The point of prescription drugs is to prevent unauthorised purchase. This system can be easily tricked.
Yes and no. 'Controlled' substances are the ones that are viewed as being too habit forming or entertaining to leave people to their own devices with. A great many prescription drugs are controlled substances(CSA schedules 2-5, not to be confused with CWC schedules 2-3 or death may result); but the rest are prescription-only because their use has some some risk believed to require medical attention(most antibiotics, say, tend to be very much nonrecreational; but widespread overuse and incorrect use would be Bad, unless it were helpful in raising cheap meat, in which case it would be wildly popular and surprisingly legal...)
I suspect that congress would be drowned in 100% genuine DEA crocodile tears before they let a scheduled substance go self-serve; but unscheduled prescription drugs are already sometimes moved to OTC status if their safety record turns out to be adequate, and it isn't hard to imagine the creation of some intermediate category for some sort of 'prescription-lite' status administered by pharmacists, nurses, and computers.
There are some exceptions; but where a branded and generic version of a given drug are available, the dispensing pharmacist can substitute the generic compound even if the prescription is written for the common brand name.
I'm told that this is maddening for a certain subset of people who experience different effects from the different versions; but it makes it substantially easier to do price-comparison at the point of sale, with somebody who can tap the insurance details into their system and actually quote you a price.
Owning your own color inkjet is a monumental waste of time and money(but at least the results are mediocre!). The cheapies provide fairly poor output and high consumables costs, even the nice units are going to require the fancy paper and a certain amount of babying to deliver results resembling your basic mini-lab photo prints.
As for which digital printing service, I'm less able to say. I had winkflash.com print 40 or so 8x10s a few years back, and they still seem to be in reasonable condition and the results, service, and price were all satisfactory. Snapfish.com is a fairly big name. My impression is that digital-source prints of quality comparable to sending 35mm film to your local pharmacy chain of choice are a fairly commodified market. 6 to 10 cents per 4x6, better initial results(especially on the glossies, if that is your preference) than you would get from a home printer; but no particular claims made about fading in N decades or other subtler factors.
If you want the really classy service, choosing from among the vendors who provide things like the option to download the ICC profiles for their equipment is probably a better bet; but I'm far too cost-sensitive and indifferent to tell you anything useful about the different ones.
HP's 'Snapfish' subsidiary offers in-store pickup from Wal-mart, among other retailers. Do you know if they control the process at all of them, or is there some sort of data and order information interchange between them; but retailer-dependent printing?
I was at the store the other day and they still had DDR, DDR2, and DDR3 on the shelf, DIMM and SODIMM sizes, in a variety of capacities...
The price/GB sweet spot does seem to migrate to the 'current' flavor, after a period of new-hotness pricing; but the RAM industry doesn't seem to be pursuing its sinister forced upgrade strategy very aggressively...
Do you know if XDR(aside from having...historically unfortunate... friends) is considered theoretically viable for general-purpose use?
I know that the PS3's RAM is soldered directly onto the mainboard; but that is normal for consoles. Does RAMBUS' secret sauce allow them to handle less controlled environments(in servers, say, if you can't do at least 8 DIMMs per socket you might as well go home) or are there technical reasons, as well as legal togetherness issues, that drove them to pursue specialty embedded applications?
Certainly; but there is a bit of a timing difference between 'estimated months spent in cabin in the sticks before emergency medical care is required' and 'hours to live once your submarine's pressure hull springs a leak'...
My point was not that other areas are infrastructureless; but that undersea habitats are among the most infrastructure-intensive environments on earth, even if you are willing to forgo basically all conveniences except safety from immediate death.
But, but, but!!! I totally heard on the radio that the nominal rate is 34% or something if your accountant has only a brain stem and you don't count any of the possible deductions or subsidies! Sharia Communism!
TFA gives the impression that they enforce it contractually. Even if cracking a 360 were as easy as cracking an Audrey, which I am given to understand is not the case, they would just continue to bill your credit card for either the monthly payments or the early termination fee.
The technological enforcement has gotten tougher since the Audrey; but the real kicker is companies no longer being stupid enough to rely purely on it...
The price premium does beat some of the really skeezy rent-to-own places; but the contract and ETF have a couple of unfortunate downsides, in addition to the price premium:
Reduced 'liquidity'(in the grim poor-people sense): You plunk down the $99 and make a (presumably legally binding, or at least more legally binding than you'll ever afford to lawyer out of) commitment to pay the rest for two years. I hope your income and expenses are stable, even though you don't have enough savings to buy an xbox... Unlike the sleazy rent-to-own guys, Microsoft isn't just going to repossess the xbox and call it a day, they'll just slap the ETF onto your probably mounting load of debt and walk away while you fight it out with the credit card company and their collections guys. If you are economically tenuous, long-term commitments that incur further costs on termination are Bad News.
Credit Card dependence: Unless MS is planning on setting up the infrastructure of sordid downmarket finance, as found at your local payday loan or check-cashing joint, 'monthly fee' and 'ETF' mean 'credit card'. There goes the impecunious under-18s market, along with the terrible-credit customers. MS has Xbox live subscription cards, widely available at retail, for just such purposes.
This seems more like a stab at the nominally-comfortable-but-heavily-over-obligated middle class family with a fair income but a mortgage, two leased cars, a few CCs, 4 smartphone plans, and maybe a college student racking up the loans....
I do like the idea of presenting privacy-relevant variables in a concise format; but I have to wonder if that would actually attack the problem usefully...
It seems that(barring the institutionally incompetent, who usually get weeded out unless firmly entrenched in some other industry and just shoving a pseudopod into the web) people are usually pretty good at making obvious on their website whatever they wish to be obvious to the user. Privacy policies are generally made non-obvious, and written to be as incomprehensible as they are mandatory.
This suggests, as does the general miasma of boilerplate evil and overreaching claims generally embedded within, that the privacy policies are largely invisible by design. Icons aren't going to solve that problem.
Potentially worse, icons that allow for the slightest weasel-wording, or which simply aren't construed to imply any meaningfully binding promise on the site operator's behalf, can simply be used to lie more easily and reassuringly.
Incidentally, while a good setting for a shooter, an underwater city seems like the least libertarian-friendly habitat one could imagine, at least within earth's gravity well:
Centralized access control, collective dependence on immediately life-critical infrastructure...
It seems particularly odd when one considers the fact that you don't need to spend months on a boat 200 miles off California to enjoy the privilege of booking a slightly-eyebrow-raising percentage of your profits through an anodyne corporate PO box in some sunny tax haven. You can do that from the comfort of your own home.
Is there a large market of non-US-citizens who can't secure visas(or who find longterm shipboard stays more comfortable than flying out for a meeting?) but desperately crave physical proximity to silicon valley, possibly along with an internet connection to it that is far suckier than a hardline from virtually anywhere in the not-actively-fighting-a-brutal-meatgrinder-bush-war world?
I understand the appeal of tax dodges; but I don't understand what this boat concept brings to the game.
Unfortunately, our providers have generally realized that taxing idiots to pay for lobbyists and generate profits is substantially more lucrative than taxing idiots to pay for infrastructure upgrades...
Kaczynski, of all those on the list, seems the most likely to have an opinion on the subject.
His methods were sufficiently notorious to largely drown out his message; but his motivation was, quite explicitly, violent opposition to the perceived consequences of large-scale technological society.
Politically, though, he isn't really a fit with any remotely mainstream philosophy. His explicit opposition to 'liberalism' and state intervention look vaguely conservative; but his equally strong distaste for private-sector control and his total technological pessimism would make him few friends among economic 'conservatives', and the secular, quasi-evolutionary-psychology, flavor of his antiliberal social views would make him an outlier at best among either contemporary secularists as a whole or among any of the flavors of theistic conservatives. Really a very odd duck(albeit a brilliant one).
My concern would be that(at least when sampling from the ones who actually have power) a substantial percentage of people who say things like that are actually entirely OK with substantial state interference in the marketplace, so long as it is in the direction of themselves or their allies. Crony capitalism is not respectable; but it has a great many friends in useful places who are polite enough to espouse free market principles when in public.
From the other responses it sounds like reflection problems in common environments, of which I was previously unaware, would doom the idea; but degradation might actually be solvable...
If the color channels are driven individually, their output could be controlled by changing the drive current. If given access to colorimeter data for a short time, the driver module could change output on each channel to compensate for uneven wear. Best case, you might be able to cram a small solid-state colorimeter into the fixture. If that isn't practical, is too expensive, or can't get a good view of the output, you could have the fixture perform a recalibration every x hundred hours or so by having a little IR chat with a portable colorimeter unit(in the style of the equipment used for monitor calibration; with IR tranciever for talking to the driver circuit).
Given the reflection trouble, though, it sounds like it wouldn't be worth the trouble.
Given that both the CFL and the white LED are pumping a phosphor glob, it probably isn't an accident that their efficiency(and range of available color temperatures) is somewhat similar.
I don't think that rental services exist; but there are about a zillion commercial/office/industrial properties whose facilities guys have to keep a whole lot of lights, some badly inaccessible from ground level or in crowded public areas, going. Whatever they use is probably the equivalent(and mostly seems to be really boring hot-cathode fluorescent tubes, except in places where they can't get away with that for aesthetic reasons)...
All these relatively small LED lights are using a phosphor layer, pumped by either a blue or UV diode or diodes, to generate something resembling reasonably white light. The phosphor step gives them much lousier efficiency compared to their monochromatic counterparts, which don't have that additional step eating photons.
I am assuming that they do this, rather than using arrays of multiple colored LEDs matched to add up to 'white', because of the difficulty of getting suitably even mixing, weird color fringes, and the like. Does anybody know what would be needed(either advances in LED fabrication, or minimum size/complexity requirements for a light fixture) to make the multiple-colors-mixed approach viable?
Well, according to RIAA math, that would leave Knuth with a net worth greater than the planetary GDP; minus legal fees for a litigation process so vast that every copyright lawyer on the planet would have to be conscripted in order to settle it...
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The point of prescription drugs is to prevent unauthorised purchase. This system can be easily tricked.
Yes and no. 'Controlled' substances are the ones that are viewed as being too habit forming or entertaining to leave people to their own devices with. A great many prescription drugs are controlled substances(CSA schedules 2-5, not to be confused with CWC schedules 2-3 or death may result); but the rest are prescription-only because their use has some some risk believed to require medical attention(most antibiotics, say, tend to be very much nonrecreational; but widespread overuse and incorrect use would be Bad, unless it were helpful in raising cheap meat, in which case it would be wildly popular and surprisingly legal...)
I suspect that congress would be drowned in 100% genuine DEA crocodile tears before they let a scheduled substance go self-serve; but unscheduled prescription drugs are already sometimes moved to OTC status if their safety record turns out to be adequate, and it isn't hard to imagine the creation of some intermediate category for some sort of 'prescription-lite' status administered by pharmacists, nurses, and computers.
There are some exceptions; but where a branded and generic version of a given drug are available, the dispensing pharmacist can substitute the generic compound even if the prescription is written for the common brand name.
I'm told that this is maddening for a certain subset of people who experience different effects from the different versions; but it makes it substantially easier to do price-comparison at the point of sale, with somebody who can tap the insurance details into their system and actually quote you a price.
Owning your own color inkjet is a monumental waste of time and money(but at least the results are mediocre!). The cheapies provide fairly poor output and high consumables costs, even the nice units are going to require the fancy paper and a certain amount of babying to deliver results resembling your basic mini-lab photo prints.
As for which digital printing service, I'm less able to say. I had winkflash.com print 40 or so 8x10s a few years back, and they still seem to be in reasonable condition and the results, service, and price were all satisfactory. Snapfish.com is a fairly big name. My impression is that digital-source prints of quality comparable to sending 35mm film to your local pharmacy chain of choice are a fairly commodified market. 6 to 10 cents per 4x6, better initial results(especially on the glossies, if that is your preference) than you would get from a home printer; but no particular claims made about fading in N decades or other subtler factors.
If you want the really classy service, choosing from among the vendors who provide things like the option to download the ICC profiles for their equipment is probably a better bet; but I'm far too cost-sensitive and indifferent to tell you anything useful about the different ones.
HP's 'Snapfish' subsidiary offers in-store pickup from Wal-mart, among other retailers. Do you know if they control the process at all of them, or is there some sort of data and order information interchange between them; but retailer-dependent printing?
If your CPU hadn't been educated stupid, it would already have the data it needs at any given time, rendering RAM unnecessary...
I was at the store the other day and they still had DDR, DDR2, and DDR3 on the shelf, DIMM and SODIMM sizes, in a variety of capacities...
The price/GB sweet spot does seem to migrate to the 'current' flavor, after a period of new-hotness pricing; but the RAM industry doesn't seem to be pursuing its sinister forced upgrade strategy very aggressively...
Do you know if XDR(aside from having...historically unfortunate... friends) is considered theoretically viable for general-purpose use?
I know that the PS3's RAM is soldered directly onto the mainboard; but that is normal for consoles. Does RAMBUS' secret sauce allow them to handle less controlled environments(in servers, say, if you can't do at least 8 DIMMs per socket you might as well go home) or are there technical reasons, as well as legal togetherness issues, that drove them to pursue specialty embedded applications?
I like my 'lock them in their headquarters and set in on fire' plan better.
Certainly; but there is a bit of a timing difference between 'estimated months spent in cabin in the sticks before emergency medical care is required' and 'hours to live once your submarine's pressure hull springs a leak'...
My point was not that other areas are infrastructureless; but that undersea habitats are among the most infrastructure-intensive environments on earth, even if you are willing to forgo basically all conveniences except safety from immediate death.
But, but, but!!! I totally heard on the radio that the nominal rate is 34% or something if your accountant has only a brain stem and you don't count any of the possible deductions or subsidies! Sharia Communism!
TFA gives the impression that they enforce it contractually. Even if cracking a 360 were as easy as cracking an Audrey, which I am given to understand is not the case, they would just continue to bill your credit card for either the monthly payments or the early termination fee.
The technological enforcement has gotten tougher since the Audrey; but the real kicker is companies no longer being stupid enough to rely purely on it...
The price premium does beat some of the really skeezy rent-to-own places; but the contract and ETF have a couple of unfortunate downsides, in addition to the price premium:
Reduced 'liquidity'(in the grim poor-people sense): You plunk down the $99 and make a (presumably legally binding, or at least more legally binding than you'll ever afford to lawyer out of) commitment to pay the rest for two years. I hope your income and expenses are stable, even though you don't have enough savings to buy an xbox... Unlike the sleazy rent-to-own guys, Microsoft isn't just going to repossess the xbox and call it a day, they'll just slap the ETF onto your probably mounting load of debt and walk away while you fight it out with the credit card company and their collections guys. If you are economically tenuous, long-term commitments that incur further costs on termination are Bad News.
Credit Card dependence: Unless MS is planning on setting up the infrastructure of sordid downmarket finance, as found at your local payday loan or check-cashing joint, 'monthly fee' and 'ETF' mean 'credit card'. There goes the impecunious under-18s market, along with the terrible-credit customers. MS has Xbox live subscription cards, widely available at retail, for just such purposes.
This seems more like a stab at the nominally-comfortable-but-heavily-over-obligated middle class family with a fair income but a mortgage, two leased cars, a few CCs, 4 smartphone plans, and maybe a college student racking up the loans....
I do like the idea of presenting privacy-relevant variables in a concise format; but I have to wonder if that would actually attack the problem usefully...
It seems that(barring the institutionally incompetent, who usually get weeded out unless firmly entrenched in some other industry and just shoving a pseudopod into the web) people are usually pretty good at making obvious on their website whatever they wish to be obvious to the user. Privacy policies are generally made non-obvious, and written to be as incomprehensible as they are mandatory.
This suggests, as does the general miasma of boilerplate evil and overreaching claims generally embedded within, that the privacy policies are largely invisible by design. Icons aren't going to solve that problem.
Potentially worse, icons that allow for the slightest weasel-wording, or which simply aren't construed to imply any meaningfully binding promise on the site operator's behalf, can simply be used to lie more easily and reassuringly.
Incidentally, while a good setting for a shooter, an underwater city seems like the least libertarian-friendly habitat one could imagine, at least within earth's gravity well:
Centralized access control, collective dependence on immediately life-critical infrastructure...
they better have a military ready, iam sure there would be a big return on capturing 146 companies on a ship and hold them hostage
now taking bookings !
I bet the Somali pirates would do it for at least 30% less than you would. I'm just going to subcontract the hijacking to them.
It seems particularly odd when one considers the fact that you don't need to spend months on a boat 200 miles off California to enjoy the privilege of booking a slightly-eyebrow-raising percentage of your profits through an anodyne corporate PO box in some sunny tax haven. You can do that from the comfort of your own home.
Is there a large market of non-US-citizens who can't secure visas(or who find longterm shipboard stays more comfortable than flying out for a meeting?) but desperately crave physical proximity to silicon valley, possibly along with an internet connection to it that is far suckier than a hardline from virtually anywhere in the not-actively-fighting-a-brutal-meatgrinder-bush-war world?
I understand the appeal of tax dodges; but I don't understand what this boat concept brings to the game.
Unfortunately, our providers have generally realized that taxing idiots to pay for lobbyists and generate profits is substantially more lucrative than taxing idiots to pay for infrastructure upgrades...
Kaczynski, of all those on the list, seems the most likely to have an opinion on the subject.
His methods were sufficiently notorious to largely drown out his message; but his motivation was, quite explicitly, violent opposition to the perceived consequences of large-scale technological society.
Politically, though, he isn't really a fit with any remotely mainstream philosophy. His explicit opposition to 'liberalism' and state intervention look vaguely conservative; but his equally strong distaste for private-sector control and his total technological pessimism would make him few friends among economic 'conservatives', and the secular, quasi-evolutionary-psychology, flavor of his antiliberal social views would make him an outlier at best among either contemporary secularists as a whole or among any of the flavors of theistic conservatives. Really a very odd duck(albeit a brilliant one).
Incidentally, I've heard that the late Mr. Bin Laden was a big enthusiast of the right to keep and bear arms...
My concern would be that(at least when sampling from the ones who actually have power) a substantial percentage of people who say things like that are actually entirely OK with substantial state interference in the marketplace, so long as it is in the direction of themselves or their allies. Crony capitalism is not respectable; but it has a great many friends in useful places who are polite enough to espouse free market principles when in public.
From the other responses it sounds like reflection problems in common environments, of which I was previously unaware, would doom the idea; but degradation might actually be solvable...
If the color channels are driven individually, their output could be controlled by changing the drive current. If given access to colorimeter data for a short time, the driver module could change output on each channel to compensate for uneven wear. Best case, you might be able to cram a small solid-state colorimeter into the fixture. If that isn't practical, is too expensive, or can't get a good view of the output, you could have the fixture perform a recalibration every x hundred hours or so by having a little IR chat with a portable colorimeter unit(in the style of the equipment used for monitor calibration; with IR tranciever for talking to the driver circuit).
Given the reflection trouble, though, it sounds like it wouldn't be worth the trouble.
Given that both the CFL and the white LED are pumping a phosphor glob, it probably isn't an accident that their efficiency(and range of available color temperatures) is somewhat similar.
I don't think that rental services exist; but there are about a zillion commercial/office/industrial properties whose facilities guys have to keep a whole lot of lights, some badly inaccessible from ground level or in crowded public areas, going. Whatever they use is probably the equivalent(and mostly seems to be really boring hot-cathode fluorescent tubes, except in places where they can't get away with that for aesthetic reasons)...
All these relatively small LED lights are using a phosphor layer, pumped by either a blue or UV diode or diodes, to generate something resembling reasonably white light. The phosphor step gives them much lousier efficiency compared to their monochromatic counterparts, which don't have that additional step eating photons.
I am assuming that they do this, rather than using arrays of multiple colored LEDs matched to add up to 'white', because of the difficulty of getting suitably even mixing, weird color fringes, and the like. Does anybody know what would be needed(either advances in LED fabrication, or minimum size/complexity requirements for a light fixture) to make the multiple-colors-mixed approach viable?
Well, according to RIAA math, that would leave Knuth with a net worth greater than the planetary GDP; minus legal fees for a litigation process so vast that every copyright lawyer on the planet would have to be conscripted in order to settle it...