No, obviously not. You're a wannabe, which is why you're reading slashdot and whining about things you can't understand. QED, you were never a "computer geek". If you're going to lie, you should start with a believable story, ok?
This from somebody who can't figure out even how to blockquote correctly on/. -- even with a 'preview' feature.
The parent didn't say they couldn't, they indicated they didn't choose to learn Linux. That's quite a difference. S/he also seems to have a business (probably not run out of his/her parent's basement), seems to have an interest in art (you know, there are things in the world other than computers), and seems to be spending time improving his/her house (either as an investment or as a hobby - but it doesn't much matter which).
Your attitude reminds me of a toddler who has just learned how to tie their shoes and for the next week spends an inordinate amount of time untying and tying their shoes proudly in front of anyone who will praise them for "how smart they are". However, the toddler only does this for a week and then moves on to master other things -- you seem to be offended by others who decide to master more than one thing.
Opening up ballot boxes and handling the individual ballots at the polling places seems unwise. In many parts of the U.S., it's very difficult to get poll workers at all -- and, based on my observations, getting pre-senility poll workers seems to be even more difficult.
Polling locations are very diverse - people's garages, community rooms at apartment/condo complexes, schools etc. These locations lack amenities such as backup power sources. If the power fails (as it is certain to do at some percentage of the polling places due to a building level "problem" or a legitimate local area power outage) while the ballot box is open and ballots are being counted, the conspiracy theorists will claim that the power outage was intentional and that in the ensuing confusion, the ballots were tampered with. It's unreasonable to expect that poorly trained poll workers would be able to implement procedures (and technology) to prevent such confusion and doubt.
As well, in our contentious partisan environment, distributing resolution of the challenge process among poorly trained, even if well intentioned, poll workers and (possibly ill-intentioned) watchers is prone to confusion. Every neighborhood seems to have at least one nut and, in some places, this nut will go down to the polling place at counting time and challenge every ballot - these nuts are much easier to deal with at a central location when higher level election officials can deal with the problem (and, these nuts are less likely to misbehave at a central location where they are more outnumbered by rational people).
Tallying preliminary counts by machine scanning as ballots are fed into a box would be fine to help satisfy the "need to know 10 minutes after the polls close" crowd, but the official counts should be done on centrally located (and maintained/calibrated/monitored) machines or, if necessary, by central hand counting.
Did you hear how s/he responded to, say, McCain's ads? Is it possible that s/he just felt it inappropriate to subject passengers to overhearing any overt partisan messages originating from a publicly financed source (either the radio, or even the bus driver)?
I've got not idea since I wasn't there, but a non-partisan stance would seem like an appropriate one for a public employee while they are "on the taxpayer's clock" (barring, of course, elected officials who voters presumably may have elected in the expectation they would be partisan).
Personally, I think Comcast's goal is to degrade internet streaming video to the point where it matches their cable services with the "Occasional 5 Second Pause" (TM) where the service goes apeshit and becomes unusable.
Ah, you sound like you may be another satisfied Comcast customer with a Motorola DVR - you should be happy that your pauses are only 5 seconds, you lucky SOB. Around the hour and half-past the hour, I'd welcome 5 second apeshit periods. It's beyond me why the stupid Motorola DVR decides at those points that the most important thing is to perform some sort of O(n^4) algorithm figuring out what programs to record and which ones not rather than, oh, maybe processing my realtime remote clicks.
It's not always the case that putting more money into your core business gives the best return to your owners (shareholders). There tend to be levels of diminishing returns - the first billion dollars of investment often returns more than the tenth billion dollars of investment does. In particular, this is likely to be true in a business that relies more on IP which is "develop once, sell N times at minimal incremental cost" than, for example, manufacturing where as long as there is persistent unmet demand for the products, investing more in production likely is a good use of cash. Cash is like drinking water -- you need enough, but vast quantities are of minimal additional value and it can become a distraction to figure out how to dispose of it efficiently.
If I were a Microsoft shareholder, I'd much rather see excess cash returned to the owners (shareholders) than invested in unrelated things (like sub-prime mortgages!) in which Microsoft has no need for expertise except to invest their spare cash. In this case, I'd rather diversify my own portfolio through pure plays rather than through muddled investments in what is supposedly a software company but which in fact is more of an investment company. So, I'd like the cash returned to me - the most obvious ways are through dividends or increased stock valuation via buybacks.
Obviously, if the buyback leaves Microsoft cash starved so they later had to borrow money for new development and operations, the buyback would likely (although, not necessarily) have been a Bad Idea. However, if this were to happen, the problem would have been that the board was stupid, not that a buyback authorization was a bad idea since I believe this buyback is at the discretion of the board and they may not buy back a single share.
A buyback can be an effective way to return tax advantaged assets to investors. First, there have been many times when what are now called "qualified dividends" were taxed at ordinary income levels while capital gains were taxed at lower levels - and "tax reform" seems much more likely to repeal preferential tax treatment of "qualified dividends" while retaining some preferential treatment for capital gains than doing the inverse - so it's best to bet on capital gains rather than qualified dividends. Second, dividends are taxed in the year they are paid out - so in order for a long term investor to compound gains, they would have to infuse more outside cash with the "pay dividends" strategy (to cover the taxes paid prematurely on dividends) than to simply "buy and hold" a block of stock for many years and let it increase in value, in part, as a result of buy back rather than dividend payments.
I find gmail almost perfect at classifying spam as such.
Unfortunately, gmail is my only mail account where I feel I have to scan the spam "folder" every week or so to look for false positives -- of which there are a couple a month. My other accounts, which receive more mail and more spam (both as a percentage and an absolute number), have given so few false positives that I don't bother looking in the spam folders on those accounts.
So, unfortunately, I end up looking at all the spam on gmail and just a little of it on other accounts. I don't think this is a win.
Well, if libertarian is right-winger, then I proudly plead guilty as charged. Overall, I find the views and political actions of most federal level officeholders, both Democrats and Republicans, distasteful.
One perhaps subtle point you might have missed is that the recent elections were not very close in popular vote as compared to Kennedy-Nixon. Bush-Kerry spread was 2.4% (50.7% vs. 48.3%), Bush-Gore spread was 0.5% (47.9% vs 48.4%) or 5x that of Kennedy-Nixon.
The other perhaps subtle point is that election manipulation claims are not new with Diebold.
Personally I prefer electronic voting if it's done right (voter verified paper audit trail being but one essential component).
Perhaps that's why Kennedy engineered the popular vote spread to only be 0.1%? Or was he was just trying to save daddy some money by not buying a blowout?
Even if at the time you downloaded the add-on you could trust the associated web site, you may not always be able to.
What if the guy who provided the add-on gets hit by a truck and no one thinks to renew his domain reg and Evil Guy buys the domain? Certainly you can't trust it anymore at that point (in most cases you probably should never have "trusted" it anyway, but that's another issue).
Agreed that it's the state's decision to do "all or nothing" EC voting, not the EC concept itself.
I'd like to see (at least more) states adopt proportional voting, but it's unlikely to happen in "dark red" or "dark blue" states as the party in power would have to decide to weaken their clout in Washington.
Proportional EC voting would certainly make the POTUS campaign much more interesting in "dark blue" and "dark red" states!
I could, and would, vote for a third party but that is akin to throwing my vote away in the current environment.
The United States has a very diverse (social, cultural, religion, economic, etc...) population. When it is not united by a compelling unifying crisis (such as persistent devastating physical attacks by an identifiable foreign power), it's unlikely that any POTUS candidate that garners enough support to win the election would be considered an ideal choice by most of the voters who actually cast a vote for them. Candidates with true principles are unlikely to be competitive - for each strong principle a candidate expresses that would differentiate them from their opponent, they will gain strength among those who were already committed to the candidate, but lose more of the votes of the mushy middle than they would gain. Principled positions, unfortunately, also involve some pain - and the mushy middle generally wants to have their cake and eat it too.
In this environment, esp. if one lives in a state where the outcome (due to the Electoral College system) is "preordained" (for example, California), voting for a third party candidate is not throwing your vote away. Indeed, it is one of the strongest messages you can send. Voting for one of the prevaricating candidates from one of the main parties does nothing to encourage candidates to be more principled in the next election (after all, you've already demonstrated you will probably vote for the [Democrat, Republican] if they just follow last election's agenda). If, on the other hand, you vote for the [Green, Libertarian] candidate - you become one of a pool of voters with clearly expressed preferences which may be convinced to vote for the [Democrat, Republican] candidate if that candidate leans towards that principled stance. With the highly engineered POTUS elections, one percent of the vote is a Really Big Deal - make the slime work for your vote!
Until the helpful cleaning crew cleans your whiteboard with whiteboard cleaner - somewhere I worked, that actually happened if your whiteboard was "empty" (i.e., had been erased).
This is a bug in the Bill of Rights. It was hacked together all too hastily, therefore it isn't very good about laying out actual rights. It's more focused on curbing specific abuses.
If I recall my history correctly...
The Bill of Rights was felt by many to be unnecessary and some feared that it would be misinterpreted to limit the rights of the people only to the listed rights (as it turns out, a legitimate concern). It came into existence as a compromise to mollify detractors of ratification and, by the time it was actually drafted, interest in its inclusion had waned somewhat. When drafted, the Constitution limited the Federal government (as clarified in the Tenth Amendment) and the Bill of Rights was not intended to be exhaustive (as evidenced by the Ninth Amendment). At the time of drafting and ratification, the Constitution detailed what the Federal government had the right to do -- it was not authorized to do anything else.
So, I think it's a bit harsh to claim the Founders left bugs in the Bill of Rights when what happened is that later generations changed the rules of interpretation. Though, perhaps the Founders could have done a better job defining what the Supreme Court's scope was and limited it rather than just let the SCOTUS make it up as it went along.
Warrants, where required, are intended primarily to protect privacy, harassment and the like - not to insure a resource is available. For example, a government employed electrician troubleshooting a short circuit isn't required to get a warrant before making these computers unavailable by unplugging them.
Anyway, is there any evidence that these computers were needed for proper functioning of the library in question?
As others have said, it's a public resource -- you shouldn't have an expectation of privacy unless some specific law insures it. (I would urge legislators to insure that such a law exists of course).
It's cost and willingness to spend that keeps the resources limited such that some patients that would benefit from a treatment don't receive it. Thus, doctors need to prioritize who gets the treatment and who doesn't -- the closer to death you are (due to age or condition), the less likely the scarce resource will be allocated to you. It's true that politicians rather than doctors, patients, and families are making the initial economic decision that a level of care is "too expensive" given a person's age/condition -- but the decision is being made (and fairly explicitly).
In the U.S., we generally have available resources and some (perhaps many) patients/families demand that resources be allocated to them even when it's not "economically justified" (i.e., ROI in terms of dollars spent vs. length or quality of life) which contributes to a high "per capita" cost. We also clearly waste resources (again contributing to high "per capita" cost). For example, I've encountered cases within my own circle of family/friends where doctors "prescribed" fairly expensive treatments which clearly had no chance of saving or extending the patient's life (or quality of life) significantly. I'm pretty sure that in most of these cases it was done to make the patient/family feel that "everything possible" was being done (rather than the doctor being motivated by income). I've also seen gross incompetence in the form of misdiagnoses and inappropriate treatment by doctors necessitating subsequent "recovery" care at great unnecessary expense (reminds me of "What do they call the medical student who graduates at the bottom of his/her class?" "Doctor").
Of course, in the U.S. we do have politicians making health care decisions via reimbursement limits - most publicized is probably in the area of Medicare. This has/is/will limit the number of resources available to Medicare patients because as reimbursement levels drop, less doctors and facilities accept Medicare patients. This probably results in some Medicare patients either not receiving care or not receiving care at an early stage of a disease due to difficulty/cost (travel or long delays) and eventually results in reduced quality/quantity of life and/or subsequently higher cost of recovery care.
(I can't speak for how this works in Cuba, so perhaps my original post should have been modded "OffTopic", but certainly not "Troll" by the idiot mods who think "I disagree" == "Troll".)
Of course, much of the extra $2200/year probably goes to "excessive" tests to avoid litigation and to fund treatments of people who have little chance for survival anyway -- one advantage of socialized medicine is that the government gets to decide when further treatment doesn't make "economic sense" - when an insurance company in the US tries to do this, the family sues too often. Arguments can be made that either way is "right" - US residents are used to getting care that is really futile - some sort of "life at any cost" bias (why, for example, should a system spend millions of dollars saving one child even though they are so severely disabled that they will never be able to even communicate with their own family or even understand they have a family?)
From drug cost standpoint, this discrepancy is not too surprising. US pharmaceutical companies rely on profits from US sales to fund research -- without those profits, quite a few hi-tech drugs simply would not exist or would not be available in the US (due to the cost of meeting FDA requirements and the tort risks). If they can sell slightly above cost of production in countries with socialized medicine, they might as well do so, but the miserly returns from those markets would never have justified development costs of the drug (also, it means they still have a supply of human guinea pigs for trials for drugs still in development).
Thus, the "excessive profits" the US patients (and Federal government, State governments, and insurance companies) pay for these drugs should really be classified as a tax that is directed to foreign aid.
The pharmaceutical companies heavily use, for example, Europe for trials because there the national health care system sometimes offers the patient two choices (1) the "standard treatment" which, with your advanced form of cancer has little chance of working or (2) adding ONE other experimental drug which might increase your chances of remission. Of course, aggressive US patients can sometimes pick from a variety of trials so they tend to pick the ones that they feel are in their best interests rather than the pharmaceutical company's best interests.
Just put a couple women in a car and have them drive around. Every time they need to stop and pee, have them collect it. As they will need to stop about every two or three minutes and they must produce something significant each time they stop (although, I must admit, I've never actually verified they really do pee on each "rest stop" - I sometimes wonder how they could), they will have the required eight gallons per day in just a couple hours.
(One of life's mysteries - what is it about getting in a car that causes women to feel a need to pee every five minutes?)
Hmm... I guess we will have to wait for the autopsy and DNA analysis to see if there's any evidence that Hans had mounted her shortly before or after her murder.
Risk of rape in prison, frankly, seems not much different than the risk of bad food that isn't very healthy or exposure to increased levels of TB. It's a very good reason not to "do the crime if you can't do the time" -- part of the reason people don't want to do time is the nasty environment it's done in. Obviously prison rape should not be sponsored by officials and encouraged, but I'm not too willing to spend a lot of my tax dollars to eliminate it entirely.
We should go to great pains to avoid convicting innocent people. Indeed, in the case of Hans and my casual following of the case/evidence, I felt (p=0.8) that Nina was killed and Hans did it, but I don't know if I could have been pushed to "beyond reasonable doubt". However, it's hard for me to worry too much about people who commit premeditated murder, arrogantly perjure themselves on the stand for days wasting everyone's time and generally make a mockery of the criminal justice system.
Indeed, I'd love to see a perjury charge leveled against Hans - although the plea agreement probably precludes that. However, I wonder what the judge could do with a contempt of court twist - he's not a party to the plea agreement. (Of course, IANAL).
The prosecutor represents "the people" collectively - not specifically the individual victims of crime (and, even less the victim's families). It is inappropriate for the prosecutor to plea bargain punishment down in exchange for information to help provide "closure" for the victim's family after the conviction. As a result of such plea bargaining, criminals can manipulate the system to get lighter sentences which in turn reduces the deterrent effect of the law enforcement and criminal justice system for which we all pay.
If limited evidence reduces the chance of a conviction and the suspect confesses (and can prove they did it) in exchange for a plea bargain, that may be appropriate.
(Now, if Hans had requested a cell mate other than Bubba who's pursuing a mail order degree in proctology, it might be alright with me if Hans was informed that revealing the location of his body might get his request more serious consideration -- or at least a few coupons good for Vaseline at the prison commissary).
Slashdot Mirror
This from somebody who can't figure out even how to blockquote correctly on /. -- even with a 'preview' feature.
The parent didn't say they couldn't, they indicated they didn't choose to learn Linux. That's quite a difference. S/he also seems to have a business (probably not run out of his/her parent's basement), seems to have an interest in art (you know, there are things in the world other than computers), and seems to be spending time improving his/her house (either as an investment or as a hobby - but it doesn't much matter which).
Your attitude reminds me of a toddler who has just learned how to tie their shoes and for the next week spends an inordinate amount of time untying and tying their shoes proudly in front of anyone who will praise them for "how smart they are". However, the toddler only does this for a week and then moves on to master other things -- you seem to be offended by others who decide to master more than one thing.
Opening up ballot boxes and handling the individual ballots at the polling places seems unwise. In many parts of the U.S., it's very difficult to get poll workers at all -- and, based on my observations, getting pre-senility poll workers seems to be even more difficult.
Polling locations are very diverse - people's garages, community rooms at apartment/condo complexes, schools etc. These locations lack amenities such as backup power sources. If the power fails (as it is certain to do at some percentage of the polling places due to a building level "problem" or a legitimate local area power outage) while the ballot box is open and ballots are being counted, the conspiracy theorists will claim that the power outage was intentional and that in the ensuing confusion, the ballots were tampered with. It's unreasonable to expect that poorly trained poll workers would be able to implement procedures (and technology) to prevent such confusion and doubt.
As well, in our contentious partisan environment, distributing resolution of the challenge process among poorly trained, even if well intentioned, poll workers and (possibly ill-intentioned) watchers is prone to confusion. Every neighborhood seems to have at least one nut and, in some places, this nut will go down to the polling place at counting time and challenge every ballot - these nuts are much easier to deal with at a central location when higher level election officials can deal with the problem (and, these nuts are less likely to misbehave at a central location where they are more outnumbered by rational people).
Tallying preliminary counts by machine scanning as ballots are fed into a box would be fine to help satisfy the "need to know 10 minutes after the polls close" crowd, but the official counts should be done on centrally located (and maintained/calibrated/monitored) machines or, if necessary, by central hand counting.
Really, it sounds more like too much Scientology rather than too much Latter Day Saints
Did you hear how s/he responded to, say, McCain's ads? Is it possible that s/he just felt it inappropriate to subject passengers to overhearing any overt partisan messages originating from a publicly financed source (either the radio, or even the bus driver)?
I've got not idea since I wasn't there, but a non-partisan stance would seem like an appropriate one for a public employee while they are "on the taxpayer's clock" (barring, of course, elected officials who voters presumably may have elected in the expectation they would be partisan).
Personally, I think Comcast's goal is to degrade internet streaming video to the point where it matches their cable services with the "Occasional 5 Second Pause" (TM) where the service goes apeshit and becomes unusable.
Ah, you sound like you may be another satisfied Comcast customer with a Motorola DVR - you should be happy that your pauses are only 5 seconds, you lucky SOB. Around the hour and half-past the hour, I'd welcome 5 second apeshit periods. It's beyond me why the stupid Motorola DVR decides at those points that the most important thing is to perform some sort of O(n^4) algorithm figuring out what programs to record and which ones not rather than, oh, maybe processing my realtime remote clicks.
It's not always the case that putting more money into your core business gives the best return to your owners (shareholders). There tend to be levels of diminishing returns - the first billion dollars of investment often returns more than the tenth billion dollars of investment does. In particular, this is likely to be true in a business that relies more on IP which is "develop once, sell N times at minimal incremental cost" than, for example, manufacturing where as long as there is persistent unmet demand for the products, investing more in production likely is a good use of cash. Cash is like drinking water -- you need enough, but vast quantities are of minimal additional value and it can become a distraction to figure out how to dispose of it efficiently.
If I were a Microsoft shareholder, I'd much rather see excess cash returned to the owners (shareholders) than invested in unrelated things (like sub-prime mortgages!) in which Microsoft has no need for expertise except to invest their spare cash. In this case, I'd rather diversify my own portfolio through pure plays rather than through muddled investments in what is supposedly a software company but which in fact is more of an investment company. So, I'd like the cash returned to me - the most obvious ways are through dividends or increased stock valuation via buybacks.
Obviously, if the buyback leaves Microsoft cash starved so they later had to borrow money for new development and operations, the buyback would likely (although, not necessarily) have been a Bad Idea. However, if this were to happen, the problem would have been that the board was stupid, not that a buyback authorization was a bad idea since I believe this buyback is at the discretion of the board and they may not buy back a single share.
A buyback can be an effective way to return tax advantaged assets to investors. First, there have been many times when what are now called "qualified dividends" were taxed at ordinary income levels while capital gains were taxed at lower levels - and "tax reform" seems much more likely to repeal preferential tax treatment of "qualified dividends" while retaining some preferential treatment for capital gains than doing the inverse - so it's best to bet on capital gains rather than qualified dividends. Second, dividends are taxed in the year they are paid out - so in order for a long term investor to compound gains, they would have to infuse more outside cash with the "pay dividends" strategy (to cover the taxes paid prematurely on dividends) than to simply "buy and hold" a block of stock for many years and let it increase in value, in part, as a result of buy back rather than dividend payments.
I find gmail almost perfect at classifying spam as such.
Unfortunately, gmail is my only mail account where I feel I have to scan the spam "folder" every week or so to look for false positives -- of which there are a couple a month. My other accounts, which receive more mail and more spam (both as a percentage and an absolute number), have given so few false positives that I don't bother looking in the spam folders on those accounts.
So, unfortunately, I end up looking at all the spam on gmail and just a little of it on other accounts. I don't think this is a win.
Well, if libertarian is right-winger, then I proudly plead guilty as charged. Overall, I find the views and political actions of most federal level officeholders, both Democrats and Republicans, distasteful.
One perhaps subtle point you might have missed is that the recent elections were not very close in popular vote as compared to Kennedy-Nixon. Bush-Kerry spread was 2.4% (50.7% vs. 48.3%), Bush-Gore spread was 0.5% (47.9% vs 48.4%) or 5x that of Kennedy-Nixon.
The other perhaps subtle point is that election manipulation claims are not new with Diebold.
Personally I prefer electronic voting if it's done right (voter verified paper audit trail being but one essential component).
Perhaps that's why Kennedy engineered the popular vote spread to only be 0.1%? Or was he was just trying to save daddy some money by not buying a blowout?
Even if at the time you downloaded the add-on you could trust the associated web site, you may not always be able to.
What if the guy who provided the add-on gets hit by a truck and no one thinks to renew his domain reg and Evil Guy buys the domain? Certainly you can't trust it anymore at that point (in most cases you probably should never have "trusted" it anyway, but that's another issue).
Two Words - Rotational Latency (For random IO of course)
Agreed that it's the state's decision to do "all or nothing" EC voting, not the EC concept itself.
I'd like to see (at least more) states adopt proportional voting, but it's unlikely to happen in "dark red" or "dark blue" states as the party in power would have to decide to weaken their clout in Washington.
Proportional EC voting would certainly make the POTUS campaign much more interesting in "dark blue" and "dark red" states!
The United States has a very diverse (social, cultural, religion, economic, etc...) population. When it is not united by a compelling unifying crisis (such as persistent devastating physical attacks by an identifiable foreign power), it's unlikely that any POTUS candidate that garners enough support to win the election would be considered an ideal choice by most of the voters who actually cast a vote for them. Candidates with true principles are unlikely to be competitive - for each strong principle a candidate expresses that would differentiate them from their opponent, they will gain strength among those who were already committed to the candidate, but lose more of the votes of the mushy middle than they would gain. Principled positions, unfortunately, also involve some pain - and the mushy middle generally wants to have their cake and eat it too.
In this environment, esp. if one lives in a state where the outcome (due to the Electoral College system) is "preordained" (for example, California), voting for a third party candidate is not throwing your vote away. Indeed, it is one of the strongest messages you can send. Voting for one of the prevaricating candidates from one of the main parties does nothing to encourage candidates to be more principled in the next election (after all, you've already demonstrated you will probably vote for the [Democrat, Republican] if they just follow last election's agenda). If, on the other hand, you vote for the [Green, Libertarian] candidate - you become one of a pool of voters with clearly expressed preferences which may be convinced to vote for the [Democrat, Republican] candidate if that candidate leans towards that principled stance. With the highly engineered POTUS elections, one percent of the vote is a Really Big Deal - make the slime work for your vote!
Oh yes, it's easy to remember now... Just wait until you're working on your second hundred victims.
Until the helpful cleaning crew cleans your whiteboard with whiteboard cleaner - somewhere I worked, that actually happened if your whiteboard was "empty" (i.e., had been erased).
This is a bug in the Bill of Rights. It was hacked together all too hastily, therefore it isn't very good about laying out actual rights. It's more focused on curbing specific abuses.
If I recall my history correctly...
The Bill of Rights was felt by many to be unnecessary and some feared that it would be misinterpreted to limit the rights of the people only to the listed rights (as it turns out, a legitimate concern). It came into existence as a compromise to mollify detractors of ratification and, by the time it was actually drafted, interest in its inclusion had waned somewhat. When drafted, the Constitution limited the Federal government (as clarified in the Tenth Amendment) and the Bill of Rights was not intended to be exhaustive (as evidenced by the Ninth Amendment). At the time of drafting and ratification, the Constitution detailed what the Federal government had the right to do -- it was not authorized to do anything else.
So, I think it's a bit harsh to claim the Founders left bugs in the Bill of Rights when what happened is that later generations changed the rules of interpretation. Though, perhaps the Founders could have done a better job defining what the Supreme Court's scope was and limited it rather than just let the SCOTUS make it up as it went along.
Hey -- stop drinking the Kool-Aid -- leave some for the rest of us.
Warrants, where required, are intended primarily to protect privacy, harassment and the like - not to insure a resource is available. For example, a government employed electrician troubleshooting a short circuit isn't required to get a warrant before making these computers unavailable by unplugging them.
Anyway, is there any evidence that these computers were needed for proper functioning of the library in question?
As others have said, it's a public resource -- you shouldn't have an expectation of privacy unless some specific law insures it. (I would urge legislators to insure that such a law exists of course).
It's cost and willingness to spend that keeps the resources limited such that some patients that would benefit from a treatment don't receive it. Thus, doctors need to prioritize who gets the treatment and who doesn't -- the closer to death you are (due to age or condition), the less likely the scarce resource will be allocated to you. It's true that politicians rather than doctors, patients, and families are making the initial economic decision that a level of care is "too expensive" given a person's age/condition -- but the decision is being made (and fairly explicitly).
As another poster mentioned, dialysis is a classic example (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/671717.stm from 2000).
In the U.S., we generally have available resources and some (perhaps many) patients/families demand that resources be allocated to them even when it's not "economically justified" (i.e., ROI in terms of dollars spent vs. length or quality of life) which contributes to a high "per capita" cost. We also clearly waste resources (again contributing to high "per capita" cost). For example, I've encountered cases within my own circle of family/friends where doctors "prescribed" fairly expensive treatments which clearly had no chance of saving or extending the patient's life (or quality of life) significantly. I'm pretty sure that in most of these cases it was done to make the patient/family feel that "everything possible" was being done (rather than the doctor being motivated by income). I've also seen gross incompetence in the form of misdiagnoses and inappropriate treatment by doctors necessitating subsequent "recovery" care at great unnecessary expense (reminds me of "What do they call the medical student who graduates at the bottom of his/her class?" "Doctor").
Of course, in the U.S. we do have politicians making health care decisions via reimbursement limits - most publicized is probably in the area of Medicare. This has/is/will limit the number of resources available to Medicare patients because as reimbursement levels drop, less doctors and facilities accept Medicare patients. This probably results in some Medicare patients either not receiving care or not receiving care at an early stage of a disease due to difficulty/cost (travel or long delays) and eventually results in reduced quality/quantity of life and/or subsequently higher cost of recovery care.
(I can't speak for how this works in Cuba, so perhaps my original post should have been modded "OffTopic", but certainly not "Troll" by the idiot mods who think "I disagree" == "Troll".)
Of course, much of the extra $2200/year probably goes to "excessive" tests to avoid litigation and to fund treatments of people who have little chance for survival anyway -- one advantage of socialized medicine is that the government gets to decide when further treatment doesn't make "economic sense" - when an insurance company in the US tries to do this, the family sues too often. Arguments can be made that either way is "right" - US residents are used to getting care that is really futile - some sort of "life at any cost" bias (why, for example, should a system spend millions of dollars saving one child even though they are so severely disabled that they will never be able to even communicate with their own family or even understand they have a family?)
From drug cost standpoint, this discrepancy is not too surprising. US pharmaceutical companies rely on profits from US sales to fund research -- without those profits, quite a few hi-tech drugs simply would not exist or would not be available in the US (due to the cost of meeting FDA requirements and the tort risks). If they can sell slightly above cost of production in countries with socialized medicine, they might as well do so, but the miserly returns from those markets would never have justified development costs of the drug (also, it means they still have a supply of human guinea pigs for trials for drugs still in development).
Thus, the "excessive profits" the US patients (and Federal government, State governments, and insurance companies) pay for these drugs should really be classified as a tax that is directed to foreign aid.
The pharmaceutical companies heavily use, for example, Europe for trials because there the national health care system sometimes offers the patient two choices (1) the "standard treatment" which, with your advanced form of cancer has little chance of working or (2) adding ONE other experimental drug which might increase your chances of remission. Of course, aggressive US patients can sometimes pick from a variety of trials so they tend to pick the ones that they feel are in their best interests rather than the pharmaceutical company's best interests.
Just put a couple women in a car and have them drive around. Every time they need to stop and pee, have them collect it. As they will need to stop about every two or three minutes and they must produce something significant each time they stop (although, I must admit, I've never actually verified they really do pee on each "rest stop" - I sometimes wonder how they could), they will have the required eight gallons per day in just a couple hours.
(One of life's mysteries - what is it about getting in a car that causes women to feel a need to pee every five minutes?)
And pay them less money because they are offshore.
Hmm... I guess we will have to wait for the autopsy and DNA analysis to see if there's any evidence that Hans had mounted her shortly before or after her murder.
Risk of rape in prison, frankly, seems not much different than the risk of bad food that isn't very healthy or exposure to increased levels of TB. It's a very good reason not to "do the crime if you can't do the time" -- part of the reason people don't want to do time is the nasty environment it's done in. Obviously prison rape should not be sponsored by officials and encouraged, but I'm not too willing to spend a lot of my tax dollars to eliminate it entirely.
We should go to great pains to avoid convicting innocent people. Indeed, in the case of Hans and my casual following of the case/evidence, I felt (p=0.8) that Nina was killed and Hans did it, but I don't know if I could have been pushed to "beyond reasonable doubt". However, it's hard for me to worry too much about people who commit premeditated murder, arrogantly perjure themselves on the stand for days wasting everyone's time and generally make a mockery of the criminal justice system.
Indeed, I'd love to see a perjury charge leveled against Hans - although the plea agreement probably precludes that. However, I wonder what the judge could do with a contempt of court twist - he's not a party to the plea agreement. (Of course, IANAL).
The prosecutor represents "the people" collectively - not specifically the individual victims of crime (and, even less the victim's families). It is inappropriate for the prosecutor to plea bargain punishment down in exchange for information to help provide "closure" for the victim's family after the conviction. As a result of such plea bargaining, criminals can manipulate the system to get lighter sentences which in turn reduces the deterrent effect of the law enforcement and criminal justice system for which we all pay.
If limited evidence reduces the chance of a conviction and the suspect confesses (and can prove they did it) in exchange for a plea bargain, that may be appropriate.
(Now, if Hans had requested a cell mate other than Bubba who's pursuing a mail order degree in proctology, it might be alright with me if Hans was informed that revealing the location of his body might get his request more serious consideration -- or at least a few coupons good for Vaseline at the prison commissary).