Well no, not quite, not as far as I understand. Yes, it's true that prices were made artificially high as a result of various things, but not exactly because of artificial scarcity, and those assets didn't exactly evaporate in the sense that a WOW character would if the service shut down. They may have become much less valuable, but they didn't cease to exist.
Comcast/AT&T/Time Warner suck, but you can bet that the US government will suck even worse.
You've honestly never had to deal with Time Warner. There is no possible way to suck worse.
But seriously now, why not treat the Internet like it's infrastructure. I suggest that because it's infrastructure. So let's treat it like roads, where the federal government maintains some lines as backbone to be the equivalent of interstate highways, states run the equivalent of intrastate highways, and local towns run the equivalent of local roads. If any of those layers want to take bids to subcontract the work out to local companies, then they do that, but the service is still considered open and public.
Such a system wouldn't put any additional control in the hands of the federal government, and it would actually be more decentralized, allowing different areas to try different approaches, to learn from each other, and by having open infrastructure you create more competition between services.
How could you not kind of like that idea? You don't like competition and capitalism?
Yeah, when the government says they want to build decent infrastructure, these companies say, "Oh, but that's too expensive, and we don't have the money to do it because our business isn't profitable enough. We need you to subsidize us." And then when the government says, "Ok, we'll subsidize you, but you have to honor net neutrality," they say, "Meh, no thanks. We have tons of money."
Well it's not necessarily nonsense. What he might mean is that web browsers' shortcomings are hamstringing the development of web technologies. I would certainly say that IE is holding the web back from some of its clear potential right now.
I guess what I'm saying is that maybe web browsers don't define the pace of the web. Maybe they just limit the pace of the web. (no, I'm not sure that's right)
I would argue that the real problem is not the people/companies who ask for it, but the ones who accept it as authentication of your identity. So you shouldn't have to refuse to fill that field out on forms, but credit card companies should have some other factor of authentication for the purpose for identity verification before extending any lines of credit.
If they don't appropriately verify identity, then they should be on the hook for any lost money.
The point is, you're claiming to know that the government plans to kill people because Obama wouldn't promise that the government would cover *all* medical claims
I am not. I have made no such claims, whatsoever, not even by proxy.
My claims along these lines are:
A) Government-ran care will make life and death decisions
and
B) Obama has the power to put these fears to rest, and is electing not to do so
And how do you suppose Obama could put those fears to rest? Because your original argument was that he could do so by saying the government would cover all claims, and obviously that's a bad idea.
He's already said there would be no "death panels", and nothing like the sort of decision making processes that people are worrying about. The only limits that he's suggested is that there might be a panel of doctors who decide whether a given treatment is a real treatment that has been demonstrated to work.
I am not the one referring to millionaires. I'm talking about regular people who are willing to put it all on the line to save their sick kids, as a single example.
Yeah, and I'm saying that if you come up with the money, you're going to get better medical care. That's always how things work. You can't stop people with more money from getting better service, even when you set out to do it (which there's no evidence they're setting out to do that here).
Obamacare will only increase costs. In fact, Medicare's published rates are already the basis for all the inflated costs we presently pay. More federal dollars will only mean more inflation. We need tort reform, less regulation, and greater competition.
Citation needed. Sorry, you might be right about some of these things, but someone could come in here and claim opposing things. Since you're presenting claims, not evidence, and not even real arguments, there's nothing really to discuss.
Again, this is well known, and you're not being intellectually honest by drawing lines between infant mortality and a non-state-sponsored healthcare system.
Hey, you were the one that brought up life expectancy. Healthcare systems are often (usually) judged by life expectancy and infant mortality, since those are some of the harder stats to skew or misread.
And the issue isn't whether infants are eligible for some degree of care, but whether the system is set up in such a way so as to provide good care for each infant. So what kind of care do infants get? Are mothers being educated about proper care? Are parents being discouraged from getting care for their children, even in cases where they're eligible?
If those socialized systems are so much worse, then just explain why they're getting better results in those countries. How hard could that be?
Research it, and get back with me.
How about you research some things and make whatever argument you want, and get back to me. The cheapest I can ship any envelope for FedEx is $12. And yeah, I know they can't use my mailbox.
It's not supposed to be secret, but then again it is. The problem is that its use and purpose is ill-defined. Lots of companies use it as an identifier (which is fairly reasonable) but also as a form of authentication. If you give a name and a SSN, they pretty much assume that it's who you actually are because how else would you know that information?
So as an identifier, we're pretty well forced to give it out to everyone, but since it's still (stupidly) used as a form of authentication, we have to keep it secret. Lots of people know this is a horrible and insecure system, but no one is willing to change it.
Personally, I think that, as the technology grows, it would be better if we could each have something like an SSL certificate, where we could establish our identities without sharing a private key. The idea gets a little sticky because, beyond the technical infrastructure needed to do something like that, there are potential privacy issues. If everyone has one of these certificates, then we may be forced to carry them and identify ourselves. However, I think it should be good enough to have it be that you're issued these certificates but cannot be required to carry them under normal circumstances, just as you aren't normally required to carry your passport.
Look, I'm not going to continue to talk with you if you're going to be so blatantly hostile. The point is, you're claiming to know that the government plans to kill people because Obama wouldn't promise that the government would cover *all* medical claims, when you yourself know that nobody is going to cover *all* medical claims, and no one should cover *all* medical claims. So that little bit of "evidence is completely meaningless.
As far as "worrying about millionaires", my point is specifically that money will always get you better service. Always. It's always a question of "do you have enough?" Whether you bankrupt your estate to come up with the money is fairly irrelevant for what we're talking about.
The more interesting question is, if medical costs keep ballooning, will we all have to go bankrupt just to get normal medical care?
And you brought up the issue of live expectancy. If the health care in Britain and Canada is so amazingly scary, then why is it that both of those countries have higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality rates?
And what exactly is the track record for government-run programs increasing productivity and improving our economy? Surely you have examples of this. USPS, perhaps?
What's wrong with the USPS? First of all, I think it's a great example of a public service coexisting side by side with private commercial services. The USPS hasn't kept you from being able to ship things, has it? It hasn't put FedEx out of business. But on the other hand, can I get FedEx to take a postcard from NY to CA for... whatever it is now, $0.30 or so? Even close?
Are you under the impression that the USPS is sucking up lots of our tax dollars or something? Because it's not. The USPS doesn't actually cost us any tax money, and our postage is very very low. So how is that not an example of the US government doing an excellent job of providing unglamorous service to the public in a cost-efficient manner?
No, that's actually not what I'm saying. I'm saying that if you actually think about it, this is extremely unlikely to make it any easier to attack political opponents. Insofar as they want to retaliate against political opponents, they already can. If they wanted to gather more information on their opponents and "compile a list", they would have better ways of doing this. This whole thing is unlikely to net them any meaningful information on who their political opponents are.
I don't think you get it. The fishy@whitehouse.gov is for reporting on people opposed to the White House agenda.
Well no, it's not, or at least not so overtly that you don't need any evidence to claim that's the purpose. The stated purpose is not to gather information on people, but to gather information on rumors. They're suggesting that if you hear a rumor about the health care proposal that sounds bad, you send it to them so that they can rebut it.
It's fairly clear that they're just asking for the rumors, and even if someone is forwarding an email they've received, it's easy enough to drop off any headers or signatures that identify who sent it.
I mean, geeze, really, even if people don't strip out email headers, they're going to get millions of emails from dubious sources, often with nothing but email addresses. Do you really think they're going to hunt everyone down who forwarded a rumor about death panels? With the secret service and the intelligence agencies at their disposal, do you think that this was the most clever thing they could come up with for finding their most dangerous political opponents? I think you're overestimating the importance of the information this is likely to net them.
Really, just think very carefully about it. If they had nefarious intent, this would be a silly and ineffective way to go about it. There's absolutely no evidence of malicious intent, and there was no explicit request for a single person's identity.
Right, and it's not just an issue of outsourcing. The reason you should trust your network administrator is that you *have to* trust your network administrator. Whether it's in house or outsourced, you have to trust someone to do the work. The only alternative is to do it yourself-- like literally you, personally.
If I'm your network administrator and I come into your office and work for you directly, I could still read your emails, steal your IP, etc. You could ask me to set up the security so that I can't do that, but you still have to trust me to do that well and not leave a back-door for myself. Also, you should understand that it might inhibit my ability to do some things. For example, if I encrypt your disk so that I can't even access it myself, and then you lose the password, I won't be able to recover anything on your hard drive. Sorry.
So that's the deal. You can try to institute some checks and balances, but there's a certain amount of trust inherent in the job. If you're concerned about security, then make the effort to find people that you can trust, and recognize that you might have to pay extra for better employees. It's an issue of what your priority is when you hire someone (or hire an outsourcing company). Which is most important, getting the person you trust most? Getting the person with the best resume? Getting the cheapest solution available?
Those might be 3 different people. Under most circumstances, I'd pick the person I trust.
Well yes, I'm sure they will make sure any emails you send to the White House are backup up and kept in a safe place. At least, I would hope so, since they're legally required to do so.
Look, if you're going to send email to the White House and don't want your personal information to be included, then don't include that information. If you don't want them to know exactly who you are, use a gmail address with an alias. If you find evidence that the secret service is investigating people who send questions (not threats) to that email address, then I'll be right on your side complaining.
But complaining that they're not deleting your emails? WTF?
The more this issue gets pressed, the less I believe that it is a non-issue. For Mr Obama to put this to bed, all that would be needed is his personal guarantee that he would not sign a bill that denies care to anyone, ever.
You want no one to ever be denied any kind of care? Ok, just to put that to the test. imagine the following scenarios:
A young woman goes to the doctor wanting an abortion.
A young woman goes to the doctor looking for breast enlargement.
A young man goes to the doctor looking for a sex change operation.
A cancer patient wants a homeopathy treatment for cancer that uses extra-special very expensive $1k per ml water.
Someone with back pain wants massage therapy.
A patient with an ulcer claims that sex is a helpful treatment for stress, and wants the government to pay for prostitutes.
Someone who seems to be perfectly healthy wants a full run of CT scans and MRi scans every week as a preventative measure.
Those are just some ideas off the top of my head, but considering situations like that, do you really want the government making a blanket statement that they'll pay for *any* medical treatment?
I'm just going to assume you said "no", and point out that obviously the line needs to be drawn somewhere. We can debate exactly where, but the government shouldn't cover everything all the time.
Our current system has an open wallet option. If you are dying you can bankrupt your estate to try and beat it. Does that exist in the Obama-care plan?
First, I'm having a real hard time imagining how that could be disallowed, or why anyone would try to disallow it.
But is that really your concern, though? You're worried about the people who can afford to pay all of their medical bills out-of-pocket? Don't worry about it. Millionaires will always get better medical care than you or me. There's no way around rich people getting preferable treatment.
If it did not exist, and a mortal condition were at play, how would 'we' decide who gets care and who does not?
A death panel, for lack of a better term.
Even following your argument, that's still a bit of a stretch. The "death panels" they're talking about is the idea that the government is going to sort through individual patients and decide who gets which procedures. That would be political suicide.
If the government were completely taking over medical care (which so far at least, they're not), and if they were to be so tight with their money (Ha! When has the government been tight with their money?) that they started rationing health care, they would probably cut out the most expensive procedures rather than cutting cheap procedures to particular people.
So in the fairly unlikely scenario where the government puts all other insurance companies out of business and makes it illegal to provide any kind of private medical care as well as rationing care, then you'd get basic medical care for all and advanced medical care for no one.
However! Even in the case that it happens, some economics start to kick in. Drug companies would probably lower the prices of their drugs, and doctors might just charge less for "advanced" procedures, since the prices are set, to some degree, by the level of demand. So the only "advanced procedures" that are unavailable in this *extremely* unlikely scenario are those that are inherently expensive.
If your against government offering a public health care option, then it should be because it will probably be expensive, which increases our national debt and therefore increases inflation. Proponents might argue that it will ultimately be less expensive because it will improve productivity and improve our economy in other ways, but maybe you don't believe them. That's a pretty valid argument. The idea of "death panels" is nonsense.
They're not going to contact a professional photographer just to scan some family photos.
That is why I said "contact a professional or their teenage grandson".
But my point is that they scan things by themselves right now, already. They don't have any teenage sons or grandsons left, either.
But I have a feeling that 5 years from now something like "crease-fix" will be laughable.
Although, I doubt that it will be this particular way of implementation. Multiple lamps can only make scanners more expensive.
Maybe something along the lines of doing multiple scans while rotating the photo to get the similar effect?
Rotating the picture seems too complicated, and too much work. How much more expensive would two lamps be? What, you have to add another lightbulb? It might not even need to be bright in order to allow the computer to determine depth. Maybe a small LED mounted somewhere would do the job.
I don't know if this particular approach to this particular problem will be used in any particular timeframe, but I still don't see this as a useless idea. It seems pretty clever and effective at what it's doing: discovering a certain set of physical flaws in a photograph.
I would hate to see a secretive US Government then...
Not to take sides, but how about one that "loses" millions of emails? That's when stuff gets really scary-- when they stop redacting records before releasing them and start destroying them outright.
But no, sure, this isn't exactly transparent.
Now we have a nearly sinister cooperation of the press and government all walking the same line. Calling them out on it is now unAmerican. We get town halls that first tell us everyone is entitled to their opinion followed by statements that those who dare have a differing one need to get out of the way.
Now you won't believe me, but lots of people think I'm too conservative, and I consider myself conservative to a large degree, so this isn't about that. But still, I don't agree with what you're saying.
As far as the evil press, it does seem to me that most people who talk about the press being evil are still blindly listening to someone who is part of "the media". People complaining about NYT and MSNBC are watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh, and vice-versa. The reason you think "the other side" is trying to use the media to mislead you is largely because "your side" tells you they are, so no one is completely clean in that regard. Yes, both sides are manipulating their coverage because the people running the show have an agenda that they're pushing. If you don't see how they're manipulating your and you don't know what agenda they're pushing, then you should pay more attention.
But as far as these people at the town hall meeting being "un-American", well... they're certainly being disruptive. What they're engaging in isn't constructive criticism or deliberate conversation. What they're doing is not debating. Hard to say whether that's "unAmerican" since our founding fathers were the intellectual elite who founded our government on philosophic theories, but they're also the lawless hooligans who dumped someone else's tea into the harbor.
However, it does seem to me that many of them are misinformed. There are plenty of valid things to be concerned about with this health care reform, but death panels aren't really one of those things. No one is suggesting death panels. Being misinformed and refusing to listen to anyone who might inform you better can be problematic behavior.
Well yes, in a sense, all intellectual property is virtual property, but then look what's happening to intellectual property. It's having to fight to keep its value high by creating artificial scarcity of copies of that IP. There's no natural scarcity anymore, at least not for creating new copies once the first copy is created.
Your WOW character may technically belong to someone, but there's no natural limit to how many times he could be replicated. On the other hand, insofar as scarcity is maintained artificially, there's no assurance that your character won't just evaporate one day and complete cease to exist. How much value do you want to assign to an asset like that?
But virtual property has always been a "good" idea, and it isn't anything new.
Yes, but in the past, virtual property was generally some kind of representation of real property somehow. Stocks are "virtual property" except that they represent ownership in a real company. If that company goes out of business and they liquidate all their assets, your stocks will still be worth some non-zero amount of money, which represents the value of your share of those liquidated assets. We could shut down the stock exchange and, insofar as you still own shares of ownership of various companies, those stocks are still worth something. If, on the other hand, one of these games shuts down their servers, there's nothing.
Now I'm not saying it's as simple as that. As long as people are perceiving value in "virtual property" and are willing to pay for it, there's going to be some kind of economy about it. But still, it's not quite exactly the same as the "virtual property" that we're used to.
In theory, great. In practice, I predict it spiraling out of control as different parties try to "get in on the action" and see a chance to turn a profit instead of just giving the money to charity.
Well to me, the bigger problem is that if everyone did adopt this (which is what would need to happen in order for it to really stop spam) and no one else was "in on the action", then we'd essentially have centralized control over email. Scary.
On the other hand, if anyone can get "in on the action" and use their own signature, then I'm not sure how paying for email helps. Spammers would just get their own signatures, and the system wouldn't be any better than if everyone signed their email.
I do think everyone signing their email is a pretty good idea, though. It would probably not solve the spam problem, but it might help. If SSL certs got moved into DNS (as some people are suggesting) then it should be easy to use authoritative (signed) DNS records which also provided you with a list of authorized mail servers for each domain, as well as SSL certs for those mail servers. That would at least allow you to verify that a given email originated from the mail server it claims to come from, and that the mail server is an authorized server for a given domain.
Now that doesn't give us too much, except it means it could make it much harder to spoof mail, which is what a lot of spammers are doing. Further, it means spammers would have to register domains to send spam, email from those domains would clearly come from those domains, and those domains could easily be blacklisted.
Does that work? Probably not. I'd be interested to know why not, if anyone is willing to explain.
First off, I would NEVER advise senior citizens and other people born decades before the invention of the term DTP and/or computers becoming a common household item, to do ANYTHING with photos other than store them in albums.
Well both my mother and grandmother scan family photos sometimes. They do it both for storage/archival purposes (but the archive is only for personal/family use), but also so they can email them around and things like that. They're not computer geniuses, but they're smart enough to use a scanner and even do some basic adjustments in Photoshop once they're digital. They're not going to contact a professional photographer just to scan some family photos.
Right now, if they scan something with some kind of damage (scratches or creases), they just leave the damage in the photo rather than making any attempt
Second, I doubt that your grandmother possesses the necessary hardware being that scanners with multiple (angled) lamps still tend to cost thousands of dollars for a used older model.
That doesn't mean that your everyday scanner being sold 5 years from now couldn't have the ability to do an auto-repair to some degree. That's what I'm trying to point out. Even if the auto-repair isn't super-high quality, if the results are even a minor improvement over leaving the scratch or crease in-place, then it's going to make people in my family happy. Ergo, this technology, as imperfect as it is, is not useless.
I have been saying for some time, the historical significance of Wikipedia will be as an extremely well documented social experiment, rather than as an encyclopedia.... I'm hoping, for the sake of the web and for the sake of Wikipedia itself (a victim of its own dominance; everyone wants access to the first hit on a Google search of their pet topic) that something else displaces it.
Well isn't the great thing about it, the thing which sets it apart from many other encyclopedias (and other similar sources of information) is that it's open source (Creative Commons license)? So not only can it be displaced if someone creates a better site with better rules and better editors, but that other site has the option to use as much of the Wikipedia's information as it wants.
So I think in that sense, you can't think of the Wikipedia alone as the thing we're talking about. We're talking about a collection of human knowledge that can't really be taken away by commercial interest or commercial failure. That set of knowledge is an achievement that can live on even if the Wikipedia turns out terribly.
The IQ scores are almost always skewed. It's not how "smart" you are, but how educated you are. For example, I've known poor farmers who were not well educated, but through what they have been educated in, it's apparent that they are smart.
Malcom Gladwell wrote an article that may be relevant here.
the student next to me, who was someone you'd probably refer to as a "typical black teen male"
I don't understand what that means.
I guess it's because I don't see race. Now admittedly, people tell me I'm white, and I believe them, because I own a lot of Jimmy Buffett albums.
But seriously, what does this add to your story? It's a good story without anything racial.
Sorry for the off-topic trolling flamebait, because I know this is the Internet and nothing good will come from me posting this. I'm not a very politically correct guy, but it seems like you're using "black" as a stand-in for "ignorant and doesn't want to learn", and it just seems unnecessarily offensive to me. And it's not fair and it's not correct.
Slashdot Mirror
Well no, not quite, not as far as I understand. Yes, it's true that prices were made artificially high as a result of various things, but not exactly because of artificial scarcity, and those assets didn't exactly evaporate in the sense that a WOW character would if the service shut down. They may have become much less valuable, but they didn't cease to exist.
since their customers are obviously happy as-is.
You mean because their customers have no other options?
Comcast/AT&T/Time Warner suck, but you can bet that the US government will suck even worse.
You've honestly never had to deal with Time Warner. There is no possible way to suck worse.
But seriously now, why not treat the Internet like it's infrastructure. I suggest that because it's infrastructure. So let's treat it like roads, where the federal government maintains some lines as backbone to be the equivalent of interstate highways, states run the equivalent of intrastate highways, and local towns run the equivalent of local roads. If any of those layers want to take bids to subcontract the work out to local companies, then they do that, but the service is still considered open and public.
Such a system wouldn't put any additional control in the hands of the federal government, and it would actually be more decentralized, allowing different areas to try different approaches, to learn from each other, and by having open infrastructure you create more competition between services.
How could you not kind of like that idea? You don't like competition and capitalism?
Yeah, when the government says they want to build decent infrastructure, these companies say, "Oh, but that's too expensive, and we don't have the money to do it because our business isn't profitable enough. We need you to subsidize us." And then when the government says, "Ok, we'll subsidize you, but you have to honor net neutrality," they say, "Meh, no thanks. We have tons of money."
Well it's not necessarily nonsense. What he might mean is that web browsers' shortcomings are hamstringing the development of web technologies. I would certainly say that IE is holding the web back from some of its clear potential right now.
I guess what I'm saying is that maybe web browsers don't define the pace of the web. Maybe they just limit the pace of the web. (no, I'm not sure that's right)
I would argue that the real problem is not the people/companies who ask for it, but the ones who accept it as authentication of your identity. So you shouldn't have to refuse to fill that field out on forms, but credit card companies should have some other factor of authentication for the purpose for identity verification before extending any lines of credit.
If they don't appropriately verify identity, then they should be on the hook for any lost money.
The point is, you're claiming to know that the government plans to kill people because Obama wouldn't promise that the government would cover *all* medical claims
I am not. I have made no such claims, whatsoever, not even by proxy.
My claims along these lines are:
A) Government-ran care will make life and death decisions
and
B) Obama has the power to put these fears to rest, and is electing not to do so
And how do you suppose Obama could put those fears to rest? Because your original argument was that he could do so by saying the government would cover all claims, and obviously that's a bad idea.
He's already said there would be no "death panels", and nothing like the sort of decision making processes that people are worrying about. The only limits that he's suggested is that there might be a panel of doctors who decide whether a given treatment is a real treatment that has been demonstrated to work.
I am not the one referring to millionaires. I'm talking about regular people who are willing to put it all on the line to save their sick kids, as a single example.
Yeah, and I'm saying that if you come up with the money, you're going to get better medical care. That's always how things work. You can't stop people with more money from getting better service, even when you set out to do it (which there's no evidence they're setting out to do that here).
Obamacare will only increase costs. In fact, Medicare's published rates are already the basis for all the inflated costs we presently pay. More federal dollars will only mean more inflation. We need tort reform, less regulation, and greater competition.
Citation needed. Sorry, you might be right about some of these things, but someone could come in here and claim opposing things. Since you're presenting claims, not evidence, and not even real arguments, there's nothing really to discuss.
Again, this is well known, and you're not being intellectually honest by drawing lines between infant mortality and a non-state-sponsored healthcare system.
Hey, you were the one that brought up life expectancy. Healthcare systems are often (usually) judged by life expectancy and infant mortality, since those are some of the harder stats to skew or misread.
And the issue isn't whether infants are eligible for some degree of care, but whether the system is set up in such a way so as to provide good care for each infant. So what kind of care do infants get? Are mothers being educated about proper care? Are parents being discouraged from getting care for their children, even in cases where they're eligible?
If those socialized systems are so much worse, then just explain why they're getting better results in those countries. How hard could that be?
Research it, and get back with me.
How about you research some things and make whatever argument you want, and get back to me. The cheapest I can ship any envelope for FedEx is $12. And yeah, I know they can't use my mailbox.
They're not supposed to be authentication credentials, but they're often treated as though they are.
It's not supposed to be secret, but then again it is. The problem is that its use and purpose is ill-defined. Lots of companies use it as an identifier (which is fairly reasonable) but also as a form of authentication. If you give a name and a SSN, they pretty much assume that it's who you actually are because how else would you know that information?
So as an identifier, we're pretty well forced to give it out to everyone, but since it's still (stupidly) used as a form of authentication, we have to keep it secret. Lots of people know this is a horrible and insecure system, but no one is willing to change it.
Personally, I think that, as the technology grows, it would be better if we could each have something like an SSL certificate, where we could establish our identities without sharing a private key. The idea gets a little sticky because, beyond the technical infrastructure needed to do something like that, there are potential privacy issues. If everyone has one of these certificates, then we may be forced to carry them and identify ourselves. However, I think it should be good enough to have it be that you're issued these certificates but cannot be required to carry them under normal circumstances, just as you aren't normally required to carry your passport.
Look, I'm not going to continue to talk with you if you're going to be so blatantly hostile. The point is, you're claiming to know that the government plans to kill people because Obama wouldn't promise that the government would cover *all* medical claims, when you yourself know that nobody is going to cover *all* medical claims, and no one should cover *all* medical claims. So that little bit of "evidence is completely meaningless.
As far as "worrying about millionaires", my point is specifically that money will always get you better service. Always. It's always a question of "do you have enough?" Whether you bankrupt your estate to come up with the money is fairly irrelevant for what we're talking about.
The more interesting question is, if medical costs keep ballooning, will we all have to go bankrupt just to get normal medical care?
And you brought up the issue of live expectancy. If the health care in Britain and Canada is so amazingly scary, then why is it that both of those countries have higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality rates?
And what exactly is the track record for government-run programs increasing productivity and improving our economy? Surely you have examples of this. USPS, perhaps?
What's wrong with the USPS? First of all, I think it's a great example of a public service coexisting side by side with private commercial services. The USPS hasn't kept you from being able to ship things, has it? It hasn't put FedEx out of business. But on the other hand, can I get FedEx to take a postcard from NY to CA for... whatever it is now, $0.30 or so? Even close?
Are you under the impression that the USPS is sucking up lots of our tax dollars or something? Because it's not. The USPS doesn't actually cost us any tax money, and our postage is very very low. So how is that not an example of the US government doing an excellent job of providing unglamorous service to the public in a cost-efficient manner?
No, that's actually not what I'm saying. I'm saying that if you actually think about it, this is extremely unlikely to make it any easier to attack political opponents. Insofar as they want to retaliate against political opponents, they already can. If they wanted to gather more information on their opponents and "compile a list", they would have better ways of doing this. This whole thing is unlikely to net them any meaningful information on who their political opponents are.
So trust them or not, this just isn't that scary.
I don't think you get it. The fishy@whitehouse.gov is for reporting on people opposed to the White House agenda.
Well no, it's not, or at least not so overtly that you don't need any evidence to claim that's the purpose. The stated purpose is not to gather information on people, but to gather information on rumors. They're suggesting that if you hear a rumor about the health care proposal that sounds bad, you send it to them so that they can rebut it.
It's fairly clear that they're just asking for the rumors, and even if someone is forwarding an email they've received, it's easy enough to drop off any headers or signatures that identify who sent it.
I mean, geeze, really, even if people don't strip out email headers, they're going to get millions of emails from dubious sources, often with nothing but email addresses. Do you really think they're going to hunt everyone down who forwarded a rumor about death panels? With the secret service and the intelligence agencies at their disposal, do you think that this was the most clever thing they could come up with for finding their most dangerous political opponents? I think you're overestimating the importance of the information this is likely to net them.
Really, just think very carefully about it. If they had nefarious intent, this would be a silly and ineffective way to go about it. There's absolutely no evidence of malicious intent, and there was no explicit request for a single person's identity.
Either that, or learn to do it your damn self.
Right, and it's not just an issue of outsourcing. The reason you should trust your network administrator is that you *have to* trust your network administrator. Whether it's in house or outsourced, you have to trust someone to do the work. The only alternative is to do it yourself-- like literally you, personally.
If I'm your network administrator and I come into your office and work for you directly, I could still read your emails, steal your IP, etc. You could ask me to set up the security so that I can't do that, but you still have to trust me to do that well and not leave a back-door for myself. Also, you should understand that it might inhibit my ability to do some things. For example, if I encrypt your disk so that I can't even access it myself, and then you lose the password, I won't be able to recover anything on your hard drive. Sorry.
So that's the deal. You can try to institute some checks and balances, but there's a certain amount of trust inherent in the job. If you're concerned about security, then make the effort to find people that you can trust, and recognize that you might have to pay extra for better employees. It's an issue of what your priority is when you hire someone (or hire an outsourcing company). Which is most important, getting the person you trust most? Getting the person with the best resume? Getting the cheapest solution available?
Those might be 3 different people. Under most circumstances, I'd pick the person I trust.
Well yes, I'm sure they will make sure any emails you send to the White House are backup up and kept in a safe place. At least, I would hope so, since they're legally required to do so.
Look, if you're going to send email to the White House and don't want your personal information to be included, then don't include that information. If you don't want them to know exactly who you are, use a gmail address with an alias. If you find evidence that the secret service is investigating people who send questions (not threats) to that email address, then I'll be right on your side complaining.
But complaining that they're not deleting your emails? WTF?
Citation needed.
The more this issue gets pressed, the less I believe that it is a non-issue. For Mr Obama to put this to bed, all that would be needed is his personal guarantee that he would not sign a bill that denies care to anyone, ever.
You want no one to ever be denied any kind of care? Ok, just to put that to the test. imagine the following scenarios:
Those are just some ideas off the top of my head, but considering situations like that, do you really want the government making a blanket statement that they'll pay for *any* medical treatment?
I'm just going to assume you said "no", and point out that obviously the line needs to be drawn somewhere. We can debate exactly where, but the government shouldn't cover everything all the time.
Our current system has an open wallet option. If you are dying you can bankrupt your estate to try and beat it. Does that exist in the Obama-care plan?
First, I'm having a real hard time imagining how that could be disallowed, or why anyone would try to disallow it.
But is that really your concern, though? You're worried about the people who can afford to pay all of their medical bills out-of-pocket? Don't worry about it. Millionaires will always get better medical care than you or me. There's no way around rich people getting preferable treatment.
If it did not exist, and a mortal condition were at play, how would 'we' decide who gets care and who does not?
A death panel, for lack of a better term.
Even following your argument, that's still a bit of a stretch. The "death panels" they're talking about is the idea that the government is going to sort through individual patients and decide who gets which procedures. That would be political suicide.
If the government were completely taking over medical care (which so far at least, they're not), and if they were to be so tight with their money (Ha! When has the government been tight with their money?) that they started rationing health care, they would probably cut out the most expensive procedures rather than cutting cheap procedures to particular people.
So in the fairly unlikely scenario where the government puts all other insurance companies out of business and makes it illegal to provide any kind of private medical care as well as rationing care, then you'd get basic medical care for all and advanced medical care for no one.
However! Even in the case that it happens, some economics start to kick in. Drug companies would probably lower the prices of their drugs, and doctors might just charge less for "advanced" procedures, since the prices are set, to some degree, by the level of demand. So the only "advanced procedures" that are unavailable in this *extremely* unlikely scenario are those that are inherently expensive.
If your against government offering a public health care option, then it should be because it will probably be expensive, which increases our national debt and therefore increases inflation. Proponents might argue that it will ultimately be less expensive because it will improve productivity and improve our economy in other ways, but maybe you don't believe them. That's a pretty valid argument. The idea of "death panels" is nonsense.
They're not going to contact a professional photographer just to scan some family photos.
That is why I said "contact a professional or their teenage grandson".
But my point is that they scan things by themselves right now, already. They don't have any teenage sons or grandsons left, either.
But I have a feeling that 5 years from now something like "crease-fix" will be laughable. Although, I doubt that it will be this particular way of implementation. Multiple lamps can only make scanners more expensive. Maybe something along the lines of doing multiple scans while rotating the photo to get the similar effect?
Rotating the picture seems too complicated, and too much work. How much more expensive would two lamps be? What, you have to add another lightbulb? It might not even need to be bright in order to allow the computer to determine depth. Maybe a small LED mounted somewhere would do the job.
I don't know if this particular approach to this particular problem will be used in any particular timeframe, but I still don't see this as a useless idea. It seems pretty clever and effective at what it's doing: discovering a certain set of physical flaws in a photograph.
I would hate to see a secretive US Government then...
Not to take sides, but how about one that "loses" millions of emails? That's when stuff gets really scary-- when they stop redacting records before releasing them and start destroying them outright.
But no, sure, this isn't exactly transparent.
Now we have a nearly sinister cooperation of the press and government all walking the same line. Calling them out on it is now unAmerican. We get town halls that first tell us everyone is entitled to their opinion followed by statements that those who dare have a differing one need to get out of the way.
Now you won't believe me, but lots of people think I'm too conservative, and I consider myself conservative to a large degree, so this isn't about that. But still, I don't agree with what you're saying.
As far as the evil press, it does seem to me that most people who talk about the press being evil are still blindly listening to someone who is part of "the media". People complaining about NYT and MSNBC are watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh, and vice-versa. The reason you think "the other side" is trying to use the media to mislead you is largely because "your side" tells you they are, so no one is completely clean in that regard. Yes, both sides are manipulating their coverage because the people running the show have an agenda that they're pushing. If you don't see how they're manipulating your and you don't know what agenda they're pushing, then you should pay more attention.
But as far as these people at the town hall meeting being "un-American", well... they're certainly being disruptive. What they're engaging in isn't constructive criticism or deliberate conversation. What they're doing is not debating. Hard to say whether that's "unAmerican" since our founding fathers were the intellectual elite who founded our government on philosophic theories, but they're also the lawless hooligans who dumped someone else's tea into the harbor.
However, it does seem to me that many of them are misinformed. There are plenty of valid things to be concerned about with this health care reform, but death panels aren't really one of those things. No one is suggesting death panels. Being misinformed and refusing to listen to anyone who might inform you better can be problematic behavior.
All software everywhere is virtual property.
Well yes, in a sense, all intellectual property is virtual property, but then look what's happening to intellectual property. It's having to fight to keep its value high by creating artificial scarcity of copies of that IP. There's no natural scarcity anymore, at least not for creating new copies once the first copy is created.
Your WOW character may technically belong to someone, but there's no natural limit to how many times he could be replicated. On the other hand, insofar as scarcity is maintained artificially, there's no assurance that your character won't just evaporate one day and complete cease to exist. How much value do you want to assign to an asset like that?
But virtual property has always been a "good" idea, and it isn't anything new.
Yes, but in the past, virtual property was generally some kind of representation of real property somehow. Stocks are "virtual property" except that they represent ownership in a real company. If that company goes out of business and they liquidate all their assets, your stocks will still be worth some non-zero amount of money, which represents the value of your share of those liquidated assets. We could shut down the stock exchange and, insofar as you still own shares of ownership of various companies, those stocks are still worth something. If, on the other hand, one of these games shuts down their servers, there's nothing.
Now I'm not saying it's as simple as that. As long as people are perceiving value in "virtual property" and are willing to pay for it, there's going to be some kind of economy about it. But still, it's not quite exactly the same as the "virtual property" that we're used to.
In theory, great. In practice, I predict it spiraling out of control as different parties try to "get in on the action" and see a chance to turn a profit instead of just giving the money to charity.
Well to me, the bigger problem is that if everyone did adopt this (which is what would need to happen in order for it to really stop spam) and no one else was "in on the action", then we'd essentially have centralized control over email. Scary.
On the other hand, if anyone can get "in on the action" and use their own signature, then I'm not sure how paying for email helps. Spammers would just get their own signatures, and the system wouldn't be any better than if everyone signed their email.
I do think everyone signing their email is a pretty good idea, though. It would probably not solve the spam problem, but it might help. If SSL certs got moved into DNS (as some people are suggesting) then it should be easy to use authoritative (signed) DNS records which also provided you with a list of authorized mail servers for each domain, as well as SSL certs for those mail servers. That would at least allow you to verify that a given email originated from the mail server it claims to come from, and that the mail server is an authorized server for a given domain.
Now that doesn't give us too much, except it means it could make it much harder to spoof mail, which is what a lot of spammers are doing. Further, it means spammers would have to register domains to send spam, email from those domains would clearly come from those domains, and those domains could easily be blacklisted.
Does that work? Probably not. I'd be interested to know why not, if anyone is willing to explain.
First off, I would NEVER advise senior citizens and other people born decades before the invention of the term DTP and/or computers becoming a common household item, to do ANYTHING with photos other than store them in albums.
Well both my mother and grandmother scan family photos sometimes. They do it both for storage/archival purposes (but the archive is only for personal/family use), but also so they can email them around and things like that. They're not computer geniuses, but they're smart enough to use a scanner and even do some basic adjustments in Photoshop once they're digital. They're not going to contact a professional photographer just to scan some family photos.
Right now, if they scan something with some kind of damage (scratches or creases), they just leave the damage in the photo rather than making any attempt
Second, I doubt that your grandmother possesses the necessary hardware being that scanners with multiple (angled) lamps still tend to cost thousands of dollars for a used older model.
That doesn't mean that your everyday scanner being sold 5 years from now couldn't have the ability to do an auto-repair to some degree. That's what I'm trying to point out. Even if the auto-repair isn't super-high quality, if the results are even a minor improvement over leaving the scratch or crease in-place, then it's going to make people in my family happy. Ergo, this technology, as imperfect as it is, is not useless.
I have been saying for some time, the historical significance of Wikipedia will be as an extremely well documented social experiment, rather than as an encyclopedia.... I'm hoping, for the sake of the web and for the sake of Wikipedia itself (a victim of its own dominance; everyone wants access to the first hit on a Google search of their pet topic) that something else displaces it.
Well isn't the great thing about it, the thing which sets it apart from many other encyclopedias (and other similar sources of information) is that it's open source (Creative Commons license)? So not only can it be displaced if someone creates a better site with better rules and better editors, but that other site has the option to use as much of the Wikipedia's information as it wants.
So I think in that sense, you can't think of the Wikipedia alone as the thing we're talking about. We're talking about a collection of human knowledge that can't really be taken away by commercial interest or commercial failure. That set of knowledge is an achievement that can live on even if the Wikipedia turns out terribly.
The IQ scores are almost always skewed. It's not how "smart" you are, but how educated you are. For example, I've known poor farmers who were not well educated, but through what they have been educated in, it's apparent that they are smart.
Malcom Gladwell wrote an article that may be relevant here.
the student next to me, who was someone you'd probably refer to as a "typical black teen male"
I don't understand what that means.
I guess it's because I don't see race. Now admittedly, people tell me I'm white, and I believe them, because I own a lot of Jimmy Buffett albums.
But seriously, what does this add to your story? It's a good story without anything racial.
Sorry for the off-topic trolling flamebait, because I know this is the Internet and nothing good will come from me posting this. I'm not a very politically correct guy, but it seems like you're using "black" as a stand-in for "ignorant and doesn't want to learn", and it just seems unnecessarily offensive to me. And it's not fair and it's not correct.