Why don't you find a way to make a positive contribution, or failing that, shut the fuck up?
I make lots of positive contributions, just one of which is good advice that can keep people out of the meat grinder. The fact that you don't perceive it as positive is only evidence that your perceptions are dysfunctional. As for the "shut the fuck up" remark, my answer is no. How's that work for ya, Sparky?:)
All the unfixable conditions you have described are social conventions. People create social conventions, and people can change them through individual contributions of small pressures. Every time drinkypoo says "we can take back our country," we get a little piece of it back. Every time fyngyrz say "we are all fucked" we give a little more up. This is exactly the "structures [that] have been very carefully tweaked over the years to benefit a particular class" - the class that understands people will go where you tell them, if you just tell them it's too hard to go anywhere else.
In the end, we get the country we deserve, and I'm going to say that we can take our country back.
I guess that depends on your definition of "inefficient."
Lets say you're at the supermarket.
You reach out your hand to take [product] off the shelf,
by the time you reach out to take another [product], the shelf is empty!
The market is more "efficient" in the sense that the seller obtains the lowest price he is willing to accept and the buyer pays the highest price he is willing to give. "Efficient" in the sense that, as long as those two prices are different, there's room for another middleman. The arguments for HFT, taken to their conclusion, would claim that every purchase should pass through as many hands as possible, in order that the person who actually created the economic value in the first place makes no profit, the person who finally benefits from the widget has paid so much that he'd reverse the sale for a penny, and a whole chain of bankers and lawyers have divided the difference.
It's like a steam plant: there's a particular shape of turbine where the steam expands reversibly and you maximize the conversion of heat to work. The chamber has to expand infinitesimally, to balance the infinitesimal cooling and depressurization of the steam.
The economists are completely agnostic to who gets the money: they only care that it gets paid to someone. Economically, no purchase should ever make you happy or improve your condition. If you are better off after your purchase, then the seller should have charged more. Or someone should have added a middleman-markup.
France, Canada, Germany have not only provided publicly funded health insurance, they are also heavily regulating prices on medical procedures and probably on drugs, on hospital stays, etc. The kinds of procedures that can be done are also heavily regulated, probably to the detriment of certain people, but this is not important to my general point.
So, the government, which is paying for services, has also said how much it's willing to pay for those services. That sounds awfully market-like to me, what with the customer stating explicitly the value of demand.
Individual healthcare is an implicitly unfair market, because there is no price that I would not pay to live one day longer. The provider can ask any price at all and he will find consumers. Nor will a healthcare provider increase demand by lowering prices. Regardless of how inexpensive chemotherapy is, I will not buy it if I don't have cancer. A true market for medical services can exist only at the public level where the demand for particular treatments becomes predictable.
Today, it's the 250 giggers. Tomorrow, 200. They will ALWAYS try to reduce the impact of the most prolific users.
I suspect they don't actually have a problem with people doing just 250GB/month. I suspect they have a problem with the long tail of outliers using 1-2 TB/month, which is what you get with a runaway process saturating the link. Honestly, 250 GB seems like a pretty reasonable warning point, where it might be time to check with the user and see whether they're even aware that their computer is saturating the link 24/7. I suspect that most cases would be malware or P2P running without an upload throttle: easy things to fix that may even improve the user's internet experience.
Currently a tablet pc costs around $1,500-$2,000 - hardly a fair comparison since the overwhelming majority of people won't spend more than $700 on a computer. Hell, I only spent $900 on my quad-core, dual video card gaming system.
I bought an NEC Lightpad five years ago for $900. 2 pounds, 0.6" thick, 2-2.5 hour battery. It was a perfectly useful slate for anything that didn't require text input, and it was about the middle of the notebook price range. And, if you docked it, it could be a reasonably functional computer (although the keyboard NEC bundled really sucked). I've no doubt that you could build a $500 Windows slate now, but people would expect it to be their only computer. I can tell you from experience that most productive computer use requires a keyboard.
The Windows problem is perception - if you see a Windows desktop, you expect a whole computer. You expect to be able to write as well as read email, and neither a slate nor an iPad is especially good for writing even email. The iPad isn't even trying to be a computer - it's a big screen iPod. Nobody would ever try to write War and Peace on an iPod, and no one is going to try to write on an iPad. iPad's success is managing user expectations, not device price or performance
Unfortunately, "not a realistic threat" won't be the part people remember, any more than it was the part that got into the/. headline. "Your car's computer is not secure" is the fearful phrase, and enhanced security seems likely to be one more way for the manufacturers to lock independent mechanics out of the system.
I had a similar project at one point. I would never use the GPL as I believe in free software, so I use a modified BSD license. But when my employer decided they didn't want to continue making my code open, I wrote it over (it was only 15,000 lines, so it took a few weekends) and BSD'd it. It's still not as complete as the original, but it's functional enough to be useful to others now.
I'm pretty sure, if your former employer wanted to push the issue, that they could successfully sue you for infringement on those 15,000 lines. It's just not possible for you to independently develop something you've already developed - there's no way you can prove you didn't enter the 'new' code from a flash drive, or from your own memory, nor that you would even have thought of the new bits without the suggestion of the employer. The intellectual property of code is not in the time it takes to type lines into an editor but in the creativity of the algorithm and solution that the lines of code represent.
In the US, they treat the test results, regardless of the condition of the patient. Outside the US, they treat the patient, using the test results as a tool to that end. That difference alone is a major factor as to why the US has the most expensive health care on the planet, yet a middle of the pack (for industrialized nations) life expectancy.
You may be forgetting that many of us Americans judge the quality of things by their cost. As long as US medical care costs more than European medical care, US must have (almost by definition) the best care.
Now I put what I can afford in a savings account in case I have a health problem, but unfortunately if I were to have a major accident right now I would go bankrupt form medical bills and if I end up with a chronic condition I will die from it as I cannot afford medicine or treatment.
You can get treatment. Most hospitals offer programs of some sort and their are charities available. Not to mention programs like Medicaid that already exist.
It's interesting that you point this out, apparently as an argument against mandatory health insurance. The reason hospitals can offer "programs of some sort" to help people unable to pay is that hospitals overcharge everyone who is able to pay. So, the insurance premiums you pay now include 1) the likely cost of your own care 2) profit for the insurance company 3) the likely cost of indigent care, offset somewhat by indigent care provided by tax dollars. The point is that, if you have insurance or pay taxes, you are already paying for the medical care of 30-50 million uninsured. This reform makes the process by which people who can afford health care have been paying for those who can't for the past 50 years
When you can no longer get health care because the government has rationed it, you will just complain even more. Instead of the government getting out of the way, they have actually just gotten between you and your doctor. Once fully implemented, rationing will affect everyone except the people with the most money. Thanks a lot.
Except that the reform has no mechanism by which you can be denied care, only mechanisms by which you can be provided reimbursement for care. Kind of like your existing health insurance - they don't pay for everything and they'd be silly to. All insurance policies pay for a limited set of all possible care, which (to my understanding of the word) is rationing. Maybe you consider it differently, since it's a company making money by denying you care rather than a government agency staying within budget, but it's the same result.
If I want to go for it, and it is my money, then I should. If it is someone else's money, then they should be able to decide. That is why you should never let the government run your money for you--you give up your freedom to decide.
And if it's the insurance company's money? I mean, that's why people get insurance, right? On the belief that the insurance company will pay out more than they have paid in, while that is clearly at odds with the continued operation of one of the most profitable industries in the country. They have to pay out less than you pay in. On average, you have to get less care than you pay for.
Almost every argument against government healthcare is an argument against the insurance industry.
You however must show them you love them and keep on trying. This will make it worth in the end.
So, they know you're wasting money and time for no medical benefit, you know you're wasting money and time, yet you have a compulsion to continue putting on a charade to demonstrate your love? Seems pretty shallow to me, in the sense of "If you loved me, you'd buy me a Lexus." ie: "if you loved me, you'd buy me four weeks of morphine coma."
End of life medical expenses are a deeply personal choice. Many people fear being locked into a dysfunctional shell of a body. Many people have faith that there are seemingly miraculous recoveries from even the worst conditions. You ought to talk about your feelings with whomever might be called upon to make life-or-death decisions for you, so you can find a compromise that balances your wishes, their guilt, and everyone's interests.
US courts may have found no property rights, but international law, meaning the Declaration of Helsinki, and accepted policy, meaning the CIOMS International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research, require that participants in research projects, like collection of a mitochondrial DNA database, give their informed consent. If these people are surprised to find that their DNA or mitochondrial DNA is stacked away in a database, this would seem to be in violation of the Declaration of Helsinki. (It's not clear whether the larger law enforcement database of genomic DNA is subject to those treaties and guidelines, but one would hope law enforcement recognizes a similar set of human rights.) Any study I've been involved with, that used residual tissue from a biopsy or other clinical procedure still had to get IRB approval and still had to get consent from the patient.
No shit. Who the hell thinks slums are a positive thing? I've spent a fair bit of time in and around the slums of South Africa, and trust me, it is roughly akin to hell on Earth --- they are not an "example", there is absolutely nothing positive about them, they cannot "teach us" anything, and the only lessons we must take away are how to prevent them.
They can teach us about the resilience of life. They can teach us that it is possible, if extremely unpleasant, to live on almost nothing. In its extreme, "green living" means to live on almost nothing, and a slum is an example of what your life could be like if you truly minimize your carbon footprint. They're not positive, but they're definitely lessons.
One imagines that the lesson we should really take is that neither a zero carbon lifestyle nor a McMansion-living, Hummer-driving US lifestyle can be the future. That you don't really need single-serving, prepackaged, frozen corn, but you don't really want to rely on the box it came as roofing material. Compromise, somewhere between the fanatics on both sides.
This article describes an experiment that demonstrates that people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief about how the world is supposed to work.
Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished.
You miss the point: no magical dogma is required. When presented with facts counter to their existing worldview (religious, philosophical, political, or scientific), people ignore those facts in favor of any that support their worldview. If anything, this says that religious nutjobs are doing exactly the same thing as every other nominally rational human.
Look, if "they" want your fingerprint, they're going to come get it from you. If you're a suspect you will be fingerprinted.
Fine. Good. This is the way it's supposed to work: in order for them to want your fingerprints, they must have some reason. Some other thing aside from you being a breathing resident of USA that brings their attention on you. If you're in that circumstance, then yes, they can (and should) be able to get your fingerprints. If you're in that circumstance, your fingerprints may even be exculpatory. Big win
The privacy issue is the pre-existing database of fingerprint or fingerprint-like identifying information (in which you may or may not overlap with other individuals). The pre-existing database means that you can be, and are, tested as a suspect without any reason. That's not right.
Others have pointed out that there may be professional requirement for fingerprinting, and this is usually associated with positions of significant trust, or significant power. Power or trust which may be easily abused and merits special surveillance. Keeping track of people because of their special position is very different than keeping track of everyone.
Not saying that they couldn't do that, but you do realize (being an aluminum foil shielded card carrying Slasdotter) that 'they' can get your fingerprints, DNA and bog knows what else without much of a problem these days.
That's fine. If, for example, they've done some good police work and identified me as a suspect, then they should be able to get biometric information in order to prove/disprove that suspicion. The unpleasant part is for there to be a large database they can search without having done any police work first. That makes everyone in the DB a de facto suspect of every crime, and if your fingerprint code happens to match a criminal, then you may be falsely accused with "strong" evidence of guilt.
The timeclock DB may not communicate with AFIS, but Government can obtain the DB with only the consent of the employer. If a crime is committed on the employer's property, do you think employer will be reluctant to providing that consent?
How many average American citizens say, "Oh, I just love all this security theater that ultimately does nothing to protect us?"
My evening news never has any trouble finding someone to interview who will say that the latest TSA restriction "is inconvenient, but it makes me feel safer flying." TSA has introduced about 1-2 new "theatrical" restrictions each year since 2002, and I can't recall any of them being rescinded. Oh, maybe nail clippers. That speaks of a weak or ineffective public backlash and suggests that average American citizens are perfectly happy with the security and don't consider it theater at all.
If "the system," being time-clock or Federal database, uses a specific, formulaic derivation of your fingerprint to establish identity, then storing that formula result is, from a privacy perspective, equivalent to storing your fingerprint. It's a means of identifying you, personally, by extracting your hash from a database of all hashes based on the hash of an unknown fingerprint. That the algorithm is one-way (ie: you can create the hash from the fingerprint, but not the fingerprint from the hash) is irrelevant. Maybe if the has space is small enough that many fingerprints give the same hash value - ie, the has provides sufficient uniqueness for a population of 50 or 100 employees, but not is not unique over a population of 1,000 or 10,0000 - although that seems to compromise its value as an employee identifier.
I wonder what would happen, if I created a website, where people could propose things the government should to, and then everybody could throw his cash in for it, so that someone would buy the government with that money.
Cute idea; extremely inefficient. 1: People don't care 2: This would require a single-mindedness that is completely inconsistent with popular opinion 3: No continuity In view of these flaws, a single lobbyist, working for a company whose annual profits equal the combined income of more than 900,000 families (MS gross profit $46b; median US household income $50k) will wield much greater influence than your web site
Votes? What’s that?
When's the last time you voted for a candidate that you thought was really outstanding? Someone who you felt really had your personal and community interests foremost in his mind? Did he stick to those principles after his election, or did he become just another go-with-the-flow legislative rubber stamp?
I've installed Ubuntu on roughly 20 different platforms (laptop, desktop, and servers) since 6.06 and I've never had it not boot.
I've had several installations of Ubuntu fail to boot on a few systems over the last 3 years. Eventually, I figured out it was the fault of my CD burner (8 years old) failing to write good disks. They'd be good enough to mount, good enough to pass Ubuntu's self-checker, but about half the time the installed OS would have some failure. I would not be surprised if bad disks contributed to many of the linux install headaches.
The FDA hasn't established limits on ethyl mercury and has several articles suggesting that the methyl mercury limits be used for chronic exposure. See my other post showing one daily exposure limit was being exceeded by 3x for a typical 6-month getting his vaccinations.
The flaw in your argument is less the specific threshold and more the use of a chronic exposure threshold to judge an acute exposure.
For example, the occupational radiation dose limit is 14 mREM/day. A hip X-ray gives you about 65 mREM, but there's no evidence of anyone getting cancer, radiation poisoning, or radiation burns from a single hip x-ray. Few people believe that a single cigarette will cause lung cancer, although there is excellent evidence that chronic smoking does, even chronic exposure to second hand smoke.
I learned more in my first 6 months in the workforce than I did in the classroom getting undergrad and master's degrees. It's not that you learn nothing, but that if you keep your eyes open you can get paid to learn more in 6 months than paying for years of college.
This depends on the assumption that you can freely choose between college and a paying job in your field of interest, and I think that is a false assumption. There's no question that college and career teach very different skills. Depending on your field you may never "use" any of the factual information you learn in college, or you may use the fundamental principles and skills every day. Whichever, the degree is a way to distinguish yourself from the other 100 applicants to an entry level position. It doesn't say you're qualified to dive right in an design the combustion chamber for a scramjet. It doesn't say you're qualified to manage a team of phone drones. It says you're able to stick with a project for 4 years with enough focus to show up most days and turn in assignments that someone can make sense of. It's less a testament to ability than a denial of incompetence. It gets you into the interview chair.
Many of these biology experiments require very expensive machines, such as microarray machines, as mentioned by the article.
You'd be surprised what you can accomplish with half-assed equipment. For example, you don't have to buy Affymetrix latest 30,000 gene chip, you can spot, by hand, a dozen or more probes onto a glass slide and visualize them with a DSLR camera. The results may not be suitable for Nature (or even your most hated journal), but it's still discovery. It's discovery you can do in your garage that would have been impossible for a major research lab just 20 years ago.
That's the point really: a lot of this discovery is based on very straightforward techniques and tools, but they're so sensitive that you can get a pretty good result with care and poor equipment. Same as the guys who build rockets in their garage: they may not get to orbit; they may not clear the atmosphere, but they can do some exceptionally sophisticated physics without a NASA grant. If you're doing biology for your own joy, you can do some very sophisticated cell and molecular biology without an NIH grant.
Tissue? I passed a dead rat on my way in today - off limits for professional research, but there's nothing preventing an amateur from using it. Or from taking as much of his own tissue as he'd like. From his friends, too, if he can convince them it's cool.
swapping a school to free software to save few buckets and satisfy some nerds linux fetish = failing at education.
Training kids to operate one specific manufacturer's equipment = failing at education.
Seriously: will the kids in your world be employable if you teach them Office 2007 when all the companies have migrated to Office 2010? Will they all get laid off when the company switches to Office 2014? Will Taco Bell hire them if you've only trained them to use McDonald's cash registers? If you teach your kids to be mindless drones, then when employers need to find people who can solve problems, figure things out for themselves, and otherwise contribute to the business, they'll be hiring H1Bs and outsourcing. Thanks for killing the country's competitiveness.
So when something is the product of your hands it should be different to the product of your mind? why should it be treated differently?
Both a book and a chair are products of the mind. A specific instantiation of the chair has the additional constraints that raw materials were required to construct it and that some physical skill and wear was required to form and assemble it. It's quite common for chairs to be copied, though generally the raw materials and workmanship that go into the copy are of lower quality than the original, and decrease the total value of the original only slightly.
The chair creator expects physically participate in each instantiation of his chair and expects to be paid for each instantiation and to recoup his costs on each instance. The book creator has no expectation to participate in the production and distribution of their book, but they expect to be paid for effort that may take the publisher years and tens of thousands of instances to recoup. The author/publisher expects to be paid gradually, over years (14-1400 years, depending on the author), for their creativity today. Because the creative aspect of the chair is so closely linked to the unique physical object, it's easy for us to assign the creative aspect to the value of that one object. It's difficult to directly value the creative aspect. How much would you pay for a Maloof chair made by Joe the Carpenter? Because the physical effort of creating a book is such a small, and relatively unskilled, fraction of the creative effort, it's much more difficult to assign a value to a single book, let alone the sum of all the copies that will ever be made.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't you find a way to make a positive contribution, or failing that, shut the fuck up?
I make lots of positive contributions, just one of which is good advice that can keep people out of the meat grinder. The fact that you don't perceive it as positive is only evidence that your perceptions are dysfunctional. As for the "shut the fuck up" remark, my answer is no. How's that work for ya, Sparky? :)
All the unfixable conditions you have described are social conventions. People create social conventions, and people can change them through individual contributions of small pressures. Every time drinkypoo says "we can take back our country," we get a little piece of it back. Every time fyngyrz say "we are all fucked" we give a little more up. This is exactly the "structures [that] have been very carefully tweaked over the years to benefit a particular class" - the class that understands people will go where you tell them, if you just tell them it's too hard to go anywhere else.
In the end, we get the country we deserve, and I'm going to say that we can take our country back.
I guess that depends on your definition of "inefficient."
Lets say you're at the supermarket.
You reach out your hand to take [product] off the shelf,
by the time you reach out to take another [product], the shelf is empty!
The market is more "efficient" in the sense that the seller obtains the lowest price he is willing to accept and the buyer pays the highest price he is willing to give. "Efficient" in the sense that, as long as those two prices are different, there's room for another middleman. The arguments for HFT, taken to their conclusion, would claim that every purchase should pass through as many hands as possible, in order that the person who actually created the economic value in the first place makes no profit, the person who finally benefits from the widget has paid so much that he'd reverse the sale for a penny, and a whole chain of bankers and lawyers have divided the difference.
It's like a steam plant: there's a particular shape of turbine where the steam expands reversibly and you maximize the conversion of heat to work. The chamber has to expand infinitesimally, to balance the infinitesimal cooling and depressurization of the steam.
The economists are completely agnostic to who gets the money: they only care that it gets paid to someone. Economically, no purchase should ever make you happy or improve your condition. If you are better off after your purchase, then the seller should have charged more. Or someone should have added a middleman-markup.
France, Canada, Germany have not only provided publicly funded health insurance, they are also heavily regulating prices on medical procedures and probably on drugs, on hospital stays, etc. The kinds of procedures that can be done are also heavily regulated, probably to the detriment of certain people, but this is not important to my general point.
So, the government, which is paying for services, has also said how much it's willing to pay for those services. That sounds awfully market-like to me, what with the customer stating explicitly the value of demand.
Individual healthcare is an implicitly unfair market, because there is no price that I would not pay to live one day longer. The provider can ask any price at all and he will find consumers. Nor will a healthcare provider increase demand by lowering prices. Regardless of how inexpensive chemotherapy is, I will not buy it if I don't have cancer. A true market for medical services can exist only at the public level where the demand for particular treatments becomes predictable.
Today, it's the 250 giggers. Tomorrow, 200. They will ALWAYS try to reduce the impact of the most prolific users.
I suspect they don't actually have a problem with people doing just 250GB/month. I suspect they have a problem with the long tail of outliers using 1-2 TB/month, which is what you get with a runaway process saturating the link. Honestly, 250 GB seems like a pretty reasonable warning point, where it might be time to check with the user and see whether they're even aware that their computer is saturating the link 24/7. I suspect that most cases would be malware or P2P running without an upload throttle: easy things to fix that may even improve the user's internet experience.
Currently a tablet pc costs around $1,500-$2,000 - hardly a fair comparison since the overwhelming majority of people won't spend more than $700 on a computer. Hell, I only spent $900 on my quad-core, dual video card gaming system.
I bought an NEC Lightpad five years ago for $900. 2 pounds, 0.6" thick, 2-2.5 hour battery. It was a perfectly useful slate for anything that didn't require text input, and it was about the middle of the notebook price range. And, if you docked it, it could be a reasonably functional computer (although the keyboard NEC bundled really sucked). I've no doubt that you could build a $500 Windows slate now, but people would expect it to be their only computer. I can tell you from experience that most productive computer use requires a keyboard.
The Windows problem is perception - if you see a Windows desktop, you expect a whole computer. You expect to be able to write as well as read email, and neither a slate nor an iPad is especially good for writing even email. The iPad isn't even trying to be a computer - it's a big screen iPod. Nobody would ever try to write War and Peace on an iPod, and no one is going to try to write on an iPad. iPad's success is managing user expectations, not device price or performance
Unfortunately, "not a realistic threat" won't be the part people remember, any more than it was the part that got into the /. headline. "Your car's computer is not secure" is the fearful phrase, and enhanced security seems likely to be one more way for the manufacturers to lock independent mechanics out of the system.
I had a similar project at one point. I would never use the GPL as I believe in free software, so I use a modified BSD license. But when my employer decided they didn't want to continue making my code open, I wrote it over (it was only 15,000 lines, so it took a few weekends) and BSD'd it. It's still not as complete as the original, but it's functional enough to be useful to others now.
I'm pretty sure, if your former employer wanted to push the issue, that they could successfully sue you for infringement on those 15,000 lines. It's just not possible for you to independently develop something you've already developed - there's no way you can prove you didn't enter the 'new' code from a flash drive, or from your own memory, nor that you would even have thought of the new bits without the suggestion of the employer. The intellectual property of code is not in the time it takes to type lines into an editor but in the creativity of the algorithm and solution that the lines of code represent.
In the US, they treat the test results, regardless of the condition of the patient. Outside the US, they treat the patient, using the test results as a tool to that end. That difference alone is a major factor as to why the US has the most expensive health care on the planet, yet a middle of the pack (for industrialized nations) life expectancy.
You may be forgetting that many of us Americans judge the quality of things by their cost. As long as US medical care costs more than European medical care, US must have (almost by definition) the best care.
Now I put what I can afford in a savings account in case I have a health problem, but unfortunately if I were to have a major accident right now I would go bankrupt form medical bills and if I end up with a chronic condition I will die from it as I cannot afford medicine or treatment.
You can get treatment. Most hospitals offer programs of some sort and their are charities available. Not to mention programs like Medicaid that already exist.
It's interesting that you point this out, apparently as an argument against mandatory health insurance. The reason hospitals can offer "programs of some sort" to help people unable to pay is that hospitals overcharge everyone who is able to pay. So, the insurance premiums you pay now include 1) the likely cost of your own care 2) profit for the insurance company 3) the likely cost of indigent care, offset somewhat by indigent care provided by tax dollars. The point is that, if you have insurance or pay taxes, you are already paying for the medical care of 30-50 million uninsured. This reform makes the process by which people who can afford health care have been paying for those who can't for the past 50 years
When you can no longer get health care because the government has rationed it, you will just complain even more. Instead of the government getting out of the way, they have actually just gotten between you and your doctor. Once fully implemented, rationing will affect everyone except the people with the most money. Thanks a lot.
Except that the reform has no mechanism by which you can be denied care, only mechanisms by which you can be provided reimbursement for care. Kind of like your existing health insurance - they don't pay for everything and they'd be silly to. All insurance policies pay for a limited set of all possible care, which (to my understanding of the word) is rationing. Maybe you consider it differently, since it's a company making money by denying you care rather than a government agency staying within budget, but it's the same result.
If I want to go for it, and it is my money, then I should. If it is someone else's money, then they should be able to decide. That is why you should never let the government run your money for you--you give up your freedom to decide.
And if it's the insurance company's money? I mean, that's why people get insurance, right? On the belief that the insurance company will pay out more than they have paid in, while that is clearly at odds with the continued operation of one of the most profitable industries in the country. They have to pay out less than you pay in. On average, you have to get less care than you pay for.
Almost every argument against government healthcare is an argument against the insurance industry.
You however must show them you love them and keep on trying. This will make it worth in the end.
So, they know you're wasting money and time for no medical benefit, you know you're wasting money and time, yet you have a compulsion to continue putting on a charade to demonstrate your love? Seems pretty shallow to me, in the sense of "If you loved me, you'd buy me a Lexus." ie: "if you loved me, you'd buy me four weeks of morphine coma."
End of life medical expenses are a deeply personal choice. Many people fear being locked into a dysfunctional shell of a body. Many people have faith that there are seemingly miraculous recoveries from even the worst conditions. You ought to talk about your feelings with whomever might be called upon to make life-or-death decisions for you, so you can find a compromise that balances your wishes, their guilt, and everyone's interests.
US courts may have found no property rights, but international law, meaning the Declaration of Helsinki, and accepted policy, meaning the CIOMS International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research, require that participants in research projects, like collection of a mitochondrial DNA database, give their informed consent. If these people are surprised to find that their DNA or mitochondrial DNA is stacked away in a database, this would seem to be in violation of the Declaration of Helsinki. (It's not clear whether the larger law enforcement database of genomic DNA is subject to those treaties and guidelines, but one would hope law enforcement recognizes a similar set of human rights.) Any study I've been involved with, that used residual tissue from a biopsy or other clinical procedure still had to get IRB approval and still had to get consent from the patient.
No shit. Who the hell thinks slums are a positive thing? I've spent a fair bit of time in and around the slums of South Africa, and trust me, it is roughly akin to hell on Earth --- they are not an "example", there is absolutely nothing positive about them, they cannot "teach us" anything, and the only lessons we must take away are how to prevent them.
They can teach us about the resilience of life. They can teach us that it is possible, if extremely unpleasant, to live on almost nothing. In its extreme, "green living" means to live on almost nothing, and a slum is an example of what your life could be like if you truly minimize your carbon footprint. They're not positive, but they're definitely lessons.
One imagines that the lesson we should really take is that neither a zero carbon lifestyle nor a McMansion-living, Hummer-driving US lifestyle can be the future. That you don't really need single-serving, prepackaged, frozen corn, but you don't really want to rely on the box it came as roofing material. Compromise, somewhere between the fanatics on both sides.
This article describes an experiment that demonstrates that people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief about how the world is supposed to work.
Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished.
You miss the point: no magical dogma is required. When presented with facts counter to their existing worldview (religious, philosophical, political, or scientific), people ignore those facts in favor of any that support their worldview. If anything, this says that religious nutjobs are doing exactly the same thing as every other nominally rational human.
Look, if "they" want your fingerprint, they're going to come get it from you. If you're a suspect you will be fingerprinted.
Fine. Good. This is the way it's supposed to work: in order for them to want your fingerprints, they must have some reason. Some other thing aside from you being a breathing resident of USA that brings their attention on you. If you're in that circumstance, then yes, they can (and should) be able to get your fingerprints. If you're in that circumstance, your fingerprints may even be exculpatory. Big win
The privacy issue is the pre-existing database of fingerprint or fingerprint-like identifying information (in which you may or may not overlap with other individuals). The pre-existing database means that you can be, and are, tested as a suspect without any reason. That's not right.
Others have pointed out that there may be professional requirement for fingerprinting, and this is usually associated with positions of significant trust, or significant power. Power or trust which may be easily abused and merits special surveillance. Keeping track of people because of their special position is very different than keeping track of everyone.
Not saying that they couldn't do that, but you do realize (being an aluminum foil shielded card carrying Slasdotter) that 'they' can get your fingerprints, DNA and bog knows what else without much of a problem these days.
That's fine. If, for example, they've done some good police work and identified me as a suspect, then they should be able to get biometric information in order to prove/disprove that suspicion. The unpleasant part is for there to be a large database they can search without having done any police work first. That makes everyone in the DB a de facto suspect of every crime, and if your fingerprint code happens to match a criminal, then you may be falsely accused with "strong" evidence of guilt.
The timeclock DB may not communicate with AFIS, but Government can obtain the DB with only the consent of the employer. If a crime is committed on the employer's property, do you think employer will be reluctant to providing that consent?
How many average American citizens say, "Oh, I just love all this security theater that ultimately does nothing to protect us?"
My evening news never has any trouble finding someone to interview who will say that the latest TSA restriction "is inconvenient, but it makes me feel safer flying." TSA has introduced about 1-2 new "theatrical" restrictions each year since 2002, and I can't recall any of them being rescinded. Oh, maybe nail clippers. That speaks of a weak or ineffective public backlash and suggests that average American citizens are perfectly happy with the security and don't consider it theater at all.
If "the system," being time-clock or Federal database, uses a specific, formulaic derivation of your fingerprint to establish identity, then storing that formula result is, from a privacy perspective, equivalent to storing your fingerprint. It's a means of identifying you, personally, by extracting your hash from a database of all hashes based on the hash of an unknown fingerprint. That the algorithm is one-way (ie: you can create the hash from the fingerprint, but not the fingerprint from the hash) is irrelevant. Maybe if the has space is small enough that many fingerprints give the same hash value - ie, the has provides sufficient uniqueness for a population of 50 or 100 employees, but not is not unique over a population of 1,000 or 10,0000 - although that seems to compromise its value as an employee identifier.
I wonder what would happen, if I created a website, where people could propose things the government should to, and then everybody could throw his cash in for it, so that someone would buy the government with that money.
Cute idea; extremely inefficient. 1: People don't care 2: This would require a single-mindedness that is completely inconsistent with popular opinion 3: No continuity In view of these flaws, a single lobbyist, working for a company whose annual profits equal the combined income of more than 900,000 families (MS gross profit $46b; median US household income $50k) will wield much greater influence than your web site
Votes? What’s that?
When's the last time you voted for a candidate that you thought was really outstanding? Someone who you felt really had your personal and community interests foremost in his mind? Did he stick to those principles after his election, or did he become just another go-with-the-flow legislative rubber stamp?
I've installed Ubuntu on roughly 20 different platforms (laptop, desktop, and servers) since 6.06 and I've never had it not boot.
I've had several installations of Ubuntu fail to boot on a few systems over the last 3 years. Eventually, I figured out it was the fault of my CD burner (8 years old) failing to write good disks. They'd be good enough to mount, good enough to pass Ubuntu's self-checker, but about half the time the installed OS would have some failure. I would not be surprised if bad disks contributed to many of the linux install headaches.
The FDA hasn't established limits on ethyl mercury and has several articles suggesting that the methyl mercury limits be used for chronic exposure. See my other post showing one daily exposure limit was being exceeded by 3x for a typical 6-month getting his vaccinations.
The flaw in your argument is less the specific threshold and more the use of a chronic exposure threshold to judge an acute exposure.
For example, the occupational radiation dose limit is 14 mREM/day. A hip X-ray gives you about 65 mREM, but there's no evidence of anyone getting cancer, radiation poisoning, or radiation burns from a single hip x-ray. Few people believe that a single cigarette will cause lung cancer, although there is excellent evidence that chronic smoking does, even chronic exposure to second hand smoke.
I learned more in my first 6 months in the workforce than I did in the classroom getting undergrad and master's degrees. It's not that you learn nothing, but that if you keep your eyes open you can get paid to learn more in 6 months than paying for years of college.
This depends on the assumption that you can freely choose between college and a paying job in your field of interest, and I think that is a false assumption. There's no question that college and career teach very different skills. Depending on your field you may never "use" any of the factual information you learn in college, or you may use the fundamental principles and skills every day. Whichever, the degree is a way to distinguish yourself from the other 100 applicants to an entry level position. It doesn't say you're qualified to dive right in an design the combustion chamber for a scramjet. It doesn't say you're qualified to manage a team of phone drones. It says you're able to stick with a project for 4 years with enough focus to show up most days and turn in assignments that someone can make sense of. It's less a testament to ability than a denial of incompetence. It gets you into the interview chair.
Many of these biology experiments require very expensive machines, such as microarray machines, as mentioned by the article.
You'd be surprised what you can accomplish with half-assed equipment. For example, you don't have to buy Affymetrix latest 30,000 gene chip, you can spot, by hand, a dozen or more probes onto a glass slide and visualize them with a DSLR camera. The results may not be suitable for Nature (or even your most hated journal), but it's still discovery. It's discovery you can do in your garage that would have been impossible for a major research lab just 20 years ago.
That's the point really: a lot of this discovery is based on very straightforward techniques and tools, but they're so sensitive that you can get a pretty good result with care and poor equipment. Same as the guys who build rockets in their garage: they may not get to orbit; they may not clear the atmosphere, but they can do some exceptionally sophisticated physics without a NASA grant. If you're doing biology for your own joy, you can do some very sophisticated cell and molecular biology without an NIH grant.
Tissue? I passed a dead rat on my way in today - off limits for professional research, but there's nothing preventing an amateur from using it. Or from taking as much of his own tissue as he'd like. From his friends, too, if he can convince them it's cool.
swapping a school to free software to save few buckets and satisfy some nerds linux fetish = failing at education.
Training kids to operate one specific manufacturer's equipment = failing at education.
Seriously: will the kids in your world be employable if you teach them Office 2007 when all the companies have migrated to Office 2010? Will they all get laid off when the company switches to Office 2014? Will Taco Bell hire them if you've only trained them to use McDonald's cash registers? If you teach your kids to be mindless drones, then when employers need to find people who can solve problems, figure things out for themselves, and otherwise contribute to the business, they'll be hiring H1Bs and outsourcing. Thanks for killing the country's competitiveness.
So when something is the product of your hands it should be different to the product of your mind? why should it be treated differently?
Both a book and a chair are products of the mind. A specific instantiation of the chair has the additional constraints that raw materials were required to construct it and that some physical skill and wear was required to form and assemble it. It's quite common for chairs to be copied, though generally the raw materials and workmanship that go into the copy are of lower quality than the original, and decrease the total value of the original only slightly.
The chair creator expects physically participate in each instantiation of his chair and expects to be paid for each instantiation and to recoup his costs on each instance. The book creator has no expectation to participate in the production and distribution of their book, but they expect to be paid for effort that may take the publisher years and tens of thousands of instances to recoup. The author/publisher expects to be paid gradually, over years (14-1400 years, depending on the author), for their creativity today. Because the creative aspect of the chair is so closely linked to the unique physical object, it's easy for us to assign the creative aspect to the value of that one object. It's difficult to directly value the creative aspect. How much would you pay for a Maloof chair made by Joe the Carpenter? Because the physical effort of creating a book is such a small, and relatively unskilled, fraction of the creative effort, it's much more difficult to assign a value to a single book, let alone the sum of all the copies that will ever be made.