I don't think the government should be subsidizing anything - I was pointing out that the limitation on supply was caused by a reliance on subsidy - nobody is going to fund their own residency if half of their competitors are subsidized - they would have to charge uncompetitive rates to recoup their loss.
The government should maintain licensing requirements for those who practice medicine, and basic manufacturing
But doesn't your precious free market theory dictate that people should be willing to invest in more medical schools if there is this untapped demand? What exactly are the 'medical schools and the AMA' doing to prevent new schools from opening?
It looks like (surprise) the cause is government regulation - although this case the absence of subsidy. Apparently medical schools undercharge for medical training, and as a result they limit seats to the number that the government is willing to subsidize...
And what part of the government is fixing prices for the general population? For the most part it is HMOs that are doing this.
The government isn't fixing prices - what I was trying to say is that the government is interested in fixing prices, which is very true (just listen to the campaign rhetoric). You are correct that HMOs fill this role currently.
What's actually happening is that we're treating medicine like a commodity. When you are selling a product that most anybody would pay almost anything for, and everybody's going to need it eventually, you're going to see skyrocketing prices.
Well, it is a commodity - there is supply and demand. Prices are only high when supply is low relative to demand - put enough doctors out there and prices will drop. A big problem is that medical schools and the AMA work to limit the supply of doctors - in order to maintain high prices.
Why is it that every medical school in the country has hundreds of applicants for each seat, and yet none seem to desire to add capcity, and no new schools open up? What would happen if there was a mob outside of CompUSA begging for computers, which sold for $10,000 the instant the truck pulled up?
The market actually works fairly well, but in this case the market is not freely operating - a number of establishments are conspiring to limit the supply side, and the overreaction on the part of government is to attempt to regulate the demand side by fixing prices. The problem with this approach is that it can lead to shortages (ie lines).
Potential health care providers aren't stupid - they figure out what people are willing to pay for, and provide this service. If people aren't willing to pay for life-saving treatments they'll apply their R&D efforts to viagra and cosmetic surgery, or they'll go into other fields of study...
The polo.eu example only serves to underscore this. Why do we need new TLDs? The typical answer to this is that we're out of easy-to-type domain names. So, what do we do - we charge a million domain-holders $10 each to replicate the.com domain to the.eu domain. How exactly does this solve the problem? The only thing that would make sense would be to disqualify anybody from holding the same address in more than one TLD. The main objection to this is due to squatters leveraging typing errors or the confusion over com/net/org/whatever. Well, if that is the real problem then the fix is very simple - just restrict everything to a single domain and then you don't have volvo.com, volvo.org, and volvo.net...
The real purpose of new TLDs is to drum up revenue for registrars...
Many of these "poor" possessed TVs, refrigerators, etc. 50 years ago these items would not be owned by the middle class (well, maybe refrigerators - not sure offhand). They probably owned a car, which was also something not common among the poor 50 years ago. These poor could have had a rainy-day fund for the cost of one of their TVs.
All that single mother had to do is drive 50 miles inland and look for shelter of some kind (any public building would do). Do you think they'd lock her up or let her starve? You don't need to drive 1000 miles to dodget a hurricane - you just need to be 50 feet above sea level a few miles inland - then it is just wind and rain.
Why not pour government funding into public R&D, with the rights to any products developed released into the public domain?
If long-term we find that this method develops the best cures for the lowest total cost then we can just let the pharmaceutical industry belly-up (as would no doubt happen with effective government competition).
If it turns out the government just spends money like water with little to show then the pharma industry will do just fine and we'll be no worse off than we are already (which arguably isn't all that bad).
I get nervous when the first step in somebody's health-care revolution is to put all the current providers out of business. If the government can really solve our problems then it will be able to compete. No need to toss what is currently working until we're sure there is something to take its place...
This guy is hardly the first. snopes has a good writeup on what happens if you have a vanity plate that reads "NO PLATE", "NONE", "MISSING", "VOID", etc...
Well, sure they want me to follow them. I'd like it if you washed my car for that matter, but I'd hardly consider it immoral of you to decline, and even if I did consider that immoral it wouldn't make you any worse of a man to respectfully disagree...
You have the right to return the software if you find you don't agree with the EULA.
The nice thing is that I also have the right to not return the software if I don't agree with the EULA, the text of the agreement notwithstanding. I acquired the right to use the software when I bought it. Nothing can remove that right except with my agreement and with additional consideration.
A contract is an agreement in which two parties give consideration and there is a meeting of the minds.
When I buy software I have the right to use it - plain and simple. When the EULA pops up it asks me to relinquish some of those rights, but does not offer anything to me that I don't already have. As a result, it is not a contract in the legal or moral standpoint.
How about this - you agree to sell me your firstborn. You can indicate your acceptance of this agreement by eating a meal. If you don't agree, simply refrain from eating. Of course, this is silly since your meal has nothing to do with the agreement. And the EULA is equally silly since your right to use the software also has nothing to do with the agreement - you had it before you ever read it.
Uh, I'm not aware of any widely-accepted source of moral teaching that suggests that sellers are able to impose use-restrictions on buyers. You are arguing that you are making a moral argument, but not a leagal one. So, where is this moral principle of yours written down? Care to reference some religious text, greek philosopher, etc? Or is this moral code because you declare it to be such?
If in the 1950s a popular car manufacturer declared that their products are not to be used to transport black people, unless they are being used by law enforcement officers to taken them to prison, would it be immoral to offer a black person a ride to work?
I can see the argument that it is immoral to install software that was not paid for. I do not see any validity in the argument that we can't install it anywhere we please if we do pay for it. If I spend $2000 on the latest version of AutoCAD and decide to use its manual as litterbox liner and the disks as frisbees, that is my business...
Hey - I'm on your side. But if you try this tactic in a US court you'll land in jail for contempt. I didn't say it made sense, was logical, etc. That is just how they interpret things...
The higher the orbit, the more velocity is needed to maintain orbit. The parent had this correct.
Sure, the angular velocity of an object in geosync is the same as one on the ground, but that means nothing. If you're launching an object to geosync you need a LOT more fuel than getting to low earth orbit, and the height is only a minor aspect of this - the orbital component of the velocity is the main contributor.
The only reason a space elevator is cheap is because it steals momentum from the earth. It has nothing to do with a reduction of the velocity needed to attain orbit...
I couldn't agree more, but the former is protected by the 5th amendment, and the latter is not.
In the past this wasn't a big deal since the solution to the former used to be to lock you up and then search your house while you were safely out of the way. Encryption requires cooperation to bypass, which creates the problem.
Put it this way, if you get a subpoena for your quicken files in a tax dispute, you must turn it over (if it exists). To destroy it is a crime. On the other hand, you can refuse to answer questions. You just can't refuse to turn over evidence. Encryption is viewed as an extension of this principle.
Uh, that website confirms my statement. Your statement is only true when referring to digital TV. My statement contained the words "analog TV". Anybody talking about lines of resolution 20 years ago would be thinking vertical lines.
The website warns about horizontal lines much in the same way that one might warn somebody about viewable area on a monitor. Manufacturers don't advertise viewable area - not because that isn't want the customers want, but rather because the number is smaller than the tube size. Ditto for hard drive sizes in "megabytes" of 1E6 bytes each...
Well, any system that uses passwords will store a hash of them somewhere that can be read. There really isn't any kind of workaround, unless you use something like trusted computing that allows the keys to be buried in hardware, or use remote authentication (thus moving the password hashes to a remote server). Otherwise physical possession of the server amounts to eventually full access to its contents.
My current linux distro uses md5 password hashes in/etc/shadow, which are simple to crack if the passwords are weak, and the password file is even easier to read than the SAM in windows.
Think about it - the OS needs to be able to read the hash file, and the hashes can only be as strong as the passwords they are protecting. If somebody uses a 6-letter word as a password there are only a few million combinations to try, and any computer will make short work of that no matter how complex the hash algorithm is...
I doubt it is pulsed - the laser is probably on continuously at variable amplitude. So, the pixels will just blur into each other. This is how a regular TV works as far as I understand. If you look at a TV you see lots of dots, but the reality is that the bandwidth on a standard TV is not sufficient to go from black to full RGB in one pixel - which is why small-fonts on TVs look horrible (it is also why analog TV is described in terms of lines of resolution and not columns - only the lines are discrete). A computer monitor is more expensive than a TV because it actually achives high bandwidth and consequently truly high resolution.
My guess is that with the laser projector each pixel will really be a horizontal dash. The only place you might get separation would be in the vertical direction, but you get that even with normal TVs and it isn't very noticable. If you fired it against a screen that would scatter the light somewhat then it might help in this regard.
In the US you cannot plead the 5th - you must turn over the key. The theory is that you aren't refusing to testify against yourself - you are withholding evidence. The typical punishment is being held in contempt of court and being imprisoned until the key is turned over. That essentially amounts to a life sentence - which is about the harshest sentence you could have received anyway.
Software like truecrypt has plausible-deniability features built in to avoid this problem.
My understanding is that the SAM itself is fine, it is just that windows can be configured to maintain LANMAN hashes of passwords, which are very weak. A local security policy setting can be made to suppress storing the LANMAN hash, and that would make the SAM file fairly strong, but would prevent remote access from old Win95 boxes on the network (not a big loss).
If windows vista ditches the backword compatibility with the ancient LANMAN hash then they'll be pretty strong out of the box.
Just use a hidden partition in your secure drive. You provide the password to the main partition and they see that it takes up the whole drive and contains your private financial records. There is no way for them to know whether it contains a hidden partition or not, unless you give them that password as well.
If you supplied only the first code the system would see a 100MB partition, not 50MB. It would see the 50MB hidden partition as free space, and would begin overwriting it if data were modified.
The algorithm does in fact provide plausible deniability.
The problem is that they're having a hard time even getting mozilla to trust them. There's a bugzilla entry with about 500 CC's listed all of whom are waiting patiently for the root cert to be installed...
Uh, I have a cacert certificate, and it does in fact contain the domain name in the common name field. If it didn't it wouldn't be much use since browsers verify this (to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks). They verify domain ownership (by sending mail to root@domain (or maybe it was postmaster...)).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the government should be subsidizing anything - I was pointing out that the limitation on supply was caused by a reliance on subsidy - nobody is going to fund their own residency if half of their competitors are subsidized - they would have to charge uncompetitive rates to recoup their loss.
The government should maintain licensing requirements for those who practice medicine, and basic manufacturing
But doesn't your precious free market theory dictate that people should be willing to invest in more medical schools if there is this untapped demand? What exactly are the 'medical schools and the AMA' doing to prevent new schools from opening?
c tor-shortage_x.htm
Check out http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-03-02-do
It looks like (surprise) the cause is government regulation - although this case the absence of subsidy. Apparently medical schools undercharge for medical training, and as a result they limit seats to the number that the government is willing to subsidize...
And what part of the government is fixing prices for the general population? For the most part it is HMOs that are doing this.
The government isn't fixing prices - what I was trying to say is that the government is interested in fixing prices, which is very true (just listen to the campaign rhetoric). You are correct that HMOs fill this role currently.
I owe you $20,000 and can't afford to pay you - I'm in big trouble.
:)
I owe you $20,000,000,000,000 and can't afford to pay you - you're in big trouble...
What's actually happening is that we're treating medicine like a commodity. When you are selling a product that most anybody would pay almost anything for, and everybody's going to need it eventually, you're going to see skyrocketing prices.
Well, it is a commodity - there is supply and demand. Prices are only high when supply is low relative to demand - put enough doctors out there and prices will drop. A big problem is that medical schools and the AMA work to limit the supply of doctors - in order to maintain high prices.
Why is it that every medical school in the country has hundreds of applicants for each seat, and yet none seem to desire to add capcity, and no new schools open up? What would happen if there was a mob outside of CompUSA begging for computers, which sold for $10,000 the instant the truck pulled up?
The market actually works fairly well, but in this case the market is not freely operating - a number of establishments are conspiring to limit the supply side, and the overreaction on the part of government is to attempt to regulate the demand side by fixing prices. The problem with this approach is that it can lead to shortages (ie lines).
Potential health care providers aren't stupid - they figure out what people are willing to pay for, and provide this service. If people aren't willing to pay for life-saving treatments they'll apply their R&D efforts to viagra and cosmetic surgery, or they'll go into other fields of study...
The lottery - a tax on those who weren't so good at math. Works for me - less taxes for the rest of us - but highly immoral regardless.
The polo.eu example only serves to underscore this. Why do we need new TLDs? The typical answer to this is that we're out of easy-to-type domain names. So, what do we do - we charge a million domain-holders $10 each to replicate the .com domain to the .eu domain. How exactly does this solve the problem? The only thing that would make sense would be to disqualify anybody from holding the same address in more than one TLD. The main objection to this is due to squatters leveraging typing errors or the confusion over com/net/org/whatever. Well, if that is the real problem then the fix is very simple - just restrict everything to a single domain and then you don't have volvo.com, volvo.org, and volvo.net...
The real purpose of new TLDs is to drum up revenue for registrars...
Exactly.
Many of these "poor" possessed TVs, refrigerators, etc. 50 years ago these items would not be owned by the middle class (well, maybe refrigerators - not sure offhand). They probably owned a car, which was also something not common among the poor 50 years ago. These poor could have had a rainy-day fund for the cost of one of their TVs.
All that single mother had to do is drive 50 miles inland and look for shelter of some kind (any public building would do). Do you think they'd lock her up or let her starve? You don't need to drive 1000 miles to dodget a hurricane - you just need to be 50 feet above sea level a few miles inland - then it is just wind and rain.
Why does it have to be either-or?
Why not pour government funding into public R&D, with the rights to any products developed released into the public domain?
If long-term we find that this method develops the best cures for the lowest total cost then we can just let the pharmaceutical industry belly-up (as would no doubt happen with effective government competition).
If it turns out the government just spends money like water with little to show then the pharma industry will do just fine and we'll be no worse off than we are already (which arguably isn't all that bad).
I get nervous when the first step in somebody's health-care revolution is to put all the current providers out of business. If the government can really solve our problems then it will be able to compete. No need to toss what is currently working until we're sure there is something to take its place...
This guy is hardly the first. snopes has a good writeup on what happens if you have a vanity plate that reads "NO PLATE", "NONE", "MISSING", "VOID", etc...
Well, sure they want me to follow them. I'd like it if you washed my car for that matter, but I'd hardly consider it immoral of you to decline, and even if I did consider that immoral it wouldn't make you any worse of a man to respectfully disagree...
You have the right to return the software if you find you don't agree with the EULA.
The nice thing is that I also have the right to not return the software if I don't agree with the EULA, the text of the agreement notwithstanding. I acquired the right to use the software when I bought it. Nothing can remove that right except with my agreement and with additional consideration.
A contract is an agreement in which two parties give consideration and there is a meeting of the minds.
When I buy software I have the right to use it - plain and simple. When the EULA pops up it asks me to relinquish some of those rights, but does not offer anything to me that I don't already have. As a result, it is not a contract in the legal or moral standpoint.
How about this - you agree to sell me your firstborn. You can indicate your acceptance of this agreement by eating a meal. If you don't agree, simply refrain from eating. Of course, this is silly since your meal has nothing to do with the agreement. And the EULA is equally silly since your right to use the software also has nothing to do with the agreement - you had it before you ever read it.
Uh, I'm not aware of any widely-accepted source of moral teaching that suggests that sellers are able to impose use-restrictions on buyers. You are arguing that you are making a moral argument, but not a leagal one. So, where is this moral principle of yours written down? Care to reference some religious text, greek philosopher, etc? Or is this moral code because you declare it to be such?
If in the 1950s a popular car manufacturer declared that their products are not to be used to transport black people, unless they are being used by law enforcement officers to taken them to prison, would it be immoral to offer a black person a ride to work?
I can see the argument that it is immoral to install software that was not paid for. I do not see any validity in the argument that we can't install it anywhere we please if we do pay for it. If I spend $2000 on the latest version of AutoCAD and decide to use its manual as litterbox liner and the disks as frisbees, that is my business...
Hey - I'm on your side. But if you try this tactic in a US court you'll land in jail for contempt. I didn't say it made sense, was logical, etc. That is just how they interpret things...
The higher the orbit, the more velocity is needed to maintain orbit. The parent had this correct.
Sure, the angular velocity of an object in geosync is the same as one on the ground, but that means nothing. If you're launching an object to geosync you need a LOT more fuel than getting to low earth orbit, and the height is only a minor aspect of this - the orbital component of the velocity is the main contributor.
The only reason a space elevator is cheap is because it steals momentum from the earth. It has nothing to do with a reduction of the velocity needed to attain orbit...
I couldn't agree more, but the former is protected by the 5th amendment, and the latter is not.
In the past this wasn't a big deal since the solution to the former used to be to lock you up and then search your house while you were safely out of the way. Encryption requires cooperation to bypass, which creates the problem.
Put it this way, if you get a subpoena for your quicken files in a tax dispute, you must turn it over (if it exists). To destroy it is a crime. On the other hand, you can refuse to answer questions. You just can't refuse to turn over evidence. Encryption is viewed as an extension of this principle.
Remember, I don't write the rules...
Uh, that website confirms my statement. Your statement is only true when referring to digital TV. My statement contained the words "analog TV". Anybody talking about lines of resolution 20 years ago would be thinking vertical lines.
The website warns about horizontal lines much in the same way that one might warn somebody about viewable area on a monitor. Manufacturers don't advertise viewable area - not because that isn't want the customers want, but rather because the number is smaller than the tube size. Ditto for hard drive sizes in "megabytes" of 1E6 bytes each...
Well, any system that uses passwords will store a hash of them somewhere that can be read. There really isn't any kind of workaround, unless you use something like trusted computing that allows the keys to be buried in hardware, or use remote authentication (thus moving the password hashes to a remote server). Otherwise physical possession of the server amounts to eventually full access to its contents.
/etc/shadow, which are simple to crack if the passwords are weak, and the password file is even easier to read than the SAM in windows.
My current linux distro uses md5 password hashes in
Think about it - the OS needs to be able to read the hash file, and the hashes can only be as strong as the passwords they are protecting. If somebody uses a 6-letter word as a password there are only a few million combinations to try, and any computer will make short work of that no matter how complex the hash algorithm is...
I doubt it is pulsed - the laser is probably on continuously at variable amplitude. So, the pixels will just blur into each other. This is how a regular TV works as far as I understand. If you look at a TV you see lots of dots, but the reality is that the bandwidth on a standard TV is not sufficient to go from black to full RGB in one pixel - which is why small-fonts on TVs look horrible (it is also why analog TV is described in terms of lines of resolution and not columns - only the lines are discrete). A computer monitor is more expensive than a TV because it actually achives high bandwidth and consequently truly high resolution.
My guess is that with the laser projector each pixel will really be a horizontal dash. The only place you might get separation would be in the vertical direction, but you get that even with normal TVs and it isn't very noticable. If you fired it against a screen that would scatter the light somewhat then it might help in this regard.
In the US you cannot plead the 5th - you must turn over the key. The theory is that you aren't refusing to testify against yourself - you are withholding evidence. The typical punishment is being held in contempt of court and being imprisoned until the key is turned over. That essentially amounts to a life sentence - which is about the harshest sentence you could have received anyway.
Software like truecrypt has plausible-deniability features built in to avoid this problem.
My understanding is that the SAM itself is fine, it is just that windows can be configured to maintain LANMAN hashes of passwords, which are very weak. A local security policy setting can be made to suppress storing the LANMAN hash, and that would make the SAM file fairly strong, but would prevent remote access from old Win95 boxes on the network (not a big loss).
If windows vista ditches the backword compatibility with the ancient LANMAN hash then they'll be pretty strong out of the box.
Just use a hidden partition in your secure drive. You provide the password to the main partition and they see that it takes up the whole drive and contains your private financial records. There is no way for them to know whether it contains a hidden partition or not, unless you give them that password as well.
If you supplied only the first code the system would see a 100MB partition, not 50MB. It would see the 50MB hidden partition as free space, and would begin overwriting it if data were modified.
The algorithm does in fact provide plausible deniability.
The problem is that they're having a hard time even getting mozilla to trust them. There's a bugzilla entry with about 500 CC's listed all of whom are waiting patiently for the root cert to be installed...
Uh, I have a cacert certificate, and it does in fact contain the domain name in the common name field. If it didn't it wouldn't be much use since browsers verify this (to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks). They verify domain ownership (by sending mail to root@domain (or maybe it was postmaster...)).