Then, down near the bottom somewhere, they finally explain that no, we're not talking about real teleportation
While I agree with the thrust of your complaint and share your hatred of journalists, I'm at least happy to see that both the recent/. stories on this have prominently featured the word "INFORMATION" as the 'thing' teleported. It still isn't quite correct, as 'information' in the ordinary sense of the term carries more ontological weight than 'quantum state' but it is a huge improvement over the usual gibberish about 'teleporting atoms'.
Obama isn't a saint, and I haven't said he is. But is Obama better than Bush by any number of substantive measures, just a week or two into his first administration? You bet he is.
I vote this a waste of my time on the part of whoever submitted it.
But this is/., where neither the editors nor most of the readers know any science.
Obviously the article is stupid. By their reckoning because people are often wrong about what will happen when they cross the street no one can argue that the world won't be destroyed the next time I cross the street despite the fact that I cross the street every day without the world ending.
No one who isn't completely brain dead would describe this as "truly frightening," but I guess there are a lot of brain dead people around, including all the/. editors.
The point of the article, rather, is to do exactly what it has done, which is generate page-views for the site. I'm told there's advertising here now, although as I use Firefox with NoScript I don't see any of it.
Hope is the tool of con men and tyrants - remember that.
It's also the tool of leaders and healers. Like any tool, it can be used for many purposes, some good, some not so good.
My school experience was not entirely unlike yours. It takes a long time to overcome that kind of damage, but it can be overcome. Saying that makes me neither a con-man nor a tyrant.
Cynicism, which I am much given to myself, can be as much a tool of tyranny as hope. "You can't fight City Hall" is a classic of cynical government propaganda.
As with many things, finding the mean between the two extremes is the trick to being happy.
From the moment they entered primary school 15 years ago, they have been under the boot of a "one-strike" "zero-tolerance" public school system that rewards blind obedience and conformity and punishes individuality and critical though
This is the kind of description that reminds me of how infinitely glad I am I moved back to Canada fifteen years ago, just before my first child was born. My kids have grown up without ever having walked through a metal detector except at the airport, and although they have had the usual mix of good, bad and indifferent teachers they have never been subject to this kind of knee-jerk authoritarian jerk policy.
It was my impression that this kind of thing was common in American public schools, at least in the part of California where I lived, when I left in the early '90's, and it doesn't sound like things have gotten any better in the meantime.
It's also false in the case at hand. The boat doesn't have a screw propeller but it does have an engine, which is electro-magnetic and acts on surface tension. This is like saying an electric car doesn't have an engine. Catchy, misleading and perfect for a/. headline.
And when those people control the media, your non-violent message will not be heard.
This just means non-violent resistance movements need to be marketing movements.
It is implausible that in the modern world we are less able to get our message out than Gandhi was in a world where establishment-friendly newspapers were the place most people got their news, and he was half a world away from the centres of power.
If people in favour of non-violent resistance as the preferred means of human conflict resolution are so incompetent as to not be able to get our message heard then maybe we are too stupid to win, but I'm thinking that the 'New Non-Violence' is just starting to build some momentum. It took Gandhi and his supporters decades to take back India, but in the end it WORKED.
The Irish having been going after the English for very nearly as long, and the violence does not look to be ending any time soon now.
This is is non-violence, but it is not non-violent resistance, because the villagers are doing nothing to resist. They are offering no resistance, just running away.
People often confuse non-violence with non-violent resistance, but the two are not the same at all. Non-violent resistance is pro-active, not reactive, and can be quite confrontational. Look at what Gandhi's movement did in India, and how they did it. It was not at all about running away, and Gandhi himself disliked the word "pacifism" as he felt it failed to capture the fundamentals of his approach, which were active.
I can't offer advice to the villagers because I don't know enough about their situation, which is one of the other problems with non-violent resistance: violence is the VisualBasic of human interaction. Any idiot can use it to produce some kind of effect with negligible training or intelligence. Non-violent resistance is the the C++ of human interaction: it requires care and planning if it is going to compile, much less run and be maintainable.
Of course, there are plenty of situations where the secrets would be justified. e.g. If you know you're a cylon, do you really want to expose that amongst a ship full of cylon-haters?
Sorry, when did cowardice become "justification" for anything? Did I miss another memo? Or by "justified" do you mean something other than "morally defensible"?
Banding together to visit consequences on those agressors seems to work but that just reverses the teacher/student roles.
Right, that's why the British still rule India but the Palestinians have successfully created a homeland for themselves and the Israelis are no longer threatened by Palestinian violence, because the "lesson" of violence works so incredibly well. Unless you mean "seems like a good idea to monkey hind-brains but actually fails miserably in practise", which is one way of reading "seems to work."
The problem with non-violence is not that it doesn't work, it's that it requires more courage than most people have to execute it. Non-violent resistance is enormously effective, and anyone who chooses violence over it as an avenue for political conflict resolution is either a coward or has no interest in actually resolving the conflict. In most real cases it is probably a bit of both.
There may be a few instances where violent attack is more effective than non-violent resistance. WWII is arguably one of them. In most other cases, and in virtually all the cases facing the modern world, non-violent resistance is clearly the superior approach.
It's a pity that hardly anyone has the guts to employ it.
Those with snide remarks should be aware that (A) this is legitimately needed by military and police to keep your life safe and comfortable, and (B) long-range target shooting is a legitimate and popular sport.
The snide remarks seem to me to be more directed at the juveniles who want to make light of killing other human beings. Killing takes something away from you, and the little losers making the jokes about this device are so far removed from that reality that they can't even see the importance of the harm to the victim, much less the killer.
That said, as others have pointed out it is hardly clear that the effectiveness of long-range snipers in the military is in any way related to the health and comfort of the civilian population. A large standing army of the kind the US currently has is historically a danger to the health and comfort of the civilian population. Read a little history and you'll learn that.
the man being selected for the DOE position is a scientist, not a politician.
Err... no. You don't get to be the head of a major national lab like LBL without being a politician. You certainly don't win a Nobel Prize without being a politician (just ask John Bell... oh wait, he's dead.)
I grant you that Chu is no dummy, and has clearly done good things as a scientist, because despite the political aspects you don't get a Nobel Prize unless you do that too.
But it is foolish and simple-minded to believe that the bulk of the work that produced this "breakthrough" was done by Chu, rather than by his post-docs, students and collaborators. It is the nature of the modern scientific process that the political leaders within any scientific team are given the bulk of the credit while frequently their actual contribution to the work is confined to finding funding (which is a full-time and arduous job, but is not what most people think of as science).
A nailgun is much more complex than a hammer, but you can't put 50 nails a minute into a roof with a hammer.
So it would be silly to compare a nailgun and hammer, because they are doing different jobs.
My point is that the simplest and most robust tool that is capable of doing a given job is always the best one. If you specify the job incorrectly you'll wind up with the wrong tool.
Often engineering choices appear to be complex because the end-user goal is poorly specified or understood. At other times the end-user goal is either inherently complex or different groups of users have different goals. But in the cases where the end-user goal can be clearly specified, the simplest, most robust tool that will meet that specification is always superior from the point of view of user experience.
I particularly like the hammer/nail-gun comparison because it is an example I have frequently used to explain to PHBs how poor specifications can lead to inappropriate tool choices. Nail guns actually LACK most of the capabilities of a hammer (ever try to bludgeon anyone to death with a nail-gun?) whereas PHBs tend to think of nail guns as "superior" to hammers. Which they are, if you are a roofer, but no everyone is a roofer.
Of course, enough Americans are liars to have basically destroyed your economy with dishonest lending practises and fraudulent commodification of risk, so it hardly matters that you try to maintain this pretence.
I've studied mysticism, spirituality, physics, and neuroscience for ten years, and the holographic model fits perfectly with what people experience during waking life, in dreams, at near-death, and during other mystical experiences.
So it's almost certainly completely wrong, eh?
The one thing we have learned about physics in the past 2000 years is that it NEVER accords very directly with any common perceptions of the universe, which are the product of highly evolved heuristics rather than mathematically precise theorems.
The key difference between Newton's physics and Aristotle's is that Newton's physics is almost completely at odds with 'everyday experience'. Ignorant people, to this day, are apt to put their discussion of physics in Aristotelian terms, as those are the appropriate terms of description for our experience. They are, however, almost completely useless for describing or understanding the underlying ontology.
The great error of the all the failed mystics in the world is to confuse mentality with metaphysics, and think that their mental processes are in some way able to provide a key to the fundamental ontological mystery. But the history of science shows again and again that our mental processes are completely useless or even counter-productive when it comes to understanding the nature of non-mental reality. Failed mystics, who want so badly to claim that they have exclusive knowledge of the solution to the mystery (which makes it no mystery at all) continually ignore that fact, and gullible acolytes continually fail to call them on it.
Real mystics understand that there is no solution, and are content to wonder at the mystery while chipping away at the problems that do have solutions.
The problem, of course, is that who identifies these "foreign enemy terrorists" as such?
How do you know that I, for example, am not a foreign enemy terrorist? Who gets to make that ruling? The same people who want to do the spying?
But if all they require is a declaration, then ANYONE can be declared a "foreign enemy terrorist," including natural-born Americans who have been summarily stripped of their citizenship because they have been declared "foreign enemy terrorists". After all, who would stand up for a "foreign enemy terrorist" who is pretending to be an American citizen?
Bellicose cowards are very quick to declare themselves as having perfect knowledge of who the law applies to, and by implication as having perfect knowledge of which individuals fall into which category. Millennia of history show that when bellicose cowards are put in charge they always declare anyone who disagrees with them about anything a "foreign enemy terrorist" and do everything they can to put them outside the rule of law.
This is happening again, now, in the United States.
And what, you think 15 year olds can't go to jail?
Omar Khadr is legally a child soldier under UN treaties that the United States pretends to be a signatory to. As such, the American detainment of him is in violation of international law.
The United States was once a bastion of the Rule of Law. Today it is a bastion of lawlessness and evil.
Re:Large uptick in Qt usage?
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I've used most of those, although NEXTStep rather than GNUStep. I used Qt very heavily in the late 90's and early 2000's, but moved to wxWidgets a few years ago, in part due to Qt's licensing costs, and now never plan to go back.
I've found wx easy to use, well-documented, well-supported across platforms and languages (using wxPython heavily at the moment as well as C++) and generally lighter weight than Qt.
The things wx "lacks" are things that I don't need and don't want anyway, like a nice GUI builder--although arguably BOAConstructor fits the bill for wxPython, and I guess maybe DialogBlocks for C++. I use code generators for all my UI coding, which gives me far more flexible and robust layouts much more rapidly than a GUI builder can.
who would you rather bring to meet the client: the arrogant jackass who's got a lot of technical experience, or the personable guy who is willing to learn anything he doesn't know and happy to admit that he doesn't know everything.
I'd like someone who doesn't think that presenting false alternatives constitutes an argument.
People buy new operating systems because they increase their efficiency
No. People buy new computers that have new operating systems on them because they don't have any choice when they buy a new computer. That's the way Microsoft sells software: to distributors, not to end-users.
How many copies of Vista do you think would have sold if users had been told, "Well, you can have an XP system that is exactly like what you've been used to running problem free for the past few years, or you can have Vista, which won't work with some of your hardware and be slow and unresponsive unless you pay more for the machine it's on"?
My guess is: not very many. XP is a pretty good system. And by the way, XP had an NT kernel, so no, it was nothing like Win98 SP3.
Engineers have always looked to nature for design inspiration. It is an approach that has some famous failures, including a lot of early flight research that was erroneously based on bird's wings that pointed people in directions that were simply wrong for the technology of the day. It has also had some notable successes, most recently with those "sharkskin" swimsuits.
But the thing that is certain is that every time the routine use of natural inspiration is pointed out to anyone who is completely ignorant of all good engineering practise for the past few centuries, they will boldly announce that it is "new" and "surprising" that engineers would do any such a thing. Unfortunately this leads to journalism that misses everything interesting.
The research linked in the story may be interesting because of some of the details of the work, but the simple fact that they are using nature as an inspiration for engineering design, which is what the story focuses on, is neither new nor interesting.
And what happens to those who cannot afford $10,000. Do they deserve to die because they were too stupid or too poor to save up $10,000?
This is exactly the kind of insurance-centric myopia I was trying to point out.
I was giving "a reasonable model of health insurance" in a post that said the insurance model was a lousy fit for health care. I was saying the insurance model is the WRONG ONE.
So rather than asking smug rhetorical questions it would be more productive to suggest a better model for health care provision than the insurance model, which is pretty clearly broken, in part for exactly the reasons you point out.
I would argue that a pooled-cost model rather than a pooled-risk model is the appropriate one, which carries with it the implication of some kind of triage within the system of the kind that over-taxed emergency rooms and long waiting lists provide in Canada. Acknowledging that we are dealing with a pooled-cost system rather than a pooled-risk system might allow us to design a better means of doing this.
The coefficient of variation in health care payouts is only 10 or so, as opposed to insurance models where it is easily over 100. If I have $1 million term life insurance and am paying $1000 per year for it and there are 1000 people who have the same plan with the same insurance company, and on average just one of us dies per year, the coefficient of variation is going to be nearly 1000 (999.49), as the mean payout is $1000 but the standard deviation is basically $1 million.
Insurance schemes work where the coefficient of variation is large. This is not the case for health care. Ergo, insurance schemes do not work for health care. If one wanted to make an insurance scheme for health care, it would have to have a high minimum payout per hospital visit to create a high coefficient of variation, which would introduce the rhetorical issues you raise.
Now that we have that cleared away perhaps you could present an actual argument rather than asking smarmy questions and pointing out the trivially obvious, because doing those things does exactly nothing toward determining the best way of paying for universal health care services.
Slashdot Mirror
Then, down near the bottom somewhere, they finally explain that no, we're not talking about real teleportation
While I agree with the thrust of your complaint and share your hatred of journalists, I'm at least happy to see that both the recent /. stories on this have prominently featured the word "INFORMATION" as the 'thing' teleported. It still isn't quite correct, as 'information' in the ordinary sense of the term carries more ontological weight than 'quantum state' but it is a huge improvement over the usual gibberish about 'teleporting atoms'.
The Obama administration is continuing to advance the same legal arguments the Bush administration used.
Empiricism puts the lie to your lies: "In a broad swipe at the Bush administration's lawyers, Obama nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any lawyer in the executive branch after September 11, 2001," the Post added."
Obama isn't a saint, and I haven't said he is. But is Obama better than Bush by any number of substantive measures, just a week or two into his first administration? You bet he is.
I vote this a waste of my time on the part of whoever submitted it.
But this is /., where neither the editors nor most of the readers know any science.
Obviously the article is stupid. By their reckoning because people are often wrong about what will happen when they cross the street no one can argue that the world won't be destroyed the next time I cross the street despite the fact that I cross the street every day without the world ending.
No one who isn't completely brain dead would describe this as "truly frightening," but I guess there are a lot of brain dead people around, including all the /. editors.
The point of the article, rather, is to do exactly what it has done, which is generate page-views for the site. I'm told there's advertising here now, although as I use Firefox with NoScript I don't see any of it.
Hope is the tool of con men and tyrants - remember that.
It's also the tool of leaders and healers. Like any tool, it can be used for many purposes, some good, some not so good.
My school experience was not entirely unlike yours. It takes a long time to overcome that kind of damage, but it can be overcome. Saying that makes me neither a con-man nor a tyrant.
Cynicism, which I am much given to myself, can be as much a tool of tyranny as hope. "You can't fight City Hall" is a classic of cynical government propaganda.
As with many things, finding the mean between the two extremes is the trick to being happy.
From the moment they entered primary school 15 years ago, they have been under the boot of a "one-strike" "zero-tolerance" public school system that rewards blind obedience and conformity and punishes individuality and critical though
This is the kind of description that reminds me of how infinitely glad I am I moved back to Canada fifteen years ago, just before my first child was born. My kids have grown up without ever having walked through a metal detector except at the airport, and although they have had the usual mix of good, bad and indifferent teachers they have never been subject to this kind of knee-jerk authoritarian jerk policy.
It was my impression that this kind of thing was common in American public schools, at least in the part of California where I lived, when I left in the early '90's, and it doesn't sound like things have gotten any better in the meantime.
commonly known as 'drifting'
It's also false in the case at hand. The boat doesn't have a screw propeller but it does have an engine, which is electro-magnetic and acts on surface tension. This is like saying an electric car doesn't have an engine. Catchy, misleading and perfect for a /. headline.
And when those people control the media, your non-violent message will not be heard.
This just means non-violent resistance movements need to be marketing movements.
It is implausible that in the modern world we are less able to get our message out than Gandhi was in a world where establishment-friendly newspapers were the place most people got their news, and he was half a world away from the centres of power.
If people in favour of non-violent resistance as the preferred means of human conflict resolution are so incompetent as to not be able to get our message heard then maybe we are too stupid to win, but I'm thinking that the 'New Non-Violence' is just starting to build some momentum. It took Gandhi and his supporters decades to take back India, but in the end it WORKED.
The Irish having been going after the English for very nearly as long, and the violence does not look to be ending any time soon now.
When their enemies come the villagers flee...
This is is non-violence, but it is not non-violent resistance, because the villagers are doing nothing to resist. They are offering no resistance, just running away.
People often confuse non-violence with non-violent resistance, but the two are not the same at all. Non-violent resistance is pro-active, not reactive, and can be quite confrontational. Look at what Gandhi's movement did in India, and how they did it. It was not at all about running away, and Gandhi himself disliked the word "pacifism" as he felt it failed to capture the fundamentals of his approach, which were active.
I can't offer advice to the villagers because I don't know enough about their situation, which is one of the other problems with non-violent resistance: violence is the VisualBasic of human interaction. Any idiot can use it to produce some kind of effect with negligible training or intelligence. Non-violent resistance is the the C++ of human interaction: it requires care and planning if it is going to compile, much less run and be maintainable.
Of course, there are plenty of situations where the secrets would be justified. e.g. If you know you're a cylon, do you really want to expose that amongst a ship full of cylon-haters?
Sorry, when did cowardice become "justification" for anything? Did I miss another memo? Or by "justified" do you mean something other than "morally defensible"?
Banding together to visit consequences on those agressors seems to work but that just reverses the teacher/student roles.
Right, that's why the British still rule India but the Palestinians have successfully created a homeland for themselves and the Israelis are no longer threatened by Palestinian violence, because the "lesson" of violence works so incredibly well. Unless you mean "seems like a good idea to monkey hind-brains but actually fails miserably in practise", which is one way of reading "seems to work."
The problem with non-violence is not that it doesn't work, it's that it requires more courage than most people have to execute it. Non-violent resistance is enormously effective, and anyone who chooses violence over it as an avenue for political conflict resolution is either a coward or has no interest in actually resolving the conflict. In most real cases it is probably a bit of both.
There may be a few instances where violent attack is more effective than non-violent resistance. WWII is arguably one of them. In most other cases, and in virtually all the cases facing the modern world, non-violent resistance is clearly the superior approach.
It's a pity that hardly anyone has the guts to employ it.
Those with snide remarks should be aware that (A) this is legitimately needed by military and police to keep your life safe and comfortable, and (B) long-range target shooting is a legitimate and popular sport.
The snide remarks seem to me to be more directed at the juveniles who want to make light of killing other human beings. Killing takes something away from you, and the little losers making the jokes about this device are so far removed from that reality that they can't even see the importance of the harm to the victim, much less the killer.
That said, as others have pointed out it is hardly clear that the effectiveness of long-range snipers in the military is in any way related to the health and comfort of the civilian population. A large standing army of the kind the US currently has is historically a danger to the health and comfort of the civilian population. Read a little history and you'll learn that.
the man being selected for the DOE position is a scientist, not a politician.
Err... no. You don't get to be the head of a major national lab like LBL without being a politician. You certainly don't win a Nobel Prize without being a politician (just ask John Bell... oh wait, he's dead.)
I grant you that Chu is no dummy, and has clearly done good things as a scientist, because despite the political aspects you don't get a Nobel Prize unless you do that too.
But it is foolish and simple-minded to believe that the bulk of the work that produced this "breakthrough" was done by Chu, rather than by his post-docs, students and collaborators. It is the nature of the modern scientific process that the political leaders within any scientific team are given the bulk of the credit while frequently their actual contribution to the work is confined to finding funding (which is a full-time and arduous job, but is not what most people think of as science).
A nailgun is much more complex than a hammer, but you can't put 50 nails a minute into a roof with a hammer.
So it would be silly to compare a nailgun and hammer, because they are doing different jobs.
My point is that the simplest and most robust tool that is capable of doing a given job is always the best one. If you specify the job incorrectly you'll wind up with the wrong tool.
Often engineering choices appear to be complex because the end-user goal is poorly specified or understood. At other times the end-user goal is either inherently complex or different groups of users have different goals. But in the cases where the end-user goal can be clearly specified, the simplest, most robust tool that will meet that specification is always superior from the point of view of user experience.
I particularly like the hammer/nail-gun comparison because it is an example I have frequently used to explain to PHBs how poor specifications can lead to inappropriate tool choices. Nail guns actually LACK most of the capabilities of a hammer (ever try to bludgeon anyone to death with a nail-gun?) whereas PHBs tend to think of nail guns as "superior" to hammers. Which they are, if you are a roofer, but no everyone is a roofer.
...the article didn't say who did the work.
Just the politician whose name is attached to it.
While the law you cite is correct, it is not the whole of the law. The Optional Protocol applies in this case, and the United States pretends to be a signatory.
Of course, enough Americans are liars to have basically destroyed your economy with dishonest lending practises and fraudulent commodification of risk, so it hardly matters that you try to maintain this pretence.
Sometimes, a simpler, robust design is vastly superior to a complex, brilliant piece of engineering.
Sometimes?
I've studied mysticism, spirituality, physics, and neuroscience for ten years, and the holographic model fits perfectly with what people experience during waking life, in dreams, at near-death, and during other mystical experiences.
So it's almost certainly completely wrong, eh?
The one thing we have learned about physics in the past 2000 years is that it NEVER accords very directly with any common perceptions of the universe, which are the product of highly evolved heuristics rather than mathematically precise theorems.
The key difference between Newton's physics and Aristotle's is that Newton's physics is almost completely at odds with 'everyday experience'. Ignorant people, to this day, are apt to put their discussion of physics in Aristotelian terms, as those are the appropriate terms of description for our experience. They are, however, almost completely useless for describing or understanding the underlying ontology.
The great error of the all the failed mystics in the world is to confuse mentality with metaphysics, and think that their mental processes are in some way able to provide a key to the fundamental ontological mystery. But the history of science shows again and again that our mental processes are completely useless or even counter-productive when it comes to understanding the nature of non-mental reality. Failed mystics, who want so badly to claim that they have exclusive knowledge of the solution to the mystery (which makes it no mystery at all) continually ignore that fact, and gullible acolytes continually fail to call them on it.
Real mystics understand that there is no solution, and are content to wonder at the mystery while chipping away at the problems that do have solutions.
Foreign enemy terrorists are not.
The problem, of course, is that who identifies these "foreign enemy terrorists" as such?
How do you know that I, for example, am not a foreign enemy terrorist? Who gets to make that ruling? The same people who want to do the spying?
But if all they require is a declaration, then ANYONE can be declared a "foreign enemy terrorist," including natural-born Americans who have been summarily stripped of their citizenship because they have been declared "foreign enemy terrorists". After all, who would stand up for a "foreign enemy terrorist" who is pretending to be an American citizen?
Bellicose cowards are very quick to declare themselves as having perfect knowledge of who the law applies to, and by implication as having perfect knowledge of which individuals fall into which category. Millennia of history show that when bellicose cowards are put in charge they always declare anyone who disagrees with them about anything a "foreign enemy terrorist" and do everything they can to put them outside the rule of law.
This is happening again, now, in the United States.
And what, you think 15 year olds can't go to jail?
Omar Khadr is legally a child soldier under UN treaties that the United States pretends to be a signatory to. As such, the American detainment of him is in violation of international law.
The United States was once a bastion of the Rule of Law. Today it is a bastion of lawlessness and evil.
GTK, wxWidgets, XForms, V, Motif, MFC, Borland VCL, Visual Basic, Swing, AWT, GNUStep and Qt,
I've used most of those, although NEXTStep rather than GNUStep. I used Qt very heavily in the late 90's and early 2000's, but moved to wxWidgets a few years ago, in part due to Qt's licensing costs, and now never plan to go back.
I've found wx easy to use, well-documented, well-supported across platforms and languages (using wxPython heavily at the moment as well as C++) and generally lighter weight than Qt.
The things wx "lacks" are things that I don't need and don't want anyway, like a nice GUI builder--although arguably BOAConstructor fits the bill for wxPython, and I guess maybe DialogBlocks for C++. I use code generators for all my UI coding, which gives me far more flexible and robust layouts much more rapidly than a GUI builder can.
who would you rather bring to meet the client: the arrogant jackass who's got a lot of technical experience, or the personable guy who is willing to learn anything he doesn't know and happy to admit that he doesn't know everything.
I'd like someone who doesn't think that presenting false alternatives constitutes an argument.
He called an hour late again.
Remember: you're interviewing your prospective employer, too. This guy clearly failed YOUR test.
People buy new operating systems because they increase their efficiency
No. People buy new computers that have new operating systems on them because they don't have any choice when they buy a new computer. That's the way Microsoft sells software: to distributors, not to end-users.
How many copies of Vista do you think would have sold if users had been told, "Well, you can have an XP system that is exactly like what you've been used to running problem free for the past few years, or you can have Vista, which won't work with some of your hardware and be slow and unresponsive unless you pay more for the machine it's on"?
My guess is: not very many. XP is a pretty good system. And by the way, XP had an NT kernel, so no, it was nothing like Win98 SP3.
Engineers have always looked to nature for design inspiration. It is an approach that has some famous failures, including a lot of early flight research that was erroneously based on bird's wings that pointed people in directions that were simply wrong for the technology of the day. It has also had some notable successes, most recently with those "sharkskin" swimsuits.
But the thing that is certain is that every time the routine use of natural inspiration is pointed out to anyone who is completely ignorant of all good engineering practise for the past few centuries, they will boldly announce that it is "new" and "surprising" that engineers would do any such a thing. Unfortunately this leads to journalism that misses everything interesting.
The research linked in the story may be interesting because of some of the details of the work, but the simple fact that they are using nature as an inspiration for engineering design, which is what the story focuses on, is neither new nor interesting.
And what happens to those who cannot afford $10,000. Do they deserve to die because they were too stupid or too poor to save up $10,000?
This is exactly the kind of insurance-centric myopia I was trying to point out.
I was giving "a reasonable model of health insurance" in a post that said the insurance model was a lousy fit for health care. I was saying the insurance model is the WRONG ONE.
So rather than asking smug rhetorical questions it would be more productive to suggest a better model for health care provision than the insurance model, which is pretty clearly broken, in part for exactly the reasons you point out.
I would argue that a pooled-cost model rather than a pooled-risk model is the appropriate one, which carries with it the implication of some kind of triage within the system of the kind that over-taxed emergency rooms and long waiting lists provide in Canada. Acknowledging that we are dealing with a pooled-cost system rather than a pooled-risk system might allow us to design a better means of doing this.
The coefficient of variation in health care payouts is only 10 or so, as opposed to insurance models where it is easily over 100. If I have $1 million term life insurance and am paying $1000 per year for it and there are 1000 people who have the same plan with the same insurance company, and on average just one of us dies per year, the coefficient of variation is going to be nearly 1000 (999.49), as the mean payout is $1000 but the standard deviation is basically $1 million.
Insurance schemes work where the coefficient of variation is large. This is not the case for health care. Ergo, insurance schemes do not work for health care. If one wanted to make an insurance scheme for health care, it would have to have a high minimum payout per hospital visit to create a high coefficient of variation, which would introduce the rhetorical issues you raise.
Now that we have that cleared away perhaps you could present an actual argument rather than asking smarmy questions and pointing out the trivially obvious, because doing those things does exactly nothing toward determining the best way of paying for universal health care services.