Re:also: more doctors, less pay, more compassion.
on
What US Health Care Needs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Cuban healthcare costs 1/20th of American healthcare for similar outcomes? That's... not really suprising.
Most of the cost of health care is the cost of labour. Health care is very labour intensive, as I am sure you know. In the West, labour is expensive. In the third world, it is cheap. The cost of living is lower, the average salary is lower, and therefore the cost of labour needed to provide healthcare is also lower. But the healthcare itself can be just as good. There are excellent hospitals throughout the world.
So yes, Cuban healthcare is cheap. I don't see what we are supposed to learn from this, though, since it's a consequence of economics rather than some sort of enlightened government policy.
Disagree. Adobe's work in porting Flash to Linux has made the Linux browsing experience as similar to the Windows one as we would ever wish it to be. Adobe has made Linux more usable, because most websites now "just work" on Linux, even when they rely on Flash.
Linux users such as myself (13+ years of desktop use) cannot expect the rest of the world to give up Flash just because it's a non-free application. Someday, HTML5 and Javascript may be so much better than Flash that the switchover occurs naturally, like the transition from IE to Firefox. Until then, there will be lots of Flash, and we cannot get around that by evangelising about how nobody should use Flash because although it's free, it isn't Free. Most people do not care about this ideological distinction. They just want things to work. If Youtube and Facebook games don't work, then they assume Linux is at fault.
And you know, sometimes it is a problem with Linux. The very worst thing we can be doing is making technical decisions that deliberately make life difficult for Adobe (and other commercial software vendors). Like the decision not to make a 32-bit web browser the default in 64-bit Linux distributions, when 32-bit browsers are always the default on Windows and Mac, the 32-bit compatibility libraries are useful for other things too, and there's no reason why a browser needs to be 64-bit anyway. Or things like this:
The issue between Flash, Alsa and Pulse is a known one that seems to be mostly located in Flash, and hence is rather difficult for anyone except Adobe to resolve:\. Ironically it's actually part of the reason why many distros are adopting Pulse: we figure if everyone is using Pulse and complaining when Flash audio breaks, it'll pile on the pressure on Adobe to do something about it...
Reading stuff like this is just amazing. Reminds me of the old saying attributed to Microsoft, "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run". If a software vendor isn't doing things your way, then break the APIs until the vendor complies or (more likely) just gives up in disgust.
The critics will be silent when (1) they can try out the service for themselves, at home, on their own connections, and (2) it doesn't suck. Until then, there will be healthy skepticism.
I'm also skeptical of how profitable the service could be, even if there was zero lag. There must be a high ratio of "subscribers" to "servers" in order to pay for the servers and make a profit. 10:1, 20:1, that sort of thing. But demand for a game is not constant. Players mostly play at the same time - in the evening (local time). This is the time when the contention ratio matters. If 9 out 10 players cannot play because all the servers are busy, then they are going to wish they'd saved their subscription money and spent it on PC upgrades.
All online services have peak usage periods, but Amazon and Google do not have a big problem with them because users can be served by any data centre anywhere in the world if necessary. In peak time, if your web page takes 50ms longer to load, you don't even notice. That's what the "cloud" is supposed to do. But OnLive can't do that. All its data centres have to be geographically close to you.
An intelligent response that I would certainly mod up if able.
Closing most airports in Europe was an overreaction, apparently based on the assumption that the cloud was uniformly dense and everywhere. That's a paranoid, unscientific assumption which was not checked soon enough.
Everything is risk. We have to balance risk against the cost of avoiding it. In this case, a bad call was made, causing inconvenience and expense for perhaps a million people who would otherwise have been unaffected. Typical behaviour for the UK Government really.. if it isn't a bogus "terror" or "paedophile" threat, then it's "volcanic ash". Don't panic! Don't panic!
And by the way, I agree with you completely about the wind farms. Money spent building them would be much better spent on nuclear reactors, since these provide better value for money and generate clean energy in all weather conditions.
If I remember correctly, MIPS actually has the "feature" you are talking about. "Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages". Certain instruction sequences are actually illegal. It is not friendly to the assembly programmer.
Unfortunately RISC ISAs (including ARM) seem to have the same sorts of braindamaged design decisions as the CISC ISAs. "It seemed like a good idea at the time," I'm sure.
And even more interestingly, there is Atom. It already exists as an IP core. If ARM starts making trouble for non-Apple smartphone manufacturers, Intel will be ready to fill a gap in this market.
Worst case, customers will have a choice between an ARM-based smartphone that only runs Apple-approved software, and an x86-based smartphone that runs any PC software. I know which one I'd pick.
Jobs knew that people wanted to hear those things. So those were the things he said.
If he was genuinely opposed to DRM on Apple platforms, iPhones would include jailbreak as an official feature, as on Android. iPods wouldn't include technical restrictions to prevent connection to unofficial software. OSX would install on any PC without needing to be modified.
In all of these cases, there would be warnings: "Apple doesn't recommend you do this. Your warranty will be void. We won't support you." But there would be no technical measure to prevent it, as there currently is.
You can't blame the DRM on the iPhone or OSX on the RIAA. Jobs is the man to blame.
He lied to you. He said what you wanted to hear. It really is that simple. Jobs likes DRM because the platform lockin makes him lots of $$$s.
It's also working from a "prevention of sales" point of view.
Today I mailed a polite letter to Yves Guillemot, Ubisoft CEO, at his corporate headquarters in France. It explains why I bought a couple of other games instead of buying R.U.S.E., which is a game that I genuinely wanted to buy.
I don't object to intellectual property law or even DRM on principle, but a balance needs to be found between the reasonable expectations of the customer and the reasonable expectations of the publisher. I'm not buying games that get it so badly wrong, as all of Ubisoft's recent titles have done.
Do you really believe that God's existence will be falsified by "science"?
Because that's nonsense. It's exactly like believing that "science" will one day solve the halting problem. You believe in something that is logically impossible.
Consider the pure, philosophical concept of "God", a concept which is independent of any particular religion or belief. This "God" is a transcendant being - outside of the natural Universe. By definition, "science" is limited to the study of natural phenomena, so how can it possibly be used to test for the existence of something that, by definition, exists outside of nature?
Of course we can use "science" to show that God isn't directly responsible for disease and gravity and aerodynamics, but that's nothing new - that's pre-Enlightenment thinking. What we will never, ever prove is that God didn't create the conditions where these things are possible.
Same - although in my case, the game I won't be buying (or pirating) is R.U.S.E.
If we reward Ubisoft's DRM with money, then it won't be long before every publisher adopts this DRM strategy. Goodbye, Steam offline mode, we hardly knew ye.
By steadfastly refusing to reward the publishers, we at least create the possibility that DRM will be cut back to a bare minimum in order to increase sales. "Amazon MP3 for Games": that is the goal. It's not life or death, but it's important enough to change my behaviour.
I find it really, really hard to believe this was the plan all along. I think it's a happy side effect of Apple's business: using DRM for platform lock-in, then attempting to use that lock-in to gouge a better deal out of the RIAA.
People say that His Holiness Steve Jobs always wanted to get rid of DRM, because he said so during the early days of iPod+iTunes. However, that was what people wanted to him to say, so did he really mean it? I doubt it. If he really hated DRM as a matter of principle, then I'd expect every iPhone to be sold with a jailbreak option as a built-in feature.
I don't know, Gaia "theory" is a major theme in "Avatar"... along with all that fascist propaganda about how humans are evil, civilisation is a bad thing, and we should all go back to living in the trees...
As non-falsifiable "theories" go, I'd say it's been quite influential. The intelligent design guys *wish* their non-falsifiable "theory" was as successful as Gaia.
Parts of that story also turn up in "Bare Faced Messiah", the unauthorised biography of L. Ron Hubbard. Scientology tried to ban it, failed miserably, and now you can download it.
Fascinating stuff. Cult leaders are very interesting people.
Actually, I rather enjoyed it. It's not a good film, it's really quite bad, but not unwatchably so. Certainly nowhere near as bad as the Internet will tell you.
If I had to watch a film, and could only choose from really bad ones, I would pick Battlefield Earth before Plan 9. Although maybe it's a close thing!
They're all the same. They all push their own agenda and make it sound like the only perspective that any intelligent person would be able to take.
The political articles in all of these papers, including the Guardian, are written by professional trolls. They want to provoke a reaction. They want you to get angry and come back to read some more.
If the Daily Mail has annoyed you today, then YHBT.
Disagree on both points, particularly the second one. Secondary markets don't directly benefit the original vendor, but there is an indirect benefit in that the health of the market is maintained. A second hand bookstore makes no money for publishers or writers, but it does keep people interested in buying and selling books, so it's a good thing. It helps to keep publishers and writers in business indirectly.
You two are not the only ones. I agree that this is the best approach to force change. I don't know if we can be as successful as the campaign for DRM-free online music stores. But if we don't try, we'll be condemned to "buying" these shitty non-resellable install-limited online-only games, and for the same prices as the non-crippled games we used to buy.
If the price of the product stays the same, but now there is DRM that prevents you reselling it, then it's more expensive. Costs the same to buy, but the value is lower.
That's true, and it's a risk that every Steam customer is taking. And even if Valve aren't ever going to "become evil", there's always the possibility that they'll go out of business. In that event, Steam would be sold to another publisher, who might have very different ideas about how DRM should work. Offline play would probably be the first casualty.
did you ever stop to think the numbers they produce about their pirated software is fake? There is NO WAY for them to find out how many people pirate their software. None.
Oh, I'd agree, I'm sure they are faked. And yet, I think you can probably get a lower bound on the number of pirate downloads by connecting to a few trackers and counting the number of people who become seeders. This doesn't account for all pirates - there may be many, many more - but it does give some idea. The fakery comes in when these numbers are arbitrarily scaled up to account for piracy through other channels, such as private FTP sites or sneakernet. I think this is particularly an issue when the corporations are lobbying the government for stronger IP laws, because it is then that they have the greatest motivation to exaggerate.
But consider the balance sheets in the corporate head office. There's no motivation to exaggerate there: piracy has a cost, but so does DRM. And since the corporation exists only to maximise profit, the combined cost needs to be minimised. There's no point spending $1 on DRM unless it prevents at least $1 of piracy.
I advocate increasing the cost of DRM by not buying games with DRM I don't like. I am a "lost sale". In fact, I am worse than a lost sale, because I go around telling people things like "Hmm, but R.U.S.E. is published by Ubisoft, so it will have always-connected DRM and I won't be buying it..."
Conversely, pirating games just increases the (apparent) cost of piracy, justifies spending more on DRM, and gives corporations a big reason to lobby for anti-competitive "anti-piracy" laws. So it is, I think, the wrong approach.
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Cuban healthcare costs 1/20th of American healthcare for similar outcomes? That's... not really suprising.
Most of the cost of health care is the cost of labour. Health care is very labour intensive, as I am sure you know. In the West, labour is expensive. In the third world, it is cheap. The cost of living is lower, the average salary is lower, and therefore the cost of labour needed to provide healthcare is also lower. But the healthcare itself can be just as good. There are excellent hospitals throughout the world.
So yes, Cuban healthcare is cheap. I don't see what we are supposed to learn from this, though, since it's a consequence of economics rather than some sort of enlightened government policy.
Disagree. Adobe's work in porting Flash to Linux has made the Linux browsing experience as similar to the Windows one as we would ever wish it to be. Adobe has made Linux more usable, because most websites now "just work" on Linux, even when they rely on Flash.
Linux users such as myself (13+ years of desktop use) cannot expect the rest of the world to give up Flash just because it's a non-free application. Someday, HTML5 and Javascript may be so much better than Flash that the switchover occurs naturally, like the transition from IE to Firefox. Until then, there will be lots of Flash, and we cannot get around that by evangelising about how nobody should use Flash because although it's free, it isn't Free. Most people do not care about this ideological distinction. They just want things to work. If Youtube and Facebook games don't work, then they assume Linux is at fault.
And you know, sometimes it is a problem with Linux. The very worst thing we can be doing is making technical decisions that deliberately make life difficult for Adobe (and other commercial software vendors). Like the decision not to make a 32-bit web browser the default in 64-bit Linux distributions, when 32-bit browsers are always the default on Windows and Mac, the 32-bit compatibility libraries are useful for other things too, and there's no reason why a browser needs to be 64-bit anyway. Or things like this:
Reading stuff like this is just amazing. Reminds me of the old saying attributed to Microsoft, "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run". If a software vendor isn't doing things your way, then break the APIs until the vendor complies or (more likely) just gives up in disgust.
The critics will be silent when (1) they can try out the service for themselves, at home, on their own connections, and (2) it doesn't suck. Until then, there will be healthy skepticism.
I'm also skeptical of how profitable the service could be, even if there was zero lag. There must be a high ratio of "subscribers" to "servers" in order to pay for the servers and make a profit. 10:1, 20:1, that sort of thing. But demand for a game is not constant. Players mostly play at the same time - in the evening (local time). This is the time when the contention ratio matters. If 9 out 10 players cannot play because all the servers are busy, then they are going to wish they'd saved their subscription money and spent it on PC upgrades.
All online services have peak usage periods, but Amazon and Google do not have a big problem with them because users can be served by any data centre anywhere in the world if necessary. In peak time, if your web page takes 50ms longer to load, you don't even notice. That's what the "cloud" is supposed to do. But OnLive can't do that. All its data centres have to be geographically close to you.
An intelligent response that I would certainly mod up if able.
Closing most airports in Europe was an overreaction, apparently based on the assumption that the cloud was uniformly dense and everywhere. That's a paranoid, unscientific assumption which was not checked soon enough.
Everything is risk. We have to balance risk against the cost of avoiding it. In this case, a bad call was made, causing inconvenience and expense for perhaps a million people who would otherwise have been unaffected. Typical behaviour for the UK Government really.. if it isn't a bogus "terror" or "paedophile" threat, then it's "volcanic ash". Don't panic! Don't panic!
And by the way, I agree with you completely about the wind farms. Money spent building them would be much better spent on nuclear reactors, since these provide better value for money and generate clean energy in all weather conditions.
If I remember correctly, MIPS actually has the "feature" you are talking about. "Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages". Certain instruction sequences are actually illegal. It is not friendly to the assembly programmer.
Unfortunately RISC ISAs (including ARM) seem to have the same sorts of braindamaged design decisions as the CISC ISAs. "It seemed like a good idea at the time," I'm sure.
And even more interestingly, there is Atom. It already exists as an IP core. If ARM starts making trouble for non-Apple smartphone manufacturers, Intel will be ready to fill a gap in this market.
Worst case, customers will have a choice between an ARM-based smartphone that only runs Apple-approved software, and an x86-based smartphone that runs any PC software. I know which one I'd pick.
Jobs knew that people wanted to hear those things. So those were the things he said.
If he was genuinely opposed to DRM on Apple platforms, iPhones would include jailbreak as an official feature, as on Android. iPods wouldn't include technical restrictions to prevent connection to unofficial software. OSX would install on any PC without needing to be modified.
In all of these cases, there would be warnings: "Apple doesn't recommend you do this. Your warranty will be void. We won't support you." But there would be no technical measure to prevent it, as there currently is.
You can't blame the DRM on the iPhone or OSX on the RIAA. Jobs is the man to blame.
He lied to you. He said what you wanted to hear. It really is that simple. Jobs likes DRM because the platform lockin makes him lots of $$$s.
Never mind that! How many Libraries of Congress do we have to burn down to get 115 gigajoules?
It's also working from a "prevention of sales" point of view.
Today I mailed a polite letter to Yves Guillemot, Ubisoft CEO, at his corporate headquarters in France. It explains why I bought a couple of other games instead of buying R.U.S.E., which is a game that I genuinely wanted to buy.
I don't object to intellectual property law or even DRM on principle, but a balance needs to be found between the reasonable expectations of the customer and the reasonable expectations of the publisher. I'm not buying games that get it so badly wrong, as all of Ubisoft's recent titles have done.
Exactly.
To put this in non-religious terms, can we prove that what we call reality isn't actually an accurate simulation like "The Matrix"? No.
In general - When a program executes on a computer, can it distinguish between a real CPU and an emulated virtual CPU? Again, no.
Statements like "Science can disprove God" show a misunderstanding of science or God or both.
Do you really believe that God's existence will be falsified by "science"?
Because that's nonsense. It's exactly like believing that "science" will one day solve the halting problem. You believe in something that is logically impossible.
Consider the pure, philosophical concept of "God", a concept which is independent of any particular religion or belief. This "God" is a transcendant being - outside of the natural Universe. By definition, "science" is limited to the study of natural phenomena, so how can it possibly be used to test for the existence of something that, by definition, exists outside of nature?
Of course we can use "science" to show that God isn't directly responsible for disease and gravity and aerodynamics, but that's nothing new - that's pre-Enlightenment thinking. What we will never, ever prove is that God didn't create the conditions where these things are possible.
This is why I am an agnostic.
Good idea. I think I might try to send them a letter on paper.
Same - although in my case, the game I won't be buying (or pirating) is R.U.S.E.
If we reward Ubisoft's DRM with money, then it won't be long before every publisher adopts this DRM strategy. Goodbye, Steam offline mode, we hardly knew ye.
By steadfastly refusing to reward the publishers, we at least create the possibility that DRM will be cut back to a bare minimum in order to increase sales. "Amazon MP3 for Games": that is the goal. It's not life or death, but it's important enough to change my behaviour.
That's a bit revisionist, I think.
I find it really, really hard to believe this was the plan all along. I think it's a happy side effect of Apple's business: using DRM for platform lock-in, then attempting to use that lock-in to gouge a better deal out of the RIAA.
People say that His Holiness Steve Jobs always wanted to get rid of DRM, because he said so during the early days of iPod+iTunes. However, that was what people wanted to him to say, so did he really mean it? I doubt it. If he really hated DRM as a matter of principle, then I'd expect every iPhone to be sold with a jailbreak option as a built-in feature.
Seconded.
Hey, remember the year when Slashdot's April Fool's joke was that all the stories were actually serious? That was a good year.
I don't know, Gaia "theory" is a major theme in "Avatar"... along with all that fascist propaganda about how humans are evil, civilisation is a bad thing, and we should all go back to living in the trees...
As non-falsifiable "theories" go, I'd say it's been quite influential. The intelligent design guys *wish* their non-falsifiable "theory" was as successful as Gaia.
Parts of that story also turn up in "Bare Faced Messiah", the unauthorised biography of L. Ron Hubbard. Scientology tried to ban it, failed miserably, and now you can download it.
Fascinating stuff. Cult leaders are very interesting people.
Actually, I rather enjoyed it. It's not a good film, it's really quite bad, but not unwatchably so. Certainly nowhere near as bad as the Internet will tell you.
If I had to watch a film, and could only choose from really bad ones, I would pick Battlefield Earth before Plan 9. Although maybe it's a close thing!
They're all the same. They all push their own agenda and make it sound like the only perspective that any intelligent person would be able to take.
The political articles in all of these papers, including the Guardian, are written by professional trolls. They want to provoke a reaction. They want you to get angry and come back to read some more.
If the Daily Mail has annoyed you today, then YHBT.
I'd like to know how it differs from www.direct.gov.uk.
The UK Government created Directgov several years ago for exactly the reasons stated in TFA.
How many single, centralised points of access to Government services do we actually need?
Disagree on both points, particularly the second one. Secondary markets don't directly benefit the original vendor, but there is an indirect benefit in that the health of the market is maintained. A second hand bookstore makes no money for publishers or writers, but it does keep people interested in buying and selling books, so it's a good thing. It helps to keep publishers and writers in business indirectly.
You two are not the only ones. I agree that this is the best approach to force change. I don't know if we can be as successful as the campaign for DRM-free online music stores. But if we don't try, we'll be condemned to "buying" these shitty non-resellable install-limited online-only games, and for the same prices as the non-crippled games we used to buy.
If the price of the product stays the same, but now there is DRM that prevents you reselling it, then it's more expensive. Costs the same to buy, but the value is lower.
That's true, and it's a risk that every Steam customer is taking. And even if Valve aren't ever going to "become evil", there's always the possibility that they'll go out of business. In that event, Steam would be sold to another publisher, who might have very different ideas about how DRM should work. Offline play would probably be the first casualty.
did you ever stop to think the numbers they produce about their pirated software is fake? There is NO WAY for them to find out how many people pirate their software. None.
Oh, I'd agree, I'm sure they are faked. And yet, I think you can probably get a lower bound on the number of pirate downloads by connecting to a few trackers and counting the number of people who become seeders. This doesn't account for all pirates - there may be many, many more - but it does give some idea. The fakery comes in when these numbers are arbitrarily scaled up to account for piracy through other channels, such as private FTP sites or sneakernet. I think this is particularly an issue when the corporations are lobbying the government for stronger IP laws, because it is then that they have the greatest motivation to exaggerate.
But consider the balance sheets in the corporate head office. There's no motivation to exaggerate there: piracy has a cost, but so does DRM. And since the corporation exists only to maximise profit, the combined cost needs to be minimised. There's no point spending $1 on DRM unless it prevents at least $1 of piracy.
I advocate increasing the cost of DRM by not buying games with DRM I don't like. I am a "lost sale". In fact, I am worse than a lost sale, because I go around telling people things like "Hmm, but R.U.S.E. is published by Ubisoft, so it will have always-connected DRM and I won't be buying it..."
Conversely, pirating games just increases the (apparent) cost of piracy, justifies spending more on DRM, and gives corporations a big reason to lobby for anti-competitive "anti-piracy" laws. So it is, I think, the wrong approach.