As long as your computer does not autoexecute the USB drive, there is no problem. Of course, on many machines the USB does execute automatically, and it seems if the IT department lets that behavior stand, the responsibility cannot be with the user, but with the IT people.
So Midland is a central location with lots of room to expand into a spaceport and provide a large buffer zone. It is a short flight from many major airports which makes it accesible from anywhere in the US. A nonstop flight from the major cities in Texas and states around Texas.
As far as workers, if I were an aerospace engineer I would be more interested in working on cool stuff like this with long term civilian potential than the fact that it is in the middle of nowhere. This is an exciting time to be a young person, more exciting than 20 years ago when the Space Shuttle was in the heyday.
I know what clear lake was like before JSC. I can only imagine what backwater the area around KSC was like. Los Alamos was only a boys school before the the national lab was installed. There is nothing to limit what we are going to be doing with commercial space travel except our imagination.
Yes, it is a website that technically literate people visit. These technically literate people used to be overwhelmingly IE. What is interesting is that when Chrome cannot be blamed for this. IE was already under 50% and Firefox was approaching 50%. When chrome was introduced, all the growth was taken from IE for a while. Even now the Firefox loss is no as great as the IE loss to Chrome.
So what does this mean. That visitors to W3schools, a place where people who designed websites use to learn website design, are no longer using IE and likely no longer designing for IE. This may be due to IE no longer being an application front end, and instead a standard compliant browser, but I think it is the other way around. To be efficient it is best to use a code for a standards compliant browser, and by many metrics Chrome is that browser.
Wikimedia says that Chrome, IE and Firefox are within 7 percentage points of each other. That IE is only 25% of the browser share for Wikipedia and falling is consistent with thee W3school results. What is also clear is that if Firefox wants to remain a major player, it must do something to get users back from Google, and it must do so if we want to save the open source browser.
As James O'keefe, a video can be edited to show whatever one wishes. While a video can be important evidence, just like a photograph, it has to be within a context and unedited. Even an unedited video has to be taken as a single point of view, and guilt determined, again, in context.
Stop and Frisk can be stopped without video, which is simply going to serve as bad publicity, which is why the police don't want it. According to police statistics, stop and frisk has a hit rate of 1 in 10, 17 out of 20 people stopped are of color, while they make up only 10 out of 20 in the population. This policy is clearly not targeting the real criminals. It is a waste of money, It is clearly designed to give the police something to do so that the real criminals, those on wall street, are free to plunder the american family.
I would feel sorry for Android users, but then I remember that iPhone has not voice directions. Android does on Google Maps. iPhone does not. Allegedly Apple pys more in license fees to Google than Google gets from Android. We know that MS probably gets more from Android than Google does. Google seems to playing an aggressive game, which is looking like a rear action. Bing is becoming acceptable. Apple is going to fight hard on maps, and probably give features that Google will not. Google is a trusted necessary brand for many people, no matter the platform. As it becomes platform specific, Chrome, Android, who knows what will happen.
Whatever you think of MS, they have cleaned up IE and it is a better browser. Yes, one of the reasons is that it is only on MS Windows. For this reason I would say it should not be in the running at all, and they should test on various platforms. However, this is a browser on MS Windows test, so the results are for MS only. The advantage is inherent, but not unfair. The results are likely meaningless on any other platform.
That said, the memory has not effect on total rankings. I don't know if they did this to make sure Chrome scored well, or if it was a legitimate decision. In any case, most of us have large amounts of ram, so 10 megabytes per web page is not going to kill us. What I would like to know, and what is important, is who memory is used over time. This is where Firefox used to be really bad.
So when i look at this test, what I want is HTML5, reliability, and CSS. In CSS and Acid3, it is Safari. In reliability it is Opera. With HTML5 it is IE. Chrome does not really do anything with which I am deeply concerned. In the results Chrome and Firefox are a statistical tie. As I mentioned, it is easy to believe the test may have been altered so that chrome would win. The "ads by google" provides a motive.
IE essentially in losing place with Safari seems suspicious considering it did so well in some many test.
This kind of sounds to me like the early Lexus ads. Can't afford a Mercedes? Get the trappings of such a car without the engineering that comes from the creator of the petrol automobile. Feel like you are riding in an incredible machine without actually doing so.
I am sure that that the online courses are good. I am sure that the online students are as collaborative and work just as hard and are just as honest as the students who are working on similar projects at standford or any other university. But the hyperbole is a bit much. And the overly competitive air, that the top students are online, is also a bit much. The purpose of the university is to learn, and the GPA, or winning a single competition, or having someone else take your tests, is hardly a meaningful way of choosing the top students. Serious schools and professors tend not to do this, unless maybe you are in the financial sector. Success to me is determined by who actually goes out into the world and creates some innovative product or some original research.
I would say they are like every other religion, except that they want the cash, instead of using brainwashing and coercion.
The current scam in mainstream evangelical faith is 'prosperity ministry'. You give to the church, and you will be rewarded. The bible does not say this. The bible says you have faith and you worship and that is your job. A person giving a penny and a person giving a million dollars is the same in they eyes of the almighty. You can choose to be secular and materialistic, but that has nothing to do with worship.
But, unfortunately, building these huge structures, taking you tithes off taxes and then claiming you tithe, using the money to push agendas of hate and trying to raise yourself to the level of the almight, is too much in all religions. We can take this back to the good Samaritan. Why do we call this person the good Samaritan? Because Samaritans, a specific branch of the Abrahamic Religions, were considered to be evil, much life Islam, people of darker skin color, and people with differing marriage practice are now considered to be the end of civilization. So we had the good Samaritan, just like the hard working mexican.
So the reason we have to deal with all this crap with Scientology is because they rightly claim the rights of every religion. The right to discriminate. The right to take money with no tangible return. The right to say things that are objectively not true while claiming in writing that they are. These behaviors are unacceptable in all other civilized society.
I would say this is partially true. MS has certainly put the resources in, and expected no return, to try to develop products that will take past the windows desktop. What it has not done is develop a planned phase out of windows, at least not until now under the force of the iPad.
So MS could be where google is now with docs, beyond it, and provide full online package with purchase of office and partial online capabilities for non-commercial use. Of course this would have required sacrifice of the MS Windows platform, and quarterly profits, to gamble on long term growth.
What is interesting is that when/. talks about MS, the talk is always there can be no problems because profits are rising. To some degree this is true, but honestly there is a problem. Because of the profits, MS can only be reactionary. It cannot put anything innovative on the market.
It is not a pregnancy test. The setup is quite complex and seems highly susceptible to human error. Latex condoms seem highly effective to reduce the risk of infection when engaging in risky sex, or at least better than a test.
I remember a time when condoms were considered absolutely unromantic.
I wonder if this, at some later time if the stock plummets, could be seen as a false material statement, an attempt to defraud the stockholders. The stock seems to be 10% of the value at the beginning of 2011. Another drop like this puts in the dollar stock.
When I think of climate change, increased sea levels are not the worse that I think about. Increased sea levels are simply about real estate and lost infrastructure. To be sure, I plan to be around awhile and these increases in sea level are going to directly effect me in terms of flooding and real estate value, but that does not have anything to with long term livelihood and food production. If anything, it might provide more territory for certain sea creatures to grow. Of course a sea levels rise, some fresh water is going to become brakish which could be a long term concern for certain population. Not to mention a few populated low lying islands that will disappear.
But when I think of climate change, I think of longer periods of temperatures that are outside what a human can really aclimate to, and food can really be produced in. For instance, daytime temperatures that approach or go over 100F during the day and don't get under 80F at night. In Europe we are seeing another winter with temperatures staying at freezing for a continuous period. This is a concern because if we can't produce food, we can't survive. Look at the desertification of Africa. Look at the fight over water going on now in Texas and California. There are going to be some things that are just going to involving restructuring, insurance, and large writeoffs. This will be over and forgotten each generation, like the recurring banking crisis that hits us every 20-30 years. The other, like weather and temperature changes, are not going to be so easily fixed.
It is not an RO membrane which is why it may be difficult to make it work. In RO the majority of the filtrand is automatically washed away as only a small amount of the water makes it through the filter. So, for instance, if you have an RO filter installed in your house, you may use 100 gallons of filtered water, but will be charged for 1000 gallons, as this is the amount that flows through the filter. The disadvantage is that the water must be pressurized. This is not a huge expense as one can buy a gallon of of RO water for a quarter, and on industrial scales it is quite cheap if you are using surface water. Of course you are going to increase the contamination levels of the surface water over time as you filter out small amount of clean water.
In this technology, the pores of the Graphene are such that only the water molecule will pass through when water is flowed through the filter at normal pressures. The practical question I have, since this is not like a carbon filter, but a single layer of Graphene, is how are they going to remove the filtrand to keep the clean. The technical question that the researches have to solve is how to make the graphene, and how to functionalize the pores so that water is encouraged to flow through the hole and impurities are encouraged to not block the pores.
This seems like a relatively early stage idea with no prototype, and little idea of if it will be marketable.
I believe that Apple gets product from Asia to all markets in a day or two. The import thing may of a bigger concern. With manufacturers winning cases preventing import of infringing technology, it might be beneficial to manufacture the final product in the market where it is to be sold. As far as piecewise manufacturing, that is not going to happen in the US. While it is possible in other countries to put workers in dorms and work them as needed, in the US most manufacturing jobs are steady. Thirty years ago I knew of small factories where workers would line up outside and supervisors would get workers as needed, but I no of no one that does this now.
What is happening is the supply chain is becoming sophisticated enough, with parts delivered on demand from around the world, that assembly of non-us parts can happen in the US without requiring huge inventories of those parts. The unemployment rate is also high enough that workers can be had for a reasonable wage. Top this with automation that allows workers to make mistakes without effecting the final product and one can manufacture with a less than skilled or diligent worker base. As such we know see auto manufacturing in areas where education is minimal and worker costs are negligible.
But all this comes at a price, as can be seen by the Fiat in the US. This car is selling, but has rated the lowest quality at delivery. It is manufactured in Mexico. This initial quality is not an issue with a sufficient warranty, but the fact still exists.
For the phone, the main reason flash had to go was the ads. You load a webpage with several flash ads, and the battery and performance is going to be drained. There is no reason to have flash on a phone, if you can guarantee that the flash is not going to autorun. Really only the lack of autoplay was the only thing that was needed to keep performance up. However, that would break the model that has kept flash in the forefront, the only advertisement delivery system that is not under use control by default.
For years I did not have flash on my computer precisely because it was such a resource drain. Eventually with the advent of flash blockers, flash became a possibility. However the one thing that keeps me from Android is the existance of Flash. There are times when lack of flash is extremely annoying, but overall I don't miss it.
I am not sure how refunding billions of dollars in premiums because one has unreasonably large administrative costs helps your bottom line.
As far as not benefitting anyone, there are many beneficiaries. The young adult who does not go to college and cannot get a benefits job can now stay on parent's insurance. The taxpayer saves because it is less likely a young person joins the military for benefits, which saves us huge amounts of money in long term costs of people who have spent a week in the military.
It helps young adults who had some childhood issues and cannot get insurance as they transition from their parents to their own insurance. it reduces the risk of a young adult being without insurance, thus forcing the taxpayer to cover the bills.
It help older people who can now lose insurance if they use it, again requiring the taxpayer to cover the costs.
It might help the states who now provide COBRA coverage.
In a happy fantasy world people without insurance either happily die or join a church of cult who will then cover their food, medical, and housing expenses. In reality sick people go the hospital and the taxpayer gets billed.
The theory is that health care will be cheaper overall because everyone will have to pay for thier healthcare. We will not have situations where a 30 year old chooses not to have health insurance because work does nor provide such a benifit, then has a major illness that the taxpayers fund the care of.
In Texas the state created a socialist program in which everyone who drives a car has to have insurance. The argument that having a car is a choice was hogwash, you have to have a car in texas. The government basically decided the insurance companies were to profit, but did crate a pool that one could use for insurance of last resort. The result is a new $400 expense to owning a car. The other result is that uninsured motorist insurance is very cheap, and I am not paying for others people accidents. If it is good in TX, it is good everywhere.
To clarify, the abstract indicates that the paper is based on the same methodology the MPAA uses. It surveys the 'victims', asks them how much the patents trolls costs them, and then used that number. The abstract also talks about this not being a problem only for corporations, as we should be more concerned about the damage to small firms, or the 'children', even though the majority of the costs were to the large corporations.
The reality is that if Apple of IBM or MS makes a product using my patent, they should have to pay me. I should not have to sell my patent to a patent troll firm for pennies on the dollar so I can a some profit from my work. I do not necessarily deserve profit from my work, but neither does the large firms deserve to profit from my work without renumeration.
Which is to say people on/. often ask how can the MPAA claim that piracy is destroying the industry when box office sales are through the roof for the good films. Likewise we can complain that patent trolls are costing major corporations $15 billions, but in five years just the iPhone has generated 10 time that much in revenue, so not only can we ask if this is a significant figure in the grand scheme of things, but we can also ask if corporations were willing to compensate others instead of jumping to litigation if these numbers might be far smaller overall.
You know if the MPAA put such a number so that we would feel sorry all the starving children and whiny stuntmen and stop pirating films online, we would all be aghast that such nonsense was posted on our august boards. However, since it is patents, I am sure we will all find the validity.
A small private service can select a targat audience. A large corporation, of in the case of netflix a corporation controlled by public stock, much less so. As part of being in America, and profiting off the infrastructure paid for by the american taxpayer, there are some sacrifices to make. I suspect that Netflix would not survive long without a legal system that allowed it the right to rent legally purchased videos, or a postal system that provided the distribution network, or the labor laws that allow low wages.
So, in a way, every taxpayer is a customer because every tax payer has helped build the infrastructure that allows a large corporation to exist. Hell, every one in the US pays a tax on their phone so rural people can have cheap communication. Tell me Netflix could be this big without such a tax.
Back in November a mercedes executive was arrested for not having papers. He was in the country legally on business.
I have two pieces of advice. First, don't play with states that value where you were born over how hard you work. Come to states like Texas where if you work hard, you will get rewarded, and, unlike arizona and alabama, the education will not be at the bottom of the world.
Second, those who are citizens and want to not pay taxes for those who are just here to be leeches, write congress to modify the citizenship of the US and the 14th amendment. For such a conservative congress who believes in taxpayers and the value of work, such a change should be a no brainer for them. Basically, any citizen over 25 who has not worked and paid taxes on work for at three consecutive 3 of the last six years should lose their citizenship. We fought against the aristocracy of England and should not have created a new aristocracy of persons who take their citizenship for granted and spends their life sucking at the public teat. If one does not want to work, fine, stay as permanent resident, but give citizenship to a person who actually respects this country, without the right to vote, or medical care, or welfare, or protection for the police. This is the simple solution to out deficit, our unemployment, our immigration 'problem'. Why a country whose business is business would restrict who firms can hire, while forcing them to hire unqualified workers at inflated wages, I will never understand.
There is a story from my ancestral homeland in which the boys of a tribe were given a Cocoa bean, which they were required to eat, and then sent out into the forest to fend for himself. If he survived the caffeine and the forest he was allowed to rejoin the tribe. Otherwise he was presumed dead.This was a relatively efficient method to insure the weak would not burden the tribe.
My specific comments on education is that in the US any sacrifice for education is seen as unacceptable. Thinking hard, asked for supplies, homework, separation between child and parent by banning cell phones, is all unacceptable. For students in certain schools, leadership is taught. Otherwise it is assumed that students are going to be worker bees, hired by some person better than them. If we ask for sacrifice, that is the purchase of general purpose computer rather than an xBox, or a notebooks and pencils rather than jordans, then we might be able to begin to teach the skills and techniques that allow on to be an efficient entrepreneur and creator of innovative product. However since there is an inherent adversarial relationship set up between those who know and have stuff and those who don't, such an education is difficult at best.
There was a big miss with basic computers as well. It was assumed in many of the classic sci fi books that hard stuff, like calculations, would be done by hand while easy stuff like cleaning the house would be done by robots.
The distressing thing is that this misconception still pervades the teaching of automation. Hardly ever do I see stationary machines doing useful work. Mostly what I see are moving machines engaged in meaningless activity that has no application in the real world, unless you are talkng about roomba, which very few people own.
So yes, Star Trek was off with the PADD, but at least they had computers and robots mostly doing what computers and robots do. We can't even get that far in what we do.
So what they were selling is privacy and security. The question is are consumers willing to pay the real and opportunity cost to achieve that level of privacy and security. The answer seems to be no. I knew many people who liked the RIM phones, but who had no interest in the service. Consumers are willing to deal with tracking and spying to get a good product that does not involve a lockin email account.
Certainly corporate is still interested in this, but if corporate does not have to pay for devices, and specialized email other than outlook, then why should it? I am not sure if RIM should stop with the handsets and software, par down operations, and just concentrate on secure apps. Of couse I am not sure how Apple and MS would reacti to this, so that would leave android. It might be enough.
My question is what we can do with these careless idiots. Certainly if I am engaging in activity that common sense tells me will result in third party property damage then I am liable for the accident. If I am riding my bike down the block at high speed, and hit damage a mail box, then I am liable for that fix.
Certainly in this case while criminal charges aren't filed, and really would do no good because dumb people do dumb things not matter the consequences, the shooters do owe 9000 people compensation for whatever costs, real, indirect, and opportunity, that their actions caused. They also owe the people costs for for the firefighters, as well as any costs for the burned acreage. I assure you that if one burned down a tree farm the corporations would come after you for damages. This should be the same on public land. The AG should aggressively protect the assets fo the people.
There is another reason why it is dumb not to use target ranges. Lead. A real target range will control the lead. Otherwise it just remains and seeps into our wate supply. I suppose it may be that dumb people want everyone to be as dumb as they are. Around here a membership is under $200 a year. Seems not much to insure safety. Certainly cheaper than paying hotel bills for 9000 people.
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As long as your computer does not autoexecute the USB drive, there is no problem. Of course, on many machines the USB does execute automatically, and it seems if the IT department lets that behavior stand, the responsibility cannot be with the user, but with the IT people.
As far as workers, if I were an aerospace engineer I would be more interested in working on cool stuff like this with long term civilian potential than the fact that it is in the middle of nowhere. This is an exciting time to be a young person, more exciting than 20 years ago when the Space Shuttle was in the heyday.
I know what clear lake was like before JSC. I can only imagine what backwater the area around KSC was like. Los Alamos was only a boys school before the the national lab was installed. There is nothing to limit what we are going to be doing with commercial space travel except our imagination.
So what does this mean. That visitors to W3schools, a place where people who designed websites use to learn website design, are no longer using IE and likely no longer designing for IE. This may be due to IE no longer being an application front end, and instead a standard compliant browser, but I think it is the other way around. To be efficient it is best to use a code for a standards compliant browser, and by many metrics Chrome is that browser.
Wikimedia says that Chrome, IE and Firefox are within 7 percentage points of each other. That IE is only 25% of the browser share for Wikipedia and falling is consistent with thee W3school results. What is also clear is that if Firefox wants to remain a major player, it must do something to get users back from Google, and it must do so if we want to save the open source browser.
Stop and Frisk can be stopped without video, which is simply going to serve as bad publicity, which is why the police don't want it. According to police statistics, stop and frisk has a hit rate of 1 in 10, 17 out of 20 people stopped are of color, while they make up only 10 out of 20 in the population. This policy is clearly not targeting the real criminals. It is a waste of money, It is clearly designed to give the police something to do so that the real criminals, those on wall street, are free to plunder the american family.
I would feel sorry for Android users, but then I remember that iPhone has not voice directions. Android does on Google Maps. iPhone does not. Allegedly Apple pys more in license fees to Google than Google gets from Android. We know that MS probably gets more from Android than Google does. Google seems to playing an aggressive game, which is looking like a rear action. Bing is becoming acceptable. Apple is going to fight hard on maps, and probably give features that Google will not. Google is a trusted necessary brand for many people, no matter the platform. As it becomes platform specific, Chrome, Android, who knows what will happen.
That said, the memory has not effect on total rankings. I don't know if they did this to make sure Chrome scored well, or if it was a legitimate decision. In any case, most of us have large amounts of ram, so 10 megabytes per web page is not going to kill us. What I would like to know, and what is important, is who memory is used over time. This is where Firefox used to be really bad.
So when i look at this test, what I want is HTML5, reliability, and CSS. In CSS and Acid3, it is Safari. In reliability it is Opera. With HTML5 it is IE. Chrome does not really do anything with which I am deeply concerned. In the results Chrome and Firefox are a statistical tie. As I mentioned, it is easy to believe the test may have been altered so that chrome would win. The "ads by google" provides a motive.
IE essentially in losing place with Safari seems suspicious considering it did so well in some many test.
I am sure that that the online courses are good. I am sure that the online students are as collaborative and work just as hard and are just as honest as the students who are working on similar projects at standford or any other university. But the hyperbole is a bit much. And the overly competitive air, that the top students are online, is also a bit much. The purpose of the university is to learn, and the GPA, or winning a single competition, or having someone else take your tests, is hardly a meaningful way of choosing the top students. Serious schools and professors tend not to do this, unless maybe you are in the financial sector. Success to me is determined by who actually goes out into the world and creates some innovative product or some original research.
The current scam in mainstream evangelical faith is 'prosperity ministry'. You give to the church, and you will be rewarded. The bible does not say this. The bible says you have faith and you worship and that is your job. A person giving a penny and a person giving a million dollars is the same in they eyes of the almighty. You can choose to be secular and materialistic, but that has nothing to do with worship.
But, unfortunately, building these huge structures, taking you tithes off taxes and then claiming you tithe, using the money to push agendas of hate and trying to raise yourself to the level of the almight, is too much in all religions. We can take this back to the good Samaritan. Why do we call this person the good Samaritan? Because Samaritans, a specific branch of the Abrahamic Religions, were considered to be evil, much life Islam, people of darker skin color, and people with differing marriage practice are now considered to be the end of civilization. So we had the good Samaritan, just like the hard working mexican.
So the reason we have to deal with all this crap with Scientology is because they rightly claim the rights of every religion. The right to discriminate. The right to take money with no tangible return. The right to say things that are objectively not true while claiming in writing that they are. These behaviors are unacceptable in all other civilized society.
So MS could be where google is now with docs, beyond it, and provide full online package with purchase of office and partial online capabilities for non-commercial use. Of course this would have required sacrifice of the MS Windows platform, and quarterly profits, to gamble on long term growth.
What is interesting is that when /. talks about MS, the talk is always there can be no problems because profits are rising. To some degree this is true, but honestly there is a problem. Because of the profits, MS can only be reactionary. It cannot put anything innovative on the market.
I remember a time when condoms were considered absolutely unromantic.
I wonder if this, at some later time if the stock plummets, could be seen as a false material statement, an attempt to defraud the stockholders. The stock seems to be 10% of the value at the beginning of 2011. Another drop like this puts in the dollar stock.
But when I think of climate change, I think of longer periods of temperatures that are outside what a human can really aclimate to, and food can really be produced in. For instance, daytime temperatures that approach or go over 100F during the day and don't get under 80F at night. In Europe we are seeing another winter with temperatures staying at freezing for a continuous period. This is a concern because if we can't produce food, we can't survive. Look at the desertification of Africa. Look at the fight over water going on now in Texas and California. There are going to be some things that are just going to involving restructuring, insurance, and large writeoffs. This will be over and forgotten each generation, like the recurring banking crisis that hits us every 20-30 years. The other, like weather and temperature changes, are not going to be so easily fixed.
In this technology, the pores of the Graphene are such that only the water molecule will pass through when water is flowed through the filter at normal pressures. The practical question I have, since this is not like a carbon filter, but a single layer of Graphene, is how are they going to remove the filtrand to keep the clean. The technical question that the researches have to solve is how to make the graphene, and how to functionalize the pores so that water is encouraged to flow through the hole and impurities are encouraged to not block the pores.
This seems like a relatively early stage idea with no prototype, and little idea of if it will be marketable.
What is happening is the supply chain is becoming sophisticated enough, with parts delivered on demand from around the world, that assembly of non-us parts can happen in the US without requiring huge inventories of those parts. The unemployment rate is also high enough that workers can be had for a reasonable wage. Top this with automation that allows workers to make mistakes without effecting the final product and one can manufacture with a less than skilled or diligent worker base. As such we know see auto manufacturing in areas where education is minimal and worker costs are negligible.
But all this comes at a price, as can be seen by the Fiat in the US. This car is selling, but has rated the lowest quality at delivery. It is manufactured in Mexico. This initial quality is not an issue with a sufficient warranty, but the fact still exists.
For years I did not have flash on my computer precisely because it was such a resource drain. Eventually with the advent of flash blockers, flash became a possibility. However the one thing that keeps me from Android is the existance of Flash. There are times when lack of flash is extremely annoying, but overall I don't miss it.
As far as not benefitting anyone, there are many beneficiaries. The young adult who does not go to college and cannot get a benefits job can now stay on parent's insurance. The taxpayer saves because it is less likely a young person joins the military for benefits, which saves us huge amounts of money in long term costs of people who have spent a week in the military.
It helps young adults who had some childhood issues and cannot get insurance as they transition from their parents to their own insurance. it reduces the risk of a young adult being without insurance, thus forcing the taxpayer to cover the bills.
It help older people who can now lose insurance if they use it, again requiring the taxpayer to cover the costs.
It might help the states who now provide COBRA coverage.
In a happy fantasy world people without insurance either happily die or join a church of cult who will then cover their food, medical, and housing expenses. In reality sick people go the hospital and the taxpayer gets billed.
In Texas the state created a socialist program in which everyone who drives a car has to have insurance. The argument that having a car is a choice was hogwash, you have to have a car in texas. The government basically decided the insurance companies were to profit, but did crate a pool that one could use for insurance of last resort. The result is a new $400 expense to owning a car. The other result is that uninsured motorist insurance is very cheap, and I am not paying for others people accidents. If it is good in TX, it is good everywhere.
The reality is that if Apple of IBM or MS makes a product using my patent, they should have to pay me. I should not have to sell my patent to a patent troll firm for pennies on the dollar so I can a some profit from my work. I do not necessarily deserve profit from my work, but neither does the large firms deserve to profit from my work without renumeration.
Which is to say people on /. often ask how can the MPAA claim that piracy is destroying the industry when box office sales are through the roof for the good films. Likewise we can complain that patent trolls are costing major corporations $15 billions, but in five years just the iPhone has generated 10 time that much in revenue, so not only can we ask if this is a significant figure in the grand scheme of things, but we can also ask if corporations were willing to compensate others instead of jumping to litigation if these numbers might be far smaller overall.
You know if the MPAA put such a number so that we would feel sorry all the starving children and whiny stuntmen and stop pirating films online, we would all be aghast that such nonsense was posted on our august boards. However, since it is patents, I am sure we will all find the validity.
So, in a way, every taxpayer is a customer because every tax payer has helped build the infrastructure that allows a large corporation to exist. Hell, every one in the US pays a tax on their phone so rural people can have cheap communication. Tell me Netflix could be this big without such a tax.
I have two pieces of advice. First, don't play with states that value where you were born over how hard you work. Come to states like Texas where if you work hard, you will get rewarded, and, unlike arizona and alabama, the education will not be at the bottom of the world.
Second, those who are citizens and want to not pay taxes for those who are just here to be leeches, write congress to modify the citizenship of the US and the 14th amendment. For such a conservative congress who believes in taxpayers and the value of work, such a change should be a no brainer for them. Basically, any citizen over 25 who has not worked and paid taxes on work for at three consecutive 3 of the last six years should lose their citizenship. We fought against the aristocracy of England and should not have created a new aristocracy of persons who take their citizenship for granted and spends their life sucking at the public teat. If one does not want to work, fine, stay as permanent resident, but give citizenship to a person who actually respects this country, without the right to vote, or medical care, or welfare, or protection for the police. This is the simple solution to out deficit, our unemployment, our immigration 'problem'. Why a country whose business is business would restrict who firms can hire, while forcing them to hire unqualified workers at inflated wages, I will never understand.
My specific comments on education is that in the US any sacrifice for education is seen as unacceptable. Thinking hard, asked for supplies, homework, separation between child and parent by banning cell phones, is all unacceptable. For students in certain schools, leadership is taught. Otherwise it is assumed that students are going to be worker bees, hired by some person better than them. If we ask for sacrifice, that is the purchase of general purpose computer rather than an xBox, or a notebooks and pencils rather than jordans, then we might be able to begin to teach the skills and techniques that allow on to be an efficient entrepreneur and creator of innovative product. However since there is an inherent adversarial relationship set up between those who know and have stuff and those who don't, such an education is difficult at best.
The distressing thing is that this misconception still pervades the teaching of automation. Hardly ever do I see stationary machines doing useful work. Mostly what I see are moving machines engaged in meaningless activity that has no application in the real world, unless you are talkng about roomba, which very few people own.
So yes, Star Trek was off with the PADD, but at least they had computers and robots mostly doing what computers and robots do. We can't even get that far in what we do.
Certainly corporate is still interested in this, but if corporate does not have to pay for devices, and specialized email other than outlook, then why should it? I am not sure if RIM should stop with the handsets and software, par down operations, and just concentrate on secure apps. Of couse I am not sure how Apple and MS would reacti to this, so that would leave android. It might be enough.
Certainly in this case while criminal charges aren't filed, and really would do no good because dumb people do dumb things not matter the consequences, the shooters do owe 9000 people compensation for whatever costs, real, indirect, and opportunity, that their actions caused. They also owe the people costs for for the firefighters, as well as any costs for the burned acreage. I assure you that if one burned down a tree farm the corporations would come after you for damages. This should be the same on public land. The AG should aggressively protect the assets fo the people.
There is another reason why it is dumb not to use target ranges. Lead. A real target range will control the lead. Otherwise it just remains and seeps into our wate supply. I suppose it may be that dumb people want everyone to be as dumb as they are. Around here a membership is under $200 a year. Seems not much to insure safety. Certainly cheaper than paying hotel bills for 9000 people.