yea, but they are headed in the wrong direction, and are moving REALLY slow. If we saw stars moving around at a few percent the speed of light, then maybe. But a million miles per hour? That's 0.0014% the speed of light. Our closest neighbor is 25.8 trillion miles away. So it would take them nearly 3 thousand years just to get there. Not much of a mother ship.
3000 years wouldn't be much of a journey if you are taking your planet with you. For instance if we knew our sun was going to die in 5000 years and we wanted to relocate our planet to a new sun and we didn't want to be cramped in small spaceships or abandon our home then moving our solar system to a new solar system and then "swapping suns" would seem like a reasonable option assuming we had the capability of doing it. It also eliminates the need of having to find a suitable planet to teraform.
The middle group between these two is pushing a fat guy off a bridge to stop the train. Again, assuming this is guaranteed to work (and other options like jumping off yourself) won't, is it still ok to kill 1 to save 5? There are other scenerios too. What if you killing one person (for instance they hold the key to an antidote) could save millions, is it then ok? What if an aircraft full of innocent people is getting ready to crash into a building that will kill thousands. Is it ok to shoot it down? That is a real life example and there are thousands of other examples. Would it be ok to divert a launched nuclear bomb to a less populated area? Would the person who made this decision be held responsible for the deaths they caused or the deaths they saved?
1) store all your passwords on an encrypted thumbdrive in a secure location along with your will. 2) give the thumbdrive master password to trusted friends/family.
The nice thing about this method is that neither step needs to be 100%. The secure location can be a lockbox, around your neck, in the heater vent, or at the bottom of a box full of other thumbdrives as the thumbdrive is useless without the key so security by obscurity is sufficient. The master password can be given to a large number of people or even posted on slashdot as the master password is useless without the thumbdrive.
To attack this you would need to both steal the thumbdrive from the secure location and know the master password which would be extremely easy for a family member if you are incapacitated but extremely difficult otherwise which is exactly what you want.
Or we could just have random pockets of civilization here on earth looking to create a locally sustainable lifestyle with careful attention to long range power supply issues (without power, modern civilization is dead, with sufficient power, we can do most anything).
Pretty much exactly what you have to do to get to Mars without the getting to Mars part.
Most if not all current "sustainable lifestyle" proposals are based on the assumption that we can grow plants with the help of the sun. In order to survive something of this magnitude you need to change your assumptions to not include the sun so this means sufficient artificial lights to grow all your plants and sufficient power to power all your lights. This is actually somewhat feasible, you just need a windmill or two and the typical setup used to grow pot indoors but probably not something most people are going to plan for.
You laugh at the power of Lord Cthulhu, the Great and Glorious One. You try to come up with "scientific" theories and fancy math but the truth will become apparent to you very soon.
Your screams of terror will be like the song of angels to me.
How does this get rated +4 insightful? Funny maybe but insightful? I'm confused.
Notice how several of the above books have been banned at one point or another? If you want a decent list of "must read" books a good starting point is to just read all the books that have been banned at one point or another. By definition controversial books are a great source of views "contrary" to the norm and are generally written in a way that opens your mind and make you think otherwise there would have been no reason to ban them.
So pay the burger flippers better. Enough so they can pay rent etc.
You can't just pay the burger flippers better. A crude example: You decide to double th emin wage. The 'burger flippers' are now making $15/hour instead of $7.50. Of course, the assistant managers who were making $15 now need to get a proportional raise, to $30, And the General Manager, who was k=making $30, needs to make $60 now.
In the end, you end up increasing ALL wages. This will cause the price of ALL goods to skyrocket (what? You expected the businesses to simply make less profit? ha!). This means that the $15 those burger flippers make now...is worth what the $7.50 they made before was worth. You reached a new balance, at a higher number value.
Honestly, I don't see this happening. If minimum wage was doubled tomorrow then my guess is you would see more automation come in and instead of having a half dozen people working for $7.50 an hour you would see entire fast food restaurants ran by one or two $15 per hour employess just checking on the machines. If you want to make more than minimum wage it is absolutely essential to learn a unique skill that somebody else will pay you for.
Android also allows unsigned code but that's not the default. You have to actually go into settings, find the setting, and click through a couple big warnings that say "are you sure" before you are actually allowed to install 3rd party software. The typical user doesn't do or even knows how to do this. This to me is the preferred solution. Make it difficult but possible. An even better solution might be to have it only work for 60 minutes before reverting. The windows method of having a little clickthru is not enough to stop the average user who just clicks ok to everything and doesn't really understand the implications.
Yea! And if ya don't like the way we run this country, you can jest geet out!
Seriously, dude, do you live in your parent's house or something? Because those of us with bills to pay understand why people might just stay in a job they hate, and thus don't make stupid, childish comments like that.
How is this bad advice? Yes, everyone has bills to pay but there are plenty of ways to pay your bills without working at a job you hate. Even if this requires you to take a significatnt paycut then its still worth it to do something that you enjoy. If I was working at a job I hated I would only do it temporarily for the absolute bare minimum time required until I was able to downsize, relocate, or do whatever else is required to be able to work a job that I enjoy.
I'm getting sick of CA putting out rules and "standards" that spread to other states that don't want/need them.
California has a big enough market that they can mostly get away with it. It would be interesting to see what would happen if companies called their bluff and just skipped the california market. I'm assuming in certain areas there are already a lot of items that are not being sold in California but what if the big companies like Nokia, Samsung, etc... just decided not to comply and skipped the California market. One of these days they are going to pass a law that's too hard to comply with and companies are going to call their bluff.
Not only why? But I don't want it. This seems like a huge step backwards for consumers. One of the great things about GSM vs CDMA is the ability to move a phone from carrier to carrier or a number from phone to phone. I don't want an embedded sim that only the carrier can change and I can't swap to a different handset or carrier. Some things I routinely do are swap a sim when in a foreign country or put my sim into an old cheap phone when I take it to the beach or if my phone is acting up, dies, or needs to be charged.
And then less than 5% of his net worth/stocks. It reduced his voting by a little over 2% and he's keeping more than half of it so he's giving less than 1% of his voting power to a charity he controls. 1 billion is a quite impressive, but as a percentage of his wealth it is nothing and add to that the fact that he's basically giving it to himself, it's not much at all. At least when Bill Gates gave it to himself he gave a substantial percentage. Warren Buffet I believe is giving 5% of his net worth per year to charity at this point.
I think you're drawing an artificial distinction. Given a regulatory requirement to pay a bug bounty, there would be an actual loss to be covered.
Ok, to continue with my previous example then it would be like the government stepping in and telling everyone that if you find your neighbor's door unlocked that you can report it and get a check from their neighbor worth half of their stuff. This would obviously cause your neighbor to want to always lock their door and to also probably want to buy insurance to protect themselve from accidently leaving their door unlocked. But doesn't this seem a little drastic and prone to abuse? Doesn't your neighbor already have an incentive to lock their door? What if they have other protections in place like a dog at home or cameras in place?
" The more the robots take over, the more people will be unemployed" Sigh. This just isn't how the economy or unemployment works. In economic terms, robots are simply one type of capital. Technology has been improving the efficiency of capital essentially for ever. Its true that if you increase your capital, you need less labour to achieve a given result. But since the labour is available, what we do instead is combine it with the now greater capital to make *more*, thus making us richer.
Your assumptions are also flawed. First, companies own most of the capital not individuals. Secondly you're assuming that you need to combine that capital with HUMAN labor for it to work. What happens when a company can combine their capital with 100% robotic labor. If I can buy 100 robots and make and sell widgets all by myself what incentive do I have to employ human labor at all? Yes, robots can be considered capital but it's naive to assume that they can't also be counted on the labor side.
Yes, that's the nature of insurance. If the actuaries do their jobs right, insurance is always, in aggregate and in the long run, a losing proposition. If you can afford the potential hit, you should not buy insurance. But insurance makes a lot of sense in cases where the probability of catastrophic loss is relatively low but the impact is, well, catastrophic.
But we're really talking about 2 different things: 1) Insurance is actuaries calculating the probabilty of a loss payout, requiring you to fix know problems to lessen this risk but then just sitting back and waiting for a loss. 2) A bug bounty is requiring you to pay a percentage of the loss even if there has never been an actual loss.
The first presumably already exists in one form or another. I'm not sure the second is workable in the real world. The second would be like making an insurance company pay out for a potential theft every time you forget to lock your front door even if no theft occurred just because your neighbor noticed it and asked for a reward.
Why would a mandate not be workable? Yes, it is a form of wealth distribution and yes it would still be taken by gunpoint by the IRS but it would at least improve one leg of the problem so that at least I have a say of where my money is spent. It could be easily done with existing tax deductions in a short simple bill if congress wanted to. i.e. every dollar you donate decreases your taxes dollar for dollar not just your gross like it currently does. Even 50 cents on the dollar and you would see charitable contributions go through the roof. If I could donate twice my tax liability to a charity of my choice instead of paying taxes I would do it in a heartbeat just so the federal government doesn't keep growing uncontrollably. I would even go one step further and set up the military, etc... as charities and instead of mandating that everyone must give X percent to the government that instead they must give X percent to a charity of their choice. Schools, hospitals, and NASA would be well funded while random wars in countries people can't even locate on a map would instantly lose their funding.
The only way the insurance would be reasonable would be if the bug bounty was not a fixed price. I.e. If I have 1000 customer's credit card numbers then the bug wouldn't be worth near as much as if I had 100000 customers. But how do you do that with opensource software or does the company running it hold the responsibility? Also, if we are basing it on the "street value" of the bug then it still becomes insane. So if I find a bug that could cost microsoft $10M and the street value is 50 cents on the dollar then microsoft has to give me 5 million dollars for finding it? That's probably worse than just waiting and letting it happen which is never going to be 100% and has at least some chance of recovering or mitigating the loss.
If charity worked we wouldn't need taxes. As it actually is, people are incredibly selfish antisocial bastards. Also, most of those who do not work, wish that they could get it. Just a few facts for you to ponder - as opposed to what the "media" would have you think.
What makes you think charity doesn't work? One of the problem with charity today is that like most things the government has corrupted it. Most if not all charities today also get some money from the government. If the real concern was people not being generous enough to charities why not mandate everyone give X percent of their money to charity instead of taking it at gunpoint and redistributing it. At least then people would have a choice about which charity THEIR money is going to support.
I've played Carcassonne with my grandma and 6 year olds. If that's your definition of geeky then you haven't been exposed to very many games. As far as board games go, risk, settlers of catan, magic, and even chess are all both more geeky and more popular. But judging geek games on popularity is kindof an oxymoron so if you exclude popularity there are a ton of games alot more complex and geeky than carcassonne.
> > DRM only works when it's not intrusive, prohibitive, or makes you feel like a criminal. >
Even then it still scares away customers. I'm always reluctant to buy music, movies or even apps as I'm always worried that something will change and render all my "possessions" null. Buying from a big name that is less likely to go out of business helps but even amazon has voided previously purchased stuff. The most ironic being the book 1984: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090717/1559425587.shtml
The ACA is something, and something is better than nothing, but the medical industry is saturated with greed and gouging. Take the obscene profits out of medical care and there is no incentive for mass misdiagnosis.
The only thing that obscene profits do is allow for bigger risk taking and drive the prices up. If there is any profit at all then there will always be an incentive for mass misdiagnosis. What we really need to do is shift the incentives. For instance researching new antibiotics is currently unprofitable because people only take antibiotics for a week or two likewise with diseases that mostly affect the 3rd world. So right now the most profitable research is research into 1st world diseases that require ongoing treatment not the ones that would cure the most people. The medical industry has other issues too but fix this problem and you would go a long way to at least fixing the problem with the drug industry.
Yep. $8,000 a month to watch somebody die slowly, painfully and inevitably. When the person being kept alive doesn't want it.
After a year of watching this person's misery, they die and you're left with a bill you might never be able to pay off.
They dies. Your life is in ruins. The mental scars of watching it for a year are far worse than if you just said goodbye and did it. Does that make sense to anybody at all?
Why is the family held responsible for the debt? How can they force the family to continue to pay for the debt? Does anyone know exactly how this works? If you want to die, couldn't you just give all your money and assets to your family and either they let you die or the hospital and/or government picks up the bill?
The only realistic way to fullfill all these requirements: 1) 100+ passwords 2) every password unique 3) every password good 4) no password stored or written down. is to create an algorithm that only you know. For instance, the 3rd letter of the url + a pin + the inverse color of the company logo, etc... That's simple enough but my problem is that as soon as I create one every 3rd website has some stupid password requirement that won't allow it so I'm back to writing down all the exceptions.
Readers, take these "friend of a guy I met somewhere" urban myths with a truckload of salt. Even that guy that kept those girls locked up for years would try that "they was asking for it" thing if he could have gotten away with it.
He didn't day "friend of a friend", he was somewhat specific. I'll be even more specific. My friend in college who worked parttime at Denny's and slept with a coworker there who already had a baby from another guy. He was 22 and she was 17. The grandmother turned them in and he's now on the sexual offender's list for life. He also lost his main job as IT at the sheriff's office because of it. It was consentual sex and she had a fricken baby but it's still listed as rape and he's on the same sexual predator's list with 50 year old men going after 12 year olds.
Problem hee is that everybody's forgotten what prisons were for. Not rehabilitation. That can be accomplished better and cheaper other ways. Renmember how much the US spends per prisoner. much more per person than welfare payments. In fact if they used that money for that instead, then onlky hardened criminals, Besides, sending someone to crime school isn't ther best rehab anyways. Well, the, Punishment? Or protecting society? The US model is based on punishment, with only a token nod to "protecting society". There's way better ways to punish criminals though, and if the prisons were used exclusively to protect society, we could tear the other half of them down. This is, in fact what they were originally for. To keep them away from society for safety's sake. The US model is based on punishment though, and creates a revolving door because of poorly drafted laws and kneejerk reactionismn on "getting tough on crime". Making more acts criminal isn't "getting tough on crime" however, but rather the opposite, and anyone who believes that has absolutely no education or understanding at all . Whatever. It's too late anyways. You make your bed you have to sleep in it.
Add to that the problem that the prison systems have lobbyists lobbying for mandatory sentences for non-violent crimes which is basically just free money for them. I don't agree that it's too late though but I think the first step is to get rid of the lobbyists and/or change the incentives. For instance instead of paying a prison just per head maybe give the prisons bonuses at the 1, 5, and 10 year mark for prisoners that stay out of the system. I read a report by a professor that showed that you could greatly reduce the number of people in prison by doing whole family intervention with juveniles. It's the classic dilbert problem though. It doubles the cost of Juvenile Hall in the short term and the savings don't show up for 5-10 years and when they do they show up in a different department so although society overall benefits, it's hard to get something like this approved as it doesn't benefit Juvenile Hall and it really doesn't benefit the prison system either as they actually lose prisoners so someone has to connect the dots and convince taxpayers to bite the bullet and pay more now for a payoff in a completely different area later.
Slashdot Mirror
yea, but they are headed in the wrong direction, and are moving REALLY slow. If we saw stars moving around at a few percent the speed of light, then maybe. But a million miles per hour? That's 0.0014% the speed of light. Our closest neighbor is 25.8 trillion miles away. So it would take them nearly 3 thousand years just to get there. Not much of a mother ship.
3000 years wouldn't be much of a journey if you are taking your planet with you. For instance if we knew our sun was going
to die in 5000 years and we wanted to relocate our planet to a new sun and we didn't want to be cramped in small spaceships
or abandon our home then moving our solar system to a new solar system and then "swapping suns" would seem like a reasonable
option assuming we had the capability of doing it. It also eliminates the need of having to find a suitable planet to teraform.
The middle group between these two is pushing a fat guy off a bridge to stop the train. Again, assuming this
is guaranteed to work (and other options like jumping off yourself) won't, is it still ok to kill 1 to save 5?
There are other scenerios too. What if you killing one person (for instance they hold the key to an antidote)
could save millions, is it then ok? What if an aircraft full of innocent people is getting ready to crash into
a building that will kill thousands. Is it ok to shoot it down? That is a real life example and there are
thousands of other examples. Would it be ok to divert a launched nuclear bomb to a less populated area?
Would the person who made this decision be held responsible for the deaths they caused or the deaths they saved?
Yes, this is really the simplest solution.
1) store all your passwords on an encrypted thumbdrive in a secure location along with your will.
2) give the thumbdrive master password to trusted friends/family.
The nice thing about this method is that neither step needs to be 100%.
The secure location can be a lockbox, around your neck, in the heater vent, or at the bottom of a box full of other thumbdrives as the thumbdrive is
useless without the key so security by obscurity is sufficient.
The master password can be given to a large number of people or even posted on slashdot as the master password is useless without the thumbdrive.
To attack this you would need to both steal the thumbdrive from the secure location and know the master password which would be
extremely easy for a family member if you are incapacitated but extremely difficult otherwise which is exactly what you want.
Or we could just have random pockets of civilization here on earth looking to create a locally sustainable lifestyle with careful attention to long range power supply issues (without power, modern civilization is dead, with sufficient power, we can do most anything).
Pretty much exactly what you have to do to get to Mars without the getting to Mars part.
Most if not all current "sustainable lifestyle" proposals are based on the assumption that we can grow plants with the help of the sun.
In order to survive something of this magnitude you need to change your assumptions to not include the sun so this means sufficient
artificial lights to grow all your plants and sufficient power to power all your lights. This is actually somewhat feasible, you just need
a windmill or two and the typical setup used to grow pot indoors but probably not something most people are going to plan for.
You laugh at the power of Lord Cthulhu, the Great and Glorious One. You try to come up with "scientific" theories and fancy math but the truth will become apparent to you very soon.
Your screams of terror will be like the song of angels to me.
How does this get rated +4 insightful? Funny maybe but insightful? I'm confused.
Notice how several of the above books have been banned at one point or another?
If you want a decent list of "must read" books a good starting point is to just read all the books
that have been banned at one point or another. By definition controversial books are a great
source of views "contrary" to the norm and are generally written in a way that opens your mind
and make you think otherwise there would have been no reason to ban them.
So pay the burger flippers better. Enough so they can pay rent etc.
You can't just pay the burger flippers better. A crude example: You decide to double th emin wage. The 'burger flippers' are now making $15/hour instead of $7.50. Of course, the assistant managers who were making $15 now need to get a proportional raise, to $30, And the General Manager, who was k=making $30, needs to make $60 now.
In the end, you end up increasing ALL wages. This will cause the price of ALL goods to skyrocket (what? You expected the businesses to simply make less profit? ha!). This means that the $15 those burger flippers make now...is worth what the $7.50 they made before was worth. You reached a new balance, at a higher number value.
Honestly, I don't see this happening. If minimum wage was doubled tomorrow then my guess is you would see more automation come
in and instead of having a half dozen people working for $7.50 an hour you would see entire fast food restaurants ran by one or two $15 per
hour employess just checking on the machines. If you want to make more than minimum wage it is absolutely essential to learn a unique
skill that somebody else will pay you for.
Android also allows unsigned code but that's not the default. You have to actually go into settings, find the setting,
and click through a couple big warnings that say "are you sure" before you are actually allowed to install 3rd party
software. The typical user doesn't do or even knows how to do this. This to me is the preferred solution. Make it
difficult but possible. An even better solution might be to have it only work for 60 minutes before reverting.
The windows method of having a little clickthru is not enough to stop the average user who just clicks ok to everything
and doesn't really understand the implications.
If you do not like your job, leave.
Yea! And if ya don't like the way we run this country, you can jest geet out!
Seriously, dude, do you live in your parent's house or something? Because those of us with bills to pay understand why people might just stay in a job they hate, and thus don't make stupid, childish comments like that.
How is this bad advice? Yes, everyone has bills to pay but there are plenty of ways to pay your bills without working at a job you hate.
Even if this requires you to take a significatnt paycut then its still worth it to do something that you enjoy. If I was working at a job I
hated I would only do it temporarily for the absolute bare minimum time required until I was able to downsize, relocate, or do whatever
else is required to be able to work a job that I enjoy.
More importantly...
I'm getting sick of CA putting out rules and "standards" that spread to other states that don't want/need them.
California has a big enough market that they can mostly get away with it. It would be interesting to see what
would happen if companies called their bluff and just skipped the california market. I'm assuming in certain
areas there are already a lot of items that are not being sold in California but what if the big companies like
Nokia, Samsung, etc... just decided not to comply and skipped the California market. One of these days they
are going to pass a law that's too hard to comply with and companies are going to call their bluff.
Not only why? But I don't want it. This seems like a huge step backwards for consumers. One of the great things
about GSM vs CDMA is the ability to move a phone from carrier to carrier or a number from phone to phone. I don't
want an embedded sim that only the carrier can change and I can't swap to a different handset or carrier. Some
things I routinely do are swap a sim when in a foreign country or put my sim into an old cheap phone when I take
it to the beach or if my phone is acting up, dies, or needs to be charged.
to his own charity?
And then less than 5% of his net worth/stocks. It reduced his voting by a little over 2% and
he's keeping more than half of it so he's giving less than 1% of his voting power to a charity
he controls. 1 billion is a quite impressive, but as a percentage of his wealth it is nothing
and add to that the fact that he's basically giving it to himself, it's not much at all. At least
when Bill Gates gave it to himself he gave a substantial percentage. Warren Buffet I believe
is giving 5% of his net worth per year to charity at this point.
I think you're drawing an artificial distinction. Given a regulatory requirement to pay a bug bounty, there would be an actual loss to be covered.
Ok, to continue with my previous example then it would be like the government stepping in and telling everyone that if you
find your neighbor's door unlocked that you can report it and get a check from their neighbor worth half of their stuff.
This would obviously cause your neighbor to want to always lock their door and to also probably want to buy insurance to
protect themselve from accidently leaving their door unlocked. But doesn't this seem a little drastic and prone to abuse?
Doesn't your neighbor already have an incentive to lock their door? What if they have other protections in place like a dog
at home or cameras in place?
" The more the robots take over, the more people will be unemployed"
Sigh. This just isn't how the economy or unemployment works. In economic terms, robots are simply one type of capital. Technology has been improving the efficiency of capital essentially for ever. Its true that if you increase your capital, you need less labour to achieve a given result. But since the labour is available, what we do instead is combine it with the now greater capital to make *more*, thus making us richer.
Your assumptions are also flawed. First, companies own most of the capital not individuals. Secondly you're assuming that you need to
combine that capital with HUMAN labor for it to work. What happens when a company can combine their capital with 100% robotic labor.
If I can buy 100 robots and make and sell widgets all by myself what incentive do I have to employ human labor at all?
Yes, robots can be considered capital but it's naive to assume that they can't also be counted on the labor side.
Yes, that's the nature of insurance. If the actuaries do their jobs right, insurance is always, in aggregate and in the long run, a losing proposition. If you can afford the potential hit, you should not buy insurance. But insurance makes a lot of sense in cases where the probability of catastrophic loss is relatively low but the impact is, well, catastrophic.
But we're really talking about 2 different things:
1) Insurance is actuaries calculating the probabilty of a loss payout, requiring you to fix know problems to lessen this risk but then just sitting back and waiting for a loss.
2) A bug bounty is requiring you to pay a percentage of the loss even if there has never been an actual loss.
The first presumably already exists in one form or another. I'm not sure the second is workable in the real world. The second would be like
making an insurance company pay out for a potential theft every time you forget to lock your front door even if no theft occurred just because
your neighbor noticed it and asked for a reward.
Why would a mandate not be workable? Yes, it is a form of wealth distribution and yes it would still be taken by gunpoint
by the IRS but it would at least improve one leg of the problem so that at least I have a say of where my money is spent.
It could be easily done with existing tax deductions in a short simple bill if congress wanted to. i.e. every dollar you donate
decreases your taxes dollar for dollar not just your gross like it currently does. Even 50 cents on the dollar and you would
see charitable contributions go through the roof. If I could donate twice my tax liability to a charity of my choice instead
of paying taxes I would do it in a heartbeat just so the federal government doesn't keep growing uncontrollably.
I would even go one step further and set up the military, etc... as charities and instead of mandating that everyone must
give X percent to the government that instead they must give X percent to a charity of their choice. Schools, hospitals,
and NASA would be well funded while random wars in countries people can't even locate on a map would instantly lose
their funding.
The only way the insurance would be reasonable would be if the bug bounty was not a fixed price. I.e. If I have
1000 customer's credit card numbers then the bug wouldn't be worth near as much as if I had 100000 customers.
But how do you do that with opensource software or does the company running it hold the responsibility?
Also, if we are basing it on the "street value" of the bug then it still becomes insane. So if I find a bug that could
cost microsoft $10M and the street value is 50 cents on the dollar then microsoft has to give me 5 million dollars
for finding it? That's probably worse than just waiting and letting it happen which is never going to be 100% and has
at least some chance of recovering or mitigating the loss.
If charity worked we wouldn't need taxes. As it actually is, people are incredibly selfish antisocial bastards. Also, most of those who do not work, wish that they could get it. Just a few facts for you to ponder - as opposed to what the "media" would have you think.
What makes you think charity doesn't work? One of the problem with charity today is that like most things the government
has corrupted it. Most if not all charities today also get some money from the government. If the real concern was people
not being generous enough to charities why not mandate everyone give X percent of their money to charity instead of taking it
at gunpoint and redistributing it. At least then people would have a choice about which charity THEIR money is going to support.
I've played Carcassonne with my grandma and 6 year olds. If that's your definition of geeky then you
haven't been exposed to very many games. As far as board games go, risk, settlers of catan, magic,
and even chess are all both more geeky and more popular. But judging geek games on popularity is
kindof an oxymoron so if you exclude popularity there are a ton of games alot more complex and geeky
than carcassonne.
>
> DRM only works when it's not intrusive, prohibitive, or makes you feel like a criminal.
>
Even then it still scares away customers. I'm always reluctant to buy music, movies or even apps as I'm always worried that
something will change and render all my "possessions" null. Buying from a big name that is less likely to go out of business
helps but even amazon has voided previously purchased stuff. The most ironic being the book 1984:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090717/1559425587.shtml
The ACA is something, and something is better than nothing, but the medical industry is saturated with greed and gouging. Take the obscene profits out of medical care and there is no incentive for mass misdiagnosis.
The only thing that obscene profits do is allow for bigger risk taking and drive the prices up. If there is any profit at all then there will always
be an incentive for mass misdiagnosis. What we really need to do is shift the incentives. For instance researching new antibiotics is currently
unprofitable because people only take antibiotics for a week or two likewise with diseases that mostly affect the 3rd world. So right now the
most profitable research is research into 1st world diseases that require ongoing treatment not the ones that would cure the most people.
The medical industry has other issues too but fix this problem and you would go a long way to at least fixing the problem with the drug industry.
Yep. $8,000 a month to watch somebody die slowly, painfully and inevitably. When the person being kept alive doesn't want it.
After a year of watching this person's misery, they die and you're left with a bill you might never be able to pay off.
They dies. Your life is in ruins. The mental scars of watching it for a year are far worse than if you just said goodbye and did it. Does that make sense to anybody at all?
Why is the family held responsible for the debt? How can they force the family to continue to pay for the debt?
Does anyone know exactly how this works? If you want to die, couldn't you just give all your money and assets to
your family and either they let you die or the hospital and/or government picks up the bill?
The only realistic way to fullfill all these requirements:
1) 100+ passwords
2) every password unique
3) every password good
4) no password stored or written down.
is to create an algorithm that only you know. For instance, the 3rd letter of the url + a pin + the inverse color of the company logo, etc...
That's simple enough but my problem is that as soon as I create one every 3rd website has some stupid password requirement that
won't allow it so I'm back to writing down all the exceptions.
Readers, take these "friend of a guy I met somewhere" urban myths with a truckload of salt. Even that guy that kept those girls locked up for years would try that "they was asking for it" thing if he could have gotten away with it.
He didn't day "friend of a friend", he was somewhat specific. I'll be even more specific. My friend in college who worked parttime at Denny's
and slept with a coworker there who already had a baby from another guy. He was 22 and she was 17. The grandmother turned them in and
he's now on the sexual offender's list for life. He also lost his main job as IT at the sheriff's office because of it. It was consentual sex and
she had a fricken baby but it's still listed as rape and he's on the same sexual predator's list with 50 year old men going after 12 year olds.
Problem hee is that everybody's forgotten what prisons were for. Not rehabilitation. That can be accomplished better and cheaper other ways. Renmember how much the US spends per prisoner. much more per person than welfare payments. In fact if they used that money for that instead, then onlky hardened criminals, Besides, sending someone to crime school isn't ther best rehab anyways. Well, the, Punishment? Or protecting society? The US model is based on punishment, with only a token nod to "protecting society". There's way better ways to punish criminals though, and if the prisons were used exclusively to protect society, we could tear the other half of them down. This is, in fact what they were originally for. To keep them away from society for safety's sake. The US model is based on punishment though, and creates a revolving door because of poorly drafted laws and kneejerk reactionismn on "getting tough on crime". Making more acts criminal isn't "getting tough on crime" however, but rather the opposite, and anyone who believes that has absolutely no education or understanding at all . Whatever. It's too late anyways. You make your bed you have to sleep in it.
Add to that the problem that the prison systems have lobbyists lobbying for mandatory sentences for non-violent crimes which is basically just free
money for them. I don't agree that it's too late though but I think the first step is to get rid of the lobbyists and/or change the incentives. For instance
instead of paying a prison just per head maybe give the prisons bonuses at the 1, 5, and 10 year mark for prisoners that stay out of the system. I read
a report by a professor that showed that you could greatly reduce the number of people in prison by doing whole family intervention with juveniles. It's
the classic dilbert problem though. It doubles the cost of Juvenile Hall in the short term and the savings don't show up for 5-10 years and when they do
they show up in a different department so although society overall benefits, it's hard to get something like this approved as it doesn't benefit Juvenile Hall
and it really doesn't benefit the prison system either as they actually lose prisoners so someone has to connect the dots and convince taxpayers to bite
the bullet and pay more now for a payoff in a completely different area later.