Snake oil: A substance with no real medicinal value sold as a remedy for all diseases
Pyramid scheme: A system of selling goods in which agency rights are sold to an increasing number of distributors at successively lower levels
There's no hierarchy of "agency rights", and, even metaphorically, bitcoins have never been sold as "a remedy for all diseases." It's like kids don't know what words mean.
If it pays your [bills], it's because someone else put in money into the system, which means that they are in the negative
Bitcoin mining isn't some kind of "pyramid scheme" - it's a kind of integrity check that makes it harder to double-spend the same bitcoin. Think of it as preventing counterfeiting.
This is necessary because there is no central authority managing bitcoin transactions - anyone sufficiently devious could put together their own set of false transactions. However, the longest chain is assumed to be the legitimate one, and "mining" blocks to add to that chain keeps it that way.
The "reward" for mining the block is the valid bitcoins you discovered in the process. It incentivizes what hackers would be doing, but puts it toward productive ends - the currency is over if someone puts together enough computing power to out-hash the miners and make a longer chain.
Notice how now part of the process involves a miner making money by taking more from someone below him then he paid to someone above him. This means that as much as it may not be your preferred currency, it certainly is not a pyramid scheme.
The safest way is nuke it from orbit - boot from your Windows install disk, do a "diskpart clean" to nuke the MBR, and reinstall.
The easiest way is to just trust that your favorite brand of virus scanner will eventually take care of it.
Expert mode is make an image of the machine using ImageX, mount it on another PC, clean the virus from the image, and reapply it to the infected computer (after nuking the MBR.)
For lesser threats, MalwareBytes will take care of most anything, although I usually run ComboFix and HijackThis first.
Protip: If you're running a modern version of Windows, you don't need a special boot CD. Vista/7 disks boot to a full WinPE environment which will give you a command prompt (press Shift+F10 or wade through the menu), let you repartition your disk (diskpart), write a new boot sector (bootsect), and mount network shares (net use x: \\computer\share). Any install disk can also install and activate any other version of Windows (you can borrow a friend's Home Premium disk to reinstall Ultimate or whatever).
If you're still rocking XP, the install disk is next to worthless, so go grab a Live CD if you have to do anything interesting.
Windows developers want to be able to build immersive applications, and they don't want to have to use HTML5 and JavaScript to do it.
They won't have to.... Far from being left behind on the legacy desktop - which was the impression that many took from the presentation - native C++ and managed C# will both be first-class, supported ways of developing immersive, touch-first, tablet-friendly Windows 8-style applications.
I was addressing the concern the accusation that healthcare is rife with "unbridled capitalism", when plastic surgery is the only thing that fits that description.
It's funny that you mention healthcare as an example of "unbridled capitalism." Even in America:
Healthcare is highly regulated. (You must treat anyone who presents at the ER, your legal medical record must contain these items, we will pay for this procedure only for a patient with this diagnosis, etc.)
The government is one of the largest and most important payors. Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements quite literally dictate prices hospitals are allowed to charge.
Consumers have no incentive to "shop around."
Insurance either covers a procedure or it doesn't, and then often only at "in-network" hospitals. No one is getting price quotes on open heart surgery.
However, the prices of elective procedures like LASIK and plastic surgery are dropping. These are not covered by private insurance or Medicare, and the patient can reasonably choose to forego them. As a result, the patient can pick any surgeon he wishes and has an incentive to get the best price (in addition to best expected outcome.)
TL;DR - our current healthcare system doesn't even remotely resemble "unbridled capitalism." The parts that do (elective procedures) actually work reasonably well.
It was the highest tax rates on the top income brackets that brought the years of economic growth, lowest unemployment and fewest bubbles, not total tax revenue over GDP.
Do you seriously think raising taxes causes economic growth?
Overall, if you carefully analyze the data, you'll find that the nation's economy does best when the top brackets pay well over 50%, because they are more inclined to invest in their companies, add workers, and thus end up making more money in the long run
So, you've identified a causative action - the "top brackets" all run their own companies, but just won't invest in them unless they're taxed enough.
The Keynesian school of economic thought dominated the great depression and post-war eras you keep mentioning. They believed that government intervention via fiscal policy (adjustments to tax rates and government spending) could grow an economy faster than it would left to its own devices. You raise taxes in times of prosperity to cover deficit spending during times of recession.
In other words, you have cause and effect flipped around. The government raised taxes when times were good, and cut them when they weren't. To imply otherwise is like saying a traffic light's red because all the cars stopped, or that others modding you up caused you to hate on Reagan.
Let's take your point as a given. How would unionizing an unrelated industry provide better, cheaper health care? The fact of the matter is union and non-union shops are giving more to their employees, and unionizing a particular business will not magically fix the structural problems in our tax code or in our health care system.
Unions are not in the business of employing as many people as possible, since having lots of people competing for the same job depresses wages. If you can limit the number of people allowed to apply, you can force wages up. This is called a "closed shop", and it sucks for anyone not on the union roll.
Although wages have been falling, total compensation is up. This is entirely due to our tax structure - it's cheaper to give an employee an extra $1 of health insurance than it is to put that same $1 in their pocket. So, employers have been increasing benefits faster than they've been increasing wages, which are both facing inflation.
You also won't cure unemployment by slashing everyone's hours, especially if it's difficult to fire people. France has been experimenting with this since at least 1981, and it hasn't magically eliminated unemployment. If you're more worried about your hours than unemployment, quit the video game industry.
But those benefits did NOT come out of thin air - they were fought for by unions.
Great. You'll notice that in the time since textile mills stopped employing bobbin boys we now also have the Department of Labor, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, OSHA, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the NLRB, on top of a large body of labor law.
What exactly are unions fighting for now, other than "give me more money" and "the Madison capitol building has too much marble"?
Yay, let's take revenge on the removal of OtherOS by removing the remaining features from our PlayStations, and those of all our friends! Pissing off the gaming community is sure to garner their support and goodwill!
The "gaming community"? Do you mean the petulant whiners who think George Hotz is paying his lawyers in stolen CC numbers? Or the ones who seem completely oblivious to the months of identity theft hell they're about to face because of Sony's incompetence?
Of course, leaving all that information completely unsecured would've been perfectly okay, if not for those meddling kids.
In seriousness, Sony's incompetence is borderline illegal. But, you think this is homebrew's fault?
If capitalism were a success, we'd all be working fewer hours and adults would be living significantly longer. We are not and they are not.
Go take a look at this graph and come back. Per-capita GDP isn't a perfect measure of wealth, but it's close enough for our purposes. You'll see that a time-travelling 1880s-man could choose, in this modern era, to:
Keep the same income he had before, but only work one-hour days, or
Kee the same hours he had before, but have more income
Having a choice between "free time" and "filthy lucre" isn't what I'd call a "failure" of capitalism. If you think your hours are too long, go work part-time, or quarter-time. You'll still have a standard of living that was nearly unfathomable throughout most of human history, and you'll still be richer than most of the rest of the world today.
The problem is choice </Neo>, which market systems tend to do a wonderful job preserving.
ribbons hide different tools behinds 6-8 separate ribbon sections that are usually clicked through where all the buttons have a similar background and 'icons' making it hard to search through as opposed to a File - menu - list with text that a person can scan through in about 2 seconds.
Let's take a look at Excel 2010's ribbon, and then at Excel 2000's menus. I can't believe an Excel user would find File/View/Data menus intuitive, yet File/View/Data tabs incomprehensible.
But, for the sake of argument, let's accept as a given that finding what you want in a menu (and its submenus) is easy because it's "text" you can scan in "about 2 seconds." Taking the "wouldn't recognize a stop sign if it wasn't labeled" demographic into account, they labeled every one of the icons.
This is why it's a major improvement over the toolbar, which was dozens of tiny (unlabeled) icons, almost entirely hidden behind chevrons so they wouldn't take up half your screen. It's also the only significant "improvement" they've made to the Office UI since 1994. It really shouldn't be incomprehensible.
Eh, worked for me. Uses HTML 5 - Chrome asked if I wanted to give the site my location information. Figured out what Large City I was in, and listed the only two providers.
But, you know what they say about anecdotes. I'd muster some good ol' libertarian outrage, but the government pisses away far more than $200 million on worse things.
It's not like doctors and nurses don't benefit from proper records. EMRs are very good at decision support - warning about allergies, drug interactions, wrong patient/wrong site/wrong med/wrong line (barcoding), and the like. Doctors like getting paid, and billing insurance is much easier and more reliable through an EMR.
EMRs are particularly useful in high-liability practices like obstetrics. Being able to produce a record of exactly what interventions were performed, what providers were notified when, who was in the room, how labor progressed, etc. is vitally important for a physician to be able to defend successfully defend himself in court. Or for a nurse to avoid getting sued for something a mother actually consented to.
I guess I'm beating a dead horse, but it's wrong to think of an EMR in terms of "I'm doing extra work for the bean counters." There's lots of stuff to let you work faster, make more money, and keep yourself from killing a patient. Data entry sucks, but I always hear complains about "new" bookkeeping requirements that were actually things necessary to maintain accreditation.
OK - we have a central certificate authority and some checksums. Your device is tamper-proof, and will always be tamper-proof. It is perfectly reliable for the purposes of determining who diagnosed who with what. Here's what you're blithely ignoring:
You cannot receive healthcare without the PDA
You're requiring millions of people, who may not even know how to operate a computer, to keep encrypted backups
EMR records are exchanged in real time.
"Individual responsibility" has jack all to do with regulation, oversight, or accreditation. It is not possible to audit an organization with this system, especially if there is no central record of which patients have been seen.
Your system will kill you if you have drug allergies and end up in an ER.
Billing insurance requires what procedures were done for which diagnoses, both of which live on that PDA. Doctors now depend on the patient to get paid.
Carrying around a PDA does nothing to keep hospitals from keeping their own records regardless.
We'll ignore legal problems, like the fact that hospitals are actually required to keep these records, because I assume sufficiently imaginative people will disband a half-dozen regulatory bodies in the time it takes to hand out PDAs. Say you solve the rest of those problems - what advantages does your system have over an EMR, or even over paper charts?
Slashdot Mirror
Snake oil: A substance with no real medicinal value sold as a remedy for all diseases
Pyramid scheme: A system of selling goods in which agency rights are sold to an increasing number of distributors at successively lower levels
There's no hierarchy of "agency rights", and, even metaphorically, bitcoins have never been sold as "a remedy for all diseases." It's like kids don't know what words mean.
If it pays your [bills], it's because someone else put in money into the system, which means that they are in the negative
Bitcoin mining isn't some kind of "pyramid scheme" - it's a kind of integrity check that makes it harder to double-spend the same bitcoin. Think of it as preventing counterfeiting.
This is necessary because there is no central authority managing bitcoin transactions - anyone sufficiently devious could put together their own set of false transactions. However, the longest chain is assumed to be the legitimate one, and "mining" blocks to add to that chain keeps it that way.
The "reward" for mining the block is the valid bitcoins you discovered in the process. It incentivizes what hackers would be doing, but puts it toward productive ends - the currency is over if someone puts together enough computing power to out-hash the miners and make a longer chain.
Notice how now part of the process involves a miner making money by taking more from someone below him then he paid to someone above him. This means that as much as it may not be your preferred currency, it certainly is not a pyramid scheme.
Your posts read like mental disorder, but I think it'd be fascinating to hear if you actually speak aloud in stilted, gratuitous
. I imagine you sound something like a cross between William Shatner and the pork chop sandwiches kid.
Anyone else morbidly curious?
Z34107
PS => I'll pay for your bus ticket to come speak on the proper use of the hosts file.
...z34107
The safest way is nuke it from orbit - boot from your Windows install disk, do a "diskpart clean" to nuke the MBR, and reinstall.
The easiest way is to just trust that your favorite brand of virus scanner will eventually take care of it.
Expert mode is make an image of the machine using ImageX, mount it on another PC, clean the virus from the image, and reapply it to the infected computer (after nuking the MBR.)
For lesser threats, MalwareBytes will take care of most anything, although I usually run ComboFix and HijackThis first.
Protip: If you're running a modern version of Windows, you don't need a special boot CD. Vista/7 disks boot to a full WinPE environment which will give you a command prompt (press Shift+F10 or wade through the menu), let you repartition your disk (diskpart), write a new boot sector (bootsect), and mount network shares (net use x: \\computer\share). Any install disk can also install and activate any other version of Windows (you can borrow a friend's Home Premium disk to reinstall Ultimate or whatever).
If you're still rocking XP, the install disk is next to worthless, so go grab a Live CD if you have to do anything interesting.
RTFA.
Windows developers want to be able to build immersive applications, and they don't want to have to use HTML5 and JavaScript to do it. They won't have to. ... Far from being left behind on the legacy desktop - which was the impression that many took from the presentation - native C++ and managed C# will both be first-class, supported ways of developing immersive, touch-first, tablet-friendly Windows 8-style applications.
I was addressing the concern the accusation that healthcare is rife with "unbridled capitalism", when plastic surgery is the only thing that fits that description.
It's funny that you mention healthcare as an example of "unbridled capitalism." Even in America:
However, the prices of elective procedures like LASIK and plastic surgery are dropping. These are not covered by private insurance or Medicare, and the patient can reasonably choose to forego them. As a result, the patient can pick any surgeon he wishes and has an incentive to get the best price (in addition to best expected outcome.)
TL;DR - our current healthcare system doesn't even remotely resemble "unbridled capitalism." The parts that do (elective procedures) actually work reasonably well.
It was the highest tax rates on the top income brackets that brought the years of economic growth, lowest unemployment and fewest bubbles, not total tax revenue over GDP.
Do you seriously think raising taxes causes economic growth?
Overall, if you carefully analyze the data, you'll find that the nation's economy does best when the top brackets pay well over 50%, because they are more inclined to invest in their companies, add workers, and thus end up making more money in the long run
So, you've identified a causative action - the "top brackets" all run their own companies, but just won't invest in them unless they're taxed enough.
The Keynesian school of economic thought dominated the great depression and post-war eras you keep mentioning. They believed that government intervention via fiscal policy (adjustments to tax rates and government spending) could grow an economy faster than it would left to its own devices. You raise taxes in times of prosperity to cover deficit spending during times of recession.
In other words, you have cause and effect flipped around. The government raised taxes when times were good, and cut them when they weren't. To imply otherwise is like saying a traffic light's red because all the cars stopped, or that others modding you up caused you to hate on Reagan.
Let's take your point as a given. How would unionizing an unrelated industry provide better, cheaper health care? The fact of the matter is union and non-union shops are giving more to their employees, and unionizing a particular business will not magically fix the structural problems in our tax code or in our health care system.
So was I - that's what "_real_ total compensation" means.
Unions are not in the business of employing as many people as possible, since having lots of people competing for the same job depresses wages. If you can limit the number of people allowed to apply, you can force wages up. This is called a "closed shop", and it sucks for anyone not on the union roll.
Although wages have been falling, total compensation is up. This is entirely due to our tax structure - it's cheaper to give an employee an extra $1 of health insurance than it is to put that same $1 in their pocket. So, employers have been increasing benefits faster than they've been increasing wages, which are both facing inflation.
You also won't cure unemployment by slashing everyone's hours, especially if it's difficult to fire people. France has been experimenting with this since at least 1981, and it hasn't magically eliminated unemployment. If you're more worried about your hours than unemployment, quit the video game industry.
But those benefits did NOT come out of thin air - they were fought for by unions.
Great. You'll notice that in the time since textile mills stopped employing bobbin boys we now also have the Department of Labor, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, OSHA, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the NLRB, on top of a large body of labor law.
What exactly are unions fighting for now, other than "give me more money" and "the Madison capitol building has too much marble"?
This is starting to sound dangerously close to some darn communist talk where the government controls the economy, rather than the other way around!
Perhaps we could call this the "Federal Reserve", although it's half private and famous for giving presidents and congress the finger.
Do you really think California is having trouble balancing its budget because of "schools, police, and buses"?
Likely the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although I don't know how much they really tracked pre-great depression.
Yes; that graph is in constant dollars, and food is a lot cheaper now than it was an 1880.
Yay, let's take revenge on the removal of OtherOS by removing the remaining features from our PlayStations, and those of all our friends! Pissing off the gaming community is sure to garner their support and goodwill!
The "gaming community"? Do you mean the petulant whiners who think George Hotz is paying his lawyers in stolen CC numbers? Or the ones who seem completely oblivious to the months of identity theft hell they're about to face because of Sony's incompetence?
Of course, leaving all that information completely unsecured would've been perfectly okay, if not for those meddling kids.
In seriousness, Sony's incompetence is borderline illegal. But, you think this is homebrew's fault?
If capitalism were a success, we'd all be working fewer hours and adults would be living significantly longer. We are not and they are not.
Go take a look at this graph and come back. Per-capita GDP isn't a perfect measure of wealth, but it's close enough for our purposes. You'll see that a time-travelling 1880s-man could choose, in this modern era, to:
Having a choice between "free time" and "filthy lucre" isn't what I'd call a "failure" of capitalism. If you think your hours are too long, go work part-time, or quarter-time. You'll still have a standard of living that was nearly unfathomable throughout most of human history, and you'll still be richer than most of the rest of the world today.
The problem is choice </Neo>, which market systems tend to do a wonderful job preserving.
Lots of people just love tabs in web browsers, but not everyone.
I'll bet your mouse only has one button, too.
ribbons hide different tools behinds 6-8 separate ribbon sections that are usually clicked through where all the buttons have a similar background and 'icons' making it hard to search through as opposed to a File - menu - list with text that a person can scan through in about 2 seconds.
Let's take a look at Excel 2010's ribbon, and then at Excel 2000's menus. I can't believe an Excel user would find File/View/Data menus intuitive, yet File/View/Data tabs incomprehensible.
But, for the sake of argument, let's accept as a given that finding what you want in a menu (and its submenus) is easy because it's "text" you can scan in "about 2 seconds." Taking the "wouldn't recognize a stop sign if it wasn't labeled" demographic into account, they labeled every one of the icons.
This is why it's a major improvement over the toolbar, which was dozens of tiny (unlabeled) icons, almost entirely hidden behind chevrons so they wouldn't take up half your screen. It's also the only significant "improvement" they've made to the Office UI since 1994. It really shouldn't be incomprehensible.
Three problems, Anon:
But, go ahead and read them. Come back when you've found out which ones were faked.
Jesus Christ. You don't care about the survival of your own species? WTF is wrong with you, in addition to playing Devil's advocate for the Devil?
If the survival of our species is in jeopardy, the last thing on my mind will be if a Gray anthropologist likes my taste in literature.
Eh, worked for me. Uses HTML 5 - Chrome asked if I wanted to give the site my location information. Figured out what Large City I was in, and listed the only two providers.
But, you know what they say about anecdotes. I'd muster some good ol' libertarian outrage, but the government pisses away far more than $200 million on worse things.
It's not like doctors and nurses don't benefit from proper records. EMRs are very good at decision support - warning about allergies, drug interactions, wrong patient/wrong site/wrong med/wrong line (barcoding), and the like. Doctors like getting paid, and billing insurance is much easier and more reliable through an EMR.
EMRs are particularly useful in high-liability practices like obstetrics. Being able to produce a record of exactly what interventions were performed, what providers were notified when, who was in the room, how labor progressed, etc. is vitally important for a physician to be able to defend successfully defend himself in court. Or for a nurse to avoid getting sued for something a mother actually consented to.
I guess I'm beating a dead horse, but it's wrong to think of an EMR in terms of "I'm doing extra work for the bean counters." There's lots of stuff to let you work faster, make more money, and keep yourself from killing a patient. Data entry sucks, but I always hear complains about "new" bookkeeping requirements that were actually things necessary to maintain accreditation.
OK - we have a central certificate authority and some checksums. Your device is tamper-proof, and will always be tamper-proof. It is perfectly reliable for the purposes of determining who diagnosed who with what. Here's what you're blithely ignoring:
We'll ignore legal problems, like the fact that hospitals are actually required to keep these records, because I assume sufficiently imaginative people will disband a half-dozen regulatory bodies in the time it takes to hand out PDAs. Say you solve the rest of those problems - what advantages does your system have over an EMR, or even over paper charts?