And you're so positive that it's impossible to undercut Apple, why exactly?
Because MP3 player components cost money to manufacture. Nobody else buys them in the huge quantities Apple does, and that allows them to negotiate better deals (as well as exclusive deals) that no other manufacturer can get. So long as nobody invents a dramatically different way of physically storing digital music and converting it to analog sounds, that will be the case.
These devices will be integrated into mobile phones, and Apple will be left out in the cold. Period. End of story.
Here on Earth, MP3 players have been integrated into mobile phones for several years now. Even with iPods right in front of them to model themselves after, none of them has been decent or made a dent in iPod sales. No doubt someday in the future (whether a year or a hundred years from now) we will all have a single device/implant that does everything we do with portable devices now. But that day just gets further away every time cell phone companies try to charge $2.99 for a single song people can buy for 99 cents at the iTunes music store.
I hope they had fun while it lasted, because it's ending soon.
I think they made iPods for money rather than fun. And they have made many billions of dollars, so I think they're pretty happy, regardless of what happens in the future. Every company will disappear eventually, but right now there is no company even planning on offering a smaller, lighter, less expensive, easier to use portable audio player than Apple. When that happens, I'll be the first to buy it! Until then (and even after), trolls who hate Apple for no rational reason will remain trolls who hate Apple for no rational reason.
It isn't some supernatural act of God that helps you recover.
God created healing.
God may well have supernaturally created the biological systems that heal us, but there is nothing supernatural about their function. If someone were to be healed supernaturally, that would be wonderful, as it wouldn't require the time-consuming and sometimes counter-productive efforts of our own bodies.
If this online movie store had every movie ever made and sold them for $5 each, of course it would be hugely successful (despite any DRM or download times).
Actually, Ipods have a quirky, finicky user interface with not enough buttons, very similar to their computers and mice.
For 90% of the public out there who just want a portable device to play their music, the iPod has an elegant interface with just the right number of buttons. The number one failure of most interfaces is that they present so much stuff at one time that the user has no idea what he's supposed to do next. That's fine in a 3D CAD/CAM application you'll use 10 hours a day for years on end, but not in a consumer device.
Creative DID sue apple for copying much of their interface. You can sue anybody for anything. Winning requires more than jealousy, and Creative has lost at everything they've done since the Soundblaster 16.
I love... I can... I like... an ipod would limit...
Congratulations, you very specific desires about how you want to do things. Most consumers want to turn it on and have it work. Those are the people Apple sells to. You don't have to buy an iPod, or even like them, but they sell more than everyone else put together precisely because they don't target users like you, who want everything and the kitchen sink but care not one whit for simplicity.
VERSATILITY. Its why the Windows OS has the market share for home and buisness computers. And it's why if Apple doesn't grow up,... it won't hold the MP3 Player market for long. Anyone else remember those few years that Apple computers dominated the home and buisness computer market?
You must have lived through a very different 1980s than the rest of us. Everybody wanted Apple computers, they just cost so damn much that people were willing to put up with IBM clones that were 25% of the price. "Versatility" was not the adjective used to sell Compaq 386s -- "cheap" was the word. You notice IBM doesn't even make PCs anymore, yet they were just as "versatile" as the clones. What they weren't was cheap -- you could buy a Compaq for $1500, an IBM for $2500, or an Apple for $5000. No surprise who sold the most units, who sold the least, and who got squeezed out in the middle.
Now, it's 2006. You can buy a Creative MP3 player for $300, an Archos for $300, or an Apple for $300. Little surprise who has 90% of the market, and it isn't changing anytime soon unless Apple starts raising their prices, because nobody else is able to undercut them.
On the contrary, Apple got this market precisely because it had/has the best UI.
Argue whatever you like about particular pet features/compatibility, but Apple is #1 because they saw what an UI mess most MP3 players (both software and hardware) were and simplified them both so that normal people were capable of operating them without having to know anything about the underlying technology.
Very few competitors have even matched the simplicity of operation, and none have surpassed it yet. Until they do, consumers simply aren't going to be interested in jumping ship without massive financial incentive. And I don't see how anyone can undercut the iPod by a significant margin given Apple's huge volume discount on parts and continued willingness to forego profit for market share.
I may have been unclear in my initial post, as you seem to have completely misinterpreted much of what I was trying to say.
Customers don't shop for health care. How do you think companies pick health plans? By shopping.
Insurance and health plans are not actual health care. Nobody shops around for an emergency appendectomy, they go straight to the closest hospital and whichever surgeon happens to be on staff that day performs the operation. No patient asks how much the breathing tube is going to cost, and then threatens to climb off the operating table if they won't lower the price. That's what I mean by customers not shopping for health care.
Shopping implies you have a choice, that you can negotiate and walk away if the offer is not good enough. There are many minor health problems where of course you can do that, and call around to different dermatologists or podiatrists to find the best deal, but those are generally not the kinds of health care that people have financial concerns about, because the market DOES keep them in check. Getting your eyes checked is very cost competitive, because it's easy to go to another optometrist or wait a week if you need to.
The only people who *shop* for major health care are the independently wealthy, and insurance agents and government agents who are negotiating prices with hospitals and clinics for what they will reimburse on behalf of patients covered by their insurance plans. Because they have large staffs with specialist knowledge, they can actually have enough information to negotiate on a free market basis with a large hospital system and know what is and isn't a reasonable price, what options are available, and where compromises may be made for the sake of cost as well as what areas cannot be cut back on no matter the cost.
So you and I, as actual sick people walking into a hospital, have insurance plans that we basically had no role in negotiating beyond selecting from the few choices presented to us, none of which we fully understand. That's what I mean when I say that sick people, the actual consumers of health care, don't shop around, and quite literally CAN'T shop around, for either lack of specialist knowledge necessary to make an informed decision or simply the short amount of time their malady allows for decision-making.
Insurance companies are't spending billions of dollars on commercials...All they're doing is taking customers from each other.
And how do you think they spread awareness so that their competitors' customers know to switch?
I think you misread my sentences. I said they don't spend billions on advertising just for fun. I know they advertise, they spend billions of dollars on it. My point was that those billions of dollars do nothing productive, as they don't provide health care for those already insured, and they don't expand the market by bringing in new customers unaware of the product. All they do is swap customers between companies and build brand loyalty. That is part of why private insurance costs so much more than Medicare yet provides less actual health care.
While death is definitely a market force... Insurance companies aren't fighting death, they wish it would strike quicker so they can charge you a premium without having to pay for your care.
I agree completely. Private insurers are not interested in providing the best health care for the dollar, they are interested in having healthy people pay premiums and never need care. insurance companies would prefer for every emergency victim to die on the scene and never even ride in an ambulance much less make it to the operating room.
The only reason I mention Death was because, in terms of innovation, it functions as the main motivator in health care research and advances. In most industries, if there is a monopoly there is no motivation to innovate any more, and the quality of product declines. Health care doesn't follow that principle because doctors don'
Aside from food and water (which most adults can select on their own with minimal skill and usually requires many poor choices over a period of time to have any long-term negative effects) there is nothing else you will ever purchase that your life depends on.
Medical care is it -- you will die if you're wrong, you will die if you try to save money in the wrong place, your children will suffer permanent physical damage for the rest of their lives if you make the wrong choice ONCE when they are 3 months old. What other purchasing decision has that effect? What other industry has that effect?
Despite how important proper health care is to most people's basic survival (hey, you could be lucky and never even get a bruise, most people aren't), you have no chance whatsoever of making a fully informed decision at the proper time, which is required for proper operation of a free market.
That makes it completely unlike any other product, any other industry on Earth.
You really need to take a Valium before logging on, sir.
You didn't shop for health care, you shopped for copays and dental/vision options and PPO choices (which of course can change at any moment, but you have to wait until next years' open enrollment to make any changes on YOUR side of the agreement).
You don't have the slightest clue beyond the very basics what actual health care you have available until you are in a situation where you need it and they tell you a particular procedure isn't covered, or that the hospital went over the limit and by the way here's the bill for the extra (how the heck should you know what the hospital has negotiated with your insurer and be able to verify they didn't go over -- were you supposed to ask the anesthesiologist how mcuh he charges for a breathing tube while he was putting you under?)
When you were in the selction process, did you actually go through and examine the credentials and experience of the potential heart specialist they would send you to if you had a heart attack? Or did you just see that your family doctor was on the list? Do you know which endocrinologist they have approved?
Did you know that if you're in a life-threatening accident and are treated while unconscious, you might get charged tens of thousands of dollars when you wake up because the ambulance took you to the wrong hospital and you didn't go to an approved one after 24 hours? Did you take that into account while "shopping" or did you just look at the phone book of doctors they give you to see that yours was listed and say "fuck, I don't know what any of this is, but paying $20 for my wife's perscription is better than $30, so I'll go with Aetna!"
So you're feeding us a complete line of utter bull, and it isn't necessary for me to read further into that big wordy comment you made.
I'd hate to trouble your initial knee-jerk reaction. have a nice night!
By "efficient" I mean less overhead. That's efficiency in health care (and charitable organizations).
There is virtually no difference in private vs public health care, as they are both provided by the same facilities and people (unless you have a VA hospital nearby or something). Insurers don't build hospitals, they reimbuse hospitals.
What you need is incentives to keep costs under control.
Medicare keeps medical costs under control better than any private insurance company. The government uses the exact same mechanism as the private carriers -- they negotiate specific rates they will reimbuse for a procedure. The only difference is that the government doesn't also need marketing expenses and profit, which takes another 20-50% out of the actual medical care provided by private insurers.
Get a job in a hospital in the US sometime, you'll see that medicare and private insurance operate almost exactly the same, the only difference being that medicare doesn't waste as much money on "other stuff". People complain about government bureaucracy, but Medicare can be a downright easy process compared to most private insurers if you're doing anything more complicated than getting a wart removed.
Otherwise you will keep the costs under control by rationing care like in Canada and England. That's just the historic record.
Health care is always rationed, and it is rationed more by private companies than it is by US government health insurance. Insurers do everything possible to keep you from ever actually getting expensive care. Dealing with Medicare or the Veteran's Administration isn't always convenient, but there is no deliberate hurdle-jumping placed in your way as there is with private care. There are no claims processors looking for excuses to deny coverage so that you're stuck with half a needed treatment and a hundred grand of debt if you want to continue.
People do shop for health care, you're just not in the right age group to notice yet. What do you think old folks talk about (their kids, grandkids and their health/doctors).
I'm not in the right age group as a buyer, but I did work in public/private healthcare for the last decade so I have a more than passing acquantaince with the process. Old folks talk about care, but only the wealthy ones can actually afford to change providers. If you've got a solid retirement savings that covers long-term care, that's great, but that covers maybe 5% of the health care customers in the USA, and they aren't the ones anybody is concerned about.
Many insured people don't get their checkups on time.
Denial and other human foibles are certainly factors, but when it comes to private insurance you also have to realize that people are often genuinely scared of going to the doctor if they think something is wrong. If they find out they are unhealthy, they could lose their job or insurance, because now they are a "risk". God forbid you discover you have diabetes or another chronic but livable condition -- your premiums will become crazy (or you will be outright uninsurable) if you pay for your own coverage, or you will become a huge liability to your employer if you don't.
We've put people in a lose-lose situation where it is BETTER for them to willfully ignore health problems as long as possible, all because we refuse to accept that it makes no sense to make health insurance a market commodity. Nobody can do without it, everybody needs it, and if you tie it to emplyment, all it does is put people's jobs in jeopardy when they do, inevitably, get sick.
It reminds me of the old joke about democracy -- of course government health care is a horrible, horrible idea. But it is still better than all the alternatives.
In theory, everything you say is right. I support the free market, believe it comes up with the best solutions through competition, and find government sluggishness to be incapable of meeting the changing landscape of needs. Unfortunately when it comes to health insurance, for many reasons theory and reality part ways and the free market has somehow managed to provide worse care at higher cost while not even being able to cover those most in need of the service!
Here in Canada we have one provider for health insurance, the provincial government. This results in our tax dollars being funneled into paying to run the system that is increasing in cost faster than we can afford it. The main problem lies in the fact that there's no competition in health insurance, therefore, no impetus to keep the efficiency high, and therefore, the affordability low.
Wow, it's amazing that it is so different here in the USA, where health care costs are low and constantly going down due to competition. Nobody is without care, and the market has made things wonderfully efficient -- you can get appointments in minutes and the paperwork is minimal!
What you state is absolutely correct for any normal commodity -- building one car factory or stereo component store would be a recipe for disaster. No incentive for development, efficiency or improvement.
Fortunately, health care has no relationship whatsoever to other commercial industries. Customers don't shop for health care. The amount of specialized knowledge you'd need to compare the providers of every kind of care is beyond the reach of any single human being. If you wait until you need a particular care, you usually need it immediately, which precludes comparison shopping. You can always walk away from a bad car salesman, but if you're bleeding to death you don't have much negotiating power if the hospital tells you it is $3,000 for admittance.
Health care needs no advertising -- Insurance companies are't spending billions of dollars on commercials so that people know there is such a thing available and they should buy some. All they're doing is taking customers from each other and money away from actual care. In the computer business, that would be fine, since a smaller transistor size on the manufacturing side or broader market on the customer side can make up for the marketing expenses, but I can assure you that there's nobody having heart attacks with health care advertising that wouldn't have had one already (or vice-versa). State Farm isn't developing any top-secret surgical procedures that Allstate won't have access to.
Incentive to improve is omnipresent since Death is a far more efficient competitor than Microsoft or State Farm. Death has no overhead, he's penetrated every market segment and is very efficient at finding new opportunities for development. Death works 24/7 -- even on holidays! No matter how good insurance and health care are, there will always be real and constant pressure on them to improve.
The fundamental issue is that we're not willing to let people simply die on the street. If someone walks into an emergency room, we, as a society, have legally required that hospital to provide stabilizing care. They cannot tell the guy to go die on the street if his credit card is declined, which means that ultimately, we the taxpayers are going to pay for such emergency medical care regardless of how the cmmercial market should or shouldn't work in an ideal world.
Finally, the major difference between medical care and every other industry is that the cost of most goods doesn't increase unpredictably (but preventably!) by thousands of percent in a matter of moments. If you were shopping for a CD player and the price was $50 -- wait, no it's $50,000! -- you'd be pretty shocked and kick yourself for not having bought it last week when it was $50.
But that's exactly what we're dealing with -- a $50 annual checkup would allow us to prevent many of the $50,000 emergency visits we already pay for. I can't imagine it makes more economic sense to write out $50,000 checks every time someone walks through the ER door, but refuse to cover the $50 checkup that would have not only increased their health in the first place, but prevented them from losing time at work and contributing to the economy.
Some day, when you actually know anything about health care in this country, you will look back on what you wrote and laugh. Government health care is far, far more efficient than any private insurer in the United States. It has been for decades and decades.
They do have an exclusive deal with Prima, but what Blizzard and Prima agree to has no bearing whatsoever on the rights of other parties to write about their game.
The sticking point for unauthorized guides is usually that the author has no access to the software or development team before it is released to the general public. Large publishers want to have a book on the shelves the day the software comes out, not 12 months later.
Does this "atmosphere" in Oblivion consist of characters being played by other people around the world that you can interact with?
Unfortunately, the characters in Oblivion use English properly, spell their words correctly, speak in complete sentences and never/yell about a leet sword they found or what a faggot that troll over there is.
I know, it ruins the atmosphere but somehow I manage to enjoy it:P
Ebay has no choice but to remove auctions if they are notified of a DMCA claim. The man's ONLY recourse is to either wait for Blizzard to sue him, shut down his own business, or file suit himself so that the courts will make a positive finding that his works do not violate the DMCA (which will allow eBay to sell them again). Amazingly he has chosen the third option, which of course Blizzard never expected.
His guide (from descriptions, I haven't read it) will most certainly sail through any Fair Use review. You dismissal of criticism, commentary, teaching etc suggest that you have no idea whatsoever what those mean or how they are applied. A guide such as his fits nearly half of the exemptions allowed for, as does every other reference/how-to manual that deals with a commercial product. The only difference between this guy and standard computer reference book publishers is that Blizzard assumed they could push him around and he couldn't or wouldn't defend his right.
They pulled the trimester thing out of the air because it was convenient.
"They pulled the trimester thing out of the air" because it is how every medical professional in the previous 150 years measured the progress of a pregnancy. There are certainly many reasonable moral and legal reasons to disagree with Roe v Wade, I find it amazing that you have hung your hat on a rather meaningless issue of semantics that any middle-school student could have explained.
In American jurisprudence there is a presumption of the competence of the legislature for most classes of cases... a legislative schema that exists under that delegated power need not actually 'work'
On the contrary, while courts generally defer to the legislature on intent, they do look at whether the stated purpose of a statute is manifested in reality. A law that does not "work" may well be unconstitutional for the obvious reason that Congress is abdicating a constitutional requirement to provide for some situation -- an ineffective provision being, to any man of reason, just as bad as no provision at all.
The clearest examples of this can be seen through the civil rights era of the 20th century, starting with Brown v Topkea Board of Education, where separate was recognized as being inherently unequal, regardless of what the legislature said. Local legislatures were quite fond of implementing civil rights laws that were constitutionally required of them, yet deliberately doing it in such a fashion that they were completely useless, ineffective, or counter-productive, and the courts repeatedly struck down statues precisely because of their failure to work.
The Supreme Court could find that the President has to wear a hat on Tuesdays and invite all patent holders to lunch. They can find whatever they like, though they have no way of enforcing decisions. If they say that runny cheese is unconstitutional, then it is.
So yes, they could certainly find that the implementation of the Patent system is unconstitutional and direct Congress to fix it.
First, that huge range is with a ballistic trajectory, and the current understanding is that it doesn't have any capability whatsoever for terrain-hugging operation (though if it did, it would have maybe 100 mile practical range in that mode). While fast is cool, fast with a ballistic trajectory is not a problem for any modern Aegis system -- a single missile cruiser could destroy an entire submarine's complement of Granit missiles before they were halfway to target. The longest delays would be waiting for the Russian crews to reload the launch tubes. Even the Russians are giving up on such missiles, as they've been made obsolete by current antimissile defense and are too massive to be carried by anything but large ships and subs.
The only supersonic AShM missile we have a realistic chance of facing anytime soon (China, Iran, North Korea, etc) is the Sunburn, which is perfectly capable of hitting anything in the Persian Gulf from a mobile launcher hidden in the mountains of Iran and can skim the surface to hide in the littoral radar jumble and do evasive maneuvers at terminal approach to counter short range engagement when it pops up.
They can travel hundreds of miles before striking a ship, way beyond any ship's detection range, similar to cruise missiles.
Anti-ship missiles only have a 50-75 mile effective range when flying low-profile, so in any remotely open area they will be ineffective against a prepared opponent (ie, one that has AWACS and shoots anything on the water or in the air within 200 miles of the battle group).
The problem, of course, is that if Iran has any of the newer Russian supersonic designs, those are specifically designed to defeat the US Navy's Aegis missile defense systems, and the narrowness of the Persian Gulf dictates that there is a LOT of land within 100 miles of the opposit shore from which you could launch a missile. So they have the ability to launch unmolested, and once in the air the missiles are pretty much impossible to take down. If we go to war with Iran, I suspect we'll fall back on the simplest solution, which is either to remove the ships from the Gulf or (more likely) set up a physical screen whereby capital ships will always have escorts on the East side to absorb any missile attacks.
the content on p2p appears to be very very limited
Whaaa?
You may be seeing the same things over and over because many p2p apps limit results to the first 300 (or whatever), and there are a lot of p2p spammers taking up the common search words. There is enough porn on every p2p system to last any person the rest of his or her lifetime.
hiding the chinks in your armor is a lot more important with regards to terrorists than invasions.
But nobody is suggesting that we not hide the chinks in our armor -- secret meetings of any security organization are to be expected. The only demand we make is that they be less convenient than open meetings, so that there is a substantial disincentive to abusing the ability, since our fundamental belief is that openness and accountability results in better government.
My comparison to the USSR was more to point out that our previous enemy had the capability to send agents to literally every public agency meeting if they had so desired (and in fact, they often did), yet we still held such meetings in public. While MAD certainly constrained our mutual willingness to openly declare war, agents from both sides of the cold war used sabotage quite frequently as a way to destabilize and undercut public confidence. No, they didn't plan on dropping anthrax into the water supply on some tuesday afternoon, their plans would have been much more painful since any large-scale sabotage was to be implemented at precisely the moment we entered a conventional military conflict and most needed to focus all our national resources.
Slashdot Mirror
And you're so positive that it's impossible to undercut Apple, why exactly?
Because MP3 player components cost money to manufacture. Nobody else buys them in the huge quantities Apple does, and that allows them to negotiate better deals (as well as exclusive deals) that no other manufacturer can get. So long as nobody invents a dramatically different way of physically storing digital music and converting it to analog sounds, that will be the case.
These devices will be integrated into mobile phones, and Apple will be left out in the cold. Period. End of story.
Here on Earth, MP3 players have been integrated into mobile phones for several years now. Even with iPods right in front of them to model themselves after, none of them has been decent or made a dent in iPod sales. No doubt someday in the future (whether a year or a hundred years from now) we will all have a single device/implant that does everything we do with portable devices now. But that day just gets further away every time cell phone companies try to charge $2.99 for a single song people can buy for 99 cents at the iTunes music store.
I hope they had fun while it lasted, because it's ending soon.
I think they made iPods for money rather than fun. And they have made many billions of dollars, so I think they're pretty happy, regardless of what happens in the future. Every company will disappear eventually, but right now there is no company even planning on offering a smaller, lighter, less expensive, easier to use portable audio player than Apple. When that happens, I'll be the first to buy it! Until then (and even after), trolls who hate Apple for no rational reason will remain trolls who hate Apple for no rational reason.
It isn't some supernatural act of God that helps you recover.
God created healing.
God may well have supernaturally created the biological systems that heal us, but there is nothing supernatural about their function. If someone were to be healed supernaturally, that would be wonderful, as it wouldn't require the time-consuming and sometimes counter-productive efforts of our own bodies.
Amazon has a greater selection and lower prices.
If this online movie store had every movie ever made and sold them for $5 each, of course it would be hugely successful (despite any DRM or download times).
Actually, Ipods have a quirky, finicky user interface with not enough buttons, very similar to their computers and mice.
... I can ... I like ... an ipod would limit...
For 90% of the public out there who just want a portable device to play their music, the iPod has an elegant interface with just the right number of buttons. The number one failure of most interfaces is that they present so much stuff at one time that the user has no idea what he's supposed to do next. That's fine in a 3D CAD/CAM application you'll use 10 hours a day for years on end, but not in a consumer device.
Creative DID sue apple for copying much of their interface.
You can sue anybody for anything. Winning requires more than jealousy, and Creative has lost at everything they've done since the Soundblaster 16.
I love
Congratulations, you very specific desires about how you want to do things. Most consumers want to turn it on and have it work. Those are the people Apple sells to. You don't have to buy an iPod, or even like them, but they sell more than everyone else put together precisely because they don't target users like you, who want everything and the kitchen sink but care not one whit for simplicity.
VERSATILITY. Its why the Windows OS has the market share for home and buisness computers. And it's why if Apple doesn't grow up,... it won't hold the MP3 Player market for long. Anyone else remember those few years that Apple computers dominated the home and buisness computer market?
You must have lived through a very different 1980s than the rest of us. Everybody wanted Apple computers, they just cost so damn much that people were willing to put up with IBM clones that were 25% of the price. "Versatility" was not the adjective used to sell Compaq 386s -- "cheap" was the word. You notice IBM doesn't even make PCs anymore, yet they were just as "versatile" as the clones. What they weren't was cheap -- you could buy a Compaq for $1500, an IBM for $2500, or an Apple for $5000. No surprise who sold the most units, who sold the least, and who got squeezed out in the middle.
Now, it's 2006. You can buy a Creative MP3 player for $300, an Archos for $300, or an Apple for $300. Little surprise who has 90% of the market, and it isn't changing anytime soon unless Apple starts raising their prices, because nobody else is able to undercut them.
On the contrary, Apple got this market precisely because it had/has the best UI.
Argue whatever you like about particular pet features/compatibility, but Apple is #1 because they saw what an UI mess most MP3 players (both software and hardware) were and simplified them both so that normal people were capable of operating them without having to know anything about the underlying technology.
Very few competitors have even matched the simplicity of operation, and none have surpassed it yet. Until they do, consumers simply aren't going to be interested in jumping ship without massive financial incentive. And I don't see how anyone can undercut the iPod by a significant margin given Apple's huge volume discount on parts and continued willingness to forego profit for market share.
potentially drive up the market share for OS/X and Linux migrations.
:P
Wow, I loved OS/2, I can't wait to see what IBM has accomplished in the 8 versions since!
The current joke inside microsoft:
What's the difference between OSX and Vista?
Microsoft programmers are actually excited about OSX.
I may have been unclear in my initial post, as you seem to have completely misinterpreted much of what I was trying to say.
... Insurance companies aren't fighting death, they wish it would strike quicker so they can charge you a premium without having to pay for your care.
Customers don't shop for health care.
How do you think companies pick health plans? By shopping.
Insurance and health plans are not actual health care. Nobody shops around for an emergency appendectomy, they go straight to the closest hospital and whichever surgeon happens to be on staff that day performs the operation. No patient asks how much the breathing tube is going to cost, and then threatens to climb off the operating table if they won't lower the price. That's what I mean by customers not shopping for health care.
Shopping implies you have a choice, that you can negotiate and walk away if the offer is not good enough. There are many minor health problems where of course you can do that, and call around to different dermatologists or podiatrists to find the best deal, but those are generally not the kinds of health care that people have financial concerns about, because the market DOES keep them in check. Getting your eyes checked is very cost competitive, because it's easy to go to another optometrist or wait a week if you need to.
The only people who *shop* for major health care are the independently wealthy, and insurance agents and government agents who are negotiating prices with hospitals and clinics for what they will reimburse on behalf of patients covered by their insurance plans. Because they have large staffs with specialist knowledge, they can actually have enough information to negotiate on a free market basis with a large hospital system and know what is and isn't a reasonable price, what options are available, and where compromises may be made for the sake of cost as well as what areas cannot be cut back on no matter the cost.
So you and I, as actual sick people walking into a hospital, have insurance plans that we basically had no role in negotiating beyond selecting from the few choices presented to us, none of which we fully understand. That's what I mean when I say that sick people, the actual consumers of health care, don't shop around, and quite literally CAN'T shop around, for either lack of specialist knowledge necessary to make an informed decision or simply the short amount of time their malady allows for decision-making.
Insurance companies are't spending billions of dollars on commercials...All they're doing is taking customers from each other.
And how do you think they spread awareness so that their competitors' customers know to switch?
I think you misread my sentences. I said they don't spend billions on advertising just for fun. I know they advertise, they spend billions of dollars on it. My point was that those billions of dollars do nothing productive, as they don't provide health care for those already insured, and they don't expand the market by bringing in new customers unaware of the product. All they do is swap customers between companies and build brand loyalty. That is part of why private insurance costs so much more than Medicare yet provides less actual health care.
While death is definitely a market force
I agree completely. Private insurers are not interested in providing the best health care for the dollar, they are interested in having healthy people pay premiums and never need care. insurance companies would prefer for every emergency victim to die on the scene and never even ride in an ambulance much less make it to the operating room.
The only reason I mention Death was because, in terms of innovation, it functions as the main motivator in health care research and advances. In most industries, if there is a monopoly there is no motivation to innovate any more, and the quality of product declines. Health care doesn't follow that principle because doctors don'
Why would I un-say the truth?
Aside from food and water (which most adults can select on their own with minimal skill and usually requires many poor choices over a period of time to have any long-term negative effects) there is nothing else you will ever purchase that your life depends on.
Medical care is it -- you will die if you're wrong, you will die if you try to save money in the wrong place, your children will suffer permanent physical damage for the rest of their lives if you make the wrong choice ONCE when they are 3 months old. What other purchasing decision has that effect? What other industry has that effect?
Despite how important proper health care is to most people's basic survival (hey, you could be lucky and never even get a bruise, most people aren't), you have no chance whatsoever of making a fully informed decision at the proper time, which is required for proper operation of a free market.
That makes it completely unlike any other product, any other industry on Earth.
You really need to take a Valium before logging on, sir.
You didn't shop for health care, you shopped for copays and dental/vision options and PPO choices (which of course can change at any moment, but you have to wait until next years' open enrollment to make any changes on YOUR side of the agreement).
You don't have the slightest clue beyond the very basics what actual health care you have available until you are in a situation where you need it and they tell you a particular procedure isn't covered, or that the hospital went over the limit and by the way here's the bill for the extra (how the heck should you know what the hospital has negotiated with your insurer and be able to verify they didn't go over -- were you supposed to ask the anesthesiologist how mcuh he charges for a breathing tube while he was putting you under?)
When you were in the selction process, did you actually go through and examine the credentials and experience of the potential heart specialist they would send you to if you had a heart attack? Or did you just see that your family doctor was on the list? Do you know which endocrinologist they have approved?
Did you know that if you're in a life-threatening accident and are treated while unconscious, you might get charged tens of thousands of dollars when you wake up because the ambulance took you to the wrong hospital and you didn't go to an approved one after 24 hours? Did you take that into account while "shopping" or did you just look at the phone book of doctors they give you to see that yours was listed and say "fuck, I don't know what any of this is, but paying $20 for my wife's perscription is better than $30, so I'll go with Aetna!"
So you're feeding us a complete line of utter bull, and it isn't necessary for me to read further into that big wordy comment you made.
I'd hate to trouble your initial knee-jerk reaction. have a nice night!
By "efficient" I mean less overhead. That's efficiency in health care (and charitable organizations).
There is virtually no difference in private vs public health care, as they are both provided by the same facilities and people (unless you have a VA hospital nearby or something). Insurers don't build hospitals, they reimbuse hospitals.
What you need is incentives to keep costs under control.
Medicare keeps medical costs under control better than any private insurance company. The government uses the exact same mechanism as the private carriers -- they negotiate specific rates they will reimbuse for a procedure. The only difference is that the government doesn't also need marketing expenses and profit, which takes another 20-50% out of the actual medical care provided by private insurers.
Get a job in a hospital in the US sometime, you'll see that medicare and private insurance operate almost exactly the same, the only difference being that medicare doesn't waste as much money on "other stuff". People complain about government bureaucracy, but Medicare can be a downright easy process compared to most private insurers if you're doing anything more complicated than getting a wart removed.
Otherwise you will keep the costs under control by rationing care like in Canada and England. That's just the historic record.
Health care is always rationed, and it is rationed more by private companies than it is by US government health insurance. Insurers do everything possible to keep you from ever actually getting expensive care. Dealing with Medicare or the Veteran's Administration isn't always convenient, but there is no deliberate hurdle-jumping placed in your way as there is with private care. There are no claims processors looking for excuses to deny coverage so that you're stuck with half a needed treatment and a hundred grand of debt if you want to continue.
People do shop for health care, you're just not in the right age group to notice yet. What do you think old folks talk about (their kids, grandkids and their health/doctors).
I'm not in the right age group as a buyer, but I did work in public/private healthcare for the last decade so I have a more than passing acquantaince with the process. Old folks talk about care, but only the wealthy ones can actually afford to change providers. If you've got a solid retirement savings that covers long-term care, that's great, but that covers maybe 5% of the health care customers in the USA, and they aren't the ones anybody is concerned about.
Many insured people don't get their checkups on time.
Denial and other human foibles are certainly factors, but when it comes to private insurance you also have to realize that people are often genuinely scared of going to the doctor if they think something is wrong. If they find out they are unhealthy, they could lose their job or insurance, because now they are a "risk". God forbid you discover you have diabetes or another chronic but livable condition -- your premiums will become crazy (or you will be outright uninsurable) if you pay for your own coverage, or you will become a huge liability to your employer if you don't.
We've put people in a lose-lose situation where it is BETTER for them to willfully ignore health problems as long as possible, all because we refuse to accept that it makes no sense to make health insurance a market commodity. Nobody can do without it, everybody needs it, and if you tie it to emplyment, all it does is put people's jobs in jeopardy when they do, inevitably, get sick.
It reminds me of the old joke about democracy -- of course government health care is a horrible, horrible idea. But it is still better than all the alternatives.
In theory, everything you say is right. I support the free market, believe it comes up with the best solutions through competition, and find government sluggishness to be incapable of meeting the changing landscape of needs. Unfortunately when it comes to health insurance, for many reasons theory and reality part ways and the free market has somehow managed to provide worse care at higher cost while not even being able to cover those most in need of the service!
Here in Canada we have one provider for health insurance, the provincial government. This results in our tax dollars being funneled into paying to run the system that is increasing in cost faster than we can afford it. The main problem lies in the fact that there's no competition in health insurance, therefore, no impetus to keep the efficiency high, and therefore, the affordability low.
Wow, it's amazing that it is so different here in the USA, where health care costs are low and constantly going down due to competition. Nobody is without care, and the market has made things wonderfully efficient -- you can get appointments in minutes and the paperwork is minimal!
What you state is absolutely correct for any normal commodity -- building one car factory or stereo component store would be a recipe for disaster. No incentive for development, efficiency or improvement.
Fortunately, health care has no relationship whatsoever to other commercial industries. Customers don't shop for health care. The amount of specialized knowledge you'd need to compare the providers of every kind of care is beyond the reach of any single human being. If you wait until you need a particular care, you usually need it immediately, which precludes comparison shopping. You can always walk away from a bad car salesman, but if you're bleeding to death you don't have much negotiating power if the hospital tells you it is $3,000 for admittance.
Health care needs no advertising -- Insurance companies are't spending billions of dollars on commercials so that people know there is such a thing available and they should buy some. All they're doing is taking customers from each other and money away from actual care. In the computer business, that would be fine, since a smaller transistor size on the manufacturing side or broader market on the customer side can make up for the marketing expenses, but I can assure you that there's nobody having heart attacks with health care advertising that wouldn't have had one already (or vice-versa). State Farm isn't developing any top-secret surgical procedures that Allstate won't have access to.
Incentive to improve is omnipresent since Death is a far more efficient competitor than Microsoft or State Farm. Death has no overhead, he's penetrated every market segment and is very efficient at finding new opportunities for development. Death works 24/7 -- even on holidays! No matter how good insurance and health care are, there will always be real and constant pressure on them to improve.
The fundamental issue is that we're not willing to let people simply die on the street. If someone walks into an emergency room, we, as a society, have legally required that hospital to provide stabilizing care. They cannot tell the guy to go die on the street if his credit card is declined, which means that ultimately, we the taxpayers are going to pay for such emergency medical care regardless of how the cmmercial market should or shouldn't work in an ideal world.
Finally, the major difference between medical care and every other industry is that the cost of most goods doesn't increase unpredictably (but preventably!) by thousands of percent in a matter of moments. If you were shopping for a CD player and the price was $50 -- wait, no it's $50,000! -- you'd be pretty shocked and kick yourself for not having bought it last week when it was $50.
But that's exactly what we're dealing with -- a $50 annual checkup would allow us to prevent many of the $50,000 emergency visits we already pay for. I can't imagine it makes more economic sense to write out $50,000 checks every time someone walks through the ER door, but refuse to cover the $50 checkup that would have not only increased their health in the first place, but prevented them from losing time at work and contributing to the economy.
Some day, when you actually know anything about health care in this country, you will look back on what you wrote and laugh. Government health care is far, far more efficient than any private insurer in the United States. It has been for decades and decades.
They do have an exclusive deal with Prima, but what Blizzard and Prima agree to has no bearing whatsoever on the rights of other parties to write about their game.
The sticking point for unauthorized guides is usually that the author has no access to the software or development team before it is released to the general public. Large publishers want to have a book on the shelves the day the software comes out, not 12 months later.
Does this "atmosphere" in Oblivion consist of characters being played by other people around the world that you can interact with?
/yell about a leet sword they found or what a faggot that troll over there is.
:P
Unfortunately, the characters in Oblivion use English properly, spell their words correctly, speak in complete sentences and never
I know, it ruins the atmosphere but somehow I manage to enjoy it
Ebay has no choice but to remove auctions if they are notified of a DMCA claim. The man's ONLY recourse is to either wait for Blizzard to sue him, shut down his own business, or file suit himself so that the courts will make a positive finding that his works do not violate the DMCA (which will allow eBay to sell them again). Amazingly he has chosen the third option, which of course Blizzard never expected.
His guide (from descriptions, I haven't read it) will most certainly sail through any Fair Use review. You dismissal of criticism, commentary, teaching etc suggest that you have no idea whatsoever what those mean or how they are applied. A guide such as his fits nearly half of the exemptions allowed for, as does every other reference/how-to manual that deals with a commercial product. The only difference between this guy and standard computer reference book publishers is that Blizzard assumed they could push him around and he couldn't or wouldn't defend his right.
They pulled the trimester thing out of the air because it was convenient.
"They pulled the trimester thing out of the air" because it is how every medical professional in the previous 150 years measured the progress of a pregnancy. There are certainly many reasonable moral and legal reasons to disagree with Roe v Wade, I find it amazing that you have hung your hat on a rather meaningless issue of semantics that any middle-school student could have explained.
In American jurisprudence there is a presumption of the competence of the legislature for most classes of cases ... a legislative schema that exists under that delegated power need not actually 'work'
On the contrary, while courts generally defer to the legislature on intent, they do look at whether the stated purpose of a statute is manifested in reality. A law that does not "work" may well be unconstitutional for the obvious reason that Congress is abdicating a constitutional requirement to provide for some situation -- an ineffective provision being, to any man of reason, just as bad as no provision at all.
The clearest examples of this can be seen through the civil rights era of the 20th century, starting with Brown v Topkea Board of Education, where separate was recognized as being inherently unequal, regardless of what the legislature said. Local legislatures were quite fond of implementing civil rights laws that were constitutionally required of them, yet deliberately doing it in such a fashion that they were completely useless, ineffective, or counter-productive, and the courts repeatedly struck down statues precisely because of their failure to work.
The Supreme Court could find that the President has to wear a hat on Tuesdays and invite all patent holders to lunch. They can find whatever they like, though they have no way of enforcing decisions. If they say that runny cheese is unconstitutional, then it is.
So yes, they could certainly find that the implementation of the Patent system is unconstitutional and direct Congress to fix it.
First, that huge range is with a ballistic trajectory, and the current understanding is that it doesn't have any capability whatsoever for terrain-hugging operation (though if it did, it would have maybe 100 mile practical range in that mode). While fast is cool, fast with a ballistic trajectory is not a problem for any modern Aegis system -- a single missile cruiser could destroy an entire submarine's complement of Granit missiles before they were halfway to target. The longest delays would be waiting for the Russian crews to reload the launch tubes. Even the Russians are giving up on such missiles, as they've been made obsolete by current antimissile defense and are too massive to be carried by anything but large ships and subs.
The only supersonic AShM missile we have a realistic chance of facing anytime soon (China, Iran, North Korea, etc) is the Sunburn, which is perfectly capable of hitting anything in the Persian Gulf from a mobile launcher hidden in the mountains of Iran and can skim the surface to hide in the littoral radar jumble and do evasive maneuvers at terminal approach to counter short range engagement when it pops up.
They can travel hundreds of miles before striking a ship, way beyond any ship's detection range, similar to cruise missiles.
Anti-ship missiles only have a 50-75 mile effective range when flying low-profile, so in any remotely open area they will be ineffective against a prepared opponent (ie, one that has AWACS and shoots anything on the water or in the air within 200 miles of the battle group).
The problem, of course, is that if Iran has any of the newer Russian supersonic designs, those are specifically designed to defeat the US Navy's Aegis missile defense systems, and the narrowness of the Persian Gulf dictates that there is a LOT of land within 100 miles of the opposit shore from which you could launch a missile. So they have the ability to launch unmolested, and once in the air the missiles are pretty much impossible to take down. If we go to war with Iran, I suspect we'll fall back on the simplest solution, which is either to remove the ships from the Gulf or (more likely) set up a physical screen whereby capital ships will always have escorts on the East side to absorb any missile attacks.
the content on p2p appears to be very very limited
Whaaa?
You may be seeing the same things over and over because many p2p apps limit results to the first 300 (or whatever), and there are a lot of p2p spammers taking up the common search words. There is enough porn on every p2p system to last any person the rest of his or her lifetime.
hiding the chinks in your armor is a lot more important with regards to terrorists than invasions.
But nobody is suggesting that we not hide the chinks in our armor -- secret meetings of any security organization are to be expected. The only demand we make is that they be less convenient than open meetings, so that there is a substantial disincentive to abusing the ability, since our fundamental belief is that openness and accountability results in better government.
My comparison to the USSR was more to point out that our previous enemy had the capability to send agents to literally every public agency meeting if they had so desired (and in fact, they often did), yet we still held such meetings in public. While MAD certainly constrained our mutual willingness to openly declare war, agents from both sides of the cold war used sabotage quite frequently as a way to destabilize and undercut public confidence. No, they didn't plan on dropping anthrax into the water supply on some tuesday afternoon, their plans would have been much more painful since any large-scale sabotage was to be implemented at precisely the moment we entered a conventional military conflict and most needed to focus all our national resources.