Recent Posts
Then there's hospital admissions...
Bring a sick elderly parent or other family member into one hospital around here and it's interesting to see all the paperwork they try to get various family members (as many as possible) to sign. Supposedly so they have "permission" to provide treatment.
Sandwiched in the stack are forms that will make you personally liable for the full hospital bill, along with paragraphs you are asked to initial on regular (they tell you they're "routine") medical admission forms that obligate you to do the same. And they hit the family members right between the eyes with this as soon as they come in behind the ambulance - counting on them to be too upset and anxious to really look very closely at what they're signing.
And this is a hospital that "prides itself" (according to their ad copy) on both "respecting the patient's dignity" and "providing the best in care." They even have a "church" sounding name - and try to create the impression that they are owned and operated by a major religious diocese despite the fact they're actually fully owned by an HMO two states away.
I saw one poor family recently arrive at the ER with what looked like a 200 year old grandmother. A good dozen additional relatives showed up within the hour. As I sat there waiting to find out what was up with my own mother (who took a bad fall earlier) I watched as various "business office" and "hospital social worker" types zeroed in on adult family members whenever they noticed one standing alone and asked them to sign a paper "so they could treat" the old lady.
I saw them get about four different people to sign before I couldn't stand it any more. I went over and explained to them what the hospital was up to -and how nobody there needed to sign anything since their grandmother came in by ambulance and the EMTs had already signed her in. And furthermore, the hospital (by law) had to render emergency treatment regardless of their signatures, or lack thereof.
Maybe they can't make that old lady liable if anything bad happened to her and she didn't make it. Or if she were uninsured as so many people increasingly are. But they certainly can (and will) hound all those people whose signatures they collected for her bill long after she's quit this mortal clay.-40hz (October 13, 2012, 12:29 PM)
While the experimenting itself may have been illegal, there were no laws that forced them to inform the public of what they were really doing. There were no "right to know" laws that covered secret government sponsored military testing of radioactive chemicals on large groups of private citizens, when they couldn't find any volunteers.
I never really seriously considered my mother's claims of secret govt. experiments involving spraying chemicals on low income urban areas in 1965, leading to the increase in the Newark, NJ area of certain birth defects around that time (especially ones involving the presence of extra or double organs), to be valid...till now. She claims that my being born with 3 kidneys may have been the result of these experiments. She told this story often, when I was growing up. I always thought her tin foil hat was highly polished with a mirror finish.
Maybe there is some truth to her claims. Of course that also leaves me wondering how she knew about it. Where did she get her info, if this was such a big secret that it didn't come to light till now?-app103 (October 13, 2012, 11:45 AM)
Did I mention that it is legal for the Australian government to deploy chemical weapons against the Australian people for absolutely no other reason than "they can"? And that it's illegal to prosecute anyone for that?-Renegade (October 13, 2012, 10:59 AM)
In the US, too.-app103 (October 13, 2012, 11:08 AM)
) The law is completely irrelevant to the govt. 
My next recollection was a hazy thought that I was having a bad dream. Maybe I'll wake up and get out of this mess, I mused. Gradually regaining consciousness, I realized this was no dream; it had really happened. That also was disturbing, because I could not have survived what had just happened. Therefore, I must be dead. Since I didn't feel bad–just a detached sense of euphoria–I decided being dead wasn't so bad after all. AS FULL AWARENESS took hold, I realized I was not dead, but had somehow separated from the airplane.
^^ Sounds like a very prejudicial book...-Renegade (October 13, 2012, 08:27 AM)
It's pretty much a dystopian sci-fi novel about capitalism run amuck.-app103 (October 13, 2012, 09:08 AM)
I'd hardly consider that theme as being fiction any more.
Besides, isn't dystopian pretty much becoming a near synonym for political science too?-40hz (October 13, 2012, 10:51 AM)
...The appropriate punishment, therefore, is that the IP owner should get to have the infringer's mind. Enforcers are sent out to remove the infringer's brain and central nervous system, carefully preserved...-app103 (October 13, 2012, 07:41 AM)
You should insist that people dont search
-
I took a guess
edit/ They lost one a while back didnt they
or it got demoted IIRC-tomos (October 12, 2012, 09:54 AM)
That looks cool! And I agree that when (not if!) you finish, you should seek an OEM deal-wraith808 (October 12, 2012, 07:54 AM)
3D Printer DRM Patent To Stop People Downloading a Car
DRM systems in the digital media world are nothing new and are utilized extensively in the music, movie and video games industries. Now, after applying four years ago, a company has this week obtained a patent for a DRM system that aims to stop future owners of 3D printers from printing whatever they like. The dream of downloading a new pair of sneakers or even a car might already be in jeopardy, before it’s even begun.
Meanwhile in Canada,
http://www.theglobea...bill/article4602164/
"John Ibbitson: The quiet death of the Internet surveillance bill ...
C-30, you will remember, would grant the federal government and law enforcement agencies the power to obtain information about individuals who are online without having to apply for a warrant."
Aka Canadian SOPA.
So we won another one. More attempts to follow.-TaoPhoenix (October 11, 2012, 04:14 PM)
A trader explained to us that this is a high frequency trading firm's way of baiting buyers interested in purchasing a specific stock and forcing them to reveal their positions. Once the potential buyer has put out their bid, the HFT cancels the order and the buyer is left out in the open. Usually, its a set-up for another trading strategy the HFT is about to execute.
And worse, kids are taught that tracking people is "ok" and that people that don't want to be tracked are "difficult" or "bad". *cough* operant conditioning *cough*-Renegade (October 11, 2012, 09:15 AM)
This is probably more a question for 40hz, but you said it. (Um...) If the object is to get people to dislike/distrust/avoid/turn on people that resist their tracking mechanisms ... Wouldn't that be avoidance conditioning?-Stoic Joker (October 11, 2012, 11:51 AM)
To kick things off, the team of researchers from Bonn have speculated that the problem with all simulations is that they're discretized: to model a physical phenomenon, the real world has to be represented by separate points in time and 3D space. Sure you can make the distance between those points reeeeeeally small—but you still have to have this kind of grid.
(Found a great deal on it from a UK distributor.) I think that's the point, they're not trying to stop it ... They're (the front line of the (for the children) first wave) trying to ease us into it. People will revolt (well they're supposed to anyway), children OTOH are taught to follow instruction from authority figures. So once you've been "registered" at school... It's already to late.-Stoic Joker (October 11, 2012, 06:57 AM)
- I couldn't really have foreseen that a US "free-market" prototype version of the Iranian model - i.e., along the line of this Six Strikes model - was already on the drawing-board.-IainB (October 11, 2012, 07:00 AM)
Vodka. Blergh. Some taste like nothing, some taste like the coat of your tongue after a long night. Vodka is for those who want to adulterate their good alcohol. I hate those people. They even drown good Czech beer in cheap coke.-Tuxman (July 02, 2012, 01:15 AM)
My condolences. As a follow-up to my OP, due to (good) circumstances in my life, I will be de-classifying myself as an alcoholic.
I've decided that I have relied on that particular crutch long enough and it's time to move on. For the near term I will be 100% dry/sober. In the future I may drink a beer or 3, but I will not allow myself to become "rely" on it again. I know why I did, I've made changes in my perspective and putting those into action.
For my fellow DC'ers who are not ready to make that change, I understand. Please be careful and keep an eye on things. I hear liver failure is a hell of a way to die.
Wishing us all well-Rover (October 06, 2012, 08:52 PM)
I'm prob a few months behind you.
I took a break from being a teetotaler for a bunch of years, but pretty soon I should slow down too.-TaoPhoenix (October 06, 2012, 09:48 PM)
Need some kind of medication to dull reality so that it's tolerable. Then wake up with a freshly rejuvenated spirit, knowing that there is a God, and he loves us, as is proved by the existence of alcohol, marijuana, magic mushrooms, and a few other good things in life. The copyright only goes away when it expires under statute - which (in the USA) is generally the lifetime of the creator plus 70 years. Or when something gets put into public domain, in which case it 'expires' immediately.-40hz (October 10, 2012, 10:26 AM)
