Take a rage dump, then re-read the GP post: he clearly stated "As a social libertarian, I would never ask for government regulation of such an enterprise"
He's clearly not calling for gov intervention like the TV version.
The article or a previous post said it was spherical to avoid corners and edges that may be damaged by handling, but you do bring up an interesting point:
Trying to make a "perfect sphere" without any corners out of a crystal structure that is inherently non-spherical will create (way more than billions- brazillions) of corners in the crystal structure. It's like trying to build a Death Star out of rectangular lego pieces, it will never be "perfectly round"/geek
So what is the trade-off between this and the simple & precise 12 edges and flat sides of a cube? It seems to me a cube would be easer to accurately fabricate. How brittle is metallic silicon? Is it prone to deforming, shearing along crystal lattice lines? Anyone in material sciences or something or other know more about this?
This is all assuming they had a better reason than "Ph33R 0Ur P3rfekt 5ph33R!!1!one!1"
While the ADD thing rings quite true, some people (kids and adults) actually do need and benefit from meds. The rest is just failure of parenting IMHO.
The whole expanded autism spectrum thing was certainly not pushed by big pharmaceuticals. To my knowledge there isn't a single drug for autism on the market, but I would love to see one: I have a high functioning autistic relative.
Doctors over the last decade or so realized that "autistic" people have a wide range of ability/impairment from 24/7 direct care needs to running a company on their own. Autism is not an ON/OFF switch like Downs syndrome (and even that has wide range of affect)
Both Joomla and Mambo are Swahili words, mambo being a greeting that roughly translates to an informal "how are you" and jumla means "together".
Anyhow, that makes jumla or joomla a good name for a CMS; "together" certainly makes more sense than "hey what's up?". I'm not sure why it's anglicised with two OOs, since in Swahili that makes a long "oh" sound, but maybe there already is a project spelled jumla... which would just go to show how hard it is to find a name for a project these days (see Phoenix->Firebird->Firefox).
/Forgive the errors, haven't written much English for 6 months //Nipo Dar es Salaam ///Nafundisha Newala Day
You can't consider the EU as a single market for games (not consoles, I'm only talking about games) because you simply can't sell a single product across the whole EU like you can across all the US or Japan.
The UK usually gets the US version localized by converting NTSC->PAL and some Cookie->Biscuit, Gasoline->Petrol language/spelling conversions. Simple stuff really. For the rest of Europe, you have to completely translate and localize a whole bunch of different versions: Germany - Translate everything into German! France - Translate everything into French! Spain - Translate everything into Spanish! Italy - Translate everything into Italian! And those are just the next biggest four markets. Now you can try to use these five to market to the rest of the EU (given that many people speak one of them as a second language), but to truly tap into the whole potential of the EU you would also need to translate and localize into all the official languages: people are simply more likly to buy it if it is in their native language. That adds: Danish, Greek, Dutch, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Czech, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak and Slovene.
Keep in mind: all that translating is difficult, expensive, time consuming work, and given the different markets in different countries, the popularity of a given game might vary from hit to zilch, which presents a bigger risk in releasing a version for each country.
Alternatively, Europe-launch games could all be released in English ONLY, and things would be simplified immensely.
Sweet Jebus, they added X and Y buttons, with a back-lit screen to boot! that was one of the only reasons that I didn't but a GP32!
Now if they can get this intro production (photos at that site look like they are all rendered) at a reasonable price, with good emulation, then count me in!
Let's count the corpses left in the wake of Nintendo's (almost always) "inferior" hardware:
Game Gear Nomad Lynx That portable TurboGrafix16 (Name anybody?) Wonderswan, Wonderswan crystal / color GP32 NeoGeo pocket, NeoGeo Pocket color Tapwave Zodiac Ngage
That's just a short list off the top of my head, I'm sure that there are others that a more thorough search would reveal.
The PSP is simply not in the right price/battery life/durability range for most people to be attracted to it. It will do well with the money-to-burn crowd and with the hard-core gamers who buy everything, price be damned. As for the casual gamer that is the bread and butter of the industry, I forsee it remaining sort of "meh".
Because they are holding a 229 year grudge? Becasue they are idiots?
I feel for you, I've always been flabergasted by that $ -> £ conversion. It's not like the pound and dollar are even near equivalent, it's closer to 2:1. It's not like they tried to go from ¥ -> $ (ouch!).
Does the UK have some sort of video game tax (A VGT to go with your VAT and your Tax-for-the-hell-of-it-tax?
I work in a multi-specialist doctors office and one of the internists is from India, with a very "foreign" name. Inevitably, new patients would ask how well she speaks English (excellently), but because she takes the time to carefully explain things, reply to questions and assure her patients (good communication skills like you said) she is one of the most well liked doctors in the area. I would say she has even opened the eyes of a few borderline-racist patients.
Back on topic: you will never have me convinced that fully robotic- or tele- surgery will EVER replace a live, in the room doctor except in limited cases. Placing tubes in eardrums, colonoscopies and tonsillectomies are possibilities, but there are too many problems that can go wrong with most procedures. Plus, if you ask any surgeon they will tell you that surgery is a VERY tactile thing, and until we can reach a holodeck-level of sensory feedback, the doctor will still need to be physically in the room.
The grandfather post is talking about how the UK gets screwed when the only localisation is flipping the bit from NTSC to PAL, and find->replace color:colour, cookie:biscuit etc. and honestly, with modern gaming systems the NTSC-PAL thing is only there to make it difficult to import. They are unfairly forced to subsidise games' translation into other languages.
If I can get a job making REAL MONEY as an English - English translator, sign me up!
Actually Swahili is spoken in Rwanda, as well as many other countries. It is the second most widely spoken language in Africa, after Arabic. Some 50M people speak it as a second language as it is the "lingua franca" in much of East and central Africa./Nit Pick//Soon to be living in Tanzania
So is the solution to lower standards for doctors so we can graduate more? I don't trust that thinking. Med schools are hard to get into for a reason!
Plus, NOBODY is holding out on the primary care doctors: it's just so DAMN HARD to convince a new doctor to enter primary care. The ONLY ones who do it are certainly not in it for the money (specialties pay beter) or the hours (~60 a week, holidays and weekend work as well). Foreign medical grads are filling many of these spaces right now. The people, the personal connection that a doctor can form with the patients, that is the ONLY reason still attracting people to primary care. That's discounting the drug-seekers, dirtbags and jerks who abuse the system and the staff, and MAN do I see a lot of those where I work.
Now I'll reference a post I made about the fiscal reality of the primary care office where I work, which can help explain the problem.
Yes, sometimes, plus there and things called a map and street signs. You still need the map with this; it just tells you "you are here" on an computer map.
Will knowing your location accurate to 20-40m really mean squat within a building? That would hardly be sufficent to tell if you were in the building...
I've said it before, every time this topic comes up:
Unless they have diamond coated surfaces or put the discs in caddies, scratches are going to be a major B#$%@: The amount of data obscured by a scratch scales linearly with the density of the disc, so while a CD scratch causes a blip in the music, a DVD scratch can cause a disc-ruining jump or scene deletion. This is compounded by the fact that movies are a singular while albums are broken up into songs.
I can barely stand dvd scratches as it is; if it gets any worse, then we will be FORCED to "pirate" and rip the discs to a more durable medium, or handle them in clean rooms with soft-latex tools.
I heard that Blue-ray was going to be in caddies - Sony seems to get this much right, e.g. UMD and minidisc - since then I have heard that isn't the case.
Considering the way most people treat game discs (coasters) It could cause a big problem when a game doesn't run right after a couple dozen trips in and out of the machine. That said, the pessimist in me thinks that Blu-ray and HD-DVD will do this purposefully, to squeeze more money out of people who have to RE-buy a disc that is scratched beyond usability
Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks: First published - 1987 Awards Won - ? (Zero by my search)
Ringworld by Larry Niven: First Published - 1970 Awards Won - 1970 Nebula Award (Best Novel), 1971 Hugo Award (Best Novel) and the 1970 Locus Award, amongst others.
p0wn3d!!
I'll agree that Consider Phlebas has scored well in many sci-fi reviews: Banks is no hack and it can stand on it's own merits without being thought of as a Ringworld rip-off.
That said, giving credit where credit is due, Banks borrowed the ring concept: Niven's work was first by nearly two decades, is more widely read and is much more distinguished.
/Before I packed to move, my books were on four 7' bookcases //Stacked horizontally to the top of each shelf ///Two rows deep ////Not counting the overflow of hardbacks, trade paperbacks and other odd sizes. /////BOW TO MY SCI-FI NERDDOM!
They can still lock the hardware so that OSX won't run on generic boards with some simple chipset tweaks or even just in the bios. You can buy non-Apple PPC boards RIGHT NOW, and you can't load OSX on them
[threadjack] 5.7 MM? A fan of the P90 eh?
It is a darn good mix of firepower, size and accuracy when you need something bigger than pistols and smaller than an M16, and damn it looks cool on Stargate SG1. I want one.
/Never allowed to have a gun as a child //Loves guns anyway [/treadjack]
This is an odd nit-pick, and it might just be a region dependent (I'm in Washington) thing, but I have worked for the DHHS (Specifically the DDD), and employee or otherwise, EVERYONE I know says DHHS not HHS, and It's abbreviated DHHS in all the material I had for the job. The Website is even www.dhhs.gov
Do people in other parts of the country refer to the "OD", "HS", "OE" Or the friggen' "OT"? Because everyone I know says DOD (Department of Defense), DHS (Department of Homeland Security), DOE (Department of Energy) and DOT (Department of Transportation). The Department of Education is the "ED" and Treasury is just the "Treasury Department" to avoid acronym overlap, but NONE of them omit the word "department".
Granted, the Department of Veterans Affairs is just the "VA" because it used to be just the "Veterans Administration" not the "Department of VA".
The only real exception is "HUD" for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but only because it became an adjective, IE "HUD project", and because you can say "hud" as a word (people don't say "H-U-D"). Plus, "DHUD" sounds too close to "dud", which is a bad connotation for a gov office, so HUD is the standard, and they use www.hud.gov instead of www.dhud.gov.
HHS sounds like some new instruction set for x86 cips, "Now with MMX, SSE3 and HHS! you'll be downloading and running viruses faster than ever before!11ONE!ELEVEN!!1)"
/By the way, working for the DDD was one of the most rewarding things I have done. Working with the disabled gave me a better perspective on my life than anything I learned or read in school
//Little tipsy from supper wine, so forgive the spelling.
In the movie "As Good as it Gets", Jack Nicholson plays a writer. Some fan comes up to him gushing about how well he portrays female characters, and asks him how he does it. His insta-classic response (Paraphrased as best as I remember it):
"I think of a male, then I remove all reason and accountability"
I've got insomnia so this is going to get detailed and LONG. Here is how expenses break down where I work, with 6 doctors, where general follow-ups are 15-30min and new patients / physicals get 45min.
Personnel (Increasing in expense):
The four grunts (me x4) to check in 120ish patients, sort, file, find and run charts, make/recieve 400+ phone calls with notes/tasks, and send 200+ faxes per day. I make a bit above min. wage + health benefits (it is a doctor's office after all)
One nurse for each doctor, who rooms patients, takes vitals, dresses wounds, gives shots/meds, assists in procedures, educates patients/family PLUS 1/3 of a shared triage nurse who sits on the phone calling in prescriptions, calling for consults, talking to patients on the phone and whatever else is needed. Regardless of how little the nurse might do in front of you, they are kept very busy with stuff mentioned above. Plus, they are highly skilled and in short supply, so they make more than me by a good chunk.
The doctor, who as I said before, works his/her ass off (at least the ones I work for) and has to put up with more bull-puckey than stable cleaners. Patients try to scam narcotics, they are non-complient with treatment, they might just be bat-shit insane - we have to call security once a month or so. They whine and bitch about the doctor leaving to save someones life in the ICU when they have a mole they want removed. Missed vacations, missed events with the spouse/kids, working holidays, etc. It's hard to put a $ value on that, but lets just say it's worth something on top of the 10 hour day the doc puts in between prepping for the days patients, seeing them, pursuing the treatment plan, and dictating for each. The rate I figured of ~$30 an hour is less than the hourly rate of many plumbers and electricians, who are very skilled, but don't put up with the same level of crap or work the same insane hours. All in all, I think it's quite fair to pay them what they earn.
Overhead:
The building, rent + utilities - BIG $, but I don't know how much. Supplies, lots of supplies. We go through ~20,000 sheets of paper a month. We mail tons of stuff, often certified which is pricey. Many long distance calls are made. Billing , coding and transcription services all cary a cost. Medical supplies are also surprizingly pricey, not all of the sticker shock is OUR markup. But, my workplace is a 6-doc group with shared expenses and is associated with a non-profit hospital that owns the building and has better bulk rate puchase power, so some costs are lowered. Call this an extra $2000 even.
Now, as to why those 15min are so expensive, it is because that transaction is the only time in the ENTIRE day that we see any positive cashflow. We are losing money every second we are not seeing a patient. If all 32 possible 15min blocks for all six doctor's 8 office hours paid a full $75, that would be $2400x6 = $14,400 / day to cover the expenses at roughly 80*4 + 170*6 + 300*6 = $3140 wages plus $2000 overhead = $5000/day (conservatively)
It sounds like a killing, but keep in mind that 32 full 15min appointments a day would be insane for a doctor, and many appointments take longer anyway, so scratch that. Realistically, It's hard work to keep up with 22-23 mixed length appointments, which is the average here. Also, some visits will be charged more than others, because billing is based off of diagnosis and procedure codes, not strictly time spent.
Now, even if only 23 per doctor were getting seen at $75 a pop, that's still $10,000+. The kicker here is that the great majority of insurance companies don't pay that much - they contract (strong-arm) lower rates with the doctors, MUCH lower. A "good" insurace might pay $35, many, such as Medicare, pay around $30 for those 15min. For Medicare/Wellfare and PPO insurances (a large % of patients) you legally can't bill the remainder to the patient. To top it all off, the insurance company payouts are only getting LOWER each year.
I thought the Xbox360 arcade is going to be stuff like freecell and solitare and online checkers, chess, go etc. Not stuff like classic PC or console games.
Anyone care to clarify with some "official" documents?
It's the OptipleXbox360! Seriously, It's a Dell Optiplex case in white plastic, and the Optiplex looks better in black.
On design: The PS2 was a good design, and I like the Gamecube design, though I think N made a big gaffe by making purple the standard colour over black, fueling the "gaycube is teh homo-gay" sexually-insecure idiots.
Xbox (180?, Pi?) was ugly and the xbox360(2 Pi!) is ugly. But Sony! Why has thou forsaken design with the PS3, lean-mean, laminating gaming machine?
Oddly enough, I almost expected the 360's and PS3's rounded design to appear in the Revolution, but instead Revolution is looking like I expected the PS3 would, sleak and sexy.
Nintendo has the best designers, let's hope the hardware and software can be just as good.
Doctors don't make a cent off of prescriptions, except in VERY rare cases (oncologists who "sell" the chemotherapy as it is administered in outpatient clinics. You can't just take that stuff home). If they do, there is something wrong.
All the doctors I know have a fairly adversarial relationship with the drug reps. They hate the marketing, but they need the sample meds for their poor and poorly insured patients. They also honestly care about the cost Vs. effectiveness of the drugs, and work with their patients to find the right choice. If your doctor doesn't do that, find another./working for a clinic right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh how I wish I had mod points now...
Take a rage dump, then re-read the GP post: he clearly stated "As a social libertarian, I would never ask for government regulation of such an enterprise"
He's clearly not calling for gov intervention like the TV version.
The article or a previous post said it was spherical to avoid corners and edges that may be damaged by handling, but you do bring up an interesting point:
/geek
Trying to make a "perfect sphere" without any corners out of a crystal structure that is inherently non-spherical will create (way more than billions- brazillions) of corners in the crystal structure. It's like trying to build a Death Star out of rectangular lego pieces, it will never be "perfectly round"
So what is the trade-off between this and the simple & precise 12 edges and flat sides of a cube? It seems to me a cube would be easer to accurately fabricate. How brittle is metallic silicon? Is it prone to deforming, shearing along crystal lattice lines? Anyone in material sciences or something or other know more about this?
This is all assuming they had a better reason than "Ph33R 0Ur P3rfekt 5ph33R!!1!one!1"
The whole expanded autism spectrum thing was certainly not pushed by big pharmaceuticals. To my knowledge there isn't a single drug for autism on the market, but I would love to see one: I have a high functioning autistic relative.
Doctors over the last decade or so realized that "autistic" people have a wide range of ability/impairment from 24/7 direct care needs to running a company on their own. Autism is not an ON/OFF switch like Downs syndrome (and even that has wide range of affect)
Both Joomla and Mambo are Swahili words, mambo being a greeting that roughly translates to an informal "how are you" and jumla means "together".
Anyhow, that makes jumla or joomla a good name for a CMS; "together" certainly makes more sense than "hey what's up?". I'm not sure why it's anglicised with two OOs, since in Swahili that makes a long "oh" sound, but maybe there already is a project spelled jumla... which would just go to show how hard it is to find a name for a project these days (see Phoenix->Firebird->Firefox).
/Forgive the errors, haven't written much English for 6 months
//Nipo Dar es Salaam
///Nafundisha Newala Day
You can't consider the EU as a single market for games (not consoles, I'm only talking about games) because you simply can't sell a single product across the whole EU like you can across all the US or Japan.
The UK usually gets the US version localized by converting NTSC->PAL and some Cookie->Biscuit, Gasoline->Petrol language/spelling conversions. Simple stuff really. For the rest of Europe, you have to completely translate and localize a whole bunch of different versions:
Germany - Translate everything into German!
France - Translate everything into French!
Spain - Translate everything into Spanish!
Italy - Translate everything into Italian!
And those are just the next biggest four markets. Now you can try to use these five to market to the rest of the EU (given that many people speak one of them as a second language), but to truly tap into the whole potential of the EU you would also need to translate and localize into all the official languages: people are simply more likly to buy it if it is in their native language. That adds: Danish, Greek, Dutch, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Czech, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak and Slovene.
Keep in mind: all that translating is difficult, expensive, time consuming work, and given the different markets in different countries, the popularity of a given game might vary from hit to zilch, which presents a bigger risk in releasing a version for each country.
Alternatively, Europe-launch games could all be released in English ONLY, and things would be simplified immensely.
/Hurrah for American Hegemony!
//Up WAY to late
Sweet Jebus, they added X and Y buttons, with a back-lit screen to boot! that was one of the only reasons that I didn't but a GP32!
Now if they can get this intro production (photos at that site look like they are all rendered) at a reasonable price, with good emulation, then count me in!
Let's count the corpses left in the wake of Nintendo's (almost always) "inferior" hardware:
Game Gear
Nomad
Lynx
That portable TurboGrafix16 (Name anybody?)
Wonderswan, Wonderswan crystal / color
GP32
NeoGeo pocket, NeoGeo Pocket color
Tapwave Zodiac
Ngage
That's just a short list off the top of my head, I'm sure that there are others that a more thorough search would reveal.
The PSP is simply not in the right price/battery life/durability range for most people to be attracted to it. It will do well with the money-to-burn crowd and with the hard-core gamers who buy everything, price be damned. As for the casual gamer that is the bread and butter of the industry, I forsee it remaining sort of "meh".
Because they are holding a 229 year grudge?
Becasue they are idiots?
I feel for you, I've always been flabergasted by that $ -> £ conversion. It's not like the pound and dollar are even near equivalent, it's closer to 2:1. It's not like they tried to go from ¥ -> $ (ouch!).
Does the UK have some sort of video game tax (A VGT to go with your VAT and your Tax-for-the-hell-of-it-tax?
I work in a multi-specialist doctors office and one of the internists is from India, with a very "foreign" name. Inevitably, new patients would ask how well she speaks English (excellently), but because she takes the time to carefully explain things, reply to questions and assure her patients (good communication skills like you said) she is one of the most well liked doctors in the area. I would say she has even opened the eyes of a few borderline-racist patients.
Back on topic: you will never have me convinced that fully robotic- or tele- surgery will EVER replace a live, in the room doctor except in limited cases. Placing tubes in eardrums, colonoscopies and tonsillectomies are possibilities, but there are too many problems that can go wrong with most procedures. Plus, if you ask any surgeon they will tell you that surgery is a VERY tactile thing, and until we can reach a holodeck-level of sensory feedback, the doctor will still need to be physically in the room.
The grandfather post is talking about how the UK gets screwed when the only localisation is flipping the bit from NTSC to PAL, and find->replace color:colour, cookie:biscuit etc. and honestly, with modern gaming systems the NTSC-PAL thing is only there to make it difficult to import. They are unfairly forced to subsidise games' translation into other languages.
If I can get a job making REAL MONEY as an English - English translator, sign me up!
Actually Swahili is spoken in Rwanda, as well as many other countries. It is the second most widely spoken language in Africa, after Arabic. Some 50M people speak it as a second language as it is the "lingua franca" in much of East and central Africa. /Nit Pick //Soon to be living in Tanzania
So is the solution to lower standards for doctors so we can graduate more? I don't trust that thinking. Med schools are hard to get into for a reason!
5 76236
Plus, NOBODY is holding out on the primary care doctors: it's just so DAMN HARD to convince a new doctor to enter primary care. The ONLY ones who do it are certainly not in it for the money (specialties pay beter) or the hours (~60 a week, holidays and weekend work as well). Foreign medical grads are filling many of these spaces right now. The people, the personal connection that a doctor can form with the patients, that is the ONLY reason still attracting people to primary care. That's discounting the drug-seekers, dirtbags and jerks who abuse the system and the staff, and MAN do I see a lot of those where I work.
Now I'll reference a post I made about the fiscal reality of the primary care office where I work, which can help explain the problem.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=149656&cid=12
Yes, sometimes, plus there and things called a map and street signs. You still need the map with this; it just tells you "you are here" on an computer map.
Will knowing your location accurate to 20-40m really mean squat within a building? That would hardly be sufficent to tell if you were in the building...
I've said it before, every time this topic comes up:
Unless they have diamond coated surfaces or put the discs in caddies, scratches are going to be a major B#$%@: The amount of data obscured by a scratch scales linearly with the density of the disc, so while a CD scratch causes a blip in the music, a DVD scratch can cause a disc-ruining jump or scene deletion. This is compounded by the fact that movies are a singular while albums are broken up into songs.
I can barely stand dvd scratches as it is; if it gets any worse, then we will be FORCED to "pirate" and rip the discs to a more durable medium, or handle them in clean rooms with soft-latex tools.
I heard that Blue-ray was going to be in caddies - Sony seems to get this much right, e.g. UMD and minidisc - since then I have heard that isn't the case.
Considering the way most people treat game discs (coasters) It could cause a big problem when a game doesn't run right after a couple dozen trips in and out of the machine. That said, the pessimist in me thinks that Blu-ray and HD-DVD will do this purposefully, to squeeze more money out of people who have to RE-buy a disc that is scratched beyond usability
Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks:
First published - 1987
Awards Won - ? (Zero by my search)
Ringworld by Larry Niven:
First Published - 1970
Awards Won - 1970 Nebula Award (Best Novel), 1971 Hugo Award (Best Novel) and the 1970 Locus Award, amongst others.
p0wn3d!!
I'll agree that Consider Phlebas has scored well in many sci-fi reviews: Banks is no hack and it can stand on it's own merits without being thought of as a Ringworld rip-off.
That said, giving credit where credit is due, Banks borrowed the ring concept: Niven's work was first by nearly two decades, is more widely read and is much more distinguished.
/Before I packed to move, my books were on four 7' bookcases
//Stacked horizontally to the top of each shelf
///Two rows deep
////Not counting the overflow of hardbacks, trade paperbacks and other odd sizes.
/////BOW TO MY SCI-FI NERDDOM!
I seem to remember it being titled "Ringworld"
Seriously, Halo was a good single player game, but the story was always kind of weak and the endings have been major suxxor.
Larry Niven could poop out a better story.
They can still lock the hardware so that OSX won't run on generic boards with some simple chipset tweaks or even just in the bios. You can buy non-Apple PPC boards RIGHT NOW, and you can't load OSX on them
[threadjack]
5.7 MM? A fan of the P90 eh?
It is a darn good mix of firepower, size and accuracy when you need something bigger than pistols and smaller than an M16, and damn it looks cool on Stargate SG1. I want one.
/Never allowed to have a gun as a child
//Loves guns anyway
[/treadjack]
This is an odd nit-pick, and it might just be a region dependent (I'm in Washington) thing, but I have worked for the DHHS (Specifically the DDD), and employee or otherwise, EVERYONE I know says DHHS not HHS, and It's abbreviated DHHS in all the material I had for the job. The Website is even www.dhhs.gov
Do people in other parts of the country refer to the "OD", "HS", "OE" Or the friggen' "OT"? Because everyone I know says DOD (Department of Defense), DHS (Department of Homeland Security), DOE (Department of Energy) and DOT (Department of Transportation). The Department of Education is the "ED" and Treasury is just the "Treasury Department" to avoid acronym overlap, but NONE of them omit the word "department".
Granted, the Department of Veterans Affairs is just the "VA" because it used to be just the "Veterans Administration" not the "Department of VA".
The only real exception is "HUD" for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but only because it became an adjective, IE "HUD project", and because you can say "hud" as a word (people don't say "H-U-D"). Plus, "DHUD" sounds too close to "dud", which is a bad connotation for a gov office, so HUD is the standard, and they use www.hud.gov instead of www.dhud.gov.
HHS sounds like some new instruction set for x86 cips, "Now with MMX, SSE3 and HHS! you'll be downloading and running viruses faster than ever before!11ONE!ELEVEN!!1)"
/By the way, working for the DDD was one of the most rewarding things I have done. Working with the disabled gave me a better perspective on my life than anything I learned or read in school
//Little tipsy from supper wine, so forgive the spelling.
In the movie "As Good as it Gets", Jack Nicholson plays a writer. Some fan comes up to him gushing about how well he portrays female characters, and asks him how he does it. His insta-classic response (Paraphrased as best as I remember it):
"I think of a male, then I remove all reason and accountability"
I nearly pissed myself laughing at that.
I've got insomnia so this is going to get detailed and LONG.
Here is how expenses break down where I work, with 6 doctors, where general follow-ups are 15-30min and new patients / physicals get 45min.
Personnel (Increasing in expense):
The four grunts (me x4) to check in 120ish patients, sort, file, find and run charts, make/recieve 400+ phone calls with notes/tasks, and send 200+ faxes per day. I make a bit above min. wage + health benefits (it is a doctor's office after all)
One nurse for each doctor, who rooms patients, takes vitals, dresses wounds, gives shots/meds, assists in procedures, educates patients/family PLUS 1/3 of a shared triage nurse who sits on the phone calling in prescriptions, calling for consults, talking to patients on the phone and whatever else is needed. Regardless of how little the nurse might do in front of you, they are kept very busy with stuff mentioned above. Plus, they are highly skilled and in short supply, so they make more than me by a good chunk.
The doctor, who as I said before, works his/her ass off (at least the ones I work for) and has to put up with more bull-puckey than stable cleaners. Patients try to scam narcotics, they are non-complient with treatment, they might just be bat-shit insane - we have to call security once a month or so. They whine and bitch about the doctor leaving to save someones life in the ICU when they have a mole they want removed. Missed vacations, missed events with the spouse/kids, working holidays, etc. It's hard to put a $ value on that, but lets just say it's worth something on top of the 10 hour day the doc puts in between prepping for the days patients, seeing them, pursuing the treatment plan, and dictating for each. The rate I figured of ~$30 an hour is less than the hourly rate of many plumbers and electricians, who are very skilled, but don't put up with the same level of crap or work the same insane hours. All in all, I think it's quite fair to pay them what they earn.
Overhead:
The building, rent + utilities - BIG $, but I don't know how much. Supplies, lots of supplies. We go through ~20,000 sheets of paper a month. We mail tons of stuff, often certified which is pricey. Many long distance calls are made. Billing , coding and transcription services all cary a cost. Medical supplies are also surprizingly pricey, not all of the sticker shock is OUR markup. But, my workplace is a 6-doc group with shared expenses and is associated with a non-profit hospital that owns the building and has better bulk rate puchase power, so some costs are lowered. Call this an extra $2000 even.
Now, as to why those 15min are so expensive, it is because that transaction is the only time in the ENTIRE day that we see any positive cashflow. We are losing money every second we are not seeing a patient. If all 32 possible 15min blocks for all six doctor's 8 office hours paid a full $75, that would be $2400x6 = $14,400 / day to cover the expenses at roughly 80*4 + 170*6 + 300*6 = $3140 wages plus $2000 overhead = $5000/day (conservatively)
It sounds like a killing, but keep in mind that 32 full 15min appointments a day would be insane for a doctor, and many appointments take longer anyway, so scratch that. Realistically, It's hard work to keep up with 22-23 mixed length appointments, which is the average here. Also, some visits will be charged more than others, because billing is based off of diagnosis and procedure codes, not strictly time spent.
Now, even if only 23 per doctor were getting seen at $75 a pop, that's still $10,000+. The kicker here is that the great majority of insurance companies don't pay that much - they contract (strong-arm) lower rates with the doctors, MUCH lower. A "good" insurace might pay $35, many, such as Medicare, pay around $30 for those 15min. For Medicare/Wellfare and PPO insurances (a large % of patients) you legally can't bill the remainder to the patient. To top it all off, the insurance company payouts are only getting LOWER each year.
I thought the Xbox360 arcade is going to be stuff like freecell and solitare and online checkers, chess, go etc. Not stuff like classic PC or console games.
Anyone care to clarify with some "official" documents?
It's the OptipleXbox360!
Seriously, It's a Dell Optiplex case in white plastic, and the Optiplex looks better in black.
On design:
The PS2 was a good design, and I like the Gamecube design, though I think N made a big gaffe by making purple the standard colour over black, fueling the "gaycube is teh homo-gay" sexually-insecure idiots.
Xbox (180?, Pi?) was ugly and the xbox360(2 Pi!) is ugly. But Sony! Why has thou forsaken design with the PS3, lean-mean, laminating gaming machine?
Oddly enough, I almost expected the 360's and PS3's rounded design to appear in the Revolution, but instead Revolution is looking like I expected the PS3 would, sleak and sexy.
Nintendo has the best designers, let's hope the hardware and software can be just as good.
Doctors don't make a cent off of prescriptions, except in VERY rare cases (oncologists who "sell" the chemotherapy as it is administered in outpatient clinics. You can't just take that stuff home). If they do, there is something wrong.
/working for a clinic right now.
All the doctors I know have a fairly adversarial relationship with the drug reps. They hate the marketing, but they need the sample meds for their poor and poorly insured patients. They also honestly care about the cost Vs. effectiveness of the drugs, and work with their patients to find the right choice. If your doctor doesn't do that, find another.
Did you mean H2SO4 for sulphuric acid?
/Nit pick //Bio-chem nerd
H2O*SO4 would be hydrated sulfion, and is something that would never form under "normal" conditions, if at all.