The United States has been the global leader in medical devices, one of the few major industries that both boasts a net trade surplus and is a job-creator. The sector employs 400,000 Americans directly and is indirectly responsible for almost 2 million more that supply and support the highly-skilled workforce. Most important, its products are essential elements of modern medical care, including everything from CT scanners and pacemakers to blood pressure cuffs and robots used by surgeons.
But all of that is in jeopardy. The medical device industry is being ravaged by unwise public policy, including a devastating 2.3% excise tax took effect on Jan 1 as part of ObamaCare. This tax, which has already required the payment of more than $1 billion by device manufacturers, is especially pernicious because it is assessed on gross sales, not profits. To put this in perspective, imagine that you’re a manufacturer of medical devices and had a profit of $100,000 on sales of $1 million after all your costs and expenses—everything from materials and labor to research. The excise tax would be $23,000, wiping out almost a quarter of your profits......
The nation’s medical device industry is vulnerable. It is not comprised of behemoths: 80% of its companies have 50 or fewer employees, the very businesses we are relying on to turn the U.S. economy around. The new excise tax comes on top of increased stringency and delays at both the FDA and the U.S. Patent Office, and at the same time that many device firms are shutting down or moving abroad to take advantage of the more favorable tax and regulatory climate in Europe. The tax is forcing companies to lay off employees, cut back on research and development, and reduce capital investment.
One sector that is seeing a rapid investment drop is healthcare and devices. That has hurt the North Carolina VC industry harder than it hurt Boston. It’s also subject to some longer term trends. Obamacare has a medical device tax buried in it-and it has caused money to pull back from taking risk in healthcare while everything gets sorted out. The FDA is a horrible bureaucratic organization to deal with, and they have made it hard to innovate
Christ some of the folks around these parts don't know their heads from their asses - use the words encryption or privacy and they don't even listen or understand wtf is being talked about they just automatically jump to tired fear mongering rhetoric.
Eshkol went ahead to create the settlement anyway, and therefore set the conditions which began the Movement for Greater Israel and Israel's settlement enterprise.
"Movement for Greater Israel"? They kind of shot that to hell when they returned Sinai to Egypt, didn't they? (How much land was that compared to the territory of Israel proper?)
Richard Goldstone, the formerly respected South African jurist who disgraced himself by lending his name to a sinister and libelous U.N. report condemning Israel for war crimes, has now issued a very public retraction. “If I had known then what I know now,” he wrote in the Washington Post, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.” New information has persuaded him, he said, “that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” by Israel.......
For the better part of four years, Israel suffered more than 10,000 missile attacks against its civilians from Gaza. When it finally used military force to stop the attacks, Israel, in the words of British colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.”
All of this was not just knowable when Goldstone signed on as front man for the U.N. lynch mob, it was known. The Goldstone Report was intended, and has since been employed, to stigmatize any Israeli self-defense as a war crime.
People raised in a country were the government spies on its citizens, encourages selling people out, and kidnaps dissenters are more likely to lie for personal gain.
Interesting assertion. How about some evidence to support it? Obscuring disagreement with the government to avoid punishment is different from cheating for gain.
My guess is this is more an effect caused by Stasi, and not the communism/capitalism divide.
As far as I know, every communist country had oppressive secret police that engaged in many forms of repression. It is a practical necessity of the system. Not so capitalism, so if you want to attribute the cheating to the Stasi and repression it is related to the communist / capitalist divide.
On that day Bletchley Park was reading the "email" of the German government, having broken the Enigma code - a fragile achievement that could fairly easily be foiled, perhaps permanently.... if the Germans knew about it. As a result of breaking that code, and keeping it secret that it had broken the code, the rights of the German government and people were trampled. The trampling of the rights of the German government and people in that fashion meant that Britain would not be starved into submission by submarine warfare, and ultimately the Allies would win the war. That meant that the trampling of the rights, including the right to live, of the people of Western and Eastern Europe by the then Nazi German government would come to an end.
Beyond that, the ability of the UK and US to read Enigma type machine encrypted messages carried over into the Cold War (which at various points nearly flared into a shooting war, including nuclear war) and played a role in helping the West obtain the intelligence necessary to defeat Soviet Communism which killed far more people than the Nazis did.
So, would-be traitor, is that still a good day for treason for you, knowing that Britain would likely have been starved into submission in WW2, the Nazis might have held on, and Soviet Communism might have lived on indefinitely? Many millions more would have been killed, several genocides would likely have been completed, we might still be faced by both Nazi and Soviet regimes, but nobody would be trampling on the rights of the German people by reading their encrypted mail. But I take it you're OK with that since it is "any day," right?
Just curious.
Isn't there an April 1st coming next year? And the year after that? What battles might be lost then?
So, who will be auditing Snowden's code? I wouldn't even consider using anything he wrote without independent third party audits.... lots of audits of the code, design, algorithms, everything. And no binaries that he builds.
Imagine the evasive power of the dual or triple functionality achieved by some of the Obfuscated C content entries combined with the subtle designs of Russian government cryptographers. No threat there, no sir.
Delusional? The NSA is violating people's rights and the highest law of the land...
Prove it. Prove that their actions are unconstitutional. It is often claimed, but the proof never seems to come. Where is the final court decision that says so? Where is the final court decision that says the Congress, the Executive branch, and all prior court decisions are wrong? Or is it "proved" by assertion only, proof by rhetoric?
You are a citizen who cares more about your children's survival than the survival of Freedom and the well being of millions. In other words you aren't merely part of the problem, you are the problem.
As is common on Slashdot your histrionics are popular, but it is pure demagoguery. Who are these "millions" whose "well being" you claim are at risk? Hmmm? Who? How is their “well being” at risk?
And what freedom is in danger of not “surviving?”
Your entire post is rubbish and it is a mark of how rare thoughtful moderation is that it is so high.
He gave up his girlfriend and cushy job, he exposed clear evidence of violation of international treaties and the US Constitution by the world's dominant superpower, and then he endured being stuck in the Moscow Airport (there isn't enough Prozac in the world to make this OK) and is now stuck in Russia, which I assure you, is a severe downgrade from Hawaii.
Since it sounds like he really hasn't been in touch with her it looks more like he dumped his girlfriend. Why hasn't he invited his girlfriend to Russia? He has stated that the only reason he took his "cushy job" was to steal classified documents: Snowden to newspaper: I took contractor job to gather evidence Snowden couldn't be found in the airport for long stretches of time. Perhaps he was resting in a Russian supplied suite? The simple truth is we know next to nothing about Snowden's living conditions in Russia, other than he is being protected by the FSB, who has no doubt had many chats with him, and his spokesman is on the FSB's public committee and a friend of Putin.
You'd have a great point if there were any reason we could trust the NSA.
You'd have a great point if there was any reason we could trust Snowden, a man who lied to friends, family, girlfriend, coworkers and the government to steal top secret documents and flee the country. The fact that he as leaked top secret documents doesn't make him trustworthy.
Now can you pretend that George Washington was a spymaster that ran a spy ring that spied on both the British and other colonists, and that Benjamin Franklin opened the mail of other colonists for intelligence purposes to aid the war effort? Well, you don't have to pretend, they actually did it.
You seem to "know" a lot of things that aren't true.
The gathering of phone metadata by NSA may be disagreeable, but it isn't a "general warrant." Since a court is supervising it and Congress has authorized it, you seem to be on weak ground as to what is constitutional. I disagree with you since you are making a variety of fundamental errors, including the suggestion that I would rather be living in North Korea.
I'm still waiting for this list of "fundamental freedoms" that have been lost.
You should look into the history of privacy in the Constitution. It is just one more thing you don't have a good handle on.
Isn't it... "odd"... that Snowden could manage to steal 1.7 million documents, but apparently didn't manage to get copies of his own emails showing his alleged attempts to raise the issues through official channels? Now I wonder why that might be?
You don't think it could be because even if he did "raise the issue" of legality he was given the reasons why they were legal and chose to steal the documents anyway?
No moon or cheese there, and you have no answer for it, hence the name calling by you. Ta ta.
a) Because when I suspect my employer of illegal wrong doing doing I always write an email? Oh, wait, no, we're trained that those sorts of inquiries are supposed to go through channels without permanent records for legal liability reasons. You can argue that that's a bad thing, but that's reality in a LOT of places.
Snowden said he wrote emails that he can't produce despite taking almost two million documents. You can't explain that away since you are directly challenging him.
b) While I'm sure he'd have been capable of snagging his email, maybe it simply didn't occur to him.
And yet it occurred to him to steal documents on intelligence operations by Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Sweden, and other places? All this while intending to make the claim that he was a "whistle blower" on the US? And he forget the whistle he claims to have blown, repeatedly, while there? That doesn't wash.
If your argument is that Snowden didn't keep and release them because they would contradict and harm his 'narrative', then why is the NSA not bending over backwards to get them out there?
Maybe because they don't exist? Or they discuss classified programs that are still classified?
The NSA should be happy to provide us with such a relevant record that details their dutiful adherence to the law, and how they conscientiously explained to Snowden why he was mistaken in raising concerns.
I expect that the NSA has done that in the proper forums for discussing classified matters: in meetings with the administration, in closed sessions of Congress, and before the courts in closed hearings.
And if you really believe what what the NSA was doing was legal, how do you reconcile that with the general consensus that a great deal of what they were doing was not, in fact, legal.
Which "general consensus" is that? The one on Slashdot? Do you really need me to answer that for you?
Since you want to limit this to the intent of the Founders, could you quote the section of the US Constitution that establishes the right to privacy? (Without resorting to the "penumbras" the judges relied upon.)
It isn't so much that I have been debunked as mod bombed. It isn't that I'm an authoritarian, it is that you misunderstand the Constitution, the law, and the views of the Founders. You are apparently a part of the "Americans must die bravely from terrorist bombings in shopping malls or we aren't free" crowd. Like many on Slashdot you probably confuse liberty with license, a topic you should probably look into as it was understood by the Founders.
Slashdot Mirror
Especially if you want to make things more appealing for the GLBT & W communities.
U.S. Medical Device Industry In Critical Condition
The United States has been the global leader in medical devices, one of the few major industries that both boasts a net trade surplus and is a job-creator. The sector employs 400,000 Americans directly and is indirectly responsible for almost 2 million more that supply and support the highly-skilled workforce. Most important, its products are essential elements of modern medical care, including everything from CT scanners and pacemakers to blood pressure cuffs and robots used by surgeons.
But all of that is in jeopardy. The medical device industry is being ravaged by unwise public policy, including a devastating 2.3% excise tax took effect on Jan 1 as part of ObamaCare. This tax, which has already required the payment of more than $1 billion by device manufacturers, is especially pernicious because it is assessed on gross sales, not profits. To put this in perspective, imagine that you’re a manufacturer of medical devices and had a profit of $100,000 on sales of $1 million after all your costs and expenses—everything from materials and labor to research. The excise tax would be $23,000, wiping out almost a quarter of your profits. .....
The nation’s medical device industry is vulnerable. It is not comprised of behemoths: 80% of its companies have 50 or fewer employees, the very businesses we are relying on to turn the U.S. economy around. The new excise tax comes on top of increased stringency and delays at both the FDA and the U.S. Patent Office, and at the same time that many device firms are shutting down or moving abroad to take advantage of the more favorable tax and regulatory climate in Europe. The tax is forcing companies to lay off employees, cut back on research and development, and reduce capital investment.
The Times They Are A Changing
One sector that is seeing a rapid investment drop is healthcare and devices. That has hurt the North Carolina VC industry harder than it hurt Boston. It’s also subject to some longer term trends. Obamacare has a medical device tax buried in it-and it has caused money to pull back from taking risk in healthcare while everything gets sorted out. The FDA is a horrible bureaucratic organization to deal with, and they have made it hard to innovate
Brilliant.
Christ some of the folks around these parts don't know their heads from their asses - use the words encryption or privacy and they don't even listen or understand wtf is being talked about they just automatically jump to tired fear mongering rhetoric.
I hadn't noticed.
Then Israel got big points all around. They weren't kicked out of any of those places, especially Sinai.
Great, you want to judge both sides impartially by international law, let's judge them by international law.
If you want to go that way you should be prepared for the possibility that international law won't be on your side. (Which I'm not sure you are.)
Are the Settlements Illegal?
Eshkol went ahead to create the settlement anyway, and therefore set the conditions which began the Movement for Greater Israel and Israel's settlement enterprise.
"Movement for Greater Israel"? They kind of shot that to hell when they returned Sinai to Egypt, didn't they? (How much land was that compared to the territory of Israel proper?)
2. Killing non-combatants
From the Goldstone Report:
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/...
The "Goldsone Report"?
Goldstone: You Cannot Undo a Slander
Richard Goldstone, the formerly respected South African jurist who disgraced himself by lending his name to a sinister and libelous U.N. report condemning Israel for war crimes, has now issued a very public retraction. “If I had known then what I know now,” he wrote in the Washington Post, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.” New information has persuaded him, he said, “that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” by Israel. ......
For the better part of four years, Israel suffered more than 10,000 missile attacks against its civilians from Gaza. When it finally used military force to stop the attacks, Israel, in the words of British colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.”
All of this was not just knowable when Goldstone signed on as front man for the U.N. lynch mob, it was known. The Goldstone Report was intended, and has since been employed, to stigmatize any Israeli self-defense as a war crime.
And Israel has demonstrated that they are dedicated to control of the entire region, through border expansion.
Like when Israel returned Sinai to Egypt? Pulled out of Gaza? Withdrew in Lebanon?
People raised in a country were the government spies on its citizens, encourages selling people out, and kidnaps dissenters are more likely to lie for personal gain.
Interesting assertion. How about some evidence to support it? Obscuring disagreement with the government to avoid punishment is different from cheating for gain.
My guess is this is more an effect caused by Stasi, and not the communism/capitalism divide.
As far as I know, every communist country had oppressive secret police that engaged in many forms of repression. It is a practical necessity of the system. Not so capitalism, so if you want to attribute the cheating to the Stasi and repression it is related to the communist / capitalist divide.
... I'd want to be a traitor any day...
Lets pick a specific day: April 1, 1940
On that day Bletchley Park was reading the "email" of the German government, having broken the Enigma code - a fragile achievement that could fairly easily be foiled, perhaps permanently .... if the Germans knew about it. As a result of breaking that code, and keeping it secret that it had broken the code, the rights of the German government and people were trampled. The trampling of the rights of the German government and people in that fashion meant that Britain would not be starved into submission by submarine warfare, and ultimately the Allies would win the war. That meant that the trampling of the rights, including the right to live, of the people of Western and Eastern Europe by the then Nazi German government would come to an end.
Beyond that, the ability of the UK and US to read Enigma type machine encrypted messages carried over into the Cold War (which at various points nearly flared into a shooting war, including nuclear war) and played a role in helping the West obtain the intelligence necessary to defeat Soviet Communism which killed far more people than the Nazis did.
So, would-be traitor, is that still a good day for treason for you, knowing that Britain would likely have been starved into submission in WW2, the Nazis might have held on, and Soviet Communism might have lived on indefinitely? Many millions more would have been killed, several genocides would likely have been completed, we might still be faced by both Nazi and Soviet regimes, but nobody would be trampling on the rights of the German people by reading their encrypted mail. But I take it you're OK with that since it is "any day," right?
Just curious.
Isn't there an April 1st coming next year? And the year after that? What battles might be lost then?
So, who will be auditing Snowden's code? I wouldn't even consider using anything he wrote without independent third party audits .... lots of audits of the code, design, algorithms, everything. And no binaries that he builds.
Imagine the evasive power of the dual or triple functionality achieved by some of the Obfuscated C content entries combined with the subtle designs of Russian government cryptographers. No threat there, no sir.
Delusional? The NSA is violating people's rights and the highest law of the land...
Prove it. Prove that their actions are unconstitutional. It is often claimed, but the proof never seems to come. Where is the final court decision that says so? Where is the final court decision that says the Congress, the Executive branch, and all prior court decisions are wrong? Or is it "proved" by assertion only, proof by rhetoric?
You are a citizen who cares more about your children's survival than the survival of Freedom and the well being of millions. In other words you aren't merely part of the problem, you are the problem.
As is common on Slashdot your histrionics are popular, but it is pure demagoguery. Who are these "millions" whose "well being" you claim are at risk? Hmmm? Who? How is their “well being” at risk?
And what freedom is in danger of not “surviving?”
Your entire post is rubbish and it is a mark of how rare thoughtful moderation is that it is so high.
Quoting the news is trolling? I think somebody doesn't understand moderation.
He gave up his girlfriend and cushy job, he exposed clear evidence of violation of international treaties and the US Constitution by the world's dominant superpower, and then he endured being stuck in the Moscow Airport (there isn't enough Prozac in the world to make this OK) and is now stuck in Russia, which I assure you, is a severe downgrade from Hawaii.
Since it sounds like he really hasn't been in touch with her it looks more like he dumped his girlfriend. Why hasn't he invited his girlfriend to Russia?
He has stated that the only reason he took his "cushy job" was to steal classified documents:
Snowden to newspaper: I took contractor job to gather evidence
Snowden couldn't be found in the airport for long stretches of time. Perhaps he was resting in a Russian supplied suite?
The simple truth is we know next to nothing about Snowden's living conditions in Russia, other than he is being protected by the FSB, who has no doubt had many chats with him, and his spokesman is on the FSB's public committee and a friend of Putin.
You'd have a great point if there were any reason we could trust the NSA.
You'd have a great point if there was any reason we could trust Snowden, a man who lied to friends, family, girlfriend, coworkers and the government to steal top secret documents and flee the country. The fact that he as leaked top secret documents doesn't make him trustworthy.
Just to protect us, obviously.
Obviously.
Now can you pretend that George Washington was a spymaster that ran a spy ring that spied on both the British and other colonists, and that Benjamin Franklin opened the mail of other colonists for intelligence purposes to aid the war effort? Well, you don't have to pretend, they actually did it.
You seem to "know" a lot of things that aren't true.
The gathering of phone metadata by NSA may be disagreeable, but it isn't a "general warrant." Since a court is supervising it and Congress has authorized it, you seem to be on weak ground as to what is constitutional. I disagree with you since you are making a variety of fundamental errors, including the suggestion that I would rather be living in North Korea.
I'm still waiting for this list of "fundamental freedoms" that have been lost.
You should look into the history of privacy in the Constitution. It is just one more thing you don't have a good handle on.
The Right of Privacy
Hmmm, looks like a (-1 inconvenient question) mod.
Let's look at what I wrote:
Isn't it ... "odd" ... that Snowden could manage to steal 1.7 million documents, but apparently didn't manage to get copies of his own emails showing his alleged attempts to raise the issues through official channels? Now I wonder why that might be?
You don't think it could be because even if he did "raise the issue" of legality he was given the reasons why they were legal and chose to steal the documents anyway?
No moon or cheese there, and you have no answer for it, hence the name calling by you. Ta ta.
And you'd be wrong. Pay up. (Donate to charity of your choice.)
Civil rights prosecutions or lawsuits often take place against private individuals or organizations.
So you don't have an argument? Just call names? Typical.
a) Because when I suspect my employer of illegal wrong doing doing I always write an email? Oh, wait, no, we're trained that those sorts of inquiries are supposed to go through channels without permanent records for legal liability reasons. You can argue that that's a bad thing, but that's reality in a LOT of places.
Snowden said he wrote emails that he can't produce despite taking almost two million documents. You can't explain that away since you are directly challenging him.
b) While I'm sure he'd have been capable of snagging his email, maybe it simply didn't occur to him.
And yet it occurred to him to steal documents on intelligence operations by Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Sweden, and other places? All this while intending to make the claim that he was a "whistle blower" on the US? And he forget the whistle he claims to have blown, repeatedly, while there? That doesn't wash.
If your argument is that Snowden didn't keep and release them because they would contradict and harm his 'narrative', then why is the NSA not bending over backwards to get them out there?
Maybe because they don't exist? Or they discuss classified programs that are still classified?
The NSA should be happy to provide us with such a relevant record that details their dutiful adherence to the law, and how they conscientiously explained to Snowden why he was mistaken in raising concerns.
I expect that the NSA has done that in the proper forums for discussing classified matters: in meetings with the administration, in closed sessions of Congress, and before the courts in closed hearings.
And if you really believe what what the NSA was doing was legal, how do you reconcile that with the general consensus that a great deal of what they were doing was not, in fact, legal.
Which "general consensus" is that? The one on Slashdot? Do you really need me to answer that for you?
Yes, Genn is a very busy man.
Glenn Greenwald enraged that Muslims with terror ties under surveillance
Nice try.
Since you want to limit this to the intent of the Founders, could you quote the section of the US Constitution that establishes the right to privacy? (Without resorting to the "penumbras" the judges relied upon.)
It isn't so much that I have been debunked as mod bombed. It isn't that I'm an authoritarian, it is that you misunderstand the Constitution, the law, and the views of the Founders. You are apparently a part of the "Americans must die bravely from terrorist bombings in shopping malls or we aren't free" crowd. Like many on Slashdot you probably confuse liberty with license, a topic you should probably look into as it was understood by the Founders.