Reading Krebs' article on the topic, the FBI has partnered with ISC to help plan a substitute DNS to stand in for the people whose computers are infected, to notify the ISPs, and to devise a plan to help get their computers cleaned up. The bigger problem is it's a boot sector infection that they don't yet appear to have a way of safely removing.
Personally, I'd rather disenfranchise them. ISC could stand up a substitute DNS server to resolve every address to a redirector site that sends them to a page on fbi.gov explaining that they've been hacked, and they need to bring their computer to a reputable dealer to have the infection removed.
Or maybe they only do this on Tuesdays and Fridays, or for the first 10 names resolved. Just enough annoyance to get their lazy bones off the couch and take care of the problem.
I like the BS stuff in CSI for one main reason: it's visionary. It gets people to want the technology they see on TV. By driving demand for these enhancements, engineers are tasked with being ever more creative.
And have you seen what kinds of video technology is available to forensic analysts these days? "Zoom and enhance" is getting "realer" by the day. Take a look at what guys like Thierry Legault are doing with astrophotograpy, by stacking multiple pictures together to piece out a clean image. There are security cameras available now that use overhead fisheye lenses to continually take 180 degree video of an area, and the operator uses software to emulate pan and tilt so he can view most scenery as if he has a clean 2D window on the scene.
The technology keeps improving, and a lot of that is because the boss walked in and said "I saw X on CSI last night, and you should make our stuff do that. I could sell a million of those!"
It's a couple of NASA rocket scientists, living outside Huntsville, Alabama, and doing a science-related build every weekend. They create such things as blast-proof armor, an Iron Man suit, a submarine, etc., in a way similar to Mythbusters. They showcase bits and pieces of science and engineering as they build (not enough in my opinion, but it's watchable.) And they do not hide who they are. They go fishin' and shoot each other with paintball guns and drink beer and whiskey.
It's like any of a dozen other web maker series, only with mass appeal to the satellite TV audience.
I give them lots of credit for trying to make engineering more accessible; or at least for showcasing engineers in a populist way. I have no idea if it's working with kids or not, but they're trying.
Mosquito nets have suffered from a completely unexpected side effect. Many of the recipients of these nets started using them to make minnow seines for fishing. That kind of use would tear the fabric, and they'd be useless for sleeping. Turns out that hungry people would rather eat fish than worry about mosquitoes when they sleep. Who knew?
Which makes me wonder what people might repurpose these mosquito repelling lasers for? They might pry them apart for the batteries to run lanterns or radios. Or they might discover something really weird, perhaps something like painting the lenses with dried urine will make them into usable flashlights.
Please. Don't argue ancient computing history with those of us who made it.
Touché!:-)
So, again, your hyperbolic statement is false.
This page has already far exceeded the capacity of those floppies. My statement may have been a slight exaggeration over the size of an average comment thread.
But this argument is completely off topic. The point is not that we are suffering some mysterious malady of bloat, it's that we're now using systems for vastly bigger and better things.
If counting too many bytes makes you sad, look at the lady next to you in the restaurant using her Facebook app. She doesn't care how many bytes it takes. Facebook doesn't care. They're each being satisfied by the product ( and one is getting rich.) If Facebook made money off of optimized code, it would change things. But they only make money off happy users, not tight code. If unoptimized code made the lady sad, it would change things. But as long as she can post, she won't care either.
There has to be incentive to drive change. The cost of maintenance is probably the highest factor. If bigger code is more maintainable, then code will be bigger. If a small footprint is driving your costs (a 2kb embedded controller in a toaster is cheaper than an 8kb chip) then bloat is the driving factor in keeping costs down, so efficiency rises in importance.
No, my VT-50's 12x80 terminal screen was indeed 12x80. It was an ASCII terminal that did not have dot addressable graphics. It did not even have a lower case font. It's not like it contained rows of pixels in an invisible buffer that were then transferred to the screen, the hardware continually rendered each row of characters a scan-line at a time.
And you've completely missed the point. The point is that while yesterday's hardware was extremely limited by today's standards, by the day-before-yesterday's standards it was still bigger, better, and faster. That Decscope could work at 9600 baud, and even though my acoustic modem was limited to 300 baud, it was still a big step up from the 110 baud ASR-33 Teletype, as it didn't require paper and ribbons. Would I have considered a program requiring a 24x80 display to be "bloated"? No, I'd have considered my hardware inadequate.
So do I care if Eclipse takes 139MB of RAM or 908MB (egads!) of virtual memory? Yes, it sticks in my craw a bit. But would I rather be without it? Hell no! That's like saying a dog's DNA is bloated, yet if I got rid of 90% of it I'd have an earthworm as a pet. It doesn't make sense.
Here's the other half of the argument. If it bothers you to run a 1GB executable, don't. I'm not forcing you to run Eclipse. Go resurrect a Pentium 100 with 64MB of RAM, and play nethack and run Turbo Pascal 1.0. Go wild and trade your DOS 6.3 for OS/2 2.1. Heck, buy an XVGA video adapter. Be happy with all the power that 1993 delivered to the home user. And then you can bitterly complain about bloated applications that you can't have. But as far as I can tell, you're probably not surfing Slashdot on such a treasured gem. Why not? Because you like using the power you have. You enjoy the benefits of the bloat you publicly decry.
Computing has advanced. Either embrace it or go live on the island of misfit PCs.
1.2 MB floppy disks? Wrong end of the decade. 5-1/4" disks of the era held 180kB (360 kb only if you were rich). The 350 comments on this page right now would have to average less than 515 characters each to fit, or about 85 words.
Don't argue ancient computing history with those of us who lived through it.
How easily we overlook the difference between "bloated" and "quantity of useful information".
Just the words on this page (no markup, no graphics, and after a few comments) would have exceeded the capacity of your beloved 5-1/4 floppy. That's only the raw information, without bloat.
My first screen (a DECScope) had 12 lines x 80 columns each (I couldn't afford the 2K RAM that would have given me 24 x 80.) The screen I'm reading this on can display over 2 million RGB pixels. Calling things "bloat" is like telling me I should honor a display that's less than the size of the "close [X]" icon, because 12x80 isn't "bloat".
By the same twisted logic, Turbo Pascal itself was bloatware, and I thought it produced horribly slow and big code. Assemblers were where the real efficiency lay, and they were a lot smaller than 39K.
You're wrong about the topics that a random stranger should share with a bunch of kids, but you are on the right track.
The real trick is to talk to them about whatever personally excites you. If it's design, talk about design patterns. If you're into security, talk about stuxnet, or botnets, or honeypots, or about hacking into a client site. If you're a network engineer, tell them about a complex data center you helped build and keep running. If you're a coder, talk to them about clean code, or software quality, or performance, or unit testing, or whatever floats your boat.
It also helps if you can let them in on a "secret" tip for success: "Here's a secret for you guys: one thing I wish I'd learned earlier was X (or the most helpful class I took was X). When you guys get to college, be sure to keep an eye out for a good class on X, and learn it right away if you can, because it'll help you with your homework." This kind of approach resonates with kids who are unsure of what they'll be taking in school.
In twenty minutes there isn't enough time to get into more than one example, but try telling them about a daunting problem you faced, the dire consequences of failure, the dedication you demonstrated in solving the issue, and the exciting solution you came up with. Maybe tell them about how your understanding of many different fields all came together to help you save the day. Maybe it was teamwork, and how cool it was to be working with a whole group of geniuses, and how you held your own right in the middle of them. Again, find the part that excited you, and share it
Finally, remind them that computers change faster than anything else in the world. Tomorrow's computers might not even be programmed by today's languages. If they want to be successful, they have to keep learning their whole lives. They have to learn how to keep learning.
If you show them your honest passion, some of them will respond. You may get some who take a little nap. Completely ignore them. You may get some who want to ask deeper and deeper questions. Unfortunately with only 20 minutes you have to be kind of ruthless in shutting them down, but do it gently, and let them know how they can contact you later for some followup.
Excuse me while I call bullshit on you. Here's a recent example of an event that is very similar to what is happening now:
Look at the push a few years ago to stop NOAA from publishing weather forecasts or providing a live weather forecasting web service for free. They wanted to shut down weather.gov. The honest, publicly stated reason that someone was trying to shut them down was that they weren't supposed to compete with the private sector. Totally coincidentally, Rick Santorum, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania, also the home state of Accuweather Inc., was the leading public employee pushing to end NOAA providing free and useful services to those of us who were paying for it.
The reason this all came down was a bit of public comment kerfluffle, driven by the fact that weather forecasting is a tiny ignorable blip on anyone's radar, that the companies involved didn't have the kind of money to pump out a large anti-public-weather-forecasting campaign, and a few activist people were able to organize enough scientists and weather geeks to make a difference in the routine public commenting. It was painfully obvious that Rick Santorum clearly did not represent anyone's interests but Accuweather. "Here's a free national service that you shouldn't have access to because my corporate overlords will lose money." Yet he tried to make it sound like a logical argument, and that anyone who opposed him was a Liberal, or a socialist. Had this been a bigger issue, we probably would have heard a word like "obamaweather."
Insurance companies, health insurance, and public health care are much bigger items and are directly in focus in the public's eye these days. There are so many cooks stirring the pot, so many companies involved, and so many liars sponsored by Fox News and the Republicans telling us that public health care means "death panels" and "obamacare" and "socialized medicine means communism and terrorists" that it's hard to keep straight who's saying what. And that's by design. Even the good ideas are damaged by being modified to opposite ends. Look at how stupid the medicare discount card system came out. Another example of making a public system as screwed up and painful as possible, due to the meddling of big corporate interests. Instead of cheaper medicine, seniors get to play "discount card roulette" by being asked to gamble on what their future health care issues will be. Oh, you got cancer? Sorry, but you bet on the diabetes card, so pay up, loser.
So don't tell me that this exact same scenario isn't being played out right now. There's way too much money at stake for the extremely wealthy insurance companies to not be pumping millions of dollars into every lobbyist, PR flack, television advertising spot, and so-called news organizations. Keep in mind that the loudest and most biased news organizations are wholly controlled and operated exclusively for the benefit of Rupert Murdoch and a small clique of the richest, greediest pigs on earth. You have to understand that these people do not give a shit about you. They want you to chant "obamacare" every time Rush Limbaugh or Nancy Grace says it. They don't want you to think about it. They just want you to hate it. Why? Because your ignorance will keep them rich.
Money is everything to these people. You are nothing to them but just another fool to be fleeced. Pay them, vote for them, fine, but do not lie to me and tell me that the people supporting this system are anything but lying pigs.
And I know that it works, at least on a local level. For example, several years ago I learned that spammers were harvesting email addresses from forwarded chain letters, and sending viruses to them on letters forged from each others' names. I started telling that to friends and relatives and that I didn't want them to forward them to me "for security reasons". I didn't actually think it would stop them from sending them around, I mostly just wanted them to not have my name on their stupid lists. Turns out they really did stop sending me those things, and they actually cut back on the crap they forward to each other! I occasionally have to debunk a relative's question about "OMG, an analrapist hid in a shopping cart under the coat rack at the store and killed 37 women in Dallas on May 3rd of last year, was that true?" but I've now gone many happy years without being the direct recipient of any of the damn things.
Of course, I'm sure little Timmy died lonely and miserably because I didn't pray for his angels, or send him enough postcards to get his name in the Guinness Book of Records, or collect enough moldy pop can tabs to buy him seventeen seconds of dialysis, but I'm totally OK with that.
Now, I probably couldn't lie enough to get them to give up the internet entirely, but maybe if we told them that Wi-Fi caused sterility or computer mice caused Carpal-Tunnel-Induced-Melanomas, they'd at least cut back.
That's because you were in a system that was built by committee and driven by the motive to not compete with private insurance companies. What you experienced is not the experience of the first world countries where all health care is simply paid for by the government.
Imagine if the courts ordered Microsoft to take over development of Open Office, with the contractual promise of keeping it open and free. Now imagine exactly what "features and fixes" Ballmer would add. You'd have to use the mouse to click the arrow buttons to move the cursor. Every third time you type the letter W, it would spit out a pair of Vs. He would have the number 1 removed from the character set. And it would install a dancing chair-throwing monkey screen saver that you couldn't disable. He'd do everything in his power to make sure that it was as awful as possible while still meeting the court-ordered requirements.
Replace Ballmer with Congress, and Open Office with Medicaid, and that's exactly what you got.
Now, take the private insurance companies away completely, and have all health care directly paid by the government. You get adequate care and treatment. You won't get the three-CAT-scan overkill that your current doctors love to bill to your insurers, but adequate and appropriate care. The only drawback is the hit to the economy when you stop shoveling truckloads of money into the insurance company vaults, and they have to fire their soon-to-be-outsourced-anyway data entry people. And the country clubs will have fewer paying members.
So stop bitching about the Republican scare-ware version of government run health care. Real government run health care is a hell of a lot better than the current insurance scams, and a hell of a lot cheaper.
I thought the last season had a good overall story arc. They did leave some gaps in there large enough to drive a lorry through, but that's OK. Why'd they pick Danes? How was he going to make their billions? Where'd the Blessing come from? Does MI5 really let the CIA run the show on merry old England's shores? I think it's good to not always answer every point. Let the viewer fill in the shady nature of the villains or the hidden secrets of the magic -- call it a conspiracy and move on.
It certainly could have done with a lot less of the sexuality that advanced nothing in the story line, as that really turned off a lot of viewers. We already knew Jack was gay; showing one-night stands with non-characters was worse than gratuitous for a certain segment of the audience (although the rest of us just kind of ignored it and moved on with the story.) The sex between Rex and Vera was different because it added to the story.
It wasn't their best season, but it was good to have it back on the air again.
I wish I remember the brand of in-room safe they used at the last hotel I stayed at. The safe displayed something like "Eror", so we called the desk who sent a security guy to come open it. He had to plug a cable into a port hidden behind the logo in the door, and he had to set some kind of device on the top of the safe. He then entered some stuff on a Palm Pilot on the other end of the cables, and the safe was opened and reset. There was no visible opening on the top of the safe so I assume it's inductively coupled some how. (Of course it could have been a simple electromagnet/reed switch and Morse code, too. I couldn't exactly tell what it was doing.)
It would have been nice to have two people, one with the device and one with the passwords. But still, at least it was complex enough that the housekeeping staff wouldn't ordinarily be able to do it.
gTewns also needs to alter the GUI to follow some other platform's specs, including non-standard key bindings and unlabeled controls. It should store all of its settings in a hidden folder somewhere on your drive that you won't accidentally find. It should take copies of your existing music files, rename them to random characters, and stick them in a different folder so you can double your backup space requirements. It should also upload periodic updates to your Android phone, just in case it got accidentally hacked. For that matter, it should install a tool to update itself that helps fill the system tray with extra useless icons, and that tool should always reinstall itself just in case you accidentally disabled it.
That's right. Jaywalkers, or "street-crossing terrorists" as we now call them, need to be stopped. Shoplifters, also known as "retail terrorists", are also on the rise. And we have all this budget for guns and officers, so why not?
Hmm. Maybe I can get federal health care out of this. Instead of the flu, someone gave me a case of the "stomach terrorists", so the Patriot act should pay to cure me so they don't spread, right? I suppose by the same token the "cure" for stomach terrorists involves a UAV, which I'd rather not experience.
What, you have to have like a murder or stabbing or bombing before you take a crime seriously? 120,000 people each defrauded out of 99 Euros isn't serious crime, because no one person was defrauded out of more than 100 Euros?
I'd like to see the definition of the law, rather than this mentioned-in-passing "violation of its initial intention" If there's going to be technical analysis of the spyware, why isn't there similar analysis of the laws it's claimed to violate?
Slashdot Mirror
Reading Krebs' article on the topic, the FBI has partnered with ISC to help plan a substitute DNS to stand in for the people whose computers are infected, to notify the ISPs, and to devise a plan to help get their computers cleaned up. The bigger problem is it's a boot sector infection that they don't yet appear to have a way of safely removing.
Personally, I'd rather disenfranchise them. ISC could stand up a substitute DNS server to resolve every address to a redirector site that sends them to a page on fbi.gov explaining that they've been hacked, and they need to bring their computer to a reputable dealer to have the infection removed.
Or maybe they only do this on Tuesdays and Fridays, or for the first 10 names resolved. Just enough annoyance to get their lazy bones off the couch and take care of the problem.
I like the BS stuff in CSI for one main reason: it's visionary. It gets people to want the technology they see on TV. By driving demand for these enhancements, engineers are tasked with being ever more creative.
And have you seen what kinds of video technology is available to forensic analysts these days? "Zoom and enhance" is getting "realer" by the day. Take a look at what guys like Thierry Legault are doing with astrophotograpy, by stacking multiple pictures together to piece out a clean image. There are security cameras available now that use overhead fisheye lenses to continually take 180 degree video of an area, and the operator uses software to emulate pan and tilt so he can view most scenery as if he has a clean 2D window on the scene.
The technology keeps improving, and a lot of that is because the boss walked in and said "I saw X on CSI last night, and you should make our stuff do that. I could sell a million of those!"
Rocket City Rednecks.
It's a couple of NASA rocket scientists, living outside Huntsville, Alabama, and doing a science-related build every weekend. They create such things as blast-proof armor, an Iron Man suit, a submarine, etc., in a way similar to Mythbusters. They showcase bits and pieces of science and engineering as they build (not enough in my opinion, but it's watchable.) And they do not hide who they are. They go fishin' and shoot each other with paintball guns and drink beer and whiskey.
It's like any of a dozen other web maker series, only with mass appeal to the satellite TV audience.
I give them lots of credit for trying to make engineering more accessible; or at least for showcasing engineers in a populist way. I have no idea if it's working with kids or not, but they're trying.
No, "potty". Why do you think they burned it?
Mosquito nets have suffered from a completely unexpected side effect. Many of the recipients of these nets started using them to make minnow seines for fishing. That kind of use would tear the fabric, and they'd be useless for sleeping. Turns out that hungry people would rather eat fish than worry about mosquitoes when they sleep. Who knew?
Which makes me wonder what people might repurpose these mosquito repelling lasers for? They might pry them apart for the batteries to run lanterns or radios. Or they might discover something really weird, perhaps something like painting the lenses with dried urine will make them into usable flashlights.
Please. Don't argue ancient computing history with those of us who made it.
Touché! :-)
So, again, your hyperbolic statement is false.
This page has already far exceeded the capacity of those floppies. My statement may have been a slight exaggeration over the size of an average comment thread.
But this argument is completely off topic. The point is not that we are suffering some mysterious malady of bloat, it's that we're now using systems for vastly bigger and better things.
If counting too many bytes makes you sad, look at the lady next to you in the restaurant using her Facebook app. She doesn't care how many bytes it takes. Facebook doesn't care. They're each being satisfied by the product ( and one is getting rich.) If Facebook made money off of optimized code, it would change things. But they only make money off happy users, not tight code. If unoptimized code made the lady sad, it would change things. But as long as she can post, she won't care either.
There has to be incentive to drive change. The cost of maintenance is probably the highest factor. If bigger code is more maintainable, then code will be bigger. If a small footprint is driving your costs (a 2kb embedded controller in a toaster is cheaper than an 8kb chip) then bloat is the driving factor in keeping costs down, so efficiency rises in importance.
No, my VT-50's 12x80 terminal screen was indeed 12x80. It was an ASCII terminal that did not have dot addressable graphics. It did not even have a lower case font. It's not like it contained rows of pixels in an invisible buffer that were then transferred to the screen, the hardware continually rendered each row of characters a scan-line at a time.
And you've completely missed the point. The point is that while yesterday's hardware was extremely limited by today's standards, by the day-before-yesterday's standards it was still bigger, better, and faster. That Decscope could work at 9600 baud, and even though my acoustic modem was limited to 300 baud, it was still a big step up from the 110 baud ASR-33 Teletype, as it didn't require paper and ribbons. Would I have considered a program requiring a 24x80 display to be "bloated"? No, I'd have considered my hardware inadequate.
So do I care if Eclipse takes 139MB of RAM or 908MB (egads!) of virtual memory? Yes, it sticks in my craw a bit. But would I rather be without it? Hell no! That's like saying a dog's DNA is bloated, yet if I got rid of 90% of it I'd have an earthworm as a pet. It doesn't make sense.
Here's the other half of the argument. If it bothers you to run a 1GB executable, don't. I'm not forcing you to run Eclipse. Go resurrect a Pentium 100 with 64MB of RAM, and play nethack and run Turbo Pascal 1.0. Go wild and trade your DOS 6.3 for OS/2 2.1. Heck, buy an XVGA video adapter. Be happy with all the power that 1993 delivered to the home user. And then you can bitterly complain about bloated applications that you can't have. But as far as I can tell, you're probably not surfing Slashdot on such a treasured gem. Why not? Because you like using the power you have. You enjoy the benefits of the bloat you publicly decry.
Computing has advanced. Either embrace it or go live on the island of misfit PCs.
1.2 MB floppy disks? Wrong end of the decade. 5-1/4" disks of the era held 180kB (360 kb only if you were rich). The 350 comments on this page right now would have to average less than 515 characters each to fit, or about 85 words.
Don't argue ancient computing history with those of us who lived through it.
How easily we overlook the difference between "bloated" and "quantity of useful information".
Just the words on this page (no markup, no graphics, and after a few comments) would have exceeded the capacity of your beloved 5-1/4 floppy. That's only the raw information, without bloat.
My first screen (a DECScope) had 12 lines x 80 columns each (I couldn't afford the 2K RAM that would have given me 24 x 80.) The screen I'm reading this on can display over 2 million RGB pixels. Calling things "bloat" is like telling me I should honor a display that's less than the size of the "close [X]" icon, because 12x80 isn't "bloat".
By the same twisted logic, Turbo Pascal itself was bloatware, and I thought it produced horribly slow and big code. Assemblers were where the real efficiency lay, and they were a lot smaller than 39K.
Nostalgia is fine. But leave it in the past.
Your brain is dirty. Let me wash that for you.
There, isn't that better now?
And don't ask where the mud came from.
You're wrong about the topics that a random stranger should share with a bunch of kids, but you are on the right track.
The real trick is to talk to them about whatever personally excites you. If it's design, talk about design patterns. If you're into security, talk about stuxnet, or botnets, or honeypots, or about hacking into a client site. If you're a network engineer, tell them about a complex data center you helped build and keep running. If you're a coder, talk to them about clean code, or software quality, or performance, or unit testing, or whatever floats your boat.
It also helps if you can let them in on a "secret" tip for success: "Here's a secret for you guys: one thing I wish I'd learned earlier was X (or the most helpful class I took was X). When you guys get to college, be sure to keep an eye out for a good class on X, and learn it right away if you can, because it'll help you with your homework." This kind of approach resonates with kids who are unsure of what they'll be taking in school.
In twenty minutes there isn't enough time to get into more than one example, but try telling them about a daunting problem you faced, the dire consequences of failure, the dedication you demonstrated in solving the issue, and the exciting solution you came up with. Maybe tell them about how your understanding of many different fields all came together to help you save the day. Maybe it was teamwork, and how cool it was to be working with a whole group of geniuses, and how you held your own right in the middle of them. Again, find the part that excited you, and share it
Finally, remind them that computers change faster than anything else in the world. Tomorrow's computers might not even be programmed by today's languages. If they want to be successful, they have to keep learning their whole lives. They have to learn how to keep learning.
If you show them your honest passion, some of them will respond. You may get some who take a little nap. Completely ignore them. You may get some who want to ask deeper and deeper questions. Unfortunately with only 20 minutes you have to be kind of ruthless in shutting them down, but do it gently, and let them know how they can contact you later for some followup.
Good luck and have fun!
Excuse me while I call bullshit on you. Here's a recent example of an event that is very similar to what is happening now:
Look at the push a few years ago to stop NOAA from publishing weather forecasts or providing a live weather forecasting web service for free. They wanted to shut down weather.gov. The honest, publicly stated reason that someone was trying to shut them down was that they weren't supposed to compete with the private sector. Totally coincidentally, Rick Santorum, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania, also the home state of Accuweather Inc., was the leading public employee pushing to end NOAA providing free and useful services to those of us who were paying for it.
The reason this all came down was a bit of public comment kerfluffle, driven by the fact that weather forecasting is a tiny ignorable blip on anyone's radar, that the companies involved didn't have the kind of money to pump out a large anti-public-weather-forecasting campaign, and a few activist people were able to organize enough scientists and weather geeks to make a difference in the routine public commenting. It was painfully obvious that Rick Santorum clearly did not represent anyone's interests but Accuweather. "Here's a free national service that you shouldn't have access to because my corporate overlords will lose money." Yet he tried to make it sound like a logical argument, and that anyone who opposed him was a Liberal, or a socialist. Had this been a bigger issue, we probably would have heard a word like "obamaweather."
Insurance companies, health insurance, and public health care are much bigger items and are directly in focus in the public's eye these days. There are so many cooks stirring the pot, so many companies involved, and so many liars sponsored by Fox News and the Republicans telling us that public health care means "death panels" and "obamacare" and "socialized medicine means communism and terrorists" that it's hard to keep straight who's saying what. And that's by design. Even the good ideas are damaged by being modified to opposite ends. Look at how stupid the medicare discount card system came out. Another example of making a public system as screwed up and painful as possible, due to the meddling of big corporate interests. Instead of cheaper medicine, seniors get to play "discount card roulette" by being asked to gamble on what their future health care issues will be. Oh, you got cancer? Sorry, but you bet on the diabetes card, so pay up, loser.
So don't tell me that this exact same scenario isn't being played out right now. There's way too much money at stake for the extremely wealthy insurance companies to not be pumping millions of dollars into every lobbyist, PR flack, television advertising spot, and so-called news organizations. Keep in mind that the loudest and most biased news organizations are wholly controlled and operated exclusively for the benefit of Rupert Murdoch and a small clique of the richest, greediest pigs on earth. You have to understand that these people do not give a shit about you. They want you to chant "obamacare" every time Rush Limbaugh or Nancy Grace says it. They don't want you to think about it. They just want you to hate it. Why? Because your ignorance will keep them rich.
Money is everything to these people. You are nothing to them but just another fool to be fleeced. Pay them, vote for them, fine, but do not lie to me and tell me that the people supporting this system are anything but lying pigs.
+5 insightful, if I had it to give.
And I know that it works, at least on a local level. For example, several years ago I learned that spammers were harvesting email addresses from forwarded chain letters, and sending viruses to them on letters forged from each others' names. I started telling that to friends and relatives and that I didn't want them to forward them to me "for security reasons". I didn't actually think it would stop them from sending them around, I mostly just wanted them to not have my name on their stupid lists. Turns out they really did stop sending me those things, and they actually cut back on the crap they forward to each other! I occasionally have to debunk a relative's question about "OMG, an analrapist hid in a shopping cart under the coat rack at the store and killed 37 women in Dallas on May 3rd of last year, was that true?" but I've now gone many happy years without being the direct recipient of any of the damn things.
Of course, I'm sure little Timmy died lonely and miserably because I didn't pray for his angels, or send him enough postcards to get his name in the Guinness Book of Records, or collect enough moldy pop can tabs to buy him seventeen seconds of dialysis, but I'm totally OK with that.
Now, I probably couldn't lie enough to get them to give up the internet entirely, but maybe if we told them that Wi-Fi caused sterility or computer mice caused Carpal-Tunnel-Induced-Melanomas, they'd at least cut back.
That's because you were in a system that was built by committee and driven by the motive to not compete with private insurance companies. What you experienced is not the experience of the first world countries where all health care is simply paid for by the government.
Imagine if the courts ordered Microsoft to take over development of Open Office, with the contractual promise of keeping it open and free. Now imagine exactly what "features and fixes" Ballmer would add. You'd have to use the mouse to click the arrow buttons to move the cursor. Every third time you type the letter W, it would spit out a pair of Vs. He would have the number 1 removed from the character set. And it would install a dancing chair-throwing monkey screen saver that you couldn't disable. He'd do everything in his power to make sure that it was as awful as possible while still meeting the court-ordered requirements.
Replace Ballmer with Congress, and Open Office with Medicaid, and that's exactly what you got.
Now, take the private insurance companies away completely, and have all health care directly paid by the government. You get adequate care and treatment. You won't get the three-CAT-scan overkill that your current doctors love to bill to your insurers, but adequate and appropriate care. The only drawback is the hit to the economy when you stop shoveling truckloads of money into the insurance company vaults, and they have to fire their soon-to-be-outsourced-anyway data entry people. And the country clubs will have fewer paying members.
So stop bitching about the Republican scare-ware version of government run health care. Real government run health care is a hell of a lot better than the current insurance scams, and a hell of a lot cheaper.
The next Doctor will be about 14 years old, if the regeneration trend carries on with any pattern.
Doogie Howser, Time Lord?
I thought the last season had a good overall story arc. They did leave some gaps in there large enough to drive a lorry through, but that's OK. Why'd they pick Danes? How was he going to make their billions? Where'd the Blessing come from? Does MI5 really let the CIA run the show on merry old England's shores? I think it's good to not always answer every point. Let the viewer fill in the shady nature of the villains or the hidden secrets of the magic -- call it a conspiracy and move on.
It certainly could have done with a lot less of the sexuality that advanced nothing in the story line, as that really turned off a lot of viewers. We already knew Jack was gay; showing one-night stands with non-characters was worse than gratuitous for a certain segment of the audience (although the rest of us just kind of ignored it and moved on with the story.) The sex between Rex and Vera was different because it added to the story.
It wasn't their best season, but it was good to have it back on the air again.
Bah. My Rubik's cube solving job was outsourced to China five years ago.
Perhaps I should have said "frothing distance", or possibly "sweating distance". Whatever, with Ballmer, they're still all about the same.
I wish I remember the brand of in-room safe they used at the last hotel I stayed at. The safe displayed something like "Eror", so we called the desk who sent a security guy to come open it. He had to plug a cable into a port hidden behind the logo in the door, and he had to set some kind of device on the top of the safe. He then entered some stuff on a Palm Pilot on the other end of the cables, and the safe was opened and reset. There was no visible opening on the top of the safe so I assume it's inductively coupled some how. (Of course it could have been a simple electromagnet/reed switch and Morse code, too. I couldn't exactly tell what it was doing.)
It would have been nice to have two people, one with the device and one with the passwords. But still, at least it was complex enough that the housekeeping staff wouldn't ordinarily be able to do it.
this sounds about as smart as hunting bunny rabbits with a cannon.
You obviously have no idea just how much fun that is!
Spitting distance? Ballmer must have selected the location.
gTewns also needs to alter the GUI to follow some other platform's specs, including non-standard key bindings and unlabeled controls. It should store all of its settings in a hidden folder somewhere on your drive that you won't accidentally find. It should take copies of your existing music files, rename them to random characters, and stick them in a different folder so you can double your backup space requirements. It should also upload periodic updates to your Android phone, just in case it got accidentally hacked. For that matter, it should install a tool to update itself that helps fill the system tray with extra useless icons, and that tool should always reinstall itself just in case you accidentally disabled it.
That's right. Jaywalkers, or "street-crossing terrorists" as we now call them, need to be stopped. Shoplifters, also known as "retail terrorists", are also on the rise. And we have all this budget for guns and officers, so why not?
Hmm. Maybe I can get federal health care out of this. Instead of the flu, someone gave me a case of the "stomach terrorists", so the Patriot act should pay to cure me so they don't spread, right? I suppose by the same token the "cure" for stomach terrorists involves a UAV, which I'd rather not experience.
What, you have to have like a murder or stabbing or bombing before you take a crime seriously? 120,000 people each defrauded out of 99 Euros isn't serious crime, because no one person was defrauded out of more than 100 Euros?
I'd like to see the definition of the law, rather than this mentioned-in-passing "violation of its initial intention" If there's going to be technical analysis of the spyware, why isn't there similar analysis of the laws it's claimed to violate?
Those holding the pen write history.
Not quite. The last person to edit Wikipedia wrote history.
Think about that difference, Winston Smith.