And shouldn't any photos of the memorial be under the copyright of whoever takes the picture?
That's not at all in question here; nobody claims that the holder of the copyright over the memorial has also copyright over the photos of it, and nobody disputes that the photographer has the copyright over the photos. However, the photos depict a copyrighted work, and there is a legal question as to whether specific uses of the photos require permission from both the sculptor and the photographer.
Why do we have this system? Well, imagine you're a painter, and you show paintings and sell them for money. Then some dude comes to your show with a camera, takes a photo of each of your paintings, and starts selling prints of your paintings. That ain't good, right?
That is, of course, a clear example of abuse of photos that depict a copyrighted work. There are also benign cases: for example, somebody might come to your gallery show and meet a long-lost friend, and have a picture taken of them together, which just happened to include your painting in the background, clearly visible. Or, two famous rock stars might have come to your show, and a journalist was there and took a photo of them, which also captures your painting.
The law is supposed to judge situations like these in a case-by-case basis and develop a set of rules that balance the painter's copyright over his work against other people's First Amendment right to take photos and reproduce them. In some cases, the purpose of the photo is very clearly to profit from the fact that the photo depicts another artist's work, and in those cases, you should need permission from the painter. In other cases the purpose will be to depict the artist's work, but not to profit from it; e.g., tourist's photos of themselves at a famous public sculpture. And in yet other cases, nobody really gives a damn about the paintings or sculptures which are just accidentally there in the photo, but it's an impromptu photo of two rock stars that has journalistic value for that reason (ugh). The legal treatment of these may be different--and there's more shades of gray.
In the case of the postage stamp, well, it's not just that it's a photo of the memorial, it is that it's a stamp that's being sold commercially, and whose whole point is that it depicts the memorial, and that therefore, the copyright holder deserves to be compensated for such an use. The counterargument could well be that the government should have a right to depict its own memorials in postage stamps, and that the sculptor, by agreeing to make a memorial for the government, should just accept that he's making a sculpture for the people, subject to different rules than commercial transactions.
But you're apparently still misunderstanding "insurance". Insurance should not cover such expenses. Insurance should cover the unusual expense of say, being hit by a car, or contracting an particularly difficult-to-treat disease, or contracting significantly more diseases than your peers. But for normal health maintenance and occasional, normal diseases, "insurance" is not possible, because you're not paying for protection against possible risks, you're just setting up a lifelong payment plan for your normal medical expenses.
I pointed this out in another post: that's just a claim people pull out of where the sun don't shine. Insurance is just paying a premium for risk transfer, period.
When health insurance covers your routine care, it's not just a "payment plan" for the actual cost of your care. It actually consists of overpaying for your routine care in exchange for protection against the healthcare costs of getting seriously sick. So a simple universal insurance scheme would be to simply charge everybody the average per-capita health care cost, so that healthy people pay the same in health care as the sick ones. It's a perfectly well structured form of insurance.
I agree that, fundamentally, insurance requires some people to pay more in premiums than they'll receive in benefits. But you're missing the massive overhead of covering routine expenses, versus the relative low overhead of covering only exceptional expenses. It's that overhead I want to avoid.
The routine stuff for healthy people is the cheap stuff, actually. Seriously, the bottom 50% of the population incurs 3% of the healthcare costs. The bottom 80% of the population accounts for 20% of the costs. If you kill off 25% of that in overheads, all you've saved overall is 5%.
If you really want to reduce costs, go after the stuff that's actually costly.
I also want to be able to choose my risk tolerance and weigh it against my lifestyle and personal health exposure.
Yeah. That's called adverse selection. Basically, you want to enroll in a plan that charges lower premiums because it doesn't admit sick people. Then if you get sick you'll act all surprised that when the plan kicks you out because it doesn't admit sick people.
But it simply doesn't work if everyone hits the insurance pot for every little thing. There are NO truly healthy people to overpay..if everyone is dipping into the pot for routine care.
Define "works," however. It certainly works in the sense that the healthcare costs are averaged over all of the participants. Though presumably you mean to argue that providing easy access to insurance coverage for every little thing raises that average cost. My answer two that has two prongs:
Health care costs are extremely skewed. Check out the costs distribution graph a bit down this blog post: the bottom 50% of health care users amount for 3% of the health care costs. If you're worried about routine care costs, well, you're worrying about the wrong thing.
Spending more on the little things is likely to lead us to spend less on the big things. Routine care catches health problems earlier and makes them more affordable to treat over the long term.
The idea of "insurance" is to cover the cost of *unexpected* events that you cannot normally pay out of your pocket.
The problem is that sickness is very often not an "event," but rather, a chronic condition that might last indefinitely long.
At any rate, you're making this much too complicated by talking about "events." Think instead of the total amount of healthcare that is expended on a person over the course of their life. Now, picture the mean and distribution of that amount over the whole population. The distribution is very skewed, so that most people are well under the mean, and a small number of people have disproportionately high costs expended on them.
The risk that health insurance is supposed to protect you against isn't an "event," but rather, the state that you may end up in the high end of that distribution. One way to do that would be simply to make the whole population pay the mean amount over their whole lifetime, independently of how much healthcare is expended on them.
Thus, you wouldn't normally make an insurance claim to replace a lost pencil--you just buy a new one. Most people can't just buy a new house if theirs burns down--this is where insurance comes in.
There's another problem with this reasoning: replacing people's lost pencils has no effect on the rate at which their houses burn down. An insurer that gave you for free a $1 box of pencils would still have to pay $200,000 on your house if it burned down, so the pencils ended up costing it $1 extra over the house.
But health insurance is completely different from that, because giving people free routine healthcare today decreases the chances that they will need extraordinary care tomorrow. If your insurer gives you $100 of free routine care today, they just have to save $100 in later extraordinary care to break even. The logic that applies to the pencils and the house just can't be applied. It's a false analogy.
The main reason that in the USA we discuss measures that impose disincentives for routine care over and over is because the private insurers's business model is to not pay for extraordinary care, but rather, to kick out those patients. If the insurers can dodge the costs of extraordinary care, then they have no incentive to pay for people's routine care, and thus will seek to minimize it.
We don't treat health insurance like insurance. Insurance is for EMERGENCY and RARE EXPENSIVE claims.
People keep saying that as if it was some sort of axiomatic thing, but no, insurance is simply risk transfer, and there's nothing about risk transfer that requires it to be applied only to emergency and rare/expensive claims. Claiming that we should stop covering routine care with health insurance because insurance is only for emergency and rare expensive puts the cart before the horse, because we should be judging if the health insurance is allowing people to manage risk effectively, not whether it fits some definition of "insurance" that you pulled out of your ass.
Health insurance is simply a scheme where a majority of people overpay for their health care so that a minority of people who get extraordinarily sick can underpay for theirs. The reason to want health insurance is that nobody really knows which of those two groups they will end up belonging to over the long run.
I know of one doctor, who no longer takes insurance because taking insurance cost him too much. He now can offer a regular checkup for very inexpensive cost, and he makes more money in the process. He doesn't have to hire two full time clerks to battle against the insurance companies, saving him tons of money. He doesn't have to get paid less for some people than for others. He charges ONE price for everyone and is able to provide better care and service.
The administrative overhead imposed by private market health insurance in the USA is a big problem, indeed.
However, your idea that regular checkups should not be paid out of insurance is wrong. Remember, again, the point of health insurance is that healthy people overpay for their healthcare so that the sick people can underpay. This means that if your proposal involves healthy people getting their healthcare at cost or at a small premium over cost, then your proposal is broken, because then there will be no actual money to cover the costs of the sick. Add to this the fact that early routine care reduces the risk that somebody will need really extraordinary care, and yes, you get a system where it makes total sense for you to overpay for your routine care in exchange for a guarantee that if you get extraordinarily sick you will underpay for your care.
Cathedrals are susceptible to top-down error. You know, the idiot at the top who doesn't know he's an idiot and leads the whole company into ruin over a few decisions. The bazaar of Linux is much more resilient to this at the cost of speed.
You can't claim that Linux's supposed "bazaar" model is resistant to top-down error when the whole premise of the project was to build a clone of an older, successful top-down "cathedral" project: Unix. Somebody else took the risk of top-down error.
I don't have time to look this up at the moment, but what I recall as the most important and least conventional GPL interpretation is that MySQL (the company) took the position that applications that depended on MySQL (the RDBMS) as one of their components were derivative works that incorporated the RDBMS--and that details about linking or protocols were just not relevant. Therefore, unless you bought a commercial license from the company, such applications had to be distributed under GPL terms.
Put more carefully, the idea is an application is a derivative of MySQL is whether if it relies critically on MySQL to provide its functionality. So, for example, a blog management tool that absolutely required MySQL as its backend would be a derivative work, while a graphical SQL client that could connect to many different RDBMSes and generically examine and modify the schema might not be (at least not under this criterion).
They may have additionally taken the position that the protocol is subject to the license, or something similar to that, but that would hardly be the whole position they've taken.
Note that the FSF itself takes a similar position with regards to linking to libraries, as shown by this old exchange about CLISP and readline. Quoting from one of RMS's emails there:
The FSF position would be that this is still one program, which has only been disguised as two. The reason it is still one program is that the one part clearly shows the intention for incorporation of the other part.
I say this based on discussions I had with our lawyer long ago. The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, following reasoning like what you are using; but since the result was very undesirable for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer.
What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled.
So the lesson here is one should not put too much stock on arguments about static vs. dynamic linking, linking vs. network protocols, or other such technical details, because judges will most likely find that none of those details are really the essential issue.
This is something I've never understood. Why should an insurance company pay for treatment for a pre-existing medical condition? That's like me crashing my car, then going and buying insurance so I can claim for 'pre-existing vehicle damage'.
This is the reason why the health care reform bills that prohibit insurers from denying coverage for existing conditions also require everybody to have insurance (individual mandate), and set up tax penalties against people who skip it. As you should understand, you can't have one without the other.
Sign language is useless unless you make a significant number of the hearing learn it.
You're completely missing the point here. Sign language is crucial even if very few hearing people learn it, because learning any first language normally is crucial for child cognitive development. You see, I actually don't want deaf children to be developmentally retarded compared to hearing children. This means that the deaf children must be able to learn and use some language effortlessly in their early years as much as hearing children get the chance to. The only languages that can fill this role are signed ones.
You say deaf people need to learn spoken languages (and the written versions thereof). Well, that's something very hard for a child who can't hear since an early age, and if you want them to succeed at it, you shouldn't short-change them cognitively by denying them the basic cognitive development that comes from learning a native language.
It might well be completely different, because blind people can speak and understand spoken language, so they don't have the same developmental risks that pre-lingual deaf children are subject to if they don't have the chance to learn a full language.
Actually, people who are blind at the wrong point in their brain development are never able to fully use their vision if it's restored later. They can see, but the pattern recognition wiring is missing; they have an incredibly hard time actually using the ability to see.
You're not seeing my point here (which perhaps I should have spelled out more obviously). The point was that a person who can't see but has full use of language is developmentally much better off than one who can see but has no language, and that this might make vision implants less controversial than auditive ones. Remember, there are people out there who insist that deaf children should be given a completely oral education--something that is risky for the child's cognitive development.
So you're basically promoting a false dichotomy by painting it as an either/or spoken/signed choice.
I did no such thing. What I would insist, however, is that signed education should be the priority over spoken education because of the developmental risks that come from missing out on first language acquisition. If you want deaf people who are competent at communicating with the hearing world, you'd first want not to cognitively short-charge them by denying them a true first language.
Your problem is that you think that people who say "not being able to hear is bad" is the same thing as saying "deaf people are bad". Uh, no.
I understand perfectly well that the statement "deaf people are bad" is not a logical consequence of "not being able to hear is bad." What I don't think a lot of people in this discussion understand is that even so, portrayals of deafness that emphasize the negatives do have a negative effect on deaf people. For example, it very often leads to adults directing a deaf child's time and work on overcoming their "deficiency" (the fact that they can't hear, and the consequences of that), when a lot of that time might be better spent on other activities that would be better for the child.
So yeah, going on and on about what a deaf child can't do (hear) does have an effect, even if it doesn't logically entail the proposition that deaf children are bad.
Here's the difference between you and me: you insist on telling deaf children "the truth" about their "deficiency," outcomes be damned, whereas I really am interested in getting the best possible outcomes for them. So, to address your three points:
"Best cure" by what measure? Ability to interpret and produce spoken language? Why is that the best measure of the outcome of deaf children treatment, as opposed to, say, high school graduation rates or standardized test scores (using written language tests)? Have you considered that by focusing on "fixing" deaf people so they can hear, you may miss the big picture?
Do you think we would have good outcomes with deaf people if all of our treatment adopted your macho posturing about "just telling those weak deluded people the hard truth"? Do you realize that this type of treatment is uncomfortably similar to how domestic abusers treat their victims?
Would you rather have us spend many man-years training a deaf child to understand spoken English with significant effort and difficulty, or rather to spend extra time using sign language to teach them written English, literature, math, history, science, etc.? Which do you think would make a deaf child happier and more productive: (a) struggling for years to learn to talk and hear without ever being able to do what hearing people do effortlessly, (b) getting an education comparable to what hearing children get?
Note that I was careful enough not to simply come out against cochlear implants; I would not be surprised at all if there is some balance that can be worked out between sign language education and implants that produced better results than education alone.
But my point is quite simply that the goal shouldn't be to "cure" deaf children; the goal should be to allow them to become healthy and productive adults. This definitely requires them to be able to manage interactions with the hearing world, and cochlear implants could very well help in that regard, but focusing too much on them just loses sight of the big picture.
I'm going to stress one final thing: learning the native language(s) is one of the crucial parts of child cognitive development. One of the biggest risks of early-age deafness is that a deaf child may fail to learn any real language, and thus will have retarded cognitive development. This is why sign language education is so important: deaf children learn to sign as easily as hearing children learn to talk, and native learning of any language is much better for cognitive development than incomplete learning of spoken language. Again, big picture: is it better to have intellectually normal deaf signers, or intellectually challenged orally-educated deaf people?
The premise of this submission is that cochlear implants are uncontroversially good, but that just ain't so; there's a lot of people who have objections to cochlear implants themselves or the way they're pushed on to deaf children.
The implants are pushed on to parents of deaf children as a "cure" for deafness, when they are at best a tool for deaf people to navigate a hearing world.
The promotion of the implants often comes along with a negative image of deafness, which portrays deaf people as deficient and unable to communicate. The NAD would rather prefer that deaf people be represented by positive role models of successful deaf people.
The implants require years of very frustrating training for many deaf children to learn to use, and a lot of that time might be better spent on sign-language based education.
I don't know to what extent this would be a factor for blindness, however. It might well be completely different, because blind people can speak and understand spoken language, so they don't have the same developmental risks that pre-lingual deaf children are subject to if they don't have the chance to learn a full language.
When a new invention or concept appears in a community, there are two general ways the people can end up changing their speech to name it:
They can take an old word for a concept that's analogous to the new thing, and extend the use of that old word to also cover the new thing. So, for example, "horseless carriage."
They can invent a new word for the new thing: "automobile."
There is no profound meaning to one strategy or the other. It's an arbitrary choice. Whether the words that we have today for newer inventions or concepts were extensions or inventions is a contingent historical fact.
Yet this sort of fact throws us into a loop any time we try to interpret an old document like the Constitution, since we run into the two corresponding types of problems:
Many of the words used in the text have since either been extended to cover new concepts. In this case, we must make a choice as to whether to interpret the text according to the old or the new standards for the use of the word. (Example: should we interpret "arms" to include nukes?)
Many of the words used in the text were also passed over as extension candidates for new concepts. In that case, we have a choice whether to interpret the Constitution to cover something analogous to what it does name, but that our vocabulary names by a different name simply because we invented a new word for it instead of extending the old one to cover it.
For example, imagine we lived in a world where everybody agreed that the word "arms" didn't cover nukes; "arms" meant what we call "non-automatic small arms," and they had a different word for nukes and bombs and cannons and such. Somebody could still argue that nukes are analogous enough to "arms" that even though the 2nd Amendment said "arms," they should interpret it to cover nukes.
There is nothing in the text of the Constitution that can make those choices for us--and yet we inadvertently and unavoidably make choices like these all the time, because people invent new things and forget old ones.
If there's no consensus, then it must be assumed that the Constitution means what it says.
There is no such thing as a text that carries its own meaning. Meaning is what you get when people interpret text.
So yes, nuclear weapons are "arms."
It is indeterminate whether the founding fathers, if we could somehow describe nukes to them, would have called them "arms." We have no way of knowing whether they would have agreed with us that nukes are "arms"; perhaps they would claim that "arms" is a narrower concept that covers only what we today call "small arms." In this case, interpreting the 2nd Amendment so that nukes are "arms" would mean that we've changed the meaning of the text, because we'd have used the words differently than they have.
Even if we today agree that by today's standards nukes are "arms," we can easily imagine an alternate history where people, instead of extending the scope of the old word "arms" to cover these new devices, invented a new word for them, say, "snooges." In that alternate history, the people of today would say that nukes are "snooges" but not "arms." Whether the word "arms" covers nukes is a historical contingency that happened after the Constitution was written. Why should we be bound by that?
Think of sentences as a program statement, the words as variable and function names, and the meaning as the result of executing the statement. If you change the values of the variables or the definitions of the functions, the result (i.e., the meaning) changes.
And also, ask yourself: if the founding fathers had known that future generations would invent these powerful weapons, and believed that those weapons were indeed "arms," would they have written the 2nd Amendment in the same manner? There is of course no way to answer that one, because the founding fathers all died a long time ago.
Doesn't market squarely to business, then why the hell do they sell Xserves with dual quad core xeons, 24GB ram, 3TB w/on board RAID, FC cards, XSAN (!) software, even reselling Promise vTrak raid storage, and Tandberg 80-tape storage libraries on the Apple store website. A SAN deployment among XServes and Mac Pros is not exactly a 'very small business' kind of situation.
Well, name some numbers as to what is "very small." I've been at businesses with 30-something employees where we had some pretty powerful hardware. If you're an enterprise software ISV startup, you may very reasonably want this caliber of hardware, though you'd almost certainly do better to go with a Linux solution. A small video production and CGI shop, on the other hand, sounds like a very good candidate for this level of Apple-branded hardware.
Pardon the uninitiated, but with 10.6 supporting Exchange Mail and Calendar with setup time of about 2 seconds (to enter your email and password), why does one need Outlook?
The OS X 10.6 support for Exchange requires the Exchange server to have some module supporting some sort of web service interface. I bet you a lot of IT departments don't want to install it.
Even in the US, some of the most deadly places also have strict gun control laws, such as Washington, D.C. had before a supreme court ruling.
But Washington DC is right next to Virginia, a state that effectively exports illegal guns to its neighbors. The local gun bans are hopeless if you can drive from VA to DC without passing through customs of some sort.
Some people would say, "Yes banning all guns IS a good idea." They've forgotten that banning beer did not work in the 1920s, nor has banning the plant marijuana/hemp worked in the present day.
So, on the one hand, we have historical bans on easily grown and made agricultural products, one of which is enjoyed by the majority of the population, or at the very least not very controversial. On the other hand, we have a proposed ban (or rather, a strawman ban) on a much harder to manufacture industrial product that the majority of people don't own. Yeah, clearly you can generalize from the one to the other.
Not to mention that there are countries with much stricter gun control laws (falling short of your "ban" strawman, though), that don't have the USA's gun violence problems. So clearly, gun control laws can be made to work.
The stock that was held by John Q. Public (i.e. me) was associated with the organization which retained all the liabilities, and is now worth just a few pennies.
And that's not true either, because (a) most of the liabilities of Washington Mutual Bank were in fact acquired by Chase, and (b) the unsecured liabilities are in the hands of the FDIC, which will most likely never have to pay them. From the FDIC report on the seizure:
If you hold senior unsecured debt, subordinated debt, or other claims in Washington Mutual Bank then you should file a claim in the receivership for recovery of any amounts that may be due to you. Please note that under federal law, 12 U.S.C. 1821(d)(11), claims by subordinated debt holders are paid only after all claims by general creditors of the institution. At this time, the FDIC as Receiver for Washington Mutual Bank does not anticipate that subordinated debt holders of the bank will receive any recovery on their claims.
The holding company didn't get stuck with the liabilities of the seized bank. Your stock became worthless because the holding company's one big asset, the bank, got seized by the government, and is now mostly an empty shell.
Dude, again, if you make an investment and it fails, make sure that in the end you at least understand why it failed. Otherwise, you've not gained even wisdom from the experience.
I was half-right. Chase bought WaMu, paid off their executives handsomely (one guy who'd been there three weeks got $18M), and then somehow said, "We're buying all the assets, but not the liabilities."
All three parts of your claim there are wrong, which makes you completely wrong, not "half-right." From:
"On September 25, 2008, the United States Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) seized Washington Mutual Bank from Washington Mutual, Inc. and placed it into the receivership of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The OTS took the action due to the withdrawal of $16.4 billion in deposits, during a 10-day bank run (amounting to 9% of the deposits it had held on June 30, 2008). The FDIC sold the banking subsidiaries (minus unsecured debt or equity claims) to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 billion, which reopened the bank's offices the next day as JPMorgan Chase branches. The holding company, Washington Mutual, Inc. was left with $33 billion assets, and $8 billion debt, after being stripped of its banking subsidiary by the FDIC. The next day, September 26, Washington Mutual, Inc. filed for Chapter 11 voluntary bankruptcy in Delaware, where it is incorporated."
To understand that passage, it's important to know that publically-owned banks in the USA are structured as a public holding company, which privately owns a bank. This is important because what you bought was shares of Washington Mutual Inc. (let's call it WMI), the holding company for Washington Mutual Bank (WMB). WMB failed, so the OTS seized it away from WMI and gave it to the FDIC, which then disposes of the assets and liabilities of WMB in order to make insured deposits and secured debtholders whole. At that point, WMI is bankrupt, so your stock investment is not really worth nothing anymore.
But the more important thing to note is that Chase didn't buy WMI from the shareholders; they bought from FDIC the WMB assets and obligations that the FDIC was on the hook for.
"Subsequent to the closure, JPMorgan Chase acquired the assets and most of the liabilities, including covered bonds and other secured debt, of Washington Mutual Bank from the FDIC as Receiver for Washington Mutual Bank. Any claims by equity, subordinated and senior unsecured debt holders were not acquired." [my emphasis]
This is a standard FDIC bank closure; the FDIC takes care of insured deposits and secured debt of the banks it takes over, and only if there's anything left over from the bank's assets, then unsecured creditors and shareholders get some (in that order). Chase bought the WMB's assets and all the liabilities that the FDIC is on the hook for. The liabilities that Chase didn't get are the ones that the FDIC doesn't normally cover. So basically, the folks who are owed those debts were wiped out by the FDIC takeover, not by the sale to Chase.
And thirdly, the WaMu executives that you claim got paid off handsomely were not paid by Chase. They were paid by WMI, the holding company that went bankrupt. Though the $17.5 million guy actually declined it:
"Chief executive Alan H. Fishman was flying from New York to Seattle on the day the bank was closed, and eventually received a $7.5 million sign-on bonus and cash severance of $11.6 million (which he declined) after being CEO for 17 days."
So basically, you made a bet on a bank that was about to fail, without understanding even a single iota of what happens when banks fail, and then you failed to learn how your investment failed. I can certainly understand and sympathize the part about making the bet on something you don't understand, if you hedge your bet accordingly (which you certainly seem to have done). What I can't understand is your inability or refusal to actually learn how your investment failed.
The programs you linked are basically the same thing; Haskell just has a bit of extra syntactic sugar than the F# version. If you really understand either language, you can see that the function definition in the other maps pretty exactly to the one you know.
Here's the F# code that you link:
let rec factorial n = match n with | 0I -> 1I | _ -> n * factorial (n - 1I)
Here's the Haskell one you link:
factorial:: Integer -> Integer factorial 0 = 1 factorial n = n * factorial (n-1)
But here's the Haskell one rewritten to (a) not use multi-equation definitions, (b) use the Int type (limited precision, faster) instead of Integer (unlimited size). (That's my guess at what the "0I" and "1I" mean in the F# program--plain ints instead of bignums.)
factorial:: Int -> Int factorial n = case n of 0 -> 1 _ -> n * (factorial n-1)
Note how much the sugarless Haskell version looks like the OCaml. This is a family resemblance; Haskell, OCaml and Standard ML all descend from ML, and share many of the same basic concepts (functional, Hindley-Milner type system, algebraic datatypes, pattern matching). Haskell's got the nicer syntax of them, though.
Just to enumerate the differences between these pieces of code: (a) OCaml and F# require you to use 'let rec' when you define a value that refers to itself recursively, while Haskell and Standard ML allow all definitions to do so; (b) Haskell top-level definitions and some local bindings can be written in multi-equation style; (c) F#'s 'match... with...' pattern-matching expression corresponds to 'case... of...' in Haskell, and the symbols used are a bit different; (d) the Haskell definitions have a type constraint, and the F# doesn't (this is optional in both languages, but the syntax is different, and Haskell programmers have a habit of doing it much more frequently).
It's like this: routine care has a cost x. Redistribution of money to pay cost x has an additional cost y, no matter who does it. If the customer pays cost x, adding cost y will increase costs.
The problem with this logic is that you're assuming that the total amount of care provided (routine + extraordinary) is independent of the amount of routine care. But on the contrary, more routine care means that conditions are dectected early on while they're easier and cheaper to treat, leading to less extraordinary care (which is the really costly item: something like 80% of health costs are spent on treating 20% of the people).
By this logic, an honest health insurer should make it as cheap as possible for their policyholders to go get routine care, because $100 of routine care today will often save $100,000 of extraordinary care 5 years later. There is overhead to providing that care through a third party, sure, but the overhead is the lesser evil.
But of course, this assumes that the insurer truly intends to pay the $100,000 health bills that do arise. Here in the USA, our private, lightly regulated health insurers have a business model that basically consists of charging the healthy for insurance and kicking out the chronically sick. Given this, there is no incentive for the insurer to make routine care affordable.
Do you expect your car insurance to pay for your gasoline? Why not? If I offered to provide you with a gasoline payment policy, in which for a monthly fee I'd pay all of your gasoline bills, would you sign up expecting to get a good deal?
Arguments about health insurance that make analogies to car insurance tend to be flawed because people are not cars.
First of all, going back to the point above, the amount of gasoline that you consume is, if anything, positively correlated with your risk of a car accident, because people who drive more have more accidents. This is the opposite to the health situation, where more routine care tends to result in less extraordinary care. So in fact, car insurers should disincentivize their policyholders from driving; it makes the routine and extraordinary event costs higher.
Second, the financial structure of car accident and health risks are different. Car accident risks are all episodic; you have an accident today, make a claim, and there's a one-time payout that covers the damages for that accident for all time. Health risks, on the other hand, come in a range from episodic to chronic. There's the folks who need an appendix removal once and never again, and then there's the folks who discover at age 34 that they have a chronic congenital condition that is going to require expensive specialized care for the rest of their lives.
Health insurance needs to work differently from auto insurance because it needs to cover the latter, chronic risks (which, I will remind you, actual American health insurers bank on not covering). Suppose you want to be insured against that second sort of risk that I mentioned (congenital disease discovered at age 34). How does one implement an insurance scheme that protects against that risk? Well, the premiums for the guy who is diagnosed with the condition must not go up after the diagnosis (relative to the healthy policyholders). So for this to work financially, the people who end up not having a congenital disease have overpay for their health care all their lives so that the very few who do have it can underpay for the rest of their lives. Any alternatives that try to make the healthy pay less than the chronically sick will simply fail to protect the policyholders from that sort of risk, because it means that if you get chronically sick your premiums go up, which is precisely what you wanted the policy to protect you from.
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That's not at all in question here; nobody claims that the holder of the copyright over the memorial has also copyright over the photos of it, and nobody disputes that the photographer has the copyright over the photos. However, the photos depict a copyrighted work, and there is a legal question as to whether specific uses of the photos require permission from both the sculptor and the photographer.
Why do we have this system? Well, imagine you're a painter, and you show paintings and sell them for money. Then some dude comes to your show with a camera, takes a photo of each of your paintings, and starts selling prints of your paintings. That ain't good, right?
That is, of course, a clear example of abuse of photos that depict a copyrighted work. There are also benign cases: for example, somebody might come to your gallery show and meet a long-lost friend, and have a picture taken of them together, which just happened to include your painting in the background, clearly visible. Or, two famous rock stars might have come to your show, and a journalist was there and took a photo of them, which also captures your painting.
The law is supposed to judge situations like these in a case-by-case basis and develop a set of rules that balance the painter's copyright over his work against other people's First Amendment right to take photos and reproduce them. In some cases, the purpose of the photo is very clearly to profit from the fact that the photo depicts another artist's work, and in those cases, you should need permission from the painter. In other cases the purpose will be to depict the artist's work, but not to profit from it; e.g., tourist's photos of themselves at a famous public sculpture. And in yet other cases, nobody really gives a damn about the paintings or sculptures which are just accidentally there in the photo, but it's an impromptu photo of two rock stars that has journalistic value for that reason (ugh). The legal treatment of these may be different--and there's more shades of gray.
In the case of the postage stamp, well, it's not just that it's a photo of the memorial, it is that it's a stamp that's being sold commercially, and whose whole point is that it depicts the memorial, and that therefore, the copyright holder deserves to be compensated for such an use. The counterargument could well be that the government should have a right to depict its own memorials in postage stamps, and that the sculptor, by agreeing to make a memorial for the government, should just accept that he's making a sculpture for the people, subject to different rules than commercial transactions.
I messed up the subject line.
I pointed this out in another post: that's just a claim people pull out of where the sun don't shine. Insurance is just paying a premium for risk transfer, period.
When health insurance covers your routine care, it's not just a "payment plan" for the actual cost of your care. It actually consists of overpaying for your routine care in exchange for protection against the healthcare costs of getting seriously sick. So a simple universal insurance scheme would be to simply charge everybody the average per-capita health care cost, so that healthy people pay the same in health care as the sick ones. It's a perfectly well structured form of insurance.
The routine stuff for healthy people is the cheap stuff, actually. Seriously, the bottom 50% of the population incurs 3% of the healthcare costs. The bottom 80% of the population accounts for 20% of the costs. If you kill off 25% of that in overheads, all you've saved overall is 5%.
If you really want to reduce costs, go after the stuff that's actually costly.
Yeah. That's called adverse selection. Basically, you want to enroll in a plan that charges lower premiums because it doesn't admit sick people. Then if you get sick you'll act all surprised that when the plan kicks you out because it doesn't admit sick people.
Define "works," however. It certainly works in the sense that the healthcare costs are averaged over all of the participants. Though presumably you mean to argue that providing easy access to insurance coverage for every little thing raises that average cost. My answer two that has two prongs:
The problem is that sickness is very often not an "event," but rather, a chronic condition that might last indefinitely long.
At any rate, you're making this much too complicated by talking about "events." Think instead of the total amount of healthcare that is expended on a person over the course of their life. Now, picture the mean and distribution of that amount over the whole population. The distribution is very skewed, so that most people are well under the mean, and a small number of people have disproportionately high costs expended on them.
The risk that health insurance is supposed to protect you against isn't an "event," but rather, the state that you may end up in the high end of that distribution. One way to do that would be simply to make the whole population pay the mean amount over their whole lifetime, independently of how much healthcare is expended on them.
There's another problem with this reasoning: replacing people's lost pencils has no effect on the rate at which their houses burn down. An insurer that gave you for free a $1 box of pencils would still have to pay $200,000 on your house if it burned down, so the pencils ended up costing it $1 extra over the house.
But health insurance is completely different from that, because giving people free routine healthcare today decreases the chances that they will need extraordinary care tomorrow. If your insurer gives you $100 of free routine care today, they just have to save $100 in later extraordinary care to break even. The logic that applies to the pencils and the house just can't be applied. It's a false analogy.
The main reason that in the USA we discuss measures that impose disincentives for routine care over and over is because the private insurers's business model is to not pay for extraordinary care, but rather, to kick out those patients. If the insurers can dodge the costs of extraordinary care, then they have no incentive to pay for people's routine care, and thus will seek to minimize it.
People keep saying that as if it was some sort of axiomatic thing, but no, insurance is simply risk transfer, and there's nothing about risk transfer that requires it to be applied only to emergency and rare/expensive claims. Claiming that we should stop covering routine care with health insurance because insurance is only for emergency and rare expensive puts the cart before the horse, because we should be judging if the health insurance is allowing people to manage risk effectively, not whether it fits some definition of "insurance" that you pulled out of your ass.
Health insurance is simply a scheme where a majority of people overpay for their health care so that a minority of people who get extraordinarily sick can underpay for theirs. The reason to want health insurance is that nobody really knows which of those two groups they will end up belonging to over the long run.
The administrative overhead imposed by private market health insurance in the USA is a big problem, indeed.
However, your idea that regular checkups should not be paid out of insurance is wrong. Remember, again, the point of health insurance is that healthy people overpay for their healthcare so that the sick people can underpay. This means that if your proposal involves healthy people getting their healthcare at cost or at a small premium over cost, then your proposal is broken, because then there will be no actual money to cover the costs of the sick. Add to this the fact that early routine care reduces the risk that somebody will need really extraordinary care, and yes, you get a system where it makes total sense for you to overpay for your routine care in exchange for a guarantee that if you get extraordinarily sick you will underpay for your care.
You can't claim that Linux's supposed "bazaar" model is resistant to top-down error when the whole premise of the project was to build a clone of an older, successful top-down "cathedral" project: Unix. Somebody else took the risk of top-down error.
I don't have time to look this up at the moment, but what I recall as the most important and least conventional GPL interpretation is that MySQL (the company) took the position that applications that depended on MySQL (the RDBMS) as one of their components were derivative works that incorporated the RDBMS--and that details about linking or protocols were just not relevant. Therefore, unless you bought a commercial license from the company, such applications had to be distributed under GPL terms.
Put more carefully, the idea is an application is a derivative of MySQL is whether if it relies critically on MySQL to provide its functionality. So, for example, a blog management tool that absolutely required MySQL as its backend would be a derivative work, while a graphical SQL client that could connect to many different RDBMSes and generically examine and modify the schema might not be (at least not under this criterion).
They may have additionally taken the position that the protocol is subject to the license, or something similar to that, but that would hardly be the whole position they've taken.
Note that the FSF itself takes a similar position with regards to linking to libraries, as shown by this old exchange about CLISP and readline. Quoting from one of RMS's emails there:
So the lesson here is one should not put too much stock on arguments about static vs. dynamic linking, linking vs. network protocols, or other such technical details, because judges will most likely find that none of those details are really the essential issue.
This is the reason why the health care reform bills that prohibit insurers from denying coverage for existing conditions also require everybody to have insurance (individual mandate), and set up tax penalties against people who skip it. As you should understand, you can't have one without the other.
You're completely missing the point here. Sign language is crucial even if very few hearing people learn it, because learning any first language normally is crucial for child cognitive development. You see, I actually don't want deaf children to be developmentally retarded compared to hearing children. This means that the deaf children must be able to learn and use some language effortlessly in their early years as much as hearing children get the chance to. The only languages that can fill this role are signed ones.
You say deaf people need to learn spoken languages (and the written versions thereof). Well, that's something very hard for a child who can't hear since an early age, and if you want them to succeed at it, you shouldn't short-change them cognitively by denying them the basic cognitive development that comes from learning a native language.
You're not seeing my point here (which perhaps I should have spelled out more obviously). The point was that a person who can't see but has full use of language is developmentally much better off than one who can see but has no language, and that this might make vision implants less controversial than auditive ones. Remember, there are people out there who insist that deaf children should be given a completely oral education--something that is risky for the child's cognitive development.
I did no such thing. What I would insist, however, is that signed education should be the priority over spoken education because of the developmental risks that come from missing out on first language acquisition. If you want deaf people who are competent at communicating with the hearing world, you'd first want not to cognitively short-charge them by denying them a true first language.
I understand perfectly well that the statement "deaf people are bad" is not a logical consequence of "not being able to hear is bad." What I don't think a lot of people in this discussion understand is that even so, portrayals of deafness that emphasize the negatives do have a negative effect on deaf people. For example, it very often leads to adults directing a deaf child's time and work on overcoming their "deficiency" (the fact that they can't hear, and the consequences of that), when a lot of that time might be better spent on other activities that would be better for the child.
So yeah, going on and on about what a deaf child can't do (hear) does have an effect, even if it doesn't logically entail the proposition that deaf children are bad.
Here's the difference between you and me: you insist on telling deaf children "the truth" about their "deficiency," outcomes be damned, whereas I really am interested in getting the best possible outcomes for them. So, to address your three points:
Note that I was careful enough not to simply come out against cochlear implants; I would not be surprised at all if there is some balance that can be worked out between sign language education and implants that produced better results than education alone.
But my point is quite simply that the goal shouldn't be to "cure" deaf children; the goal should be to allow them to become healthy and productive adults. This definitely requires them to be able to manage interactions with the hearing world, and cochlear implants could very well help in that regard, but focusing too much on them just loses sight of the big picture.
I'm going to stress one final thing: learning the native language(s) is one of the crucial parts of child cognitive development. One of the biggest risks of early-age deafness is that a deaf child may fail to learn any real language, and thus will have retarded cognitive development. This is why sign language education is so important: deaf children learn to sign as easily as hearing children learn to talk, and native learning of any language is much better for cognitive development than incomplete learning of spoken language. Again, big picture: is it better to have intellectually normal deaf signers, or intellectually challenged orally-educated deaf people?
The premise of this submission is that cochlear implants are uncontroversially good, but that just ain't so; there's a lot of people who have objections to cochlear implants themselves or the way they're pushed on to deaf children.
The National Association of the Deaf's statement on the implants makes pretty good reading about this topic. They don't come against the implants as their own, but they do point out a number of problems that they perceive on their use:
I don't know to what extent this would be a factor for blindness, however. It might well be completely different, because blind people can speak and understand spoken language, so they don't have the same developmental risks that pre-lingual deaf children are subject to if they don't have the chance to learn a full language.
When a new invention or concept appears in a community, there are two general ways the people can end up changing their speech to name it:
There is no profound meaning to one strategy or the other. It's an arbitrary choice. Whether the words that we have today for newer inventions or concepts were extensions or inventions is a contingent historical fact.
Yet this sort of fact throws us into a loop any time we try to interpret an old document like the Constitution, since we run into the two corresponding types of problems:
For example, imagine we lived in a world where everybody agreed that the word "arms" didn't cover nukes; "arms" meant what we call "non-automatic small arms," and they had a different word for nukes and bombs and cannons and such. Somebody could still argue that nukes are analogous enough to "arms" that even though the 2nd Amendment said "arms," they should interpret it to cover nukes.
There is nothing in the text of the Constitution that can make those choices for us--and yet we inadvertently and unavoidably make choices like these all the time, because people invent new things and forget old ones.
There is no such thing as a text that carries its own meaning. Meaning is what you get when people interpret text.
Think of sentences as a program statement, the words as variable and function names, and the meaning as the result of executing the statement. If you change the values of the variables or the definitions of the functions, the result (i.e., the meaning) changes.
And also, ask yourself: if the founding fathers had known that future generations would invent these powerful weapons, and believed that those weapons were indeed "arms," would they have written the 2nd Amendment in the same manner? There is of course no way to answer that one, because the founding fathers all died a long time ago.
Well, name some numbers as to what is "very small." I've been at businesses with 30-something employees where we had some pretty powerful hardware. If you're an enterprise software ISV startup, you may very reasonably want this caliber of hardware, though you'd almost certainly do better to go with a Linux solution. A small video production and CGI shop, on the other hand, sounds like a very good candidate for this level of Apple-branded hardware.
The OS X 10.6 support for Exchange requires the Exchange server to have some module supporting some sort of web service interface. I bet you a lot of IT departments don't want to install it.
But Washington DC is right next to Virginia, a state that effectively exports illegal guns to its neighbors. The local gun bans are hopeless if you can drive from VA to DC without passing through customs of some sort.
So, on the one hand, we have historical bans on easily grown and made agricultural products, one of which is enjoyed by the majority of the population, or at the very least not very controversial. On the other hand, we have a proposed ban (or rather, a strawman ban) on a much harder to manufacture industrial product that the majority of people don't own. Yeah, clearly you can generalize from the one to the other.
Not to mention that there are countries with much stricter gun control laws (falling short of your "ban" strawman, though), that don't have the USA's gun violence problems. So clearly, gun control laws can be made to work.
And that's not true either, because (a) most of the liabilities of Washington Mutual Bank were in fact acquired by Chase, and (b) the unsecured liabilities are in the hands of the FDIC, which will most likely never have to pay them. From the FDIC report on the seizure:
The holding company didn't get stuck with the liabilities of the seized bank. Your stock became worthless because the holding company's one big asset, the bank, got seized by the government, and is now mostly an empty shell.
Dude, again, if you make an investment and it fails, make sure that in the end you at least understand why it failed. Otherwise, you've not gained even wisdom from the experience.
All three parts of your claim there are wrong, which makes you completely wrong, not "half-right." From :
To understand that passage, it's important to know that publically-owned banks in the USA are structured as a public holding company, which privately owns a bank. This is important because what you bought was shares of Washington Mutual Inc. (let's call it WMI), the holding company for Washington Mutual Bank (WMB). WMB failed, so the OTS seized it away from WMI and gave it to the FDIC, which then disposes of the assets and liabilities of WMB in order to make insured deposits and secured debtholders whole. At that point, WMI is bankrupt, so your stock investment is not really worth nothing anymore.
But the more important thing to note is that Chase didn't buy WMI from the shareholders; they bought from FDIC the WMB assets and obligations that the FDIC was on the hook for.
You're also wrong about the "buying all the assets, but not the liabilities part." From the FDIC statement on the closure:
This is a standard FDIC bank closure; the FDIC takes care of insured deposits and secured debt of the banks it takes over, and only if there's anything left over from the bank's assets, then unsecured creditors and shareholders get some (in that order). Chase bought the WMB's assets and all the liabilities that the FDIC is on the hook for. The liabilities that Chase didn't get are the ones that the FDIC doesn't normally cover. So basically, the folks who are owed those debts were wiped out by the FDIC takeover, not by the sale to Chase.
And thirdly, the WaMu executives that you claim got paid off handsomely were not paid by Chase. They were paid by WMI, the holding company that went bankrupt. Though the $17.5 million guy actually declined it:
So basically, you made a bet on a bank that was about to fail, without understanding even a single iota of what happens when banks fail, and then you failed to learn how your investment failed. I can certainly understand and sympathize the part about making the bet on something you don't understand, if you hedge your bet accordingly (which you certainly seem to have done). What I can't understand is your inability or refusal to actually learn how your investment failed.
The programs you linked are basically the same thing; Haskell just has a bit of extra syntactic sugar than the F# version. If you really understand either language, you can see that the function definition in the other maps pretty exactly to the one you know.
:: Integer -> Integer
:: Int -> Int
... with ...' pattern-matching expression corresponds to 'case ... of ...' in Haskell, and the symbols used are a bit different; (d) the Haskell definitions have a type constraint, and the F# doesn't (this is optional in both languages, but the syntax is different, and Haskell programmers have a habit of doing it much more frequently).
Here's the F# code that you link:
let rec factorial n =
match n with
| 0I -> 1I
| _ -> n * factorial (n - 1I)
Here's the Haskell one you link:
factorial
factorial 0 = 1
factorial n = n * factorial (n-1)
But here's the Haskell one rewritten to (a) not use multi-equation definitions, (b) use the Int type (limited precision, faster) instead of Integer (unlimited size). (That's my guess at what the "0I" and "1I" mean in the F# program--plain ints instead of bignums.)
factorial
factorial n =
case n of
0 -> 1
_ -> n * (factorial n-1)
Note how much the sugarless Haskell version looks like the OCaml. This is a family resemblance; Haskell, OCaml and Standard ML all descend from ML, and share many of the same basic concepts (functional, Hindley-Milner type system, algebraic datatypes, pattern matching). Haskell's got the nicer syntax of them, though.
Just to enumerate the differences between these pieces of code: (a) OCaml and F# require you to use 'let rec' when you define a value that refers to itself recursively, while Haskell and Standard ML allow all definitions to do so; (b) Haskell top-level definitions and some local bindings can be written in multi-equation style; (c) F#'s 'match
The problem with this logic is that you're assuming that the total amount of care provided (routine + extraordinary) is independent of the amount of routine care. But on the contrary, more routine care means that conditions are dectected early on while they're easier and cheaper to treat, leading to less extraordinary care (which is the really costly item: something like 80% of health costs are spent on treating 20% of the people).
By this logic, an honest health insurer should make it as cheap as possible for their policyholders to go get routine care, because $100 of routine care today will often save $100,000 of extraordinary care 5 years later. There is overhead to providing that care through a third party, sure, but the overhead is the lesser evil.
But of course, this assumes that the insurer truly intends to pay the $100,000 health bills that do arise. Here in the USA, our private, lightly regulated health insurers have a business model that basically consists of charging the healthy for insurance and kicking out the chronically sick. Given this, there is no incentive for the insurer to make routine care affordable.
Arguments about health insurance that make analogies to car insurance tend to be flawed because people are not cars.
First of all, going back to the point above, the amount of gasoline that you consume is, if anything, positively correlated with your risk of a car accident, because people who drive more have more accidents. This is the opposite to the health situation, where more routine care tends to result in less extraordinary care. So in fact, car insurers should disincentivize their policyholders from driving; it makes the routine and extraordinary event costs higher.
Second, the financial structure of car accident and health risks are different. Car accident risks are all episodic; you have an accident today, make a claim, and there's a one-time payout that covers the damages for that accident for all time. Health risks, on the other hand, come in a range from episodic to chronic. There's the folks who need an appendix removal once and never again, and then there's the folks who discover at age 34 that they have a chronic congenital condition that is going to require expensive specialized care for the rest of their lives.
Health insurance needs to work differently from auto insurance because it needs to cover the latter, chronic risks (which, I will remind you, actual American health insurers bank on not covering). Suppose you want to be insured against that second sort of risk that I mentioned (congenital disease discovered at age 34). How does one implement an insurance scheme that protects against that risk? Well, the premiums for the guy who is diagnosed with the condition must not go up after the diagnosis (relative to the healthy policyholders). So for this to work financially, the people who end up not having a congenital disease have overpay for their health care all their lives so that the very few who do have it can underpay for the rest of their lives. Any alternatives that try to make the healthy pay less than the chronically sick will simply fail to protect the policyholders from that sort of risk, because it means that if you get chronically sick your premiums go up, which is precisely what you wanted the policy to protect you from.