From that article, "cut firearm suicides by 74%... no evidence of substitution of method of suicide in any state.
You're leaving out the "based on modeled statistical estimates" part, which means this isn't an actual reduction, it's a guess based on lots of assumptions.
The point was, the wikipedia article you cited did not support your claim, it showed that the numbers in Australia (where the baseline measurement was rather low to begin with) are poorly understood.
In addition, the argument that taking away someone's gun prevents them from committing suicide is a bad one. If I want to commit suicide, that is my right and you do not have a right to interfere with my choice.
Wierd. Right after the word "state." in the part you quoted, it said that it reduced homicides similarly. Guess you missed that.
FWIW, I agree with you on suicides. But it would be much safer for everyone around you if you could go to the pharmacy and purchase a cyanide cap, to be consumed only on the premises (so you didn't take it home to poison someone else). I'm thinking that, even if they had to provide a little annex for you to occupy and a free can of pop to wash it down, it would still be cheaper than a gun, and certainly less hazardous to those around you.
I don't know whether reducing the accessibility of guns reduces murders, it's entirely possible that if you sit down and think "I'm determined to kill Bill, but how?" you'll find a way, even if it's not as easy as a gun. But I'm pretty sure that it reduces homicides. I'd expect that it would reduce unplanned, spur-of-the-moment, and accidental killings, killings by small children, etc. by a lot.
In crimes of passion almost any weapon will do. A gun being present generally only changes the cause of death.
If the party doesn't have access to a gun, there may well be no "crime of passion". It's really a lot harder to kill someone with a baseball bat than it is to squeeze a trigger. You may well stop at some point short of completion and say, "shit, I didn't mean to do that".
This is evidenced by the fact that in Britain and Australia gun bans have had no effect on either suicide or homicide rates when isolated against already prevailing national crime rates and trends.
From that article, "cut firearm suicides by 74%... no evidence of substitution of method of suicide in any state. The estimated effect on firearm homicides was of similar magnitude but less precise". Other studies found no effect or were inconclusive. So I don't think you can say it is "evidenced".
You are also incorrect about the nature of homicide in the US. 70-85% of those murdered the US every year have a criminal record. Most major cities track close to 80% of there homicides resulting from gang violence.
How about "deaths by firearm"? What percentage of those have criminal records? Indeed, note that the accused perp of the Boston Marathon killings had no criminal record. But if it is true, it blows a hole in the argument that people need guns to protect themselves. At least, if they're not in gangs.
I should be clear, I am not a "gun rights" advocate, but from an economics perspective it is rather obvious that murder is price inelastic. The vast majority of murders are infact crime related. The remander are largely crimes of passion for which any serviceable weapon can and will do (suicide falls under this as well).
I'm trying to think of some category of murder that's not "crime-related", including crimes of passion. Nope, I'm drawing a blank, unless you're only talking about suicide (which I don't count as murder)..
Legally freely distributable open source software is important for folks here, but the same people pirate copyrighted movies and stuff. But if you instead torrent culture that is in public domain, there is no legal problem and you can enjoy completely free digital lifestyle.
You mean, culture that is more than 70 years out of date?
Perhaps, but in practice it doesn't matter what it was *intended* to do, only what the wording allows it to be *used* to do. And in this case, it's being used in an attempt to block unfavorable discussions.
That said, the original discussion's use would almost certainly fall within fair use, so they could just respond to the DMCA request and get their stuff put back up, putting the ball back into the court the company sending the request.
They could indeed respond to the DMCA request and get their stuff put back up. But then, potentially, lawyers get involved. And when lawyers get involved, it gets very very expensive. Maybe the EFF or the ACLU will take your case, but they don't have the staff or money (donatetoday!) to take every case, so they might not be able to, in which case you'll have to hire your own.
Typically I think computers don't fall behind, instead the applications have become more demanding. The applications aren't necessarily better but they do want more RAM or more CPU, often deciding that they want to load into memory and stay there before you even use them, just so that you get the instant-start when you do click the icon.
Yep, periodically I have to use AUTORUNS and stomp that stuff out. There is no earthly reason why a program that I run once every month or so should be constantly eating any RAM or CPU. I can live with it taking 20s more to start once a month, but I don't want it to be adding that 20s to every boot sequence.
It sounds like you are actually describing a bad neutral./p>
Yes, brain bubble, sorry. Neutral. (Which is normally grounded at the panel.) In the US, 131v is alarmingly high for line voltage, no matter when the house was electrified.
Consumer CFLs are extremely voltage sensitive, particularly to over-voltage. I have an outlet that regularly spikes to 131v (house was electrified in the 30s)
If you're spiking to 131V, you may have a bad (house or pole) ground. With a good ground the voltage should never be above nominal (110-120, depending on you local utility). With a bad ground, worst case is 2X nominal (if the ground doesn't function at all), which is very dangerous.
I've been using the same ones for 11 years, one takes longer to start these days, but none have died. Perhaps they're die when a house has a bad power source?
you need a pretty clean power supply to get maximum life out of them. And going along with that, the fixture it's placed in needs to not be a complete piece of shit. Also, they have a fairly narrow optimal temperature range compared to an incandescent bulb- running them in very cold environments (such as the one above my porch where the temp drops into the -20(F) range for weeks during the winter) will drastically reduce the lifespan.
Really? I use them for front and back porch and they last a long time (multiple years) for me. Starting back when they had ballasts (heavy) and replaceable tubes, and now the integrated ones. I just use whatever cheap low-wattage ones that I find. It doesn't go to -20F for weeks here (maybe a day or two) and the lights are in sheltered (unheated, enclosed porch, but exposed bulb) locations. The only "special treatment" is that in the cold season (for about 3 months) I don't turn them off at all, a habit I started since early CFLs didn't start reliably in below-zero weather (my impression is that the newer ones do). And since that's the dark season, it's just easier to leave them on. Actually, they get left on much of the rest of the year, too, since I've lost the habit of turning them on and off. If there aren't any bad solder joints, I can't think of any reason why cold would be a problem except for starting, or maybe if it's cold enough so that the arc in the tube becomes unstable. But I've only seen unstable arcs with regular fluorescent tubes (which have a lot more surface area).
when you look at the cost of re-wiring houses, rebuilding electric grids, replacing fixtures, installing heating elements for cold-weather areas, etc. the actual energy costs to totally abandon the old-style bulbs far exceed the gains from the LED and CFC's. And that doesn't even start to account for things like asbestos removal and disposal, lead cleanup from old paint and pipes, and other environmental costs associated with replacing wiring and sockets in older buildings.
Even though I live in a neighborhood of old houses (yah, we have asbestos and lead paint) I have never heard of anyone having to do cleanup and disposal to replace a few fixtures. Why would you replace the wiring? If it could handle incandescent bulbs, it certainly can handle CFLs. And why would you muck with the furnace, ducts, or hot-water pipes (which is where the asbestos would be, I have never seen asbestos involved with wiring)? You don't need to do a gut and rehab for this job.
Flash memory has a limited number of writes, and won't power an on-board clock in any event.
The minimum number of write cycles seems to be around 10K, and could be 1M or more (depending on type of memory). If you have the least durable flash, and turn your phone off once a day, that's 27 years. (Most people don't seem to ever turn their phone off.) What do you suppose the service lifetime of the average phone is? 3 years?
That said, if they pass this law here, I'll ignore it. I've been waiting something like 8 years for a device I could use as a HUD in my motorcycle helmet, and I'm not about to let some insipid lawmaker ruin that for me because "for the children" etc. There will always be some irresponsible retard that does something stupid with anything. The correct course of action is to ban behaviors that get other people hurt, and let behavior that gets yourself hurt work itself out.
We're not so worried about motorcycle riders. You're presumably well aware of the fact that whoever gets hurt in an accident, you'll probably be at the head of the list. If you abuse google glasses natural selection will deal with the problem, and relatively few innocent bystanders will be endangered.
But, if you've been riding anywhere around automobiles, you've surely noticed that even now not all automobile drivers are aware of their surroundings, even without HUDs. Those are the ones who'll be killing other people, like maybe you. And, if things work out the way they usually seem to, they won't personally have a scratch on them. Distracted driving laws don't do shit, of the distracted drivers you've personally encountered on the road, how many of them have gotten pulled over there and then? Do you really want to allow heavy-equipment operators (which is what drivers are) to be posting on facebook while they're operating their machines? How about that guy who's driving the semi with the oversized load that's overtaking you? How about grandpa at the wheel of the new Winnebago that's way wider than his Ford Escort admiring pictures of the grandkids?
The only solution I can think of that excludes you is to allow head-mounted displays, but only displays that are technically restricted from displaying anything other than a specified list of driving-related information (e.g. stuff that instruments now provide). Yeah, they'll get hacked some, but you make violations automatic revocation of license time. That would solve the problem, because no driver will even be interested in something with that kind of limited functionality.
Yea,but when the client was a pure asshole about the replacement to begin with,I have NO sympathy.BTW he is long out of business now and serving 5-10 for attempted robbery.
Who knew that robbery was so lucrative that robbers needed IT consultants for the back-office work?
I mean, unless he was a banker or something like that, but they don't get jail time, they get bonuses.
It's been a number of years, but when I was looking at private, non-employer, non-family insurance the cost was only about 50% higher than the Medicare maximum premiums (~$700/month). Copays were roughly the same, at 20%.
I'm not sure where that $700 for Medicare comes from, unless you hadn't worked at least 10 years or unless you had a very high income..
Medicare Part A (hospital coverage) has no premium so long as you've worked 40 quarters of covered employment.
Medicare Part B (optional doctor visit coverage) costs $105/month, but that's adjusted every year, and was probably a lot less "a number of years" ago. That mostly has a 20% deductible, but the deductible can be less if you have Part C coverage.
Medicare Part C (optional HMO- and additional fee-for-service type coverage) and Part D (drug coverage) is sold by private insurance companies, and is all over the map depending on coverage and where you are located. There's an online search that tells you what's available. The least expensive plan in my area that includes drug coverage is $42/month and the most expensive plan is $343/month (today's prices). Copays and deductibles vary with the plan and item, the (cheap) plan that I have documentation for is typically 20%, though there are a number of things that have no copay (hey, kids, free colonoscopies!), and drugs are $0 to 30%, depending on the drug and where you get it.
Nothing about medical care is cheap. But (if you're talking about Medicare Part A, the hospital coverage) it's "free" (if you're covered by enough quarters of employment), it's not covered by the insurance industry. Part B (non-hospital) isn't, either, though it's an extra $105/month. It's an order of magnitude cheaper than the alternative.
Have you looked at the costs of purchasing as an individual (without employer subsidies) comparable insurance without Medicare? If so, feel free to post the costs.
I don't know enough about Medicaid to address that issue.
My question is, why would the telecom want to remain anonymous? Wouldn't they gain plenty of positive attention from consumers if they showed they were sticking up for their privacy?
Because they're not allowed to identify themselves.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is Credo Long Distance/Mobile. More power to them, if you need LD or cell service check them out (they used to be "Working Assets" until they separated the telco stuff from the financial stuff). (They also contribute a percentage of their profits to various causes).
It is nice to see. I wonder though why it's taken this long for a ruling that actually does check some of the over reach of the govt.
It hasn't really been to court, since most telcos don't care, it's no skin off their nose. You can't fight it, because they don't tell you that it's your records the snoops want. Apparently the telco that was willing to fight in this case is cell-phone company Credo, which isn't exactly one of the big 3.
Though I don't have any great hope that higher courts will stand up for the rule of law, the govt will whisper "terrorists" and the judges will all hide under their benches.
"'Patriot Act' was a very highly manipulative naming for a very unpatriotic act. Smoke and mirrors all too common and further enabled by current major media."
Kind of like "Affordable Care Act"? The one that would fine people thousands of dollars for not buying insurance they already couldn't afford to buy?
You mean, that act that provides subsidies for low-income people to buy insurance with, and tightens the screws on employers who don't provide health insurance? That prohibits insurance companies from dumping/refusing you because you were sick?
Yeah, it's a crappy law, tailored to keep the big insurance companies happy. They should have just expanded Medicare to cover everybody (health care shouldn't have anything to do with the tender mercies of employers or insurance companies, and Medicare's overhead expense is a small fraction of what insurance companies cost), but the insurance business (which largely overlaps the financial business) is too powerful to let themselves get cut out of the picture that way.
But it's better than the previous situation, where medical problems are the #1 cause of both bankruptcy and homelessness, where the wealthy and well-insured get great care, and the hospitals have to eat the cost of care for those who can't afford it.
Do you really believe that the Muslims would have any interest in removing Nativity scenes, at least in the US? Yes, they don't believe in it, that doesn't mean they want it torn down.
Well, actually, they do believe in it, sorta. Except that they believe the kid was just a prophet like Moses, not the messiah.
If someone put up a Buddha or Ganesh or perhaps some Islamic imagery, I'm not likely to care.
Not likely to be Islamic imagery, since they aren't keen on representational art of that sort. But the point isn't whether you would care, it's that a lot of Christian fundamentalist types would. They don't want religious imagery unless it's their own particular flavor (which they do want to put up).
I can understand that we need to ensure equal time, especially with the dominance of Christian religions in the US, but one of the things that has always turned me off about vocal atheists is that they are, frankly, spoil-sports. There's no reason they have to be, but for some reason, they are. Fine, you think it's all a crock of shit, I get that, but don't be douchebags about it. Some of this stuff is lots of fun. If you really want to contribute, come up with something fun, instead of ruining everyone else's.
Yeah, some of them are spoil-sports. But I've noticed that some Christians also have a funnybone deficiency when it comes to religion. So you'd probably be ok with a Pastafarian shrine to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and think it's perfectly reasonable for the Town Council to let it be set up on the courthouse lawn. After all, meatballs and pirates, too, what could be more fun? But don't you think that in the Bible Belt, there'd be big trouble? Maybe, or maybe not, the Town Council's heads on pikes, but probably not brotherly love, in any case?
And while you'd think NRA types would go gaga over Kali (what's not to love about a cute blue female who's that into weapons), she probably wouldn't be popular on the courthouse lawn, either.
I single out Atheists, because they seem to be the most vocal in my local community when it comes to what Christians can and can't do on public land. In don't see the Muslims threatening law suits when someone wants to put a Nativity on the court house lawn.
There is probably a critical mass thing going here. There are are probably more atheists than Muslims, and they're probably not as afraid they'll become the victims of ethnic violence.
But let's say someone wanted to put a statue of Kali on the court house lawn. (You know, that's the Hindu goddess who has 10 arms, all carrying weapons, who's wearing a necklace of human skulls and dancing on a corpse.) Would the court house let them put it there? And if they did, would there be any Christians who got vocal and threatened lawsuits?
Who would have expected publicly defying the law would motivate prosecutors to come down hard on a suspect?
The "law" was a TOS/AUP. Are you saying you've never violated any of the terms of a network or website's TOS/AUP? I strongly doubt that you even read them (nobody else does either.. you may remember the game vendor who included a term ceding ownership of the user's soul to the publisher, and nobody even noticed). Do you agree that violating any of those terms ("defying the law", as you phrase it) should be treated as a felony?
Actually from my admittedly limited experience, FAA and airplane mfgrs are downright obsessive about making connections idiot proof and failsafe. It's pretty difficult to find places in an airplane where it's possible to plug the wrong things together or backwards. FAA has been dealing with Murphy for a very long time. In this case, if that's what happened, then it's one that slipped through the design and development process. FAA will mark this as a design failure and require Boeing to make it impossible to connect wrongly.
Looking at that Japanese powerpoint, it looks like that may be exactly what happened. The battery cells are rectangular with a stud on each side of the top. Not even any prominent markings to indicate polarity, though the two studs seem to be mounted with different colored rivets. You'd think they'd at least have different diameter studs for the positive and negative, and jumpers with holes to match.
If you've really used any of those alternatives, you'd know the answer: Adobe Reader is actually easier to use, install, and much more polished than the alternatives.
Actually, I've been using PDF-Xchange Viewer for several years and I think it's equal or superior to Adobe Reader on all counts. Plus, no known security holes, and has OCR built in. Biggest problem with it is nobody knows about it or where to find it, because websites say "You need Adobe Reader, click here to get it".
It would be handy, if you actually wanted to produce pdf. Given that Adobe's pdf tools are what most people use, and that those are absolutely the largest vector for malware IN THE WORLD, I don't want any more pdf around.
Why is anyone using Adobe Reader anymore? There are several very nice alternatives, including Foxit, PDF-Xchange, Sumatra, Slim and others. I haven't used Adobe on any of my computers for years.
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You're leaving out the "based on modeled statistical estimates" part, which means this isn't an actual reduction, it's a guess based on lots of assumptions.
The point was, the wikipedia article you cited did not support your claim, it showed that the numbers in Australia (where the baseline measurement was rather low to begin with) are poorly understood.
In addition, the argument that taking away someone's gun prevents them from committing suicide is a bad one. If I want to commit suicide, that is my right and you do not have a right to interfere with my choice.
Wierd. Right after the word "state." in the part you quoted, it said that it reduced homicides similarly. Guess you missed that.
FWIW, I agree with you on suicides. But it would be much safer for everyone around you if you could go to the pharmacy and purchase a cyanide cap, to be consumed only on the premises (so you didn't take it home to poison someone else). I'm thinking that, even if they had to provide a little annex for you to occupy and a free can of pop to wash it down, it would still be cheaper than a gun, and certainly less hazardous to those around you.
I don't know whether reducing the accessibility of guns reduces murders, it's entirely possible that if you sit down and think "I'm determined to kill Bill, but how?" you'll find a way, even if it's not as easy as a gun. But I'm pretty sure that it reduces homicides. I'd expect that it would reduce unplanned, spur-of-the-moment, and accidental killings, killings by small children, etc. by a lot.
In crimes of passion almost any weapon will do. A gun being present generally only changes the cause of death.
If the party doesn't have access to a gun, there may well be no "crime of passion". It's really a lot harder to kill someone with a baseball bat than it is to squeeze a trigger. You may well stop at some point short of completion and say, "shit, I didn't mean to do that".
This is evidenced by the fact that in Britain and Australia gun bans have had no effect on either suicide or homicide rates when isolated against already prevailing national crime rates and trends.
From that article, "cut firearm suicides by 74%... no evidence of substitution of method of suicide in any state. The estimated effect on firearm homicides was of similar magnitude but less precise". Other studies found no effect or were inconclusive. So I don't think you can say it is "evidenced".
You are also incorrect about the nature of homicide in the US. 70-85% of those murdered the US every year have a criminal record. Most major cities track close to 80% of there homicides resulting from gang violence.
How about "deaths by firearm"? What percentage of those have criminal records? Indeed, note that the accused perp of the Boston Marathon killings had no criminal record. But if it is true, it blows a hole in the argument that people need guns to protect themselves. At least, if they're not in gangs.
I should be clear, I am not a "gun rights" advocate, but from an economics perspective it is rather obvious that murder is price inelastic. The vast majority of murders are infact crime related. The remander are largely crimes of passion for which any serviceable weapon can and will do (suicide falls under this as well).
I'm trying to think of some category of murder that's not "crime-related", including crimes of passion. Nope, I'm drawing a blank, unless you're only talking about suicide (which I don't count as murder)..
Legally freely distributable open source software is important for folks here, but the same people pirate copyrighted movies and stuff. But if you instead torrent culture that is in public domain, there is no legal problem and you can enjoy completely free digital lifestyle.
You mean, culture that is more than 70 years out of date?
Perhaps, but in practice it doesn't matter what it was *intended* to do, only what the wording allows it to be *used* to do. And in this case, it's being used in an attempt to block unfavorable discussions.
That said, the original discussion's use would almost certainly fall within fair use, so they could just respond to the DMCA request and get their stuff put back up, putting the ball back into the court the company sending the request.
They could indeed respond to the DMCA request and get their stuff put back up. But then, potentially, lawyers get involved. And when lawyers get involved, it gets very very expensive. Maybe the EFF or the ACLU will take your case, but they don't have the staff or money (donate today!) to take every case, so they might not be able to, in which case you'll have to hire your own.
Typically I think computers don't fall behind, instead the applications have become more demanding. The applications aren't necessarily better but they do want more RAM or more CPU, often deciding that they want to load into memory and stay there before you even use them, just so that you get the instant-start when you do click the icon.
Yep, periodically I have to use AUTORUNS and stomp that stuff out. There is no earthly reason why a program that I run once every month or so should be constantly eating any RAM or CPU. I can live with it taking 20s more to start once a month, but I don't want it to be adding that 20s to every boot sequence.
It sounds like you are actually describing a bad neutral. /p>
Yes, brain bubble, sorry. Neutral. (Which is normally grounded at the panel.) In the US, 131v is alarmingly high for line voltage, no matter when the house was electrified.
Consumer CFLs are extremely voltage sensitive, particularly to over-voltage. I have an outlet that regularly spikes to 131v (house was electrified in the 30s)
If you're spiking to 131V, you may have a bad (house or pole) ground. With a good ground the voltage should never be above nominal (110-120, depending on you local utility). With a bad ground, worst case is 2X nominal (if the ground doesn't function at all), which is very dangerous.
I've been using the same ones for 11 years, one takes longer to start these days, but none have died. Perhaps they're die when a house has a bad power source?
you need a pretty clean power supply to get maximum life out of them. And going along with that, the fixture it's placed in needs to not be a complete piece of shit. Also, they have a fairly narrow optimal temperature range compared to an incandescent bulb- running them in very cold environments (such as the one above my porch where the temp drops into the -20(F) range for weeks during the winter) will drastically reduce the lifespan.
Really? I use them for front and back porch and they last a long time (multiple years) for me. Starting back when they had ballasts (heavy) and replaceable tubes, and now the integrated ones. I just use whatever cheap low-wattage ones that I find. It doesn't go to -20F for weeks here (maybe a day or two) and the lights are in sheltered (unheated, enclosed porch, but exposed bulb) locations. The only "special treatment" is that in the cold season (for about 3 months) I don't turn them off at all, a habit I started since early CFLs didn't start reliably in below-zero weather (my impression is that the newer ones do). And since that's the dark season, it's just easier to leave them on. Actually, they get left on much of the rest of the year, too, since I've lost the habit of turning them on and off. If there aren't any bad solder joints, I can't think of any reason why cold would be a problem except for starting, or maybe if it's cold enough so that the arc in the tube becomes unstable. But I've only seen unstable arcs with regular fluorescent tubes (which have a lot more surface area).
when you look at the cost of re-wiring houses, rebuilding electric grids, replacing fixtures, installing heating elements for cold-weather areas, etc. the actual energy costs to totally abandon the old-style bulbs far exceed the gains from the LED and CFC's. And that doesn't even start to account for things like asbestos removal and disposal, lead cleanup from old paint and pipes, and other environmental costs associated with replacing wiring and sockets in older buildings.
Even though I live in a neighborhood of old houses (yah, we have asbestos and lead paint) I have never heard of anyone having to do cleanup and disposal to replace a few fixtures. Why would you replace the wiring? If it could handle incandescent bulbs, it certainly can handle CFLs. And why would you muck with the furnace, ducts, or hot-water pipes (which is where the asbestos would be, I have never seen asbestos involved with wiring)? You don't need to do a gut and rehab for this job.
Flash memory has a limited number of writes, and won't power an on-board clock in any event.
The minimum number of write cycles seems to be around 10K, and could be 1M or more (depending on type of memory). If you have the least durable flash, and turn your phone off once a day, that's 27 years. (Most people don't seem to ever turn their phone off.) What do you suppose the service lifetime of the average phone is? 3 years?
Even if you assume that zeroing is 100 % sure, it has two obvious drawbacks.
1) It takes a long time. The disk has to be mounted in a computer,
Sort of. A $15 HD/USB adapter works, though it slows the process down some. But it's not as if you have to stay there and supervise it.
then written in its entirety, and read back to verify that the write was successful.
2) It does not work on drives that are broken.
This is true. For whatever reason, for me HDs that are smaller than 1G don't seem to hook up to USB very well, either.
That said, if they pass this law here, I'll ignore it. I've been waiting something like 8 years for a device I could use as a HUD in my motorcycle helmet, and I'm not about to let some insipid lawmaker ruin that for me because "for the children" etc. There will always be some irresponsible retard that does something stupid with anything. The correct course of action is to ban behaviors that get other people hurt, and let behavior that gets yourself hurt work itself out.
We're not so worried about motorcycle riders. You're presumably well aware of the fact that whoever gets hurt in an accident, you'll probably be at the head of the list. If you abuse google glasses natural selection will deal with the problem, and relatively few innocent bystanders will be endangered.
But, if you've been riding anywhere around automobiles, you've surely noticed that even now not all automobile drivers are aware of their surroundings, even without HUDs. Those are the ones who'll be killing other people, like maybe you. And, if things work out the way they usually seem to, they won't personally have a scratch on them. Distracted driving laws don't do shit, of the distracted drivers you've personally encountered on the road, how many of them have gotten pulled over there and then? Do you really want to allow heavy-equipment operators (which is what drivers are) to be posting on facebook while they're operating their machines? How about that guy who's driving the semi with the oversized load that's overtaking you? How about grandpa at the wheel of the new Winnebago that's way wider than his Ford Escort admiring pictures of the grandkids?
The only solution I can think of that excludes you is to allow head-mounted displays, but only displays that are technically restricted from displaying anything other than a specified list of driving-related information (e.g. stuff that instruments now provide). Yeah, they'll get hacked some, but you make violations automatic revocation of license time. That would solve the problem, because no driver will even be interested in something with that kind of limited functionality.
Yea,but when the client was a pure asshole about the replacement to begin with,I have NO sympathy.BTW he is long out of business now and serving 5-10 for attempted robbery.
Who knew that robbery was so lucrative that robbers needed IT consultants for the back-office work?
I mean, unless he was a banker or something like that, but they don't get jail time, they get bonuses.
It's been a number of years, but when I was looking at private, non-employer, non-family insurance the cost was only about 50% higher than the Medicare maximum premiums (~$700/month). Copays were roughly the same, at 20%.
I'm not sure where that $700 for Medicare comes from, unless you hadn't worked at least 10 years or unless you had a very high income..
Medicare Part A (hospital coverage) has no premium so long as you've worked 40 quarters of covered employment.
Medicare Part B (optional doctor visit coverage) costs $105/month, but that's adjusted every year, and was probably a lot less "a number of years" ago. That mostly has a 20% deductible, but the deductible can be less if you have Part C coverage.
Medicare Part C (optional HMO- and additional fee-for-service type coverage) and Part D (drug coverage) is sold by private insurance companies, and is all over the map depending on coverage and where you are located. There's an online search that tells you what's available. The least expensive plan in my area that includes drug coverage is $42/month and the most expensive plan is $343/month (today's prices). Copays and deductibles vary with the plan and item, the (cheap) plan that I have documentation for is typically 20%, though there are a number of things that have no copay (hey, kids, free colonoscopies!), and drugs are $0 to 30%, depending on the drug and where you get it.
Medicare is already run by the insurance industry, as is Medicaid in most States.
As for expanding Medicare to cover everyone, have you actually looked at the cost of using Medicare? It's not exactly cheap.
http://www.medicare.gov/your-medicare-costs/costs-at-a-glance/costs-at-glance.html
Nothing about medical care is cheap. But (if you're talking about Medicare Part A, the hospital coverage) it's "free" (if you're covered by enough quarters of employment), it's not covered by the insurance industry. Part B (non-hospital) isn't, either, though it's an extra $105/month. It's an order of magnitude cheaper than the alternative.
Have you looked at the costs of purchasing as an individual (without employer subsidies) comparable insurance without Medicare? If so, feel free to post the costs.
I don't know enough about Medicaid to address that issue.
My question is, why would the telecom want to remain anonymous? Wouldn't they gain plenty of positive attention from consumers if they showed they were sticking up for their privacy?
Because they're not allowed to identify themselves.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is Credo Long Distance/Mobile. More power to them, if you need LD or cell service check them out (they used to be "Working Assets" until they separated the telco stuff from the financial stuff). (They also contribute a percentage of their profits to various causes).
It is nice to see. I wonder though why it's taken this long for a ruling that actually does check some of the over reach of the govt.
It hasn't really been to court, since most telcos don't care, it's no skin off their nose. You can't fight it, because they don't tell you that it's your records the snoops want. Apparently the telco that was willing to fight in this case is cell-phone company Credo, which isn't exactly one of the big 3.
Though I don't have any great hope that higher courts will stand up for the rule of law, the govt will whisper "terrorists" and the judges will all hide under their benches.
"'Patriot Act' was a very highly manipulative naming for a very unpatriotic act. Smoke and mirrors all too common and further enabled by current major media."
Kind of like "Affordable Care Act"? The one that would fine people thousands of dollars for not buying insurance they already couldn't afford to buy?
You mean, that act that provides subsidies for low-income people to buy insurance with, and tightens the screws on employers who don't provide health insurance? That prohibits insurance companies from dumping/refusing you because you were sick?
Yeah, it's a crappy law, tailored to keep the big insurance companies happy. They should have just expanded Medicare to cover everybody (health care shouldn't have anything to do with the tender mercies of employers or insurance companies, and Medicare's overhead expense is a small fraction of what insurance companies cost), but the insurance business (which largely overlaps the financial business) is too powerful to let themselves get cut out of the picture that way.
But it's better than the previous situation, where medical problems are the #1 cause of both bankruptcy and homelessness, where the wealthy and well-insured get great care, and the hospitals have to eat the cost of care for those who can't afford it.
Do you really believe that the Muslims would have any interest in removing Nativity scenes, at least in the US? Yes, they don't believe in it, that doesn't mean they want it torn down.
Well, actually, they do believe in it, sorta. Except that they believe the kid was just a prophet like Moses, not the messiah.
If someone put up a Buddha or Ganesh or perhaps some Islamic imagery, I'm not likely to care.
Not likely to be Islamic imagery, since they aren't keen on representational art of that sort. But the point isn't whether you would care, it's that a lot of Christian fundamentalist types would. They don't want religious imagery unless it's their own particular flavor (which they do want to put up).
I can understand that we need to ensure equal time, especially with the dominance of Christian religions in the US, but one of the things that has always turned me off about vocal atheists is that they are, frankly, spoil-sports. There's no reason they have to be, but for some reason, they are. Fine, you think it's all a crock of shit, I get that, but don't be douchebags about it. Some of this stuff is lots of fun. If you really want to contribute, come up with something fun, instead of ruining everyone else's.
Yeah, some of them are spoil-sports. But I've noticed that some Christians also have a funnybone deficiency when it comes to religion. So you'd probably be ok with a Pastafarian shrine to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and think it's perfectly reasonable for the Town Council to let it be set up on the courthouse lawn. After all, meatballs and pirates, too, what could be more fun? But don't you think that in the Bible Belt, there'd be big trouble? Maybe, or maybe not, the Town Council's heads on pikes, but probably not brotherly love, in any case?
And while you'd think NRA types would go gaga over Kali (what's not to love about a cute blue female who's that into weapons), she probably wouldn't be popular on the courthouse lawn, either.
I single out Atheists, because they seem to be the most vocal in my local community when it comes to what Christians can and can't do on public land. In don't see the Muslims threatening law suits when someone wants to put a Nativity on the court house lawn.
There is probably a critical mass thing going here. There are are probably more atheists than Muslims, and they're probably not as afraid they'll become the victims of ethnic violence.
But let's say someone wanted to put a statue of Kali on the court house lawn. (You know, that's the Hindu goddess who has 10 arms, all carrying weapons, who's wearing a necklace of human skulls and dancing on a corpse.) Would the court house let them put it there? And if they did, would there be any Christians who got vocal and threatened lawsuits?
Who would have expected publicly defying the law would motivate prosecutors to come down hard on a suspect?
The "law" was a TOS/AUP. Are you saying you've never violated any of the terms of a network or website's TOS/AUP? I strongly doubt that you even read them (nobody else does either.. you may remember the game vendor who included a term ceding ownership of the user's soul to the publisher, and nobody even noticed). Do you agree that violating any of those terms ("defying the law", as you phrase it) should be treated as a felony?
Not to Godwin the thread or anything, but "I was just following orders" didn't work well as a defense at the Nuremberg trials. Just sayin'.
I think you'll find that it still works great as a defense, so long as you haven't already lost the game to the people who are putting on the trial.
Actually from my admittedly limited experience, FAA and airplane mfgrs are downright obsessive about making connections idiot proof and failsafe. It's pretty difficult to find places in an airplane where it's possible to plug the wrong things together or backwards. FAA has been dealing with Murphy for a very long time. In this case, if that's what happened, then it's one that slipped through the design and development process. FAA will mark this as a design failure and require Boeing to make it impossible to connect wrongly.
Looking at that Japanese powerpoint, it looks like that may be exactly what happened. The battery cells are rectangular with a stud on each side of the top. Not even any prominent markings to indicate polarity, though the two studs seem to be mounted with different colored rivets. You'd think they'd at least have different diameter studs for the positive and negative, and jumpers with holes to match.
If you've really used any of those alternatives, you'd know the answer: Adobe Reader is actually easier to use, install, and much more polished than the alternatives.
Actually, I've been using PDF-Xchange Viewer for several years and I think it's equal or superior to Adobe Reader on all counts. Plus, no known security holes, and has OCR built in. Biggest problem with it is nobody knows about it or where to find it, because websites say "You need Adobe Reader, click here to get it".
That's what happens when you let the suits run the companies.
It would be handy, if you actually wanted to produce pdf. Given that Adobe's pdf tools are what most people use, and that those are absolutely the largest vector for malware IN THE WORLD, I don't want any more pdf around.
Why is anyone using Adobe Reader anymore? There are several very nice alternatives, including Foxit, PDF-Xchange, Sumatra, Slim and others. I haven't used Adobe on any of my computers for years.