a hospital may charge uninsured patients upwards of 500x more than they would charge an insured patient
It strikes me there is some sick downward-spiral type thing going on there.. the reason they charge so much more is that the majority of these patients end up refusing to pay and the hospital has to pass the cost on to the remaining patients. But I am certain the majority refuse to pay because the cost is so high.. most people probably can't. So you end up with a small percentage of suckers with money footing the bill for all those who can't/won't pay. But if it wasn't so overpriced, more people would pay.
Who the hell decided to not do the format conversion when they phased out the old system?
So everyone's crying out about how expensive healthcare is, but at the same time we're all crying out about every decision to try save money? Can't have it both ways.
Sure, doctors can just quickly whip something together using the programming and database skills they all learn in medical school (that's why doctor's don't pay for this sort of system, it costs nothing). That should also certainly satisfy legal requirements to confidentially store all medical records of all their patients, indefinitely!
Since you really are confused, even though you are posting stupid straw-man arguments and don't seem interested in becoming unconfused, I'll post a clarifier: There is a moral argument to be made for medical licensing on the simple following basis:
- Most patients (yes, NOT ALL) prefer to know their doctors have qualifications - Practicing medicine and claiming to be qualified if you're not qualified, would constitute fraud - There is a moral case against fraud (duh?), especially when it endangers lives - Not upgrading ancient obsolete record systems that are hardly accessed any more does not constitute fraud (except when the practice or hospital promised to do so, which hasn't happened)
Then what do you think of medical licensing or even education?
Lol, straw-man much?
Yes, it IS immoral to use force against a doctor or hospital management for failing to spend a fortune to store very old records. That has absolutely nothing to do with educational and qualification standards, about which your view is also completely confused.
Here's a hypothetical situation - thousands of patients had information stored in an older type of system, and to upgrade that system to a new format will involve hiring programmers and paying tens of thousands of Pounds. Oh wait, that's not a hypothetical situation, it's the actual situation this whole thread is about. Multiple by every doctor's practice, every hospital and clinic.
You and ultimately only you are responsible for managing your own health. I learned a similar lesson when I left the only copies I had of an expensive MRI of my back, showing my back problems, at a doctor's office, and some time later requested them only to learn that "we threw them out, sorry, nothing we can do". The fact is that nobody is going to care about your own health like you are going to, so if any medical documents are important to you, keep records of them. This is your life, take responsibility for it.. it sucks, but he really should have made copies when it was still in an easily accessible format. I know, 20/20 hindsight. Young 'uns, learn from the mistakes of others.
Using force to compel every doctor or hospital to keep every record ever in a conveniently accessible way would be ridiculous, it's not only immoral, it would cause already overpriced healthcare to dramatically rise further in price, and we'd all have to pay higher costs so that all the doctors and hospitals could keep records that aren't actually important or will never be accessed.
Sorry to burst both your bubbles, but if you track a 2 year chart of the Nasdaq and in fact the Dow Jones composite too, and you overlay it on the AAPL chart, you see that AAPL for the past year have basically been broadly tracking the overall ups and down of the market itself... and that actually has more to do with factors like central bank market interventions, currency and bond markets, inflation, happenings in Europe etc.
It's instructive to follow the story of the liberty dollar, another attempt at a free currency. Shut down by the federal government, raided, assets seized, and the founder charged and convicted of "making, possessing and selling his own coins". He was even labelled a 'domestic terrorist'.
Trust me, the currency cartels of western economies do not like competition, and they are very powerful with friends in high places... Bitcoin's days are numbered.
Only humans can "pay" tax... as a verb, it applies to humans only. Companies are not taxed, people only speak that way metaphorically... what is actually happening when we speak of companies "paying tax", is that the humans that own those companies (and their customers indirectly) are being taxed through "corporate taxes". Also, those humans then also pay income tax whenever money is transferred out of a business and to them, in order to actually use the money for any personal self-enjoyment purposes
I had a female friend who accidentally shared naked photos (showing everything) of herself with me (and publicly) on Facebook. She was trying to create an account for only her boyfriend to see, but not being very computer-literate, screwed up the privacy settings and publicly exposed some obviously very private photos. I immediately just politely and discretely informed her that these photos were visible, and how to fix it. For my effort, she immediately decided I was some kind of creep, blocked me, and never spoke to me again. Cow. But at least I did the right thing, I think.
But if i take my home photo book to kinkos for some mending. Is there really an expectation of privacy?
You must be joking... so every single computer repair place in the entire world are fully allowed to copy and spread anything and everything off every computer that ever comes their way? Really!?
If you can't see why that's retarded then I have lost all hope for the human race. When you take a phone in for services like this, you can and should expect some level of professionalism.
If they actually contacted you, report that to the FBI. They're probably contacting other people, too. A pattern will emerge.
In addition, they have more evidence if/when the authorities do catch up with these criminals.
Another idea could be to offer a bounty to the hacker community to whoever turns in or exposes the hacker (with evidence). Might be competing hacking groups who have an idea who these guys are. If some companies clubbed together and paid toward bounties instead of 'DDoS protection', the bounty figure could be quite decent.
There is a second important difference: In the case of your physical property being stolen while being transported on roads, the law still recognizes that you were wronged, even if you never get your stuff back. But you just argued that the law should not recognize that you are being wronged when your stored data is copied and viewed by people who don't have reasonable moral rights to it (e.g. the government).
I don't "expect" that data I transmit over public networks might not be maliciously hacked (by government or hackers), nor do I "expect" that my physical goods will never be stolen. That is a pure straw man argument on your part. What we "expect" is that it be recognized legally that it is wrong to do so (in both cases) --- and that is perfectly fucking reasonable, thank you.
Jeez.. just admit you got 0wned on that one. It happens. Claiming people are "stalking" you is a disturbingly psychotic over-reaction, and to be honest, it doesn't sound like you really believe that you're being stalked, but rather, are too embarrassed about being wrong that you are just trying to insult khayman80 instead and also try distract from having been so neatly pwned.
A) Back in 2000 when the patent was applied for, this was a pretty novel idea.
No, it wasn't, not even by a long shot... how young are you? I remember implementing a system almost exactly like this while designing a generic window manager and application manager for a university project in 1996. And it wasn't even interesting then.
It also has a chilling effect on the 2nd amendment self-defense, because if an armed gang busts down your door, you now have to first meekly enquire as to whether they might be cops or not.
A search is a search. A dog's nose is just a searching device. If precedent is established for dogs already, it's pretty much automatically establish for laser-spectrometry based violations of the 4th amendment (and believe me, that's coming, in addition to drone-surveillance-based violations (already here) and AI-driven activity recognition based violations). And precedence for dogs (and drones) are already established, so we're pretty much f0cked, to be honest, as long as immoral sociopaths are running our political structures.
If it was legal the price would drop significantly because the risk in dealing would be removed, and it probably wouldn't be the biggest cash crop anymore.
Moderators, want to explain how the above is a 'troll' exactly?
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a hospital may charge uninsured patients upwards of 500x more than they would charge an insured patient
It strikes me there is some sick downward-spiral type thing going on there .. the reason they charge so much more is that the majority of these patients end up refusing to pay and the hospital has to pass the cost on to the remaining patients. But I am certain the majority refuse to pay because the cost is so high .. most people probably can't. So you end up with a small percentage of suckers with money footing the bill for all those who can't/won't pay. But if it wasn't so overpriced, more people would pay.
Who the hell decided to not do the format conversion when they phased out the old system?
So everyone's crying out about how expensive healthcare is, but at the same time we're all crying out about every decision to try save money? Can't have it both ways.
Sure, doctors can just quickly whip something together using the programming and database skills they all learn in medical school (that's why doctor's don't pay for this sort of system, it costs nothing). That should also certainly satisfy legal requirements to confidentially store all medical records of all their patients, indefinitely!
Since you really are confused, even though you are posting stupid straw-man arguments and don't seem interested in becoming unconfused, I'll post a clarifier: There is a moral argument to be made for medical licensing on the simple following basis:
- Most patients (yes, NOT ALL) prefer to know their doctors have qualifications
- Practicing medicine and claiming to be qualified if you're not qualified, would constitute fraud
- There is a moral case against fraud (duh?), especially when it endangers lives
- Not upgrading ancient obsolete record systems that are hardly accessed any more does not constitute fraud (except when the practice or hospital promised to do so, which hasn't happened)
Then what do you think of medical licensing or even education?
Lol, straw-man much?
Yes, it IS immoral to use force against a doctor or hospital management for failing to spend a fortune to store very old records. That has absolutely nothing to do with educational and qualification standards, about which your view is also completely confused.
Here's a hypothetical situation - thousands of patients had information stored in an older type of system, and to upgrade that system to a new format will involve hiring programmers and paying tens of thousands of Pounds. Oh wait, that's not a hypothetical situation, it's the actual situation this whole thread is about. Multiple by every doctor's practice, every hospital and clinic.
You and ultimately only you are responsible for managing your own health. I learned a similar lesson when I left the only copies I had of an expensive MRI of my back, showing my back problems, at a doctor's office, and some time later requested them only to learn that "we threw them out, sorry, nothing we can do". The fact is that nobody is going to care about your own health like you are going to, so if any medical documents are important to you, keep records of them. This is your life, take responsibility for it .. it sucks, but he really should have made copies when it was still in an easily accessible format. I know, 20/20 hindsight. Young 'uns, learn from the mistakes of others.
Using force to compel every doctor or hospital to keep every record ever in a conveniently accessible way would be ridiculous, it's not only immoral, it would cause already overpriced healthcare to dramatically rise further in price, and we'd all have to pay higher costs so that all the doctors and hospitals could keep records that aren't actually important or will never be accessed.
Not sure ISPs and others would be keen in upgrading their infrastructure to make the theoretical speed really available to home users
I wonder how this and this happened then?
Though USA needs to do away with regional monopolies/cartels.
I suspect that if the technology is really 'commercially viable', it could also make it cheaper to upgrade backbone links too.
Sorry to burst both your bubbles, but if you track a 2 year chart of the Nasdaq and in fact the Dow Jones composite too, and you overlay it on the AAPL chart, you see that AAPL for the past year have basically been broadly tracking the overall ups and down of the market itself ... and that actually has more to do with factors like central bank market interventions, currency and bond markets, inflation, happenings in Europe etc.
Nasdaq
Dow
It's instructive to follow the story of the liberty dollar, another attempt at a free currency. Shut down by the federal government, raided, assets seized, and the founder charged and convicted of "making, possessing and selling his own coins". He was even labelled a 'domestic terrorist'.
Trust me, the currency cartels of western economies do not like competition, and they are very powerful with friends in high places ... Bitcoin's days are numbered.
By "dodging tax", you mean contributing nearly 40% of all federal income tax revenues? I'd hate to see what you call actually dodging tax.
Only humans can "pay" tax ... as a verb, it applies to humans only. Companies are not taxed, people only speak that way metaphorically ... what is actually happening when we speak of companies "paying tax", is that the humans that own those companies (and their customers indirectly) are being taxed through "corporate taxes". Also, those humans then also pay income tax whenever money is transferred out of a business and to them, in order to actually use the money for any personal self-enjoyment purposes
I had a female friend who accidentally shared naked photos (showing everything) of herself with me (and publicly) on Facebook. She was trying to create an account for only her boyfriend to see, but not being very computer-literate, screwed up the privacy settings and publicly exposed some obviously very private photos. I immediately just politely and discretely informed her that these photos were visible, and how to fix it. For my effort, she immediately decided I was some kind of creep, blocked me, and never spoke to me again. Cow. But at least I did the right thing, I think.
But if i take my home photo book to kinkos for some mending. Is there really an expectation of privacy?
You must be joking ... so every single computer repair place in the entire world are fully allowed to copy and spread anything and everything off every computer that ever comes their way? Really!?
If you can't see why that's retarded then I have lost all hope for the human race. When you take a phone in for services like this, you can and should expect some level of professionalism.
If they actually contacted you, report that to the FBI. They're probably contacting other people, too. A pattern will emerge.
In addition, they have more evidence if/when the authorities do catch up with these criminals.
Another idea could be to offer a bounty to the hacker community to whoever turns in or exposes the hacker (with evidence). Might be competing hacking groups who have an idea who these guys are. If some companies clubbed together and paid toward bounties instead of 'DDoS protection', the bounty figure could be quite decent.
Null route the ip being attacked
So to protect against someone taking your website down, you effectively take your website down? I think I've missed some detail in your suggestion.
There is a second important difference: In the case of your physical property being stolen while being transported on roads, the law still recognizes that you were wronged, even if you never get your stuff back. But you just argued that the law should not recognize that you are being wronged when your stored data is copied and viewed by people who don't have reasonable moral rights to it (e.g. the government).
I don't "expect" that data I transmit over public networks might not be maliciously hacked (by government or hackers), nor do I "expect" that my physical goods will never be stolen. That is a pure straw man argument on your part. What we "expect" is that it be recognized legally that it is wrong to do so (in both cases) --- and that is perfectly fucking reasonable, thank you.
SuperKendall (1): You seem to be confusing law with reality. The property, by law is still yours
SuperKendall (2): I don't get where supposed rational technical ... think that any data they transmit over public networks ... was ever YOURS.
You fail your own analogy. Are there two SuperKendall's or did you just do a Romney on us?
Oooooh .. is THAT what that foes stuff is for!
Jeez .. just admit you got 0wned on that one. It happens. Claiming people are "stalking" you is a disturbingly psychotic over-reaction, and to be honest, it doesn't sound like you really believe that you're being stalked, but rather, are too embarrassed about being wrong that you are just trying to insult khayman80 instead and also try distract from having been so neatly pwned.
A) Back in 2000 when the patent was applied for, this was a pretty novel idea.
No, it wasn't, not even by a long shot ... how young are you? I remember implementing a system almost exactly like this while designing a generic window manager and application manager for a university project in 1996. And it wasn't even interesting then.
Another problem with dogs is they can be easily cued to false-indicate. This effectively renders the 4th amendment non-existent.
It also has a chilling effect on the 2nd amendment self-defense, because if an armed gang busts down your door, you now have to first meekly enquire as to whether they might be cops or not.
A search is a search. A dog's nose is just a searching device. If precedent is established for dogs already, it's pretty much automatically establish for laser-spectrometry based violations of the 4th amendment (and believe me, that's coming, in addition to drone-surveillance-based violations (already here) and AI-driven activity recognition based violations). And precedence for dogs (and drones) are already established, so we're pretty much f0cked, to be honest, as long as immoral sociopaths are running our political structures.
If it was legal the price would drop significantly because the risk in dealing would be removed, and it probably wouldn't be the biggest cash crop anymore.
Moderators, want to explain how the above is a 'troll' exactly?