Yeah, that's why the EPA just implemented new standards which would ban the production and sale of almost all of the current wood burning stoves in the U.S.
Once again government is the disease masquerading as its own cure. The free market is not the problem here because there is no free market.
The USA federal government sets price controls on any drugs sold to its big welfare programs creating a major market distortion. Government imposes a ridiculously arduous approval process that must be navigated before a drug can even be sold in the USA market. Government also erects trade barriers so that drugs cannot be imported or re-imported into the USA.
Now, consider the people in the USA who actually buy their own drugs, either through private insurance or (unfortunately for them) via direct retail sale. Basically, the working middle class. People with enough income so that they don't qualify for Medicaid and aren't yet eligible for Medicare. As a direct result of US federal government policy, this fraction of the population is forced to subsidize drug R&D for everyone else in the world! Now you're talking about levying taxes to further increase the burden on the people who are already paying most of the costs?
Get rid of all the price controls and trade barriers and you can spread the costs over hundreds of millions of additional people instead of dumping them entirely on the American middle class. As long as these distortions exist, the market cannot possibly work.
Tort reform is absolutely essential for cases like this. Vioxx was one of the most useful drugs ever developed for the treatment of arthritis pain. Vioxx does not cause strokes and heart attacks. It increases the RISK of strokes and heart attacks. Taking such an excellent drug off the market for this reason was a stroke of pure idiocy. If Rand Paul wants to repeal the ban, good for him.
Suppose you're a morbidly obese chain smoker whose knees and hips are shot from carrying your fat ass around. Maybe taking Vioxx increases your risk of heart attack from 30% to 60%. That's bad. Now, suppose that you're at a healthy body weight, eating a good diet and have joint pain as a result of all the years you spent doing distance running. Maybe taking Vioxx doubles your risk of a heart attack... from 1% to 2%.
Tort should only come into play if there is fraud, like making false claims about the risks and/or benefits of the drug. As long as the facts are fully disclosed, it should be up to the individual and their doctor to make the tradeoff between pain relief and increased risk of stroke or heart attack.
The USA government bans importation or re-importation of prescription drugs. After all the R&D and regulatory stuff, the marginal cost of producing one extra pill is almost negligible. Therefore, a place like Canada can impose price controls without a US-based drug company refusing to sell them the product. At the margin, it's all profit, so they don't care. However, those drugs can't come back into the US, so prices remain artificially inflated in the US market. Why should any country with socialized medicine develop drugs when the USA federal government is willing to force its citizens to subsidize the drug development for the rest of the world?
It's not "hard" in the sense that I couldn't read books before the e-readers, but still an unnecessary annoyance now that e-readers are available. When I'm eating breakfast for instance, It's nice to not be using one hand to hold the book open.
Interesting. I do the exact opposite. Don't you find illustrations and diagrams a pain when using an e-reader? I find it really hard to read charts, tables or what not in the e-book format. At least on my Kindle that is. And if I'm doing a project where there's dust, dirt, or solder around, I'd rather not have my laptop in the vicinity.
For anything that has pictures, charts, graphs or formulas, I definitely want the dead tree version. I can't imagine using a Kindle for my college textbooks or any technical manuals The zoom features aren't great and you're sometimes reading text on one page pertinent to a graphic on another page. I already regret having bought 'Capital in the 21st Century" as an e-book precisely for that reason.
For pure text, like a novel, the Kindle is awesome. Portable, comfortable to hold, long battery life. If you've ever read a really fat paperback (Mark Bowden's "Blackhawk Down" comes to mind), just holding the damned thing open is a pain. I love the fact that you can read the Kindle, say at breakfast, without having to use hands to hold the book open. Same with a stationary exercise machine. It's also nice that you can zoom on the text in case the motion of your head is making the print hard to read. I think the best and most invaluable feature of having an e-reader is Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org). Want to read or reference Nietzsche, Dante, Shakespeare, or go back and read Moby Dick, The Count of Monte Cristo or many other old classics? All free (and legal) via the web site.
Of course there's always the zombie apocalypse scenario where electricity would be hard to come by, but until then, the e-reader provides a lot of utility .
Actually it was 90, 45 and 22 (with some in between) but the explosion in mobile devices and the scramble for smaller, faster cheaper was still at work in that market. Mobile has sort of reached a point where shrinking the device has only marginal value however. Users want or need a certain screen size and the devices need a certain mechanical strength, so "smaller" components aren't a big value driver. I don't see that faster speeds are going to be a huge value in that market either. Lower power/more battery life is still a bonus and if costs keep going down at each node, the demand will be there. Now that we're talking about moving away from silicon however, the smaller, faster and lower power are still considerations, but I think the OP is talking about the point where the new technology can achieve that, but only at higher cost. Are there enough products and applications where people are willing to pay a premium for the extra functionality? We shall see.
The ingredients are definitely nasty, so there's concern for industrial waste and exposure. However, the finished material has proven to be relatively harmless in animal studies. I was surprised to learn this, but that seems to be the conclusion, so there should be no immediate risk for using the end products. I'm not sure about the stability of the compounds or how they degrade over time.
I would get the government out of healthcare entirely. Their 50 year intervention has created an absolute disaster of exploding costs, lack of competition and stagnation of quality. Millions unable to afford even the most basic services, the working uninsured being billed at exorbitant levels to subsidize government programs, etc. etc. If by "the system" you mean private insurance companies, then you're right. Forcing us to buy their products and entrenching a middle man that adds little value to the system. Going through health insurance companies for a routine service such as an annual physical is like going through an auto insurance company for an oil change. Competition and innovation are what drive down prices and increase quality. Governments never do. I think the automobile model is appropriate. Most services should be purchased directly by the customer from the provider with complete price transparency in a competitive marketplace. Insurance should only come into play only for catastrophic problems. Having a middle man, be it government or insurance companies, involved in every single transaction is a ridiculous model.
Wiretapping laws vary from state to state. In some places, it's legal to surreptitiously record a phone call or conversation. Other states are "mutual consent" states where all parties in a conversation must agree to the recording.
I think companies like SamSung were protecting themselves with the owner's manuals, license agreements, etc. They could argue that the user consented to the recording (as specified in the product documentation) simply by using the device.
It would certainly be interesting if a state attorney general decided to make a case against one of these companies for illegal recording.
Agreed that we are not going to be getting a personal visit from alien life forms anytime soon.
That does not mean that SETI is a waste of time however. Earthlings have been making radio broadcasts for close to 100 years. The nearest stars to Earth (apart from the sun) are only 4-5 light years away. It's also possible that intelligent life in other parts of the universe could be millions of years ahead of homo sapiens in terms of technology. Planning for a visit from aliens is a waste of time. Trying to pick up some signals emanating from elsewhere in the universe is not.
Wikipedia has a nice list of countries with whom the USA has extradition treaties and there are associated PDFs. I know that the CIA has indeed kidnapped people (extraordinary rendition is the sanitized name) from Western countries, and those countries were none too happy about it. Normally, it's possible to fight extradition in a court. In fact, there are lawyers who specialize in this sort of thing.
Given the state of Russia-USA relations, they probably would have given him a medal. His buddies have so far been smart enough to avoid getting arrested in a country with whom the USA has an extradition treaty.
"Kalinin, Kotov and Rytikov remain at large."
Neither the article, nor the linked PCworld article say much about how they identified these guys by name. I'd be curious to know.
Would you also argue that there is no such thing as epilepsy in people who have no discernible physical abnormalities in their brains? What would your "simple critical thinking skills" tell you if you observed someone having an epileptic seizure?
If the inmates aren't allowed to use facebook or other social networking websites, why the hell isn't the prison just blocking them? Schools, businesses and public libraries seem capable of denying access to certain URLs, why not the prisons? Putting someone in front of a computer with internet access and then punishing them for using certain websites borders on entrapment.
Having a bad day or are you just an asshole in general? Do you need emotional support, more sleep or professional help to prevent you from making obnoxious comments to people in a tragic situation? How dare you judge someone to be a terrible parent based on the mere fact that they don't want their kids in daycare or perhaps can't afford it? You want to sic social services on them and raise the possibility of having the kids taken away just because the wife has a medical condition? You're asking personal questions about their psychological well being? WTF? The guy is in a tough spot and he's asking for a technical solution to a given problem from the computer geeks on Slashdot. He doesn't need a fucking lecture from you on how to best manage his family situation and his wife's medical condition. Nor does he need you to run down a list of worst case scenarios for him and raise the specter of Big Brother taking his children away. I'm sure that he and his wife have gone through the "what ifs" 1000 times already. The fact that seizures are "unpredictable" does not mean they happen on a regular basis and it doesn't mean they will always be so severe as to constitute an emergency situation. Suppose the frequency is 1-3 times per year? You demand that they pay for daycare and insist that the wife sit around doing nothing because there's a 0.3% chance she might have a seizure on a given day? And that not doing so makes them terrible people? Perhaps the OP is too polite, so I'll be the first to tell you to stick your judgements, personal questions, opinions and implied threats up your ass.
FYI, It's a common misconception that 'seizure' means that a person falls to the ground and starts twitching and frothing at the mouth. There are dozens of different types of seizures, the "tonic clonic" seizures (formerly called 'grand mal') which involve these symptoms are merely the worst. The mildest seizures are probably 'absence seizures' which would be hard to distinguish from daydreaming. Other seizures alter consciousness but don't necessarily impair motor function. Some seizures have physical symptoms which aren't readily apparent. e.g. making a tight fist or gripping an object, lip licking or pronounced swallowing. The description wasn't specific, but I suppose if he needs a panic button, the wife's symptoms must be rather harsh.
The summary states that the technologies were "supposedly" untraceable and the linked article talks specifically about how LE used bitcoin to trace DPR.
Total rubbish and a false dichotomy as well. I'd like to see the results of a double-blind experiment in which a bunch of "people who truly appreciate high quality" were tasked with differentiating a $500 Ethernet cable from a $10,000 Ethernet cable. With some decent mid range stereo equipment and all else being equal, you would not be able to tell the difference. I think the knowledge of how much you spent on your equipment probably makes a marginal contribution to your audio bliss, despite the fact that it has no effect on the actual signal quality.
Space probes are actually a good example. With the right encoding, it's possible to get crystal clear photographs wirelessly from millions of miles away. Doing so in real time is harder, but with enough bandwidth you can easily overcome the shortcomings of noise or loss in the transmission medium.
Yeah, they recently proposed a $4 trillion budget, but everything in that budget is higher priority than infrastructure. Therefore we need new taxes and new spending or a massive new borrowing spree to address that issue. BS. They have more than enough money to build infrastructure. Reduce war spending and get rid of thousands of over-paid bureaucrats who have time to write 300 page novels in the futuristic fiction genre.
1. Secure the borders and put strict limits on immigration. U.S. birth rates are barely at replacement level. Stabilizing the population will reduce wear and tear on existing infrastructure and lessen the need for new infrastructure. It would also be extremely beneficial in mitigatimng problems such as pollution and water shortages.
2. Make infrastructure self-funding. There are bad taxes, worse taxes and extremely bad taxes. The "use taxes" are the "least bad" of all. Contrary to the suggestions of the economic dunce in the White House, we should not tax income and profit to pay for infrastructure. Make the people who use it pay for it through tolls, fuel taxes etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's why the EPA just implemented new standards which would ban the production and sale of almost all of the current wood burning stoves in the U.S.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/la...
All this environmental alarmist nonsense is just being used as an excuse for more government control.
"We should uncover funding sources of people and organizations that are using that money to lie to us."
The biggest liars are getting their funding by confiscating the income and profits from working people and businesses.
Once again government is the disease masquerading as its own cure. The free market is not the problem here because there is no free market.
The USA federal government sets price controls on any drugs sold to its big welfare programs creating a major market distortion. Government imposes a ridiculously arduous approval process that must be navigated before a drug can even be sold in the USA market. Government also erects trade barriers so that drugs cannot be imported or re-imported into the USA.
Now, consider the people in the USA who actually buy their own drugs, either through private insurance or (unfortunately for them) via direct retail sale. Basically, the working middle class. People with enough income so that they don't qualify for Medicaid and aren't yet eligible for Medicare. As a direct result of US federal government policy, this fraction of the population is forced to subsidize drug R&D for everyone else in the world! Now you're talking about levying taxes to further increase the burden on the people who are already paying most of the costs?
Get rid of all the price controls and trade barriers and you can spread the costs over hundreds of millions of additional people instead of dumping them entirely on the American middle class. As long as these distortions exist, the market cannot possibly work.
Tort reform is absolutely essential for cases like this. Vioxx was one of the most useful drugs ever developed for the treatment of arthritis pain. Vioxx does not cause strokes and heart attacks. It increases the RISK of strokes and heart attacks. Taking such an excellent drug off the market for this reason was a stroke of pure idiocy. If Rand Paul wants to repeal the ban, good for him.
Suppose you're a morbidly obese chain smoker whose knees and hips are shot from carrying your fat ass around. Maybe taking Vioxx increases your risk of heart attack from 30% to 60%. That's bad. Now, suppose that you're at a healthy body weight, eating a good diet and have joint pain as a result of all the years you spent doing distance running. Maybe taking Vioxx doubles your risk of a heart attack ... from 1% to 2%.
Tort should only come into play if there is fraud, like making false claims about the risks and/or benefits of the drug. As long as the facts are fully disclosed, it should be up to the individual and their doctor to make the tradeoff between pain relief and increased risk of stroke or heart attack.
Are you being facetious?
The USA government bans importation or re-importation of prescription drugs. After all the R&D and regulatory stuff, the marginal cost of producing one extra pill is almost negligible. Therefore, a place like Canada can impose price controls without a US-based drug company refusing to sell them the product. At the margin, it's all profit, so they don't care. However, those drugs can't come back into the US, so prices remain artificially inflated in the US market.
Why should any country with socialized medicine develop drugs when the USA federal government is willing to force its citizens to subsidize the drug development for the rest of the world?
It's not "hard" in the sense that I couldn't read books before the e-readers, but still an unnecessary annoyance now that e-readers are available.
When I'm eating breakfast for instance, It's nice to not be using one hand to hold the book open.
Interesting. I do the exact opposite. Don't you find illustrations and diagrams a pain when using an e-reader? I find it really hard to read charts, tables or what not in the e-book format. At least on my Kindle that is. And if I'm doing a project where there's dust, dirt, or solder around, I'd rather not have my laptop in the vicinity.
For anything that has pictures, charts, graphs or formulas, I definitely want the dead tree version. I can't imagine using a Kindle for my college textbooks or any technical manuals The zoom features aren't great and you're sometimes reading text on one page pertinent to a graphic on another page. I already regret having bought 'Capital in the 21st Century" as an e-book precisely for that reason.
For pure text, like a novel, the Kindle is awesome. Portable, comfortable to hold, long battery life. If you've ever read a really fat paperback (Mark Bowden's "Blackhawk Down" comes to mind), just holding the damned thing open is a pain. I love the fact that you can read the Kindle, say at breakfast, without having to use hands to hold the book open. Same with a stationary exercise machine. It's also nice that you can zoom on the text in case the motion of your head is making the print hard to read.
I think the best and most invaluable feature of having an e-reader is Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org). Want to read or reference Nietzsche, Dante, Shakespeare, or go back and read Moby Dick, The Count of Monte Cristo or many other old classics? All free (and legal) via the web site.
Of course there's always the zombie apocalypse scenario where electricity would be hard to come by, but until then, the e-reader provides a lot of utility .
Actually it was 90, 45 and 22 (with some in between) but the explosion in mobile devices and the scramble for smaller, faster cheaper was still at work in that market.
Mobile has sort of reached a point where shrinking the device has only marginal value however. Users want or need a certain screen size and the devices need a certain mechanical strength, so "smaller" components aren't a big value driver. I don't see that faster speeds are going to be a huge value in that market either. Lower power/more battery life is still a bonus and if costs keep going down at each node, the demand will be there.
Now that we're talking about moving away from silicon however, the smaller, faster and lower power are still considerations, but I think the OP is talking about the point where the new technology can achieve that, but only at higher cost. Are there enough products and applications where people are willing to pay a premium for the extra functionality? We shall see.
The ingredients are definitely nasty, so there's concern for industrial waste and exposure. However, the finished material has proven to be relatively harmless in animal studies. I was surprised to learn this, but that seems to be the conclusion, so there should be no immediate risk for using the end products.
I'm not sure about the stability of the compounds or how they degrade over time.
I would get the government out of healthcare entirely. Their 50 year intervention has created an absolute disaster of exploding costs, lack of competition and stagnation of quality. Millions unable to afford even the most basic services, the working uninsured being billed at exorbitant levels to subsidize government programs, etc. etc.
If by "the system" you mean private insurance companies, then you're right. Forcing us to buy their products and entrenching a middle man that adds little value to the system.
Going through health insurance companies for a routine service such as an annual physical is like going through an auto insurance company for an oil change.
Competition and innovation are what drive down prices and increase quality. Governments never do.
I think the automobile model is appropriate. Most services should be purchased directly by the customer from the provider with complete price transparency in a competitive marketplace. Insurance should only come into play only for catastrophic problems. Having a middle man, be it government or insurance companies, involved in every single transaction is a ridiculous model.
Wiretapping laws vary from state to state. In some places, it's legal to surreptitiously record a phone call or conversation. Other states are "mutual consent" states where all parties in a conversation must agree to the recording.
I think companies like SamSung were protecting themselves with the owner's manuals, license agreements, etc. They could argue that the user consented to the recording (as specified in the product documentation) simply by using the device.
It would certainly be interesting if a state attorney general decided to make a case against one of these companies for illegal recording.
Agreed that we are not going to be getting a personal visit from alien life forms anytime soon.
That does not mean that SETI is a waste of time however. Earthlings have been making radio broadcasts for close to 100 years. The nearest stars to Earth (apart from the sun) are only 4-5 light years away. It's also possible that intelligent life in other parts of the universe could be millions of years ahead of homo sapiens in terms of technology. Planning for a visit from aliens is a waste of time. Trying to pick up some signals emanating from elsewhere in the universe is not.
How does a data center drive up land and home prices if there are only a few employees?
Wikipedia has a nice list of countries with whom the USA has extradition treaties and there are associated PDFs.
I know that the CIA has indeed kidnapped people (extraordinary rendition is the sanitized name) from Western countries, and those countries were none too happy about it.
Normally, it's possible to fight extradition in a court. In fact, there are lawyers who specialize in this sort of thing.
Given the state of Russia-USA relations, they probably would have given him a medal. His buddies have so far been smart enough to avoid getting arrested in a country with whom the USA has an extradition treaty.
"Kalinin, Kotov and Rytikov remain at large."
Neither the article, nor the linked PCworld article say much about how they identified these guys by name. I'd be curious to know.
Would you also argue that there is no such thing as epilepsy in people who have no discernible physical abnormalities in their brains?
What would your "simple critical thinking skills" tell you if you observed someone having an epileptic seizure?
If the inmates aren't allowed to use facebook or other social networking websites, why the hell isn't the prison just blocking them? Schools, businesses and public libraries seem capable of denying access to certain URLs, why not the prisons?
Putting someone in front of a computer with internet access and then punishing them for using certain websites borders on entrapment.
Having a bad day or are you just an asshole in general? Do you need emotional support, more sleep or professional help to prevent you from making obnoxious comments to people in a tragic situation?
How dare you judge someone to be a terrible parent based on the mere fact that they don't want their kids in daycare or perhaps can't afford it? You want to sic social services on them and raise the possibility of having the kids taken away just because the wife has a medical condition? You're asking personal questions about their psychological well being? WTF?
The guy is in a tough spot and he's asking for a technical solution to a given problem from the computer geeks on Slashdot. He doesn't need a fucking lecture from you on how to best manage his family situation and his wife's medical condition. Nor does he need you to run down a list of worst case scenarios for him and raise the specter of Big Brother taking his children away. I'm sure that he and his wife have gone through the "what ifs" 1000 times already.
The fact that seizures are "unpredictable" does not mean they happen on a regular basis and it doesn't mean they will always be so severe as to constitute an emergency situation. Suppose the frequency is 1-3 times per year? You demand that they pay for daycare and insist that the wife sit around doing nothing because there's a 0.3% chance she might have a seizure on a given day? And that not doing so makes them terrible people?
Perhaps the OP is too polite, so I'll be the first to tell you to stick your judgements, personal questions, opinions and implied threats up your ass.
FYI, It's a common misconception that 'seizure' means that a person falls to the ground and starts twitching and frothing at the mouth.
There are dozens of different types of seizures, the "tonic clonic" seizures (formerly called 'grand mal') which involve these symptoms are merely the worst. The mildest seizures are probably 'absence seizures' which would be hard to distinguish from daydreaming. Other seizures alter consciousness but don't necessarily impair motor function. Some seizures have physical symptoms which aren't readily apparent. e.g. making a tight fist or gripping an object, lip licking or pronounced swallowing.
The description wasn't specific, but I suppose if he needs a panic button, the wife's symptoms must be rather harsh.
The summary states that the technologies were "supposedly" untraceable and the linked article talks specifically about how LE used bitcoin to trace DPR.
Total rubbish and a false dichotomy as well.
I'd like to see the results of a double-blind experiment in which a bunch of "people who truly appreciate high quality" were tasked with differentiating a $500 Ethernet cable from a $10,000 Ethernet cable. With some decent mid range stereo equipment and all else being equal, you would not be able to tell the difference.
I think the knowledge of how much you spent on your equipment probably makes a marginal contribution to your audio bliss, despite the fact that it has no effect on the actual signal quality.
Space probes are actually a good example. With the right encoding, it's possible to get crystal clear photographs wirelessly from millions of miles away.
Doing so in real time is harder, but with enough bandwidth you can easily overcome the shortcomings of noise or loss in the transmission medium.
Yeah, they recently proposed a $4 trillion budget, but everything in that budget is higher priority than infrastructure. Therefore we need new taxes and new spending or a massive new borrowing spree to address that issue.
BS. They have more than enough money to build infrastructure. Reduce war spending and get rid of thousands of over-paid bureaucrats who have time to write 300 page novels in the futuristic fiction genre.
1. Secure the borders and put strict limits on immigration. U.S. birth rates are barely at replacement level. Stabilizing the population will reduce wear and tear on existing infrastructure and lessen the need for new infrastructure. It would also be extremely beneficial in mitigatimng problems such as pollution and water shortages.
2. Make infrastructure self-funding. There are bad taxes, worse taxes and extremely bad taxes. The "use taxes" are the "least bad" of all. Contrary to the suggestions of the economic dunce in the White House, we should not tax income and profit to pay for infrastructure. Make the people who use it pay for it through tolls, fuel taxes etc.