Your position is based on a faulty presumption; it simply doesn't work.
No one is saying that someone who is actually raped suffers less than someone publicly identified as their rapist.
People are saying that someone who falsely accuses rape (which happens very, very frequently) doesn't suffer as much as the victim, who has done nothing legally wrong and just wants to go back to their life.
Unfortunately, they cannot.
As an undergraduate at RIT, I have a friend who was in a relationship with a woman. As relationships sometimes do in college, it died away after they had sex a few times; my friend had decided that he wanted something more than just sex, and since she didn't want to be in that kind of relationship, she left him.
The next morning, he was walking back from the bookstore; public safety showed up with three officers and a police car. They said his name, and he responded with a groan (he was the RA, and there had been some drinking the last week that he had to break up) and a "what's up". He was taken to a room and asked where he was on a given date (incidentally, he had been at the hospital on that date for an injury that had happened during robotics club). He was then told that he was being accused of rape.
Before he was even *charged* with the act, he had to start defending himself to the college immediately. A student conduct hearing was scheduled, he had to move off campus immediately (as in, that night; he had to come back to his room under police and campus safety escort and get a small number of his belongings to take to a hotel which he had to pay for for 4 weeks until the hearing), and he was removed from his job, all classes and student activities, and his position as the RA pending the hearing.
Mind you, this is all BEFORE he has been charged.
The police verified that he was, in fact, at the hospital at the time (two days before they broke up); she quickly changed her story 7 or 8 times as this went on, to the point where the police told her not only that this wouldn't fly in court and that it was pretty obvious that she was lying. At his request, they filed their recommendation that the school that they find in the same fashion.
They didn't; they decided that "no conclusion could be found". He was kicked out of school. If you search for his name on Google (he has a rather unique name), the first thing you see is a bit in his home town paper saying that he was under arrest for rape.
If you think that his suffering was less than the suffering of the woman who put him through that, please, tell me how.
The issue is that although the medicine is fake the treatment is viable and effective. They only use this treatment for certain kinds of psychologically based conditions
How do you know that? If this is allowed to continue, there's an incredible financial incentive on the medical industry to pass of a prescription of a 90-day supply of $0.005 sugar pill as a $2.50 pill ($1.35 versus $675 for a 90-day prescription of my most expensive medication). That's a huge profit margin for them.
No, people going to the doctor for things like a cold should be told to go home, rest, and take some dayquil. Those general practitioners, who are the PCPs for a great many people, should be dealing with their patients serious problems, not coddling everyone with a sore throat and a runny nose.
If that were true, I don't think this would be as much of an issue.
"If you are doing music work, you aren't too interested in the display. You do have to carry it around, and be able to put it in a cramped space at the back of the studio."
I'm sorry, but I have a hard time thinking tolerances for a whole studio, are so tight that the difference between a 13" and a 15" is gonna make that much difference......
What about the rest of us who have treatable medical conditions? Are we supposed to go through extra appointments and pay extra money just so I can get by the initial "Here's some fake treatment" phase?
Do you really think its ethical to charge people for this, when it isn't a viable, effective form of treatment?
I would like to know the funding behind this study, as I have seen this all over of late. It seems as though the goal is to "get the word out" to people that there is a chance their doctor is prescribing them a placebo, which is entirely possible of course because it is an accepted medical fact that placebo's work on 33% of all medical complaints.
The word SHOULD be getting out. It's entirely unacceptable to forgo real treatment. Are you seriously saying it's perfectly acceptable to do nothing based on a statistic? You really want to leave people screaming in pain in the emergency room while you tell them they're getting treatment when they're really not? What about when the nurse forgets to write somewhere that the IV labeled "Hydromorphone 10ml" is really just saline, and you continue to writhe around in pain while everyone tells you that you can't have any more "hydromorphone" because you've already had the full dose.
It seems to me that the party most interested in reversing or minimizing this would be drug companies who are sick of the placebo effect working and are wanting Doctor's to prescribe whatever the latest brand name drug is. Consumer and patient (often the same person, mind you) is a huge factor, and if people stop trusting their Doctor's and start trusting these sorts of studies or even advertisement, then the effectiveness of placebo treatment will inevitably decline.. In it's place, a placebo effect caused by ineffective brand name medications.
Good. I'll trust whoever is going to give me real treatment for my condition. I have fibromyalgia; if I have a choice between getting sugar pills from my doctor or getting actual treatment for my debilitating neuropathic pain, you bet I'm going to want to be paying the $27 copay on my $3-a-pill perscription to actually get something worth that that will help.
As incredible as it sounds, some people actually NEED treatment for their medical conditions rather than "Here, take this fake version of the pill for your condition".
If it works, what is the big deal? Doctor's should be prescribing placebo medications (excepting, of course, antibiotics).
You say that now. Will you still say that when you get prescribed a placebo for pain for your kidneystone, complain that your "percocet" isn't working, get labeled a drug addict on your records and can't get any kind of meaningful pain treatment for the rest of your life?
That's all well and good, up to the point where someone who is sick gets sicker and sicker because they keep getting prescribed placebo versions of medicines and telling specialist after specialist that they've been taking the medications they were told they were taking, not knowing that they were receiving fake versions of it.
This is a terrible, terrible idea and should be made illegal as soon as possible.
I have fibromyalgia. This requires me to take 300mg of preglabin a day. There is no generic. A five day supply, if I didn't have insurance, would cost me a little over $200. That's $1200 a month. I'm a college student, I certainly can't find that kind of money.
Earlier this month, I had a kidneystone; three ER visits before it got under control. ($4,151 each, according to the bill): $12,453 The surgery was $7,162. The surgery to remove the stent they had put in was $6,812.
So, this month, healthcare has cost me $27,627. I can barely afford my deductible; you really think people can pay that kind of cash out of pocket?
Think in computer terms. You can't block spam, spam, and only spam. Sometimes you have to block non-spam to catch most of the spam, or you block nothing but the most obvious spam, and still have a trashed inbox.
The two are nothing alike.
When you're filtering spam, you aren't dealing with a person's personal belongings worth at the very least a few dollars plus the contents of the hard drive, which is priceless.
You aren't dealing with something that makes or breaks someones livelihood, you're dealing with something with an email. The two are absolutely nothing alike,and while I'll accept a high false positive rate and a high success rate with spam filtering, I'm not going to accept a high false positive rate with a system that deprives me of physical property and my livelihood for at least 24 hours without any reason.
Better yet, they should detail their "reasonable suspicion" on a warrant beforehand and give it to a judge to decide whether or not their suspicion really is reasonable.
en-wiki editor here.
While we haven't enabled the extension on the english wikipedia yet, there have been some discussions about using sighted revisions for purposes other than vandalism. Some people don't like the idea of credentialism, but some other people have been considering changing the requirements of the surveyor group and only give it to people who can prove their expertise in some field to the foundation.
It isn't perfect, but it would be a step in the general direction that the OP seems to want to go.
Actually, this is all pretty much doable within the mediawiki environment at this point. It's been enabled in the german wikipedia, but not the english one; the Flagged revisions extension allows a specific version of an article to be flagged, and the approved versions as 'sighted'; there can be more than one of them in the history, but non-logged in users will always see the recent one.
This was developed after part of a big discussion at Wikimania 2006; basically, the idea was that sighted revisions would mark something as free from vandalism/of relatively good quality, but it could conceivably be used for something like this, as well.
"As for switching plates, yeah, that's suspicious, but there are legitimate reasons for doing that too. Say the car got sold or something. (In [wikipedia.org] some [wikipedia.org] places [wikipedia.org], the plates are for a person, not a car, your jurisdiction may vary.)"
It's easy for law enforcement to run the tags and verify if they are legit. As for using a bong to smoke tobacco, that probability in the US would be vanishingly small.
I use both a bong and a hookah to smoke tobacco, and I live in the US...
Perhaps there should be no commenting for 5/10/15/20/30 minutes after a story is posted. That would mean people "might as well" RTFA, and I think we'd get more comments, that were longer, better thought out, and more insightful/interesting.
Your ideas intrigue me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I don't have any problem with musicians getting a few bucks for their work. I can do that through eMusic, to which I have a subscription that I enjoy very much.
Unfortunately, that isn't what happens with the RIAA, etc. What happens is that the distributors grease their pockets with above 90% of the profits, taking steps to prevent the consumer from using the product they've purchased how they want (on multiple devices, etc), and even installing rootkits with music cds.
With no market selling a safe, usable product, what do you expect people to do?
In P2P file sharing, copyright infringement is taking place. It is almost certainly NOT fair use.
All of the times I have downloaded music via torrents, I either already own the piece that it was ripped from, or the music was licensed in such a way that this form of distribution was allowed.
Fair use says (or it should, at any rate; it may not have been tested in courts yet) I can have a copy of my music that isn't encumbered with DRM crapware; if I've bought my music outright, then I'm sure as hell entitled to play it on anything I want--not just in itunes and on my iPod Touch.
The RIAA wants you to believe that you need extra licenses to play it on your computers if you have more than 4 of them, that it is reasonable to have to deal with these measures.
Its sad that they've managed to convince you that these are reasonable measures, but I'm not so easily persuaded.
Not everybody has the coding skills needed to fix problems with Linux, Gnome, KDE or whatever program is giving them trouble. Of those who do, most of them have jobs that take up most of their time, and such things as eating, sleeping, and other personal maintenance tasks take up most of their Copious Free Time. Even if they did try to fix a bug, it would take them a long time -- weeks at least, if not months -- to familiarize themselves sufficiently with the code to do any good. Complaining publicly about the bugs, preferably in a forum that the developers follow, is probably the most effective use of their time. YMMV, but if so, how many times have you dug into the source code of a FOSS program you're not involved in developing and patched a bug?
A few times, actually; I've done it with d4x, pan pidgin, the first because of the way that it was handling URLs from rapidshare incorrectly, the second because I didn't like some of the default interface behaviors, and the third because I wanted a better way to manage the logs.
Granted, we're not talking about a kernel here, but its one of the great things about open source.
Both KOTOR and its sequel were absolutely wonderful single-player games.
I'd been playing through KOTOR II on the PC recently (good luck achieving that on Vista; you have to replace a bunch of dlls in the game directory to get sound to work); the storyline, the influence system, everything is just absolutely spectacular.
I'd really hate to see it become another crappy MMO; I just want to be able to sit down at the end of the day and pretend to be a leet Jedi for a while. Turning that into an MMO really ruins that if you don't have the time to commit to the damn thing.
Ritz was not an authoritative name server, a DNS server, nor any kind of computer at the time he accessed Sierra's computer. Ritz has never been an employee, agent, or network administrator for Sierra.
I'm usually not a computer the times I access other computer. I mean, there was that time when I was assimilated, but...
Slashdot Mirror
Your position is based on a faulty presumption; it simply doesn't work.
No one is saying that someone who is actually raped suffers less than someone publicly identified as their rapist.
People are saying that someone who falsely accuses rape (which happens very, very frequently) doesn't suffer as much as the victim, who has done nothing legally wrong and just wants to go back to their life.
Unfortunately, they cannot.
As an undergraduate at RIT, I have a friend who was in a relationship with a woman. As relationships sometimes do in college, it died away after they had sex a few times; my friend had decided that he wanted something more than just sex, and since she didn't want to be in that kind of relationship, she left him.
The next morning, he was walking back from the bookstore; public safety showed up with three officers and a police car. They said his name, and he responded with a groan (he was the RA, and there had been some drinking the last week that he had to break up) and a "what's up". He was taken to a room and asked where he was on a given date (incidentally, he had been at the hospital on that date for an injury that had happened during robotics club). He was then told that he was being accused of rape.
Before he was even *charged* with the act, he had to start defending himself to the college immediately. A student conduct hearing was scheduled, he had to move off campus immediately (as in, that night; he had to come back to his room under police and campus safety escort and get a small number of his belongings to take to a hotel which he had to pay for for 4 weeks until the hearing), and he was removed from his job, all classes and student activities, and his position as the RA pending the hearing.
Mind you, this is all BEFORE he has been charged.
The police verified that he was, in fact, at the hospital at the time (two days before they broke up); she quickly changed her story 7 or 8 times as this went on, to the point where the police told her not only that this wouldn't fly in court and that it was pretty obvious that she was lying. At his request, they filed their recommendation that the school that they find in the same fashion.
They didn't; they decided that "no conclusion could be found". He was kicked out of school. If you search for his name on Google (he has a rather unique name), the first thing you see is a bit in his home town paper saying that he was under arrest for rape.
If you think that his suffering was less than the suffering of the woman who put him through that, please, tell me how.
Verizon's already got that covered. Don't worry about it.
Damn. Why am I paying to be a product?
The issue is that although the medicine is fake the treatment is viable and effective. They only use this treatment for certain kinds of psychologically based conditions
How do you know that? If this is allowed to continue, there's an incredible financial incentive on the medical industry to pass of a prescription of a 90-day supply of $0.005 sugar pill as a $2.50 pill ($1.35 versus $675 for a 90-day prescription of my most expensive medication). That's a huge profit margin for them.
No, people going to the doctor for things like a cold should be told to go home, rest, and take some dayquil. Those general practitioners, who are the PCPs for a great many people, should be dealing with their patients serious problems, not coddling everyone with a sore throat and a runny nose.
If that were true, I don't think this would be as much of an issue.
"If you are doing music work, you aren't too interested in the display. You do have to carry it around, and be able to put it in a cramped space at the back of the studio."
I'm sorry, but I have a hard time thinking tolerances for a whole studio, are so tight that the difference between a 13" and a 15" is gonna make that much difference......
You obviously haven't been to very many studios.
Good for those people.
What about the rest of us who have treatable medical conditions? Are we supposed to go through extra appointments and pay extra money just so I can get by the initial "Here's some fake treatment" phase?
Do you really think its ethical to charge people for this, when it isn't a viable, effective form of treatment?
I would like to know the funding behind this study, as I have seen this all over of late. It seems as though the goal is to "get the word out" to people that there is a chance their doctor is prescribing them a placebo, which is entirely possible of course because it is an accepted medical fact that placebo's work on 33% of all medical complaints.
The word SHOULD be getting out. It's entirely unacceptable to forgo real treatment. Are you seriously saying it's perfectly acceptable to do nothing based on a statistic? You really want to leave people screaming in pain in the emergency room while you tell them they're getting treatment when they're really not? What about when the nurse forgets to write somewhere that the IV labeled "Hydromorphone 10ml" is really just saline, and you continue to writhe around in pain while everyone tells you that you can't have any more "hydromorphone" because you've already had the full dose.
It seems to me that the party most interested in reversing or minimizing this would be drug companies who are sick of the placebo effect working and are wanting Doctor's to prescribe whatever the latest brand name drug is. Consumer and patient (often the same person, mind you) is a huge factor, and if people stop trusting their Doctor's and start trusting these sorts of studies or even advertisement, then the effectiveness of placebo treatment will inevitably decline.. In it's place, a placebo effect caused by ineffective brand name medications.
Good. I'll trust whoever is going to give me real treatment for my condition. I have fibromyalgia; if I have a choice between getting sugar pills from my doctor or getting actual treatment for my debilitating neuropathic pain, you bet I'm going to want to be paying the $27 copay on my $3-a-pill perscription to actually get something worth that that will help.
As incredible as it sounds, some people actually NEED treatment for their medical conditions rather than "Here, take this fake version of the pill for your condition".
If it works, what is the big deal? Doctor's should be prescribing placebo medications (excepting, of course, antibiotics).
You say that now. Will you still say that when you get prescribed a placebo for pain for your kidneystone, complain that your "percocet" isn't working, get labeled a drug addict on your records and can't get any kind of meaningful pain treatment for the rest of your life?
That's all well and good, up to the point where someone who is sick gets sicker and sicker because they keep getting prescribed placebo versions of medicines and telling specialist after specialist that they've been taking the medications they were told they were taking, not knowing that they were receiving fake versions of it.
This is a terrible, terrible idea and should be made illegal as soon as possible.
I have fibromyalgia. This requires me to take 300mg of preglabin a day. There is no generic. A five day supply, if I didn't have insurance, would cost me a little over $200. That's $1200 a month. I'm a college student, I certainly can't find that kind of money.
Earlier this month, I had a kidneystone; three ER visits before it got under control. ($4,151 each, according to the bill): $12,453 The surgery was $7,162. The surgery to remove the stent they had put in was $6,812.
So, this month, healthcare has cost me $27,627. I can barely afford my deductible; you really think people can pay that kind of cash out of pocket?
Think in computer terms. You can't block spam, spam, and only spam. Sometimes you have to block non-spam to catch most of the spam, or you block nothing but the most obvious spam, and still have a trashed inbox.
The two are nothing alike.
When you're filtering spam, you aren't dealing with a person's personal belongings worth at the very least a few dollars plus the contents of the hard drive, which is priceless.
You aren't dealing with something that makes or breaks someones livelihood, you're dealing with something with an email. The two are absolutely nothing alike,and while I'll accept a high false positive rate and a high success rate with spam filtering, I'm not going to accept a high false positive rate with a system that deprives me of physical property and my livelihood for at least 24 hours without any reason.
Better yet, they should detail their "reasonable suspicion" on a warrant beforehand and give it to a judge to decide whether or not their suspicion really is reasonable.
en-wiki editor here. While we haven't enabled the extension on the english wikipedia yet, there have been some discussions about using sighted revisions for purposes other than vandalism. Some people don't like the idea of credentialism, but some other people have been considering changing the requirements of the surveyor group and only give it to people who can prove their expertise in some field to the foundation. It isn't perfect, but it would be a step in the general direction that the OP seems to want to go.
Actually, this is all pretty much doable within the mediawiki environment at this point. It's been enabled in the german wikipedia, but not the english one; the Flagged revisions extension allows a specific version of an article to be flagged, and the approved versions as 'sighted'; there can be more than one of them in the history, but non-logged in users will always see the recent one.
This was developed after part of a big discussion at Wikimania 2006; basically, the idea was that sighted revisions would mark something as free from vandalism/of relatively good quality, but it could conceivably be used for something like this, as well.
"As for switching plates, yeah, that's suspicious, but there are legitimate reasons for doing that too. Say the car got sold or something. (In [wikipedia.org] some [wikipedia.org] places [wikipedia.org], the plates are for a person, not a car, your jurisdiction may vary.)"
It's easy for law enforcement to run the tags and verify if they are legit. As for using a bong to smoke tobacco, that probability in the US would be vanishingly small.
I use both a bong and a hookah to smoke tobacco, and I live in the US...
Perhaps there should be no commenting for 5/10/15/20/30 minutes after a story is posted. That would mean people "might as well" RTFA, and I think we'd get more comments, that were longer, better thought out, and more insightful/interesting.
Your ideas intrigue me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I don't have any problem with musicians getting a few bucks for their work. I can do that through eMusic, to which I have a subscription that I enjoy very much.
Unfortunately, that isn't what happens with the RIAA, etc. What happens is that the distributors grease their pockets with above 90% of the profits, taking steps to prevent the consumer from using the product they've purchased how they want (on multiple devices, etc), and even installing rootkits with music cds.
With no market selling a safe, usable product, what do you expect people to do?
So the solution is to pass on the cost to everyone else rather than deal with the problematic element until the copyright system can be fixed?
In P2P file sharing, copyright infringement is taking place. It is almost certainly NOT fair use.
All of the times I have downloaded music via torrents, I either already own the piece that it was ripped from, or the music was licensed in such a way that this form of distribution was allowed.
Fair use says (or it should, at any rate; it may not have been tested in courts yet) I can have a copy of my music that isn't encumbered with DRM crapware; if I've bought my music outright, then I'm sure as hell entitled to play it on anything I want--not just in itunes and on my iPod Touch.
The RIAA wants you to believe that you need extra licenses to play it on your computers if you have more than 4 of them, that it is reasonable to have to deal with these measures.
Its sad that they've managed to convince you that these are reasonable measures, but I'm not so easily persuaded.
Wow, he really hit the jackpot with that one, didn't he? He hit both the "Protect the children" and the "Oh noes terrorism" crowds with that one.
Naturally; I can see where many consumers would have trouble with the advanced mathematics involved in the process of ... ... ... counting ... ... ...
Where are these women that you speak of?
Not everybody has the coding skills needed to fix problems with Linux, Gnome, KDE or whatever program is giving them trouble. Of those who do, most of them have jobs that take up most of their time, and such things as eating, sleeping, and other personal maintenance tasks take up most of their Copious Free Time. Even if they did try to fix a bug, it would take them a long time -- weeks at least, if not months -- to familiarize themselves sufficiently with the code to do any good. Complaining publicly about the bugs, preferably in a forum that the developers follow, is probably the most effective use of their time. YMMV, but if so, how many times have you dug into the source code of a FOSS program you're not involved in developing and patched a bug?
A few times, actually; I've done it with d4x, pan pidgin, the first because of the way that it was handling URLs from rapidshare incorrectly, the second because I didn't like some of the default interface behaviors, and the third because I wanted a better way to manage the logs.
Granted, we're not talking about a kernel here, but its one of the great things about open source.
Both KOTOR and its sequel were absolutely wonderful single-player games.
I'd been playing through KOTOR II on the PC recently (good luck achieving that on Vista; you have to replace a bunch of dlls in the game directory to get sound to work); the storyline, the influence system, everything is just absolutely spectacular.
I'd really hate to see it become another crappy MMO; I just want to be able to sit down at the end of the day and pretend to be a leet Jedi for a while. Turning that into an MMO really ruins that if you don't have the time to commit to the damn thing.