However, your idea that regular checkups should not be paid out of insurance is wrong.
Nothing (should) stop an insurance company from offering lower rates to those who agree to get regular checkups (at their own expense) if such checkups really help (note that for people who believe themselves to be healthy, there is debate about the cost effectiveness of annual checkups). Not much different than an auto insurance company giving a lower rate to those who have completed (at their own expense) a "safe driving" program. Paying for a periodic checkup is a completely predictable expense -- just like paying the electrical bill.
Certainly you wouldn't expect the doctors (anesthesiologist and the OR doc) to cost $125/hour? It's hard to find a software consultant to work for that -- and they don't even need a license or many years of additional expensive education and residency.
You also seem to have left out all the nursing staff (including one or two OR nurses).
You also need to factor in the facilities cost, payroll costs (including payroll taxes and, yes, health insurance for staff), and administrative costs. Also, don't forget, someone had to restock and clean the OR. Oh, and someone had to transcribe the medical record.
You also need to factor in the malpractice insurance. If this procedure had gone wrong somewhere and left your kid even slightly disabled, the doctor's/hospital's malpractice insurance would have had to pay thousands of dollars just to prepare to defend themselves, would probably end up paying out a "cost of defense" settlement of tens of thousands of dollars just because it would be cheaper than defending themselves, and if you found a sympathetic jury, the malpractice insurance might have to pay out hundreds of thousands (after all, your kid was an avid participant in $ACTIVITY which s/he can no longer excel at so their dreams of pursuing a professional career doing $ACTIVITY are now dashed).
Agreed that $10K sounds a little high, but $500 is absurdly low -- I wouldn't be surprised if that barely covered the sum total of all the malpractice insurance carried by those involved in your kid's care while caring for him/her.
I suspect the (I believe unfounded) accusations of libertarians being racist/homophobic are that libertarians don't think a government should have any say in who one associates with, hires, promotes, or fires -- even if the only reason for these decisions is the other individual's race, religion, gender, sexual preferences, weight, height, eye color, or shirt color. This can be confusing for those that don't understand the difference between supporting the right of an individual to make a decisions vs. supporting all such decisions an individual might make.
For example, a libertarian would support the right to smoke dope -- even if they don't choose to do so themselves or even choose to refuse to associate with those who do so. This doesn't make the libertarian "pro drug".
I've never figured out why this is so hard for some liberals and conservatives to understand about libertarians.
However, some studies show that masturbation is actually healthy for men. Even more healthy than sexual intercourse due to the elimination of STD transmission risk.
Maybe distributing porn is a cheap way for the government to reduce health care costs - perhaps the IRS could include each taxpayer's "government porn allotment" with tax refund checks. (Warning: be very careful when opening your tax refund check - make sure it's really yours, not your neighbors who checked the 'midget amputee horse' preference box on his tax return). Perhaps this could be part of the next stimulus package (although, some of the talent may be best hired overseas to meet all taxpayers' needs - I'd imagine if one likes Swedish women, one can find the highest quality in Sweden - just due to the size of the pool).
I find too many development organizations don't understand that an organization can't test quality into a product, it must be designed and implemented into a product.
Also, too many QA organizations evaluate, to some extent, testers (by that, I mean those who develop tests) by the number of bugs they find. What QA testers should be evaluated on to a great extent is how many "severity adjusted" bugs the customer finds in the tested feature as a ratio of how many bugs the tests found during QA (crappy code, even with a good QA cycle, will still be crappy in the field as not every case can be tested and software "learns" to pass tests).
Of course the developer is most responsible, and should be held so (this is one reason I believe strongly in code ownership). However, the code reviewer should also be held nearly as equally responsible for bugs as the coder.
I was referring to eldavojohn's upthread comment which asserted:
Aside from the veritable goldmine of easily disputed points you afforded me [...]
yet failed to even identify those "easily disputed" points, let alone cite any references to dispute them. Instead, eldavojohn seems to just hope we will take his/her statement as factual without any support.
For eldavojohn to then complain about Runaway1956 not citing references seems hypocritical to me. eldavojohn was certainly free to simply omit his factual claim that the points were easily disputed (with no evidence to that effect), and hypocrisy would have not been an issue.
My points about other species was simply to point out that people with common sense freely do accept (I think without a cite) that males and females of some, perhaps many, species do differ in the drive and willingness to take risks to be "top dog". Thus, I merely meant to express (apparently inelegantly) that someone who believed that humans were not that different from other "advanced" (by a parochial definition) species might, based on personal observation, think it is the case that male and female humans, on the average, have different innate competitive drives.
I agree that it would be ideal to have cites to support the assertion about humans. I must admit I took (perhaps incorrectly) Runaway1956's absolute statement of "fact" as a bit of intentional hyperbole as we all know ethics prevents us from running the controlled studies necessary to actually resolve this issue. Ethics boards are, for example, unlikely to approve a study which isolates newborns from direct human contact and raises several isolated communities of them under observation, perhaps for a few generations, to see if in the absence of cultural biases if the males are more/less competitive (by some pre approved criteria) than the females.
Good point. We should probably pay men in primary or secondary education, nursing, and child care more than women. Keep increasing the premium until the gender ratio is balanced. I'll bet there are quite a few men who would be willing to teach snotty nosed kindergartners for $150K/nine month school year.
Interestingly, men seem to take risks, even "no win" stupid ones, much more often than women (sorry, no peer reviewed citation for this impression).
For example, most recipients of Darwin Awards are men - why? Females are badly underrepresented - indeed, of the six nominees on the front page as I write this, only TWO seem to be female - THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS, women don't even get to compete for the award in equal numbers -- let alone win in equal proportion to their gender. The UN must pass a resolution immediately that more women must be encouraged, perhaps mandated, to do stupid life- (or at least gonad-) threatening things.
I really don't see much bitterness towards women here.
I do see a fair amount of self deprecating gender humor (memes about/.ers not having girlfriends or all being virgins etc.) - but these don't seem bitter. It's true that here and there one finds bitter posts that could probably be reasonably summarized as "gorgeous women are stuck up selfish egotists who, unfairly to me, always choose to date men who can discuss something other than how awesome their Star Trek figurines collection is or how awesome their code is and how $LANGUAGE_OF_CHOICE is way cool and anyone who uses $UNFAVORED_LANGUAGE is an idiot -- and I refuse to date anyone but a 'gorgeous' woman". But I suspect most readers see the latter posts for what they are - defensive musings of a failed social misfit who chooses to spend his time being a "victim" imagining a fantasy world he would like to live in rather than spending his time adapting to the world he actually lives in.
If one wants to find bitter posts on/., one only has to look at posts about H1Bs by Americans chose to ride the gravy train rather than compete and learn -- and now regret this decision and won't admit the situation they are in is their own fault. Now those posts get bitter sometimes!
You chide others for failing to cite references, but you don't support your position with any references either. Remember,/. is not a peer reviewed journal, sometimes common sense can be used without citations.
I don't think it takes cites for observant and knowledgeable individuals to realize that in many "advanced" species there are substantial and obvious sex differences, both physical (even beyond simply reproductive organs) and behavioral. (Any more than one needs cites to suspect that an unprotected human will be severely affected by swimming in molten iron for an hour.)
For example, surely one would accept that substantial sex differences (both physical and behavioral) exist between male and female elephants? Or, for that matter, male and female elephant seals? Surely one doesn't believe that these, in some cases dramatic, differences are the result of some "old elephant [seal] good old boy network" that has been in place for perhaps millions of years and a bit of retraining could cause males and females of these species to become relatively indistinguishable in behavior in a few generations?
Similarly, no reasonable person would believe that there aren't physical differences between "typical" male and female humans. Even if one ignores reproductive organs, it's just a fact that men are physically bigger and stronger than women. Even an organ that seems likely to have a significant impact on behavior and personality, the human brain, seems not to have escaped sex differences between human males and females .
None of this is to say that, by nature, women wouldn't make better or worse CEOs than men -- I have no idea, but I suspect it depends on the field and the environment. But to assume that sex differences don't play a role and only societal (nurture) differences do seems naive and reminiscent of those who argue that humans are somehow special and created "differently" than other mammals by some deity.
Even worse is American pork!... because there has been such a drop in fat levels and the pieces are so closely trimmed.
Agreed.
Back in the 70's, I loved pork (roast, chops, anything) and even Mom's guiding principle of "Anything worth cooking is worth overcooking" left Porky the Supermarket Pig quite tasty. Indeed, pork was probably my favorite meat (a juicy pork roast - yum, yum).
Now, I rarely eat pork -- Porky the Skinny Supermarket Pig is nearly tasteless and one has to "do something" with it other than just toss it in the oven or on the grill to make it tasty -- and even then it doesn't have that nice flavor I remember because it tastes like whatever it was seasoned with, coated with, marinated in, or stuffed with.
I wish the hog and pig farming industry would figure out that there are some of us who eat fatty stuff because we like it, don't have cholesterol problems, work out, and limit our caloric intake -- and want "good pork" rather than "skinny tasteless pork". Perhaps introduce a "choice" vs. "prime" type of grading system for pork - "prime" beef costs a bit more but is widely available and much better -- why not the same for pork? Until the pork agribusiness figures this out, they won't get much of my business.
(I was so thrilled when my local CostCo started routinely having a couple of cuts of prime stakes at about $11/lb -- there's better steaks out there, but these are a great price performer).
Remarkably, it's my understanding that sometime between 1973 and 2010 some HTML tags such as <BR> and <P> were introduced. I've also heard these can even be used to format comments on/.
Why would someone ever let a minimum wage cleaning staff member into their server room without a trusted escort monitoring them? I've worked at commercial companies where rooms far less important were only unlocked and cleaned under the watchful eye of a trusted security staff member -- isn't that standard practice at big companies?
(Of course, I've also worked at small startups where nothing but the exterior doors had locks and every so often those just didn't get locked at night -- perhaps the attitude was that the code was really the only valuable asset and it was so bad that it would take longer to figure it out and use it than to just implement it from scratch.)
Although I certainly don't agree with a lot of their "content", their comment system is pretty spiffy.
The whole moderation thing is handled differently and the result of it is binary - "Hidden - REALLY, YOU CAN'T SEE IT" or, well, "Not Hidden", but that's really an editorial decision. Their decision is probably appropriate for their site, not so much for/.. (So, what is the correct way to end a sentence that doesn't ask a question but ends in/.? To put a double period results in a drooling slash...)
Their site is much faster and more obvious than/. and I'm sure the whole moderation level you want to see could easily be incorporated.
Their 'search for comments by xxx' function sucks, but hopefully that will be spiffed up in the upcoming DK4 version.
Although I support the space program in general, comparing NASA and the military is like comparing Red Delicious Apples and Road Apples. Both are actually impressive organizations (and, also, in some ways unimpressive) - but that's about where the similarity ends.
When discussing the "efficiency" of NASA, consider the claimed benefits and costs of the shuttle when serious development funding began vs. what it, now in its dying days, actually delivered. As I can quickly recall, the greatest legacy of the shuttles was putting Hubble up and then fixing it (the need for fixing of course, comes back to NASA efficiency) and then upgrading it/repairing it. Perhaps worth it, but then one needs to allocate much of the shuttle budget to the Hubble and then ask "was the Hubble worth that much?". I think it's unlikely that the Hubble will/has provide/ed us with information that is going to make human's lives substantially more tolerable in the next 100 years and, quite likely, never (since humans will become extinct at some point) - so, it's interesting and perhaps enlightening much as opera (the performing art, not the browser) may be to some people, but it hasn't cure diseases, prevented birth defects, or gotten people to stop killing people for religious reasons etc...
The military has the option of throwing money at a problem when they are at war in order to save lives TODAY -- so they do it and, sometimes that's isn't very efficient. Also, the military has the difficulty of their timetable being set by other parties (ranging from a twitchy fingered POTUS, through a foe building a nuke, to a foe developing and using an asymmetric weapon technique such as IEDs). Once they are at war or in a battle, they can't just regularly say "The weather is a bit cloudy, let's cancel the mission to extract our guys who are under fire - hopefully it will clear up in the next couple days" or "We just discovered that this O ring fails sometimes and results in an entire tank blowing up -- let's shutdown our entire ground based attack mechanisms for a couple years and get a commission together to study why this happened". Nope - they have to take more risks and, often, throw money at expensive duct tape to achieve their goal. (Much of the "unnecessary" inefficiency of the military originates in Washington D.C. in the halls of Congress and the WH of course).
Since the blood bank was on one side of the street and the hospital was on the other, the tube meant the people didn't have to cross the street with samples or bags.
But... Didn't that reduce the number of readily available organ donors?
In retrospect, counting on the rovers landing near some homeless Martians who would insist on cleaning the solar panels every time the rovers stopped may not have been the best plan.
Some ethernet NICs (multiple brands) back in the late 80's and early 90's made a similar high pitched sound when actually transmitting or receiving. People gave me some strange looks when I mentioned this, but on a quiet day/evening, I could tell if someone in the next cube was doing a lot of network IO - such as transferring a large file.
Although, if you look at the impact the individual has on the company, negative or positive, the pay is more proportional.
It's very hard, in a large company, for a single unintentional error in judgment on the part of a programmer to kill the company. The same is not true of the CEO. This is the primary reason they get so much more money -- the potential cost of their failures is so high and the impact of replacing them is so high that shareholders are willing to pay almost anything to get the best. The unfortunate part is that, like developers, it's pretty difficult to quite figure out what makes a great CEO. The best CEOs are probably underpaid, the average CEO is probably overpaid - just like developers.
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Nothing (should) stop an insurance company from offering lower rates to those who agree to get regular checkups (at their own expense) if such checkups really help (note that for people who believe themselves to be healthy, there is debate about the cost effectiveness of annual checkups). Not much different than an auto insurance company giving a lower rate to those who have completed (at their own expense) a "safe driving" program. Paying for a periodic checkup is a completely predictable expense -- just like paying the electrical bill.
Certainly you wouldn't expect the doctors (anesthesiologist and the OR doc) to cost $125/hour? It's hard to find a software consultant to work for that -- and they don't even need a license or many years of additional expensive education and residency.
You also seem to have left out all the nursing staff (including one or two OR nurses).
You also need to factor in the facilities cost, payroll costs (including payroll taxes and, yes, health insurance for staff), and administrative costs. Also, don't forget, someone had to restock and clean the OR. Oh, and someone had to transcribe the medical record.
You also need to factor in the malpractice insurance. If this procedure had gone wrong somewhere and left your kid even slightly disabled, the doctor's/hospital's malpractice insurance would have had to pay thousands of dollars just to prepare to defend themselves, would probably end up paying out a "cost of defense" settlement of tens of thousands of dollars just because it would be cheaper than defending themselves, and if you found a sympathetic jury, the malpractice insurance might have to pay out hundreds of thousands (after all, your kid was an avid participant in $ACTIVITY which s/he can no longer excel at so their dreams of pursuing a professional career doing $ACTIVITY are now dashed).
Agreed that $10K sounds a little high, but $500 is absurdly low -- I wouldn't be surprised if that barely covered the sum total of all the malpractice insurance carried by those involved in your kid's care while caring for him/her.
I suspect the (I believe unfounded) accusations of libertarians being racist/homophobic are that libertarians don't think a government should have any say in who one associates with, hires, promotes, or fires -- even if the only reason for these decisions is the other individual's race, religion, gender, sexual preferences, weight, height, eye color, or shirt color. This can be confusing for those that don't understand the difference between supporting the right of an individual to make a decisions vs. supporting all such decisions an individual might make.
For example, a libertarian would support the right to smoke dope -- even if they don't choose to do so themselves or even choose to refuse to associate with those who do so. This doesn't make the libertarian "pro drug".
I've never figured out why this is so hard for some liberals and conservatives to understand about libertarians.
However, some studies show that masturbation is actually healthy for men. Even more healthy than sexual intercourse due to the elimination of STD transmission risk.
Maybe distributing porn is a cheap way for the government to reduce health care costs - perhaps the IRS could include each taxpayer's "government porn allotment" with tax refund checks. (Warning: be very careful when opening your tax refund check - make sure it's really yours, not your neighbors who checked the 'midget amputee horse' preference box on his tax return). Perhaps this could be part of the next stimulus package (although, some of the talent may be best hired overseas to meet all taxpayers' needs - I'd imagine if one likes Swedish women, one can find the highest quality in Sweden - just due to the size of the pool).
In California, for a long time, you've needed to provide a thumbprint to get a driver's license.
The time to worry about slippery slopes is when you're at the top, not hurtling down them as we are now.
Indeed.
I find too many development organizations don't understand that an organization can't test quality into a product, it must be designed and implemented into a product.
Also, too many QA organizations evaluate, to some extent, testers (by that, I mean those who develop tests) by the number of bugs they find. What QA testers should be evaluated on to a great extent is how many "severity adjusted" bugs the customer finds in the tested feature as a ratio of how many bugs the tests found during QA (crappy code, even with a good QA cycle, will still be crappy in the field as not every case can be tested and software "learns" to pass tests).
Of course the developer is most responsible, and should be held so (this is one reason I believe strongly in code ownership). However, the code reviewer should also be held nearly as equally responsible for bugs as the coder.
yet failed to even identify those "easily disputed" points, let alone cite any references to dispute them. Instead, eldavojohn seems to just hope we will take his/her statement as factual without any support.
For eldavojohn to then complain about Runaway1956 not citing references seems hypocritical to me. eldavojohn was certainly free to simply omit his factual claim that the points were easily disputed (with no evidence to that effect), and hypocrisy would have not been an issue.
My points about other species was simply to point out that people with common sense freely do accept (I think without a cite) that males and females of some, perhaps many, species do differ in the drive and willingness to take risks to be "top dog". Thus, I merely meant to express (apparently inelegantly) that someone who believed that humans were not that different from other "advanced" (by a parochial definition) species might, based on personal observation, think it is the case that male and female humans, on the average, have different innate competitive drives.
I agree that it would be ideal to have cites to support the assertion about humans. I must admit I took (perhaps incorrectly) Runaway1956's absolute statement of "fact" as a bit of intentional hyperbole as we all know ethics prevents us from running the controlled studies necessary to actually resolve this issue. Ethics boards are, for example, unlikely to approve a study which isolates newborns from direct human contact and raises several isolated communities of them under observation, perhaps for a few generations, to see if in the absence of cultural biases if the males are more/less competitive (by some pre approved criteria) than the females.
Good point. We should probably pay men in primary or secondary education, nursing, and child care more than women. Keep increasing the premium until the gender ratio is balanced. I'll bet there are quite a few men who would be willing to teach snotty nosed kindergartners for $150K/nine month school year.
Interestingly, men seem to take risks, even "no win" stupid ones, much more often than women (sorry, no peer reviewed citation for this impression).
For example, most recipients of Darwin Awards are men - why? Females are badly underrepresented - indeed, of the six nominees on the front page as I write this, only TWO seem to be female - THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS, women don't even get to compete for the award in equal numbers -- let alone win in equal proportion to their gender. The UN must pass a resolution immediately that more women must be encouraged, perhaps mandated, to do stupid life- (or at least gonad-) threatening things.
I really don't see much bitterness towards women here.
I do see a fair amount of self deprecating gender humor (memes about /.ers not having girlfriends or all being virgins etc.) - but these don't seem bitter. It's true that here and there one finds bitter posts that could probably be reasonably summarized as "gorgeous women are stuck up selfish egotists who, unfairly to me, always choose to date men who can discuss something other than how awesome their Star Trek figurines collection is or how awesome their code is and how $LANGUAGE_OF_CHOICE is way cool and anyone who uses $UNFAVORED_LANGUAGE is an idiot -- and I refuse to date anyone but a 'gorgeous' woman". But I suspect most readers see the latter posts for what they are - defensive musings of a failed social misfit who chooses to spend his time being a "victim" imagining a fantasy world he would like to live in rather than spending his time adapting to the world he actually lives in.
If one wants to find bitter posts on /., one only has to look at posts about H1Bs by Americans chose to ride the gravy train rather than compete and learn -- and now regret this decision and won't admit the situation they are in is their own fault. Now those posts get bitter sometimes!
Just name him Sue and let him work it out.
You chide others for failing to cite references, but you don't support your position with any references either. Remember, /. is not a peer reviewed journal, sometimes common sense can be used without citations.
I don't think it takes cites for observant and knowledgeable individuals to realize that in many "advanced" species there are substantial and obvious sex differences, both physical (even beyond simply reproductive organs) and behavioral. (Any more than one needs cites to suspect that an unprotected human will be severely affected by swimming in molten iron for an hour.)
For example, surely one would accept that substantial sex differences (both physical and behavioral) exist between male and female elephants? Or, for that matter, male and female elephant seals? Surely one doesn't believe that these, in some cases dramatic, differences are the result of some "old elephant [seal] good old boy network" that has been in place for perhaps millions of years and a bit of retraining could cause males and females of these species to become relatively indistinguishable in behavior in a few generations?
Similarly, no reasonable person would believe that there aren't physical differences between "typical" male and female humans. Even if one ignores reproductive organs, it's just a fact that men are physically bigger and stronger than women. Even an organ that seems likely to have a significant impact on behavior and personality, the human brain, seems not to have escaped sex differences between human males and females .
None of this is to say that, by nature, women wouldn't make better or worse CEOs than men -- I have no idea, but I suspect it depends on the field and the environment. But to assume that sex differences don't play a role and only societal (nurture) differences do seems naive and reminiscent of those who argue that humans are somehow special and created "differently" than other mammals by some deity.
As I recall, the tasteless jokes far outnumbered the tasteful jokes.
(But, maybe the tasteful ones just weren't as memorable.)
Even worse is American pork! ... because there has been such a drop in fat levels and the pieces are so closely trimmed.
Agreed.
Back in the 70's, I loved pork (roast, chops, anything) and even Mom's guiding principle of "Anything worth cooking is worth overcooking" left Porky the Supermarket Pig quite tasty. Indeed, pork was probably my favorite meat (a juicy pork roast - yum, yum).
Now, I rarely eat pork -- Porky the Skinny Supermarket Pig is nearly tasteless and one has to "do something" with it other than just toss it in the oven or on the grill to make it tasty -- and even then it doesn't have that nice flavor I remember because it tastes like whatever it was seasoned with, coated with, marinated in, or stuffed with.
I wish the hog and pig farming industry would figure out that there are some of us who eat fatty stuff because we like it, don't have cholesterol problems, work out, and limit our caloric intake -- and want "good pork" rather than "skinny tasteless pork". Perhaps introduce a "choice" vs. "prime" type of grading system for pork - "prime" beef costs a bit more but is widely available and much better -- why not the same for pork? Until the pork agribusiness figures this out, they won't get much of my business.
(I was so thrilled when my local CostCo started routinely having a couple of cuts of prime stakes at about $11/lb -- there's better steaks out there, but these are a great price performer).
Remarkably, it's my understanding that sometime between 1973 and 2010 some HTML tags such as <BR> and <P> were introduced. I've also heard these can even be used to format comments on /.
Why would someone ever let a minimum wage cleaning staff member into their server room without a trusted escort monitoring them? I've worked at commercial companies where rooms far less important were only unlocked and cleaned under the watchful eye of a trusted security staff member -- isn't that standard practice at big companies?
(Of course, I've also worked at small startups where nothing but the exterior doors had locks and every so often those just didn't get locked at night -- perhaps the attitude was that the code was really the only valuable asset and it was so bad that it would take longer to figure it out and use it than to just implement it from scratch.)
Check out the progressive web site DailyKos.com.
/.. (So, what is the correct way to end a sentence that doesn't ask a question but ends in /.? To put a double period results in a drooling slash...)
/. and I'm sure the whole moderation level you want to see could easily be incorporated.
Although I certainly don't agree with a lot of their "content", their comment system is pretty spiffy.
The whole moderation thing is handled differently and the result of it is binary - "Hidden - REALLY, YOU CAN'T SEE IT" or, well, "Not Hidden", but that's really an editorial decision. Their decision is probably appropriate for their site, not so much for
Their site is much faster and more obvious than
Their 'search for comments by xxx' function sucks, but hopefully that will be spiffed up in the upcoming DK4 version.
Although I support the space program in general, comparing NASA and the military is like comparing Red Delicious Apples and Road Apples. Both are actually impressive organizations (and, also, in some ways unimpressive) - but that's about where the similarity ends.
When discussing the "efficiency" of NASA, consider the claimed benefits and costs of the shuttle when serious development funding began vs. what it, now in its dying days, actually delivered. As I can quickly recall, the greatest legacy of the shuttles was putting Hubble up and then fixing it (the need for fixing of course, comes back to NASA efficiency) and then upgrading it/repairing it. Perhaps worth it, but then one needs to allocate much of the shuttle budget to the Hubble and then ask "was the Hubble worth that much?". I think it's unlikely that the Hubble will/has provide/ed us with information that is going to make human's lives substantially more tolerable in the next 100 years and, quite likely, never (since humans will become extinct at some point) - so, it's interesting and perhaps enlightening much as opera (the performing art, not the browser) may be to some people, but it hasn't cure diseases, prevented birth defects, or gotten people to stop killing people for religious reasons etc...
The military has the option of throwing money at a problem when they are at war in order to save lives TODAY -- so they do it and, sometimes that's isn't very efficient. Also, the military has the difficulty of their timetable being set by other parties (ranging from a twitchy fingered POTUS, through a foe building a nuke, to a foe developing and using an asymmetric weapon technique such as IEDs). Once they are at war or in a battle, they can't just regularly say "The weather is a bit cloudy, let's cancel the mission to extract our guys who are under fire - hopefully it will clear up in the next couple days" or "We just discovered that this O ring fails sometimes and results in an entire tank blowing up -- let's shutdown our entire ground based attack mechanisms for a couple years and get a commission together to study why this happened". Nope - they have to take more risks and, often, throw money at expensive duct tape to achieve their goal. (Much of the "unnecessary" inefficiency of the military originates in Washington D.C. in the halls of Congress and the WH of course).
With just a few more bends, twists, and crossover points, maybe these guys could enhance the system to carry the patients also.
Well, it was in Washington DC. Probably a politician's baby.
But... Didn't that reduce the number of readily available organ donors?
They just cut it out. 2 seconds of bad tracking was like 10 feet of tape.
Ouch, sounds like a copyright violation to me.
In retrospect, counting on the rovers landing near some homeless Martians who would insist on cleaning the solar panels every time the rovers stopped may not have been the best plan.
Some ethernet NICs (multiple brands) back in the late 80's and early 90's made a similar high pitched sound when actually transmitting or receiving. People gave me some strange looks when I mentioned this, but on a quiet day/evening, I could tell if someone in the next cube was doing a lot of network IO - such as transferring a large file.
Although, if you look at the impact the individual has on the company, negative or positive, the pay is more proportional.
It's very hard, in a large company, for a single unintentional error in judgment on the part of a programmer to kill the company. The same is not true of the CEO. This is the primary reason they get so much more money -- the potential cost of their failures is so high and the impact of replacing them is so high that shareholders are willing to pay almost anything to get the best. The unfortunate part is that, like developers, it's pretty difficult to quite figure out what makes a great CEO. The best CEOs are probably underpaid, the average CEO is probably overpaid - just like developers.