If you are a typical programmer, you'll be using libraries that already have the difficult math-y stuff worked out.
If you don't have any clue about what these libraries actually do, then they're basically as useful as a typewriter to a monkey. You don't need to reinvent the wheel every time, but at least you need to have a clue about how and why a wheel works.
Actinides aren't the big problem as far as nuclear waste is concerned - fission products are. Especially the long-lived ones that are very mobile in the environment, easy to incorporate (iodine, cesium, strontium) and basically impossible to separate from the rest of the waste chemically (unlike actinides). Heck, many actinides are actually nuclear fuel or could be turned into nuclear fuel. Fission products are just nasty, deadly poisons.
That's why I'd rather spend more on researching fusion power - you'll still end up with some radioactive waste, but you have some degree of control over its composition and you will not create any of the problematic isotopes mentioned above.
My travel insurance covered me with negligible deductible for WAY less than what you quoted.
Travel health insurance is a completely different beast than regular health insurance. Even I (call me "Mr. Uninsurable" due to a preexisting condition) was able to get it while I was studying in the US, and really cheap, too (on the order of 100 € per month).
No - he specifically mentioned two or three countries that are not "socialized" yet...
Such as...?
Pretty much any country I'd want to get medical services in has price controls and/or a public health insurance system. Even Switzerland has price controls.
So tourists pay less (and potentially get more) than citizens?
Read the fine print of your plan carefully. I'm sure it says that it doesn't cover any treatment if the reason for your visit to the US was getting said treatment, and generally only covers everything necessary to fix you enough to be able to board a plane and fly home.
So, you're not going to chemotherapy or anything similarly involved and costly.
Not that I'm a big Rush fan either, but... Rush said he would go to another country, _only_ for medical treatment, then return after being cared for (paying out of his own pocket, for all medical costs, to receive a presumably higher grade of medical care than what he predicts we will soon be facing).
Funny enough that most of the countries he would go to have some sort of regulation of prices for medical services, even if you pay out of pocket. Doctors aren't able to bill you $10k for an aspirin and a band-aid in those countries.
So, he's basically saying that he likes "socialism" in other countries.
Health insurance must not be mandated, you have just declared it to be illegal to be an individual person that does not own property and does not want to pay taxes, lives off the grid.
You can only get away with non-mandated health insurance as long as health care providers are not required to provide treatment under any circumstances. This means that they are free to leave a unconscious person to die on the curb if they are unable to verify that said person wants to be treated and has a way of paying for it.
Otherwise, you'll get freeloaders who don't get insurance, but still expect to be treated in emergencies, sticking hospitals and doctors (and therefore all other patients who _are_ able to pay) with their bills.
Because CPU power isn't the bottleneck in most systems, duh. What's slowing todays computer down are things like mass store access times and bandwidth, RAM size and bandwith, etc.
However half a million dollars in medical expenses for a heart attack which may or may not be related........
The insurer will probably place the burden of proof on you that your heart attack wasn't related to your diabetes. Meanwhile, you're in the hospital and racking up five-figure bills and, oh yeah, you've just had a heart attack. Have a nice day!
There will almost certainly be a time in your life when your medical expenses will overrun your ability to pay without insurance.
A self-reliant man will put a bullet through his skull when that happens. Hopefully, they'll still be able to pull the trigger. Oh, and they'll also provide this service to their dependents should they ever become ill enough to overrun the self-reliant man's ability to pay.
When the government has to pay for your health, they have a rational for controlling your life choices.
No, they don't. They can simply do what private insurers do already: "We're not paying for X, but you're free pay for it yourself if you really want it."
That way, they're controlling your life choices about as much as a private insurer does.
Re:OK, then why doesn't the EU have universal care
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 2
France, for example, is demographically and economically the size of the state of Virginia.
As long as you don't mind the difference of about an order of magnitude in population and GDP, yes. FYI: Population of Virginia: about 8 million, population of France: about 60 million. GDP of Virginia: about $400B, GDP of France: over $2T.
Good luck on getting them to pay the bills because most of them deny over half of the claims if not more.
And why shouldn't they? They're in a position with much, much better leverage than your standard insurer, because by the time one of their customers needs his "catastrophic" insurance, the situation is already "catastrophic" and he's an easy victim in a lawsuit.
4. Many of the successful systems in the world , e.g. Switzerland, are largely privately based albeit with governmental regulations.
Switzerland is not the rule, it's the exception. And by pure coincidence, they have the second most expensive health care system in the world. (Although they're still quite a ways behind #1, the US).
Re:I don't have health insurance.
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I have catastrophic insurance, so if I get cancer and my bills go over $20,000 then THEY will cover the cost.
That's what they want you to think. Of course, fighting a lawsuit when you're the one who has cancer and five-figure bills to pay, while the other side has a large legal department specialized on just that kind of case, is going to be fun.
Seriously. Using a cellphone to fotograph a fscking check? And that's called "smartphone-based banking"? I've been able to do my banking over the internet for almost a decade now, and I'm a late adopter. And the last time I had to use a check was over twenty years ago.
That's not what people become shrinks for, though. They want to sit in their office, put people on their couch (or, more modern, in a comfy chair) and get 100 bucks an hour for listening to some idiot whine. And most do just that and will do fine.
You're talking about psychologists, not psychiatrists. Psychologists are the ones who are highly paid for listening to you, psychiatrists will fill you up with risperdal, prozac, ritalin or whatever.
Possible cancer in future years, or the rest of your life with no hands? I'll take the cancer.
Problem is that you'll have to chose well before you lose your hands. Or rather - your parents have to make that choice. At least until we can do a full-body gene exchange.
Besides, if you know it's coming, you can go for extra MRIs and catch it very early.
That cancer will be nastier than most we know, and if you defeat the first one, the next few will get you. I doubt that spending the rest of your life between the OR, chemotherapy and radiation therapy is going to be fun.
My guess is that while not having this gene results in wonderous regenerative abilities, it'll also increase your chances of developing cancer before the age of 20 by a bajillionfold. Not a problem for mice, but certainly a problem for men.
What a ridiculously short-sighted point of view. THEIR resources will run out eventually, and then we'll start using OUR resources, which will run out as well. Then what? Mad Max time?
Then we'll go to Alpha Centauri. What, didn't you see the movie?
Slashdot Mirror
If you are a typical programmer, you'll be using libraries that already have the difficult math-y stuff worked out.
If you don't have any clue about what these libraries actually do, then they're basically as useful as a typewriter to a monkey. You don't need to reinvent the wheel every time, but at least you need to have a clue about how and why a wheel works.
You don't want to store most of the actinides - they're reactor fuel.
The fission products decay very quickly relative to the actinides
I wouldn't call a half-life of a couple of million years "very quickly".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-lived_fission_product
And I-129 is especially nasty because it's so easy to incorporate.
No, it's going to break it. Working nuclear waste is radioactive, broken nuclear waste is not.
mandatory and discrimination. It's the misanthropists choice - have a preexisting condition and be royally fscked in all kinds of ways.
... WTF are these guys smoking?
Actinides aren't the big problem as far as nuclear waste is concerned - fission products are. Especially the long-lived ones that are very mobile in the environment, easy to incorporate (iodine, cesium, strontium) and basically impossible to separate from the rest of the waste chemically (unlike actinides). Heck, many actinides are actually nuclear fuel or could be turned into nuclear fuel. Fission products are just nasty, deadly poisons.
That's why I'd rather spend more on researching fusion power - you'll still end up with some radioactive waste, but you have some degree of control over its composition and you will not create any of the problematic isotopes mentioned above.
Travel health insurance is a completely different beast than regular health insurance. Even I (call me "Mr. Uninsurable" due to a preexisting condition) was able to get it while I was studying in the US, and really cheap, too (on the order of 100 € per month).
Such as ...?
Pretty much any country I'd want to get medical services in has price controls and/or a public health insurance system. Even Switzerland has price controls.
Read the fine print of your plan carefully. I'm sure it says that it doesn't cover any treatment if the reason for your visit to the US was getting said treatment, and generally only covers everything necessary to fix you enough to be able to board a plane and fly home.
So, you're not going to chemotherapy or anything similarly involved and costly.
Funny enough that most of the countries he would go to have some sort of regulation of prices for medical services, even if you pay out of pocket. Doctors aren't able to bill you $10k for an aspirin and a band-aid in those countries.
So, he's basically saying that he likes "socialism" in other countries.
Health insurance must not be mandated, you have just declared it to be illegal to be an individual person that does not own property and does not want to pay taxes, lives off the grid.
You can only get away with non-mandated health insurance as long as health care providers are not required to provide treatment under any circumstances. This means that they are free to leave a unconscious person to die on the curb if they are unable to verify that said person wants to be treated and has a way of paying for it.
Otherwise, you'll get freeloaders who don't get insurance, but still expect to be treated in emergencies, sticking hospitals and doctors (and therefore all other patients who _are_ able to pay) with their bills.
Because CPU power isn't the bottleneck in most systems, duh. What's slowing todays computer down are things like mass store access times and bandwidth, RAM size and bandwith, etc.
The insurer will probably place the burden of proof on you that your heart attack wasn't related to your diabetes. Meanwhile, you're in the hospital and racking up five-figure bills and, oh yeah, you've just had a heart attack. Have a nice day!
A self-reliant man will put a bullet through his skull when that happens. Hopefully, they'll still be able to pull the trigger. Oh, and they'll also provide this service to their dependents should they ever become ill enough to overrun the self-reliant man's ability to pay.
No, they don't. They can simply do what private insurers do already: "We're not paying for X, but you're free pay for it yourself if you really want it."
That way, they're controlling your life choices about as much as a private insurer does.
As long as you don't mind the difference of about an order of magnitude in population and GDP, yes. FYI: Population of Virginia: about 8 million, population of France: about 60 million. GDP of Virginia: about $400B, GDP of France: over $2T.
And why shouldn't they? They're in a position with much, much better leverage than your standard insurer, because by the time one of their customers needs his "catastrophic" insurance, the situation is already "catastrophic" and he's an easy victim in a lawsuit.
4. Many of the successful systems in the world , e.g. Switzerland, are largely privately based albeit with governmental regulations.
Switzerland is not the rule, it's the exception. And by pure coincidence, they have the second most expensive health care system in the world. (Although they're still quite a ways behind #1, the US).
I have catastrophic insurance, so if I get cancer and my bills go over $20,000 then THEY will cover the cost.
That's what they want you to think. Of course, fighting a lawsuit when you're the one who has cancer and five-figure bills to pay, while the other side has a large legal department specialized on just that kind of case, is going to be fun.
Catastrophic health insurance is a scam.
Club made from silicon!
Seriously. Using a cellphone to fotograph a fscking check? And that's called "smartphone-based banking"? I've been able to do my banking over the internet for almost a decade now, and I'm a late adopter. And the last time I had to use a check was over twenty years ago.
can efficiently produce hydrogen without the need for a dirty catalyst like oil.
Whoever wrote this needs to hand in their geek card for not understanding the word "catalyst".
If we could, somehow, produce hydrogen in a reaction catalyzed by oil, our energy problems would be solved.
That's not what people become shrinks for, though. They want to sit in their office, put people on their couch (or, more modern, in a comfy chair) and get 100 bucks an hour for listening to some idiot whine. And most do just that and will do fine.
You're talking about psychologists, not psychiatrists. Psychologists are the ones who are highly paid for listening to you, psychiatrists will fill you up with risperdal, prozac, ritalin or whatever.
Problem is that you'll have to chose well before you lose your hands. Or rather - your parents have to make that choice. At least until we can do a full-body gene exchange.
Besides, if you know it's coming, you can go for extra MRIs and catch it very early.
That cancer will be nastier than most we know, and if you defeat the first one, the next few will get you. I doubt that spending the rest of your life between the OR, chemotherapy and radiation therapy is going to be fun.
My guess is that while not having this gene results in wonderous regenerative abilities, it'll also increase your chances of developing cancer before the age of 20 by a bajillionfold. Not a problem for mice, but certainly a problem for men.
What a ridiculously short-sighted point of view. THEIR resources will run out eventually, and then we'll start using OUR resources, which will run out as well. Then what? Mad Max time?
Then we'll go to Alpha Centauri. What, didn't you see the movie?
What's this doing on slashdot?
I've written whole projects on microcontrollers (in C) that do much, much more than "Hello World", in less than 10 kB.