Agreed. There seems to be a lot of talk about getting people into space for the sake of getting them into space. Why send them in the first place?
For those who suggest that space is the ticket to avoiding overpopulation on earth - I remain skeptical (at least not until technology improves GREATLY). The costs of supporting people in space are massive. If you look at where most of the population growth is happening it is in underdeveloped nations - do you think that a bunch of childless rich guys in the west are going to spend billions of dollars so that a bunch of 3rd world villagers can have 14 kids?
I'm sure we'll get there at some point, but I think that talk of space colonies is a bit premature now.
By all means there should be public investment in scientific exploration, etc. However, I don't think we need huge massive projects to accomplish that. For the cost of trying to fly 10 people to mars for a few weeks we could probably have an automated robot on every square mile of the planet. Or, we could have a few more advanced robotic projects. For less than it would cost to get people to mars we could probably be harvesting asteroids (though to be honest that project makes me a bit nervous since it involves carefully maneuvering a really big rock into earth orbit).
Yup - I've seen this far too often in areas like aerospace and medical devices. Quality Control becomes less about making products that work and more about writing lots of documents saying that the products work.
Don't get me wrong - process control is a big part of ensuring quality. However, good paperwork is not the same as good quality, and I think that a lot of box-checker types miss that. It is far more important to understand your product and how it is made, so that you can spend your quality dollars where they do the most good.
That was the problem with the solid rocket boosters. NASA had paperwork on every part in the shuttle that probably weighed more than the shuttle itself. They had tons of test data everywhere. However, when they needed to decide whether it was OK to launch at such a cold temperature they didn't bother to look at it.
On the other hand, I've seen the opposite problem in organizations as well - where quality control takes such high priority that they never actually get anything done. Often this QC involves spending lots of money on paperwork - and not so much on the actual manufacturing process.
Most likely your boss wouldn't tell you that he fired you because your name was on the list. He'd fire you "because he doesn't need you any longer" or "because times are tough" or whatever. He might not give a reason at all in an at-will state.
So, unless you could somehow prove that your name being on the list was the real reason (maybe he tells somebody this and it gets back to you), good luck doing anything about it.
Ditto for people with photos of them doing stupid things on the web - you're not going to get a call from a future employer saying "well, your interviews went well but we thought that the photo of the tattoo on your butt was a bit tacky" - you'll get a call saying "thanks for interviewing but you were not selected."
Unfortunately, that's the problem with national sovereignty - nations can do whatever they want and consider their decisions binding on everybody on the planet. The only thing that prevents that is standing armies.
If you don't want to worry about some country's legal system subjecting you to trials in-absentia then it is best to avoid travelling to that country, or to nations that readily extradite people to that country.
The problem isn't really that the jurisdiction is wrong - anybody in the US can seek relief from the US courts against anybody - and the US will do what it reasonably can to grant that relief. The problem is that the laws are slanted to one extreme, and we have groups like those running this website that retaliate with the opposite extreme.
Somewhere there is a balance between massive restrictions on even the most casual copying, and one-person-buys-everybody-else-downloads. I doubt we'll see it in the US while the legislature is on the RIAA payroll...
With Gentoo it isn't seamless, but there is a tool that will create local overlay packages from a CPAN, and then they can be installed. I don't think you get automatic updates or anything like that, but you do get collision protection, and the ability to cleanly uninstall.
There are lots of upstream packages that don't give much thought to distros.
Well, you hit the nail on the head on the contracts. There are a few other issues as well:
1. No phone subsidies. That makes the cost of the service the cost of providing the service, only. It greatly simplifies the relationship with the consumer and gets rid of those long-term tie-ins.
2. Everybody is GSM. That means that you can walk over to a store, plug in a new SIM, port your phone number, and now you're in business with the new customer.
These kinds of arrangements mean that you could switch providers every month without an inordinate amount of hassle (I'm sure there is some kind of switching cost, but it is probably nominal).
In the US, you're stuck for 2 years, and if you switch providers you're going to need new phones, and have an entirely different coverage map.
The US is also geographically large, so coverage actually still is a problem in many areas.
If a law were passed requiring that phone subsidies be sold separately from service (and that the service component cannot have early-cancellation penalties) then you'd probably see a quick change (although the fractured technologies would still tend to keep people where they are).
Absolutely, and I had this in mind. However, right now quantum cryptography only protects the transmission, not the end-nodes. You'd need a computer where every byte of data in transit, in processing, or in memory associated with the authentication mechanism is protected all the time.
Even that won't really protect you completely since you can do a MITM at any time. The processing circuitry presumably needs to read the data to do work on it. So, you can remove the existing circuitry and replace it with circuitry that copies the data as it works on it. To defeat that the circuitry needs to be able to operate on the data without being able to read it - for some operations this is probably possible, but I doubt you'll be able to pull it off. You'd need a ton of error correction code to handle the loss rate when individual components can't retransmit on error and you're transmitting and operating on single particles or photons.
Sure, but it still isn't a typical bazaar development model.
If you want to build firefox there is a ton of documentation on it, and you end up with the same product that Mozilla distributes publicly. If you want to build android there are a few docs, but you don't actually end up with the same software that google distributes.
Hey, I'm not saying that Google is the ultimate evil. I'm just saying that they're also not the ultimate embodiment of open source either. It sounds like they want to try to be more like that, and that's great...
IT operates under the constraints given it from above.
I'm sure my CIO gets a bonus of $5M for slashing costs, and a bonus of $5k for not having any outages that year. If the CEO reversed the incentives, we'd have a ballooning budget, but a much higher quality of service. I suspect the CEO likes it just the way it is, however.
The important thing is for IT to be up-front about levels of quality and costs. People at work complain all the time about how fast the support team is. The support management offered to have people waiting by the phone with the expertise to solve the most complicated problems, but obviously nobody cared about that enough to pay for it.
Are you going to say that Firefox isn't OSS because they have branding standards for what they call an official release?
No, but they're a real pain in the neck...
And the actual Firefox product is what you get when you compile the published source. So, people running Gentoo get the same browser as somebody who just downloads the binary. You can't redistribute your own builds with the logo/etc, but they are effectively the same.
It is too early to say how Chrome will turn out since it really isn't a finished product yet. However, no phone in the world is running the result of just taking the published android source and building it.
With the kernel Google just dumped a ton of code on the kernel team - nothing was really done in consultation with them.
So, Google has a bit of a mixed reputation in this area. However, I did like the tone of the article, and Google is definitely far ahead of most large corporations already.
Didn't Google just release Android out in the open, and Chrome browser, and Chrome OS?
Yes and no.
They have open source versions of both Android (AOSP) and Chrome (Chromium). Chrome is still very new and hasn't really gone into release, so it is a bit early to say how that will play out.
However, Android and AOSP have a very weak relationship. If you build AOSP you get something that won't work right on anything but the android emulator. It lacks the drivers necessary to actually work on a phone, and it also lacks most of the features that would make somebody want to buy an android phone. Additionally, there really is no evidence that any of the phones out there are running any particular build of AOSP even if you neglect the proprietary bits. Google also doesn't use AOSP as the actual development project - they do all their development in secret, and then do a huge code dump on AOSP sometime after they release a new android release on phones.
The AOSP build system is also a real pain to use - the OS and the kernel are built separately, and you need to add all kinds of stuff to it to make it actually work. It really seems like Google has no intention of making the AOSP a functional OS that can work on real phones.
Google seems to have a tendency to just dump chunks of code out there. They're more than happy to have people contribute fixes which can make their way upstream, but nobody outside of Google has any influence on the direction of the project. This is not an open-source bazaar-style approach.
However, it is obviously still preferable to being completely closed...
Chromium is to chrome as iceweasal is to firefox. Except that at least mozilla publishes the exact code to firefox - we have yet to see if Chrome ends up being identical to the output you get if you build chromium.
The only way I can see hardware security reaching true theoretical unbreakability is if we get to the level where the uncertainty principle prevents observing the hardware in action, but I'm not sure if it will be feasible to have the hardware even run reliably under those conditions.
You can certainly make the hardware hard to crack, but ultimately it is physical in nature and it can be taken apart physically. It is almost impossible to make it theoretically secure, although in practice you can do pretty well.
Not just a brother or a sister - no aunts, uncles, or cousins either.
Your ONLY relations (at least legally) are parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. Or, from the other a single child, a single grandchild, etc.
For a typical child with four living grandparents, on their birthday their entire family is in attendance, and that is the only birthday any of them will attend that year so they spend their entire annual birthday budget on them. If you ever perceived single children in the US as being somewhat spoiled, just imagine single-grandchildren.
In 20 years the country is going to have a VERY interesting social dynamic.
True, but from what I understand it is a drug that is almost impossible to beat. It is fairly effective, and from the prescribing info it sounds like it doesn't have a single side effect whose effect is greater than placebo. I actually laughed when I heard the TV ads for it because they'd go ahead and list trivial side-effects on the ad just so that they could say it was balanced, when you're just as likely to get those side-effects from eating a ham sandwich.
The newer drugs are probably only successful because of how insurance works - people would rather take the $120/month prescription drug since it only costs them $25/quarter or whatever in copays, and buying OTC loratadine could easily exceed that. Plus, the doctors don't get kickbacks for telling patients to just take the OTC stuff.
What I think is really funny is that I know people who take Benadryl all the time who are reluctant to take generic loratadine because they perceive it as being a "stronger" drug. I feel like a drug salesman when I try to explain that it has a better safety profile than just about any drug I'm aware of (including aspirin). We don't really do a good job educating people about their health options - understanding a drug label and elements of the prescribing info should probably be taught in high school.
Disclaimer - I'm not a doctor or a pharmacist, and for all I know there was some new study released last week that states that all of this stuff is rat poison...
I heard a pharmacy school story about some students writing up fake prescriptions for controlled substances. They got caught because the DEA number on the prescriptions failed to meet the internal checksum, which is an algorithm that pharmacists apparently know and check. A professor joked that they should be given poor grades simply for not knowing how to fake the number correctly (needless to say they were expelled)...
That was before the internet - I can't imagine that anybody serious about forging this stuff wouldn't be able to google for it now...
Well, the motivation for claritin was that it went generic. So, Schering Plough wasn't going to make another dime on it (no insurer would cover the branded drug). As an OTC medicine, however, they can market it just as Bayer/Tylenol/etc do for their products.
I agree with the general thread, however, that we've swung too far in not allowing access to almost any medications without a prescription. In many cases prescription drugs are safer alternatives to drugs that are non-prescription. And then you have people taking loads of red yeast rice when a modern statin would have a much better efficacy/safety profile (the supplement is just an older drug that occurs naturally).
And insurance plans really should cover OTC drugs that are taken under a doctor's direction. Why should it cost me more to take OTC niacin than some prescription formulation of it or some more exotic drug that doesn't have half as much clinical background?
But the problem here is that the patient is now expected to determine whether the tele-visit or a physical visit is the more appropriate course of action.
I think this is a false dichotomy (tele-visit vs real visit).
Right now the patient has two choices - no visit or real visit. Many patients will put off a real visit if they don't think that a problem rises to a certain threshold. Most of the time this is probably a good thing (every headache doesn't need a visit). However, perhaps somebody with a serious problem will avoid care, or they'll put it off for a day or two to make an appointment.
Now they can just pick up the phone and call 1-800-DOCTORS or whatever and get a human on the line 24x7. They pay $20 and get a real screening by a trained professional, who can triage their problem. If it is serious they can tell them to call 911 (or place the call themselves), or drive to the ER, or whatever. They can also suggest seeing a regular doctor. With the potential cost savings an insurance company might even fully cover the cost of the initial call if they get referred for later care (just think how many doctor visits they could avoid).
By lowering the threshold and cost to engage with a doctor, more people get more access to medicine. A system like this could literally have doctors on-call 24x7 for a very low cost. Maybe one of those really bad headaches will prompt a doctor to go over the signs of a stroke over the phone and get somebody to go to the ER who might otherwise have put it off a day (and minutes count for strokes).
Something like this could also provide greater continuity of care - the company might automatically screen your labs and avoid a lot of routine visits.
The key is to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of any technology, and apply it appropriately.
if such people cannot spend 30 minutes on their health, but are happy to idle time away on Slashdot, they are bringing on their own demise
However, you aren't advocating spending 30 minutes on their health - you're advocating spending 30 minutes sitting in a room, so that your doctor can try to rush you in and out in 5.
There is no reason that good healthcare should require waiting in lines.
I think that this is a good move overall - there are lots of conditions where a doctor needs to do follow-up, but direct contact isn't required. Many people need to have liver/kidney function checked if they are on chronic medication, for example, and this would be a great way to do that inexpensively. Many things like blood pressure can be tested by the patient as well, and often more accurate (white coat effect and all that). Nurses could also perform many physical screening tests.
I certainly don't suggest that this can eliminate the need for local doctors, or ERs. However, this can allow those resources to concentrate on problems that require them.
I think we need to get away from the doctor=gatekeeper approach to medicine. A doctor is an incredibly valuable resource, and will remain such even if patients are able to get care without them when they aren't essential.
I find it ironic that you apply this argument to vaccines.
If you look at vaccines their quality over time has steadily risen. The most dangerous vaccines are the ones that were invented decades ago - many before there even was a profit motive behind them. Modern vaccines are much safer by almost any standard.
Sure, marketing can create conflicts of interest, and we do need regulatory bodies to provide oversight. However, almost ANY public health advocate is going to agree that vaccines today provide the BEST bang for the buck in terms of health benefits. They're far more cost-effective than drugs, and most of the time they completely prevent or cure disease.
Sure, they're not perfect, but nothing in medicine is. People probably still die from appendectomies.
My understanding is that DirecTV no longer offers to sell equipment outright AT ALL. A few years ago you could buy up-front and own the equipment clear. Buying up-front was ALWAYS the better move. If you changed your mind the equipment had a substantial resale value on ebay, and most of the time DirecTV would offer to buy in from you in exchange for waiving the early termination fees. I suspect that was why they went to the "rental" system - they wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
The funny thing is that I bought my most recent receivers off of ebay (mid-90s models so they're clearly legal to sell) and the bill still had a "rental" fee on it. When I finally canceled service the guy on the phone gave me a hard time about sending the stuff back, but there was no follow-up so they probably figured out their error.
Most of this stuff is really shady - I'm glad that somebody is at least trying to do something about it. IMHO equipment financing deals should be severed from service contracts by law. By all means offer people zero-down phones, but charge it as $10/month for two years rather than folding it into the cost of the plan, or whatever. Then those who don't need new phones don't pay for them, and you can cancel your plan and only pay out the cost of the phone itself for the remainder of the term.
Once upon a time I worked at a K-mart and on one summer day a guy shows up in a utility uniform and wearing a hard hat. He walked up to the customer service desk (skipping the line), and politely informed the person working there that if a copy of a check wasn't FAXed to the electric company the power would be switched off in 15 minutes. Apparently nobody had been paying the electric bill for a few months.:)
I've never seen managers scramble so fast in my life, and the power never went out, so I guess they were able to respond in a timely fashion when suitably threatened.
Never underestimate the amount of bureaucracy in any major corporation. The average employee might even want to be helpful but probably is powerless to do anything.
However, in this case the matter at hand was screwing customers, and I doubt the executives felt terribly motivated to be accommodating...
I've known others with similar problems with relatives who passed away. What I don't understand is why anybody goes through all this trouble.
Step 1 - fully probate the will and lock that up tight.
Step 2 - Just send a note explaining that they're dead, and if convenient attach the death certificate. I'm not sure that relatives even have an obligation to do that.
If DirecTV keeps the service turned on then don't pay any bills. The only person with a contractual obligation to them is dead, and their estate has been dispersed. The most they could do is try to re-open the estate to try to go after the termination fee, and it isn't like any lawyer is going to look at that and think that it is worthwhile - especially if the executor can point to a polite letter giving notice of what happened with time to respond.
So far I have yet to hear of anybody successfully serving a summons on somebody in the afterlife, although I'm sure that some have tried...
Yup, and for the cost of doing a PeopleSoft upgrade most companies could probably write an entirely new web browser on the scale of firefox... Or least, most companies that could actually pull off the upgrade without major problems could do it...
Ok, I might exaggerate a bit, but I don't think that most people around here appreciate how messy these kinds of systems can be...
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Agreed. There seems to be a lot of talk about getting people into space for the sake of getting them into space. Why send them in the first place?
For those who suggest that space is the ticket to avoiding overpopulation on earth - I remain skeptical (at least not until technology improves GREATLY). The costs of supporting people in space are massive. If you look at where most of the population growth is happening it is in underdeveloped nations - do you think that a bunch of childless rich guys in the west are going to spend billions of dollars so that a bunch of 3rd world villagers can have 14 kids?
I'm sure we'll get there at some point, but I think that talk of space colonies is a bit premature now.
By all means there should be public investment in scientific exploration, etc. However, I don't think we need huge massive projects to accomplish that. For the cost of trying to fly 10 people to mars for a few weeks we could probably have an automated robot on every square mile of the planet. Or, we could have a few more advanced robotic projects. For less than it would cost to get people to mars we could probably be harvesting asteroids (though to be honest that project makes me a bit nervous since it involves carefully maneuvering a really big rock into earth orbit).
Yup - I've seen this far too often in areas like aerospace and medical devices. Quality Control becomes less about making products that work and more about writing lots of documents saying that the products work.
Don't get me wrong - process control is a big part of ensuring quality. However, good paperwork is not the same as good quality, and I think that a lot of box-checker types miss that. It is far more important to understand your product and how it is made, so that you can spend your quality dollars where they do the most good.
That was the problem with the solid rocket boosters. NASA had paperwork on every part in the shuttle that probably weighed more than the shuttle itself. They had tons of test data everywhere. However, when they needed to decide whether it was OK to launch at such a cold temperature they didn't bother to look at it.
On the other hand, I've seen the opposite problem in organizations as well - where quality control takes such high priority that they never actually get anything done. Often this QC involves spending lots of money on paperwork - and not so much on the actual manufacturing process.
Most likely your boss wouldn't tell you that he fired you because your name was on the list. He'd fire you "because he doesn't need you any longer" or "because times are tough" or whatever. He might not give a reason at all in an at-will state.
So, unless you could somehow prove that your name being on the list was the real reason (maybe he tells somebody this and it gets back to you), good luck doing anything about it.
Ditto for people with photos of them doing stupid things on the web - you're not going to get a call from a future employer saying "well, your interviews went well but we thought that the photo of the tattoo on your butt was a bit tacky" - you'll get a call saying "thanks for interviewing but you were not selected."
Unfortunately, that's the problem with national sovereignty - nations can do whatever they want and consider their decisions binding on everybody on the planet. The only thing that prevents that is standing armies.
If you don't want to worry about some country's legal system subjecting you to trials in-absentia then it is best to avoid travelling to that country, or to nations that readily extradite people to that country.
The problem isn't really that the jurisdiction is wrong - anybody in the US can seek relief from the US courts against anybody - and the US will do what it reasonably can to grant that relief. The problem is that the laws are slanted to one extreme, and we have groups like those running this website that retaliate with the opposite extreme.
Somewhere there is a balance between massive restrictions on even the most casual copying, and one-person-buys-everybody-else-downloads. I doubt we'll see it in the US while the legislature is on the RIAA payroll...
With Gentoo it isn't seamless, but there is a tool that will create local overlay packages from a CPAN, and then they can be installed. I don't think you get automatic updates or anything like that, but you do get collision protection, and the ability to cleanly uninstall.
There are lots of upstream packages that don't give much thought to distros.
Well, you hit the nail on the head on the contracts. There are a few other issues as well:
1. No phone subsidies. That makes the cost of the service the cost of providing the service, only. It greatly simplifies the relationship with the consumer and gets rid of those long-term tie-ins.
2. Everybody is GSM. That means that you can walk over to a store, plug in a new SIM, port your phone number, and now you're in business with the new customer.
These kinds of arrangements mean that you could switch providers every month without an inordinate amount of hassle (I'm sure there is some kind of switching cost, but it is probably nominal).
In the US, you're stuck for 2 years, and if you switch providers you're going to need new phones, and have an entirely different coverage map.
The US is also geographically large, so coverage actually still is a problem in many areas.
If a law were passed requiring that phone subsidies be sold separately from service (and that the service component cannot have early-cancellation penalties) then you'd probably see a quick change (although the fractured technologies would still tend to keep people where they are).
Absolutely, and I had this in mind. However, right now quantum cryptography only protects the transmission, not the end-nodes. You'd need a computer where every byte of data in transit, in processing, or in memory associated with the authentication mechanism is protected all the time.
Even that won't really protect you completely since you can do a MITM at any time. The processing circuitry presumably needs to read the data to do work on it. So, you can remove the existing circuitry and replace it with circuitry that copies the data as it works on it. To defeat that the circuitry needs to be able to operate on the data without being able to read it - for some operations this is probably possible, but I doubt you'll be able to pull it off. You'd need a ton of error correction code to handle the loss rate when individual components can't retransmit on error and you're transmitting and operating on single particles or photons.
Sure, but it still isn't a typical bazaar development model.
If you want to build firefox there is a ton of documentation on it, and you end up with the same product that Mozilla distributes publicly. If you want to build android there are a few docs, but you don't actually end up with the same software that google distributes.
Hey, I'm not saying that Google is the ultimate evil. I'm just saying that they're also not the ultimate embodiment of open source either. It sounds like they want to try to be more like that, and that's great...
This is why IT gets no respect.
IT operates under the constraints given it from above.
I'm sure my CIO gets a bonus of $5M for slashing costs, and a bonus of $5k for not having any outages that year. If the CEO reversed the incentives, we'd have a ballooning budget, but a much higher quality of service. I suspect the CEO likes it just the way it is, however.
The important thing is for IT to be up-front about levels of quality and costs. People at work complain all the time about how fast the support team is. The support management offered to have people waiting by the phone with the expertise to solve the most complicated problems, but obviously nobody cared about that enough to pay for it.
You get what you pay for...
Are you going to say that Firefox isn't OSS because they have branding standards for what they call an official release?
No, but they're a real pain in the neck...
And the actual Firefox product is what you get when you compile the published source. So, people running Gentoo get the same browser as somebody who just downloads the binary. You can't redistribute your own builds with the logo/etc, but they are effectively the same.
It is too early to say how Chrome will turn out since it really isn't a finished product yet. However, no phone in the world is running the result of just taking the published android source and building it.
With the kernel Google just dumped a ton of code on the kernel team - nothing was really done in consultation with them.
So, Google has a bit of a mixed reputation in this area. However, I did like the tone of the article, and Google is definitely far ahead of most large corporations already.
Didn't Google just release Android out in the open, and Chrome browser, and Chrome OS?
Yes and no.
They have open source versions of both Android (AOSP) and Chrome (Chromium). Chrome is still very new and hasn't really gone into release, so it is a bit early to say how that will play out.
However, Android and AOSP have a very weak relationship. If you build AOSP you get something that won't work right on anything but the android emulator. It lacks the drivers necessary to actually work on a phone, and it also lacks most of the features that would make somebody want to buy an android phone. Additionally, there really is no evidence that any of the phones out there are running any particular build of AOSP even if you neglect the proprietary bits. Google also doesn't use AOSP as the actual development project - they do all their development in secret, and then do a huge code dump on AOSP sometime after they release a new android release on phones.
The AOSP build system is also a real pain to use - the OS and the kernel are built separately, and you need to add all kinds of stuff to it to make it actually work. It really seems like Google has no intention of making the AOSP a functional OS that can work on real phones.
Google seems to have a tendency to just dump chunks of code out there. They're more than happy to have people contribute fixes which can make their way upstream, but nobody outside of Google has any influence on the direction of the project. This is not an open-source bazaar-style approach.
However, it is obviously still preferable to being completely closed...
That is for chromium - not chrome.
Chromium is to chrome as iceweasal is to firefox. Except that at least mozilla publishes the exact code to firefox - we have yet to see if Chrome ends up being identical to the output you get if you build chromium.
The only way I can see hardware security reaching true theoretical unbreakability is if we get to the level where the uncertainty principle prevents observing the hardware in action, but I'm not sure if it will be feasible to have the hardware even run reliably under those conditions.
You can certainly make the hardware hard to crack, but ultimately it is physical in nature and it can be taken apart physically. It is almost impossible to make it theoretically secure, although in practice you can do pretty well.
Not just a brother or a sister - no aunts, uncles, or cousins either.
Your ONLY relations (at least legally) are parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. Or, from the other a single child, a single grandchild, etc.
For a typical child with four living grandparents, on their birthday their entire family is in attendance, and that is the only birthday any of them will attend that year so they spend their entire annual birthday budget on them. If you ever perceived single children in the US as being somewhat spoiled, just imagine single-grandchildren.
In 20 years the country is going to have a VERY interesting social dynamic.
True, but from what I understand it is a drug that is almost impossible to beat. It is fairly effective, and from the prescribing info it sounds like it doesn't have a single side effect whose effect is greater than placebo. I actually laughed when I heard the TV ads for it because they'd go ahead and list trivial side-effects on the ad just so that they could say it was balanced, when you're just as likely to get those side-effects from eating a ham sandwich.
The newer drugs are probably only successful because of how insurance works - people would rather take the $120/month prescription drug since it only costs them $25/quarter or whatever in copays, and buying OTC loratadine could easily exceed that. Plus, the doctors don't get kickbacks for telling patients to just take the OTC stuff.
What I think is really funny is that I know people who take Benadryl all the time who are reluctant to take generic loratadine because they perceive it as being a "stronger" drug. I feel like a drug salesman when I try to explain that it has a better safety profile than just about any drug I'm aware of (including aspirin). We don't really do a good job educating people about their health options - understanding a drug label and elements of the prescribing info should probably be taught in high school.
Disclaimer - I'm not a doctor or a pharmacist, and for all I know there was some new study released last week that states that all of this stuff is rat poison...
I heard a pharmacy school story about some students writing up fake prescriptions for controlled substances. They got caught because the DEA number on the prescriptions failed to meet the internal checksum, which is an algorithm that pharmacists apparently know and check. A professor joked that they should be given poor grades simply for not knowing how to fake the number correctly (needless to say they were expelled)...
That was before the internet - I can't imagine that anybody serious about forging this stuff wouldn't be able to google for it now...
Well, the motivation for claritin was that it went generic. So, Schering Plough wasn't going to make another dime on it (no insurer would cover the branded drug). As an OTC medicine, however, they can market it just as Bayer/Tylenol/etc do for their products.
I agree with the general thread, however, that we've swung too far in not allowing access to almost any medications without a prescription. In many cases prescription drugs are safer alternatives to drugs that are non-prescription. And then you have people taking loads of red yeast rice when a modern statin would have a much better efficacy/safety profile (the supplement is just an older drug that occurs naturally).
And insurance plans really should cover OTC drugs that are taken under a doctor's direction. Why should it cost me more to take OTC niacin than some prescription formulation of it or some more exotic drug that doesn't have half as much clinical background?
But the problem here is that the patient is now expected to determine whether the tele-visit or a physical visit is the more appropriate course of action.
I think this is a false dichotomy (tele-visit vs real visit).
Right now the patient has two choices - no visit or real visit. Many patients will put off a real visit if they don't think that a problem rises to a certain threshold. Most of the time this is probably a good thing (every headache doesn't need a visit). However, perhaps somebody with a serious problem will avoid care, or they'll put it off for a day or two to make an appointment.
Now they can just pick up the phone and call 1-800-DOCTORS or whatever and get a human on the line 24x7. They pay $20 and get a real screening by a trained professional, who can triage their problem. If it is serious they can tell them to call 911 (or place the call themselves), or drive to the ER, or whatever. They can also suggest seeing a regular doctor. With the potential cost savings an insurance company might even fully cover the cost of the initial call if they get referred for later care (just think how many doctor visits they could avoid).
By lowering the threshold and cost to engage with a doctor, more people get more access to medicine. A system like this could literally have doctors on-call 24x7 for a very low cost. Maybe one of those really bad headaches will prompt a doctor to go over the signs of a stroke over the phone and get somebody to go to the ER who might otherwise have put it off a day (and minutes count for strokes).
Something like this could also provide greater continuity of care - the company might automatically screen your labs and avoid a lot of routine visits.
The key is to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of any technology, and apply it appropriately.
if such people cannot spend 30 minutes on their health, but are happy to idle time away on Slashdot, they are bringing on their own demise
However, you aren't advocating spending 30 minutes on their health - you're advocating spending 30 minutes sitting in a room, so that your doctor can try to rush you in and out in 5.
There is no reason that good healthcare should require waiting in lines.
I think that this is a good move overall - there are lots of conditions where a doctor needs to do follow-up, but direct contact isn't required. Many people need to have liver/kidney function checked if they are on chronic medication, for example, and this would be a great way to do that inexpensively. Many things like blood pressure can be tested by the patient as well, and often more accurate (white coat effect and all that). Nurses could also perform many physical screening tests.
I certainly don't suggest that this can eliminate the need for local doctors, or ERs. However, this can allow those resources to concentrate on problems that require them.
I think we need to get away from the doctor=gatekeeper approach to medicine. A doctor is an incredibly valuable resource, and will remain such even if patients are able to get care without them when they aren't essential.
True, but android does blur the lines quite a bit since it does a lot of stuff fairly unconventionally.
There's no GNU userland at all. No udev/etc either, and a lot of the init tools and all that are very different.
Most people accustomed to unix would find it fairly alien if they did more than just browse some directories from a shell.
However, it does run on the linux kernel, so yes, it is linux.
I find it ironic that you apply this argument to vaccines.
If you look at vaccines their quality over time has steadily risen. The most dangerous vaccines are the ones that were invented decades ago - many before there even was a profit motive behind them. Modern vaccines are much safer by almost any standard.
Sure, marketing can create conflicts of interest, and we do need regulatory bodies to provide oversight. However, almost ANY public health advocate is going to agree that vaccines today provide the BEST bang for the buck in terms of health benefits. They're far more cost-effective than drugs, and most of the time they completely prevent or cure disease.
Sure, they're not perfect, but nothing in medicine is. People probably still die from appendectomies.
My understanding is that DirecTV no longer offers to sell equipment outright AT ALL. A few years ago you could buy up-front and own the equipment clear. Buying up-front was ALWAYS the better move. If you changed your mind the equipment had a substantial resale value on ebay, and most of the time DirecTV would offer to buy in from you in exchange for waiving the early termination fees. I suspect that was why they went to the "rental" system - they wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
The funny thing is that I bought my most recent receivers off of ebay (mid-90s models so they're clearly legal to sell) and the bill still had a "rental" fee on it. When I finally canceled service the guy on the phone gave me a hard time about sending the stuff back, but there was no follow-up so they probably figured out their error.
Most of this stuff is really shady - I'm glad that somebody is at least trying to do something about it. IMHO equipment financing deals should be severed from service contracts by law. By all means offer people zero-down phones, but charge it as $10/month for two years rather than folding it into the cost of the plan, or whatever. Then those who don't need new phones don't pay for them, and you can cancel your plan and only pay out the cost of the phone itself for the remainder of the term.
Once upon a time I worked at a K-mart and on one summer day a guy shows up in a utility uniform and wearing a hard hat. He walked up to the customer service desk (skipping the line), and politely informed the person working there that if a copy of a check wasn't FAXed to the electric company the power would be switched off in 15 minutes. Apparently nobody had been paying the electric bill for a few months. :)
I've never seen managers scramble so fast in my life, and the power never went out, so I guess they were able to respond in a timely fashion when suitably threatened.
Never underestimate the amount of bureaucracy in any major corporation. The average employee might even want to be helpful but probably is powerless to do anything.
However, in this case the matter at hand was screwing customers, and I doubt the executives felt terribly motivated to be accommodating...
I've known others with similar problems with relatives who passed away. What I don't understand is why anybody goes through all this trouble.
Step 1 - fully probate the will and lock that up tight.
Step 2 - Just send a note explaining that they're dead, and if convenient attach the death certificate. I'm not sure that relatives even have an obligation to do that.
If DirecTV keeps the service turned on then don't pay any bills. The only person with a contractual obligation to them is dead, and their estate has been dispersed. The most they could do is try to re-open the estate to try to go after the termination fee, and it isn't like any lawyer is going to look at that and think that it is worthwhile - especially if the executor can point to a polite letter giving notice of what happened with time to respond.
So far I have yet to hear of anybody successfully serving a summons on somebody in the afterlife, although I'm sure that some have tried...
Yup, and for the cost of doing a PeopleSoft upgrade most companies could probably write an entirely new web browser on the scale of firefox... Or least, most companies that could actually pull off the upgrade without major problems could do it...
Ok, I might exaggerate a bit, but I don't think that most people around here appreciate how messy these kinds of systems can be...