US healthcare is a capitalist system. The idea that people can be treated properly is very much secondary to its main goal: maximizing profits. I think people are finally understanding what capitalism means in healthcare, thus the recent interest in socializing healthcare.
Currently its 100% legal to drag someone several years through the the system to milk their insurance. The doctors can simply argue that they wanted to be careful.
You appear to think that socializing healthcare will stop that phenomenon. Why?
It seems to me that the phenomenon is due to the "insurance" side - the side that disconnects results from payment. Without insurance, people would pay for each treatment out of their own pocket and they sure as shit wouldn't put up with a constant series of procedures and tests that don't yield results. Seems to me that socializing healthcare would just mean even less accountability for excessive testing. It isn't like tests suddenly become zero-cost under socialized healthcare, the people doing them are still going to get paid for doing them. Unless doctors are forced into a quota system for testing, there is going to be just as much incentive to over-test as there is now. And I don't think anyone could argue that a quota system would improve healthcare, only arbitrarily cap costs without regard to effectiveness.
What we really need is a system that tightens up the relationship between payment and results, not one that loosens it even further than it already is.
I've talked to people who still think that you can get it from eating pork products. People in general are stupid, and these same people are the ones who avoided Toronto when SARS hit.
Over the last 5 years more people have been killed in the US by swine flu than by terrorists. If you buy into terrorism fear-mongering, as so many people seem to do along with just about the entire news reporting industry, it's no surprise people would buy into all kinds of crazy fears about swine flue.
Police and agents of the state are prevented from obtaining evidence illegally; doing so makes it inadmissible in court. However, information collected by private citizens can be used in court regardless of how it is obtained,
Except in one case - if the "private citizens" are doing the search as proxies for law enforcement, then the results are supposed to be treated the same as if the search was done by the government in the first place. Some might argue exactly what constitutes being a proxy, for example if the the people doing the search of a long-standing but non-specific agreement to report anything they find, does that make them proxies or independent enough? I would argue that it does make them proxies, but then I again I believe that Blackstone's ratio is way too low for a so-called free society.
A bank robber flees the crime scene in a car going 90MPH. Would you permit the police to give chase, given that they would have to violate traffic safety laws to do so? Or should the police only drive the speed limit?
In an unmarked vehicle with no means of warning other drivers on the road and with a driver who has had no pursuit training? Absolutely not.
Another scenario: A man is holding a hostage at gunpoint. Should police draw their weapons and aim them, even though threatening violence (or death) against a fellow citizen is against the law?
The hostage is in imminent danger and the gunman has already broken the law. That's your latitude. But even then, you know what reciprocation would not be acceptable? For the cops to take a member of the gunman's family hostage at gunpoint in return.
And yes, a cop posing as a pross or a drug dealer or a 12 year old girl in a chatroom gives people lots of reasons to reconsider engaging in illegal behaviors. That's the whole point, comrade.
In that scenario, along with all the others the OP mentioned, no one is in imminent danger and no one has already committed a crime.
The highest tax bracket was 80% in 1939. Today it's 35%.
I pray to God that you get what you just wished for.
Of course your implication that taxes (not the maximum tax rate) were higher in 1939 is still probably false.
The wikipedia article does not spell out at what income level that 80% kicked in. Nor how it compares to the average income of the time. In today's terms, if income tax rate topped out at 80% but only for incomes larger than 100 million then it would have practically no impact at all and certainly wouldn't end up accounting for more than a very small fraction of all taxes collected.
Shouldn't be too hard to harvest energy from changes of momentum and orientation, similar to how many mechanical watches have for years been able to wind themselves.
i looked around but couldn't find any copy online. anyone have one? it's a pretty old story so i would assume it is legal. maybe i'm wrong though.
Unlikely. She was born in 1911 when copyright was already 28years plus another 28 if the author filed for extension. The puts her in the "mickey mouse envelope" so unless someone really screwed up along the way, or she deliberately donated it to the public domain, pretty much everything she's written will still remain locked up in perpetuity.
Wasila, Alaska? The killer app for this device is to put a set of high-heels on it and have it run as the GOP Veep candidate in 2012 - all puny mortals bow down before Mecha Palin, or be crushed!
Nah, Giant Mecha Palin should run for Prez and her VP can be La Pequena Palin
Feel free to disprove this by doing a list of films about death row inmates and whether they are based on true events and whether that portrayal includes prior convictions.
Whether your premise is true or not, showing that such films exist would neither prove nor disprove it. You've made a connection in your head between fictionalized criminals and the motivations of movie makers but you've shown no actual proof for it, just a rationalization. Just as good a reason for such fictionalization is that the writers want to tell a specific story so they make it all up rather than go looking for some real person who fits the profile, after all it is fiction, not a documentary. There is at least as much evidence for THAT claim as there is for YOUR claim.
Meanwhile, the television show "Saving Grace" depicted in detail other crimes of a falsely convicted death row inmate, particularly his killing of a prison guard and yet his character was intended as sympathetic.
No, the answer is statistics. What's safer and more reliable in the long run? How many crashes have we had due to computer error rather than human error given x hours flown by each?
Statistics is only the answer if it measures the right thing. At a minimum your suggestion doesn't qualify because computers fly planes on autopilot almost all of the time anyway. Sure there are better statistics to be looking at, I can think of a few myself off the cuff, but better than junk doesn't mean good or useful.
So beware the fallacy that we do know the answer, it may ultimately be that we are simply incapable of measuring the correct variables to make a mathematically sound evaluation.
Those who have those urges towards children may feel prodded seeing the depicted acts to try them in the real world.
May? May? MAY?
Before we start pissing on one of the most basic rights of all democracies don't you think we ought to have some sort of proof at least a little bit stronger than "may?"
Of course this was almost certainly an inside-assisted job. But then you better watch who your employees are. If you're employing people that have access to potentially sensitive data, how do you know they aren't in a financial bind and will do anything to make next month's mortgage payment? Or have some gambling debts that they have to pay or their wife will work off?
You can never know for certain. Even if you could know, how do you know that one of the people whose job is to watch other people isn't compromised?
Rather than require that employees have absolutely zero privacy, a far better approach is to implement business processes that are inherently self-checking. Kind of like the two-man switch for nuclear missile launches as seen in the movies. That way you limit the damage that a single compromised employee can do. While it may be possible to compromise one arbitrary employee, it is significantly more difficult to compromise one employee and the exact other employee that happens to be the one who is the other part of the process. With this approach you also gain the benefit of being more resistant to simple errors too.
"Ben Goldacre writes about invalid and misleading 'science' in the Guardian... behind a recent press story that reported illegal downloading to involve 120 billion pounds worth of material."
Everyone knows bits don't weigh anything! Those Brits better get with it, the correct unit of measure is LoC - Libraries of Congress!
Let's just hope that this tool only monitors files on his computer and communicates them to the base. It could also monitor some other stuff, like names of hardware equipment, such as VMWARE CD-ROM DRIVE or whatever.
Pretty much any of that can be configured out of the VM in one way or another. Worst case he can use Xen which, being open source, can be completely modified to report anything.
Or it may insist on talking directly to its network. Or it may actually be responsible for authenticating the detected MAC address.
Not a problem. MAC addresses are full programable and the virtual nic maps directly to the physical nic - i.e. it hands packets directly to the physical nic, fully formed and vice versa. I'm doing something very similar at home right now - running pfsense in a vmware machine on a Windows XP host as my internet firewall. I disabled the all of XP's ip protocols on the wan nic so that the pfsense firewall runs the entire show on that physical nic.
So the only solution is to destroy that little convenience he shall have by getting access onto their network, by having to do all his work in a VM?
Nah, that's backwards. Use the VM as a router/firewall to the campus network and install the campus spyware inside the VM. Then use the bare-metal for all the real work. If he sets up the VM right it will act just like a NAT firewall and unless someone logs in and really starts looking at what the VM is doing (rather than just what files are installed in it) campus IT will never be the wiser.
Or just give them a full-blown VM with an installation of XP and nothing else. Set up the physical network interface so that only the VM uses it, and use virtual interfaces to route from the host OS to the VM and then out to the network. You can run a NAT firewall (XP's connection sharing might be good enough) on the VM.
If you are feeling ultra-paranoid you could install typical applications in there too, like MS Office, etc. So if they look at everything on the VM it will look like a regular college-kid computer, but unless they are really smart they will never know that the "real" computer is just using the VM to NAT out to their network.
Slashdot Mirror
US healthcare is a capitalist system. The idea that people can be treated properly is very much secondary to its main goal: maximizing profits. I think people are finally understanding what capitalism means in healthcare, thus the recent interest in socializing healthcare.
Currently its 100% legal to drag someone several years through the the system to milk their insurance. The doctors can simply argue that they wanted to be careful.
You appear to think that socializing healthcare will stop that phenomenon. Why?
It seems to me that the phenomenon is due to the "insurance" side - the side that disconnects results from payment. Without insurance, people would pay for each treatment out of their own pocket and they sure as shit wouldn't put up with a constant series of procedures and tests that don't yield results. Seems to me that socializing healthcare would just mean even less accountability for excessive testing. It isn't like tests suddenly become zero-cost under socialized healthcare, the people doing them are still going to get paid for doing them. Unless doctors are forced into a quota system for testing, there is going to be just as much incentive to over-test as there is now. And I don't think anyone could argue that a quota system would improve healthcare, only arbitrarily cap costs without regard to effectiveness.
What we really need is a system that tightens up the relationship between payment and results, not one that loosens it even further than it already is.
I've talked to people who still think that you can get it from eating pork products. People in general are stupid, and these same people are the ones who avoided Toronto when SARS hit.
Over the last 5 years more people have been killed in the US by swine flu than by terrorists. If you buy into terrorism fear-mongering, as so many people seem to do along with just about the entire news reporting industry, it's no surprise people would buy into all kinds of crazy fears about swine flue.
Police and agents of the state are prevented from obtaining evidence illegally; doing so makes it inadmissible in court. However, information collected by private citizens can be used in court regardless of how it is obtained,
Except in one case - if the "private citizens" are doing the search as proxies for law enforcement, then the results are supposed to be treated the same as if the search was done by the government in the first place. Some might argue exactly what constitutes being a proxy, for example if the the people doing the search of a long-standing but non-specific agreement to report anything they find, does that make them proxies or independent enough? I would argue that it does make them proxies, but then I again I believe that Blackstone's ratio is way too low for a so-called free society.
A bank robber flees the crime scene in a car going 90MPH. Would you permit the police to give chase, given that they would have to violate traffic safety laws to do so? Or should the police only drive the speed limit?
In an unmarked vehicle with no means of warning other drivers on the road and with a driver who has had no pursuit training? Absolutely not.
Another scenario: A man is holding a hostage at gunpoint. Should police draw their weapons and aim them, even though threatening violence (or death) against a fellow citizen is against the law?
The hostage is in imminent danger and the gunman has already broken the law. That's your latitude.
But even then, you know what reciprocation would not be acceptable? For the cops to take a member of the gunman's family hostage at gunpoint in return.
And yes, a cop posing as a pross or a drug dealer or a 12 year old girl in a chatroom gives people lots of reasons to reconsider engaging in illegal behaviors. That's the whole point, comrade.
In that scenario, along with all the others the OP mentioned, no one is in imminent danger and no one has already committed a crime.
The highest tax bracket was 80% in 1939. Today it's 35%.
I pray to God that you get what you just wished for.
Of course your implication that taxes (not the maximum tax rate) were higher in 1939 is still probably false.
The wikipedia article does not spell out at what income level that 80% kicked in. Nor how it compares to the average income of the time.
In today's terms, if income tax rate topped out at 80% but only for incomes larger than 100 million then it would have practically no impact at all and certainly wouldn't end up accounting for more than a very small fraction of all taxes collected.
Shouldn't be too hard to harvest energy from changes of momentum and orientation, similar to how many mechanical watches have for years been able to wind themselves.
Like these guys.
And how long until they go after an innocent person?
Like these?
i looked around but couldn't find any copy online. anyone have one? it's a pretty old story so i would assume it is legal. maybe i'm wrong though.
Unlikely. She was born in 1911 when copyright was already 28years plus another 28 if the author filed for extension. The puts her in the "mickey mouse envelope" so unless someone really screwed up along the way, or she deliberately donated it to the public domain, pretty much everything she's written will still remain locked up in perpetuity.
Here's a useful list of american copyright extensions.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=249705&threshold=2&commentsort=0&pid=19855425
Wasila, Alaska? The killer app for this device is to put a set of high-heels on it and have it run as the GOP Veep candidate in 2012 - all puny mortals bow down before Mecha Palin, or be crushed!
Nah, Giant Mecha Palin should run for Prez and her VP can be La Pequena Palin
Feel free to disprove this by doing a list of films about death row inmates and whether they are based on true events and whether that portrayal includes prior convictions.
Whether your premise is true or not, showing that such films exist would neither prove nor disprove it. You've made a connection in your head between fictionalized criminals and the motivations of movie makers but you've shown no actual proof for it, just a rationalization. Just as good a reason for such fictionalization is that the writers want to tell a specific story so they make it all up rather than go looking for some real person who fits the profile, after all it is fiction, not a documentary. There is at least as much evidence for THAT claim as there is for YOUR claim.
Meanwhile, the television show "Saving Grace" depicted in detail other crimes of a falsely convicted death row inmate, particularly his killing of a prison guard and yet his character was intended as sympathetic.
Damn.
The first rule of usenet is you do not talk about usenet.
The second rule of usenet is you do not talk about ipv6.
Readnews no longer accepts individual accounts.
Were you referring to someone else?
That's not "sharing" anything that's commenting on the obvious.
Seems you really aren't terribly self-aware.
No, the answer is statistics. What's safer and more reliable in the long run? How many crashes have we had due to computer error rather than human error given x hours flown by each?
Statistics is only the answer if it measures the right thing. At a minimum your suggestion doesn't qualify because computers fly planes on autopilot almost all of the time anyway. Sure there are better statistics to be looking at, I can think of a few myself off the cuff, but better than junk doesn't mean good or useful.
So beware the fallacy that we do know the answer, it may ultimately be that we are simply incapable of measuring the correct variables to make a mathematically sound evaluation.
Interesting.
Is there anything else you'd like to share about me?
Anything else? I haven't "shared" a thing.
Those who have those urges towards children may feel prodded seeing the depicted acts to try them in the real world.
May? May? MAY?
Before we start pissing on one of the most basic rights of all democracies don't you think we ought to have some sort of proof at least a little bit stronger than "may?"
Wow; you are.
It's pretty late in the year, and most schools are already out. How'd you fare in debate class this time 'round, kid?
Debate? This isn't a debate any more, it's just your pathetic attempt to protect your id.
Of course this was almost certainly an inside-assisted job. But then you better watch who your employees are. If you're employing people that have access to potentially sensitive data, how do you know they aren't in a financial bind and will do anything to make next month's mortgage payment? Or have some gambling debts that they have to pay or their wife will work off?
You can never know for certain. Even if you could know, how do you know that one of the people whose job is to watch other people isn't compromised?
Rather than require that employees have absolutely zero privacy, a far better approach is to implement business processes that are inherently self-checking. Kind of like the two-man switch for nuclear missile launches as seen in the movies. That way you limit the damage that a single compromised employee can do. While it may be possible to compromise one arbitrary employee, it is significantly more difficult to compromise one employee and the exact other employee that happens to be the one who is the other part of the process. With this approach you also gain the benefit of being more resistant to simple errors too.
You're still here?
Amazing.
A question that begs an answer of the asker.
Ah, complete capitulation in the form of adolescent smart-assery.
Surely it should be measured in British Libraries or National Libraries of Scotland etc rather than Libraries of Congress?
Nope. None of that weird metric shit.
Are you trying to say that even a bit weighs a little bit?
"Ben Goldacre writes about invalid and misleading 'science' in the Guardian ... behind a recent press story that reported illegal downloading to involve 120 billion pounds worth of material."
Everyone knows bits don't weigh anything!
Those Brits better get with it, the correct unit of measure is LoC - Libraries of Congress!
Let's just hope that this tool only monitors files on his computer and communicates them to the base. It could also monitor some other stuff, like names of hardware equipment, such as VMWARE CD-ROM DRIVE or whatever.
Pretty much any of that can be configured out of the VM in one way or another. Worst case he can use Xen which, being open source, can be completely modified to report anything.
Or it may insist on talking directly to its network. Or it may actually be responsible for authenticating the detected MAC address.
Not a problem. MAC addresses are full programable and the virtual nic maps directly to the physical nic - i.e. it hands packets directly to the physical nic, fully formed and vice versa. I'm doing something very similar at home right now - running pfsense in a vmware machine on a Windows XP host as my internet firewall. I disabled the all of XP's ip protocols on the wan nic so that the pfsense firewall runs the entire show on that physical nic.
So the only solution is to destroy that little convenience he shall have by getting access onto their network, by having to do all his work in a VM?
Nah, that's backwards. Use the VM as a router/firewall to the campus network and install the campus spyware inside the VM. Then use the bare-metal for all the real work. If he sets up the VM right it will act just like a NAT firewall and unless someone logs in and really starts looking at what the VM is doing (rather than just what files are installed in it) campus IT will never be the wiser.
Maybe VMware Thinapp in Sandbox mode?
Or just give them a full-blown VM with an installation of XP and nothing else.
Set up the physical network interface so that only the VM uses it, and use virtual interfaces to route from the host OS to the VM and then out to the network.
You can run a NAT firewall (XP's connection sharing might be good enough) on the VM.
If you are feeling ultra-paranoid you could install typical applications in there too, like MS Office, etc. So if they look at everything on the VM it will look like a regular college-kid computer, but unless they are really smart they will never know that the "real" computer is just using the VM to NAT out to their network.