Well, obviously there is some respect for copyright laws... at least among copyright holders!:D
I'm not so sure about that. By paying for copyright term extensions on existing works, the media cartels are effectively stealing from the public domain. It seems that respect only applies when it works to their advantage...
I can understand if people are not comfortable with using ReiserFS in light of what has happened. I never used it, so I cannot offer any opinions on whether it was any good
If people are looking for something different, why not ZFS?
Sure, I know that Sun's commitment to Open Source is inconsistent and potentially suspect, but ZFS looks to be an impressive piece of technology.
Make it more of a private transaction between Dr. and patient, more like it used to be, and cost will come down due to competition, etc.
Will it?
Maybe there are some pinch-pennies out there who will seek out a Doctor Nick simply because he is the lowest cost provider, but I'm not sure that would be a sound decision.
From an economic perspective, you are dealing with the allocation of scarce resources where the demand will always exceed the supply. I don't think there is much incentive for health care providers to lower costs. The health care corporations first obligation is to the shareholders. I am not sure that any decrease in overhead would be passed on to the consumers - especially when they are running at capacity.
Besides, it is very expensive to have under- and un-insured people out there. Universal healthcare systems tend to be cheaper to operate and provide better over-all results if you trust what the WHO says.
Since this is how the game plays out then you always have a 1/2 chance of getting it right, regardless of what door you always end up having to pick between two doors, one with a prize and one without a prize.
That would be true if and only if the host did not know what was behind the door that was opened. If the host randomly chose a door, your reasoning would be correct. However, the host knows where the car is and chooses to open a door that has nothing behind it.
I had a somewhat heated discussion with someone who called herself a psychologist but hadn't studied statistics. To my thinking, statistics is central to psychology being called a science. Without statistics you're trading in conjecture and anecdote. When I said psychology without stats isn't science, it didn't go down too well.
When I took my degree (double major: CS and Psych) all psychology undergrads were required to take courses in statistics and scientific methodology. I find it hard to believe that someone with a degree in psychology from an accredited university never studied any stats.
That said, there are many sub-disciplines in psychology. I studied cognitive psychology, and there was a fair bit of maths involved. Someone who wanted to be a clinical psychologist would not need be devoted to statistics, just as I was not devoted to learning how to help clients via talk therapy and the medical model.
I went to a conference where the cognitive psychologists and clinical psychologists reviewed the same case study and made suggestions on how to help a client who was an alcoholic and suffered from bouts of severe depression. The clinicians believed that they needed to identify and resolve the root cause of the depression in order to end the alcohol dependency, whereas the cognitives believed that the client needed to stop drinking first, because alcohol is a depressant.
At the time, I could not help but recall the story of the Petit Prince, and the episode in which he met the drunkard.
As many as it takes to have a competitive market and consumer friendly pricing and service.
That's your only criteria? Where is all this infrastructure going to go? There are physical and logistical limitations that I don't think you have considered, never mind the cost of entry to the market.
Sorry dude, but free market principles can not, and do not apply everywhere.
I hope you didn't infer that I thought all monopolies should be broken up on principle (see c and d).
No, I don't believe that all monopolies should be broken up on principle. I have no problem with the existence of natural monopolies, but I think that it is best for the citizenry if such organizations are run on a not-for-profit basis. If a monopoly is run with the intention of making money, the customers will be taken advantage of, with no recourse.
There are lots of free-marketers here on/. who won't like that suggestion, but the principles of a free market simply do not apply in a monopoly situation and the state is the only entity that can wield a stick large enough to force the monopoly in line. All monopolies abuse their customers, but strong state intervention will hopefully keep them to a minimum.
a) The government sticks its nose in and creates or sanctions a monopoly
b) The government doesn't stick its nose in to break up an illegal monopoly
c) It's the government itself that's providing the service.
d) The company gets too big to care about customers anymore, and implode under the weight of their own bureaucracy.
The thing is, there are natural monopolies, and it simply is not cost-effective to have more than one provider for the service. (How many water companies does your neighbourhood need?) Any attempt to subsidize other entrants to the market is just a waste of money. There is no point in having regulated monopolies, because those corporations are smart enough to spend the time and effort in subverting and co-opting the regulator to suit their own needs instead of what is best for their customers.
In such cases, I think it is best that the service be provided by a legislated non-profit organization. I'd be OK with a wholly state-owned and operated one as well, but it would have to be run at arms' length in order to be free from political interference.
I don't give a fuck. That's their choice, it's not my job to take care of someone who can't take care of themself.
Fair enough, you don't care about what happens to other people.
I just don't understand how your perceived self-interest leads you to conclude that you are better off with the current state of health care in the US. The publicly funded health care systems in Europe and Canada have been shown to be more cost effective than the alternative. Better still, WHO metrics indicate that they provide better service.
Yes, people with money do visit the US to jump the queue for elective medical procedures, but you don't see very many of those people permanently relocate...
And all the people who need important surgeries and shit done NOW come to the US to get it done cause otherwise they would die waiting for their surgery/needstogetdonenow shit.
And you point is?
What do poor americans who have no health coverage do?
Steve, your state already tried, and aborted, an attempt at universal health care. Do you want federal universal health care because Oregon needs to take money from other states to make it work? Would you raise federal income taxes to make it work? How much?
I think the OP is expressing an opinion on universal health care, but it is so subtly disguised in this question that I am unable to find it...
f elected as Senator for Oregon, how hard would you push for environmental action? You seem to promote fiscal responsibility and I find these two topics to have interesting relationships to each other.
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter...
Seriously though, I see the two as inherently compatible. It all depends on how you calculate costs and the timeframe you are concerned with.
Looking ahead to the future, environmental responsibility offers long-term benefits, but few (if any) short-term benefits. The costs however, must be borne up front and will diminish over time. On the other hand, in the immediate short-term, there is no business case for any kind of environmental responsibility. Of course, there is no business case for any kind of intermediate-term or long-term behavior that does not offer immediate gratification either.
A better way to look at the situation is to compare the intermediate-term and long-term costs of our short-term choices. My belief is that it will be much more expensive in the future if we continue to not pay the true economic costs of our collective lifestyles. Gasoline for example, is dirt cheap compared to other staples we purchase on a regular basis. The artificial subsidy of gasoline drives other decisions (what kind of car we drive, where we live, what we do in our spare time) that affect our behaviour largely because we do not have to pay for the real costs or consequences of our actions. Unfortunately, since those costs will be borne in the future, it is difficult to persuade people to alter their short-term behaviour.
We should not look to politicians for leadership in these matters. Politicians pander to today's voters. The people in the future who will pay the price for the choices we make today aren't voting in this election, so their interests will not be represented.
The business case for environmental responsibility is that it will be more expensive in the long-term if we do not make any changes to our current behaviour. The easiest way to modify the behaviour of people and corporations is to use taxation. We should heavily tax behaviour we want to discourage, and provide incentives for behaviour we want to encourage. That way, even those people who only care about immediate short-term advantages will behave in ways that offer medium-term and long-term benefits.
If you care to further elaborate, I'm also interested in how fiscal responsibility can be maintained in addition to your pledge to reform healthcare.
How about the fact that public health care in the other G8 nations costs less per-capita than it does in the US, and all of their citizens have coverage? It seems to me that fiscal responsibility demands public health care, rather than opposes it.
I may be misinterpreting things here, but wouldn't this effectively socialize the Canadian recording industry? If filesharing is legal and people pay a tax to support the recording companies / artists, then that's effectively socialized music.
And your point is?
Now it's not unheard of for Canada to socialize media -- see the National Film Board, for instance -- but this seems rather extreme.
Do you have the slightest idea what the NFB is, or does?
Say Grandma has an internet connection, and uses it only for sending email. She lives on a fixed income. Why should she pay $5 a month to subsidize other people so they can get free music by violating copyright? For someone on a fixed income, another $5/mo bill is a significant hit. Maybe that's $5 she could have spent having lunch with her bridge club at IHOP.
To paraphrase a well-known/. meme: "Won't someone please think of the seniors on fixed incomes?"
Well, to use the same argument, why should someone who owns a house but has no children pay education taxes? Why should a young person pay taxes to subsidize Grandma's hip replacement? Why should a person who lives in a rural area subsidize urban public transport? And so on, and so on.
If taxes are only supposed to go to programs that benefit that individual taxpayer, we wouldn't have any useful social programs whatsoever. Unless of course, our society is a great deal more enlightened than I think we are...
There are valid reasons to question whether a compulsory license would achieve the stated goals, but I do not believe your example is one of them.
When a corporation operates with this kind of lack of transparency, it's called Enron.
Slightly OT, but your example may not be the best one.
A good friend of mine works at one of the big 5 accounting firms and audits the financial reports of large corporations. (FYI - he has never worked for Arthur Anderson and has never audited Enron). According to him, it was fairly clear in the audit notes what Enron was up to, but nobody bothered to read them. As long as the stock was increasing in value, nobody paid much attention to the small print.
I'd try to get the first four items done within the first 24 hours. I don't think I could handle being president any longer than that.
Sure. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
I do not believe that simplistic libertarian theories work in this day and age. Regardless of what the founding fathers might have intended, they lived in a reality that is worlds away from our own - one they could never imagine in their wildest dreams. Our world is a much bigger and much smaller place that what they were familiar with, and I don't think that their principles scale to our reality.
It is not possible to live in splendid isolation from the rest of the world. Even if you place self-interest above all else, integration is the way to go. The simplest analogy I can offer is this: if everybody is holding hands, nobody can make a fist and punch you in the nose.
You should bare in mind the reason autism rates have increased is because the criteria for autism has been expanded since the 1980's. What previously wouldn't be counted as autism now is.
That's for sure. My nephew is autistic, and I have met some of the other children who receive IBI therapy with him. I know that autism is a continuum and not a binary variable, but I think that calling some of those kids autistic is a bit of a stretch. Admittedly, I an no expert in such matters, and for all I know, the expanded diagnosis criteria is correct.
Still, I wonder if doctors aren't diagnosing some children with autism who would have been diagnosed as mentally disabled a few years ago. Either analysis would be very difficult for a parent to hear, but autism would be the least traumatic assessment.
When a congressman thinks of "his people", he does not think of "Americans", he thinks of all the people back in Timbucktoo, Alabama that need a new hickway, erm Highway to Wockahooey, Alabama so he can get elected again. Meanwhile all his fellow congressmen are doing the same thing porking money back to their home states so they can get re-elected.
It just goes to show that Tip O'Neil was right - all politics is local!
His view that the DMCA is in need of a rewrite? Has he been getting letters from his voters / constituents that the DMCA needs to be tougher?
I suspect that the MPAA/RIAA lobbyists regularly tell him that the DMCA needs to be re-written every time they make a contribution to his campaign re-election fund.
You know, users could really help the *AA and government if they would simply set the evil bit on all internet traffic that potentially infringed on someone's copyright...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not so sure about that. By paying for copyright term extensions on existing works, the media cartels are effectively stealing from the public domain. It seems that respect only applies when it works to their advantage...
I can understand if people are not comfortable with using ReiserFS in light of what has happened. I never used it, so I cannot offer any opinions on whether it was any good
If people are looking for something different, why not ZFS?
Sure, I know that Sun's commitment to Open Source is inconsistent and potentially suspect, but ZFS looks to be an impressive piece of technology.
So, why not ZFS?
Will it?
Maybe there are some pinch-pennies out there who will seek out a Doctor Nick simply because he is the lowest cost provider, but I'm not sure that would be a sound decision.
From an economic perspective, you are dealing with the allocation of scarce resources where the demand will always exceed the supply. I don't think there is much incentive for health care providers to lower costs. The health care corporations first obligation is to the shareholders. I am not sure that any decrease in overhead would be passed on to the consumers - especially when they are running at capacity.
Besides, it is very expensive to have under- and un-insured people out there. Universal healthcare systems tend to be cheaper to operate and provide better over-all results if you trust what the WHO says.
-1 Flamebait?
For $DEITY sake people, it was a joke - or an attempt at one.
Sheesh...
Has netcraft confirmed it?
That would be true if and only if the host did not know what was behind the door that was opened. If the host randomly chose a door, your reasoning would be correct. However, the host knows where the car is and chooses to open a door that has nothing behind it.
When I took my degree (double major: CS and Psych) all psychology undergrads were required to take courses in statistics and scientific methodology. I find it hard to believe that someone with a degree in psychology from an accredited university never studied any stats.
That said, there are many sub-disciplines in psychology. I studied cognitive psychology, and there was a fair bit of maths involved. Someone who wanted to be a clinical psychologist would not need be devoted to statistics, just as I was not devoted to learning how to help clients via talk therapy and the medical model.
I went to a conference where the cognitive psychologists and clinical psychologists reviewed the same case study and made suggestions on how to help a client who was an alcoholic and suffered from bouts of severe depression. The clinicians believed that they needed to identify and resolve the root cause of the depression in order to end the alcohol dependency, whereas the cognitives believed that the client needed to stop drinking first, because alcohol is a depressant.
At the time, I could not help but recall the story of the Petit Prince, and the episode in which he met the drunkard.
Maybe they should try running KDE instead?
That's your only criteria? Where is all this infrastructure going to go? There are physical and logistical limitations that I don't think you have considered, never mind the cost of entry to the market .
Sorry dude, but free market principles can not, and do not apply everywhere.
No, I don't believe that all monopolies should be broken up on principle. I have no problem with the existence of natural monopolies, but I think that it is best for the citizenry if such organizations are run on a not-for-profit basis. If a monopoly is run with the intention of making money, the customers will be taken advantage of, with no recourse.
There are lots of free-marketers here on /. who won't like that suggestion, but the principles of a free market simply do not apply in a monopoly situation and the state is the only entity that can wield a stick large enough to force the monopoly in line. All monopolies abuse their customers, but strong state intervention will hopefully keep them to a minimum.
The thing is, there are natural monopolies, and it simply is not cost-effective to have more than one provider for the service. (How many water companies does your neighbourhood need?) Any attempt to subsidize other entrants to the market is just a waste of money. There is no point in having regulated monopolies, because those corporations are smart enough to spend the time and effort in subverting and co-opting the regulator to suit their own needs instead of what is best for their customers.
In such cases, I think it is best that the service be provided by a legislated non-profit organization. I'd be OK with a wholly state-owned and operated one as well, but it would have to be run at arms' length in order to be free from political interference.
Fair enough, you don't care about what happens to other people.
I just don't understand how your perceived self-interest leads you to conclude that you are better off with the current state of health care in the US. The publicly funded health care systems in Europe and Canada have been shown to be more cost effective than the alternative. Better still, WHO metrics indicate that they provide better service.
Yes, people with money do visit the US to jump the queue for elective medical procedures, but you don't see very many of those people permanently relocate...
And you point is?
What do poor americans who have no health coverage do?
Do you care about what happens to them?
I think the OP is expressing an opinion on universal health care, but it is so subtly disguised in this question that I am unable to find it...
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter...
Seriously though, I see the two as inherently compatible. It all depends on how you calculate costs and the timeframe you are concerned with.
Looking ahead to the future, environmental responsibility offers long-term benefits, but few (if any) short-term benefits. The costs however, must be borne up front and will diminish over time. On the other hand, in the immediate short-term, there is no business case for any kind of environmental responsibility. Of course, there is no business case for any kind of intermediate-term or long-term behavior that does not offer immediate gratification either.
A better way to look at the situation is to compare the intermediate-term and long-term costs of our short-term choices. My belief is that it will be much more expensive in the future if we continue to not pay the true economic costs of our collective lifestyles. Gasoline for example, is dirt cheap compared to other staples we purchase on a regular basis. The artificial subsidy of gasoline drives other decisions (what kind of car we drive, where we live, what we do in our spare time) that affect our behaviour largely because we do not have to pay for the real costs or consequences of our actions. Unfortunately, since those costs will be borne in the future, it is difficult to persuade people to alter their short-term behaviour.
We should not look to politicians for leadership in these matters. Politicians pander to today's voters. The people in the future who will pay the price for the choices we make today aren't voting in this election, so their interests will not be represented.
The business case for environmental responsibility is that it will be more expensive in the long-term if we do not make any changes to our current behaviour. The easiest way to modify the behaviour of people and corporations is to use taxation. We should heavily tax behaviour we want to discourage, and provide incentives for behaviour we want to encourage. That way, even those people who only care about immediate short-term advantages will behave in ways that offer medium-term and long-term benefits.
How about the fact that public health care in the other G8 nations costs less per-capita than it does in the US, and all of their citizens have coverage? It seems to me that fiscal responsibility demands public health care, rather than opposes it.
And your point is?
Do you have the slightest idea what the NFB is, or does?
To paraphrase a well-known /. meme: "Won't someone please think of the seniors on fixed incomes?"
Well, to use the same argument, why should someone who owns a house but has no children pay education taxes? Why should a young person pay taxes to subsidize Grandma's hip replacement? Why should a person who lives in a rural area subsidize urban public transport? And so on, and so on.
If taxes are only supposed to go to programs that benefit that individual taxpayer, we wouldn't have any useful social programs whatsoever. Unless of course, our society is a great deal more enlightened than I think we are...
There are valid reasons to question whether a compulsory license would achieve the stated goals, but I do not believe your example is one of them.
Slightly OT, but your example may not be the best one.
A good friend of mine works at one of the big 5 accounting firms and audits the financial reports of large corporations. (FYI - he has never worked for Arthur Anderson and has never audited Enron). According to him, it was fairly clear in the audit notes what Enron was up to, but nobody bothered to read them. As long as the stock was increasing in value, nobody paid much attention to the small print.
What, one Steve Ballmer isn't enough for you?
Sure. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
I do not believe that simplistic libertarian theories work in this day and age. Regardless of what the founding fathers might have intended, they lived in a reality that is worlds away from our own - one they could never imagine in their wildest dreams. Our world is a much bigger and much smaller place that what they were familiar with, and I don't think that their principles scale to our reality.
It is not possible to live in splendid isolation from the rest of the world. Even if you place self-interest above all else, integration is the way to go. The simplest analogy I can offer is this: if everybody is holding hands, nobody can make a fist and punch you in the nose.
That's for sure. My nephew is autistic, and I have met some of the other children who receive IBI therapy with him. I know that autism is a continuum and not a binary variable, but I think that calling some of those kids autistic is a bit of a stretch. Admittedly, I an no expert in such matters, and for all I know, the expanded diagnosis criteria is correct.
Still, I wonder if doctors aren't diagnosing some children with autism who would have been diagnosed as mentally disabled a few years ago. Either analysis would be very difficult for a parent to hear, but autism would be the least traumatic assessment.
Does this mean that at least some of the media cartel believes that there is a legitimate use for P2P after all?
It just goes to show that Tip O'Neil was right - all politics is local!
I suspect that the MPAA/RIAA lobbyists regularly tell him that the DMCA needs to be re-written every time they make a contribution to his campaign re-election fund.
You know, users could really help the *AA and government if they would simply set the evil bit on all internet traffic that potentially infringed on someone's copyright...
That would make content filtering a snap!