Depends on your state/ territory laws. In VA a Doctor has to approve prescriptions, before you can buy them from a pharmacist. In other states, a pharmacist can sell you some prescription drugs w/o a Doctor approval. (No narcotics)
When the drug companies send out the representatives, they concentrate on the Doctors, because they are the decision makers.
Most people making 160K/year have very good insurance. If you don't and you have a kid with CF, hello bankruptcy, after you've been sucked dry by the medical/industrial establishment.
When the drug company provides some of your co-pay, they are in effect, jacking the cost of their product up, charging the insurance company, and giving some of that money back to the patient. The overall effect is mo money, mo money, mo money for the drug company.
The insurance companies don't like this. They are already trying to stop drug company co-pay cards. Co-pays incentivize the patients into choosing cheaper drugs. Co-pay kickbacks from the drug companies mess with this. Expect the insurance companies to fight back. The simpliest way to do this is to declare the drug to be experimental.
Sure, but the US doesn't have one of those. There are laws that a hospital/doctor has to treat the patient in front of them. (If it's life or limb threatening)
Might happen. Insurance companies have already tried to block drug company copay cards, because by making the copay small or zero means reduces the incentive that the patient has to use the lower cost drugs.
Many insurance companies and Medicare have "We pay the lowest cost" rules. So if some patients are paying little to nothing, they want all their insurees to pay that cost.
The drug companies can get around this by offering the drug through doctors that don't take whichever insurance has the difficult rules. Sucks to be a patient that isn't close to one of those doctors.
There may be new rules or rules soon to take effect to cover this, but it's a mess right now. Anyway, soaking the rich always sounds good in practice, but eventually the rich get the better of the 99%.
Imagine there's a production or distribution shortage. Who do you think is going to get the drug, and who will wait? Do you think medical necessity will be the sole determination?
Obviously they're playing chicken with the insurance companies, trying to get them to pay out the nose. But would it be better to not publicize these expensive innovations, but only make them available to rich doctors that treat rich patients? Then after the R&D has been recouped, release the knowledge of them to patients of more limited means.
Otherwise, you're just dangling it in front of the poor/ uninsured. Hey, we could keep your kid alive, but neener, neener, neener.
Problem is, these attacks don't primarily rely on bad security for their point of entry, but on fooling users. You can have the most secure network in the world, but if a user clicks a malicious link that uses the latest zero-day exploit on some Adobe product, it doesn't matter.....
The thing is, often there's no need for any Adobe product at all. It's nice to have all the bells and whistles, but you can conduct business with plain ascii text emails, and other simpler, more secure systems. You can also use physical firewalls to prevent data from moving from/to the Internet.
Use a small bottle of anti-matter to trigger the fusion reaction. Currently the world's total supply of anti-matter has the energy equivalent of a match head, I leave the production of more as an exercise to the reader.
There was a recent "Nova" episode about WWII aerial reconnaissance. The Germans did this with ships in harbor. They'd build a floating array of tires and tarps that looked like a ship in a photo. Stereo imaging was able to make out the real ship among the decoys.
Between U2 spy planes, satellites, and ground espionage, maintaining a decoy is hard, and bombs are relatively cheap.
Sure, kill a lot of innocent people for the wrongdoings of their leaders, great job.
I'm guessing you are just trolling though, no sane person could actually want that.
If that mad dictator is just some raving lunatic in an asylum somewhere, then no, it's not appropriate to kill someone else because of his ravings. However, if people are following that mad dictator and paying taxes to his regime, then yes, it's entirely appropriate to kill his military, and if some civilian taxpayers get caught as well, that's ok.
Note. If you are in a military led by, or pay taxes to, a mad dictator, you're a legitimate target too. If we extend the definition of "mad dictator" just a little, no-one is innocent.
It's all still evidence. If this were to go to trial, the defense would say that, yes, there was infringing data, but 99% was legit. If the FBI lets that 99% go into the bit bucket, there goes the case. I suspect though, there's not going to be a real case. After Megauploads is good and dead, they'll just let the perps go.
It doesn't matter. The business, "Megaupload", is gone, the guys running it have spent time in jail. Even if the FBI drops the charges, Megaupload is screwed.
The FBI is using the "Nuke 'em from orbit, it's the only way to be sure", offense.
The article says 50,000,000 users, it doesn't say how many files each might have.
If they keep any of them, there might be embarrassing disclosures like un-owned MP3's downloaded by congresspeople and their kids.
There might be department of Justice employees with unlicensed software. Even White House staffers might have kinky files.
It would take every FBI agent several years to comb through all that data. It's better for them to just destroy it all.
If the universe eventually collapses back into a singularity, there won't be a point to our civilization, either.
On the contrary: if the universe eventually collapses back into a singularity, our civilization will be reduced quite neatly to a single point.
So I'll finally find all those socks I've lost over the years.
There's at least one theory that if the Universe collapses back into a singularity, it will bounce back into a big bang, then create *exactly* the same Universe that we have now.
As an experiment, ReDigi could put a "Send $.05 to the artists" button on each track. The money would be collected and divided among the singers, writers, performers and producers of each track.
The trick is to identify who they all are. Would an artist get 3 shares if they were the singer/songwriter + 1/5th of the band?
You could still sell someone the now-dead CD and liner notes, along with a backup. Should that be legal? If so, what guarantees that the seller didn't retain a copy?
I buy used CDs at yardsales, what guarantees that the seller didn't retain a copy? Do I care? Should I?
If I shouldn't care, why should ReDigi be on the hook for determining if a seller kept a copy?
Mr. Gould left Columbia and joined Technical Research Group, a company in Syosset, on Long Island, to try to turn to the laser into a practical device. The military provided $1 million, but Mr. Gould could not work on the research himself. He was denied security clearance because he had taken part in a Marxist study group with his first wife, Glen Fulwider, in the 1940's.
There's much better coverage of Mr. Gould in actual books. They detail how his notebooks with the original laser design had been taken from him and classified so that he couldn't use them.
think the question of reselling digital music is absurd in the face of reality. It would take someone deeply convinced that people are buying digital music and spending tens of thousands of dollars on it in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Quite an ability to delude themselves it what it would take. It probably says something about a lawyer willing to take on such a client as well.
It's not the government's job to prop up a dying business model. Aluminum used to be very expensive, even more so than silver. The top of the Washington monument is aluminum, at the time a precious metal. Should government have stepped in to guard the value of someone's aluminum store, when the Hall–Héroult process made it almost worthless?
The cost and value of creative works is being adjusted due to the Internet and cheap storage. Some businesses will thrive, and others die off.
Here's some questions the court or legislators should decide:
My parent/sibling/spouse has died and left me $20,000 worth of music I don't listen to. Can I sell it? (or should digital music evaporate when the "owner" dies)
I had a large collection of physical CDs stolen. Can I listen to my backups? Can I sell the backups when I'm done with the music? (or will the record companies help me get my collection back?)
I want to buy an digital copy of a song from a new website. How do I know it's legit?
I'm not really interested in what the answers might be today, as much as I'd like to know what the answers should be. Is it even possible to have strong protections for artists without the occasional incidence of stormtroopers kicking down grandma's door?
Funded by the Department of Defense, the program comes with a steep cost: The DoD wants unlimited rights to everything the students build.
How is this different that the call for all government funded University research to be publicly available?
Is the DoD asking for exclusive access, or just access? Will they be able to take a kid's research, classify it, and forbid that kid from ever working in that area again? (See Gordon Gould and his laser research for an example)
A few years back, some mob boss was being prosecuted. The government brought in a "Mob Speak" expert to testify, translating the "Mob Speak" to English.
Saturday Night Live did a spoof of this. When a mob boss says "I'm going out for Cigarettes", he means "I'm going to kill the guy". When he says, "Do the Laundry", he means "Kill the guy". When he says "That's great.", he means "Thanks for killing the guy".
All you need is a Corporate to English translator, and you'll get all the incriminating evidence you need.
There was a recent NOVA episode about aerial photo reconnaissance during WWII. To make stereoscopic images, they'd fly the plane straight and level over the target. If they could take multiple pictures with 60% overlap, they could use two adjacent images to make one stereoscopic image that was good enough to tell a ship from a decoy.
Any motion picture where the camera pans side to side gives an opportunity to create a "3d" image. If an object moves across a still camera, you can also derive 3d information. (Also if it spins)
An interesting exercise would be to process a film, and make stereoscopic only what what can be done properly, and leave the rest flat. A scene would start out flat, then people and things would begin to jump out at you.
You can teach people to program when they can't read. In fact, teaching them anything might give them the incentive to learn reading, writing and ciphering.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on your state/ territory laws. In VA a Doctor has to approve prescriptions, before you can buy them from a pharmacist. In other states, a pharmacist can sell you some prescription drugs w/o a Doctor approval. (No narcotics)
When the drug companies send out the representatives, they concentrate on the Doctors, because they are the decision makers.
Most people making 160K/year have very good insurance. If you don't and you have a kid with CF, hello bankruptcy, after you've been sucked dry by the medical/industrial establishment.
When the drug company provides some of your co-pay, they are in effect, jacking the cost of their product up, charging the insurance company, and giving some of that money back to the patient. The overall effect is mo money, mo money, mo money for the drug company.
The insurance companies don't like this. They are already trying to stop drug company co-pay cards. Co-pays incentivize the patients into choosing cheaper drugs. Co-pay kickbacks from the drug companies mess with this. Expect the insurance companies to fight back. The simpliest way to do this is to declare the drug to be experimental.
Sure, but the US doesn't have one of those. There are laws that a hospital/doctor has to treat the patient in front of them. (If it's life or limb threatening)
Might happen. Insurance companies have already tried to block drug company copay cards, because by making the copay small or zero means reduces the incentive that the patient has to use the lower cost drugs.
Many insurance companies and Medicare have "We pay the lowest cost" rules. So if some patients are paying little to nothing, they want all their insurees to pay that cost.
The drug companies can get around this by offering the drug through doctors that don't take whichever insurance has the difficult rules. Sucks to be a patient that isn't close to one of those doctors.
There may be new rules or rules soon to take effect to cover this, but it's a mess right now. Anyway, soaking the rich always sounds good in practice, but eventually the rich get the better of the 99%.
Imagine there's a production or distribution shortage. Who do you think is going to get the drug, and who will wait? Do you think medical necessity will be the sole determination?
Obviously they're playing chicken with the insurance companies, trying to get them to pay out the nose. But would it be better to not publicize these expensive innovations, but only make them available to rich doctors that treat rich patients? Then after the R&D has been recouped, release the knowledge of them to patients of more limited means.
Otherwise, you're just dangling it in front of the poor/ uninsured. Hey, we could keep your kid alive, but neener, neener, neener.
Problem is, these attacks don't primarily rely on bad security for their point of entry, but on fooling users. You can have the most secure network in the world, but if a user clicks a malicious link that uses the latest zero-day exploit on some Adobe product, it doesn't matter. ....
The thing is, often there's no need for any Adobe product at all. It's nice to have all the bells and whistles, but you can conduct business with plain ascii text emails, and other simpler, more secure systems. You can also use physical firewalls to prevent data from moving from/to the Internet.
Use a small bottle of anti-matter to trigger the fusion reaction. Currently the world's total supply of anti-matter has the energy equivalent of a match head, I leave the production of more as an exercise to the reader.
There was a recent "Nova" episode about WWII aerial reconnaissance. The Germans did this with ships in harbor. They'd build a floating array of tires and tarps that looked like a ship in a photo. Stereo imaging was able to make out the real ship among the decoys.
Between U2 spy planes, satellites, and ground espionage, maintaining a decoy is hard, and bombs are relatively cheap.
Sure, kill a lot of innocent people for the wrongdoings of their leaders, great job. I'm guessing you are just trolling though, no sane person could actually want that.
If that mad dictator is just some raving lunatic in an asylum somewhere, then no, it's not appropriate to kill someone else because of his ravings. However, if people are following that mad dictator and paying taxes to his regime, then yes, it's entirely appropriate to kill his military, and if some civilian taxpayers get caught as well, that's ok.
Note. If you are in a military led by, or pay taxes to, a mad dictator, you're a legitimate target too. If we extend the definition of "mad dictator" just a little, no-one is innocent.
It's all still evidence. If this were to go to trial, the defense would say that, yes, there was infringing data, but 99% was legit. If the FBI lets that 99% go into the bit bucket, there goes the case. I suspect though, there's not going to be a real case. After Megauploads is good and dead, they'll just let the perps go.
The downloaders that downloaded copyright infringing material can re-download somewhere else.
Customers that downloaded original stuff are screwed if they can't find a copy.
It doesn't matter. The business, "Megaupload", is gone, the guys running it have spent time in jail. Even if the FBI drops the charges, Megaupload is screwed.
The FBI is using the "Nuke 'em from orbit, it's the only way to be sure", offense.
The article says 50,000,000 users, it doesn't say how many files each might have.
If they keep any of them, there might be embarrassing disclosures like un-owned MP3's downloaded by congresspeople and their kids. There might be department of Justice employees with unlicensed software. Even White House staffers might have kinky files.
It would take every FBI agent several years to comb through all that data. It's better for them to just destroy it all.
If the universe eventually collapses back into a singularity, there won't be a point to our civilization, either.
On the contrary: if the universe eventually collapses back into a singularity, our civilization will be reduced quite neatly to a single point.
So I'll finally find all those socks I've lost over the years.
There's at least one theory that if the Universe collapses back into a singularity, it will bounce back into a big bang, then create *exactly* the same Universe that we have now.
As an experiment, ReDigi could put a "Send $.05 to the artists" button on each track. The money would be collected and divided among the singers, writers, performers and producers of each track.
The trick is to identify who they all are. Would an artist get 3 shares if they were the singer/songwriter + 1/5th of the band?
You could still sell someone the now-dead CD and liner notes, along with a backup. Should that be legal? If so, what guarantees that the seller didn't retain a copy?
I buy used CDs at yardsales, what guarantees that the seller didn't retain a copy? Do I care? Should I?
If I shouldn't care, why should ReDigi be on the hook for determining if a seller kept a copy?
Mr. Gould left Columbia and joined Technical Research Group, a company in Syosset, on Long Island, to try to turn to the laser into a practical device. The military provided $1 million, but Mr. Gould could not work on the research himself. He was denied security clearance because he had taken part in a Marxist study group with his first wife, Glen Fulwider, in the 1940's.
There's much better coverage of Mr. Gould in actual books. They detail how his notebooks with the original laser design had been taken from him and classified so that he couldn't use them.
You can't resell something that cannot be adequately protected through DRM
The problem is that Physics and Computer Science show that there can be no cheap and effective DRM.
think the question of reselling digital music is absurd in the face of reality. It would take someone deeply convinced that people are buying digital music and spending tens of thousands of dollars on it in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Quite an ability to delude themselves it what it would take. It probably says something about a lawyer willing to take on such a client as well.
It's not the government's job to prop up a dying business model. Aluminum used to be very expensive, even more so than silver. The top of the Washington monument is aluminum, at the time a precious metal. Should government have stepped in to guard the value of someone's aluminum store, when the Hall–Héroult process made it almost worthless?
The cost and value of creative works is being adjusted due to the Internet and cheap storage. Some businesses will thrive, and others die off.
Here's some questions the court or legislators should decide:
My parent/sibling/spouse has died and left me $20,000 worth of music I don't listen to. Can I sell it? (or should digital music evaporate when the "owner" dies)
I had a large collection of physical CDs stolen. Can I listen to my backups? Can I sell the backups when I'm done with the music? (or will the record companies help me get my collection back?)
I want to buy an digital copy of a song from a new website. How do I know it's legit?
I'm not really interested in what the answers might be today, as much as I'd like to know what the answers should be. Is it even possible to have strong protections for artists without the occasional incidence of stormtroopers kicking down grandma's door?
Funded by the Department of Defense, the program comes with a steep cost: The DoD wants unlimited rights to everything the students build.
How is this different that the call for all government funded University research to be publicly available?
Is the DoD asking for exclusive access, or just access? Will they be able to take a kid's research, classify it, and forbid that kid from ever working in that area again? (See Gordon Gould and his laser research for an example)
A few years back, some mob boss was being prosecuted. The government brought in a "Mob Speak" expert to testify, translating the "Mob Speak" to English.
Saturday Night Live did a spoof of this. When a mob boss says "I'm going out for Cigarettes", he means "I'm going to kill the guy". When he says, "Do the Laundry", he means "Kill the guy". When he says "That's great.", he means "Thanks for killing the guy".
All you need is a Corporate to English translator, and you'll get all the incriminating evidence you need.
There was a recent NOVA episode about aerial photo reconnaissance during WWII. To make stereoscopic images, they'd fly the plane straight and level over the target. If they could take multiple pictures with 60% overlap, they could use two adjacent images to make one stereoscopic image that was good enough to tell a ship from a decoy.
Any motion picture where the camera pans side to side gives an opportunity to create a "3d" image. If an object moves across a still camera, you can also derive 3d information. (Also if it spins)
An interesting exercise would be to process a film, and make stereoscopic only what what can be done properly, and leave the rest flat. A scene would start out flat, then people and things would begin to jump out at you.
You can teach people to program when they can't read. In fact, teaching them anything might give them the incentive to learn reading, writing and ciphering.