They don't have the profit to invest in new technologies. If you think these hybrids are earning honda and toyota a bundle, think again. They will have to sell a lot of them, with very little competition, in order to make their investment back. Meanwhile the American autos are just trying to stay in business.
One reason the electric drive train will win big is the modular assembly. Instead of the engine being intricately combined with the transmission and the axle, your engine/generator sits in a compartment with a plug that can be easily removed for repairs, in just a few minutes instead of the hours it takes to remove a conventional automobile engine.
The entire car can be built in this modular format, with 4 separate wheel assemblies. Motor replacement would essentially be like replacing the brake rotor. The heavy wiring in the middle of the car would never need to be replaced, or maintained, unless you were hit by lightning.
No, my criticism is of the Comcast DVR cable box... Tivo is more user friendly in my experience, but I own the Comcast DVR, so I wouldn't know what you're talking about with the hidden feature.
I doubt Tivo would infest the software with ads like Comcast has done. Comcast can do whatever they want because they're a damn monopoly, Tivo has to fight for customer loyalty.
I'll tell you how we operate at my work. Our company is small, 5 employees, so we actually get our paychecks and group health insurance from a company that technically "employs" thousands of people in our area, but those people all work for small businesses. You see how that works? They write the checks, provide these small businesses with a large group policy. Same as the bank.
So you're not out of luck, although the last company I worked for employed a grand total of 3 employees, the owner and two subordinates including myself. The owner had a health savings account, they paid for their own health care, and a high deductible health plan. For us, they just gave a $250/month bonus to each of us for individual health insurance.
A common problem here is someone who is uninsured has a heart attack, or a motorcycle accident, or something, and ends up with $100,000 in bills. In this case, they lose their house and declare bankruptcy. It is sad, but that is why this is such a hot issue. Politicians love sad stories. My old neighbor lost his house because of a motorcycle accident, and if you ask me, he only had himself to blame. He thought he was young and healthy and didn't need health insurance.
The reboot is triggered by Comcast, software updates, technical support fixes, etc.
It is unresponsive when it is deleting something. Cheap hardware is the main cause of this. Software won't be able to fix it.
Your programs get interrupted by the emergency broadcast system, Amber alerts and what not. This is something they need to work around. The emergency broadcasts could pop up a software alert, it doesn't have to interrupt programming with the on-demand capabilities. That way you wouldn't have to watch the same alert over and over every 15 minutes of your show. This issue is no better with Tivo, Tivo just doesn't tell you that 3 minutes of your show is an emergency broadcast.
Now all the ads that they keep adding to the guide, and the way they abbreviate show titles while they haven't yet used HALF the length of the guide entry, now that is stupid software problems. Having to press 3 numbers (002) to change the channel, while the "enter" button does nothing, now that is stupid. I liked being able to press "2" and sit and wait for it to change the channel.
No, that guide you're using isn't Microsoft, it's probably the same one I have to use, where they recently released an update that replaced one of the lines of programming in the guide with an ad bar that you're forced to scroll over now.
You have it backward. Yeah I hate that software too, I wish I could use the MS software. I guess they're making more ad revenue with this guideworks crap.
If you can't get individual coverage, you go with a group policy. Most people go through their employer, who pays for a portion of it. My bank offers a group policy too, the prices may be higher, maybe as much as twice as much. $500 is what my aunt pays for her group policy.
George Bush pushed something called a health savings account, which is an attractive option for older people. It works like a retirement account. If you decide you don't care, then you're stuck with "Medicare", which is a free government program, comparable to your national health care. It also requires a high deductible catastrophic health insurance plan, which are roughly half as much as a low deductible (HMO) health plan.
Why do you even mention buy in bulk? That is misleading. They don't get a damn bulk discount. They demand whatever price they want. It is monopolistic, by our standards. If we did the same price fixing in the United States, those drugs simply would not exist, nobody would have them. You seem to understand the situation, there is no "bulk discount".
Pharmaceutical companies aren't ripping everyone off, you can get generic drugs for pennies in this country. The length of a patent is the key to all of this, and that is what they lobby for. The pharmaceutical companies will charge the price they need to in order to recover R&D costs before their patent expires. If you eliminate patents, you eliminate R&D (we're talking billions of dollars every year in R&D)
No other country comes anywhere close to the United States for charity health care, either. We do more for third world countries than all of you combined.
We develop more new drugs than all of you combined. (and we pay 2-3x more for our own drugs than you guys because your national health care systems are monopolistic)
You know when someone goes into an emergency room for health care we bill them, no credit check or anything. They get the treatment they need. Nobody dies, and they don't have to pay. It is absorbed in my health care costs.
We financed the human genome project, and share it for free with the rest of the world. This has and will lead to cures for many diseases.
Entrepreneurs like Bill Gates do more than anybody else on earth to combat AIDS and malaria in Africa.
This gross oversimplification of American values is ridiculous. You see what you want to see.
My health care costs $95 per month, my employer doesn't pay a cent. What's that, 70 euros? 40 pounds? I pay roughly 20% in federal income tax, and I make $70k per year. Compare that with your figures. I went to the doctor just today, made the appointment YESTERDAY, quick turnaround. I got a steroid shot in my wrist for carpal tunnel, which wasn't applied to my deductible.
My health care plan pays for any drugs I can use, 50% of the cost of brand new drugs that your national health care plan doesn't even provide. Generic drugs are practically free.
I could go on...
On the drug issue alone, your national health care plan won't pay for the most advanced drugs, isn't that cold and inhumane? Your life is not worth $10,000/year in drugs, here's a bottle of IB800 to make your death less painful.
The problem with a national health care system is greed. If you have free health care you'll go to the doc for the stupidest shit, like a cold, or because your back hurts, or you hear a funny clicking sound when you swallow, so your perfectly healthy ass ends up draining thousands of dollars from the system.
It's not necessarily that the population hates us, it is that the population is in fear of their life. If they decide one day that they are going to help the Americans, who do they call, and how do they know the person they call is not a spy who's going to kill them and their family?
I think that's the main problem, Iraqi's have had their own will beaten and frightened from them by the last regime. I don't think I fully understand the scope of their existence, but I am pretty sure this has something to do with it.
I heard a story from a soldier. Toward the beginning of the conflict there was a lot of work to be done, like moving trash piled up on the city streets, so the army was hiring independent Iraqi contractors to do the work. Three times, they hired a man, who would hire his own local Iraqi subordinates, and for each contractor a van full of terrorists drove into the mans house and killed him and his family for working with Americans. What do you do about that?
I heard that eventually they figured out that someone was stealing copies of the army's payroll. Paying in cash under the table was eventually used, which turned into a political spectacle, you know, all the headline news stories about truck loads of cash being sent into Iraq.
I have very little faith in our government, I see political partisanship destroying everything it touches, yet it's only a fraction of the reason this conflict hasn't come to an end yet.
If Youtube can restrict what gets posted based on copyright law, then google can restrict who uses what keywords. The process would be the same, the company wishing to enforce their trademark would just have to go through some trouble to prove that they own the trademark.
Yeah all-male, that's what I was going to say. The worst you get is a fist fight in space, which wouldn't be anywhere near as bad as some chick breaking down. A broken woman is like an angry rattlesnake. You never know who their next target is.
A wiki will go down in history as a most useful collaboration device. I think these professors who're against it are prudish and they are on the wrong side of this argument. It raises the more important question, is it ok to copy someone elses summary and use it as your own? Wikipedia is almost always in perfect report form.
You're the one who lives in a world of fan-boys, dude. I use Windows for my desktop, but I get most of my work done in a simple SSH terminal to a linux server. I've got Cygwin/X installed when I want to run a GUI app from my linux server on my windows box. The main reason I stick with Windows is because of the number of applications for it, and interoperability with the people I do business with.
I honestly have no clue why anybody would use OSX. I'm waiting for OSX to become the beast it set out to be, and Steve Jobs is a friggin genius and I have no doubt he will ultimately succeed, but his business tactics say nothing about the strength of OSX as an operating system. He has successfully built a community of OSX zealots and they will carry his OS to success. But I'm waiting for the day to come when OSX becomes a useful tool to me. Right now it is nothing more than an over-hyped, glorified linux distro. Honestly, I think I'd rather use fedora than OSX.
Why not just use Linux, if that's what you like so much about OSX? Is anybody really in love with AQUA? I find the OSX aqua interface to be a piece of trash, like the windows interface but more sparkly and whiz-bang. The only thing that appeals to me about OSX is that it's built on top of BSD.
Another thing; Apple has yet to release a mac convertible tablet. Has nobody realized how useful the tablet pc's are? I do some rapid, rapid prototyping using a stylus drawing right over my web browser, in conferences and meetings. Apple has no way to do that, and for the price of a powerbook you could get an IBM lenovo X60, oh sure you don't get the magnetic wire or the light-up keypad, but you know what? I've never had a problem with normal DC plugs, and I don't need to look at the keyboard to type!
And you know what else? I have a friend who bought a microsoft Zune and showed it to me. That thing is nice! For the same price you get a bigger screen, wifi, more interoperability, but you don't get the little rotaty/swirly/spinny patented interface on thee ipod. You know what? I decided that interface sucks. I'd rather just use the clicky circle interface the Zune has.
I'm tired of this Apple zealotry going on without anybody getting called on it. There is nothing all that special about OSX.
It has nothing to do with a smelly atmosphere, they pay the new guys more and won't give the old-timers a raise as readily. My dad was laid off after about the same time as you, he had a 15 year service pin, but when it came crunch time he got the axe because his job had become obsolete, nothing to do with outsourcing. In my experience there is a sweet spot for IT technicians; between 3 and 5 years you go find something better and you'll be better off in the long run.
You have no clue dude. Any effort to "protect" the USA from outsourcing is going to RUIN us. That would be selling out, we all do pretty well for a while as our entire economy slowly turns into waste and our workers become non-competitive.
I have no problem competing with the people in India for jobs.
France is not protecting it's middle class, it is "protecting" the majority of voters who would sit on their asses all day and do nothing. The same pandering goes on in the United States, in some parts, and it is equally destructive. You have no appreciation for the entrepreneurial spirit, all you see is greed.
Staying at the same job for 17 years, especially an IT job, is a bad idea. If it wasn't offshoring that got you it would have been something. Out with the old, in with the new.
This is advice my Dad gave to me after he experienced something similar to you. "Son, don't stay at the same job too long".
I was telling my coworkers that if I ruled the world, I would make IE7 illegal. Microsoft has really pulled a fast one on EVERYONE IN THE WORLD. It has gotten so bad... they just get worse and worse.
My main gripe right now is that IE7 was forced onto many people's computers as an automatic update, and it has broken nearly every single website I have put into production, and now I have to go back and fix rendering/scripting issues that only affect IE7, and the more of these I fix, the more obvious to me how lousy this browser is, but hell what can you do? 25% of the visitors are using it now. It also has one of the most ridiculous interfaces of any browser ever. I was actually looking forward to it, i figured (for some reason) that it would improve upon IE6, but it hasn't.
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Uh, flying cars are scheduled to arrive any day now..... yep, any day now...
They don't have the profit to invest in new technologies. If you think these hybrids are earning honda and toyota a bundle, think again. They will have to sell a lot of them, with very little competition, in order to make their investment back. Meanwhile the American autos are just trying to stay in business.
One reason the electric drive train will win big is the modular assembly. Instead of the engine being intricately combined with the transmission and the axle, your engine/generator sits in a compartment with a plug that can be easily removed for repairs, in just a few minutes instead of the hours it takes to remove a conventional automobile engine.
The entire car can be built in this modular format, with 4 separate wheel assemblies. Motor replacement would essentially be like replacing the brake rotor. The heavy wiring in the middle of the car would never need to be replaced, or maintained, unless you were hit by lightning.
No, my criticism is of the Comcast DVR cable box... Tivo is more user friendly in my experience, but I own the Comcast DVR, so I wouldn't know what you're talking about with the hidden feature.
I doubt Tivo would infest the software with ads like Comcast has done. Comcast can do whatever they want because they're a damn monopoly, Tivo has to fight for customer loyalty.
I'll tell you how we operate at my work. Our company is small, 5 employees, so we actually get our paychecks and group health insurance from a company that technically "employs" thousands of people in our area, but those people all work for small businesses. You see how that works? They write the checks, provide these small businesses with a large group policy. Same as the bank.
So you're not out of luck, although the last company I worked for employed a grand total of 3 employees, the owner and two subordinates including myself. The owner had a health savings account, they paid for their own health care, and a high deductible health plan. For us, they just gave a $250/month bonus to each of us for individual health insurance.
A common problem here is someone who is uninsured has a heart attack, or a motorcycle accident, or something, and ends up with $100,000 in bills. In this case, they lose their house and declare bankruptcy. It is sad, but that is why this is such a hot issue. Politicians love sad stories. My old neighbor lost his house because of a motorcycle accident, and if you ask me, he only had himself to blame. He thought he was young and healthy and didn't need health insurance.
The reboot is triggered by Comcast, software updates, technical support fixes, etc. It is unresponsive when it is deleting something. Cheap hardware is the main cause of this. Software won't be able to fix it. Your programs get interrupted by the emergency broadcast system, Amber alerts and what not. This is something they need to work around. The emergency broadcasts could pop up a software alert, it doesn't have to interrupt programming with the on-demand capabilities. That way you wouldn't have to watch the same alert over and over every 15 minutes of your show. This issue is no better with Tivo, Tivo just doesn't tell you that 3 minutes of your show is an emergency broadcast. Now all the ads that they keep adding to the guide, and the way they abbreviate show titles while they haven't yet used HALF the length of the guide entry, now that is stupid software problems. Having to press 3 numbers (002) to change the channel, while the "enter" button does nothing, now that is stupid. I liked being able to press "2" and sit and wait for it to change the channel.
No, that guide you're using isn't Microsoft, it's probably the same one I have to use, where they recently released an update that replaced one of the lines of programming in the guide with an ad bar that you're forced to scroll over now. You have it backward. Yeah I hate that software too, I wish I could use the MS software. I guess they're making more ad revenue with this guideworks crap.
If you can't get individual coverage, you go with a group policy. Most people go through their employer, who pays for a portion of it. My bank offers a group policy too, the prices may be higher, maybe as much as twice as much. $500 is what my aunt pays for her group policy. George Bush pushed something called a health savings account, which is an attractive option for older people. It works like a retirement account. If you decide you don't care, then you're stuck with "Medicare", which is a free government program, comparable to your national health care. It also requires a high deductible catastrophic health insurance plan, which are roughly half as much as a low deductible (HMO) health plan.
Why do you even mention buy in bulk? That is misleading. They don't get a damn bulk discount. They demand whatever price they want. It is monopolistic, by our standards. If we did the same price fixing in the United States, those drugs simply would not exist, nobody would have them. You seem to understand the situation, there is no "bulk discount".
Pharmaceutical companies aren't ripping everyone off, you can get generic drugs for pennies in this country. The length of a patent is the key to all of this, and that is what they lobby for. The pharmaceutical companies will charge the price they need to in order to recover R&D costs before their patent expires. If you eliminate patents, you eliminate R&D (we're talking billions of dollars every year in R&D)
No other country comes anywhere close to the United States for charity health care, either. We do more for third world countries than all of you combined.
We develop more new drugs than all of you combined. (and we pay 2-3x more for our own drugs than you guys because your national health care systems are monopolistic)
You know when someone goes into an emergency room for health care we bill them, no credit check or anything. They get the treatment they need. Nobody dies, and they don't have to pay. It is absorbed in my health care costs.
We financed the human genome project, and share it for free with the rest of the world. This has and will lead to cures for many diseases.
Entrepreneurs like Bill Gates do more than anybody else on earth to combat AIDS and malaria in Africa.
This gross oversimplification of American values is ridiculous. You see what you want to see.
My health care costs $95 per month, my employer doesn't pay a cent. What's that, 70 euros? 40 pounds? I pay roughly 20% in federal income tax, and I make $70k per year. Compare that with your figures. I went to the doctor just today, made the appointment YESTERDAY, quick turnaround. I got a steroid shot in my wrist for carpal tunnel, which wasn't applied to my deductible.
My health care plan pays for any drugs I can use, 50% of the cost of brand new drugs that your national health care plan doesn't even provide. Generic drugs are practically free.
I could go on...
On the drug issue alone, your national health care plan won't pay for the most advanced drugs, isn't that cold and inhumane? Your life is not worth $10,000/year in drugs, here's a bottle of IB800 to make your death less painful.
The problem with a national health care system is greed. If you have free health care you'll go to the doc for the stupidest shit, like a cold, or because your back hurts, or you hear a funny clicking sound when you swallow, so your perfectly healthy ass ends up draining thousands of dollars from the system.
It's not necessarily that the population hates us, it is that the population is in fear of their life. If they decide one day that they are going to help the Americans, who do they call, and how do they know the person they call is not a spy who's going to kill them and their family? I think that's the main problem, Iraqi's have had their own will beaten and frightened from them by the last regime. I don't think I fully understand the scope of their existence, but I am pretty sure this has something to do with it. I heard a story from a soldier. Toward the beginning of the conflict there was a lot of work to be done, like moving trash piled up on the city streets, so the army was hiring independent Iraqi contractors to do the work. Three times, they hired a man, who would hire his own local Iraqi subordinates, and for each contractor a van full of terrorists drove into the mans house and killed him and his family for working with Americans. What do you do about that? I heard that eventually they figured out that someone was stealing copies of the army's payroll. Paying in cash under the table was eventually used, which turned into a political spectacle, you know, all the headline news stories about truck loads of cash being sent into Iraq. I have very little faith in our government, I see political partisanship destroying everything it touches, yet it's only a fraction of the reason this conflict hasn't come to an end yet.
I think the business interests involved in this want to see to it that you're modded down.
Yeah this GD/Perl stuff is old news, I use flash for charts, fusion charts.
If Youtube can restrict what gets posted based on copyright law, then google can restrict who uses what keywords. The process would be the same, the company wishing to enforce their trademark would just have to go through some trouble to prove that they own the trademark.
hahahahahaha, now there's a mission killer. Rum in outer space. "Shriiiiit there is vomit in the CO2 schrubber! What we do!"
Yeah all-male, that's what I was going to say. The worst you get is a fist fight in space, which wouldn't be anywhere near as bad as some chick breaking down. A broken woman is like an angry rattlesnake. You never know who their next target is.
A wiki will go down in history as a most useful collaboration device. I think these professors who're against it are prudish and they are on the wrong side of this argument. It raises the more important question, is it ok to copy someone elses summary and use it as your own? Wikipedia is almost always in perfect report form.
You're the one who lives in a world of fan-boys, dude. I use Windows for my desktop, but I get most of my work done in a simple SSH terminal to a linux server. I've got Cygwin/X installed when I want to run a GUI app from my linux server on my windows box. The main reason I stick with Windows is because of the number of applications for it, and interoperability with the people I do business with. I honestly have no clue why anybody would use OSX. I'm waiting for OSX to become the beast it set out to be, and Steve Jobs is a friggin genius and I have no doubt he will ultimately succeed, but his business tactics say nothing about the strength of OSX as an operating system. He has successfully built a community of OSX zealots and they will carry his OS to success. But I'm waiting for the day to come when OSX becomes a useful tool to me. Right now it is nothing more than an over-hyped, glorified linux distro. Honestly, I think I'd rather use fedora than OSX. Why not just use Linux, if that's what you like so much about OSX? Is anybody really in love with AQUA? I find the OSX aqua interface to be a piece of trash, like the windows interface but more sparkly and whiz-bang. The only thing that appeals to me about OSX is that it's built on top of BSD. Another thing; Apple has yet to release a mac convertible tablet. Has nobody realized how useful the tablet pc's are? I do some rapid, rapid prototyping using a stylus drawing right over my web browser, in conferences and meetings. Apple has no way to do that, and for the price of a powerbook you could get an IBM lenovo X60, oh sure you don't get the magnetic wire or the light-up keypad, but you know what? I've never had a problem with normal DC plugs, and I don't need to look at the keyboard to type! And you know what else? I have a friend who bought a microsoft Zune and showed it to me. That thing is nice! For the same price you get a bigger screen, wifi, more interoperability, but you don't get the little rotaty/swirly/spinny patented interface on thee ipod. You know what? I decided that interface sucks. I'd rather just use the clicky circle interface the Zune has. I'm tired of this Apple zealotry going on without anybody getting called on it. There is nothing all that special about OSX.
It has nothing to do with a smelly atmosphere, they pay the new guys more and won't give the old-timers a raise as readily. My dad was laid off after about the same time as you, he had a 15 year service pin, but when it came crunch time he got the axe because his job had become obsolete, nothing to do with outsourcing. In my experience there is a sweet spot for IT technicians; between 3 and 5 years you go find something better and you'll be better off in the long run.
You have no clue dude. Any effort to "protect" the USA from outsourcing is going to RUIN us. That would be selling out, we all do pretty well for a while as our entire economy slowly turns into waste and our workers become non-competitive.
I have no problem competing with the people in India for jobs.
France is not protecting it's middle class, it is "protecting" the majority of voters who would sit on their asses all day and do nothing. The same pandering goes on in the United States, in some parts, and it is equally destructive. You have no appreciation for the entrepreneurial spirit, all you see is greed.
Staying at the same job for 17 years, especially an IT job, is a bad idea. If it wasn't offshoring that got you it would have been something. Out with the old, in with the new.
This is advice my Dad gave to me after he experienced something similar to you. "Son, don't stay at the same job too long".
Exactly what I thought when I first saw it... worthless piece of flash wizardry.
I was telling my coworkers that if I ruled the world, I would make IE7 illegal. Microsoft has really pulled a fast one on EVERYONE IN THE WORLD. It has gotten so bad... they just get worse and worse.
My main gripe right now is that IE7 was forced onto many people's computers as an automatic update, and it has broken nearly every single website I have put into production, and now I have to go back and fix rendering/scripting issues that only affect IE7, and the more of these I fix, the more obvious to me how lousy this browser is, but hell what can you do? 25% of the visitors are using it now. It also has one of the most ridiculous interfaces of any browser ever. I was actually looking forward to it, i figured (for some reason) that it would improve upon IE6, but it hasn't.
Mark Cuban is a moron. He's one of those people who accidentally gets rich and thinks he's larger than life.