Sure, too much choice can present problems. The effect of additional choices depends on a number of factors.
How many can I select?
What are the stakes involved?
What information is available to guide my choice?
What is the cost of experimenting?
What cost is incurred by the provider in offering another choice?
Example: I downloaded a few years worth of offerings from the SXSW festival (amounting to about 3000 songs). So far I've found a handful of songs I knew I'd never want to listen to again, a dozen truly awesome songs, and a large number of songs that are just "okay." I've listened through about 400 songs. Statistically, there are about ninety "truly awesome songs" in this collection, but the effort involved in finding them is too much.
Because the songs were effectively free, downloading them was a no-brainer. But sorting through them is daunting, because the number of choices is huge and the information guiding my decision is almost nil (band names and song names are incredibly unhelpful). When you get into numbers this big, findability becomes key.
Assuming a great personalization engine were correlating my preferences with those of others, I might be able to find most of the ninety best songs within a couple hundred listens, for an effective Awesomeness rate of.4 to.5 awesome songs per listen.
If the SXSW festival had only offered a "top 100" for each of the three years, it would throw away 90% of the songs. We can also guess that their filter would throw away half the songs I wanted to find. Sorting through the remainder, I'd have an effective Awesomeness rate of.15 awesome songs per listen.
Without a guide, each additional "listen" gives me an effective Awesomeness rate of.03, which just isn't worth it. There are too many other, easier ways to find good music.
I have to object to your lottery picking technique. While any combination of numbers is as likely to come up as any other combination of numbers, not every combination of numbers is equally likely to be picked by the population at large.
By using a strategy that makes it very likely that you'll choose numbers that others have selected, you decrease your eventual payoff in the event that you win.
Example: The numbers 4 8 15 16 23 42 are no more and no less likely than any other set of numbers, but if you pick them, you'll probably end up splitting your winnings a hundred ways.
In any event, communal systems do not work beyond a very small community size because in practice (if not in theory) they depend on unanimous consent for all actions, which any community of significant size will never have.
Not true, my freshly-minted foe. Communal systems have the exact same requirements that other "democratic" systems do: those who feel they've lost out in a decision have to have enough respect for the process to not openly rebel against it.
Now, there are a wide variety of cooperative decision making models, which bear little resemblance to our highly competitive, win-lose style of government. A few do require unanimous approval for every action, and it's true that those scale poorly. But the most popular (called the consensus approach) only allows a single individual to block a decision if their objection is that going forward would be detrimental to the group as a whole. Those whose objections are more personal have their objections noted, but are expected to stand aside and allow the decision to go forward.
As with democratic forms of government, it is sometimes not feasible to get everyone in on the decision-making, so individuals elect representatives, whom they expect will bring their concerns to the table. Consensus decision-making is then used within the representative body.
In short, I see nothing unscalable about consensus decision-making. If anything, I think it has the potential to be less rancorous than the democratic processes that run our institutions today.
Here's some more tosh for you. Truly unrestricted trade means that, when a multinational is deciding where to put a plant, it can force various desirable sites into bidding wars against each other. It says to Bangladesh, "you will forbid your workers from forming unions, or we're taking our plant to Indiana." Meanwhile, it tells Indiana, "if you don't give us tax breaks, relax your environmental standards, and purchase 400 autos a year from us, we're going to Bangladesh."
It's a clear race to the bottom, pulling down work standards, environmental standards, wages, etc.
One of the big factors preventing the U.S. environmental standards from rising is that our politicians fear that raising them further would drive jobs overseas even faster. In a truly free market, good actors will often lose out to bad actors. In this case, Canada lost hundreds of jorbs to its southern neighbor that required less regulation.
You say it's rubbish to believe that free trade is weakening environmental regs in this case. Did you read the article? The one where it specifically said that the government of Indiana set its regulations aside in order to entice BP into building the plant there? How is that not a case of globalization weakening environmental regulations?
I have no idea how you could have drawn "proprietary software" from anything I wrote. But thanks for reminding me why you're on my foes list, and why I felt no compunction in calling you a moron.
It took me all of thirty seconds to use Google to get from "grub error 25" to "25 : Disk read error - This error is returned if there is a disk read error when trying to probe or read data from a particular disk." So while it might be inconvenient to get an error code instead of an error string, that shouldn't be an insurmountable barrier. Also, it means your problem is with GRUB, not Ubuntu. There are also several possible solutions.
As for having an application tell you how to fix the cause of an error code, that's like expecting a doctor to diagnose and treat you, given no more information than "upset stomach." Should he treat you for flu? Put you on a restricted diet? Give you antibiotics to treat an ulcer? Remove a tumor? If you're programming a network application, and your attempt to open a socket returns a "network error," you wouldn't advise the user to go to the cabling closet and give a shove to the cable hooked to port 3.
There is a reason why so many of the "solutions" proposed by applications amount to "contact your system administrator." Often there isn't much more they can tell you.
Yeah, $225 sounds bad when you think of it as "paying for a free operating system." It doesn't sound so bad when you think of it as "the OS, plus whatever tweaks were needed to get all the hardware working properly, plus tech support for a Linux install. Sure, Windows users aren't paying $225 for tech support, but Dell isn't going to support your software problems if you went the wipe/reinstall route. Further, Ubuntu systems are relatively rare for Dell when compared to Windows, so there are fewer systems over which to spread the cost of developing tech support procedures, training, etc.
I'm not saying it's a great deal, but there's no guarantee that installing Ubuntu yourself will give you as good a system, or that you'll be able to figure out how to fix the quirks or get the hardware supported. I had some early problems with the screen resolution on my new laptop, which were a bugger to solve.
I would respond, "Congratulations on the new computer! I can has the old one?"
His point is, not every problem has a simple fix, and when such a state of affairs exists, it's pure whinery to complain about the difficulty of the complicated fix. You claim that your problem "should have been a simple fix," but it's not clear to me how you could know that for a fact. What is clear is that this "simple fix" was obscure enough to elude both you and the people who were trying to help you.
So, if you were presented with a problem where the only good solution required buying a new computer, then that's just the way it is. My response would be as I mentioned above. If there was a good solution, but you and your free tech monkeys were unaware of it, then my response would be, "It's a shame you didn't know about fix X". If Ubuntu should have been written in a way that allowed a much easier fix for the problem, and the problem is common enough to warrant attention, then it's certainly an Ubuntu problem. But I would first want to know how you actually know it's a simple and common problem. It sounds like you never actually diagnosed the root of the problem, so your insistence that it should have been easily diagnosable and fixable is just bluster.
Having a problem with a computer shouldn't imply incompetence. I'm worried for you if it does. Instead, it could be bad or unsupported hardware, an installation hiccup, an unexpected interaction between installed software packages, or plain old motherboard gremlins. You have to be really good to troubleshoot some problems yourself (especially if the problem kills your network connection, cutting you off from Google).
UbuntuDupe is a moron because he read what he did into mhall's answer, not because he had problems with a boot loader. I'm sure he's a very technically competent moron.
I recently got a widescreen HP laptop with Intel video drivers. I installed Ubuntu, but it would only give me these crappy standard resolutions (1024x768, etc) that got stretched across the screen. It took me forever to find the solution, which was to install a package called 915resolution (named after the chipset, I believe).
Anyhow, before I installed it, the whole screen was a bit fuzzy, as though someone had smeared it with vasoline. Could have something to do with the problem.
When you propose a fix like that, you really ought to try it first. When I right-click on the network tray icon, I get three options (enable networking, connection information (grayed out) and "about"). None of these things will do what he wants, and to suggest that he didn't try even the most seemingly obvious solutions is a little insulting. In mhall's defense, I've always assumed that the networking icon was removable, simply because I'd never felt any desire to remove it. The volume icon can be removed as you describe.
Note: I'm using Feisty Fawn. I don't know whether the icon was removable in prior versions.
I don't think the guy with these problems had any right to imply that his expectations are the correct ones. There are all sorts of different expectations for default behavior, his problem with the icons is a matter of personal taste, some of his problems sound like they're due to a bad install, and it strikes me as perfectly reasonable for the movie player to come up when you click on an MP3 (pretty much every media player you install in Windowsland will try to make itself the default for both movies and music). But he seems intelligent and seems to mean well, so his input carries some value.
Last thing: I noticed you switched a critical couple of words around. He said it "doesn't 'just work'", and you say he says it "just doesn't work". Completely different concepts. "Just works" implies a seamless user experience where the user simply performs the most obvious action and gets the result she expected. "Just doesn't work" implies that, no matter how many different ways you try, no matter how many config files you edit, you simply cannot do what you were hoping to do. There is a huge middle ground between the two, and it sounds like he's living in the "it works, but it doesn't 'just work'" region.
I think most doctors get into the field out of a desire to help and heal people. But when they leave their training with mammoth debt, it forces them to pick a high-paying specialty and seek out a private practice to join. That way, they can make enough money to get rid of their debts. I've heard that the U.S. has way too many specialists compared to the number of general practitioners, and private practices often cater to elective medical procedures.
Malpractice fees are high (though they're not what's driving the recent explosion in health costs), and it makes sense that they'd put pressure on doctors to find more lucrative options.
I think there are a couple of government programs that pay medical school bills for doctors who are willing to spend a few years working in rural areas or free clinics. Those programs could probably be greatly expanded.
Moore wasn't trying to show his audience the lifestyle of the average Frenchman. He was trying to show the lifestyle of an average French doctor, to counteract the FUD that says we need to preserve our star-spangled HMO-based system, because that's the only system where doctors are allowed to make as much as they can.
You're missing a critical point. If you choose not to prioritize bandwidth, the routing process is dead simple:
1) Read the destination IP from the packet header. 2) Look up the destination in the routing table. 3) Send the packet out the appropriate pipe.
When you decide to prioritize, you add a lot more steps.
1) Read the destination IP from the packet header. 2) Read more of the packet to determine the type of communication and prioritize it accordingly. 3) Check the queue to see if anything of a higher priority needs to be sent first. 4) Send those. 5) Look up the destination in the routing table. 6) Send the packet out the appropriate pipe.
Okay, three more steps. But the point is, the amount of processing needed for each packet is greatly increased, so the same hardware handles far fewer packets.
As Cory Doctorow likes to repeat over and over and over, the Internet2 people have tried every prioritization scheme imaginable, and have never found anything that relieves congestion quite as well as simply adding bandwidth to a stupid network. A stupid network can be blazing fast, but as you add more brains to it, it has to slow down and think about what it's doing. Intelligence should live on the edge of the network.
The only, only, only reason to make the network "priority aware" (given that we can increase capacity easily) is to allow the Telcos to use QOS guarantees to charge certain customers up the wazoo.
And why doesn't Bush go through the courts? Maybe because he doesn't think he is constitutionally obligated , and he feels that it unnecessarily dillutes executive power to do so.
Maybe the Bush Administration is deluded enough to think so, but they know damned well that there are other interpretations of the Constitution than the one they favor (read: sane interpretations). That's why -- whether they believe they have the constitutional authority to conduct warrantless surveillance or not -- they've fought tooth and nail against going to the courts to demonstrate their constitutional arguments. When they end up in court anyways, their primary arguments don't revolve around issues of constitutional authority. Instead, they simply try to undermine the plaintiffs on the grounds that they might not have grounds to bring suit.
You even admit that he would get any warrant he wants through FISA... this is a phantom "threat" to your civil liberties, but it is a very real potential threat to the constitutional balance of power. If he acknowledges some need for the FISA court in this circumstance, it sets precedent. There is more at stake here than your "feelings"... there certainly is no practical difference to YOU than if the FISA court was consulted.
No practical difference? The two situations you cannot see the difference between are:
1) The administration can spy on whomever they suspect to be dangerous.
2) The administration can spy on whomever they suspect to be dangerous, and can show evidence for the fact to an independent court.
If you cannot see a "practical difference" between those two situations, then we as a country are pretty much screwed anyways.
Maybe they call it a "charity" because -- and understand that I'm just making a guess here -- the vast majority of the money they collect is used "to feed hungry Somali orphans, educate poor Indonesian students and help sick Kenyan children."
Why not read the article you linked to? A small clique of people within the organization were diverting a small fraction of the funds towards terrorist organizations. If somebody in the Southern Baptist Convention had the power to divert a few thousand dollars to a group that hunted abortion doctors, would you call the entire SBC a terrorist front?
There's a very strong argument to be made that, aside from some eye candy to hook the users, Vista is an OS designed on behalf of Big Content, to the detriment of the users.
Of course, your only evidence of "improvement" is that Microsoft has solved some of the stability issues that plagued the last decade's incarnations of Windows. Since I almost never hear strong criticisms of Windows' stability anymore, I think you're the one beating the dead horse. Though, Peter Gutmann's article does point out that Vista's security specs seem to demand that hardware manufacturers sacrifice stability in favor of compliance with their DRM (scan the article for "tilt bits").
That's a complete misrepresentation of the past. Only women who had sex for pleasure were considered unbalanced. We weren't complete savages, you know.
You do understand that the penalty system you're ripping off only applies to proposals for comprehensive solutions to problems, right?
If only fifty people in the world think this is worthwhile enough to participate in, and it only leads to the defeat of a handful of obvious patents, it has still accomplished something. I'm not getting the impression that the author thinks that this will make it impossible for any stupid patent to ever hurt anybody ever again, so your criticism is a bit beside the point.
My favorite part about this idea is that the infrastructure is already there, waiting to be used. Blogs are generating "prior art" at a phenomenal rate right now, as authors speculate about how they'd make potential nifty ideas into reality. All he's proposing is that these speculations receive an appropriate tagging.
So, if health care is so much worse in Canada, and their evil socialized system is undermining the care of the majority in order to cater to a few, then why do they dramatically outlive us?
If you really think that nobody is getting health care throughout the *dozens* of industrialized nations that have "socialist" health care, yet are kicking our butts in life expectancy, then you've completely lost me. The claim is utterly absurd, but is repeated too many times to be a slip of the keyboard.
Your digression about how automation will eventually drive down costs is a non-sequitur. Capitalist and socialist systems alike (as though there were a pure example of either anywhere in the world) benefit from such automation, and government involvement in no way requires insulating the system from the need to pursue cost-saving technologies.
The number of toys, bells, and whistles is not the ultimate judge of a great health care system. Canada has fewer MRI machines than us, yet Cannucks with their beady little eyes live longer, healthier lives while spending far less per capita. Cuba may not have any MRI machines at all, or maybe just some aging Soviet hand-me-downs, but their obsession with universal, preventative care allows them to match our life expectancy while spending less than the U.S. system spends on tongue depressors alone.
Michael Moore's movie wasn't even about the 40+million without health care in this country. It was about people who bought insurance like good little citizens, then found out at the worst possible moment how inadequate the care they'd purchased really was. Despite your protests, Moore adequately demonstrated that the care provided by Canada and France was in many ways better than that received by many of the 250M people you claim would be harmed under a more socialized system.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Assuming that this anecdote is legitimate (rather than being made up to further somebody's preconceived notions about the French health care system) it may still not be representative. Any system of health care is going to misdiagnose the severity of an ailment (you cannot honestly believe that the hospital wouldn't have found room for the man had his symptoms obviously indicated a life-threatening problem), and France's overall health figures kick our collective ass.
You follow up the anecdote by implying that "ability to pay" *should* be the criteria used to ration care. But since the anecdote says nothing about the man's ability to pay for care, where is the guarantee that he would have gotten better treatment under the American system? Under an "ability to pay" system, we're still rationing health care; we're simply rationing it in a way that allows a rich person's desire for cosmetic surgery to take precedence over a poor person's desire to survive his cancer.
So, you're saying that right now the support staff is being paid for by magic money fairies? No, everything associated with the hospital is being paid for by insurance premiums (the government being a major insurance provider through Medicare and Medicaid) or billed to individuals.
Also, it's not necessary for the government to buy up and run every hospital. My ideal system would be much less intrusive: "simply" require that all insurers provide a basic coverage plan that anyone can purchase, regardless of age, preexisting conditions, or medical history. Require every person to carry some sort of insurance. Provide tax credits or some other method to guarantee that everyone can pay for the basic plan. These are relatively small changes, but they'd change everything.
Finally, remember that we have about a twelve trillion dollar economy. So our overall health care costs are somewhere in the two thousand billion dollar range.
The point is, someone is already paying for it. I don't understand what you mean by "on top of what we pay now." To a first approximation, money added to our tax bill would be offset by money not paid to insurers.
To be totally honest, there is one bar in town that has gained notoriety for it's policy of funding breast augmentations for employees. Let's consider them an exception to the rule.
That's pretty brilliant. The bar gets publicity, which every bar needs. The bar attracts women with low self-esteem, which makes them ideal, loyal employees. Most important, the owner of the bar (never mind the customers) gets to look at ginormous boobs all day.
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Sure, too much choice can present problems. The effect of additional choices depends on a number of factors.
.4 to .5 awesome songs per listen.
.15 awesome songs per listen.
.03, which just isn't worth it. There are too many other, easier ways to find good music.
How many can I select?
What are the stakes involved?
What information is available to guide my choice?
What is the cost of experimenting?
What cost is incurred by the provider in offering another choice?
Example: I downloaded a few years worth of offerings from the SXSW festival (amounting to about 3000 songs). So far I've found a handful of songs I knew I'd never want to listen to again, a dozen truly awesome songs, and a large number of songs that are just "okay." I've listened through about 400 songs. Statistically, there are about ninety "truly awesome songs" in this collection, but the effort involved in finding them is too much.
Because the songs were effectively free, downloading them was a no-brainer. But sorting through them is daunting, because the number of choices is huge and the information guiding my decision is almost nil (band names and song names are incredibly unhelpful). When you get into numbers this big, findability becomes key.
Assuming a great personalization engine were correlating my preferences with those of others, I might be able to find most of the ninety best songs within a couple hundred listens, for an effective Awesomeness rate of
If the SXSW festival had only offered a "top 100" for each of the three years, it would throw away 90% of the songs. We can also guess that their filter would throw away half the songs I wanted to find. Sorting through the remainder, I'd have an effective Awesomeness rate of
Without a guide, each additional "listen" gives me an effective Awesomeness rate of
I have to object to your lottery picking technique. While any combination of numbers is as likely to come up as any other combination of numbers, not every combination of numbers is equally likely to be picked by the population at large.
By using a strategy that makes it very likely that you'll choose numbers that others have selected, you decrease your eventual payoff in the event that you win.
Example: The numbers 4 8 15 16 23 42 are no more and no less likely than any other set of numbers, but if you pick them, you'll probably end up splitting your winnings a hundred ways.
Now, there are a wide variety of cooperative decision making models, which bear little resemblance to our highly competitive, win-lose style of government. A few do require unanimous approval for every action, and it's true that those scale poorly. But the most popular (called the consensus approach) only allows a single individual to block a decision if their objection is that going forward would be detrimental to the group as a whole. Those whose objections are more personal have their objections noted, but are expected to stand aside and allow the decision to go forward.
As with democratic forms of government, it is sometimes not feasible to get everyone in on the decision-making, so individuals elect representatives, whom they expect will bring their concerns to the table. Consensus decision-making is then used within the representative body.
In short, I see nothing unscalable about consensus decision-making. If anything, I think it has the potential to be less rancorous than the democratic processes that run our institutions today.
Here's some more tosh for you. Truly unrestricted trade means that, when a multinational is deciding where to put a plant, it can force various desirable sites into bidding wars against each other. It says to Bangladesh, "you will forbid your workers from forming unions, or we're taking our plant to Indiana." Meanwhile, it tells Indiana, "if you don't give us tax breaks, relax your environmental standards, and purchase 400 autos a year from us, we're going to Bangladesh."
It's a clear race to the bottom, pulling down work standards, environmental standards, wages, etc.
One of the big factors preventing the U.S. environmental standards from rising is that our politicians fear that raising them further would drive jobs overseas even faster. In a truly free market, good actors will often lose out to bad actors. In this case, Canada lost hundreds of jorbs to its southern neighbor that required less regulation.
You say it's rubbish to believe that free trade is weakening environmental regs in this case. Did you read the article? The one where it specifically said that the government of Indiana set its regulations aside in order to entice BP into building the plant there? How is that not a case of globalization weakening environmental regulations?
I have no idea how you could have drawn "proprietary software" from anything I wrote. But thanks for reminding me why you're on my foes list, and why I felt no compunction in calling you a moron.
It took me all of thirty seconds to use Google to get from "grub error 25" to "25 : Disk read error - This error is returned if there is a disk read error when trying to probe or read data from a particular disk." So while it might be inconvenient to get an error code instead of an error string, that shouldn't be an insurmountable barrier. Also, it means your problem is with GRUB, not Ubuntu. There are also several possible solutions.
As for having an application tell you how to fix the cause of an error code, that's like expecting a doctor to diagnose and treat you, given no more information than "upset stomach." Should he treat you for flu? Put you on a restricted diet? Give you antibiotics to treat an ulcer? Remove a tumor? If you're programming a network application, and your attempt to open a socket returns a "network error," you wouldn't advise the user to go to the cabling closet and give a shove to the cable hooked to port 3.
There is a reason why so many of the "solutions" proposed by applications amount to "contact your system administrator." Often there isn't much more they can tell you.
Did I miss the link to the ancient thread where UbuntuDupe originally asked for help? It seems like a lot of people are unduly familiar with it.
Maybe it's one of those semi-famous Internet memes, like that cat that plays the piano.
Yeah, $225 sounds bad when you think of it as "paying for a free operating system." It doesn't sound so bad when you think of it as "the OS, plus whatever tweaks were needed to get all the hardware working properly, plus tech support for a Linux install. Sure, Windows users aren't paying $225 for tech support, but Dell isn't going to support your software problems if you went the wipe/reinstall route. Further, Ubuntu systems are relatively rare for Dell when compared to Windows, so there are fewer systems over which to spread the cost of developing tech support procedures, training, etc.
I'm not saying it's a great deal, but there's no guarantee that installing Ubuntu yourself will give you as good a system, or that you'll be able to figure out how to fix the quirks or get the hardware supported. I had some early problems with the screen resolution on my new laptop, which were a bugger to solve.
I would respond, "Congratulations on the new computer! I can has the old one?"
His point is, not every problem has a simple fix, and when such a state of affairs exists, it's pure whinery to complain about the difficulty of the complicated fix. You claim that your problem "should have been a simple fix," but it's not clear to me how you could know that for a fact. What is clear is that this "simple fix" was obscure enough to elude both you and the people who were trying to help you.
So, if you were presented with a problem where the only good solution required buying a new computer, then that's just the way it is. My response would be as I mentioned above. If there was a good solution, but you and your free tech monkeys were unaware of it, then my response would be, "It's a shame you didn't know about fix X". If Ubuntu should have been written in a way that allowed a much easier fix for the problem, and the problem is common enough to warrant attention, then it's certainly an Ubuntu problem. But I would first want to know how you actually know it's a simple and common problem. It sounds like you never actually diagnosed the root of the problem, so your insistence that it should have been easily diagnosable and fixable is just bluster.
Having a problem with a computer shouldn't imply incompetence. I'm worried for you if it does. Instead, it could be bad or unsupported hardware, an installation hiccup, an unexpected interaction between installed software packages, or plain old motherboard gremlins. You have to be really good to troubleshoot some problems yourself (especially if the problem kills your network connection, cutting you off from Google).
UbuntuDupe is a moron because he read what he did into mhall's answer, not because he had problems with a boot loader. I'm sure he's a very technically competent moron.
I recently got a widescreen HP laptop with Intel video drivers. I installed Ubuntu, but it would only give me these crappy standard resolutions (1024x768, etc) that got stretched across the screen. It took me forever to find the solution, which was to install a package called 915resolution (named after the chipset, I believe).
Anyhow, before I installed it, the whole screen was a bit fuzzy, as though someone had smeared it with vasoline. Could have something to do with the problem.
Maybe the 915resolution thing will help someone.
When you propose a fix like that, you really ought to try it first. When I right-click on the network tray icon, I get three options (enable networking, connection information (grayed out) and "about"). None of these things will do what he wants, and to suggest that he didn't try even the most seemingly obvious solutions is a little insulting. In mhall's defense, I've always assumed that the networking icon was removable, simply because I'd never felt any desire to remove it. The volume icon can be removed as you describe.
Note: I'm using Feisty Fawn. I don't know whether the icon was removable in prior versions.
I don't think the guy with these problems had any right to imply that his expectations are the correct ones. There are all sorts of different expectations for default behavior, his problem with the icons is a matter of personal taste, some of his problems sound like they're due to a bad install, and it strikes me as perfectly reasonable for the movie player to come up when you click on an MP3 (pretty much every media player you install in Windowsland will try to make itself the default for both movies and music). But he seems intelligent and seems to mean well, so his input carries some value.
Last thing: I noticed you switched a critical couple of words around. He said it "doesn't 'just work'", and you say he says it "just doesn't work". Completely different concepts. "Just works" implies a seamless user experience where the user simply performs the most obvious action and gets the result she expected. "Just doesn't work" implies that, no matter how many different ways you try, no matter how many config files you edit, you simply cannot do what you were hoping to do. There is a huge middle ground between the two, and it sounds like he's living in the "it works, but it doesn't 'just work'" region.
I think most doctors get into the field out of a desire to help and heal people. But when they leave their training with mammoth debt, it forces them to pick a high-paying specialty and seek out a private practice to join. That way, they can make enough money to get rid of their debts. I've heard that the U.S. has way too many specialists compared to the number of general practitioners, and private practices often cater to elective medical procedures.
Malpractice fees are high (though they're not what's driving the recent explosion in health costs), and it makes sense that they'd put pressure on doctors to find more lucrative options.
I think there are a couple of government programs that pay medical school bills for doctors who are willing to spend a few years working in rural areas or free clinics. Those programs could probably be greatly expanded.
Moore wasn't trying to show his audience the lifestyle of the average Frenchman. He was trying to show the lifestyle of an average French doctor, to counteract the FUD that says we need to preserve our star-spangled HMO-based system, because that's the only system where doctors are allowed to make as much as they can.
You're missing a critical point. If you choose not to prioritize bandwidth, the routing process is dead simple:
1) Read the destination IP from the packet header.
2) Look up the destination in the routing table.
3) Send the packet out the appropriate pipe.
When you decide to prioritize, you add a lot more steps.
1) Read the destination IP from the packet header.
2) Read more of the packet to determine the type of communication and prioritize it accordingly.
3) Check the queue to see if anything of a higher priority needs to be sent first.
4) Send those.
5) Look up the destination in the routing table.
6) Send the packet out the appropriate pipe.
Okay, three more steps. But the point is, the amount of processing needed for each packet is greatly increased, so the same hardware handles far fewer packets.
As Cory Doctorow likes to repeat over and over and over, the Internet2 people have tried every prioritization scheme imaginable, and have never found anything that relieves congestion quite as well as simply adding bandwidth to a stupid network. A stupid network can be blazing fast, but as you add more brains to it, it has to slow down and think about what it's doing. Intelligence should live on the edge of the network.
The only, only, only reason to make the network "priority aware" (given that we can increase capacity easily) is to allow the Telcos to use QOS guarantees to charge certain customers up the wazoo.
I thought most VOIP systems used UDP. Do you know something the people over at Skype don't? Or am I confused about what you're trying to say?
1) The administration can spy on whomever they suspect to be dangerous.
2) The administration can spy on whomever they suspect to be dangerous, and can show evidence for the fact to an independent court.
If you cannot see a "practical difference" between those two situations, then we as a country are pretty much screwed anyways.
Maybe they call it a "charity" because -- and understand that I'm just making a guess here -- the vast majority of the money they collect is used "to feed hungry Somali orphans, educate poor Indonesian students and help sick Kenyan children."
Why not read the article you linked to? A small clique of people within the organization were diverting a small fraction of the funds towards terrorist organizations. If somebody in the Southern Baptist Convention had the power to divert a few thousand dollars to a group that hunted abortion doctors, would you call the entire SBC a terrorist front?
So Vista *is* an improvement, and not "the longest suicide note in history"?
There's a very strong argument to be made that, aside from some eye candy to hook the users, Vista is an OS designed on behalf of Big Content, to the detriment of the users.
Of course, your only evidence of "improvement" is that Microsoft has solved some of the stability issues that plagued the last decade's incarnations of Windows. Since I almost never hear strong criticisms of Windows' stability anymore, I think you're the one beating the dead horse. Though, Peter Gutmann's article does point out that Vista's security specs seem to demand that hardware manufacturers sacrifice stability in favor of compliance with their DRM (scan the article for "tilt bits").
That's a complete misrepresentation of the past. Only women who had sex for pleasure were considered unbalanced. We weren't complete savages, you know.
You do understand that the penalty system you're ripping off only applies to proposals for comprehensive solutions to problems, right?
If only fifty people in the world think this is worthwhile enough to participate in, and it only leads to the defeat of a handful of obvious patents, it has still accomplished something. I'm not getting the impression that the author thinks that this will make it impossible for any stupid patent to ever hurt anybody ever again, so your criticism is a bit beside the point.
My favorite part about this idea is that the infrastructure is already there, waiting to be used. Blogs are generating "prior art" at a phenomenal rate right now, as authors speculate about how they'd make potential nifty ideas into reality. All he's proposing is that these speculations receive an appropriate tagging.
So, if health care is so much worse in Canada, and their evil socialized system is undermining the care of the majority in order to cater to a few, then why do they dramatically outlive us?
If you really think that nobody is getting health care throughout the *dozens* of industrialized nations that have "socialist" health care, yet are kicking our butts in life expectancy, then you've completely lost me. The claim is utterly absurd, but is repeated too many times to be a slip of the keyboard.
Your digression about how automation will eventually drive down costs is a non-sequitur. Capitalist and socialist systems alike (as though there were a pure example of either anywhere in the world) benefit from such automation, and government involvement in no way requires insulating the system from the need to pursue cost-saving technologies.
The number of toys, bells, and whistles is not the ultimate judge of a great health care system. Canada has fewer MRI machines than us, yet Cannucks with their beady little eyes live longer, healthier lives while spending far less per capita. Cuba may not have any MRI machines at all, or maybe just some aging Soviet hand-me-downs, but their obsession with universal, preventative care allows them to match our life expectancy while spending less than the U.S. system spends on tongue depressors alone.
Michael Moore's movie wasn't even about the 40+million without health care in this country. It was about people who bought insurance like good little citizens, then found out at the worst possible moment how inadequate the care they'd purchased really was. Despite your protests, Moore adequately demonstrated that the care provided by Canada and France was in many ways better than that received by many of the 250M people you claim would be harmed under a more socialized system.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Assuming that this anecdote is legitimate (rather than being made up to further somebody's preconceived notions about the French health care system) it may still not be representative. Any system of health care is going to misdiagnose the severity of an ailment (you cannot honestly believe that the hospital wouldn't have found room for the man had his symptoms obviously indicated a life-threatening problem), and France's overall health figures kick our collective ass.
You follow up the anecdote by implying that "ability to pay" *should* be the criteria used to ration care. But since the anecdote says nothing about the man's ability to pay for care, where is the guarantee that he would have gotten better treatment under the American system? Under an "ability to pay" system, we're still rationing health care; we're simply rationing it in a way that allows a rich person's desire for cosmetic surgery to take precedence over a poor person's desire to survive his cancer.
So, you're saying that right now the support staff is being paid for by magic money fairies? No, everything associated with the hospital is being paid for by insurance premiums (the government being a major insurance provider through Medicare and Medicaid) or billed to individuals.
Also, it's not necessary for the government to buy up and run every hospital. My ideal system would be much less intrusive: "simply" require that all insurers provide a basic coverage plan that anyone can purchase, regardless of age, preexisting conditions, or medical history. Require every person to carry some sort of insurance. Provide tax credits or some other method to guarantee that everyone can pay for the basic plan. These are relatively small changes, but they'd change everything.
Finally, remember that we have about a twelve trillion dollar economy. So our overall health care costs are somewhere in the two thousand billion dollar range.
The point is, someone is already paying for it. I don't understand what you mean by "on top of what we pay now." To a first approximation, money added to our tax bill would be offset by money not paid to insurers.