Considering that most courts value a hard-working member of society's time at about $5/day for jury duty, I'm not surprised that they value the time of a felon so lowly!
But yes, I find it ironic that you can get a jury if you sue your neighbor for $500, but you can't get one if you face 4 months in federal prison and a stiff fine. The $20 guideline only applies to civil suits...
Keep in mind that it has been decided by the Supreme Court that you're only entitled to a jury trial if you're charged with something that carries at least a six-month prison term. Oh, and that has to be within a single charge - they've already ruled that if you face 100 counts of a 1-month sentence that you don't get a jury trial.
Oh, and if the evidence is flimsy they might not charge "you" at all - they'll just charge your stuff. The constitution provides no protections for your stuff - so in a hearing that is basically just a formality it gets confiscated. You don't have any standing to be involved in the trial.
I'm not quite sure where you find any of that in the constitution, but it happens...
Actually, if you had 1 coloumb of +charge, and set it 1m apart from a similar ball of -charge, the force of attraction between them would be enough to lift the earth. 1 coloumb of charge could fit into the size of a baseball. Separating the charges from their equilibrium (inside atoms) would be difficult though.
Yes - it just might be difficult. It would require as much energy as that which would otherwise be necessary to lift the earth.:)
Not that this analogy is really a good one - I can "lift" the earth just by jumping - the Earth's center of mass (not including myself) does indeed shift slightly every time I take a step.
There are lots of examples of huge amounts of potential energy - the problem is releasing this energy.
Strategically the US is in a bad position when it depends on military/infrastructure supplies from foreign nations.
Just look at what happened to the USSR. The US should know that when you procure parts from a strategic adversary you open yourself up to these kinds of attacks...
But it's not evasive, it's just a matter of phrasing. His answers still meant exactly the same thing, whether he said them passively or not.
Yeah, right.
Now tell me if that means exactly what it says. And tell me how far I'd get with a jury if I wanted to argue that sarcasm doesn't exist.
The last time I was on a jury the judge's instructions ENCOURAGED jurors to apply their intuition to determining the credibility of a witness. Jurors are free to accept or reject all or some of any witness's testimony. If you come off like a liar the jury will be wondering what you're hiding.
And this is how it should be. Most cases do not have a ton of physical evidence - if the testimony of witnesses could not be evaluated then there would be few convictions. How many criminals are going to get on the stand and tell the truth? Sure, it is an imperfect system, but there is no better replacement.
I agree with most of your points, but I do want to take issue with one:
Nonsense. A private company needs to make back the cost of research plus a profit. A publicly financed lab needs only to take in the cost of research, without having to feed parasitic investors.
The problem is that the government lab doesn't actually HAVE to develop anything. That is the problem with publicly-funded anything - accountability tends to be lacking. Sure, in theory if a government lab did the same work as a private lab it would be cheaper. The problem is that there is no motive to actually do the work on the same kind of resource-constraints. Nobody will fire the government scientist if they don't come up with any good ideas - whereas in a private lab a high-paid scientist who works 60 hours per week but doesn't come up with anything ground-breaking might just lose their job. There are obviously examples in inefficiency in both systems, but the profit motive tends to create more drive in the private lab.
Also - with private R&D there is incentive to research anything that you can sell to somebody. With public R&D there are all kinds of political pressures to spend your money on projects that might not have the largest benefit.
I do agree that there needs to be some improvement in how we pay for medical care. I also am all for increased public funding for the whole R&D cycle - with resulting drugs being licensed freely. However, I don't think that scrapping the current private R&D system and the patents that make it work is a good idea. Let the private system compete - if it really is a lousy system then nobody will buy the drugs it produces (which will be more expensive than publicly funded ones). And let's fix the "who pays for healthcare" problem separately - the problem isn't the costs per-se but rather how the costs are borne (and maybe a few limited aspects of the costs that can be eliminated).
Welcome to real life - utopia is the next stop on the train. Perhaps that was where you wanted to get off?:)
There are lots of solutions, and they all have problems - depending on your perspective. Socialized anything tends to reduce the incentive to work, and if a society must compete against other societies that aren't socialized it will be at a disadvantage. Pure meat-grinder capitalism is about as efficient as it gets, but it is morally questionable when taken to the full extreme. Most people try to find something in the middle, where you get the pragmatic and ethical benefits and shortcomings of both.
The ideal solution is to simply cure all diseases of any kind so that nobody needs medicine, and make all the necessities of life so cheap that they're practically free. Maybe one day we'll be there. Then there are all kinds of other problems that come up...
Like I said - I'm not a big fan of socialized medicine, but I suspect that one day it will be inevitable. Actually - in the very long term socialized everything or something like it will be inevitable. At some point robots will do ALL the work - nobody will be able to get a job to do anything, and so there will be no basis for an economy based on labor. If we were willing to accept a 1950s standard of living we could probably be 95% of the way there already. How do you allocate resources in a society where nobody can make productive use of them? In theory the ultimate utopia could have problems all its own as we have to re-invent economics. I'm sure it will be a better world than the one we live in today, but it won't look anything like the present...
We could also have the machine immediately spit back ballots that where unreadable, so that the voter has a chance to revote until they can manage to make only one mark per issue or candidate, and fill in the circle enough to be read.
However, a ballot that is accepted on the initial pass might not be counted in the same way on subsequent passes. This is very much an analog system - what if the oval is filled in just enough to make it read either way depending on the particular scanner/etc?
You can't have perfection with any method, so I'll take pretty damn good, and scantron sheets are pretty damn good.
I'm not convinced that you can't have perfection. "Pretty damn good" isn't good enough when elections come down to 5 votes out of 5 million. You really need a system that can be completely unambiguous.
I agree that the addition of certain rules can help reduce ambiguity. However, these rules are almost always going to fail. Ok, so you throw out a ballot if it has stray marks - then what constitutes a stray mark? If invalidating 5 ballots changes the outcome of the election you can bet that the opposing party is going to have out their microscopes looking for ink in the wrong spot.
"Voter intent" is a pretty hard thing to judge after the fact. The appropriate time to assess it is when the voter is present. A voting machine can do that. The shortcoming of the machines is the transparency, and that can be solved with a paper audit trail or ballot. The best of both worlds is better than either alone...
Yes, but most good samaritian laws don't protect medical professionals.
So, when you shout "is there a doctor in the house" most likely 3-4 volunteers who took a community CPR class might stand up, but any doctors would hide under their seats. Gotta love politicians...
There is a problem with this approach - judging voter intent.
What happens when somebody half-fills in one box, and completely fills in another box for the same office. How do you score it.
How about all of one box and a stray mark in the other?
How about 3/4ths of one box and 7/8ths of another?
Any time you have hand-filled ballots you get partial votes. That means court battles and lots of arguing in a close election. There is no clear and fair way to handle partial votes. Do you throw out any ballot with a stray mark on it? Do you go by most-filled box? How do you measure most-filled (by darkness, area of coverage, etc?).
I think computers should still generate the ballots since they can validate input and tell the voter to fix it before they walk away. However, the printed paper ballots should be the official record. Viola - the best of both worlds.
last parts of book or movie are really painful to watch due of this
I actually didn't really feel this when watching the end of the movie. Maybe this is because Frodo is becoming so lost to the ring progressively in the movies that the final betrayal doesn't really come as a surprise. In the book Frodo is much more loyal to Sam up until the end, making the betrayal more unexpected. At least, that is my impression at the moment - perhaps those who have read the book a few more times than I have might feel differently...
You hit on another of my pet peeves in your comment - the "we'll tell you what you need and you swallow the pills" attitude.
I find it very odd that I have to practically beg to get test results for tests that I paid for and which concern my body. The testing facilities will only send the results to the doctors (though many doctors will share them). And I find the idea of prescription-only drugs patronizing - if I want to take a pill I should be able to take the pill if I pay for it. I can certainly see insurers wanting proof of need before paying for bills, but if I want to pay cash I should be allowed to trash my own body.
Then there is the liability mess - companies that make medical equipment/pills/etc probably prefer the status quo because it means that patients have to sue the doctor for misdiagnosis rather than suing them directly when they try to do their own amputation and mess up. And medical equipment is already really expensive due to fitness-for-purpose (when my wife was in the hospital I appreciated the fact that all the critical equipment was designed to work without power - potentially for a long time (hand cranks, etc)).
To go back to the car analogy it would be like banning the sale of spare parts because people might break their cars by installing them incorrectly.
Paying for a social safety net is the ante you owe if you want to play the game of private property.
I'm not sure that A really follows B here...
By this logic if I want the government to keep people from looting my collection of paintings I need to ensure that nobody has an undecorated house.
The whole reason people pay money for food is because they need it. If it were free they wouldn't bother to pay for it. The danger is that when you make something "free" you reduce the incentive to produce it in the first place. And the items you consider most essential as being universally available are precisely the items we can least afford to have people avoid making. This is particulary true when people create value - if somebody invents a new life-saving medical procedure does that compel them to perform 12 hours of this surgery on anybody who asks for it? Their simply inventing the technology has saved countless lives - is it truly a sin if they don't then save EVERYBODY who could have been saved? That is the thing I don't understand with those who want to abolish drug patents - the new drugs that are patented would likely not exist at all if it weren't for the huge incentives to develop them (regardless of whether the basic research came out of a government lab). So, that being the case, the people who die from a lack of access to drugs would have died anyway if the drugs weren't developed. The only "injustice" is that somebody gets access to better medical technology simply by virtue of being rich - but that is just how the world works. And even if government did all the work the cost would end up probably about the same (or likely higher) - the only thing that would change would be the distribution of the costs.
The irony is that most drug companies would be just as happy to let the poor get the drugs for free anyway to save themselves the grief (it isn't like they make any money on the poor anyway and the pills themselves are cheap to make). The problem is that there is no way to really determine if somebody is "poor" and any huge source of cheap/free drugs is going to make its way back to those who could actually have afforded them (thus reducing sales).
The real problem with the medical industry isn't so much patents/insurance/access/etc. The problem is that it has a really crazy pricing system that tends to defeat the controls that govern most markets. When my wife went to the hospital pricing wasn't even discussed - she was treated and then sent a bill. Sure, there was a payment clause in the waiver, but in any other financial transaction the costs would be negotiated before payment, and you would shop around for the best price. That isn't really practical in the medical industry, and so we end up with the broken mess that we have today. Even those who could otherwise afford to pay for their own care can't do so when prices are marked up ten-fold and then discounted back down by insurers. Insurance really is just a price-negotiation club for medical care these days...
But the problem is that what you propose isn't financially viable.
Let's take diabetes. If you get it you're going to cost a fortune to treat over many years and you're going to probably get all kinds of nasty diseases like heart disease that are even more expensive to treat.
Right now nobody knows if they're going to get it or not (sure, you can control this to a degree but it isn't really a sure thing). So, everybody who can buys insurance "just in case". Most don't get back what they spend, but a few get back a LOT more than they spend.
Now, suppose you can find out with 100% effectiveness whether you're likely to get any number of serious diseases. You find out that you aren't likely to get sick - so you don't invest in an insurance policy that covers those diseases - you either get just an accident policy or nothing at all. Insurance companies aren't allowed to discriminate, so they issue policies to all who apply. However, only people likely to get sick bother to apply. Now instead of having 90% of customers paying more than they receive they now have 90% of customers receiving more than they pay. That just doesn't work financially for privately funded insurance.
You assert that insurance is both for things that CAN and WILL happen. That really isn't true based on the historical definition of insurance, although this is becoming true of socialized medicine (where the word "insurance" is used for both traditional insurance (the CAN part) and social welfare (the WILL part).
Normal private insurance is just a way for a group of people to share their costs with a broker making a profit on the trade (maybe).
Let's look at it another way - take an office lottery pool as an example. Suppose you could predict whether a lottery ticket was going to win with some kind of an oracle. Now, suppose you determine that you have a winning ticket. Would you join an office lottery pool? Of course not! You're sharing your guaranteed winnings and getting nothing back. Pools exist because people want to achieve something closer to the true statistical likelihood of winning rather than just taking their chances. (Granted, that is dumb with the lottery since statistically everybody loses.) Insurance is the same thing in reverse - a group of people choose to bear their statistical average medical costs rather than taking their chances.
I'm actually not a big fan of socialized medicine. However, I suspect that it will slowly become inevitable if genetic screening outpaces cures for diseases. The insurance industry simply can't work if people have strong knowledge about their risks - either it goes bankrupt by being forced to treat only the sick, or those who will be sick end up uninsured. Neither is really a good solution.
While I'm certainly not a telecom expert, I do realize that solutions like clustering aren't always practical for everything. If you're an upstream provider you can't exactly dictate the equipment that all your customers use, and yet they'd probably appreciate it if you didn't drop their connection once a month for patches.
Your post only served to remind me that while I find such things interesting there is a reason I don't go looking for jobs working with serious telecom equipment. Sometimes I wonder at the rather arcane designs that are used, but I guess that is mostly due to history and when I look at the uptimes you see in the telecom world I have to wonder if they aren't doing something right. For me an ambitious project would be setting up VoIP at home using Asterisk with either a voice modem or Skype connection to the outside world...:)
He might have been thinking more along the lines of the Internet that you're posting this using...:)
Not that military spending isn't a valid point for debate, but you really can't question that the US hasn't come up with a lot of innovative weapon systems. The fact that the US isn't the ONLY source of innovation doesn't really change the fact that for the most part US equipment sets the standard to beat.
Well, in the case of the F-117 it does make sense. Why do you need them? If you want air-superiority or light strike you have the F-22 and the F-35. If you want to do heavier bombing you have the B-2.
The F117 was basically a poor aircraft by almost all standards of the day, except for having stealth (which made it a great aircraft). The F-22 was already in R&D when it was fielded - but the US needed improved capabilities to defeat the Soviets ASAP.
Both the F-117 and the F-22 were basically invented to counter the leading Soviet aircraft of their day. The long R&D cycle means that we're only seeing F-22s now, but the early R&D started under Regan. Arguably the F-22 is still needed since the F-15 isn't really all that much better than some of the best Russian designs (such as the Su-27). The F-35 is designed as a lower-cost replacement for less capable fighters - you won't save much getting rid of that one since the alternative is more expensive fighters (or keeping around dated ones).
There are really two issues with the US military:
1. The cost required to be the best of the best. 2. The cost required to use it so often.
#2 is pretty controversial since you could argue that the US doesn't really need to intervene as often as it does. What you're mostly complaining about is #1 - the cost of staying modern. If you want to be the best you're going to pay more than anybody else just for that privilege, and everybody else will copy you for far less - you'll only have lead time as an advantage. On the other hand, would the world be as peaceful as it is if more nations felt they could challenge US firepower?
Another post pointed out that nobody else fields armor heavy enough to even withstand the current general of weapons the US has, so why do we need a new one? The counter-argument would be that the reason nobody else is building tanks is precisely because the US is strong in countering them. If the US stops advancing on this front then perhaps the US might start facing more conventional wars (which are potentially a lot more devestating than the insurgencies the US currently deals with).
Just tell each phone customer to have two sets of phones at home, so that when one line is down they can just use the other. Be sure to charge them for both.
Hmm - that actually is starting to sound like the sort of business model the wired phone company around my area might actually propose...
It isn't like you need to hand-write one-time passwords.
One command on a secure system will tell skey to generate any number of one-time passwords and you can just print them on a printer.
I used exactly this approach to access a remote unix system that didn't support ssh back in the days when academic network sniffing was a big problem. It works just fine with ssh as well.
Well, if nothing else a state could just decide to start pirating software en masse on the theory that copyright law doesn't apply to them. They might even be able to get away with it.
The only thing that might get them is the Berne Convention, unless they can argue in Federal court that the US didn't have the authority to enter into it in the first place. Treaties tend to get treated pretty highly by the courts and in general the Feds have the power to enter into them...
Why have all this sovereign immunity? Well there are good reasons for it, the biggest one being that it would be way too easy to sue the states for petty money in federal courts. It should be no surprise that abrogation came with the 14th amendment which was passed after the Civil War when the trust of the states was at an all time low. Remember: In a federal democracy like the U.S. the states DO have trust and sovereignty, but not absolute sovereignty, and the level of trust they get has gone up & down over the years.
I think the reason is even a bit simpler than this:
You can't sue states in Federal court because the states that created the Federal government never gave the Federal government permission to adjudicate matters between states and citizens. Since nobody gave the Federal government permission to do this, it can't.
Suppose I were to create my own private courthouse. Then, you ask me to mail your next door neighbor a summons to appear in my private court. Your neighbor would simply tear it up and ignore it - I don't have any authority to make him appear in my private court. In the same way, the Federal government only has the authority that was granted to it by the states in the first place.
Granted, this is a very constitutional argument that you've already indicated that you're not a big fan of.
Maybe a simpler way of looking at it is this - what does it mean to be a government in the first place? In a democracy the recourse for abuses is supposed to be the voting booth. It isn't an appropriate forum for individuals to go suing the state in general, because presumably if the majority didn't agree with the state things would be different. Now, if the voters do object to some state behavior and want the courts to allow it to be redressed on a case-by-base basis, they can have the legislature enact a law enabling this. As far as Federal/State jurisdiction goes - if you have a problem with the Texans, take it up in Texas - not DC. The only exception is for serious civil rights issues.
The only problem is that other countrys won't lend us money anymore.
Considering the state of the mortgage market worldwide, I doubt the US would have trouble borrowing money even AFTER defaulting.
It might be at a somewhat-higher interest rate, but it would still happen. It isn't like the US's interest rates are a whole lot better than other 1st world nations that have defaulted at points in history. Give it 10 years and everybody will be begging for T-bills...:)
Despite this not being fashionable rhetoric on/., it isn't like the US just randomly attacks countries all over the world. In general most modern democratic nations get along just fine with the US. The countries that do not get along so well tend to be dictatorships, monarchies, etc. And even many of those get along OK - it just tends to depend on what crazy policies their leader imposes.
It is rarely in the interest of anybody to go to war - most nations find peaceful ways to work things out as a result.
So, if you are a generally peaceful, democratic nation like Canada, why would you want the expense of nuclear weapons? It isn't like anybody is going to invade you - the US wouldn't let anybody since Canada shares a border and the US has always benefitted from keeping an ocean between it and any aggressor. Canada just keeps a token military to demonstrate partnership with the US/EU/NATO/etc, and that's about it. If you have a powerful and benevolant neighbor your money is almost always better spent on something other than guns.
The same sorts of arguments apply to Austrailia as well. Generally speaking, no Westernized nation is going to allow one of their kindred to get invaded. These nations share common language (mostly), culture, economic ties, etc. As much as Americans complain about France they're not going to sit back and watch if pirates start attacking French shipping off the coast of Africa - what can happen to France can happen to the US as well. And as much as Europeans complain about US policy they're not going to sit by idly if a serious attack is mounted against US interests. Economically there is some rivalry, but there is more in common than otherwise.
About the only first world nation with tense relations with the US is China, and that would be because it is a dictatorship. Sure, there is some tension with Russia here and there, but with the general rise of democracy most people are willing to give the Russians the benefit of the doubt. The fact is that most Westerners value democracy highly, and tend to distrust any government that does not hold free elections. This is just such a fundamental principle that it makes Westerners wonder what else they might be capable of.
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Considering that most courts value a hard-working member of society's time at about $5/day for jury duty, I'm not surprised that they value the time of a felon so lowly!
But yes, I find it ironic that you can get a jury if you sue your neighbor for $500, but you can't get one if you face 4 months in federal prison and a stiff fine. The $20 guideline only applies to civil suits...
The worst thing is the lengths that open source devs will go to try to obfuscate their copyright-infringement.
I just did a deep dive on the kernel source and found that half of those braces had spaces and tabs pre-pended in an attempt to evade detection.
Keep in mind that it has been decided by the Supreme Court that you're only entitled to a jury trial if you're charged with something that carries at least a six-month prison term. Oh, and that has to be within a single charge - they've already ruled that if you face 100 counts of a 1-month sentence that you don't get a jury trial.
Oh, and if the evidence is flimsy they might not charge "you" at all - they'll just charge your stuff. The constitution provides no protections for your stuff - so in a hearing that is basically just a formality it gets confiscated. You don't have any standing to be involved in the trial.
I'm not quite sure where you find any of that in the constitution, but it happens...
Actually, if you had 1 coloumb of +charge, and set it 1m apart from a similar ball of -charge, the force of attraction between them would be enough to lift the earth. 1 coloumb of charge could fit into the size of a baseball. Separating the charges from their equilibrium (inside atoms) would be difficult though.
:)
Yes - it just might be difficult. It would require as much energy as that which would otherwise be necessary to lift the earth.
Not that this analogy is really a good one - I can "lift" the earth just by jumping - the Earth's center of mass (not including myself) does indeed shift slightly every time I take a step.
There are lots of examples of huge amounts of potential energy - the problem is releasing this energy.
Strategically the US is in a bad position when it depends on military/infrastructure supplies from foreign nations.
Just look at what happened to the USSR. The US should know that when you procure parts from a strategic adversary you open yourself up to these kinds of attacks...
But it's not evasive, it's just a matter of phrasing. His answers still meant exactly the same thing, whether he said them passively or not.
Yeah, right.
Now tell me if that means exactly what it says. And tell me how far I'd get with a jury if I wanted to argue that sarcasm doesn't exist.
The last time I was on a jury the judge's instructions ENCOURAGED jurors to apply their intuition to determining the credibility of a witness. Jurors are free to accept or reject all or some of any witness's testimony. If you come off like a liar the jury will be wondering what you're hiding.
And this is how it should be. Most cases do not have a ton of physical evidence - if the testimony of witnesses could not be evaluated then there would be few convictions. How many criminals are going to get on the stand and tell the truth? Sure, it is an imperfect system, but there is no better replacement.
I agree with most of your points, but I do want to take issue with one:
Nonsense. A private company needs to make back the cost of research plus a profit. A publicly financed lab needs only to take in the cost of research, without having to feed parasitic investors.
The problem is that the government lab doesn't actually HAVE to develop anything. That is the problem with publicly-funded anything - accountability tends to be lacking. Sure, in theory if a government lab did the same work as a private lab it would be cheaper. The problem is that there is no motive to actually do the work on the same kind of resource-constraints. Nobody will fire the government scientist if they don't come up with any good ideas - whereas in a private lab a high-paid scientist who works 60 hours per week but doesn't come up with anything ground-breaking might just lose their job. There are obviously examples in inefficiency in both systems, but the profit motive tends to create more drive in the private lab.
Also - with private R&D there is incentive to research anything that you can sell to somebody. With public R&D there are all kinds of political pressures to spend your money on projects that might not have the largest benefit.
I do agree that there needs to be some improvement in how we pay for medical care. I also am all for increased public funding for the whole R&D cycle - with resulting drugs being licensed freely. However, I don't think that scrapping the current private R&D system and the patents that make it work is a good idea. Let the private system compete - if it really is a lousy system then nobody will buy the drugs it produces (which will be more expensive than publicly funded ones). And let's fix the "who pays for healthcare" problem separately - the problem isn't the costs per-se but rather how the costs are borne (and maybe a few limited aspects of the costs that can be eliminated).
Welcome to real life - utopia is the next stop on the train. Perhaps that was where you wanted to get off? :)
There are lots of solutions, and they all have problems - depending on your perspective. Socialized anything tends to reduce the incentive to work, and if a society must compete against other societies that aren't socialized it will be at a disadvantage. Pure meat-grinder capitalism is about as efficient as it gets, but it is morally questionable when taken to the full extreme. Most people try to find something in the middle, where you get the pragmatic and ethical benefits and shortcomings of both.
The ideal solution is to simply cure all diseases of any kind so that nobody needs medicine, and make all the necessities of life so cheap that they're practically free. Maybe one day we'll be there. Then there are all kinds of other problems that come up...
Like I said - I'm not a big fan of socialized medicine, but I suspect that one day it will be inevitable. Actually - in the very long term socialized everything or something like it will be inevitable. At some point robots will do ALL the work - nobody will be able to get a job to do anything, and so there will be no basis for an economy based on labor. If we were willing to accept a 1950s standard of living we could probably be 95% of the way there already. How do you allocate resources in a society where nobody can make productive use of them? In theory the ultimate utopia could have problems all its own as we have to re-invent economics. I'm sure it will be a better world than the one we live in today, but it won't look anything like the present...
We could also have the machine immediately spit back ballots that where unreadable, so that the voter has a chance to revote until they can manage to make only one mark per issue or candidate, and fill in the circle enough to be read.
However, a ballot that is accepted on the initial pass might not be counted in the same way on subsequent passes. This is very much an analog system - what if the oval is filled in just enough to make it read either way depending on the particular scanner/etc?
You can't have perfection with any method, so I'll take pretty damn good, and scantron sheets are pretty damn good.
I'm not convinced that you can't have perfection. "Pretty damn good" isn't good enough when elections come down to 5 votes out of 5 million. You really need a system that can be completely unambiguous.
I agree that the addition of certain rules can help reduce ambiguity. However, these rules are almost always going to fail. Ok, so you throw out a ballot if it has stray marks - then what constitutes a stray mark? If invalidating 5 ballots changes the outcome of the election you can bet that the opposing party is going to have out their microscopes looking for ink in the wrong spot.
"Voter intent" is a pretty hard thing to judge after the fact. The appropriate time to assess it is when the voter is present. A voting machine can do that. The shortcoming of the machines is the transparency, and that can be solved with a paper audit trail or ballot. The best of both worlds is better than either alone...
Yes, but most good samaritian laws don't protect medical professionals.
So, when you shout "is there a doctor in the house" most likely 3-4 volunteers who took a community CPR class might stand up, but any doctors would hide under their seats. Gotta love politicians...
See my comment here...
There are shortcomings to this approach.
There is a problem with this approach - judging voter intent.
What happens when somebody half-fills in one box, and completely fills in another box for the same office. How do you score it.
How about all of one box and a stray mark in the other?
How about 3/4ths of one box and 7/8ths of another?
Any time you have hand-filled ballots you get partial votes. That means court battles and lots of arguing in a close election. There is no clear and fair way to handle partial votes. Do you throw out any ballot with a stray mark on it? Do you go by most-filled box? How do you measure most-filled (by darkness, area of coverage, etc?).
I think computers should still generate the ballots since they can validate input and tell the voter to fix it before they walk away. However, the printed paper ballots should be the official record. Viola - the best of both worlds.
last parts of book or movie are really painful to watch due of this
I actually didn't really feel this when watching the end of the movie. Maybe this is because Frodo is becoming so lost to the ring progressively in the movies that the final betrayal doesn't really come as a surprise. In the book Frodo is much more loyal to Sam up until the end, making the betrayal more unexpected. At least, that is my impression at the moment - perhaps those who have read the book a few more times than I have might feel differently...
You hit on another of my pet peeves in your comment - the "we'll tell you what you need and you swallow the pills" attitude.
I find it very odd that I have to practically beg to get test results for tests that I paid for and which concern my body. The testing facilities will only send the results to the doctors (though many doctors will share them). And I find the idea of prescription-only drugs patronizing - if I want to take a pill I should be able to take the pill if I pay for it. I can certainly see insurers wanting proof of need before paying for bills, but if I want to pay cash I should be allowed to trash my own body.
Then there is the liability mess - companies that make medical equipment/pills/etc probably prefer the status quo because it means that patients have to sue the doctor for misdiagnosis rather than suing them directly when they try to do their own amputation and mess up. And medical equipment is already really expensive due to fitness-for-purpose (when my wife was in the hospital I appreciated the fact that all the critical equipment was designed to work without power - potentially for a long time (hand cranks, etc)).
To go back to the car analogy it would be like banning the sale of spare parts because people might break their cars by installing them incorrectly.
Paying for a social safety net is the ante you owe if you want to play the game of private property.
I'm not sure that A really follows B here...
By this logic if I want the government to keep people from looting my collection of paintings I need to ensure that nobody has an undecorated house.
The whole reason people pay money for food is because they need it. If it were free they wouldn't bother to pay for it. The danger is that when you make something "free" you reduce the incentive to produce it in the first place. And the items you consider most essential as being universally available are precisely the items we can least afford to have people avoid making. This is particulary true when people create value - if somebody invents a new life-saving medical procedure does that compel them to perform 12 hours of this surgery on anybody who asks for it? Their simply inventing the technology has saved countless lives - is it truly a sin if they don't then save EVERYBODY who could have been saved? That is the thing I don't understand with those who want to abolish drug patents - the new drugs that are patented would likely not exist at all if it weren't for the huge incentives to develop them (regardless of whether the basic research came out of a government lab). So, that being the case, the people who die from a lack of access to drugs would have died anyway if the drugs weren't developed. The only "injustice" is that somebody gets access to better medical technology simply by virtue of being rich - but that is just how the world works. And even if government did all the work the cost would end up probably about the same (or likely higher) - the only thing that would change would be the distribution of the costs.
The irony is that most drug companies would be just as happy to let the poor get the drugs for free anyway to save themselves the grief (it isn't like they make any money on the poor anyway and the pills themselves are cheap to make). The problem is that there is no way to really determine if somebody is "poor" and any huge source of cheap/free drugs is going to make its way back to those who could actually have afforded them (thus reducing sales).
The real problem with the medical industry isn't so much patents/insurance/access/etc. The problem is that it has a really crazy pricing system that tends to defeat the controls that govern most markets. When my wife went to the hospital pricing wasn't even discussed - she was treated and then sent a bill. Sure, there was a payment clause in the waiver, but in any other financial transaction the costs would be negotiated before payment, and you would shop around for the best price. That isn't really practical in the medical industry, and so we end up with the broken mess that we have today. Even those who could otherwise afford to pay for their own care can't do so when prices are marked up ten-fold and then discounted back down by insurers. Insurance really is just a price-negotiation club for medical care these days...
But the problem is that what you propose isn't financially viable.
Let's take diabetes. If you get it you're going to cost a fortune to treat over many years and you're going to probably get all kinds of nasty diseases like heart disease that are even more expensive to treat.
Right now nobody knows if they're going to get it or not (sure, you can control this to a degree but it isn't really a sure thing). So, everybody who can buys insurance "just in case". Most don't get back what they spend, but a few get back a LOT more than they spend.
Now, suppose you can find out with 100% effectiveness whether you're likely to get any number of serious diseases. You find out that you aren't likely to get sick - so you don't invest in an insurance policy that covers those diseases - you either get just an accident policy or nothing at all. Insurance companies aren't allowed to discriminate, so they issue policies to all who apply. However, only people likely to get sick bother to apply. Now instead of having 90% of customers paying more than they receive they now have 90% of customers receiving more than they pay. That just doesn't work financially for privately funded insurance.
You assert that insurance is both for things that CAN and WILL happen. That really isn't true based on the historical definition of insurance, although this is becoming true of socialized medicine (where the word "insurance" is used for both traditional insurance (the CAN part) and social welfare (the WILL part).
Normal private insurance is just a way for a group of people to share their costs with a broker making a profit on the trade (maybe).
Let's look at it another way - take an office lottery pool as an example. Suppose you could predict whether a lottery ticket was going to win with some kind of an oracle. Now, suppose you determine that you have a winning ticket. Would you join an office lottery pool? Of course not! You're sharing your guaranteed winnings and getting nothing back. Pools exist because people want to achieve something closer to the true statistical likelihood of winning rather than just taking their chances. (Granted, that is dumb with the lottery since statistically everybody loses.) Insurance is the same thing in reverse - a group of people choose to bear their statistical average medical costs rather than taking their chances.
I'm actually not a big fan of socialized medicine. However, I suspect that it will slowly become inevitable if genetic screening outpaces cures for diseases. The insurance industry simply can't work if people have strong knowledge about their risks - either it goes bankrupt by being forced to treat only the sick, or those who will be sick end up uninsured. Neither is really a good solution.
Sorry - I was actually joking there.
:)
While I'm certainly not a telecom expert, I do realize that solutions like clustering aren't always practical for everything. If you're an upstream provider you can't exactly dictate the equipment that all your customers use, and yet they'd probably appreciate it if you didn't drop their connection once a month for patches.
Your post only served to remind me that while I find such things interesting there is a reason I don't go looking for jobs working with serious telecom equipment. Sometimes I wonder at the rather arcane designs that are used, but I guess that is mostly due to history and when I look at the uptimes you see in the telecom world I have to wonder if they aren't doing something right. For me an ambitious project would be setting up VoIP at home using Asterisk with either a voice modem or Skype connection to the outside world...
He might have been thinking more along the lines of the Internet that you're posting this using... :)
Not that military spending isn't a valid point for debate, but you really can't question that the US hasn't come up with a lot of innovative weapon systems. The fact that the US isn't the ONLY source of innovation doesn't really change the fact that for the most part US equipment sets the standard to beat.
Well, in the case of the F-117 it does make sense. Why do you need them? If you want air-superiority or light strike you have the F-22 and the F-35. If you want to do heavier bombing you have the B-2.
The F117 was basically a poor aircraft by almost all standards of the day, except for having stealth (which made it a great aircraft). The F-22 was already in R&D when it was fielded - but the US needed improved capabilities to defeat the Soviets ASAP.
Both the F-117 and the F-22 were basically invented to counter the leading Soviet aircraft of their day. The long R&D cycle means that we're only seeing F-22s now, but the early R&D started under Regan. Arguably the F-22 is still needed since the F-15 isn't really all that much better than some of the best Russian designs (such as the Su-27). The F-35 is designed as a lower-cost replacement for less capable fighters - you won't save much getting rid of that one since the alternative is more expensive fighters (or keeping around dated ones).
There are really two issues with the US military:
1. The cost required to be the best of the best.
2. The cost required to use it so often.
#2 is pretty controversial since you could argue that the US doesn't really need to intervene as often as it does. What you're mostly complaining about is #1 - the cost of staying modern. If you want to be the best you're going to pay more than anybody else just for that privilege, and everybody else will copy you for far less - you'll only have lead time as an advantage. On the other hand, would the world be as peaceful as it is if more nations felt they could challenge US firepower?
Another post pointed out that nobody else fields armor heavy enough to even withstand the current general of weapons the US has, so why do we need a new one? The counter-argument would be that the reason nobody else is building tanks is precisely because the US is strong in countering them. If the US stops advancing on this front then perhaps the US might start facing more conventional wars (which are potentially a lot more devestating than the insurgencies the US currently deals with).
Why - that's no excuse for not clustering!
Just tell each phone customer to have two sets of phones at home, so that when one line is down they can just use the other. Be sure to charge them for both.
Hmm - that actually is starting to sound like the sort of business model the wired phone company around my area might actually propose...
It isn't like you need to hand-write one-time passwords.
One command on a secure system will tell skey to generate any number of one-time passwords and you can just print them on a printer.
I used exactly this approach to access a remote unix system that didn't support ssh back in the days when academic network sniffing was a big problem. It works just fine with ssh as well.
Well, if nothing else a state could just decide to start pirating software en masse on the theory that copyright law doesn't apply to them. They might even be able to get away with it.
The only thing that might get them is the Berne Convention, unless they can argue in Federal court that the US didn't have the authority to enter into it in the first place. Treaties tend to get treated pretty highly by the courts and in general the Feds have the power to enter into them...
I think the reason is even a bit simpler than this:
You can't sue states in Federal court because the states that created the Federal government never gave the Federal government permission to adjudicate matters between states and citizens. Since nobody gave the Federal government permission to do this, it can't.
Suppose I were to create my own private courthouse. Then, you ask me to mail your next door neighbor a summons to appear in my private court. Your neighbor would simply tear it up and ignore it - I don't have any authority to make him appear in my private court. In the same way, the Federal government only has the authority that was granted to it by the states in the first place.
Granted, this is a very constitutional argument that you've already indicated that you're not a big fan of.
Maybe a simpler way of looking at it is this - what does it mean to be a government in the first place? In a democracy the recourse for abuses is supposed to be the voting booth. It isn't an appropriate forum for individuals to go suing the state in general, because presumably if the majority didn't agree with the state things would be different. Now, if the voters do object to some state behavior and want the courts to allow it to be redressed on a case-by-base basis, they can have the legislature enact a law enabling this. As far as Federal/State jurisdiction goes - if you have a problem with the Texans, take it up in Texas - not DC. The only exception is for serious civil rights issues.
The only problem is that other countrys won't lend us money anymore.
:)
Considering the state of the mortgage market worldwide, I doubt the US would have trouble borrowing money even AFTER defaulting.
It might be at a somewhat-higher interest rate, but it would still happen. It isn't like the US's interest rates are a whole lot better than other 1st world nations that have defaulted at points in history. Give it 10 years and everybody will be begging for T-bills...
Neither of those nations really needs them.
/., it isn't like the US just randomly attacks countries all over the world. In general most modern democratic nations get along just fine with the US. The countries that do not get along so well tend to be dictatorships, monarchies, etc. And even many of those get along OK - it just tends to depend on what crazy policies their leader imposes.
Despite this not being fashionable rhetoric on
It is rarely in the interest of anybody to go to war - most nations find peaceful ways to work things out as a result.
So, if you are a generally peaceful, democratic nation like Canada, why would you want the expense of nuclear weapons? It isn't like anybody is going to invade you - the US wouldn't let anybody since Canada shares a border and the US has always benefitted from keeping an ocean between it and any aggressor. Canada just keeps a token military to demonstrate partnership with the US/EU/NATO/etc, and that's about it. If you have a powerful and benevolant neighbor your money is almost always better spent on something other than guns.
The same sorts of arguments apply to Austrailia as well. Generally speaking, no Westernized nation is going to allow one of their kindred to get invaded. These nations share common language (mostly), culture, economic ties, etc. As much as Americans complain about France they're not going to sit back and watch if pirates start attacking French shipping off the coast of Africa - what can happen to France can happen to the US as well. And as much as Europeans complain about US policy they're not going to sit by idly if a serious attack is mounted against US interests. Economically there is some rivalry, but there is more in common than otherwise.
About the only first world nation with tense relations with the US is China, and that would be because it is a dictatorship. Sure, there is some tension with Russia here and there, but with the general rise of democracy most people are willing to give the Russians the benefit of the doubt. The fact is that most Westerners value democracy highly, and tend to distrust any government that does not hold free elections. This is just such a fundamental principle that it makes Westerners wonder what else they might be capable of.