Aw, unlucky you, you should really come to the US! Here, we may not have as many physicians (about 1/3 fewer) per capita as you have in Sweden, but we compensate for this through many innovative techniques: (1) The uninsured and the underinsured can’t afford to clog our healthcare system, which frees precious resources for the better endowed. (2) The shorter life expectancy (about 3 years less than Sweden) ensures that those pesky always-ill seniors won’t waste our trained personnel’s time. (3) The higher infant mortality rate (double that of Sweden) ensures that the weaklings (who would be a drain on the system) are culled early, further optimising efficiency. (4) High throughput: your appointment with a physician will typically result in you not seeing an actual physician (merely a nurse, or perhaps a physician assistant, if you’re lucky). If you’re extremely lucky, the physician may stop by for a minute or two on his way to the bathroom. However, do not fear, you will have plenty of quality time to go through the financial paperwork with our abundant financial office staff. (5) In spite of this, you may still experience some abnormally long waiting list, due to your insistence on using one of the select few providers that your private health insurance provider requires you to use to remain eligible for partial reimbursement of costs. But, no worries! Here, there is freedom of choice and you are always welcome to choose any other healthcare provider and paying out of your own pocket (and it may be as inexpensive as just about twice what one would pay in Sweden, if one had to pay out of pocket in Sweden!).
You should ask your favourite editor at Breitbart or Russia Today to start a Tech news section.
And please stay there. Your crocodile tears over how [insert name of news site here] has become so utterly useless and lame and how, oh it’s so unfortunate, but everybody should stop reading it unless it ceases and desists from publishing anything critical of [insert name of party or politician] and be so unfairly biased against [insert name of loony conspiracy theory here]... are not welcome in discussion about news topics. Host your own blog and invite your fellow trolls to compete for the most disruptive comment over there.
Or write to the editors of the site so they can have a good laugh, instead of bothering its readers.
Hum, for a business who’s presumed to have been running successfully on Jobs’ coattails since 2014, they’ve been keeping a remarkably low profile. Searching for clothing, jeans or Barbato (or other combinations) returns nothing about them if the search is restricted to pages published before this month. Since you appear to know about them, could you point us to their past financial statements (annual gross income, sales volume, etc.)?
But, you’re right on one point: they’ve certainly managed to get a lot of free publicity. I wouldn’t say “extra” publicity, given that they seem to have been unknown until now. And though the saying goes that there is no such thing as bad publicity, I’m not entirely sure that people will be so unembarrassed wearing a brand name that was rather universally derided for ripping off Jobs’ name and Apple’s logo. Unless they aim for the ultra-cheap low-class bling category, may be.
Creating a brand name (and a logo) is one thing. Running a successful company, selling desirable products, is another. Given the large percentage of companies that fail, and given how crowded the clothing market is, they will probably soon disappear after this ephemeral hour of stolen glory, at which point Apple will probably be quick to snatch back the trademark. Not that Apple should own it, really. Jobs’ family should.
I also favour cash with local businesses because I know full well that card transactions reduce their income by a margin that, at the end of the year, is not so insignificant. And I know (from talking to them) that they generally appreciate it.
It’s a shame that the government does not set up an alternative payment method. Historically, governments have promoted trade through the creation and management of currency (which, by the way, is not free to the community, but the nation bears the cost because it is an essential tool). But policymakers have failed to provide an upgrade, possibly because of technical limitations: it’s obviously difficult (but, I imagine, not impossible), to create a secure, portable, anonymous and community-supported (i.e., at no cost per use) way of paying that could advantageously replaces cash-carrying wallets with electronic wallets. Of course, there may be other reasons in play, including lobbying from the banking sector (particularly, the credit card business), the desire to eliminate anonymous transactions for easier policing (fighting tax fraud, money laundering, etc.), and more.
Nonetheless, it’s also the role of the citizenry to demand for solutions, and fair solutions at that (i.e., not pseudo-solutions that allow private corporations to track your life and every purchase, and to get a financial cut on top of it). Yet, I haven’t seen any public discourse on the topic, which I find really strange.
From the Telegraph article: “Luis Elizondo said the existence of supremely advanced unidentified aircraft, using technology that did not belong to any nation, had been "proved beyond reasonable doubt".” And, from the Newsweek article: “...there had been “lots” of UFO sightings (...) Investigators pinpointed geographical “hot spots” that were sometimes near nuclear facilities and power plants.”
Isn’t it fascinating how those mysteriously advanced extraterrestrial spacecrafts seem to be utterly attracted to our strategic facilities like flies around, hum, I digress. They are performing lengthy (but stunning!) acrobatic manoeuvres up there, while squinting down through their windows (because their spacecrafts have windows, so pilots can see where they’re driving), and exclaiming: “Whoa, look at’em smokestacks! And the incredible billowing clouds spewed out of them!”, soon bringing the scientific officer on board to announce “Captain, it appears this phenomenon might principally be coming from a redox reaction involving some allotrope of the atomic element used in fullerenes, but one that might have originally been produced through some incredible quasi-metamorphic transformation.” Then the captain: “Better find out about that advanced technology! Besides, we’re running low on gas and I need to get back home in time for supper.”
Either that or, well, you know, just nosy friends checking out the neighbourhood for contingency planning.
Naaah, just kidding! Nobody’s got technology that we don’t understand and already have! Those are from outer space.
The article in the Telegraph (whose journalists interviewed Elizondo) states: “Luis Elizondo said the existence of supremely advanced unidentified aircraft, using technology that did not belong to any nation, had been "proved beyond reasonable doubt".” That seems rather unambiguous to me.
He also said “I’d say bolster the [UFO research] program. We want NASA to find life on different planets, but we have highly educated pilots here, and they’re seeing something they can't understand”. I can’t imagine why he’d place a reference to NASA and extraterrestrial life in the middle of his statement unless he wanted to imply that sightings made on Earth are likely to have a similar origin.
To me, this story is mostly a symptom that our society needs a bit more (probably, a lot more) mental health care. I don’t mean it in a disparaging way. I feel sincere pity for him. The guy wrote that he is a felon, so he’s probably done jail time; and his writing reveals obvious (and serious) psychological problems. I find it unfortunate that we cannot do better with (or rather, for) people like that. Mental health troubles can be debilitating (particularly, socially debilitating) and lead too many to jail.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the value of personal responsibility. For example, I might get offended if someone bumps into me. But not if it’s a blind person! Unfortunately, psychological problems are (comparatively) more difficult to recognise, understand and (importantly for the legal system) confirm (and measure), so we often handle them using the expedient and cheaper device, the discard pile. This might come from insufficient scientific understanding of those conditions, and limited medical ability to treat them. But I’m afraid that it may also reflect a lack of compassion and generosity on our part, and probably a lack of vision and good judgement as well, since we’re likely ignoring a good investment.
Frankly, I don’t see anything in that conversation showing that your colleague “could not get in his head that someome didn’t celebrate Christmas”. He heard you, and on his way out, merely wished you an enjoyable day on the day that he calls Christmas Day.
Seasonal greetings are not a reference to you, your culture and your lifestyle. They are a reference to those of the person greeting you (and, typically, of the larger community around you).
For example, on Thanksgiving day, people who were not born in America likely won’t care a bit. Does that mean that it’s not Thanksgiving Day for them? Don’t they have the day off like everyone else? Should we care that they aren’t going to celebrate it? We wish them a happy day, and that day is named Thanksgiving Day. So Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Same thing for Christmas and any other holiday that’s massively followed by the larger part of the population. There’s nothing oppressive about it, unless one chooses to feel oppressed by it. Conversely, there is something oppressive about telling people that they may not name traditions that their community has long been widely following.
If a Jewish faithful said something like “Happy Hanukkah” to me, I would absolutely find it oppressive on my part to tell him that I feel harassed by it. Personally, I would find his greeting inclusive on his part. I’d feel that he was mostly expressing friendship, while sharing a bit of his faith and culture, in a welcoming way, without trying to force it on me: a greeting is not the same thing as proselytising!
I have no doubt that if the only difference is your hypothetical 295mg vs. 300mg, my pharmacist would be faxing in a change request to get the generic instead.
It’s not hypothetical, it actually happened to me. By chance, I had searched the web before going to the pharmacy, only specifying the active ingredient name and not the dosage in the search, which returned results showing generics available for 8 USD. That was dumb luck, but I didn’t know it at the time. Went to the pharmacy expecting to find that generic and was told the full price was over 8 times that and that there was no matching generic, no arguing. I was so stunned, I couldn’t quite understand what was going on. I refused the product at the pharmacy and went home, searched the web again. At the beginning, I could no longer find the cheap generic, then realised that it was because my search was different (I was now including the dosage), finally found again the cheap generic, noticed the difference, did some more searching and ended up reading a couple blogs that explained that the new formula had actually been introduced a year prior, at nearly 20 times the price of the old generic, then had recently gone down 50% in price! I had to drive back to my physician and explain the matter. She looked surprised and, frankly, rather uninterested (possibly thinking that I was a weirdo), but nonetheless agreed to write me a replacement prescription using the previous formula, still available as a generic for less than the amount of a co-pay!
I haven’t felt much kindness toward the pharmaceutical industry since that day... So, no, it’s no fun to rant about big pharma. They are filthy predators and I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
Thinking about that story, I still feel like a geek. Do you really expect the average consumer to go through what I went through? To search on the web all variations of a medicine, using the generic ingredient names (when people, including trained physicians, keep saying “Advil” rather than “ibuprofen” and stumble on pronouncing anything less common)?
Sure, people need to be less passive but, as I wrote, nobody cares about costs in healthcare. Indeed, not only is it a rather touchy subject (“Cheap means it’s not as good, right?”), everything is done (by industry, insurers and providers) to confuse consumers (just have a look at the cheesy variety of presentations and mixes in over-the-counter meds, all at artificially different prices), and everything is done to hide the true cost of healthcare in general (not just pharmaceutical products). Even the cost of surgical procedures can vary by a factor of 3 without correlation to quality of care.
So, no, bitching that ordinary Joe who’s hurting right now and needs care, is not doing due diligence shopping for a better value... That’s not going to solve the problem. This is a typical case where we need some decent consumer protection and regulation to help fight deceptive and predatory marketing techniques (including better labeling, up-front and public disclosure of treatment costs, etc.).
It is a story because most doctors in the U.S. prescribe medicines by brand name. If the prescription forbids substitutions (a decision that was possibly made with the assumption that there isn’t much cost difference between generic and branded versions), or if if the brand name manufacturer had introduced any subtle change in the formula or presentation (for example, dosage of 295 mg instead of 300 mg, such that no perfectly identical generic will be found), the pharmacy will deliver the branded version, no questions asked. The patient will pay their ten dollar co-pay and the insurance will be billed the rest. Nobody will notice anything. And the following year, everybody’s health insurance premiums will go up by another insane percentage, as usual.
There is no real competition in pharmaceuticals because nobody (prescribers, patients, government) cares about the cost of medicines (or treatment, for that matter), except insurance companies (who secretly negotiate what they pay) and, regrettably, patients who are not insured enough to cover the cost of what they need (and those, as we all know too well, have zero influence).
I’d give my employer the same notice as they would give employees being laid off. Usually, that’s no more than a few hours (unless your employment contract requires longer notice, of course; in any case, I would give exactly the strict minimum).
Of course, circumstances vary. So, if you are in a tiny business with a good and meaningful relationship with all other employees (including owners and management), with a high level of trust such that you feel confident that they would never treat you in the typical way (“pack your stuff and be out within the hour”), then by all means, treat them nicely (like it’s been before). But since you are ending your question with “but I don't want to be let go before I'm ready to go, either”, then it’s quite obvious that you are in a typical company, and the rule of the strict legal minimum applies.
I suppose that it could be nice (and astute) of you not to make plans for a trip around the world starting the next day. That way, if they really need you to stay longer, they are free to beg and offer you some satisfying money for you to do them a big favour. After all, why train your replacement for less?
By itself, that’s not mean. That’s simply the way businesses operate. They are your trading partner, and wise businesses don’t give any unnecessary leverage to their trading partners (suppliers or clients).
Since you are limited (among other things) by the speed at which the remote machine sends you its data or receives your data, in practice, very high bandwidth is mostly useful for simultaneously connecting to many hosts. That is likely to happen if you serve data (but, of course, that concerns your upload speed), if you’re running an office with several employees (or a business serving Wi-Fi to its customers), or if you have a family with several people simultaneously (and fairly heavily) using Internet around the same time every day. Otherwise, it’s likely a waste of money.
I think that your comparison with other utilities is relevant. I would of course also include telephone service, which is directly comparable to Internet service: it’s telecommunications, just with a narrower scope (originally, voice only; though it was later extended through facsimile and data modems). The wide availability of those services is regulated. There’s no reason that this shouldn’t apply to Internet service (or, at least, telecommunication lines capable of supporting such service with reasonable performance, assuming that there are third-party ISPs providing service to customers connected to those lines).
For the same reason, I can’t imagine why we’d raise the spectre of compulsory service. I don’t know of any jurisdiction forcing people to open an account with the local telephone, electric, gas, water or even garbage-collection company. Local codes might require builders to install metered connections to those service networks, to ensure that they are effectively available to anyone moving in, should they wish to use them. But they don’t force them to be actual subscribers.
That may be the case in your area, but I doubt that it’s that simple overall, when even a large company with deep pockets and plenty of resources like Google finds its efforts thwarted through the application of federal law.
[The FCC's general counsel] added that Schneiderman's request for logs of IP addresses would (...) “raise significant personal privacy concerns.”
I love that one, coming from the FCC when, to everyone’s surprise, they published (freely downloadable) the full set of comments, complete with not only names, but also e-mail address and (if provided) home address of their authors.
I’ve been reading that 2000 homes passed per upstream port is reasonable... That doesn’t sound like a “small token ring network” to me! If it’s only a dozen active cable modems, then you’re definitely right. Otherwise, it limits what people can do with their connection. Just downloading content (like browsing the web or streaming video), sure, no problem. Anything else, well... I foresee that cable companies will probably keep saying that we don’t need it!
Interesting! Certainly, the high throughput of DOCSIS 3.1, with possible full-duplex on the horizon, seems attractive. Whether this translates in high residential bi-directional performance presumably depends on several factors. First, technical issues, like the size of a serving area (10 Gb/s is great, until it’s shared by 2000 households!); or the way collisions are handled, impacting latency (in the typical urban neighbourhood, how many modems are typically connected to the same upstream port?); or how much noise is induced on the line. Then there is marketing strategy. I can see how cable companies would be interested in improving upstream service for business customers, but I am still dubious about their commitment to residential customers (besides their interest in reselling their own telephony services, whose quality of service owes more to the use of preferential service identifiers than to improvements in general upstream capability). I interpret their active involvement with content production and services (like telephony), and their disinterest in sticking to neutral data transmission (including their rejection of network neutrality) as a sign that they just want residential customers to download and consume. And, fortunately for them (unfortunately for us), they don’t need to invest in FTTH to implement that vision!
I hope that I am wrong, that the cable infrastructure connecting residential modems will turn out to be technically capable of supporting heavy bi-directional traffic (without having to dig out everything and replace it with fiber, which is a nice but apparently distant prospect), and that cable companies will sell us access on terms that enable us to freely use the network as we see fit. But, in the current context, I’ll have to see it to believe it!
As you wrote, the problem mostly lies within the last mile. But caching is not a complete solution, because the problem is also about getting good performance when (a) sending data upstream (serving data, VoIP, etc.), (b) when connecting to a variety of remote servers (not just the handful of “popular” ISP-endorsed big players like Netflix, YouTube, etc., who can afford to pay their way to ensure good delivery through locally distributed caches), and (c) when using end-to-end encryption, which effectively makes everyone transmit different data.
CDN is based on the idea that many people will consume the same content, produced by a small number of publishers. Its design is absolutely sound for those use cases but, fundamentally, it’s also rather similar to the distribution model of television networks. And it seems to illustrate rather well the vision that large ISPs like Comcast appear to embrace: a network where consumers... just consume (download) whatever is made available to them, produced and transmitted by a handful of major players who can negotiate terms between themselves in backroom deals. First, it’s easier/cheaper to implement (because traffic can be improved through local caching instead of deploying fiber to the home, for example); and it gives them great leverage over consumers and small businesses who, unable to properly serve data, must rely on major cloud operators for everything. There lies the rub: we end up financing a network that doesn’t truly serve our needs and brings us back to the servitude associated to old school television or telephone service and their quasi-monopolies. A few wealthy players, with millions (or billions) of dependent users...
But I could have the wrong impression: see NeumannCons’s interesting answer, above, which offers a much more positive outlook. I only hope that he/she’s right.
Slashdot Mirror
01001001 00100000 01100011 01100001 01110010 01110010 01111001 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101000 01100101 01100001 01110010 01110100 00100000 01110111 01101001 01110100 01101000 00100000 01101101 01100101 00001010 01001001 00100000 01100110 01100101 01100001 01110010 00100000 01101110 01101111 00100000 01100110 01100001 01110100 01100101 00001010 01001001 00100000 01110111 01100001 01101110 01110100 00100000 01101110 01101111 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100
Aw, unlucky you, you should really come to the US! Here, we may not have as many physicians (about 1/3 fewer) per capita as you have in Sweden, but we compensate for this through many innovative techniques:
(1) The uninsured and the underinsured can’t afford to clog our healthcare system, which frees precious resources for the better endowed.
(2) The shorter life expectancy (about 3 years less than Sweden) ensures that those pesky always-ill seniors won’t waste our trained personnel’s time.
(3) The higher infant mortality rate (double that of Sweden) ensures that the weaklings (who would be a drain on the system) are culled early, further optimising efficiency.
(4) High throughput: your appointment with a physician will typically result in you not seeing an actual physician (merely a nurse, or perhaps a physician assistant, if you’re lucky). If you’re extremely lucky, the physician may stop by for a minute or two on his way to the bathroom. However, do not fear, you will have plenty of quality time to go through the financial paperwork with our abundant financial office staff.
(5) In spite of this, you may still experience some abnormally long waiting list, due to your insistence on using one of the select few providers that your private health insurance provider requires you to use to remain eligible for partial reimbursement of costs. But, no worries! Here, there is freedom of choice and you are always welcome to choose any other healthcare provider and paying out of your own pocket (and it may be as inexpensive as just about twice what one would pay in Sweden, if one had to pay out of pocket in Sweden!).
They also forgot the most popular search query: “Beer can stock”.
You should ask your favourite editor at Breitbart or Russia Today to start a Tech news section.
And please stay there. Your crocodile tears over how [insert name of news site here] has become so utterly useless and lame and how, oh it’s so unfortunate, but everybody should stop reading it unless it ceases and desists from publishing anything critical of [insert name of party or politician] and be so unfairly biased against [insert name of loony conspiracy theory here]... are not welcome in discussion about news topics. Host your own blog and invite your fellow trolls to compete for the most disruptive comment over there.
Or write to the editors of the site so they can have a good laugh, instead of bothering its readers.
Hum, for a business who’s presumed to have been running successfully on Jobs’ coattails since 2014, they’ve been keeping a remarkably low profile. Searching for clothing, jeans or Barbato (or other combinations) returns nothing about them if the search is restricted to pages published before this month. Since you appear to know about them, could you point us to their past financial statements (annual gross income, sales volume, etc.)?
But, you’re right on one point: they’ve certainly managed to get a lot of free publicity. I wouldn’t say “extra” publicity, given that they seem to have been unknown until now. And though the saying goes that there is no such thing as bad publicity, I’m not entirely sure that people will be so unembarrassed wearing a brand name that was rather universally derided for ripping off Jobs’ name and Apple’s logo. Unless they aim for the ultra-cheap low-class bling category, may be.
Creating a brand name (and a logo) is one thing. Running a successful company, selling desirable products, is another. Given the large percentage of companies that fail, and given how crowded the clothing market is, they will probably soon disappear after this ephemeral hour of stolen glory, at which point Apple will probably be quick to snatch back the trademark. Not that Apple should own it, really. Jobs’ family should.
I also favour cash with local businesses because I know full well that card transactions reduce their income by a margin that, at the end of the year, is not so insignificant. And I know (from talking to them) that they generally appreciate it.
It’s a shame that the government does not set up an alternative payment method. Historically, governments have promoted trade through the creation and management of currency (which, by the way, is not free to the community, but the nation bears the cost because it is an essential tool). But policymakers have failed to provide an upgrade, possibly because of technical limitations: it’s obviously difficult (but, I imagine, not impossible), to create a secure, portable, anonymous and community-supported (i.e., at no cost per use) way of paying that could advantageously replaces cash-carrying wallets with electronic wallets. Of course, there may be other reasons in play, including lobbying from the banking sector (particularly, the credit card business), the desire to eliminate anonymous transactions for easier policing (fighting tax fraud, money laundering, etc.), and more.
Nonetheless, it’s also the role of the citizenry to demand for solutions, and fair solutions at that (i.e., not pseudo-solutions that allow private corporations to track your life and every purchase, and to get a financial cut on top of it). Yet, I haven’t seen any public discourse on the topic, which I find really strange.
If the plane with a broken radio was piloted by a foreigner, it’d be an alien UFO. So alien UFOs are legit too.
From the Telegraph article: “Luis Elizondo said the existence of supremely advanced unidentified aircraft, using technology that did not belong to any nation, had been "proved beyond reasonable doubt".” And, from the Newsweek article: “...there had been “lots” of UFO sightings (...) Investigators pinpointed geographical “hot spots” that were sometimes near nuclear facilities and power plants.”
Isn’t it fascinating how those mysteriously advanced extraterrestrial spacecrafts seem to be utterly attracted to our strategic facilities like flies around, hum, I digress. They are performing lengthy (but stunning!) acrobatic manoeuvres up there, while squinting down through their windows (because their spacecrafts have windows, so pilots can see where they’re driving), and exclaiming: “Whoa, look at’em smokestacks! And the incredible billowing clouds spewed out of them!”, soon bringing the scientific officer on board to announce “Captain, it appears this phenomenon might principally be coming from a redox reaction involving some allotrope of the atomic element used in fullerenes, but one that might have originally been produced through some incredible quasi-metamorphic transformation.” Then the captain: “Better find out about that advanced technology! Besides, we’re running low on gas and I need to get back home in time for supper.”
Either that or, well, you know, just nosy friends checking out the neighbourhood for contingency planning.
Naaah, just kidding! Nobody’s got technology that we don’t understand and already have! Those are from outer space.
The article in the Telegraph (whose journalists interviewed Elizondo) states: “Luis Elizondo said the existence of supremely advanced unidentified aircraft, using technology that did not belong to any nation, had been "proved beyond reasonable doubt".” That seems rather unambiguous to me.
He also said “I’d say bolster the [UFO research] program. We want NASA to find life on different planets, but we have highly educated pilots here, and they’re seeing something they can't understand”. I can’t imagine why he’d place a reference to NASA and extraterrestrial life in the middle of his statement unless he wanted to imply that sightings made on Earth are likely to have a similar origin.
To me, this story is mostly a symptom that our society needs a bit more (probably, a lot more) mental health care. I don’t mean it in a disparaging way. I feel sincere pity for him. The guy wrote that he is a felon, so he’s probably done jail time; and his writing reveals obvious (and serious) psychological problems. I find it unfortunate that we cannot do better with (or rather, for) people like that. Mental health troubles can be debilitating (particularly, socially debilitating) and lead too many to jail.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the value of personal responsibility. For example, I might get offended if someone bumps into me. But not if it’s a blind person! Unfortunately, psychological problems are (comparatively) more difficult to recognise, understand and (importantly for the legal system) confirm (and measure), so we often handle them using the expedient and cheaper device, the discard pile. This might come from insufficient scientific understanding of those conditions, and limited medical ability to treat them. But I’m afraid that it may also reflect a lack of compassion and generosity on our part, and probably a lack of vision and good judgement as well, since we’re likely ignoring a good investment.
Frankly, I don’t see anything in that conversation showing that your colleague “could not get in his head that someome didn’t celebrate Christmas”. He heard you, and on his way out, merely wished you an enjoyable day on the day that he calls Christmas Day.
Seasonal greetings are not a reference to you, your culture and your lifestyle. They are a reference to those of the person greeting you (and, typically, of the larger community around you).
For example, on Thanksgiving day, people who were not born in America likely won’t care a bit. Does that mean that it’s not Thanksgiving Day for them? Don’t they have the day off like everyone else? Should we care that they aren’t going to celebrate it? We wish them a happy day, and that day is named Thanksgiving Day. So Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Same thing for Christmas and any other holiday that’s massively followed by the larger part of the population. There’s nothing oppressive about it, unless one chooses to feel oppressed by it. Conversely, there is something oppressive about telling people that they may not name traditions that their community has long been widely following.
If a Jewish faithful said something like “Happy Hanukkah” to me, I would absolutely find it oppressive on my part to tell him that I feel harassed by it. Personally, I would find his greeting inclusive on his part. I’d feel that he was mostly expressing friendship, while sharing a bit of his faith and culture, in a welcoming way, without trying to force it on me: a greeting is not the same thing as proselytising!
I have no doubt that if the only difference is your hypothetical 295mg vs. 300mg, my pharmacist would be faxing in a change request to get the generic instead.
It’s not hypothetical, it actually happened to me. By chance, I had searched the web before going to the pharmacy, only specifying the active ingredient name and not the dosage in the search, which returned results showing generics available for 8 USD. That was dumb luck, but I didn’t know it at the time. Went to the pharmacy expecting to find that generic and was told the full price was over 8 times that and that there was no matching generic, no arguing. I was so stunned, I couldn’t quite understand what was going on. I refused the product at the pharmacy and went home, searched the web again. At the beginning, I could no longer find the cheap generic, then realised that it was because my search was different (I was now including the dosage), finally found again the cheap generic, noticed the difference, did some more searching and ended up reading a couple blogs that explained that the new formula had actually been introduced a year prior, at nearly 20 times the price of the old generic, then had recently gone down 50% in price! I had to drive back to my physician and explain the matter. She looked surprised and, frankly, rather uninterested (possibly thinking that I was a weirdo), but nonetheless agreed to write me a replacement prescription using the previous formula, still available as a generic for less than the amount of a co-pay!
I haven’t felt much kindness toward the pharmaceutical industry since that day... So, no, it’s no fun to rant about big pharma. They are filthy predators and I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
Thinking about that story, I still feel like a geek. Do you really expect the average consumer to go through what I went through? To search on the web all variations of a medicine, using the generic ingredient names (when people, including trained physicians, keep saying “Advil” rather than “ibuprofen” and stumble on pronouncing anything less common)?
Sure, people need to be less passive but, as I wrote, nobody cares about costs in healthcare. Indeed, not only is it a rather touchy subject (“Cheap means it’s not as good, right?”), everything is done (by industry, insurers and providers) to confuse consumers (just have a look at the cheesy variety of presentations and mixes in over-the-counter meds, all at artificially different prices), and everything is done to hide the true cost of healthcare in general (not just pharmaceutical products). Even the cost of surgical procedures can vary by a factor of 3 without correlation to quality of care.
So, no, bitching that ordinary Joe who’s hurting right now and needs care, is not doing due diligence shopping for a better value... That’s not going to solve the problem. This is a typical case where we need some decent consumer protection and regulation to help fight deceptive and predatory marketing techniques (including better labeling, up-front and public disclosure of treatment costs, etc.).
It is a story because most doctors in the U.S. prescribe medicines by brand name. If the prescription forbids substitutions (a decision that was possibly made with the assumption that there isn’t much cost difference between generic and branded versions), or if if the brand name manufacturer had introduced any subtle change in the formula or presentation (for example, dosage of 295 mg instead of 300 mg, such that no perfectly identical generic will be found), the pharmacy will deliver the branded version, no questions asked. The patient will pay their ten dollar co-pay and the insurance will be billed the rest. Nobody will notice anything. And the following year, everybody’s health insurance premiums will go up by another insane percentage, as usual.
There is no real competition in pharmaceuticals because nobody (prescribers, patients, government) cares about the cost of medicines (or treatment, for that matter), except insurance companies (who secretly negotiate what they pay) and, regrettably, patients who are not insured enough to cover the cost of what they need (and those, as we all know too well, have zero influence).
I’d give my employer the same notice as they would give employees being laid off. Usually, that’s no more than a few hours (unless your employment contract requires longer notice, of course; in any case, I would give exactly the strict minimum).
Of course, circumstances vary. So, if you are in a tiny business with a good and meaningful relationship with all other employees (including owners and management), with a high level of trust such that you feel confident that they would never treat you in the typical way (“pack your stuff and be out within the hour”), then by all means, treat them nicely (like it’s been before). But since you are ending your question with “but I don't want to be let go before I'm ready to go, either”, then it’s quite obvious that you are in a typical company, and the rule of the strict legal minimum applies.
I suppose that it could be nice (and astute) of you not to make plans for a trip around the world starting the next day. That way, if they really need you to stay longer, they are free to beg and offer you some satisfying money for you to do them a big favour. After all, why train your replacement for less?
By itself, that’s not mean. That’s simply the way businesses operate. They are your trading partner, and wise businesses don’t give any unnecessary leverage to their trading partners (suppliers or clients).
Since you are limited (among other things) by the speed at which the remote machine sends you its data or receives your data, in practice, very high bandwidth is mostly useful for simultaneously connecting to many hosts. That is likely to happen if you serve data (but, of course, that concerns your upload speed), if you’re running an office with several employees (or a business serving Wi-Fi to its customers), or if you have a family with several people simultaneously (and fairly heavily) using Internet around the same time every day. Otherwise, it’s likely a waste of money.
I think that your comparison with other utilities is relevant. I would of course also include telephone service, which is directly comparable to Internet service: it’s telecommunications, just with a narrower scope (originally, voice only; though it was later extended through facsimile and data modems). The wide availability of those services is regulated. There’s no reason that this shouldn’t apply to Internet service (or, at least, telecommunication lines capable of supporting such service with reasonable performance, assuming that there are third-party ISPs providing service to customers connected to those lines).
For the same reason, I can’t imagine why we’d raise the spectre of compulsory service. I don’t know of any jurisdiction forcing people to open an account with the local telephone, electric, gas, water or even garbage-collection company. Local codes might require builders to install metered connections to those service networks, to ensure that they are effectively available to anyone moving in, should they wish to use them. But they don’t force them to be actual subscribers.
Paleobiologists have confirmed today that life forms existed some 3.5 billion years ago.
Since then, technology has improved...
...teamed up to devise a new way to analyze the rock specimen, which now lives in the London Museum of Natural History
Without spending much time, I can learn so much on the net!
That may be the case in your area, but I doubt that it’s that simple overall, when even a large company with deep pockets and plenty of resources like Google finds its efforts thwarted through the application of federal law.
It would be better to teach students the etiquette of modern communication.
Isn’t that the parents' job? Should schools do that too?
We have stopped (...) growing taller...
I fear that we haven’t stopped growing wider, though.
[The FCC's general counsel] added that Schneiderman's request for logs of IP addresses would (...) “raise significant personal privacy concerns.”
I love that one, coming from the FCC when, to everyone’s surprise, they published (freely downloadable) the full set of comments, complete with not only names, but also e-mail address and (if provided) home address of their authors.
I’ve been reading that 2000 homes passed per upstream port is reasonable... That doesn’t sound like a “small token ring network” to me! If it’s only a dozen active cable modems, then you’re definitely right. Otherwise, it limits what people can do with their connection. Just downloading content (like browsing the web or streaming video), sure, no problem. Anything else, well... I foresee that cable companies will probably keep saying that we don’t need it!
Interesting! Certainly, the high throughput of DOCSIS 3.1, with possible full-duplex on the horizon, seems attractive. Whether this translates in high residential bi-directional performance presumably depends on several factors. First, technical issues, like the size of a serving area (10 Gb/s is great, until it’s shared by 2000 households!); or the way collisions are handled, impacting latency (in the typical urban neighbourhood, how many modems are typically connected to the same upstream port?); or how much noise is induced on the line. Then there is marketing strategy. I can see how cable companies would be interested in improving upstream service for business customers, but I am still dubious about their commitment to residential customers (besides their interest in reselling their own telephony services, whose quality of service owes more to the use of preferential service identifiers than to improvements in general upstream capability). I interpret their active involvement with content production and services (like telephony), and their disinterest in sticking to neutral data transmission (including their rejection of network neutrality) as a sign that they just want residential customers to download and consume. And, fortunately for them (unfortunately for us), they don’t need to invest in FTTH to implement that vision!
I hope that I am wrong, that the cable infrastructure connecting residential modems will turn out to be technically capable of supporting heavy bi-directional traffic (without having to dig out everything and replace it with fiber, which is a nice but apparently distant prospect), and that cable companies will sell us access on terms that enable us to freely use the network as we see fit. But, in the current context, I’ll have to see it to believe it!
As you wrote, the problem mostly lies within the last mile. But caching is not a complete solution, because the problem is also about getting good performance when (a) sending data upstream (serving data, VoIP, etc.), (b) when connecting to a variety of remote servers (not just the handful of “popular” ISP-endorsed big players like Netflix, YouTube, etc., who can afford to pay their way to ensure good delivery through locally distributed caches), and (c) when using end-to-end encryption, which effectively makes everyone transmit different data.
CDN is based on the idea that many people will consume the same content, produced by a small number of publishers. Its design is absolutely sound for those use cases but, fundamentally, it’s also rather similar to the distribution model of television networks. And it seems to illustrate rather well the vision that large ISPs like Comcast appear to embrace: a network where consumers... just consume (download) whatever is made available to them, produced and transmitted by a handful of major players who can negotiate terms between themselves in backroom deals. First, it’s easier/cheaper to implement (because traffic can be improved through local caching instead of deploying fiber to the home, for example); and it gives them great leverage over consumers and small businesses who, unable to properly serve data, must rely on major cloud operators for everything. There lies the rub: we end up financing a network that doesn’t truly serve our needs and brings us back to the servitude associated to old school television or telephone service and their quasi-monopolies. A few wealthy players, with millions (or billions) of dependent users...
But I could have the wrong impression: see NeumannCons’s interesting answer, above, which offers a much more positive outlook. I only hope that he/she’s right.