The US healthcare system has lots of problems, but it is already a free market. Many people argue that changing that would make things worse, not better.
And many who argue that also ignore the tiny detail that many western countries have a healthcare system that is at least as good and is upto 50% cheaper.
There is a difference between legal standards of licensing and practice, and a system that has been designed to benefit the middleman.
Absolutely, but 'legal standards of licensing and practice' are effectively limiting competition, and hence it is not a free market. Not saying this is a bad thing btw.
The fact is that we have a state supported employer based health care system. A free market would at least involve individual choice, but now you get to choose who you work for and they get to choose which insurance you have to pay to get comprehensive medical care.
I happen to live in a country with a state run public healthcare, and guess what, I can pick from a few dozen companies that provide health insurance despite it being a state run system..
For me insurance is mandatory, for insurance companies, the minimum coverage is defined by the government. The result is that virtually everyone here is insured, basic ensurance provides decent coverage for most health related costs, and due to competition between multiple insurance companies, the price for this all is still reasonable. From what I read in this discussion, what I call 'decent coverage' is actually better then what comprehensive plans in the USA seem to offer.
Oh, and the lesson from this should be that a state run system does not mean there cannot be competition also. Anyone arguing this is impossible is ignoring facts and reality.
1. A perfect communist government would still fail.
Ah, but that is your opinion, and something you believe, not something you can have any proof of since such a thing never existed.
2. The more capitalist a nation is, the more prosperous it is (you don't need to have a completely capitalist nation to see it's effects).
Well yes, most countries in northern Europe, and especially Scandinavia are doing quite badly indeed.. I bet this is due to the socialist nature of their governments also.
Not to mention that capitalism is not the same as 'free market', and I'm pretty sure that Europe has seen some extremely capitalist governments that brought their citizens an extreme amount of missery.
Has anyone measured CO2 levels on mars and venus? So far the only proof we have that co2 is linked to global warming is that any time in the past when temperatures have gone up, so has CO2. How can we prove which one is the cause, and which one a symptom? And if we can't even prove that, how in the world can we possibly expect to determine exactly how much effect CO2 has on temperature?
With regards to Mars, the following pages (among many others) contain info about the exact makeup of the Mars atmosphere:
You make a very good point there about 'free markets', but then, it seems that you understand that 'free market' first of all means a market free of anti-competitive influences, and not so much 'I can do whatever the hell I want'.
The only first-hand experience I've heard was from a Belgian friend of mine who lived there for a few years, and he thought it was awful. It's been maybe 10 years since he lived there so maybe it's better now. I don't recall which part of the UK he was in, but I'm pretty sure it was the London area.
Well, it is definitely a matter of what you are used to. If your friend comes from Belgium, he is used to an even better system.
Incidentely, the health care system in Belgium is part of the social security system there and as a result it is heavily government regulated.
It is also considered to be one of the best health care systems in the world.
Maybe so, but Monbiot is also a masterful spinner of information - his books are intentionally written to appeal to the downtrodden masses to increase sales volume. Any piece, PERIOD, by Monbiot is suspect because he doesn't bother with things called "logic" or "the scientific method."
No idea about him and the scientific method, but he definitely bothers with logic in this article..
Any discussion on this piece is a waste of time. Please see the appropriate peer-reviewed articles in the appropriate scientific journals and/or conferences for a proper discussion of the facts on global warming.
Interestingly enough, the fact that the 'climate change debunking' article was not published in such a form is one of the main complaints from Monbiot, so you may find yourself in agreement with him on where to look for good information on this.
But hey, this is slashdot, so why bother to read the article before commenting..
allow people to hook up any USB mass storage device, and play the media from that.
Unless you seriously restrict the types of media that can be played, this system will be vulnerable for all kinds of malicious software.
Make it a Linux MPlayer thing and it would be able to play just about anything.
Have you veer wondered why there is no Linux distribution comming with mplayer binaries that play almost everything?
Why do companies keep on locking themselves into one device when it would be much easier to support a large number of devices. If they're worried about DRM on the files, then work out a deal with apple so that they can decrypt the files on the iPod.
Because companies want to deal with one provider instead of a zillion of them.
However my point still holds: having the source available is much better than any sort of bug-for-bug binary backwards compatibility.
That really depends, for someone who simply lacks the technical knowledge, a system built on 'bug-for-bug binary backwards compatibility' will actually do the job of running older applications, a system with source available won't.
That said, when the backward compatibility breaks, chances on fixing the situation will be a lot better when source is available.
What is better for you really depends on what is usable to you.
Whether you compile it yourself (like the Gentoo or even Slackware users love to), or the distribution provides precompiled binaries for everything is just a matter of choice. A matter of freedom. And this is something Windows will never offer.
That is all nice and well, but it does not help people who are not knowledgable about software development, whereas a system that is 'bug-for-bug backward compatible' will help such people.
And yes, I am aware that it also has a price, and I am personally not willing to pay that price, hence I use a different system where I can indeed fix things when needed without depending on others, matter of fact is that I have the knowledge to actually make use of that feature.
I have looked at Gentoo, and I'm mostly a FreeBSD user myself. I do compile virtually everything myself, and for me that is perfectly acceptable, but I am not so stupid to believe that what works for me will work for everyone. Demanding that every user knows enough about software development to compile everything themselves is a good show of complete lack of realism.
Maybe you should spend some time learning how to read so you don't look like an ass so frequently.
I suggest you take a bit of your own medicine, and while at it, in your head there is supposedly some grey mass, if that is indeed the case for you, maybe start using it.
Why the "copy" command is still broken after all these years. Someone lose the source?
It works as designed, that you happen to not like how it is designed does not make it 'broken' (tho maybe it makes the design 'broken')
And speaking of open source, I am building a new bsd box to migrate users to since the original admin missed a year of upgrades and the pieces cannot be upgraded now without serious downtime.
Don't know what BSD you are talking about, but I have done such upgrades without major downtime, it is merely a matter of making good use of the tools you have (chroot or jail and the ports collection or pkgsrc, depending on which system you use)
Backwards compatibility is one of Linux's strong points
Hmm.. you sure about that?
I seem to recall a few issues with this...
ie, multithreaded applications built for 2.4 may encounter problems on 2.6 unless you set some specific environment variable. Or.. how about the nice compatibility between glibc versions?
As long as you can recompile your software, Linux provides excelent backward compatibility, but that is a non-option for many situations.
Pure and simple, Microsoft has protected their market share by remaining backwards compatible, and will continue to do so for that reason only.
Since they are a business, in it to make money, NOT to make cool technology, that is the only correct decision for them to begin with.
A company like Apple can afford to ignore backwards compatibility to some extent, as this actually drives greater revenue from their loyal customer base buying new software.
Aha? Apple invested a lot of time and efford into making at least the important OS9 applications work on OSX, and for the exact same reason. Again now they moved to Intel hardware, they are spending time and efford to ensure powerpc based apps will work.
Microsoft though, cannot afford to give their corporate users a chance to make a migration decision.
Migration is expensive anyway, and is not what this is about. This is about selling upgrades and not shooting yourself in the foot.
If Microsoft eliminated backwards compatibility, thousands of companies would be in a position where they needed to include the cost of migrating software in the upgrade decision.
migration: move to another platform/application upgrade: move to a newer version of the same platform/application
Yeah, you can quite argue the later is a special case of the first, but the conversation is a lot easier to follow when you don't do that.
All of a sudden, Linux would become a viable option for these corporate clients, which Microsoft can't afford.
It becomes a viable option as soon as the applications for Linux exist. Where they do, it becomes a matter of which choice is more attractive, but all choices that offer the desired functionality are 'viable'
For example, my company currently has over 900 16 bit applications that we haven't touched in ~10 years. Almost all of these run fine under XP and the beta versions of Vista, so upgrading to Vista will be a cheap option. However, if Vista didn't support these 16 bit apps, we'd have to spend years of time and Millions of dollars upgrading... in this case Linux would likely become our new O/S.
A large part of the business world still runs Windows 2000, and I'm pretty sure that if those apps won't run on Vista, your company would stay on XP, possibly paying Microsoft for extended support, untill such moment that there are new applications that will run on Vista.
The cost of migration in a large environment is first of all related to training people for the entirely different system.
While it's not the most common language, there's no T9 support for swiss(-german) which is the language of choice for about 95% of my text-messages. So I agree, T9 sucks...
And neither is there for the variation on Dutch that they speak in Belgium.. Since there is a 'standard' Dutch T9 dictionary, that is what they use. I am pretty sure there is a standard German one (I use it quite often), and I bet that with a few modifications, it would work well for Swiss as well.. For all I can tell the bigger difference is pronounciation there anyway.
Ok, don't get too upset. Texting came about as a cheap way to send a message, because calling on a mobile phone was quite expensive, even for a minute.
Not really.
Texting came about as a side effect of how the gsm network works, and was initially not intended for end-users but for testing. That it exists in its current form is merely an accident.
Sending a text message can be efficient when you have a very short message for someone, but as soon as some form of 2 way communications is required, or the message isn't very short, it is often both faster and cheaper to call, even when talking about international calls from a cellphone.
There are also occasions when you want to communicate with someone, and not talk, like in the theatre, or a lecture, or a meeting.
Yep, that is what some people realized when finding out about the short messages that travel between exchange and cellphone, the 'test feature' found a good use besides testing..
But these days, texting is very popular, because it is still cheaper, so in reality, it is just a way on encoding your voice message differently, and it is one way.
It is really only cheaper when your message is very short and no reply is desired.
Maybe the price structure in the USA is different and it is really cheaper there in most cases, but for the price of a text message I can have a 2 minute conversation here also, and the later allows for more information and two way communications.
Well I admit that if I had a big project developed under PHBs' pressure, I'd take my time cleaning it up before releasing the source.
Definitely, and on top of that, SUN was worried about possible forking and losing control over the standard it seems.
Anyway I didn't mean to be harsh on Sun. I hope, and expect their work of open sourcing java and Solaris bears good fruit to them.
I hope so as well. I know that this move is going to solve a problem for me, and I bet for others as well (being able to use platforms that SUN does not support without having to jump through hoops)
I think we must thank microsoft and its C# initiative, er... plan for world domination, for convincing Sun to open up. That couldn't be done 10 years ago when Java was the only player, and it being free as in beer was already a step forward compared to other environments.
It is likely an argument, but talk about open sourcing JAVA is quite old.
A few years ago I wrote this article, and there are similar articles from other people. From my server logs I know that this article has been read by quite a few people from SUN, and I have had some discussion with a few of them.
For years it seems it was a matter of "we'd like to, but we don't dare to".
Have it be someone's job to review incoming e-mail to these addresses, understanding that the vast majority of incoming mail might be spam. Of course, you could add some sort of obfuscation to these addresses, but what's the point-- like spammers couldn't just guess "contact@your-domain.com"?
Heh, good spam filters do wonders there. You might notice I show an email addy here on slashdot unobfusicated, and yeah, a lot of spam is directed at it, but basicly none of it ever makes it through the filter, whereas any mail I want to have seems to make it through.. One of the companies I work with uses their info@ and support@ addresses intensively, tho behind a similar but less strict spam filter. I believe the total time/day spent on sorting out the remaining spam is some 15 or so minutes, not too bad.
And yes, spammers 'guess', or more accurately, use trial and error to find addresses that seem to work, so regardless of what you do, chances are you will be found by spammers anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
The US healthcare system has lots of problems, but it is already a free market. Many people argue that changing that would make things worse, not better.
And many who argue that also ignore the tiny detail that many western countries have a healthcare system that is at least as good and is upto 50% cheaper.
There is a difference between legal standards of licensing and practice, and a system that has been designed to benefit the middleman.
Absolutely, but 'legal standards of licensing and practice' are effectively limiting competition, and hence it is not a free market. Not saying this is a bad thing btw.
The fact is that we have a state supported employer based health care system. A free market would at least involve individual choice, but now you get to choose who you work for and they get to choose which insurance you have to pay to get comprehensive medical care.
I happen to live in a country with a state run public healthcare, and guess what, I can pick from a few dozen companies that provide health insurance despite it being a state run system..
For me insurance is mandatory, for insurance companies, the minimum coverage is defined by the government. The result is that virtually everyone here is insured, basic ensurance provides decent coverage for most health related costs, and due to competition between multiple insurance companies, the price for this all is still reasonable. From what I read in this discussion, what I call 'decent coverage' is actually better then what comprehensive plans in the USA seem to offer.
Oh, and the lesson from this should be that a state run system does not mean there cannot be competition also. Anyone arguing this is impossible is ignoring facts and reality.
1. A perfect communist government would still fail.
Ah, but that is your opinion, and something you believe, not something you can have any proof of since such a thing never existed.
2. The more capitalist a nation is, the more prosperous it is (you don't need to have a completely capitalist nation to see it's effects).
Well yes, most countries in northern Europe, and especially Scandinavia are doing quite badly indeed.. I bet this is due to the socialist nature of their governments also.
Not to mention that capitalism is not the same as 'free market', and I'm pretty sure that Europe has seen some extremely capitalist governments that brought their citizens an extreme amount of missery.
Has anyone measured CO2 levels on mars and venus? So far the only proof we have that co2 is linked to global warming is that any time in the past when temperatures have gone up, so has CO2. How can we prove which one is the cause, and which one a symptom? And if we can't even prove that, how in the world can we possibly expect to determine exactly how much effect CO2 has on temperature?
o xide.html
With regards to Mars, the following pages (among many others) contain info about the exact makeup of the Mars atmosphere:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003AGUFM.P42A0425K
http://www.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au/mars/Carbon_Di
http://www.solarviews.com/eng/mars.htm
This would suggest that such measurements have been made.
I'm pretty sure this is true for Venus as well.
Also, what is up with that "The computer is personal again" thing following my mouse on that page? That was annoying.
Seems like some stupid javascript joke.. annoying indeed.
You make a very good point there about 'free markets', but then, it seems that you understand that 'free market' first of all means a market free of anti-competitive influences, and not so much 'I can do whatever the hell I want'.
The only first-hand experience I've heard was from a Belgian friend of mine who lived there for a few years, and he thought it was awful. It's been maybe 10 years since he lived there so maybe it's better now. I don't recall which part of the UK he was in, but I'm pretty sure it was the London area.
n nel_id=46&story_id=1493
Well, it is definitely a matter of what you are used to. If your friend comes from Belgium, he is used to an even better system.
Incidentely, the health care system in Belgium is part of the social security system there and as a result it is heavily government regulated.
It is also considered to be one of the best health care systems in the world.
Check the following page for more information:
http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subcha
Maybe so, but Monbiot is also a masterful spinner of information - his books are intentionally written to appeal to the downtrodden masses to increase sales volume. Any piece, PERIOD, by Monbiot is suspect because he doesn't bother with things called "logic" or "the scientific method."
No idea about him and the scientific method, but he definitely bothers with logic in this article..
Any discussion on this piece is a waste of time. Please see the appropriate peer-reviewed articles in the appropriate scientific journals and/or conferences for a proper discussion of the facts on global warming.
Interestingly enough, the fact that the 'climate change debunking' article was not published in such a form is one of the main complaints from Monbiot, so you may find yourself in agreement with him on where to look for good information on this.
But hey, this is slashdot, so why bother to read the article before commenting..
Haha, you have a point there. I suppose it matters to them who is in control of the 'infection'.
allow people to hook up any USB mass storage device, and play the media from that.
Unless you seriously restrict the types of media that can be played, this system will be vulnerable for all kinds of malicious software.
Make it a Linux MPlayer thing and it would be able to play just about anything.
Have you veer wondered why there is no Linux distribution comming with mplayer binaries that play almost everything?
Why do companies keep on locking themselves into one device when it would be much easier to support a large number of devices. If they're worried about DRM on the files, then work out a deal with apple so that they can decrypt the files on the iPod.
Because companies want to deal with one provider instead of a zillion of them.
According to this Dutch news site Air France and KLM said they were not aware of such a deal with them.
However my point still holds: having the source available is much better than any sort of bug-for-bug binary backwards compatibility.
That really depends, for someone who simply lacks the technical knowledge, a system built on 'bug-for-bug binary backwards compatibility' will actually do the job of running older applications, a system with source available won't.
That said, when the backward compatibility breaks, chances on fixing the situation will be a lot better when source is available.
What is better for you really depends on what is usable to you.
Whether you compile it yourself (like the Gentoo or even Slackware users love to), or the distribution provides precompiled binaries for everything is just a matter of choice. A matter of freedom. And this is something Windows will never offer.
That is all nice and well, but it does not help people who are not knowledgable about software development, whereas a system that is 'bug-for-bug backward compatible' will help such people.
And yes, I am aware that it also has a price, and I am personally not willing to pay that price, hence I use a different system where I can indeed fix things when needed without depending on others, matter of fact is that I have the knowledge to actually make use of that feature.
Since you are obviously too stupid to understand more complicated language, I will put the argument in a very simple statement.
Technical arguments are irrelevant, the only thing that counts is if it makes Microsoft money.
Since they are a business, they are entirely correct in arguing that way.
Tell that to a Gentoo user!
I have looked at Gentoo, and I'm mostly a FreeBSD user myself. I do compile virtually everything myself, and for me that is perfectly acceptable, but I am not so stupid to believe that what works for me will work for everyone. Demanding that every user knows enough about software development to compile everything themselves is a good show of complete lack of realism.
Maybe you should spend some time learning how to read so you don't look like an ass so frequently.
I suggest you take a bit of your own medicine, and while at it, in your head there is supposedly some grey mass, if that is indeed the case for you, maybe start using it.
Why the "copy" command is still broken after all these years. Someone lose the source?
It works as designed, that you happen to not like how it is designed does not make it 'broken' (tho maybe it makes the design 'broken')
And speaking of open source, I am building a new bsd box to migrate users to since the original admin missed a year of upgrades and the pieces cannot be upgraded now without serious downtime.
Don't know what BSD you are talking about, but I have done such upgrades without major downtime, it is merely a matter of making good use of the tools you have (chroot or jail and the ports collection or pkgsrc, depending on which system you use)
Backwards compatibility is one of Linux's strong points
Hmm.. you sure about that?
I seem to recall a few issues with this...
ie, multithreaded applications built for 2.4 may encounter problems on 2.6 unless you set some specific environment variable.
Or.. how about the nice compatibility between glibc versions?
As long as you can recompile your software, Linux provides excelent backward compatibility, but that is a non-option for many situations.
Pure and simple, Microsoft has protected their market share by remaining backwards compatible, and will continue to do so for that reason only.
... in this case Linux would likely become our new O/S.
Since they are a business, in it to make money, NOT to make cool technology, that is the only correct decision for them to begin with.
A company like Apple can afford to ignore backwards compatibility to some extent, as this actually drives greater revenue from their loyal customer base buying new software.
Aha? Apple invested a lot of time and efford into making at least the important OS9 applications work on OSX, and for the exact same reason. Again now they moved to Intel hardware, they are spending time and efford to ensure powerpc based apps will work.
Microsoft though, cannot afford to give their corporate users a chance to make a migration decision.
Migration is expensive anyway, and is not what this is about. This is about selling upgrades and not shooting yourself in the foot.
If Microsoft eliminated backwards compatibility, thousands of companies would be in a position where they needed to include the cost of migrating software in the upgrade decision.
migration: move to another platform/application
upgrade: move to a newer version of the same platform/application
Yeah, you can quite argue the later is a special case of the first, but the conversation is a lot easier to follow when you don't do that.
All of a sudden, Linux would become a viable option for these corporate clients, which Microsoft can't afford.
It becomes a viable option as soon as the applications for Linux exist. Where they do, it becomes a matter of which choice is more attractive, but all choices that offer the desired functionality are 'viable'
For example, my company currently has over 900 16 bit applications that we haven't touched in ~10 years. Almost all of these run fine under XP and the beta versions of Vista, so upgrading to Vista will be a cheap option. However, if Vista didn't support these 16 bit apps, we'd have to spend years of time and Millions of dollars upgrading
A large part of the business world still runs Windows 2000, and I'm pretty sure that if those apps won't run on Vista, your company would stay on XP, possibly paying Microsoft for extended support, untill such moment that there are new applications that will run on Vista.
The cost of migration in a large environment is first of all related to training people for the entirely different system.
While it's not the most common language, there's no T9 support for swiss(-german) which is the language of choice for about 95% of my text-messages. So I agree, T9 sucks...
And neither is there for the variation on Dutch that they speak in Belgium.. Since there is a 'standard' Dutch T9 dictionary, that is what they use. I am pretty sure there is a standard German one (I use it quite often), and I bet that with a few modifications, it would work well for Swiss as well.. For all I can tell the bigger difference is pronounciation there anyway.
Ok, don't get too upset. Texting came about as a cheap way to send a message, because calling on a mobile phone was quite expensive, even for a minute.
Not really.
Texting came about as a side effect of how the gsm network works, and was initially not intended for end-users but for testing. That it exists in its current form is merely an accident.
Sending a text message can be efficient when you have a very short message for someone, but as soon as some form of 2 way communications is required, or the message isn't very short, it is often both faster and cheaper to call, even when talking about international calls from a cellphone.
There are also occasions when you want to communicate with someone, and not talk, like in the theatre, or a lecture, or a meeting.
Yep, that is what some people realized when finding out about the short messages that travel between exchange and cellphone, the 'test feature' found a good use besides testing..
But these days, texting is very popular, because it is still cheaper, so in reality, it is just a way on encoding your voice message differently, and it is one way.
It is really only cheaper when your message is very short and no reply is desired.
Maybe the price structure in the USA is different and it is really cheaper there in most cases, but for the price of a text message I can have a 2 minute conversation here also, and the later allows for more information and two way communications.
It's not trial and error, it's just trial, trial, trial!
Heh, good point.
The good news is that it is one of the easier ways to recognize spam sources and add some nice ip filter rules automatically.
Hey, humor doesn't need an excuse :)
Well I admit that if I had a big project developed under PHBs' pressure, I'd take my time cleaning it up before releasing the source.
Definitely, and on top of that, SUN was worried about possible forking and losing control over the standard it seems.
Anyway I didn't mean to be harsh on Sun. I hope, and expect their work of open sourcing java and Solaris bears good fruit to them.
I hope so as well. I know that this move is going to solve a problem for me, and I bet for others as well (being able to use platforms that SUN does not support without having to jump through hoops)
I think we must thank microsoft and its C# initiative, er... plan for world domination, for convincing Sun to open up. That couldn't be done 10 years ago when Java was the only player, and it being free as in beer was already a step forward compared to other environments.
It is likely an argument, but talk about open sourcing JAVA is quite old.
A few years ago I wrote this article, and there are similar articles from other people. From my server logs I know that this article has been read by quite a few people from SUN, and I have had some discussion with a few of them.
For years it seems it was a matter of "we'd like to, but we don't dare to".
Have it be someone's job to review incoming e-mail to these addresses, understanding that the vast majority of incoming mail might be spam. Of course, you could add some sort of obfuscation to these addresses, but what's the point-- like spammers couldn't just guess "contact@your-domain.com"?
Heh, good spam filters do wonders there. You might notice I show an email addy here on slashdot unobfusicated, and yeah, a lot of spam is directed at it, but basicly none of it ever makes it through the filter, whereas any mail I want to have seems to make it through.. One of the companies I work with uses their info@ and support@ addresses intensively, tho behind a similar but less strict spam filter. I believe the total time/day spent on sorting out the remaining spam is some 15 or so minutes, not too bad.
And yes, spammers 'guess', or more accurately, use trial and error to find addresses that seem to work, so regardless of what you do, chances are you will be found by spammers anyway.