I created this miracle cure guaranteed to extend a terminal patients life by a significant amount of time. If you are ever terminally ill,... it's basically a hair dryer with a bunch of magnets arranged in a specific pattern around the air chamber that blows on your while you ingest aspirin and sugar pills.
Can you see why the FDA has some reservations about opening the flood gates on medicines and procedures like that?
It is legal to give yourself cancer by living on junk food. It is legal to attempt to cure that cancer by praying in church. It is illegal to attempt to cure that cancer using aspirin and a hair dryer with magnets.
I created this miracle cure guaranteed to extend a terminal patients life... it's basically a hair dryer with a bunch of magnets arranged in a specific pattern around the air chamber that blows on your while you ingest aspirin and sugar pills.
Can you see why the FDA has some reservations about opening the flood gates on medicines and procedures like that?
No, actually, not all.
Risky and irrational behaviors are protected freedoms. Alcoholism, obesity, unprotected promiscuous sexual behavior and large expenditures on irrational superstitions ceremonies (religion) are all protected freedoms. They are all harmful but the government has no legal authority to prevent you from engaging in them and protects your rights to engage in those behaviors; If I harass you because you are extremely fat, then that is crime.
So what makes dangerous and superstitious behavior illegal specifically in the context of medicine? Why regulate medicine for the public good but not regulate obesity, religion or sex for the public good?
You're not being forced; if you don't like it, don't consume the media.
from the summary
From government-mandated spyware that deletes infringing content to border searches of media players
Ya, that should work. Just tell the government that you are not consuming any media and they will not infect your computer with spyware or search you at the border.
Given the US government's willingness to bend over for Big Media...
Wrong metaphor; It is not the government who is getting screwed here. On the contrary, congressmen are collect big checks from media corporations for selling off our rights. I think you mean.
Given the US government's willingness to force citizens to bend over for Big Media
The issue is poorly framed because she real sources of controversy are not whether "UFO studies" is taught but whether it is taught be skeptics or believers and whether it is publicly or privately funded.
For instance, your position might be to both endorse publicly-funded skepticism of alien encounters and to permit privately-funded teachings alien encounters. Then it is misleading to frame the issue as being for-or-against UFO education.
So it took about one day for the gullible Jordanians who initially believed the reports of aliens to gather evidence, refute those claims, and adjust their beliefs accordingly. Yet initial expression of the Islamic religion occurred about 14 centuries ago and they still believe in an imaginary being which controls events on earth. Why is that? Why such selective application of empiricism and reason?
The Spitzer Telescope is name for American theoretical physicist and astronomer Lyman Spitzer, not the millionaire New York real estate tycoon Bernard Spitzer (estimated worth $500 million) or his son, the philandering former Democratic Attorney General and Governor of New York State, Elliot Spitzer.
the advanced math 'pipeline' program at Garfield High
There is another connection between Garfield High and math. The eponymous president, James A. Garfield, discovered a novel proof of the Pythagorean theorem.
Fat addiction is not sufficient to explain the United States obesity epidemic because fats are just as addictive in Sweden, Japan and Uruguay as they are in the United States but we only have an obesity epidemic here.
With diet as with other behavior, one of the most effective ways to encourage responsible behavior, by individuals or corporations, is to internalize economic externalities. That is, make the price paid by the individual (person or corporation) be the true cost. For example, if corporations pollute the air when manufacturing, then they are messing up your air and not paying for it. Charge for air pollution and two things happen: It becomes more profitable to pollute less and the victims of air pollution are compensated. People complain about the "Tragedy of the Commons." Well internalizing economic externalities is what fixes that. Making people pay costs for their decisions encourages responsible decisions.
Socializing costs, that is, externalizing internalities by distributing the costs of individual's actions over everyone encourages irresponsible behavior. Socializing costs is a tragedy, known in fact at the "Tragedy of the Commons." Individuals act irresponsibly when insulated from the costs of their own decisions, because those costs are paid by everyone and reduced to the individual.
So here is the thing. Government policy in the United States is designed to promote obesity by socializing the costs of obesity. The first cost is the food itself, which the government pays for in the forms of, to name two, food stamps and the earned income tax credit. Everyone in the United States is required, by law, to pay for food to feed fat people. Really. The second cost of obesity, greatly increased medical care, is now socialized as well. Those costs could be reflected immediately to the individual in the price of insurance when the insurance market is deregulated and insurers are permitted to charge fatties more. If all those fatties had to pay for their food and pay more for health insurance then their would be a lot fewer fatties. Instead, now, a person who eats responsibly and exercises and who will require far less medical treatment as a result will pay the same amount for medical insurance as they guy who eats two dozen doughnuts for breakfast.
Telling people to eat less does not make them eat less. Making them pay the price for overeating does. After passage of a multi-trillion-dollar bill which sponsors obesity, somewhere down the road Congress will spend billions to create and expand government agencies staffed with overpaid unionized employees paid to tell people not to stuff themselves full of government sponsored food.
Cane sugar is far more efficient to produce than corn sweetener but is primarily produced in tropical and subtropical regions outside of the United States . The agribusiness lobby in in the United States pays off politicians to restrict imports, driving up the price of sugar within the the U.S. to above that of corn syrup. Without import restrictions on sugar, all those products you buy which are sweetened with corn syrup would be sweetened with sugar instead. And cost less.
You can blame the agribusiness lobby and the protectionist whores in the U.S. congress for this situation. It is a clear-cut case of government power expended to benefit he corrupt few at the expense of the many.
We're ALL fucked. We're ALL going to be wormfood. What difference does it make if you die of cancer at age 80, or like my grandma, get chemo and postpone the cancer until age 84. In the end, we're all fucked.
Why don't people get this? Are they in denial?
Because, just like you, they want to live. That you express indifference to the death of others makes you a sociopath, not a social philosopher. You criticize others for prolonging their own lives while you prolong your own. If you disagree with that assessment then you could prove it wrong by killing yourself immediately.
Note that I do not endorse that kind of thing and was making strictly a rhetorical point; You should not actually kill yourself. You should be less hypocritical.
I own his books and recommend them but it seems Tufte is difficult to deal with in person. He charged credit cards for pre-orders before shipping his not-yet-published book and then called someone who politely objected to that a "whiny sanctimonious asshole."
See Flip Philips' blog entry about the scandal here
Overhead is a primary measure of efficiency. Lower overhead means more efficient.
Nonsense. Overhead is no measure of efficiency. It is an accounting term for some specific categories of business expense. The proportion a government agency's expenses which its accountants classify as overhead tells me absolutely nothing about what quality of medical service I will receive at what prices were that agency to monopolize health care.
people in countries with public systems live longer and spend less than Americans do.
It is idiotic to draw conclusions about the relative quality of health care systems on basis of that comparison; Those are different populations. The correct comparison of medical systems is improvements from medical treatments. Those comparisons show that the U.S. is far ahead.
I worked in an IT office of a state government for a short period.
The system in place was that the department was staffed and run by incompetent unionized government employees, unqualified and incapable of doing their jobs. Union dues were mandatory for all state employees, there was no freedom to opt out. The powerful state employee union guaranteed that state union employees could never be fired. Mostly they screwed stuff up and collected paychecks. The actual work was done by private contractors. Some of which were honest and hard working. Others were deceitful and lazy and they had not problem pulling the wool over their incompetent paymasters in state government.
The kind if inefficiencies which which Kundra sites are an eternal and intrinsic aspect of government; Public employee unions insure that incompetent employees remain employed in government. Incompetent employees, by definition, operate wastefully and inefficiently. The power to tax insures that no matter how wasteful, government agencies continue. That is unlike private enterprises which are required to have a net social benefit, producing goods or services of equal or grater value than what they consume.
The examples which Kundra sites are symptomatic manifestations of the government system of waste. His public expression of opposition to government waste will make him popular with a public which shares those sentiments, but as a member of an administration which seeks to grow that system by historic proportions his real role is to enable that expansion by allaying concerns using the false promise that something is being done.
The study authors compared the response of insect pests to playing Rush Limbaugh to their response to playing nothing at them. Readers are going to concluded from this that insect pests are, like liberals, aggravated by conservative speech. Yet it's a bogus conclusion on the basis of that evidence. The correct experiment to perform to divine the political feelings of insect pests would be one which measured the differential response of insects to Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken.
But seriously. If you wanted to study the response of insects to sound then choose sounds for your stimulus set with which vary by known quantities along physical dimensions such as amplitude and frequency. Or use an ecological approach and choose sounds from the insect's natural environment, such as those generated by prey and predators. The choice of stimulus set in the experiment was pretty retarded. Of course it was chosen to be humorous to liberals. Humor in science can be great. But not one-sided political humor which compromises the integrity of the science.
There is a strong first-mover advantage here because social networks are natural monopolies; For members of social networks the best choice of social network is the biggest social network because more of your friends are likely to be there. People acting on that basis grow the largest networks larger. The first network to have one member wins and no other social networks exist. In fact that is not the actual outcome because other factors play rolls, nonetheless first-mover advantage may play a dominant roll, if not complete roll, in determining the outcome of the social networking site battle between Google and Facebook.
Ebay is a good example. As a buyer, the best choice of markets is the market with the most sellers because competition among sellers lowers prices paid by buyers. As a seller, the best choice of markets is the one with the most buyers because competition among buyers raises prices paid to sellers. New buyers and new sellers choose ebay for those reasons and continue to grow ebay. Ebay would have to suck really bad for the suckiness to outweigh the advantage of their monoply
Natural monopolies are not necessarily business monopolies. The telephone system was a social network, a natural monopoly and a business monopoly. After the Bell breakup the phone system remained as a social network and continued its dominance as a method of communication but not as a business monopoly. Business monopolies built on natural monopolies dissolve when networks migrate to open standards and commoditize services. When that happens small companies compete on an equal basis with large companies because customers of both enjoy exactly the same network advantages.
Google is probably going to to lose the social networking site war because it does not have first-mover advantage. What works to overthrow a competitor built on a natural monopoly?
- Creating a meta network, a network of networks. In the world of websites, the meta network is the search engine. So Google already knows this trick. But it won't work here because Facebook locks out arbitrary access.
- Open standards for information exchange between social networking sites. Facebook will never voluntarily accept that because it gives away their advantage.
- Massive price undercutting. What craigslist is to eBay. Won't work because Facebook is already free.
- Massively improved performance. What the telephone was to the telegraph. Possible.
- Infiltration. Defy the the monopolist and bridge the closed network of your competitor to a network built on open standards. What the internet was to Compuserve. Possible. If Google develops an open protocol for exchange between social networking sites and then builds bridging tools which customers use to transfer their own information out of facebook to the outside, built into what Google partly controls, the smartphone, the browser and search.
the developer community can be intimidating and hard to break into.
Well.. duh. Because you have to learn to program the Linux kernel to join.
It is a "best of the best" club for programmers. Obviously that requires a lot of brains and effort. It should be hard to join, otherwise there would be a lot of crappy code in the kernel and Linux would suck.
When I grew up in Hungary... life was somewhat difficult...Piotr did not have enough food to feed his entire family! He would provide the best nourishment to his children and wife, while during tough times he would eat grass, paper and sawdust....
In my insightful comment last week I alluded to something exactly like this happening.
This week, advocates for "net neutrality" still have a lot of excuse making to do for injustices of the patent and copyright system, rights violations in the war on terrorism, and the train wreck which is Obamacare before they get to advocating for an expansion of government into internet regulation.
Why is "But won't you think of the children?" a joke but "But won't you think of net neutrality" regarded equally?
According to the values given in the article the amount of the penalty is about 1.3 percent of net worth. For those with a negative net worth because you have student loans, mortgages and credit card debt I recommend speeding through small villages in Switzerland. Because the penalty will be a negative amount, the government will pay you. Keep speeding until your net worth is $0.00 then stop.
If you can not afford a car which reaches excessive speeds, take out a loan.
Slashdot Mirror
I created this miracle cure guaranteed to extend a terminal patients life by a significant amount of time. If you are ever terminally ill, ... it's basically a hair dryer with a bunch of magnets arranged in a specific pattern around the air chamber that blows on your while you ingest aspirin and sugar pills.
Can you see why the FDA has some reservations about opening the flood gates on medicines and procedures like that?
It is legal to give yourself cancer by living on junk food. It is legal to attempt to cure that cancer by praying in church. It is illegal to attempt to cure that cancer using aspirin and a hair dryer with magnets.
No, actually that makes no sense whatsoever.
I created this miracle cure guaranteed to extend a terminal patients life ... it's basically a hair dryer with a bunch of magnets arranged in a specific pattern around the air chamber that blows on your while you ingest aspirin and sugar pills.
Can you see why the FDA has some reservations about opening the flood gates on medicines and procedures like that?
No, actually, not all.
Risky and irrational behaviors are protected freedoms. Alcoholism, obesity, unprotected promiscuous sexual behavior and large expenditures on irrational superstitions ceremonies (religion) are all protected freedoms. They are all harmful but the government has no legal authority to prevent you from engaging in them and protects your rights to engage in those behaviors; If I harass you because you are extremely fat, then that is crime.
So what makes dangerous and superstitious behavior illegal specifically in the context of medicine? Why regulate medicine for the public good but not regulate obesity, religion or sex for the public good?
You're not being forced; if you don't like it, don't consume the media.
from the summary
From government-mandated spyware that deletes infringing content to border searches of media players
Ya, that should work. Just tell the government that you are not consuming any media and they will not infect your computer with spyware or search you at the border.
Given the US government's willingness to bend over for Big Media...
Wrong metaphor; It is not the government who is getting screwed here. On the contrary, congressmen are collect big checks from media corporations for selling off our rights. I think you mean.
Given the US government's willingness to force citizens to bend over for Big Media
The issue is poorly framed because she real sources of controversy are not whether "UFO studies" is taught but whether it is taught be skeptics or believers and whether it is publicly or privately funded.
For instance, your position might be to both endorse publicly-funded skepticism of alien encounters and to permit privately-funded teachings alien encounters. Then it is misleading to frame the issue as being for-or-against UFO education.
So it took about one day for the gullible Jordanians who initially believed the reports of aliens to gather evidence, refute those claims, and adjust their beliefs accordingly. Yet initial expression of the Islamic religion occurred about 14 centuries ago and they still believe in an imaginary being which controls events on earth. Why is that? Why such selective application of empiricism and reason?
The Spitzer Telescope is name for American theoretical physicist and astronomer Lyman Spitzer, not the millionaire New York real estate tycoon Bernard Spitzer (estimated worth $500 million) or his son, the philandering former Democratic Attorney General and Governor of New York State, Elliot Spitzer.
There is another connection between Garfield High and math. The eponymous president, James A. Garfield, discovered a novel proof of the Pythagorean theorem.
Reminds me of this advertisment in the July 23, 1956 issue of Life, claiming that eating sugar "...offers a new way to more effective weight control."
Fat addiction is not sufficient to explain the United States obesity epidemic because fats are just as addictive in Sweden, Japan and Uruguay as they are in the United States but we only have an obesity epidemic here.
With diet as with other behavior, one of the most effective ways to encourage responsible behavior, by individuals or corporations, is to internalize economic externalities. That is, make the price paid by the individual (person or corporation) be the true cost. For example, if corporations pollute the air when manufacturing, then they are messing up your air and not paying for it. Charge for air pollution and two things happen: It becomes more profitable to pollute less and the victims of air pollution are compensated. People complain about the "Tragedy of the Commons." Well internalizing economic externalities is what fixes that. Making people pay costs for their decisions encourages responsible decisions.
Socializing costs, that is, externalizing internalities by distributing the costs of individual's actions over everyone encourages irresponsible behavior. Socializing costs is a tragedy, known in fact at the "Tragedy of the Commons." Individuals act irresponsibly when insulated from the costs of their own decisions, because those costs are paid by everyone and reduced to the individual.
So here is the thing. Government policy in the United States is designed to promote obesity by socializing the costs of obesity. The first cost is the food itself, which the government pays for in the forms of, to name two, food stamps and the earned income tax credit. Everyone in the United States is required, by law, to pay for food to feed fat people. Really. The second cost of obesity, greatly increased medical care, is now socialized as well. Those costs could be reflected immediately to the individual in the price of insurance when the insurance market is deregulated and insurers are permitted to charge fatties more. If all those fatties had to pay for their food and pay more for health insurance then their would be a lot fewer fatties. Instead, now, a person who eats responsibly and exercises and who will require far less medical treatment as a result will pay the same amount for medical insurance as they guy who eats two dozen doughnuts for breakfast.
Telling people to eat less does not make them eat less. Making them pay the price for overeating does. After passage of a multi-trillion-dollar bill which sponsors obesity, somewhere down the road Congress will spend billions to create and expand government agencies staffed with overpaid unionized employees paid to tell people not to stuff themselves full of government sponsored food.
Cane sugar is far more efficient to produce than corn sweetener but is primarily produced in tropical and subtropical regions outside of the United States . The agribusiness lobby in in the United States pays off politicians to restrict imports, driving up the price of sugar within the the U.S. to above that of corn syrup. Without import restrictions on sugar, all those products you buy which are sweetened with corn syrup would be sweetened with sugar instead. And cost less.
You can blame the agribusiness lobby and the protectionist whores in the U.S. congress for this situation. It is a clear-cut case of government power expended to benefit he corrupt few at the expense of the many.
Then when you get cancer you're fucked-
HINT:
We're ALL fucked.
We're ALL going to be wormfood.
What difference does it make if you die of cancer at age 80, or like my grandma, get chemo and postpone the cancer until age 84. In the end, we're all fucked.
Why don't people get this? Are they in denial?
Because, just like you, they want to live. That you express indifference to the death of others makes you a sociopath, not a social philosopher. You criticize others for prolonging their own lives while you prolong your own. If you disagree with that assessment then you could prove it wrong by killing yourself immediately.
Note that I do not endorse that kind of thing and was making strictly a rhetorical point; You should not actually kill yourself. You should be less hypocritical.
Video gaming is already the subject of academic study elsewhere, for example see this summary of work by Daphne Bavelier, "Action Video Games Sharpen Vision 20 Percent"
I own his books and recommend them but it seems Tufte is difficult to deal with in person. He charged credit cards for pre-orders before shipping his not-yet-published book and then called someone who politely objected to that a "whiny sanctimonious asshole."
See Flip Philips' blog entry about the scandal here
Overhead is a primary measure of efficiency. Lower overhead means more efficient.
Nonsense. Overhead is no measure of efficiency. It is an accounting term for some specific categories of business expense. The proportion a government agency's expenses which its accountants classify as overhead tells me absolutely nothing about what quality of medical service I will receive at what prices were that agency to monopolize health care.
people in countries with public systems live longer and spend less than Americans do.
It is idiotic to draw conclusions about the relative quality of health care systems on basis of that comparison; Those are different populations. The correct comparison of medical systems is improvements from medical treatments. Those comparisons show that the U.S. is far ahead.
can't wait for a government health care system run like that.
I worked in an IT office of a state government for a short period.
The system in place was that the department was staffed and run by incompetent unionized government employees, unqualified and incapable of doing their jobs. Union dues were mandatory for all state employees, there was no freedom to opt out. The powerful state employee union guaranteed that state union employees could never be fired. Mostly they screwed stuff up and collected paychecks. The actual work was done by private contractors. Some of which were honest and hard working. Others were deceitful and lazy and they had not problem pulling the wool over their incompetent paymasters in state government.
The kind if inefficiencies which which Kundra sites are an eternal and intrinsic aspect of government; Public employee unions insure that incompetent employees remain employed in government. Incompetent employees, by definition, operate wastefully and inefficiently. The power to tax insures that no matter how wasteful, government agencies continue. That is unlike private enterprises which are required to have a net social benefit, producing goods or services of equal or grater value than what they consume.
The examples which Kundra sites are symptomatic manifestations of the government system of waste. His public expression of opposition to government waste will make him popular with a public which shares those sentiments, but as a member of an administration which seeks to grow that system by historic proportions his real role is to enable that expansion by allaying concerns using the false promise that something is being done.
The study authors compared the response of insect pests to playing Rush Limbaugh to their response to playing nothing at them. Readers are going to concluded from this that insect pests are, like liberals, aggravated by conservative speech. Yet it's a bogus conclusion on the basis of that evidence. The correct experiment to perform to divine the political feelings of insect pests would be one which measured the differential response of insects to Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken.
But seriously. If you wanted to study the response of insects to sound then choose sounds for your stimulus set with which vary by known quantities along physical dimensions such as amplitude and frequency. Or use an ecological approach and choose sounds from the insect's natural environment, such as those generated by prey and predators. The choice of stimulus set in the experiment was pretty retarded. Of course it was chosen to be humorous to liberals. Humor in science can be great. But not one-sided political humor which compromises the integrity of the science.
There is a strong first-mover advantage here because social networks are natural monopolies; For members of social networks the best choice of social network is the biggest social network because more of your friends are likely to be there. People acting on that basis grow the largest networks larger. The first network to have one member wins and no other social networks exist. In fact that is not the actual outcome because other factors play rolls, nonetheless first-mover advantage may play a dominant roll, if not complete roll, in determining the outcome of the social networking site battle between Google and Facebook.
Ebay is a good example. As a buyer, the best choice of markets is the market with the most sellers because competition among sellers lowers prices paid by buyers. As a seller, the best choice of markets is the one with the most buyers because competition among buyers raises prices paid to sellers. New buyers and new sellers choose ebay for those reasons and continue to grow ebay. Ebay would have to suck really bad for the suckiness to outweigh the advantage of their monoply
Natural monopolies are not necessarily business monopolies. The telephone system was a social network, a natural monopoly and a business monopoly. After the Bell breakup the phone system remained as a social network and continued its dominance as a method of communication but not as a business monopoly. Business monopolies built on natural monopolies dissolve when networks migrate to open standards and commoditize services. When that happens small companies compete on an equal basis with large companies because customers of both enjoy exactly the same network advantages.
Google is probably going to to lose the social networking site war because it does not have first-mover advantage. What works to overthrow a competitor built on a natural monopoly?
- Creating a meta network, a network of networks. In the world of websites, the meta network is the search engine. So Google already knows this trick. But it won't work here because Facebook locks out arbitrary access.
- Open standards for information exchange between social networking sites. Facebook will never voluntarily accept that because it gives away their advantage.
- Massive price undercutting. What craigslist is to eBay. Won't work because Facebook is already free.
- Massively improved performance. What the telephone was to the telegraph. Possible.
- Infiltration. Defy the the monopolist and bridge the closed network of your competitor to a network built on open standards. What the internet was to Compuserve. Possible. If Google develops an open protocol for exchange between social networking sites and then builds bridging tools which customers use to transfer their own information out of facebook to the outside, built into what Google partly controls, the smartphone, the browser and search.
Well.. duh. Because you have to learn to program the Linux kernel to join.
It is a "best of the best" club for programmers. Obviously that requires a lot of brains and effort. It should be hard to join, otherwise there would be a lot of crappy code in the kernel and Linux would suck.
Did anyone else read that headline as "Terminally 3" ?
I know some adults who act like they are terminally 3 and mummifying them would be a good thing. So it kind of made sense that way.
When I grew up in Hungary... life was somewhat difficult...Piotr did not have enough food to feed his entire family! He would provide the best nourishment to his children and wife, while during tough times he would eat grass, paper and sawdust....
So is that why they named it "Hungary"?
In my insightful comment last week I alluded to something exactly like this happening.
This week, advocates for "net neutrality" still have a lot of excuse making to do for injustices of the patent and copyright system, rights violations in the war on terrorism, and the train wreck which is Obamacare before they get to advocating for an expansion of government into internet regulation.
Why is "But won't you think of the children?" a joke but "But won't you think of net neutrality" regarded equally?
According to the values given in the article the amount of the penalty is about 1.3 percent of net worth. For those with a negative net worth because you have student loans, mortgages and credit card debt I recommend speeding through small villages in Switzerland. Because the penalty will be a negative amount, the government will pay you. Keep speeding until your net worth is $0.00 then stop.
If you can not afford a car which reaches excessive speeds, take out a loan.
Thus, it would be prudent to phase out usage of 1024-bit RSA within the next three to four years.
Or immediately if you are encrypting things now which you want to remain secret throughout the decade and beyond.