NY Times Free Registration
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NY Times on Anime
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· Score: 3, Insightful
if i could speak out on the constant repetition and yimmer-yammering on the need for free registration at the ny times site:
first, it is stated here so often that all but the most infrequent users must be, as i am, sick to death of hearing that the nyt requires free registration. we are grown-ups and can handle it if our browser directs us to something that we might have to give a fake email address to. "dammit, those bastards at/. didn't warn me about this!" i vote to drop the warning.
second, if the free registration bothers everyone so much that it must be stated, why is it that so many stories here are referenced from there? i mean, the stories come from us. does this not imply that the nyt is a valuable tool? so why do we complain about the free reg if so many of us use it?
third, why can't we get around the idea that the new york times isn't going to just give away its hard work for nothing? the feeling that i get when i read that free registration is required is that it shouldn't be, that it should all be free free free. i, for one, can handle a meaningless free registration for the excellent content they provide. it is not as if they come knocking on my door when i hit the submit button.
a small correction-- the queen in canada has had zero power since she signed it away in the 1982 repatriation of the constitution. there is nothing in the constitution that requires the queen's signature or approval for anything-- in this sense the governor general is more powerful than the queen, in that her signature is required for all canadian legislation. the queen is purely a symbol.
before 1982 all canadian legislation was theoretically subject to approval by the british parliament. the queen could also veto anything, similar to british legislation.
in this sense we lack the 'royal perrogative' that the brits live under. though by royal assent she allowed the repatriation of the constitution, that was her end of her royal perrogative.
as well, senators in canada are not appointed for life, but only until they are seventy-five years of age. this is why chretien keeps doling out senatorships to seventy-year-olds, so that he has a large turn-over of patronage appointments.
also note, (other readers, not the author of the above comment) that the governor general is appointed by the prime minister and has only *not* refused to sign legislation twice in the existence of the office (both to dissolve parliament for elections). she remains largely symbolic but could stop any act of parliament.
or have any cogent arguments about gui/hardware design.
how are we to judge what is an advancement or progress in relation to computer use? maybe making interfaces pretty is akin to building cathedrals that inspire music? who knows?
your comments on the slowness of the artistic community are both ignorant and frankly irrelevent to your argument. engineers can be just as obsessive as artists when it comes to perfection. so can drug users. so can anyone.
honestly, i hope your strong anti-drug policies aren't as well thought out as your arguments here.
but the '5 down, 95 to go' is just marketing hype, not indicative of apple's raison d'etre. i'd say that they are largely happy to be a niche player. sure they'd rather be dominant but the margins are great on the fringes and the products are cooler and more innovative.
i think i was writing more cogent arguments when i was in highschool. at the very least i wasn't painting myself into a corner with my own stupidity.
jon katz writes:
"Burned by years of outrageously poor tech support, increasingly expensive software, and hardware that's almost instantly outdated, middle-class consumers aren't the least bit interested in the coolest new new thing. They want computing that works like TV does -- that's easy to use, takes little space, costs relatively little money and works every time you turn it on, year after year. The public is increasingly wise to tech scams like hardware that's obsolete every 18 months and software that doesn't even last that long."
how does this make sense in his greater argument? apple seems to be the only manufacturer and large os retailer that is doing anything about these issues. so is apple addressing these concerns and is thus losing the battle? or are they not but others are? or nobody is?
point by point commentary (slashdot take-down style)
"Burned by years of outrageously poor tech support...
apple has excellent tech support and wins accolades both over the phone and at the apple store. what makes it even better is that their products are easier to provide tech support for.
increasingly expensive software and hardware,
final cut pro has certainly lowered the cost of professional-level video editing by about $50 000. and the iapps are the best consumer applications of their type on the market, all free. apple hardware has not risen in price, it has fallen. the imac configuration last year offered a slower processor for $4500. this year it sells for $1800. impressive.
that's almost instantly outdated,
apple hardware retains its value in resale better than anyone else and remains in service longer. in fact, one of apple's problems has been that their hardware (and software) last too long. users don;t want to upgrade because their machine is doing for them.
middle-class consumers aren't the least bit interested in the coolest new new thing.
six million imac owners and 150 000 ipod owners say otherwise.
They want computing that works like TV does -- that's easy to use, takes little space, costs relatively little money and works every time you turn it on, year after year.
the mac works more like a tv than anyone else's box, more reliably. (i will remind jon that the whole reason we are using computers instead of watching tv is because computers are more complex and challenge us in ways that tv cannot (the info flows two ways here), and that there will be trade-offs in ease of use.) if the tv could do it, why isn't it? if someone is doing this better than apple, why aren't they?
anyway, my point, jon, is that you can't have it both ways. either apple is going in the right direction and you've defeated your own argument or they aren't and you just aren't paying attention. or everybody is going in the wrong direction which doesn't make for much of an argument.
either way you lose. what makes you lose even harder is that you walked into it.
maybe apple's market position has to do with other factors you haven't cared to comment upon?
as far as reliability is concerned, i think that the ease of the system folder in os7.5 - os9 should be considered.
a full system re-install is very rare on the mac platform because problems are relatively easy to diagnose and fix. troubleshooting windows usually involves the inevitable search for the windows98 disk, which, strangely, isn't kept too far away.
most mac users never touch the os disks that come with their machines.
this is what i call reliability. sure there are some shortcomings-- but i never spend half a day re-installing and rebooting my mac just to get back to square one.
and you can add even more to the list to round out maybe 99% of all file transfers (graphics pros included)
.psd photoshop
.ai illustrator
.tiff tiff image format
.gif gif image format
.txt raw text
.rtf rich text format
.ram real audio
.mpeg mpeg movies
.html web pages
.asp active server pages
.wmf windows media player
.wav sound format
.aiff sound format
i can't even think of other file formats that people use anymore. all of these are supported natively on the mac. it actually is quite amazing how compatible the files are.
anything else is probably pretty specialized, mostly stuff the average user hasn't heard of.
wow chrisD, that was the lamest keynote report i have ever read. talk about stunning analysis. do you go to school for that kind of gripping cutthroat prose?
was there any advantage in having you there? could a better report have been written from my desk at home with the flawless quicktime webcast?
i shall be more specific? why is linux more powerful than osx? because you were at the keynote? why don't you fill us in, because, like i said, we weren't there and i'd like a little more background. were the cracks in the cubes really because of overheating? did they mention this at the keynote? and what a bomb adobe dropped! photoshop on osx, who ever would have guessed! i was glad you were there to scoop that photoshop betas have been available for over a month.
and these few sentences: "The keynote was terrific, but in the end, not so outstanding." or "[the imac's] got a good price/feature spectrum..." and then one sentence late "...It's not particularly a good deal" at the keynote did you have trouble making up your mind?
iphoto is not a source of revenue for apple-- or if it is you can bet the shareholders don't give a shit about it. it is a hook to bring customers aboard. tell us that, tell us why it is interesting that a hardware/software company bundles these services with the software they are giving away. tell us why that is significant. did the slick powerpoint presentations leave you speechless? these items are so much more important than iphoto being a good cataloguing program. that is why you went to see the keynote. because apple makes a photo program more than a photo program, just like they make a computer (somehow) more than a computer.
i don't know if it is just in canada, but heinz is hot on the heels of its green ketchup madness (incredibly successful, apparently a phenom in the marketing world) with another colour-- purple.
the comment on the leader in the storyuu is completely erroneous.
quicktime is not required to get much past the homepage on apple's site.
why the bias? because quicktime hasn't been ported to platform x for god knows what finanical reasons? sure, if you want to see spinning pictures of the new g4 or their recent ads you'll need the plug-in and quicktime. but you'll need that for any rich content.
slashdot has something truly uncomfortable up its ass and i think that the coverage of items would be significantly improved if it were removed.
just a small proviso in the "decades of refinement" that goes into photoshop...
a "decade of refinement" has gone into windows and we reap the result: an inertia whereby one cannot offend current users by making radical updates to the paradigm.
it's not that i disagree with the poster-- i do-- it's just that the advantage of being new on the scene without the baggage of protocols and tradition to lug around cannot be dismissed.
i've never understood the confusion surrounding the fans.
there is only one macintosh that currently sports a fan that runs full time, the G4 tower.
all other macs (powerbook, imac, and ibook) haven't had fans for a long time, longer than the cube has been out. my powerbook (1998) has only run its fan once in its lifetime, when it didn't go to sleep properly when i closed the lid and left it in my briefcase in the car for an hour.
it's becoming a fanless world. and thank god for that. my wife's pc laptop, which is one of the quieter models, drives me up the wall. computing should be silent.
but dumping the queen just isn't on the public agenda, something that has to do with the 30% of canadians that are of british descent. some 60% of canadians still favour the monarchy for purely sentimental reasons. but the government has taken the steps that it can against the class system without rankling the voters too much.
look friend, i think you should know something about federal / provincial taxation and healthcare in canada before you expound upon it.
1. the feds tax canadians, but so do the provinces through direct income tax and a sales tax in all provinces except alberta.
2. the provinces decide whether they run a deficit or a surplus, not the federal government.
3. the feds have cut spending faster than any jurisdiction in canada and does not tend to spend far more money than it should. the only place in canada that has better books than the feds is the alberta government and that is because they are the largest single supplier of foreign oil to the united states and the price is through the roof. the other provinces drool over the feds tax cuts and surpluses. the federal tax cut makes bush's 2 trillion cut look like child's play.
4. also, while ontario may be resource rich relative to u.s jurisdictions, its wealth is in light manufacturing. alberta is rich because of oil. b.c. has been doing poorly because of the asian crisis and the low price for lumber. it has relatively little to do with taxation policy. (ie bc led canadian growth for ten years yet had the highest taxes in the country)
5. reasonable taxes, i agree. did you know that corporate taxes in ontario (half of the country's economy) are less than in every neighbouring state?
6. alberta and ontario currently have the best health care spending in the country-- and yes at the same time as providing equalisation payments to the other provinces. that's how federalism works in canada.
7. again, the feds turn over great gobs of cash to the provinces, upwards of 50% of the costs of healthcare, or some 50% of the 95 billion that gets spent on healthcare in canada.
Actually, the Supreme Court of Canada backed Jean Chretien in his block of Conrad Black's (the newspaper magnate) peerage to the House of Lords when Black appealed. The United States has a ban on US citizens recieving foreign honours, as does the UK, why shouldn't Canada be able to have this right as well?
The reason behind Canada's objections are twofold: The first and most imporatant is that peerages and knighthoods and other titles are archaic leftovers from an oppressive class-system that Canada wants no part in perpetuating and has objected to since the Nickel Resolution of 1919.
The other is that Canada, as a former colony of Britain, sees this as an infringement on her sovereignty.
to me, the flavour of this story underlines the arrogance of the linux-mad crowd here at slashdot (not everyone, of course). why is the story slanted this way?
they pulled support because they couldn't make it work financially. is that linux's fault? partly. is it our fault? not at all. so i don't think that we should take personal offense. it most certainly wasn't that they were raking it in on the linux version and then decided that linux stinks and pulled the plug.
in my opinion, the news stories here should be reported in more of an informational manner and the opinions below the story flesh out the consensus. we can see that not everyone agrees with the bias in this piece.
these are the kinds of comments that make slashdot suck. you can't even whisper here without somebody chipping in that you've really put your foot in your mouth this time.
can you imagine? just by mentioning freedom in a trivial manner you have basically shat on the graves of our forefathers. (i dare you! 'say don't forget the foremothers!')
get a grip. the legacy of the dead will march on regardless of the humour mods on slashdot.
as a side note, i thought that the original comment was one of the funniest i have read in some time. too bad not everyone is as chipper this morning.
Funny, I would have stated the opposite. Recent studies have shown that Canadian health care delivers almost an identical service as the US model, that wait times for procedures is indistinguishable across the border.
All I hear about Australia is about how US multinationals are moving in to reap the profit that is available through privatising health care, and how doctors and nurse groups (who stand to benefit through privatisation) oppose the trend.
This quote in the New Republic, by a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine:
"Painful experience in the past few years may be forcing a re-examination of that view [market primacy in health care] for many the free market recently has begun to look more like the cause than the solution of our current health care problems. Evidence of its deficiencies is accumulating, and public dissatisfaction with the market-based system is growing rapidly".
In his book, The Welfare State, Dexter Whitfield says one of the reasons governments and their supporters give for embarking on privatisation is increasing efficiency and productivity, yet there is no firm evidence to back up this assertion.
Obviously proponents of privatisation believe that if you repeat the line that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector often enough, the public will eventually believe it.
Canadians are figuring out that the fear-mongering that has been going on for the past thirty years on the public health care system is baseless and comes from right-wing private think tanks.
Canadian health care is as strong as ever, and is viewed as a model by progressive US policy makers.
Reference material can be found here: http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/doc uments/health/privat_canada.html
I must agree with the other respondent, studies have shown that the Canadian health system provides the same level of care as the US HMO model for about 70% of the price. In Canada they just deliver the medicine, having to pay someone profit on their procedure doesn't enter into the equation. HMO's take a huge part of the health care dollar away from the patients. While every Canadian enjoys free health care, 50 000 000 Americans are uninsured in the wealthiest country on earth. If privatisation is such a success, ask the Australians why they are buying back their hospitals from the private corporations they sold them to.
The Canadian doctors who are dissatisfied come to the US because they can bill their HMO higher than the cap that is in place in Canada. There are many Canadian doctors who wouldn't work anywhere else.
I guess you could say that I'm not a fan of privatised medicine.
Slashdot Mirror
ok, i'm not allowed to mod but i would've.
fucken funny, not matter how obvious.
if i could speak out on the constant repetition and yimmer-yammering on the need for free registration at the ny times site:
/. didn't warn me about this!" i vote to drop the warning.
first, it is stated here so often that all but the most infrequent users must be, as i am, sick to death of hearing that the nyt requires free registration. we are grown-ups and can handle it if our browser directs us to something that we might have to give a fake email address to. "dammit, those bastards at
second, if the free registration bothers everyone so much that it must be stated, why is it that so many stories here are referenced from there? i mean, the stories come from us. does this not imply that the nyt is a valuable tool? so why do we complain about the free reg if so many of us use it?
third, why can't we get around the idea that the new york times isn't going to just give away its hard work for nothing? the feeling that i get when i read that free registration is required is that it shouldn't be, that it should all be free free free. i, for one, can handle a meaningless free registration for the excellent content they provide. it is not as if they come knocking on my door when i hit the submit button.
drop the free registration warning!
my peace.
a small correction-- the queen in canada has had zero power since she signed it away in the 1982 repatriation of the constitution. there is nothing in the constitution that requires the queen's signature or approval for anything-- in this sense the governor general is more powerful than the queen, in that her signature is required for all canadian legislation. the queen is purely a symbol.
before 1982 all canadian legislation was theoretically subject to approval by the british parliament. the queen could also veto anything, similar to british legislation.
in this sense we lack the 'royal perrogative' that the brits live under. though by royal assent she allowed the repatriation of the constitution, that was her end of her royal perrogative.
as well, senators in canada are not appointed for life, but only until they are seventy-five years of age. this is why chretien keeps doling out senatorships to seventy-year-olds, so that he has a large turn-over of patronage appointments.
also note, (other readers, not the author of the above comment) that the governor general is appointed by the prime minister and has only *not* refused to sign legislation twice in the existence of the office (both to dissolve parliament for elections). she remains largely symbolic but could stop any act of parliament.
amen brother.
i'll choose wine any day of the week.
for bathing.
for drinking.
for washing the car.
i don't think you understand art.
or design.
or have any cogent arguments about gui/hardware design.
how are we to judge what is an advancement or progress in relation to computer use? maybe making interfaces pretty is akin to building cathedrals that inspire music? who knows?
your comments on the slowness of the artistic community are both ignorant and frankly irrelevent to your argument. engineers can be just as obsessive as artists when it comes to perfection. so can drug users. so can anyone.
honestly, i hope your strong anti-drug policies aren't as well thought out as your arguments here.
who doesn't?
but the '5 down, 95 to go' is just marketing hype, not indicative of apple's raison d'etre. i'd say that they are largely happy to be a niche player. sure they'd rather be dominant but the margins are great on the fringes and the products are cooler and more innovative.
i think i was writing more cogent arguments when i was in highschool. at the very least i wasn't painting myself into a corner with my own stupidity.
jon katz writes:
"Burned by years of outrageously poor tech support, increasingly expensive software, and hardware that's almost instantly outdated, middle-class consumers aren't the least bit interested in the coolest new new thing. They want computing that works like TV does -- that's easy to use, takes little space, costs relatively little money and works every time you turn it on, year after year. The public is increasingly wise to tech scams like hardware that's obsolete every 18 months and software that doesn't even last that long."
how does this make sense in his greater argument? apple seems to be the only manufacturer and large os retailer that is doing anything about these issues. so is apple addressing these concerns and is thus losing the battle? or are they not but others are? or nobody is?
point by point commentary (slashdot take-down style)
"Burned by years of outrageously poor tech support...
apple has excellent tech support and wins accolades both over the phone and at the apple store. what makes it even better is that their products are easier to provide tech support for.
increasingly expensive software and hardware,
final cut pro has certainly lowered the cost of professional-level video editing by about $50 000. and the iapps are the best consumer applications of their type on the market, all free. apple hardware has not risen in price, it has fallen. the imac configuration last year offered a slower processor for $4500. this year it sells for $1800. impressive.
that's almost instantly outdated,
apple hardware retains its value in resale better than anyone else and remains in service longer. in fact, one of apple's problems has been that their hardware (and software) last too long. users don;t want to upgrade because their machine is doing for them.
middle-class consumers aren't the least bit interested in the coolest new new thing.
six million imac owners and 150 000 ipod owners say otherwise.
They want computing that works like TV does -- that's easy to use, takes little space, costs relatively little money and works every time you turn it on, year after year.
the mac works more like a tv than anyone else's box, more reliably. (i will remind jon that the whole reason we are using computers instead of watching tv is because computers are more complex and challenge us in ways that tv cannot (the info flows two ways here), and that there will be trade-offs in ease of use.) if the tv could do it, why isn't it? if someone is doing this better than apple, why aren't they?
anyway, my point, jon, is that you can't have it both ways. either apple is going in the right direction and you've defeated your own argument or they aren't and you just aren't paying attention. or everybody is going in the wrong direction which doesn't make for much of an argument.
either way you lose. what makes you lose even harder is that you walked into it.
maybe apple's market position has to do with other factors you haven't cared to comment upon?
maybe.
as far as reliability is concerned, i think that the ease of the system folder in os7.5 - os9 should be considered.
a full system re-install is very rare on the mac platform because problems are relatively easy to diagnose and fix. troubleshooting windows usually involves the inevitable search for the windows98 disk, which, strangely, isn't kept too far away.
most mac users never touch the os disks that come with their machines.
this is what i call reliability. sure there are some shortcomings-- but i never spend half a day re-installing and rebooting my mac just to get back to square one.
and you can add even more to the list to round out maybe 99% of all file transfers (graphics pros included)
.psd photoshop
.ai illustrator
.tiff tiff image format
.gif gif image format
.txt raw text
.rtf rich text format
.ram real audio
.mpeg mpeg movies
.html web pages
.asp active server pages
.wmf windows media player
.wav sound format
.aiff sound format
i can't even think of other file formats that people use anymore. all of these are supported natively on the mac. it actually is quite amazing how compatible the files are.
anything else is probably pretty specialized, mostly stuff the average user hasn't heard of.
wow chrisD, that was the lamest keynote report i have ever read. talk about stunning analysis. do you go to school for that kind of gripping cutthroat prose?
was there any advantage in having you there? could a better report have been written from my desk at home with the flawless quicktime webcast?
i shall be more specific? why is linux more powerful than osx? because you were at the keynote? why don't you fill us in, because, like i said, we weren't there and i'd like a little more background. were the cracks in the cubes really because of overheating? did they mention this at the keynote? and what a bomb adobe dropped! photoshop on osx, who ever would have guessed! i was glad you were there to scoop that photoshop betas have been available for over a month.
and these few sentences: "The keynote was terrific, but in the end, not so outstanding." or "[the imac's] got a good price/feature spectrum..." and then one sentence late "...It's not particularly a good deal" at the keynote did you have trouble making up your mind?
iphoto is not a source of revenue for apple-- or if it is you can bet the shareholders don't give a shit about it. it is a hook to bring customers aboard. tell us that, tell us why it is interesting that a hardware/software company bundles these services with the software they are giving away. tell us why that is significant. did the slick powerpoint presentations leave you speechless? these items are so much more important than iphoto being a good cataloguing program. that is why you went to see the keynote. because apple makes a photo program more than a photo program, just like they make a computer (somehow) more than a computer.
please. learn how to report.
"Crashing Xbox Kiosks"...
I thought that the headline meant the story was going to give us instructions on how to crash xboxen...
...but I suppose it would make for a pretty short article, looking something like this:
1) show up.
2) watch xbox crash
i don't know if it is just in canada, but heinz is hot on the heels of its green ketchup madness (incredibly successful, apparently a phenom in the marketing world) with another colour-- purple.
just to clear this up...
the hinge problems have affected a small percentage of wallstreet I + II laptops, manufactured in 1998.
since that time, both the lombard and pismo (same enclosure) moved to a different hinge design and thus eliminated the problem.
of course, the ibooks (all models) and the tibook haven't had any reported difficulties in this area.
it was good to get that out of my system.
the comment on the leader in the storyuu is completely erroneous.
quicktime is not required to get much past the homepage on apple's site.
why the bias? because quicktime hasn't been ported to platform x for god knows what finanical reasons? sure, if you want to see spinning pictures of the new g4 or their recent ads you'll need the plug-in and quicktime. but you'll need that for any rich content.
slashdot has something truly uncomfortable up its ass and i think that the coverage of items would be significantly improved if it were removed.
just a small proviso in the "decades of refinement" that goes into photoshop...
a "decade of refinement" has gone into windows and we reap the result: an inertia whereby one cannot offend current users by making radical updates to the paradigm.
it's not that i disagree with the poster-- i do-- it's just that the advantage of being new on the scene without the baggage of protocols and tradition to lug around cannot be dismissed.
i've never understood the confusion surrounding the fans.
there is only one macintosh that currently sports a fan that runs full time, the G4 tower.
all other macs (powerbook, imac, and ibook) haven't had fans for a long time, longer than the cube has been out. my powerbook (1998) has only run its fan once in its lifetime, when it didn't go to sleep properly when i closed the lid and left it in my briefcase in the car for an hour.
it's becoming a fanless world. and thank god for that. my wife's pc laptop, which is one of the quieter models, drives me up the wall. computing should be silent.
your link says nothing about canadian regulation of cyberspace.
it cites a media ban on the karla homolka trial, which was put in place by the judiciary to ensure a fair and unbiased trial.
i agree.
but dumping the queen just isn't on the public agenda, something that has to do with the 30% of canadians that are of british descent. some 60% of canadians still favour the monarchy for purely sentimental reasons. but the government has taken the steps that it can against the class system without rankling the voters too much.
look friend, i think you should know something about federal / provincial taxation and healthcare in canada before you expound upon it.
1. the feds tax canadians, but so do the provinces through direct income tax and a sales tax in all provinces except alberta.
2. the provinces decide whether they run a deficit or a surplus, not the federal government.
3. the feds have cut spending faster than any jurisdiction in canada and does not tend to spend far more money than it should. the only place in canada that has better books than the feds is the alberta government and that is because they are the largest single supplier of foreign oil to the united states and the price is through the roof. the other provinces drool over the feds tax cuts and surpluses. the federal tax cut makes bush's 2 trillion cut look like child's play.
4. also, while ontario may be resource rich relative to u.s jurisdictions, its wealth is in light manufacturing. alberta is rich because of oil. b.c. has been doing poorly because of the asian crisis and the low price for lumber. it has relatively little to do with taxation policy. (ie bc led canadian growth for ten years yet had the highest taxes in the country)
5. reasonable taxes, i agree. did you know that corporate taxes in ontario (half of the country's economy) are less than in every neighbouring state?
6. alberta and ontario currently have the best health care spending in the country-- and yes at the same time as providing equalisation payments to the other provinces. that's how federalism works in canada.
7. again, the feds turn over great gobs of cash to the provinces, upwards of 50% of the costs of healthcare, or some 50% of the 95 billion that gets spent on healthcare in canada.
Actually, the Supreme Court of Canada backed Jean Chretien in his block of Conrad Black's (the newspaper magnate) peerage to the House of Lords when Black appealed. The United States has a ban on US citizens recieving foreign honours, as does the UK, why shouldn't Canada be able to have this right as well?
The reason behind Canada's objections are twofold: The first and most imporatant is that peerages and knighthoods and other titles are archaic leftovers from an oppressive class-system that Canada wants no part in perpetuating and has objected to since the Nickel Resolution of 1919.
The other is that Canada, as a former colony of Britain, sees this as an infringement on her sovereignty.
Done.
are you a poor student?
or a student who is poor?
let us know which deficiency you'd like us to cater to.
to me, the flavour of this story underlines the arrogance of the linux-mad crowd here at slashdot (not everyone, of course). why is the story slanted this way?
they pulled support because they couldn't make it work financially. is that linux's fault? partly. is it our fault? not at all. so i don't think that we should take personal offense. it most certainly wasn't that they were raking it in on the linux version and then decided that linux stinks and pulled the plug.
in my opinion, the news stories here should be reported in more of an informational manner and the opinions below the story flesh out the consensus. we can see that not everyone agrees with the bias in this piece.
these are the kinds of comments that make slashdot suck. you can't even whisper here without somebody chipping in that you've really put your foot in your mouth this time.
can you imagine? just by mentioning freedom in a trivial manner you have basically shat on the graves of our forefathers. (i dare you! 'say don't forget the foremothers!')
get a grip. the legacy of the dead will march on regardless of the humour mods on slashdot.
as a side note, i thought that the original comment was one of the funniest i have read in some time. too bad not everyone is as chipper this morning.
Funny, I would have stated the opposite. Recent studies have shown that Canadian health care delivers almost an identical service as the US model, that wait times for procedures is indistinguishable across the border.
c uments/health/privat_canada.html
All I hear about Australia is about how US multinationals are moving in to reap the profit that is available through privatising health care, and how doctors and nurse groups (who stand to benefit through privatisation) oppose the trend.
This quote in the New Republic, by a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine:
"Painful experience in the past few years may be forcing a re-examination of that view [market primacy in health care] for many the free market recently has begun to look more like the cause than the solution of our current health care problems. Evidence of its deficiencies is accumulating, and public dissatisfaction with the market-based system is growing rapidly".
In his book, The Welfare State, Dexter Whitfield says one of the reasons governments and their supporters give for embarking on privatisation is increasing efficiency and productivity, yet there is no firm evidence to back up this assertion.
Obviously proponents of privatisation believe that if you repeat the line that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector often enough, the public will eventually believe it.
Canadians are figuring out that the fear-mongering that has been going on for the past thirty years on the public health care system is baseless and comes from right-wing private think tanks.
Canadian health care is as strong as ever, and is viewed as a model by progressive US policy makers.
Reference material can be found here: http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/do
I must agree with the other respondent, studies have shown that the Canadian health system provides the same level of care as the US HMO model for about 70% of the price. In Canada they just deliver the medicine, having to pay someone profit on their procedure doesn't enter into the equation. HMO's take a huge part of the health care dollar away from the patients. While every Canadian enjoys free health care, 50 000 000 Americans are uninsured in the wealthiest country on earth. If privatisation is such a success, ask the Australians why they are buying back their hospitals from the private corporations they sold them to.
The Canadian doctors who are dissatisfied come to the US because they can bill their HMO higher than the cap that is in place in Canada. There are many Canadian doctors who wouldn't work anywhere else.
I guess you could say that I'm not a fan of privatised medicine.