Why? Because my bedroom and sitting are bigger than his apartment.
I used to have a 2100 square foot house all my own, and two cars to go with it. That's part of the American dream. Living in a high-tech gerbil habitat might be the Hong Kong dream, but IMO they can keep it.
It really makes it obvious how much space (well that and other things) we waste here.
Waste? No, merely because it is more than is necessary for survival does not make it "waste". It is waste only if we derive no benefit from it.
The lesson that most will miss is, regardless how some here will claim they don't have this, that, or something else, they sure got most of the world beat and they need to stop crying
That's a useless attitude, because if you aren't living in abject poverty (like most of the world, and unlike this gentleman from HK), you've got most of the world beat. Are you supposed to be satisfied with anything you've got just because a billion subsistence farmers have it worse?
Throw it away, stick it to another car... sure, it's a foreign object attached to your car with nothing to indicate it has any official status. But, really, I think if you leave something with acid in it to be "discovered" by these guys you will have likely entered into territory you might live to regret.
Note that the OP said "butyric acid". It's basically harmless, but it stinks like vomit.
These trackers can probably operate passively. Simply sitting there, collecting location information until an agent with the proper equipment activates it and dumps the data.
It's unlikely they can run the GPS receiver without leaking the local oscillator frequency. So a frequency counter should be able to find it.
If I found one of these on my car, I'd consider it my patriotic duty to place it on a vehicle I spend more time on. Namely, the train I ride to work.
No. Health is not viewed in these terms. If a cure cost $10 to produce, and a company tried to charge $30,000 for that cure, there would immediately be Congressional hearings about it. It is widely viewed as immoral to profit excessively from providing a cure. Look at the case of the drug Makena. Before it was approved it cost $15 a shot, but after approval the company increased the cost to $1500 a shot, and there is a huge outcry now.
Makena is an entirely different case, and wholly a creation of the government -- the Orphan Drug Act allowed KV to get exclusive rights to sell an existing drug.
A company which actually developed a one-time injection which cured cancer and sold it for $30,000 would not even cause much of an eyeblink over the price in the US. The usual suspects would complain about how poor minority children couldn't afford it, but if the discrepancy between the marginal cost of the drug and the price of the drug came up, the drug companies would just come up with reams and reams of paperwork showing how they were barely breaking even due to overhead costs, and any uproar would die down quickly.
How is writing code for Android not up your alley?
Or are phones not considered embedded systems?
Having not done it myself, I can't say for sure, but I'd guess writing an app for Android isn't all that different from writing an app for Windows or MacOS; it's basically application programming, not embedded programming. Just because it's on a phone doesn't make it embedded, nowadays.
That is not how it works. There are approximately 3 million new cancer cases per year in the US. In order to get $100B/year, the industry would have to charge $30,000 per cancer vaccine dose (assuming that one dose cures the disease). There is no way that people (or the government) would tolerate that type of fee to save people's lives. It would be a form of extortion.
$30,000? You have no idea of medical costs. Looked into what a heart transplant costs? Yearly dialysis costs? Chemo and radiation treatment costs? A one-time fee of $30,000 to cure someone's life-threatening cancer would be considered cheap, and rightly so.
Penicillin is not a permanent cure. One has to take it again with every new infection.
You're an idiot. It's a cure. If you re-introduce the cured disease, of course you have to cure it again. As opposed to, e.g. insulin for diabetics, which is not a cure but a maintenance drug. If you cut off your dick, and a doctor provided you with a medicine to regrow it, would you bitch that he didn't "cure" your condition if you then cut off your dick again and he said you needed another dose?
But remember that the treatment of cancer is nearly a $100B/year industry. The industry is not going to undermine this business by finding a cure.
Given that there are so many different types of cancer, the only thing which would be a serious threat would be the proverbial "magic bullet". Since it's extremely unlikely such a thing exists, there's no reason anyone would have to hold back their research on curing any particular type of cancer.
I'm curious as to why test costs so much. Blood, enzyme, anti-body tests..., X-ray, MRI, C-T scans.... I realize it costs money to a) make tests, b)pay people to perform and analyze them and c)recoup initial spent on equipment, but I'm curious how those numbers are calculated. Last I'd heard several years ago, the Pharma. and Med-Equip. Industries charge 3X initial production costs, when it is finally broken out to the consumer. (sorry, no reference for that)
X-ray machines are fairly cheap, it's true. But MRI and CT scanners are most definitely not. They're expensive to develop, expensive to get regulatory approval for, and even expensive to own and operate (they take a lot of space and require expensive regular maintenance and calibration).
As for a lot of the other tests, they ARE cheap. Check out your explanation of benefits sometime; you'll find an incredibly high list price for the test, and a far, far, lower price that your insurance company actually paid. They're making money on that far lower price.
This discrepancy between what's charged and what's paid is what keeps people from just being able to opt out of the system (maybe with some catastrophic insurance); if people could pay anything like what insurance companies paid, most middle class people could afford health care. Logically, doctors and hospitals should charge direct patients less, in fact, since insurance companies take months to pay and are a total pain in the ass to deal with. But they can't, because their deal with the insurance companies says otherwise.
I will put the blame back upon you and fellow patients for not demanding more for your insurance dollar - you should take initiative and refuse to give money to any insurer who gives money to doctors who do not answer e-mail or provide remote conferencing for your medical examinations.
But we don't give money to insurers, not directly. Instead, our employers choose the insurers and pay money to them, often withholding some portion of our salaries to cover all or part of that money. Since most of us don't have any control over who our employers choose as an insurer, and have other reasons to take a job besides who the insurer is, there's very little a patient can do to pressure the insurance companies.
These layers of intermediaries are, IMO, one of the major causes of problems with health care in the US.
- Patient and/or insurance "Pays the Hospital" minus any "Negotiated Discount From Normal Rates." - Hospital "Credits the account of Doctor's Practice." - Hospital "Bills for Hospital's cut, space rent, etc." - Doctor's Practice then has to pay Doctor, any practice-specific staff, and Malpractice Insurance. - Doctor's Practice then has to pay taxes, based on Step 2 gross figure above rather than net figure post-Step 4. - Doctor then has to pay personal income taxes on top of all that.
You had it up to the taxes. The income taxes for the doctor's practice will be based on the net figure after legitimate business expenses (which everything you've mentioned -- including any amount paid to the doctor himself -- is). Only a local gross receipts tax would be based on that step 2 gross figure.
Back to topic. Ban malpractice suits already. In Chinese culture, we believe anything happened is in our own destiny and though no fault of anyone else.
Here in America we believe in cause and effect, so that's not going to go over too well.
No kidding. We already have a Defense Department and a National Security Agency. Or is there a difference between the "nation" and the "homeland" that I'm unaware of?
DoD: External security NSA: Part of the DoD DHS: Internal security. Like the Gestapo, the Stasi, or any number of real and fictional organizations for oppression you've heard of.
How wealthy and how small is this "wealthy ruling class". You are talking more than people who made a killing on stock options during the internet boom? I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that a few ultra-wealthy ex-nerds post on slashdot, though possibly anonymously.
Ultra-wealthy nerds (likely not ex- at all) aren't generally part of the wealthy ruling class; they remain mere nouveau riche until they figure out how to use their money to buy a strong position in the relevant legislatures. This they almost have to do eventually, or the actual ruling class will use their legislative position to separate the nerd from his wealth.
Before there was Kipling, before there was "We don't negotiate with terrorists.", there was "Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute." (US Rep. Robert Goodloe Harper, in 1798). I'm sure the idea is older than that.
Avoiding talking to beautiful young woman bank tellers about the weather by visiting the ATM is NOT anti-social... the anti-social part is their boss making them recite ridiculous sales pitches from a script or else they get fired.
Try this: "If I buy your overpriced useless piece of lead-painted flair, can I take you out to dinner tomorrow night?"
Sure, it's skanky. But how do you think all those sales types get dates?
The phone would collect location data FROM APPLE if location services was turned off, because the phone was downloading a subset of APPLES LOCATION DATABASE.
The subset downloaded identifies the phone's location.
What's wrong with advocating for a moderate solution where in large scale concepts and innovations like entirely new algorithms to perform tasks related to commercial grade software would be protected, but, also disallow abuse by those who would make it their entire business model to abuse the system?
Because
1) This idea has been patented
however
2) No one has ever managed to reduce it to practice, in any field. The typical result of attempting the "moderate" solution is a system which has all the disadvantages of both extremes.
Maybe they'll be able to get BOSE to make equipment that is testable for reviews and has some midrange.
You just need to put together some old Bose equipment and some new. The new stuff has no midrange, but the old stuff prompted the phrase "There are no highs, there are no lows, it must be Bose".
Slashdot Mirror
I used to have a 2100 square foot house all my own, and two cars to go with it. That's part of the American dream. Living in a high-tech gerbil habitat might be the Hong Kong dream, but IMO they can keep it.
Waste? No, merely because it is more than is necessary for survival does not make it "waste". It is waste only if we derive no benefit from it.
That's a useless attitude, because if you aren't living in abject poverty (like most of the world, and unlike this gentleman from HK), you've got most of the world beat. Are you supposed to be satisfied with anything you've got just because a billion subsistence farmers have it worse?
I would have fed Wesley to Troi's mum.
(and a good time was had by all)
Note that the OP said "butyric acid". It's basically harmless, but it stinks like vomit.
It's unlikely they can run the GPS receiver without leaking the local oscillator frequency. So a frequency counter should be able to find it.
If I found one of these on my car, I'd consider it my patriotic duty to place it on a vehicle I spend more time on. Namely, the train I ride to work.
This is a nonsense argument; it's easy to put a full wired workstation on a treadmill.
Makena is an entirely different case, and wholly a creation of the government -- the Orphan Drug Act allowed KV to get exclusive rights to sell an existing drug.
A company which actually developed a one-time injection which cured cancer and sold it for $30,000 would not even cause much of an eyeblink over the price in the US. The usual suspects would complain about how poor minority children couldn't afford it, but if the discrepancy between the marginal cost of the drug and the price of the drug came up, the drug companies would just come up with reams and reams of paperwork showing how they were barely breaking even due to overhead costs, and any uproar would die down quickly.
Having not done it myself, I can't say for sure, but I'd guess writing an app for Android isn't all that different from writing an app for Windows or MacOS; it's basically application programming, not embedded programming. Just because it's on a phone doesn't make it embedded, nowadays.
$30,000? You have no idea of medical costs. Looked into what a heart transplant costs? Yearly dialysis costs? Chemo and radiation treatment costs? A one-time fee of $30,000 to cure someone's life-threatening cancer would be considered cheap, and rightly so.
You're an idiot. It's a cure. If you re-introduce the cured disease, of course you have to cure it again. As opposed to, e.g. insulin for diabetics, which is not a cure but a maintenance drug. If you cut off your dick, and a doctor provided you with a medicine to regrow it, would you bitch that he didn't "cure" your condition if you then cut off your dick again and he said you needed another dose?
Given that there are so many different types of cancer, the only thing which would be a serious threat would be the proverbial "magic bullet". Since it's extremely unlikely such a thing exists, there's no reason anyone would have to hold back their research on curing any particular type of cancer.
X-ray machines are fairly cheap, it's true. But MRI and CT scanners are most definitely not. They're expensive to develop, expensive to get regulatory approval for, and even expensive to own and operate (they take a lot of space and require expensive regular maintenance and calibration).
As for a lot of the other tests, they ARE cheap. Check out your explanation of benefits sometime; you'll find an incredibly high list price for the test, and a far, far, lower price that your insurance company actually paid. They're making money on that far lower price.
This discrepancy between what's charged and what's paid is what keeps people from just being able to opt out of the system (maybe with some catastrophic insurance); if people could pay anything like what insurance companies paid, most middle class people could afford health care. Logically, doctors and hospitals should charge direct patients less, in fact, since insurance companies take months to pay and are a total pain in the ass to deal with. But they can't, because their deal with the insurance companies says otherwise.
But we don't give money to insurers, not directly. Instead, our employers choose the insurers and pay money to them, often withholding some portion of our salaries to cover all or part of that money. Since most of us don't have any control over who our employers choose as an insurer, and have other reasons to take a job besides who the insurer is, there's very little a patient can do to pressure the insurance companies.
These layers of intermediaries are, IMO, one of the major causes of problems with health care in the US.
You had it up to the taxes. The income taxes for the doctor's practice will be based on the net figure after legitimate business expenses (which everything you've mentioned -- including any amount paid to the doctor himself -- is). Only a local gross receipts tax would be based on that step 2 gross figure.
Here in America we believe in cause and effect, so that's not going to go over too well.
A competent and conservative pilot would have looked at the mission profile and said "Fuck this, I'm outta here."
May both parties in this suffer ruinous lawyers fees, regardless of the outcome.
DoD: External security
NSA: Part of the DoD
DHS: Internal security. Like the Gestapo, the Stasi, or any number of real and fictional organizations for oppression you've heard of.
Ultra-wealthy nerds (likely not ex- at all) aren't generally part of the wealthy ruling class; they remain mere nouveau riche until they figure out how to use their money to buy a strong position in the relevant legislatures. This they almost have to do eventually, or the actual ruling class will use their legislative position to separate the nerd from his wealth.
Before there was Kipling, before there was "We don't negotiate with terrorists.", there was "Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute." (US Rep. Robert Goodloe Harper, in 1798). I'm sure the idea is older than that.
Try this: "If I buy your overpriced useless piece of lead-painted flair, can I take you out to dinner tomorrow night?"
Sure, it's skanky. But how do you think all those sales types get dates?
Primality, c = 6.
So bin Laden is dead now rather than in October 2012 when it can do the most good for the Obama campaign? Boo fucking hoo.
The subset downloaded identifies the phone's location.
Because 1) This idea has been patented however 2) No one has ever managed to reduce it to practice, in any field. The typical result of attempting the "moderate" solution is a system which has all the disadvantages of both extremes.
You just need to put together some old Bose equipment and some new. The new stuff has no midrange, but the old stuff prompted the phrase "There are no highs, there are no lows, it must be Bose".
File under "Undistributed Middle, Fallacy thereof".