A dead body grows no cancer: Would you rather have that new heart now, and accept the risk of cancer later, or... well, there really is no choice here. Even if after it's studied the risk of cancer is 100% within 5 years, well, would you take those extra 5 years?
There will be plenty of volunteers for those studies.
login as: geneticist
password:
geneticist@bioresearch:~$> cd/dna/kidney/
geneticist@bioresearch:/dna/kidney$> make
Error: permission denied.
geneticist@bioresearch:/dna/kidney$> su god
password:
god@bioresearch:/dna/kidney$> make
god@bioresearch:/dna/kidney$>./configure
god@bioresearch:/dna/kidney$> su surgeon
surgeon@bioresearch:/dna/kidney$> sudo make install
FYI, Massachusetts mandates insurance, and there's no true public system, which would drive down costs. And I don't care about guns either way.
Our death rates, as per my post above, are not even close to being due solely to obesity. Greece is fatter than us and has national healthcare twice as good for a third the cost. (Sources cited in my original post.)
We do not have universal healthcare. We have universal disease care, wherein we treat only those critical illnesses that have gotten to the point where patients will die without care (and sometimes not even then) when they could have much more easily been prevented by better care earlier--but the ER doesn't do that. And your so-called "health-care" system is one that bankrupts those who are unfortunate enough to get sick, or get hit by a car driven by someone uninsured (true story; I knew an engineer that had that happen when I volunteered at a drop-in center because after he got hit, he couldn't work, and he had so much to spend on physical therapy for 9+ months that he spent all his savings on copays so he couldn't afford his rent). And over half of bankruptcies in the US, before the housing bubble popped, were due to medical bills, and mostly people who actually had insurance.
And as for ability to choose your insurance, the idea is that there is no insurance--it's transparent. Whatever your doctor says you need, you get. None of this bullshit care denial based on pre-existing conditions or bureaucracy. Everyone gets the same basic standard and nobody's left to die on the street. If you want to purchase additional insurance on top of it, feel free; we will just stop rationing basic, necessary, and preventative care based on ability to pay.
And as to the proposed new system in the US, it's starting to resemble the Belgian system, much more than the Canadian or British systems, which are quite different. Look it up. It's better than ours.
The main reason our system is broken is the profit motive. Normally it drives the free market to great things, but in our case, the less care the individual gets, the more money the insurance company gets, and there's little room to choose another option. Then, one would suggest, we should take down the barriers between states and dismantle the employer-based system--I used to agree with that point, until it came to my attention that this is how credit card companies operate: they move to the state in which the regulations and consumer protections are most lax. Hence it has to be regulated in a federal manner, and at that point, the conservative ideal of a free market has been violated anyway, so we might as well eliminate the 30% administrative costs associated with insurance companies, which, by the way, Medicare outperforms them on.
I feel obligated to point you to the post I just made replying to the GP. Here you go. Greece is a counterpoint in the obesity vs. cost debate, being as fat as or fatter than us and having better healthcare at 1/3 the cost per capita. That's not to say obesity doesn't drive costs up; it's just to say that it's possible to be obese and have lower costs and better care than we do now by way of a national healthcare system.
I call bullshit. For one, your BC study is out of date by a decade, and in that decade, healthcare costs in the US have risen 87%.
And even granting the fact that Greece is as fat as us, or fatter, Greece has national healthcare and ranks fourteenth on the same scale that rates the US as #37 (2005). And the Greeks spend the least per-capita on healthcare in the EU at $2,179/person, per the 2007 UN Human Development Report. (not, however, the least as a percentage of GDP, according to the first link). The US, per the same report, spends $6096/person.
So what accounts for the other $4000? We aren't 3x as fat. Just 3x as stupid because we accept this state of affairs.
Um. Well, that was sort of a *whoosh*. Gksudo pops up in front of what you're doing and dims the screen. And in my ten-minute-old install of Windows 7 (I've just come back to this system from my newly-minted RTM box) the UAC icon sits and blinks in the task bar until you click it. You've apparently got it backwards.
Microsoft could just implement it properly, like Sudo under Ubuntu. There is no reason that any program ever should pop up in front of what I am doing, let alone dim the whole screen to completely kill my train of thought. UAC should wait in the background until dealt with, it can draw attention to itself in the task bar, in the same way an MSN chat window would.
I think the GP's not arguing against copyright per se, so much as against this neverending copyright scheme we seem to have had thrust upon us.
When over half a century has passed, something like Disney's perpetual ownership of Mickey Mouse--long after the figure himself has become, in effect, a part of the public domain (to use the term in the sense in which it was intended, and not the legal one), so much so that passing allusions are sufficient to invoke collective association with the character--said perpetual ownership is impeding progress. Walt Disney is dead, and I don't think that it's in anyone's best interest (nor was it the intent of copyright laws) to subsidize the existence of the creator's children long after he's dead. People want to get paid for what they do, and that's understandable and perfectly legitimate. But I think any reasonable artist/musician/etc. is not so blind as to expect their work to support their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on for a hundred years after they die, or even to desire that to happen. (IMHO, nothing stifles creativity and sense of self like having everything handed to you--but that's only MHO.)
It's an inherently arbitrary and subjective assessment to give any kind of fixed-length term to a copyright, but I think we all agree that there should be some protection for those who have created these works. The question is how much is sufficient to inspire continued creativity and invention. And that is what we should be debating.
Ironically enough, I think Tony Benn (old Labour MP, for those who don't know) put the whole process of change--in this context, the change that the Pirate Party is after--best:
"It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you."
I think you see the kind of myth you're repeating perpetuated by the US government; anti-terrorist rhetoric makes a great cover for pushing through an increasingly totalitarian agenda.
Again, we have the mods wishing they had a "-1 Disagree" option. It's certainly arguable, but you make what could be a valid point, and the way Apple "protects" their devices from interactions with other software (ever tried using an iPod without iTunes?) is most certainly a restriction on what we can choose to do with our own gadgets. It's sort of like the game industry or any other kind of DRM, for that matter: they treat the legal users like criminals to prevent them from doing what they want with those pieces of technology that they have in fact acquired legally.
A former professor of mine, Dr. Ed Doering, set up this page here for our intro logic/FPGA course: PLD Oasis. The school it's hosted off of, my alma mater, is the school that produced one of the co-founders of Xilinx.
In any case, Dr. Doering has lots of video tutorials about how to use Xilinx software, Spartan boards, Nexys boards, and all other manner of Progammable Logic Devices (PLDs), as well as some clever software resources. He includes things about visual schematic design, which may be beneficial for being able to drop logic circuits onto FPGAs without Verilog as an intermediary, but it's also useful in that you can look at the intermediate Verilog files to get a handle on how Xilinx renders schematics to code.
You know, I have GlaDOS's voice on my GPS, and it's funny to turn it on when with somebody who doesn't understand that, well, it's GlaDOS, and it's going to give you bad directions. A right turn ahead 50m? "Ahead, turn left, and go... an infinite number of miles."
Which I suppose, were one following the surface of the earth, would eventually get you there. But so much for GPS finding more efficient routes.
If the parent's logic is flawed, so is yours. The problem with your shoplifting analogy is that when you go to buy an item, they don't stick a GPS tracker on it in order to verify the "proper" usage of the product. In order to match your analogy with the parent's, this would have to happen. The point is that pirates get DRM-free music (shoplifters walk out with the product, sans tracker), and law-abiding customers are the ones that get saddled with the proverbial GPS tracker that invades their privacy.
Let's not even get into the support-the-artists schtick, wherein I can tell you that I go to the concerts put on by people whose music I may or may not have pirated, and that said people make FAR more money from those concerts than they would if I'd bought a number of their CDs equivalent in price to the single concert ticket. Let's support the people who make the music, and not the outdated distribution model. If not for the social protest represented by piracy (while maintaining concert sales so as to not hurt the artists) how would you propose going about altering said flawed model?
The problem with your logic about pirates strengthening the MAFIAA cause is that, well, they don't. For example, when I buy MP3s, I buy from Amazon because they sell DRM-free music. I can get DRM-free music legally or illegally, but for those companies that refuse to allow people to legally obtain music that they have purchased, and do with it what they please, the only way is piracy. And until they adopt DRM-free music downloads as their distribution mechanism of choice, the pirates will continue to eat their profits in favor of supporting the artists. Pirates weaken the infrastructure of DRMed media by making DRM-free music available when it wasn't before, and providing an alternative mechanism by which to obtain it. Until the MAFIAA recognizes said mechanism and makes music available DRM-free, pirates will continue to thrive.
Bottom line: people want DRM-free music, and it's taking a world full of pirates to show them the light.
People say this all the time, and it drives me absolutely batty.
VOTING FOR A THIRD PARTY WILL NOT CHANGE THE SYSTEM. It will not encourage people to do the same. It's not a very hard concept to understand. Political science 101: Duverger's Law.
The two party system is a product of the single-member-district, winner-take-all electoral system that the founding fathers put in place. Whether the founders knew it or not, that's how the system was designed to be. The way to change it is to switch to a proportional representation scheme, a la Germany (not Britain: still single-member-districts), for example.
Throwing your hands in the air and bitching at people to have principles and vote for third parties will get you nowhere, because as long as more people vote for the other guy than for your guy, he's gonna win. The trick that you'd have to pull off in order to get a successful third party would be to convince a plurality of the electorate in any one district (and if you want to balance the government, it's gonna take more than one) to vote not just for a third party, but the same third party. And that's just not going to happen.
You want to change it? Run for office. On a major party ticket. And work from the inside.
"My butter, garcon, is writ large in!" A party was heard to be chargin'. "I had to write there!" Exclaimed waiter Pierre, "I couldn't find room in the margarine!"
Slashdot Mirror
A dead body grows no cancer: Would you rather have that new heart now, and accept the risk of cancer later, or... well, there really is no choice here. Even if after it's studied the risk of cancer is 100% within 5 years, well, would you take those extra 5 years?
There will be plenty of volunteers for those studies.
Fail. Missed password prompt. Oh well, that's what I get for a first-time effort at /. humor.
login as: geneticist /dna/kidney/ ./configure
password:
geneticist@bioresearch:~$> cd
geneticist@bioresearch:/dna/kidney$> make
Error: permission denied.
geneticist@bioresearch:/dna/kidney$> su god
password:
god@bioresearch:/dna/kidney$> make
god@bioresearch:/dna/kidney$>
god@bioresearch:/dna/kidney$> su surgeon
surgeon@bioresearch:/dna/kidney$> sudo make install
Capabilities not demonstrated here:
n. Ability to not have your coordinate system remain stationary.
"Dave, would you please step approximately three feet to the left, so that I may dissect you?"
"No thanks, Hal."
So, yes, this is a great robot for strangling those pesky paraplegics.
Canada = single-payer. Canada != UK. UK != single-payer. UK = national health care. Big difference.
And to answer your question, it works right here in the good ol' U-S-of-A. Just ask someone on medicare if they want it taken away. But wait! Claire McCaskill beat you to it. "Get your government hands off my Medicare," indeed.
FYI, Massachusetts mandates insurance, and there's no true public system, which would drive down costs. And I don't care about guns either way.
Our death rates, as per my post above, are not even close to being due solely to obesity. Greece is fatter than us and has national healthcare twice as good for a third the cost. (Sources cited in my original post.)
We do not have universal healthcare. We have universal disease care, wherein we treat only those critical illnesses that have gotten to the point where patients will die without care (and sometimes not even then) when they could have much more easily been prevented by better care earlier--but the ER doesn't do that. And your so-called "health-care" system is one that bankrupts those who are unfortunate enough to get sick, or get hit by a car driven by someone uninsured (true story; I knew an engineer that had that happen when I volunteered at a drop-in center because after he got hit, he couldn't work, and he had so much to spend on physical therapy for 9+ months that he spent all his savings on copays so he couldn't afford his rent). And over half of bankruptcies in the US, before the housing bubble popped, were due to medical bills, and mostly people who actually had insurance.
And as for ability to choose your insurance, the idea is that there is no insurance--it's transparent. Whatever your doctor says you need, you get. None of this bullshit care denial based on pre-existing conditions or bureaucracy. Everyone gets the same basic standard and nobody's left to die on the street. If you want to purchase additional insurance on top of it, feel free; we will just stop rationing basic, necessary, and preventative care based on ability to pay.
And as to the proposed new system in the US, it's starting to resemble the Belgian system, much more than the Canadian or British systems, which are quite different. Look it up. It's better than ours.
The main reason our system is broken is the profit motive. Normally it drives the free market to great things, but in our case, the less care the individual gets, the more money the insurance company gets, and there's little room to choose another option. Then, one would suggest, we should take down the barriers between states and dismantle the employer-based system--I used to agree with that point, until it came to my attention that this is how credit card companies operate: they move to the state in which the regulations and consumer protections are most lax. Hence it has to be regulated in a federal manner, and at that point, the conservative ideal of a free market has been violated anyway, so we might as well eliminate the 30% administrative costs associated with insurance companies, which, by the way, Medicare outperforms them on.
I feel obligated to point you to the post I just made replying to the GP. Here you go. Greece is a counterpoint in the obesity vs. cost debate, being as fat as or fatter than us and having better healthcare at 1/3 the cost per capita. That's not to say obesity doesn't drive costs up; it's just to say that it's possible to be obese and have lower costs and better care than we do now by way of a national healthcare system.
Only Greece rivals the US in plumpness.
I call bullshit. For one, your BC study is out of date by a decade, and in that decade, healthcare costs in the US have risen 87%.
And even granting the fact that Greece is as fat as us, or fatter, Greece has national healthcare and ranks fourteenth on the same scale that rates the US as #37 (2005). And the Greeks spend the least per-capita on healthcare in the EU at $2,179/person, per the 2007 UN Human Development Report. (not, however, the least as a percentage of GDP, according to the first link). The US, per the same report, spends $6096/person.
So what accounts for the other $4000? We aren't 3x as fat. Just 3x as stupid because we accept this state of affairs.
Um. Well, that was sort of a *whoosh*. Gksudo pops up in front of what you're doing and dims the screen. And in my ten-minute-old install of Windows 7 (I've just come back to this system from my newly-minted RTM box) the UAC icon sits and blinks in the task bar until you click it. You've apparently got it backwards.
Microsoft could just implement it properly, like Sudo under Ubuntu. There is no reason that any program ever should pop up in front of what I am doing, let alone dim the whole screen to completely kill my train of thought. UAC should wait in the background until dealt with, it can draw attention to itself in the task bar, in the same way an MSN chat window would.
The way Ubuntu does it? You mean like gksudo?
Hitler lost.
Yes, but he lost the war. He won the elections.
I think the GP's not arguing against copyright per se, so much as against this neverending copyright scheme we seem to have had thrust upon us.
When over half a century has passed, something like Disney's perpetual ownership of Mickey Mouse--long after the figure himself has become, in effect, a part of the public domain (to use the term in the sense in which it was intended, and not the legal one), so much so that passing allusions are sufficient to invoke collective association with the character--said perpetual ownership is impeding progress. Walt Disney is dead, and I don't think that it's in anyone's best interest (nor was it the intent of copyright laws) to subsidize the existence of the creator's children long after he's dead. People want to get paid for what they do, and that's understandable and perfectly legitimate. But I think any reasonable artist/musician/etc. is not so blind as to expect their work to support their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on for a hundred years after they die, or even to desire that to happen. (IMHO, nothing stifles creativity and sense of self like having everything handed to you--but that's only MHO.)
It's an inherently arbitrary and subjective assessment to give any kind of fixed-length term to a copyright, but I think we all agree that there should be some protection for those who have created these works. The question is how much is sufficient to inspire continued creativity and invention. And that is what we should be debating.
I've three characters for you: =-O
Ironically enough, I think Tony Benn (old Labour MP, for those who don't know) put the whole process of change--in this context, the change that the Pirate Party is after--best:
"It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you."
I think you see the kind of myth you're repeating perpetuated by the US government; anti-terrorist rhetoric makes a great cover for pushing through an increasingly totalitarian agenda.
There. Fixed that for you. [1]
[1] See also: 43rd President of the United States; Darth Vader
...stare at it and it gives you more detail...
The possibilities for expanded witty t-shirt text are frightening.
And even when there's no text, we can stare at ladies' chests and say "Oh, excuse me. I was just reading [about] your shirt!"
...[M]any smiles on pedestrian faces [and] I can read/hold an umbrella.
I'd smile too, if I saw you trying to read an umbrella...
I feel like Randall Munroe [is] my Simpsons; the thorn in my back; the down-mod for offtopic.
But this is /. Randall Munroe is never off-topic... he's like a Soviet Russia joke, or an all your base joke. It's just sort of... expected.
Again, we have the mods wishing they had a "-1 Disagree" option. It's certainly arguable, but you make what could be a valid point, and the way Apple "protects" their devices from interactions with other software (ever tried using an iPod without iTunes?) is most certainly a restriction on what we can choose to do with our own gadgets. It's sort of like the game industry or any other kind of DRM, for that matter: they treat the legal users like criminals to prevent them from doing what they want with those pieces of technology that they have in fact acquired legally.
Man.. James Bond villains are getting a lot nerdier.
Somebody beat you to this conclusion.
A former professor of mine, Dr. Ed Doering, set up this page here for our intro logic/FPGA course: PLD Oasis. The school it's hosted off of, my alma mater, is the school that produced one of the co-founders of Xilinx.
In any case, Dr. Doering has lots of video tutorials about how to use Xilinx software, Spartan boards, Nexys boards, and all other manner of Progammable Logic Devices (PLDs), as well as some clever software resources. He includes things about visual schematic design, which may be beneficial for being able to drop logic circuits onto FPGAs without Verilog as an intermediary, but it's also useful in that you can look at the intermediate Verilog files to get a handle on how Xilinx renders schematics to code.
You know, I have GlaDOS's voice on my GPS, and it's funny to turn it on when with somebody who doesn't understand that, well, it's GlaDOS, and it's going to give you bad directions. A right turn ahead 50m? "Ahead, turn left, and go... an infinite number of miles."
Which I suppose, were one following the surface of the earth, would eventually get you there. But so much for GPS finding more efficient routes.
If the parent's logic is flawed, so is yours. The problem with your shoplifting analogy is that when you go to buy an item, they don't stick a GPS tracker on it in order to verify the "proper" usage of the product. In order to match your analogy with the parent's, this would have to happen. The point is that pirates get DRM-free music (shoplifters walk out with the product, sans tracker), and law-abiding customers are the ones that get saddled with the proverbial GPS tracker that invades their privacy.
Let's not even get into the support-the-artists schtick, wherein I can tell you that I go to the concerts put on by people whose music I may or may not have pirated, and that said people make FAR more money from those concerts than they would if I'd bought a number of their CDs equivalent in price to the single concert ticket. Let's support the people who make the music, and not the outdated distribution model. If not for the social protest represented by piracy (while maintaining concert sales so as to not hurt the artists) how would you propose going about altering said flawed model?
The problem with your logic about pirates strengthening the MAFIAA cause is that, well, they don't. For example, when I buy MP3s, I buy from Amazon because they sell DRM-free music. I can get DRM-free music legally or illegally, but for those companies that refuse to allow people to legally obtain music that they have purchased, and do with it what they please, the only way is piracy. And until they adopt DRM-free music downloads as their distribution mechanism of choice, the pirates will continue to eat their profits in favor of supporting the artists. Pirates weaken the infrastructure of DRMed media by making DRM-free music available when it wasn't before, and providing an alternative mechanism by which to obtain it. Until the MAFIAA recognizes said mechanism and makes music available DRM-free, pirates will continue to thrive.
Bottom line: people want DRM-free music, and it's taking a world full of pirates to show them the light.
People say this all the time, and it drives me absolutely batty.
VOTING FOR A THIRD PARTY WILL NOT CHANGE THE SYSTEM. It will not encourage people to do the same. It's not a very hard concept to understand. Political science 101: Duverger's Law.
The two party system is a product of the single-member-district, winner-take-all electoral system that the founding fathers put in place. Whether the founders knew it or not, that's how the system was designed to be. The way to change it is to switch to a proportional representation scheme, a la Germany (not Britain: still single-member-districts), for example.
Throwing your hands in the air and bitching at people to have principles and vote for third parties will get you nowhere, because as long as more people vote for the other guy than for your guy, he's gonna win. The trick that you'd have to pull off in order to get a successful third party would be to convince a plurality of the electorate in any one district (and if you want to balance the government, it's gonna take more than one) to vote not just for a third party, but the same third party. And that's just not going to happen.
You want to change it? Run for office. On a major party ticket. And work from the inside.
"My butter, garcon, is writ large in!"
A party was heard to be chargin'.
"I had to write there!"
Exclaimed waiter Pierre,
"I couldn't find room in the margarine!"