I almost don't want to respond to this, but here goes:
-Have you ever been in a cab? Those guys are considered professionals. There is nothing safe about cab drivers.
-You obviously live in a large city and you seem to think everyone in the country is in the same situation. Do you have any idea how hard it is to implement public transportation in rural areas? My place of work is 40 miles away from my house and there is no other reasonably-sized town anywhere closer to my place of work. So what sort of viable public transportation system could you possibly implement?
I'm pretty sure your post is a joke (I hope so, at least), so I won't spend any more time responding.
I work at a place where we have a choice between 9/80 and 8/40. Almost everyone here does 9/80, but having tried it for awhile, it just does not work for me. I'm typically very busy after work (I have two large dogs that need exercise, and I work out myself, plus a few other hobbies take up the rest of my time). The extra hour/day is much more important to me than a day off every two weeks (I tended to sleep until noon on that day off anyway, due to the exhaustion of trying to get everything done around my 9 hour day the rest of the week).
A lot of people here are claiming that they "never missed" that extra hour per day, but I think it's important to realize that it's personal preference. If you take part in a lot of daily activities, that extra hour a day may be more valuable to you than the day off every two weeks.
Ok, think about these quotes from the article for a moment:
She wiped out her husbandâ(TM)s retirement account, mortgaged the house and took a lien out on the family car. Both were already paid for.
Spears said it would take her at least three to four years to dig out of the debt she ran up in pursuit of the non-existent pot of Nigerian gold.
Firstly, you would think her husband would have stopped her if she was screwing with his retirement. Granted, I've never been married, so I don't know.
Secondly, it'll take her "at least three to four years to dig out of the debt..." This is a pretty good indication of her money skills that she thinks she can dig out of $400k of debt in 3-4 years.
This is coming from an Obama voter and from someone who spent way more time in college doing community service than this mandate would require - mandatory community service is the STUPIDEST idea I can imagine.
For one, VOLUNTARILY doing community service is one thing that can distinguish college students from their peers when it comes to things like applying for grad/law/medical schools. If everyone is forced to do 100 hours, how can anyone show that they actually enthusiastically did their part as opposed to showing up for volunteer efforts and sitting around just to get their name on a roster?
Also, philanthropy and volunteer work are good things because, by nature, people CHOOSE them. A government mandate requiring 100 hrs a year of my time is ridiculous.
I already see a lot of posts about how this is a waste of time and how the government will never read the submissions and how this is a poor use of the.gov domain.
Even if all those things ARE true, isn't a webpage that encourages two-way communication between citizens and the highest level of government *LONG* overdue? Regardless of how you feel about Obama or how much you believe this website will help or how much you believe in the "change" message, I would think that slashdot readers - of all people - would agree that it's ABOUT TIME the Executive Branch implemented an idea like this.
I mean, think about it for a moment - I've been able to communicate with fantasy baseball experts, tech support workers, musicians, and videogame reviewers online for more than a decade. Yes this is the first time a president has thought to do something like this.
Regardless of how well it works, this IS a step in the right direction.
Re:You do realize the other hobbies are the same?
on
How Do Games Grow Up?
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· Score: 1
I also disagree on the car comment, although I agree with the poster's overall point.
I have ONLY fixed my car for maintenance purposes and, let me tell you, I don't enjoy it. That said, I have never spent more money on a repair as a result of doing it myself than I would have by taking it to a mechanic. I also don't buy the "Yeah, but how much was the time spent worth in dollars?" argument. If I spend 8 hours to replace my water pump and timing belt and it costs me $60 then, well, I saved about $500. Don't tell me my 8 hours was worth more than that because no one was paying me for those 8 hours (which probably would have been spent doing the other idle hobbies the poster discussed). Also, I have absolutely no background in auto repair and I have NEVER screwed up a repair. I'm a computer engineer that is willing to pay $20 for a Haynes manual.
The USA is simply doomed. I live outside the USA, and I can assure you, the rest of the world is }{ close to pulling the plug on the USA, economically, diplomatically, socially, the whole works.
Ok, look - "living outside the USA" does not give you the sudden ability to know that the "the rest of the world is close to pulling the plug..."
I don't agree with US foreign policy AT ALL right now, but be realistic here. Look what's going on in the global economy due to a blip in the US markets. No one is "pulling any plugs" if the wrong candidate gets elected and I'm realistic enough to understand that my candidate (and I voted Obama) getting elected does not mean our foreign policy problems are suddenly gone.
And what's most amazing of all is that the US spends *more government money per capita* on healthcare than most other nations
This is the part that scares me. Our health care system has become EXTREMELY inefficient. Americans do get some of the best health care in the world (don't have the numbers, but this has showed up in WHO reports before), but it is EXPENSIVE and the money is being dumped into the wrong places (billers, too-expensive insurance). I've griped about this in other slashdot discussions, but we absolutely HAVE to change the process when it comes to health care, not how we pay for the process.
This is coming from an Obama supporter who thinks both candidates' health care plans are terrible.
One more addendum to that - Again, I don't mean to imply that "people with strep throat and headaches" don't need to see a doctor.
The part of your post that I misunderstood the first time was "and discourages any sort of preventive measures to maintain health." What I meant here was that there are things we can do to maintain general health (ie eating right, exercising). But I 100% agree that people with even minor medical problems that DO require attention should have a means to get that attention early on (ie NOT the emergency room).
You're exactly right. But I thought you were referring to the MANY people who show up to the emergency room for headaches, strep throat, etc. Sorry about that - I misunderstood. It seems your point is that we need to get people whose only means of medical care is the "free emergency room" a different means of getting the care they need, which I agree with.
Walk into any Emergency Room lobby and you'll see a sign saying "you will be treated regardless of your ability to pay"
Which encourages a mentality of waiting for health problems to become emergencies and discourages any sort of preventive measures to maintain health.
Are you really that irresponsible? If health care is free, you feel like you don't need to take care of yourself because someone else will? If that's the case, the problem lies with patient responsibility, not the system.
The problem with this defense of insurance companies is the added expense and overhead they bring to the health care industry. Billers would not be necessary if insurance companies paid what they were supposed to when they were supposed to. And without billers, health care costs would go down (far less overhead for doctors).
A good friend of mine who is a doctor with a general practice had an experience where he documented every procedure (and these were common procedures for a general practice - strep tests, flu shots, etc), submitted everything correctly to the insurance companies, and paid a biller to collect from the insurance companies. Yet, he did not see a penny from insurance for over 6 months because someone in the billing company he used did a bad job.
So it's not fair to say "we need insurance companies so we'll have enough money to pay for health care" without mentioning that the towering costs of health care can be largely attributed to the state of health insurance.
By no means am I suggesting health insurance doesn't serve an important purpose - but right now they have far more influence over health care decisions and prices than they should.
This is EXTREMELY common now. What most people don't realize is that most offices have to pay separate billers, whose sole job is to convince the insurance companies to pay up. That is the definition of "inefficient."
You're exactly right that this drives up our premiums. And this is exactly why the entire healthcare process needs an overhaul.
A friend of mine is a doctor and he got sick of TALKING about healthcare reform and finally closed his general practice and opened up a cash-only clinic. He got sick of the MULTIPLE middle-men (billers, insurance companies) in the process. The cash-only clinic definitely has the effect of restricting access to some people, but his point is that nothing is going to change if it's not from the inside.
Neither campaign addresses the process problem in my opinion (although both, especially Obama, make some vague statements regarding this). But what we need are these things:
-Process overhaul
-Health education
-Effort put into causes of common health problems (anyone looked at an elementary school lunch menu recently?)
-And while I'm on the subject (sort of), please kill the stupid food pyramid
I realize most people are pushing this aside as something users would never do. But consider the scenario where a hardware decryption device is marketed as something else. Is it that unreasonable to think we could have devices like an "apple itunes box," a dedicated music downloading device that also happens to integrate RIAA's "copyright filter?"
Of course, this would only affect people CHOOSING to use the device, but that doesn't mean it can't become the norm.
I would agree with you that consumers need to do their research before buying a car. But this does not excuse manufacturers from putting some time and thought into their designs.
If I buy a high-performance car, I don't expect it to be easily maintainable. But your standard family sedan should be.
I realize engine compartments are small for a reason, but it seems to me that good design would allow the most frequently serviced components to be more accessible. I'm just talking filters/brake pads/etc here. I'm an engineer, but have never worked for the auto industry, so I'm just speculating here.
I spent ~15 hours replacing a water pump a few months ago (on a V6 with a timing chain, and I don't have a lift or anything other than the standard homeowner's tools). I realize this is in a weird spot because it will probably only be touched once or twice during the car's lifetime (unless you drive imports, and then maybe 3 or 4 times....take that, american cars!). But I change my oil filter 4-5 times a year! Why should I have to jack up my car and take my tire off to get to it?
I am with him on car maintenance. There is no reason I should have to remove my tire to get to my oil filter (anyone else owned an accord in the past 15 years? You'd think they would have fixed this by now).
Filters, fuses, spark plugs, brakes, and rotors at the bare minimum should be EASILY accessible and replaceable.
And what about diagnostics computers? Why do I need a seperate component to read the error code? I owned a '95 maxima that allowed you to hold the computer's button for a few seconds and, after doing so, the engine light would give you a sequence of long-short pulses. You could look this sequence up in a manual to determine what the error code meant. All car diagnostic computers should have features like this.
From tfp:
A client component runs on a user computer in conjunction with a web browser and detects errors, such as but not limited to "404: page not found" errors, in which a requested web page or other object cannot be displayed.
I noticed this too, but couldn't the "client component" just be a cookie? Maybe "runs on a user computer" implies otherwise.
Can amazon really patent something that a prior invention already thought to implement? What I mean is, almost all web servers (apache, iis to name two big ones) allow for custom error messages. And amazon.com requires a web server to run.
To me, this is like placing a patent on "using the emergency flashing lights on my car to signal for help." Someone already thought of this use of my emergency flashing lights, and that's why the lights were implemented. But no one thought to patent the actual process of using the lights to flag down a passing police car.
I'm probably way off on this, so can someone tell me why I'm wrong?
Honestly, I haven't really explored video games thoroughly, and I'm sure there are video games that fit more the bill of something that I'd be interested in, but I'm kind of hard-pressed to find a game that's like reading a book or something like that.
I hear this argument all the time and it drives me crazy. This assumes that videogame time will always replace reading time. What if your kid is playing videogames instead of, say, watching "edutainment?" I'm a 25-year-old with an 11-year-old brother. When I was 20 and he was much younger, I let him watch/play video games with me (I DID excercise discretion when determining WHICH games he could watch/play). As a result, he now chooses to play videogames over television most of the time. This is seperate from the time he spends reading. Depending on your opinion, a child can get a LOT more benefit out of playing Rock Band than he can watching Pokemon.
Slashdot Mirror
I almost don't want to respond to this, but here goes:
-Have you ever been in a cab? Those guys are considered professionals. There is nothing safe about cab drivers.
-You obviously live in a large city and you seem to think everyone in the country is in the same situation. Do you have any idea how hard it is to implement public transportation in rural areas? My place of work is 40 miles away from my house and there is no other reasonably-sized town anywhere closer to my place of work. So what sort of viable public transportation system could you possibly implement?
I'm pretty sure your post is a joke (I hope so, at least), so I won't spend any more time responding.
I work at a place where we have a choice between 9/80 and 8/40. Almost everyone here does 9/80, but having tried it for awhile, it just does not work for me. I'm typically very busy after work (I have two large dogs that need exercise, and I work out myself, plus a few other hobbies take up the rest of my time). The extra hour/day is much more important to me than a day off every two weeks (I tended to sleep until noon on that day off anyway, due to the exhaustion of trying to get everything done around my 9 hour day the rest of the week). A lot of people here are claiming that they "never missed" that extra hour per day, but I think it's important to realize that it's personal preference. If you take part in a lot of daily activities, that extra hour a day may be more valuable to you than the day off every two weeks.
Firstly, you would think her husband would have stopped her if she was screwing with his retirement. Granted, I've never been married, so I don't know.
Secondly, it'll take her "at least three to four years to dig out of the debt..." This is a pretty good indication of her money skills that she thinks she can dig out of $400k of debt in 3-4 years.
This is coming from an Obama voter and from someone who spent way more time in college doing community service than this mandate would require - mandatory community service is the STUPIDEST idea I can imagine.
For one, VOLUNTARILY doing community service is one thing that can distinguish college students from their peers when it comes to things like applying for grad/law/medical schools. If everyone is forced to do 100 hours, how can anyone show that they actually enthusiastically did their part as opposed to showing up for volunteer efforts and sitting around just to get their name on a roster?
Also, philanthropy and volunteer work are good things because, by nature, people CHOOSE them. A government mandate requiring 100 hrs a year of my time is ridiculous.
I already see a lot of posts about how this is a waste of time and how the government will never read the submissions and how this is a poor use of the .gov domain.
Even if all those things ARE true, isn't a webpage that encourages two-way communication between citizens and the highest level of government *LONG* overdue? Regardless of how you feel about Obama or how much you believe this website will help or how much you believe in the "change" message, I would think that slashdot readers - of all people - would agree that it's ABOUT TIME the Executive Branch implemented an idea like this.
I mean, think about it for a moment - I've been able to communicate with fantasy baseball experts, tech support workers, musicians, and videogame reviewers online for more than a decade. Yes this is the first time a president has thought to do something like this.
Regardless of how well it works, this IS a step in the right direction.
I also disagree on the car comment, although I agree with the poster's overall point.
I have ONLY fixed my car for maintenance purposes and, let me tell you, I don't enjoy it. That said, I have never spent more money on a repair as a result of doing it myself than I would have by taking it to a mechanic. I also don't buy the "Yeah, but how much was the time spent worth in dollars?" argument. If I spend 8 hours to replace my water pump and timing belt and it costs me $60 then, well, I saved about $500. Don't tell me my 8 hours was worth more than that because no one was paying me for those 8 hours (which probably would have been spent doing the other idle hobbies the poster discussed). Also, I have absolutely no background in auto repair and I have NEVER screwed up a repair. I'm a computer engineer that is willing to pay $20 for a Haynes manual.
The USA is simply doomed. I live outside the USA, and I can assure you, the rest of the world is }{ close to pulling the plug on the USA, economically, diplomatically, socially, the whole works.
Ok, look - "living outside the USA" does not give you the sudden ability to know that the "the rest of the world is close to pulling the plug..."
I don't agree with US foreign policy AT ALL right now, but be realistic here. Look what's going on in the global economy due to a blip in the US markets. No one is "pulling any plugs" if the wrong candidate gets elected and I'm realistic enough to understand that my candidate (and I voted Obama) getting elected does not mean our foreign policy problems are suddenly gone.
And what's most amazing of all is that the US spends *more government money per capita* on healthcare than most other nations
This is the part that scares me. Our health care system has become EXTREMELY inefficient. Americans do get some of the best health care in the world (don't have the numbers, but this has showed up in WHO reports before), but it is EXPENSIVE and the money is being dumped into the wrong places (billers, too-expensive insurance). I've griped about this in other slashdot discussions, but we absolutely HAVE to change the process when it comes to health care, not how we pay for the process.
This is coming from an Obama supporter who thinks both candidates' health care plans are terrible.
One more addendum to that - Again, I don't mean to imply that "people with strep throat and headaches" don't need to see a doctor.
The part of your post that I misunderstood the first time was "and discourages any sort of preventive measures to maintain health." What I meant here was that there are things we can do to maintain general health (ie eating right, exercising). But I 100% agree that people with even minor medical problems that DO require attention should have a means to get that attention early on (ie NOT the emergency room).
You're exactly right. But I thought you were referring to the MANY people who show up to the emergency room for headaches, strep throat, etc. Sorry about that - I misunderstood. It seems your point is that we need to get people whose only means of medical care is the "free emergency room" a different means of getting the care they need, which I agree with.
Walk into any Emergency Room lobby and you'll see a sign saying "you will be treated regardless of your ability to pay"
Which encourages a mentality of waiting for health problems to become emergencies and discourages any sort of preventive measures to maintain health.
Are you really that irresponsible? If health care is free, you feel like you don't need to take care of yourself because someone else will? If that's the case, the problem lies with patient responsibility, not the system.
The problem with this defense of insurance companies is the added expense and overhead they bring to the health care industry. Billers would not be necessary if insurance companies paid what they were supposed to when they were supposed to. And without billers, health care costs would go down (far less overhead for doctors).
A good friend of mine who is a doctor with a general practice had an experience where he documented every procedure (and these were common procedures for a general practice - strep tests, flu shots, etc), submitted everything correctly to the insurance companies, and paid a biller to collect from the insurance companies. Yet, he did not see a penny from insurance for over 6 months because someone in the billing company he used did a bad job.
So it's not fair to say "we need insurance companies so we'll have enough money to pay for health care" without mentioning that the towering costs of health care can be largely attributed to the state of health insurance.
By no means am I suggesting health insurance doesn't serve an important purpose - but right now they have far more influence over health care decisions and prices than they should.
This is EXTREMELY common now. What most people don't realize is that most offices have to pay separate billers, whose sole job is to convince the insurance companies to pay up. That is the definition of "inefficient."
You're exactly right that this drives up our premiums. And this is exactly why the entire healthcare process needs an overhaul.
A friend of mine is a doctor and he got sick of TALKING about healthcare reform and finally closed his general practice and opened up a cash-only clinic. He got sick of the MULTIPLE middle-men (billers, insurance companies) in the process. The cash-only clinic definitely has the effect of restricting access to some people, but his point is that nothing is going to change if it's not from the inside.
Neither campaign addresses the process problem in my opinion (although both, especially Obama, make some vague statements regarding this). But what we need are these things:
-Process overhaul
-Health education
-Effort put into causes of common health problems (anyone looked at an elementary school lunch menu recently?)
-And while I'm on the subject (sort of), please kill the stupid food pyramid
I promise I didn't google this....
I think it was Donatello.
I realize most people are pushing this aside as something users would never do. But consider the scenario where a hardware decryption device is marketed as something else. Is it that unreasonable to think we could have devices like an "apple itunes box," a dedicated music downloading device that also happens to integrate RIAA's "copyright filter?"
Of course, this would only affect people CHOOSING to use the device, but that doesn't mean it can't become the norm.
I would agree with you that consumers need to do their research before buying a car. But this does not excuse manufacturers from putting some time and thought into their designs.
If I buy a high-performance car, I don't expect it to be easily maintainable. But your standard family sedan should be.
I realize engine compartments are small for a reason, but it seems to me that good design would allow the most frequently serviced components to be more accessible. I'm just talking filters/brake pads/etc here. I'm an engineer, but have never worked for the auto industry, so I'm just speculating here.
I spent ~15 hours replacing a water pump a few months ago (on a V6 with a timing chain, and I don't have a lift or anything other than the standard homeowner's tools). I realize this is in a weird spot because it will probably only be touched once or twice during the car's lifetime (unless you drive imports, and then maybe 3 or 4 times....take that, american cars!). But I change my oil filter 4-5 times a year! Why should I have to jack up my car and take my tire off to get to it?
I am with him on car maintenance. There is no reason I should have to remove my tire to get to my oil filter (anyone else owned an accord in the past 15 years? You'd think they would have fixed this by now).
Filters, fuses, spark plugs, brakes, and rotors at the bare minimum should be EASILY accessible and replaceable.
And what about diagnostics computers? Why do I need a seperate component to read the error code? I owned a '95 maxima that allowed you to hold the computer's button for a few seconds and, after doing so, the engine light would give you a sequence of long-short pulses. You could look this sequence up in a manual to determine what the error code meant. All car diagnostic computers should have features like this.
A client component runs on a user computer in conjunction with a web browser and detects errors, such as but not limited to "404: page not found" errors, in which a requested web page or other object cannot be displayed.
I noticed this too, but couldn't the "client component" just be a cookie? Maybe "runs on a user computer" implies otherwise.
Can amazon really patent something that a prior invention already thought to implement? What I mean is, almost all web servers (apache, iis to name two big ones) allow for custom error messages. And amazon.com requires a web server to run.
To me, this is like placing a patent on "using the emergency flashing lights on my car to signal for help." Someone already thought of this use of my emergency flashing lights, and that's why the lights were implemented. But no one thought to patent the actual process of using the lights to flag down a passing police car.
I'm probably way off on this, so can someone tell me why I'm wrong?
I hear this argument all the time and it drives me crazy. This assumes that videogame time will always replace reading time. What if your kid is playing videogames instead of, say, watching "edutainment?" I'm a 25-year-old with an 11-year-old brother. When I was 20 and he was much younger, I let him watch/play video games with me (I DID excercise discretion when determining WHICH games he could watch/play). As a result, he now chooses to play videogames over television most of the time. This is seperate from the time he spends reading. Depending on your opinion, a child can get a LOT more benefit out of playing Rock Band than he can watching Pokemon.