Anyhow, I've known a lot of scientists in my day, and worked with quite a few. If you pressed them on an explanation of what significance means precisely, you'd probably get a rough and ready answer that would have statistics nazis of every stripe gritting their teeth in agony. I'd be willing to bet that for practical purposes most of 'em treat significance tests as mathematical black boxes into which they dump numbers and "significance" as green light that blinks when they've hit the statistical jackpot.
That's also consistent with my experience. In some cases they are never given (or required to get) the necessary training in statistics in the first place and are only taught some sloppy ad hoc rules.
That allows you to upload your own code, but can you load on any other software that another person develops? (That's a serious question, not a rhetorical one.) I think even the programmers among us don't write the lion's share of the programs we use, so it's only equivalent if that $99 buys you the ability to install any non-approved 3rd party software you want, and if those 3rd parties have the ability to distribute said software without lawsuits from Apple. I just don't know enough about the terms of the user and developer agreements with Apple to have any idea whether this is the case (since I don't own any Apple devices).
We used to have the quaint idea that rights came with responsibilities. The right to vote should come with the responsibility to be informed of the issues on which you are voting.
Many people in the US had the idea that people, "...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights... That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," to quote the declaration of independence. Under this view, rights are inherent by natural law, not earned. It isn't that people afforded the ability to vote because they deserve it but rather that natural law gives them the right to liberty and the only way a government may (morally) exert power on them is by their consent.
While people do use the phrase, "with rights come responsibilities," it probably makes more sense to say that privileges come with responsibilities. Under the above view, rights are not given by man and, therefore, can't have any conditions imposed by man. Whether you accept that view exactly (and it definitely has problems), I think it's fair to say that generally rights are supposed to be inherent and vital, while privileges are granted by others conditionally, and that's what separates the two. Generally the only grounds for depriving someone of a right is if it would infringe upon the rights of another.
I would have no problem with requiring that people who exercise their right to vote also demonstrate in some way that they are going to make an informed decision...
We used to have literacy tests to vote in the US. The consensus view is that they were mostly used to keep minorities from voting, so since then it's not been a very popular idea here among anyone who knows history. The flaw is probably much more general, though; if people in power write the test that determines who can vote, and the vote determines who is in power, then you have created a positive feedback loop. This feedback will tend to make the system unstable and drive it toward some extreme point, at which point either it will say there (to the disadvantage of many in society) or there will be some major social upheaval (such as a civil war, riots, etc.) that will bring the system back into balance.
I think it's important to bear in mind what Winston Churchill said, that, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried." Democracy doesn't necessarily always (or even often) produce the best solutions to problems. It's chief merit is that it is relatively stable. It usually keeps things from getting too bad for any particular group, so it removes the need for the assassinations, coups, civil wars, and so on that are common under other forms of Government. Adding in voting tests would likely undo this main benefit.
NASA has far too large a PR operation if they're doing this. If they're doing a full-scale game for PR, their PR budget is too big.
NASA is not paying for the development (read this or previous articles on the subject). The deal is more like the NFL working with EA to make a football video game (except probably with more control over the content), NASA contributes their name/marks/PR and the developer foots the bill for development in return for the profits they will reap later.
Obviously what PR budget NASA should have is arguable, but remember that a) they're prohibited from "advertising" by the space act, and b) a lot of what they do is both PR *and* designed to do the useful job of educating the public. That seems to be the aim of this game too, although again you could debate whether it can succeed.
The promotional end of NASA may now be the most effective part of the organization.
You realize that NASA astrophysicist John Mather won the Nobel prize in Physics in 2006, right? NASA's science divisions do a lot of good, useful (effective) work. They just don't get a lot of attention. Manned space flight is the expensive side show.
In an age of semi-autonomous and remote-controlled robots, manned space flight is an anachronism of questionable utility. But it is dramatic and catches the public's imagination (which is demonstrated on/. regularly), which makes it popular among politicians. The problem is that it's also expensive to do anything vaguely worthwhile with manned space flight (one of the reasons that its utility is questionable), so it usually doesn't have funding to match the set goals (at least since the Apollo program). So, NASA ends up looking ineffective because they're asked to do something which may not be a good idea in the first place and then given a level of funding with which the goal can't be accomplished.
Of course, I'm not saying that NASA as an organization isn't probably messed up in any number of ways, but the point is just that you shouldn't judge it by manned space flight.
It's my understanding that people in congress have considered before the question of expanding open access requirements to other disciplines. Obviously publishers will oppose such a move because it cuts into their bottom line. How far it eats into the bottom line depends on the reasons people subscribe and just how the opening of access works: You can make new papers closed and older papers open, or you can do the reverse. Additionally, you can make papers totally open or you can institute some half-way measure, like something similar to Google Books or Amazon book previews, which are designed with the aim that you can read the content but not easily save a copy of it.
In Physics, the APS (the professional organization for physicists) publishes the Physical Review journals, which are some of the most influential in the field besides Nature and Science. Apparently the APS relies on subscription fees from the journals in part to subsidize many of their other (worthwhile) activities, e.g. scientific conferences. As a result, it's my understanding that they opposed open access requirements (though they might have been willing to accept them in some form). This is especially interesting because the Physical Review journals have relatively friendly policies that allow one to post a pre-print to the ArXiv (which physicists generally do) and host a copy of the paper on your own website, so most of the papers they publish (at least more recently) are already available for free one way or another.
I generally have a very favorable opinion of the APS, but I would very much like to see more openness in scientific journals, at the least for taxpayer funded research. If this means that the APS will have to raise dues and conference fees to more accurately reflect the cost of their activities, I think that's something we'll just have to accept.
So...then you admit he did refer to more than just his laptop. I said it doesn't seem to "solve his worry" about computers without Firefox, and obviously that is his worry (if he mentions it as a desirable property) and your solution doesn't solve it.
A more useful response would have simply stated the reasons why you believe one cannot reasonably do better than this alternative (even in the face of the submitter's stated desire). Hashapass, for example, makes an interesting alternative with a different trade-off of security and flexibility. You could also have answered the simple question about using an external password file in Firefox.
I know people don't read the F*** Articles, but could you at lead read the F*** Summary? ...
He's referring to his laptop, which has firefox.
Pot, meet kettle. From the summary:
Magic Password Generator add-in for Firefox seems competent, but it's tied to Firefox, and I have other places and applications where I want passwords. And I might be accessing my sites from other computers that don't have it installed.
[Emphasis Mine]
That doesn't seem to solve his worry about using computers without Firefox installed. Also, even assuming every machine he wants to use has Firefox installed, does this allow him to easily use a password file stored on, say, a thumb drive? I've never tried to use an external password file with Firefox (i.e., one I did not create with Firefox.
I guess he could just keep Firefox portable on a thumb drive, although he'd need a copy for each OS he wants to run it on.
Hashapass is a clever idea, but don't you run into the problem of various sites having different requirements for a valid password?
In my experience some sites want you to have a long passwords, others actually limit the length. Some only allow alphanumeric characters, and others mandate the presence of a non-alphanumeric character. Even worse, a lot of sites don't state clearly at the login prompt what their requirements are (you might need to fail once to see or even find it on another page), so doing an on-the-fly conversion of the password to the right form may still require you to remember which form they accept. Actually, for me this is the hardest part about remembering my passwords for various sites.
Here in Texas we passed tort reform. The actual effect of that is that doctors and health practitioners are moving into the state from other states that don't have tort reform. That's the hard facts, not some study from some group.
First, can you point to hard evidence of that alleged fact? Second, the fact you're claiming is that more medical professionals are moving to the state. The question we're asking is whether the policy change on a national level will reduce national healthcare costs. So, the first question to ask is whether more medical professionals will mean lower healthcare costs. You might think that it would, from the normal rules of supply and demand. However, healthcare doesn't work at all like that sort of idealized market. Some experts on a radio program I recently listened to suggested that more medical care professionals leads to higher healthcare costs* (within certain limits, of course). You don't have to necessarily believe that, but you should appreciate that the economics of this are actually complex and sometimes bizarre, so you need to actually establish factually what the change in healthcare costs was. Finally, even if it did lower the cost on the state level due to this migration, it doesn't follow that it would lower costs on the national level, because people are not free to immigrate to the US in the same way they can between states.
See, that's the thing. The facts alone tell you certain things about a certain case. When you want to talk about what will happen when you do something similar in a different case, when you want to generalize, you have to use theory (sure, educated guesses essentially). There's no getting around it. The only way you'll know what will happen for a fact is after you've already done it.
Having lived under socialized medicine, I can tell you that things will not improve under this plan. I don't have any educated guesses to back that up, just personal experience.
I don't really know what you mean by "socialized medicine" because people tend to throw the term around so carelessly. Are we talking medicare, the VA, a foreign country (and if so, which, because they have widely differing healthcare systems). What I can say that by any objective measure I've seen, pretty much all other developed democratic nations have healthcare of comparable or better quality, and they pay a lot less for it (1/2 to 2/3 of what we do, as a % of GDP). Moreover, people in those countries are on average very satisfied with the care they get. So I have to weigh the personal experience of those hundreds of millions of people against yours.
* I think that the reason for this is as follows: A patient can choose between many doctors who participate in their plan. The patient does not pay the majority of the cost of most procedures and does not negotiate on price; all that happens between the plan and the doctor. So the patient makes a choice based on perceived quality of care. Most people think more care = better care (even when in actuality more care can be harmful), so they will tend to choose doctors who perform more services. Thus, when there's a lot of competition between doctors this expresses itself not as a lowering of costs but as an increase in the number of procedures performed, raising healthcare costs.
According to what I'veread, in Japan you get health insurance through your employer's private plan if you're employed, although if you're not then you sign up for a government plan. So most people there have private insurance. Nonetheless, prices for medical services are set by the government.
What you're talking about is called "defensive medicine", and that's what I was talking about. As I said, with that included the projected savings would be 0.5%. See the link I included. Your experience is not a good basis for drawing conclusions about national healthcare trends. The plural of anecdote is not data.
First, that poverty line INCLUDES ALL PPL LIVING HERE.
Right, that's why I was looking at what proportion of the 39 million might be illegal immigrants.
Second, most of the #s for illegals in the states show 15-30 million, not the low 11 million that you claim.
What's your source for that? I was drawing my number from an NYT article, but it seems consistent with numbers from other sources. It does look like these higher numbers are claimed out there (I actually haven't found anything much higher than 20 million, though), but they seem to be the outliers not the consensus estimate.
When you can not check the legal status of a person, then the law is worthless (and the dems know that). All that is required is to simply require hospitals to call in ICE for every person that does not have insurance or public options, and require a legality check on ppl signing up for public options...
I think maybe you're conflating two different issues. 1) Can illegal immigrants get emergency medical care at the hospital. 2) Can they get federal help on paying for insurance. The current bill does not affect question #1. Illegal immigrants will be able to get emergency care after the bill is passed only to the degree they could before. Also it's estimated that about 1/2 of illegal immigrants have health insurance, and could presumably already pay for their care. So issue #1 is a red herring. One point #2, though, the bill says that illegal immigrants can't get aid for buying health insurance and says that enforcement measures should be setup.
ANY reform on medical costs is worth it. several OB-GYN and and an anesthesiologist that I know (none with any previous issues) are paying over 100K/year for malpractice. That is outrageous.
I'm saying that research says it will not significantly, so it's not relevant to this discussion. It's another red herring.
All this did was offer up some competition to Insurance (not necessarily a bad thing), but will fund the indigent, which is mostly Illegal aliens here.
On what basis are you concluding that? A quick look suggests that a good estimate of the poor (by official poverty line) in the US is 39 million, while the illegal immigrant population may be something around 11 million. That says that at the most about a quarter of the poor are illegal immigrants, and that's assuming that all illegal immigrants are poor (which isn't strictly true, though I don't know how far off it is). In any case, the bill bars illegal immigrants from getting aid in buying health insurance, although it remains to be seen how that would be enforced.
What is really sad is that it had NOTHING TO LOWER COSTS. We are in need of tort reform (how much money is paid out for lawsuits); costs of the docs eduction; costs of the drugs; costs of the hospital; etc.
While the situation with malpractice suits may be unreasonable, it's probably not a major contributor to health care costs. It sounds plausible on the surface that it would be, but apparently the total expenditure on malpractice insurance is less than $7 billion per year, which is totally dwarfed by total healthcare spending (something like $2.5 trillion). The cost of doctors practicing defensive medicine is, of course, harder to pin down, but it sounds like most studies still peg it as small. In any case, the CBO is estimating the savings on healthcare spending from malpractice award caps at 0.5%. I think this gets talked about a lot by politicians because it sounds plausible, there are some legitimate problems with malpractice suits, and, most importantly, people making malpractice claims are a convenient scapegoat since most of us won't ever be one or probably even know one.
In terms of the other costs I agree, though. We pay an absurd amount for drugs and a lot more for medical procedures than most other developed democracies. I'm not certain of all of the reasons for that, but the most likely major reason is that in most of those places the government collectively bargins with providers on behalf of all citizens, setting prices for drugs and medical procedures (even in many countries where insurance is still provided by private companies, like Japan and Germany). You can certainly debate the merits of such a system, but its one indisputable advantage is cheap prices.
...neo-cons forbid negotiations for LOWEST PRICE. This is expected to costs something like 400 BILLION dollars, instead of 50 BILLION over the ten years that it was looked at. This is a nice and easy 350 billion dollars to be save. So, did the dems include that in this bill? Nope. They are leaving us at paying the TOP DOLLARS for this.
I don't know what the will was among the Democrats to change the rules on drug purchasing by the government, but I'm sure that even those who supported it would not have lobbied for inclusion in this bill only because this bill had uncertain prospects in the first place, so adding something else potentially controversial probably would have killed it. It's bad strategy. If they want to make that change, it should come in a different bill.
What about the "investigative" journalism that found military papers from the 1970's about George Bush, that were typed up using Word 2003?
I assume you're referring to the whole Dan Rather thing? I never said all professional journalists do useful or quality work. If you're getting your news from TV (or at least the vast majority of TV) you're simply somewhat misguided.
How about the way all of these journalists will all suddenly come up with an unusual word to describe someone, like gravatas? It's almost like they all receive their stories from one source.
Before we put on our tinfoil hats we might also consider more innocuous explanations (Occam's razor or Hanlon's). One is basically groupthink. Journalists presumably look at other news reporting and may consciously or unconsciously adopt terminology or framing from those accounts. It requires no conspiracy.
What you call "investigative journalism", I'd call propaganda. It's amazing how they can be so one-sided in their hatred, and still claim to be independent. How can you believe anything these people say?
Reporting on potentially unethical or illegal behavior by the government is propaganda? I think you may have that backward. In my experience, people generally think that any organization that reports things they don't want to hear is "biased" while any one that reports things they want to hear is "accurate" and "reliable". If you want to make a credible claim of bias, you really have to bring some sort of evidence to bear.
In the case of warrantless wire tapping all indications are the NY Times had the story in 2004 prior to the election and Bill Keller sat on it until December 2005.
I thought that people at the Times have outright stated that was the case.
Would it have made a differences in the 2004 election, probably not, but you never know. I sure wish it had because it would have saved us another four years of abuse, Constitution shredding and incompetence. It was certainly something the American people had a right to know before they reelected the Bush administration and for whatever reason the Times sat on it until a time when revealing it had little effect. I wager they were afraid of and intimated by the Bush administration in 2004 when Bush was riding high in power and popularity, so they waited until after Katrina and Bush popularity had already started to plummet. If so it was pretty spineless.
I certainly wish they had run with the story before the election, though I'm not sure it would have made any difference. IIRC the news about the "torture memos" surfaced in about August of 2004 (the story was broken by either the Washington Post for the NYT, I'm fairly certain) and people barely seemed to notice. As far as the reasons, they claim it was due to grave warnings by the administration about damage to national security. This seems quite plausible to me. They had to accept the fact that people in the administration knew many things they did not, and there could be some very real danger. I'm not sure they made the right decision, but it does seem like it would have been an extraordinarily hard one. Also, by the end of the summer of '04 Bush's approval ratings were down around 50%, so they weren't especially high.
This is simply not a case for why newspaper journalism shined. It makes a case for why we need whistleblower protection and a reliable avenue for whistleblowers to expose illegal activity in the halls of power. It tends to suggest the NY Times wasn't a very reliable avenue for this.
It suggests that the NYT was a much less than ideal avenue, but again I'm not sure what is the reasonable alternative. While better whistleblower protection is certainly a desirable thing, the idea of relying on a government structure to protect whistleblowers exposing government malfeasance seems fundamentally flawed. One needs some other large, public organization with the legal resources and self-interested motive to bring these things to light. Newspapers serve this purpose, and I don't see a viable replacement at this juncture.
It also does not follow that just because a whistleblower came to them that no investigation was involved. I thought there was quite a lot of investigation to corroborate the claims, which would require a significant network of trusted sources within the government.
The U.S. press was pretty much asleep at the wheel during Iraq, Patriot Act abuses, torture, warrantless spying on Americans on a massive scale, etc.
US newspapers broke stories on the torture memos, secret CIA prisons, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless wiretapping (off the top of my head). Many of these required extensive investigative work. I can certainly imagine that you might wish they'd done even more, but it isn't reasonable to ignore the work they did do.
The NY Times did break the warrantless wiretap story but only after it had been running for years.
So your argument is what? Better never than late? Was anyone else even close to revealing it? Would we have found out from the Drudge Report, or the Huffington Post, or Meghan McCain's twitter feed?
Real long-term journalistic investigations are quite important to a properly functioning society. From what I can see, newspapers are currently the only ones who really fill that role. They may, indeed, do the job imperfectly, but if they go away without something else to take up the slack we will be worse off for it.
If you think there is journalism in a newspaper these days it is because you haven't picked one up lately and actually read it. It's all opinion posing as news, press releases reprinted as gospel, rumors and gossip
What about the investigative journalism that revealed the existence of the so-called "torture memos", or the secret CIA prisons, or the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, or the neglect of injured veterans at the VA? That was reporting all done by print newspapers during recent years that is not just press release or opinion piece or gossip. I often hear a refrain like the one I've quoted above from would-be critics of the "mainstream media", but it simply isn't true. And, as far as I can see, there are few people (if any) in the "new media" doing that sort of very crucial work. I will certainly grant, though, that newspapers have featured more and more opinion, rumors, etc. over time, presumably because it's cheap and people seem to like it.
Thought experiment. Most reading here are tech types. Read a legacy media story about a tech issue and note how many inacuracies you can spot. It isn't just tech, it is your ability to spot errors in that field that is greater. The error rate in every other section is as great or greater.
[citation needed]?
People in the general population have differing levels of familiarity with different subjects. For example, your average American is much more likely to know a significant amount about history than mathematics or, say, astronomy. This non-uniformity will be even more pronounced in specialized group, like people in a particular profession. The bottom line is that there will be certain sorts of topics that journalists are likely to be more familiar with and others they're unlikely to know much about. Absent some compelling evidence, it doesn't make much sense to assume that the rate of errors in one particular topic transfer over to all topics. Given that journalism is usually lumped with the "liberal arts" and journalism degree programs send to stress those sorts of topics, it's probably reasonable to assume that a journalist is less likely to have a good basis for understanding tech than, say, politics and law.
Now go read a couple stories from a major source, say the NYT or CNN. Note how many basic grammar errors you find, assuming you yourself are clueful enough to do this. They SAY the reason to trust the MSM over bloggers in their underwear is they have vetting, fact checking and editors. Jason Blair puts paid to vetting, the test above should remove all doubt as to fact checking and if there are still real editors in the newsroom how do so many basic spelling and grammar errors make it into print?
But this reasoning essentially boils down to the statement that newspapers don't have a perfect record of accuracy and, therefore, they must be totally inaccurate. Clearly that's fallacious reasoning. The question you'd have to answer is how their accuracy and journalistic standards compare to blogs (or whatever alternative you're talking about). Clearly, this would take some work to examine.
If they aren't even bothering to proofread the damned copy are we to believe they are calling back all the sources and checking the quotes and going to authoritative sources to confirm every fact and figure in a story?
Isn't fact checker a distinct function from copy editor at a newspaper? If so, then it's entirely possible that one can be under-resourced and not the other. Besides which, I'd imagine that most spell-checking is relegated to a computer program.
And unlike most bloggers, they don't even bother running a correction unless someone important makes a fuss or threatens legal action.
Again, [citation needed]. I've seen all sorts of radically mistaken stuff online. Sometimes corrections are posted, and sometime not. TV seems to be totally abysmal on this front.
Re:Just to get it out of the way ...
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Glad you got the joke. Apparently the mods didn't.
Re:Does anyone REALLY take Dvorak seriously?
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TWIT is a podcast that features a sort of panel discussion with something like 4 panelists, of whom John Dvorak is one. So presumably the parent listens to hear what the other panelist have to say and this necessitates hearing Dvorak as well.
Re:Just to get it out of the way ...
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I doubt that, but it's quite possible that that cavern is not entirely stable.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
That's also consistent with my experience. In some cases they are never given (or required to get) the necessary training in statistics in the first place and are only taught some sloppy ad hoc rules.
That allows you to upload your own code, but can you load on any other software that another person develops? (That's a serious question, not a rhetorical one.) I think even the programmers among us don't write the lion's share of the programs we use, so it's only equivalent if that $99 buys you the ability to install any non-approved 3rd party software you want, and if those 3rd parties have the ability to distribute said software without lawsuits from Apple. I just don't know enough about the terms of the user and developer agreements with Apple to have any idea whether this is the case (since I don't own any Apple devices).
In fact, right here in the USA vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was seen receiving protection against witchcraft.
Many people in the US had the idea that people, "...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights... That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," to quote the declaration of independence. Under this view, rights are inherent by natural law, not earned. It isn't that people afforded the ability to vote because they deserve it but rather that natural law gives them the right to liberty and the only way a government may (morally) exert power on them is by their consent.
While people do use the phrase, "with rights come responsibilities," it probably makes more sense to say that privileges come with responsibilities. Under the above view, rights are not given by man and, therefore, can't have any conditions imposed by man. Whether you accept that view exactly (and it definitely has problems), I think it's fair to say that generally rights are supposed to be inherent and vital, while privileges are granted by others conditionally, and that's what separates the two. Generally the only grounds for depriving someone of a right is if it would infringe upon the rights of another.
We used to have literacy tests to vote in the US. The consensus view is that they were mostly used to keep minorities from voting, so since then it's not been a very popular idea here among anyone who knows history. The flaw is probably much more general, though; if people in power write the test that determines who can vote, and the vote determines who is in power, then you have created a positive feedback loop. This feedback will tend to make the system unstable and drive it toward some extreme point, at which point either it will say there (to the disadvantage of many in society) or there will be some major social upheaval (such as a civil war, riots, etc.) that will bring the system back into balance.
I think it's important to bear in mind what Winston Churchill said, that, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried." Democracy doesn't necessarily always (or even often) produce the best solutions to problems. It's chief merit is that it is relatively stable. It usually keeps things from getting too bad for any particular group, so it removes the need for the assassinations, coups, civil wars, and so on that are common under other forms of Government. Adding in voting tests would likely undo this main benefit.
NASA is not paying for the development (read this or previous articles on the subject). The deal is more like the NFL working with EA to make a football video game (except probably with more control over the content), NASA contributes their name/marks/PR and the developer foots the bill for development in return for the profits they will reap later.
Obviously what PR budget NASA should have is arguable, but remember that a) they're prohibited from "advertising" by the space act, and b) a lot of what they do is both PR *and* designed to do the useful job of educating the public. That seems to be the aim of this game too, although again you could debate whether it can succeed.
You realize that NASA astrophysicist John Mather won the Nobel prize in Physics in 2006, right? NASA's science divisions do a lot of good, useful (effective) work. They just don't get a lot of attention. Manned space flight is the expensive side show.
In an age of semi-autonomous and remote-controlled robots, manned space flight is an anachronism of questionable utility. But it is dramatic and catches the public's imagination (which is demonstrated on /. regularly), which makes it popular among politicians. The problem is that it's also expensive to do anything vaguely worthwhile with manned space flight (one of the reasons that its utility is questionable), so it usually doesn't have funding to match the set goals (at least since the Apollo program). So, NASA ends up looking ineffective because they're asked to do something which may not be a good idea in the first place and then given a level of funding with which the goal can't be accomplished.
Of course, I'm not saying that NASA as an organization isn't probably messed up in any number of ways, but the point is just that you shouldn't judge it by manned space flight.
It's my understanding that people in congress have considered before the question of expanding open access requirements to other disciplines. Obviously publishers will oppose such a move because it cuts into their bottom line. How far it eats into the bottom line depends on the reasons people subscribe and just how the opening of access works: You can make new papers closed and older papers open, or you can do the reverse. Additionally, you can make papers totally open or you can institute some half-way measure, like something similar to Google Books or Amazon book previews, which are designed with the aim that you can read the content but not easily save a copy of it.
In Physics, the APS (the professional organization for physicists) publishes the Physical Review journals, which are some of the most influential in the field besides Nature and Science. Apparently the APS relies on subscription fees from the journals in part to subsidize many of their other (worthwhile) activities, e.g. scientific conferences. As a result, it's my understanding that they opposed open access requirements (though they might have been willing to accept them in some form). This is especially interesting because the Physical Review journals have relatively friendly policies that allow one to post a pre-print to the ArXiv (which physicists generally do) and host a copy of the paper on your own website, so most of the papers they publish (at least more recently) are already available for free one way or another.
I generally have a very favorable opinion of the APS, but I would very much like to see more openness in scientific journals, at the least for taxpayer funded research. If this means that the APS will have to raise dues and conference fees to more accurately reflect the cost of their activities, I think that's something we'll just have to accept.
So...then you admit he did refer to more than just his laptop. I said it doesn't seem to "solve his worry" about computers without Firefox, and obviously that is his worry (if he mentions it as a desirable property) and your solution doesn't solve it.
A more useful response would have simply stated the reasons why you believe one cannot reasonably do better than this alternative (even in the face of the submitter's stated desire). Hashapass, for example, makes an interesting alternative with a different trade-off of security and flexibility. You could also have answered the simple question about using an external password file in Firefox.
I know, I know, "You must be new here."
Pot, meet kettle. From the summary:
Perhaps next time read the whole summary.
That doesn't seem to solve his worry about using computers without Firefox installed. Also, even assuming every machine he wants to use has Firefox installed, does this allow him to easily use a password file stored on, say, a thumb drive? I've never tried to use an external password file with Firefox (i.e., one I did not create with Firefox.
I guess he could just keep Firefox portable on a thumb drive, although he'd need a copy for each OS he wants to run it on.
Hashapass is a clever idea, but don't you run into the problem of various sites having different requirements for a valid password?
In my experience some sites want you to have a long passwords, others actually limit the length. Some only allow alphanumeric characters, and others mandate the presence of a non-alphanumeric character. Even worse, a lot of sites don't state clearly at the login prompt what their requirements are (you might need to fail once to see or even find it on another page), so doing an on-the-fly conversion of the password to the right form may still require you to remember which form they accept. Actually, for me this is the hardest part about remembering my passwords for various sites.
If you turn on the master password then the password file is encrypted.
Game. Set. Match.
First, can you point to hard evidence of that alleged fact? Second, the fact you're claiming is that more medical professionals are moving to the state. The question we're asking is whether the policy change on a national level will reduce national healthcare costs. So, the first question to ask is whether more medical professionals will mean lower healthcare costs. You might think that it would, from the normal rules of supply and demand. However, healthcare doesn't work at all like that sort of idealized market. Some experts on a radio program I recently listened to suggested that more medical care professionals leads to higher healthcare costs* (within certain limits, of course). You don't have to necessarily believe that, but you should appreciate that the economics of this are actually complex and sometimes bizarre, so you need to actually establish factually what the change in healthcare costs was. Finally, even if it did lower the cost on the state level due to this migration, it doesn't follow that it would lower costs on the national level, because people are not free to immigrate to the US in the same way they can between states.
See, that's the thing. The facts alone tell you certain things about a certain case. When you want to talk about what will happen when you do something similar in a different case, when you want to generalize, you have to use theory (sure, educated guesses essentially). There's no getting around it. The only way you'll know what will happen for a fact is after you've already done it.
I don't really know what you mean by "socialized medicine" because people tend to throw the term around so carelessly. Are we talking medicare, the VA, a foreign country (and if so, which, because they have widely differing healthcare systems). What I can say that by any objective measure I've seen, pretty much all other developed democratic nations have healthcare of comparable or better quality, and they pay a lot less for it (1/2 to 2/3 of what we do, as a % of GDP). Moreover, people in those countries are on average very satisfied with the care they get. So I have to weigh the personal experience of those hundreds of millions of people against yours.
* I think that the reason for this is as follows: A patient can choose between many doctors who participate in their plan. The patient does not pay the majority of the cost of most procedures and does not negotiate on price; all that happens between the plan and the doctor. So the patient makes a choice based on perceived quality of care. Most people think more care = better care (even when in actuality more care can be harmful), so they will tend to choose doctors who perform more services. Thus, when there's a lot of competition between doctors this expresses itself not as a lowering of costs but as an increase in the number of procedures performed, raising healthcare costs.
According to what I've read, in Japan you get health insurance through your employer's private plan if you're employed, although if you're not then you sign up for a government plan. So most people there have private insurance. Nonetheless, prices for medical services are set by the government.
What you're talking about is called "defensive medicine", and that's what I was talking about. As I said, with that included the projected savings would be 0.5%. See the link I included. Your experience is not a good basis for drawing conclusions about national healthcare trends. The plural of anecdote is not data.
Right, that's why I was looking at what proportion of the 39 million might be illegal immigrants.
What's your source for that? I was drawing my number from an NYT article, but it seems consistent with numbers from other sources. It does look like these higher numbers are claimed out there (I actually haven't found anything much higher than 20 million, though), but they seem to be the outliers not the consensus estimate.
I think maybe you're conflating two different issues. 1) Can illegal immigrants get emergency medical care at the hospital. 2) Can they get federal help on paying for insurance. The current bill does not affect question #1. Illegal immigrants will be able to get emergency care after the bill is passed only to the degree they could before. Also it's estimated that about 1/2 of illegal immigrants have health insurance, and could presumably already pay for their care. So issue #1 is a red herring. One point #2, though, the bill says that illegal immigrants can't get aid for buying health insurance and says that enforcement measures should be setup.
I'm saying that research says it will not significantly, so it's not relevant to this discussion. It's another red herring.
On what basis are you concluding that? A quick look suggests that a good estimate of the poor (by official poverty line) in the US is 39 million, while the illegal immigrant population may be something around 11 million. That says that at the most about a quarter of the poor are illegal immigrants, and that's assuming that all illegal immigrants are poor (which isn't strictly true, though I don't know how far off it is). In any case, the bill bars illegal immigrants from getting aid in buying health insurance, although it remains to be seen how that would be enforced.
While the situation with malpractice suits may be unreasonable, it's probably not a major contributor to health care costs. It sounds plausible on the surface that it would be, but apparently the total expenditure on malpractice insurance is less than $7 billion per year, which is totally dwarfed by total healthcare spending (something like $2.5 trillion). The cost of doctors practicing defensive medicine is, of course, harder to pin down, but it sounds like most studies still peg it as small. In any case, the CBO is estimating the savings on healthcare spending from malpractice award caps at 0.5%. I think this gets talked about a lot by politicians because it sounds plausible, there are some legitimate problems with malpractice suits, and, most importantly, people making malpractice claims are a convenient scapegoat since most of us won't ever be one or probably even know one.
In terms of the other costs I agree, though. We pay an absurd amount for drugs and a lot more for medical procedures than most other developed democracies. I'm not certain of all of the reasons for that, but the most likely major reason is that in most of those places the government collectively bargins with providers on behalf of all citizens, setting prices for drugs and medical procedures (even in many countries where insurance is still provided by private companies, like Japan and Germany). You can certainly debate the merits of such a system, but its one indisputable advantage is cheap prices.
I don't know what the will was among the Democrats to change the rules on drug purchasing by the government, but I'm sure that even those who supported it would not have lobbied for inclusion in this bill only because this bill had uncertain prospects in the first place, so adding something else potentially controversial probably would have killed it. It's bad strategy. If they want to make that change, it should come in a different bill.
I assume you're referring to the whole Dan Rather thing? I never said all professional journalists do useful or quality work. If you're getting your news from TV (or at least the vast majority of TV) you're simply somewhat misguided.
Before we put on our tinfoil hats we might also consider more innocuous explanations (Occam's razor or Hanlon's). One is basically groupthink. Journalists presumably look at other news reporting and may consciously or unconsciously adopt terminology or framing from those accounts. It requires no conspiracy.
Reporting on potentially unethical or illegal behavior by the government is propaganda? I think you may have that backward. In my experience, people generally think that any organization that reports things they don't want to hear is "biased" while any one that reports things they want to hear is "accurate" and "reliable". If you want to make a credible claim of bias, you really have to bring some sort of evidence to bear.
I thought that people at the Times have outright stated that was the case.
I certainly wish they had run with the story before the election, though I'm not sure it would have made any difference. IIRC the news about the "torture memos" surfaced in about August of 2004 (the story was broken by either the Washington Post for the NYT, I'm fairly certain) and people barely seemed to notice. As far as the reasons, they claim it was due to grave warnings by the administration about damage to national security. This seems quite plausible to me. They had to accept the fact that people in the administration knew many things they did not, and there could be some very real danger. I'm not sure they made the right decision, but it does seem like it would have been an extraordinarily hard one. Also, by the end of the summer of '04 Bush's approval ratings were down around 50%, so they weren't especially high.
It suggests that the NYT was a much less than ideal avenue, but again I'm not sure what is the reasonable alternative. While better whistleblower protection is certainly a desirable thing, the idea of relying on a government structure to protect whistleblowers exposing government malfeasance seems fundamentally flawed. One needs some other large, public organization with the legal resources and self-interested motive to bring these things to light. Newspapers serve this purpose, and I don't see a viable replacement at this juncture.
It also does not follow that just because a whistleblower came to them that no investigation was involved. I thought there was quite a lot of investigation to corroborate the claims, which would require a significant network of trusted sources within the government.
US newspapers broke stories on the torture memos, secret CIA prisons, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless wiretapping (off the top of my head). Many of these required extensive investigative work. I can certainly imagine that you might wish they'd done even more, but it isn't reasonable to ignore the work they did do.
So your argument is what? Better never than late? Was anyone else even close to revealing it? Would we have found out from the Drudge Report, or the Huffington Post, or Meghan McCain's twitter feed?
Real long-term journalistic investigations are quite important to a properly functioning society. From what I can see, newspapers are currently the only ones who really fill that role. They may, indeed, do the job imperfectly, but if they go away without something else to take up the slack we will be worse off for it.
What about the investigative journalism that revealed the existence of the so-called "torture memos", or the secret CIA prisons, or the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, or the neglect of injured veterans at the VA? That was reporting all done by print newspapers during recent years that is not just press release or opinion piece or gossip. I often hear a refrain like the one I've quoted above from would-be critics of the "mainstream media", but it simply isn't true. And, as far as I can see, there are few people (if any) in the "new media" doing that sort of very crucial work. I will certainly grant, though, that newspapers have featured more and more opinion, rumors, etc. over time, presumably because it's cheap and people seem to like it.
[citation needed]?
People in the general population have differing levels of familiarity with different subjects. For example, your average American is much more likely to know a significant amount about history than mathematics or, say, astronomy. This non-uniformity will be even more pronounced in specialized group, like people in a particular profession. The bottom line is that there will be certain sorts of topics that journalists are likely to be more familiar with and others they're unlikely to know much about. Absent some compelling evidence, it doesn't make much sense to assume that the rate of errors in one particular topic transfer over to all topics. Given that journalism is usually lumped with the "liberal arts" and journalism degree programs send to stress those sorts of topics, it's probably reasonable to assume that a journalist is less likely to have a good basis for understanding tech than, say, politics and law.
But this reasoning essentially boils down to the statement that newspapers don't have a perfect record of accuracy and, therefore, they must be totally inaccurate. Clearly that's fallacious reasoning. The question you'd have to answer is how their accuracy and journalistic standards compare to blogs (or whatever alternative you're talking about). Clearly, this would take some work to examine.
Isn't fact checker a distinct function from copy editor at a newspaper? If so, then it's entirely possible that one can be under-resourced and not the other. Besides which, I'd imagine that most spell-checking is relegated to a computer program.
Again, [citation needed]. I've seen all sorts of radically mistaken stuff online. Sometimes corrections are posted, and sometime not. TV seems to be totally abysmal on this front.
Good catch! :-)
Glad you got the joke. Apparently the mods didn't.
TWIT is a podcast that features a sort of panel discussion with something like 4 panelists, of whom John Dvorak is one. So presumably the parent listens to hear what the other panelist have to say and this necessitates hearing Dvorak as well.
I doubt that, but it's quite possible that that cavern is not entirely stable. ;-)