Sorry, but I couldn't find any comprehensive statistics that made a valid comparison.
First, the chunk is too big: There is no valid way to statistically say that money is evenly distributed among health providers and/or patients.
Second, in order too be valid, we would need a large sample of all medical services and statistics comparing similar ailments, the cost of treating each ailment, and the outcome. As far as I can tell, vaccinations have the only well-defined statistical data, and even that is controversial in some areas.
Yeah, I'm sorry, but health care is price-controlled in major ways, particularly Medicare and Medicaid, and that is a de facto subsidization.
Furthermore, it is an Economic principle that anything that is price-controlled causes a shortage of the good controlled and causes higher prices. This may be the one thing that almost all Economists actually agree on, and it is based on 4500 years of historical records.
I was just reading an article about a doctor who had a 12-person office until last December. In January he quit taking Medicare and Medicaid patients, and quit taking insurance. He was able to lower his prices 14% and improve his revenues by 22%. He now runs his office with 4 people. (Let's not forget that filling out insurance forms and so forth are still services, but now they are in shorter supply.) The motive for declining insurance and MM? MM did not pay the expenses and were costing him a great deal of money and aggravation. Statistics vary according to specialty, location and survey source, but the number of doctors not taking new medicare patients seems to be somewhere between 12% and 19%..This range is up about 4% from 2009.
If I remember correctly (I can't find my notes), OS2 was a port of IBM's mainframe 32-bit OS scaled for the microcontroller. If you connected using a 3270 terminal or emulator you could get some pretty fast apps going. Of course, people wanted to work from the desktop, not a terminal. The killer was the graphical interface, which never worked right. Furthermore, new apps for the desktop were hard to write, and required developers to be fully immersed in the IBM programming paradigm and mindset. On the other hand, once written, applications worked like they were supposed to. For what it did, the OS2 was one of the sweetest, most elegant OS's for the PC environment. I was hoping something would come from the osFree folks, but it is apparently tough sledding. I was really disappointed that IBM didn't release the OS2 source. A great learning opportunity has been lost.
You are jumping to conclusions: It is not the corporatocracy, nor is it a conspiracy. It is just dickering over the reins of power.
I, for one, am tired of the huge number of bills passed by our lawmakers. Many journalists this week commented on the number of laws passed each year, and most of them agree that we don't even know what they are, so we can't always be sure we are in compliance. In trying to pass comprehensive bills, our lawmakers are trying to "program" human behavior and they use lousy tools. (Imagine trying to write a program to make everyone and everything do exactly what you want done. Now imagine trying to write it in a language that only describes what is NOT allowed.)
I imagine a day will come when laws are written in explicit classes as objects with explicitly testable functions. (Right...not in My lifetime..)
I've heard a number of possible solutions here. The obvious one would be for the litigator to license the patents to the app-maker for a small, reasonable fee. It looks like this isn't happening. I see nothing in the docs I accessed to indicate this was even put forward.
People mentioned prior art. What would happen if Apple, for instance, took a stand for the app-maker? That changes the dynamics considerably.
The more this gets around to the user community and the people who prescribe the devices for their patients and customers, the more victimized the consumers feel. They will also pressure the maker to make a deal.
Blackball the companies from the research community. The researchers, some of whom appear to be stockholders in the company, might get a sense of reality if they were exposed as victimizing the poor 3-year-old girl who wants to talk.
FOSS alternative. Find someone to program the dang thing and make it better. The suggestion about the Android app and Europe is fairly good. Charitable funding for development would also be good.
There seems to be some agreement that the PTO needs overhauling and the patent laws need revision. I agree. So how about someone doing a logical analysis and finding some alternative paths that are so obvious that even the lobbyists can't overcome them? Somewhere there is a complicated, convoluted repository of all the relevant arguments for our current patent system. It is probably too much for Congress to understand, but someone could make it clear. I would know where to start, but like most of us, I have limited time and I would want to apply my own time to other projects. But who knows? The FOSS community is made up of people with ideas and intersts different from mine, and this may appeal to someone.
Your "problem" is not well defined. A problem is the difference between the way things are and the way you ant them to be. In your case, you have a large amount of digitally stored data and you are afraid that it might be lost. What do you need to do so you don't have that fear? (This is not a "management" problem, but I will get to that later.)
The only practical solution is to keep duplicates somewhere "safe", with safe being defined as someplace where you think you will be able to recover it in an emergency. Maybe the emergency is just a local hard drive failure, but it doesn't hurt to think of the effects of floods or Tunami. RAID is good, but I have customers who spent a lot of money trying to recover data stored on RAID arrays because they didn't have another backup. No matter what, you are going to lose some data in an emergency. Figure out how much you can afford to lose. This establishes the timing of your backups. 1 day? Ok, differentially back up your data 3 times per day on different backup media and you will not likely have to ever recreate more than a day's worth of data. Then arrange for the media to be copied or stored offsite so local disasters don't affect it.
I predict that loss of personal data is going to be a big problem a few years from now. Even today, how many people who taped their kid's birth in 8mm film can actually find a way to view it now? What about those files, ideas and manuscripts that you saved on that Z80 running CP/M and had the MFM drive? Oh, and those old CD's that are now rotted away? Management means deciding how long you want this info to be available. Do you want your great-grandkids to see how it was to live in the USA before Communism replaced our Constitution? Better plan for it.
Management might also include retrieval. I know at least one "backup solution" that issued a version of software that couldn't restore the data. I have over 3000 books. I don't need them every day, but I do occasionally like to go back and research or review some of the stuff I've read. Digital storage should allow us to have a tremendous amount of data at our fingertips if we can only put our fingers on the right set of facts... Semantic search is not quite good enough but it's improving. In the meantime, you might do worse than to use the data-cache model for retrieving your knowledge base.
You can't get around the budget problem. You can purchase reliable solutions or you increase your risk.
Family scrapbook solution: We created a scrapbook and made 6 copies which we sent to all the siblings in my generation of kids. If my brother's house burns down we can re-create his scrapbook for him. Use the same idea for digital safety and you might have a high probability of recovering it.
The thinking process is rigorous and follows the same scientific guidelines. The problem of testability and lack of laboratory constructs means that proof and refutation don't work as well as in a hard science like Chemistry. It is younger than Mathematics, so it doesn't have a body of reliable empirical knowledge, but many of the fundamental principles have proven their worth over time.
Consider this: Divide Economics into three categories. The first category, Economic Philosophy, might try to determine how people behave, and even try to suggest optimum behavior. Socialism and Capitalism are subcategories of Economic Philosophy.
The third category, Economic Technology, tries to shape human behavior or human results. Monetarists and Keynesians might be prime examples. The use of taxes and tariffs and other economic tricks designed to manipulate human behavior falls into this category. Marxism and other "command and control" philosophies relied on this.
Sandwiched in between them is a narrow category of Economic Science. Economic Science has a sole goal of discovering what happens under certain circumstances and tries to make predictions. Two of the main tools of Economic Science would be Probability and Statistics. Since there is no "laboratory", Economic Science must analyze what it can from History, which means that data is subject to gaps and inconsistent interpretations.
Now the evidence over time has shown that tariffs increase costs for consumers. In economic terms, this is usually considered a "bad idea" by Economic Philosophy because increased costs for one good mean acquiring less of another. Without tariffs the consumer might be able to have both and would then be plus prosperity.
Economic Technologists, however, are working in a Dynamic System where changes in one subsystem affect the behavior of all the rest. The Technologists are assuming that by increasing the cost for one imported good, the same good can be produced locally at a more acceptable price, and create jobs, etc. However, it will not create a net increase in trade, and the lower-priced local good is still higher than the imported good before tariffs, so the consumer is still suffering, even though he is suffering less. Sooner or later the system will find Equilibrium. Why would an Economic Scientist make this prediction?: It is based on 4500 years of historical comparison with a probability of somewhere around 90% allowing for error. In the meantime, the people buying tariff'ed solar cells are not buying your computer components or hiring you as a software developer because they don't have the money (which they spent on solar components).
Here is something you may be able to use in your decision making: In 4500 years of history, price controls have invariably led to shortages of the controlled good, and higher prices for the good where it is available. Obamacare is a form of price control and, if it prevails, will create a shortage of medical services for those that need it most, and those who are lucky enough to get care will pay more.
On the Economic Technology side: It is a given that when something is taxed, less of the taxed good is produced. Obamacare imposes an 8%+ added expense to employers for each employee. This is equivalent to an 8%+ tax on jobs. The result is going to be fewer jobs, and harder work for those lucky enough to have one.
(I'm only picking on Obamacare because it is the most obvious current, far-reaching, economically poor decision (IMO). Somebody with a background in Economics might see this immediately. Economists are divided: About 80% say Obamacare is a bad decision, about 20%, including Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, say it is a good decision. Those for Obamacare are not using numbers as their measurement, they are usually using some moral stance. Statistics vary by source since this is a politically sensitive issue.)
Your assumptions about Austrian Economics and the people that agree with the premises and conclusions are probably wrong.
Maybe. On the other hand, in a global economy, solar components not sold to the USA will simply be sold to other competitors for those goods (like France) making them more competitive with us. The efficiency loss is all one sided: The buyer with the tariff loses.
I'm not quoting from a dogma. The mathematics are pretty clear that tariffs mean higher prices for the buyers. Given an finite amount of money, if I have to spend more on one good, I have less money to spend on another. This means I don't get to maximize my standard of living.
Sorry, I don't know about T-Mobile, but I know Sprint does not activate phones on Verizon or ATT stolen/lost lists. Furthermore, it practically takes an act of Congress to activate a non-Sprint phone on the Sprint network. In the case of the iPhone, Sprint will NOT activate iPhones not bought through Sprint authorized outlets. (The exception was a series of iPhones bought for the Sprint network from Apple stores that were mistakenly ID'd as ATT phones. We had a workaround for that, and the phones were then correctly ID'd as Sprint phones.) Basically, if it doesn't have the Sprint logo it is not activated on the Sprint network.
I don't know what's going on, but there was a rash of iPhone thefts in January and February. I don't know what the thieves did with the stolen phones. A number of them were sold on e-bay, but the recipients couldn't activate them and were badly screwed.
Sarcasm noted. However, amost anyone who knows anything about Economics knows that the idea of tariff is a bad idea. Cure your ignorance: Read "Spin-free Economics" by Behravesh or any other good basic Economics book.
Did you do this with Toys 'R Us co-operation? If not, you are a crook and exactly the type of vendor that honest people shouldn't deal with. I hope your kids are proud of you.
I forgot to add that the insurance company has the ability to locate phones through the GPS, and we have found phones through the "family locator service". Unfortunately, the gps is not necessarily precise enough, and by itself is not enough to get a warant.
I know for a fact that Sprint (I worked for them for a while) creates a "lost or stolen" database. If your Sprint phone is stolen you report it to sprint and the "lost/stolen" service is placed on your phone. This renders the phone unusable: No calls, no messages. If you get a new phone, when you activate the new phone on the old number there is a check for "lost/stolen" and the SN/MEID goes into a database and that cannot be activated on sprint again. All allegations of carriers not concerned about the theft of phones is bogus.
My carrier is ATT. I know for a fact that they have exactly the same service although it is applied a little differently.
However, the phone would still be usable after hacking such as cloning. The carriers can only block the phone services on their network; not destroy the phone itself.
I first sold Commodore in Minneapolis back when they were making calculators in 1968. They came out with a 30-lb., programmable calculator that used magnetic strips to hold the programs. It only held 30 instructions, but it had recursion so it outperformed Friden and Marchant's competitive products. (One was 60 lbs and had two units connected by a thick cable, the other needed to be reprogrammed by performing the operation so it could be memorized before starting to produce any useful work.) I sold a bunch to Bell. With no printer (nixie-tube readout) an office of 30 people was practically silent. Bell had open rooms filled with clacking and clanking calulators in those days. Now we complain that the person next to us has a loud keyboard... Well, I made some money, but you should have heard the owner complain about the money he had tied up in Commodore. I didn't really know what he meant at the time.
Jump to 1978: I'm the first one selling Apple II and Commodore PET computers in Anchorage. I had to order 5 PET units at a time. My cost was $999.00 and the selling price was $1499.00. As long as I had a $5000 deposit with Commodore I had a $5000 "line of credit". But the manufacturing was lousy. I typically had shipments come in with two or more units DOA (and one where 4 out of my 5 units were DOA), which I had to RMA and wait for them to be returned. I needed stock? No problem: Commodore would gladly take another $5000 deposit and let me order 5 more units...
Jump to 1988: I'm selling computers to NASA in Houston for a store that also carries the Commodore Amiga. And guess what?..My manager is complaining about the same lousy manufacturing and policies that I did 10 years ago.
Jump to 1993: I helped set up a computer department for BizMart (now OfficeMax) and they are trying to deal with the same lousy stocking problems from Commodore. Right around Christmas time we sold a lot of Commodore Amiga and associated products. After Christmas the returns started coming in: It seems that we had all the marginal units dumped on us to make the Commodore numbers look good for some type of joint venture or purchase deal.
I believe in my heart that Commodore would have gone out of business if they didn't have the CMOS manufacturing to keep them afloat. I pity the vendors stuck dealing with Commodore, but it will probably be someone clueless like Best Buy anyway. The commodore products were somewhat innovative, but the company was not consumer or vendor friendly.
...just how much we need "The Encyclopaedia Britannica."
I actually sold the Britannica for a number of years. I love that set of books. My copy is the Bicentennial Edition but I would love to get another nearly-up-to-date edition, plus a complete set of the Great Books of the Western World with accessories. The CD/DVD version (which I have 2010) is good in concept, but the articles are not as comprehensive and it is not easy to browse. My older set had articles by Einstein and other original 20th Century thinkers. In an age when books were hard to come by, the EB educated many people. In later years, as public school destroyed people's ability to read and think, it became less relevant; People didn't go to the encyclopedia to learn, but only to get facts.
Basically, the EB is outmoded as a reference work. About 25 percent of the material is changing at a very rapid rate. Back in 1979 Britannica was exploring the possibility of a computerized edition. One of the criteria was that it be easily updateable as new knowledge arrived and another was that it be easy to use. What killed it at that time was that the illustrations were too massive for the type of storage available in 1979. By the time it was feasible to computerize it, the Encarta was free and people were too ignorant to judge the difference in quality between the larger, more authoritative EB and the pitiful little Encarta. So Britannica got sold to a marketing company incapable of making the necessary changes. Britannica got stuck with a slow Java-based interface, a paid online edition and lousy hyperlink service while Encarta got bigger. Then Wikipedia started making inroads as people's reference work and showed the world what was possible in an online reference (even though it is much inferior academically).
Luckily I still have the editon with major introductions by Mortimer Adler and a volume of reprints of original articles from the 1928 edition with which to stimulate my mind. I also have other reference systems including the DVD version of EB, the complete National Geographic (with its lousy interface and microfilm-type usage), the complete Mother Earth news to 1990 and some others. The new paradigm for a knowledge system will have to be something like a "university in a box" that includes articles, exercises tests, progress reports, review sessions and achivement scoring. I guess I know what my new life's mission is....
Yeah, and one problem I see in pilot programs is that the the students that get poor results are stuck with those results for their entire lives. A Fourth Grader who didn't learn Multiplication well will be passed on with poor arithmetic skills that will bug him for the rest of his life. Any manufacturer who produced as much defective product as the Public School system would be out of business in a short time.
Back in the '60's and '70's I tutored Juniors, Seniors and Grad Students in Math and Physics. My secret weapon was "programmed instruction" books. People who hadn't done a lick of work all quarter would come to me and say, "I need a miracle." OK, I would assign them a programmed instruction course that covered the material they needed. Programmed instruction courses tend to be large volumes, but they typically take from 1/3 to 1/6 as long to finish as comparably-sized standard text. Furthermore, good programmed instruction was statistically tested so that there was 97% correctness and competency from frame-to-frame and to the overall content of the course.
Programmed instruction courses are few and far between now. Two long-lived examples are the Blumenthal English series (English 2200, 2600, 3200) and Ken Stroud's books on Engineering Mathematics. I attribute the decline in programmed instruction to a number of factors:
First, it worked, and it worked well without teachers. (God knows what would happen if the world found out that you didn't need teachers to learn! Why, we might have computers and parents teaching our kids!) Like I said, competency was statistically designed in for 97% success.
Second, it was based on research by B. F. Skinner and Norman Crowder. B. F. Skinner became controversial and his work was denigrated even though most of it was very sound. (Maybe Academics should stay away from expressing controversial opinions, but then what good does Education and Research give back to Society if you're afraid to let it loose?)
Third, Good programmed instruction is time-consuming and expensive up front. Not only is there writing and planning, but there are numerous tests and revisions to achieve that 97% competency. Computer projects and teaching machines used programmed instruction at a time when computers were VERY expensive. Control Data's Plato project was very successful for a long time. CBT today is a joke; it mostly reproduces classroom demogougery. However, there are a few programs like the web-based Logic Cafe http://thelogiccafe.net/PLI/ which show the possibilities of programmed instruction on the Web. It would certainly be easier to gather statistics and make adjustments to individual frames using a web-based programmed instruction format.
Fourth, programmed instruction is possibly not suited to every subject. My first programmed instruction courses were from IBM, covering Autocoder for the IBM 1401, but there have been many subjects, even flight training, done well and successfully in programmed instruction format.
Programmed instruction succeeded because Skinner's hypothesis was that people learned more from success than failure, and all content was arranged to make people successful at every step. (There were some formats from publishers that didn't test their frames; they simply broke up text-like content into small pieces and called them "frames" and the books "programmed instruction". Do not be fooled; PI is designed from the start to produce successful responses.)
Re-introducing Computer-Based Teaching on today's internet could have some amazing possibilities. Many of the illustrations could be replaced by animations that more clearly express the ideas. Programmed reviews could be short and sweet, and provide successful mental practice for people needing to develop knowledge that requires memory reinforcement. Basic skills in Math and English could be society-changing improvements.
The qestion shoud be something like, "What distro would you use to teach (x)..?" What you are going to teach and the criteria for teaching it are more important than the software version.
If you are going to teach Linux administration, I would suggest OpenSuse, Debian, RedHat or Fedora. If you want glitch-free production systems, use something that has universal appeal and stay away from Ubuntu and Mint. (My experience is that they change too much from one release to another, administration tools are not standard, and, although installing some things like LAMP is a snap on Mint, advanced administration takes too much time. My list consists of distros I would never use again because I have work to do and I'd rather not spend a lot of time looking for the exotic configurations that make my distro work. (Top of the list: Ubuntu and CentOS, followed by Mint, Debian Mint and Fedora.) I prefer Debian, but I would go with RHE or OpenSuse without crying. I do development work on multiple hybrid systems that may require computer-machine interfaces, but you should match your requirements to your audience' needs.
Thank you for the suggestion. I did some research and I think you are probably right, and it is a solution I wan't aware of because I don't own an air-cooled VW at this time. But I have made note so I will remember it in the future. Thanks.
If you can find one. Many of my computer clients are auto shops, and here in Houston they are going out of business fairly rapidly.
My hypotheses is that the better quality of vehicle makes it harder for independent auto shops to stay in business. 15 years ago, a car that lasted 100,000 miles was considered a pretty good car, but now the lifespan before major repairs is typically 250,000 miles or more.
Added to that, the complexity of new vehicles requires a "technician" instead of a mechanic. And the biggest problem I hear about from the shops I work with is lack of good technicians.
Added to that is the cost of the equipment required for diagnosing and fixing today's vehicles. The cost for emissions testing equipment for testing pre-1996 vehicles (needed by my fleet maintenance folks) starts at 75,000 dollars and requires major construction to accommodate the dynamometer, plus a hefty maintenance contract. The locksmith tools required for today's electronic security systems costs over $20,000. Now hybrids have added to the mix of skills and equipment necessary to do a competent job.
And, the market is shrinking; some outfits, like Caterpillar, won't even sell their expensive diagnostic software to anyone except an "authorized" repair shop.
Unfortunately, the number of shops going out of business does not translate into more business for the remaining shops. I can't tell what the difference is, because Economic data is not good in this industry. In Houston, there is no reliable method for counting the number of auto shops in business, there is no way to tell how many auto shops there were in years past, so there is no way to measure the shrinkage (if any).
The auto repair business is still HUGE, but things are changing. I want my 1967 Karmann Ghia back! (However, the hotter-burning gas, with additives, burns out the air-cooled engines a lot faster. One solution is to reduce the compression ratio, but then you get less gas mileage. Who wants a 14-mile--per-gallon Volkswagon?)
I expect more auto shops to be like Jiffy Lube; drive in for quick maintenance, and drive out. I even envision a robot brake shop where you drive in, the robots spin off your wheels and replace your brakes, and the belt moves the car to an inspection station where the only human in the place inspects the job and collects the money. (Why not? The tires already are assembled by robots; Why not a universally-fitted robot dis-assembly/assembly station in a Jiffy Lube-sized shop?)
I just spent a couple of years working at a "retirement community" where I was as old as the residents. There were a couple of very healthy residents, such as a Vietnamese doctor (76) who got up every morning and did Tai Chi and an 87-year-old guy who walked two miles around the campus each morning. But most of the residents were rotting away under the burden of a lifetime of bad food and no exercise.
I don't mind the thought of dying, but I want to die reasonably suddenly after a full, active life. Frank Lloyd Wright was brilliant well into his 80's. I just read something about a biotech entrepreneur who started two major companies while in his 70's and 80's.
Working to have a healthy child is a matter of teamwork. True, the doctor thinks he/she is the quarterback, but the parent is the manager. If the players can't sync it is time to rearrange the team components. So, if the quarterback wants to go to a different team...
Medical treatment is often a matter of probability, not proof. Probability is hard to understand for someone who doesn't deal in math a lot. Many parents I've met would rather believe their own superstitions than do the research that would lead them to a reasonable conclusion about their children's health. (For one thing, it is very, very, VERY time-consuming!)
I'm on the side that thinks vaccination does much more good than harm, but I've never had to try to explain an unexplainable case of autism or mental health issue to a parent that wants an answer to, "Why us?"
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Sorry, but I couldn't find any comprehensive statistics that made a valid comparison.
First, the chunk is too big: There is no valid way to statistically say that money is evenly distributed among health providers and/or patients.
Second, in order too be valid, we would need a large sample of all medical services and statistics comparing similar ailments, the cost of treating each ailment, and the outcome. As far as I can tell, vaccinations have the only well-defined statistical data, and even that is controversial in some areas.
Ask a better question.
Yeah, I'm sorry, but health care is price-controlled in major ways, particularly Medicare and Medicaid, and that is a de facto subsidization.
Furthermore, it is an Economic principle that anything that is price-controlled causes a shortage of the good controlled and causes higher prices. This may be the one thing that almost all Economists actually agree on, and it is based on 4500 years of historical records.
I was just reading an article about a doctor who had a 12-person office until last December. In January he quit taking Medicare and Medicaid patients, and quit taking insurance. He was able to lower his prices 14% and improve his revenues by 22%. He now runs his office with 4 people. (Let's not forget that filling out insurance forms and so forth are still services, but now they are in shorter supply.) The motive for declining insurance and MM? MM did not pay the expenses and were costing him a great deal of money and aggravation. Statistics vary according to specialty, location and survey source, but the number of doctors not taking new medicare patients seems to be somewhere between 12% and 19%. .This range is up about 4% from 2009.
If I remember correctly (I can't find my notes), OS2 was a port of IBM's mainframe 32-bit OS scaled for the microcontroller. If you connected using a 3270 terminal or emulator you could get some pretty fast apps going. Of course, people wanted to work from the desktop, not a terminal. The killer was the graphical interface, which never worked right. Furthermore, new apps for the desktop were hard to write, and required developers to be fully immersed in the IBM programming paradigm and mindset. On the other hand, once written, applications worked like they were supposed to. For what it did, the OS2 was one of the sweetest, most elegant OS's for the PC environment. I was hoping something would come from the osFree folks, but it is apparently tough sledding. I was really disappointed that IBM didn't release the OS2 source. A great learning opportunity has been lost.
You are jumping to conclusions: It is not the corporatocracy, nor is it a conspiracy. It is just dickering over the reins of power.
I, for one, am tired of the huge number of bills passed by our lawmakers. Many journalists this week commented on the number of laws passed each year, and most of them agree that we don't even know what they are, so we can't always be sure we are in compliance. In trying to pass comprehensive bills, our lawmakers are trying to "program" human behavior and they use lousy tools. (Imagine trying to write a program to make everyone and everything do exactly what you want done. Now imagine trying to write it in a language that only describes what is NOT allowed.)
I imagine a day will come when laws are written in explicit classes as objects with explicitly testable functions. (Right...not in My lifetime..)
I've heard a number of possible solutions here. The obvious one would be for the litigator to license the patents to the app-maker for a small, reasonable fee. It looks like this isn't happening. I see nothing in the docs I accessed to indicate this was even put forward.
People mentioned prior art. What would happen if Apple, for instance, took a stand for the app-maker? That changes the dynamics considerably.
The more this gets around to the user community and the people who prescribe the devices for their patients and customers, the more victimized the consumers feel. They will also pressure the maker to make a deal.
Blackball the companies from the research community. The researchers, some of whom appear to be stockholders in the company, might get a sense of reality if they were exposed as victimizing the poor 3-year-old girl who wants to talk.
FOSS alternative. Find someone to program the dang thing and make it better. The suggestion about the Android app and Europe is fairly good. Charitable funding for development would also be good.
There seems to be some agreement that the PTO needs overhauling and the patent laws need revision. I agree. So how about someone doing a logical analysis and finding some alternative paths that are so obvious that even the lobbyists can't overcome them? Somewhere there is a complicated, convoluted repository of all the relevant arguments for our current patent system. It is probably too much for Congress to understand, but someone could make it clear. I would know where to start, but like most of us, I have limited time and I would want to apply my own time to other projects. But who knows? The FOSS community is made up of people with ideas and intersts different from mine, and this may appeal to someone.
Your "problem" is not well defined. A problem is the difference between the way things are and the way you ant them to be. In your case, you have a large amount of digitally stored data and you are afraid that it might be lost. What do you need to do so you don't have that fear? (This is not a "management" problem, but I will get to that later.)
The only practical solution is to keep duplicates somewhere "safe", with safe being defined as someplace where you think you will be able to recover it in an emergency. Maybe the emergency is just a local hard drive failure, but it doesn't hurt to think of the effects of floods or Tunami. RAID is good, but I have customers who spent a lot of money trying to recover data stored on RAID arrays because they didn't have another backup. No matter what, you are going to lose some data in an emergency. Figure out how much you can afford to lose. This establishes the timing of your backups. 1 day? Ok, differentially back up your data 3 times per day on different backup media and you will not likely have to ever recreate more than a day's worth of data. Then arrange for the media to be copied or stored offsite so local disasters don't affect it.
I predict that loss of personal data is going to be a big problem a few years from now. Even today, how many people who taped their kid's birth in 8mm film can actually find a way to view it now? What about those files, ideas and manuscripts that you saved on that Z80 running CP/M and had the MFM drive? Oh, and those old CD's that are now rotted away? Management means deciding how long you want this info to be available. Do you want your great-grandkids to see how it was to live in the USA before Communism replaced our Constitution? Better plan for it.
Management might also include retrieval. I know at least one "backup solution" that issued a version of software that couldn't restore the data. I have over 3000 books. I don't need them every day, but I do occasionally like to go back and research or review some of the stuff I've read. Digital storage should allow us to have a tremendous amount of data at our fingertips if we can only put our fingers on the right set of facts... Semantic search is not quite good enough but it's improving. In the meantime, you might do worse than to use the data-cache model for retrieving your knowledge base.
You can't get around the budget problem. You can purchase reliable solutions or you increase your risk.
Family scrapbook solution: We created a scrapbook and made 6 copies which we sent to all the siblings in my generation of kids. If my brother's house burns down we can re-create his scrapbook for him. Use the same idea for digital safety and you might have a high probability of recovering it.
Well, yes and no...
The thinking process is rigorous and follows the same scientific guidelines. The problem of testability and lack of laboratory constructs means that proof and refutation don't work as well as in a hard science like Chemistry. It is younger than Mathematics, so it doesn't have a body of reliable empirical knowledge, but many of the fundamental principles have proven their worth over time.
Consider this: Divide Economics into three categories. The first category, Economic Philosophy, might try to determine how people behave, and even try to suggest optimum behavior. Socialism and Capitalism are subcategories of Economic Philosophy.
The third category, Economic Technology, tries to shape human behavior or human results. Monetarists and Keynesians might be prime examples. The use of taxes and tariffs and other economic tricks designed to manipulate human behavior falls into this category. Marxism and other "command and control" philosophies relied on this.
Sandwiched in between them is a narrow category of Economic Science. Economic Science has a sole goal of discovering what happens under certain circumstances and tries to make predictions. Two of the main tools of Economic Science would be Probability and Statistics. Since there is no "laboratory", Economic Science must analyze what it can from History, which means that data is subject to gaps and inconsistent interpretations.
Now the evidence over time has shown that tariffs increase costs for consumers. In economic terms, this is usually considered a "bad idea" by Economic Philosophy because increased costs for one good mean acquiring less of another. Without tariffs the consumer might be able to have both and would then be plus prosperity.
Economic Technologists, however, are working in a Dynamic System where changes in one subsystem affect the behavior of all the rest. The Technologists are assuming that by increasing the cost for one imported good, the same good can be produced locally at a more acceptable price, and create jobs, etc. However, it will not create a net increase in trade, and the lower-priced local good is still higher than the imported good before tariffs, so the consumer is still suffering, even though he is suffering less. Sooner or later the system will find Equilibrium. Why would an Economic Scientist make this prediction?: It is based on 4500 years of historical comparison with a probability of somewhere around 90% allowing for error. In the meantime, the people buying tariff'ed solar cells are not buying your computer components or hiring you as a software developer because they don't have the money (which they spent on solar components).
Here is something you may be able to use in your decision making: In 4500 years of history, price controls have invariably led to shortages of the controlled good, and higher prices for the good where it is available. Obamacare is a form of price control and, if it prevails, will create a shortage of medical services for those that need it most, and those who are lucky enough to get care will pay more.
On the Economic Technology side: It is a given that when something is taxed, less of the taxed good is produced. Obamacare imposes an 8%+ added expense to employers for each employee. This is equivalent to an 8%+ tax on jobs. The result is going to be fewer jobs, and harder work for those lucky enough to have one.
(I'm only picking on Obamacare because it is the most obvious current, far-reaching, economically poor decision (IMO). Somebody with a background in Economics might see this immediately. Economists are divided: About 80% say Obamacare is a bad decision, about 20%, including Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, say it is a good decision. Those for Obamacare are not using numbers as their measurement, they are usually using some moral stance. Statistics vary by source since this is a politically sensitive issue.)
Your assumptions about Austrian Economics and the people that agree with the premises and conclusions are probably wrong.
Maybe. On the other hand, in a global economy, solar components not sold to the USA will simply be sold to other competitors for those goods (like France) making them more competitive with us. The efficiency loss is all one sided: The buyer with the tariff loses.
I'm not quoting from a dogma. The mathematics are pretty clear that tariffs mean higher prices for the buyers. Given an finite amount of money, if I have to spend more on one good, I have less money to spend on another. This means I don't get to maximize my standard of living.
The end result will be higher prices for the buyers. Is that good or bad?
Sorry, I don't know about T-Mobile, but I know Sprint does not activate phones on Verizon or ATT stolen/lost lists. Furthermore, it practically takes an act of Congress to activate a non-Sprint phone on the Sprint network. In the case of the iPhone, Sprint will NOT activate iPhones not bought through Sprint authorized outlets. (The exception was a series of iPhones bought for the Sprint network from Apple stores that were mistakenly ID'd as ATT phones. We had a workaround for that, and the phones were then correctly ID'd as Sprint phones.) Basically, if it doesn't have the Sprint logo it is not activated on the Sprint network.
I don't know what's going on, but there was a rash of iPhone thefts in January and February. I don't know what the thieves did with the stolen phones. A number of them were sold on e-bay, but the recipients couldn't activate them and were badly screwed.
Sarcasm noted. However, amost anyone who knows anything about Economics knows that the idea of tariff is a bad idea. Cure your ignorance: Read "Spin-free Economics" by Behravesh or any other good basic Economics book.
Did you do this with Toys 'R Us co-operation? If not, you are a crook and exactly the type of vendor that honest people shouldn't deal with. I hope your kids are proud of you.
I forgot to add that the insurance company has the ability to locate phones through the GPS, and we have found phones through the "family locator service". Unfortunately, the gps is not necessarily precise enough, and by itself is not enough to get a warant.
I know for a fact that Sprint (I worked for them for a while) creates a "lost or stolen" database. If your Sprint phone is stolen you report it to sprint and the "lost/stolen" service is placed on your phone. This renders the phone unusable: No calls, no messages. If you get a new phone, when you activate the new phone on the old number there is a check for "lost/stolen" and the SN/MEID goes into a database and that cannot be activated on sprint again. All allegations of carriers not concerned about the theft of phones is bogus.
My carrier is ATT. I know for a fact that they have exactly the same service although it is applied a little differently.
However, the phone would still be usable after hacking such as cloning. The carriers can only block the phone services on their network; not destroy the phone itself.
I first sold Commodore in Minneapolis back when they were making calculators in 1968. They came out with a 30-lb., programmable calculator that used magnetic strips to hold the programs. It only held 30 instructions, but it had recursion so it outperformed Friden and Marchant's competitive products. (One was 60 lbs and had two units connected by a thick cable, the other needed to be reprogrammed by performing the operation so it could be memorized before starting to produce any useful work.) I sold a bunch to Bell. With no printer (nixie-tube readout) an office of 30 people was practically silent. Bell had open rooms filled with clacking and clanking calulators in those days. Now we complain that the person next to us has a loud keyboard... Well, I made some money, but you should have heard the owner complain about the money he had tied up in Commodore. I didn't really know what he meant at the time.
Jump to 1978: I'm the first one selling Apple II and Commodore PET computers in Anchorage. I had to order 5 PET units at a time. My cost was $999.00 and the selling price was $1499.00. As long as I had a $5000 deposit with Commodore I had a $5000 "line of credit". But the manufacturing was lousy. I typically had shipments come in with two or more units DOA (and one where 4 out of my 5 units were DOA), which I had to RMA and wait for them to be returned. I needed stock? No problem: Commodore would gladly take another $5000 deposit and let me order 5 more units...
Jump to 1988: I'm selling computers to NASA in Houston for a store that also carries the Commodore Amiga. And guess what?..My manager is complaining about the same lousy manufacturing and policies that I did 10 years ago.
Jump to 1993: I helped set up a computer department for BizMart (now OfficeMax) and they are trying to deal with the same lousy stocking problems from Commodore. Right around Christmas time we sold a lot of Commodore Amiga and associated products. After Christmas the returns started coming in: It seems that we had all the marginal units dumped on us to make the Commodore numbers look good for some type of joint venture or purchase deal.
I believe in my heart that Commodore would have gone out of business if they didn't have the CMOS manufacturing to keep them afloat. I pity the vendors stuck dealing with Commodore, but it will probably be someone clueless like Best Buy anyway. The commodore products were somewhat innovative, but the company was not consumer or vendor friendly.
...just how much we need "The Encyclopaedia Britannica."
I actually sold the Britannica for a number of years. I love that set of books. My copy is the Bicentennial Edition but I would love to get another nearly-up-to-date edition, plus a complete set of the Great Books of the Western World with accessories. The CD/DVD version (which I have 2010) is good in concept, but the articles are not as comprehensive and it is not easy to browse. My older set had articles by Einstein and other original 20th Century thinkers. In an age when books were hard to come by, the EB educated many people. In later years, as public school destroyed people's ability to read and think, it became less relevant; People didn't go to the encyclopedia to learn, but only to get facts.
Basically, the EB is outmoded as a reference work. About 25 percent of the material is changing at a very rapid rate. Back in 1979 Britannica was exploring the possibility of a computerized edition. One of the criteria was that it be easily updateable as new knowledge arrived and another was that it be easy to use. What killed it at that time was that the illustrations were too massive for the type of storage available in 1979. By the time it was feasible to computerize it, the Encarta was free and people were too ignorant to judge the difference in quality between the larger, more authoritative EB and the pitiful little Encarta. So Britannica got sold to a marketing company incapable of making the necessary changes. Britannica got stuck with a slow Java-based interface, a paid online edition and lousy hyperlink service while Encarta got bigger. Then Wikipedia started making inroads as people's reference work and showed the world what was possible in an online reference (even though it is much inferior academically).
Luckily I still have the editon with major introductions by Mortimer Adler and a volume of reprints of original articles from the 1928 edition with which to stimulate my mind. I also have other reference systems including the DVD version of EB, the complete National Geographic (with its lousy interface and microfilm-type usage), the complete Mother Earth news to 1990 and some others. The new paradigm for a knowledge system will have to be something like a "university in a box" that includes articles, exercises tests, progress reports, review sessions and achivement scoring. I guess I know what my new life's mission is....
BTW... http://www.robertwservice.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=884
Yeah, and one problem I see in pilot programs is that the the students that get poor results are stuck with those results for their entire lives. A Fourth Grader who didn't learn Multiplication well will be passed on with poor arithmetic skills that will bug him for the rest of his life. Any manufacturer who produced as much defective product as the Public School system would be out of business in a short time.
Back in the '60's and '70's I tutored Juniors, Seniors and Grad Students in Math and Physics. My secret weapon was "programmed instruction" books. People who hadn't done a lick of work all quarter would come to me and say, "I need a miracle." OK, I would assign them a programmed instruction course that covered the material they needed. Programmed instruction courses tend to be large volumes, but they typically take from 1/3 to 1/6 as long to finish as comparably-sized standard text. Furthermore, good programmed instruction was statistically tested so that there was 97% correctness and competency from frame-to-frame and to the overall content of the course.
Programmed instruction courses are few and far between now. Two long-lived examples are the Blumenthal English series (English 2200, 2600, 3200) and Ken Stroud's books on Engineering Mathematics. I attribute the decline in programmed instruction to a number of factors:
First, it worked, and it worked well without teachers. (God knows what would happen if the world found out that you didn't need teachers to learn! Why, we might have computers and parents teaching our kids!) Like I said, competency was statistically designed in for 97% success.
Second, it was based on research by B. F. Skinner and Norman Crowder. B. F. Skinner became controversial and his work was denigrated even though most of it was very sound. (Maybe Academics should stay away from expressing controversial opinions, but then what good does Education and Research give back to Society if you're afraid to let it loose?)
Third, Good programmed instruction is time-consuming and expensive up front. Not only is there writing and planning, but there are numerous tests and revisions to achieve that 97% competency. Computer projects and teaching machines used programmed instruction at a time when computers were VERY expensive. Control Data's Plato project was very successful for a long time. CBT today is a joke; it mostly reproduces classroom demogougery. However, there are a few programs like the web-based Logic Cafe http://thelogiccafe.net/PLI/ which show the possibilities of programmed instruction on the Web. It would certainly be easier to gather statistics and make adjustments to individual frames using a web-based programmed instruction format.
Fourth, programmed instruction is possibly not suited to every subject. My first programmed instruction courses were from IBM, covering Autocoder for the IBM 1401, but there have been many subjects, even flight training, done well and successfully in programmed instruction format.
Programmed instruction succeeded because Skinner's hypothesis was that people learned more from success than failure, and all content was arranged to make people successful at every step. (There were some formats from publishers that didn't test their frames; they simply broke up text-like content into small pieces and called them "frames" and the books "programmed instruction". Do not be fooled; PI is designed from the start to produce successful responses.)
Re-introducing Computer-Based Teaching on today's internet could have some amazing possibilities. Many of the illustrations could be replaced by animations that more clearly express the ideas. Programmed reviews could be short and sweet, and provide successful mental practice for people needing to develop knowledge that requires memory reinforcement. Basic skills in Math and English could be society-changing improvements.
The qestion shoud be something like, "What distro would you use to teach (x)..?" What you are going to teach and the criteria for teaching it are more important than the software version.
If you are going to teach Linux administration, I would suggest OpenSuse, Debian, RedHat or Fedora. If you want glitch-free production systems, use something that has universal appeal and stay away from Ubuntu and Mint. (My experience is that they change too much from one release to another, administration tools are not standard, and, although installing some things like LAMP is a snap on Mint, advanced administration takes too much time. My list consists of distros I would never use again because I have work to do and I'd rather not spend a lot of time looking for the exotic configurations that make my distro work. (Top of the list: Ubuntu and CentOS, followed by Mint, Debian Mint and Fedora.) I prefer Debian, but I would go with RHE or OpenSuse without crying. I do development work on multiple hybrid systems that may require computer-machine interfaces, but you should match your requirements to your audience' needs.
Thank you for the suggestion. I did some research and I think you are probably right, and it is a solution I wan't aware of because I don't own an air-cooled VW at this time. But I have made note so I will remember it in the future. Thanks.
If you can find one. Many of my computer clients are auto shops, and here in Houston they are going out of business fairly rapidly.
My hypotheses is that the better quality of vehicle makes it harder for independent auto shops to stay in business. 15 years ago, a car that lasted 100,000 miles was considered a pretty good car, but now the lifespan before major repairs is typically 250,000 miles or more.
Added to that, the complexity of new vehicles requires a "technician" instead of a mechanic. And the biggest problem I hear about from the shops I work with is lack of good technicians.
Added to that is the cost of the equipment required for diagnosing and fixing today's vehicles. The cost for emissions testing equipment for testing pre-1996 vehicles (needed by my fleet maintenance folks) starts at 75,000 dollars and requires major construction to accommodate the dynamometer, plus a hefty maintenance contract. The locksmith tools required for today's electronic security systems costs over $20,000. Now hybrids have added to the mix of skills and equipment necessary to do a competent job.
And, the market is shrinking; some outfits, like Caterpillar, won't even sell their expensive diagnostic software to anyone except an "authorized" repair shop.
Unfortunately, the number of shops going out of business does not translate into more business for the remaining shops. I can't tell what the difference is, because Economic data is not good in this industry. In Houston, there is no reliable method for counting the number of auto shops in business, there is no way to tell how many auto shops there were in years past, so there is no way to measure the shrinkage (if any).
The auto repair business is still HUGE, but things are changing. I want my 1967 Karmann Ghia back! (However, the hotter-burning gas, with additives, burns out the air-cooled engines a lot faster. One solution is to reduce the compression ratio, but then you get less gas mileage. Who wants a 14-mile--per-gallon Volkswagon?)
I expect more auto shops to be like Jiffy Lube; drive in for quick maintenance, and drive out. I even envision a robot brake shop where you drive in, the robots spin off your wheels and replace your brakes, and the belt moves the car to an inspection station where the only human in the place inspects the job and collects the money. (Why not? The tires already are assembled by robots; Why not a universally-fitted robot dis-assembly/assembly station in a Jiffy Lube-sized shop?)
Excellent point. I do wish you had pointed to some actual statistics, though.
I just spent a couple of years working at a "retirement community" where I was as old as the residents. There were a couple of very healthy residents, such as a Vietnamese doctor (76) who got up every morning and did Tai Chi and an 87-year-old guy who walked two miles around the campus each morning. But most of the residents were rotting away under the burden of a lifetime of bad food and no exercise.
I don't mind the thought of dying, but I want to die reasonably suddenly after a full, active life. Frank Lloyd Wright was brilliant well into his 80's. I just read something about a biotech entrepreneur who started two major companies while in his 70's and 80's.
Exercise may be the fountain of youth.
Working to have a healthy child is a matter of teamwork. True, the doctor thinks he/she is the quarterback, but the parent is the manager. If the players can't sync it is time to rearrange the team components. So, if the quarterback wants to go to a different team...
Medical treatment is often a matter of probability, not proof. Probability is hard to understand for someone who doesn't deal in math a lot. Many parents I've met would rather believe their own superstitions than do the research that would lead them to a reasonable conclusion about their children's health. (For one thing, it is very, very, VERY time-consuming!)
I'm on the side that thinks vaccination does much more good than harm, but I've never had to try to explain an unexplainable case of autism or mental health issue to a parent that wants an answer to, "Why us?"