No. That's the KGB. Since the alleged fall of the Soviet Union, they've had to run their operations under far more secrecy than ever before. Sometimes, this means they have to leave a job before they have a chance to clean up entirely.
In your case, you've become a test subject for the Soviet loyalists' conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. They are attempting to steal your very essence, and it is your patriotic duty to resist them. Place loaded mousetraps around your bed to damage the stealth robots that are invading your sanctuary of slumber. To prevent their essence-extractor from invading your body, apply a liberal coating of cyanoacrylate to your penis before sleep. It may cause an unusual sensation, but that's far better than the empty fatigue the Communists will inflict.
The NSA is actually fully aware of this conspiracy, and you should assist their efforts to protect our precious bodily fluids. As it is clear that the Red Menace is most interested in corrupting your penis, you must aid the resistance research that is underway. As the NSA must also keep their research secret, no scientists will contact you directly, but you can still contribute to the noble cause by announcing publicly every time your penis functions normally, and especially whenever it does not. This is best accomplished by loudly shouting your results from an open second-story window, followed by displaying your penis for remote optical inspection. Be sure to announce that you are a subject of General Jack Ripper's studies.
The Soviet collapse was a sham, designed to lull the Americans into a false sense of security. The KGB have not given up, and neither can we. God willing, we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural fluids.
My office Internet connection recently went from about 30Mbps down to 1.5Mbps, then back to 50Mbps a month later. No explanation, and speed tests to our ISP all came through at full speeds. We only saw problems on routes going outside our city and headed west. There were also a few inaccessible sites, but those were in very specific local areas. Ultimately, the best guess anyone could come up with is that a network to the west of our city had some routing problems.
We weren't the only customers to complain about a slowdown, but our ISP couldn't really do much about it. The Internet is made up of many networks working together, and sometimes shit happens. I wouldn't jump so quickly to assume it's non-neutral throttling or the NSA, when it could just be a careless guy with a badly-aimed backhoe. Give it some time, see if it improves, and if not, it may be time to move your VPS.
As an aside, you're likely going through New York because that's how you're reaching Europe to get to your UK-based VPS. Many transatlantic cables end in New York City, mostly because the stock market pays dearly for the few nanoseconds of lower latency.
Will users feel like they've been lied to by the App Store listing?
Note that Apple's motivation is not to ensure that only quality apps get into the store. Rather, they just want to make sure that the store itself isn't tarnished. If 30% of your downloaded apps are just shells around scam-laden videos, you'll stop using the store, so they just test each app long enough to make sure that it kinda-sorta does what's claimed. Any problems after that are going to be blamed on the developer, not Apple.
That's pretty much my point, as the key word is "absolutely". For any particular freedom, there are exceptions, limitations, and caveats.
It's mostly in reference to the morons who assume that "free speech" means that any idea can be expressed anywhere at any time without consequences, but the sentiment applies to any right that is claimed without a full understanding of the legal background involved.
Way back when, I considered speculating in a monetary exchange, but now I'm realizing how many legal headaches are involved in securities trading, even in markets where none of the major investment brokers are willing to play. I'm glad I backed out before I had to deal with all of this stuff myself.
BitCoins are not special. They're legally just like any other investment, only since the big banks aren't involved, the big banks aren't there to make the traders' lives easier. There are no regulation-compliant statements, no audit records, and no breakdown of where your money went and how it came in. To properly report your income to the authorities, you'll have to track those numbers yourself. The same applies if you take an interest in speculating on any other unusual commodity, like collections or heavy equipment. Yes, technically, any gains from selling your old baseball card collection must be declared and taxed.
The question here is how the finance ministry would come to know of a person's Bitcoin holding as it is a decentralized currency with no governing body to keep count on the number of Bitcoins a person has. The German government expects that citizens declare their Bitcoin while filing their annual tax return."
They're Canadian carrier-based fighters, but probably without the fighting.
Considering the sheer size of Canada's thermally-hostile northern regions, patrolling a territory with anything ground-based is impractical because of the amount of space to cover, and patrolling from the air leaves too long a delay between seeing something suspicious and being able to investigate it. What's effective is a combined force, using aircraft to survey the landscape for anything suspicious, and using ground craft for targeted investigation.
Of course, ground vehicles offer poor choices. You get to pick two qualities, of fast, quiet, or maneuverable. By the time a Canadian patrol arrives at the site, the potential enemy has already had a chance to prepare for the arrival. A stealth snowmobile with an electric motor, careful design, and an appropriate paint job, would be able to observe a target without being detected, once the aircraft gives it a destination. It can also be carried on a larger vehicle, allowing it to cover more of the aircraft's territory.
That is, I suspect, the ultimate goal: A small team of 2-6 people, driving a rugged transport across the rough terrain, periodically launching a drone to spot targets, then making sorties on one or two stealth snowmobiles to check out anything of particular interest. From a single unit, Canada can maintain reconnaissance over a fairly large territory.
That works both ways. I recently left a position at a small company, and I passed on a few friends as candidates to replace me. The company was pretty good, so I have no problems putting my friends, who I know will do similar work to mine, in the same place.
I've also been on the other side, too. I was interviewing at a place a while ago that a friend had recently left because of management problems. Knowing what to look for, my interview made it pretty clear the company was headed for a major failure... sure enough, they had major layoffs the next year.
This attitude is the main reason why outsourcing jobs overseas so often looks good to managers.
From a manager's perspective, employees who "only do it for the paycheck" are there to kill time, and don't really care about project timelines, quality control, rework, morale, or the work environment... all the things that the manager's supposed to be improving. On the other hand, an employee who cares more about doing the job than punching a timecard is more likely to notice mistakes early, push to meet deadlines, and contribute toward making the workplace a better place to be. A caring employee makes the department/project look better to the higher managers, making it easier to get approval for that precious payroll budget.
It should be noted, however, that caring about the job and becoming emotionally attached to it are different matters. Eventually, you will leave that job, and it may or may not be your choice. Let it go, and move on to the next project with enthusiasm.
That's part of the stated assumption of having very easy policies.
The point I'm trying to illustrate is that every entity involved is going to have different figures for who paid what, based on their perspective, and those numbers are only marginally related to the total out-of-pocket amount paid, simply because the different insurers and healthcare providers don't have complete information.
Going back to the point in my original post, I'm inclined to think that this story is just muckraking political whining. Medical billing really is complicated enough that adding someone's total cost is practically impossible.
Your one policy has a maximum, which we'll say for the sake of argument is $15,000 (with 100% paid after that, which we'll just assume for the sake of it's-late-and-I'm-too-tired-for-this-shit). That's easy, and your insurance provider probably knows about your spouse and kids. However, let's also say that next year, your daughter goes off to college, and as a part of the college program they have a basic health insurance plan for students (apparently an increasingly-popular offering). On that policy, your daughter has an out-of-pocket maximum of $2500, but it's through a different provider. Then she moves in with her boyfriend who has a decent job, and his household, including your daughter, is covered under a policy with a $5000 deductible. Then, young folks doing what they do, your grandson is born to a $30,000 bill.
How much was paid by whom? Assuming some very easy policies and assuming everyone plays nicely (which is a gross distortion of reality), your daughter pays $2500 to meet the college's deductible, then the college pays $2500 to meet the boyfriend's deductible, the boyfriend's insurer pays $10,000 to meet your deductible, and your insurer pays the rest.
When the government starts asking, though, your insurer will say that $15,000 was paid out-of-pocket. The boyfriend's insurer will report $5,000, and your daughter herself will report $2,500, because everyone only knows that their deductibles were met. Somebody is going to have to look at the whole case and figure out what happened, and pray that the information matches enough to piece together an accurate number.
Add in the different deductibles and rates, and the difference in coverage for in-network, out-of-network, and standing-near-the-network-but-not-really-part-of-the-cool-kids'-group, and at the end of the day nobody really knows how much your hypothetical daughter paid out of pocket except her... and with a new bouncing baby boy to take care of, we can't really expect perfect bookkeeping there, either.
Having worked firsthand in the medical data field, I'm actually more inclined to believe them. It's pretty easy for a billing system to say "You haven't met your deductible" or "You've paid about enough"... but as I understand it, the legislation requires that each patientis cost be tracked on a per-patient basis - not per-policy or even per-insurer. That means the records have to be combined from every participating hospital, correlated with information from every other insurance provider, and deduplicated accurately, before they can be added.
There are many people with multiple health insurance policies, who go to several healthcare systems, or have incorrect identification data in their records. What's being asked is not simply adding a few numbers in a bill, but rather merging trillions of records with few errors, across hundreds of formats from thousands of providers.
I wish them luck, and I'm glad I'm not in that field any more.
Here at Slashdot, we take pride in our relatively-uncensored publication practices. We rely on the public moderators to appropriately judge the value of comments, and accordingly hide spam comments from most viewers. Spam stories, however, are given free reign over the front page.
I run a server at home because I don't just want web hosting. I want file hosting, email, remote desktop, music and video streaming, video games, and IRC to boot... And I want to access much of that from my home at the same time, and manage it the way I want and upgrade it when I want.
I did once price out what I'd be spending on Amazon to get close to my needs, and it came out to a couple hundred dollars per month. It's cheaper for me to just buy a server and rent space in a data center... and cheaper still for me to run it at home.
You missed the first definition, and all of the wit:
1. A numerical quantity that is not a whole number
Or, you could consider that the default dictionary is simply wrong. Improper fractions representing whole numbers are still fractions, and that limited scope doesn't even cover all of the fields that use the word "fraction". Try this one instead. It's a more complete set of definitions, but it does lack that particular insulting quality that you seem to hold so dear.
Destructively "bouncing" a laser is easy. Just point it in the general direction, and apply power until there's too much extra energy for the target to handle.
Communication is more difficult, because not only do you have to point in exactly the right direction, from far further away (or have ridiculously more power), but you then have to modulate the laser appropriately to transmit data, and do so in such a way that atmospheric or other line-of-sight disturbances won't be too much of a problem, and you have to keep doing it long enough to send all you data through, and ideally even have a matching receiver to pick up the return direction.
But that's part of the Doctor's appeal. He's not just a single personality... he's a complex alien whose latest mentality comes forth upon regeneration. After being forced to commit genocide against his whole species, he's an angry nihilist. Slowly, major events in his life make him a more well-rounded person, and the exrenal changes are the most visible part of that. Frankly, seeing the same Doctor for 10 years would be boring, because a major aspect of the character's development would stall.
Depending on state and local laws, it may actually be perfectly legal to build and set off a bomb for fun. Private land where nobody is close enough to be harmed is usually a good starting point, but be sure to do your research first.
Have we become nothing more than paranoid cowards who watch everyone else's moves just because there is a 0.000000000000001% chance that they could be terrorists?
Yes, we have. Not just out of paranoia, but because of the imbalance of our perceived risk. Schneier explains it well.
Ostensibly... More often, they collude to protect the interests of the few senior members with the most voting power, and the interests of the union's bargaining power. Really, it doesn't matter if a factory closes and a few thousand jobs are lost, as long as the union never has to admit defeat for a contract.
Slashdot Mirror
Posted way past my bedtime. That's my excuse.
No. That's the KGB. Since the alleged fall of the Soviet Union, they've had to run their operations under far more secrecy than ever before. Sometimes, this means they have to leave a job before they have a chance to clean up entirely.
In your case, you've become a test subject for the Soviet loyalists' conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. They are attempting to steal your very essence, and it is your patriotic duty to resist them. Place loaded mousetraps around your bed to damage the stealth robots that are invading your sanctuary of slumber. To prevent their essence-extractor from invading your body, apply a liberal coating of cyanoacrylate to your penis before sleep. It may cause an unusual sensation, but that's far better than the empty fatigue the Communists will inflict.
The NSA is actually fully aware of this conspiracy, and you should assist their efforts to protect our precious bodily fluids. As it is clear that the Red Menace is most interested in corrupting your penis, you must aid the resistance research that is underway. As the NSA must also keep their research secret, no scientists will contact you directly, but you can still contribute to the noble cause by announcing publicly every time your penis functions normally, and especially whenever it does not. This is best accomplished by loudly shouting your results from an open second-story window, followed by displaying your penis for remote optical inspection. Be sure to announce that you are a subject of General Jack Ripper's studies.
The Soviet collapse was a sham, designed to lull the Americans into a false sense of security. The KGB have not given up, and neither can we. God willing, we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural fluids.
My office Internet connection recently went from about 30Mbps down to 1.5Mbps, then back to 50Mbps a month later. No explanation, and speed tests to our ISP all came through at full speeds. We only saw problems on routes going outside our city and headed west. There were also a few inaccessible sites, but those were in very specific local areas. Ultimately, the best guess anyone could come up with is that a network to the west of our city had some routing problems.
We weren't the only customers to complain about a slowdown, but our ISP couldn't really do much about it. The Internet is made up of many networks working together, and sometimes shit happens. I wouldn't jump so quickly to assume it's non-neutral throttling or the NSA, when it could just be a careless guy with a badly-aimed backhoe. Give it some time, see if it improves, and if not, it may be time to move your VPS.
As an aside, you're likely going through New York because that's how you're reaching Europe to get to your UK-based VPS. Many transatlantic cables end in New York City, mostly because the stock market pays dearly for the few nanoseconds of lower latency.
Checklist for approval:
Note that Apple's motivation is not to ensure that only quality apps get into the store. Rather, they just want to make sure that the store itself isn't tarnished. If 30% of your downloaded apps are just shells around scam-laden videos, you'll stop using the store, so they just test each app long enough to make sure that it kinda-sorta does what's claimed. Any problems after that are going to be blamed on the developer, not Apple.
That's pretty much my point, as the key word is "absolutely". For any particular freedom, there are exceptions, limitations, and caveats.
It's mostly in reference to the morons who assume that "free speech" means that any idea can be expressed anywhere at any time without consequences, but the sentiment applies to any right that is claimed without a full understanding of the legal background involved.
I'm pretty sure you just failed at reading comprehension.
If I may paraphrase:
Way back when, I considered speculating in a monetary exchange, but now I'm realizing how many legal headaches are involved in securities trading, even in markets where none of the major investment brokers are willing to play. I'm glad I backed out before I had to deal with all of this stuff myself.
BitCoins are not special. They're legally just like any other investment, only since the big banks aren't involved, the big banks aren't there to make the traders' lives easier. There are no regulation-compliant statements, no audit records, and no breakdown of where your money went and how it came in. To properly report your income to the authorities, you'll have to track those numbers yourself. The same applies if you take an interest in speculating on any other unusual commodity, like collections or heavy equipment. Yes, technically, any gains from selling your old baseball card collection must be declared and taxed.
Exactly.
The question here is how the finance ministry would come to know of a person's Bitcoin holding as it is a decentralized currency with no governing body to keep count on the number of Bitcoins a person has. The German government expects that citizens declare their Bitcoin while filing their annual tax return."
...just like cash.
They're Canadian carrier-based fighters, but probably without the fighting.
Considering the sheer size of Canada's thermally-hostile northern regions, patrolling a territory with anything ground-based is impractical because of the amount of space to cover, and patrolling from the air leaves too long a delay between seeing something suspicious and being able to investigate it. What's effective is a combined force, using aircraft to survey the landscape for anything suspicious, and using ground craft for targeted investigation.
Of course, ground vehicles offer poor choices. You get to pick two qualities, of fast, quiet, or maneuverable. By the time a Canadian patrol arrives at the site, the potential enemy has already had a chance to prepare for the arrival. A stealth snowmobile with an electric motor, careful design, and an appropriate paint job, would be able to observe a target without being detected, once the aircraft gives it a destination. It can also be carried on a larger vehicle, allowing it to cover more of the aircraft's territory.
That is, I suspect, the ultimate goal: A small team of 2-6 people, driving a rugged transport across the rough terrain, periodically launching a drone to spot targets, then making sorties on one or two stealth snowmobiles to check out anything of particular interest. From a single unit, Canada can maintain reconnaissance over a fairly large territory.
No, it's not fair.
That works both ways. I recently left a position at a small company, and I passed on a few friends as candidates to replace me. The company was pretty good, so I have no problems putting my friends, who I know will do similar work to mine, in the same place.
I've also been on the other side, too. I was interviewing at a place a while ago that a friend had recently left because of management problems. Knowing what to look for, my interview made it pretty clear the company was headed for a major failure... sure enough, they had major layoffs the next year.
This attitude is the main reason why outsourcing jobs overseas so often looks good to managers.
From a manager's perspective, employees who "only do it for the paycheck" are there to kill time, and don't really care about project timelines, quality control, rework, morale, or the work environment... all the things that the manager's supposed to be improving. On the other hand, an employee who cares more about doing the job than punching a timecard is more likely to notice mistakes early, push to meet deadlines, and contribute toward making the workplace a better place to be. A caring employee makes the department/project look better to the higher managers, making it easier to get approval for that precious payroll budget.
It should be noted, however, that caring about the job and becoming emotionally attached to it are different matters. Eventually, you will leave that job, and it may or may not be your choice. Let it go, and move on to the next project with enthusiasm.
That's part of the stated assumption of having very easy policies.
The point I'm trying to illustrate is that every entity involved is going to have different figures for who paid what, based on their perspective, and those numbers are only marginally related to the total out-of-pocket amount paid, simply because the different insurers and healthcare providers don't have complete information.
Going back to the point in my original post, I'm inclined to think that this story is just muckraking political whining. Medical billing really is complicated enough that adding someone's total cost is practically impossible.
Your one policy has a maximum, which we'll say for the sake of argument is $15,000 (with 100% paid after that, which we'll just assume for the sake of it's-late-and-I'm-too-tired-for-this-shit). That's easy, and your insurance provider probably knows about your spouse and kids. However, let's also say that next year, your daughter goes off to college, and as a part of the college program they have a basic health insurance plan for students (apparently an increasingly-popular offering). On that policy, your daughter has an out-of-pocket maximum of $2500, but it's through a different provider. Then she moves in with her boyfriend who has a decent job, and his household, including your daughter, is covered under a policy with a $5000 deductible. Then, young folks doing what they do, your grandson is born to a $30,000 bill.
How much was paid by whom? Assuming some very easy policies and assuming everyone plays nicely (which is a gross distortion of reality), your daughter pays $2500 to meet the college's deductible, then the college pays $2500 to meet the boyfriend's deductible, the boyfriend's insurer pays $10,000 to meet your deductible, and your insurer pays the rest.
When the government starts asking, though, your insurer will say that $15,000 was paid out-of-pocket. The boyfriend's insurer will report $5,000, and your daughter herself will report $2,500, because everyone only knows that their deductibles were met. Somebody is going to have to look at the whole case and figure out what happened, and pray that the information matches enough to piece together an accurate number.
Add in the different deductibles and rates, and the difference in coverage for in-network, out-of-network, and standing-near-the-network-but-not-really-part-of-the-cool-kids'-group, and at the end of the day nobody really knows how much your hypothetical daughter paid out of pocket except her... and with a new bouncing baby boy to take care of, we can't really expect perfect bookkeeping there, either.
Having worked firsthand in the medical data field, I'm actually more inclined to believe them. It's pretty easy for a billing system to say "You haven't met your deductible" or "You've paid about enough"... but as I understand it, the legislation requires that each patientis cost be tracked on a per-patient basis - not per-policy or even per-insurer. That means the records have to be combined from every participating hospital, correlated with information from every other insurance provider, and deduplicated accurately, before they can be added.
There are many people with multiple health insurance policies, who go to several healthcare systems, or have incorrect identification data in their records. What's being asked is not simply adding a few numbers in a bill, but rather merging trillions of records with few errors, across hundreds of formats from thousands of providers.
I wish them luck, and I'm glad I'm not in that field any more.
Here at Slashdot, we take pride in our relatively-uncensored publication practices. We rely on the public moderators to appropriately judge the value of comments, and accordingly hide spam comments from most viewers. Spam stories, however, are given free reign over the front page.
I run a server at home because I don't just want web hosting. I want file hosting, email, remote desktop, music and video streaming, video games, and IRC to boot... And I want to access much of that from my home at the same time, and manage it the way I want and upgrade it when I want.
I did once price out what I'd be spending on Amazon to get close to my needs, and it came out to a couple hundred dollars per month. It's cheaper for me to just buy a server and rent space in a data center... and cheaper still for me to run it at home.
To wit, with great bandwidth comes great responsibility.
You missed the first definition, and all of the wit:
1. A numerical quantity that is not a whole number
Or, you could consider that the default dictionary is simply wrong. Improper fractions representing whole numbers are still fractions, and that limited scope doesn't even cover all of the fields that use the word "fraction". Try this one instead. It's a more complete set of definitions, but it does lack that particular insulting quality that you seem to hold so dear.
Yeah, Linux compatibility is a fraction of Windows Steam titles...
As an utter jackass, I feel compelled to point out that every rational number, even those greater than one, are fractions.
Destructively "bouncing" a laser is easy. Just point it in the general direction, and apply power until there's too much extra energy for the target to handle.
Communication is more difficult, because not only do you have to point in exactly the right direction, from far further away (or have ridiculously more power), but you then have to modulate the laser appropriately to transmit data, and do so in such a way that atmospheric or other line-of-sight disturbances won't be too much of a problem, and you have to keep doing it long enough to send all you data through, and ideally even have a matching receiver to pick up the return direction.
But that's part of the Doctor's appeal. He's not just a single personality... he's a complex alien whose latest mentality comes forth upon regeneration. After being forced to commit genocide against his whole species, he's an angry nihilist. Slowly, major events in his life make him a more well-rounded person, and the exrenal changes are the most visible part of that. Frankly, seeing the same Doctor for 10 years would be boring, because a major aspect of the character's development would stall.
Depending on state and local laws, it may actually be perfectly legal to build and set off a bomb for fun. Private land where nobody is close enough to be harmed is usually a good starting point, but be sure to do your research first.
Have we become nothing more than paranoid cowards who watch everyone else's moves just because there is a 0.000000000000001% chance that they could be terrorists?
Yes, we have. Not just out of paranoia, but because of the imbalance of our perceived risk. Schneier explains it well.
Seriously? Now you expect professionalism from the editors?
Ostensibly... More often, they collude to protect the interests of the few senior members with the most voting power, and the interests of the union's bargaining power. Really, it doesn't matter if a factory closes and a few thousand jobs are lost, as long as the union never has to admit defeat for a contract.