Great, sign me up for the Ford F-450 Super Duty (with the extended cab). That thing puts out enough CO2 to melt an entire icecap in a single trip! Combine that with the ability to crush multiple Priuses in a single pass and you've got an American Revolution (that might be Chevy's line but hey it works). Nothing says, "look at me, I'm an American like a truck the size of bus pushing its way through traffic). Besides, they really should get out of my way because I am a privileged Truck/SUV driver and I am in a hurry to get to the store so that I can fill up my gas guzzling monster truck before making the 50 mile plus trip back to my urban sprawl track home which is conveniently located nowhere near anything else.:D
have lobbied to have certain legislation* added to the new Iraq constitution
Like the people over there give a hoot in hell about Monsanto and their patents. They are too busy bombing, killing, and torturing each other over religious differences to be worried about something as worldly and academic as patents. I would like to see Monsanto and their lawyers travel to Baghdad to try the case in Iraqi court. These are people that pick up the AK-47 with even the slightest provocation and Monsanto wants to sue them? Good luck.
If there is nothing that can be reasonably done to solve a problem then is it logical to spend time worrying about it? Perhaps, but in the case of some people who got the short end of the stick at some point in the historical past that is a whole can of worms. It would probably be best to limit your arguments for compensation of past wrongs to the lifetimes of the original complaintents, otherwise how far back should we go? The 20th century? the 14th? The Roman Empire perhaps?
It may very well be the case that my starting position in this life can be traced all the way back to some barbarians looting Roman settlements along the River Danube (although I have not been able to trace it back that far...those barbarians didn't keep very good records you see). Should I have to compensate the descendants of those Roman settlers (assuming that they are still around and could be located)? Certainly not.
As for the possibility of increased violence and the like I will take my chances. I will not have my life dictated to me by an angry mob and if that means violence then so be it. Why do you think that people live in gated communities with guards, razor wire, and cameras? If having these things means that I get to keep mine then so be it, I make no apologies.
The first lie. Poeple who live in countries with socialised healthcare much prefer it to a private system.
I have never meet a single Canadian or Briton who has had anything nice to say about socialized medicine. The system is widely criticized in both Canada and Britain from both the right and the left (albeit for different reasons). It not a lie that socialized medicine tends to result in rationing out of desire to control costs. The problem is the fixed price of socialized medicine which leads to a shortage of qualified doctors and surgeons, particularly in specialty or advanced treatment areas, because who would want to go all the way through medical school, a grueling process to be sure, only to receive a pittance wage (compared to the amount of work that one has undertaken to get that medical knowledge) fixed by the government? The answer is not many which means shortages in the government controlled clinics and shortages always cause prices to go up. If the monetary price cannot go up then people "pay" in other ways: long waiting lists, black market, bribes, lotteries and rationing for high demand services, etc. There is no free lunch after all.
The second lie. Private healthcare has rationing by price. Public healthcare is rationed by need, a much better and fairer way.
The difference is that the market will respond to a high price, or would in a free system which even the United States does not have, by increasing the amount of health care produced at the expense of other goods and services that we value less. This process results in the most efficient distribution of resources given the fact that total resources of all kinds are necessarily finite and limited. Public healthcare suffers from the same problems as any other centrally planned and administrated economic activity, namely that it is, in practice, extremely difficult for a bureaucratic organization to replace the market as a signaling mechanism to organize and direct the economic inputs that go into producing health care. If central planning was so efficient and good at providing all goods, including health care, then the Soviet Union would not have fallen and the people of China and India would still be counting on socialism to lift them out of the second world and into the first. The world made up its mind last century on that question, some people just didn't get that memo.
The third lie. Waiting lists are not a disadvantage. With private healthcare if you're not fully insured you don't have the privilege of "waiting for treatment", you just die in the gutter.
Yes indeed, it is such a privilege to wait that every private business on this earth rushes to make their customers wait so that they will feel privileged. Please, people don't like to wait and neither do you. Its alright, you can go ahead and admit it.
The forth lie. With public healthcare, the complexity of the operation/treatment is tuned to the difficulty problem, not to how deep the patient's wallet is. This often gets better results than a private approach.
The demand for unilimited cost life saving care will *always* exceed the supply. The governments of Canada, Britain, and everywhere else with socialized medicine could *easily* bankrupt themselves paying whatever it costs to save everyone. There are not unlimited resources to treat everyone who needs to be treated to the fullest extent possible strictly on a need basis so somebody has to decide who gets what. In the socialized system this might be a review board or lottery or waiting list, subject to bribery, political connections, black market, etc (what strings would you *not* pull to save your life or the life of a family member under such a system, especially when you are spending the states money and not your own? The answer of course is anything costs be damned, but your fellow citizens who are not so politically well connected or able to bribe the review board may resent that). In the private system this determination is made b
Wow, finally someone on Slashdot who 'gets it' when it comes to the high costs that Americans are paying for healthcare. This guy hits all of the major points:
1) Socialized medicine *can* control costs, but at the expense of a great deal of patient dissatisfaction, through rationing, waiting lists, less technically complex (and possibly inferior) procedures and drugs, etc. Of course, the dead are no longer able to complain so the problems sort of take care of themselves eventually in a macabre sort of way.
2) Liberal people (with no financial sense) say, "I will pay anything for that!" and they are shocked when somebody actually supplies it and then hands them the bill. The system should take all reasonable steps to save your life, but we have to draw the line somewhere and that means no super-experimental massive cost procedures at public expense that have no reasonable expectation of success other than, "hell lets try this because maybe there is some outside chance that it will work and you will die if we don't and well...you're worth it."
3) Malpractice lawsuits are certainly a big factor here in the United States (we spend 4% of our GDP on lawsuits each year in this country and that is a LOT of lawsuits). There are some states that have begun instituting maximum damage caps to restore some type of sanity to the system (which the trial lawyers naturally oppose vehemently), but the lawsuits continue, the lawyers extract their pint of blood (pun intended), and the rest of us collectively pick up the increased tab.
3) The cost insulation effect is the really *big* issue in skyrocketing health care costs. Third party payer is really the single most directly contributing factor to high health care costs in the United States and the reason is simple...to paraphrase Milton Friedman, "Nobody spends someone else's money as wisely or as frugally as he spends his own."
Castro should have offered to pay *something* for the assets that he seized from American corporations and citizens, stealing is stealing after all. He could end the embargo tomorrow if he would announce free elections in Cuba, make some simple guarantees concerning freedom of speech and other basic rights, and promise to pay some suitable amount of reparations, to be negotiated in good faith, for all of the property that he seized from Americans when he came to power in the 60s. Finally, an apology to the Cuban exiles and all of the people held as political prisoners over the years probably wouldn't hurt either.
I think man will be able to go faster than the speed of light one day. It is just that our current science doesn't understand how.
This is not necessarily true. There are a number of different and interesting thought experiments which scientists, and physicists in particular, use to help them separate what is, according to all current experimental evidence, impossible and what may be possible given enough time and resources spent on researching practical techniques. To put it another way consider a highly advanced race of beings (not us...yet) that is in no way limited by lack of understanding, incompetence, or inability to comprehend, but rather solely by the laws of physics (i.e. the universe) as we now understand them according to body of our accumulated scientific knowledge. What, strictly speaking, would be possible or impossible for this hypothetical advanced race of beings?
If we use this same type of analysis to consider the topic at hand, colonization of our Milky Way Galaxy, then we are able to arrive at some fairly interesting hypothesises. The Milky Way Galaxy is thought, according to the best available scientific evidence, to be at least 13.5 billion years of age. If we assume that there has been intelligent life somewhere in the galaxy, not necessarily one continuous civilization or species, for at least half of that time and that at some point one of these species developed a barely practicable interstellar drive, able to travel at say 1/1000 light speed, then the fact that we are not already part of some vast galactic empire tends to suggest, with high probability, that such travel is simply not possible or at best not practicable since there has already been enough time elapsed for this (the colonization of the Milky Way) to have happened at least a couple of times over.
This is a fairly sound conclusion provided that you believe that the current understanding of physics is not seriously flawed in some way. If you do believe that our current understanding (not lack of current know how mind you, but understanding of the laws of physics) is seriously flawed, then the burden is upon you to prove that our current body of experimental evidence and theories are all bunk before we just throw out the bulk of the last few hundred years of science.
Yes, but it would be even better if it included floating, animated, always on top rich media advertising that was triggered every time the mouse got anywhere near the opinion widget on the page. I just might turn off AdBlock to see it...or then again I might not.
You worry too much about inherited wealth and the relative disparity of income instead of things that really matter like lots of high quality and low cost goods and services that we can all consume in satisfying amounts whether we have millions or just thousands of dollars. You also spend a great deal of time trying to justify sticking your hands in pockets of other people or helping yourself to their property simply because they may have more wealth than you do. That may be good for a populist politician, but it all boils down to coveting your neighbors oxen or his wife or indeed anything else that belongs to your neighbor and that is neither just nor right. If you agree that one should be able to spend one's own money as one freely chooses, subject to some minimal taxes to run the courts and provide for the common defense, then why should I not be able to give that money to my children without that particular transaction being arbitrarily singled out for a particularly onerous tax?
The fraction of inherited wealth as a percentage of wealth is actually declining in the United States and has been declining for some time. This might have something to do with the "stupid" children that you mentioned inheriting 500 million and then pissing it all away within their lifetimes (the fool and his money are soon parted as they say). That money is also not just sitting in some vault somewhere collecting dust, but rather most of the accumulated wealth is reinvested back into the economy. I don't particularly care *who* owns that wealth as long as they make it available for other people to invest at competitive rates (which is in fact precisely what occurs) so that we can produce and consume more goods and services more cheaply.
The liberal socialists out there dislike us libertarians because, "gosh darn it, we are just so unconcerned with fairness," (where the socialists define fairness as heavily taxing anyone who is more wealthy than they are) but in fact we recognize the truth that government will always fail to achieve the desired results, however noble and egalitarian its intentions, when it tries to "redistribute" existing wealth via legislative fiat and the power of coercive force (the so called 'leaky bucket' tax and spend model). If you *really* want to help the poor then you allow anyone and everyone to compete without undue interference, restrictions, or favoritism by the government or in other words you need to create new worth by achieving economic growth. It is a waste of time to complain about some people having a better start or an easier childhood, we all play the hand that we are dealt. It is not my problem that some parents are irresponsible and raise ignorant children with poor financial habits. My parents were not and are not wealthy, but you don't see me begging the government for my share of my millionaire neighbor's property. The winners in this life make the best use they can of what talents and resources they have while the losers sit on their hands and whine about how they weren't born with a silver spoon in their mouth...darn.
The second Atlantis leaves, should the thrusters from The Soyuz and The Progress not be sufficient to stabilize the ISS, it's a goner.
So, they either (a) fix the computers that control the gyros on the space station OR (b) everyone still up there boards either the Soyuz or Atlantis and everyone bails leaving the station to its fiery demise after it tumbles out of control OR (c) the Russians send a progress craft up there with more fuel (does the space shuttle support in flight refueling?) and consumables for the crews (the oxygen generator on the ISS is broken too they say). The space shuttle, as far as anyone without security clearance knows, has never been refueled in flight so it looks like the most likely option is everyone bails (option 'b') unless they can either fix the computers on the IIS (which may require getting new computers on a progress ala option 'c') which seems to be increasingly unlikely at this point. Perhaps Sir Isaac Newton will finally kill a project that Congress and several Presidents have been unable to. There are certainly some scientists that will not be sad to see the ISS go, given its deleterious effects on NASA's budget for other missions.
The U.S. space agency and Russian officials are still trying to determine the cause of a failure affecting multiple computers in the Russian network
I seem to recall that the Russians had a penchant, dating from the early days of their space program, to design, build, and use analog computers as either backups to main digital computers OR in embedded subsystems such as attitude control, oxygen generation, and the like. It is interesting to note that the failure occurred soon after a new solar panel installation was completed, thereby increasing the amount of current flowing across the power bus. Is it possible that analog computers that were taking a direct shunt of that power as an input could have been gradually fried under the increased load? An interesting question to be sure, perhaps a more well versed engineer among us can answer this one.
Sure they won't be well trained or equipped but if anything the last couple of decades has shown better trained and equipped doesn't give you a huge advantage it once did.
What the heck gave you that idea? Why do you suppose that nobody wants to engage the United States in a toe to toe military conflict using armies, air, and naval power? Hmmm...could it be because they would, I don't know, get their collective butts kicked? Aircraft carriers, stealth aircraft, air superiority, satellites, and well trained and equipped marines, etc make all of the difference in the world. The Chinese know this and their army is actually shrinking in numbers of manpower while at the same time they increase their spending to acquire ever more advanced equipment and training for those that remain. The Chinese military wants to *be* like us, they don't want another million conscripts armed with bolt action rifles or knockoff AK-47s marching around on foot. The future of conflict is smaller armies with extremely high tech equipment, combined arms resources, and high levels of training not the "every peasant with a rifle" tactics of yesterday.
Did you grow up in a family where your parents and the children shared resources and allocated them as a group?
No, we did not or at least not as you suggest. In my family we received only the basic items (food, clothing, shelter, and education) and items directly associated with those needs free of charge (and even then they were allocated by the parents, not the children). If we wanted anything else then we had to save our allowance money which we received in exchange for extra chores (there were also required chores for which we received no remuneration so it could be argued that even the basics were not free although they were subsidized). If we wanted to borrow against our future allowance then we were charged interest on the loans and the amount that was available for borrowing was dependent upon our previous loan repayment records. It would be more accurate to say that my family was and is a mini-capitalist unit (w/some minimal socialist policies...and I do mean minimal) operating within a larger capitalist society.
Favoring any one of those three models to an extreme leads to a breakdown of the system. Too much capitalism leads to wealth condensation, where all the money and hence power consolidates into only a few hands, thus also making it easy for a totalitarian regime to take over and motivates the people to aid in overthrowing those in power (since it is the only way to return to a more level economic playing field).
This is where we part company and disagree. There is nothing wrong with wealth condensation provided that the total production per person and therefore the standard of living rises right along with it (which tends to happen in free market capitalism). It is the responsibility of the government to enforce rules and ensure fair dealing, in much the same way that the referee enforces the rules and ensures fair play in a competitive sporting competition. The combination of democracy with free market capitalism has overwhelmingly and consistently, despite some difficulties, delivered the best economic outcomes (in the long run) to the greatest number of people time and again wherever it has been tried.
People tend to criticize the capitalist and free market systems based solely upon the experience of the United States, but in fact even the United States has not achieved a truly free market system and much of our problems can be attributed to the socialist elements of our system (i.e. entitlements such as social security, medicaid, medicare, excessive regulation, excessive taxes, etc...). If the governments were to withdraw back into their limited original roles, as defined in the constitutions of the states and federal government, then we would see the true power of the free market system to raise all of the boats, but instead the Democrats (and the Republicans too) are busy draining the lake with their misguided tax and spend big government policies. The problem is that too many Americans simply roll over and cough it up whenever the government sticks its hand in their pocket without asking what gives them the right to tax something and more importantly what the money is going to be spent on and how that fits in with the limited powers of government as outlined in the constitution.
Extreme capitalism can just as easily destroy a democracy as extreme communism or extreme socialism. The key is to have a moderate, balanced economy instead of being an extremist.
Why? What is wrong with fair and vigorous competition and creative destruction? It is too often the case that socialism prevents that competition from taking place and while this may prevent some real losers from losing everything it condemns everyone to an equal portion of misery in return.
the Chinese people are fed a picture of the world as the Communist leadership wants it seen
Was it not Mao Tsetung who once said, "the information that is given to the peasants must be carefully controlled so that they draw the right conclusions from it," or something to that effect. This is an old standard from the communist play book and should not be surprising in the least.
It is certainly not a chemical addiction to an external substance in the way that some drugs can be, however it may be the case that certain games, and MMORPGs in particular, result in a type of physiological dependence in some people when coupled with certain chemicals produced and released by the body (similar to some of the aforementioned drugs, but not externally introduced) as part of the positive = pleasure and negative = pain reward pathways in the brain. In this sense it has no substantial proven edge (to my knowledge) over any other potentially "addicting" hobbies or activities that people engage in for recreational purposes. I suppose it depends upon how one defines addiction.
I was thinking along the same lines when I read the phrase, "deceptive comfort" (talk about a loaded phrase) and promised myself that I wouldn't be dragged into the mud for yet another round of debate between the professional corporate programmer and the console cowboy, gcc hacking, linux uber geeks, but unfortunately my will is weak and so here we go again...
It has been my experience that a certain attitude, regarding the utility of more feature rich development tools, exists among Linux programmers which I find difficult to understand. They seem regard anything other than the most minimalist, zen-like, or spartan programming tools as either a complete waste of time or a highly suspect crutch for lesser (i.e. less worthy) programmers than themselves (not a flattering judgment in either case). It is my own opinion that such views are detrimental to the development of Linux as a platform since there are necessarily fewer professional programmers who take a whipping boy approach to their programming tools (i.e. *real* geeks use Emacs or VI and gcc and nothing else).
Visual Studio is less a "deceptive comfort", as the author chooses to put it, and more of a what a modern, productive, and efficient IDE *should* be (although it does fall short of that ideal sometimes). In my opinion, linux would be many times more successful if there were something more directly analogous to Visual Studio (Eclipse is getting there but it still has a ways to go) available for development. The "developer mindshare" among Linux geeks is comparatively low when weighed against, say the Windows platform and Visual Studio and whose fault is that? I leave that one as an exercise for the reader.
Were OPEC to begin accepting other currencies, all these US dollars floating outside USA would be far less needed, thus starting to flow back into USA.
Perhaps, but the USA is also the 'consumer of last resort' for the export economies of these same European and Asian countries so they cannot dump all of their dollars without destroying the purchasing power of the average American and if that average American cannot consume then the entire world feels the pain right along with us here in the USA. There simply isn't enough domestic demand in China, South Korea, Indonesia, etc to absorb the loss of demand for exports from the USA. Their whole economies depend upon exporting stuff to the USA where we buy it with, you guessed it...US dollars. Thus, the Europeans and the Asians cannot do what you suggest because they would be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
THEY FINE THE TRUCKER FOR THE TAXES HE WOULD HAVE PAID if he were stupid enough to buy NC's overpriced fuel.
How exactly do they measure this? If they just open the cap and take a peek, then it might be possible to install an inflatable air bladder in the tank so that the tank can be made to look 'full' at the flip of a switch from the cab. It would probably not be too difficult to install a system like this given that most trucks are already equipped with an air system to feed the trailer brakes and truckers tend to be mechanically inclined tinkerers anyway so perhaps someone is already doing this.
Write your own system. Throw out the charts. Tell stories. It's more fun, more memorable, and a heck of a lot cheaper.
...or just buy yourself a copy of the HERO System 5th edition revised and run *any* type of game that you can think of in any setting at any time. I have played a lot of RPG systems over the years and this is the only one I have come across, with the possible exception of Chartmaster, which tries to do the same thing but doesn't do it as well as HERO does, that literally allows you to run any game that you can think of. The only downside, if you can call it that, but you seem to be sort of gung-ho on creating your own materials, is that you have to do some additional work to build say a fantasy campaign, or a Star Wars campaign, or a cyberpunk type campaign, but all of these are possible and the combinations that can be created from the base rules are practically endless AND you can mix and match materials from different campaigns easily because the basis is the same. Think of HERO as the C programming language for your RPG games and you will have some idea about what I am getting at.
If you *really* wanted to run a campaign set in the Star Wars universe and you were willing to do a bit of work fleshing out some of the details then you could have used the HERO System to run your game and it would have been a hell of a lot better than WotC d20 Star Wars. I know that HERO is a bit complex, but it really works well in groups of older gamers (who have better than high school level of education) with previous experience in similar RPG type games. The problem with d20 and similar simplified systems is that they are bound by their simplification to pre-determined and templated campaign styles and this is fine IF you just want to run quick and casual games where the action moves quickly at the expense of some realism and details. However, serious players with more refined tastes will appreciate the greater flexibility and freedom afforded by the HERO system when the game becomes longer, more detailed, and more drawn out in scope.
If it's not real cops and they don't have real warrants wouldn't shooting up their ass come under reasonable force for self-defence?
It probably depends upon the situation, where the raid takes place (which state), when the raid takes place (middle of the night as opposed to broad daylight), whether the raid was announced (even if only five minutes prior to arriving), and finally whether or not there are *real* law enforcement officers accompanying the rent-a-cops. If it was just the rent-a-cops and they arrived unannounced during the night and without law enforcement vehicles in a rural part of Tennessee, for example, then they would probably be picking buckshot out of their asses while they waited real police officers to show up. Some of the states in the American south east and mid west have shoot first and ask questions later laws for trespassers in the middle of the night dating back to the days of horse thieves and cattle rustlers. I would venture to guess that most rent-a-cops would probably retreat if meet with armed resistance (they are not going to risk getting shot for a couple of bucks of overtime pay at their rent-a-cop night job, especially since it may not be covered by their regular health insurance).
It would be a VERY intelligent script that could COMPREHEND the purpose of any particular html input field.
Not really, considering that most of these scripts are targeted at large sites (yahoo, hotmail, etc) OR common site frameworks (PhpNuke, Drupal, Blogger, etc) where common hidden field input patterns would very quickly be tested and coded around by the script writers. The whole point of CAPTCHA in the first place was that it presented a random and dynamic test which was easy enough for users to solve (at least in theory) while hard enough to foil simple analysis by script. This might work on a small custom website where it is not worth the trouble of the script writers to code a version specifically for the hidden input pattern of your site, but this hidden field stuff was tried and failed on big sites even before CAPTCHA was in common use.
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Great, sign me up for the Ford F-450 Super Duty (with the extended cab). That thing puts out enough CO2 to melt an entire icecap in a single trip! Combine that with the ability to crush multiple Priuses in a single pass and you've got an American Revolution (that might be Chevy's line but hey it works). Nothing says, "look at me, I'm an American like a truck the size of bus pushing its way through traffic). Besides, they really should get out of my way because I am a privileged Truck/SUV driver and I am in a hurry to get to the store so that I can fill up my gas guzzling monster truck before making the 50 mile plus trip back to my urban sprawl track home which is conveniently located nowhere near anything else. :D
have lobbied to have certain legislation* added to the new Iraq constitution
Like the people over there give a hoot in hell about Monsanto and their patents. They are too busy bombing, killing, and torturing each other over religious differences to be worried about something as worldly and academic as patents. I would like to see Monsanto and their lawyers travel to Baghdad to try the case in Iraqi court. These are people that pick up the AK-47 with even the slightest provocation and Monsanto wants to sue them? Good luck.
If there is nothing that can be reasonably done to solve a problem then is it logical to spend time worrying about it? Perhaps, but in the case of some people who got the short end of the stick at some point in the historical past that is a whole can of worms. It would probably be best to limit your arguments for compensation of past wrongs to the lifetimes of the original complaintents, otherwise how far back should we go? The 20th century? the 14th? The Roman Empire perhaps?
It may very well be the case that my starting position in this life can be traced all the way back to some barbarians looting Roman settlements along the River Danube (although I have not been able to trace it back that far...those barbarians didn't keep very good records you see). Should I have to compensate the descendants of those Roman settlers (assuming that they are still around and could be located)? Certainly not.
As for the possibility of increased violence and the like I will take my chances. I will not have my life dictated to me by an angry mob and if that means violence then so be it. Why do you think that people live in gated communities with guards, razor wire, and cameras? If having these things means that I get to keep mine then so be it, I make no apologies.
The first lie. Poeple who live in countries with socialised healthcare much prefer it to a private system.
I have never meet a single Canadian or Briton who has had anything nice to say about socialized medicine. The system is widely criticized in both Canada and Britain from both the right and the left (albeit for different reasons). It not a lie that socialized medicine tends to result in rationing out of desire to control costs. The problem is the fixed price of socialized medicine which leads to a shortage of qualified doctors and surgeons, particularly in specialty or advanced treatment areas, because who would want to go all the way through medical school, a grueling process to be sure, only to receive a pittance wage (compared to the amount of work that one has undertaken to get that medical knowledge) fixed by the government? The answer is not many which means shortages in the government controlled clinics and shortages always cause prices to go up. If the monetary price cannot go up then people "pay" in other ways: long waiting lists, black market, bribes, lotteries and rationing for high demand services, etc. There is no free lunch after all.
The second lie. Private healthcare has rationing by price. Public healthcare is rationed by need, a much better and fairer way.
The difference is that the market will respond to a high price, or would in a free system which even the United States does not have, by increasing the amount of health care produced at the expense of other goods and services that we value less. This process results in the most efficient distribution of resources given the fact that total resources of all kinds are necessarily finite and limited. Public healthcare suffers from the same problems as any other centrally planned and administrated economic activity, namely that it is, in practice, extremely difficult for a bureaucratic organization to replace the market as a signaling mechanism to organize and direct the economic inputs that go into producing health care. If central planning was so efficient and good at providing all goods, including health care, then the Soviet Union would not have fallen and the people of China and India would still be counting on socialism to lift them out of the second world and into the first. The world made up its mind last century on that question, some people just didn't get that memo.
The third lie. Waiting lists are not a disadvantage. With private healthcare if you're not fully insured you don't have the privilege of "waiting for treatment", you just die in the gutter.
Yes indeed, it is such a privilege to wait that every private business on this earth rushes to make their customers wait so that they will feel privileged. Please, people don't like to wait and neither do you. Its alright, you can go ahead and admit it.
The forth lie. With public healthcare, the complexity of the operation/treatment is tuned to the difficulty problem, not to how deep the patient's wallet is. This often gets better results than a private approach.
The demand for unilimited cost life saving care will *always* exceed the supply. The governments of Canada, Britain, and everywhere else with socialized medicine could *easily* bankrupt themselves paying whatever it costs to save everyone. There are not unlimited resources to treat everyone who needs to be treated to the fullest extent possible strictly on a need basis so somebody has to decide who gets what. In the socialized system this might be a review board or lottery or waiting list, subject to bribery, political connections, black market, etc (what strings would you *not* pull to save your life or the life of a family member under such a system, especially when you are spending the states money and not your own? The answer of course is anything costs be damned, but your fellow citizens who are not so politically well connected or able to bribe the review board may resent that). In the private system this determination is made b
Wow, finally someone on Slashdot who 'gets it' when it comes to the high costs that Americans are paying for healthcare. This guy hits all of the major points:
1) Socialized medicine *can* control costs, but at the expense of a great deal of patient dissatisfaction, through rationing, waiting lists, less technically complex (and possibly inferior) procedures and drugs, etc. Of course, the dead are no longer able to complain so the problems sort of take care of themselves eventually in a macabre sort of way.
2) Liberal people (with no financial sense) say, "I will pay anything for that!" and they are shocked when somebody actually supplies it and then hands them the bill. The system should take all reasonable steps to save your life, but we have to draw the line somewhere and that means no super-experimental massive cost procedures at public expense that have no reasonable expectation of success other than, "hell lets try this because maybe there is some outside chance that it will work and you will die if we don't and well...you're worth it."
3) Malpractice lawsuits are certainly a big factor here in the United States (we spend 4% of our GDP on lawsuits each year in this country and that is a LOT of lawsuits). There are some states that have begun instituting maximum damage caps to restore some type of sanity to the system (which the trial lawyers naturally oppose vehemently), but the lawsuits continue, the lawyers extract their pint of blood (pun intended), and the rest of us collectively pick up the increased tab.
3) The cost insulation effect is the really *big* issue in skyrocketing health care costs. Third party payer is really the single most directly contributing factor to high health care costs in the United States and the reason is simple...to paraphrase Milton Friedman, "Nobody spends someone else's money as wisely or as frugally as he spends his own."
Further Recommended Reading: How To Cure Health Care - by Milton Friedman
Castro should have offered to pay *something* for the assets that he seized from American corporations and citizens, stealing is stealing after all. He could end the embargo tomorrow if he would announce free elections in Cuba, make some simple guarantees concerning freedom of speech and other basic rights, and promise to pay some suitable amount of reparations, to be negotiated in good faith, for all of the property that he seized from Americans when he came to power in the 60s. Finally, an apology to the Cuban exiles and all of the people held as political prisoners over the years probably wouldn't hurt either.
I think man will be able to go faster than the speed of light one day. It is just that our current science doesn't understand how.
This is not necessarily true. There are a number of different and interesting thought experiments which scientists, and physicists in particular, use to help them separate what is, according to all current experimental evidence, impossible and what may be possible given enough time and resources spent on researching practical techniques. To put it another way consider a highly advanced race of beings (not us...yet) that is in no way limited by lack of understanding, incompetence, or inability to comprehend, but rather solely by the laws of physics (i.e. the universe) as we now understand them according to body of our accumulated scientific knowledge. What, strictly speaking, would be possible or impossible for this hypothetical advanced race of beings?
If we use this same type of analysis to consider the topic at hand, colonization of our Milky Way Galaxy, then we are able to arrive at some fairly interesting hypothesises. The Milky Way Galaxy is thought, according to the best available scientific evidence, to be at least 13.5 billion years of age. If we assume that there has been intelligent life somewhere in the galaxy, not necessarily one continuous civilization or species, for at least half of that time and that at some point one of these species developed a barely practicable interstellar drive, able to travel at say 1/1000 light speed, then the fact that we are not already part of some vast galactic empire tends to suggest, with high probability, that such travel is simply not possible or at best not practicable since there has already been enough time elapsed for this (the colonization of the Milky Way) to have happened at least a couple of times over.
This is a fairly sound conclusion provided that you believe that the current understanding of physics is not seriously flawed in some way. If you do believe that our current understanding (not lack of current know how mind you, but understanding of the laws of physics) is seriously flawed, then the burden is upon you to prove that our current body of experimental evidence and theories are all bunk before we just throw out the bulk of the last few hundred years of science.
That is good advice
Yes, but it would be even better if it included floating, animated, always on top rich media advertising that was triggered every time the mouse got anywhere near the opinion widget on the page. I just might turn off AdBlock to see it...or then again I might not.
You worry too much about inherited wealth and the relative disparity of income instead of things that really matter like lots of high quality and low cost goods and services that we can all consume in satisfying amounts whether we have millions or just thousands of dollars. You also spend a great deal of time trying to justify sticking your hands in pockets of other people or helping yourself to their property simply because they may have more wealth than you do. That may be good for a populist politician, but it all boils down to coveting your neighbors oxen or his wife or indeed anything else that belongs to your neighbor and that is neither just nor right. If you agree that one should be able to spend one's own money as one freely chooses, subject to some minimal taxes to run the courts and provide for the common defense, then why should I not be able to give that money to my children without that particular transaction being arbitrarily singled out for a particularly onerous tax?
The fraction of inherited wealth as a percentage of wealth is actually declining in the United States and has been declining for some time. This might have something to do with the "stupid" children that you mentioned inheriting 500 million and then pissing it all away within their lifetimes (the fool and his money are soon parted as they say). That money is also not just sitting in some vault somewhere collecting dust, but rather most of the accumulated wealth is reinvested back into the economy. I don't particularly care *who* owns that wealth as long as they make it available for other people to invest at competitive rates (which is in fact precisely what occurs) so that we can produce and consume more goods and services more cheaply.
The liberal socialists out there dislike us libertarians because, "gosh darn it, we are just so unconcerned with fairness," (where the socialists define fairness as heavily taxing anyone who is more wealthy than they are) but in fact we recognize the truth that government will always fail to achieve the desired results, however noble and egalitarian its intentions, when it tries to "redistribute" existing wealth via legislative fiat and the power of coercive force (the so called 'leaky bucket' tax and spend model). If you *really* want to help the poor then you allow anyone and everyone to compete without undue interference, restrictions, or favoritism by the government or in other words you need to create new worth by achieving economic growth. It is a waste of time to complain about some people having a better start or an easier childhood, we all play the hand that we are dealt. It is not my problem that some parents are irresponsible and raise ignorant children with poor financial habits. My parents were not and are not wealthy, but you don't see me begging the government for my share of my millionaire neighbor's property. The winners in this life make the best use they can of what talents and resources they have while the losers sit on their hands and whine about how they weren't born with a silver spoon in their mouth...darn.
clearly sarcasm is lost upon some people...
The second Atlantis leaves, should the thrusters from The Soyuz and The Progress not be sufficient to stabilize the ISS, it's a goner.
So, they either (a) fix the computers that control the gyros on the space station OR (b) everyone still up there boards either the Soyuz or Atlantis and everyone bails leaving the station to its fiery demise after it tumbles out of control OR (c) the Russians send a progress craft up there with more fuel (does the space shuttle support in flight refueling?) and consumables for the crews (the oxygen generator on the ISS is broken too they say). The space shuttle, as far as anyone without security clearance knows, has never been refueled in flight so it looks like the most likely option is everyone bails (option 'b') unless they can either fix the computers on the IIS (which may require getting new computers on a progress ala option 'c') which seems to be increasingly unlikely at this point. Perhaps Sir Isaac Newton will finally kill a project that Congress and several Presidents have been unable to. There are certainly some scientists that will not be sad to see the ISS go, given its deleterious effects on NASA's budget for other missions.
The U.S. space agency and Russian officials are still trying to determine the cause of a failure affecting multiple computers in the Russian network
I seem to recall that the Russians had a penchant, dating from the early days of their space program, to design, build, and use analog computers as either backups to main digital computers OR in embedded subsystems such as attitude control, oxygen generation, and the like. It is interesting to note that the failure occurred soon after a new solar panel installation was completed, thereby increasing the amount of current flowing across the power bus. Is it possible that analog computers that were taking a direct shunt of that power as an input could have been gradually fried under the increased load? An interesting question to be sure, perhaps a more well versed engineer among us can answer this one.
Sure they won't be well trained or equipped but if anything the last couple of decades has shown better trained and equipped doesn't give you a huge advantage it once did.
What the heck gave you that idea? Why do you suppose that nobody wants to engage the United States in a toe to toe military conflict using armies, air, and naval power? Hmmm...could it be because they would, I don't know, get their collective butts kicked? Aircraft carriers, stealth aircraft, air superiority, satellites, and well trained and equipped marines, etc make all of the difference in the world. The Chinese know this and their army is actually shrinking in numbers of manpower while at the same time they increase their spending to acquire ever more advanced equipment and training for those that remain. The Chinese military wants to *be* like us, they don't want another million conscripts armed with bolt action rifles or knockoff AK-47s marching around on foot. The future of conflict is smaller armies with extremely high tech equipment, combined arms resources, and high levels of training not the "every peasant with a rifle" tactics of yesterday.
Did you grow up in a family where your parents and the children shared resources and allocated them as a group?
No, we did not or at least not as you suggest. In my family we received only the basic items (food, clothing, shelter, and education) and items directly associated with those needs free of charge (and even then they were allocated by the parents, not the children). If we wanted anything else then we had to save our allowance money which we received in exchange for extra chores (there were also required chores for which we received no remuneration so it could be argued that even the basics were not free although they were subsidized). If we wanted to borrow against our future allowance then we were charged interest on the loans and the amount that was available for borrowing was dependent upon our previous loan repayment records. It would be more accurate to say that my family was and is a mini-capitalist unit (w/some minimal socialist policies...and I do mean minimal) operating within a larger capitalist society.
Favoring any one of those three models to an extreme leads to a breakdown of the system. Too much capitalism leads to wealth condensation, where all the money and hence power consolidates into only a few hands, thus also making it easy for a totalitarian regime to take over and motivates the people to aid in overthrowing those in power (since it is the only way to return to a more level economic playing field).
This is where we part company and disagree. There is nothing wrong with wealth condensation provided that the total production per person and therefore the standard of living rises right along with it (which tends to happen in free market capitalism). It is the responsibility of the government to enforce rules and ensure fair dealing, in much the same way that the referee enforces the rules and ensures fair play in a competitive sporting competition. The combination of democracy with free market capitalism has overwhelmingly and consistently, despite some difficulties, delivered the best economic outcomes (in the long run) to the greatest number of people time and again wherever it has been tried.
People tend to criticize the capitalist and free market systems based solely upon the experience of the United States, but in fact even the United States has not achieved a truly free market system and much of our problems can be attributed to the socialist elements of our system (i.e. entitlements such as social security, medicaid, medicare, excessive regulation, excessive taxes, etc...). If the governments were to withdraw back into their limited original roles, as defined in the constitutions of the states and federal government, then we would see the true power of the free market system to raise all of the boats, but instead the Democrats (and the Republicans too) are busy draining the lake with their misguided tax and spend big government policies. The problem is that too many Americans simply roll over and cough it up whenever the government sticks its hand in their pocket without asking what gives them the right to tax something and more importantly what the money is going to be spent on and how that fits in with the limited powers of government as outlined in the constitution.
Extreme capitalism can just as easily destroy a democracy as extreme communism or extreme socialism. The key is to have a moderate, balanced economy instead of being an extremist.
Why? What is wrong with fair and vigorous competition and creative destruction? It is too often the case that socialism prevents that competition from taking place and while this may prevent some real losers from losing everything it condemns everyone to an equal portion of misery in return.
the Chinese people are fed a picture of the world as the Communist leadership wants it seen
Was it not Mao Tsetung who once said, "the information that is given to the peasants must be carefully controlled so that they draw the right conclusions from it," or something to that effect. This is an old standard from the communist play book and should not be surprising in the least.
It is certainly not a chemical addiction to an external substance in the way that some drugs can be, however it may be the case that certain games, and MMORPGs in particular, result in a type of physiological dependence in some people when coupled with certain chemicals produced and released by the body (similar to some of the aforementioned drugs, but not externally introduced) as part of the positive = pleasure and negative = pain reward pathways in the brain. In this sense it has no substantial proven edge (to my knowledge) over any other potentially "addicting" hobbies or activities that people engage in for recreational purposes. I suppose it depends upon how one defines addiction.
I was thinking along the same lines when I read the phrase, "deceptive comfort" (talk about a loaded phrase) and promised myself that I wouldn't be dragged into the mud for yet another round of debate between the professional corporate programmer and the console cowboy, gcc hacking, linux uber geeks, but unfortunately my will is weak and so here we go again...
It has been my experience that a certain attitude, regarding the utility of more feature rich development tools, exists among Linux programmers which I find difficult to understand. They seem regard anything other than the most minimalist, zen-like, or spartan programming tools as either a complete waste of time or a highly suspect crutch for lesser (i.e. less worthy) programmers than themselves (not a flattering judgment in either case). It is my own opinion that such views are detrimental to the development of Linux as a platform since there are necessarily fewer professional programmers who take a whipping boy approach to their programming tools (i.e. *real* geeks use Emacs or VI and gcc and nothing else).
Visual Studio is less a "deceptive comfort", as the author chooses to put it, and more of a what a modern, productive, and efficient IDE *should* be (although it does fall short of that ideal sometimes). In my opinion, linux would be many times more successful if there were something more directly analogous to Visual Studio (Eclipse is getting there but it still has a ways to go) available for development. The "developer mindshare" among Linux geeks is comparatively low when weighed against, say the Windows platform and Visual Studio and whose fault is that? I leave that one as an exercise for the reader.
Were OPEC to begin accepting other currencies, all these US dollars floating outside USA would be far less needed, thus starting to flow back into USA.
Perhaps, but the USA is also the 'consumer of last resort' for the export economies of these same European and Asian countries so they cannot dump all of their dollars without destroying the purchasing power of the average American and if that average American cannot consume then the entire world feels the pain right along with us here in the USA. There simply isn't enough domestic demand in China, South Korea, Indonesia, etc to absorb the loss of demand for exports from the USA. Their whole economies depend upon exporting stuff to the USA where we buy it with, you guessed it...US dollars. Thus, the Europeans and the Asians cannot do what you suggest because they would be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
THEY FINE THE TRUCKER FOR THE TAXES HE WOULD HAVE PAID if he were stupid enough to buy NC's overpriced fuel.
How exactly do they measure this? If they just open the cap and take a peek, then it might be possible to install an inflatable air bladder in the tank so that the tank can be made to look 'full' at the flip of a switch from the cab. It would probably not be too difficult to install a system like this given that most trucks are already equipped with an air system to feed the trailer brakes and truckers tend to be mechanically inclined tinkerers anyway so perhaps someone is already doing this.
Write your own system. Throw out the charts. Tell stories. It's more fun, more memorable, and a heck of a lot cheaper.
...or just buy yourself a copy of the HERO System 5th edition revised and run *any* type of game that you can think of in any setting at any time. I have played a lot of RPG systems over the years and this is the only one I have come across, with the possible exception of Chartmaster, which tries to do the same thing but doesn't do it as well as HERO does, that literally allows you to run any game that you can think of. The only downside, if you can call it that, but you seem to be sort of gung-ho on creating your own materials, is that you have to do some additional work to build say a fantasy campaign, or a Star Wars campaign, or a cyberpunk type campaign, but all of these are possible and the combinations that can be created from the base rules are practically endless AND you can mix and match materials from different campaigns easily because the basis is the same. Think of HERO as the C programming language for your RPG games and you will have some idea about what I am getting at.
If you *really* wanted to run a campaign set in the Star Wars universe and you were willing to do a bit of work fleshing out some of the details then you could have used the HERO System to run your game and it would have been a hell of a lot better than WotC d20 Star Wars. I know that HERO is a bit complex, but it really works well in groups of older gamers (who have better than high school level of education) with previous experience in similar RPG type games. The problem with d20 and similar simplified systems is that they are bound by their simplification to pre-determined and templated campaign styles and this is fine IF you just want to run quick and casual games where the action moves quickly at the expense of some realism and details. However, serious players with more refined tastes will appreciate the greater flexibility and freedom afforded by the HERO system when the game becomes longer, more detailed, and more drawn out in scope.
If it's not real cops and they don't have real warrants wouldn't shooting up their ass come under reasonable force for self-defence?
It probably depends upon the situation, where the raid takes place (which state), when the raid takes place (middle of the night as opposed to broad daylight), whether the raid was announced (even if only five minutes prior to arriving), and finally whether or not there are *real* law enforcement officers accompanying the rent-a-cops. If it was just the rent-a-cops and they arrived unannounced during the night and without law enforcement vehicles in a rural part of Tennessee, for example, then they would probably be picking buckshot out of their asses while they waited real police officers to show up. Some of the states in the American south east and mid west have shoot first and ask questions later laws for trespassers in the middle of the night dating back to the days of horse thieves and cattle rustlers. I would venture to guess that most rent-a-cops would probably retreat if meet with armed resistance (they are not going to risk getting shot for a couple of bucks of overtime pay at their rent-a-cop night job, especially since it may not be covered by their regular health insurance).
When will it end?
When they pass the Lawyers' Full Employment Act...
It would be a VERY intelligent script that could COMPREHEND the purpose of any particular html input field.
Not really, considering that most of these scripts are targeted at large sites (yahoo, hotmail, etc) OR common site frameworks (PhpNuke, Drupal, Blogger, etc) where common hidden field input patterns would very quickly be tested and coded around by the script writers. The whole point of CAPTCHA in the first place was that it presented a random and dynamic test which was easy enough for users to solve (at least in theory) while hard enough to foil simple analysis by script. This might work on a small custom website where it is not worth the trouble of the script writers to code a version specifically for the hidden input pattern of your site, but this hidden field stuff was tried and failed on big sites even before CAPTCHA was in common use.