I was thinking more about how huge the "luxury" industry is. The $80k price tag isn't justified by its performance or its comfort or its features, but by a je ne sais quoi: the sound of a car door closing.
Yes we all share these ideals, but surely you've heard of the actual problems caused by illegal immigration.
They tend to form communities that don't integrate well with society because they don't know the language and customs. The communities foster crime because nobody can call the police without being deported. Victims of violence and abuse can't get help without risking deportation, and neither can exploited workers.
Deathly ill? Too bad, come in to work or you're fired (and good luck finding medical care). Filthy run-down apartment with no heat and asbestos insulation and that would burn to the ground killing dozens of people if someone was careless with a cigarette? What are you going to do about it.
Maryland is great. In my area they don't seem to mind you going about 5 over as long as you're not driving dangerously. And speed limits on I-270 north are a joke.
I guess we budget them enough money that they don't need to harass citizens on the roads to make ends meet. Quid pro quo.
Well that pretty much demolishes this story. Straight from Sony's mouth:
"SCEUK has run searches of its customer complaints/warranty database to identify the number of reports made to it regarding instances of system shutdown or failure in circumstances where the front panel yellow indicator is illuminated," added Maguire. "The results show that of all PS3s sold in the UK to date, fewer than one half of one per cent of units have been reported as failing in circumstances where the yellow indicator is illuminated."
So where's the problem? Consumer electronics have a high failure rate. Certainly more than.5%
No, it's business. Men in suits sit around quoting business concepts at each other until they convince themselves they have a good idea.
They're executives, the way they work is by outsourcing their specialized thinking to others while they manage. I'm sure they honestly don't know how stupid they look. They read a report that mentions in passing the 30-second preview, they reel and can't understand why they're giving away content for free. They call in the secretary and set up a meeting with their iTunes lead. The poor guy tries to explain how obviously it's of enormous benefit to offer a preview. The MBA hears some engineer admitting that he's following his personal opinion in a matter of possibly huge importance to the company. The MBA looks for a real report done by Research with real numbers and tables and projections that confirms the engineer's opinion-- and there are none. He assigns a team in Research to investigate the matter and recommend any disciplinary action against the engineer. Research consults Legal, they say they have no contract with iTunes for getting paid for their content when it's in a 30 second sample. They contact the MBA, give him a preliminary report that confirms his suspicions. He sets up a meeting with Apple to discuss future payment. MBA gets laughed out, MBA lobbies congress.
Sounds fair to me too. These include rare and out-of-print works. The kind of works that automatically cost $100 extra just because the target customer is university libraries who can afford it.
Why do anything when you can pay someone else twice as much? 12TB from Amazon will be an order of magnitude more expensive than just running a storage server, and you have to pay for internet bandwidth instead of just running a wire.
That is so cool. I love that some people don't even realize they're seeing grey. They can still name colors perfectly fine (they can pick out the "blue flavored" gatorates in the supermarket at a glance), but they don't have the experience of color available to their consciousness. This sort of deconstruction of consciousness's functions is, IMO, the strongest evidence against Cartesian dualism.
This reminds me of an experiment Bill Nye did. He wore a pair of goggles that flipped his vision upside-down. After a few days (I think) of headaches he completely got used to it and was able to function normally with it upside down. I think I remember him saying that it didn't seem upside down to him, and when they took off the goggles at the end the world seemed upside down again. The really fascinating part was that there wasn't a moment of "flipping" during the experiment: the upside-down image became his expected norm. In other words, the optic nerves don't correspond directly to some raster format where they're tied directly into our Video In consciousness jack. They're interpreted as needed and presented to our consciousness experience post-processing.
And the simple experiment didn't prove this but I suspect that there's no relative relation between optic nerves either. Like they're just haphazardly bundled together and shipped off to the brain, and the brain's processing adaptively grows to sort and make sense of the random signals. So I suspect that if you sever the optic nerve and connect the nerves randomly your brain will eventually be able to just interpret the new signals as the norm like Bill Nye did.
The reason I suspect that is because of the really cool electronic sensing technology that's been developed in the last few decades. I think I've read something like they can just send signals into nerves (obviously with sensible modulation/frequency/amplitude) and make the signals vary in some way based on the external world and after awhile patients are able to sense it naturally. Like audio signals to the eardrums and such.
Oh yeah I found it. This. By just shocking areas of the tongue a blind patient can develop a kind of sight. If the top left pixel is dark you shock the top left area, etc. Again, I think that you could completely mix up all of the inputs and after awhile it would be perfectly natural.
Think of feeling with your hand. A priori you have no idea which nerves in that thick bundle of nerves correspond to a particular finger. But by observing and noticing that when you twitch a certain way a particular finger moves and when you touch something you get an input only on particular nerves you eventually build up an intuitive grasp of which nerve is which (handled transparently of course). The problem is complex and we see side effects all the time. I'm sure everyone's had the experience of being in a weird position with their arms or legs twisted up and you can't really tell which limb is which. You may experimentally try to move a particualar leg that you see and move the wrong one!
Well you would certainly have a very easily cleaned surface over a touch screen. Glass probably, coated with sapphire for extra strength? Just wipe it off with some windex.
What can't you do with touch? Just use it exactly as you would use a mouse. Make your widgets bigger and more pudgy-finger-friendly and you're good to go.
The problem is that with laptops/desktops the screen isn't really in a good position to accurately touch.
But I like the idea of getting rid of the persistent cursor. You just leave it lying somewhere on screen when you're not using it.. there's no reason to leave it sitting there, or have to navigate awkwardly between controls, when you can just touch.
I'm reminded of the PC vs console gaming argument about how mice are better because you can snap directly to a target instead of holding the control stick and having to wait as you pan around. Well touch vs mouse it's the same argument. With the mouse you have to start pushing your mouse across the mousepad, wait for it to reach its destination, and then fire. With touch you just tap the spot
Obviously touch would never work for FPS controls but desktop controls are similar.. "aiming" at the little 5-pixel high link may be harder than it has to be
I wasn't replying to the summary. I was replying to the specific things I quoted.
wat. You were going on about how employers have nothing to do with it, so I informed you that I was talking about the story summary.
And don't you dare forget, or try to hide, the fact that "the state" has no money that it hasn't taken away from the taxpayers. So, in essence, you are saying, people who HAVE jobs and money should pay for health care for those who don't.
Obviously. Sort of how like the taxpayers provide 13 years (K-12 in maryland at least) of free education to every person -working and non working- in the United States. Think about it: every weekday, most months, for 13 years almost every American child has to be supervised and taught by college-educated adults for 6 hours. Where are we going to get all of that money?! Oh yeah, we've been doing it in every state for decades, and it works. And by the way, wealthy taxpayers probably paid more for your education than you did.
From those according to their abilities to those according to their needs?
Basically. Is there a Godwin's Law for communism references? Look, not everything in communism is evil and scary. Particularly, socialized education and healthcare have strongly taken root in western Europe. In Finland the government will pay your full tuition, pay your rent while you're a student, and give you a monthly stipend of 200 euros (so you don't have to juggle work and study), as well as give you access to a low-interest loan. My sociology textbook says that in Denmark citizens have free college education, free healthcare, and five weeks of paid vacation leave paid for by the government. "People who lose their jobs receive about 90 percent of their prior income from the government for up to four years." Also if you have a baby the government will pay for leave for both the mother and the father. Canada has very cheap higher education and subsidized healthcare. These are all western, capitalistic societies.
Yes, it's unbelievable because it doesn't happen. Unlike countries with socialized medicine systems where you can't get medical treatment because there is a waiting line longer you can survive.
It doesn't have to be that way. Someone pays for quality care now (and still turns a profit) so the money exists.
The day that the government provides free cars to everyone is the day you can make such a ludicrous statement like what you just did. Yes, if the government was providing free cars to everyone, I'd say they'd be better off paying for healthcare. Since they aren't, it's a stupid and dishonest argument to say they ought to be paying for health instead of cars.
Like you said, the only money the state has is that which it collected from taxpayers. So get urban Americans out of their gas guzzlers and tax the savings out of their pockets.
If you want to choose not to have insurance, it should be your right
Tell that to Massachusetts, where you're required by law to carry health insurance.
Also, you mentioned that "premium" treatments should be charged "at full rate" and gave some examples. I'm curious, do you accept, for example, that spending $200K to extend the life of a terminally ill patient from a statistical six months to seven months would be a "premium" treatment?
This is a variable that can be adjusted. I'm sure whatever metric private insurance companies currently use would be fine.
It seems that government provided care for the needy could fairly easily be capped by "Provide no treatments that weren't available or wouldn't have commonly been provided 30 years ago unless a newer alternative is cheaper and is statistically no less successful"
OK, that's an idea. Wait, is this an argument against me, or are you just thinking out loud
Also, health care should be entirely funded by the state. It's unbelievable that people can't get medical treatment because they can't afford it. Charge for premium treatments (braces, liposuction, breast enhancement) at a full rate.
Originally we had no insurance and people who needed care were hit with massive bills. So people started buying insurance so that other people will pay part of their medical expenses in an emergency. So is it really that much of a leap to charge everyone and extend coverage to everyone, instead of charging a some people and only extending coverage to some people?
Yes obviously we can't even come close to affording it, but that's because we're wasting money elsewhere. Heathcare is a priority up there with keeping the roads open and keeping cops on patrol: it's (IMO) non-negotiable. We pay for healthcare and then we ask if we can afford things like everyone owning a car instead of mass transit, paying for 50% of the world's military spending, and saving America's pathetic auto industry.
Part of Obama's health care reform plan is to make it illegal for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition. Unbelievable that it's currently legal
So unless employers start asking for employees' complete medical history, the submitter's fears would be baseless
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I was thinking more about how huge the "luxury" industry is. The $80k price tag isn't justified by its performance or its comfort or its features, but by a je ne sais quoi: the sound of a car door closing.
Thanks for the link, that's crazy.
I guess I want "we require more vespene gas" when the tank runs low, and the Windows pinball start sound when I turn it on.
Your comment ridicules itself.
What exactly would these people do on a daily basis?
Yes we all share these ideals, but surely you've heard of the actual problems caused by illegal immigration.
They tend to form communities that don't integrate well with society because they don't know the language and customs. The communities foster crime because nobody can call the police without being deported. Victims of violence and abuse can't get help without risking deportation, and neither can exploited workers.
Deathly ill? Too bad, come in to work or you're fired (and good luck finding medical care). Filthy run-down apartment with no heat and asbestos insulation and that would burn to the ground killing dozens of people if someone was careless with a cigarette? What are you going to do about it.
Maryland is great. In my area they don't seem to mind you going about 5 over as long as you're not driving dangerously. And speed limits on I-270 north are a joke.
I guess we budget them enough money that they don't need to harass citizens on the roads to make ends meet. Quid pro quo.
Please, please, please tell me you're trolling.
One wonders how twisted business law must be to require such an article
Well that pretty much demolishes this story. Straight from Sony's mouth:
So where's the problem? Consumer electronics have a high failure rate. Certainly more than .5%
I remember stuck A and B buttons on the official N64 controllers. SNES controllers were indestructible. You could build a bunker out of Game Boys.
Well it's free.
Organization licenses cost money but multiple Office licenses wouldn't cost you nearly as little as your $150.
No, it's business. Men in suits sit around quoting business concepts at each other until they convince themselves they have a good idea.
They're executives, the way they work is by outsourcing their specialized thinking to others while they manage. I'm sure they honestly don't know how stupid they look. They read a report that mentions in passing the 30-second preview, they reel and can't understand why they're giving away content for free. They call in the secretary and set up a meeting with their iTunes lead. The poor guy tries to explain how obviously it's of enormous benefit to offer a preview. The MBA hears some engineer admitting that he's following his personal opinion in a matter of possibly huge importance to the company. The MBA looks for a real report done by Research with real numbers and tables and projections that confirms the engineer's opinion-- and there are none. He assigns a team in Research to investigate the matter and recommend any disciplinary action against the engineer. Research consults Legal, they say they have no contract with iTunes for getting paid for their content when it's in a 30 second sample. They contact the MBA, give him a preliminary report that confirms his suspicions. He sets up a meeting with Apple to discuss future payment. MBA gets laughed out, MBA lobbies congress.
Sounds fair to me too. These include rare and out-of-print works. The kind of works that automatically cost $100 extra just because the target customer is university libraries who can afford it.
I laughed out loud at "three health bars". Thank you for making my day, Impy.
Why do anything when you can pay someone else twice as much? 12TB from Amazon will be an order of magnitude more expensive than just running a storage server, and you have to pay for internet bandwidth instead of just running a wire.
That is so cool. I love that some people don't even realize they're seeing grey. They can still name colors perfectly fine (they can pick out the "blue flavored" gatorates in the supermarket at a glance), but they don't have the experience of color available to their consciousness. This sort of deconstruction of consciousness's functions is, IMO, the strongest evidence against Cartesian dualism.
This reminds me of an experiment Bill Nye did. He wore a pair of goggles that flipped his vision upside-down. After a few days (I think) of headaches he completely got used to it and was able to function normally with it upside down. I think I remember him saying that it didn't seem upside down to him, and when they took off the goggles at the end the world seemed upside down again. The really fascinating part was that there wasn't a moment of "flipping" during the experiment: the upside-down image became his expected norm. In other words, the optic nerves don't correspond directly to some raster format where they're tied directly into our Video In consciousness jack. They're interpreted as needed and presented to our consciousness experience post-processing.
And the simple experiment didn't prove this but I suspect that there's no relative relation between optic nerves either. Like they're just haphazardly bundled together and shipped off to the brain, and the brain's processing adaptively grows to sort and make sense of the random signals. So I suspect that if you sever the optic nerve and connect the nerves randomly your brain will eventually be able to just interpret the new signals as the norm like Bill Nye did.
The reason I suspect that is because of the really cool electronic sensing technology that's been developed in the last few decades. I think I've read something like they can just send signals into nerves (obviously with sensible modulation/frequency/amplitude) and make the signals vary in some way based on the external world and after awhile patients are able to sense it naturally. Like audio signals to the eardrums and such.
Oh yeah I found it. This. By just shocking areas of the tongue a blind patient can develop a kind of sight. If the top left pixel is dark you shock the top left area, etc. Again, I think that you could completely mix up all of the inputs and after awhile it would be perfectly natural.
Think of feeling with your hand. A priori you have no idea which nerves in that thick bundle of nerves correspond to a particular finger. But by observing and noticing that when you twitch a certain way a particular finger moves and when you touch something you get an input only on particular nerves you eventually build up an intuitive grasp of which nerve is which (handled transparently of course). The problem is complex and we see side effects all the time. I'm sure everyone's had the experience of being in a weird position with their arms or legs twisted up and you can't really tell which limb is which. You may experimentally try to move a particualar leg that you see and move the wrong one!
This whole field is fascinating
Something makes me suspicious... oh yeah:
I have no knowledge of which labs are trustworthy or whatever but that sentence demands skepticism
Well you would certainly have a very easily cleaned surface over a touch screen. Glass probably, coated with sapphire for extra strength? Just wipe it off with some windex.
What can't you do with touch? Just use it exactly as you would use a mouse. Make your widgets bigger and more pudgy-finger-friendly and you're good to go.
The problem is that with laptops/desktops the screen isn't really in a good position to accurately touch.
But I like the idea of getting rid of the persistent cursor. You just leave it lying somewhere on screen when you're not using it.. there's no reason to leave it sitting there, or have to navigate awkwardly between controls, when you can just touch.
I'm reminded of the PC vs console gaming argument about how mice are better because you can snap directly to a target instead of holding the control stick and having to wait as you pan around. Well touch vs mouse it's the same argument. With the mouse you have to start pushing your mouse across the mousepad, wait for it to reach its destination, and then fire. With touch you just tap the spot
Obviously touch would never work for FPS controls but desktop controls are similar.. "aiming" at the little 5-pixel high link may be harder than it has to be
wat. You were going on about how employers have nothing to do with it, so I informed you that I was talking about the story summary.
Obviously. Sort of how like the taxpayers provide 13 years (K-12 in maryland at least) of free education to every person -working and non working- in the United States. Think about it: every weekday, most months, for 13 years almost every American child has to be supervised and taught by college-educated adults for 6 hours. Where are we going to get all of that money?! Oh yeah, we've been doing it in every state for decades, and it works. And by the way, wealthy taxpayers probably paid more for your education than you did.
Basically. Is there a Godwin's Law for communism references? Look, not everything in communism is evil and scary. Particularly, socialized education and healthcare have strongly taken root in western Europe. In Finland the government will pay your full tuition, pay your rent while you're a student, and give you a monthly stipend of 200 euros (so you don't have to juggle work and study), as well as give you access to a low-interest loan. My sociology textbook says that in Denmark citizens have free college education, free healthcare, and five weeks of paid vacation leave paid for by the government. "People who lose their jobs receive about 90 percent of their prior income from the government for up to four years." Also if you have a baby the government will pay for leave for both the mother and the father. Canada has very cheap higher education and subsidized healthcare. These are all western, capitalistic societies.
It doesn't have to be that way. Someone pays for quality care now (and still turns a profit) so the money exists.
Like you said, the only money the state has is that which it collected from taxpayers. So get urban Americans out of their gas guzzlers and tax the savings out of their pockets.
Tell that to Massachusetts, where you're required by law to carry health insurance.
This is a variable that can be adjusted. I'm sure whatever metric private insurance companies currently use would be fine.
OK, that's an idea. Wait, is this an argument against me, or are you just thinking out loud
Re-read the summary:
Also, health care should be entirely funded by the state. It's unbelievable that people can't get medical treatment because they can't afford it. Charge for premium treatments (braces, liposuction, breast enhancement) at a full rate.
Originally we had no insurance and people who needed care were hit with massive bills. So people started buying insurance so that other people will pay part of their medical expenses in an emergency. So is it really that much of a leap to charge everyone and extend coverage to everyone, instead of charging a some people and only extending coverage to some people?
Yes obviously we can't even come close to affording it, but that's because we're wasting money elsewhere. Heathcare is a priority up there with keeping the roads open and keeping cops on patrol: it's (IMO) non-negotiable. We pay for healthcare and then we ask if we can afford things like everyone owning a car instead of mass transit, paying for 50% of the world's military spending, and saving America's pathetic auto industry.
Part of Obama's health care reform plan is to make it illegal for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition. Unbelievable that it's currently legal
So unless employers start asking for employees' complete medical history, the submitter's fears would be baseless