"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard."
Oops. Wrong stage of evolution. We're not there yet.
Do the math? What math, it's all the same. If the property has 1 mile road frontage or 10 feet, that 1 mile or road still needs all those services. If the property is valued at 10 dollars it still needs the same services as if the property is valued at 2 million dollars.
But the cost of providing those services isn't the same. First, the probability of a forest fire is roughly proportional to the area of land, because lightning doesn't care. Second, people are more likely to steal from big, expensive houses than slums, and people are more likely to build big, expensive houses on large pieces of land than small ones, so police protection tends to be (at least to some extent) proportional to land area as well.
Even things like utilities cost more for larger pieces of land, because the utility companies have to run their cables past your property to get to the next potential customer, and the longer your property is, the more it costs to do so. They only get one customer per property, so larger properties effectively raise the installation cost for everyone on your block.
And unless you're at the end of a street, the street has to go past your house, not just to it. Therefore, the cost is directly proportional to the width of the piece of land, so longer pieces of land should pay more in taxes. This also applies to the cost of fuel for police driving past your house when they patrol your neighborhood, the cost of running water pipes past your house for fire protection, etc.
In other words, the costs are almost all proportional to area.
That's changing the goal post a bit isn't it? Taxes do not pay the insurance coverage. the city or whatever government entity does not provide the insurance. More expensive property will cost more to insure primarily because it will cost more to replace anything of higher value. But the police and fire are not used more then cheaper properties.
Actually, they are, to some degree. When's the last time you heard of somebody breaking into a falling down shack because they thought the person might have stuff worth stealing? And as I said, forest fires are proportional to area. And house fires... well, those are more determined by the age of the home than anything else, so those tend to be inversely proportional to the cost of the home, but they're still mathematically related.:-)
If he got that big a dose and lived, he should seriously play the lottery.... IIRC, that's right about at the line where everybody above that line dies within a week or so....
4) The counter reaches zero, then you have another minute or more before the light changes. If you press the walk button again, you get a second walk cycle.
Do your 'sincerely held religious beliefs' outlaw blood transfusions? Looks like your exployees are going to be paying for that themselves.
A health insurance plan tuned for the beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses [jw.org] would still pay for blood substitutes [slashdot.org], iron supplements, and other expenses associated with bloodless surgery [wikipedia.org]. Some insurers might prefer bloodless surgery anyway because it keeps the insurer from having to pay for units of blood and pay to treat blood-borne diseases.
Now take it up a notch and consider religions that reject healthcare almost entirely, like Christian Science, or religions that insist on Eastern medicine, or.... At some point, you really do have to draw a line. The only question is where the line should be drawn. The easiest place to draw the line is "never allow exceptions". Everything from there gets progressively more complex.
There is no justification for forcing anyone to pay for anything. Not even spaghetti. Government economic coercion is the real "slippery slope". Contraceptives are predictable expenses and have no business being in insurance, abortion is an elective procedure and shouldn't be covered either.
Ignoring your last sentence (snipped), I mostly agree with you, but with an exception. Some use of contraceptives is not for prevention of birth, but rather to treat underlying medical conditions, such as ovarian cysts and endometriosis. If a policy excludes birth control, that exclusion should be allowed only when there is not a medically necessary reason for the prescription.
Oh, and the policies should also exclude other drugs that don't serve a medically necessary purpose, such as antihistamines (except for treatment of anaphylaxis), Levitra/Viagra/Cialis, etc.
...they are also free to work in another with/without religious beliefs who will purchase it.
Up until that bit, we were in agreement. However, that last part should really be left out of this discussion. The same faulty logic can literally be used to justify any level of abuse, legal or illegal:
You don't like the fact that you have to work a twelve-hour shift, seven days a week? You're free to work somewhere else.
You don't think our working conditions are safe? You're free to work somewhere else.
You want to get paid more than ten cents an hour? You're free to work somewhere else.
And so on. The fact of the matter is that people are not free to leave a job and take a job somewhere else. There's a very high cost to doing so. You must find the time to search for other jobs, interview for those jobs, get those jobs, and then leave. And when there are no jobs in your field nearby, you must move somewhere that has jobs. And when businesses are not regulated by laws that require certain minimum standards, those other jobs are likely to be equally bad.
As for the issue on the whole, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I don't like the idea of being forced to pay for things that go against my convictions. On the other hand, there's nothing stopping business leaders from professing adherence to churches that refuse all medical care, then disclaiming their responsibility to provide insurance entirely. It's hard to conceive of an exception that protects against the first situation without allowing businesses to abort coverage outright through legal maneuvering.
It will take the court granting certiorari on several other lawsuits before there's an adequate line established, and this case really should have been the last one granted cert, not the first, because there's likely to be an awful lot of abuse in the meantime as a result of this decision being interpreted in an overly broad fashion.
Just so long as you're aware that "erase everything" is useless against law enforcement, who start by shutting down your system and cloning the drive, then booting your machine off of the clone. In fact, it's worse than useless, because it qualifies as attempting to destroy evidence, and is trivially provable by comparing the original to the clone. So you'll go to jail just for trying that.
Destruction of evidence, hindering a police investigation, and so on. And unless it is done at the flash memory chip level, they could get an image of the data.
Of course, if one were the sort of person who would build a self-destructing USB stick, it would make more sense to just store part of the encryption key in a RAMDisk. Rebooting the computer wouldn't make any difference, but the rules of evidence require them to shut down the system to clone the drive, so when they ask you if you can decrypt the drive, you can honestly say, "No. You destroyed the key when you shut off the computer."
Of course, you'll probably want to have a backup copy of the key somewhere, in some form, or at least a means of reconstructing it, but because you would only use it if you actually had to shut your computer all the way down, it doesn't necessarily have to be in a place that's easily accessible, nor any place where someone would realistically look. It could, for example, involve walking around the city in a particular pattern known only to you, and typing in the text of all the graffiti you see....
I wrote a partial C language interpreter in Perl once. Trust me, you can write code that's a lot more complex than a simple text transform. With that said, you don't write that sort of code like you'd write a script. You write it like you'd write a large C/C++ library or framework....
I've never had a drive that did emergency parking until my HD-based MacBook Pro. All my dead drives were too dumb to have the needed sensors, as were the machines that they were in.
With that said, I'm terrified at the aggressiveness with which that MacBook Pro parks its heads. I literally can't pick the thing up and place it gently on my bed without the heads doing an emergency park. I don't have a lot of faith in that drive lasting very long. Non-emergency parking is hard enough on the heads. Emergency parking is downright bad.
I understand but disagree. Any language can be a write-only language if you don't care about maintainability. Then there are the wannabe gurus that save 3 lines of code not to shorten the program but to impress others. Even worse, there are people that criticise readable code for it being too simple. If you ever worked in a team of programmers with varying skills then you appreciate simple, readable code. You also will once you had to take over unreadable code.
To paraphrase the famous adage: A C programmer can write C in any language; a bad programmer can write Perl in any language.
Oh my God! Is PERL really competing for worst language with Brainf*ck? After reading the article on the operator mentioned, I can only assume so. I can't believe with all of the syntax backward-compatibility crap they've bolted on they couldn't just have cleaned up the syntax. Thus, my assumption is the only reasonable explanation. Or maybe brain damage... I hear you get that from PERL.
No, it's actually more of a vicious cycle. Bad coders write bad Perl, which leads to brain damage, which results in worse code. If you have an array with five or six indices, unless you're doing some sort of borderline insane physics computation, you're already solidly in WTF territory. Most sane people try to limit their arrays to about two indices. Three is unusual. Beyond that limit, you should almost always be assigning explicit variable names to the components, and not working with them as arrays. And that limit applies to associative arrays and data structure chain references, too. If you're going more than about two or three steps out, there needs to be a named variable in there somewhere so that the code will be maintainable.
Indeed; the compiler's even allowed to assume signed integer overflow doesn't happen, which is where you get into trouble.
Translation: In their attempt to make the spec as portable as possible, they gave compiler writers too much freedom. Honestly, the first time I heard about this problem... maybe a decade ago... my immediate reaction was, "Why don't they just change the spec to say that those optimizations aren't allowed?"
I still maintain that tightening the C spec is the correct fix, and that all the monkeying around with checking to see if the computation would overflow by subtracting one operand from or dividing one operand into INT_MAX and comparing the result against the other operand is just silly. After all, a sufficiently smart compiler, given the assumption that integer overflows are impossible, should optimize out those pre-tests anyway, by virtue of the fact that you're about to add them, and integer overflows are impossible. And it wastes a tremendous number of CPU cycles doing throwaway computation for no reason other than working around the C spec being utterly and completely brain damaged.
They're not becoming resistant to our germ killing soaps and lotions...
Actually, they are. Resistance to triclosan (one of the more popular germ killing agents used in soaps and lotions) is on the rise. The triclosan-resistant MRSA strains are particularly disconcerting, as they make disinfection in hospitals a lot harder. And given that the epidermal varieties of staph are showing increaed triclosan resistance while S. aureus (which is mostly found inside the body) isn't, there's little question at this point that the widespread use of triclosan in soaps has resulted in evolutionary selection for triclosan resistance in methicillin-resistant staph.
Sorry, but that's etymologically incorrect. Mayday (with no space) is derived from French "m'aidez", meaning "Help me". It is an internationally recognized distress call that dates back almost a hundred years. The fact that socialists latched onto the preexisting "May Day" holiday (which dates back thousands of years) and turned it into the Eurasian equivalent of Labor Day results in an unfortunate name collision.
Because there's nothing to stop an incumbent from getting publicity during an electoral cycle just by doing his job and making the news.
Actually, there is, and it is enshrined in communications law, but thirty years of weak, ineffectual FCC commissioners has mostly gutted it, between the removal of the fairness doctrine in 1987 and the consistent failure to enforce the equal time rule....
Meg Whitman spent more on her campaign than any other non-presidential candidate. She lost. Money certainly helps, but plenty of elections are won by the less well funded candidate.
Ironically, she was too well known to win in California. To be precise, most Californians had actually used eBay by the time she ran, and nobody wanted someone who could create that kind of train wreck to be in charge of the entire state.:-)
Are there autism-related charities capable of putting forth the $150 million [fastcompany.com] typically required to pay for FDA's approval?
Why would they need approval? I think Suramin is already approved and on the market as an antimicrobial/antiviral medication for treating certain diseases, so ostensibly doctors can just prescribe it off-label. AFAIK, the only reason to get FDA approval would be so that the manufacturer would be allowed to actually market it as a treatment for autism.
That's curious. Almost all of the drive failures I've seen can be attributed to head damage from repeated parking prior to spin-down, whereas all the drives that I've kept spinning continuously have kept working essentially forever. And drives left spun down too long had a tendency to refuse to spin up.
I've had exactly one drive that had problems from spinning too much, and that was just an acoustic failure (I had the drive replaced because it was too darn noisy). With that said, that was an older, pre-fluid-bearing drive. I've never experienced even a partial bearing failure with newer drives.
It seems odd that their conclusions recommended precisely the opposite of what I've seen work in practice. I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that my sample size is much smaller than Google's sample size, so it is possible that the failures I've seen are a fluke, but the differences are so striking that it leads me to suspect other differences. For example, Google might be using enterprise-class drives that lack a park ramp....
What makes electric cars great is that they are incredibly simple. They aren't loaded down with ten thousand dollars worth of emissions control parts that fail every time someone sneezes. They don't have vacuum lines that get clogged with carbon deposits because some Ford engineer put a hole in a metal baffle, causing the EGR hose to suck oil straight up out of the valve cover and into the intake manifold. And so on.
Hybrids, by contrast, are unnecessarily complex systems that combine all of the reliability drawbacks of an internal combustion engine design with nearly all of the drawbacks of an all-electric design with the sole exception of the range limitation.
Thanks, but no thanks.
I'll be interested in a hybrid the minute the ICE becomes a replaceable, standardized, outboard component. If Tesla sold a $500 "Tesla Pod" that hangs an off-the-shelf AC/DC electrical generator from your back bumper for when you want extended range, that might be interesting. As long as the ICE is an integral part of the vehicle, it's a maintenance headache that I'd much rather do without. And if I'm going to have the maintenance headaches of a built-in ICE, I expect to also get the benefits of an ICE, like all that extra torque from a V6.
Slashdot Mirror
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard."
Oops. Wrong stage of evolution. We're not there yet.
But the cost of providing those services isn't the same. First, the probability of a forest fire is roughly proportional to the area of land, because lightning doesn't care. Second, people are more likely to steal from big, expensive houses than slums, and people are more likely to build big, expensive houses on large pieces of land than small ones, so police protection tends to be (at least to some extent) proportional to land area as well.
Even things like utilities cost more for larger pieces of land, because the utility companies have to run their cables past your property to get to the next potential customer, and the longer your property is, the more it costs to do so. They only get one customer per property, so larger properties effectively raise the installation cost for everyone on your block.
And unless you're at the end of a street, the street has to go past your house, not just to it. Therefore, the cost is directly proportional to the width of the piece of land, so longer pieces of land should pay more in taxes. This also applies to the cost of fuel for police driving past your house when they patrol your neighborhood, the cost of running water pipes past your house for fire protection, etc.
In other words, the costs are almost all proportional to area.
Actually, they are, to some degree. When's the last time you heard of somebody breaking into a falling down shack because they thought the person might have stuff worth stealing? And as I said, forest fires are proportional to area. And house fires... well, those are more determined by the age of the home than anything else, so those tend to be inversely proportional to the cost of the home, but they're still mathematically related. :-)
If he got that big a dose and lived, he should seriously play the lottery.... IIRC, that's right about at the line where everybody above that line dies within a week or so....
The worst ones are:
4) The counter reaches zero, then you have another minute or more before the light changes. If you press the walk button again, you get a second walk cycle.
What were they thinking?
Now take it up a notch and consider religions that reject healthcare almost entirely, like Christian Science, or religions that insist on Eastern medicine, or.... At some point, you really do have to draw a line. The only question is where the line should be drawn. The easiest place to draw the line is "never allow exceptions". Everything from there gets progressively more complex.
Ignoring your last sentence (snipped), I mostly agree with you, but with an exception. Some use of contraceptives is not for prevention of birth, but rather to treat underlying medical conditions, such as ovarian cysts and endometriosis. If a policy excludes birth control, that exclusion should be allowed only when there is not a medically necessary reason for the prescription.
Oh, and the policies should also exclude other drugs that don't serve a medically necessary purpose, such as antihistamines (except for treatment of anaphylaxis), Levitra/Viagra/Cialis, etc.
Up until that bit, we were in agreement. However, that last part should really be left out of this discussion. The same faulty logic can literally be used to justify any level of abuse, legal or illegal:
And so on. The fact of the matter is that people are not free to leave a job and take a job somewhere else. There's a very high cost to doing so. You must find the time to search for other jobs, interview for those jobs, get those jobs, and then leave. And when there are no jobs in your field nearby, you must move somewhere that has jobs. And when businesses are not regulated by laws that require certain minimum standards, those other jobs are likely to be equally bad.
As for the issue on the whole, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I don't like the idea of being forced to pay for things that go against my convictions. On the other hand, there's nothing stopping business leaders from professing adherence to churches that refuse all medical care, then disclaiming their responsibility to provide insurance entirely. It's hard to conceive of an exception that protects against the first situation without allowing businesses to abort coverage outright through legal maneuvering.
It will take the court granting certiorari on several other lawsuits before there's an adequate line established, and this case really should have been the last one granted cert, not the first, because there's likely to be an awful lot of abuse in the meantime as a result of this decision being interpreted in an overly broad fashion.
And 50+ years of trans fats. (The dangers were discovered way back in the 1950s.)
Just so long as you're aware that "erase everything" is useless against law enforcement, who start by shutting down your system and cloning the drive, then booting your machine off of the clone. In fact, it's worse than useless, because it qualifies as attempting to destroy evidence, and is trivially provable by comparing the original to the clone. So you'll go to jail just for trying that.
Of course, if one were the sort of person who would build a self-destructing USB stick, it would make more sense to just store part of the encryption key in a RAMDisk. Rebooting the computer wouldn't make any difference, but the rules of evidence require them to shut down the system to clone the drive, so when they ask you if you can decrypt the drive, you can honestly say, "No. You destroyed the key when you shut off the computer."
Of course, you'll probably want to have a backup copy of the key somewhere, in some form, or at least a means of reconstructing it, but because you would only use it if you actually had to shut your computer all the way down, it doesn't necessarily have to be in a place that's easily accessible, nor any place where someone would realistically look. It could, for example, involve walking around the city in a particular pattern known only to you, and typing in the text of all the graffiti you see....
This is where you learn to write automation code so that you are doing lots of work even when you're reading Slashdot. :-D
I wrote a partial C language interpreter in Perl once. Trust me, you can write code that's a lot more complex than a simple text transform. With that said, you don't write that sort of code like you'd write a script. You write it like you'd write a large C/C++ library or framework....
I've never had a drive that did emergency parking until my HD-based MacBook Pro. All my dead drives were too dumb to have the needed sensors, as were the machines that they were in.
With that said, I'm terrified at the aggressiveness with which that MacBook Pro parks its heads. I literally can't pick the thing up and place it gently on my bed without the heads doing an emergency park. I don't have a lot of faith in that drive lasting very long. Non-emergency parking is hard enough on the heads. Emergency parking is downright bad.
Except that bleach resistance is starting to show up in cholera.
Yikes.
Just as long as by "implementation-defined", you mean NaN and not, for example, 0. :)
To paraphrase the famous adage: A C programmer can write C in any language; a bad programmer can write Perl in any language.
No, it's actually more of a vicious cycle. Bad coders write bad Perl, which leads to brain damage, which results in worse code. If you have an array with five or six indices, unless you're doing some sort of borderline insane physics computation, you're already solidly in WTF territory. Most sane people try to limit their arrays to about two indices. Three is unusual. Beyond that limit, you should almost always be assigning explicit variable names to the components, and not working with them as arrays. And that limit applies to associative arrays and data structure chain references, too. If you're going more than about two or three steps out, there needs to be a named variable in there somewhere so that the code will be maintainable.
Translation: In their attempt to make the spec as portable as possible, they gave compiler writers too much freedom. Honestly, the first time I heard about this problem... maybe a decade ago... my immediate reaction was, "Why don't they just change the spec to say that those optimizations aren't allowed?"
I still maintain that tightening the C spec is the correct fix, and that all the monkeying around with checking to see if the computation would overflow by subtracting one operand from or dividing one operand into INT_MAX and comparing the result against the other operand is just silly. After all, a sufficiently smart compiler, given the assumption that integer overflows are impossible, should optimize out those pre-tests anyway, by virtue of the fact that you're about to add them, and integer overflows are impossible. And it wastes a tremendous number of CPU cycles doing throwaway computation for no reason other than working around the C spec being utterly and completely brain damaged.
Actually, they are. Resistance to triclosan (one of the more popular germ killing agents used in soaps and lotions) is on the rise. The triclosan-resistant MRSA strains are particularly disconcerting, as they make disinfection in hospitals a lot harder. And given that the epidermal varieties of staph are showing increaed triclosan resistance while S. aureus (which is mostly found inside the body) isn't, there's little question at this point that the widespread use of triclosan in soaps has resulted in evolutionary selection for triclosan resistance in methicillin-resistant staph.
Sorry, but that's etymologically incorrect. Mayday (with no space) is derived from French "m'aidez", meaning "Help me". It is an internationally recognized distress call that dates back almost a hundred years. The fact that socialists latched onto the preexisting "May Day" holiday (which dates back thousands of years) and turned it into the Eurasian equivalent of Labor Day results in an unfortunate name collision.
Actually, there is, and it is enshrined in communications law, but thirty years of weak, ineffectual FCC commissioners has mostly gutted it, between the removal of the fairness doctrine in 1987 and the consistent failure to enforce the equal time rule....
Ironically, she was too well known to win in California. To be precise, most Californians had actually used eBay by the time she ran, and nobody wanted someone who could create that kind of train wreck to be in charge of the entire state. :-)
Why would they need approval? I think Suramin is already approved and on the market as an antimicrobial/antiviral medication for treating certain diseases, so ostensibly doctors can just prescribe it off-label. AFAIK, the only reason to get FDA approval would be so that the manufacturer would be allowed to actually market it as a treatment for autism.
That's curious. Almost all of the drive failures I've seen can be attributed to head damage from repeated parking prior to spin-down, whereas all the drives that I've kept spinning continuously have kept working essentially forever. And drives left spun down too long had a tendency to refuse to spin up.
I've had exactly one drive that had problems from spinning too much, and that was just an acoustic failure (I had the drive replaced because it was too darn noisy). With that said, that was an older, pre-fluid-bearing drive. I've never experienced even a partial bearing failure with newer drives.
It seems odd that their conclusions recommended precisely the opposite of what I've seen work in practice. I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that my sample size is much smaller than Google's sample size, so it is possible that the failures I've seen are a fluke, but the differences are so striking that it leads me to suspect other differences. For example, Google might be using enterprise-class drives that lack a park ramp....
I think you missed the all-electric part.
What makes electric cars great is that they are incredibly simple. They aren't loaded down with ten thousand dollars worth of emissions control parts that fail every time someone sneezes. They don't have vacuum lines that get clogged with carbon deposits because some Ford engineer put a hole in a metal baffle, causing the EGR hose to suck oil straight up out of the valve cover and into the intake manifold. And so on.
Hybrids, by contrast, are unnecessarily complex systems that combine all of the reliability drawbacks of an internal combustion engine design with nearly all of the drawbacks of an all-electric design with the sole exception of the range limitation.
Thanks, but no thanks.
I'll be interested in a hybrid the minute the ICE becomes a replaceable, standardized, outboard component. If Tesla sold a $500 "Tesla Pod" that hangs an off-the-shelf AC/DC electrical generator from your back bumper for when you want extended range, that might be interesting. As long as the ICE is an integral part of the vehicle, it's a maintenance headache that I'd much rather do without. And if I'm going to have the maintenance headaches of a built-in ICE, I expect to also get the benefits of an ICE, like all that extra torque from a V6.