Wow. Warning: That link is -very- NSFW unless you work for the Klan. Had to clear my cache and history after viewing that one.
It's Encyclopaedia fucking Dramatica. You must be new around here. As far as links to never click at work go, that ranks somewhere between kiddie porn and goatse.
Although the way NICE works in specific instances has led to a lot of very justified criticism, there seems to be no realistic alternative to something like this if you have a tax-financed system that the sick don't pay for directly. There just isn't enough money to do everything possible for every patient.
Who says it has to be tax-financed?
In the USA, much health care is funded by insurance companies that essentially serve the function of averaging medical expenditure among a group of people. The net result of this is that an individual with insurance has every incentive to spend as much as the insurance while let them, because the costs will distribute to all policy holders. When everyone does this, insurance policy costs keep going up. The insurance companies, trying to get costs back down, have incentive only to pay as little as possible, not prioritize approved treatments by QALYs or any other similar metric.
Then, due to all that, you end up with people who are uninsured or otherwise unable to afford health care ending up with emergency conditions, receiving expensive treatment, and being forced into bankruptcy. This also drives up cost (as the hospitals are forced to absorb the cost of treatment) and harms society (a financially ruined citizen accomplishes less and pays less tax).
And thus, we come to this, the worst of all possible worlds.
Rather an extension of Stanly Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiments. If an authority figure orders you to assist in molesting a 13 year old girl, how many would molest her? We know of two. How many would refuse? Thats the real question. If people refuse to assist much evil just evaporates: *poof*.
Who are you to decide the value of life, and of those whom you're so willing to sacrifice?
It's noble to sacrifice *your own* life so others can live. It's NOT noble to sacrifice *someone else's* life. If you want to be so noble, march on down to the hospital and give up your heart to someone waiting for a transplant.
The value proposition changes a little when it's your own skin, doesn't it?
I'm not deciding the value of life. I'm pointing out that, all else equal, two lives are worth more than one. Anything else is incoherent at best.
If you choose letting a hundred people die through inaction over killing one person directly, your lack of action is not noble--the blood of those hundred people is no less on your hands than if you'd killed them directly.
None of which is even considering that a blob of embryo cells isn't even remotely of the same value as a living, thinking human.
Oh, five whole dollars, good for you. I am thoroughly impressed by your confidence in your beliefs.
No, the point is that all of your shouting about stem cell research is about ideology and not science. You just hide behind miracle cures to get money. Well then, if you can deliver these cures, that's great. But let's have a date. Give us a date. If we publicly fund stem cells, we will have these results, on some date. What's the date?
You seem a little unclear about how scientific research works; there are no fixed time-tables--that's why I'm not the one making the claim that something definitely will or will not happen. I'd put maybe even odds on a previously-untreatable medical condition being rendered tractable via methods dervied from stem cell research within my lifetime, say the next 70 years.
No, that's not a very strong claim, but given that the only arguments against stem cell research are from people with absurdly skewed moral priorities or delusional ideas about economics, it sounds like a pretty clear-cut case of something worth funding for long enough to see how it pans out.
Embryonic stem cell research isn't necessarily about actually using them. Aside from the cancer thing, they'd also have the same rejection problems that organ transplants have.
The purpose of the research is to learn more about how to work with stem cells so that we can eventually culture and work with adult stem cells from individuals who need treatment. As it stands, adult stem cell research is still mostly in the state of "how do we even make these things", and would have continued in parallel with embryonic research regardless.
I bet that there are NO cures for cancer, NO blind man seeing, and NO crippled people walking due to stem cell research, in our lifetimes. All of this talk about the immediate need to fund stem cell research is just so much hype.
Do you, now? Precisely how much are you willing to bet? Put your money where your mouth is.
But I expect you won't, because you know there's far too great a chance you'd lose. Your shouting is about ideology, not science, and you know full well that reality only cares about the latter.
I think that the one potential life the embryo could have been (if the embryo was even viable) is a relatively cheap price for curing some of the greatest physical ills of our modern society.
One of the most frightening and chilling statements ever uttered on Slashdot. This is exactly the sort of moral relativism that this issue promotes. If it's already gone this far, give it 50 years.
Oh, for crying out loud. The concept of sacrificing one life to save countless others is "chilling" "moral relativism"?
I'm sorry to say it, but if you prefer letting many living, thinking people suffer and die rather than accept the death of a few lives that weren't even concious thinking beings in the first place, you are morally bankrupt beyond all belief.
Basically, you have some gung-ho lefty making a bunch of proclamations, admitting a bias against another company, and she's going to be in a position of power in government? Oh wait, I forgot, this is change we can believe in, just another form of chicago cronyism... or really, detroit, judging by the way this administration is driving the country into the ground.
And the funny part is, even if everything you say is accurate, it'd STILL be an improvement over how the Republicans had been running things!
It's not good, it's the lesser of two evils. Ludicrously restrictive intellectual property laws are purely a bureaucratic problem and can be reversed fairly easily. It's a preferable to have to deal with that sort of problem rather than wars, climate change, piss-poor education standards.... and so on.
Not to mention, that there are two tried and true methods for working around overrestrictive copyright laws:
Create and use material following an open source model; the more onerous copyright becomes for people, the more attractive stuff like Creative Commons becomes.
Pirate stuff. Yeah, some people will whine about ohhhhh, you're breaking the law; but when chances of being caught are very low and the media cartels are aggressively ceding the moral high ground to the pirates, who gives a crap? Send a few bucks anonymously to the artist if you want, it's more than they ever would have gotten from the cartels if you'd bought legit.
I've long wondered--what is it that academic journals DO, precisely? They don't seem to provide any services that a vanity press couldn't do better and cheaper.
Is there something I'm unaware of that they merely overcharge massively for, or are they actually the complete and total parasites that they sound like?
DRM still has the awkward flaw of giving the user both the key and the lock and hoping that they won't figure it out.
Modern encryption is computationally intractable for solid, mathematical reasons, but that doesn't really apply to smoke and mirrors DRM schemes. The keys and everything else are in there, and a university probably has better access to stuff like high-end hardware analysis tools vs. your average basement-dwelling w4r3z guy.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
A bit of both. In my experience they have a tendency to sensationalize and inflate stuff that's mostly fringe or highly speculative. It's mostly a matter of tone and focus, though, they're still well rooted in actual science.
If you want day-to-day news on solid scientific work, probably better off elsewhere. For coverage of interesting new ideas or possibilities in science, they're great. Just don't be disappointed if the ideas they cover don't end up working out.
More likely he's thinking of something along the lines of "maintaining referential transparency". That is, the only sense of identity a variable has is its value, not its storage location, meaning that complicated data structures can't be altered, only used to construct new, different versions.
This incidentally makes multithreading alot easier, too.:)
Such constructs are available because there are problems that are very difficult (but not impossible) to handle with pure functional programming, so language designers end up making compromises.
Not that difficult, really. The main problem is sequencing, which is provided by things like function composition. The problem is the unwieldy nature in languages like Scheme of specifying sequencing using pure functions, while also handling data that doesn't require sequencing; but this is a syntactic problem, not a practical one.
The issue is handled admirably by the language Haskell, using a mathematical construct called a "monad" to allow an elegant way of handling sequencing--even a syntactic sugar "do" notation that looks vaguely imperative--while remaining 100% pure, unlike Scheme.
And? An open market means they're free to price their goods at whatever they want to whoever they want and people can choose to buy or not buy at those prices. It has nothing to do with making their quotes confidential.
On the other hand, a free market itself isn't all that great. For a free market to provide optimal results, a variety of other conditions must be met, one of which is that all market participants have perfect information.
Trying to keep prices secret is one popular way that companies try to give the middle finger to the Invisible Hand and profit off of engineered market inefficiency.
And how fast are we moving relative to the source of the big bang?
All points equally in the entire universe are "the source of the big bang". The big bang isn't just the origin point for all matter, it's the origin point for the entire universe and all space and time.
If you want to "see" the big bang, or as close as we can see, look at the CMB.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Warning: That link is -very- NSFW unless you work for the Klan. Had to clear my cache and history after viewing that one.
It's Encyclopaedia fucking Dramatica. You must be new around here. As far as links to never click at work go, that ranks somewhere between kiddie porn and goatse.
Well, given the subject of the article:
YANI: Being punished increases chances of successfully reading a spellbook. ;)
Well, in a mathematical sense, emacs is strictly superior to vi--you can implement vi in emacs, but not the other way around!
Although the way NICE works in specific instances has led to a lot of very justified criticism, there seems to be no realistic alternative to something like this if you have a tax-financed system that the sick don't pay for directly. There just isn't enough money to do everything possible for every patient.
Who says it has to be tax-financed?
In the USA, much health care is funded by insurance companies that essentially serve the function of averaging medical expenditure among a group of people. The net result of this is that an individual with insurance has every incentive to spend as much as the insurance while let them, because the costs will distribute to all policy holders. When everyone does this, insurance policy costs keep going up. The insurance companies, trying to get costs back down, have incentive only to pay as little as possible, not prioritize approved treatments by QALYs or any other similar metric.
Then, due to all that, you end up with people who are uninsured or otherwise unable to afford health care ending up with emergency conditions, receiving expensive treatment, and being forced into bankruptcy. This also drives up cost (as the hospitals are forced to absorb the cost of treatment) and harms society (a financially ruined citizen accomplishes less and pays less tax).
And thus, we come to this, the worst of all possible worlds.
It's well-established that Americans as a whole pay far too much for health for far too little benefit, compared to other first-world nations.
Can some of this discrepancy be explained by high availability of essentially useless or even harmful "treatments"?
Medicine is more like some unknown mixture of actual science and cargo-cult pseudoscience, both using the same tools and terminologies.
Separating the two is a nontrivial problem.
Rather an extension of Stanly Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiments. If an authority figure orders you to assist in molesting a 13 year old girl, how many would molest her? We know of two. How many would refuse? Thats the real question. If people refuse to assist much evil just evaporates: *poof*.
You may be interested to read about this case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_search_prank_call_scam
No 13 year olds were involved but I think the events are rather telling, regardless.
Who are you to decide the value of life, and of those whom you're so willing to sacrifice?
It's noble to sacrifice *your own* life so others can live. It's NOT noble to sacrifice *someone else's* life. If you want to be so noble, march on down to the hospital and give up your heart to someone waiting for a transplant.
The value proposition changes a little when it's your own skin, doesn't it?
I'm not deciding the value of life. I'm pointing out that, all else equal, two lives are worth more than one. Anything else is incoherent at best.
If you choose letting a hundred people die through inaction over killing one person directly, your lack of action is not noble--the blood of those hundred people is no less on your hands than if you'd killed them directly.
None of which is even considering that a blob of embryo cells isn't even remotely of the same value as a living, thinking human.
No, the point is that all of your shouting about stem cell research is about ideology and not science. You just hide behind miracle cures to get money. Well then, if you can deliver these cures, that's great. But let's have a date. Give us a date. If we publicly fund stem cells, we will have these results, on some date. What's the date?
You seem a little unclear about how scientific research works; there are no fixed time-tables--that's why I'm not the one making the claim that something definitely will or will not happen. I'd put maybe even odds on a previously-untreatable medical condition being rendered tractable via methods dervied from stem cell research within my lifetime, say the next 70 years.
No, that's not a very strong claim, but given that the only arguments against stem cell research are from people with absurdly skewed moral priorities or delusional ideas about economics, it sounds like a pretty clear-cut case of something worth funding for long enough to see how it pans out.
No, this is why there is a patent system. I know, much reviled here, but that's what it's for.
So government paying for things directly is bad, but the government meddling in the market by granting monopolies on ideas is fine?
What's the difference, here?
Embryonic stem cell research isn't necessarily about actually using them. Aside from the cancer thing, they'd also have the same rejection problems that organ transplants have.
The purpose of the research is to learn more about how to work with stem cells so that we can eventually culture and work with adult stem cells from individuals who need treatment. As it stands, adult stem cell research is still mostly in the state of "how do we even make these things", and would have continued in parallel with embryonic research regardless.
I bet that there are NO cures for cancer, NO blind man seeing, and NO crippled people walking due to stem cell research, in our lifetimes. All of this talk about the immediate need to fund stem cell research is just so much hype.
Do you, now? Precisely how much are you willing to bet? Put your money where your mouth is.
But I expect you won't, because you know there's far too great a chance you'd lose. Your shouting is about ideology, not science, and you know full well that reality only cares about the latter.
One of the most frightening and chilling statements ever uttered on Slashdot. This is exactly the sort of moral relativism that this issue promotes. If it's already gone this far, give it 50 years.
Oh, for crying out loud. The concept of sacrificing one life to save countless others is "chilling" "moral relativism"?
I'm sorry to say it, but if you prefer letting many living, thinking people suffer and die rather than accept the death of a few lives that weren't even concious thinking beings in the first place, you are morally bankrupt beyond all belief.
Basically, you have some gung-ho lefty making a bunch of proclamations, admitting a bias against another company, and she's going to be in a position of power in government? Oh wait, I forgot, this is change we can believe in, just another form of chicago cronyism... or really, detroit, judging by the way this administration is driving the country into the ground.
And the funny part is, even if everything you say is accurate, it'd STILL be an improvement over how the Republicans had been running things!
Riddle me this (...) Why did the life expectancy of the average Russian DECREASE after the Bolshevik revolution?
Riddle me this. Why is Russian lifespan decreasing after the Soviet Union collapse and the uptake of capitalism?
The simplest theory that accounts for this data is that every time Russia's government structure changes, things get worse.
Can't argue with Occam's Razor!
It's not good, it's the lesser of two evils. Ludicrously restrictive intellectual property laws are purely a bureaucratic problem and can be reversed fairly easily. It's a preferable to have to deal with that sort of problem rather than wars, climate change, piss-poor education standards.... and so on.
Not to mention, that there are two tried and true methods for working around overrestrictive copyright laws:
Now, patents are a different matter...
I've long wondered--what is it that academic journals DO, precisely? They don't seem to provide any services that a vanity press couldn't do better and cheaper.
Is there something I'm unaware of that they merely overcharge massively for, or are they actually the complete and total parasites that they sound like?
DRM still has the awkward flaw of giving the user both the key and the lock and hoping that they won't figure it out.
Modern encryption is computationally intractable for solid, mathematical reasons, but that doesn't really apply to smoke and mirrors DRM schemes. The keys and everything else are in there, and a university probably has better access to stuff like high-end hardware analysis tools vs. your average basement-dwelling w4r3z guy.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
A bit of both. In my experience they have a tendency to sensationalize and inflate stuff that's mostly fringe or highly speculative. It's mostly a matter of tone and focus, though, they're still well rooted in actual science. If you want day-to-day news on solid scientific work, probably better off elsewhere. For coverage of interesting new ideas or possibilities in science, they're great. Just don't be disappointed if the ideas they cover don't end up working out.
I think he says "state" when he means "heap."
More likely he's thinking of something along the lines of "maintaining referential transparency". That is, the only sense of identity a variable has is its value, not its storage location, meaning that complicated data structures can't be altered, only used to construct new, different versions.
This incidentally makes multithreading alot easier, too. :)
Such constructs are available because there are problems that are very difficult (but not impossible) to handle with pure functional programming, so language designers end up making compromises.
Not that difficult, really. The main problem is sequencing, which is provided by things like function composition. The problem is the unwieldy nature in languages like Scheme of specifying sequencing using pure functions, while also handling data that doesn't require sequencing; but this is a syntactic problem, not a practical one.
The issue is handled admirably by the language Haskell, using a mathematical construct called a "monad" to allow an elegant way of handling sequencing--even a syntactic sugar "do" notation that looks vaguely imperative--while remaining 100% pure, unlike Scheme.
And? An open market means they're free to price their goods at whatever they want to whoever they want and people can choose to buy or not buy at those prices. It has nothing to do with making their quotes confidential.
On the other hand, a free market itself isn't all that great. For a free market to provide optimal results, a variety of other conditions must be met, one of which is that all market participants have perfect information.
Trying to keep prices secret is one popular way that companies try to give the middle finger to the Invisible Hand and profit off of engineered market inefficiency.
And how fast are we moving relative to the source of the big bang?
All points equally in the entire universe are "the source of the big bang". The big bang isn't just the origin point for all matter, it's the origin point for the entire universe and all space and time. If you want to "see" the big bang, or as close as we can see, look at the CMB.
Fixed!?! Fires won't burn anything! Nothing will rust! Hooray for Obama, greatest @ ever!
I'm pretty sure that politicians, as a general rule, are displayed as &, not @.