The cost of alternative treatments is set based on the cost of the original treatment. Just because it is cheaper to produce doesn't mean that the cost to the end recipient is going to reflect that. If there is a $200,000 surgery to correct your defect, and for $180,000 we can cure you without surgery, that $18,000 sounds like a bargain. There is no effective competition, so whether that cure costs $100 or $10,000, the $180k price will stick. Of course, if surgery isn't necessary, we could do the procedure to more borderline cases - ones that might never need surgery. If we catch just 15% extra people that would have opted out of surgery, we have spent more money.
I'm not convinced that a cardiac surgeon is going to cost less if he spends 8 hours experimenting on a heart and 4 hours in surgery vs 2 hours reviewing current imaging data and 6 hours in surgery.
As someone who works with computational models, knowing the exact answer is not always going to lead to a more effective or useful result in the field. Knowing you need a 1.77245 mm incision has little value over knowing that a 1.8mm incision will work with a scalpel operator which is only accurate to 0.2mm. There will always be shoulder cases where it may make a difference, but are you willing to pay 3X the cost for every procedure to cover the 10% in which it might make a difference? (That's a trick question, by the way, because you aren't paying, your insurance company is - and I can almost guarantee what their answer will be)
I was just curious. I've owned 3 precision machines (2 towers and a laptop) and the CS/TS - when I needed it - was absolutely first rate. If the support for A/W is similar to precision, it's probably worth a few extra bucks. I haven't had one for a year, opting for a consumer tower last upgrade...but it's getting long in the tooth, so I'm looking to see who's got Haswell-E on the market, and they're slim choices at the moment.
With transaction fees in the 2.5% range (WM may be even a touch lower), and some cards offering up to 2% cash back, there's a fine line CurrenC will have to walk. And, for anyone who thinks about it, getting an extra 0.3% in reward isn't going to be worth letting them dip their hand into your savings.
No merchant fees? No, it would work like a debit card, and Apple - depending on who you ask - is getting up to 15 basis points back from V/MC; they're not going to give up that free money in the case of a debit card (which has very low percentage fees, plus the swipe charge).
And I don't care if you triple encrypt it, it's not getting linked to my bank account. The whole reason I use V/MC is as a safety buffer.
The danger these companies are overlooking is that V/MC have grown fat on their percentage take of every transaction, and that money is probably going to start shifting into marketing and regulatory pushes to squash this. "Everywhere you want to be" will turn into "Would you give Target or Home Depot a stack of withdrawal tickets to your personal bank account?" And "Mastercard, it's the financial protection you need."
Hardly. Mostly, everyone seems caught up on the price, as if they've never seen what a pre-built high end system costs. They add up the cost of the components, not including the ones they have lying around, and figure that anything that costs more is silly. If you ever become successful enough that you value you time, you'll realize that pre-built is the only way to go. Until then, you'll simply be jealous of those of us who can check the boxes for what we want in 15 minutes and have Dell ship us a working machine, then go spend a couple hours extra consulting to cover the cost of all that integration. We'll be gaming while you guys are still trying to build. So, yes - jealous.
I am curious, for those who have owned Alienware since Dell acquired them - how is tech support? Are you thrown in with the consumer rabble, or so you get priority support like Dell provides with it's Precision workstations?
Except that Xeons cost nearly double the money for equivalent processing power. Their only real advantage is the ability to n-gang them. You may as well step up to the 5960 with 8 cores (33% more cores for - you guessed it - double the cost, though an extra $500 wouldn't have busted the bank). The knee in the curve is just too steep.
It is a shame that you can't get a dual i7 board with all the work done in software (binding a process to a particular CPU, so that any given process is limited to the resources of a single CPU, but you can run both simultaneously if you have multiple processes running). But that would cut into Intel's profit margins, so we won't see that ever happening.
"Or one that can turn into a lane of busy traffic that currently requires you to make eye contact with another driver to get them to slow down and let you in."
Piece of cake. When 1 in 4 cars has the driverless technology, they will negotiate the entry directly. Until then, the automatic brakes on your vehicle will activate directly once the automated car in front of you nudges into the roadway, allowing them in. Laws will change to make any accident in this case the non-automated driver's fault - i.e., if you choose to drive a car without automatic braking or disable it on a car with the feature you will be liable for damage to cars entering the freeway.
How about a Cold Fusion conference in the Physics department? A White Power rally in the African Studies department? A Holocaust Denier's conference in the Jewish Studies department? A Westboro Baptist Church meeting in the LGBT studies department?
the State school can't really do anything about it because it would be an obvious case of religious discrimination.
No, it's not religious discrimination (not that it would matter). The subject material is both sensationalized and runs counter to the charter of the school, which is to educate students in science and humanities. This is neither science nor religion, but fake science pretending it is religion. Would you allow a conference on Cold Fusion using Palladium Electrodes if it were set up by the Campus Hindu Society? Any conference which occurs on a campus is somewhat reflective of that campus, even if the event is unrelated (rightly or wrongly). They should ask that the conference be moved - perhaps to a more appropriate location like a church facility?
If students and faculty are really worried about the image of the school, they should just put on a competing event. That is, if they really care that much about it.
And legitimize the conference? No, that would certainly backfire, offering the visibility that this pseudo-science is looking for. Merely engaging them is an admission that they hold an arguable point. It's the last thing they should do.
Actually, that's my "ideal" tax system. No deductions*, no exclusions. Many cities have gross receipts taxes on businesses because it's easy to administer and hard to (legally) duck. No marriages, no dependents - one tax id = one tax bill.
Seriously: it makes everything a "cost of doing business" rather than a "tax on success". Every layer of middle man increases the cost of a good, benefiting local producers and direct sellers. Every layer of corporate shell costs money, discouraging said use. Day trading...well, that would be a thing of the past.
They see things in black and white. Regulation is bad, and must be eliminated everywhere. It's easy to forget that regulation is done for different reasons, some good and some bad. If you're on the wrong side of a regulation, it's always bad. Drugs? Clean Water? Abortion? Automobile licence plates? Murder? Every law is a regulation, changing what you can and cannot do.
Regulations are an attempt to impose a moral code. They allow societies to function, but can also hinder them. Wanting good regulations is not a sin.
The military would beg to disagree. Actually, they already have. Oh, sure, we like to believe that human operators of drones are controlling all fire/no fire decisions. Really, we're just an authorization step in the acquisition and fire control - it's a check that could be taken out in the name of efficiency.
We may be exceptionally far from strong AI, but this is a much better time to consider the implications than after it's developed and deployed.
Really? You are mistaking the rebroadcast as "entertainment" whereas it's generally background sound, not the primary purpose of the business. Music played in a retail store is a good example. People don't come to the store to be entertained by the music, they come to shop for clothes. The purpose of the music is to help set a mood, just as the posters on the wall, or the color of the carpet, or the type and style of lighting.
Lets look at it as a public place - you say that a website isn't one, but it's accessible to the general public. It's a public facing, interactive area representing the organization which presents it. A website comes with many of the rights (free speech) and restrictions (libel) that having a physical presence does.
And take it further - Amazon's only merchant space is a website. If this were to be adopted in the US, then Amazon could link copyrighted videos via YouTube on their site. That would allow them to post a video stream of John Legend on the page where they sell Teen clothing, but prevent Rue 21 from putting a computer monitor on the wall and streaming the same video.
This is an interesting ruling because, currently in the US, playing a radio station over speakers in a business is copyright infringement. This is very close to the meatspace equivalent of embedding a copyrighted work. Since this is an EU case it obviously would not hold a great deal of weight in a US court (though international rulings are considered in some cases), but it brings up an interesting dissonance in copyright law.
Google knows only one thing more than Apple does - the value of your purchase. Apple knows which store you went to and when you paid (you are using their hardware; yes, they know). If you're paranoid enough to worry about the difference, you're probably paranoid enough to know that the Bank is tracking your purchase and selling your information on the open market and you should be paying with cash.
I'll say this, though - these merchants are NEVER getting a direct connection to my bank account. To me, Visa/MC/Amex's role is to buffer me from fraud and abuse. I realize that the merchants chafe over rates, swipe fees, and liability (I do to), but they seem to care very little about security and I really don't want their hand in my till.
"...so that kids didn't need to learn how to solve them."
I don't think that's actually the *purpose* of the app, any more than the calculator was invented so that kids wouldn't have to learn how to add or multiply.
It's a correlation/causation problem, though. Most engineers are in the top 10% of compensated workers in this country and are of the delusion that since they work hard and get paid well than anyone can work hard and get paid well. They also tend to be predominantly male and white. They also, generally, come from higher socieoeconomic backgrounds. That doesn't necessarily make them right of center, but those tend to be the demographics of the right side of the aisle, regardless of their "logic" or "critical thinking" ability.
Data is not copyrightable. Your posts extolling the virtues of free living and your treatise on the need for end to end encryption in email would be completely safe from sale, but your height, weight, dog's name, friend list, favorite meal, phone number and the fact that you spoke often of your hemorrhoids is all just data about you which is non-copyrightable.
The ability to even write a licence where you retain your data and still give them permission to transmit it to a third party (the entire reason for a site with more than a single user) without potentially opening them to liability in the case of a disgruntled user would have to be a masterpiece of lawyering.
Slashdot Mirror
The cost of alternative treatments is set based on the cost of the original treatment. Just because it is cheaper to produce doesn't mean that the cost to the end recipient is going to reflect that. If there is a $200,000 surgery to correct your defect, and for $180,000 we can cure you without surgery, that $18,000 sounds like a bargain. There is no effective competition, so whether that cure costs $100 or $10,000, the $180k price will stick. Of course, if surgery isn't necessary, we could do the procedure to more borderline cases - ones that might never need surgery. If we catch just 15% extra people that would have opted out of surgery, we have spent more money.
I'm not convinced that a cardiac surgeon is going to cost less if he spends 8 hours experimenting on a heart and 4 hours in surgery vs 2 hours reviewing current imaging data and 6 hours in surgery.
As someone who works with computational models, knowing the exact answer is not always going to lead to a more effective or useful result in the field. Knowing you need a 1.77245 mm incision has little value over knowing that a 1.8mm incision will work with a scalpel operator which is only accurate to 0.2mm. There will always be shoulder cases where it may make a difference, but are you willing to pay 3X the cost for every procedure to cover the 10% in which it might make a difference? (That's a trick question, by the way, because you aren't paying, your insurance company is - and I can almost guarantee what their answer will be)
I was just curious. I've owned 3 precision machines (2 towers and a laptop) and the CS/TS - when I needed it - was absolutely first rate. If the support for A/W is similar to precision, it's probably worth a few extra bucks. I haven't had one for a year, opting for a consumer tower last upgrade...but it's getting long in the tooth, so I'm looking to see who's got Haswell-E on the market, and they're slim choices at the moment.
With transaction fees in the 2.5% range (WM may be even a touch lower), and some cards offering up to 2% cash back, there's a fine line CurrenC will have to walk. And, for anyone who thinks about it, getting an extra 0.3% in reward isn't going to be worth letting them dip their hand into your savings.
No merchant fees? No, it would work like a debit card, and Apple - depending on who you ask - is getting up to 15 basis points back from V/MC; they're not going to give up that free money in the case of a debit card (which has very low percentage fees, plus the swipe charge).
And I don't care if you triple encrypt it, it's not getting linked to my bank account. The whole reason I use V/MC is as a safety buffer.
The danger these companies are overlooking is that V/MC have grown fat on their percentage take of every transaction, and that money is probably going to start shifting into marketing and regulatory pushes to squash this. "Everywhere you want to be" will turn into "Would you give Target or Home Depot a stack of withdrawal tickets to your personal bank account?" And "Mastercard, it's the financial protection you need."
Hardly. Mostly, everyone seems caught up on the price, as if they've never seen what a pre-built high end system costs. They add up the cost of the components, not including the ones they have lying around, and figure that anything that costs more is silly. If you ever become successful enough that you value you time, you'll realize that pre-built is the only way to go. Until then, you'll simply be jealous of those of us who can check the boxes for what we want in 15 minutes and have Dell ship us a working machine, then go spend a couple hours extra consulting to cover the cost of all that integration. We'll be gaming while you guys are still trying to build. So, yes - jealous.
How is the tech support? Is it as good as the Precision workstation group?
Wow, there's so much jealous in this thread.
I am curious, for those who have owned Alienware since Dell acquired them - how is tech support? Are you thrown in with the consumer rabble, or so you get priority support like Dell provides with it's Precision workstations?
Except that Xeons cost nearly double the money for equivalent processing power. Their only real advantage is the ability to n-gang them. You may as well step up to the 5960 with 8 cores (33% more cores for - you guessed it - double the cost, though an extra $500 wouldn't have busted the bank). The knee in the curve is just too steep.
It is a shame that you can't get a dual i7 board with all the work done in software (binding a process to a particular CPU, so that any given process is limited to the resources of a single CPU, but you can run both simultaneously if you have multiple processes running). But that would cut into Intel's profit margins, so we won't see that ever happening.
"Or one that can turn into a lane of busy traffic that currently requires you to make eye contact with another driver to get them to slow down and let you in."
Piece of cake. When 1 in 4 cars has the driverless technology, they will negotiate the entry directly. Until then, the automatic brakes on your vehicle will activate directly once the automated car in front of you nudges into the roadway, allowing them in. Laws will change to make any accident in this case the non-automated driver's fault - i.e., if you choose to drive a car without automatic braking or disable it on a car with the feature you will be liable for damage to cars entering the freeway.
How about a Cold Fusion conference in the Physics department? A White Power rally in the African Studies department? A Holocaust Denier's conference in the Jewish Studies department? A Westboro Baptist Church meeting in the LGBT studies department?
the State school can't really do anything about it because it would be an obvious case of religious discrimination.
No, it's not religious discrimination (not that it would matter). The subject material is both sensationalized and runs counter to the charter of the school, which is to educate students in science and humanities. This is neither science nor religion, but fake science pretending it is religion. Would you allow a conference on Cold Fusion using Palladium Electrodes if it were set up by the Campus Hindu Society? Any conference which occurs on a campus is somewhat reflective of that campus, even if the event is unrelated (rightly or wrongly). They should ask that the conference be moved - perhaps to a more appropriate location like a church facility?
If students and faculty are really worried about the image of the school, they should just put on a competing event. That is, if they really care that much about it.
And legitimize the conference? No, that would certainly backfire, offering the visibility that this pseudo-science is looking for. Merely engaging them is an admission that they hold an arguable point. It's the last thing they should do.
Actually, that's my "ideal" tax system. No deductions*, no exclusions. Many cities have gross receipts taxes on businesses because it's easy to administer and hard to (legally) duck. No marriages, no dependents - one tax id = one tax bill.
Seriously: it makes everything a "cost of doing business" rather than a "tax on success". Every layer of middle man increases the cost of a good, benefiting local producers and direct sellers. Every layer of corporate shell costs money, discouraging said use. Day trading...well, that would be a thing of the past.
They see things in black and white. Regulation is bad, and must be eliminated everywhere. It's easy to forget that regulation is done for different reasons, some good and some bad. If you're on the wrong side of a regulation, it's always bad. Drugs? Clean Water? Abortion? Automobile licence plates? Murder? Every law is a regulation, changing what you can and cannot do.
Regulations are an attempt to impose a moral code. They allow societies to function, but can also hinder them. Wanting good regulations is not a sin.
if a robot can kill people, bolt it to the floor.
The military would beg to disagree. Actually, they already have. Oh, sure, we like to believe that human operators of drones are controlling all fire/no fire decisions. Really, we're just an authorization step in the acquisition and fire control - it's a check that could be taken out in the name of efficiency.
We may be exceptionally far from strong AI, but this is a much better time to consider the implications than after it's developed and deployed.
Really? You are mistaking the rebroadcast as "entertainment" whereas it's generally background sound, not the primary purpose of the business. Music played in a retail store is a good example. People don't come to the store to be entertained by the music, they come to shop for clothes. The purpose of the music is to help set a mood, just as the posters on the wall, or the color of the carpet, or the type and style of lighting.
Lets look at it as a public place - you say that a website isn't one, but it's accessible to the general public. It's a public facing, interactive area representing the organization which presents it. A website comes with many of the rights (free speech) and restrictions (libel) that having a physical presence does.
And take it further - Amazon's only merchant space is a website. If this were to be adopted in the US, then Amazon could link copyrighted videos via YouTube on their site. That would allow them to post a video stream of John Legend on the page where they sell Teen clothing, but prevent Rue 21 from putting a computer monitor on the wall and streaming the same video.
Yeah, we wish...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ro...
This is an interesting ruling because, currently in the US, playing a radio station over speakers in a business is copyright infringement. This is very close to the meatspace equivalent of embedding a copyrighted work. Since this is an EU case it obviously would not hold a great deal of weight in a US court (though international rulings are considered in some cases), but it brings up an interesting dissonance in copyright law.
Google knows only one thing more than Apple does - the value of your purchase. Apple knows which store you went to and when you paid (you are using their hardware; yes, they know). If you're paranoid enough to worry about the difference, you're probably paranoid enough to know that the Bank is tracking your purchase and selling your information on the open market and you should be paying with cash.
I'll say this, though - these merchants are NEVER getting a direct connection to my bank account. To me, Visa/MC/Amex's role is to buffer me from fraud and abuse. I realize that the merchants chafe over rates, swipe fees, and liability (I do to), but they seem to care very little about security and I really don't want their hand in my till.
So pretty much like the entire e-payment systems in iOS prior to ApplePay - Every vendor with their own payment "app".
If there ever was a +6 Funny, this is the one.
"...so that kids didn't need to learn how to solve them."
I don't think that's actually the *purpose* of the app, any more than the calculator was invented so that kids wouldn't have to learn how to add or multiply.
It's a correlation/causation problem, though. Most engineers are in the top 10% of compensated workers in this country and are of the delusion that since they work hard and get paid well than anyone can work hard and get paid well. They also tend to be predominantly male and white. They also, generally, come from higher socieoeconomic backgrounds. That doesn't necessarily make them right of center, but those tend to be the demographics of the right side of the aisle, regardless of their "logic" or "critical thinking" ability.
I wish I had mod points for you.
Data is not copyrightable. Your posts extolling the virtues of free living and your treatise on the need for end to end encryption in email would be completely safe from sale, but your height, weight, dog's name, friend list, favorite meal, phone number and the fact that you spoke often of your hemorrhoids is all just data about you which is non-copyrightable.
The ability to even write a licence where you retain your data and still give them permission to transmit it to a third party (the entire reason for a site with more than a single user) without potentially opening them to liability in the case of a disgruntled user would have to be a masterpiece of lawyering.