I don't know how it is in other regions, but in the places I've lived there are virtually no Toll Roads. I never even saw one in 28 years of living in Michigan, and there only seems to be one in Ohio.
The gas tax goes into the Interstate Highway Fund, which pays for the non-toll Federal Interstate highways almost everyone uses. And in the past few years that fund has run out of money, and needed to be topped off from the general budget. It cost $8 Billion in 2008 alone.
1) If the gas pay were high enough to pay for the wear and tear of that truck on the roads I'd be paying for it, because my food prices would include the increased gas tax. But I'd only be paying to the extent I actually use the roads.
2) Most freight infrastructure exists without significant subsidies from the government. The North American freight rail system, for example, is self-supporting. So are ports, and freight airlines. But truckers would not be competitive for long-distance shipping if people like me didn't pay taxes for roads we can't use.
Because they're so simple. They would also allow our highway fund to be self-sustaining, which would mean that we could stop subsidizing it with income taxes from people who don't drive. Things like tax credits and CAFE Standards can be gamed.
In the long-term taxes also have the advantage of getting people used to $6 Gas. Oil production isn't rising. Indian and Chinese guys are finally getting rich enough to drive home for the holidays, which means it's inevitable that gas will go up. Period.
But since everybody pays the gas tax all the time nobody wants to be responsible for raising it, therefore we get a mess.
Keep in mind that the US Gas tax is used to pay for highways, that it's not indexed to inflation, and it was last raised early in Clinton's first term. Which means it doesn't actually cover the cost of maintaining highways.
The result is that my, non-car-using, ass has to pay income taxes to subsidize all these people who love their cars so much, but if I dare to ask them to pay for a train or another bus I'm breezily told "nobody will use that."
That's your candidate. But 307 of 308 Canadians people don't live in Chatahoochee MB.
But if you actually care about the issues you're gonna want to be able to find out roughly where all candidates in all 308 ridings think without talking to them, and that's not practical for ordinary people. Let's assume there're two candidates a riding, and the question is something that's obvious on the candidates website. 716*5 minutes is almost 60 hours. And that's assuming that a) it's trivial to figure out the top two non-partisan candidates in every riding and b) the issue in question is something they'd all put on their front page. This is just not something a citizen's group can realistically do. OTOH most organized interest groups have employees whose entire job is to do that sort of thing, or can acquire volunteers.
To show you how this works in action take the example of the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, right across from my hometown of Detroit. Nobody who has ever dealt with the Bridge Company likes them. They are delusional. They have a government-granted monopoly, which they use to do things like illegally seize land they don't own, sell "permits" that make it easy for people to break pollution regulations, and generally act like assholes. It's so bad capitalist tool Forbes magazine profiled their owner (Matty Moroun), using the headline "the Troll Under the Bridge." Canada's current political leadership is tired of their antics, so Moroun's great desire to double-down on his monopoly by building a second bridge right by their current one is thwarted.
Under a non-partisan system here's what happens: Moroun's opponents have no money, and no organization outside of Windsor. They elect three guys from around Windsor who will reliably oppose Moroun. Moroun has dozens of people, who can be quite convincing Snake Oil Salesman. Special interest Moroun can hire the best Snake Oil Salesman in Canada to make his pitch ("I'm not a Monopolist, I'm a Capitalist, prove you love business by allowing mine to expand") to every single MP candidate in the other 305 Ridings. He probably weasels his way into the good graces of 155 winners, gets downtown Windsor bulldozed at Canadian Taxpayer expense, and proceeds to milk his monopoly for a few more Billion$. Also at Canadian Taxpayer expense, because you guys pay half the tolls.
OTOH in the current system what happens is the candidate says some sweet nothings to Moroun's guy, gets on the phone to someone whose dealt with Moroun before, and quickly realizes that he is to be avoided at all costs.
That was actually the idea in the US from the beginning.
The problem with actually implementing it in a free country is that there's nothing stopping an organized group from supporting certain candidates. Which means that if you have a Riding where the Evangelicals organize the hell out of themselves, but there a half-dozen candidates splitting the anti-Evangelical vote the Evangelicals win with 30%. You end up with all the drawbacks of a party-system, because the Unions organized their slate (NDP/Labor/Whatever), the Evangelicals organized theirs (probably a subsection of the Tories), big business managed to appoint a couple guys (another section of the Tories), etc. but it's all basically secret because everyone is officially non-partisan. There's no way to find out what the newly elected MP from Chatahoochee MB thinks without asking him.
Note that you haven't really reduced lobbyist influence, either. One of the ways lobbyists are kept in check is by Party Organizations who can tell them to go jump. Individual MPs don't necessarily have the strength to do that, particularly if they were elected with 25% of the vote. You've merely ensured that instead of making one cash donation that anyone can keep track of the lobbyists make 308 separate donations in every Riding.
BTW this is actually the major problem with getting a non-Islamist government in Egypt. During Mubarak's reign only one party was allowed. Now all the non-Islamists are creating their own technocratic/libertarian/Socialist/Monarchist/etc. parties. OTOH the major Islamic institution only made one. With 40% of the vote it will dominate everything because there simply isn't another real party. If the system was totally non-partisan it would be even worse, because the Brotherhood would still act like a political party, but it's candidates would be treated legally as guys who won 40%-25%.
Very few people actually switch political positions due to applying the intellectual tools of their job to reality. The exceptions tend to be people whose original political positions say something that flat-out contradicts what they have to believe to get their jobs done. Thus it's easy to find Conservative Christian kids who had to become less Conservative when they took a job that proved Evolution happens. But in general that's just not how the human mind works. You form your political opinions in your late teens, early 20s, and they don't change just because you get a job.
OTOH I doubt you'll find any techno-Libertarian or techno-Techncrat who switched from one to the other due to conducting an engineering study. There are probably plenty who switched because something happened outside of work that brought home either a) the value of government, or b) the drawbacks of it.
Engineers probably skew Libertarian, because the people who go into engineering school tend to be geeks and Libertarianism has an undeniable geek chic. But those folks didn't read Atlas Shrugged in their last Semester of College, they did it in the 11th Grade. They probably also skew technocratic, because the college-educated professional demographic tends to skew technocratic, and almost all of them are college-educated professionals.
I am just not getting the logic of this attack. Theoretically they're doing it as part of the Free Bradley Manning campaign. But who, that can actually help Bradley Manning gives a fuck about Stratfor?
Stratfor is what you use if you don't have a lot of resources. If you're some guy who follows foreign affairs a Stratfor subscription is great. If you're an Army Officer, who can call up a very experienced intelligence analyst at division HQ (he's called the G1), read every State Department memo ever written, etc. it's just not that useful. It could conceivably be useful as a check against groupthink (IIRC they were quite a bit more skeptical of Chalabi then Dubya was, for example), but that's about it.
Manning, OTOH, is a Private who is charged with giving away information that could potentially endanger US Troops. This includes disobeying orders. There are no US Army Officers anywhere who think helping out a possible check on groupthink is worth relaxing discipline. It's just not gonna happen.
I'm sure they've heard of proxies. That is how one gets around the Great Firewall, after all. I'm not sure they really care to keep their tracks covered. When you air videos of yourself doing a denial-of-service attack, using publicly available tools, on state TV OpSec is probably not your highest priority.
Their highest priority seems to be annoying influential people, who will then complain to the media. The media being technical doofuses breathlessly report that the Chinese Military owned Important American X, Chinese glory will be increased, the Chinese people will not think their government has sold out to American Corporations, etc.
In the US very few people have employment contracts. You agree to a salary, you get paid the salary, and that's it in terms of legal agreements between you and your employer. The advantage to a worker is he can simply stop showing up to a job and face no penalty whatsoever, the disadvantage is he's got no contractual recourse when an employer screws him.
States, the feds, and even some municipal governments; establish minimum standards that everyone has to follow. The federal guidelines are typically more generous to workers, because the people who lobby to make laws more generous to workers (mostly unions) have realized that it's a lot easier to get one government (the Feds) to act then 50.
This particular bill tweaks the law. A couple recent court decisions apparently allow IT folk to get overtime pay even if they're salaried, which is probably justified morally, and certainly justified legally, but is also clearly not what Congress intended. All salaried are supposed to be professionals who do not get overtime. Thus both parties support the change.
Unfortunately Obama is taking the position that all ACTA's provisions are compatible with existing US Law, so actual ratification is unnecessary.
Look at it this way: If the Obama administration charges somebody with counterfeiting some product using the US Code the Courts are not gonna let the dude off because ACTA isn't ratified. They're gonna try the guy under the US Code. And, according to Obama, they'll convict if he actually violated ACTA because everything illegal under ACTA is illegal under the current US Code.
The people in charge of judging whether the US is complying with the treaty will have to count the dude's conviction as compliance.
In other words you shouldn't be worried about ACTA. Yopu should be worried that everything ACTA does is already illegal.
Here's the thing: If this treaty changes US Law it cannot be enforced, because it is not ratified. Which means it does not matter.
If it doesn't change US Law the problem is not the treaty, the problem is existing US Law.
I suspect what's going on is that US Law is vague, and subject to interpretation. The treaty is probably more vague, but the window of actions permitted by both ACTA and current US Law is probably a lot smaller then the window of actions allowed under current law. Which means Obama's picked an interpretation o US Law that Sean Flynn doesn't like. But "President says he's gonna do legal things Ron Wyden dislikes," makes a much shittier headline then "President to Enforce Unratified Treaty," even tho the former is perfectly true and the latter is by definition false.
I'm not sure you're understanding the process here.
The President unilaterally commits us to agreements all the time. That's his job. What he doesn't do is implement those agreements. Thus we signed Kyoto, but we did not ratify it, so it's not the official law of the land.
In this case he's arguing that ACTA doesn't actually change US Law, so there's no need for Congressional approval. In other words he's saying he's already implemented the agreement because the US's current laws require him to do everything he'd have to do to comply with ACTA anyway. For example if you started selling fake iMacs you'd get your ass sued. Do you think the court's gonna say "We must dismiss the lawsuit, because while it is clearly valid, the Obama administration agreed to stop counterfeiting in a treaty that has not been ratified by the Senate, therefore selling fake iMacs is entirely legal until the Executive and Legislative branches resolve the situation."
In other words you shouldn't worry that Obama's not gonna put the treaty to the US Senate. You should worry that, as a US Citizen, you are already bound to do whatever it says by laws already on the books. Like the DMCA.
I, for example, have the right to use the public roads to drive to work. If you and 50,000 of your friends all decide to protest downtown during rush hour I'm not gonna be able to do so.
If there's a permit process in place the government can mitigate these problems, my Constitutional right to get to work won't be hindered, and your right to protest will be hindered solely by you having to file some paperwork.
That the protests are small is probably a major reason the cops use force.
Why? Think about it this way: Beating the shot out of one guy in a 5,000 person crowd is incredibly stupid, and border-line suicidal. OTOH it's pretty much the only way to stop a truly determined one man protest.
Different countries set up their university systems very, very differently.
In the US a Bachelors degree, by definition, includes, an awful lot of stuff that isn't described on the degree paper. That's basically the entire point of the degree. So somebody who has a four-year degree in Engineering has 20-30 credits (or 8-10 classes) of crap that is totally unrelated to the particular subfield of engineering they specialized in. A BA has 20-30 credits of crap completely unrelated to their Major. My Major was History and Political Science, but they wouldn't have let me graduate if I didn't also have a foreign language, multiple math and science course, etc.
The idea is that somebody with a Bachelors degree is a well-rounded human being. Something of a Renaissance man, by definition. While most Americans with Bachelors degrees will acknowledge that, in theory, one could be a well-rounded human being with valuable insights in a wide variety of fields without having a Bachelors, in practice nobody without a Bachelors is considered for 99.999% of non-blue collar jobs. This holds true even for institutions that love to denigrate the Bachelors-having set for it's perceived elitism. There are zero Fox News Analysts with less then a Bachelors degree.
If that's what he meant he's not making much sense.
The patent says nothing about being able to google the watermark, so he's got no way to find the picture unless he where to look for it, and he has to do it manually. Which means he's got no need for the watermark.
Not to mention that it's pretty stupid for you to be taking pictures of criminal activity, and post them online, without going to the police.
Unless you don't know you've taken the picture of illegal activity. But if that is the case killing you would be stupid for the criminal because it's low reward (your testimony is less important then the picture, and with you dead there's no way for the criminal to eliminate the picture), and high risk (like the cops ain't gonna notice a murder victim has a camera full of pics from another crime scene).
If this feature is active you can't take pictures, so your scenario of it getting somebody killed is a bit of a stretch.
As for the target market: it's probably lawyers, bail bondsman, and anybody else who works in the legal system. You can't take camera-phones into a courthouse or most other public facilities, you can't leave them at the desk, and it's not easy to find a smart-phone without a camera. An iPhone a lawyer actually could take to the courthouse would be very valuable indeed.
I doubt the courts will actually approve these things inside a courthouse. Telling the iPhones with the feature from all the other iPhones (or even iPhones from other smartphones) would take work, and courthouse security is notoriously bad at the w-word.
I was claiming capitation reduces the number of unnecessary medical procedures by removing doctor's incentive to prescribe them. That's the advantage of a capitation-based system.
As for whether it's possible to fund any system enough that the problem you mention goes away for all 6 billion humans, the answer is of course not. Criticizing a medical funding system for that flaw is like criticizing the Ford Focus's inability to ignore inertia. Yes it's true the Focus has inertia, and therefore takes some distance to stop, which makes accidents much more likely, but thre just isn;t a lot they can do about that.
You don't seem to understand the system, probably because I explained it poorly. Here's what happens, with round numbers 'cause I suck at math. A Doctor has 2,000 patients covered by the plan. He get's $2,500 per patient. Out of that $5,000,000 budget he approves every treatment, pays his receptionist, himself, nurses, etc. There's no need to call the insurance company. As long as the capitation rate is high enough to cover necessary medical care everybody gets everything they need.
The advantage is that there's no paperwork, approvals, or stupid insurance company executives second-guessing the Doctor. There's a strong incentive for the Doctor to order treatment his patient's need, because if somebody dies of a preventable disease the rest can go across the street.The disadvantage is there's also an incentive for Doctors to under-treat.
At least from a big picture level the system seems to beat the weird-ass hybrid we use because the Brits use it, have comparable health outcomes to ours in all the numbers that matter (ie: life expectancy, death rates), and spend a lot less. A lot lot less -- their government is pretty much the only purchaser of health care in the country, and it spends less per capita on health care then we do.
BTW, all this assumes the capitation rate is high enough that 99.99% of Doctors can treat their patients with it, and that there's a process so the other 0.01% don't get screwed just because they're the guy whose entire patient roster came down with terminal cancer on the exact same day. All systems for paying for health care blow up spectacularly when there isn't enough money to pay pay for the care people need.
The way around this is called capitation payment.
A Doctor gets a patient he gets a lump sum. He gets 100 patients, one of whom is really sick, he spends most of his money on the sick guy.
It works pretty good in the UK, which has the most cost-effective system in the industrialized world, but it's unlikely to appear here because it's doubtful anyone has the power to make physicians change their billing systems.
Don't be silly.
This is clearly the result of the data driven medicine movement. The author wants everybody to see a primary care Doctor, who will run the tests peer-reviewed academic research says are most efficient, and refer the patient to specialists as needed.
You don't get into liberal/conservative until you start talking about who pays for the Doctor, who picks the studies he has to follow, whether people who don't go pay extra taxes, etc.
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The gas tax isn't a percent. It's precisely $0.184 per gallon gasoline, $0.224 diesel.
Which is exactly what it was in 1993.
I don't know how it is in other regions, but in the places I've lived there are virtually no Toll Roads. I never even saw one in 28 years of living in Michigan, and there only seems to be one in Ohio.
The gas tax goes into the Interstate Highway Fund, which pays for the non-toll Federal Interstate highways almost everyone uses. And in the past few years that fund has run out of money, and needed to be topped off from the general budget. It cost $8 Billion in 2008 alone.
Two points.
1) If the gas pay were high enough to pay for the wear and tear of that truck on the roads I'd be paying for it, because my food prices would include the increased gas tax. But I'd only be paying to the extent I actually use the roads.
2) Most freight infrastructure exists without significant subsidies from the government. The North American freight rail system, for example, is self-supporting. So are ports, and freight airlines. But truckers would not be competitive for long-distance shipping if people like me didn't pay taxes for roads we can't use.
Because they're so simple. They would also allow our highway fund to be self-sustaining, which would mean that we could stop subsidizing it with income taxes from people who don't drive. Things like tax credits and CAFE Standards can be gamed.
In the long-term taxes also have the advantage of getting people used to $6 Gas. Oil production isn't rising. Indian and Chinese guys are finally getting rich enough to drive home for the holidays, which means it's inevitable that gas will go up. Period.
But since everybody pays the gas tax all the time nobody wants to be responsible for raising it, therefore we get a mess.
Keep in mind that the US Gas tax is used to pay for highways, that it's not indexed to inflation, and it was last raised early in Clinton's first term. Which means it doesn't actually cover the cost of maintaining highways.
The result is that my, non-car-using, ass has to pay income taxes to subsidize all these people who love their cars so much, but if I dare to ask them to pay for a train or another bus I'm breezily told "nobody will use that."
Actually they have:
http://www.ibisworld.com/industry/default.aspx?indid=817
Take a look at those light trucks you see tooling around. They're noticeably older then the cars.
A major reason we had to bail out GM and Chrysler was their cars sucked in latte 2008, and nobody wanted to buy SUVs with gas prices so high.
That's your candidate. But 307 of 308 Canadians people don't live in Chatahoochee MB.
But if you actually care about the issues you're gonna want to be able to find out roughly where all candidates in all 308 ridings think without talking to them, and that's not practical for ordinary people. Let's assume there're two candidates a riding, and the question is something that's obvious on the candidates website. 716*5 minutes is almost 60 hours. And that's assuming that a) it's trivial to figure out the top two non-partisan candidates in every riding and b) the issue in question is something they'd all put on their front page. This is just not something a citizen's group can realistically do. OTOH most organized interest groups have employees whose entire job is to do that sort of thing, or can acquire volunteers.
To show you how this works in action take the example of the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, right across from my hometown of Detroit. Nobody who has ever dealt with the Bridge Company likes them. They are delusional. They have a government-granted monopoly, which they use to do things like illegally seize land they don't own, sell "permits" that make it easy for people to break pollution regulations, and generally act like assholes. It's so bad capitalist tool Forbes magazine profiled their owner (Matty Moroun), using the headline "the Troll Under the Bridge." Canada's current political leadership is tired of their antics, so Moroun's great desire to double-down on his monopoly by building a second bridge right by their current one is thwarted.
Under a non-partisan system here's what happens:
Moroun's opponents have no money, and no organization outside of Windsor. They elect three guys from around Windsor who will reliably oppose Moroun. Moroun has dozens of people, who can be quite convincing Snake Oil Salesman. Special interest Moroun can hire the best Snake Oil Salesman in Canada to make his pitch ("I'm not a Monopolist, I'm a Capitalist, prove you love business by allowing mine to expand") to every single MP candidate in the other 305 Ridings. He probably weasels his way into the good graces of 155 winners, gets downtown Windsor bulldozed at Canadian Taxpayer expense, and proceeds to milk his monopoly for a few more Billion$. Also at Canadian Taxpayer expense, because you guys pay half the tolls.
OTOH in the current system what happens is the candidate says some sweet nothings to Moroun's guy, gets on the phone to someone whose dealt with Moroun before, and quickly realizes that he is to be avoided at all costs.
That was actually the idea in the US from the beginning.
The problem with actually implementing it in a free country is that there's nothing stopping an organized group from supporting certain candidates. Which means that if you have a Riding where the Evangelicals organize the hell out of themselves, but there a half-dozen candidates splitting the anti-Evangelical vote the Evangelicals win with 30%. You end up with all the drawbacks of a party-system, because the Unions organized their slate (NDP/Labor/Whatever), the Evangelicals organized theirs (probably a subsection of the Tories), big business managed to appoint a couple guys (another section of the Tories), etc. but it's all basically secret because everyone is officially non-partisan. There's no way to find out what the newly elected MP from Chatahoochee MB thinks without asking him.
Note that you haven't really reduced lobbyist influence, either. One of the ways lobbyists are kept in check is by Party Organizations who can tell them to go jump. Individual MPs don't necessarily have the strength to do that, particularly if they were elected with 25% of the vote. You've merely ensured that instead of making one cash donation that anyone can keep track of the lobbyists make 308 separate donations in every Riding.
BTW this is actually the major problem with getting a non-Islamist government in Egypt. During Mubarak's reign only one party was allowed. Now all the non-Islamists are creating their own technocratic/libertarian/Socialist/Monarchist/etc. parties. OTOH the major Islamic institution only made one. With 40% of the vote it will dominate everything because there simply isn't another real party. If the system was totally non-partisan it would be even worse, because the Brotherhood would still act like a political party, but it's candidates would be treated legally as guys who won 40%-25%.
Very few people actually switch political positions due to applying the intellectual tools of their job to reality. The exceptions tend to be people whose original political positions say something that flat-out contradicts what they have to believe to get their jobs done. Thus it's easy to find Conservative Christian kids who had to become less Conservative when they took a job that proved Evolution happens. But in general that's just not how the human mind works. You form your political opinions in your late teens, early 20s, and they don't change just because you get a job.
OTOH I doubt you'll find any techno-Libertarian or techno-Techncrat who switched from one to the other due to conducting an engineering study. There are probably plenty who switched because something happened outside of work that brought home either a) the value of government, or b) the drawbacks of it.
Engineers probably skew Libertarian, because the people who go into engineering school tend to be geeks and Libertarianism has an undeniable geek chic. But those folks didn't read Atlas Shrugged in their last Semester of College, they did it in the 11th Grade. They probably also skew technocratic, because the college-educated professional demographic tends to skew technocratic, and almost all of them are college-educated professionals.
I am just not getting the logic of this attack. Theoretically they're doing it as part of the Free Bradley Manning campaign. But who, that can actually help Bradley Manning gives a fuck about Stratfor?
Stratfor is what you use if you don't have a lot of resources. If you're some guy who follows foreign affairs a Stratfor subscription is great. If you're an Army Officer, who can call up a very experienced intelligence analyst at division HQ (he's called the G1), read every State Department memo ever written, etc. it's just not that useful. It could conceivably be useful as a check against groupthink (IIRC they were quite a bit more skeptical of Chalabi then Dubya was, for example), but that's about it.
Manning, OTOH, is a Private who is charged with giving away information that could potentially endanger US Troops. This includes disobeying orders. There are no US Army Officers anywhere who think helping out a possible check on groupthink is worth relaxing discipline. It's just not gonna happen.
I'm sure they've heard of proxies. That is how one gets around the Great Firewall, after all. I'm not sure they really care to keep their tracks covered. When you air videos of yourself doing a denial-of-service attack, using publicly available tools, on state TV OpSec is probably not your highest priority.
Their highest priority seems to be annoying influential people, who will then complain to the media. The media being technical doofuses breathlessly report that the Chinese Military owned Important American X, Chinese glory will be increased, the Chinese people will not think their government has sold out to American Corporations, etc.
In the US very few people have employment contracts. You agree to a salary, you get paid the salary, and that's it in terms of legal agreements between you and your employer. The advantage to a worker is he can simply stop showing up to a job and face no penalty whatsoever, the disadvantage is he's got no contractual recourse when an employer screws him.
States, the feds, and even some municipal governments; establish minimum standards that everyone has to follow. The federal guidelines are typically more generous to workers, because the people who lobby to make laws more generous to workers (mostly unions) have realized that it's a lot easier to get one government (the Feds) to act then 50.
This particular bill tweaks the law. A couple recent court decisions apparently allow IT folk to get overtime pay even if they're salaried, which is probably justified morally, and certainly justified legally, but is also clearly not what Congress intended. All salaried are supposed to be professionals who do not get overtime. Thus both parties support the change.
In general you're right.
Unfortunately Obama is taking the position that all ACTA's provisions are compatible with existing US Law, so actual ratification is unnecessary.
Look at it this way:
If the Obama administration charges somebody with counterfeiting some product using the US Code the Courts are not gonna let the dude off because ACTA isn't ratified. They're gonna try the guy under the US Code. And, according to Obama, they'll convict if he actually violated ACTA because everything illegal under ACTA is illegal under the current US Code.
The people in charge of judging whether the US is complying with the treaty will have to count the dude's conviction as compliance.
In other words you shouldn't be worried about ACTA. Yopu should be worried that everything ACTA does is already illegal.
Here's the thing:
If this treaty changes US Law it cannot be enforced, because it is not ratified. Which means it does not matter.
If it doesn't change US Law the problem is not the treaty, the problem is existing US Law.
I suspect what's going on is that US Law is vague, and subject to interpretation. The treaty is probably more vague, but the window of actions permitted by both ACTA and current US Law is probably a lot smaller then the window of actions allowed under current law. Which means Obama's picked an interpretation o US Law that Sean Flynn doesn't like. But "President says he's gonna do legal things Ron Wyden dislikes," makes a much shittier headline then "President to Enforce Unratified Treaty," even tho the former is perfectly true and the latter is by definition false.
I'm not sure you're understanding the process here.
The President unilaterally commits us to agreements all the time. That's his job. What he doesn't do is implement those agreements. Thus we signed Kyoto, but we did not ratify it, so it's not the official law of the land.
In this case he's arguing that ACTA doesn't actually change US Law, so there's no need for Congressional approval. In other words he's saying he's already implemented the agreement because the US's current laws require him to do everything he'd have to do to comply with ACTA anyway. For example if you started selling fake iMacs you'd get your ass sued. Do you think the court's gonna say "We must dismiss the lawsuit, because while it is clearly valid, the Obama administration agreed to stop counterfeiting in a treaty that has not been ratified by the Senate, therefore selling fake iMacs is entirely legal until the Executive and Legislative branches resolve the situation."
In other words you shouldn't worry that Obama's not gonna put the treaty to the US Senate. You should worry that, as a US Citizen, you are already bound to do whatever it says by laws already on the books. Like the DMCA.
Protesters aren't the only ones with rights.
I, for example, have the right to use the public roads to drive to work. If you and 50,000 of your friends all decide to protest downtown during rush hour I'm not gonna be able to do so.
If there's a permit process in place the government can mitigate these problems, my Constitutional right to get to work won't be hindered, and your right to protest will be hindered solely by you having to file some paperwork.
That the protests are small is probably a major reason the cops use force.
Why? Think about it this way:
Beating the shot out of one guy in a 5,000 person crowd is incredibly stupid, and border-line suicidal. OTOH it's pretty much the only way to stop a truly determined one man protest.
Different countries set up their university systems very, very differently. In the US a Bachelors degree, by definition, includes, an awful lot of stuff that isn't described on the degree paper. That's basically the entire point of the degree. So somebody who has a four-year degree in Engineering has 20-30 credits (or 8-10 classes) of crap that is totally unrelated to the particular subfield of engineering they specialized in. A BA has 20-30 credits of crap completely unrelated to their Major. My Major was History and Political Science, but they wouldn't have let me graduate if I didn't also have a foreign language, multiple math and science course, etc. The idea is that somebody with a Bachelors degree is a well-rounded human being. Something of a Renaissance man, by definition. While most Americans with Bachelors degrees will acknowledge that, in theory, one could be a well-rounded human being with valuable insights in a wide variety of fields without having a Bachelors, in practice nobody without a Bachelors is considered for 99.999% of non-blue collar jobs. This holds true even for institutions that love to denigrate the Bachelors-having set for it's perceived elitism. There are zero Fox News Analysts with less then a Bachelors degree.
If that's what he meant he's not making much sense. The patent says nothing about being able to google the watermark, so he's got no way to find the picture unless he where to look for it, and he has to do it manually. Which means he's got no need for the watermark. Not to mention that it's pretty stupid for you to be taking pictures of criminal activity, and post them online, without going to the police. Unless you don't know you've taken the picture of illegal activity. But if that is the case killing you would be stupid for the criminal because it's low reward (your testimony is less important then the picture, and with you dead there's no way for the criminal to eliminate the picture), and high risk (like the cops ain't gonna notice a murder victim has a camera full of pics from another crime scene).
Not the Wayne County Courthouse in Detroit as of last March. I had to give my Blackberry to one of the guys selling parking spaces. He charged $20.
If this feature is active you can't take pictures, so your scenario of it getting somebody killed is a bit of a stretch. As for the target market: it's probably lawyers, bail bondsman, and anybody else who works in the legal system. You can't take camera-phones into a courthouse or most other public facilities, you can't leave them at the desk, and it's not easy to find a smart-phone without a camera. An iPhone a lawyer actually could take to the courthouse would be very valuable indeed. I doubt the courts will actually approve these things inside a courthouse. Telling the iPhones with the feature from all the other iPhones (or even iPhones from other smartphones) would take work, and courthouse security is notoriously bad at the w-word.
Re-read my original post.
I was claiming capitation reduces the number of unnecessary medical procedures by removing doctor's incentive to prescribe them. That's the advantage of a capitation-based system.
As for whether it's possible to fund any system enough that the problem you mention goes away for all 6 billion humans, the answer is of course not. Criticizing a medical funding system for that flaw is like criticizing the Ford Focus's inability to ignore inertia. Yes it's true the Focus has inertia, and therefore takes some distance to stop, which makes accidents much more likely, but thre just isn;t a lot they can do about that.
Approval?
You don't seem to understand the system, probably because I explained it poorly. Here's what happens, with round numbers 'cause I suck at math. A Doctor has 2,000 patients covered by the plan. He get's $2,500 per patient. Out of that $5,000,000 budget he approves every treatment, pays his receptionist, himself, nurses, etc. There's no need to call the insurance company. As long as the capitation rate is high enough to cover necessary medical care everybody gets everything they need.
The advantage is that there's no paperwork, approvals, or stupid insurance company executives second-guessing the Doctor. There's a strong incentive for the Doctor to order treatment his patient's need, because if somebody dies of a preventable disease the rest can go across the street.The disadvantage is there's also an incentive for Doctors to under-treat.
At least from a big picture level the system seems to beat the weird-ass hybrid we use because the Brits use it, have comparable health outcomes to ours in all the numbers that matter (ie: life expectancy, death rates), and spend a lot less. A lot lot less -- their government is pretty much the only purchaser of health care in the country, and it spends less per capita on health care then we do.
BTW, all this assumes the capitation rate is high enough that 99.99% of Doctors can treat their patients with it, and that there's a process so the other 0.01% don't get screwed just because they're the guy whose entire patient roster came down with terminal cancer on the exact same day. All systems for paying for health care blow up spectacularly when there isn't enough money to pay pay for the care people need.
The way around this is called capitation payment. A Doctor gets a patient he gets a lump sum. He gets 100 patients, one of whom is really sick, he spends most of his money on the sick guy. It works pretty good in the UK, which has the most cost-effective system in the industrialized world, but it's unlikely to appear here because it's doubtful anyone has the power to make physicians change their billing systems.
Don't be silly. This is clearly the result of the data driven medicine movement. The author wants everybody to see a primary care Doctor, who will run the tests peer-reviewed academic research says are most efficient, and refer the patient to specialists as needed. You don't get into liberal/conservative until you start talking about who pays for the Doctor, who picks the studies he has to follow, whether people who don't go pay extra taxes, etc.