There's a notion that the way to get the very highest quality information is to have an expert certify it. But there's actually little evidence that this is true.
Basically he's claiming (perhaps unintentionally) that peer review is worthless. That's a pretty bold claim and he doesn't really back it up. While peer review certainly has its flaws, I don't think it can be dismissed out of hand like Mr. Wales is doing here.
FOX, CNN, and MSNBC all cover the exact same topics.
True but not actually the important point. The viewpoint about those topics matters.
You really dont seem to get that this is theater that we are looking at. The exact same topics covered by all three.
What you don't seem to get is that you can cover the same topics with different biases and that the biases matter. Fox News demonstrably has a conservative bias and they "interpret" facts (when they aren't just making shit up) accordingly. Just because they cover the same topic doesn't mean they are presenting the same position or that they have any intention of presenting an unbiased viewpoint. Of course it is theater but unfortunately some people don't realize that and actually are dumb enough to think Fox is not presenting a biased viewpoint. Something north of 90% of Fox News' audience self identifies as republican or republican leaning. Do you seriously think that would be possible if they were presenting an unbiased viewpoint and were just reporting the facts?
I know that bashing Fox News is a popular opinion. But of the mainstream papers, websites, and news TV stations, it's actually rather moderate.
"Moderate"? Compared to what? There is almost endless evidence that Fox News intentionally presents a staunchly conservative viewpoint and they have an audience to match. It's not even a meaningful debate at this point.
You're just as likely to find a liberal view on a panel segment as you are a conservative one.
Just because they invite some token liberals on to some of the shows doesn't mean their coverage is remotely balanced. Fox News is basically a mouthpiece for the republican party. Name one talking head (ala Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow) on Fox News who is a clear liberal. Go ahead, I'll wait...
Fox News gets its ratings because there are enough liberals and moderates to attract a broad audience.
The audience of Fox News contains a minority of moderates and VERY few liberals. 94% of Fox News viewers self identify as republican or republican leaning. In what universe is that a "broad audience"?
Look at who is buying newspapers now. Extreme right and left wing political donators.
Really? Warren Buffet is an "extreme" political donator?
Even if it were 1/5 of the world's fresh water (which I doubt, unless you're specifically excluding frozen fresh water, such as is covering Antarctica and Greenland), the Great Lakes are not supplying fresh water to 1/5 of the world's population.
Frozen fresh water is called ICE and very little of the ice in Antarctica or Greenland is usable to humans (or most other animals) in liquid form. If it melted it would go into the ocean and become salt water. And the Great Lakes do contain roughly 21% of the fresh surface water on the planet. There was nothing inaccurate or misleading about what I said at all. The only people who might misunderstand what I said are people who are too dumb to even get being pedantic right. Like you!
You can't take eight lawnmower engines, put them together and now claim you have an eight-cylinder Ferrari.
If Ferrari is the one doing it then yes they can claim that for whatever that gets them. And you certainly can join engines together to make a larger one. A W-16 is basically just two V-8s lashed together.
Asked whether Qualcomm would one day launch its own octa-core processor, Chandrasekher said, 'We don't do dumb things.'"
You could cut nuclear regulation in half and it would still be the safest way to generate power.
The relationship between quantity of regulation and safety is not a linear one. There are three things to consider when evaluating risk: likelihood of occurrence, chance of detection, and severity of the problem. What makes nuclear power scary is that the severity of many problems can be extremely high so one has to be very careful to keep the other two factors (likelihood and detection) as low as possible. That is the purpose of the regulations. You cannot simply say that cutting the regulations in half would double the number of problems. The real world is more complicated than that.
All of the nuclear accidents in history have happened because of poor oversight, not to the fault of the technology itself.
The oversight IS a part of the technology. If the technology were flawless and relatively safe then extensive regulation and oversight would not be needed. I'm not opposed to nuclear power but pretending that the oversight can be separated from the equipment is naive.
The remaining plants are nowhere near Lake Michigan.
In Illinois there are active three nuclear power stations (Braidwood, Dresden, and LaSalle) not far from Chicago. A serious criticality incident on any one of those three would likely affect Lake Michigan. There also are Palisades Power Station (Michigan), Point Beach (Wisconsin), Donald Cook Power Station (Michigan) which are all on Lake Michigan.
Personally I wonder if having nuclear stations so close to 1/5 of the world's fresh water supply is a good idea. I'm not opposed to nuclear power but I think some locations might be more sensible than others. The Great Lakes are hugely important, have often been environmentally abused and some of the power stations (Palisades in particular) don't have the best operating records.
Business are not non-profit, those are organizations.
Not-for-profits absolutely can be a form of business. Most are treated as a type of corporation by law and they can and do engage in many of the same practices as for-profit businesses. I've served on the board of several non-profits and with the better run ones you'd have to look carefully at times to tell that they are not profit seeking institutions. Lots of hospitals are non-profits but I assure you that they are without question businesses.
Money is always the bottom line, charitable givings are a tax right off and good publicity
Tax write offs due to charitable giving are typically not recovered dollar for dollar. Furthermore charitable donations typically have an extremely poor ROI as a marketing device. I'm an accountant and I've done the math. I think charitable giving is wonderful but under your (faulty) premise that companies are "always" trying to maximize profit, most charitable giving makes little sense if your only goal is to maximize profit.
Businesses are, by DEFINITION, primarily interested in profits.
Primarily but not exclusively. The degree of their interest depends very much on who is running the business. Even the biggest businesses have stakeholders whose interest is not in maximizing corporate profits - many employees of the company not the least among them. And a profit motive does not mean that a company cannot engage in social good at the same time. Sometimes the two will conflict but often they will not.
Furthermore there are not-for-profit businesses who typically have some sort of dominant social agenda to which profit is merely an enabler rather than a driving force.
Money is ALWAYS the bottom line. What we may interpret to be "good will" is nothing more than the business determining that is a better/easier/quicker way to make more money.
I disagree that money is "always" the bottom line. Often, yes. Usually, maybe. Always, no. If your assertion were true then there are a lot of corporate activities that make little sense, starting with charitable giving. (for the cynics among you, charity generally makes for a terrible ROI even if you think of it as marketing) Furthermore a profit motive can, and often does, align with a social good. The two are not fundamentally incompatible. Reducing energy use has both an environmental benefit and an economic one. Reforming patent law can accomplish the same thing.
I can drink starbucks black, it isn't bitter at all, because they extract it correctly.
I periodically see people claim that this or that coffee "isn't bitter" and they are invariably wrong. ALL coffee is bitter and starbucks is no exception. It is merely a question of degree. I have a very low tolerance for bitter tastes (prob genetic) and I have NEVER tasted any coffee that wasn't bitter. Only way you could claim it isn't bitter is if you aren't sensitive to bitter flavors. I love the smell of coffee but the bitterness makes coffee unpalatable to me without a lot of sugar.
For most people, Starbucks is the best coffee around.
I don't regard starbucks coffee as any better than McDonalds or Dunkin Donuts and those aren't exactly hard to find.
The papers themselves may belong to Verizon, but this information is about me.
Doesn't necessarily matter if the information is about you unless there is a law giving you specific rights regarding how that information is handled. Just because it is about you doesn't mean you own the information. Like I said, the first question is whether the "papers" are yours. If they are not then you have no standing to challenge others looking at them under the constitution.
Look, technically, the results of my HIV test are just business records to my physician, but no one would argue that the government should be able to access and store that information.
In many places (like the UK) your medical records are explicitly NOT yours. Whether you own the health records is merely a matter of law and can be handled either way. In the US (generally) you own your records or at least have specific rights to them. Not so in other places. Claiming that "no one" thinks it is a good idea for the government to have access to this information is demonstrably not true. Plenty of people think the government should have that sort of access. (I happen to disagree with them like you but they do think that) And that viewpoint is not unreasonable especially in places where the government is the one providing the healthcare.
For fuck's sake will you people stop humping the "tablets are going to replace PCs" inflatable doll?
Tablet sales are going up and PC sales are going down. All three major vendors of tablets (Apple, Google and Microsoft) are actively working on convergence. One of the most popular accessories for a tablet is a keyboard. Exactly what do you think all that implies except that tablets ARE replacing PCs for many uses?
Nobody is claiming tablets are going to make PCs go away entirely. But tablets ARE replacing PCs in a lot of circumstances and will continue to do so.
Which makes it a PC.
So apparently you agree with me - a tablet is a type of PC.
I have three 30" screens I work on. It is wonderful.
For what you do it is wonderful. What you do != what everyone else does. For my job I don't actually need that much screen real estate and most of what I do can be done on a single 17" monitor if I really needed to. For many of my clients I do my work on a laptop with a 15" screen and it works just fine thank you very much.
Microsoft completely missed the mark and the consumers have spoken. You and some others want to work on a tablet, fine - most don't.
You are conflating two issues. You are absolutely correct that Microsoft missed the mark with the Surface RT. Had they introduced the Pro for a reasonable price instead of the crippled RT then they might have had something. Tablets and laptops are going to converge over time. There are some technical hurdles to be overcome but the lines between the two are going to blur significantly in the next few years. Apple, Google and Microsoft are all working in this direction.
Where you are wrong is in thinking that Microsoft's failure somehow implies that no one does work on tablets. Plenty of people work on tablets. I have sales people visit my office all the time using tablets for real work. Plus it's no big deal to dock a tablet/laptop if you need better monitor options. Tablets are used in doctors offices and by sales people and by restaurants TODAY. Just because they aren't doing engineering on them doesn't mean it isn't real work. Over time, tablets and laptops will converge significantly much like how cell phones have taken over much of the low end camera market. A tablet is just a laptop with a touch optimized interface. With the right software, many tasks that can be done by laptops could just as easily be done with a tablet.
What? Emails, text messages and other electronic communications are not "papers", you say?
The question is whether they are *your* papers. If they aren't then the 4th amendment doesn't apply. It is not entirely obvious whether phone records should count as your property nor is it clear whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding them. (For the record *I* think they should be treated as yours and not available to law enforcement without a warrant - but that's just my opinion) If they are yours, then the question becomes whether the search is unreasonable. But if they aren't yours then the question of being an unreasonable search becomes moot.
Having the board consist of the reps from the AMA (as now) and then also have reps from Insurance and the FDA, none overlapping.
The AMA is not representative of many doctors. Supposedly around 15% of doctors are members. I know the AMA has campaigned for some rules that would directly hurt my wife's practice. The AMA is an important organization but they don't remotely represent all doctors.
Let the charges be what they are, and the time gets reported too; charges/time outside the norm would have to carry explanation.
You are talking about a standard cost accounting system. You establish an expected cost and then any variations from that cost show up in a variance report which can be analyzed for changes. The calculations in a system like this are pretty complicated and standard costing systems have some meaningful drawbacks. It tends to create some distorting incentives that drive inappropriate behavior. Standard costing systems work best when you are producing a small number of products with fairly stable cost structures. Medicine tends to have a HUGE number of products and thanks to technology and differences between processes in institutions the variance reports would be very difficult to use. Furthermore standard costing is rather poor at drilling down to individual unit variances - it tends to work on overall numbers.
You probably don't care much about Yuan-Dollar exchange rates much either, but you sure as hell have reason to care about it!
The yuan is a significant factor in the world economy. Bitcoin is not. Bitcoin is a barely used, illiquid, volatile currency that most people don't understand and even fewer people actually use. Should bitcoin become significant someday, then I will reconsider my position. I don't realistically see that happening though.
We used to see the (approximate and debatable) 3% that Visa and Mastercard skims from nearly all sales transactions, as merely the cost of doing business, and a worthwhile expense in exchange for the service they offer. And yet, now The People have the tech to avoid that charge
Bitcoin is not that tech, nor does it offer any reasonable prospect of becoming that tech anytime soon. Visa and the rest have an existing global network, transaction processing infrastructure, and an installed base of users. Replicating/replacing even a fraction of that will cost HUGE amounts of money and will have to displace entrenched competitors. Bitcoin presently has no reasonable prospects of putting any kind of dent in the business model of credit cards for the foreseeable future.
Or threaten to move to something cheaper. You don't necessarily have to do it, as long as you can prove you're willing to do it.
Threats are useless unless they are credible threats. Bitcoin is not a credible threat to the existing transaction processing infrastructure at this time.
There's reason to move to something cheaper.
Of course there is. However once you account for all the externalities and risk, bitcoin is not cheaper right now except in rare corner cases. Perhaps that will change in time... but I doubt it.
'Unlimited data' would get me over to them _if_ the other problems were solved.
Of course if the other problems were solved, they would have no need to offer "unlimited" data. Sprint isn't offering that because they are nice guys. They are offering it because they are getting their asses handed to them by Verizon and AT&T and it is a way to draw in customers that would otherwise go elsewhere.
We are talking specifically about how much time the doctor is working on the case of the patient.
The average time a doctor spends on a single patient isn't even close to the entire story. Bit of background: I'm an industrial engineer and also a cost accountant. I have degrees in both and have worked in healthcare doing six sigma projects, time studies and cost analysis.
1) Procedure times are NOT normally distributed. Not all cases are identical and some take considerably longer than the average. These longer cases typically are much more expensive. On a weighted cost basis the average cost will be higher than you would expect if you make the mistake of assuming a normal distribution. 2) You have to account for the time of the doctor PLUS the time of all the support staff. The time a doctor spends on a procedure frequently is not the biggest cost driver. My wife is a doctor. For the work she does her average time per case is about 10 minutes. For every minute she spends on a patient there is about 3-5 minutes of support staff time - sometimes more. On some cases she might spend an entire hour or more plus have to consult with other doctors for a particularly difficult diagnosis. 3) The value of a doctor's time isn't just driven by the average time for a procedure times some arbitrary hourly rate. What makes a doctor (particularly a surgeon) valuable is the value of his time when something unexpected happens. Patient goes into arrest on the operating table for instance. At that point the value of the doctor's time grows exponentially. If everything was just routine all the time, you could use nurse Now granted you can normalize the value of their time with enough study but the number you will get is going to be higher than if everything was routine and identical. 4) Time studies of procedure times are expensive and relatively difficult to perform. I've done a lot of time studies personally and trying to get an industry average for each and every procedure is far more difficult and expensive than most people realize. While there is no excuse for using outdated or wrong information, it is important to realize that maintaining an accurate and authoritative listing of expected procedure times is not a trivial exercise.
The Streisand effect on BitCoin is going to be huge.
No it isn't. Ordinarily I would agree with you but frankly very few people care about Bitcoin or have any reason to care about Bitcoin. NOBODY who is doing meaningful amounts of currency exchanges is going to want to bother with it. Since I don't buy or sell illegal drugs I honestly cannot conceive of any circumstance under which I would use it, even if I ignore the inherent exchange rate risk and liquidity problems.
Government bonds have very strict terms on repayment and that is for a reason - they need to be exceptionally predictable and reliable to function in their primary role of being reliable bonds.
Who said anything about postponing payment? Although that is in many cases an indirect option. Many bonds have terms that permit early retirement (not all but more than a few) and others are coming due regularly and the US can buy these bonds back and issue new ones with new payment terms. The Fed does this all the time entirely within the terms of the bonds issued. The only caveat is that you need someone interested in buying the debt. 90% of the buyers of US debt are not China and more than half are inside the USA.
All of above events would cause severe harm to US, and by extension world economy, which is why they are unlikely to occur. We are effectively in a state of financial MAD in credit system.
Correct. And my point is that China is if anything in a worse position. They have a MUCH larger poor population and their economy would likely be hurt far worse than the US economy in the event of a problem. China simply doesn't have a sufficiently developed domestic market yet. No one is suggesting that the US default in any way. What I am stating point-blank however is that the notion of the Chinese coming to collect the $1.1 trillion in debt they hold is absurd. They cannot do it even if they wanted to.
Essentially, the only reason most American's do not realize they are living in a police state is because most American's are decent folk and indoctrinated to submit to authority. As such, very few American's ever conflict with the state on a level to feel the police state.
I'm guessing this is just a troll but I'll bite anyway. A blanket assertion that all americans are too dumb to realize what a police state is followed by the assertion that we are all a bunch of sheep who are too docile to do anything about it? Not sure this person has met a lot of americans if they really think that and I'm quite sure this person has NO idea what life in an actual police state is like. I have friends who have actually live in genuine, certified police states and I've spoken to some of them at length about it. Whatever problems we have here in the US, there is NO valid comparison to be made. I do not live in fear of going to jail for off hand criticisms of our elected leaders. I do not fear that those currently in power will not leave office peacefully if they lose elections. I do not fear for a military coup. I do not think our courts as an institution are toothless or corrupt. The US has its problems but being a police state isn't one of them.
We actually understand what is going on, know our government is misbehaving and many of us are working actively to bring it back into line. This isn't our first rodeo with a government that has stepped out of line. That's what governments naturally try to do and correcting that tendency often takes time. You don't have to get out the ammo box to solve every problem. Usually the soap, ballot and jury boxes are quite sufficient.
Gee thanks. I'm really glad I have you to explain this to me since I merely have a master's degree in finance and am a certified accountant with 10 years experience in global sourcing. Good thing I have smart people like you to explain how currency trading works. [/sarcasm]
Defaulting on even a small amount of debt to China would collapse this system and US and world economy would not survive the fallout
The US doesn't have to default on the debt. That was the whole point. China will get paid in due time and they have very little leverage over the US regarding when and how. China bought that much US debt because they had to, not because they particularly wanted to. The notion that China now "owns" the US, or that they could take the US to some court over the matter is just nonsense. China (probably rightly) regards US debt as a safe investment but the China is in a much more precarious position than the US even without the exercise of some fiscal nuclear option.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a notion that the way to get the very highest quality information is to have an expert certify it. But there's actually little evidence that this is true.
Basically he's claiming (perhaps unintentionally) that peer review is worthless. That's a pretty bold claim and he doesn't really back it up. While peer review certainly has its flaws, I don't think it can be dismissed out of hand like Mr. Wales is doing here.
I can think of no other product so publicly rejected as Microsoft's newest products.
You must not be old enough to remember new coke. Windows 8 has been welcomed with loving arms by comparison.
FOX, CNN, and MSNBC all cover the exact same topics.
True but not actually the important point. The viewpoint about those topics matters.
You really dont seem to get that this is theater that we are looking at. The exact same topics covered by all three.
What you don't seem to get is that you can cover the same topics with different biases and that the biases matter. Fox News demonstrably has a conservative bias and they "interpret" facts (when they aren't just making shit up) accordingly. Just because they cover the same topic doesn't mean they are presenting the same position or that they have any intention of presenting an unbiased viewpoint. Of course it is theater but unfortunately some people don't realize that and actually are dumb enough to think Fox is not presenting a biased viewpoint. Something north of 90% of Fox News' audience self identifies as republican or republican leaning. Do you seriously think that would be possible if they were presenting an unbiased viewpoint and were just reporting the facts?
I know that bashing Fox News is a popular opinion. But of the mainstream papers, websites, and news TV stations, it's actually rather moderate.
"Moderate"? Compared to what? There is almost endless evidence that Fox News intentionally presents a staunchly conservative viewpoint and they have an audience to match. It's not even a meaningful debate at this point.
You're just as likely to find a liberal view on a panel segment as you are a conservative one.
Just because they invite some token liberals on to some of the shows doesn't mean their coverage is remotely balanced. Fox News is basically a mouthpiece for the republican party. Name one talking head (ala Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow) on Fox News who is a clear liberal. Go ahead, I'll wait...
Fox News gets its ratings because there are enough liberals and moderates to attract a broad audience.
The audience of Fox News contains a minority of moderates and VERY few liberals. 94% of Fox News viewers self identify as republican or republican leaning. In what universe is that a "broad audience"?
Look at who is buying newspapers now. Extreme right and left wing political donators.
Really? Warren Buffet is an "extreme" political donator?
Even if it were 1/5 of the world's fresh water (which I doubt, unless you're specifically excluding frozen fresh water, such as is covering Antarctica and Greenland), the Great Lakes are not supplying fresh water to 1/5 of the world's population.
Frozen fresh water is called ICE and very little of the ice in Antarctica or Greenland is usable to humans (or most other animals) in liquid form. If it melted it would go into the ocean and become salt water. And the Great Lakes do contain roughly 21% of the fresh surface water on the planet. There was nothing inaccurate or misleading about what I said at all. The only people who might misunderstand what I said are people who are too dumb to even get being pedantic right. Like you!
You can't take eight lawnmower engines, put them together and now claim you have an eight-cylinder Ferrari.
If Ferrari is the one doing it then yes they can claim that for whatever that gets them. And you certainly can join engines together to make a larger one. A W-16 is basically just two V-8s lashed together.
Asked whether Qualcomm would one day launch its own octa-core processor, Chandrasekher said, 'We don't do dumb things.'"
Maybe not but he clearly says dumb things.
You could cut nuclear regulation in half and it would still be the safest way to generate power.
The relationship between quantity of regulation and safety is not a linear one. There are three things to consider when evaluating risk: likelihood of occurrence, chance of detection, and severity of the problem. What makes nuclear power scary is that the severity of many problems can be extremely high so one has to be very careful to keep the other two factors (likelihood and detection) as low as possible. That is the purpose of the regulations. You cannot simply say that cutting the regulations in half would double the number of problems. The real world is more complicated than that.
All of the nuclear accidents in history have happened because of poor oversight, not to the fault of the technology itself.
The oversight IS a part of the technology. If the technology were flawless and relatively safe then extensive regulation and oversight would not be needed. I'm not opposed to nuclear power but pretending that the oversight can be separated from the equipment is naive.
The remaining plants are nowhere near Lake Michigan.
In Illinois there are active three nuclear power stations (Braidwood, Dresden, and LaSalle) not far from Chicago. A serious criticality incident on any one of those three would likely affect Lake Michigan. There also are Palisades Power Station (Michigan), Point Beach (Wisconsin), Donald Cook Power Station (Michigan) which are all on Lake Michigan.
Personally I wonder if having nuclear stations so close to 1/5 of the world's fresh water supply is a good idea. I'm not opposed to nuclear power but I think some locations might be more sensible than others. The Great Lakes are hugely important, have often been environmentally abused and some of the power stations (Palisades in particular) don't have the best operating records.
Business are not non-profit, those are organizations.
Not-for-profits absolutely can be a form of business. Most are treated as a type of corporation by law and they can and do engage in many of the same practices as for-profit businesses. I've served on the board of several non-profits and with the better run ones you'd have to look carefully at times to tell that they are not profit seeking institutions. Lots of hospitals are non-profits but I assure you that they are without question businesses.
Money is always the bottom line, charitable givings are a tax right off and good publicity
Tax write offs due to charitable giving are typically not recovered dollar for dollar. Furthermore charitable donations typically have an extremely poor ROI as a marketing device. I'm an accountant and I've done the math. I think charitable giving is wonderful but under your (faulty) premise that companies are "always" trying to maximize profit, most charitable giving makes little sense if your only goal is to maximize profit.
Businesses are, by DEFINITION, primarily interested in profits.
Primarily but not exclusively. The degree of their interest depends very much on who is running the business. Even the biggest businesses have stakeholders whose interest is not in maximizing corporate profits - many employees of the company not the least among them. And a profit motive does not mean that a company cannot engage in social good at the same time. Sometimes the two will conflict but often they will not.
Furthermore there are not-for-profit businesses who typically have some sort of dominant social agenda to which profit is merely an enabler rather than a driving force.
Money is ALWAYS the bottom line. What we may interpret to be "good will" is nothing more than the business determining that is a better/easier/quicker way to make more money.
I disagree that money is "always" the bottom line. Often, yes. Usually, maybe. Always, no. If your assertion were true then there are a lot of corporate activities that make little sense, starting with charitable giving. (for the cynics among you, charity generally makes for a terrible ROI even if you think of it as marketing) Furthermore a profit motive can, and often does, align with a social good. The two are not fundamentally incompatible. Reducing energy use has both an environmental benefit and an economic one. Reforming patent law can accomplish the same thing.
I can drink starbucks black, it isn't bitter at all, because they extract it correctly.
I periodically see people claim that this or that coffee "isn't bitter" and they are invariably wrong. ALL coffee is bitter and starbucks is no exception. It is merely a question of degree. I have a very low tolerance for bitter tastes (prob genetic) and I have NEVER tasted any coffee that wasn't bitter. Only way you could claim it isn't bitter is if you aren't sensitive to bitter flavors. I love the smell of coffee but the bitterness makes coffee unpalatable to me without a lot of sugar.
For most people, Starbucks is the best coffee around.
I don't regard starbucks coffee as any better than McDonalds or Dunkin Donuts and those aren't exactly hard to find.
The papers themselves may belong to Verizon, but this information is about me.
Doesn't necessarily matter if the information is about you unless there is a law giving you specific rights regarding how that information is handled. Just because it is about you doesn't mean you own the information. Like I said, the first question is whether the "papers" are yours. If they are not then you have no standing to challenge others looking at them under the constitution.
Look, technically, the results of my HIV test are just business records to my physician, but no one would argue that the government should be able to access and store that information.
In many places (like the UK) your medical records are explicitly NOT yours. Whether you own the health records is merely a matter of law and can be handled either way. In the US (generally) you own your records or at least have specific rights to them. Not so in other places. Claiming that "no one" thinks it is a good idea for the government to have access to this information is demonstrably not true. Plenty of people think the government should have that sort of access. (I happen to disagree with them like you but they do think that) And that viewpoint is not unreasonable especially in places where the government is the one providing the healthcare.
For fuck's sake will you people stop humping the "tablets are going to replace PCs" inflatable doll?
Tablet sales are going up and PC sales are going down. All three major vendors of tablets (Apple, Google and Microsoft) are actively working on convergence. One of the most popular accessories for a tablet is a keyboard. Exactly what do you think all that implies except that tablets ARE replacing PCs for many uses?
Nobody is claiming tablets are going to make PCs go away entirely. But tablets ARE replacing PCs in a lot of circumstances and will continue to do so.
Which makes it a PC.
So apparently you agree with me - a tablet is a type of PC.
I have three 30" screens I work on. It is wonderful.
For what you do it is wonderful. What you do != what everyone else does. For my job I don't actually need that much screen real estate and most of what I do can be done on a single 17" monitor if I really needed to. For many of my clients I do my work on a laptop with a 15" screen and it works just fine thank you very much.
Microsoft completely missed the mark and the consumers have spoken. You and some others want to work on a tablet, fine - most don't.
You are conflating two issues. You are absolutely correct that Microsoft missed the mark with the Surface RT. Had they introduced the Pro for a reasonable price instead of the crippled RT then they might have had something. Tablets and laptops are going to converge over time. There are some technical hurdles to be overcome but the lines between the two are going to blur significantly in the next few years. Apple, Google and Microsoft are all working in this direction.
Where you are wrong is in thinking that Microsoft's failure somehow implies that no one does work on tablets. Plenty of people work on tablets. I have sales people visit my office all the time using tablets for real work. Plus it's no big deal to dock a tablet/laptop if you need better monitor options. Tablets are used in doctors offices and by sales people and by restaurants TODAY. Just because they aren't doing engineering on them doesn't mean it isn't real work. Over time, tablets and laptops will converge significantly much like how cell phones have taken over much of the low end camera market. A tablet is just a laptop with a touch optimized interface. With the right software, many tasks that can be done by laptops could just as easily be done with a tablet.
What? Emails, text messages and other electronic communications are not "papers", you say?
The question is whether they are *your* papers. If they aren't then the 4th amendment doesn't apply. It is not entirely obvious whether phone records should count as your property nor is it clear whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding them. (For the record *I* think they should be treated as yours and not available to law enforcement without a warrant - but that's just my opinion) If they are yours, then the question becomes whether the search is unreasonable. But if they aren't yours then the question of being an unreasonable search becomes moot.
Having the board consist of the reps from the AMA (as now) and then also have reps from Insurance and the FDA, none overlapping.
The AMA is not representative of many doctors. Supposedly around 15% of doctors are members. I know the AMA has campaigned for some rules that would directly hurt my wife's practice. The AMA is an important organization but they don't remotely represent all doctors.
Let the charges be what they are, and the time gets reported too; charges/time outside the norm would have to carry explanation.
You are talking about a standard cost accounting system. You establish an expected cost and then any variations from that cost show up in a variance report which can be analyzed for changes. The calculations in a system like this are pretty complicated and standard costing systems have some meaningful drawbacks. It tends to create some distorting incentives that drive inappropriate behavior. Standard costing systems work best when you are producing a small number of products with fairly stable cost structures. Medicine tends to have a HUGE number of products and thanks to technology and differences between processes in institutions the variance reports would be very difficult to use. Furthermore standard costing is rather poor at drilling down to individual unit variances - it tends to work on overall numbers.
Would you like a side order of spam with your FUD?
Ok smart guy. Explain to me what use *I* have for bitcoin and what your evidence that bitcoin is not used for purchasing drugs?
You probably don't care much about Yuan-Dollar exchange rates much either, but you sure as hell have reason to care about it!
The yuan is a significant factor in the world economy. Bitcoin is not. Bitcoin is a barely used, illiquid, volatile currency that most people don't understand and even fewer people actually use. Should bitcoin become significant someday, then I will reconsider my position. I don't realistically see that happening though.
We used to see the (approximate and debatable) 3% that Visa and Mastercard skims from nearly all sales transactions, as merely the cost of doing business, and a worthwhile expense in exchange for the service they offer. And yet, now The People have the tech to avoid that charge
Bitcoin is not that tech, nor does it offer any reasonable prospect of becoming that tech anytime soon. Visa and the rest have an existing global network, transaction processing infrastructure, and an installed base of users. Replicating/replacing even a fraction of that will cost HUGE amounts of money and will have to displace entrenched competitors. Bitcoin presently has no reasonable prospects of putting any kind of dent in the business model of credit cards for the foreseeable future.
Or threaten to move to something cheaper. You don't necessarily have to do it, as long as you can prove you're willing to do it.
Threats are useless unless they are credible threats. Bitcoin is not a credible threat to the existing transaction processing infrastructure at this time.
There's reason to move to something cheaper.
Of course there is. However once you account for all the externalities and risk, bitcoin is not cheaper right now except in rare corner cases. Perhaps that will change in time... but I doubt it.
'Unlimited data' would get me over to them _if_ the other problems were solved.
Of course if the other problems were solved, they would have no need to offer "unlimited" data. Sprint isn't offering that because they are nice guys. They are offering it because they are getting their asses handed to them by Verizon and AT&T and it is a way to draw in customers that would otherwise go elsewhere.
We are talking specifically about how much time the doctor is working on the case of the patient.
The average time a doctor spends on a single patient isn't even close to the entire story. Bit of background: I'm an industrial engineer and also a cost accountant. I have degrees in both and have worked in healthcare doing six sigma projects, time studies and cost analysis.
1) Procedure times are NOT normally distributed. Not all cases are identical and some take considerably longer than the average. These longer cases typically are much more expensive. On a weighted cost basis the average cost will be higher than you would expect if you make the mistake of assuming a normal distribution.
2) You have to account for the time of the doctor PLUS the time of all the support staff. The time a doctor spends on a procedure frequently is not the biggest cost driver. My wife is a doctor. For the work she does her average time per case is about 10 minutes. For every minute she spends on a patient there is about 3-5 minutes of support staff time - sometimes more. On some cases she might spend an entire hour or more plus have to consult with other doctors for a particularly difficult diagnosis.
3) The value of a doctor's time isn't just driven by the average time for a procedure times some arbitrary hourly rate. What makes a doctor (particularly a surgeon) valuable is the value of his time when something unexpected happens. Patient goes into arrest on the operating table for instance. At that point the value of the doctor's time grows exponentially. If everything was just routine all the time, you could use nurse Now granted you can normalize the value of their time with enough study but the number you will get is going to be higher than if everything was routine and identical.
4) Time studies of procedure times are expensive and relatively difficult to perform. I've done a lot of time studies personally and trying to get an industry average for each and every procedure is far more difficult and expensive than most people realize. While there is no excuse for using outdated or wrong information, it is important to realize that maintaining an accurate and authoritative listing of expected procedure times is not a trivial exercise.
The Streisand effect on BitCoin is going to be huge.
No it isn't. Ordinarily I would agree with you but frankly very few people care about Bitcoin or have any reason to care about Bitcoin. NOBODY who is doing meaningful amounts of currency exchanges is going to want to bother with it. Since I don't buy or sell illegal drugs I honestly cannot conceive of any circumstance under which I would use it, even if I ignore the inherent exchange rate risk and liquidity problems.
Government bonds have very strict terms on repayment and that is for a reason - they need to be exceptionally predictable and reliable to function in their primary role of being reliable bonds.
Who said anything about postponing payment? Although that is in many cases an indirect option. Many bonds have terms that permit early retirement (not all but more than a few) and others are coming due regularly and the US can buy these bonds back and issue new ones with new payment terms. The Fed does this all the time entirely within the terms of the bonds issued. The only caveat is that you need someone interested in buying the debt. 90% of the buyers of US debt are not China and more than half are inside the USA.
All of above events would cause severe harm to US, and by extension world economy, which is why they are unlikely to occur. We are effectively in a state of financial MAD in credit system.
Correct. And my point is that China is if anything in a worse position. They have a MUCH larger poor population and their economy would likely be hurt far worse than the US economy in the event of a problem. China simply doesn't have a sufficiently developed domestic market yet. No one is suggesting that the US default in any way. What I am stating point-blank however is that the notion of the Chinese coming to collect the $1.1 trillion in debt they hold is absurd. They cannot do it even if they wanted to.
Essentially, the only reason most American's do not realize they are living in a police state is because most American's are decent folk and indoctrinated to submit to authority. As such, very few American's ever conflict with the state on a level to feel the police state.
I'm guessing this is just a troll but I'll bite anyway. A blanket assertion that all americans are too dumb to realize what a police state is followed by the assertion that we are all a bunch of sheep who are too docile to do anything about it? Not sure this person has met a lot of americans if they really think that and I'm quite sure this person has NO idea what life in an actual police state is like. I have friends who have actually live in genuine, certified police states and I've spoken to some of them at length about it. Whatever problems we have here in the US, there is NO valid comparison to be made. I do not live in fear of going to jail for off hand criticisms of our elected leaders. I do not fear that those currently in power will not leave office peacefully if they lose elections. I do not fear for a military coup. I do not think our courts as an institution are toothless or corrupt. The US has its problems but being a police state isn't one of them.
We actually understand what is going on, know our government is misbehaving and many of us are working actively to bring it back into line. This isn't our first rodeo with a government that has stepped out of line. That's what governments naturally try to do and correcting that tendency often takes time. You don't have to get out the ammo box to solve every problem. Usually the soap, ballot and jury boxes are quite sufficient.
I'll make this one easy on you
Gee thanks. I'm really glad I have you to explain this to me since I merely have a master's degree in finance and am a certified accountant with 10 years experience in global sourcing. Good thing I have smart people like you to explain how currency trading works. [/sarcasm]
Defaulting on even a small amount of debt to China would collapse this system and US and world economy would not survive the fallout
The US doesn't have to default on the debt. That was the whole point. China will get paid in due time and they have very little leverage over the US regarding when and how. China bought that much US debt because they had to, not because they particularly wanted to. The notion that China now "owns" the US, or that they could take the US to some court over the matter is just nonsense. China (probably rightly) regards US debt as a safe investment but the China is in a much more precarious position than the US even without the exercise of some fiscal nuclear option.