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Comment Re:Best care money can buy helps (Score 1) 495

I was kind of interested in an absolute dollar figure for your wifes total care, including medico co-payments, insurance rates and out-of-pocket expenses. Percentages are less than useless when neither you nor I know what the other earns or our respective tax threshholds. The injury was a minor fracture in my wrist, and I wass able to deal with the pain as I had only 6 days left on my contract before I flew home. It wasn't pretty, but it worked. Also, there may be some confusion with semantics - where I'm from if you are injured you go to the hospital/GP and THEY will asses what level of care you need. Whats the difference between emergency care, urgent care or other beside price bracket? (BTW, I'm glad your Missus is on the mend)

Comment Re:Best care money can buy helps (Score 1) 495

This is false. You simply haven't yet received an unfavorable ruling from NICE.

Huh? Almost the entirety of "unfavourable" rulings are because either the drug doesn't work or won't be suitable for that particular patients issues. NICE is generally accepted as being cruel to be kind, true, but at least they try to make decision based on patients needs, not whether or not a pharma company wants to pad it's bottom line with more ineffective drugs. http://www.hsj.co.uk/legaJ-briefing-nice-rulings/54290.article

Comment Re:Best care money can buy helps (Score 1) 495

She was pulling your leg. About the only issue to deal with when using NHS is a wait. The reason "Wealthy" Canadians pay the money to be treated in the US, as has been said many times in this discussion, is mostly to either a) avoid any waiting times, or b) some people equate cost with quality - so the more expensive option MUST somehow be better.

Comment Re:Best care money can buy helps (Score 1) 495

As though people don't die outside the US. Talk about confirmation bias at work.

Who knows? Maybe in some other country, they would have decided that she wasn't worth saving.

Youre hypocrisy is showing. How much did that care cost? If this argument is going to be fought with one anecote after another, I could tell an almost identical story about my mother here in Australia - however she received top-notch care for 6 years before the cancer was completely removed, all for a total cost of nothing. And that includes her medications and hospital stays. I recently spent a few months working in the US and heard stories like yours - but they were far outweighed by the multitude who receive less-than-ideal care, and pay so much it bankrupts them. I suffered a small injury while working there, and my boss thought it might be prudent to go to the hospital. After being told how much it was going to cost simply for an x-ray and 10 minutes with a doctor I balked and waited a week until I got home. The price the US hospital was going to charge me with my traveller's insurance? $2000. Cost at home? You guessed it. Nada. Explain to me how I would have "got what I paid for" with a system that is padded so drastically to fabricate costs and inflate the cost of healthcare so insurance companies continue making money hand over fist?

Comment Re:I already got a letter (Score 1) 108

I think you are dead right - and in preperation for this I (and a few other security-savvy friends) are trying to build a distributed collection of media - one friend is collating and collecting movies, another software, myself music. I'm already up to about 9TB of music alone, all full albums, id3 tagged, named and all above 256 quality - most of it stuff I would never listen to by choice. This way when the ISP's/corps get all trigger happy at least we have a great basis for a useful sneakernet/darknet.

Apple iPhone Dissected 338

Conch writes "Only hours after the launch, the Apple iPhone has been dissected. The good folks at AnandTech violated one of the first iPhones to still our curiosity about whats inside the aluminum shell. 'Please note that we're doing this so you are not tempted to on your recent $500/$600 expenditure, while it is quite possible to take apart using easy to find tools we'd recommend against it as it will undoubtedly void your warranty and will most likely mar up the beautiful gadget's exterior.'"
Biotech

Submission + - Open-Source Biology? (nybooks.com)

kripkenstein writes: In an interesting article by the physicist Freeman Dyson, he discusses the history and future of biology in terms that many Slashdotters would be familiar with,

[We can speculate about] a golden age [...] when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information [...] Evolution could be rapid, as new chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously by cells of different kinds working in parallel and then reassembled in a single cell by horizontal gene transfer.

But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species [...] reserving their intellectual property for their own private use. With their superior efficiency, the bacteria continued to prosper and to evolve separately, while the rest of the community continued its communal life. [...] And so it went on, until nothing was left of the community and all life was divided into species.

[This period] has lasted for two or three billion years. It probably slowed down the pace of evolution considerably.

[But] now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient [...] practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when [...] the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented.
Certainly an unexpected context in which to see Open Source and Bill Gates mentioned in. Are biology and software more similar than we might think? And if so, what does the history of biology portend for the longevity of Microsoft's dominance?

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