What if I don't want health insurance, and am willing to run the risk of getting cancer and dieing because I can't get it treated? Why should I be FORCED to pay for it?
This is among the stupidest arguments that anti-universal-care people trot out. Forcing you to pay into a State (or, as the case may be, national) treasury is a part of living in a well-functioning society. You cannot "opt out" of paying taxes for things you don't personally benefit from.
At its most basic level, you must compel taxes because of the need to defend borders. People near the border want it defended; people far away from the border don't feel threatened. So should 100% of the cost of border defense be placed on those living near the border? How about if the border-dwellers just decide to buy the invaders some lunch and give them directions to those living within? It doesn't work. The cost of border defense needs to be spread equally, and a fair portion compelled from every citizen, even those who do not feel like contributing.
This is precisely the same economic issue as health care. Those who are "near" to disease want treatment; those "far" from disease don't feel threatened and want things like single-payer or less regulation of the health insurance industry, essentially shifting the greatest portion of the egregious cost of health care to those who need it the most. In the case of communicable disease, this is clearly a bad policy and can only lead to an increased spread of contagion. So we've got that against it right there. For treatable non-communicable disease, this policy leads to the financial ruin of anyone afflicted, with all the attendant issues like massive defaulting and State dependency thereafter. So a whole bunch of people take a giant financial loss, possibly to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, just so that you can opt out of paying $300 into the health care pool.
Just like border defense, you need to stump up and pay your fair share so that everyone is properly covered in the first place. Declining to do so ends up costing everyone a fortune later on.
The main reason why I think people should give Linux (esp. Ubuntu or Fedora) a try is that once you get used to doing things the "Linux way" you start to realize how much it sucked to be using Windows. It's hard to quantify...I've been using Linux on my work and home desktops since 2001, and using Windows now feels clunky, clumsy, and irritating. Maybe a lot of it has to do with how you train your brain to work around all the horrible quirky behavior of Windows, and once you're away from it awhile you notice how awful it really is.
Really. Just buy one instead of trying to shoehorn a laptop into the role. As a new couple with (presumably) no kids yet, you can spare the change. In fact, if you're really price-conscious, go buy a 1st-gen Xbox for $25 or so and pick up some games at mom-and-pop used game stores for $5-$10 apiece. There are plenty of split-screen shooters and racers for the original Xbox that you two can spend countless hours on.
Fade in to a low fly-by of a dwarf on griffin-back swooping over the trees of Winterspring. Cut to three adventurers (a human warrior with impossibly enormous shoulder guards, a female night elf with thigh-high boots and no pants encircled by a shimmering bubble, and a goatee-sporting gnome shifting back and forth with two giant-sized red-hot-glowing maces in his hands) on the ground looking up at the passing griffin rider. The camera swings to track the speeding flyer. Cut to an absurdly massive axe, crackling with electrical energy, cleaving the head of a white furbolg.
HUMAN - Pile those corpses high, Ihealuloolzzz. Lilkneestaßßer needs that agility enchantment, and those greedy beasts in Timbermaw Hold won't give it to us unless we kill enough of their enemies!
IHEALULOOLZZZ - By the light of Elune, Tànkérlordd, it shall be done!
LILKNEESTAßßER - Off and away!
Cut to 9-minute montage of our heroic trio slaying thousands upon thousands of furbolgs. Intersperse clips of them ripping beaded necklaces from their slain foes, and other clips showing them spilling gold-bound chests full of these necklaces onto the floor in front of the Timbermaw denizens. Over the course of the montage, we repeatedly see the face of an important-looking Timbermaw shaman. At first the face is frowny and angry, but over time it appears friendlier and friendlier.
If it is not possible to travel faster than light then the space and time between us and our nearest neighbouring civilisation is likely to be prohibitive.
There's 2 ways to interpret what you said. The first is that we can't get there, which is probably false. Quite soon we will have sufficient mastery of our physical forms that we'll be able to live as long as we please and adapt ourselves to various conditions. ("Soon" in the long view of things, anyway...a few more hundred years.) Even if it takes ten thousand years to go somewhere, that'll be fine.
The second way to interpret what you said is that because it takes so long to get anywhere -- whether or not we can do it -- the odds of "missing" a civilization become very high. There might have been a great civilization only 10 light years away, but it's already gone. Or there might be one 300 LY away right now, but by the time we figure out it's there and fly over to pay a visit, so much time will have passed that their civilization may disappear by the time we get there. Or we might die out before any other nearby civilizations come to be.
See, I actually like it this way. It always bothered me that someone could stand there and take 40 arrows to the chest and keep on fighting. The way it's done in 4e, one arrow from a good marksman is a mortal wound. You need to spend fairly scant resources to keep yourself alive, or think about how you'll cooperate to prevent that marksman from getting his shot off. It's much better, and in the hands of a competent DM, should be far more "cinematic" and fun.
Bwha? Yeah, "over the years" is the key phrase here. They experimented wide and far during the dot-com bubble, as everyone else did, but the only versions that count (i.e., anything past 2004) are essentially Windows-only. Luckily, FrameMaker is being dustbinned by the switch to XML documentation. Their version 8 is a pathetic attempt to remain competitive. RIP, I say. I really like Frame, but Adobe's massive lack of support for it has led it into a dead end.
Pah! You forgot "Second Variety" by Philip K. Dick. Now that is a story about exactly what is under discussion: an escalating robot arms race that turns out quite poorly for everyone.
I still maintain that some of the very best music I have ever heard in my entire life was at a pub in Kilkenny. It was just a group of local lads getting together to play a few tunes after their work day was done.
I still maintain that Earth by David Brin is one of the best science fiction novels I have ever read. The eradication of privacy, the pervasive recording of everything by retirees, etc. Now we're just one step closer. Just release a few lab-made black holes and let them carve neural pathways in the planet with their decaying orbits.
You know, it's funny, yes. But in fact I always imagined this to be part of the mythos of Star Wars. It felt easy to pretend that the reason I was sitting down in a theater in 1977 was that we had intercepted this information from a galaxy far, far away. And of course because of the speed of light it had happened ages ago. It lent a very wonderful quality to the story, I thought.
I don't know about that. That's a very late post-modern (I might even say emasculated) way of looking at it. 1000 years ago, hell even 100 years ago, that kind of jackassery would definitely get you killed in a real hurry, and probably a number of other people as well. Getting roasted and shooting tigers with slingshots recklessly endangers himself and others, and those are not qualities you want in your village. I would bet virtually everyone would have shrugged and said "Glad he didn't take anyone with him when he went."
Unlike some peer posts, I will politely disagree. (Well, I will concede that there are a lot of black helicopter calls, plus a lot of calls that are just outright nuts.) Phoning the offices of your political representatives most definitely does have an impact. Keep in mind that you may not get the result you want. The Representative/Senator might have already decided, true, or there might be compromises that bind his/her vote (you do know that politics is about compromises, right?), or there might be a weight of evidence seen by the Representative/Senator that sways the balance in the direction you don't want.
This is an acceptable outcome. Just put such things in your private tally, and when election time comes up make sure you provide support or detraction in measure according to your tally. This kind of tracking and action-taking only requires about 10-30 minutes per week. If you won't spend that much time, or can't be bothered to vote, then please sit back and take whatever you're given. All this talk about how "useless" it is to participate in your government fuels exactly the thing you are bitching so loudly about on Slashdot -- a minimum of viewpoints pushed solely by vested interests.
I think there is something like 16 million students enrolled in colleges & universities in the U.S. each year. Using your figures, that means $2.30 per student. So I guess they think it's fair that because you "took" $2.30 from them, they should take $100,000 from you.
I don't know about that. This is a hair off-topic, but I contacted my Senator (Herb Kohl) regarding the telecom immunity and he responded promptly, politely, and on-point. He told me he also did not think the telecoms needed immunity (i.e., they've said they did no wrong, so clearly they need no immunity from not doing wrong).
My point is that it does influence your representatives if you call their office and/or mail them. You won't talk to El Jefe, but you will talk to someone who will help shape El Jefe's opinion. The system only works if you participate.
I am sure the comments will be flooded with alarmists screeching about black helicopter secret governments. I have a different opinion.
I cannot imagine that any truly great surveillance technology (such as tiny robotic flies) won't be used for selfish purposes -- by all layers of American society. You know your manager wants to spy on you, why not spy on your manager if there's no chance of getting caught? Get some nice juicy dirt! Back-room dirty deals among politicians? It's on Youtube now!
It's hard to accept, but we're hurtling toward a privacy-free society, including corporate board-rooms, Congressional meetings, NDAs (forget em), and whatever you do in your garage on Thursday nights.
I guess then that people with passports (I don't know if stores will try to scan these and if they can't then decline/refuse the sale) can present them instead of their driver's license.
Apropos: When I was a lad of 23, I did my share of globe-trotting but did not drive a car. I biked or walked everywhere I wanted to go, or used public transportation. So it happened that I had a current passport but not a driver's license.
There were some girls visiting town from Brazil, and my buddy and I thought it would be great fun to take them out. We brought them down to a local pub, and we were all asked for ID. The Brazilian girls and I gave the barman our passports. "I need a driver's license," he said. We laughed, because we all thought it was a joke. Obviously a passport is a much more official document than a driver's license. The barman was, however, quite serious. No service without a valid, current, State-issued driver's license.
All attempts at reason failed (e.g., surely it's better that I don't drive? how, exactly, would someone from Brazil have a State-issued driver's license?). We were all shown the door. Needless to say that was not quite the fun we had been expecting to have.
You want to be mad at the barman, but the reality is that the law is written to require a driver's license. There are no other forms of identification that shield him from liability. He was simply protecting his livelihood. So as a long way around to answering your implied question, No, you cannot use a passport in lieu of a driver's license in these situations.
Slashdot Mirror
This is among the stupidest arguments that anti-universal-care people trot out. Forcing you to pay into a State (or, as the case may be, national) treasury is a part of living in a well-functioning society. You cannot "opt out" of paying taxes for things you don't personally benefit from.
At its most basic level, you must compel taxes because of the need to defend borders. People near the border want it defended; people far away from the border don't feel threatened. So should 100% of the cost of border defense be placed on those living near the border? How about if the border-dwellers just decide to buy the invaders some lunch and give them directions to those living within? It doesn't work. The cost of border defense needs to be spread equally, and a fair portion compelled from every citizen, even those who do not feel like contributing.
This is precisely the same economic issue as health care. Those who are "near" to disease want treatment; those "far" from disease don't feel threatened and want things like single-payer or less regulation of the health insurance industry, essentially shifting the greatest portion of the egregious cost of health care to those who need it the most. In the case of communicable disease, this is clearly a bad policy and can only lead to an increased spread of contagion. So we've got that against it right there. For treatable non-communicable disease, this policy leads to the financial ruin of anyone afflicted, with all the attendant issues like massive defaulting and State dependency thereafter. So a whole bunch of people take a giant financial loss, possibly to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, just so that you can opt out of paying $300 into the health care pool.
Just like border defense, you need to stump up and pay your fair share so that everyone is properly covered in the first place. Declining to do so ends up costing everyone a fortune later on.
The main reason why I think people should give Linux (esp. Ubuntu or Fedora) a try is that once you get used to doing things the "Linux way" you start to realize how much it sucked to be using Windows. It's hard to quantify...I've been using Linux on my work and home desktops since 2001, and using Windows now feels clunky, clumsy, and irritating. Maybe a lot of it has to do with how you train your brain to work around all the horrible quirky behavior of Windows, and once you're away from it awhile you notice how awful it really is.
And by the way, World of Warcraft runs just fine.
Really. Just buy one instead of trying to shoehorn a laptop into the role. As a new couple with (presumably) no kids yet, you can spare the change. In fact, if you're really price-conscious, go buy a 1st-gen Xbox for $25 or so and pick up some games at mom-and-pop used game stores for $5-$10 apiece. There are plenty of split-screen shooters and racers for the original Xbox that you two can spend countless hours on.
Fade in to a low fly-by of a dwarf on griffin-back swooping over the trees of Winterspring. Cut to three adventurers (a human warrior with impossibly enormous shoulder guards, a female night elf with thigh-high boots and no pants encircled by a shimmering bubble, and a goatee-sporting gnome shifting back and forth with two giant-sized red-hot-glowing maces in his hands) on the ground looking up at the passing griffin rider. The camera swings to track the speeding flyer. Cut to an absurdly massive axe, crackling with electrical energy, cleaving the head of a white furbolg.
HUMAN - Pile those corpses high, Ihealuloolzzz. Lilkneestaßßer needs that agility enchantment, and those greedy beasts in Timbermaw Hold won't give it to us unless we kill enough of their enemies!
IHEALULOOLZZZ - By the light of Elune, Tànkérlordd, it shall be done!
LILKNEESTAßßER - Off and away!
Cut to 9-minute montage of our heroic trio slaying thousands upon thousands of furbolgs. Intersperse clips of them ripping beaded necklaces from their slain foes, and other clips showing them spilling gold-bound chests full of these necklaces onto the floor in front of the Timbermaw denizens. Over the course of the montage, we repeatedly see the face of an important-looking Timbermaw shaman. At first the face is frowny and angry, but over time it appears friendlier and friendlier.
There's 2 ways to interpret what you said. The first is that we can't get there, which is probably false. Quite soon we will have sufficient mastery of our physical forms that we'll be able to live as long as we please and adapt ourselves to various conditions. ("Soon" in the long view of things, anyway...a few more hundred years.) Even if it takes ten thousand years to go somewhere, that'll be fine.
The second way to interpret what you said is that because it takes so long to get anywhere -- whether or not we can do it -- the odds of "missing" a civilization become very high. There might have been a great civilization only 10 light years away, but it's already gone. Or there might be one 300 LY away right now, but by the time we figure out it's there and fly over to pay a visit, so much time will have passed that their civilization may disappear by the time we get there. Or we might die out before any other nearby civilizations come to be.
The battlefield of the future is going to be quite different.
Yeah, your dog. See previous comment.
That's because everyone will switch to Quicktime! Oh yes! It's catching on like wildfire.
See, I actually like it this way. It always bothered me that someone could stand there and take 40 arrows to the chest and keep on fighting. The way it's done in 4e, one arrow from a good marksman is a mortal wound. You need to spend fairly scant resources to keep yourself alive, or think about how you'll cooperate to prevent that marksman from getting his shot off. It's much better, and in the hands of a competent DM, should be far more "cinematic" and fun.
Bwha? Yeah, "over the years" is the key phrase here. They experimented wide and far during the dot-com bubble, as everyone else did, but the only versions that count (i.e., anything past 2004) are essentially Windows-only. Luckily, FrameMaker is being dustbinned by the switch to XML documentation. Their version 8 is a pathetic attempt to remain competitive. RIP, I say. I really like Frame, but Adobe's massive lack of support for it has led it into a dead end.
Pah! You forgot "Second Variety" by Philip K. Dick. Now that is a story about exactly what is under discussion: an escalating robot arms race that turns out quite poorly for everyone.
I still maintain that some of the very best music I have ever heard in my entire life was at a pub in Kilkenny. It was just a group of local lads getting together to play a few tunes after their work day was done.
I still maintain that Earth by David Brin is one of the best science fiction novels I have ever read. The eradication of privacy, the pervasive recording of everything by retirees, etc. Now we're just one step closer. Just release a few lab-made black holes and let them carve neural pathways in the planet with their decaying orbits.
You know, it's funny, yes. But in fact I always imagined this to be part of the mythos of Star Wars. It felt easy to pretend that the reason I was sitting down in a theater in 1977 was that we had intercepted this information from a galaxy far, far away. And of course because of the speed of light it had happened ages ago. It lent a very wonderful quality to the story, I thought.
it's not something he deserved to die for
I don't know about that. That's a very late post-modern (I might even say emasculated) way of looking at it. 1000 years ago, hell even 100 years ago, that kind of jackassery would definitely get you killed in a real hurry, and probably a number of other people as well. Getting roasted and shooting tigers with slingshots recklessly endangers himself and others, and those are not qualities you want in your village. I would bet virtually everyone would have shrugged and said "Glad he didn't take anyone with him when he went."
When you scramble up the letters in Microsoft and Yahoo it spells Hot Roomy Fiasco. That can't be good.
Wait, it can also spell Ciao, Frosty Homo. That's not so good either.
Mynocks.
the copyright holder lost out on their right to profit from the distribution of the software
There is no right to profit.
Ohio! Committed to throwing elections since 1803!
Unlike some peer posts, I will politely disagree. (Well, I will concede that there are a lot of black helicopter calls, plus a lot of calls that are just outright nuts.) Phoning the offices of your political representatives most definitely does have an impact. Keep in mind that you may not get the result you want. The Representative/Senator might have already decided, true, or there might be compromises that bind his/her vote (you do know that politics is about compromises, right?), or there might be a weight of evidence seen by the Representative/Senator that sways the balance in the direction you don't want.
This is an acceptable outcome. Just put such things in your private tally, and when election time comes up make sure you provide support or detraction in measure according to your tally. This kind of tracking and action-taking only requires about 10-30 minutes per week. If you won't spend that much time, or can't be bothered to vote, then please sit back and take whatever you're given. All this talk about how "useless" it is to participate in your government fuels exactly the thing you are bitching so loudly about on Slashdot -- a minimum of viewpoints pushed solely by vested interests.
I think there is something like 16 million students enrolled in colleges & universities in the U.S. each year. Using your figures, that means $2.30 per student. So I guess they think it's fair that because you "took" $2.30 from them, they should take $100,000 from you.
But Jesus, and the Bible!
I don't know about that. This is a hair off-topic, but I contacted my Senator (Herb Kohl) regarding the telecom immunity and he responded promptly, politely, and on-point. He told me he also did not think the telecoms needed immunity (i.e., they've said they did no wrong, so clearly they need no immunity from not doing wrong).
My point is that it does influence your representatives if you call their office and/or mail them. You won't talk to El Jefe, but you will talk to someone who will help shape El Jefe's opinion. The system only works if you participate.
I am sure the comments will be flooded with alarmists screeching about black helicopter secret governments. I have a different opinion.
I cannot imagine that any truly great surveillance technology (such as tiny robotic flies) won't be used for selfish purposes -- by all layers of American society. You know your manager wants to spy on you, why not spy on your manager if there's no chance of getting caught? Get some nice juicy dirt! Back-room dirty deals among politicians? It's on Youtube now!
It's hard to accept, but we're hurtling toward a privacy-free society, including corporate board-rooms, Congressional meetings, NDAs (forget em), and whatever you do in your garage on Thursday nights.
I guess then that people with passports (I don't know if stores will try to scan these and if they can't then decline/refuse the sale) can present them instead of their driver's license.
Apropos: When I was a lad of 23, I did my share of globe-trotting but did not drive a car. I biked or walked everywhere I wanted to go, or used public transportation. So it happened that I had a current passport but not a driver's license.
There were some girls visiting town from Brazil, and my buddy and I thought it would be great fun to take them out. We brought them down to a local pub, and we were all asked for ID. The Brazilian girls and I gave the barman our passports. "I need a driver's license," he said. We laughed, because we all thought it was a joke. Obviously a passport is a much more official document than a driver's license. The barman was, however, quite serious. No service without a valid, current, State-issued driver's license.
All attempts at reason failed (e.g., surely it's better that I don't drive? how, exactly, would someone from Brazil have a State-issued driver's license?). We were all shown the door. Needless to say that was not quite the fun we had been expecting to have.
You want to be mad at the barman, but the reality is that the law is written to require a driver's license. There are no other forms of identification that shield him from liability. He was simply protecting his livelihood. So as a long way around to answering your implied question, No, you cannot use a passport in lieu of a driver's license in these situations.