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User: Improv

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Comments · 1,594

  1. Re:w00t! on Battle Lines Being Drawn As Obama Plans To Curb Tax Avoidance · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You don't have to "earn" the right to be treated like a human being and a member of society. It's a duty of everyone to help with that.

  2. w00t! on Battle Lines Being Drawn As Obama Plans To Curb Tax Avoidance · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm not a big fan of the system, but fixing it is a big step in the right direction. I wonder if/when we'll see the EU do the same thing (e.g. with Monaco).

  3. Re:Arrogant Out of Touch Dolts on Chicago Tribune Reporters Don't Want Readers' Pre-Approval · · Score: 1

    "Science does not emerge from party politics or public debate" - the same is true of good journalism. Journalism, like academia, has a long tradition of having its own standards and practices. These traditions have served society well when they have been allowed to operate - the values taught in journalism schools lead to better news than those that would emerge from the crowd, just as peer review, the scientific method, and other academic traditions lead to better science.

    You may take joy in being one of the populist barbarians raging against all structure and virtue, but don't expect all of us to join your foolish crusade as well.

  4. WHO Flu? on Let's Rename Swine Flu As "Colbert Flu" · · Score: 1

    If we're going to do euphemisms, let's show the WHO what we think and call it the WHO Flu.

  5. Re:Can't get a copy of X-Rays? on Why Digital Medical Records Are No Panacea · · Score: 1

    I actually have both analyse and dicom formats for my data (different tools want different formats). I doubt that the dicom files are encapsulated jpegs, but I'll take a look.

  6. Re:You know what would REALLY help lower the costs on Why Digital Medical Records Are No Panacea · · Score: 1

    If they had to meet the same standards as doctors of today, that sounds fine by me. I also would be ok with having people seeing nurses when today they see doctors. I don't want to dilute the meaning of the title doctor though - keeping it to a high standard is important, I think.

  7. Re:You know what would REALLY help lower the costs on Why Digital Medical Records Are No Panacea · · Score: 1

    What's wrong with nurses as an intermediate step? They're often quite clued at what they do.

    I'm not sure if doubling admissions would be productive - in theory it could just burden the schools more, but I don't know enough to do more than guess on that.

    I agree with you on the hours. However, interns are not doctors yet - I don't think too many full doctors have a work week that resembles the itnernship.

  8. Re:The plural of anecdote is not data ... on Why Digital Medical Records Are No Panacea · · Score: 1

    We also need to understand the existing data sharing policies and their faults - I and many others have had our medical records stuck in the mail for weeks (and occasionally lost) when we really wanted immediate treatment. At least electronic records have the potential to be faster.

  9. Re:You know what would REALLY help lower the costs on Why Digital Medical Records Are No Panacea · · Score: 1

    Lowering standards might lower the costs, but it would also be immensely stupid. Sure, people who barely make it through medical school are doctors, but that's still quite an achievement given the rigours of medical school. You're talking about opening the door to the yahoos who haven't managed much at all - people who have achieved much less than that out-of-date surgeon.

    We can and should demand solutions that are better than what the market provides. They may not be perfect, and they may not be as cheap as your neighbourhood voodoo woman, but the quality will be higher.

  10. Re:Can't get a copy of X-Rays? on Why Digital Medical Records Are No Panacea · · Score: 1

    Having worked with neuroimaging software before, very few of them offer to save to a "normal" graphics format (doing so is not generally useful because there's a lot of information loss and no valid purpose for medicine or research).

    On the research side of things, we're generally cautioned by lawyers not to give people these files because we may have some liability if people look at their brain, freak out about something, and do something stupid. Many researchers will anyhow because that's ridiculous.

  11. This is how we negotiate on EFF Sues Apple Over BluWiki Legal Threats · · Score: 1

    On some level, this (and other things that have been made by the courts and through law, like the Doctrine of First Sale) is how society as a whole negotiates with vendors - when they offer things that are enough against the interests of society, we effectively band together and tell them that their terms are unacceptable and they'll either modify them or they won't be sold here.

  12. Left Behind... on How To Have an Online Social Life When You're Dead · · Score: 5, Funny

    This site, mentioned in the article, is particularly hilarious. I like how the way they know the rapture has happened is based on if enough devout christians they've hired to login everyday don't. It'd be cute if those people just lost internet access and everything were sent out early... or would that cause the RAPTURE? ;)

  13. Re:Validation on Opting Out Increases Spam? · · Score: 1

    If we could just get some random font changes in there he could try for early editions of Wired magazine.

  14. Re:Wikipedia Is Rotten on Wikipedia Threatens Artists For Fair Use · · Score: 1

    The Wikipedia community has a number of problems, but I think inclusionism is far more a problem than deletionism for a project that hopes to be an encyclopedia.

    Any community has and needs a culture - cultures like academia that aim to do something in particular have this problem more than most - establishing norms and then ensuring that they're passed down to entrants before they begin to function as full members or prominent members is a problem as old as civilisation. Deletionism is just staying on-topic. Bureaucracy is just needed structure.

    Most of your other criticisms are on-target - Wales is a poor leader because he is reluctant to lead and thinks problems will resolve themselves on their own. The happy balance between Sanger and Wales during the early years was better for the project than a meek leader.

    You might want to work a bit on your writing style - you're very repetitive.

  15. Re:Postgres is looking better than ever on Oracle Buys Sun · · Score: 5, Funny

    On the other hand, it makes selling tickets to the event easier.

  16. Advances on Telepresence — Our Best Bet For Exploring Space · · Score: 1

    This planet is entirely populated by lag monsters!

  17. Affordable rail helps everyone... on Obama Proposes High-Speed Rail System For the US · · Score: 1

    I would be delighted to have another option than Greyhound, Airlines, and renting a car.

    If we could have a system as nice as the TGV in Europe, that'd be fantastic.

  18. Re:Doubtful on Obama Proposes High-Speed Rail System For the US · · Score: 1

    There's also a lot of mass transit within (some) cities that works to varying degrees. I live in Pittsburgh, which has "okay" public transit - good enough for me to have sold my car a few years ago with only occasional regrets. Some other cities have better PT, a few have worse..

  19. Re:Jack Thompson is right: it's NOT spam. on Jack Thompson Spams Utah Senate, May Face Legal Action · · Score: 1

    Laws actually are often enforced in context - mens rea and reasonable person tests are part of how law is interpreted and enforced (see also sentencing discretion). In a common law system, interpretation is very important.

    However, I guess we're talking about proposed laws than existing laws, so my above comments might not really be relevant. On the topic of proposed laws, for proposals that come from people who primarily push for ideals of society that I consider harmful (like Thompson or Libertarians), I would want to understand how they believe the proposal helps their cause, and weigh how it actually does versus the benefits it brings. There may be (rare) times when I would find common cause with Libertarians, but I would be *very* careful to make sure I understand the consequences of anything they propose. (I think I'm largely agreeing with you here)

    For individuals who violate the norms of society badly (as JT has), I think it's kosher to go further and decide to ignore everything they say. Society cannot function without some kind of a cost for inappropriate behaviour - without such costs, everything becomes effectively appropriate and things fall apart. If JT would behave like an adult, he would probably get further in his goals. We all decide who's insane, it's a muddy consensus, and it roughly works. That's all we can do, and it is what we must do. We can cope with sometimes being wrong because the alternative is worse.

  20. Re:Jack Thompson is right: it's NOT spam. on Jack Thompson Spams Utah Senate, May Face Legal Action · · Score: 1

    I disagree. When a bill becomes a crusade, and the crusade becomes (or is revealed to be) insane, then that context should make a difference to those deliberating it.

    This is one of those "big picture" things, akin to how Lawrence Lessig argued that permitting continual just-in-time extensions of copyright amount to making it indefinite.

  21. Re:Make the reader open, the writer licensed on Working Toward a Patent-Agnostic Open Source License · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That's all well and good for a society that doesn't produce ideas and share them between themselves very freely. It more describes the pre-internet 80s society than the modern internet-driven society - Apple, Youtube, and the like have shown that society does not have to be fed, as consumers, only things that dedicated producers provide.

  22. Re:Pretty sensible, if you consider the goals on Quebec Says 'Non' To English-Only Video Games · · Score: 1

    The policy will obviously provide a dual-pathed incentive - vendors can either treat French as a first-class language, or they can not release in Quebec (or France or large parts of Africa). In either case, they don't threaten the French-centric life present in Quebec, even though the first option is far superiour. Either they're really serious about not being pushed out by English and are willing to make some sacrifices, or they resign themselves to eventually losing the language.

  23. Re:Misconduct by *Republican* Prosecutors on Conviction of Sen. Ted Stevens Is Thrown Out · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Republicans, like Democrats (and virtually every other political movement), are not a hive-mind. There are all sorts of voices in the party, from individuals to political factions. It is entirely possible that he was attacked by other Republicans for political or personal reasons, because some factions needed a scapegoat, or alternatively that this was literally just a normal trial with no political railroading.

    I don't believe Double Jeopardy applies in these situations (but IANAL).

  24. Re:Surprise surprise! on National Security Letters Reform Act Reintroduced · · Score: 1

    I went into it a bit more with my comment above, but..

    Is an accident equivalent in moral weight to an intentional harmful act? Is "mens rea" a simple binary distinction?

  25. Re:Surprise surprise! on National Security Letters Reform Act Reintroduced · · Score: 1

    Or alternatively, "only when people stop paying attention to other differences and focus on a single issue, agreeing with me significantly in my stance on it, can we make a lot of progress on that issue". I don't buy it, both because I believe I disagree with what your stance is given your wording, and because I think there are plenty of other issues you would marginalise here. Liberty is not the only value we should consider in our notion of the public good.

    For example, I believe in universal public health care, closing private religious schools and ending home schooling, reintroduction of civics into school curricula, public funding of our university system (and creating a cultural expectation of occasional continued light involvement of adults in that system), stressing public transit over car ownership, public financing of elections, high levels of government transparency, heavy investment in modernising our transport infrastructure, de-suburbanisation, etc.

    Do you think these things are un-american? Do you agree with any of them?