What you need is more doctors, but the AMA has taken steps to prevent that. Consequently there is a health care shortage.
The AMA doesn't help, but their contribution to the American medical care shambles is rather small overall. The big problem is the system where insurance and pharmaceutical companies have inserted themselves between the doctors and the patients, and ensconced themselves there via intense lobbying and bribery.
The private insurance industry adds an average overhead of 18% to medical care costs. By comparison, public insurers like Medicare or Medicaid have an overhead of about 3% or less. The savings of replacing private insurance with a public solution have been estimated to over $350 billion annually. That is enough to give medical coverage to every American, and still leave enough over to improve everybody's health care.
Be careful though. This works if you have a standalone Kindle (at least one of the older ones that isn't permanently connected to wireless), but I tried this plan with the Kindle app on my notebook and it failed miserably.
A couple of years ago I took a vacation somewhere where wi-fi access was not readily available. In preparation, I downloaded a dozen books to my little Surface 3, planning to read them at leisure. Imagine my surprise: when I tried to open and read the downloaded books the Kindle app told me they're invalid, and I need to remove them from the device and download them again.
An irate phone call to Amazon led to absolutely no resolution, beyond making me believe the issue is by design, and somehow related to DRM - without an internet connection, the app couldn't connect to the mothership to validate the purchase again (and also probably snitch to Amazon about my reading habits) so, to be safe, just blocked my access to the books *I had purchased and paid for*. I had to find a coffee shop with internet access to download them again. The experience seriously soured me on e-books.
he US does need to keep innovating like this to stay ahead though. China is producing some really competitive chips now, especially for mobile devices (CPUs, cellular modems).
It seems very shortsighted for me that the USA has put itself in this situation - because this is a great scenario for China, not so much for he USA. When the USA keeps innovating and China immediately takes the innovation (for example, via laws that force American companies to relinquish the intellectual property, or via straightforward theft) and mass produces it, the money and power go to China. In this pairing, the USA is the weak partner; if China blocks the production of new USA designs, the USA has nothing - and it would take years or tens of years to develop elsewhere a production capacity that could replace China's. If it's the USA that stops providing new designs to China, China will just innovate more slowly, using local research and development; in the meantime it can keep producing and selling products at the current technological level, while the USA is again left with nothing.
Being the producer of stuff means you get paid again and again for the stuff you produce. Being the inventor means being paid maybe once. After you disclose your invention, the producer doesn't need to pay you anymore - unless there is some kind of legal infrastructure, like IP laws, that protect you - but we know how well this works with China.
You missed the Third Law: 3) An Autonomous Car must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
And the 0th law: An Autonomous Car must protect the profits of the owner corporation above everything.
For example, if the lawsuit due to hitting some pedestrian is expected to cost less than the cost of not delivering the cargo, well, too bad for the pedestrian...
The folks who use those libraries should be buying maintenance contracts on that software. That was the original business plan for FOSS.
But this business plan creates all the wrong incentives. If you want to make money from maintaining your open source software, you need to make maintenance necessary - but if your software is good enough to begin with, people won't need maintenance, and you won't get paid.
On the contrary, that creates an incentive to make the software buggy and incomplete. Businesses will need to hire you to fix issues and develop missing features. Also, if maintenance is too easy, a business could just hire some cheap intern to manage your software. This creates an incentive to make the barrier of entry to maintenance high enough - for example via bad documentation and obscure features.
The problem with science in the US is that it has been overrun by MBAs and liberal self-centered asswipes that think they should get money just because they deserve it.
MBA's may be a problem, but you're just shaking your personal marotte when complaining about liberals. Problems for science in the US are mostly on the other side of the aisle. Some of the most powerful Republican politicians can come up with absolute howlers and go on to create legislation related to areas they're so blatantly ignorant about, but the party and their voters have no problem with that. The Republican president is proudly scientifically illiterate, but can and does name leaders of science (or related) agencies - and again, neither the party nor the voters feel there is a problem. The rank and file Republicans are themselves against science funding, while the Democrats are in majority in favor of increased science spending.
So, you're wrong. But then, since you're apparently a Republican, it was probably never about being right, was it?
That's quite the sense of entitlement you're expressing there. I'd like my Lenovo laptop to be able to crack RSA keys in under a minute, but it can't. Perhaps I should just throw it in the trash
Ah, but you're missing the point; the GP isn't asking for his Mac to do what no other computer can. He's asking for functionality that other machines in the same price range can easily provide.
Anyone who gives so much as a cent to this criminal deserves to lose it.
Fair enough, but unfortunately the "post-truth era" mentality PopeRatzo mentioned in his post isn't limited to investment. And you can't say "anyone who gives so much as a vote to this criminal deserves to lose it", because when this happens we all lose.
corporate interests write the laws they want and pay your elected officials to enact them. See George W Bush's energy policy as one of many examples.
Obviously you can't be right, since Bush the second's administration's energy policy was decided and enacted with full transparency and under open public scrutiny. Moreover, we know Republicans always put people first, so corporations can't have had any influence on the policy.
I am also certain to a very high degree of confidence that it won't be allowed to happen, either. Machines are tools. Our species creates tools to help us. Creating tools that harm us, as a species, is a ridiculous concept, always has been, always will be.
Unfortunately there is a wrong statement and at least a hidden assumption in your argument; neither of them seems true to me.
First, your assertion that humanity won't create tools that harms the species. This is obviously false. People *do* create tools that harm us as a species. They do it all the time - from cigarettes to plastic, to atom bombs, polluting industries, medicine that causes genetic harm, and so on, and so on. Nobody except a few idealists think "as a species" or are willing to abandon short term profit and/or convenience, especially for something as vaguely defined as "the good of the species". Most of us think in terms of "me and mine", and "the devil take the hindmost".
Second, you argue that taking away people's jobs is harmful to them or to the species. This relies on the unspoken assumption that people need jobs to survive or to prosper. This is not the case. Jobs are an artifact of the current social and economic structure, a mechanism for distributing the results of the economy, but are not in themselves necessary for someone's well-being. On the contrary, jobs are often a source of stress, sickness and accidents. What we need is to find a replacement for jobs as a distribution mechanism for the goods produced by robots. UBI is one such proposed mechanism - I'm sure more can be imagined.
How is removing insurance companies and inserting Government going to be cheaper or more efficient?
Because insurance companies have exactly the opposite motivation that we want in a health provider. What we want is to maximize health. What they want is to maximize profit. For insurance companies, actually treating people is a *cost*, which they will try to avoid. On the contrary, extracting more money in any kinds of ways is a benefit, and they'll try to maximize it. They have no motivation to reduce the customer's cost - on the contrary, the worse they treat the insured, and the more they bill them, the better.
The government has no such perverse incentives; moreover, a large single payer system, such as Medicare, could use it's bulk purchasing power to negotiate great reductions in prices (as any reasonable business does). In the USA there are however LAWS forbidding Medicare to negotiate, which is just crazy.
This is not just idle banter - look at this study, provided by the NIH. Private insurers have an average overhead of 18%, while public insurers (Medicare and Medicaid) have an average overhead of 3.1% (table 1 in the study). As another point of interest, the overhead of the Canadian single payer system is 1.8%. The study concludes that removing the insurance companies overhead would save a staggering 350 billion dollars a year - which would be enough to cover the cost of treating all uninsured people in the USA, and leave enough over to improve everybody's current health care.
I like to say that "everybody who's wrong thinks he's Galileo".
Here's Carl Sagan's take on this phenomenon (from "Broca's Brain"):
The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
Knowledge is power. As Google knows you better and better, they have more and more power over you. This video shows they're already considering how to exercise this power. This is the obvious next step for them (and, FWIW, I had already called it: https://slashdot.org/comments....).
Google, Facebook and the other data vampires really need to be stopped. The EU GDPR is a step in the right direction (though I, personally, would prefer both companies, and other privacy infringers, like Equifax, to be dismantled, or broken up). Unfortunately, the US government is already in Google and Facebook's pockets (it's not for nothing that Google is the largest corporate lobbyist in the USA), so I don't expect any useful legislative action.
While the article points out the Surface RT and its failure it neglects to mention the Surface 3
Yup, the Surface 3 was excellent; I have one, and I'm using it every day for lighter stuff (for example, this post). Very light, good build, battery life good enough for my needs. Add full Windows and a pretty good keyboard, and it's pretty much replaced my phone for generic e-mail/web browsing.
I particularly like the screen size; for me, it strikes the perfect balance between usability and portability - the Surface 3 fits snugly in my coat oversize pocket. I was annoyed when MS discontinued the smaller screen size product lines in favor of the larger Surface Pro, so having a 10" alternative sounds quite interesting.
I do not know what is worse: e-mail read by Google or e-mail read by the NSA/CIA/others without any warrants.
Why would you assume that's it's either one or the other? I'm fairly convinced today your Google mail is read by both Google AND the three letters. A state-run e-mail service would at least eliminate Google from the list of peeping Toms. Maybe the USPS could provide the service - the legislation that regulates paper mail, in regards to tampering, stealing, and the legal mechanisms could be extended to e-mail or other electronic communication.
High time too; thieves have been using Hands of Glory for hundreds of years now, it's nice to see the police finally catching up with modern necromantic technology...
What really makes me sad is how many of the younger generation in the USA are perfectly ok with censorship, as long as the people censored are the ones they dislike. This seems to happen more and more, in universities, in public forums, in social media.
I used to live in one of the former Iron Curtain countries, and freedom of speech was something we could only dream of. After the fall of communism, being able to speak one's mind in public was pure joy. I can't believe people born with the right to free speech can be so dismissive of it.
It's another tool in a programmer's toolbox; if used properly, it saves time and effort. It saves you from a proliferation of classes that will only be used once, in some method scope. Having to distinguish for example between class Employee; class EmployeeDataFromDatabase; class EmployeeFilteredBySalary; class EmployeeWithSalaryAndBonus etc will NOT help with maintainability.
The compiler also defines GetHashCode/Equals for you implicitly, so you can use anonymous types in LINQ queries with less bother.
it's making it just a lot harder to understand the solution
Anonymous types are much better than for example Tuples for understanding code; compare
Slashdot Mirror
One must first define social media.
Social media: a website where people may find criticism of the Ugandan government.
What you need is more doctors, but the AMA has taken steps to prevent that. Consequently there is a health care shortage.
The AMA doesn't help, but their contribution to the American medical care shambles is rather small overall. The big problem is the system where insurance and pharmaceutical companies have inserted themselves between the doctors and the patients, and ensconced themselves there via intense lobbying and bribery.
The private insurance industry adds an average overhead of 18% to medical care costs. By comparison, public insurers like Medicare or Medicaid have an overhead of about 3% or less. The savings of replacing private insurance with a public solution have been estimated to over $350 billion annually. That is enough to give medical coverage to every American, and still leave enough over to improve everybody's health care.
That's why I have a Kindle...
Be careful though. This works if you have a standalone Kindle (at least one of the older ones that isn't permanently connected to wireless), but I tried this plan with the Kindle app on my notebook and it failed miserably.
A couple of years ago I took a vacation somewhere where wi-fi access was not readily available. In preparation, I downloaded a dozen books to my little Surface 3, planning to read them at leisure. Imagine my surprise: when I tried to open and read the downloaded books the Kindle app told me they're invalid, and I need to remove them from the device and download them again.
An irate phone call to Amazon led to absolutely no resolution, beyond making me believe the issue is by design, and somehow related to DRM - without an internet connection, the app couldn't connect to the mothership to validate the purchase again (and also probably snitch to Amazon about my reading habits) so, to be safe, just blocked my access to the books *I had purchased and paid for*. I had to find a coffee shop with internet access to download them again. The experience seriously soured me on e-books.
he US does need to keep innovating like this to stay ahead though. China is producing some really competitive chips now, especially for mobile devices (CPUs, cellular modems).
It seems very shortsighted for me that the USA has put itself in this situation - because this is a great scenario for China, not so much for he USA. When the USA keeps innovating and China immediately takes the innovation (for example, via laws that force American companies to relinquish the intellectual property, or via straightforward theft) and mass produces it, the money and power go to China. In this pairing, the USA is the weak partner; if China blocks the production of new USA designs, the USA has nothing - and it would take years or tens of years to develop elsewhere a production capacity that could replace China's. If it's the USA that stops providing new designs to China, China will just innovate more slowly, using local research and development; in the meantime it can keep producing and selling products at the current technological level, while the USA is again left with nothing.
Being the producer of stuff means you get paid again and again for the stuff you produce. Being the inventor means being paid maybe once. After you disclose your invention, the producer doesn't need to pay you anymore - unless there is some kind of legal infrastructure, like IP laws, that protect you - but we know how well this works with China.
You missed the Third Law: 3) An Autonomous Car must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
And the 0th law: An Autonomous Car must protect the profits of the owner corporation above everything.
For example, if the lawsuit due to hitting some pedestrian is expected to cost less than the cost of not delivering the cargo, well, too bad for the pedestrian...
The folks who use those libraries should be buying maintenance contracts on that software. That was the original business plan for FOSS.
But this business plan creates all the wrong incentives. If you want to make money from maintaining your open source software, you need to make maintenance necessary - but if your software is good enough to begin with, people won't need maintenance, and you won't get paid.
On the contrary, that creates an incentive to make the software buggy and incomplete. Businesses will need to hire you to fix issues and develop missing features. Also, if maintenance is too easy, a business could just hire some cheap intern to manage your software. This creates an incentive to make the barrier of entry to maintenance high enough - for example via bad documentation and obscure features.
Can you say something that shows you comprehend?
Mu.
>>Why would you assume that only women wear dresses you sexist shitlord. I'll have you know I'm wearing a kilt right now.
>What? WHY WEREN'T YOU ON THAT DESIGN TEAM?WHY WEREN'T YOU ON THAT DESIGN TEAM?
Oh, he was, he was...
The Google AI reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
Well, you should have thought twice before switching to Bing...
The problem with science in the US is that it has been overrun by MBAs and liberal self-centered asswipes that think they should get money just because they deserve it.
MBA's may be a problem, but you're just shaking your personal marotte when complaining about liberals. Problems for science in the US are mostly on the other side of the aisle. Some of the most powerful Republican politicians can come up with absolute howlers and go on to create legislation related to areas they're so blatantly ignorant about, but the party and their voters have no problem with that. The Republican president is proudly scientifically illiterate, but can and does name leaders of science (or related) agencies - and again, neither the party nor the voters feel there is a problem. The rank and file Republicans are themselves against science funding, while the Democrats are in majority in favor of increased science spending.
So, you're wrong. But then, since you're apparently a Republican, it was probably never about being right, was it?
That's quite the sense of entitlement you're expressing there. I'd like my Lenovo laptop to be able to crack RSA keys in under a minute, but it can't. Perhaps I should just throw it in the trash
Ah, but you're missing the point; the GP isn't asking for his Mac to do what no other computer can. He's asking for functionality that other machines in the same price range can easily provide.
liquid cooled and running at 50Mhz
Sorry, but you can't really push the 741 far above maybe 10 kHz...
Better tracking for the three letter agencies
That can't be right, since Vint Cerf hasn't worked for the Department of Defense for a long time now. He's currently working at Google... Oh...
Anyone who gives so much as a cent to this criminal deserves to lose it.
Fair enough, but unfortunately the "post-truth era" mentality PopeRatzo mentioned in his post isn't limited to investment. And you can't say "anyone who gives so much as a vote to this criminal deserves to lose it", because when this happens we all lose.
corporate interests write the laws they want and pay your elected officials to enact them. See George W Bush's energy policy as one of many examples.
Obviously you can't be right, since Bush the second's administration's energy policy was decided and enacted with full transparency and under open public scrutiny. Moreover, we know Republicans always put people first, so corporations can't have had any influence on the policy.
I am also certain to a very high degree of confidence that it won't be allowed to happen, either. Machines are tools. Our species creates tools to help us. Creating tools that harm us, as a species, is a ridiculous concept, always has been, always will be.
Unfortunately there is a wrong statement and at least a hidden assumption in your argument; neither of them seems true to me.
First, your assertion that humanity won't create tools that harms the species. This is obviously false. People *do* create tools that harm us as a species. They do it all the time - from cigarettes to plastic, to atom bombs, polluting industries, medicine that causes genetic harm, and so on, and so on. Nobody except a few idealists think "as a species" or are willing to abandon short term profit and/or convenience, especially for something as vaguely defined as "the good of the species". Most of us think in terms of "me and mine", and "the devil take the hindmost".
Second, you argue that taking away people's jobs is harmful to them or to the species. This relies on the unspoken assumption that people need jobs to survive or to prosper. This is not the case. Jobs are an artifact of the current social and economic structure, a mechanism for distributing the results of the economy, but are not in themselves necessary for someone's well-being. On the contrary, jobs are often a source of stress, sickness and accidents. What we need is to find a replacement for jobs as a distribution mechanism for the goods produced by robots. UBI is one such proposed mechanism - I'm sure more can be imagined.
How is removing insurance companies and inserting Government going to be cheaper or more efficient?
Because insurance companies have exactly the opposite motivation that we want in a health provider. What we want is to maximize health. What they want is to maximize profit. For insurance companies, actually treating people is a *cost*, which they will try to avoid. On the contrary, extracting more money in any kinds of ways is a benefit, and they'll try to maximize it. They have no motivation to reduce the customer's cost - on the contrary, the worse they treat the insured, and the more they bill them, the better.
The government has no such perverse incentives; moreover, a large single payer system, such as Medicare, could use it's bulk purchasing power to negotiate great reductions in prices (as any reasonable business does). In the USA there are however LAWS forbidding Medicare to negotiate, which is just crazy.
This is not just idle banter - look at this study, provided by the NIH. Private insurers have an average overhead of 18%, while public insurers (Medicare and Medicaid) have an average overhead of 3.1% (table 1 in the study). As another point of interest, the overhead of the Canadian single payer system is 1.8%. The study concludes that removing the insurance companies overhead would save a staggering 350 billion dollars a year - which would be enough to cover the cost of treating all uninsured people in the USA, and leave enough over to improve everybody's current health care.
I like to say that "everybody who's wrong thinks he's Galileo".
Here's Carl Sagan's take on this phenomenon (from "Broca's Brain"):
The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
John Rogers
Knowledge is power. As Google knows you better and better, they have more and more power over you. This video shows they're already considering how to exercise this power. This is the obvious next step for them (and, FWIW, I had already called it: https://slashdot.org/comments....).
Google, Facebook and the other data vampires really need to be stopped. The EU GDPR is a step in the right direction (though I, personally, would prefer both companies, and other privacy infringers, like Equifax, to be dismantled, or broken up). Unfortunately, the US government is already in Google and Facebook's pockets (it's not for nothing that Google is the largest corporate lobbyist in the USA), so I don't expect any useful legislative action.
While the article points out the Surface RT and its failure it neglects to mention the Surface 3
Yup, the Surface 3 was excellent; I have one, and I'm using it every day for lighter stuff (for example, this post). Very light, good build, battery life good enough for my needs. Add full Windows and a pretty good keyboard, and it's pretty much replaced my phone for generic e-mail/web browsing.
I particularly like the screen size; for me, it strikes the perfect balance between usability and portability - the Surface 3 fits snugly in my coat oversize pocket. I was annoyed when MS discontinued the smaller screen size product lines in favor of the larger Surface Pro, so having a 10" alternative sounds quite interesting.
I do not know what is worse: e-mail read by Google or e-mail read by the NSA/CIA/others without any warrants.
Why would you assume that's it's either one or the other? I'm fairly convinced today your Google mail is read by both Google AND the three letters. A state-run e-mail service would at least eliminate Google from the list of peeping Toms.
Maybe the USPS could provide the service - the legislation that regulates paper mail, in regards to tampering, stealing, and the legal mechanisms could be extended to e-mail or other electronic communication.
High time too; thieves have been using Hands of Glory for hundreds of years now, it's nice to see the police finally catching up with modern necromantic technology...
Damn slippery slope for the Internet generation.
What really makes me sad is how many of the younger generation in the USA are perfectly ok with censorship, as long as the people censored are the ones they dislike. This seems to happen more and more, in universities, in public forums, in social media.
I used to live in one of the former Iron Curtain countries, and freedom of speech was something we could only dream of. After the fall of communism, being able to speak one's mind in public was pure joy. I can't believe people born with the right to free speech can be so dismissive of it.
And why would you want anonymous types
It's another tool in a programmer's toolbox; if used properly, it saves time and effort. It saves you from a proliferation of classes that will only be used once, in some method scope. Having to distinguish for example between class Employee; class EmployeeDataFromDatabase; class EmployeeFilteredBySalary; class EmployeeWithSalaryAndBonus etc will NOT help with maintainability.
The compiler also defines GetHashCode/Equals for you implicitly, so you can use anonymous types in LINQ queries with less bother.
it's making it just a lot harder to understand the solution
Anonymous types are much better than for example Tuples for understanding code; compare
to