Unsurprising, but also irrelevant. Respond to the argument, not the arguer. If you only listen to people you know you agree with, then you're an ignorant fool.
There's every reason to hate to say it. Apple does a lot of things really well, especially when it comes to UI design. But they get on my nerves. They're arrogant, they've never probably supported third-party developers, they're paternalistic towards their users, and sometimes they do things their own way just to show they can.
What especially bugs me is the way their marketing appeals to the snob factor in their products. Their Mac-and-PC commercials drive me up the wall, even when their criticism of PC shortcomings is valid. Actually, especially then, because of the smugness with which the comparison is made.
I changed my sig to point to a certain Monty Python because I was tired of reading your particular kind of idiotic comeback. I suggest you click through. It's a video, which should circumvent your reading difficulties.
You're certainly wasting your time, since what you just said doesn't make any sense. But then, you haven't made any sense anywhere in this thread. You started out by refuting my argument with an argument that didn't have any bearing, and you've repeatedly accused me of saying things any objective observer would agree I didn't say. You don't even try to understand anything I'm saying, you just pick out random statements to be outraged over.
I'm the fool wasting his time arguing with somebody who's completely incoherent. I think I'll stop now.
When you can't find a counterargument to my argument, you pretend I say something that you have an argument for. When I call you on your obvious dishonesty, you call me names. I believe that makes you the troll.
Dude, learn to read. You'll notice that I didn't make a single argument against the claim that health reform is unconstitutional. That wasn't my point. My point was that your argument (there's no explicit reference to health insurance in the constitution) is lame, and isn't even used by strong opponents of reform.
This is getting tiresome. Instead of responding to my argument, you keep trying to find technical reasons why I'm contradicting myself. Your reasons don't make sense, but you don't want to hear that. So fine, whatever, I don't care.
My argument is extremely simple: I'm saying that making workplace insurance benefits taxable does not provide any incentive for insurers to offer individual insurance to everybody. That's what I'm saying, and that's all that I'm saying. If you can suggest a mechanism by which such a change would actually provide an incentive, let's hear it. If you don't know of such a mechanism, then you're just imitating that guy in the Monty Python parrot sketch.
I saw Cleese and Palin on Saturday Night Live. They did that sketch for what must have been the millionth time, and were obviously very bored with it. As am I.
The constitution doesn't mention the trucking industry either. (Shocking that nobody at the 1788 convention ever heard of Mack trucks!) But the federal government regulates trucking, because trucking is part of interstate commerce, and that is mentioned in the constitution.
The premise behind the current reform effort is that health care is a kind of interstate commerce. This guy says that it isn't. Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but either way, the argument is a little more complicated than "show me where the constitution says..."
Don't confuse misrepresentation with stupidity. Nam37, like most slashdotters, considers himself a legal expert.
What is it about geeks that make them think they understand the law better than lawyers? Usually to their detriment, as Randal L. Schwartz, Shane Becker, and Hans Reiser can all testify. Or they could, if they could admit to their own stupidity.
Right here you said "Part of the problem here is that U.S. public policy since Reagan is dominated by the mantra, 'The marketplace can handle the problem'" as if a free market was given a chance when it has not. You're the one using a straw man argument and when that doesn't work you switch tactics.
I don't follow your logic. You seem to be assuming that any government interference in the marketplace is the cause of all failures of the marketplace to do what you want. Correct me if I'm wrong.
My argument is that the business model of the health insurance industry has no place in it for most of the individuals seeking individual health insurance, and that removing the tax benefits for insurance sold to a completely separate group of people would not change that. If you think I'm wrong, then you must think there's some mechanism by which eliminating that tax break would solve the problem. So what's the mechanism?
And forcing people to pay taxes on their workplace insurance benefits wouldn't change that.
Did I say that? Hell NO!!! I did not. I said I can not get the same deductions when I buy my own insurance as employers get for offering it to employees. Straw man.
OK, I misunderstood you. And here's the reason I got your argument wrong: I assumed it was somehow relevant to my argument. You're not arguing with statement, you're just complaining about the unfairness of the current tax code.
I think I might agree with you on that point. I happen to think most tax deductions are unfair to those not eligible for them. So let's just say you've convinced me on this point. It still has nothing to do with the inability of the marketplace to meet the needs of most individuals seeking health insurance.
If you force everybody to buy insurance,
And where does the Constitution of the USA give the federal government the power to mandate everyone pay for health insurance?
Sigh. Neither of us is a constitutional lawyer. Maybe you're right, maybe you're not. (Though if you're right, why hasn't anybody challenged the mandatory coverage laws in Massachusetts and Hawaii?) Lets just assume you're right. Does the unconstitutionality of mandatory health coverage mean that it is economic to sell health insurance to individuals? Because that's the only argument I'm making.
Your history is a little off. The business of offering employees insurance instead of wages did indeed originate during WW II, but the tax-free aspect came later. This was done to undercut proposals for a government-run health plan.
Anyway, you're strawmanning my argument. I did not say there was no government interference in the health marketplace. Obviously that's not true (for any marketplace!). I did say that the marketplace had no incentive to solve the problem of people who can't buy insurance because there's no room for them in the insurance business model. And forcing people to pay taxes on their workplace insurance benefits wouldn't change that. Requiring everybody to buy insurance would.
Seriously, why do people buy a locked down piece of hardware, then wonder why they can't do anything that hasn't specifically been authorised with it?
Because they're hackers. Hacking doesn't make any practical or economic sense. There's always some off-the-shelf solution that's less hassle and probably less money.
Electronic hardware depreciates 50% per year. So it's not very long before all its market value is gone. Does that make old C64s useless? Not to the hackers who are still playing with them 15 years after they were discontinued.
Now about your headline. "Don't buy TIVO, or any other locked down device". You're making an apples and oranges argument here. Yeah, it's stupid to buy a Tivo to repurpose it for some other use. But here's a flash: pretty much all Tivos are bought by people who plan to use them the way they're intended. The Ask Slashdot wasn't submitted by somebody who went to a store and bought a brand new Tivo — he's somebody who has an old one he doesn't want to throw away.
Self insurance is insanely expensive, most employed people wouldn't be able to cover it.
Not insanely, if you have a decent middle-class income. I'm an extreme case: I'm in the most expensive age bracket, so individual insurance for me is around $600 month. Painful, but not hopeless.
But that's where we come to the real problem: I have some pre-existing conditions, which means nobody will sell me insurance at any price.
The basic problem here is the business model. If you insure people who aren't likely to get sick, you'll make money. If you're less selective, every policy is a gamble, and the odds are difficult to estimate. So it's only logical for the insurance company to avoid the gamble and restrict their coverage to low-risk customers.
(Group policies, which is what you get when you're insured through your employer, is different. You have a large risk pool, which evens out the risk.)
Part of the problem here is that U.S. public policy since Reagan is dominated by the mantra, "The marketplace can handle the problem." And very often, that's true. But not always, as this problem shows.
If you force everybody to buy insurance, then you convert the entire population into one big risk pool, taking the uncertainty out of selling individual insurance. Which is why the insurance companies are actually pro-reform, despite their losing freedom of action. Their only concern is that the coverage requirement have real teeth.
Rush, explain to me again why such a simple and logical market reform is "socialism"?
You're thinking of Transmeta's LongRun technology, which reduces clock speed (and thus power consumption) when the system isn't working hard. Similar features are actually quite standard in the current generation of CPUs. There's no impact on performance, because when the system's busy, it's always running at maximum speed. There is some hassle with system software that gets confused when the CPU its running on goes into idle mode.
Most of the supposed power savings for a Transmeta cpu comes from the fact that its fundamental instruction set is not x86-compatible. Instead, it's a VLIW architecture that greatly reduces the transistor count. The instruction set is optimized to support software emulation of other instruction sets. The x86 emulation is best known, of course, but you can also get Java byte code support.
My first thought about Orion is that it used the native Transmeta instruction set. But no, all my sources say it's x86 compatible. It might seem strange to do HPC on an x86 emulator, but the emulator includes "code morphing" technology which optimizes use of native code at run time. (Most Java virtual machines now do something similar.) In theory, you can get pretty good performance that way. The practice seems to be a little disappointing.
The weird thing here is that the Register quotes Bill Gates as calling Orion's deskside supercomputers as part of a "key trend". Now, I've always though Bill's understanding of the marketplace was overrated. But you'd think that somebody whose immense fortune comes almost entirely from the triumph of commodity processors would know that this kind of effort is doomed.
Some people are just in love with these fancy RISC architectures and stick with them in the face of their total failure in the marketplace. When I was at Sun, the Sparcophiles would quote impressive raw numbers for Sparc architectures, even trying to sell them to people who already had a solid commitment to commodity systems. And yet every single Sun product in the HPC Top 500 run Intel or AMD!
Well, I don't think they're defeatist either. It is true that Linux-for-everybody thing was never going to happen, but you see the True Believers on Slashdot every day, years after the initial effort crashed and burned.
I was working at Borland when we came out with a Linux IDE. (In 2001!) Total failure. That's the nice thing about actually having to work for a living, your mistakes come into conflict with reality. I think a wingnut can be defined as somebody who can't or won't submit their ideas to that test.
You probably would have done a better job than the Halcyon company, which is actually better known for its litigation than for its actual productions (2 movies and a TV show, all of them duds).
I'm not saying that the Terminator franchise couldn't be a real money maker in the right hands. Indeed, I thought this one was almost decent, with good acting and direction and really stunning effects. But they forgot to hire somebody literate to write the script — a mistake you often see in expensive blockbusters.
Slashdot Mirror
Unsurprising, but also irrelevant. Respond to the argument, not the arguer. If you only listen to people you know you agree with, then you're an ignorant fool.
Where in your post do you ask for a link?
Life would be a lot easier if you didn't work so hard at denying your mistakes. We all make them.
There's every reason to hate to say it. Apple does a lot of things really well, especially when it comes to UI design. But they get on my nerves. They're arrogant, they've never probably supported third-party developers, they're paternalistic towards their users, and sometimes they do things their own way just to show they can.
What especially bugs me is the way their marketing appeals to the snob factor in their products. Their Mac-and-PC commercials drive me up the wall, even when their criticism of PC shortcomings is valid. Actually, especially then, because of the smugness with which the comparison is made.
Your reading skills continue to decline. Have a look at the last two sentences of the submission.
That said, I agree with you that dismissing the criticism because it comes from the NRDC is a fallacious, ad hominem argument.
I changed my sig to point to a certain Monty Python because I was tired of reading your particular kind of idiotic comeback. I suggest you click through. It's a video, which should circumvent your reading difficulties.
You're certainly wasting your time, since what you just said doesn't make any sense. But then, you haven't made any sense anywhere in this thread. You started out by refuting my argument with an argument that didn't have any bearing, and you've repeatedly accused me of saying things any objective observer would agree I didn't say. You don't even try to understand anything I'm saying, you just pick out random statements to be outraged over.
I'm the fool wasting his time arguing with somebody who's completely incoherent. I think I'll stop now.
When you can't find a counterargument to my argument, you pretend I say something that you have an argument for. When I call you on your obvious dishonesty, you call me names. I believe that makes you the troll.
Oh jeez. I write "your interpretation of the constitution is lame" and you read "the constitution is lame".
Obviously you're capable of handling both sides of this conversation. You don't need me. Have fun arguing with yourself.
Do either of you have any problem telling your users what you're doing? Because that's the only issue here.
Jeez, learn to read already. I didn't say you said that.
Tightwad. You can afford to buy a new burner once a century.
Dude, learn to read. You'll notice that I didn't make a single argument against the claim that health reform is unconstitutional. That wasn't my point. My point was that your argument (there's no explicit reference to health insurance in the constitution) is lame, and isn't even used by strong opponents of reform.
This is getting tiresome. Instead of responding to my argument, you keep trying to find technical reasons why I'm contradicting myself. Your reasons don't make sense, but you don't want to hear that. So fine, whatever, I don't care.
My argument is extremely simple: I'm saying that making workplace insurance benefits taxable does not provide any incentive for insurers to offer individual insurance to everybody. That's what I'm saying, and that's all that I'm saying. If you can suggest a mechanism by which such a change would actually provide an incentive, let's hear it. If you don't know of such a mechanism, then you're just imitating that guy in the Monty Python parrot sketch.
I saw Cleese and Palin on Saturday Night Live. They did that sketch for what must have been the millionth time, and were obviously very bored with it. As am I.
The constitution doesn't mention the trucking industry either. (Shocking that nobody at the 1788 convention ever heard of Mack trucks!) But the federal government regulates trucking, because trucking is part of interstate commerce, and that is mentioned in the constitution.
The premise behind the current reform effort is that health care is a kind of interstate commerce. This guy says that it isn't. Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but either way, the argument is a little more complicated than "show me where the constitution says..."
God save us from self-taught legal "experts".
Don't confuse misrepresentation with stupidity. Nam37, like most slashdotters, considers himself a legal expert.
What is it about geeks that make them think they understand the law better than lawyers? Usually to their detriment, as Randal L. Schwartz, Shane Becker, and Hans Reiser can all testify. Or they could, if they could admit to their own stupidity.
Right here you said "Part of the problem here is that U.S. public policy since Reagan is dominated by the mantra, 'The marketplace can handle the problem'" as if a free market was given a chance when it has not. You're the one using a straw man argument and when that doesn't work you switch tactics.
I don't follow your logic. You seem to be assuming that any government interference in the marketplace is the cause of all failures of the marketplace to do what you want. Correct me if I'm wrong.
My argument is that the business model of the health insurance industry has no place in it for most of the individuals seeking individual health insurance, and that removing the tax benefits for insurance sold to a completely separate group of people would not change that. If you think I'm wrong, then you must think there's some mechanism by which eliminating that tax break would solve the problem. So what's the mechanism?
And forcing people to pay taxes on their workplace insurance benefits wouldn't change that.
Did I say that? Hell NO!!! I did not. I said I can not get the same deductions when I buy my own insurance as employers get for offering it to employees. Straw man.
OK, I misunderstood you. And here's the reason I got your argument wrong: I assumed it was somehow relevant to my argument. You're not arguing with statement, you're just complaining about the unfairness of the current tax code.
I think I might agree with you on that point. I happen to think most tax deductions are unfair to those not eligible for them. So let's just say you've convinced me on this point. It still has nothing to do with the inability of the marketplace to meet the needs of most individuals seeking health insurance.
If you force everybody to buy insurance,
And where does the Constitution of the USA give the federal government the power to mandate everyone pay for health insurance?
Sigh. Neither of us is a constitutional lawyer. Maybe you're right, maybe you're not. (Though if you're right, why hasn't anybody challenged the mandatory coverage laws in Massachusetts and Hawaii?) Lets just assume you're right. Does the unconstitutionality of mandatory health coverage mean that it is economic to sell health insurance to individuals? Because that's the only argument I'm making.
Your history is a little off. The business of offering employees insurance instead of wages did indeed originate during WW II, but the tax-free aspect came later. This was done to undercut proposals for a government-run health plan.
Anyway, you're strawmanning my argument. I did not say there was no government interference in the health marketplace. Obviously that's not true (for any marketplace!). I did say that the marketplace had no incentive to solve the problem of people who can't buy insurance because there's no room for them in the insurance business model. And forcing people to pay taxes on their workplace insurance benefits wouldn't change that. Requiring everybody to buy insurance would.
Dude, you are aware that WW II ended over 60 years ago?
Seriously, why do people buy a locked down piece of hardware, then wonder why they can't do anything that hasn't specifically been authorised with it?
Because they're hackers. Hacking doesn't make any practical or economic sense. There's always some off-the-shelf solution that's less hassle and probably less money.
Electronic hardware depreciates 50% per year. So it's not very long before all its market value is gone. Does that make old C64s useless? Not to the hackers who are still playing with them 15 years after they were discontinued.
Now about your headline. "Don't buy TIVO, or any other locked down device". You're making an apples and oranges argument here. Yeah, it's stupid to buy a Tivo to repurpose it for some other use. But here's a flash: pretty much all Tivos are bought by people who plan to use them the way they're intended. The Ask Slashdot wasn't submitted by somebody who went to a store and bought a brand new Tivo — he's somebody who has an old one he doesn't want to throw away.
Self insurance is insanely expensive, most employed people wouldn't be able to cover it.
Not insanely, if you have a decent middle-class income. I'm an extreme case: I'm in the most expensive age bracket, so individual insurance for me is around $600 month. Painful, but not hopeless.
But that's where we come to the real problem: I have some pre-existing conditions, which means nobody will sell me insurance at any price.
The basic problem here is the business model. If you insure people who aren't likely to get sick, you'll make money. If you're less selective, every policy is a gamble, and the odds are difficult to estimate. So it's only logical for the insurance company to avoid the gamble and restrict their coverage to low-risk customers.
(Group policies, which is what you get when you're insured through your employer, is different. You have a large risk pool, which evens out the risk.)
Part of the problem here is that U.S. public policy since Reagan is dominated by the mantra, "The marketplace can handle the problem." And very often, that's true. But not always, as this problem shows.
If you force everybody to buy insurance, then you convert the entire population into one big risk pool, taking the uncertainty out of selling individual insurance. Which is why the insurance companies are actually pro-reform, despite their losing freedom of action. Their only concern is that the coverage requirement have real teeth.
Rush, explain to me again why such a simple and logical market reform is "socialism"?
You're thinking of Transmeta's LongRun technology, which reduces clock speed (and thus power consumption) when the system isn't working hard. Similar features are actually quite standard in the current generation of CPUs. There's no impact on performance, because when the system's busy, it's always running at maximum speed. There is some hassle with system software that gets confused when the CPU its running on goes into idle mode.
Most of the supposed power savings for a Transmeta cpu comes from the fact that its fundamental instruction set is not x86-compatible. Instead, it's a VLIW architecture that greatly reduces the transistor count. The instruction set is optimized to support software emulation of other instruction sets. The x86 emulation is best known, of course, but you can also get Java byte code support.
My first thought about Orion is that it used the native Transmeta instruction set. But no, all my sources say it's x86 compatible. It might seem strange to do HPC on an x86 emulator, but the emulator includes "code morphing" technology which optimizes use of native code at run time. (Most Java virtual machines now do something similar.) In theory, you can get pretty good performance that way. The practice seems to be a little disappointing.
Orion? Long gone.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/14/orion_shuts_down/
The weird thing here is that the Register quotes Bill Gates as calling Orion's deskside supercomputers as part of a "key trend". Now, I've always though Bill's understanding of the marketplace was overrated. But you'd think that somebody whose immense fortune comes almost entirely from the triumph of commodity processors would know that this kind of effort is doomed.
Some people are just in love with these fancy RISC architectures and stick with them in the face of their total failure in the marketplace. When I was at Sun, the Sparcophiles would quote impressive raw numbers for Sparc architectures, even trying to sell them to people who already had a solid commitment to commodity systems. And yet every single Sun product in the HPC Top 500 run Intel or AMD!
Well, I don't think they're defeatist either. It is true that Linux-for-everybody thing was never going to happen, but you see the True Believers on Slashdot every day, years after the initial effort crashed and burned.
I was working at Borland when we came out with a Linux IDE. (In 2001!) Total failure. That's the nice thing about actually having to work for a living, your mistakes come into conflict with reality. I think a wingnut can be defined as somebody who can't or won't submit their ideas to that test.
You probably would have done a better job than the Halcyon company, which is actually better known for its litigation than for its actual productions (2 movies and a TV show, all of them duds).
I'm not saying that the Terminator franchise couldn't be a real money maker in the right hands. Indeed, I thought this one was almost decent, with good acting and direction and really stunning effects. But they forgot to hire somebody literate to write the script — a mistake you often see in expensive blockbusters.
Where do you get this nonsense?
Hey, wanna buy a genuine Barack Obama birth certificate?