Although... most certifications are entry level. They only say that you've read the material, have done some practice and have a basic understanding of the theory. They *try* to test for experience, but the Cisco, Microsoft and Linux certs can be passed without experience. I've written others, but I've seen few certs which contradict this.
Woah, there, buddy.
Yes, there are entry level certificates for a lot of things:
A+ - anyone who puts this on a resume who is going for anything other than a repairman is stretching. MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) - you have passed any one MS test PMP - congrats you're a PHB-prototype. etc.
But, there's a LOT of pooh-poohing of certs around here, and some of it isn't warranted.
For example: People who have a CCNP have passed four different cisco tests, including a troubleshooting one. That could be crammed for probably, as it's strictly a multiple choice test, but most people who have a CCNP probably have at least a decent familiarity with Cisco equipment.
People who have an MCSE have passed 7 Microsoft tests. Yes, you can cram for this and learn in books / etc, but - it's still more difficult than people think. How many people do you actually know that have gone as far as really getting their MCSE? There's a lot, but not as many as who think that it's just a piece of paper and stupid test. There's some higher level domain configuration and troubleshooting, etc.
And the RHCE (which I recently got) is a literal hands-on test - they hand you a broken linux box which you have to fix, and then a list of things to make it do via whatever method you think best (i.e. sendmail or postifx, as long as it delivers mail etc).
Certifications are not the end-all be-all of knowledge measurement. But, they're not completely worthless either. I see people on slashdot all the time who are like "I don't trust someone with a certification", or "I trust someone with an RHCE less than I trust someone without one!". That just doesn't make any sense.
I worked in a repair shop in the 2003-2005 timeframe, and we used to see TONS of Compaq 3000/5000 series computers with the leaking caps on them. But other manufacturers had similar problems, and I remember some dells. Probably didn't see too many of the Optiplex ones, cause they tended to have corporate contracts.
Yeah, that problem was everywhere. You could tell how long a computer was going to last by the bulging capacitor tops - if they showed what looked like "rust", which was leaking brownish fluid, you had 4-6 months tops. If they were just bulging upward, you might get 8-12 months.
To be fair, Starcraft is ENTIRELY an anomaly in the entire history of video gaming. Blizzard have a pretty good idea that people are and will be interested in Starcraft... because the game is still selling.
Seriously, the game came out 11 years, 2 months, and 10 days ago. Literally a week ago, I was in a GameStop and saw a brand new, in box copy of the starcraft battlechest edition on the shelf, for sale.
I cannot think of any other game that is still being sold as new that's anywhere NEAR that old - discounting things like the Civ anniversary pack or the C&C: First Decade pack, and other re-releases. This game has real staying power.
Anyway, like Yahtzee said: The point of episodic content is to release smaller sections of game, more frequently, at a lower cost. Valve have gotten the small sections and lower cost down, but the frequency is downright glacial. Half Life 2 Episode 2 Manchester United 1 took years for about 5-6 hours of gameplay. So, IMO, I hope they're releasing Ep3 via announcement at E3, but it wouldn't surprise me if they took another 18 months for ep3, and then another 3-4 years for HL3.
I have 4 eve chars, totaling almost 200 million skill points, and I've mined a total of 3 hours in over 4 years of playing.
The oldest, richest characters in Eve make their money on industrial stuff: Purchasing, trading, producing from valuable blueprints, etc. Value added kinds of stuff.
A lot of people (me, in my earlier days) just went killing NPC pirates for bounties. You can make enough to buy even the most expensive ship fielded in the tournament (probably one of the Macharials or Rattlesnakes) inside of a week, easy.
A lot of people do "quests", i.e. "go here, kill that", from NPC agents. Those make a huge amount of money.
The richer alliances control minerals, yes that's true, but largely it's "Moon mining", i.e. it happens in real time, and all you have to do is empty the silos every once in a while. That's where a lot of them make their money.
And on top of that, remember this is Eve - you can always steal your way to a fortune.
To be fair, google is using it's search revenue to muscle it's way into a lot of other online services markets by offering the services for free (domain hosted Gmail, google apps, etc). That seems pretty shady to me, but what do I know.
Not that I disagree with what you're saying in principle, but national oil companies (I.e. Aramco, the Saudi Government oil company) produce 52% of the world's oil and hold 88% of the proven reserves of oil. XOM is a huge, ginormous, supermajor company, but they don't hold nearly the resources of the NOC's.
Part of the reason that RPM is quicker slash more powerful for some things is cause of the HUGE amount of data and metadata it stores. I think a lot of it is in/var/cache/yum - huge sqlite files, and sqlite is reasonably dense for storing data (my fedora 12 server shows about 140MB of stuff here).
RPM is very powerful. You learn some of this stuff while studying for the RHCE test (or at least I did):
Want to know which packages are installed? rpm -qa Want to verify a package's installation? rpm -qV packagename Want to know, of those installed, which have been modified? for i in $(rpm -qa);do rpm -qV $i;done #will have false positives... This will tell you if the timestamp / security context / MD5sum have changed. Want to know what package owns a specific file? rpm -qf/path/to/file Want to know every file that a package installs? rpm -ql packagename
Even more, want to get a pristine copy of a file / binary / whatever that's installed with a package? Did you know RPMs are CPIO archives? Verify yum downloader is installed (part of yum-utils). mkdir somedir; cd somedir #because this will "tarbomb" your directory. yumdownloader packagename rpm2cpio packagename.rpm | cpio -dim ls -lF That's everything that the package *installs*, not counting any pre- or post-install configuration.
I've really come around to appreciating RPM and yum.
It's better that Twain gave us something that will last us through the ages (his words) than to have been another generic family man.
Your comment sounds callous, but I completely agree with you.
Look at the 10,000 ft view. If you get too close, then everywhere, every day, is a tragedy. Yes, if he was a neglectful father and husband, that is a bad thing. However, look at the entirety of American Literature. In a completely objective sense, is it better with Mark Twain's writings than without? I think so.
The guy who was valedictorian of my High School went on to seminary and to become a baptist church youth pastor. Am I ok with that? Well,...no, not really. The guy was brilliant - he could have cured cancer, or invented something that moves humanity forward in an unthinkable way. I honestly kind of think that if you're great at something, you owe it to the world to *be* great at it. The question shouldn't be "does this make Mark Twain a bad person", it really is "Why did he think that he had to have a wife and family, when he had all this other stuff going on?".
Terry Goodkind sort of touched on this in "Faith of the Fallen" (as much as that series gets preachy later, this was a good book). If you stop to look around, there are tragedies everywhere. It shouldn't stop you from achieving greatness.
Ways to find NPC Criminals that need a good killin':
1.) Ask an "agent" (NPC mission giver) for work. Keeping in mind, some of the agents are kill focused and some are industrial focused ("bring me X minerals and deliver Y to my friend Z in the next solar system).
2.) Venture out into lower security space and go to an asteroid belt. Although, what they're doing there, I've never figured out - they're never mining the asteroids.
Anyway, yeah, you can solo eve - the catch is you'll need start up capital to become an industrialist (like real life, I guess?). Which means running a few missions until you can start playing the (entirely player driven) market.
Or you can take the healthy shortcut - spend $40 on a game-time card, then sell it in game for a quarter of a billion credits, which is enough to get anyone started.
Once you have the money, though, you can work on market manipulation, trading, and even buying raw materials, producing goods, and selling the value-added goods.
Agreed. In addition, I'd like to see an example of a mainstream piece of software that isn't becoming more 'bloated' as time goes by. It makes sense to give users more features and capability as hardware specs improve. Why would your average user want a browser that has limited functionality but only uses 10MB of RAM when they have a machine with 4GB that they only use to browse the web?
I'm using Opera at the moment on my office PC -- it's using ~350MB of RAM and I simply don't care. It could twice that and I still wouldn't care. For those that do, there will always be less mainstream options out there that are much more lightweight at the expense of some functionality.
I hate chrome.
But I use it on my netbook because Firefox hogs too much of the 1GB of ram and 16GB flash disk.
You don't have to hire me (or anyone) to do those things. If you're a one man shop, and perfectly comfortable doing your installs yourself, no one "should" get paid-you've every right to do it yourself. On the other hand, if you're a large corporation, chances are someone's going to get hired to do installation, maintenance, and customization.
Exactly.
Case in point, one of my good friends just left us (Rackspace) to found a company called Riptano that sells support for Cassandra (there's a story in Database Journal here).
They are committed (John and Matt) to building bits on top of Cassandra for support / management / etc, but also contributing in a big way to the project its self and not forking it.
I don't have the stones to strike out on my own like that, but MAJOR props to them - this is what the F/OSS community needs more of. It takes people with an abundance of passion about a technology to make something like this a reality. Plus, who knows, they may really turn this into a big thing if Cassandra takes off and people want nosql solutions.
You can see that there's a 3 phase cycle for release support. Major versions are supported for 7 years, with the first 4 years being "primary support", i.e. new features, hardware support, and bug / security patches, and then after that they move into a maintenance cycle in which they will first not push new features, and finally only push bug fixes / security patches that are marked as "critical".
This is important to those of us that manage thousands of RHEL boxes.
Btw, got my RHCE a couple of months ago! So, technically, for me, the longer RHEL6 takes to come out, the better - my RHCE is valid until RHEL7.
I understand that the black hat community is actively trying to hack the PS3 because it's proven to be very well protected from pirates. I realize Sony is a business and they are simply trying to protect their rights.
The end.
That's why - the fact that someone found a way to get outside of the virtualized box that they put the "run other os" option in recently - they're trying to head the coming jailbreak off.
Not to mention, some sauces such as Dave's Ultimate Insanity (which I had to sign a waiver to purchase), Blair's 3am, etc, are already pushing food additive properties into the multi-million scoville units.
Medicare paid for the birth of my son. They were polite and efficient, and also personable.
When my wife (then girlfriend) got pregnant, she didn't have the maternity option on her health insurance. Medicaid said that they would pay for it, but that the hospital / OB would have to submit everything to the other insurance company to get denied first. Any slow-downs or inefficiencies in the process were strictly related to Anthem BC/BS having to deny everything medically that happened to my wife from the day she got pregnant.
20 months later, when the hospital tried to bill us for something else related to the birth, we got a personal call from our Medicare case worker - she already knew about it. She said "Now, you guys know, they only have one year to send you bills, so you're not responsible for that. Fax me a copy of it, and I'll sort it out with the hospital. They should know better."
Anecdote is the singular of data, but my experience with Medicare has been extremely positive.
Even just a cursory glance at Wikipedia shows that other countries alter their data to decrease their infant mortality rate
Uh, well, I'll just quote your own source:
Wikipedia: Many countries, including the United States, Sweden or Germany, count an infant exhibiting any sign of life as alive, no matter the month of gestation or the size [...] France, the Czech Republic, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Poland do not report all live births of babies under 500 g and/or 22 weeks of gestation. However, the report also concludes that the differences in reporting are unlikely to be the primary explanation for the United States' relatively low international ranking.
The length thing was from Russia during the Cold War. 500g, for the google-lazy, is 1.1 lbs. 22 weeks is almost universally non-viable - that's only halfway through a pregnancy. These cases count for an insignificant percentage of total births, and as Wikipedia makes a point of saying, don't explain the US's higher infant mortality rating.
[babbling about European tax rates]
In the US, tax rates are as much as 35% for federal, and up to 10% for state, not to mention up to 10% sales (VAT) tax, as well as a payroll of tax of up to 20%+ (you, and Huffington Post, and the Heritage foundation, and World Net Daily, ad nauseum, always love to put that in when talking about a flat tax - no reason to leave it out now).
Universal government-run health care payment is provably the cheapest way to provide health care.
Oh, I also want to note the irony that you're promoting government mandated buying of insurance / government run insurance, [...]
False. I don't want health insurance. I want health care. There's a big difference.
[...] yet you're complaining about government mandated checkups for your child.
False. I'm complaining that if I am mandated by the state to have my child examined by a doctor, ideally the state should pay for the exam, and if nothing else, there should never be a question about the insurance company not covering it. It should be something that's covered 100% of the time, in network / out of network / whatever / period. It is the very definition of a "standard health care visit" - it will be the same in every doctor's office across the entire state at least, and probably the country.
I disagree with you because I value my rights, believe in upholding the Constitution
The right-wing mainstay for blocking progress when its convenient, and throwing out when it's expedient.
Ever actually read the document? Surely, you've read the Preamble - the statement of intent that covers everything else in the document? Specifically, the part about "promote the general welfare"? Or, how about the Declaration of Independence, where the framers of the constitution stated that it was self-evident that all mankind has the right to life, as well as the pursuit of happiness?
Ever tried to be happy with 7 million dollars in medical debt?
We ALL benefit from a society that is healthy. Healthy citizens are productive and happier, and produce more.
My mother-in-law died a couple of years ago, from breast cancer. Toward the end of her life, the part of her prescriptions that wasn't covered by insurance ran over $50,000 per month. If I got cancer, my health insurance covers my family for a maximum lifetime payout of $1,000,000. With today's medical rates, you can easily blow through that in 3 months.
But, it's no big deal, the free market will solve it! We should leave it alone! Why rush this through?!
Calling it "Obamacare" is a huge waving flag showing your true colors. You're a Registered Independent(tm). One of those people who lives by the credo: "BOTH SIDES ARE BAD LOL (vote republican)". So, take your talking points elsewhere. The rest of us are trying to make progress. You're outdated and, frankly, wrong, and you're damaging this country.
Re:This bill has nothing to do with health care.
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The first proposal was one of those.
The insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and right wing policy groups organized astroturf campaigns to scream and yell and basically banish it out of existence.
The bill we have now is sort of a consolation prize. It doesn't go NEARLY far enough, but it's at least something.
The thing that no one will acknowledge is that THE GOVERNMENT ALREADY PAYS OVER TWO THIRDS of the health care cost in this country, between medicaid, medicare, government employees, social security benefits, and other programs. This wouldn't be a monumental step - it would just be opening up medicaid as an OPTION to people who would choose to use it over private insurance. Namely, people who currently are un- or under-insured.
Overall cost of health care is up because the tests, treatments, and medications that are now mainstream are all dramatically better than they were not all that long ago, when they were prohibitively expensive and rarely employed. They are used more widely now because they are less expensive (economies of scale), and, after all, nobody wants sub-standard treatment.
Absolutely provably false.
Harvard Business Review published a piece on this recently. It uses raw data to compare the US health care system to other developed nations. It's conclusions:
Americans realize amongst the poorest health outcomes of developed nations. Americans have the lowest life expectancy amongst developed nations -- 78.1 years, compared to 81 in the UK, and 82 in Switzerland. [...] And America has the highest infant mortality rate -- 6.9 deaths per 1000 live births, compared to 5.4 in Canada, or 4.7 in Belgium.
The numbers are preliminary, but suggest a visible trend. Where survival rates have increased in other countries -- sometimes significantly -- in the US, cancer survival rates have dropped over the last two decades.
Americans pay more for healthcare because they trade more expensive products for less service, realizing poorer outcomes. Why? Because that is what maximizes near-term profits along the value chain. [...] Healthcare in America is a textbook example of thin value. The healthcare industry maintains significantly supernormal profitability -- yet, those profits are divorced from people being relatively better off. An American healthcare industry that "creates value" by limiting how much better off people are is simply transferring value from society to shareholders.
(emphasis theirs)
The article also goes on to state that most pharmaceutical companies spend over TWICE as much on marketing as they do on R and that the gap between R&D and marketing continues to grow. By moving to a government single payer health insurance system, the pharmaceutical industries would have to forego their ~20% annual profit margins and live with profit margins in line with the state of the economy.
The outraged opposition from "Real Americans" to public health care is entirely a manufactured product, supported by those who have interests in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
On a personal note, I talk with some friends from Europe on a regular basis about this, and they don't really understand the fuss, or the need for insurance to be involved. One friend from Denmark summed it up by saying "If you're a citizen, you pay taxes and get health care. If you're sick, you go to the doctor, you get treated, the doctor sends the bill to the government. The end".
As opposed to my current situation, where the Family Practitioner that my family has been going to since my son was born (the OB/GYN that delivered him works there) is now suddenly not covered by my insurance company - EVEN THOUGH the insurance company's own website says that certain doctors at the practice participate, and EVEN THOUGH we have previously had coverage for things performed at the doc's place. We got a bill for over $500 for a STATE MANDATED health checkup for my son that was required before he could enroll in Kindergarten - not a drop of it was covered. My employer stepped in and reimbursed me for a portion of it, but told me sadly that they couldn't fight the insurance company and that I'd have to change doctors.
We need health care reform. The Right Wing in Washington opposes it. They will fight it at any cost, because it cuts into their backing funds from the insurance and
Re:A false choice, of course...
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Your talking points are way out of date; please report to Fox News for today's new talking points.
(the "10 years of taxes, 6 years of benefits in the CBO report" talking point has been conclusively disproven)
The thing that bugs the shit out of me right now is stuff like Clear Type and whatever the default font Microsoft uses for Word 2007 now. It seriously looks like it would work better on a CRT moniter - on LCD's it looks like a blurry mess! It's SUPER anti-aliased, when LCD's provide you nothing if not crisp, perfectly aligned geometry - which looks TERRIBAD with this fuzzy font.
Anymore, the first thing I do when I open a new word doc for editing is switch the font to Arial or something other than the Calibri default.
If anyone knows how to fix that, be my guest and enlighten me, but I've tried all the built in calibration tools - you go through them and they look great at the end, but then back to word and just ugh, a fuzzy mess.
Slashdot Mirror
Although... most certifications are entry level. They only say that you've read the material, have done some practice and have a basic understanding of the theory. They *try* to test for experience, but the Cisco, Microsoft and Linux certs can be passed without experience. I've written others, but I've seen few certs which contradict this.
Woah, there, buddy.
Yes, there are entry level certificates for a lot of things:
A+ - anyone who puts this on a resume who is going for anything other than a repairman is stretching.
MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) - you have passed any one MS test
PMP - congrats you're a PHB-prototype.
etc.
But, there's a LOT of pooh-poohing of certs around here, and some of it isn't warranted.
For example: People who have a CCNP have passed four different cisco tests, including a troubleshooting one. That could be crammed for probably, as it's strictly a multiple choice test, but most people who have a CCNP probably have at least a decent familiarity with Cisco equipment.
People who have an MCSE have passed 7 Microsoft tests. Yes, you can cram for this and learn in books / etc, but - it's still more difficult than people think. How many people do you actually know that have gone as far as really getting their MCSE? There's a lot, but not as many as who think that it's just a piece of paper and stupid test. There's some higher level domain configuration and troubleshooting, etc.
And the RHCE (which I recently got) is a literal hands-on test - they hand you a broken linux box which you have to fix, and then a list of things to make it do via whatever method you think best (i.e. sendmail or postifx, as long as it delivers mail etc).
Certifications are not the end-all be-all of knowledge measurement. But, they're not completely worthless either. I see people on slashdot all the time who are like "I don't trust someone with a certification", or "I trust someone with an RHCE less than I trust someone without one!". That just doesn't make any sense.
~X
So that's what that was!
I worked in a repair shop in the 2003-2005 timeframe, and we used to see TONS of Compaq 3000/5000 series computers with the leaking caps on them. But other manufacturers had similar problems, and I remember some dells. Probably didn't see too many of the Optiplex ones, cause they tended to have corporate contracts.
Yeah, that problem was everywhere. You could tell how long a computer was going to last by the bulging capacitor tops - if they showed what looked like "rust", which was leaking brownish fluid, you had 4-6 months tops. If they were just bulging upward, you might get 8-12 months.
Wow.
To be fair, Starcraft is ENTIRELY an anomaly in the entire history of video gaming. Blizzard have a pretty good idea that people are and will be interested in Starcraft... because the game is still selling.
Seriously, the game came out 11 years, 2 months, and 10 days ago. Literally a week ago, I was in a GameStop and saw a brand new, in box copy of the starcraft battlechest edition on the shelf, for sale.
I cannot think of any other game that is still being sold as new that's anywhere NEAR that old - discounting things like the Civ anniversary pack or the C&C: First Decade pack, and other re-releases. This game has real staying power.
Anyway, like Yahtzee said: The point of episodic content is to release smaller sections of game, more frequently, at a lower cost. Valve have gotten the small sections and lower cost down, but the frequency is downright glacial. Half Life 2 Episode 2 Manchester United 1 took years for about 5-6 hours of gameplay. So, IMO, I hope they're releasing Ep3 via announcement at E3, but it wouldn't surprise me if they took another 18 months for ep3, and then another 3-4 years for HL3.
Stupid Valve. WE WANT GAMES, WE WILL PAY.
~X
God, again with the complaints about mining!
I have 4 eve chars, totaling almost 200 million skill points, and I've mined a total of 3 hours in over 4 years of playing.
The oldest, richest characters in Eve make their money on industrial stuff: Purchasing, trading, producing from valuable blueprints, etc. Value added kinds of stuff.
A lot of people (me, in my earlier days) just went killing NPC pirates for bounties. You can make enough to buy even the most expensive ship fielded in the tournament (probably one of the Macharials or Rattlesnakes) inside of a week, easy.
A lot of people do "quests", i.e. "go here, kill that", from NPC agents. Those make a huge amount of money.
The richer alliances control minerals, yes that's true, but largely it's "Moon mining", i.e. it happens in real time, and all you have to do is empty the silos every once in a while. That's where a lot of them make their money.
And on top of that, remember this is Eve - you can always steal your way to a fortune.
~X
If you think it's fun slash nailbiting to watch, try participating!
(Dystopia Alliance)
To be fair, google is using it's search revenue to muscle it's way into a lot of other online services markets by offering the services for free (domain hosted Gmail, google apps, etc). That seems pretty shady to me, but what do I know.
Not that I disagree with what you're saying in principle, but national oil companies (I.e. Aramco, the Saudi Government oil company) produce 52% of the world's oil and hold 88% of the proven reserves of oil. XOM is a huge, ginormous, supermajor company, but they don't hold nearly the resources of the NOC's.
Part of the reason that RPM is quicker slash more powerful for some things is cause of the HUGE amount of data and metadata it stores. I think a lot of it is in /var/cache/yum - huge sqlite files, and sqlite is reasonably dense for storing data (my fedora 12 server shows about 140MB of stuff here).
RPM is very powerful. You learn some of this stuff while studying for the RHCE test (or at least I did):
Want to know which packages are installed? rpm -qa /path/to/file
Want to verify a package's installation? rpm -qV packagename
Want to know, of those installed, which have been modified? for i in $(rpm -qa);do rpm -qV $i;done #will have false positives... This will tell you if the timestamp / security context / MD5sum have changed.
Want to know what package owns a specific file? rpm -qf
Want to know every file that a package installs? rpm -ql packagename
Even more, want to get a pristine copy of a file / binary / whatever that's installed with a package? Did you know RPMs are CPIO archives?
Verify yum downloader is installed (part of yum-utils).
mkdir somedir; cd somedir #because this will "tarbomb" your directory.
yumdownloader packagename
rpm2cpio packagename.rpm | cpio -dim
ls -lF
That's everything that the package *installs*, not counting any pre- or post-install configuration.
I've really come around to appreciating RPM and yum.
~X
It's better that Twain gave us something that will last us through the ages (his words) than to have been another generic family man.
Your comment sounds callous, but I completely agree with you.
Look at the 10,000 ft view. If you get too close, then everywhere, every day, is a tragedy. Yes, if he was a neglectful father and husband, that is a bad thing. However, look at the entirety of American Literature. In a completely objective sense, is it better with Mark Twain's writings than without? I think so.
The guy who was valedictorian of my High School went on to seminary and to become a baptist church youth pastor. Am I ok with that? Well, ...no, not really. The guy was brilliant - he could have cured cancer, or invented something that moves humanity forward in an unthinkable way. I honestly kind of think that if you're great at something, you owe it to the world to *be* great at it. The question shouldn't be "does this make Mark Twain a bad person", it really is "Why did he think that he had to have a wife and family, when he had all this other stuff going on?".
Terry Goodkind sort of touched on this in "Faith of the Fallen" (as much as that series gets preachy later, this was a good book). If you stop to look around, there are tragedies everywhere. It shouldn't stop you from achieving greatness.
Granted, IIRC Eucalyptus was from reverse engineering Amazon S3's api, and is compatible on the front end but sucks hard on the back end...
Tim Patterson wrote Q-DOS, which Gates and Microsoft purchases from him - after having promised IBM an OS for their personal computer.
Didn't you see Pirates of Silicon Valley?
You didn't venture far enough away from home.
Ways to find NPC Criminals that need a good killin':
1.) Ask an "agent" (NPC mission giver) for work. Keeping in mind, some of the agents are kill focused and some are industrial focused ("bring me X minerals and deliver Y to my friend Z in the next solar system).
2.) Venture out into lower security space and go to an asteroid belt. Although, what they're doing there, I've never figured out - they're never mining the asteroids.
Anyway, yeah, you can solo eve - the catch is you'll need start up capital to become an industrialist (like real life, I guess?). Which means running a few missions until you can start playing the (entirely player driven) market.
Or you can take the healthy shortcut - spend $40 on a game-time card, then sell it in game for a quarter of a billion credits, which is enough to get anyone started.
Once you have the money, though, you can work on market manipulation, trading, and even buying raw materials, producing goods, and selling the value-added goods.
~X
I hate chrome.
But I use it on my netbook because Firefox hogs too much of the 1GB of ram and 16GB flash disk.
There's still a market for a lean browser.
Exactly.
Case in point, one of my good friends just left us (Rackspace) to found a company called Riptano that sells support for Cassandra (there's a story in Database Journal here).
They are committed (John and Matt) to building bits on top of Cassandra for support / management / etc, but also contributing in a big way to the project its self and not forking it.
I don't have the stones to strike out on my own like that, but MAJOR props to them - this is what the F/OSS community needs more of. It takes people with an abundance of passion about a technology to make something like this a reality. Plus, who knows, they may really turn this into a big thing if Cassandra takes off and people want nosql solutions.
(plug: http://www.riptano.com/)
This is modded as funny, but if you see their Life Cycle page at:
https://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/
You can see that there's a 3 phase cycle for release support. Major versions are supported for 7 years, with the first 4 years being "primary support", i.e. new features, hardware support, and bug / security patches, and then after that they move into a maintenance cycle in which they will first not push new features, and finally only push bug fixes / security patches that are marked as "critical".
This is important to those of us that manage thousands of RHEL boxes.
Btw, got my RHCE a couple of months ago! So, technically, for me, the longer RHEL6 takes to come out, the better - my RHCE is valid until RHEL7.
I understand that the black hat community is actively trying to hack the PS3 because it's proven to be very well protected from pirates. I realize Sony is a business and they are simply trying to protect their rights.
The end.
That's why - the fact that someone found a way to get outside of the virtualized box that they put the "run other os" option in recently - they're trying to head the coming jailbreak off.
~W
Not to mention, some sauces such as Dave's Ultimate Insanity (which I had to sign a waiver to purchase), Blair's 3am, etc, are already pushing food additive properties into the multi-million scoville units.
~X
Medicare paid for the birth of my son. They were polite and efficient, and also personable.
When my wife (then girlfriend) got pregnant, she didn't have the maternity option on her health insurance. Medicaid said that they would pay for it, but that the hospital / OB would have to submit everything to the other insurance company to get denied first. Any slow-downs or inefficiencies in the process were strictly related to Anthem BC/BS having to deny everything medically that happened to my wife from the day she got pregnant.
20 months later, when the hospital tried to bill us for something else related to the birth, we got a personal call from our Medicare case worker - she already knew about it. She said "Now, you guys know, they only have one year to send you bills, so you're not responsible for that. Fax me a copy of it, and I'll sort it out with the hospital. They should know better."
Anecdote is the singular of data, but my experience with Medicare has been extremely positive.
Wow, I don't even know where to start.
Even just a cursory glance at Wikipedia shows that other countries alter their data to decrease their infant mortality rate
Uh, well, I'll just quote your own source:
Wikipedia:
Many countries, including the United States, Sweden or Germany, count an infant exhibiting any sign of life as alive, no matter the month of gestation or the size [...] France, the Czech Republic, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Poland do not report all live births of babies under 500 g and/or 22 weeks of gestation. However, the report also concludes that the differences in reporting are unlikely to be the primary explanation for the United States' relatively low international ranking.
The length thing was from Russia during the Cold War. 500g, for the google-lazy, is 1.1 lbs. 22 weeks is almost universally non-viable - that's only halfway through a pregnancy. These cases count for an insignificant percentage of total births, and as Wikipedia makes a point of saying, don't explain the US's higher infant mortality rating.
[babbling about European tax rates]
In the US, tax rates are as much as 35% for federal, and up to 10% for state, not to mention up to 10% sales (VAT) tax, as well as a payroll of tax of up to 20%+ (you, and Huffington Post, and the Heritage foundation, and World Net Daily, ad nauseum, always love to put that in when talking about a flat tax - no reason to leave it out now).
Universal government-run health care payment is provably the cheapest way to provide health care.
Oh, I also want to note the irony that you're promoting government mandated buying of insurance / government run insurance, [...]
False. I don't want health insurance. I want health care. There's a big difference.
[...] yet you're complaining about government mandated checkups for your child.
False. I'm complaining that if I am mandated by the state to have my child examined by a doctor, ideally the state should pay for the exam, and if nothing else, there should never be a question about the insurance company not covering it. It should be something that's covered 100% of the time, in network / out of network / whatever / period. It is the very definition of a "standard health care visit" - it will be the same in every doctor's office across the entire state at least, and probably the country.
I disagree with you because I value my rights, believe in upholding the Constitution
The right-wing mainstay for blocking progress when its convenient, and throwing out when it's expedient.
Ever actually read the document? Surely, you've read the Preamble - the statement of intent that covers everything else in the document? Specifically, the part about "promote the general welfare"? Or, how about the Declaration of Independence, where the framers of the constitution stated that it was self-evident that all mankind has the right to life, as well as the pursuit of happiness?
Ever tried to be happy with 7 million dollars in medical debt?
We ALL benefit from a society that is healthy. Healthy citizens are productive and happier, and produce more.
My mother-in-law died a couple of years ago, from breast cancer. Toward the end of her life, the part of her prescriptions that wasn't covered by insurance ran over $50,000 per month. If I got cancer, my health insurance covers my family for a maximum lifetime payout of $1,000,000. With today's medical rates, you can easily blow through that in 3 months.
But, it's no big deal, the free market will solve it! We should leave it alone! Why rush this through?!
Calling it "Obamacare" is a huge waving flag showing your true colors. You're a Registered Independent(tm). One of those people who lives by the credo: "BOTH SIDES ARE BAD LOL (vote republican)". So, take your talking points elsewhere. The rest of us are trying to make progress. You're outdated and, frankly, wrong, and you're damaging this country.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/05/weekly-address-what-health-reform-will-deliver-year would be a good start - why not ask the guy who wrote it?
The first proposal was one of those.
The insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and right wing policy groups organized astroturf campaigns to scream and yell and basically banish it out of existence.
The bill we have now is sort of a consolation prize. It doesn't go NEARLY far enough, but it's at least something.
The thing that no one will acknowledge is that THE GOVERNMENT ALREADY PAYS OVER TWO THIRDS of the health care cost in this country, between medicaid, medicare, government employees, social security benefits, and other programs. This wouldn't be a monumental step - it would just be opening up medicaid as an OPTION to people who would choose to use it over private insurance. Namely, people who currently are un- or under-insured.
Sheesh. I really fear for this country sometimes.
You could have just posted this pic:
SOCIALISM!
Cost more, yes. Gets less, I don't think so.
Overall cost of health care is up because the tests, treatments, and medications that are now mainstream are all dramatically better than they were not all that long ago, when they were prohibitively expensive and rarely employed. They are used more widely now because they are less expensive (economies of scale), and, after all, nobody wants sub-standard treatment.
Absolutely provably false.
Harvard Business Review published a piece on this recently. It uses raw data to compare the US health care system to other developed nations. It's conclusions:
Americans realize amongst the poorest health outcomes of developed nations. Americans have the lowest life expectancy amongst developed nations -- 78.1 years, compared to 81 in the UK, and 82 in Switzerland. [...] And America has the highest infant mortality rate -- 6.9 deaths per 1000 live births, compared to 5.4 in Canada, or 4.7 in Belgium.
The numbers are preliminary, but suggest a visible trend. Where survival rates have increased in other countries -- sometimes significantly -- in the US, cancer survival rates have dropped over the last two decades.
Americans pay more for healthcare because they trade more expensive products for less service, realizing poorer outcomes. Why? Because that is what maximizes near-term profits along the value chain. [...] Healthcare in America is a textbook example of thin value. The healthcare industry maintains significantly supernormal profitability -- yet, those profits are divorced from people being relatively better off. An American healthcare industry that "creates value" by limiting how much better off people are is simply transferring value from society to shareholders.
(emphasis theirs)
The article also goes on to state that most pharmaceutical companies spend over TWICE as much on marketing as they do on R and that the gap between R&D and marketing continues to grow. By moving to a government single payer health insurance system, the pharmaceutical industries would have to forego their ~20% annual profit margins and live with profit margins in line with the state of the economy.
The outraged opposition from "Real Americans" to public health care is entirely a manufactured product, supported by those who have interests in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
On a personal note, I talk with some friends from Europe on a regular basis about this, and they don't really understand the fuss, or the need for insurance to be involved. One friend from Denmark summed it up by saying "If you're a citizen, you pay taxes and get health care. If you're sick, you go to the doctor, you get treated, the doctor sends the bill to the government. The end".
As opposed to my current situation, where the Family Practitioner that my family has been going to since my son was born (the OB/GYN that delivered him works there) is now suddenly not covered by my insurance company - EVEN THOUGH the insurance company's own website says that certain doctors at the practice participate, and EVEN THOUGH we have previously had coverage for things performed at the doc's place. We got a bill for over $500 for a STATE MANDATED health checkup for my son that was required before he could enroll in Kindergarten - not a drop of it was covered. My employer stepped in and reimbursed me for a portion of it, but told me sadly that they couldn't fight the insurance company and that I'd have to change doctors.
We need health care reform. The Right Wing in Washington opposes it. They will fight it at any cost, because it cuts into their backing funds from the insurance and
Your talking points are way out of date; please report to Fox News for today's new talking points.
(the "10 years of taxes, 6 years of benefits in the CBO report" talking point has been conclusively disproven)
The thing that bugs the shit out of me right now is stuff like Clear Type and whatever the default font Microsoft uses for Word 2007 now. It seriously looks like it would work better on a CRT moniter - on LCD's it looks like a blurry mess! It's SUPER anti-aliased, when LCD's provide you nothing if not crisp, perfectly aligned geometry - which looks TERRIBAD with this fuzzy font.
Anymore, the first thing I do when I open a new word doc for editing is switch the font to Arial or something other than the Calibri default.
If anyone knows how to fix that, be my guest and enlighten me, but I've tried all the built in calibration tools - you go through them and they look great at the end, but then back to word and just ugh, a fuzzy mess.