The reader's lack of education is not the author's fault.
My opinion is that the problem of "legalese" stems not from obtuse writing, but rather from the lack of adequate reading comprehension skills in today's society. As printed language has become more common, literature has followed the common grammar into a more casual (but imprecise) tone. Schools, in appealing to modern culture, require less reading of older works in favor of modern literature. Where once a student would read The Canterbury Tales or Moby Dick, they now read Harry Potter or Twilight. While modern literature still explores the same questions and themes as the antique works (therefore being valid for a literature class), the language uses common connotations, so the imprecision goes unnoticed.
As a result, English (and indeed, many others) continues its transformation into a common tongue of simplicity, while documents written in a precise form with a wider vocabulary are regarded as being a different language altogether, that many now call Legalese.
"No other personal information is collected" or other similar wordings will do nicely. If there's something that you know your app will never try to do, it can be listed as a reassuring gesture to the user.
Why didn't the AG attach a sample? Because it's a silly idea.
This is a legal document, probably differing for every case, and the point in requiring it is to make developers take a hard look at what information they access and how they use it. Rubber-stamping a boilerplate lets developers say they have a privacy policy, but it doesn't actually encourage any increase in privacy until somebody's sued over it. Once that happens, there will be a few developers who think about privacy, but most won't even know the case happened.
Like most legal documents, you usually don't actually need a lawyer to write it. You may need a lawyer to make it bulletproof against other lawyers, but any statement is enough. You could drop in a note saying "This app doesn't intentionally collect any personally-identifiable information, and doesn't contact external services" and probably satisfy the needs of the law, assuming it's accurate. In the event of a lawsuit, though, that statement would cause a little trouble (and open up room for opposing lawyers to argue), because it doesn't define "personally-identifiable" or "external" adequately. Does a game ask for a name for a high-score list? Does it send usage reports or download updates from a developer's server?
A lawyer could enumerate all the things the app does and doesn't do, in absolutely clear language, so there's no question where users' data goes, but for many apps (especially for those made without the intent of profit) that's unnecessary. Developers should already know how their program works, so they should be able to define one aspect of it.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I've had my share of dealings with them.
That's not the only danger. That asteroid could be carrying mutagenic microbes from space, which could cause abnormal growth among local sea life, which could make all the fish and crustaceans into biological bombs, filled with microscopic cysts of nerve gas that will explode when ruptured, turning several thousand regional seafood restaurants into diners of death, crippling patrons and releasing airborne poisons into the jet stream to encircle the Earth with a toxic halo literally raining morbidity down on half the planet.
Can't be... Microsoft doesn't use the "Metro" name anymore. All salesmen are supposed to use the new names for the various components. Shills are ethical and always follow the rules, right?
What I hope is that Valve expects this, and is taking a chance at martyrdom for the greater good of gamers.
While forking and customization is the heart and soul of Linux, the fragmentation is also its weakness. With a target market of "only people who think like I do", each new standard sees only minimal adoption and leads to having whole branches of inheritance that are incompatible with each other. Consider, for example, the schism between RPM and dpkg packages. Effectively, a new project must be packaged twice, placing extra burden on the developer, or as (one format and) source, placing the extra burden on (some) users.
What I see as being immensely useful to Linux overall is having a major altruistic push toward compatibility, and Valve appears to be positioning itself to help. Tongue-in-cheek, I'll call it the One True Platform. Certainly not the only option, but rather a lofty goal of certain compatibility standards to be met. Rather than having to support Linux in general, with the myriad variations, a developer can just offer support for "Steam on Linux", work through Steam (and, conveniently/profitably, Valve's engines) as a compatibility layer, and trust that everything will be fine.
In large part, this process has already been begun by Ubuntu making a simple distro that usually just works (in some fashion), so it can be the baseline recommendation for users, reducing the burden on new users. With Steam as a baseline for game development, the burden on developers is also reduced. All together, that makes a single market for hardware vendors to target, with a fairly low support burden, hopefully leading to more cooperation from vendors in the long run.
It's a tricky game for Valve, with only a few long-shot chances at major profits, but if it works, the benefit to the Linux community is enormous. In the mean time, Valve gets to play the knight in shining armor, saving FOSS-loving gamers from the tyranny of Microsoft, which also distracts from Steam's inherent nature as DRM.
What you are implying is that they would be ok with any court or single person in congress having the power of their own persuasion and personal conviction to arbitrarily make a ruling because of his own interpretation. Pretty soon every judge has their own interpretation and as you might imagine this can lead to overwhelming chaos.
And that's exactly right. I don't see the problem here. I do see your misunderstanding, though.
The founders saw that no single set of laws could apply actual justice to every case. Mitigating circumstances and changing technologies had caused "overwhelming chaos" even 200 years ago. When they laid out the framework for the American government, they separated interpretation from legislation intentionally, so the courts could decide how (or if) the slowly-changing laws could apply to each case. Ideally, every case would follow a completely independent interpretation of the rules. For efficiency, though, American courts often follow precedent if the judges feel the circumstances haven't significantly changed since the precedent was set.
Every court can have their own opinion, and they very often do. Each state, county, and municipality can have their own interpretations of the law, which should coincide with the community's collective morality. When there's a significant disagreement, the case can be taken to a higher court for a more authoritative judgement, ultimately even arriving at the Supreme Court Of The United States, whose interpretations can override everything else in the nation.
Despite today's global culture, it is important to remember that humans only naturally compare their behavior to those physically around them. Local groups develop their own morality, and their local laws and customs reflect that. Why should their courts reflect an arbitrary morality from some other group a thousand miles away? We may as well declare tomorrow that America is under strict Muslim rule, and all courts must refer to the Qu'ran for legal guidance.
If you sell it, is it right to sell it at the German price you purchased it for (plus some markup for shipping), or the price that competing American manufacturers sell it for?
Ask yourself: if someone got a copy of all of your secrets, including your financial records and (lack of) sexual partners, maybe some stuff you'd rather bury for a century or two, and published it, would you be OK with that?
Many governments have "Freedom of information" laws which specifically grant access to government information so they do recognize that information should be free. However, there is always a battle about where to draw the line with governments wanting to be more restrictive and "the people" wanting more information.
Here's a crazy idea... how about governments are only allowed to bury information for 30 or 40 years? In terms of political climate, that's about equal to the two generations that seem reasonable for personal privacy. By that time, any security hazards posed by the information's release would long since have passed, and technology would even progress far enough to make classified military technology obsolete. Anybody who was involved in a particular classified project wouldn't be in power any more anyway, so probably doesn't care.
The analogy between personal privacy and governmental secrecy stems from the common fact that information makes future discussion difficult. My boss doesn't need to know how much I donate to my church when I ask for a raise, and foreign nations don't need to know the range of our latest fighter jet when we talk about disarming nukes.
By any chance, was that money made by buying the stock, then posting messages online about it to generate interest and raise prices, then selling the stock at the new higher price?
To be fair, they will always have a market. It'll just be an extremely limited market of companies whose people need to be mobile and not using phones, yet still able to send and receive urgent messages. One example I know of offhand is Disney's theme parks, where supervisors carry Blackberry devices only for emergency emails while they're out in public. The supervisors can't waste time playing games, yet they can still call 911 and stay up-to-date on the status of the resort. The Blackberry devices look professional and do exactly what's needed, and nothing more.
I don't see any situations where Anonymous' action result in a more positive outcome than would have come about through other choices.
The folks who identify themselves as Anonymous don't care. If they cut off income for thousands of merchants just to send a message to MasterCard, they call it a victory.
The actions of Anonymous aren't based in righteous concern for society. Rather, they're displays of overwhelming power trumping society's established systems, with a thin veneer of altruism to stave off any guilt.
Anonymous members aren't educated in ethics. They don't have any consequences for destroying someone's life. Anonymous enjoys the power of crowdsourced intelligence and abilities, without the responsibility that comes from actually caring for everyone fairly. An appropriate analogy is a newly-empowered dictator. He enjoys the support of the people because he's popular, and now he can kill anyone he wants for the good of the country.
Mentors are the most significant educational source. Match wits with the kid. Say "look what I can do, and here's how I did it". Then challenge the kid to do something similar himself. Build from "Hello, world" to a text adventure, or an animation, or a video game, or whatever else he shows some talent in. First just spend time with the kid, and let the programming interest grow naturally. If it doesn't, don't force it.
The problem is people using statistics to lie. I'm helping fix that. There's another problem of having harmful side effects, but I'm not involved with that problem any more.
If so many people died, and those drugs could affect their health, it means drugs could have deteriorated health at most that much. The system is intentionally designed to collect every possible side effect incident, so doctors know what to look out for. It is not designed to tell doctors "this is exactly how bad this drug is" (that is, in fact, one goal of the project I used to work on).
As someone else mentioned, many of the people whose deaths are recorded as being related to drugs are already in a hospital to begin with. There is no sure-fire way to know whether a particular drug caused their death, or simply didn't do enough to keep them alive.
Yes, we would rather have inflated numbers, but only with the full knowledge that those numbers are inflated, and how they're inflated. As an example of how these numbers should be quoted, look at their source. Refer to the FAERS data. Note the description right up top:
Documenting one or more of these outcomes in a report does not necessarily mean that the suspect product(s) named in the report was the cause of these outcomes.
Sadly, I don't have one. I wrote the software that would be used for peer-reviewed research, but I was given other tasks once we verified that one particular piece worked.
My method was basically to find the number of deaths noted to be related to a drug, then find the number of deaths related to a drug and related to an allergic reaction. Since this was dealing with medical records, we had intentional inaccuracy on the numbers of about 2.5% (as I recall). Both numbers were the same (as far as the program showed me, and it wouldn't have been legal for me to bypass the privacy control).
This was one of many tests to verify that our boolean logic on searches worked, which were themselves following a method of "take one set, add a condition, and expect the number to go up or down proportionally".
Or we could deploy dozens of drones constantly recording, so that when someone's caught, the police have evidence of exactly how many times they've done it before, and the sentences can reflect that accurately.
If "sick" is defined as "taking at least one prescription medication in the past month", then yes. That number includes epilepsy treatments, botox injections, and acne medication.
Now, the numbers cannot say anything about the reason for the prescriptions. America may very well be a nation of hypochondriacs, encouraged by the advertisements of a massive pharmaceutical industry. On the other hand, America may be leading at the cutting edge of medical availability, where a majority of the population has access to treatments for diseases and conditions that others have to live through or die from. I'm inclined to believe it's a mixture of both,
People are upset by them because they are designed to be constantly in the air.
So we're upset by clouds too, right? And birds are abominable?
What is so upsetting about something being in the air? Why does something being in the air all the time upset you? I propose that the constant disruption to your illusion of privacy is offensive, and frustrating because no other human has to be similarly offended.
If they were used for the same purposes as police helicopters you would only need 1 or 2. You only need more if you intend on having them constantly deployed.
This assumes that helicopters are currently used for their full purpose. The reality is that they're too expensive to fly as often as needed, and the police departments can't justify spending the money on another helicopter when there's more pressing needs, like bulletproof vests.
Knowing our local police that means they'll start using them to cite traffic violations like speeding, which most Americans don't consider a crime.
[citation needed]
Crime is defined by law, not public opinion. Laws should be determined by what's best for the people in general, not what the mindless morons of the public at large think they want.
In Virginia they still haven't answered whether or not the drones will be armed. There are serious implications if they are.
Are these implications any more serious than having every traffic cop, meter-reader, and amusement park security guard armed? Those weapons are tolerated because the officer who carries it will have to have a good reason to ever shoot someone. An armed drone is no different. If it ever shoots someone, the operator has to have a very good reason.
But either way, constantly being watched by flying vehicles is an invasion of privacy. I have a reasonable expectation that if I go out for a drive, walk, to dinner etc, that the government is not spying on me constantly.
What's inherently wrong with the government spying on you constantly? Maybe if the government were spying on me constantly, they'd know that yes, I really did move last year, so my tax credit (with accompanying change-of-address form) is valid.
What is the end game? To gather lots of small things together to make it seem like I did a crime?
There is no end game. There is only progress toward a goal that is known to be unattainable. That goal is to have no crime, and all crimes that do happen are solved. Recording everything allows investigators to go back after a crime and track the motion of the people involved. If a shooting victim ate lunch with you an hour before getting shot, that makes you a possible source for information (and yes, suspicion too).
There is no reason to be running drones constantly. Crime rates are down across the country.
So we should fire all police, too? And since your house isn't currently on fire, we shouldn't have firefighters, either? Since the invention of the steam locomotive, travel is much faster, so we don't need to work on those silly horseless carriages.
However, the title of the JAMA article is "Is US Health Really the Best in the World?", and it's available here, though apart from the statement (accompanied by another citation that I'm not ambitious enough to track down) of the number of deaths, it says little else relevant to this story.
However, I used to work with those adverse effect records, and citing them directly is incredibly misleading. The 106,000 deaths is only a tiny percentage (0.06%) of the 170,000,000 Americans on prescription medications (rough mental estimate of 48%), and it's inflated. The way adverse effects are recorded, any drug that could possibly be the cause of death is recorded as having definitely caused it. If an epilepsy drug causes a side effect, and the patient takes acetaminophen for it but overdoses and dies, the epilepsy drug is considered to be at fault, because the death was a result of its adverse effect.
The reason for this odd system of inflated numbers is that its purpose. The system was designed to inform doctors and researchers of what could happen as a result of a drug's use, including any previously-unknown interactions. By recording that an epilepsy drug, when taken with acetaminophen, could cause overdose symptoms, researchers could be pointed to an interaction between the two medications.
For direct deaths, the percentage (original research, no source) is closer to 0.001%, and the majority of these (to the point where I couldn't really differentiate "all") were where the prescription triggered an allergic reaction that wasn't already known (or at least recorded in the doctors' notes).
IANADoctor, but my understanding is that those cures aren't cures, either.
Exercises can help ED a little, but can't repair the damage of time. Valves get weaker and leak more, so to even have enough blood to keep the corpus cavernosum filled, the pressure in the rest of the body would have to be raised to dangerous levels. Cholesterol can be cut out of the diet, but the blood won't be back to normal for decades, and in that time the patient faces much higher risks from having high cholesterol.
Pills are just part of the picture. A competent doctor will urge patients to exercise and eat better for the long term, and offer the pills for the short term. Of course, there's few companies that have any money to spend on advertising diet and exercise, so you don't see any ads for that.
For the same reason people complain about GPS tracking on cars: they want to punish someone else for their perceived damage.
People have some expectation of privacy in everything they do, with thresholds varying from "I don't want anyone to know anything about me" to "just don't put anything inside me except dinner". Note that this expectation is completely unrelated to how private a particular situation really is - a big open window in full view of the street isn't really reasonably private, but people still complain if someone looks in.
When someone's expectation of privacy is broken, they get offended, and like all offended people with over-inflated senses of entitlement, they want someone else to be just as offended as they are, if not more. If someone's going to learn what grocery store they shop at, it had better involve a person standing on the sidewalk for hours handing out surveys. If the police are going to watch their movements, it should involve an officer spending their whole day in a car with a logbook, rather than ten minutes with a computer. If their neighborhood is going to be subject to aerial recording, it should cost an exorbitant amount to hire a skilled helicopter pilot, ground crew, and airport space.
This isn't about being actually worse or even being more frequent. It's about Americans being offended and not having a built-in mechanism to force someone else to share in their frustration.
By some definitions, that alone means these automated systems are unjust. After all "justice" is simply a feeling that my pain has returned to whomever caused it (in a nebulous, unquantifiable way).
You must realize, Microsoft has a long tradition of maintaining an internal tug-of-war, led by aimless management, and causing several UI redesigns. They're the perfect choice to synergize with Nokia's corporate environment to leverage their assets for market innovation!
Slashdot Mirror
The reader's lack of education is not the author's fault.
My opinion is that the problem of "legalese" stems not from obtuse writing, but rather from the lack of adequate reading comprehension skills in today's society. As printed language has become more common, literature has followed the common grammar into a more casual (but imprecise) tone. Schools, in appealing to modern culture, require less reading of older works in favor of modern literature. Where once a student would read The Canterbury Tales or Moby Dick, they now read Harry Potter or Twilight. While modern literature still explores the same questions and themes as the antique works (therefore being valid for a literature class), the language uses common connotations, so the imprecision goes unnoticed.
As a result, English (and indeed, many others) continues its transformation into a common tongue of simplicity, while documents written in a precise form with a wider vocabulary are regarded as being a different language altogether, that many now call Legalese.
"No other personal information is collected" or other similar wordings will do nicely. If there's something that you know your app will never try to do, it can be listed as a reassuring gesture to the user.
By the way, the link in your signature is broken.
Why didn't the AG attach a sample? Because it's a silly idea.
This is a legal document, probably differing for every case, and the point in requiring it is to make developers take a hard look at what information they access and how they use it. Rubber-stamping a boilerplate lets developers say they have a privacy policy, but it doesn't actually encourage any increase in privacy until somebody's sued over it. Once that happens, there will be a few developers who think about privacy, but most won't even know the case happened.
Like most legal documents, you usually don't actually need a lawyer to write it. You may need a lawyer to make it bulletproof against other lawyers, but any statement is enough. You could drop in a note saying "This app doesn't intentionally collect any personally-identifiable information, and doesn't contact external services" and probably satisfy the needs of the law, assuming it's accurate. In the event of a lawsuit, though, that statement would cause a little trouble (and open up room for opposing lawyers to argue), because it doesn't define "personally-identifiable" or "external" adequately. Does a game ask for a name for a high-score list? Does it send usage reports or download updates from a developer's server?
A lawyer could enumerate all the things the app does and doesn't do, in absolutely clear language, so there's no question where users' data goes, but for many apps (especially for those made without the intent of profit) that's unnecessary. Developers should already know how their program works, so they should be able to define one aspect of it.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I've had my share of dealings with them.
You know, bored_engineer, that's the kind of answer I'd expect from someone with a strong mathematics background and a lot of spare time.
That's not the only danger. That asteroid could be carrying mutagenic microbes from space, which could cause abnormal growth among local sea life, which could make all the fish and crustaceans into biological bombs, filled with microscopic cysts of nerve gas that will explode when ruptured, turning several thousand regional seafood restaurants into diners of death, crippling patrons and releasing airborne poisons into the jet stream to encircle the Earth with a toxic halo literally raining morbidity down on half the planet.
If you're gonna fearmonger, go big or go home.
...and have some imagination, please.
Can't be... Microsoft doesn't use the "Metro" name anymore. All salesmen are supposed to use the new names for the various components. Shills are ethical and always follow the rules, right?
What I hope is that Valve expects this, and is taking a chance at martyrdom for the greater good of gamers.
While forking and customization is the heart and soul of Linux, the fragmentation is also its weakness. With a target market of "only people who think like I do", each new standard sees only minimal adoption and leads to having whole branches of inheritance that are incompatible with each other. Consider, for example, the schism between RPM and dpkg packages. Effectively, a new project must be packaged twice, placing extra burden on the developer, or as (one format and) source, placing the extra burden on (some) users.
What I see as being immensely useful to Linux overall is having a major altruistic push toward compatibility, and Valve appears to be positioning itself to help. Tongue-in-cheek, I'll call it the One True Platform. Certainly not the only option, but rather a lofty goal of certain compatibility standards to be met. Rather than having to support Linux in general, with the myriad variations, a developer can just offer support for "Steam on Linux", work through Steam (and, conveniently/profitably, Valve's engines) as a compatibility layer, and trust that everything will be fine.
In large part, this process has already been begun by Ubuntu making a simple distro that usually just works (in some fashion), so it can be the baseline recommendation for users, reducing the burden on new users. With Steam as a baseline for game development, the burden on developers is also reduced. All together, that makes a single market for hardware vendors to target, with a fairly low support burden, hopefully leading to more cooperation from vendors in the long run.
It's a tricky game for Valve, with only a few long-shot chances at major profits, but if it works, the benefit to the Linux community is enormous. In the mean time, Valve gets to play the knight in shining armor, saving FOSS-loving gamers from the tyranny of Microsoft, which also distracts from Steam's inherent nature as DRM.
What you are implying is that they would be ok with any court or single person in congress having the power of their own persuasion and personal conviction to arbitrarily make a ruling because of his own interpretation. Pretty soon every judge has their own interpretation and as you might imagine this can lead to overwhelming chaos.
And that's exactly right. I don't see the problem here. I do see your misunderstanding, though.
The founders saw that no single set of laws could apply actual justice to every case. Mitigating circumstances and changing technologies had caused "overwhelming chaos" even 200 years ago. When they laid out the framework for the American government, they separated interpretation from legislation intentionally, so the courts could decide how (or if) the slowly-changing laws could apply to each case. Ideally, every case would follow a completely independent interpretation of the rules. For efficiency, though, American courts often follow precedent if the judges feel the circumstances haven't significantly changed since the precedent was set.
Every court can have their own opinion, and they very often do. Each state, county, and municipality can have their own interpretations of the law, which should coincide with the community's collective morality. When there's a significant disagreement, the case can be taken to a higher court for a more authoritative judgement, ultimately even arriving at the Supreme Court Of The United States, whose interpretations can override everything else in the nation.
Despite today's global culture, it is important to remember that humans only naturally compare their behavior to those physically around them. Local groups develop their own morality, and their local laws and customs reflect that. Why should their courts reflect an arbitrary morality from some other group a thousand miles away? We may as well declare tomorrow that America is under strict Muslim rule, and all courts must refer to the Qu'ran for legal guidance.
...they'll probably say that it's not their job to decide whether the law is stupid or unjust.
And it isn't. The legislature makes the law, and the courts just figure out how it applies to each case.
If you sell it, is it right to sell it at the German price you purchased it for (plus some markup for shipping), or the price that competing American manufacturers sell it for?
Ask yourself: if someone got a copy of all of your secrets, including your financial records and (lack of) sexual partners, maybe some stuff you'd rather bury for a century or two, and published it, would you be OK with that?
Many governments have "Freedom of information" laws which specifically grant access to government information so they do recognize that information should be free. However, there is always a battle about where to draw the line with governments wanting to be more restrictive and "the people" wanting more information.
Here's a crazy idea... how about governments are only allowed to bury information for 30 or 40 years? In terms of political climate, that's about equal to the two generations that seem reasonable for personal privacy. By that time, any security hazards posed by the information's release would long since have passed, and technology would even progress far enough to make classified military technology obsolete. Anybody who was involved in a particular classified project wouldn't be in power any more anyway, so probably doesn't care.
The analogy between personal privacy and governmental secrecy stems from the common fact that information makes future discussion difficult. My boss doesn't need to know how much I donate to my church when I ask for a raise, and foreign nations don't need to know the range of our latest fighter jet when we talk about disarming nukes.
I made a bunch of $$$$ last year with this one.
By any chance, was that money made by buying the stock, then posting messages online about it to generate interest and raise prices, then selling the stock at the new higher price?
To be fair, they will always have a market. It'll just be an extremely limited market of companies whose people need to be mobile and not using phones, yet still able to send and receive urgent messages. One example I know of offhand is Disney's theme parks, where supervisors carry Blackberry devices only for emergency emails while they're out in public. The supervisors can't waste time playing games, yet they can still call 911 and stay up-to-date on the status of the resort. The Blackberry devices look professional and do exactly what's needed, and nothing more.
...But my boss tells me that the cloud is fantastic, and saves everybody so much time and effort, and we never have to worry about things breaking!
I don't see any situations where Anonymous' action result in a more positive outcome than would have come about through other choices.
The folks who identify themselves as Anonymous don't care. If they cut off income for thousands of merchants just to send a message to MasterCard, they call it a victory.
The actions of Anonymous aren't based in righteous concern for society. Rather, they're displays of overwhelming power trumping society's established systems, with a thin veneer of altruism to stave off any guilt.
Anonymous members aren't educated in ethics. They don't have any consequences for destroying someone's life. Anonymous enjoys the power of crowdsourced intelligence and abilities, without the responsibility that comes from actually caring for everyone fairly. An appropriate analogy is a newly-empowered dictator. He enjoys the support of the people because he's popular, and now he can kill anyone he wants for the good of the country.
Mentors are the most significant educational source. Match wits with the kid. Say "look what I can do, and here's how I did it". Then challenge the kid to do something similar himself. Build from "Hello, world" to a text adventure, or an animation, or a video game, or whatever else he shows some talent in. First just spend time with the kid, and let the programming interest grow naturally. If it doesn't, don't force it.
The problem is people using statistics to lie. I'm helping fix that. There's another problem of having harmful side effects, but I'm not involved with that problem any more.
If so many people died, and those drugs could affect their health, it means drugs could have deteriorated health at most that much. The system is intentionally designed to collect every possible side effect incident, so doctors know what to look out for. It is not designed to tell doctors "this is exactly how bad this drug is" (that is, in fact, one goal of the project I used to work on).
As someone else mentioned, many of the people whose deaths are recorded as being related to drugs are already in a hospital to begin with. There is no sure-fire way to know whether a particular drug caused their death, or simply didn't do enough to keep them alive.
Yes, we would rather have inflated numbers, but only with the full knowledge that those numbers are inflated, and how they're inflated. As an example of how these numbers should be quoted, look at their source. Refer to the FAERS data. Note the description right up top:
Documenting one or more of these outcomes in a report does not necessarily mean that the suspect product(s) named in the report was the cause of these outcomes.
Sadly, I don't have one. I wrote the software that would be used for peer-reviewed research, but I was given other tasks once we verified that one particular piece worked.
My method was basically to find the number of deaths noted to be related to a drug, then find the number of deaths related to a drug and related to an allergic reaction. Since this was dealing with medical records, we had intentional inaccuracy on the numbers of about 2.5% (as I recall). Both numbers were the same (as far as the program showed me, and it wouldn't have been legal for me to bypass the privacy control).
This was one of many tests to verify that our boolean logic on searches worked, which were themselves following a method of "take one set, add a condition, and expect the number to go up or down proportionally".
Or we could deploy dozens of drones constantly recording, so that when someone's caught, the police have evidence of exactly how many times they've done it before, and the sentences can reflect that accurately.
If "sick" is defined as "taking at least one prescription medication in the past month", then yes. That number includes epilepsy treatments, botox injections, and acne medication.
Now, the numbers cannot say anything about the reason for the prescriptions. America may very well be a nation of hypochondriacs, encouraged by the advertisements of a massive pharmaceutical industry. On the other hand, America may be leading at the cutting edge of medical availability, where a majority of the population has access to treatments for diseases and conditions that others have to live through or die from. I'm inclined to believe it's a mixture of both,
That's stupid.
Fantastic rebuttal.
People are upset by them because they are designed to be constantly in the air.
So we're upset by clouds too, right? And birds are abominable?
What is so upsetting about something being in the air? Why does something being in the air all the time upset you? I propose that the constant disruption to your illusion of privacy is offensive, and frustrating because no other human has to be similarly offended.
If they were used for the same purposes as police helicopters you would only need 1 or 2. You only need more if you intend on having them constantly deployed.
This assumes that helicopters are currently used for their full purpose. The reality is that they're too expensive to fly as often as needed, and the police departments can't justify spending the money on another helicopter when there's more pressing needs, like bulletproof vests.
Knowing our local police that means they'll start using them to cite traffic violations like speeding, which most Americans don't consider a crime.
[citation needed]
Crime is defined by law, not public opinion. Laws should be determined by what's best for the people in general, not what the mindless morons of the public at large think they want.
In Virginia they still haven't answered whether or not the drones will be armed. There are serious implications if they are.
Are these implications any more serious than having every traffic cop, meter-reader, and amusement park security guard armed? Those weapons are tolerated because the officer who carries it will have to have a good reason to ever shoot someone. An armed drone is no different. If it ever shoots someone, the operator has to have a very good reason.
But either way, constantly being watched by flying vehicles is an invasion of privacy. I have a reasonable expectation that if I go out for a drive, walk, to dinner etc, that the government is not spying on me constantly.
What's inherently wrong with the government spying on you constantly? Maybe if the government were spying on me constantly, they'd know that yes, I really did move last year, so my tax credit (with accompanying change-of-address form) is valid.
What is the end game? To gather lots of small things together to make it seem like I did a crime?
There is no end game. There is only progress toward a goal that is known to be unattainable. That goal is to have no crime, and all crimes that do happen are solved. Recording everything allows investigators to go back after a crime and track the motion of the people involved. If a shooting victim ate lunch with you an hour before getting shot, that makes you a possible source for information (and yes, suspicion too).
There is no reason to be running drones constantly. Crime rates are down across the country.
So we should fire all police, too? And since your house isn't currently on fire, we shouldn't have firefighters, either? Since the invention of the steam locomotive, travel is much faster, so we don't need to work on those silly horseless carriages.
He can't. He's quoting a website verbatim.
However, the title of the JAMA article is "Is US Health Really the Best in the World?", and it's available here, though apart from the statement (accompanied by another citation that I'm not ambitious enough to track down) of the number of deaths, it says little else relevant to this story.
However, I used to work with those adverse effect records, and citing them directly is incredibly misleading. The 106,000 deaths is only a tiny percentage (0.06%) of the 170,000,000 Americans on prescription medications (rough mental estimate of 48%), and it's inflated. The way adverse effects are recorded, any drug that could possibly be the cause of death is recorded as having definitely caused it. If an epilepsy drug causes a side effect, and the patient takes acetaminophen for it but overdoses and dies, the epilepsy drug is considered to be at fault, because the death was a result of its adverse effect.
The reason for this odd system of inflated numbers is that its purpose. The system was designed to inform doctors and researchers of what could happen as a result of a drug's use, including any previously-unknown interactions. By recording that an epilepsy drug, when taken with acetaminophen, could cause overdose symptoms, researchers could be pointed to an interaction between the two medications.
For direct deaths, the percentage (original research, no source) is closer to 0.001%, and the majority of these (to the point where I couldn't really differentiate "all") were where the prescription triggered an allergic reaction that wasn't already known (or at least recorded in the doctors' notes).
IANADoctor, but my understanding is that those cures aren't cures, either.
Exercises can help ED a little, but can't repair the damage of time. Valves get weaker and leak more, so to even have enough blood to keep the corpus cavernosum filled, the pressure in the rest of the body would have to be raised to dangerous levels. Cholesterol can be cut out of the diet, but the blood won't be back to normal for decades, and in that time the patient faces much higher risks from having high cholesterol.
Pills are just part of the picture. A competent doctor will urge patients to exercise and eat better for the long term, and offer the pills for the short term. Of course, there's few companies that have any money to spend on advertising diet and exercise, so you don't see any ads for that.
For the same reason people complain about GPS tracking on cars: they want to punish someone else for their perceived damage.
People have some expectation of privacy in everything they do, with thresholds varying from "I don't want anyone to know anything about me" to "just don't put anything inside me except dinner". Note that this expectation is completely unrelated to how private a particular situation really is - a big open window in full view of the street isn't really reasonably private, but people still complain if someone looks in.
When someone's expectation of privacy is broken, they get offended, and like all offended people with over-inflated senses of entitlement, they want someone else to be just as offended as they are, if not more. If someone's going to learn what grocery store they shop at, it had better involve a person standing on the sidewalk for hours handing out surveys. If the police are going to watch their movements, it should involve an officer spending their whole day in a car with a logbook, rather than ten minutes with a computer. If their neighborhood is going to be subject to aerial recording, it should cost an exorbitant amount to hire a skilled helicopter pilot, ground crew, and airport space.
This isn't about being actually worse or even being more frequent. It's about Americans being offended and not having a built-in mechanism to force someone else to share in their frustration.
By some definitions, that alone means these automated systems are unjust. After all "justice" is simply a feeling that my pain has returned to whomever caused it (in a nebulous, unquantifiable way).
You must realize, Microsoft has a long tradition of maintaining an internal tug-of-war, led by aimless management, and causing several UI redesigns. They're the perfect choice to synergize with Nokia's corporate environment to leverage their assets for market innovation!