Comments like yours are pointless because they don't even try to compare the errors comitted here by the govt. to those routinely comitted by anybody else who might concievably run such a system.
I mean, it's not like private industry insurers ever deny valid claims (exactly what Social Security did here), now is it? The only difference is they do it routinely and intentionally, and consider it a business practice instead of an error. Does that bother you equally, or not? Do you have any reason to believe the number of these "errors" would go up instead of down with a single payer system?
I'm glad Social Security is fighting fraudulent claims. It does happen. How many billions of taxpayer dollars were saved by this program? What percentage of the denials were in error? Without those figures the story is meaningless.
Strictly speaking that's true, although some really smart software could restore the original image with high probability, given that almost all real-world images contain certain predictable elements such as faces, grass, clouds, etc.
If I give you a picture of the President's face with a little bit torn out, there are many other images where you can find most of the information that was almost certainly there. Now is it possible something novel was actually happening at that point on his face at the time? Yes, but not very likely.
"Real security" is not measurable at all. Let's look at a relatively tiny sub-problem in the overall picture of enterprise security: which OS is the most secure? The answer is, there are a thousand variables, and even though OS's are the most accessible garden-variety software, and we all deal with them all the time, there is still no consensus even on this single website as to which is "best." Now try to scale that problem back up to a huge bank, (say you're looking at bankrate.com considering opening a new account with somebody): you have no idea which OS they use, let alone how they handle backups, who they contract with, or whether or not they even have consistent policies across a global empire made up of dozens of essentially different companies. In short, I doubt even a security professional who just spent months doing an audit on a single company could accurately predict whether they'll be the next victim of a big data breech, let alone a comparative analysis of all the options consumers have. So to expect a non-technical end-user, who can't even keep 1 PC in their home office from joining a botnet, to somehow weight this into their decision-making is totally unrealistic.
I had a bogus item on my credit report which resulted in me being denied a mortgage (temporarily). The person who actually did the bad thing didn't even have the same first name as I do. The credit reporting agency caused me lots of problems through their "oopsie" but is not liable for their own mistakes; their only responsibility is to fix it once I call them on it. That's right, they make their money selling data about me, and the burden of maintaining their database falls on me. It's ridiculous.
Do you have any basis for thinking this is weaker, or is this just your knee-jerk response to anything that could help prevent global warming? Let me guess, you don't believe in it.
It's all about who has the latest phone, with the most non-phone-related capabilities, and therefore people are willing to pay the high prices for the service and 15 cents for 120 bytes of data.
Actually many are not willing to pay that price. The US has a very low cellphone adoption rate by international standards (graphic from this article - you'll find us right next to Turkey). What this shows is that many Americans are voting with their feet. But apparently the cellphone companies still think they are more profitable by gouging the smaller subscriber base even more. I am part of this statistic. I first had a cellphone in 1996, but quit about 10 years ago. In that time, I don't think costs have come down at all. And texting just keeps getting more and more expensive for no apparent reason. It stinks, because my kids are becoming preteens and I can tell it will be very hard to hold out against having cellphones like regular people in a few more years, but I just hate the companies and their rates.
Reminds me of broadband, actually; one day about 10 years ago I took a leap forward from dialup to cable Internet, but costs haven't dropped and speeds haven't increased by one iota in the subsequent decade. Folks, the AT&T breakup unleashed a tsunami of cost savings in long-distance, and innovation in telephony. It's time we did that again.
Apparently it relies in a compass in the device, so my guess is it would regain its bearings even after a rapid turn. The accelerometers in the iPhone are way too crude for inertial navigation so I can't imagine it's based on that.
The whole progression of mankind is based on increasing specialization - that is, increasing interdependence on each other, because no person alive actually understands all the steps of producing all the technology we use every single day. For better or worse, this trend is unlikely to reverse.
In the worldview of the individual cells that make up your body, evolving traits allowing them to multiply rapidly and without limit, instead of being subservient to the big population of cells (your body) in which they live. In the short term, greed is a supreme evolutionary strategy.
Yeah, who knows, maybe someday somebody will design a dumb system with some problems. Let's beat the crowd and start criticising whomever it is ahead of time just in case, shall we?
As for electronic records, don't worry, it appears the US is right on track to stick with the most arcane, inefficient, and not-particularly-effective medical system in the modernized world, so the chances of us making any new types of errors are fairly low! Yay!
For that matter, just about everything you do has a chance of failure, so why do anything?
Obviously the odds do matter. At one end of the extreme is communism, where everybody gets the same regardless of what they accomplish. At the other extreme is "winner takes all," where somebody gets everything, even if they are only 0.01% better than the field. Between those extremes is quite a lot. Which is most motivating? I wouldn't claim to know, and I'm sure it depends on the situation, but it's an awfully important question to society. And I'm pretty sure neither extreme is the best answer (even the Olympics have silver and bronze).
Sure you would... so you say... reading about it safely on your computer, knowing the truth ahead of time. When somebody wakes you up in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar setting (hotel room) claiming your life is in danger, you have to decide fast, go against "authority" and maybe get killed, or do what they say? You don't know.
If somebody burst into your home at night claiming to be police, would you be a "dumb dimwit" and believe them, or maintain your cocksure skepticism and wind up like this woman?
I looked into the Atom after seeing them on Top Gear, and basically, they're not real, at least in the US. There was some company that bought the rights to the design and was working on a re-design oriented towards eventual production... you get the idea.
That's more because there's no economic or military need for things like semi-ballistic flight, etc.
That's the argument being made for IT as well; the issues are basically solved.
As for higher pay for people overall...it has to be earned, like everything else.
Not really. Look at people now vs. 500 years ago (and 1500 years ago, and 10500 years ago). Over time we are more "wealthy" in virtually every respect - living longer, nicer homes, vastly better educated, more freedom. Is it because we are more virtuous, because we work so much harder? No. It is technology. It is because we accomplish so much more with each hour of work. Most of the innovators who made us that way are long since dead, and we don't even know who most of them were. Even today, those who are the most wealthy are those who do the least work for each dollar.
So, only people who are also successful can criticize a speaker?
Anybody who wants to discuss an issue on its merits should be heard if they have something valuable to add. But if somebody wants to discuss an issue using authority/reputation instead, well, the same still holds - you have to bring some credentials to the table.
Or, maybe it won't experience another boom in the near future.
I look at aerospace from 1900 (the Wright brothers) to 1970 (landing on the moon) - amazing! Now I look today, and we're still flying airframes from 1970, at the same speeds and altitudes for the most part.
What also amazes me is that the Internet revolution has made me (and many others) radically more efficient in my job over the last 10 years, yet hasn't translated to higher pay for people in the industry at all.
Golly, I sure didn't see that coming. What is you superior achievements in life that lend weight to the opinions you express when giving invited lectures at Stanford?
Even with none of the proposed improvements, quality SSD's already slaughter mechanical drives' performance. It's the biggest single advance in mass storage since the PC was invented.
SSD drives have been out for over a year now. If there were really an issue here, there would be thousands of reports from people with unusual usage patterns who write more in a year than most people write in 5. That hasn't happened. It's a non-issue.
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I mean, it's not like private industry insurers ever deny valid claims (exactly what Social Security did here), now is it? The only difference is they do it routinely and intentionally, and consider it a business practice instead of an error. Does that bother you equally, or not? Do you have any reason to believe the number of these "errors" would go up instead of down with a single payer system?
I'm glad Social Security is fighting fraudulent claims. It does happen. How many billions of taxpayer dollars were saved by this program? What percentage of the denials were in error? Without those figures the story is meaningless.
What's this, are you accusing capitalism of not being fun!?
Strictly speaking that's true, although some really smart software could restore the original image with high probability, given that almost all real-world images contain certain predictable elements such as faces, grass, clouds, etc. If I give you a picture of the President's face with a little bit torn out, there are many other images where you can find most of the information that was almost certainly there. Now is it possible something novel was actually happening at that point on his face at the time? Yes, but not very likely.
"Real security" is not measurable at all. Let's look at a relatively tiny sub-problem in the overall picture of enterprise security: which OS is the most secure? The answer is, there are a thousand variables, and even though OS's are the most accessible garden-variety software, and we all deal with them all the time, there is still no consensus even on this single website as to which is "best." Now try to scale that problem back up to a huge bank, (say you're looking at bankrate.com considering opening a new account with somebody): you have no idea which OS they use, let alone how they handle backups, who they contract with, or whether or not they even have consistent policies across a global empire made up of dozens of essentially different companies. In short, I doubt even a security professional who just spent months doing an audit on a single company could accurately predict whether they'll be the next victim of a big data breech, let alone a comparative analysis of all the options consumers have. So to expect a non-technical end-user, who can't even keep 1 PC in their home office from joining a botnet, to somehow weight this into their decision-making is totally unrealistic.
I had a bogus item on my credit report which resulted in me being denied a mortgage (temporarily). The person who actually did the bad thing didn't even have the same first name as I do. The credit reporting agency caused me lots of problems through their "oopsie" but is not liable for their own mistakes; their only responsibility is to fix it once I call them on it. That's right, they make their money selling data about me, and the burden of maintaining their database falls on me. It's ridiculous.
Do you have any basis for thinking this is weaker, or is this just your knee-jerk response to anything that could help prevent global warming? Let me guess, you don't believe in it.
It would be crazy to heat up a 500 lb slug of metal just to make warm air to blow into the cabin.
Tell me whether or not you're serious so I can decide how to respond.
Actually many are not willing to pay that price. The US has a very low cellphone adoption rate by international standards (graphic from this article - you'll find us right next to Turkey). What this shows is that many Americans are voting with their feet. But apparently the cellphone companies still think they are more profitable by gouging the smaller subscriber base even more. I am part of this statistic. I first had a cellphone in 1996, but quit about 10 years ago. In that time, I don't think costs have come down at all. And texting just keeps getting more and more expensive for no apparent reason. It stinks, because my kids are becoming preteens and I can tell it will be very hard to hold out against having cellphones like regular people in a few more years, but I just hate the companies and their rates.
Reminds me of broadband, actually; one day about 10 years ago I took a leap forward from dialup to cable Internet, but costs haven't dropped and speeds haven't increased by one iota in the subsequent decade. Folks, the AT&T breakup unleashed a tsunami of cost savings in long-distance, and innovation in telephony. It's time we did that again.
Apparently it relies in a compass in the device, so my guess is it would regain its bearings even after a rapid turn. The accelerometers in the iPhone are way too crude for inertial navigation so I can't imagine it's based on that.
The whole progression of mankind is based on increasing specialization - that is, increasing interdependence on each other, because no person alive actually understands all the steps of producing all the technology we use every single day. For better or worse, this trend is unlikely to reverse.
The BBC video doesn't seem to work for me - I think this is the same.
Sure, maybe.
In the worldview of the individual cells that make up your body, evolving traits allowing them to multiply rapidly and without limit, instead of being subservient to the big population of cells (your body) in which they live. In the short term, greed is a supreme evolutionary strategy.
As for electronic records, don't worry, it appears the US is right on track to stick with the most arcane, inefficient, and not-particularly-effective medical system in the modernized world, so the chances of us making any new types of errors are fairly low! Yay!
Obviously the odds do matter. At one end of the extreme is communism, where everybody gets the same regardless of what they accomplish. At the other extreme is "winner takes all," where somebody gets everything, even if they are only 0.01% better than the field. Between those extremes is quite a lot. Which is most motivating? I wouldn't claim to know, and I'm sure it depends on the situation, but it's an awfully important question to society. And I'm pretty sure neither extreme is the best answer (even the Olympics have silver and bronze).
If somebody burst into your home at night claiming to be police, would you be a "dumb dimwit" and believe them, or maintain your cocksure skepticism and wind up like this woman?
WWII was a bonanza for the US because it decimated our main economic competitors, plus we made a bundle supplying their reconstruction.
I looked into the Atom after seeing them on Top Gear, and basically, they're not real, at least in the US. There was some company that bought the rights to the design and was working on a re-design oriented towards eventual production... you get the idea.
That's the argument being made for IT as well; the issues are basically solved.
Not really. Look at people now vs. 500 years ago (and 1500 years ago, and 10500 years ago). Over time we are more "wealthy" in virtually every respect - living longer, nicer homes, vastly better educated, more freedom. Is it because we are more virtuous, because we work so much harder? No. It is technology. It is because we accomplish so much more with each hour of work. Most of the innovators who made us that way are long since dead, and we don't even know who most of them were. Even today, those who are the most wealthy are those who do the least work for each dollar.
Anybody who wants to discuss an issue on its merits should be heard if they have something valuable to add. But if somebody wants to discuss an issue using authority/reputation instead, well, the same still holds - you have to bring some credentials to the table.
I look at aerospace from 1900 (the Wright brothers) to 1970 (landing on the moon) - amazing! Now I look today, and we're still flying airframes from 1970, at the same speeds and altitudes for the most part.
What also amazes me is that the Internet revolution has made me (and many others) radically more efficient in my job over the last 10 years, yet hasn't translated to higher pay for people in the industry at all.
Golly, I sure didn't see that coming. What is you superior achievements in life that lend weight to the opinions you express when giving invited lectures at Stanford?
Even with none of the proposed improvements, quality SSD's already slaughter mechanical drives' performance. It's the biggest single advance in mass storage since the PC was invented.
SSD drives have been out for over a year now. If there were really an issue here, there would be thousands of reports from people with unusual usage patterns who write more in a year than most people write in 5. That hasn't happened. It's a non-issue.