British hospitals will also close up shop for the evening if they have performed too many procedures that day, in the US that is unheard of. That's straight from a doctor who worked for years as a heart surgeon at a British hospital. He said he had to tell patients in desperate need of heart transplants that they would have to wait until the next day, because they had already spent the money they were allowed for that day.
If you think hospitals are stingy now, just wait until they have only been allocated X amount of dollars to operate.
The fact is, good management is good management, and poor management is poor management. I have worked for small(ish) businesses before, I have worked for the government before, and I am currently working for a very very large corporation now (top 20 fortune 500). I can tell you that the management style of the corporation and the government entity that I worked for are very, very similar, and nothing at all like the management of the smaller company. The smaller company was tightly run, the boss knew exactly what was going on at most levels of the operation, and things were kept very efficient. However, blind man can look at what is going on at the large corporation and the government entity and point out the massive amounts of waste. Things like rotating managers through a position every couple of years, huge bonuses for cutting short-term costs, etc. The cost cutting sounds like a good thing, until you realize that with managers moving on every two years or less, the biggest way to cut costs is to deferr maintenance until after you have left the position. When there is a culture promoting this practice, you end up with massive failures 20 years down the road that cost more than the combined cost of regular maintenance for all those years. The corporation makes up for this with buying power and clout to pull in more profit than a smaller operation, but how can the government make up for it? They don't have any income to speak of other than taxes, so all they can do is tax more, and more, and more.
What is really disgusting in the US, is now thanks to Obama and Bush, the mechanism that enchourages companies to limit this waste - the risk of absolute failure - has been eliminated. There is nothing stopping them now, because they know if they reach the breaking point again the government will just bail them out.
Just look at the US government's management history, it is terrible. Social Security is going bankrupt, Medicare and Medicaide are going bankrupt (these three programs already make up most of the national budget, and yet they are running out of money), the postal service is supposed to pay for itself but it can't, the rail transportation system collapsed. Probably the best run portion of government is the Department of Defense, and that's what I was comparing to the corporation!
There are problems with Healthcare in the US, there is no doubt, but if you let the US government run health care things will only get worse, not better. I had hopes for Obama - I didn't vote for him but I thought he would still make a good president. It seems like every day something new comes out to disappoint.
Once the wires were run it no longer actually costs a fortune to connect to those areas.
However, the telecom companies still charge a fortune for the privilege, and we certainly still pay subsidies to them in the form of an aditional tax that goes straight to the telecoms.
Maintenance of those areas is more expensive, but nowhere near what they get for supporting them.
If you've signed an exclusive contract, then obviously you would be in breach of contract if you sold somewhere else. Duh.
That's actually you (the developer) creating an incentive for Valve to promote your software more than they would promote non-exclusive software. It's a business decision, and the company that has to live with it is the one that made the decision.
Re-selling is an entirely different beast. If you want to own a physical copy of a game you can sell to someone else, you should buy a physical copy. What you are doing with Steam is effectively purchasing a subscription to the game, rather than buying a copy. You can tell by the fact that you can download the game on any computer and play it, and have it installed on multiple computers at once. This is not possible with purchased copies, as you are violating copyright every time you install the game on a new computer. Of course you can break the law if you want, but I'm assuming you are an honest person.
There are competing services, by the way, which allow you to purchase digital copies of the software. If you don't like Steam, go with one of them. There is nothing limiting you to Steam except yourself.
Monopoly is a specific word that has a certain meaning, and it's more than just market dominance.
Part of what gives a company a monopoly is that they have exclusive control over access to a resource, or near enough that it doesn't matter. This control alows a company with a monopoly to prevent competitors to be able to compete by restricting the resource outright or by charging fees that are so high the competitor cannot possibly provide a competitive service at a competitive price.
The obvious example is Microsoft, who had a monopoly on the browser market by virtue of the fact that businesses and consumers were entrenched in Windows. It is obviously not reasonable to expect millions of Windows users to change operating systems just to run a browser, so the ability to tie Internet Explorer in to Windows in such a way that no browser could perform at the same level, as well as coercing retailers into not including competing browsers with no recourse for competitors, was clear evidence that Microsoft was controling a limited resource - lower level access to Windows and the ability to bundle software with Windows - which gave them a monopoly.
Now, on the flip side, they do NOT have a monopoly in the OS market. There is nothing Microsoft directly controls about PCs that prevents someone from installing an alternative operating system on the same hardware.
Other examples of monopolies are telecom and cable companies - these are government enabled monopolies, whereby only certain companies are permitted to install new cable. A competing service would find it very very difficult to run new lines or use existing lines in an area with full coverage by a single provider. This kind of monopoly really disgusts me, since the government is supposed to prevent monopolies not create them. Note that the monopolies were originally used as incentive to build the networks that would not have been profitable to build otherwise, but that was ages ago and we have long since paid for it by now. The splitting of Bell helped, but frankly it has only reduced the monopolies to regional monopolies instead of a national monopoly. It isn't a whole lot better, as competition is only less stifled than it used to be.
If you are willing to knowingly screw yourself and the candidate by not hiring the best candidate for the sole purpose of "sticking it" to the recruiter by not allowing him a commission, you're an idiot.
What you do is cancel your contract with the recruiter, citing a breach, and hire the candidate anyway. Refuse payment, essentially. If you have a contract then they are in breach of it, if you don't then it was volunteer anyway.
Why you'd chose to screw yourself and an honest potential employee instead of screwing the recruiter is beyond me.
By the way, if you do cancel the contract with the recruitment agency, you can almost guarantee that "Zeke" will be fired. Chances are the recruitment agency will attempt to negotiate a sweater deal to keep you as a customer as well.
This seems to be either a hoax or will be extremely limited in ways they aren't discussing, as to have little use.
Why? What are you basing that assessment on?
If the examples they are showing are real, the image data set they are pulling from must have been manually processed and adorned with hand-made metadata.
Why? From what I understand, the program currently needs to be configured for each sketch by hand (how many points to process, what the criteria are for the search, etc) but I've seen nothing that suggests something a program could not be written to process automatically, and I didn't see where they had to customize the meta-data for the photos to get their software to process it correctly.
Skepticism is healthy, but it doesn't really help anything to just make stuff up and then use that as a basis for not believing something.
If you have inside knowledge of this type of thing (experience attempting to program something similar would be perfect), by all means, share and educate the rest of us, but if you don't know what you are talking about just leave it at "Seems complicated, sounds too good to be true." Or something along those lines.
I personally take the opposite stance of "Sounds awesome, I hope it actually works", because I - like you - don't know shit about this sort of thing.
You know Apple switch to x86 architecture a while ago and uses Intel processors exclusively, right?
If Nvidia can't produce chipsets for the new Intel processors, that deal is only going to last as long as the FSBs remain marketable. As soon as DMI is the norm from high end to low end Nvidia won't be selling chipsets to anybody.
Sure, it will be a while, but that deal was doomed as soon as it was written - it is not a long term contract.
Er, in that article they explicitly state they are not producing any chipsets for future CPUs due to legal issues:
But because of Intel's improper claims to customers and the market that we aren't licensed to the new DMI bus and its unfair business tactics, it is effectively impossible for us to market chipsets for future CPUs.
That is, in a nutshell, exactly what the summary says - that they will continue to sell their chipsets for the older FSB processors only.
Now, they are apparently suing Intel on that score, and if they win they will probably jump back in the chipset market, but Nvidia themselves have said in the article you referenced yourself that they are currently not going to produce any chipsets for new processors. They will only be selling chipsets for processors they have already developed.
I'm assuming you didn't score too well in reading comprehension back in school.
It's because the French people allow a Frenchman with a penchant for little boys to remain their Minister of Culture.
That suggests the French people are pretty fucked in the head. Even if the average Frenchman does not want this person to be in that position, it is the French people who created the situation that allowed the man in that position, and keeps him there. The blame for the government of any democratic system rests on the people who put that government in place - that is the voting population. That holds true for the US, and I think we are soon going to feel the impact of electing a president who has absolutely zero business experience in the middle of a financial crisis.
One bad apple spoils the whole truckload?
Yes, actually, it does. You realise that old saying (One bad apple spoils the bunch) came about because if you found an apple spoiled with worms in a bucket full of apples, you could no longer trust the apples in that bucket, because worms spread.
You'd have a point if he ran on an anti-gay platform, but he didn't.
Seriously, the alternative was Al Gore, that guy is a nut job. I'd still vote Bush over Gore, he should just stick to flying his private jet around the world to give talks about environmental responsibility and leave us alone.
Kerry was horrible also, but at least he wasn't crazy like Gore. He was weak though, and fake, and it is hard to get past that, especially just a few years after 9/11 and right in the middle of the hunt for Bin Ladin. Weak was not what we wanted. The Dems just didn't put up any good candidates after Clinton, and people were unhappy with the way Clinton finished up his term.
Torts themselves add very little to the costs of healthcare. However, because the costs from a single malpractice suit can bankrupt a doctor even if they win, and the damages from a successful malpractice suit can bankrupt a small hospital, every doctor MUST have malpractice insurance in the millions of dollars, and hospitals must have insurance in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Insurance rates are so high in some areas for certain specialties that doctors cannot afford to practice.
According to a congressional study on medical malpractice insurance rates in 2003, the premiums for interns were between $15,000 -$20,000. That's a hell of a lot for someone fresh out of med-school. For general surgeons it ranged from $40,000 up to $90,000. One of the worst is OBGYN, which ranged from $80,000 to $120,000. Only neurosurgeons have a higher average premium.
Think about that, $120,000 per year just for the privilege of delivering babies. That's not including the schooling debt a doctor has, or any equipment they have to purchase. Assuming $2,000 per baby, an OBGYN has to deliver 60 per year just to cover the insurance costs. The average OBGYN delivers 100 babies a year, so obviously this number is going to have to be much much higher in order to make any money. And guess what? It is. Factor in the debt a doctor, especially a specialized doctor like OBGYN, and you have an additional overhead of between $75,000 and $150000 before you can even start practicing.
And those are pure costs that don't take into account administration overhead (which is huge) and less tangible costs directly relating to dealing with insurance. If you have your own practice you can count on $40k at a minimum to hire a lawyer to make sure what you have covers what you need. Then of course there are the extra costs of the accountant to deal with keeping your finances straight because they are now becoming a major headache to keep straight.
If you start looking at the total extra costs a doctor's office has in order to deal with insurance it becomes a significant portion of the cost of doing business that is in no way related to actually doing the business. It is simply an extra cost. Add in the administrative costs incurred by having to dick around with a patient's insurance company and you can start to see why delivering a baby costs anywhere from $15,000 - $25,000.
I'm not sure less than 10% counts as a "fuckton". The majority of people who don't have insurance have refused the plans offered at work for various reasons, and that is their right. The people for whom healthcare is simply not available in at any reasonable price number around 15 million. The people who don't have it at all number about 47 million, and that's including 10 million people who are not legal citizens of the US.
Now, there are definitely problems with actually using health insurance, and that is what needs to be adressed. Things like capping the amount of money a doctor or hospital can be sued for malpractice would do a lot, perhaps stating that people only have the right to emergency care for an immediate life saving - i.e. they'll fix that wicked bad broken leg if you get in a car accident and don't have insurance, you are dieing of cancer they should give you some pain pills and say "sorry bro" and consider it natural causes when you die. That would require making sure insurance is available to 100% of the people, and public subsidizing of only those people who can prove they absolutely cannot afford insurance. It would also require insurance to cover every procedure a doctor deems necessary - once they assess your risk they cannot re-assess it when it comes time to pay the bill, they need to pay up until you are back to 100% health.
It's a little heartless, but this bullshit of determining what group of people is "most valuable" and therefore who gets the most funding is absolutely disgusting. Under the current US plan, if you are under 18 or over 34 you deserve less care than the people in that age group. It's healthcare by accountants, and it is as bad or worse than what insurance companies are doing. It is what prompted "doctor counseling" of elderly people nearing death, which gave rise to the idea of "death panels" that got everyone so worked up.
All this time I thought we fought a big war for all that stuff back when Europe was still primarily feudal.
The US was a republic by the 1780's, and France still had a ruling King in 1830. There was nothing equivalent of US Constitution until the Charter of 1814.
The English Parliament made the UK a sort of hybrid democratic system, which although they have had representation since 1066, even today the Queen chooses the Prime Minister, the Queen approves all bills, can dissolve Parliament at any time, and the House of Lords is not publicly elected.
In short, it is nothing at all like the US system established in the 1770's and 80's.
Since the US colonies were largely formed by English who felt oppressed by their government, and since the only experience most of those original colonists had outside of England was in the Netherlands which was French controlled at the time, I'd say the only influend Europe had on the government of the US was in helping them decide exactly how they did not want it to be.
Go ahead and name me a representative democracy the US colonists would have had experience with prior to the 1770's in order to influence their choice of government once they won their freedom from England.
Frankly, most of it was simply an improvement on Grecian republics, and you can hardly count ancient Greece as part of modern Europe. That's knowledge of history, it would not have mattered where those republics had been located because they were long gone at the time.
You might even be able to make the case that the newly formed United States of America, with their constitution and Bill of Rights and lack of a monarchy influenced the expansion of democracy in Europe, not the other way around. That is probably going a bit far, since I think Europe was moving that way anyway. It may have simply been more fuel for the fire.
Ah, yeah, that's totally true, considering we don't have legacy apps from win2000 and win98 any more, it's all good.
Oh wait, we DO have legacy apps from 98 and 2000, in fact we've still got legacy DOS apps (i.e. well past your 10 year prep window)! XP is what, 7 years old now? And yet there a number of custom applications that could not be upgraded to a 64-bit based system.
Maybe, and I'm just sort of throwing this out there, but maybe if we start thinking about 128-bit compatibility NOW, there won't BE any legacy system issues when a 128-bit OS rolls around. Especially if you can avoid a hack job later, I don't see what the problem with thinking ahead is.
If you think there are no issues with our current 64-bit consumer grade hardware, consider the fact that it is nearly impossible to port a pure 64-bit OS to it. Check out OpenVMS, which has been in the 64-bit OS game for a decade now, and you'll learn you need true 64-bit hardware to run it, and Intel and AMD's consumer grade processors don't cut the mustard, and likely never will.
Why NOT try to avoid these problems now, instead of later when it may be too difficult? You know the old saying that an ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure, well it's just as true for software as it is for medicine.
How many times have we been stuck in a jam because people thought "this will never be in use by the time this is a problem"? The Y2k bug, which we were afraid might bring down the entire banking system with the change of a clock, was one major one. Before that was the infamous "640k is enough for anyone" shortsightedness. There has been plenty of it in the x86 architecture that needs to be babied as it has been upgraded from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit.
They have had to work around it over and over and over and over again, every time the technology jumps. Now that they are actually thinking "hey, what about the next big jump?" and structuring their systems in such a way that they potentially won't have this problem, and you seem to have a problem with it.
Even if it takes 50 years before we see the need to move to 128-bit, in that time we probably will certainly have very expensive legacy 64-bit applications. If they start planning for it NOW in their upgrade path, then it is very unlikely that there will be any 64-bit legacy applications that will have this problem. By then Windows 7 will be about the same as MS Dos 2.0 is today. It will be frickin ancient, and they probably won't have any 128-bit upgrade issues at all because they designed with it in mind in the first place.
Itanium is not unsuccessful for VMS machines (you cannot put VMS on an x86 based chip, 64bit or no), and VMS is used in mainframe and other ultra-high availability applications. The Itanium just didn't pan out for any sort of windows-based operating systems, because windows is so tied to its x86 legacy.
I believe they also have a successor that will be compatible with Itanium as well, I'm not sure though. I mainly only looked at Itanium from the VMS point of view. They certainly have a future their though, their only competitor is the Alpha by HP, and these tend to be very very very expensive applications they are used for.
The pictures are in the login screen on the bank's website, not the emails he gets from his bank.
My bank does the same thing, and I believe it notes that this comes from new (a couple years ago new) banking regulations to prevent phishing.
You set up your account, pick your picture, and need your pin code to access. If you follow a link to log in (which the bank never sends, if you see that it will always be a phishing scam) and the picture does not match then you know it is definitely not right. Unfortunately I think a lot of people will still think "That's funny, that isn't my normal picture..." and enter their information anyway.
The only technical flaw I see with my bank's particular implimentation is the pin pad is generated randomly each time you access the login page, but your particular pin combo will -always- be on that pin pad. If you access the login page enough you can figure out what the letters/numbers are in your pin combination, and then it is just a matter of figuring out the order. It really sabotages the number of potential pin combinations needed to hack, and leaves you open to someone deducing what your pin is.
It really is not hard to kill someone if you really want to. It is not like guns were invented and then all of the sudden people started committing murders. It didn't happen with the invention of the knife either.
I imagine the first murder was probably committed with a rock, or was just an old-fashioned strangling. And really, animals have been killing with claws and teeth for millenia. People, being more intelligent, prefer to make and use tools to kill.
Banning guns stops nothing, and really it tends to make catching the criminal easier, because it leaves various traces at the scene of the crime.
That is a terrible idea, because now the Government has to fund the campaign of everyone who can claim a space on the ballot, which would be extremely expensive. It also has severe problems with primary rights granted by the Constitution - some of the restrictions we have now concerning who can buy advertising time and when are already on very weak constitutional ground. Furthermore, it eliminates the right of a non-party affiliated individual to campaign and be elected as a write-in candidate. While as far as I know such a write-in has never won the presidency directly, non-party nominated candidates have won when the matter had to be decided by the House of Reps (i.e. no one achieved the required majority electoral votes). Unless you also fund any potential write-in candidates, what you propose would be thrown out in heart beat, and even then I doubt it would stand up.
The right way to fix things is to shake things up - the 44 million people registered as Independants need to organize together and put up a single candidate they can all get behind, if only to change the status quo. The Independant block, which currently tends to vote for one of the two main parties, has more than enough votes to disrupt the system. They just tend to be all over the map as far as ideals go.
I'll save "make everyone their own representative with instantly transferable voting powers" for another day;)
That sounds like you want to move to a pure democratic system, which has shown itself time and time again in history to be the most opressive and unstable form of government in existance. It starts to break down in a big way when the population approaches 1,000. Attempting it on a population of millions guarantees instant opression of anybody in the non-majority opinion. A pure democracy is actually worse than a totalitarian dictatorship, because a dictatorship remains stable for many years at a time, and the oppression is consistant and predictable.
Contrary to what you may think, and actually contrary to what Apple intended, Macs do need cleanup tools. OSX needs less cleanup than XP does, and will generally will work flawlessly for a couple years before you run into any issues.
However, when you do run into issues, finding programs (actually usually just scripts) to help clean things up is a nightmare. The Mac tools to do the job are built in, but there are a dozen of them, and using them properly is not something an ordinary user could do. Scripts exist that do the job well, but then you have to know what to look for.
I know this from experience, because I (a windows pro) had to help my friend (a mac user) troubleshoot strange errors she started seeing. Fortunately, having grown up with Windows and having used Linux off and on over the years, I have become very good at troubleshooting.
All in all the rarity of those types of problems on the Mac is very nice, but Windows makes the job easy enough that it is not a big deal when you need to perform your regular cleanup.
You completely misunderstood the analogy, the Insurance company equates to the music industry, not the ISP. The government equates to the ISP in the analogy, and it is the government that controls the licenses to drive a vehicle.
The analogy is actually just about perfect.
ISPs do not revoke the download rights of a person who has illegaly downloaded copyrighted media, at least not until they receive an order from the court to do so. Similarly, the government does not revoke the license of a driver who speeds until it happens many times, and a court order is issued to revoke that license.
This case is like the car insurance companies suing the Government for knowingly allowing people who speed to keep their drivers licenses, even though it will statistically cost the insurance companies more money.
Good god man it is WRITTEN!! W-R-I-T-T-E-N! Nothing has ever been wrote in Javascript, or wrote in C, or wrote in C++. They were written in Javascript, written in C, or written in C++.
People write things. People wrote things. Things have been written by people. See what's going on there?
Sorry, I'm not normally much of a grammar nazi, but I couldn't let that one go. One word (used twice) took your entire post from fairly intelligent down to utterly moronic.
That said, there is no reason you can't write a good database in C#, in fact if done correctly you might be able to make it handle data corruption better than an ordinary C based setup. On the other hand I'm not sure you could write a good database in a scripting language, there are a lot more hurdles to overcome there.
It ran as a trading system for a year or two just fine, it failed in the middle of a convoluted project to tie the system in to another system in Italy.
Are you really going to say you can't build a trading system with.NET when the only reason it failed was because someone came behind the original developers and fucked things up?
On the other hand, I can see the decision to replace the system if the MS/Accenture solution was not as wonderful as expected, and if replacing the entire system would approach the cost of integrating the new system. When you add in the fact that the ability to sell their system to others is obviously a large added value, so it isn't all that surprising they went the way they did.
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British hospitals will also close up shop for the evening if they have performed too many procedures that day, in the US that is unheard of. That's straight from a doctor who worked for years as a heart surgeon at a British hospital. He said he had to tell patients in desperate need of heart transplants that they would have to wait until the next day, because they had already spent the money they were allowed for that day.
If you think hospitals are stingy now, just wait until they have only been allocated X amount of dollars to operate.
The fact is, good management is good management, and poor management is poor management. I have worked for small(ish) businesses before, I have worked for the government before, and I am currently working for a very very large corporation now (top 20 fortune 500). I can tell you that the management style of the corporation and the government entity that I worked for are very, very similar, and nothing at all like the management of the smaller company. The smaller company was tightly run, the boss knew exactly what was going on at most levels of the operation, and things were kept very efficient. However, blind man can look at what is going on at the large corporation and the government entity and point out the massive amounts of waste. Things like rotating managers through a position every couple of years, huge bonuses for cutting short-term costs, etc. The cost cutting sounds like a good thing, until you realize that with managers moving on every two years or less, the biggest way to cut costs is to deferr maintenance until after you have left the position. When there is a culture promoting this practice, you end up with massive failures 20 years down the road that cost more than the combined cost of regular maintenance for all those years. The corporation makes up for this with buying power and clout to pull in more profit than a smaller operation, but how can the government make up for it? They don't have any income to speak of other than taxes, so all they can do is tax more, and more, and more.
What is really disgusting in the US, is now thanks to Obama and Bush, the mechanism that enchourages companies to limit this waste - the risk of absolute failure - has been eliminated. There is nothing stopping them now, because they know if they reach the breaking point again the government will just bail them out.
Just look at the US government's management history, it is terrible. Social Security is going bankrupt, Medicare and Medicaide are going bankrupt (these three programs already make up most of the national budget, and yet they are running out of money), the postal service is supposed to pay for itself but it can't, the rail transportation system collapsed. Probably the best run portion of government is the Department of Defense, and that's what I was comparing to the corporation!
There are problems with Healthcare in the US, there is no doubt, but if you let the US government run health care things will only get worse, not better. I had hopes for Obama - I didn't vote for him but I thought he would still make a good president. It seems like every day something new comes out to disappoint.
Once the wires were run it no longer actually costs a fortune to connect to those areas.
However, the telecom companies still charge a fortune for the privilege, and we certainly still pay subsidies to them in the form of an aditional tax that goes straight to the telecoms.
Maintenance of those areas is more expensive, but nowhere near what they get for supporting them.
If you've signed an exclusive contract, then obviously you would be in breach of contract if you sold somewhere else. Duh.
That's actually you (the developer) creating an incentive for Valve to promote your software more than they would promote non-exclusive software. It's a business decision, and the company that has to live with it is the one that made the decision.
Re-selling is an entirely different beast. If you want to own a physical copy of a game you can sell to someone else, you should buy a physical copy. What you are doing with Steam is effectively purchasing a subscription to the game, rather than buying a copy. You can tell by the fact that you can download the game on any computer and play it, and have it installed on multiple computers at once. This is not possible with purchased copies, as you are violating copyright every time you install the game on a new computer. Of course you can break the law if you want, but I'm assuming you are an honest person.
There are competing services, by the way, which allow you to purchase digital copies of the software. If you don't like Steam, go with one of them. There is nothing limiting you to Steam except yourself.
Monopoly is a specific word that has a certain meaning, and it's more than just market dominance.
Part of what gives a company a monopoly is that they have exclusive control over access to a resource, or near enough that it doesn't matter. This control alows a company with a monopoly to prevent competitors to be able to compete by restricting the resource outright or by charging fees that are so high the competitor cannot possibly provide a competitive service at a competitive price.
The obvious example is Microsoft, who had a monopoly on the browser market by virtue of the fact that businesses and consumers were entrenched in Windows. It is obviously not reasonable to expect millions of Windows users to change operating systems just to run a browser, so the ability to tie Internet Explorer in to Windows in such a way that no browser could perform at the same level, as well as coercing retailers into not including competing browsers with no recourse for competitors, was clear evidence that Microsoft was controling a limited resource - lower level access to Windows and the ability to bundle software with Windows - which gave them a monopoly.
Now, on the flip side, they do NOT have a monopoly in the OS market. There is nothing Microsoft directly controls about PCs that prevents someone from installing an alternative operating system on the same hardware.
Other examples of monopolies are telecom and cable companies - these are government enabled monopolies, whereby only certain companies are permitted to install new cable. A competing service would find it very very difficult to run new lines or use existing lines in an area with full coverage by a single provider. This kind of monopoly really disgusts me, since the government is supposed to prevent monopolies not create them. Note that the monopolies were originally used as incentive to build the networks that would not have been profitable to build otherwise, but that was ages ago and we have long since paid for it by now. The splitting of Bell helped, but frankly it has only reduced the monopolies to regional monopolies instead of a national monopoly. It isn't a whole lot better, as competition is only less stifled than it used to be.
If you are willing to knowingly screw yourself and the candidate by not hiring the best candidate for the sole purpose of "sticking it" to the recruiter by not allowing him a commission, you're an idiot.
What you do is cancel your contract with the recruiter, citing a breach, and hire the candidate anyway. Refuse payment, essentially. If you have a contract then they are in breach of it, if you don't then it was volunteer anyway.
Why you'd chose to screw yourself and an honest potential employee instead of screwing the recruiter is beyond me.
By the way, if you do cancel the contract with the recruitment agency, you can almost guarantee that "Zeke" will be fired. Chances are the recruitment agency will attempt to negotiate a sweater deal to keep you as a customer as well.
This seems to be either a hoax or will be extremely limited in ways they aren't discussing, as to have little use.
Why? What are you basing that assessment on?
If the examples they are showing are real, the image data set they are pulling from must have been manually processed and adorned with hand-made metadata.
Why? From what I understand, the program currently needs to be configured for each sketch by hand (how many points to process, what the criteria are for the search, etc) but I've seen nothing that suggests something a program could not be written to process automatically, and I didn't see where they had to customize the meta-data for the photos to get their software to process it correctly.
Skepticism is healthy, but it doesn't really help anything to just make stuff up and then use that as a basis for not believing something.
If you have inside knowledge of this type of thing (experience attempting to program something similar would be perfect), by all means, share and educate the rest of us, but if you don't know what you are talking about just leave it at "Seems complicated, sounds too good to be true." Or something along those lines.
I personally take the opposite stance of "Sounds awesome, I hope it actually works", because I - like you - don't know shit about this sort of thing.
You know Apple switch to x86 architecture a while ago and uses Intel processors exclusively, right?
If Nvidia can't produce chipsets for the new Intel processors, that deal is only going to last as long as the FSBs remain marketable. As soon as DMI is the norm from high end to low end Nvidia won't be selling chipsets to anybody.
Sure, it will be a while, but that deal was doomed as soon as it was written - it is not a long term contract.
Er, in that article they explicitly state they are not producing any chipsets for future CPUs due to legal issues:
But because of Intel's improper claims to customers and the market that we aren't licensed to the new DMI bus and its unfair business tactics, it is effectively impossible for us to market chipsets for future CPUs.
That is, in a nutshell, exactly what the summary says - that they will continue to sell their chipsets for the older FSB processors only.
Now, they are apparently suing Intel on that score, and if they win they will probably jump back in the chipset market, but Nvidia themselves have said in the article you referenced yourself that they are currently not going to produce any chipsets for new processors. They will only be selling chipsets for processors they have already developed.
I'm assuming you didn't score too well in reading comprehension back in school.
It's because the French people allow a Frenchman with a penchant for little boys to remain their Minister of Culture.
That suggests the French people are pretty fucked in the head. Even if the average Frenchman does not want this person to be in that position, it is the French people who created the situation that allowed the man in that position, and keeps him there. The blame for the government of any democratic system rests on the people who put that government in place - that is the voting population. That holds true for the US, and I think we are soon going to feel the impact of electing a president who has absolutely zero business experience in the middle of a financial crisis.
One bad apple spoils the whole truckload?
Yes, actually, it does. You realise that old saying (One bad apple spoils the bunch) came about because if you found an apple spoiled with worms in a bucket full of apples, you could no longer trust the apples in that bucket, because worms spread.
Do you even think before you write?
You'd have a point if he ran on an anti-gay platform, but he didn't.
Seriously, the alternative was Al Gore, that guy is a nut job. I'd still vote Bush over Gore, he should just stick to flying his private jet around the world to give talks about environmental responsibility and leave us alone.
Kerry was horrible also, but at least he wasn't crazy like Gore. He was weak though, and fake, and it is hard to get past that, especially just a few years after 9/11 and right in the middle of the hunt for Bin Ladin. Weak was not what we wanted. The Dems just didn't put up any good candidates after Clinton, and people were unhappy with the way Clinton finished up his term.
Torts themselves add very little to the costs of healthcare. However, because the costs from a single malpractice suit can bankrupt a doctor even if they win, and the damages from a successful malpractice suit can bankrupt a small hospital, every doctor MUST have malpractice insurance in the millions of dollars, and hospitals must have insurance in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Insurance rates are so high in some areas for certain specialties that doctors cannot afford to practice.
According to a congressional study on medical malpractice insurance rates in 2003, the premiums for interns were between $15,000 -$20,000. That's a hell of a lot for someone fresh out of med-school. For general surgeons it ranged from $40,000 up to $90,000. One of the worst is OBGYN, which ranged from $80,000 to $120,000. Only neurosurgeons have a higher average premium.
Think about that, $120,000 per year just for the privilege of delivering babies. That's not including the schooling debt a doctor has, or any equipment they have to purchase. Assuming $2,000 per baby, an OBGYN has to deliver 60 per year just to cover the insurance costs. The average OBGYN delivers 100 babies a year, so obviously this number is going to have to be much much higher in order to make any money. And guess what? It is. Factor in the debt a doctor, especially a specialized doctor like OBGYN, and you have an additional overhead of between $75,000 and $150000 before you can even start practicing.
And those are pure costs that don't take into account administration overhead (which is huge) and less tangible costs directly relating to dealing with insurance. If you have your own practice you can count on $40k at a minimum to hire a lawyer to make sure what you have covers what you need. Then of course there are the extra costs of the accountant to deal with keeping your finances straight because they are now becoming a major headache to keep straight.
If you start looking at the total extra costs a doctor's office has in order to deal with insurance it becomes a significant portion of the cost of doing business that is in no way related to actually doing the business. It is simply an extra cost. Add in the administrative costs incurred by having to dick around with a patient's insurance company and you can start to see why delivering a baby costs anywhere from $15,000 - $25,000.
I'm not sure less than 10% counts as a "fuckton". The majority of people who don't have insurance have refused the plans offered at work for various reasons, and that is their right. The people for whom healthcare is simply not available in at any reasonable price number around 15 million. The people who don't have it at all number about 47 million, and that's including 10 million people who are not legal citizens of the US.
Now, there are definitely problems with actually using health insurance, and that is what needs to be adressed. Things like capping the amount of money a doctor or hospital can be sued for malpractice would do a lot, perhaps stating that people only have the right to emergency care for an immediate life saving - i.e. they'll fix that wicked bad broken leg if you get in a car accident and don't have insurance, you are dieing of cancer they should give you some pain pills and say "sorry bro" and consider it natural causes when you die. That would require making sure insurance is available to 100% of the people, and public subsidizing of only those people who can prove they absolutely cannot afford insurance. It would also require insurance to cover every procedure a doctor deems necessary - once they assess your risk they cannot re-assess it when it comes time to pay the bill, they need to pay up until you are back to 100% health.
It's a little heartless, but this bullshit of determining what group of people is "most valuable" and therefore who gets the most funding is absolutely disgusting. Under the current US plan, if you are under 18 or over 34 you deserve less care than the people in that age group. It's healthcare by accountants, and it is as bad or worse than what insurance companies are doing. It is what prompted "doctor counseling" of elderly people nearing death, which gave rise to the idea of "death panels" that got everyone so worked up.
Huh, that's interesting.
All this time I thought we fought a big war for all that stuff back when Europe was still primarily feudal.
The US was a republic by the 1780's, and France still had a ruling King in 1830. There was nothing equivalent of US Constitution until the Charter of 1814.
The English Parliament made the UK a sort of hybrid democratic system, which although they have had representation since 1066, even today the Queen chooses the Prime Minister, the Queen approves all bills, can dissolve Parliament at any time, and the House of Lords is not publicly elected.
In short, it is nothing at all like the US system established in the 1770's and 80's.
Since the US colonies were largely formed by English who felt oppressed by their government, and since the only experience most of those original colonists had outside of England was in the Netherlands which was French controlled at the time, I'd say the only influend Europe had on the government of the US was in helping them decide exactly how they did not want it to be.
Go ahead and name me a representative democracy the US colonists would have had experience with prior to the 1770's in order to influence their choice of government once they won their freedom from England.
Frankly, most of it was simply an improvement on Grecian republics, and you can hardly count ancient Greece as part of modern Europe. That's knowledge of history, it would not have mattered where those republics had been located because they were long gone at the time.
You might even be able to make the case that the newly formed United States of America, with their constitution and Bill of Rights and lack of a monarchy influenced the expansion of democracy in Europe, not the other way around. That is probably going a bit far, since I think Europe was moving that way anyway. It may have simply been more fuel for the fire.
But...
It goes to 11, see?
It's only one more bit though.
128bits is twice as many bits as 64 bits.
It just also happens to be a bajillion times more addressing space.
Ah, yeah, that's totally true, considering we don't have legacy apps from win2000 and win98 any more, it's all good.
Oh wait, we DO have legacy apps from 98 and 2000, in fact we've still got legacy DOS apps (i.e. well past your 10 year prep window)! XP is what, 7 years old now? And yet there a number of custom applications that could not be upgraded to a 64-bit based system.
Maybe, and I'm just sort of throwing this out there, but maybe if we start thinking about 128-bit compatibility NOW, there won't BE any legacy system issues when a 128-bit OS rolls around. Especially if you can avoid a hack job later, I don't see what the problem with thinking ahead is.
If you think there are no issues with our current 64-bit consumer grade hardware, consider the fact that it is nearly impossible to port a pure 64-bit OS to it. Check out OpenVMS, which has been in the 64-bit OS game for a decade now, and you'll learn you need true 64-bit hardware to run it, and Intel and AMD's consumer grade processors don't cut the mustard, and likely never will.
Why NOT try to avoid these problems now, instead of later when it may be too difficult? You know the old saying that an ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure, well it's just as true for software as it is for medicine.
Jeeze, some people never learn from history.
How many times have we been stuck in a jam because people thought "this will never be in use by the time this is a problem"? The Y2k bug, which we were afraid might bring down the entire banking system with the change of a clock, was one major one. Before that was the infamous "640k is enough for anyone" shortsightedness. There has been plenty of it in the x86 architecture that needs to be babied as it has been upgraded from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit.
They have had to work around it over and over and over and over again, every time the technology jumps. Now that they are actually thinking "hey, what about the next big jump?" and structuring their systems in such a way that they potentially won't have this problem, and you seem to have a problem with it.
Even if it takes 50 years before we see the need to move to 128-bit, in that time we probably will certainly have very expensive legacy 64-bit applications. If they start planning for it NOW in their upgrade path, then it is very unlikely that there will be any 64-bit legacy applications that will have this problem. By then Windows 7 will be about the same as MS Dos 2.0 is today. It will be frickin ancient, and they probably won't have any 128-bit upgrade issues at all because they designed with it in mind in the first place.
Itanium is not unsuccessful for VMS machines (you cannot put VMS on an x86 based chip, 64bit or no), and VMS is used in mainframe and other ultra-high availability applications. The Itanium just didn't pan out for any sort of windows-based operating systems, because windows is so tied to its x86 legacy.
I believe they also have a successor that will be compatible with Itanium as well, I'm not sure though. I mainly only looked at Itanium from the VMS point of view. They certainly have a future their though, their only competitor is the Alpha by HP, and these tend to be very very very expensive applications they are used for.
The pictures are in the login screen on the bank's website, not the emails he gets from his bank.
My bank does the same thing, and I believe it notes that this comes from new (a couple years ago new) banking regulations to prevent phishing.
You set up your account, pick your picture, and need your pin code to access. If you follow a link to log in (which the bank never sends, if you see that it will always be a phishing scam) and the picture does not match then you know it is definitely not right. Unfortunately I think a lot of people will still think "That's funny, that isn't my normal picture..." and enter their information anyway.
The only technical flaw I see with my bank's particular implimentation is the pin pad is generated randomly each time you access the login page, but your particular pin combo will -always- be on that pin pad. If you access the login page enough you can figure out what the letters/numbers are in your pin combination, and then it is just a matter of figuring out the order. It really sabotages the number of potential pin combinations needed to hack, and leaves you open to someone deducing what your pin is.
Paperweights, candle sticks, rocks, fists, etc.
It really is not hard to kill someone if you really want to. It is not like guns were invented and then all of the sudden people started committing murders. It didn't happen with the invention of the knife either.
I imagine the first murder was probably committed with a rock, or was just an old-fashioned strangling. And really, animals have been killing with claws and teeth for millenia. People, being more intelligent, prefer to make and use tools to kill.
Banning guns stops nothing, and really it tends to make catching the criminal easier, because it leaves various traces at the scene of the crime.
That is a terrible idea, because now the Government has to fund the campaign of everyone who can claim a space on the ballot, which would be extremely expensive. It also has severe problems with primary rights granted by the Constitution - some of the restrictions we have now concerning who can buy advertising time and when are already on very weak constitutional ground. Furthermore, it eliminates the right of a non-party affiliated individual to campaign and be elected as a write-in candidate. While as far as I know such a write-in has never won the presidency directly, non-party nominated candidates have won when the matter had to be decided by the House of Reps (i.e. no one achieved the required majority electoral votes). Unless you also fund any potential write-in candidates, what you propose would be thrown out in heart beat, and even then I doubt it would stand up.
The right way to fix things is to shake things up - the 44 million people registered as Independants need to organize together and put up a single candidate they can all get behind, if only to change the status quo. The Independant block, which currently tends to vote for one of the two main parties, has more than enough votes to disrupt the system. They just tend to be all over the map as far as ideals go.
I'll save "make everyone their own representative with instantly transferable voting powers" for another day ;)
That sounds like you want to move to a pure democratic system, which has shown itself time and time again in history to be the most opressive and unstable form of government in existance. It starts to break down in a big way when the population approaches 1,000. Attempting it on a population of millions guarantees instant opression of anybody in the non-majority opinion. A pure democracy is actually worse than a totalitarian dictatorship, because a dictatorship remains stable for many years at a time, and the oppression is consistant and predictable.
Contrary to what you may think, and actually contrary to what Apple intended, Macs do need cleanup tools. OSX needs less cleanup than XP does, and will generally will work flawlessly for a couple years before you run into any issues.
However, when you do run into issues, finding programs (actually usually just scripts) to help clean things up is a nightmare. The Mac tools to do the job are built in, but there are a dozen of them, and using them properly is not something an ordinary user could do. Scripts exist that do the job well, but then you have to know what to look for.
I know this from experience, because I (a windows pro) had to help my friend (a mac user) troubleshoot strange errors she started seeing. Fortunately, having grown up with Windows and having used Linux off and on over the years, I have become very good at troubleshooting.
All in all the rarity of those types of problems on the Mac is very nice, but Windows makes the job easy enough that it is not a big deal when you need to perform your regular cleanup.
You completely misunderstood the analogy, the Insurance company equates to the music industry, not the ISP. The government equates to the ISP in the analogy, and it is the government that controls the licenses to drive a vehicle.
The analogy is actually just about perfect.
ISPs do not revoke the download rights of a person who has illegaly downloaded copyrighted media, at least not until they receive an order from the court to do so. Similarly, the government does not revoke the license of a driver who speeds until it happens many times, and a court order is issued to revoke that license.
This case is like the car insurance companies suing the Government for knowingly allowing people who speed to keep their drivers licenses, even though it will statistically cost the insurance companies more money.
Written.
The word is written.
Good god man it is WRITTEN!! W-R-I-T-T-E-N! Nothing has ever been wrote in Javascript, or wrote in C, or wrote in C++. They were written in Javascript, written in C, or written in C++.
People write things. People wrote things. Things have been written by people. See what's going on there?
Sorry, I'm not normally much of a grammar nazi, but I couldn't let that one go. One word (used twice) took your entire post from fairly intelligent down to utterly moronic.
That said, there is no reason you can't write a good database in C#, in fact if done correctly you might be able to make it handle data corruption better than an ordinary C based setup. On the other hand I'm not sure you could write a good database in a scripting language, there are a lot more hurdles to overcome there.
It ran as a trading system for a year or two just fine, it failed in the middle of a convoluted project to tie the system in to another system in Italy.
Are you really going to say you can't build a trading system with .NET when the only reason it failed was because someone came behind the original developers and fucked things up?
On the other hand, I can see the decision to replace the system if the MS/Accenture solution was not as wonderful as expected, and if replacing the entire system would approach the cost of integrating the new system. When you add in the fact that the ability to sell their system to others is obviously a large added value, so it isn't all that surprising they went the way they did.