The problem is unions and government regulations. Try firing someone. You have a union to deal with. Try building something really innovative, say a nice new nuclear power plant.
The unions in the USA are famously _weak_. Their wings have been clipped from the start. If you want to see how real unions look like, just take a look at Germany or France. It is widely known that France doesn't have a single nuclear power plant due to the tree hugging hippies, government regulations and unions, that is why their electricity needs are satisfied in 70% from the nuclear source.
It seems you're advocating deunionization without knowing what it actually means.
Deunionization as an economic measure means that you plan to solve fundamental problems in the economy by worsening the bargaining power of the lower and middle class, in effect worsening their conditions. Instead of outsourcing, this is bringing conditions from China to the developed world. Newsflash: if an industry fails because it cannot survive unless it has unacceptable working conditions, then that is a good thing.
I'm not negative about it at all. I'm particularly happy that Microsoft's stranglehold on IT is lessening and their older products end up on the trash heaps of history.
...releases lost the game long ago. It is useless to think in an OS as a package, much less something you put in a box. Given that the OS is the first software building block of a system and due to the sheer complexity of the thing, it has evolved into a continually updated and polished piece of engineering, where you take snapshots of the development and call them releases.
An operating system evolves and you don't sell it. You either provide it as a service, or provide it for free, so that you can hook people on some service you offer.
I'll tell you why Win 7 will be a huge flop: since it breaks almost all compatibility between itself and previous windows releases, it has to compete on the same grounds as Linux, *BSD and OSX. Which means, that without the massive inertia of the previous windows releases, those three will kick the living crap out of Win 7 in terms of maturity, usability and price.
Yeah, they are hideous. The links didn't grab attention like these do, but they were available when someone wanted to post. Just too much contrast.
I know that/. is trying to heed the call of time and modernize itself, but this is a step in the wrong direction imo. But then again, I don't like the new javascript discussion system either. I've been using Nested mode for years and that seems the best way to look at comments and keep track who is replying to what.
To be honest it's a welcome change. 1st of April deteriorated to a very bad level after everyone felt compelled to create a joke for the day. I'll feel happy to know if slashdot is not doing anything today.
Yes, Canada is cheaper, but the service is crap in comparison. Mortality rates for most cancers, heart attacks, etc. is substatnially lower. Wikipedia will confirm:
Wikipedia doesn't actually confirm this. Even though the USA spends 16% of it's GDP on healthcare and the highest amount per capita in the world, it still sports these numbers:
The World Health Organization (WHO) in 2000 ranked the U.S. health care system first in both responsiveness and expenditure, but 37th in overall performance and 72nd by overall level of health (among 191 member nations included in the study).
The CIA World Factbook ranked the United States 41st in the world for lowest infant mortality rate[13] and 45th for highest total life expectancy.[14]
You're saying that:
One of the major complaints about the Canadian health care system is waiting times, whether for a specialist, major elective surgery, such as hip replacement, or specialized treatments, such as radiation for breast cancer.
It is true that the USA is first in world ranking in responsiveness, however, responsiveness doesn't automatically mean a better system. The reasons for this are quite complex and it is an interesting subject to explore, but the currently available statistics show that while the system is responsive in the USA, it is less capable of treating someone than a lot of other countries, who might slower in providing medical care, but once they do, they do a much better job at it. I would say that the goal of the healthcare system is to provide medical assistance first and foremost and endulging in improving the perception of the patients is only secondary.
Of course, providing the perception of a good system is easier than actually having a good system. It is cheaper for the health insurance companies to make you believe you're getting a good service than actually providing a good service. (Let's not talk about how healthcare is not a traditional service anyway.)
Show me less cost and same value, or same cost and better value, and I'll believe you.
I've shown you some statistics, but I'd like to reiterate the point: the health care system should be judged based on how effectively it cures people. The healthcare system shouldn't be judged based on satisfaction indexes, because the goal is to cure, not to please. Perception is easily manipulated. Food companies learned this the hard way in the 1960s, there is a fascinating case study about this, which shows that 1/4-1/3rd of the US consumer market likes their sphagetti sauce extra chunky, but they never demanded extra chunky in any of the focus groups. The people didn't know what they wanted, or they didn't want to tell what they wanted due to the cultural stereotypes. There are similar effects in play when talking about coffee and it was an important lesson for companies. This issue is also connected to the fact that drugs are tested using the double blind method. Asking the patient whether he/she feels better doesn't cut it. There are vastly more reliable statistics to gauge how well the system works than by asking the people.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a democrat (one who believes in democracy, not the party affiliation), I believe in asking the people and I believe in that ultimately the power rests in the hands of the people, but there are questions of facts and questions of opinion. Science is not a democracy and whether the healthcare system works is a scientific issue of fact. It doesn't matter what people think, mass opinion is religion. Science is about facts, it doesn't matter if someone is ignorant of them, doesn't like them, they still remain true.
I guess the gist of the current Fitna debacle is that "Islam is a religion of peace and we'll kill everyone who doesn't think so". You know what is the worst possible reaction to this? Tolerance. You cannot be tolerant if someone threatens you with violence if you don't comform to his point of view. Taking the video down from a lot of sites in order to avoid violence is understandable if done due to fear, but collectively we, as society cannot be afraid from some archaic religious madmen.
So, if you're afraid, but only slightly, please rehost the video. Anyone got a link to it so that I can mirror it on my own site?
I'm curious what socialized medicine programs can beat those rates with the same benefits I'm receiving now.
Pretty much most of the world's. The USA spends the highest percentage of it's GDP of any country in the world on health care, but lags behind on statistics published by the World Health Organization. Canada spends half the amount and scores higher in a lot of the comparisons than the USA.
You know, the core of the problem is that the hundred billion dollar profit margins of the health insurance companies comes out of your pocket and you're not receiving a service for that profit.
I've never understood why Conservatives are opposed to funding research. How many for-profit drug companies do you think would be willing to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into things like a vaccine for AIDS with no prospects of recouping that money for decades (if ever)?
While I don't agree with pudge on a lot of matters, I think he means something different than you do in this case. 90% of the base medical research is done by publicly funded government money in the USA, but the companies that add the superficial packaging and small scale research (completely covered by tax breaks by the way) get 100% of the profit and determine market price. I'd call that subsidizing the companies and I don't think being against subsidizing companies means someone is against publicly funded research.
I wonder if it would make sense to create a slashdot account for interview subjects automatically. I'm sure most accounts wouldn't be used, but for example on the off chance that someone from Steve Novick's team would reply to for example pudge's points would make an attempt worthwhile.
I think it would fit better in the modern age in which I'd expect a dialogue, not simple statements people have no chance to argue and discuss with the person who said it. Communication in the internet age can be one many and I think journalism on the internet should partly about moderating a debate, instead of asking the questions. What slashdot has going is a good step in that direction, so I wonder if we can improve on it and how.
My boss's mother in Korea has 1Gbps coming into her house via ethernet. It costs less than 30$ a month.
Ah, this explains it. You see, only old people in Korea use email, so the government there set up a special infrastructure for the elderly in order to cope with the spam levels. Of course a very fast connection is part of the equipment!
Otherwise, the USA is still the bestest country when talking about the Internet, we invented it duh! Not listening to you nananananana not hearing you, fingers in my ears!
The UN and WTO are a bit too socialistic for my tastes, but that's just me.
You have to be really on the right end of the fascist scale to claim that the WTO is socialist, given that it was created by the USA to serve the interests of capitalism.
Actually, the situation is more complex than this. Quoting wikipedia:
* Blue LED & yellow phosphor - Considered the least expensive method for producing white light. Blue light from an LED is used to excite a phosphor which then re-emits yellow light. This balanced mixing of yellow and blue lights results in the appearance of white light, but produces poor color rendition (i.e., has low CRI).
* Blue LED & several phosphors - Similar to the process involved with yellow phosphors, except that each excited phosphor re-emits a different color. Similarly, the resulting light is combined with the originating blue light to create white light. The resulting light, however, has a richer and broader wavelength spectrum and produces a higher color-quality light, albeit at an increased cost.
* Ultraviolet (UV) LED & red, green, & blue phosphors - The UV light is used to excite the different phosphors, which are doped at measured amounts. The colors are mixed resulting in a white light with the richest and broadest wavelength spectrum.
* Blue LED & quantum dots - A process by which a thin layer of nanocrystal particles containing 33 or 34 pairs of atoms, primarily cadmium and selenium, are coated on top of the LED. The blue light excites the quantum dots, resulting in a white light with a wavelength spectrum similar to UV LEDs.
My original post only holds on a bigger scale. There are lots of coal power plants all over the world. If most of the world would be using nuclear power for their energy needs (which is the cleanest power source after fusion), then the realities would be different.
LEDs are not much more energy efficient today than CFLs. The numbers that can be usually seen on LED watt usage do not take into account that the numbers are given without taking the arc of lighting into account. LEDs might only consume 4W, but their light emission is quite focused, usually around 20 or so. When you use various techniques to get more, you're back at the CFL level in a W : lumen : arc comparison.
Too little, too late has been things "done" about voting irregularities.
In the 2004 elections around 3 million voters were denied from voting because of registration abuses. That is around 2.5% of the total voter turnout and more than the percentage Bush won in 2004 with. 5.2 million people are ineligible to vote because of their legal history. (The USA has biggest prison population on the planet, relative to population size).
It should be required by law that if any kind of irregularity exceeds 0.5% of the total voter turnout or half the difference between the opposing poll questions (between candidates or yes/no answers), then the election result is null and void. Otherwise, it cannot be said that the election was fair. If there is one thing there shouldn't be a shadow of a doubt about - it is elections.
Electronic voting is one area where things shouldn't be hacked together in a Microsoft or shitty phone software style. Election software should live up to the standards of NASA and/or nuclear power plant software, but ideally electronic voting should not be used, because otherwise it is impossible to provide a secure, relatively tamper proof election system which is also transparent to the voters in a way that the average person could verify the results if they wanted to. Shit hacked together in Visual Basic gives plausible deniability to those who say the election wasn't stolen, just glitched. Electronic voting is an overengineered solution: you have to design a computer from the ground up to serve as a voting machine and it requires advanced mathematics, advanced engineering to understand how the system works. The average person will never be able to verify if their vote was counted in a fair manner or not. Electronic voting machines are the worst things that can happen to the voting process, because it makes voting black box. There is no committee to watch whether you've inserted your voting sheet into the ballot box and ensure the ballot box wasn't tampered with. To do the same in case of electronic voting, the voting committee members would have to have a phd in computer science, hardware chip design and physics, apart from a lot of other involved fields. The voting machine would have to be in a Faraday cage and power should only be supplied to the machine when someone is actively voting. The voting machine is the ballot and the ballot box combined into one. This causes problems.
It is easier to do faster than light travel than to use electronic voting in a democratic manner. We didn't figure out FTL travel yet, but we have a better shot at it than electronic voting.
Not being sure whether an election was democratic is worse than a terrorist attack on the scale of WTC happening every single week.
Maybe the election problem was a honest mistake, but the point is that you cannot exclude the possibility of tampering. Laws, democratic rights and actions of the government should be viewed from a defensive viewpoint. "How can this law be abused? What is the damage potential of an action on this right?" Because, it is possible that this voting glitch was a honest mistake. The next one won't be, as soon as unscrupulous people learn how to exploit the lack of public outcry coupled with an insecure voting scheme.
Also, a constitutional amendment should be passed placing elections bigger than the scope of a state in the hands of the federal government (or a federal elections commission with clearly accountable personnel). It is necessary to standardize the voting procedures. You can't have 50 states voting in 50 different ways in a national election. Strict penalties should be created for those who try to tamper with voting results, either due to negligence or intentionally. While I don't agree with the death penalty, the harshest possible punishment should be used for voting fraud and currently in the USA it is the death penalty. Voting fraud is a covert overthrowing of the legitimate democratic order of a country. It should be treated as such.
To sum it up, "oh, a glitch, how funny", doesn't fucking cut it.
Humans do all kinds of things that are bad for them, but a lot of that doesn't fall in the realms of medicine. An addiction isn't simply a medical condition, it is created from a lot of different factors, genetic disposition towards addiction having a stronger grip on the given person, environmental factors, social causes, etc.
I would say there is no mental illness called "internet addiction", there is only addiction. It doesn't matter if it's the internet or alcohol, or anything else, the basic pattern is the same: you get addicted to something because that thing causes temporary happiness. It just depends on the social and personal circumstances what that thing exactly is.
Addiction isn't a mental illness the same way schizophrenia is, but that doesn't mean people who cause serious harm on their own lives shouldn't be helped, it's just that the treatment is different.
There is a grey area on the border of medicine whether a specific condition could be approached medically or not.
To go on a hyperbole, even though I think religious people are stupid for believing without evidence, I don't think I'd like to live in a society where religion would be called a medical condition (unless of course society at large got rid of religion and being religious would be finally synonymous with seriously believing a small dragon lives under your bed - then believing in religion would be an indication of a serious mental problem), because beliefs that ultimately cause people to be more miserable or actions that cause people to be more miserable aren't necessarily medical, even though they have a negative effect on the person.
There are personal problems that are in the gray area, it requires a non-trivial consensus to reach before it can be decided whether the problem should treated with drugs or not. I guess the problem at large is connected to the larger question, "If we could make everyone artificially happy, should we do it?". Medically, it might be possible, but for me that's a life not worth living.
What do you mean by unknown?
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 4, Informative
who's actual value will -- now and forever -- remain unknown
Pi's value is known totally precisely, it is just that an irrational number cannot be represented using the good ol' rational numbers or any x/y form of them, it only can be approximated. That is why it is called an irrational number! It doesn't make pi any less definite though.
Foster's positions in the following 14th congressional district election included ending involvement in the War in Iraq, increasing the amount of money used to fund alternative energy research, and enforcing existing immigration laws while allowing for immigration reform to take place. He also supports universal health care. Fiscally, Foster publically stated that he would align himself with other Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. The Blue Dog Coalition focuses on fiscal responsibility and reducing the national debt.
So wikipedia says he's not an idiot on important issues and he has a science background? I'm sold!
Slashdot Mirror
It seems you're advocating deunionization without knowing what it actually means.
Deunionization as an economic measure means that you plan to solve fundamental problems in the economy by worsening the bargaining power of the lower and middle class, in effect worsening their conditions. Instead of outsourcing, this is bringing conditions from China to the developed world. Newsflash: if an industry fails because it cannot survive unless it has unacceptable working conditions, then that is a good thing.
...releases lost the game long ago. It is useless to think in an OS as a package, much less something you put in a box. Given that the OS is the first software building block of a system and due to the sheer complexity of the thing, it has evolved into a continually updated and polished piece of engineering, where you take snapshots of the development and call them releases.
An operating system evolves and you don't sell it. You either provide it as a service, or provide it for free, so that you can hook people on some service you offer.
I'll tell you why Win 7 will be a huge flop: since it breaks almost all compatibility between itself and previous windows releases, it has to compete on the same grounds as Linux, *BSD and OSX. Which means, that without the massive inertia of the previous windows releases, those three will kick the living crap out of Win 7 in terms of maturity, usability and price.
Yeah, they are hideous. The links didn't grab attention like these do, but they were available when someone wanted to post. Just too much contrast.
/. is trying to heed the call of time and modernize itself, but this is a step in the wrong direction imo. But then again, I don't like the new javascript discussion system either. I've been using Nested mode for years and that seems the best way to look at comments and keep track who is replying to what.
I know that
To be honest it's a welcome change. 1st of April deteriorated to a very bad level after everyone felt compelled to create a joke for the day. I'll feel happy to know if slashdot is not doing anything today.
Of course, providing the perception of a good system is easier than actually having a good system. It is cheaper for the health insurance companies to make you believe you're getting a good service than actually providing a good service. (Let's not talk about how healthcare is not a traditional service anyway.) I've shown you some statistics, but I'd like to reiterate the point: the health care system should be judged based on how effectively it cures people. The healthcare system shouldn't be judged based on satisfaction indexes, because the goal is to cure, not to please. Perception is easily manipulated. Food companies learned this the hard way in the 1960s, there is a fascinating case study about this, which shows that 1/4-1/3rd of the US consumer market likes their sphagetti sauce extra chunky, but they never demanded extra chunky in any of the focus groups. The people didn't know what they wanted, or they didn't want to tell what they wanted due to the cultural stereotypes. There are similar effects in play when talking about coffee and it was an important lesson for companies. This issue is also connected to the fact that drugs are tested using the double blind method. Asking the patient whether he/she feels better doesn't cut it. There are vastly more reliable statistics to gauge how well the system works than by asking the people.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a democrat (one who believes in democracy, not the party affiliation), I believe in asking the people and I believe in that ultimately the power rests in the hands of the people, but there are questions of facts and questions of opinion. Science is not a democracy and whether the healthcare system works is a scientific issue of fact. It doesn't matter what people think, mass opinion is religion. Science is about facts, it doesn't matter if someone is ignorant of them, doesn't like them, they still remain true.
I guess the gist of the current Fitna debacle is that "Islam is a religion of peace and we'll kill everyone who doesn't think so". You know what is the worst possible reaction to this? Tolerance. You cannot be tolerant if someone threatens you with violence if you don't comform to his point of view. Taking the video down from a lot of sites in order to avoid violence is understandable if done due to fear, but collectively we, as society cannot be afraid from some archaic religious madmen.
So, if you're afraid, but only slightly, please rehost the video. Anyone got a link to it so that I can mirror it on my own site?
You know, the core of the problem is that the hundred billion dollar profit margins of the health insurance companies comes out of your pocket and you're not receiving a service for that profit.
I wonder if it would make sense to create a slashdot account for interview subjects automatically. I'm sure most accounts wouldn't be used, but for example on the off chance that someone from Steve Novick's team would reply to for example pudge's points would make an attempt worthwhile.
I think it would fit better in the modern age in which I'd expect a dialogue, not simple statements people have no chance to argue and discuss with the person who said it. Communication in the internet age can be one many and I think journalism on the internet should partly about moderating a debate, instead of asking the questions. What slashdot has going is a good step in that direction, so I wonder if we can improve on it and how.
Otherwise, the USA is still the bestest country when talking about the Internet, we invented it duh! Not listening to you nananananana not hearing you, fingers in my ears!
My original post only holds on a bigger scale. There are lots of coal power plants all over the world. If most of the world would be using nuclear power for their energy needs (which is the cleanest power source after fusion), then the realities would be different.
Simple. Mercury in CFL < mercury which would be released to produce (incandescent - CFL) energy.
LEDs are not much more energy efficient today than CFLs. The numbers that can be usually seen on LED watt usage do not take into account that the numbers are given without taking the arc of lighting into account. LEDs might only consume 4W, but their light emission is quite focused, usually around 20 or so. When you use various techniques to get more, you're back at the CFL level in a W : lumen : arc comparison.
Too little, too late has been things "done" about voting irregularities.
In the 2004 elections around 3 million voters were denied from voting because of registration abuses. That is around 2.5% of the total voter turnout and more than the percentage Bush won in 2004 with. 5.2 million people are ineligible to vote because of their legal history. (The USA has biggest prison population on the planet, relative to population size).
It should be required by law that if any kind of irregularity exceeds 0.5% of the total voter turnout or half the difference between the opposing poll questions (between candidates or yes/no answers), then the election result is null and void. Otherwise, it cannot be said that the election was fair. If there is one thing there shouldn't be a shadow of a doubt about - it is elections.
Electronic voting is one area where things shouldn't be hacked together in a Microsoft or shitty phone software style. Election software should live up to the standards of NASA and/or nuclear power plant software, but ideally electronic voting should not be used, because otherwise it is impossible to provide a secure, relatively tamper proof election system which is also transparent to the voters in a way that the average person could verify the results if they wanted to. Shit hacked together in Visual Basic gives plausible deniability to those who say the election wasn't stolen, just glitched. Electronic voting is an overengineered solution: you have to design a computer from the ground up to serve as a voting machine and it requires advanced mathematics, advanced engineering to understand how the system works. The average person will never be able to verify if their vote was counted in a fair manner or not. Electronic voting machines are the worst things that can happen to the voting process, because it makes voting black box. There is no committee to watch whether you've inserted your voting sheet into the ballot box and ensure the ballot box wasn't tampered with. To do the same in case of electronic voting, the voting committee members would have to have a phd in computer science, hardware chip design and physics, apart from a lot of other involved fields. The voting machine would have to be in a Faraday cage and power should only be supplied to the machine when someone is actively voting. The voting machine is the ballot and the ballot box combined into one. This causes problems.
It is easier to do faster than light travel than to use electronic voting in a democratic manner. We didn't figure out FTL travel yet, but we have a better shot at it than electronic voting.
Not being sure whether an election was democratic is worse than a terrorist attack on the scale of WTC happening every single week.
Maybe the election problem was a honest mistake, but the point is that you cannot exclude the possibility of tampering. Laws, democratic rights and actions of the government should be viewed from a defensive viewpoint. "How can this law be abused? What is the damage potential of an action on this right?" Because, it is possible that this voting glitch was a honest mistake. The next one won't be, as soon as unscrupulous people learn how to exploit the lack of public outcry coupled with an insecure voting scheme.
Also, a constitutional amendment should be passed placing elections bigger than the scope of a state in the hands of the federal government (or a federal elections commission with clearly accountable personnel). It is necessary to standardize the voting procedures. You can't have 50 states voting in 50 different ways in a national election. Strict penalties should be created for those who try to tamper with voting results, either due to negligence or intentionally. While I don't agree with the death penalty, the harshest possible punishment should be used for voting fraud and currently in the USA it is the death penalty. Voting fraud is a covert overthrowing of the legitimate democratic order of a country. It should be treated as such.
To sum it up, "oh, a glitch, how funny", doesn't fucking cut it.
The connection can only be established between two nuclear power stations.
Humans do all kinds of things that are bad for them, but a lot of that doesn't fall in the realms of medicine. An addiction isn't simply a medical condition, it is created from a lot of different factors, genetic disposition towards addiction having a stronger grip on the given person, environmental factors, social causes, etc.
I would say there is no mental illness called "internet addiction", there is only addiction. It doesn't matter if it's the internet or alcohol, or anything else, the basic pattern is the same: you get addicted to something because that thing causes temporary happiness. It just depends on the social and personal circumstances what that thing exactly is.
Addiction isn't a mental illness the same way schizophrenia is, but that doesn't mean people who cause serious harm on their own lives shouldn't be helped, it's just that the treatment is different.
There is a grey area on the border of medicine whether a specific condition could be approached medically or not.
To go on a hyperbole, even though I think religious people are stupid for believing without evidence, I don't think I'd like to live in a society where religion would be called a medical condition (unless of course society at large got rid of religion and being religious would be finally synonymous with seriously believing a small dragon lives under your bed - then believing in religion would be an indication of a serious mental problem), because beliefs that ultimately cause people to be more miserable or actions that cause people to be more miserable aren't necessarily medical, even though they have a negative effect on the person.
There are personal problems that are in the gray area, it requires a non-trivial consensus to reach before it can be decided whether the problem should treated with drugs or not. I guess the problem at large is connected to the larger question, "If we could make everyone artificially happy, should we do it?". Medically, it might be possible, but for me that's a life not worth living.
...but Monica Lewinsky doesn't count!
Bill Foster hacked their speech generators!
...and somehow the results were counted very fast!