Do you think Scott Adams makes up the material for the Dilbert cartoon out of thin air? It is funny precisely because it is a exaggerated version of reality. Often the exaggeration is only slight.
I heard that the full body scanners can not detect an explosive device hidden by rolls of fat in an obese person. I can't picture those rolls being searched by hand either. Yuck.
Why wouldn't terrorists recruit fat people?
Why don't we just admit that airport security is futile?
Ecstasy The attack of 9/11/2001 took out the WTC and other buildings near ground zero. This was the heart of the financial district and the IT base of many firms.
In the hours following the attack, the offsite backup sites for many of those firms seamlessly took over. Nobody noticed that.
I firmly believe that without Y2K remediations, 911 would have been a big IT disaster too.
Agony At the successful conclusion of Y2K remediation efforts, the upper and middle level managements treated themselves to celebrations at luxury resorts. Meanwhile, many IT grunts who put in all the extra hours got nothing more than pink slips. In most cases, the companies didn't even offer to buy them a beer as thanks for their long hours.
It was the most ungracious treatment of labor I ever witnessed. Compare it to calling Viet Nam vets baby killers.
You're all missing the real point. Airport security has nothing to do with actual security. It is the government's way of responding to criticism that they're doing nothing.
After past incidents (especially 911) criticism of the government was severe. Their reaction is to do something, anything. In fact the more inconvenient and the more in your face it is, the better the evidence that they're doing "everything possible."
When the next attacks occur, government can duck the blame by saying, "look how many dollars and how many man hours we threw at the problem. What more do you want?"
I just listened to Obama's statement this afternoon on the Christmas attack. What a bunch of bureaucratic double talk and utter crap. Don't believe me? Look at the transcript of his statement when it appears. Then imagine it being delivered by a mid level manager.
sopssa hit the nail on the head. Before teaching the boy *how* to program you need to pique his interest and motivate him.
I have experience teaching introductory experience to adults. I always started with Visual Basic. In a single 2 hour session I taught them how to make a primitive Pong game that really worked. That gave the students enlightment that they could create something real and substantial. It built self confidence.
VB was the best choice for the session. It allowed the students to succeed at something fun *before* they got discouraged or bored.
A few of the students decided to go further in study of programming. For them, the next course could worry about the suitable learning language.
The rest of the students didn't go the next step. Still, they enjoyed the experience and gained a little understanding of what programmers do. What more could a teacher hope for?
This is probably my last chance to tell my Saab story in public.
In 1973 I was living in Sweden. Just before returning to the USA I bought a new Saab Combi Coupe. That is the hatchback model that later became the famous Saab 900. 73 was the first model year and they were not marketing them to the USA yet. I had mine shipped to the USA when it was only 2 weeks old. My oh my. Remember the adage about not buying version 1.0 of anything? I should have remembered that.
On the very first day of driving the manual shift lever jumped out of 2nd gear, hit me in the wrist and cracked a bone.
Back in the USA, my clutch failed. I took it to the Saab dealer for a free warranty replacement. The new one failed; and the next and the next... That car went through 7 clutches in one year. Once, the new clutch failed only 6 miles from the dealer. It wasn't me. I have long experience with manual transmissions and I don't ride the clutch.
About a year and a day from new (with a 12 month warranty) I drove through a puddle. The car stopped instantly. The engine refused to turn. Upon taking the engine apart, we found water in the pistons and all the connecting rods bent like pretzels. It turns out that the air intake was low to the ground with a 90 degree elbow. Mine was mounted with the elbow facing forward, like a water scoop if one ever hit a puddle. There was a factory bulletin to rotate that elbow 180 degrees, but my dealer just shrugged. After 7 visits to the dealer he didn't feel responsible for doing the work or for informing me about the bulletins.
Still more. Upon further inspection we found that there were no retaining rings on the piston king pins. The pins had been wearing grooves in the side of the engine block. If I hadn't driven into the puddle, the block would have exploded soon; probably while I was speeding down the interstate.
The Saab regional office refused to talk to me or even listen to my story. I sold that Saab, 13 months old for 10% of my purchase price leaving me with nothing to do but Saab saab saab.
The WSJ article understates the problem. The Climategate emails reveal that the partisan scientists have undermined the peer review process itself. It can only be made right be re-peer-reviewing all climate papers re-submitted in the past 20 years. Some rejected should not have been and some accepted should not have been.
One can't help be reminded that while peer-review is the right hand, grant-review is the left. If the peer review is undermined then so isn't the awards of money.
Climate debate aside, we need to invent news ways to do review of papers and grants that is not totally dependent on self-policing of scientists. Any suggestions?
The NYT article says that the current demand for H3 is 65,000 liters per year. WTF!!!
I can't believe that so much H3 is needed for new screening machines. It must be true that the machines are leaking the H3 or contaminating it and thus needing to replenish it all the time.
If it were private industry rather than Homeland Security that wanted the screening function, the regulators would force them to refine the design until they need only one liter or less per machine, and then to protect the asset so that it never leaks or gets contaminated. One liter per ten years per screening machine sounds like a more reasonable quota.
I attribute this crisis to the inability of government to regulate itself.
By the way, I live on my sailboat and cruise internationally. I know that hundreds of thousands of recreational boats enter the USA every year. Every one of them is capable of carrying one or more nuclear warheads. Are these boats screened? No. In many cases they just call a 800 number to report their entry.
In Sweden, there is said to be a whole mountain of uranium; enough to supply all the world's reactors for 100 years. World wide there are numerous other low-grade sources.
The trouble is, that these are low grade ores and it costs more to extract the uranium.
The point is there is a continuous curve (sorry I don't have that curve to show you)of the size of uranium supply versus the cost of extracting it. Therefore, it is not a matter of uranium shortage it is a question of energy costs.
Since nuclear power is so saddled with the sky high cost of meeting safety and environmental requirements, I'm not sure how much uranium contributes to the total cost. If uranium is only 10% of the cost of a Mwh, then doubling the cost of uranium adds only 10% to the cost. Perhaps another slashdotter can post the actual cost breakdowns for today's nukes.
The question of grid vulnerability comes up again and again. Every time, it is treated as if the question was novel and never addressed before.
I work in the industry. My view is not that cyber security is being neglected. On the contrary, it seems more like the situation in the Grand Canyon where there were 30 anthropologists for every Indian being studies. Homeland Security and DOE Tiger teams and security auditors swarm like flies around the operations centers. Each of them looks forward to fame and fortune if they expose the one big unaddressed vulnerability.
The most recent fully public test of the grid's vulnerability was the Y2K scare. Many people, including renowned experts such as Capers Jones, figured that there would be no way the grid could survive Y2K without numerous incidents. The actual grid incident count on the night in question was zero. No hacker could conceivably create a more ubiquitous and more diverse cyber challenge to the grid than Y2K.
What about robustness and vulnerability to chains of failures? It is true that regional blackouts do occur. Every incident can be traced to a chain of failures. However, earthquakes, hurricanes and especially ice storms every year challenge the grids with multiple simultaneous failures; sometimes hundreds of thousands of simultaneous failures without triggering cascades. Do you really think that a hacker could think up something more challenging than an ice storm?
One thing not appreciated is the design criteria. The NERC criteria for blackouts is that blackouts affecting more than 10 million people should not happen more than once every 10 years. Using NYC as a benchmark, it was blacked out in 1965, 1977 and 2003.
The public, on the other hand, thinks erroneously that the grid should be infinitely reliable and that every regional level blackout represents an avoidable failure, and that each blackout reduces confidence in the system.
Ironically, people who live in places with frequent loss of electric service, such as India, adapt so well that it causes minimal disruption. It is a paradox that the more reliable electric supply, the less well prepared the public becomes for outages and the more neurotic they become over hypothetical threats.
Whether they were sleeping, or arguing, or playing with their computers hardly matters. They must be fired in any case.
Why such harsh punishment? Because, their actions and the resulting publicity will to more to harm the flying public's confidence in the safety of air travel than just about anything else in recent years.
I wager that even a crash killing hundreds of people does less to rattle public confidence than a news story of drunken or negligent pilots.
I have always been suspicious of that 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. As I understand it, the whole furor was caused by a single sentence. Had that sentence been buried deep in the report or in an appendix, it would hardly have been noticed. But it was moved to the first sentence in the report.
Even in 2007 it was plausible that Iran dropped research into weaponization technology because they obtained it from another source; not that they weren't interested.
The press went berserk, and jumped to their conclusions without reading past that first sentence. They rushed to publish stories about how wrong headed Bush administration policies were.
Certainly an Iranian mole in American intelligence could not write the entire NIE, but how hard would it be to alter the placement of a single sentence? If this little bit of idle speculation were true; it would have been a spectacularly successful bit of sabotage worthy of a Tom Clancy novel.
In the ice storm of 1998 in the Northeast more than 200,000 poles and 100,000 miles of lines were downed. The blackout did not extend much beyond the counties affected.
On 9/11 300 MW in NYC disappeared when the towers went down. The blackout did not extend more than a block.
Tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, ice storms, and hurricanes provide frequent tests of multiple unplanned simultaneous contingencies. They hardly ever cause cascading outages.
Yes cascading outages do occur in real life, but the grid is much more robust than popular chit chat assumes. If it were as vulnerable as pundits suggest, we'd have regional level blackouts weekly.
The design criterion is that blackouts affecting 10,000,000 or more customers should not happen more often than once every 10 years. (Source) The record for the past 40 years shows that performance is just about on-target.
People also need food, shelter, clothing and heat to stay healthy. Should we expect health insurance to pay for that?
There should be a principle like the legal de minimus rex that puts a floor on health-related expenses that we expect health insurance to cover.
Indeed, if we had stuck with the catastrophic major medical only policies that used to be the only kind of health insurance, our medical care would be much more affordable today. People would pay for routine doctor bills, and if doctors charged more than the common man can afford, they would lose business.
Thanks for the interesting post. Here in the USA we have Medicare for people 65 and older. It pays 80% of the medical costs. People can buy private insurance to cover the other 20%. That sounds like what you describe in Japan. We call it a primarily public system.
The debate is now about people under 65. People now have private insurance and Obama wants a public alternative. Opponents fear that political pressure will lead to Congress increasing the benefits of the public option every year while decreasing the amount people must pay. That is popular and brings them more votes. It also leads to eventual elimination of private alternatives, leaving the government system the only choice for most people.
Then, to keep costs down, Congress will start favoring one sickness against another. Special interest groups for cancer, child care, heart disease and every disease will have to hire lobbyists to bribe congress for more money for their sickness. I once lived in Sweden and that is how their free socialized medicine system works. Orthopedic care for old people is always underfunded while sports medicine for athletes is overfunded. It could become a terrible mess here in the USA.
I'm happy to hear that the Japanese system works well for you.
I'm amazed that no one else commented on the obvious parallel between this debate and Obama's statements on health care.
Obama insists that the so-called public option will not eliminate private health insurance, it will just give them some competition. To me, Murdoch's argument with the BBS is exactly analogous.
Just about everything said on this page regarding the pro/con of Murdoch's opinion should apply equally to the health care debate.
Hold it. Stop and consider the implications of this case beyond the character of this woman and the role of the police.
We are losing the perpetual battle for privacy between ordinary citizens and the government. Our privacy rights have been unstrategically based on reasonable expectations. Every day the expectations erode, therefore we slide down the slippery slope and reasonably expect less privacy every day.
Our only chance of detente between us and big brother is to retain the right for citizens to spy on government just as much as they spy on us. According to Moore's Law, some day surveillance cameras will be smaller than grains of pollen and proportionately cheap. We can release them into the atmosphere by the trillions. It is vital that citizens have just as much right to monitor them as the government does.
I think that EFF should rush to defend every citizen prosecuted for spying on government, regardless of the circumstances. It is a vital tactic in the struggle to protect your privacy.
You are correct. Your example, points out another facet of Dillard's cluelessness -- the assumption that value delivered equals value received.
The newspaper you talked about might estimate correctly that the value of an article is $2. However, that is only true if you truly read the article and are interested in it. Your example, the wrong obituary, is perfect. It may be worth $2 to someone else, but not to you. Providers of information can never predict the value of information received.
What about price? A CEO may read today's Wall Street Journal and learn of a trend worth billions to his company. You, might use the same day's paper to wipe you know what. So, what then is the market value of a copy of the paper? Consumers set a price they are willing to pay, and it has no relation to the potential value provided or to the cost of providing it.
People like Dillard think that we should be willing to pay a price according to what HE thinks it is worth.
Traditionally, we've only worried about the chaos that would be caused by blackouts -- failures on the electricity supply side; and about attacks on the grid via hacking or things like EMP.
However, we are distributing more and more intelligence to households. Countless billions of intelligent devices exist and they are increasingly networked.
The metaphor for reliability of electric supply is "keeping the lights on" so consider the vulnerability of billions and billions of intelligent light bulbs (Why you would want your bulb to be intelligent and networked? I have no idea; its just a metaphor).
Here's the point, as the intelligence and communications become more distributed, they become more attractive to wannabe hackers and attackers. It could become equally attractive to attack the light bulbs as attacking the power grid.
Now consider how onerous it would be to consider such innocuous devices such as light bulbs to be critical infrastructure. Homeland security might need to require the same cyber security standards from every light bulb owner as they do from the utility and grid operators. Clearly, that won't work. Therefore, we may need to restrict the spread of distributed intelligence and communications in consumer level items as a defense.
Restricting technology would be highly offensive, but what's the alternative?
Where have I heard this idea before? Oh yes, Battlestar Galactica. Galactica restricted use of technology and especially networking to reduce vulnerabilty to Zylon attacks. Might life imitate SF yet again?
It is hard to imagine how clueless an "executive" in this industry can be. Apparently, Diller is incapable of visualize himself in the shoes of others.
If most sites charged a subscription fee:
1) Personally, the only commercial site I visit frequently enough to be worth a fee is the NYT. There is no second place; not even close. If all papers charged a fee, I suspect that 80% of users would subscribe to NYT and nothing else.
Other than the NYT, I probably visit 1000 other sites per month seeking interesting reading. Diller would have me pay $5000 per month for that privilege.
2) Free ranging surfing would be discouraged because of all the fee-walls erected. Most users would never discover Diller's site in the first place.
3) As others have remarked, most users would be driven to the remaining subset of sites that don't charge a fee.
4) Given that we users like to change our minds frequently about favorite places to visit, if we did pay a $5 fee to subscribe, we would likely change our mind before getting value for the money.
If there must be a subscription fee, then the ONLY way it could work would be one $5 fee for all information sites to be allocated among providers in proportion to the actual visits they record. It would be almost the same business model as cable TV which shares subscriber fees with the providers.
The solution is to use a Delta-ungrounded-Wye transformer where needed to prevent ground currents.
After the 1980's incidents, power engineers in the USA and Canada reviewed the need for these transformers and put them in where needed. The solar flare problem should therefore be solved already.
Can you cite a power system engineering qualified source who thinks there is still risk?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think Scott Adams makes up the material for the Dilbert cartoon out of thin air? It is funny precisely because it is a exaggerated version of reality. Often the exaggeration is only slight.
I heard that the full body scanners can not detect an explosive device hidden by rolls of fat in an obese person. I can't picture those rolls being searched by hand either. Yuck.
Why wouldn't terrorists recruit fat people?
Why don't we just admit that airport security is futile?
Ecstasy
The attack of 9/11/2001 took out the WTC and other buildings near ground zero. This was the heart of the financial district and the IT base of many firms.
In the hours following the attack, the offsite backup sites for many of those firms seamlessly took over. Nobody noticed that.
I firmly believe that without Y2K remediations, 911 would have been a big IT disaster too.
Agony
At the successful conclusion of Y2K remediation efforts, the upper and middle level managements treated themselves to celebrations at luxury resorts. Meanwhile, many IT grunts who put in all the extra hours got nothing more than pink slips. In most cases, the companies didn't even offer to buy them a beer as thanks for their long hours.
It was the most ungracious treatment of labor I ever witnessed. Compare it to calling Viet Nam vets baby killers.
Hey, can you think of any recruiter in any field and any country who isn't out to snag the best and the brightest?
Wouldn't it be recruiting malpractice so not do so?
You're all missing the real point. Airport security has nothing to do with actual security. It is the government's way of responding to criticism that they're doing nothing.
After past incidents (especially 911) criticism of the government was severe. Their reaction is to do something, anything. In fact the more inconvenient and the more in your face it is, the better the evidence that they're doing "everything possible."
When the next attacks occur, government can duck the blame by saying, "look how many dollars and how many man hours we threw at the problem. What more do you want?"
I just listened to Obama's statement this afternoon on the Christmas attack. What a bunch of bureaucratic double talk and utter crap. Don't believe me? Look at the transcript of his statement when it appears. Then imagine it being delivered by a mid level manager.
sopssa hit the nail on the head. Before teaching the boy *how* to program you need to pique his interest and motivate him.
I have experience teaching introductory experience to adults. I always started with Visual Basic. In a single 2 hour session I taught them how to make a primitive Pong game that really worked. That gave the students enlightment that they could create something real and substantial. It built self confidence.
VB was the best choice for the session. It allowed the students to succeed at something fun *before* they got discouraged or bored.
A few of the students decided to go further in study of programming. For them, the next course could worry about the suitable learning language.
The rest of the students didn't go the next step. Still, they enjoyed the experience and gained a little understanding of what programmers do. What more could a teacher hope for?
OK, for the sake of the record and for ye of little faith.
I have been driving manual transmissions for 45 years -- close to 1 million miles. I only replaced one other clutch in another car.
As someone else commented, I probably should have located another dealer.
This is probably my last chance to tell my Saab story in public.
In 1973 I was living in Sweden. Just before returning to the USA I bought a new Saab Combi Coupe. That is the hatchback model that later became the famous Saab 900. 73 was the first model year and they were not marketing them to the USA yet. I had mine shipped to the USA when it was only 2 weeks old. My oh my. Remember the adage about not buying version 1.0 of anything? I should have remembered that.
On the very first day of driving the manual shift lever jumped out of 2nd gear, hit me in the wrist and cracked a bone.
Back in the USA, my clutch failed. I took it to the Saab dealer for a free warranty replacement. The new one failed; and the next and the next... That car went through 7 clutches in one year. Once, the new clutch failed only 6 miles from the dealer. It wasn't me. I have long experience with manual transmissions and I don't ride the clutch.
About a year and a day from new (with a 12 month warranty) I drove through a puddle. The car stopped instantly. The engine refused to turn. Upon taking the engine apart, we found water in the pistons and all the connecting rods bent like pretzels. It turns out that the air intake was low to the ground with a 90 degree elbow. Mine was mounted with the elbow facing forward, like a water scoop if one ever hit a puddle. There was a factory bulletin to rotate that elbow 180 degrees, but my dealer just shrugged. After 7 visits to the dealer he didn't feel responsible for doing the work or for informing me about the bulletins.
Still more. Upon further inspection we found that there were no retaining rings on the piston king pins. The pins had been wearing grooves in the side of the engine block. If I hadn't driven into the puddle, the block would have exploded soon; probably while I was speeding down the interstate.
The Saab regional office refused to talk to me or even listen to my story. I sold that Saab, 13 months old for 10% of my purchase price leaving me with nothing to do but Saab saab saab.
The WSJ article understates the problem. The Climategate emails reveal that the partisan scientists have undermined the peer review process itself. It can only be made right be re-peer-reviewing all climate papers re-submitted in the past 20 years. Some rejected should not have been and some accepted should not have been.
One can't help be reminded that while peer-review is the right hand, grant-review is the left. If the peer review is undermined then so isn't the awards of money.
Climate debate aside, we need to invent news ways to do review of papers and grants that is not totally dependent on self-policing of scientists. Any suggestions?
Canada's "negative option law" sounds great. We should lobby for something similar instead of complaining about one scam at a time.
The NYT article says that the current demand for H3 is 65,000 liters per year. WTF!!!
I can't believe that so much H3 is needed for new screening machines. It must be true that the machines are leaking the H3 or contaminating it and thus needing to replenish it all the time.
If it were private industry rather than Homeland Security that wanted the screening function, the regulators would force them to refine the design until they need only one liter or less per machine, and then to protect the asset so that it never leaks or gets contaminated. One liter per ten years per screening machine sounds like a more reasonable quota.
I attribute this crisis to the inability of government to regulate itself.
By the way, I live on my sailboat and cruise internationally. I know that hundreds of thousands of recreational boats enter the USA every year. Every one of them is capable of carrying one or more nuclear warheads. Are these boats screened? No. In many cases they just call a 800 number to report their entry.
In Sweden, there is said to be a whole mountain of uranium; enough to supply all the world's reactors for 100 years. World wide there are numerous other low-grade sources.
The trouble is, that these are low grade ores and it costs more to extract the uranium.
The point is there is a continuous curve (sorry I don't have that curve to show you)of the size of uranium supply versus the cost of extracting it. Therefore, it is not a matter of uranium shortage it is a question of energy costs.
Since nuclear power is so saddled with the sky high cost of meeting safety and environmental requirements, I'm not sure how much uranium contributes to the total cost. If uranium is only 10% of the cost of a Mwh, then doubling the cost of uranium adds only 10% to the cost. Perhaps another slashdotter can post the actual cost breakdowns for today's nukes.
The question of grid vulnerability comes up again and again. Every time, it is treated as if the question was novel and never addressed before.
I work in the industry. My view is not that cyber security is being neglected. On the contrary, it seems more like the situation in the Grand Canyon where there were 30 anthropologists for every Indian being studies. Homeland Security and DOE Tiger teams and security auditors swarm like flies around the operations centers. Each of them looks forward to fame and fortune if they expose the one big unaddressed vulnerability.
The most recent fully public test of the grid's vulnerability was the Y2K scare. Many people, including renowned experts such as Capers Jones, figured that there would be no way the grid could survive Y2K without numerous incidents. The actual grid incident count on the night in question was zero. No hacker could conceivably create a more ubiquitous and more diverse cyber challenge to the grid than Y2K.
What about robustness and vulnerability to chains of failures? It is true that regional blackouts do occur. Every incident can be traced to a chain of failures. However, earthquakes, hurricanes and especially ice storms every year challenge the grids with multiple simultaneous failures; sometimes hundreds of thousands of simultaneous failures without triggering cascades. Do you really think that a hacker could think up something more challenging than an ice storm?
One thing not appreciated is the design criteria. The NERC criteria for blackouts is that blackouts affecting more than 10 million people should not happen more than once every 10 years. Using NYC as a benchmark, it was blacked out in 1965, 1977 and 2003.
The public, on the other hand, thinks erroneously that the grid should be infinitely reliable and that every regional level blackout represents an avoidable failure, and that each blackout reduces confidence in the system.
Ironically, people who live in places with frequent loss of electric service, such as India, adapt so well that it causes minimal disruption. It is a paradox that the more reliable electric supply, the less well prepared the public becomes for outages and the more neurotic they become over hypothetical threats.
Whether they were sleeping, or arguing, or playing with their computers hardly matters. They must be fired in any case.
Why such harsh punishment? Because, their actions and the resulting publicity will to more to harm the flying public's confidence in the safety of air travel than just about anything else in recent years.
I wager that even a crash killing hundreds of people does less to rattle public confidence than a news story of drunken or negligent pilots.
Good one T.E.D. I'll remember that one and use it some day.
I have always been suspicious of that 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. As I understand it, the whole furor was caused by a single sentence. Had that sentence been buried deep in the report or in an appendix, it would hardly have been noticed. But it was moved to the first sentence in the report.
Even in 2007 it was plausible that Iran dropped research into weaponization technology because they obtained it from another source; not that they weren't interested.
The press went berserk, and jumped to their conclusions without reading past that first sentence. They rushed to publish stories about how wrong headed Bush administration policies were.
Certainly an Iranian mole in American intelligence could not write the entire NIE, but how hard would it be to alter the placement of a single sentence? If this little bit of idle speculation were true; it would have been a spectacularly successful bit of sabotage worthy of a Tom Clancy novel.
In the ice storm of 1998 in the Northeast more than 200,000 poles and 100,000 miles of lines were downed. The blackout did not extend much beyond the counties affected.
On 9/11 300 MW in NYC disappeared when the towers went down. The blackout did not extend more than a block.
Tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, ice storms, and hurricanes provide frequent tests of multiple unplanned simultaneous contingencies. They hardly ever cause cascading outages.
Yes cascading outages do occur in real life, but the grid is much more robust than popular chit chat assumes. If it were as vulnerable as pundits suggest, we'd have regional level blackouts weekly.
The design criterion is that blackouts affecting 10,000,000 or more customers should not happen more often than once every 10 years. (Source) The record for the past 40 years shows that performance is just about on-target.
People also need food, shelter, clothing and heat to stay healthy. Should we expect health insurance to pay for that?
There should be a principle like the legal de minimus rex that puts a floor on health-related expenses that we expect health insurance to cover.
Indeed, if we had stuck with the catastrophic major medical only policies that used to be the only kind of health insurance, our medical care would be much more affordable today. People would pay for routine doctor bills, and if doctors charged more than the common man can afford, they would lose business.
Thanks for the interesting post. Here in the USA we have Medicare for people 65 and older. It pays 80% of the medical costs. People can buy private insurance to cover the other 20%. That sounds like what you describe in Japan. We call it a primarily public system.
The debate is now about people under 65. People now have private insurance and Obama wants a public alternative. Opponents fear that political pressure will lead to Congress increasing the benefits of the public option every year while decreasing the amount people must pay. That is popular and brings them more votes. It also leads to eventual elimination of private alternatives, leaving the government system the only choice for most people.
Then, to keep costs down, Congress will start favoring one sickness against another. Special interest groups for cancer, child care, heart disease and every disease will have to hire lobbyists to bribe congress for more money for their sickness. I once lived in Sweden and that is how their free socialized medicine system works. Orthopedic care for old people is always underfunded while sports medicine for athletes is overfunded. It could become a terrible mess here in the USA.
I'm happy to hear that the Japanese system works well for you.
I'm amazed that no one else commented on the obvious parallel between this debate and Obama's statements on health care.
Obama insists that the so-called public option will not eliminate private health insurance, it will just give them some competition. To me, Murdoch's argument with the BBS is exactly analogous.
Just about everything said on this page regarding the pro/con of Murdoch's opinion should apply equally to the health care debate.
Hold it. Stop and consider the implications of this case beyond the character of this woman and the role of the police.
We are losing the perpetual battle for privacy between ordinary citizens and the government. Our privacy rights have been unstrategically based on reasonable expectations. Every day the expectations erode, therefore we slide down the slippery slope and reasonably expect less privacy every day.
Our only chance of detente between us and big brother is to retain the right for citizens to spy on government just as much as they spy on us. According to Moore's Law, some day surveillance cameras will be smaller than grains of pollen and proportionately cheap. We can release them into the atmosphere by the trillions. It is vital that citizens have just as much right to monitor them as the government does.
I think that EFF should rush to defend every citizen prosecuted for spying on government, regardless of the circumstances. It is a vital tactic in the struggle to protect your privacy.
You are correct. Your example, points out another facet of Dillard's cluelessness -- the assumption that value delivered equals value received.
The newspaper you talked about might estimate correctly that the value of an article is $2. However, that is only true if you truly read the article and are interested in it. Your example, the wrong obituary, is perfect. It may be worth $2 to someone else, but not to you. Providers of information can never predict the value of information received.
What about price? A CEO may read today's Wall Street Journal and learn of a trend worth billions to his company. You, might use the same day's paper to wipe you know what. So, what then is the market value of a copy of the paper? Consumers set a price they are willing to pay, and it has no relation to the potential value provided or to the cost of providing it.
People like Dillard think that we should be willing to pay a price according to what HE thinks it is worth.
Traditionally, we've only worried about the chaos that would be caused by blackouts -- failures on the electricity supply side; and about attacks on the grid via hacking or things like EMP.
However, we are distributing more and more intelligence to households. Countless billions of intelligent devices exist and they are increasingly networked.
The metaphor for reliability of electric supply is "keeping the lights on" so consider the vulnerability of billions and billions of intelligent light bulbs (Why you would want your bulb to be intelligent and networked? I have no idea; its just a metaphor).
Here's the point, as the intelligence and communications become more distributed, they become more attractive to wannabe hackers and attackers. It could become equally attractive to attack the light bulbs as attacking the power grid.
Now consider how onerous it would be to consider such innocuous devices such as light bulbs to be critical infrastructure. Homeland security might need to require the same cyber security standards from every light bulb owner as they do from the utility and grid operators. Clearly, that won't work. Therefore, we may need to restrict the spread of distributed intelligence and communications in consumer level items as a defense.
Restricting technology would be highly offensive, but what's the alternative?
Where have I heard this idea before? Oh yes, Battlestar Galactica. Galactica restricted use of technology and especially networking to reduce vulnerabilty to Zylon attacks. Might life imitate SF yet again?
It is hard to imagine how clueless an "executive" in this industry can be. Apparently, Diller is incapable of visualize himself in the shoes of others.
If most sites charged a subscription fee:
1) Personally, the only commercial site I visit frequently enough to be worth a fee is the NYT. There is no second place; not even close. If all papers charged a fee, I suspect that 80% of users would subscribe to NYT and nothing else.
Other than the NYT, I probably visit 1000 other sites per month seeking interesting reading. Diller would have me pay $5000 per month for that privilege.
2) Free ranging surfing would be discouraged because of all the fee-walls erected. Most users would never discover Diller's site in the first place.
3) As others have remarked, most users would be driven to the remaining subset of sites that don't charge a fee.
4) Given that we users like to change our minds frequently about favorite places to visit, if we did pay a $5 fee to subscribe, we would likely change our mind before getting value for the money.
If there must be a subscription fee, then the ONLY way it could work would be one $5 fee for all information sites to be allocated among providers in proportion to the actual visits they record. It would be almost the same business model as cable TV which shares subscriber fees with the providers.
Online gaming sites are a different story.
The solution is to use a Delta-ungrounded-Wye transformer where needed to prevent ground currents. After the 1980's incidents, power engineers in the USA and Canada reviewed the need for these transformers and put them in where needed. The solar flare problem should therefore be solved already. Can you cite a power system engineering qualified source who thinks there is still risk?