What is the purpose of government? Is preventing natural death a part of that purpose?
I was merely saying that in the case of those that have become 'uninsurable' the government should either force insurance companies to provide coverage or pay for it themselves.
To my mind the government exists to handle those activities whose operations are only marginally profitable or can only be operated at a loss. Insuring a person who is highly likely to die of cancer at the age of 30 is one of those duties. Few people could afford to pay the premiums that would make such a policy profitable for a private carrier
Insurance is about creating a shared pool of risk. When the pool is large, some people are going to be charged disproportinately more compared to their actually risk. This is why insurance companies like to evaluate, as much as possible, the risk factors in the people that they insure. Are you a smoker? Well then, that puts you in a different pool with a higher premium. Not a smoker? Well then you pay less.
They do this in order to save money and give lower risk people lower premiums. Life insurance for a 20yr old should cost less than for a 60 year old. In many cases we consent to divulge our age, our sexual habits, our smoking and eating habits, and family history of disease so that insurance companies can determine what risk pool we belong in. We end up sharing the risk with people who are similar to ourselves and to most of us this ideas seems basically fair.
Now I am not defending the insurance companies or the employer in this particular case. I think genetic testing at this state in the games is far from an exact science. We have found some genes that likely lead to higher incidence of some diseases, but the evidence is sparse, and in most cases we have no clear cause and effect relationship. In all cases we have barely a clue how these genes work.
But this inexact science will improve and there is no stuffing the genie back into the bottle on this one. If the tests get better and statistical studies back them up, I see no reason why the insurance companies should not be privy to the same genetic information that you are.
I am not saying that they should be able to force you to take a particular test - but if you have taken a genetic test, they should have access to that information as well. Any other solution is essentially supporting insurance fraud, like lying about your smoking, or claiming you have no history of heart disease when both your grandfather's died of heart attacks at 45.
The decision to take a test should be your own. But the results of the test should be shared with your insurer, in just the same way you would share the information with your personal physician so that she can give you better care.
Granted, this may make some people essentially 'uninsurable' - well, this is where the federal government should step in. Either forcing private insurers to take lower profits and cover the extremely high risk folks, or covering them themselves under a federally funded plan.
Everyone assumes this will automatically mean higher premiums. For some yes, for others premiums will be cheaper. Suppose you have genetic resistance to AIDS (yes, there is such a thing), and no genetic predisposition to heart disease or cancer. Wouldn't you like a break on your premiums? Or maybe you are the type that would like to pay the same as a smoker does. Not me.
As someone who suffers from more or less permanent shin splints as a result of years of running long distances in boots, this is good news. It would be nice to have something which repairs greenstick fractures, stress fractures and hairline cracks of the shin bone.
Ok, I'll ask the obvious. Why would you run for years in boots? Drill sargent? Or just unaware that better footware exists?
You sir do not understand the UNIX Philisophy. You have no business using UNIX to say such things.
Enlighten me. Explain to me what the Unix philosophy is. I myself was merely paraphrasing the philosophy Korn expressed in his answers to the slashdot questions.
Better solutions?! I would argue that GUI and console are apples and oranges.
I am not talking GUI versus console apps. You can write both GUI and console apps in Java. Java has a much better solution to code reuse than the one Korn appears to love. So does Python, or even Perl for that matter.
I would also agree with Korn that the GUI and shell belong separated at all costs.
I would argue that if people would make good GUI tools, I would not need a command shell. And actually, for the most part I almost never use one. Though I used to find them very convenient I simply do not have the time or the spare brain cells to waste on remembering the arcana of a 'find' command when I can alias control-F to pop up a nice GUI dialog that has tons of options and will nicely sort the results
Does this mean I am decades behind the times? That sounds like something Microsoft would say.
Sure does sound like something microsoft would say. But I didn't say it.
But I am a younger programmer. I don't know how 'old fart' Mr. Korn is, but it's safe to say that I am at least a few decades younger. Would this be backward evolution by your standards?
Not sure what I'd call it. Certainly not backward evolution. But you will eventually find yourself unable to compete with those who take advantage of newer technologies
I understand what he is talking about in terms of building new tools based on resuable 'toolkits' of shell commands, but I think Korn's ideas on code resuability are incredibility out of date.
The tools he talks about operate on text streams which are piped from tool to tool. There is no structure to the text streams and it is up to every tool to figure out what the stream contains on it's own. Is it HTML? A Text file?/etc/passwd? To top it off, each tools has it's own arcane syntax and combinations of command line switches - a support, training and maintenance nightmare.
This just does not strike me as a particularly good way of doing things. It was an excellent solution to the problem of resuability back in the days when hardware was slow and memory was limited. But today we have better solutions, and the only reason I could see to use these older tools is for the sake of backward compatibility.
The idea of building a web site using shell scripts strikes me as patently absurd. Sure it can be done, but why, when there are much better tools for the job - and all of these tools have solved many of the code reuse problems of the past in a much more elegant fashion than the Unix 'toolkit' has.
His comments on modern GUIs show a certain naivité about the state of the art of GUI design. Both KDE and Gnome have an extensive object models, and their own component and application toolkits which support code reuse and the building of your own personal 'toolkits'. His critique of GUIs might more appropriately be levelled at older Motif applications, where every app truly is an island unto itself.
It just seems that Korn is living a few decades behind the times. He deserves respect, but his ideas are anachronistic at best.
On receiving a web request, the first thing to do is process the input, perform any operations, and then set up necessary information for doing a page display, using a tool such as Mason, with the least possible amount of code. My Mason pages rarely contain more than a get('foo') %>.
Hopefully along with HTML and other markup. Generating HTML in code is the bigest sin of all *cough* slashcode *cough*
Ask VMWare, not apple
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
Ask VMWare to create a PowerPC emulation environment. Then you could install OSX on your PC. With some good native code translation I betcha such a thing could be plenty speedy.
.NET is Microsoft's answer to what Sun is building with J2EE and the like. The thing is, Sun has a huge head start, and they were very smart in the way they developed their iniative.
Sun decided to define a standard and provide reference implementations, but leave the rest up to everyone else. Because of this there vastly more developers currently working on J2EE and it's supporting technical infrastructure than could possibly work on.NET. There are even open source implementations (Tomcat, JBoss...)
Microsoft may be able to market.NET to death, but Sun has gained critical mindshare and momentum in the developer community, and even more importantly, in the business community. If you want to build bullet proof distributed web sites these days, some form of Java platform is the de facto standard.
I think.NET is a day late and a dollar short. It will provide a migration path for those poor souls that chose ASP early on, but I doubt the platform will steal any significant business from the firmly entrenched Java camp.
Think about it. The people likely to use cloning are those that cannot reproduce in the first place. Generally these people's genes die with them, taking with them whatever mutation lead to their infertility.
Now, cloning comes into the mix and allows these people to pass on their genes. The clone has a higher likelihood of being infertile as well (assuming the fertility problem was genetically related).
This is not neccesarily bad, but it brings with it the spectre of creating a large population of people who cannot reproduce normally - in essence a new species dependent on technology for their reproduction and entirely genetically isolated from the human population as a whole.
In the US, a movie depicting two 17 year olds having sex on prom night is child porn. It does not have to show any graphic details, just show them rolling around under a cover and bragging to friends the next day (don't want to get too detailed, then this post itself might become child porn).
Now, ask most americans if they'd think such a movie is child porn? Doubt you'd get many to say yes. Heck you can rent examples of these at the local video store.
What about the old film version of Romeo and Juliet which even goes as far as to use underaged actors? Is this child porn? God no.
Now, what about virtual porn. It get's even more difficult to legislate. Suppose the maker uses a body frame which is barely mature, say it looks about 12, then in the film has the actress say she is 18. Who is to say otherwise - its virtual after all? You might say no 18 year old looks that young, but I am sure you could find one. I once knew a 20yr old that looked about 10 if you put a 'care bear' sweatshirt on her.
My point is this, its impossible to legislate this. Most people would 'know it when they see it', but it is extremely difficult to make hard and fast rules. Let common sense and local standards sort this out - just as we have left the definition of 'obscenity' very vague in the US.
This might produce a hodge podge of standards, but I think that is better than where this is currently heading.
yikes, somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed. What, pray tell, in the original post provoked you to spew such vitriol? It's not like the guy said he was better than you, he just professed his own opinions of television. You happen to disagree. Get over it.
If you see every differing opinion as a personal attack on yourself this is going to be one long and very difficult life for you.
Yes, because the is a larger lower bound of feature size they are not going to be cranking out 1GHz CPUs on this stuff, especially when the chip is the size of a sheet of paper - it takes electrons time to get from place to place.
So this limits the power of individual processors using this process, but you can go massively parallel, just add another processor page, or 3 or 10...
This may never produce a barnstormer of a computer, but it sounds promising for consumer electronics and web appliances.
Yep the graphical client does sucks. I have a Dual Pentium III 800. When I run the graphical client maximized the things takes 100% CPU - this means it uses both CPUs. When I minimize it, it takes only 50% of CPU. So obviously there are two threads in the thing, one for the calculation engine and the other for display - and each is equally CPU hungry.
After burning through approximately 2.12E678 CPU hours of computer time in over three centuries of existence, SETI@Home is finally calling it quits.
Their search for extraterrestrials has foundered, producing only a few candidate signals per year, none of which has ever been proven to be of extraterrestrial origin. Says Lars Pendelson, current project president: "Yeah, we just can't see going on when they are more practical applications of the technology".
Those more practical applications were discovered recently when the SETI@Home team discovered a promising possible alien signal was actually a cell phone call placed by an astronaut on the Saturn space station. Lars comments, "Yeah, we were really pissed about that one - we had the code geeks working overtime decoding that one, only to discover it was some bloak talking dirty to his girl on the Saturn space station. But at least we found a practical application for the technology".
Beginning next month, the SETI@Home space array and orbital server farm will be redeployed routing cell phone traffic for Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and the asteroid belt.
Users of the SETI community were understandbly dissappointed that their pet project was going away. The slashdot community in particular was in an uproar, having just recently narrowly edged out Team Microsoft in a heated, centuries long stats battle.
Lars knows that the user community will be let down, but hopes that they realize that finding ET is an "utterly hopeless and wasteful quest." He continues, "It's just plain stupid to waste all this equipment, when cell phone service in the outlying solar system is so poor."
Their damned cell phone wouldn't work a block from the store I bought it in. (I know the store location has nothing to do with tower positions, but still, it's the principle of the thing).
I am continually stunned by the number of pundits (and yes, this author has firmly stepped into the realm of punditry with this fluff piece) who think that the Internet is somehow fundamentally different than any other 'legacy' information sources we utilize.
Somehow we get along just fine in the print world without his draconian governmentally enforced and verified 'truth'. People seem to sort it all out just fine for themselves. When I want good, reliable news I read the New York times, or CNN.com. These are names I have grown to trust over the course of my years of interaction with these organizations as a consumer of their content.
When I want sensationalism or schlock journalism I go to the Weekly World News or Matt Drudge, other outlets which have acquired a quite different reputation in my mind.
What is so different about the Internet as a source of information that somehow we now need to be protected from ourselves?
Regardless of the question of the need for such regulation, he utterly fails to address the consitutional issues that his regulations would create. I dare him to stop me from publishing lies on my own web site, via any law consistent with the US consitution. As long as I stay away from libel, slander, and inciting riots I think I will be well protected by the consitution.
Slashdot Mirror
I was merely saying that in the case of those that have become 'uninsurable' the government should either force insurance companies to provide coverage or pay for it themselves.
To my mind the government exists to handle those activities whose operations are only marginally profitable or can only be operated at a loss. Insuring a person who is highly likely to die of cancer at the age of 30 is one of those duties. Few people could afford to pay the premiums that would make such a policy profitable for a private carrier
-josh
Insurance is about creating a shared pool of risk. When the pool is large, some people are going to be charged disproportinately more compared to their actually risk. This is why insurance companies like to evaluate, as much as possible, the risk factors in the people that they insure. Are you a smoker? Well then, that puts you in a different pool with a higher premium. Not a smoker? Well then you pay less.
They do this in order to save money and give lower risk people lower premiums. Life insurance for a 20yr old should cost less than for a 60 year old. In many cases we consent to divulge our age, our sexual habits, our smoking and eating habits, and family history of disease so that insurance companies can determine what risk pool we belong in. We end up sharing the risk with people who are similar to ourselves and to most of us this ideas seems basically fair.
Now I am not defending the insurance companies or the employer in this particular case. I think genetic testing at this state in the games is far from an exact science. We have found some genes that likely lead to higher incidence of some diseases, but the evidence is sparse, and in most cases we have no clear cause and effect relationship. In all cases we have barely a clue how these genes work.
But this inexact science will improve and there is no stuffing the genie back into the bottle on this one. If the tests get better and statistical studies back them up, I see no reason why the insurance companies should not be privy to the same genetic information that you are.
I am not saying that they should be able to force you to take a particular test - but if you have taken a genetic test, they should have access to that information as well. Any other solution is essentially supporting insurance fraud, like lying about your smoking, or claiming you have no history of heart disease when both your grandfather's died of heart attacks at 45.
The decision to take a test should be your own. But the results of the test should be shared with your insurer, in just the same way you would share the information with your personal physician so that she can give you better care.
Granted, this may make some people essentially 'uninsurable' - well, this is where the federal government should step in. Either forcing private insurers to take lower profits and cover the extremely high risk folks, or covering them themselves under a federally funded plan.
Everyone assumes this will automatically mean higher premiums. For some yes, for others premiums will be cheaper. Suppose you have genetic resistance to AIDS (yes, there is such a thing), and no genetic predisposition to heart disease or cancer. Wouldn't you like a break on your premiums? Or maybe you are the type that would like to pay the same as a smoker does. Not me.
-josh
Ok, I'll ask the obvious. Why would you run for years in boots? Drill sargent? Or just unaware that better footware exists?
-josh
Enlighten me. Explain to me what the Unix philosophy is. I myself was merely paraphrasing the philosophy Korn expressed in his answers to the slashdot questions.
Better solutions?! I would argue that GUI and console are apples and oranges.
I am not talking GUI versus console apps. You can write both GUI and console apps in Java. Java has a much better solution to code reuse than the one Korn appears to love. So does Python, or even Perl for that matter.
I would also agree with Korn that the GUI and shell belong separated at all costs.
I would argue that if people would make good GUI tools, I would not need a command shell. And actually, for the most part I almost never use one. Though I used to find them very convenient I simply do not have the time or the spare brain cells to waste on remembering the arcana of a 'find' command when I can alias control-F to pop up a nice GUI dialog that has tons of options and will nicely sort the results
Does this mean I am decades behind the times? That sounds like something Microsoft would say.
Sure does sound like something microsoft would say. But I didn't say it.
But I am a younger programmer. I don't know how 'old fart' Mr. Korn is, but it's safe to say that I am at least a few decades younger. Would this be backward evolution by your standards?
Not sure what I'd call it. Certainly not backward evolution. But you will eventually find yourself unable to compete with those who take advantage of newer technologies
-josh
I understand what he is talking about in terms of building new tools based on resuable 'toolkits' of shell commands, but I think Korn's ideas on code resuability are incredibility out of date.
/etc/passwd? To top it off, each tools has it's own arcane syntax and combinations of command line switches - a support, training and maintenance nightmare.
The tools he talks about operate on text streams which are piped from tool to tool. There is no structure to the text streams and it is up to every tool to figure out what the stream contains on it's own. Is it HTML? A Text file?
This just does not strike me as a particularly good way of doing things. It was an excellent solution to the problem of resuability back in the days when hardware was slow and memory was limited. But today we have better solutions, and the only reason I could see to use these older tools is for the sake of backward compatibility.
The idea of building a web site using shell scripts strikes me as patently absurd. Sure it can be done, but why, when there are much better tools for the job - and all of these tools have solved many of the code reuse problems of the past in a much more elegant fashion than the Unix 'toolkit' has.
His comments on modern GUIs show a certain naivité about the state of the art of GUI design. Both KDE and Gnome have an extensive object models, and their own component and application toolkits which support code reuse and the building of your own personal 'toolkits'. His critique of GUIs might more appropriately be levelled at older Motif applications, where every app truly is an island unto itself.
It just seems that Korn is living a few decades behind the times. He deserves respect, but his ideas are anachronistic at best.
-josh
At 29, I think I am the oldest slashdot reader.
-josh
Hopefully along with HTML and other markup. Generating HTML in code is the bigest sin of all *cough* slashcode *cough*
-josh
Just install W2K - it just works.
-josh
Ask VMWare to create a PowerPC emulation environment. Then you could install OSX on your PC. With some good native code translation I betcha such a thing could be plenty speedy.
-josh
.NET is Microsoft's answer to what Sun is building with J2EE and the like. The thing is, Sun has a huge head start, and they were very smart in the way they developed their iniative.
.NET. There are even open source implementations (Tomcat, JBoss...)
.NET to death, but Sun has gained critical mindshare and momentum in the developer community, and even more importantly, in the business community. If you want to build bullet proof distributed web sites these days, some form of Java platform is the de facto standard.
.NET is a day late and a dollar short. It will provide a migration path for those poor souls that chose ASP early on, but I doubt the platform will steal any significant business from the firmly entrenched Java camp.
Sun decided to define a standard and provide reference implementations, but leave the rest up to everyone else. Because of this there vastly more developers currently working on J2EE and it's supporting technical infrastructure than could possibly work on
Microsoft may be able to market
I think
-josh
No, but people who are sloppy in one area tend to be sloppy in others.
And no, not asking for any specific aptitude in graphic design - a pure white background would have been better than that crap web site.
-josh
What if he needs a heart?
-josh
Think about it. The people likely to use cloning are those that cannot reproduce in the first place. Generally these people's genes die with them, taking with them whatever mutation lead to their infertility.
Now, cloning comes into the mix and allows these people to pass on their genes. The clone has a higher likelihood of being infertile as well (assuming the fertility problem was genetically related).
This is not neccesarily bad, but it brings with it the spectre of creating a large population of people who cannot reproduce normally - in essence a new species dependent on technology for their reproduction and entirely genetically isolated from the human population as a whole.
-josh
Such a good coder, and yet your web site is hideous and unreadable.
Dump the tiled background, those fell out of style years ago, and backgrounds that make the text unreadable were never in style to begin with.
-josh
In the US, a movie depicting two 17 year olds having sex on prom night is child porn. It does not have to show any graphic details, just show them rolling around under a cover and bragging to friends the next day (don't want to get too detailed, then this post itself might become child porn).
Now, ask most americans if they'd think such a movie is child porn? Doubt you'd get many to say yes. Heck you can rent examples of these at the local video store.
What about the old film version of Romeo and Juliet which even goes as far as to use underaged actors? Is this child porn? God no.
Now, what about virtual porn. It get's even more difficult to legislate. Suppose the maker uses a body frame which is barely mature, say it looks about 12, then in the film has the actress say she is 18. Who is to say otherwise - its virtual after all? You might say no 18 year old looks that young, but I am sure you could find one. I once knew a 20yr old that looked about 10 if you put a 'care bear' sweatshirt on her.
My point is this, its impossible to legislate this. Most people would 'know it when they see it', but it is extremely difficult to make hard and fast rules. Let common sense and local standards sort this out - just as we have left the definition of 'obscenity' very vague in the US.
This might produce a hodge podge of standards, but I think that is better than where this is currently heading.
-josh
huh, it was rated +2 interesting. guess noone else detected your subtle sarcasm either.
us damned literal americans...
-josh
yikes, somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed. What, pray tell, in the original post provoked you to spew such vitriol? It's not like the guy said he was better than you, he just professed his own opinions of television. You happen to disagree. Get over it.
If you see every differing opinion as a personal attack on yourself this is going to be one long and very difficult life for you.
-josh
Yes, because the is a larger lower bound of feature size they are not going to be cranking out 1GHz CPUs on this stuff, especially when the chip is the size of a sheet of paper - it takes electrons time to get from place to place.
So this limits the power of individual processors using this process, but you can go massively parallel, just add another processor page, or 3 or 10...
This may never produce a barnstormer of a computer, but it sounds promising for consumer electronics and web appliances.
-josh
Yep the graphical client does sucks. I have a Dual Pentium III 800. When I run the graphical client maximized the things takes 100% CPU - this means it uses both CPUs. When I minimize it, it takes only 50% of CPU. So obviously there are two threads in the thing, one for the calculation engine and the other for display - and each is equally CPU hungry.
-josh
according to merriam-webster both 'proved' and 'proven' are acceptable forms of the past tense of 'prove'.
Los Angeles - Jan 12, 2347
After burning through approximately 2.12E678 CPU hours of computer time in over three centuries of existence, SETI@Home is finally calling it quits.
Their search for extraterrestrials has foundered, producing only a few candidate signals per year, none of which has ever been proven to be of extraterrestrial origin. Says Lars Pendelson, current project president: "Yeah, we just can't see going on when they are more practical applications of the technology".
Those more practical applications were discovered recently when the SETI@Home team discovered a promising possible alien signal was actually a cell phone call placed by an astronaut on the Saturn space station. Lars comments, "Yeah, we were really pissed about that one - we had the code geeks working overtime decoding that one, only to discover it was some bloak talking dirty to his girl on the Saturn space station. But at least we found a practical application for the technology".
Beginning next month, the SETI@Home space array and orbital server farm will be redeployed routing cell phone traffic for Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and the asteroid belt.
Users of the SETI community were understandbly dissappointed that their pet project was going away. The slashdot community in particular was in an uproar, having just recently narrowly edged out Team Microsoft in a heated, centuries long stats battle.
Lars knows that the user community will be let down, but hopes that they realize that finding ET is an "utterly hopeless and wasteful quest." He continues, "It's just plain stupid to waste all this equipment, when cell phone service in the outlying solar system is so poor."
Their damned cell phone wouldn't work a block from the store I bought it in. (I know the store location has nothing to do with tower positions, but still, it's the principle of the thing).
-josh
I am sure the directional finder always lead to the local trailer park.
-josh
He actually thinks the government and corporate America are seperate entities.
-josh
I am continually stunned by the number of pundits (and yes, this author has firmly stepped into the realm of punditry with this fluff piece) who think that the Internet is somehow fundamentally different than any other 'legacy' information sources we utilize.
Somehow we get along just fine in the print world without his draconian governmentally enforced and verified 'truth'. People seem to sort it all out just fine for themselves. When I want good, reliable news I read the New York times, or CNN.com. These are names I have grown to trust over the course of my years of interaction with these organizations as a consumer of their content.
When I want sensationalism or schlock journalism I go to the Weekly World News or Matt Drudge, other outlets which have acquired a quite different reputation in my mind.
What is so different about the Internet as a source of information that somehow we now need to be protected from ourselves?
Regardless of the question of the need for such regulation, he utterly fails to address the consitutional issues that his regulations would create. I dare him to stop me from publishing lies on my own web site, via any law consistent with the US consitution. As long as I stay away from libel, slander, and inciting riots I think I will be well protected by the consitution.
-josh