How, exactly, is a patient qualified to make an objective assessment of their medical problems, diagnostic workups and treatment regimens?
Not only are they NOT qualified, but depending upon how those records are used, they might even be tempted to fudge them or delete items on purpose. For example, they might remove records of treatments for conditions that could effect future health insurance benefits and premiums. There are all sorts of perverse incentives that could come up when patients start altering their own medical records.
There is a reason that when the Social Security Number was invented, it included laws about it was *NOT* to be used for any other purpose but Social Security. You can see just how effective those laws were.
That is a good lesson for everyone on how governments really work and one that they generally don't teach in civics or American history class. The government will always say that a new program or power will never be abused or used for the wrong purposes and then break that promise as soon as it is convenient and the masses have moved on and forgotten or are not looking. The lesson is that the government cannot be trusted and it is lesson that our founding fathers tried to pass on, but one that has since been supressed and watered down by those with an interest in squelching liberty and choice in service of some alternative, usually socialist, agenda. The incomming Obama administration, caught up in the spirit of the times, is going to make us less even free, despite their best intentions, with tons of burdensome regulations and massive defecit spending on projects that will invariably be mishandled so that no private entrepreneurs will be able to get anything done (ala the New Deal). The people who swept him into office, and liberal (I should say socialist democrat, but that is whole other issue) young college students especially, will come to regret voting for the greatest expansion of Federal government power in a generation later on in their lives once it is too late to alter course. Ron Paul is right, but as usual nobody, neither Republicans OR Democrats wants to hear it. They say, "LA, LA, LA we're not listening" OR they accuse you of being a reactionary and an obstructionist for having the temerity to raise reasonable and sensible fiscal objections and stand in the way of their grand political plans.
The Catholic Mexican and Latin American immigrants could be a larger factor than some might think. If you asked the Latino and Mexican American young people what their opinions were would they match with white suburban or black youth? I think that the religious factor is being underestimated by the prop 8 supporters. The types of urban, white, and well to do young voters who are more likely to support gay marriage are moving to other states to escape the high cost of housing and living in California and taking their families with them (150,000 now ex-Californians left the state this year). I agree that opinions are changing in other states, but I think that there is at least an equal chance that more minority births and immigration from Catholic Mexico and Latin American countries to south western states, and especially California, will keep prop 8 around for a while. Oh sure, you will have hard core and pro gay marriage areas in and around San Francisco and other wealthy coastal areas, but the inland parts of California, where many of the recent immigrants settle, will probably become more morally conservative in the decades ahead. The religion factor, which is a part of minority (or should I say majority now) culture, should not be underestimated (even gang members commonly have Jesus and other religious iconography tattoos as part of their overall look combined with their chain jewelry).
Suppose that an ISP wants to cooperate with Nexicon to get their hands on some of the settlement loot. Suppose further that it costs the ISP nothing to implement detection and collect bounties (in actuallity it would cost them something, but assume for this example that it doesn't). The question(s) become (a) how much will Nexicon split with us AND (b) how many monthly ISP subscriber payments is that worth?
Where N is the number of payments, i is the interest rate (per period), F is the final amount (the amount of the cut that the ISP will get from Nexicon), and P is the payment amount (the amount of the monthly subscriber fee for the ISP).
Now assume that Nexicon will split 1/2 of the average $3000 settlement with the ISP (the rest being split between Nexicon and the RIAA music labels) or $1500 AND that the average ISP customer pays about $35 per month for Interent service. Assume also that once the ISP rats out the customer to Nexicon that person or business will cancel their service and never be a customer again. Finally assume that i, the interest rate, is equivalent to a yearly rate of about 2 percent. So how many payments is it worth to the ISP to rat out the customer? The answer is about:
41 payments OR about 3.5 years or service.
Are there any ISP owners out there who would sell out their customers to Nexicon for at best the equivalent of a paltry 3.5 years of subscriber payments in exchange for all of the bad publicity, ill will, and loss of sold out customers permanently (and probably others too, once word gets around that the ISP is ratting people out to the MAFIAA)? I am going to say that the answer is probably, "NO".
It's not like the government holds on to power entirely by force, in other words.
Just because the threat is more often implied than actually followed through doesn't mean that force wasn't or isn't used. China has made so many 'examples' over the years that most people are easily pacified with just a disapproving look from a policeman. For those who aren't there is always the re-education camp where attitudes, among other things, are adjusted.
Surely by now everyone who wants to see the original series has seen it so I won't be spoiling anything by mentioning that they have already killed off the main character in the last episode of the series. They slipped the movie in there by claiming that it took place in between episodes towards the end of the established storyline. So, unless they plan to do a condensed version of the standard storyline, as established in the original television program, what else can they really do that hasn't already been done with these characters? The back stories have already been fleshed out and the conflicts were mostly all resolved in the final espisode, unless they want to do spin off stories of what happens to the surviving members of the Bebop crew after Spike departs.
Clearly, more than just Republicans are against it.
Indeed, there are many citizens living in California who are of Mexican and Latin American descent. These people are mostly registered as Democrats and generally vote with the left on fiscal, social, and other issues. However, there is one caveat that some on the left forgot which is that many of these people are Catholic or were raised as such and even if they are not active in the church on a regular basis they still frame moral judgments within the context of church teachings. It is not hard to guess what the Catholic teachings on gay marriage are and yet many prop 8 supporters seemed to be surprised when this usually reliable constituency voted against them. Given the fact that such peoples are becoming an ever larger component of the California population the gap will probably only widen in the years ahead as the demographics continue to shift. The only hope for prop 8 supporters now is the state supreme court, if they fail to get it overturned there then California will remain a no gay marriage state for generations to come.
The big box stores were the McDonaldizing of electronics and big ticket consumer products.
The difference was in the products, and I don't just mean food vs non-food items. A burger is a pretty understandable concept. I buy it and then I eat it and it takes no special skill to determine whether or not it was any good. I either liked or I didn't and I will be back again when I am hungry or I won't. Electronics are not quite as simple to the average shopper. It is more difficult to recognize and price quality levels in televisions, speakers, receivers, etc and the stakes are generally higher too. If I don't like the McDonalds burger than I can leave and throw the remainder in the rubbish on the way out with the loss of only a few quid. If I get the television home and don't like it then I have to haul it back to the store, wait in the return line, find out that what I really want is going to cost even more, etc.
Which is the biggest factor really. Wal-Mart has dirty stores, over-worked part time employees who could give a shit about the customer (despite all of Wal-Mart's motivational training bull crap), and their parking lots are becoming centers of criminal activity. The documentary, Wal-Mart: High Cost of Low Price, documents rapes, murders, robberies, and other violent crimes occurring in Wal-Mart parking lots, caught on cameras that were set up not to make customers safe in the parking lots, but rather to spy on union organizing activities in and around the store.
Even WalMart has trouble beating online retailers like Amazon.com which have no physical store presence and Costco still out competes them in the bulk warehouse club store segment (WalMart runs the Sam's Club store to compete with Costco in that category). WalMart is powerful in standard retailing, but they are not omnipotent.
until I picked up the price sign, brought it to him, and got a refund at the cost of my contact info
Which is what they really wanted since your contact info was worth WAY more than $1 to them. Also, you can bet your bottom dollar that all of your information was resold multiple times during the bankruptcy to whatever direct advertising firm(s) would give CC a few dollars for the database. Your junk-mail signal to noise ratio should be decreasing real soon now.
This is exactly what they did do. Most of the choicest and best closeout items were sold off or were inside deals (i.e. you knew one of the employees). It seemed that there was nothing particularly good left by the time the doors opened to the public for the final closeout sell down. At least, that is how it was at our local CC.
The reason for that was because people, like the grandparent, stopped going to Circuit City for general needs and browsing because the overall selection and availability sucked, the prices were high, and the service was crap. However, if you wanted to go in just for the loss leader (i.e. you read the circular or looked it up online and planned your trip) then you were more likely to get that one item because there were fewer casual shoppers and browsers in Circuit City to compete with you for the loss-leader items.
in order for investment to pay off someone, somewhere has to loose.
Not necessarily. If the growth in the money supply (inflation) is balanced by growth in the quantity of goods and services produced in the economy per person (i.e. economic growth) then everyone enjoys the benefits of more goods and services while being compensated for both their labor or their risk. The reason for fractional reserve banking is to encourage more rapid economic growth through extension of timely credit (since availability of money and the ability to start new projects or produce new goods and services do not always coincide). The current world monetary system has its flaws to be sure and I myself have been a frequent critic of those flaws over the years on here on Slashdot, but it is better than the alternatives which generally include a relatively fixed quantity of hard money leading to frequent liquidity problems (people want to work and produce things now, but they have to wait until enough money enters into circulation to either save or get a loan) or more bartering of goods and services which, as history shows, can be inefficient (hence the reason for money in the first place).
Not quite. It is a crime to use your fake name and such
It is a crime in most countries to jaywalk, do you always obey that law too? Seriously, in most countries there are so many laws on the books that even an honest citizen can be accused of a crime if they become "inconvenient" to those in power. That is how governments have always worked everywhere. You'd have to be nuts to be giving out your real name and address on the Internet every time you download software, crime or not.
This is why you always give a fake address when asked
Personally, I prefer FakeNameGenerator combined with Mailinator. It is fast, easy, and it gets around those pesky sites that attempt to match street names, zip codes, and the like that can be bothersome when making up random information off the top of one's head.
You can configure the modem by directly connecting it to your NIC and using the 192.168.1.1 address (the Westel modems, like most consumer network products these days, feature browser based configuration). I omitted explaining how exactly I set it up because I assumed that everyone reading Slashdot already knew such things.
Did the school she was attending have NO public computer labs anywhere on campus? She could have gone to the public lab with a pair of surgical gloves (those public keyboards can be really dirty after all) and looked up whatever she needed. Most university computer labs also offer printing services either free or for a nominal fee per page. Seriously, if you cannot shovel a bit and solve some basic problems on your own then maybe you aren't ready to attend college.
There are people out there who have no idea how computers work and they are prey to all sorts of disingenuous marketing and out and out disinformation.
The price of ignorance, whether of technical or financial matters, has never been higher in our society and it is growing larger all of the time. My advice to these people would be to turn off American Idle and crack a few books or Google some basic knowledge instead of whining when the smarter and more educated people take all of their money.
I have Verizon DSL at home (I live in a rural area and Comcast cable, which has its own issues, was not available in the area until very recently) and it does not require any windows only software. I have a WRT54G wireless router with the Thibor 15c firmware plugged directly into the DSL modem. I have Ubuntu, WindowsXP, and OSX users all connecting via the wireless router, no special software required other than network drivers and configuration utility for the wireless card on the OS of choice.
such as sushi and in particular uni (sea urchin testes...no shit...nasty)
Uni is actually quite good and the taste and texture start to grow on you after a while. I eat Uni maybe twice per month now and it isn't exactly cheap (~$12 for 2 pieces at a decent sushi bar), but it does go great with cold sake (haikison...probably misspelled that one, the label on the bottle is in Japanese) or a large biru (beer, Orion or Sapporo are good). I find that people who gross out over sushi are almost invariably those who have never actually tried it or at least not the uncooked kind.
We're not living in any semblance of a free country when your neighbors can tell you what things you can and can't have on your property simply because they don't look pretty.
You could always put up the solar panels anyway and then publish their fight to get your 'unsightly' solar panels taken down in your blog and on the local news. Sometimes a little public shame can go a long way towards changing people's attitudes and positions. Nobody likes to be the 'bad guy' in a public news story.
The US Government has been the primary investor in general research since WW2 and I would not consider it wasteful at all.
The US Government has spent hundreds of dollars, perhaps trillions, of dollars since WW2 on research. One would hope that at least a few gems emerged from all of that spending, but just because some good things have come from government financed research doesn't meant that it was efficient. The space program, for example, has resulted in lots of useful product spin-offs, but almost nothing that could not have been discovered independently without spending billions on a manned space program. Just because good things can come from government spending doesn't mean that we get a good value or don't overpay.
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How, exactly, is a patient qualified to make an objective assessment of their medical problems, diagnostic workups and treatment regimens?
Not only are they NOT qualified, but depending upon how those records are used, they might even be tempted to fudge them or delete items on purpose. For example, they might remove records of treatments for conditions that could effect future health insurance benefits and premiums. There are all sorts of perverse incentives that could come up when patients start altering their own medical records.
There is a reason that when the Social Security Number was invented, it included laws about it was *NOT* to be used for any other purpose but Social Security. You can see just how effective those laws were.
That is a good lesson for everyone on how governments really work and one that they generally don't teach in civics or American history class. The government will always say that a new program or power will never be abused or used for the wrong purposes and then break that promise as soon as it is convenient and the masses have moved on and forgotten or are not looking. The lesson is that the government cannot be trusted and it is lesson that our founding fathers tried to pass on, but one that has since been supressed and watered down by those with an interest in squelching liberty and choice in service of some alternative, usually socialist, agenda. The incomming Obama administration, caught up in the spirit of the times, is going to make us less even free, despite their best intentions, with tons of burdensome regulations and massive defecit spending on projects that will invariably be mishandled so that no private entrepreneurs will be able to get anything done (ala the New Deal). The people who swept him into office, and liberal (I should say socialist democrat, but that is whole other issue) young college students especially, will come to regret voting for the greatest expansion of Federal government power in a generation later on in their lives once it is too late to alter course. Ron Paul is right, but as usual nobody, neither Republicans OR Democrats wants to hear it. They say, "LA, LA, LA we're not listening" OR they accuse you of being a reactionary and an obstructionist for having the temerity to raise reasonable and sensible fiscal objections and stand in the way of their grand political plans.
Deeply Catholic immigrants notwithstanding
The Catholic Mexican and Latin American immigrants could be a larger factor than some might think. If you asked the Latino and Mexican American young people what their opinions were would they match with white suburban or black youth? I think that the religious factor is being underestimated by the prop 8 supporters. The types of urban, white, and well to do young voters who are more likely to support gay marriage are moving to other states to escape the high cost of housing and living in California and taking their families with them (150,000 now ex-Californians left the state this year). I agree that opinions are changing in other states, but I think that there is at least an equal chance that more minority births and immigration from Catholic Mexico and Latin American countries to south western states, and especially California, will keep prop 8 around for a while. Oh sure, you will have hard core and pro gay marriage areas in and around San Francisco and other wealthy coastal areas, but the inland parts of California, where many of the recent immigrants settle, will probably become more morally conservative in the decades ahead. The religion factor, which is a part of minority (or should I say majority now) culture, should not be underestimated (even gang members commonly have Jesus and other religious iconography tattoos as part of their overall look combined with their chain jewelry).
Suppose that an ISP wants to cooperate with Nexicon to get their hands on some of the settlement loot. Suppose further that it costs the ISP nothing to implement detection and collect bounties (in actuallity it would cost them something, but assume for this example that it doesn't). The question(s) become (a) how much will Nexicon split with us AND (b) how many monthly ISP subscriber payments is that worth?
The formula for the number of payments to reach an investment goal is relevant here OR
N = log(1+iF/P) / log(1+i)
Where N is the number of payments, i is the interest rate (per period), F is the final amount (the amount of the cut that the ISP will get from Nexicon), and P is the payment amount (the amount of the monthly subscriber fee for the ISP).
Now assume that Nexicon will split 1/2 of the average $3000 settlement with the ISP (the rest being split between Nexicon and the RIAA music labels) or $1500 AND that the average ISP customer pays about $35 per month for Interent service. Assume also that once the ISP rats out the customer to Nexicon that person or business will cancel their service and never be a customer again. Finally assume that i, the interest rate, is equivalent to a yearly rate of about 2 percent. So how many payments is it worth to the ISP to rat out the customer? The answer is about:
41 payments OR about 3.5 years or service.
Are there any ISP owners out there who would sell out their customers to Nexicon for at best the equivalent of a paltry 3.5 years of subscriber payments in exchange for all of the bad publicity, ill will, and loss of sold out customers permanently (and probably others too, once word gets around that the ISP is ratting people out to the MAFIAA)? I am going to say that the answer is probably, "NO".
It's not like the government holds on to power entirely by force, in other words.
Just because the threat is more often implied than actually followed through doesn't mean that force wasn't or isn't used. China has made so many 'examples' over the years that most people are easily pacified with just a disapproving look from a policeman. For those who aren't there is always the re-education camp where attitudes, among other things, are adjusted.
Surely by now everyone who wants to see the original series has seen it so I won't be spoiling anything by mentioning that they have already killed off the main character in the last episode of the series. They slipped the movie in there by claiming that it took place in between episodes towards the end of the established storyline. So, unless they plan to do a condensed version of the standard storyline, as established in the original television program, what else can they really do that hasn't already been done with these characters? The back stories have already been fleshed out and the conflicts were mostly all resolved in the final espisode, unless they want to do spin off stories of what happens to the surviving members of the Bebop crew after Spike departs.
Clearly, more than just Republicans are against it.
Indeed, there are many citizens living in California who are of Mexican and Latin American descent. These people are mostly registered as Democrats and generally vote with the left on fiscal, social, and other issues. However, there is one caveat that some on the left forgot which is that many of these people are Catholic or were raised as such and even if they are not active in the church on a regular basis they still frame moral judgments within the context of church teachings. It is not hard to guess what the Catholic teachings on gay marriage are and yet many prop 8 supporters seemed to be surprised when this usually reliable constituency voted against them. Given the fact that such peoples are becoming an ever larger component of the California population the gap will probably only widen in the years ahead as the demographics continue to shift. The only hope for prop 8 supporters now is the state supreme court, if they fail to get it overturned there then California will remain a no gay marriage state for generations to come.
The big box stores were the McDonaldizing of electronics and big ticket consumer products.
The difference was in the products, and I don't just mean food vs non-food items. A burger is a pretty understandable concept. I buy it and then I eat it and it takes no special skill to determine whether or not it was any good. I either liked or I didn't and I will be back again when I am hungry or I won't. Electronics are not quite as simple to the average shopper. It is more difficult to recognize and price quality levels in televisions, speakers, receivers, etc and the stakes are generally higher too. If I don't like the McDonalds burger than I can leave and throw the remainder in the rubbish on the way out with the loss of only a few quid. If I get the television home and don't like it then I have to haul it back to the store, wait in the return line, find out that what I really want is going to cost even more, etc.
and not have to go into a Wal-Mart?
Which is the biggest factor really. Wal-Mart has dirty stores, over-worked part time employees who could give a shit about the customer (despite all of Wal-Mart's motivational training bull crap), and their parking lots are becoming centers of criminal activity. The documentary, Wal-Mart: High Cost of Low Price, documents rapes, murders, robberies, and other violent crimes occurring in Wal-Mart parking lots, caught on cameras that were set up not to make customers safe in the parking lots, but rather to spy on union organizing activities in and around the store.
Even WalMart has trouble beating online retailers like Amazon.com which have no physical store presence and Costco still out competes them in the bulk warehouse club store segment (WalMart runs the Sam's Club store to compete with Costco in that category). WalMart is powerful in standard retailing, but they are not omnipotent.
until I picked up the price sign, brought it to him, and got a refund at the cost of my contact info
Which is what they really wanted since your contact info was worth WAY more than $1 to them. Also, you can bet your bottom dollar that all of your information was resold multiple times during the bankruptcy to whatever direct advertising firm(s) would give CC a few dollars for the database. Your junk-mail signal to noise ratio should be decreasing real soon now.
This is exactly what they did do. Most of the choicest and best closeout items were sold off or were inside deals (i.e. you knew one of the employees). It seemed that there was nothing particularly good left by the time the doors opened to the public for the final closeout sell down. At least, that is how it was at our local CC.
CC would have the item but BB never would.
The reason for that was because people, like the grandparent, stopped going to Circuit City for general needs and browsing because the overall selection and availability sucked, the prices were high, and the service was crap. However, if you wanted to go in just for the loss leader (i.e. you read the circular or looked it up online and planned your trip) then you were more likely to get that one item because there were fewer casual shoppers and browsers in Circuit City to compete with you for the loss-leader items.
in order for investment to pay off someone, somewhere has to loose.
Not necessarily. If the growth in the money supply (inflation) is balanced by growth in the quantity of goods and services produced in the economy per person (i.e. economic growth) then everyone enjoys the benefits of more goods and services while being compensated for both their labor or their risk. The reason for fractional reserve banking is to encourage more rapid economic growth through extension of timely credit (since availability of money and the ability to start new projects or produce new goods and services do not always coincide). The current world monetary system has its flaws to be sure and I myself have been a frequent critic of those flaws over the years on here on Slashdot, but it is better than the alternatives which generally include a relatively fixed quantity of hard money leading to frequent liquidity problems (people want to work and produce things now, but they have to wait until enough money enters into circulation to either save or get a loan) or more bartering of goods and services which, as history shows, can be inefficient (hence the reason for money in the first place).
Not quite. It is a crime to use your fake name and such
It is a crime in most countries to jaywalk, do you always obey that law too? Seriously, in most countries there are so many laws on the books that even an honest citizen can be accused of a crime if they become "inconvenient" to those in power. That is how governments have always worked everywhere. You'd have to be nuts to be giving out your real name and address on the Internet every time you download software, crime or not.
This is why you always give a fake address when asked
Personally, I prefer FakeNameGenerator combined with Mailinator. It is fast, easy, and it gets around those pesky sites that attempt to match street names, zip codes, and the like that can be bothersome when making up random information off the top of one's head.
You can configure the modem by directly connecting it to your NIC and using the 192.168.1.1 address (the Westel modems, like most consumer network products these days, feature browser based configuration). I omitted explaining how exactly I set it up because I assumed that everyone reading Slashdot already knew such things.
Did the school she was attending have NO public computer labs anywhere on campus? She could have gone to the public lab with a pair of surgical gloves (those public keyboards can be really dirty after all) and looked up whatever she needed. Most university computer labs also offer printing services either free or for a nominal fee per page. Seriously, if you cannot shovel a bit and solve some basic problems on your own then maybe you aren't ready to attend college.
There are people out there who have no idea how computers work and they are prey to all sorts of disingenuous marketing and out and out disinformation.
The price of ignorance, whether of technical or financial matters, has never been higher in our society and it is growing larger all of the time. My advice to these people would be to turn off American Idle and crack a few books or Google some basic knowledge instead of whining when the smarter and more educated people take all of their money.
I have Verizon DSL at home (I live in a rural area and Comcast cable, which has its own issues, was not available in the area until very recently) and it does not require any windows only software. I have a WRT54G wireless router with the Thibor 15c firmware plugged directly into the DSL modem. I have Ubuntu, WindowsXP, and OSX users all connecting via the wireless router, no special software required other than network drivers and configuration utility for the wireless card on the OS of choice.
Silk worms aren't going to magically create silk worm meat
mmmmm....worm meat. You could probably replace whatever mystery meat is in taco bell tacos with worm meat and nobody would notice the difference.
such as sushi and in particular uni (sea urchin testes...no shit...nasty)
Uni is actually quite good and the taste and texture start to grow on you after a while. I eat Uni maybe twice per month now and it isn't exactly cheap (~$12 for 2 pieces at a decent sushi bar), but it does go great with cold sake (haikison...probably misspelled that one, the label on the bottle is in Japanese) or a large biru (beer, Orion or Sapporo are good). I find that people who gross out over sushi are almost invariably those who have never actually tried it or at least not the uncooked kind.
We're not living in any semblance of a free country when your neighbors can tell you what things you can and can't have on your property simply because they don't look pretty.
You could always put up the solar panels anyway and then publish their fight to get your 'unsightly' solar panels taken down in your blog and on the local news. Sometimes a little public shame can go a long way towards changing people's attitudes and positions. Nobody likes to be the 'bad guy' in a public news story.
It wouldn't be the first time that Coca Cola was involved in an insanity defense...
The US Government has been the primary investor in general research since WW2 and I would not consider it wasteful at all.
The US Government has spent hundreds of dollars, perhaps trillions, of dollars since WW2 on research. One would hope that at least a few gems emerged from all of that spending, but just because some good things have come from government financed research doesn't meant that it was efficient. The space program, for example, has resulted in lots of useful product spin-offs, but almost nothing that could not have been discovered independently without spending billions on a manned space program. Just because good things can come from government spending doesn't mean that we get a good value or don't overpay.