Let's not fool ourselves here-- if you think Hollywood has an idea shortage because they're recycling old ideas, stories, and characters, then all of humanity has had an idea shortage for a few thousand years, at least. And I say "at least" because the writers then may have been stealing ideas, but we just don't have records of the ideas they stole.
This era of reboots is fantastic in my opinion. It's what cultures do when they have a rich culture to draw from, which is that they take the old ideas and stories, and reinvent and reimagine them in a way that makes them relevant and poignant for the time. The original series was great for its time, but yeah, it's becoming increasingly dated as a relic of the 60s. The general setup of a band of explorers and the characters themselves, however, still have relevance.
There is a price where profit is maximized. Go too high and the sales drop eats more then the added profit per unit provides.
You think that's what this is about? First of all, I doubt the people at the record labels are really paying that much attention. The record companies have been complaining for years that Apple wouldn't allow them to set their own prices, and forced them to sell at $0.99. When customers said in return, "Good, we don't want you to drive up prices," the record companies came back and said, "No, we want to lower prices, too!" And no big surprise, they get their chance, and no prices have been lowered.
Part of the problem is that they aren't really interested in the long tail. Competitive pricing devalues their product. If you can get tons of great old songs for $0.02, then it gets harder to convince their customers that another track is really worth $1.29, or more (I'm sure they'd love to be selling $2.00 tracks).
Besides, it's sort of the nature of the beast that record companies are all focused on what's new, what was released last week, what's in the top ten, etc. The less likely it is to sell a lot, the cheaper it should be-- but then again, it's also less likely the record companies are going to worry about songs that aren't going to sell a lot anyway.
Regardless, none of this is what this is about. The record companies are scared of Apple. Apple is the #1 music retailer in the US now, even ahead of all the brick & mortar stores, and Apple's newfound dominance threatens the record industry's control over the music industry. They're trying to prop Amazon up as a competitor by giving them preferable deals, allowing Amazon to sell tracks and albums at significantly lower prices.
So there a couple of things I'm left wondering. First, did Apple have anything in their contracts with the record companies that say only a certain percentage of songs from a label can be $1.29, and a certain percent must be $0.69? Second, if the record companies are propping up Amazon to keep Apple from drinking their milkshake, what makes them think Amazon will be any better?
Well my first question would be, who put them on iTunes? Did Apple set the price, or did someone else?
Now I don't know who would put up public domain songs, or who would collect the profits. Does Apple get the full $0.99? It seems like they should be able to do that, but somehow I doubt that they have. Anyone have real information on that? I tried looking it up on the store to see who it had listed as the record label, but with the only thing that was a full album of Ada Jones that I could see, it said it was "unavailable".
There may be someone profiting off of public domain recordings, which incidentally isn't illegal. However, I bet that, as far as Apple is concerned, it's just another album that some label submitted with a $9.90 price point.
Well this is just a prototype, so it might be improved further before it's turned into an actual product.
But anyway, it's obviously targeting people who want to get around within a city, faster and more comfortably than walking or riding a bike. What's weird about that?
Now seriously, I live in a big city, and the roads are clogged with cars. It's not that uncommon for people to be transporting themselves a few miles. Using smaller vehicles like this would save energy, be more environmentally safe, and make the roads safer for pedestrians and bike riders.
Why it needs to balance on two wheels is a different question that I don't know the answer to.
Or even if you're unwilling to release them into the public domain, something should be able to be worked out. Let's just say, for example, that you make a law that says that if Google is allowed to sell these "orphaned books" without permission from the copyright holder, then Google must provide a digital copy to a government agency (library of congress?) as well as paying a set fee per sale into a government-held bank account which can turn the money over to the appropriate copyright holder if it comes up. Offer the same thing to anyone else who wants to do the same thing.
I can't say I've thought it through, but my point is, there should be some reasonable way to deal with this. I don't see an argument that copyright should be enough reason to allow "orphaned books" to disappear, especially not when you consider that the government is only permitted to grant copyrights for the purpose of promoting the arts. And I can't see an argument why Google should be legally permitted to do something without allowing everyone else to play by the same rules.
A substantial aspect of Fair Use is the use's effect on the value of the work. In the article he repeatedly stated that you can get these various movies for free on the internet. Therefore his article could be shown in court to have a serious negative effect upon the work's value.
That doesn't seem like it should have any effect on a fair use defense, though. He could have told you that it was possible to get these various movies for free on the Internet without actually downloading them. That information was not a result of the alleged infringement.
Anyway, like I said, I'm not sure such a defense would fly. On the other hand, I highly doubt that anyone would actually want to try to prosecute unless they can prove that he also distributed. Have the media companies ever gone after anyone for downloading without distributing?
Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed website, mochan_s would certainly want you to believe that Roger Friedman committed copyright infringment. And he makes a good case. Hell, I almost felt pity myself! But, ladies and gentlemen of this supposed website, I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!
I'm not so sure it's so cut-and-dry. I think the fair-use provisions of copyright law make specific exceptions for copying for the sake of news reporting. Now it may be arguable that those exceptions are aimed at including a quote of someone else's work in order to write about that quote, but I don't believe it's as specific as that.
A journalist making a copy of a work for the sake of writing about it may arguably fit into that somehow. However, I'm not sure that argument would fly, given that it creates a slippery slope. Suddenly it would be OK for any of us to download that movie so long as we wrote a blog post about it.
I don't think the issue is that the Bush administration favored Fox over other networks, but that they favored deregulation in general. Microsoft (the "MS" part of MSNBC) benefitted just fine from the way the Bush administration walked away from the antitrust issues. Most of the Baby Bells have been allowed to consolidate again.
Whether it's Fox or MSNBC, I don't see the Bush administration taking a news organization to task for allowing their corporate overlords to dictate policies. We haven't seen Obama do much either, but apparently he doesn't have too much of an aversion to getting involved in the affairs of private companies.
First off, how can you review an unfinished movie? Who is your audience there? "I'm sure the special effects will be awesome, but they're crap right now."
I get what you're saying, but apparently his review was pretty glowing. For the review itself, I'd bet the studio would be happy enough. The problem is he writes about how he didn't see it as a screening, but by downloading an illegal copy. He writes about how easy it is, and how much is available. He even mentions how he found some big studio picture that isn't released yet and I don't think they're even marketing. The problem is: he describes piracy in a favorable light.
Yes, he should have known this would be a problem. His review isn't just of the movie, but of the experience of piracy, and the reviews are both favorable. He works for a huge media conglomerate, and the biggest threat to that conglomerate might just be cultural validation of media piracy. Of course he's going to get fired, and I don't even blame Fox for doing so. If I were writing public articles about how much my employer sucked, seemingly advocating actions that would threaten my company, I would expect to be fired too.
But there's also another problem: he wasn't really advocating piracy, just saying how easy it is to get anything you want. It's almost just a statement of fact. It's true, you can get pretty much any movie online, and it's not necessarily all that hard. For example, I wanted to watch a movie recently (won't say which one, but a fairly major film from within the past two years) and it wasn't available on my cable's pay-per-view service. I looked on iTunes to see if I could rent it, but I couldn't find it there either. I was ready and willing to pay $5 to see it, but essentially no one was there to take my money. I wasn't going to buy it, and there isn't a convenient rental place nearby. So I figured, what the hell, and googled, "watch [insert movie name here] online". And what do you know, about 50 billion sites came up that offered the movie through flash applications and rapidshare links and all sorts of stuff. If there had been a legit way to watch it, I would have opted for that even if I had to pay money. But there wasn't any option to do that.
Piracy often provides better service than the legitimate alternatives. It's a stupid thing for someone to write if they work for a major media conglomerate, but it's true.
Then I realised if a small business owner tells you that 15 years ago he set up a system at minimal cost and is only now looking at changing because the hardware is noticeably ageing...I wouldn't know how to even approach the subject...
Maybe by pointing out to that business owner that he probably doesn't see lots of other 15 year-old computers around. It's really not just because of disposable consumer culture.
Not knowing the actual failure rates is over 15 years, I'm sure it's really high among both computers manufactured 15 years ago and computers manufactured today. So if you're the guy whose computer is still running after 15 years, then it's not really so much because you made a good purchasing decision. You got lucky.
So taking that information to an IT pro and asking, "How do I buy another computer that will last 15 years?" is a little like winning the lottery and then going to an accountant and asking, "So how do I buy another winning ticket?"
Well just to take a step back, the big question is, what is the reason for the requirement that the setup must last 15 years? Is it cost? Is it an aversion to change? Is it some sort of ideology opposed to the culture of disposable goods?
Any system can last 15 years, supposing it continues to meet the user's needs and assuming nothing breaks. There are limits to how well you can predict those things, though. Something new might be available in 5 years that would be extremely helpful for the user, in which case it becomes worthwhile to upgrade. Also, even with the best quality products, some percentage of units will break within 5 years. The likelihood of something breaking in 15 years is pretty good.
It's also worth asking why the current system can't be repaired/upgraded. If his 66MHz DOS system is working, you might be able to get a bigger hard drive that's compatible, install Windows 95/98 on it, and keep going. I know it's not sexy, but if the point is to stay cheap or avoid change, and the current system is doing its job, then why not?
But ok, let's say you want to get a new system. What are the requirements? Does it need to run the same DOS application? Have you tested that application in newer versions of Windows? What about WINE? If it doesn't need to be the same DOS application, what's the new application going to be like? There are lots of questions.
As far as hardware, I would say the best thing is to buy a midrange business-class workstation (e.g. Dell Optiplex) that seems like it will meet your needs. Maybe make sure you have a couple extra expansion slots or something, in case you need them. There's a non-zero chance that something will break, but you can't stop that. By getting a midrange business desktop from a major vendor, there's a pretty good chance that you'll be able to find support and replacement parts if you need them, which is really the best you can do.
As far as software, use open source if it's an option. Not so much for ideological issues, but over the course of 15 years, you'll be more likely to find an upgrade path with support for legacy applications and hardware if you're running an open source OS. And that upgrade path will probably be free, if cost is the issue. You really don't want to keep someone running a 15 year-old unsupported operating system on their desktop if you can avoid it-- not in the Internet age. It's much better if you can at least get security updates, even if you're not interested in new features.
Except that he's not really talking about the US giving up its nuclear arsenal, at least not in the foreseeable future. He's really talking about trying to stop the list of nuclear powers from growing.
Having open source does not alone make a product awesome. However, one thing having open source does is make it so, even if the product fails, the knowledge put into making that product is not lost. And that's pretty awesome.
I'm not saying I'm eager to take antibiotics. If I have a sore throat, I generally take care of myself, gargle, drink lots of water, etc. for about 3 weeks. If after 2-3 weeks I don't feel significantly better, I go to the doctor and describe the situation, and ask what he advises.
But my point is, if I have a bad enough infection or persistent enough infection that the doctor prescribes antibiotics, then I don't think eating tofu and jogging 5 miles is going to fix it. Yes, medical treatments require the appropriate context. You shouldn't just give antibiotics or chemotherapy to random people, but that doesn't make them illegitimate or unhelpful. Sometimes the best medical treatment is no treatment, but certainly sometimes the best medical treatment is medical treatment.
A lot of time viruses don't improve at all until they do.
In my experience (not being a doctor, but being sick), a sore throat accompanied by a fever is probably a virus and may last a couple weeks. When I've had real bacterial infections in my throat, there's often been no fever or a very low-grade fever (basically no symptoms other than a sore throat), and the pain lasts for more than a couple weeks.
But that's just my anecdotal evidence and speculation battling with yours. Maybe some of my sore throats with fever were bacterial infections that I managed to fight off on my own without antibiotics. Or maybe there's some other complete misunderstanding that a good doctor could correct.
In any case, having been pretty sickly for most of my life and so having a fair amount of experience from my own health, I usually don't really go looking for antibiotics for something like a sore throat until week 3, because they'll usually go away on their own within about 2.5 weeks, especially when accompanied by fever.
I've actually had patients get mad at me when I told them that a contusion is just a bruise, and cephalgia is just a headache.
Well that's part of the power of medicine-- if you can label something, you know what it is. Think about all those "-itis" terms and how happy they make people. People go into the doctor with sore throat, and the doctor tells them it's 'tonsillitis'. They go in with a cough, and they're told they have 'bronchitis'. And then they're happier about because they think they've gained additional knowledge about what the problem is.
Most people seem to think the 'tonsillitis' is the actual name of some virus or bacteria that only infects your throat, but it's not. The 'itis' suffix just means "inflamed or irritated". So when you go in and tell the doctor your tonsils are sore and he says you have tonsillitis, he's just telling you back what you told him, but in more technical terms.
If the doctor really wanted to try something, he should have made a try with an anti-fungic (some studies tend to show that part of recurring sinusitis might be due to bugs more of the fungi persuasion).
But that would be more work and would not help the doctor any more in what he's really trying to do: get the patient out of his office.
Seriously, I'm amazed at how lazy most doctors are about actually trying to help their patients, considering how much work it takes to get to be a doctor. I would bet money that none of my doctors in my adult life have bothered to look at my file a single time except when I've been in their presence. As in, I come with symptoms, and when I'm in the office they grab my file. They glance at the file while I tell them my symptoms, and then they recommend the first course of treatment that pops into their heads.
If they don't know what the problem is, they don't delve further into my file. They don't go back and research the situation. They don't try to contact other experts to look for greater insight.
When I was working helpdesk, if I had been that lazy in trying to diagnose problems, I would have been fired.
During my last two week bout with a bad sore throat, I demanded AB's from my MD and got them. The throat cleared up within a day, fever dropped.
It could well be that you would have gotten better within a day anyway. I know people say it a lot around here, but it's very relevant here: correlation isn't the same as causation.
I do not mind universal catastrophic health care, I do mind the idea of paying for every kook who thinks his tummy ache is an emergency.
Well the two might not be directly connected. It doesn't seem to me like giving universal catastrophic health care would encourage people to use the ER more, and in fact having better access to healthcare on a regular basis might decrease ER costs. Setting aside for a second the people who go to the ER for every tummy ache, what about those who do nothing about potentially serious issues until they actually become serious issues? Early detection can often save money, actually.
A local hospital in Atlanta (actually more than one) reports many cases of people calling 911 to get a ride downtown where by law they are required to be given a "ticket" to get home.
Well that's just a problem, and again doesn't really have a direct connection to universal healthcare. You can get in trouble (fines, I believe) for calling 911 unnecessarily. You have to figure there will be some abuse, that sometimes a person will get away with something like that. But if it's really all that rampant (the abuse the the ambulance service that you describe) then I would think they should investigate and arrest or fine people abusing the system.
There's merit in what you say, but on the other hand, I'll take antibiotics when I have an infection. I'll go in for any recommended cancer screenings, and if they find something, I'll be glad for the best medical treatment I can get, because I don't want to rely on diet, exercise, and attitude to fix that.
There is no replacement for diet, exercise, and a positive attitude, but those things also aren't a complete replacement for medical treatment.
You can take your CDMA phone to Sprint, AT&T, or Cingular? That's a neat trick, considering AT&T and Cingular are the same company and that company has a GSM network.
Each 4g handset would have to be registered on Verizon's network. Verizon will still get paid.
Yeah, but the question is whether they'll try to force you (through some means) to pay for voice service on top of the data service that you'll be paying for. It's not as though they haven't put any effort into fighting 3rd party VoIP services on their DSL lines.
Just a big question, I think, is "will I be able to get a dumb pipe?" if Verizon will offer 4G accounts with high bandwidth and high allowances, without any kind of filter or "walled garden", then will there be anything to prevent hardware manufacturers from providing 4G VoIP handsets and killing the cell phone market? Will Verizon allow that to happen?
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Let's not fool ourselves here-- if you think Hollywood has an idea shortage because they're recycling old ideas, stories, and characters, then all of humanity has had an idea shortage for a few thousand years, at least. And I say "at least" because the writers then may have been stealing ideas, but we just don't have records of the ideas they stole.
This era of reboots is fantastic in my opinion. It's what cultures do when they have a rich culture to draw from, which is that they take the old ideas and stories, and reinvent and reimagine them in a way that makes them relevant and poignant for the time. The original series was great for its time, but yeah, it's becoming increasingly dated as a relic of the 60s. The general setup of a band of explorers and the characters themselves, however, still have relevance.
There is a price where profit is maximized. Go too high and the sales drop eats more then the added profit per unit provides.
You think that's what this is about? First of all, I doubt the people at the record labels are really paying that much attention. The record companies have been complaining for years that Apple wouldn't allow them to set their own prices, and forced them to sell at $0.99. When customers said in return, "Good, we don't want you to drive up prices," the record companies came back and said, "No, we want to lower prices, too!" And no big surprise, they get their chance, and no prices have been lowered.
Part of the problem is that they aren't really interested in the long tail. Competitive pricing devalues their product. If you can get tons of great old songs for $0.02, then it gets harder to convince their customers that another track is really worth $1.29, or more (I'm sure they'd love to be selling $2.00 tracks).
Besides, it's sort of the nature of the beast that record companies are all focused on what's new, what was released last week, what's in the top ten, etc. The less likely it is to sell a lot, the cheaper it should be-- but then again, it's also less likely the record companies are going to worry about songs that aren't going to sell a lot anyway.
Regardless, none of this is what this is about. The record companies are scared of Apple. Apple is the #1 music retailer in the US now, even ahead of all the brick & mortar stores, and Apple's newfound dominance threatens the record industry's control over the music industry. They're trying to prop Amazon up as a competitor by giving them preferable deals, allowing Amazon to sell tracks and albums at significantly lower prices.
So there a couple of things I'm left wondering. First, did Apple have anything in their contracts with the record companies that say only a certain percentage of songs from a label can be $1.29, and a certain percent must be $0.69? Second, if the record companies are propping up Amazon to keep Apple from drinking their milkshake, what makes them think Amazon will be any better?
Well my first question would be, who put them on iTunes? Did Apple set the price, or did someone else?
Now I don't know who would put up public domain songs, or who would collect the profits. Does Apple get the full $0.99? It seems like they should be able to do that, but somehow I doubt that they have. Anyone have real information on that? I tried looking it up on the store to see who it had listed as the record label, but with the only thing that was a full album of Ada Jones that I could see, it said it was "unavailable".
There may be someone profiting off of public domain recordings, which incidentally isn't illegal. However, I bet that, as far as Apple is concerned, it's just another album that some label submitted with a $9.90 price point.
Well this is just a prototype, so it might be improved further before it's turned into an actual product.
But anyway, it's obviously targeting people who want to get around within a city, faster and more comfortably than walking or riding a bike. What's weird about that?
Now seriously, I live in a big city, and the roads are clogged with cars. It's not that uncommon for people to be transporting themselves a few miles. Using smaller vehicles like this would save energy, be more environmentally safe, and make the roads safer for pedestrians and bike riders.
Why it needs to balance on two wheels is a different question that I don't know the answer to.
Or even if you're unwilling to release them into the public domain, something should be able to be worked out. Let's just say, for example, that you make a law that says that if Google is allowed to sell these "orphaned books" without permission from the copyright holder, then Google must provide a digital copy to a government agency (library of congress?) as well as paying a set fee per sale into a government-held bank account which can turn the money over to the appropriate copyright holder if it comes up. Offer the same thing to anyone else who wants to do the same thing.
I can't say I've thought it through, but my point is, there should be some reasonable way to deal with this. I don't see an argument that copyright should be enough reason to allow "orphaned books" to disappear, especially not when you consider that the government is only permitted to grant copyrights for the purpose of promoting the arts. And I can't see an argument why Google should be legally permitted to do something without allowing everyone else to play by the same rules.
A substantial aspect of Fair Use is the use's effect on the value of the work. In the article he repeatedly stated that you can get these various movies for free on the internet. Therefore his article could be shown in court to have a serious negative effect upon the work's value.
That doesn't seem like it should have any effect on a fair use defense, though. He could have told you that it was possible to get these various movies for free on the Internet without actually downloading them. That information was not a result of the alleged infringement.
Anyway, like I said, I'm not sure such a defense would fly. On the other hand, I highly doubt that anyone would actually want to try to prosecute unless they can prove that he also distributed. Have the media companies ever gone after anyone for downloading without distributing?
Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed website, mochan_s would certainly want you to believe that Roger Friedman committed copyright infringment. And he makes a good case. Hell, I almost felt pity myself! But, ladies and gentlemen of this supposed website, I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!
I'm not so sure it's so cut-and-dry. I think the fair-use provisions of copyright law make specific exceptions for copying for the sake of news reporting. Now it may be arguable that those exceptions are aimed at including a quote of someone else's work in order to write about that quote, but I don't believe it's as specific as that.
A journalist making a copy of a work for the sake of writing about it may arguably fit into that somehow. However, I'm not sure that argument would fly, given that it creates a slippery slope. Suddenly it would be OK for any of us to download that movie so long as we wrote a blog post about it.
I don't think the issue is that the Bush administration favored Fox over other networks, but that they favored deregulation in general. Microsoft (the "MS" part of MSNBC) benefitted just fine from the way the Bush administration walked away from the antitrust issues. Most of the Baby Bells have been allowed to consolidate again.
Whether it's Fox or MSNBC, I don't see the Bush administration taking a news organization to task for allowing their corporate overlords to dictate policies. We haven't seen Obama do much either, but apparently he doesn't have too much of an aversion to getting involved in the affairs of private companies.
First off, how can you review an unfinished movie? Who is your audience there? "I'm sure the special effects will be awesome, but they're crap right now."
I get what you're saying, but apparently his review was pretty glowing. For the review itself, I'd bet the studio would be happy enough. The problem is he writes about how he didn't see it as a screening, but by downloading an illegal copy. He writes about how easy it is, and how much is available. He even mentions how he found some big studio picture that isn't released yet and I don't think they're even marketing. The problem is: he describes piracy in a favorable light.
Yes, he should have known this would be a problem. His review isn't just of the movie, but of the experience of piracy, and the reviews are both favorable. He works for a huge media conglomerate, and the biggest threat to that conglomerate might just be cultural validation of media piracy. Of course he's going to get fired, and I don't even blame Fox for doing so. If I were writing public articles about how much my employer sucked, seemingly advocating actions that would threaten my company, I would expect to be fired too.
But there's also another problem: he wasn't really advocating piracy, just saying how easy it is to get anything you want. It's almost just a statement of fact. It's true, you can get pretty much any movie online, and it's not necessarily all that hard. For example, I wanted to watch a movie recently (won't say which one, but a fairly major film from within the past two years) and it wasn't available on my cable's pay-per-view service. I looked on iTunes to see if I could rent it, but I couldn't find it there either. I was ready and willing to pay $5 to see it, but essentially no one was there to take my money. I wasn't going to buy it, and there isn't a convenient rental place nearby. So I figured, what the hell, and googled, "watch [insert movie name here] online". And what do you know, about 50 billion sites came up that offered the movie through flash applications and rapidshare links and all sorts of stuff. If there had been a legit way to watch it, I would have opted for that even if I had to pay money. But there wasn't any option to do that.
Piracy often provides better service than the legitimate alternatives. It's a stupid thing for someone to write if they work for a major media conglomerate, but it's true.
Then I realised if a small business owner tells you that 15 years ago he set up a system at minimal cost and is only now looking at changing because the hardware is noticeably ageing...I wouldn't know how to even approach the subject...
Maybe by pointing out to that business owner that he probably doesn't see lots of other 15 year-old computers around. It's really not just because of disposable consumer culture.
Not knowing the actual failure rates is over 15 years, I'm sure it's really high among both computers manufactured 15 years ago and computers manufactured today. So if you're the guy whose computer is still running after 15 years, then it's not really so much because you made a good purchasing decision. You got lucky.
So taking that information to an IT pro and asking, "How do I buy another computer that will last 15 years?" is a little like winning the lottery and then going to an accountant and asking, "So how do I buy another winning ticket?"
Well just to take a step back, the big question is, what is the reason for the requirement that the setup must last 15 years? Is it cost? Is it an aversion to change? Is it some sort of ideology opposed to the culture of disposable goods?
Any system can last 15 years, supposing it continues to meet the user's needs and assuming nothing breaks. There are limits to how well you can predict those things, though. Something new might be available in 5 years that would be extremely helpful for the user, in which case it becomes worthwhile to upgrade. Also, even with the best quality products, some percentage of units will break within 5 years. The likelihood of something breaking in 15 years is pretty good.
It's also worth asking why the current system can't be repaired/upgraded. If his 66MHz DOS system is working, you might be able to get a bigger hard drive that's compatible, install Windows 95/98 on it, and keep going. I know it's not sexy, but if the point is to stay cheap or avoid change, and the current system is doing its job, then why not?
But ok, let's say you want to get a new system. What are the requirements? Does it need to run the same DOS application? Have you tested that application in newer versions of Windows? What about WINE? If it doesn't need to be the same DOS application, what's the new application going to be like? There are lots of questions.
As far as hardware, I would say the best thing is to buy a midrange business-class workstation (e.g. Dell Optiplex) that seems like it will meet your needs. Maybe make sure you have a couple extra expansion slots or something, in case you need them. There's a non-zero chance that something will break, but you can't stop that. By getting a midrange business desktop from a major vendor, there's a pretty good chance that you'll be able to find support and replacement parts if you need them, which is really the best you can do.
As far as software, use open source if it's an option. Not so much for ideological issues, but over the course of 15 years, you'll be more likely to find an upgrade path with support for legacy applications and hardware if you're running an open source OS. And that upgrade path will probably be free, if cost is the issue. You really don't want to keep someone running a 15 year-old unsupported operating system on their desktop if you can avoid it-- not in the Internet age. It's much better if you can at least get security updates, even if you're not interested in new features.
Except that he's not really talking about the US giving up its nuclear arsenal, at least not in the foreseeable future. He's really talking about trying to stop the list of nuclear powers from growing.
Having open source does not alone make a product awesome. However, one thing having open source does is make it so, even if the product fails, the knowledge put into making that product is not lost. And that's pretty awesome.
I'm not saying I'm eager to take antibiotics. If I have a sore throat, I generally take care of myself, gargle, drink lots of water, etc. for about 3 weeks. If after 2-3 weeks I don't feel significantly better, I go to the doctor and describe the situation, and ask what he advises.
But my point is, if I have a bad enough infection or persistent enough infection that the doctor prescribes antibiotics, then I don't think eating tofu and jogging 5 miles is going to fix it. Yes, medical treatments require the appropriate context. You shouldn't just give antibiotics or chemotherapy to random people, but that doesn't make them illegitimate or unhelpful. Sometimes the best medical treatment is no treatment, but certainly sometimes the best medical treatment is medical treatment.
A lot of time viruses don't improve at all until they do.
In my experience (not being a doctor, but being sick), a sore throat accompanied by a fever is probably a virus and may last a couple weeks. When I've had real bacterial infections in my throat, there's often been no fever or a very low-grade fever (basically no symptoms other than a sore throat), and the pain lasts for more than a couple weeks.
But that's just my anecdotal evidence and speculation battling with yours. Maybe some of my sore throats with fever were bacterial infections that I managed to fight off on my own without antibiotics. Or maybe there's some other complete misunderstanding that a good doctor could correct.
In any case, having been pretty sickly for most of my life and so having a fair amount of experience from my own health, I usually don't really go looking for antibiotics for something like a sore throat until week 3, because they'll usually go away on their own within about 2.5 weeks, especially when accompanied by fever.
I've actually had patients get mad at me when I told them that a contusion is just a bruise, and cephalgia is just a headache.
Well that's part of the power of medicine-- if you can label something, you know what it is. Think about all those "-itis" terms and how happy they make people. People go into the doctor with sore throat, and the doctor tells them it's 'tonsillitis'. They go in with a cough, and they're told they have 'bronchitis'. And then they're happier about because they think they've gained additional knowledge about what the problem is.
Most people seem to think the 'tonsillitis' is the actual name of some virus or bacteria that only infects your throat, but it's not. The 'itis' suffix just means "inflamed or irritated". So when you go in and tell the doctor your tonsils are sore and he says you have tonsillitis, he's just telling you back what you told him, but in more technical terms.
If the doctor really wanted to try something, he should have made a try with an anti-fungic (some studies tend to show that part of recurring sinusitis might be due to bugs more of the fungi persuasion).
But that would be more work and would not help the doctor any more in what he's really trying to do: get the patient out of his office.
Seriously, I'm amazed at how lazy most doctors are about actually trying to help their patients, considering how much work it takes to get to be a doctor. I would bet money that none of my doctors in my adult life have bothered to look at my file a single time except when I've been in their presence. As in, I come with symptoms, and when I'm in the office they grab my file. They glance at the file while I tell them my symptoms, and then they recommend the first course of treatment that pops into their heads.
If they don't know what the problem is, they don't delve further into my file. They don't go back and research the situation. They don't try to contact other experts to look for greater insight.
When I was working helpdesk, if I had been that lazy in trying to diagnose problems, I would have been fired.
During my last two week bout with a bad sore throat, I demanded AB's from my MD and got them. The throat cleared up within a day, fever dropped.
It could well be that you would have gotten better within a day anyway. I know people say it a lot around here, but it's very relevant here: correlation isn't the same as causation.
I do not mind universal catastrophic health care, I do mind the idea of paying for every kook who thinks his tummy ache is an emergency.
Well the two might not be directly connected. It doesn't seem to me like giving universal catastrophic health care would encourage people to use the ER more, and in fact having better access to healthcare on a regular basis might decrease ER costs. Setting aside for a second the people who go to the ER for every tummy ache, what about those who do nothing about potentially serious issues until they actually become serious issues? Early detection can often save money, actually.
A local hospital in Atlanta (actually more than one) reports many cases of people calling 911 to get a ride downtown where by law they are required to be given a "ticket" to get home.
Well that's just a problem, and again doesn't really have a direct connection to universal healthcare. You can get in trouble (fines, I believe) for calling 911 unnecessarily. You have to figure there will be some abuse, that sometimes a person will get away with something like that. But if it's really all that rampant (the abuse the the ambulance service that you describe) then I would think they should investigate and arrest or fine people abusing the system.
There's merit in what you say, but on the other hand, I'll take antibiotics when I have an infection. I'll go in for any recommended cancer screenings, and if they find something, I'll be glad for the best medical treatment I can get, because I don't want to rely on diet, exercise, and attitude to fix that.
There is no replacement for diet, exercise, and a positive attitude, but those things also aren't a complete replacement for medical treatment.
You can take your CDMA phone to Sprint, AT&T, or Cingular? That's a neat trick, considering AT&T and Cingular are the same company and that company has a GSM network.
I don't remember which of the provisions set forth by Google Verizon was required to agree with, but I think it was only one of them.
Each 4g handset would have to be registered on Verizon's network. Verizon will still get paid.
Yeah, but the question is whether they'll try to force you (through some means) to pay for voice service on top of the data service that you'll be paying for. It's not as though they haven't put any effort into fighting 3rd party VoIP services on their DSL lines.
Just a big question, I think, is "will I be able to get a dumb pipe?" if Verizon will offer 4G accounts with high bandwidth and high allowances, without any kind of filter or "walled garden", then will there be anything to prevent hardware manufacturers from providing 4G VoIP handsets and killing the cell phone market? Will Verizon allow that to happen?