Law and order isn't a game, but it is stacked in favor of the accused. Hence the phrases "innocent until proven guilty" and "beyond a reasonable doubt". It damn well better be substantially harder to convict someone than for them to show a reasonable doubt about it, because otherwise you create a society in which people can just be thrown in prison. That's getting increasingly easy to do, but in most cases there's still a court involved, and they do still care about things like evidence procedures and presumption of innocence.
I don't care that the guy gets off, if the police were sloppy. Even if he's a murderer and everybody knows it. The police need to do their job right, because if they're allowed to get away with illegal searches and still get the conviction, we're all at risk.
I'm not even some paranoid libertarian, but this is pretty basic justice.
Six states (Arkansas, Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, and Washington) allow debt collectors to seek arrest warrants for debtors in default if all other collection methods have failed. Whether a debtor will actually be prosecuted or not varies from state to state, county to county, and town to town. The individual is taken into custody and is typically required to submit financial documentation to the courts (to facilitate seizure of assets or wage garnishment), although in some cases the individual may be held indefinitely until a payment plan is reached or the debt is paid in full, especially if the individual is insolvent. Other states have outlawed this type of collection action (Tennessee and Oklahoma have ruled it unconstitutional) unless the court finds that the debtor actually possesses the means to pay—except in the case of child support obligations.
Most state constitutions, including Minnesota's, have clauses dating to the 1850s that expressly prohibit the jailing of people for their debts. Some people make the claim that it is unconstitutional in the United States to incarcerate someone solely for failing to pay a debt. However, there is little settled law on this matter and plenty of precedent for de facto debtors' prisons.
More than a third of U.S. states allow borrowers to be jailed for non payment of debts. "Judges have signed off on more than 5,000 such warrants since the start of 2010 in nine counties." Because of “sloppy, incomplete or even false documentation,” many borrowers facing jail time don’t even know they’re being sued by creditors.
Didn't know that... Guess I'll avoid those states. I'd always thought debt collection was purely civil, unless the debt was "special" (court ordered), like child support or alimony.
You'd think she could sue the retailer for defamation, at least - accusation of delinquency I'd hope was actionable if made falsely or negligently (lost the check). Or at least legal fees, but it might be tricky to sue the "right" person. IANAL.
Hmmmm. Most checks are only valid for 90 days from issuance, or 6 months if unmarked with a "void after". Any older and it's a "stale dated cheque", which banks need not honor. Presumably, if the account had been closed, the bank wouldn't go to any particular length to honor what they weren't required to.
Can you elaborate on this story? I'm trying to figure out how the police got involved. Writing a check that bounces may be a criminal act, but a "this check is too old" isn't a bounce, and not paying a bill (other than child support or alimony or something) isn't criminal.
This guy in particular had some pretty nasty abdominal injuries as well (probably a lacerated liver, which would be why he bled out).
We're more likely is to get people who have had "normal" heart attacks, but not received attention in time (or it didn't help) and they're brain-dead from oxygen deprivation (about 10 minutes without adequate circulation). You can still get a ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation) in them, not likely, but it's enough to keep the organs alive. We don't really distinguish between people who've "gotten a pulse back" and those that survive to discharge, but it's a pretty low percentage. The remainder are typically your pool of potential donors, and they end up there because they re-code in the hospital, or are brain-dead when we bring them in. There's also other ways to become brain dead - we had a guy who was on opiate painkillers that went out drinking and passed out in bed on his face... he was still asleep at about 4pm and had been hypoxic for 12 hours. He had fixed pupils and insufficient respirations (though spontaneous) so he would've been in a very bad way, if he ever made it out of a coma.
The whole brain death thing is, as they say, above my pay grade. If they match my criteria for resuscitation (pretty much nontraumatic arrest without obvious signs of death, like rigor mortis, lividity, room temperature, decomposition, etc) then I do CPR. The paramedics we work with can hook up their EKG and find a terminal rhythm (asystole, and some others) and pronounce. If the guy is an organ donor, we'd typically continue compressions to the hospital when we might otherwise not, in the hope that they'd do some good, even if we can't save his life (compressions do provide blood flow).
People die, and we all do our best. Usually, it's not enough, and you have to come to terms with that. But it doesn't mean you fight any less hard, because sometimes you're able to help, and that's the best feeling in the world - and also because if you ever have a suspicion that you could've done just a little bit better for somebody, it'd eat you away. Cops, EMTs, medics, nurses, docs - I don't know any of them that are inclined to just "give up" because they just don't want to deal with it, and especially not because of money. On the rare chance that a donor comes in, and is a match, the docs are ecstatic that they got somebody off the transplant list and kept them from dying - not that they got paid to do the operation.
So I'm a jackass. I'd say that anybody that believes in creationism or ID should be shot (assuming they've been given the opportunity to understand, you know, facts, and just didn't take it).
Toning that back a bit, I'd say he should be fired for believing it. If you want to be a secretary and believe in ID, you're still an idiot but it isn't direct evidence that you're incompetent, like it is for a scientist or engineer.
Now I know that the guy was a "computer specialist", so he could've perhaps gotten by. Some random techie fiddling with the computers doesn't need to "believe" in science (not that science requires belief).
But note the operative word that the summary tossed in - "promoting". That's what changes this from a "they fired an idiot, but his idiocy didn't affect his job necessarily" to "he's getting in the way of everybody's work". Anyone he was able to convince, they wouldn't want anyway - but you can be damned sure he was trying hard to convince people at NASA that science wasn't really that great.
It's like Microsoft firing a guy who goes around bothering the Windows folks and telling them they ought to use Macs. Regardless of your feelings on the matter, it's impossible to see that as anything other than irritating at best, and obstructive at worst.
If you want to be pedantic, laser light is light produced by amplification based on stimulated emission. The light tends to be temporally coherent (in-phase) and spatially coherent (single point), but neither is necessary. If they've managed to spread out a laser beam while keeping it in-phase and polarized, it's very much laser light, just not focused.
Get a better radio clock. The WWVB time signal includes the DST information and your clock shouldn't be changing on its own without the signal telling it to.
It even says "about to change", which I didn't know. And leap year/seconds. Pretty cool stuff.
Good for you for being an ER doc. I have a lot of respect for you guys. Having said that, I'm an EMT, and I've seen stuff that would curl your hair. You get them after we've pulled their various parts out of the car (not always at the same time) and cleaned them up for you.
I've gotta say, I know a bunch of docs at one of the best trauma centers in the country, and they are without exception good people fighting a forever-losing game against death. There's all sorts of people who "could" be saved - but for what? It's not a money thing at least to the folks I know - they just don't see fighting to keep the patient in a coma on a vent for a few more days as appropriate - to the patient, or their families.
Since I'm sure you'd shit all over any hypothetical I offered, here's a real case: Massive car accident on the highway, one guy didn't have his seatbelt on and went partway through the windshield. Massive head injuries (open skull and brain tissue on the windshield), and cardiac arrest. He was our only "red" patient, but we didn't do CPR.
Now first of all, the standing protocols in my state is "do not perform CPR if it was caused by a traumatic cardiac arrest", so we were doing right by that. Notwithstanding, we perhaps could have pumped him with some lactated Ringer's, tubed him, and performed compressions. We may have even brought back a pulse (his brainstem appeared intact). But for what?
Let's say you are that guy's wife, or brother, or son. Which is better? "He died in a horrible car accident" or "He's in a coma, it doesn't look good"? Sure, the doctor can say up and down that he won't make it, that the windshield ripped out parts of his cerebrum and people don't come back from that, etc - but it doesn't matter, most people get their hopes up because he isn't actually dead. Then a few days later the guy dies, or even worse, his next-of-kin has to make the decision to give up. If it were me, I know which one I'd rather have, for me and my family. Get it over with and leave it at that. Don't stretch it out to various stages.
And yes, those things will stay with me for the rest of my life. But we still made the right call.
I don't know what you mean by saved. Perhaps you mean the guy coding could've been stabilized, but they gave up, or perhaps you mean the terminal cancer patient wasn't vigorously resuscitated. If "save" means "most likely could've returned to a mostly-normal life", that's a tragedy worthy of big punishment. But if "save" means "kept alive for a few more hours/days", I can't say I share your disgust at the doctor having some mercy to everybody involved and just letting it end naturally.
No, it doesn't. The marginal cost of a text message is literally zero. The text-specific infrastructure (SMSC) is pricey, but over the entire network it's not that much - easily amortized into a few cents on each bill.
People understand that there are fixed costs to things like, say, electrical infrastructure, and they're fine with paying a nominal fee over time to support the fixed costs. It's not even like the SMS system has a capacity - it replaces the (useless) padding in the control messages that the phone must already send to stay attached to a cell, and vice-versa. And SMS have no QoS - they're a best-effort thing, so if they're delayed by a few seconds, no big deal. SMS aren't exactly resource-intensive to route, they already know where to route calls.
With that in mind, a dollar or two per phone bill is more appropriate than $20/mo or 25c/per. People get annoyed because it's a money-grab from a captive audience.
I just realized the problem here. No, science can't explain everything. But science can detect, measure, and quantify things. You use that, with the scientific method, to explain.
There's tons of things we've observed that we can't explain. We're trying to, and we know it's there because we've measured it, but we don't know why. The key, crucially important bit, is that science hasn't been able to measure any effect of homeopathy. And we've tried plenty.
There's lots of stuff that science doesn't explain. But there's noting that science hasn't observed that's worth anything. Scientists observed that certain barks lessened pain - that became aspirin. Scientists observed that the foxglove helped people with heart problems, in a concrete and measurable way, and then found the chemical digitalis - a common heart treatment. Herbal and other "alternative" medicines are, at this point, only alternative because they don't work.
And to any of the pharma cynics out there - do you have any idea how much money the drug companies spend on things that never amount to anything? Don't you think they'd be thrilled to find an "alternative" treatment that already worked, and was cheaper to understand and prove safe because people were already using it with the demonstrably positive effect? And you can absolutely patent a synthesis technique, so it's not about that.
Here's the jump that people object to - you have a plant, some technique, etc that people consider "alternative" or "bupkis", and you say it works. Scientists come in, check it out, try to compare it against a placebo, and find that it doesn't work. Science can't explain why it works - because it doesn't! "Science can't explain everything", while true, does not apply to things that science can't measure.
Not that unmeasurable things can't matter to people, but that's the realm of philosophy or magic or religion or something.
They're worth US dollars, which I can use to pay for stuff, including my taxes. Even if every retailer on the planet took BitCoin, they'd still be less valuable than whatever the national currency is.
I seriously doubt they'll change the dock connector. Almost all iDevice accessories for damn near 9 years still work with the newest. Everybody with one of those stereos or cars or whatevers would be out of luck - and after 10 years, that's a lot of devices. I question the wisdom of buying a device tied to a particular interface, but Apple's been incredibly successful at keeping it all going. They'd be nuts to throw that away.
I may have been unclear... they're all legally ISPs, but at my school they see themselves as a provider of services to customers rather than anything more than incidentally associated with a university.
As a/. reader, I can only assume you're rather technical. Isn't this something you discovered before going there?
Frankly, I wouldn't go to a school that did this. And I didn't. Thankfully, my first choice doesn't do anything like this. Traffic is unmonitored, but for legal reasons you have to register your MAC address to your university credentials to get out of the VLAN. This happens automatically with authentication to the wireless network, or manually through a captive portal for Ethernet.
As required by law of all ISPs, they will use this to forward DMCA notices, which happens pretty frequently. I can't exactly fault them for that. They'll also notice if you're really hammering the network with worm traffic or something, in which case they'll kick you off until you get the system cleaned up, which I can't fault them for either.
But other than that, they're pretty much out-of-the-way. They definitely view themselves as more of an ISP than anything academically-relevant, which is good. The university structure also places them at the same level as the individual schools (liberal arts, engineering, business, etc), and each school has its own school-specific IT that runs their own email and webhosting and so on, all of which helps keep them pretty much service-oriented. They pretty much provide internet access and server space to any university department that wants it (and pays for it, in one of those interdepartmental money-shuffling schemes), and otherwise back off from content management. Individual schools are free to filter whatever they want, but only in the school-managed network. In practice, none do. Even if they did, the dorms are separated out from that.
Not to mention the university is almost as liberal as they come in terms of information freedom.
But in any case, the university is your home for the time you're there. I wouldn't live somewhere that did this, and I wouldn't go to a school that did this. Not even because of the inconvenience - think about what that suggests about how they view academic and intellectual freedom.
True global warming "believers" don't believe, they looked at the available evidence and weighed the opinions of experts and came to a conclusion based on facts and consensus.
I don't know which side you fall on, so this isn't directed to you, but my personal theory is that people who dismiss the international scientific consensus on global warming have faith that it's not happening, and figure that the "believers" are also arguing based on faith. It's the same as evolution - creationists don't believe in science, so they think that the arguments they fight are based on belief.
I refuse to play into this. Undoubtedly there are people that "believe" in global warming, and they tend to do things like buy Priuses to replace their 25 MPG Toyotas.
Sure, but try doing it on any larger scale. The pocket-sized device probably won't get you caught, sure, but anything that seriously disrupts the signal over a nontrivial area would get you noticed.
In any case, the entire reason we have the FCC is precisely because you don't get to decide how other people use radio. You're not allowed to jam GPS because you don't like it. That would be like shooting down a plane because it flew over your house.
Sure, if you wanted to jam GPS for a 20 foot radius, people probably won't notice. But GPS is a global system of great importance - planes can use it to navigate, not to mention millions of people just trying to make it to their relatives' houses, or find the nearest pizza place. Not to mention, it's military. They'd have something to say about your "I'll block GPS!" plan, I'm sure.
But let's accept the premise. Let's say for the benefit of the doubt that you didn't know the sorts of things GPS is actually used for. Can I jam the police frequency so they can't operate near my house? "Fuck da police" doesn't count. How about the fire department? ATC communications? Hospital pagers? WiFi? The local radio station while it's airing Rush Limbaugh, because I don't like him?
Most radio is licensed, including GPS. You have to abide by rules to use a licensed service, but it grants you protection from interference. You as an individual don't get to decide that this particular licensed service can just be interfered with because it pisses you off.
I can't speak for the UK, but it is absolutely illegal in the US. I'd go as far as say it's one of the most illegal things you could do with radio, in that it's about the most egregious use of deliberate "harmful interference" around. It would be illegal if they were trying to block Joe Frank's Tree Service walkie-talkies, but GPS is very highly used, very highly depended on, and not only governmental but military. Anybody doing serious GPS jamming effective over a few miles would be found in an hour - probably less. Seriously, the military invented it to know where they were. Planes use it to land (not without fallbacks...). I wouldn't screw around with it if I were trying to stay quiet, because you'll get a lot of guys that are a lot smarter and a lot more serious than the local PD on your tail in a hurry.
I'm sorry you think so. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt by assuming I was less than clear, although I thought what I meant was quite obvious.
The average Chinese person has horrendous working conditions - sustenance farming, or not much more. Do you seriously not see how working in a factory with (mostly) regular hours and a steady source of food wouldn't be a big improvement? The analogy is the industrial revolution that happened in the West - sure, those sweatshops and factories with little kids running the machines were horrible, but the fact remains that they were a big step up from sustenance farming or craft work that they had come from. Because you could go home at 5 with a paycheck, then use that to be guaranteed food - not hoping there weren't any droughts or blights. The little kids were already working and losing fingers - in the fields. And not even the factories had the guts to make you work on the Lord's day, so you had a day off - something that wasn't really a given if the crop had to come in.
Horrible? Yes. Marginally less horrible than where they'd come from? Yes. You can romanticize farming all you want, but it doesn't make it a fun thing to live off of. It's not a race thing, it's a societal thing. We moved past it, the Chinese are moving through it - partly because they started later, and partly because they've got a lot more people. It would be better to wave a magic wand and give everybody everywhere nice working conditions and comfortable lives... but I don't think that's really feasible.
I make no judgement on these factories. I have no doubt that I'd never, ever work in one, or let anyone I cared about work in one. At the same time, I'm not convinced they're not a big step up for the average Chinese person. Remember your history lessons? In this country (USA), we know something about horrible working conditions. Foxconn doesn't sound as bad as Triangle Shirtwaist Company, or any of the mine towns with the company store and wage-slavery. And people voluntarily went there just as people are voluntarily working at Foxconn.
The average work conditions have a lot to do with the environment. Sustenance farming was pretty miserable - is still pretty miserable, it's still around. There are still a huge number of people who would work in terrible conditions just for the privilege of a steady source of food (as opposed to fickle harvests).
This isn't to say we should get complacent - the moment we as a people declare the status quo "good enough", we've lost.
Having said that, there's a lot of people (many who will be posting in this article, I'm sure) that are convinced these factories are some sort of prison with forced-labor and the evil specter of Steve Jobs himself whipping workers until they're forced to jump. And that seems less productive than, you know, thinking.
Thanks for playing, but this isn't subjective. There's three kinds of Internet traffic - high-bandwidth high-latency, low-bandwidth low-latency, and somewhere in the middle. Examples would be VoIP, FTP, and SMTP respectively. Your SMTP traffic delayed by a couple dozen milliseconds is objectively less bad than having the VoIP traffic delayed. Same with file-sharing - the low-bandwidth queue (which might be limited to a few hundred kbps) is objectively worse than waiting multiple hundreds of ms for each packet but at a high rate.
The problem with net neutrality is when this is done improperly, specifically for non-technical reasons. Prioritizing one's own VoIP or streaming video service is the problem, not prioritizing VoIP over streaming video over BitTorrent.
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Ravi might be a douchebucket, but he is not responsible for clementi's choice to take his life.
Looks like the prosecutor and the courts agreed with you. He isn't being charged with the kid's death.
Law and order isn't a game, but it is stacked in favor of the accused. Hence the phrases "innocent until proven guilty" and "beyond a reasonable doubt". It damn well better be substantially harder to convict someone than for them to show a reasonable doubt about it, because otherwise you create a society in which people can just be thrown in prison. That's getting increasingly easy to do, but in most cases there's still a court involved, and they do still care about things like evidence procedures and presumption of innocence.
I don't care that the guy gets off, if the police were sloppy. Even if he's a murderer and everybody knows it. The police need to do their job right, because if they're allowed to get away with illegal searches and still get the conviction, we're all at risk.
I'm not even some paranoid libertarian, but this is pretty basic justice.
From teh wiki:
Six states (Arkansas, Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, and Washington) allow debt collectors to seek arrest warrants for debtors in default if all other collection methods have failed. Whether a debtor will actually be prosecuted or not varies from state to state, county to county, and town to town. The individual is taken into custody and is typically required to submit financial documentation to the courts (to facilitate seizure of assets or wage garnishment), although in some cases the individual may be held indefinitely until a payment plan is reached or the debt is paid in full, especially if the individual is insolvent. Other states have outlawed this type of collection action (Tennessee and Oklahoma have ruled it unconstitutional) unless the court finds that the debtor actually possesses the means to pay—except in the case of child support obligations.
Most state constitutions, including Minnesota's, have clauses dating to the 1850s that expressly prohibit the jailing of people for their debts. Some people make the claim that it is unconstitutional in the United States to incarcerate someone solely for failing to pay a debt. However, there is little settled law on this matter and plenty of precedent for de facto debtors' prisons.
More than a third of U.S. states allow borrowers to be jailed for non payment of debts. "Judges have signed off on more than 5,000 such warrants since the start of 2010 in nine counties." Because of “sloppy, incomplete or even false documentation,” many borrowers facing jail time don’t even know they’re being sued by creditors.
Didn't know that... Guess I'll avoid those states. I'd always thought debt collection was purely civil, unless the debt was "special" (court ordered), like child support or alimony.
You'd think she could sue the retailer for defamation, at least - accusation of delinquency I'd hope was actionable if made falsely or negligently (lost the check). Or at least legal fees, but it might be tricky to sue the "right" person. IANAL.
Hmmmm. Most checks are only valid for 90 days from issuance, or 6 months if unmarked with a "void after". Any older and it's a "stale dated cheque", which banks need not honor. Presumably, if the account had been closed, the bank wouldn't go to any particular length to honor what they weren't required to.
Can you elaborate on this story? I'm trying to figure out how the police got involved. Writing a check that bounces may be a criminal act, but a "this check is too old" isn't a bounce, and not paying a bill (other than child support or alimony or something) isn't criminal.
This guy in particular had some pretty nasty abdominal injuries as well (probably a lacerated liver, which would be why he bled out).
We're more likely is to get people who have had "normal" heart attacks, but not received attention in time (or it didn't help) and they're brain-dead from oxygen deprivation (about 10 minutes without adequate circulation). You can still get a ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation) in them, not likely, but it's enough to keep the organs alive. We don't really distinguish between people who've "gotten a pulse back" and those that survive to discharge, but it's a pretty low percentage. The remainder are typically your pool of potential donors, and they end up there because they re-code in the hospital, or are brain-dead when we bring them in. There's also other ways to become brain dead - we had a guy who was on opiate painkillers that went out drinking and passed out in bed on his face... he was still asleep at about 4pm and had been hypoxic for 12 hours. He had fixed pupils and insufficient respirations (though spontaneous) so he would've been in a very bad way, if he ever made it out of a coma.
The whole brain death thing is, as they say, above my pay grade. If they match my criteria for resuscitation (pretty much nontraumatic arrest without obvious signs of death, like rigor mortis, lividity, room temperature, decomposition, etc) then I do CPR. The paramedics we work with can hook up their EKG and find a terminal rhythm (asystole, and some others) and pronounce. If the guy is an organ donor, we'd typically continue compressions to the hospital when we might otherwise not, in the hope that they'd do some good, even if we can't save his life (compressions do provide blood flow).
People die, and we all do our best. Usually, it's not enough, and you have to come to terms with that. But it doesn't mean you fight any less hard, because sometimes you're able to help, and that's the best feeling in the world - and also because if you ever have a suspicion that you could've done just a little bit better for somebody, it'd eat you away. Cops, EMTs, medics, nurses, docs - I don't know any of them that are inclined to just "give up" because they just don't want to deal with it, and especially not because of money. On the rare chance that a donor comes in, and is a match, the docs are ecstatic that they got somebody off the transplant list and kept them from dying - not that they got paid to do the operation.
I lol'd. But a bad troll... I give 3/10.
Other judges?
So I'm a jackass. I'd say that anybody that believes in creationism or ID should be shot (assuming they've been given the opportunity to understand, you know, facts, and just didn't take it).
Toning that back a bit, I'd say he should be fired for believing it. If you want to be a secretary and believe in ID, you're still an idiot but it isn't direct evidence that you're incompetent, like it is for a scientist or engineer.
Now I know that the guy was a "computer specialist", so he could've perhaps gotten by. Some random techie fiddling with the computers doesn't need to "believe" in science (not that science requires belief).
But note the operative word that the summary tossed in - "promoting". That's what changes this from a "they fired an idiot, but his idiocy didn't affect his job necessarily" to "he's getting in the way of everybody's work". Anyone he was able to convince, they wouldn't want anyway - but you can be damned sure he was trying hard to convince people at NASA that science wasn't really that great.
It's like Microsoft firing a guy who goes around bothering the Windows folks and telling them they ought to use Macs. Regardless of your feelings on the matter, it's impossible to see that as anything other than irritating at best, and obstructive at worst.
If you want to be pedantic, laser light is light produced by amplification based on stimulated emission. The light tends to be temporally coherent (in-phase) and spatially coherent (single point), but neither is necessary. If they've managed to spread out a laser beam while keeping it in-phase and polarized, it's very much laser light, just not focused.
Get a better radio clock. The WWVB time signal includes the DST information and your clock shouldn't be changing on its own without the signal telling it to.
It even says "about to change", which I didn't know. And leap year/seconds. Pretty cool stuff.
Good for you for being an ER doc. I have a lot of respect for you guys. Having said that, I'm an EMT, and I've seen stuff that would curl your hair. You get them after we've pulled their various parts out of the car (not always at the same time) and cleaned them up for you.
I've gotta say, I know a bunch of docs at one of the best trauma centers in the country, and they are without exception good people fighting a forever-losing game against death. There's all sorts of people who "could" be saved - but for what? It's not a money thing at least to the folks I know - they just don't see fighting to keep the patient in a coma on a vent for a few more days as appropriate - to the patient, or their families.
Since I'm sure you'd shit all over any hypothetical I offered, here's a real case: Massive car accident on the highway, one guy didn't have his seatbelt on and went partway through the windshield. Massive head injuries (open skull and brain tissue on the windshield), and cardiac arrest. He was our only "red" patient, but we didn't do CPR.
Now first of all, the standing protocols in my state is "do not perform CPR if it was caused by a traumatic cardiac arrest", so we were doing right by that. Notwithstanding, we perhaps could have pumped him with some lactated Ringer's, tubed him, and performed compressions. We may have even brought back a pulse (his brainstem appeared intact). But for what?
Let's say you are that guy's wife, or brother, or son. Which is better? "He died in a horrible car accident" or "He's in a coma, it doesn't look good"? Sure, the doctor can say up and down that he won't make it, that the windshield ripped out parts of his cerebrum and people don't come back from that, etc - but it doesn't matter, most people get their hopes up because he isn't actually dead. Then a few days later the guy dies, or even worse, his next-of-kin has to make the decision to give up. If it were me, I know which one I'd rather have, for me and my family. Get it over with and leave it at that. Don't stretch it out to various stages.
And yes, those things will stay with me for the rest of my life. But we still made the right call.
I don't know what you mean by saved. Perhaps you mean the guy coding could've been stabilized, but they gave up, or perhaps you mean the terminal cancer patient wasn't vigorously resuscitated. If "save" means "most likely could've returned to a mostly-normal life", that's a tragedy worthy of big punishment. But if "save" means "kept alive for a few more hours/days", I can't say I share your disgust at the doctor having some mercy to everybody involved and just letting it end naturally.
No, it doesn't. The marginal cost of a text message is literally zero. The text-specific infrastructure (SMSC) is pricey, but over the entire network it's not that much - easily amortized into a few cents on each bill.
People understand that there are fixed costs to things like, say, electrical infrastructure, and they're fine with paying a nominal fee over time to support the fixed costs. It's not even like the SMS system has a capacity - it replaces the (useless) padding in the control messages that the phone must already send to stay attached to a cell, and vice-versa. And SMS have no QoS - they're a best-effort thing, so if they're delayed by a few seconds, no big deal. SMS aren't exactly resource-intensive to route, they already know where to route calls.
With that in mind, a dollar or two per phone bill is more appropriate than $20/mo or 25c/per. People get annoyed because it's a money-grab from a captive audience.
I just realized the problem here. No, science can't explain everything. But science can detect, measure, and quantify things. You use that, with the scientific method, to explain.
There's tons of things we've observed that we can't explain. We're trying to, and we know it's there because we've measured it, but we don't know why. The key, crucially important bit, is that science hasn't been able to measure any effect of homeopathy. And we've tried plenty.
There's lots of stuff that science doesn't explain. But there's noting that science hasn't observed that's worth anything. Scientists observed that certain barks lessened pain - that became aspirin. Scientists observed that the foxglove helped people with heart problems, in a concrete and measurable way, and then found the chemical digitalis - a common heart treatment. Herbal and other "alternative" medicines are, at this point, only alternative because they don't work.
And to any of the pharma cynics out there - do you have any idea how much money the drug companies spend on things that never amount to anything? Don't you think they'd be thrilled to find an "alternative" treatment that already worked, and was cheaper to understand and prove safe because people were already using it with the demonstrably positive effect? And you can absolutely patent a synthesis technique, so it's not about that.
Here's the jump that people object to - you have a plant, some technique, etc that people consider "alternative" or "bupkis", and you say it works. Scientists come in, check it out, try to compare it against a placebo, and find that it doesn't work. Science can't explain why it works - because it doesn't! "Science can't explain everything", while true, does not apply to things that science can't measure.
Not that unmeasurable things can't matter to people, but that's the realm of philosophy or magic or religion or something.
How sad is it that I can't just assume that you're joking?
They're worth US dollars, which I can use to pay for stuff, including my taxes. Even if every retailer on the planet took BitCoin, they'd still be less valuable than whatever the national currency is.
I seriously doubt they'll change the dock connector. Almost all iDevice accessories for damn near 9 years still work with the newest. Everybody with one of those stereos or cars or whatevers would be out of luck - and after 10 years, that's a lot of devices. I question the wisdom of buying a device tied to a particular interface, but Apple's been incredibly successful at keeping it all going. They'd be nuts to throw that away.
I may have been unclear... they're all legally ISPs, but at my school they see themselves as a provider of services to customers rather than anything more than incidentally associated with a university.
As a /. reader, I can only assume you're rather technical. Isn't this something you discovered before going there?
Frankly, I wouldn't go to a school that did this. And I didn't. Thankfully, my first choice doesn't do anything like this. Traffic is unmonitored, but for legal reasons you have to register your MAC address to your university credentials to get out of the VLAN. This happens automatically with authentication to the wireless network, or manually through a captive portal for Ethernet.
As required by law of all ISPs, they will use this to forward DMCA notices, which happens pretty frequently. I can't exactly fault them for that. They'll also notice if you're really hammering the network with worm traffic or something, in which case they'll kick you off until you get the system cleaned up, which I can't fault them for either.
But other than that, they're pretty much out-of-the-way. They definitely view themselves as more of an ISP than anything academically-relevant, which is good. The university structure also places them at the same level as the individual schools (liberal arts, engineering, business, etc), and each school has its own school-specific IT that runs their own email and webhosting and so on, all of which helps keep them pretty much service-oriented. They pretty much provide internet access and server space to any university department that wants it (and pays for it, in one of those interdepartmental money-shuffling schemes), and otherwise back off from content management. Individual schools are free to filter whatever they want, but only in the school-managed network. In practice, none do. Even if they did, the dorms are separated out from that.
Not to mention the university is almost as liberal as they come in terms of information freedom.
But in any case, the university is your home for the time you're there. I wouldn't live somewhere that did this, and I wouldn't go to a school that did this. Not even because of the inconvenience - think about what that suggests about how they view academic and intellectual freedom.
True global warming "believers" don't believe, they looked at the available evidence and weighed the opinions of experts and came to a conclusion based on facts and consensus.
I don't know which side you fall on, so this isn't directed to you, but my personal theory is that people who dismiss the international scientific consensus on global warming have faith that it's not happening, and figure that the "believers" are also arguing based on faith. It's the same as evolution - creationists don't believe in science, so they think that the arguments they fight are based on belief.
I refuse to play into this. Undoubtedly there are people that "believe" in global warming, and they tend to do things like buy Priuses to replace their 25 MPG Toyotas.
Sure, but try doing it on any larger scale. The pocket-sized device probably won't get you caught, sure, but anything that seriously disrupts the signal over a nontrivial area would get you noticed.
Paranoid much?
In any case, the entire reason we have the FCC is precisely because you don't get to decide how other people use radio. You're not allowed to jam GPS because you don't like it. That would be like shooting down a plane because it flew over your house.
Sure, if you wanted to jam GPS for a 20 foot radius, people probably won't notice. But GPS is a global system of great importance - planes can use it to navigate, not to mention millions of people just trying to make it to their relatives' houses, or find the nearest pizza place. Not to mention, it's military. They'd have something to say about your "I'll block GPS!" plan, I'm sure.
But let's accept the premise. Let's say for the benefit of the doubt that you didn't know the sorts of things GPS is actually used for. Can I jam the police frequency so they can't operate near my house? "Fuck da police" doesn't count. How about the fire department? ATC communications? Hospital pagers? WiFi? The local radio station while it's airing Rush Limbaugh, because I don't like him?
Most radio is licensed, including GPS. You have to abide by rules to use a licensed service, but it grants you protection from interference. You as an individual don't get to decide that this particular licensed service can just be interfered with because it pisses you off.
I can't speak for the UK, but it is absolutely illegal in the US. I'd go as far as say it's one of the most illegal things you could do with radio, in that it's about the most egregious use of deliberate "harmful interference" around. It would be illegal if they were trying to block Joe Frank's Tree Service walkie-talkies, but GPS is very highly used, very highly depended on, and not only governmental but military. Anybody doing serious GPS jamming effective over a few miles would be found in an hour - probably less. Seriously, the military invented it to know where they were. Planes use it to land (not without fallbacks...). I wouldn't screw around with it if I were trying to stay quiet, because you'll get a lot of guys that are a lot smarter and a lot more serious than the local PD on your tail in a hurry.
I'm sorry you think so. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt by assuming I was less than clear, although I thought what I meant was quite obvious.
The average Chinese person has horrendous working conditions - sustenance farming, or not much more. Do you seriously not see how working in a factory with (mostly) regular hours and a steady source of food wouldn't be a big improvement? The analogy is the industrial revolution that happened in the West - sure, those sweatshops and factories with little kids running the machines were horrible, but the fact remains that they were a big step up from sustenance farming or craft work that they had come from. Because you could go home at 5 with a paycheck, then use that to be guaranteed food - not hoping there weren't any droughts or blights. The little kids were already working and losing fingers - in the fields. And not even the factories had the guts to make you work on the Lord's day, so you had a day off - something that wasn't really a given if the crop had to come in.
Horrible? Yes. Marginally less horrible than where they'd come from? Yes. You can romanticize farming all you want, but it doesn't make it a fun thing to live off of. It's not a race thing, it's a societal thing. We moved past it, the Chinese are moving through it - partly because they started later, and partly because they've got a lot more people. It would be better to wave a magic wand and give everybody everywhere nice working conditions and comfortable lives... but I don't think that's really feasible.
I make no judgement on these factories. I have no doubt that I'd never, ever work in one, or let anyone I cared about work in one. At the same time, I'm not convinced they're not a big step up for the average Chinese person. Remember your history lessons? In this country (USA), we know something about horrible working conditions. Foxconn doesn't sound as bad as Triangle Shirtwaist Company, or any of the mine towns with the company store and wage-slavery. And people voluntarily went there just as people are voluntarily working at Foxconn.
The average work conditions have a lot to do with the environment. Sustenance farming was pretty miserable - is still pretty miserable, it's still around. There are still a huge number of people who would work in terrible conditions just for the privilege of a steady source of food (as opposed to fickle harvests).
This isn't to say we should get complacent - the moment we as a people declare the status quo "good enough", we've lost.
Having said that, there's a lot of people (many who will be posting in this article, I'm sure) that are convinced these factories are some sort of prison with forced-labor and the evil specter of Steve Jobs himself whipping workers until they're forced to jump. And that seems less productive than, you know, thinking.
Thanks for playing, but this isn't subjective. There's three kinds of Internet traffic - high-bandwidth high-latency, low-bandwidth low-latency, and somewhere in the middle. Examples would be VoIP, FTP, and SMTP respectively. Your SMTP traffic delayed by a couple dozen milliseconds is objectively less bad than having the VoIP traffic delayed. Same with file-sharing - the low-bandwidth queue (which might be limited to a few hundred kbps) is objectively worse than waiting multiple hundreds of ms for each packet but at a high rate.
The problem with net neutrality is when this is done improperly, specifically for non-technical reasons. Prioritizing one's own VoIP or streaming video service is the problem, not prioritizing VoIP over streaming video over BitTorrent.
The sinus infection he's describing (more than 10 days) is almost certainly bacterial.