Unfortunately, each time they do this they get slightly different results. The difference between the international standard and the average of the national standards is increasing.
Reminds me of the old quote: "A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure."
It may not be the best OS of the bunch, but the fact of the matter is that it will run on a whole host of hardware.
Which means very little by itself. Linux runs on lots of hardware but isn't remotely dominating the operating system market. There is more to it than that. It needs to run on the hardware people want and run the software people want and have a critical mass of users of those devices. Pulling all that off is no mean feat. Possible you will be right but you shouldn't be so certain.
Apple and RIM have lost in this respect, because there will be very little choice.
You are presuming two things. One, that people will care about choice in hardware. The iPod is a great example of a device that has dominated its market despite a multitude of alternative hardware choices available. Choice in hardware might not matter much at all. Two, that Apple & RIM need a monopoly to be successful. The iPhone is wildly profitable and popular and Apple is making a fortune even though there are plenty of other choices out there. The iPhone does not dominate the market the way the iPod does but you'd have a hard time arguing it isn't a successful product. Apple's strategy is a bit of a high wire act and they could easily screw it up but they've shown every reason to think they might succeed.
WebOS and Android will take the market because soon enough someone will be running it on a toaster.
My wife was just telling me the other day, "Why isn't our toaster web enabled? Isn't it about time someone did that?" [/sarcasm]
A friend of mine who dropped out of college chemistry became a better coder in 6 months than many of my classmates did in 4 years.
Programming has the somewhat unusual feature that it is actually reasonable to teach yourself because the materials needed are inexpensive and commonly available and you aren't likely to cause any physical damage. You really just need a computer and some documentation. If you are smart and have a good memory, you probably can become a passably good coder in short order. It's possible to learn chemistry yourself but getting a well equipped working lab is prohibitively expensive. (Sure you can do some basic stuff cheaply but you can only get so far without spending some serious bucks and/or possibly drawing the attention of law enforcement) Plus even if you did have the lab, learning it yourself carries a lot of danger since there are numerous non-obvious ways to kill yourself. Lots of other professions are difficult to learn without some amount of formal instruction. You aren't going to become a self taught bridge engineer in this day and age. Even some computer related professions like CAD are difficult to learn on your own due to the prohibitive cost of software. (A seat of 3D solid modeling software can be many thousands of dollars) I was self taught on computer simulation but my company picked up the cost of the software which was $15,000US per seat.
In short, just because you can learn to program on your own, doesn't mean that doing so is reasonable for every other activity.
If you have 15+ years of experience, that's probably better than two years of a co-op and a four year degree.
Not necessarily. There are some fields where the amount of experience you have is almost meaningless unless you have the certifications that go with that field. It's not necessarily sensible but that is the way it is. I have 15 years of experience and for some jobs it won't help me a bit if I didn't have the certifications to go with that experience. I've had to get certifications to get considered for jobs I've been doing for years. The certification does not make me one bit better at the job but it did matter more than my experience.
You can do background screening, but you can't do future screening, because people can change their minds after they overhear some comments about how this new stealth fighter is going to be used to attack their homeland.
You can do monitoring of current behavior. Access to sensitive information is normally tracked and so are the people who have access to it. Not foolproof to be sure (nothing is) but it isn't easy and there are some pretty strict rules about who has access to things. They don't let any random smart guy from a foreign country have access to whatever he wants.
They have recently designed (and put into service) the capable J-10 themselves
The engine in the J-10 is made and sold by Russia and is the same engine used in the SU-27. Kind of hard to fly the jet without an engine. While they designed much of it, they didn't design all of it.
, as well as the JF-17 with Pakistan.
Which has one operational squadron of 14 aircraft and isn't presently used by the Chinese themselves.
Your point is correct that the Chinese are progressing rapidly, but the J-10 at best matches fighters that were developed in the US 30 years ago such as the F-16. I have little doubt that the Chinese in time will develop some impressive fighters but they are going to be playing catch up with the US for probably another decade or three.
it is also unclear whether F-22 price tag matches its combat performance
Exactly how does a comparison of operational performance between the J-20 and F-22 have anything to do with the cost vs operation performance of the F-22? Yes the F-22 an extremely expensive weapons platform and I agree it isn't at all clear that the F-22 optimizes bang for the buck (pun slightly intended). That has nothing to do with whether the J-20 can match the performance of the F-22.
What exactly is the basis for these claims that the tech is stolen and they cant do it on their own?
The fact that China is not a major exporter of aircraft, particularly of the cutting edge military variety. The fact that they don't even produce a 4th generation fighter of their own design (most of their fighters are copied/adapted from Russian designs) and suddenly they unveil this supposed 5th generation fighter supposedly without any foreign technology. Major leaps in technology like that generally do not happen without some help. The Chinese are smart people but development of that kind of technology takes time and infrastructure neither of which seem to be applicable here. It's not that they couldn't do it; it's just that it is unlikely that the could do it that fast without getting a little boost on the information front.
Stealth has been around for a long time
No it hasn't and what has been around is among the more highly guarded secrets among the military forces that have access to it.
Chinese may well have found a way to do it.
Certainly possible, though the smart money says that they probably acquired significant amounts of knowledge through spying. Please note that this isn't a condemnation, every country spies including the US. China acquiring this technology illicitly seems the most likely source.
there have been a lot of Chinese researchers in the US, they may not have worked directly on the projects, but definitely there must be many who worked on relevant projects, and nothing is stopping them from taking the knowledge back to their country with them.
You think the defense industry isn't aware of that possibility? I've been in factories where they make fighter jets. Foreign nationals are quite carefully monitored and aren't given access to sensitive technology without some very careful background screening.
As for the new Chinese stealth fighter, it's reported to be an even match for the Raptor...
You mean the J-20 which is due to be operational 6-8 YEARS from now? Most of what is "known" about it is just speculation based on some very limited information. Most performance projections are going to be pure conjecture until more information is available.
As for matching the F-22, did it occur to you that the folks selling the F-22 might have a vested interest in proclaiming this jet to be competitive with the F-22? Fear is a great way to sell weapons. It's certainly possible to design a jet to match the F-22, but its not remotely clear that this Chinese jet reaches or will reach that level of performance.
In Western democracies, the governments are answerable to companies.
There is a huge difference between influence and power. Companies in the US and pretty much any other western democracy have a lot of influence, but when push comes to shove they can be (and occasionally are) shut down or taken over by government with the stroke of a pen. Companies have influence but their power doesn't remotely eclipse that of the government because the government has the military and the police and the companies do not.
You'd be an idiot to think it were otherwise.
And you would be a naive fool to think that a rich influential company has more power than the US government. Governments can and do take over companies at will. Happens all the time. The same is not normally true in reverse except for tiny weak nations.
Oh, look! Another moron who's never heard of a thing called a "monopoly".
Monopolies are answerable to the government in the country in which they reside. Furthermore, there is no monopoly that has the (legal) authority to put you in jail, confiscate your property, or terminate your life. I can live a free life without electricity or telephone service. Less convenient but quite doable.
That's actually a very clever insight. I can't think of a single benefit of having the cockpit on top...
It is far easier to engineer a cockpit above an aircraft than below. Remember you still have to sit in it and humans are designed to have our feet point at the ground. Putting the cockpit below the plane makes designing a functional landing gear considerably more difficult.
In practical terms, it doesn't really matter much whether you can see up or down. Except for fighter jets, most cockpits have relatively poor visibility both up and down. It really doesn't matter as much as you think it does.
Crash landings with a cockpit below the plane are a BAD idea.
Cameras with displays can be mounted to the bottom if visibility is actually important for some reason. Much easier to engineer than to design a glass bottomed aircraft.
Should we not spare 40% of children from DYING so that 1% doesn't get autism. That is easily worth the trade off.
Try saying that when it's your child, asshole.
Ok. Saving the lives of 40% of children is worth the risk of giving 1% of them autism including my own child. Easily worth the trade off. Your child isn't any more special than anyone else. Neither are any children of mine.
Some people are just going to be unlucky. Taking stupid risks like not vaccinating because someone hypothesizes (fraudulently as it turns out) that there might be a link between a particular vaccine and autism merely trades a theoretical risk for another well established risk. Don't get vaccinated and you might not get measles or mumps but some percentage of the population absolutely will. It's a roll of the dice. Taking a hypothetical risk over a well proven one is retarded.
Vaccines save lives. This is not in dispute. EVERY vaccine has side effects in at least some portion of the population. So does every medicine and medical treatment known to man. Unproven side effects in a few are not sufficient reason to not use a medication and certainly not reason to not be vaccinated.
There is a reason MS is in a dominate position on the desktop. The visual studio tools are way better than what everyone else has.
No real disagreement with the rest of your post but the reasons MS dominates on the desktop go WAY beyond the quality of their developer tools. Not to say those aren't important (they are) but I think DOS and Windows would probably have dominated even if their developer tools were much worse than they actually are.
That is what government regulation is for. It is to ensure that the best product wins under its own merits and that all costs are taken into account.
Government regulations do not have that effect. Not even close. Quite the opposite, really.
They do when they are designed well. Granted it doesn't happen enough, partly because well designed regulations are actually really hard to pull off, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's not hard to find government regulations that do indeed increase competition and make commerce more competitive and consumer friendly. Unfortunately it's just as easy to find regulations that do exactly the opposite.
the way to "eliminate competitors" in a free market is to have a better product.
That's only one of many ways to beat competitors and not necessarily the most effective one. It's not hard to come up with examples of inferior products that ended up dominating the market. In fact if you look at many disruptive technologies they are often inferior in many ways to the technologies they replace. Price, availability, service, control of a scarce resource such as a raw material or distribution channel, artificial monopolies in the form of patents, better sales people, better personal networks, trade barriers, market entry costs, economies of scale, marketing, and image are just a few of the tools that come into play. The notion of the better mousetrap always winning is pure, unadulterated fiction.
If your product is so good that no one else can compete, then who cares?
That's a nice fantasy but vanishingly uncommon in real life.
If you start trying to abuse your monopoly position, new competition will come.
Not necessarily. You might get slapped down by the government but it's quite possible to establish a monopoly that cannot be dislodged by conventional market forces. DeBeers at one time owned the vast majority of the diamond mines in the world as well as had control of the primary distribution channel. They had a de-facto monopoly on diamond supply which could not be dislodged because there was little product available from anyone else. It would be hard to argue that they didn't abuse their position but the only thing that could really dislodge them was the discovery of new sources of diamonds.
I don't want our medical devices on our main network.
Too bad. It's going to be increasingly necessary that they are if you want to really utilize electronic records. That doesn't mean that security is impossible but it is going to be a fact of life. Get over it and worry about how to secure the network.
Why does the radiology equiment need to be given access to the internet anyway such that it would ever get infected by conficker?
Because a lot of radiology is done on computers (film is going away for the same reasons you don't use a film camera anymore) and the data is often read remotely, sometimes not even in the same state. Unless you have a plan to somehow come up with a secure parallel internet that doesn't cost trillions of dollars, it is necessary to use the internet to transmit data. Sneakernet is not really an option, nor is walling everything off completely from the internet. You also might want to be able to put the radiographic data into the patient's electronic chart which you might want read at a remote office, say with the primary care physician.
It's not there yet but I expect the same will be true of pathology in the not too distant future. Pathology slides will eventually be digitized and embedded in the patient's electronic chart.
I think you are a troll or a moron or both but what the heck.
I am one of the REALLY HATED libertarians. I am against gov't regulations of everything.
Gov't has 2 jobs: 1. Minimum military. 2. Justice system.
That's it, no exceptions.
Really? You have come up with a solution for how to build an efficient road system? How to keep a financial system functioning in the face of a credit crisis? How to establish a widely accepted private currency? How to build a private fire fighting system? Zoning rules? Education system? How to keep natural monopolies of power, water, and communications from taking every penny you own? You have a solution for the problem of market failure? If so, your Nobel prize awaits. Apparently you are somehow more brilliant than the rest of us.
But let's be serious, you haven't really thought any of this through have you? Sadly, life is a tad more complicated outside of your lonely little ivory tower.
There should not be gov't involvement into any of this at all. FDA should be abolished, like all other agencies (except for what I specifically listed already.)
So you are ok with no one ensuring that medicines and medical devices actually work and provide real benefits? If so I don't EVER want you involved in health care in any way. There is WAY too much money to be made selling snake oil cures to not have someone neutral forcing drug companies to prove that their cures actually provide the benefit they say that do. If you want to do it a different way than the FDA, fine, but you had better have a very detailed idea of how to accomplish this vital service.
This regulation is like all other gov't regulations, will bring costs up and will decrease competition.
It's a proven fact that in many cases regulation does exactly the opposite - particularly in the case of monopolies. What you really want is the Goldilocks amount of regulation - not to much, and not too little. There need to be rules but it's also possible to have too many rules. It's not always clear where the dividing line between the two is but I'm pretty sure no regulation at all is a disaster in the making.
That should be true for non-life-threatening circumstances.
But it frequently is not true. In fact, even if you could get enough data to make a rational and fully informed decision (which is almost always impossible in real life), most people wouldn't know what to do with the information once they got it. It's possible to measure outcomes in many cases but there are so many variables that go into health care that most people would find it impossible to say Doctor A is better than Doctor B even if you just restrict the evaluation to medical outcomes - never mind externalities like cost, location, convenience, or soft factors like bedside manner. And even just staying with outcomes, it's frequently not clear cut what constitutes a better outcome.
It's very difficult to seriously comparison shop between health care providers because health care is a experiential good. You only can evaluate the care after you have received it. You might consult friends and whatever limited data you have available to you about likely outcomes but all you are doing is evaluating the odds and probably doing a very crude job of it. Even the best hospitals with the best doctors and best practices have poor outcomes sometimes.
Libertarianism is about being aware that one person's liberty ends where the other person's liberty begins.
The problem with that is you have to define what constitutes your individual rights. Reasonable people can disagree on what those limits should be. "Libertarians" themselves can't even agree on where the limits of government and personal liberty should be.
The hospital's liberty to cut corners ends where my liberty to live begins.
Actually it ends where the ability to finance your "liberty to live" (whatever the hell that means) ends. Finite resources are available for infinite health care needs. That's not an excuse to not provide the best care they are able to provide prior to reaching those financial limits but odds are you are going to run into the limits of what a hospital will do for you prior to hitting the limits of what they (theoretically) can do for you.
First of all, if there's something you need to say to many people (like, It's a boy! or, I got a new job!), why would you go through the effort of telling everyone you know individually?
Because it solidifies a relationship, makes the other person feel special, let's them ask question or make comments they might not want to make publicly, and generally is what you do with people who you actually care about. If my sister notified me about her wedding via a Facebook post, I would rightly conclude that she didn't care very much about my involvement with that information. There are perfectly wonderful reasons to use one-to-many broadcasts of information but mere convenience isn't necessarily a sufficient reason by itself. Social interactions aren't just about your personal convenience.
Why wouldn't you bother letting everyone in the world know at once (keeping in mind that most people couldn't care less about their privacy or security of course)?
I think you just answered your own question. Furthermore you presume that everyone uses Facebook and the like. I can count on my fingers the number of MY close relatives, friends and associates who regularly use Facebook. This is particularly true of the generations that are older than myself. Posting to Facebook doesn't remotely let "everyone in the world know at once". There is nothing wrong with using Facebook if it fits your social circle but don't presume it makes sense for everyone.
The Web, AOL, they were all largely novelties that died down when people realized it wasn't relevant to them.
Huh? AOL sure but you are using the Web right now. Facebook is a subset of the Web. If the Web isn't relevant, Facebook isn't either. QED it is personally relevant to you.
Facebook is different. It's something people actually want, and it's something that makes their lives easier and more enjoyable.
Facebook is just another means of communication with certain advantages and certain disadvantages. Facebook offers me personally nothing that I desire or need. Might be great for you and lots of other people but it's hardly universally wanted.
...nobody could complain that they weren't "told first" (something that happened when we announced our wedding)
I have a strict policy for people who do this to my wife and I. They get told *last* if they get told at all from that point on until we receive an apology. This applies to parents, siblings, and everyone else. I have no time for anyone who thinks they "deserve" priority in how I disclose facts about my life.
Usually I just designate someone I trust to be the point person and I relay all information to them if I don't have time to relay important information myself. They get it to the people who need/want to know. Most of the people I deal with do not use Facebook or Twitter (myself included) so if I used those services I would be de-facto prioritizing those few who use those services. Nothing wrong with doing it through Facebook if that fits nicely into your social network. Doesn't work for me though.
US Air and Southwest are the only two airlines that have not regularly fucked up my travel.
Give them time and I promise that will change. I've flown quite a bit on pretty much any US carrier you care to mention and they're all pretty much equally crappy. If you haven't had bad luck with one of them I applaud your good fortune.
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Is a kilogram in terms of fractions of an elephant please?
Isn't everything supposed to be quoted in units of Library Of Congresses?
Unfortunately, each time they do this they get slightly different results. The difference between the international standard and the average of the national standards is increasing.
Reminds me of the old quote: "A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure."
It may not be the best OS of the bunch, but the fact of the matter is that it will run on a whole host of hardware.
Which means very little by itself. Linux runs on lots of hardware but isn't remotely dominating the operating system market. There is more to it than that. It needs to run on the hardware people want and run the software people want and have a critical mass of users of those devices. Pulling all that off is no mean feat. Possible you will be right but you shouldn't be so certain.
Apple and RIM have lost in this respect, because there will be very little choice.
You are presuming two things. One, that people will care about choice in hardware. The iPod is a great example of a device that has dominated its market despite a multitude of alternative hardware choices available. Choice in hardware might not matter much at all. Two, that Apple & RIM need a monopoly to be successful. The iPhone is wildly profitable and popular and Apple is making a fortune even though there are plenty of other choices out there. The iPhone does not dominate the market the way the iPod does but you'd have a hard time arguing it isn't a successful product. Apple's strategy is a bit of a high wire act and they could easily screw it up but they've shown every reason to think they might succeed.
WebOS and Android will take the market because soon enough someone will be running it on a toaster.
My wife was just telling me the other day, "Why isn't our toaster web enabled? Isn't it about time someone did that?" [/sarcasm]
A friend of mine who dropped out of college chemistry became a better coder in 6 months than many of my classmates did in 4 years.
Programming has the somewhat unusual feature that it is actually reasonable to teach yourself because the materials needed are inexpensive and commonly available and you aren't likely to cause any physical damage. You really just need a computer and some documentation. If you are smart and have a good memory, you probably can become a passably good coder in short order. It's possible to learn chemistry yourself but getting a well equipped working lab is prohibitively expensive. (Sure you can do some basic stuff cheaply but you can only get so far without spending some serious bucks and/or possibly drawing the attention of law enforcement) Plus even if you did have the lab, learning it yourself carries a lot of danger since there are numerous non-obvious ways to kill yourself. Lots of other professions are difficult to learn without some amount of formal instruction. You aren't going to become a self taught bridge engineer in this day and age. Even some computer related professions like CAD are difficult to learn on your own due to the prohibitive cost of software. (A seat of 3D solid modeling software can be many thousands of dollars) I was self taught on computer simulation but my company picked up the cost of the software which was $15,000US per seat.
In short, just because you can learn to program on your own, doesn't mean that doing so is reasonable for every other activity.
If you have 15+ years of experience, that's probably better than two years of a co-op and a four year degree.
Not necessarily. There are some fields where the amount of experience you have is almost meaningless unless you have the certifications that go with that field. It's not necessarily sensible but that is the way it is. I have 15 years of experience and for some jobs it won't help me a bit if I didn't have the certifications to go with that experience. I've had to get certifications to get considered for jobs I've been doing for years. The certification does not make me one bit better at the job but it did matter more than my experience.
You can do background screening, but you can't do future screening, because people can change their minds after they overhear some comments about how this new stealth fighter is going to be used to attack their homeland.
You can do monitoring of current behavior. Access to sensitive information is normally tracked and so are the people who have access to it. Not foolproof to be sure (nothing is) but it isn't easy and there are some pretty strict rules about who has access to things. They don't let any random smart guy from a foreign country have access to whatever he wants.
They have recently designed (and put into service) the capable J-10 themselves
The engine in the J-10 is made and sold by Russia and is the same engine used in the SU-27. Kind of hard to fly the jet without an engine. While they designed much of it, they didn't design all of it.
, as well as the JF-17 with Pakistan.
Which has one operational squadron of 14 aircraft and isn't presently used by the Chinese themselves.
Your point is correct that the Chinese are progressing rapidly, but the J-10 at best matches fighters that were developed in the US 30 years ago such as the F-16. I have little doubt that the Chinese in time will develop some impressive fighters but they are going to be playing catch up with the US for probably another decade or three.
it is also unclear whether F-22 price tag matches its combat performance
Exactly how does a comparison of operational performance between the J-20 and F-22 have anything to do with the cost vs operation performance of the F-22? Yes the F-22 an extremely expensive weapons platform and I agree it isn't at all clear that the F-22 optimizes bang for the buck (pun slightly intended). That has nothing to do with whether the J-20 can match the performance of the F-22.
What exactly is the basis for these claims that the tech is stolen and they cant do it on their own?
The fact that China is not a major exporter of aircraft, particularly of the cutting edge military variety. The fact that they don't even produce a 4th generation fighter of their own design (most of their fighters are copied/adapted from Russian designs) and suddenly they unveil this supposed 5th generation fighter supposedly without any foreign technology. Major leaps in technology like that generally do not happen without some help. The Chinese are smart people but development of that kind of technology takes time and infrastructure neither of which seem to be applicable here. It's not that they couldn't do it; it's just that it is unlikely that the could do it that fast without getting a little boost on the information front.
Stealth has been around for a long time
No it hasn't and what has been around is among the more highly guarded secrets among the military forces that have access to it.
Chinese may well have found a way to do it.
Certainly possible, though the smart money says that they probably acquired significant amounts of knowledge through spying. Please note that this isn't a condemnation, every country spies including the US. China acquiring this technology illicitly seems the most likely source.
there have been a lot of Chinese researchers in the US, they may not have worked directly on the projects, but definitely there must be many who worked on relevant projects, and nothing is stopping them from taking the knowledge back to their country with them.
You think the defense industry isn't aware of that possibility? I've been in factories where they make fighter jets. Foreign nationals are quite carefully monitored and aren't given access to sensitive technology without some very careful background screening.
As for the new Chinese stealth fighter, it's reported to be an even match for the Raptor...
You mean the J-20 which is due to be operational 6-8 YEARS from now? Most of what is "known" about it is just speculation based on some very limited information. Most performance projections are going to be pure conjecture until more information is available.
As for matching the F-22, did it occur to you that the folks selling the F-22 might have a vested interest in proclaiming this jet to be competitive with the F-22? Fear is a great way to sell weapons. It's certainly possible to design a jet to match the F-22, but its not remotely clear that this Chinese jet reaches or will reach that level of performance.
In Western democracies, the governments are answerable to companies.
There is a huge difference between influence and power. Companies in the US and pretty much any other western democracy have a lot of influence, but when push comes to shove they can be (and occasionally are) shut down or taken over by government with the stroke of a pen. Companies have influence but their power doesn't remotely eclipse that of the government because the government has the military and the police and the companies do not.
You'd be an idiot to think it were otherwise.
And you would be a naive fool to think that a rich influential company has more power than the US government. Governments can and do take over companies at will. Happens all the time. The same is not normally true in reverse except for tiny weak nations.
Oh, look! Another moron who's never heard of a thing called a "monopoly".
Monopolies are answerable to the government in the country in which they reside. Furthermore, there is no monopoly that has the (legal) authority to put you in jail, confiscate your property, or terminate your life. I can live a free life without electricity or telephone service. Less convenient but quite doable.
That's actually a very clever insight. I can't think of a single benefit of having the cockpit on top...
Should we not spare 40% of children from DYING so that 1% doesn't get autism. That is easily worth the trade off.
Try saying that when it's your child, asshole.
Ok. Saving the lives of 40% of children is worth the risk of giving 1% of them autism including my own child. Easily worth the trade off. Your child isn't any more special than anyone else. Neither are any children of mine.
Some people are just going to be unlucky. Taking stupid risks like not vaccinating because someone hypothesizes (fraudulently as it turns out) that there might be a link between a particular vaccine and autism merely trades a theoretical risk for another well established risk. Don't get vaccinated and you might not get measles or mumps but some percentage of the population absolutely will. It's a roll of the dice. Taking a hypothetical risk over a well proven one is retarded.
Vaccines save lives. This is not in dispute. EVERY vaccine has side effects in at least some portion of the population. So does every medicine and medical treatment known to man. Unproven side effects in a few are not sufficient reason to not use a medication and certainly not reason to not be vaccinated.
There is a reason MS is in a dominate position on the desktop. The visual studio tools are way better than what everyone else has.
No real disagreement with the rest of your post but the reasons MS dominates on the desktop go WAY beyond the quality of their developer tools. Not to say those aren't important (they are) but I think DOS and Windows would probably have dominated even if their developer tools were much worse than they actually are.
That is what government regulation is for. It is to ensure that the best product wins under its own merits and that all costs are taken into account.
Government regulations do not have that effect. Not even close. Quite the opposite, really.
They do when they are designed well. Granted it doesn't happen enough, partly because well designed regulations are actually really hard to pull off, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's not hard to find government regulations that do indeed increase competition and make commerce more competitive and consumer friendly. Unfortunately it's just as easy to find regulations that do exactly the opposite.
the way to "eliminate competitors" in a free market is to have a better product.
That's only one of many ways to beat competitors and not necessarily the most effective one. It's not hard to come up with examples of inferior products that ended up dominating the market. In fact if you look at many disruptive technologies they are often inferior in many ways to the technologies they replace. Price, availability, service, control of a scarce resource such as a raw material or distribution channel, artificial monopolies in the form of patents, better sales people, better personal networks, trade barriers, market entry costs, economies of scale, marketing, and image are just a few of the tools that come into play. The notion of the better mousetrap always winning is pure, unadulterated fiction.
If your product is so good that no one else can compete, then who cares?
That's a nice fantasy but vanishingly uncommon in real life.
If you start trying to abuse your monopoly position, new competition will come.
Not necessarily. You might get slapped down by the government but it's quite possible to establish a monopoly that cannot be dislodged by conventional market forces. DeBeers at one time owned the vast majority of the diamond mines in the world as well as had control of the primary distribution channel. They had a de-facto monopoly on diamond supply which could not be dislodged because there was little product available from anyone else. It would be hard to argue that they didn't abuse their position but the only thing that could really dislodge them was the discovery of new sources of diamonds.
I don't want our medical devices on our main network.
Too bad. It's going to be increasingly necessary that they are if you want to really utilize electronic records. That doesn't mean that security is impossible but it is going to be a fact of life. Get over it and worry about how to secure the network.
Why does the radiology equiment need to be given access to the internet anyway such that it would ever get infected by conficker?
Because a lot of radiology is done on computers (film is going away for the same reasons you don't use a film camera anymore) and the data is often read remotely, sometimes not even in the same state. Unless you have a plan to somehow come up with a secure parallel internet that doesn't cost trillions of dollars, it is necessary to use the internet to transmit data. Sneakernet is not really an option, nor is walling everything off completely from the internet. You also might want to be able to put the radiographic data into the patient's electronic chart which you might want read at a remote office, say with the primary care physician.
It's not there yet but I expect the same will be true of pathology in the not too distant future. Pathology slides will eventually be digitized and embedded in the patient's electronic chart.
I think you are a troll or a moron or both but what the heck.
I am one of the REALLY HATED libertarians. I am against gov't regulations of everything.
Gov't has 2 jobs:
1. Minimum military.
2. Justice system.
That's it, no exceptions.
Really? You have come up with a solution for how to build an efficient road system? How to keep a financial system functioning in the face of a credit crisis? How to establish a widely accepted private currency? How to build a private fire fighting system? Zoning rules? Education system? How to keep natural monopolies of power, water, and communications from taking every penny you own? You have a solution for the problem of market failure? If so, your Nobel prize awaits. Apparently you are somehow more brilliant than the rest of us.
But let's be serious, you haven't really thought any of this through have you? Sadly, life is a tad more complicated outside of your lonely little ivory tower.
There should not be gov't involvement into any of this at all. FDA should be abolished, like all other agencies (except for what I specifically listed already.)
So you are ok with no one ensuring that medicines and medical devices actually work and provide real benefits? If so I don't EVER want you involved in health care in any way. There is WAY too much money to be made selling snake oil cures to not have someone neutral forcing drug companies to prove that their cures actually provide the benefit they say that do. If you want to do it a different way than the FDA, fine, but you had better have a very detailed idea of how to accomplish this vital service.
This regulation is like all other gov't regulations, will bring costs up and will decrease competition.
It's a proven fact that in many cases regulation does exactly the opposite - particularly in the case of monopolies. What you really want is the Goldilocks amount of regulation - not to much, and not too little. There need to be rules but it's also possible to have too many rules. It's not always clear where the dividing line between the two is but I'm pretty sure no regulation at all is a disaster in the making.
If you read TFA, yes, actually, they were:
You must be new here...
That should be true for non-life-threatening circumstances.
But it frequently is not true. In fact, even if you could get enough data to make a rational and fully informed decision (which is almost always impossible in real life), most people wouldn't know what to do with the information once they got it. It's possible to measure outcomes in many cases but there are so many variables that go into health care that most people would find it impossible to say Doctor A is better than Doctor B even if you just restrict the evaluation to medical outcomes - never mind externalities like cost, location, convenience, or soft factors like bedside manner. And even just staying with outcomes, it's frequently not clear cut what constitutes a better outcome.
It's very difficult to seriously comparison shop between health care providers because health care is a experiential good. You only can evaluate the care after you have received it. You might consult friends and whatever limited data you have available to you about likely outcomes but all you are doing is evaluating the odds and probably doing a very crude job of it. Even the best hospitals with the best doctors and best practices have poor outcomes sometimes.
Libertarianism is about being aware that one person's liberty ends where the other person's liberty begins.
The problem with that is you have to define what constitutes your individual rights. Reasonable people can disagree on what those limits should be. "Libertarians" themselves can't even agree on where the limits of government and personal liberty should be.
The hospital's liberty to cut corners ends where my liberty to live begins.
Actually it ends where the ability to finance your "liberty to live" (whatever the hell that means) ends. Finite resources are available for infinite health care needs. That's not an excuse to not provide the best care they are able to provide prior to reaching those financial limits but odds are you are going to run into the limits of what a hospital will do for you prior to hitting the limits of what they (theoretically) can do for you.
First of all, if there's something you need to say to many people (like, It's a boy! or, I got a new job!), why would you go through the effort of telling everyone you know individually?
Because it solidifies a relationship, makes the other person feel special, let's them ask question or make comments they might not want to make publicly, and generally is what you do with people who you actually care about. If my sister notified me about her wedding via a Facebook post, I would rightly conclude that she didn't care very much about my involvement with that information. There are perfectly wonderful reasons to use one-to-many broadcasts of information but mere convenience isn't necessarily a sufficient reason by itself. Social interactions aren't just about your personal convenience.
Why wouldn't you bother letting everyone in the world know at once (keeping in mind that most people couldn't care less about their privacy or security of course)?
I think you just answered your own question. Furthermore you presume that everyone uses Facebook and the like. I can count on my fingers the number of MY close relatives, friends and associates who regularly use Facebook. This is particularly true of the generations that are older than myself. Posting to Facebook doesn't remotely let "everyone in the world know at once". There is nothing wrong with using Facebook if it fits your social circle but don't presume it makes sense for everyone.
The Web, AOL, they were all largely novelties that died down when people realized it wasn't relevant to them.
Huh? AOL sure but you are using the Web right now. Facebook is a subset of the Web. If the Web isn't relevant, Facebook isn't either. QED it is personally relevant to you.
Facebook is different. It's something people actually want, and it's something that makes their lives easier and more enjoyable.
Facebook is just another means of communication with certain advantages and certain disadvantages. Facebook offers me personally nothing that I desire or need. Might be great for you and lots of other people but it's hardly universally wanted.
...nobody could complain that they weren't "told first" (something that happened when we announced our wedding)
I have a strict policy for people who do this to my wife and I. They get told *last* if they get told at all from that point on until we receive an apology. This applies to parents, siblings, and everyone else. I have no time for anyone who thinks they "deserve" priority in how I disclose facts about my life.
Usually I just designate someone I trust to be the point person and I relay all information to them if I don't have time to relay important information myself. They get it to the people who need/want to know. Most of the people I deal with do not use Facebook or Twitter (myself included) so if I used those services I would be de-facto prioritizing those few who use those services. Nothing wrong with doing it through Facebook if that fits nicely into your social network. Doesn't work for me though.
US Air and Southwest are the only two airlines that have not regularly fucked up my travel.
Give them time and I promise that will change. I've flown quite a bit on pretty much any US carrier you care to mention and they're all pretty much equally crappy. If you haven't had bad luck with one of them I applaud your good fortune.