I was with you, Eric, right up until you called the media industry execs "stupid" and "dimwits".
I agree with you, but for a different reason. Those execs are NOT dimwits. To the contrary, they know EXACTLY what they're doing, and are making quite a bit of money for it.
If you want to understand the behavior of a CEO of a well-established company start with the premise that everything they do is based on self-interest. Then it will all make sense to you, and you'll realize they are indeed VERY intelligent. Their actions are intended to maximize their personal net worth when they quit, and those actions include anything that comes out of their mouth, which may or may not have any relationship to what they're actually thinking. Just because a CEO says that they believe "the future is..." doesn't mean that they really think that - they just think that saying that will make their own futures wealthier.
I'd include gpsd as well - my understanding is that it is very widespread and if you read his blog he spends quite a bit of time hacking together a network of half the GPS devices out there for testing purposes.
Oh, it exists in the US. Just keep in mind that in the US legal costs are probably one or more orders of magnitude larger than in Germany, which would make the cost of insurance that much higher. There is also not a loser-pays system, so vexatious litigation is encouraged and the winner usually can't recoup fees. All this makes this kind of insurance either very expensive, or very limited in coverage.
Yup. Personally I'd like to see a revamped approach to loser pays. Either party can take a matter to a court, and file a complaint. Each party would state their opinion as to the amount at issue (no judgment will be issued for more than this amount). Based on the amount at issue the court sets the fees for the case and each side can hire an attorney, who bills their time to the court. Attorneys would be forbidden to charge clients for cases or accept any kind of payments, or any assistance in research or casework/etc. The attorney for each side has the same budget to work within. Anybody who has to show up to court gets paid by the court for the value of their time, and their employers would be reimbursed for lost time. Then you litigate and the court decides on a verdict (whether by judge or jury). The court then directly pays the winner the amount of any judgment. The loser is then liable for court costs, including the judgment, attorney fees, and participant payments for both sides. The loser is indebted to the court to repay - no collection hassles for the winner. All judgments and settlements would be published. Any evidence that is redacted or otherwise not made public would not be made available to attorneys for the same party if they get involved in subsequent litigation - they have to re-invent the wheel with each case (so no mass-lawsuit factories).
Such an arrangement would give neither side a large advantage in a trial beyond that merited by the facts of the case. Attorneys really would be agents of the courts. Legal bills would be curtailed for all sides, and vexatious litigation would be expensive indeed. Little guys could afford to actually show up in court, as I'd have the fees be such that people and their employers come out ahead from the experience.
Obviously this could be tweaked in numerous ways, but the concept is to get rid of the clash of budgets.
I wouldn't really call Obama a weak candidate - disagree or not he certainly had a lot of zeal behind him. Most of the Republican zeal in that election was more about don't-elect-Obama than anything else - when even your opponents define their platform on your positions, you know you have a fairly strong candidate.
What really seemed week was the "analysis" in that email chain. It looked like some email chain that might get bounced around my family.
Actually, your elections process seems remarkably similar to the US, as compared to other parliamentary systems.
You apparently aren't using proportional representation, and instead a district-based system similar to that used in the US. In the US it is true that voting procedure is established by the states, and does vary, although the manner in which it is done in some areas is exactly as you describe. The use of volunteers is very widespread.
The equivalent to Elections Canada in the US would be some combination of the Federal Election Commission, and various state and local election commissions. These bodies regulate the conduct of elections - they're political appointees selected for their willingness to perpetuate the status quo and usually there are a few members from each of the two established parties.
There are clearly differences as you point out, but it sounds like the main difference is perhaps the voters in Canada are a little less apathetic.
You seem to be using definitions of state and government that I am unfamiliar with.
In my post, define state as "a sovereign nation," and define government as "the organization that has a monopoly on the use of force within a state." So, per my definition Canada would be the state, and Elections Canada would just be part of the government. You can of course use whatever words you would like to describe the same thing...
The question that interests me the most is whether counterfeiters could effectively overcome the problem of distributing counterfeit bills without revealing their source in a world with occasional validation.
In this case we're talking about North Korea. Do they even care that the source can be identified?
How can the entity running the elections be "independent from Government." They are the government! Presumably if you walk into a polling place and attempt to disrupt things somebody will arrest you, which sounds like a government function to me.
Perhaps they have appointments that are less accountable to the elected officials, like supreme court justices in the US. However, that does not make them unbiased, as at some point it is likely that people who were elected officials had a say in their selection.
You joke of course, but an interesting factoid I learned about a few months ago is that the vision requirements for driving vary across the US. There certainly is plenty of incentive for anybody with failing vision to adjust their residency accordingly, and as long as you have a license issued by one state you can drive anywhere you like in the US (or in any country that accepts an international/US driver's license).
Unfortunately there is no way you'd get the best of both worlds. If the merger went through you'd get AT&T service, and soon after AT&T CS and rates. Oh, and not much later everybody would raise their rates so you'd pay more than current AT&T rates by the time it is done...
Well, I imagine they're aiming to have their LTE service where their 3G service was maybe 4-5 years ago. That wasn't bad - I had service in most metropolitan suburbs I visited, and 2G service anywhere that there were more people than bears. Today their 3G service is basically ubiquitous, and to be honest there aren't a lot of things that 3G isn't sufficient for. Their "4G" service is about as widespread as their 3G service as well.
Sure, it isn't as useful as Verizon if you're camping in the woods, but I'll save the $40/month and stick with T-Mo.
You can patent the "push e-mail to device instead of polling" part, because it does not relate to software. You could implement it with manual labor and pidgeons and would still be violating the patent.
There isn't anything that a computer can do that can't be implemented with a sufficient number of people enacting some process manually. The most trivial example of this is to take every transistor in a CPU and tell somebody to raise their right hand whenever two other particular people have their right hands raised...
Your solution would potentially work fine - per my post my criticism only applies if people don't check into a central database to validate cash when they accept it. If you do have to validate your bills, then you essentially are using a weak form of digital currency that uses paper as the data storage medium.
However, if you're going to do this, why not just use each serial number once, and when somebody accepts and checks in a bill you invalidate it and give them a new serial number so they can print a new one-time-use bill? And if you're gong to do that, why print it on paper, instead of just keeping it electronic and transmitting it. Voila, you have digital currency.
The whole point of the current paper money system is that you don't have to use a central repository to validate notes. As long as this remains the case it will be very vulnerable to counterfeiting.
These clearly have some kind of genuine medical problem (they're still bound by the laws of physics, however). They aren't the same as your common or garden lardarses.
Citation needed. I haven't seen any accepted scientific evidence that suggests that the difference isn't merely one of degree. I have no proof that it is either - more information is needed. However, I'm not willing to just dismiss anybody who is overweight as simply not caring to lose weight, let alone insult them. Your willingness to do both does not make you right, but believe what you will...
P.S. What was the point about calculus, other than to brag about how smart you think you are?
I wasn't bragging about my prowess at calculus - only about my inability to play ice hockey. The point was that when you are different from somebody it isn't cause for claiming that you are superior. Everybody has their talents and their deficiencies.
Remember folks, Fair Use includes being able to make backups of software you buy. Exercise that right.
While fair use gives you the legal right to make backups, it does not give you the right to exercise that right. Hence, on any Android phone it is not possible to back up an application unless you've rooted the phone, or otherwise obtained direct access to its storage. The out-of-the-box android security model protects the directory containing the application files, and any file-browser app you install on the phone doesn't have access to it. Apps stored on the SD card are encrypted using a key that is, again, stored in a protected location.
Now, if you root the phone then you can do whatever you want with it, and that includes the legal right to make backups of apps.
Also simulation of quantum mechanical systems (protein folding) is known to be in BQP...
Aren't all problems ultimately quantum mechanical problems? If they occur in the real world, then the universe is a quantum mechanical system. If they occur only in some mathematician's brain, then that brain exists in the universe, which is a quantum mechanical system.
Of course, as you said nobody has proved that they are NP-hard, however it does stand to reason that if you built a quantum computer with a mass of perhaps a few thousand universes that you could solve quite a few problems very quickly. Building such a computer with the materials at hand (a single universe) is an exercise left to the reader.
Oh, its sketchy alright if you ask me. However, the company usually does genuinely only want to enroll patients that are likely to benefit from the drug (in theory), and which meet the other criteria for the trial. Even if you assume they have no care for human life enrolling people who aren't likely to benefit adds noise to the data, and you'll never see more careful design-of-experiment than you will in a drug trial. If the trial comes up with noise, the drug can't be approved. Companies routinely check patient records and if they catch a doctor enrolling somebody who doesn't qualify for the trial they'll turn them over to the FDA. Google for the "FDA Debarment List" and you'll see 3/4ths of the people on it are doctors who tried to make a buck off of clinical trials by enrolling unqualified patients. That is bad for the patient, bad for the trial sponsor, and bad for everybody else too since maybe that drug really did cure cancer but for the bad data.
I think there are definitely ways to improve things. However, there are a lot of established interests who are going to fight change. If doctors were all employed by an NHS of some sort that would probably greatly streamline things. Having the government conduct all the trials would also help - plus they're in theory impartial.
A big reason for all the payments for doctors is that there are only so many sick people to go around. If two companies are both running clinical trials for the same disease, and there is no way to know which drug is better, then the doctors are going to enroll their patients based on whoever is willing to pay them the most. I'd like to think that if there were some differential benefit to the patient that the doctor would prioritize this first, but that might be naive. If the government did run the trials then it would have to pick winners and losers so as to not have to compete with itself.
It might work in very urban settings, but patients usually don't switch doctors based on advertisements for experimental drugs. Usually they stick with somebody they trust, and you need to bribe (err, compensate) them to recommend your experimental treatment.
To be fair participating in clinical trials does take time on the doctor's part.
If a national healthcare system were established I'd see this as a potential route to making this process FAR more efficient - you'd pay doctors a salary and not for piece-work. Enrolling patients in trials when it makes sense would just be part of the job description.
I'm the first to agree that there is a huge opportunity to save money here. The problem is that the same kinds of forces are at work against Pharma companies that work against everybody else with regard to healthcare costs.
Pharma companies already do SNP analysis on their clinical trial volunteers whenever they can.
The only thing that the DNA helps with is understanding diseases to come up with treatment mechanisms. That is very important, but it isn't the part that makes drugs expensive. If you have a good mechanism of treatment then it is almost inevitable that you will be able to make a drug, but it is also inevitable that you'll blow through maybe $100M or so in the process.
Your solution does not address replay attacks. Unless anybody accepting a bill checks that into a central database there is no way to know that the same bill hasn't been printed a million times with the same copy of the original signature that remains valid.
If I send you a signed email, you can make a million copies of it, and they're all still signed.
I doubt there is anything you could do to prevent state-sponsored counterfeiting that doesn't involve either getting rid of unregistered paper currency, or dropping bombs.
If the US stopped issuing greenbacks, they'd just be counterfeiting Euros. With the kinds of money at stake you can easily fund any scale of counterfeiting operation. The only reason it doesn't happen anywhere is because law enforcement will shut you down if you try to do it on an industrial scale, which is what it takes to do it right. If it is state-sponsored than that can't happen.
Now, if you get rid of paper currency, or register every piece of paper to an owner by serial number, then you can defeat copying. The person receiving a bill could efficiently determine if it were valid either way.
I doubt we'll see paper money go away - bombs are actually a cheaper solution. If the US got rid of paper money everybody would just switch to Euros and do the same trades - and the US would lose a ton of economic power in the process. Certainly JDAMs wouldn't cost as much, and historically that is what every country does when some other country tries to do something like this on a large scale.
However, this article refers to tens of millions of dollars. That isn't nearly enough to start a war over.
as partial owners it could be that they are 'part of the team that develops the drugs' and thus they are just participating in quality assurance or something of that kind.
I'm sure FDA regulations include anybody who takes a drug, including company employees. Believe it or not having scientists swallowing random pills isn't a normal part of pharmaceutical quality assurance.
And, even if you get rid of the FDA, you've just invited OSHA to ensure their working conditions are safe. Companies have to establish exposure limits for pills that scientists handle while wearing gloves, so what do you think the regulation around pills you actually swallow is going to be like?
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I was with you, Eric, right up until you called the media industry execs "stupid" and "dimwits".
I agree with you, but for a different reason. Those execs are NOT dimwits. To the contrary, they know EXACTLY what they're doing, and are making quite a bit of money for it.
If you want to understand the behavior of a CEO of a well-established company start with the premise that everything they do is based on self-interest. Then it will all make sense to you, and you'll realize they are indeed VERY intelligent. Their actions are intended to maximize their personal net worth when they quit, and those actions include anything that comes out of their mouth, which may or may not have any relationship to what they're actually thinking. Just because a CEO says that they believe "the future is..." doesn't mean that they really think that - they just think that saying that will make their own futures wealthier.
I'd include gpsd as well - my understanding is that it is very widespread and if you read his blog he spends quite a bit of time hacking together a network of half the GPS devices out there for testing purposes.
Well, gpsd is at least fairly heavily used. My understanding is that a substantial portion of anything containing GPS units makes some use of it.
Obviously he is more known for writing books/etc - which isn't a bad accomplishment as they're good books.
Oh, it exists in the US. Just keep in mind that in the US legal costs are probably one or more orders of magnitude larger than in Germany, which would make the cost of insurance that much higher. There is also not a loser-pays system, so vexatious litigation is encouraged and the winner usually can't recoup fees. All this makes this kind of insurance either very expensive, or very limited in coverage.
Yup. Personally I'd like to see a revamped approach to loser pays. Either party can take a matter to a court, and file a complaint. Each party would state their opinion as to the amount at issue (no judgment will be issued for more than this amount). Based on the amount at issue the court sets the fees for the case and each side can hire an attorney, who bills their time to the court. Attorneys would be forbidden to charge clients for cases or accept any kind of payments, or any assistance in research or casework/etc. The attorney for each side has the same budget to work within. Anybody who has to show up to court gets paid by the court for the value of their time, and their employers would be reimbursed for lost time. Then you litigate and the court decides on a verdict (whether by judge or jury). The court then directly pays the winner the amount of any judgment. The loser is then liable for court costs, including the judgment, attorney fees, and participant payments for both sides. The loser is indebted to the court to repay - no collection hassles for the winner. All judgments and settlements would be published. Any evidence that is redacted or otherwise not made public would not be made available to attorneys for the same party if they get involved in subsequent litigation - they have to re-invent the wheel with each case (so no mass-lawsuit factories).
Such an arrangement would give neither side a large advantage in a trial beyond that merited by the facts of the case. Attorneys really would be agents of the courts. Legal bills would be curtailed for all sides, and vexatious litigation would be expensive indeed. Little guys could afford to actually show up in court, as I'd have the fees be such that people and their employers come out ahead from the experience.
Obviously this could be tweaked in numerous ways, but the concept is to get rid of the clash of budgets.
I wouldn't really call Obama a weak candidate - disagree or not he certainly had a lot of zeal behind him. Most of the Republican zeal in that election was more about don't-elect-Obama than anything else - when even your opponents define their platform on your positions, you know you have a fairly strong candidate.
What really seemed week was the "analysis" in that email chain. It looked like some email chain that might get bounced around my family.
Actually, your elections process seems remarkably similar to the US, as compared to other parliamentary systems.
You apparently aren't using proportional representation, and instead a district-based system similar to that used in the US. In the US it is true that voting procedure is established by the states, and does vary, although the manner in which it is done in some areas is exactly as you describe. The use of volunteers is very widespread.
The equivalent to Elections Canada in the US would be some combination of the Federal Election Commission, and various state and local election commissions. These bodies regulate the conduct of elections - they're political appointees selected for their willingness to perpetuate the status quo and usually there are a few members from each of the two established parties.
There are clearly differences as you point out, but it sounds like the main difference is perhaps the voters in Canada are a little less apathetic.
You seem to be using definitions of state and government that I am unfamiliar with.
In my post, define state as "a sovereign nation," and define government as "the organization that has a monopoly on the use of force within a state." So, per my definition Canada would be the state, and Elections Canada would just be part of the government. You can of course use whatever words you would like to describe the same thing...
The question that interests me the most is whether counterfeiters could effectively overcome the problem of distributing counterfeit bills without revealing their source in a world with occasional validation.
In this case we're talking about North Korea. Do they even care that the source can be identified?
How can the entity running the elections be "independent from Government." They are the government! Presumably if you walk into a polling place and attempt to disrupt things somebody will arrest you, which sounds like a government function to me.
Perhaps they have appointments that are less accountable to the elected officials, like supreme court justices in the US. However, that does not make them unbiased, as at some point it is likely that people who were elected officials had a say in their selection.
You joke of course, but an interesting factoid I learned about a few months ago is that the vision requirements for driving vary across the US. There certainly is plenty of incentive for anybody with failing vision to adjust their residency accordingly, and as long as you have a license issued by one state you can drive anywhere you like in the US (or in any country that accepts an international/US driver's license).
Unfortunately there is no way you'd get the best of both worlds. If the merger went through you'd get AT&T service, and soon after AT&T CS and rates. Oh, and not much later everybody would raise their rates so you'd pay more than current AT&T rates by the time it is done...
Well, I imagine they're aiming to have their LTE service where their 3G service was maybe 4-5 years ago. That wasn't bad - I had service in most metropolitan suburbs I visited, and 2G service anywhere that there were more people than bears. Today their 3G service is basically ubiquitous, and to be honest there aren't a lot of things that 3G isn't sufficient for. Their "4G" service is about as widespread as their 3G service as well.
Sure, it isn't as useful as Verizon if you're camping in the woods, but I'll save the $40/month and stick with T-Mo.
You can patent the "push e-mail to device instead of polling" part, because it does not relate to software. You could implement it with manual labor and pidgeons and would still be violating the patent.
There isn't anything that a computer can do that can't be implemented with a sufficient number of people enacting some process manually. The most trivial example of this is to take every transistor in a CPU and tell somebody to raise their right hand whenever two other particular people have their right hands raised...
Your solution would potentially work fine - per my post my criticism only applies if people don't check into a central database to validate cash when they accept it. If you do have to validate your bills, then you essentially are using a weak form of digital currency that uses paper as the data storage medium.
However, if you're going to do this, why not just use each serial number once, and when somebody accepts and checks in a bill you invalidate it and give them a new serial number so they can print a new one-time-use bill? And if you're gong to do that, why print it on paper, instead of just keeping it electronic and transmitting it. Voila, you have digital currency.
The whole point of the current paper money system is that you don't have to use a central repository to validate notes. As long as this remains the case it will be very vulnerable to counterfeiting.
These clearly have some kind of genuine medical problem (they're still bound by the laws of physics, however). They aren't the same as your common or garden lardarses.
Citation needed. I haven't seen any accepted scientific evidence that suggests that the difference isn't merely one of degree. I have no proof that it is either - more information is needed. However, I'm not willing to just dismiss anybody who is overweight as simply not caring to lose weight, let alone insult them. Your willingness to do both does not make you right, but believe what you will...
P.S. What was the point about calculus, other than to brag about how smart you think you are?
I wasn't bragging about my prowess at calculus - only about my inability to play ice hockey. The point was that when you are different from somebody it isn't cause for claiming that you are superior. Everybody has their talents and their deficiencies.
Remember folks, Fair Use includes being able to make backups of software you buy. Exercise that right.
While fair use gives you the legal right to make backups, it does not give you the right to exercise that right. Hence, on any Android phone it is not possible to back up an application unless you've rooted the phone, or otherwise obtained direct access to its storage. The out-of-the-box android security model protects the directory containing the application files, and any file-browser app you install on the phone doesn't have access to it. Apps stored on the SD card are encrypted using a key that is, again, stored in a protected location.
Now, if you root the phone then you can do whatever you want with it, and that includes the legal right to make backups of apps.
Also simulation of quantum mechanical systems (protein folding) is known to be in BQP...
Aren't all problems ultimately quantum mechanical problems? If they occur in the real world, then the universe is a quantum mechanical system. If they occur only in some mathematician's brain, then that brain exists in the universe, which is a quantum mechanical system.
Of course, as you said nobody has proved that they are NP-hard, however it does stand to reason that if you built a quantum computer with a mass of perhaps a few thousand universes that you could solve quite a few problems very quickly. Building such a computer with the materials at hand (a single universe) is an exercise left to the reader.
Oh, its sketchy alright if you ask me. However, the company usually does genuinely only want to enroll patients that are likely to benefit from the drug (in theory), and which meet the other criteria for the trial. Even if you assume they have no care for human life enrolling people who aren't likely to benefit adds noise to the data, and you'll never see more careful design-of-experiment than you will in a drug trial. If the trial comes up with noise, the drug can't be approved. Companies routinely check patient records and if they catch a doctor enrolling somebody who doesn't qualify for the trial they'll turn them over to the FDA. Google for the "FDA Debarment List" and you'll see 3/4ths of the people on it are doctors who tried to make a buck off of clinical trials by enrolling unqualified patients. That is bad for the patient, bad for the trial sponsor, and bad for everybody else too since maybe that drug really did cure cancer but for the bad data.
I think there are definitely ways to improve things. However, there are a lot of established interests who are going to fight change. If doctors were all employed by an NHS of some sort that would probably greatly streamline things. Having the government conduct all the trials would also help - plus they're in theory impartial.
A big reason for all the payments for doctors is that there are only so many sick people to go around. If two companies are both running clinical trials for the same disease, and there is no way to know which drug is better, then the doctors are going to enroll their patients based on whoever is willing to pay them the most. I'd like to think that if there were some differential benefit to the patient that the doctor would prioritize this first, but that might be naive. If the government did run the trials then it would have to pick winners and losers so as to not have to compete with itself.
It might work in very urban settings, but patients usually don't switch doctors based on advertisements for experimental drugs. Usually they stick with somebody they trust, and you need to bribe (err, compensate) them to recommend your experimental treatment.
To be fair participating in clinical trials does take time on the doctor's part.
If a national healthcare system were established I'd see this as a potential route to making this process FAR more efficient - you'd pay doctors a salary and not for piece-work. Enrolling patients in trials when it makes sense would just be part of the job description.
I'm the first to agree that there is a huge opportunity to save money here. The problem is that the same kinds of forces are at work against Pharma companies that work against everybody else with regard to healthcare costs.
Pharma companies already do SNP analysis on their clinical trial volunteers whenever they can.
The only thing that the DNA helps with is understanding diseases to come up with treatment mechanisms. That is very important, but it isn't the part that makes drugs expensive. If you have a good mechanism of treatment then it is almost inevitable that you will be able to make a drug, but it is also inevitable that you'll blow through maybe $100M or so in the process.
Your solution does not address replay attacks. Unless anybody accepting a bill checks that into a central database there is no way to know that the same bill hasn't been printed a million times with the same copy of the original signature that remains valid.
If I send you a signed email, you can make a million copies of it, and they're all still signed.
I doubt there is anything you could do to prevent state-sponsored counterfeiting that doesn't involve either getting rid of unregistered paper currency, or dropping bombs.
If the US stopped issuing greenbacks, they'd just be counterfeiting Euros. With the kinds of money at stake you can easily fund any scale of counterfeiting operation. The only reason it doesn't happen anywhere is because law enforcement will shut you down if you try to do it on an industrial scale, which is what it takes to do it right. If it is state-sponsored than that can't happen.
Now, if you get rid of paper currency, or register every piece of paper to an owner by serial number, then you can defeat copying. The person receiving a bill could efficiently determine if it were valid either way.
I doubt we'll see paper money go away - bombs are actually a cheaper solution. If the US got rid of paper money everybody would just switch to Euros and do the same trades - and the US would lose a ton of economic power in the process. Certainly JDAMs wouldn't cost as much, and historically that is what every country does when some other country tries to do something like this on a large scale.
However, this article refers to tens of millions of dollars. That isn't nearly enough to start a war over.
Mod parent up. You'd probably see everybody and their uncle carrying Euros around in the US if this happened...
as partial owners it could be that they are 'part of the team that develops the drugs' and thus they are just participating in quality assurance or something of that kind.
I'm sure FDA regulations include anybody who takes a drug, including company employees. Believe it or not having scientists swallowing random pills isn't a normal part of pharmaceutical quality assurance.
And, even if you get rid of the FDA, you've just invited OSHA to ensure their working conditions are safe. Companies have to establish exposure limits for pills that scientists handle while wearing gloves, so what do you think the regulation around pills you actually swallow is going to be like?