It already happened in other areas for every single country that joined the European Union. That's because EU human-rights law trumps national law.
Yeah, so when that Swedish couple who have a civil Union in Sweden are visiting Alabama in the US. They get in a car accident and one of their kids is injured. Are you telling me they will have the same legal rights as a married couple from Sweden in the same situation? Because I don't believe that.
EU laws override existing laws in member states, but that doesn't solve the problem for laws outside the EU. It's a small world these days and while it may not matter if a gay couple is married or has a civil union when they visit Egypt or France, it may matter a lot when they visit the US or Canada or Australia.
When a couple goes before a justice of the peace and get married, they're really just entering a civil-union. The state has allowed religious officiants to create these unions as part of a church's marriage ceremony, but they are two distinct institutions.
Except 'marriage' is a legal term accepted by law in the US and around the world... so you may define it one way, but that doesn't matter to the courts or laws or reality.
For instance if one get's married in the Catholic church...
Who cares? Gays aren't fighting for the right to be married by the Catholic church they're fighting for equal rights with regard to the law.
Of course the source of confusion is that the state refers to civil unions with the religious term marriage.
No, the source of the confusion is politicians and religious leaders who exploit people's hatred and intolerance by claiming 'marriage' is a religious term only and the fact that it is used in thousands if not millions of laws can be safely ignored.
Gays need to drop the gay-marriage campaign, and go for civil-unions which are identical, yet more palatable to the general(voting) public.
Umm, yeah, then gays just need to go change those thousands of laws all around the country and in other countries and they'll have equal rights. You think that is in any way plausible?
Yeah, instead they'll move to one of all those other states where the voters have approved gay marriage. Oh wait...
I used to work for a network security company. Google hired away about five people from that company. The company is based out of Massachusetts. One person just left the same company. He is gay. He took a job with another company that would let him move to Massachusetts (from Michigan). You don't think Google has a vested interest in getting unconstitutional laws overturned so they are not at a disadvantage when trying to recruit people like my former co-worker?
If you break a leg in a country with socialized healthcare, you will very likely get excellent care. It's a standardized problem, they deal with it.
As soon as you have something exotic wrong with you, you are in a world of hurt.
As someone who has recently had something exotic go wrong, I can tell you, you're in a world of hurt in the US too. If your ailment is something less than about 1% of the population gets, the numbers in the US are absurdly bad. Be prepared to wait four years on average just for the first correct diagnosis. I spent about two years seeing some of the best specialists in the country (Mayo for example) and despite the fact that lots of people come down with the same symptoms, there's no real evidence the standard diagnosis I was given is even a real ailment. I spent over a year in agony, while my body wasted away before getting better pretty much entirely on my own (I was in the lucky 50% who heal themselves).
The USA has the best advanced health care in the world. I don't want to see that sabotaged.
The USA has some of the most expensive healthcare in the world, but by many metrics it certainly does not seem to be the best. We surely have more people go blind of preventable causes than most of the first world.
As someone who suffers horribly and can't buy insurance at any price, I find it disgusting that conservatives who claim to be about common sense equate the loss of a few bucks extra in taxes or insurance premiums to the massive degradation I suffer in my quality of life.
You seem very reactionary and emotional. You also seem to have problems understanding context and with your bizarre application of labels. In context, the sentence you quoted:
I have two concerns and neither has anything to do with sympathy....The second is personal freedom, where said freedom does not significantly impact others.
...was discussing people who have medical conditions that are preventable and brought on by a lifestyle choice and may or may not increase the cost of their medical care overall.
Your calling me a conservative is rather amusing, given that in this very thread as well as in other threads in this discussion I advocated increased taxes for the wealthy, establishment of a socialized healthcare system, and the increase in other socialist programs within the US. All of these are very unconservative opinions in both the traditional and modern sense of the word.
Except, as both of you have ignored, many conditions are genetic, and completely unrelated to weight or food intake.
It's true I did ignore that point, in order to address the other case, where personal choice does influence the situation. I didn't feel it was really necessary to discuss genetic conditions, because I don't think there is really any reasonable argument against providing care to people with them and most people agree on the issue.
Despite this I was diagnosed with crohn's disease and now suffer mild but chronic internal bleeding and pain equivalent to a blow to the groin day in and day out.
You're preaching to the choir my friend. I don't have your condition but a good friend of mine does and I'm mostly recovered from my own long, wasting illness which doctors guess was probably the result of some rare virus that somehow made its way to the states. I'm still in small amounts of constant pain and the neurological damage will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. I've spent so much time dealing with insurance companies and learning the reality of how much use the legal system is for individuals with moderate claims, you need not waste any time convincing me.
Pardon me for asking, but what statistics are you using to cite your first "fact"? I find that claim quite hard to believe.
Actually there have been quite a few such studies recently, mostly as eaurpean countries attempt to figure out what laws make sense with their healthcare systems. The first one to show up in Google for me was:
van Baal PHM, Polder JJ, de Wit GA, Hoogenveen RT, Feenstra TL, et al. (2008) Lifetime medical costs of obesity: Prevention no cure for increasing health expenditure. PLoS Med 5(2): e29. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029
On the second point, optimizing system means reducing unnecessary demands on the system also.
I never argued that, only that laws and regulations tend to ignore what actually reduces demand on the system in favor of punishing what people dislike (obesity) while ignoring any evidence. Regardless of if smoking or obesity reduces the cost on the system for everyone, most people will favor rules banning it and claim justification using the healthcare systems because the desire to punish is stronger than the desire to make the system cheaper.
Wow, that's the first time I've heard that study applied to socializing medicine. I've always heard of it being used to illustrate the immense hate of "rich" people and justify confiscatory taxes on said "rich".
Don't understand the logic of such an application. How does one argue such a study justifies progressive taxes? How does hate justify taxes?
I think the real argument has nothing to do with that, though. If everyone is expected to share the costs of something, everyone should share the responsibility of keeping the costs down. Poor diet and the ensuing health issues are not something that deserves sympathy.
Sympathy? I have two concerns and neither has anything to do with sympathy. The first is reducing the amount of taxes that need to be spent on the socialized portion of the healthcare system. The second is personal freedom, where said freedom does not significantly impact others. My problem is others are inclined to remove freedom and increase costs because they want to punish people they feel are doing something wrong (overeating or smoking in their home). Personally, I'm medically underweight and don't smoke, but I'm a strong advocate for personal freedoms and I don't like my taxes wasted on regulations that just increase costs to me while reducing the freedoms of others. If people want to overeat or smoke, you'd better have some really convincing evidence that it is costing healthcare a lot more than it is saving before you will get my support on restricting their freedom to choose.
If you pig out on Doritos and Big Macs and end up a diabetic because of your poor choices, why the hell should anyone else have to pay for your lifestyle?
If you exercise all the time and eat really well and as a result live twenty years longer why should anyone else have to pay for your lifestyle? Oh yeah, because paying for everyone's lifestyle saves money overall as well as bring numerous other societal benefits like reduced crime and a more stable economy.
They end up having to wait in line (especially when you start seeing the inevitable rationing that comes from socialized medicine) for the bums that chose to live poorly and have health issues because of it.
Sorry, these scare tactics don't work on me. I spent years waiting in lines in the good ole USofA when I developed a serious medical condition. I came within months of marrying a friend and moving to Canada just for the healthcare. Objective reviews of healthcare systems around the world don't exactly paint the US's system as the top of the heap, especially considering how much more we pay. Investing the same amount in a socialized healthcare system would not inevitably lead to any longer wait times for the average person than we have now. They would pro
However, you can choose to eat a Big Mac instead of a salad.
You make a valid point but there are two important points you may be missing. First, eating poorly and becoming obese generally leads to a shorter life and overall decreased medical costs thus saving society money. Second, in the US the culture is such that most people don't care much about the first fact and are more interested in punishing people they feel have done something wrong than optimizing the system.
There was a sociological study not that long ago. Basically you have one person divide cash into two piles, the money they get and the money their partner in the experiment gets. The second person decides if they each get the piles or if they both go home with nothing. Logically, the second person should always choose to go through with the deal because it is free money for them, even if it is not as much free money as the other person gets. Realistically, the further the first person skews the piles in their favor the less likely the second person is to go through with the deal. They are more interested in punishing what they feel is unfair or wrong than in their own financial gain.
This problem crops up whenever socialized healthcare is discussed in the US, as well as many other socialized programs. Most people are more interested in punishing others for overeating than they are in having an effective and economical solution for themselves.
And, wouldn't liberal government love to have access to my private health info and use it any way they like it to further their socialist free healthcare for everyone agenda ? I am personally in charge of my health, and *I* choose to share that information with whom ever I like not what government feels I should.
Yeah, because health insurance companies are so scrupulous they aren't allowing the government to mine their data now. What a joke.
Should the insurance company have a veto over the form of treatment or medication that your Doctor can proscribe? Probably not. But if you remove that veto costs will go up. It seems criminal to me that nobody is even bothering to acknowledge this.
I think you're looking at this as though the industry where an effectively functioning, competitive free market. Do you really think costs of insurance are determined by how much it costs the insurance company plus a small profit? That would be stupid of insurance company executives when most purchasers have no choice of plans and have to go with what they are provided by their employer. It makes a lot more sense for them to provide kickbacks and large client discounts to lock in people, then use their bureaucracies to minimize payoff to people too sick and desperate to fight too hard.
Tort reform might also be in order. Have any friends in the medical field? Ask them what they pay for malpractice insurance and if there would be better ways they could spend that money.
Actually, this is symptom of a society with ineffective or too low of levels of socialist healthcare and disability insurance. Juries rule all the time that doctors should pay large sums to people who are sick and disabled because despite the facts of the case, they feel there is nothing else that is going to provide for the ill and disabled and they feel sorry for those people. They feel doctors can afford it and on a case by case basis, most people are in favor of society providing for the sick and disabled.
I agree. I've just never heard of Government as a solution for inefficiency and waste.......
This is, quite simply, the main argument I have against socialized healthcare programs, in general. On paper it saves money and benefits society in many, many ways most people never even consider. In practice, in most places around the world, it works better. The only real question is our government one of the worst and least efficient at performing tasks like these and is that likely to continue? Our government has already managed some of the worst implementations of social constructs around the world. Currently our healthcare system is one of them, but there are may more. Heck, look at how well we managed to implement broadband internet access. We paid triple in taxes (per person) more than the Swedes, who have almost the same population density and who had a huge amount of that money embezzled in the middle of the project. They still pay significantly less every month for significantly faster connections that reach an enormously larger percentage of their population. Our current healthcare is analogous (both times we tried the capitalist route, but lobbyists undermined the decision making). On solution that has worked for other countries is eating one's own dogfood. That is, whether it is healthcare or internet access, force everyone to rely on the same system. This means the lobbyists and government officials and decision makers all have to live with whatever solution results, affecting their quality of life. I have a lot more faith in congress critters voting in my best interests when they have to use the same medical system and can't bypass it an go to a private hospital they pay for with their wealth.
One final point I'd like to address. Many times here you mention costs, but costs are not the most important factor for economic recovery and societal benefit. Whether 10% of the money is wasted or 20% is wasted makes a lot less difference to society than you'd think. What matters more is who is paying what percentage. In our current system taxes pay some portion of healthcare for some people, but over the last 8 years the burden of the taxes have shifted more and more to people on the low end of the spectrum. As a result, wealth has been consolidating more and more at the top in fewer and fewer hands. This and no other factor, is the important one for our economy. Wasted money is mostly
I don't think that the reason for reduced overhead should be entirely attributed to digitalized medical records. You also have to remember that one of the main problems that medical companies don't do this already is liability problems created by HIPPA. Likewise, insurance is a nightmare to work with. These will both continue to be true whether or not records are digitalized.
I think it probable that lower overhead costs also come along with different business cases. Overhead is going to be a lot higher when it is profitable for the company and that is currently the case in the US. Insurance companies make billions by making reimbursement so difficult to obtain through their bureaucratic nightmare that sick people give up or die before they complete the process. In countries where healthcare is socialized there is no financial payoff to that behavior, so they don't do it.
Oh the technological frameworks are there and could be implemented in short order. What is lacking is the motivation on the part of mainstream organizations and companies that could implement such a thing and a well polished implementation that deals well with the UI and total usability issues. I've used SELinux, and it has gotten better, but unless it is implemented by default by major distros, developers will never adjust their applications to work well with it and it will always be problematic. It also doesn't integrate with a signing framework or do a good job of giving the user the info and control needed via a usable UI.
If a user installs some program on either Linux or OS X, what's to stop that program from making outbound connections to port 6667 (to receive instructions) and to port 25 (to send spam)?
Well, one possibility is the firewall, but for most setups it won't by default. Right now what protects OS X and Linux users from that happening is the fact that there are very few trojans in the wild that do that and work on those OS's. For that matter, not too many do that on Windows, because automated worms work better at gathering bots than trojans do.
Now for some Linux distros and potentially for OS X and Windows there are sandboxing technologies that could be implemented to prevent trojans from working in that way. There are signing frameworks to automatically verify the source of programs to inform the user about whether or not some software they are installing is from well known and trustable source. If trojans ever become a real problem for the average Linux or OS X user, then these technologies will be implemented and become default setups.
I've never understood this "if users wouldn't run as Administrator/root, we'd all be safe" argument, you don't need superuser privs to send email.
I made no such argument. Rather I mentioned that boxes could be locked down to prevent the problem. Part of that means implementing finer grained permissions on the application level. I also asserted that the real problem is the broken market, where the one, mainstream OS that really needs such technology has utterly failed to implement it, but because there is no competition, very few users move to alternatives.
While OS X, Linux and others are inherently more secure than an unpatched Windows, the user is still the weakest part of the whole setup.
I disagree. Users are a weak link, but currently not the weakest and there is a lot that can be done before modifying users becomes practical.
Wait until we get enough dumb users who install all sorts of shit onto their computers. Granted, the numbers will be much lower than machines which can get infected without any interaction by its owner, but we WILL get users dumb enough to type their password to install "stupid program XYZ" from unknown sources.
Most users have the expectation that installing a program is not the same thing as giving someone else complete control of their computer and the ability to send as many e-mail messages in the background as they desire. This expectation is not met. Most users who install software use many different mechanisms for such installation, some of which do require users to type in their password. Because of this, why would users not type in their password when installing a program?
My basic point is just that we need to fix operating systems and make them relatively secure, consistent, and understandable to users as well as make sure they don't reward unsafe behavior. People interested in making computers and the internet more secure have plenty of room to make improvements. The problem is, they don't have the motivation. The solution is effective enforcement of antitrust laws. Return competition and capitalism to the market and the problem will solve itself in short order.
Care to tell me what government actually cared enough to send a reply that wasn't a winded and wordy version of "meh"?
It was either Denmark or Norway, I forget which. I'm not implying, by the way, that most governments do nothing, just that most don't have the manpower, expertise, or purview to go after botnets in ways that could potentially affect computers that have become bots in many jurisdictions.
Who cares about laws? I mean, the criminals don't, the government doesn't care, is anyone still clinging to this outdated model of a coexistance standard?
Both companies and universities who have security researchers on their staff care about laws and more than that the risk of lawsuits. When the network security company I worked for had the ability to shut down several botnets we consulted with our primary council and decided it was not worth risking the company to lawsuits from people whose zombies could be shut down or lose data. The publicity would have been nice, but there are always people looking to cash in. Instead, we collaborate with law enforcement a few times and gave them the ability to shut them down if they wanted to (at least one government did hut down a botnet we handed them the keys to).
A shorter answer would be, the researchers care about laws because they want to keep their jobs and not go broke or go to prison.
Since when can the FBI grant immunity for german citizens?
Why would they need to? It's not illegal to write the code in Germany, just to run it. They can almost certainly give the code to the FBI who can run it in the US without too much legal risk. Back in the day researchers at my company broke into a botnet that was DDoSing Danish cable networks rather incompetently. Once our research was done we handed our access over to the Danish authorities and they took action to shut it down, something that we could not do without incurring risk of litigation.
TFA mentioned the use of the recall feature that is only supported by Exchange servers and Outlook.
Actually IBM's Domino servers and Lotus Notes support e-mail recall and have for some time, although I don't think it is compatible with Exchange's version of the feature.
Re:TFA says Juniper is doomed. Not so fast.
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Google Router Rumors
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TFA says that Juniper is doomed because Google is getting ready to switch to their own in-house brand of routers. I find this difficult to believe for several reasons. One is that even if Google is Juniper's biggest customer, one customer does not a demise make -- Juniper has many other customers...
Agreed. I worked in the routing industry and Juniper has plenty of loyal customers yet.
But there are far more practical reasons. Routers contain a lot of specialized hardware designed for rapid switching of packets.
I'm not as firm on this one. There are a number of generic switching hardware manufacturers out there with nice platforms upon which anyone can build a Linux or NetBSD device with a little work. Also, you can get a lot out of many smaller devices working as a mesh when you factor in the cost of a lot of little generic boxes. It would not be so hard to start with switches and then start replacing routing hardware heading towards the core routers, right up until you hit a place where the cost/performance no longer makes sense. I remember hearing Google already did this with switches internally.
Another question is how much sense it makes for Google to take this commercial or buy an existing commercial developer. How much do some of these companies cost right now compared to how much Google is shelling out regularly? We're not necessarily talking about Google starting from scratch, but given some of the scarily good OSS routing packages out there that is an option.
I'd say its safer to chalk it up to a mistake rather than make this into some sort of witch hunt.
Witch hunt? I just asked if it was some bad joke. It sounds a lot like the lame jokes you hear in bad comedies starring Jack Black or Adam Sandler. I was just curious if it was a joke in pop culture, a mistake by the writer, or some sort of racist joke by the writer. I didn't think asking would get people so upset, with the multiple flamebait mods and the like. Luckily I have karma to burn, so I don't really care how I'm modded. Like you I'm leaning towards thinking this is a mistake, probably the writer parroting a cliche he didn't ever think about and did not remember correctly or really understand.
I know what a "chink in the armor" is. But since I don't see how one can easily mistype "armor" as "army" I was wondering if this was a joke (possibly from some inane comedy) where a character misspeaks. "Chink in the armor" implies a crack, but "chink in the army" implies the derogatory racial term for chinese, since having a crack in your army is nonsensical... hence my question.
Slashdot Mirror
It already happened in other areas for every single country that joined the European Union. That's because EU human-rights law trumps national law.
Yeah, so when that Swedish couple who have a civil Union in Sweden are visiting Alabama in the US. They get in a car accident and one of their kids is injured. Are you telling me they will have the same legal rights as a married couple from Sweden in the same situation? Because I don't believe that.
EU laws override existing laws in member states, but that doesn't solve the problem for laws outside the EU. It's a small world these days and while it may not matter if a gay couple is married or has a civil union when they visit Egypt or France, it may matter a lot when they visit the US or Canada or Australia.
When a couple goes before a justice of the peace and get married, they're really just entering a civil-union. The state has allowed religious officiants to create these unions as part of a church's marriage ceremony, but they are two distinct institutions.
Except 'marriage' is a legal term accepted by law in the US and around the world... so you may define it one way, but that doesn't matter to the courts or laws or reality.
For instance if one get's married in the Catholic church...
Who cares? Gays aren't fighting for the right to be married by the Catholic church they're fighting for equal rights with regard to the law.
Of course the source of confusion is that the state refers to civil unions with the religious term marriage.
No, the source of the confusion is politicians and religious leaders who exploit people's hatred and intolerance by claiming 'marriage' is a religious term only and the fact that it is used in thousands if not millions of laws can be safely ignored.
Gays need to drop the gay-marriage campaign, and go for civil-unions which are identical, yet more palatable to the general(voting) public.
Umm, yeah, then gays just need to go change those thousands of laws all around the country and in other countries and they'll have equal rights. You think that is in any way plausible?
Yeah, instead they'll move to one of all those other states where the voters have approved gay marriage. Oh wait...
I used to work for a network security company. Google hired away about five people from that company. The company is based out of Massachusetts. One person just left the same company. He is gay. He took a job with another company that would let him move to Massachusetts (from Michigan). You don't think Google has a vested interest in getting unconstitutional laws overturned so they are not at a disadvantage when trying to recruit people like my former co-worker?
If you break a leg in a country with socialized healthcare, you will very likely get excellent care. It's a standardized problem, they deal with it. As soon as you have something exotic wrong with you, you are in a world of hurt.
As someone who has recently had something exotic go wrong, I can tell you, you're in a world of hurt in the US too. If your ailment is something less than about 1% of the population gets, the numbers in the US are absurdly bad. Be prepared to wait four years on average just for the first correct diagnosis. I spent about two years seeing some of the best specialists in the country (Mayo for example) and despite the fact that lots of people come down with the same symptoms, there's no real evidence the standard diagnosis I was given is even a real ailment. I spent over a year in agony, while my body wasted away before getting better pretty much entirely on my own (I was in the lucky 50% who heal themselves).
The USA has the best advanced health care in the world. I don't want to see that sabotaged.
The USA has some of the most expensive healthcare in the world, but by many metrics it certainly does not seem to be the best. We surely have more people go blind of preventable causes than most of the first world.
As someone who suffers horribly and can't buy insurance at any price, I find it disgusting that conservatives who claim to be about common sense equate the loss of a few bucks extra in taxes or insurance premiums to the massive degradation I suffer in my quality of life.
You seem very reactionary and emotional. You also seem to have problems understanding context and with your bizarre application of labels. In context, the sentence you quoted:
I have two concerns and neither has anything to do with sympathy....The second is personal freedom, where said freedom does not significantly impact others.
...was discussing people who have medical conditions that are preventable and brought on by a lifestyle choice and may or may not increase the cost of their medical care overall.
Your calling me a conservative is rather amusing, given that in this very thread as well as in other threads in this discussion I advocated increased taxes for the wealthy, establishment of a socialized healthcare system, and the increase in other socialist programs within the US. All of these are very unconservative opinions in both the traditional and modern sense of the word.
...and I thought mob hits were cheap.
Why, what are they charging you?
Except, as both of you have ignored, many conditions are genetic, and completely unrelated to weight or food intake.
It's true I did ignore that point, in order to address the other case, where personal choice does influence the situation. I didn't feel it was really necessary to discuss genetic conditions, because I don't think there is really any reasonable argument against providing care to people with them and most people agree on the issue.
Despite this I was diagnosed with crohn's disease and now suffer mild but chronic internal bleeding and pain equivalent to a blow to the groin day in and day out.
You're preaching to the choir my friend. I don't have your condition but a good friend of mine does and I'm mostly recovered from my own long, wasting illness which doctors guess was probably the result of some rare virus that somehow made its way to the states. I'm still in small amounts of constant pain and the neurological damage will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. I've spent so much time dealing with insurance companies and learning the reality of how much use the legal system is for individuals with moderate claims, you need not waste any time convincing me.
Pardon me for asking, but what statistics are you using to cite your first "fact"? I find that claim quite hard to believe.
Actually there have been quite a few such studies recently, mostly as eaurpean countries attempt to figure out what laws make sense with their healthcare systems. The first one to show up in Google for me was:
van Baal PHM, Polder JJ, de Wit GA, Hoogenveen RT, Feenstra TL, et al. (2008) Lifetime medical costs of obesity: Prevention no cure for increasing health expenditure. PLoS Med 5(2): e29. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029
On the second point, optimizing system means reducing unnecessary demands on the system also.
I never argued that, only that laws and regulations tend to ignore what actually reduces demand on the system in favor of punishing what people dislike (obesity) while ignoring any evidence. Regardless of if smoking or obesity reduces the cost on the system for everyone, most people will favor rules banning it and claim justification using the healthcare systems because the desire to punish is stronger than the desire to make the system cheaper.
Wow, that's the first time I've heard that study applied to socializing medicine. I've always heard of it being used to illustrate the immense hate of "rich" people and justify confiscatory taxes on said "rich".
Don't understand the logic of such an application. How does one argue such a study justifies progressive taxes? How does hate justify taxes?
I think the real argument has nothing to do with that, though. If everyone is expected to share the costs of something, everyone should share the responsibility of keeping the costs down. Poor diet and the ensuing health issues are not something that deserves sympathy.
Sympathy? I have two concerns and neither has anything to do with sympathy. The first is reducing the amount of taxes that need to be spent on the socialized portion of the healthcare system. The second is personal freedom, where said freedom does not significantly impact others. My problem is others are inclined to remove freedom and increase costs because they want to punish people they feel are doing something wrong (overeating or smoking in their home). Personally, I'm medically underweight and don't smoke, but I'm a strong advocate for personal freedoms and I don't like my taxes wasted on regulations that just increase costs to me while reducing the freedoms of others. If people want to overeat or smoke, you'd better have some really convincing evidence that it is costing healthcare a lot more than it is saving before you will get my support on restricting their freedom to choose.
If you pig out on Doritos and Big Macs and end up a diabetic because of your poor choices, why the hell should anyone else have to pay for your lifestyle?
If you exercise all the time and eat really well and as a result live twenty years longer why should anyone else have to pay for your lifestyle? Oh yeah, because paying for everyone's lifestyle saves money overall as well as bring numerous other societal benefits like reduced crime and a more stable economy.
They end up having to wait in line (especially when you start seeing the inevitable rationing that comes from socialized medicine) for the bums that chose to live poorly and have health issues because of it.
Sorry, these scare tactics don't work on me. I spent years waiting in lines in the good ole USofA when I developed a serious medical condition. I came within months of marrying a friend and moving to Canada just for the healthcare. Objective reviews of healthcare systems around the world don't exactly paint the US's system as the top of the heap, especially considering how much more we pay. Investing the same amount in a socialized healthcare system would not inevitably lead to any longer wait times for the average person than we have now. They would pro
However, you can choose to eat a Big Mac instead of a salad.
You make a valid point but there are two important points you may be missing. First, eating poorly and becoming obese generally leads to a shorter life and overall decreased medical costs thus saving society money. Second, in the US the culture is such that most people don't care much about the first fact and are more interested in punishing people they feel have done something wrong than optimizing the system.
There was a sociological study not that long ago. Basically you have one person divide cash into two piles, the money they get and the money their partner in the experiment gets. The second person decides if they each get the piles or if they both go home with nothing. Logically, the second person should always choose to go through with the deal because it is free money for them, even if it is not as much free money as the other person gets. Realistically, the further the first person skews the piles in their favor the less likely the second person is to go through with the deal. They are more interested in punishing what they feel is unfair or wrong than in their own financial gain.
This problem crops up whenever socialized healthcare is discussed in the US, as well as many other socialized programs. Most people are more interested in punishing others for overeating than they are in having an effective and economical solution for themselves.
And, wouldn't liberal government love to have access to my private health info and use it any way they like it to further their socialist free healthcare for everyone agenda ? I am personally in charge of my health, and *I* choose to share that information with whom ever I like not what government feels I should.
Yeah, because health insurance companies are so scrupulous they aren't allowing the government to mine their data now. What a joke.
Should the insurance company have a veto over the form of treatment or medication that your Doctor can proscribe? Probably not. But if you remove that veto costs will go up. It seems criminal to me that nobody is even bothering to acknowledge this.
I think you're looking at this as though the industry where an effectively functioning, competitive free market. Do you really think costs of insurance are determined by how much it costs the insurance company plus a small profit? That would be stupid of insurance company executives when most purchasers have no choice of plans and have to go with what they are provided by their employer. It makes a lot more sense for them to provide kickbacks and large client discounts to lock in people, then use their bureaucracies to minimize payoff to people too sick and desperate to fight too hard.
Tort reform might also be in order. Have any friends in the medical field? Ask them what they pay for malpractice insurance and if there would be better ways they could spend that money.
Actually, this is symptom of a society with ineffective or too low of levels of socialist healthcare and disability insurance. Juries rule all the time that doctors should pay large sums to people who are sick and disabled because despite the facts of the case, they feel there is nothing else that is going to provide for the ill and disabled and they feel sorry for those people. They feel doctors can afford it and on a case by case basis, most people are in favor of society providing for the sick and disabled.
I agree. I've just never heard of Government as a solution for inefficiency and waste.......
This is, quite simply, the main argument I have against socialized healthcare programs, in general. On paper it saves money and benefits society in many, many ways most people never even consider. In practice, in most places around the world, it works better. The only real question is our government one of the worst and least efficient at performing tasks like these and is that likely to continue? Our government has already managed some of the worst implementations of social constructs around the world. Currently our healthcare system is one of them, but there are may more. Heck, look at how well we managed to implement broadband internet access. We paid triple in taxes (per person) more than the Swedes, who have almost the same population density and who had a huge amount of that money embezzled in the middle of the project. They still pay significantly less every month for significantly faster connections that reach an enormously larger percentage of their population. Our current healthcare is analogous (both times we tried the capitalist route, but lobbyists undermined the decision making). On solution that has worked for other countries is eating one's own dogfood. That is, whether it is healthcare or internet access, force everyone to rely on the same system. This means the lobbyists and government officials and decision makers all have to live with whatever solution results, affecting their quality of life. I have a lot more faith in congress critters voting in my best interests when they have to use the same medical system and can't bypass it an go to a private hospital they pay for with their wealth.
One final point I'd like to address. Many times here you mention costs, but costs are not the most important factor for economic recovery and societal benefit. Whether 10% of the money is wasted or 20% is wasted makes a lot less difference to society than you'd think. What matters more is who is paying what percentage. In our current system taxes pay some portion of healthcare for some people, but over the last 8 years the burden of the taxes have shifted more and more to people on the low end of the spectrum. As a result, wealth has been consolidating more and more at the top in fewer and fewer hands. This and no other factor, is the important one for our economy. Wasted money is mostly
I don't think that the reason for reduced overhead should be entirely attributed to digitalized medical records. You also have to remember that one of the main problems that medical companies don't do this already is liability problems created by HIPPA. Likewise, insurance is a nightmare to work with. These will both continue to be true whether or not records are digitalized.
I think it probable that lower overhead costs also come along with different business cases. Overhead is going to be a lot higher when it is profitable for the company and that is currently the case in the US. Insurance companies make billions by making reimbursement so difficult to obtain through their bureaucratic nightmare that sick people give up or die before they complete the process. In countries where healthcare is socialized there is no financial payoff to that behavior, so they don't do it.
Oh the technological frameworks are there and could be implemented in short order. What is lacking is the motivation on the part of mainstream organizations and companies that could implement such a thing and a well polished implementation that deals well with the UI and total usability issues. I've used SELinux, and it has gotten better, but unless it is implemented by default by major distros, developers will never adjust their applications to work well with it and it will always be problematic. It also doesn't integrate with a signing framework or do a good job of giving the user the info and control needed via a usable UI.
If a user installs some program on either Linux or OS X, what's to stop that program from making outbound connections to port 6667 (to receive instructions) and to port 25 (to send spam)?
Well, one possibility is the firewall, but for most setups it won't by default. Right now what protects OS X and Linux users from that happening is the fact that there are very few trojans in the wild that do that and work on those OS's. For that matter, not too many do that on Windows, because automated worms work better at gathering bots than trojans do.
Now for some Linux distros and potentially for OS X and Windows there are sandboxing technologies that could be implemented to prevent trojans from working in that way. There are signing frameworks to automatically verify the source of programs to inform the user about whether or not some software they are installing is from well known and trustable source. If trojans ever become a real problem for the average Linux or OS X user, then these technologies will be implemented and become default setups.
I've never understood this "if users wouldn't run as Administrator/root, we'd all be safe" argument, you don't need superuser privs to send email.
I made no such argument. Rather I mentioned that boxes could be locked down to prevent the problem. Part of that means implementing finer grained permissions on the application level. I also asserted that the real problem is the broken market, where the one, mainstream OS that really needs such technology has utterly failed to implement it, but because there is no competition, very few users move to alternatives.
While OS X, Linux and others are inherently more secure than an unpatched Windows, the user is still the weakest part of the whole setup.
I disagree. Users are a weak link, but currently not the weakest and there is a lot that can be done before modifying users becomes practical.
Wait until we get enough dumb users who install all sorts of shit onto their computers. Granted, the numbers will be much lower than machines which can get infected without any interaction by its owner, but we WILL get users dumb enough to type their password to install "stupid program XYZ" from unknown sources.
Most users have the expectation that installing a program is not the same thing as giving someone else complete control of their computer and the ability to send as many e-mail messages in the background as they desire. This expectation is not met. Most users who install software use many different mechanisms for such installation, some of which do require users to type in their password. Because of this, why would users not type in their password when installing a program?
My basic point is just that we need to fix operating systems and make them relatively secure, consistent, and understandable to users as well as make sure they don't reward unsafe behavior. People interested in making computers and the internet more secure have plenty of room to make improvements. The problem is, they don't have the motivation. The solution is effective enforcement of antitrust laws. Return competition and capitalism to the market and the problem will solve itself in short order.
Care to tell me what government actually cared enough to send a reply that wasn't a winded and wordy version of "meh"?
It was either Denmark or Norway, I forget which. I'm not implying, by the way, that most governments do nothing, just that most don't have the manpower, expertise, or purview to go after botnets in ways that could potentially affect computers that have become bots in many jurisdictions.
Who cares about laws? I mean, the criminals don't, the government doesn't care, is anyone still clinging to this outdated model of a coexistance standard?
Both companies and universities who have security researchers on their staff care about laws and more than that the risk of lawsuits. When the network security company I worked for had the ability to shut down several botnets we consulted with our primary council and decided it was not worth risking the company to lawsuits from people whose zombies could be shut down or lose data. The publicity would have been nice, but there are always people looking to cash in. Instead, we collaborate with law enforcement a few times and gave them the ability to shut them down if they wanted to (at least one government did hut down a botnet we handed them the keys to).
A shorter answer would be, the researchers care about laws because they want to keep their jobs and not go broke or go to prison.
Since when can the FBI grant immunity for german citizens?
Why would they need to? It's not illegal to write the code in Germany, just to run it. They can almost certainly give the code to the FBI who can run it in the US without too much legal risk. Back in the day researchers at my company broke into a botnet that was DDoSing Danish cable networks rather incompetently. Once our research was done we handed our access over to the Danish authorities and they took action to shut it down, something that we could not do without incurring risk of litigation.
TFA mentioned the use of the recall feature that is only supported by Exchange servers and Outlook.
Actually IBM's Domino servers and Lotus Notes support e-mail recall and have for some time, although I don't think it is compatible with Exchange's version of the feature.
You're a tighter.
In this context, I think the antonym would be 'captivator'.
Man, I expected someone to get it. He's a looser, not a loser. You know, the headline is about him loosing something. Sigh.
Balmer is a looser.
TFA says that Juniper is doomed because Google is getting ready to switch to their own in-house brand of routers. I find this difficult to believe for several reasons. One is that even if Google is Juniper's biggest customer, one customer does not a demise make -- Juniper has many other customers...
Agreed. I worked in the routing industry and Juniper has plenty of loyal customers yet.
But there are far more practical reasons. Routers contain a lot of specialized hardware designed for rapid switching of packets.
I'm not as firm on this one. There are a number of generic switching hardware manufacturers out there with nice platforms upon which anyone can build a Linux or NetBSD device with a little work. Also, you can get a lot out of many smaller devices working as a mesh when you factor in the cost of a lot of little generic boxes. It would not be so hard to start with switches and then start replacing routing hardware heading towards the core routers, right up until you hit a place where the cost/performance no longer makes sense. I remember hearing Google already did this with switches internally.
Another question is how much sense it makes for Google to take this commercial or buy an existing commercial developer. How much do some of these companies cost right now compared to how much Google is shelling out regularly? We're not necessarily talking about Google starting from scratch, but given some of the scarily good OSS routing packages out there that is an option.
I'd say its safer to chalk it up to a mistake rather than make this into some sort of witch hunt.
Witch hunt? I just asked if it was some bad joke. It sounds a lot like the lame jokes you hear in bad comedies starring Jack Black or Adam Sandler. I was just curious if it was a joke in pop culture, a mistake by the writer, or some sort of racist joke by the writer. I didn't think asking would get people so upset, with the multiple flamebait mods and the like. Luckily I have karma to burn, so I don't really care how I'm modded. Like you I'm leaning towards thinking this is a mistake, probably the writer parroting a cliche he didn't ever think about and did not remember correctly or really understand.
I know what a "chink in the armor" is. But since I don't see how one can easily mistype "armor" as "army" I was wondering if this was a joke (possibly from some inane comedy) where a character misspeaks. "Chink in the armor" implies a crack, but "chink in the army" implies the derogatory racial term for chinese, since having a crack in your army is nonsensical... hence my question.
I don't know if you wanna count this as the first chink in the army but the fact is no-one is flawless.
Am I missing a reference or something? Is this some sort of racist pun?