Than why does the US pay above average percentage of GDP for their healthcare with below average outcomes? There is a "HUGE" efficiency savings in billing. Just think: no uncollected bills, no paperwork to process, no credit checks, no time wasted when you first go into the er to make sure that you can pay rather than finding out what is wrong with you etc. Governments can piss money away your right but there is a large, perhaps 50% potential savings from universal healthcare (larger purchasing power, less administration, fewer people letting illnesses linger until there serious because they "can't afford it this month, maybe next month" etc). Add to that potential for more efficient resource allocation: no MRI sitting around because someone in the HMO isn't in need of it when someone in another plan can't find a space in their allowed hospitals. It might not be perfect but it is in theory better.
After all why is there restrictions on mergers to prevent monopolies? The whole idea is one big company can set the price they want, in a similar way one big purchaser/regulator can put huge pressures on providers to give them stuff at the price they want. Hey GE if you don't like our CT prices than try to sell them all in asia kind of things.
I don't know I've read that usually employers will answer it if they like you, it is only if they have negative things to say that they worry that you'll come after them if you don't get the job. As for salary being one of the things they will give: if my future employer asks for my salary and I don't chose to disclose it I don't think my current employer should be able to tell them. You can get stuck in low paying jobs because everyone finds out "well your working for 30k now so you must be happy with it" regardless of whether or not what you are being paid is fair, reflects your newly acquired skills and experience etc. I don't get to go to random strangers and look at their bank accounts so a potential employer shouldn't either. The question should be "this is what we are prepared to pay for this position is it satisfactory? Yes or no.".
What you currently make is rarely relevant because the job description is rarely if ever the same between two positions, the corporate environment and benefit packages are different etc. All providing that information does is give the hiring company leverage in any negotiations and potentially eliminate you as a candidate if you are "out of their price range" regardless of what skills would be demonstrated if you were to get the interview.
Sort of the theme of the Reagan administration. Wow he was a great fiscal conservative and lowered taxes except that he didn't. But he played a cowboy so it must be true;-)
The beauty of something meant as a social tool. If you have colleagues friends etc attached to your profile they'll call out your "inaccuracies" vs a one time submitted resume that only the hiring company sees. Sure they can check each one of your references. How many do? How many drill down low enough to confirm that you really did use Cassandra as your data store and played with REST interfaces? I suspect that a lot of the reference checks are pretty much:
1) Did Bob work there from X to Y as a "developer"? 2) Would you recommend Bob?
Didn't know that about Alec. Interesting. You always could find a group to belong to in the US to have your rights stripped from you. You could be too black, too woman, too socially progressive, too rich, too poor etc. You're "free" as long as you are a reasonably good clone of the ideal middle class, conservative christian majority. Step outside of that at look out. How a democracy can (and the US wasn't alone with this but the McCarthy is the most well known commie witch hunt) decide that any ideas outside of representative politics ist Forbodden is beyond me. Freedom has to include freedom to do something you don't agree with as long as it doesn't affect the collective society IMHO.
West to where? My understanding is until ~1850's most "west" wasn't really US at all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Territorial_Acquisitions.png . If you had to leave the US colonies to be free pretty much what you are saying is that people were free as long as the moved to somewhere that the government wasn't yet established. It's not exactly a great recommendation of the US collectively representing "land of the free" if you have to leave it to be free;-)
True other places were messed up for most of the US history too. (Us was about 30 years behind the UK/british colonies on the slavery issue, about middle of the pack for womens sufferage (earliest about 80 years prior http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage) mainly nordic, and western europe, and british colonies prior, with others following afterwards. New Zealand (and a lot of the countries in the area) was early but not first from what I found.
I'll take it the way other responses have that "land of the free" is aspirational versus a definition of the US. All I was getting to in my original post is that the US isn't becoming un-free since it never was, just a matter of degree of freedom. Other places might have been worse (the assumption that everyone else was at least as bad if not worse would need some evidence besides patriotic "USA #1" chestthumping though).
In general I find most countries have some things right (at least the way I want to live), some things wrong, and somethings that don't really matter to me (gay rights for example, I'm glad they have them where I live, but it doesn't really affect me one way or another as I'm not part of that group). In general unless behavior directly affects someone else I think it should be unregulated, a la, legal prostitution, drugs, gay marriage, abortion, where you can consume alcohol etc. I'm yet to find a country were all the things I think shouldn't matter to the government are not regulated (Holland is probably the closest I've found) but regardless countries are a mixed bag of rights and challenges. None have figured it out yet IMHO.
Land of the free isn't "land of the people getting more free". But yeah I'll give you that the US was moving from less free to more free. All I was saying is this magical fairyland that people live in where the founding fathers were perfect and foresaw every possible type of society and picked the best one. Followed by gradual corruption from this perfect country to now is ludicrous. The US was never completely free, there is lots of non-democratic aspects of the country assuming that you hold to the claim that democracy is the best government. For example: electoral college idea vs direct votes, 2 party system, house procedures trumping vote results (a la filibuster) etc are far from perfect implementations of democracy. Segments of society were either not given freedoms (blacks, gays, women) or given citizens rights even when they shouldn't (illegals getting drivers licenses and such when they don't even have a right to be in the country for example). In short the only people that have been relatively consistently treated are white males over 21. Everyone else gets pissed on occasionally.
Was america ever worthy of that title? Slavery for the first part of the countries history, women didn't get sufferage until 1919. Blacks were still segregated until the 60's and by then there was the paranoia over the cold war with people getting accused of being a communist (so what if you are?). Perhaps after the wall came down for that 10 years or so people were fine and then 9/11 happened and the US went to a police state. Also when your country has one of the highest incarceration rates you can't really claim to be very free.
Based on what todays spinning disk form factors? If SDDs become standard we can rethink the formfactor for the harddrive. My understanding among other reasons ~3.5" disks one out because they were selling in higher volumes and advanced quicker than the huge mainframe disks of the day. They then became the standard size and everything has been basing itself out of that. But there is no reason why SDD couldn't be a different form factor if you were willing to pay for it. For example: how about a disk that is the size of your motherboard? You open up your case from the side and there it is. It could be on a hinge so you just swing it out of the way whenever you need to work on something else but on a full sized desktop that would give you about 10 disks worth of space to play with. Or you could have a data "cube" next to your box, and the box would probably be getting correspondingly smaller what with smaller formfactor computers already out, more integration into the CPU, etc.
Oh for mod points. I enjoy your sarcasm, seems like someone else thought it was trolling or something:-(. True documentation is good. However, when your coding away and having code completion popuping up suggestions it is nice if that little one line is enough to hint you in the right direction. When using a serial port class for example and see that there is a "Handshake" member, I'm pretty sure I"m not the only one that does this, it is pretty easy to assume you have a rough idea what that thing should do. So documentation tends to get consulted when the expected behaviour isn't what happens. Member names, conventions like iEnumerable where the i tells you that it is an interface, etc is helpful. You can than thing, hey do I really need to get a list here or would the base class be specific enough to supply me with the methods I need? Encourages you to accept the least specific class that is required.
Hmm perhaps breaking with hiding of implementation details but having a way to tell someone that a thing is an interface (abstract base class) not a specific class seems nice. For example when I found out that the C# TextWriter needed a specific type of writer to construct it lead me to look for other things to use besides streamWriter. While it is an implementation detail letting the developer know that the actual class has to be something different since the class is abstract helps stear the search towards the options available to use rather than to one specific derived class and not even know for example that StringWriter exists because the first example you land on uses a different class.
For interfaces to me it makes sense. It is nice to know that when you are sending something in to say a TextReader that it doesn't care that it is a filestream, memory stream, etc just that it wants something that implements a particular interface. Kind of a poorman's contractual programming. Give me something that implements interface X, I don't care what you call the widget it it has four wheels and a stearing wheel I'll figure it out.
Oh come on. Shouldn't we get 10% Canadian content? I'd love to see Bell and Rogers/Shaw duopoly try to make 1 in 10 pages:-) What they would probably do instead is make 100 pages and than block enough to keep their content ratio. Still would be amusing the amount of crap that they could come up with if they try. Can't do that on Interwebs anyone?
By that logic Linux/GPL is worse than MS in that regards as they seem to be more lawsuit happy than MS. MS for the most part sues people not paying for their stuff. GPL-code and Linux (I realize it MS does it too but not to such an extent) claims OTHER people copied them and tries to stop them from shipping their products.
MS only has a monopoly if you buy there stuff. As long as the courts keep them from forcing you to pay the MS tax on a new system that you don't even want Windows on I'm fine with them being dominant. If people chose (really chose not because of not having a choice) to buy stuff from them who's hurt? People chose to make Apple dominant on the tablet and music player markets. Don't like it? Build a better iPod.
Why on earth wouldn't you want them to get better? You can like something else all you want but better is better. Might even get better than whatever you like the best. If I like a Ferrari I at worst don't care if a Ford gets better that is until the Ford is better than my Ferrari. the competition has to get better it is a big motivator for innovation/adoption of what works.
Your right about the could have been added between releases bit. Sucks to be MS, they'd have to test it against everything > XP. Might need different versions for each, potentially even different versions for service packs and 32 v 64 bit OS. Sucks. Probably an excuse to make it a "feature" of the next OS that will help sell it. Wait a year later and then release the Win 7 version of the driver. Never release the XP or Vista version because you want to force people to upgrade. That would be my guess how it will play out.
It's somewhat free if your employer has charging stations isn't it? Unless of course they meter them (which I suppose will probably happen) you can plug in and get the "free lunch". As mentioned though it is about getting off foreign oil, less of course that foreign oil comes from Canada and than I'm all for it, eh? Cost of pollution, cost of national defence needed to ensure that the oil gets to your country etc. Heck dealing with Isreal's douchbagery because they are better than the other douchbags in the area wouldn't be necessary if we didn't care about oil.
Not to mention if you are remoted into the system or making a script you might prefer the command line solution. Your not stuck learning how to do something with the flavour of the month shell and then have to learn a slightly different way of doing things next month when Ubuntu goes mainline with a different shell.
Does anyone remember the marketing crap from back when Vista was in Beta? I seem to recall MS was talking about a new filesystem for that release too. Not sure what it was supposed to have but if it is similar to ReFS than the "they copied linux" charges might be moot in that area. MS thought of something long time ago, got distracted and finally got around to it.
USB 3: don't really get the big deal. You had drivers from the people selling the thing to you. Sure it is more convenient if it comes with the OS but is it really a surprise that a mostly downloadable, open source (so ~0 switching cost) OS got a feature into production before the company that was in late stage testing of a boxed OS when the standard came out?
Apple did little that was original over the years but executed better. I'll settle for Win8 doing Linux better if they can. Doesn't have to be open just has to be whatever has the best featureset for the 2-3 years I plan on keeping whatever new gadget I buy.
According to: http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2012/0210/Tesla-Model-X-Era-of-the-all-electric-SUV-is-arriving 80-100 mile range. Probably enough for about 90% of everyone's one go trips. I really don't get this crazy worry about electric: oh but I can't go for 300 miles on a charge. How often do you do 5 hrs of non-stop driving anyways? If the technology for rapid charging comes out it wouldn't matter much either since you could just stop at a restaurant for an hour break and recharge. At any rate for the very rare times you need to drive 5hrs at a go run a car. The other 340 days a year your electric will be fine.
Depends what is sold. If the copy of the file is sold then you are right. But if the copyright to digital versions of the file is what is sold than Apple would be free to make copies. But yeah pretty sure it is a license since the studios are still free as far as I know to sell their songs digitally on Amazon, or physical format in stores etc.
No it is sold to Apple (so the low royality rate applies to the artist) so that Apple can license it to the customer (thus ensuring that the customer can't sell their copy).
Slashdot Mirror
Than why does the US pay above average percentage of GDP for their healthcare with below average outcomes? There is a "HUGE" efficiency savings in billing. Just think: no uncollected bills, no paperwork to process, no credit checks, no time wasted when you first go into the er to make sure that you can pay rather than finding out what is wrong with you etc. Governments can piss money away your right but there is a large, perhaps 50% potential savings from universal healthcare (larger purchasing power, less administration, fewer people letting illnesses linger until there serious because they "can't afford it this month, maybe next month" etc). Add to that potential for more efficient resource allocation: no MRI sitting around because someone in the HMO isn't in need of it when someone in another plan can't find a space in their allowed hospitals. It might not be perfect but it is in theory better.
After all why is there restrictions on mergers to prevent monopolies? The whole idea is one big company can set the price they want, in a similar way one big purchaser/regulator can put huge pressures on providers to give them stuff at the price they want. Hey GE if you don't like our CT prices than try to sell them all in asia kind of things.
As opposed to attacking a country and then permanently leaving "advisors"/bases behind?
I don't know I've read that usually employers will answer it if they like you, it is only if they have negative things to say that they worry that you'll come after them if you don't get the job. As for salary being one of the things they will give: if my future employer asks for my salary and I don't chose to disclose it I don't think my current employer should be able to tell them. You can get stuck in low paying jobs because everyone finds out "well your working for 30k now so you must be happy with it" regardless of whether or not what you are being paid is fair, reflects your newly acquired skills and experience etc. I don't get to go to random strangers and look at their bank accounts so a potential employer shouldn't either. The question should be "this is what we are prepared to pay for this position is it satisfactory? Yes or no.".
What you currently make is rarely relevant because the job description is rarely if ever the same between two positions, the corporate environment and benefit packages are different etc. All providing that information does is give the hiring company leverage in any negotiations and potentially eliminate you as a candidate if you are "out of their price range" regardless of what skills would be demonstrated if you were to get the interview.
Sort of the theme of the Reagan administration. Wow he was a great fiscal conservative and lowered taxes except that he didn't. But he played a cowboy so it must be true ;-)
The beauty of something meant as a social tool. If you have colleagues friends etc attached to your profile they'll call out your "inaccuracies" vs a one time submitted resume that only the hiring company sees. Sure they can check each one of your references. How many do? How many drill down low enough to confirm that you really did use Cassandra as your data store and played with REST interfaces? I suspect that a lot of the reference checks are pretty much:
1) Did Bob work there from X to Y as a "developer"?
2) Would you recommend Bob?
Didn't know that about Alec. Interesting. You always could find a group to belong to in the US to have your rights stripped from you. You could be too black, too woman, too socially progressive, too rich, too poor etc. You're "free" as long as you are a reasonably good clone of the ideal middle class, conservative christian majority. Step outside of that at look out. How a democracy can (and the US wasn't alone with this but the McCarthy is the most well known commie witch hunt) decide that any ideas outside of representative politics ist Forbodden is beyond me. Freedom has to include freedom to do something you don't agree with as long as it doesn't affect the collective society IMHO.
West to where? My understanding is until ~1850's most "west" wasn't really US at all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Territorial_Acquisitions.png . If you had to leave the US colonies to be free pretty much what you are saying is that people were free as long as the moved to somewhere that the government wasn't yet established. It's not exactly a great recommendation of the US collectively representing "land of the free" if you have to leave it to be free ;-)
True other places were messed up for most of the US history too. (Us was about 30 years behind the UK/british colonies on the slavery issue, about middle of the pack for womens sufferage (earliest about 80 years prior http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage) mainly nordic, and western europe, and british colonies prior, with others following afterwards. New Zealand (and a lot of the countries in the area) was early but not first from what I found.
I'll take it the way other responses have that "land of the free" is aspirational versus a definition of the US. All I was getting to in my original post is that the US isn't becoming un-free since it never was, just a matter of degree of freedom. Other places might have been worse (the assumption that everyone else was at least as bad if not worse would need some evidence besides patriotic "USA #1" chestthumping though).
In general I find most countries have some things right (at least the way I want to live), some things wrong, and somethings that don't really matter to me (gay rights for example, I'm glad they have them where I live, but it doesn't really affect me one way or another as I'm not part of that group). In general unless behavior directly affects someone else I think it should be unregulated, a la, legal prostitution, drugs, gay marriage, abortion, where you can consume alcohol etc. I'm yet to find a country were all the things I think shouldn't matter to the government are not regulated (Holland is probably the closest I've found) but regardless countries are a mixed bag of rights and challenges. None have figured it out yet IMHO.
Land of the free isn't "land of the people getting more free". But yeah I'll give you that the US was moving from less free to more free. All I was saying is this magical fairyland that people live in where the founding fathers were perfect and foresaw every possible type of society and picked the best one. Followed by gradual corruption from this perfect country to now is ludicrous. The US was never completely free, there is lots of non-democratic aspects of the country assuming that you hold to the claim that democracy is the best government. For example: electoral college idea vs direct votes, 2 party system, house procedures trumping vote results (a la filibuster) etc are far from perfect implementations of democracy. Segments of society were either not given freedoms (blacks, gays, women) or given citizens rights even when they shouldn't (illegals getting drivers licenses and such when they don't even have a right to be in the country for example). In short the only people that have been relatively consistently treated are white males over 21. Everyone else gets pissed on occasionally.
Was america ever worthy of that title? Slavery for the first part of the countries history, women didn't get sufferage until 1919. Blacks were still segregated until the 60's and by then there was the paranoia over the cold war with people getting accused of being a communist (so what if you are?). Perhaps after the wall came down for that 10 years or so people were fine and then 9/11 happened and the US went to a police state. Also when your country has one of the highest incarceration rates you can't really claim to be very free.
Based on what todays spinning disk form factors? If SDDs become standard we can rethink the formfactor for the harddrive. My understanding among other reasons ~3.5" disks one out because they were selling in higher volumes and advanced quicker than the huge mainframe disks of the day. They then became the standard size and everything has been basing itself out of that. But there is no reason why SDD couldn't be a different form factor if you were willing to pay for it. For example: how about a disk that is the size of your motherboard? You open up your case from the side and there it is. It could be on a hinge so you just swing it out of the way whenever you need to work on something else but on a full sized desktop that would give you about 10 disks worth of space to play with. Or you could have a data "cube" next to your box, and the box would probably be getting correspondingly smaller what with smaller formfactor computers already out, more integration into the CPU, etc.
Oh for mod points. I enjoy your sarcasm, seems like someone else thought it was trolling or something :-(. True documentation is good. However, when your coding away and having code completion popuping up suggestions it is nice if that little one line is enough to hint you in the right direction. When using a serial port class for example and see that there is a "Handshake" member, I'm pretty sure I"m not the only one that does this, it is pretty easy to assume you have a rough idea what that thing should do. So documentation tends to get consulted when the expected behaviour isn't what happens. Member names, conventions like iEnumerable where the i tells you that it is an interface, etc is helpful. You can than thing, hey do I really need to get a list here or would the base class be specific enough to supply me with the methods I need? Encourages you to accept the least specific class that is required.
To be fair we don't know that with one hundred percent certainty that you exist. You might be a bot that passes the Turing test.
Hmm perhaps breaking with hiding of implementation details but having a way to tell someone that a thing is an interface (abstract base class) not a specific class seems nice. For example when I found out that the C# TextWriter needed a specific type of writer to construct it lead me to look for other things to use besides streamWriter. While it is an implementation detail letting the developer know that the actual class has to be something different since the class is abstract helps stear the search towards the options available to use rather than to one specific derived class and not even know for example that StringWriter exists because the first example you land on uses a different class.
For interfaces to me it makes sense. It is nice to know that when you are sending something in to say a TextReader that it doesn't care that it is a filestream, memory stream, etc just that it wants something that implements a particular interface. Kind of a poorman's contractual programming. Give me something that implements interface X, I don't care what you call the widget it it has four wheels and a stearing wheel I'll figure it out.
Oh come on. Shouldn't we get 10% Canadian content? I'd love to see Bell and Rogers/Shaw duopoly try to make 1 in 10 pages :-) What they would probably do instead is make 100 pages and than block enough to keep their content ratio. Still would be amusing the amount of crap that they could come up with if they try. Can't do that on Interwebs anyone?
By that logic Linux/GPL is worse than MS in that regards as they seem to be more lawsuit happy than MS. MS for the most part sues people not paying for their stuff. GPL-code and Linux (I realize it MS does it too but not to such an extent) claims OTHER people copied them and tries to stop them from shipping their products.
MS only has a monopoly if you buy there stuff. As long as the courts keep them from forcing you to pay the MS tax on a new system that you don't even want Windows on I'm fine with them being dominant. If people chose (really chose not because of not having a choice) to buy stuff from them who's hurt? People chose to make Apple dominant on the tablet and music player markets. Don't like it? Build a better iPod.
Why on earth wouldn't you want them to get better? You can like something else all you want but better is better. Might even get better than whatever you like the best. If I like a Ferrari I at worst don't care if a Ford gets better that is until the Ford is better than my Ferrari. the competition has to get better it is a big motivator for innovation/adoption of what works.
Your right about the could have been added between releases bit. Sucks to be MS, they'd have to test it against everything > XP. Might need different versions for each, potentially even different versions for service packs and 32 v 64 bit OS. Sucks. Probably an excuse to make it a "feature" of the next OS that will help sell it. Wait a year later and then release the Win 7 version of the driver. Never release the XP or Vista version because you want to force people to upgrade. That would be my guess how it will play out.
It does say "The Tesla Model X will have a similar range as the SUVs from AMP." in the article though.
It's somewhat free if your employer has charging stations isn't it? Unless of course they meter them (which I suppose will probably happen) you can plug in and get the "free lunch". As mentioned though it is about getting off foreign oil, less of course that foreign oil comes from Canada and than I'm all for it, eh? Cost of pollution, cost of national defence needed to ensure that the oil gets to your country etc. Heck dealing with Isreal's douchbagery because they are better than the other douchbags in the area wouldn't be necessary if we didn't care about oil.
Not to mention if you are remoted into the system or making a script you might prefer the command line solution. Your not stuck learning how to do something with the flavour of the month shell and then have to learn a slightly different way of doing things next month when Ubuntu goes mainline with a different shell.
Does anyone remember the marketing crap from back when Vista was in Beta? I seem to recall MS was talking about a new filesystem for that release too. Not sure what it was supposed to have but if it is similar to ReFS than the "they copied linux" charges might be moot in that area. MS thought of something long time ago, got distracted and finally got around to it.
USB 3: don't really get the big deal. You had drivers from the people selling the thing to you. Sure it is more convenient if it comes with the OS but is it really a surprise that a mostly downloadable, open source (so ~0 switching cost) OS got a feature into production before the company that was in late stage testing of a boxed OS when the standard came out?
Apple did little that was original over the years but executed better. I'll settle for Win8 doing Linux better if they can. Doesn't have to be open just has to be whatever has the best featureset for the 2-3 years I plan on keeping whatever new gadget I buy.
According to: http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2012/0210/Tesla-Model-X-Era-of-the-all-electric-SUV-is-arriving 80-100 mile range. Probably enough for about 90% of everyone's one go trips. I really don't get this crazy worry about electric: oh but I can't go for 300 miles on a charge. How often do you do 5 hrs of non-stop driving anyways? If the technology for rapid charging comes out it wouldn't matter much either since you could just stop at a restaurant for an hour break and recharge. At any rate for the very rare times you need to drive 5hrs at a go run a car. The other 340 days a year your electric will be fine.
Dude 0-60 in an SUV in 4.4s not too shabby and only 0.3s behind the 2012 corvette.
Depends what is sold. If the copy of the file is sold then you are right. But if the copyright to digital versions of the file is what is sold than Apple would be free to make copies. But yeah pretty sure it is a license since the studios are still free as far as I know to sell their songs digitally on Amazon, or physical format in stores etc.
No it is sold to Apple (so the low royality rate applies to the artist) so that Apple can license it to the customer (thus ensuring that the customer can't sell their copy).