Had Gore carried his own state he would have won. Tennessee's 11 electoral votes went to Bush. The outcome was 271 - 266. Had Gore carried his own damn state he would have won.
I support AC. I used to moderate extensively but ever since I gave +5 to "fuck beta" posts I lost my mod points. Don't know if I was somehow banned behind the scenes from moderation, but ever since then I've posted AC because there was no point in signing in.
Slashdot moderation is unique, and far preferable to reddit.
What should not be forgotten is how bad the CIA estimates were on the Soviet economy. They were utter crap. I cannot stress this enough, and I encourage anyone interested in the topic to read the highly-rated (at the time) US texts on Soviet economy.
Virtually all highly rated US texts in 1980-1999 on Soviet/Russian economy were garbage.
Oh, and I left out rx, and payments to (and clawbacks from) providers. We can also discuss vision and dental, but again, what is the point???
The American medical insurance is so broken there is no believable reason another nation would wish to copy it.
Why not adopt a more believable (and simpler) hypothesis that the reason medical insurance claims data was of interest was because of mental illness and sexual disease claims?
I offer my services to the Chinese. For a mere $300K I will elucidate in greater detail if required. Medical insurance is not exactly rocket science (and you've already launched something to the moon! Congrats!)
Let's break it down. There are a few components:
Plans - but in a Communist country I'd expect everyone has the same insurance plan, right? Or is one animal great than another?
Member Information - things like name, gender, age, tobacco user, dependents, etc. Again, though, given it is a Communist country, are there really dependents, or is everyone a participant?
Provider information - things like provider name, address, tax ID. I hate to sound tedious, but in a Communist country I don't think you'd have PPO networks, right? Aren't all providers equal?
Premiums - this ties the member to a plan. In a capitalistic society this gets pretty complicated, as there are a vast number of plans, and different rates based on member age/smoker status/gender, etc. As I have now stated ad nauseum, I expect under a Communist system everyone pays the same, so maybe this becomes a trivial issue?
Claims processing - in a Capitalistic system one would take the billing codes, procedure codes, diagnostic codes, etc., match them against the date of service, connect this to the member and the plan, and adjudicate to determine if 1) the claim falls under the plan, 2) who gets paid what, 3) a bunch of other stuff (like lifetime deductibles). Now, if we were operating under a Communist plan, wouldn't all claims be covered?
When I started writing my response, I sympathized w/ the Chinese, as I've been involved with a few claims processing systems, and there's a ton of institutional knowledge. However, under a Communist system, what really is there?
Ps - Honestly, as an American who thinks theAmerican insurance & medical business is a complete scam, I'd love to hear what Sweden and other civilized countries need in the way of medical insurance software.
I worked for seven years in the medical insurance business (so glad to have left the field!) and the ignorance seen in many high-rated posts here is astounding.
1. GAO report, so no fraud
2. Even if someone wanted to fraudulently create an applicant, I don't see the problem, as long as they don't submit a claim. What's wrong w/ additional premium? (I will ignore the geeky underwriters, as I understand their position, but haven't seen any relevant objections so far about messing up the statistics.)
3. You cannot begin to appreciate the stupidity of pretty much everyone in the insurance business - so the inability to do very basic SSN validity checking comes as no surprise at all.
I left the year ACA came into effect, so got to experience the fun as we tried to implement insurance plans that Congress had not defined. See, ACA went into effect 2014, but we (that is, insurance companies) didn't have black letter law or even Federally-defined policies established (on many different fronts) until way past Jan 2014. How can you determine policies if underwriters don't know what the rules are???
Biut what continues to be under-reported is what a complete disaster/fail the back-office procedures are. Are we finally able to determine if someone is eligible? When I left, there was no way to tell if an applicant was qualfied for subsidies under the various arcane income rules.
If I were dictator, I'd immediately force hospitals and pharmaceutical companies to fall under the anti trust laws that everyone else has to follow. The high-deductible plans were created under the assumption that consumers would be motivited to shop around for the cheapest deal. But, it is impossible to get an actual quote for a procedure. If you require hospitals to produce a rate sheet that applies to all, and permitted people to import drugs from anywhere in the world, a massive amount of money could be saved.
But this cuts into rx profits, and we can't have that.
1. Legacy mainframe systems that have no data integrity - dates like 99/99/9999 are considered valid
2. Legacy mainframe systems that have no data integrity - tabs present in names & addresses, so a tab-delimited extract then proves challenging
3. IT Staff who refuse to block China and the -stans (despite having only US coverage), saying that it is not a complete solution.
4. On the database side, passwords stored in cleartext. Surprisingly, this apparently isn't a violation of PCI rules.
My advice? If you have a sensitive claim, pay cash and don't involve the insurance company. This is difficult, and may require you to use a different doctor when going this route. Bonus points if you can use fake ID. You would be absolutely astonished at where the claims data goes. Third parties get all sorts of data. HIPAA exclusions are enormous. If you think only your doctor knows about your embarassing drug addiction/sexual disease/mental health problem you are grossly mistaken.
Your Patreon post states "So, I waste hours documenting this for law enforcement."
Can you enumerate the law enforcement reports you've made? Columbus District Attorney said they had no complaint, and you apparently followed up that it was a communication error.
Given the penalties for filing false reports, have you actually filed a report? Please include jurisdiction and date.
I believe this is slighly incorrect. In the very first chapter of many algebra/trig/calculus textbooks there's something to the effect that we study y = f(x), where there is only one solution for f(x). In other words, linear. As a kid I wondered why 1/0 was undefined. I only learned at the end of linear algebra, in college, when it came to inverse functions.
We know that x * 0 = 0, for any value of x. However, if we take the inverse operation of multiplication (that is, division), there is an infinite number of solutions for x / 0. Since we're operating in a linear system where there's only one solution for y = f(x), having more than one solution is undefined.
Clear as mud... This is why Feynman was a genius and I am not.
Oh, don't worry, the parent poster is probably complaining about how the top tier got bailed out in 2007-2008. Goldman Sachs et al, because acorrding to Secretary Paulson, tanks would be in the streets if the 1% weren't bailed out. Elizabeth Warren disagrees with this position. but you'll never read about that in the mainstream media. Sad to say, Chomsky was right. 20 years ago, I would never have thought I'd say that....
The ridiculous summary suggesting that garbage produced from a computer program could be considered music immediately reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter'sGödel Escher Bach, where music and its relevance to AI form much of the book. The book (unlike the article) has meaningful thoughts on Chopin, Bach and AI.
Anyone seriously interested in music & computers needs to read this book now.
I used to financially support the NRA, under the assumption that they defended the 2nd amendment. A while age I realized that was not actually correct,
The EFF is the best example of an entity that defends *all* amendments. I now financially support them, every month. When NPR comes begging for money I'm happily able to refuse, secure in the knowledge that EFF is far more effective in their use of funds than NPR when it comes to presevring the Constitution.
There are a ton of relatively affluent people here on Slashdot. It certainly wouldn't hurt you to allocate a small amount of money to EFF annually, and we know their results.
Technically I believe the United States is a Constitutional Republic.
Danger: anecdote ahead...I listened to an NPR interview recently where it was stated there was significant fear during the Irish/Italian immigration waves that the immigrants were not capable of appreciating US' liberty, and would effectively dilute it. I now think that was accurate, and came to pass.
One cannot argue that in today's United States we have liberty - cutting down a tree requires a permit, even when there are no safety considerations. Growing various plants is illegal. Operating a hair-cutting business without the proper permits is illegal. The list goes on...
Republic? Long gone... One can debate, but I would nominate Wilson at the latest. FDR is the common scapegoat, but Wilson certainly set the stage. There may be earlier contestants, but this is not my area of expertise.
Marbury v Madison was pulled out of the air from the Constitution to define the Judicial branch's power.
So, what is the use of the Supreme Court these days? Certainly Roberts is no Marshall, instead he seems a throwback the original ineffectiveness of the Court.
Just as the Court was extremely courageous in deciding Korematsu only once the war was over, the Supremes appear to wish to sit this one out.
I'd love to hear O'Conners', Thomas', and Scalia's opinions of this milque toast decision.
There was a time when Seagate was a gold standard, but nowadays certainly not. I would not trust a Seagate drive if someone gave it to me. A truly sad state of affairs. I just pity the consumers who don't know any better. Even worse that they're now tarnishing the Hitachi brand.
Hmm, very similar to JD Salinger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Salinger)
For all of you arguing that college requirements for non-technical courses are BS, this is a great counter-example. If you have no idea of what _Catcher in the Rye_ is, nor who Salinger is, then you are at a disadvantage vs. the Harvard (etc) graduates.
Slashdot Mirror
Had Gore carried his own state he would have won. Tennessee's 11 electoral votes went to Bush. The outcome was 271 - 266. Had Gore carried his own damn state he would have won.
I support AC. I used to moderate extensively but ever since I gave +5 to "fuck beta" posts I lost my mod points. Don't know if I was somehow banned behind the scenes from moderation, but ever since then I've posted AC because there was no point in signing in.
Slashdot moderation is unique, and far preferable to reddit.
Please leave AC and moderation unchanged. Thanks!
What should not be forgotten is how bad the CIA estimates were on the Soviet economy. They were utter crap. I cannot stress this enough, and I encourage anyone interested in the topic to read the highly-rated (at the time) US texts on Soviet economy.
Virtually all highly rated US texts in 1980-1999 on Soviet/Russian economy were garbage.
So, what does this say about the CIA?
Oh, and congrats to the idiot Slashdot editors. The primary source for the article is paywalled: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0...
Oh, and I left out rx, and payments to (and clawbacks from) providers. We can also discuss vision and dental, but again, what is the point???
The American medical insurance is so broken there is no believable reason another nation would wish to copy it.
Why not adopt a more believable (and simpler) hypothesis that the reason medical insurance claims data was of interest was because of mental illness and sexual disease claims?
I offer my services to the Chinese. For a mere $300K I will elucidate in greater detail if required. Medical insurance is not exactly rocket science (and you've already launched something to the moon! Congrats!)
Let's break it down. There are a few components:
Plans - but in a Communist country I'd expect everyone has the same insurance plan, right? Or is one animal great than another?
Member Information - things like name, gender, age, tobacco user, dependents, etc. Again, though, given it is a Communist country, are there really dependents, or is everyone a participant?
Provider information - things like provider name, address, tax ID. I hate to sound tedious, but in a Communist country I don't think you'd have PPO networks, right? Aren't all providers equal?
Premiums - this ties the member to a plan. In a capitalistic society this gets pretty complicated, as there are a vast number of plans, and different rates based on member age/smoker status/gender, etc. As I have now stated ad nauseum, I expect under a Communist system everyone pays the same, so maybe this becomes a trivial issue?
Claims processing - in a Capitalistic system one would take the billing codes, procedure codes, diagnostic codes, etc., match them against the date of service, connect this to the member and the plan, and adjudicate to determine if 1) the claim falls under the plan, 2) who gets paid what, 3) a bunch of other stuff (like lifetime deductibles). Now, if we were operating under a Communist plan, wouldn't all claims be covered?
When I started writing my response, I sympathized w/ the Chinese, as I've been involved with a few claims processing systems, and there's a ton of institutional knowledge. However, under a Communist system, what really is there?
Ps - Honestly, as an American who thinks theAmerican insurance & medical business is a complete scam, I'd love to hear what Sweden and other civilized countries need in the way of medical insurance software.
I worked for seven years in the medical insurance business (so glad to have left the field!) and the ignorance seen in many high-rated posts here is astounding.
1. GAO report, so no fraud
2. Even if someone wanted to fraudulently create an applicant, I don't see the problem, as long as they don't submit a claim. What's wrong w/ additional premium? (I will ignore the geeky underwriters, as I understand their position, but haven't seen any relevant objections so far about messing up the statistics.)
3. You cannot begin to appreciate the stupidity of pretty much everyone in the insurance business - so the inability to do very basic SSN validity checking comes as no surprise at all.
I left the year ACA came into effect, so got to experience the fun as we tried to implement insurance plans that Congress had not defined. See, ACA went into effect 2014, but we (that is, insurance companies) didn't have black letter law or even Federally-defined policies established (on many different fronts) until way past Jan 2014. How can you determine policies if underwriters don't know what the rules are???
Biut what continues to be under-reported is what a complete disaster/fail the back-office procedures are. Are we finally able to determine if someone is eligible? When I left, there was no way to tell if an applicant was qualfied for subsidies under the various arcane income rules.
If I were dictator, I'd immediately force hospitals and pharmaceutical companies to fall under the anti trust laws that everyone else has to follow. The high-deductible plans were created under the assumption that consumers would be motivited to shop around for the cheapest deal. But, it is impossible to get an actual quote for a procedure. If you require hospitals to produce a rate sheet that applies to all, and permitted people to import drugs from anywhere in the world, a massive amount of money could be saved.
But this cuts into rx profits, and we can't have that.
Incompetence abounds in the health care industry:
1. Legacy mainframe systems that have no data integrity - dates like 99/99/9999 are considered valid
2. Legacy mainframe systems that have no data integrity - tabs present in names & addresses, so a tab-delimited extract then proves challenging
3. IT Staff who refuse to block China and the -stans (despite having only US coverage), saying that it is not a complete solution.
4. On the database side, passwords stored in cleartext. Surprisingly, this apparently isn't a violation of PCI rules.
My advice? If you have a sensitive claim, pay cash and don't involve the insurance company. This is difficult, and may require you to use a different doctor when going this route. Bonus points if you can use fake ID. You would be absolutely astonished at where the claims data goes. Third parties get all sorts of data. HIPAA exclusions are enormous. If you think only your doctor knows about your embarassing drug addiction/sexual disease/mental health problem you are grossly mistaken.
Last time I checked, Kali had an issue in that updates were provided via an unsigned process (thus vulnerable to MITM attack). Is this still an issue?
Your Patreon post states "So, I waste hours documenting this for law enforcement."
Can you enumerate the law enforcement reports you've made? Columbus District Attorney said they had no complaint, and you apparently followed up that it was a communication error.
Given the penalties for filing false reports, have you actually filed a report? Please include jurisdiction and date.
I believe this is slighly incorrect. In the very first chapter of many algebra/trig/calculus textbooks there's something to the effect that we study y = f(x), where there is only one solution for f(x). In other words, linear. As a kid I wondered why 1/0 was undefined. I only learned at the end of linear algebra, in college, when it came to inverse functions.
We know that x * 0 = 0, for any value of x. However, if we take the inverse operation of multiplication (that is, division), there is an infinite number of solutions for x / 0. Since we're operating in a linear system where there's only one solution for y = f(x), having more than one solution is undefined.
Clear as mud... This is why Feynman was a genius and I am not.
Have none of you read Three Body Problem??? No spoilers in my post, but the answer is out there... (Yes, I'm going for funny)
Seriously, though that book is awesome and should win the Nebula this year. If you like hard SF you need to read it right now.
This is a classic game theory problem. I'm astonished no one has pointed this out already.
The setup is Amazon vs, conventional publishers. Surely Amazon has done the payoff calculations???
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Oh, don't worry, the parent poster is probably complaining about how the top tier got bailed out in 2007-2008. Goldman Sachs et al, because acorrding to Secretary Paulson, tanks would be in the streets if the 1% weren't bailed out. Elizabeth Warren disagrees with this position. but you'll never read about that in the mainstream media. Sad to say, Chomsky was right. 20 years ago, I would never have thought I'd say that....
mod parent up. Given unemployment numbers, why not cancel H1-B altogether?
The ridiculous summary suggesting that garbage produced from a computer program could be considered music immediately reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach, where music and its relevance to AI form much of the book. The book (unlike the article) has meaningful thoughts on Chopin, Bach and AI.
Anyone seriously interested in music & computers needs to read this book now.
I found it interesting that for the URL for the article someone found it necessary to use the word "girl"
/www.chicagotribune.com/features/la-sci-sn-lego-girl-scientist-set-20140605,0,873917.story
Girl scientist...
I used to financially support the NRA, under the assumption that they defended the 2nd amendment. A while age I realized that was not actually correct,
The EFF is the best example of an entity that defends *all* amendments. I now financially support them, every month. When NPR comes begging for money I'm happily able to refuse, secure in the knowledge that EFF is far more effective in their use of funds than NPR when it comes to presevring the Constitution.
There are a ton of relatively affluent people here on Slashdot. It certainly wouldn't hurt you to allocate a small amount of money to EFF annually, and we know their results.
http://grokcode.com/11/the-top...
Technically I believe the United States is a Constitutional Republic.
Danger: anecdote ahead...I listened to an NPR interview recently where it was stated there was significant fear during the Irish/Italian immigration waves that the immigrants were not capable of appreciating US' liberty, and would effectively dilute it. I now think that was accurate, and came to pass.
One cannot argue that in today's United States we have liberty - cutting down a tree requires a permit, even when there are no safety considerations. Growing various plants is illegal. Operating a hair-cutting business without the proper permits is illegal. The list goes on...
Republic? Long gone... One can debate, but I would nominate Wilson at the latest. FDR is the common scapegoat, but Wilson certainly set the stage. There may be earlier contestants, but this is not my area of expertise.
Marbury v Madison was pulled out of the air from the Constitution to define the Judicial branch's power.
So, what is the use of the Supreme Court these days? Certainly Roberts is no Marshall, instead he seems a throwback the original ineffectiveness of the Court.
Just as the Court was extremely courageous in deciding Korematsu only once the war was over, the Supremes appear to wish to sit this one out.
I'd love to hear O'Conners', Thomas', and Scalia's opinions of this milque toast decision.
There was a time when Seagate was a gold standard, but nowadays certainly not. I would not trust a Seagate drive if someone gave it to me. A truly sad state of affairs. I just pity the consumers who don't know any better. Even worse that they're now tarnishing the Hitachi brand.
Imagine how NPR would cover the ongoing (Executive branch) changes to the ACA if Bush were President.
Hmm, very similar to JD Salinger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Salinger)
For all of you arguing that college requirements for non-technical courses are BS, this is a great counter-example. If you have no idea of what _Catcher in the Rye_ is, nor who Salinger is, then you are at a disadvantage vs. the Harvard (etc) graduates.
I will take this seriously when they cease watering golf courses. Until then, it is just theater.
"...each course each day in Palm Springs consumes as much water as an American family of four uses in four years. "
http://www.npr.org/templates/s...