This new party would be best advised to stand a full senate team for each state and look to exchange preferences with other minor parties. The difficulty here is that the Wiki Party voters would probably also be Greens voters and the Greens might be hostile to an exchange.
Then again who knows. Maybe in best Orwellian leftist fashion they'll just decide we have always been at war with Eastasia^H^H^H^Feminism. It all depends which parts of the alternative media they get their news from.
Getting a message after it was sent is no biggie. I mean; write yourself a letter if you want to see that in action. But getting a message before it was sent causes issues (see for example; practically every sci-fi franchise). What those issues are exactly depends on how time travel works (e.g., "Timecop" or "Back to the Future" rules?), and thatâ(TM)s wide open to debate.
Flash forward 250 years to a physics class.
"So as we've learned in 2100 scientists discovered it was possible to communicated instantaneously"
"But Miss, doesn't that mean causality violations?"
"No of course not, as I mentioned we now know the multiverse works according to the 'Sliders' rules "
Something analogous happened with processors. MIPS had a an instruction set with a couple of patented instructions. Lexra made MIPS compatible chips and didn't implement the patented instructions. Unfortunately they trapped the unimplemented instructions and MIPS successfully argued that since the invalid instruction trap handler could implement the patented instructions the Lexra chip invalidated the patent!
If a Lexra processor encountered an unaligned load or store instruction in the program that it was executing then it did the same thing that it would do for any other invalid opcode, it took a reserved instruction exception. In the second lawsuit between MIPS Technologies and Lexra, filed November 1999, MIPS Technologies claimed that because exception handler software could be written to emulate the function of unaligned load and store hardware, using many other instructions, Lexra's processors infringed the patent. Upon learning of this broad interpretation of the patent, Lexra requested that the US Patent and Trademark office (USPTO) reexamine whether the patent was novel when granted. Almost every microprocessor in the world can emulate the functionality of unaligned loads and stores in software. MIPS Technologies did not invent that. By any reasonable interpretation of the MIPS Technologies' patent, Lexra did not infringe. In mid-2001 Lexra received a preliminary ruling from the USPTO that key claims in the unaligned load and store patent were invalid because of prior art in an IBM CISC patent. However, MIPS Technologies appealed the USPTO ruling and won a favorably broad interpretation of the language of the patent from a judge. That forced Lexra into a settlement that included dropping the reexamination request before MIPS Technologies might have lost its appeal.
One interesting problem with the patent system is that one institution, the USPTO, determines whether a patent is valid but a different institution, the courts, determine whether one infringes. It is entirely possible for the two institutions to interpret a patent differently and for either a non-infringer to be wrongly convicted or an infringer to get away with the crime.
The case of MIPS Technologies v Lexra was ultimately settled out of court and the request for reexamination of the patent was dropped. To this day there is no precedent indicating that processors that execute the MIPS-I instruction set that treat unaligned loads and stores as reserved instructions, such as Lexra's, infringed the '976 patent. The patent expired on December 23, 2006 at which point it became legal for anybody to implement the complete MIPS-I instruction set, including unaligned loads and stores.
After its experience with Lexra MIPS Technologies changed all of its 32-bit cores to use its new MIPS32 instruction set which extends the MIPS-I instruction set to include other features patented by MIPS Technologies. This is similar to Intel's addition of the instruction set extensions to Pentium III in order to prevent AMD from building compatible processors.
Cores from Lexra as compared to cores from MIPS Technologies were smaller, had higher clock speed, had high performance instruction extensions, brought features (such as on-chip debug, MIPS16, write-back caches, MMU, and more) to market sooner, and were less expensive. Despite MIPS Technologies' relatively abundant resources, their product offerings in the market were inferior, their investors wanted to see MIPS Technologies defend its intellectual property, and MIPS Technologies needed to justify the license fees that other companies such as Broadcom, PMC-Sierra, and LSI Logic were paying for rights to use the instruction set for their own processors. This left MIPS Technologies little choice but to sue Lexra, despite a weak case.
Ultimately, MIPS Technologies hurt Lexra's business, Lexra hurt MIPS Technologies' business, and ARM made off with a solid dominance of the IP
If they do attack, the US and South Korea should seize upon the opportunity to wreck as much of their military equipment as possible, as we did with the Iraqi army in Gulf War I, so as to limit their future offensive capabilities and degrade their military effectiveness.
I think if an actual shooting war breaks out the South Koreans would be forced to invade North Korea to destroy the artillery they have in range of Seoul. I.e. it would be more Gulf War II - regime change at all costs than Gulf War I.
In highly sensitive discussions in February this year, the-then South Korean vice-foreign minister, Chun Yung-woo, told a US ambassador, Kathleen Stephens, that younger generation Chinese Communist party leaders no longer regarded North Korea as a useful or reliable ally and would not risk renewed armed conflict on the peninsula, according to a secret cable to Washington.
Chun, who has since been appointed national security adviser to South Korea's president, said North Korea had already collapsed economically.
Political collapse would ensue once Kim Jong-il died, despite the dictator's efforts to obtain Chinese help and to secure the succession for his son, Kim Jong-un.
"Citing private conversations during previous sessions of the six-party talks , Chun claimed [the two high-level officials] believed Korea should be unified under ROK [South Korea] control," Stephens reported.
"The two officials, Chun said, were ready to 'face the new reality' that the DPRK [North Korea] now had little value to China as a buffer state - a view that, since North Korea's first nuclear test in 2006, had reportedly gained traction among senior PRC [People's Republic of China] leaders. Chun argued that in the event of a North Korean collapse, China would clearly 'not welcome' any US military presence north of the DMZ [demilitarised zone]. Again citing his conversations with [the officials], Chun said the PRC would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the US in a 'benign alliance' - as long as Korea was not hostile towards China. Tremendous trade and labour-export opportunities for Chinese companies, Chun said, would also help 'salve' PRC concerns about . a reunified Korea.
"Chun dismissed the prospect of a possible PRC military intervention in the event of a DPRK collapse, noting that China's strategic economic interests now lie with the United States, Japan and South Korea - not North Korea."
Chun told Stephens China was unable to persuade Pyongyang to change its self-defeating policies - Beijing had "much less influence than most people believe" - and lacked the will to enforce its views.
A senior Chinese official, speaking off the record, also said China's influence with the North was frequently overestimated. But Chinese public opinion was increasingly critical of the North's behaviour, the official said, and that was reflected in changed government thinking.
Previously hidden tensions between Pyongyang and its only ally were also exposed by China's then vice-foreign minister in a meeting in April 2009 with a US embassy official after North Korea blasted a three-stage rocket over Japan into the Pacific. Pyongyang said its purpose was to send a satellite into orbit but the US, South Korea and Japan saw the launch as a test of long-range missile technology.
Discussing how to tackle the issue with the charge d'affaires at the Beijing embassy, He Yafei observed that "North Korea wanted to engage directly with the United States and was therefore acting like a 'spoiled child' in order to get the attention of the 'adult'. China encouraged the United States, 'after some time', to start to re-engage the DPRK," according to the diplomatic cable sent to Washington.
You could imagine a deal where US forces stay south of the DMZ to keep the Chinese happy. So South Korean forces would need to occupy the North.
In actual reality, even in private insurance, the low-risk ratepayers subsidize the high-risk receivers.
Depends on the insurance company doesn't it? I know there are companies that offer lower premiums to lower risk insurees - e.g. older drivers.
If you have an environment where multiple companies are competing there is an incentive to limit risk pooling in order to be more able to offer lower premiums.
Private health insurance means that everyone pays a premium dependent on their risk level. An NHS type system means people pay a premium based on their income level.
So with private health insurance I don't really care if you live an unhealthy lifestyle. With an NHS type system I do - my taxes will need to go up.
In fact in the UK there have been proposals to remove NHS treatment for people who injure themselves when drunk
I work for the NHS on the frontline, and binge drinking is a huge problem, but you can't charge drinkers, unless you charge the smokers and the fatties for the illness their choices cause. You'd even have to charge sportsmen who damange their ligaments running!
A nationwide Freedom of Information request by the medical magazine Pulse revealed many types of surgery, MRI scans and IVF treatment are being withheld from obese people and smokers.
In the Anglia region, NHS Bedfordshire has barred obese patients from hip and knee surgery until they loss 10% of their weight or their Body Mass Index drops below 35.
NHS North Essex requires patients to lose at least 5% of their weight, and keep it off for 6 months.
While NHS Hertfordshire patients must have a BMI under 30, while smokers have to attend a stop smoking course to have any type of surgery.
Lawyers warn that health authorities risk being sued by patients if they can prove they've been discriminated against.
It's particularly risky in places like the UK where the rich pay most of the income taxes but the poor tend to have unhealthy lifestyles.
In 2009-10, the top 1% of Income Tax payers were responsible for 13.9% of declared income before tax. Conversely, the same group paid some 26.5% of the money taken by HMRC in Income Tax. These figures are very close to those cited by Mr Redwood, albeit slightly different.
According to Department of Health figures, the poorest children are almost twice as likely to be obese than the richest.
Government figures published last month showed that 24.3 per cent of the most deprived 11 year-olds in England were obese, compared with just 13.7 per cent of children from the wealthiest homes.
There's a strong incentive for the rich to support an authoritarian model whereby NHS treatment is withheld from the obese and smokers simply because the rich are less likely to be in that category.
Incidentally if you add in VAT and duty on tobacco and alcohol you find that the poor pay about the same percentage of their income in tax as the rich
Still despite that there is an incentive for NHS trusts to deny treatment to people with unhealthy lifestyles - it cuts down on the expensive medical care you need to provide.
It's like in the US where you pay your premiums and then get denied treatme
It's interesting how as soon as you socialise the costs of things going wrong you have a case for banning behaviour that is likely to go wrong.
E.g. if we both buy health insurance privately I don't really care if you live an unhealthy lifestyle. If we have a national health service I do because people who live an unhealthy lifestyle will end up hogging resources to the point where I won't be able to get treated.
No, no no. It's true Iran is making highly enriched Uranium that it could turned into weapons grade stuff in a couple of months, and is testing space launch systems that could easily be used as ICBMs and now is building naval drones that could be used to attack US ships.
But everyone knows these projects are all civilian. The Uranium is for a research reactor which they need to generate power. Even though most countries with large amounts of nuclear power plants don't have research reactors or local enrichment.
The rockets are so Iran can go into the space launch business because obviously US and EU companies would have no legal problems shipping satellites to a company in Iran run by the Revolutionary Guards.
And the drone is to rescue swimmers who've got into trouble. Even though the IRGC is not known for its concern about swimmers in peril
And if you believe all that, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Ever wonder why CNN seems to be the only Western news organization regularly allowed into North Korea? The next room perhaps offered a clue. In the 'Gifts from America' room a whole section of one wall is taken up by gifts from CNN. A few engraved plaques, a coffee cup (yeah, a freaking coffee cup!), a logo ashtray, etc. Probably at most a couple hundred bucks worth of crap that nonetheless get pride of place in the museum - for they reveal obvious signs of respect from a world famous news organization. The people at CNN are certainly using their heads and showing they know how to play the game. Though one wonders how that fits in with journalistic integrity . ..
...
Wednesday night at 6:30pm ET CNN ran a special, "Inside North Korea," based on the reporting of CNN International President Eason Jordan who managed to get into North Korea. Anchor Jonathan Mann asked who or what are being blamed for the lack of food. Jo rdan replied:
"It depends on whom you talk to. The international relief agencies, some of the people who work there say that the plight of the people here is not just the fault of Mother Nature, that it's also the government's economic policies and agriculture policies .
Government officials dispute that and they say this is solely a problem generated by Mother Nature and only Mother Nature can solve this problem. So there's a real dispute about the blame in this case, but General Kim Jong Il has been personally involved in this. He has ordered all of the entire army, hundreds of thousands of troops, into the countryside to help the farmers try to harvest what crops will survive."
Another example of the problem with Western reporters applying Western journalistic norms to reporting from an oppressive nation. Jordan gave equal weight to views of both the communist regime and the relief workers, as if each are equally credible. And the fact that the General "is personally involved in this" is more ironic than reassuring. In a closed off, backward nation run by a military dictatorship the army is hardly the solution to anything.
I see functions and protocol implementations. Decision makers see "Microsoft" vs "I've never heard of them before."
Isn't this the same as "no one got fired for buying IBM"?
Trouble is, Microsoft has become a standard in office documents even if they can't implement it faithfully themselves.
I've got OpenOffice on my Win7 netbook and Polaris Office on my Android phone. Both of those can open.doc,.xls etc just fine.
I actually prefer OpenOffice3.4.1 to Office 2010, though neither of them are as fast as Office 97.
I dunno but I think the position of Android versus Windows is very similar to that of DOS based PC's versus mainframes. 90% of the stuff most people do on Windows can be done on a cheaper and more user friendly competitor. It's already happened with consumers, it just takes a few smart people to get corporations to switch too.
Getting rid of the counter-revolutionary fascist insects in the Judea People's Front and the Popular Front of Judea made the People's Front of Judea so much stronger.
Android becoming dominant this year? What's dominant? It will take a LOT to move business IT infrastructure and data away from Wintel. Android isn't enough to do that. At the moment, it's small. And it doesn't threaten to replace the way business does business. Not yet.
I'm sure people said the same thing about personal computers just before they took over from mainframe and minicomputers.
-pedant- It's "Don't Be Evil" (aka Microsoft) -/pedant- We ALL do wrong occasionally, just because we're human and we screw up. For some companies, evil is what they ARE, nastiness is their core.
That's an intriguing distinction - kind of like you can do bad things without considering yourself one of the bad guys.
It would actually be pretty funny if Google had to use this line of reasoning.
Also if you read it it only cover specific Google patents. So they can identify the business areas where this strategy is a net win and put those patents into the pledge. In other areas where it might be a net loss they don't.
In fact I think this whole pledge is about a specific Google project, but they haven't told us what that is.
In simplified form, this is the clay hypothesis: Clays form naturally from silicates in solution. Clay crystals, as other crystals, preserve their external formal arrangement as they grow, snap, and grow further. Clay crystal masses of a particular external form may happen to affect their environment in ways that affect their chances of further replication. For example, a 'stickier' clay crystal is more likely to silt a stream bed, creating an environment conducive to further sedimentation. It is conceivable that such effects could extend to the creation of flat areas likely to be exposed to air, dry, and turn to wind-borne dust, which could fall randomly in other streams. Thus - by simple, inorganic, physical processes - a selection environment might exist for the reproduction of clay crystals of the 'stickier' shape.
There follows a process of natural selection for clay crystals that trap certain forms of molecules to their surfaces (those that enhance their replication potential). Quite complex proto-organic molecules can be catalysed by the surface properties of silicates. The final step occurs when these complex molecules perform a 'Genetic Takeover' from their clay 'vehicle', becoming an independent locus of replication - an evolutionary moment that might be understood as the first exaptation.
Despite its frequent citation as a useful model of the kind of process that might have been involved in the prehistory of DNA, the 'clay hypothesis' of abiogenesis is not so popular, as with several other abiogenesis hypotheses. As it was current and fashionable at that time, Richard Dawkins used it as the example model of abiogenesis in his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker.
Dawkins poetically talks of a future "robot Cairns-Smith" working out that life has gone from being silicon based to carbon based and back again and each transition has vastly increased the speed at which it can develop. I.e. from the pseudo heredity of clay based 'life' to DNA protein based life and Darwinian evolution and finally to machines which understand themselves enough to far outpace pure Darwinian evolution by designing their successors.
Actually if we do get herded into camps by murderous AI this sort of idea would be a great deal of comfort to me.
Slashdot Mirror
A Porterhouse Blue is a stroke brought on by an idle lifestyle of excessive consumption and privilege.
This new party would be best advised to stand a full senate team for each state and look to exchange preferences with other minor parties. The difficulty here is that the Wiki Party voters would probably also be Greens voters and the Greens might be hostile to an exchange.
Yeah, I imagine calling Sweden "the Saudi Arabia of feminism" might go down poorly with them.
Then again who knows. Maybe in best Orwellian leftist fashion they'll just decide we have always been at war with Eastasia^H^H^H^Feminism. It all depends which parts of the alternative media they get their news from.
Who wants to be the guy who keeps repeating a joke that was never funny?
Are you kidding? Slashdot is the homepage of the guy who keeps repeating a joke that was never funny.
E.g. Hot Grits, Bluescreen, Throwing Chairs, etc.
I prefered the one where Microsoft said they were dropping Metro and going back to the Start Menu on Windows 9.
From your link
Getting a message after it was sent is no biggie. I mean; write yourself a letter if you want to see that in action. But getting a message before it was sent causes issues (see for example; practically every sci-fi franchise). What those issues are exactly depends on how time travel works (e.g., "Timecop" or "Back to the Future" rules?), and thatâ(TM)s wide open to debate.
Flash forward 250 years to a physics class.
"So as we've learned in 2100 scientists discovered it was possible to communicated instantaneously"
"But Miss, doesn't that mean causality violations?"
"No of course not, as I mentioned we now know the multiverse works according to the 'Sliders' rules "
Something analogous happened with processors. MIPS had a an instruction set with a couple of patented instructions. Lexra made MIPS compatible chips and didn't implement the patented instructions. Unfortunately they trapped the unimplemented instructions and MIPS successfully argued that since the invalid instruction trap handler could implement the patented instructions the Lexra chip invalidated the patent!
http://jonahprobell.com/lexra.html
If a Lexra processor encountered an unaligned load or store instruction in the program that it was executing then it did the same thing that it would do for any other invalid opcode, it took a reserved instruction exception. In the second lawsuit between MIPS Technologies and Lexra, filed November 1999, MIPS Technologies claimed that because exception handler software could be written to emulate the function of unaligned load and store hardware, using many other instructions, Lexra's processors infringed the patent. Upon learning of this broad interpretation of the patent, Lexra requested that the US Patent and Trademark office (USPTO) reexamine whether the patent was novel when granted. Almost every microprocessor in the world can emulate the functionality of unaligned loads and stores in software. MIPS Technologies did not invent that. By any reasonable interpretation of the MIPS Technologies' patent, Lexra did not infringe. In mid-2001 Lexra received a preliminary ruling from the USPTO that key claims in the unaligned load and store patent were invalid because of prior art in an IBM CISC patent. However, MIPS Technologies appealed the USPTO ruling and won a favorably broad interpretation of the language of the patent from a judge. That forced Lexra into a settlement that included dropping the reexamination request before MIPS Technologies might have lost its appeal.
One interesting problem with the patent system is that one institution, the USPTO, determines whether a patent is valid but a different institution, the courts, determine whether one infringes. It is entirely possible for the two institutions to interpret a patent differently and for either a non-infringer to be wrongly convicted or an infringer to get away with the crime.
The case of MIPS Technologies v Lexra was ultimately settled out of court and the request for reexamination of the patent was dropped. To this day there is no precedent indicating that processors that execute the MIPS-I instruction set that treat unaligned loads and stores as reserved instructions, such as Lexra's, infringed the '976 patent. The patent expired on December 23, 2006 at which point it became legal for anybody to implement the complete MIPS-I instruction set, including unaligned loads and stores.
After its experience with Lexra MIPS Technologies changed all of its 32-bit cores to use its new MIPS32 instruction set which extends the MIPS-I instruction set to include other features patented by MIPS Technologies. This is similar to Intel's addition of the instruction set extensions to Pentium III in order to prevent AMD from building compatible processors.
Cores from Lexra as compared to cores from MIPS Technologies were smaller, had higher clock speed, had high performance instruction extensions, brought features (such as on-chip debug, MIPS16, write-back caches, MMU, and more) to market sooner, and were less expensive. Despite MIPS Technologies' relatively abundant resources, their product offerings in the market were inferior, their investors wanted to see MIPS Technologies defend its intellectual property, and MIPS Technologies needed to justify the license fees that other companies such as Broadcom, PMC-Sierra, and LSI Logic were paying for rights to use the instruction set for their own processors. This left MIPS Technologies little choice but to sue Lexra, despite a weak case.
Ultimately, MIPS Technologies hurt Lexra's business, Lexra hurt MIPS Technologies' business, and ARM made off with a solid dominance of the IP
he'd have to have one hell of an interview.
He'd have to show you his BRAAIINSS?
If a reunified Korea asked US forces to leave they'd do so. Just like they did in Saudi Arabia.
If they do attack, the US and South Korea should seize upon the opportunity to wreck as much of their military equipment as possible, as we did with the Iraqi army in Gulf War I, so as to limit their future offensive capabilities and degrade their military effectiveness.
I think if an actual shooting war breaks out the South Koreans would be forced to invade North Korea to destroy the artillery they have in range of Seoul. I.e. it would be more Gulf War II - regime change at all costs than Gulf War I.
Actually the South Koreans reckon they are quite close to a deal with China
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/29/wikileaks-cables-china-reunified-korea
In highly sensitive discussions in February this year, the-then South Korean vice-foreign minister, Chun Yung-woo, told a US ambassador, Kathleen Stephens, that younger generation Chinese Communist party leaders no longer regarded North Korea as a useful or reliable ally and would not risk renewed armed conflict on the peninsula, according to a secret cable to Washington.
Chun, who has since been appointed national security adviser to South Korea's president, said North Korea had already collapsed economically.
Political collapse would ensue once Kim Jong-il died, despite the dictator's efforts to obtain Chinese help and to secure the succession for his son, Kim Jong-un.
"Citing private conversations during previous sessions of the six-party talks , Chun claimed [the two high-level officials] believed Korea should be unified under ROK [South Korea] control," Stephens reported.
"The two officials, Chun said, were ready to 'face the new reality' that the DPRK [North Korea] now had little value to China as a buffer state - a view that, since North Korea's first nuclear test in 2006, had reportedly gained traction among senior PRC [People's Republic of China] leaders. Chun argued that in the event of a North Korean collapse, China would clearly 'not welcome' any US military presence north of the DMZ [demilitarised zone]. Again citing his conversations with [the officials], Chun said the PRC would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the US in a 'benign alliance' - as long as Korea was not hostile towards China. Tremendous trade and labour-export opportunities for Chinese companies, Chun said, would also help 'salve' PRC concerns about . a reunified Korea.
"Chun dismissed the prospect of a possible PRC military intervention in the event of a DPRK collapse, noting that China's strategic economic interests now lie with the United States, Japan and South Korea - not North Korea."
Chun told Stephens China was unable to persuade Pyongyang to change its self-defeating policies - Beijing had "much less influence than most people believe" - and lacked the will to enforce its views.
A senior Chinese official, speaking off the record, also said China's influence with the North was frequently overestimated. But Chinese public opinion was increasingly critical of the North's behaviour, the official said, and that was reflected in changed government thinking.
Previously hidden tensions between Pyongyang and its only ally were also exposed by China's then vice-foreign minister in a meeting in April 2009 with a US embassy official after North Korea blasted a three-stage rocket over Japan into the Pacific. Pyongyang said its purpose was to send a satellite into orbit but the US, South Korea and Japan saw the launch as a test of long-range missile technology.
Discussing how to tackle the issue with the charge d'affaires at the Beijing embassy, He Yafei observed that "North Korea wanted to engage directly with the United States and was therefore acting like a 'spoiled child' in order to get the attention of the 'adult'. China encouraged the United States, 'after some time', to start to re-engage the DPRK," according to the diplomatic cable sent to Washington.
You could imagine a deal where US forces stay south of the DMZ to keep the Chinese happy. So South Korean forces would need to occupy the North.
In actual reality, even in private insurance, the low-risk ratepayers subsidize the high-risk receivers.
Depends on the insurance company doesn't it? I know there are companies that offer lower premiums to lower risk insurees - e.g. older drivers.
If you have an environment where multiple companies are competing there is an incentive to limit risk pooling in order to be more able to offer lower premiums.
Private health insurance means that everyone pays a premium dependent on their risk level. An NHS type system means people pay a premium based on their income level.
So with private health insurance I don't really care if you live an unhealthy lifestyle. With an NHS type system I do - my taxes will need to go up.
In fact in the UK there have been proposals to remove NHS treatment for people who injure themselves when drunk
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theoneshow/2010/02/should-boozers-foot-the-bill-f.shtml
I work for the NHS on the frontline, and binge drinking is a huge problem, but you can't charge drinkers, unless you charge the smokers and the fatties for the illness their choices cause. You'd even have to charge sportsmen who damange their ligaments running!
http://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2012-03-07/health-trusts-restrict-treatment-to-those-with-unhealthy-lifestyles/
A nationwide Freedom of Information request by the medical magazine Pulse revealed many types of surgery, MRI scans and IVF treatment are being withheld from obese people and smokers.
In the Anglia region, NHS Bedfordshire has barred obese patients from hip and knee surgery until they loss 10% of their weight or their Body Mass Index drops below 35.
NHS North Essex requires patients to lose at least 5% of their weight, and keep it off for 6 months.
While NHS Hertfordshire patients must have a BMI under 30, while smokers have to attend a stop smoking course to have any type of surgery.
Lawyers warn that health authorities risk being sued by patients if they can prove they've been discriminated against.
It's particularly risky in places like the UK where the rich pay most of the income taxes but the poor tend to have unhealthy lifestyles.
E.g.
http://fullfact.org/factchecks/tax-28258
In 2009-10, the top 1% of Income Tax payers were responsible for 13.9% of declared income before tax. Conversely, the same group paid some 26.5% of the money taken by HMRC in Income Tax. These figures are very close to those cited by Mr Redwood, albeit slightly different.
and
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9819607/Minister-poor-families-are-likely-to-be-obese.html
According to Department of Health figures, the poorest children are almost twice as likely to be obese than the richest.
Government figures published last month showed that 24.3 per cent of the most deprived 11 year-olds in England were obese, compared with just 13.7 per cent of children from the wealthiest homes.
There's a strong incentive for the rich to support an authoritarian model whereby NHS treatment is withheld from the obese and smokers simply because the rich are less likely to be in that category.
Incidentally if you add in VAT and duty on tobacco and alcohol you find that the poor pay about the same percentage of their income in tax as the rich
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/household-income/the-effects-of-taxes-and-benefits-on-household-income/2009-2010/data---the-effects-of-taxes-and-benefits-on-household-income.xls Table 3
Still despite that there is an incentive for NHS trusts to deny treatment to people with unhealthy lifestyles - it cuts down on the expensive medical care you need to provide.
It's like in the US where you pay your premiums and then get denied treatme
It's interesting how as soon as you socialise the costs of things going wrong you have a case for banning behaviour that is likely to go wrong.
E.g. if we both buy health insurance privately I don't really care if you live an unhealthy lifestyle. If we have a national health service I do because people who live an unhealthy lifestyle will end up hogging resources to the point where I won't be able to get treated.
No, no no. It's true Iran is making highly enriched Uranium that it could turned into weapons grade stuff in a couple of months, and is testing space launch systems that could easily be used as ICBMs and now is building naval drones that could be used to attack US ships.
But everyone knows these projects are all civilian. The Uranium is for a research reactor which they need to generate power. Even though most countries with large amounts of nuclear power plants don't have research reactors or local enrichment.
The rockets are so Iran can go into the space launch business because obviously US and EU companies would have no legal problems shipping satellites to a company in Iran run by the Revolutionary Guards.
And the drone is to rescue swimmers who've got into trouble. Even though the IRGC is not known for its concern about swimmers in peril
And if you believe all that, I've got a bridge to sell you.
And the US media loves it too, they get to scare people and talk endlessly about it during a slow news cycle. Ratings up, win-win.
http://www.dinocrat.com/archives/2005/02/15/what-else-did-eason-jordan-give-north-korea/
Ever wonder why CNN seems to be the only Western news organization regularly allowed into North Korea? The next room perhaps offered a clue. In the 'Gifts from America' room a whole section of one wall is taken up by gifts from CNN. A few engraved plaques, a coffee cup (yeah, a freaking coffee cup!), a logo ashtray, etc. Probably at most a couple hundred bucks worth of crap that nonetheless get pride of place in the museum - for they reveal obvious signs of respect from a world famous news organization. The people at CNN are certainly using their heads and showing they know how to play the game. Though one wonders how that fits in with journalistic integrity . . .
...
Wednesday night at 6:30pm ET CNN ran a special, "Inside North Korea," based on the reporting of CNN International President Eason Jordan who managed to get into North Korea. Anchor Jonathan Mann asked who or what are being blamed for the lack of food. Jo rdan replied:
"It depends on whom you talk to. The international relief agencies, some of the people who work there say that the plight of the people here is not just the fault of Mother Nature, that it's also the government's economic policies and agriculture policies .
Government officials dispute that and they say this is solely a problem generated by Mother Nature and only Mother Nature can solve this problem. So there's a real dispute about the blame in this case, but General Kim Jong Il has been personally involved in this. He has ordered all of the entire army, hundreds of thousands of troops, into the countryside to help the farmers try to harvest what crops will survive."
Another example of the problem with Western reporters applying Western journalistic norms to reporting from an oppressive nation. Jordan gave equal weight to views of both the communist regime and the relief workers, as if each are equally credible. And the fact that the General "is personally involved in this" is more ironic than reassuring. In a closed off, backward nation run by a military dictatorship the army is hardly the solution to anything.
I think the South Koreans would take advantage of the first point to land north of the DMZ and attack the NK troops there from the north.
I see functions and protocol implementations. Decision makers see "Microsoft" vs "I've never heard of them before."
Isn't this the same as "no one got fired for buying IBM"?
Trouble is, Microsoft has become a standard in office documents even if they can't implement it faithfully themselves.
I've got OpenOffice on my Win7 netbook and Polaris Office on my Android phone. Both of those can open .doc, .xls etc just fine.
I actually prefer OpenOffice3.4.1 to Office 2010, though neither of them are as fast as Office 97.
I dunno but I think the position of Android versus Windows is very similar to that of DOS based PC's versus mainframes. 90% of the stuff most people do on Windows can be done on a cheaper and more user friendly competitor. It's already happened with consumers, it just takes a few smart people to get corporations to switch too.
Getting rid of the counter-revolutionary fascist insects in the Judea People's Front and the Popular Front of Judea made the People's Front of Judea so much stronger.
Android becoming dominant this year? What's dominant? It will take a LOT to move business IT infrastructure and data away from Wintel. Android isn't enough to do that. At the moment, it's small. And it doesn't threaten to replace the way business does business. Not yet.
I'm sure people said the same thing about personal computers just before they took over from mainframe and minicomputers.
Reading timothy's summaries these days is like watching an unhappy chimp in zoo throwing faeces at the visitors.
Consider the following Nuclear Monroe Doctrine example
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?lat=-4.959937902085307&lng=76.28965300000004&zm=1&kt=20000000000
Basically the US would tow a very large nuke - perhaps one designed to ignite the ocean - just off Diego Garcia.
It's good to know that supplies of plastic dogshit will still be secure after that.
Of course it may not come to that but who knows?
Here's an NZ version
http://i.imgur.com/sr6LR.jpg
-pedant- It's "Don't Be Evil" (aka Microsoft) -/pedant- We ALL do wrong occasionally, just because we're human and we screw up. For some companies, evil is what they ARE, nastiness is their core.
That's an intriguing distinction - kind of like you can do bad things without considering yourself one of the bad guys.
It would actually be pretty funny if Google had to use this line of reasoning.
Also if you read it it only cover specific Google patents. So they can identify the business areas where this strategy is a net win and put those patents into the pledge. In other areas where it might be a net loss they don't.
In fact I think this whole pledge is about a specific Google project, but they haven't told us what that is.
Put your prices up. Wild-ass predictions are obviously a Veblen Good
It's interesting how much of the technology for Skynet is being built by humans as tools.
It's very reminiscent of this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Cairns-Smith
In simplified form, this is the clay hypothesis: Clays form naturally from silicates in solution. Clay crystals, as other crystals, preserve their external formal arrangement as they grow, snap, and grow further. Clay crystal masses of a particular external form may happen to affect their environment in ways that affect their chances of further replication. For example, a 'stickier' clay crystal is more likely to silt a stream bed, creating an environment conducive to further sedimentation. It is conceivable that such effects could extend to the creation of flat areas likely to be exposed to air, dry, and turn to wind-borne dust, which could fall randomly in other streams. Thus - by simple, inorganic, physical processes - a selection environment might exist for the reproduction of clay crystals of the 'stickier' shape.
There follows a process of natural selection for clay crystals that trap certain forms of molecules to their surfaces (those that enhance their replication potential). Quite complex proto-organic molecules can be catalysed by the surface properties of silicates. The final step occurs when these complex molecules perform a 'Genetic Takeover' from their clay 'vehicle', becoming an independent locus of replication - an evolutionary moment that might be understood as the first exaptation.
Despite its frequent citation as a useful model of the kind of process that might have been involved in the prehistory of DNA, the 'clay hypothesis' of abiogenesis is not so popular, as with several other abiogenesis hypotheses. As it was current and fashionable at that time, Richard Dawkins used it as the example model of abiogenesis in his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker.
Dawkins poetically talks of a future "robot Cairns-Smith" working out that life has gone from being silicon based to carbon based and back again and each transition has vastly increased the speed at which it can develop. I.e. from the pseudo heredity of clay based 'life' to DNA protein based life and Darwinian evolution and finally to machines which understand themselves enough to far outpace pure Darwinian evolution by designing their successors.
Actually if we do get herded into camps by murderous AI this sort of idea would be a great deal of comfort to me.