Well, I think it's been established by now that your beliefs about human worth, and your tolerance for living at subsistence level, are pretty far away from the norm. In light of that and the slow pace of this thread, I'm going to bow out. It's been interesting.
The major league baseball player serves many more people. He may be worth $1 each to a million people. The teacher is worth $1000 each to 30 people. The player is thus worth more, in total, in society's judgement. You're still confusing the value of his labor with his value as a person. The world is more than just economics, and most people seem to realize that.
I don't see where you'd draw the line. You'll feed me too, and put a roof over my head, because I need those to live as well. I really don't need to keep up with the Joneses; I'm fine with not having the latest Mercedes. Are you fine with living in a crappy housing project, eating government cheese (or apples and oatmeal), walking everywhere you need to go, patching your clothes instead of replacing them when they get worn out, etc.? If so, then I have to ask, why are you still working? Is health insurance really the only thing keeping you from quitting your job and going on the dole?
Judging by pay, the average person values the baseball players more. Oh well. There's no accounting for taste. More like there's no accounting for poor judgment methods. If you polled people and asked whether they'd rather save the life of their kid's teacher or a major league baseball star, I think the majority would choose the teacher. One conclusion is that people are only pretending to value teachers more. An alternative, perhaps saner conclusion is that salary is a stupid way to judge the value of a person's life. It judges the economic value of a person's labor - no more.
That's sort of the whole point of having a government: we recognize that the cheapest, most efficient, or most profitable solution isn't always the best one, because most human beings care about a few things besides quarterly growth. So we have an alternate means of decision making, which trades efficiency for responsiveness to citizens' desires. And few citizens desire for people to die just because, to quote Sarah Silverman, they don't have the "right number of money".
If I can have things be decent without working my ass off, then I'm going to quit my highly productive nerd job or at least go part-time. (seriously) I'd much rather spend time with my kids. I'm not alone in this thought. Can you see how this kind of thing undermines our economy, and ultimately even health care? No, not at all. I'm talking about providing health care to people who need it, regardless of income, not "making things decent". There's a big difference between not dying and having a good life.
And the fact is, millions of people who work their asses off still can't afford health care. (I'm the only one of my peers who has health insurance, and I work less than any of them.) The most they can hope for is an emergency room, which we all end up paying for, and it costs us more than if we paid for them to visit a normal doctor before it became an emergency. Medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy. Can you see how that undermines our economy, our position as a civilized nation, and our basic human dignity?
Yes, and our Democracy is also "the most ancient" in the world (not just "first world"). So what? Well, at the risk of straying off topic, our democracy was designed by people who hoped there would never be such a thing as a political party, and instead that voters would judge candidates as individuals and candidates would run as individuals. The system has had to adapt to the reality that parties exist, but it's been done awkwardly and unsatisfactorily - just witness all the comments from people who complain about the two-party system, wish they didn't have to choose between the lesser of two evils, etc. who aren't aware that that problem is caused by the way we elect representatives (Duverger's law). Other democracies that came later are arguably better suited to the reality of political parties.
Money orders cost money. The fee is under a dollar if you get it from the right place (like a grocery store), but it can be several dollars if you get it from the wrong place (my bank charges $4 for money orders, $8 for cashier's checks). And then there's the inconvenience of traveling to the store to get one, and the fact that you can only get them in amounts up to $500.
Checking accounts, however, are free from all the major banks. You can deposit, withdraw, and transfer money without paying anyone a dime. You do have to buy a box of checks if you want to write a check, but (1) you get a handful of starter checks for free, and (2) instead of writing checks, you can just use your free debit card to pay anyone who accepts Visa/MC.
I'm sorry to hear that you either don't believe in evolution or don't mind people evolving away from the level of capability that we currently enjoy. I'm also sorry to hear that you don't value a brain surgeon over a homeless person; might you like the homeless person doing your brain surgery? I don't know where you're getting any of that from - it certainly isn't in anything I wrote. Just because I don't want someone doing brain surgery on me doesn't mean I want him to die an easily preventable death.
Now let me ask you, do you value a baseball player over a teacher? Do you want a baseball player teaching you calculus or molecular biology? Because baseball players can sure afford a lot more health care than teachers or even brain surgeons.
Assuming this even counts as eugenics, isn't it the least offensive form? It's not active harm, and it's not picking some preferred race. What, you think that makes it OK? Letting people live or die based on your idea of their "value" to society is repulsive, barbaric, and inexcusable. The least offensive form of eugenics is still eugenics. Letting poor people die is no better than rounding them up and sterilizing them - and remember, we're not just talking about unemployed and homeless people, we're also talking about millions of people who work full-time but still don't get enough benefits or pay to afford health care.
That works. (because it's still money) It works even better if people can't hide behind insurance. All right. So, homeless people get all the medical treatment they want for free, because any percentage of $0 is still $0. Meanwhile, Bill Gates is charged billions for a routine physical. I think I like this idea.
First, the reason you might find offensive. It's more important (for our economy, for our gene pool, whatever) that we keep the highly skilled people alive. You're right, I do find that offensive -- in fact, "offensive" is about the nicest description I can think of. No wonder you didn't want to admit it. BTW, I'm sure you'll have a great time convincing the general public that we should let poor people die because baseball players, Enron executives, lottery winners, and drunk-driving heiresses are more important to our economy.
Second, this isn't just a matter of one person's wealth vs. another person's wealth. This is also a matter of one individual person choosing between alternate things to spend money on. [...] Money is a way to cause individuals to decide their own priorities. Sure, that's a nice game to play if you've got the cash for it. But of course if you have the wrong employer, you get screwed.
Here's a modest proposal: why not price medical services as a proportion of income (or net worth)? You can decide between toe surgery and a new car, and someone working part-time as a busboy can decide between toe surgery and a new VCR. Surely, if all you want to do is force people to limit their consumption--rather than intentionally letting them die as part of your eugenics program--it'd work just as well to bring the decision down to one that's realistic for their income level, right?
So then, based on YOUR idea of the distinction, you wish to ration things. Medical care is going to be rationed on some basis anyway, because there's only so much of it to go around. You still haven't answered my question: why is rationing it according to wealth any better than rationing it according to a doctor's determination of medical necessity?
The example is way overexaggerated, but in some ways I wouldn't be wrong in determining that I need an X-ray for my hangnail. If that's what I feel I need, and it isn't hurting you, what's your problem with it? No problem at all, as long as you aren't taking X-ray time away from someone who, you know, really does need it. Maybe you and some of your hypochondriac friends could pool your money together and buy a private X-ray machine to use whenever you like.
Maybe I overeat, and so I "need" stomach reduction surgery to keep myself from dying of obesity-related problems. Again, feel free to spend your own money on things like that. I have no problem with limiting frivolous, optional treatments to those patients who can afford them, as long as everyone else is able to get necessary treatment when they actually need it. The problem with our system is not that rich people are able to spend money on frivolous surgeries, but that many low-to-middle-income people aren't able to get medical care except in an emergency room.
So yeah, people do decide their own need. Need, desire, and ability/willingness to pay (economic demand) are three separate things. Need can be determined by a medical expert. Desire is a matter of personal opinion but is influenced by need. Economic demand is a function of desire and the amount of money or insurance you have available. Our current system allocates medical care according to economic demand, but that's not necessarily the best way to do it.
That "don't need immediately" is unjustified. Who are you to say that my treatment is unneeded? A doctor, that's who. (Well, not me, but that's who'd be making the decision.) Medicine isn't just a matter of opinion. If you come in with a hangnail and say you need it X-rayed immediately, and the doctor says "no you don't", you're wrong and he's right.
It sounds like you want to limit my care by some arbitrary idea of your own. That "arbitrary idea" is called "modern medicine". Sorry if you have a problem with it.
What we're doing is slightly less awful. People decide their own need. Uh.. WTF? By that logic, poor people never "need" anything, because they can't afford it. Do you not understand that our current system denies people medical care based not on any medical basis, but simply on the basis of how much money they have? Wouldn't it make a hell of a lot more sense for medical decisions to be made on a medical basis?
If we offer everyone all the care they need or claim to need, we won't be able to satisfy the demand. That's why you'd hire medical experts to make decisions about actual need rather than going by "claims".
We can make people wait, causing many to die. We can hire McDonald's fry cooks to do surgery, causing many to die. We can have arbitrary quotas or a lottery, causing many to die. We can limit health care access only to those who can afford to pay for it, or who have the right employee benefits package, causing many to die. In fact, that's what we're already doing. Why is that any better than making people wait for treatment when they don't need it immediately?
1 for right answer. -1/4 for wrong answer. 0 for no answer. ITYM -1/3 for each wrong answer. That way, the expected value of guessing is zero: on average, out of four guesses, you'll gain a point for one of them and lose it for the other three.
Here's the relevant quote from TFA:
If Apple decided to sell the iPhone directly to consumers, it would have to sell the devices without simlock, allowing the buyer to insert their own Sim card.
This is not an option for the US market because several providers do not use Sim cards, and because operators use different network standards that prevent the iPhone working on some networks. Hard to tell whether the author was confused or just wrong. All the GSM providers in the US use SIM cards, because that's how GSM works. Different operators do use different network standards (mainly CDMA), but GSM is GSM no matter who's providing it. There's nothing stopping Apple from selling the iPhone directly to consumers and saying "You need a SIM card to make this work, so go get one from Cingular, T-Mobile, or somewhere else."
It's funny how people like you take offense to any other theories, No, actually, I don't take offense to any other theories. As soon as I see one that provides a better explanation of the evidence than the currently accepted theory, then it will have my support (as well as everyone else's). What I take offense to is people pushing fringe theories that don't fit the evidence as well as other theories, lack predictive power, fail to stand up to peer review, and oh-so-coincidentally shift the blame away from polluters.
you're kinda like a religious zealot in that way, you KNOW what you know, and that's scary. Incorrect. See above.
Notice how they always say "serious scientific organizations", then dismiss anyone who disagrees as being on the fringe. This is despite the fact that highly qualified scientists do disagree about the actual cause and level of global warming. One or two "highly qualified scientists" disagree about whether HIV causes AIDS, too. Hell, you could probably find a couple who disagree about whether the earth revolves around the sun. When the vast majority of scientific opinion, and more importantly scientific evidence, is against you, then you are on the fringe. Sorry, but it's true.
The simple fact is, most of the hysteria is based on Gore's little movie, which is based on BAD science that can never pass peer review. As the other commenter pointed out, this is incorrect. Are you lying or just ignorant?
Maybe "a lot" in terms of absolute number, but not as a proportion of the entire scientific community. In a world with 6.6 billion people in it, you can find a few dozen who'll agree with any statement you come up with, but that doesn't negate the thousands of others who won't.
I have recently read a report that the energy output of the sun has risen recently and is the highest it has ever been. Whoa, holy shit! You should alert those dozens of international scientific organizations about it right away! I'm sure they've never considered that possibility, and once you tip them off to the hypothesis that global warming is all the sun's fault and there's nothing we can do about it, they'll see the overwhelming explanatory power of your theory, throw away years' worth of research, recant everything they've ever said about climate change, and get right behind you.
Let me know how it goes, and please don't forget all of us little people on Slashdot when you're famous for revolutionizing the field of climate science.
Why? Because you heard someone say so? Because you feel it's true? Because that's what all the serious scientific organizations have concluded after examining the data. Because that's where all the scientific evidence points, and no better theories have been put forth to explain it.
First off, we have to allow scientists to determine whether global warming is a problem, without political interference. That's already been done. The only political interference now is coming from those who don't like the answer.
A plain old optical microscope will do just fine. "Less than 1 mm" is pretty small to the naked eye, but I work with hologram production equipment that produces features 0.5 mm in size or less, and we use optical microscopes for troubleshooting.
In Firefox, if you try to drag a tab out to your desktop, it creates a new shortcut to that URL. So you can effectively open the tab in a new window, but it takes more steps. (You have to double-click the shortcut it created and then close the original tab.) Or better yet, hit Alt+D, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+N, Ctrl+V, enter to open the current page in a new window.
No, the parent is wrong. iTunes uses your purchase history to check for upgrade eligibility, not a signature in the file. In addition, even if they did need the signature, you'd still be wise to remove the personal info from your "working copies" of the files (keeping the originals in a safe place for future upgrades).
Finally, his justification for keeping the personal info is simply that it lets you participate in a cycle of paying over and over for the same songs, albeit at a reduced price. If you've already paid for the songs, even 30% is too much to pay for a new format, in my opinion. Apple has already screwed me once with upgrade pricing: albums cost the same amount with or without DRM, unless you bought them before iTunes Plus came out (like I did), in which case you have to pay an extra 30% for the same product everyone else can now get for the regular price. Screw that. If I want to upgrade my songs to higher quality, no-DRM versions, I'll do it for free the old-fashioned way.
Sigh... this is a proof of purchase. It is advantageous to the legitimate purchaser to leave this information in the file so as to future-proof their music investment. Not quite. It's advantageous to keep a copy somewhere, if that signature really is used for identifying purchases for future upgrading, but you still don't want to have that personal info lying around. If someone steals your iPod, shares the music, and then someone across the world is caught with a copy, that leaves a big red arrow pointing back to you.
If a person follows the EFF's advice and strips the unique meta data out of their iTunes Plus purchase, iTunes will not be able to identify those tracks as iTunes Store purchases, and the tracks will never be upgradable to lossless, which is the next bump, within 3-5 years. Sure they will. Just open up your favorite P2P app and download the FLAC files for free. Why would you want to pay a 30% upgrade penalty for buying early? You've paid for the song once already.
Since there will be 3 or 4 jumps before we get there (and by then the music studio may have moved up ahead) you are looking at a lot of money to stay current if you insist on paying full price for every track every time out. I think you mean "if you insist on letting the industry bend you over a stump every few years". You'd have to be a complete sucker to pay yet again for the same songs whenever a new format comes out.
Dude, that's the same link I posted up here. The signature is exactly what I'm talking about: even if you take your name out with a hex editor, the signature still links the file back to you. Anyone with access to Apple's customer database can find you by trying different names until the signature matches.
Slashdot Mirror
Tags and descriptions, presumably the same way YouTube finds "related videos".
Well, I think it's been established by now that your beliefs about human worth, and your tolerance for living at subsistence level, are pretty far away from the norm. In light of that and the slow pace of this thread, I'm going to bow out. It's been interesting.
That's sort of the whole point of having a government: we recognize that the cheapest, most efficient, or most profitable solution isn't always the best one, because most human beings care about a few things besides quarterly growth. So we have an alternate means of decision making, which trades efficiency for responsiveness to citizens' desires. And few citizens desire for people to die just because, to quote Sarah Silverman, they don't have the "right number of money". If I can have things be decent without working my ass off, then I'm going to quit my highly productive nerd job or at least go part-time. (seriously) I'd much rather spend time with my kids. I'm not alone in this thought. Can you see how this kind of thing undermines our economy, and ultimately even health care? No, not at all. I'm talking about providing health care to people who need it, regardless of income, not "making things decent". There's a big difference between not dying and having a good life.
And the fact is, millions of people who work their asses off still can't afford health care. (I'm the only one of my peers who has health insurance, and I work less than any of them.) The most they can hope for is an emergency room, which we all end up paying for, and it costs us more than if we paid for them to visit a normal doctor before it became an emergency. Medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy. Can you see how that undermines our economy, our position as a civilized nation, and our basic human dignity?
Money orders cost money. The fee is under a dollar if you get it from the right place (like a grocery store), but it can be several dollars if you get it from the wrong place (my bank charges $4 for money orders, $8 for cashier's checks). And then there's the inconvenience of traveling to the store to get one, and the fact that you can only get them in amounts up to $500.
Checking accounts, however, are free from all the major banks. You can deposit, withdraw, and transfer money without paying anyone a dime. You do have to buy a box of checks if you want to write a check, but (1) you get a handful of starter checks for free, and (2) instead of writing checks, you can just use your free debit card to pay anyone who accepts Visa/MC.
Now let me ask you, do you value a baseball player over a teacher? Do you want a baseball player teaching you calculus or molecular biology? Because baseball players can sure afford a lot more health care than teachers or even brain surgeons. Assuming this even counts as eugenics, isn't it the least offensive form? It's not active harm, and it's not picking some preferred race. What, you think that makes it OK? Letting people live or die based on your idea of their "value" to society is repulsive, barbaric, and inexcusable. The least offensive form of eugenics is still eugenics. Letting poor people die is no better than rounding them up and sterilizing them - and remember, we're not just talking about unemployed and homeless people, we're also talking about millions of people who work full-time but still don't get enough benefits or pay to afford health care. That works. (because it's still money) It works even better if people can't hide behind insurance. All right. So, homeless people get all the medical treatment they want for free, because any percentage of $0 is still $0. Meanwhile, Bill Gates is charged billions for a routine physical. I think I like this idea.
Here's a modest proposal: why not price medical services as a proportion of income (or net worth)? You can decide between toe surgery and a new car, and someone working part-time as a busboy can decide between toe surgery and a new VCR. Surely, if all you want to do is force people to limit their consumption--rather than intentionally letting them die as part of your eugenics program--it'd work just as well to bring the decision down to one that's realistic for their income level, right?
-1/4 for wrong answer.
0 for no answer. ITYM -1/3 for each wrong answer. That way, the expected value of guessing is zero: on average, out of four guesses, you'll gain a point for one of them and lose it for the other three.
Well, there's this.
This is not an option for the US market because several providers do not use Sim cards, and because operators use different network standards that prevent the iPhone working on some networks. Hard to tell whether the author was confused or just wrong. All the GSM providers in the US use SIM cards, because that's how GSM works. Different operators do use different network standards (mainly CDMA), but GSM is GSM no matter who's providing it. There's nothing stopping Apple from selling the iPhone directly to consumers and saying "You need a SIM card to make this work, so go get one from Cingular, T-Mobile, or somewhere else."
Maybe "a lot" in terms of absolute number, but not as a proportion of the entire scientific community. In a world with 6.6 billion people in it, you can find a few dozen who'll agree with any statement you come up with, but that doesn't negate the thousands of others who won't.
Let me know how it goes, and please don't forget all of us little people on Slashdot when you're famous for revolutionizing the field of climate science.
A plain old optical microscope will do just fine. "Less than 1 mm" is pretty small to the naked eye, but I work with hologram production equipment that produces features 0.5 mm in size or less, and we use optical microscopes for troubleshooting.
No, the parent is wrong. iTunes uses your purchase history to check for upgrade eligibility, not a signature in the file. In addition, even if they did need the signature, you'd still be wise to remove the personal info from your "working copies" of the files (keeping the originals in a safe place for future upgrades).
Finally, his justification for keeping the personal info is simply that it lets you participate in a cycle of paying over and over for the same songs, albeit at a reduced price. If you've already paid for the songs, even 30% is too much to pay for a new format, in my opinion. Apple has already screwed me once with upgrade pricing: albums cost the same amount with or without DRM, unless you bought them before iTunes Plus came out (like I did), in which case you have to pay an extra 30% for the same product everyone else can now get for the regular price. Screw that. If I want to upgrade my songs to higher quality, no-DRM versions, I'll do it for free the old-fashioned way.
Dude, that's the same link I posted up here. The signature is exactly what I'm talking about: even if you take your name out with a hex editor, the signature still links the file back to you. Anyone with access to Apple's customer database can find you by trying different names until the signature matches.