They can stop compettition that would otherwise increase the quality of life of the public and decrease the economic drain.
So you're going to take the "Dr. Craptacular" route. Where out of the goodness of their hearts without any organization or government entity to compel them and despite the fact that the shitty doctors want everyone to give them thousands of dollars, they're going to let the patients know that they're shitty doctors so the patients can make educated choices so that competition can occur?
The values of A and B are decreased as they are shared with other people (scarcity)
Huh? If I write a program that does something Very Interesting(tm), does it get less Interesting if 10 people run it? 100 people? 1,000,000? The value of a creation is related directly to its perceived utility. Unless the program competes with itself it's utility and value is very unlikely to be related to it's distribution. (Consider a lotto-number program that always gets the jackpot. After you're splitting a $10M jackpot 100M ways, it's pretty pointless, though it might be of interest to see how many people would continue to use it based on the assumption that everyone else will give up and quit thereby raising the value again)
To you perhaps, but let's say I want to set up a mailserver, lets say sendmail. I can read the fine manual (o'reilly publishes a nice one, it's about 1000 pages long) and do it myself. Or I could pay someone else (sendmail.com) to A) take the time and B) take the risk (the latter is what big companies are always looking for when they whine about "support")
The principle is the same as with tinkering with your car, except your car wasn't free as in beer. You can pay someone else to take the time to keep it running, or you can spend a couple of hours every now and then, change the oil and whatever else.
It'd never be because of everyone going to med school because they heard they can make six figure salaries by cutting people up, rather than because they have a serious desire to help people. Take a look at the glut of shitty programmers for an analogy. Please, share with us your wisdom of how reducing government interference will make the thousands of monkeys who took CS from their local college because they heard it would make them rich into better programmers.
Sadly enough, the reason so many doctors suck it here is because the oversight that exists is barely enough. I have here the Spring 2005 edition of the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners bulletin. The Spring quarterly contains all of the disciplinary actions against doctors for the prior year, and in it are juicy tidbits like one doctor sexually assaulting a patient under anesthesia for which he was awarded a temporary suspension of his license, after the DNA tests came back positive. At least the doctor did the right thing and voluntarily gave up his license. Another gave false information to the board, "forgot" to tell the board that he was manic-depressive, assaulted his wife with a gun, and eventually ended up getting up close and personal with the Dallas SWAT team. He also got a temporary suspension. Another was put on probation (his suspension was "stayed") for practicing while drunk... in all, there were 187 doctors facing discipline in the year prior, for anything from rape to failing to maintain their required education.
Less regulation is going to make that better? Are the bad doctors (who are in it for the money) going to step forward and give up their cash cow out of a sudden discovery of the goodness in their hearts? Or maybe they'll put up a sign and let their patients know: "Welcome to Dr. Craptacular's Surgical Practice! In the past 5 years I've raped one woman, shown up to an appendectomy while drunk twice, and was arrested for possession of cocaine three times, but my rates are 10% lower than the guy across the hall's rates!"
Go ahead an tell me Iraq would be better off long-term with Saddam in charge. HA.
Thats easy, look at Iran now, thats the way Iraq is going if Sharia infects the new constitution. Meanwhile Saddam and his sons may have been cruel sadistic murderers, but at least women were allowed to drive, have jobs, and even run for office. Until the US put his face on a playing card, one of Saddam's top officials was openly Christian. I'd like to see all of that happen again under a Muslim Iraqi government. (No, really, prove me wrong!)
When you put it this way, it seems to me that the only logical way out without pissing everyone off is to separate "health insurance" into health and major-medical(-ish... some health issues can become major problems but should still be covered under "Health" in this case, otherwise Health would always wait until it got bad and then pass the buck... maybe "Medical Catastrophe") insurance. You get sick? Health insurance pays to make it better. You break your leg? Catastrophe pays to make it better. You think you can get through life without being maimed? Fine, don't buy the insurance.
Then catastrophe insurance becomes just like "real" insurance, since unlike the health insurance, some people won't need any payout while some people will need a huge payout. Companies will need to be straightforward over what they will and will not pay on, if you've got health insurance that won't pay for a heart attack, maybe you should look for medical catastrophe insurance that will.
It won't fix the whole issue, since the regular health part will still be a guaranteed-payout thing, but it's the beginning of a divide-and-conquer plan that takes out some of the most expensive parts of the problem.
If the company stopped buying it for you, do you believe for one instant they'd increase your salary by the amount they were spending on you so that you could go buy it yourself?
Fine, let's say the first 72 hours of response should be up to the city and state... hell, let's say they should be responsible for the first WEEK of response time. It doesn't change the fact that it took 8 days for some people to be rescued. That's inexcusable across ALL levels.
In the end, it will be a great big blame game with everyone pointing fingers at everyone else, well choreographed to make sure that the viewing public gets their tax dollar's worth while keeping them in the dark about the fact that all of them are equally at fault.
Yeah, well, we just got the report from your doctor via the insurance company that you look like you've got MS, so we're going to have to let you go, otherwise the health insurance rates for the company will double. Good luck with whatever is left of your life, and don't let your thousand-dollar-a-month COBRA rates hit you on the ass on the way out the door.
Eh, really now it's just as simple. You decide what you want to do with the machine, then you pick a (distribution|version of vista) that does what you want to do. Not that hard, even with the "millions" of choices for Linux.
The problem with the "one size fits most" approach is that sooner or later you'll end up not being "most".
Nobody, not a single person, knew exactly what was going to happen up until after Katrina went through
Thats funny, it was in government reports only a few years ago. Just like the terrorism notes that were supposed to have been read when Bush got into office which didn't turn up until after 9/11.
It's obvious at this point that Bush is incompetent. He is incapable of reading the pre-digested reports he is handed. He cannot be trusted with appointing people now that it's been publicized that he appointed a guy whose sole achievement in life was to run a horse association into the ground and donate money to Bush to be the head of FEMA.
Not only that, but states requested mobilizing their national guards days before Katrina hit. With a category 5 storm in the Gulf, it was obvious to the governors that it was going to be BAD no matter where it landed, and that they'd need to be ready. Washington did not approve the mobilizations (required for the national guard to cross state lines in certain situations and capacities) until after Katrina hit, when those guardsmen would have been best stationed in the Gulf behind the hurricane to follow Katrina ashore, where they would have been there the instant Katrina moved away from the shore (if not sooner, assuming you believe the Guard exists to risk their lives to defend our country).
There's level upon level of fuckup here, and the federal government had their finger in everyone's pie, from the national guard's slow response to FEMA's inability to operate.
Ah, interesting. Just loading the page containing the link causes it to crash. And yeah, those aren't - signs as was in the message linked on CNET, those are some other character (maybe on a certain font they are minuses?).
Looks that way here too. both the link as exactly pasted from his "proof of concept" and one I made with about 30,000 -'s.
I suspect that the actual impact of this is minimal, since he claims that it's an error in the IDN (international domain name) processing, which was disabled some time back (remember the controversy back when people were using cryllic or some other kind-of-like english alphabet to pretend to be some other website for phishing and firefox's answer was to disable it?)
Oddly enough my copy of Mozilla (with IDN enabled) behaves properly (tells me it can't resolve it).
it's likely because they are focusing on the bottom line as much as anyone else.
Yes, but that focus is tempered by their principles. They could say "gee, it's so much easier to make a profit by setting fire to the amazon rainforest and then selling the resulting land to resorts which will go out of business a few years down the road once people decide they don't want to go and see dead jungles." but they don't, instead they work harder to find ways to make money that minimizes their destructiveness.
They may not do things "on principle" but given choices, they would take into consideration both profit and their guiding principles. This way they can justify (to themselves and the rest of us) the choices they make given "option A" (destroy the world and make billions) and "option B" (don't destroy the world and make millions).
Make no bones about it: NO company can afford to do things on principal.
Bullshit. Tell that to all the people out there holding Green mutual funds. Sure, they aren't getting as rich as the people holding the vice funds, but the companies aren't drying up and dying off as you would have us believe.
Non-communism of China aside, it is important to consider other possibilities. For all we know, Yahoo wasn't told what they were actually doing. Hell, they might have just been given the email headers and told to find out where they came from. Maybe they were told it was a child porn investigation. Would you demand to see the proof?
Of course, in a situation like this, we'll probably never know if Yahoo's employees knew what they were doing, whether this guy actually stole any "State Secrets" or if they just needed a phony charge to shut the guy up, or what the real truth is.
The problem with cities is that there's just nothing to do without driving for hours.
Yet companies insist on getting downtown offices.
Then they tell their employees that they're not paid enough to live downtown because they're expected to live at the edge of town and drive for hours to get to work. Oh except for the sysadmin, who lives on site since he's paid the same as everyone else but is expected to have a 15 minute incident response time.
But you wouldn't deny that interviewing a murderer would help us understand what drives people to murder.
It wouldn't help understand what drives people to not murder though. And thats the point here. The book talks about how people exposed to porn get worse and worse and how they start looking for more hardcore stuff to get "stimulated", yet somehow the millions of people who were not interviewed for the book look at porn and manage to not become rapists. Therefore there is an unexplored "upper bound" on just how much porn can actually screw someone's mind up.
And now it's punishment for blood transfusions in third world countries, marrying someone who had sex before marriage, marrying someone who had sex outside of marriage, marrying someone who divorced someone who had sex outside of marriage, marrying someone born to someone who had sex outside of marriage. Or a blood transfusion. Or sharing needles, or sharing dentists. Heck, there's at least one case suspected to have been caused by sharing a razor.
If you believe AIDS was "god's punishment" your god is one sloppy asshat.
Thats what I said. And if the shareholders say "moneymoneymoney!" then thats the shareholders' fault. Not the system's.
There are quite a few corporations (for profit even) which explicitly lay out the fact that they choose ethics/morals over money. If you don't like it as an investor, you should have read the prospectus and/or the corporate charter before you invested. Don't put your money in "green" mutual funds and then be disappointed when another company makes billions by levelling the amazon rainforests.
Slashdot Mirror
They can stop compettition that would otherwise increase the quality of life of the public and decrease the economic drain.
So you're going to take the "Dr. Craptacular" route. Where out of the goodness of their hearts without any organization or government entity to compel them and despite the fact that the shitty doctors want everyone to give them thousands of dollars, they're going to let the patients know that they're shitty doctors so the patients can make educated choices so that competition can occur?
The values of A and B are decreased as they are shared with other people (scarcity)
Huh? If I write a program that does something Very Interesting(tm), does it get less Interesting if 10 people run it? 100 people? 1,000,000? The value of a creation is related directly to its perceived utility. Unless the program competes with itself it's utility and value is very unlikely to be related to it's distribution. (Consider a lotto-number program that always gets the jackpot. After you're splitting a $10M jackpot 100M ways, it's pretty pointless, though it might be of interest to see how many people would continue to use it based on the assumption that everyone else will give up and quit thereby raising the value again)
To you perhaps, but let's say I want to set up a mailserver, lets say sendmail. I can read the fine manual (o'reilly publishes a nice one, it's about 1000 pages long) and do it myself. Or I could pay someone else (sendmail.com) to A) take the time and B) take the risk (the latter is what big companies are always looking for when they whine about "support")
The principle is the same as with tinkering with your car, except your car wasn't free as in beer. You can pay someone else to take the time to keep it running, or you can spend a couple of hours every now and then, change the oil and whatever else.
why would people believe me?
Because people are stupid. See also: pediatrician getting lynched because long words are just too damn confusing to mobs.
Ah yes, clearly it's the fault of the government.
It'd never be because of everyone going to med school because they heard they can make six figure salaries by cutting people up, rather than because they have a serious desire to help people. Take a look at the glut of shitty programmers for an analogy. Please, share with us your wisdom of how reducing government interference will make the thousands of monkeys who took CS from their local college because they heard it would make them rich into better programmers.
Sadly enough, the reason so many doctors suck it here is because the oversight that exists is barely enough. I have here the Spring 2005 edition of the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners bulletin. The Spring quarterly contains all of the disciplinary actions against doctors for the prior year, and in it are juicy tidbits like one doctor sexually assaulting a patient under anesthesia for which he was awarded a temporary suspension of his license, after the DNA tests came back positive. At least the doctor did the right thing and voluntarily gave up his license. Another gave false information to the board, "forgot" to tell the board that he was manic-depressive, assaulted his wife with a gun, and eventually ended up getting up close and personal with the Dallas SWAT team. He also got a temporary suspension. Another was put on probation (his suspension was "stayed") for practicing while drunk... in all, there were 187 doctors facing discipline in the year prior, for anything from rape to failing to maintain their required education.
Less regulation is going to make that better? Are the bad doctors (who are in it for the money) going to step forward and give up their cash cow out of a sudden discovery of the goodness in their hearts? Or maybe they'll put up a sign and let their patients know: "Welcome to Dr. Craptacular's Surgical Practice! In the past 5 years I've raped one woman, shown up to an appendectomy while drunk twice, and was arrested for possession of cocaine three times, but my rates are 10% lower than the guy across the hall's rates!"
Go ahead an tell me Iraq would be better off long-term with Saddam in charge. HA.
Thats easy, look at Iran now, thats the way Iraq is going if Sharia infects the new constitution. Meanwhile Saddam and his sons may have been cruel sadistic murderers, but at least women were allowed to drive, have jobs, and even run for office. Until the US put his face on a playing card, one of Saddam's top officials was openly Christian. I'd like to see all of that happen again under a Muslim Iraqi government. (No, really, prove me wrong!)
When you put it this way, it seems to me that the only logical way out without pissing everyone off is to separate "health insurance" into health and major-medical(-ish... some health issues can become major problems but should still be covered under "Health" in this case, otherwise Health would always wait until it got bad and then pass the buck... maybe "Medical Catastrophe") insurance. You get sick? Health insurance pays to make it better. You break your leg? Catastrophe pays to make it better. You think you can get through life without being maimed? Fine, don't buy the insurance.
Then catastrophe insurance becomes just like "real" insurance, since unlike the health insurance, some people won't need any payout while some people will need a huge payout. Companies will need to be straightforward over what they will and will not pay on, if you've got health insurance that won't pay for a heart attack, maybe you should look for medical catastrophe insurance that will.
It won't fix the whole issue, since the regular health part will still be a guaranteed-payout thing, but it's the beginning of a divide-and-conquer plan that takes out some of the most expensive parts of the problem.
Man, imagine that, a world with only CEOs and nobody to lay off, what would they EVER do with themselves?
If the company stopped buying it for you, do you believe for one instant they'd increase your salary by the amount they were spending on you so that you could go buy it yourself?
Fine, let's say the first 72 hours of response should be up to the city and state... hell, let's say they should be responsible for the first WEEK of response time. It doesn't change the fact that it took 8 days for some people to be rescued. That's inexcusable across ALL levels.
In the end, it will be a great big blame game with everyone pointing fingers at everyone else, well choreographed to make sure that the viewing public gets their tax dollar's worth while keeping them in the dark about the fact that all of them are equally at fault.
Yeah, well, we just got the report from your doctor via the insurance company that you look like you've got MS, so we're going to have to let you go, otherwise the health insurance rates for the company will double. Good luck with whatever is left of your life, and don't let your thousand-dollar-a-month COBRA rates hit you on the ass on the way out the door.
Eh, really now it's just as simple. You decide what you want to do with the machine, then you pick a (distribution|version of vista) that does what you want to do. Not that hard, even with the "millions" of choices for Linux.
The problem with the "one size fits most" approach is that sooner or later you'll end up not being "most".
Those that WISH to hear what you have to say can
By walking blocks away to a place caged in underneath a roaring freeway.
The only thing it's missing is the sign "Beware of Tiger!" and the plans for destroying the Earth to make room for an intergalactic freeway.
Yeah, obviously they need more bullhorns, not radios. Nothing gets your point across faster than 500 people screaming into their bullhorn at max!
"RRRararammmaarrr rararrrrR! GeRaaaarrRRRAararR RRAaraRaarRRarRR!"
Nobody, not a single person, knew exactly what was going to happen up until after Katrina went through
Thats funny, it was in government reports only a few years ago. Just like the terrorism notes that were supposed to have been read when Bush got into office which didn't turn up until after 9/11.
It's obvious at this point that Bush is incompetent. He is incapable of reading the pre-digested reports he is handed. He cannot be trusted with appointing people now that it's been publicized that he appointed a guy whose sole achievement in life was to run a horse association into the ground and donate money to Bush to be the head of FEMA.
Not only that, but states requested mobilizing their national guards days before Katrina hit. With a category 5 storm in the Gulf, it was obvious to the governors that it was going to be BAD no matter where it landed, and that they'd need to be ready. Washington did not approve the mobilizations (required for the national guard to cross state lines in certain situations and capacities) until after Katrina hit, when those guardsmen would have been best stationed in the Gulf behind the hurricane to follow Katrina ashore, where they would have been there the instant Katrina moved away from the shore (if not sooner, assuming you believe the Guard exists to risk their lives to defend our country).
There's level upon level of fuckup here, and the federal government had their finger in everyone's pie, from the national guard's slow response to FEMA's inability to operate.
Ah, interesting. Just loading the page containing the link causes it to crash. And yeah, those aren't - signs as was in the message linked on CNET, those are some other character (maybe on a certain font they are minuses?).
Looks that way here too. both the link as exactly pasted from his "proof of concept" and one I made with about 30,000 -'s.
I suspect that the actual impact of this is minimal, since he claims that it's an error in the IDN (international domain name) processing, which was disabled some time back (remember the controversy back when people were using cryllic or some other kind-of-like english alphabet to pretend to be some other website for phishing and firefox's answer was to disable it?)
Oddly enough my copy of Mozilla (with IDN enabled) behaves properly (tells me it can't resolve it).
part of a government conspiracy.
Huh?
Everyone commenting in this article is bashing the incompetence of the government. Last I checked, conspiracy meant "not blindingly obvious".
Posts modded up far higher than yours pointed out the site works perfectly fine in firefox and Opera... if you get past the UA check.
it's likely because they are focusing on the bottom line as much as anyone else.
Yes, but that focus is tempered by their principles. They could say "gee, it's so much easier to make a profit by setting fire to the amazon rainforest and then selling the resulting land to resorts which will go out of business a few years down the road once people decide they don't want to go and see dead jungles." but they don't, instead they work harder to find ways to make money that minimizes their destructiveness.
They may not do things "on principle" but given choices, they would take into consideration both profit and their guiding principles. This way they can justify (to themselves and the rest of us) the choices they make given "option A" (destroy the world and make billions) and "option B" (don't destroy the world and make millions).
Make no bones about it: NO company can afford to do things on principal.
Bullshit. Tell that to all the people out there holding Green mutual funds. Sure, they aren't getting as rich as the people holding the vice funds, but the companies aren't drying up and dying off as you would have us believe.
Non-communism of China aside, it is important to consider other possibilities. For all we know, Yahoo wasn't told what they were actually doing. Hell, they might have just been given the email headers and told to find out where they came from. Maybe they were told it was a child porn investigation. Would you demand to see the proof?
Of course, in a situation like this, we'll probably never know if Yahoo's employees knew what they were doing, whether this guy actually stole any "State Secrets" or if they just needed a phony charge to shut the guy up, or what the real truth is.
The problem with cities is that there's just nothing to do without driving for hours.
Yet companies insist on getting downtown offices.
Then they tell their employees that they're not paid enough to live downtown because they're expected to live at the edge of town and drive for hours to get to work. Oh except for the sysadmin, who lives on site since he's paid the same as everyone else but is expected to have a 15 minute incident response time.
But you wouldn't deny that interviewing a murderer would help us understand what drives people to murder.
It wouldn't help understand what drives people to not murder though. And thats the point here. The book talks about how people exposed to porn get worse and worse and how they start looking for more hardcore stuff to get "stimulated", yet somehow the millions of people who were not interviewed for the book look at porn and manage to not become rapists. Therefore there is an unexplored "upper bound" on just how much porn can actually screw someone's mind up.
And now it's punishment for blood transfusions in third world countries, marrying someone who had sex before marriage, marrying someone who had sex outside of marriage, marrying someone who divorced someone who had sex outside of marriage, marrying someone born to someone who had sex outside of marriage. Or a blood transfusion. Or sharing needles, or sharing dentists. Heck, there's at least one case suspected to have been caused by sharing a razor.
If you believe AIDS was "god's punishment" your god is one sloppy asshat.
CEO's answer to the shareholders.
Thats what I said. And if the shareholders say "moneymoneymoney!" then thats the shareholders' fault. Not the system's.
There are quite a few corporations (for profit even) which explicitly lay out the fact that they choose ethics/morals over money. If you don't like it as an investor, you should have read the prospectus and/or the corporate charter before you invested. Don't put your money in "green" mutual funds and then be disappointed when another company makes billions by levelling the amazon rainforests.