"Tort Reform" is a red herring foisted by insurance companies. reducing the ability for patients to protect themselves when medical practitioners screw up does nothing to reduce costs and does everything to undercut the little guy.
government is needed to step in and counter this trend. left to their own devices, the healthcare industry and pharmaceutical companies will just continue to jack up prices, while our population does little to increase overall health.
a lot of basic science isn't about finding groundbreaking stuff all the time. in fact, if you're doing research only looking for the "groundbreaking stuff", you're doing science wrong. much of science is straight observation. and it is USEFUL.
it's not about separating art from the creator, it's about not giving money or publicity to someone who still actively fights against equality. Card was on the board of the National Organization for Marriage and is still (afaik) a member.
quite bluntly, i don't want to give him any of my money, because that money is being used to deny human rights to millions of people merely because they love someone of the same gender.
Sections 23123 and 23123.5 of the California Vehicle Code prohibit use of a mobile phone while driving unless "the electronic wireless communications device is specifically designed and configured to allow voice-operated and hands-free operation" or "that telephone is specifically designed and configured to allow hands-free listening and talking, and is used in that manner while driving."
There's a specific provision disallowing drivers under 18 years of age from using mobile devices at all, but that's not the case here.
HOWEVER, the ticket in the article says in part that the charge was under Section 27602 of the Vehicle Code, which says that "A person shall not drive a motor vehicle if a television receiver, a video monitor, or a television or video screen, or any other similar means of visually displaying a television broadcast or video signal that produces entertainment or business applications, is operating and is located in the motor vehicle at a point forward of the back of the driver’s seat, or is operating and the monitor, screen, or display is visible to the driver while driving the motor vehicle."
the main problem is that the vehicle code does not even contemplate devices that have multiple uses, like smartphones, that can act as phones, texting devices, GPS devices, AND potential video streaming devices.
i'd say the person's best legal recourse is to argue that Google Glass is a mobile phone device and should be considered under Section 23123, rather than a "television" or "video monitor" under Section 27602. and while i'm angry at the police officer for issuing such a charge, the officer also is not in the position of determining what the law is. that's going to have to be a judge.
the ticket also charges the person with generic speeding, so, really, she kinda screwed up to begin with. my guess is that a traffic judge will dismiss the 27602 charge and fine her handily for speeding.
I think Valve actually wants to approach this by introducing a number of different machines at different spec levels, but all running Steam OS. Then, like how Steam operates now, they sell licenses to a wide variety of games (and possibly applications) that have different levels of system requirements.
The end goal is to reach out into a wide audience of different levels of gamers, from the casual to the hardcore, from puzzle game fans to FPS fans, etc., and to provide different kinds of devices geared towards each audience.
There's a danger of segmentation, of course. But I think the way Valve is approaching this is quite brilliant. The PS4, XBone, and Wii platforms have the advantage of being "do-it-all" machines, but they're also prohibitively expensive (at least in the cases of the PS4 and XBone) and might not be interesting to casuals, fans of games requiring lesser resources, or even hi-end gamer enthusiasts. Valve is taking a page from Android and casting a wide net.
A professionally trained, well-paid human teacher eh?
If this is true, then how come our schools are so awful?
We the people have been throwing more and more money at schoolteachers, and requiring ever-increasing levels of training and education to maintain their license to teach, yet the educational achievments of our students have been flatlined for 40 years, and have even fallen dramatically in some districts.
this is nothing but a red herring argument foisted by fiscal conservatives to continue to destroy the public school system and to concentrate resources in elite public schools. for a nation whose economic engine relies on advanced knowledge and high literacy, we should be treasuring our teachers. teaching should be one of the highest-paid professions, and people should be beating down the doors to try to become a teacher.
Aiming at a stationary fishing boat near Sydney, Australia.
if that's true, i'd be more worried that North Korea's navy (ahem) apparently has torpedo technology that can hit targets in an entirely different oceanic region.
manufacturers of iOS devices, Android devices, Windows Phone devices, even Blackberries that still exist in the wild all do at least some of their manufacturing in China, where labor and environmental abuses are not just a daily occurrence but an accepted part of "doing business."
calling one side hypocritical is naïve, flame baiting, and ultimately pointless.
Why, if changing the entire world fleet of personal cars into electircal vehicles will have no measurable impact on CO2 emissions, are all the environmental nuts yacking about this? Should they/you not be yacknig about something that can make an actual difference?
5% to 7% of all CO2 emissions is quite a LARGE number, when you think about the number of personal internal-combustion automobiles and transports used worldwide. that is statistically significant.
the other problem is that reducing the amount of CO2 produced by human activities (aside from just respiration) is a cumulative effort. an analogy: humans worldwide used chlorofluorocarbons fairly widely, even after scientists determined that CFCs were actively destroying the ozone layer protecting us all from excessive UV exposure. it took the collective effort of the world's governments to regulate and limit the use of CFCs, the willingness of corporations to go along with these regs and with scientific recommendations, and knowledge of the problem on a widespread scale for humanity to address the problem. today, most industrialized nations have at least switched to CFC alternatives that don't gobble up the ozone layer as quickly, and the rapid depletion we saw of the layer in the 90s has ceased. somewhat. we're at least not severely irradiating ourselves.
my point is that an argument saying that humans shouldn't institute a change like transitioning from internal combustion engines in cars because it would only make a 5% dent in the problem is silly. that change on its own might not make a large difference, but that change in combination with other fundamental changes in how we generate and use energy would make all the difference.
those changes, reducing energy consumption, increasing efficiency, and seeking alternative, cleaner energy sources are necessary but unpalatable to pretty much everyone who has gotten use to being energy gluttons. the politics behind all of this is even worse. that doesn't alter the fact that any meaningful effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions requires a lot of different efforts, including reducing automotive emissions.
Facebook is an american company
freedom of speech, even speech we dont like is legal
i feel bad for the girl being bullied but i dont blame anyone for their death who kills themselves except for them.
not ALL speech is legal in the US. take the "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" example. or cases of defamation.
in some US jurisdictions, there are laws criminalizing severe verbal harassment and there are actionable torts for intentional and/or negligent infliction of emotional distress.
too many folks in the US misunderstand exactly what the First Amendment entails.
in addition, there are arguments for why Facebook should be subject to Italy's laws. if they benefit from any way by doing business in Italy with Italians, those persons would at least have an argument that any harm Facebook does as a company against Italians should have consequences.
there are definitely espionage and foreign relations nerds.
this would also qualify under "stuff that matters", since incidents that affect the peaceful relations of two world powers would count as such.
most two-factor authentication schemes i've seen so far require users to have either a physical dongle that provides keycodes, a mobile phone capable of receiving SMS messages, or a smartphone app.
most users i've seen can't be bothered to take this "inconvenient" step to secure their accounts. i hope Google makes the two-factor login a requirement soon, but they're going to get some pretty tough pushback from the lazy.
it may be a "technology issue" as you say, but don't think for a second that the Mobile Phone companies are just obliviously choosing technologies that only work on their own network.
it's the same issue with AT&T's and T-mobile's LTE networks using different frequencies of LTE. it's simply another form of lock-in.
Here's the Yelp page for Dietz Development. Look at the reviews and you can see that Yelp has been censoring them pretty heavily. All of them are from the last day or two and the review in question has been removed.
This was a great opportunity for Yelp to stand up for consumer rights and freedoms, but instead they've stuck their head in the sand. Even if they'd put a notice at the top of her review saying that "the statements here are not those of Yelp's, blah blah blah lawyer speak" that would have been fine. However, they've shown they have no backbone and won't stand behind their users.
What if Slashdot editors deleted comments anytime somebody looked at them wrong; what effect would that have on the quantity and quality of the discussion here? There's only been a tiny handful of times that a comment here has been censored -- hopefully it stays that way.
I've never used Yelp before because I wasn't real familiar with them. Now that I am I'll never use them in the future.
that's not quite accurate.
Yelp uses an automated algorithm to filter out some posts: "How do you decide which reviews to filter?
We use filtering software to determine which reviews should be filtered on any given day among the millions that are submitted to the site. The software looks at a wide range of data associated with every review. We invite you to watch this short video for more detail about how it all works."
http://www.yelp.com/faq#why_filter
as a site dedicated to enabling ordinary people to post reviews about businesses in their own communities, Yelp provides a great service for consumers. but Yelp also has its own concern to try to keep reviews on its site relevant as much as possible. it doesn't serve anyone to allow users to publish reviews that have little to no connection to the actual businesses being reviewed. Yelp's reputation for being a place where you can get low-noise, high-signal reviews is on the line. and having too much noise as compared to actual signal does not serve Yelp's users either, as they won't get a reasonably accurate picture of businesses reviewed on the site.
i'll acknowledge that Yelp is treading a fine line here. i think they understand that. but to say that Yelp is "undermining consumer rights and freedoms" here is completely unfair and unabashedly silly. filtered posts can still be seen if you click on a link below the reviews. Yelp explains why they have been filtered but still allows users to access said posts.
and even then, if you go to Dietz Development's page now, there are a slew of negative reviews, completely unfiltered, that have nothing to do with Dietz Development's services or customer relations. most of them are backlash "internet badass" posts shaming Dietz for suing. while allowing people to review businesses like Dietz and provide said reviews online for the public is a general good, allowing for higher noise to signal and for reviews that have little to do with the actual quality of a company is not.
there was a Florida pizza restaurant President Obama visited during this year's Presidential campaign. the owner of the restaurant was, apparently, a conservative, but he was excited to host the President all the same and even gave Obama a hug. as a result, hundreds of trolls crashed the restaurant owner's Yelp page and posted negative review after negative review. many of the "reviewers" acknowledged never having eaten at the restaurant. some of the "reviewers" had never been to Florida. would you say Yelp should keep all those "noise" posts anyway? i would argue no. the posts were marginally-relevant, if at all, to the actual pizza restaurant, the quality
Slashdot Mirror
perhaps they could stop subsidizing fossil fuels and ethanol as well.
"Tort Reform" is a red herring foisted by insurance companies. reducing the ability for patients to protect themselves when medical practitioners screw up does nothing to reduce costs and does everything to undercut the little guy.
healthcare costs so much in the U.S. because primary and preventative care are lacking, and the "market" has emphasized high-cost hospital care and pharmaceuticals. in short, capitalistic greed is unchecked. sad, but unsurprising, really.
government is needed to step in and counter this trend. left to their own devices, the healthcare industry and pharmaceutical companies will just continue to jack up prices, while our population does little to increase overall health.
this is not just knowledge for knowledge's sake. this is part of efforts to observe planetoids and asteroids to determine if there's risk of collision with Earth, determining feasibility of mining asteroids for resources, or even plain and simple adding to data sets observing how planetoids and asteroids interact with space
a lot of basic science isn't about finding groundbreaking stuff all the time. in fact, if you're doing research only looking for the "groundbreaking stuff", you're doing science wrong. much of science is straight observation. and it is USEFUL.
are...are you suggesting we be tolerant of a person who actively promotes intolerance?
how do you function with those mental acrobatics?
it's not about separating art from the creator, it's about not giving money or publicity to someone who still actively fights against equality. Card was on the board of the National Organization for Marriage and is still (afaik) a member.
quite bluntly, i don't want to give him any of my money, because that money is being used to deny human rights to millions of people merely because they love someone of the same gender.
Sections 23123 and 23123.5 of the California Vehicle Code prohibit use of a mobile phone while driving unless "the electronic wireless communications device is specifically designed and configured to allow voice-operated and hands-free operation" or "that telephone is specifically designed and configured to allow hands-free listening and talking, and is used in that manner while driving."
According to Google Glass' product page, ALL control is done via voice command: http://www.google.com/glass/start/what-it-does/
There's a specific provision disallowing drivers under 18 years of age from using mobile devices at all, but that's not the case here.
HOWEVER, the ticket in the article says in part that the charge was under Section 27602 of the Vehicle Code, which says that "A person shall not drive a motor vehicle if a television receiver, a video monitor, or a television or video screen, or any other similar means of visually displaying a television broadcast or video signal that produces entertainment or business applications, is operating and is located in the motor vehicle at a point forward of the back of the driver’s seat, or is operating and the monitor, screen, or display is visible to the driver while driving the motor vehicle."
the main problem is that the vehicle code does not even contemplate devices that have multiple uses, like smartphones, that can act as phones, texting devices, GPS devices, AND potential video streaming devices.
i'd say the person's best legal recourse is to argue that Google Glass is a mobile phone device and should be considered under Section 23123, rather than a "television" or "video monitor" under Section 27602. and while i'm angry at the police officer for issuing such a charge, the officer also is not in the position of determining what the law is. that's going to have to be a judge.
the ticket also charges the person with generic speeding, so, really, she kinda screwed up to begin with. my guess is that a traffic judge will dismiss the 27602 charge and fine her handily for speeding.
"oh dear, i seem to have premature electorate all over my caucus!"
I think Valve actually wants to approach this by introducing a number of different machines at different spec levels, but all running Steam OS. Then, like how Steam operates now, they sell licenses to a wide variety of games (and possibly applications) that have different levels of system requirements.
The end goal is to reach out into a wide audience of different levels of gamers, from the casual to the hardcore, from puzzle game fans to FPS fans, etc., and to provide different kinds of devices geared towards each audience.
There's a danger of segmentation, of course. But I think the way Valve is approaching this is quite brilliant. The PS4, XBone, and Wii platforms have the advantage of being "do-it-all" machines, but they're also prohibitively expensive (at least in the cases of the PS4 and XBone) and might not be interesting to casuals, fans of games requiring lesser resources, or even hi-end gamer enthusiasts. Valve is taking a page from Android and casting a wide net.
A professionally trained, well-paid human teacher eh?
If this is true, then how come our schools are so awful?
We the people have been throwing more and more money at schoolteachers, and requiring ever-increasing levels of training and education to maintain their license to teach, yet the educational achievments of our students have been flatlined for 40 years, and have even fallen dramatically in some districts.
this is a MYTH.
this is nothing but a red herring argument foisted by fiscal conservatives to continue to destroy the public school system and to concentrate resources in elite public schools. for a nation whose economic engine relies on advanced knowledge and high literacy, we should be treasuring our teachers. teaching should be one of the highest-paid professions, and people should be beating down the doors to try to become a teacher.
instead, people have bought the line that teachers are "overpaid" and don't bother to realize that teachers earn incredibly low salaries for the education and professional level of their work. that is insane.
at the very least, please stop repeating the blatant lie that teachers are overpaid. there could be nothing farther from the truth.
that's an assertion without proof. i thought the posters (yes, even AC ones) were better than that on Slashdot.
i wish i had mod points right now to rate this as flamebait/troll.
alright AC, where's your proof.
don't worry, all we need to do is send one spaceship, a hot bald model, and a guy with a 70s haircut to go "interface" with the robot's probe.
"Sending yourself pilfered code through your company email account is probably not the wisest plan."
apparently sending ANYTHING through e-mail period is not the wisest plan, either.
Aiming at a stationary fishing boat near Sydney, Australia.
if that's true, i'd be more worried that North Korea's navy (ahem) apparently has torpedo technology that can hit targets in an entirely different oceanic region.
manufacturers of iOS devices, Android devices, Windows Phone devices, even Blackberries that still exist in the wild all do at least some of their manufacturing in China, where labor and environmental abuses are not just a daily occurrence but an accepted part of "doing business."
calling one side hypocritical is naïve, flame baiting, and ultimately pointless.
Why, if changing the entire world fleet of personal cars into electircal vehicles will have no measurable impact on CO2 emissions, are all the environmental nuts yacking about this? Should they/you not be yacknig about something that can make an actual difference?
5% to 7% of all CO2 emissions is quite a LARGE number, when you think about the number of personal internal-combustion automobiles and transports used worldwide. that is statistically significant.
the other problem is that reducing the amount of CO2 produced by human activities (aside from just respiration) is a cumulative effort. an analogy: humans worldwide used chlorofluorocarbons fairly widely, even after scientists determined that CFCs were actively destroying the ozone layer protecting us all from excessive UV exposure. it took the collective effort of the world's governments to regulate and limit the use of CFCs, the willingness of corporations to go along with these regs and with scientific recommendations, and knowledge of the problem on a widespread scale for humanity to address the problem. today, most industrialized nations have at least switched to CFC alternatives that don't gobble up the ozone layer as quickly, and the rapid depletion we saw of the layer in the 90s has ceased. somewhat. we're at least not severely irradiating ourselves.
my point is that an argument saying that humans shouldn't institute a change like transitioning from internal combustion engines in cars because it would only make a 5% dent in the problem is silly. that change on its own might not make a large difference, but that change in combination with other fundamental changes in how we generate and use energy would make all the difference.
those changes, reducing energy consumption, increasing efficiency, and seeking alternative, cleaner energy sources are necessary but unpalatable to pretty much everyone who has gotten use to being energy gluttons. the politics behind all of this is even worse. that doesn't alter the fact that any meaningful effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions requires a lot of different efforts, including reducing automotive emissions.
Facebook is an american company freedom of speech, even speech we dont like is legal i feel bad for the girl being bullied but i dont blame anyone for their death who kills themselves except for them.
not ALL speech is legal in the US. take the "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" example. or cases of defamation.
in some US jurisdictions, there are laws criminalizing severe verbal harassment and there are actionable torts for intentional and/or negligent infliction of emotional distress.
too many folks in the US misunderstand exactly what the First Amendment entails.
in addition, there are arguments for why Facebook should be subject to Italy's laws. if they benefit from any way by doing business in Italy with Italians, those persons would at least have an argument that any harm Facebook does as a company against Italians should have consequences.
Let's all pretend the last 80+ years of science didn't happen and we live under Newton's ideas of how everything behaved. Who's in?
the Republican Party? large swaths of the American Bible Belt? Scientologists? Liberal Arts majors? Michio Kaku?
there are definitely espionage and foreign relations nerds. this would also qualify under "stuff that matters", since incidents that affect the peaceful relations of two world powers would count as such.
most two-factor authentication schemes i've seen so far require users to have either a physical dongle that provides keycodes, a mobile phone capable of receiving SMS messages, or a smartphone app.
most users i've seen can't be bothered to take this "inconvenient" step to secure their accounts. i hope Google makes the two-factor login a requirement soon, but they're going to get some pretty tough pushback from the lazy.
it may be a "technology issue" as you say, but don't think for a second that the Mobile Phone companies are just obliviously choosing technologies that only work on their own network. it's the same issue with AT&T's and T-mobile's LTE networks using different frequencies of LTE. it's simply another form of lock-in.
i wish i had some mod points for this. it's not NK that the US is worried about. It's CHINA.
Sadly, it looks like they're going the other way.
Here's the Yelp page for Dietz Development. Look at the reviews and you can see that Yelp has been censoring them pretty heavily. All of them are from the last day or two and the review in question has been removed.
This was a great opportunity for Yelp to stand up for consumer rights and freedoms, but instead they've stuck their head in the sand. Even if they'd put a notice at the top of her review saying that "the statements here are not those of Yelp's, blah blah blah lawyer speak" that would have been fine. However, they've shown they have no backbone and won't stand behind their users.
What if Slashdot editors deleted comments anytime somebody looked at them wrong; what effect would that have on the quantity and quality of the discussion here? There's only been a tiny handful of times that a comment here has been censored -- hopefully it stays that way.
I've never used Yelp before because I wasn't real familiar with them. Now that I am I'll never use them in the future.
that's not quite accurate.
Yelp uses an automated algorithm to filter out some posts: "How do you decide which reviews to filter? We use filtering software to determine which reviews should be filtered on any given day among the millions that are submitted to the site. The software looks at a wide range of data associated with every review. We invite you to watch this short video for more detail about how it all works." http://www.yelp.com/faq#why_filter
as a site dedicated to enabling ordinary people to post reviews about businesses in their own communities, Yelp provides a great service for consumers. but Yelp also has its own concern to try to keep reviews on its site relevant as much as possible. it doesn't serve anyone to allow users to publish reviews that have little to no connection to the actual businesses being reviewed. Yelp's reputation for being a place where you can get low-noise, high-signal reviews is on the line. and having too much noise as compared to actual signal does not serve Yelp's users either, as they won't get a reasonably accurate picture of businesses reviewed on the site.
i'll acknowledge that Yelp is treading a fine line here. i think they understand that. but to say that Yelp is "undermining consumer rights and freedoms" here is completely unfair and unabashedly silly. filtered posts can still be seen if you click on a link below the reviews. Yelp explains why they have been filtered but still allows users to access said posts.
and even then, if you go to Dietz Development's page now, there are a slew of negative reviews, completely unfiltered, that have nothing to do with Dietz Development's services or customer relations. most of them are backlash "internet badass" posts shaming Dietz for suing. while allowing people to review businesses like Dietz and provide said reviews online for the public is a general good, allowing for higher noise to signal and for reviews that have little to do with the actual quality of a company is not.
there was a Florida pizza restaurant President Obama visited during this year's Presidential campaign. the owner of the restaurant was, apparently, a conservative, but he was excited to host the President all the same and even gave Obama a hug. as a result, hundreds of trolls crashed the restaurant owner's Yelp page and posted negative review after negative review. many of the "reviewers" acknowledged never having eaten at the restaurant. some of the "reviewers" had never been to Florida. would you say Yelp should keep all those "noise" posts anyway? i would argue no. the posts were marginally-relevant, if at all, to the actual pizza restaurant, the quality
being in the CIA is about as nerdy as it gets.
clearly your anecdotal, personally-biased evidence is all we need to come to the conclusion that lawyers are jerks. right.