You *could* move to another country, but that seems unnecessarily expensive. Much better, if you already know you want to strike out on your own, is to find a business partner in the same situation, and then the two of you start the business together. Two separately covered individuals counts as a group, and group health insurance is a) easy to find and b) quite cheap by comparison to private health plans.
I know this, because I left the corporate world (where Multimegabigacorp paid for a part of my health insurance premium) and started my own business (with a single other business partner), and I actually *cut* the cost of insuring my family (me, wife, 2 children; medical + dental, but no vision). Private health would have been 3-4 times as expensive. And I have the same coverage!
Alternatively, you can try starting your own company as a franchise or subunit of a larger company that gives you access to group benefits - but the key in the US is to be a business, not an individual. Small businesses really do get the best tax breaks.
Good luck.
I don't get the eleventy-bajillion suggestions for using the existing coax as a wire pull -- have you ever really tried this (I have)? In any house up to code, that coax is tacked down securely about every foot. There's no way you're pulling it out of the wall without opening the wall.
No, what you need to do is mimic a CMTS in the attic and buy a bunch of cable modems. That way, you're using digital cable channels (over coax) to broadcast the data from your head end (CMTS) to the modems. Then your faux-CMTS can sit on the network connection offered by your ISP.
You might do better at just running new wire, which isn't as tough as you might think.
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
I'm sorry, but I can't help but disagree with this sentence. The purpose of creating a program really is to instruct the computer what to do. Not to explain other human beings what we want the computer to do.
Computers don't do what we want, they do what we tell them to do. Success in programming a computer comes from telling it what we want it to do.
Note quite right. The purpose of creating a computer program is to get work done. This includes, but is not limited to, telling the computer what to do. We want to maximize the amount of work done by the computer and minimize the work done by people. This implies striking the right balance between optimizing the run-time of the program and optimizing BOTH the readability AND usability of the program. When modifying a program, we have to balance effectiveness, readability, and usability.
Comparing the potential benefit of a faster-running program with the cost of poor readability or usability is difficult, but (at least in business) can be done by converting all units to dollars. Dollars are then easily convertible to pizza and beer, units of measurement familiar to nearly every programmer in the world.
In some cases, cryptic one-liners that shave a few milliseconds off the per-cycle run-time produce many millions of pizzas and thousands of gallons of beer annually, at the expense of a few pies and a six-pack in maintenance per year. Who cares if that code is hard to read? We have PIZZA and BEER! But saving a slice and a half-pint at the expense of an office pizza party.... that's just a travesty.
And don't get me started on all that pre-packaged stuff that costs nothing to install, runs really fast, and is super-maintainable -- but that costs the end-user all of Papa John's and most of Sam Adams just to make a few photocopies. Feh.
You *could* move to another country, but that seems unnecessarily expensive. Much better, if you already know you want to strike out on your own, is to find a business partner in the same situation, and then the two of you start the business together. Two separately covered individuals counts as a group, and group health insurance is a) easy to find and b) quite cheap by comparison to private health plans. I know this, because I left the corporate world (where Multimegabigacorp paid for a part of my health insurance premium) and started my own business (with a single other business partner), and I actually *cut* the cost of insuring my family (me, wife, 2 children; medical + dental, but no vision). Private health would have been 3-4 times as expensive. And I have the same coverage! Alternatively, you can try starting your own company as a franchise or subunit of a larger company that gives you access to group benefits - but the key in the US is to be a business, not an individual. Small businesses really do get the best tax breaks. Good luck.
I don't get the eleventy-bajillion suggestions for using the existing coax as a wire pull -- have you ever really tried this (I have)? In any house up to code, that coax is tacked down securely about every foot. There's no way you're pulling it out of the wall without opening the wall. No, what you need to do is mimic a CMTS in the attic and buy a bunch of cable modems. That way, you're using digital cable channels (over coax) to broadcast the data from your head end (CMTS) to the modems. Then your faux-CMTS can sit on the network connection offered by your ISP. You might do better at just running new wire, which isn't as tough as you might think.
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
I'm sorry, but I can't help but disagree with this sentence. The purpose of creating a program really is to instruct the computer what to do. Not to explain other human beings what we want the computer to do. Computers don't do what we want, they do what we tell them to do. Success in programming a computer comes from telling it what we want it to do.
Note quite right. The purpose of creating a computer program is to get work done. This includes, but is not limited to, telling the computer what to do. We want to maximize the amount of work done by the computer and minimize the work done by people. This implies striking the right balance between optimizing the run-time of the program and optimizing BOTH the readability AND usability of the program. When modifying a program, we have to balance effectiveness, readability, and usability. Comparing the potential benefit of a faster-running program with the cost of poor readability or usability is difficult, but (at least in business) can be done by converting all units to dollars. Dollars are then easily convertible to pizza and beer, units of measurement familiar to nearly every programmer in the world. In some cases, cryptic one-liners that shave a few milliseconds off the per-cycle run-time produce many millions of pizzas and thousands of gallons of beer annually, at the expense of a few pies and a six-pack in maintenance per year. Who cares if that code is hard to read? We have PIZZA and BEER! But saving a slice and a half-pint at the expense of an office pizza party .... that's just a travesty.
And don't get me started on all that pre-packaged stuff that costs nothing to install, runs really fast, and is super-maintainable -- but that costs the end-user all of Papa John's and most of Sam Adams just to make a few photocopies. Feh.