. If, as you say, 30% of the public wants a public option, then there should only be 30% of congressmen and representatives that support it and the rest should eat them alive and eject it from the bill. So far, that hasn't happened. That's how our system works. Again, I'm sorry you don't like it. Write your congressman or representative.
Why do you think it didn't pass before the August recess? Because a boatload of Democratic Congresspersons realized that they would lose the next election if they voted for the bill as it was.
The evidence suggests that a majority of Congresspersons would not vote in favor of the bill as it currently stands. Considering that the bill was not written at the time of the last election, I think it is disingenuous to suggest that the majority of the Congresspersons were elected for the express purpose of passing this bill.
But, of course, the smart ones aren't there to figure out the new technology because they got tired of living under the poverty level and decided to change careers.
You are obviously not in the U.S. because the average starting salary for public school teachers in the U.S. was more than $2,000 a year above the poverty line for a family of four in 2008-2009. Additionally, a quick review indicates that the average teacher's salary is well above the median per capita income for every state. Considering that teachers only work approximately nine months out of the year, teachers are certainly not underpaid.
Good teachers certainly deserve the salary they receive, but they are not underpaid.
If the American people decide they want a single payer system, so be it. I believe that it would be a terrible mistake. The American people currently don't want a single payer system. Additionally, they have recognized that the current "public option" is an attempt to get a single payer system in by the back door and appear to have decided that they don't want that either.
As far as I can tell, all of the support for the "public option" comes from people who want a single payer system but have recognized that the American people will not accept one at this time. The evidence I have seen suggests that somewhere around 50% of the population doesn't want the "public option", while only somewhere around 30% do want it. So who is the one "spitting in the face of democracy"?
So, the more government regulates business the more business seeks to influence government. You perceive that business has too much influence on government, your answer to reducing business influence is to increase government regulation of business?
The Republicans say that health care is not in trouble.
Well it probably isn't in "crisis", but there are difficulties with it.
The Republicans have made several suggestions designed to address some of the problems with the healthcare system in the U.S.. ( http://themoderatevoice.com/43992/the-real-republican-health-care-proposal/ ) This link contains links to specific legislation, so you can check the author's interpretation of those bills against the actual bills.
All of the Republican proposals seem to follow to a greater degree than any of the Democratic proposals I am aware of what I consider to be legislative best practices: keep it short and focused.
The Constitution was intended to limit the power of the federal government. By any reading of the Constitution that allows the federal government to control the funding for healthcare in the entire U.S., there are no limits on the power of the federal government. Of course there are many other things that the federal government has done that are, also, outside of any reading of the Constitution that limits the power of the federal government.
Could an American please explain to me why the majority of USA seems to oppose public healthcare?
I have no problem with public healthcare. I oppose all healthcare being supplied (paid for) by the government. There are several reasons. The first is that I get perfectly good health care under the current system and see no good reason to fix what isn't broken. A second reason I oppose government run healthcare is that all of the plans I have seen proposed look like they are intended to break any part of the system that would be resistant to government control. Finally, none of the plans seem to actually address those problems that I see with the health care system in the U.S..
the legislation currently on the tables doesn't rule out free-market alternatives. It gives 1 more choice to you.
Are you aware that Obama and several others have said in the past (before he was elected), that the "public option" is intended to be the first step to getting the U.S. to a single (government) payer health care system?
So, as far as I can tell, the people promoting the "public option" all wish to migrate the U.S. to a single payer system, but do not believe that that is politically possible, but I am supposed to take their word for it that it will be designed merely to compete with existing health insurance. The public option combined with the regulations that will be put on private health insurance will ensure that private health insurance will be unable to compete with the government option and so private insurance will then gradually wither away.
But the less the government is involved in economic decisions, the less corporations will feel the need to influence it. Seems you just can't win.
Let me get this straight, you think that corporations feeling less need to (and therefore putting less effort into it) influence the government is a bad thing?
Please explain.
. There's absolutely no reason why
a single entity had to / has to scan all the world's back catalog on their
own as fast as they can.
First, you make a good point. The danger of Google doing this is that once they have done it (no matter how poorly), if it is comprehensive, it significantly reduces the incentive for another organization to do it. This is compounded by the agreement that Google reached with the Authors' Guild, which makes it legally problematic for another organization to do it.
It doesn't mean that Google should not have done it, but it does mean that it is important for people to point out the shortcomings of Google's effort. By loudly complaining about the shortcomings of what Google has done here, the author(s) push Google to fix the problem and/or make it easier for someone to gain the funding to create an online collection that addresses their concerns.
So are you saying you can't hear this "privacy thing"? Or are you saying that it just doesn't "speak" to you?
I believe that you meant to say, "So, the whole privacy thing to me is kinda moot"?
I was merely pointing out that MS does not in fact want people to pay money for the OS every year, .
I am sorry that is not correct. I remember several articles from the 90s talking about MS trying to figure out how they could change the model from selling the OS license to one where people and businesses pay a licensing fee every year (with quotes from high level MS management supporting the premise of the article).
Now, MS has been unable to make that change, but they want to.
"Um, that "large group of people" happens to be the shareholders, who are rightly excluded from being held liable."
Sounds like you're a shareholder. Liability should fall even MORESO on the shareholders, it's their company, they'd better damned-well keep TIGHT reins on what the hell is happening and they'd better be FULLY INFORMED of every business decision. FULL LIABILITY. Hiring someone else to take care of your business, thus leaving you blissfully ignorant of what is happening as long as money rolls in, is not an excuse.
I take it you don't have a 401K? How about some other type of mutual fund? If you do, do you know what stocks are held by them?
The Pharma industry would love to destroy traditional placebo-based remedies as chicken soup,
Actually there have been several studies showing that chicken soup actually does have an effect on colds greater than the placebo effect. At least one of them actually explored what component of chicken soup improved the patient suffering from the common cold (although I don't remember what they suggested).
The people who should fear clouds are the people who want their data in their own hands, and don't trust third parties to handle it for then. It's that easy, and it's what will make SaaS fail.
We write SaaS, and almost all our customers ask us where we store the data, and if it we don't guarantee them it is in the country they are from they back off. And we write software for small firms only. Bigger clients want the software and the data stored in their own datacenter. They will not trust the "cloud" for that (and I wouldn't either). Not in the near future at least.
Don't forget the people who like to pay a one time fee for their computing costs rather than a monthly fee that will go up to make it (just barely) less expensive to stay than to migrate away.
Of course not, I have upgraded exactly one machine that I owned from one MS OS to another (Windows ME to Windows XP). Most people only upgrade their MS OS when they buy a new computer. The only question is what the reaction of the general public is to buying new machines with Windows 7 on them.
If you want to repeat history, by all means, crack down on the ELF and send them all to prison and beat up anyone in the group.
Then is 40 years or so, the protege of one of their leaders will be elected President of the U.S. just like happened with the Weathermen from the 1960's.
The effects of filesharing are negative for artists (certainly for pop artists), and especially for the "music industry". There can be little doubt about that.
Sorry, I think there can be significant doubt about that. There have been several studies that indicate that those who obtain music illegally (primarily by filesharing), also, buy more music than those from the same demographic who don't obtain music illegally.
Just from my personal experience this is supported. I have five or six friends who download a lot of copyrighted music without paying for it. They also buy quite a bit of music. I have never downloaded any music. I have also bought fewer than 10 CDs in the last 10 years.
Doctorow should know the difference: He is talking about remotely hosted computing, not cloud computing. Vendors can host your applications, data or processing using a cloud, a bunch of clusters, pairs of load-balanced failover servers, or just individual servers. The issues he address remain the same: Lack of endpoint power and control.
Cloud computing is a technology your vendor can use to lower their costs, in some circumstances. As the consumer, it doesn't really matter what it's hosted on. All that matters is its performance, availability, etc. I get tired of end users and journalists mis-using the latest buzzword, but Doctorow should know better.
Except that the term "cloud computing" was used as market speak to refer to remotely hosted computing that one would connect to over the Internet. The term was used to overcome the resistance to remotely hosted solutions that had developed when other connection methods had been used to connect: "See, this isn't like that, it's over the Internet. It's 'cloud computing'." They tried to sell people that because it was over the Internet it wouldn't have the inherent problems of remotely hosted solutions (lack of endpoint power and control).
Once the term was out there people like you looked at it and thought that it was a good term to refer to virtual machines and other services delivered over the Internet.
We use a couple of cloud compute providers to host our web servers. We pay a monthly fee and get the root password to a standard Linux virtual machine, what we install on it is up to us. If the physical hardware that is hosting our server fails, we just install it somewhere else. All of the install process is automated, and we can transfer our server and data from one provider to another in a couple of hours*..
In this case you are using "cloud computing" to apply to a service that was visualized (if not already being provided), before "cloud computing" was thought of. This probably represents what is wrong with this buzzword (and most buzzwords for that matter).
If I remember correctly, people started talking about "cloud computing" about the time when Google Apps started to be developed. It was a "new paradigm". People would no longer host software on their own computers. They would connect to the Internet and use a spreadsheet, or word-processor, or database that was hosted "on the cloud". Their data would be stored there rather than locally. It was about selling Software as a Service.
You are talking about hosting on the Internet something that is inherently on the Internet (web servers), while "cloud computing" was originally about hosting on the Internet things that had been considered inherently local.
The way you are using "cloud computing" is to refer to having Virtual Machines hosted on someone else's hardware. While that is not necessarily wrong, it is a different usage of the term than that of those who originally coined the term.
I fix my computers. My friends' computers. My parents' computers. My friends' parents' computers.
I do the same. There are only a few of those I do for free: my computer (you could argue whether that is really for free), my parents' computer, my mother-in-law's computer, and one friend who has from time to time done things of equivalent value for me. Everybody else pays my hourly rate (I have three tiers: friends & co-workers, other private individuals, businesses).
No, I just don't listen to much music. The RIAA long ago made it too much work to find music I like. Some time back a major act that I like released a new album. The label pushed one of the songs as a single. That was the only song that got airplay on the radio. It was a cover of a song that I loved, which suggests that people with my musical tastes were their target audience. I found the cover uninteresting. A friend of mine illegally downloaded the entire album and played it for me. I loved every other song on the album.
Now I only buy music directly from acts that I see live.
Slashdot Mirror
According to Rassmussen 54% of Americans said that passing no healthcare reform would be better than passing the plans currently proposed by Congress.
So, you are saying that you want the "public option" at this step, but you don't want to see the implementation of a single payer system?
. If, as you say, 30% of the public wants a public option, then there should only be 30% of congressmen and representatives that support it and the rest should eat them alive and eject it from the bill. So far, that hasn't happened. That's how our system works. Again, I'm sorry you don't like it. Write your congressman or representative.
Why do you think it didn't pass before the August recess? Because a boatload of Democratic Congresspersons realized that they would lose the next election if they voted for the bill as it was.
The evidence suggests that a majority of Congresspersons would not vote in favor of the bill as it currently stands. Considering that the bill was not written at the time of the last election, I think it is disingenuous to suggest that the majority of the Congresspersons were elected for the express purpose of passing this bill.
But, of course, the smart ones aren't there to figure out the new technology because they got tired of living under the poverty level and decided to change careers.
You are obviously not in the U.S. because the average starting salary for public school teachers in the U.S. was more than $2,000 a year above the poverty line for a family of four in 2008-2009. Additionally, a quick review indicates that the average teacher's salary is well above the median per capita income for every state. Considering that teachers only work approximately nine months out of the year, teachers are certainly not underpaid.
Good teachers certainly deserve the salary they receive, but they are not underpaid.
If the American people decide they want a single payer system, so be it. I believe that it would be a terrible mistake. The American people currently don't want a single payer system. Additionally, they have recognized that the current "public option" is an attempt to get a single payer system in by the back door and appear to have decided that they don't want that either.
As far as I can tell, all of the support for the "public option" comes from people who want a single payer system but have recognized that the American people will not accept one at this time. The evidence I have seen suggests that somewhere around 50% of the population doesn't want the "public option", while only somewhere around 30% do want it. So who is the one "spitting in the face of democracy"?
So, the more government regulates business the more business seeks to influence government. You perceive that business has too much influence on government, your answer to reducing business influence is to increase government regulation of business?
The Republicans say that health care is not in trouble. Well it probably isn't in "crisis", but there are difficulties with it.
The Republicans have made several suggestions designed to address some of the problems with the healthcare system in the U.S.. ( http://themoderatevoice.com/43992/the-real-republican-health-care-proposal/ ) This link contains links to specific legislation, so you can check the author's interpretation of those bills against the actual bills.
All of the Republican proposals seem to follow to a greater degree than any of the Democratic proposals I am aware of what I consider to be legislative best practices: keep it short and focused.
The Constitution was intended to limit the power of the federal government. By any reading of the Constitution that allows the federal government to control the funding for healthcare in the entire U.S., there are no limits on the power of the federal government. Of course there are many other things that the federal government has done that are, also, outside of any reading of the Constitution that limits the power of the federal government.
I'm European (Dutch to be exact).
Could an American please explain to me why the majority of USA seems to oppose public healthcare?
I have no problem with public healthcare. I oppose all healthcare being supplied (paid for) by the government. There are several reasons. The first is that I get perfectly good health care under the current system and see no good reason to fix what isn't broken. A second reason I oppose government run healthcare is that all of the plans I have seen proposed look like they are intended to break any part of the system that would be resistant to government control. Finally, none of the plans seem to actually address those problems that I see with the health care system in the U.S..
sans any existing dwindling market forces
the legislation currently on the tables doesn't rule out free-market alternatives. It gives 1 more choice to you.
Are you aware that Obama and several others have said in the past (before he was elected), that the "public option" is intended to be the first step to getting the U.S. to a single (government) payer health care system?
So, as far as I can tell, the people promoting the "public option" all wish to migrate the U.S. to a single payer system, but do not believe that that is politically possible, but I am supposed to take their word for it that it will be designed merely to compete with existing health insurance. The public option combined with the regulations that will be put on private health insurance will ensure that private health insurance will be unable to compete with the government option and so private insurance will then gradually wither away.
But the less the government is involved in economic decisions, the less corporations will feel the need to influence it. Seems you just can't win.
Let me get this straight, you think that corporations feeling less need to (and therefore putting less effort into it) influence the government is a bad thing?
Please explain.
So are you saying you can't hear this "privacy thing"? Or are you saying that it just doesn't "speak" to you?
I believe that you meant to say, "So, the whole privacy thing to me is kinda moot"?
I was merely pointing out that MS does not in fact want people to pay money for the OS every year, .
I am sorry that is not correct. I remember several articles from the 90s talking about MS trying to figure out how they could change the model from selling the OS license to one where people and businesses pay a licensing fee every year (with quotes from high level MS management supporting the premise of the article).
Now, MS has been unable to make that change, but they want to.
"Um, that "large group of people" happens to be the shareholders, who are rightly excluded from being held liable."
Sounds like you're a shareholder. Liability should fall even MORESO on the shareholders, it's their company, they'd better damned-well keep TIGHT reins on what the hell is happening and they'd better be FULLY INFORMED of every business decision. FULL LIABILITY. Hiring someone else to take care of your business, thus leaving you blissfully ignorant of what is happening as long as money rolls in, is not an excuse.
I take it you don't have a 401K? How about some other type of mutual fund? If you do, do you know what stocks are held by them?
You haven't read much of the old testament have you?
That wasn't a "side effect".
The Pharma industry would love to destroy traditional placebo-based remedies as chicken soup,
Actually there have been several studies showing that chicken soup actually does have an effect on colds greater than the placebo effect. At least one of them actually explored what component of chicken soup improved the patient suffering from the common cold (although I don't remember what they suggested).
The people who should fear clouds ...
The people who should fear clouds are the people who want their data in their own hands, and don't trust third parties to handle it for then. It's that easy, and it's what will make SaaS fail. We write SaaS, and almost all our customers ask us where we store the data, and if it we don't guarantee them it is in the country they are from they back off. And we write software for small firms only. Bigger clients want the software and the data stored in their own datacenter. They will not trust the "cloud" for that (and I wouldn't either). Not in the near future at least.
Don't forget the people who like to pay a one time fee for their computing costs rather than a monthly fee that will go up to make it (just barely) less expensive to stay than to migrate away.
Would I upgrade my XP machines? NOT A CHANCE!!!
Of course not, I have upgraded exactly one machine that I owned from one MS OS to another (Windows ME to Windows XP). Most people only upgrade their MS OS when they buy a new computer. The only question is what the reaction of the general public is to buying new machines with Windows 7 on them.
If you want to repeat history, by all means, crack down on the ELF and send them all to prison and beat up anyone in the group.
Then is 40 years or so, the protege of one of their leaders will be elected President of the U.S. just like happened with the Weathermen from the 1960's.
The effects of filesharing are negative for artists (certainly for pop artists), and especially for the "music industry". There can be little doubt about that.
Sorry, I think there can be significant doubt about that. There have been several studies that indicate that those who obtain music illegally (primarily by filesharing), also, buy more music than those from the same demographic who don't obtain music illegally.
Just from my personal experience this is supported. I have five or six friends who download a lot of copyrighted music without paying for it. They also buy quite a bit of music. I have never downloaded any music. I have also bought fewer than 10 CDs in the last 10 years.
Doctorow should know the difference: He is talking about remotely hosted computing, not cloud computing. Vendors can host your applications, data or processing using a cloud, a bunch of clusters, pairs of load-balanced failover servers, or just individual servers. The issues he address remain the same: Lack of endpoint power and control.
Cloud computing is a technology your vendor can use to lower their costs, in some circumstances. As the consumer, it doesn't really matter what it's hosted on. All that matters is its performance, availability, etc. I get tired of end users and journalists mis-using the latest buzzword, but Doctorow should know better.
Except that the term "cloud computing" was used as market speak to refer to remotely hosted computing that one would connect to over the Internet. The term was used to overcome the resistance to remotely hosted solutions that had developed when other connection methods had been used to connect: "See, this isn't like that, it's over the Internet. It's 'cloud computing'." They tried to sell people that because it was over the Internet it wouldn't have the inherent problems of remotely hosted solutions (lack of endpoint power and control).
Once the term was out there people like you looked at it and thought that it was a good term to refer to virtual machines and other services delivered over the Internet.
We use a couple of cloud compute providers to host our web servers. We pay a monthly fee and get the root password to a standard Linux virtual machine, what we install on it is up to us. If the physical hardware that is hosting our server fails, we just install it somewhere else. All of the install process is automated, and we can transfer our server and data from one provider to another in a couple of hours*..
In this case you are using "cloud computing" to apply to a service that was visualized (if not already being provided), before "cloud computing" was thought of. This probably represents what is wrong with this buzzword (and most buzzwords for that matter).
If I remember correctly, people started talking about "cloud computing" about the time when Google Apps started to be developed. It was a "new paradigm". People would no longer host software on their own computers. They would connect to the Internet and use a spreadsheet, or word-processor, or database that was hosted "on the cloud". Their data would be stored there rather than locally. It was about selling Software as a Service.
You are talking about hosting on the Internet something that is inherently on the Internet (web servers), while "cloud computing" was originally about hosting on the Internet things that had been considered inherently local.
The way you are using "cloud computing" is to refer to having Virtual Machines hosted on someone else's hardware. While that is not necessarily wrong, it is a different usage of the term than that of those who originally coined the term.
I fix my computers. My friends' computers. My parents' computers. My friends' parents' computers.
I do the same. There are only a few of those I do for free: my computer (you could argue whether that is really for free), my parents' computer, my mother-in-law's computer, and one friend who has from time to time done things of equivalent value for me. Everybody else pays my hourly rate (I have three tiers: friends & co-workers, other private individuals, businesses).
No, I just don't listen to much music. The RIAA long ago made it too much work to find music I like. Some time back a major act that I like released a new album. The label pushed one of the songs as a single. That was the only song that got airplay on the radio. It was a cover of a song that I loved, which suggests that people with my musical tastes were their target audience. I found the cover uninteresting. A friend of mine illegally downloaded the entire album and played it for me. I loved every other song on the album.
Now I only buy music directly from acts that I see live.