That's an impossible fantasy - since healthcare resources are not infinite, rationing must happen somewhere. The open issue is: who does the cost-benefit analysis? Both history and basic economic theory say the person most affected usually has the best information to make that call. Healthcare is less obvious, because sometimes you're unable to make the decision precisely because of the condition you need help for. Even so, the consumer should be the one making that cost-benefit analysis wherever practical, and where not the doctor is perhaps the best choice - never the government ruling from afar, deciding what's best for the peons.
Ever wonder why banks can pay less than inflation for savings accounts and still get customers? Government insurance against the bank getting robbed / going broke / just absconding with the cash lets them provide a service that's worth a small cost.
In a way, Bitcoin is a bet that the risk of the government itself being the ones to take your money exceeds the risk that individuals will do so. History shows plenty of risk both ways, but I could certainly see the value in banks offering Eurobitcoin accounts.
Well, they easily serve the same purpose. How long until "disagreeing with the politics of the ruling party" becomes a mental illness? No, no, we're not locking up millions in prison camps, that would be fascism, we're just confining them in mental health institutions, it's really for their own good!
Now did Noah build a massive boat. Or was a merchant,
Well, there seem to be multiple accounts of the boat-builder story, so I give it a lot of credibility. Every civilization has it's "preppers", it's survivalists, whether building boats or bunkers. With all of the survivalists, and all of the disasters afflicting mankind through the ages, eventually one of them was bound to get it right, and prepare for exactly the disaster that happened. A series of events so unexpected that we're still talking about it 10000 years later!
Of course you'll also get into the problem of defining exactly what "knowing" means, and if you are not careful, you'll easily define it in a way that no human is able to know anything.
The best definition for "knowledge" is "justified, true belief". Can you be justified in believing God exist? Sure, if you've met him or whatever. Can you be justifies in believing no god exists? That's a tricky one - it seems likely that the origin of the universe hides behind an event horizon, and so we'll never be sure how the universe itself happened. Can you be justified in believing that one specific deity as described by one specific faith does not exist? I think so - surely most of them are wrong.
It's possible to justify belief that "if a god exists, he must be the kind of god whose existence doesn't directly affect the ongoing operation of the Universe". I don't think we know enough yet to claim that, but it seems possible we might one day know enough.
Of course, you'll never be able to rule out God as described by Spinoza/JMS "the universe itself is God, and intelligent life is its self-awareness".
I think there's a big future for a testing company, like Underwriter's Labs is for physical goods, to do just that. Anyone big or small can send them code to review, and pay a fee, and they'll certify the resulting binary as trouble-free, at least to level of confidence you's expect from a good app store or distro (acknowledging that sufficiently clever malware can hide anywhere, but forcing it to be really clever would probably fix 99% of the problem),
To test it, they want you to put in all kinds of personal information. No thanks.
In the first release, a significant percentage of people who put in their info, checked out some plans, and then cancelled out of it all were accidentally signed up for Medicaid. Hope that bug got fixed.
But even the government doesn't claim the site is secure yet. Glad I'm not legally required to use it before they get around to they security audit they skipped (also legally required, but laws are for peons).
Yes, but a skilled artist doesn't need an optical aid for that. Matching color on canvas accurately to the color you see is a skill all it's own, especially when you're making your own paints from raw materials. Today there are tools and Pantone color #s and so on, but having a good eye for color was just one part of the skill required back then.
I've found that "print, sign, scan, and email back to us" seems to be preferred for contracts these days. When I moved this year, everyone worked that way from the apartment lease to my car insurance. Actually, some of the agreements with my apartment complex (well, their management company) were done by signing a web form using a mouse, which I thought odd but it does save effort on everyone's part. I hope that whole "sign online with a mouse" thing gets some court backing soon if it hasn't already - we need more of that.
I think the postulated optical aids are really a less interesting part of all this. What makes his paintings start out aren't that they have lots of accurate detail - they do, but that's not that rare - but that they have very accurate color. The rooms look realistic because the color values are right: they all have the same lighting temperature, to remarkable accuracy.
Getting the color palette just right is what impresses me about paintings from Vermeer to modern artists in the same style, but the modern guys have a very mature science to work from and just need to make the colors match precisely to the calculated ideal.
That... doesn't even make sense in software. Yes, for domain experience, you can expect lower pay if you don't have it, but that's different from technology. For tools and languages and whatever, everything's obsolete a few years later, and you'll always be training whoever you hire, or for that matter whoever you keep.
Just checked my gaming box and it's 40GB, but I know I've used VM images that were 20GB: wonder what we stripped out? Of course, for any small install it's important to not have a pagefile, and to turn off volume snapshotting, but that's the case on my gaming rig and it's still using 40GB.
30GB is fine for Win 7, but you might have a lot of other stuff.
Keeping WinXP around for aging crufty hardware isn't that interesting - just throw that old worthless crap out already, this isn't the 90s where you have to hang on to the old box until you have $3000 for a new one.
OTOH, Windows is really hurting for a lightweight OS to replace XP in virtual machines. When you're trying to stack 200 virtual machines on a server, WinXP really hits a sweet spot. MS seems to have lost the ability to do "thin and lightweight" after the move to managed code.
Is WinPE good for anything here? Has anyone tried using it as a real OS?
Look closer, and stop believing every bit of propaganda you read. Every state has a non-drivers ID, jokingly called a "drinkers ID". Almost everyone who doesn't have a driver's license has one. They typically cost less than $10, and in many states you're effectively legally required to have one already, because you have to present some form of ID when called for jury duty.
But even if there are a few people here and there who don't - that's what "get out the vote" programs are for. The parties already spend significant time and effort helping people who need assistance get to the polls, and helping them register to vote ahead of time. Helping a few people get ID cards will be small effort by comparison.
There is certainly a serious problem with vote fraud in the US. How much of it is addressed by and ID law I'm not sure, since I suspect most fraudulent ballots are created by other means, but I'm just not seeing the harm here.
No state with voter ID laws requires a driver's license. Don't believe every bit of propaganda you read. Every state has some sort of non-driver's ID card, and has for decades. They're often called a "drinker's ID", but you also need them to write a check, report for jury duty (in most places), or do any of the hundreds of things one needs an ID for in modern life.
Just because you haven't the slightest idea about the living conditions of the working poor and socially marginalized, doesn't mean those people don't exist
You don't have a fucking clue what living conditions I grew up in. I've met people with poorer childhoods on/., but few from America.
Google will hire anyone smart and find work for them. I have several friends who work there, and none of them had experience with the specific technologies they went on to work with at Goggle (partly because so much of the stack at Goggle is homebrew).
Don't know much about Amazon, but a friend just started there as a hiring manager, maybe I should ask.
Blizzard isn't a company any more, and nig game devs are the perfect example of "a place you shouldn't work if you have a choice". EA's the worst, but not by a lot.
The other reason is that many companies are not interested in training people anymore: they want someone already trained to put to the task immediately without additional costs.
And that's a sure sign of a struggling company that you shouldn't work for unless you have no other choice. At least in software, all the big guys, and the smaller companies who plan to be around for awhile, look to hire smart people, generally with relevant domain experience (i.e., storage experience for a storage job) but specific technologies don't matter.
And that's the job you want: a company that wants you not just for one specific position, but because you can do whatever comes in the future. If you have a choice, avoid the guys who list very specific technologies an job descriptions!
Generalities are a different matter: a senior dev position might have a full page of bullet points of stuff you're expected to be able to do, but that all really comes down to "own development of a product and drive it to completion on schedule with features people actually want". Be easier if they just wrote that.
Right, right, because laws that require you to actually be eligible to vote, and vote only once, are "anti-voting laws"?
Anyone who buys alcohol will have an ID that lets them vote. So other than a few conservative Christians, who exactly do such laws prevent from legitimately voting?
I'm not sure that it makes sense to look for a logical explanation of how RT works in the first place. My point was that you were never limited to RT for a Windows/Metro tablet.
I have heard of whole fleet of people who maintain both their corporate-issued Windows phone and a personal iPhone, because they hate it so much.
I bet you those are pre-Metro Windows phones. The old Win phones were just bad. A friend of mine has the one of the new Nokias and it seems totally unobjectionable to me (he got it for the camera, but I'm a bit skeptical that "moar megapixels" help a phone camera).
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That's an impossible fantasy - since healthcare resources are not infinite, rationing must happen somewhere. The open issue is: who does the cost-benefit analysis? Both history and basic economic theory say the person most affected usually has the best information to make that call. Healthcare is less obvious, because sometimes you're unable to make the decision precisely because of the condition you need help for. Even so, the consumer should be the one making that cost-benefit analysis wherever practical, and where not the doctor is perhaps the best choice - never the government ruling from afar, deciding what's best for the peons.
Ever wonder why banks can pay less than inflation for savings accounts and still get customers? Government insurance against the bank getting robbed / going broke / just absconding with the cash lets them provide a service that's worth a small cost.
In a way, Bitcoin is a bet that the risk of the government itself being the ones to take your money exceeds the risk that individuals will do so. History shows plenty of risk both ways, but I could certainly see the value in banks offering Eurobitcoin accounts.
Well, they easily serve the same purpose. How long until "disagreeing with the politics of the ruling party" becomes a mental illness? No, no, we're not locking up millions in prison camps, that would be fascism, we're just confining them in mental health institutions, it's really for their own good!
Now did Noah build a massive boat. Or was a merchant,
Well, there seem to be multiple accounts of the boat-builder story, so I give it a lot of credibility. Every civilization has it's "preppers", it's survivalists, whether building boats or bunkers. With all of the survivalists, and all of the disasters afflicting mankind through the ages, eventually one of them was bound to get it right, and prepare for exactly the disaster that happened. A series of events so unexpected that we're still talking about it 10000 years later!
Of course you'll also get into the problem of defining exactly what "knowing" means, and if you are not careful, you'll easily define it in a way that no human is able to know anything.
The best definition for "knowledge" is "justified, true belief". Can you be justified in believing God exist? Sure, if you've met him or whatever. Can you be justifies in believing no god exists? That's a tricky one - it seems likely that the origin of the universe hides behind an event horizon, and so we'll never be sure how the universe itself happened. Can you be justified in believing that one specific deity as described by one specific faith does not exist? I think so - surely most of them are wrong.
It's possible to justify belief that "if a god exists, he must be the kind of god whose existence doesn't directly affect the ongoing operation of the Universe". I don't think we know enough yet to claim that, but it seems possible we might one day know enough.
Of course, you'll never be able to rule out God as described by Spinoza/JMS "the universe itself is God, and intelligent life is its self-awareness".
Didn't Sting make a song about that? Someone had to shovel all that manure, and Noah was the wealthiest man on Earth, wasn't going to be him!
I think there's a big future for a testing company, like Underwriter's Labs is for physical goods, to do just that. Anyone big or small can send them code to review, and pay a fee, and they'll certify the resulting binary as trouble-free, at least to level of confidence you's expect from a good app store or distro (acknowledging that sufficiently clever malware can hide anywhere, but forcing it to be really clever would probably fix 99% of the problem),
To test it, they want you to put in all kinds of personal information. No thanks.
In the first release, a significant percentage of people who put in their info, checked out some plans, and then cancelled out of it all were accidentally signed up for Medicaid. Hope that bug got fixed.
But even the government doesn't claim the site is secure yet. Glad I'm not legally required to use it before they get around to they security audit they skipped (also legally required, but laws are for peons).
Yes, but a skilled artist doesn't need an optical aid for that. Matching color on canvas accurately to the color you see is a skill all it's own, especially when you're making your own paints from raw materials. Today there are tools and Pantone color #s and so on, but having a good eye for color was just one part of the skill required back then.
I've found that "print, sign, scan, and email back to us" seems to be preferred for contracts these days. When I moved this year, everyone worked that way from the apartment lease to my car insurance. Actually, some of the agreements with my apartment complex (well, their management company) were done by signing a web form using a mouse, which I thought odd but it does save effort on everyone's part. I hope that whole "sign online with a mouse" thing gets some court backing soon if it hasn't already - we need more of that.
I think the postulated optical aids are really a less interesting part of all this. What makes his paintings start out aren't that they have lots of accurate detail - they do, but that's not that rare - but that they have very accurate color. The rooms look realistic because the color values are right: they all have the same lighting temperature, to remarkable accuracy.
Getting the color palette just right is what impresses me about paintings from Vermeer to modern artists in the same style, but the modern guys have a very mature science to work from and just need to make the colors match precisely to the calculated ideal.
That ... doesn't even make sense in software. Yes, for domain experience, you can expect lower pay if you don't have it, but that's different from technology. For tools and languages and whatever, everything's obsolete a few years later, and you'll always be training whoever you hire, or for that matter whoever you keep.
Just checked my gaming box and it's 40GB, but I know I've used VM images that were 20GB: wonder what we stripped out? Of course, for any small install it's important to not have a pagefile, and to turn off volume snapshotting, but that's the case on my gaming rig and it's still using 40GB.
30GB is fine for Win 7, but you might have a lot of other stuff.
Keeping WinXP around for aging crufty hardware isn't that interesting - just throw that old worthless crap out already, this isn't the 90s where you have to hang on to the old box until you have $3000 for a new one.
OTOH, Windows is really hurting for a lightweight OS to replace XP in virtual machines. When you're trying to stack 200 virtual machines on a server, WinXP really hits a sweet spot. MS seems to have lost the ability to do "thin and lightweight" after the move to managed code.
Is WinPE good for anything here? Has anyone tried using it as a real OS?
*big game devs companies
Look closer, and stop believing every bit of propaganda you read. Every state has a non-drivers ID, jokingly called a "drinkers ID". Almost everyone who doesn't have a driver's license has one. They typically cost less than $10, and in many states you're effectively legally required to have one already, because you have to present some form of ID when called for jury duty.
But even if there are a few people here and there who don't - that's what "get out the vote" programs are for. The parties already spend significant time and effort helping people who need assistance get to the polls, and helping them register to vote ahead of time. Helping a few people get ID cards will be small effort by comparison.
There is certainly a serious problem with vote fraud in the US. How much of it is addressed by and ID law I'm not sure, since I suspect most fraudulent ballots are created by other means, but I'm just not seeing the harm here.
No state with voter ID laws requires a driver's license. Don't believe every bit of propaganda you read. Every state has some sort of non-driver's ID card, and has for decades. They're often called a "drinker's ID", but you also need them to write a check, report for jury duty (in most places), or do any of the hundreds of things one needs an ID for in modern life.
Just because you haven't the slightest idea about the living conditions of the working poor and socially marginalized, doesn't mean those people don't exist
You don't have a fucking clue what living conditions I grew up in. I've met people with poorer childhoods on /., but few from America.
Google will hire anyone smart and find work for them. I have several friends who work there, and none of them had experience with the specific technologies they went on to work with at Goggle (partly because so much of the stack at Goggle is homebrew).
Don't know much about Amazon, but a friend just started there as a hiring manager, maybe I should ask.
Blizzard isn't a company any more, and nig game devs are the perfect example of "a place you shouldn't work if you have a choice". EA's the worst, but not by a lot.
The other reason is that many companies are not interested in training people anymore: they want someone already trained to put to the task immediately without additional costs.
And that's a sure sign of a struggling company that you shouldn't work for unless you have no other choice. At least in software, all the big guys, and the smaller companies who plan to be around for awhile, look to hire smart people, generally with relevant domain experience (i.e., storage experience for a storage job) but specific technologies don't matter.
And that's the job you want: a company that wants you not just for one specific position, but because you can do whatever comes in the future. If you have a choice, avoid the guys who list very specific technologies an job descriptions!
Generalities are a different matter: a senior dev position might have a full page of bullet points of stuff you're expected to be able to do, but that all really comes down to "own development of a product and drive it to completion on schedule with features people actually want". Be easier if they just wrote that.
Good joke, good joke. As if you weren't monitoring and tracking everyone already - it is the funny.
Slashdot needs a "whoosh" mod so very badly. The joke was explained by a link in the post, for goodness sake.
For the love of all that is good and right: please keep that kilt on!
Right, right, because laws that require you to actually be eligible to vote, and vote only once, are "anti-voting laws"?
Anyone who buys alcohol will have an ID that lets them vote. So other than a few conservative Christians, who exactly do such laws prevent from legitimately voting?
I'm not sure that it makes sense to look for a logical explanation of how RT works in the first place. My point was that you were never limited to RT for a Windows/Metro tablet.
I have heard of whole fleet of people who maintain both their corporate-issued Windows phone and a personal iPhone, because they hate it so much.
I bet you those are pre-Metro Windows phones. The old Win phones were just bad. A friend of mine has the one of the new Nokias and it seems totally unobjectionable to me (he got it for the camera, but I'm a bit skeptical that "moar megapixels" help a phone camera).