Odds are, that $15 transfer charge is for a wire transfer, while the free transfer is via ACH. ACH transfers are almost always free; wire transfers are almost always pricey.
The problem you could end up with simply making banks responsible is that it would just slow things down a whole lot. So you tell the bank "You are responsible for any bad checks." The bank says "Ok, no problem." Then, you deposit a rent check from your roommate. It doesn't show up in your account the next day, nor the next week, nor the week after.
The law requires that funds be made available within 7 days (with a few exceptions), so unless that law goes away, putting the liability on banks will either result in greater use of ACH or less favorable interest rates to pay for the losses. It's not clear which. Maybe both.
IMHO, the iPhone sold well even without discounts for three reasons:
It was one of the first devices to put a usable web browser in your pocket.
It provided better Mac OS X integration (music and contact syncing in particular) than any other phone to date.
It was also an iPod, complete with the portability thereof.
I agree with you that the iPad is a harder sell for most people, but for frequent travelers, I think it would be tempting as an alternative to carrying a laptop on airplanes. I'd be interested in one myself if I were a normal person who didn't mostly use his laptop for running Finale (music notation), Xcode, Perl, PHP, Apache, and vi.:-)
I had a touch-sensitive light and a touch-sensitive intercom beside my bed way back in the 80s. The only thing new is doing it on a saw, which sadly, the patent office considers to be an "invention" in much the same way that "on the internet" makes some thousand-year-old process an "invention".
So the current method of jamming an aluminum block into the blade to stop it instantly is really the only way.
Two flaws in that: 1. using an aluminum block, 2. jamming it into the blade. Other than that, the principle is correct....
Assume for a moment that the radial saw is designed sensibly. You have a multi-sided (ideally square or triangular) center hole in the blade and a similar shape for the shaft. The motor is direct-driving the blade. There should be exactly zero play between that shaft and the blade, and the shaft isn't being flexed in any way, so if the shaft stops, so does the blade. Immediately.
At this point, the problem becomes much easier. Use a motor with a shaft that sticks out both ends. On the back end, place a round steel plate with holes in it. Use multiple rows of holes staggered so that there's always a pin over a hole within a tiny fraction of an inch. Use strong springs to push steel pins into those holes and an electromagnet to pull the pins back against the springs. You might even find a way to do this using the electromagnets built into the motor if you do it right (i.e. reduce the power to the motor, or for a DC motor, even provide a small reverse current to the motor, thus preventing the pins from dropping in until the motor has reached a fairly slow speed).
Upon detecting a finger, you simultaneously disable power to the motor and to the electromagnets. Maybe even use magnetized pins and reverse the electromagnet for even faster response time. Either way, the victim pins drop into holes in the disc and abruptly stop the mechanism; the motor's power is off, so it doesn't continue to apply force, thus you shouldn't get motor overheating or other serious damage. By using pins on opposite sides of the plate, you can minimize the amount of stress you put on the motor bearings, too, unlike with the aluminum block shoved into the blade....
With such a design, if the safety pins even bend (which with the right kind of steel, they should not, if my back-of-the-napkin math is right) you should generally just have to unscrew the spring retainer, yank the bent pins out with a pair of Vise-Grips, and install a couple of new $3 safety pins. In the worst case, you'd have to unfasten some set screws, unplug the stop plate assembly control wire, slide the cracked or jammed stop plate off the end of the motor shaft, and slide a new one on. Either way, you should not be out an entire motor assembly....
Oh, and maybe replace the blade if it cracks or shatters when you stop it like that. Even if the blade cracks though, I can't see how it could continue rotating in any significant way unless the saw design stupidly uses a round shaft, in which case, yeah, an aluminum block in the blade itself is basically the only way to stop the blade. It's still a bad design (in more ways than one)....
As for cutting metal.. thats not what a table saw is designed for.
There are radial saws designed for cutting metal. This technology is not and should not be limited to table saws.
Sole proprietorships and small medical clinics are almost always by definition not-for-profit (albeit not 501c(3) non-profit) because all of the money after expenses goes directly to the doctors. So the difference between those facilities and non-profit corporations is mostly a bunch of paperwork and legal pedantry....
Hospitals, by contrast, are often operated on a for-profit basis as a part of large corporations. In those situations, stockholders who played no useful part whatsoever in patient care are skimming money off the top while cutting the number of nurses to the legal minimum, limiting doctor wages, cutting facility maintenance to the bare minimum, etc., all of which can potentially diminish the quality of patient care. That's what I'm complaining about, not doctors making a living. Indeed, quite the opposite---doctors would likely get paid more if those hospitals were run in a non-profit fashion because they wouldn't have to pinch pennies to make more profit for the shareholders.
Actually, the fact that Oracle is slashing and burning stuff immediately after an acquisition seems like a pretty good indication that this really wasn't the S.O.P. for Sun, which may explain why they had to accept a buyout to stay afloat....
If you have to replace hardware when a safety system kicks in, then the safety system wasn't designed right, which is just further indication that things will get much better after the patent expires. The interesting part is the use of what is presumably capacitive touch sensing on the blade to detect human flesh. As soon as that only moderately novel reuse of existing technology falls out of patent protection, companies can start designing safety brakes that don't destroy themselves when they actuate.
On a side note, if this is using capacitive sensing, any such system will be unable to cut metal without the safety system going off constantly. That is presumably another reason why the technology hasn't caught on---particularly if the hardware has to be replaced every time this happens. Such a saw would likely be unprofitable at any price unless that rather fundamental brake design flaw were fixed.
And don't forget Ingres, SQLite (which is good enough for a lot of low-bandwidth stuff that MySQL has historically been used for), Drizzle (MySQL fork), and probably at least a half dozen others....
The good news is that patents have a short lifespan. The core patent will expire in 2022, at which point the manufacturers will be free to use the patented technology without paying the licensing fees. This also means that the company in question needs to pull its head out of its butt rather quickly and stop being so greedy or else it will find itself getting nothing at all.
In theory, it's a nice idea. The idea, as I understand it, isn't a darknet, but rather a P2P network. Presumably, there would still have to be some central server that has at least enough information about you to make people discoverable, but the bulk of the data would be on your own machine under your control.
Want to know what you have to do to make this actually get adoption? Make it also support computer-free VoIP where you plug your home phone network into it, it provides a dial tone, and you use it like a normal telephone. This solves two problems. First, it gives the product a reason for existing even for non-geeks and makes it worth the effort to set it up. Second, your phone number becomes an easy means of discoverability. Maybe build the interesting bits on top of XMPP.
The next step after that is to get decent cell phone integration for voice calls (through your home), text messaging, and accessing the social network, all in a single app. Once you get to that point, it should be mostly downhill as far as getting adoption if you have a good UI.
Regarding the setup issues, that doesn't have to be hard. 99% of networks have DHCP. Make the device connect to a central server somewhere and provide its local IP and a code number from the bottom of the device. The instructions then tell the user to go to http://myobscuredevicesetup.com/ and enter their serial number. The server then issues an HTTP redirect to the right local IP number, and you're configuring the device.
I could not disagree with you more. The vast majority of these people who "can't pay for insurance" still manage to pay for an iPod or a Cell Phone or a form of reliable transportation (read: new car in most cases 2).
First, An iPod costs a couple hundred dollars, once. A cell phone plan costs an average of $635.85 annually, though you can easily find low-cost plans for about half that.. Health insurance, for an average family, will cost you and/or your employer a whopping $13,375 annually (Sources: USA Today, about.com). So even if they gave up all the things you mention, they still don't have the cash to get decent health insurance.
Second, not everyone really needs health insurance. I've looked at my health care costs and my insurance, and at my age, even with a fairly significant chunk of medical bills late last year, my insurance still didn't pay for what it cost me and my employer. And that's for the cheapest tier of health insurance I can get through my employer. For younger people with no family history of cancer, health insurance is basically subsidizing other people's care. So for many people in that age range, it just doesn't make financial sense. Fortunately, my employer basically pays the entire cost. Were it not for that, I probably would have pocketed the money until at least age 30.
As for your assertion that individual funding cannot be solved at a governmental level, that's a big part of what this plan does---the government gives tax credits to people who buy insurance for themselves, thus effectively covering the cost of the insurance. If people don't take that health insurance, they don't get the credit. Unlike money that they earn from their employers, the credit can't be used to pay for anything else, eliminating the incentive to skip it. And that was my point.
Flash prices shouldn't be that much of the cost. A 32 Gig SD or CF card costs in the neighborhood of $60-80. The CrunchPad was supposed to have a mere 4 GB. That's (at most) eight or ten bucks worth of flash even at full retail prices, so probably $3-4 in terms of the manufacturing cost.... The problem is that if you're an unknown vendor, you aren't buying in bulk, so you can't get those deals. Still, if it's more than $20, it probably makes more sense to ship the device without onboard flash, put a concealed SDXC card slot inside the battery compartment. and make the user go down to Wal-Mart or Fry's or whatever and buy a flash card for ten bucks. Just saying.
I'm also concerned about what will happen to what is left of this bill after the SCOTUS challenges to it with regard to the Federal Govt. mandating that individual citizens be required to buy health insurance. I really do believe this will be struck down.
I don't, but even if it is (and it probably should be removed form the bill), if they got the tax credits right, it shouldn't matter. The reason people don't get insurance is that they can't pay for it. The parts of the bill that are important are the requirement for businesses to provide health coverage and the tax credits for people who currently can't afford it. I'm honestly not convinced that someone looking at a tax credit that covers his/her medical insurance costs is going to reject the credit and the insurance. Now if the credits are too small, then maybe. That won't be clear until the law is passed and the plans start to materialize....
Why can't they do a simple bill, with some main points everyone can agree on...in about 10 pages of simple language everyone can understand and agree on?
That's basically what this bill was. It's so full of compromises to get Republican support that it's watered down to the point of being almost useless, and now that the Democrats have bent to their demands, the Republicans see blood in the water and are continuing to attack it and are acting like they didn't support this exact design before. The Republicans can't be trusted, and the Democrats can only be trusted to cave in to the Republicans at every turn. Every single one of them is a disgrace to his/her office. No one is more deserving of having to beg for change on the streets....
Unfortunately, the real problems are not in Congress's best interests to fix because its members are almost all lawyers and/or in the pockets of pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies. Some of the big problems with health care are:
a need for tort reform and patent reform
overcharging for prescription medication (need price caps)
fraud by insurance providers---using all sorts of dirty tricks to reject coverage for certain procedures.
overcharging by health care providers to make up for the money lost due to the insurance providers fraudulently rejecting legitimate charges
the for-profit nature of most insurance providers
the for-profit nature of the health care providers themselves
lack of sufficient oversight and insufficiently strict medical standards, both in terms of patient care and in terms of finances
poor nurse-to-patient ratios
massively overpaid executives
Out of that list, if things are regulated correctly, this bill should help with the fraudulent behavior by insurance companies in that the approved plans won't be allowed to pull those tricks, but the reality is that they'll just come up with other dirty tricks, judging from their history, which is why a public option is so desperately needed. And I have basically zero faith in the government's ability to regulate these things. After all, they've done a bang-up job of it so far, right?
So in the long term, it's just going to become Medicare/Medicaid all over again, only with an added profit margin for the insurance companies. It's the largest health insurance bailout in the nation's history, at taxpayer expense. Will it get more people insured? Sure. Is this the right way to do it? No. They had it right before they started bending to pressure from their corporate buddies and took out the public option and the prescription drug price caps they were talking about originally. Now, the bill is really just putting lipstick on a pig....
If the Republicans manage to make this bill fail, the Democrats need to go back to their original plan---price caps on pharmaceuticals, a public option, etc. Then, we'd at least be able to look at the people who voted against it and know precisely which of our Congresspeople are in the back pockets of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
The press relies on confidential informants. This list of individuals is supposed to be secret. What do you think would happen to these people if their names and profiles were released to the public?
See how easy that was? With the possible exception of military secrets and other very narrow security concerns, for pretty much anything that the government needs to keep secret, you can make the same claim about the general public and it is equally true.
Actually, the blueprint has enormous value to people studying reactor design in a university environment. One might even argue that the guard shifts would be of value to people learning about security planning, and wouldn't be a security risk if the data were anonymized (the name and location of the facility removed, etc.).
C may well be a perfectly fine language, depending on the types of programs that are typical in these sorts of contests. For anything mathematical in nature, C is a decent choice; there's minimal bloat (hence faster performance) and it has a very simple syntax. If the questions involve lots of string manipulation, on the other hand, C is out.
The same logic applies to Pascal, except that it's basically not used anywhere anymore, making it not particularly useful in the long term. That may or may not be a good reason to avoid it, but it is certainly worth considering.
I tend to agree, however, that PHP is probably the best compromise. It's a broadly used language, it is close enough to C at a syntactical level that students can easily learn C in the future (and, consequently, C++, Java, JavaScript, etc.). More importantly, it is the only language on your list other than C and Pascal that can be used completely procedurally without the need to teach young students OOP. That's a rather big advantage; younger kids may have a hard time with such an abstract concept. And it still provides built-in Perl-compatible regular expressions, stacks, arrays, associative arrays, simple string concatenation and manipulation, etc., unlike pure C or Pascal.
I tend to agree. We should not allow advertisements for prescription drugs in ANY venue intended for the general public. The pharmaceutical industry has done irreparable harm to the health care industry through advertising. It's one thing to have people going out on their own and doing independent research to find out alternative treatments that might help them. It's quite another when sizable percentages of the population whose sole source of information about a product is what they learned in a 30 second TV ad decide to follow the ad's advice to "ask your doctor if [insert drug here] is right for you". If everyone did that, doctors would never get anything done....
More often than not, it's a waste of doctors' time having to explain to patients why a particular highly advertised medicine is not the best choice. Half the time, the reason is that the medicine the person is on is working, so changing medications would just be adding risk with little benefit. As such, this sort of direct-to-patient advertising is harmful to both the quality of patient care and the proper functioning of our health insurance system.
Don't just ban it on Twitter. Ban it on TV, on the radio, in newspapers, magazines, and related Google search result sidebars, too. While you're at it, please crack down on the "herbal viagra" spam.:-)
If a netbook can do the EQ for $400 , then a pair of ear buds, and a netbook with a microphone can do the job for about $410 plus tax. No need to get two. Heck, an iPod touch could probably handle the job for half that....
Slashdot Mirror
An omni, by definition, can't be pointed.
Odds are, that $15 transfer charge is for a wire transfer, while the free transfer is via ACH. ACH transfers are almost always free; wire transfers are almost always pricey.
The law requires that funds be made available within 7 days (with a few exceptions), so unless that law goes away, putting the liability on banks will either result in greater use of ACH or less favorable interest rates to pay for the losses. It's not clear which. Maybe both.
IMHO, the iPhone sold well even without discounts for three reasons:
I agree with you that the iPad is a harder sell for most people, but for frequent travelers, I think it would be tempting as an alternative to carrying a laptop on airplanes. I'd be interested in one myself if I were a normal person who didn't mostly use his laptop for running Finale (music notation), Xcode, Perl, PHP, Apache, and vi. :-)
I had a touch-sensitive light and a touch-sensitive intercom beside my bed way back in the 80s. The only thing new is doing it on a saw, which sadly, the patent office considers to be an "invention" in much the same way that "on the internet" makes some thousand-year-old process an "invention".
Two flaws in that: 1. using an aluminum block, 2. jamming it into the blade. Other than that, the principle is correct....
Assume for a moment that the radial saw is designed sensibly. You have a multi-sided (ideally square or triangular) center hole in the blade and a similar shape for the shaft. The motor is direct-driving the blade. There should be exactly zero play between that shaft and the blade, and the shaft isn't being flexed in any way, so if the shaft stops, so does the blade. Immediately.
At this point, the problem becomes much easier. Use a motor with a shaft that sticks out both ends. On the back end, place a round steel plate with holes in it. Use multiple rows of holes staggered so that there's always a pin over a hole within a tiny fraction of an inch. Use strong springs to push steel pins into those holes and an electromagnet to pull the pins back against the springs. You might even find a way to do this using the electromagnets built into the motor if you do it right (i.e. reduce the power to the motor, or for a DC motor, even provide a small reverse current to the motor, thus preventing the pins from dropping in until the motor has reached a fairly slow speed).
Upon detecting a finger, you simultaneously disable power to the motor and to the electromagnets. Maybe even use magnetized pins and reverse the electromagnet for even faster response time. Either way, the victim pins drop into holes in the disc and abruptly stop the mechanism; the motor's power is off, so it doesn't continue to apply force, thus you shouldn't get motor overheating or other serious damage. By using pins on opposite sides of the plate, you can minimize the amount of stress you put on the motor bearings, too, unlike with the aluminum block shoved into the blade....
With such a design, if the safety pins even bend (which with the right kind of steel, they should not, if my back-of-the-napkin math is right) you should generally just have to unscrew the spring retainer, yank the bent pins out with a pair of Vise-Grips, and install a couple of new $3 safety pins. In the worst case, you'd have to unfasten some set screws, unplug the stop plate assembly control wire, slide the cracked or jammed stop plate off the end of the motor shaft, and slide a new one on. Either way, you should not be out an entire motor assembly....
Oh, and maybe replace the blade if it cracks or shatters when you stop it like that. Even if the blade cracks though, I can't see how it could continue rotating in any significant way unless the saw design stupidly uses a round shaft, in which case, yeah, an aluminum block in the blade itself is basically the only way to stop the blade. It's still a bad design (in more ways than one)....
There are radial saws designed for cutting metal. This technology is not and should not be limited to table saws.
Sole proprietorships and small medical clinics are almost always by definition not-for-profit (albeit not 501c(3) non-profit) because all of the money after expenses goes directly to the doctors. So the difference between those facilities and non-profit corporations is mostly a bunch of paperwork and legal pedantry....
Hospitals, by contrast, are often operated on a for-profit basis as a part of large corporations. In those situations, stockholders who played no useful part whatsoever in patient care are skimming money off the top while cutting the number of nurses to the legal minimum, limiting doctor wages, cutting facility maintenance to the bare minimum, etc., all of which can potentially diminish the quality of patient care. That's what I'm complaining about, not doctors making a living. Indeed, quite the opposite---doctors would likely get paid more if those hospitals were run in a non-profit fashion because they wouldn't have to pinch pennies to make more profit for the shareholders.
Actually, the fact that Oracle is slashing and burning stuff immediately after an acquisition seems like a pretty good indication that this really wasn't the S.O.P. for Sun, which may explain why they had to accept a buyout to stay afloat....
If you have to replace hardware when a safety system kicks in, then the safety system wasn't designed right, which is just further indication that things will get much better after the patent expires. The interesting part is the use of what is presumably capacitive touch sensing on the blade to detect human flesh. As soon as that only moderately novel reuse of existing technology falls out of patent protection, companies can start designing safety brakes that don't destroy themselves when they actuate.
On a side note, if this is using capacitive sensing, any such system will be unable to cut metal without the safety system going off constantly. That is presumably another reason why the technology hasn't caught on---particularly if the hardware has to be replaced every time this happens. Such a saw would likely be unprofitable at any price unless that rather fundamental brake design flaw were fixed.
And don't forget Ingres, SQLite (which is good enough for a lot of low-bandwidth stuff that MySQL has historically been used for), Drizzle (MySQL fork), and probably at least a half dozen others....
The good news is that patents have a short lifespan. The core patent will expire in 2022, at which point the manufacturers will be free to use the patented technology without paying the licensing fees. This also means that the company in question needs to pull its head out of its butt rather quickly and stop being so greedy or else it will find itself getting nothing at all.
In theory, it's a nice idea. The idea, as I understand it, isn't a darknet, but rather a P2P network. Presumably, there would still have to be some central server that has at least enough information about you to make people discoverable, but the bulk of the data would be on your own machine under your control.
Want to know what you have to do to make this actually get adoption? Make it also support computer-free VoIP where you plug your home phone network into it, it provides a dial tone, and you use it like a normal telephone. This solves two problems. First, it gives the product a reason for existing even for non-geeks and makes it worth the effort to set it up. Second, your phone number becomes an easy means of discoverability. Maybe build the interesting bits on top of XMPP.
The next step after that is to get decent cell phone integration for voice calls (through your home), text messaging, and accessing the social network, all in a single app. Once you get to that point, it should be mostly downhill as far as getting adoption if you have a good UI.
Regarding the setup issues, that doesn't have to be hard. 99% of networks have DHCP. Make the device connect to a central server somewhere and provide its local IP and a code number from the bottom of the device. The instructions then tell the user to go to http://myobscuredevicesetup.com/ and enter their serial number. The server then issues an HTTP redirect to the right local IP number, and you're configuring the device.
First, An iPod costs a couple hundred dollars, once. A cell phone plan costs an average of $635.85 annually, though you can easily find low-cost plans for about half that.. Health insurance, for an average family, will cost you and/or your employer a whopping $13,375 annually (Sources: USA Today, about.com). So even if they gave up all the things you mention, they still don't have the cash to get decent health insurance.
Second, not everyone really needs health insurance. I've looked at my health care costs and my insurance, and at my age, even with a fairly significant chunk of medical bills late last year, my insurance still didn't pay for what it cost me and my employer. And that's for the cheapest tier of health insurance I can get through my employer. For younger people with no family history of cancer, health insurance is basically subsidizing other people's care. So for many people in that age range, it just doesn't make financial sense. Fortunately, my employer basically pays the entire cost. Were it not for that, I probably would have pocketed the money until at least age 30.
As for your assertion that individual funding cannot be solved at a governmental level, that's a big part of what this plan does---the government gives tax credits to people who buy insurance for themselves, thus effectively covering the cost of the insurance. If people don't take that health insurance, they don't get the credit. Unlike money that they earn from their employers, the credit can't be used to pay for anything else, eliminating the incentive to skip it. And that was my point.
Flash prices shouldn't be that much of the cost. A 32 Gig SD or CF card costs in the neighborhood of $60-80. The CrunchPad was supposed to have a mere 4 GB. That's (at most) eight or ten bucks worth of flash even at full retail prices, so probably $3-4 in terms of the manufacturing cost.... The problem is that if you're an unknown vendor, you aren't buying in bulk, so you can't get those deals. Still, if it's more than $20, it probably makes more sense to ship the device without onboard flash, put a concealed SDXC card slot inside the battery compartment. and make the user go down to Wal-Mart or Fry's or whatever and buy a flash card for ten bucks. Just saying.
I don't, but even if it is (and it probably should be removed form the bill), if they got the tax credits right, it shouldn't matter. The reason people don't get insurance is that they can't pay for it. The parts of the bill that are important are the requirement for businesses to provide health coverage and the tax credits for people who currently can't afford it. I'm honestly not convinced that someone looking at a tax credit that covers his/her medical insurance costs is going to reject the credit and the insurance. Now if the credits are too small, then maybe. That won't be clear until the law is passed and the plans start to materialize....
That's basically what this bill was. It's so full of compromises to get Republican support that it's watered down to the point of being almost useless, and now that the Democrats have bent to their demands, the Republicans see blood in the water and are continuing to attack it and are acting like they didn't support this exact design before. The Republicans can't be trusted, and the Democrats can only be trusted to cave in to the Republicans at every turn. Every single one of them is a disgrace to his/her office. No one is more deserving of having to beg for change on the streets....
Unfortunately, the real problems are not in Congress's best interests to fix because its members are almost all lawyers and/or in the pockets of pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies. Some of the big problems with health care are:
Out of that list, if things are regulated correctly, this bill should help with the fraudulent behavior by insurance companies in that the approved plans won't be allowed to pull those tricks, but the reality is that they'll just come up with other dirty tricks, judging from their history, which is why a public option is so desperately needed. And I have basically zero faith in the government's ability to regulate these things. After all, they've done a bang-up job of it so far, right?
So in the long term, it's just going to become Medicare/Medicaid all over again, only with an added profit margin for the insurance companies. It's the largest health insurance bailout in the nation's history, at taxpayer expense. Will it get more people insured? Sure. Is this the right way to do it? No. They had it right before they started bending to pressure from their corporate buddies and took out the public option and the prescription drug price caps they were talking about originally. Now, the bill is really just putting lipstick on a pig....
If the Republicans manage to make this bill fail, the Democrats need to go back to their original plan---price caps on pharmaceuticals, a public option, etc. Then, we'd at least be able to look at the people who voted against it and know precisely which of our Congresspeople are in the back pockets of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
Now, all we need is a good CEO outsourcing firm and the transition will be complete.
In precisely the way you damage the language when you elide the space between the words "more so". You're creating a word where none is needed.
And that's why we have a 4th amendment... or at least we used to.
The press relies on confidential informants. This list of individuals is supposed to be secret. What do you think would happen to these people if their names and profiles were released to the public?
See how easy that was? With the possible exception of military secrets and other very narrow security concerns, for pretty much anything that the government needs to keep secret, you can make the same claim about the general public and it is equally true.
Actually, the blueprint has enormous value to people studying reactor design in a university environment. One might even argue that the guard shifts would be of value to people learning about security planning, and wouldn't be a security risk if the data were anonymized (the name and location of the facility removed, etc.).
Message to our government: why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide?
I mean, they use that B.S. line on us all the time. I think it's time we turned the tables and started using it back.
C may well be a perfectly fine language, depending on the types of programs that are typical in these sorts of contests. For anything mathematical in nature, C is a decent choice; there's minimal bloat (hence faster performance) and it has a very simple syntax. If the questions involve lots of string manipulation, on the other hand, C is out.
The same logic applies to Pascal, except that it's basically not used anywhere anymore, making it not particularly useful in the long term. That may or may not be a good reason to avoid it, but it is certainly worth considering.
I tend to agree, however, that PHP is probably the best compromise. It's a broadly used language, it is close enough to C at a syntactical level that students can easily learn C in the future (and, consequently, C++, Java, JavaScript, etc.). More importantly, it is the only language on your list other than C and Pascal that can be used completely procedurally without the need to teach young students OOP. That's a rather big advantage; younger kids may have a hard time with such an abstract concept. And it still provides built-in Perl-compatible regular expressions, stacks, arrays, associative arrays, simple string concatenation and manipulation, etc., unlike pure C or Pascal.
You might get lucky and end up with a benevolent dictator. It has happened at least a couple of times in the history of humanity....
I tend to agree. We should not allow advertisements for prescription drugs in ANY venue intended for the general public. The pharmaceutical industry has done irreparable harm to the health care industry through advertising. It's one thing to have people going out on their own and doing independent research to find out alternative treatments that might help them. It's quite another when sizable percentages of the population whose sole source of information about a product is what they learned in a 30 second TV ad decide to follow the ad's advice to "ask your doctor if [insert drug here] is right for you". If everyone did that, doctors would never get anything done....
More often than not, it's a waste of doctors' time having to explain to patients why a particular highly advertised medicine is not the best choice. Half the time, the reason is that the medicine the person is on is working, so changing medications would just be adding risk with little benefit. As such, this sort of direct-to-patient advertising is harmful to both the quality of patient care and the proper functioning of our health insurance system.
Don't just ban it on Twitter. Ban it on TV, on the radio, in newspapers, magazines, and related Google search result sidebars, too. While you're at it, please crack down on the "herbal viagra" spam. :-)
If a netbook can do the EQ for $400 , then a pair of ear buds, and a netbook with a microphone can do the job for about $410 plus tax. No need to get two. Heck, an iPod touch could probably handle the job for half that....