Sex without a condom isn't rape in most countries including the UK. He is wanted for questioning related to that, but isn't charged with any crime in any country.
He is being extradited to Sweden, not the US, for alleged sex crimes (not wearing a condom during intercourse), well sort of alleged. He hasn't actually been charged with anything in Sweden.
"That's pretty much the only thing you've said that matters. Well that and the fact that most of them are at least partially customized to the patient."
Not as much as you think. They sell previous generation hearing aids as hearing enhancers for hunting. As for the customized stuff, the hearing aid itself just has a an equalizer in it like you'd have for a stereo or software mp3 player and the equalizer is tuned to match your own hearing at various ranges. A hearing test can be administered by software, you could make it a downloadable app with a simple calibration utility. Require it be done with noise canceling headphones and press a button to indicate you can hear the tone or not. When done the software determines the settings for the equalizer and loads them onto the device.
The only downside to not having the medical certification is that the doctor wouldn't sell them, medicaid and insurance wouldn't cover them. But if you could get somebody with deep enough pockets to have the molds and ASICs made for the device and then marketed it cheaply enough for individuals to afford on their own ($50-$100) I'm confident you'd have no trouble recouping the cost and making a hefty profit.
At this point the audiologist isn't much different than the eye doctor. If you go in the military you aren't given a vision test manually, you look into a machine and it flips lens over your eyes while you focus on a spot and the machine can tell whether you are properly focused or not and determines your prescription automatically. The hearing tests can be mostly automated, it can't look at your purpil to objectively determine focus but it can play sounds and have you press a button and determine if you pressed at the right times just as well as a doctor can. After the exam determines your hearing capabilities software programs a hearing aid or pair of them. You could replace the doctor with a booth at W@lmart like they have for foot pads now and it would be good enough for most.
They already have hearing aids comparable to what was available 5-10yrs ago freely available for $50-300 sold as hunting enhancements. They are better than nothing. So obviously you don't have to get FDA clearance for a hearing device, you just need it if you want the cost to be paid by insurance. They aren't individually fit but they have electronics with a universal fit and then a set of rubber pieces to go in the ear. You just pick whichever is most comfortable. It's an electronics device, the cost to make a better one is a one off price and the price per unit is negligible after that. The same with the rubber pieces.
Granted that is for normal hearing aids. If you are completely dear in one ear or something exotic that is a different story.
They aren't really. Most are just are just individually tuned to the user but that is just generic tunable hardware combined with a hearing assessment application.
If you just want a simple amplifier, or even a good amplifier you can get them much cheaper than hearing aids. They are sold for hunting. That kind of blows the approved medical device criteria out the window. Not being approved means insurance couldn't pay for them.
Even the modes he's discussing. That wouldn't be that hard to do. Do the same thing they've done for open source digital speech. Start a project collecting sample recordings from dinner at restaurants, etc. Run filtering algorithms on them to identify patterns in the noise and load the result in your hearing aid. Make the device flashable and you could even update from the web.
It's amazing how deaf companies are to the idea of lowering price to reach a larger market. Almost every company out there would rather sell less at a higher price.
There are headaches that come along with selling a higher quantity for a lower price. Increased overhead, lower margins, etc.
Just tell the carriers that you've estimated the costs of breaking those contracts and determined that it will be more profitable to not do so. Watch how fast they come begging for new terms.
Nobody would pay the ridiculous cable/sat prices without the premium channels like HBO. Their the only channels you can be sure will have shows worth DVRing every season.
Not true. Blu-ray sales of the show are at record levels. The market is apparently willing to pay plenty. There is just no way for studios to reconcile the idea that all those people who were exposed to the show via torrents turned around and bought copies afterward.
Since it is completely inconsistent with the argument they make and will continue to make about piracy costing them revenue they will naturally do the right thing and give the profits they've made due to free viral exposure due to piracy back.
And your anal correction has altered the point in what way? Your corrected match still shows selling cheaper widgets to more people as more profitable.
Just think of all the lost revenue due to piracy. It couldn't have possibly increased sales by exposing a larger audience to the show. It served one function only, to rob the artists of their god given revenue.
I think you'll find the article you linked contends that scientists do not like the methodologies of the subject. While the article I linked wasn't the source paper it did give the methodology of exposing mice to a substance and then letting them self dose. That methodology is pretty much the standard for testing if something is habit forming aka addictive.
I think the tendency to resist things being called an addiction or addictive stems from the false negative view of addiction that has been thrust on people in the first place. Our brain is a neural net and an addiction is nothing more than a habit that triggers that neural nets reward pathway. If you build a computer neural net and teach it addition by feeding it two numbers over and over and hitting the reward button when it is right that network will form a pattern around the paths that lead to correct results. It will form a habit (aka addiction) of performing addition in response to two numbers because that tends to trigger a reward. If our neurons didn't become addicted to rewards they wouldn't form into chains and patterns. Recognizing patterns is a function of addiction and pretty much all other human learning and behavior is an emergence of recognizing patterns. Addiction is the basis of all human learning and intelligence. It is not a negative thing.
The mother who got pregnant out of wedlock and abandoned her child and has found herself in an abandoned building performing favors and then laying comatose overwhelmed by the effects of drugs. That woman is the product of her own inability to cope with life and escaped into drugs she is not the product of addiction or the drugs she escaped into. A person can be addicted to those same substances or other substances (recreational or otherwise), indulge in them with moderation, and live a normal reasonably healthy and productive life.
"I'd disagree with sugar being addictive. Desired, yes, addictive, not so much"
That is what all addicts say and literally everyone is a sugar addict. Sugar is arguably the most addictive substance known and refined sugar is far more addictive than cocaine. The difference between a 'desired' chemical and addictive one is only availability. Since pretty much everyone is addicted to sugar and generally can't see themselves giving sexual favors in an alley for it or stealing from family or in any of the negative addiction center funded special scenerios they draw a distinction. That distinction is imaginary. First addiction isn't what it is made out to be. Most people wouldn't do those horrible things to feed a habit. Those who would do them, would do them for sugar given an equally scarce and expensive supply.
There is nothing about drug use that causes A. I think you are confusing lazy vagabonds sitting around getting high with getting high causing people to be lazy vagabonds. For example there is a higher drug use rate in IT and among rocket scientists than in the general population. You can be certain this would be higher yet if workplace drug testing were prohibited.
Where true B and C are generally caused by the black market. For instance, the risks, effects, and cost of cocaine are all slightly reduced vs caffeine. Coca-cola noticed this and switched to caffeine as the next best choice when cocaine was outlawed. Most people have no trouble getting this caffeine and sugar fixes despite these substances being at least as addictive as any black market choice. Because they are dirt cheap.
Cocaine powered the population of the western world during the height of the industrial revolution. Drugs do not make people lazy and unproductive. Having a black market for drugs just increases the cost of lazy and unproductive people.
The WHO did a long term global study on the effects of cocaine use and found no significant indication of negative health or lifestyle effects associated with low to moderate use.
It was the US representative who pushed successfully to block the results from being published. Just because something is being done across the globe doesn't mean it isn't the US who is pushing it. The US is the largest economy in the world and definitely has the ability to force other nations to pass laws in their interest. Just look at the draconian intellectual property policies the US has forced the rest of the world to embrace.
Definitely, the only risk I see here is the general push to impose extra taxes on these products. Often those taxes are based on current illicit rates. In California for instance the proposed taxes were massive and based on fixed rates instead of a percentage of price. That prevents the market from dropping the price to the appropriate ridiculously low rates most of these substances should be at.
Production of marijuana, poppy, and cocaine is fairly cheap. Using backwoods third world agricultural techniques the average yield for refined cocaine is about 600kg per acre. Marijuana yields 500-600lbs of dried tops per acre. Poppies yielded about 8kg per acre in 2006.
Marijuana averages about $100 per 1/4oz on the black market. Quality cocaine is about $120/gram on the black market.
So a legal market wholesale rate for marijuana to give equal profit is $0.36/lb. At that price is it would be on even par with growing corn last year. Cocaine would be $0.33/kg or about $0.15/lb. This does assume that there is enough demand for farmers to be able to sell off their crops and that marijuana and coca carry production costs per acre similar to corn. Somehow I don't think that will be a problem. Those prices might skyrocket to $0.50/lb with real costs! And that will be doubled in the retail market to more like $1/lb. Of course with large scale processing the quality output isn't going to be the same as the current hand manicured and trimmed buds at less than $1/lb I don't think anyone is going to be too concerned. I also don't think anyone is going to be worrying about the THC efficiency loss of ingestion vs smoking at those prices.
Cocaine is completely water soluble. Perhaps a legal market delivery system would entail a sugary carbonated beverage in an aluminum can. We could replace replace caffeine with an addictive stimulant... oh wait.
Minus the gov only stores and the ridiculous recreational taxes people want to lump onto these things I agree. Marijuana is safer than most anything sold over the counter at CVS including asprin by a wide margin. Cocaine is in the ballpark of caffeine and carries similar risks and was commonly used in pretty much the same way during the industrial revolution when the US was a major world producer of coca. Despite the propaganda campaigns heroine is really no better or worse than the other opiates including, hydrocodone (vicodin), percocet, oxycontine, prescribed every day.
It's amazing how much less of a big deal it is to have a gram a day habit when the substance is $1-2 for a 10lb bag at the local grocer. Sugar is one of the most addictive substances known to man.
Re:kernel 3.2 was released only 5 months ago
on
Linux 3.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
I was exaggerating a bit. But people are still expecting a stable release number to mean the system is stable and has been in the beta unstable stage for quite a while getting beaten up by the bold and bug fixes applied. It's the kernel, the stable releases have always been solid and people trust that they always will be.
My point remains. The release cycle is about as fast as it can be and still live up to that expectation.
Here in the US we have brown outs. They aren't from storms but from power shortages when everyone runs their climate control systems (heat and a/c) during the peak times in summer and winter. Usually the power doesn't even go completely out, it just hiccups with a visible flicker in the lights.
In any case, it isn't ALL power outages. During the course of working on a system I might power it off in a half booted state a dozen times. If I'm trying to boot a dvd and miss the window I don't wait for the OS to come all the way up and properly power down I'll just hit the switch and start over. EXT3/4 and NTFS are all pretty solid and I've never lost a system because of improper shutdown on those fs. Scratch that, I have had to chkdsk and fixboot the ntfs stuff though I haven't lost one and EXT3+ hasn't needed even that. Well okay, I did lose a system once but that was only because a laptop chose to overheat during a full disk encryption process!
"Of course there's (parts of) southern France where you have one about daily, but I can't see how one can operate a computer there without a battery at all."
I have absolute confidence you could run a personal system with ext3 in those conditions and it would be fine. You could power it off multiple times every day and have no issues.
"When you really don't know what you're talking about it's best to shut up."
Agreed. Feel free at any time. Or perhaps you want to come back with some more of your anecdotal evidence.
"I've been running (many) production servers on Linux since 1995"
I can't imagine what could be a more clear indication of not knowing what you are talking about than bringing servers into a discussion of personal system usage conditions. My linux servers have 400+ day uptimes. You aren't exactly fscking them every time you turn around. Solid as a server means not going down in the first place. Solid as a personal system means recovering from the inevitable constant downs. Windows was and is a joke as a server. But the simple fat fs was more durable than ext2 hands down, it was/is slower and there is no feature comparison even with ext2 but it is definitely more stable.
"what the hell operating system did you think most of the Internet was running on in those days?"
Again. That is a discussion about servers. Off topic.
Slashdot Mirror
Sex without a condom isn't rape in most countries including the UK. He is wanted for questioning related to that, but isn't charged with any crime in any country.
He is being extradited to Sweden, not the US, for alleged sex crimes (not wearing a condom during intercourse), well sort of alleged. He hasn't actually been charged with anything in Sweden.
"That's pretty much the only thing you've said that matters. Well that and the fact that most of them are at least partially customized to the patient."
Not as much as you think. They sell previous generation hearing aids as hearing enhancers for hunting. As for the customized stuff, the hearing aid itself just has a an equalizer in it like you'd have for a stereo or software mp3 player and the equalizer is tuned to match your own hearing at various ranges. A hearing test can be administered by software, you could make it a downloadable app with a simple calibration utility. Require it be done with noise canceling headphones and press a button to indicate you can hear the tone or not. When done the software determines the settings for the equalizer and loads them onto the device.
The only downside to not having the medical certification is that the doctor wouldn't sell them, medicaid and insurance wouldn't cover them. But if you could get somebody with deep enough pockets to have the molds and ASICs made for the device and then marketed it cheaply enough for individuals to afford on their own ($50-$100) I'm confident you'd have no trouble recouping the cost and making a hefty profit.
At this point the audiologist isn't much different than the eye doctor. If you go in the military you aren't given a vision test manually, you look into a machine and it flips lens over your eyes while you focus on a spot and the machine can tell whether you are properly focused or not and determines your prescription automatically. The hearing tests can be mostly automated, it can't look at your purpil to objectively determine focus but it can play sounds and have you press a button and determine if you pressed at the right times just as well as a doctor can. After the exam determines your hearing capabilities software programs a hearing aid or pair of them. You could replace the doctor with a booth at W@lmart like they have for foot pads now and it would be good enough for most.
They already have hearing aids comparable to what was available 5-10yrs ago freely available for $50-300 sold as hunting enhancements. They are better than nothing. So obviously you don't have to get FDA clearance for a hearing device, you just need it if you want the cost to be paid by insurance. They aren't individually fit but they have electronics with a universal fit and then a set of rubber pieces to go in the ear. You just pick whichever is most comfortable. It's an electronics device, the cost to make a better one is a one off price and the price per unit is negligible after that. The same with the rubber pieces.
Granted that is for normal hearing aids. If you are completely dear in one ear or something exotic that is a different story.
They aren't really. Most are just are just individually tuned to the user but that is just generic tunable hardware combined with a hearing assessment application.
If you just want a simple amplifier, or even a good amplifier you can get them much cheaper than hearing aids. They are sold for hunting. That kind of blows the approved medical device criteria out the window. Not being approved means insurance couldn't pay for them.
Even the modes he's discussing. That wouldn't be that hard to do. Do the same thing they've done for open source digital speech. Start a project collecting sample recordings from dinner at restaurants, etc. Run filtering algorithms on them to identify patterns in the noise and load the result in your hearing aid. Make the device flashable and you could even update from the web.
It's amazing how deaf companies are to the idea of lowering price to reach a larger market. Almost every company out there would rather sell less at a higher price.
There are headaches that come along with selling a higher quantity for a lower price. Increased overhead, lower margins, etc.
Did you read the books? I'm baffled at how anyone could follow the show without reading the books.
Just tell the carriers that you've estimated the costs of breaking those contracts and determined that it will be more profitable to not do so. Watch how fast they come begging for new terms.
Nobody would pay the ridiculous cable/sat prices without the premium channels like HBO. Their the only channels you can be sure will have shows worth
DVRing every season.
You could say the same about all the sports channels. Sports can be fun to play but I've never gotten the appeal of watching other people play them.
Not true. Blu-ray sales of the show are at record levels. The market is apparently willing to pay plenty. There is just no way for studios to reconcile the idea that all those people who were exposed to the show via torrents turned around and bought copies afterward.
Since it is completely inconsistent with the argument they make and will continue to make about piracy costing them revenue they will naturally do the right thing and give the profits they've made due to free viral exposure due to piracy back.
And your anal correction has altered the point in what way? Your corrected match still shows selling cheaper widgets to more people as more profitable.
No, 30 large for a REPLICA of a fiberglass prop.
Plus torrent...
Just think of all the lost revenue due to piracy. It couldn't have possibly increased sales by exposing a larger audience to the show. It served one function only, to rob the artists of their god given revenue.
Me four! We exist.
I think you'll find the article you linked contends that scientists do not like the methodologies of the subject. While the article I linked wasn't the source paper it did give the methodology of exposing mice to a substance and then letting them self dose. That methodology is pretty much the standard for testing if something is habit forming aka addictive.
I think the tendency to resist things being called an addiction or addictive stems from the false negative view of addiction that has been thrust on people in the first place. Our brain is a neural net and an addiction is nothing more than a habit that triggers that neural nets reward pathway. If you build a computer neural net and teach it addition by feeding it two numbers over and over and hitting the reward button when it is right that network will form a pattern around the paths that lead to correct results. It will form a habit (aka addiction) of performing addition in response to two numbers because that tends to trigger a reward. If our neurons didn't become addicted to rewards they wouldn't form into chains and patterns. Recognizing patterns is a function of addiction and pretty much all other human learning and behavior is an emergence of recognizing patterns. Addiction is the basis of all human learning and intelligence. It is not a negative thing.
The mother who got pregnant out of wedlock and abandoned her child and has found herself in an abandoned building performing favors and then laying comatose overwhelmed by the effects of drugs. That woman is the product of her own inability to cope with life and escaped into drugs she is not the product of addiction or the drugs she escaped into. A person can be addicted to those same substances or other substances (recreational or otherwise), indulge in them with moderation, and live a normal reasonably healthy and productive life.
"I'd disagree with sugar being addictive. Desired, yes, addictive, not so much"
That is what all addicts say and literally everyone is a sugar addict. Sugar is arguably the most addictive substance known and refined sugar is far more addictive than cocaine. The difference between a 'desired' chemical and addictive one is only availability. Since pretty much everyone is addicted to sugar and generally can't see themselves giving sexual favors in an alley for it or stealing from family or in any of the negative addiction center funded special scenerios they draw a distinction. That distinction is imaginary. First addiction isn't what it is made out to be. Most people wouldn't do those horrible things to feed a habit. Those who would do them, would do them for sugar given an equally scarce and expensive supply.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2007/08/23/is-sugar-more-addictive-than-cocaine.aspx
"A: Don't work, they can't keep a job
B: Don't have money
C: Need money to get high"
There is nothing about drug use that causes A. I think you are confusing lazy vagabonds sitting around getting high with getting high causing people to be lazy vagabonds. For example there is a higher drug use rate in IT and among rocket scientists than in the general population. You can be certain this would be higher yet if workplace drug testing were prohibited.
Where true B and C are generally caused by the black market. For instance, the risks, effects, and cost of cocaine are all slightly reduced vs caffeine. Coca-cola noticed this and switched to caffeine as the next best choice when cocaine was outlawed. Most people have no trouble getting this caffeine and sugar fixes despite these substances being at least as addictive as any black market choice. Because they are dirt cheap.
Cocaine powered the population of the western world during the height of the industrial revolution. Drugs do not make people lazy and unproductive. Having a black market for drugs just increases the cost of lazy and unproductive people.
The WHO did a long term global study on the effects of cocaine use and found no significant indication of negative health or lifestyle effects associated with low to moderate use.
It was the US representative who pushed successfully to block the results from being published. Just because something is being done across the globe doesn't mean it isn't the US who is pushing it. The US is the largest economy in the world and definitely has the ability to force other nations to pass laws in their interest. Just look at the draconian intellectual property policies the US has forced the rest of the world to embrace.
"As opposed to what..."
Legalizing things and NOT regulating the hell out of it.
Definitely, the only risk I see here is the general push to impose extra taxes on these products. Often those taxes are based on current illicit rates. In California for instance the proposed taxes were massive and based on fixed rates instead of a percentage of price. That prevents the market from dropping the price to the appropriate ridiculously low rates most of these substances should be at.
Production of marijuana, poppy, and cocaine is fairly cheap. Using backwoods third world agricultural techniques the average yield for refined cocaine is about 600kg per acre. Marijuana yields 500-600lbs of dried tops per acre. Poppies yielded about 8kg per acre in 2006.
Marijuana averages about $100 per 1/4oz on the black market. Quality cocaine is about $120/gram on the black market.
At $200 an acre farmers are pretty happy in the US: http://www.agrimoney.com/news/corn-growers-profits-to-top-0-an-acre--2796.html
So a legal market wholesale rate for marijuana to give equal profit is $0.36/lb. At that price is it would be on even par with growing corn last year. Cocaine would be $0.33/kg or about $0.15/lb. This does assume that there is enough demand for farmers to be able to sell off their crops and that marijuana and coca carry production costs per acre similar to corn. Somehow I don't think that will be a problem. Those prices might skyrocket to $0.50/lb with real costs! And that will be doubled in the retail market to more like $1/lb. Of course with large scale processing the quality output isn't going to be the same as the current hand manicured and trimmed buds at less than $1/lb I don't think anyone is going to be too concerned. I also don't think anyone is going to be worrying about the THC efficiency loss of ingestion vs smoking at those prices.
Cocaine is completely water soluble. Perhaps a legal market delivery system would entail a sugary carbonated beverage in an aluminum can. We could replace replace caffeine with an addictive stimulant... oh wait.
Minus the gov only stores and the ridiculous recreational taxes people want to lump onto these things I agree. Marijuana is safer than most anything sold over the counter at CVS including asprin by a wide margin. Cocaine is in the ballpark of caffeine and carries similar risks and was commonly used in pretty much the same way during the industrial revolution when the US was a major world producer of coca. Despite the propaganda campaigns heroine is really no better or worse than the other opiates including, hydrocodone (vicodin), percocet, oxycontine, prescribed every day.
It's amazing how much less of a big deal it is to have a gram a day habit when the substance is $1-2 for a 10lb bag at the local grocer. Sugar is one of the most addictive substances known to man.
I was exaggerating a bit. But people are still expecting a stable release number to mean the system is stable and has been in the beta unstable stage for quite a while getting beaten up by the bold and bug fixes applied. It's the kernel, the stable releases have always been solid and people trust that they always will be.
My point remains. The release cycle is about as fast as it can be and still live up to that expectation.
Here in the US we have brown outs. They aren't from storms but from power shortages when everyone runs their climate control systems (heat and a/c) during the peak times in summer and winter. Usually the power doesn't even go completely out, it just hiccups with a visible flicker in the lights.
In any case, it isn't ALL power outages. During the course of working on a system I might power it off in a half booted state a dozen times. If I'm trying to boot a dvd and miss the window I don't wait for the OS to come all the way up and properly power down I'll just hit the switch and start over. EXT3/4 and NTFS are all pretty solid and I've never lost a system because of improper shutdown on those fs. Scratch that, I have had to chkdsk and fixboot the ntfs stuff though I haven't lost one and EXT3+ hasn't needed even that. Well okay, I did lose a system once but that was only because a laptop chose to overheat during a full disk encryption process!
"Of course there's (parts of) southern France where you have one about daily, but I can't see how one can operate a computer there without a battery at all."
I have absolute confidence you could run a personal system with ext3 in those conditions and it would be fine. You could power it off multiple times every day and have no issues.
"When you really don't know what you're talking about it's best to shut up."
Agreed. Feel free at any time. Or perhaps you want to come back with some more of your anecdotal evidence.
"I've been running (many) production servers on Linux since 1995"
I can't imagine what could be a more clear indication of not knowing what you are talking about than bringing servers into a discussion of personal system usage conditions. My linux servers have 400+ day uptimes. You aren't exactly fscking them every time you turn around. Solid as a server means not going down in the first place. Solid as a personal system means recovering from the inevitable constant downs. Windows was and is a joke as a server. But the simple fat fs was more durable than ext2 hands down, it was/is slower and there is no feature comparison even with ext2 but it is definitely more stable.
"what the hell operating system did you think most of the Internet was running on in those days?"
Again. That is a discussion about servers. Off topic.