I was in the emergency room for a few hours because I got suddenly very sick after a tooth extraction to the point that I was going to die. They ran a bunch of tests and gave me a saline iv and then sent me home shivering with a 102 fever.
So I got the bill a few weeks later. It was astronomical. Luckily the insurance covered it but it was of course filled up with all kinds of obscure bizarre codes that only insurance billers know anything about. What I'd like to see is some auditor look very closely at how the money flows around the medical system and find the $3000 toilet seats that I'm sure are lurking somewhere in their. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few dirty HMOs that were taking kickbacks from hospitals for over-billing. Hospital over-billing would also be a perfect way to launder money I'm sure because everybody expects the costs to be unreasonable.
I think the best course of action would be for hospitals to sell their own insurance. Having the HMO and the hospital separate creates all kinds of incentives for fraud and over-billing not to mention many different sets of books to take care of.
If you took the current medical system and had the government spent 10x as much on it prices would rise around 10 times. That's because doctors who want to work are all working, getting paid very well, and more money will just make them have to raise their prices or, if their prices were fixed, result in a shortage of available time slots for patients. The fix is is to make health care more efficient by not requiring someone who had to go to 8 years of college to give you a refill on your antibiotics, etc. There are serious medical cases that need expert attention but the vast majority of health care problems suck up the efforts of lots of highly trained accountants, overseers, inspectors, lawyers, claims adjusters and health professionals when the transaction could be so much simpler if they'd just trust people to have a bit more personal responsibility over their own health and not try to make sure that every single step of their treatment is authorized and approved by a limited pool of highly skilled professionals who are much better employed elsewhere.
So great.. A lot of abstract physics that doesn't lead to anything practical except lots of huckster books advocating a world view based on the idea that reality doesn't exist and a bunch of math geeks getting paid to explain away every mystery of the universe in yet another extremely tortured rendition of 10 dimensional hyperspace.
Physicists! Please come back when you have something practical. You guys are the new liberal arts majors.
It seems that Microsoft's security problems are due to them wanting to make every technology they deliver have access to all the low level guts of Windows and the x86 architecture. This creates security problems because if the applications are not well sandboxed there will be many security holes.
Ok I'm sick of the education debate in this country. It's all about who to blame. It's been going on for 40 years. Give up people! Just go find a country with a good math/science program and copy them exactly. For instance, Singapore has some of the best math performance of any country. All of Singapore's math instruction materials are in English. Just go get the whole curriculum, import a few teachers to get the program started, and just do math the same way they do math from Kindergarten on.
Along similar lines to this article, during the middle ages The Thema of Byzantium (Present Day Greece and Turkey) were military districts made up of farmers/soldiers who independently procured all their own uniforms, weapons and provisions without a centralized military bureaucracy. They came up with some interesting military inventions such as "Greek Fire".
When I was a young lad I was really into Ayn Rand for a long time and read all her books and all the non-fiction stuff. It was fun and interesting. I was a randroid, debated on usenet. blah blah.
Then I realized that there aren't all these super-human man-god objectivists that are being held down by the evil-evader looters. Really the world is a big soup of mediocrity, confusion, uncertainty and incompetence and everybody just tries the best they can. Even people who are genius architects are probably about average as track atheletes or at writing poetry. Thus the need to co-operate with other people who are good at different things and the need for humility, listening to people, etc.
Really Rand is a reflection more generally of Russian thought which is that everything is either perfect and godlike or low, despicable and corrupt. Look at the characters in the Brothers Karamozov for example. The real world is a lot more ambiguous.
This whole situation comes down to the fact that the government would rather see a terminal cancer patient die than see them waste a small amount of money on a possibly ineffective treatment.
Correlation does not equal causation. All people's brains are not perfectly equal. Perhaps suffering from dementia later means the brain has more processing capacity to spare, thus making learning two languages easier earlier in life.
So what if there are space aliens cruising around? I'm an atheist so I find this to not implausable. The only thing I would get out of confirmation that aliens exist is proof that we have a lot more to learn about physics. If they want to talk with us they will. If they don't want to they won't. We probably have nothing to offer them anyway. Humans think they are so important.
Re:Java is doing better than ever IMHO.
on
2007 Java Predictions
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Using an IDE no matter if one is a rockstar or an average programmer is going to make work go quicker. There's more than enough things to think about on any given project and and IDE just lets one focus better on the more interesting parts of the project instead of things like repetitively typing import statements.
Java is doing better than ever IMHO.
on
2007 Java Predictions
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· Score: 3, Informative
I have been programming in Java since 2000 and it just gets easier and more powerful to develop with. Sure there were some big disasters in Java land like EJB1 and EJB2 but that's all cleared out of the way and the tools now are fantastic. I've been working with Appfuse, JSF, Hibernate, Testng, Spring and the latest versions of Eclipse and almost every day I find myself smiling with glee at how easy web development has become compared to a few years ago. The biggest mistakes for new developers in Java is not using Eclipse and not using either Maven or Appfuse. That's because there's a lot to take advantage of in Java land and getting all the tools and dependencies set up and rolling along can take quite a while. Both Maven and Appfuse make this process go a lot quicker and tend to steer the developer in the right direction. Eclipse makes understanding the whole thing a lot easier as well and the refactoring and debugging are amazing. After the initial setup though things start to become very easy and fun and development goes quickly. This is the opposite situation from programming in a dynamic language. Starting in a dynamic language is easy but as programs grow, the lack of static typing and refactoring support causes more and more bugs to start sprouting up and the system generally get more painful to work with.
I don't know why anyone would want to work with C#. I never run into showstopper bugs in third party libraries with Java because I have the source and can trace into the libraries, find the bugs, report them to the developers and then find an intelligent workaround while a $35 call to MS tech support will tell me to reinstall my whole system and upgrade to the latest versions.
The Brazilian National Healthcare System has been called the largest Enterprise Java application ever built, with over 2M lines of code, and a domain model of 350 classes. The application models all of the domain concepts one could imagine in a country-wide health care system and is bringing a level of automation that is creating enormous value for the public healthcare system as well as for the people of Brazil. This case study, the only one of it's kind, takes a detailed look at the architecture, interesting solutions, lessons learned, and future directions for the project.
I got a sidekick three with a 4gb SD card. I am perfectly happy with MP3 only support. I think the sound is better too and the battery life is much better. The music player app isn't "awesome" but it does the basics and the thing acts like a usb drive when connected to the computer so it's easy to manage and transfer songs. The best part about it is I don't have to keep multiple chargers around and my pockets are less full of crap. Even better when someone calls me when I've got my head phones on the ring goes through the head phones and I can pick up quickly.
A man is in the desert dying of thirst. A guy on a camel comes up to him and offers him a jug of water for his diamonds which he gladly trades.
An illterate family is dying of hunger somewhere in a Africa. Someone offers them a loaf of bread to melt down their free solar powered wi-fi station and latop as scrap metal. They gladly trade.
That's the problem in these places where people are starving and illiterate. Any kind of infrastructure you put in is just going to be sold as scrap for food. This might not be the case in India, where people aren't starving to death and are not totally uneducated, but this kind of thing has happened over and over again in Africa. People put in an elaborate desert irrigation system to grow food and all the pipe fittings are stolen and sold as scrap metal.
Now that the US Governement is pretty much anti-science, and that the US debt is soaring to ever more dangerous summits, I am not so sure the USA can maintain their advance on the rest of the world.
1. The U.S has had soaring debt for the past 26 years yet experienced a technological/science revolution. Not that debt is good or bad, just that it doesn't appear to be particularly well correlated with technological advancement.
2. The government is not anti-science. Focusing in on the stem cell and evolution debate and using that to characterize all government science programs is the fallacy of composition. e.g "The bolt is light, therefore the engine is light".
unfortunately I just about nuked my brain in the process, but thats another story completely. now I need to very carefully control my dopamine levels with several different medications, but thats life as I know it.
At least you know what dopamine is now. Most people just think in terms of "gets you high", "fucks you up", "calms you down", "stimulates", "depresses". A lot of people for whatever reason are somewhere approaching mentally ill but they don't really know what their brain is doing. The general understanding of most people toward chemicals and mental health is almost like that of a primitive tribe trying to explain diseases in terms of evil spirits. Some people still even believe in Freud! I think people should be taught basic neurochemistry in high school. That's the best way to keep them from destroying their brains. I don't mean dumbed down anti-drug neurochemistry either. I think people should know the difference between nicotinic and muscaric acetycholine receptors, they should know what all the neural agonists and receptors are that are available to them and how they influence mood, how brain chemicals are manufactured from food intake, the metabolic cycles, etc. All of this to the average person is high-voodo sacred sorcery knowledge that should only be disseminated to licened professionals lest somebody to use it to "get high" or gain some sort of mental or other psychological advantage over their fellow man. Everybody has a brain why aren't we taught how it really works?
Also remember that the most dangerous of diseases are species jumping diseases contracted from domestic animals. For instance camels get camelpox, cows get cowpox and this jumps species to cause smallpox in humans who domesticated these animals. Same goes for serious flus (e.g bird flu), plague, etc.
When the Europeans arrived in the new world they had immunity to these diseases because they had lived with domesticated animals for a long time. The Native Americans had not domesticated animals, instead focusing on hunting, gathering, and agriculture and therefore did not aquire immunity to these diseases. So smallpox is 98% fatal to those with no inherited immunity so the natives died in extrordinary numbers wiping out more than 90% of them. Now if this is nature not rendering some kind of verdict on our relationship with animals I don't know what is. Perhaps this is the way that domestic animals protect those who help them breed? Similar symbiotic relationships exist elsewhere in nature.
People might suffer more chronic illnesses in the U.S than the U.K but when you look at survival rates for cancer and other serious diseases, the U.S does much better than the U.K. Also many people live with chronic ailments that would have killed them much earlier without quick access to things like heart bypass surgery and transplants that we receive in the U.S.
In My Humble Opinion....I would guess that one's undocumented day laborers might not be able to get a bank account but they could get a Project Entropia account. The key to all this is that direct transfers between parties do not occur and instead go through the PED intermediary currency which obscures who is paying whom and is the cause of all the mischief.
I'm related to one of these anti-wind activists...
on
Tilting At Windmills
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm related to an anti-wind activist and I'll tell you what they think. First off, they complain that there is far too much population on the planet. They think people should stop having children, etc. Think euthanasia is a good thing, etc. They are the basically lower the population at any and all costs and don't go creating any more energy or else it will encourage people to have more babies. They think that since they have lots of money they'll be the last ones kicked out of the lifeboat when the difficult times come. Really, they are living so damned well that a huge drop in their standard of living wouldn't really mean that much to them if it meant that all the less desirable inhabitants of the planet were eliminated. This position has actually become quite popular in recent years and I hear it more often and more vehemently. I just wish people would come right out and say it. Instead they take positions on various issues that they think will promote their aims and just pay lip service to whatever window dressing makes the rest of the coalition they're with happy.
Your post was great but I see this kind of thing all the time in really badly written emails to customer service. I think Slashdot has spoiled you. Despite all the moaning and groaning the Slashdot audience is fairly well educated and can write tolerably. You haven't had to spend a lot of time with exceptionally stupid and/or very poorly educated people since high school no doubt (if you went to public school), but they're out there and there are lots and lots of them and Myspace caters to them. I'm actually really happy that the great uneducated masses are learning to type, get a thought across at some level or another and do basic internet stuff.
Not to thread jack but Peak Oil has far more evidence for it and will have a more immediate (next 10 to 15 years) catastrophic impact and may have already happened according to some experts however it hardly gets as much press as Global Warming does.
I almost suspect that Global Warming is a euphamistic way for countries to talk about peak oil. One other thing is that China, India, and Russia ignore the whole Global Warming issue. Too them it doesn't matter and since our whole industrial base will be in China and India soon, short of invading those two countries and sending them back to the post-industrial age, there's not much we can do about it. In fact, I almost don't even care about global warming because I know that everywhere, when the rubber actually hits the road and it's reduce carbon emissions by reducing standards of living people will always balk. Talk is cheap, republicans are easy to bash but this all really doesn't matter in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in the emergency room for a few hours because I got suddenly very sick after a tooth extraction to the point that I was going to die. They ran a bunch of tests and gave me a saline iv and then sent me home shivering with a 102 fever.
So I got the bill a few weeks later. It was astronomical. Luckily the insurance covered it but it was of course filled up with all kinds of obscure bizarre codes that only insurance billers know anything about. What I'd like to see is some auditor look very closely at how the money flows around the medical system and find the $3000 toilet seats that I'm sure are lurking somewhere in their. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few dirty HMOs that were taking kickbacks from hospitals for over-billing. Hospital over-billing would also be a perfect way to launder money I'm sure because everybody expects the costs to be unreasonable.
I think the best course of action would be for hospitals to sell their own insurance. Having the HMO and the hospital separate creates all kinds of incentives for fraud and over-billing not to mention many different sets of books to take care of.
If you took the current medical system and had the government spent 10x as much on it prices would rise around 10 times. That's because doctors who want to work are all working, getting paid very well, and more money will just make them have to raise their prices or, if their prices were fixed, result in a shortage of available time slots for patients. The fix is is to make health care more efficient by not requiring someone who had to go to 8 years of college to give you a refill on your antibiotics, etc. There are serious medical cases that need expert attention but the vast majority of health care problems suck up the efforts of lots of highly trained accountants, overseers, inspectors, lawyers, claims adjusters and health professionals when the transaction could be so much simpler if they'd just trust people to have a bit more personal responsibility over their own health and not try to make sure that every single step of their treatment is authorized and approved by a limited pool of highly skilled professionals who are much better employed elsewhere.
So great.. A lot of abstract physics that doesn't lead to anything practical except lots of huckster books advocating a world view based on the idea that reality doesn't exist and a bunch of math geeks getting paid to explain away every mystery of the universe in yet another extremely tortured rendition of 10 dimensional hyperspace.
Physicists! Please come back when you have something practical. You guys are the new liberal arts majors.
It seems that Microsoft's security problems are due to them wanting to make every technology they deliver have access to all the low level guts of Windows and the x86 architecture. This creates security problems because if the applications are not well sandboxed there will be many security holes.
Ok I'm sick of the education debate in this country. It's all about who to blame. It's been going on for 40 years. Give up people! Just go find a country with a good math/science program and copy them exactly. For instance, Singapore has some of the best math performance of any country. All of Singapore's math instruction materials are in English. Just go get the whole curriculum, import a few teachers to get the program started, and just do math the same way they do math from Kindergarten on.
Along similar lines to this article, during the middle ages The Thema of Byzantium (Present Day Greece and Turkey) were military districts made up of farmers/soldiers who independently procured all their own uniforms, weapons and provisions without a centralized military bureaucracy. They came up with some interesting military inventions such as "Greek Fire".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thema
When I was a young lad I was really into Ayn Rand for a long time and read all her books and all the non-fiction stuff. It was fun and interesting. I was a randroid, debated on usenet. blah blah.
Then I realized that there aren't all these super-human man-god objectivists that are being held down by the evil-evader looters. Really the world is a big soup of mediocrity, confusion, uncertainty and incompetence and everybody just tries the best they can. Even people who are genius architects are probably about average as track atheletes or at writing poetry. Thus the need to co-operate with other people who are good at different things and the need for humility, listening to people, etc.
Really Rand is a reflection more generally of Russian thought which is that everything is either perfect and godlike or low, despicable and corrupt. Look at the characters in the Brothers Karamozov for example. The real world is a lot more ambiguous.
Perhaps Nobel prize winners had higher intelligence and thus had more brain cells to waste before they went senile?
This whole situation comes down to the fact that the government would rather see a terminal cancer patient die than see them waste a small amount of money on a possibly ineffective treatment.
Correlation does not equal causation. All people's brains are not perfectly equal. Perhaps suffering from dementia later means the brain has more processing capacity to spare, thus making learning two languages easier earlier in life.
So what if there are space aliens cruising around? I'm an atheist so I find this to not implausable. The only thing I would get out of confirmation that aliens exist is proof that we have a lot more to learn about physics. If they want to talk with us they will. If they don't want to they won't. We probably have nothing to offer them anyway. Humans think they are so important.
Using an IDE no matter if one is a rockstar or an average programmer is going to make work go quicker. There's more than enough things to think about on any given project and and IDE just lets one focus better on the more interesting parts of the project instead of things like repetitively typing import statements.
I have been programming in Java since 2000 and it just gets easier and more powerful to develop with. Sure there were some big disasters in Java land like EJB1 and EJB2 but that's all cleared out of the way and the tools now are fantastic. I've been working with Appfuse, JSF, Hibernate, Testng, Spring and the latest versions of Eclipse and almost every day I find myself smiling with glee at how easy web development has become compared to a few years ago. The biggest mistakes for new developers in Java is not using Eclipse and not using either Maven or Appfuse. That's because there's a lot to take advantage of in Java land and getting all the tools and dependencies set up and rolling along can take quite a while. Both Maven and Appfuse make this process go a lot quicker and tend to steer the developer in the right direction. Eclipse makes understanding the whole thing a lot easier as well and the refactoring and debugging are amazing. After the initial setup though things start to become very easy and fun and development goes quickly. This is the opposite situation from programming in a dynamic language. Starting in a dynamic language is easy but as programs grow, the lack of static typing and refactoring support causes more and more bugs to start sprouting up and the system generally get more painful to work with.
I don't know why anyone would want to work with C#. I never run into showstopper bugs in third party libraries with Java because I have the source and can trace into the libraries, find the bugs, report them to the developers and then find an intelligent workaround while a $35 call to MS tech support will tell me to reinstall my whole system and upgrade to the latest versions.
I got a sidekick three with a 4gb SD card. I am perfectly happy with MP3 only support. I think the sound is better too and the battery life is much better. The music player app isn't "awesome" but it does the basics and the thing acts like a usb drive when connected to the computer so it's easy to manage and transfer songs. The best part about it is I don't have to keep multiple chargers around and my pockets are less full of crap. Even better when someone calls me when I've got my head phones on the ring goes through the head phones and I can pick up quickly.
A man is in the desert dying of thirst. A guy on a camel comes up to him and offers him a jug of water for his diamonds which he gladly trades.
An illterate family is dying of hunger somewhere in a Africa. Someone offers them a loaf of bread to melt down their free solar powered wi-fi station and latop as scrap metal. They gladly trade.
That's the problem in these places where people are starving and illiterate. Any kind of infrastructure you put in is just going to be sold as scrap for food. This might not be the case in India, where people aren't starving to death and are not totally uneducated, but this kind of thing has happened over and over again in Africa. People put in an elaborate desert irrigation system to grow food and all the pipe fittings are stolen and sold as scrap metal.
Sergey and Larry are Billionaires... To put that in perspective, if you had a net worth of 1 million dollars this would be like being sued for $200.
Now that the US Governement is pretty much anti-science, and that the US debt is soaring to ever more dangerous summits, I am not so sure the USA can maintain their advance on the rest of the world.
1. The U.S has had soaring debt for the past 26 years yet experienced a technological/science revolution. Not that debt is good or bad, just that it doesn't appear to be particularly well correlated with technological advancement.
2. The government is not anti-science. Focusing in on the stem cell and evolution debate and using that to characterize all government science programs is the fallacy of composition. e.g "The bolt is light, therefore the engine is light".
unfortunately I just about nuked my brain in the process, but thats another story completely. now I need to very carefully control my dopamine levels with several different medications, but thats life as I know it.
At least you know what dopamine is now. Most people just think in terms of "gets you high", "fucks you up", "calms you down", "stimulates", "depresses". A lot of people for whatever reason are somewhere approaching mentally ill but they don't really know what their brain is doing. The general understanding of most people toward chemicals and mental health is almost like that of a primitive tribe trying to explain diseases in terms of evil spirits. Some people still even believe in Freud! I think people should be taught basic neurochemistry in high school. That's the best way to keep them from destroying their brains. I don't mean dumbed down anti-drug neurochemistry either. I think people should know the difference between nicotinic and muscaric acetycholine receptors, they should know what all the neural agonists and receptors are that are available to them and how they influence mood, how brain chemicals are manufactured from food intake, the metabolic cycles, etc. All of this to the average person is high-voodo sacred sorcery knowledge that should only be disseminated to licened professionals lest somebody to use it to "get high" or gain some sort of mental or other psychological advantage over their fellow man. Everybody has a brain why aren't we taught how it really works?
so eating meat is just going against nature
Also remember that the most dangerous of diseases are species jumping diseases contracted from domestic animals. For instance camels get camelpox, cows get cowpox and this jumps species to cause smallpox in humans who domesticated these animals. Same goes for serious flus (e.g bird flu), plague, etc.
When the Europeans arrived in the new world they had immunity to these diseases because they had lived with domesticated animals for a long time. The Native Americans had not domesticated animals, instead focusing on hunting, gathering, and agriculture and therefore did not aquire immunity to these diseases. So smallpox is 98% fatal to those with no inherited immunity so the natives died in extrordinary numbers wiping out more than 90% of them. Now if this is nature not rendering some kind of verdict on our relationship with animals I don't know what is. Perhaps this is the way that domestic animals protect those who help them breed? Similar symbiotic relationships exist elsewhere in nature.
People might suffer more chronic illnesses in the U.S than the U.K but when you look at survival rates for cancer and other serious diseases, the U.S does much better than the U.K. Also many people live with chronic ailments that would have killed them much earlier without quick access to things like heart bypass surgery and transplants that we receive in the U.S.
Probably the best study I've found debunking the "utopia" of nationalized health care: 12 Popular Myths About National Health Insurance.
In My Humble Opinion....I would guess that one's undocumented day laborers might not be able to get a bank account but they could get a Project Entropia account. The key to all this is that direct transfers between parties do not occur and instead go through the PED intermediary currency which obscures who is paying whom and is the cause of all the mischief.
I'm related to an anti-wind activist and I'll tell you what they think. First off, they complain that there is far too much population on the planet. They think people should stop having children, etc. Think euthanasia is a good thing, etc. They are the basically lower the population at any and all costs and don't go creating any more energy or else it will encourage people to have more babies. They think that since they have lots of money they'll be the last ones kicked out of the lifeboat when the difficult times come. Really, they are living so damned well that a huge drop in their standard of living wouldn't really mean that much to them if it meant that all the less desirable inhabitants of the planet were eliminated. This position has actually become quite popular in recent years and I hear it more often and more vehemently. I just wish people would come right out and say it. Instead they take positions on various issues that they think will promote their aims and just pay lip service to whatever window dressing makes the rest of the coalition they're with happy.
Your post was great but I see this kind of thing all the time in really badly written emails to customer service. I think Slashdot has spoiled you. Despite all the moaning and groaning the Slashdot audience is fairly well educated and can write tolerably. You haven't had to spend a lot of time with exceptionally stupid and/or very poorly educated people since high school no doubt (if you went to public school), but they're out there and there are lots and lots of them and Myspace caters to them. I'm actually really happy that the great uneducated masses are learning to type, get a thought across at some level or another and do basic internet stuff.
Not to thread jack but Peak Oil has far more evidence for it and will have a more immediate (next 10 to 15 years) catastrophic impact and may have already happened according to some experts however it hardly gets as much press as Global Warming does.
I almost suspect that Global Warming is a euphamistic way for countries to talk about peak oil. One other thing is that China, India, and Russia ignore the whole Global Warming issue. Too them it doesn't matter and since our whole industrial base will be in China and India soon, short of invading those two countries and sending them back to the post-industrial age, there's not much we can do about it. In fact, I almost don't even care about global warming because I know that everywhere, when the rubber actually hits the road and it's reduce carbon emissions by reducing standards of living people will always balk. Talk is cheap, republicans are easy to bash but this all really doesn't matter in the end.