Unfortunately, incompetence and criminal negligence are two very different things. The end result may be the same, but we can't lock people up for being stupid (at least not until I'm dictator of Earth).
"If you want to make health care more affordable to have to do things to reduce the cost directly." The only way of doing that is cutting corners and reducing standards for medicine and medical equipment. That's a bad idea no matter how you put it.
Or fix stuff like my insurance company "negotiating" $900 worth of blood tests down to the $90 they actually pay the lab. If it's $90 worth of blood tests (which it is since the lab somehow stays in business), then say it's $90. That would open a whole world of people being able to get catastrophic coverage and pay out of pocket for the basics which would put people in touch with what it actually costs and provide price pressure.
As the system stands, the buyer has hardly any idea of what the seller is actually being paid. Nobody has any inclination of what the actual cost is. The insurance companies can throw their weight around and get reasonable prices, but the poor schmuck that doesn't have insurance pays MSPR. If I could pay the same "bulk rates" as the insurances companies, my medical costs, excluding anything catastrophic, would be less than what I pay for insurance.
People like to make a big deal out of free market medicine failing, but we don't have free market medicine because the actual cost has been abstracted away from so many of the consumers that there's no cost control.
As a juror, would I buy it? No. Though it does raise a doubt, I wouldn't feel it a reasonable one. It's too improbable, and I doubt they would be able to replicate the scenario in a court room.
But to play devil's advocate...
The guy could've had a Search Engine up, perhaps searching for ordinary/legal trash. He walks away and the cat jumps on desk and initiates a click-action on one of the bad links that can come up in the search-noise. Perhaps while taking a number of steps on the keyboard, or perhaps lying down on the thing and mashing keys. The resulting actions click on the bad link on the search results, click another link for images (perhaps a zip of a sampler"), and the next thing you know it's on his computer. And if it happened while a P2P client was up, then it's probably more possible as it might've clicked into a remote user's folders and did a download-all.
That gives me an idea...
Let this guy get aquitted on the basis of his cat. All child porn fans would then get cats.
Then we arrest everyone with a cat because they must be downloading child porn!
Just the other day I saw a rich person going all over town setting soup kitchens and churches on fire. When I asked him why he was doing it he just laughed in my face and muttered something about "community sucks" before throwing the armani jacket back on, hopping in his BMW and driving off like a bat out of hell.
Yes, It's like going to prison and having the choice of being raped ever night by either Bubba OR Mo, you have 2 great choices for your raping preference, you should feel blessed to live in a country that will allow you the freedom to choose who will violate your asshole.
Nah in that instance (cable vs dsl) it's more like you can get butt raped for a pack of smokes by Bubba or Mo. You could always choose not to smoke.
As an aside, would dialup be like giving Larry a handjob?
Numerous studies have shown that kids that grow up in families "on the dole" tend to grow up to be adults that collect "the dole" much more than other families. The most popular theory for this is a lack of good role models. If you grow up with parents who do not work, do not try to teach you the value of work, who are not well educated, and do not teach their children the value of education, often, not always, the child grows up thinking that going on "the dole" is just the way things are. Work is for some other class of people they can never belong to. Many children DO escape this life, often due to the influence of teachers, or relatives that do work.
Make birth control mandatory and test for it in order to receive welfare. I think a significant issue is people who theoretically can't work because they have children, get welfare, then have more children! I think that would go a long way towards breaking the cycle. It's harsh and controlling, but there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Eradicating poverty, genocide, child molestation, global climate change, and mercury in fish are also hard tasks. I suggest we rank our "hard" projects intelligently.
Less people. Bam! Solved everything but the kiddy molesters. Those are easy problems to solve, but nobody likes the solution.
Try taking ethics. If we followed your slippery slope logic we'd start killing people when they hit retirement age. After all, they'll never again go back to work and 'pay back' their value after they start collecting social security. Same for the mentally retarded, just drown them right?
Ethics smethics. They're pretty arbitrary and fluid. And what's wrong with letting the old people die when they get old. The evolutionary biological argument that I've heard is that having old people around is good for knowledge transmission. We have other decent ways of doing that now, and the old are not providing a benefit to the young breeding population much anymore. Mostly they're a drain. As for the mentally retarded, they're pretty much evolutionary dead ends and burdens.
I guess if you subscribe to some other ethical code beyond the biological basis, you might not agree, but you'd better have a basis for it beyond "but but it's wrong!"
"Realistically we need to start realizing that not every person DESERVES the best treatment". And who decides that?
Whoever is footing the bill. If society is paying, then society should expect a ROI. I wouldn't argue that the ROI can't come in some form that's not monetary, but it should be there. If someone else decides that X deserves it and will pay for it, all power to them.
"so costly that society can never regain that investment". Public education is costly, if a kid isn't learning and behaving by second grade should society perform a retroactive abortion? After all without an education they'll just be a burden on society, and its not worth paying for the education if they aren't being productive, why not save the money for the other years of school?
The net value to society of educated members generally is worth it even accounting for some "loss" through bad outcomes, but maybe you're right. I wouldn't set the bar at 2nd grade though just because they may not be a total loss by then.
Did you have a 4.0 GPA in school? what about college? How much are you contributing to society now? I'm not so sure I am getting back my investment in you. Most of the education system in the world are funded by tax dollars.
See now you're just stabbing outwards. The net benefit for society doesn't require everybody to be rocket scientists, just to have a basic education.
As for what benefit I provide...I correct people on the internet;)
Ok we'll cite something a little more recent as counter examples to your "oh noes they have helicopters and bombs!11oneoneone" ideas...
See
Afghanistan vs Russia
Afghanistan vs USA
Iraq vs USA
Most of Africa
An armed citizenry can fight a guerrilla war in which all those fancy weapons don't do much, and you can usually count on somebody for a little foreign support
Rather than investing more in escape systems, it might make more sense to spend the same amount of money making rockets that blow up less...
Well the ones that blow up less probably won't be the same design as SRBs, so they won't be made in the same congressional district as the SRBs so they won't get certain congress critters' approval.
That's my understanding of why they went solid instead of liquid and accepted the resulting vibration problems not realizing that the shuttle has a giant liquid damper on it...
Someone inevitably brings this up everytime there's an article about the UK. But there are also news reports of other, also worrying infringement of people's liberties, going on in the US. So how come the handguns never stop them? Has there ever been a case where people got out their guns, and the police said "Oh dear, we'll back down then and ignore them"? Or does it just end up in bloodshed, with the citizens being either shot dead, or arrested for far more serious offences?
Don't get me wrong, I do agree with the principle of bearing arms to defend against the Government, but I don't see that this would prevent things happening such as those in the article. What are you expecting them to do, shoot down the helicopter?
It always ends in bloodshed. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." and all that jazz.
The arms aren't for shooting down the helicopter. The arms are for when the police break up the party violently, someone gets killed, and the rest of the armed citizenry get fed up and decide to change the regime. See the American Revolution.
Actually, I think the fastest way to see a change would be if a senator's/governor's/etc. son/daughter was caught pirating their favorite song/movie/whatever.
While I don't think much of the RIAA/MPAA/MAFIAA, I can't imagine them being that stupid! It would certainly be nice, but I think it's right up there with world peace.
Yeah, and cannibalism is only crazy to you because you haven't lived their culture, history or know how cannibals have grown to think along the hundreds of years.
Sorry, but sometimes things seem crazy because they are.
Nah cannibalism makes sense in the cultural context. It usually develops in places where there are severe problems with getting enough protein. Eventually, people stop wasting perfectly good meat. That and pork is a big delicacy in Polynesia.
I'm not a cannibal but I did stay in a holiday inn last night.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all about reaction times and control when the driver needs to make a decision (i.e. granny walks in front of the car).
Being of sound mind and completely sober at this moment, the correct answer is floor it, no? I could probably do that quick enough even drunk.
Unfortunately, incompetence and criminal negligence are two very different things. The end result may be the same, but we can't lock people up for being stupid (at least not until I'm dictator of Earth).
You have my vote!
"If you want to make health care more affordable to have to do things to reduce the cost directly." The only way of doing that is cutting corners and reducing standards for medicine and medical equipment. That's a bad idea no matter how you put it.
Or fix stuff like my insurance company "negotiating" $900 worth of blood tests down to the $90 they actually pay the lab. If it's $90 worth of blood tests (which it is since the lab somehow stays in business), then say it's $90. That would open a whole world of people being able to get catastrophic coverage and pay out of pocket for the basics which would put people in touch with what it actually costs and provide price pressure.
As the system stands, the buyer has hardly any idea of what the seller is actually being paid. Nobody has any inclination of what the actual cost is. The insurance companies can throw their weight around and get reasonable prices, but the poor schmuck that doesn't have insurance pays MSPR. If I could pay the same "bulk rates" as the insurances companies, my medical costs, excluding anything catastrophic, would be less than what I pay for insurance.
People like to make a big deal out of free market medicine failing, but we don't have free market medicine because the actual cost has been abstracted away from so many of the consumers that there's no cost control.
Does that mean ugly girls "taste like shit"?
Well that's going to depend entirely on where you look.
01011001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101101 01100101 01100001 01101110 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 01111001 01100010 01101111 01100100 01111001 00100000 01100100 01101111 01100101 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00111111
No not everyone does. Also, you may have inadvertently slashdotted the first result for "binary to ascii" in google.
And in New Zealand.
Thank you for that.
As a juror, would I buy it? No. Though it does raise a doubt, I wouldn't feel it a reasonable one. It's too improbable, and I doubt they would be able to replicate the scenario in a court room.
But to play devil's advocate...
The guy could've had a Search Engine up, perhaps searching for ordinary/legal trash. He walks away and the cat jumps on desk and initiates a click-action on one of the bad links that can come up in the search-noise. Perhaps while taking a number of steps on the keyboard, or perhaps lying down on the thing and mashing keys. The resulting actions click on the bad link on the search results, click another link for images (perhaps a zip of a sampler"), and the next thing you know it's on his computer. And if it happened while a P2P client was up, then it's probably more possible as it might've clicked into a remote user's folders and did a download-all.
That gives me an idea...
Let this guy get aquitted on the basis of his cat.
All child porn fans would then get cats.
Then we arrest everyone with a cat because they must be downloading child porn!
Just the other day I saw a rich person going all over town setting soup kitchens and churches on fire. When I asked him why he was doing it he just laughed in my face and muttered something about "community sucks" before throwing the armani jacket back on, hopping in his BMW and driving off like a bat out of hell.
Haha! That was you? It's a small world after all!
Yes, It's like going to prison and having the choice of being raped ever night by either Bubba OR Mo, you have 2 great choices for your raping preference, you should feel blessed to live in a country that will allow you the freedom to choose who will violate your asshole.
Nah in that instance (cable vs dsl) it's more like you can get butt raped for a pack of smokes by Bubba or Mo. You could always choose not to smoke.
As an aside, would dialup be like giving Larry a handjob?
Just remember, the internet is proof that a large amount of monkeys behind a large amount of keyboards does not produce Hamlet. Just porn.
lol r u srs?! Ill tell my bff!
I, too, find American's aversion to referring to toilets by anything that vaguely resembles what one might do in them, damn strange.
Nah, we just don't like to refer to it as the shitter or the pisser in polite company.
Numerous studies have shown that kids that grow up in families "on the dole" tend to grow up to be adults that collect "the dole" much more than other families. The most popular theory for this is a lack of good role models. If you grow up with parents who do not work, do not try to teach you the value of work, who are not well educated, and do not teach their children the value of education, often, not always, the child grows up thinking that going on "the dole" is just the way things are. Work is for some other class of people they can never belong to. Many children DO escape this life, often due to the influence of teachers, or relatives that do work.
Make birth control mandatory and test for it in order to receive welfare. I think a significant issue is people who theoretically can't work because they have children, get welfare, then have more children! I think that would go a long way towards breaking the cycle. It's harsh and controlling, but there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Landing on Mars will be easy compared to landing on Jupiter, so by that logic we should go to Jupiter.
Yeah we want to stay away from Jupiter. I've seen the movie; it doesn't end well. Ditto for Europa.
Eradicating poverty, genocide, child molestation, global climate change, and mercury in fish are also hard tasks. I suggest we rank our "hard" projects intelligently.
Less people. Bam! Solved everything but the kiddy molesters. Those are easy problems to solve, but nobody likes the solution.
What did hairdressers ever do to you?
Have you SEEN his haircut?! There's a reason he only uses slashdot.
Try taking ethics. If we followed your slippery slope logic we'd start killing people when they hit retirement age. After all, they'll never again go back to work and 'pay back' their value after they start collecting social security. Same for the mentally retarded, just drown them right?
Ethics smethics. They're pretty arbitrary and fluid. And what's wrong with letting the old people die when they get old. The evolutionary biological argument that I've heard is that having old people around is good for knowledge transmission. We have other decent ways of doing that now, and the old are not providing a benefit to the young breeding population much anymore. Mostly they're a drain. As for the mentally retarded, they're pretty much evolutionary dead ends and burdens.
I guess if you subscribe to some other ethical code beyond the biological basis, you might not agree, but you'd better have a basis for it beyond "but but it's wrong!"
"Realistically we need to start realizing that not every person DESERVES the best treatment". And who decides that?
Whoever is footing the bill. If society is paying, then society should expect a ROI. I wouldn't argue that the ROI can't come in some form that's not monetary, but it should be there. If someone else decides that X deserves it and will pay for it, all power to them.
"so costly that society can never regain that investment". Public education is costly, if a kid isn't learning and behaving by second grade should society perform a retroactive abortion? After all without an education they'll just be a burden on society, and its not worth paying for the education if they aren't being productive, why not save the money for the other years of school?
The net value to society of educated members generally is worth it even accounting for some "loss" through bad outcomes, but maybe you're right. I wouldn't set the bar at 2nd grade though just because they may not be a total loss by then.
Did you have a 4.0 GPA in school? what about college? How much are you contributing to society now? I'm not so sure I am getting back my investment in you. Most of the education system in the world are funded by tax dollars.
See now you're just stabbing outwards. The net benefit for society doesn't require everybody to be rocket scientists, just to have a basic education. ;)
As for what benefit I provide...I correct people on the internet
Ok we'll cite something a little more recent as counter examples to your "oh noes they have helicopters and bombs!11oneoneone" ideas...
See
Afghanistan vs Russia
Afghanistan vs USA
Iraq vs USA
Most of Africa
An armed citizenry can fight a guerrilla war in which all those fancy weapons don't do much, and you can usually count on somebody for a little foreign support
Rather than investing more in escape systems, it might make more sense to spend the same amount of money making rockets that blow up less...
Well the ones that blow up less probably won't be the same design as SRBs, so they won't be made in the same congressional district as the SRBs so they won't get certain congress critters' approval.
That's my understanding of why they went solid instead of liquid and accepted the resulting vibration problems not realizing that the shuttle has a giant liquid damper on it...
Someone inevitably brings this up everytime there's an article about the UK. But there are also news reports of other, also worrying infringement of people's liberties, going on in the US. So how come the handguns never stop them? Has there ever been a case where people got out their guns, and the police said "Oh dear, we'll back down then and ignore them"? Or does it just end up in bloodshed, with the citizens being either shot dead, or arrested for far more serious offences?
Don't get me wrong, I do agree with the principle of bearing arms to defend against the Government, but I don't see that this would prevent things happening such as those in the article. What are you expecting them to do, shoot down the helicopter?
It always ends in bloodshed. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." and all that jazz.
The arms aren't for shooting down the helicopter. The arms are for when the police break up the party violently, someone gets killed, and the rest of the armed citizenry get fed up and decide to change the regime. See the American Revolution.
Arguments against DC power lines is based on ignorance.
Québec and Manitoba have big power lines and they save tons of money. The cost of the converters on both ends is offset by the lower cost of the power lines. DC power lines have less loss and only need 2 wires instead of three. You don't have the inductive losses in DC lines. When the line exceeds 1000km the savings are huge.
Ha! I knew you were a Canadian sympathizer, Edison! Take you direct current and go back to Canada!
Sincerly,
N. Tesla
you know our culture has become so shallow that more people would watch "ISS Survivor" than the moon landings
Did they space anyone during the moon landings? 'nuff said.
exactly on the money. people see race as the reason, but in trailer parks are just as bad and are full of white people.
But the tornadoes clean the trailer parks out on a fairly regular basis... ;)
I agree. That's why I program machine code in hexl mode.
...and I program with butterflies That's also relevant to the discussion at hand. Why do you need a mouse when you have butterflies?
Actually, I think the fastest way to see a change would be if a senator's/governor's/etc. son/daughter was caught pirating their favorite song/movie/whatever.
While I don't think much of the RIAA/MPAA/MAFIAA, I can't imagine them being that stupid! It would certainly be nice, but I think it's right up there with world peace.
Yeah, and cannibalism is only crazy to you because you haven't lived their culture, history or know how cannibals have grown to think along the hundreds of years.
Sorry, but sometimes things seem crazy because they are.
Nah cannibalism makes sense in the cultural context. It usually develops in places where there are severe problems with getting enough protein. Eventually, people stop wasting perfectly good meat. That and pork is a big delicacy in Polynesia.
I'm not a cannibal but I did stay in a holiday inn last night.