The keywords are competition and incentive. I won't say private health care is perfect, but it IS a damn lot better than the alternative.
As mentioned earlier you can't compete with "free". If several actors fought for my business they would have incentive become better, or they would be beaten by the competition. The state monopoly has no incentive whatsoever to provide good service because there's no competition and because regulations secures their place as the only health care provider. Think about it, if you had a monopoly by law, why in the nine hells would you want to get better when adequate or just below adequate service would be enough? It's not like you're getting paid for the quality of service you provide. Swedish health care might largely treats everyone equally (providing you're not a politician or a bureaucrat, who gets preferential treatment), but the treatment is generally poor.
If i get mistreaded by the swedish health care system, there's nothing I can do about it, except maybe bitch about it to some buerocrat who will just put another piece of paper on the pile marked "complaints". I can't refuse to pay taxes because men with guns will come and threaten me if I do. On the other hand, if I get mistreated by a private actor, I can easily punish them by taking my money to the competition instead. Competing actors have incentive to become better providers, state mandated monopolies do not.
And, of course, there's the whole mess that comes with anything thats publically funded. Out of the cut of the taxes that alledgedly goes to health-care, how big a chunk of that money ends up in middle-men buerocrats hands who produce nothing do you think? I don't know, but I do know that this would be less of a problem with a private actor because efficency is profit. Profit is not a bad thing, which seems to be concensus here, as it gives the actor resourses to expand and improve. The economics of public health care is quit simply an inefficient mess that grossly mishandles the resourses available. But on the other hand, why would the system handle them efficiently? It's not like there's an incentive...
Absoluteley, state-funded health care is a shining example of how things inevitably get fucked up. The problems in health care is when governments get involved, not because of the lack thereof.
I'll take swedish health care as an example, as I have plenty of experience with it. First of all, concider that the tax burden on the swedish people is ludicrously high, there's no shortage of money for public "service" here.
First example: My father had knee problems a few years ago (I believe the year was 2002) and needed surgery. If he had used the state health care system, he _MIGHT_ have gotten his surgery for one leg in 2004. Hell knows when his other leg might have been treated. Suffice to say, this was out of the question, so he went to a private surgeon and got his treatment in no time.
Second example: My grandmother had glaucoma and fairly recently got treated for a condition she had for a long while. Of course she got treated too late. She now lacks eye-sight worth anything in her left eye and her right eye was saved only because she was rushed through the country in a train to Gothenburg, where a special unit had been set up to start slashing (read: barley touch) the lines of people suffering of glaucoma in the country.
The swedish health care system is a bloody soviet system, kind of like how people stood in lines for moldy bread. Keep in mind that both my father and my grandmother had been productive tax-slaves (my father even has a rather high-income job) all their lives and got practically nothing for it when they needed the services their money had supposedly been paying for. My father is overweight, and I really fear the day his heart starts giving him trouble, as I have absolutely no confidence in anything the state does.
Now, what can the problem be here? Sweden is a rather rich country, and as I mentioned earlier there's plenty of money in the health care system. Do we have a shortage of doctors, nurses or other professionals? No, although they, or at least the nurses, are as state employees underpaid of course. What then? Could it be that SWEDISH DOCTORS SPEND ABOUT 80% OF THEIR DAMNED TIME FILLING OUT PAPERWORK INSTEAD OF HELPING PEOPLE?
There are several problems with "free" state health care. The first one is that as soon as anything is "free" it is inevitably overused to the point of exhaustion. It is also near impossible to compete with "free". The fact that treatment lines are long as hell helps private doctors here, and the current government is FINALLY starting to CONCIDER the idea of privatizing health-care. I won't even get into the whole moral aspects of public health care.
Governments and states are the PROBLEM in health care, never the solution. As mentioned, the ludicrous legislation here has our public doctors spending about 80% of their time filling out paperwork. Please, please, oh PLEASE don't allow yourselves to fall into this trap.
I wouldn't put to much weight on the D&D-banner. The game "Dragonshard" for instance bragged about the same thing, without having one single thing to do with the D&D ruleset.
I can of course not speak for the rest of you, but what I really want is another game with the quality of the Baldurs Gate series.
The real question is, can we trust the weapon operators to use this responsibly?
Probably not. Last year the police in the US managed to shoot one of their pepper-spray paintballs through an bystanding girl's eye, killing her. And that's a "non-lethal" weapon you can aim!
That's not a matter of responsibility, that was an accident, and those are bound to happen. No (typical) police office would intentionally aim for the face, or fire if the odds of hitting anyone in the face were high.
If the officer in question is assaulted and overmanned however, the above statement is most likely not true. Everyone has the potential to panic and fire without control to save him- or herself. An officer firing to defend him- or herself is still an okay act in my book.
Depending on the implementation, the images have varying degrees of opacity, and with most of them, you could theoretically walk down the street while watching Futurama.
Stop that, you're giving me a boner here:/
It sends the message that they are dirty slimeballs and they will rightfully deserve to be against the wall when then people get pissed-off enough at them.
When you act like an ass, however legally, do not expect the people to stand idle and let you be like an ass.
I agree in every way, but there are better ways to handle this. Ponténs kids for example have nothing to do with this little "war" in the first place. Why in the nine hells should they suffer because their dad is an asshat?
Spamming and generally terrorizing the poor sucker is (in my view) almost APB-low.
So, don't buy another CD, don't see another film, dont rent another DVD and don't buy any programs from the companys sponsoring "Antipiratbyrån" until they stop this foolishness!
People don't buy CDs, rent DVDs or buy programs. They download.
A lot of people claim to live by the line of "If I like what I downloaded, then I'll buy it" which is complete crap. Very few people I know that download a lot actually buys what they like. I'm not saying this kind of person doesn't exist, I'm saying that they're rare.
I am in no way defending the APB. Breaking in and using up a lot of public money for a relatively trivial crime is redicilous.
I'm a bit split at how to take this. APB (Translated: "The bureau of anti-piracy") is using illegal methods and a lot of money to track down and convict pirates. I believe we all agree that APB generally sucks. Right?
But defacing the website to publish information about private citizens is in my view worse. There's currently several campaigns going on which aims at terrorizing Pontus Pontén (chief asshat of the APB) by sending hate SMS, e-mail, snailmail. His own kids have gotten several death threats for fucks sake. What kind of message does that send? There have also been several attempts to break into the APB locales, in at least one case using heavy tools.
APB uses methods thate are questionable to say the least, but this response will only strenghten the public view that pirates are evil anarchists that ought to be hung.
Sweden is a democracy, and we have freedom of speech. I'd like to encourage everyone to protest openly.
Has the RIAA or the MPAA ever provoked this kind of responses?
Indeed there are LANs with several hundreds, even thousands, of visitors dedicated to Cstrike. We swedes likes to classify things and people, and this is our way of putting idiots in their own camp.
About a year ago, i owned an Asus Geforce4 TI4200, which in my world sounded like hell, so i bought a bigass(tm) passive cooling setup by zaalman and had it installed. It worked fine for several months. Then I went to a LAN-party.
The cooling was to heavy for me to dare having it in the AGP-slot during transport, so i had it in my lap while a friend of mine and me drove to the LAN-party (he was the driver).
In any event, we arrived without incident and started to get our stuff into the building. The first thing i did however was to put the GFX-card on my friends cars roof, things are getting predictable aren't they?
When all of my stuff minus the GFX-card was inside, safe and sound, my friend remembered that he forgot a switch at home, and drove to retrieve it, I was left in the building with a lot of other people, asking them if they knew where i put my GFX-card...
My friend came back with the switch after a few minutes and he had no idea of where the card could be either. After about half an hour I knew where my card was, though of course it wasn't still on my friends cars roof...
After some driving around we found it on the road, smashed to LOTS of pieces... I hate my friend...
Slashdot Mirror
The keywords are competition and incentive. I won't say private health care is perfect, but it IS a damn lot better than the alternative.
As mentioned earlier you can't compete with "free". If several actors fought for my business they would have incentive become better, or they would be beaten by the competition. The state monopoly has no incentive whatsoever to provide good service because there's no competition and because regulations secures their place as the only health care provider. Think about it, if you had a monopoly by law, why in the nine hells would you want to get better when adequate or just below adequate service would be enough? It's not like you're getting paid for the quality of service you provide. Swedish health care might largely treats everyone equally (providing you're not a politician or a bureaucrat, who gets preferential treatment), but the treatment is generally poor.
If i get mistreaded by the swedish health care system, there's nothing I can do about it, except maybe bitch about it to some buerocrat who will just put another piece of paper on the pile marked "complaints". I can't refuse to pay taxes because men with guns will come and threaten me if I do. On the other hand, if I get mistreated by a private actor, I can easily punish them by taking my money to the competition instead. Competing actors have incentive to become better providers, state mandated monopolies do not.
And, of course, there's the whole mess that comes with anything thats publically funded. Out of the cut of the taxes that alledgedly goes to health-care, how big a chunk of that money ends up in middle-men buerocrats hands who produce nothing do you think? I don't know, but I do know that this would be less of a problem with a private actor because efficency is profit. Profit is not a bad thing, which seems to be concensus here, as it gives the actor resourses to expand and improve. The economics of public health care is quit simply an inefficient mess that grossly mishandles the resourses available. But on the other hand, why would the system handle them efficiently? It's not like there's an incentive...
Absoluteley, state-funded health care is a shining example of how things inevitably get fucked up. The problems in health care is when governments get involved, not because of the lack thereof.
I'll take swedish health care as an example, as I have plenty of experience with it. First of all, concider that the tax burden on the swedish people is ludicrously high, there's no shortage of money for public "service" here.
First example: My father had knee problems a few years ago (I believe the year was 2002) and needed surgery. If he had used the state health care system, he _MIGHT_ have gotten his surgery for one leg in 2004. Hell knows when his other leg might have been treated. Suffice to say, this was out of the question, so he went to a private surgeon and got his treatment in no time.
Second example: My grandmother had glaucoma and fairly recently got treated for a condition she had for a long while. Of course she got treated too late. She now lacks eye-sight worth anything in her left eye and her right eye was saved only because she was rushed through the country in a train to Gothenburg, where a special unit had been set up to start slashing (read: barley touch) the lines of people suffering of glaucoma in the country.
The swedish health care system is a bloody soviet system, kind of like how people stood in lines for moldy bread. Keep in mind that both my father and my grandmother had been productive tax-slaves (my father even has a rather high-income job) all their lives and got practically nothing for it when they needed the services their money had supposedly been paying for. My father is overweight, and I really fear the day his heart starts giving him trouble, as I have absolutely no confidence in anything the state does.
Now, what can the problem be here? Sweden is a rather rich country, and as I mentioned earlier there's plenty of money in the health care system. Do we have a shortage of doctors, nurses or other professionals? No, although they, or at least the nurses, are as state employees underpaid of course. What then? Could it be that SWEDISH DOCTORS SPEND ABOUT 80% OF THEIR DAMNED TIME FILLING OUT PAPERWORK INSTEAD OF HELPING PEOPLE?
There are several problems with "free" state health care. The first one is that as soon as anything is "free" it is inevitably overused to the point of exhaustion. It is also near impossible to compete with "free". The fact that treatment lines are long as hell helps private doctors here, and the current government is FINALLY starting to CONCIDER the idea of privatizing health-care. I won't even get into the whole moral aspects of public health care.
Governments and states are the PROBLEM in health care, never the solution. As mentioned, the ludicrous legislation here has our public doctors spending about 80% of their time filling out paperwork. Please, please, oh PLEASE don't allow yourselves to fall into this trap.
Can it cut through armor and still slice a tomato?
On the contrary, often we see the blade cutting through other objects and body parts with frightening ease. (Just ask Count Dooku.)
Body parts? Obi-Wans mentor nearly succeeds in melting his way through a blast door, who cares about some fragile body parts?I wouldn't put to much weight on the D&D-banner. The game "Dragonshard" for instance bragged about the same thing, without having one single thing to do with the D&D ruleset.
I can of course not speak for the rest of you, but what I really want is another game with the quality of the Baldurs Gate series.
While 'Lutefisk' is bad, just wait until they name another rock 'Surströmming'
As soon as the project page is up at SourceForge.
...companies including Intel, AMD, Microsoft, IBM, Dell and HP...
The real question is, can we trust the weapon operators to use this responsibly?
Probably not. Last year the police in the US managed to shoot one of their pepper-spray paintballs through an bystanding girl's eye, killing her. And that's a "non-lethal" weapon you can aim!
That's not a matter of responsibility, that was an accident, and those are bound to happen. No (typical) police office would intentionally aim for the face, or fire if the odds of hitting anyone in the face were high.
If the officer in question is assaulted and overmanned however, the above statement is most likely not true. Everyone has the potential to panic and fire without control to save him- or herself. An officer firing to defend him- or herself is still an okay act in my book.
Sounds likely enough to me. I'm still curious however why everything on etek.chalmers.se is damn slow compared to the rest of the *.chalmers.se
Damn, you slashdotted my university.. I was wondering why things were slow as muck today.
Depending on the implementation, the images have varying degrees of opacity, and with most of them, you could theoretically walk down the street while watching Futurama. :/
Stop that, you're giving me a boner here
I failed to find any reference to how far from Earth the explosion occured. Anyone?
A lot of people claim to live by the line of "If I like what I downloaded, then I'll buy it" which is complete crap. Very few people I know that download a lot actually buys what they like. I'm not saying this kind of person doesn't exist, I'm saying that they're rare.
I am in no way defending the APB. Breaking in and using up a lot of public money for a relatively trivial crime is redicilous.
That's bahnhof, not bahnnof or banhof.
I'm a bit split at how to take this. APB (Translated: "The bureau of anti-piracy") is using illegal methods and a lot of money to track down and convict pirates. I believe we all agree that APB generally sucks. Right?
But defacing the website to publish information about private citizens is in my view worse. There's currently several campaigns going on which aims at terrorizing Pontus Pontén (chief asshat of the APB) by sending hate SMS, e-mail, snailmail. His own kids have gotten several death threats for fucks sake. What kind of message does that send?
There have also been several attempts to break into the APB locales, in at least one case using heavy tools.
APB uses methods thate are questionable to say the least, but this response will only strenghten the public view that pirates are evil anarchists that ought to be hung.
Sweden is a democracy, and we have freedom of speech. I'd like to encourage everyone to protest openly.
Has the RIAA or the MPAA ever provoked this kind of responses?
Which is the swedish word for patch... It's a sign I tell you!
Indeed there are LANs with several hundreds, even thousands, of visitors dedicated to Cstrike.
We swedes likes to classify things and people, and this is our way of putting idiots in their own camp.
Personally i find OGLE to be an excellent DVD-player for linux, and a good complement to mplayer.
I've got a Jens of Sweden MP-100 MP3-player (bought in april 2003) with SRS, WOW and TB... what's new with these features?
About a year ago, i owned an Asus Geforce4 TI4200, which in my world sounded like hell, so i bought a bigass(tm) passive cooling setup by zaalman and had it installed. It worked fine for several months. Then I went to a LAN-party.
The cooling was to heavy for me to dare having it in the AGP-slot during transport, so i had it in my lap while a friend of mine and me drove to the LAN-party (he was the driver).
In any event, we arrived without incident and started to get our stuff into the building. The first thing i did however was to put the GFX-card on my friends cars roof, things are getting predictable aren't they?
When all of my stuff minus the GFX-card was inside, safe and sound, my friend remembered that he forgot a switch at home, and drove to retrieve it, I was left in the building with a lot of other people, asking them if they knew where i put my GFX-card...
My friend came back with the switch after a few minutes and he had no idea of where the card could be either. After about half an hour I knew where my card was, though of course it wasn't still on my friends cars roof... After some driving around we found it on the road, smashed to LOTS of pieces... I hate my friend...
I take it this is the guy you're referring to? Doesn't seem to be that much of a difference from the original goblin if you ask me...
Okay, so we have portknocking, but do we have clients that can utilize it?
Let's say I want to access machine X's ssh daemon, which utilizes portknocking, is there any ssh client today that can access it?
Anyhow, I'm gonna name my firewall "Heavens door" when this works.
The rest of Europe has Windows versions without Windows Media Player 9.
"I'll have a MacTux please"?
I wonder why they didn't stick to Windows... a company that profits on bloating people should use a bloated OS...