On the surface, the argument that we should be able to unlock anything we own is simple: to put it as a syllogism, if we own something we can do w/it as we please; we own our phones/tablets/etc.; therefore we can do with them as we please. But... it's not as simple as that. For many phones, the price we pay is heavily discounted by the carrier- in effect, we're paying a substantially discounted price b/c the carrier is assuming that they will make back the money they spend on the discount in subscription fees. In effect, we're paying off the true cost of the device as we pay the monthly fee. At least, that would likely be the argument that the carriers would make.
Now, in my opinion, possession is 9/10 of the law, you possess it, QED. But, sadly, that doesn't fly in most courts, where the bigger bucks tend to win. One potential compromise is to say that, after X number of months, you own the device, and it's yours to do w/as you please. This would allow the carriers to make back the "investment" that they made in the discounted phone, and also allow the owner to *really* own the phone and do w/it as s/he pleased. Eventually.
This would really make neither side happy. And that's the essence of compromise: it makes neither side really happy, but also makes neither side want to start shooting.
During the "Master Trilogy" of a few years back- the one in which the Master rejiggers the TARDIS as a paradox machine so as to allow the distant seed of humanity to travel back in time to conquer the Earth- there is a scene in Germany where Daleks are flying through the air screaming "EXTERMINIEREN," to bring that image more fully to life, so to speak...
You may remember Windows Compact Edition- only Microsoft could make a product whose all-but-official nickname meant "grimace in pain." Well, for WinCE, MS decided to shoehorn the desktop- complete w/the Start Menu- onto phones of the day, phones that had much smaller displays than they do now. Well, with Win8, MS did exactly the opposite thing: instead of shoehorning the desktop onto a phone, they blew up a phone to desktop size. The result is... interesting. But not convincing, and certainly not interesting enough to motivate significant numbers of people- especially not corporate buyers- to upgrade their current desktops.
On the corporate side, you've got plenty of potential buyers who are perhaps only now finishing upgrades from Windows XP- which was patched to "good enough" status after a few service packs- to Windows 7. These potential customers are *not* interested in spending time and money to upgrade systems to Windows 8, given both their recent investments in upgrades to 7, and in the cost of retraining employees to use a completely new desktop metaphor. Look up Neil Stephenson's term "metaphor shear" for more about that.
On one hand, the iPad has been an unqualified success, and Android, other linux, and Windows successors are said to be arriving shortly. On the other hand, part of me wonders how much of the iPad's success was simply due to Apple hype. Had, say, Dell released the exact same hardware, but w/o the Apple imprimatur or OS, would it have sold as well? I rather suspect not.
It me that, like desktop linux and the monorail, the tablet computer is the wave of the future- always has been, always will be.
OK, so the US Supreme Court recently ruled in the most forceful way possible in favor of corporate personhood, the idea that a corporation is a person in the eyes of the law. Fine, let's run with that. Is there any question that, had an individual person committed something like BP clearly has done in the Gulf, whether purposefully or via negligence, they'd be put in jail?
Throw the book at these idiots. Make them pay criminally, not merely by docking their profits a wee bit. Throw chief executives in jail and let them rot. Better yet, give them work release jobs- cleaning up their own mess.
I used a version a few months back which was compiled from the pre-release code. It was the Google Chrome browser... that's it. OK, that's not quite it, but the idea of Chrome OS is to remove anything not necessary to load a browser, especially those things which slow the boot process.
I found it interesting, but nowhere near interesting enough for me to keep using it rather than Crunchbang on my Eee 900. If all you want is a browser, period, then you might just like Chrome OS. If you want more than that, you'll take a pass.
More to the point, the genetic differences between human beings of all racial groups are incredibly insignificant. According to a Wikipedia article on the subject, there is an average 0.1% difference between any two randomly-selected human beings, with a maximum difference of 8% between racial groups. This has led to a conclusion that race is largely insignificant at a genetic level. Race is, more than anything else, a social construct.
To paraphrase psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan's One Genus Theory, any randomly-selected human being has far more in common w/any other randomly-selected human being than w/anything else on the planet.
Your objections are precisely why the individual mandate is a necessary part of this plan. The entire idea of insurance is that payments from everyone- including the healthy- go into a pool out of which the costs of health care provision are paid. If you don't require healthy people to pay into this pool, they don't, and, as you point out, you wind up w/a pool consisting of only the sick. Since a pool wherein the sick subsidize the sicker is not sustainable, you *need* the healthy to pay into the pool.
The payoff for the healthy is that good health is, almost by definition, temporary. You will get sick. You will have an accident and break a limb. Even if, by some miracle, you manage to avoid aging, you *will* get old. And, at that point, you begin to draw money from the very pool into which you have been contributing.
The math isn't exactly complicated.
Re:It is bad, wrong way to go about it
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 1
Yes: healthcare.
The US currently has a limited single-payer system, Medicare. Medicare functions w/a 3% overhead, as opposed to a ~30% overhead for private insurance. And customer satisfaction w/Medicare is markedly higher than that w/private insurance.
Executive summary: the government does health care better than the private sector.
A few counterpoints which are of particular relevance in the US today:
1) Medicare is implemented w/a rough overhead of 3%, as compared to 20-30% overhead for private insurers. In other words, the government does medical insurance at a lower cost than private business.
2) The private contractors to whom the Bush administration handed work in Iraq did the job for a much higher cost per-pseudo soldier than the US Military would have done. In other words, the government does war cheaper than private business.
Yes, private industry is probably more aggressive about cutting costs than the government. But that's b/c they have a vested purpose to do so: the profit motive. Every dollar spent on actual health care, or a soldier, or on providing high speed Internet access, is one less dollar in the owners' pockets. Hence, all costs- or corners- shall be cut to maximize profits.
Slashdot Mirror
On the surface, the argument that we should be able to unlock anything we own is simple: to put it as a syllogism, if we own something we can do w/it as we please; we own our phones/tablets/etc.; therefore we can do with them as we please. But... it's not as simple as that. For many phones, the price we pay is heavily discounted by the carrier- in effect, we're paying a substantially discounted price b/c the carrier is assuming that they will make back the money they spend on the discount in subscription fees. In effect, we're paying off the true cost of the device as we pay the monthly fee. At least, that would likely be the argument that the carriers would make.
Now, in my opinion, possession is 9/10 of the law, you possess it, QED. But, sadly, that doesn't fly in most courts, where the bigger bucks tend to win. One potential compromise is to say that, after X number of months, you own the device, and it's yours to do w/as you please. This would allow the carriers to make back the "investment" that they made in the discounted phone, and also allow the owner to *really* own the phone and do w/it as s/he pleased. Eventually.
This would really make neither side happy. And that's the essence of compromise: it makes neither side really happy, but also makes neither side want to start shooting.
You're right- this was the return of Davros, moving the Earth + all the other planets to create the Universe Eraser Button, right?
During the "Master Trilogy" of a few years back- the one in which the Master rejiggers the TARDIS as a paradox machine so as to allow the distant seed of humanity to travel back in time to conquer the Earth- there is a scene in Germany where Daleks are flying through the air screaming "EXTERMINIEREN," to bring that image more fully to life, so to speak...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGx7c-QBotE
You may remember Windows Compact Edition- only Microsoft could make a product whose all-but-official nickname meant "grimace in pain." Well, for WinCE, MS decided to shoehorn the desktop- complete w/the Start Menu- onto phones of the day, phones that had much smaller displays than they do now. Well, with Win8, MS did exactly the opposite thing: instead of shoehorning the desktop onto a phone, they blew up a phone to desktop size. The result is... interesting. But not convincing, and certainly not interesting enough to motivate significant numbers of people- especially not corporate buyers- to upgrade their current desktops.
On the corporate side, you've got plenty of potential buyers who are perhaps only now finishing upgrades from Windows XP- which was patched to "good enough" status after a few service packs- to Windows 7. These potential customers are *not* interested in spending time and money to upgrade systems to Windows 8, given both their recent investments in upgrades to 7, and in the cost of retraining employees to use a completely new desktop metaphor. Look up Neil Stephenson's term "metaphor shear" for more about that.
I wouldn't virtualize a firewall.
Spaghetti. Definitely spaghetti. A great big, monstrous flying bunch of spaghetti.
Before anyone comments, I know that the iPad OS was a big part of its success.
On one hand, the iPad has been an unqualified success, and Android, other linux, and Windows successors are said to be arriving shortly. On the other hand, part of me wonders how much of the iPad's success was simply due to Apple hype. Had, say, Dell released the exact same hardware, but w/o the Apple imprimatur or OS, would it have sold as well? I rather suspect not.
It me that, like desktop linux and the monorail, the tablet computer is the wave of the future- always has been, always will be.
I can see it now...
"From the people who brought you Roomba and Scooba... it's BOOMBA!"
OK, so the US Supreme Court recently ruled in the most forceful way possible in favor of corporate personhood, the idea that a corporation is a person in the eyes of the law. Fine, let's run with that. Is there any question that, had an individual person committed something like BP clearly has done in the Gulf, whether purposefully or via negligence, they'd be put in jail?
Throw the book at these idiots. Make them pay criminally, not merely by docking their profits a wee bit. Throw chief executives in jail and let them rot. Better yet, give them work release jobs- cleaning up their own mess.
Morons.
http://xkcd.com/695/
I used a version a few months back which was compiled from the pre-release code. It was the Google Chrome browser... that's it. OK, that's not quite it, but the idea of Chrome OS is to remove anything not necessary to load a browser, especially those things which slow the boot process.
I found it interesting, but nowhere near interesting enough for me to keep using it rather than Crunchbang on my Eee 900. If all you want is a browser, period, then you might just like Chrome OS. If you want more than that, you'll take a pass.
More to the point, the genetic differences between human beings of all racial groups are incredibly insignificant. According to a Wikipedia article on the subject, there is an average 0.1% difference between any two randomly-selected human beings, with a maximum difference of 8% between racial groups. This has led to a conclusion that race is largely insignificant at a genetic level. Race is, more than anything else, a social construct.
To paraphrase psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan's One Genus Theory, any randomly-selected human being has far more in common w/any other randomly-selected human being than w/anything else on the planet.
And here, I thought that the Great Firewall of China had been blocking access to politically-charged Websites again.
Your objections are precisely why the individual mandate is a necessary part of this plan. The entire idea of insurance is that payments from everyone- including the healthy- go into a pool out of which the costs of health care provision are paid. If you don't require healthy people to pay into this pool, they don't, and, as you point out, you wind up w/a pool consisting of only the sick. Since a pool wherein the sick subsidize the sicker is not sustainable, you *need* the healthy to pay into the pool.
The payoff for the healthy is that good health is, almost by definition, temporary. You will get sick. You will have an accident and break a limb. Even if, by some miracle, you manage to avoid aging, you *will* get old. And, at that point, you begin to draw money from the very pool into which you have been contributing.
The math isn't exactly complicated.
Yes: healthcare.
The US currently has a limited single-payer system, Medicare. Medicare functions w/a 3% overhead, as opposed to a ~30% overhead for private insurance. And customer satisfaction w/Medicare is markedly higher than that w/private insurance.
Executive summary: the government does health care better than the private sector.
I suppose if this business plan doesn't pan out, we shouldn't say that they went under?
Or, perhaps, if they sign a bad mortgage on their offices, and wind up owing more than the building is work, they'll *really* be underwater.
Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
"You don't get rich writing science-fiction. If you want to get rich, you found a religion." * L. Ron Hubbard, Nov. 11, 1948
A few counterpoints which are of particular relevance in the US today:
1) Medicare is implemented w/a rough overhead of 3%, as compared to 20-30% overhead for private insurers. In other words, the government does medical insurance at a lower cost than private business.
2) The private contractors to whom the Bush administration handed work in Iraq did the job for a much higher cost per-pseudo soldier than the US Military would have done. In other words, the government does war cheaper than private business.
Yes, private industry is probably more aggressive about cutting costs than the government. But that's b/c they have a vested purpose to do so: the profit motive. Every dollar spent on actual health care, or a soldier, or on providing high speed Internet access, is one less dollar in the owners' pockets. Hence, all costs- or corners- shall be cut to maximize profits.
More breaking news: such criticisms of Judaism are an excellent *definition* of antisemitism.
Then again, I should expect nothing else from a person whose handle is also the name of an hate group.
'Irrational dogma...' 'absolute bulllshit...' 'nothing but evil.'
How does the post above get modded as anything other than antisemitic flamebait?
Isn't this how we wound up w/'All your base are belong to us?'
Sounds good to me. Now, where did I leave that cell phone...
As I tell my wife virtually every day, never ascribe to anything else that which can be ascribed to human stupidity.
It does seem as if the melting of Antarctic ice is what revealed the long-lost plane. Global warming, anyone?