It's one thing to use old aircraft. All of the planes I did my primary training in are older than I am and very well worn. It's yet another thing to fail to maintain the equipment to the point that it fails catastrophically. The fact that this comes from a jump school, where the repsonsible parties should be incredibly safety concious is that much more disturbing. After seeing that, I wouldn't get in a plane at that school, let alone jump one of their chutes.
Because they didn't want to risk the bad publicity that they were sure would accompany such checks those managers were willing to gamble the lives of seven astronauts, as well as the future of NASA's manned programme and perhaps even NASA itself. Now, I don't know what you call that, but I sure as hell don't call it good management let alone good science.
What would be the point? So that the astronauts could have the option of dying in space? There was no way to fix the damage in orbit, and no realistic chance of rescue. The astronauts still would have attempted reentry, and they still would have died.
NASA should be making mmore progress, no doubt about that. But part of the reason there isn't more momentum is precisly because there is no one nipping at their heels. We just can't ahve a space race with Russia, since their mostly funded by us, and the ESA isn't really doing anything that we weren't anyway. Maybe the Chinese spae program will become more interesting and result in a political push for NASA.
Re-read my post. I didn't say that NASA is lagging behind anyone
What did you mean by this:
So, relatively speaking, given the inactivity of NASA, this Russian programme is flourishing.
There is no other component that can carry 7 people and 63,000lbs of cargo into orbit. None. No one has a better way, a worse way, or an equivalent way. The rest of the world has focused on unmanned spaceflight which is a completly different beast. The shuttle has never lived up to the promise of rapid turnaround, but no one else has come up with a reusable vehicle with a seven day turnaround either. So, it turns out, it just may not be practical. But the orbiter and the SRB's are fully reused on every mission. The only thing I know of that is replaced everytime, are heatsheild tiles, and fuel. I'm glad that NASA now has a mandate to go back to the moon, and I hope it happens. But you need to recognize that NASA's "past glories" are still pretty glorious.
As to whether the Challenger and Columbia disasters could have been avoided, well there's no doubt that the first should have been and the second could have been. In both cases, NASA's internal politics played a big part in ignoring the advice of NASA's own engineers, whose cautionary notes went unheeded. You might dismiss such things with a "shit happens" but, in both cases, shit didn't have to happen.
It's hardly that clear cut. Yes, if the specifi precautions reccomended by certain engineers had been followed then those specific accidents might have been avoided. But engineers point out posible problems and solutions all the time. They can't all be incorporated, this would be too costly, and possibly not functional.
If you're suggesting that I'm in no position to comment because my own nation's space programme is pathetic, well, Frankly I find that just sad. It's unfortunate that the only way you can think to reply to comments about how rudderless NASA seems right now is to come back with a pithy comment that fails to address any of the points that I've made.
You're certainly welcome to comment on anything you like. Your comments, however, being in the form of comparision, invite a comparative response. You know what they say about glass houses, don't you?
It's this sort of shit - refusing to acknowledge facts that are staring you in the face, ignoring any problems that appear and just hoping that things will work out for the best in the end - that killed the crew of Columbia in the first place.
What a silly thing to say. The shuttle will fly again, and when it does it will still be vastly superior to anything else out there. Yes we've lost two of them, and whether or not those losses were preventable is hotly debated, but shit like that happens when you send humans into space. Your "constructive" post implies that NASA is actually lagging behind the rest of the world's space programs, which couldn't be further from the truth. NASA has been flying a craft for 23 years, that is still unrivaled today.
Improvements to the shuttle will be made as a result of the Columbia accident, just as improvements were made based on Challenger. Then we'll move on and fly the shuttle some more. When the shuttle is replaced, it's replacement will incorporate everything we've learned.
Sure it does. It just isn't turned on by default. Turning it on isn't beyond most home users, in fact it's trivial, and most ISP's instruct their users to do it.
I'm sure you can cite some research to back up your claims. Certainly there's been some succesful research done outside of the US, right? Your claim that the embryonic stem cells can be used to treat alzhermers carries as much weight as claiming that eating dirt will accomplish the same thing.
Less != Zero Fuel cells may or may not be more useful that gasoline in the future but right now, they're useless to me when I want to get to work and gass tank is empty.
Actually, by ALL accounts embryonic stem cells are LESS useful, since they've never been succesfully used in any therapies, while adult stem cells have.
That's a very interesting link. I think you should read it. Scroll down to the part about the exemptions. Since we're discussing contractors, if the OP starts his own company, and his customers pay his company by hours worked or by the job they are not liable for overtime. His company might have to pay him overtime, but that depends on whether he's exempt or not. HTH. HAND.
1. Incorporate yourself into a company The last thing you want is employeers/customers coming after your and your families personal assets
Welcome to self employment tax and a big stick in the butt. This is a pain in the ass and don't do it unless you are forced to go 1099. W2 contracting is the way to go. Even if you get a gig where they want to pay you 1099 there are places out there willing to process payroll for a small fee.
If you use these places, you become their employee, and wave bye bye to all of the benefits of being self employed. So you have all the hassles, and none of the bennies, huzzah! The upside is that they pay the taxes for you. This may sound attractive, but it really isn't. Since they just pass whatever you bill on to you as salary (after taking their cut) you ave no opportunity to leave equity in the company, or pay yourself a salary and let your company mke a profit (taxed 14% less than salary). You also lose to option of setting up a SEP IRA (how does putting away an additional 25% of your salary for retirement sound?). If you're frightened of filling out the forms and making a mistake, or remebering to pay the taxes, get QuickBooks. The program is like $200, and for an additional $200 a year it can be set up to automatically do all of your required fillings, and even electronically make your tax deposits. You can even set up direct deposit of your paychecks. All for much, much, less than these companies will take.
2. Insurance Many companies require Professional Indemnity & Public Liability insurance. For the young & inexpirienced, this can be very expensive - recent PI insurance for us was more than $6000.
Never have I or anyway I have done business with on the entire west coast ever required this. Maybe it's an Australian thing.
Probably because you've worked through agencies, and they maintain the insurance. All of my contracting customers require liability insurance, and all of the contractors we hire must have liability insurance. Also, if you are willing to take money to mess with other people's shit without protecting yourself....dumb.
4. Working Harder You will work harder as a contractor. Seriously. Because contract rates are more expensive and generally because you work on specific tasks (ie write system X), you MUST show a positive return on investment.
Wrong. Here in California you are required by law to get paid time and a half overtime, so guess what? After 40 hours you get to go home and like it. IF you have a $50/hr contract the CFO is going to pee all over the place when you start billing $75/hr, and that's YOUR cut not even the agency's.
Well, there's no such federal law. Contractors and exempt employess don't get overtime. I suspect that you only got overtime because you weren't really a contractor. It's possible to be paid on a 1099, but still be subject to the FLSA. If you set up your own company, and pay yourself a high enough salary, you can work an infinate number of hours without overtime. Of course, you may want to negotiate a sliding scale for your billing rate, but you don't necesarrily have to pay yourself any more that your salary. read, more profit for the company.
About an accountant- It is highly recommended but not entirely necessary to go through an accountant for these things. Accountants are people just like you, and you can read the same books and tax codes that they do. Accountants make mistakes and get too aggressive too and YOU are the one signing the tax return- having an accountant doesn't reduce your liablity one iota. If you have the techie spirt figuring out what you can and cannot deduct should not be too difficult, and won't leave you a whimpering uneducated mess if the IRS comes a knocking for an audit. Have you ever used an accountant to do your taxes? Yeah, accountants make mistakes, but they also have a lot more time dedicated to learning about the tax code and changes to it. They also have (hopefully) years of experience and know what you can and can't get away with. And when you use an accountant to do your taxes he also signs your return and deals with the IRS if they want to audit you.
What advice would you give your excellent accountant if he wanted to write his own software? I'd tell him to stick with what he knows, and hire experts when he needs them. Unless you have lots of free time (i.e. not otherwise income producing) and you really don't have the money get an accountant.
As long as you are notified that there are additional terms inside the box, and those terms are reasonable, and you have an opportunity to return the product if you do not accept the additional terms, it's a perfectly good contract.
If you have DirectTV, the Tivo will cost you $99 tops, and the service is $4.99 no matter how many you have. Can you build one for less than a hundred bucks? Can you keep it running for less than 60 bucks a year?
You're still assuming that he knows what he has and that he would even know what type of specialist he needs to see. Assuming is what got him to where he is.
If he'd had a PCP that he had been seeing through the whole process, he would probably be in a much better position than he is now. Making disjointed trips to random specialists and internists isn't particularly productive without someone managing the process. That's what PCP's do. That's why many specialists won't see patients wihtout a referal, and why HMO's don't allow it.
At the point he's at now he probably needs to be admitted to a big hospital in a major city. Preferably one associated with a medical school. There he'll have someone to manage his care and access to whatever specialists he needs.
He's covered all the hospitals he's been to and doctors he's seen. And he mentions that he walked out of at least one of them before being seen because he didn't want to be a GOMER. He's not expecting some doctor to just prescribe him medicine; he's looking for a doctor who MAY have a clue as to what his illness might be. Is that what you got from this:
If anyone out there is familiar with this and is able to help, please let me know. I'll travel anywhere I have to at this point. I can be reached on my cell phone at (925) 535-9062.
Please call only if you can help get me some high-dose antibiotic treatment.
The guy needs to get checked in to a decent university hospital. If he's willing to travel anywhere, I don't really see what the problem is. Fly to Boston, and get checked into Mass. General.
When something hurts, your doctor is supposed to keep going until they figure out what is wrong and fix it, no? Do some followup, make some phone calls, etc. A good doctor, at least.
And I'm sure they'd be happy to if he let them. From his story it sounds like he sees different doctors every time. That's a good way to keep starting from square one. You can't possibly expect each new doctor to just pick up where the last one left off. For all the faults of HMOs this is precisely why they enforce the patient/PCP relationship.
He doesn't want your money. He wants you to send him drugs. That's all he asked for. I didn't see a single mention of money in the whole post. What he really needs to do is stop going to random doctors and clinics in podunk towns and get himself to a major hospital.
Christ, if he's going to get screwed by some stupid HMO if he doesn't play their little game or something, I'll toss a couple bucks into a donation fund for the medical bills if someone sets one up.
Where did you get the idea that this has anything to do with insurance? It sounds like his small town doctor doesn't have admit privileges at a hospital, so he has to see a doctor who will. He's not asking for money, he's asking for drugs.
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It's one thing to use old aircraft. All of the planes I did my primary training in are older than I am and very well worn. It's yet another thing to fail to maintain the equipment to the point that it fails catastrophically. The fact that this comes from a jump school, where the repsonsible parties should be incredibly safety concious is that much more disturbing. After seeing that, I wouldn't get in a plane at that school, let alone jump one of their chutes.
The "perfectly functioning" jump ship I learned with at Perris is a perfect example.
1 4X 36487&key=1
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=200012
"THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE FOUND TO SUBSTANTIATE COMPLIANCE WITH A MANDATORY AIRWORTHINESS DIRECTIVE ON THE PROPELLER BLADE."
Sounds like a failure of people, not equipment.
Which time? The 1903 Flyer seems to fit his definition.
The contract argument supported by the EULA (if it is) is your defense when you are charged with the crime of copyright infringement.
Because they didn't want to risk the bad publicity that they were sure would accompany such checks those managers were willing to gamble the lives of seven astronauts, as well as the future of NASA's manned programme and perhaps even NASA itself. Now, I don't know what you call that, but I sure as hell don't call it good management let alone good science.
What would be the point? So that the astronauts could have the option of dying in space? There was no way to fix the damage in orbit, and no realistic chance of rescue. The astronauts still would have attempted reentry, and they still would have died.
NASA should be making mmore progress, no doubt about that. But part of the reason there isn't more momentum is precisly because there is no one nipping at their heels. We just can't ahve a space race with Russia, since their mostly funded by us, and the ESA isn't really doing anything that we weren't anyway. Maybe the Chinese spae program will become more interesting and result in a political push for NASA.
What did you mean by this:There is no other component that can carry 7 people and 63,000lbs of cargo into orbit. None. No one has a better way, a worse way, or an equivalent way. The rest of the world has focused on unmanned spaceflight which is a completly different beast. The shuttle has never lived up to the promise of rapid turnaround, but no one else has come up with a reusable vehicle with a seven day turnaround either. So, it turns out, it just may not be practical. But the orbiter and the SRB's are fully reused on every mission. The only thing I know of that is replaced everytime, are heatsheild tiles, and fuel. I'm glad that NASA now has a mandate to go back to the moon, and I hope it happens. But you need to recognize that NASA's "past glories" are still pretty glorious.
As to whether the Challenger and Columbia disasters could have been avoided, well there's no doubt that the first should have been and the second could have been. In both cases, NASA's internal politics played a big part in ignoring the advice of NASA's own engineers, whose cautionary notes went unheeded. You might dismiss such things with a "shit happens" but, in both cases, shit didn't have to happen.
It's hardly that clear cut. Yes, if the specifi precautions reccomended by certain engineers had been followed then those specific accidents might have been avoided. But engineers point out posible problems and solutions all the time. They can't all be incorporated, this would be too costly, and possibly not functional.
What a silly thing to say. The shuttle will fly again, and when it does it will still be vastly superior to anything else out there. Yes we've lost two of them, and whether or not those losses were preventable is hotly debated, but shit like that happens when you send humans into space. Your "constructive" post implies that NASA is actually lagging behind the rest of the world's space programs, which couldn't be further from the truth. NASA has been flying a craft for 23 years, that is still unrivaled today.
Improvements to the shuttle will be made as a result of the Columbia accident, just as improvements were made based on Challenger. Then we'll move on and fly the shuttle some more. When the shuttle is replaced, it's replacement will incorporate everything we've learned.
How's the british space programme these days?
Sure it does. It just isn't turned on by default. Turning it on isn't beyond most home users, in fact it's trivial, and most ISP's instruct their users to do it.
I'm sure you can cite some research to back up your claims. Certainly there's been some succesful research done outside of the US, right? Your claim that the embryonic stem cells can be used to treat alzhermers carries as much weight as claiming that eating dirt will accomplish the same thing.
Less != Zero
Fuel cells may or may not be more useful that gasoline in the future but right now, they're useless to me when I want to get to work and gass tank is empty.
Except that there's never been any controversy over the use of adult stem cells. This research could have been done in the US with government funding.
Actually, by ALL accounts embryonic stem cells are LESS useful, since they've never been succesfully used in any therapies, while adult stem cells have.
That's a very interesting link. I think you should read it. Scroll down to the part about the exemptions. Since we're discussing contractors, if the OP starts his own company, and his customers pay his company by hours worked or by the job they are not liable for overtime. His company might have to pay him overtime, but that depends on whether he's exempt or not. HTH. HAND.
If you use these places, you become their employee, and wave bye bye to all of the benefits of being self employed. So you have all the hassles, and none of the bennies, huzzah! The upside is that they pay the taxes for you. This may sound attractive, but it really isn't. Since they just pass whatever you bill on to you as salary (after taking their cut) you ave no opportunity to leave equity in the company, or pay yourself a salary and let your company mke a profit (taxed 14% less than salary). You also lose to option of setting up a SEP IRA (how does putting away an additional 25% of your salary for retirement sound?). If you're frightened of filling out the forms and making a mistake, or remebering to pay the taxes, get QuickBooks. The program is like $200, and for an additional $200 a year it can be set up to automatically do all of your required fillings, and even electronically make your tax deposits. You can even set up direct deposit of your paychecks. All for much, much, less than these companies will take.
Probably because you've worked through agencies, and they maintain the insurance. All of my contracting customers require liability insurance, and all of the contractors we hire must have liability insurance. Also, if you are willing to take money to mess with other people's shit without protecting yourself....dumb.
Well, there's no such federal law. Contractors and exempt employess don't get overtime. I suspect that you only got overtime because you weren't really a contractor. It's possible to be paid on a 1099, but still be subject to the FLSA. If you set up your own company, and pay yourself a high enough salary, you can work an infinate number of hours without overtime. Of course, you may want to negotiate a sliding scale for your billing rate, but you don't necesarrily have to pay yourself any more that your salary. read, more profit for the company.
About an accountant- It is highly recommended but not entirely necessary to go through an accountant for these things. Accountants are people just like you, and you can read the same books and tax codes that they do. Accountants make mistakes and get too aggressive too and YOU are the one signing the tax return- having an accountant doesn't reduce your liablity one iota. If you have the techie spirt figuring out what you can and cannot deduct should not be too difficult, and won't leave you a whimpering uneducated mess if the IRS comes a knocking for an audit.
Have you ever used an accountant to do your taxes? Yeah, accountants make mistakes, but they also have a lot more time dedicated to learning about the tax code and changes to it. They also have (hopefully) years of experience and know what you can and can't get away with. And when you use an accountant to do your taxes he also signs your return and deals with the IRS if they want to audit you.
What advice would you give your excellent accountant if he wanted to write his own software? I'd tell him to stick with what he knows, and hire experts when he needs them. Unless you have lots of free time (i.e. not otherwise income producing) and you really don't have the money get an accountant.
As long as you are notified that there are additional terms inside the box, and those terms are reasonable, and you have an opportunity to return the product if you do not accept the additional terms, it's a perfectly good contract.
If you're talking about "Showcase" on DirectTivo you can turn that off too. Remove channels 581 and 582 from "Channels I Receive"
If you have DirectTV, the Tivo will cost you $99 tops, and the service is $4.99 no matter how many you have. Can you build one for less than a hundred bucks? Can you keep it running for less than 60 bucks a year?
You know you can turn off suggestions, right?
You're still assuming that he knows what he has and that he would even know what type of specialist he needs to see. Assuming is what got him to where he is.
If he'd had a PCP that he had been seeing through the whole process, he would probably be in a much better position than he is now. Making disjointed trips to random specialists and internists isn't particularly productive without someone managing the process. That's what PCP's do. That's why many specialists won't see patients wihtout a referal, and why HMO's don't allow it.
At the point he's at now he probably needs to be admitted to a big hospital in a major city. Preferably one associated with a medical school. There he'll have someone to manage his care and access to whatever specialists he needs.
And he mentions that he walked out of at least one of them before being seen because he didn't want to be a GOMER.
He's not expecting some doctor to just prescribe him medicine; he's looking for a doctor who MAY have a clue as to what his illness might be.
Is that what you got from this:
The guy needs to get checked in to a decent university hospital. If he's willing to travel anywhere, I don't really see what the problem is. Fly to Boston, and get checked into Mass. General.
And I'm sure they'd be happy to if he let them. From his story it sounds like he sees different doctors every time. That's a good way to keep starting from square one. You can't possibly expect each new doctor to just pick up where the last one left off. For all the faults of HMOs this is precisely why they enforce the patient/PCP relationship.
He doesn't want your money. He wants you to send him drugs. That's all he asked for. I didn't see a single mention of money in the whole post. What he really needs to do is stop going to random doctors and clinics in podunk towns and get himself to a major hospital.
Where did you get the idea that this has anything to do with insurance? It sounds like his small town doctor doesn't have admit privileges at a hospital, so he has to see a doctor who will. He's not asking for money, he's asking for drugs.