But you don't need a license to buy or use a gun (in most places). Nor does the CPSC or any other regulatory body place restrictions on their manufacture (in any meaningful way).
OTOH, you must register a car and have a license to drive it. To register the car for use on the road, it must meet a host of requirements imposed by the federal and state governments.
Gus are the outlandish exception to just about every rule, and cannot be extended to account for any other product.
Yes, but where your logic fails is that 1) train tracks are very expensve to build and 2) you still have to get the material from the rail termination to the final destination.
You can think of it as the broadband problem, but without the luxury of counting RF carriers. Much of the US population has broadband available, but more than 95% of the US landmass does not have access to hardwired broadband. Build a house 300 miles from the Washington DC and you'll find that "high speed internet access" means that they've upgraded to V.90 modems in the pool two years ago (I'm not joking!). We already have copper to most US homes (can you say "Universal access fee?" I knew you could), but just dropping in the switches and repeater stations is prohibitive for the outlying communities.
Now, back to rail. It's not $1.50 a foot for cable, plus $500 a pole to string it. Now your talking hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile - maybe millions. And that doesn't count the court costs for the land you're going to take via eminent(sp) domain. If you take a look, hazmat producing/storing/disposal sites tend to be in remote areas. It's partly safety, partly NIBMY resistance. There's no rail out there to use.
Rail is a fabulous idea for transportation of all sorts of things. It's perfect for, say, Denmark, or Disney World (uniform high population density or planned community) but not for the wide open spaces and independant "frontier" lifestyle of most of the US or Canada. Heck, I'd take rail to the office if I could, but as I live on the top of a mountain, my entire town (several square miles has only 1500 residents, and I'm the only one who works in the old school building I rent, it's not really a luxury I'll have in my lifetime.
There are a few nut cases out here (south west Virginia) who think that adding a rail line in the I-81 corridor will help the traffic on the interstate. Not a chance - even if only 30% of the truck traffic were local in origin or destination, you would still need to get the cargo to a rail station at each end. It's just not a practical solution.
When I was in LA, there was a critic with the Times who was just awful. Of course, that was my opinion, but luckily it was very accurate for me. If he hated a movie, and threw in some of his oft used "keywords" in his scathing review, I knew it was one I would like. Every film he liked, I would avoid like the plague.
Moreal of the story - you can use lousy critics, they just have to be consistent. Once he's benchmarked, it's almost as good has having a good critic;-)
No, clearly this won approval due to the cool factor, and dies due to the practicality & cost factor. The "Oooooh, shiny!" effect is not lost on parts of NASA management, and is the second most powerful motivator for congress. (The first most powerful motivator for congress is the "Ooooooh, green in my district" effect.)
I worked with several PIs (principal investigators - heads of projects) while at NASA, and the truth is ugly. If it doesn't shine up real nice at the dog-and-pony show, it won't get the desired funding.
Example: Very Long Baseline Interefeometry is very accurate for determining motions in the earths crust, but it uses large, boring antennas to record boring signals from far away stars. Comparison of received signals against known time standards can be used to determine relative motion in the sub cm level (iirc).
Laser Satellite Ranging is not as accurate, but uses a bright green (Nd:YAG) laser several inches in diameter to "hit" a 150cm diameter satellite target in low earth orbit, and read the return signal (sometimes measured in single digit photons) to get the time of flight. By knowing the orbit precisely (bettern than 5cm @ 6000km), a the motion of a terrestrial station can be tracked over time. Due to the fast motion of the satellite, the laser can be seen actively tracking the target, and if you have two stations co-located (usu. for calibration) you get two green death-ray looking things firing to a single point in the sky. Cool factor off the charts.
Can you guess which one got better funding? Lasers. Both worthy projects, both studying the same thing using different techniques. One with a much easier funding path.
My question would be, how much effort (processing) does it take to get a result which falls within the bounds (-acceptable,acceptable) or within the band for numerically processed data? I mean, if you plot a course back to earth and the landing interval is calculated as (-5000', 1000') for your zero rate of decent altitude, is that really comforting?
Re:World first non-lethal weapon of mass destructi
on
Radiofrequency Weapons
·
· Score: 1
That's the beauty of the system - even guerella (sp?) forces are likely to need electronic communications for all but annoyance operations. I suspect the loss of cell phone service would cripple many (otherwise) low-tech operations.
Sadly, modern governmentshave forgotten what war is really about. Oh, sure, when you pay with someone who argrees to the same rules, you can do the clean-and-tidy version where only young men are killed or wounded, and prisoners get swapped at the end.
The probelm is, REAL war is fought when one nation (or an alliance) has an unstoppable will to take over somehting they think should be theirs to control, or a nation (or alliance) defending - to the death and at all costs - from said invading military. When a REAL war is fought, those who play be the "rules" lose. Can you say Vietnam? No? How about American Revolution? The winning side didn't play by the rules and would have broken the Vegas bookies with their successes.
War is a nasty, ugly, foolish endeavor that only ends in tears. Most of our leaders are so worried about saving face that they go to war for very poor reasons. I'm am against war as an international problem solving technique. Nonetheless, if it comes to war I want to know that my President has the balls to call in the Nukes, 'cause if it's not important enough to kill every last one of the enemy and turn their country into an uninterruped sheet of radioactive glass, then it probably wasn't worth fighting in the first place. Play the game for keeps or don't play the game at all.
Back on topic...this bio stuff scares the $#!t out of me. I suppose we need to know how it works so that we can learn to counteract it, but this is the kind of stuff that really ought to be classified. Sure, the "bad guys" might find out how to do it themselves, but it would take them a lot longer than if they could sift through the whitepapers published by others. Of course, I suppose if it got out, mutated, and wiped out most of the humans, it just might save the rest of the planet;-)
And now you must ask youself...am I Right (kill all those foreigners, even the women and children), Left (save the planet from those nasty humans), or just plain nuts?
He He... I forgot what my.sig was. That's not my campaign slogan, btw. Maybe it should be "There are way to many stupid people in the world, and most of them seem to have been elected to run our county, state, and country. " Of course, the tag line would have to be "You can change that this fall...vote for me instead!"
I haven't made any promises about staying in local office, 'cause I turn 35 this winter which makes me eligible to run for President. It seems like anyone with half a brain and a few million dollars can get a spot on the democratic ticket. Anyone have a few mil to spare?
Which is why I decided to run for local office this fall. Will I win? Who knows. I didn't like the choices I was going to have on the ballot, so I got the required signatures to put my name on the ballot. I've spent about $160 on advertising and a few evenings away from my family talking to others in my district. A small price to have a voice.
I can't make a difference at a larger level than my county...no I take that back. My new title will actually get me in the door where I couldn't previously. Maybe I'll be heard after all. I know I have an earful to deliver!
I, for one, am glad that my voting site still uses the old monster sized lever-operated machines for voting. Everything is on one board, I can change my decisions as many times as I want before I exit the booth. And, of course, there's that satisfying mechanical noise when my ballot is created.
With all the millions of dollars spent trying to implement various digital solutions, is it really more expensive to maintain the old machines? Maybe the old machines don't break down often enough to support a company? How tragic is that? We have to go to a system which we know is less (physically) reliable, just so we can keep a company in business! For the cost of the new voting machine hardware, you can buy an awful lot of replacement widgets for the old machines; for the cost of anuual software upgrades you can directly employ quite a few old-machine repairmen.
And finally, I'm sure the machines at my polling station are at least 40 yeras old. All these digital stations we're buying now - what condition will they be in come 2043? Will we have to find a stick of 266MHz DDR? How expensive will it be to manufacture the (let's say) 2500 required to fix these great voting machines? We worry that the machines we have are obsolete, but aren't we just replacing them with something even worse?
I couldn't possibly afford to pay out-of-pocket for medical care. The rates listed on the invoice are just foolishly high. When I get my insurance statement, though, the rates are a bit more in line with what's affordable. Actually, some reimbursements are, IMHO, too low for the services rendered. There are lots of costs involved in servicing a patient (record keeping, billing, expendables, rent, receptionist, taxes, nurse time) that add up to far more than the physician's time.
Nonetheless, if I could get the insurance-negotiated rates up front from my physician and dentist, I would happily pay the day I received service and there would be no need for claim forms and 60-90 day payment delays. At negotited rates, I could get away with a high deductible major medical policy and a medical savings account, paying most routine costs out-of-pocket.
On a side topic, the dramatic rise in malpractice insurance premiums (actually, most premiums) over the last few years has very little to do with (1) 9/11 losses or (2) malpractice lawsuits. You can see the malpractice effects in different states with varying laws, but that's not the driving factor.
The financial markets - bonds in particular - are the problem. Don't believe me? Where do insurance companies make their money? Sure, they get capital from their premiums, but that money nees to be invested or their reserves will slowly erode to the inevitable march of inflation. They must invest in safe securities, and bonds are where a majority of the money goes.
When the bond market is doing well, insurance companies, like all for-profit ventures, seek to expand. They do this, in part, by offering to undercut the competition on price. During the boom years in the 90s, indurance premiums in some industries didn't even cover the losses. It didn't matter because the ins. companies were making so much in the securities market that they tured a tidy profit. Now the boom is over and the insurance companies have to cover payouts with premiums again.
FWIW, I have a bit of first hand experience with liability insurance. I pay over 12% of _gross billables_ to insure my small structural engineering firm. I've never had a claim, and very little history to add cost to my "claims made" policy.
I only watch one class of event in real-time: sports. Oh what I would give to get all my football in HD. I might even consider watching basketball, baseball, hockey, or soccer if it were in HD. Okay, not really those last three - boring in hi def is still boring. But I digress...
With that exception, I don't have to watch anything to discuss it around the coffee pot the next morning. I watch TiVo so often (2-3 hours of programming a week, which is a lot for me by pre-TiVo standards) that when I happen to be watching live TV I get worried the batteries have died in the remote because I can't FF. Now, I would expect PVRs to be able to timeshift, but if it's illegal to do so...where do we go from there?
I suppose I feel lucky that so many of the/. readers are hackers-at-heart, and at least some of you will fire up your illegal Linux law-circumvention machines and strip out that annoying bit so I can get all the digitally enhanced Alton Brown I can handle off of bittorrent. But what about poor sots like my mother? She hasn't got a clue. She still thinks AOL IS the internet. If she misses something, it's gone for good - and she proabbly represents the "average" consumer out there.
Oh well, I've written to:
Michael Powell (who still needs a spine transplant) my congressman, Rick Boucher (who "gets" it) both VA Senators (neither of which could his own ass if he used both hands) and the head of the subcommitee which oversees the FCC (Upton, about whom I know nothing)
I can't wait for the responses (in order: Comment period is over - f*ck off, Thank you I'm doing all I can, F*ck off, F*ck off, and You're not in my district - f*ck off)
This is a typical hype-story. Now, I'm from Tech, and we can count, but the math used is leaving a lot out of the equeation.
The press release quote from the Roanoke Times is "Tech plans to spend $5.2 million over the next five years on the computer cluster, which eventually will be housed in the university's fledgling Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science." and is here: http://www.unirel.vt.edu/vtnetletter/sept03/featur e1.html
We'll pretend the facilities already existed and all of the people will be working for free (that's what graduate students are for anyways, right?) So... 12000 SF of dedicated facility space (and a 24x7 staff) Assembly, testing, and operation. Sole use facility items (1.5MW of UPS and Diesel Generators) 170 Tons of cooling (HVAC & assoc components)...is all free
Now, from the $5.2M (over 5 years) comes:
Power: 3MW x 24hx365.25dx5y x (1000x0.06c/kwH) = $7.89M
Oops, even if all the network, racks, cableing, custom cooling parts, and computers were FREE, we'd still be $2.5M over budget. Whoops.
This is somewhat simlar to UAB flying an amatuer radio satellite for $20,000. If you ignore the costs of everything, it always sounds cheap.
Heck, I can get you a brand new Mercedes S Class Limo for $50. That's as long as you don't count the $2000/mo lease payment for the next four years, and maintenance, or the $40,000/yr for the chauffeur (that's really operating budget, so it doesn't count toward the cost of the car).
Or just put them in a removable tray. My XP root drive (120GB) gets cloned once a week to a second 120GB drive in a $15 removable drive tray. Yes, $15 for the insert and tray. Extra trays run about $7. I take the second drive home with me and put it in a fire safe.
I've tested the cloned drive and it boots flawlessly into XP, so I'm always just a short drive away from being instantly back up after a HD disaster.
I suppose the best situation would be three drives - a RAID 0 plus my removable backup, but I'm not that mission critical. A weeks worth of changes on my root wouldn't be tragic.
But don't forget to send a short (paper) letter to Michael Dell telling him _why_ you chose another vendor to service your corporate account. Preferrably, you can tell him why you have chosen bnot to putchase your next computer from his company, but rather from his competitor. Most businesses & end users don't buy processors, they buy computers. Computer makers must know that we expect computers wihtout DRM shackles, otherwise Intel will continue to underwrite their advertising campaigns and get their hobbled chips into more systems.
Yeah, but Porche's don't come in 12 packs, AFAIK - you have to buy them one at a time from a vending machine...oh, I guess the analogy breaks down there.
Twelve years ago I paid $190 for my 48G after I lost(!) my 28s. If it died today, I'd probably pay twice that to get another before I'd buy a TI.
I downloaded all the cutsy games and calendars at one point, but I've sense removed them all. I have all my key engineering formulae programmed into it, and with billables approaching $100/hr it save's me about $20-$25 per day in real productivity.
Ahhh, the second half of #4 is what I'd like to see, but with shorter follow-on periods or an availability clause.
Think of it as an aim at Disney's "Vault" method of distribution, or just the ability to get out-of-print, but in-copyright works. I'd allow 14 or 21 years unassailable rights, followed by sucessive 3 year periods in which retail material must be "in-print" and available for purchase for more than 1/2 the period, up to the Berne Convention limits. Okay, actually, I'd like to see it limited to 30 years or the life of the author plus 10 years, whichever occurs SOONER.
Apparently, my "Plain Old Text" still made my tags dissappear on the first couple sentences of that last paragraph. Damn slashdot.
let's try that again, kids:
[flamebait] Isn't the line in the 2nd amendment about the right to bear arms followed by the caveat that it be for the purpose of a well-regulated militia? Are the state national guards not that "well regulated milita" which was so necessary in the years before a national paid army? Is your desire to own a shotgun for sport not protected by the 2nd amendment? [/flamebait]
That's quite true. I suspect that - even in theory - no individual or group of individuals, given an unlimited right to buy arms, could stand up the the US military. Even Bill Gates couldn't rally against the $300+B/yr the gov't spends.
However, the right to free speech _can_ mobilze a nation to "overthrow" the government in power. It usually happens every 4-12 years here.
Isn't the line in the 2nd amendment about the right to bear arms followed by the caveat that it be for the purpose of a well-regulated militia? Are the state national guards not that "well regulated milita" which was so necessary in the years before a national paid army? Is your desire to own a shotgun for sport not protected by the 2nd amendment? For what it's worth, I own a 12ga dbl barrel shotgun, and (until just recently), a Semi-automatic Ruger MarkII pistol. Though I think a well secured gun is a lousy crime deterrant, there are times when they are quite useful. That's especially true when you live out in the country, as I do.
Actually, DeCSS circumvents a copy-protection feature of a commerically produced DVD which inadvertantly prevents the end user of a purchased product from a legal use of said product.
Before you cry foul, the "feature" was intended to prevent the viewing of a DVD on an unauthorized system (one which has no macrovision or region encoding, for example, which is TRUE for region 1 DVDs based on current law, AFAIK).
Nonetheless, you have purchased a product - not a licence. If your DVD breaks in five years, they will not replace it for a nominal media cost, nor will they send you new media should your system change (OTOH, microsoft used to send you 3.5" floppies if you licenced their software and you got it delivered on CD).
Once you've bought it, you should be able to do anything you want to with it, as long as the product (physical disc and information therein) stays with you and, arguably, your immediate family. You can even use it to shim up that door frame that's a bit out of whack. Of course, if it doens't work to shim the door frame, you won't get your money back, as it's not the intended use of the product. If , even with DeCSS it doesn't work on your PC - once again - you won't get your money back. If you put it in your DVD player and it doesn't work, you can take it back and get a replacement, because that IS the intended use.
Try this analogy: you may purchase a lock from Quickset, sit on your living room floor, and pick the lock all you want. You are circumventing their mechanism without a licenced key, but it's your lock and your home. The law has not been broken.
If you had paid by the hour for that seat at the park, and had several hours (or days, or months) invested in the game you would probably have civil recourse, but I'm not aware of a law which would forbid you to do such a thing (maybe disorderly conduct?)
OTOH, If I owned a private, pay-for-membership chess club, with a sign out front which says "no tresspassing" (pronounce it "terms of service") and you came in and flipped over a chess board and then ran out, I _could_ call the cops on you and file charges for tresspassing. Then sue you in civil court for damage to my business as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a secret stash of improvised maces,
should you wish to arm yourself.
Sarcasm isn't a moderation option, so we have to settle for the 50/40/10 mix which counts as appropriate moderation.
But you don't need a license to buy or use a gun (in most places). Nor does the CPSC or any other regulatory body place restrictions on their manufacture (in any meaningful way).
OTOH, you must register a car and have a license to drive it. To register the car for use on the road, it must meet a host of requirements imposed by the federal and state governments.
Gus are the outlandish exception to just about every rule, and cannot be extended to account for any other product.
Yes, but where your logic fails is that 1) train tracks are very expensve to build and 2) you still have to get the material from the rail termination to the final destination.
You can think of it as the broadband problem, but without the luxury of counting RF carriers. Much of the US population has broadband available, but more than 95% of the US landmass does not have access to hardwired broadband. Build a house 300 miles from the Washington DC and you'll find that "high speed internet access" means that they've upgraded to V.90 modems in the pool two years ago (I'm not joking!). We already have copper to most US homes (can you say "Universal access fee?" I knew you could), but just dropping in the switches and repeater stations is prohibitive for the outlying communities.
Now, back to rail. It's not $1.50 a foot for cable, plus $500 a pole to string it. Now your talking hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile - maybe millions. And that doesn't count the court costs for the land you're going to take via eminent(sp) domain. If you take a look, hazmat producing/storing/disposal sites tend to be in remote areas. It's partly safety, partly NIBMY resistance. There's no rail out there to use.
Rail is a fabulous idea for transportation of all sorts of things. It's perfect for, say, Denmark, or Disney World (uniform high population density or planned community) but not for the wide open spaces and independant "frontier" lifestyle of most of the US or Canada. Heck, I'd take rail to the office if I could, but as I live on the top of a mountain, my entire town (several square miles has only 1500 residents, and I'm the only one who works in the old school building I rent, it's not really a luxury I'll have in my lifetime.
There are a few nut cases out here (south west Virginia) who think that adding a rail line in the I-81 corridor will help the traffic on the interstate. Not a chance - even if only 30% of the truck traffic were local in origin or destination, you would still need to get the cargo to a rail station at each end. It's just not a practical solution.
When I was in LA, there was a critic with the Times who was just awful. Of course, that was my opinion, but luckily it was very accurate for me. If he hated a movie, and threw in some of his oft used "keywords" in his scathing review, I knew it was one I would like. Every film he liked, I would avoid like the plague.
;-)
Moreal of the story - you can use lousy critics, they just have to be consistent. Once he's benchmarked, it's almost as good has having a good critic
No, clearly this won approval due to the cool factor, and dies due to the practicality & cost factor. The "Oooooh, shiny!" effect is not lost on parts of NASA management, and is the second most powerful motivator for congress. (The first most powerful motivator for congress is the "Ooooooh, green in my district" effect.)
I worked with several PIs (principal investigators - heads of projects) while at NASA, and the truth is ugly. If it doesn't shine up real nice at the dog-and-pony show, it won't get the desired funding.
Example: Very Long Baseline Interefeometry is very accurate for determining motions in the earths crust, but it uses large, boring antennas to record boring signals from far away stars. Comparison of received signals against known time standards can be used to determine relative motion in the sub cm level (iirc).
Laser Satellite Ranging is not as accurate, but uses a bright green (Nd:YAG) laser several inches in diameter to "hit" a 150cm diameter satellite target in low earth orbit, and read the return signal (sometimes measured in single digit photons) to get the time of flight. By knowing the orbit precisely (bettern than 5cm @ 6000km), a the motion of a terrestrial station can be tracked over time. Due to the fast motion of the satellite, the laser can be seen actively tracking the target, and if you have two stations co-located (usu. for calibration) you get two green death-ray looking things firing to a single point in the sky. Cool factor off the charts.
Can you guess which one got better funding? Lasers. Both worthy projects, both studying the same thing using different techniques. One with a much easier funding path.
My question would be, how much effort (processing) does it take to get a result which falls within the bounds (-acceptable,acceptable) or within the band for numerically processed data? I mean, if you plot a course back to earth and the landing interval is calculated as (-5000', 1000') for your zero rate of decent altitude, is that really comforting?
That's the beauty of the system - even guerella (sp?) forces are likely to need electronic communications for all but annoyance operations. I suspect the loss of cell phone service would cripple many (otherwise) low-tech operations.
623 comments and not a mention of Tom Clancy's book yet. Has his Shiva virus fallen so far into our literary past?
Now all we need is a conspiracy!
And we're the reason the pacific campaign ended.
;-)
Sadly, modern governmentshave forgotten what war is really about. Oh, sure, when you pay with someone who argrees to the same rules, you can do the clean-and-tidy version where only young men are killed or wounded, and prisoners get swapped at the end.
The probelm is, REAL war is fought when one nation (or an alliance) has an unstoppable will to take over somehting they think should be theirs to control, or a nation (or alliance) defending - to the death and at all costs - from said invading military. When a REAL war is fought, those who play be the "rules" lose. Can you say Vietnam? No? How about American Revolution? The winning side didn't play by the rules and would have broken the Vegas bookies with their successes.
War is a nasty, ugly, foolish endeavor that only ends in tears. Most of our leaders are so worried about saving face that they go to war for very poor reasons. I'm am against war as an international problem solving technique. Nonetheless, if it comes to war I want to know that my President has the balls to call in the Nukes, 'cause if it's not important enough to kill every last one of the enemy and turn their country into an uninterruped sheet of radioactive glass, then it probably wasn't worth fighting in the first place. Play the game for keeps or don't play the game at all.
Back on topic...this bio stuff scares the $#!t out of me. I suppose we need to know how it works so that we can learn to counteract it, but this is the kind of stuff that really ought to be classified. Sure, the "bad guys" might find out how to do it themselves, but it would take them a lot longer than if they could sift through the whitepapers published by others. Of course, I suppose if it got out, mutated, and wiped out most of the humans, it just might save the rest of the planet
And now you must ask youself...am I Right (kill all those foreigners, even the women and children), Left (save the planet from those nasty humans), or just plain nuts?
He He... I forgot what my .sig was. That's not my campaign slogan, btw. Maybe it should be "There are way to many stupid people in the world, and most of them seem to have been elected to run our county, state, and country. " Of course, the tag line would have to be "You can change that this fall...vote for me instead!"
I haven't made any promises about staying in local office, 'cause I turn 35 this winter which makes me eligible to run for President. It seems like anyone with half a brain and a few million dollars can get a spot on the democratic ticket. Anyone have a few mil to spare?
Which is why I decided to run for local office this fall. Will I win? Who knows. I didn't like the choices I was going to have on the ballot, so I got the required signatures to put my name on the ballot. I've spent about $160 on advertising and a few evenings away from my family talking to others in my district. A small price to have a voice.
I can't make a difference at a larger level than my county...no I take that back. My new title will actually get me in the door where I couldn't previously. Maybe I'll be heard after all. I know I have an earful to deliver!
I, for one, am glad that my voting site still uses the old monster sized lever-operated machines for voting. Everything is on one board, I can change my decisions as many times as I want before I exit the booth. And, of course, there's that satisfying mechanical noise when my ballot is created.
With all the millions of dollars spent trying to implement various digital solutions, is it really more expensive to maintain the old machines? Maybe the old machines don't break down often enough to support a company? How tragic is that? We have to go to a system which we know is less (physically) reliable, just so we can keep a company in business! For the cost of the new voting machine hardware, you can buy an awful lot of replacement widgets for the old machines; for the cost of anuual software upgrades you can directly employ quite a few old-machine repairmen.
And finally, I'm sure the machines at my polling station are at least 40 yeras old. All these digital stations we're buying now - what condition will they be in come 2043? Will we have to find a stick of 266MHz DDR? How expensive will it be to manufacture the (let's say) 2500 required to fix these great voting machines? We worry that the machines we have are obsolete, but aren't we just replacing them with something even worse?
Bingo! We have a winner!
I couldn't possibly afford to pay out-of-pocket for medical care. The rates listed on the invoice are just foolishly high. When I get my insurance statement, though, the rates are a bit more in line with what's affordable. Actually, some reimbursements are, IMHO, too low for the services rendered. There are lots of costs involved in servicing a patient (record keeping, billing, expendables, rent, receptionist, taxes, nurse time) that add up to far more than the physician's time.
Nonetheless, if I could get the insurance-negotiated rates up front from my physician and dentist, I would happily pay the day I received service and there would be no need for claim forms and 60-90 day payment delays. At negotited rates, I could get away with a high deductible major medical policy and a medical savings account, paying most routine costs out-of-pocket.
On a side topic, the dramatic rise in malpractice insurance premiums (actually, most premiums) over the last few years has very little to do with (1) 9/11 losses or (2) malpractice lawsuits. You can see the malpractice effects in different states with varying laws, but that's not the driving factor.
The financial markets - bonds in particular - are the problem. Don't believe me? Where do insurance companies make their money? Sure, they get capital from their premiums, but that money nees to be invested or their reserves will slowly erode to the inevitable march of inflation. They must invest in safe securities, and bonds are where a majority of the money goes.
When the bond market is doing well, insurance companies, like all for-profit ventures, seek to expand. They do this, in part, by offering to undercut the competition on price. During the boom years in the 90s, indurance premiums in some industries didn't even cover the losses. It didn't matter because the ins. companies were making so much in the securities market that they tured a tidy profit. Now the boom is over and the insurance companies have to cover payouts with premiums again.
FWIW, I have a bit of first hand experience with liability insurance. I pay over 12% of _gross billables_ to insure my small structural engineering firm. I've never had a claim, and very little history to add cost to my "claims made" policy.
I only watch one class of event in real-time: sports. Oh what I would give to get all my football in HD. I might even consider watching basketball, baseball, hockey, or soccer if it were in HD. Okay, not really those last three - boring in hi def is still boring. But I digress...
/. readers are hackers-at-heart, and at least some of you will fire up your illegal Linux law-circumvention machines and strip out that annoying bit so I can get all the digitally enhanced Alton Brown I can handle off of bittorrent. But what about poor sots like my mother? She hasn't got a clue. She still thinks AOL IS the internet. If she misses something, it's gone for good - and she proabbly represents the "average" consumer out there.
With that exception, I don't have to watch anything to discuss it around the coffee pot the next morning. I watch TiVo so often (2-3 hours of programming a week, which is a lot for me by pre-TiVo standards) that when I happen to be watching live TV I get worried the batteries have died in the remote because I can't FF. Now, I would expect PVRs to be able to timeshift, but if it's illegal to do so...where do we go from there?
I suppose I feel lucky that so many of the
Oh well, I've written to:
Michael Powell (who still needs a spine transplant)
my congressman, Rick Boucher (who "gets" it)
both VA Senators (neither of which could his own ass if he used both hands)
and the head of the subcommitee which oversees the FCC (Upton, about whom I know nothing)
I can't wait for the responses (in order: Comment period is over - f*ck off, Thank you I'm doing all I can, F*ck off, F*ck off, and You're not in my district - f*ck off)
This is a typical hype-story. Now, I'm from Tech, and we can count, but the math used is leaving a lot out of the equeation.
r e1.html
...is all free
The press release quote from the Roanoke Times is "Tech plans to spend $5.2 million over the next five years on the computer cluster, which eventually will be housed in the university's fledgling Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science." and is here: http://www.unirel.vt.edu/vtnetletter/sept03/featu
We'll pretend the facilities already existed and all of the people will be working for free (that's what graduate students are for anyways, right?)
So...
12000 SF of dedicated facility space (and a 24x7 staff)
Assembly, testing, and operation.
Sole use facility items (1.5MW of UPS and Diesel Generators)
170 Tons of cooling (HVAC & assoc components)
Now, from the $5.2M (over 5 years) comes:
Power: 3MW x 24hx365.25dx5y x (1000x0.06c/kwH) = $7.89M
Oops, even if all the network, racks, cableing, custom cooling parts, and computers were FREE, we'd still be $2.5M over budget. Whoops.
This is somewhat simlar to UAB flying an amatuer radio satellite for $20,000. If you ignore the costs of everything, it always sounds cheap.
Heck, I can get you a brand new Mercedes S Class Limo for $50. That's as long as you don't count the $2000/mo lease payment for the next four years, and maintenance, or the $40,000/yr for the chauffeur (that's really operating budget, so it doesn't count toward the cost of the car).
Or just put them in a removable tray. My XP root drive (120GB) gets cloned once a week to a second 120GB drive in a $15 removable drive tray. Yes, $15 for the insert and tray. Extra trays run about $7. I take the second drive home with me and put it in a fire safe.
I've tested the cloned drive and it boots flawlessly into XP, so I'm always just a short drive away from being instantly back up after a HD disaster.
I suppose the best situation would be three drives - a RAID 0 plus my removable backup, but I'm not that mission critical. A weeks worth of changes on my root wouldn't be tragic.
But don't forget to send a short (paper) letter to Michael Dell telling him _why_ you chose another vendor to service your corporate account. Preferrably, you can tell him why you have chosen bnot to putchase your next computer from his company, but rather from his competitor. Most businesses & end users don't buy processors, they buy computers. Computer makers must know that we expect computers wihtout DRM shackles, otherwise Intel will continue to underwrite their advertising campaigns and get their hobbled chips into more systems.
Yeah, but Porche's don't come in 12 packs, AFAIK - you have to buy them one at a time from a vending machine...oh, I guess the analogy breaks down there.
Twelve years ago I paid $190 for my 48G after I lost(!) my 28s. If it died today, I'd probably pay twice that to get another before I'd buy a TI.
I downloaded all the cutsy games and calendars at one point, but I've sense removed them all. I have all my key engineering formulae programmed into it, and with billables approaching $100/hr it save's me about $20-$25 per day in real productivity.
Ahhh, the second half of #4 is what I'd like to see, but with shorter follow-on periods or an availability clause.
Think of it as an aim at Disney's "Vault" method of distribution, or just the ability to get out-of-print, but in-copyright works. I'd allow 14 or 21 years unassailable rights, followed by sucessive 3 year periods in which retail material must be "in-print" and available for purchase for more than 1/2 the period, up to the Berne Convention limits. Okay, actually, I'd like to see it limited to 30 years or the life of the author plus 10 years, whichever occurs SOONER.
Apparently, my "Plain Old Text" still made my tags dissappear on the first couple sentences of that last paragraph. Damn slashdot.
let's try that again, kids:
[flamebait] Isn't the line in the 2nd amendment about the right to bear arms followed by the caveat that it be for the purpose of a well-regulated militia? Are the state national guards not that "well regulated milita" which was so necessary in the years before a national paid army? Is your desire to own a shotgun for sport not protected by the 2nd amendment? [/flamebait]
That's quite true. I suspect that - even in theory - no individual or group of individuals, given an unlimited right to buy arms, could stand up the the US military. Even Bill Gates couldn't rally against the $300+B/yr the gov't spends.
However, the right to free speech _can_ mobilze a nation to "overthrow" the government in power. It usually happens every 4-12 years here.
Isn't the line in the 2nd amendment about the right to bear arms followed by the caveat that it be for the purpose of a well-regulated militia? Are the state national guards not that "well regulated milita" which was so necessary in the years before a national paid army? Is your desire to own a shotgun for sport not protected by the 2nd amendment? For what it's worth, I own a 12ga dbl barrel shotgun, and (until just recently), a Semi-automatic Ruger MarkII pistol. Though I think a well secured gun is a lousy crime deterrant, there are times when they are quite useful. That's especially true when you live out in the country, as I do.
Actually, DeCSS circumvents a copy-protection feature of a commerically produced DVD which inadvertantly prevents the end user of a purchased product from a legal use of said product.
Before you cry foul, the "feature" was intended to prevent the viewing of a DVD on an unauthorized system (one which has no macrovision or region encoding, for example, which is TRUE for region 1 DVDs based on current law, AFAIK).
Nonetheless, you have purchased a product - not a licence. If your DVD breaks in five years, they will not replace it for a nominal media cost, nor will they send you new media should your system change (OTOH, microsoft used to send you 3.5" floppies if you licenced their software and you got it delivered on CD).
Once you've bought it, you should be able to do anything you want to with it, as long as the product (physical disc and information therein) stays with you and, arguably, your immediate family. You can even use it to shim up that door frame that's a bit out of whack. Of course, if it doens't work to shim the door frame, you won't get your money back, as it's not the intended use of the product. If , even with DeCSS it doesn't work on your PC - once again - you won't get your money back. If you put it in your DVD player and it doesn't work, you can take it back and get a replacement, because that IS the intended use.
Try this analogy: you may purchase a lock from Quickset, sit on your living room floor, and pick the lock all you want. You are circumventing their mechanism without a licenced key, but it's your lock and your home. The law has not been broken.
If you had paid by the hour for that seat at the park, and had several hours (or days, or months) invested in the game you would probably have civil recourse, but I'm not aware of a law which would forbid you to do such a thing (maybe disorderly conduct?)
OTOH, If I owned a private, pay-for-membership chess club, with a sign out front which says "no tresspassing" (pronounce it "terms of service") and you came in and flipped over a chess board and then ran out, I _could_ call the cops on you and file charges for tresspassing. Then sue you in civil court for damage to my business as well.