Why should an insurance company want to pay for your child's existing illness?
Because our society values (somewhat) equal opportunity at birth regardless of wealth/responsibility of parents. A child didn't yet have a chance to make an informed decision on weather or not to buy health coverage. And we do not want to doom children with treatable congenital illnesses because their parents didn't buy a policy against a future risk of having a sick child before he/she was conceived.
Therefore we have two choices - cover childhood illnesses from public funds outright or disallow insurance companies from excluding at least young people based on pre-existing conditions. I would bet insurance industry would prefer the second option, as the first one will create public will for just covering everyone now that there is a system to treat both young and the seniors. The cost to the companies - or the taxpayers - can be minimized by charging a fine to parents who can afford insurance for their kids but don't get it and using the money to refund some of the extra cost of insuring children with preexisting conditions.
Actually it sounds like security through algorithm, like low probability that someone just happens to guess your 128 bit key. Security through obscurity would be flying your balloon far away from all common air traffic in hope that nobody will think to look for it to collide with.
I beg to differ. What's wrong with a balloon boosted to a proper orbit and filled with low pressure gas staying in space. It's just getting it there that is a bit of a problem.
If you could make a balloon filled with hard vacuum, you would be able to almost, but not quite, reach space.
Actually you would need to reach the space first to keep this one inflated (until the point the rubber needs to be stretched anyway). But it will orbit just as well as a balloon filled with soft vacuum/rarified gas.
Remember, if you buy their products, it's your money being spent. I use GNU/Linux exclusively since 2001, so that's a non-issue to me.
Wow, you must have Open Source BIOS, cell phone OS, car firmware and cable box! After all, PC operating systems are not the only software we are using, nor it is the one that tends to come with most troublesome restrictions.
This doesn't make any sense. A library book or DVD can already be checked out free of charge many times per year and yet bookstores are still around. Why would digital content be any different? Are you saying the MAIN reason people buy a book/movie is because a library copy is checked out or needs to be returned in two weeks?
So what are you doing here reading slashdot instead of curling up next to the fire with a newspaper and writing letters to editors instead of commenting on blogs. Nobody is taking away your books, candles, LPs or fireplaces. It's just most people prefer central heating, electric lights MP3s and digital text when efficiency is needed.
Agriculture, organized government, dynamite and computers all had negative side effects on society, but few would go back to hunting and gathering. Similarly electronic books bring problems of overused DRM, device durability and availability of titles and loss of library/bookstore culture. Yet most people are used to many conveniences of Internet and will not take advantage of availability/durability/fair use of paper books if they are not able to find them through a search engine, immediately get a copy over the air from wherever they are, carry hundreds of books in a handback/backpack/pocket or search content for specific topics. I know I read maybe 4 books per year before getting a Kindle and now get through at least one per month and end up discovering new authors rather than just the bestsellers. I am also saving 4 books worth of trees.
We will just have to control use of DRM in our society just as we regulate environmental impact of agriculture or indiscriminate use of dynamite. And for paper book lovers - hey, you can still take a steam train tour nowadays. It's just not our most common mode of transportation.
2009 called and said there are now $600 Macs and $999 apple notebooks. True, you can still find significantly cheaper Dells, and if you don't see any difference in software and hardware quality you should be all means save money.
Ok, so exclude actors, prostitutes, sperm/egg donors and surrogate mothers. Why should there be discrimination for jobs where you don't directly use male/female/white/black parts of your body? Even for actors, discriminating based on genetic tests would be illegal and locker room exams should be limited to porn flick screening. Simply see if someone looks a part for the role.
By the way, there are many straight, physically normal males who played successful female roles.
Name me any other job where it's legal to hire only man, or only women or only whites? We now require employees to evaluate candidates based on their actual abilities rather than prejudices about the group that the person belongs to. I don't see why sports should get a pass where firefighters or nurses don't.
Simply let her and or any other female athlete compete in man's events if they qualify, without requiring any genetic testing. Athletes are ambitious and always go for the toughest competition that they have even a remote chance of winning. While blacks may be statistically better than whites in basketball or 100M run, we manage just fine without banning Usain Bolt from "white-only races".
Would you rather ban someone who happened to be good athletically from any races, male or female? Doesn't sound like good sportsmanship to me.
Return rates for a new, less familiar product are higher than those for an older product which customers had 15 years to evaluate and decide if they want. This doesn't mean the new product is bad. On the contrary, people who are returning it - and those who are not - bought it because they were not completely satisfied with the old product (on price or other reasons) and wanted to evaluate other solutions.
Punishment for violating virtual property rights must be domain-specific. If I got too clever in a game and ended up taking or damaging someone else's stuff, it's all right to forfeit my items (fine), suspend my account for a certain time (incarceration) or terminate my character and ban me from the game for life (death penalty). However people playing games shouldn't end up in real-world jail for getting caught up in the moment.
The only exception would be virtual systems specialized for tracking real-life assets such as banks and brokerages. In other words, something which is obviously not a game or social interaction medium.
It depends on the basics of your justice system. American one is supposed to let ten guilty people go free before letting one innocent suffer. As such, we should limit statutory rape charges to sex with children rather than teenagers. One safeguard we could implement is let 12 person jury decide unanimously that a particular incident is beyond reasonable doubt a case of child exploitation rather than being bound to just age or age difference.
A similar principal dictates that even when someone needs to be punished, the punishment must not be lifelong except in the most rare and horrendous cases. Impose internet or residence restrictions for X number of years and then purge the criminal record and let the person be.
More contemporary (and popular) products have horrible design flaws. Kindle, where pressing back button loses track of dozens of pages you read since opening the book. iPhone, which has to be charged every day just so that it's thin. MacOSX, which makes access to trivial UNIX configuration files an exercise in frustration. Windows, oh well let's not even go there.
In US, ISPs may not be the ones filtering Internet content, but filtered it is - by lawsuits, employers who fire for facebook pages, and vigilantes jumping at any lapse of political correctness. I am sure the parties involved this the content is as offending as Yemenes consider porn.
If it were unfettered capitalism, AT&T contract would be only good as a substitute for toilet paper. It would be as simple as I take a chance on your product and you take a chance on my payment and whatever else I agreed to do. Obviously companies would be free to blacklist consumers and vice versa, and other companies/consumers would be free to ignore these blacklists to try to get a better deal.
I am not saying unfettered capitalism is good. But if AT&T wants a nanny state to protect it from evil customers, they better accept that the regulation goes both ways. No more carrier-locked phones, rural coverage holes or tax shelters.
People are paying to the tune of $100/month for TV+Internet packages. That's a lot of newspaper subscriptions. What everyone is clamoring for is predictable costs, quality assurance and predictable value. Let's say I want to learn more about release of journalists from North Korea. Do you really expect me to limit myself to your newspapers website? Say I use a search engine of my choice and see 20 promising links. Some go to newspapers, some go to blogs. If one link costs $4.95 and the other is free, do you really expect me to pay? Do you really expect me to pay $100 for 20 different newspapers just to follow up on one subject?
What newspaper publishers need to do is get off their butt and come up with a truly interoperable and convenient model of revenue sharing that addresses EVERYTHING - free access for casual browsers vs heavy regular readers, protection of users from extraordinary monthly charges, access for minors and citizens of countries without credit cards or convertible currency, fair use forwarding of and blogging about individual articles, no-questions-asked refunds for unintentional access or disappointing content. For-pay newspapers that are not in the system must be as rare as stores that don't accept Visa.
If this is too hard, well nobody is entitled to run a business except by releasing a product appealing to potential customers.
There is no doubt that Ubuntu notebook would be somewhat cheaper than Apple hardware of comparable specs. Although, your own comparison is terribly flawed by choosing refurbished and low end Dell laptop compared to high-end Macbook Pro. Regular MacBooks can be had in the ballpark of $1K and refurbished one might well be available for $600.
But a bigger problem is comparison between Linux open source and commercial audio apps for OSX. Apparently you are both a geek and a music guy and can manage fine. For one, I prefer Gimp to Photoshop as the interface of the former is much more logical from programmer's perspective. However, majority of non-geeks still prefer Word, Photoshop, Garage Band or Logic studio and value their time more than a couple grand to get the hardware platform.
I don't think you get the purpose of this car. It's not about being cheaper or more pleasant to own. The car itself is likely to be expensive enough to more than nullify gas savings over it's lifetime. It's not about environment. Batteries probably require lots of energy and pollution to make and most electricity is produced by burning coal.
It is however about making these things possible in future. If people see electric cars on the street, they'll feel more comfortable buying one and mass production will bring down the price and reward innovations in battery capacity and efficient (and therefore less polluting) manufacturing. And building a new wind farm instantly makes your existing EV environment-friendly without you having to junk it and buy another car. I would think any public charging stations will be trailblazers of green energy given attitudes of the drivers.
So if you are looking for the most useful car for yourself, by all means buy a luxury SUV. If you want instant payoff for environment, become a vegan - you would cut more greenhouse gases than by not driving. But if you have the money and the patience, there is still something to the EV concept.
Sounds like a pretty bulletproof case then. The defendant admitted copying files and his lawyers didn't dispute it. So what is the harm again in letting jury deliberate for 15 minutes and find for plaintiff? If RIAA's hands are clean, wouldn't they want to let us know that their rights were affirmed by a jury of defendant's peers rather by the government on the payroll of big corporations? Are they perhaps afraid that the jury might not want to fine someone thousands to millions just because they downloaded 3 CDs?
If the point is so clear, just how much time would the Jury spend debating the issue? Even in a criminal trial you could have a defendant yelling "I did it" and the lawyers arguing that he is bonkers. As unlikely as the jury is to buy that, what is the real harm in asking?
If the judge gets to decide the verdict (unless it's a not guilty verdict in a criminal case)? Why not let the judge consult with whomever he/she wants rather than the 12 jurors in this case? If jury trials are not necessary in civil cases, mandate judge trials. At least outrageous fines will become rare. But don't create a farce hidden by an appearance of a right to a jury trial.
Actually, no legitimate therapist should dismiss this out of hand. Most of the discussions of one's heartfelt issues in the world take place over a few beers. That is like a film actor refusing work in Hollywood.
Even if someone IS an alcoholic, there are different contributing factors in their behavior - relationship problems, stress at work, physical dependence, depression, lack of social skills. Making even a small change in these problem areas (even just finding drinking buddies rather than drinking alone) can help reduce the addictive behavior. Obviously starting a treatment for physical dependence and depression - which may not necessarily involve cold turkey rehab - would make an impact on alcoholism and improvement in social skills and family relationships would stop WoW addiction.
For one, I was an extremely heavy drinker for several years because of a bad relationship. When I finally got out, I had a six pack to celebrate and then the urge to drink heavily went away right the next day. I absolutely enjoy heaving a cocktail with dinner but don't get an urge for anything more or have any issues skipping it when the circumstances do not permit. My nephew used to spend all his waking hours playing MMORGs until he got a girlfriend. Then he completely lost interest.
I think we suck at treating addiction precisely because we view it as a fundamental "sin" that we have to denounce in AA-style meetings and an addict as an unclean person that no therapist should approach until he/she "repents". If we focused on objective problems of each individual - which may or may not include medical substance dependence - we will find that these are not that difficult to address.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should an insurance company want to pay for your child's existing illness?
Because our society values (somewhat) equal opportunity at birth regardless of wealth/responsibility of parents. A child didn't yet have a chance to make an informed decision on weather or not to buy health coverage. And we do not want to doom children with treatable congenital illnesses because their parents didn't buy a policy against a future risk of having a sick child before he/she was conceived.
Therefore we have two choices - cover childhood illnesses from public funds outright or disallow insurance companies from excluding at least young people based on pre-existing conditions. I would bet insurance industry would prefer the second option, as the first one will create public will for just covering everyone now that there is a system to treat both young and the seniors. The cost to the companies - or the taxpayers - can be minimized by charging a fine to parents who can afford insurance for their kids but don't get it and using the money to refund some of the extra cost of insuring children with preexisting conditions.
Actually it sounds like security through algorithm, like low probability that someone just happens to guess your 128 bit key. Security through obscurity would be flying your balloon far away from all common air traffic in hope that nobody will think to look for it to collide with.
A balloon can't be in space
I beg to differ. What's wrong with a balloon boosted to a proper orbit and filled with low pressure gas staying in space. It's just getting it there that is a bit of a problem.
If you could make a balloon filled with hard vacuum, you would be able to almost, but not quite, reach space.
Actually you would need to reach the space first to keep this one inflated (until the point the rubber needs to be stretched anyway). But it will orbit just as well as a balloon filled with soft vacuum/rarified gas.
Remember, if you buy their products, it's your money being spent. I use GNU/Linux exclusively since 2001, so that's a non-issue to me.
Wow, you must have Open Source BIOS, cell phone OS, car firmware and cable box! After all, PC operating systems are not the only software we are using, nor it is the one that tends to come with most troublesome restrictions.
This doesn't make any sense. A library book or DVD can already be checked out free of charge many times per year and yet bookstores are still around. Why would digital content be any different? Are you saying the MAIN reason people buy a book/movie is because a library copy is checked out or needs to be returned in two weeks?
So what are you doing here reading slashdot instead of curling up next to the fire with a newspaper and writing letters to editors instead of commenting on blogs. Nobody is taking away your books, candles, LPs or fireplaces. It's just most people prefer central heating, electric lights MP3s and digital text when efficiency is needed.
Agriculture, organized government, dynamite and computers all had negative side effects on society, but few would go back to hunting and gathering. Similarly electronic books bring problems of overused DRM, device durability and availability of titles and loss of library/bookstore culture. Yet most people are used to many conveniences of Internet and will not take advantage of availability/durability/fair use of paper books if they are not able to find them through a search engine, immediately get a copy over the air from wherever they are, carry hundreds of books in a handback/backpack/pocket or search content for specific topics. I know I read maybe 4 books per year before getting a Kindle and now get through at least one per month and end up discovering new authors rather than just the bestsellers. I am also saving 4 books worth of trees.
We will just have to control use of DRM in our society just as we regulate environmental impact of agriculture or indiscriminate use of dynamite. And for paper book lovers - hey, you can still take a steam train tour nowadays. It's just not our most common mode of transportation.
2009 called and said there are now $600 Macs and $999 apple notebooks. True, you can still find significantly cheaper Dells, and if you don't see any difference in software and hardware quality you should be all means save money.
Ok, so exclude actors, prostitutes, sperm/egg donors and surrogate mothers. Why should there be discrimination for jobs where you don't directly use male/female/white/black parts of your body? Even for actors, discriminating based on genetic tests would be illegal and locker room exams should be limited to porn flick screening. Simply see if someone looks a part for the role.
By the way, there are many straight, physically normal males who played successful female roles.
Name me any other job where it's legal to hire only man, or only women or only whites? We now require employees to evaluate candidates based on their actual abilities rather than prejudices about the group that the person belongs to. I don't see why sports should get a pass where firefighters or nurses don't.
Simply let her and or any other female athlete compete in man's events if they qualify, without requiring any genetic testing. Athletes are ambitious and always go for the toughest competition that they have even a remote chance of winning. While blacks may be statistically better than whites in basketball or 100M run, we manage just fine without banning Usain Bolt from "white-only races".
Would you rather ban someone who happened to be good athletically from any races, male or female? Doesn't sound like good sportsmanship to me.
Return rates for a new, less familiar product are higher than those for an older product which customers had 15 years to evaluate and decide if they want. This doesn't mean the new product is bad. On the contrary, people who are returning it - and those who are not - bought it because they were not completely satisfied with the old product (on price or other reasons) and wanted to evaluate other solutions.
Punishment for violating virtual property rights must be domain-specific. If I got too clever in a game and ended up taking or damaging someone else's stuff, it's all right to forfeit my items (fine), suspend my account for a certain time (incarceration) or terminate my character and ban me from the game for life (death penalty). However people playing games shouldn't end up in real-world jail for getting caught up in the moment.
The only exception would be virtual systems specialized for tracking real-life assets such as banks and brokerages. In other words, something which is obviously not a game or social interaction medium.
It depends on the basics of your justice system. American one is supposed to let ten guilty people go free before letting one innocent suffer. As such, we should limit statutory rape charges to sex with children rather than teenagers. One safeguard we could implement is let 12 person jury decide unanimously that a particular incident is beyond reasonable doubt a case of child exploitation rather than being bound to just age or age difference.
A similar principal dictates that even when someone needs to be punished, the punishment must not be lifelong except in the most rare and horrendous cases. Impose internet or residence restrictions for X number of years and then purge the criminal record and let the person be.
More contemporary (and popular) products have horrible design flaws. Kindle, where pressing back button loses track of dozens of pages you read since opening the book. iPhone, which has to be charged every day just so that it's thin. MacOSX, which makes access to trivial UNIX configuration files an exercise in frustration. Windows, oh well let's not even go there.
In US, ISPs may not be the ones filtering Internet content, but filtered it is - by lawsuits, employers who fire for facebook pages, and vigilantes jumping at any lapse of political correctness. I am sure the parties involved this the content is as offending as Yemenes consider porn.
If it were unfettered capitalism, AT&T contract would be only good as a substitute for toilet paper. It would be as simple as I take a chance on your product and you take a chance on my payment and whatever else I agreed to do. Obviously companies would be free to blacklist consumers and vice versa, and other companies/consumers would be free to ignore these blacklists to try to get a better deal.
I am not saying unfettered capitalism is good. But if AT&T wants a nanny state to protect it from evil customers, they better accept that the regulation goes both ways. No more carrier-locked phones, rural coverage holes or tax shelters.
People are paying to the tune of $100/month for TV+Internet packages. That's a lot of newspaper subscriptions. What everyone is clamoring for is predictable costs, quality assurance and predictable value. Let's say I want to learn more about release of journalists from North Korea. Do you really expect me to limit myself to your newspapers website? Say I use a search engine of my choice and see 20 promising links. Some go to newspapers, some go to blogs. If one link costs $4.95 and the other is free, do you really expect me to pay? Do you really expect me to pay $100 for 20 different newspapers just to follow up on one subject?
What newspaper publishers need to do is get off their butt and come up with a truly interoperable and convenient model of revenue sharing that addresses EVERYTHING - free access for casual browsers vs heavy regular readers, protection of users from extraordinary monthly charges, access for minors and citizens of countries without credit cards or convertible currency, fair use forwarding of and blogging about individual articles, no-questions-asked refunds for unintentional access or disappointing content. For-pay newspapers that are not in the system must be as rare as stores that don't accept Visa.
If this is too hard, well nobody is entitled to run a business except by releasing a product appealing to potential customers.
There is no doubt that Ubuntu notebook would be somewhat cheaper than Apple hardware of comparable specs. Although, your own comparison is terribly flawed by choosing refurbished and low end Dell laptop compared to high-end Macbook Pro. Regular MacBooks can be had in the ballpark of $1K and refurbished one might well be available for $600.
But a bigger problem is comparison between Linux open source and commercial audio apps for OSX. Apparently you are both a geek and a music guy and can manage fine. For one, I prefer Gimp to Photoshop as the interface of the former is much more logical from programmer's perspective. However, majority of non-geeks still prefer Word, Photoshop, Garage Band or Logic studio and value their time more than a couple grand to get the hardware platform.
Since when is Apple a proponent of DRM? They kept it on music just until the labels relented.
I don't think you get the purpose of this car. It's not about being cheaper or more pleasant to own. The car itself is likely to be expensive enough to more than nullify gas savings over it's lifetime. It's not about environment. Batteries probably require lots of energy and pollution to make and most electricity is produced by burning coal.
It is however about making these things possible in future. If people see electric cars on the street, they'll feel more comfortable buying one and mass production will bring down the price and reward innovations in battery capacity and efficient (and therefore less polluting) manufacturing. And building a new wind farm instantly makes your existing EV environment-friendly without you having to junk it and buy another car. I would think any public charging stations will be trailblazers of green energy given attitudes of the drivers.
So if you are looking for the most useful car for yourself, by all means buy a luxury SUV. If you want instant payoff for environment, become a vegan - you would cut more greenhouse gases than by not driving. But if you have the money and the patience, there is still something to the EV concept.
And just where do you think the power comes from when you plug into the wall?
Well, I am pretty sure it at least comes from United States.
Sounds like a pretty bulletproof case then. The defendant admitted copying files and his lawyers didn't dispute it. So what is the harm again in letting jury deliberate for 15 minutes and find for plaintiff? If RIAA's hands are clean, wouldn't they want to let us know that their rights were affirmed by a jury of defendant's peers rather by the government on the payroll of big corporations? Are they perhaps afraid that the jury might not want to fine someone thousands to millions just because they downloaded 3 CDs?
If the point is so clear, just how much time would the Jury spend debating the issue? Even in a criminal trial you could have a defendant yelling "I did it" and the lawyers arguing that he is bonkers. As unlikely as the jury is to buy that, what is the real harm in asking?
If the judge gets to decide the verdict (unless it's a not guilty verdict in a criminal case)? Why not let the judge consult with whomever he/she wants rather than the 12 jurors in this case? If jury trials are not necessary in civil cases, mandate judge trials. At least outrageous fines will become rare. But don't create a farce hidden by an appearance of a right to a jury trial.
Actually, no legitimate therapist should dismiss this out of hand. Most of the discussions of one's heartfelt issues in the world take place over a few beers. That is like a film actor refusing work in Hollywood.
Even if someone IS an alcoholic, there are different contributing factors in their behavior - relationship problems, stress at work, physical dependence, depression, lack of social skills. Making even a small change in these problem areas (even just finding drinking buddies rather than drinking alone) can help reduce the addictive behavior. Obviously starting a treatment for physical dependence and depression - which may not necessarily involve cold turkey rehab - would make an impact on alcoholism and improvement in social skills and family relationships would stop WoW addiction.
For one, I was an extremely heavy drinker for several years because of a bad relationship. When I finally got out, I had a six pack to celebrate and then the urge to drink heavily went away right the next day. I absolutely enjoy heaving a cocktail with dinner but don't get an urge for anything more or have any issues skipping it when the circumstances do not permit. My nephew used to spend all his waking hours playing MMORGs until he got a girlfriend. Then he completely lost interest.
I think we suck at treating addiction precisely because we view it as a fundamental "sin" that we have to denounce in AA-style meetings and an addict as an unclean person that no therapist should approach until he/she "repents". If we focused on objective problems of each individual - which may or may not include medical substance dependence - we will find that these are not that difficult to address.