I agree in general, but I enforce that one specifically very strictly. But mostly because my oldest split his head on a corner after tripping and had to get stitches (two little metal staple things actually so they don't have to shave their head). Managed to cost me $600. Typically it is a timeout in the corner if I have to say stop more than once. If they have something in their hand it is an immediate swat and then into the corner. I would rather their ass sting then them getting seriously hurt and winding up in an ER again. The best part is..."do you want to go get staples again" pretty much stops any potentially hazardous misbehaving dead in its tracks.
To be honest I am a bit random with the minor rules. You don't want to be consistently lax on specific rules or they will never obey them and will start to pull the same thing on progressively more important rules trying to test the waters. The occasional hammer dropping on a relatively minor thing serves as a reminder "I told you not to do that". You don't have to discipline them all the time, and they are always left with that "I know I'm not supposed to do this...will I get busted this time?" thought that tends to make them police themselves. Gotta make them think about what they are doing, not just blindly follow specific behavior.
That and I really enjoy that cautious look as they realize they just broke a rule and wait in nervous anticipation for the judgment of their behavior.:)
That all depends on how you handle the finer points of this method.
You just have to make sure your enforcement encourages coming clean. The best way to do this is to "not see" what happened and then question them. If it isn't serious then you let them off with a minor "don't let me catch you doing it again" as long as they come clean. If they lie, *KABOOM* extra severe punishments. Groundings, lost toys, etc. (One of my personal favorites is back against the wall and legs at 90 deg angle. I only had to use that one once and it broke the tantrum pretty quick.) Not only does that encourage the honesty portion, it enforces "holy shit, they see everything!".
Congratulations, you win the idiot atheist prize. First, you are arbitrarily defining what "God" is and a whole other group of assumptions about being a "sick-fuck voyeur". Why are you insisting on personifying God? I mean...you know...thousands of years of literary evidence that humans inherently personify damned near anything they come across should probably be weighed into any discussion on the subject. Unless of course you don't believe things like trees exist because humans have personified those for ages as well.
Second. Jefferson in particular was a Deist, a well known one at that. He absolutely believed in God, just not the magical fairytale stuff. There is something out there called the Jeffersonian Bible where he collected a bunch of biblical writings, arranged them chronologically (rather than it's current manipulated format), and cut out all of the "this was magic" stuff. This resulted in a book that covered the whole teachings of Jesus stuff without all the magical/miracle stuff. He has said that Jesus gave the world the best ethical code it has ever seen. Then you also have Darwin who said the wide variety of life and its adaptability is evidence of the greatness of God.
Dawkins is just a flaming militant atheist asshat that uses his flame war crap to maintain his fame. He is like the Bill O'Reilly of atheists. So...maybe you should look up some other guys that I think have actually done a little more to contribute to scientific progress and freedoms. Ken Miller, has a great 2hr presentation on youtube where he talks about his time as the expert witness in the Dover trial and shutting down creationism...oh...but he is a Catholic. Then we have Francis Collins, you know, map the human genome guy? Oh...but he has a book about how DNA is the language of God.
The smart guys have indeed spoken on the subject, however you are a complete liar or an idiot for saying they unilaterally agree on your statement. So again...I hereby present you with the militant atheist asshat award for reaching the same heights of religious fundamentalism using lies and misdirection to make your argument.
Yeah! Because linux and BSD are bug ridden pieces of crap when it comes to drivers too...oh...wait...but they don't have the same level of idiocy implemented in their driver model... Apple's hardware control has been a very important factor, and probably will continue to be, it isn't anywhere near as ugly as you imply. I think the major distinction to here isn't so much the hardware variety, so much as allowing whatever closed shop hardware vendor to give their chunks of driver code system level access site unseen. The Linux/BSD model of driver doesn't really do that.
It has way more to do with the driver development and implementation model than the actual variety of hardware. It isn't the POS PCI card, it is the POS drivers for that PCI card that cause the problems.
The worst part of this is that the solution is also the problem. Eat all the cows fixes the problem, but causes the problem to repeat as the farmers want to sell more cows to be eaten! It is a vicious cycle I tell you.
The way I see it we are all totally fucked anyways so why bother worrying about stupid details? An object of size X or larger could hit us and destroy all life on the planet. Or solar system alone has more than a few of these X sized things, when you start adding up all the unknown extrasolar X sized objects whole thing gets pretty dismal. Then you add in things like gamma ray bursts, super volcanoes (we have one brewing at Yellowstone), and a whole variety of other doomsday scenarios that don't have anything to do with human behavior that could end us all in an instant. The end result is that we are completely, totally, and undeniably fucked so long as we are squabbling over silly bullshit rather than learning how to get all the eggs out of this one basket called Earth. In the meantime $diety has intelligently designed the universe in such a way that life exists and interacts in such a great way with that most important hydrocarbon... alcohol (Proof that $diety exists and that he loves us and wants us to be happy).
In all seriousness, I think the whole warming debate is hilariously unimportant. 1. The models involved are horrifically complex and ultimately have very little predictability due to the wide array of variables involved. 2. It is fucking stupid to not err on the side of caution when all your eggs are in one basket. Fuckall the rest of the "evidence" for one side or the other. This is purely a game of chance and it is fucking stupid to not take the safe bet of "quit spewing shit into the air that we have not been spewing into the air for the vast majority of human history". Shit, even if this whole global "climate change" or whatever it is called these days is totally wrong, we will at least have fresher fucking air to breathe. To even begin to try and play the whole economic impact vs fate of life on Earth as even remotely equal is mindbogglingly stupid. It doesn't exactly take a brilliant scientist to figure out shitting into the air results in breathing lots of shit. You can bet your ass the same assholes that insisted on the negative economic impacts being more important will also be the first motherfuckers to buy breathing apparatuses and premium land in "safe" areas if things do go horribly wrong.
umount/dev/soapbox
If a star within ~3000 light years (I think this is the number I saw) goes nova and sends a nice gamma burst our way it could eradicate all life on the planet regardless of the state of our climate. The best part is (as raised elsewhere in the threads for this story), EOL != EOHL. The parameters required for Earth to support life are MUCH wider than the parameters required for Earth to support HUMAN life. The Earth can shake us off at a moments notice and keep on spinning through the inky blackness of space still teeming with life. So! Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we will surely die!
I'm not sure what you are getting at... As I understand it "cow farts" are actually a pretty significant source of methane. The massive population explosion of the various 4 legged cud chewers to feed the huge growth in demand for tasty meat products has had a significant impact on things even when you aren't directly considering the other environmental damage caused by this type of livestock.
The methane stored in the permafrost will make our bit of car exhaust look like a significant problem?
Fucked? Are you stupid? Let me explain it to you this way. Folks like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and so on fucked their citizens. We however have instituted a system that ensures only the most incompetent fuckwits ever hold the highest offices in the land. These self serving fuckwits are easily purchased or otherwise flipped to the other side and all just go along with the political winds of change. Specter is a good example of the most recent one. Allows some of the most horrible R legislation to "accidentally" come out of his office, then switches side to great cheering! What the fuck?!
No...we have found a perfect system where we can keep these idiot assholes occupied rather than actually DOING anything TOO stupid or dangerous and ensure that the most powerful offices are filled with the most small minded idiots we have to offer. Notice, the most horrible things that DO come out of our government is not typically done by the elected people, but by the people those idiot assholes were convinced to appoint to various positions.
Think about it...it could be WAY worse if these guys actually had any kind of conviction or dedication other than their own self absorbed self serving agendas.
After rereading it occurs to me that you were already mentioning the removal from jury duty problem. (It's late, I apologize) However, even assuming you get past that point, you have to educate the others and they can still basically ignore it even if you do manage to rally the support for it's use.
You might want to look that one up. Not that I disagree with the point you are making, but jury nullification basically doesn't exist anymore. It exits as a trivial technicality that can be completely ignored and can potentially be used to declare a mistrial and start again. In fact, simply being aware that it exists is frequently enough to get you removed from jury duty.
Ultimately, it is a rather ugly two edged sword. There were more than a few cases where a white jury would use jury nullification to prevent a white man guilty of killing a "nigger" from being prosecuted. In the end we just find more creative and expensive(profitable) ways to fuck each other over, welcome to the rat race.
Absolutely! That way those laws that mandate people of certain ages be in school can be used to generate a boatload of money! Further, I would like to point that we had public schools when we were at the top of the science/math/technology realm. The interesting thing is that the quality of education declined mostly when it became a political issue. Now, I admit the government education lends itself to abuse of things like the mandatory teaching of creationism as science, but thus far it has not made it terribly far. On the other hand, private schools have been doing this type of thing with great success for many years now.
Neither side is guilt free on this. The far left end has promoted that "trophy for everyone" crap and "no bullying contracts" and other such innane bullshit. The far right has pushed for taking all the funding away, teaching religion as science, and Reagan's infamous Ketchup is a vegetable plan.
Well, I only object to the taxes one because there always the remote possibility that you can avoid them.
Now...what happens if it has tits AND wheels? Or only one tit or one wheel? There seems to be some research required to determine the universal validity of this one.
I see this argument a lot, and it is as equally as mindless as the PR folks trotting out the "copying = theft" in such simple terms. At the end of the day it is still theft. It is dealing with lost revenue. That revenue has been taken from me and I can no longer use it. That is the whole "theft" piece that zealots try to use to debunk copying=theft. The problem is they aren't stealing the game/music/whatever. They are stealing revenue.
Now...to go on and say that every pirated copy = 1 lost sale is pretty intellectuallily dishonest too. But to say no pirated copy = any lost sales is equally stupid. So...some percentage of pirated copies DO equate to some number of lost sales. Those lost sales are stolen revenue. Now...since there is no way to round up all the people and figure out which ones would have bought it and would not have bought it, the only sane approach is to spread the lost revenue across all of them. Some companies try to do that using the 1 copy = 1 lost sale ratio, and I think that is pretty bogus, but there is going to be a more correct formula for determining that average and it is not $0 lost/copy.
It amuses me to no end to watch people who have absolutely no underestanding of business or economics chiming in on how this should work. It is honestly almost more amusing than the people that have no understanding of the technology chime in.
My 3 yr old has been playing gcompris on the linux desktop I set up for the kids since she was 2. It started with the push the ball to tux thing and colored duck games. One day she was playing the alphabet train game and was getting 80% or so correct... She found the game on her own, figured out the rules, and was gettin g80% of her letters correct at 2 1/2 years old. Then I came by another time and she was doing the shape matching and puzzle games very successfully. She "fails" more when we are watching just because she likes our reaction when we tease her. Those little monsters just learn WAY too fast.
You are opposed to government healthcare because through this entire discussion you have done nothing but repeat propaganda rather than facts. Your repeat made up bullshit about how government insurance works without actually doing any research into how it has been implemented elsewhere and what works and what doesn't work. You keep saying nonsense about how government is *always* less efficient, which is a total load of horseshit and shows that YOU are the one that has not bothered to read history. You keep equating military healthcare to civilian government pay...they are not even REMOTELY the same thing. Both of your Army stories are anecdotal, and your first one should have resulted in the removal of a large section of the chain of command and ignores that they could have gone to a civilian emergency room and TRICARE (the government insurance, not government care) would have paid.
And now...for my anecdotal stories. We went to pick up my wife's rather important prescription... We stood waiting ages at the counter...eventually the person came back and said "Your insurance says they won't pay for this and will only pay for the generic". If we wanted the meds that her doctor prescribed (and specifically wrote dispense as written to make sure she got the right ones) we would have to pay $500 for 30 days. So...we had to call her doc, have her pick up a fist full of "sample packs" just so she could have her pills and then he had to REWRITE THE SAME THING, spend 3 days fighting with the insurance company, and then she could go get her pills. This all from a private insurance company. These phone jockey assholes do this all the time, they get in their little computer and tap some buttons and then decide that they get to skip medical school and play doctor based on cost rather than care. So...I canceled them...I went back to Tricare RS. I have had fewer fights with Tricare in 7 years than I have with BCBS in 1 year. The only fight I had with Tricare was when a clinic screwed up the billing, didn't get paid, and then pushed the bill into collections for my wife. When we finally found out what had happened we called them and they refused to do anything. We called Tricare and explained the situation and Tricare said they had to refile, that was law. We call the clinic and they refuse to do anything still. We called Tricare...they called the clinic and explained in no uncertain terms that if they did not pull this out of collections and refile they would start the procedure to ban that clinic from ever receiving Medicaid/Medicare/Tricare for failing to follow the rules. It got fixed pretty quick after that...but I guess that is a bad story because in that case my insurance company was fighting FOR me not AGAINST me...
Please...go get a fucking clue. You have only given "real" examples of being against government provided healthcare through anecdotal stories and NOTHING relating to government insurance. I realize it is very hard for you to understand there is a significant difference, I have tried to point it out over and over and you keep insisting that it is the same thing. This is the propaganda making you stupid on the subject, go do the research and understand that government paid and government provided are not even remotely the same thing. Even if you want to bitch about "everyone has to pay the tax" if it happens to get implemented in that fashion, it keeps the people around you healthier and you are less likely to be exposed to disease. Most people, especially those without insurance, don't go to the doctor until they are VERY sick because of the expense. So they spread the disease around. Then they go to emergency rooms for treatment instead of clinics, where the cost of treatment is an average of 7x more expensive and the chances the bills get paid are WAY less...now of course when the hospitals with ERs lose so much money like that (no hospital ER is a profitable department because of this) your quality of care goes down AND you are exposed to more disease because people were
And your precious private insurance ALREADY DOES JUST THAT! They are charging more if you smoke, they are charging more if you are overweight and some companies are just firing you outright so they don't have to pay the healthcare costs associated. You live in some kind of magical happy fantasy land where "get another insurance company" is even a realistic possibility for most people. Paying the full premium out of pocket costs a God damned fortune, you will be dealing with them finding every reason possible not to provide you with the service you are paying for, and most employers don't exactly give you more than once choice in provider. The hospital I am at has MULTIPLE full time employees whose only purpose in life is to fight with the insurance companies so our patients don't have to. Do you understand that? We have multiple fulltime employees that had to be hired to protect our patients rights and so that the hospital can get fucking paid by these piece of shit companies. You know how many complaints I have heard from them about getting what is owed out of Tricare/Medicare/Medicaid...ZERO NADA FUCKING ZILCH! The only bitch there is that the government has a tendency to lower their max payment and force the hospital to write off the rest of the cost...which most of the insurance companies do too, and they get WAY more fucking vicious about it than the government does. And, since you clearly have not been paying attention, most of the proposals that anyone actually supports INCLUDE YOUR ABILITY TO SEEK PRIVATE INSURANCE! What part of that don't you get? Most of the countries that have that type of "government insurance" system allow their citizens to get insurance elsewhere as well. Also...government pay insurance is NOT GOVERNMENT HEALTHCARE PROVIDER. Let me explain in very clear english for you. Provider is the person providing medical care. Insurance is the people paying the bill. Government provider I think is a bad plan, but most of the serious proposals are not government provider, that is just bullshit rhetoric. Government INSURANCE means the government steps in and acts like an insurance company, not a provider. There is a fucking huge difference.
Listen very carefully...I do not support government being the only choice. I do not support government providers. The only people I have seen talking about government provider or government being the ONLY choice are far right wing propagandists blathering on about how horrible it will all be. I think you are completely and totally deluded about "get another insurance company". The average person, without the employer plan (which was a total government mandate fuckup), would be paying something like $600-$900/month. At those rates your only "real" option is to go get every elective surgery under the sun and visit your doctor every few days just to get your fucking money out of it. The fact of the matter is that government *insurance* with the option to purchase additional private works pretty fucking well and it works a hell of a lot better than what we have now. You are just using a bunch of nonsense rhetoric and trying to force all government healthcare solutions into being the same fucking thing. You keep mixing "provider" with "insurer" and just keep using stupid talking points of right wing rhetoric filled asshats. I have NO problem fighting the notion that we should only have government providers, or be stuck with government only insurance, but our current state of affairs is a fucking horrible mess. I have to see the effects of this crap every day when I go to work. Just today waiting to talk to an office manager of a clinic I watched someone that had to cancel an appointment because that clinic isn't signed on with their specific PRIVATE insurance provider...after he left she looked at me and said "That is the ONLY insurance our docs refuse to sign on with because they treat the patients so horribly, refuse to pay out on anything, and get picked by employers as the cheap option because of that". For fucks sake, go take an
WTF? The main bitch about government healthcare is that taxpayers will be forced to subsidize bad health choices...so you are pointing to an article that shows that isn't the case? Congratulations for not making sense AND once again making nonsense claims about the government. The government only started looking at that trick after private insurance and private employers started doing it!
Here we have multiple private insurance companies and private employeers charging smokers more. That is right...multiple instances of the little "government boogeyman" story you linked...the story is about a TREND not a single incident like your story. How stupid of you to think that private industry isn't already doing it. Oh and in both cases they are paying extra, not being forced. But for shits and giggles since you want to play... How about reading this about an employee was fired for smoking by a private company. After all, private companies trying to increase their bottom line don't want to pay the insurance premiums of smokers and obese people...so just fire them instead!
You aren't allowed to say things like that here...common sense...who the hell approved that?
I am a tad surprised you don't already have a horde bitching at you about how horrible iPods are, or how evil Apple is, or whatever.
Personally, I think MS should have stuck with WinCE over WM. Not for any technical reason...I just think the fact that they let a version of Windows called "wince" out the door is hilarious.
And as far as Android being better in the long run...I don't know that I entirely doubt that, but I wouldn't put too much stock in it. Google is shaping up to be much more "evil empire" than Apple and I think faced with enough pressure Apple may cave on the lockdown. Fact is, they aren't facing a whole lot of competitive pressure, so natural business behavior is to flex muscles and maintain control, it may be distasteful to some, but it is unfortunately smart business. When they start facing some severe competition they will have to change strategy or start getting torn up. Too many non DRM music sites started popping up and iTunes went DRM free. Whether Apple fully supported DRM in the first place is irrelevant, they tolerated it, and it wasn't until there was some competitive pressure that they really pushed against it.
Also...despite common belief, monopolies are legal. It is perfectly legal to build and maintain a monopoly based on being the best (or perceived best) in the field. The problems only come from using your monopoly position to maintain that position rather than competing.
Wow...just wow... Mindless fearmongering, backpedaling, and then saying that being forced to carry a Real ID is not "papers please" and that we are talking about some communist regime healthcare system. In case you haven't actually been paying attention, there have been a whole gang of suggestions on how to approach it, and the Canadian one isn't even "government provided", it is a government insurance, not government healthcare, it worked even better before they capped the salary of doctors, and the Canadians have a fucking holiday to celebrate the guy that came up with it.
Now, if you would be bothered to read the statistics (I work in the medical field, I have read them), the numbers of "wrong procedures" in the operating room or wrong medications or wrong doses are disturbingly high in our current private medical system. Pretending that this fucking trainwreck of a system is "good" is the biggest load of head in the sand bullshit I have ever heard. The only people I have EVER heard sing the praise of our system here are people that have never actually had to go through anything even remotely serious. I see the slimey shit drug reps all the time. I have had to fight with private insurance. Tricare is a fucking organization of saints compared to BCBS. There was an incident in Kansas City where a woman miscarried and BCBS refused to pay and called it an "elective abortion". That one is in the news and can be verified. Your little anecdotal story is sketchy at best because that kind of refusal of emergency treatment could have had a whole fucking gang of people drummed out and likely facing criminal charges. Worst case scenario, military members and their families are allowed to go to civilian emergency rooms and Tricare covers it. Also, it is a D&C not a DNC.
Further, "Medicaid approved surgeon"...like there is a difference between regular surgeons and medicaid approved ones? Is there some mystery test failure that must happen to get them on the Medicaid approved list? I mean...I know a good number of surgeons that accept all forms of insurance, private, Tricare, Medicaid, etc...and all of them are damned good and have a tremendous amount of respect from their patients and staff. There are good docs and bad docs, and whether or not they accept Medicaid is completely and totally irrelevant. Funny thing is, the vast majority of those "wrong procedures" happen in private hospitals because the patient never actually meets the surgeon...they are wheeled in, operated on, and wheeled back out. Those super high priced surgeons don't have time for chitchat.
The military is government provided healthcare, Tricare is government provided insurance. The difference in quality between the two is pretty significant. Your assertion that it still sucks compared to private medicine is laughable at best and tells me you have absolutely no clue how Tricare or private insurance works. With the exception of active military, you can pretty much do what you want with Tricare...and even active military can get a referral to private specialists in many cases. Do you think that all doctors accept all insurance equally? I know doctors that refuse private insurance companies because they cause too much of a hastle in stupid fighting about what is and isn't going to be covered!
Please...get a fucking clue before parading about with your moronic far right wing rhetoric.
OK...so...Google not releasing books that are otherwise impossible to get anyways constitutes censorship? A settlement between Google members of the class action lawsuit is a government granted monopoly? The original government (congress critter) proposed solution is that anyone can use orphaned works in specific ways so long as they attempt to reach the original owner. The "foul" bit here is that if this settlement is accepted by the judge then Google will basically have a get out of jail free card for any potential infringement lawsuits brought by people who didn't opt out of the class action settlement while everyone else will still be liable to potential infringement suits brought by the original copyright holders. This is not censorship in any way shape or form. And I am the one that doesn't understand how this works?
If you are going to make wild accusations about censorship and government monopolies you might look into what is really happening first. This isn't censorship at all. I do think it gives Google a rather large unfair advantage in the market because anyone else competing with them won't have that massive class action settlement to protect them from potential claims of infringmenet. New competitors would have to go through the same legal battle to even attempt to enter the market. THIS IS NOT CENSORSHIP.
I'm so glad people pay attention rather than just being kneejerk asshats. Did you not see where I talked about how they are not all bloodthirsty killers? Did you not see where I talked about All Quiet on the Western Front? Or maybe you couldn't be bothered to look up what that actually is. So here...it is a movie that follows a group of German soldiers through WWI in a very human way. I mean seriously...did you read the post at all given that most of it is actually talking about exactly what you are saying I am "afraid" of?
"Know thy enemy" is not even remotely the same as what was happening here, it is more along the lines of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." I don't think this game is being marketed for insurgents...and I doubt they would be buying it even if it was. So this kind of "enemy point of view" marketed primarly to the opposing team is called "propoganda". It swings both ways, but I have nothing but disgust for either side when they use dead bodies for propoganda and money making purposes like this.
So...it is censorship because Google is the only one who has the rights and you expect them to use that right the way you demand? This doesn't even touch on the rather bizarre notion that Google can even be granted this set of rights in the fashion that it happened. What if no one had the rights? Then is Google still engaging in censorship by not putting anything up? Would that make everyone guilty of censorship because they didn't do it too? So the government and Yahoo and Microsoft and Apple and Linus Torvaldes and your grandmother are all guilty of censorship because they didn't attempt to secure any of these rights themselves and then use them to put all known literary works up on the internet? You know what...I think *YOU* are guilty of censorship now because you haven't posted everything you have ever written on the internet for everyone to read and have not attempted to secure the rights and subsequently post every literary work online!
So...Google pays for the bandwidth. Google pays for the storage. Google pays for the lawyers that even allow them to post *ANYTHING*...and because they don't post everything they are guilty of censorship?
Once again...the hordes come out and cry censorship...
Book is out of print...
Google doesn't post book online...
Censorship at Google!
Are you f'ing serious? So...people should demand that Google digitizes every book ever so that they aren't censoring? Ahh yes...let us all get the pitchforks and torches and force Google to do what we want...after all...that kind of totalitarian control is WAY better than censorship right guys?
Seriously...can someone please explain to me how not digitizing a book that is already out of print even begins to qualify as censorship?
This does raise an interesting issue. As the price goes down and the bandwidth goes up there will eventually be a point where it would be profitable for botnet herders to subsidize infected machine connections. Like Netzero only a little more sinister.
What about died waiting for someone qualified to read the MRI or died because they scanned the wrong thing? A piece of this whole technological healthcare stuff is that you can send those MRI images anywhere in the world to be read quickly. This is fairly common in after hours emergency situations where the choice is wake up the local radiologist and get them to read ASAP or just click a button and have it immediately sent to a radiology service elsewhere in the world that can read the image quickly and send back the results. Most of that diagnostic equipment you speak of is intricately linked into the electronic medical systems. I check in at the front desk, my info gets forwarded on to the MRI machine as a specific job, so when I get back there the machine already is displaying my information and what I am getting scanned to the technicians.
Oh and anecdotal as this may be, not only have I been a patient that has recieved xrays and an MRI by these fancy integrated systems, I also work at a hospital where my job is to make sure all of those things CAN send/recieve data to all the places they need to go.
Now, not that I disagree that the state of medical information technology doesn't have a long way to go, but medical folks actually are trained to repeatedly ask the same questions even if they know the answers. It is very common for patients (especially the elderly) to suddenly remember that medication they have been taking after you asked them the 5th time.
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I agree in general, but I enforce that one specifically very strictly. But mostly because my oldest split his head on a corner after tripping and had to get stitches (two little metal staple things actually so they don't have to shave their head). Managed to cost me $600. Typically it is a timeout in the corner if I have to say stop more than once. If they have something in their hand it is an immediate swat and then into the corner. I would rather their ass sting then them getting seriously hurt and winding up in an ER again. The best part is..."do you want to go get staples again" pretty much stops any potentially hazardous misbehaving dead in its tracks.
:)
To be honest I am a bit random with the minor rules. You don't want to be consistently lax on specific rules or they will never obey them and will start to pull the same thing on progressively more important rules trying to test the waters. The occasional hammer dropping on a relatively minor thing serves as a reminder "I told you not to do that". You don't have to discipline them all the time, and they are always left with that "I know I'm not supposed to do this...will I get busted this time?" thought that tends to make them police themselves. Gotta make them think about what they are doing, not just blindly follow specific behavior.
That and I really enjoy that cautious look as they realize they just broke a rule and wait in nervous anticipation for the judgment of their behavior.
That all depends on how you handle the finer points of this method.
You just have to make sure your enforcement encourages coming clean. The best way to do this is to "not see" what happened and then question them. If it isn't serious then you let them off with a minor "don't let me catch you doing it again" as long as they come clean. If they lie, *KABOOM* extra severe punishments. Groundings, lost toys, etc. (One of my personal favorites is back against the wall and legs at 90 deg angle. I only had to use that one once and it broke the tantrum pretty quick.) Not only does that encourage the honesty portion, it enforces "holy shit, they see everything!".
Congratulations, you win the idiot atheist prize. First, you are arbitrarily defining what "God" is and a whole other group of assumptions about being a "sick-fuck voyeur". Why are you insisting on personifying God? I mean...you know...thousands of years of literary evidence that humans inherently personify damned near anything they come across should probably be weighed into any discussion on the subject. Unless of course you don't believe things like trees exist because humans have personified those for ages as well.
Second. Jefferson in particular was a Deist, a well known one at that. He absolutely believed in God, just not the magical fairytale stuff. There is something out there called the Jeffersonian Bible where he collected a bunch of biblical writings, arranged them chronologically (rather than it's current manipulated format), and cut out all of the "this was magic" stuff. This resulted in a book that covered the whole teachings of Jesus stuff without all the magical/miracle stuff. He has said that Jesus gave the world the best ethical code it has ever seen. Then you also have Darwin who said the wide variety of life and its adaptability is evidence of the greatness of God.
Dawkins is just a flaming militant atheist asshat that uses his flame war crap to maintain his fame. He is like the Bill O'Reilly of atheists. So...maybe you should look up some other guys that I think have actually done a little more to contribute to scientific progress and freedoms. Ken Miller, has a great 2hr presentation on youtube where he talks about his time as the expert witness in the Dover trial and shutting down creationism...oh...but he is a Catholic. Then we have Francis Collins, you know, map the human genome guy? Oh...but he has a book about how DNA is the language of God.
The smart guys have indeed spoken on the subject, however you are a complete liar or an idiot for saying they unilaterally agree on your statement. So again...I hereby present you with the militant atheist asshat award for reaching the same heights of religious fundamentalism using lies and misdirection to make your argument.
Yeah! Because linux and BSD are bug ridden pieces of crap when it comes to drivers too...oh...wait...but they don't have the same level of idiocy implemented in their driver model... Apple's hardware control has been a very important factor, and probably will continue to be, it isn't anywhere near as ugly as you imply. I think the major distinction to here isn't so much the hardware variety, so much as allowing whatever closed shop hardware vendor to give their chunks of driver code system level access site unseen. The Linux/BSD model of driver doesn't really do that.
It has way more to do with the driver development and implementation model than the actual variety of hardware. It isn't the POS PCI card, it is the POS drivers for that PCI card that cause the problems.
The worst part of this is that the solution is also the problem. Eat all the cows fixes the problem, but causes the problem to repeat as the farmers want to sell more cows to be eaten! It is a vicious cycle I tell you.
/dev/soapbox
The way I see it we are all totally fucked anyways so why bother worrying about stupid details? An object of size X or larger could hit us and destroy all life on the planet. Or solar system alone has more than a few of these X sized things, when you start adding up all the unknown extrasolar X sized objects whole thing gets pretty dismal. Then you add in things like gamma ray bursts, super volcanoes (we have one brewing at Yellowstone), and a whole variety of other doomsday scenarios that don't have anything to do with human behavior that could end us all in an instant. The end result is that we are completely, totally, and undeniably fucked so long as we are squabbling over silly bullshit rather than learning how to get all the eggs out of this one basket called Earth. In the meantime $diety has intelligently designed the universe in such a way that life exists and interacts in such a great way with that most important hydrocarbon... alcohol (Proof that $diety exists and that he loves us and wants us to be happy).
In all seriousness, I think the whole warming debate is hilariously unimportant. 1. The models involved are horrifically complex and ultimately have very little predictability due to the wide array of variables involved. 2. It is fucking stupid to not err on the side of caution when all your eggs are in one basket. Fuckall the rest of the "evidence" for one side or the other. This is purely a game of chance and it is fucking stupid to not take the safe bet of "quit spewing shit into the air that we have not been spewing into the air for the vast majority of human history". Shit, even if this whole global "climate change" or whatever it is called these days is totally wrong, we will at least have fresher fucking air to breathe. To even begin to try and play the whole economic impact vs fate of life on Earth as even remotely equal is mindbogglingly stupid. It doesn't exactly take a brilliant scientist to figure out shitting into the air results in breathing lots of shit. You can bet your ass the same assholes that insisted on the negative economic impacts being more important will also be the first motherfuckers to buy breathing apparatuses and premium land in "safe" areas if things do go horribly wrong.
umount
If a star within ~3000 light years (I think this is the number I saw) goes nova and sends a nice gamma burst our way it could eradicate all life on the planet regardless of the state of our climate. The best part is (as raised elsewhere in the threads for this story), EOL != EOHL. The parameters required for Earth to support life are MUCH wider than the parameters required for Earth to support HUMAN life. The Earth can shake us off at a moments notice and keep on spinning through the inky blackness of space still teeming with life. So! Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we will surely die!
I'm not sure what you are getting at... As I understand it "cow farts" are actually a pretty significant source of methane. The massive population explosion of the various 4 legged cud chewers to feed the huge growth in demand for tasty meat products has had a significant impact on things even when you aren't directly considering the other environmental damage caused by this type of livestock.
The methane stored in the permafrost will make our bit of car exhaust look like a significant problem?
Fucked? Are you stupid? Let me explain it to you this way. Folks like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and so on fucked their citizens. We however have instituted a system that ensures only the most incompetent fuckwits ever hold the highest offices in the land. These self serving fuckwits are easily purchased or otherwise flipped to the other side and all just go along with the political winds of change. Specter is a good example of the most recent one. Allows some of the most horrible R legislation to "accidentally" come out of his office, then switches side to great cheering! What the fuck?!
No...we have found a perfect system where we can keep these idiot assholes occupied rather than actually DOING anything TOO stupid or dangerous and ensure that the most powerful offices are filled with the most small minded idiots we have to offer. Notice, the most horrible things that DO come out of our government is not typically done by the elected people, but by the people those idiot assholes were convinced to appoint to various positions.
Think about it...it could be WAY worse if these guys actually had any kind of conviction or dedication other than their own self absorbed self serving agendas.
After rereading it occurs to me that you were already mentioning the removal from jury duty problem. (It's late, I apologize) However, even assuming you get past that point, you have to educate the others and they can still basically ignore it even if you do manage to rally the support for it's use.
You might want to look that one up. Not that I disagree with the point you are making, but jury nullification basically doesn't exist anymore. It exits as a trivial technicality that can be completely ignored and can potentially be used to declare a mistrial and start again. In fact, simply being aware that it exists is frequently enough to get you removed from jury duty.
Ultimately, it is a rather ugly two edged sword. There were more than a few cases where a white jury would use jury nullification to prevent a white man guilty of killing a "nigger" from being prosecuted. In the end we just find more creative and expensive(profitable) ways to fuck each other over, welcome to the rat race.
Absolutely! That way those laws that mandate people of certain ages be in school can be used to generate a boatload of money! Further, I would like to point that we had public schools when we were at the top of the science/math/technology realm. The interesting thing is that the quality of education declined mostly when it became a political issue. Now, I admit the government education lends itself to abuse of things like the mandatory teaching of creationism as science, but thus far it has not made it terribly far. On the other hand, private schools have been doing this type of thing with great success for many years now.
Neither side is guilt free on this. The far left end has promoted that "trophy for everyone" crap and "no bullying contracts" and other such innane bullshit. The far right has pushed for taking all the funding away, teaching religion as science, and Reagan's infamous Ketchup is a vegetable plan.
Well, I only object to the taxes one because there always the remote possibility that you can avoid them.
Now...what happens if it has tits AND wheels? Or only one tit or one wheel? There seems to be some research required to determine the universal validity of this one.
Death is 100% certain. Are you sure you are on Earth?
I see this argument a lot, and it is as equally as mindless as the PR folks trotting out the "copying = theft" in such simple terms. At the end of the day it is still theft. It is dealing with lost revenue. That revenue has been taken from me and I can no longer use it. That is the whole "theft" piece that zealots try to use to debunk copying=theft. The problem is they aren't stealing the game/music/whatever. They are stealing revenue.
Now...to go on and say that every pirated copy = 1 lost sale is pretty intellectuallily dishonest too. But to say no pirated copy = any lost sales is equally stupid. So...some percentage of pirated copies DO equate to some number of lost sales. Those lost sales are stolen revenue. Now...since there is no way to round up all the people and figure out which ones would have bought it and would not have bought it, the only sane approach is to spread the lost revenue across all of them. Some companies try to do that using the 1 copy = 1 lost sale ratio, and I think that is pretty bogus, but there is going to be a more correct formula for determining that average and it is not $0 lost/copy.
It amuses me to no end to watch people who have absolutely no underestanding of business or economics chiming in on how this should work. It is honestly almost more amusing than the people that have no understanding of the technology chime in.
My 3 yr old has been playing gcompris on the linux desktop I set up for the kids since she was 2. It started with the push the ball to tux thing and colored duck games. One day she was playing the alphabet train game and was getting 80% or so correct... She found the game on her own, figured out the rules, and was gettin g80% of her letters correct at 2 1/2 years old. Then I came by another time and she was doing the shape matching and puzzle games very successfully. She "fails" more when we are watching just because she likes our reaction when we tease her. Those little monsters just learn WAY too fast.
You are opposed to government healthcare because through this entire discussion you have done nothing but repeat propaganda rather than facts. Your repeat made up bullshit about how government insurance works without actually doing any research into how it has been implemented elsewhere and what works and what doesn't work. You keep saying nonsense about how government is *always* less efficient, which is a total load of horseshit and shows that YOU are the one that has not bothered to read history. You keep equating military healthcare to civilian government pay...they are not even REMOTELY the same thing. Both of your Army stories are anecdotal, and your first one should have resulted in the removal of a large section of the chain of command and ignores that they could have gone to a civilian emergency room and TRICARE (the government insurance, not government care) would have paid.
And now...for my anecdotal stories. We went to pick up my wife's rather important prescription... We stood waiting ages at the counter...eventually the person came back and said "Your insurance says they won't pay for this and will only pay for the generic". If we wanted the meds that her doctor prescribed (and specifically wrote dispense as written to make sure she got the right ones) we would have to pay $500 for 30 days. So...we had to call her doc, have her pick up a fist full of "sample packs" just so she could have her pills and then he had to REWRITE THE SAME THING, spend 3 days fighting with the insurance company, and then she could go get her pills. This all from a private insurance company. These phone jockey assholes do this all the time, they get in their little computer and tap some buttons and then decide that they get to skip medical school and play doctor based on cost rather than care. So...I canceled them...I went back to Tricare RS. I have had fewer fights with Tricare in 7 years than I have with BCBS in 1 year. The only fight I had with Tricare was when a clinic screwed up the billing, didn't get paid, and then pushed the bill into collections for my wife. When we finally found out what had happened we called them and they refused to do anything. We called Tricare and explained the situation and Tricare said they had to refile, that was law. We call the clinic and they refuse to do anything still. We called Tricare...they called the clinic and explained in no uncertain terms that if they did not pull this out of collections and refile they would start the procedure to ban that clinic from ever receiving Medicaid/Medicare/Tricare for failing to follow the rules. It got fixed pretty quick after that...but I guess that is a bad story because in that case my insurance company was fighting FOR me not AGAINST me...
Please...go get a fucking clue. You have only given "real" examples of being against government provided healthcare through anecdotal stories and NOTHING relating to government insurance. I realize it is very hard for you to understand there is a significant difference, I have tried to point it out over and over and you keep insisting that it is the same thing. This is the propaganda making you stupid on the subject, go do the research and understand that government paid and government provided are not even remotely the same thing. Even if you want to bitch about "everyone has to pay the tax" if it happens to get implemented in that fashion, it keeps the people around you healthier and you are less likely to be exposed to disease. Most people, especially those without insurance, don't go to the doctor until they are VERY sick because of the expense. So they spread the disease around. Then they go to emergency rooms for treatment instead of clinics, where the cost of treatment is an average of 7x more expensive and the chances the bills get paid are WAY less...now of course when the hospitals with ERs lose so much money like that (no hospital ER is a profitable department because of this) your quality of care goes down AND you are exposed to more disease because people were
And your precious private insurance ALREADY DOES JUST THAT! They are charging more if you smoke, they are charging more if you are overweight and some companies are just firing you outright so they don't have to pay the healthcare costs associated. You live in some kind of magical happy fantasy land where "get another insurance company" is even a realistic possibility for most people. Paying the full premium out of pocket costs a God damned fortune, you will be dealing with them finding every reason possible not to provide you with the service you are paying for, and most employers don't exactly give you more than once choice in provider. The hospital I am at has MULTIPLE full time employees whose only purpose in life is to fight with the insurance companies so our patients don't have to. Do you understand that? We have multiple fulltime employees that had to be hired to protect our patients rights and so that the hospital can get fucking paid by these piece of shit companies. You know how many complaints I have heard from them about getting what is owed out of Tricare/Medicare/Medicaid...ZERO NADA FUCKING ZILCH! The only bitch there is that the government has a tendency to lower their max payment and force the hospital to write off the rest of the cost...which most of the insurance companies do too, and they get WAY more fucking vicious about it than the government does. And, since you clearly have not been paying attention, most of the proposals that anyone actually supports INCLUDE YOUR ABILITY TO SEEK PRIVATE INSURANCE! What part of that don't you get? Most of the countries that have that type of "government insurance" system allow their citizens to get insurance elsewhere as well. Also...government pay insurance is NOT GOVERNMENT HEALTHCARE PROVIDER. Let me explain in very clear english for you. Provider is the person providing medical care. Insurance is the people paying the bill. Government provider I think is a bad plan, but most of the serious proposals are not government provider, that is just bullshit rhetoric. Government INSURANCE means the government steps in and acts like an insurance company, not a provider. There is a fucking huge difference.
Listen very carefully...I do not support government being the only choice. I do not support government providers. The only people I have seen talking about government provider or government being the ONLY choice are far right wing propagandists blathering on about how horrible it will all be. I think you are completely and totally deluded about "get another insurance company". The average person, without the employer plan (which was a total government mandate fuckup), would be paying something like $600-$900/month. At those rates your only "real" option is to go get every elective surgery under the sun and visit your doctor every few days just to get your fucking money out of it. The fact of the matter is that government *insurance* with the option to purchase additional private works pretty fucking well and it works a hell of a lot better than what we have now. You are just using a bunch of nonsense rhetoric and trying to force all government healthcare solutions into being the same fucking thing. You keep mixing "provider" with "insurer" and just keep using stupid talking points of right wing rhetoric filled asshats. I have NO problem fighting the notion that we should only have government providers, or be stuck with government only insurance, but our current state of affairs is a fucking horrible mess. I have to see the effects of this crap every day when I go to work. Just today waiting to talk to an office manager of a clinic I watched someone that had to cancel an appointment because that clinic isn't signed on with their specific PRIVATE insurance provider...after he left she looked at me and said "That is the ONLY insurance our docs refuse to sign on with because they treat the patients so horribly, refuse to pay out on anything, and get picked by employers as the cheap option because of that". For fucks sake, go take an
WTF? The main bitch about government healthcare is that taxpayers will be forced to subsidize bad health choices...so you are pointing to an article that shows that isn't the case? Congratulations for not making sense AND once again making nonsense claims about the government. The government only started looking at that trick after private insurance and private employers started doing it!
Here we have multiple private insurance companies and private employeers charging smokers more. That is right...multiple instances of the little "government boogeyman" story you linked...the story is about a TREND not a single incident like your story. How stupid of you to think that private industry isn't already doing it. Oh and in both cases they are paying extra, not being forced. But for shits and giggles since you want to play... How about reading this about an employee was fired for smoking by a private company. After all, private companies trying to increase their bottom line don't want to pay the insurance premiums of smokers and obese people...so just fire them instead!
You aren't allowed to say things like that here...common sense...who the hell approved that?
I am a tad surprised you don't already have a horde bitching at you about how horrible iPods are, or how evil Apple is, or whatever.
Personally, I think MS should have stuck with WinCE over WM. Not for any technical reason...I just think the fact that they let a version of Windows called "wince" out the door is hilarious.
And as far as Android being better in the long run...I don't know that I entirely doubt that, but I wouldn't put too much stock in it. Google is shaping up to be much more "evil empire" than Apple and I think faced with enough pressure Apple may cave on the lockdown. Fact is, they aren't facing a whole lot of competitive pressure, so natural business behavior is to flex muscles and maintain control, it may be distasteful to some, but it is unfortunately smart business. When they start facing some severe competition they will have to change strategy or start getting torn up. Too many non DRM music sites started popping up and iTunes went DRM free. Whether Apple fully supported DRM in the first place is irrelevant, they tolerated it, and it wasn't until there was some competitive pressure that they really pushed against it.
Also...despite common belief, monopolies are legal. It is perfectly legal to build and maintain a monopoly based on being the best (or perceived best) in the field. The problems only come from using your monopoly position to maintain that position rather than competing.
Wow...just wow... Mindless fearmongering, backpedaling, and then saying that being forced to carry a Real ID is not "papers please" and that we are talking about some communist regime healthcare system. In case you haven't actually been paying attention, there have been a whole gang of suggestions on how to approach it, and the Canadian one isn't even "government provided", it is a government insurance, not government healthcare, it worked even better before they capped the salary of doctors, and the Canadians have a fucking holiday to celebrate the guy that came up with it.
Now, if you would be bothered to read the statistics (I work in the medical field, I have read them), the numbers of "wrong procedures" in the operating room or wrong medications or wrong doses are disturbingly high in our current private medical system. Pretending that this fucking trainwreck of a system is "good" is the biggest load of head in the sand bullshit I have ever heard. The only people I have EVER heard sing the praise of our system here are people that have never actually had to go through anything even remotely serious. I see the slimey shit drug reps all the time. I have had to fight with private insurance. Tricare is a fucking organization of saints compared to BCBS. There was an incident in Kansas City where a woman miscarried and BCBS refused to pay and called it an "elective abortion". That one is in the news and can be verified. Your little anecdotal story is sketchy at best because that kind of refusal of emergency treatment could have had a whole fucking gang of people drummed out and likely facing criminal charges. Worst case scenario, military members and their families are allowed to go to civilian emergency rooms and Tricare covers it. Also, it is a D&C not a DNC.
Further, "Medicaid approved surgeon"...like there is a difference between regular surgeons and medicaid approved ones? Is there some mystery test failure that must happen to get them on the Medicaid approved list? I mean...I know a good number of surgeons that accept all forms of insurance, private, Tricare, Medicaid, etc...and all of them are damned good and have a tremendous amount of respect from their patients and staff. There are good docs and bad docs, and whether or not they accept Medicaid is completely and totally irrelevant. Funny thing is, the vast majority of those "wrong procedures" happen in private hospitals because the patient never actually meets the surgeon...they are wheeled in, operated on, and wheeled back out. Those super high priced surgeons don't have time for chitchat.
The military is government provided healthcare, Tricare is government provided insurance. The difference in quality between the two is pretty significant. Your assertion that it still sucks compared to private medicine is laughable at best and tells me you have absolutely no clue how Tricare or private insurance works. With the exception of active military, you can pretty much do what you want with Tricare...and even active military can get a referral to private specialists in many cases. Do you think that all doctors accept all insurance equally? I know doctors that refuse private insurance companies because they cause too much of a hastle in stupid fighting about what is and isn't going to be covered!
Please...get a fucking clue before parading about with your moronic far right wing rhetoric.
OK...so...Google not releasing books that are otherwise impossible to get anyways constitutes censorship? A settlement between Google members of the class action lawsuit is a government granted monopoly? The original government (congress critter) proposed solution is that anyone can use orphaned works in specific ways so long as they attempt to reach the original owner. The "foul" bit here is that if this settlement is accepted by the judge then Google will basically have a get out of jail free card for any potential infringement lawsuits brought by people who didn't opt out of the class action settlement while everyone else will still be liable to potential infringement suits brought by the original copyright holders. This is not censorship in any way shape or form. And I am the one that doesn't understand how this works?
If you are going to make wild accusations about censorship and government monopolies you might look into what is really happening first. This isn't censorship at all. I do think it gives Google a rather large unfair advantage in the market because anyone else competing with them won't have that massive class action settlement to protect them from potential claims of infringmenet. New competitors would have to go through the same legal battle to even attempt to enter the market. THIS IS NOT CENSORSHIP.
I'm so glad people pay attention rather than just being kneejerk asshats. Did you not see where I talked about how they are not all bloodthirsty killers? Did you not see where I talked about All Quiet on the Western Front? Or maybe you couldn't be bothered to look up what that actually is. So here...it is a movie that follows a group of German soldiers through WWI in a very human way. I mean seriously...did you read the post at all given that most of it is actually talking about exactly what you are saying I am "afraid" of?
"Know thy enemy" is not even remotely the same as what was happening here, it is more along the lines of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." I don't think this game is being marketed for insurgents...and I doubt they would be buying it even if it was. So this kind of "enemy point of view" marketed primarly to the opposing team is called "propoganda". It swings both ways, but I have nothing but disgust for either side when they use dead bodies for propoganda and money making purposes like this.
So...it is censorship because Google is the only one who has the rights and you expect them to use that right the way you demand? This doesn't even touch on the rather bizarre notion that Google can even be granted this set of rights in the fashion that it happened. What if no one had the rights? Then is Google still engaging in censorship by not putting anything up? Would that make everyone guilty of censorship because they didn't do it too? So the government and Yahoo and Microsoft and Apple and Linus Torvaldes and your grandmother are all guilty of censorship because they didn't attempt to secure any of these rights themselves and then use them to put all known literary works up on the internet? You know what...I think *YOU* are guilty of censorship now because you haven't posted everything you have ever written on the internet for everyone to read and have not attempted to secure the rights and subsequently post every literary work online!
So...Google pays for the bandwidth. Google pays for the storage. Google pays for the lawyers that even allow them to post *ANYTHING*...and because they don't post everything they are guilty of censorship?
Once again...the hordes come out and cry censorship...
Book is out of print...
Google doesn't post book online...
Censorship at Google!
Are you f'ing serious? So...people should demand that Google digitizes every book ever so that they aren't censoring? Ahh yes...let us all get the pitchforks and torches and force Google to do what we want...after all...that kind of totalitarian control is WAY better than censorship right guys?
Seriously...can someone please explain to me how not digitizing a book that is already out of print even begins to qualify as censorship?
This does raise an interesting issue. As the price goes down and the bandwidth goes up there will eventually be a point where it would be profitable for botnet herders to subsidize infected machine connections. Like Netzero only a little more sinister.
What about died waiting for someone qualified to read the MRI or died because they scanned the wrong thing? A piece of this whole technological healthcare stuff is that you can send those MRI images anywhere in the world to be read quickly. This is fairly common in after hours emergency situations where the choice is wake up the local radiologist and get them to read ASAP or just click a button and have it immediately sent to a radiology service elsewhere in the world that can read the image quickly and send back the results. Most of that diagnostic equipment you speak of is intricately linked into the electronic medical systems. I check in at the front desk, my info gets forwarded on to the MRI machine as a specific job, so when I get back there the machine already is displaying my information and what I am getting scanned to the technicians.
Oh and anecdotal as this may be, not only have I been a patient that has recieved xrays and an MRI by these fancy integrated systems, I also work at a hospital where my job is to make sure all of those things CAN send/recieve data to all the places they need to go.
Now, not that I disagree that the state of medical information technology doesn't have a long way to go, but medical folks actually are trained to repeatedly ask the same questions even if they know the answers. It is very common for patients (especially the elderly) to suddenly remember that medication they have been taking after you asked them the 5th time.