Yeah you have to pay for the good stuff. But one ruined or delayed project (or injury), even for amateurs, makes the better tool worth it.
Completely agree. I have a nice Milwaukee power drill which performs beautifully. I don't use it a lot, but every time I have had to use consumer equivalents, I have been sorely disappointed....
A decentralized social networking toolkit that interoperates across sites and that any site can integrate? That would liberate us from social networking lockin to some extent.
There are times when, for the good of everyone in the nation, we decide that federal policies are a necessary solution. Like when Kansas decides it's school children would learn about invisible pink unicorns, and slashdot explodes. Because, honestly, those children don't get a choice about where they go to school.
It's too often that the poor also don't have a choice, or much of one. Moving is expensive, and jobs aren't always easy to find. So USians without much in the way of resources (and who may make up a part of the 30 million uninsured) may not have a choice about which state they live in, health care or no.
Sure, and since change is good, I bet you are upgrading your production DNS servers to BIND 10 tonight, right?
The point is that when you supplant one system with another, it's going to take a while before the bugs are worked out. Anyone who thinks this will save lives or control costs in the short term is kidding themselves. Maybe, if we are very lucky, we will get things working as well as they are now within the next decade. My prediction though is for more difficulty contesting necessary care being declined in advance by an insurance company and as a result more people dying.
With the Malibu, the issue was that GM violated standard practices of automotive design (as of 1979) as to where they placed the fuel tank in ways that were known to be unreasonably hazardous. While I think the judgement was excessive, I think it was reasonable to find that GM was responsible and that placing the fuel tank behind the rear axle was negligent.
In this case, however, you have a new technology, no guarantees that it is flawless or perfect, which is expensive to implement, which nobody currently implements, and which is under patent. This is a very different case from placing the fuel tank of a car in a location well known at the time to be unsafe.
I would say it is legislation from the jury box.....
Sort of like "legislation from the bench" but done by a committee of people specifically selected to have no relevant expertise in anything relevant.....
I get a small amount of royalties on works I have authored. Also as far as rent paid to you, that is cost you pass on to renters, right? Which means higher rent rates, right? IOW, unless you own your own home, you are paying more taxes directly or not.
The US Commission on Civil Rights first flagged this issue. I remember at the time the Senate bill passed, the numbering they used no longer corresponded to the bill but I was able to find the section nonetheless. Unfortunately Scribd isn't playing well with gnash at the moment so I will have to try later from another computer. Stay tuned.
They're not under any obligation to take you back. I know several people whom the insurance companies do not want back.
This bill still dramatically shifts the balance of power towards insurance companies and away from individuals.
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Pelosi has said this is only the first bill and that we should expect many more. I would assume that means trying to push for public options, and perhaps eventually build on the populist anger towards private insurance to remove it from most of the market. I think the push for socialized medicine is exactly what a large part of the Democratic party is fighting for, though by no means enough to win the day right now.
However, aside from that (and I don't think a single payer system in this country would be a good idea for reasons of abuse of power I have seen from administrations of both parties, on both state and federal levels), there is some really bad stuff in this bill. For example:
The bill empowers the DHHS to waive most of the fines for things like long-term care facilities' employees abusing patients if the facility serves an under-served population, and this is defined as rural areas or ethnic minorities. This is just Jim Crow under a new name: it means that facilities serving ethnic minorities are held to a lower standard, and African-American patients of them are not entitled to the same protections of the laws that white patients are. That's just wrong.
Re:Capitalism and competition re health insurance
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 1
This bill actually makes these problems worse by requiring 90% of premiums to go to payouts. The end result will be more emphasis on payouts, but this will mean higher insurance rates.
Just remember what Pelosi said:
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 2, Funny
There are a number of problems with the GP, including the fact that nearly every country that has a single payer system ALSO has a private insurance option.
This entire argument is a total fallacy. It starts with the assumption that health insurance and single payer regulation will somehow control costs. The only way that will work is through rationing, and that's not really controlling costs - it's lowering services.
True, but the current system rations based on affordability. Rationing wouldn't necessarily be anything new.
The reason health care costs have gotten so out of control in the first place is because patients never look at the costs, because the vast majority of health care is paid for by third parties. So patients demand all the best care and all the tests they want and costs be damned. Then they complain when insurance companies want to deny some services that seem unnecessary or reduce coverage.
I agree with this, btw. Real reform would make non-emergency medical care subject to similar consumer protections as, say, getting your car fixed. You know, make you get an estimate, check with your insurance as to whether it is covered in advance, etc. and put the consumer in the center of that. This bill doesn't really address the place of the consumer relative to cost control and hence it won't work. My prediction is that costs will increase. Furthermore, the 9.5% cap doesn't include addional taxes needed to pay for everyone's subsidies, so it is a bit disingenuous.
Anyway, my prediction is higher costs and higher mortality rates from this bill. The higher mortality rates don't come from rationing per se, but rather from the fact that state regulators tend to be more responsive to complaints by a doctor that a given treatment wasn't authorized than federal regulators are likely to be at least while the bugs are getting worked out.
There are reforms that need to be done. This bill however is deeply misguided.
True, but I still oppose the bill
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The insurer will probably place the burden of proof on you that your heart attack wasn't related to your diabetes. Meanwhile, you're in the hospital and racking up five-figure bills and, oh yeah, you've just had a heart attack. Have a nice day!
That's the problem, and it is a real problem. However this bill is not the answer. The answer is regulation at the state level.
The US health insurance industry is currently regulated by individual states. Different states have different rules. However, one element to the current system is that the state government (which is more responsive to the needs of citizens usually than the federal government) tends to have offices for dealing with these sorts of complaints. Additionally, the same offices take complaints from doctors about lack of authorization for procedures. While this means that some states have better health insurance requirements than others, it means there is a clear point of contact when a problem exists that needs to be resolved quickly.
The problem with this bill is it entirely supplants the state health insurance regulation structures and replaces them with a shiny new federal system. There is no way that the main protections that the states offer against insurance abuses will work right away in the federal system. By pre-empting a fairly mature system of state regulation, this bill will not save lives but rather cost them.
The secondary problem is that the bill has inadequate cost control provisions. In Massachussets, after they passed a similar bill, health insurance rates went up. We can expect the same here. Quite frankly, I have no idea how I will afford it when the rates go up. Right now, when insurance companies raise their rates, I can drop off until they lower them again. This bill makes me part of a captive market.
The real underlying problem left unresolved is that we have inadequate consumer protections in the areas of health care and health insurance. While this bill purports to improve these conditions, it fixes, IMO, the wrong problems and leaves major issues unresolved. Why is it that I have more consumer protections when getting my car repaired than in obtaining non-emergency medical care?
However, Diabetes is a major issue currently and many states require insurance companies to pay for pre-existing conditions after a certain waiting period (in my state it's nine months).
The issue isn't just that it's expensive to treat. The problem also is that a large number of other expensive ailments can be, in part, caused by it. A heart attack costs a lot of money regardless of whether the individual has diabetes or not, but diabetes can be a contributing factor and hence if you let insurance companies avoid paying for pre-existing conditions, they won't cover things like heart attacks for folks with diabetes.
I don't know that diabetes that's well controlled is that expensive to treat. However half a million dollars in medical expenses for a heart attack which may or may not be related........
The issue in part is the fact that it isn't clear that you can perfectly decontaminate material being passed through airlocks. So in fact sealing reduces the problem considerably but does not eliminate it by itself.
The mark of a poor developer is one who says comments are not needed. Furthermore, comments make for good content to improve searchability and often allows coders to think something through before they actually code it up.
I never said comments were not needed. I said comments were not needed to say what the code was doing. There is a tremendous difference. Comments are not to explain code. They are to explain thought processes to other programmers.
Basically there are two kinds of legitimate comments IMO. The first is essentially inline documentation. Using a POD example:
This method maps the calling argument to stored procedure argument names according to the following convention: all named arguments starting with obj_ are mapped to object properties with the same name (minus the obj_ prefix). This is then passed to exec_raw_procedure which actually does the main work (see below). The procname argument defines the name of the procedure called, order_by sets the column ordering, and args provides named arguments mapped according to a similar convention for mapping object properties, except that arg_ is the prefix.
The return type is a list of hashrefs of the returned database results.
=cut
Such is clearly legitimate. It allows test cases to be written, gives folks an idea of when to call the function and what it is supposed to do etc. As far as the code is concerned it is a comment but it is really part of inline documentation.
As for the other type of comments, I think that comments should be addressed to the programmer and say something useful which isn't necessarily immediately apparent from the code. "# Creating the user" isn't helpful. "# This is bad, raising error" can be pretty good.
I also think programmers should initial their comments. If you see two comments: # This is bad, raising error --DS # Not necessarily. Should we really raise an error here? --JR
That can be incredibly helpful. Reading over it quickly you can note there is some disagreement over what this is supposed to do.
Even:
# I wish I could find a better way to write this
or
# Bah, this is hopelessly broken
tell the programmer something which is USEFUL in evaluating what the code does. They are hence good comments.
In short I think comments should be addressed to other programmers, telling them something beyond what the code does. "Here's how to use this API" is one such thing: It provides a common point of expectation and makes it less likely that a change will break lots of things because folks are depending on corner-case behavior (or even bugs in the API).
As for your point about starting the function as a set of comments, that's fine. The comments that are addressed to oneself rather than other programmers should be deleted after. The comments actually telling something to other programmers should definitely be left there.
In short, I am firmly in the camp which says "comments should tell you why, not how" with the exception of inline documentation.
The early phone industry faced very long and complex wars over patent thickets for quite some time. Who had the patent on what parts of the Telephone? Who had patents on various bits of electromechanical switch technology? Cell phones too are very, very patent-laden.
I read the article and I wasn't convinced. I don't think one can guarantee malware detection. Any detection approach has false positives and/or false negatives. Typically we err on the side of false negatives, while some other approaches (host-based IDS-type approaches) err on the side of false positives.
The method addressed here does not deal with all possible attacks, but only the problem of malware interfering with the scan. Hence even with such a mechanism, all you can use it for is guaranteeing the integrity of the scan process. It doesn't tell you by itself whether a given executable is malware or not. For that you have to either look for known threats or for suspicious system changes (sha256 checksums on files changing, for example).
"All we need" is generally an indication that something is missing in the analysis and this is the case here.
I've picked up an open source project that doesn't have comments. There's major chunks of it that the code is such a mess that I have no idea what it does, yet I'm supposed to be fixing it.
If the code is a real mess, it is unlikely that comments telling you what it does will be of help. I HATE seeing comments like: # now we save the user
or
# Checking roles....
It's much better, if you think a comment is required to explain WHY a certain choice was made. For example:
# I am making the assumption here that the user is always an employee. I think this is safe. If not, we might need to revisit....
Of course, good API docs (what every function does, etc) is a different matter. These can be in comments, POD, or the like. These are often helpful for test case construction as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Completely agree. I have a nice Milwaukee power drill which performs beautifully. I don't use it a lot, but every time I have had to use consumer equivalents, I have been sorely disappointed....
A decentralized social networking toolkit that interoperates across sites and that any site can integrate? That would liberate us from social networking lockin to some extent.
The original Senate Bill (HR 3590) to which the reconciliation would be applied has this in it on pages 1813-1814.
I wasn't able to locate an appropriate amendment in the reconciliation bill.
Sure, and since change is good, I bet you are upgrading your production DNS servers to BIND 10 tonight, right?
The point is that when you supplant one system with another, it's going to take a while before the bugs are worked out. Anyone who thinks this will save lives or control costs in the short term is kidding themselves. Maybe, if we are very lucky, we will get things working as well as they are now within the next decade. My prediction though is for more difficulty contesting necessary care being declined in advance by an insurance company and as a result more people dying.
With the Malibu, the issue was that GM violated standard practices of automotive design (as of 1979) as to where they placed the fuel tank in ways that were known to be unreasonably hazardous. While I think the judgement was excessive, I think it was reasonable to find that GM was responsible and that placing the fuel tank behind the rear axle was negligent.
In this case, however, you have a new technology, no guarantees that it is flawless or perfect, which is expensive to implement, which nobody currently implements, and which is under patent. This is a very different case from placing the fuel tank of a car in a location well known at the time to be unsafe.
I would say it is legislation from the jury box.....
Sort of like "legislation from the bench" but done by a committee of people specifically selected to have no relevant expertise in anything relevant.....
I get a small amount of royalties on works I have authored. Also as far as rent paid to you, that is cost you pass on to renters, right? Which means higher rent rates, right? IOW, unless you own your own home, you are paying more taxes directly or not.
The US Commission on Civil Rights first flagged this issue. I remember at the time the Senate bill passed, the numbering they used no longer corresponded to the bill but I was able to find the section nonetheless. Unfortunately Scribd isn't playing well with gnash at the moment so I will have to try later from another computer. Stay tuned.
This bill still dramatically shifts the balance of power towards insurance companies and away from individuals.
Pelosi has said this is only the first bill and that we should expect many more. I would assume that means trying to push for public options, and perhaps eventually build on the populist anger towards private insurance to remove it from most of the market. I think the push for socialized medicine is exactly what a large part of the Democratic party is fighting for, though by no means enough to win the day right now.
However, aside from that (and I don't think a single payer system in this country would be a good idea for reasons of abuse of power I have seen from administrations of both parties, on both state and federal levels), there is some really bad stuff in this bill. For example:
The bill empowers the DHHS to waive most of the fines for things like long-term care facilities' employees abusing patients if the facility serves an under-served population, and this is defined as rural areas or ethnic minorities. This is just Jim Crow under a new name: it means that facilities serving ethnic minorities are held to a lower standard, and African-American patients of them are not entitled to the same protections of the laws that white patients are. That's just wrong.
This bill actually makes these problems worse by requiring 90% of premiums to go to payouts. The end result will be more emphasis on payouts, but this will mean higher insurance rates.
"We have to pass this bill so you can find out what's in it..."
To quote Eugene Volokh, "It's going to be very, very exciting!"
There are a number of problems with the GP, including the fact that nearly every country that has a single payer system ALSO has a private insurance option.
True, but the current system rations based on affordability. Rationing wouldn't necessarily be anything new.
I agree with this, btw. Real reform would make non-emergency medical care subject to similar consumer protections as, say, getting your car fixed. You know, make you get an estimate, check with your insurance as to whether it is covered in advance, etc. and put the consumer in the center of that. This bill doesn't really address the place of the consumer relative to cost control and hence it won't work. My prediction is that costs will increase. Furthermore, the 9.5% cap doesn't include addional taxes needed to pay for everyone's subsidies, so it is a bit disingenuous.
Anyway, my prediction is higher costs and higher mortality rates from this bill. The higher mortality rates don't come from rationing per se, but rather from the fact that state regulators tend to be more responsive to complaints by a doctor that a given treatment wasn't authorized than federal regulators are likely to be at least while the bugs are getting worked out.
There are reforms that need to be done. This bill however is deeply misguided.
That's the problem, and it is a real problem. However this bill is not the answer. The answer is regulation at the state level.
The US health insurance industry is currently regulated by individual states. Different states have different rules. However, one element to the current system is that the state government (which is more responsive to the needs of citizens usually than the federal government) tends to have offices for dealing with these sorts of complaints. Additionally, the same offices take complaints from doctors about lack of authorization for procedures. While this means that some states have better health insurance requirements than others, it means there is a clear point of contact when a problem exists that needs to be resolved quickly.
The problem with this bill is it entirely supplants the state health insurance regulation structures and replaces them with a shiny new federal system. There is no way that the main protections that the states offer against insurance abuses will work right away in the federal system. By pre-empting a fairly mature system of state regulation, this bill will not save lives but rather cost them.
The secondary problem is that the bill has inadequate cost control provisions. In Massachussets, after they passed a similar bill, health insurance rates went up. We can expect the same here. Quite frankly, I have no idea how I will afford it when the rates go up. Right now, when insurance companies raise their rates, I can drop off until they lower them again. This bill makes me part of a captive market.
The real underlying problem left unresolved is that we have inadequate consumer protections in the areas of health care and health insurance. While this bill purports to improve these conditions, it fixes, IMO, the wrong problems and leaves major issues unresolved. Why is it that I have more consumer protections when getting my car repaired than in obtaining non-emergency medical care?
I am opposed to this bill.
However, Diabetes is a major issue currently and many states require insurance companies to pay for pre-existing conditions after a certain waiting period (in my state it's nine months).
The issue isn't just that it's expensive to treat. The problem also is that a large number of other expensive ailments can be, in part, caused by it. A heart attack costs a lot of money regardless of whether the individual has diabetes or not, but diabetes can be a contributing factor and hence if you let insurance companies avoid paying for pre-existing conditions, they won't cover things like heart attacks for folks with diabetes.
I don't know that diabetes that's well controlled is that expensive to treat. However half a million dollars in medical expenses for a heart attack which may or may not be related........
The problem in this case is that Viacom seems as unable to determine how much is authorized as YouTube is....
I would rather see the market decentralize.
The issue in part is the fact that it isn't clear that you can perfectly decontaminate material being passed through airlocks. So in fact sealing reduces the problem considerably but does not eliminate it by itself.
Thanks!
Looks like it has been added again, I think. Last time I looked at this it didn't have a plain text option which was really, really annoying.
As for my gmail account, I had moved there before this happened and it's a hassle to move.
I am glad that this has been made available. As I say, last time, it had not been and that was really, really annoying.
My opinion changed when they stopped releasing text-only copies of public domain works through Google Books.
I am rather concerned about Google and Apple, and primarily support alternatives.
I won't buy Apple products though and only grudgingly do business with Google these days.
I never said comments were not needed. I said comments were not needed to say what the code was doing. There is a tremendous difference. Comments are not to explain code. They are to explain thought processes to other programmers.
Basically there are two kinds of legitimate comments IMO. The first is essentially inline documentation. Using a POD example:
=item exec_mapped_procedure({procname => $procedure_name, args => {$key1 => $value1, ...}, order_by => $field_name})
This method maps the calling argument to stored procedure argument names according to the following convention: all named arguments starting with obj_ are mapped to object properties with the same name (minus the obj_ prefix). This is then passed to exec_raw_procedure which actually does the main work (see below). The procname argument defines the name of the procedure called, order_by sets the column ordering, and args provides named arguments mapped according to a similar convention for mapping object properties, except that arg_ is the prefix.
The return type is a list of hashrefs of the returned database results.
=cut
Such is clearly legitimate. It allows test cases to be written, gives folks an idea of when to call the function and what it is supposed to do etc. As far as the code is concerned it is a comment but it is really part of inline documentation.
As for the other type of comments, I think that comments should be addressed to the programmer and say something useful which isn't necessarily immediately apparent from the code. "# Creating the user" isn't helpful. "# This is bad, raising error" can be pretty good.
I also think programmers should initial their comments. If you see two comments:
# This is bad, raising error --DS
# Not necessarily. Should we really raise an error here? --JR
That can be incredibly helpful. Reading over it quickly you can note there is some disagreement over what this is supposed to do.
Even:
# I wish I could find a better way to write this
or
# Bah, this is hopelessly broken
tell the programmer something which is USEFUL in evaluating what the code does. They are hence good comments.
In short I think comments should be addressed to other programmers, telling them something beyond what the code does. "Here's how to use this API" is one such thing: It provides a common point of expectation and makes it less likely that a change will break lots of things because folks are depending on corner-case behavior (or even bugs in the API).
As for your point about starting the function as a set of comments, that's fine. The comments that are addressed to oneself rather than other programmers should be deleted after. The comments actually telling something to other programmers should definitely be left there.
In short, I am firmly in the camp which says "comments should tell you why, not how" with the exception of inline documentation.
The early phone industry faced very long and complex wars over patent thickets for quite some time. Who had the patent on what parts of the Telephone? Who had patents on various bits of electromechanical switch technology? Cell phones too are very, very patent-laden.
I read the article and I wasn't convinced. I don't think one can guarantee malware detection. Any detection approach has false positives and/or false negatives. Typically we err on the side of false negatives, while some other approaches (host-based IDS-type approaches) err on the side of false positives.
The method addressed here does not deal with all possible attacks, but only the problem of malware interfering with the scan. Hence even with such a mechanism, all you can use it for is guaranteeing the integrity of the scan process. It doesn't tell you by itself whether a given executable is malware or not. For that you have to either look for known threats or for suspicious system changes (sha256 checksums on files changing, for example).
"All we need" is generally an indication that something is missing in the analysis and this is the case here.
It's your model. If it works for you, great.
Me? I have gotten paid for at least the last 4 years to do open source and documentation work full time.
Of course this depends to some extent on what the software does. Some software is easier to make money developing than others.....
If the code is a real mess, it is unlikely that comments telling you what it does will be of help. I HATE seeing comments like:
# now we save the user
or
# Checking roles....
It's much better, if you think a comment is required to explain WHY a certain choice was made. For example:
# I am making the assumption here that the user is always an employee. I think this is safe. If not, we might need to revisit....
Of course, good API docs (what every function does, etc) is a different matter. These can be in comments, POD, or the like. These are often helpful for test case construction as well.