However flawed, having lived in both France and the USA (as well as other countries) I have an opinion of course. I can attest that the level of care in France is pretty good (choice of doctor and general quality of care) as well as easily and cheaply accessible for all. I have a good friend being treated for cancer right now in France, and she is treated completely for free, with the best treatment available in the literature for her condition as far as I have been able to research, even though she is actually not French and currently unemployed. She will continue to get free care until she is cured (which, thank God, looks likely). That is pretty good in my book. This is not a isolated case, this is a policy.
Now in the US I have another friend who went through childbirth in a hospital L.A., a throroughly normal birth took place with zero complication, she spent 3 days in hospital with her baby, and was billed $15k by the hospital and $5k by her gynecologist. Her husband being currently not unemployed, her insurance took most of the bill but she still had a few hundred US$ to pay.
I'm sure everyone have their favourite horror story but here is another one on the US health care. Yet another friend of mine came back to college in Texas (A&M Uni.) from Ivory Coast sick with malaria. The college hospital did not find what was wrong with her. After a few days of very high temperature, she was transfered to Austin, where they suspected everything wrongly and were putting her on the list for liver transplant, until her parents turned up and told the doctors what her condition most likely was. After a few days of a quinine or equivalent regimen she was basically fine again and sent home. However her prolonged stay in hospital blew the ceiling on her insurance and she was left with a debt of many 10s of thousands of US$. With no other rescourse, she went to the TAMU lawyer and sued both hospitals for malpractice. This was settled out of court, and my friend eventually paid nothing, the lawyer worked pro-bono.
OK, these are perhaps anecdotal, but a bit more than that I think. My wife has had two kids in two different countries, neither being the US, and we never had anything to pay for childbirth. I'm pretty sure that if my malaria-affected friend had been treated in most western countries the doctors would have perhaps apologised for their incompetence and certainly refrained from sending her such an outrageous bill. I'm also pretty sure that you have to look far and wide in the US for a hospital that will give you top-level cancer care for free.
There you have in a nutshell why the US health system is poorly ranked. Having the best level of care in the world means nothing if one can't afford it, and if public health policies are driven by greed.
I'd mostly agree with the recent lack of "big invention" like the aeroplane or the car, however the author underplays the role of the computer and associated communication technologies. Now whether we like it or not we are moving towards a single, small world where everybody can communicate with everyone else and can access most of the world's public knowledge cheaply and effectively. This is increasingly replacing travel and having profound effects at every level of the society. Furthermore, whereas the car and the aeroplane were used for war, the computer so far has mostly been used for peace. As a result we have avoided a third WW so far that would have destroyed us utterly. Of course this is not strictly true but by and large not altogether incorrect.
At the same time we are becoming aware that the world is small, exeedingly finite and that resources are scarce on the one hand, and that expanding our universe to other planets is extremely difficult on the other. We are at an important point in history. Either we rise to the challenge of providing cheap energy, food, shelter, clothes, learning and health for everybody, or in a few short decades we will be all dead. We do not have another couple of millennia ahead of us.
The good thing is that we have now more thinkers, scientists, engineers and industrialists than at any point in history, by several orders of magnitude. However, we are all driven by greed. The odds are almost even, but maybe I'm an optimist.
I'm assuming you know how to connect to a remote machine over a ssh tunnel. The NFS ports are well-known. Then this is a simple matter of letting time-machine accept NFS mounts as valid backup drives : you can have a look at this site for instance.
The new proposed law is *not* slightly altered. Several main points make is somewhat more acceptable :
1- the internet subscriber is presumed innocent as per the French constitution. The word of the "HADOPI" authority carry no judicial weight other than a denunciation. The courts will have to do their own fact finding, and they are not likely to be satisfied by a mere IP number matching that of the subscriber. 2- The internet subscriber can defend him/herself before any punishment is meted out. In the previous version, the internet connexion was summarily cut, and only then could the subscriber complain and argue his/her innocence.
Most importantly, the decision is now up to a judge. One has to remember that judges are not at all friends of the current French government. Their budget have been cut, their power have been diminished, they are already overworked. It is not likely that judges will favour the Sarkozy approach, which is to punish early, punish often.
My personal opinion is that this is a face-saving law. The new law is 99.9% inapplicable in practice. There is just no way thousands of people can go through the court system every month as is the government's plan. Plus people are *very* likely to put up a good fight, like they have done everywhere. There are no possible settlement.
Soon the entertainment industry will realise that they have been wasting their time all along, and that they will eventually have to offer what everybody wants, which is a cheap, effective, legal system, be it unecumbered VOD, global licence, whatever . Otherwise they will die, simple as that.
It is hard for most slashdotters to understand why banning these meds may be good. It boils down to this:
0- A lot of slashdotters have a libertarian streak and hate government making decisions for them, however: 1- A lot of people are a lot less educated than slashdotters in general. 2- Many people don't know that taking too much pain meds can kill your liver 3- In a civilized society one has to treat even the uneducated or the stupid. 4- Liver transplant or death is *extremely* expensive to society.
So it comes down to optimising the cost function. In this case don't allow painkiller cocktails. It doesn't matter really as the individual components remain available.
I can assure you that countries do have standards of living. Think of the education and health systems for instance. Local relative wealth might get you a better bed in the local hospital but not necessarily the level of care you would get as Jo Random Citizen in a richer country.
1- the "unreasonable" bit, subject to interpretations 2- like it or not, legally an underage kid is not really a person yet and get fewer, not more, protection from the constitution than an adult in the USA.
There exists an international document, called the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which would have protected the young girl in this situation. However, the USA is one of only two member countries of the UN (the other is Somalia) that has not ratified this convention. However Obama has indicated he intends to remedy this situation.
There are assumptions in this article, the most important of which was that SJ had liver cancer, metastasized from his earlier pancreas cancer. For all we know this is not the case and SJ really had an illness that can be cured effectively with a liver transplant.
Actually there were scientific studies on the effectiveness of AA. The wikipedia page has a good summary (but check your own sources).
The results are mixed, as is often the case in social sciences and medicine, because success at kicking alcoholism depends on very many factors. Researchers seem to agree that AA or more generally mutual support group therapy is better than nothing.
This is ignoring the history of Iran since the 1950s. Iran had a democratically elected prime minister, Dr Mossadegh in 1951. He nationalised the oil field. As a result, he was overthrown during a West-supported coup. The western-friendly Shah came to power, installed an autocratic dictatorship, which was overthrown by the theocrats in 1979, who were the most vocal opponents of the Shah. Ayatollah Khomeny came to power, installed an even more brutal and repressive, West-unfriendly theocracy. The West tried to overthrow it by staging a war by cutting a deal with Saddam Hussein in Iraq (remember him?), who lusted after Iran's oil fields. After many years of war and nearly a million deaths, a stalemate was reached in 1988. Since then there is an election system in Iran but it is closely controlled by the theocrats. Even though reforms were made, the most progressist of elected leader, Mohamed Katami, did not succeed in freeing the press and installing a real democracy.
Given all the above I would not say the problems of the Iranians are purely their own fault. The West including the US have been meddling in Iranian policies for a long time.
Remember that Napoleon was basically a dictator, but even the Napoleonic code never put in place the "guilty until proven innocent" false principle. He just made it easier to be proven guilty, which is sufficient in most cases.
I think people got the wrong impression from watching "Les Miserables" in Broadway.
Revenge was achieved by the killer, not justice. The controller should have lost his job and gone to prison. I'm sure his mistake was unintentional, and so this his only manslaughter, if on a large scale.
People's lives are always in your hands, say when you drive. People don't need a fear of retribution to lead their lives, only a sense of responsability, and competence in what they do.
The bill is a disaster. It will rely on honeypots for P2P traffic set up by big media. Competent "pirates" have already started using VPNs, they will never get caught.
Inevitably there will be mistakes made by big media just like there were in the case of *IAA in the US. There will be big sob stories, appeal to the European court of justice and someone will have to pay compensations, all for the pityful download of a few music tracks. Years down the track this bill will have to be overturned.
A complete waste of time. The only good thing is that about 40 MP from the majority abstained from the vote, indicating that even the majority has serious misgivings about this. Hopefully this will help cause Sarkozy lose his reelection.
These days MacOS is basically very close to NetBSD. When things work well all is hunky-dory, and when they don't, they are basically as easy to fix as under Linux or BSD. The best of both world !!
Hello ? I've just been to DELL and selected their middle-of-the-range desktop with all defaults. It does run a quad-core but with only 3G of RAM and Vista-32 family edition. 3GB is the sweet spot for vista32. Few will want to pay more for the 64-bit version.
Maybe the 2011 mass market will run win7-64 with much more RAM but we are not there yet.
Basically I've heard the same argument regarding Linux vs. Windows since Linux exists. First with Win95, then Win92, then NT, then 2K, then XP. All were supposed to completely kill Linux.
The fact that Linux still exists. It's windows that doesn't have much breathing room on a $300 netbook. Windows has no room at all on a router or a cheap NAS, which all run linux.
Finally Apple does not cover everybody due to the restrictive hardware choice.
So yeah, Linux still has plenty of breathing space, but I agree basically that it will probably never take over Windows now, unless all hardware goes below $200. In that space Microsoft does not make much money (see XBox).
Back when I was in college a bunch of my friends bought these cheap 286 boxes (in 1989 or so), only they came with no floppy and only a weird proprietary connector. They did have a 40MB hard disk with DOS on it, so they could boot but basically do nothing with it.
To help my friends I used DEBUG.EXE to write a bare-bone RS232 serial link driver in about 20 lines or assembly, complete with interrupt handler, in about 15 mn. I used it to transfer Kermit. After that it was all plain sailing.
What are you saying? if everybody is doing it maybe it shouldn't be wrong? Should everybody be punished?
Yes obtaining a copy of a work without permission and compensation for the authors is wrong, but perhaps a $20 DVD is wrong as well, else people would pay for it.
Perhaps restricting access to culture to only the relatively wealthy is also wrong.
Perhaps greedy entertainment executive should get no respect. In France when the three-strike law was about to be voted a number of very well-known artists (mostly actors) wrote a newspaper column saying they supported file sharing, because mostly they want people to see their work.
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This is a nice analysis of the study, thanks.
However flawed, having lived in both France and the USA (as well as other countries) I have an opinion of course. I can attest that the level of care in France is pretty good (choice of doctor and general quality of care) as well as easily and cheaply accessible for all. I have a good friend being treated for cancer right now in France, and she is treated completely for free, with the best treatment available in the literature for her condition as far as I have been able to research, even though she is actually not French and currently unemployed. She will continue to get free care until she is cured (which, thank God, looks likely). That is pretty good in my book. This is not a isolated case, this is a policy.
Now in the US I have another friend who went through childbirth in a hospital L.A., a throroughly normal birth took place with zero complication, she spent 3 days in hospital with her baby, and was billed $15k by the hospital and $5k by her gynecologist. Her husband being currently not unemployed, her insurance took most of the bill but she still had a few hundred US$ to pay.
I'm sure everyone have their favourite horror story but here is another one on the US health care. Yet another friend of mine came back to college in Texas (A&M Uni.) from Ivory Coast sick with malaria. The college hospital did not find what was wrong with her. After a few days of very high temperature, she was transfered to Austin, where they suspected everything wrongly and were putting her on the list for liver transplant, until her parents turned up and told the doctors what her condition most likely was. After a few days of a quinine or equivalent regimen she was basically fine again and sent home. However her prolonged stay in hospital blew the ceiling on her insurance and she was left with a debt of many 10s of thousands of US$. With no other rescourse, she went to the TAMU lawyer and sued both hospitals for malpractice. This was settled out of court, and my friend eventually paid nothing, the lawyer worked pro-bono.
OK, these are perhaps anecdotal, but a bit more than that I think. My wife has had two kids in two different countries, neither being the US, and we never had anything to pay for childbirth. I'm pretty sure that if my malaria-affected friend had been treated in most western countries the doctors would have perhaps apologised for their incompetence and certainly refrained from sending her such an outrageous bill. I'm also pretty sure that you have to look far and wide in the US for a hospital that will give you top-level cancer care for free.
There you have in a nutshell why the US health system is poorly ranked. Having the best level of care in the world means nothing if one can't afford it, and if public health policies are driven by greed.
The US people deserve and can afford better.
I'd mostly agree with the recent lack of "big invention" like the aeroplane or the car, however the author underplays the role of the computer and associated communication technologies. Now whether we like it or not we are moving towards a single, small world where everybody can communicate with everyone else and can access most of the world's public knowledge cheaply and effectively. This is increasingly replacing travel and having profound effects at every level of the society. Furthermore, whereas the car and the aeroplane were used for war, the computer so far has mostly been used for peace. As a result we have avoided a third WW so far that would have destroyed us utterly. Of course this is not strictly true but by and large not altogether incorrect.
At the same time we are becoming aware that the world is small, exeedingly finite and that resources are scarce on the one hand, and that expanding our universe to other planets is extremely difficult on the other. We are at an important point in history. Either we rise to the challenge of providing cheap energy, food, shelter, clothes, learning and health for everybody, or in a few short decades we will be all dead. We do not have another couple of millennia ahead of us.
The good thing is that we have now more thinkers, scientists, engineers and industrialists than at any point in history, by several orders of magnitude. However, we are all driven by greed. The odds are almost even, but maybe I'm an optimist.
Written as someone who has never lost 6 months worth of work in a few minutes due to hardware failure or theft.
Hello, I'm not the parent,
I'm assuming you know how to connect to a remote machine over a ssh tunnel. The NFS ports are well-known. Then this is a simple matter of letting time-machine accept NFS mounts as valid backup drives : you can have a look at this site for instance.
Cheers.
Sorry, the summary is bad.
The new proposed law is *not* slightly altered. Several main points make is somewhat more acceptable :
1- the internet subscriber is presumed innocent as per the French constitution. The word of the "HADOPI" authority carry no judicial weight other than a denunciation. The courts will have to do their own fact finding, and they are not likely to be satisfied by a mere IP number matching that of the subscriber.
2- The internet subscriber can defend him/herself before any punishment is meted out. In the previous version, the internet connexion was summarily cut, and only then could the subscriber complain and argue his/her innocence.
Most importantly, the decision is now up to a judge. One has to remember that judges are not at all friends of the current French government. Their budget have been cut, their power have been diminished, they are already overworked. It is not likely that judges will favour the Sarkozy approach, which is to punish early, punish often.
My personal opinion is that this is a face-saving law. The new law is 99.9% inapplicable in practice. There is just no way thousands of people can go through the court system every month as is the government's plan. Plus people are *very* likely to put up a good fight, like they have done everywhere. There are no possible settlement.
Soon the entertainment industry will realise that they have been wasting their time all along, and that they will eventually have to offer what everybody wants, which is a cheap, effective, legal system, be it unecumbered VOD, global licence, whatever . Otherwise they will die, simple as that.
It is hard for most slashdotters to understand why banning these meds may be good. It boils down to this:
0- A lot of slashdotters have a libertarian streak and hate government making decisions for them, however:
1- A lot of people are a lot less educated than slashdotters in general.
2- Many people don't know that taking too much pain meds can kill your liver
3- In a civilized society one has to treat even the uneducated or the stupid.
4- Liver transplant or death is *extremely* expensive to society.
So it comes down to optimising the cost function. In this case don't allow painkiller cocktails. It doesn't matter really as the individual components remain available.
I can assure you that countries do have standards of living. Think of the education and health systems for instance. Local relative wealth might get you a better bed in the local hospital but not necessarily the level of care you would get as Jo Random Citizen in a richer country.
There are several points of importance.
1- the "unreasonable" bit, subject to interpretations
2- like it or not, legally an underage kid is not really a person yet and get fewer, not more, protection from the constitution than an adult in the USA.
There exists an international document, called the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which would have protected the young girl in this situation. However, the USA is one of only two member countries of the UN (the other is Somalia) that has not ratified this convention. However Obama has indicated he intends to remedy this situation.
There are assumptions in this article, the most important of which was that SJ had liver cancer, metastasized from his earlier pancreas cancer. For all we know this is not the case and SJ really had an illness that can be cured effectively with a liver transplant.
Actually there were scientific studies on the effectiveness of AA. The wikipedia page has a good summary (but check your own sources).
The results are mixed, as is often the case in social sciences and medicine, because success at kicking alcoholism depends on very many factors. Researchers seem to agree that AA or more generally mutual support group therapy is better than nothing.
It might be easier to mine garbage dumps for those than outer space.
This is ignoring the history of Iran since the 1950s. Iran had a democratically elected prime minister, Dr Mossadegh in 1951. He nationalised the oil field. As a result, he was overthrown during a West-supported coup. The western-friendly Shah came to power, installed an autocratic dictatorship, which was overthrown by the theocrats in 1979, who were the most vocal opponents of the Shah. Ayatollah Khomeny came to power, installed an even more brutal and repressive, West-unfriendly theocracy. The West tried to overthrow it by staging a war by cutting a deal with Saddam Hussein in Iraq (remember him?), who lusted after Iran's oil fields. After many years of war and nearly a million deaths, a stalemate was reached in 1988. Since then there is an election system in Iran but it is closely controlled by the theocrats. Even though reforms were made, the most progressist of elected leader, Mohamed Katami, did not succeed in freeing the press and installing a real democracy.
Given all the above I would not say the problems of the Iranians are purely their own fault. The West including the US have been meddling in Iranian policies for a long time.
Who cares about firsts anyway. Microsoft teaches us that only thirds matter.
Here the French "Declar\'e" (utf-8 accents lacking, sorry), in a legal document, does mean proven in a court of law.
"D\'eclar\'e" (stupid slashdot lack of utf8 support) here does mean proven in a court of law, after a trial, it does not mean merely "declared".
Remember that Napoleon was basically a dictator, but even the Napoleonic code never put in place the "guilty until proven innocent" false principle. He just made it easier to be proven guilty, which is sufficient in most cases.
I think people got the wrong impression from watching "Les Miserables" in Broadway.
Revenge was achieved by the killer, not justice. The controller should have lost his job and gone to prison. I'm sure his mistake was unintentional, and so this his only manslaughter, if on a large scale.
People's lives are always in your hands, say when you drive. People don't need a fear of retribution to lead their lives, only a sense of responsability, and competence in what they do.
The bill is a disaster. It will rely on honeypots for P2P traffic set up by big media. Competent "pirates" have already started using VPNs, they will never get caught.
Inevitably there will be mistakes made by big media just like there were in the case of *IAA in the US. There will be big sob stories, appeal to the European court of justice and someone will have to pay compensations, all for the pityful download of a few music tracks. Years down the track this bill will have to be overturned.
A complete waste of time. The only good thing is that about 40 MP from the majority abstained from the vote, indicating that even the majority has serious misgivings about this. Hopefully this will help cause Sarkozy lose his reelection.
These days MacOS is basically very close to NetBSD. When things work well all is hunky-dory, and when they don't, they are basically as easy to fix as under Linux or BSD. The best of both world !!
Uh, wait.
Hello ? I've just been to DELL and selected their middle-of-the-range desktop with all defaults. It does run a quad-core but with only 3G of RAM and Vista-32 family edition. 3GB is the sweet spot for vista32. Few will want to pay more for the 64-bit version.
Maybe the 2011 mass market will run win7-64 with much more RAM but we are not there yet.
Basically I've heard the same argument regarding Linux vs. Windows since Linux exists. First with Win95, then Win92, then NT, then 2K, then XP. All were supposed to completely kill Linux.
The fact that Linux still exists. It's windows that doesn't have much breathing room on a $300 netbook. Windows has no room at all on a router or a cheap NAS, which all run linux.
Finally Apple does not cover everybody due to the restrictive hardware choice.
So yeah, Linux still has plenty of breathing space, but I agree basically that it will probably never take over Windows now, unless all hardware goes below $200. In that space Microsoft does not make much money (see XBox).
Thanks, I believe you, yet this is incredible.
Judges are normal people like you and me. The right to belong to a political party of one's choosing is a pretty fundamental right.
Back when I was in college a bunch of my friends bought these cheap 286 boxes (in 1989 or so), only they came with no floppy and only a weird proprietary connector. They did have a 40MB hard disk with DOS on it, so they could boot but basically do nothing with it.
To help my friends I used DEBUG.EXE to write a bare-bone RS232 serial link driver in about 20 lines or assembly, complete with interrupt handler, in about 15 mn. I used it to transfer Kermit. After that it was all plain sailing.
Well, reducing armaments globally would also solve world hunger several times over.
I would like to see fewer weapons, fewer wars and fewer starving children please.
Write to your representative that stupid wars are not on anymore, period.
What are you saying? if everybody is doing it maybe it shouldn't be wrong? Should everybody be punished?
Yes obtaining a copy of a work without permission and compensation for the authors is wrong, but perhaps a $20 DVD is wrong as well, else people would pay for it.
Perhaps restricting access to culture to only the relatively wealthy is also wrong.
Perhaps greedy entertainment executive should get no respect. In France when the three-strike law was about to be voted a number of very well-known artists (mostly actors) wrote a newspaper column saying they supported file sharing, because mostly they want people to see their work.
I see no hideous contortion here.