I sincerely doubt that. This wasn't just a case of "pick a doctor from this school". This guy was one of a few in the world that could perform the procedure without killing the patient.
As for Canada, I didn't say the system was "broken". There's a cost/benefit in every system, including theirs. I just don't think Canada's system is naturally "better" than any other.
He didn't pay $100,000. His insurance company did. Granted, he has a nice plan and there's the whole discussion about whether insurance companies are fucking up the price of healthcare as much as the doctors (they are).
My bottom line, though, still stands. Doctors do try to save people because of compassion, but greed does play a part in it as well. Ask yourself, "Where are the most skilled doctors? Charging huge sums of money first world or doing it for free third world?" Not hard to figure out.
To be perfectly honest, one wonders if better prevention methods would be more appropriate in both cases. The US CAN stop people from shipping Anthrax in the mail. Brazil CAN have their people be more self-conscious about sex and spreading the disease. You will have avenues you can't alter (e.g. children getting AIDS and they can do nothing abou it), but in both cases these are situations caused primarily by human behavior. Human behavior can be altered.
Because if you don't have this you get a system of healthcare paid for by the lowest bidder. Doctors that aren't really motivated to study and be the best at their craft. Long waiting lists for basic procedures. In other words, Canada.
Like all things in life, an element of greed is involved with healthcare. Also like all things in life, that same greed drives competition which forces participants to be better than average. We're built that way down to the very cell (Ever see an amoeba engulf another one? You think they feel remorse? Competition is ingrained in their design).
A family member of mine recently had major surgery. The tab was $100,000. For that high price, we got what has been argued one of the best adolescent surgeons in America. That man saved his life. If we didn't pay that price -- hell, if prices were not an issue -- would we have gotten the same level of commitment? Questionable.
People act as if this is uncommon. I'm alarmed that people have reacted in this way.
It's very common.
I used to freelance for a large, well-known video game site (not hard to guess which -- there's only a couple). This was back when CD games were first introduced, and a lot of companies were experimenting by cramming as much video as they could onto a disk (with no respect to video quality, acting, and especially gameplay).
Anyway, a company came out with something particularly wretched. Basically some "video game" where interacting involved pushing an arrow key on your keyboard every 10 minutes or so while actors hammed it up. I bluntly gave the game the lowest possible score and walked away.
A few months later, I get an email from editor. The game's maker wasn't happy, and they were threatening to pull advertising from the online rag. Now, the editor didn't say "change the review". He just subtetly requested that another review "rereview it" to give a "counterpoint". That counterpoint would be provided by the editor himself.
Needless to say I wasn't happy, but this was a burgeoning new online rag and I didn't have much say as a freelancer.
However, ever notice when sites like GameSpot or IGN go soft on a review for a crappy game when that same company has front page splash rights (they cover the page in their company or game logo)? Now you know.
yes right because your going to have the follow through to double check those names.
No, because you don't know anyone.
Everyone who was accosted by the RIAA/MPAA who DIDN'T have the money to fight a protracted legal battle has been given an attorney for free. E.g. the 12 year old downloader. Everyone who DID have the money hasn't run into problems because they had the money (and knew what they were getting into beforehand).
All you're basically saying in your OP is "I have no clue how the legal system works, but I'm going to rant so I can get some free Slashdot karma".
Publicis is a major marketing/advertising conglomerate. Having worked for one, these places are definitely "Mac shops", with almost 50% of the userbase using Macs.
Having worked for one, also, the Mac users are more demanding. Not because they use their machines more, but because they're more abstracted from the system. In order to use a windows box you need to have a basic understanding of how the system works. E.g. "if I have a bunch of programs open, things might slow down". You learn that as you use Windows. In contrast, I had so many calls where a vet Mac user would demand more memory. We would go down only to find they hadn't closed any of their applications (just the windows -- they left the apps open on the dock). They didn't seem to have any understanding of how the system works.
Sometimes abstraction is a good thing. You don't need to necessarily know how to change your oil, for example, to drive your car. However, knowing basic stuff like "need to change oil for things to run right" is important, and in general (at least with the hundreds of Mac users I've helped) they don't seem to have a grasp on that. The Mac is a "magical box" that "just works". Except when it doesn't "just work", they have absolutely no idea what's wrong.
Again, this is just an observation in helping hundreds of Mac users in an enterprise environment.
Critically questioning requires the ability to form critical questions - which implies the ability to analyze and logically examine the thing you are questioning as well as applying the same methods to the answers. If you don't teach those methods you get people who question everything - but are unable to evaluate the answers they recieve. If you can't evaluate the answers - you are no better off than if you hadn't asked the question in the first place.
I'm not sure how that differs at all from what the Mythbusters do. On many occasions they test the answers before making a conclusion. They also revisit their answers frequently if fans object (sometimes rescinding their analysis).
However, this is all besides the point. As I mentioned, the show is about entertainment and questioning -- not belaboring oneself about how to question "correctly". When the average American is more interested in passively watching amateurs belt out tuneson Fox, how can one fault Mythbusters for at least getting people *interested* in being skeptical?
I've been reading through the comments and I'm fairly alarmed by how many people think Mythbusters isn't worthwhile based solely on scientific merit.
Look, the show never said it was teaching people about science. Adam and Jaime themselves have said many times they're more entertainment than science. They're special effects people by trade, not scientists. They build things and blow shit up. It's what they enjoy doing. You can even see it on Jaime's face when they're doing myths that don't involve blowing things up (e.g. Adam building a wind tunnel for the penny drop myth).
When the show first started, there wasn't even mention of science. They looked at urban legends such as rocket car and getting airborne in a lawnchair. The show was about the stories themselves, not the methods. Only in about season 2 or so did they start including things like "controls" and "variables" (probably by Discovery's request), but they never lost sight of the fact that they're a TV show, and television (by and large) is meant to entertain.
But that leads to an interesting question: even if they DID follow proper scientific method, how do you even apply that to some of the myths they examine? For example, they did a myth where a hillbilly chased a raccoon into a sewer pipe, decided to throw gas down it, attempted to fill the thing with fire to kill the raccoon and was purportedly "shot out". How on earth do you test that scientifically? Nowhere in the myth does it says how big the pipe was, how much gasoline was used, etc. Nowhere does it mention if he was stuck (which is important, as they found the man could only be shot out of he was wrapped in a sabot). All they have is a fun story to go off of.
If nothing else, Mythbusters gets people interested in the process of examining life, not teaching how to use proper scientific method. If their only accomplishment is making people critically question things that are usually taken at face value, they'll have succeeded in my mind.
Maybe I'm missing the big picture, but what's the problem with preventing minors from buying games specifically market for adults? I know legally there's been no teeth in it up until now (and parents should really be watching out for their kids) but what's the objection to this? The only group I would think could possibly object is minors.
Actually, it's not even Apple's initiative. It's EMI's.
In interviews after the announcement EMI said it was them, not Apple, that initiated the push for DRM-free music. They had already experimented with smaller versions of the program in the past. Internal tests said their own employees preferred the option to buy DRM-free tunes.
I wouldn't be surprised if the timeline was: discussed it with Steve Jobs sometime in 2006, they were close to inking a deal, Jobs publishes his "Thoughts on Music", EMI and Apple push the new initiative. Jobs looks like a visionary, EMI looks like a marketplace innovator.
In other words, how Jobs usually plans things: to make it look most appealing marketwise.
Your first reference doesn't mention Mac Pros at all (it mentions G5 servers). Your second reference mentions the Mac Pro but in the context of graphics, which is what I mentioned earlier. In neither link does it push the Mac Pro as a cluster node (the Apple Workgroup Cluster link on the second page specifically points to servers).
As for building a cluster (2 nodes or more) you mention all these options for the Mac Pro. If I'm building clusters for work on a budget, I use what everyone else uses: HP or IBM blades. For that kind of work, I wouldn't touch Mac Pros with a 10-foot pole (they don't even have the basics you want your cluster to have, like redundant power supplies).
And since when do people use desktops for any kind of professional clustering? I don't *want* my cluster to also function as my desktop computer. I want it to function as my CLUSTER. Nor would I want a high-end graphics card in my servers.
You can argue it up and down all you want -- Mac Pros are powerful, but very few are using them professionally for clustering. No one is turning to them over blade servers these days.
The bulk of Apple's market, as always, is creative arts (publishing, video, etc). For those purposes, the base level machine deserves a decent card. Period.
No one's questioning the primary purpose of the machine. However, a 7300 GT (which is also used in their iMac) really doesn't belong in a machine of this level.
Let's face facts: a desktop like this, being sold by Apple, is intended for some kind of graphics work. You mention physics, bioinformatics, etc. Workstations don't typically handle these kind of computations -- servers do. Whether or not we should classify the Mac Pro as a server is a matter of semantics. Point is, you'd get a couple of Xserves to handle that kind of jobs -- not a workstation.
As a workstation, Apple is targetting HD video editors, high-res graphics work, local rendering, etc. A nice video card would DEFINITELY improve processing and overall workflow for these tasks. A 7300GT is woefully underpowered for this kind of work.
I'm rather disappointed in this. There were rumors that they'd put a top-of-the-line ATI video card with Crossfire in the 8-core machines (http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2492).
Yes it's a workstation. Yes, it's not meant for games. But putting those cards in it would give Apple a significant salvo to fire into the boutique camp. I know a number of gamers who would buy them (outside the video card the machine is awesome).
8-core? Nice. But Apple, enough is enough: put a premium video card in these things. Coupling a 7300GT with a Mac Pro (the basic configuration) should be classified as a low-level travesty.
Not to mention you can right-click just about any song in iTunes and (assuming it's not protected) and have it automatically convert it to MP3. It's always been a pretty cool feature. In summary -- you buy these songs, you can get them to play on anything WITHOUT having to download some potentially illegal 3rd-party app.
Or, alternatively, you can just click the files and convert them to MP3. That was always a nice feature in iTunes but it never worked with protected files (for obvious reasons).
Further, any blogger (any internet user, and in particular any Slashdot user) should know that online anonymity is impossible. The best take their real names and run with it. The worst stand behind a glass wall and wonder how people figure out who they really are.
Because this is the calm between storms. We've done all we can from a patch standpoint. Sunday is the change, Monday is the test. Considering MS's official recommendation in calls with them was "Have your users write down their appointment times in the subject line", no matter what we do things will be a crapshoot. We've thrown the shit. Now we need to see what sticks to the fan.
That, I will admit, was the most totally braindead portion of this: Exchange. The multiple system patches I can kind of stomach because various government organizations were sorting this out to the last minute. But to have Exchange use its own time setup, in addition to Outlook modifying that setup for its own purposes, was especially stupid. I hope this got the Exchange team to wake up and realize how awful their design was.
Slashdot Mirror
I sincerely doubt that. This wasn't just a case of "pick a doctor from this school". This guy was one of a few in the world that could perform the procedure without killing the patient.
As for Canada, I didn't say the system was "broken". There's a cost/benefit in every system, including theirs. I just don't think Canada's system is naturally "better" than any other.
That works. In fact, I'm sure they're already doing some kind of analysis on most packages (making sure they're not leaking powder, for example).
He didn't pay $100,000. His insurance company did. Granted, he has a nice plan and there's the whole discussion about whether insurance companies are fucking up the price of healthcare as much as the doctors (they are).
My bottom line, though, still stands. Doctors do try to save people because of compassion, but greed does play a part in it as well. Ask yourself, "Where are the most skilled doctors? Charging huge sums of money first world or doing it for free third world?" Not hard to figure out.
To be perfectly honest, one wonders if better prevention methods would be more appropriate in both cases. The US CAN stop people from shipping Anthrax in the mail. Brazil CAN have their people be more self-conscious about sex and spreading the disease. You will have avenues you can't alter (e.g. children getting AIDS and they can do nothing abou it), but in both cases these are situations caused primarily by human behavior. Human behavior can be altered.
Because if you don't have this you get a system of healthcare paid for by the lowest bidder. Doctors that aren't really motivated to study and be the best at their craft. Long waiting lists for basic procedures. In other words, Canada.
Like all things in life, an element of greed is involved with healthcare. Also like all things in life, that same greed drives competition which forces participants to be better than average. We're built that way down to the very cell (Ever see an amoeba engulf another one? You think they feel remorse? Competition is ingrained in their design).
A family member of mine recently had major surgery. The tab was $100,000. For that high price, we got what has been argued one of the best adolescent surgeons in America. That man saved his life. If we didn't pay that price -- hell, if prices were not an issue -- would we have gotten the same level of commitment? Questionable.
People act as if this is uncommon. I'm alarmed that people have reacted in this way.
It's very common.
I used to freelance for a large, well-known video game site (not hard to guess which -- there's only a couple). This was back when CD games were first introduced, and a lot of companies were experimenting by cramming as much video as they could onto a disk (with no respect to video quality, acting, and especially gameplay).
Anyway, a company came out with something particularly wretched. Basically some "video game" where interacting involved pushing an arrow key on your keyboard every 10 minutes or so while actors hammed it up. I bluntly gave the game the lowest possible score and walked away.
A few months later, I get an email from editor. The game's maker wasn't happy, and they were threatening to pull advertising from the online rag. Now, the editor didn't say "change the review". He just subtetly requested that another review "rereview it" to give a "counterpoint". That counterpoint would be provided by the editor himself.
Needless to say I wasn't happy, but this was a burgeoning new online rag and I didn't have much say as a freelancer.
However, ever notice when sites like GameSpot or IGN go soft on a review for a crappy game when that same company has front page splash rights (they cover the page in their company or game logo)? Now you know.
No, because you don't know anyone.
Everyone who was accosted by the RIAA/MPAA who DIDN'T have the money to fight a protracted legal battle has been given an attorney for free. E.g. the 12 year old downloader. Everyone who DID have the money hasn't run into problems because they had the money (and knew what they were getting into beforehand).
All you're basically saying in your OP is "I have no clue how the legal system works, but I'm going to rant so I can get some free Slashdot karma".
Really? Name one.
Publicis is a major marketing/advertising conglomerate. Having worked for one, these places are definitely "Mac shops", with almost 50% of the userbase using Macs.
Having worked for one, also, the Mac users are more demanding. Not because they use their machines more, but because they're more abstracted from the system. In order to use a windows box you need to have a basic understanding of how the system works. E.g. "if I have a bunch of programs open, things might slow down". You learn that as you use Windows. In contrast, I had so many calls where a vet Mac user would demand more memory. We would go down only to find they hadn't closed any of their applications (just the windows -- they left the apps open on the dock). They didn't seem to have any understanding of how the system works.
Sometimes abstraction is a good thing. You don't need to necessarily know how to change your oil, for example, to drive your car. However, knowing basic stuff like "need to change oil for things to run right" is important, and in general (at least with the hundreds of Mac users I've helped) they don't seem to have a grasp on that. The Mac is a "magical box" that "just works". Except when it doesn't "just work", they have absolutely no idea what's wrong.
Again, this is just an observation in helping hundreds of Mac users in an enterprise environment.
I'm not sure how that differs at all from what the Mythbusters do. On many occasions they test the answers before making a conclusion. They also revisit their answers frequently if fans object (sometimes rescinding their analysis).
However, this is all besides the point. As I mentioned, the show is about entertainment and questioning -- not belaboring oneself about how to question "correctly". When the average American is more interested in passively watching amateurs belt out tuneson Fox, how can one fault Mythbusters for at least getting people *interested* in being skeptical?
I've been reading through the comments and I'm fairly alarmed by how many people think Mythbusters isn't worthwhile based solely on scientific merit.
Look, the show never said it was teaching people about science. Adam and Jaime themselves have said many times they're more entertainment than science. They're special effects people by trade, not scientists. They build things and blow shit up. It's what they enjoy doing. You can even see it on Jaime's face when they're doing myths that don't involve blowing things up (e.g. Adam building a wind tunnel for the penny drop myth).
When the show first started, there wasn't even mention of science. They looked at urban legends such as rocket car and getting airborne in a lawnchair. The show was about the stories themselves, not the methods. Only in about season 2 or so did they start including things like "controls" and "variables" (probably by Discovery's request), but they never lost sight of the fact that they're a TV show, and television (by and large) is meant to entertain.
But that leads to an interesting question: even if they DID follow proper scientific method, how do you even apply that to some of the myths they examine? For example, they did a myth where a hillbilly chased a raccoon into a sewer pipe, decided to throw gas down it, attempted to fill the thing with fire to kill the raccoon and was purportedly "shot out". How on earth do you test that scientifically? Nowhere in the myth does it says how big the pipe was, how much gasoline was used, etc. Nowhere does it mention if he was stuck (which is important, as they found the man could only be shot out of he was wrapped in a sabot). All they have is a fun story to go off of.
If nothing else, Mythbusters gets people interested in the process of examining life, not teaching how to use proper scientific method. If their only accomplishment is making people critically question things that are usually taken at face value, they'll have succeeded in my mind.
IE runs on Windows XP.
IIS runs on Windows 2000/2003/XP.
MS Office runs on practically any flavor of Windows.
So there goes your argument.
DirectX is an anomaly and, quite frankly, if Vista sales continue to suck I imagine MS will backport it to XP just to keep Windows gaming going.
Maybe I'm missing the big picture, but what's the problem with preventing minors from buying games specifically market for adults? I know legally there's been no teeth in it up until now (and parents should really be watching out for their kids) but what's the objection to this? The only group I would think could possibly object is minors.
Great, you cost them a whole .1%! Smooth, varmint.
Actually, it's not even Apple's initiative. It's EMI's.
In interviews after the announcement EMI said it was them, not Apple, that initiated the push for DRM-free music. They had already experimented with smaller versions of the program in the past. Internal tests said their own employees preferred the option to buy DRM-free tunes.
I wouldn't be surprised if the timeline was: discussed it with Steve Jobs sometime in 2006, they were close to inking a deal, Jobs publishes his "Thoughts on Music", EMI and Apple push the new initiative. Jobs looks like a visionary, EMI looks like a marketplace innovator.
In other words, how Jobs usually plans things: to make it look most appealing marketwise.
Your first reference doesn't mention Mac Pros at all (it mentions G5 servers). Your second reference mentions the Mac Pro but in the context of graphics, which is what I mentioned earlier. In neither link does it push the Mac Pro as a cluster node (the Apple Workgroup Cluster link on the second page specifically points to servers).
As for building a cluster (2 nodes or more) you mention all these options for the Mac Pro. If I'm building clusters for work on a budget, I use what everyone else uses: HP or IBM blades. For that kind of work, I wouldn't touch Mac Pros with a 10-foot pole (they don't even have the basics you want your cluster to have, like redundant power supplies).
And since when do people use desktops for any kind of professional clustering? I don't *want* my cluster to also function as my desktop computer. I want it to function as my CLUSTER. Nor would I want a high-end graphics card in my servers.
You can argue it up and down all you want -- Mac Pros are powerful, but very few are using them professionally for clustering. No one is turning to them over blade servers these days.
The bulk of Apple's market, as always, is creative arts (publishing, video, etc). For those purposes, the base level machine deserves a decent card. Period.
No one's questioning the primary purpose of the machine. However, a 7300 GT (which is also used in their iMac) really doesn't belong in a machine of this level.
Let's face facts: a desktop like this, being sold by Apple, is intended for some kind of graphics work. You mention physics, bioinformatics, etc. Workstations don't typically handle these kind of computations -- servers do. Whether or not we should classify the Mac Pro as a server is a matter of semantics. Point is, you'd get a couple of Xserves to handle that kind of jobs -- not a workstation.
As a workstation, Apple is targetting HD video editors, high-res graphics work, local rendering, etc. A nice video card would DEFINITELY improve processing and overall workflow for these tasks. A 7300GT is woefully underpowered for this kind of work.
I'm rather disappointed in this. There were rumors that they'd put a top-of-the-line ATI video card with Crossfire in the 8-core machines (http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2492).
Yes it's a workstation. Yes, it's not meant for games. But putting those cards in it would give Apple a significant salvo to fire into the boutique camp. I know a number of gamers who would buy them (outside the video card the machine is awesome).
8-core? Nice. But Apple, enough is enough: put a premium video card in these things. Coupling a 7300GT with a Mac Pro (the basic configuration) should be classified as a low-level travesty.
Not to mention you can right-click just about any song in iTunes and (assuming it's not protected) and have it automatically convert it to MP3. It's always been a pretty cool feature. In summary -- you buy these songs, you can get them to play on anything WITHOUT having to download some potentially illegal 3rd-party app.
Or, alternatively, you can just click the files and convert them to MP3. That was always a nice feature in iTunes but it never worked with protected files (for obvious reasons).
If I learned anything from Starcraft, Haliburton should have plenty of propane when they move to the Middle East. Or propane accessories.
"Figure out who I am."
I couldn't. CmdrTaco and friends could easily. Feel safe?
And?
Nothing what they did was illegal.
Further, any blogger (any internet user, and in particular any Slashdot user) should know that online anonymity is impossible. The best take their real names and run with it. The worst stand behind a glass wall and wonder how people figure out who they really are.
Because this is the calm between storms. We've done all we can from a patch standpoint. Sunday is the change, Monday is the test. Considering MS's official recommendation in calls with them was "Have your users write down their appointment times in the subject line", no matter what we do things will be a crapshoot. We've thrown the shit. Now we need to see what sticks to the fan.
That, I will admit, was the most totally braindead portion of this: Exchange. The multiple system patches I can kind of stomach because various government organizations were sorting this out to the last minute. But to have Exchange use its own time setup, in addition to Outlook modifying that setup for its own purposes, was especially stupid. I hope this got the Exchange team to wake up and realize how awful their design was.