What would the DPRK possibly benefit by nuking Japan, other than the safe knowledge they'd need a pretty accurate stopwatch to measure the very short span of time between them doing that and their government being vaporized as every other nation on Earth expressed their displeasure with large amounts of ordinance.
The prevailing winds in Korea vary by season and at one time or another seem to come from every direction. There doesn't seem to be a politically irrelevant wind direction. The fallout from vaporizing N.K. either falls on our allies in S.K. or Japan (or a zillion other places) or falls on the ChiComs and they would likely not appreciate the fallout. So, the N.K. are nuke-proof, more or less. Worst case, weird as this sounds, they nuke a wasteland area of their own country when the fallout lands perfectly on Japan and use that as the excuse to start the invasion of the south. Or they nuke their own territory when the winds are blowing south, and they follow the wind.
What a convenient time to begin the invasion of S.K. anyway, while everyone is distracted by the third big crater in Japan... Especially since they control the "when" and they can perfectly well mobilize everyone on the border and depopulate their cities and other hard targets.
Now, how do we respond to a human wave with no hard targets worth hitting, possibly in a nuclear fallout scenario?
If SW raid 5, disregard rest of my post, I think...
If the bios says its totally dead, it'll skip to the second. No problem.
Or, if using mirroring, and removable drive caddies, swap the drives or simply pull the primary. That'll make it switch to the "second" drive for certain.
I've been doing this for years, and yes I have successfully pulled both drives (not at the same time of course). I also had a drive failure, and successfully fixed it this way.
If you forget to install grub on the second drive, of course, it doesn't work so well.
Perhaps with a nuclear reactor it is impossible to know with 100% certainty what a totally safe shutdown condition is?
Little do you apparently know, you got the TMI accident pretty much correct. So, you've got multiple coolant pumps, which is great in case one breaks, and a spaghetti of interconnected valves connecting it all, which is great redundancy. Coolant is pouring out of the works but you cant figure out where it's coming from. Figuring out the exact configuration of valves and pumps based on past conditions and instruments is darn near that computer science "halting problem". Add in a healthy dose of "this can't possibly be happening". Oh, and some of your monitoring instruments and some of the valves are not entirely working, but you don't know which is broke and which is working, much less why. Each plant is designed completely new from the ground up, so its not like experience at a different plant will help, beyond the basic background knowledge that all share anyway. Everyone practices the heck out of small little simple easily defined and measured metrics, but combine a zillion simple rules and you get a chaotic unpredictable overall system. And since what is happening was not predicted at design time, procedure-izing it or automating it would only make the wrong decisions quicker. Some of the first guess/judgements made seemed correct, but some turned out wrong. After all, 99.99999% of the time in the past, your first judgment was correct, since you are a highly trained and experienced operator/engineer. Other than that.... no problem.
Redundant systems are great, but anyone else ever notice that more data center power outages are caused by switchgear / batteries / generators than by electric company problems? That's what I've seen over a couple decades. Nukes are no different. The backup to the backup to the backup to the backup might spring a leak and take the whole thing down....
The weirdest part of the original quote is the poster knows nothing about trains and steam engines, or what people believed a century ago. It does sound nice, but is totally wrong.
Take, for example, this story from 1895, a mere 114 years ago, of a speed run, which means everything tuned up to the max, considerable effort to keep all other traffic out of the way, etc, but hardly, "body falling apart" levels.
http://mikes.railhistory.railfan.net/r070.html.... Thus an average of 63.3 miles an hour, including three stops and both Shap and Beattock summits (the latter 1,015 ft. above the sea), was maintained over the whole distance of 540 miles....
More topical, just a decade later in 1905, still over a century ago, there was a regular scheduled run, nothing special, just another run, from atlantic city to camden, that required an AVERAGE speed along the route above 60 MPH, a mile a minute. Sometimes it was late, but pretty much ran on time.
Don't downhill skiers generally get above 50 MPH too?
No, I'm sad to report Conficker got him. Haven't you been watching the news? Remember when there were terrorists hiding behind every tree trunk waiting to pounce on us? Well, conficker got them too.
I wonder if having a parental-reported autistic spectrum disorder is the same as actually having autism?
According to the article, they talked to the kids doctors for 10 of the 72 positive reports, and the doctors agreed. So at least or around 90% of the time, and assuming the doctor is telling the truth, and assuming you live in Sweden, I'd say the answer is "yes".
Think of all the parental claims you've ever heard that are ridiculous "I don't know what he does in school, but he's a perfect little angel at home" or "my kid would never do drugs" or the ever popular, "but she's never even kissed a boy". Apparently although some parents (admittedly, mostly of teenagers) clearly live in an alternate universe, the researchers verified that's not the case w/ regards to parents of autistic kids.
Well, I guess we know whats on your mind... think adjective, not verb. That disease is much more common in boys than girls.
What is "autistic spectrum"?
The symptoms range from pretty freaking minor to pretty awful. Despite there being no firm obvious medically detectable difference between diseases, and also that it is always possible to find a patient right in the middle of two precisely defined "definitions" the medical community overall prefers to label different degrees of one disease as entirely separate diseases, and a semi-passive aggressive way to make fun of that is to refer to "the autistic spectrum". Not all doctors agree, and many of them also use terms like "autistic spectrum".
Can parents report autistic behavior accurately?
Guess you didn't read the article, since it explained that 72 parents told them they had a diagnosis, then the surveyors checked up on ten of them by talking to their doctors, and the story from the parents matched the doctors story. Ten out of ten told the truth, so probably, at least 90% of the 72 did accurately report a positive diagnosis. There are also some notes in the article about how they had to follow the swedish rules for medical reporting with regards to finding that info, no idea what that requires. There are some diseases that people lie about, most commonly the level of obesity, also there are mental health problems that inherently involve lying, but lying about a positive autism diagnosis is apparently not an issue, at least in Sweden. Doesn't look like they checked up on people whom claimed negative but perhaps their doctors might say positive, so its not exactly a perfect study, but not too bad.
Was whoever wrote the article or placed the article in Scientific American paid to sensationalize the story?
Dude don't know if you've read SciAm over a long period, but over decades its gone from a somewhat light version of Science or Nature toward something that I feel is the "weekly world news" or "national enquirer" of the science journalism world. Also page count has gone from small town phone book to mid double digits at best. Its a shame the editors ran it into the ground and stomped on the corpse... if they had not, I'd still be a subscriber. In fact, if they had not run it into the ground, I'd be glad to pay twice the subscription fee. So, in summary, uh, yeah, it might be just slightly sensationalized.
If perl looks like line noise, but at least ASCII line noise, APL looks like... Klingon? You know you're in big trouble when you need unicode to display the language. UTF-8 is fine for people's names in changelogs, or even the occasional comment, but for the language itself, its a bit of a problem.
There are also goofy languages that are not use for real projects like whitespace, but I don't think they should count.
"Although similar, it builds on 1960s technology"? While the old one was build on 1860 technology? I don't get it.
You have to realize these guys are journalists. Its big, and vaguely cylindrical, therefore its "the same technology". Rest assured they aren't using discrete transistors and core memory.
Huge mistake right there.... budget breakdown is more like:
30% various licensing fees for theme, art, and music. 30% for marketing, tv commercials, paid for advertorials and complimentary copy in magazines and online, print ads, posters in stores, parties for the media, show expenses. 30% for executive management bonuses, HR, finance, other non-frontline cost centers 8% for customer service to handle all the bugs, purchasing/shipping department, technical writers, etc. 2% for developer pay, at most.
The percentages vary slightly from megacorp to megacorp, but not much.
The question that will not be asked, is why the overhead approaches 99% yet provides so little impact on the final gameplay experience.
Actually, I think it would be pretty sweet having that extra dimension to worry about when building my huge towers.
No, it would be hideous. It would change from a game where you primarily "stick stuff together" to a game where you primarily scroll around for minutes between sticking things together, and getting frustrated when you didn't scroll around for hours to get it just right and it collapses. Also using a basically 2D control system to mess with a virtual 3D world merely gets in the way and ruins the gameplay.
Also would change the scale of the game from simple giant 2D structures to "normal real world" small squat 3D structures. That would utterly ruin the weirdness factor / cool art/other world-li-ness factor.
3D would turn WoG into an absolutely hideous play-skool autocad.
Here is another fine example... What, if anything, does 3D bring to the civilization series, or for that matter, anything ever sold by matrixgames or spiderwebsoftware? If all 3D brings is a very expensive cut scene that interrupts the action, why not improve the game by removing that annoying interruption? Thus saving huge bucks that can go into gameplay, etc.
Can someone explain why we need a dedicated desktop version?
You ever hear of "think outside the box"? There are lots of people whom simply can not. Microsoft made a lot of money by convincing people they need different OS for server and desktop and charging alot more for the server, therefore linux has to do the same thing.
Kind of like process switching and creation was horrifically slow on windows, so MS needed "lightweight threads". But processes on linux are not slow, not much slower than threads, at least compared to windows, so why bother on linux? But linux "needs" threads because windows has them.
Another good example is microsoft style backup technologies for linux. With a zillion archs and mirrors, there's no way I can back up/usr/bin/ls as well as debian does. So, why back it up? If you exclude every non-config file in the packaging system backups and restores work quicker. Besides, if I back up the entire filesystem of my AMD64 fileserver, what good is my backup of/usr/bin/ls if I move it to an ARM based NSLU2 or a non-AMD64 arch as part of the restore?
An excellent reason not to use separate OS for desktop and client can be seen in the "unison" file replication package. It's entirely too easy to have incompatible protocol versions on the client and server unless you have the same software on both. I have heard of, although not experienced, similar compatibility problems between NFS versions.
Voicepulse just discontinued their support of the IAX protocol because supposedly it didn't handle redundancy properly.
I also have no first hand knowledge, other than suffering thru the IAX to SIP conversion as a customer, but I heard the problem was IAX is too easy to get to work... It Just Works Every Time. So, their support folks were flooded with people whom were "skilled" enough to get IAX to work but had no idea how to run "vi" to configure their asterisk or how to configure their phones or just the most basic trivial stuff that comes with running a PBX.
On the other hand, SIP is such an unholy PITA to securely run thru firewalls and NAT that anyone whom can get it to work is probably either smart enough or lucky enough or rich enough (hire consultants) or doesn't care at all about security, so they will not call support and ask stupid questions.
Again, just making it clear I have no secret internal info from voicepulse, but the story I heard does make a certain kind of sense.
I'm mystified as to how to set up a dial plan for this. Maybe the answer is not to, just ignore it?
I have a perfectly good asterisk PBX at home with voicepulse as a IAX err... SIP provider, which used the much more modern and firewall friendly IAX protocol but dumped it for the PITA ancient pre-NAT pre-firewall era SIP protocol last month. Other than that major headache, they are great and only cost me 1/2 of a cent per minute outgoing.
Now skype will do free on-skype-net calls but offnet is 2 cents per minute per the article, which is a mere four times my current providers cost and they don't even offer off-net incoming like voicepulse. So I need two providers minimum.
So, whats in it for me? How do I only route skype user calls out the skype hole? I guess if I know in advance I can make custom plan for individual numbers.
Also saving a whopping half cent per minute only to skype users, what is the payback time for a business that pays a consultant $100 per hour to set this thing up?
And whats in it for skype? Lots of talk about "billions of dollars" in the article, which at 2 cents billable per minute, would only take something like 95000 call-years to gross a single billion.
Your list of outcomes is incomplete - I'd at the very least put "the treatment leads them to suffer more than they already do" far ahead of any others.
Yes for cosmetic genetic engineering stuff like changing eye color or womens chest size I'd agree, the possible downsides could be pretty icky.
But, MD is not exactly a joyous party... Even if you intentionally tried, how do you suggest you'd make it even worse? You'd have to do some pretty ridiculous scaremongering like claiming they "could" get something like rabies or ebola, or "could" become lycanthropes. But that doesn't sound very responsible in their situation.
Has anyone ever anywhere suggested a line item opt out?
I know there are people out there who feel the need to keep health secrets. Probably they are clinically paranoid, but that's not the issue I'm discussing here (although I will make fun of them anyway).
Why not have a line item opt out?
Normal or highly extroverted people would not opt out of any line item because they don't care. Most old people I know seem to greatly enjoy telling everyone about their operations and such, so the old people's unwillingness to learn something new would be no problem.
People whom in my opinion are unbalanced would opt out of absolutely every line. And that's perfectly OK. Of course if a parent opts out a line for their kids stating they are allergic to bee stings, and the kid dies of a bee sting, who gets the blame?
Personally I couldn't care less if everyone on slashdot learns I am allergic to amoxocilian and I had a mild bout of pneumonia back in 04 that was cured in about 4 hours with a three pack of zithromycin. But IF I had something to hide, I'd just log in and click "hide" and away it goes like it never happened.
Doesn't seem like much of a technological challenge.
Another interesting option would be a nationwide registry of stuff you'd WANT to publicize, like allergies. Sign a release form and the dr will post it. That seems like a blindingly good idea in general.
Slashdot Mirror
and the PD always goes in the Ann B. Davis spot
You must be a tech writer, correct? That is the weirdest description I've ever read (and figured out).
What would the DPRK possibly benefit by nuking Japan, other than the safe knowledge they'd need a pretty accurate stopwatch to measure the very short span of time between them doing that and their government being vaporized as every other nation on Earth expressed their displeasure with large amounts of ordinance.
Disagree. According to:
http://www.thewoodexplorer.com/countrydata/Korea-South/home.html
The prevailing winds in Korea vary by season and at one time or another seem to come from every direction. There doesn't seem to be a politically irrelevant wind direction. The fallout from vaporizing N.K. either falls on our allies in S.K. or Japan (or a zillion other places) or falls on the ChiComs and they would likely not appreciate the fallout. So, the N.K. are nuke-proof, more or less. Worst case, weird as this sounds, they nuke a wasteland area of their own country when the fallout lands perfectly on Japan and use that as the excuse to start the invasion of the south. Or they nuke their own territory when the winds are blowing south, and they follow the wind.
What a convenient time to begin the invasion of S.K. anyway, while everyone is distracted by the third big crater in Japan... Especially since they control the "when" and they can perfectly well mobilize everyone on the border and depopulate their cities and other hard targets.
Now, how do we respond to a human wave with no hard targets worth hitting, possibly in a nuclear fallout scenario?
If SW raid 5, disregard rest of my post, I think...
If the bios says its totally dead, it'll skip to the second. No problem.
Or, if using mirroring, and removable drive caddies, swap the drives or simply pull the primary. That'll make it switch to the "second" drive for certain.
I've been doing this for years, and yes I have successfully pulled both drives (not at the same time of course). I also had a drive failure, and successfully fixed it this way.
If you forget to install grub on the second drive, of course, it doesn't work so well.
Perhaps with a nuclear reactor it is impossible to know with 100% certainty what a totally safe shutdown condition is?
Little do you apparently know, you got the TMI accident pretty much correct. So, you've got multiple coolant pumps, which is great in case one breaks, and a spaghetti of interconnected valves connecting it all, which is great redundancy. Coolant is pouring out of the works but you cant figure out where it's coming from. Figuring out the exact configuration of valves and pumps based on past conditions and instruments is darn near that computer science "halting problem". Add in a healthy dose of "this can't possibly be happening". Oh, and some of your monitoring instruments and some of the valves are not entirely working, but you don't know which is broke and which is working, much less why. Each plant is designed completely new from the ground up, so its not like experience at a different plant will help, beyond the basic background knowledge that all share anyway. Everyone practices the heck out of small little simple easily defined and measured metrics, but combine a zillion simple rules and you get a chaotic unpredictable overall system. And since what is happening was not predicted at design time, procedure-izing it or automating it would only make the wrong decisions quicker. Some of the first guess/judgements made seemed correct, but some turned out wrong. After all, 99.99999% of the time in the past, your first judgment was correct, since you are a highly trained and experienced operator/engineer. Other than that.... no problem.
Redundant systems are great, but anyone else ever notice that more data center power outages are caused by switchgear / batteries / generators than by electric company problems? That's what I've seen over a couple decades. Nukes are no different. The backup to the backup to the backup to the backup might spring a leak and take the whole thing down....
The weirdest part of the original quote is the poster knows nothing about trains and steam engines, or what people believed a century ago. It does sound nice, but is totally wrong.
Take, for example, this story from 1895, a mere 114 years ago, of a speed run, which means everything tuned up to the max, considerable effort to keep all other traffic out of the way, etc, but hardly, "body falling apart" levels.
http://mikes.railhistory.railfan.net/r070.html .... Thus an average of 63.3 miles an hour, including three stops and both Shap and Beattock summits (the latter 1,015 ft. above the sea), was maintained over the whole distance of 540 miles ....
More topical, just a decade later in 1905, still over a century ago, there was a regular scheduled run, nothing special, just another run, from atlantic city to camden, that required an AVERAGE speed along the route above 60 MPH, a mile a minute. Sometimes it was late, but pretty much ran on time.
Don't downhill skiers generally get above 50 MPH too?
Missed it by that much...
Yeah, by a whole third of the ENTIRE 4 digit club.
Now, the prime number achievement, that actually was a real near miss by you.. the guy one before you, 103069, is in the prime number club.
(would be real funny if he posted a response to this)
Dude.. the guy is still alive!
No, I'm sad to report Conficker got him. Haven't you been watching the news? Remember when there were terrorists hiding behind every tree trunk waiting to pounce on us? Well, conficker got them too.
All my radio stations were switched to fox news radio.
A station that is not clearchannel still exists?
I read 2^4 days in a row. I knew there was a reason I logged out... I'd have made 2^7 easy...
Oh you six digit UID kids... I'd be getting close to 2^12 if I signed up for an account when they came out, instead of just lurking.
Now we just need little icons representing each of our achievements next to our names.
Little goatse icons in a horizontal row to the right of "homepage"... just what I want to see first thing in the morning.
I wonder if having a parental-reported autistic spectrum disorder is the same as actually having autism?
According to the article, they talked to the kids doctors for 10 of the 72 positive reports, and the doctors agreed. So at least or around 90% of the time, and assuming the doctor is telling the truth, and assuming you live in Sweden, I'd say the answer is "yes".
Think of all the parental claims you've ever heard that are ridiculous "I don't know what he does in school, but he's a perfect little angel at home" or "my kid would never do drugs" or the ever popular, "but she's never even kissed a boy". Apparently although some parents (admittedly, mostly of teenagers) clearly live in an alternate universe, the researchers verified that's not the case w/ regards to parents of autistic kids.
What? Male sex?
Well, I guess we know whats on your mind... think adjective, not verb. That disease is much more common in boys than girls.
What is "autistic spectrum"?
The symptoms range from pretty freaking minor to pretty awful. Despite there being no firm obvious medically detectable difference between diseases, and also that it is always possible to find a patient right in the middle of two precisely defined "definitions" the medical community overall prefers to label different degrees of one disease as entirely separate diseases, and a semi-passive aggressive way to make fun of that is to refer to "the autistic spectrum". Not all doctors agree, and many of them also use terms like "autistic spectrum".
Can parents report autistic behavior accurately?
Guess you didn't read the article, since it explained that 72 parents told them they had a diagnosis, then the surveyors checked up on ten of them by talking to their doctors, and the story from the parents matched the doctors story. Ten out of ten told the truth, so probably, at least 90% of the 72 did accurately report a positive diagnosis. There are also some notes in the article about how they had to follow the swedish rules for medical reporting with regards to finding that info, no idea what that requires. There are some diseases that people lie about, most commonly the level of obesity, also there are mental health problems that inherently involve lying, but lying about a positive autism diagnosis is apparently not an issue, at least in Sweden. Doesn't look like they checked up on people whom claimed negative but perhaps their doctors might say positive, so its not exactly a perfect study, but not too bad.
Was whoever wrote the article or placed the article in Scientific American paid to sensationalize the story?
Dude don't know if you've read SciAm over a long period, but over decades its gone from a somewhat light version of Science or Nature toward something that I feel is the "weekly world news" or "national enquirer" of the science journalism world. Also page count has gone from small town phone book to mid double digits at best. Its a shame the editors ran it into the ground and stomped on the corpse... if they had not, I'd still be a subscriber. In fact, if they had not run it into the ground, I'd be glad to pay twice the subscription fee. So, in summary, uh, yeah, it might be just slightly sensationalized.
If you are, you work with some obscure programming language that has non-English keywords/reserved words.
APL, confusing people since 1957
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)
If perl looks like line noise, but at least ASCII line noise, APL looks like ... Klingon? You know you're in big trouble when you need unicode to display the language. UTF-8 is fine for people's names in changelogs, or even the occasional comment, but for the language itself, its a bit of a problem.
There are also goofy languages that are not use for real projects like whitespace, but I don't think they should count.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)
"Although similar, it builds on 1960s technology"? While the old one was build on 1860 technology? I don't get it.
You have to realize these guys are journalists. Its big, and vaguely cylindrical, therefore its "the same technology". Rest assured they aren't using discrete transistors and core memory.
Cost for the developers is $25m
Huge mistake right there.... budget breakdown is more like:
30% various licensing fees for theme, art, and music.
30% for marketing, tv commercials, paid for advertorials and complimentary copy in magazines and online, print ads, posters in stores, parties for the media, show expenses.
30% for executive management bonuses, HR, finance, other non-frontline cost centers
8% for customer service to handle all the bugs, purchasing/shipping department, technical writers, etc.
2% for developer pay, at most.
The percentages vary slightly from megacorp to megacorp, but not much.
The question that will not be asked, is why the overhead approaches 99% yet provides so little impact on the final gameplay experience.
Actually, I think it would be pretty sweet having that extra dimension to worry about when building my huge towers.
No, it would be hideous. It would change from a game where you primarily "stick stuff together" to a game where you primarily scroll around for minutes between sticking things together, and getting frustrated when you didn't scroll around for hours to get it just right and it collapses. Also using a basically 2D control system to mess with a virtual 3D world merely gets in the way and ruins the gameplay.
Also would change the scale of the game from simple giant 2D structures to "normal real world" small squat 3D structures. That would utterly ruin the weirdness factor / cool art /other world-li-ness factor.
3D would turn WoG into an absolutely hideous play-skool autocad.
Here is another fine example... What, if anything, does 3D bring to the civilization series, or for that matter, anything ever sold by matrixgames or spiderwebsoftware? If all 3D brings is a very expensive cut scene that interrupts the action, why not improve the game by removing that annoying interruption? Thus saving huge bucks that can go into gameplay, etc.
I had the same reaction. And it was just SOOOOO successful last time we went down this road.
That being said, the hardware is about two orders of magnitude more powerful than it was in the 90s.
It wasn't unsuccessful because it was slow. It was unsuccessful because it was USELESS (for all but gaming or 3d CAD purposes).
Last time around in the late 90s I fooled around with making 3d-graphical visualizations of data. Turned out to be totally useless.
Maybe virtual pr0n. Maybe. Other than pr0n, gaming, and some CAD, what good is it?
Can someone explain why we need a dedicated desktop version?
You ever hear of "think outside the box"? There are lots of people whom simply can not. Microsoft made a lot of money by convincing people they need different OS for server and desktop and charging alot more for the server, therefore linux has to do the same thing.
Kind of like process switching and creation was horrifically slow on windows, so MS needed "lightweight threads". But processes on linux are not slow, not much slower than threads, at least compared to windows, so why bother on linux? But linux "needs" threads because windows has them.
Another good example is microsoft style backup technologies for linux. With a zillion archs and mirrors, there's no way I can back up /usr/bin/ls as well as debian does. So, why back it up? If you exclude every non-config file in the packaging system backups and restores work quicker. Besides, if I back up the entire filesystem of my AMD64 fileserver, what good is my backup of /usr/bin/ls if I move it to an ARM based NSLU2 or a non-AMD64 arch as part of the restore?
An excellent reason not to use separate OS for desktop and client can be seen in the "unison" file replication package. It's entirely too easy to have incompatible protocol versions on the client and server unless you have the same software on both. I have heard of, although not experienced, similar compatibility problems between NFS versions.
Also, what's with the assumption that the desktop won't be relevant in 5 years? That seems highly unlikely.
It means he doesn't think he can catch up with Ubuntu even after 5 years.
Voicepulse just discontinued their support of the IAX protocol because supposedly it didn't handle redundancy properly.
I also have no first hand knowledge, other than suffering thru the IAX to SIP conversion as a customer, but I heard the problem was IAX is too easy to get to work... It Just Works Every Time. So, their support folks were flooded with people whom were "skilled" enough to get IAX to work but had no idea how to run "vi" to configure their asterisk or how to configure their phones or just the most basic trivial stuff that comes with running a PBX.
On the other hand, SIP is such an unholy PITA to securely run thru firewalls and NAT that anyone whom can get it to work is probably either smart enough or lucky enough or rich enough (hire consultants) or doesn't care at all about security, so they will not call support and ask stupid questions.
Again, just making it clear I have no secret internal info from voicepulse, but the story I heard does make a certain kind of sense.
54 ?
You meant six by seven, I think.
I'm mystified as to how to set up a dial plan for this. Maybe the answer is not to, just ignore it?
I have a perfectly good asterisk PBX at home with voicepulse as a IAX err... SIP provider, which used the much more modern and firewall friendly IAX protocol but dumped it for the PITA ancient pre-NAT pre-firewall era SIP protocol last month. Other than that major headache, they are great and only cost me 1/2 of a cent per minute outgoing.
Now skype will do free on-skype-net calls but offnet is 2 cents per minute per the article, which is a mere four times my current providers cost and they don't even offer off-net incoming like voicepulse. So I need two providers minimum.
So, whats in it for me? How do I only route skype user calls out the skype hole? I guess if I know in advance I can make custom plan for individual numbers.
Also saving a whopping half cent per minute only to skype users, what is the payback time for a business that pays a consultant $100 per hour to set this thing up?
And whats in it for skype? Lots of talk about "billions of dollars" in the article, which at 2 cents billable per minute, would only take something like 95000 call-years to gross a single billion.
Zeppelins, Balloons, Bottle Rockets and Jets
So what is management, an anti-aircraft gun?
Your list of outcomes is incomplete - I'd at the very least put "the treatment leads them to suffer more than they already do" far ahead of any others.
Yes for cosmetic genetic engineering stuff like changing eye color or womens chest size I'd agree, the possible downsides could be pretty icky.
But, MD is not exactly a joyous party... Even if you intentionally tried, how do you suggest you'd make it even worse? You'd have to do some pretty ridiculous scaremongering like claiming they "could" get something like rabies or ebola, or "could" become lycanthropes. But that doesn't sound very responsible in their situation.
Has anyone ever anywhere suggested a line item opt out?
I know there are people out there who feel the need to keep health secrets. Probably they are clinically paranoid, but that's not the issue I'm discussing here (although I will make fun of them anyway).
Why not have a line item opt out?
Normal or highly extroverted people would not opt out of any line item because they don't care. Most old people I know seem to greatly enjoy telling everyone about their operations and such, so the old people's unwillingness to learn something new would be no problem.
People whom in my opinion are unbalanced would opt out of absolutely every line. And that's perfectly OK. Of course if a parent opts out a line for their kids stating they are allergic to bee stings, and the kid dies of a bee sting, who gets the blame?
Personally I couldn't care less if everyone on slashdot learns I am allergic to amoxocilian and I had a mild bout of pneumonia back in 04 that was cured in about 4 hours with a three pack of zithromycin. But IF I had something to hide, I'd just log in and click "hide" and away it goes like it never happened.
Doesn't seem like much of a technological challenge.
Another interesting option would be a nationwide registry of stuff you'd WANT to publicize, like allergies. Sign a release form and the dr will post it. That seems like a blindingly good idea in general.