How about less time for letting somebody rape you, or less time for mowing the judge's lawn every Saturday, or so on? Just because you agree to it doesn't make it OK to enforce the agreement.
There is a reason that government is not permitted to dispense cruel or unusual punishment. It shouldn't be able to dispense an inordinate amount of ordinary punishment to coerce you into accepting unusual punishment.
That said - She may have agreed to delete her account as a condition of a lighter sentence. Personally, I have a problem with games like that in general, but since it happens, and she took the deal, she damned well better hold up her side if she wants to remain on the outside of a cage.
I think that enforcing the deal just legitimizes it. Much of what we call justice today is about grabbing somebody, charging them with about 35 lifetimes in prison, then offering them 5 years if they plead guilty, and then six months in prison and a bunch of bizarre conditions that you could never put into a law on their own if they agree to them. The accused can either take their chances with 35 lifetimes in prison, or bend over and take it. I can't condone that sort of thing, and really we're all responsible for it as members of society.
The justice system should be about figuring out whether somebody actually did something wrong, punishing them, and rehabilitating them, and doing all of it as quickly as possible. It should actually be done with no long-term financial hardship to the accused, even if convicted. Being unable to get a job and having a mountain of debt isn't really an effective way to treat somebody that you're trying to rehabilitate.
Why would the victims even be looking at their facebook page? The fact that the guy is walking around on the streets is probably more than enough of a reminder of what they did, but we can't just kill anybody who reminds us of something bad.
Except that EVERYBODY is guilty of something. How does having some judge browbeat somebody after the fact improve our society?
The purpose of the justice system should be to deter crime and rehabilitate offenders. It is in the interest of society to make that system take as little time as possible so that everybody can get on with living. If you want to make sure somebody is getting on with life and help them find a job, by all means do it. If you want to pester them about using Facebook, find something better to do.
One way to find out for sure - design a virus or XSS attack that triggers that delete function, and after 95% of the Facebook-using population deletes their accounts you'll see if they have an undelete feature.
Well, the reality is that the mean probably is a few days walk, and that is due to a highly skewed distribution.
On the one hand you have the huge chunk of the population that lives near urban centers where the average walk is minutes to maybe an hour or two. On the other hand you have people living in the middle of Nebraska who would probably have to walk for a few months to get to a bus stop on a route that resembles an expedition from the age of discovery.
Ultimately the end of the line is whoever points a gun at you. All that law and justice stuff is nice in theory, but in the end it all comes down to what people can get away with, whether it is those in power, or those who defy those in power. The legal system is an approximation of justice, but certainly an imperfect one. Just look at how well it handles scientific evidence and then tell me that they really have the final word on what is and isn't a fact.
Yes, but the other avenues aren't much better. You can either voluntarily comply, or spend a fortune trying to get the order rescinded.
Legally speeding isn't a smart move either, but 99.9999% of the population does it anyway, because the laws are dumb. It won't get you out of a ticket, but only because the justice system isn't.
Frankly, the current legal system makes simply being accused of a crime an undue burden and so on. Think that not having a drivers license will make it hard to find employment? How about having your name in the newspaper, being fired, having to show up to court, having to come up with tens of thousands of dollars, and so on? Your life is ruined well before you get to a verdict.
Honestly, the way we treat it these days I tend to think yes.
I'm all for deterring crime. I'm also for not having huge swaths of our population that have no way to support themselves but no social network to fall back on. Somebody convicted of crime loses access to any decent paying job. So instead of supporting himself and presumably doing something useful for society in the process and paying taxes, now the guy might work for minimum wage, pays little in taxes, receive public benefits of one sort or another, and if they are bored with their job perhaps they become a more serious criminal. All because one day the guy lost it and beat his wife or hit somebody or whatever it was. All of those things should be punished, but at some point you have to move on.
Adults really are just like children - they have bad days and good days and when they do stupid stuff you need to whack them and then get on with it.
You could actually make an argument for corporal punishment as a result. Do something dump and you get whipped a few times. Costs little to administer, you'll NEVER forget the lesson, but after a day or two of recovery you can go right back to work. Frankly it seems a lot better all around than sticking people in a cell for months on end while they lose their job, their family loses the house, and they probably still get all beat up anyway.
What I don't get is why people sentenced to death should have any more access to appeals than those sentenced to life in prison. If there is some merit to the appeal it should be heard, and if not it shouldn't be. I think the fact that we don't spend so much money on people not sentenced to death is a potential sign that we just brush problems with their cases under the rug.
If we are going to execute someone, should we really not give them full due process of law? Taking a life is the most extreme action available to our justice system.
Frankly we should be giving people better than what currently is due process of law for the least of our offenses, let alone for capital crimes. Perhaps taking a life is the most extreme action available, but even fairly trivial crimes are met with extreme actions these days.
The death penalty is merely a symptom of a much bigger problem - we don't care about justice - we care about security theater.
While your argument has some merit, I'd hardly say that sticking people in jail for 15 years and then saying, "oops, got it wrong, good luck getting a job now" is a lot better than just killing them. Somewhat better, sure.
When it comes to the problems with our justice system, it seems to me like the death penalty is the least of our problems. It is symbolic in some sense, and obviously it really does kill people, but far more lives are ruined by other problems with the system - probably more people die from suicides as a result of miscarriages of justice than from lethal injection.
Yup. For a Nexus device you will probably get security updates for about 1.5 years from the date that the device was FIRST announced (ie passed out at IO or whatever). For any other device you probably won't ever get an update, unless somebody manages to totally own the thing will it is still being advertised on TV.
If you care about updates on Android don't ever buy anything but a Nexus device, and don't buy the Nexus device unless it is no more than a few months old. I'd say in a few months the Nexus 7 is going to be obsolete as far as updates go (sure, it will still get them, but likely for only a year after you buy it). I think two years is the minimum a phone should be supported, but if you want that you need to buy an iPhone (if you buy a 4s TODAY you'll probably STILL get updates for a full two years). I love Android, but the lack of updates just kills me.
I did, and I understand the concerns about not amplifying parts of the range that aren't deficient. However, why not just have a tiny dial that sets a high-pass filter, and individuals could just tweak that on the basic model? Sure, it isn't perfect, but it is better than going without because you don't have $2k.
Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of good enough.
I'd think that the "basic" model shouldn't require any tuning at all. Do you even have that choice when using insurance?
As far as antivenom goes - I suspect that the trials to get it approved in the US probably did cost a small fortune. Part of the reform has to be regulatory. If the manufacturer actually had to perform a clinical trial then the costs for that is in the millions of dollars. Then if you sell 10 vials a year you need to charge $3k per vial just to make up that up-front cost in 30 years. It doesn't matter that it has been made for 50 years for $100/vial in Mexico if you're not allowed to sell it in the US without a new trial, and the US might not except past trials if they weren't run to modern standards.
Companies certainly are complicit in all of this - often a form of regulatory capture. However, our own laws create barriers to competition and sometimes set standards that are higher than they need to be.
On the other hand, you could argue that insurers paying $3k/dose is cheaper than taking the risk that you could get sepsis or something from the shot.
The truth likely is somewhere in-between. I suspect the cost to make these things is way less than $4500, but it may very well be more than $200.
Consumers should have a choice in products, and a choice in whether they need them tuned more extensively or not, and so on.
While I don't have any experience with hearing aids in particular, I've had to deal with other "medical devices" and it definitely is like working with a cartel. You're often just handed something and if you want to actually have some choice in the matter you sometimes have to go to war with your doctor (who no doubts gets kickbacks or at least free classes from his brand of choice), and you end up paying through the nose especially if you want insurance to pay part of it. The FDA is really big on patients not having any control over their own devices, so things get super-locked down, and so on.
One example was a several-year-old Macbook preloaded with some accessibility software for $50k, and with everything and the kitchen sink disabled and locked down on it. It so happens that it would have been really useful if that software could have been used with things like email/facebook/etc, but those things sound like fun and are evil, so if you want to use those you need to get somebody who isn't disabled to do your typing/reading for you from a separate device. There wasn't anything about the setup that couldn't have been handled by selling a CD in a box, but hey that isn't a fully-integrated medical device so it can't be helpful and bill Medicare.
Yup, my employer went through a merger and no doubt getting the networks merged went as quickly as it did because one of the companies involved had a class A (yup, one of THOSE companies). Every printer, PC, and whatever in the company had a globally routable IP address - and yet they were all NATed as far as the internet was concerned.:)
Yup, that argument is like saying the solution to our budget deficit is to grow the economy.
Nobody is going to argue that a cure for all human disease and economic woe isn't the best possible solution. However, until we have that figured out we have some treatments that work to some extent today, and it doesn't hurt to continue to refine those while we're still working on the panacea.
A lot of good could come from more experiences like the one you speak of (whether true or not). I don't think anybody has a true appreciation of the US Healthcare system until they have sat at the bedside of somebody who has been hospitalized for at least a week with a major problem. You have everything from dealing with doctors who spend 5min/day with you to mind-boggling billing practices to the psychological torture of near absolute boredom to being told at 6PM that you'll be going home tomorrow and finally getting into your car almost 24 hours later after all the paperwork is done.
For those with an IT background picture a 2-3 core CPU whose clock line pulses once a day and you'll get a sense of how things get done in a hospital. All decisions get made between 8-10AM Mon-Fri only, and everything else that takes place is about gathering data for the next tick of the "clock."
There is something to be said about this. I know somebody with an invasive and chronic health problem and I really do get concerned about their will to live.
If you measure the effectiveness of painkillers the way you measure the effectiveness of other drugs you'll come up with the same result across the board - they don't make people "healthier" and they often harm people. However, this kind of evaluation is not unlike the kinds of "medical evaluations" used to justify torture in the last decade - "waterboarding doesn't cause permanent harm" and that sort of thing. Medicine is only a means to an end - and that end for most people is an enjoyable life, not simply a long one.
you can't afford out-of-pocket or with only moderate hardship the expense of covering a loss.
The insurance company is making money. If they thought you'd be better off (by the numbers) with insurance they wouldn't be selling it to you.
I have homeowner's insurance, because I can't handle having a $180k bill if the house burns down while I'm away. I have auto insurance, because I can't afford a $500k liability payment in the unlikely event that I bounce off a supercar and hit some guy on a bike. I have health insurance, because if I have a heart attack I can't afford bypass surgery.
I don't pay for phone insurance, because if I break my $600 phone I just buy another $600 phone. Even if I had to pay interest for a month or two at horrible credit card rates it is WAY cheaper than insurance. Phone insurance is expensive because people with it have little incentive to check their pockets before doing the wash.
Oh, and keep in mind that what we call "health insurance" in the US is about 10% insurance, and 90% a buyer's club for health services. It is wise to buy it even if you have $50M in the bank, otherwise your nice friendly doctor will rape you on every little thing you have done.
Not so here. This FAA certification means "accurate enough to stand in for some flight hours" - it's not just a random seal of Officialness that you think it is.
FAA certification means "declared by the FAA to be legal to stand in for some flight hours." It is possible for something to be accurate enough to stand in and not be certified. Presumably the FAA audits accuracy in some way before granting certification, but certification isn't the same as accuracy, even if the goals of the certifying agency is for it to be so.
For example, take a non-commercial-use copy of X-Plane. It is apparently not considered by the author to be FAA certified, but on appropriate hardware it is just as good as the certified version. It simply doesn't check to make sure that it is on appropriate hardware.
Yup. And things inside sandboxes probably won't be allowed to make direct Wayland calls anyway, so I tend to agree that this particular issue seems to be a non-issue.
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How about less time for letting somebody rape you, or less time for mowing the judge's lawn every Saturday, or so on? Just because you agree to it doesn't make it OK to enforce the agreement.
There is a reason that government is not permitted to dispense cruel or unusual punishment. It shouldn't be able to dispense an inordinate amount of ordinary punishment to coerce you into accepting unusual punishment.
That said - She may have agreed to delete her account as a condition of a lighter sentence. Personally, I have a problem with games like that in general, but since it happens, and she took the deal, she damned well better hold up her side if she wants to remain on the outside of a cage.
I think that enforcing the deal just legitimizes it. Much of what we call justice today is about grabbing somebody, charging them with about 35 lifetimes in prison, then offering them 5 years if they plead guilty, and then six months in prison and a bunch of bizarre conditions that you could never put into a law on their own if they agree to them. The accused can either take their chances with 35 lifetimes in prison, or bend over and take it. I can't condone that sort of thing, and really we're all responsible for it as members of society.
The justice system should be about figuring out whether somebody actually did something wrong, punishing them, and rehabilitating them, and doing all of it as quickly as possible. It should actually be done with no long-term financial hardship to the accused, even if convicted. Being unable to get a job and having a mountain of debt isn't really an effective way to treat somebody that you're trying to rehabilitate.
Why would the victims even be looking at their facebook page? The fact that the guy is walking around on the streets is probably more than enough of a reminder of what they did, but we can't just kill anybody who reminds us of something bad.
Except that EVERYBODY is guilty of something. How does having some judge browbeat somebody after the fact improve our society?
The purpose of the justice system should be to deter crime and rehabilitate offenders. It is in the interest of society to make that system take as little time as possible so that everybody can get on with living. If you want to make sure somebody is getting on with life and help them find a job, by all means do it. If you want to pester them about using Facebook, find something better to do.
One way to find out for sure - design a virus or XSS attack that triggers that delete function, and after 95% of the Facebook-using population deletes their accounts you'll see if they have an undelete feature.
Well, the reality is that the mean probably is a few days walk, and that is due to a highly skewed distribution.
On the one hand you have the huge chunk of the population that lives near urban centers where the average walk is minutes to maybe an hour or two. On the other hand you have people living in the middle of Nebraska who would probably have to walk for a few months to get to a bus stop on a route that resembles an expedition from the age of discovery.
Ultimately the end of the line is whoever points a gun at you. All that law and justice stuff is nice in theory, but in the end it all comes down to what people can get away with, whether it is those in power, or those who defy those in power. The legal system is an approximation of justice, but certainly an imperfect one. Just look at how well it handles scientific evidence and then tell me that they really have the final word on what is and isn't a fact.
Yes, but the other avenues aren't much better. You can either voluntarily comply, or spend a fortune trying to get the order rescinded.
Legally speeding isn't a smart move either, but 99.9999% of the population does it anyway, because the laws are dumb. It won't get you out of a ticket, but only because the justice system isn't.
Frankly, the current legal system makes simply being accused of a crime an undue burden and so on. Think that not having a drivers license will make it hard to find employment? How about having your name in the newspaper, being fired, having to show up to court, having to come up with tens of thousands of dollars, and so on? Your life is ruined well before you get to a verdict.
Honestly, the way we treat it these days I tend to think yes.
I'm all for deterring crime. I'm also for not having huge swaths of our population that have no way to support themselves but no social network to fall back on. Somebody convicted of crime loses access to any decent paying job. So instead of supporting himself and presumably doing something useful for society in the process and paying taxes, now the guy might work for minimum wage, pays little in taxes, receive public benefits of one sort or another, and if they are bored with their job perhaps they become a more serious criminal. All because one day the guy lost it and beat his wife or hit somebody or whatever it was. All of those things should be punished, but at some point you have to move on.
Adults really are just like children - they have bad days and good days and when they do stupid stuff you need to whack them and then get on with it.
You could actually make an argument for corporal punishment as a result. Do something dump and you get whipped a few times. Costs little to administer, you'll NEVER forget the lesson, but after a day or two of recovery you can go right back to work. Frankly it seems a lot better all around than sticking people in a cell for months on end while they lose their job, their family loses the house, and they probably still get all beat up anyway.
What I don't get is why people sentenced to death should have any more access to appeals than those sentenced to life in prison. If there is some merit to the appeal it should be heard, and if not it shouldn't be. I think the fact that we don't spend so much money on people not sentenced to death is a potential sign that we just brush problems with their cases under the rug.
If we are going to execute someone, should we really not give them full due process of law? Taking a life is the most extreme action available to our justice system.
Frankly we should be giving people better than what currently is due process of law for the least of our offenses, let alone for capital crimes. Perhaps taking a life is the most extreme action available, but even fairly trivial crimes are met with extreme actions these days.
The death penalty is merely a symptom of a much bigger problem - we don't care about justice - we care about security theater.
While your argument has some merit, I'd hardly say that sticking people in jail for 15 years and then saying, "oops, got it wrong, good luck getting a job now" is a lot better than just killing them. Somewhat better, sure.
When it comes to the problems with our justice system, it seems to me like the death penalty is the least of our problems. It is symbolic in some sense, and obviously it really does kill people, but far more lives are ruined by other problems with the system - probably more people die from suicides as a result of miscarriages of justice than from lethal injection.
Yup. For a Nexus device you will probably get security updates for about 1.5 years from the date that the device was FIRST announced (ie passed out at IO or whatever). For any other device you probably won't ever get an update, unless somebody manages to totally own the thing will it is still being advertised on TV.
If you care about updates on Android don't ever buy anything but a Nexus device, and don't buy the Nexus device unless it is no more than a few months old. I'd say in a few months the Nexus 7 is going to be obsolete as far as updates go (sure, it will still get them, but likely for only a year after you buy it). I think two years is the minimum a phone should be supported, but if you want that you need to buy an iPhone (if you buy a 4s TODAY you'll probably STILL get updates for a full two years). I love Android, but the lack of updates just kills me.
I did, and I understand the concerns about not amplifying parts of the range that aren't deficient. However, why not just have a tiny dial that sets a high-pass filter, and individuals could just tweak that on the basic model? Sure, it isn't perfect, but it is better than going without because you don't have $2k.
Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of good enough.
I'd think that the "basic" model shouldn't require any tuning at all. Do you even have that choice when using insurance?
As far as antivenom goes - I suspect that the trials to get it approved in the US probably did cost a small fortune. Part of the reform has to be regulatory. If the manufacturer actually had to perform a clinical trial then the costs for that is in the millions of dollars. Then if you sell 10 vials a year you need to charge $3k per vial just to make up that up-front cost in 30 years. It doesn't matter that it has been made for 50 years for $100/vial in Mexico if you're not allowed to sell it in the US without a new trial, and the US might not except past trials if they weren't run to modern standards.
Companies certainly are complicit in all of this - often a form of regulatory capture. However, our own laws create barriers to competition and sometimes set standards that are higher than they need to be.
On the other hand, you could argue that insurers paying $3k/dose is cheaper than taking the risk that you could get sepsis or something from the shot.
There seem to be no easy answers in healthcare.
The truth likely is somewhere in-between. I suspect the cost to make these things is way less than $4500, but it may very well be more than $200.
Consumers should have a choice in products, and a choice in whether they need them tuned more extensively or not, and so on.
While I don't have any experience with hearing aids in particular, I've had to deal with other "medical devices" and it definitely is like working with a cartel. You're often just handed something and if you want to actually have some choice in the matter you sometimes have to go to war with your doctor (who no doubts gets kickbacks or at least free classes from his brand of choice), and you end up paying through the nose especially if you want insurance to pay part of it. The FDA is really big on patients not having any control over their own devices, so things get super-locked down, and so on.
One example was a several-year-old Macbook preloaded with some accessibility software for $50k, and with everything and the kitchen sink disabled and locked down on it. It so happens that it would have been really useful if that software could have been used with things like email/facebook/etc, but those things sound like fun and are evil, so if you want to use those you need to get somebody who isn't disabled to do your typing/reading for you from a separate device. There wasn't anything about the setup that couldn't have been handled by selling a CD in a box, but hey that isn't a fully-integrated medical device so it can't be helpful and bill Medicare.
Yup, and after 3 years, 47 hearings, and 300 briefs they'll have the opportunity to try to invalidate them.
The upside of being sued by a patent troll is that you could win and only lose $3M. The downside is that you could lose and lose every cent you have.
Yup, my employer went through a merger and no doubt getting the networks merged went as quickly as it did because one of the companies involved had a class A (yup, one of THOSE companies). Every printer, PC, and whatever in the company had a globally routable IP address - and yet they were all NATed as far as the internet was concerned. :)
Yup, that argument is like saying the solution to our budget deficit is to grow the economy.
Nobody is going to argue that a cure for all human disease and economic woe isn't the best possible solution. However, until we have that figured out we have some treatments that work to some extent today, and it doesn't hurt to continue to refine those while we're still working on the panacea.
A lot of good could come from more experiences like the one you speak of (whether true or not). I don't think anybody has a true appreciation of the US Healthcare system until they have sat at the bedside of somebody who has been hospitalized for at least a week with a major problem. You have everything from dealing with doctors who spend 5min/day with you to mind-boggling billing practices to the psychological torture of near absolute boredom to being told at 6PM that you'll be going home tomorrow and finally getting into your car almost 24 hours later after all the paperwork is done.
For those with an IT background picture a 2-3 core CPU whose clock line pulses once a day and you'll get a sense of how things get done in a hospital. All decisions get made between 8-10AM Mon-Fri only, and everything else that takes place is about gathering data for the next tick of the "clock."
There is something to be said about this. I know somebody with an invasive and chronic health problem and I really do get concerned about their will to live.
If you measure the effectiveness of painkillers the way you measure the effectiveness of other drugs you'll come up with the same result across the board - they don't make people "healthier" and they often harm people. However, this kind of evaluation is not unlike the kinds of "medical evaluations" used to justify torture in the last decade - "waterboarding doesn't cause permanent harm" and that sort of thing. Medicine is only a means to an end - and that end for most people is an enjoyable life, not simply a long one.
I'll take it a step further.
NEVER buy insurance EVER...
UNLESS...
you can't afford out-of-pocket or with only moderate hardship the expense of covering a loss.
The insurance company is making money. If they thought you'd be better off (by the numbers) with insurance they wouldn't be selling it to you.
I have homeowner's insurance, because I can't handle having a $180k bill if the house burns down while I'm away. I have auto insurance, because I can't afford a $500k liability payment in the unlikely event that I bounce off a supercar and hit some guy on a bike. I have health insurance, because if I have a heart attack I can't afford bypass surgery.
I don't pay for phone insurance, because if I break my $600 phone I just buy another $600 phone. Even if I had to pay interest for a month or two at horrible credit card rates it is WAY cheaper than insurance. Phone insurance is expensive because people with it have little incentive to check their pockets before doing the wash.
Oh, and keep in mind that what we call "health insurance" in the US is about 10% insurance, and 90% a buyer's club for health services. It is wise to buy it even if you have $50M in the bank, otherwise your nice friendly doctor will rape you on every little thing you have done.
Not so here. This FAA certification means "accurate enough to stand in for some flight hours" - it's not just a random seal of Officialness that you think it is.
FAA certification means "declared by the FAA to be legal to stand in for some flight hours." It is possible for something to be accurate enough to stand in and not be certified. Presumably the FAA audits accuracy in some way before granting certification, but certification isn't the same as accuracy, even if the goals of the certifying agency is for it to be so.
For example, take a non-commercial-use copy of X-Plane. It is apparently not considered by the author to be FAA certified, but on appropriate hardware it is just as good as the certified version. It simply doesn't check to make sure that it is on appropriate hardware.
Yup. And things inside sandboxes probably won't be allowed to make direct Wayland calls anyway, so I tend to agree that this particular issue seems to be a non-issue.