Utilities are essential, but it is just as important that utilities are limited to providing the sorts of things that are natural monopolies - such as providing bandwidth. Vertical integration causes all kinds of competition problems.
If your DNS provider makes money off of registrations and isn't allowed to make it off of selling ads, then they have no incentive to redirect NXDOMAINs. If your bandwidth provider doesn't also sell VOIP or on-demand video, then they have no incentive to filter/deprioritize competitor's traffic.
It isn't just technology - look at the mess with dealer-servicing of cars. OEMs withold specifications (particularly around on-board diagnostics) to make life more difficult on competing repair shops.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the issue of failure of the drive material itself at higher rotational velocities.
I believe CDs are limited to 52X because the polycarbonate they are constructed of explodes when you get too much higher than that (with a safety factor of course).
A metal hard drive probably can take more speed, but I'm sure that at some point you get deformation of the platter. You also have bearings/etc to deal with. 30k is a pretty fast rotation rate - and we're talking about a device that is always-on.
Additionally, even 10k SCSI drives aren't exactly consumer-grade hardware. We're already getting in to the high-end realm, and the whole point of RAID was the "I."
Yup - almost any OEM case is nearly useless to reuse. Other issues:
1. Compact designs often only work with specific board layouts (including assumptions of the height of various components on the board and their position.
2. The case might or might not have a full set of screw-holes for various board formats.
3. The connectors for USB/power/reset/speaker/etc often use fancy connectors that are non-standard, rather than just individual connectors. There might even be primitive daughterboards involved.
4. The power supply might or might not be standard ATX. Granted, that isn't case-related per-se, but it is a chunk of gear that has to be tossed. If the power supply does something weird with the power connections/etc then that is a case issue.
OEMS do all kinds of crazy stuff that makes their hardware almost impossible to recycle...
Uh, no such rule exists in any law I am aware of (your jurisdiction may vary - ask your judge if you are on jury duty). Circumstantial evidence is just that - evidence! There really is a continuum of certainty - maybe you just happened to be in the area the crime was committed, or maybe your fingerprint just happened to match the one on the gun that was used to commit the crime. Both are circumstances in some sense, but their likelihood of being associated with guilt are very different.
I liked a definition that I heard from a judge (when I served on a jury for a criminal case): Reasonable doubt is the kind of doubt that would cause somebody to defer making an important life decision (such as buying a house). It is not the absence of all doubt, or the possession of mathematical certainty.
If the only evidence against a guy was that somebody was seen from the back with a similar height and hair color, then I'd probably have reasonable doubt. If the only evidence were:
1. The guy used to own a gun of the same model used to commit the crime, but it was "lost." 2. Somebody matching the general description of the defendant was seen in the vicinity, but no positive ID. 3. The defendant had motive to commit the crime. 4. The defendant has no credible alibi. 5. The defendant has the same size shoes as the footprints at the crime scene. 6. People heard the defendant making strong threats against the victim, And so on...
Well, maybe that is all circumstantial, but at some point if it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck... You don't need a body and a weapon to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Lots of people spend lots of time in jail based on this kind of evidence. In fact, if they had a weapon and fingerprints, chances are it wouldn't even go to trial.
It doesn't need to be like winning the lottery. However, if somebody is the sole wage-earner for their family and has an income and expenses around a $75k/year salary, then if you make them take a week or two off and pay them $50 for their time, then they're going to be seriously impacted financially. The fact is that EVERYBODY in that court room is being paid SIGNIFICANTLY more than that to be there - except for the jurors. If it is essential to justice that the lawyers be paid $200/hr, maybe we can at least pay the jurors something in-line with their hourly income. For most well-paid professionals that might be $50/hour.
Keep in mind that many professions aren't paid hourly - they're expected to get projects done on particular timelines. So, even if they are paid for their time away, if they deliver projects late from being out, then they're going to damage their careers.
The whole system treats jurors like their time isn't valuable. It should be. Sure, that costs money - but so do courts in general.
And chances are back when those $5/day payments were devised it probably represented a meaningful payment. The law simply hasn't been changed in 100 years...
It encourages people to serve (except the rich people who already get enough representation)
Maybe if it were in addition to your regular employer's pay. I suspect that a huge percentage of educated professionals make more than $40 an hour. Certainly when you factor in benefits this is the case.
$40 on top of regular pay might get a lot of people's attention. $40 per hour INSTEAD of regular pay and benefits probably wouldn't - at least not most well-educated professionals. I'm not talking about people who are "rich" - just people who are successful and well-educated.
Evidence siezed illegally is admissible once the person who siezed it has finished paying their (income-adjusted) $50k fine or serving a full year in prison? If nobody is punished it reverts to the status quo.:)
Hmm - just realized my statement was ambiguous. How about this:
However, the solution isn't: "to leave it up to a jury but to filter information to such an extent that they're forced to come up with the 'right' decision."
The information SHOULDN'T be filtered - that was my point. Either give the jurors full access to info, or just cut them out of aspects of a trial that they can't judge.
This is why people need to be taught about the nature of sources and their bias. That applies in both the voting booth and the jury room.
If I Googled a case and found press reports, I'd probably be fairly skeptical of the information, or I'd at least look at how it was actually obtained. Granted, I'm not necessarily a typical juror. However, it is possible for an educated juror to weigh outside info in making their decisions.
In any case, as you point out at some point these problems are going to become inevitable - unless net access is pervasively monitored. When we all have implants in our heads that make the internet an extention of our memories, how do you ask a juror not to "remember" anything they didn't hear in the courtroom?
1. Illegally-siezed evidence is fully admissible. If somebody commits a crime then police error should not be a reason to excuse the crime. The nature of the discovery of the evidence should also be disclosed to the jury.
2. Officers who illegally-sieze evidence should be seriously punished - I'm talking serious fines or jail-time. It should be illegal to perform an illegal search (well, uh, duh). This needs to be taken seriously, and penalities need to actually be applied the vast majority of the time. Officers wouldn't perform illegal searches if it was 90% likely that it would land them with a $20k fine or a year in prison.
The law hates jurors in the first place - all those non-professionals who evaluate things in terms of right and wrong and not on the pure bases of compliance with appropriate legal loopholes.
It seems like the modern court system starts with the assumption that jurors only mess things up. Then it has rules of evidence so that the jury is given precisely the right information so that they reach the "appropriate" conclusion.
I understand the issues with expert testimony and all that. IMHO some kinds of expert decisions probably shouldn't be made by a jury at all (whether a given product did or didn't cause an injury, for example). However, the solution isn't to leave it up to a jury but to filter information to such an extent that they're forced to come up with the "right" decision. If you want to take the decision away from the jury, just do it!
Maybe next election when there's hanging chads they can use that as a captcha.
It would certainly be a lot more fair than the current process - which is a bunch of cronies each interpret the results to their preferred candidate's advantage and then a judge settles it.
Of course, the better solution is to not have such ambiguity in the first place.
If you wanted to implement a system for interpreting analog votes here is what I'd do:
1. All ambiguous votes are digitized. Of course, the definition of "ambiguous" is itself ambiguous - if somebody solidly fills in one circle and leaves one dot in another, is that ambiguous? What constitutes a stray mark vs a double-vote? I guess you could err on the side of caution, or maybe put all votes through the digitizer.
2. The digitizer chops up each vote into individual boxes and then presents them to a user in random order. For example, if the Gore box is on the left on the ballot, it could be on the left or on the right in the presented ballot.
3. The human interprets the vote. They have no cues to actually determine who the vote is for - just whether a given box was selected.
4. Each vote is given to sufficient numbers of people that a high-confidence vote can be selected. If you get 3 people who agree then maybe that's enough. If you get any disagreements maybe you keep asking for opinions until one response has a significant margin. Maybe votes are tossed entirely at some threshold.
The key is that those looking at ballots should not be able to tell which boxes correspond to which candidates. That will eliminate the bias from the system.
Again, in my opinion computers should generate human-readable ballots - so that the computer validates the ballot BEFORE the voter submits it. No issue with stray marks if there are no pencils in the room.
Yup. You just hit on my pet peeve with all those folks who complain about "me too" drugs. There are many who think that most drugs are a waste of money since they don't treat new conditions. Who needs Crestor when you already have Zocor?
Well, if you happen to have an allergy or other reaction to Zocor, maybe you'd be happy that companies didn't quit after just one. Plus, the competition helps keep down prices.
The biggest problem with the healthcare industry is that it is far too dependent on statistical means. We treat everybody as an average, and on average everybody does well. Of course, lots of people fall through the cracks. Treatment would be far more effective if we could determine who reacts to what treatment best and tailor accordingly.
More likely than not the 3-letter agencies have done it to nationals from other countries, so they know it can be done to their own citizens.
During the cold war the US sabotaged a Soviet oil facility by introducing a trojan into firmware for various control systems. They also tapped undersea lines, listened to cell-phone conversations from space, and likely did all manner of other elaborate info-gathering operations that we still don't know about.
When you're talking about state-sponsored intelligence, there is a remarkable number of vulnerabilities that they have the resources to exploit. If China really cared what Steve Jobs had on his laptop, they could easily gas his hotel room while he was sleeping and do all manner of things to his laptop. I'm not sure that weighing is going to do you much good - if I wanted to be really slick I'd just replace a chip on the motherboard with something that does a little extra. If you replaced a chip on the northbridge, and one on the ethernet controller, you could gather any intel you'd like and send it out over the internet and it would be utterly undetectable without a packet sniffer.
No doubt the insulator is easy to replace, but what else gets damaged in the resulting short? If you hit a few of them power will certainly be out for a while no matter what. You could get a cascading failure which multiplies the damage.
Substation transformers are clearly another possible target.
The serious vulnerabilities are the distributed ones. Most likely a power plant has some kind of security - even a barbed wire fence and ID badges are a serious impediment to an attack. On the other hand, most substations run with almost nobody around, and the equipment is just sitting out in the open where it could be attacked with fairly simple weapons. With all that current it doesn't take much damage to destroy things permanently.
Could it be entirely possible that two different people in the same country could have different anecdotal experiences with the health care system?
I agree that my point was anecdotal in nature. Perhaps the problems are regional in nature, or they tend to happen in specific cases.
However, my point is that NHS isn't a bed of roses either. I think that something like it is inevitable in the US simply due to the nature of insurance (what happens when your risk profile can be determined at birth genetically?). However, a public health option brings along a whole set of new problems that need to be managed. Unfortunately, good health care simply isn't easy to do.
If you wanted to take out a substation/etc, wouldn't it make more sense to just shoot at the ceramic insulators with a rifle? Why on earth would you go sawing on the support beams for a tower? First, it takes a while. Second, you are right next to a metal tower that is about to have high-voltage lines fall onto it - at those levels that electricity will arc multiple feet through the air and turn you into a cinder. To shoot out an insulator you probably just need to be a good shot - you probably don't need a particularly exotic rifle. Of course, if you're shooting up into the air you might need to take the elevation change into account with your aim - and if you don't have tracers it could be a tough shot.
In fact, this showcases why it is that little R&D takes place for antibiotics - there isn't much money in them, and when you do come out with one you need to charge obscene rates to make a profit.
The fact is that 95% of people who get bacterial infections will do just fine with pennicilian. 95% of the rest will do just fine with one of a few other super-cheap antibiotics. The only people who need the really exotic stuff are people with really exotic problems. However, there aren't enough of them to pay for making new exotic stuff.
I think that antibiotics are one of those areas where the NIH should probably just contract the development of new classes of treatments. They could place an order for a new drug just like the Air Force places an order for a new plane. Sure, it would be pricey, but it is probably the only way it will happen. Actually - it probably shouldn't even be the NIH, but rather a coalition of first-world governments. The government might license it royalty free to anybody who paid in to the development, and to third world nations.
I dunno (maybe they checked, maybe they didn't) - but if it costs $1000 to completely diagnose a problem when overtreating it costs $100, then it might make sense to just overtreat it. I agree completely that antibiotics need to be administered in moderation, but we're talking about somebody with confirmed fluid in their lungs - not somebody with the sniffles.
I ran into the guy from the UK months after the fact and his voice still wasn't completely normal. Spending weeks on end tinkering around with Pneumonia isn't a good way to handle it. We're talking about a consdition that with early detection is almost a non-issue, but if neglected it can be very serious or even fatal. The risk of complications from antibiotics is probably much lower than the risk of delaying treatment.
In this particular case the US approach actually was far more cost-effective than the UK approach - once all externalities are taken into account (lost work, quality of life, etc).
Don't get me wrong - the US system messes up plenty too. However, it tends to mess up in different ways. In this case insurance kept the costs reasonably low for the whole incident, but somebody who was poor and uninsured would have gotten the same treatment and then would have been hounded for months with bills.
The problem with this is that insurance companies demand a discount from participating physicians. The physicians compensate by overcharging non-insurance patients, so that the insurance company receives the required "discount," which is no discount at all, really.
I know - hence the whole reason I said that the practice should be banned. If nobody is allowed to do it, then insurance companies will have no choice but to play ball. Right now if a doctor tries to stand up and refuse they just get blacklisted.
If a company or doctor or hospital is caught charging different rates for different people, then they should be fined so much that anybody associated with the idea is rapidly fired.
If a hospital can amputate a leg for $500, then they can do it for everybody. None of this nonsense of uninsured people paying more. Maybe catastrophic insurance would actually work if the prices were fair.
However, it does explain why people are reluctant to just overhaul the entire system - for the overwhelming majority it works moderately well. For a small minority it doesn't work at all.
In many single-payer systems all those difficult choices are simply taken away from the patient. Nobody has to choose between paying for care or going without. Instead your doctor (or somebody else) decides whether it is worth treating you. For treatments that are clearly necessary but expensive, they just limit the amount of care available, so that many people just give up on waiting or deteriorate to the point where they can't be treated (thus eliminating the cost of treatment). People are treated more-or-less equally, but it is a bit of a meat grinder.
Oh, and don't go on too much about equality. I doubt an MP gets the same treatment as an ordinary citizen in ANY European country. It is "all equality," but mysteriously all the stars happen to align and wait times are minimal for such VIPs. It certainly is no better in the US, but I am amused when advocates of Socialism point to equality as if ANY country ever practiced it.
From what I've heard cost-cutting has a big impact. I know a guy who had some breathing problems in the UK, and the problem was handled with tiny little escalations until it became untreated Pneumonia and he was out of work for a month. It took a week before they gave him an x-ray, and it took a week to get the x-ray interpreted. Then it took about a week before they prescribed him an antibiotic.
I had a friend with similar symptoms in the US. They went to the ER at 10PM with difficulty breathing. They were x-rayed within about 15 minutes, and despite it being late at night the test was interpreted within an hour. Antibiotics and steroid nebulizer were immediately administered, and by about 1-2AM they were headed home with a prescription in hand. They still had a few symptoms the next day, but within 48 hours all symptoms were gone and they finished their prescription over the next week. No work/etc was missed aside from sleeping in a little the next morning.
In this case the UK actually shot itself in the foot since the patient in question missed a month of work - which was a huge net cost - just so they could try to save a few dollars on treatments that have been around for 50+ years. However, sick pay/etc doesn't come out of the NHS budget...
Somewhere there is a balance. The US is a mess, but so are most health care systems - they're just messy in different ways, and by different metrics.
There are simply no incentives to reduce costs - unless insurance companies get so sick of it that they just drop the hospitals entirely.
If they'd just pass a law requiring the following it would probably start to make a difference (by no means is this all the reform needed):
1. Hospitals must publish a public domain price list for services. It must be posted in an obvious manner. The hospital is not allowed to charge different customers or insurers different rates. 2. The full cost of a procedure must be disclosed to a patient before care is rendered. Risks of expensive but unlikely complications should be built into this cost. 3. After everything is over the hospital submits a single bill in the exact amount of #2. No more, no less, and no bills from 300 "independent contractors." No rebates/discounts/etc - EVERYBODY pays the same rate, period. No payments or incentives between providers and payers other than the list price. 4. Care rendered to anybody who is not conscious would either be free or billed at the lesser of their published rates or a government-regulated rate.
People could then shop around, and independant reviewers could compare hospitals on cost. There would actually be incentive to reduce costs.
Again, this will not on its own fix the health care mess. However, it certainly would help.
Are you certain that these accounts don't have an SMS/MMS data plan? I believe that for $10/month/line Verizon gives unlimited SMS/MMS - if they have that plan then the reason it is "free" is the fact that they're already paying for it.
Most US providers do not allow free SMS/MMS messages to be sent, and emails are treated the same as these services. Using email also tends to be a little clumsy from the standpoint that nobody knows what the email address pattern is for provider foo. Also - if I gave you my cell phone number, you could easily SMS/MMS me, but to send an email to my phone you'd have to figure out who my provider was in the first place.
I still don't understand why MMS is even a point. Every single phone on the market can send and receive e-mail including media files for free...
Uh - most phones do not receive email for free. In fact, most phones barely support receiving email at all (usually only text - via SMS). MMS is by far the most standardized way to send a photo to somebody on a cell phone. Granted, MMS is also not free to most people.
Unless you're limiting "every single phone on the market" to a handful of smartphones with data plans.
Most people are carrying around some tiny little phone that came free with their plan and does little more than SMS/MMS with a less-than 2MP camera.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but that is where standards come in to play.
Utilities are essential, but it is just as important that utilities are limited to providing the sorts of things that are natural monopolies - such as providing bandwidth. Vertical integration causes all kinds of competition problems.
If your DNS provider makes money off of registrations and isn't allowed to make it off of selling ads, then they have no incentive to redirect NXDOMAINs. If your bandwidth provider doesn't also sell VOIP or on-demand video, then they have no incentive to filter/deprioritize competitor's traffic.
It isn't just technology - look at the mess with dealer-servicing of cars. OEMs withold specifications (particularly around on-board diagnostics) to make life more difficult on competing repair shops.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the issue of failure of the drive material itself at higher rotational velocities.
I believe CDs are limited to 52X because the polycarbonate they are constructed of explodes when you get too much higher than that (with a safety factor of course).
A metal hard drive probably can take more speed, but I'm sure that at some point you get deformation of the platter. You also have bearings/etc to deal with. 30k is a pretty fast rotation rate - and we're talking about a device that is always-on.
Additionally, even 10k SCSI drives aren't exactly consumer-grade hardware. We're already getting in to the high-end realm, and the whole point of RAID was the "I."
Yup - almost any OEM case is nearly useless to reuse. Other issues:
1. Compact designs often only work with specific board layouts (including assumptions of the height of various components on the board and their position.
2. The case might or might not have a full set of screw-holes for various board formats.
3. The connectors for USB/power/reset/speaker/etc often use fancy connectors that are non-standard, rather than just individual connectors. There might even be primitive daughterboards involved.
4. The power supply might or might not be standard ATX. Granted, that isn't case-related per-se, but it is a chunk of gear that has to be tossed. If the power supply does something weird with the power connections/etc then that is a case issue.
OEMS do all kinds of crazy stuff that makes their hardware almost impossible to recycle...
circumstantial evidence alone doesn't destroy reasonable doubt
Uh, no such rule exists in any law I am aware of (your jurisdiction may vary - ask your judge if you are on jury duty). Circumstantial evidence is just that - evidence! There really is a continuum of certainty - maybe you just happened to be in the area the crime was committed, or maybe your fingerprint just happened to match the one on the gun that was used to commit the crime. Both are circumstances in some sense, but their likelihood of being associated with guilt are very different.
I liked a definition that I heard from a judge (when I served on a jury for a criminal case): Reasonable doubt is the kind of doubt that would cause somebody to defer making an important life decision (such as buying a house). It is not the absence of all doubt, or the possession of mathematical certainty.
If the only evidence against a guy was that somebody was seen from the back with a similar height and hair color, then I'd probably have reasonable doubt. If the only evidence were:
1. The guy used to own a gun of the same model used to commit the crime, but it was "lost."
2. Somebody matching the general description of the defendant was seen in the vicinity, but no positive ID.
3. The defendant had motive to commit the crime.
4. The defendant has no credible alibi.
5. The defendant has the same size shoes as the footprints at the crime scene.
6. People heard the defendant making strong threats against the victim,
And so on...
Well, maybe that is all circumstantial, but at some point if it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck... You don't need a body and a weapon to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Lots of people spend lots of time in jail based on this kind of evidence. In fact, if they had a weapon and fingerprints, chances are it wouldn't even go to trial.
It doesn't need to be like winning the lottery. However, if somebody is the sole wage-earner for their family and has an income and expenses around a $75k/year salary, then if you make them take a week or two off and pay them $50 for their time, then they're going to be seriously impacted financially. The fact is that EVERYBODY in that court room is being paid SIGNIFICANTLY more than that to be there - except for the jurors. If it is essential to justice that the lawyers be paid $200/hr, maybe we can at least pay the jurors something in-line with their hourly income. For most well-paid professionals that might be $50/hour.
Keep in mind that many professions aren't paid hourly - they're expected to get projects done on particular timelines. So, even if they are paid for their time away, if they deliver projects late from being out, then they're going to damage their careers.
The whole system treats jurors like their time isn't valuable. It should be. Sure, that costs money - but so do courts in general.
And chances are back when those $5/day payments were devised it probably represented a meaningful payment. The law simply hasn't been changed in 100 years...
It encourages people to serve (except the rich people who already get enough representation)
Maybe if it were in addition to your regular employer's pay. I suspect that a huge percentage of educated professionals make more than $40 an hour. Certainly when you factor in benefits this is the case.
$40 on top of regular pay might get a lot of people's attention. $40 per hour INSTEAD of regular pay and benefits probably wouldn't - at least not most well-educated professionals. I'm not talking about people who are "rich" - just people who are successful and well-educated.
Ok, how about a modification:
Evidence siezed illegally is admissible once the person who siezed it has finished paying their (income-adjusted) $50k fine or serving a full year in prison? If nobody is punished it reverts to the status quo. :)
Not that any of this will ever happen...
Hmm - just realized my statement was ambiguous. How about this:
However, the solution isn't: "to leave it up to a jury but to filter information to such an extent that they're forced to come up with the 'right' decision."
The information SHOULDN'T be filtered - that was my point. Either give the jurors full access to info, or just cut them out of aspects of a trial that they can't judge.
This is why people need to be taught about the nature of sources and their bias. That applies in both the voting booth and the jury room.
If I Googled a case and found press reports, I'd probably be fairly skeptical of the information, or I'd at least look at how it was actually obtained. Granted, I'm not necessarily a typical juror. However, it is possible for an educated juror to weigh outside info in making their decisions.
In any case, as you point out at some point these problems are going to become inevitable - unless net access is pervasively monitored. When we all have implants in our heads that make the internet an extention of our memories, how do you ask a juror not to "remember" anything they didn't hear in the courtroom?
A better approach would be this:
1. Illegally-siezed evidence is fully admissible. If somebody commits a crime then police error should not be a reason to excuse the crime. The nature of the discovery of the evidence should also be disclosed to the jury.
2. Officers who illegally-sieze evidence should be seriously punished - I'm talking serious fines or jail-time. It should be illegal to perform an illegal search (well, uh, duh). This needs to be taken seriously, and penalities need to actually be applied the vast majority of the time. Officers wouldn't perform illegal searches if it was 90% likely that it would land them with a $20k fine or a year in prison.
The law hates jurors in the first place - all those non-professionals who evaluate things in terms of right and wrong and not on the pure bases of compliance with appropriate legal loopholes.
It seems like the modern court system starts with the assumption that jurors only mess things up. Then it has rules of evidence so that the jury is given precisely the right information so that they reach the "appropriate" conclusion.
I understand the issues with expert testimony and all that. IMHO some kinds of expert decisions probably shouldn't be made by a jury at all (whether a given product did or didn't cause an injury, for example). However, the solution isn't to leave it up to a jury but to filter information to such an extent that they're forced to come up with the "right" decision. If you want to take the decision away from the jury, just do it!
Maybe next election when there's hanging chads they can use that as a captcha.
It would certainly be a lot more fair than the current process - which is a bunch of cronies each interpret the results to their preferred candidate's advantage and then a judge settles it.
Of course, the better solution is to not have such ambiguity in the first place.
If you wanted to implement a system for interpreting analog votes here is what I'd do:
1. All ambiguous votes are digitized. Of course, the definition of "ambiguous" is itself ambiguous - if somebody solidly fills in one circle and leaves one dot in another, is that ambiguous? What constitutes a stray mark vs a double-vote? I guess you could err on the side of caution, or maybe put all votes through the digitizer.
2. The digitizer chops up each vote into individual boxes and then presents them to a user in random order. For example, if the Gore box is on the left on the ballot, it could be on the left or on the right in the presented ballot.
3. The human interprets the vote. They have no cues to actually determine who the vote is for - just whether a given box was selected.
4. Each vote is given to sufficient numbers of people that a high-confidence vote can be selected. If you get 3 people who agree then maybe that's enough. If you get any disagreements maybe you keep asking for opinions until one response has a significant margin. Maybe votes are tossed entirely at some threshold.
The key is that those looking at ballots should not be able to tell which boxes correspond to which candidates. That will eliminate the bias from the system.
Again, in my opinion computers should generate human-readable ballots - so that the computer validates the ballot BEFORE the voter submits it. No issue with stray marks if there are no pencils in the room.
Yup. You just hit on my pet peeve with all those folks who complain about "me too" drugs. There are many who think that most drugs are a waste of money since they don't treat new conditions. Who needs Crestor when you already have Zocor?
Well, if you happen to have an allergy or other reaction to Zocor, maybe you'd be happy that companies didn't quit after just one. Plus, the competition helps keep down prices.
The biggest problem with the healthcare industry is that it is far too dependent on statistical means. We treat everybody as an average, and on average everybody does well. Of course, lots of people fall through the cracks. Treatment would be far more effective if we could determine who reacts to what treatment best and tailor accordingly.
More likely than not the 3-letter agencies have done it to nationals from other countries, so they know it can be done to their own citizens.
During the cold war the US sabotaged a Soviet oil facility by introducing a trojan into firmware for various control systems. They also tapped undersea lines, listened to cell-phone conversations from space, and likely did all manner of other elaborate info-gathering operations that we still don't know about.
When you're talking about state-sponsored intelligence, there is a remarkable number of vulnerabilities that they have the resources to exploit. If China really cared what Steve Jobs had on his laptop, they could easily gas his hotel room while he was sleeping and do all manner of things to his laptop. I'm not sure that weighing is going to do you much good - if I wanted to be really slick I'd just replace a chip on the motherboard with something that does a little extra. If you replaced a chip on the northbridge, and one on the ethernet controller, you could gather any intel you'd like and send it out over the internet and it would be utterly undetectable without a packet sniffer.
No doubt the insulator is easy to replace, but what else gets damaged in the resulting short? If you hit a few of them power will certainly be out for a while no matter what. You could get a cascading failure which multiplies the damage.
Substation transformers are clearly another possible target.
The serious vulnerabilities are the distributed ones. Most likely a power plant has some kind of security - even a barbed wire fence and ID badges are a serious impediment to an attack. On the other hand, most substations run with almost nobody around, and the equipment is just sitting out in the open where it could be attacked with fairly simple weapons. With all that current it doesn't take much damage to destroy things permanently.
Could it be entirely possible that two different people in the same country could have different anecdotal experiences with the health care system?
I agree that my point was anecdotal in nature. Perhaps the problems are regional in nature, or they tend to happen in specific cases.
However, my point is that NHS isn't a bed of roses either. I think that something like it is inevitable in the US simply due to the nature of insurance (what happens when your risk profile can be determined at birth genetically?). However, a public health option brings along a whole set of new problems that need to be managed. Unfortunately, good health care simply isn't easy to do.
If you wanted to take out a substation/etc, wouldn't it make more sense to just shoot at the ceramic insulators with a rifle? Why on earth would you go sawing on the support beams for a tower? First, it takes a while. Second, you are right next to a metal tower that is about to have high-voltage lines fall onto it - at those levels that electricity will arc multiple feet through the air and turn you into a cinder. To shoot out an insulator you probably just need to be a good shot - you probably don't need a particularly exotic rifle. Of course, if you're shooting up into the air you might need to take the elevation change into account with your aim - and if you don't have tracers it could be a tough shot.
In fact, this showcases why it is that little R&D takes place for antibiotics - there isn't much money in them, and when you do come out with one you need to charge obscene rates to make a profit.
The fact is that 95% of people who get bacterial infections will do just fine with pennicilian. 95% of the rest will do just fine with one of a few other super-cheap antibiotics. The only people who need the really exotic stuff are people with really exotic problems. However, there aren't enough of them to pay for making new exotic stuff.
I think that antibiotics are one of those areas where the NIH should probably just contract the development of new classes of treatments. They could place an order for a new drug just like the Air Force places an order for a new plane. Sure, it would be pricey, but it is probably the only way it will happen. Actually - it probably shouldn't even be the NIH, but rather a coalition of first-world governments. The government might license it royalty free to anybody who paid in to the development, and to third world nations.
I dunno (maybe they checked, maybe they didn't) - but if it costs $1000 to completely diagnose a problem when overtreating it costs $100, then it might make sense to just overtreat it. I agree completely that antibiotics need to be administered in moderation, but we're talking about somebody with confirmed fluid in their lungs - not somebody with the sniffles.
I ran into the guy from the UK months after the fact and his voice still wasn't completely normal. Spending weeks on end tinkering around with Pneumonia isn't a good way to handle it. We're talking about a consdition that with early detection is almost a non-issue, but if neglected it can be very serious or even fatal. The risk of complications from antibiotics is probably much lower than the risk of delaying treatment.
In this particular case the US approach actually was far more cost-effective than the UK approach - once all externalities are taken into account (lost work, quality of life, etc).
Don't get me wrong - the US system messes up plenty too. However, it tends to mess up in different ways. In this case insurance kept the costs reasonably low for the whole incident, but somebody who was poor and uninsured would have gotten the same treatment and then would have been hounded for months with bills.
The problem with this is that insurance companies demand a discount from participating physicians.
The physicians compensate by overcharging non-insurance patients, so that the insurance company receives the required "discount," which is no discount at all, really.
I know - hence the whole reason I said that the practice should be banned. If nobody is allowed to do it, then insurance companies will have no choice but to play ball. Right now if a doctor tries to stand up and refuse they just get blacklisted.
If a company or doctor or hospital is caught charging different rates for different people, then they should be fined so much that anybody associated with the idea is rapidly fired.
If a hospital can amputate a leg for $500, then they can do it for everybody. None of this nonsense of uninsured people paying more. Maybe catastrophic insurance would actually work if the prices were fair.
However, it does explain why people are reluctant to just overhaul the entire system - for the overwhelming majority it works moderately well. For a small minority it doesn't work at all.
In many single-payer systems all those difficult choices are simply taken away from the patient. Nobody has to choose between paying for care or going without. Instead your doctor (or somebody else) decides whether it is worth treating you. For treatments that are clearly necessary but expensive, they just limit the amount of care available, so that many people just give up on waiting or deteriorate to the point where they can't be treated (thus eliminating the cost of treatment). People are treated more-or-less equally, but it is a bit of a meat grinder.
Oh, and don't go on too much about equality. I doubt an MP gets the same treatment as an ordinary citizen in ANY European country. It is "all equality," but mysteriously all the stars happen to align and wait times are minimal for such VIPs. It certainly is no better in the US, but I am amused when advocates of Socialism point to equality as if ANY country ever practiced it.
From what I've heard cost-cutting has a big impact. I know a guy who had some breathing problems in the UK, and the problem was handled with tiny little escalations until it became untreated Pneumonia and he was out of work for a month. It took a week before they gave him an x-ray, and it took a week to get the x-ray interpreted. Then it took about a week before they prescribed him an antibiotic.
I had a friend with similar symptoms in the US. They went to the ER at 10PM with difficulty breathing. They were x-rayed within about 15 minutes, and despite it being late at night the test was interpreted within an hour. Antibiotics and steroid nebulizer were immediately administered, and by about 1-2AM they were headed home with a prescription in hand. They still had a few symptoms the next day, but within 48 hours all symptoms were gone and they finished their prescription over the next week. No work/etc was missed aside from sleeping in a little the next morning.
In this case the UK actually shot itself in the foot since the patient in question missed a month of work - which was a huge net cost - just so they could try to save a few dollars on treatments that have been around for 50+ years. However, sick pay/etc doesn't come out of the NHS budget...
Somewhere there is a balance. The US is a mess, but so are most health care systems - they're just messy in different ways, and by different metrics.
There are simply no incentives to reduce costs - unless insurance companies get so sick of it that they just drop the hospitals entirely.
If they'd just pass a law requiring the following it would probably start to make a difference (by no means is this all the reform needed):
1. Hospitals must publish a public domain price list for services. It must be posted in an obvious manner. The hospital is not allowed to charge different customers or insurers different rates.
2. The full cost of a procedure must be disclosed to a patient before care is rendered. Risks of expensive but unlikely complications should be built into this cost.
3. After everything is over the hospital submits a single bill in the exact amount of #2. No more, no less, and no bills from 300 "independent contractors." No rebates/discounts/etc - EVERYBODY pays the same rate, period. No payments or incentives between providers and payers other than the list price.
4. Care rendered to anybody who is not conscious would either be free or billed at the lesser of their published rates or a government-regulated rate.
People could then shop around, and independant reviewers could compare hospitals on cost. There would actually be incentive to reduce costs.
Again, this will not on its own fix the health care mess. However, it certainly would help.
Are you certain that these accounts don't have an SMS/MMS data plan? I believe that for $10/month/line Verizon gives unlimited SMS/MMS - if they have that plan then the reason it is "free" is the fact that they're already paying for it.
Most US providers do not allow free SMS/MMS messages to be sent, and emails are treated the same as these services. Using email also tends to be a little clumsy from the standpoint that nobody knows what the email address pattern is for provider foo. Also - if I gave you my cell phone number, you could easily SMS/MMS me, but to send an email to my phone you'd have to figure out who my provider was in the first place.
I still don't understand why MMS is even a point. Every single phone on the market can send and receive e-mail including media files for free...
Uh - most phones do not receive email for free. In fact, most phones barely support receiving email at all (usually only text - via SMS). MMS is by far the most standardized way to send a photo to somebody on a cell phone. Granted, MMS is also not free to most people.
Unless you're limiting "every single phone on the market" to a handful of smartphones with data plans.
Most people are carrying around some tiny little phone that came free with their plan and does little more than SMS/MMS with a less-than 2MP camera.