Actually, CNN for some time after September 11 had a really cool feature - an IRC channel featuring nothing but the closed-captions from the network. It was a brilliant idea.
And gopher was terrible. Please, that's one thing that I'm glad is dead. It is interesting, however, that they do choose to run it via finger. IIRC fingerd was the preferred method of rooting boxes remotely. More holes than Swiss cheese. Etc.
They don't all use tape on the floor. We have one that apparently gets its bearings from radio - there are beacon antennas at the nursing stations and in front of the elevators.
We've had one in my med school for, oh, four or five years. They even ginned up an ID badge for him, which necessitated a naming contest (the winning entry was "Rudy").
Works just like the article says - takes drugs from the pharmacy to the floor. Fairly straightforward, really. I'm honestly surprised there aren't more in use - most hospitals (of any real size - I'm not counting all the rural 30- and 40-bed hospitals) use a pneumatic tube system of some sort to deliver meds to the floors, and those are notoriously difficult and expensive to maintain.
I only take my iced tea seriously when it's sweet mint tea. And I take that seriously. Of course, I only make a pitcher or two a year. I'm practically a traitor to the South.
Er, people use those machines the same reason they use coffee machines - not because they're faster than any other method, but because they're fire-and-forget. No need to be in the kitchen to take the water out of the microwave, set the timer for the proper steep time, remember to take the bags out of the pot, and pour over ice. Just add water and tea, press a button, and leave.
I think you may be right about e-voting, but if done correctly it would hold the possibility of eliminating ballot-box-stuffing. (I don't think it will be done correctly.)
And since I'm putting it on every comment I make in this thread:
If your jurisdiction has evm's, request a paper ballot when you get there. Mine had preprinted ones with every race on them - they weren't just fill-in-the-blank. It was traceable, it was easy, and it was faster than electronic - no lines to wait in. Encourage your family and friends to do it. Tell everyone you know. We can't get around the unreliability of the evm's, but we can make sure our votes are counted properly.
It's profoundly antidemocratic. We've cast our lot with letting everyone vote who hasn't managed to disqualify themselves (generally through an active process; I'm not sure what laws are regarding those who've been in mental institutions). Changing that is a significant alteration in how we do things. Actually, you'd probably be open to a discrimination lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act, which put poll taxes and literacy tests out the door (yes, I know it was really just enabling legislation for 24th Amendment, but I live in a state that is still subject to Justice Dept oversight for all elections, so I'm more familiar with VRA).
Besides, most voters do decide on the issues - one or two ideas that matter most to them. The fact that they disagree with other ideas held by their chosen candidate doesn't mean that they're stupid; it means that other things came first. Abortion is a great example of this; there are many blue-collar Catholics who vote Democrat, and plenty of Republicans that don't oppose it in all circumstances. But neither of those groups is stupid, as such, or necessarily ill-informed. They just pick a handful of issues that matter to them, find out where the candidates stand, and pick.
And since I'm putting it on every comment I make in this thread:
If your jurisdiction has evm's, request a paper ballot when you get there. Mine had preprinted ones with every race on them - they weren't just fill-in-the-blank. It was traceable, it was easy, and it was faster than electronic - no lines to wait in. Encourage your family and friends to do it. Tell everyone you know. We can't get around the unreliability of the evm's, but we can make sure our votes are counted properly.
Good proposal. Careful with the numbering of ballots, though - unless you allow people to pick a ballot at random from the stack, you have eliminated anonymity.
And since I'm putting it on every comment I make in this thread:
If your jurisdiction has evm's, request a paper ballot when you get there. Mine had preprinted ones with every race on them - they weren't just fill-in-the-blank. It was traceable, it was easy, and it was faster than electronic - no lines to wait in. Encourage your family and friends to do it. Tell everyone you know. We can't get around the unreliability of the evm's, but we can make sure our votes are counted properly.
Count me in as a Republican who vehemently opposes electronic voting machines. He doesn't consider himself Republican (although most Interneters would consider him of the Right because of a mostly-small-ell-libertarian bent), but InstaPundit has been on this story for a long time.
I mentioned this in another comment on this story, but I figure the more I write it, the more will see it. YMMV, but my jurisdiction, although it uses evm's, has paper ballots available at the polling station. It's much faster than electronic voting (no waiting in line for a machine), to boot. So, everybody on/., and all their friends and family too, should get the word out to people to use the paper wherever possible.
You don't keep the piece of paper. It goes in a ballot box. Still totally anonymous, at least if you wear gloves while handling it.
It's a damned fine idea, and this Republican is vastly in favor of it - it removes a lot of the ambiguity from the system. In fact, I now vote by paper ballot, even though my jurisdiction has evm's. I encourage everyone else to do the same. (Incidentally, it's usually faster than voting via the machines, as you get to bypass the lines.)
You know, he probably could have gotten George Soros to pay for the servers. Why bother with P2P at all? Soros would have paid him just about anything remotely reasonable just to do the film, and I hardly think he'd balk at funding a few grand of bandwidth.
I think we have to go with the tinfoil boys on this one - it's to entice people into going.
I would. People tend to forget that, except for the hassles during commuting, cars are really great. I can travel where I want to, whenever I want to, and spend as much or as little time there as I choose. Public transit is useful only in a few situations - long-distance commuting, you can't afford a car, you live in a monstrous city that just can't handle the traffic, etc. You don't need a marketing division to make people want them (as opposed to, say, soft drinks).
I just wish I was rich enough to afford a private jet. That would be total mobility.
"Rush junkie Limbaugh"? Jesus, I feel like I'm on a playground. I guess if you won't answer a simple question after I ask it 3 times, there's not much point in keeping this up.
Just this: in a world of imperfect information, are you willing to let George W. Bush order a civilian jet to be shot down based on information that might be flat-out wrong? Would you have been willing to do so on September 11, 2001? And would you have accepted his expanation as fact even if none of the post-facto evidence that we found turned up?
I don't think you would have been. I certainly would have had severe doubts about it. And that's what I meant how each of us contributed to the failures of that day. And it's why I mentioned the one technique that did work that day. Each of us - every one of us living in this country - should be informed of as much as possible because governments can't be everywhere. More information means more eyes watching. You want a great reason to bash this administration? Ask them why they still haven't come up with a policy that relies on giving people the information to protect each other instead of a government guards program.
I had a long post ready but realized it was stupid. Never mind. The original thought process, for the interested, was that earnings would be less important for a stock that didn't pay dividends - b/c you never expect to see those earnings anyway, the value of the stock basically depends on how many people are willing to pay for the prestige of owning 100 shares of Microsoft.
I'm not beating a gong, I'm asking a question. Since you said that the Bush administration should have stopped the attacks - should, indeed, have shot down the flights ("I'll point out the moral distance between crashing a hijacked plane into the US Capitol housing Congress, and shooting down that plane: one US Congress, and everything that goes with it.") - would you have been totally okay with George Bush killing roughly 600 Americans in airplanes on September 11, 2001, on the basis of evidence no more reliable than what you characterize as out-and-out lies?
Regardless of the presence of a shootdown order, my question remains: do you think, given what you think of Bush and his administration, you would have been okay with his splashing around 600 US citizens because their four planes had been hijacked? When nobody had ever done that with a hijacked plane before? On the basis of intelligence information no more reliable than what you insist, in your post, are lies - that Saddam had WMD (good enough evidence for everyone, throughout the 90's, to insist he had them) and that he cooperated with al Qaeda (evidence for which even the NYT finds at least credible enough to publish)?
Look, I know you can't stand the guy, but the political will just wasn't there. It's sad - but if he had had perfect foresight, people would have accused him of total paranoia at ridiculous expense. And there would have been endless parades of "George Bush killed my husband/wife/child/friend". It's a terrible thing that it happened. It's even more of a travesty that the kind of simple steps - like giving cockpits armored doors that cannot be unlocked during flight - that would render these attacks impossible (though introducing new risks of their own) were not taken. But I don't think it's realistic to say that an Al Gore administration would have prevented the attacks from succeeding. And I would, honestly, have been surprised if a Gore administration took a terribly different approach than what Bush did. There would have probably been more foreign veto power over our actions, and press conferences would have been a lot duller without Rumsfeld and with Gore. But significantly different? Nah. Most Democrats are anti-war now for the same reason most Republicans opposed Bosnia - it makes the wrong guy look good.
I dunno. As Microsoft doesn't pay any dividends, there's a limited relationship between earnings and share value in the first place. I would think more of the value lies in the assumption that it will eventually participate in buy-backs of stock - what else is it going to do with the blinding torrent of cash? IIRC, they've got something like two years' worth of operating expenses in cash in the bank.
Assume, for a moment, that every bit of that information was taken totally seriously. At huge expense, F-15's assume patrol over major American flyways, guaranteeing the ability to intercept ANY target within 15 minutes of notification.
On the morn of 11 September 2001, an air traffic controller notices a plane drop off the map - not a particularly rare occurrence. He contacts the craft, which reports that it's just fine, thank you, and boy, that sucker sure must be broken, but we'll keep in touch with the towers and keep our collision-avoidance beacon on.
He's preternaturally suspicious and forwards the info to the red phone. The duty officer on the other end is equally suspicious and scrambles an F-15 to find out where that plane is. (We don't have enough radar across the US to actually paint the skin of every bird in flight - we just rely on them to tell us where they are. You couldput AWACS on station, but I doubt the AF has enough of those birds and personnel to be able to keep them up 24/7 over every major flyway.)
The jets somehow guess that yep, that's a terrorist, and if I were a terrorist wouldn't I go to NYC too? So he cranks the afterburner and notifies air command for NYC to scramble someone from there heading north. Amazingly, they manage to catch it just south of Poughkeepsie, following the Taconic.
Do you honestly think that everybody, across the political spectrum, would have been okay with Bush ordering the death of everyone on board that plane (and on the highway below, and any residential area nearby) based solely on a bunch of reports that told him that Islamist terrorists were considering flying planes into American targets? Would you? Even considering that the reports are, essentially, no stronger than the case that Iraq possessed WMD's (which, remember, was repeated over and over again throughout the 90's by Clinton, Chirac, and every other sensible human being on earth)?
The problem was in part the govt, but was also in part us - we weren't ready to take that kind of action yet. We weren't willing to kill a lot of civilians on a hunch. The real solution, the one that actually worked in the long run, was letting people know that there were nutballs on board who wanted to fly the plane into a populated target. On average, Americans are pretty resourceful folks. You can't have police and surveillance and armed guards everywhere - but you can give people the information they need to be able to protect themselves when bad things happen.
(Oh, and please don't call all other governments 'socialistic'. It doesn't do much either for international relations, or for your image here.)
Huh? He never said "all other". Just some. And compared to the US, just about every other industrialized country is... pretty damned socialistic. In fact, in my experience their citizens prefer it that way and are quite proud of their socialism (although I've never much understood that view myself). Still better, I've known Americans who didn't like this country's way of doing things and moved to Europe. Everybody wins.
And crap like saying the US doesn't look out for its people - and I can only assume you mean healthcare, as that's the most usual charge leveled - is just a line you've been spun. Why? I work in a large public hospital that is an academic medical center. We take all comers and treat them equally. The general rule of thumb is that about 1/3 of the patients have some form of insurance; about 1/3 have Medicare (for the elderly) or Medicaid (the poor); about 1/3 just don't pay. That's a huge burden in a state that isn't very populous or rich, but it's what we do. They come in, abuse the staff, demand everything be done their way, refuse to hang up cell phones when told to, go to the front of the hospital in their gown to smoke, and still spend months in the ICU getting treated when we know we'll never see a penny of the $200k the treatment would cost.
And we're a final dropoff point for those people, because all the little 20-bed hospitals out in the countryside can't afford to deal with those people without going bankrupt. But they still go to those ER's, get CT's, MRI's, you name it - and they get stabilized and transferred here.
Are there problems with our system? Sure. But the problem is NOT the oft-repeated mantra that the poor can't get health care in the US. What they can't get are the latest drugs for free. (If they would save the money they spend on cigarettes and fried foods, they could afford the drugs, but then they wouldn't need them).
You have broached the wrong idea for this place. Don't you know that everyone has a right to totally free L3 support to everything without ever actually identifying themselves, even if the company is picking up the tab for the call?
Actually, you could have a nice little web support system that let you take a test and get an access code that starts you out with a certain PPQ - say, you go straight to L2 support - and then you upgraded/downgraded as appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
And gopher was terrible. Please, that's one thing that I'm glad is dead. It is interesting, however, that they do choose to run it via finger. IIRC fingerd was the preferred method of rooting boxes remotely. More holes than Swiss cheese. Etc.
The article aside, you are aware that you're posting on Slashdot, right?
Routine meds only, of course. Stat orders are, I think, hand-delivered.
They don't all use tape on the floor. We have one that apparently gets its bearings from radio - there are beacon antennas at the nursing stations and in front of the elevators.
They demo'd it at my med school. The guys who tested it were suitably impressed. Buy the stock, folks. (No, I have no connection to them.)
Works just like the article says - takes drugs from the pharmacy to the floor. Fairly straightforward, really. I'm honestly surprised there aren't more in use - most hospitals (of any real size - I'm not counting all the rural 30- and 40-bed hospitals) use a pneumatic tube system of some sort to deliver meds to the floors, and those are notoriously difficult and expensive to maintain.
Well, it's not as though you endorsed Bush or Microsoft...
I only take my iced tea seriously when it's sweet mint tea. And I take that seriously. Of course, I only make a pitcher or two a year. I'm practically a traitor to the South.
I think you may be right about e-voting, but if done correctly it would hold the possibility of eliminating ballot-box-stuffing. (I don't think it will be done correctly.)
And since I'm putting it on every comment I make in this thread:
If your jurisdiction has evm's, request a paper ballot when you get there. Mine had preprinted ones with every race on them - they weren't just fill-in-the-blank. It was traceable, it was easy, and it was faster than electronic - no lines to wait in. Encourage your family and friends to do it. Tell everyone you know. We can't get around the unreliability of the evm's, but we can make sure our votes are counted properly.
Inspiration to Cello, wasn't it?
Besides, most voters do decide on the issues - one or two ideas that matter most to them. The fact that they disagree with other ideas held by their chosen candidate doesn't mean that they're stupid; it means that other things came first. Abortion is a great example of this; there are many blue-collar Catholics who vote Democrat, and plenty of Republicans that don't oppose it in all circumstances. But neither of those groups is stupid, as such, or necessarily ill-informed. They just pick a handful of issues that matter to them, find out where the candidates stand, and pick.
And since I'm putting it on every comment I make in this thread:
If your jurisdiction has evm's, request a paper ballot when you get there. Mine had preprinted ones with every race on them - they weren't just fill-in-the-blank. It was traceable, it was easy, and it was faster than electronic - no lines to wait in. Encourage your family and friends to do it. Tell everyone you know. We can't get around the unreliability of the evm's, but we can make sure our votes are counted properly.
And since I'm putting it on every comment I make in this thread:
If your jurisdiction has evm's, request a paper ballot when you get there. Mine had preprinted ones with every race on them - they weren't just fill-in-the-blank. It was traceable, it was easy, and it was faster than electronic - no lines to wait in. Encourage your family and friends to do it. Tell everyone you know. We can't get around the unreliability of the evm's, but we can make sure our votes are counted properly.
I mentioned this in another comment on this story, but I figure the more I write it, the more will see it. YMMV, but my jurisdiction, although it uses evm's, has paper ballots available at the polling station. It's much faster than electronic voting (no waiting in line for a machine), to boot. So, everybody on /., and all their friends and family too, should get the word out to people to use the paper wherever possible.
It's a damned fine idea, and this Republican is vastly in favor of it - it removes a lot of the ambiguity from the system. In fact, I now vote by paper ballot, even though my jurisdiction has evm's. I encourage everyone else to do the same. (Incidentally, it's usually faster than voting via the machines, as you get to bypass the lines.)
I think we have to go with the tinfoil boys on this one - it's to entice people into going.
I just wish I was rich enough to afford a private jet. That would be total mobility.
"Rush junkie Limbaugh"? Jesus, I feel like I'm on a playground. I guess if you won't answer a simple question after I ask it 3 times, there's not much point in keeping this up.
I don't think you would have been. I certainly would have had severe doubts about it. And that's what I meant how each of us contributed to the failures of that day. And it's why I mentioned the one technique that did work that day. Each of us - every one of us living in this country - should be informed of as much as possible because governments can't be everywhere. More information means more eyes watching. You want a great reason to bash this administration? Ask them why they still haven't come up with a policy that relies on giving people the information to protect each other instead of a government guards program.
I had a long post ready but realized it was stupid. Never mind. The original thought process, for the interested, was that earnings would be less important for a stock that didn't pay dividends - b/c you never expect to see those earnings anyway, the value of the stock basically depends on how many people are willing to pay for the prestige of owning 100 shares of Microsoft.
I'm not beating a gong, I'm asking a question. Since you said that the Bush administration should have stopped the attacks - should, indeed, have shot down the flights ("I'll point out the moral distance between crashing a hijacked plane into the US Capitol housing Congress, and shooting down that plane: one US Congress, and everything that goes with it.") - would you have been totally okay with George Bush killing roughly 600 Americans in airplanes on September 11, 2001, on the basis of evidence no more reliable than what you characterize as out-and-out lies?
Look, I know you can't stand the guy, but the political will just wasn't there. It's sad - but if he had had perfect foresight, people would have accused him of total paranoia at ridiculous expense. And there would have been endless parades of "George Bush killed my husband/wife/child/friend". It's a terrible thing that it happened. It's even more of a travesty that the kind of simple steps - like giving cockpits armored doors that cannot be unlocked during flight - that would render these attacks impossible (though introducing new risks of their own) were not taken. But I don't think it's realistic to say that an Al Gore administration would have prevented the attacks from succeeding. And I would, honestly, have been surprised if a Gore administration took a terribly different approach than what Bush did. There would have probably been more foreign veto power over our actions, and press conferences would have been a lot duller without Rumsfeld and with Gore. But significantly different? Nah. Most Democrats are anti-war now for the same reason most Republicans opposed Bosnia - it makes the wrong guy look good.
I dunno. As Microsoft doesn't pay any dividends, there's a limited relationship between earnings and share value in the first place. I would think more of the value lies in the assumption that it will eventually participate in buy-backs of stock - what else is it going to do with the blinding torrent of cash? IIRC, they've got something like two years' worth of operating expenses in cash in the bank.
On the morn of 11 September 2001, an air traffic controller notices a plane drop off the map - not a particularly rare occurrence. He contacts the craft, which reports that it's just fine, thank you, and boy, that sucker sure must be broken, but we'll keep in touch with the towers and keep our collision-avoidance beacon on.
He's preternaturally suspicious and forwards the info to the red phone. The duty officer on the other end is equally suspicious and scrambles an F-15 to find out where that plane is. (We don't have enough radar across the US to actually paint the skin of every bird in flight - we just rely on them to tell us where they are. You couldput AWACS on station, but I doubt the AF has enough of those birds and personnel to be able to keep them up 24/7 over every major flyway.)
The jets somehow guess that yep, that's a terrorist, and if I were a terrorist wouldn't I go to NYC too? So he cranks the afterburner and notifies air command for NYC to scramble someone from there heading north. Amazingly, they manage to catch it just south of Poughkeepsie, following the Taconic.
Do you honestly think that everybody, across the political spectrum, would have been okay with Bush ordering the death of everyone on board that plane (and on the highway below, and any residential area nearby) based solely on a bunch of reports that told him that Islamist terrorists were considering flying planes into American targets? Would you? Even considering that the reports are, essentially, no stronger than the case that Iraq possessed WMD's (which, remember, was repeated over and over again throughout the 90's by Clinton, Chirac, and every other sensible human being on earth)?
The problem was in part the govt, but was also in part us - we weren't ready to take that kind of action yet. We weren't willing to kill a lot of civilians on a hunch. The real solution, the one that actually worked in the long run, was letting people know that there were nutballs on board who wanted to fly the plane into a populated target. On average, Americans are pretty resourceful folks. You can't have police and surveillance and armed guards everywhere - but you can give people the information they need to be able to protect themselves when bad things happen.
Huh? He never said "all other". Just some. And compared to the US, just about every other industrialized country is... pretty damned socialistic. In fact, in my experience their citizens prefer it that way and are quite proud of their socialism (although I've never much understood that view myself). Still better, I've known Americans who didn't like this country's way of doing things and moved to Europe. Everybody wins.
And crap like saying the US doesn't look out for its people - and I can only assume you mean healthcare, as that's the most usual charge leveled - is just a line you've been spun. Why?
I work in a large public hospital that is an academic medical center. We take all comers and treat them equally. The general rule of thumb is that about 1/3 of the patients have some form of insurance; about 1/3 have Medicare (for the elderly) or Medicaid (the poor); about 1/3 just don't pay. That's a huge burden in a state that isn't very populous or rich, but it's what we do. They come in, abuse the staff, demand everything be done their way, refuse to hang up cell phones when told to, go to the front of the hospital in their gown to smoke, and still spend months in the ICU getting treated when we know we'll never see a penny of the $200k the treatment would cost. And we're a final dropoff point for those people, because all the little 20-bed hospitals out in the countryside can't afford to deal with those people without going bankrupt. But they still go to those ER's, get CT's, MRI's, you name it - and they get stabilized and transferred here. Are there problems with our system? Sure. But the problem is NOT the oft-repeated mantra that the poor can't get health care in the US. What they can't get are the latest drugs for free. (If they would save the money they spend on cigarettes and fried foods, they could afford the drugs, but then they wouldn't need them).
Actually, you could have a nice little web support system that let you take a test and get an access code that starts you out with a certain PPQ - say, you go straight to L2 support - and then you upgraded/downgraded as appropriate.