Well, it can't measure actual flow unless you stick a mechanical device inside the capillaries. It presumably measures something very indirect (such as change in energy state) which, in a living brain, can be linked more to blood flow than other sources.
However, there will certainly be other sources that generate identical signals. There will also be experimental errors (such as noise in the system) and observer errors (eg: mis-ascribing cause to effect).
Since this is a dead brain, there will presumably be a non-zero level of decay. This means that there will be observable energy generated, sugars will be consumed, and a change in structure will occur. If this had been a living brain, nobody would think twice about taking such effects and linking them to a cause of brain activity. But because A implies B if C, A does not necessarily imply anything about B if !C. THAT is the real message of this paper.
(Or, as Slashdotters often prefer to say, correlation is NOT causation.)
The top MRI used on humans is, I believe, 9.2 T - just good enough to see individual neurons and make out the synapses firing. The top MRI used on animals is closer to 12 T. Provided such high magnetic fields are shown to be safe, you could gather a lot of useful information on the functioning of the brain.
But I see no way of gathering continuous data at high resolution. From radio astronomy through to quantum mechanics, there's always a trade-off between resolution in space and resolution in time. The better you get one, the worse will be the other. This appears to be fundamental and not a property of the technology, as it applies to all measurements of two interdependent variables.
There is, however, the question of whether you even need to gather continuous data at high resolution. If you know the state of the brain before and the state of the brain after, you implicitly know which areas of the brain were involved in that state change without having to know the how. The same way we can understand macrosystems like a car engine without needing to track the individual atoms real-time.
What more we can learn, however, is entirely dependent on what the brain can withstand without the act of observing interfering with the observation. There are now magnets that can generate 100 T fields repeatedly rather than being one-off. Are there any brains of meaningful complexity that can handle it? If so, a 100 T MRI scanner will obviously tell you more than a 9.2 T and a hell of a lot more than your bog-standard hospital 2.5 T.
The gravitational models of GR and QM are incompatible. One of them MUST be wrong. Any conclusion drawn from an incorrect theory must also be wrong, although it is certainly possible to draw incorrect conclusions from correct theory. (The latter was responsible for the discrepancy between observed and predicted neutrino counts from the sun.)
Even if we knew which model was the correct one, as was noted by another poster, all the models we have are incomplete. (Well, since models are simplifications of reality, models are always going to be incomplete. That's the nature of the beast. Hell, even mathematics cannot be both complete and correct at the same time.)
Certainly, dark matter may well exist. But at this time, it is a correction factor for a theory that at best has holes. Correction factors can be useful, but they remind too many people of the constant adding of wheels within wheels in the Platonic model of the Earth-centred solar system, or of Einstein's Cosmological Constant.
Generally, when discrepancies of this nature arise, it has led to a revamp in thinking. Keplar found circular orbits simply couldn't work with the data for planetary motion, so abandoned Copernicus' insistence on a flat-space geometric "perfection" and allowed himself to consider mathematical perfection instead.
(You still get geometric perfection, if you allow space to be curved, but that's incidental. Keplar dumped a false assumption rather than try to insist it merely needed adjusting.)
I say "generally" because there are plenty of exceptions in the history of science. Until there's hard, direct evidence that is not subject to observer bias, we do not (and cannot) know if Dark Matter is an example of Copernicus or Einstein trying to wallpaper over the cracks in a theory, or if it is a meaningful extension that was merely omitted from earlier models.
This is what makes science fun - the understanding that the Victorians totally lacked, which is that science is never "finished", that what appear to be minor fill-in operations can be disastrous and cause an entire edifice of theory to collapse into rubble, but equally major revamps can turn out to be a minor surgical fix.
The best way to be wrong in science is to assume the last guy was right. The next-best way to be wrong in science is to assume the last guy was wrong.
Given that psychotherapists are often accused of having at least as many problems as their patients, and that actually resolving issues cuts off an income stream, there's an argument that undead salmon might be more honest than a lot of practicing therapists.
The mechanisms are the most important thing. What is fMRI actually measuring? It doesn't measure activity directly, since it's not built into the brain. Ergo, it measures activity indirectly by measuring something else entirely. But anything which also generates that something else will also be detected.
This is less a false positive than it is a complete confusion between direct and indirect observations. The falseness is not in the measurement but in the observer.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have loved this finding, as he often has his most famous creation of Sherlock Holmes make snide remarks about the folly of poor observation and the absurdities that follow.
No, research that absolutely nobody would want to repeat or is so utterly improbable that nobody would THINK of repeating it is all perfectly valid. Such entrants have won awards in the past.
"Full Employment" (Keynsian economics) has some problems, but has to be a part of any sound economic policy. The optimal economic strategy is always going to be what is best for the individual and the group as a whole. The latter half of the equation can only exist if some socialist (in the real sense, not the bogeyman sense used in the US) principles are added to the mix.
However, the first half of the equation turns out to be more important than Keynes had anticipated and for that you do need some free market principles as well.
As far as the current situation goes, handing out $10,000 to each person might well have had a major impact. Paying off mortgages with 1/20th of that (I'm assuming 1 in 20 have some kind of property), thus rigorously fixing the purpose of that amount, and then giving everyone a stimulus check for ($10,000 - payment on that person's mortgage) might be better as it would guarantee the intent.
Yes, you'd get a lot of people complaining that it reduced the freedom on how to spend the money and it's certainly Government interference, but the former is an illusion (some things aren't optional for either individual OR country) and the latter becomes an illusion when you consider the crisis was caused by Government interference and therefore the only thing big enough to correct the damage is the Government.
Too late. Mitochondrial DNA was originally a parasite, and there are far more non-human cells in a human being than human cells. There's hardly anything actually human for a new parasite to be the overlord of.
Actually, unless DNA shows you have Native American blood, you're all bleedin' immigrants. And probably quite some number of these supposed "immigrants" actually ARE Native Americans. Some are probably of Spanish descent, but frankly you'd be better off sending them back to Spain rather than Mexico.
(After all, the head of the FBI pointed out in his letter over the Lockerbie Bomber that we should not show any sign of weakness or softness to terrorists. And what was Cortez and his cohorts but the worst terrorists of all? Send all the Latinos packing back to Spain.)
In Europe, where students get grants or (at worst) zero-interest loans, that's almost true. Britain has, I believe, over a 50% take-up rate of higher education, although I believe it had a peak of 65%-70%.
America? Well, for starters, the population isn't that well-known. Lots of rural communities and religious communities have a dubious reputation on things like documentation. That makes it hard to get accurate statistics.
Those who do go to University in America are faced with crippling loans that will take much of the person's life to pay off completely, especially if they go for a Masters or PhD. Doctors - well, part of the reason they charge so much is they've got 10+ years of accumulated loans. A few doctors become rich, most probably die in debt.
And who are those who go to University? Well, we can eliminate almost all pacifists - many States WILL NOT take students who have refused "selective service". (Though what's selective about something that's mandatory beats me. It's a bloody draft if you have consequences for refusing.)
We can eliminate most of the 95% of those who are "poor" from the list as well, as poor people can't afford quality education or quality study-time after hours.
The mega-rich don't bother with education, since they can get jobs via the Good Old Boy's Network.
So you're left with moderately rich Republicans, extremists who can get into a religious University, Democrats who have sold out, and those who are just there to take part in the hazings and fraternity drug-outs.
In short, almost nobody I'd give the time of day to. Since I regard almost that entire crowd as a bunch of amoral washouts, the exact number is unimportant. They're not capable of doing anything worthwhile with the education they get, so it doesn't matter how many.
France, Canada, Britain and Japan, together with America, are the top 5 leading nations in healthcare. I doubt any of them get third-world "discounts". Aside from possibly Japan, all have horribly bad eating habits - obesity in Britain isn't that much lower than that in the United States.
But let's look at the figures. Britain, PER CAPITA, has half the rate of heart attacks and spends half as much as the US. The four nations I mention pay, on average, 50 cents for every $200 spent on health-care in the US. I'm not sure about Japan, but the rest ALL manage to have public health services.
Now, let's look at the other side, competition. Britain has the NHS which is universal. It also has BUPA (private healthcare that's so profitable it can even afford to run its own damn hospitals), Standard Life, Orchid, HealthTrust, PatientChoice, AXA PPP, Essential Healthcare, HSA, Norwich Union Healthcare, General & Medical,... In short, not what I'd call a shortage.
So, go on. Tell me how a public health service would "ruin" the private insurance companies. Convince me BUPA is just an illusion. Go ahead. Persuade me that Japan is getting medicines "on the cheap" as part of foreign aid shipments to poor nations. Convince me that even those medical marvels invented in Canada, Britain or Japan are more expensive in America solely in order to recoup the costs.
Yes, the top 5% of Americans CAN pay more, and prices have been adjusted to maximize profits not availability, so cater TO those 5%. What about the other 95%? Since America has never been able to adjust the ratio, it will always be 5:95, and that means it doesn't matter what the 95% earn. The prices will simply go up because the profits are all with the 5%.
You happen to be one of the 5%. So is everyone on Slashdot, because nobody in the 95% is spending time talking. Me, well, although I'm in the top 5% as well (or I wouldn't be here), I have medical conditions which make getting insurance a real pain and which mean I spend $250+ a month to stay alive because insurance won't touch me.
I know three people with spinal injuries who would LOVE to get away with something so cheap and none of them have my earning power. They each spend more in a week than I do in a month - those weeks they have enough money to spend on such luxuries. With those kinds of injuries, most work is right out of the question, which means you either have to start off very rich OR live your life on the bread line.
Assuming the people I know are roughly representative of the population, traumatic injuries and life-threatening conditions are likely more common amongst those 95% than serious illness is amongst the 5%.
When I look at America as it exists today, I see a world that is socially backwards, something out of a Dickens novel. Britain hasn't had workhouses for the poor since the Victorian era and abolished slavery in 1770. Even the fruit-pickers in Britain have unions and have a far better standard of living than those in the "land of opportunity".
I happen to think Britain is regressive and repressed in many other ways, and that America has got quite a bit right, but American society is so.... backwards! It's barely better than it was when the Mayflower arrived. In some ways, it might even be worse - I'm fairly sure they didn't have a 1% prison population.
It makes very little difference whether it is unprecedented or not. Diseases need ONE carrier. That is sufficient.
Start looking at the numbers (over a million undocumented, uninsured and entirely legal US citizens live homeless in the New York subway system, and most cities don't bother to try and estimate any more).
Now look at the total in the US who are considered to be living below a living wage (which is a good deal higher than the so-called "poverty line" but is still the minimum for basic nutritional and environmental concerns). It's getting on for 85% of the KNOWN population!
Since the unknown population will certainly lack any kind of healthcare, have a dangerously unhealthy diet, and be living in unsanitary conditions, the population at high risk is going to be much higher than that 85%.
And, no, the suburbs won't be safe. Many people in the suburbs work in cities, and when in cities are likely to come in contact with one or more people who are at high risk. Airborne disease doesn't require more than a single cough.
Swine Flu started in ONE small village in Mexico. It wasn't even looked at by heath officials there until it had spread for months. After Mexico declared it had a problem, ambulance workers and hospitals refused to take anyone with flu symptoms and health inspectors refused to monitor infected areas. Result - it spread out of control.
Health officials in the US largely ignored it even after people started dropping dead. It's now a raging pandemic that was entirely preventable. There were MANY opportunities to stop it, by Mexico and by the US, but cowardice in Mexico and greed in the US resulted in inaction.
Once upon a time, West Nile Virus was practically unknown in the US. It is now a killer that claims lives from all parts of society. Yes, the poor suffer more, but the poor don't suffer exclusively.
The MRSA "superbug" (which kills more hospital patients than any other single cause) originated in ONE hosptial in Australia and can be traced to ONE patient carrying the disease from ward to ward. ONE carrier and we now have a bug that kills globally.
People across society WILL die from these new diseases, and when they do, the newspapers will doubtless claim nobody could have foretold it happening, and that the country was powerless anyway.
From the days of Typhoid Mary, we've known of the dangers even a single carrier has posed. And every malnourished person, every uninsured person, every person unable to take an hour off work to see a doctor for economic reasons, or those who won't for religious reasons, they are ALL potential carriers. Every one of them.
We're damned lucky that the rare diseases that have broken out in the US and Europe in the last hundred years have been relatively difficult to transmit. Marburg being one of the deadlier.
Spanish Flu wasn't a rare disease, just a very deadly mutation of a common one. If you include that, and the hundreds of millions it killed, then we're still damned lucky. That was still before widespread travel, antibiotic-resistant bacteria and antiviral-resistant viruses.
History says there need by just ONE contageous carrier for a global catastrophe. The failure to provide adequate healthcare to hundreds of millions of Americans increases the risk hundreds of millions of times over. The failure to research "less profitable" diseases (the heliobacter-caused stomach ulcers being a classic example) increases the risks even to those who ARE insured and ARE going to the doctors when needed.
And the failure to provide adequate medical care to poorer nations just creates fertile breeding grounds for even deadlier diseases.
Humanity's epitath will likely read: Suicide By Microbe.
It is precisely because Sony escaped with barely a rapped knuckle to its name that it is evident the laws do not provide any kind of deterrent to deliberate and willful sabotage of a software product by a corporation.
In light of the "special circumstances" provisions in other laws (eg: violence that is also a hate crime, theft with terroristic intent, etc), the deliberate addition and concealment of defects for the purpose of causing harm (even if the harm actually caused is not the harm intended) should be a special case which results in severe penalties AND jail time for each and every person who was involved in producing that defect or an accessory to the fact through the willful concealment of it.
In short, I don't give a damn if this ends up being product defect liability, some other area of liability, or a law only the man in the moon could have thought up, I want the legal system to indemnify utterly those who discover such logic bombs regardless of DMCA provisions, and I want the legal system to treat the planters and co-conspirators in logic bomb attacks to be treated no different from the planters of car bombs. The action is that of a terrorist and should be treated as such.
I did not say defect-free, I said defect-tolerant (ie: it will have defects but it will handle them in a manner that is safe, controlled and ultimately corrects the problem).
Defect-free is bloody hard, defect-tolerant is actually quite easy.
This is one of the theoretical purposes of Common Law, which at its most abstract basically says that nobody shall be liable for the unreasonable or the unforeseeable, and anyone may be liable for failures they are responsible for that are both reasonably avoidable and foreseeable.
This is why it deals with things like "acts of God/Nature", the "reasonable man", and so on.
IMHO, the problem is not with the concept of liability where liability is reasonable, but rather the problem is that reasonableness has left the country and is currently on a skiing holiday at the north pole. If there is no legal framework which sanity-checks the inputs, no law can ever be a good law. If the sanity-checks are in place, even a defective law cannot be used for defective purposes.
You'd be right in the absolute general case. However, I would argue that certain bounds are within reason.
For example, it is certainly possible for a computer - through software - to destroy a hard drive (bounce the read-heads off the buffers enough times and they'll misalign or fall off) or a monitor (with the right timings, you can even set some monitors on fire).
The Sony rootkit was an actual piece of software that really DID cause actual damage to hardware AND where knowledge was maliciously withheld.
The self-bricking Seagate drive firmware was also an actual piece of sofrware that really DID cause actual damage, but it would be exempt because the company did NOT withhold information but made a damn good best-effort try at releasing unbricking firmware.
Thus, here we have two examples of actual damage, but only one would fall foul of the proposal - the one we all complained should damn-well have been illegal.
Those objecting to this proposal should consider that the Sony rootkit was not illegal and is not illegal, but under the DMCA it IS illegal to take any precautions to safeguard your system against it. I say that this is a damn-fool way for the law to be. You should NEVER be liable for taking reasonable steps, companies should ALWAYS be liable when they DO NOT take reasonable steps.
And that, I believe, is the key to this debate - whether or not a reasonable step has been taken or deliberately avoided. I don't think anyone is arguing UNreasonable steps should be taken. But when something is entirely reasonable, practical and sensible, it should be possible to hold avoiders to account.
TFA only talks of known bugs that are specifically and maliciously not revealed. Thus:
If the product has known bugs but the vendor supplies a list that documents it, it's not a problem.
If the product has unknown bugs, it's not a problem.
If users report bugs onto a public bugtracker, it's documented and therefore not a problem.
If bugs are detected and not publicized for a few days so that a patch can be rolled out, it's not a problem - particularly for security defects.
The ONLY case where it would be a problem would be if you had a flaw that was likely to be damaging to others, known about for a significant period of time, not fixed and not revealed - particularly if not revealed for reasons of PR or market share.
Frankly, if a vendor is more concerned about PR than a good product, they're bastards that deserve everything they get.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it can't measure actual flow unless you stick a mechanical device inside the capillaries. It presumably measures something very indirect (such as change in energy state) which, in a living brain, can be linked more to blood flow than other sources.
However, there will certainly be other sources that generate identical signals. There will also be experimental errors (such as noise in the system) and observer errors (eg: mis-ascribing cause to effect).
Since this is a dead brain, there will presumably be a non-zero level of decay. This means that there will be observable energy generated, sugars will be consumed, and a change in structure will occur. If this had been a living brain, nobody would think twice about taking such effects and linking them to a cause of brain activity. But because A implies B if C, A does not necessarily imply anything about B if !C. THAT is the real message of this paper.
(Or, as Slashdotters often prefer to say, correlation is NOT causation.)
Especially if the conclusions are connected to high-power magnets.
The top MRI used on humans is, I believe, 9.2 T - just good enough to see individual neurons and make out the synapses firing. The top MRI used on animals is closer to 12 T. Provided such high magnetic fields are shown to be safe, you could gather a lot of useful information on the functioning of the brain.
But I see no way of gathering continuous data at high resolution. From radio astronomy through to quantum mechanics, there's always a trade-off between resolution in space and resolution in time. The better you get one, the worse will be the other. This appears to be fundamental and not a property of the technology, as it applies to all measurements of two interdependent variables.
There is, however, the question of whether you even need to gather continuous data at high resolution. If you know the state of the brain before and the state of the brain after, you implicitly know which areas of the brain were involved in that state change without having to know the how. The same way we can understand macrosystems like a car engine without needing to track the individual atoms real-time.
What more we can learn, however, is entirely dependent on what the brain can withstand without the act of observing interfering with the observation. There are now magnets that can generate 100 T fields repeatedly rather than being one-off. Are there any brains of meaningful complexity that can handle it? If so, a 100 T MRI scanner will obviously tell you more than a 9.2 T and a hell of a lot more than your bog-standard hospital 2.5 T.
What goes through the salmon's mind at those times? The pen in the researcher's top pocket.
The gravitational models of GR and QM are incompatible. One of them MUST be wrong. Any conclusion drawn from an incorrect theory must also be wrong, although it is certainly possible to draw incorrect conclusions from correct theory. (The latter was responsible for the discrepancy between observed and predicted neutrino counts from the sun.)
Even if we knew which model was the correct one, as was noted by another poster, all the models we have are incomplete. (Well, since models are simplifications of reality, models are always going to be incomplete. That's the nature of the beast. Hell, even mathematics cannot be both complete and correct at the same time.)
Certainly, dark matter may well exist. But at this time, it is a correction factor for a theory that at best has holes. Correction factors can be useful, but they remind too many people of the constant adding of wheels within wheels in the Platonic model of the Earth-centred solar system, or of Einstein's Cosmological Constant.
Generally, when discrepancies of this nature arise, it has led to a revamp in thinking. Keplar found circular orbits simply couldn't work with the data for planetary motion, so abandoned Copernicus' insistence on a flat-space geometric "perfection" and allowed himself to consider mathematical perfection instead.
(You still get geometric perfection, if you allow space to be curved, but that's incidental. Keplar dumped a false assumption rather than try to insist it merely needed adjusting.)
I say "generally" because there are plenty of exceptions in the history of science. Until there's hard, direct evidence that is not subject to observer bias, we do not (and cannot) know if Dark Matter is an example of Copernicus or Einstein trying to wallpaper over the cracks in a theory, or if it is a meaningful extension that was merely omitted from earlier models.
This is what makes science fun - the understanding that the Victorians totally lacked, which is that science is never "finished", that what appear to be minor fill-in operations can be disastrous and cause an entire edifice of theory to collapse into rubble, but equally major revamps can turn out to be a minor surgical fix.
The best way to be wrong in science is to assume the last guy was right. The next-best way to be wrong in science is to assume the last guy was wrong.
If they're zombies, wouldn't that be psychotic therapist?
Given that psychotherapists are often accused of having at least as many problems as their patients, and that actually resolving issues cuts off an income stream, there's an argument that undead salmon might be more honest than a lot of practicing therapists.
Salmon only possess soles.
The mechanisms are the most important thing. What is fMRI actually measuring? It doesn't measure activity directly, since it's not built into the brain. Ergo, it measures activity indirectly by measuring something else entirely. But anything which also generates that something else will also be detected.
This is less a false positive than it is a complete confusion between direct and indirect observations. The falseness is not in the measurement but in the observer.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have loved this finding, as he often has his most famous creation of Sherlock Holmes make snide remarks about the folly of poor observation and the absurdities that follow.
No, research that absolutely nobody would want to repeat or is so utterly improbable that nobody would THINK of repeating it is all perfectly valid. Such entrants have won awards in the past.
Then all who call themselves "nth-generation Americans" are confusing themselves with their nth generational ancestors?
"Fascinating" as Spock might say.
To a very large extent, I agree.
"Full Employment" (Keynsian economics) has some problems, but has to be a part of any sound economic policy. The optimal economic strategy is always going to be what is best for the individual and the group as a whole. The latter half of the equation can only exist if some socialist (in the real sense, not the bogeyman sense used in the US) principles are added to the mix.
However, the first half of the equation turns out to be more important than Keynes had anticipated and for that you do need some free market principles as well.
As far as the current situation goes, handing out $10,000 to each person might well have had a major impact. Paying off mortgages with 1/20th of that (I'm assuming 1 in 20 have some kind of property), thus rigorously fixing the purpose of that amount, and then giving everyone a stimulus check for ($10,000 - payment on that person's mortgage) might be better as it would guarantee the intent.
Yes, you'd get a lot of people complaining that it reduced the freedom on how to spend the money and it's certainly Government interference, but the former is an illusion (some things aren't optional for either individual OR country) and the latter becomes an illusion when you consider the crisis was caused by Government interference and therefore the only thing big enough to correct the damage is the Government.
First arrivals are technically immigrants, yes, but usually get the benefit of aboriginal status.
Remember to put your option in the oven to bake at gas mark 6. And here's one I prepared earlier.
Too late. Mitochondrial DNA was originally a parasite, and there are far more non-human cells in a human being than human cells. There's hardly anything actually human for a new parasite to be the overlord of.
Actually, unless DNA shows you have Native American blood, you're all bleedin' immigrants. And probably quite some number of these supposed "immigrants" actually ARE Native Americans. Some are probably of Spanish descent, but frankly you'd be better off sending them back to Spain rather than Mexico.
(After all, the head of the FBI pointed out in his letter over the Lockerbie Bomber that we should not show any sign of weakness or softness to terrorists. And what was Cortez and his cohorts but the worst terrorists of all? Send all the Latinos packing back to Spain.)
In Europe, where students get grants or (at worst) zero-interest loans, that's almost true. Britain has, I believe, over a 50% take-up rate of higher education, although I believe it had a peak of 65%-70%.
America? Well, for starters, the population isn't that well-known. Lots of rural communities and religious communities have a dubious reputation on things like documentation. That makes it hard to get accurate statistics.
Those who do go to University in America are faced with crippling loans that will take much of the person's life to pay off completely, especially if they go for a Masters or PhD. Doctors - well, part of the reason they charge so much is they've got 10+ years of accumulated loans. A few doctors become rich, most probably die in debt.
And who are those who go to University? Well, we can eliminate almost all pacifists - many States WILL NOT take students who have refused "selective service". (Though what's selective about something that's mandatory beats me. It's a bloody draft if you have consequences for refusing.)
We can eliminate most of the 95% of those who are "poor" from the list as well, as poor people can't afford quality education or quality study-time after hours.
The mega-rich don't bother with education, since they can get jobs via the Good Old Boy's Network.
So you're left with moderately rich Republicans, extremists who can get into a religious University, Democrats who have sold out, and those who are just there to take part in the hazings and fraternity drug-outs.
In short, almost nobody I'd give the time of day to. Since I regard almost that entire crowd as a bunch of amoral washouts, the exact number is unimportant. They're not capable of doing anything worthwhile with the education they get, so it doesn't matter how many.
France, Canada, Britain and Japan, together with America, are the top 5 leading nations in healthcare. I doubt any of them get third-world "discounts". Aside from possibly Japan, all have horribly bad eating habits - obesity in Britain isn't that much lower than that in the United States.
But let's look at the figures. Britain, PER CAPITA, has half the rate of heart attacks and spends half as much as the US. The four nations I mention pay, on average, 50 cents for every $200 spent on health-care in the US. I'm not sure about Japan, but the rest ALL manage to have public health services.
Now, let's look at the other side, competition. Britain has the NHS which is universal. It also has BUPA (private healthcare that's so profitable it can even afford to run its own damn hospitals), Standard Life, Orchid, HealthTrust, PatientChoice, AXA PPP, Essential Healthcare, HSA, Norwich Union Healthcare, General & Medical,... In short, not what I'd call a shortage.
So, go on. Tell me how a public health service would "ruin" the private insurance companies. Convince me BUPA is just an illusion. Go ahead. Persuade me that Japan is getting medicines "on the cheap" as part of foreign aid shipments to poor nations. Convince me that even those medical marvels invented in Canada, Britain or Japan are more expensive in America solely in order to recoup the costs.
Yes, the top 5% of Americans CAN pay more, and prices have been adjusted to maximize profits not availability, so cater TO those 5%. What about the other 95%? Since America has never been able to adjust the ratio, it will always be 5:95, and that means it doesn't matter what the 95% earn. The prices will simply go up because the profits are all with the 5%.
You happen to be one of the 5%. So is everyone on Slashdot, because nobody in the 95% is spending time talking. Me, well, although I'm in the top 5% as well (or I wouldn't be here), I have medical conditions which make getting insurance a real pain and which mean I spend $250+ a month to stay alive because insurance won't touch me.
I know three people with spinal injuries who would LOVE to get away with something so cheap and none of them have my earning power. They each spend more in a week than I do in a month - those weeks they have enough money to spend on such luxuries. With those kinds of injuries, most work is right out of the question, which means you either have to start off very rich OR live your life on the bread line.
Assuming the people I know are roughly representative of the population, traumatic injuries and life-threatening conditions are likely more common amongst those 95% than serious illness is amongst the 5%.
When I look at America as it exists today, I see a world that is socially backwards, something out of a Dickens novel. Britain hasn't had workhouses for the poor since the Victorian era and abolished slavery in 1770. Even the fruit-pickers in Britain have unions and have a far better standard of living than those in the "land of opportunity".
I happen to think Britain is regressive and repressed in many other ways, and that America has got quite a bit right, but American society is so.... backwards! It's barely better than it was when the Mayflower arrived. In some ways, it might even be worse - I'm fairly sure they didn't have a 1% prison population.
It makes very little difference whether it is unprecedented or not. Diseases need ONE carrier. That is sufficient.
Start looking at the numbers (over a million undocumented, uninsured and entirely legal US citizens live homeless in the New York subway system, and most cities don't bother to try and estimate any more).
Now look at the total in the US who are considered to be living below a living wage (which is a good deal higher than the so-called "poverty line" but is still the minimum for basic nutritional and environmental concerns). It's getting on for 85% of the KNOWN population!
Since the unknown population will certainly lack any kind of healthcare, have a dangerously unhealthy diet, and be living in unsanitary conditions, the population at high risk is going to be much higher than that 85%.
And, no, the suburbs won't be safe. Many people in the suburbs work in cities, and when in cities are likely to come in contact with one or more people who are at high risk. Airborne disease doesn't require more than a single cough.
Swine Flu started in ONE small village in Mexico. It wasn't even looked at by heath officials there until it had spread for months. After Mexico declared it had a problem, ambulance workers and hospitals refused to take anyone with flu symptoms and health inspectors refused to monitor infected areas. Result - it spread out of control.
Health officials in the US largely ignored it even after people started dropping dead. It's now a raging pandemic that was entirely preventable. There were MANY opportunities to stop it, by Mexico and by the US, but cowardice in Mexico and greed in the US resulted in inaction.
Once upon a time, West Nile Virus was practically unknown in the US. It is now a killer that claims lives from all parts of society. Yes, the poor suffer more, but the poor don't suffer exclusively.
The MRSA "superbug" (which kills more hospital patients than any other single cause) originated in ONE hosptial in Australia and can be traced to ONE patient carrying the disease from ward to ward. ONE carrier and we now have a bug that kills globally.
People across society WILL die from these new diseases, and when they do, the newspapers will doubtless claim nobody could have foretold it happening, and that the country was powerless anyway.
From the days of Typhoid Mary, we've known of the dangers even a single carrier has posed. And every malnourished person, every uninsured person, every person unable to take an hour off work to see a doctor for economic reasons, or those who won't for religious reasons, they are ALL potential carriers. Every one of them.
We're damned lucky that the rare diseases that have broken out in the US and Europe in the last hundred years have been relatively difficult to transmit. Marburg being one of the deadlier.
Spanish Flu wasn't a rare disease, just a very deadly mutation of a common one. If you include that, and the hundreds of millions it killed, then we're still damned lucky. That was still before widespread travel, antibiotic-resistant bacteria and antiviral-resistant viruses.
History says there need by just ONE contageous carrier for a global catastrophe. The failure to provide adequate healthcare to hundreds of millions of Americans increases the risk hundreds of millions of times over. The failure to research "less profitable" diseases (the heliobacter-caused stomach ulcers being a classic example) increases the risks even to those who ARE insured and ARE going to the doctors when needed.
And the failure to provide adequate medical care to poorer nations just creates fertile breeding grounds for even deadlier diseases.
Humanity's epitath will likely read: Suicide By Microbe.
It is precisely because Sony escaped with barely a rapped knuckle to its name that it is evident the laws do not provide any kind of deterrent to deliberate and willful sabotage of a software product by a corporation.
In light of the "special circumstances" provisions in other laws (eg: violence that is also a hate crime, theft with terroristic intent, etc), the deliberate addition and concealment of defects for the purpose of causing harm (even if the harm actually caused is not the harm intended) should be a special case which results in severe penalties AND jail time for each and every person who was involved in producing that defect or an accessory to the fact through the willful concealment of it.
In short, I don't give a damn if this ends up being product defect liability, some other area of liability, or a law only the man in the moon could have thought up, I want the legal system to indemnify utterly those who discover such logic bombs regardless of DMCA provisions, and I want the legal system to treat the planters and co-conspirators in logic bomb attacks to be treated no different from the planters of car bombs. The action is that of a terrorist and should be treated as such.
I did not say defect-free, I said defect-tolerant (ie: it will have defects but it will handle them in a manner that is safe, controlled and ultimately corrects the problem).
Defect-free is bloody hard, defect-tolerant is actually quite easy.
This is one of the theoretical purposes of Common Law, which at its most abstract basically says that nobody shall be liable for the unreasonable or the unforeseeable, and anyone may be liable for failures they are responsible for that are both reasonably avoidable and foreseeable.
This is why it deals with things like "acts of God/Nature", the "reasonable man", and so on.
IMHO, the problem is not with the concept of liability where liability is reasonable, but rather the problem is that reasonableness has left the country and is currently on a skiing holiday at the north pole. If there is no legal framework which sanity-checks the inputs, no law can ever be a good law. If the sanity-checks are in place, even a defective law cannot be used for defective purposes.
You'd be right in the absolute general case. However, I would argue that certain bounds are within reason.
For example, it is certainly possible for a computer - through software - to destroy a hard drive (bounce the read-heads off the buffers enough times and they'll misalign or fall off) or a monitor (with the right timings, you can even set some monitors on fire).
The Sony rootkit was an actual piece of software that really DID cause actual damage to hardware AND where knowledge was maliciously withheld.
The self-bricking Seagate drive firmware was also an actual piece of sofrware that really DID cause actual damage, but it would be exempt because the company did NOT withhold information but made a damn good best-effort try at releasing unbricking firmware.
Thus, here we have two examples of actual damage, but only one would fall foul of the proposal - the one we all complained should damn-well have been illegal.
Those objecting to this proposal should consider that the Sony rootkit was not illegal and is not illegal, but under the DMCA it IS illegal to take any precautions to safeguard your system against it. I say that this is a damn-fool way for the law to be. You should NEVER be liable for taking reasonable steps, companies should ALWAYS be liable when they DO NOT take reasonable steps.
And that, I believe, is the key to this debate - whether or not a reasonable step has been taken or deliberately avoided. I don't think anyone is arguing UNreasonable steps should be taken. But when something is entirely reasonable, practical and sensible, it should be possible to hold avoiders to account.
TFA only talks of known bugs that are specifically and maliciously not revealed. Thus:
The ONLY case where it would be a problem would be if you had a flaw that was likely to be damaging to others, known about for a significant period of time, not fixed and not revealed - particularly if not revealed for reasons of PR or market share.
Frankly, if a vendor is more concerned about PR than a good product, they're bastards that deserve everything they get.
If the car explodes when you turn the ignition key, it's a bug.
If the car explodes but the driver can escape and sue, it's a disaster.