EHRs were having a negative impact on physicians' practices. Many physicians are spending at least two hours each workday using their EHR and may click up to 4,000 times per 8-hour shift, he said. -- Dr. James L. Madara, CEO of the American Medical Association
How does this metric identify a negative impact in any way? If those clicks are keyboard clicks it doesn't even sound high at all. How about something like "doctors among the top 20% of EHR adoption misdiagnosed 10% more often", or something similar? I'm have no idea if pushing adoption of EHRs is beneficial, but based on the metrics Dr. Madara chose to use they don't seem to have any idea either.
This is why vaccines should be 100% mandatory unless there is a valid medical reason. I don't care what your religion, personal beliefs etc are. If you are going to live around other people you have to be vacinated.
I share this sentiment for easily communicated diseases (which is what I'm vaccinated against), but why should people be forced to take vaccines for diseases that are very easily avoided? I'm not going to lose sleep over sending my (hypothetical) child to a school where a bunch of children haven't taken Gardasil, as long as they've taken vaccines for anything they'd be likely to spew onto other children in the classroom.
I hate to break it to you, but STDs are easily communicated diseases. You may think you will be some kind of perfect parent whose children would never go against your wishes, but that just shows how unprepared for parenthood you are right now. Over two thirds of teenagers have sex before they are 20, and only 3% of Americans save themselves for marriage. If you assume your children will be part of that very small percentage then I wouldn't trust you with heavy machinery let alone children.
The 1mm answer would be silly of course, but I don't think it makes your argument that I have made a claim.
That is exactly my point. It is silly. And by not being able to take a stance on whether a god created the universe, you are at least making the claim that it is not a similarly silly stance. Many if not most non-believers would claim the likelihood of a sentient god creating the universe is just about as silly.
So both could be equally plausible, and at least 1 was true at one time for anyone born. So the less likely answer is 6 feet tall.
Notice I said is, not has been. Considering there is no way to know if my sibling is a brother or a sister until s/he is much longer than 1 mm, there is no way for me to have a brother who is currently 1 mm tall.
Then you got hosed. I paid like $500 each for 2 27" pro series Dells a few years ago. They're amazingly clear for all of my uses (and I'm pretty picky about visuals). I don't know what speciality niche industry you could possibly need such an expensive monitor for, but I'm guessing that instead you paid 'that' company a lot of tax for the privilege of having a grey monitor with a fruit on it.
I guess you got hosed too, since I paid $418 each for 2 27" WQHD monitors a few years ago.
Although I also paid $800 for a 34" Dell UltraSharp U3415W monitor last year to replace my 30" Dell monitor which used to be between my two 27" monitors. All four of these monitors look great and fulfill my needs perfectly. The ultra wide allows me to put two development environments side by side much better than my 30" or 27" ones, although my small 27" monitors are still very good for surfing looking at online documentation or watching movies.
And since they meet my needs perfectly it must mean you were hosed when you paid $80 more for your monitors. Since no one could ever have different uses for their monitor setup, right?
It's also encouraging to see someone who is able to distinguish evolution (genetic change within a population), speciation (evolution to the point that the population is no longer part of the same species)
Why would you distinguish evolution from speciation in this way, especially since your own definition of speciation considers it a subset of evolution and not a separate process? Speciation is simply one part of the evolutionary process, not separate from it. Over time evolutionary changes are categorized as cladogenesis (splitting into a new species) or anagenesis (evolution without speciation taking place), but both types of classifications are a part of overall evolutionary theory.
Your comment has a slight smell of someone who thinks macro-evolution and micro-evolution are different biological processes, instead of just different ways for scientists to classify evolutionary changes. I could be interpreting your message incorrectly though.
When I say I don't know, there is nothing I need to prove.
Well no one ever "needs" to prove anything. But just saying you don't know doesn't absolve you of taking a stance on the matter. To illustrate this, just answer the question "which do you think is more likely?" (you can pick whichever options you want when determining which are most likely).
Even if you answer this with "I'm not sure", this is essentially the same as saying "they have similar possibilities of being correct." If you didn't think the chances were similar, you would take a side. For instance if I asked you if it was more likely that my brother is 1 millimeter tall or 6 feet tall, answer "I'm not sure" is making the claim each are at least similarly likely. Saying "I'm not sure" about whether a god created the universe is no different.
So either you make the claim that one side is more likely, or you make the claim they are similarly likely. Those are all claims which require a defense just as much as someone who has faith or is a non-believer.
Agnostic here. IMHO we really have no way to think or talk about the origin problem. We can insert some placeholder, that semantically answers the question (like God started it all, or time goes back infinitely, or time started at the big bang), but ontologically, we still got nothin'. How do we make sense of a beginning with no previous moment ? Or an infinitely backward extending line of time ? Go ahead and act like the problem is resolved, but it is still an open question. And this is a problem because I have a belief that something, rather than nothing, exists, which raises these nasty origin questions.
Just because we will probably never have a definitive answer does not mean you cannot have reasoned discussions on the topic. First we can come to an agreement that either something has always existed, or something sprung up from nothingness. One of those has to be true as far as I can tell. So this is something almost everyone can agree on.
Then everyone needs to refrain from making the mistake that all possibilities are equally likely simply because we don't know which is correct. That way arguments don't break down to someone saying their opinion is equally valid just because you cannot "disprove" it.
Then look at the options that are currently up for debate in our society, of which there are basically two sides. In one camp they believe the universe started with the simplest of building blocks, complexity emerged, and eventually life evolved to a point where sentient beings exist. In the other camp a sentient being was the first thing to ever exist, or at least it sprung into being without "evolving" from simpler building blocks.
After describing the two possibilities, it seems obvious why non-believers find the former option infinitely more plausible. This is why non-believers don't take the possibility of a creator deity seriously, since it isn't really worthy of even being considered an option in a rational discussion.
I finally felt well enough to try Lumosity... [and got better]
This is why actual research has control groups. After your concussion started improving, you could have probably sprinkled the fairy dust I just invented on your head and would start to see improvement in a week. I'm sorry about your tough recovery, but your anecdote is no different than the moms who think vaccines caused their kid's autism. There are plenty of people who think some sugar water cured their cancer too.
It's also smart that lawyers "unionized" in the form of the Bar Association so they have the power to fight automation and outsourcing unlike "the every man for himself" state of IS/IT.
I find it amusing that many arguments for and against unions are the exact same argument.
Anti-union: Unions are horrible because they create artificial barriers that hold back efficiency improvements when those improvements hurt existing employees. Pro-Union: Unions are great because they create artificial barriers that hold back efficiency improvements when those improvements hurt existing employees.
That is the problem with all of these predictions. They say something stupid like "We can replace all lawyers" or "No one will need a doctor", when the reality is almost no jobs are completely destroyed by any technology. We even have uses for horses 100 years after automobiles became common.
The only reasonable question is whether or not automation will massively disrupt the legal profession. This is a question which can lead to meaningful dialogue, instead of knee jerk reactions like "No, next question?" New lawyers are already seeing this profession undergo massive changes causing there to be far less entry level positions, which in large part is because of current automation.
Even if we only need half as many lawyers 15 years from now, that will have a massive impact on all practicing lawyers. My guess is the top 10% of lawyers will make even more money, the next 40% of lawyers will make far less than they do today, and the bottom 50% will spend their time lobbying to make their $250k in student loans be dischargeable in bankruptcy.
>> She added round-the-clock care for children with crappy parents.
So...federal breakfast+lunch+dinner+afterschool+foodstamps+welfare = fail? Can we just invest in what she's doing then and cut back on all the other social programs that are not addressing poverty?
Looks like they are just doing more of the same, showing welfare isn't the problem. Not enough welfare is the problem.
VR is better than a high-end gaming monitor for anyone who doesn't get motion sickness. Even Gear VR is incredibly immersive, and the Rift + a gaming PC will be a much more powerful device. I think it'll take off at any sub-$1K price point. Obviously it'll catch on faster if they can get it under $500.
I really hope Oculus Rift is truthful with their claims that the CV1 release of the headset will do away with motion sickness problems. I can handle 3-D movies and first person shooters, but need Dramamine for boats, can't deal with spinning amusement park rides, and can't read while driving. I really hope I will be able to use the Oculus Rift, which I will certainly purchase if it is $500 and will probably still purchase if it is around $750.
The problem is that it's been there for a long time. I played Duke3d in VR at Slam Site in the mid 90s. The only effective change from an end user perspective is that you don't have to stand on a DDR type platform to use it anymore. That's 20 years of innovation.
The innovation is not in the look of the device, it is in all of the technology inside the device. I think you are discounting the massive improvements in screens and video processing that makes this generation of virtual reality possible. The minimum requirements for an Oculus Rift is a computer equipped with a GTX 970, a top of the line $350 video card. To put things in perspective, the GTX 970 is about 60x faster than the GeForce 6800 GT that was released in 2004, and I'm not even sure how to compare it to video cards from the 90's.
The Oculus Rift consumer version will consume 233 million pixels per second and will display top of the line graphics, which blow away anything from the 90s. The screens being used by the Oculus use the best panels money can buy, and they are a huge difference compared to what was available 5 years ago let alone 20 years ago.
The reason we have so many VR headsets coming out in such a short period of time is not coincidence. It is because the technology has finally caught up with peoples' expectations. Or at least that is what the companies producing these products are betting on.
There is no law that prohibits a service provider from reporting all the legal processes that it has not received. The gag order only attaches after the ISP has been served with the gagged legal process."
There may be no law that specifically prohibits that, but judges make rulings based on the intent of laws and the intent of criminals all the time. Just look to the Supreme Court decision regarding the Affordable Care Act, where they used the spirit and purpose of the law as guidance when ignoring a pedantic gotcha that threatened to scuttle the whole law.
Even if such a narrow loophole did hold up in court, it seems a simple gag order stopping a site from disclosing if they have or have not received any other NSL gag orders would suffice. If the government decided to do that. Australia did enact similar laws, and there is nothing inherent in the first amendment that would prevent that in the USA.
The law does not and cannot forbid you from saying that you haven't been served a NSL. The law can not compel you to say that you haven't been served a NSL if you have indeed been served a NSL. The freedom not to say what you don't want to say is fundamental.
First off, there is no case law on this matter so you cannot make many of the claims you are making.
Why can't the law forbid you from saying you haven't been served with an NSL? Do you think you can get around a gag order just because a journalist asks you the right questions? If you have a gag order saying you can't disclose the amount of a settlement, a journalist cannot just keep asking "was it under $100k? $500k? $1 million?", and just wait for the interviewee to stop saying "No" and start saying "I can't answer that". The correct answer to all of these questions is "I can't disclose that information".
And the correct answer to questions about certain subpoenas and warrants that cannot be discussed openly is "I can neither confirm nor deny its existence". I assume any more shows clear intent to break the law, but that is just my opinion. I don't think anyone knows the answer to that until it is challenged in court.
The problem with America isn't that we don't tax the poor enough.
Who said anything about taxing the poor more? We are talking about federal income taxes here, both corporate and personal, and none of that is directly paid by the poor. The top 20% of earners pay 84% of federal income taxes. Corporate income taxes comprise about 19% of all federal income taxes, and if that went to 0% the burden would not fall to the poor. It would overwhelmingly fall to households making over $110k per year (the top 20%). If the ratios of taxes spent per quintile of income stayed the same, the average family in the middle quintile would pay about $20 per month more in federal income taxes if the corporate tax rate went to 0%.
Arguments that the upper middle class are already taxed to much hold a little weight, but complaining about poor people paying more taxes is incredibly dishonest. They don't pay federal income taxes. Even the middle class pays next to nothing in federal income taxes.
Open standards help the industry innovate in an environment where only a few large "winners" exist. But they don't really stop the winner take all results of the IT industry. This is because this situation is caused more by high barriers of entry, network effects, and the benefits of user data.
In the article, the attributes Google had which led to its dominance would not have been mitigated by open standards. Their initial benefit was a better approach to search, but that was very short lived. Their dominance was the result of having more user searches to train their algorithms, more infrastructure to crawl the Web more often and more efficiently, and brand name awareness.
The traits which led to Google's dominance are not unique. Almost every case of a dominant IT company can be attributed to accumulated user data, high infrastructure costs / benefits of scale, brand name awareness, network effects, and vendor lock in. Open standards only help with the last one, and even then only a little.
You are comparing a guy sufficiently prescient to license his database with the GPL so that he can get back access to the code later and start a fork with a guy who's taken 4 billion and is still complaining? Widenius would have a pretty good case for libel.
Widenius's decision to sell to Sun and his decision to GPL MySQL were very different decisions. What Widenius ultimately became upset about is that he tried to stop companies like Oracle from buying MySQL by putting clauses in the Sun contract preventing such a sale. What he didn't have the prescience to foresee was the possibility of Oracle buying Sun itself. This was the mistake Richard_at_work was comparing to George Lucas's complaints.
If anything, the comparison is unfair to Lucas because Lucas doesn't claim he was tricked by Disney, just that he wishes the movies were done differently. In this case Lucas had a far better handle on how his work was going to be used in the future than Widenius did.
Are you serious? They prohibit telling people they are not being spied on? Fascinating.
It just says you cannot report on the existence or non-existence of certain types of warrants. I doubt such language is even necessary (warrant canaries have not been tested in USA courts yet) since using a warrant canary shows clear intent to break the law. In my opinion tech companies only use them for good PR since the financial penalties are not that high.
I seriously doubt a warrant canary would hold up in courts in the USA either. There is no settled case law on this matter that I know of so no one knows for sure. But even if warrant canaries worked in some cases, I would be very surprised if there was no way to word legislation in a way that makes warrant canaries illegal.
What has been held up in court is the government's ability to prevent citizens from speaking publicly about law enforcement investigations. The FBI uses gag orders on national security subpoenas (NSLs) to prevent the recipient from publicly stating they have been served with the subpoena, and they have held up in court as not violating the 1st amendment. A law similar to the Patriot Act (which gives authority to these NSLs) could prevent warrant canaries IMHO.
Although I doubt new laws would even be necessary to get around warrant canaries. The law seems pretty straight forward. Warrant canaries involve going out of your way to communicate information you are not legally allowed to communicate. Intent to break the law is undeniable.
A contract that any party can terminate at any time at his sole discretion is not a contract.
Not necessarily. A contract I have with a retailer that allows me to return their product at any time at my sole discretion within 30 day is still a contract. And in this case, the landlord cannot terminate the lease at any time. They have to provide notice, just like the landlord in this story did. The tenants were given months to find new rental units.
I obviously do not know the details here, and the landlord could certainly have broken the law. But nothing in the story gives any reason to believe laws have been broken here.
None. We don't need twice as many maids. We hire exactly as many maids as we need to serve the people who want maid service.
What makes you think this? There are plenty of services people want that are too expensive for them to afford. If those services become cheaper there would be more people who can afford them. Regardless of any opinions about whether having more maids is good for the economy or good for the maids themselves, you have to at least realize there are people who would like to have someone else clean their home but choose not to because of cost.
To remove the human element of it, think of adoption of big screen TVs. 20 years ago owning a 50 inch TV was very uncommon. This wasn't because no one wanted them, its because they cost over $5000 (over $10k in 2015 dollars). Today most middle class homes have at least one TV over 50", but only because they can be found for under $1000.
If the cost of housekeeping saw a similar decline, you would see far more dual earning families paying people to do laundry and dishes.
A better use for a basic income is to make up for the fact that there are not enough jobs to keep everyone fully employed. So instead of having ten maids working 40 hours at $8/hour, you might have 20 maids working 20 hours at $8/hour [...] That way, instead of being a money grab by businesses, this approach allows a time grab by individuals, freeing up more time to do the things that matter to them. This approach also has the advantage of making it possible for people to spend part of their time doing work in artistic fields, where there's no notion of a wage. [...] You can't really achieve that by making those people work the same amount of time for half the wages, even if you replace those lost wages.
That is true, but this is a goal that almost only benefits the people being given "free" money. What do the people paying all of these extra taxes get out of the deal? You may not care about that question, but anyone trying to get legislation to pass sure will. In my scenario, the working class improve their lives because there are plentiful jobs for everyone, and the upper class paying for these benefits are also getting cheaper services.
I think looking for a win-little / win-little solution is more viable than a win-big / lose situation. You are much more likely to get upper middle class tax payers to give up hundreds of dollars a month in extra taxes if they are getting something out of the deal.
I am not sure I agree with your evidence against. I can argue by some measures the wealth gap is larger than it has ever been.
Over the past 30 years when the wealth gap has exploded, social safety net programs and union power was reduced, not strengthened. If you want to see what wealth inequality looks like under strong social programs, look at the 1960s. In 1963, the top 1% had 35x more wealth than the median family. This is what the social programs after the Great Depression gave us. This disparity grew to 40x by 1983, when our social safety nets started deteriorating. Fast forward to 2013, and the top 1% has 97x more wealth than the median family.
Its really even worse than this, because almost all of the wealth gap has been caused by the top 0.01%. If you look at wealth growth of the top.01%-1%, the growth is pretty flat. It is only the top 0.01%, or about 10,000 families, that are seeing all of this growth.
The great society programs enacted in '64-'65 allowed the US economy to keeping growing after the post-WW2 prosperity faded, and kept inequality from growing significantly for 20 years. Once Reagan started to lower taxes and defeat the unions (without enacting other worker protections) the rise in inequality was inevitable.
We have plenty of evidence that strong social programs help the poor. Just look at Scandinavian countries. All we have evidence of in the US is that social programs can be run poorly. That is a reason to improve and strengthen them, not scuttle them.
isn't an agreement to continue offering housing at a stated rate exactly what a signed lease is?
It is quite common for a lease to include a clause detailing how many days notice the landlord must provide the tenant in the event of an eviction involving the sale of the home. 60-day notice is the most common, mostly because this time frame is mandated by the rent control ordinances of many states. Considering how business friendly Texas is, I assume landlords have no problems legally evicting tenants when the property is sold as long as sufficient notice is given.
Slashdot Mirror
EHRs were having a negative impact on physicians' practices. Many physicians are spending at least two hours each workday using their EHR and may click up to 4,000 times per 8-hour shift, he said. -- Dr. James L. Madara, CEO of the American Medical Association
How does this metric identify a negative impact in any way? If those clicks are keyboard clicks it doesn't even sound high at all. How about something like "doctors among the top 20% of EHR adoption misdiagnosed 10% more often", or something similar? I'm have no idea if pushing adoption of EHRs is beneficial, but based on the metrics Dr. Madara chose to use they don't seem to have any idea either.
This is why vaccines should be 100% mandatory unless there is a valid medical reason. I don't care what your religion, personal beliefs etc are. If you are going to live around other people you have to be vacinated.
I share this sentiment for easily communicated diseases (which is what I'm vaccinated against), but why should people be forced to take vaccines for diseases that are very easily avoided? I'm not going to lose sleep over sending my (hypothetical) child to a school where a bunch of children haven't taken Gardasil, as long as they've taken vaccines for anything they'd be likely to spew onto other children in the classroom.
I hate to break it to you, but STDs are easily communicated diseases. You may think you will be some kind of perfect parent whose children would never go against your wishes, but that just shows how unprepared for parenthood you are right now. Over two thirds of teenagers have sex before they are 20, and only 3% of Americans save themselves for marriage. If you assume your children will be part of that very small percentage then I wouldn't trust you with heavy machinery let alone children.
my brother is 1 millimeter tall or 6 feet tall,
The 1mm answer would be silly of course, but I don't think it makes your argument that I have made a claim.
That is exactly my point. It is silly. And by not being able to take a stance on whether a god created the universe, you are at least making the claim that it is not a similarly silly stance. Many if not most non-believers would claim the likelihood of a sentient god creating the universe is just about as silly.
my brother is 1 millimeter tall or 6 feet tall
So both could be equally plausible, and at least 1 was true at one time for anyone born. So the less likely answer is 6 feet tall.
Notice I said is, not has been. Considering there is no way to know if my sibling is a brother or a sister until s/he is much longer than 1 mm, there is no way for me to have a brother who is currently 1 mm tall.
Then you got hosed. I paid like $500 each for 2 27" pro series Dells a few years ago. They're amazingly clear for all of my uses (and I'm pretty picky about visuals). I don't know what speciality niche industry you could possibly need such an expensive monitor for, but I'm guessing that instead you paid 'that' company a lot of tax for the privilege of having a grey monitor with a fruit on it.
I guess you got hosed too, since I paid $418 each for 2 27" WQHD monitors a few years ago.
Although I also paid $800 for a 34" Dell UltraSharp U3415W monitor last year to replace my 30" Dell monitor which used to be between my two 27" monitors. All four of these monitors look great and fulfill my needs perfectly. The ultra wide allows me to put two development environments side by side much better than my 30" or 27" ones, although my small 27" monitors are still very good for surfing looking at online documentation or watching movies.
And since they meet my needs perfectly it must mean you were hosed when you paid $80 more for your monitors. Since no one could ever have different uses for their monitor setup, right?
It's also encouraging to see someone who is able to distinguish evolution (genetic change within a population), speciation (evolution to the point that the population is no longer part of the same species)
Why would you distinguish evolution from speciation in this way, especially since your own definition of speciation considers it a subset of evolution and not a separate process? Speciation is simply one part of the evolutionary process, not separate from it. Over time evolutionary changes are categorized as cladogenesis (splitting into a new species) or anagenesis (evolution without speciation taking place), but both types of classifications are a part of overall evolutionary theory.
Your comment has a slight smell of someone who thinks macro-evolution and micro-evolution are different biological processes, instead of just different ways for scientists to classify evolutionary changes. I could be interpreting your message incorrectly though.
When I say I don't know, there is nothing I need to prove.
Well no one ever "needs" to prove anything. But just saying you don't know doesn't absolve you of taking a stance on the matter. To illustrate this, just answer the question "which do you think is more likely?" (you can pick whichever options you want when determining which are most likely).
Even if you answer this with "I'm not sure", this is essentially the same as saying "they have similar possibilities of being correct." If you didn't think the chances were similar, you would take a side. For instance if I asked you if it was more likely that my brother is 1 millimeter tall or 6 feet tall, answer "I'm not sure" is making the claim each are at least similarly likely. Saying "I'm not sure" about whether a god created the universe is no different.
So either you make the claim that one side is more likely, or you make the claim they are similarly likely. Those are all claims which require a defense just as much as someone who has faith or is a non-believer.
Agnostic here. IMHO we really have no way to think or talk about the origin problem. We can insert some placeholder, that semantically answers the question (like God started it all, or time goes back infinitely, or time started at the big bang), but ontologically, we still got nothin'. How do we make sense of a beginning with no previous moment ? Or an infinitely backward extending line of time ? Go ahead and act like the problem is resolved, but it is still an open question. And this is a problem because I have a belief that something, rather than nothing, exists, which raises these nasty origin questions.
Just because we will probably never have a definitive answer does not mean you cannot have reasoned discussions on the topic. First we can come to an agreement that either something has always existed, or something sprung up from nothingness. One of those has to be true as far as I can tell. So this is something almost everyone can agree on.
Then everyone needs to refrain from making the mistake that all possibilities are equally likely simply because we don't know which is correct. That way arguments don't break down to someone saying their opinion is equally valid just because you cannot "disprove" it.
Then look at the options that are currently up for debate in our society, of which there are basically two sides. In one camp they believe the universe started with the simplest of building blocks, complexity emerged, and eventually life evolved to a point where sentient beings exist. In the other camp a sentient being was the first thing to ever exist, or at least it sprung into being without "evolving" from simpler building blocks.
After describing the two possibilities, it seems obvious why non-believers find the former option infinitely more plausible. This is why non-believers don't take the possibility of a creator deity seriously, since it isn't really worthy of even being considered an option in a rational discussion.
I finally felt well enough to try Lumosity ... [and got better]
This is why actual research has control groups. After your concussion started improving, you could have probably sprinkled the fairy dust I just invented on your head and would start to see improvement in a week. I'm sorry about your tough recovery, but your anecdote is no different than the moms who think vaccines caused their kid's autism. There are plenty of people who think some sugar water cured their cancer too.
It's also smart that lawyers "unionized" in the form of the Bar Association so they have the power to fight automation and outsourcing unlike "the every man for himself" state of IS/IT.
I find it amusing that many arguments for and against unions are the exact same argument.
Anti-union: Unions are horrible because they create artificial barriers that hold back efficiency improvements when those improvements hurt existing employees.
Pro-Union: Unions are great because they create artificial barriers that hold back efficiency improvements when those improvements hurt existing employees.
That is the problem with all of these predictions. They say something stupid like "We can replace all lawyers" or "No one will need a doctor", when the reality is almost no jobs are completely destroyed by any technology. We even have uses for horses 100 years after automobiles became common.
The only reasonable question is whether or not automation will massively disrupt the legal profession. This is a question which can lead to meaningful dialogue, instead of knee jerk reactions like "No, next question?" New lawyers are already seeing this profession undergo massive changes causing there to be far less entry level positions, which in large part is because of current automation.
Even if we only need half as many lawyers 15 years from now, that will have a massive impact on all practicing lawyers. My guess is the top 10% of lawyers will make even more money, the next 40% of lawyers will make far less than they do today, and the bottom 50% will spend their time lobbying to make their $250k in student loans be dischargeable in bankruptcy.
>> She added round-the-clock care for children with crappy parents.
So...federal breakfast+lunch+dinner+afterschool+foodstamps+welfare = fail? Can we just invest in what she's doing then and cut back on all the other social programs that are not addressing poverty?
Looks like they are just doing more of the same, showing welfare isn't the problem. Not enough welfare is the problem.
VR is better than a high-end gaming monitor for anyone who doesn't get motion sickness. Even Gear VR is incredibly immersive, and the Rift + a gaming PC will be a much more powerful device.
I think it'll take off at any sub-$1K price point. Obviously it'll catch on faster if they can get it under $500.
I really hope Oculus Rift is truthful with their claims that the CV1 release of the headset will do away with motion sickness problems. I can handle 3-D movies and first person shooters, but need Dramamine for boats, can't deal with spinning amusement park rides, and can't read while driving. I really hope I will be able to use the Oculus Rift, which I will certainly purchase if it is $500 and will probably still purchase if it is around $750.
The problem is that it's been there for a long time. I played Duke3d in VR at Slam Site in the mid 90s. The only effective change from an end user perspective is that you don't have to stand on a DDR type platform to use it anymore. That's 20 years of innovation.
The innovation is not in the look of the device, it is in all of the technology inside the device. I think you are discounting the massive improvements in screens and video processing that makes this generation of virtual reality possible. The minimum requirements for an Oculus Rift is a computer equipped with a GTX 970, a top of the line $350 video card. To put things in perspective, the GTX 970 is about 60x faster than the GeForce 6800 GT that was released in 2004, and I'm not even sure how to compare it to video cards from the 90's.
The Oculus Rift consumer version will consume 233 million pixels per second and will display top of the line graphics, which blow away anything from the 90s. The screens being used by the Oculus use the best panels money can buy, and they are a huge difference compared to what was available 5 years ago let alone 20 years ago.
The reason we have so many VR headsets coming out in such a short period of time is not coincidence. It is because the technology has finally caught up with peoples' expectations. Or at least that is what the companies producing these products are betting on.
"Is it legal to publish a warrant canary?
There is no law that prohibits a service provider from reporting all the legal processes that it has not received. The gag order only attaches after the ISP has been served with the gagged legal process."
There may be no law that specifically prohibits that, but judges make rulings based on the intent of laws and the intent of criminals all the time. Just look to the Supreme Court decision regarding the Affordable Care Act, where they used the spirit and purpose of the law as guidance when ignoring a pedantic gotcha that threatened to scuttle the whole law.
Even if such a narrow loophole did hold up in court, it seems a simple gag order stopping a site from disclosing if they have or have not received any other NSL gag orders would suffice. If the government decided to do that. Australia did enact similar laws, and there is nothing inherent in the first amendment that would prevent that in the USA.
The law does not and cannot forbid you from saying that you haven't been served a NSL. The law can not compel you to say that you haven't been served a NSL if you have indeed been served a NSL. The freedom not to say what you don't want to say is fundamental.
First off, there is no case law on this matter so you cannot make many of the claims you are making.
Why can't the law forbid you from saying you haven't been served with an NSL? Do you think you can get around a gag order just because a journalist asks you the right questions? If you have a gag order saying you can't disclose the amount of a settlement, a journalist cannot just keep asking "was it under $100k? $500k? $1 million?", and just wait for the interviewee to stop saying "No" and start saying "I can't answer that". The correct answer to all of these questions is "I can't disclose that information".
And the correct answer to questions about certain subpoenas and warrants that cannot be discussed openly is "I can neither confirm nor deny its existence". I assume any more shows clear intent to break the law, but that is just my opinion. I don't think anyone knows the answer to that until it is challenged in court.
The problem with America isn't that we don't tax the poor enough.
Who said anything about taxing the poor more? We are talking about federal income taxes here, both corporate and personal, and none of that is directly paid by the poor. The top 20% of earners pay 84% of federal income taxes. Corporate income taxes comprise about 19% of all federal income taxes, and if that went to 0% the burden would not fall to the poor. It would overwhelmingly fall to households making over $110k per year (the top 20%). If the ratios of taxes spent per quintile of income stayed the same, the average family in the middle quintile would pay about $20 per month more in federal income taxes if the corporate tax rate went to 0%.
Arguments that the upper middle class are already taxed to much hold a little weight, but complaining about poor people paying more taxes is incredibly dishonest. They don't pay federal income taxes. Even the middle class pays next to nothing in federal income taxes.
Open standards help the industry innovate in an environment where only a few large "winners" exist. But they don't really stop the winner take all results of the IT industry. This is because this situation is caused more by high barriers of entry, network effects, and the benefits of user data.
In the article, the attributes Google had which led to its dominance would not have been mitigated by open standards. Their initial benefit was a better approach to search, but that was very short lived. Their dominance was the result of having more user searches to train their algorithms, more infrastructure to crawl the Web more often and more efficiently, and brand name awareness.
The traits which led to Google's dominance are not unique. Almost every case of a dominant IT company can be attributed to accumulated user data, high infrastructure costs / benefits of scale, brand name awareness, network effects, and vendor lock in. Open standards only help with the last one, and even then only a little.
You are comparing a guy sufficiently prescient to license his database with the GPL so that he can get back access to the code later and start a fork with a guy who's taken 4 billion and is still complaining? Widenius would have a pretty good case for libel.
Widenius's decision to sell to Sun and his decision to GPL MySQL were very different decisions. What Widenius ultimately became upset about is that he tried to stop companies like Oracle from buying MySQL by putting clauses in the Sun contract preventing such a sale. What he didn't have the prescience to foresee was the possibility of Oracle buying Sun itself. This was the mistake Richard_at_work was comparing to George Lucas's complaints.
If anything, the comparison is unfair to Lucas because Lucas doesn't claim he was tricked by Disney, just that he wishes the movies were done differently. In this case Lucas had a far better handle on how his work was going to be used in the future than Widenius did.
Are you serious? They prohibit telling people they are not being spied on? Fascinating.
It just says you cannot report on the existence or non-existence of certain types of warrants. I doubt such language is even necessary (warrant canaries have not been tested in USA courts yet) since using a warrant canary shows clear intent to break the law. In my opinion tech companies only use them for good PR since the financial penalties are not that high.
I seriously doubt a warrant canary would hold up in courts in the USA either. There is no settled case law on this matter that I know of so no one knows for sure. But even if warrant canaries worked in some cases, I would be very surprised if there was no way to word legislation in a way that makes warrant canaries illegal.
What has been held up in court is the government's ability to prevent citizens from speaking publicly about law enforcement investigations. The FBI uses gag orders on national security subpoenas (NSLs) to prevent the recipient from publicly stating they have been served with the subpoena, and they have held up in court as not violating the 1st amendment. A law similar to the Patriot Act (which gives authority to these NSLs) could prevent warrant canaries IMHO.
Although I doubt new laws would even be necessary to get around warrant canaries. The law seems pretty straight forward. Warrant canaries involve going out of your way to communicate information you are not legally allowed to communicate. Intent to break the law is undeniable.
A contract that any party can terminate at any time at his sole discretion is not a contract.
Not necessarily. A contract I have with a retailer that allows me to return their product at any time at my sole discretion within 30 day is still a contract.
And in this case, the landlord cannot terminate the lease at any time. They have to provide notice, just like the landlord in this story did. The tenants were given months to find new rental units.
I obviously do not know the details here, and the landlord could certainly have broken the law. But nothing in the story gives any reason to believe laws have been broken here.
None. We don't need twice as many maids. We hire exactly as many maids as we need to serve the people who want maid service.
What makes you think this? There are plenty of services people want that are too expensive for them to afford. If those services become cheaper there would be more people who can afford them. Regardless of any opinions about whether having more maids is good for the economy or good for the maids themselves, you have to at least realize there are people who would like to have someone else clean their home but choose not to because of cost.
To remove the human element of it, think of adoption of big screen TVs. 20 years ago owning a 50 inch TV was very uncommon. This wasn't because no one wanted them, its because they cost over $5000 (over $10k in 2015 dollars). Today most middle class homes have at least one TV over 50", but only because they can be found for under $1000.
If the cost of housekeeping saw a similar decline, you would see far more dual earning families paying people to do laundry and dishes.
A better use for a basic income is to make up for the fact that there are not enough jobs to keep everyone fully employed. So instead of having ten maids working 40 hours at $8/hour, you might have 20 maids working 20 hours at $8/hour [...] That way, instead of being a money grab by businesses, this approach allows a time grab by individuals, freeing up more time to do the things that matter to them. This approach also has the advantage of making it possible for people to spend part of their time doing work in artistic fields, where there's no notion of a wage. [...] You can't really achieve that by making those people work the same amount of time for half the wages, even if you replace those lost wages.
That is true, but this is a goal that almost only benefits the people being given "free" money. What do the people paying all of these extra taxes get out of the deal? You may not care about that question, but anyone trying to get legislation to pass sure will. In my scenario, the working class improve their lives because there are plentiful jobs for everyone, and the upper class paying for these benefits are also getting cheaper services.
I think looking for a win-little / win-little solution is more viable than a win-big / lose situation. You are much more likely to get upper middle class tax payers to give up hundreds of dollars a month in extra taxes if they are getting something out of the deal.
I am not sure I agree with your evidence against. I can argue by some measures the wealth gap is larger than it has ever been.
Over the past 30 years when the wealth gap has exploded, social safety net programs and union power was reduced, not strengthened. If you want to see what wealth inequality looks like under strong social programs, look at the 1960s. In 1963, the top 1% had 35x more wealth than the median family. This is what the social programs after the Great Depression gave us. This disparity grew to 40x by 1983, when our social safety nets started deteriorating. Fast forward to 2013, and the top 1% has 97x more wealth than the median family.
Its really even worse than this, because almost all of the wealth gap has been caused by the top 0.01%. If you look at wealth growth of the top .01%-1%, the growth is pretty flat. It is only the top 0.01%, or about 10,000 families, that are seeing all of this growth.
The great society programs enacted in '64-'65 allowed the US economy to keeping growing after the post-WW2 prosperity faded, and kept inequality from growing significantly for 20 years. Once Reagan started to lower taxes and defeat the unions (without enacting other worker protections) the rise in inequality was inevitable.
We have plenty of evidence that strong social programs help the poor. Just look at Scandinavian countries. All we have evidence of in the US is that social programs can be run poorly. That is a reason to improve and strengthen them, not scuttle them.
isn't an agreement to continue offering housing at a stated rate exactly what a signed lease is?
It is quite common for a lease to include a clause detailing how many days notice the landlord must provide the tenant in the event of an eviction involving the sale of the home. 60-day notice is the most common, mostly because this time frame is mandated by the rent control ordinances of many states. Considering how business friendly Texas is, I assume landlords have no problems legally evicting tenants when the property is sold as long as sufficient notice is given.