How do you tell if someone is astroturfing? Basically, by the same method. If every person, by every means at their disposal, comes to the absolutely unequivocal decision that something is astroturfing, so far beyond all even remotely reasonable doubt that you could put a complete list of every unreasonable doubt left, written in crayon, in an Altoids tin without being remotely concerned about the space, then it's astroturfing.
So if someone goes to Saudi Arabia and tells people there humans evolved he's astroturfing? He might be lucky and be allowed to walk away with his life. Maybe they'll think he's crazy, and you're not supposed to harm crazy people. Heck, as a percentage more people in Turkey believe in evolution than people in the US do.
Funny. When I fill a prescription in the US, the cheapest pharmacy in my city (the largest city in a medium-size state) is $330. The cheapest US mailorder source I've found (drugstore.com) is $235. If I order it from a Canadian pharmacy, the order is filled by a Swiss pharmacy (selling the same drug, made by the US pharmaceutical company in Australia) it costs $117, including air shipping. It's traveled almost all the way around the world, and has an extra middleman, and yet it costs a third of what it does here. And you're saying this is somehow the fault of the government?
True, that's why a lot of seniors in border states, like Maine and Washington, get a large van or bus and go on field trips to Canada to buy the drugs they need. Canada basically buys the drugs, or tells the companies how much they can sale drugs for. As do many other countries. This was a big stink in congress recently, some wanted to prevent people in the US from buying drugs from Canada. In this sense the US subsidizes drugs for the rest of the world, prices are higher in the US because drug companies know they can't sale drugs for as much in other countries. In a sense it is a government manufactured problem, by Canada telling companies they have to sell at a given price and not more it raises the prices in those countries without the government doing it. Me, I'd allow anybody to buy any drug they want from anywhere. And that includes so called illegal street drugs, or experimental drugs.
You don't have to (actually, you can't) let the legislature decide what's frivolous, but you can force the losing party to pay all legal fees. As it is, it costs money to win a lawsuit, and that's really what makes frivolous lawsuits damaging.
On the face of it this seems reasonable but by having the loser pay all costs it will prevent even some with good cases from filing a lawsuit. Some won't take the risk they will lose. I was involved in a case that if we had a system like that there never would of been a settlement. After my classes in college one day I was riding my bike when a moving van, Apartment Movers, hit me. Defense lawyers are good at twisting facts around and adding conjecture to make someone innocent look guilty, if they aren't they aren't good lawyers. Even though the driver was at fault, he had a record of causing accidents and had left his home state and moved to mine because the state issued an arrest warrant for him, the lawyers might have made it look like it was my fault. My family would never of been able to pay my medical bills, they were more than $120,000 not including all the therapy I went through. Forget their lawyers, I don't know how much they paid, but in the first couple of months of my case the lawyer my family hired, I was in a coma, paid more than $100,000 out of pocket in expenses.
Why does health insurance need to be income based? Based solely on demographics, I would expect the rich to pay lower premiums on average then the poor. Most employers allow health plans to be opted out of, and if the cost for private insurance outside of the company (which will definitely not be based on percentage of income) is lower than inside, and then I expect that they would jump out and do so.
Because employers pay premiums on insurance they offer employees said insurance should be cheaper than private insurance.
(a) How much would BMS have been able to develop the drug for had they paid for it rather than the government? Was government research actually more effecient, or would we have been better off just having BMS do it?
I don't have the answer to either question.
(b) How many unsuccessful drugs have BMS have attempted, and how much have they lost persuing them?
Again I don't know. But that's part of business, you're not guaranteed a profit only the opportunity to try to make profits.
How many of those drugs were unsuccessful because the FDA didn't approve them, even if there are people for whom using it would be worth the risk?
While I'd keep the National Health Institutes, including the NCI, and the CDC the FDA is one of the government agencies I'd abolish. I'd allow the person a drug that could help to take it as long as they knew the risks involved.
(c) How many drugs does this scenario actually relate to? Is this exception or the norm?
Again I don't know the answer to either question but looking at the wiki page for the NCI I see about 50 drugs listed. The NCI is part of the National Institutes of Health, NIH, and I see a couple of dozen other institutes listed as part of the NIH. That's a lot of drugs.
Then you have universities doing a lot of medical research as well. I'd hazard to guess many of them are government funded.
I think you have to ask all of those questions before concluding that the government is a useful vehicle for sustainable medicine development.
Though the government does a lot of research in general I'd prefer private entities fund most research. I like and support the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, but I wonder if they should be privatized. They could be either made into profit making businesses, not for profits, or nonprofit organizations. Personally I prefer the third.
i am not saying make it hard for a poor smuck to sue someone.. i am just wanting to increase the merits required to bring a case aginst someone..
Who's going to decide and how high are the requirements going to be? I'm sure businesses and doctors would love to set the level. It's kind of like someone on the right telling someone on the left, in the US that is, just what rights they have to speak.
Congratulations, you just spouted off a bunch of nonsense without backing it up.
What happens when government pays healthcare cost for those who can't afford it? One, it takes money out of taxpayers pockets. Two, healthcare providers don't get as much from government as they would from private insurance. This means providers will raise prices for everyone else.
As for Canada: so what if some Canadians who can afford it come to the US for treatment? The US is the most technologically advanced nation in the country --- is it surprising that you can get some stuff here (if you have the _money_) that you can't get in Canada?
Ah, why is the US the most advanced? Because the government doesn't control as much of the market as other countries do. It allows more businesses, organizations, and people to do more research without constantly getting in the way.
The question is how the system handles the hundred other people who have mundane things like work-related injuries
Work related health issues are just that work related. The employer is who should have to pay, not taxpayers.
or childhood illnesses.
If government got out of the way healthcare costs would be lower therefore insurance would be more affordable. More employers could offer health insurance to employees. That is one of the big issues with employers today, many aren't able to afford to offer insurance to employees. Up the thread someone said something about allowing Walmart to run healthcare, but Walmart is one of the businesses that doesn't offer employees insurance. Employers can officer insurance to employees at low rates because they pay much of the cost of insurance. I don't have any data now but say an employee pays, just making up a figure, $50 a week, the employer may be paying twice that or more. So some have dropped health insurance as a benefit. Many of those who lost coverage had children.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I may be wrong but I sense an unwavering belief socialized medicine will fix everything. My beliefs on this aren't solid so if there is a better system I'm all ears, however I have yet to be offered anything that will improve the situation. Do yo have one?
Ever stop and think of where all the medicines that are saving people are coming from? If you guess "The Government," you're wrong. Nope, it is from creativity that is motivated by reward. So yeah, pharmaceutical companies are making bank off of medicine, but where would we be otherwise (answer: we wouldn't have the medicine anyways)
If you think the government does no research into drugs and that pharmaceutical companies do all the research in the US you are dead wrong. A very good example I know is with Taxol. A group of researchers with the National Cancer Institute, NCI, a government organization, spend $183 million US taxpayer dollars to develop Taxol as a cancer treatment. What does the NCI do with it? It sells all of the rights to the data, needed for FDA approval, to Bristol Myers Sqibb, BMS, for $43 million, $140 million less than the government paid to develop it. BMS was brought in on it in 1989 and in 2000 BMS made $1.6 Billion, with a "B" not an "m". US taxpayer were ripped off. I wouldn't be surprised if BMS has made more than 10 Billion on it.
Don't tell me pharmaceutical companies spend all of the money and develop all of the drugs. If I had had my way either everything that was needed so anyone could manufacture and sale Taxol would be released, or BMS would of had to pay the government royalties on the money they made on the sale of Taxol. Said royalties could then be put into a fund to fund more research.
4. Let WalMart or some other low-cost innovator run low-cost health care and see if they can get some efficiencies going there. This actually isn't too far off - WalMart's Sam's Club is starting to push low-cost health insurance for small business, for example, and WalMart has also begun selling cheaper medications in select stores. The problem with this is that most people are (understandably) concerned about letting someone with a penchant for selling shirts that don't last six months take control of people's health decisions.
Ah but Walmart already has the opportunity to do this, by giving Walmart employees health insurance. However many employee neither have nor can get health insurance through Walmart. So a lot of employees end up getting public assistance when they need healthcare, which costs even more. To me this smacks of subsidizing Walmart with taxpayer money.
I agree with your point, totally. I was referring only to those situations where both operating systems are on a single unit, being dual-booted.
Actually for dualbooting you don't need an external hdd either, unless you want more storage space. Instead you can create three partitions, one for OS X, one for Linux, and the third for user files, the home directory. In both OSes point the home directory to the third partition then you can access the files on both OSes. Ah, after typing this I read you did partition.
With something like photography I would be thinking of a large, fast external drive for all the originals to be dumped to, by 'any' system, and then using whichever non-destructive editor, in whichever system-of-choice, for the edits. That's me, though. There must be unlimited ways of doing things, all with their own pros and cons.
I've been thinking of getting an external hdd, I'd actually need more than one, for backup purposes. If my Linux box doesn't work out as a server though and I can make money in photography what I'll do is either go ahead and get a Mac Pro filled with the biggest hdds I can get I read of one photographer with 4 terabytes on his. Or secondly get a san hdd I believe it's called which basically an external hdd system, it can hold more than one hdd. Third might be a Mac server. But none of this will happen if I'm not able to work as a photographer.
See, at one tyme I was in college majoring in Computer Engineering. However a bad accident I had left me with a disability, a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury. Though I came to believe I could no longer do CE any more I went back to college when I could working on a degree in programming. That however proved to be difficult for me as well. While working on it I took a photography class as an elective, which proved to be easier for me, so I thought I'd give it a try as a field I could work in. I'd been interested in photography for years, in high school I took it then when I was in the military I kept up with photography. I was the unofficial photographer for my unit. My CO, Commanding Officer, would get film for me for when we went out training. I'd shoot it then go to a darkroom at the arts and crafts center on base to develop the film and make enlargements.
That said, it is certainly the case that the US health care system could use some fixing, but the solution is to take the government out of it, not add more government. We could drastically reduce health care costs by limiting frivolous lawsuits and government red tape. That way, more people could have health care and it would be better to boot.
With the exception of lawsuits I agree with this. As for lawsuits, who's going to decide what's frivolous? It's no different than someone deciding what's frivolous speech and therefore should be banned.
I'll agree that churches shouldn't receive government funding. However if you are simply equating their tax-exempt status as a government subsidy, you are simply wrong.
Are you a U.S. citizen? What portion of your taxes go to support churches? Or are you making the argument that not taxing something (like charitable donations) is the same as supporting it.
That's the same argument people make when the issue of school taxes comes up. People are free to send their kids to a private school if they so choose, but they are still forced to pay for both the public school and private. That is wrong.
It's also wrong to send a child to a bad school just because their parents aren't wealthy. All keeping poor children in poor school does is make it harder for them to escape poverty. However good public schools improve the area they are located in which benefits most people there. Even those who don't have children or who's children moved out.
make it hard to sue people - get rid of crap lawsuits - and stop crap malpractice suits - i mean if they can show intention to do harm sure sue and lock the guy up - but if it is a mistake.. then it is a mistake...
BS! Make it hard for some poor smuck to sue and there's no justice.
It's a mediocre idea, but one that's better than the idea we're running with now. My dad's been working in public health for about 35 years, all over the world. He was telling me the other day that there are ex Soviet-bloc countries that have better child and maternal health statistics than major US cities. That's just plain _broken_.
Best would be for government to get out of the way. Socialized medicine drives up healthcare costs and or rations healthcare. Some say look at Canada's system, but I hear a lot of Canadians come to the US to get healthcare if they can afford it. US healthcare quality may be the best in the world but unfortunately not everyone has insurance and can afford it out of pocket. Because the government drives up the prices though, if it were to get out of the way healthcare prices would be lower.
Ironically, socialized medicine takes healthcare decisions out of individuals' hands and gives it to the government, but you don't hear many people around here complaining about that.
Socialized medicine is one of the reason I oppose Clinton, she wants to socialize the country.
Next on the todo list: throw out the rest of that abomination of a document that is the Patriot Act. It seems more and more often that document is affecting reach of life that go far beyond "national security".
Just what I was thinking, now the whole act needs to be thrown out.
That, sadly, is one of the greatest problems with content that has neither protection nor restriction. Someone, somewhere, WILL decide what is acceptable and what is not, and they will do so in a totally closed, totally partisan, totally self-serving manner. Political bloggers and (honest) investigative bloggers absolutely have to be protected against such people. Equally, there will also be people who use the medium to slander, libel, harass, abuse, spam, etc.
There's not much a person can do about spam other than not use the net, but a person can bring civil proceedings against someone else for these others. Of course anyone pursuing such a remedy has be able to afford it, then they have to prove it was malicious. However to change this just requires making it easier to win a case though civil lawsuits already are easier than criminal cases to win. This is because unlike a criminal case where guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, in a civil case all that's needed is a preponderance of guilt. OJ won the criminal case but lost the civil case because of this.
Ok, so your question is who gets to decide what is what. My argument is that if you need to have someone do the deciding, it's the grey area in between. Leave it alone. If society is so unsure about something that it needs to have an individual pick an answer, then society probably has no business framing the question. It is the stuff that is so clear-cut that it is unambiguous that you can categorize, where an overwhelming (and I mean overwhelming - 99%+) majority of people - whether in a given part of the political spectrum or across the board - totally agree that something is in the public interest or is a deliberate attempt to kill the public's right to have interests.
Which brings back my question of how anyone can tell whether someone is legitimate or is astroturfing. One of my favorite professors in college, I had her for philosophy, Understanding Religious Man, and some humanities classes, played a mean devil's advocate. We'd be discussing something and she'd leave a person to believe she actually held the position she took. Then the following class she could take the opposite position and have the same effect. Because of her ability nobody actually knew where she stood. A friend of mine interned under her and she didn't even know.
I've been thinking about dualbooting OS X and Ubuntu, I've been thinking of doing the same with my Linux PC, which has Linspire installed. However I'm wondering what use could it do installing Linux on my Mac. Using X11, which I've installed, I can run most if not all X software. And OS X is built on BDS so I can drop to the command line to use BSD, I may even be able to install KDE and or Gnome. What I'm thinking about is disk storage, I got the biggest hdd offered when I ordered the MBP which was 200GB. However I have a 750GB hdd installed on my Linux PC and 200GB is used now. When I get back into photography, I hope to work as a photographer, I'll need the storage space. Actually the 750GB hdd could fill up fast. Though I shoot film, I can expose 4 more rolls of 36 exposure 35mm film a day. The only thing holding me back is the expense of having the film developed and scanned to disk. However I'm planning on joining an association for photographers and other media artists and they have a darkroom members can use. When accessing a darkroom it won't cost nearly as much to develop my own film as it costs to have a store develop them. And yes, I've worked in a darkroom developing film and making prints, which I love doing but because I haven't done it in a long tyme I miss working in a darkroom. I'll need to take a refresher class, however before members can use the darkrooms they have to take a class anyway.
one of the easier ways to sync your apps, to a degree, is to just copy the things like bookmarks.html, and your Eudora folder (stuff like that) to a little external hard drive and then pop the data where it belongs when booted into Linux.
I've been wondering how to setup a system to sync my Linux PC and MBP, they'll be networked so sneakernet, or rebooting, will not be needed. But how to keep them syncronized without taking the tyme to physically copy every new or edited doc. What I've been thinking of is creating a folder on each computer where all new and edited docs can be placed then I could just copy over those without having to look for them.. For email there's no problem as I keep messages on the server even when I've downloaded them. So all I'd have to do is to download the messages on both computers.
I haven't done it with Eudora, yet, but will this afternoon. Having a drive that can be shared between Mac/Windows/Linux is 'the easy way out' as far as I know.
Easiest if you keep all your docs on the external drive, however if you want copies of each doc on each computer a network is easiest. An 11n wireless router is only $70 OR $80 and my wireless connection is just about as fast as my cabled connection. However I've been thinking of getting an external hdd, for two reason, the first is the one mentioned above, I want more space. The second is I've been thinking of using them for backup. I could use an external hdd for backup and store it somewhere else, offsite.
With Hotmail I used to go back through pages and pages of messages to find what I wanted, but with GMail I just search and it's there.
You can do the same in Eudora, and you don't have to be connected to do it.
I like to use webmail because I can access it anywhere. If I were downloading all my mail to my hard drive, I'd be concerned about my hard drive crashing. Either that or I'd have to bother with transferring it all when I get a new machine.
I can do the same with my ISP and Eudora. My ISP offers webmail, with a filter and white list. Any message you want can be marked as spam then you'll never see any messages from the sender again if you don't want to. The webmail has an online address book and you can filter messages so only messages from senders who are in the address book gets placed in the book are placed in the inbox. When I want to download those messages in the inbox so I can have them local, instead of having to be connected, all I do is fireup Eudora, once the messages are downloaded and sorted I quit it. If I need access to them later I have them locally. For backups, if I don't want to create backups locally my webmail allows me to setup folders online, I bet just like gmail does, and every message I download I put in one of those folders. Either way I have local access as well as can access them online.
I used Eudora for years, until about the time Thunderbird was gearing up for version 1. What finally kicked me over the threshold was that I do a lot of work with spam detection, and so I needed access to the original format of each message. Eudora reformats messages as they arrive, separating out the attachments, adjusting the headers, and in some cases reformatting text.
I've used Eudora for years, up until about a month ago when my Windows PC died. I then switched to OS X with a new Macbook Pro. Now that the new version of Eudora is out, I'll be installing it on my MBP. Although I don't like how it formats email, like how it affects spam, I do like it's filtering. However I don't have to think about spam anyway, my ISP offers filters. You can label something as spam and the sender's addy will be added to a filter so no mail from it will end up in your inbox. It also uses a white list so only people who are in your online address book goes to your inbox. Everything else goes into a "suspect" folder. When you check your email using webmail you can check this folder and put a message in the inbox, put it in the inbox and add the sender's addy to you address book, or delete it. I mostly use the webmail and will only fireup the email client, Eudora, to download those messages I want to keep locally.
At the time I had a ~5-year-old collection of mail in Eudora. I must have imported that corpus dozens of times, looking for things that imported incorrectly, figuring out how to identify whether a message was in plaintext, richtext, HTML, etc. so that the importer could reconstruct the appropriate MIME headers, and filing bugs. By the time 1.0 was ready, it could import my 5 years of mail.
Now that the new version is out and I have the MBP I'll have to import about 10 years worth of messages in the new version of Eudora. Of course because OS X has a different end of line or linefeed, I'll have to convert all of the messages from Windows to OS X with a text editor.
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How do you tell if someone is astroturfing? Basically, by the same method. If every person, by every means at their disposal, comes to the absolutely unequivocal decision that something is astroturfing, so far beyond all even remotely reasonable doubt that you could put a complete list of every unreasonable doubt left, written in crayon, in an Altoids tin without being remotely concerned about the space, then it's astroturfing.
So if someone goes to Saudi Arabia and tells people there humans evolved he's astroturfing? He might be lucky and be allowed to walk away with his life. Maybe they'll think he's crazy, and you're not supposed to harm crazy people. Heck, as a percentage more people in Turkey believe in evolution than people in the US do.
FalconFunny. When I fill a prescription in the US, the cheapest pharmacy in my city (the largest city in a medium-size state) is $330. The cheapest US mailorder source I've found (drugstore.com) is $235. If I order it from a Canadian pharmacy, the order is filled by a Swiss pharmacy (selling the same drug, made by the US pharmaceutical company in Australia) it costs $117, including air shipping. It's traveled almost all the way around the world, and has an extra middleman, and yet it costs a third of what it does here. And you're saying this is somehow the fault of the government?
True, that's why a lot of seniors in border states, like Maine and Washington, get a large van or bus and go on field trips to Canada to buy the drugs they need. Canada basically buys the drugs, or tells the companies how much they can sale drugs for. As do many other countries. This was a big stink in congress recently, some wanted to prevent people in the US from buying drugs from Canada. In this sense the US subsidizes drugs for the rest of the world, prices are higher in the US because drug companies know they can't sale drugs for as much in other countries. In a sense it is a government manufactured problem, by Canada telling companies they have to sell at a given price and not more it raises the prices in those countries without the government doing it. Me, I'd allow anybody to buy any drug they want from anywhere. And that includes so called illegal street drugs, or experimental drugs.
You don't have to (actually, you can't) let the legislature decide what's frivolous, but you can force the losing party to pay all legal fees. As it is, it costs money to win a lawsuit, and that's really what makes frivolous lawsuits damaging.
On the face of it this seems reasonable but by having the loser pay all costs it will prevent even some with good cases from filing a lawsuit. Some won't take the risk they will lose. I was involved in a case that if we had a system like that there never would of been a settlement. After my classes in college one day I was riding my bike when a moving van, Apartment Movers, hit me. Defense lawyers are good at twisting facts around and adding conjecture to make someone innocent look guilty, if they aren't they aren't good lawyers. Even though the driver was at fault, he had a record of causing accidents and had left his home state and moved to mine because the state issued an arrest warrant for him, the lawyers might have made it look like it was my fault. My family would never of been able to pay my medical bills, they were more than $120,000 not including all the therapy I went through. Forget their lawyers, I don't know how much they paid, but in the first couple of months of my case the lawyer my family hired, I was in a coma, paid more than $100,000 out of pocket in expenses.
FalconWhy does health insurance need to be income based? Based solely on demographics, I would expect the rich to pay lower premiums on average then the poor. Most employers allow health plans to be opted out of, and if the cost for private insurance outside of the company (which will definitely not be based on percentage of income) is lower than inside, and then I expect that they would jump out and do so.
Because employers pay premiums on insurance they offer employees said insurance should be cheaper than private insurance.
Falcon(a) How much would BMS have been able to develop the drug for had they paid for it rather than the government? Was government research actually more effecient, or would we have been better off just having BMS do it?
I don't have the answer to either question.
(b) How many unsuccessful drugs have BMS have attempted, and how much have they lost persuing them?
Again I don't know. But that's part of business, you're not guaranteed a profit only the opportunity to try to make profits.
How many of those drugs were unsuccessful because the FDA didn't approve them, even if there are people for whom using it would be worth the risk?
While I'd keep the National Health Institutes, including the NCI, and the CDC the FDA is one of the government agencies I'd abolish. I'd allow the person a drug that could help to take it as long as they knew the risks involved.
(c) How many drugs does this scenario actually relate to? Is this exception or the norm?
Again I don't know the answer to either question but looking at the wiki page for the NCI I see about 50 drugs listed. The NCI is part of the National Institutes of Health, NIH, and I see a couple of dozen other institutes listed as part of the NIH. That's a lot of drugs.
Then you have universities doing a lot of medical research as well. I'd hazard to guess many of them are government funded.
I think you have to ask all of those questions before concluding that the government is a useful vehicle for sustainable medicine development.
Though the government does a lot of research in general I'd prefer private entities fund most research. I like and support the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, but I wonder if they should be privatized. They could be either made into profit making businesses, not for profits, or nonprofit organizations. Personally I prefer the third.
Falconi am not saying make it hard for a poor smuck to sue someone.. i am just wanting to increase the merits required to bring a case aginst someone..
Who's going to decide and how high are the requirements going to be? I'm sure businesses and doctors would love to set the level. It's kind of like someone on the right telling someone on the left, in the US that is, just what rights they have to speak.
FalconCongratulations, you just spouted off a bunch of nonsense without backing it up.
What happens when government pays healthcare cost for those who can't afford it? One, it takes money out of taxpayers pockets. Two, healthcare providers don't get as much from government as they would from private insurance. This means providers will raise prices for everyone else.
As for Canada: so what if some Canadians who can afford it come to the US for treatment? The US is the most technologically advanced nation in the country --- is it surprising that you can get some stuff here (if you have the _money_) that you can't get in Canada?
Ah, why is the US the most advanced? Because the government doesn't control as much of the market as other countries do. It allows more businesses, organizations, and people to do more research without constantly getting in the way.
The question is how the system handles the hundred other people who have mundane things like work-related injuries
Work related health issues are just that work related. The employer is who should have to pay, not taxpayers.
or childhood illnesses.
If government got out of the way healthcare costs would be lower therefore insurance would be more affordable. More employers could offer health insurance to employees. That is one of the big issues with employers today, many aren't able to afford to offer insurance to employees. Up the thread someone said something about allowing Walmart to run healthcare, but Walmart is one of the businesses that doesn't offer employees insurance. Employers can officer insurance to employees at low rates because they pay much of the cost of insurance. I don't have any data now but say an employee pays, just making up a figure, $50 a week, the employer may be paying twice that or more. So some have dropped health insurance as a benefit. Many of those who lost coverage had children.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I may be wrong but I sense an unwavering belief socialized medicine will fix everything. My beliefs on this aren't solid so if there is a better system I'm all ears, however I have yet to be offered anything that will improve the situation. Do yo have one?
FalconEver stop and think of where all the medicines that are saving people are coming from? If you guess "The Government," you're wrong. Nope, it is from creativity that is motivated by reward. So yeah, pharmaceutical companies are making bank off of medicine, but where would we be otherwise (answer: we wouldn't have the medicine anyways)
If you think the government does no research into drugs and that pharmaceutical companies do all the research in the US you are dead wrong. A very good example I know is with Taxol. A group of researchers with the National Cancer Institute, NCI, a government organization, spend $183 million US taxpayer dollars to develop Taxol as a cancer treatment. What does the NCI do with it? It sells all of the rights to the data, needed for FDA approval, to Bristol Myers Sqibb, BMS, for $43 million, $140 million less than the government paid to develop it. BMS was brought in on it in 1989 and in 2000 BMS made $1.6 Billion, with a "B" not an "m". US taxpayer were ripped off. I wouldn't be surprised if BMS has made more than 10 Billion on it.
Don't tell me pharmaceutical companies spend all of the money and develop all of the drugs. If I had had my way either everything that was needed so anyone could manufacture and sale Taxol would be released, or BMS would of had to pay the government royalties on the money they made on the sale of Taxol. Said royalties could then be put into a fund to fund more research.
Falcon4. Let WalMart or some other low-cost innovator run low-cost health care and see if they can get some efficiencies going there. This actually isn't too far off - WalMart's Sam's Club is starting to push low-cost health insurance for small business, for example, and WalMart has also begun selling cheaper medications in select stores. The problem with this is that most people are (understandably) concerned about letting someone with a penchant for selling shirts that don't last six months take control of people's health decisions.
Ah but Walmart already has the opportunity to do this, by giving Walmart employees health insurance. However many employee neither have nor can get health insurance through Walmart. So a lot of employees end up getting public assistance when they need healthcare, which costs even more. To me this smacks of subsidizing Walmart with taxpayer money.
FalconI agree with your point, totally. I was referring only to those situations where both operating systems are on a single unit, being dual-booted.
Actually for dualbooting you don't need an external hdd either, unless you want more storage space. Instead you can create three partitions, one for OS X, one for Linux, and the third for user files, the home directory. In both OSes point the home directory to the third partition then you can access the files on both OSes. Ah, after typing this I read you did partition.
With something like photography I would be thinking of a large, fast external drive for all the originals to be dumped to, by 'any' system, and then using whichever non-destructive editor, in whichever system-of-choice, for the edits. That's me, though. There must be unlimited ways of doing things, all with their own pros and cons.
I've been thinking of getting an external hdd, I'd actually need more than one, for backup purposes. If my Linux box doesn't work out as a server though and I can make money in photography what I'll do is either go ahead and get a Mac Pro filled with the biggest hdds I can get I read of one photographer with 4 terabytes on his. Or secondly get a san hdd I believe it's called which basically an external hdd system, it can hold more than one hdd. Third might be a Mac server. But none of this will happen if I'm not able to work as a photographer.
See, at one tyme I was in college majoring in Computer Engineering. However a bad accident I had left me with a disability, a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury. Though I came to believe I could no longer do CE any more I went back to college when I could working on a degree in programming. That however proved to be difficult for me as well. While working on it I took a photography class as an elective, which proved to be easier for me, so I thought I'd give it a try as a field I could work in. I'd been interested in photography for years, in high school I took it then when I was in the military I kept up with photography. I was the unofficial photographer for my unit. My CO, Commanding Officer, would get film for me for when we went out training. I'd shoot it then go to a darkroom at the arts and crafts center on base to develop the film and make enlargements.
FalconThat said, it is certainly the case that the US health care system could use some fixing, but the solution is to take the government out of it, not add more government. We could drastically reduce health care costs by limiting frivolous lawsuits and government red tape. That way, more people could have health care and it would be better to boot.
With the exception of lawsuits I agree with this. As for lawsuits, who's going to decide what's frivolous? It's no different than someone deciding what's frivolous speech and therefore should be banned.
FalconI'll agree that churches shouldn't receive government funding. However if you are simply equating their tax-exempt status as a government subsidy, you are simply wrong.
Ah but as part of hie White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives Bush does give churches taxpayer money.
FalconYou get that back. Since you are taxed "zero" for churches, you get back "zero".
Wrong bigtime, the current occupant of the White House gives churches taxpayer money.
FalconAre you a U.S. citizen? What portion of your taxes go to support churches? Or are you making the argument that not taxing something (like charitable donations) is the same as supporting it.
Now that Bush is president the US does support churchs, thats what Bush's White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is all about.
FalconThat's the same argument people make when the issue of school taxes comes up. People are free to send their kids to a private school if they so choose, but they are still forced to pay for both the public school and private. That is wrong.
It's also wrong to send a child to a bad school just because their parents aren't wealthy. All keeping poor children in poor school does is make it harder for them to escape poverty. However good public schools improve the area they are located in which benefits most people there. Even those who don't have children or who's children moved out.
Falconmake it hard to sue people - get rid of crap lawsuits - and stop crap malpractice suits - i mean if they can show intention to do harm sure sue and lock the guy up - but if it is a mistake .. then it is a mistake...
BS! Make it hard for some poor smuck to sue and there's no justice.
FalconIt's a mediocre idea, but one that's better than the idea we're running with now. My dad's been working in public health for about 35 years, all over the world. He was telling me the other day that there are ex Soviet-bloc countries that have better child and maternal health statistics than major US cities. That's just plain _broken_.
Best would be for government to get out of the way. Socialized medicine drives up healthcare costs and or rations healthcare. Some say look at Canada's system, but I hear a lot of Canadians come to the US to get healthcare if they can afford it. US healthcare quality may be the best in the world but unfortunately not everyone has insurance and can afford it out of pocket. Because the government drives up the prices though, if it were to get out of the way healthcare prices would be lower.
FalconSocialized medicine is one of the reason I oppose Clinton, she wants to socialize the country.
If you love freedom vote for Ron Paul.
FalconNext on the todo list: throw out the rest of that abomination of a document that is the Patriot Act. It seems more and more often that document is affecting reach of life that go far beyond "national security".
Just what I was thinking, now the whole act needs to be thrown out.
FalconThat, sadly, is one of the greatest problems with content that has neither protection nor restriction. Someone, somewhere, WILL decide what is acceptable and what is not, and they will do so in a totally closed, totally partisan, totally self-serving manner. Political bloggers and (honest) investigative bloggers absolutely have to be protected against such people. Equally, there will also be people who use the medium to slander, libel, harass, abuse, spam, etc.
There's not much a person can do about spam other than not use the net, but a person can bring civil proceedings against someone else for these others. Of course anyone pursuing such a remedy has be able to afford it, then they have to prove it was malicious. However to change this just requires making it easier to win a case though civil lawsuits already are easier than criminal cases to win. This is because unlike a criminal case where guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, in a civil case all that's needed is a preponderance of guilt. OJ won the criminal case but lost the civil case because of this.
Ok, so your question is who gets to decide what is what. My argument is that if you need to have someone do the deciding, it's the grey area in between. Leave it alone. If society is so unsure about something that it needs to have an individual pick an answer, then society probably has no business framing the question. It is the stuff that is so clear-cut that it is unambiguous that you can categorize, where an overwhelming (and I mean overwhelming - 99%+) majority of people - whether in a given part of the political spectrum or across the board - totally agree that something is in the public interest or is a deliberate attempt to kill the public's right to have interests.
Which brings back my question of how anyone can tell whether someone is legitimate or is astroturfing. One of my favorite professors in college, I had her for philosophy, Understanding Religious Man, and some humanities classes, played a mean devil's advocate. We'd be discussing something and she'd leave a person to believe she actually held the position she took. Then the following class she could take the opposite position and have the same effect. Because of her ability nobody actually knew where she stood. A friend of mine interned under her and she didn't even know.
I dual boot Linux and OS X on Mac here,
I've been thinking about dualbooting OS X and Ubuntu, I've been thinking of doing the same with my Linux PC, which has Linspire installed. However I'm wondering what use could it do installing Linux on my Mac. Using X11, which I've installed, I can run most if not all X software. And OS X is built on BDS so I can drop to the command line to use BSD, I may even be able to install KDE and or Gnome. What I'm thinking about is disk storage, I got the biggest hdd offered when I ordered the MBP which was 200GB. However I have a 750GB hdd installed on my Linux PC and 200GB is used now. When I get back into photography, I hope to work as a photographer, I'll need the storage space. Actually the 750GB hdd could fill up fast. Though I shoot film, I can expose 4 more rolls of 36 exposure 35mm film a day. The only thing holding me back is the expense of having the film developed and scanned to disk. However I'm planning on joining an association for photographers and other media artists and they have a darkroom members can use. When accessing a darkroom it won't cost nearly as much to develop my own film as it costs to have a store develop them. And yes, I've worked in a darkroom developing film and making prints, which I love doing but because I haven't done it in a long tyme I miss working in a darkroom. I'll need to take a refresher class, however before members can use the darkrooms they have to take a class anyway.
one of the easier ways to sync your apps, to a degree, is to just copy the things like bookmarks.html, and your Eudora folder (stuff like that) to a little external hard drive and then pop the data where it belongs when booted into Linux.
I've been wondering how to setup a system to sync my Linux PC and MBP, they'll be networked so sneakernet, or rebooting, will not be needed. But how to keep them syncronized without taking the tyme to physically copy every new or edited doc. What I've been thinking of is creating a folder on each computer where all new and edited docs can be placed then I could just copy over those without having to look for them.. For email there's no problem as I keep messages on the server even when I've downloaded them. So all I'd have to do is to download the messages on both computers.
I haven't done it with Eudora, yet, but will this afternoon. Having a drive that can be shared between Mac/Windows/Linux is 'the easy way out' as far as I know.
Easiest if you keep all your docs on the external drive, however if you want copies of each doc on each computer a network is easiest. An 11n wireless router is only $70 OR $80 and my wireless connection is just about as fast as my cabled connection. However I've been thinking of getting an external hdd, for two reason, the first is the one mentioned above, I want more space. The second is I've been thinking of using them for backup. I could use an external hdd for backup and store it somewhere else, offsite.
I'd love to have more Eudorish features in my Thunderbird, but please provide them as an extension and not a wholly separate (and competing) product.
I've been using Eudora for about 10 years and I want a new version, especially seeing as how I've switched OSes, not any type of addon or plugin.
FalconYou can access just about any mailbox with http://mail2web.com/
I've seen the url somewhere before but didn't know what it is. Thanks, maybe I can pass it on to others.
FalconWith Hotmail I used to go back through pages and pages of messages to find what I wanted, but with GMail I just search and it's there.
You can do the same in Eudora, and you don't have to be connected to do it.
I like to use webmail because I can access it anywhere. If I were downloading all my mail to my hard drive, I'd be concerned about my hard drive crashing. Either that or I'd have to bother with transferring it all when I get a new machine.
I can do the same with my ISP and Eudora. My ISP offers webmail, with a filter and white list. Any message you want can be marked as spam then you'll never see any messages from the sender again if you don't want to. The webmail has an online address book and you can filter messages so only messages from senders who are in the address book gets placed in the book are placed in the inbox. When I want to download those messages in the inbox so I can have them local, instead of having to be connected, all I do is fireup Eudora, once the messages are downloaded and sorted I quit it. If I need access to them later I have them locally. For backups, if I don't want to create backups locally my webmail allows me to setup folders online, I bet just like gmail does, and every message I download I put in one of those folders. Either way I have local access as well as can access them online.
I used Eudora for years, until about the time Thunderbird was gearing up for version 1. What finally kicked me over the threshold was that I do a lot of work with spam detection, and so I needed access to the original format of each message. Eudora reformats messages as they arrive, separating out the attachments, adjusting the headers, and in some cases reformatting text.
I've used Eudora for years, up until about a month ago when my Windows PC died. I then switched to OS X with a new Macbook Pro. Now that the new version of Eudora is out, I'll be installing it on my MBP. Although I don't like how it formats email, like how it affects spam, I do like it's filtering. However I don't have to think about spam anyway, my ISP offers filters. You can label something as spam and the sender's addy will be added to a filter so no mail from it will end up in your inbox. It also uses a white list so only people who are in your online address book goes to your inbox. Everything else goes into a "suspect" folder. When you check your email using webmail you can check this folder and put a message in the inbox, put it in the inbox and add the sender's addy to you address book, or delete it. I mostly use the webmail and will only fireup the email client, Eudora, to download those messages I want to keep locally.
At the time I had a ~5-year-old collection of mail in Eudora. I must have imported that corpus dozens of times, looking for things that imported incorrectly, figuring out how to identify whether a message was in plaintext, richtext, HTML, etc. so that the importer could reconstruct the appropriate MIME headers, and filing bugs. By the time 1.0 was ready, it could import my 5 years of mail.
Now that the new version is out and I have the MBP I'll have to import about 10 years worth of messages in the new version of Eudora. Of course because OS X has a different end of line or linefeed, I'll have to convert all of the messages from Windows to OS X with a text editor.
Falcon