much more cost efficient to simply wait for customers to develop illnesses, and then drop them for bogus reasons.
Actually, the market is more regulated than it would be under universal, single payer, health care.
At least under that, there would be one set of rules about what would be treated and how, instead of constantly having to run each and every treatment by each and every insurance company.
Yes, it's so sad.
Nintendo had a choice. They could either continue the graphic arms race with Sony and MS, and attempt to capture the 20 million or so 'serious gamers' by adding yet another 20% incremental increase in graphics quality that cost $200...
Boy, what dumbasses for picking the second choice. They must cry themselves to sleep on their pillows stuffed with money.
Instead of whining about the Wii, how about you recognize it's not aimed at you 'serious gamers' who want eight bajillion FPS.
That's exactly what I said.
This method may result in better PS3 games in four or five years, whereas providing a 'crutch' to programmers might result in the process taking seven years.
However, for the first couple of years, it's going to result in high entry costs and worse looking games, and Sony has apparently forgotten it has competitors.
While they're doing this, MS is going to keep churning out easy-to-program-if-you-have-a-PC-port boxes, and Nintendo is going to keep churning out the same console they've had for eight years that everyone knows how to program for by now, along with a fun new input device.
The point is to not have some ideal game in a decade, because, in a decade, no one's going to be buying PS3s.
And, to top it off, I assert there's a point where graphics aren't really the things selling the game, and the entire console's industry focus on them exclusively has been harming them. As evidenced by the Wii's explosion, and DDR and Rock Star before them, there's an entire untapped market out there that doesn't want to sit pushing buttons, and doesn't give a flying fuck about real-time shaders and quad framebuffers.
The real question that Sony should ask themselves is if people are going to buy a 9 year-old console to play a cool game?
Or will they move over to MS's X-Box 720 or whatever and play the exact same game, along with a bunch of other games that came out at the same time as the 720 because, duh, it's easy to program for.
I mean, duh, the XBox itself is a counterexample of this. MS essentially walked into the marketplace because programming for the XBox was easy if the game had a Windows version. Ease of programming=more games and better games.
And Nintendo isn't giving a shit about 'utilizing hardware to the max', has essentially given up on building faster boxes, and has decided to build fun ones. (They have a point. Consoles really are fast enough to do essentially anything you want. Hell, my computer is fast enough to real-time near perfect 3D rendering.)
I have a feeling that Sony is trying to pull off a NES, where some of the best games for that came out years later, but has forgotten that a) There were very little competitors at the time, and b) A lot of that was the entire industry maturing.
(Before anyone think I'm being unfair, or if I'm just wrong about something, be aware I haven't had a console since the NES.)
Exactly, and this is why IT needs a responsive process where needed applications, can be installed via a simple request within a day or two. And even useful but not technically 'needed' applications like NotePad++ and other simple tools that most users wouldn't care about, but one guy really wants it.
Even mp3 players are okay, if you let them listen to music/radio at work, although it'd be a good idea to make them sign a statement that their mp3s will be legal, and they won't download or trade with coworkers any at work, or put them on shared drives, and that they understand all of them can be deleted by admin whim from their machine.
As long as it's not a security risk or legal-liability risk for the company, or something completely inappropriate for work like a game, install it. (p2p is both a security and legal-liability risks, and inappropriate use of the network resources. And, to top it off, it's hard to find a p2p network not covered in porn, which introduces other legal liabilities into the workplace.)
If they don't have that ability, if they can't get 'non-bad' software installed, there were be legit gripes, and people will take them up the chain of command, and you'll run the risk that people will become 'exempt' to the rules, and will become able to install anything they want because they 'need' to be...and then will happily install all sorts of crap.
No, just install the damn non-dangerous software people ask for. All too often companies claim software needs to be 'approved', but most of that is nonsense. Obviously commercial software needs correct licenses, but if someone wants to install a program like NotePad++ that isn't 'approved', a few minutes of reading about it and making sure it's not spyware infested and licensed freely should be able to get it past any hurdles. (I just picked that program because I have it installed.)
If you can counter each 'But I want install software on my computer!' request with 'If you'd tell us application you want to install, we'll get right on it. Should have it in by tomorrow.', the legit gripes will vanish, and people won't take their 'I want to run Limewire!' gripe to anyone.
Of course, all this falls apart if applications need to run as admin.
'blocks from' might have been a bit unclear. Although sane people might realize there's no such thing as 'sunlight from the moon', and I meant 'blocks all sunlight from reaching the moon', in the same way you'd say 'blocks the football player from the endzone'.
In a lunar eclipse the Moon is being obscured.
Um, no. The moon cannot be obscured from the earth. A lunar eclipse is when the earth blocks all sunlight from the moon.
A lunar eclipse and a solar eclipse are not the same thing with the sun and moon flipped around, as people, including slashdot editors, seem to think.
If things always have the same name regardless of where they are viewed,
Nice strawman. I didn't say 'things' did, I said that these things did. Or, to put it more clearly, extrapolating the names we use on earth for these phenomenon to other locations is pretty stupid, considering the names we use on earth are pretty stupid.
Wouldn't an eclipse where the moon blocks the sun be a, "Terran eclipse," regardless of where it's observed from? I mean, your system appears to be be, "That which receives less light is the eponym."
Well, yes, if we named things logically. We don't, or a 'solar eclipse' would be a 'Terran Eclipse' to start with. Even from earth.
Arguing based on the names is like arguing that 'Postmodernism' is, by definition, impossible. Well, yes, if by 'modern' in that we actually meant 'present day'. However, what that's talking about is the style of art called 'Modernism', and Postmodernism is the style that came immediately after it.
For your logic to work, the only time a solar eclipse would be possible if it the sun got between the moon and the Earth.
No, that would be true if I was, in fact, asserting exactly the opposite of what I was asserting, that the names were logically related to what they were describing. They clearly aren't, hence the inability to change them around based on POV. There are no historical terms for describing things from the POV of someone on the moon, for obvious reasons.
Just because something sounds like a scientific term doesn't mean we can just randomly use it as one, and 'solar eclipse' vs 'lunar eclipse' are not actually describing the same phenomenon with the sun and moon switched around. We don't actually have any term to describe 'the earth blocking your location from the sun' except 'night'.
This isn't a solar eclipse, this is a lunar eclipse.
That's what it's called when the earth blocks the sunlight hitting the moon, which is what happened here.
A solar eclipse is when the moon blocks the sunlight hitting the earth. (And would appear, from the moon, as a dark spot moving across the face of the earth.)
Viewing it from the other place doesn't change the name of it. The names are not relative, they're legacy names that don't mean anything. (Otherwise a solar eclipse would be called an 'earth eclipse' or something.)
Well, with the actor's guild, the minimum wage is due to the fact that there are literally tens of thousands of lower-end actors competing for the same roles. Some of them very hungry, some of them rather delusional that the next role will be their big break. Thus if there wasn't a acting minimum wage given for a non-extra role, and a slightly higher one for a speaking role, (This is called 'scale'.), actors would underbid each other down to state minimum wage. Or, hell, for free.
Talking about 'reasonable' is not relevant. Guilds and unions are not 'reasonable', they are groups of people in the same industry who work together to force their employers to do something. It's certainly reasonable for them.
In industries where there are identically jobs requires essentially the same skill and same work, it makes sense to set the wage per-job and per-experience and all sorts of things via unions.
In industries where that is not true, a guild does a lot less, but it still does things like protecting people starting out in the industry. Screen actors got ripped off badly by studios for the first 60 years of their existence. There are reruns on TV Land that people still watch that the actors don't make a penny from. (Neither do the writer, or the director, or anyone except the studio.)
I don't know how much the various actors guilds actually require actors get paid in residues now, but what they don't require, they offer actors information about what 'fair' deals are, and even write or at least examine and approve standard contracts. (Simply educating people to take a percentage of the gross instead of the net helps a lot.)
Photographers don't have a useful guild not because it wouldn't make sense for them, but because not enough of them work for organizations with a bunch of photographers. Many of them aren't working for anyone at all...they're contractual hires by random people.
And I'm not aware of any guild that operates the way you think a photography guild would operate, by setting a minimum price on sold goods.
In fact, that would probably be a violation of anti-trust laws. Unions are exempt when negotiating wages, not prices. A bunch of small business owners who work for themselves, can't negotiating price fixing, and make it legal by calling it a 'union'.
The bar for criminal copyright violation is quite low, for better or worse.
Um, did you bother to read that cite? Did you follow through to 506? Ironically, you just disproved your own point and even what I said about 'mostly'.
Criminal penalties only apply for copyright if, and I quote, it is 'a computer program, a musical work, a motion picture or other audiovisual work, or a sound recording'.
All those things are very well defined, and a password is none of them. (And before you argue it is one of them, actually cite the definition first, or I'll ignore it. You don't get to pretend you know what those things are defined as, they are very explicitly defined in copyright law.)
I was under the mistaken impression criminal penalties could apply to written works, which is all anyone could argue a password is. They cannot. Criminal penalties cannot apply here.
If they weren't, they could never be used. They're stored in the computers that they are used to govern.
As pretty much everyone who's worked with computers at all knows, this is simply factually wrong. Passwords are not stored in computers. A hash of the password is stored.
If merely storing something in "encrypted/hashed/obfuscated" etc. form means it is not actually copied or stored, what a great loophole in copyright you've found! Woohoo! Perhaps the same defense will work with mp3s?
Yes, if you only record a hash of music instead of the actual music, you have not produced a copyrightable piece of music. (This is a bit moot as you don't have a copy of said music anyway, so it'd be a bit hard stopping people from copying something that doesn't exist.)
This isn't the same as saying that making a hash of an mp3 and trading it isn't a copyright violation...although it actually isn't. If you can't turn it back into music, it does not count as a 'copy'. (You , of course, are about to argue that 'hashes' can somehow be turned back into music, because you are a moron and don't understand what a 'hash' is.)
However, even if the original copy is the copy in the computer, he still didn't have a copy and can't be forced to turn it over, moron.
I swear to God, you have produced the most fucking stupid legal theory that ever existed. Even if you're 100% right about passwords being copyrighted, you're still completely wrong as he clearly didn't make a copy, and hence cannot be in violation of copyright. (You're about to argue that the copy 'in his head' counts, but a) no, remembering stuff really isn't a violation of copyright, but as you're a moron who doesn't understand copyright, I point to b) he made that 'copy' as part of his job in a presumable legal manner.)
Yeah, sometimes 'unions' end up in places that 'guilds' should be.
In the modern world, those terms are often interchangeable, but guilds aren't there to set prices except at the lowest rung of the ladder. For example, the Actors Guilds set 'scale', below which you can't hire an actor, but they don't have any caps on the top.
A barber's guild, something to represent them to the outside world and ensure that there are minimum standards (For example, that people actually know how to cut hair.) and minimum prices (So that employees aren't pay minimum wage to cut five people's hair, at 10 dollars each, an hour.) makes sense. A barber's union does not.
AT&T really should have refused to budge, or sued the cruise ship on behave of him. Neither AT&T or the international carrier should have to pay. They both did exactly what they were supposed to do, operating both legally and morally. AT&T forwarded a bill like it's supposed to do as a telephone company, and the international carrier carried a call at exactly the prices it said it would, and sent the correct bill to the operator of a telephone number.
Of course, the problem is that total morons, a lot of slashdot readers included, will assume AT&T are the villains, and hence bad PR.
A different subset, who think they are smarter, assume the international carrier is the villain, especially considering how they have a reputation for overcharge, although they don't really. Yes, there's a profit, but, OTOH, the equipment is expensive, live tracking of satellites and all and the rented bandwidth on multiple satellites is expensive. And, ironically, very few people actually use it because it's so expensive, which makes it even harder to recoup fixed costs.
It obviously makes a profit, but they're not rolling in money.
Neither of them could have done anything different, and the cruise ship is entirely at fault.
So, the person that sent the bill initially (the international carrier) isn't responsible when their system bills someone in the US for international calls when it is quite likely that their tower was operating illegally at the time?
I guess the international carrier is just supposed to magically know where the cruise ship with a satellite dish aimed at their satellite is located?
If they just "sell the service" to the cruise ships, the who turns it on and off? The cruise director? Then it isn't provided by the carrier, but by the cruise ship.
Um, duh. Are you under the misconception that international carriers would have someone physically on the ship? That seems like a rather extreme use of resources.
No. They've provided a product and service to the cruise ship...a cell 'tower' they probably install, and a sat uplink they also install. And provide a satellite for the uplink to aim at. This service is only legal to operate in international waters, and I'm certainly they explain this to the cruise ship and demonstrate where the on/off switch is.
But in any case, what happened here is someone was hijacked by a rogue tower and billed by AT&T for usage he incurred while in an area covered by AT&T.
No. What happened is that someone was hijacked by a rogue tower and billed by an international carrier for usage he incurred that AT&T has no idea of where it happened.
Pretending it is AT&T is dishonest. It was no more AT&T than your local phone company is billing you for long distance charges because they appear on your local bill.
The way the phone system works is that any reputably phone company can bill any number in the entire world. The phone company in charge of said number puts that amount on their bill, and pays the billing company that amount. They have absolutely no idea if the charge is legitimate, or where it's made, or under what circumstances. You can call that stupid if you want, but it is the actual functioning of the phone system.
No matter the cause of the mess, AT&T is the *only* entity that can fix his bill, and if AT&T was screwed out of money because of it, they should contact the person that passed them the fraudulent bill, as well as contacting the FCC or anyone else that needs to get involved about the rogue tower operating in Miami.
AT&T cannot 'fix' his bill. All they can do is eat the charges, or refuse to pay.
Neither should the international carrier 'fix the bill'. What people seem to be missing is that the international did carry the call, which probably cost it a small fortune in satellite time. This wasn't their fault in any way.
What should have happened here is that he should have contacted the cruise ship for a refund. They made this mistake, they should pay for it. And he should possibly have included the FCC in this process.