You're leaving out #5: You find a cancer that is so aggressive that it will kill you no matter what, but you still treat it and the treatment kills you faster or reduces the quality of your remaining life.
They accounted for benefits given to federal employees when making the comparison. And pointed out that the government provided the infrastructure (office space, computers etc.) to the IT contractors as well as the employees.
People would be more likely to fail to see a glass door if it has anti-reflective film, resulting in them walking face-first into it and hurting themselves and possibly also damaging the door.
Given how frequently people are close to other people, it's not unlikely that more than one person will be directly or indirectly hit if anybody is hit.
For example, if it lands on a moving car, it could kill everybody in the car, plus people in other cars behind it that slam into the wreckage. Even if it lands on the road without directly striking a car, it could cause a multi-car pileup.
Or it could land on a classroom, killing a half-dozen children inside. Or it lands on top of an apartment building, ramming through 3 or 4 floors and killing multiple people along the way plus more people getting killed by the rubble. Or any of a thousand other scenarios where people gather in numbers.
Loans that are funded, subsidized, or guaranteed by the government should come from state governments, not the Federal government.
In the current situation where the Federal government gives the loans and state universities set the prices of tuition, the states have an incentive to keep raising prices to capture more of the Federal loan dollars. That mostly goes away if the states are providing both the loans and the education. I expect that many states would also restrict the state-provided loan money to state universities in their own state, so the loans wouldn't inflate the cost of private university.
And if the Federal guarantee went away and student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy, private lenders would be more selective about how much they lend and who they lend to. So they'd stop lending $100K to sociology and art history majors who are likely to have extreme difficulty paying off the loan, but aspiring engineers and doctors could still get the money they need (of course, lenders would have to look at data like SAT/ACT/AP scores to determine the likelihood of the applicant actually completing their stated major).
Having said that, I still think it's a good idea to subsidize university education. But loans are not the best way to do it. If I controlled the state university system, I'd do something like shrink the enrollments by half (over time, like 10-15 years), but everybody who gets in would have really cheap tuition like $1000/year. That increases the academic barrier to entry but lowers the financial barrier, and the smaller enrollment avoids creating a huge excess of graduates who aren't going to find jobs related to their degree.
It's not about breaking the bank, it's about whether the extra $8/mth would better spent on other entertainment options. With the price increase, many people think it's a better deal to downgrade or drop Netflix, and use the savings for Redbox rentals or video games.
Except that there is often a significant degree of subjectivity and room for disagreement on decisions of whether to operate, so the surgeon who recommends unnecessary operations won't face any consequences 99% of the time.
One pass with zeroes or random data over the whole drive is sufficient, unless you expect that a large government agency is going to open up the hard drives and spend millions of dollars to attempt to recover the data (and even they might be unable to get at the overwritten data. See http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-guttman.html).
With dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb you can wipe all the hard drives in a weekend.
Except that Net Neutrality isn't telling any ISPs to block anything. It's telling ISPs what NOT to block. With Net Neutrality we'd get to access whatever the ISP would let us have anyway, plus other services that they wanted to block or throttle but the government wouldn't let them block it.
The diamond planet created a lot of attention and excitement because people could fantasize about a mining mission to bring back tons of diamonds (even though the reality is that such travel will likely be impossible for centuries, and perhaps forever).
But climate science brings out the naysayers and layman disbelievers in hordes because it invokes thoughts of government regulations and/or taxes aimed at reducing emissions.
It's not necessarily and all-bad or all-good situation.
The auto-increasing fee idea is based on the principle of it being good to extend copyright for works that still bring in substantial revenue after several years, but bad to extend it for those that stopped bringing worthwhile revenue. The fee is just a mechanism to ensure that the latter type joins the public domain without undue delay, while reserving protection for the 1% that still make money.
The fact that humans were voted as human only 63.3% of the time shows that the voters are too ignorant of the limitations of AI conversational capabilities.
If a participant (erroneously) believes that computers are already at the level where they can have a sensible impromptu conversation with humans, they're often going to wonder if the human on the other side of the conversation is a bot. That probably was the case for most of the 37% who thought the humans were bots.
As for the 59.3% who thought the bots were human, many of them probably thought the bots were humans pretending to be bots -- in other words, it's not clear that they were told that the other party (human or bot) of each conversation is trying to appear as human as possible. So without being told that fact, many of the voters would think the other party was trying to be indistinguishable, rather than trying to appear human.
"FYI, Texas instituted malpractice caps and protections several years ago that put it in line with Canada, I believe. Since those protections were put in place, malpractice premiums have increased 30%."
Haven't those premiums increased more in most other states?
"It's not the lawsuits driving up malpractice costs; it's the malpractice insurers gouging the doctors. It's a distraction anyway. Currently only 2.5% of U.S. health care dollars are in the area of malpractice lawsuits and insurance. To flesh out your latter point, 28% of U.S. health care dollars are spent on administration, compared to 16% in Canada."
However, the cost of malpractice goes beyond lawsuits and insurance. Defensive medicine adds to the cost of testing and treatments, and many avoid certain specialties (e.g. ob/gyn) with high rates of malpractice lawsuits, resulting in the doctors in those specialties charging more due to lower supply and higher risk.
There is some logic to that. They're mitigating against people who would automatically demand the most expensive hearing aid that insurance would pay for. By paying for just one hearing aid, only the people who reeeally want and need the more expensive model would demand it, since they have to pay for the other unit out of pocket.
However, there are some people with hearing loss only in one ear. So they would demand a single $3000 model whether they really need it or not. A more sensible rule would be for insurance to pay for 50% of the hearing aid costs (up to the $3000 maximum), whether the money is used to buy one or two units.
The trouble is that this invention may be infringing on a dozen trivial and/or overbroad patents, and the licensing fees or lawsuits for those patents could make this new memory technology unprofitable.
The hard drive is encrypted, with a password entered in the boot process to decrypt the disk. So removing the hard drive without knowing the encryption key is useless.
"In any case - undercover cops aren't cost effective for catching small time criminals."
Ever watch Cops, or Police Women of Broward County? They use undercover cops all the time to catch small time drug dealers and buyers, and guys looking for prostitutes. Although social media probably won't hurt them, given that they often expose the undercover cops faces on TV but they're still able to fool people for more than 1 season.
It's OK if the man-in-the-middle is only listening, because the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm is designed so that the two legitimate parties can exchange encryption keys without a listener being able to determine the key, even if the listener records the whole transmission.
This is not just about one company attacking another with patents.
Multiple companies colluding to attack a competitor may be a violation of antitrust legislation, whether their weapon is the patent system, or attack ads, or price fixing.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the GP meant Allan McLeod Cormack, who developed the theoretical calculations that were later put to use for CT scans.
Scalability and performance are important.
You're leaving out #5:
You find a cancer that is so aggressive that it will kill you no matter what, but you still treat it and the treatment kills you faster or reduces the quality of your remaining life.
They accounted for benefits given to federal employees when making the comparison. And pointed out that the government provided the infrastructure (office space, computers etc.) to the IT contractors as well as the employees.
People would be more likely to fail to see a glass door if it has anti-reflective film, resulting in them walking face-first into it and hurting themselves and possibly also damaging the door.
Given how frequently people are close to other people, it's not unlikely that more than one person will be directly or indirectly hit if anybody is hit.
For example, if it lands on a moving car, it could kill everybody in the car, plus people in other cars behind it that slam into the wreckage. Even if it lands on the road without directly striking a car, it could cause a multi-car pileup.
Or it could land on a classroom, killing a half-dozen children inside. Or it lands on top of an apartment building, ramming through 3 or 4 floors and killing multiple people along the way plus more people getting killed by the rubble. Or any of a thousand other scenarios where people gather in numbers.
Loans that are funded, subsidized, or guaranteed by the government should come from state governments, not the Federal government.
In the current situation where the Federal government gives the loans and state universities set the prices of tuition, the states have an incentive to keep raising prices to capture more of the Federal loan dollars. That mostly goes away if the states are providing both the loans and the education. I expect that many states would also restrict the state-provided loan money to state universities in their own state, so the loans wouldn't inflate the cost of private university.
And if the Federal guarantee went away and student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy, private lenders would be more selective about how much they lend and who they lend to. So they'd stop lending $100K to sociology and art history majors who are likely to have extreme difficulty paying off the loan, but aspiring engineers and doctors could still get the money they need (of course, lenders would have to look at data like SAT/ACT/AP scores to determine the likelihood of the applicant actually completing their stated major).
Having said that, I still think it's a good idea to subsidize university education. But loans are not the best way to do it. If I controlled the state university system, I'd do something like shrink the enrollments by half (over time, like 10-15 years), but everybody who gets in would have really cheap tuition like $1000/year. That increases the academic barrier to entry but lowers the financial barrier, and the smaller enrollment avoids creating a huge excess of graduates who aren't going to find jobs related to their degree.
... the opposite of whether Obama supports it.
If Obama supports something, the Republicans will auto-hate it even if it originated with Republicans.
So if Obama supports this bill, the Republicans will vote against it. If he opposes it, the bill will be on his desk for signing next week.
It's not about breaking the bank, it's about whether the extra $8/mth would better spent on other entertainment options. With the price increase, many people think it's a better deal to downgrade or drop Netflix, and use the savings for Redbox rentals or video games.
Except that there is often a significant degree of subjectivity and room for disagreement on decisions of whether to operate, so the surgeon who recommends unnecessary operations won't face any consequences 99% of the time.
One pass with zeroes or random data over the whole drive is sufficient, unless you expect that a large government agency is going to open up the hard drives and spend millions of dollars to attempt to recover the data (and even they might be unable to get at the overwritten data. See http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-guttman.html).
With dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb you can wipe all the hard drives in a weekend.
The catch is that the five right-winged judges in the Supreme Court will strike it down.
Except that Net Neutrality isn't telling any ISPs to block anything. It's telling ISPs what NOT to block. With Net Neutrality we'd get to access whatever the ISP would let us have anyway, plus other services that they wanted to block or throttle but the government wouldn't let them block it.
The diamond planet created a lot of attention and excitement because people could fantasize about a mining mission to bring back tons of diamonds (even though the reality is that such travel will likely be impossible for centuries, and perhaps forever).
But climate science brings out the naysayers and layman disbelievers in hordes because it invokes thoughts of government regulations and/or taxes aimed at reducing emissions.
It's not necessarily and all-bad or all-good situation.
The auto-increasing fee idea is based on the principle of it being good to extend copyright for works that still bring in substantial revenue after several years, but bad to extend it for those that stopped bringing worthwhile revenue. The fee is just a mechanism to ensure that the latter type joins the public domain without undue delay, while reserving protection for the 1% that still make money.
The fact that humans were voted as human only 63.3% of the time shows that the voters are too ignorant of the limitations of AI conversational capabilities.
If a participant (erroneously) believes that computers are already at the level where they can have a sensible impromptu conversation with humans, they're often going to wonder if the human on the other side of the conversation is a bot. That probably was the case for most of the 37% who thought the humans were bots.
As for the 59.3% who thought the bots were human, many of them probably thought the bots were humans pretending to be bots -- in other words, it's not clear that they were told that the other party (human or bot) of each conversation is trying to appear as human as possible. So without being told that fact, many of the voters would think the other party was trying to be indistinguishable, rather than trying to appear human.
"FYI, Texas instituted malpractice caps and protections several years ago that put it in line with Canada, I believe. Since those protections were put in place, malpractice premiums have increased 30%."
Haven't those premiums increased more in most other states?
"It's not the lawsuits driving up malpractice costs; it's the malpractice insurers gouging the doctors. It's a distraction anyway. Currently only 2.5% of U.S. health care dollars are in the area of malpractice lawsuits and insurance. To flesh out your latter point, 28% of U.S. health care dollars are spent on administration, compared to 16% in Canada."
However, the cost of malpractice goes beyond lawsuits and insurance. Defensive medicine adds to the cost of testing and treatments, and many avoid certain specialties (e.g. ob/gyn) with high rates of malpractice lawsuits, resulting in the doctors in those specialties charging more due to lower supply and higher risk.
There is some logic to that. They're mitigating against people who would automatically demand the most expensive hearing aid that insurance would pay for. By paying for just one hearing aid, only the people who reeeally want and need the more expensive model would demand it, since they have to pay for the other unit out of pocket.
However, there are some people with hearing loss only in one ear. So they would demand a single $3000 model whether they really need it or not. A more sensible rule would be for insurance to pay for 50% of the hearing aid costs (up to the $3000 maximum), whether the money is used to buy one or two units.
"SSD's are quoted now as $1 per GB
1TB rotating metal drive ~ $60 That's $16 per GB"
$60 for a terabyte is 6 cents per GB.
The trouble is that this invention may be infringing on a dozen trivial and/or overbroad patents, and the licensing fees or lawsuits for those patents could make this new memory technology unprofitable.
The hard drive is encrypted, with a password entered in the boot process to decrypt the disk. So removing the hard drive without knowing the encryption key is useless.
"In any case - undercover cops aren't cost effective for catching small time criminals."
Ever watch Cops, or Police Women of Broward County? They use undercover cops all the time to catch small time drug dealers and buyers, and guys looking for prostitutes. Although social media probably won't hurt them, given that they often expose the undercover cops faces on TV but they're still able to fool people for more than 1 season.
It's OK if the man-in-the-middle is only listening, because the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm is designed so that the two legitimate parties can exchange encryption keys without a listener being able to determine the key, even if the listener records the whole transmission.
Didn't the court rule that it was legal for Bleem to replicate the Playstation APIs?
This is not just about one company attacking another with patents.
Multiple companies colluding to attack a competitor may be a violation of antitrust legislation, whether their weapon is the patent system, or attack ads, or price fixing.