Not to worry - according to the growth rate on the pot of E. Coli I have simmering in the other room the entire planet will be one big mass of bacteria by next Tuesday. That's a conservative estimate based on current growth rates.
Agreed. Arguing about what the universe would look like if some particular constant were different is pure conjecture.
We can't even explain adequately how the universe we can observe clumps matter into galaxies/etc (our models account for, what, a few percent of the mass-energy content of the universe?). How can you say what it would look like if you tweaked a fundamental constant. Maybe if the cosmological constant were different all the dark matter (whose general behavior is completely unknown) would turn the whole thing into a singularity or whatever?
Actually, these kinds of issues are a big problem with cosmology. It is pretty hard to do experimental science on the universe.:)
My Gentoo desktop begs to disagree with you. Actually, right now it is just begging for a break from compiling chromium and xfce...:)
You can't get much lighter than a tailored Gentoo install. The amount of stuff that actually eats RAM that is required is very minimal. Granted, some would argue a full toolchain isn't light, but that only slows down the system when you're actually using it, which I've found to be a better tradeoff.
Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now?
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Xfce 4.8 Released
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Yup - this is why most countries try to source all their military supply chain from friendly countries, if not 100% domestic. The US won WWII because it could build ships/tanks faster than anybody could destroy them. It started out WWII much weaker than their opponents. The US could meet almost all of its production needs domestically, and geographic barriers protected the means of production.
Now, I'm not sure how likely a protracted war between equals would be in the future. If a war is fought and won in six months it doesn't really matter whether the US can build replacement microchips or whatever - the whole war is fought from inventory. However, in a protracted war the ability to continue building fancy high-tech weapons will probably help determine the outcome. If the US can only field 1970s-era tech due to supply constraints they will suddenly be on parity with many nations out there...
Vietnam was a war of equals - the US vs the soviet union+china. It was fought in Vietnam, and often by proxies, but the US constraints in the war were the result of political considerations and a desire to not escalate the war.
The US wasn't really fighting "to win" - or at least not in the usual sense of "win." Propaganda was a big part of the war.
If the US wanted to "win" Vietnam it would have fought much less restricted warfare. For starters, they'd have bombed all strategic targets in the north.
Uh, MS getting money from the US government is not a legal issue - it is a political one.
The US constitution grants the US government sovereign immunity. Nobody can sue the federal government unless a law is passed allowing them to do so. That makes this purely a political issue at this point. If such a law is passed, then a legal issue is created.
Why would the US allow a company to sue it over a matter considered critical to national defense.
Look, the president is sworn to uphold the constitution. The constitution forbids holding people without trial.
When the FBI busts somebody for money laundering or whatever, does the president submit a budget request for their arrest/imprisonment to Congress? No, the prisons are paid for, and the laws are in writing, so you just do it.
The president doesn't need permission to follow the constitution. The last president didn't think he needed permission to NOT follow the constitution, so this should be relatively controversy-free.
All he needs to do is load the prisoners on a plane, put then in Levenworth or whatever, and now they're on US soil and all those loopholes about jurisdiction go away. Just follow the law, and charge it to the appropriate budget code like any other prison transfer/etc.
Standing up for what is right is tough politically. I certainly can't have more disdain for Obama than for the guys who voted down the budget request. However, there is nothing really keeping the president from doing his job.
The cable Wikileaks showed that they were having trouble getting countries to accept them.
Uh, from what I've read, the cables basically suggest that rather than holding a bunch of people without a trial in Gitmo, they want to ship them to some other country, where they will be held without a trial. That really has me scratching my head.
Look, it isn't that hard:
1. You give the list of prisoners to the attorney general and ask which once he wants to charge with a crime. These guys get shipped to a normal US prison and are arraigned. Normal criminal justice system takes over with its outcomes.
2. The rest are deported to whatever country issued their passports. That's what you do when somebody shows up on your border and you don't want them in your country.
It seems like the real fear is that the countries that issued their passports will turn them loose, or that they will be found innocent if charged and then will be deported and again turned loose. Well, what is the point of habeas corpus if you suspend it anytime you think somebody is guilty? What cop arrests somebody they DON'T think is guilty?
Apparently in some cases there are concerns that that prisoners will be mistreated if they are deported. I don't see that we have many options here. If they really are suspected terrorists I doubt we want to offer them asylum. By all means see if anybody else wants to do so, but you can't just keep them in prison forever without a trial. Maybe give prisoners in these cases the opportunity to stay as long as they want, but they'll be in cells (minus torture) for as long as they do. They're welcome to go home anytime they want to.
Closing down Gitmo is a matter of will - not difficulty.
If your firewall is set up right (which takes almost no effort), then you're just as protected as if you set it up correctly with NAT. Just set a default rule that blocks anything incoming, and then allow specific IPs/ports - just like with NAT, but minus all the IP mangling.
Why have only 2 of the 36 shots our kids receive been looked at for their relationship to autism?
Well, that would be fun.
If you do 20 trials on 20 different vaccines, I would expect that around 1 of them would show a link at the 95% level of confidence due to chance alone.
That's the problem with statistics. If you keep running trials you'll find all the evidence you want, and so will the other side.
You can't just do data mash-ups and see what sticks. That was what that big article a few weeks ago was all about.
Agreed. In theory I'm generally on-call in emergencies and occassionally need to dial into a meeting, but my employer does not issue a cell phone. The reality is I use the phone for work probably once every two months. If I needed to I could expense the minutes. It doesn't make sense for them to fork out $50/month so that I can take a call every other month. And, I don't particularly care to carry an extra phone for that either, or be forced to use an employer phone for personal use.
The people at work who actually qualify for phones HATE them. They're expected to answer them and get calls/texts/etc all the time.
If somebody really needs a phone give them one. If not, don't. That's all this policy is. Every company works this way.
In between IE specific sites and Apple boycotting flash it's already hard to access information on the web with a device one happens to have at hand.
There should be no reason that it is hard to access INFORMATION using whatever device you have at hand, unless it is stored on some lame site that puts everything in a flash app. Just write your content using valid html and you're done.
Sure, video may be tricky right now, but that's about it. I don't tend to be a media consumer on any platform, so this really is a non-issue for me. If anything, I prefer it when all the junk on websites doesn't render, and it makes it that much easier to find the aforementioned INFORMATION.
T-mobile actually has great service in a lot of areas, but the extent of that coverage is nowhere near as large as the other networks.
I get great 3G service just about everywhere I go, but that is in the NY-DC corridor. If you live in arkansas or something your mileage could vary GREATLY. Indeed, if you just live in a smaller metro area you might be spotty.
T-mobile has online coverage maps on their website. I've found them to be very honest - they use a Google-maps like interface. If the shaded map says 3 bars you might have 2 or 4, but that's about it - they're very up-front about their coverage.
We've used them for two years and haven't had problems even on vacations. However, we don't do camping - if we did they would probably not be adequate.
Agreed, although in the US I wouldn't put it past them to just put it on your credit rating anyway, and let you fight it out in court. It is really up to the company to behave well.
I think this is a big problem with credit bureaus in the US. Random companies can put whatever they want in your file, and it is on the consumer to try to contest this legally and get injunctive relief (which I doubt you can even get in a small claims court - now you're talking a MUCH more expensive court of common pleas, with no loser-pays system in the US).
They should just pass a law that nothing goes into a credit ratings file without a court judgment. If you don't pay your bill, they sue you, and then as part of the judgment they get to collect and report you, assuming the court finds in their favor. Credit bureaus are an end-run around presumed innocence/etc.
I find this pretty amazing - in the US contract law would almost certainly protect customers from these kinds of significant changes, and the US tends to be much less consumer-friendly than the EU.
In the US if a mobile carrier unilaterally decided to change terms of this level of significance I'd write them a letter telling them that I consider this a material change to our agreement, and that I'd like to maintain service under the previous contact, or consider the previous contract terminated on their part - their choice as to which.
If they chose to terminate the contract I would just hang onto the phone and not pay any termination fees. The phone was mine outright when we signed the contract (I paid for it, perhaps a token amount or just by my agreeing to the termination fees). The termination fees only apply if I terminate the agreement, and not if they terminate it.
A US company would be hard-pressed to secure a judgment in court for the termination fees, since they wrote the entire contract themselves (not even a meeting of the minds), and they unilaterally changed the contract that they wrote in the first place. If I don't consent to the new contract then it certainly cannot be binding, notwithstanding any fine print in the original (you can't enforce a contract term that allows you to make unilateral material changes to the agreement after the fact).
This is just basic contract law - a contract is when two parties come together and agree on something for something. That happened, and now one party wants to change the agreement and try to force acceptance by the threat of financial penalty clauses that were onerous to begin with.
Yes, but my understanding is that the APS wasn't built for high-energy physics - it was built exactly for the purpose which it is being used for, which is what makes it so useful. I think the original complaint is that we're throwing a lot of money on "build the biggest collider" without much ROI.
Also, from what I've seen of most use of sychotron radiation for less exotic experiments the utilization of the equipment is suboptimal. We could probably get by with less of these machines if we used them more efficiently. In most cases that I've seen some lab has a bunch of crystals and they want to collect diffraction patterns on them (just one use case for these machines). They schedule time on a beam, travel to the site, learn how to use the equipment, and then collect their data.
A much more efficient system would be for them to just pay a fee like any other fee-for-service system, ship out the crystals, and then get a file emailed to them containing their data. The data collection would be performed by experts at that particular skill, and it wouldn't take blocks of solid days of scheduling. Submissions just get in line, and pricing ensures that there is not too much demand and that people are throwing junk into the queue. Scientists could of course get grant money for this just like anything else.
Now, experimenters actually looking to discover new techniques/etc might still need to schedule time in the more traditional way, since they might need to mess with the machine/etc. Nothing wrong with this. I just never understood why people needed to travel halfway across the country to use some super-expensive piece of equipment that they were barely qualified to operate inefficiently. Imagine if when you needed a blood test that you were given a needle and shown how to take your own blood, and then you flew to a lab and they showed you how to do an LDL analysis or whatever.
We treat too much of routine science as if it were cutting edge, and this is part of why it is so expensive.
I agree - if they are the sole authors. If they adopted any code from anybody else, then they relied on the GPL to redistribute it, and thus they must comply.
I am not really suggesting anything new so far as the child's financial and medical dependence on its parents is concerned.
Actually, you are. Most states have insurance programs for children, so that the care of children is not impacted by the financial status of their parents. This coverage terminates at adulthood, since the expectation is that everybody should be able to provide for themselves at this point. That expectation probably would not hold in a society where insurance is unattainable by many, regardless of effort or even intellect/ creativity/ etc.
Should anyone happen to not be completely satisfied with their life, as easy or hard as it may be, they have always had the option of returning it for a full refund.
Keep in mind those enacting public policy need to stand for election. I suspect that this would not go over well as a campaign slogan...:)
Thank you for providing the clearest possible illustration of exactly what is wrong with your preferred society, and the petty criminals who would choose it.
Hey, I never said that it was fair, or that I'd even vote this way. From pure self-interest the kind of society you advocate is likely to work out far better for me anyway. However, reality is the world we live in, and given a choice between my scenarios #1 and #2, I think that society is going to be more likely to choose #1. Well, actually, they're just as likely to bungle around with non-solutions like price controls or prevention of exclusions until they end up at #1 or #2 anyway, probably at a higher cost than if they just cut straight to the chase.
you counter with threats of theft, kidnapping, and extortion
Uh, I'd be the last person to take a dime of yours. Your fellow citizens, however, have likely already demonstrated plenty of willingness to do exactly this, assuming you live in just about any first-world nation out there. Socialism doesn't work if those who don't need it get to opt-out.
Don't take it personally. I'm just telling you what is likely to happen one of these days - don't shoot the messenger.
Of course, the reality is that this will be something that develops gradually over time. Our understanding of genetics will improve and as that happens traditional insurance will become less and less tenable over time. By the time it doesn't work society will have moved on.
Believe it or not, there is... I work in a regulated industry and we pay tons of money for software that basically helps us manage the paperwork that says we're doing everything right...
I think that this kind of regulation is appropriate - in certain cases. I think you need to do a FEMA (failure mode effects analysis - basically ask what could go wrong?) and then control your network accordingly.
Modern networking gear is very reliable in terms of transmission accuracy - if you send a packet from A to B and it gets there, it is extremely unlikely that it was modified (unless deliberately). It is not so reliable in terms of guaranteed transmission.
So, if we're talking about a network being used to display a lab test in a doctor's office, I'd argue that there is a pretty low risk of anything going wrong and strong control over the network should be unnecessary (beyond general good security practices that would apply in any business setting).
On the other hand, if we're talking about monitoring equipment, I'd say that control of the network is critical, unless there is some kind of backup for communicating alarms. If an alarm in a patient room is likely to be heard and responded to without the aid of the network, then it is probably important but not critical. If a patient alarm could be ignored if not broadcast over a network, then that network needs to be treated as a life-critical piece of equipment. That means that changes are carefully controlled, and the design has to be fit for purpose. Lives are at stake, and if some cheap router hangs up without a backup of some kind, or if a cable is left detached during maintenance and isn't caught by routine procedure, somebody could die.
The sad thing is that regulations like this are likely to get abused in two different ways (I've seen this happen in other regulated industries):
1. It will be over-applied in areas that are not really at risk, driving up all kinds of costs that consumers end up paying for, and often delaying the introduction of technology that could actually improve care.
2. Because of the huge cost associated with knee-jerk reactions and consultants/etc in #1, administrators will try to skirt the regulation as much as possible, which puts patients at risk in situations where the controls really are appropriate.
In other regulated industries I've actually seen "turn the clock back" responses to regulation - where ancient practices that are grandfathered in get preferred to modern practices that are actually better, but which become more expensive to implement due to the presence of the regulation. In this way regulation can actually harm those it purports to benefit. Unfortunately, it usually is still better than the alternative.
your case #1 isn't insurance at all, but rather (false) "charity" for those with high risk
Insurance is basically an agreement of a bunch of people to share a single risk pool. I agree that #1 stretches this because the agreement part is by majority rule and not individual consent.
However, the basic principle of insurance is that individuals share their risks. That is met in #1.
Now, #1 is inherently socialistic, especially if combined with a progressive premium structure (such as premiums coming from income taxes). Socialism and insurance aren't exactly the same things though they are often conflated.
I agree that if you want unsocialized health care, then #2 is your only stable choice.
Solution: If you know you are likely to develop cancer in your 50s, then set aside the savings from your cheap (pre-40s) insurance and be prepared.
That isn't a completely horrible scenario, since it at least sounds feasible. However, it is a heck of a future to look forward to, and it will be a chain around your neck all your life saving up to it.
Parents take out insurance on the child before conception, at a cost dependent on their own genetic profiles and the resulting likelihood of hereditary genetic issues.
And what do you do with kids whose parents chose not to take out such a policy? Essentially this makes the financial/health outcome of a child completely dependent on the actions of their parents before they were even born. Most would not consider it just to make a child pay for their parents' irresponsibility, or their own inability to pay.
Sure, in a Darwinian sense everything you suggest would work. Those who are unfortunate to have bad genes are just predestined to be poor and die young. Those who are fortunate to have good genes are predestined to not be shackled by paying for those who do not. To some extent our genes predestine much of our success already, but I doubt society will be willing to stomach this in such a blatant way. It is kind of like putting a price on life - we all do it but you're not allowed to talk about it.
It is far more likely that the majority of society will vote to adopt laws enacting my scenario #1. They will then send you a tax bill to help pay for it. If you don't pay for it, you will be hunted down and sent to prison. You can of course write diaries in prison about how unjust this is for anybody who cares to read them, which will not be the majority who voted to put you there.
My point wasn't to declare the moral rightness of either #1 or #2. My point was only that only scenarios #1 or #2 are sustainable. This is as opposed to mythical scenarios that people dream up where health insurance will be cheap and everybody can wait until they have a tumor diagnosed to start paying for it.
I suspect that your average biologist or biochemist would be at least as qualified or more qualified than the average MD to interpret the results of genetic testing (with the help of Google scholar perhaps), so why make the filter an MD which includes tons of completely irrelevant education (like how to chop people up and put them back together).
A big problem with health care expenses is that we have one kind of certification that really matters for 99% of everything, and a big shortage of people with that certification. Oh, and if you have that certification you can't get a hospital job unless you agree to work 18-hour shifts, or whatever (gee, wonder why so few want to go into it).
We need to get away from MD vs non-MD in our healthcare laws, and employ a system of triage. If somebody has an earache should it be necessary to have an MD prescribe antibiotic drops, or whatever? This of course requires an expensive emergency room visit, or suffering a few days until a doctor's office is open at a really inconvenient time.
We need a system where 80% of first-line problems are addressed for $20 by somebody with a basic college education. By all means refer the more serious cases to higher levels of expertise, up to the best practitioners in the world. Standardized processes (and prices) for common maladies and the use of triage would solve probably 80% of the health care crisis...
First - you would need to download it from them - not from somebody else. Otherwise it is the somebody else who is potentially violating the GPL.
Second - I suspect that only a copyright holder would have standing to sue. When they give you the software with a copy of the GPL, the GPL is defining YOUR rights to redistribute it. They're giving you permission to give it to somebody else if you provide a copy of the source.
When somebody else gave them the copy of the source with the GPL, it was then that the terms of their redistribution of the software were set forth. That is, their right to redistribute the software has nothing to do with their agreement with you, but rather their agreement with whoever gave them the software. Ultimately, this traces back to the copyright holders, who originated the software and set for the license.
So, you might be a witness for one of the author's lawsuits, but I'm not sure that you would have standing to sue.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to worry - according to the growth rate on the pot of E. Coli I have simmering in the other room the entire planet will be one big mass of bacteria by next Tuesday. That's a conservative estimate based on current growth rates.
Agreed. Arguing about what the universe would look like if some particular constant were different is pure conjecture.
We can't even explain adequately how the universe we can observe clumps matter into galaxies/etc (our models account for, what, a few percent of the mass-energy content of the universe?). How can you say what it would look like if you tweaked a fundamental constant. Maybe if the cosmological constant were different all the dark matter (whose general behavior is completely unknown) would turn the whole thing into a singularity or whatever?
Actually, these kinds of issues are a big problem with cosmology. It is pretty hard to do experimental science on the universe. :)
My Gentoo desktop begs to disagree with you. Actually, right now it is just begging for a break from compiling chromium and xfce... :)
You can't get much lighter than a tailored Gentoo install. The amount of stuff that actually eats RAM that is required is very minimal. Granted, some would argue a full toolchain isn't light, but that only slows down the system when you're actually using it, which I've found to be a better tradeoff.
Great idea. We should call it PulseAudio!
Yup - this is why most countries try to source all their military supply chain from friendly countries, if not 100% domestic. The US won WWII because it could build ships/tanks faster than anybody could destroy them. It started out WWII much weaker than their opponents. The US could meet almost all of its production needs domestically, and geographic barriers protected the means of production.
Now, I'm not sure how likely a protracted war between equals would be in the future. If a war is fought and won in six months it doesn't really matter whether the US can build replacement microchips or whatever - the whole war is fought from inventory. However, in a protracted war the ability to continue building fancy high-tech weapons will probably help determine the outcome. If the US can only field 1970s-era tech due to supply constraints they will suddenly be on parity with many nations out there...
Vietnam was a war of equals - the US vs the soviet union+china. It was fought in Vietnam, and often by proxies, but the US constraints in the war were the result of political considerations and a desire to not escalate the war.
The US wasn't really fighting "to win" - or at least not in the usual sense of "win." Propaganda was a big part of the war.
If the US wanted to "win" Vietnam it would have fought much less restricted warfare. For starters, they'd have bombed all strategic targets in the north.
Uh, MS getting money from the US government is not a legal issue - it is a political one.
The US constitution grants the US government sovereign immunity. Nobody can sue the federal government unless a law is passed allowing them to do so. That makes this purely a political issue at this point. If such a law is passed, then a legal issue is created.
Why would the US allow a company to sue it over a matter considered critical to national defense.
Look, the president is sworn to uphold the constitution. The constitution forbids holding people without trial.
When the FBI busts somebody for money laundering or whatever, does the president submit a budget request for their arrest/imprisonment to Congress? No, the prisons are paid for, and the laws are in writing, so you just do it.
The president doesn't need permission to follow the constitution. The last president didn't think he needed permission to NOT follow the constitution, so this should be relatively controversy-free.
All he needs to do is load the prisoners on a plane, put then in Levenworth or whatever, and now they're on US soil and all those loopholes about jurisdiction go away. Just follow the law, and charge it to the appropriate budget code like any other prison transfer/etc.
Standing up for what is right is tough politically. I certainly can't have more disdain for Obama than for the guys who voted down the budget request. However, there is nothing really keeping the president from doing his job.
The cable Wikileaks showed that they were having trouble getting countries to accept them.
Uh, from what I've read, the cables basically suggest that rather than holding a bunch of people without a trial in Gitmo, they want to ship them to some other country, where they will be held without a trial. That really has me scratching my head.
Look, it isn't that hard:
1. You give the list of prisoners to the attorney general and ask which once he wants to charge with a crime. These guys get shipped to a normal US prison and are arraigned. Normal criminal justice system takes over with its outcomes.
2. The rest are deported to whatever country issued their passports. That's what you do when somebody shows up on your border and you don't want them in your country.
It seems like the real fear is that the countries that issued their passports will turn them loose, or that they will be found innocent if charged and then will be deported and again turned loose. Well, what is the point of habeas corpus if you suspend it anytime you think somebody is guilty? What cop arrests somebody they DON'T think is guilty?
Apparently in some cases there are concerns that that prisoners will be mistreated if they are deported. I don't see that we have many options here. If they really are suspected terrorists I doubt we want to offer them asylum. By all means see if anybody else wants to do so, but you can't just keep them in prison forever without a trial. Maybe give prisoners in these cases the opportunity to stay as long as they want, but they'll be in cells (minus torture) for as long as they do. They're welcome to go home anytime they want to.
Closing down Gitmo is a matter of will - not difficulty.
I don't believe in the no-win scenario.
(Sorry, you asked for it...)
Here's a better one still:
NAT = firewall = no connectivity... :)
If your firewall is set up right (which takes almost no effort), then you're just as protected as if you set it up correctly with NAT. Just set a default rule that blocks anything incoming, and then allow specific IPs/ports - just like with NAT, but minus all the IP mangling.
Why have only 2 of the 36 shots our kids receive been looked at for their relationship to autism?
Well, that would be fun.
If you do 20 trials on 20 different vaccines, I would expect that around 1 of them would show a link at the 95% level of confidence due to chance alone.
That's the problem with statistics. If you keep running trials you'll find all the evidence you want, and so will the other side.
You can't just do data mash-ups and see what sticks. That was what that big article a few weeks ago was all about.
Agreed. In theory I'm generally on-call in emergencies and occassionally need to dial into a meeting, but my employer does not issue a cell phone. The reality is I use the phone for work probably once every two months. If I needed to I could expense the minutes. It doesn't make sense for them to fork out $50/month so that I can take a call every other month. And, I don't particularly care to carry an extra phone for that either, or be forced to use an employer phone for personal use.
The people at work who actually qualify for phones HATE them. They're expected to answer them and get calls/texts/etc all the time.
If somebody really needs a phone give them one. If not, don't. That's all this policy is. Every company works this way.
In between IE specific sites and Apple boycotting flash it's already hard to access information on the web with a device one happens to have at hand.
There should be no reason that it is hard to access INFORMATION using whatever device you have at hand, unless it is stored on some lame site that puts everything in a flash app. Just write your content using valid html and you're done.
Sure, video may be tricky right now, but that's about it. I don't tend to be a media consumer on any platform, so this really is a non-issue for me. If anything, I prefer it when all the junk on websites doesn't render, and it makes it that much easier to find the aforementioned INFORMATION.
T-mobile actually has great service in a lot of areas, but the extent of that coverage is nowhere near as large as the other networks.
I get great 3G service just about everywhere I go, but that is in the NY-DC corridor. If you live in arkansas or something your mileage could vary GREATLY. Indeed, if you just live in a smaller metro area you might be spotty.
T-mobile has online coverage maps on their website. I've found them to be very honest - they use a Google-maps like interface. If the shaded map says 3 bars you might have 2 or 4, but that's about it - they're very up-front about their coverage.
We've used them for two years and haven't had problems even on vacations. However, we don't do camping - if we did they would probably not be adequate.
Agreed, although in the US I wouldn't put it past them to just put it on your credit rating anyway, and let you fight it out in court. It is really up to the company to behave well.
I think this is a big problem with credit bureaus in the US. Random companies can put whatever they want in your file, and it is on the consumer to try to contest this legally and get injunctive relief (which I doubt you can even get in a small claims court - now you're talking a MUCH more expensive court of common pleas, with no loser-pays system in the US).
They should just pass a law that nothing goes into a credit ratings file without a court judgment. If you don't pay your bill, they sue you, and then as part of the judgment they get to collect and report you, assuming the court finds in their favor. Credit bureaus are an end-run around presumed innocence/etc.
I find this pretty amazing - in the US contract law would almost certainly protect customers from these kinds of significant changes, and the US tends to be much less consumer-friendly than the EU.
In the US if a mobile carrier unilaterally decided to change terms of this level of significance I'd write them a letter telling them that I consider this a material change to our agreement, and that I'd like to maintain service under the previous contact, or consider the previous contract terminated on their part - their choice as to which.
If they chose to terminate the contract I would just hang onto the phone and not pay any termination fees. The phone was mine outright when we signed the contract (I paid for it, perhaps a token amount or just by my agreeing to the termination fees). The termination fees only apply if I terminate the agreement, and not if they terminate it.
A US company would be hard-pressed to secure a judgment in court for the termination fees, since they wrote the entire contract themselves (not even a meeting of the minds), and they unilaterally changed the contract that they wrote in the first place. If I don't consent to the new contract then it certainly cannot be binding, notwithstanding any fine print in the original (you can't enforce a contract term that allows you to make unilateral material changes to the agreement after the fact).
This is just basic contract law - a contract is when two parties come together and agree on something for something. That happened, and now one party wants to change the agreement and try to force acceptance by the threat of financial penalty clauses that were onerous to begin with.
Yes, but my understanding is that the APS wasn't built for high-energy physics - it was built exactly for the purpose which it is being used for, which is what makes it so useful. I think the original complaint is that we're throwing a lot of money on "build the biggest collider" without much ROI.
Also, from what I've seen of most use of sychotron radiation for less exotic experiments the utilization of the equipment is suboptimal. We could probably get by with less of these machines if we used them more efficiently. In most cases that I've seen some lab has a bunch of crystals and they want to collect diffraction patterns on them (just one use case for these machines). They schedule time on a beam, travel to the site, learn how to use the equipment, and then collect their data.
A much more efficient system would be for them to just pay a fee like any other fee-for-service system, ship out the crystals, and then get a file emailed to them containing their data. The data collection would be performed by experts at that particular skill, and it wouldn't take blocks of solid days of scheduling. Submissions just get in line, and pricing ensures that there is not too much demand and that people are throwing junk into the queue. Scientists could of course get grant money for this just like anything else.
Now, experimenters actually looking to discover new techniques/etc might still need to schedule time in the more traditional way, since they might need to mess with the machine/etc. Nothing wrong with this. I just never understood why people needed to travel halfway across the country to use some super-expensive piece of equipment that they were barely qualified to operate inefficiently. Imagine if when you needed a blood test that you were given a needle and shown how to take your own blood, and then you flew to a lab and they showed you how to do an LDL analysis or whatever.
We treat too much of routine science as if it were cutting edge, and this is part of why it is so expensive.
I agree - if they are the sole authors. If they adopted any code from anybody else, then they relied on the GPL to redistribute it, and thus they must comply.
I am not really suggesting anything new so far as the child's financial and medical dependence on its parents is concerned.
Actually, you are. Most states have insurance programs for children, so that the care of children is not impacted by the financial status of their parents. This coverage terminates at adulthood, since the expectation is that everybody should be able to provide for themselves at this point. That expectation probably would not hold in a society where insurance is unattainable by many, regardless of effort or even intellect/ creativity/ etc.
Should anyone happen to not be completely satisfied with their life, as easy or hard as it may be, they have always had the option of returning it for a full refund.
Keep in mind those enacting public policy need to stand for election. I suspect that this would not go over well as a campaign slogan... :)
Thank you for providing the clearest possible illustration of exactly what is wrong with your preferred society, and the petty criminals who would choose it.
Hey, I never said that it was fair, or that I'd even vote this way. From pure self-interest the kind of society you advocate is likely to work out far better for me anyway. However, reality is the world we live in, and given a choice between my scenarios #1 and #2, I think that society is going to be more likely to choose #1. Well, actually, they're just as likely to bungle around with non-solutions like price controls or prevention of exclusions until they end up at #1 or #2 anyway, probably at a higher cost than if they just cut straight to the chase.
you counter with threats of theft, kidnapping, and extortion
Uh, I'd be the last person to take a dime of yours. Your fellow citizens, however, have likely already demonstrated plenty of willingness to do exactly this, assuming you live in just about any first-world nation out there. Socialism doesn't work if those who don't need it get to opt-out.
Don't take it personally. I'm just telling you what is likely to happen one of these days - don't shoot the messenger.
Of course, the reality is that this will be something that develops gradually over time. Our understanding of genetics will improve and as that happens traditional insurance will become less and less tenable over time. By the time it doesn't work society will have moved on.
Believe it or not, there is... I work in a regulated industry and we pay tons of money for software that basically helps us manage the paperwork that says we're doing everything right...
I think that this kind of regulation is appropriate - in certain cases. I think you need to do a FEMA (failure mode effects analysis - basically ask what could go wrong?) and then control your network accordingly.
Modern networking gear is very reliable in terms of transmission accuracy - if you send a packet from A to B and it gets there, it is extremely unlikely that it was modified (unless deliberately). It is not so reliable in terms of guaranteed transmission.
So, if we're talking about a network being used to display a lab test in a doctor's office, I'd argue that there is a pretty low risk of anything going wrong and strong control over the network should be unnecessary (beyond general good security practices that would apply in any business setting).
On the other hand, if we're talking about monitoring equipment, I'd say that control of the network is critical, unless there is some kind of backup for communicating alarms. If an alarm in a patient room is likely to be heard and responded to without the aid of the network, then it is probably important but not critical. If a patient alarm could be ignored if not broadcast over a network, then that network needs to be treated as a life-critical piece of equipment. That means that changes are carefully controlled, and the design has to be fit for purpose. Lives are at stake, and if some cheap router hangs up without a backup of some kind, or if a cable is left detached during maintenance and isn't caught by routine procedure, somebody could die.
The sad thing is that regulations like this are likely to get abused in two different ways (I've seen this happen in other regulated industries):
1. It will be over-applied in areas that are not really at risk, driving up all kinds of costs that consumers end up paying for, and often delaying the introduction of technology that could actually improve care.
2. Because of the huge cost associated with knee-jerk reactions and consultants/etc in #1, administrators will try to skirt the regulation as much as possible, which puts patients at risk in situations where the controls really are appropriate.
In other regulated industries I've actually seen "turn the clock back" responses to regulation - where ancient practices that are grandfathered in get preferred to modern practices that are actually better, but which become more expensive to implement due to the presence of the regulation. In this way regulation can actually harm those it purports to benefit. Unfortunately, it usually is still better than the alternative.
your case #1 isn't insurance at all, but rather (false) "charity" for those with high risk
Insurance is basically an agreement of a bunch of people to share a single risk pool. I agree that #1 stretches this because the agreement part is by majority rule and not individual consent.
However, the basic principle of insurance is that individuals share their risks. That is met in #1.
Now, #1 is inherently socialistic, especially if combined with a progressive premium structure (such as premiums coming from income taxes). Socialism and insurance aren't exactly the same things though they are often conflated.
I agree that if you want unsocialized health care, then #2 is your only stable choice.
Solution: If you know you are likely to develop cancer in your 50s, then set aside the savings from your cheap (pre-40s) insurance and be prepared.
That isn't a completely horrible scenario, since it at least sounds feasible. However, it is a heck of a future to look forward to, and it will be a chain around your neck all your life saving up to it.
Parents take out insurance on the child before conception, at a cost dependent on their own genetic profiles and the resulting likelihood of hereditary genetic issues.
And what do you do with kids whose parents chose not to take out such a policy? Essentially this makes the financial/health outcome of a child completely dependent on the actions of their parents before they were even born. Most would not consider it just to make a child pay for their parents' irresponsibility, or their own inability to pay.
Sure, in a Darwinian sense everything you suggest would work. Those who are unfortunate to have bad genes are just predestined to be poor and die young. Those who are fortunate to have good genes are predestined to not be shackled by paying for those who do not. To some extent our genes predestine much of our success already, but I doubt society will be willing to stomach this in such a blatant way. It is kind of like putting a price on life - we all do it but you're not allowed to talk about it.
It is far more likely that the majority of society will vote to adopt laws enacting my scenario #1. They will then send you a tax bill to help pay for it. If you don't pay for it, you will be hunted down and sent to prison. You can of course write diaries in prison about how unjust this is for anybody who cares to read them, which will not be the majority who voted to put you there.
My point wasn't to declare the moral rightness of either #1 or #2. My point was only that only scenarios #1 or #2 are sustainable. This is as opposed to mythical scenarios that people dream up where health insurance will be cheap and everybody can wait until they have a tumor diagnosed to start paying for it.
I suspect that your average biologist or biochemist would be at least as qualified or more qualified than the average MD to interpret the results of genetic testing (with the help of Google scholar perhaps), so why make the filter an MD which includes tons of completely irrelevant education (like how to chop people up and put them back together).
A big problem with health care expenses is that we have one kind of certification that really matters for 99% of everything, and a big shortage of people with that certification. Oh, and if you have that certification you can't get a hospital job unless you agree to work 18-hour shifts, or whatever (gee, wonder why so few want to go into it).
We need to get away from MD vs non-MD in our healthcare laws, and employ a system of triage. If somebody has an earache should it be necessary to have an MD prescribe antibiotic drops, or whatever? This of course requires an expensive emergency room visit, or suffering a few days until a doctor's office is open at a really inconvenient time.
We need a system where 80% of first-line problems are addressed for $20 by somebody with a basic college education. By all means refer the more serious cases to higher levels of expertise, up to the best practitioners in the world. Standardized processes (and prices) for common maladies and the use of triage would solve probably 80% of the health care crisis...
First - you would need to download it from them - not from somebody else. Otherwise it is the somebody else who is potentially violating the GPL.
Second - I suspect that only a copyright holder would have standing to sue. When they give you the software with a copy of the GPL, the GPL is defining YOUR rights to redistribute it. They're giving you permission to give it to somebody else if you provide a copy of the source.
When somebody else gave them the copy of the source with the GPL, it was then that the terms of their redistribution of the software were set forth. That is, their right to redistribute the software has nothing to do with their agreement with you, but rather their agreement with whoever gave them the software. Ultimately, this traces back to the copyright holders, who originated the software and set for the license.
So, you might be a witness for one of the author's lawsuits, but I'm not sure that you would have standing to sue.
Disclaimer: IANAL.