When I looked at that, it seemed to me you need an enclosure to go with it (for things like power etc.). HP offer 3 different enclosure prices: $4299 (with a 'trial' licence, whatever that is...), $4999, and $7791...
8 blades @ 379 + enclosure @ 4299 => $7331
8 x Mac mini server => $7992
So on cost the HP just about wins out if you max it out (still worried about that 'trial' label though. If you go for a 'full' licence, the HP costs $10823; the price gets steadily more in favour of the minis as you drop the servers as well...
That doesn't take into account that the $379 machine is a 1GB 1.8GHz Celeron either, not a 2.53GHz 4GB Core Duo either...
You're missing the point. From my perspective, it's the USA that's the crazy foreign government...
If I've got a UK passport for myself and my child has UK citizenship by birthright ( and therefore a UK passport), there's not a whole lot the US can do without raising a massive international incident. Which they're not going to do to a UK citizen.
FWIW, my uncle was recently diagnosed with a heart problem back in the UK, he was in hospital the same day, operated on within 2 days and back home 2 days later. The only real down-side was that he couldn't attend the wedding because of the US insurance costs.
And two weeks before the wedding, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She opted to put off the operation-date offered (1 week after diagnosis) and wait until after the wedding. Since then she's been back and had her operation.
Cancer survival rates are 50% higher in the US than in the UK. Go look it up, the data is on NHS's website. NHS is not the rosy picture you think it is.
No, it's not. See my reply below to nomadic.
Only 15% of America is uninsured. We do not have a healthcare problem.
Right there, I see a dichotomy. I really hope (for your sake) that you don't lose your job and then get diagnosed with cancer. That would really suck, for you, as an american. As a Brit, all you'd be worrying about is recovering from the disease. As a Yank, you have to worry about paying for it as well.
Actually that's not a survival rate, that's a 5-year survival rate.
The issue here is when it is first detected. The US has a medical system based on money coming into the medical profession, so people go and get tested more often, normally at a doctor's urging. Typically a cancer is detected at an earlier stage then, which is when the clock starts ticking. In the UK, women go for breast-cancer tests every 2 years, at my mother's age (at least she gets called in that often, I'm generalising).
The sad fact is that people who die from cancer would probably (there's no certainty in this for obvious reasons) die at the same time under either system - it's just that because it's detected earlier in the USA, the 5-year statistic is boosted for the USA.
In my mother's case, the tumour was 5mm across (3/16" for those non metricized:) . If it was detected a year earlier, it may have been smaller (if it existed, of course, we don't know).
Citing the same statistics, the UK beats the USA on average lifespan, infant mortality, and post-natal periods for both child and mother. Most people, when dying of old age, die of cancer of one form or another. If the UK's cancer statistics are so bad, how come people generally live longer in the UK ?
I'm aware of that - and I was split on which way to post it, in fact. The post I was replying to was talking about soviet-style healthcare though, and I thought it was more appropriate to use the old designation, since he was talking about that era. *shrug* it was a toss-up....
Well, yes, but *everyone* pays the same tax-rates, whether you go to university or not. You could argue that the marginal cost for university education is therefore zero.
However, what I meant to say was that I walked out of London University at the end of 3 years with a B.Sc. in Physics and an overdraft facility of ~£1000. The government paid my tuition fees every year, and gave me the standard grant (£1700 IIRC, which seems such a small amount these days). This grant paid for my lodgings and food (oh, and beer of course), except that I spent more than that (mainly on beer) so every year I worked my Summer holidays to get back down to zero - even at minimum wage working behind a bar, it's pretty easy to earn that sort of money when you're living at home with parents:)
Once I'd finished my undergraduate degree, and taken another 8 weeks to work off my debts, I decided to do a PhD. The standard government grant for that felt like riches - about £5000 per year IIRC. That meant I could get my own pad rather than sharing a flat - life was good.
At no time did I ever entertain the idea of taking on the sort of crippling loans that my wife has finally paid off, 7 years after getting her graduate degree. I was the first person in my family to ever go to college, in fact my uncle tried to talk me out of it. Credit to him, 10 years later, he told me he regretted talking his own sons out of it. I would never have gone if the financial burden was as great as today's students have to shoulder, and a lot of people on this site (who use what I make) would have lives ever so slightly worse as a result.
... but there are many many different places in the world, some of which are outside the USA. Most of these places have different laws, customs, and living standards. The UK is not Czechoslovakia...
If I didn't care about the state of play in the USA, I'd just up and leave, taking my family and my considerable yearly tax burden with me. I choose to stay and try to influence people as I can...
FWIW, my uncle was recently diagnosed with a heart problem back in the UK, he was in hospital the same day, operated on within 2 days and back home 2 days later. The only real down-side was that he couldn't attend the wedding because of the US insurance costs.
And two weeks before the wedding, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She opted to put off the operation-date offered (1 week after diagnosis) and wait until after the wedding. Since then she's been back and had her operation.
My family is not rich. My father worked on the docks, my mother had a variety of part-time jobs through her life. Excellent, timely medical care is something she (and I, until I moved to the USA) take for granted, without any "recission", or "previously established medical condition" nonsense. If you're sick, see a doctor. Get better with as much or as little help as necessary. No co-payments. No payments (at the point of treatment) at all, and if you need heart surgery or extensive (5 years chemotherapy is being talked about for my mother) treatment, there's no questions asked...
There's no way my family could have afforded the medical insurance that would be equivalent to the care that my mother and uncle have just received. They of course don't consider this to be anything special, it's only when you don't have something any more, that you miss it. Similarly, I don't think americans miss it because frankly they've never experienced it. They just keep on telling themselves they have "the best healthcare system in the world", which (IMHO) is only true for the minority of rich americans that don't really need the insurance companies anyway...
The problem is one of treating education as a business like any other. The country obtains a benefit from having an educated citizenry, and allowing education of this type to be treated as just another profit-center is at best short-sighted, at worst actively hostile to the country's best interests. From this basic problem, everything else flows.
I'm from the UK, and just recently I've been reflecting on the things that I took for granted in the UK that are pay-for over here in the USA. Don't get me wrong, I love living here, I've just married an USAsian who's simply wonderful, but there are things I miss...
Primarily of course, is universal healthcare. The NHS is so far and away better than the situation we have here in the US that it's just not funny. Leaving that argument aside, the other major thing is education. My new wife and I were thinking about where any future offspring might be educated...
If the USA stays the same course as it's currently on, I think my children (as UK citizens by birthright) may be going to the UK for their education. It's a lot cheaper, it'll broaden their minds by travelling, and the quality is generally very high.
Oh how things have changed. I no longer think of the USA as being the gold-standard of higher education. Now I think of it as being just a way of transferring money from rich people to educated people.
As it happens, my wife paid off her student loans (for a JD/MBA) this evening (well, they'll settle on Tuesday). For the cost she just paid, we could buy a small house in the UK. The only debt higher is our mortgage, and living in a nice house in a nice part of the Bay area, that's expected.
I didn't pay for my education (although these days if you don't go to Scotland you pay something in the UK - it's a *lot* less than over here in the US though). I gave the UK about 10 years of higher taxes as a result - probably less than they were expecting - but moved to the USA for the nicer weather:)
I should have been clearer perhaps. I did read the patent...
Xanadu was a graphical 3D game where you clicked on command buttons alongside the main view and commands were sent to the server to update the server's state. Some of the buttons cast spells (eg fireball) and the server then propogated the fireball's progress to affected clients periodically. Similarly, we raytraced sound volume, so you could hear around corners. Loud events propogated further. This was implemented using asynchronous socket comms, with the server periodically sending out updates to clients that needed them, even if that client hadn't requested any change. In our code, clients were dumb and the server calculated everything - and this would appear to be the same thing as they're talking about with their bandwidth reduction.
Back when I was doing my PhD, I (together with a friend) wrote a networked game called Xanadu (Xanadu - A New Adventure Dungeon Underground was the rather strained recursive acronym) for X workstations. We even connected across London from different colleges to the same server running on my Decstation 3100. That was in 1991, which seems to handily predate these patents. I still have a backup CDROM of the source code alongside all of my other (thesis) code...
I remember pulling all-nighters in college, and I specifically remember the first time we successfully connected using the commandline client and moved a character from X,Y to X,Y+1, thus validating the movement routines - there were a lot of firsts for us back in that code: socket programming (thankyou Stevens), bitfields in structures, function pointer tables, etc. To see it all work at 3:00 am was a major high. Kid's stuff today, of course:)
Anyway, much as I'd love to think of myself as a prodigy, it seems this patent falls afoul of the obvious clause, and if blizzard or whomever want to get in touch for some patent-busting source code, just feel free:)
Oh for [insert deity]'s sake, it's obvious that payment is made somehow - I thought that could be taken as read... If all you got from that was that I thought the emergency services somehow magically work unpaid, your reading comprehension isn't that good.
I direct you to the part in the post...
All of this is standard-stuff, she pays her dues (in her taxes / national insurance contributions), and she has the peace-of-mind that comes from knowing she has access to excellent health-care whenever she wants it, without being suddenly landed with huge bills, and without any worry of 'recission' by a financially-orientated insurance company.
... where it ought to be obvious that the payment is being made from national insurance/taxes contributions.
The difference between you and I is that I think the low cost ($20/month if you're working) is well worth the peace of mind it brings. I'm also happy to pay that much per month to fund other people's well being - and from what I see on TV/read in newspapers, that's not a concept that sits well with a lot of people in the USA.
Funnily enough, I was in a motorbike accident myself before I came over to the USA. Nowhere near as bad as your own (I was very lucky) but I was in hospital for a couple of days, rode there in the ambulance, had police and fire trucks called out to the scene etc. There was no charge, and it didn't cross my mind that there would be...
Any (every ?) government gets a lot of flak for pretty much anything it does - you can't please all the people all the time and all that, but at the end of the day, they're not trying to make a profit. Any private institution has to run all the same risks, spend all the same money, and also make a return on the investment. Normally I'm fully behind this as a great motivator for the company concerned, but when the easy option is to simply screw the "customer" in order to turn a profit, I'm not so sure.
In any event, the point of my post wasn't about people like you and I, with good medical insurance coverage. It was because I don't believe *anyone* should be concerned about medical coverage, even if that costs me something. That, I think, is a big cultural divide between the US and the UK on this matter, not just the public/private debate.
My fiancee is in fact more-qualified than I, she has a JD/MBA. However, she is still paying off student debts (another thing I didn't have to worry about in the UK, but that's another rant altogether:) and has only got a position as a long-term contractor; she would have had to pay her own medical insurance without any company aid, which (even with her income) is simply ridiculously expensive. If a well-educated well-to-do person can't afford medical insurance, something is rotten in the state of Denmark...
As far as the argument that you don't trust the government because of its past performance, it seems you do trust an insurance company, despite all evidence to the contrary of how they behave when you need them to pay up. Anyone who's been involved in a car accident would probably attest that (a) they screw you if they can, and (b) they screw you later by increasing your premiums, even if they somehow didn't manage to screw you via (a).
On top of that, Medical insurance agencies have come up with (c), a new evil: "recission". This is where they go back through your file looking for any possible (no matter how tenuous) excuse to retroactively cancel your insurance (even after payment has been initially made), leaving you with the huge bill that you might even have thought was already paid, and no possibility of getting any medical insurance in the future. I read of a case where a fall by the pregnant mother cancelled a policy by the adult daughter when the daughter developed vision problems at age 27.
I'm sorry, but that just sucks. Really. Really. Really sucks.
Unless it's a prank call (and even then, you normally just get a ticking-off by an irate policeman from what I've read), when would any emergency-service make you PAY for its use ? Isn't the whole point of an emergency service to be there when you need it ? What the hell do you do if you can't afford an emergency service ?
I'm guessing the whole 'paying' idea is a USA thing, although my apologies to the US for assuming that, if there's anywhere else that's so screwed up that they make you pay for essential services.
I've recently had very bad news in my family - in the space of two weeks, my uncle has been told he needs heart surgery, and my mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer. My uncle has been scheduled for surgery on 15th of this month, and my mother has put off her appointment (originally on the 11th) because I'm getting married on the 12th. She'll be going under the knife on 19th instead. My uncle will be missing the wedding, but we're going to stream it live so he can watch it in the UK, even if it is at midnight over there:)
I thank my lucky stars we're from the UK, because there's just no way our family could afford their treatment over here in the USA - my uncle's heart surgery would cost circa $175,000, my mother's cancer treatment and subsequent costs could come to circa $100,000. We've never had money - I was the first kid in our family to go to college for example, and I had to pay my way through that. We've always scraped-by and made-do, mother and father working, grandmother looking after the kids etc. Over here, I'm lucky in that I have an excellent medical insurance plan from my company, but my fiancee didn't have medical insurance until we met. She used to try not to visit a doctor, to self-medicate via a drugstore if something was wrong. I was horrified that someone would even consider that. Seriously and truthfully - I was aghast that a visit to the doctors wasn't just "what you'd do if you're not feeling well". It's just a no-brainer from my (and anyone from the UK, I suspect) perspective.
For her part, my mother gets personal visits in her home from the MacMillan nurse (cancer specialist nurses, there to answer any questions, give advice, as well as do the nursing stuff), and she has one of the best surgical teams in the country ready to operate when she gets back to the UK. All of this is standard-stuff, she pays her dues (in her taxes / national insurance contributions), and she has the peace-of-mind that comes from knowing she has access to excellent health-care whenever she wants it, without being suddenly landed with huge bills, and without any worry of 'recission' by a financially-orientated insurance company.
There's a lot I like (even prefer) about the USA, but the healthcare system is (from an outsiders perspective) a badge of shame. Everyone gets sick eventually, and everyone dies eventually. Any civilised country ought to recognise and cope with that such that people don't fall through the cracks. The NHS in the UK isn't perfect - you'll frequently hear Brits complaining about it - but it's head, shoulders, and torso above the system over here. I still pay my 'national insurance' in the UK, even though I live in the US - the cost is minimal (about £15/month), and I don't mind helping fund something today that I (or, say, a member of my family) might make use of tomorrow. To me, it's beyond belief that people in the USA fight *against* a similar system, but hey, each to their own. I don't get to vote over here so it's not as though I can do anything about it...
Bottom line: In the UK, health follows an almost burger-king like mantra - "you need it? You got it!" whereas in the USA, you're trusting your health and possibly your life to the same sort of company that screws you
I'm confused, how can one "murder" an animal ? I can see how you can kill it (perhaps by poaching on someone else's property), but how does one "murder" a non-human ? As far as I can tell, the dictionary defines murder as "the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another".
I get that you're against killing animals. I can even understand that, but using emotionally-charged words like 'murder' when they don't apply just weakens the rest of your argument, at least to me.
Yep. The first time I heard a police/army officer described as a loo-tenant I thought he was living in a toilet (restroom/bathroom to you yanks). I reckon that's why the British version of lieutenant is pronounced (incomprehensibly) as 'lef-tenant'.
(No, not really, for the humour-impaired. It's probably due to the 'u' being mistaken for a 'v', can typically migrate to 'f' over time.)
Define "truck". If you include SUV's then I'd agree (in the US) that ~40% of vehicles are "trucks". I don't really consider an SUV to be a truck though, in my eyes it's an inefficient petrol-guzzling boat of a car. Trucks are the 18+ wheel vehicles or RV's. Something of that size anyway.
40% means that almost one in two would have to be a "truck". So you're in a car, and the vehicle in-front is a truck, then a car, then a truck etc. I don't see that (using my definition of truck, anyway) where I drive.
The examples are correct. If you go from requiring 5 units to 4 units of fuel, it's the same *saving* (not expenditure) as going from 2 units to 1 unit of fuel. In both cases, you *save* 1 unit. In the second example, 180/12 is actually 15, so you're saving 5 (15-10) units here, as you are when going from 30mpg to 180. (6-1).
His point is therefore that improving the worse-performing engines (SUV's, trucks, vans, lorries, busses, etc.) so that they *save* an extra N units of fuel will be the largest factor in reducing the fuel consumption. For each truck that gains 6 miles/gallon in efficiency, you'd need a car that gained 120 miles/gallon, or 2 that gained 60,...
FWIW, I think his argument falters when you take into account the overwhelming number of cars on the road, compared to other vehicles. If you figure a 20:1 ratio, then that saving of 120 miles/gallon is still only (6*20) or 6 miles/gallon/car. The reciprocal problem, however, is one of uptake (you need 20 cars to have their efficiency increased for the effect of 1 truck, if both cars and trucks gain 6mpg). Personally I think it probably comes out in the wash, so we should strive to improve both:) Nothing like sitting on the fence:)
Rename a file: click the icon. Click it again. Note that the icon name is now editable, and the selection has been set to preserve the extension. Type the new name and press return.
How to backspace:Press the 'delete backwards' key positioned slightly above the 'return' key'. To delete forwards, press the 'delete forwards' key above the cursor keys. (Shakes head in disbelief that this could confuse *anyone*)
Run a program: Either do as you say (and if this is a commonly-used app, drag it to the dock after the first time. Thereafter it's just a click-on-an-icon away), or click on the spotlight menu-extra and type the name. Hit return.
Perhaps you ought to *use* a Mac before slating it...
Slashdot Mirror
When I looked at that, it seemed to me you need an enclosure to go with it (for things like power etc.). HP offer 3 different enclosure prices: $4299 (with a 'trial' licence, whatever that is...), $4999, and $7791...
8 blades @ 379 + enclosure @ 4299 => $7331
8 x Mac mini server => $7992
So on cost the HP just about wins out if you max it out (still worried about that 'trial' label though. If you go for a 'full' licence, the HP costs $10823; the price gets steadily more in favour of the minis as you drop the servers as well...
That doesn't take into account that the $379 machine is a 1GB 1.8GHz Celeron either, not a 2.53GHz 4GB Core Duo either...
Simon
You're missing the point. From my perspective, it's the USA that's the crazy foreign government...
If I've got a UK passport for myself and my child has UK citizenship by birthright ( and therefore a UK passport), there's not a whole lot the US can do without raising a massive international incident. Which they're not going to do to a UK citizen.
Simon.
FWIW, my uncle was recently diagnosed with a heart problem back in the UK, he was in hospital the same day, operated on within 2 days and back home 2 days later. The only real down-side was that he couldn't attend the wedding because of the US insurance costs.
And two weeks before the wedding, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She opted to put off the operation-date offered (1 week after diagnosis) and wait until after the wedding. Since then she's been back and had her operation.
Cancer survival rates are 50% higher in the US than in the UK. Go look it up, the data is on NHS's website. NHS is not the rosy picture you think it is.
No, it's not. See my reply below to nomadic.
Only 15% of America is uninsured. We do not have a healthcare problem.
Right there, I see a dichotomy. I really hope (for your sake) that you don't lose your job and then get diagnosed with cancer. That would really suck, for you, as an american. As a Brit, all you'd be worrying about is recovering from the disease. As a Yank, you have to worry about paying for it as well.
Simon
Actually that's not a survival rate, that's a 5-year survival rate.
:) . If it was detected a year earlier, it may have been smaller (if it existed, of course, we don't know).
The issue here is when it is first detected. The US has a medical system based on money coming into the medical profession, so people go and get tested more often, normally at a doctor's urging. Typically a cancer is detected at an earlier stage then, which is when the clock starts ticking. In the UK, women go for breast-cancer tests every 2 years, at my mother's age (at least she gets called in that often, I'm generalising).
The sad fact is that people who die from cancer would probably (there's no certainty in this for obvious reasons) die at the same time under either system - it's just that because it's detected earlier in the USA, the 5-year statistic is boosted for the USA.
In my mother's case, the tumour was 5mm across (3/16" for those non metricized
Citing the same statistics, the UK beats the USA on average lifespan, infant mortality, and post-natal periods for both child and mother. Most people, when dying of old age, die of cancer of one form or another. If the UK's cancer statistics are so bad, how come people generally live longer in the UK ?
Simon
Surprise buddy. You're wrong. On both counts.
Simon
I'm aware of that - and I was split on which way to post it, in fact. The post I was replying to was talking about soviet-style healthcare though, and I thought it was more appropriate to use the old designation, since he was talking about that era. *shrug* it was a toss-up....
Simon
Well, yes, but *everyone* pays the same tax-rates, whether you go to university or not. You could argue that the marginal cost for university education is therefore zero.
:)
However, what I meant to say was that I walked out of London University at the end of 3 years with a B.Sc. in Physics and an overdraft facility of ~£1000. The government paid my tuition fees every year, and gave me the standard grant (£1700 IIRC, which seems such a small amount these days). This grant paid for my lodgings and food (oh, and beer of course), except that I spent more than that (mainly on beer) so every year I worked my Summer holidays to get back down to zero - even at minimum wage working behind a bar, it's pretty easy to earn that sort of money when you're living at home with parents
Once I'd finished my undergraduate degree, and taken another 8 weeks to work off my debts, I decided to do a PhD. The standard government grant for that felt like riches - about £5000 per year IIRC. That meant I could get my own pad rather than sharing a flat - life was good.
At no time did I ever entertain the idea of taking on the sort of crippling loans that my wife has finally paid off, 7 years after getting her graduate degree. I was the first person in my family to ever go to college, in fact my uncle tried to talk me out of it. Credit to him, 10 years later, he told me he regretted talking his own sons out of it. I would never have gone if the financial burden was as great as today's students have to shoulder, and a lot of people on this site (who use what I make) would have lives ever so slightly worse as a result.
Simon
My sister just bought a place for £65k. Simon
... but there are many many different places in the world, some of which are outside the USA. Most of these places have different laws, customs, and living standards. The UK is not Czechoslovakia...
If I didn't care about the state of play in the USA, I'd just up and leave, taking my family and my considerable yearly tax burden with me. I choose to stay and try to influence people as I can...
FWIW, my uncle was recently diagnosed with a heart problem back in the UK, he was in hospital the same day, operated on within 2 days and back home 2 days later. The only real down-side was that he couldn't attend the wedding because of the US insurance costs.
And two weeks before the wedding, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She opted to put off the operation-date offered (1 week after diagnosis) and wait until after the wedding. Since then she's been back and had her operation.
My family is not rich. My father worked on the docks, my mother had a variety of part-time jobs through her life. Excellent, timely medical care is something she (and I, until I moved to the USA) take for granted, without any "recission", or "previously established medical condition" nonsense. If you're sick, see a doctor. Get better with as much or as little help as necessary. No co-payments. No payments (at the point of treatment) at all, and if you need heart surgery or extensive (5 years chemotherapy is being talked about for my mother) treatment, there's no questions asked...
There's no way my family could have afforded the medical insurance that would be equivalent to the care that my mother and uncle have just received. They of course don't consider this to be anything special, it's only when you don't have something any more, that you miss it. Similarly, I don't think americans miss it because frankly they've never experienced it. They just keep on telling themselves they have "the best healthcare system in the world", which (IMHO) is only true for the minority of rich americans that don't really need the insurance companies anyway...
Simon
The problem is one of treating education as a business like any other. The country obtains a benefit from having an educated citizenry, and allowing education of this type to be treated as just another profit-center is at best short-sighted, at worst actively hostile to the country's best interests. From this basic problem, everything else flows.
:)
I'm from the UK, and just recently I've been reflecting on the things that I took for granted in the UK that are pay-for over here in the USA. Don't get me wrong, I love living here, I've just married an USAsian who's simply wonderful, but there are things I miss...
Primarily of course, is universal healthcare. The NHS is so far and away better than the situation we have here in the US that it's just not funny. Leaving that argument aside, the other major thing is education. My new wife and I were thinking about where any future offspring might be educated...
If the USA stays the same course as it's currently on, I think my children (as UK citizens by birthright) may be going to the UK for their education. It's a lot cheaper, it'll broaden their minds by travelling, and the quality is generally very high.
Oh how things have changed. I no longer think of the USA as being the gold-standard of higher education. Now I think of it as being just a way of transferring money from rich people to educated people.
As it happens, my wife paid off her student loans (for a JD/MBA) this evening (well, they'll settle on Tuesday). For the cost she just paid, we could buy a small house in the UK. The only debt higher is our mortgage, and living in a nice house in a nice part of the Bay area, that's expected.
I didn't pay for my education (although these days if you don't go to Scotland you pay something in the UK - it's a *lot* less than over here in the US though). I gave the UK about 10 years of higher taxes as a result - probably less than they were expecting - but moved to the USA for the nicer weather
Simon.
Parent spouts bollocks. Simon.
I should have been clearer perhaps. I did read the patent...
Xanadu was a graphical 3D game where you clicked on command buttons alongside the main view and commands were sent to the server to update the server's state. Some of the buttons cast spells (eg fireball) and the server then propogated the fireball's progress to affected clients periodically. Similarly, we raytraced sound volume, so you could hear around corners. Loud events propogated further. This was implemented using asynchronous socket comms, with the server periodically sending out updates to clients that needed them, even if that client hadn't requested any change. In our code, clients were dumb and the server calculated everything - and this would appear to be the same thing as they're talking about with their bandwidth reduction.
Simon
Back when I was doing my PhD, I (together with a friend) wrote a networked game called Xanadu (Xanadu - A New Adventure Dungeon Underground was the rather strained recursive acronym) for X workstations. We even connected across London from different colleges to the same server running on my Decstation 3100. That was in 1991, which seems to handily predate these patents. I still have a backup CDROM of the source code alongside all of my other (thesis) code ...
:)
:)
I remember pulling all-nighters in college, and I specifically remember the first time we successfully connected using the commandline client and moved a character from X,Y to X,Y+1, thus validating the movement routines - there were a lot of firsts for us back in that code: socket programming (thankyou Stevens), bitfields in structures, function pointer tables, etc. To see it all work at 3:00 am was a major high. Kid's stuff today, of course
Anyway, much as I'd love to think of myself as a prodigy, it seems this patent falls afoul of the obvious clause, and if blizzard or whomever want to get in touch for some patent-busting source code, just feel free
Simon
I direct you to the part in the post
... where it ought to be obvious that the payment is being made from national insurance/taxes contributions.
The difference between you and I is that I think the low cost ($20/month if you're working) is well worth the peace of mind it brings. I'm also happy to pay that much per month to fund other people's well being - and from what I see on TV/read in newspapers, that's not a concept that sits well with a lot of people in the USA.
Simon
Funnily enough, I was in a motorbike accident myself before I came over to the USA. Nowhere near as bad as your own (I was very lucky) but I was in hospital for a couple of days, rode there in the ambulance, had police and fire trucks called out to the scene etc. There was no charge, and it didn't cross my mind that there would be...
:) and has only got a position as a long-term contractor; she would have had to pay her own medical insurance without any company aid, which (even with her income) is simply ridiculously expensive. If a well-educated well-to-do person can't afford medical insurance, something is rotten in the state of Denmark...
Any (every ?) government gets a lot of flak for pretty much anything it does - you can't please all the people all the time and all that, but at the end of the day, they're not trying to make a profit. Any private institution has to run all the same risks, spend all the same money, and also make a return on the investment. Normally I'm fully behind this as a great motivator for the company concerned, but when the easy option is to simply screw the "customer" in order to turn a profit, I'm not so sure.
In any event, the point of my post wasn't about people like you and I, with good medical insurance coverage. It was because I don't believe *anyone* should be concerned about medical coverage, even if that costs me something. That, I think, is a big cultural divide between the US and the UK on this matter, not just the public/private debate.
My fiancee is in fact more-qualified than I, she has a JD/MBA. However, she is still paying off student debts (another thing I didn't have to worry about in the UK, but that's another rant altogether
As far as the argument that you don't trust the government because of its past performance, it seems you do trust an insurance company, despite all evidence to the contrary of how they behave when you need them to pay up. Anyone who's been involved in a car accident would probably attest that (a) they screw you if they can, and (b) they screw you later by increasing your premiums, even if they somehow didn't manage to screw you via (a).
On top of that, Medical insurance agencies have come up with (c), a new evil: "recission". This is where they go back through your file looking for any possible (no matter how tenuous) excuse to retroactively cancel your insurance (even after payment has been initially made), leaving you with the huge bill that you might even have thought was already paid, and no possibility of getting any medical insurance in the future. I read of a case where a fall by the pregnant mother cancelled a policy by the adult daughter when the daughter developed vision problems at age 27.
I'm sorry, but that just sucks. Really. Really. Really sucks.
Simon
Unless it's a prank call (and even then, you normally just get a ticking-off by an irate policeman from what I've read), when would any emergency-service make you PAY for its use ? Isn't the whole point of an emergency service to be there when you need it ? What the hell do you do if you can't afford an emergency service ?
:)
I'm guessing the whole 'paying' idea is a USA thing, although my apologies to the US for assuming that, if there's anywhere else that's so screwed up that they make you pay for essential services.
I've recently had very bad news in my family - in the space of two weeks, my uncle has been told he needs heart surgery, and my mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer. My uncle has been scheduled for surgery on 15th of this month, and my mother has put off her appointment (originally on the 11th) because I'm getting married on the 12th. She'll be going under the knife on 19th instead. My uncle will be missing the wedding, but we're going to stream it live so he can watch it in the UK, even if it is at midnight over there
I thank my lucky stars we're from the UK, because there's just no way our family could afford their treatment over here in the USA - my uncle's heart surgery would cost circa $175,000, my mother's cancer treatment and subsequent costs could come to circa $100,000. We've never had money - I was the first kid in our family to go to college for example, and I had to pay my way through that. We've always scraped-by and made-do, mother and father working, grandmother looking after the kids etc. Over here, I'm lucky in that I have an excellent medical insurance plan from my company, but my fiancee didn't have medical insurance until we met. She used to try not to visit a doctor, to self-medicate via a drugstore if something was wrong. I was horrified that someone would even consider that. Seriously and truthfully - I was aghast that a visit to the doctors wasn't just "what you'd do if you're not feeling well". It's just a no-brainer from my (and anyone from the UK, I suspect) perspective.
For her part, my mother gets personal visits in her home from the MacMillan nurse (cancer specialist nurses, there to answer any questions, give advice, as well as do the nursing stuff), and she has one of the best surgical teams in the country ready to operate when she gets back to the UK. All of this is standard-stuff, she pays her dues (in her taxes / national insurance contributions), and she has the peace-of-mind that comes from knowing she has access to excellent health-care whenever she wants it, without being suddenly landed with huge bills, and without any worry of 'recission' by a financially-orientated insurance company.
There's a lot I like (even prefer) about the USA, but the healthcare system is (from an outsiders perspective) a badge of shame. Everyone gets sick eventually, and everyone dies eventually. Any civilised country ought to recognise and cope with that such that people don't fall through the cracks. The NHS in the UK isn't perfect - you'll frequently hear Brits complaining about it - but it's head, shoulders, and torso above the system over here. I still pay my 'national insurance' in the UK, even though I live in the US - the cost is minimal (about £15/month), and I don't mind helping fund something today that I (or, say, a member of my family) might make use of tomorrow. To me, it's beyond belief that people in the USA fight *against* a similar system, but hey, each to their own. I don't get to vote over here so it's not as though I can do anything about it...
Bottom line: In the UK, health follows an almost burger-king like mantra - "you need it? You got it!" whereas in the USA, you're trusting your health and possibly your life to the same sort of company that screws you
See here
Money quote: "Battery life to die for"...
Simon
I'm confused, how can one "murder" an animal ? I can see how you can kill it (perhaps by poaching on someone else's property), but how does one "murder" a non-human ? As far as I can tell, the dictionary defines murder as "the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another".
I get that you're against killing animals. I can even understand that, but using emotionally-charged words like 'murder' when they don't apply just weakens the rest of your argument, at least to me.
Simon.
Now now, your jealousy is starting to show through...
Yep. The first time I heard a police/army officer described as a loo-tenant I thought he was living in a toilet (restroom/bathroom to you yanks). I reckon that's why the British version of lieutenant is pronounced (incomprehensibly) as 'lef-tenant'.
(No, not really, for the humour-impaired. It's probably due to the 'u' being mistaken for a 'v', can typically migrate to 'f' over time.)
Simon
I guess there's not as many "ringworld" fans on /. as I'd expected.
Simon.
... as any fule know, is associated with a reduced defence mechanism and is therefore a sign of insanity.
Simon (pulling some strings)
Define "truck". If you include SUV's then I'd agree (in the US) that ~40% of vehicles are "trucks". I don't really consider an SUV to be a truck though, in my eyes it's an inefficient petrol-guzzling boat of a car. Trucks are the 18+ wheel vehicles or RV's. Something of that size anyway.
40% means that almost one in two would have to be a "truck". So you're in a car, and the vehicle in-front is a truck, then a car, then a truck etc. I don't see that (using my definition of truck, anyway) where I drive.
Simon
The examples are correct. If you go from requiring 5 units to 4 units of fuel, it's the same *saving* (not expenditure) as going from 2 units to 1 unit of fuel. In both cases, you *save* 1 unit. In the second example, 180/12 is actually 15, so you're saving 5 (15-10) units here, as you are when going from 30mpg to 180. (6-1).
...
:) Nothing like sitting on the fence :)
His point is therefore that improving the worse-performing engines (SUV's, trucks, vans, lorries, busses, etc.) so that they *save* an extra N units of fuel will be the largest factor in reducing the fuel consumption. For each truck that gains 6 miles/gallon in efficiency, you'd need a car that gained 120 miles/gallon, or 2 that gained 60,
FWIW, I think his argument falters when you take into account the overwhelming number of cars on the road, compared to other vehicles. If you figure a 20:1 ratio, then that saving of 120 miles/gallon is still only (6*20) or 6 miles/gallon/car. The reciprocal problem, however, is one of uptake (you need 20 cars to have their efficiency increased for the effect of 1 truck, if both cars and trucks gain 6mpg). Personally I think it probably comes out in the wash, so we should strive to improve both
Simon
Perhaps you ought to *use* a Mac before slating it...
Simon