The problem is that even if you win it can cost nearly as much to defend yourself as to roll over and pay up. Add that to the contingency fees system and there's a big incentive to 'play the lottery' - the plaintiff has nothing to lose and could win big time.
Wrong. The plaintiff has a lot to lose, and so do his attorneys. Increasingly, the defense costs are being viewed merely as costs of doing business, so defendants are much more likely to fight than settle.
In order to pursue a "med mal" claim, the plaintiff and/or his attorneys must front the money for expert witnesses. In other words, the wronged person has to pay another doctor $500 or so an hour to put together a report, be deposed and, if the case goes to trial, testify. This is fraught with peril as the defendants will bring what is called a Daubert motion to have the expert disqualified. If they succeed, as they often do, then the case is dismissed on summary judgment. That means the plaintiff loses without even getting to the courthouse door. Of course, he and his attorneys are now on the hook for some very large bills for their experts.
By contrast, the doctor and his insurer have practically unlimited resources to hire their own experts who will say that the plaintiff and his experts are full of shit. And there is a large contingent of doctors who don't practice, but make their living testifying as "experts" on behalf of insurance companies. Gee . . . I Just Wonder what they're going to say about the plaintiff and his case. (I'm inclined to refer to those kinds of experts as "whores" or at least "paid shills," but that would be unseemly, wouldn't it?) And let's not forget that about 5% of the doctors commit roughly 60% of the malpractice.
This risk is so great that many lawyers won't take med mal cases. But no, we're supposed to believe the doctor's union and the insurance industry. Makes perfect sense to me.
Not causative, but if managed care was doing what you say, we'd all be out of jobs by now. We certainly work for less money than in middle america, though.
My point was that managed care is squeezing doctors a lot harder than the so-called lawsuit crisis is.
Truth is that more malpractice cases are settled out of court now than before, because the insurance companies don't want to pay whatever a jury might think is just, and no hospital wants their reputation damaged publicly. There's more of a driver for this in areas w/o tort reform because the jury awards can be so much higher and, therefore, more publicized.
Not necessarily. From what I've seen having worked in the legal field, med mal cases are often defended vigorously, usually by guys with American flags pins on their lapels who truly believe that any lawsuit against a doctor has no merit.
Insurance companies, despite very rare cases with high damage awards (most of which seem to be dropped on appeal) use that to justify charging outrageous premiums to MDs.
In fact, the reason for the high premiums is the insurance companies' losing gambles in the stock market. You are correct that they have been able to pass the buck onto everybody except themselves.
And, if they do settle out of court, that typically means the MD forever carries that blemish on their record and has to report that case everytime they apply for a license, job, etc. The insurance companies have done a good job of passing the buck on to everyone else but them.
I say this: When the National Practitioner Data Bank is made publically accessible, then we can talk about so-called tort reform. The fact that it isn't is further proof that the industry is out to protect its own, not the public. The idea that I can't check the record of someone into whose hands I am placing my very life is a travesty.
Ultimately, the problem will only be solved when the U.S. is led, kicking and screaming, down the path towards some kind of national health care system, like every civilized nation on this planet has done. It's high time that the profit motive is taken out of medicine and doctors can get back to being doctors.
I'm not sure that that many Americans would actually cheer Bush's assassination. I can, however, see a large, collective sigh of relief. Unfortunately, It's quite possible that that sigh might be short-lived. I'm not at all convinced that 'shure-shot' Cheney would make a much better president than Bush. On the (somewhat) bright side, I doubt that he could be much worse.
Wouldn't make shit difference. Deadeye Dick and the Usual Gang of PNAC Idiots (Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al) are really running the show. You know, the guys who said we would be "greeted as liberators"?
"Dumb-Ya" is merely the useful idiot, the frontman.
Too expensive! A more fitting punishment would be to tie all trial lawyers to trees, upsidedown, and feed them ex-lax for a week. Then they would be covered in what they try to dish out to the rest of us!
Start with John Edwards since the only thing he ever did "for" North Carolina with his malpractice suits is raise the cost of insurance to the point that there are now 10% fewer Doctors here than 15 years ago. This is the kind of slime that wants to be President?
Okay, I'll bite.
We hear an awful lot about the so-called "tort crisis" and that the "courts are overrun with frivolous lawsuits." These claims are nothing more than insurance industry propaganda. It's all in the name of getting so-called tort reform passed. This, from an industry whose entire raison d'etre is not to pay.
Those of us in the business know that, in fact, the number of lawsuits, number of trials, and sizes of jury awards have actually been going down, not up. Using your medical malpractice example, the odds against a medical malpractice plaintiff winning at trial are three-to-one at best. The simple fact is, the medical profession has done a horrible job of policing itself and is mainly interested in protecting the "doctor lifestyle." No, friend, the reason there are so many fewer doctors is principally because managed care (an oxymoron if there ever was one) is driving them out of business.
[i]by aichpvee (631243) Alter Relationship on Thursday May 10, @09:43AM (#19069671) That's what you get when you have an ignorant, superstitious population that votes accordingly.[/i]
Too bad I don't have mod points. This isn't a flamebait, it's the truth.
is that the Democrats have already decided to commit political suicide and run Hillary.
For the uninitiated, it is a fallacy to think of the whole of America as a beautiful, progressive shining city on a hill. Most of America is not NYC, San Fran, Chicago, and other progressive bastions. The whole of America, and especially of the red states is a lot more like Tulsa, Oklahoma. They send their kids to Bob Jones University, a Taliban-like environment that forsook its tax-exempt status rather than relax its ban on interracial dating.
To give you a better idea, consider that 35 per cent of Americans view the Bible as the literal and inerrant word of the Creator of the Universe. Approximately 40 per cent take a literalist view of creation. In other words, anywhere from a third to half of my (for now) countrymen believe that the same deity who created 250,000 species of beetles wrote a book that is stylistically inconsistent, self-contradictory, and consists largely of mistranslations from documents of dubious provenance. Yet, this country makes its public policy based on quotes taken out of context from said book.
What does this have to do with Hillary? Well, the Bubbas aren't going to vote for her or any other woman in a million years. Despite his international popularity, the Christian Reich^H^H^H^H^HRight thought Bill Clinton was a quarter-step above Satan. They will come out in force to fight her with every fibre of their being. That, and the Bible says that women are to be "submissive" to their husbands. In other words, they sure as hell have no business in the White House.
The fact that she voted for the Vietraq war will not stop the RepubliKKKans from portraying her as an extreme leftist. And if it comes right down to it, they'll manipulate the election to make it close enough that they can hit the Diebold button and ensure a Romney or Giuliani victory.
Bottom line, the Democrats couldn't pick a worse candidate, yet the party has already anointed her to be The Nominee. This is just further proof of what a sham the primaries really are. In 2004, the grassroots wanted Howard Dean, but The Party decided that Ketchup Man was the guy. We were then left with a Hobson's choice of which Bonesman to vote for. We got the chimp whose Skull and Bones name was and still is "Temporary." Things aren't looking much better this time around.
to Harpo to "harmonize" Canadian copyright laws with the U.S. This is part of his "deep integration" hidden agenda he's going to implement the second he gets a majority government. You know, all of those "extra" laws Canada has on the books that "hinder" trade? He's already sold the tar sands to the oil barons lock, stock and barrel.
Don't forget, the "piracy" claims come from an industry whose reputation for "creative accounting" is cited as examples of such in accounting textbooks!
If Watada had been ordered to gun down 27 unarmed teenagers and then bulldoze their bodies into a grave, then yeah, he's got a leg to stand on.
But you and I both know that the odds are about 100% that if he goes, he eventually will be ordered to do something along those lines. Or just pick them up and haul them off to concentration, erm, "detention" camps to be tortured, erm, interrogated with "enhanced interrogation methods."
My contract and enlistment oath says I swore to "obey all LAWFUL orders", and they're quite quick to fry anybody woh does something illegal with the cop-out "but I was ordered to...."
Think so, huh? Wonder what 1LT Ehren Watada has to say about that.
Besides, the Nuremberg Doctrine is a shining example of victor's (so-called) justice. The Allies knew right, good and well that "but I was refusing an illegal order" would have gotten nowhere. "That's nice, private. Would you like a blindfold? A cigarette? Do you have any last words?" Watada's situation is proof positive of that.
Trying to silence ESR? Isn't that like the proverbial unstopable rock hitting the unmoveable object? Silencing ESR would require the violation of at least 7 laws of physics:-)
Could be dangerous too. He's also a gundamentalist. You know, the type that puts the "gun" before "da mental"?
Apparently he settled out right before a contempt hearing was set in the state court. He was apparently about to get his ass slapped pretty hard for something. Since I don't have access to the state court file, I can't tell you what it is. I'll see what I can find out and let everyone know.
When you're emboldened by the fact that the Bush administration folded the royal flush they had against you, this is what you can and will do.
In other words, when you have no competition and the government's antitrust function has been neutered, you can force people to use a technologically inferior and more expensive product that they otherwise wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.
by limecat4eva (1055464) on Saturday April 07, @08:26AM (#18646411)
I can't speak for Mr. Graham, but I know my friends and I all use Macs, and always have. I've actually never seen any of my friends buy a new PC. Of course, I live in Brooklyn; prevailing attitudes towards operating systems must surely differ in red-state East Jesus...
by nighty5 (615965) Alter Relationship on Tuesday April 03, @09:08PM (#18599221)
Who would want to work in the US anyway?
Better off heading to Europe.
How is this a troll? It's the truth. Fucking right-wing mods.
Let's see here . . . what's it like to live in the U.S., with its asinine, idiotic "faith based" (read: Making scientific and public policy based upon long-discredited fairy tales comprised of mistranslations of out-of-context quotes from documents whose provenance is dubious at best, all describing events that are preposterous as being contrary to the laws of physics) approach to life? Oh my, where to begin.
-- First in the world in health care spending, yet 37th in health care outcomes. Practically speaking, this means 1/6th of the population has no access to health care at all, i.e., no insurance. The rest? Most insurance policies only cover 80% of the costs after a deductible is met, and then there are further limits and exclusions aplenty. What's 20% of the cost of your $200,000 open heart surgery? Do you have that kind of money laying around? I didn't think so. And believe me when I tell you, they are going to want it all and want it now.
-- Well behind the rest of the world in internet use and broadband penetration. Don't give me that bullcrap about "the U.S. is a huge country." Canada has more broadband penetration.
-- A people so culturally and intellectually bankrupt that it twice elected a (1) downright moron and a former actor already in late-state Alzheimer's. Both times, they were frontmen for the Machivellian sociopaths (Cheney, Bush Sr., et al) who run things from behind the scenes.
-- Continuing the above theme, a culture where stupidity is glorified, no condemned as it should be.
-- Workers are losing, not gaining, ground. Real wages have been falling since Carter was in office, while the number of hours worked has increased. In other words, we're working more and more, harder and harder, just to keep the bleeding under control. Did I mention that one in four U.S. jobs pays less than $10/hour?
-- At the same time, the only group whose income has gone up over these past eight years has been the wealthy. Not the merely well-to-do, mind you, I'm talking about the super-rich, the top fraction of one percent. Their incomes have increased by approximately 50%.
-- A government run by of, by, and for moneyed special interests. The government folded winning hands against both Microsoft (toothless non-settlement) and the tobacco industry (declined to seek money damages when they were found to have engaged in racketeering.) Oh, and with the Medicare Part D, it is prohibited by law from using its purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices. Free market my ass, that sounds an awful lot like socialism to me.
-- An unsustainable economy built on a housing bubble and Pentagon socialism. Vonage is a perfect example of what happens if you try to "innovate" - you get sued out existence because of some vague interpretation of a heretofore unused patent.
-- A long history of being the world's bumbling idiot bully. The U.S. has repeatedly toppled democratically elected governments all over the world. Nobody likes a bully, and everybody laughs their ass off when said bully gets kicked in the nuts good and hard, as happened to the U.S. on 9/11. It's even funnier when the mastermind of said attack, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, entered the U.S. legally on a tourist visa six weeks prior to 9/11 while he was a wanted fugitive! Oh, and let's not forget that the 9/11 hijackers had their visas approved weeks or months after the attacks!
I could go on, but that's why you'd be better off going to just about any other first-world country besides the U.S.
You will be rather surprised at how the moderation system get used to suppress dissenting but otherwise valid opinions.
Naa, I think the surest way to get modded into oblivion on/. is to criticize Apple in any way. You know, point out how the Mac Pros are ridiculously overpriced, for example. I still want one, though.;)
And I say this as I'm typing on an Apple machine while my Apple laptop is sitting on the charger in the other room. Fukkin fanboys.
First, the site deals with helping those accused of child molestation. Second, archive.org removed her site when she requested it. Third, archive.org sued her for declaratory judgment of noninfringement when she demanded payment of $10,000. She countersued for RICO violations, etc. The judge shot all of those down except for the contract law claim and expressed doubt about the viability of that one. So, yes, extremely high kook factor. This would be a non-story but for the pervasive legal illiteracy on/.
If the 9/11 hijackers had hit, say, Harlem and wiped out 3,000 of our "tinted brethren," rather than the WTC and wiped out 3,000 wealthy white stockbrokers, would we have been so quick to "avenge" their deaths?
On another note, the airlines had been told for a number of years before 9/11 that they needed to armor the cabin doors. Their response? "No, that would cost too much money." Same thing with airport security people. Every civilized nation on Earth takes airport security seriously, hiring well-paid, well-trained, and often heavily armed agents. The U.S., on the other hand, hires grade-school dropouts of dubious immigration status to do the job. Why? How else are the airlines going to afford several billion a year in executive pay and perks? By cutting those things, they could put more money into security, but no.
Nevermind the fact that there are much larger and complex setups out there, as others have pointed out. Nevermind the fact that Star Wars was a ripoff of a Japanese pulp science fiction novel.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that even if you win it can cost nearly as much to defend yourself as to roll over and pay up. Add that to the contingency fees system and there's a big incentive to 'play the lottery' - the plaintiff has nothing to lose and could win big time.
Wrong. The plaintiff has a lot to lose, and so do his attorneys. Increasingly, the defense costs are being viewed merely as costs of doing business, so defendants are much more likely to fight than settle.
In order to pursue a "med mal" claim, the plaintiff and/or his attorneys must front the money for expert witnesses. In other words, the wronged person has to pay another doctor $500 or so an hour to put together a report, be deposed and, if the case goes to trial, testify. This is fraught with peril as the defendants will bring what is called a Daubert motion to have the expert disqualified. If they succeed, as they often do, then the case is dismissed on summary judgment. That means the plaintiff loses without even getting to the courthouse door. Of course, he and his attorneys are now on the hook for some very large bills for their experts.
By contrast, the doctor and his insurer have practically unlimited resources to hire their own experts who will say that the plaintiff and his experts are full of shit. And there is a large contingent of doctors who don't practice, but make their living testifying as "experts" on behalf of insurance companies. Gee . . . I Just Wonder what they're going to say about the plaintiff and his case. (I'm inclined to refer to those kinds of experts as "whores" or at least "paid shills," but that would be unseemly, wouldn't it?) And let's not forget that about 5% of the doctors commit roughly 60% of the malpractice.
This risk is so great that many lawyers won't take med mal cases. But no, we're supposed to believe the doctor's union and the insurance industry. Makes perfect sense to me.
Not causative, but if managed care was doing what you say, we'd all be out of jobs by now. We certainly work for less money than in middle america, though.
My point was that managed care is squeezing doctors a lot harder than the so-called lawsuit crisis is.
Truth is that more malpractice cases are settled out of court now than before, because the insurance companies don't want to pay whatever a jury might think is just, and no hospital wants their reputation damaged publicly. There's more of a driver for this in areas w/o tort reform because the jury awards can be so much higher and, therefore, more publicized.
Not necessarily. From what I've seen having worked in the legal field, med mal cases are often defended vigorously, usually by guys with American flags pins on their lapels who truly believe that any lawsuit against a doctor has no merit.
Insurance companies, despite very rare cases with high damage awards (most of which seem to be dropped on appeal) use that to justify charging outrageous premiums to MDs.
In fact, the reason for the high premiums is the insurance companies' losing gambles in the stock market. You are correct that they have been able to pass the buck onto everybody except themselves.
And, if they do settle out of court, that typically means the MD forever carries that blemish on their record and has to report that case everytime they apply for a license, job, etc. The insurance companies have done a good job of passing the buck on to everyone else but them.
I say this: When the National Practitioner Data Bank is made publically accessible, then we can talk about so-called tort reform. The fact that it isn't is further proof that the industry is out to protect its own, not the public. The idea that I can't check the record of someone into whose hands I am placing my very life is a travesty.
Ultimately, the problem will only be solved when the U.S. is led, kicking and screaming, down the path towards some kind of national health care system, like every civilized nation on this planet has done. It's high time that the profit motive is taken out of medicine and doctors can get back to being doctors.
Where is Lee Harvey Oswald, now that we Really Need Him?
I'm not sure that that many Americans would actually cheer Bush's assassination. I can, however, see a large, collective sigh of relief. Unfortunately, It's quite possible that that sigh might be short-lived. I'm not at all convinced that 'shure-shot' Cheney would make a much better president than Bush. On the (somewhat) bright side, I doubt that he could be much worse.
Wouldn't make shit difference. Deadeye Dick and the Usual Gang of PNAC Idiots (Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al) are really running the show. You know, the guys who said we would be "greeted as liberators"?
"Dumb-Ya" is merely the useful idiot, the frontman.
Too expensive! A more fitting punishment would be to tie all trial lawyers to trees, upsidedown, and feed them ex-lax for a week. Then they would be covered in what they try to dish out to the rest of us!
Start with John Edwards since the only thing he ever did "for" North Carolina with his malpractice suits is raise the cost of insurance to the point that there are now 10% fewer Doctors here than 15 years ago. This is the kind of slime that wants to be President?
Okay, I'll bite.
We hear an awful lot about the so-called "tort crisis" and that the "courts are overrun with frivolous lawsuits." These claims are nothing more than insurance industry propaganda. It's all in the name of getting so-called tort reform passed. This, from an industry whose entire raison d'etre is not to pay.
Those of us in the business know that, in fact, the number of lawsuits, number of trials, and sizes of jury awards have actually been going down, not up. Using your medical malpractice example, the odds against a medical malpractice plaintiff winning at trial are three-to-one at best. The simple fact is, the medical profession has done a horrible job of policing itself and is mainly interested in protecting the "doctor lifestyle." No, friend, the reason there are so many fewer doctors is principally because managed care (an oxymoron if there ever was one) is driving them out of business.
Asperberger's It's spelled Asperger's! Learn to spell! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHH
It's pronounced "ass burger," isn't it?
[i]by aichpvee (631243) Alter Relationship on Thursday May 10, @09:43AM (#19069671)
That's what you get when you have an ignorant, superstitious population that votes accordingly.[/i]
Too bad I don't have mod points. This isn't a flamebait, it's the truth.
is that the Democrats have already decided to commit political suicide and run Hillary.
For the uninitiated, it is a fallacy to think of the whole of America as a beautiful, progressive shining city on a hill. Most of America is not NYC, San Fran, Chicago, and other progressive bastions. The whole of America, and especially of the red states is a lot more like Tulsa, Oklahoma. They send their kids to Bob Jones University, a Taliban-like environment that forsook its tax-exempt status rather than relax its ban on interracial dating.
To give you a better idea, consider that 35 per cent of Americans view the Bible as the literal and inerrant word of the Creator of the Universe. Approximately 40 per cent take a literalist view of creation. In other words, anywhere from a third to half of my (for now) countrymen believe that the same deity who created 250,000 species of beetles wrote a book that is stylistically inconsistent, self-contradictory, and consists largely of mistranslations from documents of dubious provenance. Yet, this country makes its public policy based on quotes taken out of context from said book.
What does this have to do with Hillary? Well, the Bubbas aren't going to vote for her or any other woman in a million years. Despite his international popularity, the Christian Reich^H^H^H^H^HRight thought Bill Clinton was a quarter-step above Satan. They will come out in force to fight her with every fibre of their being. That, and the Bible says that women are to be "submissive" to their husbands. In other words, they sure as hell have no business in the White House.
The fact that she voted for the Vietraq war will not stop the RepubliKKKans from portraying her as an extreme leftist. And if it comes right down to it, they'll manipulate the election to make it close enough that they can hit the Diebold button and ensure a Romney or Giuliani victory.
Bottom line, the Democrats couldn't pick a worse candidate, yet the party has already anointed her to be The Nominee. This is just further proof of what a sham the primaries really are. In 2004, the grassroots wanted Howard Dean, but The Party decided that Ketchup Man was the guy. We were then left with a Hobson's choice of which Bonesman to vote for. We got the chimp whose Skull and Bones name was and still is "Temporary." Things aren't looking much better this time around.
O Canada, our Home and Native Land . . .
Rightwing mods, fire away, I have karma to burn.
to Harpo to "harmonize" Canadian copyright laws with the U.S. This is part of his "deep integration" hidden agenda he's going to implement the second he gets a majority government. You know, all of those "extra" laws Canada has on the books that "hinder" trade? He's already sold the tar sands to the oil barons lock, stock and barrel.
Don't forget, the "piracy" claims come from an industry whose reputation for "creative accounting" is cited as examples of such in accounting textbooks!
If Watada had been ordered to gun down 27 unarmed teenagers and then bulldoze their bodies into a grave, then yeah, he's got a leg to stand on.
But you and I both know that the odds are about 100% that if he goes, he eventually will be ordered to do something along those lines. Or just pick them up and haul them off to concentration, erm, "detention" camps to be tortured, erm, interrogated with "enhanced interrogation methods."
My contract and enlistment oath says I swore to "obey all LAWFUL orders", and they're quite quick to fry anybody woh does something illegal with the cop-out "but I was ordered to...."
Think so, huh? Wonder what 1LT Ehren Watada has to say about that.
Besides, the Nuremberg Doctrine is a shining example of victor's (so-called) justice. The Allies knew right, good and well that "but I was refusing an illegal order" would have gotten nowhere. "That's nice, private. Would you like a blindfold? A cigarette? Do you have any last words?" Watada's situation is proof positive of that.
I have karma to burn, so fire away, wingnut mods.
Trying to silence ESR? Isn't that like the proverbial unstopable rock hitting the unmoveable object? Silencing ESR would require the violation of at least 7 laws of physics :-)
Could be dangerous too. He's also a gundamentalist. You know, the type that puts the "gun" before "da mental"?
Apparently he settled out right before a contempt hearing was set in the state court. He was apparently about to get his ass slapped pretty hard for something. Since I don't have access to the state court file, I can't tell you what it is. I'll see what I can find out and let everyone know.
this is what you can do.
When you're emboldened by the fact that the Bush administration folded the royal flush they had against you, this is what you can and will do.
In other words, when you have no competition and the government's antitrust function has been neutered, you can force people to use a technologically inferior and more expensive product that they otherwise wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.
Innovative? Orwellian, that.
I'd mod you insightful if I could.
by limecat4eva (1055464) on Saturday April 07, @08:26AM (#18646411)
I can't speak for Mr. Graham, but I know my friends and I all use Macs, and always have. I've actually never seen any of my friends buy a new PC. Of course, I live in Brooklyn; prevailing attitudes towards operating systems must surely differ in red-state East Jesus...
And precisely how is this a troll?!?
Then why do so many try to come and stay here?
A classic ad populum fallacy, that.
Be that as it may, the U.S. needs cheap, easily exploitable labor, and the U.S. lets them in.
And just for the record, where do you live?
The U.S., for now.
Bonus Question: If the answer to the above is "US", why have you not emmigrated to another first-world country?
I'm working on that.
by nighty5 (615965) Alter Relationship on Tuesday April 03, @09:08PM (#18599221)
Who would want to work in the US anyway?
Better off heading to Europe.
How is this a troll? It's the truth. Fucking right-wing mods.
Let's see here . . . what's it like to live in the U.S., with its asinine, idiotic "faith based" (read: Making scientific and public policy based upon long-discredited fairy tales comprised of mistranslations of out-of-context quotes from documents whose provenance is dubious at best, all describing events that are preposterous as being contrary to the laws of physics) approach to life? Oh my, where to begin.
-- First in the world in health care spending, yet 37th in health care outcomes. Practically speaking, this means 1/6th of the population has no access to health care at all, i.e., no insurance. The rest? Most insurance policies only cover 80% of the costs after a deductible is met, and then there are further limits and exclusions aplenty. What's 20% of the cost of your $200,000 open heart surgery? Do you have that kind of money laying around? I didn't think so. And believe me when I tell you, they are going to want it all and want it now.
-- Well behind the rest of the world in internet use and broadband penetration. Don't give me that bullcrap about "the U.S. is a huge country." Canada has more broadband penetration.
-- A people so culturally and intellectually bankrupt that it twice elected a (1) downright moron and a former actor already in late-state Alzheimer's. Both times, they were frontmen for the Machivellian sociopaths (Cheney, Bush Sr., et al) who run things from behind the scenes.
-- Continuing the above theme, a culture where stupidity is glorified, no condemned as it should be.
-- Workers are losing, not gaining, ground. Real wages have been falling since Carter was in office, while the number of hours worked has increased. In other words, we're working more and more, harder and harder, just to keep the bleeding under control. Did I mention that one in four U.S. jobs pays less than $10/hour?
-- At the same time, the only group whose income has gone up over these past eight years has been the wealthy. Not the merely well-to-do, mind you, I'm talking about the super-rich, the top fraction of one percent. Their incomes have increased by approximately 50%.
-- A government run by of, by, and for moneyed special interests. The government folded winning hands against both Microsoft (toothless non-settlement) and the tobacco industry (declined to seek money damages when they were found to have engaged in racketeering.) Oh, and with the Medicare Part D, it is prohibited by law from using its purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices. Free market my ass, that sounds an awful lot like socialism to me.
-- An unsustainable economy built on a housing bubble and Pentagon socialism. Vonage is a perfect example of what happens if you try to "innovate" - you get sued out existence because of some vague interpretation of a heretofore unused patent.
-- A long history of being the world's bumbling idiot bully. The U.S. has repeatedly toppled democratically elected governments all over the world. Nobody likes a bully, and everybody laughs their ass off when said bully gets kicked in the nuts good and hard, as happened to the U.S. on 9/11. It's even funnier when the mastermind of said attack, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, entered the U.S. legally on a tourist visa six weeks prior to 9/11 while he was a wanted fugitive! Oh, and let's not forget that the 9/11 hijackers had their visas approved weeks or months after the attacks!
I could go on, but that's why you'd be better off going to just about any other first-world country besides the U.S.
You will be rather surprised at how the moderation system get used to suppress dissenting but otherwise valid opinions.
/. is to criticize Apple in any way. You know, point out how the Mac Pros are ridiculously overpriced, for example. I still want one, though. ;)
Naa, I think the surest way to get modded into oblivion on
And I say this as I'm typing on an Apple machine while my Apple laptop is sitting on the charger in the other room. Fukkin fanboys.
and kiss your ass goodbye!
First, the site deals with helping those accused of child molestation. Second, archive.org removed her site when she requested it. Third, archive.org sued her for declaratory judgment of noninfringement when she demanded payment of $10,000. She countersued for RICO violations, etc. The judge shot all of those down except for the contract law claim and expressed doubt about the viability of that one. So, yes, extremely high kook factor. This would be a non-story but for the pervasive legal illiteracy on /.
If the 9/11 hijackers had hit, say, Harlem and wiped out 3,000 of our "tinted brethren," rather than the WTC and wiped out 3,000 wealthy white stockbrokers, would we have been so quick to "avenge" their deaths?
On another note, the airlines had been told for a number of years before 9/11 that they needed to armor the cabin doors. Their response? "No, that would cost too much money." Same thing with airport security people. Every civilized nation on Earth takes airport security seriously, hiring well-paid, well-trained, and often heavily armed agents. The U.S., on the other hand, hires grade-school dropouts of dubious immigration status to do the job. Why? How else are the airlines going to afford several billion a year in executive pay and perks? By cutting those things, they could put more money into security, but no.
Nevermind the fact that there are much larger and complex setups out there, as others have pointed out. Nevermind the fact that Star Wars was a ripoff of a Japanese pulp science fiction novel.
The false positive rate on WGA is well-documents to be extremely high. Change out your video card? Nailed. NIC? Nailed. Windows hiccups? Nailed.