I believe that most policy-makers here in the U.S. use a number between 6 and 12 million per life when balancing the costs of laws.
Spend too much trying to save -everyone- from -every- high-publicity tragedy and you end up unable to pay for programs that save a lot of lives, but don't make the news.
I live in the only state that mandates bus monitors on every school bus. The cost of the program is $12 million per year, and it prevents on child from being run over by a bus every 2.5 years. That's $30 million per life saved, a number way out-of-line with actual good policy. More lives could be saved if we got rid of the mandate and invested the $30 million in other life-saving programs.
Unfortunately, politicians aren't always good at making policy, nobody is going to say in front of a news camera or a hearing full of parents that a life -must- have a dollar value attached to it in order to make sane policy in the greater public interest.
The fact that it's so addictive and harmful are reasons to regulate.
I've lost a few friends and family to heroin. It's already here. The $80B we spend trying to keep it away only puts helpless addicts into contact with unscrupulous armed drug dealers.
If there were pharmacies that were secure like banks where addicts could go and buy limited amounts, we'd be much better off. Does it totally fix the problem? Absolutely not, but I'd like to know that my local junkie can peaceably go down to the store and buy his fix of clean, regulated regulated smack for the day and offset my taxes a bit.
Cigarettes are a -great- model, they're -maddeningly- addictive. I've collected wet butts off the ground, dried them in the toaster, and rolled them in wrapping paper to get my fix (long ago). I'll gladly pay $9 for a pack that costs under $1 to make if it keeps me sane. I want the same model for heroin addicts.
Also, it's not the -users- of drugs out there that tend to be violent (in my experience), it's the dealers and runners. Cut the dealers out of the loop and replace them with secure distributors and bank-type retail and you've just grown the economy -and- cut a huge amount of crime and lowered enforcement costs.
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
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iPad Review
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You are correct that it's not a computer replacement, it's not supposed to be. All I hear about is people comparing this to a laptop or netbook, that's not what it's for at all.
I plan on getting a second-gen in a year or two to use as a 'bathroom reader'; I'm going to replace that big gnarly stack of magazines with an iPad. If there are good offerings of magazine/newspaper/movie/show/radio content at competitive rates, I'll buy-in. I have an iPod touch that lives somewhere between the couch and the bathroom, and it's invaluable, I often wish it was bigger!
The iPhone isn't a computer replacement, but it makes a swell appliance to find out how many calories are in your ice cream cone, what's on TV in an hour, or to read your email and check the news. This thing is just an appliance, an appliance that handles what most people are doing 90% of the time with their machines. Us nerds are a special case, we want to hack, we want to tinker and create. Most people want to watch funny kitten videos on YouTube during TV commercial breaks.
I think that the print content creators have been waiting a -long time- for a secure newspaper/magazine delivery system that can offer more than just 'read this' functionality. Apple just delivered it. Watch as publishers slowly start dabbling in iPad versions of the magazines your wife reads... one-click purchasing of the stuff they show the stars wearing... This is going somewhere.
I also want one of these for my Mom. She's scared of computers, doesn't know how to type or use a mouse. I let her play with my iPod Touch and she thought it was 'cool'. An iPad is the only 'computer' I could give her that she wouldn't be intimidated by or fear breaking. Also, outside of the annual firmware update, there's virtually no maintenance.
Now for the geeky stuff... I remember spending hours and hours as a kid reading whatever science text I could get my grubby little fingers on. These days, all that info is on Wikipedia instead of in an expensive, outdated encyclopedia. I intend to set up a wireless SSID that only allows access to wikipedia and a few other sites. I bind the iPad to that SSID, hand it to the next generation of rugrats, and let them learn on their own without fear that they'll spend the day looking at who-knows-what.
Then I guess I've had war crimes perpetrated on me by Providence Police. I've been sprayed as an innocent bystander twice. Once when a mounted officer sprayed at a bus shelter downtown (there was a fight going on nearby, officers were pretty much spraying into the crowd). The other time was a party where the police announced themselves by spraying -up the stairs- into a crowded room, effectively turning an out-of-hand party into a dangerous encapsulated stampede.
"...states that have some semblance of fiscal responsibility and individual rights."
Thanks, now I have to clean soda off my monitor.
Really though, I appreciate the sentiment, and I actually agree with you, but I'm also from Rhode Island, which I'm starting to think is on-par with Nigeria in terms of 'fiscal responsibility' and 'individual rights'.
It's not even in the kernel, so it doesn't matter when the kernel was written. The problem is in userland, the partitioning utility in particular.
'util-linux' hasn't been updated since 2005. How much you want to be your Linux distro is using 'fdisk' from five years ago?
Luckily, someone got busy today and updated the util-linux-ng 'fdisk' to start partitions at 1MB, unless the device is super small and each megabyte matters.
Now all we have to do is have the distros pick it up.
Problem solved. It probably took less than ten minutes of coding. Arguably, it should have been solved years ago. I know I've been aligning my partitions to 64K or 1MB bounds for four years (I got hip to this stuff when I started virtualizing things).
All that needs to happen is a very minor update to the 'fdisk' utility to make it start partitions at 1MB. Microsoft saw this coming and changed the partitioner in Vista (and newer) to align on 1MB boundaries.
There don't have to be kernel tweaks. I've been doing this myself for years when I install Linux or Windows. Windows XP's 'diskpart' aligns by 32K, whereas the built-in format in setup from the CD aligns on 31.5K, so just format the drive from BartPE's diskpart utility first. In Linux you just drop into 'expert' mode in fdisk, hit 'x' and tell your partition to start at 2048 sectors (1MB).
Why 1MB instead of 32K or 64K? Because some RAID arrays have stripe sizes up to 1MB, and it just makes sense to 'waste' one meg in order to have alignment work on bounds of 4K, 16K, 32K, 64K, 128K, 256K, and 1MB (all common page or RAID stripe sizes).
It's a race to the bottom, with states bidding against each other. If your state isn't business-friendly, making a tax-exception for a single business -seems- like a good idea, but your neighbors just end up doing the same. The answer isn't to hand out band-aid exemptions to certain businesses, but to not cut them in the first place.
The thief is the rootkit, you're the kernel, and the patch is the police.
The thief is already in, hiding behind the sofa with a gun pointed at your head. The officer knocks on your door and asks if you're being robbed. The answer is 'no'.
A rootkit can invade the lowest-level of the Virtual File System, so when a patcher running in user space asks for the checksum of the file it's about to patch, it gets a 'clean' result, even if the -real- file on the disk is something entirely different.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what rootkits really are. I encourage anyone to take a few hits of LSD and explain physics to me, or perform surgery on themselves while under the influence, that's about the closest thing I can compare to patching or rootkit detection on a system that's already compromised.
I don't know how many times I need to say it, I get calls about this all day escalated from the Help Desk.
If your system has a rootkit installed, you just plain cannot trust anything you see. You can't trust the SP3 installer. You can't trust Antivirus. You can't trust MalwareBytes. You can't trust System File Checker. You can't trust -anything- that you see from inside the rooted system. Why? Because the way rootkits work is to infect the kernel, say with a modified 'atapi.sys', then intercept when calls for 'atapi.sys' are made from the VFS, and return non-infected code back. For all you know, the write call to replace 'atapi.sys' from SP3 was intercepted and the old rooted one is still doing its business.
The only way to be somewhat confident is to scan the machine from known-good media, like another booted instance of the OS, a boot disk, or something like that.
The only way to be -really- confident is to format the drive from sector 0 and reinstall.
If the kernel is rooted, the checksum of the altered file from the running instance of the rooted OS would appear fine. That's the beauty of a rootkit.
Windows XP already has a built-in checksumming system file checker. Unfortunately, the only way you'll see the rootkit is by booting from alternate media.
The answer is to change the way insurance works as we deploy it.
Instead of covering 'expenses over your deductible', why not charge a flat-percentage of total costs?
Right now the system de-incentivizes people from getting routine and preventative care, but encourages them to spend like mad once they're past their deductible.
A doctor's visit cost me $10. It costs my girlfriend $160. An MRI costs me $10, it costs her the difference to her deductible, about $900. Once we've both had an MRI, and she's hit her deductible for the year, we're -both- likely to go for every elective procedure under the sun at $10 a pop.
What we should do is have insurance cover a flat 90% of medical costs. Doctor visits will cost us each $16, the MRI will cost us each $270, and the cancer treatment will have to be financed because our bills will be $20,000 a piece.
The problem is that the people driving health care reform mostly have insurance like mine, don't understand how it works, and they are horrified at the idea of a poor person having to pay a month's rent to get an MRI. My response is that someone who is motivated to live will take out a $20,000 loan for cancer treatment, and it's a much better solution than today's, where the insured people have their full coverage. The poor get the treatment and survive only to get a $200,000 bill in the mail, which causes a bankruptcy, foreclosure, etc.
There's no way to 'make the system better' without driving costs down dramatically, and the only way to do that is to make people take some ownership in the expenses they incur on the system. It's not any less fair than me being able to afford a better car or fancier education than someone else.
We used to have 'breakdown' on Fridays. That's where we send someone around asking what you want, then send them out to get a bunch of beer. Invite one senior director every-other week for coverage and to see them 'in real life'.
I learned more about how the office -really- works, got a lot of things actually done, and met the key players much faster than those who opted-out of 'breakdown'.
Firefox is based on Gecko, which uses Cairo Graphics, which has an accelerated OpenGL back-end as an output option.
My guess is that performance when using an OpenGL-accelerated renderer is actually -worse- on non-compositing window managers.
The rendering of pages wouldn't be helped by GPGPU stuff, since it's 'procedural' to parse and render HTML, it's not SIMD in nature.
Apple's been sitting on accelerated 2D rendering of the UI, glyphs, text, and primitives for over four years now, it's not a panacea. I don't think Firefox would be improved if it started depending on video drivers, 3D hardware, and was slower.
Most of the people I know with HDTVs have them connected to their cable boxes by coax or composite, so they're looking at an SDTV signal. I know quite a few FIOS users who do have HD signals between their set-top box and HDTV who watch the channel numbers that they're familiar with, meaning that they only browse the SDTV channels, not knowing that all they have to do to get dramatically better picture is -look at a different channel-.
I'll guess that 90% of WII users don't care at all about HD, or picture quality. What comes out of the box with the composite cable is 'great' for them as-is.
My grandfather's stories about the depression were the best. He was a little boy when things went sour, so while mom stayed home and made clothes, food, and kept the fire going, dad had to get himself miles to the town center to wait for milk and bread. What did my grandfather and his brothers do? They started a gang, beating up local drunks and taking their whiskey money.
There are a couple of pictures of my grandfather as a twelve year-old, skinny as a rail, wearing 1930s 'thug life' outfits (newsboy caps, home-sewn knee-length trousers, white t-shirts, and no shoes) with his friends. All were wielding leather-wrapped sticks (horse whips?) to accost their prey.
Just imagine that when you think of how 'bad' things are today. Imagine if every ten year-old armed himself and started (basically) car-jacking people for their wallets... It would be like Los Angeles.
I make the system images and package the downloads and SMS packages where I work. I suppose you would classify it as one of those academic environments. A few days ago a user called and asked if there was a good way to image her machine. When I told her to boot to the utility disk we hand out to people like her (department computer folks), log in to the file server, and reimage from there, she explained to me that:
1. She's not on our network. They split-off years ago. 2. She can't log in over VPN either, because they roll their own Novell services, and she doesn't even know her AD credentials. 3. She certainly couldn't pull a multi-GB file over VPN. 4. Our images sort of expect there to be LAN and AD access for stuff like logging in, pulling software, syncing the time, etc. They won't work in a bubble.
I wasn't sure exactly how to answer her, but I felt like saying, "So you're basically from another company, I'm not sure I can spend time helping people who have already decided to do 'everything' themselves."
Excellent post. That's a real issue. I had my bank account frozen twice when I had my stripper roommate. I would put her ones in and withdraw twenties, the bank didn't like getting four stuffed envelopes of ones every night, I guess.
I actually testified at the state house that the sex workers in my city need 401Ks and tax advice more than they need prison terms or 'rescuing'.
IF you've met any who actually did complete their respective degrees and went on to leave the stripper life, you sir, have met a rare breed indeed.
I could say the same thing about the state-college student paying her way through school by working at the Dunkin Donuts. As far as I can tell, they're both just as unlikely to complete school and move on to bigger-and-better. This is a tough-as-nails world, no matter how you finance it.
Um, I live in a college city, we're also the strip-capitol of New England, and I can tell you that I've met plenty of stripper-students who are paying their way through various schools with the money (I also work at the universities, so I see them on-campus). It's tough to find a job where you can make rent and tuition without going into debt, and without help from the parents.
Not everyone is on good terms with their parents, especially younger folks, and there are a lot of young folks who aren't comfortable going $40,000 into debt to go to school.
The strippers I knew were making about $800/week working three nights, much more if they performed 'extras' or escorted on the side (which was legal here until recently).
I've also known a few who were excellent people, but were -really- loose with money. I had a roommate who stripped and 'did extras', and she insisted on paying for -everything-, since she always had a wad of cash. She would buy drinks for everyone within reach when we went to the bar together.
Another stripper I knew managed to pay off her house in three years (sub-prime, interest-only, and she was single) by dropping her nursing job ($50K) and stripping five nights a week ($90K). She's back to nursing now, but she would have been a foreclosure, for sure.
Another I know is a lesbian who has a -really- extensive crystal/jewel collection. Her girlfriend doesn't mind the stripping, since 'men don't count, and the crystals make her happy'.
I know several who have deadbeat boyfriends/babydaddies/husbands who are always out of work and don't take care of the kids. They work two or three nights a week to make ends meet, and they're home during the day with their kids. Not an enviable lifestyle, but it says more about the nature of mate-selection than it does about stripping.
Your post reminds me of the stuff I would see on the message boards about the Asian Spa near my house, guys would post stuff like 'I totally forced myself on that fat sex-slave' when in fact, they paid $160 for a hand job by the -owner- of the place. Maybe things are different in your neck of the woods, but here in Rhode Island, it seems mostly legitimate.
That doesn't make any sense. The 945 chipset uses the GMA950, the GMA500 is actually a totally-outsourced PowerVR chip. The 'native' Intel chips (i810 through G45) are all tatally supported by Intel's open-source drivers, the GMA500 is almost impossible to get working in Linux.
The new built-in N450, D410, and D510 graphics chips are based on the GMA3100, if I recall, they're even called 'GMA3150'. That means they're supported by open-source drivers (and possibly by Mac OS X!), but the performance is bad enough that even Google Earth will make you want to cry.
They really should have used the G45 series of graphics for these things, instead of the G33. They're -worlds- apart in functionality and performance.
I had a pre-release e-series machine from Dell on my desk last year. It's like they built the thing from the outside-in. Even on a 'release' E6500, Ubuntu seems to halt and die on full-screen video, Windows AHCI drivers that work everywhere else cause BSODs, and the power management firmware seems like it was written by a roomful of meth-addicted monkeys.
I've never been more disappointed with Dell as I was with the E6500. At least when the Optiplex GX260 power supplies all failed a few years ago, it was easy enough to fix them. These things are abhorrent.
Sweats, shivers, massive irritability to the point that the sound of water while doing the dishes made me want to cry, constipation, lack of appetite, extreme depression, complete lack of libido, extreme rapid weight loss, sleep disturbances, and inability to concentrate.
Happens every time I hit the two-day mark on not smoking. The only time I made it past two weeks, I lasted nine months, and still had several of those symptoms.
Of course, there's something that runs in my family that makes us all slaves to various forms of addiction, I consider myself lucky that I'm just helplessly addicted to caffeine and nicotine, I have cousins in prison for much worse.
My oringinal thought was that it might not be on-purpose... There are 32-bit only Atom CPUs. Has anyone tested on the Atom 330, which can handle x86-64 instructions?
Remember how 10.6 boots to a 32-bit kernel, even on 64-bit machines? Maybe Apple is comfy switching over to 64-bit by default now, so it's breaking most Atom chips. If they switched from the default logic of 'boot 32-bit unless we're on a 64-bit whitelist' to the more sane 'boot 64-bit unless we're on a 64-bit blacklist (like the original Core-based machines)', this would make perfect sense.
He might be saying that, but the changes do not realistically warrant a major version iteration.
Windows 7's kernel is -virtually the same- as Vista's, clearly in the '6' family. Even the drivers from Vista load into 7, the file sizes and structures are virtually identical.
The difference between Vista and 7 is not under the hood, it's on the surface. They ripped a bunch of useless crap out from the userland, made the startup less taxing (Vista would churn for ten minutes loading everything under the sun into RAM), and gave you a new start menu. The kernel is virtually the same, but no engineer on the MS payroll wants to get caught admitting it.
Interestingly, we -still- don't have the features we were promised for Longhorn... We're still using NTFS, we still have gaping holes caused by bending over backwards to run ancient apps, and the userland stuff from Microsoft isn't written in.NET yet.
At least PowerShell is decent. Someone should get an award for that.
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I believe that most policy-makers here in the U.S. use a number between 6 and 12 million per life when balancing the costs of laws.
Spend too much trying to save -everyone- from -every- high-publicity tragedy and you end up unable to pay for programs that save a lot of lives, but don't make the news.
I live in the only state that mandates bus monitors on every school bus. The cost of the program is $12 million per year, and it prevents on child from being run over by a bus every 2.5 years. That's $30 million per life saved, a number way out-of-line with actual good policy. More lives could be saved if we got rid of the mandate and invested the $30 million in other life-saving programs.
Unfortunately, politicians aren't always good at making policy, nobody is going to say in front of a news camera or a hearing full of parents that a life -must- have a dollar value attached to it in order to make sane policy in the greater public interest.
The fact that it's so addictive and harmful are reasons to regulate.
I've lost a few friends and family to heroin. It's already here. The $80B we spend trying to keep it away only puts helpless addicts into contact with unscrupulous armed drug dealers.
If there were pharmacies that were secure like banks where addicts could go and buy limited amounts, we'd be much better off. Does it totally fix the problem? Absolutely not, but I'd like to know that my local junkie can peaceably go down to the store and buy his fix of clean, regulated regulated smack for the day and offset my taxes a bit.
Cigarettes are a -great- model, they're -maddeningly- addictive. I've collected wet butts off the ground, dried them in the toaster, and rolled them in wrapping paper to get my fix (long ago). I'll gladly pay $9 for a pack that costs under $1 to make if it keeps me sane. I want the same model for heroin addicts.
Also, it's not the -users- of drugs out there that tend to be violent (in my experience), it's the dealers and runners. Cut the dealers out of the loop and replace them with secure distributors and bank-type retail and you've just grown the economy -and- cut a huge amount of crime and lowered enforcement costs.
You are correct that it's not a computer replacement, it's not supposed to be. All I hear about is people comparing this to a laptop or netbook, that's not what it's for at all.
I plan on getting a second-gen in a year or two to use as a 'bathroom reader'; I'm going to replace that big gnarly stack of magazines with an iPad. If there are good offerings of magazine/newspaper/movie/show/radio content at competitive rates, I'll buy-in. I have an iPod touch that lives somewhere between the couch and the bathroom, and it's invaluable, I often wish it was bigger!
The iPhone isn't a computer replacement, but it makes a swell appliance to find out how many calories are in your ice cream cone, what's on TV in an hour, or to read your email and check the news. This thing is just an appliance, an appliance that handles what most people are doing 90% of the time with their machines. Us nerds are a special case, we want to hack, we want to tinker and create. Most people want to watch funny kitten videos on YouTube during TV commercial breaks.
I think that the print content creators have been waiting a -long time- for a secure newspaper/magazine delivery system that can offer more than just 'read this' functionality. Apple just delivered it. Watch as publishers slowly start dabbling in iPad versions of the magazines your wife reads... one-click purchasing of the stuff they show the stars wearing... This is going somewhere.
I also want one of these for my Mom. She's scared of computers, doesn't know how to type or use a mouse. I let her play with my iPod Touch and she thought it was 'cool'. An iPad is the only 'computer' I could give her that she wouldn't be intimidated by or fear breaking. Also, outside of the annual firmware update, there's virtually no maintenance.
Now for the geeky stuff... I remember spending hours and hours as a kid reading whatever science text I could get my grubby little fingers on. These days, all that info is on Wikipedia instead of in an expensive, outdated encyclopedia. I intend to set up a wireless SSID that only allows access to wikipedia and a few other sites. I bind the iPad to that SSID, hand it to the next generation of rugrats, and let them learn on their own without fear that they'll spend the day looking at who-knows-what.
Then I guess I've had war crimes perpetrated on me by Providence Police. I've been sprayed as an innocent bystander twice. Once when a mounted officer sprayed at a bus shelter downtown (there was a fight going on nearby, officers were pretty much spraying into the crowd). The other time was a party where the police announced themselves by spraying -up the stairs- into a crowded room, effectively turning an out-of-hand party into a dangerous encapsulated stampede.
"...states that have some semblance of fiscal responsibility and individual rights."
Thanks, now I have to clean soda off my monitor.
Really though, I appreciate the sentiment, and I actually agree with you, but I'm also from Rhode Island, which I'm starting to think is on-par with Nigeria in terms of 'fiscal responsibility' and 'individual rights'.
It's not even in the kernel, so it doesn't matter when the kernel was written. The problem is in userland, the partitioning utility in particular.
'util-linux' hasn't been updated since 2005. How much you want to be your Linux distro is using 'fdisk' from five years ago?
Luckily, someone got busy today and updated the util-linux-ng 'fdisk' to start partitions at 1MB, unless the device is super small and each megabyte matters.
http://git.kernel.org/?p=utils/util-linux-ng/util-linux-ng.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/master
Now all we have to do is have the distros pick it up.
Problem solved. It probably took less than ten minutes of coding. Arguably, it should have been solved years ago. I know I've been aligning my partitions to 64K or 1MB bounds for four years (I got hip to this stuff when I started virtualizing things).
All that needs to happen is a very minor update to the 'fdisk' utility to make it start partitions at 1MB. Microsoft saw this coming and changed the partitioner in Vista (and newer) to align on 1MB boundaries.
There don't have to be kernel tweaks. I've been doing this myself for years when I install Linux or Windows. Windows XP's 'diskpart' aligns by 32K, whereas the built-in format in setup from the CD aligns on 31.5K, so just format the drive from BartPE's diskpart utility first. In Linux you just drop into 'expert' mode in fdisk, hit 'x' and tell your partition to start at 2048 sectors (1MB).
Why 1MB instead of 32K or 64K? Because some RAID arrays have stripe sizes up to 1MB, and it just makes sense to 'waste' one meg in order to have alignment work on bounds of 4K, 16K, 32K, 64K, 128K, 256K, and 1MB (all common page or RAID stripe sizes).
That practice needs to stop!
It's a race to the bottom, with states bidding against each other. If your state isn't business-friendly, making a tax-exception for a single business -seems- like a good idea, but your neighbors just end up doing the same. The answer isn't to hand out band-aid exemptions to certain businesses, but to not cut them in the first place.
Won't work. To take your analogy a bit farther...
The thief is the rootkit, you're the kernel, and the patch is the police.
The thief is already in, hiding behind the sofa with a gun pointed at your head. The officer knocks on your door and asks if you're being robbed. The answer is 'no'.
A rootkit can invade the lowest-level of the Virtual File System, so when a patcher running in user space asks for the checksum of the file it's about to patch, it gets a 'clean' result, even if the -real- file on the disk is something entirely different.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what rootkits really are. I encourage anyone to take a few hits of LSD and explain physics to me, or perform surgery on themselves while under the influence, that's about the closest thing I can compare to patching or rootkit detection on a system that's already compromised.
Oh good lord! You should not trust that machine!
I don't know how many times I need to say it, I get calls about this all day escalated from the Help Desk.
If your system has a rootkit installed, you just plain cannot trust anything you see. You can't trust the SP3 installer. You can't trust Antivirus. You can't trust MalwareBytes. You can't trust System File Checker. You can't trust -anything- that you see from inside the rooted system. Why? Because the way rootkits work is to infect the kernel, say with a modified 'atapi.sys', then intercept when calls for 'atapi.sys' are made from the VFS, and return non-infected code back. For all you know, the write call to replace 'atapi.sys' from SP3 was intercepted and the old rooted one is still doing its business.
The only way to be somewhat confident is to scan the machine from known-good media, like another booted instance of the OS, a boot disk, or something like that.
The only way to be -really- confident is to format the drive from sector 0 and reinstall.
If the kernel is rooted, the checksum of the altered file from the running instance of the rooted OS would appear fine. That's the beauty of a rootkit.
Windows XP already has a built-in checksumming system file checker. Unfortunately, the only way you'll see the rootkit is by booting from alternate media.
I agree with both sides. What should we do?
The answer is to change the way insurance works as we deploy it.
Instead of covering 'expenses over your deductible', why not charge a flat-percentage of total costs?
Right now the system de-incentivizes people from getting routine and preventative care, but encourages them to spend like mad once they're past their deductible.
A doctor's visit cost me $10. It costs my girlfriend $160. An MRI costs me $10, it costs her the difference to her deductible, about $900. Once we've both had an MRI, and she's hit her deductible for the year, we're -both- likely to go for every elective procedure under the sun at $10 a pop.
What we should do is have insurance cover a flat 90% of medical costs. Doctor visits will cost us each $16, the MRI will cost us each $270, and the cancer treatment will have to be financed because our bills will be $20,000 a piece.
The problem is that the people driving health care reform mostly have insurance like mine, don't understand how it works, and they are horrified at the idea of a poor person having to pay a month's rent to get an MRI. My response is that someone who is motivated to live will take out a $20,000 loan for cancer treatment, and it's a much better solution than today's, where the insured people have their full coverage. The poor get the treatment and survive only to get a $200,000 bill in the mail, which causes a bankruptcy, foreclosure, etc.
There's no way to 'make the system better' without driving costs down dramatically, and the only way to do that is to make people take some ownership in the expenses they incur on the system. It's not any less fair than me being able to afford a better car or fancier education than someone else.
We used to have 'breakdown' on Fridays. That's where we send someone around asking what you want, then send them out to get a bunch of beer. Invite one senior director every-other week for coverage and to see them 'in real life'.
I learned more about how the office -really- works, got a lot of things actually done, and met the key players much faster than those who opted-out of 'breakdown'.
Firefox is based on Gecko, which uses Cairo Graphics, which has an accelerated OpenGL back-end as an output option.
My guess is that performance when using an OpenGL-accelerated renderer is actually -worse- on non-compositing window managers.
The rendering of pages wouldn't be helped by GPGPU stuff, since it's 'procedural' to parse and render HTML, it's not SIMD in nature.
Apple's been sitting on accelerated 2D rendering of the UI, glyphs, text, and primitives for over four years now, it's not a panacea. I don't think Firefox would be improved if it started depending on video drivers, 3D hardware, and was slower.
Most of the people I know with HDTVs have them connected to their cable boxes by coax or composite, so they're looking at an SDTV signal. I know quite a few FIOS users who do have HD signals between their set-top box and HDTV who watch the channel numbers that they're familiar with, meaning that they only browse the SDTV channels, not knowing that all they have to do to get dramatically better picture is -look at a different channel-.
I'll guess that 90% of WII users don't care at all about HD, or picture quality. What comes out of the box with the composite cable is 'great' for them as-is.
My grandfather's stories about the depression were the best. He was a little boy when things went sour, so while mom stayed home and made clothes, food, and kept the fire going, dad had to get himself miles to the town center to wait for milk and bread. What did my grandfather and his brothers do? They started a gang, beating up local drunks and taking their whiskey money.
There are a couple of pictures of my grandfather as a twelve year-old, skinny as a rail, wearing 1930s 'thug life' outfits (newsboy caps, home-sewn knee-length trousers, white t-shirts, and no shoes) with his friends. All were wielding leather-wrapped sticks (horse whips?) to accost their prey.
Just imagine that when you think of how 'bad' things are today. Imagine if every ten year-old armed himself and started (basically) car-jacking people for their wallets... It would be like Los Angeles.
I make the system images and package the downloads and SMS packages where I work. I suppose you would classify it as one of those academic environments. A few days ago a user called and asked if there was a good way to image her machine. When I told her to boot to the utility disk we hand out to people like her (department computer folks), log in to the file server, and reimage from there, she explained to me that:
1. She's not on our network. They split-off years ago.
2. She can't log in over VPN either, because they roll their own Novell services, and she doesn't even know her AD credentials.
3. She certainly couldn't pull a multi-GB file over VPN.
4. Our images sort of expect there to be LAN and AD access for stuff like logging in, pulling software, syncing the time, etc. They won't work in a bubble.
I wasn't sure exactly how to answer her, but I felt like saying, "So you're basically from another company, I'm not sure I can spend time helping people who have already decided to do 'everything' themselves."
Excellent post. That's a real issue. I had my bank account frozen twice when I had my stripper roommate. I would put her ones in and withdraw twenties, the bank didn't like getting four stuffed envelopes of ones every night, I guess.
I actually testified at the state house that the sex workers in my city need 401Ks and tax advice more than they need prison terms or 'rescuing'.
IF you've met any who actually did complete their respective degrees and went on to leave the stripper life, you sir, have met a rare breed indeed.
I could say the same thing about the state-college student paying her way through school by working at the Dunkin Donuts. As far as I can tell, they're both just as unlikely to complete school and move on to bigger-and-better. This is a tough-as-nails world, no matter how you finance it.
Um, I live in a college city, we're also the strip-capitol of New England, and I can tell you that I've met plenty of stripper-students who are paying their way through various schools with the money (I also work at the universities, so I see them on-campus). It's tough to find a job where you can make rent and tuition without going into debt, and without help from the parents.
Not everyone is on good terms with their parents, especially younger folks, and there are a lot of young folks who aren't comfortable going $40,000 into debt to go to school.
The strippers I knew were making about $800/week working three nights, much more if they performed 'extras' or escorted on the side (which was legal here until recently).
I've also known a few who were excellent people, but were -really- loose with money. I had a roommate who stripped and 'did extras', and she insisted on paying for -everything-, since she always had a wad of cash. She would buy drinks for everyone within reach when we went to the bar together.
Another stripper I knew managed to pay off her house in three years (sub-prime, interest-only, and she was single) by dropping her nursing job ($50K) and stripping five nights a week ($90K). She's back to nursing now, but she would have been a foreclosure, for sure.
Another I know is a lesbian who has a -really- extensive crystal/jewel collection. Her girlfriend doesn't mind the stripping, since 'men don't count, and the crystals make her happy'.
I know several who have deadbeat boyfriends/babydaddies/husbands who are always out of work and don't take care of the kids. They work two or three nights a week to make ends meet, and they're home during the day with their kids. Not an enviable lifestyle, but it says more about the nature of mate-selection than it does about stripping.
Your post reminds me of the stuff I would see on the message boards about the Asian Spa near my house, guys would post stuff like 'I totally forced myself on that fat sex-slave' when in fact, they paid $160 for a hand job by the -owner- of the place. Maybe things are different in your neck of the woods, but here in Rhode Island, it seems mostly legitimate.
That doesn't make any sense. The 945 chipset uses the GMA950, the GMA500 is actually a totally-outsourced PowerVR chip. The 'native' Intel chips (i810 through G45) are all tatally supported by Intel's open-source drivers, the GMA500 is almost impossible to get working in Linux.
The new built-in N450, D410, and D510 graphics chips are based on the GMA3100, if I recall, they're even called 'GMA3150'. That means they're supported by open-source drivers (and possibly by Mac OS X!), but the performance is bad enough that even Google Earth will make you want to cry.
They really should have used the G45 series of graphics for these things, instead of the G33. They're -worlds- apart in functionality and performance.
I had a pre-release e-series machine from Dell on my desk last year. It's like they built the thing from the outside-in. Even on a 'release' E6500, Ubuntu seems to halt and die on full-screen video, Windows AHCI drivers that work everywhere else cause BSODs, and the power management firmware seems like it was written by a roomful of meth-addicted monkeys.
I've never been more disappointed with Dell as I was with the E6500. At least when the Optiplex GX260 power supplies all failed a few years ago, it was easy enough to fix them. These things are abhorrent.
Sweats, shivers, massive irritability to the point that the sound of water while doing the dishes made me want to cry, constipation, lack of appetite, extreme depression, complete lack of libido, extreme rapid weight loss, sleep disturbances, and inability to concentrate.
Happens every time I hit the two-day mark on not smoking. The only time I made it past two weeks, I lasted nine months, and still had several of those symptoms.
Of course, there's something that runs in my family that makes us all slaves to various forms of addiction, I consider myself lucky that I'm just helplessly addicted to caffeine and nicotine, I have cousins in prison for much worse.
My oringinal thought was that it might not be on-purpose... There are 32-bit only Atom CPUs. Has anyone tested on the Atom 330, which can handle x86-64 instructions?
Remember how 10.6 boots to a 32-bit kernel, even on 64-bit machines? Maybe Apple is comfy switching over to 64-bit by default now, so it's breaking most Atom chips. If they switched from the default logic of 'boot 32-bit unless we're on a 64-bit whitelist' to the more sane 'boot 64-bit unless we're on a 64-bit blacklist (like the original Core-based machines)', this would make perfect sense.
He might be saying that, but the changes do not realistically warrant a major version iteration.
Windows 7's kernel is -virtually the same- as Vista's, clearly in the '6' family. Even the drivers from Vista load into 7, the file sizes and structures are virtually identical.
The difference between Vista and 7 is not under the hood, it's on the surface. They ripped a bunch of useless crap out from the userland, made the startup less taxing (Vista would churn for ten minutes loading everything under the sun into RAM), and gave you a new start menu. The kernel is virtually the same, but no engineer on the MS payroll wants to get caught admitting it.
Interestingly, we -still- don't have the features we were promised for Longhorn... We're still using NTFS, we still have gaping holes caused by bending over backwards to run ancient apps, and the userland stuff from Microsoft isn't written in .NET yet.
At least PowerShell is decent. Someone should get an award for that.