You see, individuals have a hard time over money earned outside the U.S., corporations get to keep it.
Great, we've established that corporate revenues and personal income is treated differently. This is a feature, not a bug.
The point of the article was not, "Apple is cheating the US by only paying 2% to Ireland and nothing to the US." The point of the article was "Apple's paying a REALLY LOW tax rate to European governments on its revenues earned in Europe."
Now, please explain for us dim unwashed masses exactly why you think the US government has any right to a "fair share" of taxes earned by European corporations doing business in Europe, when those revenues are never funneled back to an American holding company? Apple, Inc. pays income taxes on its US revenues to the US government - should the European countries also be able to line up and demand a "fair share" of that tax bill?
Where Apple does differ from other companies is that it sets aside a portion of the foreign profits, marking them as subject to U.S. taxes sometime in the future.
When Apple reports quarterly results, it records that portion of the taxes as a liability, which is subtracted from its profits even though it hasn't actually paid the taxes.
Tax experts say the company could easily eliminate these "phantom" tax obligations. That would boost Apple's profits for the past three years by as much $10.5 billion, according to calculations by The Associated Press reported in July.
Now, that same article DOES go on to say that they're also lobbying for other ways to eliminate this "phantom" tax - but again, this is where we come back to it being the government's responsibility to write a sensible tax code that doesn't leave companies "guessing" about what constitutes a fair share. Fix the tax code if you feel you're not getting enough money out of them. Don't blame them for adhering to the tax code as written, and not handing over more than they're being asked to.
Now I just have to decide which of the many technology companies who gladly pay their fair share of taxes to choose from...
Well, that should make your choices very simple: since no company pays more than they absolutely have to, you can just skip purchasing anything produced by anybody, anywhere in the world.
And that's the problem - there's all kinds of outrage that "they only pay TWO PERCENT!" but if the law allows it, that *is* their "fair share." When's the last time you went to a store, the cashier said, "That'll be $1.99, sir," and you said, "you know what? Here's fifty bucks - keep the change!"
If the store wants more than $1.99 for the item you're buying, they should ask a higher price. If the government wants more than 2% of a company's profits as a tax payment, they should raise the rates &/or close the loopholes that the company is using to reduce its tax burden. Don't like it? Call your representatives and tell them they need to reform corporate tax laws to close these loopholes and force corporations to pay a bigger share of their profits in taxes.
You seem to think I disagree with you. I'm not sure how you got that from what I wrote. I was explaining that there is a fine line that government agencies must walk in their hiring/firing/disciplinary policies, because of first amendment protections - a government agency cannot - I repeat, cannot - refuse to hire someone solely on the basis of their religious views, gender, or anything else, because it would be a government agency ("The government") establishing a rule regulating and repressing ("shall make no law") religious expression and free speech ("respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech[...]").
In private industry, you can make such exclusions under certain conditions, and you are NOT allowed to file a First Amendment suit against a private employer for firing you "on religious grounds." A first amendment challenge may ONLY be made against the federal government. Private industry has equal opportunity employment rules they must follow, and labor protections they must follow, but they can (and do) discriminate in some cases quite legally.
If he had been Muslim instead and talked about Jews and Christians being infidels worthy only of death, and that gays and promiscuous people must be slaughtered to keep the world pure, do you feel equally strong that these are within his first amendment rights?
Indeed, I do feel that they are within his First Amendment rights. I find the content of his speech abhorrent and disgusting, and I would challenge his ideals every chance I could - but he is free to hold them and express them. What I DO NOT believe is that they are within his *rights to express in a workplace where he is offending people and being difficult and obstinate to work with*. I also don't believe he has a right to express his views wherever, whenever, and however he sees fit when it negatively impacts his co-workers and employer - it is not his employer's business, and he should have taken that into account.
As I wrote: "It would have to be shown that it wasn't the "religious beliefs, per se" that caused the firing, but a pattern of disruptive behavior and poor performance." And that's exactly what JPL did, and exactly what should happen in the theoretical case you outlined. It doesn't matter what makes the guy an obnoxious prick nobody wants to work with - it matters that he's being an obnoxious prick that nobody wants to work with, and has had numerous occasions to address and remediate his behavior, yet failed to.
It does, to a degree. A private business engaging in discrimination may run afoul of eeoc regulations, and be subject to a suit, but a government agency funded by government money is also subject to constitutional challenge. Some private organizations can discriminate in certain ways - churches can discriminate in the basis of religion, hooters can discriminate For certain positions based on gender, appearance, etc. The government is constitutionally forbidden from doing so.
Neither case would bother me, until the person in question began handing out flyers and DVDs in the workplace, and engaging in aggressive evangelism for their cause.
The point is not "he was politically incorrect.". The point is that he doesn't seem capable or willing to pick up on cues tha people are sick of hearing his shit, and he had a record of argumentative, uncollaborative work style above and beyond his evangelism of ID and against prop 8. It's the long term pattern of not playing well with others that got him fired.
Government agency, supported by government funds - non-discrimination rules are legion, and if a government agency implements a rule that basically amounts to, "you can't talk about your religious beliefs," there is a first amendment concern there. It would have to be shown that it wasn't the "religious beliefs, per se" that caused the firing, but a pattern of disruptive behavior and poor performance. It looks like JPL has shown this, but if they weren't able to provide documentation of the issue, the case very well could have been decided in favor of the guy who was fired.
So you let your time be wasted by trolls who you gleefully feed, all in the service of making sure "someone on the Internet knows they're wrong?"
I say again - you seem to approach any discussion where there is an attempt at rationality with bumper sticker slogans and tweet-length "zingers," which are specifically designed to shut down a conversation and turn it into a confrontation. If the other person refuses to be rational, why waste an instant of your time on them? It's clear you get some sort of thrill out of wasting your time on being trolled, but I can't fathom what it is.
It's much healthier and more constructive to simply walk away from the fool who is more interested in wasting your time than he is in discussing anything substantive. Here, I'll demonstrate the technique for you: in this case, you're the idiot wasting my time. Now, this is me, walking away from wasting my time trying to discuss anything with you. See how easy it is?
I've never seen a libertardian deal in logic or criticism.
I can see why you've never seen it, just from reading that single sentence - you don't deal in ideas and rational thought - you deal in snarky sloganeering, and use language explicitly designed to END any chance at rational discussion, and instead provoke an argument. If your stated premise at the start of any "conversation" is "I'm going to insult you, demean you, and call you names," don't be surprised when nobody bothers to try and engage you in anything resembling a rational discussion.
I'm sure behaving like this helps you sleep soundly at night, somehow. But you should also know that it makes you look like a shallow, pseudo-intellectual fraud of the first order, as well.
Yes, the typical argument is that the high-net-worth individuals are the ones who will *invest* their money into other businesses, thus helping to create jobs, which grows the economy, which also helps bring about higher tax revenues in general, because more people will be making money to put them into the tax-paying income brackets.
The argument continues that since a fair share of of "low-income" people already pay little-to-no-taxes, and much of any stimulus given to them would go into consumption, the stimulus would be a short-term jolt to the economy that would have little long-term effect in terms of creating new jobs or helping existing businesses to grow.
And if you help businesses grow and hire more people, the low-income people you didn't directly provide stimulus to will still get better paying jobs, and be able to afford more and better stuff for themselves.
I'm not enough of an economic expert to say whether or not this *actually* works, but the theory runs something like that. I suspect most of the other people who will respond to you are not economic experts either, so beware accepting anything asserted as fact without seeing some actual data to back up the assertions.
Not entirely. Hobby Lobby and other private enterprises are certainly making a mockery of the law; but when some of the plaintiffs filing suit include the Archdioceses of Washington, New York, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Dallas - this is very much an issue for churches as well. The churches (as of now) only receive exemptions for components that largely serve ONLY the Catholic community; The argument of the Catholic churches in their complaints is that, since their religious teachings demand that they minister to and work with people of all faiths (and they employ people of other faiths, certainly), the requirement that they provide plans which offer contraception infringes on their religious freedoms.
Now, they could solve this by changing their hiring policies and firing all non-Catholics in their employ, but I hope you'd agree that that's a less-than-optimal solution for everybody involved.
For a pretty interesting review by an actual constitutional law scholar, check out this post, from Michael Dorf, Professor of Law at Cornell School of Law. It's not just Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby whining that they're being infringed on, there are some actual legal concerns for the churches that need to be evaluated.
Software is not the resultant output of multiple devices or processes.
Uh... have you ever actually written software?
In what way do a series of design tools, coding tools, static analysis tools, test harnesses, install tools, runtime containers - all spread across a multitude of compilers, runtime VMs, and target platforms & architectures, *NOT* constitute the "output of multiple devices or processes"?
So on a site with thousands of active users... a few of them are libertarian? Next time a post comes up where they're likely to post, also look for the literally hundreds of attendant "lol Randroid libertarian faget loser stupid asshole" comments that greet them.
I'm not sure how, exactly, you get from "a handful libertarians post on Slashdot, and are roundly and derisively dismissed every time they do," to "Slashdot is very conservative," to be honest. And as far as "libertarians being conservative," if you know pretty much anything about their *actual* viewpoints, you'd know that libertarian thought is a mix of "socially liberal" and "fiscally conservative," so calling them "conservatives" as if they share a monolithic platform with other so-called "conservative" parties like Republicans is both disingenuous, and stupid. Might as well start calling members of the Socialist party "stupid liberal Demoncrats" too, because they happen to share some policy goals with the mainstream "liberal" party.
I have to admit, this sounds less and less like "Slashdot is part of some vast right wing conspiracy," and more and more like, "I'm horribly offended that a small minority of people who have beliefs different than I do are able to post their opinions on a site like Slashdot. I wish they'd just shut up and just accept that anything I believe is the absolute truth, instead of challenging me and making me defend my positions using facts and logic, rather than twitter-style bumper sticker slogans."
If your ideology can't stand up to the very small minority of libertarian criticism present on/., then your ideology is reflexive, uncritical, and unthinkingly held - the problem isn't libertarians on Slashdot, it's your inability to deal with any criticism of your views.
Same challenge I just offered to damn-registrars: cite 3 examples of articles posted in the past few weeks that push some sort of "conservative agenda" to support your point.
So then, you're not new here; are we to assume that you're having an aphasia, instead?
Only if you never read the front page here. At least once a week there is a story on the front page that pushes the conservative agenda.
Please cite just 3 examples for us, will you? If it's at least once a week, you should be able to trivially find 3 articles that are "pushing a conservative agenda," to support your assertion.
I'm more interested in how they determined an error in 1% of their pumps. Did somebody look carefully? Did their QA processes find it? Did the FDA find it?
What's interesting is that TFA says the wifi connectivity of the device is partly for reporting back dosage and timing information. It's entirely possible that the "IP-enablement" of the device is exactly how this bug was caught - somebody noticed a discrepancy where either it was reporting delivering a dangerous amount of a drug to a patient, or a patient said, "I told it to give me 100mg of the drug," and the device was reporting, "I gave them 10mg of the drug."
It's entirely possible that the IP capabilities of the device are precisely why the were able to find the bug in question.
Capacitive touchscreens generally work fine with the latex gloves medical personnel wear. Thin, little-to-no insulation, no seams... there's really very little issue getting them to work.
Also, moving keys can have corners and edges that can snag and tear gloves, as well - touchscreens do not.
They're moving to touchscreens because touchscreens work, and work well, plus are easier to keep clean.
The problem you have with the FDA is that it's so complex to gain approval that it slows adoption to the point that it's fairly frequent that common user devices gain functionality far faster than the FDA approved medical devices can. Thus you get a smartphone with app X being able to do task Y better then the medical device that costs thousands and is designed solely to do Y.
Do you really want the performance of your hearing aid to be subject to the processor load on your fucking smartphone? Do you want to randomly lose your ability to hear because your phone starts ringing, or some other app on your phone wore down the battery and now longer has a charge? Even if you MADE something like that and offered it in the market, nobody would buy it!
These are not "convenience" devices that people can go, "oh well, I guess I just can't hear for a couple hours until I can recharge my phone." These are assistive devices that people rely on all day, every day, for critical functions of living. Want your hearing cutting out just as you're crossing the street? Just as you're in the middle of an important talk with your spouse or your boss? Would you buy a device that that was one of the "features" of? This is a single purpose device because it's an IMPORTANT FUNCTION that many people rely on to make it through every minute of every day.
Bluetooth, as I mentioned in another post in response to you, also opens up attack vectors (hand-waving the concerns away is a non-solution), adds enormous amounts of latency to the device, and also adds a huge amount of complexity, to collect incoming sound, stream it to the processing unit for processing, process it, and send it back to the earpiece. You weren't thinking of using the phone's microphone, were you? Because if it's in your pocket, you're not going to get very good sound.
I'm not sure why you think that it's an adequate solution, or that it would somehow magically drop the price, but I can assure you it would not. They are expensive because they are complex, require a high degree of reliability, and must be durable, energy efficient, and fast. "Just add bluetooth" changes none of that - especially when you consider that you can easily spend a couple hundred dollars on plain old consumer bluetooth headphones just for listening to music.
Bluetooth introduces a fair amount of latency. Realtime dsp's (and the people listening to their output, and relating what they hear to what they see going on around them) don't like latency. It's also subject to interference. Realtime dsp's (and the people listening to their output) don't like interference.
Bluetooth is NOT an adequate solution for connecting processor to hearing piece for a hearing aid, which is why they are not using it. Why do novices always assume that the experts haven't chosen to use a technology the novices are familiar with because of a sinister conspiracy? Why is it never assumed that the experts may just know what the hell they're doing, and have considered the technology, and found it lacking for the purposes of the device they're building?
If your mom showed up at your job and started telling you, "I don't know why you don't just use that Windows thing, Windows is great, I love Windows, everybody should use Windows, it comes WITH your computer anyway! It's so much easier, and better," wouldn't you get annoyed by that? Because that's kinda what you're doing here - prescribing a one-size solution to a problem domain you really don't know anything about, and haven't bothered to try to understand.
They are trying to stuff all the electronics into this tiny little thing you put inside your ear.
Yes, because it turns out that that's the lowest-latency way to design a hearing aid. They used to have external packs you could carry around connected to the speaker in your ear by a cord, then they had over-the-ear units, where the processor and battery were behind the ear, but connected to the speaker in your ear by a short wire as well. They moved away from those, because as miniaturization allowed them to put everything into the ear, they found that the units performed faster - and this is a pretty important feature for a hearing aid. But you already knew that, I'm sure, since you've come up with a revolutionary new way to design them.
Bluetooth introduces a ~.5s latency into the communication channel. Have you considered the effect of that on hearing? These are very much "realtime" dsp systems - they require low latency to work well, or what you're hearing will continuously be half a second behind what you're seeing happening around you - very disorienting and difficult to adjust to for someone who's deaf. But no doubt you've got an easy, hand-waving assertion to make about that, as well.
Have you also considered the security & interference characteristics? Wireless devices need to be shut off in medical facilities - anybody who's wearing a hearing aid will have to be effectively deaf whenever they go to the doctor's office. And god forbid somebody walks by with a device that emits interference on bluetooth frequencies - anybody in range would immediately lose their hearing.
You seem to think that these are trivial problems to solve: they are not. hearing aids are, in fact, very complicated pieces of engineering that have to make lots of tradeoffs between performance, durability, reliability, and ease of use. There's a reason why the industry has moved to in-the-ear, and away from the "speaker, separate processing unit connected via wireless communication" model you're describing - it introduces latency, weight, attack vectors, points of failure, and engineering and design work that still must be paid for.
There are huge untapped markets because the current manufacturers are going about things all wrong.
Easy to say for an armchair quarterback. If it's so easy, and it's so much a guaranteed blockbuster product, I can't wait to see your offering hit the market. When should we expect to see it available, and what price point do you imagine you'll be able to sell it at - $99? $199? $49?!
No, they are expensive because they are complicated, detailed, tiny pieces of electronic gear, that have to work reliably, safely, and comfortably for 12-16 hours a day, for years at a time, with only an occasional battery change to keep them going.
Your assertion that they're "not that complicated" simply shows that you don't have the first clue what sort of components, design work, and engineering goes into them, and you haven't the foggiest notion what the market they're selling into looks like - hint: low volume, low numbers. This is not a "mass market" device where you can hope to sell tens of millions of units per quarter like an iPhone or a Nexus. If a manufacturer owned 100% of the market, the numbers I've been able to find via Google suggest that about 7 million units are sold *globally* each year. And, there are a handful (5-6) "major" producers of the devices - which means any single producer can probably expect to sell about a million a year.
Amortize millions dollars of R&D (chip & circuit design, programming, testing - a single decent engineer is going to run you a quarter of a million dollars in salary, benefits, and related operating costs - perhaps more if they have a particular expertise in the circuitry required in a hearing aid), marketing, and manufacturing ("Hi, chip fab facility, we'd like a production run of 50,000 of our chip." "Okay, but that small a number is going to cost you extra.") across that number of units, and build in a reasonable profit for manufacturer & retailer, and you'll understand that these are expensive devices because they are expensive, and expertise-intensive, to produce.
No way! Surely he's considered the cost of certification and testing in his estimates of how cheap it would be to produce this device!
After all, he's told us how simple it is - surely he's aware of all the legal requirements such a product is subject to?
Incidentally, I find it incredibly amusing that so many on slashdot - where libertarians are routinely ridiculed and mocked - love to pull out the "anything expensive in a regulated field is expensive ONLY because of government interference," argument.
If they're so cheap to design & make, then surely you could go start a company to build one, sell it for like, $200 a pair - a STEAL in the current "overpriced" market, after all - and make millions by disrupting the market and breaking the stranglehold of these colluding companies? After all, they're "just" a microphone, speaker, circuit board, battery, and case... right?
Or, maybe, you have no idea what's actually involved in the design and manufacture of such a device, no clue what you're talking about, and are behaving like a PHB who assumes that anything he doesn't understand must be trivially simple.
For the same reason you typically want to use other medical devices under the supervision of a trained professional - safety and ensuring a proper setup.
You write software to do it at home, it needs to be absolutely bulletproof and idiot-proof. It also needs to support a host of different consumer devices, be more secure than any other consumer device on the market.
All of that stuff will add to the cost of the device - it may make it slightly cheaper than buying the device and paying an audiologist, but it's not going to make a significant difference in the cost - maybe you'll save $50 on the price tag - eliminate audiologist fees, but spend more R&D budget building a good, secure, user-friendly interface to configure it at home.
Slashdot Mirror
You see, individuals have a hard time over money earned outside the U.S., corporations get to keep it.
Great, we've established that corporate revenues and personal income is treated differently. This is a feature, not a bug.
The point of the article was not, "Apple is cheating the US by only paying 2% to Ireland and nothing to the US." The point of the article was "Apple's paying a REALLY LOW tax rate to European governments on its revenues earned in Europe."
Now, please explain for us dim unwashed masses exactly why you think the US government has any right to a "fair share" of taxes earned by European corporations doing business in Europe, when those revenues are never funneled back to an American holding company? Apple, Inc. pays income taxes on its US revenues to the US government - should the European countries also be able to line up and demand a "fair share" of that tax bill?
Interestingly, Apple shows more integrity and less scumbaggishness than many other companies:
Now, that same article DOES go on to say that they're also lobbying for other ways to eliminate this "phantom" tax - but again, this is where we come back to it being the government's responsibility to write a sensible tax code that doesn't leave companies "guessing" about what constitutes a fair share. Fix the tax code if you feel you're not getting enough money out of them. Don't blame them for adhering to the tax code as written, and not handing over more than they're being asked to.
Well, that should make your choices very simple: since no company pays more than they absolutely have to, you can just skip purchasing anything produced by anybody, anywhere in the world.
And that's the problem - there's all kinds of outrage that "they only pay TWO PERCENT!" but if the law allows it, that *is* their "fair share." When's the last time you went to a store, the cashier said, "That'll be $1.99, sir," and you said, "you know what? Here's fifty bucks - keep the change!"
If the store wants more than $1.99 for the item you're buying, they should ask a higher price. If the government wants more than 2% of a company's profits as a tax payment, they should raise the rates &/or close the loopholes that the company is using to reduce its tax burden. Don't like it? Call your representatives and tell them they need to reform corporate tax laws to close these loopholes and force corporations to pay a bigger share of their profits in taxes.
You seem to think I disagree with you. I'm not sure how you got that from what I wrote. I was explaining that there is a fine line that government agencies must walk in their hiring/firing/disciplinary policies, because of first amendment protections - a government agency cannot - I repeat, cannot - refuse to hire someone solely on the basis of their religious views, gender, or anything else, because it would be a government agency ("The government") establishing a rule regulating and repressing ("shall make no law") religious expression and free speech ("respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech[...]").
In private industry, you can make such exclusions under certain conditions, and you are NOT allowed to file a First Amendment suit against a private employer for firing you "on religious grounds." A first amendment challenge may ONLY be made against the federal government. Private industry has equal opportunity employment rules they must follow, and labor protections they must follow, but they can (and do) discriminate in some cases quite legally.
Indeed, I do feel that they are within his First Amendment rights. I find the content of his speech abhorrent and disgusting, and I would challenge his ideals every chance I could - but he is free to hold them and express them. What I DO NOT believe is that they are within his *rights to express in a workplace where he is offending people and being difficult and obstinate to work with*. I also don't believe he has a right to express his views wherever, whenever, and however he sees fit when it negatively impacts his co-workers and employer - it is not his employer's business, and he should have taken that into account.
As I wrote: "It would have to be shown that it wasn't the "religious beliefs, per se" that caused the firing, but a pattern of disruptive behavior and poor performance." And that's exactly what JPL did, and exactly what should happen in the theoretical case you outlined. It doesn't matter what makes the guy an obnoxious prick nobody wants to work with - it matters that he's being an obnoxious prick that nobody wants to work with, and has had numerous occasions to address and remediate his behavior, yet failed to.
It does, to a degree. A private business engaging in discrimination may run afoul of eeoc regulations, and be subject to a suit, but a government agency funded by government money is also subject to constitutional challenge. Some private organizations can discriminate in certain ways - churches can discriminate in the basis of religion, hooters can discriminate For certain positions based on gender, appearance, etc. The government is constitutionally forbidden from doing so.
Neither case would bother me, until the person in question began handing out flyers and DVDs in the workplace, and engaging in aggressive evangelism for their cause.
The point is not "he was politically incorrect.". The point is that he doesn't seem capable or willing to pick up on cues tha people are sick of hearing his shit, and he had a record of argumentative, uncollaborative work style above and beyond his evangelism of ID and against prop 8. It's the long term pattern of not playing well with others that got him fired.
Government agency, supported by government funds - non-discrimination rules are legion, and if a government agency implements a rule that basically amounts to, "you can't talk about your religious beliefs," there is a first amendment concern there. It would have to be shown that it wasn't the "religious beliefs, per se" that caused the firing, but a pattern of disruptive behavior and poor performance. It looks like JPL has shown this, but if they weren't able to provide documentation of the issue, the case very well could have been decided in favor of the guy who was fired.
So you let your time be wasted by trolls who you gleefully feed, all in the service of making sure "someone on the Internet knows they're wrong?"
I say again - you seem to approach any discussion where there is an attempt at rationality with bumper sticker slogans and tweet-length "zingers," which are specifically designed to shut down a conversation and turn it into a confrontation. If the other person refuses to be rational, why waste an instant of your time on them? It's clear you get some sort of thrill out of wasting your time on being trolled, but I can't fathom what it is.
It's much healthier and more constructive to simply walk away from the fool who is more interested in wasting your time than he is in discussing anything substantive. Here, I'll demonstrate the technique for you: in this case, you're the idiot wasting my time. Now, this is me, walking away from wasting my time trying to discuss anything with you. See how easy it is?
Ad hominem attacks are not credible commentary. Please delete this comment.
I can see why you've never seen it, just from reading that single sentence - you don't deal in ideas and rational thought - you deal in snarky sloganeering, and use language explicitly designed to END any chance at rational discussion, and instead provoke an argument. If your stated premise at the start of any "conversation" is "I'm going to insult you, demean you, and call you names," don't be surprised when nobody bothers to try and engage you in anything resembling a rational discussion.
I'm sure behaving like this helps you sleep soundly at night, somehow. But you should also know that it makes you look like a shallow, pseudo-intellectual fraud of the first order, as well.
Yes, the typical argument is that the high-net-worth individuals are the ones who will *invest* their money into other businesses, thus helping to create jobs, which grows the economy, which also helps bring about higher tax revenues in general, because more people will be making money to put them into the tax-paying income brackets.
The argument continues that since a fair share of of "low-income" people already pay little-to-no-taxes, and much of any stimulus given to them would go into consumption, the stimulus would be a short-term jolt to the economy that would have little long-term effect in terms of creating new jobs or helping existing businesses to grow.
And if you help businesses grow and hire more people, the low-income people you didn't directly provide stimulus to will still get better paying jobs, and be able to afford more and better stuff for themselves.
I'm not enough of an economic expert to say whether or not this *actually* works, but the theory runs something like that. I suspect most of the other people who will respond to you are not economic experts either, so beware accepting anything asserted as fact without seeing some actual data to back up the assertions.
Not entirely. Hobby Lobby and other private enterprises are certainly making a mockery of the law; but when some of the plaintiffs filing suit include the Archdioceses of Washington, New York, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Dallas - this is very much an issue for churches as well. The churches (as of now) only receive exemptions for components that largely serve ONLY the Catholic community; The argument of the Catholic churches in their complaints is that, since their religious teachings demand that they minister to and work with people of all faiths (and they employ people of other faiths, certainly), the requirement that they provide plans which offer contraception infringes on their religious freedoms.
Now, they could solve this by changing their hiring policies and firing all non-Catholics in their employ, but I hope you'd agree that that's a less-than-optimal solution for everybody involved.
For a pretty interesting review by an actual constitutional law scholar, check out this post, from Michael Dorf, Professor of Law at Cornell School of Law. It's not just Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby whining that they're being infringed on, there are some actual legal concerns for the churches that need to be evaluated.
Uh... have you ever actually written software?
In what way do a series of design tools, coding tools, static analysis tools, test harnesses, install tools, runtime containers - all spread across a multitude of compilers, runtime VMs, and target platforms & architectures, *NOT* constitute the "output of multiple devices or processes"?
So on a site with thousands of active users... a few of them are libertarian? Next time a post comes up where they're likely to post, also look for the literally hundreds of attendant "lol Randroid libertarian faget loser stupid asshole" comments that greet them.
I'm not sure how, exactly, you get from "a handful libertarians post on Slashdot, and are roundly and derisively dismissed every time they do," to "Slashdot is very conservative," to be honest. And as far as "libertarians being conservative," if you know pretty much anything about their *actual* viewpoints, you'd know that libertarian thought is a mix of "socially liberal" and "fiscally conservative," so calling them "conservatives" as if they share a monolithic platform with other so-called "conservative" parties like Republicans is both disingenuous, and stupid. Might as well start calling members of the Socialist party "stupid liberal Demoncrats" too, because they happen to share some policy goals with the mainstream "liberal" party.
I have to admit, this sounds less and less like "Slashdot is part of some vast right wing conspiracy," and more and more like, "I'm horribly offended that a small minority of people who have beliefs different than I do are able to post their opinions on a site like Slashdot. I wish they'd just shut up and just accept that anything I believe is the absolute truth, instead of challenging me and making me defend my positions using facts and logic, rather than twitter-style bumper sticker slogans."
If your ideology can't stand up to the very small minority of libertarian criticism present on /., then your ideology is reflexive, uncritical, and unthinkingly held - the problem isn't libertarians on Slashdot, it's your inability to deal with any criticism of your views.
Same challenge I just offered to damn-registrars: cite 3 examples of articles posted in the past few weeks that push some sort of "conservative agenda" to support your point.
So then, you're not new here; are we to assume that you're having an aphasia, instead?
Please cite just 3 examples for us, will you? If it's at least once a week, you should be able to trivially find 3 articles that are "pushing a conservative agenda," to support your assertion.
Sorry, are you really that new here? Or just having an aphasia?
Complaining about slashdot's "conservative base" is sort of like complaining about Facebooks "tireless devotion to user privacy."
What's interesting is that TFA says the wifi connectivity of the device is partly for reporting back dosage and timing information. It's entirely possible that the "IP-enablement" of the device is exactly how this bug was caught - somebody noticed a discrepancy where either it was reporting delivering a dangerous amount of a drug to a patient, or a patient said, "I told it to give me 100mg of the drug," and the device was reporting, "I gave them 10mg of the drug."
It's entirely possible that the IP capabilities of the device are precisely why the were able to find the bug in question.
Capacitive touchscreens generally work fine with the latex gloves medical personnel wear. Thin, little-to-no insulation, no seams... there's really very little issue getting them to work.
Also, moving keys can have corners and edges that can snag and tear gloves, as well - touchscreens do not.
They're moving to touchscreens because touchscreens work, and work well, plus are easier to keep clean.
Do you really want the performance of your hearing aid to be subject to the processor load on your fucking smartphone? Do you want to randomly lose your ability to hear because your phone starts ringing, or some other app on your phone wore down the battery and now longer has a charge? Even if you MADE something like that and offered it in the market, nobody would buy it!
These are not "convenience" devices that people can go, "oh well, I guess I just can't hear for a couple hours until I can recharge my phone." These are assistive devices that people rely on all day, every day, for critical functions of living. Want your hearing cutting out just as you're crossing the street? Just as you're in the middle of an important talk with your spouse or your boss? Would you buy a device that that was one of the "features" of? This is a single purpose device because it's an IMPORTANT FUNCTION that many people rely on to make it through every minute of every day.
Bluetooth, as I mentioned in another post in response to you, also opens up attack vectors (hand-waving the concerns away is a non-solution), adds enormous amounts of latency to the device, and also adds a huge amount of complexity, to collect incoming sound, stream it to the processing unit for processing, process it, and send it back to the earpiece. You weren't thinking of using the phone's microphone, were you? Because if it's in your pocket, you're not going to get very good sound.
I'm not sure why you think that it's an adequate solution, or that it would somehow magically drop the price, but I can assure you it would not. They are expensive because they are complex, require a high degree of reliability, and must be durable, energy efficient, and fast. "Just add bluetooth" changes none of that - especially when you consider that you can easily spend a couple hundred dollars on plain old consumer bluetooth headphones just for listening to music.
Bluetooth introduces a fair amount of latency. Realtime dsp's (and the people listening to their output, and relating what they hear to what they see going on around them) don't like latency. It's also subject to interference. Realtime dsp's (and the people listening to their output) don't like interference.
Bluetooth is NOT an adequate solution for connecting processor to hearing piece for a hearing aid, which is why they are not using it. Why do novices always assume that the experts haven't chosen to use a technology the novices are familiar with because of a sinister conspiracy? Why is it never assumed that the experts may just know what the hell they're doing, and have considered the technology, and found it lacking for the purposes of the device they're building?
If your mom showed up at your job and started telling you, "I don't know why you don't just use that Windows thing, Windows is great, I love Windows, everybody should use Windows, it comes WITH your computer anyway! It's so much easier, and better," wouldn't you get annoyed by that? Because that's kinda what you're doing here - prescribing a one-size solution to a problem domain you really don't know anything about, and haven't bothered to try to understand.
Yes, because it turns out that that's the lowest-latency way to design a hearing aid. They used to have external packs you could carry around connected to the speaker in your ear by a cord, then they had over-the-ear units, where the processor and battery were behind the ear, but connected to the speaker in your ear by a short wire as well. They moved away from those, because as miniaturization allowed them to put everything into the ear, they found that the units performed faster - and this is a pretty important feature for a hearing aid. But you already knew that, I'm sure, since you've come up with a revolutionary new way to design them.
Bluetooth introduces a ~.5s latency into the communication channel. Have you considered the effect of that on hearing? These are very much "realtime" dsp systems - they require low latency to work well, or what you're hearing will continuously be half a second behind what you're seeing happening around you - very disorienting and difficult to adjust to for someone who's deaf. But no doubt you've got an easy, hand-waving assertion to make about that, as well.
Have you also considered the security & interference characteristics? Wireless devices need to be shut off in medical facilities - anybody who's wearing a hearing aid will have to be effectively deaf whenever they go to the doctor's office. And god forbid somebody walks by with a device that emits interference on bluetooth frequencies - anybody in range would immediately lose their hearing.
You seem to think that these are trivial problems to solve: they are not. hearing aids are, in fact, very complicated pieces of engineering that have to make lots of tradeoffs between performance, durability, reliability, and ease of use. There's a reason why the industry has moved to in-the-ear, and away from the "speaker, separate processing unit connected via wireless communication" model you're describing - it introduces latency, weight, attack vectors, points of failure, and engineering and design work that still must be paid for.
Easy to say for an armchair quarterback. If it's so easy, and it's so much a guaranteed blockbuster product, I can't wait to see your offering hit the market. When should we expect to see it available, and what price point do you imagine you'll be able to sell it at - $99? $199? $49?!
No, they are expensive because they are complicated, detailed, tiny pieces of electronic gear, that have to work reliably, safely, and comfortably for 12-16 hours a day, for years at a time, with only an occasional battery change to keep them going.
Your assertion that they're "not that complicated" simply shows that you don't have the first clue what sort of components, design work, and engineering goes into them, and you haven't the foggiest notion what the market they're selling into looks like - hint: low volume, low numbers. This is not a "mass market" device where you can hope to sell tens of millions of units per quarter like an iPhone or a Nexus. If a manufacturer owned 100% of the market, the numbers I've been able to find via Google suggest that about 7 million units are sold *globally* each year. And, there are a handful (5-6) "major" producers of the devices - which means any single producer can probably expect to sell about a million a year.
Amortize millions dollars of R&D (chip & circuit design, programming, testing - a single decent engineer is going to run you a quarter of a million dollars in salary, benefits, and related operating costs - perhaps more if they have a particular expertise in the circuitry required in a hearing aid), marketing, and manufacturing ("Hi, chip fab facility, we'd like a production run of 50,000 of our chip." "Okay, but that small a number is going to cost you extra.") across that number of units, and build in a reasonable profit for manufacturer & retailer, and you'll understand that these are expensive devices because they are expensive, and expertise-intensive, to produce.
No way! Surely he's considered the cost of certification and testing in his estimates of how cheap it would be to produce this device!
After all, he's told us how simple it is - surely he's aware of all the legal requirements such a product is subject to?
Incidentally, I find it incredibly amusing that so many on slashdot - where libertarians are routinely ridiculed and mocked - love to pull out the "anything expensive in a regulated field is expensive ONLY because of government interference," argument.
If they're so cheap to design & make, then surely you could go start a company to build one, sell it for like, $200 a pair - a STEAL in the current "overpriced" market, after all - and make millions by disrupting the market and breaking the stranglehold of these colluding companies? After all, they're "just" a microphone, speaker, circuit board, battery, and case... right?
Or, maybe, you have no idea what's actually involved in the design and manufacture of such a device, no clue what you're talking about, and are behaving like a PHB who assumes that anything he doesn't understand must be trivially simple.
For the same reason you typically want to use other medical devices under the supervision of a trained professional - safety and ensuring a proper setup.
You write software to do it at home, it needs to be absolutely bulletproof and idiot-proof. It also needs to support a host of different consumer devices, be more secure than any other consumer device on the market.
All of that stuff will add to the cost of the device - it may make it slightly cheaper than buying the device and paying an audiologist, but it's not going to make a significant difference in the cost - maybe you'll save $50 on the price tag - eliminate audiologist fees, but spend more R&D budget building a good, secure, user-friendly interface to configure it at home.