If it was like CSI, they'd be able to enhance footage from a security camera two blocks away from one of the crime scenes to show the unique thermal imprint of one of the twins could be detected reflecting off a passerby's ipad cover.
Financial incentives? As a father of a son that has Asperger's, please point out to me what these financial incentives are. I'd love to get some compensation for everything that we have to fight with every single day.
I'm Canadian. I have a son who was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. Now I guess he'd just be diagnosed as on the autism spectrum.
Anyway, because of that diagnosis, I get to claim a disability tax credit (http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/disability/) for him. I get a pretty good chunk of my income tax back at return time.
These questions might not be as self-evidently ludicrous as you seem to think. Assumptions are your enemy.
Having children who can properly think and reason leads to uncomfortable questions like : "why are there no dinosaurs in the bible?" or "how can the entire earth flood in only a few days?" or "where did Noah store all that food?"
In other words, The US is full of stupid people, because their religion tells them to be stupid
"why are there no dinosaurs in the bible?" - there are. Well-documented, just not by that name. You did know that "dinosaur" is a neologism, coined in the mid-19th century, right? Look for terms like "leviathan", "dragon", and "behemoth", then laugh at the footnotes saying that those terms probably mean something like a hippopotamus.
"how can the entire earth flood in only a few days?" - 40 > "a few".
"where did Noah store all that food?" - how much food did he need? Were some of the animals onboard used as feed for others (especially given that some reproduction / breeding may have taken place during the time spent afloat)? How much space was available? How much preparation time was available? Your question is an interesting design challenge; dismissing it out of hand would be a mark of an uninquiring mind.
I'm not trying to argue for a literal interpretation of the Bible here - I'm trying to make the point that critical thinkng cuts both ways. Calling other people "stupid" because they've given consideration to questions you didn't consider worthy is not a mark of greater intelligence, it's a mark of different interests.
And the disingenuous framing continues from ignorant right wingers.
The previous AC is correct. Embryonic stem cell research requires the deliberate destruction of a fertilized human embyro. You're free to believe there's nothing wrong with that, but to refer to the fact as "disingenuous" or "ignorant" is itself, well...
They in fact succeeded in banning embryonic stem cell research.
Incorrect. The government declining to pay for something is not the same thing as banning it. By your logic, the government has banned my puchasing any more guitars, because I have to pay for them myself.
And the right wing DID ban embryonic stem cell research.
Incorrect. The government declining pay for something is not the same thing as banning it. By your logic, the government has banned my puchasing any more guitars, because I have to pay for them myself.
Remember Phil Hartman's "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer" character on Saturday Night Live? He wasn't a lawyer who specialzed in services to or for unfrozen cavemen - he was a lawyer who also happened to be an unfrozen caveman.
This woman appears to be a "special needs attorney" in the same sense.
the only anti-homosexuality in the Bible is in the old testament book of Leviticus
Completely incorrect. There are other Old Testament passages bearing on the subject, and Romans and I Corinthians are in the New Testament. Please read the Bible before you try to publicly teach it. Some other people who don't know better may be misled by your inaccuracies.
You're free to disagree with the Bible, but not to just make things up about its contents. (The same goes for any other book, "sacred" to anyone or not.)
I dont't like Harper either, but let me assure you that you have absolutely no right to detemine who is or is not a real Canadian based on their political beliefs.
-Zirbert, real Canadian no matter what some arrogant douchebag on the Internet may claim http://zirbert.blogspot.com/
At a $10K price point, you could afford to do what I've long been expecting to see widely adopted: online activation, with the serial number / key validated against a whitelist of known good (i.e., paid-for) keys.
The cycle is always the same: require key to install or activate; hackers determine algorithm and make keygens; keys known to be used in the wild get blacklisted. Validating against a whitelist breaks this cycle, but normally wouldn't be cost-effective. At $10K, you can go for it.
Yes, there will be some hiccups (what to do if / when a *second* user tries to validate using the same key and you need to determine who's legit, etc.), but they should be solvable in low volume / high price-point scenarios.
The pendulum of balance has been swinging wildly back and forth between buyer and seller at ebay. It wasn't too long ago that sellers were routinely screwing over buyers and leaving scathing negative feedback if they tried to get any resolution.
The whole "I'll leave feedback after you do" thing was one of my pet peeves as an eBay buyer. If I'm the buyer and you're the seller, then the entire basis for your evaluation of my performance should be whether I paid promptly. That's it. Once I've paid you for the merchandise, my role is over. (Assuming I don't pull a scam of my own claiming the item wasn't shipped, wasn't as described, etc.).
The seller's role is far more complex, and it's understandable that a buyer may need more time to evaluate - say, until the buyer has had time to receive the item and make sure it is as described.
Back when sellers could leave feedback for buyers, I always though that they should have needed to do so at the time of receiving payment. You won the auction, and you paid me within a reasonable timeframe? A+, we're done here. Assuming, again, no scams by dishonest buyers, etc. - but such matters should always have been handled through eBay and PayPal's dispute resolution mechanisms, not via feedback.
Whenever a seller said "I'll leave feedback after you do", I interpreted that as extortion and moved on to the next listing.
2015. Sony releases the PS4. Sony releases an update for the PS3 which removes all remaining functionality. When the console is turned on, the message "Buy a PS4!" is displayed. No games will play.
And now it's legal!!!
Why was this modded "funny"? It's Insightful, maybe Informative, but not funny. This behaviour is exactly what this ruling encourages.
Between rootkits and this fraud, no one should give Sony a dime of their money.
Exactly. Much of Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, is devoted to explaining this principle. I put an article about it on my blog a while ago, but far more importantly, it's been on Cracked.com.
In Canada, we do not have free speech in absolute terms like our southern counterparts. The difference between us and what those senators are suggesting is that we have a Charter of Rights which protects us from any attempt of gov't approved censorship. It can be annoying at times, but it keeps the holocaust deniers at bay.
We actually have massive government-perpetrated censorship. So-called "human rights commissions", which are government bureaucracies, impose large fines, with no real legal recourse, on those targets (carefully chosen, of course) who violate the supposed rights of others not to be offended. As long as those others are members of the correct groups, of course.
I know a lot of people in general, and Slashdot readers in particular, won't/don't agree with many of Ezra Levant's positions, but he's done more to shine disinfecting sunlight on the HRCs than all the "civil liberties" groups in Canada combined. Googling his name and doing some reading will quickly show just how fragile supposed freedom of speech really is in Canada. That may be gradually changing, thankfully - there are movements afoot to remove or re-word Section 13 of the Human Rights Act so that just hurting someone's feelings is no longer an offense. In fact, Ezra just did a segment on his show about it: http://ezralevant.com/2011/10/free-speechs-only-hope.html.
The solution to Holocaust deniers is not to stifle everyone's freedom of speech. Let them say their piece, then let the rest of us refute, rebuke, and roundly mock.
There is also a significant shortage of primary care doctors in much of the USA as well. I recall seeing a statistic a few years back that one of the poor areas of San Francisco, with a population of about 70,000 was served by a total of two or three doctors at a single clinic.
That's a function of the same phenomenon. There isn't enough money in practicing medicine in poor areas, or in places like Canada where artificial price controls keep the price of medical care artificially low. You'll get a few altruistic diehards, but the majority of doctors, like the rest of us, will follow the money.
Both countries suffer from the artificial control of the supply of med students - largely set by the medical societies, in addition to the relatively low pay that primary care physicians (the "family doctor") get on either side of the boarder, particularly when compared to specialists of which in some fields I think there is a bit of a glut. Double or triple the number of spots in med school (to say the level per capita they were producing in the 1950s) and some of these issues might be lessened.
This is an interesting idea, and one that hadn't occurred to me. I don't know anything about med school admissions. If I had mod points today, there'd be an Insightful or Informative coming your way.
I agree, open med school admissions up, and let the market sort this problem out. That raises another question in the short term of where we get the doctors to teach all these new doctors (you can't be in your office treating patients and in the classroom teaching at the same time), but that's relatively minor. And if we wind up with a bit of a glut of doctors a decade later, well, that's a bit of a nice problem to have.
Canada has another problem, although a somewhat understandable one: we don't recognize many foreign medical credentials. I've read too many articles about people who were surgeons in their home country who had to get out when the place fell apart, and are now driving cabs in Canada because their medical credentials aren't recognized here, and won't be until they repeat their training in a Canadian program.
I'm sure that sometimes that's justified, but I think a lot of it is probably protectionism to benefit Canadian medical schools. I could be completely wrong about this, but I assume there's some medical equivalent of the legal profession's bar exam. I think immigrant doctors should just be allowed to "challenge the test", and take whatever exams / tests (I would certainly expect some sort of practical component) are administered to Canadian doctors. If they pass, then they can practice here. If they don't, they can't. That should weed out the quacks and aromatherapists, and let us put the surgeons to proper work.
Just to come back on topic about hearing aids: make them like eyeglasses, where my optometrist will give me a written copy of my prescription, which I can then take to any number of Lenscrafter-type places, who compete on price, to actually get that prescription filled. Once you have the specs for your optimized hearing aid, it should be trivial to order the unit online. Sorry to keep saying it, but it keeps being true: if it's allowed to, the market can sort this problem out.
One thing that does suck is we don't have enough doctors to go around. I'm not too sure what's up with that, but it is one of the main causes of those long ER delays.
What's up with that is that there isn't enough money in practicing medicine in Canada. Most people smart and driven enough to become doctors are also smart and driven enough to make a lot more money doing something else, so they do something else. For those who are in it for reasons other than just money, which includes almost all of the doctors I know personally, there are too many other demands / temptations on their time. Some volunteer at specialized clinics (addiction treatment, etc.), and/or take frequent trips to third-world nations to spend a few weeks providing medical care to people who normally would receive none at all, etc.
For those who can be swayed by money (and there's nothing wrong with that, everybody has bills to pay), there's an everpresent temptation to moonlight doing something else. My own doctor runs a "cosmetic and aesthetic medical clinic" on evenings and weekends. I don't know quite what that means, but I think it involves aromatherapy, which scares the daylights out of me. I have visions of going into his office complaining of severe abdominal pain and hearing him say, "Sounds like your appendix. Here, try smelling this."
But I digress.
A bigger problem for the money-minded doctors (I stress, again, there's nothing wrong with this - few among us would turn down a raise) is the possibility of going somewhere where the system allows doctors to make a lot more money. United States of America, I'm looking in your direction. Because of our publicly funded single-payer heathcare system, the government has a lot of control over how much money doctors make. When the gov. is looking to cut costs, they often hint that maybe doctors are making a little *too* much money, and that may be a good place to cut back on expenses. When they talk like that, some doctors put their resume out (or, more likely, return the foreign headhunter's call) rather than take the pay cut.
Allowing capitalism and competition into the health-care market allows doctors to make a lot more money. There are downsides to that sort of system, yes, but there are upsides as well. One rarely hears of doctor shortages in places where doctors are paid based on market principles instead of socialist principles.
In the U.S. (and lots of other places), people die because they can't afford medical care. Here in Canada, people who could afford medical care die on waiting lists because there aren't enough doctors. I'm glad I don't run a country, because I don't know of a perfect solution to this (and doubt there is one). I think Canada probably should maintain the essentials of its current system but allow privately-paid treatment as well (which is now explicitly illegal), to end the need for medical tourism. I think the U.S. should run screaming from Obama's incoming system, which combines the worst aspects of both. (Buy private medical insurance or be a criminal? Really?)
The embryos used for this type of thing are the waste product of in-vitro fertilization. Are these folks also against these kinds of fertility treatments?
I assume this was a matter of near-term survival, which LJ's message to subscribers hinted at but didn't state quite so bluntly (unless my skim-read overlooked it). From a practical perspective, LJ's subscribers probably had two choices: continue to receive a paper publication whose life expectancy was measured in months (at most), or receive a digital edition for hopefully somewhat longer.
I also assume that going digital with no (or minimal, or easily removed) DRM will mean that LJ will be readily available on filesharing sites within minutes of the release of each issue. That may already be the case, though - I haven't checked.Hopefully the impact of piracy on LJ will be mitigated by the fact that most of their subscribers are probably motivated to pay them out of a wish to support their philosophy, not because they had no way of getting the same information elsewhere for free. I know virtually all of my media spending these days works that way. I'm paying for it because I want to support the creators, not because I can't get it for free.
This AC said "I'd be fine with a hardware dongle." I agree wholeheartedly on this point (if not the rest of what he/she - oh, let's get real, this is Slashdot, so "he" - said). A hardware dongle would be much better than requiring an always-on Internet connection. It would free people up to play regardless of connectivity, and without using up their bandwidth quotas. And if (when) Blizzard/Activision decide, admittedly probably several years from now, that D3 is no longer generating enough profits to maintain the authentication server (or go under / get bought out / etc.), a hardware dongle wouldn't suddenly render us unable to play the game we paid for.
A game that requires constant (or even repeated) online authentication is only a rental. Rentals are $5, not $50.
I was really looking forward to D3. Now I'm disappointed for what could have been, and planning to start exploring D2 mods.
The game Blizzard is now describing does not deserve to be called Diablo 3. It's World of Diablo, Diablo Online, or Diablo The MMO. Any of which would be fine, but they would not be, and are not, Diablo 3.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe someone could set up a BOINC project to do this analysis to lower the cost?
This is a job for Kickstarter!
Well, if it was like CSI ...
If it was like CSI, they'd be able to enhance footage from a security camera two blocks away from one of the crime scenes to show the unique thermal imprint of one of the twins could be detected reflecting off a passerby's ipad cover.
Or, in this case, what you're calling "pedant" is "someone who knows what a word means when you won't admit it."
Different words mean different things. That's why we have so many of them.
What this guy (allegedly, etc.) did is despicable, but it is not rape. Just like it is not murder, theft, or arson.
Financial incentives? As a father of a son that has Asperger's, please point out to me what these financial incentives are. I'd love to get some compensation for everything that we have to fight with every single day.
I'm Canadian. I have a son who was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. Now I guess he'd just be diagnosed as on the autism spectrum.
Anyway, because of that diagnosis, I get to claim a disability tax credit (http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/disability/) for him. I get a pretty good chunk of my income tax back at return time.
Are those who call for black voters to vote for black candidates also racists?
The answer is yes, I just want to see whether you'll admit it.
Anybody else getting a "lost scene from 40 Year Old Virgin" vibe from this?
"Know how I know you're gay? Becuase you got an e-mail form Jason Kenney."
And once humans decided they 'liked' music, you can argue for an evolutionary advantage to the talent.
Rumour has it that people with musical talent can sometimes leverage said talent into additional reproductive opportunities.
These questions might not be as self-evidently ludicrous as you seem to think. Assumptions are your enemy.
Having children who can properly think and reason leads to uncomfortable questions like : "why are there no dinosaurs in the bible?" or "how can the entire earth flood in only a few days?" or "where did Noah store all that food?"
In other words, The US is full of stupid people, because their religion tells them to be stupid
"why are there no dinosaurs in the bible?" - there are. Well-documented, just not by that name. You did know that "dinosaur" is a neologism, coined in the mid-19th century, right? Look for terms like "leviathan", "dragon", and "behemoth", then laugh at the footnotes saying that those terms probably mean something like a hippopotamus.
"how can the entire earth flood in only a few days?" - 40 > "a few".
"where did Noah store all that food?" - how much food did he need? Were some of the animals onboard used as feed for others (especially given that some reproduction / breeding may have taken place during the time spent afloat)? How much space was available? How much preparation time was available? Your question is an interesting design challenge; dismissing it out of hand would be a mark of an uninquiring mind.
I'm not trying to argue for a literal interpretation of the Bible here - I'm trying to make the point that critical thinkng cuts both ways. Calling other people "stupid" because they've given consideration to questions you didn't consider worthy is not a mark of greater intelligence, it's a mark of different interests.
"that requires an abortion"
And the disingenuous framing continues from ignorant right wingers.
The previous AC is correct. Embryonic stem cell research requires the deliberate destruction of a fertilized human embyro. You're free to believe there's nothing wrong with that, but to refer to the fact as "disingenuous" or "ignorant" is itself, well...
They in fact succeeded in banning embryonic stem cell research.
Incorrect. The government declining to pay for something is not the same thing as banning it. By your logic, the government has banned my puchasing any more guitars, because I have to pay for them myself.
And the right wing DID ban embryonic stem cell research.
Incorrect. The government declining pay for something is not the same thing as banning it. By your logic, the government has banned my puchasing any more guitars, because I have to pay for them myself.
Remember Phil Hartman's "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer" character on Saturday Night Live? He wasn't a lawyer who specialzed in services to or for unfrozen cavemen - he was a lawyer who also happened to be an unfrozen caveman.
This woman appears to be a "special needs attorney" in the same sense.
the only anti-homosexuality in the Bible is in the old testament book of Leviticus
Completely incorrect. There are other Old Testament passages bearing on the subject, and Romans and I Corinthians are in the New Testament. Please read the Bible before you try to publicly teach it. Some other people who don't know better may be misled by your inaccuracies.
You're free to disagree with the Bible, but not to just make things up about its contents. (The same goes for any other book, "sacred" to anyone or not.)
-Zirbert
Maybe I am being a little over-reactive
No, you're being over-the-top stupid. Not liking some of Harper's policies (I don't like a lot of them either) doesn't justify this kind of hyperbole.
There's a fable about a boy falsely shouting about a wolf that a whole lot of people need to learn before they start tossing verbal grenades.
-Zirbert
http://zirbert.blogspot.com/
I dont't like Harper either, but let me assure you that you have absolutely no right to detemine who is or is not a real Canadian based on their political beliefs.
-Zirbert, real Canadian no matter what some arrogant douchebag on the Internet may claim
http://zirbert.blogspot.com/
At a $10K price point, you could afford to do what I've long been expecting to see widely adopted: online activation, with the serial number / key validated against a whitelist of known good (i.e., paid-for) keys.
The cycle is always the same: require key to install or activate; hackers determine algorithm and make keygens; keys known to be used in the wild get blacklisted. Validating against a whitelist breaks this cycle, but normally wouldn't be cost-effective. At $10K, you can go for it.
Yes, there will be some hiccups (what to do if / when a *second* user tries to validate using the same key and you need to determine who's legit, etc.), but they should be solvable in low volume / high price-point scenarios.
-Zirbert
http://zirbert.blogspot.com/
The pendulum of balance has been swinging wildly back and forth between buyer and seller at ebay. It wasn't too long ago that sellers were routinely screwing over buyers and leaving scathing negative feedback if they tried to get any resolution.
The whole "I'll leave feedback after you do" thing was one of my pet peeves as an eBay buyer. If I'm the buyer and you're the seller, then the entire basis for your evaluation of my performance should be whether I paid promptly. That's it. Once I've paid you for the merchandise, my role is over. (Assuming I don't pull a scam of my own claiming the item wasn't shipped, wasn't as described, etc.).
The seller's role is far more complex, and it's understandable that a buyer may need more time to evaluate - say, until the buyer has had time to receive the item and make sure it is as described.
Back when sellers could leave feedback for buyers, I always though that they should have needed to do so at the time of receiving payment. You won the auction, and you paid me within a reasonable timeframe? A+, we're done here. Assuming, again, no scams by dishonest buyers, etc. - but such matters should always have been handled through eBay and PayPal's dispute resolution mechanisms, not via feedback.
Whenever a seller said "I'll leave feedback after you do", I interpreted that as extortion and moved on to the next listing.
2015. Sony releases the PS4. Sony releases an update for the PS3 which removes all remaining functionality. When the console is turned on, the message "Buy a PS4!" is displayed. No games will play.
And now it's legal!!!
Why was this modded "funny"? It's Insightful, maybe Informative, but not funny. This behaviour is exactly what this ruling encourages.
Between rootkits and this fraud, no one should give Sony a dime of their money.
Exactly. Much of Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, is devoted to explaining this principle. I put an article about it on my blog a while ago, but far more importantly, it's been on Cracked.com.
In Canada, we do not have free speech in absolute terms like our southern counterparts. The difference between us and what those senators are suggesting is that we have a Charter of Rights which protects us from any attempt of gov't approved censorship. It can be annoying at times, but it keeps the holocaust deniers at bay.
We actually have massive government-perpetrated censorship. So-called "human rights commissions", which are government bureaucracies, impose large fines, with no real legal recourse, on those targets (carefully chosen, of course) who violate the supposed rights of others not to be offended. As long as those others are members of the correct groups, of course.
I know a lot of people in general, and Slashdot readers in particular, won't/don't agree with many of Ezra Levant's positions, but he's done more to shine disinfecting sunlight on the HRCs than all the "civil liberties" groups in Canada combined. Googling his name and doing some reading will quickly show just how fragile supposed freedom of speech really is in Canada. That may be gradually changing, thankfully - there are movements afoot to remove or re-word Section 13 of the Human Rights Act so that just hurting someone's feelings is no longer an offense. In fact, Ezra just did a segment on his show about it: http://ezralevant.com/2011/10/free-speechs-only-hope.html.
The solution to Holocaust deniers is not to stifle everyone's freedom of speech. Let them say their piece, then let the rest of us refute, rebuke, and roundly mock.
There is also a significant shortage of primary care doctors in much of the USA as well. I recall seeing a statistic a few years back that one of the poor areas of San Francisco, with a population of about 70,000 was served by a total of two or three doctors at a single clinic.
That's a function of the same phenomenon. There isn't enough money in practicing medicine in poor areas, or in places like Canada where artificial price controls keep the price of medical care artificially low. You'll get a few altruistic diehards, but the majority of doctors, like the rest of us, will follow the money.
Both countries suffer from the artificial control of the supply of med students - largely set by the medical societies, in addition to the relatively low pay that primary care physicians (the "family doctor") get on either side of the boarder, particularly when compared to specialists of which in some fields I think there is a bit of a glut. Double or triple the number of spots in med school (to say the level per capita they were producing in the 1950s) and some of these issues might be lessened.
This is an interesting idea, and one that hadn't occurred to me. I don't know anything about med school admissions. If I had mod points today, there'd be an Insightful or Informative coming your way.
I agree, open med school admissions up, and let the market sort this problem out. That raises another question in the short term of where we get the doctors to teach all these new doctors (you can't be in your office treating patients and in the classroom teaching at the same time), but that's relatively minor. And if we wind up with a bit of a glut of doctors a decade later, well, that's a bit of a nice problem to have.
Canada has another problem, although a somewhat understandable one: we don't recognize many foreign medical credentials. I've read too many articles about people who were surgeons in their home country who had to get out when the place fell apart, and are now driving cabs in Canada because their medical credentials aren't recognized here, and won't be until they repeat their training in a Canadian program.
I'm sure that sometimes that's justified, but I think a lot of it is probably protectionism to benefit Canadian medical schools. I could be completely wrong about this, but I assume there's some medical equivalent of the legal profession's bar exam. I think immigrant doctors should just be allowed to "challenge the test", and take whatever exams / tests (I would certainly expect some sort of practical component) are administered to Canadian doctors. If they pass, then they can practice here. If they don't, they can't. That should weed out the quacks and aromatherapists, and let us put the surgeons to proper work.
Just to come back on topic about hearing aids: make them like eyeglasses, where my optometrist will give me a written copy of my prescription, which I can then take to any number of Lenscrafter-type places, who compete on price, to actually get that prescription filled. Once you have the specs for your optimized hearing aid, it should be trivial to order the unit online. Sorry to keep saying it, but it keeps being true: if it's allowed to, the market can sort this problem out.
One thing that does suck is we don't have enough doctors to go around. I'm not too sure what's up with that, but it is one of the main causes of those long ER delays.
What's up with that is that there isn't enough money in practicing medicine in Canada. Most people smart and driven enough to become doctors are also smart and driven enough to make a lot more money doing something else, so they do something else. For those who are in it for reasons other than just money, which includes almost all of the doctors I know personally, there are too many other demands / temptations on their time. Some volunteer at specialized clinics (addiction treatment, etc.), and/or take frequent trips to third-world nations to spend a few weeks providing medical care to people who normally would receive none at all, etc.
For those who can be swayed by money (and there's nothing wrong with that, everybody has bills to pay), there's an everpresent temptation to moonlight doing something else. My own doctor runs a "cosmetic and aesthetic medical clinic" on evenings and weekends. I don't know quite what that means, but I think it involves aromatherapy, which scares the daylights out of me. I have visions of going into his office complaining of severe abdominal pain and hearing him say, "Sounds like your appendix. Here, try smelling this."
But I digress.
A bigger problem for the money-minded doctors (I stress, again, there's nothing wrong with this - few among us would turn down a raise) is the possibility of going somewhere where the system allows doctors to make a lot more money. United States of America, I'm looking in your direction. Because of our publicly funded single-payer heathcare system, the government has a lot of control over how much money doctors make. When the gov. is looking to cut costs, they often hint that maybe doctors are making a little *too* much money, and that may be a good place to cut back on expenses. When they talk like that, some doctors put their resume out (or, more likely, return the foreign headhunter's call) rather than take the pay cut.
Allowing capitalism and competition into the health-care market allows doctors to make a lot more money. There are downsides to that sort of system, yes, but there are upsides as well. One rarely hears of doctor shortages in places where doctors are paid based on market principles instead of socialist principles.
In the U.S. (and lots of other places), people die because they can't afford medical care. Here in Canada, people who could afford medical care die on waiting lists because there aren't enough doctors. I'm glad I don't run a country, because I don't know of a perfect solution to this (and doubt there is one). I think Canada probably should maintain the essentials of its current system but allow privately-paid treatment as well (which is now explicitly illegal), to end the need for medical tourism. I think the U.S. should run screaming from Obama's incoming system, which combines the worst aspects of both. (Buy private medical insurance or be a criminal? Really?)
The embryos used for this type of thing are the waste product of in-vitro fertilization. Are these folks also against these kinds of fertility treatments?
Yes, many of us are.
I assume this was a matter of near-term survival, which LJ's message to subscribers hinted at but didn't state quite so bluntly (unless my skim-read overlooked it). From a practical perspective, LJ's subscribers probably had two choices: continue to receive a paper publication whose life expectancy was measured in months (at most), or receive a digital edition for hopefully somewhat longer.
I also assume that going digital with no (or minimal, or easily removed) DRM will mean that LJ will be readily available on filesharing sites within minutes of the release of each issue. That may already be the case, though - I haven't checked.Hopefully the impact of piracy on LJ will be mitigated by the fact that most of their subscribers are probably motivated to pay them out of a wish to support their philosophy, not because they had no way of getting the same information elsewhere for free. I know virtually all of my media spending these days works that way. I'm paying for it because I want to support the creators, not because I can't get it for free.
-Zirbert, Linux user since 2009
This AC said "I'd be fine with a hardware dongle." I agree wholeheartedly on this point (if not the rest of what he/she - oh, let's get real, this is Slashdot, so "he" - said). A hardware dongle would be much better than requiring an always-on Internet connection. It would free people up to play regardless of connectivity, and without using up their bandwidth quotas. And if (when) Blizzard/Activision decide, admittedly probably several years from now, that D3 is no longer generating enough profits to maintain the authentication server (or go under / get bought out / etc.), a hardware dongle wouldn't suddenly render us unable to play the game we paid for.
A game that requires constant (or even repeated) online authentication is only a rental. Rentals are $5, not $50.
I was really looking forward to D3. Now I'm disappointed for what could have been, and planning to start exploring D2 mods.
The game Blizzard is now describing does not deserve to be called Diablo 3. It's World of Diablo, Diablo Online, or Diablo The MMO. Any of which would be fine, but they would not be, and are not, Diablo 3.