Thats because executives take the lions share of what an insurance company earns. ...
Ever been to Hartford Connecticut?...
I live in Connecticut. You have no idea whats going on here.
You could pay the CEO's $0 and it wouldnt make a bit of difference. You don't seem to have a grasp of exactly how much money insurance companies are handling, or are just jealous that CEO's make big bucks.
The point being that its easy to cry "big bucks!" without rationalizing an argument.
Would returning all the CEO's money to the insurance company change its profit margins significantly? Research the answer so that you have those precious "facts" you talk about in your signature.
You would need to show that the CEO's in total are paying themselves TRILLIONS of dollars (not millions, not billions, but TRILLIONS!) in order to cut health insurance rates by 50%. If you can only show BILLIONS, then you are in the sub-1% catagory of crybaby jealousy.
Note: if the facts don't match your ideology it does NOT mean that the facts are wrong.
The problem I see with (1) being at all a part of a solution is that it isnt really the health insurance company that is the problem. A simple check of profit margins reveals that health insurance companies are not out of line.
To be clear, their profit margins are single-digit percentages. So you pay $270+/month instead of $300/month for a family plan if you completely eliminate the insurance companies profit.
I agree that there should be more competition, that a Californian should be able to get on a plan that people in Vermont enjoy, and so forth. But I do not think that this in any way addresses the problem of high costs.
(2) is closer to the point. Right now there is a disconnect between those who pay for insurance and those that use the insurance.
(3) I havent actually seen data that shows that lawsuits are the cost culprit. I am more of the mind that people not shopping around for cheap care rates, getting extra work done, etc.. are the big culprit.
If someone else was paying for my car, I'd want a Tesla Roadster. Since I actually have no pay for my car, I own a 17 year old Buick.
So your rationalization is that because poor people in 1st world countries have it better than the worst places in the world, they should shut up and be grateful?
Nope. Do you like to twist words?
Note that the word 'poor' does not refer to a specific threshold of economic power. The word that you are confusing it with is 'poverty.'
The poster I was replying to was measuring prosperity with an equality index, and in fact declared that this was the "correct" way.
If you think people should be economically equal in every way, JUST FUCKING SAY SO. Dont beat around the fucking bush.
Do you really think that people should be completely economically equal? Make your stand. Seriously... swallow your pride ad tell us what you believe in.
Its fairly obvious to me that people that want to dictate the terms of special treatment, be they calling it 'marriage' or 'civil unions', are the real discriminators.
Remember that in at least one state in our Union of States, it is legal to be married to more than one person at a time. Shouldn't that go for everyone in every state? Isnt that fucking discrimination?
..and why cant I assign those same rights that gays are fighting for to my sister, brother, parent, or child? Isnt that fucking discrimination?
And why do these special rights have to be reciprocal? Can't I assign the rights to (A) while that person assigns them to (B) and (B) assigns them to (C)?
The whole fucking thing that we call marriage is discrimination, and calling it something else while letting homosexuals into it DOESNT FUCKING CHANGE A THING.
Married people get special treatment. Gay people say "me too!".. and you are all like.. "yeah.. gay people deserve special treatment too!"
..and then you say that its discrimination if gay people dont also get that special treatment?.. and have the balls to do so rudely?
Go fuck yourself. I'm single and don't want yet another fucking group of people getting special treatment. THAT is fucking discrimination against me, you hypocrite douche-bag.
If given the choice to trade places with a completely random person selected from the population of all the other countries on the planet, even the poorest Americans (for that matter, the poorest from any 1st world nation) would be well served by turning down the option to do so.
This fact highlights a severe problem with your rationalization. You dont seem to have a real grasp of how bad it is in most places around the world.
Literally billions of people around the world worry about where and when they are going to get their next meal, dont have a dime to their name, literally owning nothing but the rags they drape over their malnourished bodies. No hope. No future. No chance.
Screw you idiots that spew the "poor get poorer" bullshit. In America, the poor get richer too.
Even if Intel's compiler does better for Intel's own chips, which I'm sure it does, it is still the best compiler out there by a long shot.
This isnt about not putting effort into optimizing for non-Intel. This is about intentionally putting effort into sabotaging non-Intel performance. They have been convicted of this act, and so far have not honored the courts ruling on the matter.
Remember when Microsoft intentionally sabotaged competing DOS clones? Yeah.
They only care how it does in the apps they actually use. So if all their apps are ICC apps and they run better on Intel processors, well hten that's all that matters.
Who claimed that all their apps are ICC-based? The claim is that most BENCHMARKS use ICC-generated code at some point, and this claim is DEMONSTRABLY true (simply changing the CPUID VendorID string to "GenuineIntel" proves it, as many have done.)
Most apps for Windows are compiled with VC++ and most apps for Linux are compiled with GCC.
In spite of Intels unfair benchmarking advantage, AMD is still king of price/performance. Thats how killer AMD's are on the very metric we are talking about.
The first Intel showing is only 75% the price/performance value of AMD's best and of the top 20 or so CPU's on that chart, only two of them are from Intel. Quite frankly, Intel fanboys such as yourself should be embarrassed for not realizing how badly you are getting ripped off.
Those prices are just for the CPU as well, so doesnt include the higher price that Intel users pay for motherboards.
You mean besides the fact that a $40 video card is only good for entry level gaming?
Even the HD4650 blows the doors off of the HD5450. That HD5450 ranks right up there with 2 year old mid range (at the time) graphics cards.
That the Intel integrated solution is a "tiny bit slower" than something no serious gamer would even consider buying today. The Farcry 2 benchmark for the HD5450 puts it at an average 20 FPS on Medium Settings, Low Shadows, No AA. Simply horrible. Its probably fine if you want to play WOW, but not fine for any serious gaming.
Very few people have my email address because I dont want them "inviting" me to sites, because for most sites that is exactly equivalent to them ordering viagra and penis enlargement emails for me.
I dont give a crap if general acquaintances know who I am dating, or what movie we saw last night. I do give a crap how many spam emails I get.
You are what is called an ignorant fanboy. Someone that doesnt even know the most basic of things about the opposition but makes a series of declarations, each one following evidence that the previous one was demonstrably incorrect in the most trivial of ways.
You should stop now, because everything you are saying is demonstrably false.
Its OK to not like Microsoft, or Windows. Its not OK to repeatedly make shit up in some stupid fucking effort to defend your embarrassing amount of ignorance.
Why not stick to the REAL reasons you don't like Microsoft? Do you really have to make shit up? Really? You dont have any factual reasons? Wow.
I think you missed the point that "...Apple is the only commercial system I know of with which I get a free development environment..." shows that you dont know shit about anything but Apple and BSD.
VSE stands for Visual Studio Express.
Now answer his fucking question! Whats not free about VSE?
If they can't deliver the speeds, how hard is it to have a truthful advertising campaign
High Speed 10Mbit(*) service for only $24.95/month.
(*) 10Kbit if all subscribers use the service simultaneously
I think the problem is that you dont really want to admit the truth. The truth is that to stick a value for guaranteed bandwidth, it would be a number so small (and yet so meaningless) that it wouldnt effect your decision to buy at all. The value wouldnt matter because 99% of the time you will get between 500 and 1000 times as much bandwidth as that stupid guaranteed minimum.
That said, "Net Neutrality" is not about what people think. It's about bringing the internet, and specifically ISP's, under more regulation to solve a problem that doesn't exist. How you you carefully craft regulation to solve a problem that doesn't exist?
This.
If I was to set up a hundred different machines all over the internet to hammer a single IP address with packets, usually that would be considered a Denial of Service (DoS) attack (even if it doesnt succeed in denying service.) Well thats exactly what Bittorrent does, right?
Even if ISP's gave each of their users 10 times as bunch bandwidth as they do now, the problem would remain. Bittorrent's goal would still be to fully saturate the receiving pipe, and the only barrier to that happening in a lack of popularity for the specific torrent.
It is no surprise at all that some ISP's tried to do something about it, even if they were morally wrong to do so. No surprise at all.
Throttling torrents has to do with peak usage, not neutrality. Your ISP can't deliver the maximum rated bandwidth to all of its subscribers simultaneously. Thats the fact of the matter. How much would an ISP have to charge to REALLY support a fully saturated 10Mbit/1Mbit for everyone at the same time? My guess is a lot more that double the current rates.
Oh, I see - you're upset about IMPRECISE ESTIMATES!!!ONE!!!1111!ONE!
In this case, precision was important.
If cutting the number of convoys by half would only increase the number of patrols by 1%, then your argument is bullshit. Your argument RELIES on the VERACITY of the values you claimed.
Unfortunately for you, 1% is about exctly right. Do you need me to hold your fucking opinion-motivated horseshit hand and derive this figure for you?
Many of these younger folks dont seem to understand how bad Netscape 4 was. They think that IE took over only because Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer.
The authors had thought that Netscape 4 was so bad that they junked the entire codebase and started with a complete rewrite. One of the worst decisions in software development history, but enabled them to care a little bit more about standards.
I live in a world where all of the units escorting convoys could not double the number of units performing patrols, let alone half of them.
In my world, when someone (you) makes a horseshit claim such as that the number of patrols could be DOUBLED if we HALVED the number of convoys, that someone else (me) gets to point out that that someone (you) is talking out their ass.
1) Religion.
2) Wrong.
3) Subjective horseshit. You could say that anything is "underspecified".. its a crap argument. Content providers will use good codecs. DUH.
4) Many plugins are malware too. Pick a theory and stick with it.
5) FLASH is a giant security hole. Arent you going to remove FLASH support?
6) Instead of interfacing with existing decoders, which we think is too hard, we are going to maintain our own decoder.. which any coder will note is obviously harder.. but we wont mention that because most people who read this arent programmers.
You forgot that Flash is a plug-in that doesn't ship with Firefox.
Nobody suggested that CODEC's would ship with Firefox.
Pretty much everyone already has these codecs, and the license to play back video with them.
If you want to take the high road, you've GOT to be consistent.
You hate H.264. Dont try to convince us that this is about some grand Free and Open slant.. when clearly you are just picking and choosing what non-Free and non-Open shit to ostracize.
Pick a theory and run with it. Someone obviously convinced you that H.264 is Bad but you never reconciled 'why' with the rest of your moral makeup.
Why should Firefox support FLASH but not a CODEC? Both are DLL's provided by the end user. Period. Thats it. Let me repeat that. They are BOTH DLL's provided by the end user. One more time. They are BOTH DLL'S PROVIDED BY THE END USER.
It sounds like you're assuming everyone here blocks every ad they come across.
Whenever debates over Firefox vs Chrome vs Safari vs Opera come up on slashdot, there is always an explosion of posts about how they will never switch from Firefox until Adblock Plus or an alternative works well with any of the other browsers.
This leads me to believe that A LOT of slashdot users want to block every single advertisement. The figure certainly isn't 100% of slashdotters, but its almost certainly closer to 100% than it is to 0%.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats because executives take the lions share of what an insurance company earns.
... ...
Ever been to Hartford Connecticut?
I live in Connecticut. You have no idea whats going on here.
You could pay the CEO's $0 and it wouldnt make a bit of difference. You don't seem to have a grasp of exactly how much money insurance companies are handling, or are just jealous that CEO's make big bucks.
The point being that its easy to cry "big bucks!" without rationalizing an argument.
Would returning all the CEO's money to the insurance company change its profit margins significantly? Research the answer so that you have those precious "facts" you talk about in your signature.
You would need to show that the CEO's in total are paying themselves TRILLIONS of dollars (not millions, not billions, but TRILLIONS!) in order to cut health insurance rates by 50%. If you can only show BILLIONS, then you are in the sub-1% catagory of crybaby jealousy.
Note: if the facts don't match your ideology it does NOT mean that the facts are wrong.
Really?
The problem I see with (1) being at all a part of a solution is that it isnt really the health insurance company that is the problem. A simple check of profit margins reveals that health insurance companies are not out of line.
To be clear, their profit margins are single-digit percentages. So you pay $270+/month instead of $300/month for a family plan if you completely eliminate the insurance companies profit.
I agree that there should be more competition, that a Californian should be able to get on a plan that people in Vermont enjoy, and so forth. But I do not think that this in any way addresses the problem of high costs.
(2) is closer to the point. Right now there is a disconnect between those who pay for insurance and those that use the insurance.
(3) I havent actually seen data that shows that lawsuits are the cost culprit. I am more of the mind that people not shopping around for cheap care rates, getting extra work done, etc.. are the big culprit.
If someone else was paying for my car, I'd want a Tesla Roadster. Since I actually have no pay for my car, I own a 17 year old Buick.
So your rationalization is that because poor people in 1st world countries have it better than the worst places in the world, they should shut up and be grateful?
Nope. Do you like to twist words?
Note that the word 'poor' does not refer to a specific threshold of economic power. The word that you are confusing it with is 'poverty.'
The poster I was replying to was measuring prosperity with an equality index, and in fact declared that this was the "correct" way.
If you think people should be economically equal in every way, JUST FUCKING SAY SO. Dont beat around the fucking bush.
Do you really think that people should be completely economically equal? Make your stand. Seriously... swallow your pride ad tell us what you believe in.
Its fairly obvious to me that people that want to dictate the terms of special treatment, be they calling it 'marriage' or 'civil unions', are the real discriminators.
..and why cant I assign those same rights that gays are fighting for to my sister, brother, parent, or child? Isnt that fucking discrimination?
Remember that in at least one state in our Union of States, it is legal to be married to more than one person at a time. Shouldn't that go for everyone in every state? Isnt that fucking discrimination?
And why do these special rights have to be reciprocal? Can't I assign the rights to (A) while that person assigns them to (B) and (B) assigns them to (C)?
The whole fucking thing that we call marriage is discrimination, and calling it something else while letting homosexuals into it DOESNT FUCKING CHANGE A THING.
Because it's discrimination you fucking retard.
Married people get special treatment. Gay people say "me too!" .. and you are all like.. "yeah.. gay people deserve special treatment too!"
..and then you say that its discrimination if gay people dont also get that special treatment? .. and have the balls to do so rudely?
Go fuck yourself. I'm single and don't want yet another fucking group of people getting special treatment. THAT is fucking discrimination against me, you hypocrite douche-bag.
If given the choice to trade places with a completely random person selected from the population of all the other countries on the planet, even the poorest Americans (for that matter, the poorest from any 1st world nation) would be well served by turning down the option to do so.
This fact highlights a severe problem with your rationalization. You dont seem to have a real grasp of how bad it is in most places around the world.
Literally billions of people around the world worry about where and when they are going to get their next meal, dont have a dime to their name, literally owning nothing but the rags they drape over their malnourished bodies. No hope. No future. No chance.
Screw you idiots that spew the "poor get poorer" bullshit. In America, the poor get richer too.
Even if Intel's compiler does better for Intel's own chips, which I'm sure it does, it is still the best compiler out there by a long shot.
This isnt about not putting effort into optimizing for non-Intel. This is about intentionally putting effort into sabotaging non-Intel performance. They have been convicted of this act, and so far have not honored the courts ruling on the matter.
Remember when Microsoft intentionally sabotaged competing DOS clones? Yeah.
They only care how it does in the apps they actually use. So if all their apps are ICC apps and they run better on Intel processors, well hten that's all that matters.
Who claimed that all their apps are ICC-based? The claim is that most BENCHMARKS use ICC-generated code at some point, and this claim is DEMONSTRABLY true (simply changing the CPUID VendorID string to "GenuineIntel" proves it, as many have done.)
Most apps for Windows are compiled with VC++ and most apps for Linux are compiled with GCC.
In spite of Intels unfair benchmarking advantage, AMD is still king of price/performance. Thats how killer AMD's are on the very metric we are talking about.
The first Intel showing is only 75% the price/performance value of AMD's best and of the top 20 or so CPU's on that chart, only two of them are from Intel. Quite frankly, Intel fanboys such as yourself should be embarrassed for not realizing how badly you are getting ripped off.
Those prices are just for the CPU as well, so doesnt include the higher price that Intel users pay for motherboards.
You mean besides the fact that a $40 video card is only good for entry level gaming?
Even the HD4650 blows the doors off of the HD5450. That HD5450 ranks right up there with 2 year old mid range (at the time) graphics cards.
That the Intel integrated solution is a "tiny bit slower" than something no serious gamer would even consider buying today. The Farcry 2 benchmark for the HD5450 puts it at an average 20 FPS on Medium Settings, Low Shadows, No AA. Simply horrible. Its probably fine if you want to play WOW, but not fine for any serious gaming.
Very few people have my email address because I dont want them "inviting" me to sites, because for most sites that is exactly equivalent to them ordering viagra and penis enlargement emails for me.
I dont give a crap if general acquaintances know who I am dating, or what movie we saw last night. I do give a crap how many spam emails I get.
Try instead looking at, say, a Core i5-760. 2.8GHz quad core chip for $210. Look up some performance numbers and then compare to AMD chips.
Performance numbers based on Intel crippling compiler.
Yeah. Even in cases where Intel's compiler isnt used for the benchmark program, many benchmarks still use libraries compiled with Intel's compiler.
Of significance are Intels Math Kernel Library and even AMD's Core Math Library (compiled with Intels fortran compiler!)
These libraries are extensively used in most benchmark programs.
Emacs is an entirely different OS.
If you call that a development environment.
You are what is called an ignorant fanboy. Someone that doesnt even know the most basic of things about the opposition but makes a series of declarations, each one following evidence that the previous one was demonstrably incorrect in the most trivial of ways.
You should stop now, because everything you are saying is demonstrably false.
Its OK to not like Microsoft, or Windows. Its not OK to repeatedly make shit up in some stupid fucking effort to defend your embarrassing amount of ignorance.
Why not stick to the REAL reasons you don't like Microsoft? Do you really have to make shit up? Really? You dont have any factual reasons? Wow.
I think you missed the point that "...Apple is the only commercial system I know of with which I get a free development environment..." shows that you dont know shit about anything but Apple and BSD.
VSE stands for Visual Studio Express.
Now answer his fucking question! Whats not free about VSE?
To what rate do they throttle?
I just tested a 720p Netflix stream and over 10 minutes it averaged 1.67mbit/s (125MB)
If they can't deliver the speeds, how hard is it to have a truthful advertising campaign
High Speed 10Mbit(*) service for only $24.95/month.
(*) 10Kbit if all subscribers use the service simultaneously
I think the problem is that you dont really want to admit the truth. The truth is that to stick a value for guaranteed bandwidth, it would be a number so small (and yet so meaningless) that it wouldnt effect your decision to buy at all. The value wouldnt matter because 99% of the time you will get between 500 and 1000 times as much bandwidth as that stupid guaranteed minimum.
That said, "Net Neutrality" is not about what people think. It's about bringing the internet, and specifically ISP's, under more regulation to solve a problem that doesn't exist. How you you carefully craft regulation to solve a problem that doesn't exist?
This.
If I was to set up a hundred different machines all over the internet to hammer a single IP address with packets, usually that would be considered a Denial of Service (DoS) attack (even if it doesnt succeed in denying service.) Well thats exactly what Bittorrent does, right?
Even if ISP's gave each of their users 10 times as bunch bandwidth as they do now, the problem would remain. Bittorrent's goal would still be to fully saturate the receiving pipe, and the only barrier to that happening in a lack of popularity for the specific torrent.
It is no surprise at all that some ISP's tried to do something about it, even if they were morally wrong to do so. No surprise at all.
Throttling torrents has to do with peak usage, not neutrality. Your ISP can't deliver the maximum rated bandwidth to all of its subscribers simultaneously. Thats the fact of the matter. How much would an ISP have to charge to REALLY support a fully saturated 10Mbit/1Mbit for everyone at the same time? My guess is a lot more that double the current rates.
Oh, I see - you're upset about IMPRECISE ESTIMATES!!!ONE!!!1111!ONE!
In this case, precision was important.
If cutting the number of convoys by half would only increase the number of patrols by 1%, then your argument is bullshit. Your argument RELIES on the VERACITY of the values you claimed.
Unfortunately for you, 1% is about exctly right. Do you need me to hold your fucking opinion-motivated horseshit hand and derive this figure for you?
Many of these younger folks dont seem to understand how bad Netscape 4 was. They think that IE took over only because Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer.
The authors had thought that Netscape 4 was so bad that they junked the entire codebase and started with a complete rewrite. One of the worst decisions in software development history, but enabled them to care a little bit more about standards.
What world do you live in?
I live in a world where all of the units escorting convoys could not double the number of units performing patrols, let alone half of them.
In my world, when someone (you) makes a horseshit claim such as that the number of patrols could be DOUBLED if we HALVED the number of convoys, that someone else (me) gets to point out that that someone (you) is talking out their ass.
I said that exact thing the last time I fled from the United States to Canada to get my health care.
half the number of fuel convoys to guard means twice as many combat patrols out in the field
Do you live in a world where the number of convoys equals the number of patrols?
blah blah blah blah blah.
.. its a crap argument. Content providers will use good codecs. DUH.
1) Religion.
2) Wrong.
3) Subjective horseshit. You could say that anything is "underspecified"
4) Many plugins are malware too. Pick a theory and stick with it.
5) FLASH is a giant security hole. Arent you going to remove FLASH support?
6) Instead of interfacing with existing decoders, which we think is too hard, we are going to maintain our own decoder.. which any coder will note is obviously harder.. but we wont mention that because most people who read this arent programmers.
Blah blah blah blah blah.
You forgot that Flash is a plug-in that doesn't ship with Firefox.
Nobody suggested that CODEC's would ship with Firefox.
Pretty much everyone already has these codecs, and the license to play back video with them.
If you want to take the high road, you've GOT to be consistent.
You hate H.264. Dont try to convince us that this is about some grand Free and Open slant.. when clearly you are just picking and choosing what non-Free and non-Open shit to ostracize.
Pick a theory and run with it. Someone obviously convinced you that H.264 is Bad but you never reconciled 'why' with the rest of your moral makeup.
Why should Firefox support FLASH but not a CODEC? Both are DLL's provided by the end user. Period. Thats it. Let me repeat that. They are BOTH DLL's provided by the end user. One more time. They are BOTH DLL'S PROVIDED BY THE END USER.
I am amazed that you didnt cite MSNBC as the go-to source for liberal bias while citing FOX as the go-to source for conservative bias.
This suggests that you hold a very large left-leaning bias.
It sounds like you're assuming everyone here blocks every ad they come across.
Whenever debates over Firefox vs Chrome vs Safari vs Opera come up on slashdot, there is always an explosion of posts about how they will never switch from Firefox until Adblock Plus or an alternative works well with any of the other browsers.
This leads me to believe that A LOT of slashdot users want to block every single advertisement. The figure certainly isn't 100% of slashdotters, but its almost certainly closer to 100% than it is to 0%.