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Comment Re:also: more doctors, less pay, more compassion. (Score 2, Insightful) 584

by Emunix (#32639396) Attached to: What US Health Care Needs

You say there's no optimal command style solution to health care...

The trouble with applying market economics to health care like this is that markets achieve maximum efficiency through consumers acting as -rational- actors seeking to maximize value. When it comes to health care, people are not terribly rational and not terribly good as assigning value.

Sometimes, it's a matter of information. (Turns out, there might be something in that decade of schooling for doctors.) Sometimes, it's a matter of emotion... I mean, what wouldn't you pay to save your life? What about your arm? Or your vision? (I'd pay damn near anything... I'm just glad I live somewhere where I won't be paying personally.)
Security

Man Arrested For Taking Photo of Open ATM 1232

Posted by kdawson from the i-will-tackle-you dept.
net_shaman writes in with word of a Seattle man who was arrested for taking a photo of an ATM being serviced. "Today I was shopping at the downtown Seattle REI. I was about to buy a Thule hitch mount bike rack. They were out of the piece that locks the bike rack into the hitch. So I was in the customer service line to special order one. It was a long line and while I was waiting, I saw two of guys (employees of Loomis, as I later learned) refilling the ATM. I walked over and took a picture with my iPhone of them and more interestingly of the open ATM. I took the picture because I'm fascinated by the insides of things that we don't normally get to see. ... That was when Officer GE Abed (#6270) spun me around and put handcuffs on me."
Businesses

Submission + - Deepwater sunk perhaps with youtube help

Submitted by
anagama
anagama writes: "You may recall some time ago a slashdot topic about Mike DeKort, an engineer from Lockheed Martin working on the Coast Guard's Deepwater project (basically, construction of new ships). He released a whistleblower video on Youtube outlining problems and cover up/apathy related to the ships under construction. Well, in the news today, looks like the Coast Guard is taking over the project and ending its contract with Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman. Perhaps the (digital) pen is mightier than the sword (manufacturer)."
Databases

Submission + - MySQL paper on Port25

Submitted by
einhverfr
einhverfr writes: "Microsoft's has recently published a primer for MySQL on Windows. Although the title suggest that it is mostly an installation guide, it does cover table types, and common gotchas. It is nice to see more coverage of open source software from Microsoft, but it does raise the question of where the organization is going regarding open source. What do people think?"
Biotech

Submission + - CPR not as effective as chest compressions alone

Submitted by
patiwat
patiwat writes: "A Japanese study has found that people suffering from cardiac arrest were more likely to recover without brain damage if rescuers focused on chest compressions rather than on rescue breaths, and some experts advised dropping the mouth-to-mouth part of CPR altogether. Interrupting chest compression to perform mouth-to-mouth ventilation might do more harm than good if blood flow to the heart was not properly re-established, a researcher from Tokyo's Surugadai Nihon University Hospital said. Also, people could be too squeamish to lock lips with a stranger, whereas more might be prepared to attempt hands-only resuscitation, noted the study published in the current issue of The Lancet. Dr Gordon Ewy, the chief of cardiology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, wrote in the same journal that the results "should lead to a prompt interim revision of the guidelines for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest." More than 300,000 Americans die from cardiac arrest each year. Roughly 9 out of 10 cardiac arrest victims die before they get to a hospital — partly because they do not get CPR."
Announcements

Submission + - Cingular to Refund $18.5M in California

Submitted by YogaFlame
YogaFlame writes: Cingular Wireless will refund $18.5 million to thousands of former California customers who were penalized for canceling their mobile phone service because they had trouble making and receiving calls. The settlement announced Thursday with the California Public Utilities Commission ends a lengthy battle revolving around Cingular's treatment of dissatisfied subscribers from January 2000 through April 2002.
Enlightenment

Submission + - why exercise boosts brainpower

Submitted by aditi
aditi writes: CNN reports that exercise boosts brainpower by building new brain cells in a brain region linked with memory and memory loss.
Tests on mice showed they grew new brain cells in a brain region called the dentate gyrus, a part of the hippocampus that is known to be affected in the age-related memory decline that begins around age 30 for most humans.Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging scans to help document the process in mice — and then used MRIs to look at the brains of people before and after exercise.They found the same patterns, which suggests that people also grow new brain cells when they exercise.
Censorship

Submission + - Man Explodes Self In Casablanca Internet Cafe

Submitted by perlhacker14
perlhacker14 writes: A Moroccan Man with explosives on his body blew himself up in an Internet Cafe in Morocco after he was not allowed to look at terror websites. The man and his companion had entered late at night, seeking to see terrorist propaganda. The bombs were not intended for the cafe, but they did injure four other people there. Most likely the men were about to get "motivated" by terror sites, and then go cause harm to society, but were angered by the refusal to see the said sites.

1: "Man blows himself up in Internet cafe"

2: mail: perlhacker14@gmail.com
Music

Submission + - Another example of RIAA legal incompetence

Submitted by
UnknowingFool
UnknowingFool writes: "In another move of legal brillance, the RIAA asked for a default judgement on January 25th in the case of Atlantic vs Boggs "on the ground that Defendant has failed to appear or otherwise respond to the Complaint . . ." The court denied the motion because the defendant did appear before the court a month earlier on December 20. What makes the motion appear so boneheaded is that not that the RIAA lawyers seemingly forgot that the defendant appeared, it is that defendant, representing himself at the time, appeared in person before the court while the RIAA phoned in, a move that the court admonished. The transcript seems to show that judge is sympathetic to the defendant in the case.

The Court: You're not here looking at Mr. Boggs, but I doubt seriously he's doing this. . . these titles don't seem to go along with Mr. Boggs persona."
"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft XML fast-tracked despite complaints

Submitted by Lars Skovlund
Lars Skovlund writes: Groklaw reports that the Office XML standard is being put on the fast track in ISO despite the detailed complaints from national standards bodies. The move seems to be the decision of one person, Lisa Rachjel, secretariat of the ISO Joint Technical Committee, according to a comment made by her.
Google

Submission + - Making Sense out of Census Data with Google Earth

Submitted by
mikemuch
mikemuch writes: "Irman Haque has developed a mashup of Google Earth with data from the U.S. Census Bureau, called gCensus. The app uses the XML format known as KML (Keyhole Markup Language), which can create shapes and colors on the maps displayed by GE. Haque had to build custom code libraries (which he's made available as open source) that could generate KML for the project. He also had to extract the relevant data from the highly counter-intuitive Census Bureau files and store them in a database that could handle geographic data. gCensus lets you do stuff like create colorful overlays on maps showing population ages, race, and family size distributions."
Microsoft

Submission + - NZ objects to Microsoft Open XML standard

Submitted by kumachan
kumachan writes: According to a Standards New Zealand spokesperson, the objection is that "the ISO [The International Organisation for Standardisation] has already developed a standard for XML open format [that is, Open Document] and the committee does not believe that there is a need for another standard, and that Microsoft's [standard] is in conflict with the existing one." http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/82AF97DEB BAFD057CC2572990006C14C
Software

Submission + - What 's going on at Apache?

Submitted by
nofactor
nofactor writes: "Every time i visit the apache.org website i see that they are hosting new projects. Apart from the famous HTTP server, the Apache Foundation now offers a full-text search engine (Lucene), a directory server (ApacheDS), the #1 open source spam filter (SpamAssassin), a database server (DB), a SVG toolkit (Batik), a network application infraestructure (Mina), a robust message broker (ActiveMQ), they are also working on a full-featured Java EE 5 server (Geronimo), etc. Wow, there seems to be an enormous ecosystem developing! Apart from the webserver, does anybody use these pieces of software? Are they production-ready, high quality packages? Will we be droping MySQL for DB in the future? OpenLDAP for ApacheDS? JBoss for Geronimo?"
Microsoft

Submission + - Bill Gates Technology Talk from 1989

Submitted by alphabetasigmagamma
alphabetasigmagamma writes: The Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo hosted a talk in 1989 with Bill Gates as the speaker. Recently this audio tape of the talk has been discovered by the Computer Science Club office and has since been digitized and posted on the Computer Science Club website at http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/ In this talk you get to hear Bill Gates in an awkward position at Microsoft, promoting the then soon to fail OS/2 operating system product while at the same time downtalking slightly the significance of Windows. This rare glimpse into Microsoft in its early days shows some of the predictions that Microsoft got right as well as got wrong (such as the memory allocation issues in MS-DOS). In addition, Bill Gates discusses how he sees the computer industry in the coming years.

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