I agree that the situation is fucked up, but can we do without the brainless cliches for once? Yeah, it's a big payday for the lawyers, but that's true every day in this litigious society. They're not the winners, they're just well-paid peons.
The winner (of a sort, see below) is Apple. They're the ones that hired the lawyers, and the lobbyists, and the politicians, so that they can cash in big on a few design patents.
The losers is everybody who depends on innovation. Which is to say everybody, including Apple, though they they will see some short term financial benefits.
What's the answer? Well it's not to elect Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul, or Ralph Nader, or Ross Perot, or whoever the white knight is this week. Even if such a pure-minded soul had the slightest hope of winning an election in the real world, he'd be even less well equipped to fight The Bad Guys than mainstream politicians.
You've got to fix the system. You've got to throw away the stupid cliches, develop an actual understanding of how the system works, and start electing people who will actually fix it. Not just Presidents. Representatives and Senators too. (How many of you know the name of your Representative and where he or she stands on IP issues?) And you keep an eye on what they're doing, not just wait until it becomes obvious that they've sold out and whine about it.
That's hard work, and it won't happen overnight. It's so much easier to say "Don't Reward Corruption!" and refuse to have anything to do with mainstream politics. But it's time to give up on the lazy, simple-minded righteousness and actually do stuff.
Human space flight has so far consisted of series of expensive demo projects. Our one big attempt at building an affordable, reusable low orbit vehicle (the space shuttle) has finally sputtered out. The various private efforts at building spacecraft are steps in the right direction, but very tiny ones. The ISS does some cool science, but doesn't represent the beginning of a real space infrastructure — it can't even provide its inhabitants with clean clothes!
If we want people in space, we need to spend a lot of money on long term goals. That means big, high-orbit reusable vehicles, and finding some way to bootstrap the whole thing economically (asteroid mining? zero-gee factories?), so we don't have to keep coming back to taxpayers who are less and less likely to shell out for blue sky projects. It's technically feasible, but do you see any politician motivated to stake his career on making it happen?
Unless things change drastically (like some genius inventing a practical alternative to chemical rockets, or the Overlords invade and give us some motivation), even a return to the moon is a pipe dream, never mind a trip to Mars. And yet I hear people talking as if it's a done deal.
Jeez, what are you taking, and where can I get a prescription?
I understand the appeal of RPGs, and if people have fun playing them, good for them. But let's not pretend that stringing together a lot of semi-random events is storytelling. Telling a story is an art form with discipline and direction.
I have to admit that a lot of SF and Fantasy these days reads like an RPG log. But that's not a good thing, unless you view reading as a form of self-hypnosis. From where I sit, there are way too many books that go on for thousands of pages without really going anywhere.
If you have the patience and visual imagination to enjoy RPGs, they're self-explanatory. If you don't (and I have to admit I don't), then they're simply boring and any explanation of them is even more boring. So save your breath to blow on your 20-sided die.
Willow Wilson is an American writer who converted to Islam, married an Egyptian and now lives partly in her husband's country. I'm not a big fan (I have issues with her understanding of events and her selective condemnation of bigotry) but her memoir Butterfly Mosque is must reading if you pretend to have any understanding of the way people live and think in Islamic countries.
Her account of her trip to Iran is illuminating. She had assumed that Iranian, living as they do in a theocracy, would be even more conservative in lifestyle and dress than the old-fashioned Egyptian Muslims she lives among, and had dressed for the trip accordingly. She was surprised to find that Iranian women actually dress less conservatively than Egyptian women. Iranians, according to her, are not so much cowed by the Islamist rulers as unwilling to take violent action to overthrow them. This she blames on many years of revolution and war.
If her picture is right, neither the Islamists or the more liberal Iranians are in a position to really force their views on the other. People go through the motions of obeying all the religious restrictions on their lives, but push back — hard — when the mullahs go too far. I think this is going to be a moderately unstable situation with no real resolution for a long time
Comedian Tom Green actually traveled FROM Canada to get his cancer surgery.
Redundant post. See the rest of the thread.
BTW why does everyone always assume "government provides free care for everyone" is the only answer?
Maybe because they're not? Countries that provide universal health care (which is every country that has a modern economy except for the U.S.) mostly rely on some combination of private and public insurance. Canada just keeps coming up because they're right next door, they have a society very similar to ours, and they have a government-run health system that seems to work pretty good. Oh, and because the blogosphere keeps coming up with BS stories about how Canadian socialized medicine is killing people, despite the fact that Canadians live about as long as we do.
I pay a mere $120 a month for my insurance.
Well, goodie for you. Let me guess, you're in your 20s? No pre-existing conditions? I'm in my 50s and have pre-existing conditions; no insurance company will sell me a policy at any price. I can get catastrophic coverage (but not day-to-day care) from my state's "shared risk pool" for $600, and that's with a subsidy from cigarette taxes. Needless to say, I'm no longer rude to people who smoke!
In 2014 the rules for pre-existing conditions cut in, and the Obamacare health insurance exchanges start up — at least in those states that have been actually working on them, and not just suing to get Obamacare declared unconstitutional. When that happens, I'll be able to get a policy for $200 with a yearly out-of-pocket cap of $2K. Which is something I can live with, though a single--payer system like Canada's would make for a lot less bureaucratic hassle..
No, it sounds like the doctors tried to tell the guy that further treatment would only prolong his mother's suffering and he didn't want to hear it.
I've been through the same thing several times with family members and friends. There comes a time when it doesn't make sense to inflict any more painful chemo, radiation, or surgery. In each case, the ultimate decision was made by patient themselves, and in each case I saw some relative angrily reject their decision as "giving up".
And this time, we have a convenient scapegoat in the Canadian health care system. But guess what? Cancer survival rates are about the same in Canada as they are in the U.S.
The way CEOs are overpaid pisses me off too. But that's not a big line item. The odd yacht is nothing compared to simple waste that's built into the system.
This is not unrelated to the fact that Canadians often have to wait for things like MRIs. This happens because the Canadian system is stingy about expensive hardware, like MRI machines. Meanwhile, in the US, every hospital has to have its own MRI machine to stay competitive, and we have way more MRI capacity than we need — and have to pay for it.
You claim that your mother would have gotten better care in the U.S., but you don't cite any basis for the claim. Do you have any, besides the usual "socialized medicine sucks" assumption?
As they say in Wikipedia, attribution required. While there's a lot online about Green's fight with cancer, I can't seem to find anything resembling the 9-month delay.
This sounds like a typical internet meme. While you often hear Canadians complain about delays, it's always for stuff that can wait, not for something that's likely to kill you soon. Of course, by the time this is filtered through the right-wing blogosphere it's "we're going to have to let you die because we don't have enough beds."
One feature of Obamacare is health exchanges, which will allow individuals to get the shared-risk benefits of belonging to a group plan. These will start appearing in 2014. The one for my state is planning to offer plans that will cost $200 a month, assuming you're over 30 and have an income of no more than $30K.
Switzerland deserves special mention, since their public-private patchwork is the system that most resembles Obamacare. Isn't it terrible that we're emulating a such a notoriously socialistic country?!
My mother actually traveled to Canada for cataract surgery. She was no longer a Canadian citizen, but she was eligible as a recipient of the Canadian equivalent of Social Security.
She could have had it done under Medicare, but would have had to cover huge co-payments.
It's pretty clear that data centers are rapidly turning into service providers that sell VM time and maybe adding value in the form of SaaS. That's true even for internal data centers that are used only by the companies that own them — they just use a different billing procedure for their customers.
So, a serious developer doesn't buy a 1u server and rent colo space. He buys VM time and any other services he needs, and lets the provider worry about the hardware. Much more cost effective, much easier to scale up when the app becomes popular.
And providers who cater to this new paradigm are not going to bother with variant architectures. The only way they can compete is by making their infrastructure as generic as possible. This minimizes their costs and maximizes their customer base. So x86 processors have won the data center wars the same way they won the desktop wars. There are good reasons to regret this fact, but a fact it is.
Products that ignore the above trends are just wishful thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm confused. You don't want Apple to be in control, but you don't think "copyists should run things". What's the third choice?
So, you think Apple should have had sole ownership of GUIs and smartphones? Windows and Android should just go away? Now that is facile.
I agree that the situation is fucked up, but can we do without the brainless cliches for once? Yeah, it's a big payday for the lawyers, but that's true every day in this litigious society. They're not the winners, they're just well-paid peons.
The winner (of a sort, see below) is Apple. They're the ones that hired the lawyers, and the lobbyists, and the politicians, so that they can cash in big on a few design patents.
The losers is everybody who depends on innovation. Which is to say everybody, including Apple, though they they will see some short term financial benefits.
What's the answer? Well it's not to elect Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul, or Ralph Nader, or Ross Perot, or whoever the white knight is this week. Even if such a pure-minded soul had the slightest hope of winning an election in the real world, he'd be even less well equipped to fight The Bad Guys than mainstream politicians.
You've got to fix the system. You've got to throw away the stupid cliches, develop an actual understanding of how the system works, and start electing people who will actually fix it. Not just Presidents. Representatives and Senators too. (How many of you know the name of your Representative and where he or she stands on IP issues?) And you keep an eye on what they're doing, not just wait until it becomes obvious that they've sold out and whine about it.
That's hard work, and it won't happen overnight. It's so much easier to say "Don't Reward Corruption!" and refuse to have anything to do with mainstream politics. But it's time to give up on the lazy, simple-minded righteousness and actually do stuff.
Human space flight has so far consisted of series of expensive demo projects. Our one big attempt at building an affordable, reusable low orbit vehicle (the space shuttle) has finally sputtered out. The various private efforts at building spacecraft are steps in the right direction, but very tiny ones. The ISS does some cool science, but doesn't represent the beginning of a real space infrastructure — it can't even provide its inhabitants with clean clothes!
If we want people in space, we need to spend a lot of money on long term goals. That means big, high-orbit reusable vehicles, and finding some way to bootstrap the whole thing economically (asteroid mining? zero-gee factories?), so we don't have to keep coming back to taxpayers who are less and less likely to shell out for blue sky projects. It's technically feasible, but do you see any politician motivated to stake his career on making it happen?
Unless things change drastically (like some genius inventing a practical alternative to chemical rockets, or the Overlords invade and give us some motivation), even a return to the moon is a pipe dream, never mind a trip to Mars. And yet I hear people talking as if it's a done deal.
Jeez, what are you taking, and where can I get a prescription?
I understand the appeal of RPGs, and if people have fun playing them, good for them. But let's not pretend that stringing together a lot of semi-random events is storytelling. Telling a story is an art form with discipline and direction.
I have to admit that a lot of SF and Fantasy these days reads like an RPG log. But that's not a good thing, unless you view reading as a form of self-hypnosis. From where I sit, there are way too many books that go on for thousands of pages without really going anywhere.
If you have the patience and visual imagination to enjoy RPGs, they're self-explanatory. If you don't (and I have to admit I don't), then they're simply boring and any explanation of them is even more boring. So save your breath to blow on your 20-sided die.
Willow Wilson is an American writer who converted to Islam, married an Egyptian and now lives partly in her husband's country. I'm not a big fan (I have issues with her understanding of events and her selective condemnation of bigotry) but her memoir Butterfly Mosque is must reading if you pretend to have any understanding of the way people live and think in Islamic countries.
Her account of her trip to Iran is illuminating. She had assumed that Iranian, living as they do in a theocracy, would be even more conservative in lifestyle and dress than the old-fashioned Egyptian Muslims she lives among, and had dressed for the trip accordingly. She was surprised to find that Iranian women actually dress less conservatively than Egyptian women. Iranians, according to her, are not so much cowed by the Islamist rulers as unwilling to take violent action to overthrow them. This she blames on many years of revolution and war.
If her picture is right, neither the Islamists or the more liberal Iranians are in a position to really force their views on the other. People go through the motions of obeying all the religious restrictions on their lives, but push back — hard — when the mullahs go too far. I think this is going to be a moderately unstable situation with no real resolution for a long time
He liked dogs and never ate meat. Oh Lord, when I think of all the dog-walking vegetarians in America today, I despair!
Well, if by "stupid" you mean "they believe garbled BS they picked up online" then yeah, they're pretty dumb. As are most people who post on Slashdot.
Comedian Tom Green actually traveled FROM Canada to get his cancer surgery.
Redundant post. See the rest of the thread.
BTW why does everyone always assume "government provides free care for everyone" is the only answer?
Maybe because they're not? Countries that provide universal health care (which is every country that has a modern economy except for the U.S.) mostly rely on some combination of private and public insurance. Canada just keeps coming up because they're right next door, they have a society very similar to ours, and they have a government-run health system that seems to work pretty good. Oh, and because the blogosphere keeps coming up with BS stories about how Canadian socialized medicine is killing people, despite the fact that Canadians live about as long as we do.
I pay a mere $120 a month for my insurance.
Well, goodie for you. Let me guess, you're in your 20s? No pre-existing conditions? I'm in my 50s and have pre-existing conditions; no insurance company will sell me a policy at any price. I can get catastrophic coverage (but not day-to-day care) from my state's "shared risk pool" for $600, and that's with a subsidy from cigarette taxes. Needless to say, I'm no longer rude to people who smoke!
In 2014 the rules for pre-existing conditions cut in, and the Obamacare health insurance exchanges start up — at least in those states that have been actually working on them, and not just suing to get Obamacare declared unconstitutional. When that happens, I'll be able to get a policy for $200 with a yearly out-of-pocket cap of $2K. Which is something I can live with, though a single--payer system like Canada's would make for a lot less bureaucratic hassle..
No, it sounds like the doctors tried to tell the guy that further treatment would only prolong his mother's suffering and he didn't want to hear it.
I've been through the same thing several times with family members and friends. There comes a time when it doesn't make sense to inflict any more painful chemo, radiation, or surgery. In each case, the ultimate decision was made by patient themselves, and in each case I saw some relative angrily reject their decision as "giving up".
And this time, we have a convenient scapegoat in the Canadian health care system. But guess what? Cancer survival rates are about the same in Canada as they are in the U.S.
The way CEOs are overpaid pisses me off too. But that's not a big line item. The odd yacht is nothing compared to simple waste that's built into the system.
This is not unrelated to the fact that Canadians often have to wait for things like MRIs. This happens because the Canadian system is stingy about expensive hardware, like MRI machines. Meanwhile, in the US, every hospital has to have its own MRI machine to stay competitive, and we have way more MRI capacity than we need — and have to pay for it.
None of which has anything to do with data center computing.
You claim that your mother would have gotten better care in the U.S., but you don't cite any basis for the claim. Do you have any, besides the usual "socialized medicine sucks" assumption?
As they say in Wikipedia, attribution required. While there's a lot online about Green's fight with cancer, I can't seem to find anything resembling the 9-month delay.
This sounds like a typical internet meme. While you often hear Canadians complain about delays, it's always for stuff that can wait, not for something that's likely to kill you soon. Of course, by the time this is filtered through the right-wing blogosphere it's "we're going to have to let you die because we don't have enough beds."
And of course, people killed by legitimate hurricanes are asking for it!
My name is Isaac Rabinovitch. I have no connection whatever with this hurricane. Please don't complain to me about it.
Silly idea. As far as I can tell, nobody at Microsoft knows how any sense of fashion,.
One feature of Obamacare is health exchanges, which will allow individuals to get the shared-risk benefits of belonging to a group plan. These will start appearing in 2014. The one for my state is planning to offer plans that will cost $200 a month, assuming you're over 30 and have an income of no more than $30K.
Switzerland deserves special mention, since their public-private patchwork is the system that most resembles Obamacare. Isn't it terrible that we're emulating a such a notoriously socialistic country?!
My mother actually traveled to Canada for cataract surgery. She was no longer a Canadian citizen, but she was eligible as a recipient of the Canadian equivalent of Social Security.
She could have had it done under Medicare, but would have had to cover huge co-payments.
You have a very strange idea of how mobile apps work.
You're right, and it's obviously not a coincidence. I for one, welcome our new Metro Overlords!
It's pretty clear that data centers are rapidly turning into service providers that sell VM time and maybe adding value in the form of SaaS. That's true even for internal data centers that are used only by the companies that own them — they just use a different billing procedure for their customers.
So, a serious developer doesn't buy a 1u server and rent colo space. He buys VM time and any other services he needs, and lets the provider worry about the hardware. Much more cost effective, much easier to scale up when the app becomes popular.
And providers who cater to this new paradigm are not going to bother with variant architectures. The only way they can compete is by making their infrastructure as generic as possible. This minimizes their costs and maximizes their customer base. So x86 processors have won the data center wars the same way they won the desktop wars. There are good reasons to regret this fact, but a fact it is.
Products that ignore the above trends are just wishful thinking.
If you go to a large firm, it will inevitably turn out that they're part of the conspiracy.