However, there really are some gains as well, including greater convenience and utility
Ah, but in the USA, most food grocery stores accept personal checks, and give cash back. So you can write a check at the ACME a day or so before you get paid, and get a little gas money and food loan without actually using a credit card.
My card was eaten by one of those machines once, and the bank told me there wasn't any way to get it back and they'd have to issue me a new one. Glad it wasn't a wad of hundreds.
At least TD Bank will give you a new card immediately at any branch.
After all, think about it from their point of view -- one could put an empty envelope in the thing while punching in a $500 deposit, and then claim that it was stolen or otherwise misplaced. So, there is no deposit until a bank employee says there is a deposit.
In the 1980s some banks would actually credit you half of that deposit immediately. So you could stuff an empty envelope in the machine, then withdraw half of it. When the bank figured out what had happened, they would be rather upset but if you deposited right away, would live with it. So, if you had gambled or drank away all of your getting travel money, it was a decent enough trick to get you home from college for the holidays. Of course, after the first bank meltdown in the 1990s, that all went away, I believe, and now, some bank machines are actually smart enough to actually count the money and scan the checks you deposit into them.
Just wanted to throw out that technically she's violating the copyright of the graffiti owner, and cannot be distributing that work. I think all the graffiti authors should step forward and claim their share of her enormous royalties. If you are a graffiti writer, please click [this is a joke] to claim your giant prize.
Because it would further bloat the mammoth that is your government (which is unsurprising, as when you have a single government that deals with so many matters for over 300 million people, that's what you inevitably get).
Tell me about it. I'm working on a budget widget for the USA for my site, not done yet, and I've got like a thousand things that are a few hundred million a pop, and a couple that are more... and it all actually sounds "reasonable" once you start digging into it. Like, look at Social Security Disability. I broke it down into beneficiaries by the kinds of reasons... and I've got like a billion for retarded people, a few billion for the blind, and you know, at some level, the whole of it, the 150 billion a year, its getting ripped off, but you can't really cut any particular item, lest suddenly people are in an uproar because the blind and the retards are starving - the key is really, the doctors who say who is blind, and who is not, that is the real problem, and its untouchable.
Other jobs (esp. White collar ones) have no such physical requirements, and thus no physical reason for such disparity in employment/pay rates.
It's kind of odd that the number of women in IT has actually declined since we moved from heavier IBM selectric style keys on the original PC keyboard, to today's present light touch keys, don't you think? The one where women still have a harder time is in core IT - like networking, because, full tower servers weighing in at 60-70lbs are a bit much, for sure.
All of those jobs are also high paying, but they're just not...ya know...glamorous or easy to do while still have long fingernails.
No, actually, working in a coal mine sucks. It doesn't pay well, it's never paid all that great, and for the most part, all of the action adventure jobs are jobs that pretty much appeal to the testosterone camp anyway - you go out there and battle nature in some way, and women just aren't into that.
That's my point. They don't truly want an equal representation in the workforce. They want an "equal" representation in the fields that they choose.
But who does?
Which, in case you're not paying attention, is not the same thing or quite as noble as the advocacy groups would have you believe.
It never has been equal. Advocacy groups, in particular NOW, basically just advocate for their groups with the expectation that because they are not the ones in power, they can rationalize pushing to any extreme, knowing that conservative groups can and will push back. It's pretty fair to assume that NOW leaders do not like men, NAACP leaders do not like white people, or at least don't care about them, and so on.
It's messy, and ugly, for sure, but, it is democracy and the thing worse than this would be to have a law that says that the government would decide who can associate with whom politically.
Keeping your woman barefoot and pregnant means starvation in just another generation or two
Well, no, because then we exterminate our genetic rivals, and move on. From there, we fill up the earth and build atomic spaceships, set out to find nearby planets that we can at least settle on, and take over the galaxy.
You should care because the only way to make this work
Why does it have to work? You answered my question, why should I care, with, "you have to care"... I really, don't see a need to. I'm a guy with no money. It's a non-issue.
As it has been repeated so many times already, you need health care, not health insurance.
And, the folks repeating it are wrong. I do not need health care, I need health insurance. I only need health care if I'm sick, and if it costs too much, I use health insurance to manage the risk of paying for it.
I can tell you're not very realistic. Good luck with that.
Your cynicism is what gives the powerful their power. Ultimately, you've decided that you aren't a big fan of the system, but, its not so bad that you would actually get off of your rear and do something about it. Fortunately, on all political stripes, left or right, there have been people in the USA that have done exactly that.
Leonardo didn't care too much about budgets or practicality, but that's not to say he didn't lie to his patrons about them. Leonardo could -easily- get a job today, and would arguably be even more famous back then than he was in his own time. He would be self-employed inventor, selling stuff to governments, computer companies, or even on TV.
Hell, for all we know it, Leonardo DaVinci may have been re-incarnated as Ron Popeil, the inventor of the Pocket Fisherman...
The energy of a carbon bond is a few electron volts. IOW, that much energy is needed to cause a chemical change in the molecule. The energy of a 2GHz cell-phone photon is about 0.00001 eV. Cell-phone photons cannot cause a chemical change.
There may not be an observed direct change, but certainly, we have no idea what all of the indirect effects might be. 0.0001 eV (10 times more), is enough to bend or deform some organic molecules for sure. What effect would that cause? What downstream effects could there be? You could have a cell phone bending or wiggling one fat molecule, which gets stuck, and, as that particular body is already at a tipping point, more fat molecules pile up, blocking a vessel, and then, your cell phone just caused a stroke.
I think we are finally beginning to see some of the endings to the technology euphoria that have developed over the past 20 year.
Frankly, I think the political and other events of the last decade have vndicated technophoria completely. Our democracy, in the United States, is stronger than it has ever been in our lifetimes. This is a golden age for the people to have a voice and it should be held up in history as such.
We are living through the best of times, and the choices we have before us, about increasing spying and all the other police state crap, serve only to make those choices worse, not better.
I mean, right now, I can get online and ask, or rather, argue, with anyone who either shares my beliefs or disagrees with them. I can take the whole pulse of the whole nation directly from the communities anywhere, without having to have a middle man of media telling me, honestly, what I want to hear, so they can sell newspapers. Sure, there are times when this polarizes, but I think as people get older, as I have, you learn to keep your own blood pressure down and then come to appreciate all the people, regardless of affilitation, and can, at times, glimpse pieces of the world in its most honest glory, for what it is.
It's excellent.
60 years ago, the US government was able to marshall the building of an entire atomic bomb in secret. Could the USA do that today? Could we build something like that today, in secret? I don't think so. The most sinister abuse of our present war, the pictures from Abu Ghraib, went round the internet, all over the place, as did documents leaked and what not. There's just so many things that we can share, and we can know, that we didn't know before. Breakthroughs in communications technologies have always lead to conflicts and wars - the invention of the printing press sparked a number of wars in Europe and the USA, and arguably lead to the reign of terror in France, the American civil war and US Spanish American war, but, the internet is a different sort of animal, and maybe, we can live through or learn to cope with the polarization, and, see the promise of all of this stuff.
Maybe humanity as a whole, is not so bad after all.
Maybe, we as a people, are a bit less evil than we or the critics among us, judge ourselves to be.
Maybe, just maybe, the human race will do just fine.
I wouldn't trade the internet and computers for anything else, for even a second.
So, in exchange for the government not taking money from you, you'd rather pay more than the government would take to a third party, to get worse service? That doesn't make sense.
I get better service from Blue Cross / Blue Shield than anyone I know has ever gotten from Medicare. If I don't like Blue Cross / Blue Shield, I can switch to someone I do like, and still get better service than what Medicare gets, for me.
What the left wing always forgets is that health insurance is a risk management tool. I can tailor the coverage that I want, to the risks that I actually have. Things that are not "risk", I can pay out of pocket. That's why the left always screws up insurance by having carriers be mandated to provide things like doctors visits and some prescription drugs... those aren't risks often, and I can do better with myself.
Remember, slashdot is run by young rich white guys whose parents were all well-off. They don't need health-care right now, so screw everybody else
So basically, anything a white guy has to say doesn't count? That's pretty racist to me.
Really, what is so damned scary about a national health care system
Those who have good medical care already, will get less medical care, as a national health care system really means rationing. That's pretty much what it is. If you have the money and a good job in the USA, you get the best health care in the world. Everyone says "the USA as a whole gets less", but a lot of that is because our doctors can get sued for just about anything. If you wanted to make health care reform like the rest of the world, let's get rid of malpractice lawsuits, as is the case in Britain, and you'd watch costs fall dramatically, and then, other people -could- afford health insurance.
The right national health care reform was the one proposed by John McCain. He would have had tort reform to lower costs, unlinked health insurance from employers and moved that to individuals, which would have gotten rid of some huge social problems (like pre-existing conditions, etc), and then, we could have taxed the benefits to help those in need.
All Dems have to offer, instead, is that everybody who is young must take their tiny paychecks and buy health care they don't need, or go to jail or face fines. Sounds like a dumb ass plan to me.
We may not have all the answers.. yet. But one day we may. It might be noteworthy that the pace of RnD is progressing exponentially too.
But, so is the price of R&D... when Einstein was around, it was pretty cheap. A few decades ago, it was hundreds of millions for a nuclear pile. Now, its what, tens of billions of dollars for space telescopes and super colliders. At the rate we're going, we're going to hit a wall because the cost will simply be too high.
Larry and Sergei : Guess the commander in chief's not getting any rides on Larry and Sergei's private party jet any time soon! Obama : My current private jet is actually much better. Larry and Sergei : We can play Call of Duty on a giant screen. Obama : I play Afghanistan and Iraq on mine
I would make the argument that its not cooperation or competition in a large company, but just autonomy that matters most. General Motors for years sought to tie all of its disparate car divisions that it acquired in the 1920s and 1930s into a single cohesive whole. By the time it was successful, they had created so many layers and bureacracies within the company, that the whole system was mired with inefficiency and red tape. Like, how long were many cars denied better engines, because Corvette "had to be" the fastest car.
Eliminating functional overlap in multiple divisions seems more like a disaster that it is worth. Sure, GM might have had cost overlap with in its different car divisions, but, if each could sink or swim on its own, it would have been easier to drop one or grow one over the years, rather be locked into unrealistic production goals across the entire company in order to make all the red tape pay for itself. Even now, I don't know that bankrupt GM even gets this.
Ah well.
And now we have the same sort of crap at Microsoft. Exhibit A [for today], is LINQ vs other ORM efforts that Microsoft is working on in C#. LINQ is what, wildly popular, and it is also killed, largely because LINQ didn't come from the Visual Studio group, but from the SQL Server group. But there's others as well. I suspect that the continual and ongoing story of communications frameworks like WCF largely stems from intradepartmental rivalries and not really customer demand, and this goes all the way back.. like the whole COM fiasco the notion that everything must be COM within Windows (when obviously calling a DLL works pretty well for everything in Linux), came from the Office group and not from the Windows group, and there was infighting there.
I bet that many of the new features that we see really are targetted for a handful of corporate customers and are less for the far more numerous but smaller shops... Visual Studio is becoming much less of a personal craft tool and more of a stop on an assembly line of shitty code.
But on the other hand, MS can still put it together on key stuff. Windows 7 is a really good product. I like it.
Slashdot Mirror
However, there really are some gains as well, including greater convenience and utility
Ah, but in the USA, most food grocery stores accept personal checks, and give cash back. So you can write a check at the ACME a day or so before you get paid, and get a little gas money and food loan without actually using a credit card.
My card was eaten by one of those machines once, and the bank told me there wasn't any way to get it back and they'd have to issue me a new one. Glad it wasn't a wad of hundreds.
At least TD Bank will give you a new card immediately at any branch.
After all, think about it from their point of view -- one could put an empty envelope in the thing while punching in a $500 deposit, and then claim that it was stolen or otherwise misplaced. So, there is no deposit until a bank employee says there is a deposit.
In the 1980s some banks would actually credit you half of that deposit immediately. So you could stuff an empty envelope in the machine, then withdraw half of it. When the bank figured out what had happened, they would be rather upset but if you deposited right away, would live with it. So, if you had gambled or drank away all of your getting travel money, it was a decent enough trick to get you home from college for the holidays. Of course, after the first bank meltdown in the 1990s, that all went away, I believe, and now, some bank machines are actually smart enough to actually count the money and scan the checks you deposit into them.
Just wanted to throw out that technically she's violating the copyright of the graffiti owner, and cannot be distributing that work. I think all the graffiti authors should step forward and claim their share of her enormous royalties. If you are a graffiti writer, please click [this is a joke] to claim your giant prize.
Because it would further bloat the mammoth that is your government (which is unsurprising, as when you have a single government that deals with so many matters for over 300 million people, that's what you inevitably get).
Tell me about it. I'm working on a budget widget for the USA for my site, not done yet, and I've got like a thousand things that are a few hundred million a pop, and a couple that are more... and it all actually sounds "reasonable" once you start digging into it. Like, look at Social Security Disability. I broke it down into beneficiaries by the kinds of reasons... and I've got like a billion for retarded people, a few billion for the blind, and you know, at some level, the whole of it, the 150 billion a year, its getting ripped off, but you can't really cut any particular item, lest suddenly people are in an uproar because the blind and the retards are starving - the key is really, the doctors who say who is blind, and who is not, that is the real problem, and its untouchable.
Other jobs (esp. White collar ones) have no such physical requirements, and thus no physical reason for such disparity in employment/pay rates.
It's kind of odd that the number of women in IT has actually declined since we moved from heavier IBM selectric style keys on the original PC keyboard, to today's present light touch keys, don't you think? The one where women still have a harder time is in core IT - like networking, because, full tower servers weighing in at 60-70lbs are a bit much, for sure.
All of those jobs are also high paying, but they're just not...ya know...glamorous or easy to do while still have long fingernails.
No, actually, working in a coal mine sucks. It doesn't pay well, it's never paid all that great, and for the most part, all of the action adventure jobs are jobs that pretty much appeal to the testosterone camp anyway - you go out there and battle nature in some way, and women just aren't into that.
That's my point. They don't truly want an equal representation in the workforce. They want an "equal" representation in the fields that they choose.
But who does?
Which, in case you're not paying attention, is not the same thing or quite as noble as the advocacy groups would have you believe.
It never has been equal. Advocacy groups, in particular NOW, basically just advocate for their groups with the expectation that because they are not the ones in power, they can rationalize pushing to any extreme, knowing that conservative groups can and will push back. It's pretty fair to assume that NOW leaders do not like men, NAACP leaders do not like white people, or at least don't care about them, and so on.
It's messy, and ugly, for sure, but, it is democracy and the thing worse than this would be to have a law that says that the government would decide who can associate with whom politically.
Keeping your woman barefoot and pregnant means starvation in just another generation or two
Well, no, because then we exterminate our genetic rivals, and move on. From there, we fill up the earth and build atomic spaceships, set out to find nearby planets that we can at least settle on, and take over the galaxy.
? You will note that I do NOT advocate that women should be kept barefoot and pregnant
Why not? I mean, what kind of a man are you?
Come on dude, the Romans are laughing at you.
You should care because the only way to make this work
Why does it have to work? You answered my question, why should I care, with, "you have to care"... I really, don't see a need to. I'm a guy with no money. It's a non-issue.
As it has been repeated so many times already, you need health care, not health insurance.
And, the folks repeating it are wrong. I do not need health care, I need health insurance. I only need health care if I'm sick, and if it costs too much, I use health insurance to manage the risk of paying for it.
I'm a man, I don't have venture capital, so I don't care. If women want more venture capital, its not my issue.
I can tell you're not very realistic. Good luck with that.
Your cynicism is what gives the powerful their power. Ultimately, you've decided that you aren't a big fan of the system, but, its not so bad that you would actually get off of your rear and do something about it. Fortunately, on all political stripes, left or right, there have been people in the USA that have done exactly that.
That's ludicrous. Organic molecules are constantly being bent and deformed due to thermal collisions.
All I have to say, is the track record of science pronouncing things as safe, and having them stay safe, is pretty low.
Leonardo didn't care too much about budgets or practicality, but that's not to say he didn't lie to his patrons about them. Leonardo could -easily- get a job today, and would arguably be even more famous back then than he was in his own time. He would be self-employed inventor, selling stuff to governments, computer companies, or even on TV.
Hell, for all we know it, Leonardo DaVinci may have been re-incarnated as Ron Popeil, the inventor of the Pocket Fisherman...
The energy of a carbon bond is a few electron volts. IOW, that much energy is needed to cause a chemical change in the molecule.
The energy of a 2GHz cell-phone photon is about 0.00001 eV. Cell-phone photons cannot cause a chemical change.
There may not be an observed direct change, but certainly, we have no idea what all of the indirect effects might be. 0.0001 eV (10 times more), is enough to bend or deform some organic molecules for sure. What effect would that cause? What downstream effects could there be? You could have a cell phone bending or wiggling one fat molecule, which gets stuck, and, as that particular body is already at a tipping point, more fat molecules pile up, blocking a vessel, and then, your cell phone just caused a stroke.
You just don't know.
I think we are finally beginning to see some of the endings to the technology euphoria that have developed over the past 20 year.
Frankly, I think the political and other events of the last decade have vndicated technophoria completely. Our democracy, in the United States, is stronger than it has ever been in our lifetimes. This is a golden age for the people to have a voice and it should be held up in history as such.
We are living through the best of times, and the choices we have before us, about increasing spying and all the other police state crap, serve only to make those choices worse, not better.
I mean, right now, I can get online and ask, or rather, argue, with anyone who either shares my beliefs or disagrees with them. I can take the whole pulse of the whole nation directly from the communities anywhere, without having to have a middle man of media telling me, honestly, what I want to hear, so they can sell newspapers. Sure, there are times when this polarizes, but I think as people get older, as I have, you learn to keep your own blood pressure down and then come to appreciate all the people, regardless of affilitation, and can, at times, glimpse pieces of the world in its most honest glory, for what it is.
It's excellent.
60 years ago, the US government was able to marshall the building of an entire atomic bomb in secret. Could the USA do that today? Could we build something like that today, in secret? I don't think so. The most sinister abuse of our present war, the pictures from Abu Ghraib, went round the internet, all over the place, as did documents leaked and what not. There's just so many things that we can share, and we can know, that we didn't know before. Breakthroughs in communications technologies have always lead to conflicts and wars - the invention of the printing press sparked a number of wars in Europe and the USA, and arguably lead to the reign of terror in France, the American civil war and US Spanish American war, but, the internet is a different sort of animal, and maybe, we can live through or learn to cope with the polarization, and, see the promise of all of this stuff.
Maybe humanity as a whole, is not so bad after all.
Maybe, we as a people, are a bit less evil than we or the critics among us, judge ourselves to be.
Maybe, just maybe, the human race will do just fine.
I wouldn't trade the internet and computers for anything else, for even a second.
The hope is worth the angst.
So, in exchange for the government not taking money from you, you'd rather pay more than the government would take to a third party, to get worse service? That doesn't make sense.
I get better service from Blue Cross / Blue Shield than anyone I know has ever gotten from Medicare. If I don't like Blue Cross / Blue Shield, I can switch to someone I do like, and still get better service than what Medicare gets, for me.
What the left wing always forgets is that health insurance is a risk management tool. I can tailor the coverage that I want, to the risks that I actually have. Things that are not "risk", I can pay out of pocket. That's why the left always screws up insurance by having carriers be mandated to provide things like doctors visits and some prescription drugs... those aren't risks often, and I can do better with myself.
Remember, slashdot is run by young rich white guys whose parents were all well-off. They don't need health-care right now, so screw everybody else
So basically, anything a white guy has to say doesn't count? That's pretty racist to me.
Really, what is so damned scary about a national health care system
Those who have good medical care already, will get less medical care, as a national health care system really means rationing. That's pretty much what it is. If you have the money and a good job in the USA, you get the best health care in the world. Everyone says "the USA as a whole gets less", but a lot of that is because our doctors can get sued for just about anything. If you wanted to make health care reform like the rest of the world, let's get rid of malpractice lawsuits, as is the case in Britain, and you'd watch costs fall dramatically, and then, other people -could- afford health insurance.
The right national health care reform was the one proposed by John McCain. He would have had tort reform to lower costs, unlinked health insurance from employers and moved that to individuals, which would have gotten rid of some huge social problems (like pre-existing conditions, etc), and then, we could have taxed the benefits to help those in need.
All Dems have to offer, instead, is that everybody who is young must take their tiny paychecks and buy health care they don't need, or go to jail or face fines. Sounds like a dumb ass plan to me.
We may not have all the answers.. yet. But one day we may. It might be noteworthy that the pace of RnD is progressing exponentially too.
But, so is the price of R&D... when Einstein was around, it was pretty cheap. A few decades ago, it was hundreds of millions for a nuclear pile. Now, its what, tens of billions of dollars for space telescopes and super colliders. At the rate we're going, we're going to hit a wall because the cost will simply be too high.
Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
I was just walking down the street one day...
and to think all these young ones don't know about Chicago...
I unplugged the atomic clock by mistake. I was just brooming around and I knocked out this here plug. Anyone know what time it is?
Larry and Sergei : Guess the commander in chief's not getting any rides on Larry and Sergei's private party jet any time soon!
Obama : My current private jet is actually much better.
Larry and Sergei : We can play Call of Duty on a giant screen.
Obama : I play Afghanistan and Iraq on mine
I would make the argument that its not cooperation or competition in a large company, but just autonomy that matters most. General Motors for years sought to tie all of its disparate car divisions that it acquired in the 1920s and 1930s into a single cohesive whole. By the time it was successful, they had created so many layers and bureacracies within the company, that the whole system was mired with inefficiency and red tape. Like, how long were many cars denied better engines, because Corvette "had to be" the fastest car.
Eliminating functional overlap in multiple divisions seems more like a disaster that it is worth. Sure, GM might have had cost overlap with in its different car divisions, but, if each could sink or swim on its own, it would have been easier to drop one or grow one over the years, rather be locked into unrealistic production goals across the entire company in order to make all the red tape pay for itself. Even now, I don't know that bankrupt GM even gets this.
Ah well.
And now we have the same sort of crap at Microsoft. Exhibit A [for today], is LINQ vs other ORM efforts that Microsoft is working on in C#. LINQ is what, wildly popular, and it is also killed, largely because LINQ didn't come from the Visual Studio group, but from the SQL Server group. But there's others as well. I suspect that the continual and ongoing story of communications frameworks like WCF largely stems from intradepartmental rivalries and not really customer demand, and this goes all the way back.. like the whole COM fiasco the notion that everything must be COM within Windows (when obviously calling a DLL works pretty well for everything in Linux), came from the Office group and not from the Windows group, and there was infighting there.
I bet that many of the new features that we see really are targetted for a handful of corporate customers and are less for the far more numerous but smaller shops... Visual Studio is becoming much less of a personal craft tool and more of a stop on an assembly line of shitty code.
But on the other hand, MS can still put it together on key stuff. Windows 7 is a really good product. I like it.